Oh, I should mention that with COW file system based NAS distros, the normal practice is to take snapshots every 15 minutes and keep them for a month or two. It doesn't require massive overprovisioning because each snapshot in a COW file system only contains changed blocks. In a situation where 100% of your files are changed, you'd need to have as much space free to accommodate all the encrypted files. If you didn't have it, then the update would fail.
I'm quite a few years out of date on Windows administration, but the last time I looked into Windows snapshots they were a lot more costly than they are under ZFS.
Oracle's been using COW for its RDBMS product for years, which accounts for its unusually robust and flexible transaction isolation, backup and recovery capabilities. Oracle programmers by in large have never heard of a "dirty read". You can use a past version of the database as the starting point for a new, updatable copy of the database that runs in parallel, something Oracle calls "virtual private databases". And you don't need to wildly overprovision anything, where storage blocks are identical between copies, they're shared.
Anybody who has the brains to qualify as a Windows server administrator should be able to install FreeNAS on a beige box. That, plus block-level RSYNC copying and you've got a cheap safety net that doesn't affect how you operate on a day-to-day basis.
If your connected storage has copy-on-write or log-structured filesystem technology, and you still have control of the server itself, you don't have to worry if the ransomware encrypts the data on the server. The previous, unencrypted data is still there and easily accessible.
This technology is exotic in the Windows world but it's been mainstream on Unix for years.
Definitely not rocket science but how many snapshots can you hold especially once all the data has been encryption with ransomware?
Millions, probably. After the data has been encrypted, you can't change it, so additional snapshots (which only record changes in copy-on-write filesystem like ZFS or BTRFS) will take up only metadata storage space. Meanwhile you'll still have at least dozens of good snapshots from before the attack to fall back on. Honestly Windows is at least fifteen years behind in filesystem technology, most people just don't *know* that.
I agree snapshots are not a backup solution, because if something happens to the server you lose them too. But running a tightly locked-down BSD fileserver on a private network is certainly a low risk for ransomware attacks.
In a way, I'm half serious. I run Linux and only boot Windows occasionally, just to keep abreast of what's happening in that world. But I prefer Linux because Windows, like so many other digital platforms out there today, has an agenda: to shape my behavior as a consumer.
While Linux may not be perfect, and it comes with occasional hardware compatibility headaches, I value the ability to create the user experience *I* want, to orchestrate the kind of work flow *I* prefer, not take what Microsoft wants me to take. It's a tradeoff, but every operating system is a tool; the question is whose hand is it in?
Microsoft has always tried to leverage its desktop position to sell its other products and services. And they understand the day of the market dominance of the desktop has passed so they really do want you to use the cloud services. I don't actually think Microsoft would screw up its desktop OS deliberately, but for most people if MS does screw up, they don't really have any choice but to continue using Windows. In the long term entrusting their data to Microsoft's cloud services will almost certainly be the path of least resistance for those people.
Military intelligence service is now so free for time it has ability to get into the pastime of sport?
Yep. International sport has been an instrument of national prestige and diplomacy for over fifty years now.
Russia is ninth in the world in population with 144 million people; that puts it between Bengladesh and Mexico. It's twelfth in the world by GDP, between South Korea and Spain. But it once was the core of a powerful empire that counted nearly half the world in its sphere of influence. The loss of that influence stings, and Russia is very interested in raising its international prestige, either by positive means like sport or negative means like ratfucking other countries' political systems. That's why they've been involved in state sponsored athlete doping.
You're supposed to be keeping your files on Microsoft Cloud. If you insist on using a product in a way other than the manufacturer intended, that manufacturer can't be responsible for the results.
Well, sure. But if you were to undertake sequestration, you'd be doing it on a massive scale to have any effect. You could pump most of the methane you produce into the ground and skim of the methane you actually needed and divert that into the market.
The real problem is that this would be massively energy-intensive. It takes as much energy to unburn a CO2 molecule as you get from making it in the first place. You might consider this after you've had a technological breakthrough in fusion or something like that, although more conventional sequestration strategies that form mineral carbonates would probably still be more attractive.
Most people gain weight very slowly, over the course of years. For example I gained 100 pounds over 20 years (most of which I've subsequently lost, but that's another story); that works out to about 6 grams per day; over the course of 4 weeks that works out to about six ounces, a difference that would be extremely challenging to detect against the background noise of hydration variation.
Well just to play devil's advocate, it's not just about marketing, like slapping tail fins and chrome on a car. Facial expressions are one of the few communication systems that are universal across human cultures. That's obviously not true of language and writing, but gestures too are purely arbitrary in their meaning.
The communication you can do with a simulated face is clearly very limited, but potentially useful in certain situations (e.g. where danger is involved).
This is appealing to a certain mentality, I suppose, and there are some in our military and government who unquestionably have that mentality.
This is like the massive, impractical MOAB bomb, or reactivating those old WW2 battleships; it's something that has a kind of juvenile emotional appeal because of its sheer destructiveness. But really our needs are served better by precision and control than wholesale destruction. That's because we fight wars to get people do do things, not to obliterate them. A single 500 pound GPS bomb works better than flattening entire cities, like we did to Dresden. If you could somehow teleport a firecracker into a single person's ear that would be even more effective.
That's why nuclear weapons don't really serve our warfighting needs. We have them because once they existed we had no choice, but they're just too crude in their effect to be useful. And if nuclear weapons are crude, something like this, weaponized, would be orders of magnitude worse.
This is a weapon for having, not using. And if we have it, others will want to have it, and proliferation will be a thousand times harder to control than nuclear proliferation.
Sure, a pointed stick and an atom bomb are both weapons. But the fact that the same word can be used to describe both of them doesn't mean that you should treat them equivalently.
As a weapon, this one would have more negative side-effects than an atom bomb, and the explanation that they're doing this to somehow protect our crops from other countries' biological weapons doesn't pass the sniff test. If there were some general, broad-spectrum means of protecting crops from any possible disease, that'd be quite an accomplishment.
Polygraphs aren't pseudoscience; but there's a lot of pseudoscience around polygraphs. People can't deal with anything that's complicated, so (as needed) people will regard a polygraph as practically infallible or utterly useless. In fact their performance is better than chance, which is useful, but not decisive.
What's so farfetched about SpaceX's competitors hiring a firm to conduct a PR campaign? There are firms that offer such services because there's a market for it. Talk up your client's company or spread FUD about their competition. You see it all the time in big ticket defense contracting.
The only thing that's a bit melodramatic is calling it "shadowy" or regarding it as somehow especially dirty pool.
Voters in places with a lot of space jobs are important political constituencies for space contractors,
Oy. Nobody is saying the Earth is literally a greenhouse with a glass roof. However it does have a troposphere, which is warming, and a stratosphere, which is cooling (although there is more going on there than CO2).
The greenhouse effect absolutely works by blocking radiation. CO2 is a trace gas that has no direct physical effect whatsoever on convection.
The reason CO2 affects the energy in the atmosphere is that the Earth receives an immense amount of solar energy, enough that tiny variations (such as produced by orbital resonances) can have what to us seem enormous effects.
Conduction has minimal effect on energy transfer within a medium (air or water) in comparison to advection and diffusion, but ti does play some role (along with evaporation and condensation) in transferring energy between the oceans and the atmosphere.
Hormesis -- a positive health impact from low exposures to an environmental stressor like radiation or pollution -- is a real thing. You can demonstrate that in lab animals.
The thing is, humans aren't lab animals. You can't control their total exposure to the stressor. Scientific support for radiation hormesis in humans is (for obvious reasons) anecdotal, and by definition isn't controlled. The same exposure that had a small beneficial effect in one population might not have happened had that population been living on a radon spur.
Where there is a possibility of a hormetic effect at low levels of exposure and a certainty of a negative effect at high levels of exposure, you have to limit human exposure from any single source. That doesn't take a genius to understand, but that level of reasoning appears to be light years beyond the current political discussion, in which radiation is either good or evil and must be treated accordingly.
I agree, but I was talking about the arguments that free markets yield optimal results, which is the theoretical basis for favoring markets. History does not support the idea that markets always converge on optimal solutions to things like pricing and supply, only that they work better on a practical basis than central planning based schemes that have been tried thus far.
However if consumers are sufficiently lazy, and if consumer protection laws are sufficiently weak, there's no real lower limit to how poorly a market system might work.
A capitalist can only be as good as its consumers are.
The whole rationale which "proves" that free markets are optimal is based on the assumption that consumers make perfectly rational decisions with perfect information. In that world a consumer would never take an auto loan without comparison shopping, just to drive the car off the lot *today*. If he bought a shoddily built television he'd be making a conscious choice to prioritize short term cash flow over long term expense. And if he signed over his privacy to an online service it would be after careful weighing of the pros and cons.
This is by the way isthe same idealized world in which citizens in a democracy examine each politician's proposals in detail and with a keen critical eye.
As with the old joke about the bear and the running shoes, capitalism and democracy don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than the alternative. But it's not necessarily given that they are. How much better they are, if at all, depends on us not being gullible and carried away by enthusiasm or fear.
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Oh, I should mention that with COW file system based NAS distros, the normal practice is to take snapshots every 15 minutes and keep them for a month or two. It doesn't require massive overprovisioning because each snapshot in a COW file system only contains changed blocks. In a situation where 100% of your files are changed, you'd need to have as much space free to accommodate all the encrypted files. If you didn't have it, then the update would fail.
I'm quite a few years out of date on Windows administration, but the last time I looked into Windows snapshots they were a lot more costly than they are under ZFS.
Oracle's been using COW for its RDBMS product for years, which accounts for its unusually robust and flexible transaction isolation, backup and recovery capabilities. Oracle programmers by in large have never heard of a "dirty read". You can use a past version of the database as the starting point for a new, updatable copy of the database that runs in parallel, something Oracle calls "virtual private databases". And you don't need to wildly overprovision anything, where storage blocks are identical between copies, they're shared.
Well, overprovisioning has the advantage that it's simple. You spend your money or you take your chances.
Anybody who has the brains to qualify as a Windows server administrator should be able to install FreeNAS on a beige box. That, plus block-level RSYNC copying and you've got a cheap safety net that doesn't affect how you operate on a day-to-day basis.
If your connected storage has copy-on-write or log-structured filesystem technology, and you still have control of the server itself, you don't have to worry if the ransomware encrypts the data on the server. The previous, unencrypted data is still there and easily accessible.
This technology is exotic in the Windows world but it's been mainstream on Unix for years.
Definitely not rocket science but how many snapshots can you hold especially once all the data has been encryption with ransomware?
Millions, probably. After the data has been encrypted, you can't change it, so additional snapshots (which only record changes in copy-on-write filesystem like ZFS or BTRFS) will take up only metadata storage space. Meanwhile you'll still have at least dozens of good snapshots from before the attack to fall back on. Honestly Windows is at least fifteen years behind in filesystem technology, most people just don't *know* that.
I agree snapshots are not a backup solution, because if something happens to the server you lose them too. But running a tightly locked-down BSD fileserver on a private network is certainly a low risk for ransomware attacks.
In a way, I'm half serious. I run Linux and only boot Windows occasionally, just to keep abreast of what's happening in that world. But I prefer Linux because Windows, like so many other digital platforms out there today, has an agenda: to shape my behavior as a consumer.
While Linux may not be perfect, and it comes with occasional hardware compatibility headaches, I value the ability to create the user experience *I* want, to orchestrate the kind of work flow *I* prefer, not take what Microsoft wants me to take. It's a tradeoff, but every operating system is a tool; the question is whose hand is it in?
Microsoft has always tried to leverage its desktop position to sell its other products and services. And they understand the day of the market dominance of the desktop has passed so they really do want you to use the cloud services. I don't actually think Microsoft would screw up its desktop OS deliberately, but for most people if MS does screw up, they don't really have any choice but to continue using Windows. In the long term entrusting their data to Microsoft's cloud services will almost certainly be the path of least resistance for those people.
I just prefer to stay well out of that.
Show me a scheme like this that successfully prevented black hats from compromising a system.
I run a small form-factor server running FreeBSD with ZFS, set to do daily snapshots. I never worry about Windows ransomware.
I'm surprised more people don't use some kind of snapshot-capable server. It's not exactly rocket science.
Military intelligence service is now so free for time it has ability to get into the pastime of sport?
Yep. International sport has been an instrument of national prestige and diplomacy for over fifty years now.
Russia is ninth in the world in population with 144 million people; that puts it between Bengladesh and Mexico. It's twelfth in the world by GDP, between South Korea and Spain. But it once was the core of a powerful empire that counted nearly half the world in its sphere of influence. The loss of that influence stings, and Russia is very interested in raising its international prestige, either by positive means like sport or negative means like ratfucking other countries' political systems. That's why they've been involved in state sponsored athlete doping.
I like to keep people guessing, which tells you everything you need to know :-)
You're supposed to be keeping your files on Microsoft Cloud. If you insist on using a product in a way other than the manufacturer intended, that manufacturer can't be responsible for the results.
Well, sure. But if you were to undertake sequestration, you'd be doing it on a massive scale to have any effect. You could pump most of the methane you produce into the ground and skim of the methane you actually needed and divert that into the market.
The real problem is that this would be massively energy-intensive. It takes as much energy to unburn a CO2 molecule as you get from making it in the first place. You might consider this after you've had a technological breakthrough in fusion or something like that, although more conventional sequestration strategies that form mineral carbonates would probably still be more attractive.
Four weeks is not very long.
Most people gain weight very slowly, over the course of years. For example I gained 100 pounds over 20 years (most of which I've subsequently lost, but that's another story); that works out to about 6 grams per day; over the course of 4 weeks that works out to about six ounces, a difference that would be extremely challenging to detect against the background noise of hydration variation.
Well just to play devil's advocate, it's not just about marketing, like slapping tail fins and chrome on a car. Facial expressions are one of the few communication systems that are universal across human cultures. That's obviously not true of language and writing, but gestures too are purely arbitrary in their meaning.
The communication you can do with a simulated face is clearly very limited, but potentially useful in certain situations (e.g. where danger is involved).
This is appealing to a certain mentality, I suppose, and there are some in our military and government who unquestionably have that mentality.
This is like the massive, impractical MOAB bomb, or reactivating those old WW2 battleships; it's something that has a kind of juvenile emotional appeal because of its sheer destructiveness. But really our needs are served better by precision and control than wholesale destruction. That's because we fight wars to get people do do things, not to obliterate them. A single 500 pound GPS bomb works better than flattening entire cities, like we did to Dresden. If you could somehow teleport a firecracker into a single person's ear that would be even more effective.
That's why nuclear weapons don't really serve our warfighting needs. We have them because once they existed we had no choice, but they're just too crude in their effect to be useful. And if nuclear weapons are crude, something like this, weaponized, would be orders of magnitude worse.
This is a weapon for having, not using. And if we have it, others will want to have it, and proliferation will be a thousand times harder to control than nuclear proliferation.
Sure, a pointed stick and an atom bomb are both weapons. But the fact that the same word can be used to describe both of them doesn't mean that you should treat them equivalently.
As a weapon, this one would have more negative side-effects than an atom bomb, and the explanation that they're doing this to somehow protect our crops from other countries' biological weapons doesn't pass the sniff test. If there were some general, broad-spectrum means of protecting crops from any possible disease, that'd be quite an accomplishment.
Polygraphs aren't pseudoscience; but there's a lot of pseudoscience around polygraphs. People can't deal with anything that's complicated, so (as needed) people will regard a polygraph as practically infallible or utterly useless. In fact their performance is better than chance, which is useful, but not decisive.
What's so farfetched about SpaceX's competitors hiring a firm to conduct a PR campaign? There are firms that offer such services because there's a market for it. Talk up your client's company or spread FUD about their competition. You see it all the time in big ticket defense contracting.
The only thing that's a bit melodramatic is calling it "shadowy" or regarding it as somehow especially dirty pool.
Voters in places with a lot of space jobs are important political constituencies for space contractors,
Oy. Nobody is saying the Earth is literally a greenhouse with a glass roof. However it does have a troposphere, which is warming, and a stratosphere, which is cooling (although there is more going on there than CO2).
It's not a partisan think. I'm a liberal myself. It's that people across the political spectrum make ridiculous arguments.
The greenhouse effect absolutely works by blocking radiation. CO2 is a trace gas that has no direct physical effect whatsoever on convection.
The reason CO2 affects the energy in the atmosphere is that the Earth receives an immense amount of solar energy, enough that tiny variations (such as produced by orbital resonances) can have what to us seem enormous effects.
Conduction has minimal effect on energy transfer within a medium (air or water) in comparison to advection and diffusion, but ti does play some role (along with evaporation and condensation) in transferring energy between the oceans and the atmosphere.
Hormesis -- a positive health impact from low exposures to an environmental stressor like radiation or pollution -- is a real thing. You can demonstrate that in lab animals.
The thing is, humans aren't lab animals. You can't control their total exposure to the stressor. Scientific support for radiation hormesis in humans is (for obvious reasons) anecdotal, and by definition isn't controlled. The same exposure that had a small beneficial effect in one population might not have happened had that population been living on a radon spur.
Where there is a possibility of a hormetic effect at low levels of exposure and a certainty of a negative effect at high levels of exposure, you have to limit human exposure from any single source. That doesn't take a genius to understand, but that level of reasoning appears to be light years beyond the current political discussion, in which radiation is either good or evil and must be treated accordingly.
I agree, but I was talking about the arguments that free markets yield optimal results, which is the theoretical basis for favoring markets. History does not support the idea that markets always converge on optimal solutions to things like pricing and supply, only that they work better on a practical basis than central planning based schemes that have been tried thus far.
However if consumers are sufficiently lazy, and if consumer protection laws are sufficiently weak, there's no real lower limit to how poorly a market system might work.
Never read the classical economists, I take it.
A capitalist can only be as good as its consumers are.
The whole rationale which "proves" that free markets are optimal is based on the assumption that consumers make perfectly rational decisions with perfect information. In that world a consumer would never take an auto loan without comparison shopping, just to drive the car off the lot *today*. If he bought a shoddily built television he'd be making a conscious choice to prioritize short term cash flow over long term expense. And if he signed over his privacy to an online service it would be after careful weighing of the pros and cons.
This is by the way isthe same idealized world in which citizens in a democracy examine each politician's proposals in detail and with a keen critical eye.
As with the old joke about the bear and the running shoes, capitalism and democracy don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than the alternative. But it's not necessarily given that they are. How much better they are, if at all, depends on us not being gullible and carried away by enthusiasm or fear.