* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Lights, camera, 802.11ax-ion!

Alan Brown Silver badge

"We have locations where we have an AP per room or two"

I have 120 APs in one building with 1-2 people per room. Sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Unlike 2.4/5GHz 802.1ax runs at 60GHz or higher and gets stopped by a couple of sheets of paper.

Pickaxe chops cable, KOs UKFast data centre

Alan Brown Silver badge

UPS

At these scales you fit the UPS to the BUILDING.

1000kVA Flywheel systems don't fit in server racks. Nor would you want them there.

Disk drive fired 'Frisbees of death' across data centre after storage admin crossed his wires

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Recycle platters from modern hard disks

"only magnetic on one side"

They're not "a" magnet. They're at least 4 configured to keep the field confined to the voice coil area.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 1980's Technology

I'll see your 1950s calculator and raise you a Creed model 7 teletype with 1/8hp motor spinning at one end to drive everything.

Alan Brown Silver badge

> *Because once bitten....

A chemistry lecturer I know used to wander around the hall whilst mixing up black powder in a mortar and pestle. Cue nervous students trying not to be near him.

He stopped doing it after a former student showed up minus 2 fingers. Said student had become a science teacher and tried the same stunt without realising that you need to keep the mixture wet to prevent ignition...

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "In WWII the bomb disposal squads never got a do-over when they made that mistake."

"You really have to worry if the enemy guy assembling the bomb was colour blind"

Or if the timer/detonator had been fitted with a booby trap. (Many of them were)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Wrong-way wiring

This is why you use polarised plugs.

It's also why you try to avoid using plugs of the same type/size even if they ARE colour coded.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Lathes

"the hole in the wall of the machine shop"

According to legend something similar happened to a 20k rpm biology centrifuge at a university I worked in when the pulse counter went wonky. Only it was on the 5th floor.

I read a similar story in the late 1970s about a 2MW hydro generator which lost its oil supply sometime in the past. Before the operators noticed and could (manually) stop it, it levered itself out of the cradle and thankfully went downstream for a couple of miles (upstream was the dam wall). The article noted that contemporary hydro turbines were 600MW with automatic emergency shutdown systems and in the one case of oil failure documented up to that point, the ends of the bearing holders were visibly glowing red hot before they managed to stop it.

Almost all those floor standing washing machine drives used mains-driven synchronous motors for the platters, so I'm surprised about overspeeding. About the only thing which sounds possible is that the head carriage shattered the spindle and freed the platters. Even at 3600RPM they'd be scary things.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Establish no go safety zones for assistants and onlookers."

Yup. And yet you'd still be amazed at the number of people with winches who stand right next to them whilst they're in use.

Would-be startup crew charged with stealing employer's tech

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The cycle of history

> When asked why they'd stopped buying them they just openly admitted "we've worked out how you make them and are now making them ourselves".

if they can do it cheaper, and the quality can be made as good as yours, then license production to them and take royalties.

You'll probably make a bigger profit too.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The cycle of history

"They've been openly doing this for decades."

Who? China? Or the USA?

They're all at it.

Looking through walls, now easier than ever

Alan Brown Silver badge

Shielding - attention getting

If the spooks find they can't see through your walls then they'll assume that you have something to hide.

Perhaps something loaded up with corner reflectors would be a better idea.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"You also get massively reduced Wi-Fi & mobile phone signals"

Yes, I've noticed this. A new building on campus ended up having to have an AP in every individual room AND ones in the hallways, to give adequate coverage,

Alan Brown Silver badge

"A cage made of sheet metal .... would be a better bet"

Coming soon to a survival bunker supply depot near you, anti-spook metal-backed Laura Ashley wallpaper and conductive wall paint

Alan Brown Silver badge

Stucco might do so if salted with wire fragments of random lengths.

Euro Patent Office ignores ruling and refuses entry to vindicated judge

Alan Brown Silver badge

> Lets all play "Spot the Battistelli shill"

Whilst the schill is fairly transparent there's no disagreement that the EPO did need some cleanup, which is what he was hired to do.

What he _ACTUALLY_ did was create his own personal fiefdom, ejecting all objectors and along the way severely damaging the EPO's reputation for impartiality and ability to reject prior art.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Thankfully, there's little chance that the next guy will be quite as bad as this one. "

Unfortunately, taking that attitude could result in him being much worse.

It happens with management and with systems (which is how oracle manage to get their fucking unusable financial crap in to replace systems that are merely difficult to use)

VW's US environment boss gets seven years for Dieselgate scam

Alan Brown Silver badge

The issue with NOX isn't that it exists, it's the concentrations it exists in.

Even the most NOXious diesels are fine outside of urban areas and smogtraps, but a large chunk of California has smogtrapping areas (The central valley and LAX basin), so the laws nationally are set for those (NOX is why lean burn gasoline engines were banned. Instead of regulating NOX emissions and allowing makers to comply any way they wanted, US carmakers lobbied the government to mandate stociometric air-fuel ratios which allow "easy" 3-way catalysts to be used - at cost of fuel economy.

EU rules haven't said much about NOX until recently and now they allow makers to solve the issues however they want, as long as they comply.

Another way of tackling the issue using the technology in the dieselgate engines would be to add a NOX sensor in the intake, switching to low-NOX mode when atmospheric levels increase above a threshold and economy+power mode the rest of the time. The problem is that rules and regulations are based on the assumption that emissions control systems are fixed or extremely slow-acting things and they haven't been for a long time.

Urban NOX levels are the main reason why condensing boilers were pushed so hard by councils. There have been NOX limits on boilers since ~2003, but condensing units emit even less (almost zero) because the oxides are absorbed into the water and go down the drain instead. This is important because around half of London's NOX is sourced from old boiler installations that aren't (currently) covered by emissions legislation - they were grandfathered for 20 years past the introduction of the new law. Those NOX bombs tend to be 1970s-early 80s non-sealed units that also put out shitloads of carbon monoxide.

Euro Patent Office commanded to reinstate 'Nazi judge' it attacked

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Labo\ur

"fancy granting a "Patent" for a flat screen with rounded edges"

It's a DESIGN patent for "trade dress" - what in the rest of the world would be a Registered Design or Trademarked design.

This goes back to the original meaning of letters patent as granted by royal decree which had nothing to do with protecting inventions and usually granted exclusive use of a technology or business area to the entity named on the patent.

EG: For over 200 years the East India Company had a patent assigning exclusive trading rights between the UK and India, noone else was allowed to try and muscle in on the action, by law(*)

The USA is about the only country who still use "patent" as a term for this kind of stuff. The rest of the world moved on long ago to assuming that Patents were for new inventions.

(*) And the result was what you usually expect for a legal monopoly. It grew agressive and inefficient, eventually being dissolved by parliament in the 19th century after demanding a bailout for the 3rd time.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It Just Doesn't Matter

"Do I read correctly that his term ends in 2018 anyway?"

Yes but he's been angling to ensure that he gets renewed.

Merger-hungry AT&T sued for price gouging by Texas ISP

Alan Brown Silver badge

AT&T have managed to reassemble themselves without antitrust oversight, or that pesky universal service obligation. Go figure.

Origin of the beasties: Mirai botnet missing link revealed as DVR player

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Does it matter?

AVM and Linksys, both of which I've tested here.

No, BMW, petrol-engined cars don't 'give back to the environment'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The only way to make cars give back to the environment

"have created a society and culture that won't easily go back to public transport and which doesn't suit public transport."

You are confusing mass transportation with public transportation. The two have been synonymous for a long time, but it's not going to stay that way for much longer.

The ideal size for an autonomous bus is about 8 seats. That way it's large enough to carry groups but small enough to also carry individuals and run in express mode (ie, not stopping at every point). Once you have enough of them and robot drivers, when not used you can start thinking about quiesciing them along the route to only move when required. Hello Johnnycab.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nice to see some backbone here

The LEVC units are intended to be electric in the smog zone with the generator only operating outside the congestion area.

In that respect they're low polluting, but only just.

Drone collisions with airliners may not be fatal, US study suggests

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Other comparable hazards

"Another risk to aircraft... hailstones."

Yes. And pilots go well around anvil tops if they have any sense. Hailstones launched by them have been encountered 15-20 miles away from the originating cloud.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stating the obvious, much?

"we can *hope* that five or six pounds of Li-Ion battery and a mess of wires and cameras will not cause an uncontained failure"

That is a fucking _big_ drone. Big enough to show up on radar and start causing all sorts of shit to start happening if seen around airports.

If Airbus and Boeing haven't done so already, simulators need to cover birds/drones/plastic bags on the approach path which _aren't_ impacters and see how observant pilots actually are.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How can this be?

"Birdstrikes do bring down aircraft, occaisionally."

Sure, but usually only large birds going into the engines.

windscreens aren't flat on to the airflow for obvious reasons. This has obvious advantages for impact vectors.

Don't bother bringing up GA aircraft. The screens are on those are enough to keep the wind out and that's it. The best you can hope for is that the prop macerates the thing before it gets to you.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How is this different than birdstrike?

"I hate to be "that guy," but this is an urban myth. "

On the other hand, UK and USA locomotive front windows have had to be armoured against CONCRETE BLOCKS for decades, after a number of "unfortunate incidents" involving things deliberately dropped from overpasses.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: How can this be?

"A bit of metal sucked into an engine at take-off can destroy a concorde"

It wasn't sucked into the engine. It punctured a tyre, which exploded and sent shards into the bottom of the wing, which happened to also be the unprotected fuel tank. From there fuel poured out and got ignited by the engines.

The reason concordski (TI-144) was grounded was precisely because of this vulnerability. The soviets realised the risk pretty quickly due to the more remote strips not being able to guarantee cleanliness and couldn't figure how to mitigate it without making the aircraft too heavy to fly economically when it was uneconomic in the first place.

Interestingly, the vulnerability of the wing tanks was already known thanks to at least one ground incident: Concorde dumped thousands of litres of fuel all over the apron at Harewood airport (Christchurch NZ) in the late 1980s whilst parked up, when someone managed to whack the underside of the wing with a too-tall ladder. There is videotape of the fire crews attempting to stem the leak in the TVNZ archives.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Bear in mind

That the number of "drone sightings" around Heathrow and other UK airports has increased with a directly inverse relationship to the decrease in the number of "bird sightings"

And that at least one of those "drones" turned out to be a plastic bag.

The reality is that when you're on finals, you're concentrating on putting the aircraft on the ground. Birdstrikes (quite hefty ones) on the nose or windscreen are usually never seen until they're smeared all over the windscreen or have already put a large dent in the radome. There are a few gopro videos containing birdstrikes and I challenge anyone watching any of the civil airliner ones to see more than a couple of frames of the winged wonder before impact.

Personal experience at 70mph in a trainer climbing out at 500 feet is that you won't even see a flight of ducks until one gets macerated in the prop (thankfully it passed just over the the prop, but I never saw the one that left a dent in the leading edge of the right wing)

On that basis I'll challenge _anyone_ who claims to see a drone travelling at 200 knots around heathrow (lots of nice corner reflectors to bounceback radar signals) and can ID the model, or says they saw it for more than a fraction of a second to start stumping up evidence - and bear in mind that a drone large enough to be easily seen on inbound approach or powerful enough to keep up with an airliner on finals is going to stick out on the radar like a set of dogs balls.

User dialled his PC into a permanent state of 'Brown Alert'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Brownouts

I'm very well aware of the rules in kiwiland as they've been around a long time.

Bosses sack people anyway - and then find themselves facing criminal charges + larger fines for failing to provide safety training. One of the advantages of a state-run compulsary accident insurance system is that workers actually do get compensated and dodgy company operators get nailed to the wall.

In the UK, IT and office workers are required to self-assess, but manglement who ignore the results are in deep doo-doo.

Ofcom just told BT to up its game on fibre investment

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Wind Turbines & Fibre

"have a fibre connection for control use."

Yes, that has a lot to do with windmills being tall and pointy and attracting electric charge zappy thingies from the sky.

It's hard to communicate down a line which has just turned to copper vapour.

Russia threatens to set up its 'own internet' with China, India and pals – let's take a closer look

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Someone missed an important point

"There are actually a few alternative DNS systems in operation"

I know, and many have come and gone. If you're using deep packet inspection, then you can detect DNS traffic on nonstandard ports and block it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Critical infrastructure

" if all the smart stuff had been wiped out by EMP."

The bigger risk is that the POWER GRID can be wiped out by EMP.

Or a large enough solar flare. Both put a DC bias on the lines and cook the transformers.

The really big distribution transformers take a couple of years each to make and are usually backlogged by a decade.

It's possible to mitigate this issue with endpoint redesigns but you need to double up on the transformers and there are a few thousand of them involved. There are a number of papers about this but the most commonly advocated defense step is to temporarily disconnect the lines, not to rewire them to make the system immune to such stuff. That's fine for a solar flare where you have hours/days of warnings. Somewhat harder for EMP.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: They are obliged by law to do that

"the thirteen root servers"

Have you ever looked at the A records for "The thirteen root servers" ?

There are a LOT more than 13

Alan Brown Silver badge

"They're only going to be bothered about what comes in, less so with what traffic leaves."

They are to a point. One of the advantages of controlling the DNS is that you can make all those pesky VPN sites go away.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The headline got my hopes up

"5-strikes-and-you're-out"

Take a look at the names they use. If they don't exist in your password file there's no harm whatsoever in making it one strike if they're attempted. (likewise, root, oper, sysman, toor, postmaster, etc)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Someone missed an important point

Those "alternate roots" are proposed as only accessible by BRICS countries.

It's a hop skip and jump to legislating that residents of these countries are only _allowed_ to use those alternate roots and to enforce that by forcing ISPs to divert port 53 and 5353 traffic to "approved" nameservers.

Ex-cop who 'kept private copies of data' fingers Cabinet Office minister in pr0nz at work claims

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The real issue

> lots of porn sites are scams with "pretty pictures".

What you mean is there are a lot of scam sites masquerading as pornsites.

The genuine operators generally hate the scamsites as they're not too hot on respecting intellectual property rights either. A relative in the adult entertainment industry (magazine publisher. Get your mind out of the gutter!) once made it clear she'd quite like to pour petrol over spammers and scammers, then start playing "flick the zippo", thanks to the damage they were doing to the business.

But just like spammers, going after them is a serious game of whack-a-mole unless you can trace the mothership and take that down (which is much harder than going after spammers).

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Going down, going down, going down...

"Well, we all know how effective the ICO is on matters like this"

The MP himself has the right to go after the copper for _unlimited_ personal damages in civil court due to unauthorised disclosure of personal information. It's rare that it happens, but it HAS happened.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Wait until you get home...

"I'd suggest locking the cat-flap in the bedroom door!"

Wouldn't work with at least 3 of mine over the years. They worked out how handles work (Doors, windows and toy cupboard) and would get pretty vocal if shut out for any period whilst the big cats were clearly doing something they liked.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "you can't put fingers on a keyboard"

"Green must have been researching the matter."

If doing this legitimately, surely one would declare the purpose and ask for a separate, sandboxed system?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What Proof It Was Him ???

You might be deeply concerned if they're using it to manipulate national politics.

_I_ Am deeply concerned they took it home at all.

Apart from blowing apart the chain of custody, the obvious first use that springs to mind use using ut for blackmail purposes some years down the track.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The issue I have with this

"if you DO have an AUP, breaches would make it possible to withdraw ICT privileges for the MP"

Firstly, there is an AUP, but actually enforcing it against an MP would probably need an act of parliament - and "withdrawing ICT privileges" would amount to restraint of trade in their self-employed position, given that _everything_ required ICT access these days.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The issue I have with this

"eight laptop computers to his Parliamentary expenses in three years "

Did he keep driving off with one on the roof, which them mysteriously found its way under the wheels?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The issue I have with this

"Because - he actually cannot be fired."

He can - by his constituents.

But not by someone in Westminster.

UK government bans all Russian anti-virus software from Secret-rated systems

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Jet Engine

"American military supremacy is based on money"

Actually, it was based on sheer numbers and production capabilities, They've rather painted themselves in to a very expensive corner of late.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Hopefully, those OS makers never come up with the idea of secure-by-design systems,"

"Which version of Windows was supposed to be a from-the-ground-up redesign"

I'll go one better.

Which version of BIND was supposed to be a from-the-ground-up redesign?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Further sanctions

"It is not sanctions. It is treating the other side as an adversary which UK never ever stopped."

Nations do not have allies or adversaries. They have interests - Dr Kissinger pointed that out 45 years ago and anyone (or nation) which loses sight of that fundamental truth is bound to have a bad time sooner or later.

Just as the USA spies on everyone in the EU, do you really think that the UK isn't also doing it? Especially to the USA?

The fundamental issue is that Kaspersky detected malware on a PC - which is correct as it was malware. That malware was in a zip, so the zip was uploaded for analysis - which is only done if the user has explicitly opted into that facility. The zip happened to contain the source code for the malware.

The fact that the malware was written by the NSA and was illegally taken out of the faciility by someone who should know better makes no difference to the fact that the software was WORKING AS DESIGNED.

As for how the Russian govt got hold of it: Probably the same way that the NSA and GCHQ do - with massive snoop farms. I'm willing to bet that the suspect file uploads weren't done over https, nor were the files encrypted first using 2-key crypto (Something I bet Kaspersky is now doing)

One may suspect that the GCHQ directive is a tacit admission that they're also in the business of writing targetted malware.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I guess NOFORN doesn't apply anymore?

"Wikipedia is about as reliable on contentious subjects as I am, and I don't trust myself an inch."

That notwithstanding, the Internet Research Agency has been traced a number of times back into Russian netspace and it's fairly clear they're a government disinformation outfit. If you think they're the only government with one of these, you're dreaming. The rest are simply more subtle.