Different issues
So, what's the real issue? Is it just poor security (as the report seems to suggest) or fear of Chinese government backdoors?
155 posts • joined 15 Sep 2009
Today, thanks to low quality electronic devices (switching power supplies, led lamps, usb devices) or devices that generate interference by design like powerline ethernet, the whole RF spectrum from 0 to at least 150 MHz is flooded with noise.
I am an ham radio operator, and I can tell you that if you live in an urban area, no ham band below 70 cm (430 MHz) is noise-free.
On the bright side, I am happy to report that the LED street lamps that have been installed in Bologna, Italy, where I live, are properly shielded and have not increased the noise level at all.
I'm totally sure that in Vietnam the law stating that data should reside only inside the country is made to restrict citizen's freedom.
But, I'm also totally sure that the same applies to every other state that has such a law (Europe, I'm talking abou YOU!).
Soon every nation will have its own great firewall, and the free and united internet will cease to exist.
Thunderbird does NOT need a fancy and useless "modern" UI. It needs internal rework. Local email storage is SLOW when folders are big. IMAP sometimes hangs on "sending message". Sometimes TB just crashes (rarely, but it happens). On big installations (with lots of accounts and folders and emails) it sometimes says that this or that script no longer responds, even of fast PCs with SSDs. I have some 100 or so installations on win, mac, and linux. And they all have the same issues. So, issues are not OS-related.
Everybody (based on comments here) want a USABLE email client, and TB is committed to produce a "nice" email client. I think we have a problem here.
Not necessarily. This is Italy, where the government just wants your money, and it wants it NOW. It does not matter if you're a criminal or not. You can settle these kind of issues out of court. And, as usual, if you have unpaid taxes worth 10 euros, you get to pay 1000 euros. If you have unpaid taxes worth 100 millions euros, you end up paying one million. This depends on the level (as in D&D) of your fiscal consultants.
systemd
-free Devuan Linux hits version 1.0.0
I'm a long time (since versione 3) Debian user, and now I have both Debian Jessie (with systemd removed) and Devuan Jessie beta installed in about 50 servers total. They both work fine. On my desktop I use Mint. I will end up using systemd on my dekstop distro, I suppose, and I can live with it as long as it does not crash too often. But I don't want it in my server.
I had this very very old and very dusty PC from a rock grinding mill control system (yes, very fine rock powder everywhere) that needed to be cleaned. I had an oversized air compressor. I have TRIED to be kind, regulating air flow by gently pulling the air gun trigger, and it sort of worked. No components flying around. But I forgot to hold the cpu fan in place, so it went spinning at about 100.000 RPM, generated a lot of current (a motor is a generator, too) and totally fried something. The PC never booted again.
I remember the old WD Raptors, that had a glitch every 57,6 days of being powered on. Mirror sets failed synchronously. History repeats itself. At that time, WD would not acknowledge the issue. They did later on, on a private basis, and never made it public. But then you could find the relevant information by googling.
systemd
v228
Telecom Italia, in years 2000-2003, gave their BUSINESS users a router from "Telindus" that exposed its password in plain text to anyone that sent the right "request" to it. Both on LAN and on WAN. So hacking Telecom Italia business users was as simple as sending the right request packet (simple and identical for every router, no MAC address hash involved) to every Telecom Italia public IP address, and you could collect all of the router's passwords in plain text. Then you telnet to the router and you are in.
I discovered this vulnerability while trying to access a router (locally) for a customer who lost the password. (http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/bugtraq/2002-06/0028.html)
When I told Telecom Italia (and then Telindus) about it, they asked me if I was going after a ransom, if I was some sort of criminal. I just wanted to warn them. Anyway, 6 months later, they changed the firmware so that now you needed to apply a XOR to have the password in plain text.
Double Fail!
I have had a lot of bad experiences with Asus mainboards (and with quite every consumer mainboard I have happened to use under heavy load). These mainboard are usually slow. Their buses are full of bottlenecks, so you don't get to use all fo the speed of the CPU or of the disks or of the RAM you are installing. I know that this is not a proper techical description of the issues I had, but I am no more "up to date" with modern hardware design. What I know is that I have seen more than one Asus-based "very fast workstation" perform very poorly at various I/O intensive tasks. I have seen the latest and greatest hardware (Asus mainboard) run terribly slow when compared to hardware that was 5 years old (Intel mainboard) at the same task (mechanical 3D CAD that needed to load hunderds of little files to create the entire project in RAM). It was not a video card issue, but definitely an I/O issue.
How does your setup feel? Does it feel fast enough, considering the CPU and RAM you are using? Have you tried using different mainboards?
Some time ago (six months, maybe) I was installing some new Windows machines (which I usually don't, because I am a Linux sysadmin) and after installing them I wanted to install "security essentials", so I opened up Explorer, and searched (in Bing, it is the default search engine) for "microsoft security essentials". The first two links (sponsored, I suppose, because they were on some gray or blue background) where for malware sites, the first non sponsored link was for some dodgy download site that puts spyware in every download, and the fourth result was for the right site.
If I run the same search in Firefox (same windows box, same day, just installed Firefox and tried the search on Bing using Firefox) , the sponsored links do not appear at all.
I have confirmed this behaviour for at least four or five times. I don't know if they have fixed it now.
... but I like to play Diablo 2 offline in coop mode with some friends, on a LAN with no internet connection (at a cottage with flaky cellular connection and no phone and dsl line). This "online only" mode, that is not actually required (except for DRM purposes) when playing solo or in a LAN environment will spoil our Diablo nights at the cottage.
So I', not buying it, at least not until we find a way to play offline in our LAN, which may be possible by cracking the DRM, or may not be possible at all, if the game can only talk to its servers to setup a multiplayer coop game, instead of talking to the other local installations.
While such a solution can be nice for a fibre patch cable (that you buy already "terminated" with such opto-electronic integration), it is quite useless for longer runs where you have to lay the fibre for hundreds of meters (or feet, o furlongs, or whatever) and then cut it and connect it. You should have the fibre pre-cut and pre-terminated at the right lenght, before you buy it.
Well, when someone really thinks that a big non-touch monitor needs to run the same interface as a small touch one, I think it's time to say "sure, go on with this madness" and promptly choose another distro or another desktop manager.
I like the Android touch-friendly interface on my phone and on my tablet, but I DON'T WANT the same interface on my 28 inch non-touch monitor.
Interface designers in commercial products think that users are stupid, suffer from attention disorder, and cannot focus on more that one simple task on one big window that covers all of the screen, with no more that two big buttons at a time. Everything more complex is absolutely too hard to use. And while there are smarter users in the commercial software world, there are also a lot of brain damaged users.
But, if we keep helping the brain damaged users, sooner or later the smart users will die of boredom.
Have you seen the movie "Idiocracy"? It is a perfect example of where we are headed.