Posts by pierce

SSL-busting adware: US cyber-plod open fire on Comodo's PrivDog

chain of trust? more like chain of fools (que up the motown...)

The finest weird people in the world live here, and we're proud of it

Re: Homeless

"Don't get me wrong I understand the statement on the level of not giving the individual money as it might well go on booze. ".

hah, booze? nah, more likely cheap mexican heroin.

Have YOU got Equation NSAware in your drives? Meh, not really our concern, says EU

Re: Business Opportunity

seems to me that any hard drive maker that released their secret innards and magic recipes would immediately be faced with mass produced clones of their product line whose pricing benefits from being able to skip a huge amount of expensive R&D

'Net neutrality will turn the internet communist – and make Iran's day'

Re: Netizens of the world unite!!

>> Or maybe just, we don't use ANYTHING made in or by Americans ....

which includes anything with Intel, AMD, IBM, or Oracle CPUs ?

Re: The Internet turning Communist?

decade? try, since WW-II.

SCREW YOU, BRITS: We're going through with UK independence ANYWAY – Scotland

Re: great.scot

no, no, beam.me.up.scot ....

mmmm, I should register up.scot ASAP!

Hacker kicks one bit XP to 10 Windows scroll goal

another OS with very good long term binary compatibility is IBM AIX, but IBM z/OS probably holds the grand prize here, its derived from OS/MVS of the early 1970s and afaik, binaries from that era STILL run on the latest version as long as the mainframe has the equivalent facilities configured.

Received surprise new Redmond licenses? You might be pwned

put out a hit contract on the authors and operators of this crap, with orders to chop their fingers off.

China and Russia start again with this UN internet takeover bull****

Russia, China, etc should build their own damn net if they want to run it as a political propaganda arm

Scientific consensus that 2014 was record hottest year? No

Re: Cut the sh*t!

solar activity such as sunspots and flares has NO measurable impact on the amount of sunlight and heat radiated. just because the sun is or isn't active does NOT mean its warmer/colder.

Got a 4King big TV? Ready to stream lots of awesome video? Yeah, about that…

157 channels and nothing on.

the vast majority of video is all still slime oozing out of the tv set.

El Reg tests portable breathalyzers: Getting drunk so you don't have to

Re: Scotland

what, you say the 2CV has nothing to do with that?

Disk areal density: Not a constant, consistent platter

Re: Memories ...

first disk drive I worked with had a single platter cartridge of 1 megabyte total capacity on both sides. actually, it was 510,000 words (16 bits each) but that's close enough to 1 MB as what won't matter. This platter was 12 or 14 inches in diameter, and spun at the blinding speed of 1500 RPM, and one of these disk packs held the whole operating system, complete with a FORTRAN compiler, Assembler, and other programming tools.

Trevor contemplates Consumer Netgear gear. BUT does it pass the cat hair test?

my home setup is now a pfSense (freeBSD based) router on a APU1D4 board (10 watts total draw, no fans), whihc is ridiculously overpowered for my 30Mbit cable (and will soon be configured with failover to a static IP ADSL I keep around), FreeNAS (also FreeBSD based) NAS on a HP Microserver N40L (4x3TB disks in raidZ for 7.4TiB usable space), and a UniFi AP-LR ceiling mounted wifi.

I am SO much happier with this setup than my previous old-PC-running-Linux router/fileserver, and various consumer routers-in-WAP-mode doing wifi. Its also greatly lowered my always-on power footprint.

Google Chrome on Windows 'completely unusable', gripe users

about once ever 3-6 months, I have to purge Chromes cache, then its snappy again for the next few months. history -> clear browsing data.. -> uncheck passwords and form data if you want to keep them, its the browsing history and files you need to clear, and clear 'from the beginning of time'.

ESA's spaceplane cleared for lift-off in February 2015

so the ESA has reinvented the Space Shuttle?

huh.

Cloud unicorns are extinct so DiData cloud mess was YOUR fault

and by the time you factor in all the redundancy and management required to secure a cloud application, your hypothetical cost savings have gone pooof.

also don't forget to factor in the costs of getting OUT of whatever particular cloud you've chose.

Fake antivirus scams: It's a $120m business – and alleged ringleaders have just been frozen

I think convicted major computer hackers should loose fingers, a number in proportion to their crime. lets see them type with their stumps.

729 teraflops, 71,000-core Super cost just US$5,500 to build

don't think of that as $5500, think of it as $16500/day. they just happened to only use 1/3rd of a day.

Forget WHITE BOX, it's time for JUNK BOX NETWORKING

indeed...

indeed, my personal internet server (sharing a friend's coloc bay) is a 2U HP DL180G6 12GB 12 core 2.6ghz SAS machine with 12 3.5" bays I got off fleabay for $740. throw in a couple SSD's for database and software, and a couple SATA drives for bulk storage, and it totally rocks. I host a variety of nonprofit websites and such on this. we paid $7000 for the exact same kit a few years ago at work.

US Senate's net neutrality warrior to Comcast: Remind us how much you hate web fast lanes

if I want internet faster than 5-6Mbit/sec inbound, 500-600k outbound, I have ONE choice. Comcast.

Air-slurping solar battery will slice energy costs – boffins

Re: "a patent-pending hybrid device ..."

this isn't a solar cell attached to a battery, its a solar cell battery in one piece. very clever.

Bash bug flung against NAS boxes

Re: Routers

most of the router firmware I've seen uses busybox's built in minimal shell.

# ash --version

BusyBox v1.14.4 (2010-06-27 20:11:16 PDT) built-in shell (ash)

Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

# sh --version

BusyBox v1.14.4 (2010-06-27 20:11:16 PDT) built-in shell (ash)

Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

What's a Chromebook good for? How about running PHOTOSHOP?

yeah, this will be SO useful. lets see, I shot 1400 canon raw pics at a festival one 4-day weekend a couple weeks ago, about 50GB worth. If I'd had to upload the raws to the cloud, I'd just about be done by now and could start working on the pictures. oh yeah!

Third patch brings more admin Shellshock for the battered and Bashed

this article says this is the third patch, but its apparently already incorporated in redhat's 2nd patch released last friday....

$ foo='() { echo not patched; }' bash -c foo

bash: foo: command not found

$ bash --version

GNU bash, version 4.1.2(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)

...

$ rpm -q bash

bash-4.1.2-15.el6_5.2.x86_64

(this on centos 6.5)

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

bash is a bloated pig.

most embedded devices use busybox, not bash.

BMC Software flings patent sueball at ServiceNow

we switched from remedy to SNow, and SNow is AWFUL.

Fedora gets new partition manager

Re: Yeah that's what Linux was missing!

WIndows DIsk Management may look easy, but its underying support for raid and volume management are /awful/.

NONE of the existing mainstream linux partition managers are 'good enough'. fdisk and most of its ilk can't handle devices over 2GB due to the limitations of MBR. parted can, but its UI and functionality is *awful*. gparted is just a gui over parted, and has a lot of problems caused by the underpinnings.

really, storage management as a whole under linux is awful. mdraid capabilities should be folded into LVM, so you don't have to deal with all these different layers. look at the way IBM does LVM+JFS in AIX for a big clue.

Square Kilometre Array reveals its 1.6TB-a-day storage and network rigs

aww, and after reading the headline, I was thinking, ok, 1.6TB/day, triple redundancy, thats like 8 4TB disks/week, no problem!

tape? really? tape is for stuff you never want to have to read again. presumably all this science data will want to be read many times over.

Ice cream headache as black hat hacks sack Dairy Queen

wait. Dairy Queen serves nothing remotely resembling actual ice cream. its soft-serve synth crap.

paris, cuz she's fake, too.

Microsoft boots 1,500 dodgy apps from the Windows Store

I've never used a WiPho (heck I don't even use an Android or iPhone, although I do have an android tablet), adn being a staunch desktop user, I can say that the entire 'metro' experience of win8 has done NOTHING for me. I find Win8 quite usable as a desktop system when augumented with Classic Start Menu, but there's absolutely zero of interest to me in that Playskool/Fisher-Price world of lavender and teal blocks and full screen 'apps' that do nothing useful.

Best shot: Coffee - how do you brew?

I get my beans from a local wholesale roaster for US$10/lb for the likes of Kenya AA or Tanzania Peaberry (two favorites, both medium roast), as its half the price of the only slightly better beans from either of the two local boutique roasters. We grind them in a Capresso Infinity burr mill to fairly fine, and usually brew in a Bonavita electric drip maker, with a goldfilter. makes a near perfect cup of drip, and the bonavita's thermal carafe keeps it hot for hours without burning it.

the Capresso grinder works surprisingly well for a circa $100 grinder, especially for drip grinds. and its lasted us for many years of daily use.

the aeropress rocks, but we find we use 2-3X more coffee and I end up SO wired I don't sleep well, so its mostly used for camping trips and such. We also have a rather nice little Olympia MaxiMatic espresso maker but that doesn't get much use as its just more work, and I usually drink 2-3 mugs of strong black a day.

Cleversafe CEO: We would tell you about the 8TB drive, but...

15k disks aren't 3.5" platters anyways, they are 2.5", thats why all the new enterprise stuff is 2.5" form factor.

BOFH: We CAN do that with a Raspberry Pi, but think of the BODIES

raspberry pi is so last year. the beaglebone black is much cooler.

US Copyright Office rules that monkeys CAN'T claim copyright over their selfies

if he did any photoshoppery (even sharpening, color balance, contrast), thats a piece of work, which shoudl be copyrightable, even if the original image may not be. so all he has to do is not release the original, just the 'derivative work' he produced, voila, fully copyrightable.

no 'serious' photographer ever releases his negatives.

Naughty NSA was so drunk on data it forgot collection rules

Re: URLs are Content

URL's CAN be the address of static content.. but they also can be an API, passing data as POST or GET arguments.

Paris, cuz even SHE knows that.

Top Ten 802.11ac routers: Time for a Wi-Fi makeover?

yikes, the speed drop off from 1 to 5 meters away on even the best of these is awful. and 30m is even worse, nearly unusable on many of these, and presumably thats not with any walls.

in the 1-5m range, I'll stick with ethernet cables, I do believe. gigE is always 1gb, full duplex, no matter what. and in the 30m range you'd BETTER use ethernet if you want anything done. I've had to run ethernet to both the back bedroom/office rooms in my house as the wifi couldn't possibly reach them through the 5-6 intervening walls and 20m or so distances.

Verizon to limit unlimited 4G plans

there's only so much radio bandwidth possible in a cellular system. if you have 10000 users in an area all streaming 5Mbit/sec videos, thats 50 gigabits/second sustained. there's no way the cellular architecture can cope with that.

they should never have sold "unlimited" service, and encouraged that expectation, it should have been metered from the get-go... use more, pay more. if too many people are using more than you can deliver, jack the prices til the usage drops to manageble levels. use a tiered pricing system so moderate/occasionalusers pay significantly less per unit than data hogs.

Cyber scum pump ransomware at victims from spambot-stuffed websites

me thinks we shoudl take up a bitcoin collection and put a old fashion pain contract out on whoever is originating these sorts of virus. some thugs need to break some fingers. repeat until the wannabes decide to take up another career.

'Big Internet' wades into 'net neutrality' battle with the FCC

the real reason AT&T has been pushing UVerse is to get out from under public utility regulations.

guess what? uverse is a digital service, it has no service level guarantees, and its down when the power goes out.

Korea’s third biggest phone maker faces $180m OBLITERATION

Re: You have misidentified the customer

bingo... remember, we are NOT the customer, we are the PRODUCT.

AT&T: We will right many of world's wrongs if allowed to slurp DirecTV

ROFL!

"Econometric analysis confirms that, even before efficiencies are considered, the combination of AT&T and DirecTV will create a pro-competitive, integrated bundle of video and broadband services that provokes a beneficial competitive reaction from cable and results in a demonstrable overall net benefit to consumers," AT&T argues.

omg, how could they say that with a straight face??

Panasas: Avoid lengthy RAID re-builds - use our dodgy-file tart-up tech

ZFS works much the same way.

207 thousand lights-out boxes are STILL hackable

Re: Maybe more wiring-related than protocol-related

thats difficult for single computers in an internet colocation environment.

Google, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Parallels bet on virtualization's surprising successor

the big advantage of containers is much less overhead per VM. with a hypervisor, each VM is running on its own kernel, all of which are talking to virtualized IO devices. with a container (solaris zone, etc), each container is a virtual userspace under the same OS kernel

Remember Control Data? The Living Computer Museum wants YOU

40 years ago I knew the IBM 1130 inside and out, down to the bits and bytes, IO devices and all.

Today? not so much so.

Would I want to dredge all that back up? not for any sane amount of money such a museum job could possibly pay.

Canon offers a cloud just for still photos, not anything else. Weird

I'll stick with smugmug. I tried the various free services, didn't like their albums and/or spamminess. smugmug isn't free, but its cheap enough, offers unlimited storage for a annual fee, and has good looking albums without any restrictions on embedding. Combined with Adobe Lightroom as the photo editing/management tool, it totally rocks, a couple clicks to publish an album, fix a few pics in it later, one click republish.

Seagate in surprise $450m LSI Flash gobble

Re: What about CacheCade Pro 2.0 SW

cachecade is part of LSI's megaraid line, which I don't believe was involved in this.

Expulsion from Garden of Steven: Apple staffers tossed out of Fruit Loop

more likely, marketing and executives get the fancy new Fruit Loop, actual product engineers get sent to outer suburbia.

AOL Mail locks down email servers to deal with spam tsunami

yup. all 7 of the AOL subscribers on one of my email lists got shut out the other day by dmarc policy p=reject.

so now, yahoo and its clients (att, and all the former babybell legacy domains), hotmail, AND AOL have effectively banned email list servers. "Why, fewer than 2% of our 300 million email users post to mail lists, who cares about those 5 million people!"