Posts by pixl97 295 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2011
>when they start to inconvenience someone important the rules can be thrown out of the window.
We need to publish lists of these someone importants on the internet so sustained attacks can be commissioned against just them until the time that they figure out not being a twat when it comes to policy is necessary.
"I want the secret of the Coca-Cola company not to be kept in a tiny file of 1KB, which can be exfiltrated easily by an APT," Shamir said. "I want that file to be 1TB, which can not be exfiltrated. I want many other ideas to be exploited to prevent an APT from operating efficiently.
MIcrosoft made this years ago by allowing you to embed flash in a .doc file.
Designed to fail, because it's a single point of failure. I bet about everything else with the system is redundant.
The entire cert system needs to be ran off 2 different CA's, the entire system can run off one, but has a total fit about it (leading a person to correct the problem). Oh, and make sure the CA's expriy dates are significantly different.
Redundant Hardware: Check.
Redundant Network: Check.
Redundant DNS: Check.
Redundant Services: Check.
Single point of failure at certificate services: Check, wait not FAIL, crap ARRAHHH.
Design tip for next time, find a way for your services to use two different set of certificates from two different providers. Make sure the expiry dates differ. Have stuff warn, but not fail if there is a problem with one.
I'd like my consulting fee now.
Ugh, it's because the word cloud is used in places it shouldn't be.
It's not the WAN, it's the VM. Cloud isn't about the end user, it's all internet to them. It's about the server room. Cloud is not co-location, it's closer to no-location. Go back 10 years, ask your co-location service to have 150 servers up and running for you in 2 hours and then take them down 10 hours later. I think the words they would use is 'FAT FUCKING CHANCE' as they hung up. I see cloud as the abstraction of the server room. Apps have always had some abstraction when they used DNS to contact a server, now because of VMs I can push that same server to US, EU, or Asia in almost no time, depending on what I needed to serve. And then, I can take it all back down quickly.
Reality is, since running on VMs has become almost universal, that clouds will be here to stay.
Being a server guy I see the 'cloud' as a hardware abstraction layer for software that has rapidly changing demands. If I need extra 'burst' processing capability for rare events, I can have a number of VM images on the cloud provider of the day ready to go at a moments notice. I don't have to have $x extra servers taking up space and power sitting unused 95% of the time.
I tend to think of my server room as baseline power, a nuclear power plant. I have a lot of power available, but it is inflexible if large, short endurance spikes of demand (it would take days to add new servers, even after I got purchase authorization). The cloud works like natural gas generators for me. They are more expensive to use, but they can be fired up quickly when needed and then shut down.
If it doesn't feel like a quantum leap in technology, maybe you aren't using it. VM/VDI has made deployment, management, and backup of servers click and drool easy. People where time sharing in the 60's because computers were expensive. I time share (VM) servers because they fast and cheap, so fast that without VMs you'd have to put a lot of services on one box, which in the Windows world is a great way to have things go bad.
>Please summarise all science learned from the Mars missions so far, plus the cost of obtaining it
Mars is not made from gold and unobtanium. Oh, and we've learned how to send bots to other planets where the speed of light makes significant communications delays run around and do stuff, so lets say if in the future we want to mine rocks from there.
Real science isn't like the movies. Oh, and space is big and boring, pretty much the only place with interesting things occurring in real-time (on the human scale) is earth.
You do realize when you mix white and black people together, you don't get grey people. As much as the women tan around here it would seem that closer to a light brown is pretty popular.
Anyway, if the porn sites are giving me accurate statistics, all the black men are having sex with white women that have a very large derriere.
>Data transfer errors with SMB or FTP? Maybe the next fw update will fix it. (never did)
Our Linux router shows some interesting logs from one of these BlackArmors
'martian destination 127.0.0.1 from 192.168.10.143, dev eth2'
(.143 is the BA unit)
WTF, who fucked up the network stack in these units. How do 127 packets even leave the device?!?
Please explain why VM is the worst thing to happen to computing again? Why at some point in the future am I going to regret it, hell I regret not going to it sooner. Or is this just mixing VM and cloud together? Since I run my own VM servers I can balance out the need for IO and CPU, this has lead to far fewer servers and great cost reductions in the amount of systems I need. Instant snapshots (and the ability to back them up easily) has made system administration far easier. Being able to move guests easily or spinning up a second copy from a snapshot is something I only dreamed about 10 years ago.
That said I don't do much cloud stuff, but.. If I need a lot of extra capacity very quickly it is extremely easy to start up a number of instances and then shut them down again. There are a number of things I don't put in the could though to avoid HIPAA and other regulations.
>If I shoot you with a gun, it's pretty obvious it was me. If I shoot you with a remote controlled drone, it's not?
It's probably easier to train with a scoped rifle and hit someone then try to hit someone with a gun on a 'reasonably affordable' drone. You can hit someone with a scoped rifle from quite a distance, we tend to call the people who do it regularly snipers.
Lesson 1. Never believe the performance metrics giving to you from the people you pay. They will only show themselves in the best possible light.
Solution for lesson 1. Monitor your sites performance from different 3rd party locations, preferably from locations across the world where you have concentrations of customers.
Lesson 2. Proprietary software locks you in to a provider. Even though in the beginning the software sounds like the sweetest thing since sugar and is completely buzzword compliant, Even a simple change by the provider can send costs skyrocketing.
Solution for lesson 2. Standards compliant and/or open source software. Do not tie your data to one program. Look at your software/platform as an investment. If it has no liquidity or fungibility you are stuck with the pricing of one company rather than an entire market. Monopolies rarely treat their customers fairly.
Most desktop towers are built with the mainboard mounted on in inside right of the case (if you are looking at it from the front). Dell likes to build any number of units internally reversed, so not only are the connectors on the other side of the rear of the case, you have to flip the connector for it to go in.
>...and what happens when the knot at the end comes undone and the universe flies around the room making a 'pbltltttbhbbbttttt!' sound?
Quite possibly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Vacuum_metastability_event
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
'The region visible from Earth (the observable Universe) is a sphere with a radius of about 47 billion light years,['
Perhaps when talking about the size of the universe, one should say 'observable universe', because the unobservable universe is much bigger, possible infinite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance
Comoving distance makes trying to figure out where something would be now interesting, since 'the universe' is expanding equally (apparently) in all directions.
Yes, most of the time I run Windows on Xen or something like that, but I do have a few instances of the other way around.
In once case I run a small CentOS instance in Hyper-V on a 2008 Domain Controller. It runs a few scripts like MRTG, RRDTool, Smokeping, and some other SNMP stuff monitoring network metrics and performance. It was easier for me to set up Linux then try to have the commands work in Windows.
I read this article on Erlang and TCPincast and imagine application issues like this will cause the migration to 10G-E sooner then many people will think.
http://www.snookles.com/slf-blog/2012/01/05/tcp-incast-what-is-it/
This page is even better at describing the issue. http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/Incast/
Sometimes it's easier to throw more hardware at the problem then fix the nature of the problem.
Could the increased cost of energy extraction and waste disposal be consuming our growth?
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/story/2011-12-13/electric-bills/51840042/1
Without a significant decrease in energy costs any growth will be consumed by increased extraction costs. We've mined all the cheap and easy stuff and are digging deeper and farther out then ever. Solar, Wind, and other renewables are more expensive then their non-renewable counterparts and economies based on them will see a larger piece of their economic output used to support them. On the other side of the same coin we're globally *trying* to limit pollution, where once pollution costs were externalized (by dumping it where ever), now it's a cost of doing business.
Kinda like when people actually figure out the words to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_%28song%29
My rather conservative nephew was singing the song with the lyrics all wrong and was rather redfaced when I told him to go look them up. I still get a chuckle out of that.
There are many times finding the misattributed song has lead me to the actual artist. At least the internet makes it easily searchable when you have incorrect information and are trying to find what you are looking for. It was a real pain in the ass back in the day trying to sing to someone else to see if they could figure out the song you were talking about.
Oh, and my favorite "There's a bathroom on the right" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Moon_Rising_(song)
Why would you want a duplicate checker to check a whole file? In theory you'd only check files of the same size then check the file up to the first difference (which may be the entire file up to the last byte).
Now, if you wanted to check against any future duplicates you'd select a hashing system that makes sense for the number and size of files you will have (CRC may be fine, or SHA-512 if you want to reduce the chance of collisions), then hash the file as it comes in to your system since that should be the cheapest time to do it. You could then save this info to a database that could handle the comparisons quickly. Just make sure you figure a way to handle deletions and moves correctly.
>I have no way of putting them back in the pool... at any price!
If someone wants them, there will be a price for them. If no one wants them but you, the price is determined by how long the person that has them wants to sit on them vs how much you are willing to pay.
If someone wants them, but not 19/20 of them, ebay, or whatever industry related site them off. May take a while though.
The author didn't state something here...
Reuters "Lanthanum, used in rechargeable batteries for hybrid autos and in night-vision goggles, rocketed 26-fold from $5.15 a kg in January 2010 to a peak of $140 in June 2011. Although it has slid to $20.50, the price is still well above earlier lows."
Even though they don't have a monopoly on light rares, they managed to make 28x what they were for a while, and the market is still 4x over what it was. Assuming the base mining costs are the same, they have compressed many years of profits in to one. Also, it is very likely the mines from the Americas are going to produce a more expensive product simply because of environmental regulations. What may cause the bigger problem is all the new mines coming on line and crashing the prices, then going out of business, meanwhile the rare earth mines in China fund themselves off the heavy rares they produce.
"Analyst Edward Otto at Cormark Securities forecasts the long-term price of cerium oxide to settle eventually at 50 cents a kg and lanthanum oxide at $1.00 per kg, down from $20.50/kg currently."
Support for legacy documents sounds like a good thing to remove. Just another place for a bug to creep in and exploit the program.
I'm trialing Outlook 2013 currently and having a problem with S/MIME
I have a .pfx key that works fine on my iphone for signing messages, but when I setup Outlook to use it, the program locks up when I try to send a signed message. So far I've not seen anything else on google about this.
Which is why you should use full disk encryption or set your truecrypt drives to unmount themselves after some time of inactivity. When you unmount a drive Truecrypt actively erases they key from memory. Truecrypt also tries to make sure master keys don't hit the page file.
http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/unencrypted-data-in-ram
If anyone has ever read the Truecrypt site and forums they would already know 2 things.
Hibernation and encryption don't work securely together. and,
Disk encryption doesn't protect an open encrypted volume.
Only a system that is designed to clear the encryption key out of memory at hibernation and ask for it again when waking up is secure to go to sleep. Other then that, turn it off. I need to to experiment with SSDs using full disk encryption to see what the performance is like for full shutdowns and startups. Oh, and if you ever use a SSD on for an encrypted disk and want to change your key, move all your data off and do a factory wipe on it.
Yes, guns are the easy way to commit a mass murder. Take away the guns and you are still going to have a higher number of mass murders in America then other places. There is a cultural need to solve problems with violence here.
Also, Austraila has a gun ban, but it didn't stop this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childers_Palace_Fire
>It's time for the US government to grow some balls and do what's needed rather than just pretend to do something,
In theory the government is the people, and the people are deeply divided on guns. We shot up the king of England's boys a long time ago when he thought it was a good idea to do what he needed to do.
Just trying to blame guns alone doesn't make sense, Canada has had a much lower rate of mass murders then the U.S. per capita even before guns were banned in most cases there. I'm assuming that this has a historical basis of gaining independence via violence and surviving a very violent civil war. It becomes ingrained in the American ideal that violence is a solution that has worked in the past. Also add in the teaching that American freedom and independence helped saved the world both in WWI and WWII.
I'm assuming that these products are being designed for next generation product lines. The 2.5 format would allow the design of a much thinner end product. Add the quite and low power factor in and you can end up with a device that doesn't heat your room, stays silent about that fact, and might not look like an eyesore.
>Well what kind of negative environmental impact could that possibly have, eh?
Lets say it acts like a fertilizer, which it's trying to in this case. It could cause low oxygen levels in the water by causing a growth bloom. That's about all. If you're worried about the environmental impact, you'd be far more worried (at least in the U.S. case) that we put 3,000,000,000 pounds of nitrogen a year in the Gulf, from just one river. Who knows how much phosphorus. All concentrated close to the shore where it kills everything off. The place where most sea life lives.
Vast portions of the oceans are desserts. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/27/oecan-deserts.html Huge portions of the oceans don't have much life in them all all, mostly bound the the lack of iron. Dumping iron there is analog to watering the desserts on earth.
Think of how much effort would be saved if the world moved away from time zones and daylight savings times. Yes, it would be quite odd not to call the time when the sun is directly overhead 12, but instead noon could happen at what ever local hour it happened to fall at. It would be 14 o'clock in London, Chicago, and Hong Kong at the same time. We'd still have the same problem of knowing weather people are awake in that part of the world at the time, but knowing that the U.S. is dark from around 20 to 6 would mean the same thing for everybody.
I'm negative and cynical about everything without the Reg communities help, thank you.
And I will keep the flame to EVERY software providers feet on keeping their products patched. Open Source, Commercial, Freeware, and locked down and private. Remember Microsoft responds to security threats these days pretty well, because in the past they did not. Microsoft addresses security issues relatively responsibly because sitting on the problem and hiding it or going after the researchers ended up with the bugs hitting full disclosure lists and turning in to 0-day exploits.
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