* Posts by Henry Wertz 1

3137 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Why US Feds and g-men kick up a stink about a growing smartphone encryption trend

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Goering Hadn't got CNN to Contend With"

Hah, I laughed when I read that. When was the last time you've watched CNN? They're not as bad as Fox News (who basically said Snowden was a war criminal and that the NSA is just doing their job and shold be left alone). But CNN still spent more time covering Snowden himself than the numerous legal abuses of the NSA; they accepted the lie hook, line, and sinker, of redefining "collecting" information as being when it's actually looked at (so they could claim they don't "collect" much information). They did very little to nothing that would cause despots to have to contend with them.

What would give the likes of Goering problems now is online coverage; stories that would ever get mainstream media coverage now get coverage online. And occasionally some story that the mainstream media initially missed will be picked up later. (The so-called network news here in the US is about 1/4 sports coverage, 1/4 tabloid crap like actor X marrying actress Y despite having tabloid shows for this to go on, 1/4 advertisements, leaving about 7 minutes out of a half hour show for news and weather, so important news is frequently either bumped outright, or dumbed down to a sentence or two so the viewer doesn't REALLY know what's what.)

Before you could get online coverage, previously the choice was "nothing" or (if you're near a university) "self-published local newspaper" (which may have had info of dubious accuracy -- and unlike online you couldn't do a further search to verify if the info is likely true or not.)

As for the original article -- several of Google's engineers are pretty mad about the NSA tapping their fiber links, they may go for a proper encryption setup where Google doesn't even have the keys. In the US there's no law compelling me to give up my crypto keys, and furthermore the 5th ammendment prohibits requiring anyone from giving up self-incriminating information. The devil (whether this crypto is actually useful or for show) is in the details really

Doctor Who becomes an illogical, unscientific, silly soap opera in Kill The Moon

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Summed it up for me

SuccessCase, you've summed it up for me. I don't need the Doctor to be cold and callous. But it's way too inconsistent, one episode dozens or hundreds will die and it doesn't seem to trouble anyone one bit; the next episode, he'll be angsting the whole episode "one person to save billions? Can I do it?" (even if that person's a villain), and then some dues ex machine will pop up so he can. Also, Dr. Who has always been quite soft sci-fi, but it seems like it's gone right off the rails, from more-futuristic-than-Star-Trek pseudoscience running the Tardis etc., to (far too often) "If you believe hard enough you can do anything!" type of fluffery.

Marriott fined $600k for deliberate JAMMING of guests' Wi-Fi hotspots

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Greasy.

Wow that's greasy. And just so Marriott (et al.) know -- if I find agressive attacks against my equipment, I can and will respond in kind. If I found a hotel deauthing me, I would deauth them in kind, and try to crash their hardware so the channel is clear.

Leaked: Mobile operators' SCARE campaign against net neutrality

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I assume this will fail...

I assume this misinformation campaign will fail. If the below is too long to read, in short Verizon (and AT&T) have tried misinformation campaigns here to try to charge companies to provide decent access to their services, and make it out like it's those companies fault if their videos buffer or whatever. Those companies have responded by refusing to pay, and popping up information making it clear it's Verizon's or AT&T's fault and showing comparative speeds of other local ISPs that are maintaining their internet connectivity properly. I don't know if it's been long enough for people to flee AT&T and Verizon yet, but in the longer term that's what would happen.

Verizon has recently failed to buy an adequate connection at at least one internet exchange, because Netflix is a large customer at this IXP. Verizon claims "Netflix isn't paying their fair share". Verizon wants people to ignore the fact that Netflix *is* paying for their access to the internet exchange points just as Verizon is, and that Netflix is NOT Verizon's customer. Verizon wants to double-dip by continuing to charge their customers full price (who are after all paying for *internet* access, not just access to Verizon's private network), while charging Netflix a second time for the Internet access Verizon's actual customers are already paying for.

This has failed spectacularly, Netflix and Youtube (among others) have refused to pay up since they already pay for their internet connectivity. People with any knowledge of Internet connectivity know Verizon isn't owed a penny, Verizon is the one cheaping out and Netflix *is* paying their fair share already. Those *not* in the know just know that Verizon's service has started to suck recently. Netflix and Youtube (among others) now helpfully have a little bar pop up if a video starts buffering that is like "Buffering? Click here to find out why", which explains the Verizon situation and then shows your speed along with typical (much much higher) Netflix and Youtube speeds from ISPs in your area. I don't know if there's any significant churn from this yet but it hasn't gone the way Verizon wanted for sure.

AT&T was planning to artificially degrade service of services who did not pay their double-dip (rather than failing to upgrade a connection to an internet exchange point), with similar result -- a few companies paid, but now the rest have drawn a line in the sand are making it clear to everyone that service problems are AT&T's fault.

Atlas snubbed! Ad blocker says it can kill Facebook's stalker tech

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

On the one hand...

First off, Facebook tracking facebook users? Fair enough IMHO. But what I actually see is the browser phoning home to fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net on all sorts of random pages. This happens so often, if you Google it some Windows users (assuming Windows got infected yet again) have begun posting the last few years asking what the deal is with the "fbstatic-a spyware" and how to remove it.

Anyway...

On the one hand, the amount of data these people collect is troubling, and there should absolutely be an opt-out. Worse still, I haven't seen any perceptible indication that Facebook actually *uses* this info to improve your experience. My friend uses Facebook all the time and just gets the stupidest ads that don't have anything to do with his interests.

On the other hand... Hulu. I suppose based on how fast I hit that "skip ad" button, it figured out I like technology and cars, and even figured out I don't like Hondas and skipped the Honda ads. The few minutes of ads they slip in during a typical show are a genuine pleasure.

OMG! With nothing but machine tools, steel and parts you can make a GUN!!

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"So why all the hype? "

This is what the anti-gun lobby does -- comes up with problems where there really aren't any as an excuse to reduce gun rights. If you listen to these people, you'll get the impression you're in imminent danger of being shot into a fine mist by machine-gun-wielding misfits on each and every block. Ultimate goal would be to restrict *some* guns, then use that a starting point to restrict *more* guns, and so on.

The three major problems as I see it (disclaimer, I have no guns, I just am a libertarian so I don't believe in unnecessary restrictions):

1) As you're seeing now in Britain, if guns are made illegal then only criminals have guns. I read an article saying a "Saturday Night Special" in Britain is only about double the cost as in the US (something like 150 UKP) so if a crim wants a gun they can have it, and since all these guns are black market there's no realistic chance of tracking a gun down if it was used in a shooting. Despite what the article asserts, guns here usually are registered. With that said, quite a few shootings here are gangbangers shooting each other up, and a lot of those guns are illegal (not illegal mods like machine guns, but people carrying a weapon without gun permit, unregistered guns, etc.) so then you are at the same point of not being able to find the weapon.

2) Often times, these objections are not fact-based. A big problem in the US, with our relatively broken two-party system (two nearly-identical centrist parties but each party is sure they are TOTALLY polar opposite of the other), there tends to be these shows and channels and web sites that are like an echo chamber echoing more and more distorted information to meet their political agenda. A lot of people (both pro and anti-gun) are not just uninformed, they have very inaccurate information because of this.

3) Constitutionality. Gun rights are a constitutional guarantee, and anyone saying they just want to restrict them *some* indicates they are willing to ignore the constitution and the bill of rights. These are often the same people who want to start "balancing" people's rights (meaning removing rights) in other ways. There is a defined mechanism for passing a constitutional ammendment, if these people truly want to restrict a few defined types of guns and that's it, enumerate them and get an ammendment passed to do it.

One Windows? How does that work... and WTF is a Universal App?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Why not?

Firstly, People. Do. Not. Want. Metro. If Microsoft is truly interested in so-called universal apps ("so-called" because supporting a few versions of Windows is in no way universal....), they really need to have an option to run these at least in Windows 8 *outside* the Metro environment, and preferably a Windows 7 runtime. Why not? They will have to realize eventually, expecting people to build to a spec with *zero* backward compatibility, they just aren't going to do it.

Secondly.... I just can't believe how badly Microsoft screwed this up. .NET's original intention was just to claim portability to displace Java, but really make sure that other platforms are second-class citizens compared to Windows to drive users to Windows. Nevertheless, the language has a decent design, the API is pretty clean as long as you stick to the portable part. They have a not at all portable WinAPI, but recommend against using it unless you have to use it for something. Don't use WinAPI, and the same binary will in fact run on Windows, Mac, Linux and any other platform Mono is built for.

WHY... ****WHYYYYY****... did they not use .NET and CLR runtime to allow the same apps to run on Windows (Vista on up), the stupid tablet-on-desktop interface (Metro), Windows (Phone) and Windows (RT)? As long as your .NET app doesn't call WinAPI, it would already be portable. You'd spend like 30 seconds running it through Metro, Phone, and RT packagers (assuming they use different package formats) and a packager to build a Windows desktop installer if you don't want the user to just download and run your .exe directly, and you'd be done!

Home Depot ignored staff warnings of security fail laundry list

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

CIOs fault -- yes but for a different reason

Is it the CIO's fault? Well, yes, but not for the reason suggested.

I have to disagree with Ledswinger's assertion that it is automatically the CIO's failure to articulate costs and so on that led to this problem. Some people, you can articulate the need for something to be done as eloquently, definitively, and assertively as you want, they just will not listen. Maybe he didn't make his case, maybe the executives just didn't listen.

On the other hand, why should tills have internet access? The couple setups I've dug into, against any sanity and good judgement the registers are running Windows (this is enough by itself to make me only pay cash!), but anything on the "cash register" network segment can ONLY contact a single computer, not to the public internet -- if a till were hypothetically hacked it could never phone home. Forget virus scanners and whatever, this is where the CIO's going to run into problems -- why was the network at each location set up so incompetently? If the tills connect to a "back of house" server to do all transactions, they should not be able to reach the internet at all, and the back of house should be behind a firewall that only lets it connect to the card processor and whatever Home Depot machines it needs to connect to to record sales transactions. If the tills do this themselves, then they should be similarly restricted. The fact that this information could get out at all means they were not doing this.

Infosec geniuses hack a Canon PRINTER and install DOOM

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

500mhz CPUs and "internet of things"

Why 500mhz CPU? Because the 133mhz CPU was not fast enough even when the LJ 1320 was new; almost the first Google result is a review complaining how the printer just sits there whenever any complex or graphics-intensive page is sent to it, because the CPU is not fast enough to keep up with the print engine. Making the printer driver do all the work and send bands to the printer, you don't need a fast CPU, the computer's drawn everything out; using Postscript or PCL, the printer does almost all the work and you do.

Internet of Things -- I made sure to turn this "Print from wherever!!!" stuff off on the HPs I've admined. This would tunnel out to some HP web site, which I think would let you print by just knowing the printer serial number -- which I assume are issued consecutively. There didn't appear to be any way to require a password. I find it most troubling that many companies are now taking products that were meant to either run standalone, or on a LAN, and just giving them methods to bust out of a NAT and be fully online. I would venture quite a bit of these devices firmware *originally* assumed direct connection via USB or parallel port (or no connection whatsoever depending on the device), then use on a (assumed non-hostile) LAN, and so are not hardened in any way whatsoever.

Special pleading against mass surveillance won't help anyone

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

FISA? Heh.

" While the FISA may be a cangaroo court with nearly unlimited powers it is still a court."

Except the NSA et. al. decided years ago they can even bypass FISA, FISA has even complained about it, but with no result other than some nonsensical circular logic from NSA lawyers claiming they can do whatever they want.

But the mainstream media here in the US has not covered this to the extent they should, the powers that be have played them like a fiddle. They dutifully repeated quotes from officials saying they don't "collect" much info, but (with very few exceptions) failed to report their twisted definition of "collect" (for PR purposes these officials don't consider info to be "collected" until someone has pulled it up and looked at it, instead of the normal English definition where it's collected as soon as they've slurped it up and stored it.) They then shifted emphasis from the (100% illegal) data collection programs, to the (questionable but legal) metadata collection programs to try to shift public scrutiny away from the really problematic programs. This worked, Congress then started grilling them on the metadata collection programs instead of the real problem.

Poverty? Pah. That doesn't REALLY exist any more

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Poverty...

To me, saying "well, we'll adjust this figure from some other country to 1990s-era USD, then assume 20% inflation (prices have actually more than doubled since then BTW)" to come up with the $1.25/day figure, then say anything above that is not poverty, is missing the point. I think it's quite simple -- if one cannot afford both housing and adequate food, they are impoverished.

I think the root problem I see with this analysis is, is the housing in UK and the US much better than in these countries where $1.25/day is typical? I'm sure yes. Is the food better? I'm sure yes. But, if one is down and out here in the US, there is no option to move into cheaper and cheaper rental units -- you get below a (pretty expensive!) point and there's nothing cheaper, nothing at all. You also are not permitted to just squeeze more and more people into a rental unit to save money, as probably happens in some of these countries, that's a quick way to get evicted. Obviously at lower income buying a place to live is right out.

Same with food, there are good inexpensive options. But, to many they are unobtainable. A big problem people here in the US are trying to figure out what to do about, it turns out there are "food deserts" in the poorer areas of quite a few cities where there's no grocery store within walking distance and the local poor do not have access to transportation. They'll have a gas station with food or a convenience store, where the food is like 2-3x the normal cost, limited selection of foods, and none of the lower-cost nutritious foods someone on a tight budget would ordinarily buy. Effectively, by the definition of being able to afford housing + food, they would not be impoverished if they had access to a grocery store, but are impoverished because they don't; and it's a catch-22, because they can't just move nearer the grocery store because they would not be able to afford even a basic apartment in those areas.

Bono: Apple will sort out monetising music where the labels failed

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Two comments

Two comments...

a) Bono is a douchebag.

b) He's also delusional if he thinks some yet another rights restriction system will even be effective, and doubly delusional if he thinks people will ever go back to buying music in some rights-restricted format -- and apparently pay more for it!

(Although I don't care for the "mastered for itunes" monicker, it's good if they are enforcing some standards in mastering, since the music industry seems incapable of consistently being able to handle a mixing board properly.)

The one "anti-piracy" method I think could be effective -- watermarking. The customer can make any fair use usage of the video, ebook, or audio they want. But I think most people who put stuff on file sharing services that is not public domain assume anonymity and would not do it if they don't know for sure if their name is scrubbed off the file or not! I for example got a few EBooks, standard non-DRM-infected PDFs, but they have my name on the back cover (and I don't know if it's hidden elsewhere in there.) Video could have the purchaser's name near the beginning or end, and embed it, and audio it'd have to be embedded since nobody would want songs with their name read at the beginning or end (or middle!)

Not appy with your Chromebook? Well now it can run Android apps

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Chromebook only?

This sounds like it may be compiling these apps to NaCL? This sounds cool, but I thought NaCL was at least portable between Chrome running on different platforms. Apparently not?

Keep that consumer browser tat away from our software says Oracle

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Agreed

Agreed, supporting ESR releases seems sensible. You want to use a newer version? It'll probably work but I wouldn't want to have to retest everything every 6 weeks either.

It's a pain in the ASCII, so what can be done to make patching easier?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"None of us can do much about the need for Windows to reboot."

Yeah, unfortunately. The big reason for this: POSIX (UNIX standards) permit deleting an *in-use* file, and replacing it with a new one (the old file's space is not freed up until the last program closes the old file). So, *generally*, Linux only requires restarting to start into a new kernel. (And I saw a patch that allowed going straight from one running kernel to another without reboot; how, I have no idea, I would think any changed data structures would break it...) Windows, these files must be updated while the system is shutting down or booting up.

I must get in my 2 cents... doing the regular updates in any given Ubuntu install, I have not had problems with updates introducing bugs. Following Debian's roots, the updates to a LTS (long term support) version are very conservative and mainly fix bugs and security holes.

Cloud? Nah, we're not bothering with that, say HALF of enterprises

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Just depends on how it's operated...

I'm with Hargrove hit the nail on the head. It's not that IT is incapable of grasping what cloud means. It's that some companies want to keep their information in-house, or are required to. Or they already have well-managed infrastructure that doesn't make cloud make sense. Or they might have data in a mainframe (which will scale out as needed). Or they've analyzed costs and cloud doesn't make sense... cloud saves the most when there are unpredictable bursty loads since you can rent some extra machines to cover the burst; if the loads predictable, once some economies of scale are hit it should cost less to run your own infrastrcuture than outsource it to the cloud, since the cloud provider wants to break even plus make some profit.

Has Europe cut the UK adrift on data protection?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I think the issue here...

I think the issue here may be EU wanting to continue strong data protection laws, whilst UK is probably following the US line of "Well, let's 'balance' this against the need for whatever" which means watering down and removing people's rights. If you have UK and only UK (out of EU members) arguing to water this stuff down, then eventually the rest will just quit listening to them.

Heavy VPN users are probably pirates, says BBC

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Licence fee payer travelling overseas

"Well you're 'forced' to pay rent and services on the home you have in the UK too aren't you? You should demand the right to not pay for any local rent or water and demand a free hire car whilst you're away too."

Nope, he could go ahead and have services shut off. He also has the right to sublet his home, or store his stuff there, or whatever; you know, make use of it. Unlike the license fee where he's apparently being forced to pay it but expected to get nothing out of it. Good on him for getting his money's worth!

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Absurd

if one was to say "Oh, those people heavily using telephones, they might be using them to illegally stream music, phone companies should be required to report all heavy phone users to us", they would be laughed out of the room. This is exactly as absurd.

CenturyLink said to have pondered Rackspace buy

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

What they said --^

What they said --^. CenturyLink's DSL also drops (for 30 seconds to 5 minutes) at least 4 or 5 times a week. It's not the copper, if you get service from a competitor (who has their own DSLAM across the street from the phone company central office here), it may go down once every 6 months.

As for Rackspace... I've heard about their zeal to buy them up. I'm not sure what to think, though, because CL has come out and said competing on price is a race to the bottom (which it probably is), so they aren't going to even try. Their current price is like 4-8x the price of their competitors, and they have no plans to lower prices. How will they compete then? Well.... who knows. Their one big asset is that fiber optics, and they have made no mention of, say, providing below-average-cost transit to attract bandwidh-using customers. They seem to think they will just be able to market (way above normal cost) services to their existing DSL customers, despite the poor reliability of the DSL. Will they keep Rackspace together or rip them apart? I don't know.

Reddit wipes clean leaked celeb nudie pics, tells users to zip it

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yep...

I am not sure if a DMCA notice actually obligates a site to preventing re-postings of some information. The MPAA etc. had been pushing for obligating sites to install automated systems, but as far as I know they are not.

I think John Robson got it right -- underage pics got this subreddit banned. The confusion arises I think from all the *other* reasons an ordinary website would have already closed a problematic forum, or section, or (in this case) subreddit.

You can thank Brit funnyman John Oliver for fixing US broadband policy, beams Netflix

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"ISPs and internet backbone providers argue large websites, such as Netflix, that make heavy use of the underlying network should pay towards the deployment and improvement of the web's infrastructure."

Which they do. They pay standard rates at the internet exchange points they connect to based on the capacity of the connection they get, i.e. if they generate more traffic they buy more capacity and so are paying more.

Fuck you to ISPs like AT&T and Verizon in particular... Firstly, for trying to make it out Netflix etc. are somehow freeloading when they pay a price based on capacity (mbps or gbps) of their connections just like everyone else -- in other words they ARE paying for their use by having to buy a high-gbps capacity connection. And secondly, for trying to "double dip" by wanting Netflix (etc.) to pay a second time when they are already paying the internet exchange point. These ISPs have been laughing all the way to the bank for years, reaping high profit margins from their very high prices while neglecting to upgrade their infrastructure enough to handle year-over-year increasing traffic (well not Verizon as much in their fiber-optic markets, but cable and DSL providers both big and small have run into this). This is simply not Netflix's problem, this is these ISPs choosing to put off capital expenditures in order to further increase profit margins, then expecting unrelated parties to provide them cash to spend on these expenditures they've put off.

Intel launches skinny nippy Core M – its new BRAIN for fondleslabs

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"If it's a 2 in 1 you can argue it's enough of a laptop to command a laptop's price, with the convenience of turning into a tablet. That was the Metro dream after all. We'll see if consumers take the bait."

2-in-1s have been on the market all along, and potential customers have not taken the bait.

Why? Every one I've seen has *not* resembled a "laptop with the convenience of turning into a tablet." They appear to be an EXTREMELY expensive tablet (and actually expensive as a plain laptop for that matter), with a nasty rubber keyboard, and saddled with power-hungry Intel chips (this chip will help with that part) and Windows 8, which makes it not so great as a tablet *or* a PC.

Until some vendor starts shipping ARM notebooks, this Core M may be an acceptable stopgap. But, not if they only stick it in tablets and "2-in-1s". I think tablets are a non-starter, ARMs are even lower power. And 2-in-1s... oh, boy, *1* USB port! I want a real keyboard and not to spend money on a touch screen I'll never use, thanks. Also, not if they saddle it with Windows 8 -- blank please! I've taken a hard line, I will not pay Microsoft a single penny for software I'll never use; my recent solution has been to buy only used hardware.

Snooptastic US CELL TOWERS pose man-in-the-middle THREAT

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

microcells?

" Further, what cell phone company puts up towers for NON-paying customers regardless of their location? And why would the location of the tower have anything to do with the presence or absence of encryption?"

I'm thinking perhaps microcells or some DAS (distributed antenna system) type installations? They tend to be added by an end-user who wants to fill in a coverage hole, and (since it's meant to cost like $100, much less than a cellular base station) it may not follow the usual standards and practices of the given cell company.

As for issues like phone cos failing to keep notifications of encryption being disabled etc.... I just don't get it. Why do these companies feel in any way they need to "help law enforcement"? Law enforcement is not their customer, and law enforcement can go ahead and help themselves.

IT blokes: would you say that lewd comment to a man? Then don't say it to a woman

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Not to minimize this..

I heartily agree with this article BTW.

Not to minimize the inappropriateness of this type of behavior, but I do know a person or two who, once they are drunk, if nobody sets them off on a different topic, they'll talk about who they've banged, want to bang, exes and who they are banging, if some TV show or movie's on they'll try to turn every line into a double entendre and like "Oh what I'd like to do with her..." for 2/3rds of the female actresses that come on the screen. When it's that over the top, it's pretty embarassing among men too. I'm sure if they went to conferences, after a few drinks they'd be a real horses ass to any women at the conference while they're at it.

Forrester says it's time to give up on physical storage arrays

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Well..

Well, when I looked at the specs for Sanbolic, for example, it could use EMC and a few other storage arrays; it supports "cloud storage" (no I would not use this either...), and it supports flash and whatever disks you throw into the systems. They describe this setup as "virtual RAID", whether it's disk-level like RAID or file or block level, or uses it's own distributed file system, I don't know. It looks like these setups do all push using a pool of local disks for storage.

I have noticed more modern servers no longer have the space to stick a good 5 or 6 disks into it, but as far as I know storage chassis are still on the market, so you can hook plenty of disks up to each server if you want. Of course if your usage is extremely storage-heavy (compared to number of servers) you really won't want to do this. It's definitely workload dependent.

Trundle, trundle, FLEEEP: iPhone 6 production grinds to halt

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yeah..

Yeah, personally, I would just make it large enough to hold a battery and two layers of LCD backlight.

Pedals and wheel in that Google robo-car or it's off the road – Cali DMV

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

liability insurance

"The manual control requirement is perfectly reasonable, but the insurance requirement is kind of ridiculous. Human-driven cars only need $35,000 worth of liability insurance."

For now, I think it's due to the fear of a faulty design just locking up and plowing through... well... more than $35,000 worth of stuff.

These designs are experimental after all. What are the failure modes? What should be done in case of catostrophic fault (for example if the computer locks up or crashes)? I seriously doubt it'd cause $5 million in damage, or even close to it. But, the "big fear" is a faulty design where it just locks at whatever steering angle and accelerator position it was at; I do think they'll take safety precautions and this unlikely. But does the car just suddenly come to a dead stop? This can be dangerous too if it's in the middle of the road or going around a curve. Does a secondary system try to pull it over to the shoulder? These are things that'll have to be worked out.

I expect the getting $5 million coverage from a commercial provider may be to get an insurance co to look at these vehicles as they would before insuring any new make/model of car, and see if there are ways the insurance co suggests to make the car safer that the engineers didn't think of.

Red Hat: ARM servers will come when people crank out chips like AMD's 64-bit Seattle

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Smart

I'm not the biggest fan of UEFI, but it'll make sure the system can boot. Using ACPI is a good move, it allows the vendor to still stick these serial ports etc. on however they want but let the OS know (via the ACPI tables and code) how to use these devices.

The Register Monopoly Pubcrawl Mobile Map: Vodafone wins Voice

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Could it be the codec?

Is it possible Vodafone uses a different codec? For instance, AT&T sounded **HIDEOUS** for years here in the US in most markets. They were using AMR-FR (full rate) in just a few markets, and AMR-HR (half rate) *all the time* in most markets. T-Mo at that point was usually running AMR-FR (full rate) with half rate used only if the site was busy, and then only if your signal strength was good enough (i.e closer to the site -- since half rate has poorer error correction, calls would go back up to full rate further from the site.) AT&T apparently got over this more recently. T-Mobile now advertises "HD" calls, running I think 14kbps codec (which is a little higher than the usual AMR-FR.)

I won't compare with Sprint and Verizon, the CDMA codecs are quite different, and there is no defined "half" and "full" rate on this setup. It's still possible to tank call quality by setting average call bit rate too low though.

Citrix says reports of XenServer's death are greatly exaggerated

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Not seeing the problem here.

I'm not seeing the problem here at all.

When you get right down to it, Cloud = (usually large scale) server farm + hype. Any "cloud" improvements should amount to being able to move VMs among machines better & more easily, use pools of storage better & more easily, and deploy VMs more easily, all things that are good to have even if you don't consider your physical servers you are running VMs on to be a "cloud".

vGPU itself is admittedly pretty useless for servers, but also doesn't take away from everything else being developed. But, any improvements in latency that may be being done with an eye towards desktop virtualization will still reduce the latency on server VMs as well.

Microsoft refuses to nip 'Windows 9' unzip lip slip

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

S.O.P.

This is S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure) for Microsoft. When they release a failed version of Windows, they claim the next version is coming out *real* soon now, just a few more months now... for however many months or years it takes them to get the next version ready. Regarding Windows 9 being ready (or a test version being ready), I'll believe it when I see it (being reviewed online or whatever) and not a day earlier.

The thing that always amazed me about this technique... and indicates Microsoft's continued anti-competitive abuse of monopoly position*, is that a normal company ("company A"), if they say "something much better is coming out soon!" usually *decreases* sales as people hold out for that better model, or buy from someone else if their product seems a bit ahead "company A"'s model.

*Not 100% monopoly, but for anti-trust purposes a "monopoly" is generally defined as >90% of the market, and abusing this position to maintain and extend this monopoly, for example by making agreements force-bundling their software with almost every PC sold and not honoring the license clause saying the software can be returned for a refund.

Microsoft: We plan to CLEAN UP this here Windows Store town

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Refunds?

So what about refunds? Google Market *used* to have some dubious apps (and I'm sure Google Play at least has a few still.) But, they have a "no questions asked" 15 minute refund. That's not long, but it's long enough so if you paid $8.99 for an app that says "itunes? Here's the download link for Windows", you can give it a quick 1-star rating and return it. Sounds like Microsoft is not even doing this!

VMware buys CloudVolumes to speed app installations

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Another Ballmer stuffup

I don't know what CloudVolumes, Xenapp, or Windows have to do with Apple. But, yeah, OSX runs on the Mach microkernel, so Apple went to a microkernel effective 2001.

The agony and ecstasy of SteamOS: WHERE ARE MY GAMES?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Not drivers

Just to be clear, I don't think Steam games are missing due to Linux drivers -- even the ATI ones are pretty good. (And the Intel ones have vastly improved the last year or two). I could be wrong, but I think a few of the games on SteamOS are Linux native, and quite a few more are still "for Windows" but are running under (I would assume customized) wine. I would fully expect Valve will improve wine compatibility, and as they do more and more of these other games will then be "SteamOS compatible."

Luckily for everyone involved, a main weak point in stock wine is that they are unwilling for legal reasons to put in workarounds for rights restriction systems (DRM) on games (one system for example tries to load a kernel module -- which of course doesn't work since wine doesn't have an NT kernel to load modules into; a few other DRM systems decide things look a bit fishy, conclude they are running under a debugger, and abort the game.) Steam games usually have disabled any DRM systems the non-Steam (CD or downloadable) versions of the game may have.

For those who have not seen games or apps run under wine... compared to installing a game in Windows, it installs so much faster in wine you'll think the installer has malfunctioned (the "write out a bunch of small files" workload is MUCH faster in wine on Linux than in Windows). Running typical apps (those that work), those that are CPU bound run the same in Windows or Linux; those that make intensive Windows calls tend to run a bit faster and lower CPU useage compared to in Windows. Games of course are not a typical app. I would estimate (a few years ago) that the overhead of running a Direct3D game was approximately 10-20% (due to Direct3D->OpenGL conversion overhead and possibly slower drivers at the time), running games that support it in OpenGL mode avoided this overhead (since the OpenGL calls can essentially be passed right on.)

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yeah, Ubuntu goes psychedelic too

"I don't know what he did here. I have the same BRIX platform running SteamOS and I have no graphics issues."

I don't either, but I've seen it -- the Ubuntu boot logo (the word "Ubuntu" with some dots underneath that change color as it boots) shows up all psychedelic on boot on probably 1/4th of the systems I've installed it on (JUST the boot logo, once it boots into X it looks fine, and text consoles also look fine.) It doesn't seem at all consistent, I'm sure I've seen two computers with the same video chip (something old like an intel 945) where it did it on one and not the other; it's not consistent based on if you have ATI, NVidia, or Intel chip either. I haven't noticed it with Ubuntu 12.04.5 (or other 12.04.x version with the newer "Trusty" kernel and X installed).

So, I don't think he did anything, I think Steam has the same buggy boot graphics code that Ubuntu does (both inheriting the Debian code probably) and he's got one of the 1/4th of installs that goes funky on boot.

iPhone 6 flip tip slips in Aussie's clip: Apple's 'reversible USB' leaks

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

*shrug*

Normally, I love slamming Apple for gratuitously and unnecessarily using non-standard plugs for no good reason. And I still do. For instance, running thunderbolt on the device end is still dumb.

But, if the goal on the other end of the cable is a reversible USB cable? It makes much more sense to do what Apple did (make a reversible USB cable) than to go with USB type C (apparently reversible, but not compatible with any existing USB connectors.)

Intel's Raspberry Pi rival Galileo can now run Windows

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"I wonder if they know where the sources are for NT3.1"

This is one thing I've seen on some embedded Linux devices; they'll have a pretty old kernel (not NT 3.1 old but pretty old), but an arbitrarily modern userland on there.

Munich considers dumping Linux for ... GULP ... Windows!

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Well yeah...

I could see this transition as genuinely not being successful. If you have large quantities of windows-specific apps (that don't run cleanly under wine), then running some kind of "Linux + lots of Windows desktop use via Citrix" doesn't really help much.

US TV stations bowl sueball directly at FCC's spectrum mega-sale

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Well...

They would be selling off 600mhz spectrum. Sprint has a small amount of 1ghz spectrum, and T-Mobile has none. (Hopefully) AT&T and VZW would not pursue this when they already have 700mhz spectrum.

For historical perspective... we've got VHF 2-7 (VHF low), 8-13 (VHF hi). These aren't used much with digital TV (ATSC can't deal well with the kind of burst noise from motors etc. that VHF gets that UHF pretty much doesn't), unfortunately 3(!) local channels do for me (1 is close and the other 2 just don't come in at all). UHF, originally 14-83. When 850mhz cellular went online this knocked it back to 16-69. Now, it is 16-51 (but channel 51 is also being cleared as an additional guard band.) There couldn't possibly be a need for that many channels here in the midwest, but areas for instance around NYC (with Baltimore, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, etc. all within close enough proximity to cause potential RF problems) the dial's apparently rather crowded already.

One thing here that is VERY different than in UK -- when channels went digital here, there was very little reduction in number of actual physical channels being run (there's just about as many digital multiplexes as there were analog channels). The channels here went digital, put the old analog channel (but in HD) on the digital channel, and added maybe one additional channel (one of RTV, MeTV, AntennaTV, ThisTV, which play older movies and TV shows. These all appeared after the digital transition). I haven't heard of a single case where two seperate (analog era) channels have combined onto one multiplex; although it seems like a good way to save loads on the ol' power bill.

Hackers' Paradise: The rise of soft options and the demise of hard choices

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

2 points.... plus a few more

1) 386 got an MMU and in fact supports all the features of a VAX. It is definitely possible to keep process address spaces seperate, to use seperate kernel and user modes, and in fact these are all done by Linux, Windows, and Mac. (Android uses both the MMU and Java-style sandboxing.. which is probably unnecessary since the MMU would already keep everything seperate AFAIK.)

2) The VAX. I think, if you look objectively, you'll find these had plenty of security problems despite use of the MMU hardware. Note I'm not distinguishing between VMS, BSD for VAX, and Ultrix (UNIX for VAX) bugs here, just saying the VAX software had plenty of security flaws over the years. Among these, they shipped with a field service account. Which for years was username: FIELD, password: SERVICE. Yup, walk up and log in and you've got superuser access. FTP with anonymous turned on, but could read/write where you shouldn't, not just a special ftp directory. Doing a "cd .." with FTP or other utilities to escape the "top level directory" you were supposed to be restricted too. World readable /etc/passwd files. Network utilities that would allow you to send a system a file, THEN ASK IT TO EXECUTE IT -- sometimes this utility would run as root, not user nobody! UUCP (UNIX to UNIX CoPy) had minimal to no security, you could request (for example) /etc/passwd off a system with this. On some systems, a user could submit cron jobs which would be run on root. This ignores the havoc packet sniffers could cause with everything unencrypted (encryption wouldn't be feasible with the processor speeds of these systems.) Seriously, though, the list goes on and on. See the Morris worm of 1988 (I'll get to that below.)

I think you'll find the reason that *cough* certain OSes... are not as good security-wise is simply design and history. Quite simply, UNIX was deisgned to be multi-user (almost) from the start -- and programming practices since like the 1970s reflect this. Windows still supports methodologies from Windows 95 and older which assumed a single user account or complete system access. I'm quite sure there's some real messy code in there to support this. The big factor though, I think -- Microsoft didn't start to take security that seriously until NIMDA worm or so -- about 2001. UNIX vendors didn't usually take security all that seriously up through the 1980s either -- but they had their "NIMDA moment" with the Morris worm back in 1988. Quite simply, they had a 13 year head start.

The problem is that programs in absolute isolation are just not that useful. Lets say you want to download a file, edit it, and print it. With perfect isolation.. first, the browser or FTP utility or whatever would not be able to get anything on to the screen, since after all that would break isolation of both the utility and the display software. Lets say you could download the file. Then it'd be in the browser or FTP utility's secured area; the word processor would be unable to access it. Lets say you get the word processor to open it, you edit and save it. Now, the print driver or utility (if isolated) would not be able to get any information to print. It's these needed points of overlap that can be hacked and exploited to pwn a person's (lets face it, probably Windows...) system.

Premier League wants to PURGE ALL FOOTIE GIFs from social media

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Indeed

"

Do not piss off fans

Or they will piss off leaving you with no money.

"

Indeed. Major League Baseball has been apparently trying to figure out why viewership has dropped off... it was already dropping like a rock 15 years ago when I was in college. Why did it drop off? They make it so quite a few games are only available with expensive sports packages. With an antenna you certainly will not get enough games to bother watching it. And no online coverage without paying like $150 for a MLB online package (not even streaming radio.) Result? A lot of younger people don't have a TV (they watch videos on the computer if at all), and even fewer spend big money on some cable or dish package; and they aren't about to pay $150 to watch. So they don't.

Boffins brew TCP tuned to perform on lossy links like Wi-Fi networks

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Fixing at the wrong layer

"I was thinking the same - why is the wifi base station not able to cache a half second or so of recent packets and re-transmit them as needed as part of a wifi protocol?"

It does. The default is 7 retransmissions of unacknowledged packets. Wifi is a harsh mistress, despite the retransmission mechanism it still has some degree of packet loss, particularly under poor RF conditions.

New voting rules leave innocent Brits at risk of SPAM TSUNAMI

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

No sympathy from me!

"Despite the administrative incompetence, you have to have some sympathy with the councils."

I don't have to have any sympathy for them. Being transferred from paper to electronic records ***IS NOT*** an excuse to ignore a person's privacy. They should have either 1) Respected people's preferences; those on open registry could go on the open registry in electronic form, and those not on open registry would stay off open registry. Or 2) Transfer nobody to the electronic registry, if you have to register every year anyway then why wouldn't they turn on the electronic system and let it fill up with registrations as people actually register?

So, do you run into the problem there where companys sell, re-sell, and re-re-sell the same info? Or do these companys jettison your info once it's unavailable from the original source? Here, I think I could end up with some numpties putting my name on a list, and by the time I'd get the mail saying they'd done it, at least one company would already have my name from that list and would re-sell it for all eternity. Boy would I ever sue my city council if they did this to me!!! My parents still get occasional junk mail for me, and I haven't lived there for over 15 years.

Brits' borked Samsung kit held up after repair centre slips into administration

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Thing that bothers me...

The thing that bothers me is how it appears Samsung was unaware a business partner of there's went broke. Like, (for sake of argument, I don't think either is "on the ropes"...) if UPS or Fedex closed up shop, would Samsung US just keep trucking over pallets of stuff ready to ship and leave it at their doorstep? I do hope this works out for everyone with their Samsung stuff off in limbo.

Know what Ferguson city needs right now? It's not Anonymous doxing random people

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Anonymous vs. Anonymous

Yeah I saw this; then a second Anonymous account is like (paraphrasing here) "Yeah we have a name too, and it's not the name those Anons released."

The good news, I think, the report of the name found being the wrong one seems to have spread far more widely than the wrong person's name and address.

I do think the PD (Police Departrment)'s behavior has been quite irresponsible though. Hiding the name of the (allegedly...) responsible party. The head of the PD pledged (I think Monday?) to take any lawsuit against the PD through the courts as far as possible (which is irresponsible to say before they had a chance to even investigate this properly). Indiscriminate use of teargas and rubber bullets. And arresting and harrasing the media as well as protestors.

It sounds like at this point, due to the level of misconduct the last few days in.. umm... "crowd control"... (plus building animosity against the local PDs at this point), the Ferguson PD (and probably other local PDs) are basically being kicked out of Ferguson and Missouri Highway Patrol taking over.

UK.gov's Open Source switch WON'T get rid of Microsoft, y'know

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

OpenOffice compatibility and cloud services

"The data in those documents needs to be liberated and ODF is seen as the way to do this – modern-day editions of Office also support ODF. Just don’t expect to install open-source OpenOffice on the desktop and open your old Microsoft Office docs. It won’t work – many documents won’t display properly"

Must call BS on this one. I have not heard of anyone having a problem with *many* documents not displaying properly. Don't get me wrong, some found the few documents they had not display properly were absolutely mission-critical; but this is by no means some widespread issue. And, I would venture, neither are macros.

Secondly.. if it were my gov't doing this, I would find it absolutely irresponsible for them to knowingly spend much more overall for a software subscription to save a bit up front. But, not surprsing, gov'ts love to "kick the can down the curb" when it comes to spending even if they know it's going to screw them later.

Five Totally Believable Things Car Makers Must Do To Thwart Hackers

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Physical separation

To me, physical separation is the best way to go. Don't get me wrong, the rest is also important, but these systems should usually be totally separated.

If you have to connect them, very restrictive firewall. Remote diagnostics? Read-only access to the engine parameters. Some auto park system or whatever that requires "write" capability to steer or break? The firewall should allow only traffic from the CPU responsible for auto-park, and only the type of traffic the auto-park system actually uses. Most current exploits involve unusual traffic types, coming from ports and devices the traffic would normally never come from. Oh and do make sure the firewall is secure, obviously it is not useful if an attacker can just change firewall rules then pass their traffic through.

Rimini Street promises 'business as usual' after Oracle IP judgment

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yeah basically...

"Do I understand this correctly? Rimini provide some kind of oracle managed service but think that they can use other peoples licenses?"

Yeah basically... it looks like a customer would already be running Oracle; they didn't want to spend the big bucks on running it on their own hardware. So, Rimini would copy this software onto a system on their end instead.

So, first off, not "IP theft" in any sense of the words. Remini and their clients in a few cases exceeded the letter of their license terms. But they were not exceeding the "spirit"; they weren't exceeding number of users, or running excess copies of Oracle, or exceeding licensed hardware limits, or using the copy of Oracle licensed to one client to serve other clients, or really anything that should be any of Oracle's concern. But (just like Microsoft) Oracle has some extra-special clauses in their licenses which Rimini and some of their clients were violating.

ONE EMAIL costs mining company $300 MEEELION

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Surprised he got off so light

I'm surprised he got off so light. I don't think he should get hard prison times and crippling fines, but I could get $1000 fine off a couple speeding tickets (well, not in my state...), I would think intentionally crashing a companies' stock price* would warrant a *little* more than that.

*Well, crashing it through false information. Crashing it through true information should be fair game so long as you're not shorting their stock at the time.