Posts by Lee D 4259 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2013
WRONG.
UK law applies in all foreign embassies in the nation.
It's only amabassadors who are immune to prosecution (and only under certain caveats).
Otherwise, you could literally sneak people into a foreign embassy, torture them in front of an open window, and nobody would be able to stop you.
The "foreign soil" thing is NOT TRUE. Stop perpetuating it. The premises are subject to UK law at all times.
No such thing as "embassy soil" etc.
Honestly, that's just a myth, like ship's captains being able to marry people.
The Ecuadorian embassy is subject to the rule of UK law, even if the ambassador himself may not be (he enjoys some immunity).
What stops the police just walking in is *convention* - it's considered rude and a bad precedent to do so, even though it's entirely legal.
Plus, the UK can deem the embassy "not an embassy" any time they like, totally legally.
"****We're****" suing?
Who's we?
Anyone else except Assange would lack standing to bring such a case.
However, apart from pissing away everyone's money, listening to a lawyer is about the only thing he HASN'T bothered to do. If he had, he wouldn't be where he is.
But, of course, that doesn't make much of a story and it must have been nearly a week since you were last on the front pages, mustn't it?
Seriously, stop giving the twat air-time.
I solved that problem another way.
I don't use BT for anything, and my broadband is a mobile 4G router.
Broadband, mobile and Wifi in one box, from one provider, with one bill.
Honestly, it's just another show of how when you buy something up, you should integrate it and brand it with your main brand, and if you own several types of business, you should do your best to merge them all together rather than break them into bits and spin them off all the time.
An ISP, a telephony provider and a mobile cellular network should all just be part of one big brand/company, rather than faffing about spinning off Cellnet/O2/etc. and then having to provide the same services to them but now on the basis of entirely different underlying infrastructure.
The fact that those three are ALL so similar nowadays that they are moving to entirely-IP networks for even home telephony just shows you that you should have done that decades ago when it was still in its infacy and saved yourself a lot of money in the first place.
BT seem to actually be making some sensible choices for once. Pity it's about 30 years too late, and only because they are losing money. I mean, bringing your customer services back home? Obviously GDPR/Brexit related, but other companies worked out 10 years ago that they needed to do that.
Again... there just aren't enough people affected to care.
If literally Huawei phones couldn't run Google Maps, or some popular app that uses them (everything from OKCupid dating apps to games use that interface in the background!), then it would flag rather heavily with everyone who buys an Huawei phone.
It doesn't. So it hasn't. Nobody is saying "your problem doesn't exist". We're saying that it's not as prevalent or as affecting as you seem to think. There are 200+ notes on that bug report. I'd expect THOUSANDS, tens of thousands, if it was actually impacting app developers to the extent you suggest.
It's a niche issue that has happened to affect you and your uses. Nobody else (here or other places) even realised it was a problem.
That was more about a service running exposed to the Internet by default, back in the days of XP/98 when people used to connect via modems and be their only defence against network-borne packets
Doesn't mean that UPnP isn't an atrocious idea. But GRC was more concerned with "why is there a new, by-default, always-on, Internet exposed service on all Windows PC's" and would let you turn it off via software. Nothing to do with UPnP on routers, networks in general etc.
Your phone is not a server. If you nmap it, it likely has zero ports open unless you turn on Wifi hotspot functionality.
Your Playstation is neither (though if it claims that peer-to-peer network requires a port forward because some games producers are cheap and won't run matchmaking servers).
Your DVR may well be. But only if it's not capable of talking out to a central server which acts a proxy like most DVRs do for their mobile apps. Hint: Have you seen the stories for the last 5 years about how insecure DVRs are, the article on BBC News yesterday about the guy who had a DVR open to the world and didn't know, etc.? There's a reason we don't let ordinary people run servers).
Your lightbulb - if you're stupid enough to have networked lightbulbs - I'd hope they only operate internally on your Wifi, but if not then see the DVR answer.
Sorry, but nothing you have REQUIRES a port-forward, unless you are providing an actual service. Running a web server. Running an email server. Running a games server (not just playing games online on other people's servers). All of which require more care about how you do so than the average person can ever give them, which is why we put people behind NAT on home routers.
And if you're doing those things, you want well-known port-number statically entered, the server running all day long, and for it to be advertised to the world. UPnP is not the answer.
I literally turn off UPnP on all devices. Not one person has ever complained, even the couple who brought their XBox 360 to my house and connected it to play multiplayer online. Everything that "needs" port-forwarding doesn't. Unless you are trying to run a server from your home connection and thereby exposing yourself to much worse than anything UPnP can do to you anyway.
"Applications that needed to accept connections from the outside would probably include instructions in how to place your PC in the DMZ and disable its internal firewall."
And no such novice computer user has any programs that require that.
That's exactly my point.
Unless you are expecting to be a host server for something, you don't need to bypass NAT at all. Even SIP etc. will work inside NAT and that's a horrible protocol.
Quite.
"Allow any local network client to request any external port to be forwarded to any internal port on any internal computer, without notification or authentication".
If you weren't turning off UPnP from day one, you're an idiot.
P.S. No... I do NOT have any problems playing games, talking on Skype, etc. etc. etc. Never have had. And I forward precisely ZERO ports.
P.P.S. Though, technically, you COULD have authentication, nobody has it, uses it, implements it or configures it. Most routers etc. don't even allow you to touch it... it's UPnP on or off, and that's it.
Does it solve these problems:
- My gaming laptop is 8 years old. Plays GTA V just fine, but I probably only want to play casual VR games. Will it work?
- If I have two of them plugged into the same PC will it work? Or do my games parties need two high-powered machines and two expensive VR headsets just to shoot arrows at each other in a cartoon world?
- If I buy an Oculus, can I play all the VR games (Steam VR games, Vive games) without too many faffing about with drivers and convertors and shim layers and things?
I don't think it solves any of the above, but it's hard to be sure as no review ever really covers that aspect.
In fact:
From the Wiki article on Redcare:
"Other versions also use GSM (mobile) as a backup to the main phone line or can function using either wireless (2G/3G mobile data) or IP as the primary connection all backed up by an alternative signalling path. These 2G/3G and IP offerings are marketed by Redcare under their Secure product range."
Technically, nobody in range for copper should be out of range for fibre. The physics just don't support that.
It might cost to convert but it should be a one-time conversion for at least the next 50-100 years.
Mains supply? I think we're talking about the box near the customer converting fibre down to something on traditional copper + 47volt. Otherwise you're talking about ripping up every telegraph pole wire in the country and that's not practical.
No, they'll just fibre to the nearest exchange/cabinet, provide IP backend, and cut the "direct" access to the POTS... it will just go through a PSTN->IP convertor. It knocks out things like Redcare and proprietary protocols that run over the copper, but it shouldn't mean that granny has to even change her phone, let alone all the phone wiring in the house. And presumably said box is already getting mains and providing telephony voltages down the wires to power whatever may be at the other end.
Been ripping out Redcare from sites for years. The second owner of a property never feels it's worth paying for. There's no reason, in theory at least, that you couldn't get a "redcare adaptor" that goes on the customer end if absolutely necessary.
Lifts and emergency lines? I think we'll all going to have to start accepting IP as emergency-capable lines by the sounds of it. I'm much more concerned about a little old granny out in the sticks with no family trying to call 999 than someone stuck in a lift who almost certainly has a mobile phone on them, alarm buttons, staff on site, etc. BT's (not unreasonable) plans are to sort out the old granny first, so the lift people will have to get onboard or provide a better solution (e.g. lifts tend to go all the way to the top of the building... which would be a lovely spot to put in a cheap GSM-connected box). Someone already has to pay the line rental, so having to pay for the GSM connection shouldn't be that much of a chore (I can run a GSM connection reliably for £5 a month, I'm sure someone negotiating nationwide can get a cheaper deal... but a BT line rental is what? £20 a month now?).
To be honest, for once, BT are operating at least vaguely in the right decade and I can't really fault them for it.
Correction: You can only ever perceive one universe. Which, are far as 99.9999999999% of things are concerned makes almost no difference to you.
However, explaining quantum physics to laymen is much easier when you can explain it as "There are a billion possible positions/answers... only one of them is right... when you discover which one is right, that one is right instantaneously throughout the entire universe for that measurement/question".
Rather than magically-faster-than-light stuff, it makes a much better analogy to say "By measuring, you find out what universe you were in all along from an infinity of possibilities".
Like anything in maths (and quantum physics, like relativity, is someone doing the maths, going "Oh, that can't be right, that would mean that..." and then 100 years later realising that's exactly what happens in the real world) - all the explanations can be correct simultaneously, so they are all equivalent, and choosing one arranged in a particular way that makes a particular calculation / explanation easier is part and parcel of making a breakthrough in understanding. (I refer you to how Fermat's Last Theorem was proven - by joining two entirely different areas of mathematics with a particular equivalence that meant an unsolveable problem became solveable).
1) These things really need to be renamed. A random walk should really be called a Wander. A quantum random walk should be a Quander.
2) The way I understand it, quantum physics / collapsing waveforms is really about finding out what universe you happen to be in. In all the myriad possibilities of possibilities, there's only one that you're actually in. But once you find out what one you're in, the answer reveals itself across the universe (hence you can take entangled photons, send them across the galaxy, and as soon as someone "reveals" what one of them is, the other one is automatically determined... you didn't make it do anything, you just discovered which particular universe you were in at that point).
3) Though this can help towards quantum computing, it's really just a speed-up of traditional computing. It looks short-lived and relatively limited in terms of applications.
The chances of someone clicking on a waffle iron advert when playing a strategy game are slim.
However, there's a good chance they may be interested in a rival game, for instance.
Almost all "personalised ad" stuff is absolute nonsense.
I only ever get ads about things totally unrelated to the pages I'm reading when they are "personalised". The best one was trying to advertise spandex leotards to me, on a Linux news site. I still can't fathom how they picked up those keywords, nor what kind of masochist WANTS to imagine their target audience of Linux nerds like that.
Yes.
In essence, all these kinds of things do (and if you believe all that "acres of datacentres" junk "listening to every phone call", etc.) is drastically reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.
Because, I guarantee you that the REAL criminals are using proper encryption and services that don't reveal their metadata etc. anyway, and you spend your life chasing people who just applied 4096-bit encryption to their MS Paint picture for the sake of it..
Pretty much I read this as:
"Unless criminals incriminate themselves automatically, and leave prima facie evidence everywhere they go, we can't do our job!"
Which is slightly nonsensical, especially given that UNTIL this generation, that data didn't exist anyway. I was one of the first people in my area to start using t'Internet and encryption came along very early on (the Zimmerman case and PGP was already in place before most people even found out what DSL was... and then it was a strange American thing that we didn't have over here until many years later).
It's much more expensive (by orders of magnitude) to capable up a single person in a rural area than upgrade thousands of people in an urban area.
This isn't ever likely to change, even if you put 4G everywhere today, you'd need to do the same for 5G, 6G, etc. the same as broadband etc. There were times when you couldn't even dial-up from rural locations, that hasn't changed at all... only the tech you desire access to.
There comes a point - and that point is about the 95% mark - where you could upgrade an entire city cheaper than connect a single street. On a cost/benefit analysis, it's just not worth anyone's time.
Question: How long do you think it would take for a lone farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, paying £25 a month, to pay off the INSTALLATION costs alone of a 1km leased line to provide them with 4G / broadband. And 1km is really quite optimistic and, in some places, literally a radius within which there may only be that one building serve.
Hint: a 500m leased line fibre run, using existing ducting, road infrastructure and nearby connections, to an inner-city school within the M25 cost me approximately £13,000 not including the £600 a month ongoing fee for 100Mbps. And we dug half the route for them as it went through our land, to reduce costs.
What do you get for that install price? A fibre presenting itself and a box with an SFP module.
It would take 43 years to pay off that installation cost alone, if you were paying NOTHING else for the actual connection it utilises.
What ISP is going to - without literally having the government PAY THEM to do it - run that cable and then hope that the family will pay them £25 a month for the next 50 years without fail, not to mention another £25 AT LEAST to provide service / make profit.
And that's an EASY scenario. Once you get into land ownership / wayleave / physical obstacles / other utilities / longer distances / etc. it quickly becomes inviable to even put the cable in.
This stuff needs an independent body (someone like OpenReach) to be REQUIRED to provide the infrastructure on demand, funded by all the ISPs being required to use them and/or government subsidising the expensive connections. All that means is... sure... you can have 4G out in the sticks. By the way, we just added £5 a month to everyone's bill in the country to pay for it.
All of that assumes the impetus is solely "peace with North Korea".
There's not going to be any significant amount of trade with NK, not compared to pissing off China, etc.
Given the state of global governments, I think that's incredibly optimistic as being the driving cause.
I think it's probably got more to do with a suppressed NK press story about the mountain base that was being used for all their atomic testing suddenly collapsing in an accident. Because it went very quiet on that front, right about that time.
Now, that could just be "NK had an accident, want to save face" or it could be "NK was infiltrated and their nuclear capability removed" but thinking that the US is operating solely on the basis of peace in NK feels a little blinkered.
I imagine it's much more likely "NK cannot afford to be a nuclear power after their main testing base is destroyed, therefore pretend that peace is now suddenly the best option and oh, look, isn't this new president that was only just threatening us with war moments ago such a great negotiator".
Try an interesting thought experiment:
Imagine if the US president was someone who would do whatever the highest bidder / whoever bribed him more / whoever let him have a golf course asked of him without any concept of international politics whatsoever.
Now look at Russia, Israel, Iran, North Korea, ZTE, the NRA, etc.
"Matt’s company learned something too. “We only install our software on dedicated systems for production environments,” Matt told us."
About ten years too late, by the sounds of it, but welcome to common sense.
Literally, what was their main web portal doing running the email tracking too? That's just stupid.
Kind of forgiveable in a mom-n-pop kind of place, but the second you're into a "real server" then you should be virtualising out to individual VM's with stated purposes.
Case in point: When I arrived, my workplace had four physical servers. One of those ran finance and, for some unfathomable reason, file shares and print server (no finance integration, including talk-home software), and a myriad other things.
Replace with the same number of physical servers, virtualised everything, and now run 30+ virtual machines on pretty much the same hardware. Ironically, not only is everything faster, it's more energy efficient, much more resilient, everything is replicated to more places, and you can safely assume that one server does one job (including the hypervisors which do nothing but... VM hypervising).
There's no way that you should be doing ANYTHING else on a public-facing web server machine. Hell, it shouldn't even be in the same VLAN / network.
And if you've not pushed your public-facing stuff through an IDS/IPS reverse proxy (also a separate machine), then you're just opening yourself to attack.
Step 1) Buy everybody (at least those on benefits) a new phone every time it stops working.
...
Yep. We failed there.
This is a case of things just being taken from thought-experiment to headline news of impending doom.
You know what? At some point, we'll all have ID cards, and those ID cards are already small enough to contain a complete GSM modem set. With an e-sim we don't even need anything else. Enough research and they could be charged inductively as you walk around the city or so low power they gather energy from wifi signals and whatnot passively. Done. Everyone is now carrying a fully-traceable Star Trek combadge-like thing that you could legislate the necessity of it.
But you have a long way to go before then, because we couldn't even convince people to use ID cards and scrapped the whole concept at great expense. Couple with a handful of data breaches and people just won't use them or they'll be rendered unfit for such a purpose anyway.
I have no doubt that ID cards, driving licences, passports and car number plates will eventually turn into trackers/computers. It's the only logical natural progression. But let's not run before we can walk.
Literally, the point at which people will get such things is the point at which they find it more useful than worrying anyway. Go back to the 80's and tell them we all have always-listening devices that can send our conversation to any phone / person on the planet at any time, which can take photos of us, that we tap our most intimate messages into to send to others, and which we all voluntarily buy for ourselves and carry on our person / put on the nightstand. They'd be horrified. But it happened because they turn out to be more useful to the average person, than the average person feels they have to worry about their security and privacy. Sad, but true.
This stuff is inevitable. When we get there, we will want controls. We discover what kind of controls we will need and possible implications by performing such thought-experiments. In the same way that "AI will overrun the planet", we will all end up carrying tracking devices. It doesn't mean "only if you vote Labour at the next election". It will happen. It's just a case of deciding what they will mean and how we should do that.
Personally, an ID card whose possession proves my identity that, when activated by - say - a biometric or challenge-response of some kind that only the user can activate, confirms the location of such a card to an authority, and receives a notification to the card that your location was requested - proves several very useful things. Your identity. Your presence. That no-one has tried to use your identity on the other side of the world to request credit without your knowledge. That the person signing up for benefits is you and you don't have ten other ID's on you. That the person signing up for benefits isn't using a cloned card or their mate's card. That the person requesting access to their bank is you even though you're on holiday in France. That anyone can verify who you are with a two-factor system with your consent (e.g. "Are you over 18?").
It would seem to have ENORMOUS advantages, personally. And needs that kind of two-way communication, connectivity, sensors, etc. And we're really not that far away from it given electronic passports and driver's licences and things like 2FA apps for banking and email accounts. You could make it happen today if you wanted.
Therefore it's probably something that will happen, and probably something we should think about now.
Manslaughter doesn't require intent.
Death by careless driving doesn't require intent.
Failure to comply with a lot of statutory regulation doesn't require intent.
Speeding offences don't require intent.
Lots of very, very old laws don't require intent.
The words you want to see are "neglect", "carelessness", etc. I may not intend to defraud the taxman but proving that is another matter entirely, however it would be neglectful to be in charge of a multi-billion dollar company and not check the local tax law, for example.. You can't just let people off scot-free because you can't prove intent. What you prove is ignorance of the law (no defence!), blatant disregard for it (not bothering to check whether you were doing something illegal), or something so incredibly stupid that it was obviously illegal anyway. Intent normally only changes one type of crime into another (e.g. manslaughter to murder, etc.).
Having to prove "intent" on a laser shone at a plane for a few seconds from a distant house is literally impossible unless you get a YouTube vid of that exact incident with them saying "we're going to blind a pilot". People will just hide behind "Well, I was just waving it about, or dropped it, and it must have pointed upwards for a nanosecond" as their defence.
As it is, it's hard enough to find them and prosecute them. Having to prove that they set out to blind pilots rather than just did something incredibly stupid like bought a high-powered laser and pointed it into the sky near an airport is an obstacle you really don't want.
Plus... sorry... intent is really not necessary to form many crimes at all. You may not have intended to forget all about the firewall that's supposed to protect your user's credit card usage data for a porn site that's splatted all over the front page of the newspapers now... but that's not a defence if you were legally required to have one. You may not have intended for your car to be unroadworthy and kill a small child - still a crime. You may not have intended to not service your tenant's gas boiler which then blew up the entire street - still a crime.
Intention determines the direction of your neglect of the law - a particular act explicitly considered for a particular deliberate purpose. It does not determine the fault, magnitude or culpability, or whether the act is just illegal to do entirely, intentional or not.
"Sorry, your honour, I didn't intend to steal $4.5 billion from the bank I work at, I just fat-fingered my own account number and it popped into my bank account."
"Oh, that's alright then, you keep it."
Literally, you're basing your internal security on "nobody uses brass doorhandles any more, everyone uses these modern chrome things".
It takes a fraction of a second for something that COULD traverse SMB connections to test an FTP port and follow that too. A virus that isn't modular is a real amateur show. The proper ones test and have things akin to Metasploit modules that literally use the techniques that you are revealing yourself vulnerable to.
Though someone might traverse an SMB network with a given credential, the chances of having write access over random shares as anonymous user with any kind of useful data should be infinitesimal. But the chances of being able to sniff a plain-text FTP credential are... well... it's barely a handful of lines of code to do so. Sure there are SMB exploits just the same, but FTP is a really, really dumb idea.
Especially when ANYTHING that actually is worth the money will support SSH2 for encrypted file transfer with full public-key authentication.
You're like the people who say they "run Mac because there are less viruses". It's a nonsense. It's the PC equivalent of painting your car blue, because blue cars get broken into less often. It's not "security". It's "theatre".
Some pillock signed a contract that said something along the lines of:
"Services will be available to all EU members".
The UK won't be an EU member.
This automatically kicks us out of everything we originally signed, means we have to negotiate those same rights that we've forfeit back (you hope) and have to come to a particular agreement to do so rather than automatic consent.
That answers 1, 2 and 3. Because the countries not in the EU were either specifically mentioned or negotiated under their own contracts. We weren't/didn't. And dropping ourselves out of the group that gave us all those privileges was a really silly idea without checking.
I'm wondering now quite how much law that says things like "EU states" now has to be duplicated, reworded, renegotiated etc. for it to still apply to us.
And you can guarantee that anything that OBLIGES us to do something (pay bills, etc.) lists us specifically by name and is enforceable whether or not we're still a member.
Whether or not I agree with you regarding the joke, you have a blinkered argument.
"You do things to children when they don't want you to".
Not one of those words is offensive, either.
The overall statement, however, is incredibly offensive and potentially libellous. Even the word "abortion" isn't offensive. It's the concept. I think their argument is "human abortion is a serious thing that shouldn't be made light of to get a cheap laugh." Not "you can't say abortion".
NNTP? Really? Buy yourself a Usenet service, relying on an ISP to run one in the modern era is like asking if they have a gopher service or whether you can dial-up. That's really not a negative point against VM at all, I'm surprised any modern ISP even runs those kinds of services any more.
IPv6... yes, that's annoying. I grant you that one. But there's no change there, almost no ISP in the UK offers it, A&A are the only ones I know and they cost a fortune more than VM. Despite the fact that it's a requirement of EuroDOCSIS, 4G standards, and all sorts nowadays.
You're going to get carrier-grade NAT long before you ever see proper IPv6, just accept it (and blame those idiots who equated IPv6 with "you must not ever, ever, ever use NAT" thus making IPv4->6 transition that much more complicated when it could have just been "slap an IPv6 address on the gateway device").
I can't fault their speeds, though. Maybe I was lucky for the 4 years I had them. The bigger problem - they just don't service most people, and most that they do service are literally via BT which is the same show as ever. I have two VM leased lines at work, about 500m apart. One is Virgin-pure, no other company involved. The other is a BT-resold line managed by Virgin. Guess which one drops the VPN all the time and is generally much poorer despite the customer being the same site? But even for a leased line they couldn't be bothered to actually cable it direct and just resold the local BT connection despite a 3-month install delay because BT didn't have any capacity.
In my new home, Virgin isn't possible. You can't compete if you're not there. The only thing they offer is reselling me a BT line that I would have to activate and pay BT for, and then pay Virgin their part on top. It would be hundreds to start, 2-year-contracts and then lots-a-month and all kinds of junk I don't want. I could literally go with ANYONE else and get better prices and service.
So I bought myself a 4G Wifi router and stuck two fingers up to them all. When my mobile provider screws me over, I'll just change the SIM to someone else. To be honest, it's already cheaper, faster and more reliable than even my last Virgin connection. And I am on a month-to-month contract, so I can just up and go any time.
Sorry, ISPs, but you're not competing at all. Not even trying. Mainly because BT is the ISP for 90% of people, the others are only in very select areas and unwilling to invest to stray out of them. I get why: it's incredibly expensive and NTL went bankrupt trying to do just that (which is the only reason Virgin Media even exists, they snapped up a lot of already-installed stuff for next-to-nothing). But in terms of competition, there is none at the moment.
Roll on 5G. I'd really much rather give my money to a company with some investment, infrastructure, future plans and constantly evolving technology than an incumbent ex-government telephony monopoly. I get 30Mbps down, 10Mbps up. More than good enough, and actually twice what even BT say they can provide. I can carry my Internet in my pocket. I can connect all my devices, play all my games, Cast and stream all my movies. Hell, my Internet is even battery-backed (pocket-4G-wifi thing) and for sure people would moan more if the 4G tower went down than if the local broadband did. But then I just change the SIM card and off I go again on the next tower along.
Gimme 5G and potentially Gbps (yeah, right, but to be honest anything is welcome) and I'll happily pay those kinds of prices direct to the cell provider. But I refuse to pay BT anything if I can help it, and won't pay Virgin through the nose for a basic service.
Literally, I forget that my connection is not hard-wired sometimes.
Absolutely.
I propose that we create a language which is subject to a strict security model and runs inside a user-space application. Such a language wouldn't facilitate any kind of arbitrary code execution, but instead be formed from a limited subset of a common language, and not allow interaction with, say, the filesystem, or direct networking, or hardware, etc.
We could base the language syntax on some popular language, to make it easy to learn, and have browsers implement their own scripting engine isolated from the OS to execute it, subject to the browser DOM model. We could even have it compile down to a nice virtual-machine like architecture in later years and some primitive form of assembly that gets interpreted by the browser while still subject to the same model, for performance reasons.
Oh, look, you just invented Javascript and WebAssembly.
Basically, if you want the computer to be useful, it has to perform actions. You CAN have a remote server perform actions on your behalf, but then you really have little need for a computer at all. That's what we used to call a thin client, and they often have bad reputations for a number of reasons. Unless you want an entirely thin client based on web services performing all calculations, you have to act on some kind of code in a limited fashion. That means isolating yourself as best as possible (see above).
Personally, I'd avoid indexing backwards at all costs and instead I'd be looking ahead. That's exactly how you start breaking stuff, not to mention messing up caches and whatnot.
Not at all difficult to look for CR alone and then ignore any single following LF when dealing with it.
I think it stems more from Notepad used to use a certain type of control that only ever handled plain text and (initially) had a limit of 32Kb, and lived entirely in memory. It then grew up and ended up in Windows 95, but was never really developed on properly. Load a large file in Notepad and you still have to have however-much free RAM to hold the entire file to even look at the first page of it, and wait while it parses it all (do it with a binary and see what happens!). Do the same in anything else and it might decide to parse the whole file (and will handle it like a text file, not just a bunch of ASCII characters) but it probably won't stick it all in RAM over reading from the relevant index as it goes.
I can't even remember the name of the control now, but back in VB 2/3 days you could make your own Notepad in about a minute... it was a textbox control and a couple of menus. Wordpad etc. was very different and required per-line / per-character formatting to be applied programmatically and wasn't subject to the 32Kb limit.
You can still technically open a 2Gb file with Notepad nowadays, but good luck waiting for it.
If you've ever done any fire safety course ever:
The fire extinguishers are there for you to secure a safe exit.
NOT for you to extinguish the fire.
You can do. If you like. If your company lets you. If you take the risk upon yourself. If you think it's safe. If you accept that nobody's going to praise you for it.
But the fire "extinguisher" is for you to escape with. Not put out the fire with.
I question it every year, at many different employers, but that's the universal "we're not going to take the risk of telling you otherwise" answer.
Yep, you see a fire, you're supposed to just get to a safe place. You can use the extinguishers to help you do that, but you should have been out of the building long before that's necessary.
Given some of the (listed, 400+ year old, wood-panelled, with original fireplaces still in use) buildings I've worked in, I don't need to be told twice.
Had a close incident with a MacBook battery that got wet and swelled to four times its normal size (destroying the MacBook in the process), which someone wanted to drop in a bucket of water, and that was enough to tell me that most people's first reaction to a fire is probably not sensible anyway. It's like the chip-pan fire safety videos from when I was a kid. I *still* see people do dumb things like pour water on hot fat.
Gimme the wages of 1/10th of the drivers on the line, and I'll build you an automated system that is immune to signal loss (why the hell do you LOSE SIGNALS just because of a bit of rain in BRITAIN! Of all countries!), able to cope with any London storm conditions, and where in the wet it will go slower and do a better job than any human could ever do.
Honestly, train automation is not hard. "Only drivers can possibly do this" is just blatant - and false - propaganda to justify extortionate wages backed by union intervention. Other countries, which everything from tsunami to tornado, manage this perfectly well with the same kind of stock on the same kind of rail, and often in much worse environments, and much more cheaply.
I will HAPPILY trade the current system for one that literally turns itself off in stormy weather if it thinks it's unsafe to continue. Because the savings of £30k+ per shift, per train, per year into perpetuity would immediately pay for everyone to have a personal London taxi in such rare instances. And an INCREDIBLY DUMB computer system capable of doing the job. You don't need AI to operate a train. Nor an always-on Internet connection to every device. Nor an intelligent signalling system.
Er... Reg... let's not be idiots here:
"It’s not entirely clear who is at fault, though. Police say the Honda Sedan smashed into the Waymo motor after trying to avoid hitting another car on Chandler Boulevard, Chandler, Arizona."
Quite clearly the Waymo is hit by an oncoming car which rapidly ends up on the wrong side of the road, at speed, and strikes it smack in the front.
There is nothing any system, autonomous or not, could do. And that car swerved because some other idiot has pulled RIGHT OUT in front of it at the last second. So wording it as if there's some doubt, especially as to whether the Waymo van that *gets hit*, is just disingenuous.
I'm the first to jump on the "stop putting this stuff on the road" bandwagon, but there is literally nothing any device or person could have done to prevent an accident in this case.
(That said, the Waymo doesn't not appear to take any corrective action whatsoever. You'd hope that something like an alert was going off, or it couldn't move even an inch because of cars in other lanes, but it doesn't seem to brake either.)
Well, technically, if you want to be like that, no home in the world has a fibre connection. Nor, probably, the vast, vast majority of workplaces.
Unless you put an SFP direct into your machine and connect by fibre straight to a switch which connects by fibre only to other switches which all connect only by fibre to a fibre leased line, etc. Or you are using some magic Wifi->optical light device that doesn't translate to copper in between. And even then I could argue that the SFP interconnection to your machines bus is "copper".
FTTP and FTTC are both very different things, both sold as fibre. Most people don't know, understand or care about the difference. But claiming semantics on the word fibre to mean "everything being fibre" is just wrong.
And I guarantee you that it makes almost no difference as the "coax" won't be the bottleneck anyway (which will actually be artificial rate-limiting) - DOCSIS 3.1 can go up to 10Gbps full duplex. EuroDOCSIS is technically slightly faster than that I believe.
(P.S. please point at the cheapest electronic component of your home Internet setup, the one most likely to be a bottleneck more than any cable, device, or incoming feed... yep, it's probably the £30 box that converts all your fancy high-speed stuff to some pathetic percentage of a shared Wifi channel).
If only there was an ISP who could offer their workers and telesales/support staff some way to work securely at home over the Internet?
Honestly, shouldn't "call centres" be dead by now? Just give them a home connection, and monitor every X calls at random to make sure they are doing the job.
Certainly, you would then be able to hire the cheapest labour available to you, regardless of location. And you're not telling me that it's any more expensive to pay for a business line to them, and give them the same IP phone and terminal as they have in the call center, when you're not paying rent, business rates, facilities, etc. etc. for a building to house that same equipment and personnel instead. Not to mention locally competitive salaries.
Remote-working is now PERFECTLY VIABLE for anything involving an ordinary computer and a telephone line. Hell, say that they have to have the web-cam on all the time while working, if you're that worried. They'll stick it in their spare room, and you could even snatch the customer call away from them and put it to any other operator immediately if you think their children screaming in the background is distracting.
Sorry, it's still "not my problem, gov."
If they are blaming me, they need to identify the action I need to take to resolve it. Which I can do for them. And then likely nothing will change.
And, yes, had those conversations ANY NUMBER of times, for the big-boss and associates. Not once has it ever not been "They need to tell me what to do then". If it wasn't, it would already be fixed.
(P.S. "Just open up all your firewall ports, disable all security, run as administrator" is not a valid course of action. And NOT ONCE has it ever resolved any problem an outside vendor has experienced).
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