Posts by theblackhand 925 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2009
"Lawyers never lose."
You obviously haven't heard of my targeted adventure tourism business "High Adrenaline Shark Diving Tours 4 Lawyers"
It involves sharks, lawyers and a large pool. So far, the sharks have an almost perfect record.
This has also disproved the myth that sharks will eat anything...
If we changed "didn't work" to "worked for very specific situations but was old as the next big thing" it would be true - Autonomy brought a lot of companies, many of which had known, viable products.
Alternatively, consider this the sequel to "The Emperor's New Clothes" where HP is the Emperor, Autonomy is his fantastic new clothes, they've added a few snakes (lawyers) and a long suffering judge listening to the Emperor pretend he only got nothing because of some shenanigans in purchasing the materials for the new clothes.
Spoiler: the snakes will probably bite everyone.
Marriott have put aside upto £100m for the fine - while they're challenging the decision is this a case of not accepting the legal liability, accepting the fine and challenging the amount? Or not accepting they should be fined, because I don't
From previous accounts, Marriott appeared to have a robust internal data security policy given their ability to detect an intrusion and publicly disclosed what happened and have fully co-operated with the investigation. The challenge was in discovering just how broken Starwoods data security systems were prior to the acquisition and then subsequently during the integration of the companies.
"Wouldn't that actually be more encouraging to potential customers than the transparently untrue garbage? Contrition is more convincing than bluster."
Normally I would agree however given that this problem was acquired rather than being of Marriot's making AND they appear to have been open and honest about it and cleaning it up, I think they have been contrite.
"The total proposed fine of £183.39 million would be the biggest penalty ever issued by the ICO.
It is the equivalent of 1.5% of BA's global turnover for the financial year ending December 31 2018."
Ref: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/british-airways-fined-more-than-180m-for-customer-data-breach-a4184376.html
My recollection of the Cisco 7000/7500/7600 is that they either have hardwired DC PSU's with no power switch or a "clunky" turning knob type power switch to power them on.
Having said that, Cisco produced so many different PSU options for these beasts that there is likely something exactly as OP described.
Do you have any references for LES retirement?
WES/WEES is already retired (july 2018) and replaced by EAD.
I'm aware of PSTN/ISDN retirement in 2025 and hence the retirement of systems providing power over copper, but hadn't heard anything about the LES platforms.
As far as I am aware, the EAD platform is the intended ISDN replacement.
"And the solution seems simple : replace the stupid ECI kit."
OpenReach could be about to - they are hiring night migration engineers which would fit the profile of a ECI replacement. The scale (~25,000 cabinets) is significant as is the work required (no FTTC service between the start and completion of the cabinet migration):
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/06/openreach-uk-could-replace-eci-fttc-broadband-cabinets.html
My guess is the pipeline is something along the lines of:
- write a rule
- validate rule and add to rulebase
- check rulebase in monitor mode against pre-canned test traffic
- check rulebase in enforce mode against pre-canned test traffic
- check rulebase in monitor mode against sample traffic containing items to block
- check rulebase in enforce mode against sample traffic containing items to block
- check rulebase in monitor mode against production traffic for select customers
- check rulebase in enforce mode against production test traffic for select customers
- deploy to production
This is based largely on (historical?) Google checks for firewall rule changes. As long as the hit counts/device health stats don't show anything scary, everything should be good.
I wonder if the canned/sample traffic didn't trigger CPU usage in quite the same way (i.e. in small doses the checks remain in CPU caches but as traffic rises above X it starts to cause high latency with memory reads and the CPU is least waiting) or resulted in additional CPU to fully process the rule with some production traffic (repeated calls to a script possibly?) that wasn't fully considered.
The West gained significantly from foreign expansionism - whether it was European colonialism or post-WW2 Imperialism.
While there is still some scope for China to benefit from expansionism, the potential "victims" are less willing to part with all of their wealth for little reward.
I'm aware of China's economic incentives in African countries, but the returns on many of those investments will never match the returns that Western nations got in the past.
"Working from home is used by beancounters for THEIR benefit not yours, even though that's not how they spin it!"
While I don't disagree with what you're saying, if you normally travel by public transport into a large, crowded metropolis and it takes you a few hours each day, the benefit can significantly weigh in your favour.
For London, WFH saves me around £30/day travel, whatever I spend on food and gives me back 3 hours. Any costs I incur at home is tiny in comparision
"Gripen (Gripen NG or Super-JAS), I don't expect the announcement of a replacement soon, but there will be one within fifteen years, those Swede aren't stupid and quite capable. I also expect the first country (outside of Sweden) to order them to be Switzerland."
Unlikely...SAAB have been asked to drop out of Switzerlands procurement programme as they don't have flight-ready aircraft. https://www.janes.com/article/89220/saab-pulls-gripen-e-from-swiss-flight-evaluations
From an electronic perspective, SRAM requires ~6 transistors per bit to create a flip-flop switch while DRAM requires a single transistor per bit for memory functions.
The implication is that for a given memory area, DRAM gives you 6x the capacity of SRAM, so you would likely look at improving ECC schemes to make them detect/correct more errors, as most ECC requires 36 bits per 4 bytes to operate successfully (a 12.5% overhead) for detecting 2-bit errors or dead chips.
Based on increasing memory sizes, there is a very good argument for moving to ECC as standard anyway as the reliability benefits would outweigh the additional costs if ECC was the standard and was priced ~12.5% higher versus the current 20%+ premium.
"That is not an inherent feature of ECC memory designs, although it may well be a common misfeature in many 'modern' system implementations."
My understanding of DRAM (with or without ECC) is that write operations require one operation and read options require a read operation followed by a write operation. Note I'm making no assumptions about cycles required per operation.
If ECC detects a correctable error, there is a small delay while the correct data/ECC information is calculated before being written back resulting in a small delay. This delay is what is being detected.
"To be fair, it *is* a two person company. They're probably working out of shoebox with no proper AC/power for a server"
They're a two person company relying on a third party to provide their infrastructure because they can't do it more cost-effectively themselves. They may have had a tested, sensible DR plan and appropriate site redundancy with their hosting plan, but weren't prepared for an "account suspended" incident in much the same way as a landlord locking out a business tenant and shutting off the power would affect a similar physical server installation
In all likelihood, being in their first year, they likely choose Digital Ocean based on their previous experience and moving to a more appropriate provider maybe on their to do list as their sales increased.
"The cloud is not your friend."
But it can't be beaten for price (close to free from the point of the consumer) and convenience (i.e. easy access 360+ days of the year) so it's going to be sticking around.
Keeping a single user connected to a single application in one timezone for the working day is relatively easy. Keeping tens or hundreds of physical/virtual servers and their associated applications operational and maintained 24/7 with tested DR is challenging from both a technical and cost perspective for many organisations with revenues less than <US$10k/employee. And no, I don't expect that to be a popular opinion for an IT website, in spite it being a commonly help opinion at many levels of organisations.
"Israel companies may have done spying on whatsapp, but we can trust the israel govt to investigate and stop that"
You misunderstand - the Israeli companies found the WhatsApp flaw, created software to exploit the flaw to allow installation of remote surveillance and sold the software. In all likelihood, it was sold to first and second world law enforcement agencies.
Countries that have existing large scale surveillance systems don't really require the software as they can fall back to more physical methods of data acquisition.
Why would any government be pressuring Israel to stop the sale of the software?
"all it needs is to spy at one critical moment"
You make it sound like the majority of countries don't spy 24x7 already. They do, it's just the quality and trustworthiness of the information that changes.
"But these "new" schemes are doomed to password failure right away, by "Forcing users to choose non-random passwords" -- i.e., "You cannot choose your characters at random, you must select mixed case and numeric and etc. etc."
Which is why length of the password is substituted for the randomness of individual characters to increase entropy.
Your point is valid for excessively short passwords combined with rules like "one upper case, one lower case, one number and one symbol" but once you go beyond 30 characters, the entropy should still be sufficient to resist most brute force efforts and any common patters would still make it unlikely to simplify the search space significantly.
This assumes the password is in use for the coming 2-3 years and viable quantum computing that is orders of magnitude faster than current systems doesn't becomes available .
"(Seriously, for a while you could barely watch a youtube vid without it turning into a NordVPN ad at some point)"
I assume you are referring to the ads served before/during/after the content rather than it being part of the content.
Doesn't Google determine the ads they serve you rather than the content providers? The content providers just get a share of the revenue.
"That doesn't sound like countries with a drinking problem to me."
In the UK, ~5% of the population drink 30% of the alcohol. I believe the figure comes from the NHS and is summarised in the following graph showing drinkers cunsuming more than 35 units of alcohol per week:
https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/media/293220/figure-1-summary-of-weekly-alcohol-consumption-2017-1.png
https://digital.nhs.uk/binaries/content/documents/corporate-website/publication-system/statistical/statistics-on-alcohol/2019/part-4/part-4/publicationsystem%3AbodySections%5B9%5D/publicationsystem%3Aimage
~5% of all UK adults is around 2 million people.
"The failure was, apparently, caused by using subcontractors and cheap H1B visa holders."
The attempt to make a failing service more cost effective after failing to deliver any measurable success (over and above competitors) in the last 20 years resulted in the use of subcontractors and H1B visa holders. And failed to deliver a different result.
And there's the old adage...no one ever ever got fired for buying IBM. They all got fired for working at IBM...
"Unless your organisation outsourced networking and has to pay through the nose for GigE..."
Difficult to blame the technology for that... I suspect you probably have GigE hardware configured to run at only 100Mbps...
I'm surprised management hasn't dropped you to 10Mbps as part of a cost cutting exercise.
"it's not even minimum wage, for instance. And BT charges £85 for an iffy callout, so seems reasonable to mirror that for a no-show"
The ISP is paying a percentage of the cost of the service, not compensation for your time, hence the discrepancy.
The hope is the charges will result in more attention to detail on the part of those managing the faults, because sometimes they just don't seem to give a f.....
I'm not optimistic - the people that take the calls/fix the problems are rarely the cause of the issues. I doubt that the diagnostic systems that send engineers out when there is little they can do or ignores known problems (i.e. ECI cabinets or modems under performing) or providing simpler ways to review the diagnostic information in a useful way rather than presenting it to (the majority of ) call handlers who have no idea what to do with it.
"Also, I suspect the vast majority of cloud datacenters today (including those in Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon etc.) are using 19-inch racks.. So deploying 21-inch racks only becomes a consideration"
The majority of cloud data centres typically deploy equipment as a pre-built rack - ether during initial deployment or during equipment upgrades to allow for pre-deployment testing so it's unlikely to be a significant consideration outside of the physical space required.
As the majority of clouds DC's are also power limited (i.e. either directly or indirectly via cooling limits), space is unlikely to be an issue.
"Kaspersky was alerting users of a self signed Google cert on their network:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/kaspersky-av-having-certificate-conflicts-with-google-chromecast/"
If I understand this issue correctly, Kapersky is using a self-signed SSL certificate to allow it to scan SSL content and Googles use of HSTS is causing the error to be flagged.
Or am I missing something?
"There's ALWAYS something about to go wrong - a tree shorting a 32 kV local feeder line, the 400 kV export connection of a big power station failing, a nuclear plant shutting down on a safety system flagging up"
Coal/gas plant's going into an overspeed state will suddenly drop upto 500MW off the grid due to a fuel or mechanical issue so smaller amounts shouldn't cause any issues.
The attacks on Huawei's reputation appear to have been driven by commercial interests around 5G availability from non-Chinese vendors - I suspect this is politicians adding 1+1 and getting "the Chinese are hiding under the bed".
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