Re: and will be pushed out to phones this month
Depends on the vendor. The Sept 1st patch set landed on my WileyFox on Sept 8th, which is about normal for them.
986 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2015
I'm no Cloud advocate, but losing your systems because of cabling damage is not specifically a "cloud" issue. Large organizations (Banks, TfL, Argos et. al.) who run their own DCs have always been in this position since bit barns are typically remotely sited, not squirreled away in office basements.
Your Doctors clinic would be most secure (in this sense) with paper records and failing that, everything on a laptop (because laptops have inbuilt UPS). If they had an on prem server then they would still be vulnerable to a backhoe hitting the power instead of the fiber and would likely take longer to recover from a server failure since they probably don't have on site technicians and hot spares which the remote facility probably does.
If you're worried about all your employees idling because their computer systems won't work then by all means host all servers locally, after you've installed full building UPS and auxiliary generators, hired or trained an IT DR team, purchased relevant hot spares and installed a couple of microwave relays to keep your external connectivity operational if the fiber is down.
That describes my house by the way. In the last three years the UPS has cut in four times and the router switched to 4G cellular backup (two different networks) seven times. The remote stuff I've moved around, but in over a year I've detected no Linode or AWS downtime. If the cloud component goes down, it won't be critical since everything is mirrored from the local NAS, but that is only relevant because the (demonstrably more fragile) local services are secured failure conditions.
These predictions included that 80 per cent of IT spending would be on cloud services, that the number of corporate-owned data centres would drop by 80 per cent and that there would be two SaaS providers by 2025.
His prediction is that the future belongs to Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) with Oracle doomed to "also ran" status along with other bit part players like IBM? Interesting. Personally I think the likes of Alibaba will still be significant (at least regionally), but mostly I would have to agree with Hurds prediction of progressive Oracle marginalization. I'm surprised Leisure Suit Larry lets him voice this publicly though.
To qualify under this rule the individual would have to demonstrate a shareholding of at least 10% in a business no more than 5 years old with at least $250k investment from US VCs. That's hardly H-1B territory, it says nothing about salaries and US citizens still have the advantage of no immigration issues at all and potentially lower costs (i.e. "Mom's basement").
Personally I'm still against this sort of thing, but for other reasons: half the point of inventing the internet was to decouple from geography. There is no reason you can't incorporate in Delaware and continue to live in Mumbai, or Vilnius, or Ulan Bataar. That's what Skype and Email are for. I have never met most of the people who work on our products and I possibly never will - because I don't need to - because how they smell really doesn't matter.
i.e. find out what your customers want before trying to sell it
Selling what your customers want is just logistics. Marketing is the art of changing what the customer wants into what you have already decided to sell, and that's what Apple have have historically been good at. However, that doesn't mean you can buck the market. You have to be on the same trajectory as the customers and use greater insight to deliver what they would want had they the vision to conceive it.
That's what the iPod, iPad and iPhone did and what Apple have conspicuously failed to do with the iWatch (which is the closest they've come to innovation lately). Once you lose that ability to see further along the path the customers are walking you're reduced to being just a brand name and that inevitably means a contracting market share until you reach equilibrium alongside the likes of Chanel, Gucci and Rolex. The only other option is to abandon pretentions of superiority and compete on price, which risks fatally undermining your brand (e.g. the Jaguar Mondeo X Type).
With the iPhone X/8 Apple demonstrated no vision (pun intended) beyond what Samsung already released (facial recognition is a gimmicky detail, not a core feature, irrespective of how well it works) and the prices indicate they're not interested in competing on price. That leaves the Louis Vuitton handbag strategy and that inevitably means (indeed, requires) contracting market share.
Re:but the Government isn't restricted by the law since they can change it if they don't like it
... one of the most chilling things I think I've read this week.
I think he's referring to the fact that Ministers can vary the rules regarding jamming telecommunication devices via secondary legislation (Executive Orders to Americans) if they want to. It is already done on a temporary basis to defeat cellphone triggered IEDs during particular events.
More generally, the principle of Parliamentary Supremacy means that no parliament may bind its successors and that the Judicial branch cannot countermand the express will of parliament. Add that to the fact that any government has to have a parliamentary majority and it is clearly true that the government can attempt to change any law it finds inconvenient. That doesn't mean they'll succeed. They would have to get a majority of MPs (650 of them) to go along with it and secure Royal Assent. For a technical measure regarding radio broadcast frequencies that is likely to be possible - for an Enabling Act it likely isn't.
As for the USA, they may have a written constitution but what it actually means is decided by only 9 people (currently), all nominated by the Executive and subject to approval by only one part of the Legislature. Since the number of justices isn't fixed, you only need to rig the votes of 102 people (the President and a majority of Senators) to pack the Court with stooges and achieve the same effective power. FDR nearly tried this in the '30's but managed to get his own way without doing so.
Isn't this discourse in this style called science?
It's science if you're interesting facts and the truth or law if you're just interested in winning the argument. Effective interview technique falls somewhere between the two, whereas this sort of thing:
introduced as a "masterpiece" of how to scale up the "growth mindset" by the on-stage interviewer
Is clearly channelling Nadella's Marxist Dad by adopting a tone appropriate for 1930's Pravda.
Bring Your Own Attack Surface was obviously a horrible idea for employers from the start, but why on Earth would employees be in favour of it? Creating a situation where Livestock Control can potentially root around in your personal files without a Court Order? Not just, "no" but "Hell No!".
The problem is laptop hardware and Linux really don't get along
My local DIY store doesn't stock brushes that wide. I have two Dell and one HP laptop, all with Mint and they all resume perfectly reliably (one of the Dells resumed last week after idling for over a month) and only one of them ever required any manual jiggery pokery (PulseAudio - quelle surprise) and that was just to tweak the configuration file.
Mostly I use Win10 because mostly I'm doing something or other in Visual Studio, but if I'm working the embedded part of the stack (gcc cross compilers, Yocto) or the servers (CentOS, Ubuntu) then I'm in Linux all the time. The only thing I've seen a Mac do that won't work elsewhere is a storyboard tool (Scribble or Sketch or something like that) and that's not something I'm interested in.
Personally, though, the pensions I'd go after before the civil service scheme would be those of MPs
Good PR, futile materially. MPs are a rounding error in public sector pensions budget (as are Congressmen for colonials). Once you're done virtue signalling, you're left with exactly the same arithmetic problem as when you started. Going after the private sector C suite (and assorted Bankers) is a different kettle of fish. The total annual cost of MP pensions (£15-20M) is close to the annual salary of DXC's CEO (£18M+).
...and I say brickbats for a BCP that needed to be invoked because of such a trivially easy to deflect threat, with an extra side order of brickbat for not having the systems wiped and re-imaged from backup inside 24 hours. You might almost think they don't have an Ansible scripting expect on the payroll! (OK, I exaggerate - they couldn't be that useless).
My stance is that FB is not "objective media" and it isn't intended to be. It is a lightly moderated blogging and chat platform aimed at a global audience with all the network effects and shoaling behaviour that implies. Trump was never considered an OK guy by the "Left". The USA doesn't have a "Left" at party level. The closest it has come is running a centrist (Saunders) in a primary. You can't win a FB popularity contest to the right of Obama and you can't (currently) win the Presidency in the USA to his left. If you think FB is hard on Trump, imagine what they would do to Cruz.
A Freeper is a denizen of the freerepublic.com forum, currently popular with members of the Trump "base" (in both senses of that word). Their primary policy objectives are deportation of all ILLEGALS! (the caps and compulsory), end birthright citizenship, repeal of all gun legislation, legalisation of discrimination against homosexualists [sic], muslims, ethnic minorities ("ferals") and foreigners in general (but not Jews), Bibles in schools, expel and leave the UN, ignore climate change etc. .... You get the idea.
@Big John
You're absolutely sure that is the correct sequence? It couldn't be that his ratings are low because of biased coverage against him?
I entirely agree that there's a feedback loop there, but he started that himself when he first put on the faux gold painted clown shoes back in the 1990's. Then, when he decided to go into politics, he dithered ideologically for years before deciding (correctly) that the way to short circuit the Republicrat duopoly was to appeal directly to the Freeper demographic and that is invariably a Faustian pact.
Most of the world (we're discussing FB remember) is *way* to the left of the Democrats, so even a cookie cutter Republican is on a sticky wicket with a global audience, let alone a someone making a hard right turn into FreeperVille.
So, to answer your question: yes, the sequence is correct and inevitable. There is no level of spin or sycophantic coverage that could detoxify Freeper approved policies with the rest of the world. Trump is President of the USA because the American people voted for him. The rest of the world (i.e. the FB majority) never did, never would and can never be influenced to treat him as anything other than a negative aberration.
We don't know if it happened because (and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't follow this obsessively) these allegations are still anonymous and unsubstantiated. If I believed every unsubstantiated rumour on the internet I would conclude that Trump intends to remake "Escape from New York" in Chicago as reality TV.
More generally, FarceBorg is global and the majority of content is user generated. Trump has negative approval ratings almost everywhere (including the USA) so it is axiomatic that coverage will be biased against him. If FB coverage was fair and balanced then *that* would be prima facie evidence of corporate meddling because it would be demonstrably incompatible with the views of the majority of posters.
JPG files are byte streams and the EXIF data is part of the header. You can read that into memory as a structured object, but that isn't how it is stored (i.e. it isn't a structured storage document like a .DOC file).
You would have to adjust API so that the only way to open a JPG was via UIImageJPEGRepresentation which would break just about every file handling app in existence (including cloud storage) and probably most imaging apps too. It also fails to address checksum mismatch and would strip EXIF data from all image files (not just your own) which might actually be illegal in some jurisdictions, depending upon the terms of use of the image (i.e. you might be stripping out someones copyright notice).
That assumes that iOS apps are accessing files directly when given access to photos, as opposed to get a handle to some sort of object or stream.
All (modern) operating systems work that way. Accessing files "directly" doesn't even make sense since a file is an operating system construct representing a number of (likely non contiguous) disk blocks. To open and copy a JPG in iOS you do something like this:
if let image = UIImage(named: "photo.jpg") {
if let jpg = UIImageJPEGRepresentation(image, 1.0) {
try? jpg.write(to: "photo_backup.jpg")
}
}
"image" is a byte stream with the abstract image file contents and "jpg" is the same byte stream wrapped in a JPEG compander. As you can see, it takes one parameter specifying compression level. What you're suggesting is making UIImageJPEGRepresentation suppress the EXIF component based on some global setting, but that's not going to stop a nefarious app parsing "image" directly so you're going to have to shift the code down to UIImage and start parsing content inside APIs that were intended only to marshal byte buffers. But it's worse. They could still do this:
let folder = try? FileManager.default.url(for: .documentDirectory,in: .userDomainMask, appropriateFor: nil, create: true)
if let rawJPGData = folder?.appendingPathComponent("photo").appendingPathExtension("jpg") {
// Decode and snaffle the EXIF
}
That bypasses the image subsystem entirely and treats the file as an undifferentiated byte sequence. Suddenly we need to move speculative JPG/EXIF sniffing and suppression to every I/O operation.
There are various steps Cupertino could take with equally varied backward compatibility and performance side effects. A simple example of the former is that a hash of the file as written to disk won't match the verification check once it is read into memory (because the OS altered it) so a robust application (read back after write) will flag all JPG I/O as corrupt, and the performance implications of checking every file read for a potential JPG header are obvious.
Sure, it could - just like it could use StreetView type object detection to blur out faces and number plates. Who is in the photo is surely just as privacy sensitive as where it was taken? (oh, and "when" - blank the file timestamp while you're at it).
I don't buy it. For one thing, excess security granularity inevitably leads to complexity, frustration, mistakes and worse overall security (see routine AWS blunders) and more generally the function of the kernel is to supply data to userland for processing, it should not be meddling with file content. If you don't want EXIF data in your photos then switch it off just like any other image capture setting.
EXIF data is written into the header of the JPG so it is obvious that anything that can access the file is going to be able to read the metadata. If I encountered a camera or slideshow app that *couldn't* parse that information I would probably report it as a bug. If the OS interdicts the file read operation to block metadata, how are you supposed to back anything up?
This "security flaw" is equivalent to complaining that an app which can view your photos might apply facial recognition and determine that the girl you've got your arm around isn't your wife (<cough>FarceBorg</cough>) or that the date stamp of you snorkelling in Bali corresponds with your recent "sick leave".
In other phone privacy related non-news: Truecaller may display the identity of your favourite intimate massage therapists even if you added them to your contacts list as "emergency plumbers".
Usually the 'red scare' would be the McCarthy witch hunts in the 1950's, so what's the second one?
That was the second one. The First Red Scare was earlier and triggered by the 1917 revolution.
Of course, the current Russian government is so far from being socialist I can only assume that calling them 'reds' is just old age showing
I used "Reds" because the hysterical tone is similar. The evil Rooskies plotting the overthrow of American democracy, inquisitions into whether people met any Rooskies, flinging accusations of "Traitor" at anyone who suggests that just maybe the likes of the Koch Brothers have far greater pernicious effects than anything a few FB trolls could manage etc.
The Presidency has been bought and paid for with corrupt corporate/plutocrat cash for years. Unfortunately both sides are up to their necks in that so we get "Russian plotting" on one side and "millions of illegals voted" on the other. See the common thread? Blame it all on "foreigners" so we don't have do deal with the real (exclusively domestic) issues.
... because Democrats are knee deep in a "Third Red Scare" and aren't going to be receptive to anything involving RUSSIANS!!! Certain sites I could mention will probably already have this down as a RUSSIANS/Republican plot to establish an off world labour camp for interning BLM activists and genuflecting football players.
That's a common one. Livestock Control (a.k.a. HR) like to serenely pontificate that "No-one is irreplaceable" but as a practical matter in the real world that platitude is worth about as much as their CIPD coffee mugs. People are frequently irreplaceable[1]. So much so that making them redundant and then being forced to hire them back as consultants on double salary doesn't even raise eyebrows. Just because "overhead" staff (like the C suite and LC) can be freely swapped around with minimal detrimental side effects it does not follow that the same applies to specialists with domain specific knowledge.
[1] Yes, that's "fall under a bus" risky and ideally it shouldn't happen. In other news: smoking is bad for you, always wear a condom and don't run with scissors. Back in the real world.....
Facilities tests are almost always run by Facilities people who have a vested interest (and therefore a cognitive bias) in successful results. The Military case I mentioned before was more like a penetration test. The resiliency team *delighted* in failure - they weren't trying to prove the systems worked, they were trying to break them. That shift in perspective can dramatically change the results.
@Mark 110
I agree. The only place I've seen do proper tests on a regular basis was military.
What you describe is the best that can be achieved in the commercial world, with the caveat that scheduling things at the least disruptive time for the business will often tend to invalidate tests because the least disruptive time is usually the same as minimal loading. The fact you can switch the Amazon purchasing DC to "B" feed at 2 am on a random Tuesday does not mean you can do the same in the middle of "Black Friday" and it is under maximal load that failure should be anticipated because that's when everything is as hot as it's going to get and your mechanical components (e.g. CRAC units) are most likely to lock up and start a failure cascade. Faking full load with dummy processes (assuming Ops even have the capability) is only a partial solution because of thermal inertia.
As for DR sites, I think the main reason they are avoided is that even if Facilities hands over correctly, Ops won't. The network probably won't re-route properly, and even it it does you end up with dangling partial transactions in the storage and database systems, a nightmare job reintegrating the datasets afterwards and inevitable data loss because there is so much lazy writing, RAM buffering and non-ACID data (I'm looking at you, Riak) floating about in modern systems.
Anyone shopping for DC space should ask the proprietor when they last randomly flipped the master breakers with no advance notice[1] to test the auxiliary systems. This isn't because you expect an answer, it's for the amusement value of watching the Facilities guys turn grey in ten seconds.
Untested business continuity procedures are obviously likely to be worthless, but in fairness to the guys on the ground, actually running a test is likely to end your career. Identifying a critical weakness in the DR plan will not protect you from PHBs whose bonuses are linked to uptime metrics. This is why you hear of generators with no fuel, auxiliary power units that fail in seconds because the fuses have evaporated and 3 phase switch overs so wildly unbalanced that the upstream systems shut down.
[1] "Scheduling" tests never works because Operations will subvert you by shifting the workload elsewhere. That causes the servers, fans and CRAC units to idle which means the power load you're switching won't be representative of a real failure condition.
True, but since the "Libya" of his time was essentially the entire Maghreb and their location isn't given precisely, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco could have an equally valid claim. Alternatively, one could also take the view that "Amazons" were actually a comic book version of the Scythians, which would give Ukraine and Russia precedence. Bezo's Bookshop has no more right to .amazon than a certain soft drinks company has to .co.ke (commercial, Kenya - in case it isn't obvious).
Hatred? I mentioned that someone is Orange (fact), Menacing (fact), wears a non-curly toupée (obvious fact) and probably doesn't know command line Linux (assumption, I grant you). The rest is quotation.
Are you arguing that the hair is real, the skin tone is natural, North Korea wasn't threatened, he writes bash scripts in his spare time and he's never bemoaned "Fake news"? You really want to ride that train?
This is equivalent to a conventional telco saying that in the event of a system outage their priority will be do restore the premium grumble lines, not the 999/911 service. Of course any telco even implying that would have it's operating license revoked for breaching the 2003 Communications Act.
The UK government didn't obstruct the Scottish independence referendum when there was a reasonable chance it might pass. In NI (or Gibraltar, or The Falklands) there is no chance of such a referendum succeeding so the UK government would likely be even more relaxed about it. It isn't as if the mainland is economically dependent on NI (very much the reverse) and there isn't the same pathological paranoia about maintaining the integrity of the "motherland" in a country that dismantled an Empire inside living memory.
Well, that'll be useful for giving your Molotov cocktail equipped drone an autonomous "precision strike" capability.
Hmmm ... that can't be it. No $$$ in that. What are they thinking of? Aha! Parking fees? If you can pin the vehicle to a precise parking spot you can charge more optimise efficiency and improve customer service. Also useful for pinning down exactly which hotel room your wife is meeting her spiritual adviser/personal trainer/tennis coach in.
I believe you are thinking of Signal or Wire.
Telegram isn't secure and it isn't supposed to be since the "secret chat" feature is not the default and depends on an unproven algorithm. You use Telegram (or not) because you happen to like its other features, like easy to customise bots.
Cooling just takes power, which isn't much of a problem. The real issue in that locale (in my experience) is dust. You would think that filtration would be equally simple, and the air doesn't obviously appear loaded with particulates, but in the facilities I've seen the mechanical (fans etc) failure rate is off the scale (literally: we had to expand the graph axis in the monitoring system).
It'll probably work with the colonials because Vue/Weex has connections to the dreaded Chicoms (AliBaba use it etc), but for many others Elvis has already left the building. React/JSX[1], like HHVM before it, is a textbook example solving the wrong problem and these license shenanigans continue the trend.
[1] Aurelia, Vue and Angular all make a better fist of merging HTML with JS and CSS.