The FCC later specified that they were not trying to block Open Source firmware modifications
they were told IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that this is exactly what would happen - that manufacturers would take the "lazy" way out. unfortunately, a number of prominent "open source" activists completely and utterly failed to comprehend that this would happen, and ENDORSED the FCC's proposal.
there are some very specific companies that sell RYF-Endorsed products (answering the OP's question: google "RYF Certified router" or other such keyword combinations), and these companies are near-completely screwed. if they are not careful they have to sell ILLEGAL products in order to satisfy the RYF-Endorsement Criteria! however it turns out that there's a small workaround: what they can do is put an UNPUBLISHED hidden link into the web interface in order for users to carry out quotes unauthorised quotes firmware updates.
basically as a world-wide community we f******d up. the opportunity to stop the FCC from being a Corporate lap-dog was when the "Save WIFI" campaign was underway. it was a complex situation understood by very few people: we should have listened to the people who properly understood it, and supported them. we didn't do that... and now we suffer the consequences, as indicated by the OP.
Well, duh. You shouldn't run VPNs over TCP connections, even on decent networks. You're seeing windowing and retransmission problems caused by TCP. Just use UDP for transport and let the VPN deal with connection control properly.
UDP was entirely blocked. by "entirely blocked" i mean that the chinese government's "Great Firewall" terminated ALL AND ANY access to ALL ports of the type UDP, to the (fixed) IP address of my server. i had absolutely no choice but to use TCP. 24 hours later the block would be dropped.
basically what this incredibly rubbish "firewall" does is deep packet inspection, looking for anything that looks like a VPN. but there is so much traffic out there, with *so many* people running VPNs, that they simply can't keep up. so they block only for around 24 hours and then drop the firewall rule.
by constantly changing from TCP to UDP and constantly changing the port number i was able to avoid this stupid, stupid deep packet inspection.
a number of people in china run a recompiled version of openvpn, which allows XORing of a fixed pattern at both the client and server end. this also allows avoidance of detection. however i was unable to compile the "hacked-together" version of openvpn so could not use it.
the "fast" websites you're referring to are things like the universities, and the "big commercial" websites. things that the majority of smartphone-addicted chinese citizens use every waking moment of their lives. things like wechat and other companies. wechat *has* to be fast because it's now used pretty much everywhere, for paying for everything from bills to groceries. the average medium-sized business however is still stuck with ridiculously-slow internet access. component suppliers in shenzhen simply cannot tolerate maintaining a decent web site because it's so slow that they just don't perceive there to be any benefit at all in doing so. i uploaded a stack of datasheets to my server on behalf of one of my suppliers, because for them to do it the speed would be so ridiculously slow they might as well not bother, and to just email them to clients on request: it's quicker and more reliable. note that's CHINESE clients.
this gives you an idea of what it's like to try to browse websites. literally every single problem that you've ever encountered arbitrarily and very very occasionally, perhaps maybe once every two to twelve months if that: HTTPS errors, socket errors, timeout errors at the network layer, timeout errors at the SSL layer, SSL certificate errors, cache inconsistency errors - LITERALLY every single possible network-related error - occurred on a regular and unending excruciatingly monotonous basis.
trying to log in to https accounts.google.com just to enable IMAP took me TWO HOURS and over TWENTY refresh attempts. eventually enough got into the browser cache for it to take ONLY five minutes for the page to load... but the AJAX-controlled radio button refused to update properly, so i had to repeat the process. offlineimap (and running cyrus imap server *on my laptop*) was the only way to gain access to the 50,000 emails in my gmail inbox. it took five days to sync them all down.
the chromium team have accidentally marked this bugreport as "related to and problem is directly caused by VPN" but it's not. you can emulate this behaviour (answering the OP's question) by setting up a network filter (which you can do with a userspace tun/tap program written e.g. in python) that randomly and arbitrarily drops between 20 and 80% of packets, and limits the traffic rate to between 15 and SIX kilobytes per second. also you should add huge packet latency as an option: up to around 20 seconds should do the trick.
access to the UK is particularly bad (15k/sec); access to the USA is slightly better (around 70k/sec). during that massive DDOS attack (i happened to be in shenzhen at the time) all speeds dropped to around 5-10k/sec and packet loss was consistently around 80% (i run a constant "ping" in a window).
the worst latency i saw on openvpn was around 120 seconds, when using TCP instead of UDP. yes you read that right: not 120 MILLI-seconds - one hundred and twenty SECONDS. the connection was so bad that the bandwidth throttling option of openvpn simply did not work. i had to constantly change from TCP to UDP and back, and to regularly change the port number of the VPN.
as i have a server with a fixed IP address i gave serious consideration to writing my own userspace traffic proxy/router - not even a VPN, just a NAT/forwarding service - that would automatically make multiple connections over an arbitrary and random series of TCP and UDP connections, XOR something over the top of every packet, add a sequence number in front of the packet (exactly like TCP) and then reassemble the stream in-order at the other end of the connection.
basically with all my contacts being outside of china, there was absolutely no way that i could conduct business in china. every single software developer that i met INCLUDING CHINESE NATIONAL CITIZENS had a VPN connection. every foreigner trying to do business had a VPN connection. every tourist th
you can... until a vendor like e.g. lenovo releases a laptop with a UEFI BIOS where you are not permitted to remove the boot-locked settings that would *allow* you to install a GNU/Linux distro... https://www.bit-tech.net/news/...
quick! before they get a court order taking the site down somebody write a perl script to take the research papers and automatically publish them on turrentz.eu^W limetorrents^W extratorrents^W torrentfreak^W argh forget it...
I'm still struggling to understand the use case for this.
in 2006 i worked for NC3A Research, where windows had been made mandatory some years before (through offering them a uniform pricing discount... that of course did not involve future products. or upgrades). this made it an absolute bitch to do any kind of development, so i investigated installing a wide range of software, including Cygwin, MSYS and other tools which made my life bearable. i even at one point installed userspace linux.
being able to install straight debian on top of the POSIX subsystem would have been great. so yes: where organisations are stupid enough to have been fooled by microsoft and have forcibly made specific OSes mandatory, even for developers, being able to say "oh yeah, these are just apps, sir" is a huge relief.
I had a domain registered to DynDNS for 10 years (5 at a time) because I was really happy with them, particularly back when they did free domains based off of subdomains on dyndns.org: that was a really helpful and useful feature so I supported them by actually paying for a domain long-term.
However the moment they were bought by Oracle I *IMMEDIATELY* put in a Transfer Request. The reason: Oracle I consider to be one of the world's most unethical companies, up there with Broadcom and Qualcom for various semi-illegal corporate practices and outright power-abuses. If you're not familiar with the stories behind OpenOffice, MySQL, VirtualBox (which forces people to sign over total rights and ownership of code contributions), and BerkeleyDB (change of license to an unacceptable one that's incompatible with Software Libre, forcing Debian to pull latest versions: many projects have converted to LMDB as a result) - the list goes on and on. If you're not familiar with these stories I recommend you *get* familiar, fast, and drop all dependency on Oracle as fast as you practically can. They poison every company they buy, including, sadly, Sun Microsystems.
i'm the creator and guardian of the EOMA68 standard, and someone just brought the intel compute card to my attention on the mailing list. the intel compute card is *exactly* the same size as EOMA68, which in turn is based on legacy PCMCIA casework and connector re-use: credit-card-sized at: 54 x 86 x 5mm. fortunately, from the BBC video, if you check 30 seconds in the connector is completely different (otherwise intel would have a Certification Mark infringment case on their hands): it looks like it's Mini-PCIe which, if that's true, would be a very sensible choice as it contains USB2, one PCIe lane, some GPIO and power.
i do wonder if my discussions with intel over the past couple of years, as well as the crowd-funding campaign which i'm here in taiwan presently to fulfil, have spurred them to go "i know! let's make our own computer card standard just like that guy did because he said "NO" when it came to having hardware-level spying capability in the BIOS through the Intel Management Engine, with the resultant *complete* meltdown from a security perspective as outlined here https://libreboot.org/faq/#int... "
i'll be watching this with interest, because standards, i've learned, live and die by whether the designers have enough foresight to design it with upgradeability in mind, as well as have the balls to say NO when it comes to "adding options" that are not backwards-compatible.
okay, so this is about trademarks. canonical's trademark is being brought into disrepute by the irresponsible action of some cloud providers: it's perfectly reasonable for them to sort this out. now, here's where i have an issue with canonical: why do they think it's okay to have *canonical* not brought into disrepute, when they are themselves acting in a criminal capacity, bringing the *linux* trademark into disrepute by illegally distributing linux kernel source code after they lost their right to do so under the GPLv2, by including the (binary) incompatible ZFS kernel module?
i tried explaining the problem to the OSHWA group: they didn't get it. the problem with their Certification Programme is that there's nothing in their document which covers liability if a design causes injury or death (deliberate or accidental). the OSHWA group is therefore setting themselves up for a class action lawsuit where some incompetent person designs something extremely badly, slaps an OSHWA logo on it, then a chinese company goes and copies it (logo included... without bothering to find out what the logo's actually for), somebody dies in an electrical fire and the family gets an aggressive lawyer to sue and blame (rightly in this case) the people they deem to have been responsible.
what's particularly troublesome is that the OSHWA's Programme is "self-certifying" Certification Programmes *NEED* to actually have clout behind them, with money put aside to be able to take legal action against people who bring the Certificate into disrepute (using Trademark Law - not patents, not copyright), and there needs to be clauses and phrases that define and assign responsibility and liability. the OSHWA document has been written by well-meaning and unfortunately very naive people who cannot comprehend how much of a risk they are taking, who have not thought things through properly. they haven't taken legal advice, and they have no idea of the distinction between "Libre" and "Open".
what is useful however is that their mailing list is a focus for like-minded people to congregate and communicate.
". According to the report, an estimated 279m music tracks, 56m TV shows, 34m movies, and 5m video games were consumed in the three month period."
how were they "consumed"? did they print them out on rice paper, frame by frame and then and only then manage to EAT them?? this is how the cartels manage to make it look like people are criminals - by using words like "pirate" and "consumption". videos are not "physical objects". copies can't be "stolen". or CONSUMED. the watching of a video does NOT subtract any physical substance from the universe (except perhaps indirectly reducing brain matter due to complete boredom and lack of stimulus). we're being duped here. time to take back control.
I won't waste my time explaining you why NoSQL databases are suitable for many use cases
at the request of a client i did an evaluation of a range of databases, mongodb, postgresql, mysql, and after none of them matched up to the required performance tried leveldb and lmdb (which ended up the winner by a long, long margin). mongodb's performance was the worst of the worst. it wasn't so much that it was below the performance of the other databases, it was the *MASSIVE* pauses which began after about 90 seconds of continuous INSERTs, and continued to increase to over THIRTY SECONDS, that really put the nail in its coffin.
so after only ten minutes of INSERTs i gave up on the testing because it was clear that mongodb had some form of internal cacheing and administrative overhead that took absolute precedence over data entry. as the use-case was for the storage of real-time data, having massive pauses that effectively took the entire database offline was completely unacceptable, and i will not be using mongodb, ever.
... Hardware bought from thinkpenguin.com costs even less than Macs because it's pre-vetted by their 3-man company to "Just Work". the only "support" calls that they get are down to flaky USB host chipsets, BIOS DRM/whitelisting which prevents certain WIFI cards from being recognised, and the *very* very occasional request for driver support for OSes that are getting on for 15 years old. they sell ACM dial-up modems because they get calls from people who have upgraded from windows xp only to find that their old conexant softmodem is "so old" it no longer works. they buy and sell printers that don't require firmware uploads and have "generic" drivers - postscript, PCL and so on. we don't *have* to live on the treadmill: it's a choice, to tolerate the pain, cost, stress and distress of living with hardware that's designed for obsolescence, trapped by our own desire to pay less for less.
I don't see them keeping the schematic to themselves as being a real solution
schematics are not protected by copyright law. as in: they are uncopyrightable, by definition of them being a "functional description". it is a common mistake (even amongst the open hardware community) to assume that schematics may be copyrighted. what *may* be copyrighted is for example an aesthetic layout of a PCB, because that is a creative process.
Two senior Democratic lawmakers with access to classified intelligence on Thursday accused Russia of "making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,"
>>>>
Two senior Democratic lawmakers (because all the Republican ones were "out to lunch") with access to classified intelligence (which they shouldn't have revealed even the existence of, if they're really and truly classified) on Thursday (the best day for reporting viral news) said that the people (who were actually aliens wearing face-masks) who came to them (without providing any concrete verifiable proof of their credentials) put some bits of paper in front of them (without any way for those lawmakers to verify the authenticity of the documents) which had some words in it *claiming* to "accuse Russia of making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,"
what a complete crock. over how many pairs of eyes do these people *really* think that this can be pulled? oh wait.... they've probably run the numbers, and they only need to make it look like *DEMOCRAT* Lawmakers are incompetent, so that a large enough percentage will vote for Republican.... and the rest they can swing by manipulating the numbers using that new-fangled "percentage" adjustment they added into the backdoors after the last time some of the vote totals went NEGATIVE. i wonder if they remembered to do rounding to integers? we'll find out soon enough, if the number of votes comes out to "25012.79" won't we!
y'know... skype used to have this feature, y'know? it wasn't completely undetectable, but it *used* to have the ability to disguise itself as pretty much anything, so that it would "just work" in the face of badly-configured firewalls, DNS servers, idiot companies that blocked *all* incoming and outgoing traffic stone-dead including ICMP (including BGP and other absolutely crucial traffic) with the statement "you've got unrestricted access to port 80, that's the 'internet' isn't it, what the hell are you complaining about yer lame-techie-wannabe-tuck-fard??"
it also had the ability to create any kind of tunneling over pretty much any port and any protocol (TCP, UDP, you name it, it could do it) such that it was pretty much impossible to shut it down.
AND THEN.... for no good reason WHATSOEVER [1], skype changed hands not once but THREE TIMES in succession. now it's under the "control" of microsoft, and anyone considering installing it now is a fool. it's been turned into a "cloud is all" protocol. there's no peer-to-peer capability. that leaves it vulnerable to being mass-IP-range blocked. anyone can work out what the IP range(s) are of the various "cloud" servers used by microsoft are... and just block them (regardless of consequences).
so i *would* have said "just tell them to install skype". except we can logically deduce that it was SOME FUCKWIT IN THE U.S. GOVERMNENT who caused skype, in its current release, to lose its inherent firewall-busting capabilities to be COMPLETELY REMOVED.
and with skype being proprietary, and the "startup" (bootstrap) nodes no longer being run or "supported", we cannot even run older versions of skype any more because the older versions have been shut down. oh, and it's proprietary, so it would be man-decades before it is properly reverse-engineered. oh, and the original creators are likely to have been asked (or threatened) to enter into some serrrrious non-compete contract which, even if it wasn't legally enforceable, they probably understood the full implications were that if they wanted to keep all their body parts, they'd better like, y'know, not even *think* about writing a replacement / competitor, y'ken. they did try setting up a company called "joost", but interestingly, it "failed". i don't wonder why, not any more.
so, this appears to be a golden opportunity for software libre and proprietary software writers alike, but honestly it's a poisoned chalice. one department in the U.S. does *NOT* want such software to even *EXIST*... another is offering money to anyone willing to CREATE such software.... it's either a case of "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing", or it's just plain entrapment: the NSA wants to know if you have the CAPABILITY to write such software (and you're going to tell them who you are for god's sake!)
bottom line is, there's a phrase which covers this scenario in the security world - it's called "a honey pot". my advice to anyone who reads this: stay the FUCK away from this "offer" unless you're such a huge software libre team (over 100 people would do it) that it would be clearly obvious if one or more people suddenly "went missing", or "received sudden lucrative job offers" or "went on holiday" or "won the lottery" or "had an accident". what would *really* do it is if EVERYBODY who is capable of collaborating on this (including people from proprietary software companies) joined *ONE* single software libre team (with a single person allocated as the front-man), where everybody else used anonymous two-way communications with that front-man), and through them proposed one single entry for the "competition". 100, 200, 300 people, the more the better. if the application *requires* that every single person on the "team" be named individually and separately (either before or after the application), then you can logically deduce that it's extremely likely to be a honeypot. if the application's mysteriously "denied" when there's only the one entry, you can logically deduce that it's extremely lik
what many people do not appreciate is that asimov's books were a logical demonstration spanning asimov's lifetime and beyond that the three laws of robotics were a FAILURE. this is only really truly and clearly spelled out in the works written under contract by asimov's estate, for example in the book by Greg Bear. the three laws were so hard-wired into the positronic brain with billions upon billions of checks being carried out to ensure strict compliance with the three laws that there was no room for creativity - at all - and secondly that no robot could possibly allow a human being to take *any* form of risk because it *might* result in "harm", be that physical or psychological.
it would appear that BSI is unaware of this and is intending to force the three laws of robotics onto us without understanding the harm that that will do.
"Trending" means it's popular. People won't watch (and share) something that they don't actually want to watch. Here's the thing though about those WTC and Building 7 videos: a simple analysis of any of the off-the-street real-time videos - of which there were several so it's not like they could all be faked - by using simple equations of motion from O'Level Physics it is undeniably obvious that the tops of all of those buildings are in free-fall, accelerating at 9.8 metres per second squared.
Now, if a building is hit two thirds of the way up and becomes damaged, you would expect that damage to cause the top to fall over. Maybe some of the outer walls would fall off, but there would be a central core at least 1/2 to 1/3 of the height of the building sticking up. Bits would hit other bits, and it would take a long time and there would be rubble strewn out across a wide area, damaging the surrounding buildings and killing or injuring the people in them. You certainly would not expect it to collapse in a tidy heap at the speed of gravity where the entire building becomes a neat pile of rubble without any kind of significant damage to surrounding buildings.
For a quite insightful analysis which goes beyond the above brief invitation to use simple physics equations, logical analysis and reasoning, you might want to read this: https://steemit.com/tyranny/@b...
Bottom line is: not everything that "trends" under automatic algorithms (which would be filtered out by humans too scared of what they're seeing) is bullshit.
ah NO. please do some research BEFORE recommending fairphone to people. you'll notice that Fairphone has REMOVED (reneged on) their promise to provide a "Fair OS". their naivety (and the fact that they haven't listened to extremely experienced software libre developers) is well-documented - a good example is here: http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...
the Fairphone is only "modular" if you are mechanically-minded. i know of people who are competent engineers who, in attempting to repair a laptop, have managed accidentally to destroy FPC12 connectors because they weren't anticipating quite how tiny and fragile they would be.
"Modularity" also doesn't really solve the problem of chipsets being proprietary *and* insecure - google "900 million qualcomm android security vulnerability". you have to actually *design* the phone in *advance* to take into account these sorts of things. Neither google nor Fairphone have done that.
dave hakkens is the person who really inspired the modular smartphone movement and brought it to prominence (buglabs was the first to really implement the concept, almost a decade ago). however we don't really have an actual explanation of what went wrong with project ara. here's some hints (search in this document for "ara" obviously): http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep...
basically it's down to the fact that google has more money than they have creative sense. they therefore tried to use "financial brute force" to solve problems. the summary is: with their financial resources they created a "backbone standard" called MIPI UniPro... forgetting that in the process it would be patented by the partners, thus AUTOMATICALLY locking out ANY kind of interoperability and competition for the next 20 years. how, exactly, is that supposed to be "open"???
if we want modular smartphones to be successful, we need PROPERLY OPEN STANDARDs that have no vendor lock-in, but that are also properly protected by a Certification Mark (the standards-equivalent of a Trademark) and a Foundation (or CIC or Benefit Corporation), which is given the financial clout by its sponsors to jump on anyone who wrongly implements the standard in such a way as to cause short-circuits (and end up killing someone due to lithium battery fires for example). it's not like a software standard, where interoperability failures cause a segfault: a HARDWARE fault can genuinely be dangerous.
also the standard needs to be made up of *other* standards that are unencumbered and royalty-free, so that companies and makers alike are incentivised to create modules (using 3D printers and low-cost off-the-shelf circuits), for example this one, under development: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Ope... . Google *literally* did the total opposite of this strategy in every single conceivable way. paying companies to develop new chipsets (patented, proprietary) and saying "here! it's open! sign our NDA, agree to our policy, and you'll be fiiiine!" i'm just staggered by the naivety of a billion-dollar company that had to add me to a special list "stop phoning this person to invite them to interview, you've called them five times already over the past 10 years".
the other thing is, whilst i am delighted at dave's success in bringing the benefits of modularity to a wider audience, he doesn't have any technical knowledge. he views an *increase* in the number of companies on the phonebloks.com front page as being a good thing. the key question which illustrates the point without having to spell it out: are any of the products listed on the phonebloks page interoperable in *any* way?
so. if there is anybody who would like to see this done properly - in an open fashion so that the mistakes of both google and fairphone are not repeated (see http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...) do reach out on the arm-netbook mailing list http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mail... i've been investigating and researching this for years and waiting for the right opportunity. often it's good to wait for "big" corporations to fail to deliver, because it means that the hugely-public lessons sink in. a "small person" saying "this ain't gonna work no matter how much money they throw at it" tends not to be believed until the predicted failure comes about.
just as i did with the successfully-crowd-funded modular libre eco-laptop i've set up a stub page (for now) http://rhombus-tech.net/commun... which is a hybrid phone that acts "dumb" and may be upgraded to "smart" by plugging in a computer-on-a-module in Compact-Flash form-factor. "peripher
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The FCC later specified that they were not trying to block Open Source firmware modifications
they were told IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that this is exactly what would happen - that manufacturers would take the "lazy" way out. unfortunately, a number of prominent "open source" activists completely and utterly failed to comprehend that this would happen, and ENDORSED the FCC's proposal.
there are some very specific companies that sell RYF-Endorsed products (answering the OP's question: google "RYF Certified router" or other such keyword combinations), and these companies are near-completely screwed. if they are not careful they have to sell ILLEGAL products in order to satisfy the RYF-Endorsement Criteria! however it turns out that there's a small workaround: what they can do is put an UNPUBLISHED hidden link into the web interface in order for users to carry out quotes unauthorised quotes firmware updates.
basically as a world-wide community we f******d up. the opportunity to stop the FCC from being a Corporate lap-dog was when the "Save WIFI" campaign was underway. it was a complex situation understood by very few people: we should have listened to the people who properly understood it, and supported them. we didn't do that... and now we suffer the consequences, as indicated by the OP.
awesome, that's really useful to know, and i've cross-referenced it on the bugreport. thank you.
Well, duh. You shouldn't run VPNs over TCP connections, even on decent networks. You're seeing windowing and retransmission problems caused by TCP. Just use UDP for transport and let the VPN deal with connection control properly.
UDP was entirely blocked. by "entirely blocked" i mean that the chinese government's "Great Firewall" terminated ALL AND ANY access to ALL ports of the type UDP, to the (fixed) IP address of my server. i had absolutely no choice but to use TCP. 24 hours later the block would be dropped.
basically what this incredibly rubbish "firewall" does is deep packet inspection, looking for anything that looks like a VPN. but there is so much traffic out there, with *so many* people running VPNs, that they simply can't keep up. so they block only for around 24 hours and then drop the firewall rule.
by constantly changing from TCP to UDP and constantly changing the port number i was able to avoid this stupid, stupid deep packet inspection.
a number of people in china run a recompiled version of openvpn, which allows XORing of a fixed pattern at both the client and server end. this also allows avoidance of detection. however i was unable to compile the "hacked-together" version of openvpn so could not use it.
the "fast" websites you're referring to are things like the universities, and the "big commercial" websites. things that the majority of smartphone-addicted chinese citizens use every waking moment of their lives. things like wechat and other companies. wechat *has* to be fast because it's now used pretty much everywhere, for paying for everything from bills to groceries. the average medium-sized business however is still stuck with ridiculously-slow internet access. component suppliers in shenzhen simply cannot tolerate maintaining a decent web site because it's so slow that they just don't perceive there to be any benefit at all in doing so. i uploaded a stack of datasheets to my server on behalf of one of my suppliers, because for them to do it the speed would be so ridiculously slow they might as well not bother, and to just email them to clients on request: it's quicker and more reliable. note that's CHINESE clients.
some insight:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/ch...
this gives you an idea of what it's like to try to browse websites. literally every single problem that you've ever encountered arbitrarily and very very occasionally, perhaps maybe once every two to twelve months if that: HTTPS errors, socket errors, timeout errors at the network layer, timeout errors at the SSL layer, SSL certificate errors, cache inconsistency errors - LITERALLY every single possible network-related error - occurred on a regular and unending excruciatingly monotonous basis.
trying to log in to https accounts.google.com just to enable IMAP took me TWO HOURS and over TWENTY refresh attempts. eventually enough got into the browser cache for it to take ONLY five minutes for the page to load... but the AJAX-controlled radio button refused to update properly, so i had to repeat the process. offlineimap (and running cyrus imap server *on my laptop*) was the only way to gain access to the 50,000 emails in my gmail inbox. it took five days to sync them all down.
the chromium team have accidentally marked this bugreport as "related to and problem is directly caused by VPN" but it's not. you can emulate this behaviour (answering the OP's question) by setting up a network filter (which you can do with a userspace tun/tap program written e.g. in python) that randomly and arbitrarily drops between 20 and 80% of packets, and limits the traffic rate to between 15 and SIX kilobytes per second. also you should add huge packet latency as an option: up to around 20 seconds should do the trick.
access to the UK is particularly bad (15k/sec); access to the USA is slightly better (around 70k/sec). during that massive DDOS attack (i happened to be in shenzhen at the time) all speeds dropped to around 5-10k/sec and packet loss was consistently around 80% (i run a constant "ping" in a window).
the worst latency i saw on openvpn was around 120 seconds, when using TCP instead of UDP. yes you read that right: not 120 MILLI-seconds - one hundred and twenty SECONDS. the connection was so bad that the bandwidth throttling option of openvpn simply did not work. i had to constantly change from TCP to UDP and back, and to regularly change the port number of the VPN.
as i have a server with a fixed IP address i gave serious consideration to writing my own userspace traffic proxy/router - not even a VPN, just a NAT/forwarding service - that would automatically make multiple connections over an arbitrary and random series of TCP and UDP connections, XOR something over the top of every packet, add a sequence number in front of the packet (exactly like TCP) and then reassemble the stream in-order at the other end of the connection.
basically with all my contacts being outside of china, there was absolutely no way that i could conduct business in china. every single software developer that i met INCLUDING CHINESE NATIONAL CITIZENS had a VPN connection. every foreigner trying to do business had a VPN connection. every tourist th
beepi: never heard of it ... ... ...
quixey: never heard of it
yik yak: never heard of it
you can... until a vendor like e.g. lenovo releases a laptop with a UEFI BIOS where you are not permitted to remove the boot-locked settings that would *allow* you to install a GNU/Linux distro... https://www.bit-tech.net/news/...
quick! before they get a court order taking the site down somebody write a perl script to take the research papers and automatically publish them on turrentz.eu^W limetorrents^W extratorrents^W torrentfreak^W argh forget it...
I'm still struggling to understand the use case for this.
in 2006 i worked for NC3A Research, where windows had been made mandatory some years before (through offering them a uniform pricing discount... that of course did not involve future products. or upgrades). this made it an absolute bitch to do any kind of development, so i investigated installing a wide range of software, including Cygwin, MSYS and other tools which made my life bearable. i even at one point installed userspace linux.
being able to install straight debian on top of the POSIX subsystem would have been great. so yes: where organisations are stupid enough to have been fooled by microsoft and have forcibly made specific OSes mandatory, even for developers, being able to say "oh yeah, these are just apps, sir" is a huge relief.
"try the mitigations here".... you mean the ones that force you to sign a EULA?? is intel having a laugh?
I had a domain registered to DynDNS for 10 years (5 at a time) because I was really happy with them, particularly back when they did free domains based off of subdomains on dyndns.org: that was a really helpful and useful feature so I supported them by actually paying for a domain long-term.
However the moment they were bought by Oracle I *IMMEDIATELY* put in a Transfer Request. The reason: Oracle I consider to be one of the world's most unethical companies, up there with Broadcom and Qualcom for various semi-illegal corporate practices and outright power-abuses. If you're not familiar with the stories behind OpenOffice, MySQL, VirtualBox (which forces people to sign over total rights and ownership of code contributions), and BerkeleyDB (change of license to an unacceptable one that's incompatible with Software Libre, forcing Debian to pull latest versions: many projects have converted to LMDB as a result) - the list goes on and on. If you're not familiar with these stories I recommend you *get* familiar, fast, and drop all dependency on Oracle as fast as you practically can. They poison every company they buy, including, sadly, Sun Microsystems.
i'm the creator and guardian of the EOMA68 standard, and someone just brought the intel compute card to my attention on the mailing list. the intel compute card is *exactly* the same size as EOMA68, which in turn is based on legacy PCMCIA casework and connector re-use: credit-card-sized at: 54 x 86 x 5mm. fortunately, from the BBC video, if you check 30 seconds in the connector is completely different (otherwise intel would have a Certification Mark infringment case on their hands): it looks like it's Mini-PCIe which, if that's true, would be a very sensible choice as it contains USB2, one PCIe lane, some GPIO and power.
i do wonder if my discussions with intel over the past couple of years, as well as the crowd-funding campaign which i'm here in taiwan presently to fulfil, have spurred them to go "i know! let's make our own computer card standard just like that guy did because he said "NO" when it came to having hardware-level spying capability in the BIOS through the Intel Management Engine, with the resultant *complete* meltdown from a security perspective as outlined here https://libreboot.org/faq/#int... "
i'll be watching this with interest, because standards, i've learned, live and die by whether the designers have enough foresight to design it with upgradeability in mind, as well as have the balls to say NO when it comes to "adding options" that are not backwards-compatible.
okay, so this is about trademarks. canonical's trademark is being brought into disrepute by the irresponsible action of some cloud providers: it's perfectly reasonable for them to sort this out. now, here's where i have an issue with canonical: why do they think it's okay to have *canonical* not brought into disrepute, when they are themselves acting in a criminal capacity, bringing the *linux* trademark into disrepute by illegally distributing linux kernel source code after they lost their right to do so under the GPLv2, by including the (binary) incompatible ZFS kernel module?
i tried explaining the problem to the OSHWA group: they didn't get it. the problem with their Certification Programme is that there's nothing in their document which covers liability if a design causes injury or death (deliberate or accidental). the OSHWA group is therefore setting themselves up for a class action lawsuit where some incompetent person designs something extremely badly, slaps an OSHWA logo on it, then a chinese company goes and copies it (logo included... without bothering to find out what the logo's actually for), somebody dies in an electrical fire and the family gets an aggressive lawyer to sue and blame (rightly in this case) the people they deem to have been responsible.
what's particularly troublesome is that the OSHWA's Programme is "self-certifying" Certification Programmes *NEED* to actually have clout behind them, with money put aside to be able to take legal action against people who bring the Certificate into disrepute (using Trademark Law - not patents, not copyright), and there needs to be clauses and phrases that define and assign responsibility and liability. the OSHWA document has been written by well-meaning and unfortunately very naive people who cannot comprehend how much of a risk they are taking, who have not thought things through properly. they haven't taken legal advice, and they have no idea of the distinction between "Libre" and "Open".
what is useful however is that their mailing list is a focus for like-minded people to congregate and communicate.
". According to the report, an estimated 279m music tracks, 56m TV shows, 34m movies, and 5m video games were consumed in the three month period."
how were they "consumed"? did they print them out on rice paper, frame by frame and then and only then manage to EAT them?? this is how the cartels manage to make it look like people are criminals - by using words like "pirate" and "consumption". videos are not "physical objects". copies can't be "stolen". or CONSUMED. the watching of a video does NOT subtract any physical substance from the universe (except perhaps indirectly reducing brain matter due to complete boredom and lack of stimulus). we're being duped here. time to take back control.
I won't waste my time explaining you why NoSQL databases are suitable for many use cases
at the request of a client i did an evaluation of a range of databases, mongodb, postgresql, mysql, and after none of them matched up to the required performance tried leveldb and lmdb (which ended up the winner by a long, long margin). mongodb's performance was the worst of the worst. it wasn't so much that it was below the performance of the other databases, it was the *MASSIVE* pauses which began after about 90 seconds of continuous INSERTs, and continued to increase to over THIRTY SECONDS, that really put the nail in its coffin.
so after only ten minutes of INSERTs i gave up on the testing because it was clear that mongodb had some form of internal cacheing and administrative overhead that took absolute precedence over data entry. as the use-case was for the storage of real-time data, having massive pauses that effectively took the entire database offline was completely unacceptable, and i will not be using mongodb, ever.
... Hardware bought from thinkpenguin.com costs even less than Macs because it's pre-vetted by their 3-man company to "Just Work". the only "support" calls that they get are down to flaky USB host chipsets, BIOS DRM/whitelisting which prevents certain WIFI cards from being recognised, and the *very* very occasional request for driver support for OSes that are getting on for 15 years old. they sell ACM dial-up modems because they get calls from people who have upgraded from windows xp only to find that their old conexant softmodem is "so old" it no longer works. they buy and sell printers that don't require firmware uploads and have "generic" drivers - postscript, PCL and so on. we don't *have* to live on the treadmill: it's a choice, to tolerate the pain, cost, stress and distress of living with hardware that's designed for obsolescence, trapped by our own desire to pay less for less.
I don't see them keeping the schematic to themselves as being a real solution
schematics are not protected by copyright law. as in: they are uncopyrightable, by definition of them being a "functional description". it is a common mistake (even amongst the open hardware community) to assume that schematics may be copyrighted. what *may* be copyrighted is for example an aesthetic layout of a PCB, because that is a creative process.
Two senior Democratic lawmakers with access to classified intelligence on Thursday accused Russia of "making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,"
>>>>
Two senior Democratic lawmakers (because all the Republican ones were "out to lunch") with access to classified intelligence (which they shouldn't have revealed even the existence of, if they're really and truly classified) on Thursday (the best day for reporting viral news) said that the people (who were actually aliens wearing face-masks) who came to them (without providing any concrete verifiable proof of their credentials) put some bits of paper in front of them (without any way for those lawmakers to verify the authenticity of the documents) which had some words in it *claiming* to "accuse Russia of making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election,"
what a complete crock. over how many pairs of eyes do these people *really* think that this can be pulled? oh wait.... they've probably run the numbers, and they only need to make it look like *DEMOCRAT* Lawmakers are incompetent, so that a large enough percentage will vote for Republican.... and the rest they can swing by manipulating the numbers using that new-fangled "percentage" adjustment they added into the backdoors after the last time some of the vote totals went NEGATIVE. i wonder if they remembered to do rounding to integers? we'll find out soon enough, if the number of votes comes out to "25012.79" won't we!
y'know... skype used to have this feature, y'know? it wasn't completely undetectable, but it *used* to have the ability to disguise itself as pretty much anything, so that it would "just work" in the face of badly-configured firewalls, DNS servers, idiot companies that blocked *all* incoming and outgoing traffic stone-dead including ICMP (including BGP and other absolutely crucial traffic) with the statement "you've got unrestricted access to port 80, that's the 'internet' isn't it, what the hell are you complaining about yer lame-techie-wannabe-tuck-fard??"
it also had the ability to create any kind of tunneling over pretty much any port and any protocol (TCP, UDP, you name it, it could do it) such that it was pretty much impossible to shut it down.
AND THEN.... for no good reason WHATSOEVER [1], skype changed hands not once but THREE TIMES in succession. now it's under the "control" of microsoft, and anyone considering installing it now is a fool. it's been turned into a "cloud is all" protocol. there's no peer-to-peer capability. that leaves it vulnerable to being mass-IP-range blocked. anyone can work out what the IP range(s) are of the various "cloud" servers used by microsoft are... and just block them (regardless of consequences).
so i *would* have said "just tell them to install skype". except we can logically deduce that it was SOME FUCKWIT IN THE U.S. GOVERMNENT who caused skype, in its current release, to lose its inherent firewall-busting capabilities to be COMPLETELY REMOVED.
and with skype being proprietary, and the "startup" (bootstrap) nodes no longer being run or "supported", we cannot even run older versions of skype any more because the older versions have been shut down. oh, and it's proprietary, so it would be man-decades before it is properly reverse-engineered. oh, and the original creators are likely to have been asked (or threatened) to enter into some serrrrious non-compete contract which, even if it wasn't legally enforceable, they probably understood the full implications were that if they wanted to keep all their body parts, they'd better like, y'know, not even *think* about writing a replacement / competitor, y'ken. they did try setting up a company called "joost", but interestingly, it "failed". i don't wonder why, not any more.
so, this appears to be a golden opportunity for software libre and proprietary software writers alike, but honestly it's a poisoned chalice. one department in the U.S. does *NOT* want such software to even *EXIST*... another is offering money to anyone willing to CREATE such software.... it's either a case of "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing", or it's just plain entrapment: the NSA wants to know if you have the CAPABILITY to write such software (and you're going to tell them who you are for god's sake!)
bottom line is, there's a phrase which covers this scenario in the security world - it's called "a honey pot". my advice to anyone who reads this: stay the FUCK away from this "offer" unless you're such a huge software libre team (over 100 people would do it) that it would be clearly obvious if one or more people suddenly "went missing", or "received sudden lucrative job offers" or "went on holiday" or "won the lottery" or "had an accident". what would *really* do it is if EVERYBODY who is capable of collaborating on this (including people from proprietary software companies) joined *ONE* single software libre team (with a single person allocated as the front-man), where everybody else used anonymous two-way communications with that front-man), and through them proposed one single entry for the "competition". 100, 200, 300 people, the more the better. if the application *requires* that every single person on the "team" be named individually and separately (either before or after the application), then you can logically deduce that it's extremely likely to be a honeypot. if the application's mysteriously "denied" when there's only the one entry, you can logically deduce that it's extremely lik
what many people do not appreciate is that asimov's books were a logical demonstration spanning asimov's lifetime and beyond that the three laws of robotics were a FAILURE. this is only really truly and clearly spelled out in the works written under contract by asimov's estate, for example in the book by Greg Bear. the three laws were so hard-wired into the positronic brain with billions upon billions of checks being carried out to ensure strict compliance with the three laws that there was no room for creativity - at all - and secondly that no robot could possibly allow a human being to take *any* form of risk because it *might* result in "harm", be that physical or psychological.
it would appear that BSI is unaware of this and is intending to force the three laws of robotics onto us without understanding the harm that that will do.
"Trending" means it's popular. People won't watch (and share) something that they don't actually want to watch. Here's the thing though about those WTC and Building 7 videos: a simple analysis of any of the off-the-street real-time videos - of which there were several so it's not like they could all be faked - by using simple equations of motion from O'Level Physics it is undeniably obvious that the tops of all of those buildings are in free-fall, accelerating at 9.8 metres per second squared.
Now, if a building is hit two thirds of the way up and becomes damaged, you would expect that damage to cause the top to fall over. Maybe some of the outer walls would fall off, but there would be a central core at least 1/2 to 1/3 of the height of the building sticking up. Bits would hit other bits, and it would take a long time and there would be rubble strewn out across a wide area, damaging the surrounding buildings and killing or injuring the people in them. You certainly would not expect it to collapse in a tidy heap at the speed of gravity where the entire building becomes a neat pile of rubble without any kind of significant damage to surrounding buildings.
For a quite insightful analysis which goes beyond the above brief invitation to use simple physics equations, logical analysis and reasoning, you might want to read this: https://steemit.com/tyranny/@b...
Bottom line is: not everything that "trends" under automatic algorithms (which would be filtered out by humans too scared of what they're seeing) is bullshit.
can somebody please add this to u-block already? or tell me how i can add it myself.
ah NO. please do some research BEFORE recommending fairphone to people. you'll notice that Fairphone has REMOVED (reneged on) their promise to provide a "Fair OS". their naivety (and the fact that they haven't listened to extremely experienced software libre developers) is well-documented - a good example is here: http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...
the Fairphone is only "modular" if you are mechanically-minded. i know of people who are competent engineers who, in attempting to repair a laptop, have managed accidentally to destroy FPC12 connectors because they weren't anticipating quite how tiny and fragile they would be.
"Modularity" also doesn't really solve the problem of chipsets being proprietary *and* insecure - google "900 million qualcomm android security vulnerability". you have to actually *design* the phone in *advance* to take into account these sorts of things. Neither google nor Fairphone have done that.
https://davehakkens.nl/news/re...
dave hakkens is the person who really inspired the modular smartphone movement and brought it to prominence (buglabs was the first to really implement the concept, almost a decade ago). however we don't really have an actual explanation of what went wrong with project ara. here's some hints (search in this document for "ara" obviously): http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep...
basically it's down to the fact that google has more money than they have creative sense. they therefore tried to use "financial brute force" to solve problems. the summary is: with their financial resources they created a "backbone standard" called MIPI UniPro... forgetting that in the process it would be patented by the partners, thus AUTOMATICALLY locking out ANY kind of interoperability and competition for the next 20 years. how, exactly, is that supposed to be "open"???
if we want modular smartphones to be successful, we need PROPERLY OPEN STANDARDs that have no vendor lock-in, but that are also properly protected by a Certification Mark (the standards-equivalent of a Trademark) and a Foundation (or CIC or Benefit Corporation), which is given the financial clout by its sponsors to jump on anyone who wrongly implements the standard in such a way as to cause short-circuits (and end up killing someone due to lithium battery fires for example). it's not like a software standard, where interoperability failures cause a segfault: a HARDWARE fault can genuinely be dangerous.
also the standard needs to be made up of *other* standards that are unencumbered and royalty-free, so that companies and makers alike are incentivised to create modules (using 3D printers and low-cost off-the-shelf circuits), for example this one, under development: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Ope... . Google *literally* did the total opposite of this strategy in every single conceivable way. paying companies to develop new chipsets (patented, proprietary) and saying "here! it's open! sign our NDA, agree to our policy, and you'll be fiiiine!" i'm just staggered by the naivety of a billion-dollar company that had to add me to a special list "stop phoning this person to invite them to interview, you've called them five times already over the past 10 years".
the other thing is, whilst i am delighted at dave's success in bringing the benefits of modularity to a wider audience, he doesn't have any technical knowledge. he views an *increase* in the number of companies on the phonebloks.com front page as being a good thing. the key question which illustrates the point without having to spell it out: are any of the products listed on the phonebloks page interoperable in *any* way?
so. if there is anybody who would like to see this done properly - in an open fashion so that the mistakes of both google and fairphone are not repeated (see http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...) do reach out on the arm-netbook mailing list http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mail... i've been investigating and researching this for years and waiting for the right opportunity. often it's good to wait for "big" corporations to fail to deliver, because it means that the hugely-public lessons sink in. a "small person" saying "this ain't gonna work no matter how much money they throw at it" tends not to be believed until the predicted failure comes about.
just as i did with the successfully-crowd-funded modular libre eco-laptop i've set up a stub page (for now) http://rhombus-tech.net/commun... which is a hybrid phone that acts "dumb" and may be upgraded to "smart" by plugging in a computer-on-a-module in Compact-Flash form-factor. "peripher
The biggest issue is fragmentation
we know!
The offering is available for both Android and iOS -- the only two mobile platforms that matter (sorry, Windows 10 Mobile).
so the biggest issue is fragmentation... but they leave out Windows 10 Mobile.... oh dear :)