Posts by Jase 1

Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

Great except Digicert is FUBAR

We have a few Symantec issued certs and have been in communication with our provider and they are basically saying that the Digicert system is up the creek so they are not able to reissue at the moment.

"At this point in time no re-issues are being completed for this issue.

This is due to the fact that the new Digicert system is not 100% up and running correctly to support this.

You will be contacted over the coming weeks at a time when your order or orders are eligible for re-issue.

You will then be informed in that email on how to complete the process.

In the mean time please do not attempt to re-issue your order at all.

The Digicert system is making orders fail, if this happens to your order, you will need to purchase a new one. So it is best to wait until you are contacted to re-issue."

Gutted: 6.6M cleartext creds, dox, breached in ClixSense site hack

It has taught us that regardless of what you do to stay secure, it still may not be enough

I would suggest that doing jack shit does not really class as doing anything to stay secure - you stored passwords in cleartext and then have the balls to talk about it not being enough?

The NO-NAME vuln: wget mess patched without a fancy brand

Is this why all my Linux servers have 270+ updates totalling 150MB today?

Gartner mages throw deduping backup appliance bones, claim EMC's in lead

Re: Where is Oracle/Sun/StorageTek? CommVault?

This MQ is for target dedupe devices only

Expert view: What is the forecast for cloud backup?

"Aren't incremental backups just deduplication happening at the application (and file) level rather than at the driver/hardware (and block) level?"

An incremental backup is has this file changed since my last backup (could be from my last full or my last incremental which is where differential and cumulative come into play) but it does not take into account if you have backed the file up somewhere else already.

Deduplication is have I seen this file anywhere else before and if I have then I don't need to take another copy of the file (but metadata may still be created) and you can do an deduplicated full or a deduplicated incremental.

Within deduplication there are then a few ways that vendors operate ranging from file (single instance) to blocks to chunks (or a mix of more than one) but the backup "method" does not influence this.

How to grill an EMC division chief

If Data Domain hadn't been first to the dedupe market they would be dead by now - the whole range is such an overpriced one trick pony with so many better alternatives on the market

China ponders ban on IBM servers

China surely knows this and that any order to change would be futile for at least a few months??

Try years - or longer| Any financial institution who tries to move critical apps from platform to platform in a few months is in for a very nasty shock and that is before adding mainframes et al into the fray

Business is slow. Here's a good idea, let's compete with customers

"If enterprise vendors move into the service provider space, they compete with some of their largest customers" - what has any of this got to do with a book seller building an IT infrastructure?

If the said booksellers only customers were people buying books from them to resell then it might make some sense but otherwise?

IT salaries: Why you are a clapped-out Ferrari

What the hell is the relevance of the backup piece?

I was happily reading and nodding along until the backup piece - did you actually read and digest the article you linked to or did the pretty chart just prove a point?

Brit Bill Gates writes ANOTHER open letter to HP board

Does anyone give a shit?

This is one of the most monotonous, tedious and over egged "stories" of all time - HP bought a pup / he sold HP a pup. The only people in the world who thought this was a good deal at the time were the Autonomy board and HP big wigs who agreed to buy it so why is anyone surprised it has all gone tits up?

Oh and the British Bill Gates - WTF?

'Brit Bill Gates' was powerless to stop HP's Autonomy acquisition

Stop tittering at the back

"as soon as you are a pubic company in the UK"

Security mess sends Kiwi auction site titsup in two days

Re: No they don't

I don't agree - a programmer needs to understand security and the risks in what he does otherwise how can he ever write good code?

As my application has developed and moved forward I have used other programmers and there are many who are very knowledgeable about security and performance and scalability and other considerations beyond the technicality of writing code and that's what separates the shit from the good.

Programmers need to start with security and work backwards - too many start with the code and then try to make it secure.

Learned this the hard way through a "professional" UK programmer who created a pile of insecure shit for me two years back with all sorts of holes like no checking of data before entering it into a database, URL manipulation, admin functions accessible by anyone if they knew the URL - pain............

Got a BMW? Thicko thieves can EASILY NICK IT with $30 box

Re: Pissed off owner

"The need to point out you have a premium BMW probably says a lot about you that we shouldn't go into but it also says something about the brand. What allegedly prestigous car maker has the need to make bland low end models? Still, I suppose it increases sales and allows a load of plebs to be able to say they have a BMW. We all know if they don't say the model number its a one series and those that point out it's one of the premium models, well, as I said let's not go there.

The same also goes for Jaguar, no mention of the model then it's a refurbished Sierra, but what the hell they can say they have a Jaguar.

Also, I assume you mean you paid 60k for your car but I seriously doubt it is worth that."

This is a post about BMW's - considering many who are posting don't even own a BMW I thought it might be useful to establish that I am an owner of an affected vehicle and have a vested interest in the story to justify my concern.

For the record, mine is not a "bland low end model" nor is it a one series - it is a premium model so I highlighted it is a premium model which makes it MUCH more attractive to thieves hence my increased concern.

Re: Pissed off owner

"Never understood why anyone feels the need to spend that much on a car anyway. Especially on British roads where much of the time you can't go much faster than about 10MPH average.

It took a work colleague about 20-30 minutes to move about a mile the other day. I can cycle to work in 20 minutes and bypass all that traffic as no car can take the short cuts a bicycle can. Plus I don't get fat, poor and angry either."

I don't need to - I choose to in the same way as you choose to buy a bicycle which, IMO, is the scourge of the earth especially when the cyclists take the "short cuts a bicycle can" like riding on the pavements, going the wrong way down one way streets and jumping red lights...

Re: Pissed off owner

"Maybe put in the garage rather than leaving it out on full view then?"

You tried to get anything larger than a bicycle into a new build garage recently?

Pissed off owner

As someone who has owned premium BMW's for the last 12 years this has royally pissed me off - I have £60k worth of car sitting on my drive which could be nicked by a scumbag at any moment due to BMW incompetence.

I have no issue with the OBD port "problem" itself - criminals will always come up with new ways of bypassing any security as we in IT can lay testament to day in, day out.

My two issues are much simpler:

1) This problem started occurring 18 months ago and was brought to BMW's attention but they did jack shit until Watchdog reported on it. Total disregard for their customers.

2) What idiot designed an alarm system which allows you to break the side window AND put your arm into the body of the car WITHOUT setting off the alarm and how the hell did that ever get Thatcham approval?

BMW may well have just lost a customer through their incompetence - the service I have received has always kept me going back but this is really a step too far.

Watch out, PC disk drive floggers: Cloud will rust up those spinners

The only use I see for all these services is portability or as an ad hoc backup as if I had to recover everything it would take too long - I sure as hell wont be using any of them to replace local storage.

Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K quad-core CPU

Price?

I take it the price quoted is for the CPU only? The review is confusing as hell jumping between CPU then CPU and mobo and then back again - even the summary talks about both in tandem so which is it?

EMC climbs software storage cash mountain, taunts rivals below

Misleading

I always find these figures misleading - EMC, Netapp, IBM and HP all sell storage which comes with software to manage the storage. Is it storage software? Well yes it is but it is only software for their disk so it is then difficult to do a true comparison against Symantec, Commvault and other software companies.

I would be much more interested in seeing storage software which is not a prerequisite of the arrays broken out so we can see the figures for things like backup, archiving, storage agnostic replication and so on where the pure play software vendors are not trying to "compete" against proprietary storage software sold (or given away) with disk.

Bring your backups out of the closet! It's time for 'Tape Pride'

Long live tape!

The big disk vendors (especially those who also sell backup software) have been saying tape is dead for ages - I wonder why?

Every customer I talk to wants to reduce their reliance on tape and has a desire to remove it completely but I know of very few outside the SME space who have been able to.

The main problem with tape is restore speeds and reliability of media and drives - contrary to popular belief if you get the right data set pushed to a tape library it will outperform all but the fastest and most expensive disk systems which few customers will consider using for backups. The big problem area in tape backup is unstructured data but technology can help alleviate that or do the first backup to disk and then either keep on disk for a desired period or move it off to tape when there is more time to do so. If a customer can get to a point where most of their restores are coming from disk it takes away the main problems associated with tape which is what most customers do.

For those who need to keep data for less than ~3 years disk is viable for most but once you go over ~3 years or the data volumes are huge then disk is still too expensive regardless of compression or deduplication or what the disk vendors may say.

Chinese smut site boss gets 10 years in the slammer

"periodically get tough on pornography, internet fraud and other unacceptable online activities"

Ironic considering China is the biggest producer of copied and fake goods worldwide with zero respect for copyright, patents and so on - would be nice to see them crack down on the thousands of factories turning out cheap, poor quality and often dangerous copies of branded goods.

I guess though the factory owners employ millions and they pay taxes so the moral here is it is OK to break the law if you contribute to society but if you peddle tits and bums and don't generate the government an income then you are bad and must pay with 10 years!

LG, Lovefilm sign smart TV pact

Until they both get a decent selection of movies younger than me then 5 quid is still a waste of money - I bought a 55" IPTV just before Xmas and neither of them have anything I am even remotely interested in watching. Looking at Lovefilm today, their most recent 10 additions to the site have 2 movies from 2009 and nothing newer - there are lots from the 50's, 60's and 70's though. Not really why I bought an IPTV!

Give me 10 gig Ethernet now!

The key is to reduce the amount of data being backed up in the first place rather than simply throwing more bandwidth at it.

Cloud startup's business model defies laws of physics

Maybe they are doing dedupe on the client, then encrypting the deduped blocks and only sending the unique blocks?