A really cool article, but why do they spin it as a 'cloud' setup?
In my experience, the gamers who care about such beautiful graphics are happy to spend a few grand on hardware. They are not happy with jitter due to the internet connection, or waiting in line for a server.
I am much more likely to be able to afford a 30GB or 60GB SSD than a 512GB SSD. But that's all most people would need for applications and the Operating system.
I don't know about these "most people", but after I'd put windows 7, MS office, some drivers, java and python on my 60 GB SSD, it was close to 30 GB already. After that it was a constant pain to redirect every bloody installer to D: instead of C:. Now I'm the happy user of a 40 or so GB read cache and a 16 GB swap partition (for hibernation, though I haven't used that yet). Only problem is that it's flushed on reboot, but I just avoid rebooting unless I have to. No management required, just one big speedy / . I'll be using caching until I can put 2 1TB SSDs in RAID1 with data checksums.
"If and when an SSD fails, the failure is likely to be catastrophic with total data loss.
I don't have any practical experience, but shouldn't SSDs just become read-only when they fail? Or is the failure not due to wear-out of the flash cells, maybe.
Sometimes the OS cache is not smart though. On Linux, if you do a grep over a huge dataset or a backup, then all of the useful files you had in cache are wiped out and replaced with that data. I wish Linux could adopt a more sophisticated algorithm, like ZFS has. Granted, it's difficult for the OS to predict whether a file will be accessed once or hundreds of times in the future, but it makes sense to check if it's *frequently* used and not just if it's recently used.
Looters ransacking universities - oh, that's the fault of the US.
To be fair, the looters probably wouldn't have looted if the US didn't invade Iraq. It's easy to stay on moral high ground when you don't have boms dropping all around you.
I hope you can see the problems a company (or organization of companies) that sells devices using radio waves might have with suing the FCC.
I'm quite sure that being vengeful is not part of FCC's mandate. FCC is required to evaluate all products fairly, based on their merit. If they deny your product because you are suing them, you can probably sue them again for thta...
I wonder how successful would be a company providing data storage service like Dropbox, but with guaranteed data security.
There are several companies like that: http://www.wuala.com/ , https://spideroak.com/ , http://www.swissdisk.com/. They are doing OK, I believe, but don't have the hype of Dropbox. They don't have to say they guarantee the security because only the user has the keys (which is the best guarantee possible).
Obligatory non-answer: If it's an uncapped connection, how about just being a good neighbour and leave it on? If you get scary DMCA letters or the users on your wired network gets slowed down, *then* think about access control. Like others have suggested, please consider putting the AP on a timer switch if it's only used a few hours every week, to reduce interference for others.
I was going to write something similar -- the premise of this story, and the idea of war in general, is deeply psychopatic. Like it's OK to kill someone as long as you do it "cleanly", but you can't disrespect them? I think you are being too nice to the soldiers as well, painting it as self defence. These soldiers (on both sides) are driving around and seeking out enemies, for the sole purpose of killing them!
It's almost comical (in a very dark way). Wars cause too much collateral damage, how about we battle it out in Counter-Strike instead? US would still have the upper hand, with those nice Alienware gaming systems, and we could shoot the "soldiers" that lose to raise the stakes. It really isn't any more absurd, and it's a lot less messy. Tea-bagging is NOT allowed and will cause great headlines, though.
Microsoft has every capability of treating writes to the boot area and EFI configuration as special and performing their own security checks to prevent 'unauthorized' writes to that area (going even beyond their permissions to also require signed code). It still regretably break things like Ubuntu's in-windows installer, but I would accept that wasn't their goal and I think the tradeoff is more defensible.
It's actually better to have it the other way around. If it's configurable from within windows, then all it takes is a kernel-mode exploit and the malware gets to add its key. If it's a pre-boot menu, then it's a lot more difficult to own it.
Indeed, modern Linux systems have approximately the same amount of minor annoyances as Windows (not even counting malware). This is a great accomplishment! Windows is only living on inertia and lock-in. (Fedora user here, no native Windows installed, but I have a VM)
It's quite difficult to design a system for adding keys manually.
Doing it in Windows is obviously insecure: if Windows can do it, then any malware can do it.
Having the user toggle a physical switch requires adding extra hardware which can be costly and ugly. If the UI is in Windows, it's not even secure when you have a switch: the malware could just keep pounding the I/O port (or what ever) until it user flips the switch for what ever reason.
Having a pre-boot interface (triggered by a key combo, for example) is the best way, but it requires the OEMs to do a lot of programming. If full disk encryption was used on ARM devices, MS could argue that an attacker with physical access to the device would have a much easier time installing some snooper tool to pick up the encryption keys. The pre-boot approach seems the most secure overall, though.
I wish they would actually make transport-mode IPSEC compatible across different systems. Sure, it's a big pain to set up now anyway, but someone could write a GUI to generate a CA and certify different computers, etc. Windows already does this with its HomeGroup tech, and that's a quite elegant solution.
Copyright violation isn't free speech, no matter how you want to dress it up as such.
Copyright is absolutely a restriction of free speech! Copyright restricts what you are able to say and write, I can't see how anyone could argue with that.
Please show me a definition of "free speech", one without any cultural bias, that still allows copyright enforcement (I'm sure North Korea could - and probably do - claim that they have free speech too, if they got to exclude things that are "beneficial for society" to restrict). You are right in practice, though, there is enough free speech in most countries to have an informed discourse, and maybe absolute free speech is not a good thing.
You should also ensure that any functions that will only be *reading* data do not have privileges to *write* data under any circumstances.
Any malformed entries stored within your database should be immediately flagged as "bad data" and *not* presented back to the user. The record should simply be gone.
How exactly would one block users without write access?
Incorrect, actually. The GPLv3 is a "use license" that relies on the fact that you copy the code when executing it. It needs to work in this way to protect against the TiVo "hole". IMHO a too large concession.
The benefit of having the router do it is that the router knows its WAN-facing IP, and that's harder to get on the computers on the LAN (though there are plenty of options). But really, you can just run a cron job on the router, and execute wget or nsupdate when the IP has changed. Your router supports shell scripts, right?;)
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A really cool article, but why do they spin it as a 'cloud' setup?
In my experience, the gamers who care about such beautiful graphics are happy to spend a few grand on hardware. They are not happy with jitter due to the internet connection, or waiting in line for a server.
I am much more likely to be able to afford a 30GB or 60GB SSD than a 512GB SSD. But that's all most people would need for applications and the Operating system.
I don't know about these "most people", but after I'd put windows 7, MS office, some drivers, java and python on my 60 GB SSD, it was close to 30 GB already. After that it was a constant pain to redirect every bloody installer to D: instead of C:. Now I'm the happy user of a 40 or so GB read cache and a 16 GB swap partition (for hibernation, though I haven't used that yet). Only problem is that it's flushed on reboot, but I just avoid rebooting unless I have to. No management required, just one big speedy / . I'll be using caching until I can put 2 1TB SSDs in RAID1 with data checksums.
"If and when an SSD fails, the failure is likely to be catastrophic with total data loss.
I don't have any practical experience, but shouldn't SSDs just become read-only when they fail? Or is the failure not due to wear-out of the flash cells, maybe.
Sometimes the OS cache is not smart though. On Linux, if you do a grep over a huge dataset or a backup, then all of the useful files you had in cache are wiped out and replaced with that data. I wish Linux could adopt a more sophisticated algorithm, like ZFS has. Granted, it's difficult for the OS to predict whether a file will be accessed once or hundreds of times in the future, but it makes sense to check if it's *frequently* used and not just if it's recently used.
Looters ransacking universities - oh, that's the fault of the US.
To be fair, the looters probably wouldn't have looted if the US didn't invade Iraq. It's easy to stay on moral high ground when you don't have boms dropping all around you.
I hope you can see the problems a company (or organization of companies) that sells devices using radio waves might have with suing the FCC.
I'm quite sure that being vengeful is not part of FCC's mandate. FCC is required to evaluate all products fairly, based on their merit. If they deny your product because you are suing them, you can probably sue them again for thta...
Maybe SwissDisk isn't encrypted actually. The above is not a recommendation.
I wonder how successful would be a company providing data storage service like Dropbox, but with guaranteed data security.
There are several companies like that: http://www.wuala.com/ , https://spideroak.com/ , http://www.swissdisk.com/. They are doing OK, I believe, but don't have the hype of Dropbox. They don't have to say they guarantee the security because only the user has the keys (which is the best guarantee possible).
The only flaw with the DMCA is the ability for the content owners to use infringement notices with impunity.
Nooo! Don't forget about the anti-circumvention rules.
1 ton = 1E3 Kg.
FTFY
Obligatory non-answer: If it's an uncapped connection, how about just being a good neighbour and leave it on? If you get scary DMCA letters or the users on your wired network gets slowed down, *then* think about access control. Like others have suggested, please consider putting the AP on a timer switch if it's only used a few hours every week, to reduce interference for others.
I was going to write something similar -- the premise of this story, and the idea of war in general, is deeply psychopatic. Like it's OK to kill someone as long as you do it "cleanly", but you can't disrespect them? I think you are being too nice to the soldiers as well, painting it as self defence. These soldiers (on both sides) are driving around and seeking out enemies, for the sole purpose of killing them!
It's almost comical (in a very dark way). Wars cause too much collateral damage, how about we battle it out in Counter-Strike instead? US would still have the upper hand, with those nice Alienware gaming systems, and we could shoot the "soldiers" that lose to raise the stakes. It really isn't any more absurd, and it's a lot less messy. Tea-bagging is NOT allowed and will cause great headlines, though.
Microsoft has every capability of treating writes to the boot area and EFI configuration as special and performing their own security checks to prevent 'unauthorized' writes to that area (going even beyond their permissions to also require signed code). It still regretably break things like Ubuntu's in-windows installer, but I would accept that wasn't their goal and I think the tradeoff is more defensible.
It's actually better to have it the other way around. If it's configurable from within windows, then all it takes is a kernel-mode exploit and the malware gets to add its key. If it's a pre-boot menu, then it's a lot more difficult to own it.
Indeed, modern Linux systems have approximately the same amount of minor annoyances as Windows (not even counting malware). This is a great accomplishment! Windows is only living on inertia and lock-in. (Fedora user here, no native Windows installed, but I have a VM)
I wish they would actually make transport-mode IPSEC compatible across different systems. Sure, it's a big pain to set up now anyway, but someone could write a GUI to generate a CA and certify different computers, etc. Windows already does this with its HomeGroup tech, and that's a quite elegant solution.
This will probably not work for polymorphic viruses that rewrite their own code to avoid detection.
Copyright violation isn't free speech, no matter how you want to dress it up as such.
Copyright is absolutely a restriction of free speech! Copyright restricts what you are able to say and write, I can't see how anyone could argue with that.
Please show me a definition of "free speech", one without any cultural bias, that still allows copyright enforcement (I'm sure North Korea could - and probably do - claim that they have free speech too, if they got to exclude things that are "beneficial for society" to restrict). You are right in practice, though, there is enough free speech in most countries to have an informed discourse, and maybe absolute free speech is not a good thing.
You should also ensure that any functions that will only be *reading* data do not have privileges to *write* data under any circumstances.
Any malformed entries stored within your database should be immediately flagged as "bad data" and *not* presented back to the user. The record should simply be gone.
How exactly would one block users without write access?
Use peer-reviewed, open crypto algorithms where possible. (including hashing, key exchange, bulk data encryption)
Incorrect, actually. The GPLv3 is a "use license" that relies on the fact that you copy the code when executing it. It needs to work in this way to protect against the TiVo "hole". IMHO a too large concession.
It's hard to make a directional antenna that focusses all the energy into a few hundredths of a degree of solid angle.
The router doesn't HAVE TO do the updating.
The benefit of having the router do it is that the router knows its WAN-facing IP, and that's harder to get on the computers on the LAN (though there are plenty of options). But really, you can just run a cron job on the router, and execute wget or nsupdate when the IP has changed. Your router supports shell scripts, right? ;)
Oh come on.. Link please?
It's interesting, Windows actually has built-in support for DNS updates.