Posts by Daniel B.

Return of the Jedi – Apache reclaims web server crown

@AC shilltard

There is hardly any mention of it from Microsoft ever - it only seem to be Microsoft shills that are getting their knickers in a twist that Microsoft are doing so badly in this space...

FTFY.

Re: @FF22

But not for the last few months - IIS was previously ahead with the highest market share of sites of any web platform.

Not if you added up Apache + nginx sites. Even with the July 2014 stats, they made up 37.53%, which means that more than 60% of all web servers were running something other than IIS. And even then, most of those servers were actually Chinese linkfarms anyway. If you're going to shill MS, do it with better datasets.

Windows 10's 'built-in keylogger'? Ha ha, says Microsoft – no, it just monitors your typing

Re: Class action law suit

Microsoft repeatedly defended the Win8 UI on the grounds that their "telemetry" contradicted the nay-sayers.

Their telemetry was severely broken then. Because pretty much all beta testers were complaining about Metro and were doing the registry hack thing to disable the hideous Start Screen until one of the releases outright removed that ability and rammed Metro up all the beta testers asses. That might have given MS the "wanted" telemetry, as nobody could do otherwise.

Cops and spies should blame THEMSELVES for smartphone crypto 'problem' - Hyppönen

Re: What Freaks Me Out...

Everyone has always been looking for those backdoors. Remember NSA_KEY? The hacker community has been very suspicious since the early 2000s. We probably only need better SSL/TLS protocols or just use them for everything, as it seems that is spooking more the spooks.

FUD

BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) has been pretty much broken despite the encryption too.

Nope, BES isn't broken at all. In fact, that was one of the main reasons why BlackBerry (formerly RIM) ran into trouble with the Indian government, as they wanted access to both BIS and BES.

Now that BB10 devices are no longer tied to BIS, it's possible that they are now harder to tap than the old devices. Also notice that the NSA was able to h4xx0r Merkel's Nokia handset ... but they weren't able to do the same to her BB Z10. Quite interesting...

Something ate Google's 8.8.8.8 at about eight in Asia's evening

Oh please...

Setting up a recursive search BIND is easy peasy. If you are really concerned, configure iptables (or ipfw) on the box to only allow incoming queries from ISP-controlled networks and/or configure BIND to only serve their networks.

Anyone relying on 8.8.8.8 who isn't a mortal user is being extremely lazy!

Jony Ive: Flattered by rivals' designs? Nah, its 'theft'

Re: "Flat" design

Stuff like the depth of a UI is a personal preference, not something for which there is one obvious "right" answer.

Which is why you should give users the choice of one or the other. I'm miffed that Yosemite is going to foist the "retro" flat Dock on us, and AFAIK there's no way to choose the 3D look.

Linux systemd dev says open source is 'SICK', kernel community 'awful'

Re: Oh please...

Ah, so the best way to address that is be insulting, instead of finding a way forward that works for all. That validates what the guy says.

Nope, it's actually the other way around. He was originally told "hey dude, we have the UNIX philosophy stuff, maybe you should read this" and he dismissed it as utter crap. That is, he's coding stuff for a thing he absolutely hates. This is akin to Stallman doing code for Windows. Would you really expect Stallman to play nice with MS developers, especially given his hostility to propietary code?

Yes, I know about the Linux prima donna effect. In fact, the way someone refers to Linux itself will raise red flags (or yellow flags) on his attitude. Does he/she insist on saying "GNU/Linux"? There's a good chance you've got one of the hostile dudes. But in Lennart's case, it seems he's a prima donna himself!

Oh please...

The systemd developer saying the Linux kernel dev community is awful? Has he seen his own work? systemd is awful and one of the worst things that Linux has ever got saddled with in the last 20 years! Not to mention that part of the Big Leap Forward with systemd is killing text logs, now they're some weird binary format. Yeech!

I'm also guessing that many of Linus' hostility would probably be because his code is crap as well. See, the shouty man may not be nice all the time, but it doesn't mean he isn't right.

Prez Obama backs net neutrality – but can't do anything about it. Thanks, Obama

Re: Be careful what you wish for...

Icon for those who need to re-read "1984", then look at China, and think twice about giving the government the power to neuter the internet.

Regulation of Internet packet prority treatment isn't the same as regulating internet content. The FCC can simply declare internet providers as "common carriers" and that would bring internet regulation in line with telephone operators. The government hasn't been censoring phone lines, has it?

If you're really, really concerned about "internet censorship", you should not only be for Net Neutrality, you should be asking for laws to make CGNAT illegal as it allows ISPs to block incoming internet traffic if they want to do so. (in a phone analogy: it would be like you paying for a phone that can only make calls, but can't receive any calls at all.)

Re: Dan Paul "He's got a pen"...

And can we cut the crap with this Net 'Neutrality' misdirection? It has nothing to do with 'neutrality', it's just a word the anti-capitalists have seized on because Net 'socialism' wouldn't go down so well with the American public.

Net Neutrality has nothing to do with socialism. It has everything to do with double-dipping; telcos are already charging you for bandwidth, and they want to charge an extra 'extortion rate' on content providers to prioritize their traffic lest they get stuck in the slow lane. The problem is that the content provider is already paying for bandwidth on his end.

There's a good chance that a non-Net Neut internet will still see U.S. telco's not investing on infrastructure, instead sitting their asses while they rake in the big bucks they get from double-dipping subscribers and content providers alike.

Obama is getting a clear message from the American public. He should ask for Wheeler's resignation. NOW.

To Russia With Love: Snowden's pole-dancer girlfriend is living with him in Moscow

Now it makes sense!

And in other news, a new report by Poitras and Peter Maass reveals that the NSA uses undercover operatives to subvert foreign companies and telecommunications networks, having done so in China, Germany, and South Korea.

And Finland. So that's what Elop was really doing! Subverting a foreign company!

Was Nokia's Elop history's worst CEO?

Re: It could have been so different

Um, what exactly did he do to benefit MS?

MS wanted to Borg a phone manufacturer to raise their WP installed base, as most of their usual OEMs were flocking to Android. Nokia had one of the largest shares in the smartphone market, and somehow MS thought all those Nokia users would keep buying Nokia even if the OS was switched to Windows Phone. Instead, it was "Palm: The Sequel" as everyone just flocked to Android or iOS.

He did what the mothership ordered him to do, now if that was good for MS is an entirely different matter.

Flames because of burning platforms, get it?

N900

I had high hopes for Nokia after playing with an N900. Not just on the OS, anyone remember the transflective display it had? It was probably the only phone you could read in daylight, and the transflective feature meant more battery life. Maybe we'll see a spiritual successor from Jolla?

Re: Too slow

From some perspective, Microsoft understood better what a smartphone is than Apple and Google.

I don't think so. In fact, they still don't understand it. MS idea is "Windows everywhere" and that's why they fail everywhere else.

...and just not be a Fisher Price interface with a lot of colorful candies to collect for the joy of the average fanboy luser

You are right on Fisher Price interfaces being bad. But MS did exactly that with WP7, and then hobbled their own desktop OS with it in Windows 8!

If anyone had a good idea on how to do a real smartphone UI, it was Symbian-era Nokia. In fact, most of the pre-iPhone smartphone UIs were pretty much good on giving useful information to their users.

Re: No-one gets away scott free

While I agree with your assessment, who on the board would realistically have pulled that trigger? Firing a brand new CEO with clearly no planned replacement strategy would have only doubled down on the share nosedive, and then the firer has then just committed the same offence as the firee.

I'll say a name here, and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Leo Apotheker.

While HP might not be swimming in the McDuck Moneybin's worth of $$$, the decision to axe Leo after his stupid gaffé is probably the reason we still have an HP vs. having it go down the acquisition route which befell good old companies like DEC, Tandem, or Sun Microsystems. See the difference:

- Elop sends the Burning Platforms memo and kills pretty much Nokia's value overnight. Board keeps him. Nokia Mobile is no more, now Borged by Microsoft and the way things are going, that's where it will die.

- Leo sends the Burning PCs memo, causing an instant 25% drop in HP shares. The board axes him about 1 month after this stupid, stupid move and backtracks on it. HP is still alive.

Is Apple incubating a Macbook, iPad bastard child?

Re: Inevitable

I've no doubt it won't take them much effort at all to port OS X to ARM and I wouldn't be surprised if they've already done it.

Technically, they already did it. iOS is basically a cut-down OSX to the core, which is what gave Ballmer the grand idea of using the NT kernel for the next WinPhone iterations. Of course, he forgot that OSX uses a far more suitable microkernel (Mach) while NT is still a monolithic monstrosity. I'm guessing that the only things that actually require porting are the apps themselves, as most of the base system is already ported to ARM.

Screen resolution on netbooks

Reading websites on the first generation of netbooks was a shit experience, due to the screen aspect ratio and poor resolution. It might have been almost okay if the screen rotated through 90º to 'portrait', but they didn't.

I blame the HDTV market. PCs in general have always been 4:3 and had no need to change said resolution, but somehow 16:9 became the new "hotness". 16:9 is crappy, 16:10 is still far wider than what I need but at least the height is workable. The suckiness of 16:9 was just more noticeable with the netbook because of the reduced resolution they had. If anything, netbooks were the kind of product that would have benefited of a plain old 4:3 screen...

Re: This sounds like Windows 8 territory

There was a much earlier version of 'one click to launch' icons as an option in the finder in pre-OSX days (OS 8 perhaps?), introduced at the same time I think as the 'coverflow' option.

I think every OS with a GUI has added this 'feature' at some point. I know KDE has it (and the places where I haven't disabled it, it's because I don't know how to do it), Windows9x added it around the time they brought the "Active Desktop" feature and made it the default option on new installs (this is how I learned how to disable the feature) and now I learn they added it on MacOS as well (can't remember seeing it, last MacOS Classic version I used was 8.x but I was more familiar with 7.1 and 7.5.5. I'm still used to call it System 7, which will probably give away how old I am...

Re: The "giant iPad" rumors have been around for several years

I've always thought it would make a lot of sense to have the iPhone/iPad capable of running the OS X GUI and API as an app

This. It should be obvious to anyone that if convergence is to be achieved, it would be by having a phone acting by a full-blown computer once "docked" to PC-like hardware and thus making a second PC redundant. The Sinofsky/Ballmer take on this was the opposite: force the phone UI on desktops which turns your awesome PC into a useless giant phone.

I remember seeing a Motorola phone w/Android back in 2011 that could be "docked" to a laptop-lookalike-thingy which turned it into an Android laptop. That looked awesome enough to get us looking at this as a viable substitute for laptops, yet we never saw Motorola (or anyone else) going down this path. It is far more useful than Win8.

Re: This sounds like Windows 8 territory

Would Apple dare to go down a desktop / ios approach?

They've already kind of done it with Launchpad. Something nobody uses. Other features like those due to come in Yosemite are probably less jarring and might be accepted. I for one dislike they're reverting the Dock to 2D flatness. I'm also less impressed with their switch to Hipstervetica as the new System font. But all in all, Apple hasn't had a Windows 8 moment on OSX, and thanks to MS they probably know it is a bad idea.

I doubt they'll try something like this. They may have done dumb changes (i.e. iOS 7 UI) but they seem to have kept it mostly on the sane side. They're probably taking note that nobody actually wants a tablet/phone UI on their full-blown computers, and that the Surface devices are a disaster.

How much is Microsoft earning from its Android taxes again?

Re: Microsoft scrapping WP royalties

Had Microsoft had zero royalties for WP7 from day one, back when Android was a fuddled mess in the 1.x and 2.x days, they probably would have had a much better market share.

I doubt it. Windows Mobile had a rock bottom share since forever, and anything associated to Windows Mobile would usually see their market shrink & die in a matter of months, or years if they were really lucky. See Palm, Sendo, even HTC. It isn't really a wonder that WP7 also dragged Nokia from #1 OS (Symbian) to "right next to the Other category". It also didn't help that when MS dumped WinMo 6.5 for the full rewrite WP7, they had already done the "dump & rewrite" trick a couple of times already. Remember Windows CE? A lot of stuff was deprecated/obsoleted when they dumped that in favor of Windows Mobile. Some devs commented that they were feeling deja vu on the whole issue; the thing is that by WP7's announcement, it was far more profitable to develop for iOS or Android than the dying WP/WinMo ecosystem. Hell, even BlackBerry looked more promising than WP!

Re: I do wonder

The reason that Samsung pay Microsoft is that Microsoft spend a far higher percentage of revenue on R&D - and Microsoft accordingly have a much stronger patent portfolio.

Nope, the reason Samsung pays Microsoft is because Microsoft has been pulling a SCO on the main Linux players and claiming that Linux uses MS patented stuff, but fail to produce the "offending" code. They just FUD their way into extortion, and up until now, both the Linux and the Android players have just ponied up the cash. Samsung has probably reached a point where it can actually bring up the fight against Microsoft. It would be interesting to see those patents either invalidated or proven not to be infringed at all, SCO-style. You'd think the IT industry would learn its lesson from the SCO fallout, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

PEAK LANDFILL: Why tablet gloom is good news for Windows users

I remember those days

... when I could bring up my old handset and have it linked to a new contract. This would enable me to avoid the compulsory 12/18/24-month period and be able to terminate my contract with only a 30-day notice. It's been years, maybe a decade since that ability went away as "bring your own phone" is no longer an option. I know, I tried to do this back in 2007 with my PAYG phone.

However, one thing I do know is that you might sign up for a 12, 18 or 24 month mandatory term contract ... but this is a minimum length. You can hold on to your contract after the mandatory term ends, and you'll be able to do the 30-day termination notice if you hold to it. This is why my carrier starts nagging me around my "expiration date" offering free handsets just to get me on a new contract. I also get a plus as I rack up more "client points" which make my next upgrade choice cheaper, and I get out a longer lifetime out of my current smartphone. My previous one (BlackBerry Bold 9700) lasted me 3 years, and would've probably lived longer had I not made the mistake of upgrading it to BBOS 6 (it couldn't handle that OS). I'm probably going to go down the upgrade path early this time round, but mostly because my current phone was obsoleted earlier than expected. I hope my next choice doesn't go down the same route...

Yahoo servers? SHELLSHOCKED? by Bash?

Lycos?

It still exists??

Marriott fined $600k for deliberate JAMMING of guests' Wi-Fi hotspots

Re: Harvey's law

If the hotel is crap enough and expensive enough that will not help either. Example the Etoille convention centre (nowdays Grand Hayatt) in Paris. Last time I was there (IETF 2011) it was killing any persistent sessions _INCLUDING_ port 443 and disallowing IM (so you use the hotel phone you know).

There are ways to getting around this as well, let's just say that I've encountered most of these scenarios. Yes, I'm including the persistent session killing on port 443.

Hotels should wise up on the fact that they aren't going to stop a skillful hacker from getting his/her unrestricted internet access. We're willing to pay for internet access (even if it is far more expensive in some hotels than what it should be), but we expect unfiltered access to the 'net when doing so.

The US is a weird place

Over here in Mexico, all hotels have free WiFi. The more expensive ones might have a login/password thing to check you really are a guest in the hotel, but that's as far as they'll go. Public spaces will sometimes have free internet, others have "infinitum movil" where you have to log in with your ISPs login/password combo.

In the US, even wired internet is charged per-24hour access and it is too damn expensive. Oh, and they charge per-device fees. Meanwhile, most if not all public spaces are 100% free. Weird...

Re: curious how it works

Having monkeyed with aireplay-ng and the whole set of tools, this can be done easily. Use airodump to scan the area, you'll get all MACs and to which BSSID they're associated with. Simply ignore the ones associated to your own infrastructure's BSSID, send deauth packets to the rest of 'em. Rinse and repeat.

The only people I know that do this fake deauth packet business are those interested in cracking WEP or WPA. It is considered DoS and it's probably illegal under FCC rules. I'm surprised the FCC only slammed them with a $600k fine, I would hand them at least a $6 *million* fine to discourage not only them but any other establishment from doing this.

Re: A small step in the right direction

De-authing networks does have it's legitimate uses though. For instance in a business environment where people shouldn't be using their own Wi-Fi or plugging in unauthorised equipment in your buildings but do so anyway.

If you're concerned with people plugging in unauthorised equipment, you should have actual MAC filters in your level 2&3 switches, not doing illegal DoS on the airwaves. I remember from my college years that the Cisco Catalyst 2950 has a "protected" mode for switchports where you could lock a port to a single MAC address. I would expect beefier stuff to have these kinds of security.

Re: Harvey's law

I tried this at one hotel, and found they had a machine in the middle that passed on url requests to the outside world for you. In other words, you could not directly connect to another server via their systems (VPNs will never work).

This is where you set up OpenVPN on its "port-sharing" mode, where it listens on port tcp/443 so you can deal with this exact scenario.

FLASH drive ... Ah-aaaaaah! BadUSB no saviour to plug and play Universe

Re: "Are you sure that you want to use this USB Storage device"

A keyboard could be a threat vector, especially coupled with a USB storage device.

It already exists. Google "Rubber Ducky USB". A USB "drive" that is actually showing itself as a keyboard, and can be programmed to type stuff upon being plugged in.

Xen sticks pin in bug behind Rackspace GLOBAL CLOUD REBOOT

Yipes!

Oh well, the reboot wasn't that painful anyway. But holy shit that's one big hole they patched right there!

Apple blacklists tech journo following explicit BENDY iPhone vid

@45RPM

Um... you do know that phones are supposed to be resilient because *gasp* they will be carried and used in extremely harsh environments most of the time? My BlackBerries have survived countless falls, at least 4 super-soaking storms; my current one survived Monday's storm that flooded my freaking shoes as I was caught mid-commute on my motorbike. Any phone that can't handle that kind of beating is not fit for purpose. Phones that break if you look at them cross-eyed aren't fit for purpose.

Oh, and if you're a software developer, you should know that this also applies to software. Programs should not crash if someone inputs 1025 chars in a 1024 char field, if a network connection is broken/lost mid-transfer, of you get weird input, among other things. All exceptions should be handled safely. Your reservation system shouldn't break because someone inputted 2014-09-32.

I do remember!

It was because of Jagwyre. Or at least, I think it was because of that.

I'm not surprised about Apple, after all they forced Ellen DeGeneres to backtrack on a joke ad she made on the iPhone. But really, Apple shouldn't keep the Jobs-era policy on reporters given that they don't have Jobs on the helm anymore. They're just coming out as rude.

Apple, Google mobe encryption good news... for TERRORISTS – EU top cop

Re: Won't make much difference at all

Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Most people "secure" their smartphones with a 4-digit PIN which is laughable by modern standards. Brute-forcing even an 8-digit PIN is done in seconds, probably minutes depending on the algorithm used.

Re: Irreversible encryption

I can't imagine a more useless type of encryption.I can't imagine a more useless type of encryption.

Interestingly, it is useful, but not in the context used by the speaker. Irreversible encryption is useful for password hashes, as it makes it easier to do quick hash encryption that can be only verified by encrypting the same hash and checking if the encrypted bytes match the ones you stored earlier.

But yeah, the "irreversible encryption" they're talking about isn't irreversible at all.

Facebook apologizes for binning accounts of drag queens

"According to Cox's statement, Facebook has never required people to use their legal name, merely the name they are known under."

Yeah, I call BS as well. A friend of mine got his FB profile taken down, and was explicitly asked to show some ID if he wanted to have his profile reactivated. He just discarded it and opened up a new one elsewhere.

So when I hear Cox saying "it isn't required", he's outright LYING. And yes, there are many reasons why someone would not use their real name and/or use alternative profiles, work stuff being the #1 reason. Every single company that has tried to force "Real Names Only" on users has seen those attempts backfire in a very bad way real quick. Anyone remember Blizzard's "Real ID" situation from a couple of years ago? Remember how that ended? Now try to do that on FB en masse, I'm pretty sure FB's "userbase" would deflate faster than the Hindenburg. It would be glorious!

So long Lotus 1-2-3: IBM ceases support after over 30 years of code

Re: Notes

Indeed. I used Notes at HighSchool and even my first college years because my university started using something called LearningSpace, which was based on Lotus Notes. I found the whole database groupware thingy pretty interesting; mostly the "replication" feature that allowed you to download the entire course database in one fell swoop, allowing you to work offline and just upload/download any changes later. This was a killer feature in the era of 33.6k dialup internet; I could bring my laptop on campus during our first days, jack into the campus LAN and replicate the whole semester's worth of databases (~400Mb, usually) and then do all my assignments at home, post them offline and just crank up replication, uploading only a couple Kb's worth of data over dialup.

We never used the mail feature, which seems to be what everyone hated about Notes. Thus I can't really comment on that, but it seems that the lack of usage of that particular feature is what gave us a better opinion on Notes.

Samsung abandons Chromebooks, laptops, PCs in Europe

Seconded

I've always complained about Apple's lock-in sheanigans, and I still dislike some of the stuff they are doing (i.e. Retina MBP being non-user-upgreadable). But MS finally pushed me over the edge with their stupid, stupid Windows 8 "Fisher Price Edition" OS. You can't buy a laptop that doesn't have that ghastly OS, so I won't buy them at all. OSX does everything I need to, so the switch to Mac was pretty obvious.

So you're not alone...

Re: Sad news

Indeed. Windows 8 turned a PC stagnation into a PCpocalypse as nobody wants to buy toy computers. It is only the tablet/mobile device popularity that has allowed MS to mask how badly they damaged the desktop/laptop market. A stupidly designed OS has now killed Samsung Europe's laptop presence. That's pretty damning.

Business is back, baby! Hasta la VISTA, Win 8... Oh, yeah, Windows 9

Re: Time to rethink

Those who believe an OS is just a GUI, usually fail to understand that hardware evolution needs OS evolution as well.

Oh, but we do understand that OS evolution is necessary. Every single OS has had to do some underlying tweaks during major releases due to this, hence filesystem changes, binary support changes (switching from 32 to 64-bit) and even low-level partition scheme changes (MBR to GPT). Even Linux has to move on to at least 64-bit and ext4 to avoid the awful year 2038 problem. Newer OSen are aware of SSD media and will usually be able to manage them accordingly; it would be even better if filesystems were SSD aware … wait, Linux has had JFFS2 since 2001, and there are at least other three SSD-aware filesystems out there. They'd be more in use if MS weren't forcing everyone to using its dismal NTFS or FAT for "everything else".

So what does MS offer instead? No SSD-aware filesystems, a newer one that's yet again propietary and it's gimped as usual for consumer-grade OSen. Oh, and a fugly Fisher-Price GUI. So most users, consumer and enterprise don't see a real advantage on the new OS and a great disadvantage in using that ugly thing called TIFKAM.

Super Cali so litigious, Uber is the focus. Even German judges say it's something quite atrocious

Re: Supercaliawesomeheadline

hehehe. I knew I couldn't be the only one reading that headline while singing!

Yahoo! dumps! thing! that! made! it! Yahoo! and! told! to! bed! AOL!

Um...

The letter goes so far as to suggest that Yahoo! could even take AOL's name and shut down most of its operations, if need be.

Replace their faltering but still pretty notorious brand with one that is synonymous with "awful internet"? Really???

FBI boss: Apple's iPhone, iPad encryption puts people 'ABOVE THE LAW'

Re: I am a little reassured

My cursory understanding is that it's the time increment added to every wrong attempt that makes for ensured security.

Unless the underlying hardware is something with FIPS 140-2 Level 3 or 4 certified tamper-proof hardware (the kind that destroys the key if you try to open it up to extract the storage media containing the key) any "time increment" countermeasures are moot. I'm guessing any federal agency worth its salt will be able to rip apart the phone and then fire up a brute force PIN/password guessing program that is unhindered by these measures.

It would also be really fast for most phones, because most sheeple still use 4-digit PIN passwords to "secure" their phones. 10k attempts should be easy to brute-force through; even WPS now uses 8-digit passcodes and those are still brute-forceable.

Sun of a beach! Java biz founder loses battle to keep his shore private

Re: what an asshat!

I think it is not venom against the guy for being a rich guy, but because he's being an asshat with said acquired riches. If you were rich and nice to your community, you wouldn't get any venom at all.

Um...

He owns the land where the only access road to the beach passes through, not the beach itself. Building those things would probably be illegal anyway, because he would be doing that outside his property.

He might apply to get public funding for the access road maintenance, though.

SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD – courting speed freaks and gamers

Re: An important question : SSD failure modes?

I like RAID-10 so if I lose a drive, I can replace it and rebuild the raid group.

I prefer RAID-5 or RAID-6, as that doesn't cause me to lose 50% of my storage space to redundance. Also, rebuilding on SSDs won't have the same problem that HDD RAID has, namely that a second disk might fail while the first failure is rebuilding; mostly because SSD failures will usually be on writing instead of reading.

Huawei prez: A one-speed internet is bad for everyone

Re: The difference is not traffic priority....

Indeed. QoS is an issue, but that is seen at the customer's endpoint side so that his 10 year old kid doesn't hog all his DSL pipe with uTorrent uploading slowing down TCP ACK traffic.

Your ISP is selling bandwidth to you. If they can't serve it, they are lying in their service terms. They should upgrade their links, end of discussion. And this guy is obviously talking about "smart networks" because he sells the stuff that would do that, not because he actually believes all that crap.

In fact, the Bell phone system is the perfect analogy to the Internet. All in all, everything is simply packet routing from A to B, the main difference being that everything is packet switched instead of circuit switched which allows for far more traffic to go through a single wire. TCP/IP in particular basically builds up a virtual circuit between two endpoints, each side just sees a two-way stream of bytes that will always arrive in order. Connections are similar to phone calls, where instead of phone numbers you have IP+port numbers. Another good thing of using the phone analogy is that it shows the travesty that NAT is, especially "CGNAT" which is how some ISPs get to squeeze their users and save on money by using one single routeable IP to serve hundreds of subscribers. In a Bell phone analogy, you would have the phone company giving you a "outgoing calls only" phone but charging you the same as a "incoming and outgoing calls" phone!!!

Patch Bash NOW: 'Shellshock' bug blasts OS X, Linux systems wide open

Wow that was quick.

I ran yum upgrade bash on my internet-facing servers and the update's already there, fixing the issue. So it seems it'll be a quick fix for CentOS and RHEL boxes.

Fedora 17, however, doesn't have a fix. Looks like that's one case where you'll have to svn checkout & compile by yourself...

Bash bug: Shellshocked yet? You will be ... when this goes WORM

Oh $!#t.

$ bash -version

GNU bash, version 3.2.48(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin12)

Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

So we all OSX users are screwed?