Re: The malware in this story seems to be of a level way above the usual windows effort.
"Actually I was totally taking the piss."
Yes, I know. I enjoyed it all the more !
2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010
From the Norton link in June
Risk Level 1: Very Low
Linux.Fokirtor Threat Assessment
Component Severity
Wild Level Low
Number of Infections 0 - 49
Number of Sites 0 - 2
Geographical Distribution Low
Threat Containment Easy
Removal Easy
Damage Level Medium
Distribution Level Low
"I didn't know Linux was incapable of running closed source applications."
If you're not joking -it does and I spent a great deal of my last few years at work running EXTREMELY expensive molecular and protein modeling programs - all closed-source and all protected to the hilt.
NASA state on their webpage that the photo shows the moon also as a slight extension to the south-east of the earth 'blob' - on the .tif image it looks to be so but the .jpg has artifacts which mask it . The difference in size between the files is 94MB/0.76MB so I guess that's a reasonable tradeoff.
(I did need to use my reading glasses at ~6" from the 1920x1080 display to see it though )
"They already have solar producing 25% of their needs"
They do not !
Solar being ~4% in 2012 as far as I can see, coal+gas ~65%, wind ~8%
http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/germanys-energiewende-the-story-so-far/ (English)
I heard a German boasting recently that "they produced almost all of their elec. from renewables" - talk's cheap
"Hmmm and now try get a column containing 000846383 to load as text from a CSV."
It will in LibreOffice as long as ALL that column is to be text. You need to select the column in the import preview and change it's type from the pull-down menu to 'text'
With Excel I can't remember although I used to import VERY large CSVs once upon a time.
"how does Excel calculate if you have put the $ at the front of each number?"
Don't remember with Excel but LibreOffice ( presumably on a UK set machine) treats a number starting with a £ symbol as just that and sums to the correct value. Dollars and other currencies need have the cells/rows/columns formatted and then the unadorned number typed. A safer option really, in any case, is to format to use the 3-letter currency code USD, CHF, GBP etc. which also can be chosen from the formatting menu
"rows to the value of $500 were inserted into the spreadsheet but somebody forgot to press F9 in order to recalculate the spreadsheet formulae."
Why would you have turned off auto mode ? I rarely did even when I had huge sheets. Recalculate was pretty quick.
Even on this old 1.6GHz Celeron laptop using LibreOffice I've just altered the first value in a set of 400000 sine calculations each dependent on the another and it took < 1sec
"Indeed, who *does* use TIFF as a common file format? "
It's used in photography as it's lossless , indeed I think some RAW formats are modified TIFF. Certainly photo processing software like the panorama program Hugin uses it internally for intermediates and can also export it.
"You can (apparently) easily use samba over wireless"
I certainly use Samba/the house file server via wireless to let my wife's Nexus 7 save/load stuff using ( I think - we're away at the moment) FileExpert > interestingly it only seems to allow onto the Nexus file formats that Android has apps that will open - must probe a little more
"You may find that when you made the booking for the hotel in advance"
No, and as I have a motorhome I spend a lot of time on French campsites too - some ask for form filling but hardly any ask for passports.
"Switzerland you may do,"
Almost never, and I travel there by road a lot as we have a holiday home. Infrequently at the motorway crossing in Geneva. A few years ago (~2009) we crossed near Belfort on a fine road (E27) with brand new huge customs/border area which was completely deserted
"This requires all hotels and other commercial accommodation to have foreign guests complete, in their own hand, a registration form and provide valid identification documents."
Well I've traveled to Europe, mostly by road, 3-5 times a year for the last 20+ years and I've never needed anything other than a booking number for a hotel, occas. filled out a form, hardly ever shown a passport (except flying) , maybe once or twice at the Swiss border - but always traveling back into GB
""Also, one remembers that Stuxnet was spread by USB sticks."
The original versions used a modified autorun.inf file.
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/stuxnet-lnk-file-vulnerability
Later versions used a vulnerability in how .lnk files were handled
"This means that, even with AutoRun and AutoPlay disabled, you can open a removable media device (USB) and execute malicious code without user interaction."
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2010/07/15/windows-day-vulnerability-shortcut-files-usb/
Sounds distinctly nutty - these lines are a giveaway
"but there is a distinct, new humming in the computing room from the walls Could be something far out there like LAN over Powerline I'd suspect, as the outlets in the room are clearly magnetically charged too now? (wtf??)"
And his Android tablet - "The read-me and license files were all filled with scripts to keylog and steal photos, video and audio from the microphone" - or maybe that's standard
"My cellphone, my NON-smartphone cellphone got hacked."
@ John Smith 19
He seems to claim that audio is used just for C&C links although I find it all very far fetched. There's a forum on SANS
https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Happy+Halloween+The+Ghost+Really+May+Be+In+The+Machine/16934
in which the man himself (anon?) is giving some details which I have to say seems very confused. He's saying they are short of money for forensic gear and yet seems to be throwing new PCs at the problem.
I'd have thought a workshop/lab with even modest equipment should be able to check at least some of these claims.
The other startling claim is that this may have been affecting him for 3 YEARS.Oh, and "the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed.."
"And no surprises I've received at least 4 down-votes,"
You probably received them because your post was rather unclear about what you meant - indeed I'm still not sure either. What would you like the default to be ?
BTW even I could restore the OS and the extra software I use in ~30 mins without touching my personal files.
It doesn't help posting as AC either as there is a certain AC around who trashes Linux ALL the time
" It's stupid that by default Linux distro's only create a single filesystem. "
Some do but certainly not all. I've never experienced a single partition install in years In fact I installed OpenSUSE onto a 16GB pendrive the other day - not a live CD but a full install and it defaulted to a 6GB partition for the root system / and a 8GB for /home - the only change I made was to suggest a swap partition on the stick as well ( this was an experiment to have a full mobile Liniux 'machine' that I could carry from machine to machine. Apart from being a little slow to boot ( the stick's access time is rather slow) it seems to have worked very well
"ow comes with DAB as standard and the first internet-enabled car radios are making an appearance so expect digital radio listening in the car to grow sharply."
Except that most people find their car radio is often useless on DAB, I know mine is. SO just because cars are being fitted with them doesn't mean that the DAB stations are being used. For that matter my car is fitted with self-parking but I'll never use it.
Until DAB radios are cigarette lighter sized and run for 12 hours on one AAA battery like my Roberts FM set they're useless for hill walking too.
"It seems to be smaller than most Linux distributions...."
That's a stupid comment even by your standards as I'm sure you know most Linux distros ship with MASSES of user programs. FYI I've just generated a custom distro using SUSE Studio (brilliant) and with all the software I want it is a 270MB download
"It always seemed obvious that a GW detector near a big particle accelerator should be picking up feint but repetitive pulses when the accelerator was running."
I don't think the minute amount of protons being run around the accelerator even with relativistic mass would generate any measurable gravity wave esp. as ( AFAIK) the usual detectors probably wouldn't be tuned to the frequency of any such wave. A single bunch of protons at the LHC must have an orbital rate of ~10000 orbits/s