Posts by razorfishsl

FBI boss: Sony hack was DEFINITELY North Korea, haters gonna hate

The question is...

if it was an upset employee, was that person capable of routing traffic so that it appeared the traffic came from North Korea or is there actually a '3rd party' involved in all this mess?

No cellphones in cells, you slag! UK.gov moots prison mobe zap law

Re: How do you identify the phone?

Derrrrrr.....

Each phone has a unique ID built into the hardware that persists sim changes.

Just leave a SDR and pick out the ID from cell tower communication, map the patterns then switch off the ID acceptance at the tower/network....

WTF would you try to triangulate a rarely used mobile phone or try to 'jam' it?

EU VAT law could kill thousands of online businesses

Re: This is entirely UNreasonable

Or she could just setup a business in Hong kong and not worry about it.

Cops think Mt Gox meltdown was an 'INSIDE JOB' – report

yep....

All the time this goes on, the amount of money to be returned to the account holders slowly diminishes in 'administrator fees'.

They could have sold the coins they had and repurchased at the lower rate, thereby ensuring EVERYONE got ALL their coins back, as it is they have completely destroyed the value of the assets of the company... something NO administrator should do.

Zuckerberg asks the public to tell him where to go in 2015

Re: Can't feel the love here.

He is out to destroy your privacy & the privacy of the under age members of your family...

Is that not enough to hate him for?

Want to have your server pwned? Easy: Run PHP

Today I found a major new customer is running Ubuntu 5 on all its web facing production servers....

(as the IT guy pointed out.... when we run update there is nothing to be updated....) (mental note to self... strong kicking in the nuts needed)

Security by obscurity........ but at least the PHP is secure....

ISC.org website hacked: Scan your PC for malware if you stopped by

Re: Why do websites like this even use a CMS anyway?

Sometimes people you work for insist that complexity and the cloud are the way to go... when all along they just need 50 pages served to the masses

Dotcom 'saved' Xmas for Xbox – but no one can save Sony's titsup PlayStation Network

So he bent over paid a ransom ... and thinks it is something to boast about?

ICANN's technical competence queried by Verisign report

Time to get 'localhost' & 'localdomain' registered........

Assange's WikiLeaks: Give generously this Xmas – for statue of our dear leader

Re: What scale is that?

The planet is not large enough for such a construction

Microsoft drops early Chrissie pressie on Mac Office fanbois

Yep the key is 'once setup'........

I am still in the middle of an office 365 migration... it is a complete nightmare once you get up to migrating several hundred staff.

Very difficult to delete accounts if you make a mistake, cannot initially install a hundreds of users with the same password then change on login......(yep each user has to be dealt with separately...thanks Microsoft for making me type in EVERY notification email address)

CANNOT have a catch all situation to route unknown mails, almost impossible to copy messages and route through.

( FAILS on China based staff)... weird you are using encryption in Exchange--- 'get lost' messages...... but works on OSX client!!

Microsoft partner & Microsoft don't know why.......

Untangling .NET Core: Open source for Windows, Mac, Linux

Re: @matt collins

Obviously you have NOT used outlook 365....

So this is the m$ that paid money to SCO to damage the open source community?

yep now there IS a company I would trust as regards to opensource.....

CoolReaper pre-installed malware creates backdoor on Chinese Androids

So what is new

This is nothing new.

I worked with a number of Chinese manufacturers on the development of tables

Nearly all Chinese devices come with backdoors and malware already installed by the manufacturers.

Useless 'computer engineer' Barbie fired in three-way fsck row

Re: MEN!

Birka Barbie

Why solid-state disks are winning the argument

Re: Too many words

ER no…

Nand- flash start to act 'strangely' with temp variation or increase, as do all semiconductors.

And you should consider more about what goes wrong, rather than what goes right.

go read some of the forensic papers about what a nightmare these drives are to recover data from, then imagine something goes wrong with your setup.

Human DNA 'will be found on moon' – Brian Cox

Great…..

Not only have we polluted the Earth but now we are dumping spunk filled tubes on the moon.

Holidaying in the UK, the nightmare was always to digup or find a spunk filled jonny on the sands, some time in the future space tourists holidaying on the moon will also have that pleasure.

USB coding anarchy: Consider all sticks licked

Research……

In 2007 I visited suppliers in China to speak directly to the manufacturers of the various controller chips……

I have 'stuff' I was working on from 2008~. In 2011 I dropped an email to members of the security community, who were working on similar concepts.

My research covered 'anti-forensics' specifically to prevent block 'cloning' of storage devices, also systems for code injection into the data stream being read from the storage partition and systems for hiding encrypted data.( all done by controller reprogram)

I had future plans for when USB allowed a device to be both a master & slave, allowing it to probe external devices connected to hubs and utilize any WIFI adaptors plugged in.

All this was 'hidden' and non-detectable from outside of the device.

Some controllers also have a 'Fucked up mode" boot loader where they can page code from the nand-flash incase the masked rom is bad during production or extra functionality is needed.

With a multi-gb nand-flash you can build a 'paged' exploit kit, no longer limited to a particular internal code size of the controller chip.

One of my pets is a 'custom' development kit that 'emulates' the Nand-flash chip allowing rapid development from RAM/Disk without having to continually tool about , instead I just replace the 'Nand-chip' download an image of the contents of the 'flash' to ram then fiddle with the USB stick controller image in ram in an attached slave computer.

The greatest 'wet dream' are the Atheros chips….., consider all the 'datastream goodness' those reprogrammable chips have access to, plus they have their own handy WIFI which is a total black box to the computer or any computer based 'security' software.

Oi, Europe! Tell US feds to GTFO of our servers, say Microsoft and pals

All this bullshit could be circumvented if the applications were written properly.

Encrypt ALL the data sent to the servers and keep the private keys on the users computers,

but noooooo , these scum bags don't want to do that for at least two reasons

1. They loose access to mine the data.

2. Data de-duplication, encrypted data cannot be de-duplicated thereby pushing up storage space requirements.

Afterall what's the point in having all that lovely private data and internal documents from a massive number of companies and internal government departments if you cannot mine it ?

They just want to be greedy and are attempting to use European law to stop the US government from putting customers off cloud storage thereby fucking up their massive data grab.

Complain to your government and request that they NEVER use Microsoft products that store documents on cloud servers.

Exit the dragon: US govt blows $325m on China-beating 300PFLOPS monster computer

Anyone want to mine some crypto currencies?

FLASH better than DISK for archiving, say academics. Are they stark, raving mad?

Re: More to the story....

I would have to take exception to at least one of the points you make reference to in your paper

'Using Storage Class Memory for Archives with DAWN, a Durable Array of Wimpy Nodes'

"Even assuming data is overwritten daily, it would take over 25 years for a conservative write endurance of 10,000 cycles to be ex-ceeded [9]. Of greater concern are the issues of read dis-turb and data retention. "

The only mention I can see of 10,000 is related to 'latency' tests[9].

'Empirical Evaluation of NAND Flash Memory Performance'

Which goes on to state ( in the next paragraph):

"Due to the high variance of the measured endurance values, we have not collected enough data to draw strong inferences, and so report general trends instead of detailed results."

More of an issue, it the fact that since this was a 'latency' test for device speed, the writes & reads would have been in a highly compact burst on a 'new'ish chip. ( even the de-soldered devices)

More worrying…

They[9] state they measure "3.2 Endurance " by:

"Program/erase endurance was tested by repeatedly pro-gramming a single page with all zeroes, and then erasing the containing block. Although rated device endurance ranges from 10^4 to 10^5 program/erase cycles, in Figure 5 we see that measured endurance was higher, often by nearly two orders of magnitude, with a small number of outliers."

So basically this 10,000 writes was performed in a burst with values of 00 & FF ( Nand flash erases to FF)

which is not a true test of an MLC device, since the test is only testing 2 of the possible 4 states the cell can store AND the test is angled to minimize read/write disturbs from adjacent cells, not to mention the two BEST values for the read/write amps. to pick out. ( I say that because the author appears to be fully aware of how MLC devices function(2.1[9]) but uses a 'non-standard' representation for his test data all '1' or '0')

There is also no mention of:

1. The Block number they choose, in their 'single' block test ( that result seems to make me think it was block 0, which all manufacturers give the highest R/W rating to)

2.The ambient conditions the tests were performed at.

3. No mention of the Read ID's of the chips tested in [9]. ( manufacturers part numbers on the case are NOT an indication of the enclosed die, they might have been all from the same manufacturer)

I would 'like' to have seen the endurance data 'test' performed with a range of test data

1. 'True random data'

2. 'Marching ones'

3. 'Marching Zeros'

Really I would have expected a far better testing regime from the paper[9], I would have some concerns about the conclusions.

Re: more than one way to fail ...

That's the problem, there are too many salesmen with their bullS**t.

There is massive amounts of peer reviewed data on Nand flash failures, and it is not only related to 'wear out', or 'fade' but also read/write disturbs.

That's why I consign any 'non-peer reviewed data' to the WPB ( waste paper basket)

Examples of 'other' failure modes.

'Techniques for Disturb Fault Collapsing'

'Program Disturb Phenomenon by DIBL in MLC NAND Flash Device'

' Study of Stored Charge Interference and Fringing Field Effects in Sub-30nm Charge-Trapping NAND Flash'

'Reliability Issues and Models of sub-90nm NAND Flash Memory Cells'

Etc…Etc….

Re: Endurance?

Yep… modern drives use DRY Tantium caps, there is a bigger threat from 'stiction' or rubber degradation on the drive seals.

Re: Endurance?

I spent a year researching die level Nand flash for a dissertation, what I found out completely shocked me, so much so I never use SSD's for critical data storage or booting my os.

ANY sort of access to the Nand Flash array causes degradation to the data on the device (randomly!!). Read/write and even drift over time ( as the level amps. start to drift, new & old data charge levels starts to drift wider apart)

One thing they don't mention is that you can loose a complete chip of data if the read amps go out of spec .

MLC is potentially the kiss of death for your data, they store 4 different binary levels in 1 cell based on charge level rather than simple 'binary'.

So rather than storing '1 or 0' they can store '00','01','10','11' in a single bit, which means your differential read/write amps have to be SPOT on to clearly distinguish the 4 levels, if the amps. go out of spec…. so does the data.

It is VERY hard to loose a complete disk drive of data( relatively speaking), and there is usually a warning, this is not the case with Nand flash.

Worse is that some 'scumbag' companies are deliberately selling defective product into the market under a 'special' brand name, unfortunately their product and details are covered under NDA.

All I can say is that I was completely shocked at what crap is ending up on the market, some of the product is only good for 50-100 writes, ( mainly crap from China, BUT the dies are from 'reputable' known companies, so the internal die ID's read as 'quality' product when queried electronically, [you can ask a Nand chip 'who made you'])

Languages don't breed bugs, PEOPLE breed bugs, say boffins

You just know some guy in hiking boots and a beard is not going go care about error handling, it's just too pro-establishment.

Online tat bazaar eBay collapses in UK

Re: Don't bad mouth eBay on social media!

Also if you are a seller and you report another seller for being a scammer

I.E using edited material from YOUR web listing, then also be prepared to get a life ban.

Chinese coder's got 99 problems and getting hitched is one: Huge iPhone woo plot FAILS

Re: he just had to gimp on the last one, didnt he

It is also used as slang for peinus

Bitcoin is great and safe, says, er, the Bitcoin Foundation

Unfortunately,

Until the bitcoin foundation has a house cleaning exercise, they are going to have more more of a detriment to the Currency than anything else.

Far too many scumbags ,both Ex and current are still connected to the 'foundation'.

Bona-fide science: Which forms of unusual sex are mainstream?

Re: Missionary position

Well bugger me, I'd never thought of it that way……

Hmmm LEGO now there is complete proof it is normal.

Re: Phah....

Nope I would recommend against that……

Most reality rarely meets the level of the fantasy, and once the fantasy is realized, well that is the end of that.

Microsoft jolts awake, remembers it still makes Office for Mac

If they think they are going to anally probe me with that 360 crap they have another thing coming….

Remote code execution flaws fixed in tnftp and wget

Re: wtf is a boilerplate response?

Actually you missed the

"Apple takes security very seriously"

line…..

Disney wins Mickey Mouse patent for torrent-excluding search engine

Not to worry , it is only enforceable in the US…

Hey - who wants 4.8 terabyte almost as fast as memory?

Dolphin stolen from SQL, non existent product only computer renderings

Website that shoots content faster than you can read….

"Pianokey-Technology" ( everyone else calls then card slots) "is a unique capacity expansion technology owned by Memblaze, which is applied for PBlaze3 Flash Accelerator. Its design idea is derived from the chord of piano"

What could possibly go wrong…….

Men who sleep with lots of women lessen risk of prostate cancer

"it could be that anal intercourse produces physical trauma to the prostate," speculates the prof."

Thank god women don't have prostate glands then…..

Martha Lane Fox: Yeuch! The Internet is made by men?!?

It is disgusting…..

All those '1' and '0' being ejeculated from the ends of cables and inseminating those RJ45 sockets.

Hello, Ello. Still no ads and no features to sell. What do? Bag $5.5m

It is bolox…

All it will require is a buy out, since they have not specifically written this in their T&C

So a quick buyout and all that highly valuable data will be slurped.

FTDI yanks chip-bricking driver from Windows Update, vows to fight on

Re: @Donald Becker

Problem is , that until now the customers did not know they had been sold a Duck….

Really FTDI should just have disabled the driver after all they would be within their right, then force the USB consortium to deal with the stolen PID.

I would expect a lot of EBAY customers being ready to make claims against EBAY and PP once these new drivers get established.

Zuckerberg bombshell: Man married to Chinese woman speaks Chinese in China

Re: Is Old English The Only Real English?

"I don't know who told you otherwise but Simplified Chinese is real Mandarin."

ER…. no.

Simplified was introduced by Mao in the 50's to try and raise the level of education of the Chinese masses ( also to deny the people the ability to read past documents).

He claimed to have produced the form himself. ( are you saying that Chinese did not start writing 'real Chinese until the 50's?….. hint it is called Mandarin for a reason….)

Prior to that traditional characters were used, and if you go to Taiwan and say such things you would be punched in the face.

The true 'written form' has evolved over thousands of years, eventually stabilizing in about the 4-5 Century and were the central form used by the Emperors courts of China.

Re: Chinese

雞同鴨講

"Chicken & Duck speaking" is a rough equivalent, they say it is not used in Mandarin only Cantonese, but that is not correct, over the last 20 years there has been a merging of such terms.

It can cause all sorts of confusion in a brothel. ;-)

( Chicken =female prostitute, Duck = male prostitute)

Go check out the Hong Kong films based around his term, there are some very funny ones.

Re: Is Old English The Only Real English?

Yep…

There are just too many homographs in Chinese, any westernized system of representing the words, ends up messing you up, even just looking at the Chinese whilst learning the words is enough to prompt the correct usage.

But then all those so called experts would not be raking in millions from the various published systems.

But Traditional & Simplified do not have the same meaning( even for the same character groups) it is not always a 1:1 substitution.

Re: "So, kids, keep on learning those verb conjugations "

Or indeed animate objects.

He, she & it are all the same

Re: difficult to master?

Yep Exposing yourself and practice , solves many of life's problems.

The 'fun-nification' of computer education – good idea?

My absolute hatred of maths has nothing to do with the Iranian teacher I used to have ,slaps around the head, Blacks at the back and SMP ( Scottish matriculation program) whilst he went to chat up the English teacher next class room down.

Whisper tracks its users. So we tracked down its LA office. This is what happened next

Might be a CIA front….

Torvalds CONFESSES: 'I'm pretty good at alienating devs'

Re: Development

" the Django project changed their documentation on database replication to remove the terms "master server" and "slave server"."

Which is the kind of politically correct shit that just needs to be told to 'fuck off'.

Are we to change all the terms in electronics as well?

Can we no longer have SPI or I2c master & slave devices

Re: Eric Raymond's (in)famous quote

Some people think everything is about them and to them it is the same,

Because they have spent a good amount of time mentally justifying their contribution that it becomes part of them.

And attack on the idea is an attack on them directly, after all nearly every one wants to be recognized a genius.

Something ate Google's 8.8.8.8 at about eight in Asia's evening

Re: Rose tinting?

They would not use it like that………

More along the lines of… lets take every DNS request from Texas and run an analysis on the number of Gay cowboy sites that are hit.

Re: There's nothing wrong with using 8.8.8.8 for DNS...

there is EVERYTHING wrong with 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.8.4.

It identifies:

1. The network/ computer requesting a DNS lookup

2. The target.

3. with a little bit of work, it allows cookies & facebook redirects to identify individual users traffic & interests, especially if the target is using google analitics.

4. If something were to go wrong, every DNS lookup could be directed to a single location, without the safety of a randomizing selection of alternative DNS servers.

NetWare sales revive in China thanks to that man Snowden

Groupwise was a complete abortion, then they added direct connection to the internet via an SMTP NLM , which blew a massive hole in the Netware security.( you could leverage text messages to send commands to the groupwise system)

Not only did the SMTP module have ZERO security, it allowed the free relaying of any messages sent to it, from ANYWHERE on the internet to anywhere.

Almost the biggest waste of money our company invested in computer systems.

don't even get me started about 'arcserve' or even 'faxserve'