Posts by Paul Crawford

Re: @Novell time

And long before that we had ephemeris time (1952), and then TDT (1976), and then GPS from 1980 using continuous time with a leap-second offset rather like a time-zone.

As I keep saying IT IS A KNOWN FEATURE and if your code can't handle it gracefully you are incompetent due to either:

1) Not using tested system libraries to handle time, delays, etc.

2) Writing or modifying said libraries without knowing what you are doing.

And most of all NOT TESTING YOUR DAMN CODE! Really, just set up a fake NTP time server and have it generate leap seconds regularly backwards and forwards and see if your code works.

Re: Doughnut Eaters

Agreed, there should always be real evidence, not just a phone's contents (which could be planted if the phone is hacked or insecure by default). In Scotland there has always been (I'm simplifying a bit, and this might change though..) a requirement for corroborating evidence, i.e. a second aspect that is necessary for a trial to proceed, let alone to secure a conviction.

The problem with asking a policeman what they want is they will ask for whatever makes their job easier. That is basic human nature. And given most of them are honestly trying to solve crimes, they usually dismiss suggestions it can and will be misused because they (i.e. the one you are asking) is not planning on doing that.

Sadly though not all police are honest and trustworthy and once politicians are involved you are dealing with a proverbial moral slime-pit of self interest and dodgy dealings, and of course there are criminals out there as well.

That is why I am in favour of decent end-to-end encryption by default, everywhere, because you just can't trust people, of any profession or any reputation, to not fuck up deliberately or unintentionally and use whatever powers they have wrongly. They can already get the metadata of who talked to who, etc, and that should be enough for a proper investigation of the suspects in the old way of getting out there and gathering physical evidence.

Re: "Which you should, by the way"

"if you actually watch it"

Given the iPlayer is their own web site, why not just tie access to the TV licence?

You know, allow a couple of IP addresses or player ID strings, etc, per day from a given license and job done. Most UK broadband users will still be behind IPv4 NAT anyway so multiple devices in a home will appear as a single IP address.

Re: Windows 7 and prior to that, XP and 2000 and even NT4 have been quite good

Sadly yes, I also remember NT4/2000 fondly.

But the rot started with XP and "product activation" for me, the first sign that MS believed they controlled your PC and you now needed permission to repair/change hardware.

Re: Thank you Mr.Farage

"in a democracy the will of the majority is sacrosanct"

Yes, and also in a lynch mob

Re: 1) No need to defrag

At least NTFS never needed to run fsck every n days because it isn't sure if the file system is OK... when ext got journaling?

ext3 has had journalling for 15 years now, long enough to be "distant past".

As for NTFS, how come every time I have checked the output of chkdsk on XP and 7* machines' system disk it say it is fixing "minor inconstancies" even when there has been no (apparent) system crashes?

[*] thankfully I have not had much need of sorting out Windows 8.x or 10 as yet.

Re: What does putting my Windows installation in a VM do for me?

2bi) Yes, most browsers support some sort of sandbox protection mechanism. But I quite like apparmor as its a separate protection mechanism (so two steps to p0wning your PC), and it allows you to define *where* the process is allowed to read and/or to write.

That is a nice feature, so you can't have a compromised browser encrypting your files outside of, say, ~/Downloads, nor reading sensitive stuff (say ~/.ssh contents) and sending to some Bad Guy even though it has the same nominal privileges as your own account. Also it can't overwrite your .bashrc file or similar (in your name) and it has two levels to breach to overwrite system files in order to permanently p0wn the machine for a single account or for everyone.

Sure I know its not perfect, but defence is all about layers. Just like Ogres have...

Re: What would Aubrey and Maturin say?

Why should the ship/boat not be a "she"? Probably as many women like anal sex as men, which is frequently the definition of sodomy. Allegedly.

Re: And I take objection to *this* article.

Maybe the lesbian version would be a "Cocking Dykelords" instead?

Or maybe the original cyberpunk just needs to take his dried frog pills?

Re: RS485 / RS232

Serial is still common in very low power devices as the overhead to implement a UART and the matching software stack is trivial in comparison. Seriously, work out the power used to be listening and able to respond quickly in both cases and you are in for a big surprise.

Also simplicity makes for reliability/security as you are only point to point and not having to fend of the barbarian hoards when someone forgets to properly firewall your system.

Re: Interesting

Not all VPN systems are good at making sure your DNS queries are also tunnelled, so it may well be getting local look-ups that Google is using to decide on your location.

Proper privacy / anonymity on t'Internet is surprisingly hard to achieve, as the occasional arrest of folk who piss off those in power (or those funding them e.g. the RIAA, etc) find out.

Re: They Are Only Effective If The Operating Frequency Is Standard

Realistically this is for "stupid", both in terms of idle morons doing stuff near airports, and similarly stupid jehadies wanting to re-purpose commercial stuff for terrorism.

Of course, there might be a 2nd step of action if the RF deterrent is not working...

Re: Rethink time

Exactly. So much of the problem is simply crap software.

This is made more crap by the mind-set that software is expected to be shit, so bugs are accepted, vendors not held to account, and people simply click on "OK" without reading that pop-up asking of shaftmewithatoastingfork.exe should be allowed to run.

Second aspect of a lot of this is the lack of 2FA for important stuff, or the "two factors" both relying on a single device like a phone that may already be compromised.

At last! Now I can have my robot monkey butler!

Re: 371kg of cold liquid xenon

At least you did not go for anything kryptic...

Re: No One Wants The Flight Found

Really? Other than a handful of nut-jobs, everyone in the area of science and technology wants to know what happened so there is a better chance of it not happening again.

This is not some shitty OS that crashes and people just shrug their shoulders, reboot, and try to redo the last hour or twos lost work. Here it really matters!

Even if it turns out to be a human fault, or even a deliberate action, we can learn and make it less likely in the future. As already pointed out, the lack of a squawk that said something useful about location and status is something that is trivial to remedy, but some other failure scenario may be present but no one has seen it yet (other than the poor souls on board MH370) so knowing that would allow something to be done.

Interesting. Wonder if those networks deliberately interfere with VPNs, or maybe VPN traffic is just less tolerant of shitty networks?

Re: Data estimates

"autonomous car .. about 40GB a minute of data"

Very likely in its own sensors, but almost bugger-all of that will be hauled back to the cloud as the radio bandwidth is simply not available for the huge number of cars in most cities (along will all of those trying to use youtube on mobiles, etc).

Sure they might sell CPUs for on-board processing but most likely it will be ARM for lower power and cost if the car companies have anything to say about it.

Re: No central provider.

"way around E2E encryption should be compromising the physical endpoints"

This is very likely to be possible with any phone, including those featuring in the current criminal cases, given how crappy the software is. But it much simpler and cheaper to shoot the messenger, isn’t it?

Re: The you-know-who is warming up backstage

"Given the Chinese USA government's constant attacks by the People's Army hacking units NSA and others, running Chinese American closed source software represents an unacceptable risk."

Any different?

Re: "run MS Office"

Appears you can use Office365 using a Linux based web browser:

http://www.sdselite.com/7351/2015/04/15/working-with-office-365-and-linux/

Re: There's more!

I think you mean "by spreading obvious bollocks through the moron-net in a manner that even the Daily Mail and Morning Star would be ashamed of".

Re: Not quite $0 per month ...

So £38/month for around 12TB of protected storage (i.e. 400 times the original MS offer) assuming RAID-5 on each of your NAS and then they are mirrored somehow, and with gigabit access speeds and no dependency on foreign government policies.

Hmm, how much for the same size and speed from a cloud provider?

Re: So a major price increase then...

Sad, but predictable.

Many years ago when I was using w2k and then XP I was pleasantly surprised when MS decided to go per-processor licensing as we saw the first multi-core x86 appear, instead of some complex and ultimately rather pricey per-core formula as Oracle and the rest of the "old guard" pushed.

Now that practically all my software development is for Linux first, with Windows support as an after thought for "the old guard" perhaps I shall not care...

Re: @DainB

"Excel is a swiss knife type tool every accountant knows on a level you would not master in years."

Very true, but why do people assume that a general migration to Linux means EVERYTHING must be Linux?

In my own limited experience, most folk are happy with Linux for many things, and the few business-critical programs you really must have can often be run in a VM of Windows. Said VM can be minimal, have limited network access, and generally is a very secure way of doing things (given that a lot of smart malware avoids running in VMs to evade analysis).

Sure it is an extra training step for those users, but my 75 year old and largely computer-illiterate father was able to master VM use for a specific genealogy program. I'm sure your accountants, etc, would manage it fine if given a couple of minutes tuition and a cheat-sheet of things to remember.

Re: ...or use honeypots

Use a server with something like ZFS that supports snapshots and is copy-on-write. Then seeing massive disk use between snapshots is a clear sign of bulk modification, plus you can go back to previous snapshots to recover the data quickly.

Try FreeNAS on, say, a bottom end HP Microserver with, 4 * 6TB disks or similar and 12GB or 16GB RAM. Under a grand for a system with 12TB of well protected storage. OK, you need to make damn sure that snapshots are on and *WORKING* (hint - make sure 'recursive' is ticked) and that control over the NAS is secured so malware cant go in and disable stuff or simply wipe it. But that is kind of basics anyway.