Posts by Lee D

Re: If you can fix train ridership, you can fix bus ridership

This is not an exaggeration but I live in rural Oxfordshire. I moved there last year.

There is precisely one bus that stops in my village.

It goes to a small town, drops off near the "market".

It runs only on market days. Which is a Tuesday or something. I don't know because I've never witnessed the actual market, even though I've driven through that town on countless hundreds of instances for each day. If there is a market, it's not what you and I know as a market. Also, that town only has about 10 roads and 5 shops, so it's not in some side-street or other.

Anyway, this bus runs once every Tuesday. It goes from another big town MANY miles away, into my village, and then onto another town 3 miles away.

That's it. It doesn't COME BACK. It just goes there.

I asked all the neighbours about it - in a village of barely a few dozen people, nobody has even seen it, knew it ran or ever used it. Why would you?

Apparently it was there for the elderly and disabled to get to the village on market days. It just abandons them there. It doesn't even go back to the far larger town further away. So nobody ever uses it. It's only because we're a village that it has to go past to get to the bigger town, it "stops" but we're absolutely not who it's designed for. It's designed for one big town to transport people to a smaller town.

I have seen this mythical bus (I believe) twice. It's a little minibus. I saw it stopped, or got stuck behind it, once or twice in my village. I've never seen anyone get on it. There were about 3 people on it whenever it was heading towards the drop-off in the town.

People don't believe me, and then I show them the schedules.

One bus. One day. One trip. One way. One destination.

Strangely, when planning permission was being sought to add ten new houses to the village, this was raised - because the village has no resources of its own, no public transport, no schools, no doctors, etc. The council refused planning permission and all appeals because there just aren't the facilities to serve the village, including transport.

The other day my car was unusable and I haven't tried to get to my current employer by public transport. The journey is 25 minutes in a car. I used all the tools and found the "best route". This involves a 20 minute DRIVE to the nearest railway station. Catching a train into Central London. Changing onto another train out of Central London. And then a 30 minute walk to my workplace. The total estimated time - including waiting for trains - was 3.5 hours.

The other story I have is when I was challenged why I don't use public transport. At the time I lived in a pretty major London town that you've definitely heard of. I worked just across the same town. My commute was about a 5-10 minute drive.

I researched the public transport. The one, sole, viable option I could find was thus: a 20 minute walk to a particular bus stop. Catch a single bus that only ran at one time that would get me to work on time (earlier, that bus doesn't run, later the other required links don't run or have huge gaps to make me late). Get off bus, walk to another bus stop. Wait 15 minutes. Get on that bus (assume it's perfectly on-time), get off that bus, get on another bus almost immediately (again, I hope everything's running on time!), get off bus, walk for 15 minutes to destination (because no other bus goes that way).

When people ask me why I don't use public transport in the UK, I tell them - it absolutely, categorically sucks unless you've deliberately bought a house and got a job near the right type of public transport. Anything else, and you're absolutely stuffed. And those houses/jobs are costed to factor that kind of access in - the houses are more expensive, and the jobs don't provide any other way to get to them, nowhere to park, you have to buy a season ticket, etc. etc. etc.

Even when it comes to travel for a break or holiday... I can take some ridiculous time and money to get to Cornwall from London (and only certain places in Cornwall), or I can do it in half the time, half the cost just driving myself, whenever I like, however I like, to wherever I like.

I'm not a car fanatic, I have no interest in Jeremy Clarkson's diatribes or fast cars or making loud noises or leaving tyre tracks. I never have. I don't like that the only way I can reasonably get to most places is by car. But that's been a fact of life for almost my entire life, except when I lived in London near a tube station and went to university in London near a tube station on the same line.

My retirement plans include an electric car, because there is no other reasonable alternative whatsoever. And when I start becoming too infirm for that, I'm stuck. Sure, I'll have "the time" to spend 3.5 hours trying to go shopping, but I will not have the inclination at all. And I imagine I'll just live in the same village and order goods in. Goods that will arrive by road.

Public transport is abysmal almost everywhere I've ever lived. In one place it was actually better for me to get on a train for half the journey and then cycle for 15 miles to get to work than it was to get the equivalent buses and trains.

That's before you even get into timings, reliability, frequency, night services, rail replacements, and all the other things that "go wrong" so often that they are more correctly called "the norm".

As far as I'm concerned, outside the centre of major cities, mostly London, we just don't have public transport.

They wanted to ensure there could only be one bad review and disappointed customer per vehicle.

Re: J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif

I once fitted an entire 12 foot shed into a standard hatchback Mondeo, I moved house entirely with a Mondeo (lots of trips, and a roof rack, and a car full of stuff, but took double-beds, sofas, bookcases, etc. no problem at all), and I put a 9ft live Christmas tree in one every year (saves me buying pine-scented air freshener...).

Most start-stop car batteries are AGM too.

My Ford one was, from the factory, and the replacements all are.

It's not the black-box or even the software that would be the problem.

The hardware has to be able to do what you need it to do and cope with any new encryptions required, or patch any flaws in the radio end of the protocol.

They are not, presumably, software-defined radios, and they are based on a given base encryption requirement which may well be about to change if this one is obsoleted.

In the same way as Wifi / 3G means changes to previous generations and the next generation requires hardware changes or far more oomph to manage (and thus not every hardware is upgradeable), or other assumptions built into the hardware design mean that it can't actually do what you want no matter what software you throw at it.

To pick an analogy in a field we should all be familiar with - it's relatively easy to change the software on an Wifi router to talk WPA3 if it's just using software supplicants. It's a different thing entirely if it uses any kind of hardware supplicant or acceleration for such, and may not be possible at all. Hence obsoleting rafts of hardware that were working fine.

And if you factor in that you just listed 3 different mobile OS, and hardware systems are likely to vary depending on manufacturer and purchase date, that could mean a lot of radios obsoleted, or a lot of radios running insecure portions of the software for backwards compatibility.

This looks to me to be a far bigger potential problem - if those protocols are actually insecure and need to be changed for something that requires even a little more oomph.

Do you know what happens when you allow things because they're "only a stone's throw" from something horrible, but at the same time tear up the green-belt plans?

There's only one inevitable conclusion, and that's precisely what made the green belt necessary in the first place - everything turns into concrete which grows, unchecked.

10 years ago, you were next to a field. Now you're next to a house that's next to a house that's next to a house that's next to a motorway... and before you know it there is no field, and the next field over is the same, and so on and so on.

Nobody wants a motorway in their back yard, but equally nobody wants zero development at all, either (especially with a growing population).

It's about choosing the best place for it... and in a long-established and legally-sound green belt is not the place when you could go a few miles in a couple of directions and do just the same but without infringing on the green belt.

Do you know, I lived in and around London for 40 years and I'd never seen anything like the wildlife, flora, night-sky and silence that I got when I moved into a part of Oxfordshire just 20 minutes from London? We can't just obliterate all that without thinking, when there are plenty of other urban and semi-urban places to build a datacentre.

Re: only the driver – be it the vehicle or person – is accountable

Why not? That's what humans get. And this self-driver is all the same entity, so yep.

Now imagine the insurance that the manufacturers will build into it once they realise that one car accident could cripple all their cars until the courts rule it's safe to drive again. Ouch.

The onus is entirely on whatever is in control of the vehicle. If that's me, it's on me. If that's not me, it's going to be the car.

Like I explain to bad bosses on a regular basis in my career - I can have both the power and the responsibility, or neither, but you can't mix and match.

I was thinking more that a CAA record can be definitive, so if the presented root CA is as pre CAA, it gets accepted for THAT SITE ONLY.

And therefore sites are automatically filling in their CA and root CA and browsers ship with nothing trusted by default.

Why should I be accepting a root CA to browse My Bank and then automatically accept everything that it claims to secure including Random 3rd Party Website forever more?

And if the governments want to get into CAA and DNSSEC tampering, there are alternates and measures in those already.

Re: Not quite to same scale

As an IT manager for schools - that's a nonsense.

There's no way that an Internet failure should take out fire alarms - they can't be compliant.

Also - no MIS access is feasible, but emergency contact details should be printed out and/or otherwise held offline and on-site. You could phone the MIS provider and ask them to send the output of a single emergency report (which all MIS have) to an email address, and then access it on a phone, in extremis.

Stopping a school running for either of the above is a failure of their basic processes, whether they use third-parties or not.

What are they going to do in a real fire that occurs in the middle of the school day and burns through the networking cabinets? Are they going to shrug and say "Oh, well, we can't possibly know how to contact parents or see if we're missing any children now". They'd be shut down by the DoE and the fire service if nobody else.

And no - repeat NO - fire alarm should have any network dependency, let alone Internet dependency. You keep that stuff entirely separate for a reason.

Something tells me a fire inspector is going to be paying them a visit "real soon now".

Re: Please think of the techies

This doesn't affect any corporate user, because you're not actually storing data on those systems anyway (so the user can be given any other machine in the meantime) and you have full access to the machine.

Remoting into a broken computer where you can't log into it as yourself is definitely a "return to base" issue nowadays.

The whole point of MFA is that you can't pretend to be the user without their cooperation. The whole point of a corporate managed system is that IT don't need to.

Re: Sneaky badges got caught

As Terry Pratchett went to great lengths to point out in his character Samuel Vimes:

Sometimes you need secret policemen because there are sometimes secret crimes.

Re: So :

Not really.

Your NI number isn't privileged and nothing should hang off it (unless people are being absolutely incompetent).

Your name and address are a matter of public record, easily discovered for any given individual - you give that to Amazon or everyone that you ever receive a letter from, for example.

Pension scheme - yeah, maybe some slight phishing possibility there but nothing really major.

Salary? Nope. Horrible personal data to have leaked but not a security issue of accessing anything (nobody genuine is going to ask you to enter your salary to gain access to a website, for example).

Same for equal opportunities data.

Any place that lets the above information take over an account without checking is utterly incompetent, and probably failing their own GDPR to be honest.

What I don't see in that list are passwords, account numbers, security questions, etc. that would actually be required to directly do any harm.

It's actually quite a low-level compromise, with the exception of the salaries.

P.S. your employer knows all the above, anyone who works in the accounts or payroll department, anyone who works in the HR department, as do all of your previous employers up to a given point in time.

Re: The University of Birmingham do this

It's very different when you own all the infrastructure and buildings involved.

Have you seen the price?

Also you need full sky view (which rules out a lot of places), the kit is wireless-only in its home form (you have to pay a lot more to get an Ethernet port), and the one that lets you actually move around (i.e. use on vehicles, etc.) isn't available everywhere and costs even more again. Don't know about you but paying nearly 5 times what a basic DSL line costs each month, on top of a huge layout to get something that you have to mount on your roof (and hope there's nobody nearby) and then hope the wireless penetrates into your home without affecting the speed too much isn't as great a deal as it sounded at first. (I know, I live rurally and was considering it).

Also, the speeds of the service are dropping as reality sets in that if you give everyone what they want, you need to have the back-end connectivity to supply it - Starlink has been trying to do deals all over the world to increase its ground station bandwidths, and trying to get its satellites to share the traffic among each other, which again costs a lot of money. There have been articles on The Reg about that only this year, I believe. In the meantime it appears to be applying traffic shaping and limits (hitting home users first, obviously) which are bringing it back down to what DSL supplies rather than the glorious advertising numbers.

Believe it or not, a few rural joes with little to no current Internet aren't a great money-making market in the long-term and for the more useful features, it's actually not ready and/or very expensive (not Iridium-expensive, I grant you, but not great).

Over-promised, under-delivered. As always with Musk.

Re: CS students are interesting

When I did a CS degree, I had to:

- Fit a (stupendously expensive) IDE DVD-ROM drive in a home PC for a guy studying for his Masters in CS. He literally paid me to do it because he didn't understand how to. Two days later, he complained that he "couldn't switch region" any more - and we'd already had a VERY extensive chat about how those drives would stop you changing region after 5 goes, and he shouldn't mess with it.

- Explain "minimax" algorithms to Masters programming students.

- Literally debugged a guy's program from across the room. Saw he was struggling, knew exactly what the problem was, walked up and offered the solution. It was that simple and obvious.

- Explain how an emulator worked to many, many people after they saw me using one to run old programs.

- Show several people how to login to their university FTP accounts (which was a requirement of submitting any programming project!). I'm pretty sure I was the only one in that year's intake of the department to submit coursework from home (by modem) because nobody else understood FTP (and www was still in its Netscape days back then).

- Explain to people how I managed to download hundreds of megs (huge for the time) and spread it across several disks using PKZIP on the command-line to take it home. Hell, I was doing parts of that onto floppies still (and all the machines had ZIP drives).

And I was literally the only person I ever saw, in a CS department with a huge suite of dual-boot Linux/NT machines only for use by CS students, to ever boot into Linux. It was specifically set up to allow both OS, all the same software, all the same access and logins. It must have been a work of art for its day, because it was seamless. And I think I'm the only one who ever used it, at least in the Bachelor's programmes. I watched many people submit code that worked on Windows but failed on Linux because they'd written it exclusively with Windows components / assumptions etc. and it would be rejected and they couldn't understand why.

I came to the conclusion - as a Maths "major" with CS being only the "minor" in my degree - that almost all of the CS people I'd met there would never work in IT, never write a program once their course was finished, and would struggle to run a home laptop, let alone anything more complex.

From my alumni updates, I was pretty much right.

"Not that I'm a believer, but there have been sightings around the globe."

And yet not one single credible photograph, video, recording or corroboration in a planet of 7.8 billion people with over 6.5 billion smartphones.

There are *definitely* 100% UFOs. Things we can't identify. Because the evidence is so terribly poor. It's like holding up a blurry, badly processed photo of a blob and going "See, evidence!" and expecting the world to believe you have caught an alien/ghost//bigfoot/honest politician on camera.

Most of those UFOs will be nothing at all. Specks on the camera, sunlight, out-of-focus ordinary object confusing scale.

Some of those UFOs might even be aircraft... foreign, spies, drones, *cough* Chinese weather balloons *cough* etc. etc. etc. That's what the Pentagon are actually interested in.

None of them are aliens.

And yet: There are absolutely *definitely* 100% aliens out there. Just nowhere (and no-when) we will even encounter each other even blasting signals out into space 24/7 at the maximum power we can muster from the second we discovered radio/lasers/whatever to the second our civilisations collapse.

And if you haven't noticed, humans - all humans, from all walks of life - are absolutely unreliable witnesses. RAF or not. Politician or not. Scientist or not. There are cranks, crackpots, people with mental health issues, people who age, get dementia, make up stories, lie, turn to conspiracy theories, join cults, or even outright believe in things that simply don't exist (like, hey, gods and ghosts and things). Even among top-tier PhDs and Nobel Prize winners to the highest general in the land.

Saying there have been sightings around the globe doesn't mean a damn thing, until one vaguely credible person (hell, even a journalist!) stands up with one good photograph or video that clearly shows something we absolutely can attribute to non-human creation, ever, in the history of the world.

Strangely, the more CCTV, cameras, smartphones, selfies and cloud-connected automatic uploads we have in the world, the fewer UFO sightings we actually get per person. It's almost like having lots of good quality, easy-to-operate cameras in the hands of every ordinary person isn't actually making any difference to our detection of these mystical beings that are crashing into Earth, flying around populated locations, and posing a massive threat to the world's militaries if they were to exist. But find a blue/gold dress photo and we're all poring over it trying to analyse it.

It's a nonsense, and while aliens will exist (just by sheer weight of numbers of galaxies), I'm a far, far, far greater believer in the Drake equation than I am in some guy who say something briefly once while pulling 8Gs shortly because being discharged on mental health grounds after suffering immense shellshock.

Re: One more strategy,,,,

"Solar is also a terrible idea at UK latitudes. Production in the winter when you actually need to heat your home is near zero."

I rode through a 4-hour power outage last night in the depths of Oxford countryside, with a pretty poor charge all day long because of the gloomy, wet, stormy weather.

Sorry, but solar at UK latitudes is perfectly viable. So long as you're not playing with toys.

https://www.fabhabs.com/solar-insolation-calculator

At worst-case, you get 1KWh / m^2 / day. My daily usage is 7KWh. 7 m^2 is nothing in terms of solar panels on a standard UK roof.

Re: Wild west?

I reported 6 different ads yesterday for cryptocurrency scams, all featuring Musk's face, and most of them with the "warning" label of everyone telling you that it's just a scam using his image.

He can't even control his own image being used by his own advertisers to scam his own customers on his own platform.

It never used to be like that.

Better as a human? No, he's a voluntary billionaire. Of course he's not nice.

What he isn't, though, is a loud-mouth lying twat.

Re: We really do need a new name

Fine.

"Mass mandatory critical software fix for potentially lethal issue".

What's that? Oh, you're happy calling it a recall instead?

I wouldn't bother.

In this instance, stamp it "Not at this address" and put it back in a postbox.

The longer they are receiving mail (without this happening) at your address, the greater the chance they're affecting your credit record because the banks will think they still live there along with you.

Any kind of contact is going to reinforce that.

Just mark it not at this address, post it back and keep doing it until they stop.

Whenever I move (and I bought a house last year), I do this with all mail addressed to previous occupants. Otherwise you're just making trouble for yourself. As it is, the guy somehow appeared on my electoral-roll registration form this year and I corrected it (and then received a letter from the council addressed to him, which I returned... that's their "test" to see if he still lives there).

You are opening yourself up to card fraud (like the other post below yours here), credit record merging, etc. if you're not careful - I know, because I've had that at previous addresses, even to the point of debt collection people turning up at the door looking for the previous residents.

If it's not addressed to you, you're not supposed to open it, either.

When companies - including councils, banks, lawyers, etc. - get mail marked "not at this address", they start cancelling the accounts automatically because they are being told it's not an address you live at, and if they have no other address they will shut down the accounts and wait for the owner to contact them. I know because I've seen that happen too! Just a few letters marked "not at this address" is enough to cancel someone's credit card, for instance, and debt collectors actually tend to respect the same (but usually after a more persistent contact campaign at first).