Posts by vtcodger 2029 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
That said, do Google allow backups of G Suite?
Good question. And even if they do, how easy are the backups to do? I recall that about the third thing Google did when in bought Blogger many, many years ago was to delete the capability to load Blogger websites by ftp. So much for any possibility of easily maintaining a local copy of your website. (Or of moving it quickly to another host).
On a 286 machine it was quite usable.
It was probably usable if you could afford a hard drive and had a megabyte or so of free disk space. I ran Windows 2.0 once from floppies just to see what it looked like. Almost as slow as Amazon's web site has become in recent months. Interesting, but not very usable.
You think you're going to get that kind of deployment, vendor support and testing overnight with any half-assed middle ground?
Overnight? Of course not. Only IPv6 fanbois think (or used to think -- maybe they've learned a bit) implementation details are simple. OTOH, everybody supports IPv4 also, so maybe it'd be good idea next time to plan to support it as a subset of the network protocols.
I actually don't have any problem with running major network backbones on IPv6. It seems that might be a pretty good idea. Folks at that level have the resources to deal properly with IPv6 and I'm under the impression that IPv6 includes real improvements in message handling. For all I know, a well planned IPv6 roll out might have been built around exactly that.
However, I don't see anybody ready to deal with the IoT issue. It does have to be dealt with. Dropping IPv4 before those monstrosities are housebroken looks to be a really bad idea for most end users.
BTW, IMHO what is half-assed is the IPv6 rollout. You folks should possibly quit blaming everybody else for your self-inflicted problems.
"I invite you to write a RFC. Surely it can't be that hard?"
Actually, I've written a few specifications in my time. Sometimes it's not all that hard -- **IF** you understand the problems, talk to everyone involved and can reflect their needs. ... And sometimes it 's difficult or impossible. But the issue isn't my of skill level. It's that the IPv6 spec writers made two major mistakes -- one not their fault. Those REALLY need to be resolved before IPv6 adaptation will become (near) universal.
Well they **COULD** have dedicated one (1) IPv4 address for use as a flag that a 128 bit address will be found elsewhere in the header. That's probably not the best answer, but it's what pops immediately to mind. Truth is surely that the IPv6 designers thought (incorrectly) that they were dealing with a captive audience that had no choice but to follow the IPv6 game plan.
But if ever there was a symbol of how miserably the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is going
The world is a different place than it was when IPv6 was developed fifteen years ago. For one thing, it turns out that the exhaustion of IPv4 address space is much less catastrophic than was anticipated. It can be, and is being, worked around. For another the potential security and social problems associated with billions of poorly designed and badly implemented consumer products directly addressable by manufacturers, hackers, advertisers, nation states and other scoundrels -- What is coming to be called "The Internet of Shitte" -- were not well understood. If they had been, it's possible that IPv6 would be a substantially different protocol. Third, it was assumed that people would have no choice but to "upgrade" to IPv6 so backwards compatibility with IPv4 was not included. It is claimed that it's not technically possible to do that -- an assertion that strikes me as quite improbable. Anyway, the result was that network people worldwide looked at the effort and budget required to "upgrade" and decided to wait a while -- next year. Or maybe next century.
My suggestion. IPv6 people should recognize that they screwed up. Cancel the "transition" Come up with something serious and effective to tame IoT problem (which they didn't cause, but truly must not enable). Then design a new protocol compatible with both IPv4 and IPv6. And give a lot of thought to ease of implementation this time.
I did a very small amount of research on this. The government justification for sole source seems rather hazy. But I'm guessing that they prefer the risks of being locked into a single contractor until the end of time to the risks of ending up with a digital Tower of Babel where every organization with a procurement office has a different contractor and a different -- probably incompatible -- cloud interface.
Anybody actually know anything about this?
Realistically, I think insulin pump sabotage is probably about number 37 on the list of hazards facing insulin dependent diabetics. Undetected insulin pump system failures of various sorts and, the unreliability of meters are probably far greater dangers. As are inaccurate/misleading food labeling.
But still, the pumps shouldn't be hackable. And certainly not easily hackable.
Where can I get a co...
Not to worry, bootleg copies of both the free and premium versions will be available from a variety of sources within a few days. If they aren't out there already.
Of course, the bootleg copies will mostly be loaded with about six dozen different kinds of malware. But what the heck. If this sort of stuff appeals to you, your computers are probably already pwned.
No rush. Bootleg copies will doubtless continue to be available for decades. With up to date and ever improving malware suites.
Sounds like the best way to improve your security rating is to give the CIO loads of authority and make sure you don't ever stiff any private business of any payment they might be owed. Nothing about keeping IOT junk out of the operation. Nothing about demanding vendors not spy on the government. Nothing about standards compliance. Things like HIPPA (patient medical data) and FIOA (Freedom of Information Act). I suspect some of that is actually reflected in the report even though the Reg chose not to highlight it.
Anyway, my guess is that this report tells no one anywhere anything meaningful about government agency security. And my bet is that the security problem is so tough and best security practices are so inadequate that government security practices (outside the military and intelligence areas) are on a par with private industry. Pretty much a total, across the board, failure.
Guessing, but that road is probably perfectly OK, if a bit bumpy, 350 days of the year. It's just that a very heavy rain or, in some parts of the US "Mud season" can reduce the road to a bog. Mud Season -- for those who are unfamiliar -- is a short period in Spring in cold climates when the road surface thaws and the underlying material is still frozen and thus is impermeable. Result -- near instant swamp. Mud season roads in Vermont have been known to temporarily swallow even tracked vehicles like bulldozers.
That said, both the Internet, (Google) and canned information (Garmin) have been known to recommend some rather odd routes. I'm fine with unpaved roads. But I generally turn around when the road is so rarely used that plants are growing in the track.
That's why you also want integration tests
You're correct. Integration Testing is essential. The problem is that the number of combinations of events and conditions quickly becomes too large to test exhaustively. And sometimes sequencing matters. And sometimes not only sequencing, but timing of events matters (e.g. race conditions). Integration testing, while essential, can be a crap-shoot. Many bugs will be caught. But maybe not all of them.
There are other problems. For example, designers are often (usually in my experience) resistant to the notion that their design sucks and that real people can't use it reliably. Their solution tends to be to improve the users -- which oddly enough is often (usually) not well received by the users
... And management often, not always, but often, understands very little of that.
Answers: I don't have any. e.g. Don't count on me to be an early adopter of autonomous vehicles even though I think they are great idea that will eventually make the world a better place.
This will, of course, and inevitably, end up with the shipper signing a meaningless form declaring that the package is legal and contains no forbidden content. For EVERY DAMN BOX shipped from the US to anywhere outside the US. And that nonsense will be caused by the same people who complain endlessly about government red tape.
Perhaps letting people who believe that government can't do anything right run the government is a flawed strategy.
Absolutely. We Americans must get our political leaders to understand that if we push our enemies too hard, they will strike back and hit us where it hurts. They might shut down Facebook. Or Netflix. They could even -- if pushed too far -- shut down Google and Microsoft telemetry. How will we know where we are and what we want if our phones don't know?
I suppose it might not be common knowledge, but it's no secret that many countries with serious military capability frequently probe other country's borders and air defenses. Russian patrols, for example, frequently probe US airspace in the Arctic. In 2015, Turkey shot down a Russian SU-24 that may or may not have been wondering about on the Turkish side of their border.
My guess would be that the US was flying its drone right down the edge of Iranian airspace. Maybe they pushed it a little too close. Or maybe the Iranians got tired of seeing the blasted thing on their radars. Or maybe the US and Iran have slightly different ideas of where Iran's boundaries are.
why should be believe any word of what they say?
Why would you believe that an operation led by Donald J Trump, right-wing flake Mike Pompeo, and aspiring war criminal John Bolton might not be entirely honest and forthcoming?
However, I would point out that Trump's Iran policy is quite similar to that applied to Japan by the US and England in the 1930s. In both cases, the US would like the object of their ire to pack up and depart the planet forthwith. While 1930s Japan (and today's Iran) certainly were/are less than ideal global citizens, leaving them with little option other than war is a strategy that will quite likely lead to war. In 1941, that meant discovering the hard way that the US Pacific Fleet was poorly prepared for a Pacific naval air war. Today, that's likely to mean discovering the hard way that the US is far more dependent on the internet and vulnerable to cyberattack than Iran and that in cyberspace we are all neighbors and all distressingly vulnerable.
This might conceivably be one of the few cases where President Dingbat and his enablers are mostly telling the truth.
A Raspberry Pi 3 is about 5GFlops on CPU alone.
And, I'm guessing that a typical modern web page --- amazon.com for example -- will bring it to its knees for several minutes while trying to download and render the incredible amount of junk that appear to be essential to my contemplated purchase of 100 index cards.
(I AM impressed with the capability of modern CPUs. The stuff running on them ... not so much)
I submit that the curve is no longer a bell with its bulge centred on 100. It ain't a normal distribution any more.
Actually, it never was Gaussian although "they" tweak the tests (there are quite a few) to keep the numbers output somewhat close to a normal distribution no matter what is going on with the underlying population. There is also something called the Flynn Effect which seems to say that folks might be slowly getting smarter although it may only say that folks are getting better at scoring on intelligence tests. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
In any case, I think most of us would agree that there remains considerable room for improvement.
and a few others that I am too lazy to do due diligence to bother to name.
Try Worldcom communications -- for a time the second largest Telephone Company in the US. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldCom#Accounting_scandals
"""
The fraud was accomplished primarily in two ways:
1. Booking "line costs" (interconnection expenses with other telecommunication companies) as capital expenditures on the balance sheet instead of expenses.
2. Inflating revenues with bogus accounting entries from "corporate unallocated revenue accounts".
In 2002, a small team of internal auditors at WorldCom worked together, often at night and secretly, to investigate and reveal $3.8 billion worth of fraud.[9][10][11] Soon thereafter, the company's audit committee and board of directors were notified of the fraud and acted swiftly: Sullivan was dismissed, Myers resigned, Arthur Andersen withdrew its audit opinion for 2001, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began an investigation into these matters on June 26, 2002 (see accounting scandal).
"""
Just curious. I know that the UK is a large diverse entity. And I know that people are quite diverse and hold a wide range of really odd views. But does anyone over there actually believe that an age verification block will somehow dissuade kids from viewing pornography? Having had some experience observing kids using computers, let me assure you folks that the first juvenile to figure out how to bypass the block -- which should take no more than five minutes from the time the block is imposed -- will post full and accurate instructions on the bypass procedure on social media sites within a hour. Probably 40% of the underage population will know one or more bypass methods within a day. The rest will take a few days longer.
Actually, I'm having trouble imagining a better way to encourage the viewing of pornography by children than an attempt to block it.
Google seems to envision a world where happy users -- everyone but a few eccentrics -- live, play and work digitally in a gorgeous walled garden that is run by their benevolent overlords in Mountain View. A sort of digital Disneyland if you will. The happy users probably pay a very modest tithe for access to the garden and advertisers, of course, pay for access to the happy users.
Don't get me wrong. Disneyland is an interesting place. Everyone who can afford it probably ought to visit it or one of its analogs once or twice. (Take kids) And Google really does have a great browser as well as a free email service that actually does a terrific job of spam filtering. Their maps are pretty good also.
But I don't want any part of Google's garden. It's based, of necessity, on web scripting -- which is an absolutely awful idea that puts ME at risk in order to benefit Google. Google may, and I emphasize MAY be able eventually to keep the web scoundrels out of its garden. But at the cost of putting those of us who occasionally have to venture outside at risk.
There's also the problem that Google's UI's really tend to be mediocre at best. Whoever gave those nitwits the idea that white on light blue and vice versa is legible? And navigating their menus ... Makes navigating Boston -- noted for its strange geometry and lack of street signs -- seem almost logical.
Then there's the spying.
So no. This probably isn't a good idea.
First let's say nice things about Ron Wyden -- a lawmaker who actually understands a complex issue and tries to actually fix things related to it. Boy, could all nations, not just the US, use more like him.
Second, the problem addressed here is MUCH more difficult than most folks seem to think. The US government is **HUGE**. If we exclude the military and postal service, it has around 2,000,000 employees. And that doesn't count hundreds of thousands of contractors hired to do one time jobs or ten million state and municipal government employees the feds may have to interface with. Or the incredibly awful "free market" healthcare "system" that manages to consume 20% of the country's GDP. There are many millions of computers involved -- many of them second or third generation hand me downs from long defunct projects. Probably there are some AT bus 8086s running WFWG still alive here and there and doing useful work. Did I mention that budgets in that world are always tight?
And don't forget that in much of rural America, the "Information superhighway" is a rutted muddy track, barely capable of supporting a 32K modem on good days. There are government employees with computers at the ends of some of those information footpaths.
If you're going to exchange sensitive information in that world, the folks on both ends have to have compatible tools. And they have to know how to use them. BTW, the laws of mathematics pretty much guarantee that the average government computer user has an IQ around 100, and that some have lower IQs.
All Wyden is suggesting is that the National Institute of Standards and Technology try to come up with standards for government information handling that are a bit better than .ZIP. It's far from clear that can even be done. Or what the time frame for implementing such standards would be.
Why would I get rid of them when they are work fine and do what I want them to do?
Why? Because 64 bit is prima facia twice as good as 32 bit. OTOH, I suppose you could hold out for 128 bit CPUs before you shuffle off to our glorious digital future.
I've heard rumors that 32 bit logic is a bit underpowered for supporting the telemetry needs of modern software. What'll you do if Google, Microsoft et al decide that spying on you isn't worth the effort? Are you prepared to be the only kid on the block whose digital profile is way out of date? What'll you do without ads tailored to your needs and desires?
Though the ultimate security would be to drop the whole 'connected world' thing .
Hard not to agree. But when you sit back and think about it, there are all sorts of folks that actually need one or more of those nasty little boxes for some legitimate reason or another -- security, controlling access, monitoring the livestock, checking on those with medical problems, spying on the babysitter ... whatever. And we really can't expect everyone to be a network professional. How can these things be deployed without spending hundreds of dollars/euros/pounds per unit on professional installation?
Tis a puzzlement.
something like 2FA
An interesting concept, but one with VERY limited utility and quite badly implemented in many cases. In too many situations, two factor authorization translates to "Now You Have Two Problems."
Routers don't ACK anything but packets addressed directly to them.
But isn't that how NAT works? From the outside world POV, all TCP traffic is directed to the router. The router then extracts the "network address" from the packet and uses that to redirect the packet to the connected machine on the internal network that thinks (mistakenly) that it is connected directly to the rest of the universe? I would think that the NAT router has to handle ACK and other IP protocol stuff. But I could certainly be wrong about that.
In any case it is probably going to be severely stressed by a flood of tiny packets flowing through, and I'm guessing that it'll likely break before the "target machine" does.
I don't think the /proc/sys/net/ipv4/sack workaround is going to work on all or even most linux systems. On my Slackware 14.1 system, the corresponding item might be /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_sack ... or not ...
BTW, /proc is an internal pseudo file system, not a directory on the disk so modifications to /proc and its kids won't hang around when the system is rebooted. The Red Hat link has a more persistent patch (for systemd init).
I would guess that most ipv4 systems are NATed and that the device that is going to crash if they are assaulted by a zillion tiny message packets is the network router, not the individual PCs. Lord only knows what the router internal software looks like although I'd guess that it started off as a Unix of some sort.
But maybe I'm wrong.
Is the Treasury planning to outlaw them?
Not that we're aware of. But India -- in an attempt to put a dent in its legendary corruption problems -- recently did something along that line. As I understand it, they effectively called in and reissued all their high value banknotes a couple of years ago at least theoretically generating a paper trail for most of the cash floating around the country. I'm skeptical that it really worked all that well, but it'd probably be nice if I was wrong about that.
India is also considering making trafficing in cryptocurrency a felony. https://www.ibtimes.com/india-proposes-law-ban-cryptocurrencies-10-year-prison-term-users-2799371
Then there's this which was turning up this morning whenever I hit a "raw_input" statement I had in some non-web related Python code for debugging.
WARNING: At least one completion condition is taking too long to complete. Conditions: [{"name":"TelemetryController: shutting down","state":{"initialized":true,"initStarted":true,"haveDelayedInitTask":false,"shutdownBarrier":[{"name":"TelemetrySession: shutting down","state":{"initialized":true,"initStarted":true,"haveDelayedInitTask":true},"filename":"resource://gre/modules/TelemetrySession.jsm","lineNumber":1389,"stack":["resource://gre/modules/TelemetrySession.jsm:setupChromeProcess:1389","resource://gre/modules/TelemetrySession.jsm:Impl.observe:1791","resource://gre/modules/TelemetrySession.jsm:this.TelemetrySession<.observe:638","resource://gre/components/TelemetryStartup.js:TelemetryStartup.prototype.observe:31"]}],"connectionsBarrier":"Not started","sendModule":{"sendingEnabled":false,"pendingPingRequestCount":0,"pendingPingActivityCount":0,"unpersistedPingCount":0,"persistedPingCount":453,"schedulerState":{"shutdown":true,"hasSendTask":false,"sendsFailed":false,"sendTaskState":"bail out - no pings to send","backoffDelay":60000}}},"filename":"resource://gre/modules/TelemetryController.jsm","lineNumber":772,"stack":["resource://gre/modules/TelemetryController.jsm:setupTelemetry:772","resource://gre/modules/TelemetryController.jsm:Impl.observe:868","resource://gre/modules/TelemetryController.jsm:this.TelemetryController<.observe:198","resource://gre/components/TelemetryStartup.js:TelemetryStartup.prototype.observe:30"]}] Barrier: profile-before-change2
Where was it coming from? No clue. Something running in my ancient version of Opera I think.
I wonder if those of us who don't care who looks at our DNS queries would be allowed to opt out of this nuttiness? It adds complexity and presumably an extra transaction to negotiate a key (what could possibly go wrong?) to every internet operation that uses DNS. Furthermore the Security enthusiasts and the world's abundant crop of hackers will eventually find about three levels of bugs in any secure DNS scheme, so we'll probably end up stumbling over several mutually incompatible secure-DNS schema. All of which MUST be patched in RIGHT NOW as they evolve.
BTW, My dim view of computer security is based on many decades of working with classified data. My experience was that security was VERY costly. And ultimately it didn't actually work very well for a variety of reasons. My feeling is that you can't secure everything and trying to do so is a serious mistake. I do think that it might, and I emphasize MIGHT, be possible to secure a very small set of critical information -- launch codes for nuclear missiles, authorization codes for transferring large amounts of money, etc. And that's well worth doing. But my guess is that is about the best that can be done.
Needless to say, I think that the current enthusiasm for putting all sorts of critical infrastructure in the "cloud" in search of (probably imaginary) cost savings is an dubious idea that may well end badly.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"
OK, so the all knowing Internet tells me it was Mr Spock. But my initial guess was either Karl Marx, Chairman Mao, or Adolph Hitler. Seems to me it could be a quote from any demagogue from Cleon to Donald Trump to the antichrist him/herself.
Well, yes. But as I understand it, the original reason for git was for collaboration. If one is actually using git in order that multiple folks can work on the code with minimal confusion, aren't backups likely to be somewhat less than complete and current at times? (Caveat -- I know nothing about git other than what I read on the Internet. RCS seems to be adequate for my minimal needs).
"Historians will look back in the future at marvel at how the West built up the Chinese industry to make a short term increase of profits."
Well, yes. But it's a bit hard to see what other choices the West had or has. There are a LOT of Chinese -- 1.3B of them give or take. They are disciplined, hard working, and they work cheap. Much like the Japanese in the 1950s (who the Chinese seem to have used as a model), the Chinese are pretty much inevitably going to become major players in whatever business they set their mind to learning. At least until their standard of living and production costs approach those of the West.
The West could, of course avoid trading with China -- as the US did in the 1930s with Japan and is doing today with Iran. But the results back then were pretty ghastly for all concerned. And probably would/will be equally unfortunate today.
"$999 is a stupid price for a stand"
Quite possibly. But people pay stupid prices for stuff all the time. In this case, some Apple fanbois will probably buy the thing because it has an Apple logo on it. And realistically, it probably is a high quality $250 monitor stand.
But I think the major market is probably a small number of high end graphics workstation purchasers. And there you are dealing with folks who are trying to push through a purchase order for a computer costing maybe $30,000 or $40,000 and a monitor in the $5,000 range through the corporate bureaucracy. Who really cares whether the total package comes to $37,619 or $36,869 (per unit)? ... And all the hardware comes from the same vendor -- which cuts down on the work for Purchasing whose job is is to execute the P.O. not to question the need for the stuff.
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