Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The migration away from US services should have started when the US Cloud Act was passed."
Given the prior existence of national security letters and all the rest of it that dependence should never have existed. GDPR should have made it illegal and all the fig-leaves that were constructed to allow it to continue despite GDPR were an obvious fail at the time. All the CLOUD Act did was give Microsoft an excuse when they were in a legal bind.
None of those links even mentions the CLOUD act let alone provide an explanation of why it wouldn't apply.
I suppose it would be possible for a US company to come to a franchise model where the company provides the S/W and IP to a franchisee wholly owned and managed by nationals of the territory to which sovereign services are to be provided with the contract signed in and subject only to the laws of that territory and specifying strict hands-off by the franchisor. That would enable them to set up a Google, AWS or Microsoft-branded sovereign cloud.
It would also be possible, I suppose, for a company with experience setting up a generic cloud service to provide consultancy, initial or on-going, to a locally owned and operated sovereign cloud.
Even then, the local operators would have to have some means of verifying S/W from the provider.
What I do not see is how local day-to-day operation and even part ownership of a US corporation's operation is going to be able to prevent against a demand by the USG with its notions of extra-territorial legislation.
I'm surprised that Frank Karlitschek is surprised about "the espionage factor". Data sovereignty has been a concern for a long time although maybe not as prominent as it should have been (i.e. not prominent enough for governments to take much action). It should still be a factor in a post-Trump world.
Along the same lines I find "Vultr, an American-based company with datacenters worldwide, has seen an uptick in interest in sovereign infrastructure" a remarkable statement. Can a US company provide infrastructure which is sovereign for any country other then the US?
At least people are waking up to the significance of "It's somebody else's computer you don't control".
Certainly anything written non-portably for Windows is going to have to be rewritten to run anywhere else. That's a fact of life i moving platforms. It's a very long time since I wrote anything for Windows but my experience over a few years was that it was just a perverse system to write for. In reality it might be easier than indicated here* to move stuff based on DotNet over to Linux where is is supported with official Microsoft implementations.
OTOH Pinta, which is based on DotNet, is distinctly crashy here. Admittedly I'm asking it to handle a really large map with multiple layers but Gimp doesn't mind the same material (I use both - some operations are easier on Pinta, others on Gimp, at least for a non-graphics person who's officially been declared by his wife to be "not artistic").
* Note that this isn't really about porting S/W, it's non-Microsoft cloud vendors building a case against Microsoft about pricing differentials so Rice-Davies applies. AIUI Linux is actually a major client OS on Azure.
As I read it, IBM has been investing in expensive flagship offices so it needs some window dressing in them to avoid looking stupid. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire out-of-work actors for the occasions when they have visitors they need to impress? Or maybe all those smiling well-dressed young models who you see posing in any advert for business products?
A single resource with multiple, mirrored servers works well in other circumstances. It could also have multiple coordinated maintainers so that if one gets funding dropped the work will continue. It would probably end up with the US leeching off other nations' work.
"Either a system is democratic in intent and outcome, or it's not."
Let's see:
Direct vote by all citizens on every issue.
First past the post voting for representatives
Proportional representation of various arrangements
The same population at any given type might have different outcomes from the various systems. All are democratic in intent but does this mean that only one - or none - are democratic if they don't produce the saem outcome? Who decides if the outcome was democratic? You? The winners? The losers? Winners and losers might disagree so tho then decides whether it was a democratic outcome?
Direct vote doesn't, of course, scale well so we might have to modify it for anything larger than a city state by combining it with some other form.
Different parts of the polity may vote in different ways. If one voted much differently to the rest but are nevertheless bound by the decisions of the rest is the outcome democratic? Should the exceptional area be spun out into a completely separate polity? Would various levels of local or devolved government be a more democratic arrangement - oops, we can't have "more democratic" can we if it either is or isn't democratic.
Seemed simple when you wrote it, but welcome to reality.
Reports of shipments into the US peaked in Q1 suggesting non-US vendors and their importers had anticipated tariffs? How come the likes of AMD & Nvidia didn't, even even park them in warehouses in Canada if not further afield?
Whatever, it's a peculiar way to encouraging manufacturing in the US.
I think it's the good chaps rule in operation. If, for instance, some good chaps running a bank have a bit of a misfortune and have to pay out a few million $CURRENCY to get it sorted out that's no reason why a good chap in government would want to see them having to go to prison, not when it's been sorted so easily.
What's more a good chap in government has to look at the bigger picture. For instance in 5 years' time he might be in banking himself and it would be a rum do if he had a bit of misfortune and couldn't get it sorted without his old legislation sending him to prison. A good chap wouldn't want to see that sort of thing happening, would he?
We're dealing here at a level of INSERTs, DELETEs, UPDATEs and COMMITs or ROLLBACKs on the actual data of the commercial transaction as it's being processed. If the order for 3 pairs of socks get s encrypted to 287 in the course of the transaction the user might notice and if key fields get encrypted to different values in the tables that they joins there's liable to be an error thrown PDQ as the indexes become corrupted. OTOH there might be an argument that some product names at Ikea and vendors names on Amazon have already been.
The objective, really would be to keep the database sufficiently isolated from anywhere where a marketroid might click on a phishing email, a dodgy but of javascript downloaded onto a server on the fly or whatever. I get the impression that we have businesses set up with networks of machines with storage shared at file system level so that malware introduced through one is readily written to another if there's an escalation of privilege. That becomes a lot harder if the only traffic to some node is through a single protocol that doesn't deal with file systems. On reflection I suppose it would be possible, given an escalation of privilege to introduce a malware stored procedure but even then change control would help - something like the DBA granting and then dropping the required privilege required to upload SPs. Basically you connect the server to the outside world through a very narrow (in functionality) terms.
I suppose as a sometime DBA I take a paranoid approach but the data which represents the real business needs to be separated from all the wielders of spreadsheets and powerpoint presenters.
Right now I'm chasing a UK financial institution as to why I've been sent a click to confirm email to an address that should be part of my customer ID when the email wasn't intended for me and, of course, only a small number of customers were affected. Clearly that information hasn't been kept where it should as it should.
"However, they aren't going to work so well for online businesses because all the transactions between the last backup and its time of reload will have vanished into cyberspace."
What sort of online business runs on an RDBMS that doesn't use transaction backups?
Unfortunately I suppose the answer is an ordinary one.
Let's think of what seems an overly old-fashioned concept. A physical server that runs nothing but a basic OS and the RDBMS service. it has a network connection on which only the RDBMS service port is open. It is controlled solely by the console - either a directly connected monitor and keyboard or a serial terminal plugged into tty0 and located next to it. It has its own directly attached media drives for backup and for installing upgrades over trusted media. It's not somebody else's computer.
Before the mutterings of Stuxnet let's remember that we're wanting to proof the system against ransomware, not a nation-state attacker.
"Although they can be hard to test without a spare machine to test them on."
If you have a DR contract this should include provision for testing. You can test a full recovery that way. I found this to be ... instructional. The first test led to changes in the order on which the files were put onto tape. Moving some closer to the start of the tape meant that it was quicker to get some functionality in place so that database restoration could proceed from another tape drive before the file system had been fully backed up.
Testing tells you much more than the simple fact of whether you can restore your system.
Horizon seems to have been a case of someone too close to the day-to-day operation becoming blind to its limitations, especially if there was incentive to be so. It takes a fresh pair of eyes to see the problems. That was how I conceived my role back in the day - a fresh pair of eyes. The police investigate, they bring in bags of potential exhibits, the statements, their hypothesis. Can I, without having been enrolled in any group-think that might have happened, find evidence that contradicts the hypothesis? If I can it avoids a miscarriage of justice, if I look hard and fail it strengthens the hypothesis but again it's up to the court to become the final arbiter of fact.
There were two sides, the gathering of evidence - in my day in conventional forensic science often delegated to police SOCOs - and the testing. I'm not sure this is brought out strongly enough; presentation and testing are not the same thing.
Yes, of course it was a failure to distinguish between grams & mg. I'd hope that most readers of this site would know that. You'd maybe expect that the editors of a site called healthdigest.com would notice. You don't need to refer to DoA listings to see that they're nonsense. But at least twice - those were the ones which caught my eye, there may have been more. It also wasn't a casual news write-up, it presented itself as being somewhat analytical. Perhaps I should have said would the editors expect him to consume over 3½ kilos of salt a day?
Interesting liink. It says "A 3-ounce serving of broiled ground beef has 3 grams of saturated fat and 75 grams of cholesterol. "
3 ounces are 85 grams. That only leaves 7 grams for everything else.
Another gem:
" Trump's order of two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate shake would end a long day without eating on the campaign trail (via Business Insider). That comes to more than 2,600 calories, 46 grams of saturated fat, and almost 3,600 grams of sodium."
Would he really consume over 3½ kilos of salt a day?
Software development and maintenance is difficult. It involves such requirements as thinking. Automation would make it simpler. It is proposed therefore to set up an automatic process which makes random changes to the software at random times. Those that cause problems can then be reverted, those that don't can be left in even if their effects are meaningless.
Hope isn't going to get you very far.
Remember where all that debt came from: you buying stuff you couldn't make. You still won't be able to make it and now people are already to buy less of the stuff you do make. They'll also be less willing to invest in your country to enable you to make more because investors want to see stability first.
No, hope isn't going to get you very far at all.
that debt is was happily bought by foreign investors who consider considered America both safe and a good place to invest.
FTFY
If the US wants to continue selling their debt they're going to have to jack up interest rates a lot.
When a UK PM has that effect on bonds their party can remove them in less time than it takes a lettuce to wilt.
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