Posts by Alan Brown

Movie bosses demand Google take down takedown notices

He also commented that his only real issue with home piracy was the generally poor quality of the rips. (commercial piracy is another matter, as he pointed out)

Rocket boffinry in pictures: Gulp the Devil's venom and light a match

Re: Anybody working on superguns?

So far the closest anyone's gotten is to point the "gun" at the ground and ride the recoil to orbit. (Terry Pratchett cam up with that analogy a number of years ago). In that case, Saturn V is very "super"

The HARP guns could fire sounding(*) payloads but the fundamental problem with guns or EM rail launchers on earth is that atmospheric friction will destroy most of the payload which didn't get squished by the initial acceleration.

(*) In rocketry terms, "Sounding" means (more or less) straight up - and straight back down afterwards. Spaceship One is a sounding rocket with wings.

Re: I aim for the stars

d: There was no money to be made. That left the door wide open for those lovely folks at intelsat, etc.

Re: Space Junk

"Most of the debris is microscopic (paint flecks, metal fragments, SRB exhaust particles)"

Putting that in perspective - a single paint fleck gouged a large chunk out of a space shuttle front window.

Devices left in orbit for a while and then retrieved generally look like they've been hit with shotguns. It's not uncommon for there to be hundreds of tiny holes in solar panels, etc.

As for "too dangerous to go up" - there's a lot of speculation that we're already at or perilously close to the tipping point when cascades of collisions pretty much wreck everything at several orbital levels. If you've ever seen the video of a room full of armed mousetraps plus 1 rubber ball you might get an idea of what can happen.

Re: T-Stoff

Does anyone recall a news story some years back (2004-5 iirc) about a cargo of hydrogen peroxide going off in a transport truck, leaving the M25 strewn with orange buckets?

IIRC that was about 5-10 litres of 90% peroxide for a rocketpack enthusiast, which didn't like being shaken on the truck (cue stories about couriers and their mishandling of anything marked "fragile")

Shuttles

"The 1986 Challenger disaster was caused by a seal failure in one of the orbiter's SRBs, which in turn ruptured the external liquid hydrogen fuel tank, resulting in a catastrophic explosion."

Um, no. The ruptured tanks dumped their load, which deflagrated harmlessly (but spectacularly) behind the shuttle stack. What destroyed the orbiter was the result of going sideways at mach $LARGENUMBER due to asymetric thrust - aerodynamic stresses ripped it apart in a matter of a 1-2 seconds.

The SRBs kept going until the Range Safety Officer sent the destruct command a few seconds later. This fired a charge which split the SRB casings longitudinally and effectively shut down forward thrust. (The SRB propellant burned for a while longer, but at no point was there an explosion.)

Production-ready ZFS offers cosmic-scale storage for Linux

Re: zpool scrub == fsck

"The "ZFS needs no fsck" is mainly of interest to users of FS where an unexpected reboot will require a full fsck before coming back online again."

It's not that ZFS needs no fsck, it's that the fsck can be safely conducted while the filesystem is online.

Kinda like the old days ot fsck -p on Sunos 4.1, but much much better.

Re: Add / Remove disks?

Not at all. For starters, you need something to recover when one of the lusers types "rm -rf /path/to/dir/ *" - which happens depressingly often, leaving them wondering where all that source code went.

You can mitigate this by keeping rolling snapshots over the last few hours/days or use a VMS style FS (which requires an explicit purge) but users will still find ways of losig data or not realise they needed it until the snapsots have expired.

Re: Gordon BTRFS? You must be joking...

"Cluster file systems are very specialized, and there are only 3 real cluster file systems out there with any traction: GFS, OCFS, and VCFS."

Having used GFS extensively, I'd say that for more than a small cluster/a couple of TB, you're better off running Gluster on top of ZFS. We've wasted several man-years of effort trying to keep GFS clusters together and come to the conclusoin that it's the part of our "Highly-available" setup which torpedoes the "highly available" part.

Can't speak for the other FSes, but experience on several sites with multiple vendors shows that clustered setups have a helluva difficulty scaling under serious load - things work ok when testing but tend to break when you want them to do serious work, or when the serious work gets beyond N size and X requests. There's a reason why noone's managed to recreate the reliability of TruCluster (which got killed off by HP) and it comes down to "it's bloody hard to make things all work in sync"

if you don't enable deduplication then the memory requirements aren't anywhere near as heavy - and for a lot of loads deduping isn't needed (eg, anything already compressed, images, mp3s, movie files and astrophysics data) .

In any case, needing 8Gb ram isn't a big deal wioth today's ram prices (Not that my setup uses anything like that much for 32Tb of storage - and bearing in mind that the rule of thumb for ext4 on fileservers is 1Gb per Tb of storage)

Re: XFS

Amen. That's why I stopped using XFS

BTRFS may be lots of things, but it's not particularly robust. That's why I stopped using it.

ZFS (so far) has been bulletproof. As for Linux versions, it's available for Debian/Ubuntu and Redhat/clones

If you want a commercially supported version, there's Nexenta.

They all work - and ZFS is the only FS for linux which can detect and repair disk ECC failures (others can detect, but not repair)

Bitcoin briefly soars to record $147 high, driven by Cyprus bank flap

Re: Bitcoin offers criminals an untraceable way to launder their ill-gotten gains

Or various cypriot banks, with money belonging to nice russian gentlemen.

Review: Intel Next Unit of Computing barebones desktop PC

for that money....

I'd prefer to buy an all-in-one. There are a number around which cost about the same as one of these plus a decent screen (with or without 10-point touch, so your windows really can be GUI if you want) with a i5/i7 installed.

"At the bank I work at (one of the largest 3 UK banks) our IT Dept's "purchasing power" could pick these up at £2,590 per unit. With a 6 month delivery SLA."

Are you buying from that outfit owned by an east end barrow boy?

US to chat again with Campaigners Against Stuff on mobile health regs

Ruh oh.

USA exposure limits are amongst the highest in the world, because they rely on detectable heating effects.

Russian standards are around 10% of USA levels on average (It's complex, high levels are allowed for brief periods, with a rapid dropoff in acceptable level vs increasing time and frequencies. Certain microwave frequencies are verboten for exposure because they correspond to wavelengths where the eyeball and skull are resonant.)

Can your equipment handle operating at levels 10dB lower then they currently are?

Flash to the future: Memristors, photonics, MLC-y tsunami

Re: Too soon?

I did (several arrays) and didn't even get a mug!

Re: Memristor vs. Flash

"Yes, but Flash's history isn't exactly that brilliant. In fact its bloody awful. All that fussing with wear leveling, block erasing, error correcting and all that fretting about whether it's gonna just forget what's been written is a pain in the rear. "

All that may be moot if the "bake" tech proves to work as well in devices as it does in the lab. At that point write cycles become effectively indefinite.

Building the actual real internet simply doesn't pay

It'd work.

Think of "brazil"

Kiwi boffins bid up Earth-like planet prediction

Re: How many stars have earthlike planets or moons?

Space: Size - Infinite, Population - Zero (Infinity divided by anything is Zero)

‘Unstoppable WEEE Tsunami’ staunched by PPP plan

Re: @ Irongut Two (sorry three, sorry four, five) main villains

By the time you load up an Antivirus on XPsp3 and expect to be able to do anything else, you need 2Gb.

A machine equipped with this much ram will run Win7 faster than WinXP - mainly because MS had to optimise things a bit in order to fit it on netbooks. With the demise of netbooks, the bloatpath resumed in Win8.

Swedish judge explains big obstacles to US Assange extradition

Re: if you are on the wrong side of them, i would expect it pays to be very cautious

"While I currently have no issue with US foreign policy, it is becoming increasingly easier to see why a lot of people (Arabs, Chinese, et. al.) distrust the US Government."

I've been of that opinion since the early 1980s. It was clear after looking at what was happening that the USA was as bad as all the others, just wrapping itself in a flag and proclaiming democracy and the free world.

As Mark Twain said, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. He also pointed out that congress is to progress as "pro" is to "con"

Re: but politicians cannot be trusted

"Unless i got a written guarantee of no extradition, then i would not go to Sweden"

If you got a written guarantee, that means they've at least considered it - and guarantees can trivially be voided.

Re: Guarantee from Sweden

"He has committed a crime in the UK now, he breached his bail conditions."

Almost all bail breaches in the UK (especially those regarding where one must or must not go at certain hours) result in a slap on the wrist and a stern admonishment of "don't do it again". In extreme cases a fine will be levied.

Even violent offenders are not usually locked up for repeated bail breaches, nor is a history of bail breaches sufficient grounds to oppose an offender being bailed in the first place.

Even if an offender is locked up for a bail breach, they'll probably be out in 1-2 days. Jails are overfull, don'chanknow?

If you don't believe me, try sitting in the public gallery of a county court for a week or so. It's mindnumbingly boring, but also scarily devoid of commonsense on the benches at times (law 101 - "It's a legal system, not a justice system").

Card skimmers targeting more than ATMs, says EU

Re: Funny Stuff

You aren't the victim.

Whoever sold 1500 euro of stuff is, because they're now out of pocket for the goods AND got whacked with punitive extra charges by the bank as well. Banks are more than happy to reimburse you, because they're taking it back from the merchants.

It's fairly reliably estimated that banks make substantially more from card fraud incidents than they do from genuine sales - which is one reason they're not in any hurry to change the system.

ICANN under fire as Verisign warns of rushed domain-name expansion

Re: It's basically a licence to print money

One could also argue it's a way of destroying the value of domains names for speculators by flooding the market with bazillions of TLDs they can't afford to cover.

Could... if the issue of most of these new ones weren't fairly tightly controlled.

Copyright troll Prenda refuses to explain legal strategy

Yes it is - and has been for a long time.

Have you seen any Big Media companies hauled up on criminal charges after breaching those laws? (Quite a few artists have complained loudly about record companies ripping off their works in compilations, etc)

I thought not.

FTC splits $50,000 robocall killing tech prize

Re: Only in America

Ofcom won't enforce that here. (BT does for its ISDN PRIs). It's possible the FCC might float this but I can see the telcos playing chicken little.

It's already a criminal offence in the USA to spoof CallerID on marketing calls, as well as using robocallers (with a very limited set of exceptions). If they put some effort into tracking down the culprits and used legal powers relating to confiscation of everything under criminal gains it'd be a lot harder for these operators to continue operating.

Re: Brilliant ideas...

Indeed it's already been solved. My PBX/Wlan/DSL router already does most of this and I've never bothered putting up a capcha type challenge because if I don't know who's calling I generally don't want to talk to them anyway.

Tech is the biggest problem facing archiving

Old tapes

Can't just be left sitting around. They have to be periodically exercised and checked to see if the data is still intact. (You'd be surprised how many old "archives" are completely unreadable)

When you're doing that, it's just as easy to migrate to new media.

As for holding on to old drives: If your recovery policy relies on equipment which can only be sourced or repaired via ebay, then what you have is a liability, not a backup.

Old drives (disk and tape) left on shelves have a remarkable ability to simply stop working the next time they're switched on. Apart from the obvious stuff like bearings breaking down, simple corrosion and ion migration inside components or on PCBs can easily result in a device being unusable after several years on the shelf without major servicing. If you don't test the devices regularly then you're living in la-la land.

Again, whilst you're doing that, it's a good opportunity to move the data to new media.

NB: Bare tar files aren't good enough - no error correction, no redundancy, no checksums, etc. If you must use 'em, make 'em small and make sure you include a list of checksums. I'm pretty pissed off with trying to read tape-spanning tarballs which have a glitch at tape 2 of 20, rendering the whole bloody thing useless.

Re: It's the same with paper

"Financial records get shredded after 10 years, or so, so why not all other records?"

You're confusing "minimum retention period" with "mandatory destruction" - yes you may shred 'em after 10 years or you may keep them longer, but you may not shred them before that period - because that's how long the tax department is allowed to go back when they audit you.

Review: HTC One

Re: No SD card slot, no removable battery

Why oh why can't vehicle chargers keep up with battery drain?

Re: No microSD AGAIN

"Phone, no problem. Rinse thoroughly in changes of distilled or deionised water, shake, dry. Next?"

BTDT - doesn't work if the "water" is seawater or a 8 foot deep brackish tidal lagoon (which was clear enough to watch the thing slowly drift to the bottom) - and especially doesn't work if the employee who did it waits 3 days before bringing it in and asking for it to be repaired.

ROBOT COCKROACH SWARM unleashed in Sheffield lab

Re: Always looks cool but probably more flexible to do this in simulation

Or the technical staff, who get stuck with the task of building the things - working out along the way that the hardware will never work as designed, why the code supplied doesn't work either and rewriting everyuthing from scratch.

There's a lot to be said for simulations, as long as they cover all the bases, ncluding mechanical complexity.

Brits, Germans, French, Dutch, Spanish and Italians ALL to probe Google

"This has the potential to get very, very ugly and very, very costly indeed."

Google only has 2 ways of clawing that back of course - charging advertisers more (if they haven't been scared off) or charging endusers (who would leave in droves if they do this).

Then again, there's all those "free" email services it and Microsoft have been supplying to academic outfits up and down the EU. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they have hooks in the contracts, given how long it took $orkplace lawyers to comb through the things (Google got rejected because they couldn't guarantee data would not end up being stored outside the EU)

BT engineers - missed appointments

Re: Who'd want to be a BT Engineer

"The aim is to replace them with less qualified people on 'cheaper' contracts"

Hence why BT is taking on hundreds of ex-squaddies as contractors. It's not about giving them jobs, although that makes a nice soundbite. They'll be out on their collective ear as soon as their purpose is served.(*)

(*) It's trivial to get rid of contractors, which is why they're setup like that instead of as employees.

Re: About a month ago, my phoneline went off.

FWIWm, that's probably a DC fault. DSL operates at radio frequencies so it often continues to work (badly) when there's a minor break in the cable pair.

Federal lawyers, MIT threatened following Aaron Swartz' death

Justice has nothing to do with it.

The very first thing taught in law courses is that what is in place is a LEGAL system and it is not a JUSTICE system in any way shape or form.

Calling it a "ministry of justice" is no different to the newspeak which renamed a certain govt department to the "Ministry of Defence". Calling it a ministry of "law and order" would be far more accurate (department of Law and Order for the USAians here)

Once you understand that, a lot of the other pieces fall into place. Just because legal system decisions usually result in justice being done is no guarantee this will always happen - or that it is required in the current scheme of things.

Re: Oh the irony!

It strikes me that more appropriate postcards would feature the people concerned in bright orange jumpsuits, or their personal details on unemployment welfare applications forms.

BitTorrent opens kimono, gets out one-to-many streaming tool

Re: BT Multicast!

Except multicast usually doesn't work because most ISPs refuse to support it.

This appears a reasonable compromise regarding ISP pigheadedness.

Lotsa lasers an option for the Next Big Physics

Re: Thinking, Thinking...

These days "new and interesting" tends to mean "smaller and more exactly targetted"

Eg: Why drop a 20 ton bomb on a bunker when a 1kg UAV might be able to fly in the air ducts and deliver the payload exactly next to $BADGUY? Especially when $BADGUY hides his bunker under a civilian air raid shelter packed with 200-500 bystanders. Even military bods understand bad publicity.

Call centers under attack in targeted cyber-blackmail scheme

Re: HSBC Call Centre sweatshops manage this already ...

"As for 'tracing' calls, all digital calls for over 15-20 years include all information needed including the call originator."

Yes, but..... the SS7 system assumes that everyone along the chain is trustworthy. There's even less concept of security in the world's phone switching network than there is in BGP. It only takes one bad actor to screw things up - and it's pretty clear there is way more than one bad actor with access to international routing systems.

Net neutrality? We've heard of it, says Ofcom

Re: In the future

Yup, until fucktard ISP1 blocks VPNs. (It's already happening on some networks)

Your best bet is to complain to the ASA then.

They seem to be taking an interest in this very issue (they've already nailed a bunch of ads on "no buffering", "unlimited internet" and other claims). Just be very clear on the issues that you're raising with them and nominate a couple of advertisers whose advertising is misleading.

They're also very big on stompig on practices where the large print giveth and the small print taketh away - they've forced a nuimber of ads to be rewritten so that tiny fast scrolling stuff is made more visible for those without 100/20 vision and a 1000wpm reading speed.

Back to the ASA then.

They understand that advertising something as "Internet", with things like skype crippled is "not on".

Especially now that MSN is about to be switched off and all users are expected tp migrate to Skype.

BIGGEST DDoS in history FAILS to slash interweb arteries

apart from the DDoS

It looks like Cyberbunker/c3rob were playing other games:

https://greenhost.nl/2013/03/21/spam-not-spam-tracking-hijacked-spamhaus-ip/

Why AS 34109 isn't widely shitholed is a matter of conjecture.

Re: I'm sure we'll see more of this

All the spoofing in the world won't help attackers much if you simply use the allow-query{} directive in your bond9 config file

in options.conf - allowquery{localnets;}; (add networks which should be making recursive requests to this entry)

For each zone you serve (ie, are authoritative for), add "allow-query{any;};" in the zonefile.

Problem solved - The great unwashed can't use your DNS server as a resolver, EXCEPT for domains you want to make available.

Other DNS servers exist and they all have variants of allow-query. You should also lock down allow-transfer, but that's already been done as part of general security locksdowns, hasn't it?

IT Pro confession: How I helped in the BIGGEST DDoS OF ALL TIME

Re: I wonder if most other servers were as "badly" configured as Trevor's?

Yes they are. Wide open is the default setting for Bind. Even DJB and MS wwere wide open last time I looked.

It's the same mentality which STILL defines any DNS entries in zonefiles with zero padding as octal, despite the RFC explicitly stating that IPv4 addresses are dotted decimals. I got royally flamed when I pointed that particular "issue" out 18 years ago and asked that the RFC or the software be altered for consistency (given they were written by the same person, it didn't seem to be an unreasonable request). Not long after that, spammers started using dotted and long hex/binary/octal/decimal URLs in spam (It took filter authors to nail that down. Bind is still open to that abuse)

FBI on trial for warrantless Stingray mobile spying

Re: FISA no longer applicable?

"hey most likely still collect illegally, but its inadmissable as evidence"

I'd like to meet a judge with the balls to recommend that the illegal gatherers face criminal charges,

That'd ruffle a few feathers in Fed-ville.

Entire internet credits snapper for taking great pic while actually dead

steganography is usually trashed the first time an image is edited. Watermarks often persist.

I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working

Re: Systems architect here

"Don't tell my mother I'm an IT specialist. She thinks I'm a piano player in a Brothel"