Posts by doublelayer

Worried ransomware will screw your network? You could consider swallowing your pride, opening your wallet

Re: Just no

Not exactly. I'm not saying I would never pay the ransom under any circumstances whatsoever. I can imagine a situation in which 1) I know I'll get the data back if I pay, 2) there is a confirmed bad result if I don't such as all the employees losing their jobs immediately, and 3) I don't have the alternative of restoring from backup. Even then, I'd have to consider very carefully.

I'm pretty sure I will never face this situation, though, because I do back things up responsibly. If, for example, some quick math tells me that it might be cheaper to pay the ransom than restore from backups, which was mentioned in the article as if that's a good reason, I would then never accept paying the ransom. For one thing, I would require performing a clean reimaging of every affected machine at the very least, so we'd be paying that bill one way or another.

If I didn't have backups for some reason, I'd have to ask what the costs would be if we didn't pay the ransom. They'd have to be extremely high for me to decide to pay it. As I said above, "Every employee will definitely lose their jobs tomorrow" is strong enough that I'd have to consider it. However, lots of other things would not be so strong. I care much less about the investors or owners than I do about the employees, so "We'll lose a lot of money" almost certainly wouldn't cut it. If I was the person involved, the reason there are no backups is almost certainly an incompetent superior who rejected my suggestions for backup or violated the policy, and once again, I have no sympathy for that. So "that person will lose their job" wouldn't matter to me either. If this was a small company without employees, E.G. a company run by a few people who all own part, I would probably be willing to let it fold rather than do something this unethical. If they're going to pay, they can do so without me.

Re: Just no

"You assume the crims will plough all their ill-gotten gains back into their business."

I assume nothing of the kind. I only assume that they like money, so getting it would convince them that they should keep up with this plan rather than doing something else to get it. Or, for example, that stories of lots of people paying will convince other people to start writing and distributing ransomware because they too like money.

Re: What if they were hunted down like real criminals...

The anonymity of cryptocurrencies makes this difficult. While the currency of choice remains bitcoin, which is public, there is a little chance, but the criminals can switch to closed cryptocurrencies (zcash and monero come to mind) to make this difficult or impossible. In addition, a lot of these strains are being written in countries whose attitude toward international cooperation is not so positive. WannaCry and NotPetya, for example, were government projects of North Korea and Russia respectively.

Re: Just no

And the next step will happen when the following discussion occurs. The IT staff, of course, are not present. This version as written from the perspective of a small business:

Finance: "We had to pay four grand to get our data back."

Operations: "Our technical advisor says we should hire a systems administrator and pay for a backup system so this can't happen again."

Finance: "How much will that cost?"

Operations: "The salary for the IT person plus whatever a backup costs. How much does a backup system cost?"

Finance: [Types in Google search box] "Well, this says that backups can be done to tapes. You need a reader and some tapes. Readers cost ... about three grand. Tapes cost ... about fifty. They recommend taking an incremental backup every day and a full one every week. I think that means we need a tape for every weekday and another two every week, or about seven a week."*

Operations: "How much will that cost a year?"

Finance: "Well, three thousand plus three hundred fifty a week comes to about twenty thousand a year not including the salary of the administration guy."*

Operations: "Yikes. That's quite a lot."

Finance: "Yes it is. That's why I've written a small Excel spreadsheet to calculate how often an attack like this will happen. Based on the number of ransomware attacks per annum for the last ten years and the number of other victims in the world, I anticipate that we'll probably see one of these every four years or so. This means paying the ransom will cost us on the order of one thousand per year, while backing up will cost a lot more."**

Operations: "Let's do that then."

Finance: "You should know that there is some chance of being hit with multiple ransomware attacks in one year, so you can't be guaranteed a low level of risk. However, we can weather at least eight of them and still have less costs than a backup system by my Google math."**

*This is obviously not how backups work. However, I've heard people do that type of mathematics before to try to estimate costs.

**I'm presenting a rather unintelligent finance and operations staff. Plenty of companies wouldn't get into this type of situation. However, not every company is run competently, and you don't need a lot of incompetent companies of this nature to fund even more ambitious and sophisticated ransomware that will in fact destroy someone else's company, government, or infrastructure system.

Re: "If you can't back up the data that is operationally important . . "

Actually, since that drive is probably left disconnected a lot and few ransomwares attack small removable drives (not unheard of but most I've seen only attack internal drives), that spreadsheet is probably safe. The IT department should have informed the finance person concerned that the spreadsheet should be stored in compliance with policies, but assuming they did that, they shouldn't be held responsible if it is later lost because it wasn't.

Re: Have done just this.

And it's very good they didn't, as it was WannaCry, which DID NOT return any data. Just like the case mentioned in the article several times, Maersk. The article fails to mention that Maersk was hit with NotPetya, which was meant as a warfare tool and wouldn't have returned their information in any case. The multiple millions they spent were going to have to be spent, there was no option to try their luck with the fake criminals involved. Yet that critical detail didn't get mentioned. I usually like your articles, El Reg, as they're carefully researched by technical people, but that hole is far too big to be left unexplained.

On the topic of taxpayers paying for ransom, it has happened in the case of SamSam malware attacks on various cities, most of which are American ones. The higher-profile ones like Atlanta chose not to pay, but SamSam has obtained several thousand taxpayer dollars from America and will probably continue to target governments because they're found to be behind the times and potentially willing to pay up.

Apple strips clips of WWDC devs booing that $999 monitor stand from the web using copyright claims. Fear not, you can listen again here...

Re: Third parties?

I'm very confident that a substitute stand will hit aliexpress about two days after the screen is released. However, I don't think you'd want to test your luck putting something heavy like this off the front of something that comes out of a home 3D printer. I haven't seen a 3D printer capable of producing something with enough integrity for this purpose. It works fine for lighter things, or if the monitor was simply placed on top, but I don't envy those who attach the monitors to their ABS or PLA stands to hear a disconcerting creaking sound.

Re: Something strikes me as being odd about this

In addition to nobody being likely to go into the middle of the stream to find it, the sentence "Apple edits out developers' discontent about prices" is too obviously asking for a Streisand effect. Even those people who tried to take down these youtube videos realizes that editing a live stream looks shifty and doesn't end well for them.

Re: No one has to buy it

I'm not an Apple hater. Proof: I'm typing this on a Mac, running Mac OS. I don't feel hatred toward Apple for this. I do find it laughable, a bit sad, and pathetic. There's a major difference. I'm in that category that includes a lot of people who neither love nor hate everything Apple does. They're a company. We support them when they do something we like; we acknowledge facts like their equipment coming with a much larger profit margin than certain competitors, but we still buy it if it has value for us; when they're in a reality distortion field and we're not, we laugh and say they're making a mistake; when they make us angry by, for instance, causing me a lot more trouble trying to install a Mac OS update than it really should be, we say things like "I am much less likely to buy another Mac unless they fix this reliability problem". It's fun not to have to love or hate a company.

Re: Streisand Effect

Has any PR department heard of that? While I'm certain PR at large has been able to quash many discussions, they keep doing mindbogglingly stupid things that backfire horribly. One would think this could be covered in the first PR class taken.

UK's internet registry prepares a £100m windfall for its board members – and everyone else will pay for it

Re: OFC there are always options

You seem to be misunderstanding or misstating my points. I do not contend that change is impossible. I contend that change of the type suggested is infeasible. I do not contend that anti-ad technology is impossible, unpopular, or the like. I contend that Google will not help with it. We seem to disagree strongly about the ease with which users can be convinced to change their DNS settings, and the enthusiasm for such a system on the part of businesses and other site operators. Your counterpoints to mine do not address this, unfortunately.

Re: OFC there are always options

Of course that's possible. And it's been attempted before. I know of only one system at all like that that has buy-in, that being Tor's onion addresses (added privacy on that one, but an alternate way of naming sites). The reason: people don't want to fragment the internet when they don't have a good reason. The goal of changing the DNS system in this case is to reduce the power held by the operators and registrars of the .uk domains, but if it only works on a privacy-focused browser, or if a user changes some configuration settings, or if Google or Apple gets taken over by a mind control system and decides to do something diametrically opposed to all their previous actions, it won't succeed. Nontechnical users won't be able to access a new site in their favorite browser or operating system without doing some work they don't want or know how to do. Companies won't see the point in reserving a new domain name. Semitechnical users who could set this up won't have any domains they care about, so they won't bother adding the domain to their systems. Small organizations won't see the point in reserving a new domain name. Technical people who clearly know what they're doing will set it up, and never use it because only a few people have chosen to put domains there, the rest having chosen that the .uk people aren't that bad or having just moved to a different TLD that actually exists in the normal internet.

Re: Trade Marks

That is quite true. In addition, you sometimes end up with situations where someone sues another someone over their domain name and it is hard to tell who should have the rights to it. For example, a year ago, someone who had the domain france.com which was used to organize tourism to France was sued by the French government, who wanted it for I don't really know why. You could make an argument that the tourism guy didn't have the right to get the domain in the first place because France already had the name, or that France didn't have the right to take it from him after he had been using it. Who is right?

Re: OFC there are always options

You're of the belief that Google will set up an anti-advertising DNS system? Well, I can't argue with that.

I don't think the root servers are required for a DNS system. I think they are required for a DNS system that gets used by the general public. You're trying to get something that replaces .uk or at least comes to dominate it so the .uk people don't have any power. That requires convincing people to get domains in your .gb or whatever new DNS space, which requires users to be able to access it. Not just users who are willing and know how to change their DNS settings, but users in general. Somehow, you think that's a possibility. I'll note that the first comment implied that it would be a utopian decentralized dream, and now the suggestion has changed to getting openDNS or Google to lend their weight, which isn't going to happen.

Re: OFC there are always options

Riiiiight. How exactly are we to coordinate the replacement of the .uk registry if the U.K. government doesn't want us to do so? Because that will require either convincing all the ISPs to go along with us, convincing the root servers to change their records, or every citizen who uses the internet to perform a manual configuration check. Adding an entry to the DNS for a small group is doable though pointless, but replacing an existing one or adding a replacement without external support will not be feasible.

Re: Flat design was a bad idea

In my mind, a country should either do a purely third-level domain structure or a purely second level. Mixing them is asking for trouble. The main reasons for choosing to do only second level domains are to attract international purchases (for example, randomstartup.co.io wouldn't catch on as well as randomstartup.io) and to simplify the categorization of sites (for example, whether a personal site gets placed in .me.uk or .org.uk or .co.uk, all of which I've seen). The third level doesn't give those benefits, but clearly classifies the sites. Doing both results in a patchwork mess where domain impersonation is made far too easy.

And in spirit, it is. Legally, however, it's an organization that has been given a supported monopoly because that's pretty much the only way to run a registry that has decided on the system, not the market leaders. Their decision just happens to look like one that was set up by collusion. So an investigation into the registrars would likely come to the conclusion that they're fine, and an investigation into the registry would say that they have the right to set policies such that they get a bunch of money and then pay that money to themselves. There really should be some method for calling their motives into question or removing them entirely, but I don't think there is. Unless there's a class of law I don't know about that says "Institutions must not abuse their market position", they'll probably get off in that valley between letter and spirit of the law.

LTO-8 tape media patent lawsuit cripples supply as Sony and Fujifilm face off in court

Re: Sure this will be great on the long term

"And one tape drive/robot/tape subsystem, which typically lasts until next version(tm) of tape is available, 10 years."

First, tape generations come more quickly than that, so they must be skipping a few. Second, your need for tape readers and writers is directly proportional to your requirement for tapes, after a given point. If you have multiple petabytes to back up, you will need more than a single tape drive. You will need at least a large automatic tape library, and quite possibly multiple smaller automatic tape libraries for different locations. You will also need a backup reader, because they might not make these readers after three more generations have been released.

However, even if you don't have multiple petabytes and are using many fewer tapes, you still need a drive. That's why there is a point at which a certain amount of data storage in disk is cheaper than that amount in tape, because the equipment required to use the storage is so much cheaper for disk than tape.

For example, a post below has stated prices for 30 GB of LTO7 at $400 and the same amount of disk at $1300. If you add in the $3000 reader for the tapes, you get

Price of tape = 3000+(400/30)*t where t=number of terabytes stored

Price of disk = (1300/30)*t

In other words, the price of disk is lower than the price of tape below a hundred terabytes. If we conclude that we need twice as much disk as tape because you consider disk extremely unreliable, it's still cheaper under fifty terabytes. And that's why there is very little use of tape in small business or places that don't generate a lot of data. A local business can keep eight copies of their data on disk and still be even with the price of a tape backup system. The problem is that the increasing price of tapes and readers due to these legal disputes and the decrease in manufacturers while disk prices are falling is pushing that boundary higher. Of course tape is going to be used when the company is large enough and has a very large dataaset. While I don't run our backup systems at [current employer, which has a very large amount of data], I'm entirely certain there are rooms full of tapes around me.

Re: Sure this will be great on the long term @Tomato42

"I pity future generations of historians when so much of todays information will no longer be available."

I think they'll be fine on that score. We certainly make it hard to get at some data, stored on hardware that might not be readable, but we also create and preserve a lot more data. First, we print out a lot of completely irrelevant information because paper, ink, and the means to make the ink say something without a lot of human effort are so cheap. Second, we have places whose job it is to keep a lot of data in a decentralized manner. Some of these places have a clear purpose that would be useful to historians, like academic paper storage and wikipedia, but as useful as the Internet Archive is, I doubt they'll really need the multiple identical captures of dead sites.

I pity future generations of historians when they'll have to read so much junk. They'll get a lot of useful accurate information, but they'll have to read a lot of internet users insulting one another, people's social media posts, and mangled or false information on the way.

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

Then don't use cloud systems. Your options:

1. Tape. Relatively cheap (for now), known as relatively reliable. That said, don't just assume a single tape will last as long as they say, as there is always some variability and you care a lot more than the manufacturer does when you ended up with one that varied too low.

2. Disk, spun down: Cheap and reducing in price. Reading is easy. You'll have to duplicate a bit more because disks are not as reliable as tape, but the people who make claims like the data vanishing in a few years are exaggerating.

3. Disk, spun up locally: Uses power, processing, and internal network bandwidth. However it lets you run a system as described above where your integrity is guaranteed well because drives can be replaced. Your constant availability also makes it easier to take incremental backups more frequently, which is a useful benefit. Access time is also reduced.

4. Flash, spun down. It's known as very reliable, and restoration is very fast once you've connected it. It costs an arm, a leg, and your favorite coworker, though.

Re: Sure this will be great on the long term

That's correct, as well. However, many places use spun down disk for offline backup. It may not have a perfect lifetime, but those who choose it usually fall into one of these categories:

1. They keep backups for emergencies and don't need decades of reliability.

2. They're worried enough that they will have data corruption that they keep several copies of data. Having chosen this, they can get similar reliability with a greater number of hard drives.

3. They want convenient access to data at multiple sites in case of emergency. They choose disk because they can afford to buy several readers and leave them in the backup location unused, or even keep a server that can accept them into a bay so a person at the remote location can load a drive for them to access remotely. Buying that many tape readers would be prohibitively expensive and most locations that specialize in data storage of the kind they just improvised charge a lot more and are in the cloud services group.

Nothing is perfect and will store data forever without risk, but as disk price falls, the price of reliable enough is falling too.

Re: Sure this will be great on the long term

But that's about the same number of tape cartridges shipped, too. In terms of physical size, we're almost exactly the same. The major issue is cost. If you were just to buy that much disk and that much tape, the tape would definitely be much cheaper. Most people, however, are buying tapes and readers. For example, if you bought ten tapes and ten disks, but also needed reader for each, the combined price of the tapes and reader would now exceed the price of the disks and a standalone enclosure. If you scale up to the area where you need more than a standalone single-cartridge reader, the price of a library that can handle a lot of media is once again much more than a multi-disk system.

That's why tape is limited to things at scale. There used to be a time where a small business would back up their local data to a single set of tapes, but that market has almost entirely died to be replaced by disk cartridges or cloud services. Large businesses will eventually reach the point where they're going to obsolete their old LTO systems and have to decide whether they're going to invest in the latest LTO version or something based on disk. If LTO keeps getting more expensive while the increased demand for hot storage keeps disks innovating and being manufactured, the difference in price will fall and may fall enough to lose LTO a big customer.

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

This really depends on how much data you have. If you're a place that has a relatively small amount of data that you just really don't want to lose (say 20 TB or less), spinning disks are fine, as a few duplicated sets can be placed at all available offsite locations. If you have somewhat more than that, you can do a cost calculation for services like Amazon's Glacier, your own disks, or tape. When you start getting into the area of a bunch of data which was previously a bunch of tapes, you can redo those calculations as most of the cloud storage providers have some extra benefits for storing a very large amount of data there. As decreased number of producers and lawsuits push up the price of tape cartridges, increasing capacity of tapes and disks reduce the utility of massive libraries, and prices for storage fall across disks, SSDs, and cloud storage, the math is going to change.

Re: Sure this will be great on the long term

"There isn't a good, viable alternative to LTO for tape;"

That's true, but disk backup is getting cheaper, and it will start running up against tape's market even more than it already has. Tape's benefit used to be that it was the cheapest way to store a bunch of data per gigabyte. That's still the case, but its margin over hard drives is falling due to innovation in disk and lower demand for disk because SSDs are more popular for hot storage. If the price of tape media is pushed much higher, the margin will become so minimal as to be ignored.

The other problem is that, in order to use the tape, one also needs to purchase readers for the media, and those can be very expensive. Even the standalone LTO tape readers that read only one cartridge at a time and don't load it for you can cost several thousand. That's enough to deny them all of the very small business market and most of the small to medium business market. The last thing they need to do right now is convince large businesses that there will be problems getting media for their drives and replacing that media.

Still sniggering at that $999 monitor stand? Apple just got serious about the enterprise

Re: Corporates like idevices?

In addition, a corporate-provided device can be managed by the IT department, which has control over the device higher than the individual user. Because the user can't easily subvert these things, some IT departments prefer IOS to Android for corporate-supplied mobile devices. This becomes very different when BYOD is considered, but I shudder at the various implications of that, so I'm going to avoid considering it.

Swedish court declines to detain Belmarsh prison resident Julian Assange

Re: I am still confused

"And there has been absolutely no indication that the trial will not be public."

Response: "He's accused of treason. This will go through a secret court, with proceedings held behind closed doors"

He is not accused of treason. He is accused of conspiracy to break into a computer and crimes under the espionage act. Neither of which has anything to do with treason. Both of these are standard crimes which get tried in public unless there is some reason, like needing to protect the defendant from possible attack, not to. If that occurred, the request to do that would be public. Stating demonstrably untrue things doesn't help make points.

Apple kills iTunes, preps pricey Mac Pro, gives iPad its own OS – plus: That $999 monitor stand

Re: "We sat through 150 minutes of WWDC keynote so you didn't have to"...

They livestream it, and the writers probably sat at a table to watch that. Knowing how boring these presentations can be, I'm glad they did and I can just read the summary.

Nobody mourns iTunes?

I'll put my evidently unpopular vote in for iTunes. It wasn't the nicest of software, in fact it was mostly a nightmare, but it was one application for the tasks you might want to do, namely controlling one of Apple's portable devices. Syncing with it, backing it up, restoring it from a bricked state, etc. It also organized music and played it, again not perfectly, but it could do that well enough that it helped sell iPods. Now, they have made three applications to do what one did, and I doubt they've actually markedly improved on those things iTunes did wrong.

I'll just clear down the database before break. What's the worst that could happen? It's a trial

Re: never trust a PM

That would make sense, but as I already chose not to bill them for the time I spent actually writing the app, it's a bit out of character to charge them for something that really doesn't impact me. The server is running anyway, and I'm going to keep it going for my personal website and the various other services I've put on it. Their data doesn't take much disk or bandwidth and I could easily cut it off. I'm still surprised people don't take a look at the address bar and wonder why they've suddenly left the website of the institution concerned and ended up on my site instead, but I guess that, because I have an SSL cert on my site, they just trust the padlock and go ahead and enter the information*.

*The information collected is not personal, so there are no privacy/GDPR issues here. Also, as I wrote the code, I can say with complete honesty that it collects only what is needed and periodically flushes old records from the database.

Re: never trust a PM

That really depends on who set up the system and how their chain of command connects to processes. We've probably all been in a similar situation. For example, several years ago, I wrote a simple web application at the request of a friend who worked at a relatively big non-corporate institution that I'm choosing not to name or further characterize here. To clarify, I did not work for this institution, but they needed this functionality and it didn't take me very long. In order to test it and make changes they wanted, I spun up this application on my personal webserver. When we were done, I gave them the code and instructions on how to put it on their webserver.

I think you know what happened next, which is that they did not put it on their webserver and probably lost the code. However, I forgot to take the files off my server. I used almost no javascript or complex images so the files took up little space, and the application did not get a ton of use and was not data intensive, so I didn't see any spikes in disk or bandwidth usage. By the time I realized they'd been using my server, my friend had moved to a different place and couldn't help move it across. My contact there did not respond to my warning email. I had to make the decision of whether I'd turn it off, thus breaking their system (they were still using it heavily), send a bunch of messages to get it moved to their systems meaning I'd have to spend a lot more time on it, or take the easy way and just let them keep using my server until such time as something breaks and I don't fix it.

It's still there. They're still using it. It gets included in my standard backups, and I think it's very unlikely to go down any time soon. I really think it might be a good idea to do something else, but that's work.

Cloudflare goes big on serverless with new command line, lures devs with free account tier

I know how that'll be used

"Workers has also introduced a "free" subscription tier, in addition to "professional" and "business", that the company hopes will encourage experiments on the platform, with an allowance of up to 100,000 requests per day."

So soon we'll see just how much cryptocurrency you can make by starting a request every 0.864 seconds. Yes, it's running for periods of a few minutes and has to be written in javascript, or in other words probably one of the least efficient ways to mine crypto or do anything computationally intensive. That will not stop these people.

DigitalOcean drowned my startup! 'We lost everything, our servers, and one year of database backups' says biz boss

Re: DigitalOcean hosts hackers

They don't have complete visibility into what users are doing, as users have private server space. A script can identify things like serially accessing IP addresses, but it would be harder to detect other types of automatic scanning. For example, I run an endpoint for a VPN on a DO-provided server, and it also makes lots of HTTPS connections to sites because it handles my traffic and those of a few friends. The only way to tell this apart from a scanner that is a bit random with the servers it attempts to access is to log my sites and build up patterns that would show that I'm just browsing rather than scanning. If they did that, I'd be a bit unhappy about the privacy implications and I'd probably move my endpoint.

However, they should really check some other types of scanning, like attempts at SSH logins. I see these from lots of places, including Digital Ocean addresses, and those should be very obvious from the traffic. I simply set a rather vigorous fail2ban config, where you get quite a few attempts at first but get locked out for a rather long time (currently 48 hours) when you exceed them. Previously, I saw bots start trying again after a delay, but they usually give up if their retry attempt is likewise rejected.

Re: Sad

I'm similarly unimpressed with their competence, and I have little sympathy, but saying things like "they deserve to fail" is victim blaming. They don't deserve to fail because they did something wrong. They deserve to have their problems pointed out to them rather brusquely and to lose business if they don't fix them immediately.

Facebook ordered to open internal docs for investors livid about losing cash following data slurp scandal

Re: What are they fighting for?

The theory at this point is that there is evidence of wrongdoing that resulted in lost funds. If the investors can obtain this evidence, they can use it as a rationale to gain more power by trying to have some people held accountable. They can't use this to persuade other shareholders because there is a single majority shareholder, but in the case of a normal company, that'd have been another factor. If they can't get the evidence, the evidence is found not to exist, or Facebook managed this by not creating any evidence, they will have gained nothing by attempting this.

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: There's a time and a place ...

I haven't seen many servers with much in the way of audio capability. None have internal speakers of the type that play audio files, and few have any method for connecting external ones. They all usually have a PC speaker for making beeps, but I've seen quite a few methods for actually using them, usually differing between different manufacturers and none as easy as finding an audio file and piping it somewhere. A good idea, but it might have taken some time to get right.

Apple's privacy schtick is just an act, say folks suing the iGiant: iTunes 'purchase histories sold' to data slurpers

Re: Pandora not Apple.

Me: "For one thing, these controls only started having an effect in relatively recent builds of the operating system, as they were previously just a warning at install time."

Reply: "Hmm, since Android version 6 - quite some time."

Good point. My android devices had a marked lag between the one that never got off version 4.4 and the one I eventually got running version 7 (it's still on version 7). I overestimated the delay in getting that in. I withdraw that objection.

Me: " IOS's policy of not letting apps interact with the file systems of other apps let alone the OS may be limiting in some cases, but prevents one of the more annoying kinds of malware frequently seen on Android. "

Reply: "In Android each app has private file areas by default. [...]"

That's all true, but an application that asks for access to storage can edit any data that is in a public location, including writing malicious files there. Other applications sometimes put data there as well even when they haven't been requested to do so, meaning that a user must be aware of what kind of thing can be read when an app asks for and gets access to read and write storage. There is no mechanism for allowing it to read and write a specific area of storage only, which would be nice. This isn't intrinsically problematic, but it increases complexity for nontechnical users. This is a major point; while most of us here have a good level of security on our devices and are aware of risks to it, difficulty to less technical users weakens their security footprint and can cause extra downsides for us.

Me: " In addition, we have the difficulty in disabling things for built-in applications on Android"

Reply: "No you don't unless the manufacturer has specifically changed the OS to stop that."

Maybe Huawei is great at this, or there is something different in the last Android build that I have not seen yet. However, I have never seen an Android device that was particularly granular about what components could access what data. Frequently, the closest I could get was disabling location and microphone for Google Play Services in its entirety (that wasn't always an option, either). Articles posted here and in other places have informed us that these settings weren't always seen as binding by certain companies, especially Google but some manufacturer-installed facebooks as well. The phones that come with someone else's apps installed often went to great extents to prevent me from doing anything to them (not just removing, but permissions too). That's why I don't buy any device with third-party apps installed, but I've worked with others' devices that are so infected.

Me: ", the permission to use bluetooth also allows an app on android to turn it back on if the user has disabled it"

Reply: "This can be good or bad."

You raise some good points, but I think this is an inadvisable choice. I like the idea of having a set of master switches that allow me to be entirely certain that certain facilities are disabled. My reasons may be privacy or security related, concern about power consumption, or the like, but this is useful. I'd be entirely happy if there were two permissions for each of these: "Use bluetooth inside the app" and "alter the state of the bluetooth settings". Similarly, I'd really like Google to hack apart the various permissions in some of the large permission grants like "read phone state" to increase user control and knowledge.

Re: No

"Clearly you don't use Apple kit. No matter which <something>OS (watch, mac, i, tv) the user has to approve any such disclosure of personal information in a dialog box."

I'm afraid that's not correct. I've just posted a defense of Apple's privacy protections, but they don't work as you describe. An application must request access to specific types of information, but there is little protection should it choose to disclose the information it is granted. A navigation app that operates entirely offline and a navigation app that also sends a full and complete log to the developer would have the same request, requesting location access. Apple does not require any simplicity in disclosures made by applications. It does nicely allow you to deny access to this data if you already mistrust the app, but the integrity and privacy of the data granted to the app is not guaranteed by Apple in any way.

Re: Pandora not Apple.

"Android also has granular control for permissions. if you compare them, Android's are actually better, in particular, location fine/coarse and independent reading and writing storage."

I'm very unhappy to here this news about Apple, but I don't think I can call Android's attempt at security controls good. For one thing, these controls only started having an effect in relatively recent builds of the operating system, as they were previously just a warning at install time. Furthermore, it is relatively difficult to deny access to specific information. Applications can request certain permissions, like "read phone state" and some others, that give lots of access to many things. IOS's policy of not letting apps interact with the file systems of other apps let alone the OS may be limiting in some cases, but prevents one of the more annoying kinds of malware frequently seen on Android. In addition, we have the difficulty in disabling things for built-in applications on Android, whereas IOS includes a full list of apps (both user-installed and stock) and system services for which access can be controlled. Finally, the permissions available to android apps often allow them to take actions normally associated with subverting the user's intent; for example, the permission to use bluetooth also allows an app on android to turn it back on if the user has disabled it, whereas the master bluetooth switch on IOS preempts an application that has been granted bluetooth rights.

Mozilla returns crypto-signed website packaging spec to sender – yes, it's Google

How often

The rest of these comments cover the very real security implications of this. I agree on all of that. However, I also need to ask another important question: when would this actually be of much use?

We no longer use the internet of the 1990s, where everyone saw the same page, the pages didn't change frequently, and network bandwidth was limited. Nearly every site and page online falls into one of these categories, none of which would benefit from this at all:

1. Sites with user-specific content, requiring direct contact with the server. Webmail, anything with a login page, etc. falls under this. Obviously, nobody gets an advantage if this is cached, and for privacy and security, this would have to be encrypted from server to device.

2. Sites with very dynamic content, requiring that visitors receive up-to-date versions of the page. Yes, for some sites, you could get a bit of cache benefit by having a small time, perhaps five minutes, of caching. That only works if the site gets accessed by a lot of people and the site only changes every once in a while. News sites might work this way. But many other sites update more frequently than that.

3. Sites that offer small pages. When a site infrequently updates, the pages from that site are often very small, so there isn't much downside to a direct connection.

4. Sites that are rare. Many other sites will be accessed so rarely that, by the time someone else wants a page, either the cache has evicted the copy, or the copy has expired.

We need a page that updates relatively infrequently, has no user-specific content, no private content, is accessed by a bunch of people who all want a small enough set of pages that the cache keeps them, and has large enough files that the cache provides a real benefit. The only one like this that comes to mind is Wikipedia. Of course, you could always save some pages yourself or keep the whole thing offline. Any other sites that come to mind?

'Evolution of the PC ecosystem'? Microsoft's 'modern' OS reminds us of the Windows RT days

Re: The future is called Powerpoint

The major problem I've seen frequently with the attempts to sandbox applications is where they put files and what they do with them. For many use cases, a user will open a file in one application, do something to it, open it in another application, do something else to it, and bring it back up in the first application. Many sandboxing attempts make that a lot harder by storing the file inside the working directory of the first application and making one specifically export it, assuming it even has that option in a usable way. Sandboxing of this type is usually manageable on phones, where it is most visible, because few people do much complex editing on a phone across multiple applications, but trying that on a computer will get in the way of many. I hope Microsoft doesn't try it; if they do, it will fail.

That's a hell of Huawei to run a business, Chinese giant scolds FedEx after internal files routed via America

Re: SD Card

I was hoping they'd forget about that, because the last thing we need is another competing storage card format when we almost had a standard that everyone uses. I guess that's a lost cause now. Do you think the SD people would take this as a convincing argument to let Huawei back in? I'm willing to sign it and send it to their headquarters in California, and it shouldn't take that long to bounce there from Memphis.

Re: "Inadvertently misrouted." Wow, that's what I call a spectacular display of contempt.

I'm not buying the "inadvertence" either, but they do manage to inadvertently misdirect other packages (not them specifically, just the general class of package delivery companies) often enough that they've probably had this statement sitting on a shelf for a while.

It's all in the RISC: Arm legs it to Computex with a head full of Cortex-A77 CPU, Mali-G77 GPUs

As I understand it, it can only use one of these cores, but would run. However, if it didn't run, you could have a full Linux kernel spin up just to virtualize it and still wouldn't realize it. It's sometimes a bit amazing to think how old software's requirements compare to available technology today.

It's the curious case of the vanishing iPhone sales as Huawei grabs second place off Apple in smartmobe stakes

Re: They can test all they want

I'm wondering whether this is actually just AOSP with their layer on top, for the simple reason that the app market has made it pretty clear that they're not going to start writing for another mobile platform what with the failures of Windows Phone, Firefox OS, and Ubuntu Touch, all of which had some buy-in from a few hardware manufacturers. I could see Huawei spending a bit longer reimplementing some compatibility with Google Play Services because they know a lot of apps will refuse to run otherwise, so that might explain it. It could also be a project run by a small team as a just-in-case, so not a major priority with many devs until it really became important.

Re: Yes this is their Hongmeng OS

I would actually be more likely to assume a startup would do this properly, for the simple reason that most startups have fewer types of devices and use cases that need to work properly. I do not have any confidence in Huawei's ability to replace android with something else on devices in the field without requiring extra assistance from users. They will need to deal with users who have very little internal memory free, users who have made unusual system modifications, users who have replaced parts of the hardware (cracked screens, etc.), devices running on 2, 3, and 4G cell networks all over the world, and running in some cases firmware developed specially for specific mobile providers to lock them to that provider and to interact with providers' systems. These from the same people who forgot to turn off telnet for their routers (it wasn't an intentional backdoor, probably not at least, but it was a pretty bad mistake). No confidence at all. However, I also would not have confidence in any manufacturer who tried this, not Samsung, not Google, not Apple, not anybody. It's too large a change to go perfectly, at least in my experience, and I don't see any reason to believe that Huawei has a special method of escaping that.

Re: Yes this is their Hongmeng OS

They might have done that. Microsoft might have tested the 1809 build of Windows on lots of models, preventing the driver blue screens. Router manufacturers might have security tested their basic firmware, having fewer vulnerabilities. Samsung might have put some of their Galaxy Folds into the field before sending them to reviewers, catching the easily damaged mechanisms. Samsung might also have put their Galaxy Note 7s into more vigorous testing, catching the exploding batteries.

Just because a company is big, that doesn't mean they will be perfect. Huawei doesn't have a reputation as some technogenious which always knows what is going on and produces flawless products. If they did, your defense of them based on nothing might have some logic. In reality, they're a normal tech company that has its history of making mistakes and being generally fine. Saying that they might have some trouble trying to update a billion devices in the field to something that might be an entire replacement of the operating system is a very sensible worry, born out by the experience of trouble that happened every other time such a massive change was attempted.

Re: Marketing

No on all counts.

"So I can buy the one phone that I'm sure the US/UK government don't have backdoors to?"

You can't be sure of that. Nobody really knows to what extent if at all there is a backdoor running on current phones. Huawei might harbor one just as well as any other manufacturer. If the backdoor you've supposed into existence was part of Android, perhaps inside Google's blobs, it would apply to all Android phones including those from Huawei. If you're concerned enough that the U.S. and U.K. have backdoored phones, you should at least give thought to other countries, like, just to pick a name at random, the People's Republic of China having one too.

"With an open source OS and alternatives to the Google spyware?"

You've supposed the open source into existence too? Can I suppose things about these devices and that will just happen? They'll have a magic chip inside them that emits a new type of radio frequency that cures cancer. You have no basis for that. While Google's spyware will be gone, plenty of Huawei and partner's spyware will have replaced it. If you want open, get open, such as Lineage OS with FDroid apps on it. Do not expect a company to ride in as a savior; it isn't going to happen.

"And it has the same premium hardware as Apple/Samsung but costs half as much"

It has different premium hardware, and it costs the same. Their flagships are also ludicrously overpriced. They have cheaper models, and just like those from every mid-range and low-range manufacturer, they are just fine and will work for lots of people, but do not have the latest and greatest components. If you want latest and greatest at a lower pricepoint, choose a company like Xiaomi or the Oppo brand who do not have a ridiculously-expensive lineup and are better at charging a price commensurate with performance.

I've seen several of these comments recently. Just because you don't like the action of the U.S. government, that doesn't make the company harmed by that action into the best thing on Earth. I am inclined to agree that the restrictions placed on them don't make sense from the stated security benefit and are a purely political stunt for the purposes of a continued trade war. I think that, as such, they should be reversed. That doesn't make Huawei a wonderful company that is out to make my life great and is being repressed by someone who wants to keep the underdog down. The goal of this is money, not a backdoor. It's shortsighted to assign good and evil tags out without considering the large area in the middle where these things reside.

Activist shareholders to target Zuck with giant angry emoji inflatable at Facebook AGM

Re: Separate CEO and Board Chair

It does make a lot of sense and that's why most companies do it. However, a company that is run by one person with all the power, while frequently inefficient or actively mismanaged, isn't the same as a dictatorship. The power over a corporation is based on how much of it, or in this case, its voting shares, a person owns. Even if he left as CEO, he would still be able to dictate policy by choosing another CEO and telling them what to do. This is entirely legal if inadvisable.

Re: Who?

In this case, the stake in the sense of how much power can be wielded is exactly the same, and better described as imaginary than real. Since there is a majority shareholder, whatever they say goes. The activist with 10% and the activist with 10 shares have exactly the same amount of power and will receive the same amount of respect. Yes, they could try to do a stunt like dropping all 10% at once, but A) they don't actually own that large a chunk, B) they wouldn't want to take that kind of loss to send a message, and C) someone else would buy it and Facebook would not care at all about the former investor.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Re: Wouldn't Happen Here

Just because some set of people who do something have qualifications, that doesn't mean that everyone else using the verb has those qualifications or that those qualifications are important. For example, penetration testing can be very well done and very useful, with lots of different attack vectors that can be tested by very experienced people in real world scenarios. You can also get a penetration tester who just tries a small number of really obvious things. That's why you have to choose one who knows what they're doing. In this case, the audit seems to have found some problems with security, who didn't do anything when they saw people breaking through a door. Yet they seem to have blamed the IT people, who did everything well as far as they knew.

Computer room has a door? Check. Computer room door is locked? Check. Locked door doesn't unlock with unauthorized cards? Check. Door is sturdy enough not to be shoved open? Check. So I think they yelled at the wrong group. If they were supposed to test security, they did something potentially useful, but if they were there just to audit IT, they were wrong to try to break through a door.