Posts by ElReg!comments!Pierre 2711 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
I... dunno. Perhaps the assembly managed to keep him talking? Talking for more than 10 hrs is an athletic challenge, even for a well-trained pro. Ask teachers! If he had not enough support from fellow opponent to give him rest from time to time he may not be able to speak much for the next couple days!
The need to get high stems from the use of a rifle; bullets can travel for quite some way, and it was an inhabited area (with a busy road close by). In order to avoid any accident, the cops wanted a downward shot. Good on them (the need to dispatch the animal in the first place notwithstanding).
You're a bit unfair there. He was considerably less slimy than that. He flat out declared "free speech is not someting we can tolerate anymore" which is quite ballsy. Even with the accompanying "because terrorists, duh" thrown in to placate the sheep. I think he attended the same training workshop as Kim Jong-un.
Just answered an email from my old (OK, not-so-old) daddy honestly at loss with a request from his editor. The man's down-with-the-kids teacher, published author, and a bit trained in the ways of software, by yours truly (or so I wished).
The Question? "My publisher asks for a plain-text version of the book as well as the PDF, what is it and how do I do that?" [summarised and translated].
Oh, the humanity. He's using OpenOffice, too.
If you're looking for me I'll be over there under that oaktree, busy hanging myself.
And then there's the classic trick of the 20-MB pdf carefully crafted from within powerpoint, that just contains the date, time and location of a meeting. Because of course there was no way to put that in plain text in the body of the email.
Oh and let's not forget the old "I put the price of that new stappler you were looking at in the attached Excel file. Good reception."
Perhaps because Instagram is as serious about security as they are about photography?
As a person who thinks highly of both security and photography I can't help but feel the Schadenfreunde urge. I'm not myself very good at photo, but at least I'm trying not to be overly cheesy. I'm not perfect at security either, but I challenge y'all to prove me that "perfect security" ain't an oxymoron in this day and age.
A toy-photo app/site is proven to have toy-like IT support. Big surprise.
I'm a lot more concerned when I hear of major IT players with enterprise-grade contracts happen to make the same mistake. Which, worryingly enough, happens way too often.
" the extra step of pressing *5 only assures that a human is on the line who won't be stymied by it."
Except that (round these parts at least) telemarketters and other phone parasites don't have access to a dial; it's either entirely robotic, the fleshie is only there to do the talking and gets the phone calls handed to them by a robotic dialer one after the other. So, unable to press the required "5*" combination.
Let's hope Devuan won't run out of steam. In the long run it would probably be beneficial to have separate desktop and server branches anyway, less pollution of the server branch by bulky dependancies only needed for GUI niceties. I initially thought that Ubuntu et al. were going to be the desktop branches with Debian staying focussed on clean, lean server-ready code; obviously I was wrong. Long live Devuan!
Full-disk encryption with the passwords kept away from the hardware would slow someone down considerably in the task of accessing the installed system
Not really, no, unless the server happens to be powered down when the perp gains access to it. If the system is running whole-disk encryption is a minor inconvenience only if your strategy involves rebooting the system, which in most cases would be the best way to alert the rightful admins that something is up. If you keep the system running you're not event going to notice that the disk is encrypted...
but how common is that on a server?
I'd guess "not very", perhaps because a server is typically designed to stay up, while whole-disk encryption is only useful to prevent either disk theft or unauthorized boot.
The subtleties of the English language make the slogan readable in 2 different ways:
-you must use the Brixton Pound, and only that, when in Brixton (illegal shirley)
-you must use the Brixton Pound in Brixton and nowhere else (obviously, as anywhere else it would only get you bemusedly puzzled looks at best)
I think legally it's supposed to be read in the second way, while being phrased to be understood the 1st way by most of the population.
We don't think we're brighter than the BBC
Perhaps not, wouldn't know, don't care. You're also not brighter than even a pretty dim star, or a 500 W construction spot for that matter. I usually avoid staring at those, too.
images
Yeah, that. well they're not going away apparently.
There's also the mouseover bar; the newly-added delay is nice but on my browser when you pass the mouse over it to reach the browser's command bar it pops up and won't go away, which means I have to sneak the pointer by the side gap. No biggie; a bit annoying.
Soooo I found a solution. w3m. Black background, no image. No problem.
I don't know what it does to advertising revenue but at least it's a version of the site I can actually look at, which has to be better than no page views at all.
Plus I get to use a truly good no-nonsense web browser.
Nothing different that I noticed when using w3m; good.
I also tried on a graphical browser, and it looks a bit like a website designed for cell phones: the mousover images and the "featured" images are humongous, as is the text, resulting in only a tiny part of the page height being displayed at once. "zooming out" kinda fixes that but then the fixed width feels a bit awkward.
And I like grey, very stylish. Good thing it's not entirely gone.
Overall it's not too bad, if you really had to. We'll get used to it. Or we'll use text-mode browsers.
I switched to w3m almost completely* for El Reg (cuts both the white wastelands and immense immages from the Monstrous Makeover). The alt text displayed for that image is Bush in Game of Thrones; hardly a hidden attempt at political manipulation.
*I do use the "night theme" on xombrero from time to time, but something on El Reg seems to kill xombrero regularly, even without js)
The problem is not that renewables are not a complete solution. The problem is nutters who spout nonsense such as "micro generation is the way to go". Hey, let's solve malnutrition in the world, quick, everyone start growing lentils on a piece of damp cotton, that'll take care of it!
The problem is that people pushing "renewables" are fighting very hard to cut every other possible power source, despite the very obvious fact that, as you say, said renewables just can't cover more than ~10% of the energy need in densely populated areas such as western Europe (and I'm being generous). At a huge cost, at least for now. I'm not against experimentation with wind power and the like, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and discard the actual power sources, shall we? (to that regard the UK has acted as a warning for other european countries such as France that has slowed down the planned deployment of windfarms considerably after the overchannel results were published... and kept nuclear plants open that had been earmaket for shutdown after Fukushima. SOmeone has to provide that energy the UK is not self-producing anymore, heh?)
Yeah, deleting this post was a smart move methink; although it did make for a nice read, it was almost completely unrelated to the (to me, completely abstruse) post it was supposed to answer to.
I hope you fare well in you new pasture (no doubt more appleish).
not good enough
it may not be; however, the only way to find a good way to recycle waste is to invest in research on the topic -which we're told is unacceptable as it "sponsors" nuclear power which is not good enough at recycling its waste products. See the problem there?
Meanwhile in the real world everyone knows the basic fact: local, small-scale electricity generation is incredibly inefficient*, moreso in the case of a "solidarity" low-voltage grid that many greenies dream about (low-voltage 'leccy transport is like carrying water in a handbasket). If you need big amounts of juice the only viable way is a big centralized generation center and high-tension (ie low loss) distribution grid.
Now that's not necessarily true for other forms of energy; you can lower a house's need for 'leccy by locally installing a geothermal heat pump and water-heating rooftop panels for example, both of which are relatively cheap and non-polluting (compared with photovoltaic panels for example). Then you buy the 'leccy you still need from the vastly more efficient grid, but you buy a much smaller amount.
*and the gear is hugely more expensive, proportionately to the output.
It's a bit shocking that it's not already the case. Big biz often asks (sometimes borderline illegally) for a whole lot of private -sometimes very private- information on you, most of which is completely unrelated to your job. I would think it is a bare minimum that they are held liable for leaks should they misplace such data. If they can't keep it secure, they should not ask for it. (in most cases they should not ask for it in any case to begin with, but high unemployment rates awaken the slave-trader instincts in HR bods)
I am guessing that if the public wifi is still functional with the modem in bridge mode, it's going to be using the 67.something IP.
It's going to use an IP attributed directly by the provider to the "guest" authenticating to it, and it's going to be different from the one the operator gives you.
suppose that handles my concern too, but the people who send out black helicopters may not understand the distinction between username and IP address. This 'feature' doesn't seem to work on my own-bought wireless router/modem.
O...K. In for some explaining: these routers broadcast 2 different networks, with different APs, and different IP spaces. One is yours to fiddle with, you can encrypt to your heart's content and it takes precedence in the case of a bandwidth limitation. The other is managed directly by your ISP, is open to all connections but requires a webpage-based login (using credentials valid with the ISP). It also only uses "leftover" bandwidth, for which you are, quite obviously, not charged.
Whether you like the idea or not, it doesn't draw any significant power (I would estimate in the milliwatt range) and should not impact your traffic speed.
It is also operated directly by the network operator (here, the ISP) and thus completely unrelated to your account AND your IP, no black helicopters for you.
In some cases (e.g. Fon), non-subscribers can connect on a pay-per-minute basis, and the hotspot "owner" can choose to receive some of that money (as for me I didn't bother giving my Paypal ID to receive what amounts to pennies; still would pay more than the added 'leccy bill though).
My router does that too, I don't see a problem.
It probably draws some extra power when someone connects to it. In the order of the power consumption of one of the bulbs in the Xmas lighting that the pair probably have all over the house.
It doesn't impact my bandwidth in any significant way (QoS does work, it would seem).
In fact it's so negligible that I actually installed a second "open" spot using Fon. That way, on the move I can benefit from my ISP's hotspots AND Fon's ones, should one of the networks not be available in the area.
Except for Matt who has clearly been blessed with a veritable plethora of said sphincters from which he spouts forth
Forgive me if I get a bit technical, but we are all "blessed with a veritable plethora of sphincters" (for example your anus has 2). Some of which we use in the process of oral expression.
I will give you that there is none used in the process of typing comments on El Reg (well, appart from Matt, obviously).
And undetectable with netstat? What exactly does this mean? Guessing wildly: it is detectable with netstat but doesn't advertise itself as a nasty but masquerades as something else, eh?
No, it only sends the one packet containing its contact info, then uses PCAP to catch the TCP and/or UDP packets containing remote instructions. No real connection here for netstat to sniff.
Well you should certainly stop downloading trojans, run them, and give them correct ID and interface parameters when it asks. That should keep you safe.
Oh, and don't give access to your system to someone who may install trojans, run them, and give them correct ID and interface parameters.
The module statically links PCAP libraries, and uses this code to get a raw socket, ..., but use of PCAP requires superuser privileges???
Statically linked. That doesn't fix the raw socket issue though; in the examples contained in the advisory they do run it as root...
It doesn't seem to exploit anything but user stupidity. What is described in the advisory is not a way to infect Linux machines, just an explanation of how it works when it's there. It's basically a user-level backdoor to /bin/sh, with network monitoring capabilities (statistically linked to pcap) although from the write-up it only seems to use pcap to catch the TCP/UDP packets containing the remote commands.
The way it works makes it invisible to the way most people use netstat; however by checking the traffick at the packet level it would be pretty obvious I expect (there's not much info on how it parses the command packets other than that it passes the payload to /bin/sh -c , that must surely make for quite visibly fishy packets, no?).
Ah. A bit like McKinnon then. Or like that time when the general's dog pissed on a comms cabinet. Got to love the US and their tendency to have "the worst (biggest) X in human history" roughly every 2 month.
Regarding the trojan "described" in the article, the details are a bit too thin on the ground to really get an idea of the threat.
Bug reports? What actually didn't work?
Just to make everything absolutely clear: I only tested systemd on test systems, and even then, "unwillingly" (as in, it got installed as I dist-upgraded test systems).
I do run Sid on such systems, because I like to keep abreath of current developpments, and I like to struggle with technical issues before they show up on stable. I also DO like to fix problems, that's my job.
I'm thus perfectly fine with systemd in Sid. That's where it belongs.
I fancy myself as a pretty practical person; I know of to fix problems, and I know how to to learn how to fix problems. I also know that I can't quickly and efficiently fix intermittent problems. As far as I know, noone can. And these are just the ones systemd created for me on the test systems. Admittedly, I could have devoted hours upon hours learning about the intrinsic workings of systemd (that changes every new moon, more often on a month with an 'e' in the name). Assuming I would have needed a replacement for my perfectly fine and proven system. Assuming I would want to replace a perfectly fine, elegant, lightweight and quite clever system that I know inside-out with a huge, dumb, opaque, malfunctiunning beast of a blob that insists on working differently with each release. I would look into it more seriously should it stay in Sid for a release cycle or two. Pushing it to stable now in Debian of all distros, The Conservative Distro, is just taking the piss.
Piss Duly taken. Apt-get dist-upgrade devuan
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