Same problem in Canada. So now, instead of heating my house with light bulbs (hydro and nuclear power) I have to heat it by burning natural gas. Sigh...
Or you could just buy a portable electric heater that will provide much more heat than a light bulb unless you have an awful lot of light bulbs in your house. You'd need 15 100W Bulbs to replace the heat of a single 1500W plug-in heater.
Its a very valid point. Incandescent light bulbs add heat directly where people are located. Even though there is significant efficiency loss going from primary fuels to electricity, it is possible that it is an overall win over gas heating, and certainly is better than electrical heating. (assuming no heat pumps)
How is using an electric bulb as a heater better than using an electrical resistance heater?
I've seen what happens when a voltage regulator failure on a blade takes out the entire 12V rail on the blade chassis (as well as taking out the blade next to it). No one that cares about reliability is going to run a single chassis.
Yeah? What about nuclear war? EMP? Zombies? Ebola? Solar flares? Mice chewing through wires? I mean, yes, you're right, but it comes down to how many contingencies you can possibly plan for, and how much budget you have to plan for them all.
That's what geographical redundancy is for - it protects you from everything that could affect a single datacenter or, with enough distance, it can protect you from a disaster that affects an entire state, or even an entire coast.
I can't plan for a one in a million event -- but neither can cloud giants, as we've seen even the mighty Amazon go down. Shit just happens sometimes. We want to minimize it of course, but be realistic.
As far as I know, Amazon has never had a multi-region outage. In 2 years on AWS, we haven't experienced any multi-availability zone outages that affected us, we've split our servers across AZ's, and though we have experienced single-AZ outages, we haven't been hit by any multi-AZ outages. Once a quarter we do a live failover to the our backup site in an Amazon region on the other side of the country to test it out. Our monthly spend at Amazon is about half what we were paying in colocation costs (which doesn't take into account the cost savings on equipment and maintenance contracts).
If I were paranoid enough and given unlimited funding and development budget, I'd host the disaster recovery site using a different provider, but we have a lot of management scripts that rely on AWS API's to monitor, manage, and scale the site as needed (spot instances help keep the costs down for some of the big data analysis jobs we run) and we rely on some AWS services that would make it inconvenient to use a different provider. That's a known risk that ties us to Amazon, but so far it's been a fair tradeoff.
The disaster recover site costs us very little - we keep a bare minimum number of servers running there that can host our service with some more resource intensive features turned off, and after failover, we can spin up more servers as needed, but even if the backup region is out of spare capacity due to a large number of customers migrating, we can provide our core services using just the reserved instances we keep running all the time. We're working on generalizing the failover so we can spin up our site in any of AWS's regions.
Does anyone really run their border firewall on the same blade chassis that run their servers?
I didn't say it was a good idea or that I liked it; just that it can be done... and sadly, I have done it.
Isn't that your entire point? That a blade chassis with 2TB SSD's is cheaper and better than using a cloud provider?
Why suggest it if it's not a good idea? There are an unending number of ways to host an unreliable service.
That's what businesses say when they haven't had a week-long outage because a transformer blew a hole in the side of their colocation center.
Sounds like another one of those crazy random events (if that actually happened). Although... a week is a long outage for something like that. That sounds like someone isn't prepared, regardless of whether you've got iron or cloud.
It's usually not as spectacular as an actual explosion, but datacenter center outages do happen. You think a week is a long time to recover from a datacenter explosion? I'm impressed that in this case they managed to get temporary power to customers in only a week after the explosion blew out the electrical room walls several fee
Of course, you need 2 of them for redundancy. And a router. And a firewall. And a load balancer - all duplicated for redundancy. And multiple internet connections from different vendors (you don't trust your coloc for internet connectivity, right?
Do you even know what a blade server is? Redundant blades, redundant power supplies... redundant bloody everything.
I do, and I even know the difference between a blade chassis and a blade server. And I've seen what happens when a voltage regulator failure on a blade takes out the entire 12V rail on the blade chassis (as well as taking out the blade next to it). No one that cares about reliability is going to run a single chassis.
Firewalling, routing, and load balancing can be handled by VMs running on said ridiculously redundant blade server.
Don't you still need people to set up all of those services?
Does anyone really run their border firewall on the same blade chassis that run their servers? I won't even plug non-firewalled internet traffic into the same core switches that carry the rest of our traffic.
Most businesses don't need geographical redundancy because they don't need 100% uptime. Very few do. I'd say the vast majority of the businesses (small to medium) out there can get by without their servers for a day. They might not like it, but they won't die.
That's what businesses say when they haven't had a week-long outage because a transformer blew a hole in the side of their colocation center. Business continuity can make-or-break a business after a disaster - and it comes very cheap with most cloud computing solutions. Shipping hourly data snapshots to a remote coloc is cheap a business can be up and runnning at the remote site with no more than an hour of lost data.
I used to work for a company that sold cloud services. It can be good for some use cases, but not so often as people seem to think.
Sure, cloud computing is not for everyone, but a single blade chassis is not a replacement for cloud computing.
Seriously, a 128 core blade server with tons of TB in DDR3 and a couple of SSD boxes are pretty darned cheap.
And then your data doesn't get "stolen" or "lost".
Of course, you need 2 of them for redundancy. And a router. And a firewall. And a load balancer - all duplicated for redundancy. And multiple internet connections from different vendors (you don't trust your coloc for internet connectivity, right? That's like using a cloud provider).
And then you need to duplicate the whole thing in another datacenter for geographical redundancy.
And hire people to manage it all.
Suddenly it's not so cheap when all you really needed is a half dozen 2 core servers and a few warm spares in the remote datacenter.
Insane hard to calculate what your costs will be at any given provider. So insane bad for the bottom line.
It seems pretty easy to calculate what your costs will be at any given provider - just add up your infrastructure needs and use the published pricing to calculate how much you'll pay. When we migrated to AWS, we estimated our monthly bill to within 10% of our actual monthlybill. Of course, if you don't know what your needs are, then you're shooting in the dark, but the same is true if you're buying your equipment on hosting it at a coloc.
What's hard is comparing prices against all providers since you have to look up prices and do separate calculations for each one.
While we're brainstorming on this, can someone tell me how to shoplift food without stealing it? Until we solve that problem, I'm going to have to continue to break the law to feed my Doritos addiction, but I really don't see any alternative.
When you post a suggestion like that on a site filled with people capable and weird enough to follow it, then serious discussion of consequences is merited.
We don't care if normal people notice it's just a joke and move on, because we are not among them.
Now I'm wondering how consistent GPS signal in my lab is...
If someone is smart enough to build a GPS controlled igniter that can set off a small thermite charge in their computer, then they are smart enough to realize that it's dangerous and have no excuse if they end up burning down their house.
A thermite reaction contains its own oxygen and will burn underwater. Furthermore, it throws sparks. It'll happily melt through an engine block and its normal use is welding railroad ties. It also gives off intense UV radiation. When was the last time you played with thermite?
Yet when it runs out of fuel it stops - it's not an unstoppable runaway reaction. So just use enough to destroy your target without burning down your house.
I have a natural gas fired oven in my wood framed house and it hasn't burnt the house down yet. Maybe there's some magical way to contain combustion to prevent it from spreading outside of an enclosure. A thermite reaction isn't like a nuclear plant meltdown, it doesn't keep burning through the earth's crust all the way to China, it burns until it's out of fuel. (ok, for the pedantic, a nuclear core meltdown also stops when it runs out of fuel).
Where do you live? I have this urge to disable GPS reception for a moment or two..
That's the risk any self-destruct mechanism faces, there are benign circumstances that can trigger the self-destruct, but if you keep your data where it could possibly be seized and the data is so important that you'd rather destroy it than let it fall into enemy hands, then it's an acceptable tradeoff.
So the options are die or they get your data? Sounds like a lousy bargain to me. What nobody in this thread has proposed is a non-illegal method without risk to life and limb for preventing a government from getting your data. Sounds a lot like no 4th Amendment anymore. Public figures, persecuted minorities, corporations with trade secrets...nobody would ever need that. You're ready to roll over and be a peon.
I didn't see where I suggested dying as an option - a thermite charge needn't kill anyone. Especially if you can trigger it before anyone disassembles your safeguards. But hey, if that's too risky for you, then how about keeping your secret data on a flash drive suspended over a vat of acid - to destroy the data, you crush the flash chip between two spring loaded hammers to crack the case, then let the remains drop into the acid. seal up the whole thing in a hermetically sealed chamber so no one gets acid on their fingers without ignoring the "Warning - acid inside, do not open this chamber" label.
Or, you could take the easy route and just encrypt your data. Assuming that you trust that published encryption algorithms don't have a hidden back door and that the open source software that you use to compile and run it also is not back doored.
Then you're up for felony charges on laws against boobytraps which fail to distinguish between lawful and unlawful intruders.
I have a big button on the front that says "Press this if you're a lawful intruder". It still sets off the thermite, but at least they have no one to blame but themselves, what else did they think the button would do!?
Yep. That totally solves everything. You are really fucking stupid. What sort of actual useful contribution do you have to make?
While I was being obviously facetious, if my data is incriminating enough to make melting down my computer worth protecting the data from prying eyes, then why doesn't thermite solve the problem? Many people are willing to die for their cause, so risking a felony charge to keep secret data out of the hands of the "enemy" is not unreasonable - and maybe a lesser charge than the evidence would have proven.
The thermite charge needn't injure anyone, your goal isn't to make a spectacular explosion, you just want to melt the parts that contain data - be judicious with the thermite and the triggering device, and maybe build a brick shell around the computer case with a chimney to vent the combustion gases outside. Put a sign on it that says "Warning, combustion device inside, do not move" -- if the police dismantle the safeguards and get injured, well, they should have read the sign first and taken reasonable precautions against injury. For the truly paranoid, make sure you destroy the RAM and every other device in the computer that could possibly store data -- including video cards, network cards, etc -- who knows what backdoors are there.
Of course, I don't *really* have a self-destruct system on my computer (I'd quickly get tired of replacing my computer and the cats that keep chewing through the GPS antenna wire and triggering the self destruct). There's no point in protecting my data against seizure by the government -- if the government wants the data on the computer, they already have it, seizing the computer is just a pretense so they don't have to reveal which back door(s) they used to get the data in the first place.
Then you're up for felony charges on laws against boobytraps which fail to distinguish between lawful and unlawful intruders.
I have a big button on the front that says "Press this if you're a lawful intruder". It still sets off the thermite, but at least they have no one to blame but themselves, what else did they think the button would do!?
Besides, I've carefully packed the thermite around the hard drives, so no one will get hurt. Much.
Standard forensic procedure is to keep everything in the condition it was in as far as possible. This includes removing drives and imaging them and working on images, and if your home is raided, and they anticipate you might be set up to destroy data on shutdown/loss of power, even going so far as to bring a generator along.
Fortunately, my home computer self-destructs based on its GPS location. Loss of signal or moving it more than 5 meters away from the house sets off the thermite.
As for home delivery, it'll be sad to lose it but the alternative, the community mailbox a few doors down from most houses, will have one advantage: parcels will be loaded into it for you to pick up. Currently if you're not home you have to drive to the nearest sub-post office to get your parcels. This will be way more convenient.
I see a whole lot of mail returned to sender for being abandoned, or being discarded for being abandoned, in those communal mailboxes. I also see a lot of people only visiting their mailboxes weekly, like how they take out their trash cans for the truck to pick up, so mailboxes will be even bigger targets for thieves as there'll be more payoff for the effort than before.
I think the reason people only visit their mailbox weekly (or less) is because they get so little valuable mail so there's not much for theives to steal. The only bill I get in the mail these days is my property tax bill from the county (I wish they'd move to electronic delivery, it would save them money (which ultimately saves *me* money), but it can be looked up online by anyone that knows my address, so I'm not sure why someone would want to steal it. The rest of my bills get paid electornically or mailed to my electronic bill pay service (Paytrust).
I believe it's narrowly defined as telephone service and VOIP doesn't count. According to AT&T spokeperson, Google even agree's they don't fit the requirement as a telecom.
So like I posted below, update the regulation to include any form of communication, or if you want to keep it narrow add ISP's. I don't think even if the fed's don't change it, that AT&T has a leg to stand on. The city owns the right of ways and can change what's allowed within their borders IMO. But IANAL.
So can Google form a telecom subsidiary that provides voice service that also leases fiber bandwidth back to Google for use in delivering Gigabit Ethernet?
I'm sure they can find a small CLEC that would run the voice service for them.
Why would Google buy Macs if they don't use OS X? They could use Linux on ANY cheaper computer they choose but bought Macs anyway.
I believe Google thinks like a lot of us: OS X for desktops, Linux for servers, a mix of iOS and Android for mobiles.
Because Apple makes good, attractive, hardware? Besides, hardware cost is inconsequential compared to the cost of a developer, whether his laptop costs $1500 or $3000 doesn't matter. Our entire development team uses Macbooks - and of 12 users, only two of them run OSX. One of them is even geeky enough to paste a Tux logo over the light-up Apple logo.
Since they deploy on Linux servers, it makes sense to develop on Linux. Write-once run-anywhere still isn't a reality - obscure platform specific bugs can still come back to bite you.
Google lives in a fantasy world, where the WAN is as fast as the LAN. For me, both at home and in the workplace, you're talking about two and a half orders of magnitude difference. That's the whole reason all this cloud stuff, streaming (as opposed to download) video, etc all seems so bizarrely alien. You're talking about such a tremendous performance downgrade, that I just can't begin to really take it seriously.
I suppose the thinking is that they are planning for the future, when some day the WAN gets reasonably fast, where my home and business DSL line is replaced with fiber. Cool. Be ready, Google. But how are you going to spend those decades of waiting? Some cons are a little too long, IMHO.
But how much data do you really need to send to your home computer?
I deal with multi-terabyte datasets every day, and can work just as effectively from home as I do from the office since my data lives on the server and I never need to bring it down to my computer. I rarely even compile code on my local computer anymore since it's so much faster to do builds on the 16-core 32GB servers than on my little 4 core 8GB home computer (and even worse on the old 2core 4GB laptop).
Likewise, I don't have a Windows computer on my desk - I remote desktop to the Windows Terminal Server when I need to run a Windows app. At long as I'm not streaming video, it works just as well from home (~12mbit DSL) as it does from the office.
I may be wrong with this but if your computer sends data to their meta inventory system, all the hacker needs is that data to replicate with some packet capture software and use that info to log in...wont it ?
There's a big difference between a backdoor in a published encryption algorithm and a backdoor in commercial encryption software/hardware. It's much harder to hide a backdoor in a well known algorithm that's been under international scrutiny. Though I do have my doubts about the ECC constants
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Same problem in Canada. So now, instead of heating my house with light bulbs (hydro and nuclear power) I have to heat it by burning natural gas. Sigh...
Or you could just buy a portable electric heater that will provide much more heat than a light bulb unless you have an awful lot of light bulbs in your house. You'd need 15 100W Bulbs to replace the heat of a single 1500W plug-in heater.
Its a very valid point. Incandescent light bulbs add heat directly where people are located. Even though there is significant efficiency loss going from primary fuels to electricity, it is possible that it is an overall win over gas heating, and certainly is better than electrical heating. (assuming no heat pumps)
How is using an electric bulb as a heater better than using an electrical resistance heater?
I live in Wisconsin, seriously, that "waste" heat is NOT wasted! It's freaking cold outside!! I'm an American, I want to be free to choose!
It's still wasting money unless you heat your house with electrical resistance heating.
And many lamps aren't located where they are the most effective radiators - much of the heat from a ceiling fixture is conducted into the ceiling.
I've seen what happens when a voltage regulator failure on a blade takes out the entire 12V rail on the blade chassis (as well as taking out the blade next to it). No one that cares about reliability is going to run a single chassis.
Yeah? What about nuclear war? EMP? Zombies? Ebola? Solar flares? Mice chewing through wires? I mean, yes, you're right, but it comes down to how many contingencies you can possibly plan for, and how much budget you have to plan for them all.
That's what geographical redundancy is for - it protects you from everything that could affect a single datacenter or, with enough distance, it can protect you from a disaster that affects an entire state, or even an entire coast.
I can't plan for a one in a million event -- but neither can cloud giants, as we've seen even the mighty Amazon go down. Shit just happens sometimes. We want to minimize it of course, but be realistic.
As far as I know, Amazon has never had a multi-region outage. In 2 years on AWS, we haven't experienced any multi-availability zone outages that affected us, we've split our servers across AZ's, and though we have experienced single-AZ outages, we haven't been hit by any multi-AZ outages. Once a quarter we do a live failover to the our backup site in an Amazon region on the other side of the country to test it out. Our monthly spend at Amazon is about half what we were paying in colocation costs (which doesn't take into account the cost savings on equipment and maintenance contracts).
If I were paranoid enough and given unlimited funding and development budget, I'd host the disaster recovery site using a different provider, but we have a lot of management scripts that rely on AWS API's to monitor, manage, and scale the site as needed (spot instances help keep the costs down for some of the big data analysis jobs we run) and we rely on some AWS services that would make it inconvenient to use a different provider. That's a known risk that ties us to Amazon, but so far it's been a fair tradeoff.
The disaster recover site costs us very little - we keep a bare minimum number of servers running there that can host our service with some more resource intensive features turned off, and after failover, we can spin up more servers as needed, but even if the backup region is out of spare capacity due to a large number of customers migrating, we can provide our core services using just the reserved instances we keep running all the time. We're working on generalizing the failover so we can spin up our site in any of AWS's regions.
Does anyone really run their border firewall on the same blade chassis that run their servers?
I didn't say it was a good idea or that I liked it; just that it can be done... and sadly, I have done it.
Isn't that your entire point? That a blade chassis with 2TB SSD's is cheaper and better than using a cloud provider?
Why suggest it if it's not a good idea? There are an unending number of ways to host an unreliable service.
That's what businesses say when they haven't had a week-long outage because a transformer blew a hole in the side of their colocation center.
Sounds like another one of those crazy random events (if that actually happened). Although... a week is a long outage for something like that. That sounds like someone isn't prepared, regardless of whether you've got iron or cloud.
It's usually not as spectacular as an actual explosion, but datacenter center outages do happen. You think a week is a long time to recover from a datacenter explosion? I'm impressed that in this case they managed to get temporary power to customers in only a week after the explosion blew out the electrical room walls several fee
Of course, you need 2 of them for redundancy. And a router. And a firewall. And a load balancer - all duplicated for redundancy. And multiple internet connections from different vendors (you don't trust your coloc for internet connectivity, right?
Do you even know what a blade server is? Redundant blades, redundant power supplies... redundant bloody everything.
I do, and I even know the difference between a blade chassis and a blade server. And I've seen what happens when a voltage regulator failure on a blade takes out the entire 12V rail on the blade chassis (as well as taking out the blade next to it). No one that cares about reliability is going to run a single chassis.
Firewalling, routing, and load balancing can be handled by VMs running on said ridiculously redundant blade server.
Don't you still need people to set up all of those services?
Does anyone really run their border firewall on the same blade chassis that run their servers? I won't even plug non-firewalled internet traffic into the same core switches that carry the rest of our traffic.
Most businesses don't need geographical redundancy because they don't need 100% uptime. Very few do. I'd say the vast majority of the businesses (small to medium) out there can get by without their servers for a day. They might not like it, but they won't die.
That's what businesses say when they haven't had a week-long outage because a transformer blew a hole in the side of their colocation center. Business continuity can make-or-break a business after a disaster - and it comes very cheap with most cloud computing solutions. Shipping hourly data snapshots to a remote coloc is cheap a business can be up and runnning at the remote site with no more than an hour of lost data.
I used to work for a company that sold cloud services. It can be good for some use cases, but not so often as people seem to think.
Sure, cloud computing is not for everyone, but a single blade chassis is not a replacement for cloud computing.
Seriously, a 128 core blade server with tons of TB in DDR3 and a couple of SSD boxes are pretty darned cheap.
And then your data doesn't get "stolen" or "lost".
Of course, you need 2 of them for redundancy. And a router. And a firewall. And a load balancer - all duplicated for redundancy. And multiple internet connections from different vendors (you don't trust your coloc for internet connectivity, right? That's like using a cloud provider).
And then you need to duplicate the whole thing in another datacenter for geographical redundancy.
And hire people to manage it all.
Suddenly it's not so cheap when all you really needed is a half dozen 2 core servers and a few warm spares in the remote datacenter.
Insane hard to calculate what your costs will be at any given provider. So insane bad for the bottom line.
It seems pretty easy to calculate what your costs will be at any given provider - just add up your infrastructure needs and use the published pricing to calculate how much you'll pay. When we migrated to AWS, we estimated our monthly bill to within 10% of our actual monthlybill. Of course, if you don't know what your needs are, then you're shooting in the dark, but the same is true if you're buying your equipment on hosting it at a coloc.
What's hard is comparing prices against all providers since you have to look up prices and do separate calculations for each one.
While we're brainstorming on this, can someone tell me how to shoplift food without stealing it? Until we solve that problem, I'm going to have to continue to break the law to feed my Doritos addiction, but I really don't see any alternative.
it seems like it was just days ago when they said they couldn't run fiber to the home and were going to use copper to the home:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/05/2025245/australias-44b-broadband-network-may-settle-for-fiber-near-the-home
What are they downgrading to now? A piece of string to the house?
That was a joke.
When you post a suggestion like that on a site filled with people capable and weird enough to follow it, then serious discussion of consequences is merited.
We don't care if normal people notice it's just a joke and move on, because we are not among them.
Now I'm wondering how consistent GPS signal in my lab is...
If someone is smart enough to build a GPS controlled igniter that can set off a small thermite charge in their computer, then they are smart enough to realize that it's dangerous and have no excuse if they end up burning down their house.
A thermite reaction contains its own oxygen and will burn underwater. Furthermore, it throws sparks. It'll happily melt through an engine block and its normal use is welding railroad ties. It also gives off intense UV radiation. When was the last time you played with thermite?
Yet when it runs out of fuel it stops - it's not an unstoppable runaway reaction. So just use enough to destroy your target without burning down your house.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8gapa8ibK0
Like a wood-framed house?
I have a natural gas fired oven in my wood framed house and it hasn't burnt the house down yet. Maybe there's some magical way to contain combustion to prevent it from spreading outside of an enclosure. A thermite reaction isn't like a nuclear plant meltdown, it doesn't keep burning through the earth's crust all the way to China, it burns until it's out of fuel. (ok, for the pedantic, a nuclear core meltdown also stops when it runs out of fuel).
Where do you live? I have this urge to disable GPS reception for a moment or two..
That's the risk any self-destruct mechanism faces, there are benign circumstances that can trigger the self-destruct, but if you keep your data where it could possibly be seized and the data is so important that you'd rather destroy it than let it fall into enemy hands, then it's an acceptable tradeoff.
So the options are die or they get your data? Sounds like a lousy bargain to me. What nobody in this thread has proposed is a non-illegal method without risk to life and limb for preventing a government from getting your data. Sounds a lot like no 4th Amendment anymore. Public figures, persecuted minorities, corporations with trade secrets...nobody would ever need that. You're ready to roll over and be a peon.
I didn't see where I suggested dying as an option - a thermite charge needn't kill anyone. Especially if you can trigger it before anyone disassembles your safeguards. But hey, if that's too risky for you, then how about keeping your secret data on a flash drive suspended over a vat of acid - to destroy the data, you crush the flash chip between two spring loaded hammers to crack the case, then let the remains drop into the acid. seal up the whole thing in a hermetically sealed chamber so no one gets acid on their fingers without ignoring the "Warning - acid inside, do not open this chamber" label.
Or, you could take the easy route and just encrypt your data. Assuming that you trust that published encryption algorithms don't have a hidden back door and that the open source software that you use to compile and run it also is not back doored.
Then you're up for felony charges on laws against boobytraps which fail to distinguish between lawful and unlawful intruders.
I have a big button on the front that says "Press this if you're a lawful intruder". It still sets off the thermite, but at least they have no one to blame but themselves, what else did they think the button would do!?
Yep. That totally solves everything. You are really fucking stupid. What sort of actual useful contribution do you have to make?
While I was being obviously facetious, if my data is incriminating enough to make melting down my computer worth protecting the data from prying eyes, then why doesn't thermite solve the problem? Many people are willing to die for their cause, so risking a felony charge to keep secret data out of the hands of the "enemy" is not unreasonable - and maybe a lesser charge than the evidence would have proven.
The thermite charge needn't injure anyone, your goal isn't to make a spectacular explosion, you just want to melt the parts that contain data - be judicious with the thermite and the triggering device, and maybe build a brick shell around the computer case with a chimney to vent the combustion gases outside. Put a sign on it that says "Warning, combustion device inside, do not move" -- if the police dismantle the safeguards and get injured, well, they should have read the sign first and taken reasonable precautions against injury. For the truly paranoid, make sure you destroy the RAM and every other device in the computer that could possibly store data -- including video cards, network cards, etc -- who knows what backdoors are there.
Of course, I don't *really* have a self-destruct system on my computer (I'd quickly get tired of replacing my computer and the cats that keep chewing through the GPS antenna wire and triggering the self destruct). There's no point in protecting my data against seizure by the government -- if the government wants the data on the computer, they already have it, seizing the computer is just a pretense so they don't have to reveal which back door(s) they used to get the data in the first place.
Then you're up for felony charges on laws against boobytraps which fail to distinguish between lawful and unlawful intruders.
I have a big button on the front that says "Press this if you're a lawful intruder". It still sets off the thermite, but at least they have no one to blame but themselves, what else did they think the button would do!?
Besides, I've carefully packed the thermite around the hard drives, so no one will get hurt. Much.
Standard forensic procedure is to keep everything in the condition it was in as far as possible. This includes removing drives and imaging them and working on images, and if your home is raided, and they anticipate you might be set up to destroy data on shutdown/loss of power, even going so far as to bring a generator along.
Fortunately, my home computer self-destructs based on its GPS location. Loss of signal or moving it more than 5 meters away from the house sets off the thermite.
I see a whole lot of mail returned to sender for being abandoned, or being discarded for being abandoned, in those communal mailboxes. I also see a lot of people only visiting their mailboxes weekly, like how they take out their trash cans for the truck to pick up, so mailboxes will be even bigger targets for thieves as there'll be more payoff for the effort than before.
I think the reason people only visit their mailbox weekly (or less) is because they get so little valuable mail so there's not much for theives to steal. The only bill I get in the mail these days is my property tax bill from the county (I wish they'd move to electronic delivery, it would save them money (which ultimately saves *me* money), but it can be looked up online by anyone that knows my address, so I'm not sure why someone would want to steal it. The rest of my bills get paid electornically or mailed to my electronic bill pay service (Paytrust).
The referenced source file has no actual implementation of the encryption in it, so claiming 100 lines is a bit silly...
Using their metric of excluding the function calls that do the real work, OpenSSL only needs one line of source code to encrypt a file:
#!/bin/bash
openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -in somefile.txt -out somefile.txt.enc
I believe it's narrowly defined as telephone service and VOIP doesn't count. According to AT&T spokeperson, Google even agree's they don't fit the requirement as a telecom.
So like I posted below, update the regulation to include any form of communication, or if you want to keep it narrow add ISP's. I don't think even if the fed's don't change it, that AT&T has a leg to stand on. The city owns the right of ways and can change what's allowed within their borders IMO. But IANAL.
So can Google form a telecom subsidiary that provides voice service that also leases fiber bandwidth back to Google for use in delivering Gigabit Ethernet?
I'm sure they can find a small CLEC that would run the voice service for them.
Why would Google buy Macs if they don't use OS X? They could use Linux on ANY cheaper computer they choose but bought Macs anyway.
I believe Google thinks like a lot of us: OS X for desktops, Linux for servers, a mix of iOS and Android for mobiles.
Because Apple makes good, attractive, hardware? Besides, hardware cost is inconsequential compared to the cost of a developer, whether his laptop costs $1500 or $3000 doesn't matter. Our entire development team uses Macbooks - and of 12 users, only two of them run OSX. One of them is even geeky enough to paste a Tux logo over the light-up Apple logo.
Since they deploy on Linux servers, it makes sense to develop on Linux. Write-once run-anywhere still isn't a reality - obscure platform specific bugs can still come back to bite you.
Google lives in a fantasy world, where the WAN is as fast as the LAN. For me, both at home and in the workplace, you're talking about two and a half orders of magnitude difference. That's the whole reason all this cloud stuff, streaming (as opposed to download) video, etc all seems so bizarrely alien. You're talking about such a tremendous performance downgrade, that I just can't begin to really take it seriously.
I suppose the thinking is that they are planning for the future, when some day the WAN gets reasonably fast, where my home and business DSL line is replaced with fiber. Cool. Be ready, Google. But how are you going to spend those decades of waiting? Some cons are a little too long, IMHO.
But how much data do you really need to send to your home computer?
I deal with multi-terabyte datasets every day, and can work just as effectively from home as I do from the office since my data lives on the server and I never need to bring it down to my computer. I rarely even compile code on my local computer anymore since it's so much faster to do builds on the 16-core 32GB servers than on my little 4 core 8GB home computer (and even worse on the old 2core 4GB laptop).
Likewise, I don't have a Windows computer on my desk - I remote desktop to the Windows Terminal Server when I need to run a Windows app. At long as I'm not streaming video, it works just as well from home (~12mbit DSL) as it does from the office.
I may be wrong with this but if your computer sends data to their meta inventory system, all the hacker needs is that data to replicate with some packet capture software and use that info to log in...wont it ?
Read this to see why you're right and wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_attack
...so unless you think the government has a secret back door into every encryption algorithm...
Where have you been man? See here.
There's a big difference between a backdoor in a published encryption algorithm and a backdoor in commercial encryption software/hardware. It's much harder to hide a backdoor in a well known algorithm that's been under international scrutiny. Though I do have my doubts about the ECC constants
Do you think the government should be able to retrieve your private conversations on an analyst's "hunch"?
Yes
That's clever coming from an Anonymous Coward, but you should feel free to bcc AnyAnalyst@NSA.gov on all of your emails.
But I'd rather keep my conversations private.