Posts by Alan Brown 16473 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Monopoly laws might apply"
In particular the ones relating to a company leveraging its dominance in ONE area of the market to obtain a dominant position in OTHER parts of the market.
That one is so painfully obvious that I'm sure Streetmap's lawyers pulled it up, but I've never seen judges rule that doing so is ok because of the "consumer benefit" before.
I've spent many years dealing with spammers and their victims - both the advertisers and the spammees.
Most advertisers are blissfully unaware that sending bulk email is mostly illegal unless "done right" and are happy to sign up for a glossy brochure and a smooth talker - it's worth noting that the vast majority of signups of otherwise reputable businesses happen via spammers treading the boards at tradeshows, introducing themselves as marketing experts and usiing the usual snake oil high pressure selling techniques we all know and hate.
Responsible businesses generally learn pretty fast thanks to the tsunami of complaints they get and general business losses resulting from the spam campaign - which can be substantial and most spammers demand payment in advance. (Then there are Joe Jobs... spam sent by someone purporting to be from a 3rd party in order to deliberately damage the 3rd party)
Unfortunately there are some who decide the pain is worth it, the ones who do it twice are of the same ilk as the spammers - entitled sociopaths who usually cry "free speech" when confronted and "victim" when the tables get turned (see: Alan Ralksy, or Donald Trump)
The long-term way of eliminating spam is to punish the companies which hire spammers - even for a first offence, but with increasing fines if they continue. That way only criminals will hire spammers and spammers knowingly involved in a criminal enterprise are usually part of organised crime groups that the smaller players will steer clear of. (The mafia hates competition, etc)
4 years isn't long enough. But it's a start. I just hope that his activities are tagged when released so that if there is any other source of money found, it can be confiscated too.
"$1.5M for five years = $300k per year"
If he's splashing out on that kind of toy and has 1.3mill sitting in his bank account, then the actual figure taken in is likely to be significantly higher.
It really depends how deep down the rabbit hole the investigators want to go, but most crooks tend to sequester money in multiple locations.
Spamming won't be eliminated but you can put one hell of a dent in it by making the companies paying them responsible for the spam too.
This was the part of the USA's TCPA that put a huge brake on junk faxes. Advertisers started caring when illigal advertising practices cost them directly.
At that point the remaining spam is mostly for illegal shit like web pharmacies selling narcotics - which you can use to ensure the spammer gets a lot more than 4 years.
" simply hacking Openreach away from its parent would probably have a catastrophic effect."
Perhaps for BT. But riddle me this: If Openreach is _so_ expensive and has _so_ many liabilities and is losing _so_ much money, why is BT trying desperately to hang onto it?
The effect of splitting in New Zealand was electrifying. Their version of Openreach went into high gear when the split happened and hasn't slowed down since. Almost all(*) customers are happy at paying 1/2 to 1/3 the rates they were previously forced to.
The incumbent telco isn't looking so rosy though. It advanced the exact same arguments and costs against splitting that BT has been using - including the claim that an independent openreach would have trouble raising financing.
Not long after the split, NZ Openreach (chorus) got lots of financing, whilst the former incumbent had its credit rating slide substantially. It seems that plant in the ground and hundreds of telcos as your customer is a better credit risk than being one of those hundreds of telcos (especially when customers are leaving like a plague of rats deserting a sinking ship. Most people stay with BT because they're the lines company. Once that goes away they're more inclined to move)
(*) The exception to the happy clients list being the former incumbent - which despite the line charge figures being set based on information it passed to the regulator about costs, etc. claimed that the charges were far too high, they couldn't possibly make money and they demanded a special deal.
Everyone laughed at them and the damands weregiven short shrift. That little tantrum demonstrated what everyone else already knew - that the outrageous costs they claimed were involved in running the lineside operation were made up figures to cross-subsidise the other divisions.
"and that's me sweating, how to explain to a very attractive woman, in her mid 40 that her porn browsing habits got her machine riddled with viruses, adware and PUPs?"
If she's browsing porn sites then you don't need to be sweating it.
Been there, done that, had a chat about how lots of them are trojan horses and if you're going to spend time trawling these sites you need to use scriptblockers etc etc.
People are people. As long as you don't play "prude" it's relatively easy.
I get more flak for my lectures to people who've been told not to open XYZ attachments and do it anyway or disable the antivirus that's wraning the file is infected "because it might contain something important" (in one case, twice). Such people go to the end of the queue. Once it's clear that they don't listen, the lesson usually only sinks in if they get a large bill or maximum inconvenience.
Some people really don't like being told they're the reason that 30 other staff can't do any work at an effective cost of £1000 per person per day.
As for C-level staff or other manglement: Form a good relationship with the company accountant and/or finances dept. When this kind of thing happens, have a chat and explain the costs/inconvenience/losses. You'd be amazed how fast they can school the most stubborn lusers.
"and he had a foot of Phantom wingtip to prove it, sliced off on a guy wire..."
Not in the UK, but one transmitting station I worked at had a semi-regular problem with local flyboys knocking the nav lights off the top of the 110 foot towers on the way to their bombing ground.
" In fact let's just make this sinister thing called "NDAs" illegal. "
NDAs hold no water in a court, If a judge orders someone to talk and there's a NDA they don't mention holding them back, then they'd better talk because if that NDA comes up later, it's perjury charges time.
If they do mention it and the judge tells them to talk anyway, any penalty clauses in the NDA are null and void. vs not talking and facing contempt of court.
> So I would guess Intel has EoS this?
The Cisco story said anything shipped after Nov 2016 was OK.
That's probably your cutoff on bad silicon, but as a long term supported SoC for embedded systems and low end servers, the failures seen to date are probably only the tip of the iceberg.
Regarding other comments: These are not your grandfather's anaemic Atoms that used to hobble consumer systems. The Avoton/Rangely parts were a new generation Atom System-on-chip with performance spec that outruns Xeons prior to the E55xx/56xx parts (ie, anything more than 7-8 years old) whilst using 1/10 of the power and in a lot of cases became the chip of choice even when replacing 3-5 year old systems that would have traditionally been DP
They've been Intel's bread and butter server chip for non-compute-intensive operations and embedded work, which means the company is going to take a hammering unless it steps up and 'fesses up. The longer they leave it, the deeper the shitpile's going to be.
> It does sound like they're not going to replace anything until the unit has actually died
My worry is that even if makers have this policy, they won't have enough stock to handle increasing failure rates.
Having a critical system go tits-up - then finding that even though there's a support contract, not being able to replace it for a week - is one of the nightmare scenarios.
Encrypt your mail - even on the server.
At that point you have to encrypt everything including laundry lists, because otherwise the fact that something's encrypted screams "oooh, I'm secret, look at meeee"
(For added shits and giggles, ONLY encrypt your laundry lists)
"I've demonstrated a few weeks ago that that is at least partially a fabrication. Their so-called "EU only" services also use US based infrastructure, and I demonstrated this using a government level service, well beyond any anti-terror excuse they could use at consumer level."
If you can provide proof of this, I know some people who would be _very_ interested in seeing it.
"I think this court is under the same appeals court that ruled Slurp did not have to turn over the emails."
A fundamental difference between the cases is that MS went out of its way to ensure that mail delivered to an EU mailbox STAYED in the EU at all times.
Google flitted things around between datacentres worldwide, including inside the USA - which means that the USA has jurisdiction under most interpretations.
The other fundamental difference is the difference in company structure. MS EU is a standalone company not under MS USA control, whilst Google EU isn't. (Franchising vs Subsidiary)
"Because that was a direct cause of the power vacuum occurring due to the removal of Saddam Hussein"
It goes back a lot further than that - still mostly the USA's fault, though the French and British caused the initial problems to start festering in the way they carved up the former Ottoman empire.
In the French case, they did it deliberately, to keep everyone fighting amongst themselves and in the British case through bureaucratic incompetence (Ignoring T.E.Lawrence's recommendations and simply putting straight lines on maps) coupled with self interest (oil access and promising large tracts of land to the French in the first place).
Ever since the end of WW2 and the start of the second(*) Cold War the USA has responded to mideast issues (especially anything which affected business interests there) in a way which didn't solve the problem at hand and usually made things worse. I'm minded of the tale of an old lady who swallowed a fly and how that eventually ended up. The only question is when the horse shows up.
(*) The First Cold War was between the USA and Japan before WW2 - which is the root source of all those yellow peril propaganda movies from that period.
"It establishes a neat argument for "EU First" (as a reaction to "America first") when it comes to purchasing online services."
It's interesting that the Chocolate factory is fighting this.
One of the reasons $orkplace _didn't_ go with them when mail was farmed out (over everyone's objections) was that Google told us that if they were served with this kind of court order they'd have to comply.
Google also couldn't guarantee that data wouldn't be taken outside the EU (this was long before safe harbour was shown to be so much hot air, but our lawyers had already come to that conclusion)
MS did give an assurance on both counts. Unlike Google, MS EU is (on paper) totally independent from MS USA and licenses the name, etc. MS went to a fair bit of effort to try and ensure protection of EU personal data against judicial overreach from the outset, unlike Google.
NB: Not long after mail was switched over, MS did admit that a PATRIOT Act order would overrride everything and they'd have to hand over data. These cases are not PATRIOT-related though.
Exactly.
300 merlins launched so far(*) and not a single engine RUD (although one did shut down early on one launch, but that didn't affect the delivery). If there's cracking in the turbopumps then it's fairly minor - but rest assured that having been raised it will be remedied.
(*) Every single one of them had at least 2 ground tests before launch too.
"This is worrying on a couple of levels."
1: You assume China and Russia are friendly. They've been to war twice in the last century.
2: You're also assuming the chinese want to copy the aircraft rather than simply work out what's needed to take or keep them out of the air
3: Russia and the USA have "domestic" and "export" tech. Russia might have sold china a few Mig-35s but they won't be equipped with the same technology that the domestic versions get. In the same way USA export version F35s are inferior to domestic ones (and this extends downrange to things like F15/16s, the export versions are significantly less capable than the domestic units)
It's been predicted since the 1960s (or earlier) that there would eventually be an oil war in the South China Sea centred on the Spratley Islands (there's not much under the Spratleys but there's a lot in surrounding continental shelves)
The only real questions are "who will show up?" and "Can it be avoided by making oil irrelevant?"
The thing about wars is that they're usually about trade (most of them in the last 400 years up to WW1 and it's arguable that WW1 went on so long because UK/Germany had been gearing up for a trade war for 30 years beforehand), pillage and plunder (most of them before that - war was only done if profitable) or resources (oil and water primarily). There was an odd period around 1000 years ago when religion was supposedly a primary motivator, but plunder played a large part in the attraction.
Just about every conflict since WW2 has been about oil or independence from colonialism - even the proxy wars that the superpowers engaged in.
Looking closer at oil wars, they're really about cheap energy and access to it. If a better energy source source can be developed (preferably soon, carbon dioxide is looking to be a much worse problem than simplistic warming issues) and is replicable enough, many wars would simply go away.
Poland and eastern europe in general is a bit of a stretch as far as provoking the Russians is concerned.
The years 1956 and 1968 should be borne in mind. NATO stayed well back from the eastern borders since 1990 to avoid any issues until the Russians started making the Poles and others nervous that history might repeat.
not only 2 aircraft carriers (one russion, one being built), but it has working antiship ballistic missiles (DF21-D and DF24) which are believed to be more capable than anything the US or Russia have.
ASBMs make aircraft carriers as obsolete as aircraft carriers made battleships - you don't need to have a nuke onboard, or even to destroy the target. If you can put a big enough hole in the flight deck then the entire fleet will keep its distance lest they have to return home unexpectedly(*) and stay there for several months.
(*) Wounding the enemy is more effective at tying up resources than killing them. If you wound a man or damage a ship, resources have to be expended to save him or it (6 people to recover one wounded solider is the rule of thumb, factor on tying up a dockyard for a long time repairing a ship). If you sink or kill your opponent then they leave it where it is and keep going. On top of that the psychological effects of having one of your own screaming his nuts off in pain can't be underestimated.
It's worth noting that the F14 and F15 were both "cheaper faster" aircraft using lessons from the F-111B program.
The importance of that is that the F-111B was almost as large a clusterfuck as the F35 project, but eventually common sense prevailed and it was scrapped. It appears that amongst the lessons learned by aircraft makers was "how to ensure your program doesn't get killed off"
"The appeal of stealing details of the F-35 is that it will make it possible to screw not only its flight & fighting systems but also its logistics & maintenance systems"
That and knowing what it's weaknesses are. It's pretty clear that noone would want to copy a tubby underpowered thing that handles badly and blows its radar stealthiness by having to fly with the bomb bay doors open most of the time in order to avoid overheating.
The americans didn't want the MiG-31 to build their own one, they wanted to find out what made it tick and how to work around it. The factor of using vacuum tubes was mindblowing to them and made them think about emp resistance in their own aircraft.
That's _why_ everybody spies on everybody else (and if you think 'allies' aren't as busy pilfering data about each others' systems or industrial processes, you're pretty slow)
"What will QLC expected life usage be then? 10TeraBytes read/write operations or less?"
In a lot of applications at this scale data is written to the storage and rarely altered. This applies as much for SANs as for home systems.
The more important question becomes "what's the write speed?"
There's the other side to this too:
mid 1990s:
A school I was providing connectivity and doing consult work for (mostly for free) switched to another ISP without telling me. First I knew of problems was when I discovered the admin and student networks had been physically connected together (no vlans) and something on the LAN was RIPing itself as a default router. Digging into the issue showed that a fly-by-night outfit had shown up during summer break when only the core admin staff were around and offered a "fantastic deal" on wiring up the classrooms plus connecting them to an ISP based about 500km away (this was in the days when ISPs were usually local outfits). The School Administrator had taken them up on the deal without bothering to consult with the IT staff. (It wasn't any kind of cheap, they'd used nasty wee 10MB/s hubs in a flat network connecting 150+ systems together, well beyond ethernet distance specs, hadn't even bothered using separate subnets for the staff and student systems and charged them top dollar for a 3rd rate installation, dropping another router on the network without disconnecting our one.)
Upon warning the School Administrator (who's supposed to cover business and legal aspects of operation and be aware of liability law) in writing that:
1: The ISP agreement they'd signed up for was 5 times my charges.
2: That it was only a matter of time before the more enterprising students would hack into the admin network
3: That if they were lucky those students would only change their own grades.
4: They risked major expense and litigation if anyone's privacy was breached.
I was shown the door, fairly unsurprisingly.
This was despite having been discussing security arrangements for such a connection for about a year beforehand with staff who were supposed to be in charge of developing networking. We'd been making plans to roll out physically separated networks and 100Mb/s managed switches everywhere in conjunction with one of the local networking specialists (not just vlans - not secure enough in everyone's eyes at the time) specifically to ensure that confidential data wouldn't leak and to keep porn out of the network. They were caught by surprise as much as I was and the worst thing was that the total cost of doing it the right way with companies which were supportive would have been cheaper than the deal agreed over the summer by that one administrator.
Somehow the staff did manage to block the ISP switch (by all accounts at this stage the administrator was huffing at them more loudly than Donald Trump if my name was mentioned), but shortly afterwards their connection was switched to a 3rd ISP, amid claims that ISP had offered them a deal which was half the cost of getting leased lines from the local telco, let alone anything else.
18 months later the school was in the news for having been hacked (by a student, of course) and student/staff personal information circulated, leading to problems with bullying targets and their families being heavily victimised on their home phone numbers even after those numbers had been changed.
At that point the school's public liability insurer discovered a copy of the letter I'd written(*) and decided the school's policy was null and void. It ended up being quite expensive for them (several million dollars) and the administrator was heavily censured by the board of governors. Despite that, security problems continued for several years afterwards until she was replaced and the school was ordered by the education department to sort its shit out.
(*) Someone sent them a copy and it wasn't me.
I don't know what the moral of this story is, other than "be vigilant" - because once someone's absolutely cocked things up and they're in a position up the food chain, they'd rather pretend that everyone else is wrong and they're right.
Another similar saga in another school in the same town had a meeting between the school's "IT lead", myself and employees of a government research institute discussing how to get the school online (the school wouldn't be paying for this, it was donated effort and connection from the institute - one of the director's daughters was a pupil). When the discussion turned to ensuring network security and the various issues with that, the "IT lead" said "I'm in charge here, I don't see what the problem is. You're the technicians and you'll do what I tell you" - at which point we all looked at each other, picked up our stuff and left without saying a word. The school didn't get its free connection.
"either no access to SkyDrive/OneDrive on free WiFi or being told that there's no Guest WiFi"
I kind of assumed that conslutants would ask the obvious question about this kind of thing.
At current $orkplace this kind of thing gets asked about a couple of times per week by people about to visit.
"The 1984 movie was an unmitigated disaster."
Frank Herbert wrote about the making of it from his point of view. It seemed that whilst Lynch had everything sorted, when they moved the filming to Mexico a lot of sequences were arbitrarily dumped because the production company claimed they were too hard to film.
He indicated that the film wasn't too bad from his point of view - just "rushed" and I think he's right, which is the way I felt on seeing it. Novels like Dune are too long to be a single movie (the best movies are made from short stories) and unless you know the book well (I'd read it a half dozen times) there was no way of keeping up with the movie's plot.
Whilst the film was an unmitigated commercial disaster in the english-speaking world, he pointed out that it was wildly popular in Latin America from the outset. Herbert didn't live long enough to see it turn into a cult film in other countries.
"The sockets had tin plated contacts - not gold"
The oxide buildup wasn't due to the low current. That was the dissimilar metals of the socket and the IC pins causing corrosion in the presence of moisture (in the air). the low current just meant that the oxide layer wasn't being punched through.
Gold plated sockets need gold pins. Tin (solder) plate need tin pins. Mix at your peril.
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