Posts by SAdams

Bing is useless

The first thing I do when setting up a new laptop for family etc is replacing Bing with Google, and Microsoft are making the process increasingly arcane. Even Google are going backwards in terms of how easy it is to find things, but Bing is demonstrably rubbish. Surely the focus should be on making Bing better than Google?

I wonder

… if this could have anything to do with the “cosmological axis of evil”. Wild speculation, I know, but we really don’t understand as much as we think we do.

Hard disk failure

I agree with everything in the article apart from the comment on hard drives ‘hardly’ failing anymore.

They still fail, whatever type they are. If only I had a bitcoin for every person who thought that hard drives don’t fail anymore, and then lost all their data…

Rubbish EU Law

I can’t see why the EU made this law apply to all sites. If a site only uses cookies for defined essentials, no cross site, no adds etc, why should it be law to have a consent button?

The consent button requirement I could live with if it was associated with ‘bad’ behaviour, it would make sense. As it stands it’s just a badly drawn up law, which I bet 99% of people click “agree to all”…

“ If you need something else to direct your Brexit-induced rage towards, look no further than the big guy upstairs”

I think the rest of the article proves that any blame should sit with Henry VIII...

AI sending us backwards?

Is it just me, or have all these weather forecasting apps using big data going backwards?

Five years ago, there were apps like Meteo’s “Weather Pro” that were about 80% accurate, and you could reasonably rely on the forecast for the next 3-5 days. Over the past year or so, none of them are reliable. The only one that you seem to be able to have any confidence in is the next 120 minutes from AccuWeather. I’ve started using satellite radar as the best way to predict whether it will rain, which seems crazy...

User Error, but Adobe are bad

People should of course backup. But I am continually surprised that Adobe are seen as the gold standard for photo and video editing. I bought Adobe Premier for videos based on this, and it’s terrible, clunky software that fills your hard disk with multiple copies of junk. They then force you to fork out another huge wad of cash every time they update it and make it slightly less clunky...

You’re infected ISP page

Presumably it would not be difficult for ISP’s to have a group on their proxy which they put infected sources into. That then redirects them to a landing page, and restricts access to everything but Malware/AV vendor domains. The landing page could have a message directing them to resources to clean/check their devices, and a way of confirming that they’re clean.

Each time they are put in this group, it takes a bit longer before they can get access to the internet again. That should quickly encourage them to deal with infected / vulnerable device. It would also stop people selling vulnerable IOT devices eventually, if this was enforced by law on all ISPs...

Windows 8

“ Despite these missteps, Windows 8 was not all bad.”

Really? It was a big mess. So much so that I ended up replacing my Windows laptop with a Macbook. I’ve now come to appreciate some aspects of the Macbook and may even replace it with another, even though I’m more comfortable with Windows 10. VMware fusion is finally good enough to give you a full Windows experience, so you get the best of both.

All because Windows 8 was so bad.

‘The cloud’ is just a different datacentre

As a few have said, using a cloud service (whether SaaS, PaaS or IaaS) doesn’t take away the need to think about recovery processes etc, although recovery testing can be more complicated.

The top level admin who had the rights to do this probably would have had similar abilities in an ‘on premise’ world - delete all the VMs/clusters, delete everything in AD, delete all the passwords, delete the encryption keys used for backups etc etc. Only a delegation of rights that separates rights over separate areas prevents this, but its not uncommon for the top admins to have rights over everything.

I guess maybe the difference is that you could have someone with very little experience as your top level Gsuite administrator. But if it was done deliberately by someone who, say, just got sacked, the fact its a cloud service is not that relevant. The company just has someone else they can try to put the blame on, and possibly less chance of scavenging around for fragments of data...

Straining at gnats

Why is everyone so worried about device fingerprints ? Surely 99% of people don’t clear down their cookies regularly and don’t have security problems?

I can imagine hackers and paedos want to avoid fingerprints, but presumably they’re using Tor on virtual machine running on a USB stick. I guess there are a few other legit concerns, but not enough to justify having to press “I accept your cookies blah blah” on every bloody web page...

A tot of vinegar in your wine, sir?

The judges next visit to a restaurant;

Judge: This wine tastes thin and watery. I ordered the Trivento Eolo Malbec 2014, a rich and full bodied wine.

Waiter: Yes sir, we add water to make it go further. That is how we have such excellent prices.

Judge: But it tastes just like a cheap Merlot, you advertised it as Trivento Eolo Malbec 2014, and said nothing about adding water!

Waiter: The wine is indeed Trivento Eolo Malbec 2014. We find most people don’t notice the difference, sir.

To do fast patching reliably, you really need to have (the equivalent of) Winrunner and Loadrunner scripts setup on your pre-peoduction environment that are constantly maintained for all critical applications, and then a full team to manage all these scripts and update them each time an application, OS or middleware is updated. However now that most companies use VM’s on replicated storage, as long as the storage has snapshots (and there is some failover mechanism), security should really take presidence when roll back is an option.

I suspect most companies with *nix patch less than monthly ?

Everything is just magic when you put it in “the cloud”... no need for any designs, you can have lots of agile applications without any designs and they will just work fine forever.

Transparent Metal

We keep hearing about various types of transparent metal that will be used in everything from screens to buildings.

There must be a way to make a phone tough enough that it doesn’t need a case etc, with a decent battery life that lasts the whole day (even if you use it!)

Possible solution

All these options fail to ask the question “How old do you have to be to work out how to install Tor browser or a VPN client on an iPad ?

The only real answerr I can see is to use the cost of buying a laptop to mean thats an adult. You could then legislate that all laptops are sold with some kind of child protection software enabled (ideally AV software) - which includes a wizard to setup a password and optionally an account for kids in the house. Users can of course change this, but you would expect parents to have some level of control/responsibility...

Its not perfect but seems a sane compromise ...

The Inhibitors

There is of course the Alistair Reynolds explanation for the Fermi Paradox - in the Revelation Space series.

However I tend to agree with the update here, it doesn’t take long for a civilisations technology to exceed its ability to be kind and forgiving on a global scale. There will always be ups and downs and people to blame, and then war.

Intel crypto mining

You have to hand it to Intel - they've come up with a genius way of dealing with the fact they've hit a brick wall in Moore's Law, breaking their business model. By inventing "vulnerabilities" in order to mine Bitcoin/Monero etc on all machines globally they've secured themselves a strong new revenue source....

Good article

One of the best summaries of the issue - which happens to be in an IT paper.

Its ironic that the FBI,CIA (and even NSA) have done some incredibly dodgy things in the past (some verging on evil), all proven and with very little if any attempt to even try to follow due process. Admitedly most of it was during the cold war - trying to oppose the USSR being just as dodgy all around the world in the name of global communism.

Nonetheless much of that was ordered and supported by presidents, congress, senate, the republican party etc. Its ironic that here you have a vastly reformed FBI following the prescribed process for something they and the CIA/NSA should know about. You have Trump and many of the Republicans creating fake news about it - the same Trump that demonstrably got elected on the back of fake news, and yet keeps complaining about fake news. This is all straight out of the Goebels / Hitler playbook. Its all about controlling the narrative at all costs.

The FBI will probably pay for past crimes now in the US public imagination, wounded and inefective. Just at the time their role as independant investigative body is probably more important than its ever been. We will soon see how effective the US constitution and its seperation of powers really is when faced with a president playing them all against each other.