Posts by Claptrap314 2994 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jan 2015
I worked for Google as an SRE when it became Alphabet.
Our systems were designed so that something like this would not cause disruption to the customer. One data center unexpectedly going offline was a core scenario, and one that we regularly exercised. (And by "regularly", I mean "more than once a month".)
Three options come to mind. The first is that this outage was deemed to be non-transient, which means that additional capacity for the affected services needs to be brought online. If someone fat-fingered the change, you might see an outage.
The next option is that the bean counters might have pushed to reduce the resilience of the systems. Of course, they don't admit that's what happens, but it does. Our PM's response to one such initiative was brilliant, "It is in Google's best interest that you pretend to believe these calculations."
Third is, just a coincidental fat-fingering of an unrelated change that happened to be on that day.
I mentioned this in my FIRST reply to the FIRST article that came out about SPECTRE. The drip, drip, drip of these exploits is precisely why NIST recommended (for twelve hours) turning speculative execution off. These partial mitigations add up, and in a big way.
I've interviewed with multiple companies who have gone this route for protected database servers and the like. The cost savings are enormous, and, as alluded to above, with proper least-access privileges implemented network-wide, quite safe.
What surprises me is that a mere kernel option can really do it. To really see the benefit, you need to turn off things like retpoline when you compile your applications and libraries. I would strongly urge something like Yggdrasil if a company I was advising was considering going this route.
when even the most conservative and originalist members of the USSC refer to our form of government as "democracy". It makes me wonder if they think in the back of their heads that they were elevated to the Court by some sort of plebiscite.
And as for everyone else, the US has never had, and hopefully will never have anything approaching democracy as its form of government. We are a constitutional republic. The very fact that laws are passed by congress, and that the Courts dare to occasionally dismiss such laws a unconstitutional should, I think, be a constant reminder of this fact, but apparently not.
I'm as much a conservative as you're likely to find, but I'm also an originalist, and you're not being honest in your reasoning.
1) The third amendment is very much, although not exclusively, about privacy. Pre-telephone, quartering is a VERY effective way of keeping an eye on "troublesome" people, and almost everyone involved in drafting and passing the constitution either themselves or their fathers would have qualified as "troublesome" not too much earlier.
2) The "and their papers" of the fourth amendment is, again, very much an issue of privacy. How would the "committees of correspondence" have fared if the government had driven very far against it? Or for that matter, what if a businessman happened to corrupt a government official & seize papers for competitive gain?
3) One of the objections that was raised against the Bill of Rights was that the inclusion of certain rights would result in the disparagement of others. The idea that these recent revolutionaries would have had _any_ truck with the "if you have nothing to hide, there should be no problem" bs that has occasionally been pressed by some faux-law-and-order types is laughable.
Privacy certainly _is_ one of the "unenumerated rights". That what has been done by prior courts at times under the banner of the privacy has been abominable does not affect this fact.
Let's see. We can net $142M this year. Now, there is this _tiny_ security fix we need for our system. It costs $34.5M. And, if we don't, the worst we can expect is a $9M fine. Maybe.
What is our fiduciary responsibility?
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Seriously, I'm more upset with the government here than anyone. NO WAY was the unclassified network 100% p0wned, but the classified secure. That company should be fined out of existence, and that CEO behind bars for a decade or so, and not at Club Fed.
Unless the government _wants_ more of this for some unfathomable reason.
"Lastly, the malware looks at the system's MAC address and compares it to organizationally unique identifier (OUI) prefixes usually used by virtual machines."
This is just nuts. There is NO reason for a VM to use predictable addresses like this, and this obvious route to identifying the presence of a VM should have been revealed by even a cursory security review. Certainly, the services are a "bigger" issue in this regard, but to not even bother with such a simple & obvious change...
This is why we can't have nice things.
If you want a retroactive law in the US, checkout the 1993 tax hike. Passed after president Clinton assumed office, it took effect 1/1. Of course, for some strange reason Her Royal Clinton just happened to have asked to be paid for some of her 1993 "work" for some law firm in 1992--a request that was granted.
Yes, our written constitution has a clause against that. Constitutions are only worth the people who enforce them.
That really depends on what exactly was SUPPOSED to be going on with those computers. It seems likely that was a TS site, and if the Powers That Be decide it's time to make an example, it's not that hard to turn any security violation of TS into hard time.
We were ALL briefed (repeatedly) about the consequences of violating TS security. (Technically, a firing squad is possible.)
I realized that holding a cryptocoin is holding stock--in a company with no income, assets, sales, employees, or liabilities, and with novel rules regarding stock issuance and the structure of the board.
I really think that, from the standpoint of consumer protection, coin regulation ought to start there. There is absolutely NO reason for governments to take seriously the notion that this stock is a currency. It clearly is not, and anyone with any sense of history or politics knows that if it ever were to reach such status, it would be attacked and destroyed almost immediately.
A Ponzi scheme is a situation where the schemer promises guaranteed outsized returns in some other business with the intent to generate those returns primarily by attracting new investors. Ponzi himself claimed to generate money by investing in land deals.
Very few of these ventures meet that definition. In particular, there is not promise of any particular return & there is no other business involved.
In both the 2016, and 2020 elections, these pages reported research that Google was biasing search to favor the D nominee. And I was present at a TGIF (attended by a substantial % of G workers) in 2015 when a director bragged about changing the election results in a Central American country.
It takes a "Some animals are more equal than others" kind of brazenness to claim that concerns of Republicans that they are getting unequal treatment regarding these filters.
Without reading the details of the proposed bill (something which usually takes a JD & access to the Federal Register to decode anyway), the description sounds like they are wanting to require that campaign-related email requires an opt-out. An ugly, transparently self-serving bill? Certainly. But G in particular has no valid claim of neutrality, so these untraceable in-kind donations must be stopped if there is to be any hope of free and fair elections.
The question that I have is: will the opt out actually work? I've got one company whose emails come through no matter how many filters I try to slap on it. (And yes, I only use gmail for work.)
I'm not holding my breath.
And my complaint against C for something like an OS kernel is that you loose direct access to the flags register. Integer overflow error almost disappear when you have it.
Think about that.
Bounds-checking array accesses become MUCH cheaper.
Think about that.
Imagine (if you're old enough) writing C with that capability in place. NOW, explain how excited you are about Rust.
Again, I'm not saying that Rust is no good for the kernel. However, it strikes me that people seem to want to jump to entirely new tools when really, some minor tweaks to existing tools can get them much of what they need.
I'm pretty sure I get what you're trying to say, but in fact, US laws generally DO apply globally--to US persons. In fact, we have laws expressly against certain types of sex tourism, for instance. Of course, if you travel (or operate) outside the US, the locals are going to demand that you obey their laws. A fact that seems to elude many people. (And get me lots of downvotes when I phrase it a certain way here.)
If you are calling the US a "tin pot country", I might, depending on my mood & the subject, agree. But in context, I would say that you are at best misleading.
FDR outlawed it. From what little reading I have done, it seems that it is a preparatory step to going off the gold standard, which is why I stretched a bit & called it "generally outlawed".
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