Posts by doke

not thermal imaging

Too bad it's not a real thermal imaging camera. That would be useful for scanning my breaker panels at work, outlets, etc.

This is what "BEGIN" is for

This is why databases have BEGIN, ROLLBACK, and COMMIT. They would have saved me from some of my own mistakes. :-)

$106k over three years

So a type 2 would cost about $106k over three years, not including licenses? I can buy a fully loaded Dell R7425 server and run it for three years for about $5k.

I have a few read-only shares, for playing mp3s and such. I want them to be available via SMB1 for older client devices. I would never expose a share read-write over SMB1.

I don't like wireless earphones.

They're very expensive. The Samsung Galaxy Buds are $140 USD on Amazon.

They're easily lost. Wired headphones have a harder time falling down the sewer, because they're attached. If they do, I can get a new pair for less than $10.

Many bluetooth devices have poor audio fidelity. https://www.lifewire.com/what-to-know-about-bluetooth-3134591

I have to enable bluetooth on my phone. That increases the power consumption, and decreases battery life. There have also been several security issues with bluetooth, https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/bluetooth_vulne.html I could save power by disabling bluetooth after listening, but I will probably forget.

SCADA systems should never be connected to the internet. The vast majority of them have someone in a control booth 24x7. The boss can just call and ask "Is everything workiing?" If they insist on a status display, that should be done in a one-way export-only fashion, where the protected systems send status updates to an external web server. There's seldom that much status data to update, you could even do it with an RS-232 serial line, with the RX wire clipped.

Backscatter data retrieval has been around since the 1940s. In 1945 Theramin made a passive, unpowered bug that operated for about 7 years. These guys seem to have increased the bandwidth, but not the range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%29

I really want an autonomous car.

There are many reasons I would want an autonomous car.

- It could drop me off at the store door, then go find parking. When I'm done, I would call it to come pick me up. I wouldn't have to carry my packages half a mile to my parking space.

- I could relax and watch video or something on long trips.

- It could drive me home after an evening out.

- I could send it off to get gas, or be serviced.

Intel's normal reaction is denial

These are the same people who said the the F00F bug would only affect scientific computation users.

pendulum

The pendulum is starting to swing back. I feel like I'm in a pit...

routers and embedded devices

These days I mostly use ftp to get firmware images and data on and off of routers, switches, and embedded devices. The simple protocol, and low cpu / memory requirements make it a good fit in bootloaders and rescue images. Virtually all of those transfers are to or from an anonymous ftp server on the same protected management lan.

ftp is sometimes problematic on the internet, because the firewall has to inspect the protocol and open the ports for the data channel. Passive mode will get around your firewall, but not the other end's firewall. Active mode is the other way around. In linux, as a client, you have to load a kernel module, nf_conntrack_ftp, to get iptables to do the inspection to make active mode work.

VMware Vcenter

I have one thing left that needs flash, VMware Vcenter. Unfortunately, I need to use it for work. I have a separate browser just for that.

That's one example of a growing problem. Many intranets contain legacy devices that need older protocols or ciphers, but for various reasons can't be easily replaced. As the browser companies delete support for those older features, we're forced to use obsolete browser versions to talk with these legacy systems. This becomes a big problem when you have to provide a secretary with two browsers, and tell them "only use browser B for X". They often forget, and venture out on the internet with the wrong browser.

might be good for sensor networks

With all the reflections and interference, I wouldn't expect to get much bandwidth of of this system. However, there are things in a data center that only need limited, intermittent bandwidth, ie distributed temperature sensors.

IT people should be able to filter email

Anyone working in IT should know how to put filters on their email, and know not to reply all to this sort of thing. Anyone who replied into the mailbomb just announced their incompetence to the entire group.

buffer in ram

Why would there be anything to extract from the device? It should be keeping the audio buffer in RAM. If it were in flash, it would run through the erase cycles too quickly. So when the cops unplugged it, it should have blanked. If they left it plugged in, it should have overwritten that part of the circular buffer after a few minutes.

Too little

Two days of paid vacation is a nice thank you, but hardly compensates for what I estimate was several weeks of unpaid overtime to fix this mess.

Replacements?

What are people using instead of Evernote? I'm playing with Turtl for anything private, and Google Keep for unimportant things (ie grocery lists).

existing contracts and future instability

I suspect part of the price hike is to compensate for the existing contracts at lower prices. The new ones get gouged to make up for MS's losses on the old ones. Also, they may be factoring in some "insurance" for future instability in the UK pound vs the US dollar. Between BREXIT and Trump, the financial future is uncertain.

Standards in the US would also affect china, due to dev costs

It's expensive to make multiple versions of code for an IoT device. So imposing security standards for selling into the US will cause the IoT developers to improve their code in products released worldwide.

The same thing happened when Europe legislated Reduction of Hazardous Substances. It took a few years, but now virtually all consumer electronics meet RoHS, regardless of the country they're sold into.

snaps are a stupid way to badly reinvent LD_LIBRARY_PATH

For over 20 years, every version of unix I'm aware of has supported using the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to avoid library conflicts. If you need a specific version of libjpeg, just put it in it's own directory, and set the variable.

lawyers scare deveopers into leaving projects

Linus is right about the BusyBox GPL lawsuit. Bringing in lawyers scared the developers into leaving. That ended up hurting everyone.

Programmers usually don't understand or trust lawyers. There have been too many stories about people losing everything. The developers don't want to be caught in the splash zone, so they abandon the project. It can take years to recover.

statistics are inadequate to draw any conclusion

This report is based on too little data to mean anything, nor draw any conclusions. On page 1 of the pdf, "http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/upfile/2016_08_23/Pegatron-report%20FlAug.pdf", the report says "Pegatron is one of Apple's major suppliers, employing almost one hundred thousand workers in Mainland China". Most of the numbers in the report are based on paystub data. However, on page 5, there is a table showing how many paystubs they analysed. Over 10 months, they collected a total of 2015 paystubs. One month, Jun 2015, they got only 4 paystubs. The peak was 1064 in Oct 2015. The average number of paystubs they got per month was 202. That is only 0.20 % of the workforce. That is not enough data to be a worthwhile statistical universe.

I have no doubt Apple is pressuring them to reduce costs. Conditions there might well be awful. However, I can't tell one way or the other from this study, because it's statistics are insufficient.