Posts by big_D

Re: 'making Google's vid-hosting platform liable for infringements on copyrighted material would'

It is up to Google/Youtube, Facebook & Co. to come up with a method for pre-clearing content (E.g. YouTube "stars" can pre-declare that the content they are uploading falls within the law and the content is theirs alone or they have the electronic rights to distribute the material.

Maybe some sort of digital certificate from the content producer - if they want to ensure they get paid, they have to do some work as well and issue valid, traceable digital certificates, which the uploader attaches to the video. If the copyright holder then see a misuse of the content, they can revoke the certificate and the video will be automatically "pulled" on all services that use it.

The uploaders could digitally sign an afidavit that the content is theirs and they have the rights to upload the content. Of course, it would mean uploads over anonymous accounts would have to still be vetted. But "legitimate" sources (podcasters, Youtube stars, influencers (yeuch, what a horrible word!) etc.) can ensure that they are taking responsibility for the upload and their videos can be uploaded straight away or just subjected to random sampling.

That is just a couple of "simple" ideas off the top of my head. The idea is simple, how easy it would be to implement is another idea, but YouTube and Facebook have earnt billions from "illegal" content over the last decade, so the funding for implementing a scheme has already been, illegetimately, earnt.

Re: When Urban Myths Come True

I was working in the old wooden huts in Titchfield during the 1991 hurricane. We were sitting there, watching the walls slam in and out, just waiting for the whole lot to blow away, when out of the window, we just watched in awe as the roof of the data centre lifted up in the air, in one piece, turned over on its back, length ways, and slammed down on the carpark.

We then quickly ran to the data centre to set about getting the people out. By some miracle, there were no serious injuries.

Re: When Urban Myths Come True

We had a datacenter in Addelstone, which was a converted bus deopt, I believe. Anyway, one nicht the IT director was called out, because the roof had caved in during a heavy rainstorm.

Re: AS400's

It depends, I've worked at sites that had a central UPS/generator setup that powered specific sockets for IT equipment throughout the building. But they were still individually fused, so a single socket could still "blow".

Once, I worked on a site that had a central UPS that allowed all IT equipment to run for up to 15 minutes without power, allowing them to be safely powered down... We were working hard, but we didn't have any lamps or lights on in our office, suddenly all the PCs in the office went out! It turns out that the power went out 20 minutes earlier and everybody in offices where they had lights, lamps, radios or anything non-IT running had noticed that the power had gone and had powered down.

Nobody had bothered to inform us.

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

Yes, the not pressing return at the end of a line was a hard lesson to learn for long-time typists (of both sexes). It is muscle memory, you get towards the end of the line and you either throw the carriage or you press return.

Unlearning that takes a lot of practice.

Re: stop me if you've heard this one....

In my day, a rubber hammer was a rubber hammer. A mallet was, generally wooden or had leather ends (probably replaced with some artifical leather surrogate these days).

Re: stop me if you've heard this one....

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sky%20hook

And, after you've sent the noobie to get half a dozen non-existent things, you send him to get the rubber hammer. That is the joke.

By then they have had enough and will probably tell you to go to hell, at which point you pull out a rubber hammer...

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

They were great, really rugged. Ahead of their time, in some respects.

But they had one fatal weakness. The battery could be put in either way round, but putting it in the wrong way round blew an internal fuse!

When we got them back from the repair centre, they were always packed in a big mound of bubble-wrap. My boss used to cut the tape off at the end, then flip the wrap violently, causing it to accelerate down the table, spewing the Husky out of the end, where it crashed against the wall. If it booted, the repair had been successful...

Re: stop me if you've heard this one....

You forgot the sky hooks...

And when they've got all that, send them back for a rubber hammer.

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

I've certainly seen floppies stored near/under/stuck to metal with magnets over the years.

And floppies stapled to things, yes. Original software stapled to the invoice and license number certificate for safe keeping at one place!

It is like the myth of the laptop that got run over. I've experienced that a couple of times. One was a project manager taking their kids to school. They put their laptop bag down behind the car, because the kids were causing havoc and they had to spend extra time belting them up. They then got in the car, reversed down the drive and... crunch.

At least the disk drive was unharmed and we could recover the data.

On the other hand, the field engineers had Husky portable PCs and one used his Husky to get his Mecedes G-Wagon out of a swamps field by sticking it under the rear wheel, getting traction. He then went back, collected the Husky, washed it in a nearby stream and carried on working with it.

Re: Do as I say...

I agree.

I find very interesting that the UK has shown that there are genuine security holes in Huawei products, but steps back from saying they are tampered with by the Chinese intelligent services; yet the Americans keep saying they are an intelligence security risk, whilst offering absolutely no evidence to support their case.

Re: Is this the best that the USA can come up with ?

The knackers in Eastern Europe, where the meat was coming from, weren't particularly bothered and lax controls at some meat handlers (or those willingly taking on the meat) led to the problem.

What knackers do in more controlled countries is another matter.

Re: Is this the best that the USA can come up with ?

The problem is that non-food horses aren't controlled for meds and get more pumped into them, because they aren't supposed to be consumed. That was the scandal at the time.

And, having worked in the food industry for around a decade, before and after the scandal, the tightening of controls and the traceability of the supply chain has been beefed up, if you'll excuse the pun, in Europe and, in Germany for example, you can use various apps to scan the QR code on the meat or meat product you are buying and see where the products came from, all the way back to which farm (or farms for mixed products, like sausage or mince).

In Germany, the data about each animal and the "batch" it was processed in has to be stored in unalterable form and the metadata passed down the line. For EU sourced products, it has become a lot harder (although probably not impossible) to slip unauthorized meat into the supply chain.

Our dishwasher died this week. The first criteria from my other half was, it musn't be smart. No app control, no wi-fi, no, she doesn't want to know how many tabs are left and no, she doesn't want it to automagically order new tabs when it thinks the supply is running low.

Re: t's best to try them on a test machine before allowing them anywhere near production

We have a bunch of "test" PCs, they get updates and patches ahead of the hoi polloi. They are single PCs in key departments. If the updates don't cause problems, they are rolled out to the rest of the machines.

We have Kaspersky's and Symantec's corporate offerings and no problems so far (couple of hundred PCs and Servers patched before the warning came out). I rolled it out to a test group, then a day later to all PCs, after there weren't any problems.

Re: ReactOS (as the new XP)

But it would also still need patching...

I worked a company that were still kicking out SUSE 7 from 2001 on their new servers to their customers in 2015! Because it is Linux, so it doesn't need security patches! They only switched to an ageing CentOS because the new SCSI RAID controller's driver refused point blank to work with such an old Kernel and the old controllers weren't being made any longer.

Re: You should have been sacked

And even when not, I've had to optimize systems that others had written.

A financial reporting system that took over 4 hours to pack up the data for transmission to HQ. 2 days work on that system got it down to under 20 minutes. Just a few simple changes. That saved 4 hours times 5 reporting programs, times 12 months, times over 260 reporting sites. Those 2 days re-programming and testing saved the company over 62,000 hours lost productivity a year.

Another time, the customer had already invested in 4 servers and a load-balancer for their commercial webiste, but it still keeld over and died, when more than 25 users per server tried to load a page. The programmers were good at web coding, but hadn't a clue about optimization. They had just thrown new indexes at the database to speed up loading the menu structure, but it hadn't helped. It still took over a minute to load the menu under load.

A quick run through the code, re-oder the WHERE clause so the database could process it optimally - as opposed to the programmers being able to read it in "from front-to-back" order (I changed it from human understanding drop-through to database starting with the shortest exclusion and working outwards). A few changes to the deeply nested surrounding IF statements in the PHP code and hey presto, the query sank from over 1 minute to execute to under 500 milliseconds. The page load time dropped to under 3 seconds.

Sometimes a company is more than willing to pay for optimization. Spending a few days of developer time to save 7 man years of accountants time per year, for example, or customer satisfaction at not having to wait for pages to load, is peanuts in comparisson to what the company will have to give out otherwise or could lose due to poor customer experience.

Re: You should have been sacked

Too long living in a non-English speaking country! Thanks.

Re: You should have been sacked

I remember working on a McDonald Douglas mainframe for Laker Airlines (Freddy Laker). It had 64KB pages for code and data, so you had to write very optimized code to get the code and data within a 64KB boundary.

Re: Modern grownups

Out social event is the boss springing for a Döner lunch.

Re: Modern grownups

eating chicken nuggets = yuck

getting upset at Secret Santa = a what now?

learning the moronic lyrics of the same three-note songs that dominate the music charts = definitely not!

competing in mini-golf tournaments = not since I was 8

smoking candy floss-flavoured e-cigs = I gave up smoking in 1987

drinking blueberry cider = BLEH!

and openly reading Harry Cunting Potter = no.

I must be abnormal, I don't do any of those things.

GDPR says you cannot refuse people access to the service if they don't agree to share their personal information.

Under GDPR, they wouldn't be able to share the data with third parties, unless they have the written permission of the user... Clicking "I accept" isn't considered written permission.

I had also heard about it, but I thought CBP considered airports to be borders as well.

Agreed, although you are forgetting BIOS/UEFI level malware, which can't be gotten rid of on a re-imaged machine.

The photojournalist Eric Durchschmied was caught in Russia "back in the day" with a young female in his room. No hidden cameras, the door was flung open at the right "moment" and somebody took a flash photograph of him and a young lady who picked him up in the department store.

If they were hoping to blackmail him, they were disappointed, he just looked at them, smiled and asked if he could have a copy for his wife's solicitor, as he was getting divorced. They never contacted him again.

(from his autobiography "Don't shoot the Yanqui!")

I was thinking TeamViewer, VPN and Co.