* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Openreach engineers vote to strike amid changes to job grading structure

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: management grade

"Management get all sorts of restrictions such as no paid overtime etc. but with a much higher salary to compensate."

s/much/slightly/

Universities have been pulling this stunt for decades

Alan Brown Silver badge

and given what's also happening (LEO sat broadband providers), a "British Leyland"/"British Shipbuilding" feel - internal strife whilst ignoring that the barbarians have parked several sets of cannon on the front lawn

Alan Brown Silver badge

Meantime.... on the customer side of the equation

Starlink are now taking signups in the UK for service starting in mid-late 2021

_THOUSANDS_ (~40%) of Openreach's DSLAM cabinets are hot garbage ECI units that are prone to dropping connections and also apparently prone to water damage because they're eaily not buttoned up correctly (and leak if this happens)

These are also the ones where FTTH (GPON) isn't available (this has been a showstopper in many areas)

BT is no longer "the only game in town" (or part of a comfy duopoly) and the speeds/latencies on offer more than favourably compare with what they're offering (increasingly frustrated) customers. If you're in a rural area then it's doubly attractive

It's going to be interesting to see how many people have been to starlink.com and put down their refundable £85 deposit for Dishy mcDishface

Myanmar orders blocks of Twitter and Instagram on top of Facebook ban

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: SOP nothing new here.

I've spent time living in Myanmar.

The rich have satelilte ISP links via Thai ISPs.

Everyone else puts up with absolutely shitty connectivity via several levels of CGNAT that makes most websites barely usable. This won't make much overall difference as things are heavilly throttled/firewalled via Naypyiadaw before the rest of the country gets to see it - and unfortunately whilst those of us in the west were hoping for another Nelson Mandela, what Myanmar has got (even before the coup) is more like another Robert Mugabe.

There's a lot of stuff going on that is carefully hidden from western eyes and that all sides of government really DON'T like people outside the country findng out (particularly in Shan state, Karen tribal zones and in Rakine State) which the general populations finds "OK"

There's no Huawei on Earth we're a national security threat, Chinese giant tells US appeals court

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Track record

"On the other hand the Chinese government does have the legal authority to coerce Huawei as they please."

As does the USA with Cisco - and have been demonstrated to do so

There's also the issue that the USA government has repeatedly been fingered as directly involved in industrial espionage (frequently afgainst its "allies") and blatent protectionist behaviour whilst using the "Oh look! Squirrel!" tactic to divert criticism.

The recent stoush over australian coal and barley is a good example. The USA encouraged its poodle to keep annoying the chinese enough that they found a reason for blocking the products they might have otherwise let slide (unlawful subsidies), then walked in and scooped up the resulting sales gap, leaving its vassal state high and dry.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: China is not our friend, it would be naive to think otherwise

"Huawei'd research budget is $20billion per annum. That's three times as great as Cisco's"

The number of USA/EU and Chinese patents they're being awarded is also a lot higher than Cisco (especially in the 5G arena), most of which they have put up on FRAND basis to all comers, unlike certain players whose FRAND only applies to organisations they like

Alan Brown Silver badge

" so at the moment it still looks like a purely commercial decision."

Why is the FCC making commercial decisions?

Why is the FCC seeking to act as a regulator of commerce (Telcos) instead of leaving it to the FTC?

When did they start hiring antitrust supervisory lawyers?

Why is the FCC making blanket decisions about "bnational security"

When did they start taking on electronic security experts?

Messrs Dunning and Kruger would like a word (This also applies in the UK to OFCOM)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"A couple of heads might change but their fear of China remains, it's understandable."

The USA has a fear INDUSTRY - people are afraid of everything, including their own shadows and believe they need "protection" in various over the top ways

This is mostly driven by the people Eisenhower warned about in his farewall speech of January 17, 1961

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Huawei will this end?

"Who's going to scrutinize all future firmware updates from Huawei before deployment?"

GCHQ was doing a prtety good job of that up until the day the UK government decided to ban Huawei on security grounds and repatedly stated that they found no issues (other than crufty code).

That's what made the UK ban obviously political - the country's OWN security organisations were giving it a clean bill of health

In the case of the USA: The FCC is well and truely stepping out of its regulatory confines (it's been stomping all over FTC toes for decades and preventing repeats of the 1930s FTC telco antitrust actions) by pretending to be competent in matters of security - that's NOT its remit and never has been

The words you're looking for are "regulatory capture" - in the same way McBoing managed to gain control of the FAA, USA telco vendors have managed to gain control of the FCC.

This shouldn't be surprising in a country where organised wide scale bribery of politicians is not only tolerated, but has become encouraged, expected and necessary to get ANYTHING done, becoming a formalised industry in itself - "lobbying"

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It was argued by the FCC and the US government that the Chinese gear cannot be trusted as Beijing may have backdoored it. "

Vs, say Cisco, which we KNOW has been backdoored by US security agencies on a number of occasions

The laptop you bought in 2020 may stop you buying a car in 2021: Chips are going short

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Wouldn't car sales be expected to be lower?

"Less wear and tear on your car if you are working from home even part time, not driving your kids to school some/all the time, "

My car decided it didn't like the lack of use and started growing mushrooms in the passenger footwell

Written off - biohazard

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stop me from buying a car? Probably not.

"To be honest, I don't think there is any such thing as a 'bad car' these days, at least in Europe and Japanese builds/imports. "

Yup, I've said it manmy times - the most mediocre current car is more reliable and will last longer than even best Japan could put out in the 1970s - and a HUGE part of that is down to electronic replacing fiddly mechanical bits that needed constant adjustments

Who carries a point contact file or knows how to adjust a distributor vacuum advance these days?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stop me from buying a car? Probably not.

" I'm sure people will attempt to hack their EVs if they haven't already, "

Once people realise that "ludicrous mode" destroys driveshaft splines, pelple stop playing with it. The repairs are expensive

Electric motors can trivially output 5 times their continuous rating for short periods, but not every part of the drivetrain is rated for that kind of torque wihtout bending

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stop me from buying a car? Probably not.

"only have 2 wheel drive despite living in the country. Chelsea tractors don't really need 4WD; and from the number of them bemused locals pass broken down in the weather at the moment they aren't suitable for driving in adverse weather conditions."

Before it rusted so much the doors fell off, my pug106 used to fairly regtularly chug up/down steep hills in snow (chains) cruising past many well and truely beached 4WDs(*). The number of dirty looks from Chelsea Tractor drivers was a thing of joy

(*) Occasionally I see one whose driver decided the roof or sides had better traction than the tires. More frequently they'd still be sittng there going nowhere whilst fruitlessly spinning all four wheels

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Stop me from buying a car? Probably not.

"Don't mock the man just because he drives a Fiat!"

if anything we should admire that he has a 1995 one still running.

That takes some dedication and a lot of rust killer

Salesforce likes to play the diversity nice guy in public – Black ex-employee claims the reality is quite different

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmm

"Promoting based on merit and promoting based on diversity are orthogonal"

Not necessarily.

It means weighting so that if there are two equally qualified candidates then the minority candidate has a slightly higher chance of landing the role. It emphatically DOES NOT mean hiring an unqualified person over significantly better-qualified competitors, but it might mean slotting them into a role which they can grow into if only just missing the requirements

It also means ENCOURAGING minority/underepresented staff to further their training and ensuring they have support & opportunities to actually do so when "invisibles" at home may be holding them back

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Hmm

Lest anyone think that it's NOT needed in the UK: a reminder of the 1964 Smethwick election should be made

Alf Garnett was created as a way of calling out the behaviour/attitudes - but that didn't stop the character being taken to heart by National Front/BNP/Nigel Farage

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Lead Design Researcher

"whether the customers of ours that buy our kilowatt laser products would be interested in cat toys"

long distance feline bothering?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The white working class in the UK is very much an oppressed majority.

"However, it is well known that economically disadvantaged children tend to have lower academic achievements than their more advantaged peers"

And my experience is that many such children take great delight in pulling those around them down to their level - to the point that a bright kid from such a background is extremely likely to be relentlessly bullied into "toeing the line" and "not standing out". The poorer the area, the worse the bullying

It's a cult of jealous medocrity, it''s inherited from parents and it's become self-perpetuating

Harmed by a decision made by a poorly trained AI? You should be able to sue for damages, says law prof

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: He's right and MIT says so

It's because of the MIT reports that this is being talked about by lawyers

The average middle aged lawyer thinks that computers and the people who program them are "godlike". They really don't get that computers are "literal" or understand "garbage in, garbage out"

I'm quite serious. They're frequently the most common proponents of "Computer says" and the idea of statistics showing otherwise - or that human twist things by selectively tweaking statistics inputs is alien to them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Does an ML system get trained once and then continue operating on the basis of that one training set?"

Yes. Any "lessons learned" have to then be fed back into the training sets. They don't learn/improve "on the fly"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Theory and Reality

"The GDPR has provisions both on profiling "

The problem for th emost part isn't "INDIVIDUAL" profiling.

AIs are trained on populations and once they learn that most people named "Fred" are thieves (based on a sample of 2 out of 3), it will proceed on that basis forevermore

It's not "artificial intelligence", it's artificial STUPIDITY and that's far more dangerous

Anyone who's had to sit down and walk users through documentation will know that they will come up with the most insane interpretations of what's written down that you can't even think of - and believe they're being entirely reasonable in doing so (and that's before you get into the basicly naive "literal" interpretations of what's written down that children might come up with)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: @ThatOne - Theory and Reality

"AI will get dispensation because it is sold as flawless and this offers a golden opportunity to deflect responsability"

THIS IS NOT THEORY

It is already happening. The whole "Computer says...." mentality is based on it and that's been going on for 40+ years

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Theory and Reality

" in my experience, you often see organisations forming a "cultural identity" which is essentially a shared-belief-system."

Yup, and the problem here is not "One bad apple, oh dear how sad"

The REAL problem is that that "one bad apple" will rot the ENTIRE FUCKING BARREL if not nuked on sight, all infected apples removed immediately and the rest then checked for contamination

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Theory and Reality

What absolutely shouldn't happen is

* You complain to the council

* They say "sod off, talk to Palantir"

* You complain to Palantir

* They say "sod off, talk to the council"

Funnily enough, this is EXACTLY what is currently happening between Surrey County Council/Surrey Police/district councils in the UK, resulting in a bunch of flagrant issues being unenforced (including major environmental crimes until they get too big to ignore thanks to nationmal newspaper coverage)

Then again, what do you expect from the country which made British Leyland such a worldbeating technological and customer service sucess story?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Theory and Reality

The company which made the loud TV?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Theory and Reality

"The developer might not even be aware of the purpose to which it was put, nor would they necessarily endorse it for that purpose if they were."

A developer actually saying that in court would be a huge blow against the marketers trying to push things

"I had no idea my work was being used for this, nor do I feel it is fit for that purpose" is a rather damning indictement not of the developer but of those who misuse the work

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Theory and Reality

"The biggest problem is that "poor training" is a very vague and subjective notion"

"insufficiently diverse data set" and "data selection bias" come to mind

It'snot just healthcare. Bear in mind that AIs were disproportionately selecting/punishing black lawbreakers because history showed greater conviction rates and stiffer punishments - but looking under the covers showed that selecive enforcement(white offenders more likely to simply be let off with a warning rather than arrested) and selective punishments (judges more likely to give white offenders probation rather than prison) had a lot to do with the stats

in otther words, AIs were formalising insittionalised racial biases and then people were using "Computer says" as a reason for bllindly going along with it

No joy for Julian Assange as Uncle Sam confirms it will keep pushing for WikiLeaker's extradition to America

Alan Brown Silver badge

Not just Assange

Things are ramping up under the Kim Dotcom front too

Both of these were initiated by Biden as VP under Obama

CD Projekt Red 'EPICALLY pwned': Cyberpunk 2077 dev publishes ransom note after company systems encrypted

Alan Brown Silver badge

or SCUMM-like engines enabling the games to be run in various environments

Alan Brown Silver badge

At some point

The response is going to be the kind stated by Liam Nielson in Taken

Except the warning may not be issued first

These gangs are playing with fire and risking more than just being roasted

Someone tried to poison a Florida city by hijacking its water treatment plant via TeamViewer, says sheriff

Alan Brown Silver badge

Checking Gruntles

Who recalls the story posted on thier very website of a recently-fired employee who managed to use his remote access to direct raw sewage into the water supply?

Western Australia about a decade ago if I recall correctly...

(But.... "Terrorists" and "foregn hackers" makes for better headlines when Muricans do it)

The unanswered question at CentOS community Q&A: How can we trust you now?

Alan Brown Silver badge

the dead hand of IBM has been obvious for a while

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: No it can’t, not when 3rd party vendors won’t certify their products on it.

" after all SUSE is the #2 enterprise Linux vendor after RH "

Suse have proven themselves quite willing to toss non-german speaking customers under a bus and run away (not even responding to quesries on the issue from Novell head office)

We're talking serious and permanent breaches of trust. They're on my "Never do business with this company again" list

Alan Brown Silver badge

"or preparing for the costs of entering the RHEL licensing ecosystem."

Those costs aren't JUST the licensing. It's RHEL being being seriously crufty in a bunch of areas and the RHEL rpm environment not being something you can just drop XYZ pakaging RPM into

EG: Just because SSH in RHEL7 says its 7.0.2 doesn't MEAN it's 7.0.2, it may incorporate chunks of later versions (including pieces of SSH 8) AND still be crippled by pieces of SSH 6 as well. (I'm bringing this one up as it's a real world example and it's major security issue. The only way to disable dangerous ciphers is to hardcode the exact list of what you'll accept, which in turn means you need to look at every update to see if things have been changed/new ciphers added

Of course researchers being researchers, they'll see that XYZ package isn't the latest and greatest, so compile up their own version and locally install it, leading to all kinds of library clashes and the inability to keep rpms portable across systems unless extensively customised - which defeats the purpose of using a distribution-based system in the first place

You can tell people not to install latest "everything" and build against that until you're blue in the face. It doesn't sinnk in until the $2million contract you have with ESA is being cocked up because such decisions mean the software you supplied them won't work in their standardised environments (yes, really).

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Open source as sales lead vs open source as competitor

Redhat has managed to continue to alienate the science community which is where most of Centos was coming from

Their target market is things like banks, with thousands of identical almost thin-client setups and it's getting _very_ difficult to keep science softwrae running on it anymore (which is a real problem as most solar, particle and planetary physics space groups are still using it)

I've been suggesting that our techies learn and support Ubuntu for a while but it's becoming clearer and clearer this is no longer "a good idea" but moving into "mandatory" territory (You'd be surprised how many supposed tech types through up their hands and use the "I don't understand this, it's too haaard!" card - or perhaps not)

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This is why they should be banned.

"Should be be "Poes' Razor" then?"

Does it come with its own pit?

The Linux box that runs the exec carpark gate is down! A chance for PostgreSQL Man to show his quality

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I was half tempted to ask some of them what lies he was telling them, and tell them the truth - but I decided against it."

All you need to do is contact the the clients and tell them that critical staff aren't there anymore. Don't offer to assist or direct them to competitors. Just the heads-up is usually enough to start them worrying

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Got made redundant a few years ago

"Needless to say 4yrs later they are still trying to find people to replace me and they have failed to release a new version of the product."

You see this a lot on the customer side.

Needless to say if you find a supplier has just had a large change of staff, it's time to start looking at alternative products or risk being left high and dry

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Execu-barge

"A radar detector or AI CCTV camera determines speed, and if over the limit,..."

If you're in the Netherlands or Sweden you'd already know that such things are linked to the traffic lights and will set the next set red if speeding is detected

Instant problem solver

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Execu-barge

"when the owners of super-cars from the middle east ship them over for "the season"

It's not il;legal to be in possession of a big bag of birdseed

nor is it illegal to scatter it over the roofs of such cars as they're parked on the roadside when you walk past

Grass seed for added fun as it works its way into crevices. Just make sure you don't use the kind which is treated to be poisonous to birds

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Execu-barge

It's worth noting this adage about traffic safety:

"Speed humps are almost always put in place to protect children walking to school from being killed by cars containing children being driven to school"

The real fix isn't to slow down the cars but to ask if they should be on THAT road at all

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Execu-barge

"Speed bumps are a literal pain. I have been beached on a couple of them in the tiger."

It's better to cause the road to be "waisted" by parked cars so there are areas where vehicles need to go single file AND visiblity is dodgy

Any clear road == "BOOTING IT!" - which is not what you want on residential roads

The laws are clear (even in the USA) - safety of residents of an area MUST NOT be compromised for the "convenience" of drivers passing through

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/01/05/states-highest-court-holds-nyc-liable-for-injuries-on-streets-without-traffic-calming

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Execu-barge

"The only remedial action has been to reconfigure the major crossroads to make it even more dangerous and to provide onesmall, inconspicuous convex mirror."

90% of "safety fixes" on roads result in safety issues becoming WORSE

Traffic psychology is perverse - anythign which visibily "improves safety" increases driver speeds and have them paying less attention to their surroundings. If you want roads to be safer, you NEED to make drivers feel vulnerable

painted lines, fences, humps and crossings are particularly bad for this issue

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Execu-barge

" The continuous procession of HGVs caused severe seismic vibrations that were damaging the houses along the street,"

if you're in the UK you have legal claims on councils for this and there are vibration limits they have to adhere to

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Execu-barge

"Householders who are pleased when a hump is installed in their street should consider investing in a seismometer before they congratulate themselves. "

Speedhumps on such roads are usually because some bright spark decided traffic wasn't getting through and put in parking restrictions which result in the road becoming a rat run full of speedsters.

The REAL fix is to back out the alterations which caused the traffic issue in the first place, not add on more layers of shit - the story of the old lady who swallowed a fly could be about most council traffic policies

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Execu-barge

"I've never liked speed humps. "

Speed humps and traffic cameras are an admission that traffic planning has failed horribly. They're there because traffic is going too fast on a road which probably shouldn't have that traffic on it anyway

Alan Brown Silver badge

"over the next year I would get called in several times to fix their messes, all at my original salary."

You were being kind. Contractors normally charge 3-7 times standard salary

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Had a call...

It's like explaining you're not paying a bad for the hours they spend at the gig, you're paying for the hours they spend PRACTISING until they don't sound like a bag of crockery falling down a flight of stairs

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Had a call...

> did I think he had much of a case? (I'll not go into details, but it also involved French employment" law.)"

At this point you should have asked for consultantcy rates

And THEN said what you said