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User: petermgreen

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  1. Re:Design Issue on Multipath TCP Introduces Security Blind Spot · · Score: 1

    Lets say... a malware binary is downloaded with a dynamic load balancing across 2 tcp streams. Everything looks fine to your NG firewall, no malware detected.

    Mind you the same applies if someone downloads a malware binary across an encrypted protocol

    The countermeasure is to enable deep protocol inspection (and HTTPS inspection!)

    To inspect https traffic you have to force proxy it. Force proxying should be an effective measure to prevent multipath TCP as well.

  2. Re:it's not that hard to use Wikipedia on An Accidental Wikipedia Hoax · · Score: 1

    If you see a statement in a Wikipedia article that you are thinking of repeating or relying on for something, look first to see: does it cite a source? In this case it did not. In that case, stop here, you should probably not trust the statement. At least not if it's something that matters at all. If it does cite a source, then things are better, but there is still one more step before you should rely on it for anything more than barroom trivia (like, say, publishing an academic paper): you should probably take a glance at that source and see if it really says that.

    Unfortunately that isn't enough, many sites copy unreferenced information from wikipedia without indicating their source. These sites can later end up being cited by wikipedia.

    Especailly if you are new to a field it can be difficult to know who are the reputable sources and who are the not to reputable ones.

  3. Re:So! The game is rigged! on 35% of American Adults Have Debt 'In Collections' · · Score: 1

    Interestingly even in places where companies are allowed to charge extra for taking credit cards to the customer very few do.

    So you are getting the cost of taking credit cards rolled into the price whether you use them or not. May as well take the benefits.

  4. Re:Past due not reported by companies on 35% of American Adults Have Debt 'In Collections' · · Score: 1

    If you have a million in assets, what do you need a loan for?

    Same reason anyone else does. They want/need to spend money on something now and don't have the cash on hand to pay for it.

    Between a house and a pension pot I expect quite a lot of upper middle class people have a million in assets. That doesn't mean they have a lot of liquid cash.

  5. Re:$7142.85 on A 24-Year-Old Scammed Apple 42 Times In 16 Different States · · Score: 1

    A 6-core mac pro plus an apple thunderbolt display plus a high end macbook pro for when you are on the road could get to that kind of money pretty easilly without looking too suspiscious (assuming you look rich)

  6. Re:Great... on Satellite Images Show Russians Shelling Ukraine · · Score: 1

    They did close airspace during the conflict first up to 26000 feet and then up to 32000 feet. Unfortunately that wasn't enough.

    I guess they either didn't know what weapons the rebels had or didn't want to admit it for fear of advancing the rebels PR.

  7. Re:Elop on Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus · · Score: 1

    Lets not forget that Nokia was floundering before Elop went in.

    AIUI corporate officers are given wide lattitude to do what they belive is in the best interests of the company. Otherwise you'd get a flood of lawsuits whenever a descision turned out badly. So you would basically have to prove that Elop did not belive that going the MS route was in the best interests of the community.

  8. Re:OCR on Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus · · Score: 1

    OCR can still be useful for search even if the accuracy is too low for complete conversion.

  9. Re: Sigh, that's another waste of time then. on Microsoft's Nokia Plans Come Into Better Focus · · Score: 1

    Windows mobile and windows phone are sufficiently different (AIUI there is some comonaility at the lowest levels but the user and developer interfaces are totally different) that they may as well be regarded as different platforms.

  10. Re:WinAPI Windows on Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows · · Score: 1

    The questions are

    1: will MS continue tying winRT to the windows store and charging people for the privilage of bypassing it?
    2: will MS be able to extend/enhance winRT so that one app can give a good experiance on both desktop and mobile?
    3: will the developers buy into it or will they stick with win32 to maintain compatibility with the massive installed base of older versions?

  11. Re:Virtual Machines and Windows Key on Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows · · Score: 1

    No Macintosh has a windows key and those are fairly popular.

    It's got an apple logo on it rather than a windows logo but if you run windows on your mac (natively at least), you will find it does act as a windows key.

  12. Re:Why would I want "special magic things"? on Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows · · Score: 1

    pro-tip: not all keyboards have Windows keys!

    Not all but certainly the vast majority.

    The bigger problem with global shortcut keys is remote desktop tools, VMs etc. Will the global shortcut be picked up by the outer system? the inner system? both? (IME it's usually the outer system but I haven't tried win8 yet) what do I do if I want the other one?

  13. Re:Server 2012 already looks like Windows 8. on Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows · · Score: 1

    The big problem with traditional shells is the lack of a clean distiction between data and code. This means it's very easy to write code that works most of the time but has serious security and/or functionality issues when presented with certain filenames.

  14. Re: H-1b should not be used for lower-level worker on VP Biden Briefs US Governors On H-1B Visas, IT, and Coding · · Score: 1

    AIUI the problem is that the H1B abusers advertise a position with a low-level job title but a high level set of requirements. In this way they can appear to be paying the prevailing wage for the "position" while actually paying a lot less than they would pay for a similarly skilled american.

  15. Re:Latest version on Firefox 33 Integrates Cisco's OpenH264 · · Score: 1

    https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/p...

    Source packages are on that page, follow the links to the builds for the binaries.

  16. Re:bad for standards on Firefox 33 Integrates Cisco's OpenH264 · · Score: 1

    This has nothing to do with the "tag" itself, which does not specify codecs.

    IIRC at one stage it specified vorbis/theora as a baseline which every implementation should support but under pressure from apple and MS they took that out.

  17. Re:this is great news! on Open-Source Blu-Ray Library Now Supports BD-J Java · · Score: 1

    Depends where in the UK you are.

    Some areas have competion between virgin meda cable and openreach FTTC. At the other extreme some areas have no cable and phone lines so long/shitty that they can't handle DSL at all. Many providers have caps or "fair usage policies", especially in areas that don't have LLU.

  18. Re:Patent upgrade treadmill on Firefox 33 Integrates Cisco's OpenH264 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Maybe maybe not. Once a format is deemed "good enough" it can stick around for a long time. See mp3, jpeg png etc. Furthermore bandwidth prices have dropped through the floor in recent years,

  19. Re:Why ODF? on UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents · · Score: 1

    You can't assume that ASCII will be more readable than any other binary format.

    Yes we can, the combination of simplicitly and ubiquity mean it is highly unlikely we will lose the ability to read it.

    UTF-8 is a little more complex but the encoding method can still be described in less than a page, the harder bit is what to do with the code point sequence you get from decoding but for most widely used languages* that is a simple table lookup.

    Do you have any tools that can open and read PETSCII?

    Well you might end up with swapped case and block-drawing would be a mess but you could read the actual text by just treating the file as ASCII.

    * The exceptions being languages like hebrew, arabic and some indian languages.

  20. Re:Why ODF? on UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents · · Score: 1

    How well does word with odf actually work? does saving from word as odf and opening it in libreoffice have a higher or lower chance of screwing up the document than saving as doc and opening it in libreoffice?

  21. Re:Why ODF? on UK Cabinet Office Adopts ODF As Exclusive Standard For Sharable Documents · · Score: 2

    Which is WHY it's important that big guys are doing this.

    When you are the little guy there is a lot of pressure on you to conform to the standards set by those you work with (and that may mean not just using MS office but using a specific version of MS office), when you are the big guy you SET the standards and require other people to conform to them.

  22. Re:As it should be on Verizon Boosts FiOS Uploads To Match Downloads · · Score: 1

    There are legitimate reasons for asymetry on DSL and cable

    On DSL upstream and downstream have to be given seperate frequency slices out of the limited bandwidth available on a typical phone pair (which lets not forget was only designed to carry voiceband). So you have to tradeoff upstream speed and downstream speed and for most users it makes more sense to tradeoff towards downstream. Having said that I do think it's scandalous that symetric services are insanely expensive compared to asymetric ones of comparable total bandwidth.

    On cable the technical reasons are even greater, cable networks are designed for broadcasting TV with a high power transmitter broadcasting through the high-loss (due to the splitting/padding) network to a lot of receivers. Upstream traffic is going against the flow which means it has a lower acceptable transmit power and a lot more interference present at the receiver.

    On the other hand with fiber the only reason for the asymetry is artifical crippling (making it harder to use P2P, run servers etc)

  23. Re:aaargh! pinheads in the IT. on Verizon Boosts FiOS Uploads To Match Downloads · · Score: 1

    Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.

    Depends on what you see as "the whole point of using a VPN".

    Afaict there are three main reasons to use a VPN

    1: you don't trust the provider of your internet connection
    2: you need to access IP-locked resources on the internet
    3: you need to access resources on a private network that is not directly reachable from the internet.

    "Split tunnel" kills reason 1 and probablly also reason 2 (unless there is some complex routing configuration in place). It certainly does not kill reason 3 which is often the main reason for using a VPN.

    On the other hand forcing everything down the VPN kills the ability to use resources on your local network (a PITA if you use a network printer) and means traffic to the internet is wastefully forced to take a roundabout route to it's destination.

  24. Re:What about on Verizon Boosts FiOS Uploads To Match Downloads · · Score: 1

    From what I can gather both comcast and verizon bullied netflix into paid peering by refusing to expand peering with any carrier netflix used or tried to use as an upstream.

    When netfllix paid up to comcast they got massive improvments in connectivity to comcast customers, when they paid up to verizon they didn't.

    http://hardforum.com/showthrea...

  25. Re:In other words on The Almost Forgotten Story of the Amiga 2000 · · Score: 1

    I don't know about the amiga specifically but some computers have a memory backup battery mounted on the main PCB. If they leak and the leakage is not noticed and dealt with quickly it can cause severe damage to PCB traces which can be a nightmare to repair.