Posts by Paul Johnson 1

Who, me?

I look forwards to reading the "who, me?" story on this one.

Field engineers...

How do you recognise a field engineer with a flat tire? He's the one swapping all the wheels to find out which one is flat.

How do you recognise a field engineer with an empty fuel tank? He's the one swapping all the wheels to find out which one is flat.

Receipt?

Yes, you can have your refund. We just need to see the original sales receipt.

Oh dear, you didn't keep it. More fool you. You don't pass go, you don't collect $2.

How much money off do you get for not buying Windows?

Do you still pay the "Windows tax" even if you don't want Windows?

Way ahead of me

Thats what I like about El Reg. I saw the sub-head about "static display only" and instantly thought I should post "yes, but that doesn't mean you couldn't fire it up". But no, you got there ahead of me.

Beware survival bias

No doubt there were lots of watches made 200 years ago that stopped working 6 months later. We don't see those. We only see the ones that have lasted 200 years, and we marvel at how reliable they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

For once, its not just spin

Between Intel's on-going security issues, the high core-count of AMD parts and their superior single core performance I had already decided to make my next upgrade an AMD one, despite having opted for Intel for the last couple of decades. There is no question which is the better CPU at present.

Why didn't the earth leakage detector trip?

Don't offices have earth leakage detectors (aka residual current devices RCDs)? If that much current went from live to earth then it ought to have tripped the instant it was plugged in.

IPv4 is a barrier to entry, so ISPs like it.

The article says "Then there’s the fact that some ISPs just don’t see it impacting their bottom line and so can’t be bothered."

Its actually worse than that.

One of the things you want in a business is a barrier to entry for would-be competitors, the higher the better. If there is no barrier to entry then competition will drive prices down to the point where you can barely make any money (as any Uber driver will tell you). Having a barrier to entry lets you raise prices to just below the point where competitors would find it profitable to buy in.

Exhaustion of IPv4 addresses makes it difficult to start up a new ISP; you can't just request a few nice big /16 blocks to get you started, you have to go out and buy a /8 here and a /8 there. Meanwhile existing ISPs are sitting pretty with their existing pools of IPv4 addresses. In fact the secondary market makes those an appreciating asset, something else that businesses like to have.

If IPv6 becomes widespread then this barrier to entry disappears and the existing pools of IPv4 become worthless. So it is in the ISPs interests to delay this evil day for as long as possible.

Where were the risk assessment and reversion procedure?

I used to work in a related area where high accuracy, uptime and reliability are critical. Anything done on the live system had to be rehearsed on the test system first. It had to be done according to a written procedure which had been reviewed and approved beforehand. Part of the review was a risk assessment (i.e. ask "what could possibly go wrong?"). There also had to be a reversion procedure (i.e. "We screwed up; put it back the way it was").

We did have occasional outages, including one particularly embarrassing incident where "Do routine thing" was next to "Shut down the system" on a menu. But they were rare, and both management and engineering took justifiable pride in that.

One thing we would *NEVER* do is blame the engineer holding the mouse (short of actual malice). If they made a mistake, its because the system upstream of them enabled that mistake and set them up to fail. You don't shoot the engineer, you fix the system.

Actually, its probably for any HTTPS site

Company intranets that block NSFW websites (basically meaning all of them) do so using a HTTPS proxy. The browser connects to the proxy instead of the real web site and the proxy masquerades as the site. In order for this to work the browser needs to have a certificate for the proxy, basically telling it that the same certificate is owned by every single web site on the Internet. In-house PCs will have this certificate installed by the IT department, but obviously someone forgot to notify them about the fridge.

So this message is not the result of someone trying to access porn, its probably just from the fridge trying to phone home and getting a certificate error.

Which is actually a Good Thing: the fridge security is configured properly, at least for outgoing HTTPS access.

Trump really believes a conspiracy theory

Trump is referring to a conspiracy theory about a "missing" DNC server containing Hilary Clinton's emails. According to this theory, the FBI deliberately failed to seize this server, and it was subsequently smuggled to the Ukraine by Crowdstrike, who were the company hired by the Democrats to investigate the hack which obtained the original emails. He wanted Zelensky to use his police force to go find this mythical server (presumably in the custody of the Knights Who Say Ni).

See https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/what-is-the-crowdstrike-conspiracy-theory-890459/ or just google "crowdstrike conspiracy".

The fact that Zelensky is a professional comedian just adds extra wierdness. He was probably thinking "I could never have invented this in a million years."

Big brother will know what you like.

What you look at, and for how long, is a big clue about what you like. If your eyes spend more time on something then its a good bet its because you like looking at it. People with weight problems often spend more time looking at food adverts or outlets. And which bits of which other people do your eyes tend to linger on? See this article for more details. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bj9ygv/the-eyes-are-the-prize-eye-tracking-technology-is-advertisings-holy-grail

Rin Tin Tin Can

No need for any extra words, this is just a story about a Rin Tin Tin Can

Caught between two legal systems?

Obviously this is speculation, but its quite possible that the second Grand Jury (the "I don't recall" one) is still sealed, so he can't tell anyone about it under US law. However when on the witness stand in the UK he was required to answer all questions fully and honestly. By claiming forgetfulness he could avoid breaking US law. If he was lying about his lack of memory then of course that would be perjury, but in the absence of mind-reading it could not be proved.

Set up to fail

This poor guy is being left to dangle in the breeze for management failings. If his employer had properly protected their secret key then it would never have been possible to put it in a public repo.

The policy of hanging a minion who screwed up "pour encourager les autres" is a classic symptom of an immature organizational culture. Its the *system* that screwed up; the minion was just the last link in the causal chain. Hence the correct response is not to hang the minion but to fix the broken system.

So why are men still not getting it?

"It's an elementary life 101 message.". Yeah it is. So why are so many men still unable to grasp it.

Pushing kids and ignorant adults towards dodgy VPNs

There are a lot of free VPNs out there, but most of them are pretty scammy (big surprise there). If you are lucky you just get a bunch of adverts injected into your browsing experience. If you are unlucky you get your passwords stolen and malware delivered.

The people most likely to fall for these outfits are:

* Children (wow! think of the children!) because they don't have credit cards or spare money to pay for a reputable VPN.

* Unsophisticated adults who don't know any better.

* Poor people of all ages who don't have the spare money (see above).

So measures that are ostensibly aimed at protecting children will actually put them even more at risk than they are now.

1/3 mm total error

For me the most stunning thing is the required accuracy. The observations were taken at a wavelength of 1.3mm. A telescope works "perfectly" if it is accurate to 1/4 of a wavelength (the Rayleigh Limit, not to be confused with the equally important Ralyleigh Criterion which is about the aperture). So the total error in the system had to be kept down to 0.4mm across the Earth. If I mention that the moon creates tides of up to 1m in solid Earth every day, and one of the telescopes was on a moving ice sheet, you will have some idea of the practical difficulties.

Timing was equally important. 0.3mm is 1 light-picosecond, so clocks accurate to 1ps had to be used to time the incoming signals.

The sheep were right there...

What are you suggesting they should have done with the sheep?

* Knitted themselves some woollies?

* Set them on fire and gathered round to keep warm, just like Grandma did in the Great Patriotic War?

* Eviscerated them and curled up inside the nice warm bodies, like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (hint: sheep are smaller than taun-tauns).

* Something NSFW to keep their extremities warm?