Posts by Paul Crawford 5667 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2007
Yes, people need to get priorities straight and that means *useful* screening and not the various pointless additions (like 100ml fluids) that were knee-jerk reactions to a failed terrorist attempt. They are winning you know, not by blowing us up but by wasting our lives and freedom by knee-jerk reactions.
Incidentally can anyone cite a case of the new THz scanners actually leading to an arrest or something to justify the additional invasion of privacy?
Indeed, so many desktops running Linux are hacked. infested with malware and pointless browser toolbars and parasitic AV software that didnt do its job, leaving the poor users to wipe & re-install from scratch, and left hunting for their license key to re-enable the OS and the recovery DVD they (failed to make) made when it was new.
Oh wait, got the wrong OS...
"any of them online could only come from one source so it will be easy to trace the downloaders and sue them several hundred gazillion dollars"
Oh please tell me the torrents were seeded from Sony machines before this hack was discovered? The irony would be delicious and good for my red blood cell count...
How would compensation work? A tax on blank CDs (a past technology for music transfer), or on HDDs, and if so how is it calculated? Given a 4TB disk could hold millions of songs, should it be taxed to the £1k range?
The other side of this coin is the question of pirating, if you have already paid compensation on your audio equipment for the right to copy, why should it matter where you copied from? In such a case it is going to end very badly for the music industry.
Finally, how is this done in the USA where "fair use" AFIK allows copying without a fee? Do they offer compensation for it, and if not, why should the EU?
(Just to say I do believe musicians deserve compensation for their work, but this seems an unworkable position that you deserve compensation for what has been allowed for years and is seen as "fair use").
I think the answer is so many people, in particular high up in the company, just don't want a Windows phone/tablet. Have you ever tried to use a typical non-tech person's home Windows PC (not an El Reg reader) that is more than a few months old? It is a horrific experience of blot, advert tool bars, shitty trial-ware AV, etc.
So when they first used an iPad or iPhone with near instant resume, slick UI and more or less "just working" experience they liked it and wanted it for work.
Of course a large scale corporate deployment by a good Windows admin person is easier and in most ways better than wrangling iOS, but it seems not to be what enough important folk want.
The big things we need for comfort, like heat and clean water and being washed more than twice a year are not something we really want to give up.
Transport is another that we could do much better on, but ain't going away so long as we operate efficient farming, etc, that moves large amounts of stuff globally.
And we have a LOT of folk still in 3rd world misery and they also deserve something better.
So efficiency might help a bit, like 20-50% perhaps, and reducing birth rate would help a lot long term, but really the Google guys are right - we need so much energy for a comfortable life that when either fossil runs out or it screws our climate beyond achievable farming and population relocation changes, we are fscked.
Unless we do something now about large scale generation that is not fossil based.
Everyone has their price, its just a shame its so low in some cases.
Really you need to plan for people making mistakes or doing the wrong thing, and have arrangements to detect and correct that as far as possible. Often that costs money or causes inconvenience though so its not done...
They were kind. The alternative punishment/time-waste is to send them to a meeting to suffer hours of "death by powerpoint"!
But seriously, the problem in some cases is they only have one admin, or only one that every looks after XYZ systems, so on antagonistic exit (or a bus accident, etc) they find they can't do anything due to a lack of passwords or alternative admin accounts.
Businesses, particularly those with only one admin person, should have a policy of root passwords being written down and kept in a safe and regularly tested to ensure they still allow access, and that password changes are recorded and done for good reason[1].
[1] Changing periodically to me is dumb, it just promotes writing stuff down in insure places. For example, changing once per year would give a hacker a mean time of 6 months to do stuff. just how long do you need to set up shadow accounts, email redirects, etc?
However, if you think a compromise might have occurred, or someone leaves, then changing is essential.
I take that back, just had a cursory look at the code and found stuff like this without any comments:
bs, _ = base64.StdEncoding.DecodeString("H4sIAAAJbogA/0SPsW4iMRCG+3sKM0I6W7L8AKCrTtw16ZIOURh7nDXx2pvxLAQtvHucJZBuPP413/fb/DomS6YvfkwoYbDV2TQQuo4Nk801WUZQJljHhc4Slo/tM1uO7l9MWJ+K9Uigt7B8Bw3LjnkAHcbsOJYsrd6riZBHyuKxdGqKQS7c5bJwphFD/JjHOoY2Ku6onETGk9gQFZLwt4zJ598sUoOJOsNF+KJrkYu4XRCFxO2AqAO6GCL6Baj10ZLwf6zxGJCkWn/L7OU0Ulpt7wLamTc867vEzhxKzBJA6R65K34F/zcvoAdLtq8rgKtqSeewVvlTVk3eENaSjtgeLYJzgUfg9n9Ax3LGtYj2TaD0seL1ulPrX58AAAD//wEAAP//1rAncZcBAAA=")
gr, _ = gzip.NewReader(bytes.NewBuffer(bs))
bs, _ = ioutil.ReadAll(gr)
assets["angular/angular-translate-loader.min.js"] = bs
So sorry "Syncthing" but unreadable code for me means untrustworthy code.
Beat me to it: why trust a closed-source program? While open/closed tells you nothing about how good the programmers are, or the underlying ideas, at least with open it is possible[1] to audit the code and much harder to conceal back doors[2].
[1] Possible yes, but not necessarily going to happen.
[2] Back doors are still possible, but code changes/commits need a bit more explaining.
Moving from OS to OS, or between versions of the "same" OS separated by many years, is often a real pain and takes a lot of effort and testing. For some legacy applications the cost or trouble may not be worth it. If you have legacy code that is not internet-facing, then running it in VMs of NT4, W2k, old Linux, etc, is probably going to be your saviour.
You can typically run a good few VMs on a single newer server with your preferred OS (Linux or Windows) using either a paid-for VM or (if willing to risk it) a free one. All at lower cost and higher performance, security, and ease of backup/restore, than keeping old machines going.
You make an important point, considering how practically useless and excruciatingly unpleasant the "cure" for viruses is.
What matters most is you have some off-line backup & restore strategy and actually use it.
Then you are probably better to run Windows without AV and just be willing to nuke it and restore the backup when t gets infected. This has the added bonus of getting rid of general crap and bloat (aka "windows entropy") as well.
Either this guy has been smoking something his former employers would have strong policies against, or he is barking mad. Who wants to be spied upon, given the bad guys (for any preferred definition of "bad"), gain the same capability?
On the other hand, maybe he is sane and just revealed the existence of a behind-the-scenes campaign by the US gov to discredit RIM to a number of big businesses?
On the third hand, for those of you with special capabilities, maybe he is talking up the 'problem' knowing full well they already have to broken enough for business as usual?
The problem for most folk is that so much of what they want to do on-line, like buy stuff, relies on stuff that NoScript blocks. Once users get the idea of just clicking 'yes' to make things work you have something just as bad as the typical Windows plus shitty AV software that asks users if they want shaftmesideways.exe to run.
Until (and I advise you not to hold your breath) most web sites are designed to work without suspect scripting that crosses domains, then NoScript is just an annoyance to non-tech folk that they will click-through, rendering it pointless.
You seriously think that a typical nearby phone cell is going to offer usable data to 22 thousand delegates?
That is why venues charge a lot for good wifi (though clearly the 2nd part was missing here) as you need a lot of coordinated access points and serious back-end capacity. You know, simplistically 22k users trying to get a miserable-by-3g-standards 100kbit is going to peak at 2.2Gbit/sec for the broadband link out.
Why can't they make IE a stand-alone product like every other browser manages? I thought they had got to the point with a GUI-less Windows Server that this was now possible (or at least, not *essential* for Windows to run), so why don't they?
How hard could it be for a multi-billion dollar company to make their software cross-platform like all other seem to manage on a fraction of the budget?
True, you can't p0wn the machine unless running as root (why? really why do that?)
But you could get up to lots of mischief by overwriting the user's own files, maybe starting with something creative in .bashrc
<twiddles moustache like a cad & bounder>
Can we have a Terry Thomas icon please?
"not patched, then there would be no need to reboot"
That was what I meant, these days an unmolested Windows box (as for Linux) should stay up more or less indefinitely.
The problems come when patching, and that leads you to the "soapy frog dilemma":
(1) Do you leave things alone because they are working, and risk someone coming along with a bucket of soapy frogs, or;
(2) Do you patch/update them to keep your trousers on, and risk breaking things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJF_bBiMstc
So we have internet-connected machines running critical control stuff, probably not OS patched due to the risks of disruption from untested interactions or bad patches (and the near-inevitable reboots in these as windows-based system), and probably not application patched due to vendors taking their time and/or the same risks of downtime, more testing needed, etc.
And they get compromised.
Are there any El Reg readers who are surprised?
I also wondered about that, after all correlation (which we have) is not causation. But that is science really: Find some unexplained connections, postulate a theory, and then try to perform experiments to disprove said theory. If it holds up, then it is true enough to be usable.
Until someone else comes along with something better that can be tested...
A few thousand folk is not, in my humble opinion, statistically small. That is the whole point of sampling a population, you can't practically evaluate all so you get "enough" to have some specified confidence interval.
Do you have enough knowledge of statistical method to comment in any more detail?
Before criticising folk who use iTunes you have to consider the following:
1) Apple managed to get a sensible sales model from the major music labels. You need to look back a decade or so to see just how crap the industries own on-line shops were. Just who gives a fsck about which label your favourite band is on? And the incompatible DRM shit!
2) Some folk struggle to use ripping software. Hell, some struggle with the concept of RTFM, or even of using Google, etc, to find help...
3) A lot of folk bought Apple ipods, etc, and they deliberately did not document the interfaces and often changed them, so getting music on along with album art was hit and miss. Same trick MS has used...except nobody bought the Zune...
4) A lot of new laptops, and all tablets, lack CD drives and few folk will splash for an external USB one unless they can be persuaded of the benefit. Buying the CD may be comparable to, or even cheaper to iTunes in the sale/bargin box case, but buying one track at a time is popular because frankly a lot of albums are pish, with one or two redeeming tracks. If you are lucky. In that case the economics work against CD purchases.
5) While CDs are uncompressed and better than half of the MP3 tracks out there, most folk don't seem to care about Hi-Fi quality. They play them through crappy speakers or headphones and often as background music, and just don't see sound quality as important.
"The only reason for the #Climatecrisis is the greed of the fossil fuel industry, and that is why this book is a must-read."
No, the reason is the collective "greed" of humans, like the tragedy of the commons. Paying more is something most folk will avoid, and even go in to denial about what the consequences are of their choices. People want, indeed expect, cheap energy and fossil fuels provide that but at a high environmental cost since folk are not paying for the consequences directly, nor are they being charged the "replacement" cost of such a resource.
Look how much has been done to try and raise animal welfare standards and yet a lot of folk still buy factory-farmed eggs rather than paying a few pence more! The same folk who bitch about petrol costs but won't change their behaviour to car-share on commutes, and need an SUV to take precious Tarquin the 1/2 mile to school, etc.
While the lobbying and dirty tricks of some of the fuel industry is distasteful, it is not unique to them but a character of our political system where those with money try to keep it by any means.
Personally I am in favour of "incentive taxes" against polluting or wasteful products, rather than the EU's approach of trying to ban things like filament bulbs, etc, as it gives folk the choice and generally the market will go that way as a result.
I have seen some interest in PC World while wandering around. Quite a lot if you compare the area of Windows machines to the sole Chromebook stand, but not as much as the fondlslabs and Apple kit was getting.
I suspect most ended up buying a fondleslab though, probably the cheaper iPads or Android. But then I am not a sales guru like Gartner, etc, so why listen to me?
My biggest gripe with Chromebooks is actually the keyboard, more specifically the lack of Ins/Del/Home/End keys. Even with a web page, having to scroll all the way to top or bottom rather than using the Home/End is a major irritation.
Having said that, for a few folk I know they are ideal: cheap, simple, and virtually nothing to do to keep them running infestation-free, and not having a dozen or so updaters running in the background (of which they can't even explain what half of the stuff was installed for).
Accepting that Google's slurping is an infestation of sorts, of course...
Perhaps if some of the punishment was also metered out to those ultimately in charge [1] of the systems being hacked and defrauded when they have not done a good job of securing them, things might change.
[1] I.e. at the CEO/CFO level, not BOFH. Those who decide how much to spend on security and if changes that make things better are to be vetoed for business reasons.
Systemd won't fix poorly implemented services either. Anyone who is not able to write/test/test-again something for init.d won't magically have it all work perfectly under another scheme. Upstart seems to be the least-worst option for something that permits dependency resolution and parallel starting, but its not perfect either and really should be extended to include managing the init.d scripts as well, as realistically there is a lot of stuff that won't get converted to native jobs any time soon.
At one point the Ubuntu project was doing a really good job of making a Linux distro that worked, and was fairly sane, but sadly from about 10.04 seems to have lost its way. It really needs someone like that who is interested in PC use, and not the tablets they fixated upon, to drive a project sanely.
And never listen to the GUI developers either: look how many stupid changes have been made to Gnome and Firefox, etc, etc.
I think upstart is a bit more sane, but even then it has its dumb aspects.
Why, for example, is upstart not calling the traditional scripts in order as well? That way you could at least use its dependency capabilities with non-upstart processes, just like the "service wibble start|stop" sort of command suggests you could.
Exactly! A "driver-less car" has to be just that - NO driver input expected at any time, bar choosing where to go.
Otherwise why bother? You would be paying a lot extra one way or another and still expected to be sober and alert for any time the computer decides "Fskc this, too hard for me. Hey meat bag? Grab the controls, oh by the way you have 5 seconds to impact..."
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
