Posts by doctau

Old JBoss vuln in the wild, needs patching

Old unsupported software has a security flaw? How surprising

(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat)

The flaw isn't exploitable on the supported JBoss EAP releases since a second layer requires authentication. It isn't a flaw in AS 6 and 7, or EAP 6.

So in other words if you are running old unsupported versions of software and don't have security patches installed, then you might get affected by flaws from a year or two ago.

Would you trust crowd-sourced maps? Skobbler releases satnav app

"Would you trust crowd-sourced maps?"

Not completely, but you shouldn't trust non-crowd sourced maps either. Google maps has a whole lot of mistakes near where I live, including a number of "roads" which are someone's paddock.

Spooky action at a distance is faster than light

Re: Spooky action != Information

> (2) the chips would have a little switch which would allow you to flip their colors between red and blue,

> and (3) if someone flipped the switch on one, the other would simultaneously change to the opposite color,

> thus allowing a FTL morse code. So we've been given the wrong idea of what entanglement means?

This is basically where it's wrong. The chips are in a quantum superposition of red and blue, and when you look at the chip it will be one or the other, but it's 50% either way. If you see red you know that the other guy will have the blue one, but since you can't choose which colour it is, you haven't send any information to the other end.

There are some ways of rigging it so you can affect the outcome, but they all require you to have a side-channel communication mechanism which operates on normal classical mechanisms so can't transmit faster than light.

Imagine that you had a machine which when used would code the information, transmit it via entanglement mechanisms and give you the decoding key. The person at the other end can record the data which has travelled faster than light, but they can't do anything to extract the information without the decoding key. There is no way to transmit the decoding key to you faster than light, so in essence you haven't transmitted the information faster than light.

Internet retail tax threshold 'probably irrelevant'

(untitled)

The 10% GST is obviously why I can buy things overseas and have them shipped here for under half the price of buying them locally*. Not to mention the fact that many things I want to buy aren't sold locally anyway.

Before blaming the GST, they blames the fact that one Aus dollar bought 50 US cents. Our dollar is now worth more than one US dollar, and the prices are still stupidly high.

Gerry Harvey and the other retail moguls can just harden the fuck up and deal with the fact that they charge too much, offer too few products, and have sales staff that make you want to punch them in the face.

* For values of locally meaning "within 3000km"

Australia, give up your fixed broadband!

60gbp a month?

60GBP/month? You'd only be paying that if you live out in a rural area, or go for one of the plans with a huge download quota (e.g. half a terabyte a month).

I pay ~45GBP a month for 150gb downstream quota (unlimited upstream) on "up to 24mbit" ADSL2+, which can sustain ~1.6mbyte/sec on file downloads (plus overheads). And that's because I go with one of the good but expensive ISPs, who have mirrors with lots of content that don't count against quota, and actually have knowledgable tech support people.

If you want one of the horrible companies, 60GBP will get you ADSL2+ with no quota and a landline phone.