Posts by David Roberts

Great science.

Found something that current theory can't explain.

Hopefully they will either find that current climate models need updating or there is an alternative to water in the lake formation. Or something else.

Noted the impact on current climate models!

Naive question

If this is designed for extremely high bandwidth over kilometres between cell towers, is there enough power to cook sausages or the occasional pasding bird?

Or does "not absorbed by water" come into it?

MTBF?

Interesting time if you are running a really big network (Telco or cloud).

Beyond a certain point you know you are going to have regular failures.

Percussive anti-maintenance

A word of warning.

Way back in the day we were fitting a replacement disc into an external drive for a Sparcstation IPX.

The disc was hapilly formatting away and making the usual happy burbling chirpy noises.

Old style engineer walks past, says "Fan's sticking." and gives the drive a good slap.

This (presumably) caused the heads to bounce around on the platters which is not in the best interest of further use.

Fortunately we were able to find another replacement drive.

Engineer spent some time looking very sheepish.

A short and inaccurate history of NAT routers in the home

Long, long ago when PCs were few and expensive, and networking them together was very hard (and required expensive experts) they were designed to make linking them together on a network as easy as possible. Think happy puppy glad that everyone is their friend.

Then PCs appeared in homes and still were happy puppies; however not all strangers were trustworthy. However so much work had been put into ease of connection that nobody wanted to change this. "Use a firewall" was the solution. Can you say Zone Alarm, children? Good. Now can you install and configure it?

Woe, though, firewalls were even more complicated than networking and had the annoying habit of asking you if they should allow you to do every little thing that was obviously vital. Can you say "Yes..yes...yes...YES....... Oh, just turn the fucking thing off!" children? Potty mouth!

Then PCs became cheaper (although IP addresses didn't) so someone invented NAT. Suddenly there was an example of the law of unintended consequences.

Bear with me for a short while; to connect to a program on a computer over a network that program has to be listening for the incoming call on a specific port. Happy puppies respond to everything. To route data over a network the router just accepts all the data and passes it on. The router doesn’t have to run any/many services so it doesn't have to listen to any ports. Early routers often didn't even have web servers. They were managed over serial ports using real metal wires.

So the unintended consequence was that all unsolicited incoming calls were just dropped because the router wasn't listening for them. It only listened for replies to connections it had initiated.

This was NOT a firewall. It just looked very like one when viewed from the Internet. Can you say "shields up" children? Well done!

So NAT suddenly increased the security of Internet connected PCs without the PC makers having to do anything hard and expensive.

Over time, of course, there was feature creep. Games wanted to call out on one port and listen on another. So UPnP was born and did much to reduce the security. As attacks became more sophistcated and routers had more ports open to do vital and clever things router manufacturers had to add a firewall. This was a good thing because clever users could do clever things but happy fluffy bunnies and waggy puppies didn't really have to worry.

So the home was a happy place because everything came in to one point and was managed by an off the shelf router which (with luck) didn't need anything more than just plugging in by that nice engineering man in the grubby van.

So here we are today in 2017 with our nice cosy walled garden where what happens in Chez Vegas stays in Chez Vegas (more or less). We are being told that we should replace our nice cosy set up with a new kind of setup. Unfortunately this setup was designed 20 years ago and may well be designed to solve the problems which were obvious 20 years ago but which may not be the biggest problems now.

However some things have now become a religion so beware of criticising them, Best Beloved, because bad people will come with sticks to beat you.

Be careful what you wish for.

Way back in the day the programming of micro-devices was a black art, often requiring specialised hardware to program a chip and specialised developers who could program at assembler level in tiny amounts of memory. This lead to a high cost of development and maintenance and sometimes to unmaintainable code. Many chips, many different low level languages.

Oh, how we wished for a simple global development environment.

Now cheap as chips hardware has loads of memory and processing power and any Linux developer can work on the code. Linux on the desktop (well, on the lamp on the desktop) has finally artived. Yay!

You no longer need specialised hardware as most code can be developed on almost anything with a CPU. Develope in your own home in your spare time.

Hang on, amateur development and entry level unskilled programmers may be cheap but is it secure? If you use well known components with well known interfaces which are easily updated remotely then this adds ease and low cost to the attackers as well.

So be careful what you wish for. With cheap devices come cheap developers and cheap software.

Security is usually expensive. Long term support is ALWAYS expensive.

Mr. Picky says

Mozilla Mozilla - so good they named it twice....

Sobering thoughts

My Dad was born in 1897 and was alive from before the first widely acknowledged powered manned flight in 1903 to watching the moon landings.

I don't think I will be lucky enough to see a comparable step forward in manned flight in my lifetime.

Having said that, the space race was probably mainly driven by USA national pride combined with the Cold War. Not something I would like to see again. Memories of the Cuba crisis are still not good.

The big developments in my lifetime seem to be in electronics, mainly computing. A device more powerful than a mainframe computer so cheap everone has one in their pocket? Not mainstream in the SciFi I used to read in my youth. Still waiting for my personal flying belt and my jet car.

Anyway, virtual pint raised to another hero sadly departed.

Keep trying until you find a laptop that works?

So (I am making the generous assumption that the didn't just try connecting the same one several times and found that worked eventually) the specialised laptops essential for support don't have a standard hardware/software build?

Or is the software so crap that once the standard build has connected to one aircraft and been used successfully then it is borked for some/all future use unless rebuilt?

I have the (possibly unworthy) suspicion that there may be several (many?) variants of the airframe interface and several (many?) builds of the laptop interface which could lead to interesting times.

Whatever, for those wondering what idiot could design a system which was broken by an unplanned disconnect I would respectfully point to the humble external drive.

So many straw men, so little time

So I'll build my own straw man from the few remaining materials.

The report isn't particularly helpful, but let us assume:

(1) They are specifically looking at public material searchable by Bing (their own search engine)

AND

(2) This material is hosted on OneDrive (their own file server)

First thing, as it has been published this is not invasion of privacy. My straw man tells me that they are (in this context) only searching material that meets (1) and (2) above.

Secondly, especially in the context of hosting companies and ISPs being under constant pressure to be the Internet Police and to be legally responsible for any and all content accessible over the Internet, they have a very big legal/political problem here.

They have therefore taken the political (not moral) decision to mitigate the risk by specifically reviewing content where there is a risk that they could be targeted by Law Enforcement as both the host and publisher of particularly unsavoury and illegal material.

My straw man (he's called Fred in case you are interested) has asked if you would rather see this "voluntary" level of auditing of content or see the "think of the children" brigade make it mandatory across all search engines, all hosting providers and all ISPs.

Fred also mentioned that the law suit seems to be because others in Microsoft were viewing the same material but were given a much higher level of personal support (which suggests that they were deliberately discriminated against). The words "different budget" may lend this some credibility if you have corporate IT experience.

Anyway, Fred has asked me to take him outside to see some precious little snowflakes before they melt.

Linux and DD-WRT

Who is the manufacturer who is required to provide the filter?

Wierd study

A balanced study would have included women, at a minimum.

Sounds like a scheme to create a brothel not a sex partner for your own home. I don't really like the idea of an exploitable female analog either. No doubt great fun for the rugby club, but if you can freely abuse a machine designed to look and act like a woman then the lines could get very blurred.

Some code of conduct might be required - inhuman rights act, perhaps?

Typical Microsoft

Running crap insecure W10.

Ditch it and run Linux; you know it makes sense!

Oh, wait....

.....I seem to be in the wrong thread.....