Posts by Lee D

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

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.

Quite literally batteries not included.

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...

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Private keys are private

No more than normal processes.

You can always regenerate a certificate. At worst you might run into trouble with HSTS or pinning, in which case you probably have a backup procedure in place.

And your backups should be encrypted and are reading data to backup AS ROOT anyway. Thus it's not accessible to anyone who doesn't already have full access to the entire machine anyway, and encrypted anyway, and should still be passphrased anyway.

And the passphrase should be handled the same as the root password, the domain administrator password, etc. Which means DON'T write it down on anything you can't revoke or encrypt.

Re: Edinburgh Woolen Mill

Maplin probably have a lot of prime rented stores in the middle of big towns and shopping centres.

Sure, it's not easy-money, but chances are you could snap them up, use the leases and it'll be cheaper than fighting for a prime spot.

Re: Fag packet calculation time...

That Leaf has a 40kWh battery. To charge that from solar panels in 3-4 hours means you have... what? 10KW of solar panels on your roof? Let's say on average it requires a half-charge, that's 5KW of panels at full whack for 4 hours, using 35+ square metres of solar panel.

Truth is, you're topping up the battery at best. Serious usage of the vehicle (150 mile range? That's a single 75-mile back and forth) would drain your proposed house battery and the entire daily solar output with less than one full charge. And you're doing that using a set of solar panels costing as much as the car (not including fitting and legal agreements on who owns the roof if you sell the house, etc.). And you're doing that on a roof which isn't available to most people.

Sure, you can do this. But stating it as if everyone can just do it, or would do it, is slightly dishonest. In actual fact any two-car families wouldn't have the roof-space. Anyone renting wouldn't be allowed to. Anyone in a flat wouldn't be able to. Anyone whose car is parked away from their house (even out-front in private parking) wouldn't be able to.

And each car requires 30-something square metres of solar to make it happen, at best, so local solar for those use cases - even if supplied by a town council, etc. as a solar-powered charging point - is actually sucking up land quicker than houses themselves are being built.

Fact is, if you want to have electric cars, you need investment in the electric network. YOU have invested £10k+ in your electric setup, which benefits just you, and supports one vehicle. To scale that up to millions of cars means the OP is right... lots of new nuke stations or entire counties full of panels, or forget it.

Re: They can't afford to fix it

Unlikely... though it might hit "cashflow", there would have a bucket of contingency for that. If they're losing a million pound over a weekend, they can afford to lose 10 million easily.

However, they haven't "lost" anything... people will still need to top-up, they just couldn't do it when they liked. The only loss is much more easily measurable by "how many customers have we lost". And that won''t be costing them in the millions just because of a weekend's outage of a top-up that customers only do once a month, if that, and that the highest paying regular customers don't do at all.

Re: PMSL

Yep. Either tell me WHAT to use and WHY or don't bring it up.

The answer is always Owncloud/Nextcloud, which is fine but hardly a replacement for a globally available network.

Same principle.

15" was minimum back in the 90's.

Re: Saturated

I feel the same about everything PC-wise, not just phones:

- Processor speeds, unnecessary past 2-3GHz (though the trend now is ordinary-speed chips that slow down "for power-saving" )

- RAM, I've had that argument on here about the minimum being > 4GB, but once you have 8, 12 or 16, I don't need much more.

- Storage, SATA SSD gives me all the speed I could desire, I don't need stupdenous NVMe speeds. I'd much rather have a 2Tb SATA SSD that I won't fill than a 256Mb NVMe that I will.

- Networking, Gigabit to the desktop, everything else is the bottleneck.

- Sound, so long as it can do the basics, who cares? That means 44KHz stereo for me, and even that's probably overkill.

- Video, I'd rather have my games running at 1368x786 or whatever it is and not struggle than at 4K and need a beast of a machine. Same for SD vs HD TV, etc., especially if I save a few quid and Gigabytes on the download.

- Mobile phone, I stuck with an S5 Mini (removable battery, headphone socket, IR blaster to control my old-fashioned devices that don't need to broadcast over the airwaves or connect to the Internet, etc.). It does everything I need, could do with some better logic on installing to internal memory all the time when there's a half-full 32Gb microSD card in it, but apart from that it's fine.

There's a point where "good enough" suffices. There's also a reason that I use an 8-year-old model of laptop and yet have a dozen virtual machines in it, all my games from Steam, and just about every game I've ever owned on any platform, ever, all loaded on it. And why my phone is from 2014.

At some point, any kind of upgrade just doesn't make sense, especially if it means you lose features that you currently have. As far as I'm concerned Windows 10 and new Android are more than cancelled out by stupid update policies (just dealt with someone who loses their Ethernet on every Windows 10 update at home, so they try their hardest not to update at all), hardware without the basic removable parts (SD cards, batteries, headphones, decent amount of USB instead of USB-C, etc.) and PC's that are basically dialling back to stupid speeds to save power.

Re: Bad move

My new place near a large city inside the M25... I get 3Mbps on standard ADSL2, "up to" 10Mbps if I go VDSL. And because nothing else covers my cul-de-sac, there's nothing I can do about it. Sorry, but BT's network is a mess. I use 4G and get 35+Mbps instead.

And BT will just have to provide for people to use their facilities... if they break it, you charge them for it and fix it. That's how it works already. Because aren't Openreach mostly subcontractors anyway?

P.S. Last time I asked for a leased line from BT, they took FOUR YEARS and did nothing. After the last six months of constant yelling, we ended up with three empty, incomplete, different and not-joined bits of empty plastic tubing, and then we were told there was "no room at the exchange". Not one fibre every made it even to the site, let alone just jointed together.

This is the same site that gets 25Mbps "at the boundary" on two seperate VDSL lines, which drops to less than 1 if it rains (and our analogue phone lines all cut out). The six ISDN lines regularly failed (to the point of cables dangling in the street despite no hurricane, etc.).

But once Virgin put in a proper fibre line, we moved all the ISDN and analogue lines to SIP, all the ADSL/VDSL to the leased line, and have not had a single outage in three years.

Sorry, BT, but if you want the custom and you're forced to "allow subcontractors" by the people controlling you, that can ONLY be an improvement. It might mean more outages, but I can't imagine it, and at least then there will be a backup of some kind when you don't ever resolve the issues. I'd rather than 20 lines from different companies, one of whom might hire dodgy subcontractors who somehow damage all the other lines occasionally and have to pay to fix it, than being stuck with BT / Openreach as the only (atrocious) option where they don't care if it's broken for years, nothing happens to fix it.

Re: As predicted ...

Yup.

Pretty much when even the most luddite of people probably has a smartphone with camera, internet, games, movies, tv, music, satnav, compass, torch, spirit level, etc.etc.etc. then there's nowhere else to go and they aren't going to upgrade "just because" especially if all those things weren't what made them upgrade to a smartphone (which is most likely to be "to use WhatsApp to call people for free", "to check email", "to go on Facebook" and "because it's just as cheap to do all that as buy a normal phone", according to a brief survey of the people who come to me in that position).

Gimme something new and I'll think about it. And a removable battery. And a headphone socket. The Samsung "this phone can also be an Ubuntu Linux desktop" is intriguing to me, but niche. Hell, stick a fold out joystick on it and licence a bunch of retro games and the kids would probably be all over it. But without something new, it's just a case of "I'll buy when mine is bad enough for me to notice", whether that's because it's broken, slow, can't do something I need, etc.

Re: Molten salt ?

They tried, but then all the chips disappeared.

Re: What could possibly...?

Keep your debit card in an RFID blocking wallet or sleeve.

I like to demo to people the "Credit Card Reader" app which can pull off their card number and expiry date by just tapping an NFC phone against their card (or, in theory, from across the room) without them even knowing.

Sure, it's not every detail and not the same as performing a proper doink transcation, but it's enough. But put it in a sleeve / wallet with foil insert and you can't read the card at all.

The other app I like is "Passport Image Decoder". Worrying that such access is available passively without your knowledge, even if the most vital data is encrypted

Re: Remnant of the 1980s

"My PSU too, just after Xmas. Only place for a *now* replacement at a half reasonable price."

Amazon Prime Now:

Corsair CP-9020097-UK VS Series ATX/EPS 80 PLUS Power Supply Unit, 550 W,Black

(They had loads of other choices, I just picked one)

£38.52

Sold by Amazon EU S.a.r.L. Remove

Check out now with 2-hour delivery for £0.00

I could have it before I got home tonight, if I wanted,

Welcome to the 21st Century.