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Comment It's not bit-rot (Score 1) 321

If you're noticing data corruption on only 2TB it's probably not what we normally call bit-rot. A bit that changes state for no apparent reason within a very large set of data can be described as bit-rot, otherwise it's general data corruption which has many causes which all are understood: Poor media, poor transmission of data, overwriting of data etc. Once you've got the system sorted out so you don't get data corruption, start thinking about the nature of your data. How much redundancy is in it? If it's jpegs the almost none, so a single bit error could be serious to a file. If uncompressed TIFFs then there is a lot of data redundancy and the single bit error might only be an error of a single pixel, which you might not even notice. And finally, don't expect optical media to be safe from errors. Only use it as part of a DR plan.

Comment Re:Daylight Saving Time (Score 1) 545

This whole clock switching thing is utter bollocks: First it was: "Our farmers need more daylight" - well just let them change THEIR hours! Next it was: "Our kids mustn't go to school in the dark" (but it's ok for them to come home in darkness) - - well just let them change THEIR hours! Next it was: "We'll save energy" - which is doubtful and unproven, but if you want to try - just change YOUR hours! There are only a given number of daylight hours in a day - you just can't have more! Since we all have biological clocks, it's difficult argue with the article that shifting hours screws with people's well being and efficiency.

Comment Culture matters as well (Score 1) 204

Amusingly I found that in Tokyo bars (in friendship terms) I had more in common with the locals than with caucasian Americans with whom I share the same European ancestry.

Nevertheless I am broadly drawn towards females who are similar to me. Those who look most dissimilar do not rate on my "wish to procreate with" list.

For the article's hypothesis to work, it's the second point that matters most. It means that the people who are born around you will be more like you and so are there for available friendship.

Not everyone is like me, and I'm glad of that. The more diverse the gene pool, the stronger the specie.

Submission + - Cryptography experts meet inunction against publishing research (guardian.co.uk)

dhaen writes: The Guardian runs a story that VW group who build Porches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis plus some lesser cars that ordinary mortals can afford, have banned publication of research that exposes security algorithms. It's becoming well known that security through obscurity is flawed and the Streisand Effect will now get to work

Submission + - How worried should we be about NSA backdoors in open source and open standards? 1

quarrelinastraw writes: For years, users have conjectured that the NSA may have placed backdoors in security projects such as SELinux and in cryptography standards such as AES. However, I have yet to have seen a serious scientific analysis of this question, as discussions rarely get beyond general paranoia facing off against a general belief that government incompetence plus public scrutiny make backdoors unlikely. In light of the recent NSA revelations about the PRISM surveillance program, and that Microsoft tells the NSA about bugs before fixing them, how concerned should we be? And if there is reason for concern, what steps should we take individually or as a community?

History seems relevant here, so to seed the discussion I'll point out the following for those who may not be familiar. The NSA opposed giving the public access to strong cryptography in the 90s because it feared cryptography would interfere with wiretaps. They proposed a key escrow program so that they would have everybody's encryption keys. They developed a cryptography chipset called the "clipper chip" that gave a backdoor to law enforcement and which is still used in the US government. Prior to this, in the 1970s, NSA tried to change the cryptography standard DES (the precursor to AES) to reduce keylength effectively making the standard weaker against brute force attacks of the sort the NSA would have used.

Since the late 90s, the NSA appears to have stopped its opposition to public cryptography and instead (appears to be) actively encouraging its development and strengthening. The NSA released the first version of SELinux in 2000, 4 years after they canceled the clipper chip program due to the public's lack of interest. It is possible that the NSA simply gave up on their fight against public access to cryptography, but it is also possible that they simply moved their resources into social engineering — getting the public to voluntarily install backdoors that are inadvertently endorsed by security experts because they appear in GPLed code. Is this pure fantasy? Or is there something to worry about here?

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