Posts by Tom Samplonius 372 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2010
"Don't know, I'll let you know, however I won't be using Google's data gathering services."
I'm sure the mandatory data gathering service that the gov't is forcing ISPs to assemble, will be more effective anyways. Google just wants to click on ads. The UK gov't wants to know if you are planing to blow something up.
"...I wish Netflix would piss off from Australia. Since they arrived it has caused nightmare congestion in the local backhaul."
Maybe call your crap ISP and complain? Backhaul is the cheapest thing to provision. Because turning a 1Gbps link into a 10Gbps link, or a 10Gbps link into 4 x 10Gbps links is not that expensive. And it has gotten a lot cheaper in the last 12 months.
"...I never knew if my wireless connection will still work after the next update, or not. At least on Linux."
Maybe you shouldn't be using a crap distro that puts out untested updates? Because I've never had a problem with Broadcom wired or wireless. For Ethernet NICs, your only choice these days is Intel or Broadcom.
Oh no, the Register let Trevor write about the Internet again.
"internet service providers are not going to build for peak traffic". And obviously this statement is false. I've worked at many ISPs, and they are designed for busy hour traffic. I'm not aware of a single ISP that doesn't. Residential ISPs using cable (DOCSIS) often do let their busy hour traffic go to 100%, but DOCSIS is not an appropriate technology for any business use, especially those using their connection for mission critical backups.
"Ultimately Cloud is marketing speak for renting someone else's datacentre. There are real computers with real storage. So who is supplying them?"
They buy from OEMs, typically in China. All built-to-order and built-to-spec. Google uses servers that most of Dell's market wouldn't even recognize as a server. Google uses top-of-rack and distribution switches that are also built-to-order, and are completely proprietary to their data center.
Basically, all distributors are walking dead. If the only part of the box you make, is the box itself, eventually customers get big enough to buy the parts from the same people you do, and get rid of the middle men.
"...leaving him struggling with a €3.2 million severance payment and a €1 million annual pension."
He is going to be struggling for real, if charged with fraud in the US. If you deliberately lie in order to sell something (as opposed to be being merely incompetent), that is fraud. And it appears that many people inside VW knew this was going on. It might be hard to provide that the CEO knew. So 400,000 fraud charges is going to result in some major prison time. And federal US prisons aren't like those country clubs that you call prisons in the EU. This whole thing is going to come down to email, and finding out who knew what and when.
So, $8B for repairs. Up to $18B in EPA fines for the defeat devices, but likely $4B to $5B once settled out. Possibly fraud charges against VW directly for $1B or so (GM is nearing a $900M criminal settlement in the US over the ignition switch issue, and Toyota was fined $1.2B over the throttle issue). Plus, class action lawsuits in every country that allows them for probably billions each. I don't think VW is going to survive this. They are done.
""Defendants were aware or should have been aware of the need to secure users' information, especially in light of the recent rise of massive security breaches"
Ahh... the ATT Defense: When we said Unlimited, it wasn't really unlimited but everyone should known that it was.
Applied here: Our site is Secure. Of course, everyone knows that doesn't mean it is secure.
"...that "good" error rate of 10^-15 becomes a virtual guarantee that you *will* hit corruption at some point while rebuilding your RAID 5 array..."
And the SpectraLogic product has triple parity, so issue is also solved. Plus, a weekly data scrub is important on all NASesl. And for an archive NAS with shingled disks, read IO should be quite cheap.
"So? They also halve the distance from what is by far the world's greatest economic bloc."
Well, I assume you mean the EU. But you maybe check your atlas first, because if India is only a few more sea days from the US, it means it is only a few sea days closer to the EU.
But also, you are underestimating the damage the EU economic crisis is having. If you take a typical international manufacturer like Samsung, 69% of their sales are in the Americas and 52% in the EU (2013 numbers from Samsung's 2014 Facts and Figures report).
" But Bezos can do it for 10 years and still get cheered? What's up?"
Because Amazon is also growing revenue by 15 to 20% per year. Fast growing company's lose money. Telsa hasn't got to the "fast growing" part yet. And it might not, since the product is niche oriented.
Telsa will probably fail as a company, but has helped a lot to make further improvements to the technology, and creating a path for someone else to follow. They are the Altavista of electric cars.
"I call bunkum. I've never had any problems with WiFi bandwidth or ..."
Oh great. It works for you. But the 2.4/5Ghz spectrum is shared. If you have 30+ other active APs nearby, the amount of available bandwidth is pretty variable. Especially, if someone is using 40Mhz wide channels and has cranked the output power to the maximum the law allows.
" The fact that over 20 years later we still don't have decent virtual reality hardware and applications is down to cynicism and apathy, not the level of tech required to achieve it."
Reverse good old days effect? Because 20 years ago, 1080x1200 screens with 90Hz update rate and 2ms persistence, weren't available. Let alone, one per eye.
Maybe the 2005 copyright date on the EPON book should have clued you into the fact that EPON is dead. EPON (802.3ah-2004) is 1G up and 1G down, per port. GPON (G.984) is 2.5 down, and 1.25G up per port. 10G-PON or XPON (G.987) is 10G down and 1.25G up. Though some people use EPON to refer to any of the above.
"I'm guessing he never sued the Simpsons on the advice of his lawyers, I think he'd find it hard to overcome the defense that the Simpsons is clearly satire."
Oh, and that Simpsons is a fictional show, and that the Simpsons are not real? So when James Woods meets that Simpsons, that is not the real James Woods? And the James Wood, the real person, is actually playing James Woods, the Simpsons character?
The disassociation disorder apparent in many Register readers is frightening. James Wood (the real one), would likely to murdered on any street in the UK, because they saw him play an alien in a movie that evening, so therefore he must be an alien. It would be self defense.
"What makes you think that any major western democracy will have any qualms to shutdown access to let's say Facebook, Twitter or messaging services in the case of major social unrest or a major ongoing attack of let's say "Charlie Hebdo x 100" type?"
Europe, maybe, but North America is pretty unlikely. And under what grounds would you get a court order?
"...why not show two fingers up to ICANN and not in the good way."
But why? What has ICANN done wrong? They basically function as an Internet Quartermaster.
The only criticism I see, is of the new top level domains. But those don't hurt anyone. If you don't a .gay domain, you don't need to get one. Though theregister.gay is probably a good idea.
"...abuse the grid using..."
Umm, no. They are the anchor tenant for the wind farm, which itself is a business enterprise. And with time-of-day billing, there is no "abuse" of the grid. Peak time KWh's cost more than offpeak hours. Winds farms will produce a predictable amount of KWh's per month, though not always at peak times, but it balances out. And the data centre uses a constant amount of power 24x7. Or maybe it doesn't. Google can turn data centres down, when load drops. No reason why Facebook can't run a data centre 12 hours a day. Or just the 12 hours, when the wind is blowing.
"That's going to screw a few budgets."
Very very very few budgets. After the 7 hour outage last week, I don't know how many Australian customers they have, or will be able to get. MS also seems to tone deaf to announce a price increase so close to a major outage, but that is typical for them.
"According to a recent survey from the International Monetary Fund, Canadian investors allocate a mere 40 per cent of their total equity investments outside Canada. Their local allocation to Canada is about 10 times what it should be."
This is so stupid. A lot of money is held in funds, which to get certain tax incentives, must be 80% Canadian investments. Everyone knows this isn't great for diversity of investments. I assume all gov'ts have various tax incentives to keep money from leaving. Or, if you are Greece, just order the banks closed. Either way, there are a lot of reasons to invest at home besides being irrational.
"However it's another example of how policy needs to be defined elsewhere, and the limits of BGP policy configuration done via the current OSS model....
Please god don't anyone say "hey we need another extended attribute for BGP that will solve this".."
Umm ok, so you know about BGP attributes, but you don't know about routing registration databases? You are supposed to build routing policies based on routes registered in a registration database. Interestingly, Level 3 runs their own routing registration database (http://www.irr.net/docs/list.html). What Level 3 is supposed to be doing, is automatically building new route prefix lists and pushing them to their edge routers every day. And those prefix lists would contain all acceptable routes.
Since a large ISP may have several thousand prefixes, automatically generating them from a database is the only way to go.
"FFS Tier-1 ISP's have been using AS filter paths for 20 years - how the hell is this still happening in 2015?"
Given that you must mean prefix lists, not a path fitler, as a path filter would have allowed this through. As far as why, your comment is a perfect example: people don't know the difference between prefix filters and AS path filters, among many other things.
"Google is large enough to have peering agreements with all major carriers..."
For IP yes, but the transport has never been the problem with SMS. It's the transaction processing, and fact that all of the mobile operators use various clearing houses to exchange SMS with each other. And those clearing houses don't make money by giving messages away for free. And while you could theoretically connect direct to every mobile operator and bypass the clearing houses, adding additional SMS gateway connections to each mobile operator's existing switching software, is typically very expensive in licensing and/or hardware, so they prefer to let the clearing houses handle everything.
"...I would not be surprised that in the near future you will be able to buy PVRs with so much storage that they just record all the time and there is no need for catchup over IP"
Probably traditional broadcast TV would be dead before that happens. Broadcast TV is dying pretty fast. I think you may be the one person in a thousand that likes live TV. And unfortunately that will not be enough to save it.
"...yet we're lucky to get 10Mbps on land. What am I missing here? AND, it's over COPPER!"
Speak for yourself. I can get 850 Mbps. And that is measured via a third parties speed test site, that is routed out of the country and then back into the country. So that is pretty real world.
Though it sucks that Rackspace's servers can only manage 350 Mbps.
"banks like HSBC are free to commit fraud, money laundering and tax evasion with no hint of prosecution."
HSBC was fined $1.6B USD in 2012 for money laundering. The tax evasion issues are before the Public Accounts Commitee (PAC), so hardly "... no hint of prosecution.." The PAC will probably recommend another big fine too. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31799405
"... I think I can make better use of my time."
You forgot stock price manipulation. Apparently by breathlessly reporting accurate new a little bit before anyone else, will make your information seem explosive, when it is actually routine, because it seems leak-ish, leading to a stock price crash. I guess that is the Snowden generation for you: unless it is leak, they just aren't listening. This is worth billions to short traders.
"...undisputed champs at making offerings for differing customer targets, form factors, and objectives work together, and also at providing an ecosystem as an infrastructure for third parties"
Umm.. what? First of all, I dispute that, so you can't claim that is undisputed. As far as ecosystem development, MS is awful at that. If anyone produces a substantial business in their ecosystem, MS just takes the entire category over, by using their control of the OS. Look at office productivity software: MS is the only player left. The Windows ecosystem has shown that MS tolerates minnows in their ecosystems, but anyone too big is taken out.
"...3 kW for all the fluorescent tubes lighting up the empty space"
The lights need to be on to take the picture. Large data centres of this style have used motion detecting switches for lighting for years. I've been through Equinox centres a few times, and they all completely dark, except for the segments happen to have people in them.
"Seeing something similar Stateside is a bit of an insight?"
Gov'ts have always licensed spectrum. But the gov't is the spectrum steward, but it is not a provider of services. So, all radio stations, TV stations (expect UK, I guess) that were formed in the last 100 years or so, have paid the gov't for a license. So there is nothing new about this process.
"Then those guvmints request the buyers, lease holders, successful bidders to retain data including metadata for security purposes."
No they don't. The terms of use are publicly available, as this auction is open to the public to begin with.
And if metadata collection was required (and it is not required), the gov't could pass a law to require collection. The medium of transmission is irrelevant.
Well, once the VCs decide to monetize DuckDuckGo, then I guess you are out of luck. DuckDuckGo just needs 30 days to "substantial update" their privacy policy, per their existing policy. And I guess no time at all, if it is not a "substantial" change. And since DuckDuckGo is apparently not making money, that is just a matter of time. I guess at that point, all of the Freetards will flee DuckDuckGo, and go to the next startup.
"Seems clear now that the devs didn't abandon the project because the code was defective or compromised. That leaves the canary theory. "
No, it leave the actual reason for it: a bunch of self-entitled users bitching about so called "missing features", and then spreading rumors of the developers supposed incompetence. The forums and mailing lists were full of this bitching just prior to the release.
Telling those bunch of freetards to go use Bitlocker was perfect. The developers knew their own code was good, and probably still are developing it themselves.
For another tales of freetards bitching to developers: http://sqlite.1065341.n5.nabble.com/SQLite-and-McAfee-Anti-Virus-td15283.html
"... will have to be done by people living in nations other than the US (and the UK, it seems.."
Other than your desire to spread FUD, why? Everything in Truecrypt is completely legal. And it is completely legal to use it. The US might be the only country with decent encryption use protection.
Yes, the PM of the UK would like to ban encryption, but so far no one in the US gov't is getting to chuffed about it.
"Why the bump to 2Gbps, aside from a one-upsmanship towards Google? To fully benefit, I assume this means you'll have to use the ISP supplied router, since running such a device in bridge mode will basically lock you down to 1Gbps..."
It will be based on GPON, and the ONT (optical network terminal) box will likely have as many as 4 x GBE ports. So you won't be able to get all 2 Gbps via a single ethernet port, but it will be there. The ONT may be bridged or routed. As a cable operator, Comcast probably prefers bridged, as that is how DOCSIS works.
What is interesting, is that 2.5 Gbps is the maximum performance of a single GPON port. I wonder how many homes will be put on each port. The technology supports a maximum of 64.
Also the shared uplink is only 1.25 Gbps per GPON port, so this 2 Gbps service will not be symmetrical. Probably will be 2 Gbps down and 1 Gbps up.
"There are allegations that Facebook "opened" stuff they shouldn't have. See El Reg last week."
Or, someone realized that Facebook has a lot of money in the bank. It wouldn't be the first time that a company adopted IP theft claims as a business model. See basically every article Reg wrote about Novell.
"is your internet connection ... as the guy who's in charge of our "broadband" (the term is laughable) 25mb/s ought to be enough for everyone."
10 Gbps may not be needed in the home, but surely business users can get more than 25Mbps?
I'm seeing 1 Gbps small business plans go for $250/m for 1000 GB and a static IP.
"Any RAM chip that is operated within the manufacturer's guidelines should be able ..."
Yes, the memory is probably defective. But this kind of defective RAM is installed in many systems today, because the access pattern used by the rowhammer exploit is never found in real-world work loads, so they never tested for it.
http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.in/2015/03/exploiting-dram-rowhammer-bug-to-gain.html
MemTest86 v6 includes a test for rowhammer (test 13), but prior to that, MemTest86 didn't detect the rowhammer fault either.
"It's only ok with the compliance requirements are the same for both?"
I think you are expected to know what the compliance requirements are, for your data.
The "look at the data and look at your business address and determine your compliance requirements" feature will be added in a successive release.
Or, you could store everything encrypted. Try to not lose your encryption key though.
"As ODIN is the name of the tool to flash new firmware to their mobile phones."
The 1990s called and want their firmware update technology back.
"Do these marketing wallys ever bother to see if the name they want to rebrand themselves with is already in common use elsewhere?"
Well, a firmware update tool is hardly setting the world on fire with its popularity.
I think the number of non-Samsung sites offering phone Odin downloads is worse for the Odin, rather than it being a tool implementing an obsolete firmware update method.
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