Posts by Crazy Operations Guy

Making them thinner is getting pointless

Now that we have phones thinner than 3/4 of a centimeter, there is really no longer a point in making them smaller, rather phone manufacturers should be focusing on putting more in the same space, particularly more battery capacity.

"demonstrates our commitment to changing the way gamers experience the world of PlayStation."

Changing from a fun experience to being propped up over a barrel...

But what about data caps?

Sure you get 2 Gbps, but how much of that can you use before they cut you off? 250 GB goes pretty quickly on a connection like that...

So how long was is account hacked?

I'm counting 16 months between the 3 posts in the screenshot. How thick do you ave to be to not noticed it for that long? Especially since these are semi-public posts and not chat messages or anything like that...

Tape price/GB isn't what is killing tape.

The thing that is killing tape isn't the tapes, its the insane cost of entry compared to disk. A small business can pick up an inexpensive NAS box with a couple 1 TB disks in it with some basic backup software for less than $1500-2000. If more storage is needed, it is relatively inexpensive to just buy a new box, often offering better features.

Compare that to tape, which, at the lowest end, will require a $5000+ tape drive, a server to connect to it, tapes, and storage for the tapes (which have a much smaller maximum write count than disk). That isn't even considering the cost of purchasing a separate system to test the tapes... And that isn't even considering license cost of tape library software.

Backup admins are, by nature, a very risk-averse group of people. If disk-to-disk backup has worked for them in the past, they are very unlikely to change no matter the cost savings. Even then, management would also be quite adverse to such a change, since the business depends on being able to recover quickly from disaster.

So only Israel is allowed to have Nukes?

Even if Iran does build nukes, they aren't going to use them, they aren't stupid enough to risk the US's response just to wipe out Israel, which would turn the entire country into vapor and the land to glass. But I tend to believe that Iran is intending to use its nuclear program to build power reactors for the simple reason that doing such would free up more oil for export and thus more money in their coffers (which, at the very worst, means they have the money to wipe out Israel with conventional weapons which reduces the risk of everyone dying horribly in atomic fire)

The bubble will be bursting soon

A company that continues to lose massive amounts of money is going to be giving money it doesn't have to a company that will continue to hemorrhage cash for the foreseeable future...

This will all come crashing down once companies no longer see a good return on the money they are pouring into advertising. Companies like Twitter and Facebook are dependent the display of ads translating in enough sales for the advertised product to create profit for the product's manufacturer.

Demanding money from a public school?

Haha, they've been foiled; the school has no money.

You'd need intel on the physical location of the machines

How would the malware know here its receiving data from, or even that the heat is coming from an infected system and not just a box that gets used for periodic, yet intensive tasks.

SO for this task to work, you'd have to manage to get the malware onto both machines. Its not hard to infect either machine, but beating the odds and getting both? Those are some pretty big odds given that the sending machine would need to remain undetected (which gets harder as time goes by, because someone is going to notice a process that wastes that many cycles).

Things like this is why my company put all air-gapped systems into secure data center and users access them by way of a thin client. Pus we have executable white-lists, so something like this wouldn't be able to run in the first place.

But isn't the point of the cloud

Isn't the whole point of "The Cloud" that you don't need stuff like this, that geographically disperse data-centers would fix that problem?

But why would they kill us?

Every piece of Science Fiction I've read on the subject has never actually mentioned anything about the AI's End Game. Sure they want us humans dead, but what is the reason for doing so?

I would assume that any AI that can outsmart humanity would also realize that just we humans are no threat to them, rather we are beneficial. We build massive power grids to feed them, house them in state-of-the-art facilities, allow them to communicate, and repair them when they break.

But then again, I am the kind of person that summarizes the Matrix movies as "Brainwashed terrorist ruins the world for everyone", mostly because the robots built the Matrix in order to stop the humans from killing them and felt that such a simulation was a fair compromise.

Hypervisor as malware

I've always wondered if it would be possible to a Hypervisor to produce a more advanced version of this. Wouldn't be all that difficult now that pretty much every processor supports the virtualization extensions and they can be turned on by way of UEFI. Just spoof the device IDs to the guest and re-direct all of the systems peripherals and you could get a very difficult to detect rootkit that can access whatever it wants.

can be killed with software

Just request 2*row_width more memory than needed and then block off a row before and after the page tables. Maybe throw some canary values in those blank rows to detect an attack, maybe set the NX bit on those rows so the OS becomes aware... On a 512-bit wide memory system, it would only take 128 Bytes of memory. We live in an era of phones shipping with 4 GB of RAM, I don't think anyone would miss a few KB here and there if it improves security.

Sat Network

These systems really should be on a fully air-gapped dedicated network, not unlike SWIFTNet has with banks. I figure that a satellite network would be ideal for something like this to enable communications between airports, ATC centers, and aircraft.

With a proper mesh set up with both satellites and ground stations, it'd be possible to create a fully redundant network and allow for entire airports / regions to go offline and air traffic can continue to operate as normal. And maybe with enough bandwidth added in, upload flight recorder and cockpit recorder data in real-time (Seems ridiculous that we can put WiFi and phone systems on a plane, but we have to fish the black box out of the wreckage to figure out what went wrong...)

"...as Alfred Nobel was to dynamite"

So spending the rest of their lives regretting it?

Spammers stealing from spammers

Couldn't have happened to a nicer group of companies... I hate how they aren't considered spammers in the eyes of the law simply because someone bought something from an online store 3 years ago and the terms allowed for them and their partners to send you 'newsletters' and 'Special offers' for the rest of your life (unless you find that 'unsubscribe' link buried deep in the emails footers and then manage to remember the username/password you used when you got signed up for the messages).