Posts by Paul Crawford 5656 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
All very well if you have shit software to manage, but it means they have the wrong time for most of that day. Now they might not care, you might not care, but there are many cases when you need to know the right time to millisecond or better accuracy.
Ironically folk who program for Windows have learned to be tolerant of time-jumps because typically they are updated one per week or so by SNTP which applies a time-step. Where as UNIX/Linux has an OS that handles it properly (except when someone changes code and does not test it) but many code monkeys who never test/debug their code against time steps because they don't see it often.
No, they only need programmed in to stand-alone computers, anything using NTP gets the updates automatically as NTP announces the pending leap-second for 24 hours before it happens.
Similarly if you get time from GPS it has a field that tells you of the coming leap second for days, maybe months, before it is due. Assuming of course you don't have some shitty GPS receiver that hides the information from you because the firmware monkeys just don't understand it...
Funny that, we explicitly switched wholesale to LibreOffice because it did that (a) across all of its versions and (b) across all platforms (we mainly use macOS and Linux, but a few less fortunate souls have to use Windows for customer experience testing of our service :) ).
If you can get other in multi-company to change - yes!
But if they are wed to MS Office then you are forced to use the same to get consistency :(
I don't use Office where I work either and nobody that I respect technically in the IT business uses it.
Technical people are not the major use-case for Office, it is business that demands it. Now we can compare its good and bad points relative to LibreOffice and for many jobs I use the free one.
But sadly I have to use MS Office for some projects as its the only one that maintains correct layout. And that also means using the more recent ribbon-infested version because even MS can't achieve true portability between versions of its own damn suite!
Other option is you make it so the phone's key, for example, is held in an accessible manner internally, but that needs hours of careful, destructive, and expensive time to read out using a scanning electron microscope.
That way if they REALLY need to get in to a phone they can, but the time and cost and physical access needed makes it utterly useless for panoptican surveillance or fishing trips when someone is stopped for a trivial reason.
"In some ways the really old code is easier, because it's less likely to rely on large libraries"
Another factor is they often had all the code on CD or tape, etc. Now if you try to create an old-ish machine often you simply can't get the code from that era because it was all on-line and downloaded then and not archived. Or was, and now has been replaced. Because no one needs to maintain old stuff do they, it has to be new, new, new? And more or less incompatible...
Even if you can provide better alternatives for everything it offers, people get very fond and possessive of such old systems, and decommissioning can be a nightmare.
More often than not, the problem is it is running some old OS/libraries that special code needs, and that is why you get serious resistance to change. If you can offer it on a VM then mostly its a non-problem, but alas few can run up VMs that emulate old VAX hardware/software, etc.
Yes, I know you should not end up in that position, but academics like to solve something once and move on. At least its not IE6 based...
Well you could follow the link to the article (PDF hosted on GIThub) and read it there?
However, this attack is not OS-specific in that *any* machine with externally controllable DMA enabled at any time is vulnerable to having the OS and program memory read out for analysis.
In fact the UK gov security advice[1] is to try and buy machines without that feature. I guess Apple are a special case in that they control the UEFI boot loader and so are able to turn off external DMA access until the machine is booted and access is under OS control.
[1] For example https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/guidance/end-user-devices-security-guidance-ubuntu-1404-lts#risk-owners-summary
IMHO, storing it on the camera except at the moment of taking pic is wrong idea anyway.
This is exactly what the cameras should be 'avoiding' - the SD card should look like noise no matter what was stored there, or nothing at all. Add to that a plausible deniability of more than one password to reveal different photo sets and it becomes very difficult to establish if the camera has anything on it at all. For example, if I am going out to take any photos of importance I format the SD card first and take a spare just to have more chance of it storing things properly and not having corrupted FAT, etc. So a camera showing no stored photos is not unusual.
As for speed of taking photos, if for example, it was using an asymmetric key arrangement the camera can always encrypt the files without your (stored) public key so no need for PIN/password at switch-on, and only that private key can decrypt it later. It can show the in-RAM copy briefly after taking it for you to check composure, focus, etc, and then its wiped and you need the private key to recover the on-disk copy.
At a guess I would say for attitude control thrusters that unload momentum from the reaction wheels to keep their speed within sensible bounds.
Some satellites use torquing coils to do that instead of chemical engines (basically pull against the Earth's magnetic field as needed) - not sure if there are any special reasons for XMM not using that, or maybe it has both and they managed to hardly ever use thruster fuel?
Good to see this being done, we (as in privacy-conscious individuals or businesses throughout the world) will benefit from a VPN technique that has no major shortcoming to allow mass surveillance. PIA deserve kudos for doing so.
Of course, if other organisations would ditch PPTP for once and for all it would also be a great step forward!
WTF do AV companies need an exclusion list for well known vendors like citrix, etc? Why don't they have the program checksums already so they know they are genuine?
Same question with the borking of Windows itself by AV vendors from time to time - where is MS' master list of SAH-1 or whatever checksums so every genuine Windows exe/dll is recognisable?
You forget that organisations like the NSA and GCHQ have a split personality to deal with, as on the one hand the goal is to spy on everyone of interest to their respective country’s government (sadly today that means "everyone") and for that knobbling encryption is a useful trick to pull off.
But on the other hand their goal is to protect the interests of their country and that means stopping other governments and/or criminal gangs from spying and hacking business and individuals personal information. For that they need good encryption and secrecy.
Back to the old saying that Regan & Gorbachev used "trust, but verify" perhaps?
the speed of light is inconsistent in atmosphere
That is why the military GPS used two frequencies, to compensate for ionospheric electron density effects. You can get the same with newer systems like Galileo and from differential GPS, etc.
But if you need us or better time its a challenge for the OS, etc, to respond and stamp the network packets with sufficient stability. For that sort of job you use PTP instead:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_Time_Protocol
How the heck to do test a leap-second event from NTP?
By the power of Google searching, first on the list:
http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Dev/LeapSecondTest
Or if you are looking for an easy to deploy commercial solution:
http://blog.meinbergglobal.com/2015/02/25/leap-second-test/
Google could well have added its servers to the NTP time pool
No, no, and thrice no! Because Googles NTP servers will be telling the wrong time for about a day after every leap second.
Now you might not care, and many others don't case, because all they want is some sort of time-of-day indicator. But heaven help you if you need millisecond or better accuracy for anything like financial HFT, log file forensics or any number of science applications.
"Unless the OS (like XP and earlier) is at EOL. Or the OS is meant to operate in a fixed, non-upgradeable capacity such as an embedded device?"
You mean the same devices that have been working with leap seconds for years and years now? Lets face it, Windows default is to update the time using SNTP once per week! So it steps time every week and your system just get on with like. So what is the beef about a correctly applied 1 second step every ~18 months?
The "smearing" approach is probably the most sensible method in the vast majority of cases.
You mean for those code monkeys who don't know/don't care and don't test?
First point - your software should not crash if time is stepped anyway, what happens then if a machine is off-network for a while and then adjusted to the correct time (manually or by NTP)?
Second point - if you depend on precise time then do it properly! This is not a new issue, it has been documented and implemented in sane systems since the late 1970s. And for those who really need continuous time-scales (e.g. for computing time differences that are correct in any absolute sense) we already have TIA or even simpler GPS time.
All sane OS already handle the leap second properly, except when some code monkey changes it and does not test it, and NTP has this built-in (it announces the leap 1 day in advance so the kernel can step as needed without an NTP packet at the precise change point).
No, this is simply a sop to shitty coders who do not understand the basics of precise time-keeping that have been this way for 40 odd years. I.e. for longer than most of them have lived.
"RAID0 can be more reliable than RAID5" is an example of very dubious arguments. The basic points are:
In RAID-0 any drive error is losing you data, and typically a lost HDD means you have to wipe and restore the whole file system. Only upside is you *know* you are vulnerable so probable (I hope?) have a backup and restore plan that is regularly tested.
In RAID-5 you can tolerate one disk fault, be it a whole disk or reported bad sectors. Down side is folk over-estimate the independence of errors and the correct reporting of errors. If using any RAID system you really must do regular disk scrubs to make sure that the inevitable rebuild has a sporting chance of completing OK and not throwing up other errors.
However, if your data really matters than (a) you have a backup anyway, as RAID != Backup, and (b) you should be using something with double parity, at a minimum RAID-6 or better still ZFS RAID-Z2 since it has better write performance (more so with a SSD for the intent log) and additional checksums on the blocks so it can spot HDD lying or disk controller faults, etc. I think btrfs is planned to have a similar scheme (i.e. redundancy and extra checksums like ZFS) and some variants of GPFS (or whatever IBM call it now) has it, but on the payment of lots of extra money.
Not so silly - while the OS files & configurations may not be secret, whole disk encryption prevents an "evil maid" style of attack from modifying them because you have to decrypt the disk in the first place.
Assuming your password is not known to the main, of course...
Realistically you cannot trust closed source providers any more as they can be notified to change and not tell you. The big players like MS, Google, Facebook, etc, are all business-driven (mostly whoring you to advertisers) so they will just roll over and "follow local laws" no matter what.
I'm not sure how this would go with binaries from an open-source repository - they could ask a UK based company to modify the ones distributed not to match the source but that might get caught. I guess the simple and sad fact is you have to treat any UK-based supplier of software and services as untrustworthy now since they are under this odious law.
I suspect most servers used for serious database work would have ECC DRAM and probably be tested (often called "qualified") that it works without crashing.
My Asus Chromebook, now running Linux, hangs occasionally. When I tried the rowhammer example it hung the same way. Also it hangs on memtest86 unless you use the 'safe' mode, so guess who has crappy RAM?
Comes down to money eventually - people want cheaper/faster DRAM and so design margins are inevitably pushed down and refresh arrangements made more 'optimistic' so they don't block I/O too much, etc.
ECC should trap this of course, but again few will pay the ~15% more for ECC DRAM and sadly most AMD motherboard don't support it even though AMD do in the CPU! For Intel you have to pay extra for the 'server' CPUs to use it (except I think for a few embedded CPUs where they grudgingly enable the feature).
Still this approach makes sense as it has little performance hit and the genera idea, of identifying and separating physical RAM regions that care at risk of coupling in a rowhammer attack, could be applied to other OS as well. Assuming they care...
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