Posts by rcxb

Stiff penalty: Prenda Law copyright troll gets 14 years of hard time for blue view 'n sue scam

The legal profession reminds me of Chinese businesses. You can get away with a hell of a lot of unethical behaviour. But if you push it just a bit too far and end up in a major spotlight, the penalties are going to be severe...

This Free software ain't free to make, pal, it's expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras

Re: Firefox's global market share dwindles ...

> Adding support for web extensions doesn't require you to remove existing ones.

They added it TWO YEARS before they deprecated the legacy extensions. How long do you think they should wait? It always hurts to rip off a bandage, but you can't put it off forever.

The article explains new version of the browser would both break legacy extensions, and possibly be broken by legacy extensions, and the performance issues.

But of course the US and China's trade war is making those godDRAM oversupply issues worse

Re: Shoot foot, then head

> international companies no longer trust you.

International companies never trusted China, but they still crawled on their hands and knees to get access to that huge consumer market. The US has the biggest market, and cutting off your profits to spite your face just isn't a likely outcome.

More likely is future trade deals with the US (and China) including a nuclear option... If one party imposes tariffs, even for "national security reasons," the other party gets a huge cash sum, or similar.

LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents

Wake me when Calc can handle thousands of columns. Until then, it's no competitor to proprietary options.

IBM accused of pumping staff retirement funds into a tanking stock... IBM's to be exact

Re: Pfft... stupid

> ... would have made more sense to let them tank, then use the retirement funds to buy them up cheap.

There was nothing to buy up. IBM had to give GlobalFoundries a huge check to TAKE the division from IBM. You'd get a better return investing in radioactive waste.

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

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

> Dedup has no benefits during restores, [...] you actually restoring complete 12TB and even slower than restoring from tapes.

Bollocks. Client-side dedupe does not do that... at all. If your 12TB dataset gets deduped and compressed down to 3TB, then it's only 3TB that gets transferred over the network, whether for a full backup, or a full restore. And it can do better than that if you're not completely starting from scratch.

> Keep in mind defragmentation or housekeeping from backup dedup storage repository can cause heavy performance hits

Again, client-side deupe does not have that issue.

> the two technologies are actually complimentary when used in conjunction

I mostly agree. I'm all for a monthly archive tape, and similar. But tape's benefits keep getting smaller and smaller, so large companies are going to have fewer libraries and cycle through far fewer tapes, as they do more and more online and cloud backups. Mid-sized companies will decide they don't need to upgrade to newer tape tech. Smaller companies will get a big benefit out of being able to forego the expense of tape entirely. Mid-sized companies will get there in the not-too-distant future.

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

> That piece of software is 30+ years old, so don´t get all shouty about it.

TSM didn't get client + server side deduplication options until v6.2 in 2010.

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

> What if you need to restore OFFLINE to get back ONLINE?

What did you have in mind? You need internet access, account information and key config info to access your cloud services, encryption keys, and some place to grab the backup software, but that's about it. You may only need a small piece of paper to hold all that info, tucked in your wallet (with several people having copies). Fireproof safes are another good option.

You'll have at least as much trouble boot-strapping from tapes. Still need a copy of the backup software to get started, and special hardware (tape drive/tape library) and systems need to be configured to access it.

Re: Every Two Years...

> There just isn't any technology available that can meet all the use cases where tape is needed currently.

No, but the vast majority are better suited by other technologies.

> If there was then tape *would* already be dead!

Even floppy drives are still hanging onto life. Tape sales have been in steep decline for decades now. It's been dying for a long time, and it won't take very much to finally kill it. This current patent squabble certainly has the potential to kick it off. Or the LTO group might learn their lesson and ensure this nonsense NEVER happens again. Then perhaps tape could retain a strong niche for quite some time. But there is no possible future where tape dominates the landscape once again.

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

> Has anyone got any info on the lifetime of data stored on an HDD kept in ideal conditions?

You're thinking about it the wrong way, entirely. It's a sea change, not a direct substitution.

Offsite and encrypted but online data gets scrubbed and checksums verified on a routine basis. Malfunctioning hard drives are replaced as needed. You rely on the integrity of the system as a whole, not put blind faith in every single individual component (like a tape).

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

> how do you do that without running over data transfer allowances, given you're talking bulk data in the multi-TB range

Modern smart backup software only needs to complete one full backup, EVER, and that can be spread out over as long of a period as you want to. After that, it's an "incremental forever" strategy, where only the highly deduplicated, rolling hash, incredibly well compressed differences need to be transferred.

This strategy works great for the vast majority of workloads. "Sneakernet" would only be useful in exceptionally rare circumstances, like a massive DVR with already highly-compressed data that (strangely) also cycles out its full data set on a perhaps weekly basis.

You need to modernize your IT skill-set because you're seriously missing out on immensely useful modern developments. Take a look at Borg and Veeam just for a start.

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

> And after a disaster, how do those hard drives in Romania get the data back to you?

The better providers will offer to rush ship a drive to you, for a price.

> Better have a 10G upstream connection, then.

Bollocks. LTO-7 has a maximum speed of just 2.4Gbits/sec. The far less pricey LTO-6 is only a bit over gigabit speeds. And with a smart restore, you only need to pull down a fraction as much data as you would need to pull off of a tape, so even a gigabit connection may be FASTER to restore than a tape. No old fulls and several incrementals to reconstruct the current state. You'll only be pulling a virtual full, and even then, if you're able to start from something like a month-old backup, then it'll only transfer over the network a small set of differences against your current data set. Modern backup solutions are just that advanced.

Honestly, if a little downtime is that critical to you, you've already got a replicated DR site... at least for all your most important systems. For important systems, even having an off-site tape isn't nearly fast enough, and isn't much faster (and may be much slower) than pulling it from the cloud.

When your entire datacenter gets wiped out by an asteroid, and you've got to order all new servers and start over completely from scratch, a little extra time to pull down your backup isn't going to be your biggest problem, as you're scrambling around to build everything up again from scratch. You're just going to be ecstatically thankful someone was smart enough to save a tertiary copy and leave you the means to access it at all.

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

> And at one petabyte per litre, what media can even come even close to matching that?

Every single bit of similar storage vaporware that has been hyped by companies seeking stupid investor dollars for the past half century but never makes it out of the lab...

Re: Bye-bye tape drives

> And what would you replace it with, especially for archival and off-site storage?

You get backup software that supports encrypting and uploading it to various "cloud" storage providers. Pay a monthly fee for however much you need, add to it as needed, checksum it once in a while, and then transfer one of the sets to a cheaper cloud provider when they come along.

Tape (here) is cheaper than hard drives here, but what about tape (here) versus hard drives in Romania? What about when you factor in the cost of the tape library? The shrinking cost of spinning drives, combined with the advantages dynamic allocation and easily accessible online data, means many, many organizations are going that way for more and more of their backups. Sure, any decent sized company still has a tape drive around for important long-term archival, but they're throwing FAR fewer tapes at it, and seeing less reason to upgrade to the next gen as their tape usage shrinks.

Of course that's just the latest trend. Off-site SAN replication and snapshots over ever-faster internet connections was the thing a few years back, which took a big bite out of tape as well.

Re: So how come ...

> Whats so fancy and innovative about LTO7 and LTO8 then ?

LTO up to 5 used Metal Particulate (MP) tape. LTO-6 was compatible with both MP and BaFe tape. LTO-7 and 8 moved to BaFe only.

Re: Sure this will be great on the long term

LTO (and cheaper hard drives) killed off just about everything else. Oracle/Sun StorageTek T10000 was recently discontinued in favour of LTO-8. Only IBM is still hanging on with the 3592, and that's ironic, since IBM is nearly the last surviving LTO member. Half the LTO-8 drives out there have HP's extremely-vented design, and the other half have Big Blue's prominently big blue eject button.

A generation back, there were a handful of manufacturers of LTO drives and tapes, and the competition kept prices reasonable. Now there's only two drive manufacturers, and two media manufacturers, and this story nicely outlined the media manufacturer's current refusal to manufacturer media...

The organization really shot themselves in the fet on this one.

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

Re: " And Brad, of course, was in Europe,

> The Continental Shelf begs to differ.

Quite true, but if you just go by geology, then there's no rational way to draw a dividing line between Europe and Asia, as commonwealth countries still teach their children. India, however, could easily be its own continent.

Introducing 'freedom gas' – a bit like the 2003 deep-fried potato variety, only even worse for you

Re: Freedom gas needs big ships

More importantly than emissions, having two suppliers is a hedge against either forcing political alignment (on any particular issue) by European nations that have inadequate domestic energy supplies.

Re: My main regret ...

> pollution, carbon emissions, etc, do not stay within the national borders of the country that created them. If they did then

...Europeans would be dead from lack of oxygen, having cut down their vast forests before the Americas were ever discovered.

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

Re: I will not attribute your post to malice, never.

Can't help but admire conspiracy theorists. The evidence that disproves their first crazy theory becomes the foundation for their next crazy theory. Keep trying again and again, until you have an elaborate conspiracy that kinda fits, and can't be conclusively disproven. I don't even put that kind of effort into my full-time job.

Re: Huawei "above reproach," I'd say most victims of bullying are above reproach

Powerless, huh? They just created a highly publicized international incident out of two packages being misrouted.

Somebody stole a package of mine a few days ago, which secretive government agency do you suppose did it? Where do I go to get Reuters to write up a paranoid story about my missing box? At least Hauawei got their packages back...

Re: the real enemy

There's always room for more than one enemy...

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

In fact FedEx's answer seems quite plausible, because I know a bit about how they fly. Memphis is their "Super-Hub" which is the fallback destination for any packages that don't have a direct route. Any failure to match a more direct route, defaults to sending the package there. Of course it should have gone to a local hub instead, but it's a fairly minor error. Now if it had been routed to Langley, VA, I'd pop out my tin hat, tool

See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qfeoqErtY

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Down-vote away if it makes you feel better.

One question for you. If this is some super-secret NSA spy op... Why did FedEx show the route to Memphis right in their package tracking information? Do you think maybe that might tip-off the Chinese? There's a huge military base right in Japan, so how is the reroute necessary or even desirable?

Headsup for those managing Windows 10 boxen: Microsoft has tweaked patching rules

Isn't it nice how buying into the Windows ecosystem makes everything so easy?

You know what you need for Linux updates? One HTTPS server somewhere. with a few gigabytes of disk space.

HP: Based on our Intel, don't hold your breath waiting for Chipzilla's CPU shortage to end

It's okay HP, I'm sure Intel will keep spitting out plenty of Itantium CPUs for you...

HP had the BEST support archive around, until the HPE split. Now you can't hardly download drivers for HPE equipment without a support contract. HP keeps shooting themselves in the feet, Dell wins by default. It's sad, really.

Amazon’s Away Teams laid bare: How AWS's hivemind of engineers develop and maintain their internal tech

> The policy is to do whatever it takes to provide value to the customer and not worry about duplication or deviating from standards. There is no waiting while the perfect shared service is being developed. There is no friction from having to use the perfect shared service.

Perhaps these superior policies are why the amazon.com website is broken so damn often, with searches turning up zero results, sorting by price resulting in 1/10th as many hits, higher priced items are interspersed through the lower priced items, and utterly irrelevant products show up even though the keywords you used don't show up anywhere in the product page.

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

Re: To be fair to AirBnB I don't think they can be held responsible for people doing this

> The cost of carrying out inspections or surprise visits on every BnB place would be completely prohibitive. There are millions of listings

That's not how inspections work, for anything. You inspect a small percentage, at random. Those who are cheating will have no way of knowing if or when an inspector will show up and catch them. The penalties just need to be harsh enough to discourage playing the odds.

Re: To be fair to AirBnB I don't think they can be held responsible for people doing this

> even if AirBnB held regular inspections of every room, the guy puts in an unmodified router for the inspection, then replaces it with the dodgy one when they leave

That's why you have unannounced randomly timed inspections, even with the inspector making a reservation and staying as a paid guest.

IT bod who does a bit of everything: You might want to specialise if that pay rise proves elusive

This kind of specialization happened in manufacturing decades ago. After the fallout, many companies reversed course and brought their engineering and manufacturing back together on at least a smaller scale, and then engineers with hands-on manufacturing experience became one of those specialized skills that companies are willing to pay extra for. Strange world.

I know it's not going to work out any better in IT. Having the guys who maintain it completely separate from guys who develop it guarantees unmaintainable systems.

Personality quiz for all you IT bods: Are you a chameleon or an outlaw? A diplomat or a high flier? Vote right here

Re: Impossible to answer

That's okay, because their advice for all the types is practically the same...

Over and over:

"To attract this persona ... career progression ... good salary and benefits"

Yeah... that certainly won't hurt...

Backup bods Backblaze: Disk drive reliability improving

Re: He He He

Re SMART, see here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/

Helium can move much more heat than air, and conduction of heat through most metals is higher than convection through whichever gas, so it shouldn't be a dominant effect anyhow.

Oh dear. Secret Huawei enterprise router snoop 'backdoor' was Telnet service, sighs Vodafone

Re: "We all want to see hard proof of espionage. This is absolutely not it"

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from a deliberate backdoor...

Sophos antivirus tools. Working Windows box. Latest Patch Tuesday fixes. Pick two: 'Puters knackered by bad combo

Re: Out o'curiosity ...

> As much as I hate the dumpsterfire that is Windows, it pays the bills to cull that fire every now and again

If you have twice as many problems, and need twice as many warm bodies to babysit the misbehaving software, you can only charge half as much for their time. A world without Windows would be a world with fewer PC Techs, but they would be far better-paid. Hopefully it's the mediocre ones that choose to switch careers...

Re: Out o'curiosity ...

It's not a question of asking people to replace what they've got. It's a matter of directing them to something else when it comes time to upgrade. People have the mistaken impression that what ran on Windows XP will run on Windows 10, when in truth it's just as likely to run properly on WINE under Linux as it is on Redmond's latest reboot of their burning platform, and several Linux desktop environments require LESS user retraining than Microsoft's ever changing desktop.

Surprising absolutely no one at all, Samsung's folding-screen phones knackered within days

Re: @rcxb

You're clearly unaware of all the amazing synthetic materials available, for those willing to pay for them.

Any device that's under-engineered will wear-out, whether it moves, or not. If laptop makers used hinges designed for submarine hatches, they'd outlast the rest of the laptop. If they included a processor that needed liquid hydrogen cooling systems, it would burn up in your laptop long before the hinges had a chance to fail.

Nice to see Samsung has reached 1980's Nintendo Game & Watch level technology.

This of course explains the high sale price. Much like Apple, they need that cash to come up with lots of novel new reasons to deny your warranty claims...

Google Fiber experiment ends with Choc Factory paying Louisville $3.8m to clean up its mess

Re: Scorched Earth

> "cheap and shitty" almost always forces "expensive but good" out of the market.

Cheap ISPs like Windstream and Frontier are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, while expensive (but consistently fast) ISPs like Charter, Comcast, etc. earn record profits.

What we usually end up with is acceptable (for most everyone) quality at very low prices, but it can take quite a long time to get there when there is limited competition.

China responsible for just, oh, 20% of global semiconductor revenue in 2018, no biggie

Were they still pretending Taiwan is part of China when they came up with those numbers?

RIP: Microsoft finally pulls plug on last XP survivor... POSReady 2009

Re: I know places still installing them ...

How does that work? XP didn't get modern TLS protos and ciphers, so it blows up when you try to have any native programs connect to any modern servers. Firefox included their own, making web browsing is still possible, but even they dropped support for XP several versions back, so things are going to get ugly quite soon. IMHO, XP (and 2003) is fully in the same boat as Win2000, and past the point where it's less painful to savagely rip out those old systems immediately and disruptively, than it is trying to keep them limping along.

Free online tax filing? Yeah, that'll soon be illegal thanks to rare US Congressional unity

The IRS keeps a list of such free services it directs the public to:

https://apps.irs.gov/app/freeFile/

One of them even eliminated the income cap for federal returns (if you sidestep the prompts to upgrade to the paid service) although they have a similar income cap for free state returns.

The (relatively insignificant) state taxes are an entirely different issue. 9 states have none. Several of the others provide a service for free filing of your state tax forms, with no income cap.

Dyin'... for some li-ion, from Taiwan? Electronics powerhouse spewing out data centre cells

Re: Is that a smart idea?

The increased energy-density of Li-Ion per-volume is probably the key issue. I know that's the selling point in UPSes... Give your UPS 3X the run-time in the same footprint for an only slightly exorbitant amount of extra cash.

On that metric, Ni-MH is almost as good as Li-Ion, and VASTLY safer and longer-lasting than either Li-Ion or lead-acid. But I suppose economies of scale are pushing Li-Ion prices down faster than Ni-MH.

Plus, Li-Ion can also be safely discharged at a higher rate, so if you only want 3 minutes of runtime from a relatively tiny bank of batteries (although shortening the lifetime), Li-Ion is a better way to go.

2019: The year all-flash finally goes lamestream – but you know we were into it before it was cool

Re: Meh

You can easily compensate for UREs by just including some FEC codes. You'll need some more storage to hold that extra data, but it's manageable. Some backup software has the option baked-in. We're still quite some time away from the end of LTO tapes, but it won't hang around very long after spinning rust reaches price-parity.

Falling NAND prices to drive NVMe SSD uptake, say industry watchers

I'm waiting to see how the RAID situation with NVMe pans out. Intel is telling everyone to just use software RAID, which is of course what you have to do when there's no hardware solutions out there, but is that really the best option? Sure, it's perfect if you're using ZFS (ZRAID) anyhow, but is it really as reliable and manageable for everyone else? I know, if you absolutely NEED the speed, you do whatever you've got to do, but plain SATA/SAS SSDs are only a slight bottleneck for us as of yet, so I'll wait and see how it develops.

PuTTY in your hands: SSH client gets patched after RSA key exchange memory vuln spotted

Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

"I would like to point out the consideration of increasing your attack surface by installing third party tools to do something that is already baked into the OS. In general, this should be avoided though YYMV."

So YOU'RE guy who is still using Internet Explorer / Edge... keeping the stats hovering above zero.

Take Note: Schneider's teeny-tiny Galaxy VS li-ion UPS set to explode onto data centre scene

Re: Schneider Electric

Eaton is far better in that regard, they're advertise their ABM system. Just about all other UPS manufacturers copy APC's lead. It's really not because of run time specs, but because a constant float charge is just the simplest and cheapest way to charge a battery. Never-mind that not only do they not lose money when the batteries fail, they actually earn money every time you swap the battery.

Re: Fire Risk ?

"LiFePO still have more capacity than lead-acid and a much longer lifespan than other rechargeable batteries."

Ni-MH batteries have the same lifespan, even better safety margins, and have been around decades longer.

Re: Fire Risk ?

"Lead acid batteries have a VERY big advantage over Lithium ion for UPS use - they do NOT catch fire."

No they don't. Instead lead-acid batteries just explode suddenly and for absolutely no reason:

https://appel.nasa.gov/2018/06/25/spotlight-on-lessons-learned-battery-explosion/

Prodigy dancer and vocalist Keith Flint found dead aged 49

Re: Smack My Bitch Up

He's smacking bitches up in heaven now, kids...

Demand for HP printer supplies in free-fall – and Intel CPU shortages aren't helping either

Ink sucks. Get a laser. Never look back.