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If you had a valid, uncompromised version of firmware, and were able to substitute it, and look at the streams, you could compare one stream to the other, uncompromised vs suspect. At some point, to do its work, the suspect firmware has to cough something different, be it an altered MBR, or something else to allow it to do its job. Otherwise, its sits in firmware forever doing nothing. There needs to be a routine, an exercise, comparing known vs unknown to assess what it does to a stream, or to infect/root its host.

I get the feeling that the NSA attack is likely focused on a fairly select few, otherwise the C&C traffic would be heavy enough to otherwise detect. A rooted machine may stay asleep for a long time, perhaps forever, but at some point, it has to wake up. Change your IP address to a CIDR block in Iraq and see if your router suddenly lights up.

Summary: to do its work, it has to either talk to something or infect/root the kernel or something the kernel uses a lot, otherwise, it's useless except as a local attack. It has to assert itself, and using known vs unknown analysis is perhaps the only real way of making it show its footprints in the snow.

Firefox comes with a couple of calculators built in. It has since before it was called Firefox.

Embrace, extend.....

You have a lot of rational paranoia here. Tin foil or no, I often wonder if some of the VPN services are just honeypots.

There's always spinning up free instances in Azure or another host like AWS, and trying your hand there; at least the circuits would be somewhat secure. But if you're doing something at a monitored host and its record list is tracked, your IP access would at least be tracked. You might need several of these in a tawdry, highly latent chain to make things tough. That said, for some that need this, diligence might pay off. For others using such circuits for evil, I wish them failure.

That's their retail value. If you're suing Anthem in a class action because of their breach, the value will be astoundingly different.

A nice VPN is a great idea. The very idea that your privacy is worth such a pittance is really insulting.

Be thankful they were just plain laserdiscs - the BBC Domesday Project is an oft-cited example of digital obsolescence, involving weird analogue/digital laserdiscs and custom computer hardware...

One year vaper, previously 20 year smoker. I've had the medical labs done to show how much damage was undone in just one year.

At 41, I can run farther and faster, keep up with young folk better than most of my non-smoker friends of the same age. 3 years ago this was not the case.

Not broken. It's an improvement. Devices needed organization. It's not a perfect solution. Nothing is.

Slow down. We disagree on all your points.

First, use grub2 to set alternate boots. Not tough.
Second, use rsyslog or install syslog-ng to push out the logs to a log server so you can see why it goes down.
Third, BIOS is still the longest part of my boots; not sure what you're using.
Fourth, the file format you loathe is easy pushed back to half-ASCII if you simply must; you can ask chron to push it for you regularly, if you're really anal.

As far as stability is concerned, mine are just fine, thanks, doing their jobs nicely. This .ini problem you speak of is no different from the madness of other conf files that permeate the landscape, and prior versions are worse. I can squirt plentiful relevant system calls to one freaking spot, not eleven, and not nineteen different goofball apps twisting relevant settings through backdoors going back to Minix. I call that progress. It enforces a little discipline.

Oh, sure. Are you sure it wasn't the fact that all of the Sun engineers exited for greener pastures, and Oracle left the openness in a ditch? Took all of Schwartz's pile of open goodies and stepped on them like they were cockroaches?

C'mon. Say something real.

Along the way, your RHEL6 will be fine, and it will grow cold, like they all do, as will your skills. I don't particularly care for systemd, but I learned it in a couple of hours, and yeah, it works.

I've been doing Unices for longer than most slashdotters have been alive, a very long time. This isn't much to get outraged over. Many changes meet resistance. I saw this changeover first in Solaris; I knew it was coming. First few times, PITA. Now, I shrug.

Stuff is going to change. This one's for the better, IMHO. I would change other stuff, too, but that's another thread. This one was ripe. If it's too hot in the kitchen, go back to the dining room. Find another dining room. Linux has more darwinism in it than any other OS I've seen. I used think that fact was forboding, but it's not. It's pressured evolution.

Wrong question. The problems that led to systemd weren't built in a day/week/month/year, and neither will be the maturity that it needs to work.

Regardless of how shitty? If you're unaware of bad implementations, I can suggest many places to turn towards to find pretty ugly stuff, no matter the OS. The pain of systemd passes easily. Not rocket science. Pretty consistent.

It's my humble opinion that if systemd stops you cold, you ought to be in another profession. Just surrender your capacity to adapt and move on, hang up your holster and belt, and go into automotive tech or something else where the rules change less frequently.

Using systemd isn't rocket science. It a simple change that cleans up a lot of old code and retirement plan permutations.

Maybe I get marked as troll. Guys that can't think out of an ipconfig box need to embrace their brittleness and just bug out into early BSD or similar. The world's gonna pass you by.

Farting around doing FFTs on radio telescope data at university, I saw big chunky peaks at multiple of 50Hz (it being the UK) - mixed in with peaks from the pulsar being observed. Mains hum gets everywhere!