Posts by Crypto Monad 597 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2017
El Reg said:
The shift would penalize companies which had spent years minimizing their Java usage
Actually it puts them in a very good position, and incentivises them to finish the job properly.
(Not necessarily to minimise Java as such, but Java SE and anything else with an Oracle license)
Did you buy via Amazon's marketplace from a third-party supplier? Then I would suspect it's a *fake* Belkin cable. The complete lack of technical information is a good clue that this is the case.
Belkin's own website does tell you the spec:
https://www.belkin.com/uk/usb-c-to-usb-c-cable/P-CAB003.html
But that would only apply if you'd bought the genuine article.
12 inches = 1 foot (factors: 2, 2, 3)
3 feet = 1 yard (factors: 3)
22 yards = 1 chain (factors: 2, 11)
10 chains = 1 furlong (factors: 2, 5)
8 furlongs = 1 mile (factors: 2, 2, 2)
(UK)
16 ounces = 1 pound (2, 2, 2, 2)
14 pounds = 1 stone (2, 7)
8 stone = 1 hundredweight (2, 2, 2)
20 hundredweight = 1 [long] ton (2, 2, 5)
Yes, that's *really* convenient to work with for mental arithmetic. How much taller is someone who is 6 foot 4 inches than someone who is 5 foot 7 inches? How much heaver is 13 stone 5 pounds than 11 stone 10 pounds? How long is a quarter of a mile, in yards?
At least Americans just give the weight in pounds.
A US quart is sufficiently close to a litre that a switch would be pretty unproblematic.
What I object to is recipes like these (came with an air frier):
- 5 small gold potatoes, cut into 6.35mm pieces
- 28 grams unsalted butter, melted
- 1.42 grams salt, plus more to taste
- 1.42 grams pepper, plus more to taste
- 32 grams plus 17 grams all-purpose flour, divided
- 1 large egg
- 5.69 grams prepared horseradish
- 1.42 grams paprika
... etc
Now, where did I put my apothecary scales!
Not really, because you will be talking to a local cache. If you query www.tHeRegIStEr.com followed by www.therEGISTER.com, the second answer will come directly from the cache (both are equal to "www.theregister.com") and so there will be no second query forwarded to the auth server - which is presumably the target you're trying to talk to. You could set the TTL to zero, but it will be noisy, and the cache could enforce its own minimum TTL anyway.
Better just to use random-looking subdomains of your domain. This is what Iodine does, AFAIK.
Something I read in the early 80's:
"Real Software Engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness. This process doesn't necessarily involve execution of anything on a computer, except a Correctness Verification Aid Package.
Real Software Engineers don't like the idea of some inexplicable and greasy hardware several aisles away that may stop working at any moment. They have a great distrust of hardware people, and wish that systems could be virtual at ALL levels. They would like personal computers you know no-one's going to trip over something and kill your DFA in mid-transit, except that they need eight megabytes to run their Correctness Verification Aid Packages."
And yes, that was 8 megabytes. It was considered an impossibly large amount of RAM for a personal computer at the time :-)
Not these days:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobyte
* 8 Pebibytes = 8192 Tebibytes = 9,007,199,254,740,992 bytes
* 8 Petabytes = 8000 Terabytes = 8,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
I know it sticks in the throat (especially when talking about RAM), but that's where we are. Blame the hard drive manufacturers, who wanted to sell drives with 500,000,000,000 bytes as "500GB" and not "465GB".
"In May, the GMSA estimated that cloud providers and hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and Netflix account for 57 percent of global traffic."
Without observing that on a broadband access network, subscribers account for 100% of that traffic (and already pay for its transit).
I don't think this is about heating. The key question is: how do domestic electricity prices compare to commercial prices?
I'd have thought that big consumers of electricity (i.e. data centres) could get their electricity considerably cheaper - buying in bulk, direct access to wholesale markets etc. This would surely wipe out any benefit from "free cooling" which could be obtained by installing servers in people's homes - assuming it can even be made to work against the temperature gradient, as others have said(*).
However, right now, domestic electricity is cheaper due to government intervention in the marketplace. Is this what the companies are really trying to exploit?
Once this loophole is found, regulatory mechanisms will have to be added to forbid domestic consumers reselling their electricity.
(*) Not to mention the problems of managing and maintaining such a distributed server fleet, and the few workloads which are suitable for a server with poor network connectivity. And having to shut the server down when the water tank reaches its maximum temperature.
Confused between SSH keys and GPG keys? GPG keyservers have nothing to do with SSH keys. And you can't "retract" an SSH key.
But yeah, SSH private keys are valuable for exactly the reasons you describe. The user *should* have protected them with a passphrase strong enough to make brute-force decryption infeasible - but not everyone does.
I guess the moral is: do all your development inside a sandbox of some sort (e.g. VM, docker container, lxd container, whatever).
For comparison: in Go, module dependencies point to exact versions of external code, with SHA256 checksum. And each module is named using a domain name and path whose ownership is clear: commonly "github.com/<author>/<repo>", although it doesn't have to be.
It works well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space
"Outer space does not begin at a definite altitude above the Earth's surface. The Kármán line, an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level,[8][9] is conventionally used as the start of outer space in space treaties and for aerospace records keeping."
Indeed, "backed by a shady cabal of Charles Ponzi lookalikes" would be a better description - except at least Charles Ponzi was identifiable.
To be fair, there are identifiable names behind some of the crypto exchanges - the Ponzi resellers. But Bitcoin itself? All you'll find is ghosts.
I don't think this will fly in the way suggested.
If you put (say) 40 SMRs in a single large site connected to the grid, then you only need one set of operators, one set of security, one set of refuelling and waste disposal procedures etc.
If you put 40 individual SMRs in separate locations, then you have a lot more operational cost - not necessarily 40 times, but still substantially more. In return, all you save is the relatively minor cost of grid transmission. (If that was significant, data centres would already be built next to power stations). You also have 40 times as many NIMBYs complaining about a nuke in their neighbourhood.
In the big picture, I don't really see data centres being significant consumers of power here. Why not substitute "city" for "data centre" - wouldn't the same arguments apply? Or perhaps this is a tacit admission that people *really* don't want nuclear power stations on their doorsteps, so having a data centre and a power station colocated in the wilderness is the only acceptable application?
But the biggest flaw here is the huge amount of extra long-term nuclear waste. How does the cost of reprocessing or storing this waste factor into the overall cost? In my opinion, it would be obscene to leave future generations with a waste problem 35 times bigger than it needed to be.
I don't know why there are no big European providers (as yet?).
It's a fair question.
There are plenty of medium-sized providers, but try asking customers of OVH and Rackspace what they think of them, when their data centres catch fire and their servers get hacked.
I think the answer is chicken-and-egg: you can't do cloud properly unless you're really big, but you can't get big without being a trusted and well-known brand. AWS made it by being first, followed by sustained and rapid product development. Microsoft did it through its name and its leverage with licensing. Google struggles.
Even Oracle has found it impossible to break into the hegemony of the Big Three, despite aggressive pricing and a name well known to business.
Investors are not stupid, and IF (not sure if they do push this TBH) they are insisting that a company uses Amazon, Microsoft or Google, it's for a good reason. Ability to go global, number of different services available, the pace of new features and services being launched, uptime (well, not including Azure on that one).
Add "focus" to that list. Technology businesses should be focussing on the thing that makes their business special, not re-inventing the infrastructure wheel.
This means (at least in the early stages) re-using as many off-the-shelf services as possible. *If* they reach the scale where it's necessary to in-house some of these to save costs, that bridge can be crossed later.
...I do wonder what will happen if Big Cloudy Services like Exchange365 etc fall prey to ransomware.
They will have proper preparation for exactly this eventuality: that is, they will be able to restore everything to exactly as it was N hours or days ago. They may be out of service for hours, but they will get through it. Being able to restore to a known state is not magic, it is just difficult (read: expensive) to do right, especially with large data volumes.
They will also have deep security monitoring, tripwires and honeypots, which will alert them as soon as any files start changing unexpectedly, or a hundred other behavioural anomalies. The chances of any ransomware running rife but undetected is very low, and the response will be immediate and well-drilled.
It would be great if every large organisation that hosts its own IT were able to deploy the same level of protection and observation, but sadly it's usually too hard and too expensive. Besides: when your managed IT infrastructure contains tens of thousands of Windows *workstations*, running local applications with direct filesystem access via SMB mounts or whatever, it's a whole different level of insecurity. A self-contained cloud service at least doesn't have to contend with that.
If Microsoft does get attacked by ransomware (and who says they haven't already?), I'd expect it would be their staff office network that succumbs.
What does "hosted Exchange" mean in general? It sounds like you're paying [someone] for Exchange mail service, storage, hopefully backups, and support -- no Exchange admin on your own staff required. It is considered perilous vs. running your own?
You're right: "Hosted Exchange" basically means paying some company to spin up a Windows Server VM with Exchange in it. It comes complete with the full set of vulnerabilities that both Windows and Exchange are famous for. *Hopefully* your hosting company will have scripts to apply patches in a timely fashion across their fleet of VMs - but they might be lax, and in any case this is software with a long and illustrious history of zero-days. *Hopefully* they are taking regular immutable backups (and doing test restores), but clearly that wasn't happening in this case.
Office 365 is a completely different beast. This was built from the ground up to be a multi-tenant cloud service. I think it's very probable that Windows Server does not form any part of it, nor does Exchange. There will be data sanitization and security tripwires in every Internet-facing component, and between every internal component, and 24x7 security ops monitoring every aspect of the platform.
Consider this: if there were a similar security breach with Office 365, it would be *Microsoft's* entire cloud business which would be trashed. Whereas when there's a security breach with Windows Server or Exchange, it's only *your* business which is trashed - and/or some third party hosting company like Rackspace - neither of which Microsoft cares about. In any case, they can always blame you for not doing your job right.
Therefore, the amount of care and attention applied by Microsoft to building, maintaining and securing its O365 platform is orders of magnitude higher than its traditional software products. And Rackspace recognise this.
My reading is, it's not a continuous process at all. You have a laser *pulse*, pointing at a single target, which goes splat once and evaporates, and the whole thing is over.
Turning this into a source of *power* would indeed require turning it into a continuous process - which in this case sounds like firing at a conveyor belt full of pellets.
Commercial power output with this sort of technology? Almost certainly never, but "at least 50 years away" is still safe.
For one thing, you need some massive technological breakthrough in laser efficiency - say 10 to 100 times better than today. However, lasers have been studied and developed heavily for many decades; huge breakthroughs here are unlikely. They also need to be able to cycle thousands of times faster than they can today, not to mention be much cheaper to build. Then you need to build these incredibly tiny precise tritium-containing targets in mass quantities really cheaply (and/or make them work on a much bigger scale), and have a way to deliver them rapidly into the target area with microscopic precision, whilst they vaporize. And you still need to wrap all this with neutron capture / heat exchanger type stuff, not to mention fully robotic remote maintenance because those pesky neutrons will make the whole reactor vessel highly radioactive. Those latter things are doable, but add greatly to the cost, and hence count against commercial viability.
I think the article is right in its general drift. The main output from this research will be a better understanding of fusion bombs, and perhaps in 20-50 years the world will have a new type of H-bomb which doesn't need uranium or plutonium to trigger it. Whoopee doo :-(
If the BBC is to believed, it's 3.15 MJ out for 2.05MJ in.
That converts easily to the units that your home electricity meter uses (kWh): 0.88 units out, for 0.57 units in.
Apparently they can fire this experiment once per day. I bet you a billion dollars their electricity meter goes up by a lot more than 0.57 units every day :-)
20 years to an operational, commercially viable fusion reactor? Not a chance.
OTOH, we have this huge operational fusion reactor 93 million miles away. The technology to convert its power into electricity is with us now, cheaper and more efficient than ever before.
For non-technical users? Definitely not.
For technical users? If you already have your own 24x7 NOC, and can build up sufficient expertise in running the platform, then maybe. It's your call whether the cost is justified, and whether your own people can do a better job.
But I think you'd probably be better finding a more competent hosting company. The big three (AWS, Google, Microsoft) have the best possible operations teams, the best possible disaster recovery preparations, and the best possible security and incident management. The smaller ones? Not so much.
what you can read of global command and unilateral control here .....
It started off OK. Sadly it then went to the entire "Covid is a scam" thing.
I would ask the author:
1. Let's suppose that infectious diseases are real (most of us have personal experience of this at some time in our life); also, that there exist diseases with a fatal outcome for a non-zero percentage of those infected.
2. Suppose that some diseases are so infectious that they can spread rapidly across entire populations. (I'd say that seems reasonable too, unless you are somehow able to rule out the possibility that an infectious disease *could* behave this way. You'd also have to discount history of things like the Black Death, in which case you pretty much have to discount *all* history)
3. Now a more difficult supposition: but just say hypothetically, that there was a government which was honest, *not* manipulating the population, but concerned for their general well being. This government made decisions based on the limited information available at the time, attempting to minimise overall harm.
How do you think such a government would respond to a pandemic of a new disease not seen before? And how would it differ from the "scam" under which we've apparently been living?
The blockchain is completely peer-to-peer with every peer communicating with every other peer. This is terrible for scaling (which is why Bitcoin can only process a handful of transactions per second)
That's only *one* reason why Bitcoin is terrible at scaling. There are other consensus protocols, like Raft, which scale pretty well for their use cases. It's the proof-of-work part of Bitcoin that bites, i.e. you have to burn real physical resources to be a significant part of the blockchain.
it's *only* advantage is that it is completely "trustless" in the sense that you do not have to trust a central controlling authority
Instead, you have to trust a cabal of mostly-anonymous shady organizations who are the big Bitcoin miners. If they collude, they *can* reverse a blockchain transaction. It doesn't happen very often, but it does - like when 184 billion bitcoins were created out of thin air by an integer overflow bug, and they decided that wasn't a good thing.
But they decide based on whether it's a good thing *for them*, not for anyone else.
OK: they want to get to "net zero" carbon for data centres.
How many tons of fuel does it take to lift, say, one ton of server racks (plus batteries and solar panels plus radiation shielding) into orbit?
And how does that compare with the emissions for that same rack of servers on the ground, over 5 years, powered by any current representative power mix?
And what about the waste when this de-orbits?
Some ideas are just too stupid to spend real research money on. That doesn't stop people claiming it, but funding committees should have more sense.
There seems to be an obvious alternative.
It's always sunny somewhere on earth. Therefore, build one or more power cables that circumnavigate the globe, and connects those sunny hot spots together into a global grid. Windy ones too.
Certainly, it would be quite expensive: but it's already been done (that is, there are high-voltage DC cables running undersea already), and it's just a case of scaling up. It would last for a long time, and even if parts of it were 4km under the sea, it would be a hell of a lot easier to maintain than something in orbit.
I believe there are smaller scale proposals in the pipeline already, such as a cable to connect the UK to solar farms in North Africa.
You could say the same about, say, Office 365.
I don't use Twitter, but I *would* be interested in using (and paying for) a version where all users have a verified identity. Or equivalently, that with one button press I could totally filter out posts from all non-verified users.
However, it would have to be actual identity verification: by passport, driving licence, or at least the name on the credit card.
I wouldn't want to see users who are paying $8 per month but are otherwise anonymous.
"Additionally, the Sun's strength on Mars is only about 44 percent as strong as it is on Earth, meaning there's a lot less solar energy getting to panels even when they're clean."
However there are practically no clouds, and on a cloudy day on Earth you'll be lucky to get 10-20% of peak output. So at least something works in their favour.
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