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* Posts by Duncan Macdonald

1111 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2009

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Researchers warn of unpatched remote code execution flaws in Schneider Electric industrial gear

Duncan Macdonald
FAIL

air gap - Air Gap - AIR GAP

Any industrial control network should NEVER be connected to the internet unless it is unavoidable no matter what any idiotic senior managers want.

Most industrial control systems were designed in the days when their security depended on there being no access outside the plant being controlled. This resulted in the majority of the controllers having virtually no internal security measures - the assumed air gap was their security.

(If there is a need for control over the internet (eg for an unmanned pumping station) then the communication link should be via a firewall at the remote unit that only allows a few (preferably one) PC to exercise the control.)

Icon for the people who blindly connect industrial control systems to the internet ==========>

25 1

SteelSeries Apex Pro plays both sides of the mechanical keyboard fence – and wins

Duncan Macdonald

Good non-clicky soft keyboard preferred

At the age of 67, millisecond delays in key activation do not matter, quiet operation with low activation pressure and travel are preferred for comfort. Simple white backlight to make the keys easy to read without distracting from the content on the display is also desired. The money spent on bling, I would prefer to leave in my pocket.

(In my youth I used what must have been one of the worst mechanical keyboards ever devised on an ASR33 teletype - the activation pressure was well over 1 pound per key!! The nice soft keyboard that came with a VT220 (the LK201) was still one of the best keyboards that I have ever used. (The LK201 also set the keyboard layout that has been used ever since in desktop PCs.))

11 0

Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

Duncan Macdonald
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Unhappy

Re: I don't understand

BT just want the money - they do not care about the lives lost or ruined because their wonderful new phone service does not work without mains power.

5 2

USA's efforts to stop relying on Russian-built rocket engines derailed by issues with Blue Origin's BE-4

Duncan Macdonald
Mushroom

Use Raptor instead ?

If asked nicely then SpaceX would probably sell Raptor engines to ULA for only $10million each (a nice 900% markup on the production cost of $1million each!!) .

Icon for Bezo's head if the ULA used Raptor instead of BE-4 ===============>

11 0

Systemd 249 release candidate includes better support for immutable OSes and provisioning images

Duncan Macdonald
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Mushroom

Android and small devices

It is notable that one of the biggest users of Linux - Android does NOT use systemd. Google has rightly decided that systemd is unsuitable for prime time use in phones and tablets.

Small devices (eg media players and IoT devices) do not normally use systemd due to it needing far more resources (ROM,RAM and CPU time) than a simple init based system.

My own opinion - systemd is part 2 of the M$ "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" method. I wonder how much M$ is paying the systemd team.

Icon for what should happen to systemd and its developers ========>

11 1

Inventor of the graphite anode – key Li-ion battery tech – says he can now charge an electric car in 10 minutes

Duncan Macdonald
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Re: different perspective.

If like many in the UK you have no private parking then charging at home is not an option.

2 0
Duncan Macdonald
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Re: Solution desperately seeking problem

If you already have a car then swapping it for an EV is unlikely to be economic. Look at the price of reasonable EVs then see how many years of lower fuel and maintenance costs are needed to break even (do not forget to include in interest costs on the buying of the EV).

The cheapest halfway decent electric car is the SEAT Mii electric with a basic price of just over £20k.

The average running cost for a car in the UK (fuel, maintenance, car tax and insurance) is estimated to be approximately £2k. Even if an electric car had zero running costs it would still take TEN YEARS to break even. Given actual costs (electricity,insurance and maintenance (including a battery swap as batteries are unlikely to last ten years)) and the break even point will probably exceed 15 years.

Add to the above the problem that there will not be enough charging points, buying an EV seems to be a mugs game.

1 0
Duncan Macdonald
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FAIL

Re: A power station at each garage ?

The only medium scale generators (1-10MW) that are readily available are diesel powered. (There are some gas turbine units but even 10MW is below the economic size for a gas turbine generator.)

Given the above, a generator in a garage to provide the power will be a diesel one.

People unable to charge their vehicles at home (anyone without private off street parking) would need to charge at a garage. Far more charging points would be needed compared to petrol/diesel pumps - a full charge on a petrol car takes under 3 minutes vs 10 minutes with a 450kW charger and over 2 hours for an existing high rate charger (30kW).

At a motorway service station, the number of vehicles needing to be charged per hour would take the power demand high enough (well over 20MW) to make a direct connection to the national grid the best option.

One point to consider with all the government push to renewable energy - how much power can renewable sources provide on a calm winter night. (Solar zero, wind zero, hydroelectric 2GW at a time when the electricity demand can reach 50GW.)

Icon for government plans to go wholly renewable =========>

2 0
Duncan Macdonald

A power station at each garage ?

Assuming that the claim is correct, charging a Tesla with a 75kWh battery in 10 minutes will require a feed of 75x6kW ie 450kW (and that is assuming no losses!!). Compared to the power consumption of a normal (petrol/diesel) garage of 10kW or less this is a huge increase. There is no way that the electricity supply to a normal garage would cope - either a new electricity grid connection or a diesel generator at the garage would be required to provide the power.

(Multiple charging points would multiply the power demand.)

If a diesel generator at the garage is used then the big advantage of EVs - no local pollution - is negated as the CO2 and other pollutants would be emitted by the generator which is local. If a grid connection is used then the local electricity grid would need to be reinforced - a garage with 10 of these charging points would need a feed of 4.5MW. This is more that the peak electricity demand of 5000 people (UK peak demand 52.7GW, population 66.65 million demand/population under 800W).

Add to that the problems of connecting leads carrying 450kW (over 1000 amps needed) to the car (perfectly clean connectors required and cables that are rated for a continuous current of over ten times the short term current of a car's starter motor) and I do not see this charging speed becoming at all common. A few demonstration sites might have such a charger but this would be for advertising not for practical use.

The only practical use of such fast charging batteries at the moment is for far lower powered devices - power tools, phones, tablets etc where the peak demand required is under 3kW.

10 4

US Senate finds $52bn to keep chipmakers working, $195bn for tech R&D

Duncan Macdonald

Fat cats getting fatter

Intel (and other US companies) fell behind TSMC and Samsung by cutting their R&D investment so that they could give bigger dividends to shareholders. Now that they realize that they are behind, instead of cutting dividends to fund their R&D they are getting the US taxpayers to fund it.

I wonder how big the lobbying contributions were to get this bill passed?

The US - the county with the best government money can buy!!!

15 0

Biden expands Chinese tech and military blocklist to 59 companies

Duncan Macdonald

A figleaf

This is just banning US investment in these companies. It will have no effect on the companies themselves. It does not normally matter to a company whether its shares are held by shareholder A or shareholder B.

The order seems designed to make it look as though Biden is being tough on China while not actually doing anything to hurt China.

0 0

Report commissioned by Google says Google isn't to blame for the death of print news

Duncan Macdonald

Partly true

Local papers survived on their advertising revenue - a large part of which used to be from housing ads. This part of their income has all but vanished as advertising on Rightmove is far more effective. The classified ads for tradesmen has to a large part been gobbled by Google. Much of the vehicle advertising has moved to Autotrader, manufacturers websites and eBay. Secondhand items are no longer advertised in local papers - eBay is more effective. The bits of advertising that are left (eg sales at local shops) are not enough to sustain anything like the previous range of local papers.

Print media advertising can not compete with internet advertising for speed or number and quality of photos. (Any photos printed on standard newspaper are restricted to poor quality - far worse than quality of photos available on the internet.)

Unfortunately local papers (barring special circumstances eg the Metro in London) are going to die out. (The Metro has a large fairly captive audience in London commuters.)

5 0

Security is an architectural issue: Why the principles of zero trust and least privilege matter so much right now

Duncan Macdonald

Nice idea but...

A common requirement for many jobs is to be able to look up something on the internet. (Examples - where can I get widget X, where is the parts diagram for item Y, where is the recipe for food Z.) By their very nature these queries have no predefined list of nodes with the required information - a query might start with Google then branch to a list of suppliers (quite possibly including eBay and Amazon). Some larger firms might be able to afford the costs of staff members having two computers (one (secure) on the internal network and one (insecure) on a separate network) - smaller firms have to allow some staff members general internet access at work - this requires that those computers have the best affordable protection software.

0 0

Big Tech has a big problem with Florida passing a law that protects politicians from web moderation

Duncan Macdonald

Race/color/religion are protected attributes - denying services based on any of them is illegal in the US

(except when Trump banned Muslims from many countries!!)

Politics is NOT a protected attribute - it is legal for a website or service to only cater to the speech of most far right nutters (eg Parler) - it is also legal for a website or service to decline to carry such speech.

4 0

The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun

Duncan Macdonald
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Re: The lawyers have more paydays coming

Apple has already taken 30% of the purchase price of the app - this is more than enough to cover the hosting and other costs. Taking 30% of in app purchases has no justification other than "We are so big that we can take your money and there is nothing you can do about it".

6 4
Duncan Macdonald
Mushroom

The lawyers have more paydays coming

Whichever side loses will appeal against the judgement - and this case will probably end up being settled by the Supreme Court.

Both sides have enough money to fund long running appeals.

As far as Apple "taxing" in app purchases, it is very difficult to see any justification for the "tax". Apple are not providing any service - they are just demanding money with menaces.

When it comes to the initial purchases of apps, there is one major difference between Apple and Google - with Android it is easy to install applications from locations other than the Play Store, with IOS on iPhones this is not possible. Google might well be able to argue in court that it is not a monopoly supplier of apps for Android but Apple most certainly IS a monopoly supplier of apps to iPhones/iPads.

Icon for what should happen to lawyers ===========>

9 7

Frontier sued by FTC, six states for allegedly over-promising, under-delivering broadband

Duncan Macdonald
Flame

Yet another firm using Chapter 11

Chapter 11 is probably the worst single bit of the entire US legal system - it allows firms to evade their debts while letting the shareholders keep the ownership of the company. If it was to be anything like a fair system then the existing shares would all be cancelled and the debtors would get new shares in the company in proportion to the debts owned to them.

9 0

Cisco discloses self-sabotaging SSD bug that causes rolling outages for some Firepower appliances

Duncan Macdonald
WTF?

Why on earth does it use a non-standard SSD ?

SSD's have been a commodity item for years so why is Cisco using a non-standard one? The only reasons that I can think of are to make third party repairs more difficult/impossible or to make it difficult for anyone to discover backdoors buried in the firmware stored on the drive.

Given the cost of Cisco equipment even the cost of most expensive Samsung SSD would only be a rounding error in the price so cost saving is not a valid reason.

7 0

When the chips are down, Intel's biggest gamble isn't what to do – it's whom to do it with

Duncan Macdonald
Mushroom

Intel has major design problems

All of Intel's CPUs for many years have been monolithic (everything on one piece of silicon) with structures such as their ring bus providing a significant part of their improved performance compared to the pre chiplet AMD designs.

To match the core counts that AMD can manage in a single package, Intel will need to move to a chiplet design to get acceptable yields. However a chiplet design will mean discarding much of the "secret sauce" such as the ring bus that provided the improvement relative to AMD's monolithic designs.

Intel need to do a MAJOR architecture redesign to use chiplets while at the same time trying to get their basic silicon speed to match what TSMC will be able to get from their 3nm node.

Intel will also have another major problem - patents - I would be willing to bet that TSMC has a lot of patents covering parts of their 7nm and smaller processes - Intel will either have to work around the patents (entailing extra delay) or pay TSMC to allow Intel to use them.

Basically Intel screwed up big time by paying out money in shareholder dividends instead of investing in the required EUV based production to handle smaller nodes. Because AMD was not an immediate threat, they cut back on R&D and like all high tech firms have now found out that doing so is a long term kiss of death.

To add to the above problems, Intel will have stock market problems if they cut their dividends to try to finance increased R&D - investors do not like seeing dividend cuts and are often far more focused on the short term rather than the long term health of a company.

9 0

Apple's expert witness grilled by Epic over 'frictionless' spending outside the app

Duncan Macdonald

How many appeals ?

If Apple loses which on the reporting so far seems probable, expect them to appeal it all the way up through the legal system in the hope that Epic will run out of money before the appeal process concludes.

My own opinion is that the Apple store and the Google Play store should be limited to a commission of no more than 20% on the purchase of games and apps

and that developers should be free to use outside payment methods for in app purchases. I also think that it should be possible to load apps from outside the Apple store as can be done on Android.

19 7

Copper load of this: Openreach outlines 77 new locations where it'll stop selling legacy phone and broadband products

Duncan Macdonald
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FAIL

Mains failures kill mobile as well

The majority of mobile phone masts have either no UPS or only a short term one designed to handle short outages of a few minutes. A prolonged mains failure to an area will kill the mobile phone traffic in that area. The only phone communication with long term operating capacity in the event of mains failure is basic phones connected by copper to a telephone exchange.

Icon for people who think that mobile phones work when the masts have no power ===>

4 0

Broadband plumber Openreach yanks legacy copper phone lines in Suffolk town of Mildenhall en route to getting the UK on VoIP

Duncan Macdonald
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FAIL

Re: OMG - El Reg: this is a tech journal

If you read the article - it was about the withdrawal of copper which is the thing that makes emergency calls etc dependent on mains electricity. Basic telephones connected by copper to the exchange continue to function even if the mains supply to the area is cut. If the direct copper connection to the exchange with its huge batteries is replaced by any other type of connection (fibre, shared coax, wireless etc) then the communication link becomes dependent on mains electricity.

A repeat of the incident in Lancaster in December 2015 will result in a total loss of communications,(during the Lancaster incident wired phones still worked as the big batteries in the exchange provided the power they needed.). Probably several people would die in such a repeat because they would not be able to summon help.

Icon for a person that comments on an article without reading and understanding it ===>

7 1
Duncan Macdonald
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Re: "usually competent enough to not site them in spots where flooding was likely."

Old analog phones usually worked even if a cabinet was under water - the operating voltage was 50 volts and the phones would still work down to about 35 volts. The leakage from a single connection point being under water was not normally enough to stop operation (it did make for poor voice quality).

Please remember the PSTN network operated at a much lower voltage than mains electricity (50v DC vs 240v AC) so it was nothing like as badly affected by water.

The Japanese nuclear plant had its backup generators in the basement which meant that even after the tidal wave had receded the generators were still inoperable. If the Japanese government had been even halfway competent they would have airlifted a couple of 1MW generators to the site in the 24 hours after the tidal wave - this would have been sufficient to keep the cooling systems going and the plant would have suffered no serious damage. (A 1MW generator is light enough to be slung under several types of helicopter.)

Please also remember fibreoptic cables are normally far more fragile than the traditional phone cables. (A 100 pair telephone cable can withstand someone standing on it - a fibre cable is very likely to be broken by the same load.)

6 0
Duncan Macdonald
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Flame

Re: "When there are floods"

Back when BT was part of the Post Office, the people planning where to put exchanges were usually competent enough to not site them in spots where flooding was likely. The exchanges also had batteries big enough to run the exchange (and all the telephones because they were powered from the exchange) for 24 hours or more. Many exchanges also had backup generators that could keep the exchange operational for a week or more.

With telephones depending on mains driven adapters (with a ONE hour backup battery), mobile phone masts also dependent on mains power (backup batteries normally have only a few hours capacity - when they are even present!!) any prolonged mains outage is going to result in a complete loss of communications.

The thing to remember about BT/OpenReach and their lapdog OFCOM is that all they care about is profits - emergency cover, alarms etc are not profitable so any excuse to drop them will be taken.

18 1

Big right-to-repair win: FTC blasts tech giants for making it so difficult to mend devices

Duncan Macdonald
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Re: End of life

Batteries should be user replaceable items - if my THL phone of a few years ago could not only have user replaceable batteries but even came with a spare battery in the box why is that no longer possible on most current phones.

Perhaps for phones pass a law that manufacturers are required to replace batteries with new ones for a fee of not more than $50 with a penalty of having to refund the original list price if they do not do the battery swap.

30 0

Appeals court nixes online blueprint sharing ban on 3D-printed 'ghost guns'

Duncan Macdonald
Mushroom

Why bother with 3D printing

Full CAD/CAM drawings of the AK-47 have been available online for years. I would much rather trust an AK-47 machined from blocks of steel than a 3D printed gun using the low strength materials available to 3D printers.

Leave the 3D instructions online to apply Darwin's rule to the idiots who try to build and use such a gun.

Icon for what happens to people who try to use a 3D printed firearm =========>

23 2

Not saying you should but we're told it's possible to land serverless app a '$40k/month bill using a 1,000-node botnet'

Duncan Macdonald

Cloud services

Cloud working is just the modern version of using timesharing mainframes from the early days of computing.

For almost all sustained workloads it is cheaper to use your own kit rather than rent services from a cloud provider.

Valid reasons for using a cloud

1) Short term peak (under 3 months)

2) Insufficient internet connectivity at own premises

3) Keeping development and testing well away from production

4) Temporary substitute for unavailable systems (eg after a fire)

Reasons for NOT using a cloud

1) Cost - in under 3 years (under 1 year in many cases) running the job on own hardware will be cheaper than the cloud price

2) Legal constraints - any company in the EU that allows personal data to be on a cloud controlled by US firms is in danger of massive fines due to the EU GDPR and the US CLOUD act.

3) Data security - if the access to the cloud application is not set correctly then massive data breaches are all too easy - this again raises the potential of nasty fines to companies that trade in the EU due to GDPR. Data breaches on own kit behind a firewall are usually due to an attack (rather than the stupidity that has left so many Amazon storage buckets with world access).

4) Lock in to one cloud supplier. It is far too easy to embed implicit assumptions about the available facilities into applications resulting (for example) in an application that works on AWS but needs extensive rework to run on Azure.

PLEASE before committing a job to "the cloud" price the costs of own kit vs cloud kit over the expected timeframe. Include the costs of 2,3,and 4 above in the analysis before committing to the cloud.

5 0

Biden administration effectively slaps bans on seven Chinese supercomputer companies for military links

Duncan Macdonald
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FAIL

Re: Design software ?

Covid-19 has an overall death rate of under 1% - a real biowarfare agent would have a death rate of over 50%.

Many of the epidemics of the 19th and 20th centuries had death rates way higher than covid-19 (eg Spanish Flu).

And still many Americans believe Trump's idea that covid-19 was a Chinese bioweapon - SAD.

Icon for the brains of the people who believe covid-19 was a bioweapon =====>

0 2
Duncan Macdonald

Design software ?

It is rather difficult for the US to put effective bans on the use of the chip design software that China is already using.

It seems to me that there is a segment of the US government that wants a war to try to hide their own failings.

These embargoes remind me of the ones that the US imposed on Japan prior to WW2 which was one of the main reasons for Japan attacking the US at Pearl Harbor.

Is the US government stupid enough to believe that ANYONE wins in a nuclear (or biological) war ?

7 1

Belgian police seize 28 tons of cocaine after 'cracking' Sky ECC's chat app encryption

Duncan Macdonald
Black Helicopters

OpenPGP

As OpenPGP has been available for years - for a text only service why not use it for the encryption.

1 0

Ice Lake, Baby: Intel's 10nm 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server processors to arrive at last

Duncan Macdonald

Still does not match AMD EPYC

Anandtech has a review (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16594/intel-3rd-gen-xeon-scalable-review) that compares the speed of the new Intel chips and the AMD EPYC (Milan). The EPYC wins in almost all tests apart from AVX-512 and idle power consumption. The idle power consumption of the EPYC is higher due to the chipset being in the package, the extra 64 PCIe 4.0 lanes and 256 MB of L3 cache vs 60 MB .

Much of the performance gain from higher IPC in the new Xeon is lost due to the lower frequencies (3.4GHz vs 4GHz).

4 0

Absolutely fab: As TSMC invests $100bn to address chip shortage, where does that leave the rest of the industry?

Duncan Macdonald
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Re: Arizona ? Fabs ? Water ?

Compared to the cost of a fab, a seawater desalination plant is peanuts. TSMC could easily afford to build a desalination plant (and if necessary a power station to power it) in Taiwan for a small fraction of the cost of a single fab. Unlike Arizona, Taiwan is an island with plenty of access to seawater.

Given Arizona's water problem - choosing somewhere by the great lakes instead would seem to be a better choice (unless tax breaks etc decide the positioning).

1 0
Duncan Macdonald

The critical firm is ASML

The only supplier of EUV equipment is ASML - if the Chinese want to force the US to stop semiconductor sanctions then buying ASML would give them effective control of the world's sub-10nm production.

2 0

Bad news for automakers: That fire at the Renesas chip plant was worse than expected

Duncan Macdonald
Unhappy

Yet again JIT causing problems

Just In Time manufacturing works very well till it fails very badly!!

Any plant that relies on JIT is only one supplier delay away from loss of production. Management SHOULD (but rarely does) consider the benefit from reduced component inventories against the loss of production if a component is delayed. Any international delivery of components can be expected to have delays from time to time and therefore should have a higher stock level to handle delays. If a supplier is approaching 100% of its capacity then delays are also likely due to the supplier not having slack to take up any production problems (and again a higher local stock level is warranted).

Icon for when JIT has supply problems ==============>

10 0

Apple iPad torched this guy's home, lawsuit claims

Duncan Macdonald
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Re: I Got It At The Dollar Store

Unless the voltage from the charger is too high then it would not be responsible for any fire in a phone - the control of the charging is in the phone not in the external charger.

1 0
Duncan Macdonald
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Re: Where was it charged?

As I said earlier - any competent design would terminate the charging if the device got too hot. Does this apply to the iPhone - I do not know.

2 0
Duncan Macdonald
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Re: Whats the betting

The battery charge regulation takes place in the phone - unless the charger has so high a voltage that it breaks the electronics in the phone, the charger should make no difference.

A charger provides a voltage feed (typically 5 volts) at whatever current the phone asks for up to the limit of the charger. If the voltage does not exceed the limit for the phone then the charger is not responsible for any fire in the phone. (If the charger catches fire then that IS the fault of the charger.)

3 1
Duncan Macdonald
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Flame

Re: Laptop fires

IF a phone is designed correctly then it will terminate charging if the temperature gets too high. (Likewise it should throttle down or shut off if too hot.)

Not being familiar with the internals of the iPhone, I do not know if it has these common sense provisions.

If phones used LiFePO4 batteries instead of the more common types of lithium-ion then battery fires would cease to be a problem - however the phones would need to be a bit thicker and heavier for the same runtime. (Because LiFePO4 batteries do not degrade as fast as common lithium-ion batteries the phones would also last longer before battery replacement was needed.)

Icon for burning phones ============>

20 0

SAP community suggestions for on-prem database canned as app giant looks cloudwards

Duncan Macdonald
FAIL

When a company ignores its customers

- then its decline is inevitable. SAP has moved further into this position.

Many of its customers cannot use the cloud due to legal reasons (GDPR etc) so this is likely to force many of those customers onto non-cloud alternatives to SAP.

Also many (most?) SAP customers have significant custom modifications which SAP has already said will not be available in its cloud offering thereby making the SAP cloud even less attractive.

Icon for SAP cloud future ================>

6 0

Samsung spruiks Galaxy Buds Pro performance as comparable to hearing aids

Duncan Macdonald
Reply Icon
Mushroom

Use an app ?

The processor on a smartphone can easily run an app that allows the user to tailor the frequency response of the earbud.

(Give the app a collection of standard profiles - the user chooses the one that sounds best then can tweak the response curve further if desired.)

For the lower end of the market (eg village dwellers in India) a very cheap alternative would be basic wired earphones with the phone acting as the amplifier and frequency response corrector. The cost to such users would be the cost of the app (if anything) and the cost of basic wired earphones (under £1).

Icon for the response of the firms and audiologists selling overpriced hearing aids if this idea takes hold. ====>

8 2

China's top chip company speaks of massive silicon shortage felt around the globe

Duncan Macdonald
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Re: Good news

The biggest problem with lithium batteries is cobalt - needed for the high performance batteries. (LiFePO4 batteries do not need cobalt but have a much lower power density - resulting in even heavier battery packs for vehicles.)

0 0
Duncan Macdonald

Please show your evidence

As Huawei has had a significant reduction in its sales due to the US driven trade war limiting its supplies, please show the evidence that they are hoarding. (And Breitbart/Parler/The Gateway Pundit/etc do not count as evidence.)

2 0

Xiaomi didn't turn the glue up to 11 on its new Mi flagship, but still gets low marks for repairability

Duncan Macdonald
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FAIL

Screws

The back should be held on by screws or clips not glue - the would make repairs (especially battery replacement) far easier. Glass backs and curved screens both reduce device life expectancy as they result in a more fragile device.

My previous phone was a THL one with a clip on plastic back and a user swappable battery (the package even included a spare back and a spare battery) - if this was possible on a £200 phone why is it not available on current flagship phones ?

Icon for the deliberately difficult to repair phones =======>

2 0

A lot of things will have changed with Biden as US president, but an easier ride for Huawei is not one of them

Duncan Macdonald

Cisco and/or NSA ?

Who is the prime leader to stop Huawei supplying network equipment ?

Is it Cisco because the Huawei equipment is better and cheaper or is it the NSA because equipment from Huawei does not come with the NSA backdoors preinstalled ?

8 2

ISP industry blasts UK Telecoms Security Bill for vague requirements, high costs of compliance

Duncan Macdonald
Mushroom

Agree on the code first

The code should be part of the bill and debated upon before becoming law. A code that can be changed without the oversight of Parliament gives too much power to the ministers and their lobbyists (ie the UK security services and the US alphabet soup (NSA,CIA,DHS,DoD etc)).

If the UK government actually wanted more secure telecoms (which they obviously do not) then they would require the ISPs etc to remove the Cisco equipment (with its NSA backdoors) and replace it with Huawei equipment.

Icon for what should happen to the power hungry security services of all nations =======>

3 0

Twitter sues Texas AG to halt 'retaliatory' demand for internal content-moderation rulebook in wake of Trump ban

Duncan Macdonald
Reply Icon
FAIL

Re: First Amendment - False Claims

No one is stopping you from speaking - however no one is compelled to hand you a megaphone to blast your speech around the town. The constitution does not demand that a business provides the means for your speech to be send around the world.

If the Republican Party actually embraced the far right conspiracy ideas etc, it would be easily within their financial resources to setup a data center and host Parler themselves. Given that the majority of the Republican Party is however not stupid enough to want anything to do with the far right, Parler and its extremist users will stay in the cold.

Icon for those people stupid enough to believe in the far right conspiracy theories =====>

1 0
Duncan Macdonald
Stop

First Amendment - False Claims

There have been many false claims that Amazon and Twitter have broken the First Amendment by denying a platform to the far right.

As the First Amendment only prohibits GOVERNMENT interference with free speech, Amazon and Twitter can not be guilty of breaking it as they are not part of the government.

As can be seen from the text the limitation is only on Congress

The text of the First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

28 2

Redditor thinks they have a solution to Surface Laptop 3's overheating issues: Elastic bands and USB fans

Duncan Macdonald
FAIL

Do NOT buy ultra thin laptops

Good cooling demands sufficient airflow and a decent amount of cooling surface. Ultra thin laptops do not have room for decent cooling. The fan(s) have to be very thin profile which reduces the amount of air moved for a given fan speed and there is no room for a large cooling surface to be cooled by the airflow.

Any well engineered laptop should sustain continuous heavy use without overheating or excessive fan noise.

Unfortunately the Microsoft Surface laptops are not well engineered.

When you add the difficulty in replacing the battery which is a short life component, only a mug would buy a Microsoft Surface laptop.

Icon for the M$ engineering ===============>

5 2

Copper broadband phaseout will leave UK customers with higher bills and less choice, says comparison site

Duncan Macdonald
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Re: Emergeny calls

I have relatives on the Isle of Skye - there are many dead spots there. Even in the largest town on the island (Portree) there are dead spots. The Isle of Skye is about the same size as Greater London - but has a permanent population of under 13,000. As a result there are few mobile phone masts and combined with the hilly nature of the island makes for many areas with no signal.

Any hilly sparsely populated area has mobile dead spots as it is not worthwhile for the mobile phone companies to cover them unless they are forced or bribed into doing so.

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Duncan Macdonald
FAIL

Emergeny calls

Removal of copper connections in areas with poor or no mobile signal can make it impossible to make emergency calls. Traditional landline phones are powered by the exchange and work even if the mains power fails.

The adapter that allows traditional phones to work with a fiber connection is mains powered and its backup battery will only last for one hour after mains failure.

If in an area without mobile coverage the mains fails while people are sleeping then by the time they wake up they will be unable to call for help.

It should be a requirement for full mobile coverage for an area before the copper connections can be removed from that area.

Also FTTP and FTTC are both going to be wildly uneconomic in many rural areas where farm houses can be hundreds of yards apart.

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