* Posts by Lee D

4232 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2013

Android Oreo mic drop fury: Google ups tempo for Pixel mobe audio fix

Lee D Silver badge

Truly, we're in the age where phones that cannot be used to make calls are considered to be... well... a minor inconvenience.

Maybe it's time we just started called them Personal Digital Assistants again...

UK mobe network Three's profits hit by IT upgrade costs

Lee D Silver badge

Re: "realise how crap their coverage is"

But mobile broadband... that's not just smartphones. Three got famous by being for the "data-heavy" user, they aren't going to be wandering around much.

And I have both Three (mobile Wifi) and Giffgaff (smartphone) and I don't think either of them are better than the other and not to the point of detriment for either of them.

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Hiding

"I dunno, man. Have you seen Independence Day?"

Yes, and it contains one of the most true-to-life lines known to man.

An American newsreader telling people not to shoot at the aliens.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Not useful

How did you send a message around the world 100 years ago?

Spark-gap generators pushing out watts of EM power on all frequencies.

Then?

You moved to frequency-specific transmissions.

Then... you moved to low-power frequency-specific transmissions.

Then... you moved to low-power, encrypted (i.e. indistinguishable from noise), frequency-specific transmissions.

Then... you moved to low-power, encrypted frequency-HOPPING transmissions.

Then... you moved to fibre.

Some huge portion of the world's communications is now entirely invisible electromagnetically. Sure, the endpoints may be converted to EM, but that's it. And now? Fibre optics to your home, to your device (USB3 anyone?), massively reduced and controlled EM emissions, and moving from broadcast technology to digital services and direct streaming. We switched off analogue TV. How long before we switch off analog radio? DVB? In favour of streamed content over IP rather than broadcast-over-the-airwaves? Not long.

That's in the space of 100 years. 100 times that length of time? I can't imagine that what we recognise as an EM emission is even comparable to what's used by then. It's literally like having had Morse Code transmissions over a spark-gap generator at the start of the stone age, and projecting towards what you would have in the modern day.

So... yes. I'll be amazed if any kind of detectable, recognisable, understandable (i.e. not encrypted so it stands out from random noise, etc.) EM emission from a synthetic source would still be being produced by us in 10,000 years. And we have to assume that other civilisations will be the same.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Not useful

It's called an error margin.

The equation is perfectly fine, so long as you account for your potential error.

And when you do that, we know the number of planets quite well. The number of intelligent beings is an estimate, of course, but it has limits. We know there can't be intelligent life on every planet. We know there can't be no intelligent life. So you get a nice range of measurements of where it's MOST LIKELY to lie and you apply those to the equation.

That gives you an answer of "what are the chances" with a nice error margin. And, fortunately, that error margin can be read as either a "most likely minimum chance" and "most likely maximum chance". The most likely minimum is basically zero. The most likely maximum is... well... tiny. So we can say, with some degree of accuracy, that the chances of finding any communicating civilisation at all are... tiny.

It's not hard. That's GCSE science. State your units. Calculate the possible error in your measurements.

And the Drake equation tells you that you won't observe life out there. And it only rarely gets revised up (e.g. the latest round of planet-detections in the last 20 years). And it more often than not gets revised further down (as here - even if they were around broadcasting for 10,000 years, we might never have detected them, and 10,000 years seems an oddly long time for a civilisation to be stuck on producing arbitrary and strong EM emissions).

At the end of the day, it's statistics, so it could all be "wrong". But it's not actually wrong. It's a probability, that you can calculate. We might find an intelligent civilisation next door (in solar terms), which is a billions-upon-billions-to-one chance. But it could happen and we still wouldn't be "wrong". It just may be fluke and the next one might never happen, statistically.

If you think statistics are wrong, you may as well never do any science at all, ever. If nothing else, they give you an indication of where it's best to focus your efforts. Sure, it may not work out. But, on average, over the age of a civilisation like ours, the statistics will win out and provide you with the best possible solution. Rather than waste billions looking for aliens and never developing space-flight, we can say "Hey, it's worth poking around, but let's spend the most money on real science that's more likely to result in something more practical."

Patch LOSE-day: Microsoft secures servers of the world. By disconnecting them

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Oh dear

Increase the DHCP lease times if it's a problem. There's no way a DHCP-providing server should be offline for more than a week, anyway.

Static IPs have their places, but generally speaking DHCP solves more issues than it causes. First, it usually means manually entering IP and subnet. As someone who inherited very odd subnets, I can assure you that it's not fun to spend ages on a problem only to discover it was a typo in an IP/subnet.

And DHCP with long lease times, failover DHCP server (bog-standard since Server 2008), and reservations for anything you care about makes life so much easier.

Honestly, how do you deploy clients? I press F12 in the BIOS, they get a DHCP address, it goes (via PXE) into WDS, I choose a Windows image, it reboots and when it comes up it's on the domain. Whether it's brand-new out-of-the-box, or a complete re-image. From that point on the address doesn't change unless the lease expires and for some reason it can't renew the old address (i.e. never). Literally one key-press, one mouse click and you're done.

How do you do that with static addressing without having to maintain huge lists of things and manually enter stuff in places, or code it specifically in templates of some kind? And when I need to find out the IP or force a particular option, image, etc. I can do it via DHCP management.

Static for servers, yes. DNS server you really have NO choice but to be static (it's silly for your DNS IP to constantly have to change, for instance, but you could easily give that machine a reservation on DHCP). Everything else will work no differently on DHCP or static and for every far-fetched scenario you can imagine on one, there's something on the other that works to your advantage.

But I honestly don't have the time to manage hundreds of individual client IPs like that. Set up the servers. Maintain a list of their IPs. Done. Everything else, you let manage itself because it doesn't matter. Group membership, web-filtering, whatever else you can conceive should then be set up on a computer-name basis, possibly a MAC address or authentication as a user, not by IP.

And in a world of VM's, BYOD, self-building clients and managed networks, its too much faffing to be bothering with any kind of individual IP address for services. I literally know two of my IP addresses off by heart - the gateway (.1 of my subnet) and a secondary DNS server (.10). Everything else I don't need to ever know and don't know and don't care, they're all named and DNS-accessible and worst-case I could find out via the switch (which also keeps track of DNS name vs IP vs Mac) in about two clicks.

I honestly haven't typed in an IP address other than those in ages (and that is to ping them to ensure they're back up after taking them down, so that everything else I'm about to do will resolve properly). I just reserve the IP on DHCP if I need to, e.g. I made an exception for web filtering on one machine, added it to an AD group, used that group for filtering I made a port forward to a particular machine, reserve the lease on DHCP and use the computer name. I can blacklist clients on RADIUS on the basis that their MACs aren't in the right groups, etc.

About the only other thing that needs static IPs is some forms of HA failover, but even that's not all of them and they're not "usual" IT stuff. DHCP, DNS, DFS, HTTP, SMTP, etc. failover doesn't need the same IPs on every machine, for instance. Just list multiple entries and have "server1.domain.com" or equivalent.

Lee D Silver badge

Bigger question - why are you using static IPs on regular PC's?

To be honest, even servers don't need a static IP. The only exceptions are literally the DNS server IPs that you plug into clients via DHCP or manually. That's it. Even the OTHER DNS servers can be DHCP and picked up from the original DNS server and relayed.

But a client PC? Stop it. Use the computer name. Whack the lease-life up on DHCP if you have to, but static IPs are just silly.

Openreach hiring thousands more engineers

Lee D Silver badge

I play CS:Go, and have done back to CS 1.6, when it was on WON prior to needing Steam, and run CS servers.

30 ping is absolutely fine, you're not going to be able to distinguish (sorry, but your mouse->monitor refresh path has much greater latency than that).

Literally, never noticed a latency issue via 4G.

Bigger question: Do you game over Wifi? I guarantee you that your Wifi introduces bigger spikes than the 4G ever would. And also, do you QoS your gaming packets? I always did because just one person on Facebook sharing the connection with you while you game will make your ping spike.

But 30ms is not a problem at all.

Lee D Silver badge

Who uses a landline in this day and age?

I stopped paying for one years ago. If it comes "for free", fine, but I never used it and so can safely put it on one of those "I never use it" rates, and it only ever rung for spam callers.

Moved house recently, didn't even bother. The broadband rates were pathetic, I'm not going to pay for a landline, and 4G signal was perfect.

Honestly, OR and BT together have done more to push new technology than anyone else - they pushed me towards 4G and SIP rather than touch their services. I scrapped 6 ISDN lines (and dozens of analogue lines) in work, pushed them to SIP. Cheaper, easier, more features, more reliable, greater capacity. Backhaul is via Virgin leased line, so BT literally lost ALL our custom there. At home, they lost all my custom by the simple precept of me buying a 4G Wifi dongle. I now pay Three less than it costs to run a BT monthly line on their cheapest package for phone + broadband, get faster speeds, more reliability, and the ability to change provider every month by simply buying a SIM card in a shop, if I so desire.

If it really came to it, I'd buy a Skype number, or a SIP account for my mobile phone. I can't imagine ever using BT or OR again, voluntarily. How they think that will help their business, I can't work out. And it's not like I haven't given them many chances over the years. They're scrapping ISDN, but when they provide a SIP offering, do they honestly think they are going to be able to compete?

More power to UK, say 'leccy vehicle makers. Seriously, they need it

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Its not just manufacturing that needs a solution

" the latest fast chargers are 120kW. A 1/2 hour stop for food and bladder relief should be able to add 180+ miles range, or about another 3 hours of motorway driving (by which time you'll probably be in need of another stop anyway)."

Question:

How many 120KW chargers can a motorway service station support instantaneously?

That is precisely the number of cars that can charge at one time. In your example, double that number of cars per hour can charge up.

How much does it cost to keep that number of chargers running 24 hours a day?

Let's say 10p per KWh to make the maths nice. That's £12 per hour per charger. Let's just say that's a significant portion of motorway service revenue, per vehicle. I don't imagine people spend more than £24 on non-fuel items when they go to a motorway services, on average. Of course, you can charge them for the use of the charger... probably £24 an hour would be about normal rates for a standard 50% markup.

A service station might service... let's say 100 vehicles an hour (there's about a 40 minute dwell time at your average motorway services... so at any one time the number of people visible in one is going to be about "that many vehicles per hour" - 100 seems reasonable, but I can't trace statistics for this - a vehicle or so a minute actually seems quite generously low).

That's 12MW of charging power per motorway services. Wiki has a list of 100+ motorway services. That's 1.2GW. About the equivalent of 4.6m solar panels (~300W on average, according to energy.gov). That's JUST the motorway service stations. Nothing else.

And even with 120KW, you have to wait around for an hour before you can continue. And then do the same 3 hours later. You wouldn't even get from London to Cornwall without TWO STOPS OF ONE HOUR EACH of just sitting around doing nothing. If you go to Land's End from London, possibly three.

That's assuming every service station has 100 "fast-chargers" chargers, that all work, there are no queues for them, and you're happy to pay ~£60 for the privilege of "fast-charging" and sitting around doing nothing just to get to Cornwall.

Or you could just get in a petrol car. Put in £60 of petrol. Get to Cornwall. Done.

The economics isn't there until: Electricity DRASTICALLY drops in price (which isn't likely when subsidies for things like solar expire). Batteries triple in capacity. The National Grid gets hundreds of billions of pounds to upgrade capacity down to hundreds of individual service stations and smaller charging points.

I don't know if you notice, but it's hard to do all those things at the same time - each one makes one of the others more expensive (yep... bigger batteries? Oh, now you have to charge for three hours or require a 360KW charger...)

Lee D Silver badge

Re: This has not been properly thought out.

How far does the average electric car drive after a five-minute stop to top-up?

Because my old petrol car can do 500 miles, then after five minutes at a petrol station, it'll do another 500 miles.

Electric cars may have the theoretical capacity to do such things, but they would have to be carefully planned (if nothing else, to ensure you DO remember to stop off at the electric points and/or find another quickly if you forget) and you're into reliance on everything working perfectly - the range of the car, the indication of the charge, the charger being available, the margins being right, and you knowing all this in advance.

If I wanted to drive to Scotland, I could get in my car, fill up whenever I pass any station, as necessary, and not have to think about it or rely on fine-margins.

If I wanted to do that in an electric car, I have to plan it perfectly and everything has to combine to work well. One diversion, traffic jam, refuelling station missed or out of order or closed, and you're stranded. And when stranded... you need to be towed. You can't just hitch a ride to the nearest station with a jerry can.

EV's are no doubt fine for short trips only. Everything else you have to stop and think if it will make it and plan ahead and hope for the best. To be honest, that's not why I own a car in the first place. I own a car to stop me having to worry about if the trains are running, what time the bus arrives, will there be room on it in peak hours, and can it get me to where I need.

As pointed out - maybe fine for going to a nearby workplace. But visiting relatives? You're into starting with a full charge straight away no matter what, charging en-route (and presumably on the way back), and the time cost associated with such. And if you live in a flat where the car can't park near your power supply? Yeah, game over in terms of owning one before you even start.

I just did a map of electric charging points near the town I work in. There are maybe a dozen (as in TOTAL number of cables available, not just charging stations). All of different types, connectors and capacities, all with different companies. Most of them are in places that shut at certain times too, e.g. shopping centres and town halls. There are 100,000 people in my town, and it's inside the M25. There are as many charging POINTS as there are petrol stations. But petrol stations have a dozen pumps, and it takes 5 minutes for someone to use them. EV stations... not the same. And one of the EV points is actually just a 2KW ordinary mains plug connector...

I'm all for the concept of EV, but they need much better batteries (they literally become a no-brainer at that point) and/or hundreds of charging points, not a dozen. To be honest, even if it came to that, I still want the battery capacity more than the reliance on constantly being able to find a charger.

Blackout at Samsung NAND factory destroys chunk of global supply

Lee D Silver badge

Re: The maths don't add up...

If the power goes off midway, restarting all the kit and removing all the half-done stuff, etc. is no easy task.

You're just assuming you switch it back on and everything comes back online, gets back to temperature and just carries on mid-process... hell, just a cheap PCB could be ruined if it's stopped mid-way through the process of creation (still soaking the copper off, in the middle of soldering, solidified residue from sitting around from 30 minutes, etc.)... now imagine nano-scale processes on a constantly-moving plant.

More importantly, if a brief blip COULD have cost you 10% of the month's supply, why do you not have generators to stop that happening?

But the answer to that is simple... if you're the only person making it, sure, you're delivery deadlines are hit. But you can still charge more because there's a dearth of your product worldwide. Same way that memory prices are generally volatile - supply and demand. Nobody's going to have spare capacity in a similar plant at a rival to "ramp up" and steal that 10% of revenue before you're back up and running, so you can get away with it.

Maplin shutdown sale prices still HIGHER than rivals

Lee D Silver badge

Re: A note on customer service , retailers

"Yes, you can help me by leaving me alone".

I only use it when I absolutely need to, but yep - if you NEED to push sales that hard, and you can afford to employ people to do nothing but approach customer's individually all day long, then sorry - you either don't need my money, or you've got problems which mean I don't want to be relying on you for ongoing support.

Maplin's is just proof of this - from when you need to push your wares in my face, and approach me when I'm clearly standing there holding an armful of very specific techy electronic items which I've experienced no problem determining what they are, at that point you have too much invested in staff having to push products rather than customers coming to you to get them. And look what happens to companies who get that far.

EDIT: My usual line, in any kind of Maplin's / CEX / etc. is usually "Do I *look* like I need help in a geek shop?"... because there's no way anyone looks at me in an electronics shop and thinks "Poor old non-techy codger, maybe he needs a hand"... I basically project "geek". Said in the right tone, it makes people laugh, agree, and wander off.

Lee D Silver badge

Interesting that nobody else is interested in their stores, even for another retail store.

Maybe the high street really is dead nowadays.

Though, if my old road is anything to go by, it'll be a bookies or a pharmacy before long (four bookies and three pharmacies on one quite-small row of shops!).

It's Pi day: Care to stuff a brand new Raspberry one in your wallet?

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Dates

YYYY-MM-DD is a fabulous, sensible format. It means that alphabetical sorting actually sorts chronologically too. If you don't file your emails like that, you're barking.

But MM-DD-YYYY is ludicrous and nonsensical. It doesn't matter "how you say it".

Privacy folk raise alarm over schools snooping on kids' online habits

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Privacy? What's that?

@israel_hands: Agree with pretty much all you say.

Biometrics, however, don't have specific legislation that I'm aware of. They are just captured as "personal data" the same as everything else. Personally, I object to (and therefore don't work with) biometric systems (from a security point of view, because you can't change the biometric if it's made public and it's easy to forge them enough to fool any sensibly-priced reader) but many, many schools have them for canteen, library, etc. Fingerprint is the most common and, no, they don't need specific permission, they can cover it in the blanket school agreements. Again, that ship has already sailed and there's not much we can do about it. I also object on the grounds that, in theory, the police would be within their rights to request and use that data for law enforcement (i.e. "We know it was one of your kids, but we don't have their fingerprint data.... but you do...").

The best defence I have is that I went to the BETT exhibition and interrogated all the major biometric vendors, and, for the age of children that I cater for, biometrics are regarded as being nearly useless - too much growth and change in their bodies means constant re-registering and high false-readings. Most companies said "Anyone under 9, don't bother" or words to that effect and I work in a prep school which goes up to age 13, so half our kids wouldn't be able to use it.

We don't do BYOD (that's just stupid, you can't secure random third-party devices without specifying models and then "supervising" them, so it's not really "Bring" your own, so much as "Buy" your own) but we do issue mobile devices that some kids take home. When they are used at home, yes, they can talk back to us. And we can track them, trace them, lock them down and switch them off if required. I strictly control access to such functions, we would never do it on a whim, but other places may not be so secure in their policies. However, if you use a device at home, it's on your wifi with our system. We don't have 3G/4G devices (that's just stupid, though you can do something called Global Proxy which means it uses the school filter for ANY CONNECTION wherever it happens to join the Internet) but in theory we can push apps, and we can also get GPS traces.

Some schools that I'm aware of also push camera-monitoring apps (at least in theory), keyboard- and screen-logging apps, etc. They are suites of software especially for that for schools (I have thus far refused to deploy them). If the kids are taking those home...

One more example: A child had an allocated school iPad. They took it on holiday to the US. They phoned us to tell us that they thought it was lost or stolen. We locked the device and had it report its GPS location. Turned out that it was half-way across the Atlantic when we asked it to check-in. It had been used on the plane (therefore presumably connected to Wifi) and therefore reported back it's location, and we watched it fly over the ocean over a series of hours. It was found when the plane was empty and the pilot had noticed it was security marked, so he decided to take it in the cockpit with him on his return journey and drop it back to the school. Fact is, we knew that before the child or parent did.

It's scary stuff. But the alternative is no technology in schools (which may not be a bad thing, but it's never going to happen, and it would put children at a detriment while ANY OTHER school allows it). If we have tech that's going to be wireless, Internet-connected, etc. and mandate that children have to use it (Google Classroom, etc.) then we have to lock it down (for their protection, and for theft-protection). There's no reason for such tech to be generic off-the-shelf hardware and Internet-connected to the wide web, but it is. As a school IT guy, my job has morphed from "control these locally connected machines that you have full power over" to "control these devices that are tagged with the child's name, advertise their location, and connect to the school database with all their personal details." The scope for misuse is enormous.

There have been, and no doubt will be, a point where as a professional I refuse to implement more measures like this, even if that involves a change of career. But parent objections? So far zero. They are statistically infinitely more likely to complain that "the wifi is schools is microwaving my child's brain" (while having a mobile phone strapped to their head 24 hours a day themselves). Nobody has ever yet mentioned, or objected to, the technical monitoring measures involved. In fact, they ask to MAKE SURE we have them and complain about the slightest thing their darling child is able to find that they disapprove of. They object to the cost. They object to the hassle (taking the device back and forth, charging, etc.). They object to the "blue light" nonsense. They object to the destruction of traditional pen and paper. They object to the device or filter not functioning correctly for a fraction of a second.

But out of literally TENS OF THOUSANDS of parents that I've dealt with professionally, not one has ever raised an objection about a clearly-stated policy on monitoring of all their child's school-internet and school-device activities. *I* have. But not a single parent.

I remember in a private school rolling out compulsory iPads (not my choice!) like this and then charging the parents for them on their annual bill. The only objection came from two sets of parents (out of 500+) who came to an induction meeting we held on it. That objection? "Well, you'll still be setting them homework on paper, won't you, we don't want them losing the ability to hold pen and paper!" (that's an entire other rant in itself, though).

And when nobody objects to that kind of thing, it becomes the norm (as it has done) and then it becomes too late to object because "all the other schools do it". Sadly, it may take an incident such as you hint at (some IT guy mis-using it to groom children or similar, God forbid) to actually make people take notice.

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Privacy? What's that?

Sorry, but the various child protection laws MANDATE that schools deploy this technology.

Until you resolve that conflict, schools are required to do this. Whether or not you, or they, like it. And I tell you now - your schools do it. All of them. Without it, their governors would go mad, and the DoE would be informed and it would be a "start shutting them down" kind of issue. Private or state. Primary or secondary.

And it's been that way for 20 years.

How do I know? I've only ever worked as a school IT guy (consultant, freelance, technician, manager) for those 20 years.

Sorry, but we're required to do it by laws that give us no other choice but to do so. Even down to SSL interception. And now, with anti-terror legislation, we're also required to flag on any keywords that might indicate someone being groomed for terror-related acts, etc. It's encoded in that legislation that we record everything they do online and flag for keywords, and that we do the same for staff too.

P.S. that means the IT guy also has access to every pupil and staff's private sessions, including personal banking etc. if it's conducted via school computers. We push wildcard certificates for interception as part of standard images, on managed devices etc. If you don't like it, you have no option but to not work in a school or send your children to one (no, you can't ask that they opt out of the IT either... it's required for everything from assessment to reporting to having them do anti-terror online tests!).

If you don't like it, keep your school Internet usage to nothing more than that required for the school. Whether you're a student or a teacher. We have absolutely no interest in your Facebook page, but we are unfortunately required to log, report and respond if you browse a Facebook page that talks about "chatting with kids" or "blowing stuff up" or anything even vaguely miscontruable by a computer to be related to child protection or terrorism.

I'm afraid you're at least 20 years too late. And, no, GDPR won't stop it. It just means that we'll have to tell you about it, like we already have to. It's a legal requirement for every IT department in every school in the country.

Real-life example from before Christmas - a Year 8 pupil saying "I want to kill myself" on the Internet. You can't anonymise that past the extent it already is (i.e. only IT, the senior staff, their form tutor, their parents, the medical personnel, etc. have to know about it and who it was).

Uni IT man stole £22k of Macs to pay for smack

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Cash Converters

Bigger question - why were the Macs not properly supervised / Find My Mac, thus making them useless, remote-wipeable and quite easy to identify as stolen?

I hate Apple products, but I don't know of a way around supervision/activation lock/Find My XXXX when activated. Even wiping, firmware-wiping, etc. just say "Hey, this device is locked... sign in on your iCloud to unlock it", and any Wifi-joining instantly tells the owner where that device is.

Lee D Silver badge

I would guess it's a lot easier to trace a guy back from an account on eBay than it is from the local Cash Convertors.

Fact is, once you get past 2 or 3, if you don't start being careful then you're an idiot. It wouldn't take long for someone to say "Hold on, didn't you bring me a Mac just like this only a month or so ago?". People might sell off their Mac for cash. But they don't do it and then re-buy one the next month and then sell that and then re-buy. After a while, even if they know what you're up to and don't care, they still have to report or it's them that goes down for knowingly fencing the stuff.

Thankfully, criminals are generally dumb, especially if they're addicted to something.

16 exoplanets found huddled around 12 lightweight stars

Lee D Silver badge

Re: "only minor obstacle is creating a warp drive/whatever else with FTL capability"

The problem is that even at light-speed, it's 200 years away. And when you get there (if you get there), it'll likely be most dull and you won't be able to tell anyone who cares for another 200 years.

Not only does it need to be FTL, but significantly so... maybe twice as fast. And even then you're 200 years from finding out and telling anyone. In that 200 years, you'll almost certainly be overtaken by something that'll do a better job. Imagine that - 199 years in transit, generations cooped up on a ship, and then all of a suddenly "Whoosh," and Flash Lockhart appears... "WWWAaaaahhhaahhhey! What're you guys still doing here?! Jump on and I'll give you a lift! We colonised that planet last century... by now about 99% of them have my DNA in them.... WOOF!".

To say you'd be slightly irritated at the waste of time, effort and money involved would be understating it a little.

We not only need FTL, but FTL comms, and to know that in the time we get there, nobody's going to overtake us. Who's going invest in a dead-end that 20 years later will be overtaken by its competitor and become worthless? Maybe the first one, but after that?

CEO of smartmobe outfit Phantom Secure cuffed after cocaine sting, boast of murder-by-GPS

Lee D Silver badge

So... the encryption serves its purpose but was used by the wrong people.

And not being able to identify a single legitimate user? That might just be because the anonymity is actually pretty good, not that everyone using it is a criminal.

Though they are rightly chasing crimes and criminals, the fact that the devices are secure is surely neither here not there. The FBI couldn't get into an iPhone, so is that the same?

I'm more worried that in the age of secure communications, law enforcement are baffled about how to stop illegal drug shipments, distribution and "following the money" and can only suggest "let's not let anyone have secure devices" as a solution.

How about this? Assume the problem will only get worse. Assume every company will release secure phones. Assume every criminal will get a secure phone out of your control no matter what measures you try to enforce. The same way that criminals could just build an encrypted walkie-talkie and shut you out of that conversation too. Now, extrapolating that to the global population, how are you going to stop people growing, shipping and selling illegal drugs?

Because that's the answer you need. Not "well, obviously, nobody can be secure". I'd suggest things like more undercover operations (so you end up with one of their phones "legitimately"), better controls on imports and customs (seems to me that an awful lot slips through), better monitoring of borders (again, a lot slips through), and monitoring finances (isn't cash basically going to die soon?). But, of course, that involves law enforcement personnel being paid and doing their jobs. It's so much easier to just say "Apple, sort it out", or similar.

By no means am I a fan of even casual, "soft" drug use in any way, shape or form. (It's illegal, so don't do it, or instead campaign for it to be legal) But I damn well would rather they got off their backsides and either legalised certain things (thereby taking them off the market and police hands, and generating tax) which would then leave you focused and funded to combat the more dangerous stuff by ways and means core to the traditional method of policing. Before smartphones you didn't have this information either, and yet somehow you managed to catch the criminals too.

Your manhood is safe, judge tells ZX Spectrum reboot boss

Lee D Silver badge

Last time I had an Escort, it totally broke down on me in public.

Lee D Silver badge

Have they filed their accounts yet?

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08831435

"Accounts overdue"

Apparently not. Guys, maybe turn up to court and pay your accountant to file a return in the month it's due (rather than still-not-published two months later) and people might actually stop whinging at you. Even if you still can't ship a product you promised... when?

Lee D Silver badge

Yep.

If you can't attend court because of a threat, inform the court. Get a crime reference number. Ask for protection or an escort.

Don't just not-turn-up.

Capita screw-ups are the pits! Brit ex-miner pensioners billed for thousands in extra tax

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Outsourcing .....

Pretty much my argument.

If an outside company can do the project and make a profit, it means government could do the same and either a) make profit or b) not charge as much to do so, with the difference being immediate and direct into the Treasury.

But then, I've had this argument with people for decades. Why do schools hire cleaners via agencies? Just... hire a cleaner. Why do we outsource IT? Just... hire an IT guy.

If it's not important enough to hire even a single part-timer, then it may be worth paying someone who deals with dozens of such customers to absorb the costs (which should make it cheaper than you hiring someone, not more expensive). But you wouldn't afford to hire someone via such an agency if it's more expensive than you doing it yourself. And if it's important enough to demand dozens or hundreds of permanent staff... you could do it cheaper yourself by... hiring those SAME dozens or hundreds of permanent staff.

Every outsourced thing I've ever seen or used ends up being the same answer. Either not as good because they skimp, or more expensive than just doing it yourself.

There's a reason that everyone of my bosses, when asked about outsourcing the IT, has a series of yarns of previous attempts and they ended up just hiring me instead.

Rant launches Eric Raymond's next project: Open-source the UPS

Lee D Silver badge

Quite literally batteries not included.

Lee D Silver badge

Buy battery charger.

Buy power inverter.

Connect one to other.

Need to monitor it? Put small USB voltmeter in the middle bit and connect.

I'm always baffled that people think a UPS is anything more than that. Sure, there's a certain amount of passthrough and switchover and so on, but that's the bit that's going to go wrong when people try to wire up their own ones.

If you're really that worried at the "code" that a UPS is running, when all it does is present a serial interface saying "Please shut down nicely now because I'm about to die", then making something that has no code at all is surely easier.

HP is turning off 'Always On' data deals but won't say why

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Three Data sims

I have one of those.

Pay per month, though.

And it's 40Gb for £30 (£25 if you're willing to go into 24-month contracts).

Free roaming. Go binge (free data to Netflix / TVPlayer).

I think you need to phone Three and demand more data or a cheaper deal...

Lee D Silver badge

If it seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

I never believe anything like that, because there's always an asterisk that takes away all the fun stuff.

I'd rather be told "20Gb" or whatever, than "unlimited (*)". Because it's always a lie. And at least with 20Gb, if I use 19.9999Gb, they can't touch me and if they do, I can sue them for breach of contract.

That said, these companies obviously don't want me to use data abroad. So I don't. It's as simple as that. Give your money to the companies that clearly do, not the ones that begrudgingly allow it with a raft of sub-clauses on that use.

If we all did that, then maybe when they go looking for new revenue streams, they might have to think to themselves "Well, how can we capture this money that's going to foreign competitors when our users take their phones / laptops abroad?" rather than "Oh my god, let's charge them per megabyte, how dare they!".

Other the last few decades I've tired of companies that obviously DO NOT WANT to do business with me and take my money. So I don't give it to them. I'd rather give WhatsApp £10 than my carrier a single penny for a text message. I'd rather give a 4G carrier £30 a month, than BT £50 a month for a slower connection. I'd rather give Amazon £79 a year and get a ton of movies for free, than pay Sky a penny for their overpriced offerings.

If it means I go without, then I've taken to going without. In this day and age, there's plenty of other choices or things to entertain me, and I don't see why I should struggle along with it. Make my life simpler and give me what I want I'll give you money, it's quite easy.

Elon Musk invents bus stop, waits for applause, internet LOLs

Lee D Silver badge

It's a load of nonsense anyway. Actually tunnelling under stuff isn't the expensive / controversial / time-consuming part.

Things like "getting a licence to tunnel underneath thousands of banks, archaeological sites, rivers, sewers, skyscrapers, etc.", not disturbing anything en-route (that you haven't just shoved a drill through, obviously), subsidence and other movement, unknown geography and geology, criss-crossing dozens of other tunnels and services, etc.

The actual BORING part is... well... relatively boring if everything else is planned out and tested beforehand. Getting people to give you a licence to tunnel underneath their city of skyscrapers and ancient ruins is actually rather more difficult. And you DON'T want people shortcutting the process just because they threw money at the problem that you don't have... the first skyscraper that tilts even an inch and causes an evacuation is going to shut your company down with lawsuits permanently (and wasn't Musk only saying the other day that both SpaceX and Tesla almost went bankrupt already?).

Musk is full of bright ideas that though they may work if humans were new and never tried anything before are ridiculous when taken at face value in the modern world. His electric cars are the same as everything else, with bog-standard batteries. His factories don't scale. His production rates are miniature and cost the earth. His rockets are no different - nothing "new", just "current tech". If NASA had had 3GHz onboard computers for Apollo and the shuttles they'd have been able to land a rocket upright too. Fact is, it's still just cheaper to ditch them in the ocean. And even then, every single time one of them fails to land, doesn't it, Elon?

Trains in a vacuum. Buses in a tunnel. Great sci-fi material. But absolutely ridiculous in a real world scenario that involves keeping thousands of miles of tunnel at vacuum pressure, or digging thousands of miles of tunnel underneath a modern city for a bus (if you were going to do that, you'd just add another subway line - hell, you could even automate it ala DLR and save yourself from driver strikes too).

Musk thinks that throwing money at his favourite episode of Star Trek is worthwhile, when almost none of his "business" ventures actually produce a viable product (if you want your own private rocket, fine, but you're supposed to be operating a company) that isn't just bouyed up by his billions and gets almost nothing back in profit.

Hey Musk, they had these things on Star Trek called communicators where you just press a button and say someone's name and you can talk to them if they have a communicator too... why don't you work on that?!

(Don't get me wrong, if you want to invest in teleportation, shields, phasers, warp cores, then go ahead, I'll follow it with interest... but a tunnel under a city isn't new).

Good news: Apple designs a notebook keyboard that doesn't suck

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Doesn't suck, but it might blow

You mean... a gasket like lots of similar things have because otherwise you're pushing against an hermetically sealed unit with pressurised air in it?

Everyone else had the brains to make the air go out the bottom of the keyboard, though. Because a tiny hole which squirts air every time you hit a key is going to do precisely nothing but blow the dirt around the keyboard rather than blow it away. And anything vaguely sticky is going to gum it up. And once it's gummed up, where does the air go when you hit a key? The place every other keyboard sends it.

It's trying to add novelty to something that people make millions of that work just fine every day, so that you can charge a fortune for it, and stop spare parts being made.

You want a fancy keyboard? Do that thing that new laptops do where the "webcam" is really a key that pops up and faces you when you press it and blinds itself when you press it back in (ala the headlights on sports cars, catseyes, etc.). That is infinitely more useful to me than any kind of new untested type of keyboard layer which stops me having to go "PFFFttt" about once a year or so and solving the problem they describe.

A smartphone recession is coming and animated poo emojis can't stop it

Lee D Silver badge

And I've never once thought of my S5 Mini as "slow".

I'd give my right arm for 32Gb more internal storage though or, even better, the ability to move ALL apps to the SD card.

Lee D Silver badge

Too big.

Too expensive.

Too hard to repair.

They cut out all the popular ports / replaceable parts.

They never upgrade the software.

Too many gimmicks and too few options to get rid of them.

Stop pre-loading apps I don't want or at the very least let me remove them (Plain Android is absolutely fine).

Too many models, too often.

Gimme a Samsung S5 Mini "Plus" with upgrades to the in-place hardware (RAM, CPU, storage, etc.) and I'll bite. Everything else loses things I want for the sake of things I don't want.

Ofcom to networks: Want this delicious 5G spectrum? You'll have to improve 4G coverage

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Ofcom, Comreg and other greedy regulators.

Because places in, say, areas of special scientific interest, would be destroyed trying to cable in one remote farmer.

100% is ridiculous. To be honest, this is just reasonable. "More than before, and try to catch people who have nothing at the moment" is a reasonable, achieveable requirement that doesn't mean rural planning officers are forced to allow a dirty great mast in the middle of an otherwise empty landscape just to cover Farmer John who won't pay for a broadband line and a pico-cell.

Were I in charge, my requirement would mirror this announcement (maybe a little more) but would just define the terms so strictly that you couldn't "cheat" by covering easy dead spots instead of the harder ones. I'd have a points system - so that you'd basically find it more advantageous to cable in some of the current dead-zone places but if you can't, you can make it up by covering MORE of the rural areas that have virtually nothing.

Businesses will always take the cheapest way out of what is basically a condition on doing business. Of course they will. Expect it and plan for it so that the cheapest way out achieves the most you can.

But expecting 100% coverage is a nonsense. There isn't 100% landline coverage or postal coverage let alone mobile coverage.

Unidentified hax0rs told not to blab shipping biz Clarksons' stolen data

Lee D Silver badge

Random attacks, yes you can defend quite well against.

But any targeted attack at all, anything with the help of even a low-level insider, anything by a well-funded or determined adversary, anything committed with a modicum of up-to-date technical knowledge? Not a chance of defending against.

This is the problem - scale. Sure, granny isn't really worth attacking but she is quite an easy target and is more likely to succumb to random spam than anything else.

Sure, Facebook are really worth attacking, but they shouldn't be an easy target and aren't likely to succumb to random attacks, pings, port-forwards, email attachments, social engineering etc.

The middle ground? That's tricky. They almost certainly deal with hundreds if not thousand of people a day, emailing back and forth, and all kinds of levels of staff most of which will have little to no dealing with the IT guys. They may be worth attacking. They can be easy targets. They are capable of succumbing to "one wrong click" no matter who you put in charge.

Take my example - a private school. Despite what you might think, teachers and other staff are paid pretty much market rates. But they suck in millions of pounds a year (which are spent with suppliers because they usually have to be non-profit). They will accept credit cards, they will have tons of personal information, they will have celebrity parents, they will have databases of children's details that every teacher needs to be able to log into, they will have contact with hundreds upon hundreds of parents from all kinds of staff (office, IT support, teachers, etc.) and all their suppliers. And they won't have teams or budgets big enough to stand up against a determined attacker or malicious interference from within.

Sure, you'll catch the silly stuff. Your remote desktop will be up-to-date. Your Windows patches will be recent. You'll have backups. Your network won't allow arbitrary access. You may even be able to stop people getting in via the website / parent portal / intranet / etc. if you're diligent. You'll have antivirus. You'll have sensible email defaults (i.e. not opening attachments, etc.). But there's still nothing in the way of a targeted, determined, knowledgeable attacker finding a PHP hole in the parent portal (which needs to talk to the main school database) and walking right through it. I guarantee you, the quality of most school online MIS software is such that I wouldn't trust it alone. And things like "set up a VPN to let us suck from your school database to your cloud-based parent portal" are surprisingly common (and usually with just arbitrary SQL access to said database without even limited views).

The people "in the know" will offer limited users, limited views, limited access, reverse proxies, DMZ, IDS/IPS, VLANs, audit logs, etc. But I guarantee you that most school IT departments - even where outsourced - follow the default installation instructions which leaves the potential for a massive hole the second someone finds one. And it's not going to be publicly advertised on the CVE lists.

The big-guys can handle themselves.

The little-guys, you can't really do much for them except try to build systems where compromise isn't capable.

The middle-ground is the scary part. Where they have just enough investment to require complex IT systems, but nowhere near enough expertise or resources to hire it to secure it against someone determined to get in.

Your primitive attempts at "I'm from Apple, click on this attachment" and scanning port 80 might not work. But for sure they are the risk category with the most to lose while being the easiest target for that kind of tradeoff.

Most IT contractors want employment benefits if clobbered with IR35

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Man...

I contracted for... nearly ten years. One-man operation. It was great. The hours I want. The pay I wanted. The choice of client. The flexibility. Broad base of skills, experience and clients. I was working for a different place every three hours, and worked only six hours a day, and only the days I wanted. Paid every penny of tax etc. necessary.

That's not what IR35 is about. IR35 is about you going to work for an employer, pretty much the only person you work for, and then opting-out of certain benefits by doing so, and charging more and then (the entire point of IR35's existence) trying not to pay the same tax. Now that you have to pay the same tax, you realise that you have to raise prices. And people don't want to pay those prices.

But you can't then have all of a) only one client, b) all the benefits of employment c) higher prices than an identical employee working for that same company d) not pay the same tax.

Pick one of the four and sacrifice it, preferably the one that's not illegal.

Lee D Silver badge

Raise your prices. Take your holiday. Pay into a pension.

If that means you can't get work, maybe you need a thing called a job.

If you can get work at those rates, you can do those things yourselves (I mean... you co-write the contract, or agree to it, right? Stick a holiday in there You got the money, pay into a private pension. Not getting employer contribution? Charge more).

Fact is that the way you want to work means that you don't get certain benefits. If you want those benefits, give them to yourself. If you can't give them to yourself, then you need to raise prices, or go somewhere that will give them to you.

It's simple cost-benefit analysis.

And you're only under IR35 if you're effectively working as an employee, right? We're not talking about the 1-day-a-month, fly-by-night, drop-in consultants. We're talking you doing a regular job for a single employer for a significant length of time, while not do very much else outside that, and then complaining that you're not giving the benefits of people who do EXACTLY THAT, but earn less.

Honestly, you aren't going to make IR35 disappear, certainly not overnight. You either need to convince your employers (yes, that's what they are, that's what IR35 is basically about) to employ you properly. Or get them to give you enough money to cover / substitute / pay for those benefits that you don't have because you're not officially on their books as an employee but as a contractor.

Though the technicalities may have changed, the business plan hasn't. Either charge enough to do what you need. Or find some other kind of work. It's sad that you might have to change how you work or charge more, yes, but that's how business works. And if you have to charge more and people won't pay? Then that's a sign. Lamp-lighters, wheelwrights and chimney sweeps all had to raise their prices when the work dried up, and eventually move on to other things. So do you.

Bots don't spread fake news on Twitter, people do, say MIT eggheads

Lee D Silver badge

"A lie will be half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on."

It's not hard to see why when people are how they are (to understand why people continue to do so is another matter entirely). I've taken to Snopes-linking all the rubbish that comes up on my Facebook from "friends". It's a brilliant way to deal with it because they either learn and stop posting nonsense or (more likely) take me off their friends list (which saves me the hassle and rudeness of doing so).

Everything from the "waiter's-missing-pound" maths puzzle, to junk about the brace-position on airplanes, to "medical" studies, to diets, etc.

The truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction definitely has a better agency and gets more bookings.

For all we know, aliens could be as careless with space junk as us

Lee D Silver badge

"Let's look for people as stupid and careless as us!"

Sounds like a plan.

Too many bricks in the wall? Lego slashes inventory

Lee D Silver badge

Re: Lego Minecraft

I could really mess you up and show you Lego Worlds which is basically a computer game based on Minecraft using virtual Lego bricks.

Lee D Silver badge

Wouldn't have anything to do with their patents expiring and so the market being flooded with compatible parts (which are often cooler than anything Lego have produced themselves, e.g. strips of Lego-compatible bases on a reel tape, mugs with Lego-compatible bases, etc. etc.).

Their products are still overpriced. My daughter loves Lego Friends but even some of the bigger sets can run to over £100. For a bunch of plastic blocks. By comparison I can get her about 4-5 Android tablet computers for that price.

And the £5-10 "mini-kits" are an absolute p***-take. There's about 10 parts in them and they're all tiny and not very interchangeable at all. That's can mean 50p-£1 for one tiny little brick or flower in some cases.

Would be happy to support them, and they've bought up things like Lego Minecraft and similar, but the fact is they're just too expensive for what is a mass-produced plastic twiddly bit that's hardly ever a brick.

Make less specific parts, make more bricks from the standard moulds, they'll then be cheaper to mass-produce. And fill the bag/box with parts, rather than a tiny, quarter-full bag not even occupying one third the volume of the box.

Ofcom to probe Three and Vodafone over network throttling

Lee D Silver badge

As someone with only Three as their "home broadband" (via a handheld Huawei 4G router), I don't see this. I have their "Go Binge" addon on a 40Gb package, which gives me unlimited data to TVPlayer and Netflix. That works, and I don't notice other services being any slower. If anything, that would cost them money as when I'm NOT using Netflix/TVPlayer, they are able to take it out of my data which means I would have to pay more if I use it up (I have done that in the past, it's not hard to blast through 40Gb).

I see no evidence that either sites in the package or out of the package are throttled, though. I can stream just the same on anything that I tried, subject to the usual "4G isn't steady". There is no pattern of peak period dropout, or heavy usage dropout or anything, it just works.

I was going to do the same with Vodafone but they're too thick to send me the SIM I ordered (and now I can't order another, and I've created another account even and still it won't let me get the SIM sent to me, only "go to a store") and so I literally can't receive their prroduct. They haven't charged me for it because I can't activate it but neither can I order another.

Their Passes thing was a much better deal. I could get 50Gb a month for the same price as Three and for an extra £15, they wouldn't count traffic from basically all the famous sites - Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. That would have been a much better deal for me, and they'd have made more money out of me, but that's their fault.

Good luck saying 'Sorry I'm late, I had to update my car's firmware'

Lee D Silver badge

Strangely, I like my computers to not do anything unless requested.

It seems some people lost that idea some years ago and tolerate anything now.

Hell, even my phone can't update an app without asking first.

Sorry, Microsoft / Samsung / whoever. It's my device. You'll do what I say. By all means inform me, but I can also say "shut up" to those notifications permanently if you abuse them.

The auto-update-with-no-choice-about-it is really only a product of the last few years. I will literally hack my operating system to stop you doing that to me, having witnessed any number of updates-gone-drastically-wrong, and inconvenient timings for updates.

Within weeks of Windows 10 upgrades going out to Windows 7/8 users, I had one person who trashed their entire system including all documents (we have no idea how), and one who was forced to upgrade a fresh machine and then explorer crashed out constantly (which meant Windows was unusable in any mode and we had to recover files). That's not counting all the Windows Updates that just blue-screen, take out features (one IT guy I know has a PC on Windows 10 that every Windows 10 update removes his Ethernet drivers and nobody knows why, but to say that's slightly annoying is an understatement), or are later revoked for discovered problems.

You have to be an idiot to blindly upgrade everything the second it pops up. Hell, the software often doesn't even give you a chance to make a proper backup with it's "Update Later" kind of non-option. If MS etc. were taking responsibility for my data, that would then be their problem. While they don't, they don't get to dictate when I update.

Copper feel, fibre it ain't: Ads regulator could face court for playing hard and fast with definitions

Lee D Silver badge

Re: A question of degree, perhaps

Agreed, copper can easily do 10Gbit just with ordinary protocols. But that's a specialised 8-strand cable. And though the back of an SFP module might be copper etc. that really just processing (we haven't yet found a way to reliably process light-only signals!). My switch interconnects on a switch stack are "copper" but they can do 10/40Gbit or whatever. Similarly, I have a "fibre" that can barely hit 10Mbps because it's old and shonky.

But when it comes to "fibre" vs "2-wire telephone cabling" over the same kind of run, there's not much competition. As such advertising 2-wire as "fibre" is really misleading. And also technically wrong. And unhelpful.

Fibre inherently possesses a potential for upgrade. Just change the modules at each end and you can go from 10Mbit to 10Gbit in seconds without having to repull the cable. Pretty much the distances involved don't matter (outside a reasonable range). Copper, that's not as true. Distance and quality of copper matters a LOT. Especially 2-wire copper, rather than Cat5e/Cat6a or whatever (which can still only do 100m / 40m depending on the speed you want).

It's misleading but if we sell on the basis of "speed" then the fibre moniker matters much less. However, it should still matter - because of the upgradeability, etc. potential of the line. There's also consideration for the potential for abuse. Here's a 56K modem. It connects to our cabinet at the end of the road. From there to "the rest of the Internet" we have a fibre leased line. Can I still sell that as "fibre"? I don't think so. Even if I advertise the speed legitimately.

Lee D Silver badge

"And they'll try it, and for most of them the only difference they'll see is the 2x monthly charge. Not a useful USP..."

Hey, it works for Apple, right?

Lee D Silver badge

Ignore the ASA. They're toothless.

Put out a series of ads that go for something the customer will understand:

"Hey, that 'fibre' broadband they're selling you? Yeah, it could have the same 40-year-old copper or aluminium cable that your grandmother was using for the last mile and they can still claim it's 'fibre'. Whereas, with our product, it's fibre all the way to your door.... New FibreAllTheWay. Try it today."

That's a USP if ever I heard one.

Sysadmin left finger on power button for an hour to avert SAP outage

Lee D Silver badge

Nope, but they do come with ID lights.

It's a really dumb thing to press the button on the wrong server. And... if we're talking about an era where holding in the power button doesn't kill the machine hard in 5 seconds, and where NT is running, and where it doesn't auto-power-off on the Turn Off Your Computer screen, then we're back in the age of floppy disks and maybe even pre-CD in your average server.

But whatever era, there will have been a better way to indicate what server you mean rather than just guessing.

WordPress is now 30 per cent of the web, daylight second

Lee D Silver badge

Why does the bottom half of the article read like an advertisement?

Knock, knock. Whois there? Get ready for anonymized email addresses after domain privacy shake-up

Lee D Silver badge

ICANN are supposed to be global. Ignoring the 1st/2nd largest market in the world (depending on what you're looking at, America often comes after Europe in terms of market size etc.) because you happen to be originally based in America is a really dumb idea if you want to have that global responsibility.

America has also had to play ball if it wants European information. Don't want that information? No problem. Want it? Then you handle OUR information in a way compliant with OUR laws (or there's no point having them as everyone will just say "Oh, I spammed you anyway because although I'm European and that's illegal, I just had a US company do it for me". There's a reason that America basically are inheriting our data laws - if they want to trade, they have to be on the same level.

If they don't play ball, they will lose the European market, who will quite happily take their Internet ball home and play a different game. Likely a better one, to be honest. Fact is, if ICANN claims to control/manage every .uk, .eu, .fr, .it etc. domain that it either plays ball or has those taken away from it (i.e. bye-bye 50% of revenue).

The EU has all the jurisdiction over its own data. And it's own top-level domains. And trade that involves any European entity. That's WAY more than enough to have a say.

And, yes, the WHOIS-hiders are breaking the rules, but they were never enforced anyway (mainly because they realised what a stupid idea a public database of everyone's address was). This is way, way overdue. No other place that I sign up to has the right to just put my real name and address on a worldwide, publicly-searchable database that I can't remove it from without breaking the rules (and certainly not for something as trivial as a name to run a website). And they had phone number and email too.

This should have ALWAYS been like this. Law enforcement, sure. Anyone else, no. And it hit personal users hardest as they didn't have a company head office to hide behind.

Lee D Silver badge

1) About bloody time.

2) What idiot thought it was a good idea for anyone other than law enforcement to have that information anyway? I mean, I have my ISP account tied to me, but I'm not required to put that in a public database and so let any website know who I am when I visit.

3) Apparently good things come out of GDPR, as well as all the hassle.