1. Crashplan does the encryption for you as well has managing the differential backups and restores. It even does a lot of work calculating the minimal differences and de-duplications so the internet traffic and disk space are optimally managed. Your friend cannot read your backups on his computer and you can't read your freinds computer.
2. But from your point of view you are always wokring the GUI with unencrypted files and folders when choosing what to back up so the enxryption is all transparent to you.
3. combine this with Full Disk Encryption on your originating computer and the encyption and backup objectives won't step on each other.
4. Unlike most roll-your-own solutions like this, crashplan also manages the problem of dynamic DNS and establishing a connection through various firewalls and routers. In a nutshell, Crashplan the company acts like napster and brokers the connection between the two peers, then it gets out of the loop. Even if the company disappears your data is still yours and you can still physically access it.
5. crashplan also notifies you by e-mail on the backup status and warns you when too long a time has elapsed since it was able to make a connection between the local and remote computers.
6. if you like crashplan will escrow your encryption password to protect you from your own incompetence.
A few more words about Crashplan. Crashplan markets itself as a competitor to things like Mosy and other purveyors of managed remote backup. But Crashplan is distintly different than all these others in a way that is unbeatable. Namely, you don't have to use their archives to store your data. With crashplan you can target any disk as backup storage. This could be an external disk connected by USB 3.0 or one over at your freinds house (they run crashplan too), or you can use crashplans servers. They sell the app not the service if just want to use it with your own disks or a freinds.
The difference here is what happens when you need to restore. With any other service (like Mosy) you are hosed. How the heck are you going to recover a terrabyte from the remote storage to your local disk over the internet????? Not going to happen. FOr a fee Mosy will burn DVDs and mail them to you. But that assumes you know what date you want the back up for. If you are trying to recover from some slow disk corruption or a trojan you want to inspect the backups first to find the latest possible date before the corruption started, then you want to add back the newer files you can salvage. That's not going to happen with the DVDs you have sent to you.
But crash plan is different. You just drive across town to your freinds house and pick up the drive. Mount it locally and find all the files you need for the backup. Just like what you would like to have! perfect.
If crashplan would just solve their Java memory management issues it would be perfect. when you launch it it starts off with 100MB but a week later it's up to a gigabyte of memory use. Fortunately it seems the Virtual Memory manager is able to page out most of this when it's not active, but java programs are such out of control pigs.
He doesn't say what OS he is using. If he is not using a mac I would reccomend a combination of full disk encyption on the local machine and use crashplan (java application) to back up an incremental set of encrypted backups. Crashplan works very well and is very reliable in my experience. (It's only problem is the bloat java program tend to do when they have been running for a long time.)
If he is using Mac OS then since 10.7 it is possible to manage encrypted disk backup most easily with the tools apple provides built in to the OS. The way it works is that you use Full disk encryption. After you boot the disk is readable by the OS. The OS then runs the backup system (Time Machine). If you use time machine you can set it to encrypt the backups. These backups can be done to a remote OSX drive and still use encryption regardless of whether the remote drive itself is Full Disk Encrypted. (That is Time machine manages the backup as an encrypted disk image).
The FDE on the Mac is accelerated with special decryption Intel Chip ops so there's no measurable speed decrease even when using an SSD, thus it does not need a special hardware encryption disk. It behaves just like a non-encrypted disk from the point of view of every program trying to access it.
That is to say FDE is preferable to the old style of OSX encryption that used encrypted disk images. With those the problems you list were all manifest (no incremental backups, catastrophic loss of all data from image corruption, and brittel behaviour of apps that expect their paths to be valid at all time regardless of the mount state of the image).
why do I need such a powerful computation engine in my pocket? the main use I see is if it gets to be good enough to be a desktop replacement and I can just dock it to a big screen. But until then having more cpu or GPU isn't going to let be surf the internet faster or type e-mail faster or even give me longer battery life. THe existing ones already play HD movies so the frame rate threshold has been reached for highly satisfactory video.
SO what's the killer app for increased CPU? playing halo? Nice but not a killer app for a cell phone I think. I just can't think of anything in terms of compuational horsepower that I would like my cell phone to do that it doesn't do now and for which the cell platform is the right place to do it. I need help with my imagination I guess.
For me the thing I need on my cell phone is vastly more battery. Why? Well aside from the obvious of longer charge time, you could probably vastly increase the communication rate and reliability by broadcasting more power. You could certainly increase the amount of time you would be tempted to use video (battery consumers).
I recall how the Taliban kept sabotaging Cell Towers in the interest of enforcing some "islamic" ban on cell phone usage. It seemed like this was a pretty fragile system since it was hard to protect the towers. Did this ever resolve itself? I would guess that broadcast towers for TV and Radio have longer ranges and thus might have fewer locations to protect. But ultimately I wonder if those can be protected against a determined foe.
The article noted that you can do everything, and better, offline except "save" and "socialize". I would bet that you can work around the save issue simply by running a virtual machine and saving the session using the virtual machines capability to preserve memory state. Unless this thing is actually monitoring gaps in the wall clock time record for DRM puproses it should be possible to use a memory image.
This reminds me of the extraordinary lengths that the RIAA goes to sustain a technologically endangered bussiness model. Google, which gives away the razor and sells ads on the blades, is threatened by ad blockers which are cheap and easy to implement. Only by simply denying that technology can google's bussiness model work.
On the one hand, I'm happy to get free stuff in return for ads so I'd like that to make google enough profit to continue. On the other, denying inevitability creates conflict. What makes this a hard choice is that, like the tragedy of the commons, sometimes market restrictions are required to create a liquid vibrant market. But at some point it changes to unnecessary restrictions to preserve an outdated business model (see RIAA). Google is in the early stages where ad based services are a good thing. But at some point those services will be cheaper and easier to proved under some other bussiness model and meanwhile in the absence of those google will be turning the advertising revenue know up to 11 and preventing those from taking off to last a bit longer.
Microsoft has a point with its scrooged campaign. THe fact that MS is not a saint doesn't mean they can't speak truth.
The blast from the little retro rockets hitting the much larger asteroid, will cancel the whole thing out - every action having an equal and opposite reaction and all that pesky old Newtonian conservation of momentum stuff...
I want to know more about code.org but the summary doesn't give a link.
Review Ruby for the perl enthusiast please
on
Ruby 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Could someone offer a comparison of ruby to perl in terms of replacing perl as a command line quickie or short admin or text processing. I use python for writing serious programs. But for getting quick things done like say shredding some text copied off a telephone directory web page to pull out a list of telphone numbers and peoples names, or parsing the text output of some unix right on the command line, perl is the right tool, python is not. If you don't know that that is true then you are not an experienced perl person.
But I've looked at ruby syntax a bit and it looks like it might have the advantage perl has for quick ad hoc text parsing but an overall cleaner syntax.
What I don't care a lot about is fancy pants modules like rails. If I want to do something serious there's python.
two things I like about perl: perl is lightning fast to start from the command line so glue scripts between applications like blast and something else dont' slow things down, and the O'reily nut shell book is the thinest book (even thinner than C++) yet it's a very poerful language. (yes I have looked a Lua)
please respond with a review of ruby for a perl enthusiast.
The obvious retort is that because google is doing "dumb" semantic analysis like key word searches that it's not "reading" your e-mails. But that's a naive. In ten year semantic analysis of text will be approaching human comprehension. There will be no difference between a human reading and a computer reading in terms of the harm this might have for you. Furthermore those e-mails you write now will be fully avaialble to google in the future. Google might even change it's policy and let humans read your e-mails. You gave them permission. How do do you know what google will do int he next ten years? Maybe some credit agency will pay them $100 per user account to see all your e-mails.
Mean while microsoft is actually promising in their user agreement that they will never ever do that to you. There's thus a big difference.
The people you are thinking of are Lord Kelvin and Michelson. Michelson quoted lord Kelvin as saying all future science is in the 5th decimal place. But, as Michelson went on to explain, he didn't mean everthing left was about dotting i's and crossing t's. He meant it was unlikely that classica physics was profoundly wrong in the realms we observe and inhabit but there could be great physics out there. It just had to be lurking in the shadows-- out in the 5th decimal place. And sure enough it was. ANd still is. Just the other day someone measured the radius of a proton using muons instead of the usual electrons and it was wrong by 4%. That's absurdly huge. COuld be some new physcis is about to move into the light.
Don't discount that as stupid. Most of what he said is true. Evolution makes you write code that works, not good or clean code, just code that works. The only time evolution comes into lay is when the code can't even compile.
Indeed there's even some selective pressure for code obfuscation. Viruses take advantage of compression for example. New functions usually evolve from faulty events in old genes. There's no pressure to remove accidental calls to the wrong subroutine if they don't matter, hence a lot of messages go to the wrong place as well as the right place. Even in higher animals you see this (dog's legs that scratch themselves when you scratch their ribs) is probably some back propagation on the nerve network that was not necessary to remove for proper operation of the dog.
If a cloud drive is not expansion then why does MS tout it as a solution for a congested hard drive. On my mobile devices I don't want to attach unportable storage or things that stick out of ports. I want it built in at a sufficient level for most things. For slower stuff I can use the cloud for more.
Now that I think about it more, it seems like a penny per document-save would come out about right. I probably save a working document 50 times before its final. and I produce hundreds of documents per year. So that would work out to be a bit more than the ownership price.
Would you buy MS word if it was a penny per document-save?
Heck why not just meter it. You can pay per document saved or minutes of use. That way if I can have all my legacy documents stored and available on any computer and I just pay when I open them up to edit them. No seats just copies attached to credit cards accounts. No one time big payment.
then when you get sent an MS word document you can edit it (for a price). Viewing could be free.
This way you would not need an internet connection to pay (though that could be one way). Instead a security conscious company could buy a hundred thousand thousand one-time codes that you would enter every time you wanted to save a document. You dole these out internally. Sure people could cheat but they can do that now with cracked licensees if they really want to. Significant Bussinesses won't cheat.
The whole concept here is like a terminator crop from monsanto where you do all the work raising the seed but it won't grow unless you pay Monsanto for the magic chemical it has been engineered to need. In this case you do the install and maintenance on your computer everything is local and under your control but you pay for a code when you want to save a new document.
What matters then is the cost. Suppose the cost to buy it was $300, the cost to subscibe was $150 and the cost to meter it was 50 cents per document save. Which would appeal to you?
In poker, you have the same chance of getting a 2 and King, but the king is more powerful. On a GO board not every playable square is equally strong. Why should scrabble make it so the letter composition of your word is neutral? some letters can be more valuable than others. One can account for this in strategy. makes the game richer not off kilter.
Slashdot Mirror
With apologies to the aptly named Go-Gos
See the people driving down the street
Fall in line just waiting for their beet
They don't know where they wanna go
But they're in the fill-up line
They got the beet
They got the beet
Yeah
They got the beet
1. Crashplan does the encryption for you as well has managing the differential backups and restores. It even does a lot of work calculating the minimal differences and de-duplications so the internet traffic and disk space are optimally managed. Your friend cannot read your backups on his computer and you can't read your freinds computer.
2. But from your point of view you are always wokring the GUI with unencrypted files and folders when choosing what to back up so the enxryption is all transparent to you.
3. combine this with Full Disk Encryption on your originating computer and the encyption and backup objectives won't step on each other.
4. Unlike most roll-your-own solutions like this, crashplan also manages the problem of dynamic DNS and establishing a connection through various firewalls and routers. In a nutshell, Crashplan the company acts like napster and brokers the connection between the two peers, then it gets out of the loop. Even if the company disappears your data is still yours and you can still physically access it.
5. crashplan also notifies you by e-mail on the backup status and warns you when too long a time has elapsed since it was able to make a connection between the local and remote computers.
6. if you like crashplan will escrow your encryption password to protect you from your own incompetence.
A few more words about Crashplan.
Crashplan markets itself as a competitor to things like Mosy and other purveyors of managed remote backup. But Crashplan is distintly different than all these others in a way that is unbeatable. Namely, you don't have to use their archives to store your data. With crashplan you can target any disk as backup storage. This could be an external disk connected by USB 3.0 or one over at your freinds house (they run crashplan too), or you can use crashplans servers. They sell the app not the service if just want to use it with your own disks or a freinds.
The difference here is what happens when you need to restore. With any other service (like Mosy) you are hosed. How the heck are you going to recover a terrabyte from the remote storage to your local disk over the internet????? Not going to happen. FOr a fee Mosy will burn DVDs and mail them to you. But that assumes you know what date you want the back up for. If you are trying to recover from some slow disk corruption or a trojan you want to inspect the backups first to find the latest possible date before the corruption started, then you want to add back the newer files you can salvage. That's not going to happen with the DVDs you have sent to you.
But crash plan is different. You just drive across town to your freinds house and pick up the drive. Mount it locally and find all the files you need for the backup. Just like what you would like to have! perfect.
If crashplan would just solve their Java memory management issues it would be perfect. when you launch it it starts off with 100MB but a week later it's up to a gigabyte of memory use. Fortunately it seems the Virtual Memory manager is able to page out most of this when it's not active, but java programs are such out of control pigs.
He doesn't say what OS he is using. If he is not using a mac I would reccomend a combination of full disk encyption on the local machine and use crashplan (java application) to back up an incremental set of encrypted backups. Crashplan works very well and is very reliable in my experience. (It's only problem is the bloat java program tend to do when they have been running for a long time.)
If he is using Mac OS then since 10.7 it is possible to manage encrypted disk backup most easily with the tools apple provides built in to the OS. The way it works is that you use Full disk encryption. After you boot the disk is readable by the OS. The OS then runs the backup system (Time Machine). If you use time machine you can set it to encrypt the backups. These backups can be done to a remote OSX drive and still use encryption regardless of whether the remote drive itself is Full Disk Encrypted. (That is Time machine manages the backup as an encrypted disk image).
The FDE on the Mac is accelerated with special decryption Intel Chip ops so there's no measurable speed decrease even when using an SSD, thus it does not need a special hardware encryption disk. It behaves just like a non-encrypted disk from the point of view of every program trying to access it.
That is to say FDE is preferable to the old style of OSX encryption that used encrypted disk images. With those the problems you list were all manifest (no incremental backups, catastrophic loss of all data from image corruption, and brittel behaviour of apps that expect their paths to be valid at all time regardless of the mount state of the image).
what's the killer app for increased CPU?
why do I need such a powerful computation engine in my pocket? the main use I see is if it gets to be good enough to be a desktop replacement and I can just dock it to a big screen. But until then having more cpu or GPU isn't going to let be surf the internet faster or type e-mail faster or even give me longer battery life. THe existing ones already play HD movies so the frame rate threshold has been reached for highly satisfactory video.
SO what's the killer app for increased CPU? playing halo? Nice but not a killer app for a cell phone I think. I just can't think of anything in terms of compuational horsepower that I would like my cell phone to do that it doesn't do now and for which the cell platform is the right place to do it. I need help with my imagination I guess.
For me the thing I need on my cell phone is vastly more battery. Why? Well aside from the obvious of longer charge time, you could probably vastly increase the communication rate and reliability by broadcasting more power. You could certainly increase the amount of time you would be tempted to use video (battery consumers).
I recall how the Taliban kept sabotaging Cell Towers in the interest of enforcing some "islamic" ban on cell phone usage. It seemed like this was a pretty fragile system since it was hard to protect the towers. Did this ever resolve itself? I would guess that broadcast towers for TV and Radio have longer ranges and thus might have fewer locations to protect. But ultimately I wonder if those can be protected against a determined foe.
The article noted that you can do everything, and better, offline except "save" and "socialize". I would bet that you can work around the save issue simply by running a virtual machine and saving the session using the virtual machines capability to preserve memory state. Unless this thing is actually monitoring gaps in the wall clock time record for DRM puproses it should be possible to use a memory image.
This reminds me of the extraordinary lengths that the RIAA goes to sustain a technologically endangered bussiness model. Google, which gives away the razor and sells ads on the blades, is threatened by ad blockers which are cheap and easy to implement. Only by simply denying that technology can google's bussiness model work.
On the one hand, I'm happy to get free stuff in return for ads so I'd like that to make google enough profit to continue. On the other, denying inevitability creates conflict. What makes this a hard choice is that, like the tragedy of the commons, sometimes market restrictions are required to create a liquid vibrant market. But at some point it changes to unnecessary restrictions to preserve an outdated business model (see RIAA). Google is in the early stages where ad based services are a good thing. But at some point those services will be cheaper and easier to proved under some other bussiness model and meanwhile in the absence of those google will be turning the advertising revenue know up to 11 and preventing those from taking off to last a bit longer.
Microsoft has a point with its scrooged campaign. THe fact that MS is not a saint doesn't mean they can't speak truth.
whiners
They are found tumbling in space in lead line fridge.
"Safari on Mac OS X Lion was the only browser left standing at the conclusion of the zero day portion of pwn2own. "
Perhaps it's also telling that the prizes for winning are Mac Laptops.
The iPip offloads its computation to the server in your stockings: the Pipi longstocking.
the EM drive has no emissions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
The blast from the little retro rockets hitting the much larger asteroid, will cancel the whole thing out - every action having an equal and opposite reaction and all that pesky old Newtonian conservation of momentum stuff...
Just use a tractor beam instead.
I want to know more about code.org but the summary doesn't give a link.
Could someone offer a comparison of ruby to perl in terms of replacing perl as a command line quickie or short admin or text processing. I use python for writing serious programs. But for getting quick things done like say shredding some text copied off a telephone directory web page to pull out a list of telphone numbers and peoples names, or parsing the text output of some unix right on the command line, perl is the right tool, python is not. If you don't know that that is true then you are not an experienced perl person.
But I've looked at ruby syntax a bit and it looks like it might have the advantage perl has for quick ad hoc text parsing but an overall cleaner syntax.
What I don't care a lot about is fancy pants modules like rails. If I want to do something serious there's python.
two things I like about perl: perl is lightning fast to start from the command line so glue scripts between applications like blast and something else dont' slow things down, and the O'reily nut shell book is the thinest book (even thinner than C++) yet it's a very poerful language. (yes I have looked a Lua)
please respond with a review of ruby for a perl enthusiast.
The obvious retort is that because google is doing "dumb" semantic analysis like key word searches that it's not "reading" your e-mails. But that's a naive. In ten year semantic analysis of text will be approaching human comprehension. There will be no difference between a human reading and a computer reading in terms of the harm this might have for you. Furthermore those e-mails you write now will be fully avaialble to google in the future. Google might even change it's policy and let humans read your e-mails. You gave them permission. How do do you know what google will do int he next ten years? Maybe some credit agency will pay them $100 per user account to see all your e-mails.
Mean while microsoft is actually promising in their user agreement that they will never ever do that to you. There's thus a big difference.
The people you are thinking of are Lord Kelvin and Michelson. Michelson quoted lord Kelvin as saying all future science is in the 5th decimal place. But, as Michelson went on to explain, he didn't mean everthing left was about dotting i's and crossing t's. He meant it was unlikely that classica physics was profoundly wrong in the realms we observe and inhabit but there could be great physics out there. It just had to be lurking in the shadows-- out in the 5th decimal place. And sure enough it was. ANd still is. Just the other day someone measured the radius of a proton using muons instead of the usual electrons and it was wrong by 4%. That's absurdly huge. COuld be some new physcis is about to move into the light.
Does Dalvik have the same security problems Oracle Java does? If so this is a serious problem
Don't discount that as stupid. Most of what he said is true. Evolution makes you write code that works, not good or clean code, just code that works. The only time evolution comes into lay is when the code can't even compile.
Indeed there's even some selective pressure for code obfuscation. Viruses take advantage of compression for example. New functions usually evolve from faulty events in old genes. There's no pressure to remove accidental calls to the wrong subroutine if they don't matter, hence a lot of messages go to the wrong place as well as the right place. Even in higher animals you see this (dog's legs that scratch themselves when you scratch their ribs) is probably some back propagation on the nerve network that was not necessary to remove for proper operation of the dog.
So do the kids get a "snow day" if the internet is down?
If a cloud drive is not expansion then why does MS tout it as a solution for a congested hard drive. On my mobile devices I don't want to attach unportable storage or things that stick out of ports. I want it built in at a sufficient level for most things. For slower stuff I can use the cloud for more.
Now that I think about it more, it seems like a penny per document-save would come out about right. I probably save a working document 50 times before its final. and I produce hundreds of documents per year. So that would work out to be a bit more than the ownership price.
Would you buy MS word if it was a penny per document-save?
Heck why not just meter it. You can pay per document saved or minutes of use. That way if I can have all my legacy documents stored and available on any computer and I just pay when I open them up to edit them. No seats just copies attached to credit cards accounts. No one time big payment.
then when you get sent an MS word document you can edit it (for a price). Viewing could be free.
This way you would not need an internet connection to pay (though that could be one way). Instead a security conscious company could buy a hundred thousand thousand one-time codes that you would enter every time you wanted to save a document. You dole these out internally. Sure people could cheat but they can do that now with cracked licensees if they really want to. Significant Bussinesses won't cheat.
The whole concept here is like a terminator crop from monsanto where you do all the work raising the seed but it won't grow unless you pay Monsanto for the magic chemical it has been engineered to need. In this case you do the install and maintenance on your computer everything is local and under your control but you pay for a code when you want to save a new document.
What matters then is the cost. Suppose the cost to buy it was $300, the cost to subscibe was $150 and the cost to meter it was 50 cents per document save. Which would appeal to you?
In poker, you have the same chance of getting a 2 and King, but the king is more powerful. On a GO board not every playable square is equally strong. Why should scrabble make it so the letter composition of your word is neutral? some letters can be more valuable than others. One can account for this in strategy. makes the game richer not off kilter.