> Unless, of course, you count the vast array of herbs used through the ages that pharmaceuticals are now based on.
This is not a good comparison if you'd want to make a pro-homeopathy argument. Homeopathy and herbalism are quite different.
I agree with you that medicine can be found in plants. Some plant extracts will cure infections, some will help wounds heal, some will calm you, some act as a painkiller and so on. I've seen it and felt it. I actually wouldn't know how many, but I'd guess a lot of pharmaceuticals are based on the molecules found in these plants. Nature provides in a lot of good stuff including antibiotics.
If I take some herbals or pills, I actually put molecules into my body which could have a certain effect on the biochemistry going on. You gotta take the right mix and right amount to get the right effect. If you use only a fraction of that amount it simply won't work, and an overdose or wrong mix can harm you badly. That's not so hard to believe or proof.
Homeopathy, however, works like this: I shake my water with molecules in a specific way, and now my water itself becomes the medicine. That's right, my water has a memory, it will remember the medicine solved in it, and it will change state and become a medicine all by itself! And because of my shaking and this water memory, I can now dilute my water with molecules by adding more water, shake it again, and it can even be a *stronger* medicine! I can dilute it, shake it, dilute it and shake it until the actual bottle *you* buy does not even contain the original medicinal molecules anymore!
This committee of British members of parliament now says: Shake it!
And rightfully so!
The shaking is a ritual. There's no scientific base for it. No logic reasoning will explain why homeopathics shake the way they shake. Gotta shake it violently! Imagine someone on the market shaking their medicine violently and diluting it with water again and again. Would you buy from them or shake your head, call it quackery and walk away?
so to you, "girlintraining", this gender stuff might all be very important and so on... I really woudn't know if that's your myspace btw... just making a point to everyone else...
... the rest of us simply DON'T GIVE A SHIT... it's "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"... and we DON'T GIVE A SHIT about your gender and your issues about it. There's different forums for that kinda shit...
... other than that... you're more than welcome to discuss any of the topics at hand... just like anyone else... regardless of your gender... post about online privacy... about your latest BSD hack... about whatever the fuck it is that is appropriate for slashdot...
... but don't expect people to go whoooosh about your gender or your pride about it on SLASHDOT, of all sites...
... People won't give a shit... nor respect your gender... they *might* respect a brilliant post... or a funny one... and so on... like you've made a couple before... but start demanding respect for whatever that's just irrelevant to slashdot... and people will make fun of you at best...
... but *most* likely... you'll just attract some anonymous troll who'll like to provoke exactly these kind of reactions from you... because they know you'll bite... bite more and they'll follow you around... they'll bookmark your userpage... there's probably better things to do with your time... because this is a total waste... you'll just get a chuckle out of a troll...
** holds up a worn out sign reading, "--==>> Please do NOT feed the trolls! <<==-- " **
** sighs **
Oh, hint, if you feel personally attacked, and want to defend yourself personally on slashdot... you're probably feeding a troll... because there's nobody here to know you... nobody *can* attack you or disrespect you and so on and so on... you're that "someone on the world"... why would you ever feel attacked? Why would you give a troll what they want?
You're just making an easy target.
Not because of your (trans)gender.
But because you bite.
Bite more, and you'll become an easier target.
Bite more, and slashdot will suck more.
Yeah I knew all that, i still call it bullshit though. Nice you mention arpanet, because well it's nifty and all... but it didn't require science that wouldn't be available for at least the next decade.
According to wikipedia they took a Honeywell DDP-516 and turned it into a router. It had 24kb of memory... nice for the time and all but not exactly mind blowing science. They got existing hardware to do what they wanted.
It was all about ideas... creating protocols and implementing them. Twelve companies submitted bids and BBN won the contract in 1968. WITHIN A YEAR, arpanet was created, consisting of 4 IMPs! Funny, isn't it!?
A very nice accomplishment. And look how it's growing! It looks like everybody is using the internet nowadays. But that won't mean I'll grant DARPA a hero status and believe they can wave their funds like a magic wand and defeat Moore's law like that.
I call it bullshit, vapor, publicity stunt, or a joke at best.
Why would CCP ever facilitate this guy's rmt wet dream?
Why would the EVE developers want you to be able get real dollars for your ISK?
They're not running a business to make *you* money. They rather have the real dollars going into their own pockets selling GTCs, and happily let the abandoned accounts with billions of ISK rot away in the bit bucket.
... and it's a sure way to get on one of those cd's with 60 million addresses. They've been doing this for eh... at least 10 years, perhaps 15. I'm wondering what planet this guy has been living on... and if timothy is his neighbour;-) He could've just answered "Duh! Yes!";-)
Yeah... it really helps if you keep things under control;-) I've been running my own mailserver for over a decade. I don't even have my own domain, I've been using dyndns.org like forever, it works and is good enough for my home server.
I've used sendmail's (postfix has it too) LUSER_RELAY for a while, and set it to "local:<username>". This sends email for unknown users to <username>, so I didn't have to keep the alias file up... basically it turns every non-existing username into an alias! I could still use/etc/aliases as blacklist by aliasing to/dev/null.
I used this for a while to trap usenet related spam, every post would get a unique FROM address;-) I hardly post to usenet anymore so now I'm just using/etc/aliases. Every time I sign up somewhere I also create a new alias for it. If one plays dirty and I receive spam, I kill the alias.
Only friends and family get a "real" alias. This and keeping my email addresses away from the web has kept my inbox clean... without using a spam filter.
Just to avoid labeling myself as a fan, I'll just say I use linux on my desktop, notebook, and my small home server, have done so for over a decade, and I like it a lot:-)
The main reason why "the year of Linux" never happens is that the press (and analysts) keep comparing Linux to what they know: a Windows desktop.
I think "the year of Linux" will not happen either, but for different reasons. Because it's all about evolution, not revolution. Who thought these netbooks would turn an entire new market into Linux users simply looked at a single population at a given time and drew conclusions from it, underestimating Microsoft's ability to catch up quickly.
I'd say that the simple fact that Linux *was* there first is quite nice by itself. Furthermore they're *still* selling 10% of these netbooks with linux while there's now also a Windows option available... which is still a progress in the larger process, these people are now using linux while otherwise they wouldn't. Also, it helped gain Linux more attention, both in media and in personal contacts. People sometimes go like, oh nice small notebook... interesting... what's it running... and so on. That's a "possible linux-user" virus being spread through the population;-)
Sometimes it's also trivial things why people switch. A girl I know studies to become a dentist, and she bought an asus eee netbook with linux. It runs Xandros, based on Debian 4.0, with fluxbox as window manager I think. It looked to be designed to give easy access to commonly used programs and configuration, while hiding everything else under a nice shiny hood. I had to search the web to find out how to get a terminal emulator running on the thing (control-alt-t)
Asking her how she liked the linux environment, she was pretty enthusiastic, it ran solid, responded fast, worked great for her and did everything she wanted to... except that she couldnt access the wifi network at school, the helpdesk didn't support Linux at all, and someone was going to install windows XP on it the next day just so she could get connected at school.
That hurt...
Someone put up a pdf with instructions how to access their school's network with linux, using either the gnome network manager (she had a network manager... but wasn't sure if it was the right one) or shell commands, but she couldn't figure out how to get a shell. She's an intelligent girl, just not so computer/linux savvy, and working with her I got the idea that the fact that wpasupplicant on xandros is called xandros-wpasupplicant might have been just enough to prevent her from succeeding.
Needless to say I installed the certificate and got the stuff going... I hope it worked out, I just had one shot, without the wifi network to test it... if it didn't work the next day at school she'd install xp...:-/ This was past weekend, I haven't heard about the results yet. Even if she replaced linux with xp tho, I don't think this whole experience would really wreck linux' reputation with her, her overall impression of Linux as operating system for her netbook was so good that this one problem would not keep her from trying linux again in the future.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them. What we need are real killer applications in completely new spaces. For instance, look at web applications: that's hurting Microsoft 10 times more than any 3D effect in KDE ever will. The Web made a lot of Microsoft software irrelevant. Linux needs to do the same, by doing something *different*.
Linux *is* about doing things different, whether or not some or all UI elements are "copied" from Windows. There's just so many ways you can present a solitaire game, you know? The file manager has an icon representing an actual file cabinet on many operating systems including phones... Did they all copy that
Probably because those victims were offered a year of "credit monitoring" and those victims took them up on it.
Hmm... credit monitoring (monitoring your credit reports for changes) would increase the chance of detection tho, not decrease the chance of fraud. If the detection rate increases and the chance of fraud is the same, the fraud rate found for the breached data would increase since logically there's only detected fraud in the numbers, not undetected.
It made them more paranoid than they had been before, so they watched their financial data more carefully,
That would have the same effect as the credit monitoring I guess.
and were perhaps more cautious when using their credit cards. (Of course that doesn't reduce the number of attacks, just the number that are successful, but the data posted is a "fraud rate", and doesn't denote "successful vs. unsuccessful.")
Well being more careful might decrease the chance of their cards being abused somewhat indeed...
Or maybe many of them closed out a bunch of unused credit accounts to minimize their footprints, which actually did spare them from further breaches.
... guess that's more likely tho:-) Well if you change "unused" to "unwanted" or something... Unused accounts probably wouldn't have their data stolen in the first place;-) So people were notified of the breach and closed down accounts... and now these closed accounts are polluting the attackers data... while the "overall fraud rate" only includes working accounts.
It makes an interesting read... there's just so many things affecting the fraud rate. For example, the report estimates it'd take a single person about 10 years to use a million breached accounts. Perhaps this one data set was stolen by a smaller group of attackers. Or just one, and a lazy one at that...;-)
There's something wrong with the math in the report tho... they estimate: 5 minutes per application, 6.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 days a year. That's 12 applications per hour * 6.5 * 5 * 50 = 19500 applications per year, or roughly 51 years for a single person, not the 10 they write about.
The report then goes on saying that you'd have to hire 51 workers to complete all that in one year -- which actually triggered my curiosity about these numbers because it matches my 51 years but not their 10;-) -- which would cost over $830,000 at $10 an hour... quite the operation;-)
My conclusion is that we can't compare the results of this one study to the overall fraud rate at all. I do agree with jambarama's comment tho that these companies selling credit monitoring services and "fraud protection" try very hard to hype the fraud fear.
They found the fraud rate was 1 in 1020, practically identical to the ambient fraud rate of non-breached data (which was 1 in 1010). [...] Fraud rate 3 years later of those people was 1 in 1244 - slightly better than average.
So what you're saying is that I should give my data to these thugs and *decrease* the chance of fraud? How's that logical? I'd guess the stolen accounts should have at least the same chance of fraud as any other... why does this not add up?
Look into Duplicity. I haven't used it -- this is something that's interesting enough to me that I'll probably write my own. But the software definitely exists.
That's cool tho... because I've used duplicity for a while before switching to plain rsync. Apparently they've added an S3 backend since then, and even a gmail one as well... yay:-) It's fairly simple to setup too.
It didn't pop up in my google/freshmeat searches for S3 stuff... perhaps they'd need to advertise that some more;-) Thanks!
The keys I got so far are so small that even just printing them on paper and having to type them back in in the unlikely scenario of me needing the offsite backup would be very acceptable;-)
Sounds like a passphrase, not a key. And I'd be using a large-ish, random key.
Those were the AWS key and secret key, as amazon calls them. You might just call them random passphrases. They're like 20 or 40 characters long. I don't have any S3 keys yet... no credit card yet... might not get one either depending on how this duplicity/gmail thing is going to work out. I just stored and restored some data with it. S3 seems more suitable to dump a couple hundred megs of photos on tho, while even a couple of gigabyte still amounts to pennies per month:-)
What would be a sufficient keysize? Would it really need to be more than 128 characters?
True. It's at least as annoying as replacing a hard drive though.
Really?
S3 downtime: You get an email, and by the time you go to look at it, S3 is probably back up and your script has taken care of everything.
Yeah that might be a more likely scenario than the doom I had in mind;-) It'd just be annoying to have to wait for it and not being able to do something about it.
Replacing a hard drive: You get an email, and you order a new drive from Newegg, unpack it, open up your NAS, and push the drive in, assuming it's hotpluggable. If not, you'll have to carefully power it down, probably open it, hook up the drive, close it, lock it, and boot it back up.
Well usually i just pick up my hardware on my way to or from work... so it'd cost like 10 minutes to replace a hd I guess.
Or perhaps I'd just shrug it off with a "oh maybe tomorrow" and return to the smoking remains of my home to see if there's any *real* stuff left...
Probably. But since the things I've created are digital, I would still be pretty worried about that -- if my house burns down, there's a lot of nice things I've lost, and probably a fair amount of money. So I go to work, make some more money, get a new house, and buy more things to fill it -- just takes time, but it's all replaceable.
If I lose that killer app I was working on, or that great American novel, I have to start over. I may be able to recreate it, but most likely, I will never get it back.
Yeah... I don't really have anything digitally at home that's making me money... there's just stuff I'd hate to lose... so I've got the NAS and do some backups on my server as well. Of course when the house burns down I'd still love to get at least some digital stuff back;-)
Read up on Dynamo, among other things.
I just read the paper... cool stuff:-)
More relevantly, that is now their job, not yours -- which means you can relax. It's hard, I know:)
Heh.. nah.. I still sleep fine;-) It's just that when you're creating offsite backups it's for the worst doom scenario;-)
True, with a NAS you'll have the burden of hardware maintenance. How often would that be tho?
More often than "none at all", which is what the OP was asking for.
That doesn't make it a non issue... the OP was asking for the impossible, like it should last for decades, easy setup, zero maintenance and be inexpensive at that. I mean, he isn't gonna get what he was asking for anyways, so some tradeoff needs to be made, just as Amazon S3 has its downsides as well. To find out if the tradeoffs are acceptable or to optimize them you should be able to quantify them somewhat somehow.
When I've had trouble with hard drives, it was either due to my own stupidity (physical shocks while they were running) or with pretty old hard drives.
You can prevent the stupidity part by mounting the NAS in a safe place, and by only doing something to it physically when it's turned off;-)
Apart from the stupidity I've had 2 harddisk crashes in my server in over a decade, both hard drives were living their second life after at least 3 years of being desktop whores.
Hard drives will fail sooner or later but personally I don't think it'd happen so often that it'd become a chore, I think it'd be an acceptable sacrifice.
That's great advice of course:-) Perhaps I'm just too paranoid about trusting my personal data to third parties:-(
So encrypt it.
Yeah... I'm seriously looking into S3 now to use it in addition to the NAS... it really does make sense to put the highest priority data offsite as well. I see that this is going to be one of the downsides for S3... it's gonna cost a lot of time getting something going that'll encrypt and store the data periodically in a reliable way. Muuuuch more than it took to configure my NAS and some rsync jobs;-).
Unless of course you happen to know some free (speech) software that'll do the trick easily.
More S3 pitfalls ahead... I didn't have an amazon.com account and created one. Obviously I had to create an AWS account as well. Apparently I need a credit card to pay for S3 which I don't have and actually would rather not have... so now I either gotta get me one anyways or forget the S3 plan alltogether... feh.
Then you have to store your crypto keys somewhere -- but crypto keys are relatively tiny, and if they're sufficiently secure, unchanging. You could, for instance, fill a DVD with copies of the same tarball, of that key, any script you wrote to retrieve the data, and a text file of instructions. Or use Paperdisk.
The keys I got so far are so small that even just printing them on paper and having to type them back in in the unlikely scenario of me needing the offsite backup would be very acceptable;-)
If it'd cost pennies to store on S3 it won't get in your way on the NAS, and S3 *has* had downtimes, tho not a lot...
Yes, store it on the NAS, and also on S3, so if the NAS blows up for whatever reason, you have that critical stuff. Remember, this is stuff on the level of "I am not willing to ever lose this."
And S3 has had downtime, but I don't remember it ever losing data. Downtime just means you try again later.
True. It's at least as annoying as replacing a hard drive though. When I'm arriving at that stage I've lost the data in my desktop, my backup on the NAS, my critical stuff backup on my server, and probably replaced a lot of hard drives. By that time I really really want at least that data... and I mean not maybe in 5 minutes, or maybe 2 hours, or whatever scenario my spinning head will come up with at that time... but NOW damnit... hehe.
Or perhaps I'd just shrug it off with a "oh maybe tomorrow" and return to the smoking remains of my home to see if there's any *real* stuff left...
I have trouble with this in my mind, since so much of my work is devoted to making sure that information always exists and is accessible all the time. I look at these personal solutions for backup, and I'm so used to evaluating enterprise-type products that I scoff.
So why bother replying to a thread if the level is so far below your own you can't say anything but "don't know"? If it's to advertise your blog... well it worked... i read some of it, and it represents a nice view on a person just learning how to tunnel some traffic thru ssh... or reading "interesting" stuff on the wikipedia page about system administration...
I guess that I don't know anymore what is appropriate for 'home users' when they say they want to keep data long-term.
The submitter stated that tape drives were inadequate when that's still the most reliable method that enterprises use.
They're reliable and cheap so enterprises tend to use them a lot. They don't make the data easily accessible though.
Sure, there are VTLs, but to not keep your data offsite as well would be counterproductive. I guess I just don't know what the submitter wants.
My requirements are simple: It must be stable, lasting for decades if possible, and must be as inexpensive as possible. I'm not looking to start my own national archive; I have less than 500GBs and only save things important to me."
There's also the fact that when the first disk fails, someone has to notice, buy a new one, and replace it.
True, with a NAS you'll have the burden of hardware maintenance. How often would that be tho?
This leaves a period during which, in a typical configuration, one more disk failure will obliterate all data.
Ehh... I thought the question was about a backup sollution... so I meant that the NAS is the backup, not the primary place to store data. So if one disk would fail, the data would still be redundant. If two disks would fail, you could still access the data (either the original or the limping RAID) but have no redundancy. Only if 3 disks would fail at once you'd lose all data.
If you don't notice the disk failing, it could be a considerably long period.
So, the additional advantage to Amazon is that it truly is "set it and forget it" -- upload it once, no need to monitor it until you need it.
True. It's amazing tho what kinda software these NAS devices have these days. If you get the "set it" part of S3 right you *sure* can get the failure notification of these NAS devices going.
And yes, there's the possibility of your house burning down. Or getting struck by lightning.
Yeah I already acknowledged that. That hasn't changed tho now we have digital data. I havent seen anyone store the negatives of their family photos offsite... It's gotta have something to do with statistics, the chance of your house burning down.
Which, now that I'm thinking of it, might actually vary greatly depending on where you live... I don't concern it to be a big issue here...
... above water level is more important to me;-) I live below sea level, and I've seen pics of a flooded home theater basement where they also had a server and some backup storage... I'd be really really sad;)
My small pos server and backup storage is all on the second floor for this very reason.
Or you spill Mountain Dew on the NAS. Or any of a large number of things.
Yeah well, if you'd take a look at them, your idea would quickly turn into "shake a bottle of mountain dew till you're afraid it will explode and spew the dew into a vent hole because otherwise I'll just wipe the thing clean without even turning it off".
Also, let's just assume that if you're smart enough to install a NAS for the just-in-case backup you'll also find a suitable spot to place it safely. I've got one between 2 shelves, just used two lathes and a couple of screws to mount it. I fixated the cables with simple clamps I also screwed onto the shelf.
It won't drop down short of an earthquake... but we don't have quakes like those. You'd really have to try hard to damage it with liquid.
I would say, prioritize your data. Most of the time, there's a small amount of data which cannot ever ever ever EVER be lost -- stuff like financial history, that book you're writing, etc. Even if you throw in, say,/etc on Linux, it's still a small enough amount of data that it would cost pennies to store on S3.
That's great advice of course:-) Perhaps I'm just too paranoid about trusting my personal data to third parties:-(
Put the rest of it -- your porn, whatever -- on that NAS. This is stuff that it would suck to lose, but it's not exactly irreplaceable -- or it is, but you're not willing to pay a premium to protect it.
I'd turn that into "put *everything* you want to backup on the NAS anyways". If it'd cost pennies to store on S3 it won't get in your way on the NAS, and S3 *has* had downtimes, tho not a lot... I also don't have a triple redundant pipe at home... ISPs have their downtimes as well.
There's also a lot stuff I don't backup at all... like gigabytes of stuff I got
The whole point is moot actually. People are buying new computers every 3-5 years at most but want their data carriers to last for decades?
I don't think so. Ten years from now you'll just copy your entire USB backup system to whatever you bought for half the money, taking up 1% of the new capacity and running at 100 times the speed, just like I've done for the past decades...
I bought a 1TB external USB hd for 93 euros just 2 weeks ago... and it's gonna fit in the bag I used for an iomega zip drive over a decade ago just nicely! The zip drive cost more at the time, not even counting the 100 MB disks. The transfer rate of the usb hard drive is about 1000 times as fast. I no longer have a parallel port in my pc, and while every hardware shop in town sold at least a couple of interface cards with a parallel port back in those days.... they're actually pretty hard to come by right now.
And while I actually do have an internal pata zip drive and my pc does have pata... I don't intend to use it because I copied over all data I want to keep to newer systems.
Except that I'd rather spend the money all at once and actually have something, like a nice NAS sollution with 2 raid disks in it. Could be as simple as this. Way faster, failing disks covered by raid.
Only advantage I'd see for Amazon is that it's offsite, so you get to keep your data in case your house burns down. Yay!
It's interesting indeed... perhaps the most interesting post on idle so far. I can totally understand the use for a robot driving *me* around, but what's the point of having some robot take drives with you? An old FM radio would be less boring. Well, that won't be able to read maps but then again I'd guess a gps unit in a car is much cheaper still and most come with FM built in;)
Perhaps the nagging wouldn't be much of a problem had this guy learned to negotiate and make compromises. Or perhaps saying "Stop nagging like a baby!" is too hard for him. Perhaps he's so totally scared of rejection he really needs a "wife" that'll always agree with him. Perhaps he doesn't know how to give love to a real person, or perhaps he doesnt dare to just *give*.
Other than that I I've never met any asian woman "in her 20s" looking like that... so most likely he's just a high tech pervert.;-)
Re:What masses, specifically, have botnets destroy
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Botnets As "eWMDs"
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It's about the fear. And the concept of hundreds of thousands of zombie computers attacking an institution without the proper defenses could be devastating, especially if that institution is critical to the public health/safety.
I've heard that before. I'd hope that such critical institutions, especially those affecting public health/safety have enough common sense to not hook up their critical systems to the internet. DUH!
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> Unless, of course, you count the vast array of herbs used through the ages that pharmaceuticals are now based on.
This is not a good comparison if you'd want to make a pro-homeopathy argument. Homeopathy and herbalism are quite different.
I agree with you that medicine can be found in plants. Some plant extracts will cure infections, some will help wounds heal, some will calm you, some act as a painkiller and so on. I've seen it and felt it. I actually wouldn't know how many, but I'd guess a lot of pharmaceuticals are based on the molecules found in these plants. Nature provides in a lot of good stuff including antibiotics.
If I take some herbals or pills, I actually put molecules into my body which could have a certain effect on the biochemistry going on. You gotta take the right mix and right amount to get the right effect. If you use only a fraction of that amount it simply won't work, and an overdose or wrong mix can harm you badly. That's not so hard to believe or proof.
Homeopathy, however, works like this: I shake my water with molecules in a specific way, and now my water itself becomes the medicine. That's right, my water has a memory, it will remember the medicine solved in it, and it will change state and become a medicine all by itself! And because of my shaking and this water memory, I can now dilute my water with molecules by adding more water, shake it again, and it can even be a *stronger* medicine! I can dilute it, shake it, dilute it and shake it until the actual bottle *you* buy does not even contain the original medicinal molecules anymore!
This committee of British members of parliament now says: Shake it!
And rightfully so!
The shaking is a ritual. There's no scientific base for it. No logic reasoning will explain why homeopathics shake the way they shake. Gotta shake it violently! Imagine someone on the market shaking their medicine violently and diluting it with water again and again. Would you buy from them or shake your head, call it quackery and walk away?
Yes, water molecules can "change state" (form ordered networks) but that won't make it a medicine by itself and even if it did, it loses the ordered networks within fifty millionths of a nanosecond.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7030/full/nature03383.html
Here's a hint...
girl in TRAINING...
transgender...
so to you, "girlintraining", this gender stuff might all be very important and so on... I really woudn't know if that's your myspace btw... just making a point to everyone else...
... the rest of us simply DON'T GIVE A SHIT... it's "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"... and we DON'T GIVE A SHIT about your gender and your issues about it. There's different forums for that kinda shit...
... other than that... you're more than welcome to discuss any of the topics at hand... just like anyone else... regardless of your gender... post about online privacy... about your latest BSD hack... about whatever the fuck it is that is appropriate for slashdot...
... but don't expect people to go whoooosh about your gender or your pride about it on SLASHDOT, of all sites...
... People won't give a shit... nor respect your gender... they *might* respect a brilliant post... or a funny one... and so on... like you've made a couple before... but start demanding respect for whatever that's just irrelevant to slashdot... and people will make fun of you at best...
... but *most* likely... you'll just attract some anonymous troll who'll like to provoke exactly these kind of reactions from you... because they know you'll bite... bite more and they'll follow you around... they'll bookmark your userpage... there's probably better things to do with your time... because this is a total waste... you'll just get a chuckle out of a troll...
** holds up a worn out sign reading, "--==>> Please do NOT feed the trolls! <<==-- " **
** sighs **
Oh, hint, if you feel personally attacked, and want to defend yourself personally on slashdot... you're probably feeding a troll... because there's nobody here to know you... nobody *can* attack you or disrespect you and so on and so on... you're that "someone on the world"... why would you ever feel attacked? Why would you give a troll what they want?
You're just making an easy target.
Not because of your (trans)gender.
But because you bite.
Bite more, and you'll become an easier target.
Bite more, and slashdot will suck more.
Yeah I knew all that, i still call it bullshit though. Nice you mention arpanet, because well it's nifty and all... but it didn't require science that wouldn't be available for at least the next decade.
According to wikipedia they took a Honeywell DDP-516 and turned it into a router. It had 24kb of memory... nice for the time and all but not exactly mind blowing science. They got existing hardware to do what they wanted.
It was all about ideas... creating protocols and implementing them. Twelve companies submitted bids and BBN won the contract in 1968. WITHIN A YEAR, arpanet was created, consisting of 4 IMPs! Funny, isn't it!?
A very nice accomplishment. And look how it's growing! It looks like everybody is using the internet nowadays. But that won't mean I'll grant DARPA a hero status and believe they can wave their funds like a magic wand and defeat Moore's law like that.
I call it bullshit, vapor, publicity stunt, or a joke at best.
Yeah and on top of that... 50 Gflops per watt ...
;-)
The IBM Roadrunner:
444.94 megaflops per watt
So... to meet the DARPA goal... you'd only have to be more than 100 times as efficient.
I don't think it's going to happen this year
Why would CCP ever facilitate this guy's rmt wet dream?
Why would the EVE developers want you to be able get real dollars for your ISK?
They're not running a business to make *you* money. They rather have the real dollars going into their own pockets selling GTCs, and happily let the abandoned accounts with billions of ISK rot away in the bit bucket.
DUH!
Nooooo! That'd unleash the giant guinea-pigs and get everyone killed!!
... and it's a sure way to get on one of those cd's with 60 million addresses. They've been doing this for eh... at least 10 years, perhaps 15. I'm wondering what planet this guy has been living on... and if timothy is his neighbour ;-) He could've just answered "Duh! Yes!" ;-)
News at 11.
Yeah... it really helps if you keep things under control ;-) I've been running my own mailserver for over a decade. I don't even have my own domain, I've been using dyndns.org like forever, it works and is good enough for my home server.
I've used sendmail's (postfix has it too) LUSER_RELAY for a while, and set it to "local:<username>". This sends email for unknown users to <username>, so I didn't have to keep the alias file up... basically it turns every non-existing username into an alias! I could still use /etc/aliases as blacklist by aliasing to /dev/null.
I used this for a while to trap usenet related spam, every post would get a unique FROM address ;-) I hardly post to usenet anymore so now I'm just using /etc/aliases. Every time I sign up somewhere I also create a new alias for it. If one plays dirty and I receive spam, I kill the alias.
Only friends and family get a "real" alias. This and keeping my email addresses away from the web has kept my inbox clean... without using a spam filter.
I'm a Linux fan.
Just to avoid labeling myself as a fan, I'll just say I use linux on my desktop, notebook, and my small home server, have done so for over a decade, and I like it a lot :-)
The main reason why "the year of Linux" never happens is that the press (and analysts) keep comparing Linux to what they know: a Windows desktop.
I think "the year of Linux" will not happen either, but for different reasons. Because it's all about evolution, not revolution. Who thought these netbooks would turn an entire new market into Linux users simply looked at a single population at a given time and drew conclusions from it, underestimating Microsoft's ability to catch up quickly.
I'd say that the simple fact that Linux *was* there first is quite nice by itself. Furthermore they're *still* selling 10% of these netbooks with linux while there's now also a Windows option available... which is still a progress in the larger process, these people are now using linux while otherwise they wouldn't. Also, it helped gain Linux more attention, both in media and in personal contacts. People sometimes go like, oh nice small notebook... interesting... what's it running... and so on. That's a "possible linux-user" virus being spread through the population ;-)
Sometimes it's also trivial things why people switch. A girl I know studies to become a dentist, and she bought an asus eee netbook with linux. It runs Xandros, based on Debian 4.0, with fluxbox as window manager I think. It looked to be designed to give easy access to commonly used programs and configuration, while hiding everything else under a nice shiny hood. I had to search the web to find out how to get a terminal emulator running on the thing (control-alt-t)
Asking her how she liked the linux environment, she was pretty enthusiastic, it ran solid, responded fast, worked great for her and did everything she wanted to... except that she couldnt access the wifi network at school, the helpdesk didn't support Linux at all, and someone was going to install windows XP on it the next day just so she could get connected at school.
That hurt...
Someone put up a pdf with instructions how to access their school's network with linux, using either the gnome network manager (she had a network manager... but wasn't sure if it was the right one) or shell commands, but she couldn't figure out how to get a shell. She's an intelligent girl, just not so computer/linux savvy, and working with her I got the idea that the fact that wpasupplicant on xandros is called xandros-wpasupplicant might have been just enough to prevent her from succeeding.
Needless to say I installed the certificate and got the stuff going... I hope it worked out, I just had one shot, without the wifi network to test it... if it didn't work the next day at school she'd install xp... :-/ This was past weekend, I haven't heard about the results yet. Even if she replaced linux with xp tho, I don't think this whole experience would really wreck linux' reputation with her, her overall impression of Linux as operating system for her netbook was so good that this one problem would not keep her from trying linux again in the future.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them. What we need are real killer applications in completely new spaces. For instance, look at web applications: that's hurting Microsoft 10 times more than any 3D effect in KDE ever will. The Web made a lot of Microsoft software irrelevant. Linux needs to do the same, by doing something *different*.
Linux *is* about doing things different, whether or not some or all UI elements are "copied" from Windows. There's just so many ways you can present a solitaire game, you know? The file manager has an icon representing an actual file cabinet on many operating systems including phones... Did they all copy that
Probably because those victims were offered a year of "credit monitoring" and those victims took them up on it.
Hmm... credit monitoring (monitoring your credit reports for changes) would increase the chance of detection tho, not decrease the chance of fraud. If the detection rate increases and the chance of fraud is the same, the fraud rate found for the breached data would increase since logically there's only detected fraud in the numbers, not undetected.
It made them more paranoid than they had been before, so they watched their financial data more carefully,
That would have the same effect as the credit monitoring I guess.
and were perhaps more cautious when using their credit cards. (Of course that doesn't reduce the number of attacks, just the number that are successful, but the data posted is a "fraud rate", and doesn't denote "successful vs. unsuccessful.")
Well being more careful might decrease the chance of their cards being abused somewhat indeed...
Or maybe many of them closed out a bunch of unused credit accounts to minimize their footprints, which actually did spare them from further breaches.
... guess that's more likely tho :-) Well if you change "unused" to "unwanted" or something... Unused accounts probably wouldn't have their data stolen in the first place ;-) So people were notified of the breach and closed down accounts... and now these closed accounts are polluting the attackers data... while the "overall fraud rate" only includes working accounts.
I also found the written testimony of ID Analytics these numbers originate from.
It makes an interesting read... there's just so many things affecting the fraud rate. For example, the report estimates it'd take a single person about 10 years to use a million breached accounts. Perhaps this one data set was stolen by a smaller group of attackers. Or just one, and a lazy one at that... ;-)
There's something wrong with the math in the report tho... they estimate: 5 minutes per application, 6.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 days a year. That's 12 applications per hour * 6.5 * 5 * 50 = 19500 applications per year, or roughly 51 years for a single person, not the 10 they write about.
The report then goes on saying that you'd have to hire 51 workers to complete all that in one year -- which actually triggered my curiosity about these numbers because it matches my 51 years but not their 10 ;-) -- which would cost over $830,000 at $10 an hour... quite the operation ;-)
My conclusion is that we can't compare the results of this one study to the overall fraud rate at all. I do agree with jambarama's comment tho that these companies selling credit monitoring services and "fraud protection" try very hard to hype the fraud fear.
They found the fraud rate was 1 in 1020, practically identical to the ambient fraud rate of non-breached data (which was 1 in 1010).
[...]
Fraud rate 3 years later of those people was 1 in 1244 - slightly better than average.
So what you're saying is that I should give my data to these thugs and *decrease* the chance of fraud? How's that logical? I'd guess the stolen accounts should have at least the same chance of fraud as any other... why does this not add up?
Look into Duplicity. I haven't used it -- this is something that's interesting enough to me that I'll probably write my own. But the software definitely exists.
That's cool tho... because I've used duplicity for a while before switching to plain rsync. Apparently they've added an S3 backend since then, and even a gmail one as well... yay :-) It's fairly simple to setup too.
It didn't pop up in my google/freshmeat searches for S3 stuff... perhaps they'd need to advertise that some more ;-) Thanks!
The keys I got so far are so small that even just printing them on paper and having to type them back in in the unlikely scenario of me needing the offsite backup would be very acceptable ;-)
Sounds like a passphrase, not a key. And I'd be using a large-ish, random key.
Those were the AWS key and secret key, as amazon calls them. You might just call them random passphrases. They're like 20 or 40 characters long. I don't have any S3 keys yet... no credit card yet... might not get one either depending on how this duplicity/gmail thing is going to work out. I just stored and restored some data with it. S3 seems more suitable to dump a couple hundred megs of photos on tho, while even a couple of gigabyte still amounts to pennies per month :-)
What would be a sufficient keysize? Would it really need to be more than 128 characters?
True. It's at least as annoying as replacing a hard drive though.
Really?
S3 downtime: You get an email, and by the time you go to look at it, S3 is probably back up and your script has taken care of everything.
Yeah that might be a more likely scenario than the doom I had in mind ;-) It'd just be annoying to have to wait for it and not being able to do something about it.
Replacing a hard drive: You get an email, and you order a new drive from Newegg, unpack it, open up your NAS, and push the drive in, assuming it's hotpluggable. If not, you'll have to carefully power it down, probably open it, hook up the drive, close it, lock it, and boot it back up.
Well usually i just pick up my hardware on my way to or from work... so it'd cost like 10 minutes to replace a hd I guess.
Or perhaps I'd just shrug it off with a "oh maybe tomorrow" and return to the smoking remains of my home to see if there's any *real* stuff left...
Probably. But since the things I've created are digital, I would still be pretty worried about that -- if my house burns down, there's a lot of nice things I've lost, and probably a fair amount of money. So I go to work, make some more money, get a new house, and buy more things to fill it -- just takes time, but it's all replaceable.
If I lose that killer app I was working on, or that great American novel, I have to start over. I may be able to recreate it, but most likely, I will never get it back.
Yeah... I don't really have anything digitally at home that's making me money... there's just stuff I'd hate to lose... so I've got the NAS and do some backups on my server as well. Of course when the house burns down I'd still love to get at least some digital stuff back ;-)
Read up on Dynamo, among other things.
I just read the paper ... cool stuff :-)
More relevantly, that is now their job, not yours -- which means you can relax. It's hard, I know :)
Heh.. nah.. I still sleep fine ;-) It's just that when you're creating offsite backups it's for the worst doom scenario ;-)
The page linked to from the summary is NOT a compatibility list, but a compatibility REQUEST list!
True, with a NAS you'll have the burden of hardware maintenance. How often would that be tho?
More often than "none at all", which is what the OP was asking for.
That doesn't make it a non issue... the OP was asking for the impossible, like it should last for decades, easy setup, zero maintenance and be inexpensive at that. I mean, he isn't gonna get what he was asking for anyways, so some tradeoff needs to be made, just as Amazon S3 has its downsides as well. To find out if the tradeoffs are acceptable or to optimize them you should be able to quantify them somewhat somehow.
When I've had trouble with hard drives, it was either due to my own stupidity (physical shocks while they were running) or with pretty old hard drives. You can prevent the stupidity part by mounting the NAS in a safe place, and by only doing something to it physically when it's turned off ;-)
Apart from the stupidity I've had 2 harddisk crashes in my server in over a decade, both hard drives were living their second life after at least 3 years of being desktop whores.
Hard drives will fail sooner or later but personally I don't think it'd happen so often that it'd become a chore, I think it'd be an acceptable sacrifice.
That's great advice of course :-) Perhaps I'm just too paranoid about trusting my personal data to third parties :-(
So encrypt it.
Yeah... I'm seriously looking into S3 now to use it in addition to the NAS... it really does make sense to put the highest priority data offsite as well. I see that this is going to be one of the downsides for S3... it's gonna cost a lot of time getting something going that'll encrypt and store the data periodically in a reliable way. Muuuuch more than it took to configure my NAS and some rsync jobs ;-).
Unless of course you happen to know some free (speech) software that'll do the trick easily.
More S3 pitfalls ahead... I didn't have an amazon.com account and created one. Obviously I had to create an AWS account as well. Apparently I need a credit card to pay for S3 which I don't have and actually would rather not have... so now I either gotta get me one anyways or forget the S3 plan alltogether... feh.
Then you have to store your crypto keys somewhere -- but crypto keys are relatively tiny, and if they're sufficiently secure, unchanging. You could, for instance, fill a DVD with copies of the same tarball, of that key, any script you wrote to retrieve the data, and a text file of instructions. Or use Paperdisk.
The keys I got so far are so small that even just printing them on paper and having to type them back in in the unlikely scenario of me needing the offsite backup would be very acceptable ;-)
If it'd cost pennies to store on S3 it won't get in your way on the NAS, and S3 *has* had downtimes, tho not a lot...
Yes, store it on the NAS, and also on S3, so if the NAS blows up for whatever reason, you have that critical stuff. Remember, this is stuff on the level of "I am not willing to ever lose this."
And S3 has had downtime, but I don't remember it ever losing data. Downtime just means you try again later.
True. It's at least as annoying as replacing a hard drive though. When I'm arriving at that stage I've lost the data in my desktop, my backup on the NAS, my critical stuff backup on my server, and probably replaced a lot of hard drives. By that time I really really want at least that data... and I mean not maybe in 5 minutes, or maybe 2 hours, or whatever scenario my spinning head will come up with at that time... but NOW damnit... hehe.
Or perhaps I'd just shrug it off with a "oh maybe tomorrow" and return to the smoking remains of my home to see if there's any *real* stuff left...
I have trouble with this in my mind, since so much of my work is devoted to making sure that information always exists and is accessible all the time. I look at these personal solutions for backup, and I'm so used to evaluating enterprise-type products that I scoff.
So why bother replying to a thread if the level is so far below your own you can't say anything but "don't know"? If it's to advertise your blog... well it worked... i read some of it, and it represents a nice view on a person just learning how to tunnel some traffic thru ssh... or reading "interesting" stuff on the wikipedia page about system administration...
I guess that I don't know anymore what is appropriate for 'home users' when they say they want to keep data long-term.
They're confusing keeping the data long-term with keeping the data carrier long-term.
The submitter stated that tape drives were inadequate when that's still the most reliable method that enterprises use.
They're reliable and cheap so enterprises tend to use them a lot. They don't make the data easily accessible though.
Sure, there are VTLs, but to not keep your data offsite as well would be counterproductive. I guess I just don't know what the submitter wants.
My requirements are simple: It must be stable, lasting for decades if possible, and must be as inexpensive as possible. I'm not looking to start my own national archive; I have less than 500GBs and only save things important to me."
There's also the fact that when the first disk fails, someone has to notice, buy a new one, and replace it.
True, with a NAS you'll have the burden of hardware maintenance. How often would that be tho?
This leaves a period during which, in a typical configuration, one more disk failure will obliterate all data.
Ehh... I thought the question was about a backup sollution... so I meant that the NAS is the backup, not the primary place to store data. So if one disk would fail, the data would still be redundant. If two disks would fail, you could still access the data (either the original or the limping RAID) but have no redundancy. Only if 3 disks would fail at once you'd lose all data.
If you don't notice the disk failing, it could be a considerably long period.
So, the additional advantage to Amazon is that it truly is "set it and forget it" -- upload it once, no need to monitor it until you need it.
True. It's amazing tho what kinda software these NAS devices have these days. If you get the "set it" part of S3 right you *sure* can get the failure notification of these NAS devices going.
And yes, there's the possibility of your house burning down. Or getting struck by lightning.
Yeah I already acknowledged that. That hasn't changed tho now we have digital data. I havent seen anyone store the negatives of their family photos offsite... It's gotta have something to do with statistics, the chance of your house burning down.
Which, now that I'm thinking of it, might actually vary greatly depending on where you live... I don't concern it to be a big issue here...
... above water level is more important to me ;-) I live below sea level, and I've seen pics of a flooded home theater basement where they also had a server and some backup storage... I'd be really really sad ;)
My small pos server and backup storage is all on the second floor for this very reason.
Or you spill Mountain Dew on the NAS. Or any of a large number of things.
Yeah well, if you'd take a look at them, your idea would quickly turn into "shake a bottle of mountain dew till you're afraid it will explode and spew the dew into a vent hole because otherwise I'll just wipe the thing clean without even turning it off".
Also, let's just assume that if you're smart enough to install a NAS for the just-in-case backup you'll also find a suitable spot to place it safely. I've got one between 2 shelves, just used two lathes and a couple of screws to mount it. I fixated the cables with simple clamps I also screwed onto the shelf.
It won't drop down short of an earthquake... but we don't have quakes like those. You'd really have to try hard to damage it with liquid.
I would say, prioritize your data. Most of the time, there's a small amount of data which cannot ever ever ever EVER be lost -- stuff like financial history, that book you're writing, etc. Even if you throw in, say, /etc on Linux, it's still a small enough amount of data that it would cost pennies to store on S3.
That's great advice of course :-) Perhaps I'm just too paranoid about trusting my personal data to third parties :-(
Put the rest of it -- your porn, whatever -- on that NAS. This is stuff that it would suck to lose, but it's not exactly irreplaceable -- or it is, but you're not willing to pay a premium to protect it.
I'd turn that into "put *everything* you want to backup on the NAS anyways". If it'd cost pennies to store on S3 it won't get in your way on the NAS, and S3 *has* had downtimes, tho not a lot... I also don't have a triple redundant pipe at home... ISPs have their downtimes as well.
There's also a lot stuff I don't backup at all... like gigabytes of stuff I got
The whole point is moot actually. People are buying new computers every 3-5 years at most but want their data carriers to last for decades?
I don't think so. Ten years from now you'll just copy your entire USB backup system to whatever you bought for half the money, taking up 1% of the new capacity and running at 100 times the speed, just like I've done for the past decades...
I bought a 1TB external USB hd for 93 euros just 2 weeks ago... and it's gonna fit in the bag I used for an iomega zip drive over a decade ago just nicely! The zip drive cost more at the time, not even counting the 100 MB disks. The transfer rate of the usb hard drive is about 1000 times as fast. I no longer have a parallel port in my pc, and while every hardware shop in town sold at least a couple of interface cards with a parallel port back in those days.... they're actually pretty hard to come by right now.
And while I actually do have an internal pata zip drive and my pc does have pata... I don't intend to use it because I copied over all data I want to keep to newer systems.
Everything changes, everything stays the same.
Even if we move away from x86... there'll be x86 emulators.
Except that I'd rather spend the money all at once and actually have something, like a nice NAS sollution with 2 raid disks in it. Could be as simple as this. Way faster, failing disks covered by raid.
Only advantage I'd see for Amazon is that it's offsite, so you get to keep your data in case your house burns down. Yay!
It's interesting indeed... perhaps the most interesting post on idle so far. I can totally understand the use for a robot driving *me* around, but what's the point of having some robot take drives with you? An old FM radio would be less boring. Well, that won't be able to read maps but then again I'd guess a gps unit in a car is much cheaper still and most come with FM built in ;)
Perhaps the nagging wouldn't be much of a problem had this guy learned to negotiate and make compromises. Or perhaps saying "Stop nagging like a baby!" is too hard for him. Perhaps he's so totally scared of rejection he really needs a "wife" that'll always agree with him. Perhaps he doesn't know how to give love to a real person, or perhaps he doesnt dare to just *give*.
Other than that I I've never met any asian woman "in her 20s" looking like that... so most likely he's just a high tech pervert. ;-)
It's about the fear. And the concept of hundreds of thousands of zombie computers attacking an institution without the proper defenses could be devastating, especially if that institution is critical to the public health/safety.
I've heard that before. I'd hope that such critical institutions, especially those affecting public health/safety have enough common sense to not hook up their critical systems to the internet. DUH!
Hey... this might be better... stripped the x-forwarded-for. See the other comments.
/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -s $ip --dport 22 -j ACCEPT"); /sbin/iptables -nL INPUT|head -n3|tail -n1");
<?php
function getIP()
{
if (isset($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'])) $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
else $ip = "UNKNOWN";
return $ip;
}
$ip = getIP();
if ($ip != "UNKOWN") {
system("sudo
system("sudo
} else {
print("Could not determine IP address");
}
?>
I really think it's not much of an issue as long as it's password protected by apache... but better be safe than sorry... you never know ;)
While reading some more about it i find there's also more issues with x-forward-for... like multiple IPs, comma seperated...
So I stripped the forwarded-for anyways, thanks.
Yeah it doesn't do sanity checking, I did realize that. Did you crack the .htaccess password yet tho?
Is your X-Forwarded-For somewhat less awesome as you make it sound, or would you really think I created a serious security hole here?