Posts by Doctor Syntax 42420 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"We're just saying that NAT is an unnecessary headache, that it breaks too much stuff and requires too many compromises, and that you should be avoiding it."
Millions of people are, however, running NAT and haven't even noticed that their stuff is broken.
"When IPv4 was under development during the 1970s, it must have seemed reasonable to specify 32-bit source and destination fields that dictate approximately 4.3 billion possible addresses."
And now that those 4.3 billion addresses are moe or less all allocated and, via NAT and CGNAT, over-allocated that's many billions of nodes, some with IPv4-only baked in via firmware which need to be migrated if you want an IPv6-only world. That's a seriously non-trivial task. And it's no good saying, as one commentard more or less did some time ago, if you don't understand hex you shouldn't be using it because most of the owners of those billions of nodes don't, never will and shouldn't need to.
Unless a scheme had been devised to seamlessly - let me go full Bob here: SEAMLESSLY - migrate those it was always going to end up like this.
Would it have been feasible to devise a protocol which accepted IPv4 as a fully accepted subset? I don't know, but if it would then anything else would have been a serious mistake.
"Instead, he'll always be the person who, to all intents and purposes, sued a kid for using his photo that she cribbed from the net for a school project "
Maybe so - and incorrectly. According to the article he sued the school for publishing it on the net, not the child for using it in a project.
"However, there are a number of websites where when you hyperlink, if it detects an invalid "referrer" field in the URL request, it substitutes the image with a placeholder image telling you where to licence from."
I can't help thinking that this is directly contrary to the whole purpose of the web and HTTP. The whole idea as published was that if you provided a URL it was to enable people to link to it. What's the difference between someone slotting in a URL to your work and you taking someone else's work (TB-L's work in this case) and misusing it?
Try running a local history website. There are often a good few images of the locality, often originating in old post-cards which have been passed around, published in books with titles such as "Old Dunny on the Hill in Pictures" and nobody knows where they originated. Often they're from postcards but a local company publishing postcards in the 1920s has disappeared without trace.
"Because the stack layout of a function is determined at compile time, we can control what data will be overwritten when the overflow occurs, which gives us an opportunity to ensure the overflow will not be exploitable."
That assumes that what the compiler does with the source is predictable. Optimisation might affect that. Even if the result is what was intended it might not be after a new release of the compiler.
"The truth however is that ICANN continues to be baffled by the fact that the European court system has no interest in its corporate interests and refuses to be told that the Whois service is as important as ICANN considers it to be."
I think it's more of a case that ICANN isn't as important as it thinks itself to be.
"On the other, such moves would also hammer a stake into the corpse of the Vega+."
It depends. The IP would be one of the assets the administrators would want to realise cash on. If there's perceived to be a market for the device someone might be interested in buying it and goinf into production. Not that that would help those who've already paid.
"Customers who may have been impacted by this issue were notified."
Which customers are these? Salesforce's customers or the customers who had their misfortune to have their data spaffed to someone not entitled to have it? Are any of them in the EU and if so have the appropriate regulators been informed? What was that about 72 hours?
"some impatient woman ramming my car because we weren't moving, neither was the car in front, or the police offering stood in front of them!"
Years ago, in the queue for security checks leaving the ferry port at Larne the driver in the car behind was flashing lights and gesturing impatiently. I was strongly tempted to flash my official pass at the police checkpoint and suggest the driver behind was acting suspiciously.
I later wished I had as a means of getting retaliation in early. Many years later my wife worked in QC for an Anglo-Italian firm which had a plant in Larne and in retrospect the driver looked very like her then Italian boss. He didn't like some of the figures she produced about a batch of product and "adjusted" them. When it turned out the batch was indeed substandard it was she who got fired for producing an erroneous analysis.
"They've evolved to the point where they can recognise a tech' who actually knows what they are doing, so behave properly in fear of being molested."
This can even happen remotely. Only this week SWMBO's sister rang to say could I come and look at her laptop on Thursday afternoon and described a catalogue of woes leading me to wonder if it was malware (quietly wondering what sites her husband might have visited if he'd borrowed it). Oh, no, it was the cat that had walked across the keys.
On Thursday morning she rung to say it had "fixed itself". Probably fear of being molested by somebody who didn't know what they were doing (it runs Windows) and might have taken the step of installing Linux.
"who all enjoy a decent, index linked final-salary pension"
People keep saying this. It's actually a smaller proportion of final salary than I encountered in the private sector. Every time HMG decided there should be a freeze on pay rises it was to their own staff they could apply that. Until I got out I had every expectation of retiring in penury.
"so you go to out of town superstore to shop instead as it has free parking"
The "free" parking is funded by letting it out to parking vultures who hand out fines to people who might only have driven through to drop off a passenger. And yet the chains who rent premises there don't seem to mind being treated as bait.
And yet both town centre and out-of-town venues wonder why they lose business to the net.
"while it has been shown that adding an abrasive material such as sand and lubrication can indeed help to cut using copper, this again, is just a possible theory that is unlikely to ever be proved."
Nowadays if you want to cut stone with a smooth surface you use a diamond saw. My uncles who ran a quarry retired without even installing one. They did a lot of stone cutting, however. Their reciprocating "saw" didn't actually have teeth or anything like that, all it did was move sand back and forward. If you have plenty of man-hours available it's surprising what you can do with simple means. Technology allows you to do things faster and more cheaply but if you don't rate those attributes highly you don't necessarily need the technology.
"That used to worry me too so for safety's sake we had an earthenware Belfast sink fitted instead"
Our Belfast sink in a Belfast lab leaked badly despite all attempts to tighten up the joints on the drain. I only realised later it was the effect of the hydrofluoric acid on the glaze.
"When you have 20+ servers, changing the administrator password because Joe Admin left the company is not so simple."
I think the word you were looking for was "convenient". Do not trade security for convenience.
"Passwords can be cracked or leaked, so a security compromise of one server quickly becomes a site-wide problem (unless you use unique passwords, which complicates the distribution issue further)."
Just so. If an admin's personal password is cracked what stands between the cracker and root? If you have multiple admin users the cracker only has to get lucky with one of them.
"In other words, think about how you implement security instead of just bashing some random tool based on a 7 year old forum post."
I don't have to base my dislike of sudo on any thing as recent as a 7 year old forum post. I can make up my own mind.
"Firstly, sudo logs all its invocations. Secondly, sudo can be configured to only allow a user to run a certain subset of commands."
Those, in my view are because sudo is a kludge to overcome:
"su is an all or nothing command."
Which it has become as a kudge because root is now used for a great many purposes which could and should have separate administrators: e.g lpadmin to manage printers, bin to install and upgrade S/W. But that was too inconvenient so root got handed all the powers.
"Finally, su requires the destination user's password (e.g. root) whereas sudo requires the current user's password (or not at all). "
You say that as if it's an advantage. If the user has adopted a weak password that's all that stands between anybody who cracks it and root permissions. Requiring a second password provides an extra layer of protection.
"One benefit of this, is that when an employee leaves, you don't have to change all the root passwords, you just delete their account."
Again, it's the convenience thing.
I harbour suspicions about that (convenient)option to enter further sudo commands within a given period. It opens the door to an exploit.
