Posts by Alan Brown

Replication is not backup either!

Ditto on the comments about raid, but simply using rsync or other techniques to copy your files to a remote drive isn't a backup strategy either.

What happens when the file you just copied turns out to be corrupt? You need an older version.

How many older versions do you need? In one case where a telco killed their system, they had to go back 14 MONTHS to find data images for a phone exchange that weren't corrupted, then wind in all the incremental changes over a 4 week period. Meantime 90,000 people had dodgy phone service (I was one of them)

Home backups are a pain in the a***, primarily because of media fragility and where to keep it safely (backing up 1Tb+ onto DVDs is a no-go, big tapes are pricey and hard drives are touchy)

For $orkplace I use Bacula, but I'm backing up several tens of Terabytes with it and have all the right gear (tape robot, fibre, giant data safe, blah blah etc ) to go with it.

Bacula's fairly simple to setup for home use. It doesn't have a whizzy gui and you need a propellor beanie to set it up, BUT it works really well.

The online services seem like a good idea, modulo the question of "can you trust them?" - encypting your data BEFORE it goes upstream might solve that though - but you still have the issue of blowing your data cap every time you make a full backup. :(

Mine's the one with the tinfoil beanie in the shoulder pocket.

Fake registrars

It's worth noting that Knujon recorded 67 _registrars_ have having no contact details at the beginning of this month.

Following an ICANN crackdown, 20 of the registrars are now listed at one location and at least one of the registrars (Parava) involved in the story above has FAKE registration details.

ICANN has played fast and loose with accountability, they have a consistent history of not following up to registrars on complaints about fake domain registration details (ICANN only created a procedure to handle this after sustained complaints of registrar inaction) and now they clearly aren't even bothering to verify if a registrar actually exists.

Given what i know about the people within ICANN, I'm not particularly surprised, Style over substance every step of the way...

Paris, because she's fake too.

Fraudulent applications? Terrorism or fraudsters?

It strikes me that the process is there to achieve 1 thing:

Gather biometrics to prevent one person assuming multiple identities and gathering a passport collection (more likely a fraudster than a terrorist, there are hundreds of times more of the former) - most likely as a precursor to the infamous Universal ID card.

It's being sold as an anti-terrorism weapon, but we're all tired of that old schtick - more to the point a birth certificate is NOT valid as ID - for 11 quid I can obtain any one I want to and there is very little currently being done to ensure people are who they say they are, so it's not going to stop an Al Quaeda footsoldier obtaining a single passport.

If Mr and Mrs Hussain from Peckham are given _any_ grief by the interviewer when they are entitled to a passport, that'd be grounds for legal action on the basis of institutional racism - and a determined fraudster is more likely to turn up in a pinstripe suit carrying a briefcase as that kind of applicant is far less likely to be given a second glance.

Black Helo, because the photos in ALL my passports (all legitimate) look like I should be on XYZ most-wanted list - a few immigration officials have said so too.

Quality British workmanship.....

Were they designed/built by British Leyland^W^WRover by any chance?