Posts by Mark 65

How long is too long to wait for a security fix?

The great home network

Unfortunately, as you have already said, many people do not upgrade a single component. But who can blame them? For years they have been sold the promise of devices that just work with minimum configuration and so much of the blame is with the manufacturers. To be honest, most home users would likely screw up an upgrade anyhow - impatience causing them to turn things off etc as well as some devices having less than stellar interfaces.

I'm with the other vendor whose attitude is predominantly to force an upgrade on you. To be honest I cannot blame them as supporting multiple versions is a lot of work and encourages people to stick where they are thus cementing the problem in. You pay your money you take your choice. However, whilst this is fine in the home environment I don't think they would be able to sustain this in the SMB sector with their higher end gear. Not owning any of the rack kit I cannot say what their attitude is there. I am fine with upgrading to the latest and greatest after a few weeks so that any issues can emerge - been bitten far too many times by early adopter eagerness (which can leave you as a beta tester with some companies) to do otherwise. I wasn't too impressed with their fix which took too long (in my opinion) to release given they only did a recompile with a change to a switch.

When the openssl issues emerged the first thing I did was to close all ports maps on the router and leave nothing exposed. It was a pain in the arse but with heartbleed you just knew a script kiddy would get you with a port scan. I looked at my logs as soon as the fault was reported and witnessed scanning occurring from Rackspace hosted boxes in the US - that's when services were shutdown quicksmart.

After this episode I've now brought everything back with only SSH passed through and all other access via openvpn with an up to date install of Gargoyle on my home router.

Going forward there is a clear issue here - as these devices become more feature rich (with more attack vectors) and more accessible to your average user we are now left with a situation where, just like with the dreaded Adobe flash/reader pairing, these things need to self update unless told otherwise because the owner just won't be doing it and we don't want to be left with our data being scanned by someones convenience kit. As for the IoT, internet connected fridges and the like can kiss my arse because they will never have a place on my network.

Report: American tech firms charge Britons a thumping nationality tax

Re: Tax????

But was it free? Lots of EU states have good healthcare, although not measuring up in that report but they charge various explicit levies to fund it. How does that work in comparison?

Stop begging, startup-land, and start YELLING at Catch of the Day

Welcome

Welcome to Australia. Hand over your hard-earned and take it like a man. You are a cash-cow to be milked by big corporates in the land of plenty (but not of competition). Tony salutes you as he tramples over your peasant tax-bitch corpse.

THUD! WD plonks down SIX TERABYTE 'consumer NAS' fatboy

Re: Storage cost

"Average assets of UK adult March 2014 = £147,000 (source: AOL), of which £20,000 savings"

Yep and there's quite a few people in the UK with hundreds of millions in savings (they probably use cash or 'cash equivalents' in the metric), wonder how this affects that "average"? What you want is the median assets. Always. The mean is then useful for comparison to show the skew. This is irrespective of with savings or without savings as it then gives an idea of the inequality we all know to be present.

Australia gets spooks' charter, new leak penalties

Re: And so...

...and it still wouldn't stop the next Edward Snowden.

ISPs haul GCHQ into COURT over dragnet interwebs snooping

Re: Court case

WIth regards RIPA it is also likely that good buddies GCHQ and NSA have a tit-for-tat arrangement where "you spy on our citizens and we'll spy on yours". One of the many benefits of the five-eyes relationship.

Apple tax on new iMac: fair or foul?

Re: Apple tax on new iMac: fair or foul?

My first thoughts:

1. $95 out of $1849 is around 5%, not really gouging. See local retailers for examples of price gouging

2. The price gouge is technically in the headline price to start with rather than the translated one per se.

3. One area they can legitimately claim cost variations is anything that involves humans as Australian minimum wage is multiples of the American version.

4. The AUD is quite volatile and 5% seems acceptable padding.

There are many complaints one could make: shit spec, high base price, virtually unmodifiable, everything glued in place etc.

I think USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt are the greatest things to have happened in computer tech as it means that people can upgrade the main drive in these from slow spinning rust to a 1TB M550 and Apple can't prevent it. Memory is the only hold they really have - Intel already see to it with annual pin variations that CPU upgrades are off the menu.

Should NBN Co squeeze a server into FTTN nodes?

Re: Quit while you're ahead

BT Infinity with phone and cable TV is cheaper per month than your average speedy connection in Australia. Australia is just plain expensive. Unfortunately the monopolist shitbag that is BT has proved more capable than the monopolist shitbag that is Telstra. Who'd have thunk it?

Today's get-rich-quick scheme: Build your own bank

Re: Or you could just use Bitcoin

Bit volatile though. Especially when the FBI flog their hoard off - I'd imagine that will suppress pricing for quite a while. They could even manipulate the price for quite some time if they wanted to be shitty about it.

Re: Tesco

From watching the Bank of Dave the licenses are a pain in the arse to come by so most will either be a joint venture or a simple fascade/rebranding exercise.

Re: Perhaps I should also mention

Northern Rock used to lend over 100% of a home's market value, I remember the LTVs in the section at the back of The Times - you can call that a management error but I prefer to call it willful recklessness.

NR: "Secured loan for 125% is it sir?"

Punter: "Yes please"

NR: "What's it secured on"

Punter: "Effectively fuck all as far as the liquidator will be concerned"

Re: A better mousetrap @ Pete 2

Hmm, might work if the bank were Coutt's but Worstal Bank?

Re: Set the wayback machine to Girobank

To be honest I'm not such a great fan of the "wouldn't it just be fantastic to start fresh" approach. Given the wanky old COBOL code has been running for the odd decade or so do you really want the current crop of CV++ coders using their latest fad technology on something so important? Sure, RBS has had some issues but then DO'C here on the Reg has documented all about how that clusterfuck came about and it certainly wasn't the fault of a language, save perhaps for a couple of spoken ones.

Re: @Chris Miller

Not to also add that it is possible for central banks to actually have a negative interest rate for money on deposit in order to incentivise the depositing bank to lend it out. Thus not only would you struggle to make any money in this venture but in the current climate you may be at risk of pissing away a fortune. I believe the ECB has mooted the idea before of a negative deposit rate and I'd hate to take the view that "it couldn't happen here" when you may have billions on deposit.

Cabbies paralyze London in Uber rebellion

It's not really the technological aspect it is rather the uneven playing field of them not being, and not having to be, licensed. I can understand them having the shits with that. They have additional costs and obligations over some chummy just chipping up in his car.

600 school sysadmins sacked in New South Wales

Re: Computers are Evil

Maybe they could be Chaplain/Admins? Kind of like DevOps but offering spiritual guidance delivered via the command line.

Five eyes spies good for us: Tony Abbott

I see as part of the Wingnut World Tour ole Tone decided to have dinner with Rupert Murdoch. Colour me surprised. Did he want a chat or was he collecting some policies by hand?

EU privacy A-Team tells Google: Get a grip and obey OUR laws

Re: Oh Thank You Rubbish EU

"UKIP is a newspaper these days?"

I thought it was a sleeping pill.

Apple plots HOME INVASION at WWDC

Re: Apple ditch vendor lock-in.. for user lock-out.

"Yes, I can see how the idea of giving a single corporation control of every important system in one's home would appeal."

No different from those high end houses that have Clipsal or AMX systems in place then.

California gives green light to test self-driving cars on public roads

Re: Good

Nah, they'll just go back to busting your tail lights.

Telstra asks users to be its next backhaul network

Re: Let me see if I have this right

Dude, this is Telstra remember. Nothing they do shocks me any more such is the complacency that arises from a cast iron monopoly.

Achtung! Use maths to smash the German tank problem – and your rival

Re: 1+1/E seems dubious for low values of E

"The chances of finding one in the first or last quarter of the range is much smaller than finding one in the middle somewhere"

If we're talking about stumbling upon a piece of data, why is more likely for it to be from the centre rather than the tail i.e. what, other than it occurring more frequently in nature, makes us assume a normal rather than uniform distribution? Would the tanks not be a uniform distribution?

Just curious.

Recommendations for NAS-based home media set-up

Re: Recommendations for NAS-based home media set-up

Errr, the Gen8 is a microserver - the HP Gen8 Microserver - the replacement/upgrade for the N54L.

You also stated that the £120 unit (must be a N54L or lower) offer massive outperformance over a NAS. Given you were trash-talking the Synology for £500 (which would be the DS412+) I offered a simple comparison, N54L vs DS412+, and stated it highly unlikely a N54L could outperform it, whereas the Gen8 perhaps could thus making the £350 Gen8 the fairer comparison as there's no point slagging off NAS performance to then compare it with a device likely to give a lower performance is there? You were not comparing apples with apples and I merely corrected this so that readers get the facts and not what seems like your personal bias. NAS units offer a valid alternative depending on the needs of the individual.

"I'm interested, but I'd be pretty surprised if they come close performance wise"

The performance I gave for the Synology is for the benchmark off of the smallnetbuilder site, i.e. they tested it when they reviewed it in order to verify manufacturer claims. You can verify it's speed on a variety of RAID setups from fastest to safest. As an example the DS412+ hits 102.4MB/s on RAID 5 write performance - that's pretty bloody fast. A Gen8 using SSD caching which cannot, to my knowledge, be configured in a 4 bay from Synology or QNAP would offer vastly greater performance. Simple RAID5 HDD to RAID5 HDD I'd like to see but have had trouble getting benchmarks for the HP - faster processor is not the be-all if other components are not well matched.

"unbelievably awful internal components of all of these NAS system cannot compare to a normal system"? These devices are SME targeted and hot-swappable - which the beloved HP Microserver most certainly isn't. The more expensive 4 bays units (£500) also come with dual 1Gb/s ethernet. The microserver, especially the N54L is basically the same as one of these (without dual LAN) in that it's a prepacked spec and you're adding drives. The only freedom is really the OS. It does offer an expansion slot and may take more drives but that's by fiddling with the layout. I do not for one minute believe the internals of the HP would be superior for the given price than a NAS. I also know the actual specs, they are there on the review sites and the manufacturer sites for all to see.

"NAS dogs-wrapped-up-in-expensive-shiny-covers" - your personal bias is showing through and it isn't fair to give someone asking a genuine question an answer based upon this. The HP stands up on it's own merit without personal bias but Synology and QNAP offer valid NAS alternatives depending upon needs, budget, and desire to play with/configure FreeNAS vs the embedded offering. They will outperform a N54L, for example, but be similar price to a Gen8 Microserver when it is dual LANed. A Gen8 is better if you want to run ZFS (stack it with RAM) but is not hot-swappable (may be achievable with added card).

Give them the facts and let them make the decision rather than try to force your viewpoint upon them - I feel no need to trash-talk the HP to make the point that the Synology offers a valid alternative because I'd rather them make the right decision for themselves than try and sway them to any bias I may have.

Re: Recommendations for NAS-based home media set-up

@adobob: Although something like a Gen8 microserver will no doubt trash most NAS devices in terms of performance, price, and functionality you need to accept that some people seriously couldn't give a flying f*ck for maintaining yet another box in their spare time and so something like the (kerching) Synology you mention fits their needs perfectly and they are happy to pay the associated "convenience premium".

However, the gen8 will set you back over £350 for the g1610T and is a fairer comparison to the DS412+ you seem to have priced. I sincerely doubt a N54L has massively better performance, in fact I'm pretty bloody confident it doesn't. I'd like to see the benchmark of a 4xHDD N54L against a Synology DS412+ that smallnetbuilder has benchmarked at 106MB/s. I think the N54L would be lucky to hit 70MB/s, ergo feature (b) in your list is a false assertion.

I work in IT and have built plenty of file servers in the past but these days I value my spare time just a bit more than back then. Other folks likely share this outlook.

Re: Recommendations for NAS-based home media set-up

I have an old QNAP TS-439 PRO. As others mentioned Gb ethernet does not mean you'll be getting 125MB/s on your file access - RAID mode, hard drives, and processor all affect that. I get about 70MB/s write speed which is as expected given the data available on the smallnetbuilder website. I recommend looking there for off the shelf reviews and speeds. The device manufacturers (QNAP, Synology etc) are putting out x86 units these days (TS-470?) that can host VMs also.

If I were buying again I'd look at these, possibly a Synology as they seem to be a bit ahead and definitely more speed for the dollar than QNAP in my experience. Your alternative is to get an HP Gen8 Microserver or build something using a tower (mini or maxi depending on drive requirements) and install FreeNAS - just depends on whether you want the hassle. My QNAP is pretty lower power (CPU and electricity) - check out their comparison page for power draw on their units.

As for media streaming I make use of the Twonky Server on the NAS and a WD TV Live box hooked up to the TV. Plays anything you care to throw at it. Just make sure to turn off the UPnP setting in the MyQNAPCloud settings if you get a QNAP as it plays havoc with the WD and is a b*stard to diagnose.

Almost forgot to mention that the file security is taken care of on any system in a similar way (users, groups and shares) and these systems (QNAP, Synology, FreeNAS) all have app/plugin capabilities so they can be setup as RADIUS servers, DB hosts (normally MySQL), Downloaders (torrent, http(s), NZB / Sickbeard) and a whole host of other functions.

Adobe blames 'maintenance failure' for 27-hour outage

Re: ...wake up with a gigantic omelette on its corporate face.

"...viable alternative to CS, they have no choice but to keep paying Adobe."

Or buy the current perpetual licensed version, or download a pirate copy.

Activist investors try forcing Google to pay more taxes

Re: Cue the usual (mis-informed) post...

How many times? Their duty is to act in the best interests of the shareholders. That does not necessarily mean maximising profits especially if that is achieved by pissing off every Western Government in existence through tax structuring as that sort of behaviour will blow back and that isn't in the shareholder's best interests.

Russia to suspend US GPS stations in tit-for-tat spat

<quote>You know, the ones that invaded Ukraine and are pretending they're "not soldiers".</quote>

Are you talking about the ones that helped overthrow a democratically elected Government or the ones helping those who object to the replacement one?

LinkedIn killing CardMunch biz-card scanning app

Re: Raised lettering . . .

Indeed, what would Patrick and the boys make of this? It's just not the same passing around an app

Fusion-io takes DIMM view of flash cards ... Diablo goes for broke

Why?

Why would you call a product UlltraDIMM?

Security guru: You can't blame EDWARD SNOWDEN for making US clouds LOOK leaky

Re: Well said that man.

The problem with encrypted email is that email encryption is not pervasive. I can't encrypt my email if the recipients don't use encryption and half the time it can be a pain in the arse to setup. Now if firefox (for webmail), iOS Mail or thunderbird etc came with email encryption ready to go with wizard to prompt for setup at the start then maybe we could get this ball rolling. But if it is left as a download, install, setup, integrate task for the end user it just won't take off.

EU: Let's cost financial traders $400m a day, because EVIL BANKERS. Right?

" There's good old, solid economic theory "

What, the sort that has given us quantitative easing? Most economics is utter bollocks and comes with a plethora of caveats that prevents application to the real world.

Re: You might be able to buy at £4.26 and sell at £4.24, though.

non-market maker pricing vs market maker pricing. They win, you lose.

Re: Article sounds like a rant

"Firstly it competes with the market makers, taking away their profits, but HFT isn't necessarily being done in order to provide a market making service."

Market makers are part of HFT as well. There are many types of HFT, both good and bad. Market making = good, quote stuffing = bad etc. Part of the problem I have with the comments on here (not yours) is that they are Daily Mail ignorant of what HFT covers and come up with stupid arsed statements about minimum holding periods such as 6 months. Idiotic ideas like this would utterly f*ck the market. You wouldn't be able to sell if you spotted an impending market crash unless you'd held for long enough and arbitrage free pricing would disappear. Oh no, that's right, mom and pop would be screwed but banks would just setup multiple holding entities where one bought and the other sold.

You'd better get out before the sync 'n' share bubble POPS

QNAP have it on their boxes too. A DNS Alias type arrangement and you connect to your own storage. Phone apps for various aspects including basic management, sharing etc.

Turnbull gave NBN Co NO RULES to plan blackspot upgrades

Surely it's cheaper to just buy Telstra and take what you want?

Call of Duty 'fragged using OpenSSL's Heartbleed exploit'

Re: My thoughts exactly

Agree regarding the media and password changing. I thought myself, and have also seen other articles confirming it, that a lot of sites may not be patched so going straight out and changing everything may not be wise as you may be changing a safe password and getting the new one hoovered up. On this front the LastPass security check has proved handy.

iiNet to Senate committee: metadata retention an expensive joke

Complicit opposition

The capture of the opposition by the spy agencies in this scheme just proves how many skeletons are obviously in their closets.

Hey, Michael Lewis: Stop DEMONISING Wall Street’s SUPERHUMAN high-speed trading

Re: Speed is also part of the problem

I saw the argument that longer quote times effectively result in market makers being left with stale quotes in the market. The best suggestion I've seen so far was for a quote:trade ratio which some exchanges have enacted. Not perfect, but a start.

Hardwired crypto certificate FAIL bricks Juniper router kit

Re: at best...

In the UK it is impossible to sign away statutory rights. T&C are thus irrelevant if an offense has been committed.

Australia's opposition backs warrantless metadata collection

In answer to the first question, it is because this is to be used as a way to control dissent and you wouldn't want legal oversight on that would you? It never ceases to amaze me how Stazi-like the behaviour of Western *cough* Democracies has now become. I think even the most hardened post-war privacy invading eastern block nutcase would be amazed at what they now get up to in the name of saving us from events rarer than lightning strikes.

Re: It's Time

"It's time for us to yell "NO!" at the top of our voices, shatter the windows of parliament with the sound of our indignant rage, and deafen those who have the "born to rule" mentality. "

It is now impossible to shout loud enough to even momentarily disturb the pigs feeding at the trough of taxpayer funding. What with Can-do Campbell paying himself just shy of 1 Obama (new wage metric for pollies) and the Mad Monk on well over an Obama there's no stopping their single-minded and blatantly open piggery.

Surrender your crypto keys or you're off to chokey, says Australia

Re: For information

Independent and yet established by Government. We'll see how independent that ends up.

Alibaba float could make Facebook's look like small change

Re: Alibaba actaully sells stuff?

Use Alibaba express for smaller quantities else it's wholesale.

My work-from-home setup's better than the office. It's GLORIOUS

@Ledswinger: A truly ignorant response. Beancounters control the purse strings so best of luck getting the purchase signed off. You also neglect the fact that most managers are ignorant to the need for better kit whilst making sure they have something way beyond what they need for email and internet sat on their desktop.

"If the IT department were competent they'd stand up for workforce productivity"

and they'd be promptly ignored like they are in most other regards.

Barclays warns freelance techies of DOUBLE DIGIT rate cut

Re: Short-sighted

Yep, when you cut rates you just get to keep the shit as the capable are already out of the door. That's capitalism for you.

MtGox, that bastion of unregulated e-currency Bitcoin, turns to Texas judge for protection

Re: Perhaps someone can explain to me...

"The US will still know, that you transferred the coins, however. All transactions are registered forever in the blockchain."

Surely all they know is that someone transferred the coins, not necessarily who?

Distro diaspora: Four flavours of Ubuntu unpacked

Old hardware

I may be wrong, but from personal experience Ubuntu doesn't generally work on older less powerful hardware unless it has a PAE enabled/compatible processor. I think anything up to 11.10 going from my experience with a T42.

Vulture wraps claws around Elgato Thunderbolt Drive+ portable SSD

Re: "that’s a serious amount of money"

@Steve. I'm sure modern processors on machines on which this is likely to be used can cope adequately especially when it tops out below 0.5GB/s but I'm willing to be educated given the past failings of USB 2.0 with redards sustained transfer rates. Although you can chain thunderbolt this device has to be at the end as it has but 1 port. Also, being portable, how likely is it to be on a chain rather than just a portable add-on? All of which does not add up to a £150 premium.

Re: "that’s a serious amount of money"

Problem is that anything with a thunderbolt interface is likely to have a 5Gb/s (theoretical) USB3.0 port in which case any premium for thunderbolt - especially a piss taking one like this - is unjustified and utterly pointless.