Posts by Paul Crawford 5666 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
A friend of mine goes diving and he has little time for the claims of waterproof watches, most are only short term static pressure proof at best.
So '50m' really means it is OK to shower with it on. Though quite why you would not normally take it off is a mystery to me, I would rather be clean underneath!
Really, just how expensive is it to support a CPU on the database software? How much is (or indeed should be) written in assembly or anything so low-level that you need teams of expensive and specialist programmers to make sure the build & test process works on all architectures? Can't be anything like $3B, in fact, probably less than one Oracle license...
I was going to mention contraception, but then I would not put it past the CCP to interfere with the availability or functionality of it should they deem not having a child to be seditious activity.
Seditious; adj.
1. of, like, or causing sedition
2. inclined to or taking part in sedition
3. anything that Winnie-the-Pooh feels unhappy with
Hmm, given the secretive nature of the x86 (and other) management engines, and the fundamentally unknowable status of a someone else's running machine you start execution on, I don't think you can really have "secure" cloud computing in any real sense. Those in charge of the hardware always have means of subverting you.
Yes, it might help with cross-load snooping and stuff like encrypted data at rest helps with preserving security on disposed of (or stolen) hardware, but just how secure is it against the cloud company country of operation's spooks?
Indeed. While developing a USB device many years ago I managed not only to crash the XP host with my microcontroller's code, but also to wipe the boot disk MBR FFS!
Had to get the local folks to re-image that machine to continue (I was not permitted any admin rights on their test network, etc).
Then there are things like USB (why is it bad?)
Many reasons:
Stupid naming of different speeds
Early versions had no useful interrupt/DMA capability
Excess complexity compared to RS232 for most jobs
Implementations made the "oh I have found X device, lets run it! Oh bugger that was a trick, we are screwed"
I remember that as well, we had to change some software/scripts to delete a small file instead of repeatedly overwriting it as after a while it chocked the disk up due to all those past versions!
Also remember the Alpha machines as stupendous in their day, just a shame they were dropped for the Itanic
while Spectrum doubled the speed of its $30 a month plan from 50Mbps to 100Mbps, the minimum speed which the ACP classifies as high-speed internet.
Do you really think the users will see their real-world speed doubled?
We need (globally) an end to the "up to" crap as acceptable, so at least folks get to see their real-world performance statistics without running (probably gamed) speed tests and if the ISP is delivering on claimed performance,
I noticed by VM connection was really slow on one app that was reporting the download speed, but when I went to run a speedtest on my phone (wifi to same router) miraculously the overall speed increased!
Some calculations are very asymmetric so you can go one way very easily, inverting it very hard.
For example public key cryptography should be sub-millisecond for those with the keys, and aeons for those without. So if your aeon -> proper tea brewing time improvement is working, just try a few known keys as if you did not know them.
We had an old SPARC machine that ran with virtually no issue for around 15 years when it was finally retired around 5-10 years ago. After age around 10 if it ever was rebooted you had to use the cheat-sheet to get it to boot off the correct partition as the (soldered in) CMOS BIOS battery had gone. Sun hardware was really good then.
Last hardware we had was one of the Sun-turning-into-Oracle storage appliances, poor software that was not properly developed or bug-fixed and unresponsive support. Really, we would have been better with FreeNAS/TrueNAS on some cheaper hardware!
After then we ran down the Sun stuff as no intention of getting in to Oracle's grasp and Linux did everything well enough not to need it.
Yes, you would use the QKD to share a random symmetric key (probably 256 bits for AES or similar, but can be from "true" random source like noise generator).
The "secure" aspect of QKD is not that you can't intercept it, but that you know if it has been compromised by an eavesdropper so your shared key is not secure. Except here, where the key exchange nodes could be compromised and you would never know (as they are not quantum-passing but decode/recode).
The problem is you cant easily WDM the data (bright) and the single-photon quantum on the same fibre at the same time. So may demos would use one dark (literally!) fibre for the key-exchange and the bulk data transfer done on a 2nd. You can see how unpopular that is going to be with telcos and the customers who would be left waiting months or years for additional fibre capacity to be installed.
So it seems (without actually looking at the details) they TDM the key and data parts for this.
Of course, the "perfect security" promised by QKD also depends on the hardware implementing not having back doors, either deliberately or due to some error leading to key exposure. I would apply my own end-end security over the QKD-secured network for that reason...
Apple's neglect of Safari and its lack of cross-platform operation these days is lamentable, but equally Google's addition of various stupid features to Chrome like hardware access and misc API shenanigans that seem to be largely about breaking things for those that don't use Chrome (or Edge, MS' towel-throwing exercise) is equally worrying.
Apple might also have genuine fears over web privacy is users are going for Chrome as a web browser on iOS devices considering the number and variety of methods Google have used to slurp user's information.
At this time most definitely not!
But hopefully in future years with Putin is gone and sanity has returned I would really like to visit the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, etc. I really should have gone several years ago, but even then when I mentioned it to a Belarusian friend she warned me not to to visit her country without a guide who knows the dangers and corrupt official to deal with.
True, but those "other ways" requires someone getting malware in to the system AND adding some means to control it from outside, unless it is something very specific like the Iranian centrifuge where they just messed with the control in a specific region they knew it would be using.
Having a connection to the outside world for patching is not automatically going to let bad stuff in, but very quickly said network gets used for other things of convenience.
Proper design in terms of network segmentation and firewall rules can give you want you need, but probably not what many folk want (which is convenience to do everything at one place).
In this case Zyxel. Reasonably cheap, Taiwanese (but assembled in China), have a not-too-sucking admin interface, and seem to work quite well most of the time.
As well as preventing any incoming connections, we also firewall off the switches' admin IPs from outgoing connections so they can't phone home (same for our web cameras, IoT tat, and special-task Windows 7 box) which may, or may not, be a factor in the odd glitch.
We have the older/cheaper models that don't have cloud management and are determined it stays that way!
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