Posts by SteveK

Re: Hardware nostalgia

I do still have a bunch of SGI kit that I acquired when it was being thrown out. Kept meaning to do something with them and never quite found the time.

As a result, hidden at the back of our server room is a Challenge L (4xR8000) (it is actually exceedingly difficult to 'hide' a Challenge server the size of a small fridge), 2-3 Indigo2s in various states of disrepair (including 1 Indigo2 Impact), a couple of Indys and an O2. The Challenge needed some hard disks, I think the Indigo2s were fine but had stripped them down in order to max the RAM in one.

Re: Irony-o-meter exploded!

Indeed, and only a mere couple of weeks since a major malware outbreak based on leaked vulnerabilities amassed by security agencies showed that said agencies clearly can't be trusted to securely safeguard any back doors that they might demand.

Don't forget your gold plated optical cables too!

Re: Dear Apple.

Register a trademark with a banana and two kiwis. That should do the trick.

Ah, that'll be the logo for 'Fruit Computers', and the iFruit Phone in the Grand Theft Auto series then.

http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/IFruit

Re: What if...

But then you won't be allowed in because it's too new and empty looking.

Please come back when you're following the endless ramblings of at least 100 vacuous celebrities.

Re: Meh!

Haven't apple already patented "taking all the profits from the mobile space"?

Re: The moral of the story?

I thought it was "Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are quick to anger and have no need for subtlety" ?

Re: Let's think big

I was thinking Warwick Davis - he was in Willow, several of the Harry Potters and all three Star Wars trilogies amongst others, so he's got fantasy/sci-fi credibility. And it's his birthday today, so why not.

Re: About time

Oh Big John. I'm so sorry but just look at all those down votes! I'm afraid like our glorious King we aren't winning the popular vote

But those down-votes were obviously made illegally by people who are dead or foreign. It's the only explanation as to where they came from. Or maybe the press did it?

Re: 'We...

'We, um, have to let this one go, because if we say how we got him, we might jeapordise future investigations.'

But surely future investigations are already jeopardised as future defence lawyers now know what they have to ask to get the case quietly dropped?

Re: How does it work in practice?

I'd read (but now can't find the reference) that the site is expected to do age checks (only on UK browsers) via either a credit card transaction, or by checking details against (government provided?) records (passports or something?). I'm sorry, I really wouldn't trust those who run porn sites to behave responsibly with personal data on the UK's population, or with credit cards.

But apparently the punishment on non-British porn sites that don't cooperate? They lose the ability to charge UK credit cards. But as any that *do* charge credit cards are clearly providing an age verification service, the only ones left will be the ones that make their money from affiliate links and hosting dodgy malware-laden adverts and so won't care about the punishment.

I would like to know though whose job it is to constantly patrol the world's porn sites looking for which sites do or don't do age verification.

Re: The real elephant in the room

The other option would be to run it as a physical server, but then you've still got a single point of failure, and at least with a VM, you might be able to migrate it to a working host if your hardware fails in a non terminal way.

I run it as the only VM on a standalone (free) ESXi box that it doesn't manage. So I can still take snapshots before upgrades and take advantage of hardware abstraction so can move it via shared storage to another box if the first one blows up (and have done so).

Re: Going nowhere

Quite. I'm also having some difficulty imagining that, at no point during any of the concerned parties activities, did "that's what insurance is for" occur to anyone.

They probably had insurance, but the insurers insist it's a wear and tear failure and not covered

No, didn't miss that bit. But as the article later says he handed over USB sticks containing classified material, it wasn't clear whether he had obtained classified data that he didn't have access to (in which case, how did he access it), or whether it wasn't 'Government classified', but - as in the section you quoted - proprietary trade secrets (in which case it is possibly misleading for the agent to describe it as 'classified').

Or perhaps it's my interpretation - companies have commercial secrets that they don't want competitors to have, and in this case may require a license to export, but to me at any rate, that's not the same thing as being classified as containing government secret information or designs, which ought to be access restricted etc.

I'm guessing it's the former - that he obtained the material that he wasn't supposed to have access to through nefarious means, but that implies poor security.

Re: History lesson

Ahh, Wimpy. Home of the 'Bender in a bun'.

And yes, that is an actual menu item, not the dodgy character skulking in the toilet.

Re: Healthy options

I misread the subtitle on quickly skimming and thought it was some sort of aversion therapy.

Or to put it another way, "Does it run Crysis?"

Only clue I get from the name patrick_bateman is the main character from psycho.

I thought that was Norman Bates? Or was that changed in a sequel/spinoff?

Re: Statement of the Obvious award of the week goes to:

While I do agree with you entirely, I'm afraid that 'statement of the obvious' award for this week has already gone to:

"This individual was wrapped in plastic bags and his arms were tied behind him and his feet were submerged in concrete," Detective Robert Boyce said in a press conference.

"Obviously a homicide," he added.

..from the BBC

Re: Didn't realize there were more data dumps to come

I was surprised that there were no US politicians in the list, but I guess if we've only seen 1/6th of it so far that makes sense. Maybe whoever is deciding the order of release has wants to hold up the US release until after the primaries are done so to maximize the fallout.

I've read two opposing views on the lack of prominent US politicians/wealthy donors (and I also wondered if the elections were involved) - the first a blog post saying that the group controlling the release of the data was owned and run by US politicians and billionaires and, surprise surprise, none of their own sort have been revealed.

The second (NY Times I think it was) explaining it by saying it's so easy to create shell companies in the US that US citizens don't need to bother with offshoring...

Not sure which of those views is worse than the other!

Re: Company wordsmith?

And as for it looks like a "superstar's car" I think I may have a different idea of what that may look like.

I'm not sure there - a lot of superstars would rush out to buy one based on the environmental stuff regardless of what it looks like - look how many Hollywood types were reported as having rushed to buy a Prius when they launched.

Re: @AC

From what I've read, a lot of the docs were scanned and ocr'd. So yeah, it could conceivably go back that far.

But if this report of a breach of a mailserver is to be believed, how would all this 40 year old scanned material have been obtained? Seems unlikely that a couple of Tb of scanned files would have been sat in someone's inbox rather than somewhere more suitable.

Re: Puzzled (@ DougS)

At the very least, being able to double your kid's room console as a Linux PC will save you the need of purchasing a dedicated PC, so the kids can e.g. surf the web and do their homework in a safe(-ish) environment

While I agree with your thinking, the fact it needs to use an exploit to work means that it won't be suitable as a proper tool/kids PC as the exploit will almost certainly get patched pretty soon.

I'm not sure that "I couldn't do my homework until someone hacks the latest PS4 firmware" will get much sympathy.

Yes, you could just not install firmware updates that block the exploit, but then,assuming Sony are consistent with how they handled firmware updates on the PS3, games and things like Netflix will refuse to work until you update the firmware, turning the machine back into a single-use box again.

I'd agree with that. In the past I've spent hours fiddling around with a Spectrum (or C64 or Amiga) emulator to fire up some game long remembered through magenta-tinted glasses (Spectrum didn't do 'rose'), only to play it for 2 minutes and decide it was actually pretty crap. There were some good games that did revolutionary things and pushed the boundaries of the hardware and of games in general. But they just don't live up to the depth, complexity and polish of modern games.

It may be in part that back then (maybe it's part of being a child?) you filled in the gaps with imagination (that circle's a planet, these few triangles are a spaceship - in the mind all fully textured and photo realistic) but now you're used to having those aspects and not needing to use your imagination to fill what's not there.

Not just the phone manufacturer, in many cases the manufacturer has released updates but the phone software has been tweaked by the mobile operator and only fetches updates from them - but once you're locked into a contract and that phone model has been superseded, there's no profit in them repackaging the manufacturer's updates and merging back in their own "value" added tat and branding, testing and developing fixes if it doesn't work.

Personally I think phone operators should be required to provide unmodified phones that will go and install the manufacturer updates, and not inject their own applications which probably are not highly security tested. Or required to provide timely updates (within 1 week of the upstream release, say) to their customers for at least the length of the contract, preferably 3 years, even if a newer shinier model comes out. You don't give the customer a new phone 6 months into their 24 month contract so support the one you gave them at the start.

Re: h2testw.exe anyone??

next time I need to do this I'm going to use dd - which will write until it fails unlike some other utilities which refuse to write at all - and then fsck (GParted) to "fix" the partition size

It didn't work for me, resulting truncated image wouldn't boot, but managed to faff about mounting the image via loopback and shrinking the filesystem down slightly so the resultant new image was small enough.

Wasn't any actual data on it, but would have taken longer to get the boot environment configured back how it was supposed to be than it took to mess about with the filesystem. At least I had an image of the SD card from a few months before it failed to go back to.

Re: Er...

If I had to work on them today, 'm not sure if I could understand the creative hackery I used in my own autoexecute.bat & config.sys files in the DOS days getting that one extra device running in a tiny memory footprint.

I agree... I used to pride myself on being able to outperform memmaker on getting the optimal sequence for loading DOS drivers and TSRs and create multiple boot sequences loading different combinations. Although it did take me longer!

At the time, worked for a games company and the QA department PCs tended to have at least 3 completely different ISA sound cards, a variety of VGA (and later additional 3DFX or PowerVR) cards, random network cards and CDRom drives - all of which needed different drivers loaded, not to mention just dual booting between DOS and Windows (with or without the drivers for connecting to Netware via IPX)...

A lost art. For which I am very grateful!

They'll also have some process where unless you pay extra (say, equivalent to the old roaming rates) the data rate will be so slow as to be virtually unusable. Certainly that's been my experience when abroad using the Three 'feel at home' 'free' roaming data - can almost watch the individual bits roll in. Fine for me checking email and looking up restaurant reviews mind.

Also I believe that the providers are allowed to impose a fair use limit. If so, I would imagine that to be set to .. ooh .. a generous 10Mb/day maybe? Hopefully you catch it and turn roaming data off before it kicks into the out-of-tariff data rates...

Re: Can we finally settle this?

I always thought it was the strange tape numbering system where it was the length of tape in feet (so an L750 was 3 hours 15 - thanks Wikipedia) rather than VHS's simpler 'minutes'...