A far bigger privacy concern is Google's spyware itself.
I hope the phone vendors some day get sick of google and market phones with unlocked bootloaders so you can install Debian, Red Hat, or whatever OS you want on them.
Quantum computers are about the size of a person:
https://www.google.com/search?...
While I agree all this brain stuff is nonsense; the size is kinda irrelevant.
"It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows,
...
Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future.:-)",
...
Silverberg replied: "What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is dr-dos and then go out to buy ms-dos. or decide to not take the risk for the other machines he has to buy for in the office."
The bigger problem is that Equifax themselves has the data.
Who cares if some small-scale spammer got their hands on the leaked data? They don't have the skills, resources, or knowledge of how to abuse it.
The fact that the huge data mining companies like Equifax, Facebook, and Google are building such databases is far more concerning from a privacy point of view.
Bitcoin was the (technologically) best currency at the time it launched.
These days there are better.
For example, Monero's better in some ways.
People shouldn't stay married to the old technology when the better comes around. These currencies (with no actual value) aren't long-term investments. They're payment vehicles. And with better ones around (more private, cheaper transactions, etc) it's no surprise people leave bitcoin.
Android absolutely is a Linux system. As are Tivo, "smart thermostats", and some kitchen appliances.
Android is absolutely NOT a GNU/Linux system.
In contrast, Microsoft's "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is absolutely NOT a Linux, but has a GNU environment because it does include:
Bash (part of GNU)
glibc (part of GNU)
GNU coreutils (part of GNU)
gcc (part of GNU)
GNU grep (part of GNU)
so should more properly be called GNU/NT or whatever their kernel is called. Microsoft seems to have kept everything except the Linux part of GNU/Linux.
What kind of data really needs to set powered off for 40 years, though?
Because data grows so fast, I imagine all 40 year old data will be absolutely tiny in comparison, and fit in the corner of whatever live/hot storage is in use.
I do like the premise of companies storing data locally.
I think all the "cloud backup" advocates have it backwards. The cloud's the best place for live data; but companies (and people) should have local backups of their clouds.
* Ideally - you wouldn't, so manufacturers stop that stupidity. They're primarily doing it for spyware --- which is exactly what a home router should protect against.
* If for some reason a user really wants to be spied on in that way, they can provide instructions how to open whatever is necessary in a firewall.
* If it has to communicate with a cloud --- especially if it can update itself from the cloud -- that device should ***NOT*** be able to communicate with the rest of your network.
Pay for good IT people... lowest-bidder contractors
Unfortunately some companies pay incompetent people huge sums and promoting them to upper management, while ignoring their own good lower-level people that are aware about the problems but not empowered to fix them.
how do you go about getting everyone, including the undisciplined, to function in an office-less work environment?
You don't hire them; in the same way you wouldn't hire any other unqualified person.
The place I currently work also has no office, because they're too widely geographically distributed (in different countries) to easily meet in a single place more than about once a year.
Start people off as contractors -- and if they work will with your distributed team -- hire them. If they don't work in that environment, don't.
Considering dozens of Intel agencies buy from black-hat groups ---- and they're good at buying stuff under pseudonyms ---- how would anyone know if they were state sponsored or not?
... if it was easy to un-brick a phone be resetting it to factory settings; I'd be much more eager to do so.
Ideally, in my mind, it'd work just like a PC --- where I could make a backup image of the Factory Disk Image (just in case); and then install whatever I want on it; knowing that it wouldn't be hard to boot from an external device and restore the factory image.
Anyone know of such a phone --- and that'll be the next one I'd buy.
13,584 were accessible.... the remainder is assumed to be nefarious,
Seriously?!?
At least some of those are probably my "hello world" virtual machines where I set up a hidden services that serve literally just the static page '<html\>Hello World\</html\>', or just the default installs of things like WikiMedia, just to see if i could.
I never could figure out anything interesting to do with them; so they're just hosting empty wikis, blogs, etc; that were locked down so I'm the only one that can get in, to avoid spammers from uploading crap into them.
TL/DR: No, most of the inaccessible sites should not be 'assumed to be nefarious'. Just boring.
TL/DR: About a 5x-10x CPU and Disk I/O improvement migrating a pretty large project from [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article]* see edit below to Postgres. CPU and Disk I/O Graphs below.
Here's one data point - based on from experience migrating a pretty big system from [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article] to Postgres, I think the two biggest advantages Postgres has are:
GIST and GIN indexes (and soon BRIN indexes), and
Writeable CTEs.
We migrated a very busy, pretty large (24 CPU core, 256GB RAM, 20TB disk space) system from [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article] to Postgres about a year ago. These graphs measuring CPU and disk activity provide a nice visualization of the improvement:
Note that with [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article], all 24 CPU cores in the system were over 40% utilized (and growing) 24x7 most days a year. After a pretty naive port (November to May in the graph) the CPU load fell to an average of about 10%, and the disk array's queue length fell from painful to near zero. After adding some Postgres-specific code, we got it down to an average of near 5% (shown in the most recent month in the graph).
CPU differences seem to have been mostly related to the availability of GIN indexes in Postgres, which can be much more efficient on certain types of data (like the OpenStreetMap road network).
Disk I/O improvements seems to be mostly related to Postgres's far more compact storage of XML data. Seems SQL Server stores XML data using 2-bytes-per-character for the data itself; and on top of that adds extremely large indexes. In contrast, the "toast" feature in Postgres means the XML data takes an average of less than one byte per character for the data and its "functional index" feature allowed for far more compact indexes. One of our XML-heavy databases went from over 600GB in SQL Server down to 140GB in Postgres, with more efficient indexes.
For a few months we tried to stay database-agnostic so it'd be easy to port back if we needed to -- but after a while we started adding Postgres specific changes. The benefits of those Postgres specific changes can be seen near the end of those graphs. An enormous improvement occurred when we changed the inserts and updates to use the Writable CTE features following recommendations someone outlined here
.
In the end, Postgres looks to me like it's saving us like 5X in hardware costs as we continue to grow.
Edit: I'm told this proprietary database vendor dislikes users publishing benchmark results comparing their software to F/OSS databases. I'd argue that this is more of an anecdote than a benchmark; but just in case I edited the comment to remove the vendor and product name from the parts that talk about performance.
Disclaimer: As mentioned in a comment below, we tried to tune each the systems to the best of our team's abilities, but aren't really experts in tuning either database system. No doubt each system's results could be improved by people who were deeply available with each databases internals (which I argue is much easier to find for Postgres, since its mailing lists have thousands of people familiar with the internal code).
Slashdot Mirror
A far bigger privacy concern is Google's spyware itself. I hope the phone vendors some day get sick of google and market phones with unlocked bootloaders so you can install Debian, Red Hat, or whatever OS you want on them.
The cost of whatever laptop your employee wants (within reason) will be well worth their happiness.
Quantum computers are about the size of a person: https://www.google.com/search?... While I agree all this brain stuff is nonsense; the size is kinda irrelevant.
Basically "anything that is really at all useful carries on"
So might be best if the shutdown continues forever.
"It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'" Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows,
Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)",
Silverberg replied: "What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is dr-dos and then go out to buy ms-dos. or decide to not take the risk for the other machines he has to buy for in the office."
I was suggesting that they are more scary because they are a technology leader.
So did significant improvements to HBase, PyTorch, Haxl, PHP compilers, and much more.
And Facebook is inventing sophisticated AI hardware (https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/the-next-step-in-facebook-s-ai-hardware-infrastructure/) including semiconductor design (https://www.networkworld.com/article/3268974/hardware/is-facebook-looking-to-build-its-own-data-center-chips.html). and is the primary contributor to the Open Compute Project's work on more efficient data center hardware (https://www.opencompute.org//
TL/DR: The only reason they are able to invade our privacy that effectively is that they really are an impressive technology company.
The bigger problem is that Equifax themselves has the data.
Who cares if some small-scale spammer got their hands on the leaked data? They don't have the skills, resources, or knowledge of how to abuse it.
The fact that the huge data mining companies like Equifax, Facebook, and Google are building such databases is far more concerning from a privacy point of view.
made it through its first 5,000 years without any means to "digitally transfer value without central control".
On the contrary, for 4900 of the first 5000 years all value was transferred without central control.
It wasn't until electronic payments were common that central control was dominant.
Bitcoin was the (technologically) best currency at the time it launched.
These days there are better.
For example, Monero's better in some ways.
People shouldn't stay married to the old technology when the better comes around. These currencies (with no actual value) aren't long-term investments. They're payment vehicles. And with better ones around (more private, cheaper transactions, etc) it's no surprise people leave bitcoin.
In contrast, Microsoft's "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is absolutely NOT a Linux, but has a GNU environment because it does include:
so should more properly be called GNU/NT or whatever their kernel is called. Microsoft seems to have kept everything except the Linux part of GNU/Linux.
Linux is in far too many places for "a" "best" distro.
But it's not hard to pick candidates for the best for specific purposes.
Because data grows so fast, I imagine all 40 year old data will be absolutely tiny in comparison, and fit in the corner of whatever live/hot storage is in use.
I do like the premise of companies storing data locally.
I think all the "cloud backup" advocates have it backwards. The cloud's the best place for live data; but companies (and people) should have local backups of their clouds.
Who ever runs the website gets to decide the trolls
Remember all the reddit trolls like the GNAA who always attempted to get upvoated first posts?
with blackjack, and hookers
Are you talking about voat.co ?
I'd argue:
* Ideally - you wouldn't, so manufacturers stop that stupidity. They're primarily doing it for spyware --- which is exactly what a home router should protect against.
* If for some reason a user really wants to be spied on in that way, they can provide instructions how to open whatever is necessary in a firewall.
* If it has to communicate with a cloud --- especially if it can update itself from the cloud -- that device should ***NOT*** be able to communicate with the rest of your network.
By default, it seems that your home firewall should restrict any packets from whatever stupid crap you put on your network.
That way such devices can't spy on you or hack the rest of your home network, unless you explicitly allow them in your firewall.
If you push the responsibility to dozens of different device vendors, you'll never be able to adequately vet them all.
Pay for good IT people ... lowest-bidder contractors
Unfortunately some companies pay incompetent people huge sums and promoting them to upper management, while ignoring their own good lower-level people that are aware about the problems but not empowered to fix them.
how do you go about getting everyone, including the undisciplined, to function in an office-less work environment?
You don't hire them; in the same way you wouldn't hire any other unqualified person.
The place I currently work also has no office, because they're too widely geographically distributed (in different countries) to easily meet in a single place more than about once a year.
Start people off as contractors -- and if they work will with your distributed team -- hire them. If they don't work in that environment, don't.
Considering dozens of Intel agencies buy from black-hat groups ---- and they're good at buying stuff under pseudonyms ---- how would anyone know if they were state sponsored or not?
... if it was easy to un-brick a phone be resetting it to factory settings; I'd be much more eager to do so.
Ideally, in my mind, it'd work just like a PC --- where I could make a backup image of the Factory Disk Image (just in case); and then install whatever I want on it; knowing that it wouldn't be hard to boot from an external device and restore the factory image.
Anyone know of such a phone --- and that'll be the next one I'd buy.
13,584 were accessible .... the remainder is assumed to be nefarious,
Seriously?!?
At least some of those are probably my "hello world" virtual machines where I set up a hidden services that serve literally just the static page '<html\>Hello World\</html\>', or just the default installs of things like WikiMedia, just to see if i could.
I never could figure out anything interesting to do with them; so they're just hosting empty wikis, blogs, etc; that were locked down so I'm the only one that can get in, to avoid spammers from uploading crap into them.
TL/DR: No, most of the inaccessible sites should not be 'assumed to be nefarious'. Just boring.
Yes - I should have mentioned that.
Here's one data point - based on from experience migrating a pretty big system from [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article] to Postgres, I think the two biggest advantages Postgres has are:
GIST and GIN indexes (and soon BRIN indexes), and
Writeable CTEs.
We migrated a very busy, pretty large (24 CPU core, 256GB RAM, 20TB disk space) system from [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article] to Postgres about a year ago. These graphs measuring CPU and disk activity provide a nice visualization of the improvement:
http://imgur.com/a/bp2ky
Note that with [a major proprietary database mentioned in the article], all 24 CPU cores in the system were over 40% utilized (and growing) 24x7 most days a year. After a pretty naive port (November to May in the graph) the CPU load fell to an average of about 10%, and the disk array's queue length fell from painful to near zero. After adding some Postgres-specific code, we got it down to an average of near 5% (shown in the most recent month in the graph).
CPU differences seem to have been mostly related to the availability of GIN indexes in Postgres, which can be much more efficient on certain types of data (like the OpenStreetMap road network).
Disk I/O improvements seems to be mostly related to Postgres's far more compact storage of XML data. Seems SQL Server stores XML data using 2-bytes-per-character for the data itself; and on top of that adds extremely large indexes. In contrast, the "toast" feature in Postgres means the XML data takes an average of less than one byte per character for the data and its "functional index" feature allowed for far more compact indexes. One of our XML-heavy databases went from over 600GB in SQL Server down to 140GB in Postgres, with more efficient indexes.
For a few months we tried to stay database-agnostic so it'd be easy to port back if we needed to -- but after a while we started adding Postgres specific changes. The benefits of those Postgres specific changes can be seen near the end of those graphs. An enormous improvement occurred when we changed the inserts and updates to use the Writable CTE features following recommendations someone outlined here
.
In the end, Postgres looks to me like it's saving us like 5X in hardware costs as we continue to grow.
Edit: I'm told this proprietary database vendor dislikes users publishing benchmark results comparing their software to F/OSS databases. I'd argue that this is more of an anecdote than a benchmark; but just in case I edited the comment to remove the vendor and product name from the parts that talk about performance.
Disclaimer: As mentioned in a comment below, we tried to tune each the systems to the best of our team's abilities, but aren't really experts in tuning either database system. No doubt each system's results could be improved by people who were deeply available with each databases internals (which I argue is much easier to find for Postgres, since its mailing lists have thousands of people familiar with the internal code).
Relevant SMBC cartoon: http://www.smbc-comics.com/ind... You can't really even tell if you're still you when you wake up in the morning.