Posts by btrower

It's an error. Fix it.

What this means is that the BitCoin system has a bug or design error that makes it vulnerable to this type of attack. If it is to be a proper part of the Internet, it needs to be able to route around such attacks.

This is an argument in favor of Crypto Currency, not against it. The fact that they have control over other forms of exchange and don't over this is a bad thing for them but a good thing for us. Intervening like this is an admission that they can't control Crypto Currency.

I have some technical misgivings about BitCoin in particular and I think it should be replaced rather than upgraded. However, I think we truly need a strong assault-proof Crypto-Currency.

Don't forget the Lemonade

The upside of this is that the Internet *always* routes around damage. The CoLP are an attacker and will eventually be rebuffed and kicked off of the Internet. Hopefully we will be able to identify other entities and individuals involved so the suspension from the Internet applies to them as well.

We need an equivalent to RBL that identifies these attackers so that their IP traffic only goes where it is welcome. Hint:It is not welcome here.

Forbes can kiss my graminivorous quadriped

They are making their case on the a priori assumption that patents are good and necessary. If patents were net positive, they would show their proof. They do not show the proof because they have no such proof. They have no such proof because that proof does not and cannot exist because patents are not net positive.

If it looks like a troll, sues like a troll, and quacks like a troll, then it probably is a troll. Either that or a very ugly duck.

How much?

These sound pretty cool, but the article fails to mention how much they cost. If they are cheap enough I would like to buy a bucket full.

Kudos!

Re: took "a substantial commitment of time and resources."

Gutsy move. It is devilishly difficult in practice to bake in security like this. Even if there are significant flaws, this is still really good news. As long as we establish the principle that security has this stature, we will eventually get there.

That's the way you do it...

Your money for nothing and your chicks for free.

Personally Torn

I am personally torn over all of the stuff like this. As a Canadian, I am a compulsive rule follower. I find the notion of straying outside even illegitimate boundaries uncomfortable. As a developer, I take an attack on a system very seriously. It is not as dire now, but once upon a time even a fairly weak attack could take weeks to clear up and even destroy years of work.

The ultimate place to solve these issues is at the ballot box. First, though, somebody reasonable has to be on the ballot. Thus far, you get a choice of Stalin or Hitler.

We have, as a body politic, been badly used. Come the revolution as they say, we could create an amnesty for the good guys and round up the bad guys. Meantime, cyber warfare is a bad thing for everyone.

Voting with my feet

MS has more problems than just the complexity of their licensing.

I have been a Microsoft customer since 1984 when I purchased their excellent (at the time) macro assembler for x86.

I actually did a contract for Microsoft years ago. For a while I contented myself with the fact that I was sort of playing with 'house money'.

MS has always been fierce and predatory, but as long as they were going after someone else nobody seemed to mind. Now they consider the customer (at least my company) to be the enemy.

I actually had a vanilla VM move yesterday that resulted in a properly licensed Windows 7 Pro system claiming that the license had to be validated again and then claiming the license, which I got directly from Microsoft and has been working for years, has to be validated by phone. Anyone who has undergone the torture of validation by phone will understand that I elected to do otherwise. I used a (legitimate) hack to extend the license while I move whatever was on there to Linux.

I spent literally more than 12 hours upgrading a Windows 8 machine yesterday and the vast majority of that time is attributable 100% to Microsoft belligerence.

Microsoft will never stop until they have ruined you. I strongly suggest anyone do as I have done/am doing -- retire your MS systems entirely and move to open source.

Unlike my MS stuff, my open source stuff hums along smoothly. I have had my main Linux server crash only one time in the five years it has been running. Except for that one time, I have never been forced to reboot the system and it sometimes goes literally months without a reboot. It started as an Ubuntu 8.x server and has smoothly upgraded (except that one time) to 12.04. Meantime, my MS Server 2003 did not work at all due to an MS shipment error they refused to correct and the 2008R2 server I had to use instead failed so often I eventually virtualized it so I could just copy over the whole thing when it screwed up. OMFG. I had originally had Hyper-V machines, but transitioned all of them to VMWare.

Like many, I am stuck in the MS ecosystem. As someone else mentioned here, I am not a customer, I am a hostage.

MS has been such a bad partner for so long that I have largely moved off of MS Office, Visual Studio, Outlook, etc for day to day use. I am still obliged to maintain some sort of foothold in the MS ecosystem, but except for Win 7 Ultimate licenses on notebooks, I have begun virtualizing all of the MS operating systems and intend to keep one dual-boot machine for a workstation for performance reasons. Five notebooks here run the Windows OS they came with. All the rest run Windows 'something' on bare iron with most stuff virtualized under VMWare.

I actually have a new SSD expressly for the purpose of transitioning the first Windows 7 workstation to Linux. I was deferring the agony but since MS has been so incredibly bad recently, I am evaluating Linux workstation versions today and will install in a day or two.

MS Licensing is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is that MS is and always has been a predatory partner. It started with competitors, then large vendors and now it has hit the ground so it affects small consulting companies and their customers.

Part of the agony is blunted a bit because Windows 8 and its server equivalent is not a viable operating system for me. MS has forced a move off of Win XP and Win 7 but has not provided anything to which you can reasonably transition. They have basically 'end-of-lifed' their entire business as far as my company is concerned.

Windows 7 and even Windows XP is still superior to the Linux alternatives. As well, native RDP to windows (even from Linux to Windows) is superior to alternatives like XDMCP and VNC. Microsoft Office, at least the 2003 version I normally use is still superior to LibreOffice. The entire Windows ecosystem is still larger and richer than the Linux equivalents. Functionally, the advantage is almost entirely Microsoft's. However, operationally, the advantage is now with Linux. The only thing keeping some of us from moving is the cost of transition. Microsoft, for my company, has done several things of late that make it necessary to absorb the cost of transition. Microsoft has made staying with them costly enough that it outweighs the cost of transition to Linux.

I have taken a very long look at this. It has an enormous effect on me personally. Making Linux the primary environment is costly and difficult, but I am voting with my feet for Linux.

I can't say what will happen with the rest of the community, but for thirty years now I have been something of a bellwether. If others follow in the next few years MS will discover one of the cardinal rules of business applies more to them than anyone else: It is very cheap to keep a customer, but very expensive to obtain one or win one back. In this case, it would be virtually impossible to win me back.

Same wavelength

Nice to see that others are equally scandalized by this.

Re: "delivers spectrum for broadband while ensuring a vibrant future for broadcasting"

Why should lining the pockets of broadcasters be a goal? Why subsidize broadcasting if it is not naturally supported by demand? Why should these things affect the deployment of bandwidth?

These bandits have for much too long abused a monopoly they should never have had in the first place.

Don't forget

The Supremes are political appointees. They attempt to couch their prejudiced decisions in language that is legally plausible, but make no mistake, it is not law as such that they are interested in upholding.

Did anybody do the math?

I am not sure I have the figures correct, but it looks like after 10 hours of use this puts out one thousandth of a KwH. Assuming they keep that fired up 10 hours a day 333 days a year, they will put out about 10 cents worth of electricity after three years. Given a thirty year service life this $10 generator would put out a dollar's worth of electricity. That does not include the cost of hiring someone to keep lifting the weight.

Would it not be cheaper and more humane to simply sell them a couple of dollars worth of batteries?

I am sure I must have slipped a decimal point somewhere, but everyone should know that heat energy and electrical energy are equivalent to enormous amounts of stored kinetic energy. Using humans to generate power is a really big step backward.

Interesting, but changes little

According to Ashley Montegue, The Theory of Evolution Through Natural Selection is "the most thoroughly authenticated fact in the whole history of science."

The 'Post Darwinian' refinements including the wonderful discoveries of genes and DNA help to explain particulars of mechanisms, but the Theory itself was entirely sound and whole when "On the Origin of Species" was first published around this time of year in 1859.

I cannot say why this simple and elegant Theory is so badly misunderstood, but it is. It seems to me that Darwin's contemporaries, without the aid of genetics, understood evolution better than most people today.

This article is about a refining discovery about a particular genetic history that interests us -- our own. This has no bearing one way or the other on the bedrock paradigm of Biology. There are more things we don't know by far than things we do know about the historical development of life on this planet. We do not have to know how a system of gases evolved in order to validate Thermodynamics. Were someone incorrect about the history of such a system it would say nothing at all about Thermodynamics. If you understand Thermodynamics, then you know that it is a logical imperative. The same is true of Evolution.

It drives me nuts that Biological discoveries are framed in such a way that laymen might think it says something about the correctness of Evolution. At its heart, Evolution is essentially a tautology. It is correct by definition.

Evolution, BTW, despite Darwin's own misgivings, says nothing at all about the existence of God either as a part of the holy trinity or as the deity in the more logically coherent Pastafarianism. Religious matters and Secular matters are orthogonal and incommensurate separate systems. Both are equally valid in their own right. Understanding the rules of the Universe as created by the Noodle in the Sky does not speak one way or the other to whether or not the FSM (or God, if you prefer) created it. The argument that the FSM does not exist from parsimony or "Occam's Razor" is a naive logical positivist point of view that shows a fundamental lack of understanding about the world. For atheists that just cannot let go, consider the sanctity of belief in the Saucy Master as a political necessity to prevent the total domination of the state. The personal relationship between a person and their deity is sacrosanct even in the event that, against all evidence to the contrary, they do not even believe in that deity.

Tragically funny

All of us receive security updates constantly. Why? Because yet another attack vector was exploited and our security people deal with security one patch at a time.

By their nature, security breaches happen along pathways that are 'improbable'. The fact that so many commentards cannot see why this is actually important to security makes me wonder.

Do the math. The ones who know what they are talking about have pricked up their ears because this is yet one more pathway that *has not been shut down* that needs to be shut down. The ones saying that this cannot be a problem and therefore we should not research and seal the breach will spend the rest of their days constantly being surprised by the ordinary.

Makes perfect sense

Re:"the price demanded was sufficiently low that Dell and Silver Lake make money either way"

Regardless of what they are planning on doing or what reason they think they had to take the company private, the low price is what was driving this.

Michael Dell has a good track record. He knows about making money. The company itself may crater, but I expect Mikey will do just fine with this deal.

Now that the company is private there are all kinds of things that they can do. Being fleet of foot for a company with this kind of critical mass is a very good thing. This should also be a lot of fun. There are lots of really cool things you can do when you control billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people.

They want too much

Whatever as a Service *should* be cheaper by virtue of spreading usage across idle or underutilized resources. Vendors should be able to provide the same function for less than half the cost and still take a profit from the savings. Instead, they take all the savings for themselves and resources end up costing as much as or more than traditional deployments.

It looks pretty bleak right now, but I am confident that competition will eventually bring down prices to something sane.

Put them all on a diet!

I beg of you, if you have any influence on this, trim the fat.

Once upon a time you could get a whole server operating system in the amount of RAM we now have in a CPU cache. I have seen the code and it is bloat upon bloat upon bloat.

My 6502 machines (Apple and Atari) with only kilobytes of RAM and with CPUs much less than one thousandth the speed of a single modern CPU core would boot instantly. You turned it on and by the time you got your fingers on the keyboard it was good to go.

With more than 20GHz of CPU, 8GB of RAM, my current machine takes about a minute to boot from an SSD when the stars are aligned and ten minutes or more if Windows is choking on its updates.

I don't care what is happening under the covers, it should not take more than a trillion machine instructions to boot a supercomputer let alone a modest workstation.

The insane bloat has consequences. For instance, it means you need a whole bunch of different codebases for what should be essentially the same thing.

In fairness to Microsoft, they *do* have to deal with byzantine machine architecture and standards that are not entirely baked. However, they are a big player in this game and responsible for much of the mayhem.

Wrong people in charge

The people making such a decision are technically illiterate. Why would they have any say in this? Thank goodness they don't have control over the phone system... wait a minute...

Houston, we have a problem

Once we start sending people, what if they get there and some alleged patent holder gets an injunction? Are they allowed to come back first or do they have to hope their oxygen can last through trials and appeals?

You just *know* there is something in the Chinese space program eligible for patent harassment.

Final push for IPv6

My ISP cannot provide IPv6 connectivity here in Canada, a former leader in communications. Why? They don't think we have a problem with the IPv4 address space. WTF? I will name and shame:ISP is Cogeco

IPv6 sucks barnacles and that is why after more than ten years we still do not have an IPv6 network.

The billions of smartphones online or coming online need their own IP address to get on to the network. NAT does not cut it, especially if it basically confines you to point to point communications within your ISP.

I am expecting that adoption of IPv6 will happen rapidly in the next five years or so and it will be driven by devices like this. The phones are a first-wave, but it will be followed by all sorts of other devices as the IoT emerges.

I'm on it

That cabinet is a thing of beauty! I am seriously going to copy that idea. I will avoid putting the 220W AMD parts in there, but otherwise, it's a go!

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

Amazon is doing what we would all like to do. We should look into that. I am a Canadian socialist, but I think federal level taxation has become completely insane.

Latency and bandwidth?

None of these guys, including oddly enough network people, spend much time addressing latency and bandwidth. This is a shame because the reason we have all of these shenanigans is that latency and bandwidth are hopelessly inadequate all around.

By the 21st century I would have hoped that a good portion of the resources we all used would be de-localized and distributed to the point where nobody even cared anymore.

You should never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence. In this case, I am all for incompetence because the issues are pervasive throughout computing. The same issues they have in supercomputer fabrics affect us as well. Only the supercomputer guys seem to care and not even all them it seems at times.

One of the things driving this is, I think, a conflation of levels whereby things that should be exclusively implementation details end up bleeding over into the architecture standards.

Were a reasonable standard in place for communications most of the software written would neither know nor care where things were or what their characteristics were. Drivers should be taking file designations and credentials and figuring out how to contact the next step in the chain.

One thing that may be perverting this is that a secure location service and secure distributed data is not what some people (*cough* NSA) want to see us use.

As long as latency is low enough, bandwidth high enough and security sound, nobody would either know or care what back-end infrastructure looked like except the small percentage of people actively building the stuff.

That's it in a nutshell

How insane does the patent situation have to get? This destruction of productive capacity cannot possibly serve thee and me.

What's next? Death sentences?

You should be suspicious that this odious cash grab requires that all major jurisdictions be convinced to sign on. If, for instance, Canada said 'nope', we would see within a few years that abolishing patents is highly beneficial for most of us. In fact, Canada *has* said this with respect to some generic drugs and there is no question at all that it is highly beneficial for Canadians.

Survivalist avec Aluminum Chapeau?

That thing looks seriously overbuilt. Do they have a locker and freezers with food and water for more than a year? Does the facility have its own generator? Guns and ammo? Magazines with articles about going off-grid?

As for the nausea inducing silence, the Ontario Science Center used to have an eerie soundproof passageway and I can vouch for the fact that real silence is compellingly strange. It would not surprise me if what he says about this is correct. It would not surprise me, though, if 'alien anal probe' found its way into his explanation.

Nobody is expected to read it

Nobody posting here and nobody on the judges or plaintiff's side has any realistic hope of even assembling all the contracts that allegedly bind them, let alone both read them and fully understand their ramifications.

This whole discussion is bullshit. It is not unreasonable to expect a custodian of your data to protect it. It does not matter what a contract says if the provision is fundamentally unreasonable.

I am skeptical that this is really a good decision under law. By any reasonable interpretation of common law you can't be bound by all the fine print in a contract like this because it is not really a proper contract. If this actually is a good legal decision that stands up on appeal then the law should be changed.

The establishment has done one hell of a fine job steering debate to the stupidest of places because they have convinced *almost* everyone that they have no rights and are entitled to nothing. The PATRIOT Act, DHS and the TSA are eloquent testimony to that fact. All three are outrageous insults to the body politic and might well have sparked another revolution a couple of centuries ago.