Posts by Blue Shirt Guy 66 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2024
"Did you miss one of the driest years on record, drought conditions and hosepipe bans this year?"
This is about the UK not globally, it seems to have done nothing but rain here for most of this year. For at least the last half a century half the country could be under water and there would still be a hosepipe ban. :-)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/cz69gpy99w7o
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rp0vg17n7o
Zen are pretty good at the internet stuff but I would never recommend them to anyone that still needs a landline after they cut off my 80 year old mother leaving her without a phone line for several days by moving her to digital voice without any notice or authorisation, something that could have caused the worst outcome imaginable.
I'd like to have put that down as a one off but not only has it happened to other family members but they also then did it to me! Even worse they don't have any option for battery backup or any way at all to provide their phone service if you use your own router, the one thing that was their actual USP as an ISP. So I seem to have had my landline number of many years killed by them (yes I could probably port it out but that risks killing the broadband as there is no option for fibre here) despite the fact I'm still paying for it!
The minute they issue a single paper card the whole scheme becomes pointless as it's being sold on being "digital" as in the app forms part of the verification process. It's also ridiculous to expect everyone to have, want or be able to use a smartphone. We already have free photo ID 'Voter Authority Certificates' for people without another photo ID to allow them to vote, so that could easily be expanded to allow them to be used by anyone without a passport or driving licence for these other purposes. Instead they want to spaff half a billion pounds or more on this nonsense for nothing while claiming they have no money.
"Is this because its more effective than solutions involving mobile phones? Or is its security so bad that no-one dare mention it."
Yes.
The problem is if you lose the card who will issue a new one the same day, setup and ready to use with all the existing accounts?
Even my bank can take a week to post out a new card, so while secure it breaks an essential online service if you ever lose your card, which for bank cards is the time you need that service most, which is why banks have mostly now moved to other methods such as dedicated apps. For all other services they would all either need their own individual cards, or need to share one card, both of which can then become another security nightmare to manage both for users and the services.
It's funny you say that but we've had two Windows 10 boxes crash and reboot installing updates overnight, despite having all the no auto reboot GP and other settings set and all random stars aligned as they should have been to prevent unauthorised restarts. That's about a day of work lost and it's finally triggered a meeting this afternoon to consider moving those system to Linux!
This. I'm reading El Reg because I either can't (no headphones) or don't want to listen to audio. If posting this as a text story then it needs to be summarised in text to avoid wasting our time. Otherwise just put it on a Youtube or similar channel, or at the very least away from the written stories in a completely separate part of the site.
I'm not sure how many times it needs to be said but NAT is not a firewall, it just breaks a lot of things. If you don't have a firewall for IPv6 then you don't have one for IPv4. Worse, with IPv4 you may think you have something you don't, while having to impliment bodges that make things even less secure. IPv6 generally makes it simpler to be secure as there's no hidden port translation.
It's working well enough at present that that one "big" operator (EE) only currently has less than 1/3 of the total customers in the UK. Removing one of their competitors and making another bigger isn't going to help anyone other than the shareholders as there's even less reason to compete, while everyone else gets to pay more for the same!
As for O2, they're not even using the spectrum they have in many places and EE have mast sharing with 3.
I've seen it used recently as a desktop OS for some old but critical legacy Windows software. It seems "server" to Microsoft just means "not actually designed to reboot at random times" unlike their otherwise pretty much idential "desktop" versions.
Indeed. VHS hifi stereo sound was so good we used the machines in the recording industry as loggers and for sending out audio demos for people to play at home. It was as close to CD sound as any analogue consumer format ever got and I doubt many people could tell the difference. It was also reliable, with domestic machines recording and playing 24/7 for months without issues.
The picture was far from perfect compared to broadcast TV but fine on TVs of the time. The early linear audio recorders (mono and stereo) did have bad sound but that was fixed in the 80s when they added the hifi stereo track. SVHS also vastly improved the picture for camcorders, though Hi8 was better.
Tell me you don't understand end to end connectivity without telling me?
The problem is you can't do that, as NAT only works with a middle man. Even with every consumer device behind NAT and no ability for end users to host anything themselves, that still does not leave enough IPs as GCNAT at scale still requires an IP per 100-1000 users to avoid running out of ports.
You then also need more servers to move traffic between those users, which then use more real IPs, create more latency and higher bandwidth costs.
I wonder where those CDNs will get their IP addresses, or is he suggesting no new competition?Does he even know what an A or AAAA record is?
Googling he seems to have had a respected history, is he the internet's Roger Waters or John Cleese?
It appears so. The example above is particularly jarring as the comma implies there's a section of the quote that's been omitted after the comma, but I googled and it seems that was the end of his sentence! I'd have thought even in American that would mean a full stop rather than a comma. As written it's read as "I think it'd be impossible not to conclude that, ..." and leaves the reader hanging wondering what conclusion was omitted.
I guess it's too much to hope that what is (or I guess was if it's been taken over) a British site writing about a British story and quoting someone in the UK could actual use the appropriate gamma. Can anyone recommend a site like The Register that's written in English? :-)
"I think it'd be impossible not to conclude that," Read said.
I know this is a minor thing but WTF is going on with commas and proof reading at El Reg? They seem to appear in the strangest of places, then go missing when needed. It's incredibly distracting to try and read articles full of grammatical errors.
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