Posts by Mayhem

Re: Yes, but...

What about if you post pictures of short cats?

Re: Timely

Present a skinned version of the new platform to a few key users as a "new interface" to their existing setup, and their complaints about which bits aren't working will help narrow down their actual requirements.

Then a few weeks later after you've migrated the settings, swap the skin to the company wide one and show everyone the new improved system that does everything they want.

Re: Not my idea of fun

Jesus christ. From that article

The Duqu 2.0 malware platform was designed in a way that survives almost exclusively in memory of the infected systems, without need for persistence. To achieve this, the attackers infect servers with high uptime and then re-infect any machines in the domain that get disinfected by reboots. Surviving exclusively in memory while running kernel level code through exploits is a testimony to the technical prowess of the group. In essence, the attackers were confident enough they can survive within an entire network of compromised computers without relying on any persistence mechanism at all.

The reason why there is no persistence with Duqu 2.0 is probably because the attackers wanted to stay under the radar as much as possible. Most modern anti-APT technologies can pinpoint anomalies on the disk, such as rare drivers, unsigned programs or maliciously-acting programs. Additionally, a system where the malware survives reboot can be imaged and then analyzed thoroughly at a later time. With Duqu 2.0, forensic analysis of infected systems is extremely difficult – one needs to grab memory snapshots of infected machines and then identify the infection in memory

Yep, it pretty much can do anything to anything. I expect there are plugins for non-windows systems which can back infect everything - I can imagine infecting a switch and it will reinfect anything that connects. You literally need to shut down *everything* to get rid of it, and they know your credentials so can get back in and reinfect as soon as one of your machines touches the internet.

That is one scary piece of malware - the difference between angry script kiddies and State Espionage is profound.

Re: Optimism?

The book reminded me a heck of a lot of Douglas Mawson's Home of the Blizzard, which features his survival in Antarctica after a disaster some 500km from their base,

He has a similar improvisational style, manufacturing what is needed to survive, and simply perservering through force of will, despite numerous setbacks.

Many reviews like this one complain that the subject never falls into despair, yet when you read a lot of first hand accounts of survival, very few actually do experience much despair. When they do, they certainly don't write about it - it just isn't something they waste energy on. Mawson has a quote I've never forgotten - upon pausing for a break in the sun one day because his feet hurt, he peels off his boots and socks and the soles of his feet come away with them. He writes Was there ever to be a day without some special disappointment? . He then dried them, bandaged them up, put his socks and boots back on and kept on walking - because there was no other option.

Weir's book is well researched and compelling entertainment. I'm very much looking forward to the movie.

Re: ID Card

My central point is that ID cards commonly issued on the continent of Europe, don't show residential address and as such are not the all in one master identity document they are frequently trumped up to be. As far as I can see, an ID card does nothing that an ordinary Passport cannot do

So you seem to be conflating Proof of Identity with Proof of Residence. Which are two different requirements. Recall the original Estonian system provides proof of identity for access to government services. Holding the card does “not entail full legal residency or citizenship or right of entry to Estonia.

Which means it isn't a Passport, which is a globally recognised legal travel document and proof of citizenship. It may be accepted as such within the EU, but legally it isn't.

What it does appear to do is allow an Estonian to avoid having to carry multiple valid legal documents for every service they use - in the UK that would be the equivalent of a drivers licence, student id, NHS number, NI number, banking two factor device, et cetera and only have to carry a single ID card.

Each department that interacts with the cardholder has a device that can talk to the card system, and the middleware on the card system can then talk to their own systems.

Since the banks and utilities also have access to the system, they don't need external proof of residence - the system itself knows where you live and work and the cardholder can approve that information being made available to the company asking.

The UK has the same idea, but every service relies on composite keys manufactured out of disparate information that the user has to pull together every time they need to establish something new. The Estonian ID system lets you do that once and never need to do it again.

The key difference is where the balance of power lies. In the current UK system, the individual continually has to prove themselves to the arms of the state, though combined the state has access to most information about the individual. In the Estonian system, the state formally knows everything about the individual, but the individual has control over who sees the information and under what conditions.

Re: If only

Not forgetting Celine Dion.

She's Canadian.

Yes, but she famously won Eurovision as a representative of Switzerland.

Re: Excuse me???

Typo.

And what every loon that wants to cry Ecodammerung upon our heads does is take the reserves numbers

Took me a minute too.

Re: @PeterGriffin

Much as I hate to put down the popcorn temporarily, there are a few points I want to comment on.

First is this wonderful comment from mr Anonymous Coward, who somehow misses the irony in tracking down someone's registration details because they take offense to what was said.

"You'll want to watch your baseless assertions regarding my fitness as a parent. Consider this your only warning. And no, it isn't a threat, it's a precursor to obtaining your registration details pending further action."

Second is the underlying idea A/C has that 6 year olds are not taught sex education because they are too young to understand it.

Of course 6 year olds are taught sex education. Education is a line, not a discrete lump. 6 year olds should be taught that running around in public with no trousers on or waving your willy at the rest of the class is bad. And that mummies have babies. They don't need to know details of specifics, but they do need a nice Lie to Children to answer the inevitable questions they ask. 8 year olds get more, and teens get the full boredom. I reckon they should get a proper instructional class by some jaded porn stars around the age of 15-16 - it would heavily cut the rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs, but apparently that is frowned upon.

At the end of the day, A/C is getting heavily worked up about a hearsay statistic that PeterGriffin has no citations for - the closest I've seen is an Alexa rating that puts Pornhub at #62 for all traffic - and then claiming that a Daily Mail style Think Of The Children means we should allow our government to compile a list of people who don't believe in protecting kids and/or have deviant tastes?

What, you think a Great Firewall will limit its scope? Governments always believe that people should be protected from themselves, the only difference between blue and red is the extent. And it's one heck of a slippery slope to start down, especially when Opt-In to filtering is the accepted norm in the west.

Opt-Out of default censorship reeks a little too strongly of China/North Korea to me, and I don't trust the government not to try and monetise it at some stage...

Re: safety @Alan Brown

We had an ex-NZFS Series 2a for most of the 80s, still had all the speed limits for Kaingaroa, Kinleith etc printed on the firewall. Was still going well but struggled to pull our new trailer yacht so we got a SWB Series 3 instead with the bigger petrol engine and an LPG mod for cheaper running.

The Series 3 would never win any speed records thanks to the gearbox - it topped out somewhere around 110 but the needle would swing from 100-120 so you kinda had to guess. Sounded like a banshee on heat and was about as economical as a brick. But as a work vehicle for a marine environment it was brilliant - you could leave it parked for a week or three and not worry about rust. It pulled a 2.5 ton load without complaint and had the low range to get it in and out of the drink. The narrow wheels also sliced nicely through the slime on the boat ramps, so we pulled our share of weekend warriors out as well.

Aye, the electrics were notoriously bad, but trivial to rewire, and I never forgot someone slamming into the back at some traffic lights and all he did was clean the surface rust off my towball with his radiator. You also never had to worry about cold feet, that was what the firewall was for.

I do remember there being some kind of black market trade in halfshafts - we had both sides pinched out of the wheels at different times, and I always had a couple of spares rolled up under a seat along with a crown or two. Very odd, they weren't terribly expensive parts as they were basically a mechanical fuse.

Fond memories.

Re: It may not sound very clever. But...

Not to mention that it is still a car - so long as it doesn't actually get stuck on a building, it can be towed or driven away quickly.

Re: Wait and see

Err... You want to tax _outgoings_ rather than profits?

Not quite.

What I'm saying is that for almost all countries, the current tax system for businesses was designed in a time when all businesses were local, and some exported or imported overseas.

Today most countries are being exploited by multinationals, that take advantage of legal fictions and loopholes to avoid paying what they should in the countries that they operate in. Starbucks. Google. Amazon. Apple. it really doesn't matter who, BigCorp is a good enough name.

The key is that they and their subsidiaries really are the same company, in spite of the legal fiction that they aren't. In that there is one overall management team that controls pricing and what is happening at every subsidiary, and has shareholders that it reports to. The subsidiaries usually only have one shareholder - the parent company.

And as someone else pointed out, if you or I tried this, we'd be held liable for every scrap of tax owed, but BigCorp gets away with it, because they have the money to buy the right politicians. Financial transfers to related entities attract tax. So do royalty payments. But the "Licence Fees" are allocated as expenses, so can be used to offset profits.

So what I say is the "licencing fees" that BigCorp(AU) pays to BigCorp should be taxed at the same rate that profits or royalty payments should have been - because they really are.

Take the rate Starbucks pays for beans, or Amazon pays Luxembourg for the use of the name in the UK. They are fake costs done for accountancy purposes and everyone knows it.

Being able to make an iThing for x and sell it for 500x is fine. Its when the company "sells" it internally to a subsidiary for 500x-1 that things go wrong. If BigCorp really is two separate companies, then the supplier should be able to sell your iThing at 200x wholesale to a competitor. If they aren't willing to compete, then the two entities are related, and should be taxed accordingly.

Re: When I was a kid

In Germany today there is a 25c deposit on all plastic drink bottles, which means a bunch of extremely efficient scavengers are permanently installed just outside Security in all the airports, gratefully taking your bottle off you before you go through. With an average of 150ppl per Easyjet flight, that's a lot of bottles coming through.

Re: "The things that actually seem to work in making the poor richer."

We don't have low wage poverty in the UK, not judging by the Living Wage we don't, we have tax poverty. And the answer to that is simple, stop bloody taxing poor people. And by doing so we instantly convert the minimum wage into the Living Wage.

Yep, that's one of the simplest and easiest changes for a government to do to raise the quality of life for everyone.

The basic personal allowance is £10600, the minimum wage is approx £11800.

That £1200 is a heck of a lot of cash at that level of income, which will be directly funnelled straight back into the economy via the Vimes boot theory of economics.

Make it a universal change, and every taxpayer benefits, as they have more disposable income, and the money is just as fake as the QE.

Re: Fitted racks

How did they attach the servers to the wooden racks?

Are we talking wooden frames with metal inserts for traditional cage nuts, or pure timber?

I would have thought that the weight of a piece of equipment or laden shelf which only attaches at the front would cause undue stress on the frame.

The key is offline backups - ransomware can spread and corrupt your online ones, at which point you turn and go "why did we stop using tape again".

Fire, flood, theft - these all affect one site only, and a mirror set, hot site or live backup will quickly restore data.

Accidental deletion is usually reported relatively rapidly.

What this style of malware does is deliberate corruption of all your data, and if it happens at the end of the day just before your file sync kicks off ... you're screwed.

While IBM *as a vendor* is out of the running, IBM *as a hardware platform* is a pretty strong contender because there will be a logical and reasonably well established migration path from the current hardware and database to wherever they want to go. The key part will be migrating all the customisations that have been put in place over decades, and *noone* will want to be writing them again from scratch.

I expect that one of the major domestic IBM shops will take on the work with their own experienced engineers, along with various warm bodies contracted in from around the world for specific expertise.

Upgrading a core system like this should be relatively straightforward, although I doubt that the people in charge have really thought out what they want done.

Re: They drink beer and whisky, just like us

Puerto Rico also has no voting rights, being full of alien races according to the law.

Re: DNS Sec isn't the problem

@Jamie

That makes more sense. I didn't realise it was that easy to replicate the ISP service - most DNS server howtos only relates to lookups on internal servers, not internet ones. I might look into spinning up a DNS server over the weekend then - up until the last round of poor performance I hadn't really thought about it - DNS is one of those fundamental things you only consider when it breaks.

As a better writeup on the situation than I can do from work, which put me on the path of figuring out why my youtube performance had gone down the toilet (again), have a read of

https://jackpearce.com/virgin-media-why-are-you-manipulating-my-traffic/

As best as can be determined, Virgin (and several other ISPs) are effectively proxying all Google services in the UK - most likely to reduce bandwidth costs for all parties concerned. Which is what I meant by ISPs diverting my traffic, and that I can understand - I'm technical enough to work around it, but the masses won't be. The problem is the CDNs are heavily congested, so the cure is worse than the disease for users.

The big issue I have is that there appears to be some form of agreement between GoogleDNS, OpenDNS and the ISPs to subvert what is marketed as open and reliable information into the same CDN networks that I'm using them to avoid.

Re: Where to put it?

I seem to recall Peter F Hamilton having floating runways anchored offshore in the Atlantic which had spaceflight capability. That would seem logical enough - and it means you can launch in any direction by just turning the ship around or sailing it south for equatorial launches.

Pykrete might be a plausible base, or just build it like a scaled up oil platform out of a number of segments.

Re: If I met a woman at a bar..

Heh, the big one for me was learning the difference between now, just now and now now.

Now now means as soon as I can, definitely today at least.

Just now means in the next day or so.

Now means eventually. Maybe. Possibly never.

"Sure, I'll do that now" literally meant it wasn't going to happen.

Re: Ahhh

Exactly what I thought.

£5 says that a close inspection of the tax records revealed an unusually large entry from government accounts, which was buried asap.

Re: Doesn't Affect Me

Ahh, you see, half the delight of the box was being able to source genuine parts, so an original 486, SB16, intel nic etc, which meant that almost every app has the correct drivers.

I did a dualboot with 3.11 to simplify copying files onto the drive, and then dos for the games.

The biggest headache, as anyone could have predicted, was memory management.

God it has been a LONG time since I had to remember half of that, and playing with EMM386 and QEMM reminded me why we were so glad to get rid of it.

Still, worth hanging onto for nostalgias sake.

unfiltered web feeds

Well I have a range of 100mb circuits from Colt, Level3, TDK and Orange scattered around Europe, and all of them at some stage have passed on polite little notes from the relevant local RIAA affiliate to complain about guests downloading movies*. So it really doesn't matter what tier your ISP is, the Powers That Be will get to them in time.

*To be fair, they don't do anything else, just pass them on. We have a quiet chuckle, and pass them on in turn to the short term storage device aka Recycle Bin.

Re: Sharing the winnings?

Now, consider Psy. A classic one hit wonder. A bit like Chesney Hawkes. They delivered the goods briefly, without really having showing any previous form.

To be fair, Gangnam Style came off his sixth album, and he was regularly topping the charts domestically in South Korea. So while he is a one hit wonder internationally, I think the no previous form is a little harsh.

Kind of like a solid domestic league footballer having a stunner of a game in the champions league before breaking himself and being relegated.

Re: Relative

Turns a very pretty shade of pink in fact

Typical english - gets sunburn the moment you put it outside!

Re: survive harsh winters & global warming?

Of course they get smaller when it is warm - they dry out and shrink!

Re: "32-bit Windows-powered ATM"

@AC

You must have been looking at a different brand of ATM to mine.

Mine definitely had no A/V - they basically booted a very stripped down Windows then went straight to the app. From memory it was all about the old tech - they didn't even support usb mice & keyboards, only PS2.

IIRC they only had 512Mb -1GB of ram - there wouldn't have been enough memory to run much else - every so often they'd lock up with a memory leak and the bank would need to flip the power switch for the whole unit. Thinking back, half of them were still Windows 95 too.

We would run occasionally run A/V on the unit, but only back at home base where we would be running diagnostics for the controller PC or replacing faulty components. Usually we would just yank and reimage the drive from master, guaranteed it would be clean.

I only dealt with the larger hole in the wall style or the big 1m2 4bin free standing ones though, not the little 2bin pocket atms you see today wedged in everywhere in the UK.