Posts by Orv

Just how rigged is America's broadband world? A deep dive into one US city reveals all

Re: When I read articles like this...

For what possible reason would "everybody" need 100 to their home?

Off-site backup, for one. I mean, I'm hoping you're not going to lose everything if your boat sinks?

Also, latency goes up fast on low-bandwidth connections if someone starts downloading or streaming video. If you do anything latency-sensitive (VoIP, gaming, etc.) it becomes noticeable problem fast. It's also a bit awkward when Microsoft's latest patch takes hours to download. Basically, no one needs 100 mbps all the time, but the ability to burst at higher speeds is very useful.

Face-PALM: US Patent and Trademark Office database down for 5 days and counting

NOAA's servers are having issues, too, although it's probably unrelated. Specifically, www.aviationweather.gov has been down all day. There is a backup server (bcaws.aviationweather.gov), but it doesn't have all the API endpoints.

At around 0530Z, network access to our web provider went down. As of 2000Z, some web access is available but the data are old (last data still from 05Z). The web pages are still unavailable. We are monitoring the situation. An effort to recover lost data will happen once network access is restored and stable.

Pentagon 'do not buy' list says нет to Russia, 不要 to Chinese code

Re: Protectionism vs. security

I would have given them the benefit of the doubt before foreign cars were declared a "national security threat." The term no longer has any meaning.

FBI boss: We went to the Moon, so why can't we have crypto backdoors? – and more this week

Re: Question to FBI Boss

Same reason I haven't been to Fargo in 18 years. Went there once, found there wasn't much to see.

Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

Re: "Since when? I recall Google pulled out of China"

Ah, my bad. It was a TLA collision but I should have been able to gather that from context.

Re: You can't fork Android

You can disable all those apps, fairly easily.

Disable, yes. But that just removes the icon. They're still in there, taking up space, and still getting updates.

Re: "Since when? I recall Google pulled out of China"

The two Chinese-made phones I've had had GPS capability, although it's possible that's an export market thing. I've observed my current ZTE phone locking on to GPS, GLONASS, and BEIDOU.

Re: Morons

The thing is, Google needs the EU more than the EU needs Google. You can't just cut off the second-largest economy in the world and expect to make it as a publicly-traded company; investors would revolt instantly. Heck, China is only the third largest and Google bends over backwards to meet their demands.

Re: Apple

If manufactures don't want to use android they should go and do what google did and build their own OS.

Ah, but there's the rub. If they start selling their own OS, they lose access to Google Play services for any Android phones they're continuing to sell. So they have to give up an OS that has >80% market share before they even try to get their own OS off the ground. This had a lot to do with Firefox OS and FireOS dying off. No phone manufacturer could afford to sell phones loaded with those OS's, because they'd effectively lose the ability to sell Android phones.

Re: Apple

...how have Apple been able to keep on doing this on OSX (after Microsoft Windows decision with IE) and with iOS (Safari is the only browser preinstalled and there is NO other App store option).

Apple does not have a monopoly share of the market, and never has. They may have a monopoly on iPhones, but >80% of the smartphone market is Android. Before Android took off they were in third place behind RIM and Symbian.

Re: Google needs to fix Chrome

The hosts file has long been low-hanging fruit for malware to intercept network traffic. I'm not exactly shocked that it's being locked down. I know a lot of people have been using it as a cheap and cheerful way to blacklist sites but there are other ways.

Re: At least it's not BING

Google was recently forced to break their image search service by eliminating direct links to images. I now use DuckDuckGo for that.

Re: You can't fork Android

If you're that short on storage that the amount taken up by a few Google apps would even be noticeable, then you're screwed anyway, if not now then soon.

One problem is it can bloat over time. Samsung phones were famous for this for a while -- each OTA update would add another layer, until the bloatware pre-installed apps had crowded out everything else.

Another German state plans switch back from Linux to Windows

Re: The problem is not Linux itself...

Almost everywhere I've worked the setup of choice for tech staff was MacBooks for office use and Linux on servers. The two get on especially well, since you can forward X applications to OS X as long as you have XQuartz installed.

I have, at various times, tried using a Linux laptop for my work. Ultimately it came down to having to chase down too many small issues. I can't do my job properly if I'm constantly having to fix my tools.

Re: "They dont have some sort of electronic calendar?"

Which of these are not supported by CalDav/CardDav/GroupDav?

My experience is that CalDav sync is usually only reliable in a one-way sync environment. For example, you used to be able to sync a Mac calendar to Google Calendar via CalDav, but due to numerous problems they had to cut that back to only one-way sync. (You can view events in Mac calendar, but not change them.) The problem here is different companies interpret the standards differently, where there even are standards. (vCalendar is not really standardized, for example, in spite of its popularity.)

Another issue is free/busy status, which kept a lot of people on Outlook at some of my previous employers. Sure, Mozilla Mail could receive a VCS attachment fine, but you couldn't see when anyone else was likely to be available.

Ah, British summer. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the internet is on the fritz

Re: Pick two from the trinity

I had a brief stint with a railroad signal department, and what really made them sweat bullets is directional boring. In theory it's a great time saver -- instead of digging up a road, just run a small tunneling device under it that you can steer. In reality, you're flying blind through dirt with very little idea of what you might hit on the way. I believe in the end they decided, over some objections by the union, to just contract out all their directional boring work so that someone else would bear the liability.

That's clever, and will fix local outages fine, but are you sure your 3G provider doesn't use the same fiber for backhaul that your ISP does? I've lived in places where a fiber cut took down not only Internet for a college campus, but phone service for the entire town, before.

In that case the mesh concept did work for campus -- sort of. They had another link to a satellite campus, which in turn happened to have another backbone link. Problem was this resulting in the entire traffic load of a T3 trying to go down a single skinny ATM line, so in practice it was almost totally unusable. Made for some interesting traceroutes, though.

Even if you pay for redundancy it's not unlikely that your two connections with both end up running along the same highway, power line, or railroad corridor. There's only so many places it's cost-effective to put cable.

Re: Talking of bright things in the sky

Cherry picker bloke would have to be right in front of and close to the transmitter for an extended period to come to harm.

A friend of mine used to work on military radar systems. Those really *do* have enough power to cook you in short order, and the wavelengths in use tend to resonate in some pretty important body structures. Eyeballs, for example. They were informed that if the transmitter was accidentally switched on, their first hint would be dry eyes due to their tears evaporating, and the recommended action was to immediately step off the tower. Whatever injuries they got from being caught by their safety harnesses would be far easier to repair than cooked eyeballs.

Re: Talking of bright things in the sky

To be fair, the military protects its links rather more carefully than your average Internet provider. I've heard tales of fiber encased in two-foot-thick concrete. For microwave links, the solution was to use some extremely robust antennas: http://long-lines.net/places-routes/MD01/020719B-11.jpg

Re: Pick two from the trinity

Hence why the end stage of pre-digging prep tends to involve sending some guys 'round with metal detectors and spray paint.

Projects in the US to nail this data down more comprehensively stalled after 9/11 due to security concerns; it seems that having one central, accessible database with the locations of all the vital infrastructure was maybe not the best idea. One poor bastard had his PhD dissertation spiked by the NSA for that reason -- he'd mapped out all the Internet backbone cables. Left him in a bit of a bind, since you can't be awarded a PhD without publishing your work.

Re: Big red ball?

Last year the Thomas Fire in SoCal played havoc with the power to the Santa Barbara area, as there's only one transmission line and the fire was burning right along its path. The problem wasn't so much direct damage to the wires, it was that the smoke particles and heat reduced the ionization threshold of the air and caused the line to expand and sag, forcing them to cut the power to avoid catastrophic arcs.

As Corning unveils its latest Gorilla Glass, we ask: What happened to sapphire mobe screens?

Re: Phone appearance

Part of the problem is unless you buy one of the five or six current flagship phones on the market, you're not going to find a case for it unless maybe it comes with one.

Re: Phone appearance

For instance, cases make buttons and jacks more recessed than they would otherwise be.

This.

I have yet to have a case that didn't require me to carve it away around the headphone jack in order to plug things in securely, which makes the whole thing even uglier.

Re: Seems obvious ...

The last phone I shattered was *because* of the case. I had a Sony Xperia Z4 Compact in a flip case. One day I pulled the case out of my pocket without having a good enough grip on the back part, and it flips open on the hinge, with the crack-the-whip effect *slinging* the phone out of the case and onto the pavement. Since it was a plastic phone without much of a bezel, the impact was transferred directly to the edge of the glass.

My current phone is a ZTE Axon Mini with an aluminum body and fairly fat top and bottom bezels, and it's got dinged corners from being dropped a few times, but it hasn't broken yet. Why have I dropped it? Well, the display goes right up to the sides, and the case edges are rounded to give the impression of thinness, so there's really only about a 1/8" wide area on each edge that I can hold it by without triggering the touchscreen.

British Airways' latest Total Inability To Support Upwardness of Planes* caused by Amadeus system outage

It's of keen interest to the tow pilot, but proper balance is also important to the person at the other end of the rope! Gliders can have their handling affected just as adversely as any other aircraft, it's just that with only two or three seats and maybe some water ballast the calculations are quite a bit easier. Often they just placard the seats with the required weight.

I used to fly ASK-15s. I was skinny back then and had to fly with 20 lbs of lead under my seat to meet the required minimum front seat weight. One of our other gliders, a Schweitzer 2-22, had its own lead weight blocks that could be bolted into the nose as needed.

Re: Phew

I recently sat for half an hour on a plane because someone else was parked at our gate.

The problem is flights get delayed, canceled, irregular charter flights get booked -- it's all very chaotic and that makes it hard to know gate numbers too far in advance. I've been told one gate at check-in and found it had changed by the time I finished going through security, sometimes.

Re: Amadeus

...why isnt each passenger and their hand luggage, if these are then put into the calculation you could get a good measure of the centre of mass and the TOW of the aircraft, along with work on distributing the passengers better.

My guess is, since passengers are evenly distributed throughout the plane, it's easier and reasonably effective to just use averages -- at least on large planes, where you're averaging across a pretty large number of people. Weighing each passenger would add a lot of time to the already lengthy boarding process, and the extra time spent during turnaround would probably outweigh any potential fuel savings.

Re: Amadeus

Many passenger cars *are* actually over their GVWR if you load up four adults and their luggage. And the vast majority of small aircraft cannot technically legally fly with an adult in every seat. In both cases, they're often driven or flown "over gross" anyway; in small aircraft this is usually not a big problem as long as the center of gravity limits are respected.

The real question is, how did we do this before the age of computers? Paper, pencil and human experience ... all easily replaced by a computer ... until something goes wrong.

I believe airlines had employees who did basically nothing but make these calculations.

The thing is, they were fallible too. A surprising number of old accident investigations found that the weight-and-balance calculations were incorrect, although in the vast majority of cases they were close enough that it didn't create a problem. A computer system that reliably gets it right but occasionally goes down entirely is probably better than a human who occasionally sends a flight into the air based on incorrect numbers, although neither is ideal.

Re: this what happens when they get the sums wrong

Yup. There's also a sad litany of small airplane crashes due to weight-and-balance issues. Most of the time on a small plane you can just wing it (ha), especially if you're flying solo, but if you're packing in a full load of passengers and luggage it can get away from you, especially if (as is typical) the luggage all goes in the tail compartment. This is what's thought to have killed Aaliyah; heavy bodyguards in the back seat and luggage in the back.

If you screw it up, best case is the CG is too far forward and you can't get the nose up to take off.

Worst case, it's so far aft that you don't have enough elevator authority to keep the nose down, and you end up getting just high enough to crash before you stall. In between there's a whole range of traps, including the aircraft becoming unstable when the flaps are extended and the center of lift shifts.

Techie sues ex-bosses, claims their AI avatar tech was faked – and he was allegedly beaten up after crying foul

Still, no need to assault the guy. Just wipe it by remote control. I assume a laptop with data that vital to the company would have tracking and remote-erase capability, right? And be fully backed up on-site?

Re: Nasty

I suspect by "personal data" he really meant "incriminating evidence."

Oldest swinger in town, Slackware, notches up a quarter of a century

I got my first copy of Slackware from a high school friend. He'd downloaded it all and offered to copy it for me if I gave him a box of disks. At the time I had only local BBS dial-in so I had no other way to get it without a long-distance phone call. In hindsight, tinkering with that distro was the entry point to my current career.

Don't panic about domain fronting, an SNI fix is getting hacked out

Re: Or we finally switch to IPv6

You certainly *can* pile lots of sites onto one IPv6 address and use a hack like SNI. You just don't necessarily have to. People who run privacy-conscious services will probably want to stick with an SNI-like scheme, and most other people probably will out of force of habit. (One address per server is pretty ingrained now, and it's so convenient for administration to just point a bunch of CNAME records at one A record.)

For that matter, given the large address space in even a minimum IPv6 allocation, there's no reason you can't round-robin to lots of different ones and effectively force a choice between blocking the whole prefix or not blocking at all.

Re: Or we finally switch to IPv6

I doubt it. For starters a typical IPv6 delegated prefix is a /56. There are about 72 quadrillion of these, so it would take us a while to get through them.

A /56 is a pretty decent amount of address space, so a typical home or small business customer isn't going to care about buying anything bigger. In fact IPv6 mostly makes the whole concept of a netmask automatic and invisible to end users. (Besides, what's this idea of ISPs needing "selling points" other than "we're the ISP that serves your address, you'll take what we give you"?)

Re: How does Encrypted SNI protect against censorship from DNS Providers?

Scenarios 1 and 2 are only possible if China has the server's certificate and private key. Now, even without those things China could always MITM and provide their own certificate to the client, but that would be extremely obvious and would create lots of breakage. 3 would also break lots of stuff since so much of the web uses HTTPS now.

4 is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the server isn't necessarily one in China itself. The goal here is to make it harder to block requests at the network level without lots of collateral damage. It makes it more difficult (although not impossible) to run a "Great Firewall" type censorship system.

Re: How does Encrypted SNI protect against censorship from DNS Providers?

I think the concern is more about censorship by ISPs and/or government firewalls (in other words, China.) It's trivial to change DNS providers, but not so trivial to change what backbone your traffic traverses.

Re: Or we finally switch to IPv6

That would be ideal, since IPv6 handles multiple IPs per host very gracefully. Unfortunately even if everyone dual-stacked their servers tomorrow IPv4 would still be with us a long time. Many organizations that have very large v4 allocations haven't even started deploying IPv6, because address exhaustion isn't a pain point for them yet. (The university I work for, which has an entire class B for their wired network, is in this category. I think they should deploy IPv6 anyway, but it's not my call.)

Dudes. Blockchain. In a phone. It's gonna smash the 'commoditization of humanity' or something

Re: Merkle Tree

Short answer: It depends on the hash function.

Longer answer: In Bitcoin reversing a difficult hash is used as a form of proof-of-effort for distributing new coins. That's only one way to do it, although it's the easiest one to conceptualize because it involves real-world inputs with value (power and time.) If the goal is not to create digital items that are supposed to be a store of value, there doesn't necessarily have to be a high level of effort involved.

That said, yeah, a lot of stuff currently has "blockchain" tacked on it that either isn't using blockchain at all, or is using it as an inferior substitute for MySQL or MongoDB.

Re: Of all places to start

Email has, if anything, become more centralized. There are a couple reasons for this:

1. Spam. ISPs have found it necessary to block direct SMTP from their users to limit spam, so everything has to go through a central smarthost anyway. Filtering *incoming* spam is also a difficult and time-consuming job and one of the reasons I stopped running my own private mail server.

2. Convenience. People want to be able to access their mail from their desktop, their laptop, and their phone. That requires some kind of central repository. No one particularly wants to go back to the old days when you POP'd your mail down to your desktop machine, and that was it, it was trapped there.

There are already decentralized file-sharing services, but uptake has been slow. Not a lot of people are eager to share their disk space with others, especially when you never know if someone's going to upload kiddie porn and get you arrested.

Rub some bacon blockchain on it.

AAAAAAAAAA! You'll scream when you see how easy it is to pwn unpatched HPE servers

I've seen a few machines that defaulted to failover mode, although they weren't Microservers.

Best to check the channel config and make sure the iLO doesn't have an IP address. Under Linux you can do this on the machine with ipmitool.

Re: Hope at least your management interfaces are on a separated, segregated VLAN...

The usual trick is to use a "bastion host" to access the management network. This moves the problem to having to keep the bastion host secure, of course, but even desktop OS's usually have higher security than iLOs. The machine need not run any services other than SSH.

Xen 4.11 debuts new ‘PVH’ guest type, for the sake of security

I've mostly switched to KVM, not because I had any problems with Xen, but because KVM became CentOS's preferred VM.

I had to run a VMware machine for a while once, in order to use a prefab VM appliance, and I can't say I enjoyed the experience. Although the console TUI did make me slightly nostalgic for Novell Netware.

BGP hijacker booted off the Internet's backbone

Re: Good news all round

I think the main reason it takes so long is there's no central authority for these things. Each individual peering provider has to be independently convinced to cut them off. I think we should be glad that cutting a business off from the Internet is not something that people do lightly.

Google offers to leave robocallers hanging on the telephone

Where I live "reverse 911" systems are often used to call everyone in a particular area to inform them about emergency evacuations. (In California during fire season, it's pretty much guaranteed that this will happen *somewhere*.) I worry about systems like this blocking those calls. They also use SMS, but SMS is not a reliable service.

EAS (Emergency Alert System) is the obvious solution, but after last years' experience they've cut back on using it because it's far too blunt an instrument; EAS alerts generally cover a whole county, which here means people 30 miles away from the threat were getting woken up in the middle of the night. This was resulting in a lot of people turning alerts off entirely.

EmDrive? More like BS drive: Physics-defying space engine flunks out

Re: N-Waves Again

Almost certainly self-delusion, combined with a misunderstanding of how the eye reacts to dim light at off-center angles. At the time there was no scientific instrument as sensitive as the human eye, so it's somewhat understandable that people were sucked in.

Cops suspect Detroit fuel station was hacked before 10 drivers made off with 2.3k 'free' litres

It's theft. You took the fuel, you didn't pay for it. It's pretty simple.

Moreover, it's almost certainly "Theft of motor vehicle fuel" (750.367c):

"The secretary of state shall suspend the operator's or chauffeur's license of a person convicted of an offense or attempted offense under this chapter involving the theft of motor vehicle fuel that occurred by pumping the fuel into a motor vehicle..."

In the case I mentioned the police essentially gave people a choice -- pay for the fuel they took, or be charged with theft and have their license suspended.