Posts by Lee D

Re: Encryption is complicated enough already

I don't think AES is at all safe in a post-quantum world, no matter what keys you choose.

A comment I found from 2013: "The best known theoretical attack is Grover's quantum search algorithm... this allows us to search an unsorted database of n entries in √n operations. As such, AES-256 is medium term secure against a quantum attack, however AES-128 is broken, and AES-192 isn't looking too good. With the advances in computational power (doubling every 18 months, etc.), no set keysize is safe indefinitely."

And that's the worst-case example of just using a QC as nothing more than brute-force on the keys, not even taking advantage of any particular exposed weakness, etc.

A QC will radically change the landscape of encryption forever, because it just works in a very different way. It's not a case of "just increase the keysize" any longer. The solution is IMMEDIATE. The keysize barely matters, it affects only the size of the QC that you need build, not the time to solution. Once someone starts building decent-sized QCs and joining them together you won't be able to make the key large enough to be practical for you to use, while impractical for them to build a machine capable of breaking it instantaneously.

AES is dead in such circumstances. As is pretty much every conventional encryption algorithm. That's why post-quantum cryptography is an entire area of research and relies on things which we have but which we DO NOT yet use in the ways we'd need to to make them post-Q safe. Even ECC cannot escape this and requires reinvention to be valid post-Q.

Think about how it works - it's no longer a case of just "making things laborious" in terms of brute-force. That's gone, in a post-Q world. No amount of brute-force can withstand instantaneous calculation. What works is literally: you get billions of possible answers (hashes used on an enormous scale as an integral part of the basic encryption system which they currently aren't), or you have to build a quantum computer so huge that your adversary can't afford it.

The latter is literally just a matter of time and effort again, though.

Post-Q instantly invalidates all currently deployed encryption methods overnight. They all become nothing more than plaintext, in effect. Now matter how carefully you chose your keys, how big they were, how well you secured them, or what flaws may exist in the algorithm, etc.

Post-Q cryptography has to be a reinvention from first principles, which is why things like SPHINCS just don't have any resemblance to a current encryption system. Currently we USE encryption to build hashes. Post-Q we'll use hashes to build encryption.

Re: Original Hardware?

The original boards are dying.

There is no modern equivalent chip for most things.

It's hard to even READ the old memory chips, let alone have them work in a game.

CRTs are hard to buy.

Anything to do with preserving an arcade machine in its original state is difficult, very technical, expensive, and ultimately will be useless as they will become harder and harder to get as time goes by.

I'm not saying "don't do it", but be aware. And most people honestly don't have the time, money or resources to pull it off. It's £1000 for a basic cab with a working board in it, before you even start. A CRT can cost you an absolute fortune and very soon won't even be made any more. With suicide-chips and dying memory etc. it can be difficult to even get an old board working. And even making a cabinet that could house an old machine would still cost hundreds.

It's a niche, specialist, collector sport that most people will have absolutely no interest in. I'd love to re-live the 80's. I sit there reading disassemblies of 80's Spectrum games. I can program in the Z80 assembly language. I love the nostalgia. But there's no way that I could justify maintaining an old arcade board against replacing the innards. I'd keep them. Of course, I would. But I wouldn't even try down the path of getting them working if they didn't turn on.

It's not lazy and pig ignorant to understand all that technology and, given unlimited funds and time, being able to covet it and restore it. But that's not what even the geekiest of geeks can manage, afford or dedicate themselves to. There's a reason MAME exists. It's to preserve the originals as best we can before they all die. Because they will all die. And it's not even going to be possible to get hold of one in another 20-30 years, because arcades are very different places now (and I can't see the kids now wanting to get one of those modern ticket-spewing things working in 30-years time for their nostalgia).

But I can get Pac Man working on something that looks and feels like an old arcade, which everyone will enjoy playing on and my daughter could get a feel of how it used to be. It would take all my spare time to build such a cabinet from parts and get it all working. That's not lazy or pig-ignorant. It's just reality.

I have three ZX Spectrums upstairs that I have 1) kept from the 80's, 2) repaired from a boot sale job, 3) sent off for specialist restoration and RAM/ULA replacement. Guess what? None of them work anymore, even though they all did at some point. But Spectaculator? It plays all the games I remember, how I remember, on a big-screen TV for people to enjoy.

Re: I think its fine to not have details public

"And important part of malware email handling consists in finding out who they are from, or who they are redirecting you to."

And you rely on the domain names given to be definitive, do you?

If you want to handle malware, you go for the IP "whois" (e.g. AS lookup), which is an entirely different kettle of fish. But domain names resolve to IPs. What makes you think they can't just change the domain they are using in seconds?

There's no practical reason to have publicly visible names and addresses (except of abuse contacts at the ISP in question) for anything any more. It used to be there so you COULD call up John Bloggs who worked at X University and talk about a problem with his system. Nowadays, that's just not feasible.

And a vast, vast, vast portion of domains are now owned by private individuals. It's like requiring me to put my name, home address and phone number inside the front cover of every book I write, song I record, game I create, etc. which is just silly.

It's outdated. It's illegal (always has been in the EU, which is why Nominet gave the whois opt-out for personal information - the GDPR is nothing more than ratification of DPA case law into written statute). It's stupid. And it's useless, because of the sheer number of ways to put fake information there because it has way less verification than even an SSL certificate. It should have died decades ago.

Re: Virgin

Does it really matter? Most people then use a fibre-to-copper convertor called a "router" to then put it into their other devices anyway.

Copper can do ridiculous speeds if you are only doing short runs on uncontested connections (which is what these local fibre->copper convertors will have on them - it's the fibre that's contested, not the coax that is shared).

People fuss too much about this, sure selling it as "fibre" is not particularly honest but I think that nobody cares as in the same way that "broadband / DSL" (meaning everything from ADSL to VDSL) is a certain class of speeds, "fibre" (meaning everything from VDSL, FTTC, FTTP, DOCSIS, etc.) is a better class of speeds. It's like 3G/4G/5G.

I honestly couldn't care what they know it as colloquially, so long as they're honest about the technology used (small print is fine) and the speed.

To be honest, I'd be glad of even 10Mbit where I live (inside the M25!), so I couldn't care less what it's called or where the fibre ends. I use a 4G wifi router, because it literally gives me three times anything else that enters my road, and there's no "fibre" of any description at all (and would need my landlord/building management agent/etc. permission to install that anyway).

Re: Why all the flash?

So, that's £230 for a console, £280 for a piece of hardware.

That's £510. Against an HTC Vive (£499 + PC) / Oculus Rift (£399 + PC)). Not including the addons, etc. that comes with the latter two, the games (console games were ridiculously expensive last I looked, as I haven't owned one in about 15 years), and the actual difference in capabilities.

Sorry, but £500+ is too expensive for this stuff. Even adjusting for inflation, that's more than the console, every controller and every game I've bought for a console, for every console I did ever own in my life.

Especially if you then only get the one. That's a damn-expensive single-player game.

£500 for a complete TWO player kit. Yeah, then you could be in people's homes rather than an expensive status symbol. But it's twice the price it needs to be. It wouldn't even be so bad if there was a standard and PSVR, Rift and HTC could all play each others games seamlessly across all the platforms (we have USB everywhere now, right?). But that's not true either, so every penny sunk is potentially lost if you chose the Betamax of VR.

I'd happily pay £200 for PSVR if it worked on my PC. The lower res of the screen would actually HELP, I wouldn't need anywhere near as beefy a PC. But the only option to do that is unofficial software that you have no guarantees will work on any particular game.

Whereas if someone had made a proper VR console, with two VR headsets, with the Nintendo name on it, for £500, people WOULD buy it, and it would establish a standard overnight in terms of programming API as well as hardware connection (Wiimotes are just Bluetooth and have drivers for everything now).

I have dealt with your blinkered approach to voting more times in my adult life than I care to mention, and thus have prepared answers for all the usual stock rubbish that people spout at me for it. It's a pity such time and effort isn't put into putting forward worthy candidates rather than attacking those that won't vote for unworthy ones.

If your idea of democracy is "lesser of only two/three evils", then you really need to go back and look up the definition. Especially when those people are ALL you have available, and you can't even vote for yourself, a friend, a celebrity, a scientist, whoever the hell you want.

"People are sent to die in order to protect your ability to vote so you should at least honour that. Doesn't matter who for."

a) No, they died to protect my freedom of speech, expression, decision and life. Including that of people they disagree with, don't understand, don't share a culture or attitude, or people whom they find unbearable, uncivilised or even downright nasty.

b) Yes it does matter. I will not vote in someone that I deem inadequate for the job. Present a worthy candidate and I'll vote for them.

Force me to vote by all means, as a civic duty. But give me a "none of the above" or even "Other (complete details) ________" box in which I can enter anyone that I like, including nobody. No, the "vote for one guy one year and the other the next to 'cancel' it out" system isn't right either. And maybe if you forced everyone to vote, you'd be able to tell that despite party X winning over party Y, that actually party Z (the "we don't want either of them" clan) outclasses them in every election.

P.S. I did technically vote once, not for a person or party but to answer a question. To change the way that we vote. Because the way that we vote sucks, but the way we were proposing we could vote sucked less and therefore was a clear and progressive step towards improving not just my outlook but everyone else's. As a mathematician, I can say that neither system was ideal, but one was mathematically "fairer". It didn't matter, because most of the other 20m people didn't agree, so nothing changed.

However, voting for one person over the other does not allow for such "less ideal" candidates to significantly improve the outcome for everyone. For instance, Clinton vs Trump.

"Pick the person who APPEARS to be slightly less stupid, obnoxious, corrupt, inept and cringe-worthy from a group of three/four that you have no say in" isn't democracy. I don't know those people. "Pick the person you'd like to run the country" is a democratic question. The answer for which would be "Me", "My mate Jim", or failing that, someone like Stephen Hawking. I want a scientist in charge for once, like a meritocracy. Someone logical who spends their life cutting through the bias and getting to the issues and actually determining the improvement made in a repeatable manner, who could drastically alter the way we live and can distance themselves from rubbish like sex-scandals and stupid things people say about foreigners. Someone who hires people best for the job. Rather than someone who was education minister than prison minister then minister for Brexit then minister for agriculture and then....

Absent that, I'd really rather not vote at all. Take the consequences of your own decision. I'll abstain. If my abstaining doesn't register at all, so be it. But think to yourself why you would tolerate ministers and diplomats abstaining from a crucial political question, but not someone who has no knowledge of the situation deliberately abstaining until a worthy candidate(s) appears.

Re: A stand-alone program to ...

I used to use it all the time (I know the jonath domain by heart).

It was a great tool for PC systems that weren't full desktops for everything from identifying machines to indicating problems via a series of tones. Not always was a ^G able to be sent, or sufficient, for such purposes. It's much easier to break out to shell and run a specific program, if for no other reason than echoing scripts that do the same will also beep even though you're only viewing the script, not to mention what's the controlling terminal nowadays with everything from virtual terminals to SSH, containers to virtual machines, etc. - where does the ^G actually play the sound? Beep played out of the hardware of the physical machine you were executing on (hence why it liked to have root).

For instance, a home machine that controlled the Internet connection has no screen or speakers except the internal speaker and used to have a set of rising or falling tones if the Internet came up or went down. I literally never had a graphics card in that machine, so it was very handy, and just a ^G is insufficient to convey that.

However, to tell you how long ago that was, it was a 386 running Freesco on a 2.0.38 kernel, and the Internet was a modem connection which I used to have to turn-off to let my dad make a phone call and it was useful to know that the modem was stopped from dialling out (the falling tones) and when it had managed to restart the PPP session after resuming (the rising tones). If you kept hearing both, it was still trying to dial out.

I know that a lot of embedded hardware still has the same kind of things in them - everything from firewalls to NVR servers - to let you know when they've completed booting. Not to mention that I don't think I've ever owned a computer that WOULDN'T output the sound from beep if you installed it. It might be a PC speaker passthrough header on a sound-card or motherboard, but it usually still works, I believe.

That said, it's probably a long-abandoned bit of software given that it's been 20 years since then, and all it does it beep, and that's pretty much everything you wanted it to do even 20 years ago. It should have been audited, it should have been caught, and being setuid (or suggesting so), it should have been subject to a higher level of scrutiny.

I bet there are a million machines out there with it on, just for those rising-tone power-up notifications in embedded devices, if they're not using some busybox equivalent.

Now consider a determined state-level attacker such who might be interested in intercepting encrypted communications on a targeted and international level.

Now he just needs a satellite picture of the sky over your head at the time they took the photo to stand a good chance of knowing enough to predict some of your "random" numbers to a certain extent.

Not all use-cases are as simple to combat as you think, when you're talking encryption that you expect one day a government or military might use itself and/or might not want you to use.

Random numbers are hard. Much harder than you might think. And tiny deliberate influences can drastically alter the security of them. There's a reason that there are entire books on the subject, and where most of the current traditional techniques - even on input data we're convinced is pretty random to start - revolve around hashing, mixing, eliminating higher-order bits, melding into existing pools, preserving historical pools to use for future mixing, selecting, analysing viability of and plucking numbers from random pools, etc.

Your "random input" might well be considered untrusted external data, in effect. Someone who really wants to corrupt that pool could do so quite easily if they were determined. Hell, just by cutting your CCD and hoping you weren't checking the image wasn't all-black. 90% of handling random numbers (and 90% of coding errors where they are mishandled resulting in a security problem) is about taking only selected parts that are more likely to be random and incorporating them in such a way that their randomness leaks through but not any determined pattern or bias that may be present. The other 10% is actually getting something that looks random enough to use as source data and could probably be trusted.

Hint: The Debian versions of OpenSSL software generated millions of certificates signed on such systems with atrociously insecure keys by failing to use proper random input and nobody noticing (they seeded from process ID, not an RNG, which varied but not truly randomly). For years. Once discovered, almost every key ever made on those systems was compromisable. Because all the fancy techniques in the world are for naught if your input isn't truly random or trusted.

Just the JPG-artifacts in an image could give a serious attacker enough bias to compromise your RNG. Or the resolution of a particular camera. Or the post-processing algorithms in the camera biasing pixels to generate a more natural image. Or the fact that someone knows the seed picture is of the sky might well give them enough.

As a mathematician, I have advice for people who aren't: Never think you understand randomness, encryption, statistics or probability. Just don't. Don't write code for them. Don't apply them to work things out. Don't dabble and think you understand everything. You'll make things weaker or more incorrect a billion times over before you make it stronger, no matter how clever or well-intentioned you are.

I'm fairly certain I could sit and derive a public-key encryption/decryption algorithm, a random number generator, etc. from first-principles given enough time and a programming language. I'm also 100% certain it would be useless to the point of utter compromise upon the first serious analysis by someone who understands those fields.

If you haven't read Numerical Recipes, go do so. It's got a maths-and-C-code heavy description of everything RNG, encryption, probability, etc. And that book is approaching 30-something years old and was never designed to cover hostile intent. It's currently holding up my coffee table, because it's thicker than my phone is wide.

Re: I wish Linux would support the Apple File System (APFS)

Just think practically:

Unless someone takes the time to code it up, port it over, test its implementation, keeps synced with all the iOS updates and features they throw into it (probably without announcement, code or assistance as this is Apple we're talking about), tests it to the extent that you're happy with putting your data on it, fight the patent fight with Apple, and then works to integrate it into the Linux kernel, it ain't gonna happen.

"Linux" isn't about a team of guys just putting in your wishlist. The central people do nothing more than approve and critique stuff other people have made. If nobody's made it, it won't get in. I think there's precisely ZIP in terms of Apple code contributions in the kernel, and even MS has huge chunks of their code in HyperV etc. compatibility modules.

So, if Apple aren't going to do it, and there's no open-source implementation of it (even NTFS had several competing implementations, one utilising the original Windows NTFS.SYS binary via a shim layer!), where's this code going to come from?

The closest I can find is this:

https://github.com/sgan81/apfs-fuse

Which is read-only (like NTFS drivers were for years). I have no idea about Mac version numbers for compatibility so you're on your own there, but it appears to be a wrote-from-scratch, reverse-engineered module using FUSE. It's also a handful of months old. You're going to be several years down the path before that's even close to CaptiveNTFS's standard, which never made it to the kernel.

And who would benefit? People putting an Apple-formatted disk into a machine that runs Linux. That's a tiny portion of even the most techy of users.

And, looking at the code in that archive, there's literally nothing in there that's shocking or new or complicated or whole-new-levels of filesystem. It's just a bog-standard bit of coding. Sure, that's not the write-logic, including all the data-safety-guarantees and atomicity required for that (because that's the hard part), but that code is pretty indicative that APFS is really nothing very special at all.

Re: This has happened to me for years

Yeah, I have a guy with the same name in Ireland who's somehow convinced that he has a variation of my email address.

One year I managed to get a postal address off a plane ticket he bought and sent him a letter. He was very good for a while, and wrote a nice letter back and closed a bunch of accounts (including PayPal - I could have been very naughty and "confirmed" his account and then waited for him to add a credit card, but I'm far too honest). But then either he or another person in Ireland with the same name started doing it again about six months later.

I now just put them in spam folders. Fact is, it's more tricky to convince me anyway as I have a domain that forwards to various things (one destination is a GMail that I can access on the go), but for which I use unique prefixes for each service. It's quite obvious and takes seconds to know if an email was sent to the actual prefix I signed up with, to some made-up prefix at my domain, or direct to the GMail account. Pretty much anything direct to the account is spam (I've never advertised that address whatsoever).

I always wondered what the point of the dot-address stuff was on GMail as I could only think of ways for it to go wrong. On a side-note, does anyone remember the Apache mod_spell module, that would try to correct mis-spelled page names? That always seemed the same to me... surely it just lets a ton of mis-spelled links propagate all over the web rather than actually fix the problem.

So why does a smaller screen, less capable CPU, less heatsinks etc., no GPU to speak of, less RAM, less built-in features, etc. translate to MORE EXPENSIVE?

It's not like they've shrunk it down to fit on the head of a pin. It's still a laptop, with the same standard screens and standard processors and standard RAM modules as the one I showed you. They've just put it in a smaller box with a battery that probably isn't anywhere near as powerful as the one in the gaming laptop.

There's a point at which I say "Yeah, fair enough, different use means an entirely different type of device". But this is just someway between a tablet and a low-end laptop, and should cost LESS THAN HALF what it does. Because for the price it does, I can outmatch it just on every single specification by about double.

Oh, I'm quite sure there are tens of thousands of places that do just that.

Cost-benefit analysis is fine, so long as someone did it.

It's when people whine that "Oh, my 4G credit card reader is down, I can't take cards, my business is in ruins" or "WE CAN'T GET OUR EMAILS!", when they haven't bothered to take such a loss into account that bothers me.

To be honest, everything in the world from GMail to Azure, AWS to IBM will be down for things on that order of magnitude, no matter what they promise. They have to be. But it's what YOU do about it for your circumstances that matters.

Emails will delay an hour or so and then come in later if it comes up. Skype shouldn't be a business-critical tool. Your remote workers not being able to get in on VPN for a bit is no worse than someone tripping over a plug. But when you whine that your work-at-home telesales can't dial into your VoIP VPN for a fraction of a second and it's costing you money, I have to just think "Okay, so what was your backup?"

Re: It is not just lost VAT ...

I think that HMRC don't start asking questions until you're earning something undeclared over £4k a year, minimum.

Even then, you can "get away" with things for a lot time, but you would be an idiot to try to do so via Amazon or eBay, etc. In a cash-business, yes, you can get away with a lot. Ask London cabbies about the back-handers from strip-clubs, as exposed on the news not long ago. Up to £80 cash-in-hand for a dropoff in some cases, the second the customer enters their premises.

But with something like Amazon or eBay, where you need a bank account? They'll get you eventually but they'll wait until you've run up a bill worth chasing you for.

(P.S. Do not make me count how many "official" lightning cables just snap in two at the end. We stopped buying them except once a term because it was getting silly.)

Re: What other Which

"TIP: If you have a direct debit with a company, make sure they know it's been cancelled. A phone call to their Support department will be recorded."

If you tell your bank you're cancelling a Direct Debit, the company it's with are informed. Within minutes. I can assure you of this, having done it to a company I had a grievance against (charging me for a phone which never arrived) and I gave them more than adequate time to resolve the situation.

I phoned the bank. I asked to cancel. They said "Are you sure?". I said yes. They are legally obliged to honour that, and because it was a "recent" DD and I said it was disputed, they refunded all the payments (three months worth, I think) immediately.

When I put down the phone, the company in question phoned to ask why I'd done it, so I explained to them: "For the reasons I told you that I would. Check your records."

They were literally unable to take any more payments from me from that point on (I had asked them nicely not to several times earlier, but they continued to do so).

But the bank didn't even care. They just clicked "Undo" and all the DD agreement and past payments were magically history and I got my money back in my account.

Sure, it's nice to TELL the company, but you don't need to.

(P.S. They threatened me with court, which I offered to initiate for them, not having supplied me with the goods they had promised for the monthly payment they were taking. And, I mean, we're talking about a PHONE that they supplied... if they genuinely thought I was using it without payment, they could block the IMEI. Strangely, like every other company that's ever made that threat to me, no court case ever happened).

Re: It would take a heart of stone not to laugh...

"And you'd be betting your life on that? Do you know what they do to people at CIA black sites?"

If I was in Assange's position? Yeah, I'd bet my life. Better than rotting in an embassy forever.

Additionally, nobody has even BOTHERED to try to suggest he would end up in the US at all, in any way, shape or form.

It's based on an unspoken assumption that the rule of law will be subverted to extract him without formal process in the view of the world's press for... well, let's be honest, some pretty worthless news item he once dug up that - as you might notice - nobody is really up in arms about. Certainly not any more. The "news" was small-fry stuff, it really was. It's not started a war or changed a political situation or made the public demand a review... nobody really cares about it. "The truth"? Well, it was pretty boring, to be honest. I would be expecting a million times worse among modern large governments.

So, yes, in his position, I'd bet my life. Of course, that doesn't generate anywhere near as much press, once people realise that what you SAY you're going to abducted for is pretty boring. I can point out a lot more war crimes that also go un-cared-about. Rather than fuss about a prat-in-a-box, let's fix the war-crimes happening, eh? Like, let's generate some actual disgust that they happened. Because... I'm looking around... and I see nothing.

And, to be honest, I could argue that Wikileaks put more innocent people at risk by doing what they did, how they did, without caring and instead fighting to get publicity. The fact that US forces kill innocents in a "warzone" (without a formal declaration of war, which is probably worse) is hardly even news. They've bombed hospitals and all kinds quite publicly.

Not saying it's right. Not saying I condone it. Not saying people shouldn't know. Not saying the perpetrators shouldn't face investigation and action.

But Assange? He's just a prat-in-a-box, and for self-inflicted reasons.

If anything, he has helped prove that if you DO know something, whatever you do never make it public. Unless you want to spend a paranoid eternity in an embassy (Assange), a prison (Manning), or being interrogated by Russia (Snowden). He has basically SCARED OFF anyone else ever following suit, for some pretty minor stuff that we already knew in principle, just lacking the specifics, and in doing so condemned himself when he could just have not skipped bail, cleared his name, and stayed the same kind of celebrity twat but with some integrity.

Re: I can't remember

Happens all the time.

Oh, you mean in the UK? Yeah, no, forget it.

Re: Oil Pressure Gauge?

I have a 2016 vehicle. There is no oil pressure gauge. Because...well... let's be honest, if you need it, then you shouldn't have let your vehicle get to that point (i.e. you should know enough to get someone to service it precisely because you never do, or you should know enough to service it yourself).

There's an oil light (although explaining that they occasionally need to check that ALL THE LIGHTS COME ON when they start the car, and then all go out, is lost on most people). There's a rev meter (which I don't understand the point of nowadays, given that there are also gear-change icons as well as this big loud revving noise or stall action if not in the right range). There's a speedo. There's even a thing that tells me fuel efficiency (which I would argue is actually quite useful in this eco-era).

But oil-pressure? Nope. Same way I don't need to know the battery voltage, etc. It's a detail that shouldn't need to be *measured* as part of the normal course of driving operation. I'm sure the *car* might want to know it... does the ECU act on oil-pressure for anything other than a low pressure warning? I don't think so. But I'm sure the car needs to know exhaust temperature, O2 content of intake air, valve timing, etc. I don't. It does.

To be honest, that's how a dashboard should work. The stuff I need to know, only, including a big red light if there's some problem that requires intervention. Everything else is just a distraction. I don't need to know how many emails per second my server is dealing with. But I'd like a red light if - for some reason - it doesn't see any emails for a long time, or if it's hitting overload on dealing with incoming emails.

But people lost that point about user-interfaces a long time ago, so most UIs try to show you everything all the time for no real reason. There's no need for my software firewall to flash for every possible network activity, for example.

If I was in charge of some huge national grid of something, I'd want a red-amber-green of most things. And full statistics collection in the background, obviously. But I just need the red-amber-green. Everything else is detail that you can dig into later if it's more than an intermittent blip.

Re: For Everyone?

Tell them to buy a 4G stick / wifi router (e.g. Draytek Vigor LTE models).

I guarantee you that you'll get more than 6MBps around there. Even if you only use that as an "first, fast, unreliable" services and keep the 6Mbps as the "second, slow, more reliable" fallback.

Re: That was certainly my understanding

Which would be how I would design it. [[However, for all intents and purposes a properly secured and managed VLAN setup is practically identical to separate cabling (no, on a proper setup, you can't just "pretend" to be on the secure VLAN even if you know what that is - any decent switch will refuse that, only allow certain ports to do that, override any VLAN setting (or absence of one) you try anyway, or demand RADIUS to authenticate to the other VLAN).]]

But in terms of modifications... why would you want them remotely-accessible from anything other than the central bank itself (and the computers controlling your centralised ATM network? Yeah, they shouldn't have Outlook on them), and why would you want to modify (say) denominations issued or present in the drawers? That stuff should be done by an engineer on-site (by definition, physically inside the bank, and usually when it's closed to the public).

Certainly it shouldn't be issuing out more than requested, giving money for free, or from accounts that don't have the funds (up to a set amount, possibly, in the case of complete disconnection from the network but to be honest, I would then say "Don't issue money at all but say "Out of Order" because you have no idea if it actually exists in the account at all"). Isn't that how ATMs are scammed across Europe - everyone clones a card, uses it at the same time in ten different countries, the foreign ATMs all "trust" it for a while and issue cash, and only realises 10 times the amount has been withdrawn from various countries but it took a little while to update them all and realise that? It always seemed a stupid design for me, and the reason that card machines dial-up to check the ACTUAL live status rather than hope there was credit and issue the goods/money.

Re: What have I missed?

However:

https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/alcohol-facts/alcohol-and-the-law/buying-alcohol/

It is against the law:

- To sell alcohol to someone under 18 anywhere, and can lead to a maximum fine of £20,000 1 for bar staff/managers or premises may eventually be shut down.

- For an adult to buy or attempt to buy alcohol on behalf of someone under 18.

- For someone under 18 to buy alcohol, attempt to buy alcohol or to be sold alcohol.

If you give your son a drink, that's fine. If you buy a bottle of cider for the kid outside the shop, that's illegal.