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* Posts by PyLETS

682 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2011

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Magic mystery malware menaces many UK machines - new claim

PyLETS
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Boffin

Re: Good to see all the "heuristic malware scanners" are doing their job

Malware remaining active on many machines and undiscovered for 11 months emphasises that scanning for known bad stuff within an everything per user access-control context isn't an effective security approach any more. Making sure you only execute known good stuff other than in very secure, application and time limited sandboxes seems to make more sense, e.g. the sandbox in which you do online purchases and run associated web-supplied Javascript shouldn't connect to any other sandbox and needs wiping and resetting to a known good state at short and regular intervals.

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Boffins: Tireless star spurted deadly jets for half an hour at a time

PyLETS
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Re: Red Shift - red faces

"So, what do you think? Did they?"

I'm far too inexpert to hold a strong view either way, but it's an interesting speculation. Highest observed redshifts suggest a z of around 8, and I guess (but am not sure this is what this means) this corresponds to the time multiple you would get in the duration of the burst. Gamma rays are such high frequency that a redshift reducing frequency by factor of 8 seems neither here nor there. Redshifts getting much closer to the start of the universe seem to multiply to much larger factors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift#Highest_redshifts

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PyLETS

Red Shift - red faces

The further away the object, the longer in earth perceived time an event of a particular duration wrt the frame of reference of the exploding object will appear, due to the relativistic doppler shift which gives us a red shift to lower frequencies of objects further away, due to the expanding universe. I wonder if they've taken this into consideration in relation to the longer than expected duration of this event ? It would be a simple but embarrassing mistake if this is the case.

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Bitcoins: A GIANT BUBBLE? Maybe, but currency could still be worthwhile

PyLETS
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Meh

Re: If you don't know who the sucker is...

" If you have a dept in Bitcoins then it will grow perhaps massively in real terms with the deflation over time."

Or you will be able to redeem it for nothing when the bubble goes the way of all such. Or it will be like being on the wrong end of a short sell, with unlimited liabilities. People don't contract such obligations, unless they can be recalled at the instant that the limited bond securing the unlimited side of it runs out. It's because BC is inherently unsuitable for denominating debt/credit book-kept contracts that it's likely to remain a networked gambling game, a kind of online poker with a limited chip supply, amongst those sufficiently interested to play it until they lose interest.

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PyLETS
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Meh

Re: Free trade?

"the anonymity of purchase from point A to sale at point B would be an auditors nightmare with respect to laundering practice"

Bitcoin, use of Linden Dollars and online gambling are very minor problems from this point of view compared to cash.

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IT Pro confession: How I helped in the BIGGEST DDoS OF ALL TIME

PyLETS
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DJBDNS now public domain.

Since 2007. And nicely supported in Debian package format. Had to compile it myself before then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djbdns

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PyLETS
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Boffin

@Alex Brett

"As I understand it this wasn't actually a DNS amplification attack as you described in the article, instead they were sending DNS requests with the source address spoofed to be the target, causing the DNS servers to send its response directly to the target."

This aspect of the attack would be largely defeated by BCP 38, also known as RFC 2827 . Basically, spoofed UDP packets pretending to be from the party being attacked would not get through an ISPs customer-facing routers, unless sent from the same network as the party being attacked.

Sure, DNS configurations also need tightening up here as Trevor and some of the comments describe, but this is also something the ISPs need to get to grips with, and start offering worse peering terms to those which don't .

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After Leveson: The UK gets an Orwellian Ministry of Truth for real

PyLETS
FAIL

that's rich

For a copyright maximalist to be worrying about freedom of speech, given I can't use a debugger in relation to something I've bought, and publish what I discover if it relates to a copyright protection mechanism and go to the US without being arrested. Clearly Andrew seems to want one law for the benefit of big media, and different laws for everyone else.

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Entire internet credits snapper for taking great pic while actually dead

PyLETS
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Re: protection racket

now for a few quid we could look after you... you wouldn't want anything... bad... to happen"

That's a bit like accusing fencing installers or padlock manufacturers of a protection racket, if you have an apple tree in your front garden and your lack of a fence results in local kids thinking your apples were available for free. They may well not be, but you'd probably get better redress in the small claims courts against local kids scrumping them if you had put up a fence.

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PyLETS
WTF?

Rumour mill amplifies simple mistake

Such happened pre internet, and I can't imagine why the internet should make this phenomenon go away. People thought spinach had 10 times as much iron as it really has for about 100 years after a Victorian analytical chemist got a decimal place wrong in a calculation, a mistake amplified in the public imagination by the Popeye cartoons.

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BIGGEST DDoS ATTACK IN HISTORY hammers Spamhaus

PyLETS
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Boffin

@Shannon Jacobs

"That is why I think there should be a larger focus on breaking the spammers' business models at the downstream end, not upstream where Spamhous and Microsoft have been firing their big cannons."

Fully agree with you there.

What we need are better tools to allow the large number of spam-haters more actively cut the spammers away from their small number of suckers and victims."

I've worked on developing anti-spam tools for some time. A problem here is that the primary motivation for doing so is to get a cleaner message stream without losing wanted messages. Putting spammers out of business has to be secondary to this primary objective. Spamhaus have done excellent research here also, which has led to prosecutions and jail terms. But the need to have a very low false positive rate means some false negatives inevitably get through, enough probably for the small proportion of suckers to support the spammer business model.

So I agree with what you are trying to achieve, but I think this probably needs to be recast as a social, educational and legal solution, because it probably can't be handled as a technical model without very major changes to the email model as it now exists. It might become possible to do more of the latter in the sense of requiring much higher authentication and reputation lookup standards when accepting SMTP over IPV6, and then everyone gradually letting IPV4 SMTP become marginalised before switching it off entirely.

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PyLETS
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Boffin

Desktop mail server

You can certainly run a mail server on a desktop if you wish, but you'd do well to relay outgoing email from it through a smarthost which Spamhaus doesn't block, e.g. your ISP's smarthost, and which doesn't block you due to not knowing your address as one of theirs or if it can't authenticate you, or due to you sending more than the smarthost operator policy allows. It also helps greatly if you have a static IP address, or one which changes very, very infrequently for incoming mail. You'll have to ensure the incoming domain MX record is pointed at your IP address, preferably dynamically if you IP changes.

I've done this experimentally and successfully for small volumes for years, but I put my production email server and services for non-experimental work on a £15/month hosted virtual machine which has a static IP. I use the production email server as my own smarthost, and use authenticated SMTP from my home system to relay outgoing.

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Whoops! Tiny bug in NetBSD 6.0 code ruins SSH crypto keys

PyLETS
Go

RNG quotation

"Random numbers should not be generated with a

method chosen at random." Donald Knuth

Source: https://www.random.org/quotations/

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Bitcoin prices spike on Euro woes

PyLETS
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Thumb Down

@Big John

"So why has Bitcoin continued for so long? Simple stupidity? I mean yeah, it was fun and cool when it was new, but that's long past. Is it just momentum?"

It's a pyramid, and those in the lower layers seem still to believe there is money to be made by recruiting further layers. Pyramids can go up as well as down. They have to go up before they collapse spectacularly. For various technical reasons, it's also in the interests of large botnet operators to keep it going, because it helps monetise their botnets.

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Fukushima switchboard defeated by rat

PyLETS
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Mushroom

Re: In other news... first new UK nuclear power station approved

In other news England hit bit a magnitude 9 earth quake and 40.5m high tsunami!"

An earthquake of that magnitute in a place of such relative geological stability seems to require meteorite impact, and such a tsunami is more likely, given that tsunamis can impact coasts and estuaries thousands of miles away from an earthquake or meteor impact and historical evidence for such incidents exists. .

Locations such as the Severn Estuary are also favoured sites for the location of nuclear power plant,due to the need for cooling water and having a coastline which isn't subject to silting up or coastal erosion.

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NASA chief: Earth is DOOMED if we spot a big asteroid at short notice

PyLETS
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Boffin

large asteroid deflection

Various approaches have been proposed. To be realistic you'd need a 10 year plan and execute period, preferably 20. Given that it's theoretically possible to cover a side of one of these with white or black paint, enough to use solar radiation to change its course ever so slightly, given enough years to change the course, a flyby at 100 km from the earth's surface resulting in a slingshot well out of range is much better than a direct hit.

What's important is to detect and catalogue everything above about 100 metres across in near earth orbit, starting with 500 metres across, which needs more and better telescopes on the job. Technology available is already nearly there, and it's something all advanced economies have a reason to contribute towards in connection with international scientific and space collaborations. If you think how much money is being spent in maintaining the ability to nuke the planet many times over, this one is much smaller change.

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First sale doctrine survives US Supreme Court

PyLETS

They couldn't really decide otherwise.

If they had, copyright preventing resale could probably be made to apply to just about anything other than books, e.g. cars as well. Sorry, that car you bought 2 years ago, Ford has a copyright on its design - it'll have to be crushed if you don't want to continue to use it yourself.

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Paying a TV tax makes you happy - BBC

PyLETS
Happy

Didn't have a telly for many years

I once engaged in an amusingly surreal exchange when a TV Licence collector came knocking on the door. Q. "Our records say you don't have a TV licence". A. "That's correct, I don't have one". Q. "Is there any reason why you don't have a TV license". A. "You don't have a fishing license for the River Wye do you ?" (wild guess, but pretending as if I knew). "No". "Is there any reason why you don't ?". "But I don't go fishing". "Isn't that what you are doing now ? And why would a sensible individual pay to have an open sewer spewing filth into their living room when they could be out fishing on the River Wye ?".

Well, I married and my better half persuaded me how many good programs there really are on the BBC so I recanted and we obtained a TV and a license. The Africa series was worth a year's license fee alone. And having to endure 25% or more advertising breaks on commercial channels would be unthinkable.

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World's largest solar collection plant opened in Abu Dhabi

PyLETS
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solar thermal heat storage

"suffice to say, no you can't store it in batteries for nighttime use"

Apart from the fact that nighttime demand is lower than daytime due to aircon, also the fact that evening lighting demand is much greater than pre dawn demand, this kind of solar thermal plant lends itself to storage of the heat in the form of hot rocks and hot sand. That's much cheaper than pumped water storage in this kind of situation, and also integrates well between the operations of the heat collection and electricity generation plant design, without needing so many expensive external components and systems. Lower loss of heat from a thermal store for early evening demand also compared to pre-dawn demand, based on given insulation values.

That's a possibility where solar thermal is likely to give better storage options than solar voltaic. The cost of heat storage or any kind of electrical storage for that matter is also trivial compared to orbital launch and maintenance costs.

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Flooding market with cheap antivirus kit isn't going to help ANYONE

PyLETS
Boffin

AV gives minor protection to weak systems

It's going to be way, way less than 99% of the effort and spend in any of the minority of organisations which have a clue about security, in my view more likely much less than 5%. 99% is suggested by the article based on (assumed?) threat prevalence.

That's been the case since the first viruses appeared in the late eighties. It's why organisations with valuable data and processes which understand their security needs employ professionals with advanced skills in areas including virtual private networks, intrusion detection systems, firewall technologies, sandboxing of critical process, mandatory access control and most importantly, verification of origin and supply chain of all executable content allowed on critical systems. They involve managers at the appropriate level together with those with relevant technical skills in defining, maintaining and enforcing appropriate access control policies. AV can only be a very small part of such defences.

AV is also very expensive in relation to memory and CPU demand on many so is very inefficient, as well as being ineffective in relation to zero day threats. These products are based on the wrong assumption that it's possible for an AV vendor to know about every program in the world that's bad. Much better to verify that nothing can run on your critical system unless and until it's been confirmed as good to a high level of confidence, Ken Thompson's Reflections on trusting trust paper notwithstanding.

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Global warming fingered as Superstorm Sandy supersizer

PyLETS
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Re: 60mph

89 MPH recorded, and > 80MPH recorded across a wide area according to this article:

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/10/sandy_wind_speed_map_see_how_s.html

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$1.5k per complaint. Up to 1,900 gTLDs. Brand owners, prepare to PAY

PyLETS
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Re: IP addresses

IPV4 is on the long way out, but that isn't one of the reasons. You only need a different IP for SSL HTTP domains and that's only for clients which don't implement the increasingly well supported SNI workaround..

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PyLETS
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Boffin

Re: Cluster...

Yep. ICANN, by giving themselves a license to print money at everyone else's expense creating massive confusion in the process, and subject only to the laws of the State of California, have just created the perfect argument for the ITU to setup a competing root, and for DNS resolver admins everywhere to point at the ITU root version. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, but that's what too much greed and arrogance always does I guess.

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Need an army of killer zombies? Yours for just $25 per 1,000 PCs

PyLETS
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Boffin

Re: Away from the real problem: Who PAYS for the zombies?

The spam rejection load on my email server has reduced last couple of years, but the spam that gets through seems mostly people I've dealt with in the past illigitimately selling on the custom addresses I gave them to others they think interested, before I shut down said custom addresses. Bots which start spewing will get blacklisted on zen.spamhaus.org within hours in the unlikely event they're not already on it, so not much problem there for a well configured email server.

More likely large botnets are being used more for Bitcoin mining these days when they're not stealing identities or propagating themselves to pwned contact lists. Running other people's compute power on their leccy bills sure must be cheaper than paying for your own, whatever they say about GPUs and dedicated ASIC Bitcoin mining rigs.

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Rise Of The Machines: What will become of box-watchers, delivery drivers?

PyLETS
Stop

Luddites misrepresented

"The Luddites, who opposed early industrial revolution mechanisation because it put people out of work, were ultimately wrong in the long term ""

I for one am not lapping up the history of this defeated movement which was written by their victorious Victorian mill owner opponents because it doesn't square with the facts. The Luddites were very evidently the highest tech workers of the time - the Lancashire cotton weavers. It seems to me that what they were opposed to wasn't the automation of weaving, it was the loss of control over their working lives - effectively a form of slavery - which came with the mill-owners' system of clocking in and massively long working hours and industrial discipline, regardless of season. These had previously been individuals working from their own cottages able to choose work hours which suited them based upon the season.

I'd recommend a visit to Quarry Bank Mill near Manchester for anyone interested in a great day out and visit to one of the best surviving examples of the technology and industrial system concerned with the loss of liberty the Luddites contended.

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/quarry-bank-mill/

With a growing proportion of technology, media and administration workers able to work from home in our own best suited hours, and this wheel turning full circle, I'm sure the Luddites would have loved personal computers and the Internet.

3 2

Congratulations, copyright infringers: You are the five per cent

PyLETS
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Pirate

Re: The customer defines value

"In ten years you've never had a single new idea, PyLETS. I am not surprised you dislike people who do have new ideas, and want don't want (sic) the ideas to be ripped off."

That's called an Ad Hominem. When someone whose argument is exposed as weak attacks the messenger of the unwelcome news instead of addressing the issue.

"Property is property, and rights are rights: and activists who want to rob people of their rights (as the UK Coalition Government is doing) find that it's expensive and ends in defeat."

So you'll be telling us who to vote for next. Property and rights exist because lawful or unlawful coercion defend these. But you'd prefer to forget, as do most big media lobbyists, that we are living in a society where the means by which laws are made theoretically uphold the interests of those who don't own property as well as those who do. Clearly the coalition, post Levenson, isn't going to continue delivering the best laws the big media lobby can buy. So which party is big media going to be supporting at the next election, so we can all decide who not to vote for ?

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PyLETS
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Pirate

Re: The customer defines value

The usual moral argument behind a capitalist market requires the existence of open competition. But copyright isn't competition, it's a monopoly by definition. In this case a legally created one, and with some justification, but in any monopoly market, especially a state created one as in this case, balances need to be struck between the conflicting interests of producers and consumers. Balances which havn't yet been successfully struck concern boundaries between:

a.when the content goes into the public domain, where all economic analysis suggests terms are longer than needed in comparison with pure incentive requirements for content to be produced and

b. where the business interests of the producers outweigh the reasonable privacy rights of the consumers.

5 5

Honk if the car in front is connected

PyLETS
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Boffin

Re: And when it all gets hacked...

As evident from some of the above posts, there are many different kinds of security and hacking to consider:

a. The cars' and other nodes' firewalls to prevent these being hacked into by outsiders.

b. Ability using crypto signatures and registers (maintained by whom and accessible to whom?) securely to identify originators of malicious messages without leaking confidential data to unauthorised parties or for unintended purposes.

c. Ability to check whether client X is authorised to perform action Y on server Z.

d. Denial of service, through jamming, overloading etc.

e. Issues to do with differences of interpretation of standards by foreign vehicles on local roads.

That's just for starters - list by no means complete.

Very nice set of features suggested in the article, but the security engineering and architecture of this all is going to be very far from trivial, even if it ever gets a coherent security architecture. If it doesn't we'll see much more of this as the threat landscape evolves and engineers spend years trying to patch something up for issues which should have been foreseen by system and standards designers but weren't.

3 1

Wannabe infosec kiddies put Enigma Bombe machine to the test

PyLETS
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Boffin

Re: If you have any interest at all in the subject...

The crib equivalent to successfully guessed plaintext, e.g. "All quiet, nothing to report" or preferably something a bit longer - obviously in German with spaces removed and using military acronyms - would have massively reduced the number of keys needing to be searched based on the rule that a letter never encrypted as itself, which would have excluded most of the remaining keyspace to be searched.

They alligned the guessed plaintext against the typically longer ciphertext message until no letters corresponded between the 2. A crib longer than 50 characters or so would give a higher probability of a match (based on no matching letters) not occurring by accident. If the crib was long enough and guessed correctly, this match gave the initial settings for the keysearch, based on the correspondence between plaintext and ciphertext letters in the matching section.

I wonder how this aspect of the Enigma crack can be simulated in the modern cryptanalysis challenge based on use of the same cipher ? For this to work, the cryptanalysts need to know part of the plaintext.

I couldn't agree more about Bletchley Park being an excellent daytrip.

2 0

Health pros: Alcohol is EVIL – raise its price, ban its ads

PyLETS
Pint

Won't affect how much it costs me

Won't affect the price of sugar, malt, hops, yeast or yeast nutrient. Or the amount of time it takes to pick blackberries. Doesn't change the price of fruit juices or grape extract. Most of the beer or wine available in the shops is crap anyway, unless you buy the more expensive stuff.

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Vint Cerf: 'The internet of things needs to be locked down'

PyLETS
Flame

How to burn someone's house down using TCP/IP

I heard a talk at DNSCON a few years ago, by someone who had managed to upload firmware to a window blind control motor which caused the thing to drive in both directions at once, resulting in smoke being emitted. Having a very hot motor underneath window blinds is one way to burn someone else's house down using TCP/IP. The earlier model had a hardware lock preventing this, but software control will inevitably be cheaper.

Pretty obvious reason for flame icon.

4 0

Microwaves thrash fibre on speed... if you like two-nines uptime

PyLETS
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Boffin

Re: Run for the hills

If transactions can stand a tax of somewhere between 0.1% and 1% there must be some value in it for the rest of us. If they haven't, such transactions have no inherent right to exist. Charging such a tax would have a dramatic calming effect on these hyperactive markets. Professor James Tobin didn't get a Nobel prize without good reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax

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Look out! Peak wind is coming, warns top Harvard physicist

PyLETS
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Mushroom

Re: Why not just build a solar panel that covers half the world....

"What do the French know that the rest of the world doesn't? Why aren't they afraid of it?"

Don't know what they know that we don't, but maybe the Fukushima or Chernobyl evacuees know something the French don't.

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PyLETS
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Re: One question I have always asked myself

"The main effect would be one of cooling. All those winds blowing around eventually end up as thermal energy - unless they are converted into some other energy first. A lot of the wind energy currently gets converted into wave energy, but even that eventually gets turned into thermal energy."

Only temporarily and to the extent the wind electricity has to be stored, e.g. behind big hydro dams . One the electricity generated is consumed, the consumption results in the same heating as would otherwise have occurred if the wind had blown other stuff around e.g. waves instead of driving wind turbines. I suppose you could argue theoretically that using any kind of sustainable energy locked into aluminium has a similar effect, but it's going to be so miniscule in practice you'll never be able to measure it. Getting people to make their roofs white or black would have a greater cooling or heating effect.

1 2

John Sweeney: Why Church of Scientology's gravest threat is the 'net

PyLETS
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Boffin

Bible and copyright

wow after googling it looks like a lot of shady Christians come out with their own translation of the bible with a few words different and then copyright it as well. Greed even before God these days in America."

As you say, there's plenty of copies being given away and most major translations available gratis on the Net. As to 'a few words different' new translations are needed all the time as the languages used by those who might want to read it evolve. The Bibles most likely to be read by everyone except a few highly specialist scholars are translations, of the ancient books which were written in Hebrew and Greek, with arguably some Aramaic thrown in. Copyright law isn't something done as an act of the publisher, law makes it inherent in the publication, and as it's difficult to make money when competing against free, and for other reasons also, money and greed are unlikely to be the motivation for many new translations and editions.

Scientology also isn't a new phenomena. There were con men making money out of claimed 'hidden knowledge' since at least AD300 . The so called 'Gospel of Thomas' was very likely to have been created by a Gnostic sect, probably very similar in pyramid-selling business model to the Scientologists.

1 0

Wind-up bloke Baylis winds up broke, turns to UK gov for help

PyLETS
WTF?

Purpose of patents misunderstood

Their purpose may have originally had something to do with incentivising invention. But the donkey with a carrot tied to its back is never intended to eat the carrot. The purpose of patents nowadays is to line the pockets of patent lawyers and patent officers. I'd have thought that much was pretty obvious by now.

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You can help fix patent laws … now!

PyLETS
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Re: I hereby patent making sarcastic article titles

"So I presume in your grand plans if a company were to design processors but not manufacture them, then they shouldn't be able to license others to do the manufacturing (i.e. make money off their design work)."

What you need here is more likely to be copyright protection than patent protection.

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Traceroute reveals Star Wars Episode IV 'crawl' text

PyLETS
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Joke

Re: Wonderful

No need to worry about IPV4, he's got another story out on an IPV6 route as well. You mean to say your poxy no-good out of date ISP hasn't given you access to IPV6 yet ?

rich@mars:~$ traceroute6 -m 100 obiwan.beaglenetworks.net

traceroute to obiwan.beaglenetworks.net (2001:470:5:c77::babe) from 2001:470:1f08:1ac2::2, 100 hops max, 24 byte packets

1 2001:470:1f08:1ac2::1 (2001:470:1f08:1ac2::1) 28.117 ms 29.382 ms 27.313 ms

2 gige-g4-8.core1.lon1.he.net (2001:470:0:67::1) 27.142 ms 24.759 ms 23.985 ms

3 10gigabitethernet7-4.core1.nyc4.he.net (2001:470:0:128::1) 99.985 ms 92.735 ms 95.722 ms

4 10gigabitethernet2-3.core1.ash1.he.net (2001:470:0:36::1) 99.846 ms 99.074 ms 97.808 ms

5 10gigabitethernet1-2.core1.atl1.he.net (2001:470:0:1b5::2) 110.248 ms 110.986 ms 121.191 ms

6 10gigabitethernet4-1.core1.mia1.he.net (2001:470:0:a6::1) 129.544 ms 144.314 ms 125.302 ms

7 tserv1.mia1.he.net (2001:470:0:8c::2) 143.382 ms 127.179 ms 128.605 ms

8 rwerber-1-pt.tunnel.tserv12.mia1.ipv6.he.net (2001:470:4:c77::2) 166.414 ms 166.233 ms 167.021 ms

9 EPISODE.VI (2001:470:5:c77::1) 167.057 ms 167.607 ms 166.55 ms

10 Luke.Skywalker.has.returned.to (2001:470:5:c77::6) 166.956 ms 166.406 ms 166.779 ms

11 his.home.planet.of.Tatooine.in (2001:470:5:c77::9) 190.382 ms 184.109 ms 166.755 ms

12 an.attempt.to.rescue.his (2001:470:5:c77::e) 171.982 ms 165.507 ms 196.112 ms

13 friend.Han.Solo.from.the (2001:470:5:c77::11) 166.14 ms 163.673 ms 166.431 ms

14 clutches.of.the.vile.gangster (2001:470:5:c77::16) 166.496 ms 168.988 ms 164.47 ms

15 Jabba.the.Hutt (2001:470:5:c77::19) 167.071 ms 168.107 ms 167.839 ms

16 Little.does.Luke.know.that.the (2001:470:5:c77::1e) 175.477 ms 165.509 ms 166.139 ms

17 GALACTIC.EMPIRE.has.secretly (2001:470:5:c77::21) 166.459 ms 162.842 ms 213.015 ms

18 begun.construction.on.a.new (2001:470:5:c77::26) 166.889 ms 164.413 ms 166.804 ms

19 armored.space.station.even (2001:470:5:c77::29) 166.982 ms 170.249 ms 167.742 ms

20 more.powerful.than.the.first (2001:470:5:c77::2e) 167.81 ms 191.279 ms 170.408 ms

21 dreaded.Death.Star (2001:470:5:c77::31) 166.186 ms 166.701 ms 167.349 ms

22 When.completed.this.ultimate (2001:470:5:c77::36) 166.523 ms 179.404 ms 168.93 ms

23 weapon.will.spell.certain.doom (2001:470:5:c77::39) 168.003 ms 168.551 ms 166.402 ms

24 for.the.small.band.of.rebels (2001:470:5:c77::3e) 167.77 ms 185.671 ms 171.789 ms

25 struggling.to.restore.freedom (2001:470:5:c77::41) 181.803 ms 166.683 ms 165.435 ms

26 to.the.galaxy (2001:470:5:c77::46) 167.822 ms 178.81 ms 166.63 ms

27 0-------------------0 (2001:470:5:c77::49) 166.282 ms 172.291 ms 174.944 ms

28 And.Now.For.Something.Completely.Different (2001:470:5:c77::4e) 171.665 ms 169.412 ms 170.131 ms

29 Now.this.is.the.story.all.about.how (2001:470:5:c77::51) 171.827 ms 166.828 ms 171.978 ms

30 My.life.got.flipped.turned.upside.down (2001:470:5:c77::56) 166.723 ms 167.615 ms 166.224 ms

31 And.Id.like.to.take.a.minute.just.sit.right.there (2001:470:5:c77::59) 167.417 ms 171.167 ms 167.473 ms

32 Ill.tell.you.how.I.became.the.prince.of.a.town.called.Bel-air (2001:470:5:c77::5e) 166.365 ms 168.675 ms 171.33 ms

33 In.west.Philadelphia.born.and.raised (2001:470:5:c77::61) 166.328 ms 169.031 ms 165.674 ms

34 On.the.playground.where.I.spent.most.of.my.days (2001:470:5:c77::66) 166.966 ms 177.483 ms 170.921 ms

35 Chilling.out.maxing.relaxing.all.cool (2001:470:5:c77::69) 166.349 ms 171.002 ms 167.515 ms

36 And.all.shooting.some.b-ball.outside.of.the.school (2001:470:5:c77::6e) 166.613 ms 169.564 ms 170.651 ms

37 When.a.couple.of.guys.they.were.up.to.no.good (2001:470:5:c77::71) 165.96 ms 166.223 ms 165.851 ms

38 Started.making.trouble.in.my.neighbourhood (2001:470:5:c77::76) 167.062 ms 191.81 ms 170.934 ms

39 I.got.in.one.little.fight.and.my.mom.got.scared (2001:470:5:c77::79) 210.863 ms 170.602 ms 168.717 ms

40 And.said.Youre.moving.with.your.auntie.and.uncle.in.Bel-air (2001:470:5:c77::7e) 167.467 ms 167.686 ms 165.443 ms

41 I.whistled.for.a.cab.and.when.it.came.near.the (2001:470:5:c77::81) 166.605 ms 167.603 ms 165.738 ms

42 License.plate.said.CCIE.and.had.a.dice.in.the.mirror (2001:470:5:c77::86) 176.611 ms 167.648 ms 166.236 ms

43 If.anything.I.could.say.that.this.cab.was.rare (2001:470:5:c77::89) 178.11 ms 176.832 ms 170.678 ms

44 But.I.thought.nah.forget.it.yo.homes.to.Bel-air (2001:470:5:c77::8e) 172.071 ms 170.85 ms 166.906 ms

45 I.pulled.up.to.a.house.about.seven.or.eight (2001:470:5:c77::91) 171.307 ms 169.199 ms 171.147 ms

46 And.I.yelled.to.the.cabby.Yo.homes.smell.you.later (2001:470:5:c77::96) 166.437 ms 167.096 ms 172.061 ms

47 Looked.at.my.kingdom.I.was.finally.there (2001:470:5:c77::99) 171.245 ms 170.879 ms 168.108 ms

48 To.sit.on.my.throne.as.the.prince.of.Bel-air (2001:470:5:c77::9e) 171.664 ms 169.919 ms 166.902 ms

49 By.Ryan.Werber.Beaglenetworks.net (2001:470:5:c77::a1) 171.382 ms 169.609 ms 171.465 ms

14 0

Irony alert: Pirate Bay accuses anti-piracy group of illegal copying

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Pirate

Re: Irony...?

Big Media are not concerned about keeping the law . They buy the best laws money can buy, paid for by campaign contributions to politicians who support them and by providing less favourable coverage to those who don't. They are the law, so far as they seem concerned, and see themselves as being at liberty to break it when it suits them, e.g. as with the Sony rootkit, which also reused materials in violation of copyright not belonging to them, regardless also of the Computer Misuse Act implications.

As to the Pirate Bay suing them for enforcement of their IP, who is going to act in court for a group big media have paid to have turned into a fugitive organisation ?

Welcome to the new serfdom, my friends, and hail our new corporate overlords.

8 0

Ethernet at 40: Its daddy reveals its turbulent youth

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Re: Ethernet is the Ayn Rand network?

Ayn Rand probably wasn't a fascist, but she was certainly a hypocrite for trying to create a moral justification for why her followers had to do what she told them, when she had taught them that morality was obsolete.

13 0

Wind now cheaper than coal in Oz: Bloomberg

PyLETS
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Re: Here we go again

The wind not blowing is always a local issue. Australia is a big continent, mostly connected by grid. You may want to find out a little bit about how weather works in relation to the transfer of energy from tropical to polar regions, and when you do, you'll find there's no shortage of energy in this driver to be harvested, at least somewhere if your grid connected collection region is large enough. Besides which, anywhere with water dams generating power can adjust the hydro output to match regional temporary dips in wind availability.

2 4

Socket to 'em: It's the HomeGrid vs HomePlug powerline prizefight

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Boffin

Another approach - plastic optics added to standard mains power cabling

I've had cat 5e in most rooms in my house for about 10 years now, one of the best investments ever made. However, this allows only 1 or 2 networked devices per room. A standard suitable for just about every electrical device being networkable without drowing us in interference must involve adding plastic optic fibres designed for easier termination to mains cable as manufactured and fitted into new homes. It's the standard plugs and sockets which need upgrading, maintaining backwards compatibility, to include a data path.

0 0

Solar undercuts coal in New Mexico

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Re: We've had wind and solar power, like forever.

In the UK, the start of the industrial revolution was driven by water power. If you visit Cromford Mill in Derbyshire and you'll see why it was located where it was, and why the Derbyshire Derwent valley is a world heritage site. Coal generated steam power was used because prior to the development of large dams and an electricity grid, hydro power could not be expanded when generated and used onsite to match industrial demand.

The existence of a grid and the possibilities of mass manufacture of renewable energy, and our dislike of smoke and C02 pollution are drivers to renewables, not any shortage of coal.

The stone age didn't end due to a shortage of stone either, but due to metals being able to do the job better.

3 1
PyLETS
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Compressed air heating and cooling

Compressing air heats it on compression and freezes on decompression. If the main electric demand after dusk is aircon, combining compressed air tanks with large building thermal design could enable some of the waste energy to reduce evening aircon demand, by making use of the cool decompressed air for extra cooling, resulting from use of previously compressed air to generate electricity during the evening.

0 0

Linux boot doesn't smash Samsung laptops any more

PyLETS
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Re: so what happens to the bricked boxes?

Saw a fix proposed involving disconnecting power, taking back off and temporarily removing motherboard battery, due to it being a NVRAM corruption linked here.

If not it's a question of asking for a factory replacement as this should reasonably be covered by any reasonable hardware warranty, unless the warranty specifically prohibits using software other than specified, in which case it would be a consumer rights issue.

4 0

'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues'

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Boffin

Wind intermittency problem grossly exaggerated

Firstly the wind intermittency in a NIMBY back garden is not equivalent to the wind availability in the UK plus coastal waters taken as a whole. When considering UK wide supply and demand we also need to consider supply and demand balanced to some extent based on wherever we import and export electricity from and to. It becomes possible to increase wind to more than 20-30-% of UK electric demand to a greater extent also by the idea that less pumped storage is needed than otherwise when run of the river hydro can be made intermittent by raising and lowering water levels behind dams as required to fill the smaller gaps which exist than are imagined. If you can make the electric output of existing hydro dams intermittent so that the combined hydro and wind outputs are related to demand, the problem is largely solved using existing hydro capacity and some water supply dam repurposing, with a relatively small amount of pumped storage.

Even without uprating and repurposing hydro, this report to Parliament based on Oxford University research of wind availability UK wide over a 20 year period shows the intermittency problem to be greatly exaggerated:

http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/research/energy/downloads/sinden-houseoflords.pdf

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PyLETS
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@James 51: Advances in tech

Of course we should take advantage of these advances. And careful account of them too. Renewables are advancing more rapidly than any other form. Carbon sequestration is much younger and less proven. Advances will also improve nuclear over time, but won't get rid of any of the fundamental problems with it. That's why we probably need at least one last generation of nuclear plants alongside an expanding and developing renewables sector, because the renewables sector is advancing somewhat faster while not yet capable of supporting more than about 50% of electric demand within the next 10 years, at a time when nuclear is more mature and a few new nuclear plants on existing nuclear sites will help guarantee energy supply over the next 20-30 years.

1 1

Who ate all the Pis?

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Linux

Re: The vi thing

Vi is much faster and less clunky than any other editor I know once you have learned how to use it, which is why I use it daily for handling email. Driving a car also requires training for very good reasons.

Besides which for those who don't want to learn vi, wherever you can ssh you can also sftp which means you can edit files locally using whichever editor takes your fancy and manage the remote filesystem and its configuration simply by mounting it in sftp mode as if it were a drag n droppable network drive using WinSCP or Nautilus or whatever file browser with sftp support you prefer.

1 0

Review: Intel 335 240GB SSD

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Boffin

Re: These may be...

Modern operating systems have quite good algorithms to swap least live memory pages out of real memory into swap or extended memory. Presumably if a disk controller knew which were the most frequently or recently used sectors, or sectors ahead of those currently being accessed, these could be put into the flash/faster access part of the hybrid drive using similar algorithms. Should be doable if it isn't already being done. Not all parts of an OS or apps will be used very frequently, and not all data will be used infrequently, so you might get better performance from a smart controller than by the system administrator allocating different filesystem directories or folders to different drives.

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