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* Posts by There's a bee in my bot net

189 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Aug 2010

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Feds commandeer botnet, issue 'stop' command

There's a bee in my bot net

Wow... government does the fucking obvious?

I've been wondering why there hasn't been more international cooperation on this sort of thing.

Sure you are going to have a hard time if the CnC is in deepest darkest Russia or the like but if you can identify the CnC in use and can get physical access to it, surely the best thing to do is take control of it (or replace it with your own).

Assuming the CnC has exclusive control of the herd, keep sending those stop commands (if no kill command is available) until you can send an update to the herd to shut them all down. Otherwise it might be possible for someone to take control of at least part of the herd from somewhere else as and when each bot restarts.

I'm sure there would be plenty of clever reverse engineer types out there who would be interested in taking apart a bot so it could be replaced with something harmless...

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Embrace chaos, beat pirates... buy my book, says Mason

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Exactly what I was thinking...

Though I would never condone such actions myself, after all you wouldn't steal a car would you? On the other hand if I could copy one...

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Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!

There's a bee in my bot net

Insignificant in what context?

"This is the problem that everyone faces, who describes nuclear incidents as they really are – that is, insignificant. You are accused of being heartless, of failing to care about or empathise with people who are terribly frightened. You have committed the same sin as bracingly telling a toddler that there is no monster under his bed and that he should go back to sleep."

Perhaps it's the way you present your argument. I would argue that you don't just describe things the way they are, but go too far in trying to show how little impact there has been.

If you could stick to the facts and explain their meaning without adding opinion then you could probably produce a decent article on the subject. Granted that would be difficult to fit into one article.

Telling a toddler that there is no monster can be done a number of ways, not all of which will reinforce the argument that there is no monster. "Bracingly telling a toddler that there is no monster under his bed" isn't the best way to go about it...

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Red Dwarf to blast off on new adventure

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Series 1 & 2 were bleak...

...in comparison to series 3 and on. The comedy was brought to the fore and just got sillier as time went on and as a result it lost its edge. I think that darkness and sense of isolation made the jokes and jibes all the more funny.

Anyhoo - I hope the cast and crew do a sterling job and look forward to seeing what they come up with.

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Indonesian anti-smut MP caught ogling filth

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Anyone else read "Prosperous Justice Party"

As "Preposterous Justice Party"?

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Nissan Leaf electric car

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Battery cost per month

Worst case, if the battery pack costs £10k and lasts 5 years before the range is low enough to need replacing then you are looking at £166 a month.

I would like to think Li-ion will get significantly cheaper but I doubt it.

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Sony buries hatchet with GeoHot in PS3 modding case

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Yes. Yes it does in some ways...

And puts instant award of damages on George if he is in breach...

Have a read of the judgement (if genuine)...

http://psx-scene.com/forums/attachments/f6/26802-settlement-george-hotz-case-127-stipulation.pdf

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Wind power: Even worse than you thought

There's a bee in my bot net
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Meh...

>At what point did Lewis Page claim the Fukushima plant's problems are anything *other* than serious?

He kept going on about how safe it was despite the uncertainty of the situation. Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good", "Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA", "Fukushima: Situation improving all the time" and I'm sure there was one that said Fukushima: A triumph of nuclear engineering. Doesn't sound particularly serious from his article titles.

>The point of Page's Fukushima pieces was the *poor reporting*, which blew the whole thing out of proportion.

There was only one article where he focused on the mainstream press coverage. His reporting style was just as biased as the main stream press albeit on the opposite side of the scale.The pro nuke bias and all the trumpeting of nuclear power in the face of a disaster that could have been much worse made his articles all that much harder to take seriously.

>Unlike you, I went to some of the primary sources

That's a massive assumption on your part. I see and hear little broadcast news as the main stream media is obsessed with the dramatisation of everything no matter how trivial and for me it detracts from the news they are trying to report. I personally found mitnse.com (which links to the TEPCO reports) very informative, Ars Technica also ran some interesting articles and for the other disparate sources, google was helpful in filling in the details or displacing F.U.D.

>The only thing "mental" about Fukushima was the mainstream media's reporting of it.

Again I agree that the main stream media's reporting (what little I saw/heard of it) was appalling and misleading, I was suggesting that Mr Pages articles on the Fukushima disaster were unbalanced*. I enjoy his articles on military technology though, where his writing is clear and unbiased, I guess he doesn't have an axe to grind there.

>The way the politicians have grabbed for this media circus and milked it for all their worth is an even greater embarrassment

You'll get no argument from me on that one.

>The future is a mix of sources, but giant wind farms are an expensive distraction, not a "solution".)

I agree the future of power generation is a mix of sources, big (power plants & farms) and small (micro and mini generation), nuclear and renewable. I'm not so sure that wind is as big a waste as some might suggest. Sure, betting the farm on wind is stupid, and I suspect the people who are, are those who stand to make the most money in that industry. Wind has its place, and to dismiss one form of power generation (and I'm speculating on the content of the article based on the comments as I still haven't read it) out of hand seems churlish.

*You probably think that I am anti nuclear power but that is not true. I am a realist and understand that the developed world is selfish and will not easily give up that to which it has become accustomed. Nuclear IS a part of our future (albeit 10 to 20 years away).

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There's a bee in my bot net

I might have read this if it wasn't for your mental series of articles on Fukushima

I mean, its all going swimmingly there right? No need to hammer the point home about how safe it is, so you might as well start in on how crap alternative forms of energy production are.

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Energy crisis over - for 250 years?

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That'll be one of them cultural things then I guess?

I knew implicitly that the article was referring to gas as in the UK the gas we burn in our cookers and boilers is... well, a gas. The fuel we put in our cars is either petrol, diesel or LPG* and is a liquid 'Merkins referring to petrol as gas has always puzzled me as... well, it's a liquid. Granted 'step on the liquid' doesn't have the same ring to it, but 'Punch it Chewy' still works just as well...

*I'll admit that LPG kind of muddies my argument as it is only a liquid under compression.

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Commodore 64 revivalist posts prototype PC pics

There's a bee in my bot net

For that real nostalgia

you could just bring the real C64 down from the loft and then wonder why you bothered when you remember would have to relearn the memory map to do anything interesting with peek and poke...

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Vanilla Ice to tackle panto Captain Hook

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Am I the only one who thought...

...this was a good opportunity to go and heckle him?

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WTF is... 3D printing

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Next wave of copyright hoo ha...

http://www.shapeways.com/ is a pretty neat idea - you can put your models in a gallery for other people to print and they also offer a full colour ceramic-ish printing. Reasonably priced too if you are making hollow models.

Looking forward to desktop models with built in laser scanners being as cheap as colour laser printers. Parts photocopying will bring with it loads more industries complaining about copyright... sit back and enjoy the fun!

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Zomm wireless leash

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That should be tablets

over priced tablets. Not tables. Soz.

Though now that I come to think about it, tables are getting suspiciously expensive too - oh no I've become my dad, complaining about the cost of everything. Damn it!

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There's a bee in my bot net

Age of austerity?

£80? For what is effectively a lost key beeper in reverse? Are you mental? I would be more worried about losing this little gadget than my phone (which is insured).

This and the plethora of over priced tables makes me wonder what's going on.

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Microsoft skills up IT pros for jobs in the cloud

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eyez-share

Not one to turn down any kind of free training I've been getting my hands dirty but found myself getting increasingly annoyed at the pronunciation of Azure. So much so that I even started to doubt my own understanding of the word.

I had to double check just to make sure I wasn't going mental when on one video it gets pronounced as See-quel eyez-share (soft on the 'eye' more emphasis on the 'z'). Seequel annoys me at the best of times, but I know it's just my personal pet hate, preferring S.Q.L. but couple it with izshur and you simply distract me so much I can't concentrate of the subject matter.

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Wi-Fi body wants hotspots to override 3G

There's a bee in my bot net

Won't the ISP providing the bandwidth want a cut of the call/data tarif?

see title...

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Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear

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@Andydaws, An interesting read. Thanks.

Agreed, the problem of establishing (or disestablishing) a link is the thankfully small numbers exposed to low doses (i.e. > 100 < 250mSv/yr perhaps even < 500mSv/yr depending on your point of view).

From the abstract this is interesting: "Significant excesses of deaths from diseases of the circulatory system were found when compared with the population of England and Wales but not when compared with the population of Northwest England" I wonder why? Higher background radiation in the NE? More coal mines, flour mills or steel smelting perhaps leading to increased incidents of respiratory disease? Maybe the indigenous population of the North East are just a bit more sickly than the rest of England & Wales.

Would have been interesting to read the full text...

>In fact, the evidence for a relationship between cancer rates and low doses is very questionable. The "Linear Low Dose Hypothesis" is only usually justified on the precautionary principle, not because there's good evidence for it.

Questionable yes, clear cut? No. Until there is good evidence one way or the other, the precautionary principle sounds eminently sensible.

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There's a bee in my bot net

Oh well thats all right then...

"cancer is a very common cause of death, future investigations decades from now will almost certainly not be able to attribute any cases of cancer among the workers to service during the current incident"

No need to try and establish a link to the lower radiation doses then... move along nothing to see here...

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Fukushima: Situation improving all the time

There's a bee in my bot net
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Toxoplasmosis

I specifically didn't mention Toxoplasmosis as I didn't want to cause widespread panic!

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There's a bee in my bot net
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RE: Balanced Reporting

I used to live just down the coast from Sellafield/Seascale/Windscale call it what you like. I've been there on school trips and as an adult. It is a fascinating place with its own single man on site police force. No longer generating electricity but is reprocessing the nasties from other nuclear sites.

I doubt most of that would still be standing if struck by an 8.9 earth quake... you are right though, the actual reactors would likely still be intact. But cooling towers and the like probably wouldn't.

My current local nuclear installation Winfrith on the other hand... I would give that a fighting chance. Mainly because it was shut down a decade ago and is currently being decommissioned. (I say currently, but a lot of that has stopped due to lack of money).

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There's a bee in my bot net

Almost balanced...

Read dispassionately and without regard to previous articles, this one is almost balanced. It is still leaning on the pro nuke side but keeps that to a minimum, spoiled by trying to shoe horn in your opinion that "It has to be one of the safest forms of activity undertaken by the human race". I would counter by suggesting there are innumerable other things that are safer, stroking fluffy kittens for example. Though anything can be shown to have some danger, however remote or ridiculous that danger might seem. Say, catching Bartonellosis from fluffy kitty when kitty gets angry and scratches you, and being immuno-suppressed you fall horribly ill, contract pneumonia and die. Far fetched I know, but then so is my office being struck by a meteor.

I'm also sceptical of the notion that (in respect of the power plants) "they have not and will not harm a hair on anyone's head radiologically". Thankfully there have only been a handful of contamination cases reported with little detail of the doses received. The one case of exposure that stated a dose over 100mSv (100mSv/yr being the limit over 1 year in normal circumstances for a Japanese nuclear worker, 250mSv/yr in emergencies) didn't state how quickly that dose was received but it is safe to speculate it was hours rather than a year. Unfortunately (or perhaps more appropriately fortunately) not enough data exists about the consequences of doses below 250mSv/yr so it is not simply enough to say that there are no side effects because we haven't seen enough data to know one way or the other. It would be more responsible to say any exposure over 50mSrv in a short period of time carries a likely risk of increased susceptibility to ill health, with regular medicals being made available to that person for their lifetime (I would also add, at the expense of, but not provided by, the nuclear authority whose plant emitted the radiation).

As is the nature of radiation exposure to complex organic life, the effects are not always immediately apparent (except in high doses over short periods of time or concentrated doses), nor does every organism react in the same way or suffer the same damage. It is a complex interplay relating to the type of radiation exposure, the energy level and duration, the area affected, the age and general health (including pre existing cellular or genetic damage) of those exposed. Then you need to consider the effects of the exposure on a cellular level, is it directly damaging cell structure? Causing chemical changes? Or is it damaging DNA. In the case of DNA, effects depend on whether the radiation damage causes a single or double stranded break and the individuals ability to repair the damage. Another factor in successful cell replication is where in the DNA strand the damage occurs, Not to mention the number of incidents of damage within the body. Pre existing risk, such as family history of disease and previous exposure to radiation sources also play a part in long term outcomes of radiation exposure.

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Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

There's a bee in my bot net

Balanced...

This article is certainly more balanced than any of your previous on the topic.

But it still far from objective. When you say "hit by a monster earthquake and tsunami, one of the safest places to be is at the local nuclear powerplant" is that not just on the opposite side of the scale from "imminent meltdown"?

Are you not as guilty of sensationalism as the rest? I mean, saying "Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!" is again on the opposite side of the scale from whoever is saying "Fukushima a dirty bomb waiting to happen" (don't ever build another Nuclear power plant ever again! (I added that last bit for some balance)).

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Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

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You didn't read it did you...

Maintained by the students of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT

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There's a bee in my bot net

http://mitnse.com/

Facts...

http://mitnse.com/

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Download data versus piracy claims: the figures don’t add up

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You forgot D)

D) Don't bother watching it cause Jigsaw is dead and they are just doing it to wring the last few million pounds out of a lame franchise and also 3D gives me a headache...

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Google copyright purge leaves Android developers exposed

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Yeah... read that...

...and still don't see how writing an Android Java application that runs in the Dalvik VM in any way shape or form is derived from or an extension of the kernel header code.

The issue of what Google has done re the GPL is another matter...

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Gov and ISPs clash over informal policing of net

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Stenography?

If they ban encrypted traffic then you could just embed your encrypted traffic in plain site in normal data...

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Fukushima situation as of Wednesday

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Some balance?

Indeed, more balanced than the last article.

However, you shouldn't take it as read that his descriptions of the types of radioactive material release are the full story. After all there is an argument to say that low doses of Iodine 131 are more harmful than high doses (if Wikipedia is to be believed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine-131 ).

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There's a bee in my bot net

Wow... more?

I refrained from posting about your last article as others had said it better than I. And while I will concede that this one is slightly more restrained than the last. I still find it odd that you are trumpeting Nuclear power as safe, albeit with a caveat that it is relatively safe.

I suggest you stop until this is all over.

I'll even ask nicely. Please stop.

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How do you find the skills needed in the virtualised data centre?

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Yup - Multidisciplinary IT carrys poor prospects...

I whole heartedly agree. I started out in Electronics and migrated to computers and eventually into software development with a small company where I helped grow the business, taking on and managing various staff while also continuing to develop software and taking on the job of implementing and supporting the IT infrastructure, which took ever increasing amounts of my time. When I saw the writing on the wall for that company (a real shame) I jumped ship and spent 9 months looking for another job. Ended up as an IT admin for another SME for considerably less money and no real prospects of getting back into software development other than as a hobby...

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There's a bee in my bot net

Train your own staff?

Radical idea I know...

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Samsung goes stereoscopic rental mental

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Yawn...

Still waiting for everything to be broadcast in HD and don't care much for pseudo 3d TV thanks...

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Should IT departments tackle desktop virtualisation on their own?

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Budget?

Surely you would include the cost of consultants in the initial budget rather than decide afterwards?

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BMI taken out by Anonymous

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I really feel for BMI

Oh wait no, that's not what I mean... I mean ha ha!

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The desktop lifecycle: How long is it anyway?

There's a bee in my bot net

I've said it before and i'll say it again

We run our desktops until they die and I can't bring them back again.

The older machines have all been given some extra ram to bring them up to a decent speed but that is it. As long as they can run Office 2010 and IE without taking too long about it then the users can do their jobs. The newer ones are running Win7 and a few Vista.

When XP stops getting security updates in 2014(?) I expect to have replaced at least half of the desktops we currently have. Leaving only a handful of XP machines to upgrade.

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Chickens show empathy: Official

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Hen down...

The weirdest thing I have seen chickens do was after we had to dispatch one due to her being severely egg bound. (In case anyone here is pro chicken welfare, our chickens live like kings (or should that be queens?) and this one was gently shuffled off by a vet). Upon presenting the rest of the flock with their fallen comrade the whole flock went quiet and crowded round to see. A few of them made gentle pecks and soft trilling noises, but the one who stayed longest was the hen we bought at the same time (was also the same breed). The event only lasted a few minutes before it was business as usual, but it was totally unexpected. There was certainly the appearance of basic empathy or at least concerned curiosity... or maybe they were just trying to work out if they could eat it..

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Toyota plans major electric car roll outs

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Practical for what?

If you want to commute less than 20 miles or so through towns and citys at 30mph or less every day then there are practical electric motorbikes. If on the other hand you want to scream up and down the motorway at motorway speeds for more than an hour then you are out of luck.

Having ridden a ebike for the past year and a half (due to an acute awareness of rising costs and falling wages (and I include the rising cost of insurance, tax & mot not just fuel) I am starting to change my expectations of what a practical electric vehicle is. It is one that full fills a need, a specific journey, in my case, the commute, rather than a replacement for a 'drive for hours and fill up in minutes' liquid fuelled car. I suspect it will be a long time before electric vehicles can provide that kind of convenience without relying on internal combustion.

In the mean time, for me at least, the convenience of conventionally fuelled vehicles is reserved for long journeys.

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Thumbs up...

cause that made me laugh and spit coffee over my desk...

(and because the thumbs downers don't seem to have a sense of humour)

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The public cloud ... why bother?

There's a bee in my bot net
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Interesting until it goes pop

While I can see the benefit of letting someone else run your kit/services/kittens whatever, in their data centre(s) on their massively redundant 'cloud' computing resources, there are two things that stop me from wanting to even think about moving everything there.

Firstly, I suspect the majority of us (SMEs) are still using adsl. It doesn't scale well for off site data storage. These days reliability is great until something goes wrong. And when it goes wrong, and it does go wrong. It can take days to get fixed. Use the back up connection I hear you say? SMEs like to only pay for what they use and backup connections are seen as an expense for something rarely used. So the backup is usually dialup or a borrowed 3G dongle.

Secondly the provider themselves are open to problems. We've all seen big providers cock things up (Think Skype, Google/Gmail) and I have first hand experience of Plusnet deleting their mail storage array during a migration and the ensuing shit storm while they tried for a week to recover the data and admit that they didn't backup the array.

If anything we seem to be moving more critical systems in house and farming the smaller more task/industry specific stuff to providers. Perhaps that is a result of new servers costing less for more power (multiple cores and lots of disk/ram) that take less power (electricity) and cheap virtualisation allowing SMEs to have better disaster recovery.

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Whitehall to puff punters: 'Hide your fags'

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If you really have to ask

then the only way you will learn is to try it for yourself...

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Building Windows 7 skills - will we need another 10 years?

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I was wondering that...

As we buy PCs as and when they are needed and we buy them with OEM licences we get what we are given and PCs have been coming with Win7 for the last 12 months (most with downgrade rights to XP) and for the last 6 months I have been deploying them with Win7 and no one has quizzed me on the UI yet.

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There's a bee in my bot net
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Really?

I am installing a printer in XP Mode right now on a Win7 machine with 3GB running lots of other stuff. The XP mode instance is running with 256MB of ram... (I have to install the printer software in XP mode as HP have decided that they aren't going to support the scanner feature under Windows 7 on printers that you can still buy).

I do find it amusing that the article suggests XP mode or application virtualisation requires training for administrators. Really? You need training to install an application in XP mode and then run it from Windows XP Mode Applications? If you are struggling with that then you are in the wrong job...

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Bad Belgian busted by kinky iTunes openness

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Computer Misuse Act 1990

Yup - see this http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/1

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'Self-incriminators' may be forced to tell the court what they know

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r.e. It would be contempt

A bit of googling and if wikipedia is to be believed then the maximum sentence would be 1 month in gaol and £2500 for a civil court and 2 years for a criminal court.

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There's a bee in my bot net

What are the concequences...

...of him not saying anything at all? Is he looking at more chokey than his likely sentence if he did incriminate himself? I mean, regardless of what the law says, you cannot be forced to speak unless perhaps you are in Gitmo or are 'falling down some stairs' on the way to the cells etc.

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Welsh battle killer shrimp invasion

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Controling marine wildlife?

Why not ask BP for help. They are great at controlling marine wildlife populations...

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Teen cybercrime forum boss jailed

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Genius...

'ran a prolific cybercrime forum from HOME'

Schoolboy error...

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Europe confirms raids on ebook publishers

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Copyright wars...

We will all look back and laugh at the silly things that corporations got up to during the copyright wars of the 21st century whilst all enjoying our creative commons, open file format, non drm'ed ebooks of the future...

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