Posts by gap

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

Re: Well...

And while we're migrating to IPv6, we'll also migrate to X.400 & X.500!

RIP: Creators of the GIF and TRS-80

Thank-you John Roach

As a school kid, I spent years of my free time hanging around local Tandy stores to use the TRS-80. It was my introduction to computers, programming and digital electronics by way of the technical manual with the schematic and description. It was the genesis of my hobby and wonderful career in engineering.

Australian ponders requiring multiple IDs to sign up for social media, plus more crypto-busting backdoors

Social media companies make their money by marketing and selling people's information - some of it voluntarily handed over, some of it involuntarily via tracking, surreptitious upload of contacts, etc. By default, social media companies continually make the default settings to make your data public.

Requiring people the provide 100 points of ID is akin to putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. Governments should be keeping people safe from social media companies, not pandering to them.

The other problem is that social media companies operate in every country, have users worldwide, and all users from all over the world to interact. How is online safety improved by requiring a small subset of users to be verified when they can be attacked by anyone else in the world. This is no different to a country banning nuclear weapons and therefore expecting not to have one dropped on them!

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

And this is the rub - you own hardware, but with software you get a license to use it. Most software isn't thrown over the fence and you walk away with it unrestricted.

I don't know what is normal in other app stores, but imagine the storm if Apple were to pass on details of every person installing an app from their app store to the developer.

NSA: We've learned our lesson after foreign spies used one of our crypto backdoors – but we can't say how exactly

Pseudorandom - i.e. not random. aka. deterministic.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

Other vendors?

Now the fun part will be waiting for other OEM's or better still SSD manufacturers to issue a similar warning.

I'll be surprised if HP is messing with custom firmware versions for those components to a degree that would break it like this, hence I'm guessing there will be more of these notifications soon.

Consequences

The possibilities raise good reason to have backups on completely different technology.

Imagine having an array of these things backed up to another array of them. Even with remote sites and offline backups, you could be in a world of hurt if you deployed the hardware at the same time.

Let's hope the navy aren't using these on their nuclear subs, etc.

Re: What the fuck is 11/15?

Is that 11/15 date displayed as a octal, decimal or hex number?

Was it stored in a 4 or 5 bit fields?

The JTAG probably isn't externalised, hence you'd need to crack the drive open, run the thing with extension cables, etc, etc. You'd be out of production for so long, it would be faster and cheaper to recover from a backup and keep driving.

Why b0rk the drive?

Using an unsigned short is one thing, but the fact it b0rks the drive when it overflows is insane.

Why would the number of power on hours be used in anything that would get in the way of drive operation?

FYI: Processor bugs are everywhere – just ask Intel and AMD

Modern processors require large design teams and huge compute ranches for simulation and verification. The crazy things modern processors do (particularly the CISC) to obtain the performance is truly amazing, but like software, the complexity comes with a cost - design defects.

While you could get something fabricated yourself, it won't be the cutting edge processors.

SCO vs. IBM case over who owns Linux comes back to life. Again

Please die!

Dear SCO,

Just go away and die quietly, please! It's over. Deal with it.

Yours,

The rest of humanity

Dropbox gets all up in your kernel with Project Infinite. Cue uproar

Re: Battle-tested my Ars...

They probably mean battled-tested by someone in the marketing department.

MPAA spots a Google Glass guy in cinema, calls HOMELAND SECURITY

Re: According to the Law.....

Aren't Customs / ICE part of the larger Homeland Security department?

Macy's: Now with Apple's Minority Report ads system that TRACKS your iPHONE

Simple fix - delete it!

Why not just delete the app? That's what I do with all the other spam, malware and adware.

LG: You can stop hiding from your scary SPY TELLY quite soon now

Aren't they breaking the law?

I wonder how corporations feel about LG TV's and monitors scanning their LAN and reporting the results back?

I'd like to know how the LAN scanning "feature" isn't illegal. It sounds like intentional and unauthorised spying and data theft.

It's strange how their attitude changed once the story was picked up by news media. They originally told people "too bad, you agreed to it in the T&C's. Go complain to the retailer you bought it from."

The problem with their latest response is they don't even act like it's an issue, let alone a privacy issue. Because they don't take the issue seriously, I'll no longer seriously think about buying their spyware infested products.

Hm, disk drive maker, what's that smell lingering around you?

Spinning rust will die

One of the biggest challenges facing spinning rust is actually the transfer rates. The enormous and ever increasing amounts of data stored is outpacing the ability to get the data off the drives. This is due to the physical limitations of the rotation rate. 10K+ RPM disks are not particularly great due to heat and energy considerations and are likely to face a decline to be superseded by SSD's. Consider the amount of time it takes to backup/restore/resync a multi-TB drive. While people forecasted the death of tape, transfer rates and capacities have kept pace and I suspect they will continue to. The other factor that will have an impact is actually communications speeds. Cloud services not only allow global access to data, they also provide the ability to deduplicate data, while user end SSD's will effectively function as a layer of caching. The backend storage will need to perform better than what traditional rotating disks can provide, hence SSD.

Apple asked me for my BANK statements, says outraged reader

And you can't just buy it in a store because?

There is a simple approach, don't provide the information - particularly things like bank statements, then go buy the device in a store or from another online retailer. It's not like these prized goods are only available in the online Apple store.

Facebook: Yeah, we'll ban chainsaw beheading vids - when journos call us

No nudity but gruesome murder footage is ok?!

Providing the video is real / authentic, it obviously constitutes evidence of a crime. You'd think FaceBook would be reporting it to police when it was brought to their attention.

The thing that really puzzles me is why Americans (in general) get so offended by basic nudity, which everyone sees on a daily basis and are our own bodies, but is completely non-plused by even the most extreme violence. e.g. removing breast feeding imagery but being perfectly ok with the most gruesome murder videos.

Now there is a company that lacks a moral compass or any values.

UK: 'We're legally bound to arrest Mr Assange'

Re: Once again a government fails it's people.

Unlike the US, we (Aussies) abandon our citizens when it's not convenient for the government cause.

Would any of this been going on if Assange was a US citizen and he'd leaked Australian secrets?

Re: Oh for fecks sake

No, they would be doing something of benefit to the UK. (or perhaps humanity)