Posts by Trevor_Pott

Canadians taking to spying on their spies

Re: Good, but don't hold out hope

That's what the Conservative party of Alberta said.

Right before we turfed them.

Liber8 yourself!

The Global Corporate Congress would like a word with you, citizen...

Re: Groundswell

NDP are Canada's left-wing party. That said, they've moved more towards the center (by Canadian standards) as they started to have a real shot at the crown. They are not as populist as the Pirate or Green parties, but they do stand more for the people than the corporations.

The NDP got elected in Alberta (which has had 43 consecutive years of Conservative government!) on a mandate of moving from flat taxes to progressive taxation, increasing oil royalties, increasing corporate taxes on large organizations, rooting out government corruption and cronyism, balancing the budget (which should be possible in Alberta, of all places!) and spending rationally on infrastructure instead of vanity projects.

The NDP federally are running a very similar campaign, though there are some important differences. For example, federally, we already have progressive taxation, and the federal government doesn't control resource royalties.

Want security? Next-gen startups show how old practices don't cut it

If the attacker is able to compromise your datacenter enough to trigger an isolation event, isn't that exactly the sort of reason you should be locking things down? Better that you take the services offline than that you allow the compromise to spread or that you allow personally identifiable information to be extracted from the DC.

Re: Not fully convinced

Humans are slow. Too slow.

By all means, have the decisions of the automated software reviewed by a human after they have taken effect, but do not sit around and wait for some human to wake up, have a shower, have some coffee, get to work, shoot the shit, look at the problem and make a decision. Even if you have a 24/7 staffed security NOC, humans are still too slow. Security compromises can spread faster than humans can react, and the number of malicious actors working to increase the speed of compromise spread is far - far - greater than the number of analysts. Or their reaction times.

If you want to put a hold on notifying police or customers, maybe that's a reasonable business decision. But automated isolation of compromised systems and services needs to be automatic. Gathering forensic information needs to be automatic. getting information wrapped up into a bundle so that if the analyst pulls the trigger for sending to the cops it is all ready to go needs to be automatic.

Humans are just too damned slow. The only time they really should be involved here is when making decisions about hot to interface with other humans, and in doing post-event analysis to ensure that the automatics didn't isolate a system/service as a false positive.

But you'll never convince me that we should simply wait around for a human being to decide if a compromise if valid before locking down threats in our datacenters. The threat landscape has just evolved beyond what humans can handle, even in 24/7 real time.

Having talked to many of the startups (stealth and non), I'd say they know a hell of a lto more than the basics. But that's personal opinion from having talked to them. I recommend bringing yoru own experts to talk to the startup of your choice.

Citrix really needs to get its act together, and soon

Re: LWL? Really!

Deeply sorry the truth offends you. Actually...no I'm not.

Re: LWL? Really!

Clearly, you've never actually used the thing. Or, more to the point, LWL's competitors.

ProfileUnity is actually quite good, multiply so if you actually know how to use it.

Win8 inventory glut? Yep, it's all Microsoft's fault, says HP

Re: Now's the best time to buy HP

The "Service Pack" being all the privacy stealing crap, forced updates that Microsoft won't explain and a newfound complete lack of reason to trust Microsoft with your personal or professional data?

That's a hell of a Service Pack, mate.

Bruce Schneier: 'We're in early years of a cyber arms race'

About as much as a ham radio operator after an earthquake.

Japan's 'White Stork' soars heavenwards to ISS

Wait, what?

When did Japan start building ICBMs? How does that square with their treaty obligations? Given the crazy nationalistic ultra right-wing warcrimes-denying halfwits in charge of japan, I am not remotely okay with this.

Captain, dark energy sensor readings show dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way

Re: 500 stars a galaxy?

http://www.fcaglp.unlp.edu.ar/CGGE/Eng/gcdg_obj.html

http://www.gemini.edu/node/247

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~kolena/hou/clusters.htm

http://mydarksky.org/2008/04/04/a-globular-cluster-turns-galaxy/

These provide some basic info for the layman. The best info, however, will be found by searching Google Scholar for articles related to astrophysics classification. Look at dark matter concentration as a means of classification specifically, it's rather interesting.

Re: 500 stars a galaxy?

It's about density and stellar population. Globular clusters are really densely packed, despite not having a black hole larger than a few stellar masses. They also tend to be metal poor stars and are much, much, much older.

These dwarf galaxylets are likely to be small stellar nurseries ejected from the Milky Way during a previous collision and are hence metal rich and pretty new. Previous discoveries of similar objects have shown them to be not all that densely packed and roughly in line with the age of the stars in the host galaxy.

Some speculate that these represent stellar nurseries that formed around black holes of a few stellar masses and remained gravitationally bound as their location within the galactic disk was perturbed. As such, when they were ejected they stayed together. By staying together they retained enough gravity (collectively) that they didn't achieve galactic escape velocity but were simply pulled into a wider orbit.

It is probably better not to view these as dwarf galaxies in the traditional sense as they don't have supermassive black holes and aren't remnants of larger galaxies that experienced a collision event. They are - for lack of a better term - larger objects in the Kuiper belt of the Milky Way. Part of it as much as Eris, Haumea, Makemake and Sedna are part of Sol's Kuiper belt, which is a part of our solar system.

There is no hard edge to the galaxy. it doesn't just stop at some arbitrary point. The number of systems and gases peter out with distance, but within the very low density fringed agglomerations appear. These are typically material kicked out from the main body, but there is still enough low density stuff out there - gases, rogue planets, individual systems, etc - that it can keep small clusters of stars young.

I hope that explains how these objects are (most of them, anyways,) likely to be different from the old, dense globular clusters that orbit much farther out.

Pirate MEP: Microsoft's walled garden is no consumer pleasure park

Re: Earth to Microsoft

He wouldn't be able because his patches would be rejected because Linux has to stay a 1970s OS and never enter the XXI century

May you catch systemd and suffer greatly

Windows 10 keeps Microsoft's odd desktop-as-a-service rules

Re: LTSP

I honestly don't know. I haven't checked the bleeding edge stuff in a few months. Been busy migrating everything away from RHEL since RHEL7 is such shit. Learning Slack and Debian in real depth takes time.

Microsoft's horrific approach to VDI is the reason I started to loathe their business practices in the first place. it is what led me to question them and the more answers I found to to my questions the less trust in Microsoft I was able to maintain.

Microsoft's views on LDI licensing are abhorrent. Putting the whole "Microsoft were late to the invasion of your privacy party but when they showed up they brought their A game" thing to one side...just for how they fuck us all on VDI licensing alone, I hope Microsoft fail. A pox on the houses of each and every one of them who had even the most tangential thing to do with this clusterfuck of halfwittery.

Re: LTSP

LTSP over the WAN is a lot like grinding off your genitals with an acid covered cheese grater while you're on fire and in hell. And fuck, that's just the shitty connectivity of the login, let alone trying to use the smegling thing!

Sorry mate, but Linux needs to get Weland/Weston front and center, with its freerdp server, and get all the bugs shaken out before it can compete with Microsoft on this.

Microsoft replaces Windows 10 patch update, isn't saying why

Re: Me too

Not a heck of a lot of Google in my CyanogenMod, mate. And all the tracking's off by default. And it works just fine if I don't add a Google account.

Wot?

Re: Me too

Trevor , I thought you made your living by providing maintenance for windows users, does this mean that you are moving full time to Linux systems and completely giving up on windows ?

Actually, I've mostly quit IT. While I keep a few clients around (I'm back down to around 25), this is mostly to keep my hand in the craft and have some form of legitimacy to what I write. I honestly don't think I do more than break even with any of them anymore. I make my money writing.

A few clients will probably still have Windows. The large ones that - to be frank - have other sysadmins to handle the day-to-day stuff. 80%+ of what I'm called in on today that is sysadmin related would be classified as either "datacenter architecture" or "something went kaboom and nobody else can fix it".

For the most part this actually does leave me working with non-Windows products. Linux (increasingly Debian as clients move away from RHEL thanks to the shitpile that is RHEL 7) on the server side and OSX (seriously, I've seen a crazy uptick in the past month, what gives?) on the desktop side.

Now, OSX is not joy to work with - securing this is proving to be a monumental pain in the ass - but I'm getting the hang of it.

For me, I've gone back to Windows 7. I think there is still Windows 10 on my little conference portable, but to be 100% honest I need to sent that back to Lenovo with a big "WTF this shitty plastic shell is disintegrating put a new one on" sticker anyways. I suspect they'll reset it to the Win 7 pro it shipped with, as they always seem to do OS resets when I send things in and don't want them to do so.

I have said multiple times that the only thing keeping me from really adopting Linux for all non-gaming roles was that the remote access protocols are a bucket of flaming hamster poo. This is still true, but the end of this miserableness is in sight. Weyland/Weston have built the freerdp server in directly, so we can finally use a protocol that actually works over crappy WAN links. That, and SPICE seems to have evolved to be almost not crap!

LibreOffice 5 is a huge step forward in usability for me, while Office 2013 has been a huge step backwards. (I have yet to try Office 2016.) Thunderbird is a bucket of shite, but if I can kick the exchange addiction, it just might do. Zentyal looks promising as a means to boot exchange out the door.

SAMBA 4 has finally reached "usable", and I no longer need Windows Server-based domain controllers for most things. I'm still waiting for a usable UI to configure SAMBA shares, but I live in hope.

Meanwhile LizardFS has provided a good scale out storage option for those looking to build additive storage filers with a single global namespace. Bye, bye DFSR, don't let the door hit you on the way out! And I don't even have to wait for Storage Replica, because I just don't need it anymore.

Scale Computing has taught me that KVM is just fine, thanks. And if I don't want to keep using Scale, I've found both OpenNebula and Proxmox are okay too. Nodeweaver is willing to sell me all-open-source hyperconverged (including OpenNebula-based managment) as a software-only item I can install on my own systems for next to nothing. That's fine too.

To be 100% honest, Outlook was the thing that was keeping me on Windows for so long. Not Outlook is a bloated piece of crap that crashed all the goddamned time, I have to use gsyncit in order to sync with my gmail, and that plug-in conflicts with my scheduleonce.com connector too often for my liking.

The calendar appears to be almost completely non-deterministic, even without the plug-ins and Exchange support for Android is best described as rubbish. Outlook means Office, and I am getting mightily sick of defanging Office's attempts to be "helpful" with each new install. No, I don't want you make fancy formatting decisions at the end of a pragraph, Office, I want <CR><LR> when I hit enter and not a goddamned thing more. And frak off with the smart quotes!

I basically want Office 2003. That was the thing that made me love Windows. It kicked everything else's ass in terms of productivity. Unfortunately, now Office 2003 isn't supported by Office 365, or newer exchange servers and is basically dead.

LIbreOffice comes in "portable" and I can run that right out of Dropbox. No taming the beast with each install. Bloody marvelous. Firefox and Chrome take my settings with them, so they're not a problem. Pretty much everything of importance is in Sync. Everything that's not important is in Dropbox.

What else do I use? Oh, yeah, Trillian. Trillian is cool, but there are a squillion great Linux alternatives. Oh, wait, nevermind, I can get that on Linux too. Skype. Skype goes on my phone, but there's Skype for Linux too. Ummm...ummm.....

Yeah, that's about it. There's lots of other things I use, but they all either have direct Linux ports, are browser-delivered, or have "good enough" Linux-based stuff. Or they are so infrequently used they work just fine as a VM-based item.

That leaves video games. I don't play often, but I have a diverse library. I hate controllers so that rules out consoles. This leaves me building Windows gaming rigs every 5 or 6 years. I'm okay with that. I'll pay Microsoft their pound of flesh in order to play my games.

Once Windows 7 can't be had, I'll move to Windows 10. When I do, I'll lock that SOB down and firewall it off from the rest of the network and treat it like the a toxic digital piracy-thieving piece of shit that it is.

But Windows for primary stuff? No. I just don't see the reason to do anymore.

Look, I'm lazy. I really, really, really, really, really, really, really lazy. I don't want to move off Windows 7. I'm comfortable here and life is simple. But the end is nigh. Windows 7 is going to get Windows XPed, and sooner rather than later.

The problem is, Windows 7 users have nowhere to go. In terms of software you mostly control, it's the end of the line. Now everything Microsoft is all cloud enabled, privacy-stealing bilge pumped from the abandoned mines at Redmond.

I either have to give up on any notion of privacy or control over my own data whatsoever or I have to learn to suck it up and deal with the clusterfuck that is Linux UIs. According to my own principles, the latter is preferable.

So yeah, I'm out. Windows 7 until I can't go any more. And as for clients, I won't take any new Windows clients. The existing ones I am going to try to get away from supporting Windows on the endpoint at all. Windows Server I might keep supporting, but mostly as a vessel for running legacy Win32 apps.

I don't like it, but the choices available are a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich. Which do you pick?

If the product is free, you are the product being sold.

Of course, even if you pay for, you're still going to be sold.

You know what? Fuck it, I'm out.

Two weeks of Windows 10: Just how is Microsoft doing?

Re: "Despite these concerns..."

I can't speak to the other offices, but here at Reg North productivity means "git 'er done". Make of that what you will.

Re: "Despite these concerns..."

I don't think it's an unfair comment. A rubber dick with a wig on it is a more acceptable productivity platform than Windows 8. If the bar for "success" is "we hate this less than Windows 8" then your measurement of success is pretty skewed.

The real question is "do we prefer it to Windows 7"? So far, every non-nerd I've talked to says no. The nerds seem 50/50 split. Those who believe novel has intrinsic value love Windows 10. Those who believe new things need to prove they are worth more than old things tend to stick with Windows 7.

From this I conclude that Windows 10 is - for the most part - "good enough" to people who don't care about privacy or control of their OS. It is not, however compelling enough to pull users away from Windows 7 in any great numbers.

Perhaps this is why trickery and skullduggery is being employed to nudge - or force - users off of Windows 7?

Either way, I am not making a pretty penny doing rollbacks from Windows 10 to Windows 7 and configuring the systems to block the Windows 10 download. Let's hope that revenue stream doesn't dry up for a while, as it pays well for easy work.

Rise up against Oracle class stupidity and join the infosec strike

Re: Nice idea

Canada already has a professional association for iT. I am working for increased legal recognition.

Re: Rise up Techie Introverts and be ...

Taking a stand doesn't mean you'll win. But for it to work not everyone who takes a stand has to win. Even a small percentage winning some of the time can begin to change things, and make security the new normal. That can start to make those who don't provide security for their products seem a worse deal.

Persistence is required. And a diversity of people willing to take a stand in a diversity of situations. But the attempt is not irrelevant simply because not all will succeed in all situations all of the time.

Re: Industry pressure

The market has failed to produce solutions thus far. Why do you feel it is rational to cling to a belief this will somehow change? There are very, very few examples in human history of markets self-regulating, especially in a manner good for the population at large.

There are an unlimited number of examples in which markets have failed to self regulate. Belief that markets will self regulate, in defiance of all historical evidence to the contrary, is faith as irrational as any religion.

Re: Civilisations?

Civilisations such as the Assyrians and the Greco-Roman civilisation and the Mayan civilisation were not good places to live in if you were, say, a slave, poor, etc

First off, it's worth noting the difference between "citizen" and "not citizen" in these cultures. Even the poor were treated a heck of a lot better than any non-citizen. And, to be perfectly frank, for a lot of the existence of those cultures non-citizens did okay. Not great, but far - far - better than non-citizens in contemporary cultures.

But the cultures you mentioned existed for long periods of time. How people were treated varied. And towards the end of each civilization we see the treatment of people at large degenerating. Slaves are treated more harshly. The poor are treated as non-citizens. Eventually, only the very rich seem to enjoy any rights at all.

Empires have fallen because when conquerors came they found an eager fifth column in an oppressed populace. That is where civilizations end. Hence, in my analysis, a culture it no longer "civilized" when the populace becomes so stratified that the majority are oppressed enough to actively work against the culture as a whole.

Those who pay history no mind will repeat its most egregious errors.

Re: Nice idea

@charles 9: plenty of other professions have codes of conduct, ethical standards and we have legislation to enforce this.

It's only every man for himself in really shitty parts of the world, mate. Like Somalia. Or the US of NSA. In much of the rest of the world - the good parts of the world - people are raised with a belief in a duty of care to their society.

But I've noted your Randian worldview and made the appropriate push of the ignore button. Good bye.

Re: Be careful out there kids....

@AC: If they won't listen to you and implement security as a priority then there's fuck all you can do. Being there won't give you power to magically make it better. Leaving - especially if the why of it is explained to the right people - may well make them realize the importance of security. Especially if enough do it.

As for If some unknown sysadmins quit, or developers, who would notice? that depends on who finds out. As a generally rule, if you're good at your job, people internal to the company notice. And if enough people (or high ranking) people leave a company for this reason the press notices. And this is what is ultimately required.

They will just thank the whiner went away, so they could work as they like

If this is the kind of attitude that not only your company but your peers within that company have then you are in a really shitty workplace. If they view you as a "whiner" for having professional ethics what makes you think that their apathy about corporate or professional duty of care will somehow end at treating the customer like a commodity? If they treat others like shit they are going to treat you like shit and you need to get the hell out of there ASAP.

Do you believe answering "I quitted each of them because my colleagues/managers were morons who didn't care about IT security" will help you?

Hell yes it would, at any place that actually worth my time and effort.

Just because the US of NSA has allowed itself to deteriorate doesn't make it civilized. It's not. It's a shithole. An uncivilized shithole that is losing any shred of decency it may once have had.

If my country follows, it too won't be fit to call civilized either. Civilizations work collaboratively for the good their people. The US of NSA gave that up some time ago. As is very clearly evidenced by the unrepentant - even proud - selfishenss of some of the commentards here.

I've never been more disappointed in humanity than I am today.

Re: Nice idea

If "Following Orders" is the only way to put food on the table, ethics kind of takes second priority.

That worldview is fucking appalling. Jesus H mother of goddamned donkeyfucking christ, what the hell happened to us that we've forgotten so much, so fast?

Holy wow. Just wow.

Re: Be careful out there kids....

You mean something like this?

Re: Easy to bitch about other people's work

Bad IT in a car can indeed kill people.

Bad IT in planes has killed people.

Bad IT in medical equipment has killed people.

Bad IT in AI-equipped auto-death weapons inevitably will kill people.

And on and on and on....

Re: will it really help?

Assuming your take on things to be correct, how is it rational to take a job knowing that there will be a lax attitude to security, this will lead to security breaches and you, as the minion "just following order" will be the schlub on the hook to take the blame?

How is it rational to say "I'll take some easy money now, knowing that there is a really good risk that shit will hit the fan, I'll get blamed, and end up unemployable in this field forever after that point"? Wouldn't it make more sense to put your labour into another profession where you can actually expect long term employment, instead of an abrupt, messy - and potentially expensive - sacking, followed by being reverted to essentially "unskilled labour"?

We'll have to agree to disagree, Charles 9; I don't consider shitholes particularly civilized. I mean, look at the US of NSA...

Re: Be careful out there kids....

@AC Well, at least you're honest. That's not really much of a consolation, but there is that one, small redeeming quality.

Re: Nice idea

I think did answer it: because, apparently, IT is filled with people perfectly willing to put their own desires before the lives of others. Just shrug off any responsibility. You're just following orders.

Nice.

That's not a civilized country. That's a shithole.

I disagree. Legislation to make information security failures the responsibility of the executive layer personally would stop this almost overnight. The other alternative would be legal recognition of professional associations and banning individuals from working in the field who weren't members. Those associations would then boot out anyone who didn't follow ethical guidelines.

Engineering in civilized countries functions this way. It's time to apply this to development, and IT in general.

Re: Nice idea

So..fuck the customer, the population at large and everyone, everywhere, only you and your job matter?

Sorry, but this one is actually worth fighting for. And it is worth organizing professional associations for. And worth putting time and effort into.

Or maybe you just want to wait until the price of individual selfishness and cowardice on behalf of developers is measured in bodies. How many people's lives is your job worth? Hmm? How many injuries and maimings does it take before you exit your comfort zone? How many people need to face financial ruination before you speak out?

or do you somehow think that, because you're "just following orders" you aren't to blame? That it's only the fault of the higher-ups who pushed back on you over and over to get it done quicker, and you folded like a cheap tent every time?

Do you feel you bear no responsibility whatsoever for the results of your work?

Re: Be careful out there kids....

You're absolutely correct. It can get you fired. So you have to make the choice: do you care only about yourself? Or do you have a responsibility to others? I argue that we all have a responsibility to others not to let companies ignore security. Even if it cost us our jobs.

If we were able to make professional ethics a legal requirement for our professions they wouldn't be able to fill those positions with people willing to break with ethics for corporate profit. Not if they wanted to be allowed to keep practicing, anyways.

A combination of legislation and a unified stance is required for this to work.

Re: Easy to bitch about other people's work

Who is asking they be fixed "in a week"? The issue is taking information security seriously and doing everything reasonably possible to ensure that it not be given lip service only. For a company Oracle's size, that absolutely includes bug bounties.

But bug bounties aren't the real issue. The Oracle-class stupidity is bemoaning user and researcher attempts to discover bugs in the first place. The concept that a company's need to protect its intellectual property and/or near-monopoly with an EULA should come before security is not only assinine, it is dangerous.

Oracle has been pretty clear about putting security far behind commercial interests for a very long time now. This lady has just been the first to be honest about it. And they threw her under the yacht for doing so!

If yoru software is so awful that you have a "line of CVSes to fix" then you should be out there, fixing those. They shouldn't stay unfixed for ages. And you shouldn't be objecting to people adding new ones to the list.

More to the point, you should have layers of QA, proper unit tests and proper security testing before things go out so that the number of CVSes starts dropping over time.

I don't expect any company to magically solve all security problems over night. I don't expect all code to be without flaw. I absolutely do expect companies - especially large ones - to make security the primary priority. Ahead of new features. Ahead of release dates. Ahead of any other priority in their software.

Corporate profit should not come before information security, especially for vendors as large (and profitable) as Oracle. The hell of it is that it doesn't take a whole lot of investment to resolve this. For a company Oracle's size adding a few hundred extra bodies to security testing design and then to QA (those who implement the tests) and drawing out releases a little so that the bugs can be solved before going out...that's nothing.

And throwing a few measly million at the research community to find bugs in your software is a minor expense for an Oracle. Especially since the stuff the researchers find is going to be the same stuff so easily visible to blackhats using those very same techniques.

Nobody should get to avoid responsibility for security just because they believe they have a $deity-given right to ignore security in the quest for money.

Re: Real geeks roll their own home routers.

Well, I use OpenWRT. So that's upgradable. Not everyone is allowed to do this, however. My ISP, for example, usually freaks out if you don't use their shitty Actiontec modem/gateways. I was able to score an appropriate VDSL2 modem-only unit from ebay and put my own router behind it. But what if I had had an Actiontec? I can't really do much to it. I'd be entirely at the mercy of the ISP.

This is a really bad situation.

Re: will it really help?

Actually, we are working on HTTPS for all our sites. (There are about 12, including trevorpott.com)

The issue we're facing is one of limited IP addresses. I know that HTTPS should work with multiple sites to a single IP on newer browsers, but I would really like to ensure that we have backwards compatibility support. So I'm in the process of evaluating load balancers and how it is they might (or might not) solve the problem.

In the meantime, we have (to my knowledge) removed from all our sites any member sign-ups on publicly published pages. We have informed our existing members that we're looking to alter our entire security stance on the sites, including eventually altering where the login pages are, switching to .hta access and more.

We've been mostly working on behind the scenes security in the past month. Database and operating system hardening. Automated updates for Wordpress. Security plugin testing and hardening for wordpress. Selective writelock cascades for any site which doesn't have to be writable for that particular timeframe...we've also gone over the code and the databases to make sure we weren't pwned at any point in the past.

Because we aren't in the process of building an active forum presence that requires readers to sign up or subscribe, bur primary focus from a security standpoint has been to ensure that we aren't hosting malicious stuff that could infect readers. HTTPS support is on the list in the near term, but as the sites are (at the moment) publicly facing read-only (rather than interactive) sites, we felt the other security issues had priority.

If you feel there is a really good reason to push HTTPS above the rest of our security efforts to get it done sooner, please, make your case! We're entirely open to it!

Assange™ is 'upset' that he WON'T be prosecuted for rape, giggles lawyer

To be fair, most western nations seem pretty keen on getting rid of "innocent unless proven guilty", so I'm not sure why anyone would trust any western government if they made their living trading in governmental secrets.

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone."

--David Cameron,

Prime Minister of the UK.

WTF

Re: Name clearing

I would expect that a man "man up" and that a woman "woman up". The exhortation need not be gender determined, nor involve gender roles. It refers to the difference between a "man" and a "boy": namely that adults are required to accept certain levels of responsibility, especially social responsibility, as a matter of course.

It has nothing to do with bravery. It has everything to do with meeting the obligations of adulthood. And yes, sometimes those obligations require sacrifice - even of one's own life - for the greater good.

"Adult up" would be a possible gender non-determinative, though most people seem to prefer "(wo)man up" when gender is unknown. In this case, gender is known, so Assange needs to man the fuck up.

Data centre disk use is spinning down – Wikibon report

Nice to see Wikibon more or less in line with my own thoughts on the matter. All companies having a "Tier 0" flash tier by 2020 that handles potentially up to 50% of workloads that would normally be considered "Tier 1". By 2025ish the whole of Tier 1 moved to Flash (or a post-flash technology).

I think it's possible we'll be able to build enough foundries to handle that.

It's where people start saying stupid things like "nearline storage will be replaced by flash" or "Tier 1 will be all flash within the next [insert very short timeframe here]" that I start getting tetchy. No, we damned well don't have the fab capacity for either of those scenarios.

I don't think nearline storage will ever be replaced by flash. It will probably take a post-flash technology to do the job. Meanwhile, Tier 0 applications will be on post-flash technologies by the time we've moved "all" Tier 1 applications to flash (2025ish).

Tier 2 and lower applications will still likely be on hybrid storage for a long time to come.

Cisco network kit warning: Watch out for malware in the firmware

Re: Holy *crap*

I'm no expert on switches, but couldn't you require that ROMMON images be signed?

Police use RIFLE AND TASER to relieve man of iPhone case

Re: stupid Canadian volunteers to give away rights

I can carry my guns around. In a locked case. With the ammunition in a separate locked case. This is the correct mode of transportation for firearms, just as it is the correct storage method for firearms.

I can unlock my firearms in my own residence if I take appropriate security precautions. This allows me to clean and maintain these devices.

It is not recommended (and is in most cases illegal) to unlock both the firearm and the ammunition at the same time excepting in designated areas such as firing ranges, or designated hunting grounds.

You are not allowed to acquire or retain firearms unless you have a license for that class of weapon. In order to get a firearms license you must learn and demonstrate understanding of firearm safety, including (but not limited to) all of the above.

This is exactly how firearms should be treated. It is sane. It is rational. It allowes Canada to maintain a higher per capita gun ownership than the United States without anywhere near as many firearms-related deaths (intentional or otherwise.)

Philosophies on the ownership and utilization of firearms which are less safety oriented have proven outright disastrous for those nations which have employed them. When dealing with firearms safety come first last and always.

IT touts cough up $6m for flogging 'overpriced' PCs to US nuke boffins

So whistleblowers that make the government money get paid a portion of the proceeds. Whistleblowers that detail how the government is eradicating the rights of it's own people go to prison.

Excellent priorities.