Re: ReiserFS...
"I hear it murders wives and gets caught"
Neither of which are good traits in a file system developer...
5636 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
Odd really. A lot of folk accept, and Linux distros offer, closed-source drivers for video and similar. Not a GPL violation it seems.
Where as ZFS is open-source and you can also modify it, hence in terms of the overall goals of GPL, a much better fit. But not compatible because? Because?
I'm guessing its something to do with linking in the kernel rather than loading a driver, but it seems a little odd and almost one of those religious-wars type of reasons (you know Catholic/Protestant, Sunni/Shia, little-end/big-end, etc)
My proposed solution to both the "lawful examination" request and the "dead relatives' phone" problem is to make the key readable by physical means: by desoldering a chip, grinding off its top and scanning the silicon with an electron microscope to read the bits back.
That way its not usable remotely, quickly, or cheaply. Just like old-school investigations that time & cost would focus its use to cases that really matter, and would not be viable for mass surveillance, fishing extraditions, etc.
Surely you encrypt before storing it remotely?
Certainly things like reliability and backups are dependent on the service they make/buy, but again, if possible it would be better to duplicate on two providers so if one goes TITSUP and/or hikes the price too much, you keep the other and migrate to a new "2nd copy" for the next contract negotiation round.
Do they actually need to build out the cloud infrastructure?
What about putting an abstraction layer on other cloud services so they can use whoever is cheaper and/or actually working at any given time? After all, the key selling point is supposed to be "computing/storage" as a commodity, just like power or the ISP networking, and its the data that is precious and needs protection (encryption + backing up) and management?
Indeed, that is an irritation for many.
However, more penitent is the fact there often never is "no clear, easily marketable, crying need in mass-market consumer electronics" because world+dog would have filled it. What Apple did that made it such a money-spinner was either:
1) Make something that already was well known, like a "PC", but make it suck less than others that were available at the time (i.e. Windows, with all its AV needs and infestations that were the home user's experience).
2) Imagine something a little different that no one in the tech world thought would sell big-time. Such as the iPad that partly dealt with (1) but was too simple for most technical designers to see the big use for it.
The watch is not such a game-changer. Maybe a TV/PC home entertainment centre convergence that "just worked" and did not have shitty on-screen controls, partly-supported features that get pulled a year or two one, and inconstancies from TV, to streaming, to music, to recording/time-shift, etc, would allow them to mark it up and thus get the big profits they know and love? Who knows...
The alternative, that of not having intrusive ads with sound or video, or grabbing focus, etc, has never occurred to them?
Really, they get what they deserve for that. True, they do deserve some finical support for publishing, but not by throwing crap (and potential infection vectors) all over my screen.
1) Macros were a stupid idea, at least, the idea they could do anything in any way to overwrite or run an executable program, script, etc.
2) Backups.
Really, while getting your machine shafted by a cryptovirus sucks donkey balls big-time, what were your plans for the day your HDD/SSD dies, machine is stolen, or PSU goes on a last bender and takes out several disks in your RAID set?
I was pleasantly surprised a couple of weeks ago when I tried attaching a USB to RS232 converter to my laptop and all I had to do to make my serial code work we tell it to open /dev/ttyUSB0 instead of /dev/ttyS0. My decade-old code is hard coded for ttyS0 or S1, so I created a symbolic link of that name to the USB device as a temporary work-around until I fix that in a more elegant way. I believe it was using the FTDI chip, but don't know who made the overall converter, and laptop is running Ubuntu 14.04
Back to Andrew's article: sure Windows 10 has a poor reputation but its not just the user interface. That may not be great, but as others have pointed out, its the creepy nature of the telemetry and forced updates that really make me advise against it to anyone who will listen. A shame really as lower down the Windows kernel, etc, has useful improvements.
For Windows-only software that I need (e.g. some CAD stuff) I used VMs and don't have to worry about the "hardware" changing and Windows complaining of activation, etc.
Indeed, can you imagine the first court case when a suitably clued-up litigant gets the judge's approval for a full and public audit of the banks systems. You know, including those banks still on XP and IE6 because they have internal stuff that demands it?
And the same for Government offices who request you pay on-line to them, will they want to be held to the same standard of public auditing?
You can be damn sure the banks have considered the cost of liability and the cost of mitigating it (and loss of business if folk just stop using on-line payments, etc) and have come to the conclusion the current arrangement is the least-worst option.
It is also very difficult to assess. Did they find out something useful and apply it, or pay for a "mechanical Turk" to do the work they just submitted?
And as others have pointed out, without a basic grasp of roughly what to expect the solution to be, how can you filter the 99.9% of crap found by Google and sanity-check the data in/out the produced it?
Odd thing is, they only do the for the webmail interface. I have a yahoo account for spammy stuff and access it via POP, no problems with changing geographic log-ins, etc, for years now.
Same password as the web interface. Same security problems of a password being stolen or brute-forced. Go figure...
Lets face it, most of said SMB equipment would be a strong and resilient as a wet paper bag if you expose the network to world+dog, samba patch or not.
I'm guessing this is more of a risk in small businesses if a malicious actor can get a machine attached (or p0wn one via email, etc). Nobody should have a network share visiable to world+dog and big organisations/companies will have network switches set up to reject unknown machines being attached internally. I hope?
CCTV, APRN, etc. Do you think anyone going to blow themselves up cares about detection *after* the event?
As you seem to have not noticed, the blew up the airport *outside* of the security checks where folk were waiting. How far back do you want those checks? Its turtles all the way down...
I think (but may be wrong) that stars normal fusion process can create atoms up to iron, above that and fusion is not generating energy so the star's fusion engine stalls and collapses. That final supernova burst is what powers the creation of heavier atoms (and, of course, releases all of the stuff above hydrogen/helium that we need to exist out in to space so eventually planets form, life arises, porn is created, etc...).
"The problem here is that an attacker's site can also use SSL/TLS, and if it's a user (who clicks on a phishing link, for example)"
I'm guessing most businesses only really deal with a modest number of sites with ligitimate reason from the corporate LAN (as opposed to the separate guest/coffee break wifi, which of course they have on a separate network). So they could have a system where access to a site has to be requested first by the user (with various checks) to add it to the white-list. That way most phishing links would fail and most malware C&C would be blocked.
Unless the users was really, really dumb of course and determined to access some random site.
"they don't offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app's features in the future"
To me this suggests WhatsApp is going to start shit advert-slinging soon.
Otherwise what do they need to add? It already does chat and photos/video sending, plus group support to help arrange parties, etc. It is all I want in an IM app and I really don't want any other "features" to track me or serve up shit adverts.
"Find one of the inevitable vulnerabilities and extort money from either the vendor or the vendor's clients."
Maybe the FBI chose to investigate them because they did not find one of the inevitable vulnerabilities, but still chose to pressure for paid services?
Lets face it MS should have spent the last 15+ years fixing the damned thing (and not supporting main stream languages like Arabic and Hebrew is a bug to me, not a "feature request"). What did they do? Piss around with the the ribbon, and generally make most versions shittier than before.
Only recently I found that equations pasted from Windows version of Word to Powerpoint won't work on Mac Powerpoint. And MS fans bitch about LibreOffice not being "compatible", etc?
A pox on them all! May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their groins!
Given the privacy implications of ISPs storing domain names, and some servers front many domains so you usually can't get away with the IP number alone, what about having two layers?
The first is a certificate, etc, for the numeric IP address so you know the URL will be secured, and the second is the same sort of thing for the URL to authenticate that the domain name matches. That way all a snooping ISP can see is the numeric request, such as 104.20.24.212, and nothing more personal such as www.theregister.co.uk
Assuming El Reg gets round to security at some point...
"That's partly because embedded hardware designers have no clue whatsoever about programming languages."
I don't think so. It seems to be down to (usually) having only one choice of tool, that blessed by the FPGA supplier, and they have little incentive to do any better. I really hope you are right and programmable hardware accelerators become popular enough to have multiple vendors competing to supply the tools, but I double it will come soon.
As someone else pointed out, for things like software-defined radio where you need lots of small integer-like operations performed essentially in parallel to process the signal as it is shifted in frequency and sample-rate. Those steps can be implemented in dedicated chips, but there are only few of them off the shelf and often not quite what you wanted. So being able to push the "simple but massively parallel" tasks to FPGA and keep the "complex but slow" stuff on the CPU makes sense.
Except that programming tools for FPGAs suck donkey balls big-time. Really, you think that developing for C is a pain, just try VHDL with tools that lack any sort of usable context-sensitive help for the vast number of uber-pedantic problems you will encounter. And weep....
...the Russians have a point. Almost exactly the same point as the past MS anti-trust investigators found with the bundling of IE and similar on Windows to leverage the near-monopoly that MS had with OEM deals for Windows at a "competitive price" on the hardware.
Of course the US investigation folded before anything useful was done (you know, like breaking MS in to separate OS & apps companies to compete openly, a la MySQL now...) and the EU took ages to pick that up and it was all to little and too late.
Will Russia have enough clout to force Android licensing and app compatibility to be free of Google's slurping? OK Yandex slurping maybe not be much better, but choice is kind of a good thing.
The UK tried "evidence based policy" on the risks of drugs in society but found it did not tell them what they wanted (or more accurately, what the tabloid papers were pushing). Dr David Nutt was in charge and knows his stuff (you know, life time of research, etc), but that counted for nothing ultimately:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Dismissal
The original complaint was if you searched for a given person's name, the page it found was for some sort old page showing court action of many years previously. Why can't google deal with this personal privacy by using an algorithm that simply limits the time of a search if it is a personal name, and no other details (e.g. the name of the court, etc)?
That way if you are looking for a specific case, you still find it, but if you are simply trawling (or trolling) for dirt on someone then old sins are quietly forgotten.
No, its not exactly binary. True, if you make software vulnerable then suddenly everyone's phone and tablet can be accessed, probably remotely, and with very low cost or discoverability. That will open the doors to more abuse of such powers in exactly the same way the NSA, GCHQ, etc, decide that spying on all of us "just in case" was OK.
What if the key could be accessed by physical forensics, e.g. by grinding the top off a chip and using an electron microscope to read it out? Bingo! The law can access the phone if it is important enough but the time and cost, along with the need to basically destroy the phone physically, means it can't be massively abused in the way a permanent backdoor (key escrow) or software bypass (as the FBI are currently requesting) can be.
And if the Linux admin's password or SSH key is leaked?
This problem is not OS-specific, though most victims so far have been Windows users. The solution is, equally, not an OS choice (even if it helps the odds) but having some arrangement that when the admin's key is leaked it is not enough to trash everything.
This means probably multiple keys for different areas of a system, but more importantly (in my humble view) that you have something else, something physical or fundamental to a bit of hardware design, that prevents trashing of all backups along with the primary data.
Having different roles/accounts for backing-up separate "root/admin" is a start. But you have to start with the assumption that someone has got complete control of the victim machines and so can undo any permissions on those machines.