* Posts by Paul Crawford

5625 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Removing their internet access would be a fitting punishment.

TrueNAS CORE 13 is the end of the FreeBSD version

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Bad news indeed

This is a bad move as far as I can see it for two reasons. The first is the obvious one that being able to boot the lot from a USB stick in a small server or adapted desktop is great for home and small office use, furthermore that is likely to get small businesses looking at paid-for support if they are using it and realise it has become business critical.

Second reason is that I would rather have a different OS for my backup machine in case my main machines (almost all Linux) find themselves with their pants down one day due to a zero-day bug, one would hope that FeeeBSD would not (more so given their generally slow/negligible adoption of useless features that might compromise security).

In my previous employment we had a ZFS based NAS using Solaris, but that turned out to be pretty awful due to Sun rushing it out, and Oracle being rubbish at fixing any of that once they took over. Perhaps as the key engineers had all left! So while I think ZFS is fantastic for this sort of a job due to integrity checks being built-in, and low-overhead snapshots against data corruption by ransomware, it seems hard to get a company who can wrap it in to a good product that is not prone to bloat and usurious licenses.

Microsoft license shuffle means Power Apps users could break the bank

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"Instead, it looks like Microsoft is using it as an opportunity to further limit Power Apps subscription rights and increase cost for customers who deployed Power Apps solutions in good faith," he concluded.

You mean business as usual then?

Any on-going license or service is subject to their capricious money generating goals. But you already know that?

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

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Gimp

Re: "The .. crime we uncovered here could threaten the integrity of our wildlife species in Montana"

I hoped for more Cougars

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Impressive horns

Oh, great idea - breed a small sheep that can use a semi-automatic on any intruders!

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Re: "The .. crime we uncovered here could threaten the integrity of our wildlife species in Montana"

The love that dare not baaaa its name?

Exchange Online blocked from sending email to AOL and Yahoo

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You may laugh...yes, I know now please stop laughing...but I have found my Yahoo spam-sink email has been much less of a crap show than any attempts with MS for a free low-value email address in the past.

Trump 'tried to sell Truth Social to Musk' as SPAC deal stalled

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Re: How much?

I utterly fail to see the value either. Twitter was stupidly over-priced and far more popular than TS, and that seems to have crashed and burned in finance as well as reputation.

Just how did they get a value such as that?

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

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Many folks might have it installed on their phone but don't actually use it much (or even at all).

British Library pushes the cloud button, says legacy IT estate cause of hefty rebuild

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I suspect what really happened is old servers had their OS wiped and now you can't get a new image to boot (due to lack of working CD drive, no usable USB boot support, etc) or that new OS just don't support the hardware. So not "destroyed" in a real sense, but "rendered unusable for re-use" in practice.

We have got rid of old Dell servers as it was too much convoluted steps to try and boot a new USB stick with Linux on it, not to mention your work might be worthless if the hardware actually fails in 1-2 years or less.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

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Better option

The best option is, of course, never to touch any company that has difficult/opaque licensing terms, or are known abusers of audits.

We were quite fond of Solaris back in the day, but once borged by Oracle it was game over and Linux machines went in to do those jobs as the Sun boxes were retired.

Microsoft confirms Russian spies stole source code, accessed internal systems

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Re: Zero trust?

Oh I have had zero trust of MS for many years now.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

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Re: Trump's like a 10-year old child with the name-calling.

"orange Judas" is how it always reads to me.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: US politics is basically

As one comedian said in an apparent attempt at irony: many Americans can remember what they were doing when Kennedy was shot, they can remember what they were doing when Lincon was shot".

Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7

Paul Crawford Silver badge

But should you be managing newer kit from an old, say W7, machine that exists now for some legacy reason?

That is kind of my original point: yes keep older OS for specific software/hardware reasons, but for goodness sake divest any external and non-essential tasks off it so you are really only doing what you absolutely have to there, and all the rest is done on newer supported machines.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

I can see very good reasons to keep XP and similar going for specialised hardware or software that has no (affordable) replacements, but why in $DIETY name would you be browsing the web from that?

If not tied to hardware then run in a VM and use the supported host for your email/browsing! If tied to hardware get a 2nd PC to browse!

Boffins propose fiber-optic network for the Moon

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Lightweight overhead fibre (off the shelf stuff) is about 40kg/km, so 4 tonnes for a 100km run. That has a few fibres per bundle as well!

It would seem practical to get 100km specially made and weight in at 1T but the rover to lay that without incident is the real challenge.

German defense chat overheard by Russian eavesdroppers on Cisco's WebEx

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Re: Paranoia Is Mandatory In 2024!!

I trust their chocolate.

Would you trust Hershey for a mouth full of pleasure?

US accuses Army vet cyber-Casanova of sharing Russia-Ukraine war secrets

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innocent fool => guilty tool ?

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

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Re: Bring back 3.11

But only on Mondays

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

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Re: Came to say the same thing

The basic EU eCall system only broadcasts your position if the car is involved in a crash (probably airbags deployed).

However, car companies are eager to whore your data to world+dog and that is far more of a privacy issue. What should be happening in USA/EU is a rule with serious financial penalties so you get to chose no data if you want, and it must be honoured without any nagging or essential systems just not working.

One can dream, but the EU is the more likely place for that to happen. If it ever does.

Uncle Sam explores satellites that can create propellant out of thin air

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Is this a bit like the engines that drove Red Dwarf?

AT&T's apology for Thursday's outage should stretch to a cup of coffee

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Re: That reminds me of Lily Tomlin's line

Sadly that is not restricted to the USA

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AT&T's offer to consumers and small businesses is a reminder to check your contracts and exactly what that SLA really means

Soft, strong, and absorbent is the usual?

Microsoft's February Windows 11 security update unravels at 96% for some users

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Gimp

Re: "Something didn't go as planned. No need to worry – undoing

Hot crumpet here, thanks.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

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Re: re: Twitter/X account

I read that as Orange Judas

It's crazy but it's true: Apple rejected Bing for wrong answers about Annie Lennox

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Re: All search engines, now appear to be crap.

Don't know how they took something so good and made it into something so lame.

Follow the money...

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

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Re: Windows NT

You can memory-map files in C on Linux as well using mmap() to make them look like RAM, can be very handy at times. Not sure if it is limited to local storage (most likely) or can also be done with network storage though. Also available for python and probably a few other platforms.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Hit-and-Miss

The cost of PMEM is not such a critical aspect as, one might presume, it becomes just a tier in a seamless pool of storage and is essentially a cache that happens to be non-volatile so you don't have the issue of journaling, etc, so a crash or power off causes incomplete storage.

However, given the crappy state of all software (and absolutely no sign of that improving) the issue of how to recover from the inevitable crashes is really, REALLY, serious. It needs seamless and low-overhead snap-shots of the OS, apps and data, so you have a sporting chance at the not-a-boot prompt to select how you want to recover if anything is amiss following a crash (or yet another borked update).

Microsoft catches the Wi-Fi 7 wave with Windows 11

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Or half a dozen other WiFi points are around you competing for spectrum. Oh yes, like most blocks of flats...

Singapore's monetary authority advises banks to get busy protecting against quantum decryption

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Re: Easy solution

A random and secure one-time pad does indeed render definite decryption impossible.

In the real world, and for messages of non-trivial size, it is simply not practical. Hence the need for key-exchange algorithms that are hard to do (or QKD so you know if a key was intercepted), and block ciphers that are tolerably fast and tolerably secure on shorter keys thus exchanged.

The concerns are real, not because quantum comping is just around the corner, but because it might be in a decade's time and most big businesses like banks are as agile as an oil tanker in a yacht race.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Where’s The Potential Threat?

with 256-bits will have been captured and saved, ripe for cracking. If you make it 4096 bits that's only 16 more times computing power for a classical cpu

Er, no. Going from 256 bits to 257 bits is one more bit of entropy, twice as many choices.

Assuming no deep flaws that make the algorithm susceptible to short cuts...

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

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Only to a point. Lightning has most power below 1MHz so cables that are in the hundreds of meters to pick up sizeable power. NEMP has power well up to 1GHz and beyond so only a couple of cm is plenty, and most devices have that and VERY much lower damage thresholds than before.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

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Not like every developer has buckets of space and money to replace hardware when microsoft dictates it.

Err, is the article not that MS will now dictate this whether you like it or not?

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My i7 3770 with 32GB RAM is a totally usable computer

So why on Earth would you want to install MS' latest OS?!

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Then again, running Microsoft's latest OS on hardware more than a decade old is probably likely being done by enthusiasts masochists than an ordinary users.

Fixed it for you...

Meta says risk of account theft after phone number recycling isn't its problem to solve

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Re: Well if Meta are going to get roasted for this one

Oh it is much better than nothing, but only really if both are not on the same device (e.g. 2nd to 1st = saved password on your phone) as then all keys lie with whoever has accesses to it.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

SMS / phone number should not be the only means - it is acceptable as the '2' in 2FA where something more robust is the primary authentication, but not here where your allocated (and reused) phone number is all you need to get in to an account.

They won't fix it most likely as they are more concerned about making it easy to sign up for whoring to advertisers.

Closure of Windows 10 upgrade path still catching users by surprise

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Linux

Once again I am reminded of why I ditched Windows as my primary OS when XP introduced this crap.

Windows specific software now in VM, with no need for internet access and no worries over hardware faults impacting on keys.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: We dont go for "uptime" records

I once worked with a company that installed a Vax cluster for redundancy at a client site. Years later it failed.

When they were called it to explain and then it turned out one of the machines had failed a year previous and nobody noticed, and more importantly, nobody fixed it. Second failure took out the lot.

The lesson being to actually monitor stuff!

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: We dont go for "uptime" records

Doing a reboot when you can is in my mind A Good Thing. While I mostly use Linux boxes and they have less need of rebooting for patches, I have been caught out before by a boot loader patch that borked booting but in itself had no need to reboot. Only discovered when an unplanned late night reboot occurred, doh!

After that I try to reboot after significant patching even if not called for, assuming there is not any real impact from doing so.

The other "gotcha!" is application software that has been changed and fails to properly start on boot. It may have SFA to do with the OS patching, but again a planned reboot while to responsible software person is to hand is a good policy so you have a server that is kept in "automatically recovers" mode. Because unplanned reboots happen. Due to power issues, gross administrative error, system lock-ups triggering a watchdog, etc, etc.

Work to resolve binary babble from Voyager 1 is ongoing

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Facepalm

You see what the science and engineering folks at JPL have accomplished in 5 decades.

Then you see their budget being cut due to political squabbling and ask what the politicians have accomplished in their 3-5 decades of adult life.

Rust can help make software secure – but it's no cure-all

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Re: "Security is a process, not a product. Nor a language"

It is not paranoia - somebody is out to get you.

It might be the $BADGUYS in t'Internet, or it might be Smithers in accounts to carelessly copies and pastes, or it might be one of your dev team who didn't pay enough attention to $SYSTEMCALL, but they are out there so you need to be building defences in from the very start...

CERN is training robot dogs to spot radiation hazards at Large Hadron Collider

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Re: $2700

Robot butlers are closer than I realised!

As long as you don't mind them peeing on your leg...

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

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Holy Quarrel by Philip K. Dick

Worth a read...

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

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Best name?

I feel an El Reg poll coming, as "Future Circular Collider" is not really that exciting, nor does it lend itself to puerile puns. I would vote for Harder Hadron Collider, but maybe the legion of commentards have better suggestions?

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Facepalm

Sir David King, a chemist and a former chief scientific advisor for the British government, called the project "reckless" in an interview.

Sure £17.1 billion is a lot even for a group of nations, but even the grand total is less than the impact to the UK of having Liz Truss do a single budget...

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

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Re: What percentage?

Hard to know. Some problems are solved by a software reboot (if you can get a usable prompt, etc) but that won't always reset the hardware in to known good states.

A lot of proper high-availability stuff has a watchdog daemon that monitors system health and expected processes, etc, and if it looks bad, forces a reboot. Ideally backed by a hardware timer so if the daemon and/or kernel itself dies, a hard reboot follows not long after. That has saved me a trip and/or manual intervention on a good few occasions.

Paul Crawford Silver badge

Re: Hillary-ous

It has been downhill ever since...

Oracle quietly extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037

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And in 2018 Oracle just about confirmed that status by halting development of a major upgrade and freezing the OS at version 11.4, plus continuous patches and package updates.

Don't you wish more OS would stop monkeying with adding new/shiny/shitty stuff and just keep fixing the known/working/stable system?