Posts by Alan Brown

Re: £750 per referral, about £1 per person fine

" Therefore the fine per lead (converted or otherwise) is still in the region of £1.31 per illegal correspondence"

And THIS underscores why the UK needs statutory per call damages as the USA TCPA instiuted from day one

$500 per call claimable by the call recipient (tripled if wilful - meaning any rules were broken), jointly and individually payable by the calling company and the call instigator, with $15,000 per call charges once the FCC stepped in

The idea was deliberately intended to dissuade businesses by bankrupting them (and just like the UK, you can't dodge a judgement by phoenixing) if they continued

In this case it's good EB got hit - they were banking on the calling outfit being the schmucks with the fines. It's bad that the ICO didn't name the calling outfits and their fines too

Re: Sanctions?

> If sanctions include blocking traffic then there's an immediate preventative element

"The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it"

These kinds of attacks can be perpetrated by an attacker using a dialup modem to a compromised box outside of the "blocked" area - and besides it's virtually impossible to block an entire country (Russia has tried on several occasions to do it the other way around, blocking all inbound traffic to create a russia-only internet - and failed every time - see comment about dialup modems)

Re: Sanctions?

"For that matter blocking traffic from unfriendly countries"

doesn't achieve much as the actual criminals merely dodge around the blocks using proxies and/or mules outside the affected areas

In a word, "no"

In a few more words, "it's a lot harder than you seem to think it is" - and more to the point, the fuel (incredibly toxic to people+dangerous in other ways) needs to be loaded into something that's going to be launched on the pointy end of a firestick at some point.

Doing so in a way which requires even more handling later, with even more complications and therefore possibilities of something going wrong - is generally a bad idea from the outset

Any question that that starts "why can't they just" or "it doesn't seem particularly hard" usually turns out on analysis to be VERY difficult to achieve

Re: Like red bull to a rag....

I'm kinda waiting for a ground station to be setup in Sri Lanka. It would ruffle feathers quite badly

Re: it does not have a valid license

India's control over RF is legendary, It was essentially impossible to be a ham in India until the 1970s and a huge amount of it is justified by war-footing paranoia regarding Pakistan ("spying")

The USA has bureaucracy for bureaucracy sake. India has it as the true national sport and supreme religion

Re: it does not have a valid license

"without having received a final permit to operate the factory"

He got an "agreement in principle" to do so. These are seldom withdrawn, unlike other parts of the worl

Templehof is a completely different kettle of fish (or vat of Bratwurst), for utterly different causes (the same ones that had German farmers slipping NATO tank crews beer and pizza money to drive through rickety old barns so they'd be replaced with shiny new modern ones with the latest modern amenities)

Re: it does not have a valid license

You can't use wifi on international flights in Indian airspace either (but you'll be charged for the flight time as if you were using it anyway)

Re: Hollywood Fantasists

"Even funnier is people thinking we can "just" blow stuff like this up."

It's generally accepted in the science community now that asteroids are mostly fluffy rubble piles which will just react like a giant feather pillow to any kind of impactor we can throw at them (either having it pass straight through, or simply puffing out slightly and reforming shortly afterwards)

The problem is that POLITICIANS need to have it demonstrated so they stop thinking it's a feasible option

In all likelihood they still wont get it until a couple of airbursting bolides seriously destroy stuff on the ground without anything actually impacting (Tunguska, Chelyabinsk)

Re: Impacts are not always bad

"The Siberian ones did the Late Permian, one of the biggest"

The end game of the late Permian was blowouts of methane clathrate beds driving atmospheric CO2 levels past 800ppm, resulting in global acid raid that killed off most land vegetation (and massive erosion), with most land animal life folllowing shortly afterwards, whilst the acidified seas killed off most plankton and shell forming oganisms (unable to form shells) which resulted in collapses of marine food chains.

This was folllowed by "red tides on steroids" (which form most of the easy oil deposits we've been burning) and atmospheric oxygen plummeted to 11%, staying there for tens of thousands of years

When the kneepoint was hit it went "instantaneously" in geologicaly terms. The rocks show life striggling a little (declining biodiversity etc) for a few tens of thousands of years and then BAM! - it's like Nature hit an "off switch" - the final mass extinction event played out in less than a decade, possibly less than 18 months

People can move away from rising sea levels. It's harder to move away from declining oxygen levels. A decline to 17% would restrict the habitable zone down to about 1500 feet above sea level and deny us/most mammals the interior of most continents). A decline to 11% is unsurvivable and we would end up drowning in our own lungs (a most unpleasant way to die)

An asteroid strike in the wrong location could cause this - Chixulub did it to an already stressed planet 65 million years ago by hitting a shallow sea underlain by 20km of limestone. Or we could simply do what the Siberian traps did 250 millions years ago and warm up those methane clathrate deposits.

Our climate is remarkably similar to what existed back then and ironically it's off the north coast of Siberia where methane clathrate deposits have been seeping out to the surface since 2004 (Leptav sea continental shelf). What's coming out _now_ is minor, but what comes up leaves holes and destabilises what's still down there - about 20GT by most estimates. All it takes is an earthquake to rattle things and life could get interesting in the Arctic circle (there are lots of methane clathrate deposits and blowouts have happened in the past. "Storegga Slides" raised global temperatures 1-2C 9000 years ago, raised sea levels 100m in a couple of hundred years and inundated what's now the North Sea in a 1000 foot high Tsunami)

Humans tend to act when shit and fan start partying, but there's a strong possiblity we may end up acting too late this time

Re: Impacts are not always bad

check out https://craterhunter.wordpress.com/ for an idea of what may happen if an asteroid or comet splinters and a series of airbursts results. It's his hypothesis for what sterilised North America and caused the Younger Dryas

Re: Just don't bother.

Russia has already done that a few times.

Russian friends I talk to freely admit their country is run by kleptocrats but also ask what they can do when the gangsters have guns.

Cutting Russia off plays into the hands of those in power. Information _is_ power and those who can control its flow to the masses wield much

UUCP was a _very_ powerful tool back in the 1990s. Store and forward/burst mode will be again if authorities attempt to clamp down on free flow of data

Re: a state run by mafia

It's not the only one, just less subtle than most

Re: On the Ocean Blue

" This sounds like piracy, particularly with the indefinite detention bit."

Piracy is operating without government sanction. As long as you have government backing you can do what you want in international waters (privateering)

The fact that it may violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is neither here nor there. American Fascists have been trying to overturn it since 1948 (they simply branded themselves as anticommunists after WW2 rather than actually going away completely) and mostly stopped the pretence entirely after 1990

Re: Have to wonder

Doesn't matter. It only takes 2 nukes in space to pretty much cripple everything that's up there

Re: Use them?

it's a bit like nukes in space

The Americans and Russians both let them off in the 1950s to see what would happen and realised it was such a spectacularly bad idea that they were all happy to agree to ban ever doing it again (Arguably the soviet ones caused more problems than the american ones, wiping out power and telecommunications across a large part of central Asia instead of just Hawaii)

Re: Get it?

No idea about foreign civilians but the USA is documented tested biological agents on civilian populations in the New York Subways and nerve agents in San Francisco bay

The real story behind alien cattle mutilations proves truth is stranger than fiction too - secretly tracing radioactive fallout clouds to see their effects on cattle and people (it also shows smart people can do really dumb things. If they'd bought the livers and thyroids at a local abbatoir there'd have been no eyebrows raised)

Re: Get it?

Laser brooms have been postulated for a while. The problem is that anyone who demonstrates one also demonstrates the ability to bring down other people's satellites by stealth

It needs to be a neutral, open effort

Re: Positive signals

I'd have said the same thing - and expanded by saying that it's most likely to be water under the carpets

Germans have a tendency to take the attitude "This shouldn't happen, so we don't need to design for the possiblity", whilst Japanese designers take the position "It HAS happened more than once in the past, so we MUST take the possiblity into account"

Of course if you have a sunroof, the risks go up exponentially because cleaning the drains out is never part of the manufacturer documented regular maintenance procedure, therefore never gets done - and they DO block up

Re: Positive signals

"Yes, I've seen lights stay on when the control signal was turned off. And vice versa."

This is more or less that happened at TMI: The lights on the control panels indicated what the control switches were set to, not what the equipment was actually doing

Re: It can take a remarkably long time to notice that the alert mailer has stopped working.

There are a couple of stories of hydroelectric generator bearing seizures where this happened and the rotating assembly was found over half a mile down-valley after exiting the building at speed

It was only at this point that people considered what might have happened if the assembly had gone in the OTHER direction and went whiter shades of pale

Bear in mind that these were "small" generators (well under 1MW) and modern hydropower ones are easily 50MW with a small one being 2MW). More recently (1970s) a 2MW unit in Australia's Blue mountains had lubrication turned off before it stopped spinning during an emergency shutdown procedure and by all accounts the end was glowing cherry red within seconds

For obvious reasons, bearings and lubrication systems on $LARGE rotating assemblies are treated as critical assemblies with multiple redundancies - and if they're not, they need to be

Re: It can take a remarkably long time to notice that the alert mailer has stopped working.

I got to the point of setting up a "canary checker". If things don't check in regularly then it flags the fact for attention

Re: There's two more rules, actually...

"I break out the Book of the Profane and start selecting appropriate phrases from it, especially if it's me they've swept!)"

I used to get particularly pissed off when supposed "firearms experts" would sweep a group whilst explaining how to verify the breech was empty

I don't care if you think it's unloaded. the subtext of #1 is "even if you've verified it's unloaded, it's still loaded" - I've seen too many instances of "verified" weapons subsequently discharging to trust anyone

Re: Nice article

Perhaps someone should rollout a .teevee TLD?

Re: I have too much time on my hands...

I put "Read the fine manual" in some Q&A documents - and a bunch of academics objected because THEY know what "fine" really means and found it offensive.

Re: Huawei has always unsurprisingly denied it is a stooge for the Chinese Communist Party

7 years ago when the trumpets were being sounded about how bad Huawei code was, it was actually Comware code from their joint venture with 3com that they were in the process of dumping because it was so awful

Huawei's own Wind River Linux stuff is much better and keeps improving. The comware stuff is still shite and many of the bugs highlighted in the seminars about "how bad Huawei code is" are still shipping in 3com's (now HP) products

That's not to say Huawei don't produce bad code (they do), but this is very much a case of stones, glass houses, fat brown envelopes and political corruption rather than anything else. The USA has been losing the technological and economic race for a while due to shooting itself in both feet as the "America First" mobsters from the 1930s come back to political power

Hint: https://www.nj.com/opinion/2017/03/dr_suess_biting_political_cartoons_against_america.html

Re: Coincidence

"And SSDs for speed?"

No. SSDs for low power consumption

8TB spinners draw 8-15W depending on speed and even more when randomly seeking.

8TB SSDs draw under 1 watt on average (2-3 when writing)

Re: '"how far can I push this before it gets silly". A true engineer'

Hypothesising that something is incapable of performing a task well is not the same as actually demonstrating it in practice

I've been involved in a number of VERY expensive projects over the years where I could see issues building and was pooh-poohed upon raising doubts that the system would cope under full load, only for the wheels to fall off very spectacularly

I've seldom (if ever) been patted on the back and congratulated for catching something before it happened (more often vilified, even when I've started already making alternative plans to get the organisation out of the deep hole that management is intent on driving us deeper into) - even worse, once I've GOT the good stuff in position I then have to deal with mangelement who recall the wheels falling off and don't trust anything/keep interfering with plans to keep the good stuff running

They then get offended when I get sweary and threaten bodily harm. I fully understand and sympathise with Simon's stories and just wish that it would be possible to arrange a few open elevator shafts

And of course - if you get everything running well, your reward is to get your budget cut whilst the best way to have oodles of money thrown at you is to have a "turd bomb" explode under the the director's chair

Re: Price isn't everything

"Trust me, we have tills with some of this "cheap" SSD stuff you mention."

Not 4-8TB enterprise SSDs you don't - which is the context for this story and my comment

Toy drives in cheap SMB toys are another matter altogether and a good example of beancounters costing companies dealy through having few clues about what they're specifying (Hint: The drives you speak of aren't rated at even 0.2 DWPD and the controller in question isn't intended to have 24*7 uptime - it shits itself at 2^32-1 centiseconds uptime - the infamous "49.7days" problem)

Re: Hardware vs Software

that's because it's hard to apply a hardware update in the field

This isn't just a case of "working reliably" either. The problem isn't on the head side of the arm but the coil side. Trying to have 2 moving electromagnet assemblies between very strong magnets that won't interact with each other - even with shielding in place - is likely an essentially economically unsolveable problem - meaning that yes it can be solved but by the time they nail it, SSDs will have taken over and surpassed the density/cost of HDDs

In the same way that MAMR/HAMR implementation delays have doomed that technology for the same reason. SSDs have already overtaken the technology

Re: £35k in total?

companies like this arrange the books very carefully to not show profit. Renumeration to the director will be much higher

Don't foget that Linited liability only limits SHAREHOLDER exposure. Directors or management can and should face the full legal wrath that comes from their decisions