Posts by Kevin McMurtrie 3561 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2007
My impression from getting support on Netgear products is that engineering is outsourced. There were entire classes of features that didn't work, public releases sometimes had testing backdoors permanently enabled, and support needed multiple days to contact engineering. The only satisfactory solution I came up with was throwing them in the trash.
Comcast Business does this. They phoned me a few years ago to say that a couple of my devices might be participating in PnP amplification. They were Axis security cameras that that needed an update. I shut off PnP permanently and patched them.
Then there's lots of other ISPs that don't care at all what their customers do. I block them at the router so fail2ban doesn't get bogged down.
I'm mentioned before that it's time to bring back network blacklisting. There are several large networks that are just fine hosting organized crime.
If you think this is a bad idea, you don't know about AGIS in the 1990s. Criminals were big business for them. When portions of their network were registered with blocklists (usually MAPS), they rotated legitimate customers to those addresses and declared war against blocklist maintainers. AGIS was huge and these focused RBLs took out significant parts of the Internet. AGIS organized DDoSes, lied to the press, lied to Congress, and spread misinformation in their war. They had the full resources of organized crime on their side. The Internet survived only because a large number of networking peers agreed to halt AGIS traffic.
LG open-sources their phones and appliances, 3rd party support comes to life, and their hardware works however people want it to.
OK, reality is more like LG asking everyone to install a sketchy unsigned Windows driver to patch firmware vulnerabilities as they're disclosed. The driver will have vulnerabilities too.
ARM is taking off. ARM processors are available for cloud computing and servers because they do sometimes offer more compute power per watt. Apple has been pumping a lot of money into their flavor of ARM and some reports say it's faster than the low power Intel processors that Apple uses.
Developers probably aren't impacted much. Changing the CPU is trivial compared to the work of when Apple changes the OS. Anyone adverse to regularly rewriting non-portable code has already left.
If it's faster, I look forward to someday having a work laptop that can apply a minor software update in less than 35 minutes.
I never mentioned politicians. I'm talking about why public blacklists and blacklist services aren't used more often. These can be selected and used by whatever serves a company best.
The current technique of re-actively blocking single abusive IPv4 addresses stopped working well some time in early 1990.
Networking people really need to get more aggressive about blocking huge chunks of the Internet that doesn't like playing nice. The potential loss of a few legitimate customers isn't anything compared to the constant attacks that certain networks pride themselves on hosting. Start with Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese government networks, OVH, and DigitalOcean. If it works out, maybe try FOS VPN, Google, and Amazon too.
Or do nothing and let the Internet slowly decay into nothing but constant attacks. It's why there's no more free WiFi. Free WiFi companies did nothing about customers with infected laptops and eventually everything was supersaturated with botnet attacks.
Universities have incredible manpower. Get the art and UX students to design beautiful and fluid art applications. Get the CS students to write the application code. Have the math and statistics students work out the correct pixel operations.
Building a good illustration and multimedia app is hard as hell. Participating in a real-world Adobe-killing product would look amazing on a recent grad's resume.
Too many phones get articles like these without real testing. Even though it's mentioned that HTC phones have a bad reputation, there's nothing here hinting improvement. Phones are getting to be as expensive and powerful as laptops but software reliability remains awful. I've had multiple phones that, despite flagship specifications and prices, could not actually make phone calls or use WiFi reliably. "Try another factory reset" is the first suggested fix and "Buy our newer phone" is the second.
At least these HTC phones could work in England. Arse posted a glowing article without noticing that the phones don't have radio bands for North America.
We're not yet in a perfect world where people don't have to worry about "slave" being used on them.
We watch Sci-Fi like Star-Trek and think that humans are going to evolve into a species capable of living in peace and traveling the galaxy. We watch the news and realize that humans still carry a unique form of stupidity and savagery that was somewhat out of sight until Trump put "strong and stupid" back in fashion.
Politics aside, it would be nice if the ZFS folks fix free space integrity.
A giant monitor is what you need.
There are many projects where you'll never get anything done without an IDE. Golang has functions pretending to be methods. Scala has invisible implicits everywhere to make it work (or not). Java and Scala have giant stream pipelines where intermediate values are beyond tedious to calculate manually.
Alternately, you could work some place that's using so many garbage Spring/EE frameworks and custom build pipelines that an IDE has no ability to analyze the code.
Maybe they don't want to be employees, but California is tired of people needing government assistance when they need medical care, can't work, or get tricked with a deceptive contract. It wasn't a big deal until seemingly half of California was driving around in circles and parking in the middle of intersections with Uber/Lyft decals.
AB5 needs some tuning, of course, but I don't think Uber/Lyft are going to escape it. Those employees are told exactly how to do their work rather than being paid for the outcome. Tech companies had the same issue where they couldn't micromanage employees then claim that they're exempt from overtime.
Has Apple tried cleaning up the OS? They have compessed virtual memory, which sounds cool until you realize that you're swapping only because the compressed memory buffer is eating huge amounts of RAM. There must be 4 GB of various unused Apple daemons running that never swap out. The filesystem still doesn't seem to cache properly. Mix poor caching with constant compressed memory swapping and now the laptops are thermally throttled during any serious work. Oh, and periodic minor software updates somehow take 35 minutes to install. The battery in my late model Macbook Pro is more like a UPS than anything freeing me from an AC outlet.
I put Linux on an old personal Macbook Pro. It went from being unbearably slow to being responsive and capable for some tasks.
Those old timer driers work better than you think. Evaporation cools the air so it's an excellent humidity sensor. When the outgoing air is cool, the heat turns on and timer stops. When it's hot, the heat turns off and the timer advances. That's it and it works. You adjust the dial to accommodate clothes that are very thin or very thick, but wetness is compensated for.
I'm still trying to figure out why cooking ranges and small-room air conditioners have WiFi remote control. It's just as confusing as why I need to create a cloud account to even look at the remote control app.
It might be amusing to watch a portable air conditioner get hacked but the fire breathing appliance is never getting a WiFi password.
Plenty of companies are paying millions of dollars a year in compute costs. The ones that will still be around tomorrow don't want to hear any crap about scaling up to accommodate lazy code.
It doesn't matter how fast computers are. You're in trouble if your competitor can make them run even 50% faster.
China could try putting real contact information into their APNIC records. Most countries use such information to request that attacks be shut down.
I may never remove Chinese and Vietnamese government owned networks from my firewall. I put in a nice request to have attacks stopped but they bounced. I've already wasted enough time.
I'm guessing many years of applying superstitious IPv4 security fixes until the vulnerability scans pass. They flip the switch to IPv6 and nothing works but some vulnerabilities.
Software for IPv6 still sucks too. It's the year 2020 and there's still no way for a Docker container, VM, or VPN to negotiate dividing the host's massive subnet.
I've started checking how long phishing resources remain active on Google. It's about 7 months. Google's own search engine has indexed lists of Google's own resources being listed on multiple phishing blacklists, and the accounts are still alive. Google is usually #1 on Spamhaus for C&C hosting.
I find it hard to believe that all 390 employees are staying for the full bonus. Jumping ship for a better job can offset long-term retention bonuses, especially if sanity has value. I'd heroically fight to save a startup that still has a heart and a chance but a big DSL telco is going to be a slow and procedural failure.
Remember discount GoogleFi, discount fiber, free citywide wireless, free Bluetooth beacon databases, free whitespace WiFi technology AND a free national whitespace database, free browser, free phone OS, free GPS accuracy enhancement, balloon Internet relays...
l'm shocked that they haven't offered up 5G cellular equipment yet. So much data is going unwatched.
Samsung has so much shovelware, spyware, and spotty updates that this has to be a joke. I've disabled maybe a dozen apps (using a shady 3rd party tool) and the network transfer indicator still never turns off. I've had to swap the SIM card three times to trigger updates after they stopped for nearly a year. There's no unlocking the bootloader on the Snapdragons so you can't install a secure 3rd party OS.
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