Comment Re:Why don't you have any remote management? (Score 1) 539

by algae on Saturday December 26, 2009 @04:31PM (#30558104) Attached to: Preventing My Hosting Provider From Rooting My Server?

Seriously? What you have is not a "server", it's a PC in a rack chassis. Any decent computer designed to go into a datacenter will have a redundant PSU, and a BMC that will log and alert you that one same has failed. I'm responsible for computers that I've literally never seen, and it's really not that big a deal.

Comment Why don't you have any remote management? (Score 1) 539

by algae on Saturday December 26, 2009 @01:36PM (#30556826) Attached to: Preventing My Hosting Provider From Rooting My Server?

The only reason you wouldn't be able to remotely enter in a boot-time decryption password, is if you don't have any remote management capabilities on this server. If this is the case, you should get just better hardware.

Comment Re:Cleartext Passwords? Really? (Score 1) 259

by algae on Thursday September 24, 2009 @03:04PM (#29531969) Attached to: ISP Mistakenly Emails Customer Database To Thousands

I have never been asked that in my life. SSN, mother's maiden name, billing address, but never for characters of my password for the account in question. Where did you run into this, so I can make sure never to do business with them?

Comment Cleartext Passwords? Really? (Score 2, Insightful) 259

by algae on Wednesday September 23, 2009 @07:48PM (#29523825) Attached to: ISP Mistakenly Emails Customer Database To Thousands

The real WTF is that all those passwords were in the clear. What the hell business does anyone have these days, doing anything more than storing a one-way hash?

Comment Point of Comparison (Score 1) 160

by algae on Sunday September 06, 2009 @02:15PM (#29332931) Attached to: Measuring Input Latency In Console Games

Just as a point of comparison, the typical latency you want in pro audio applications between when a guitarist plucks a string, and when they hear the note, is less than 15ms. This makes me think that the 80ms might be *acceptable*, but it's by no means ideal.

Comment Those developers are cooler than you. (Score 1) 109

by algae on Friday August 21, 2009 @06:53PM (#29151797) Attached to: Clojure and Heroku Predict Flight Delays

Clojure, Rails, Hadoop, jeez - what's next, white belts and fixed-gear bicycles? This is probably what these guys look like.

Comment Censorship? (Score 1, Interesting) 371

by algae on Tuesday August 04, 2009 @04:44PM (#28947231) Attached to: Large Hadron Collider Struggling

You can't help but wonder if these failures aren't a coincidence.

Comment "Up to" (Score 1) 105

by algae on Saturday June 06, 2009 @12:04AM (#28229999) Attached to: "Colossal Magnetic Effect" Could Lead To Another Breakthrough In Storage Tech

2x more powerful, is included in the set of "up to" 1000x more powerful.

Comment Double Standard? Nah. (Score 4, Interesting) 1188

by algae on Thursday April 02, 2009 @08:14PM (#27438855) Attached to: Angry Villagers Run Google Out of Town

You see, unlike us savage Americans, the British know that it's not a violation of privacy if the government are the ones watching you.

Google should just cut a deal with parliament to use the 88,000,023 cameras already installed across the UK.

Comment Re:bc -l? (Score 1) 776

by algae on Thursday March 12, 2009 @01:37PM (#27169737) Attached to: Favorite on-screen calculator?

Good tip - you can also set the "scale" variable for FP rounding: :-) me@fuzzy:~$ bc
5/4
1
scale=2
5/4
1.25
scale=10
22/7
3.1428571428

Student Satirist Gets 3 Months; the Judge, Likely More 689

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 17, 2009 @11:22AM from the but-everyone-else-in-pa-is-clean dept.

ponraul writes "When Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, sentenced Hillary Transue, 17, on a harassment charge stemming from a MySpace parody of her high school's assistant principal, Hillary expected to be let off with a stern lecture; instead, the Wilkes-Barre, PA area teen got three months in a commercially operated juvenile detention center. In a reversal of fortune, Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Conahan, 56, find themselves trying to plea-bargain an 87-month sentence in Federal correctional facilities relating to a kick-back scheme that netted the pair $2.6 Million and PA Child Care 5000 inmates." True poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.

Comment CyberSecurityCyberCyberChiefofCyber (Score 1) 188

by algae on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @01:52AM (#26794063) Attached to: Obama To Name Melissa Hathaway Cybersecurity Chief

For the love of $DIETY why the fuck is it that the government feels the need to call anything that has the slightest thing to do with information technology "Cyber." I'm cybersick of cybermorons in cybergovernment cyberthinking they cyberknow cyberanything about cyberanything.

Hackers Clone Passports In Driveby RFID Heist 251

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday February 04, 2009 @09:48AM from the well-not-exactly dept.

pnorth writes "A hacker has shown how easy it is to clone US passport cards that use RFID by conducting a drive-by test on the streets of San Francisco. Chris Paget, director of research and development at Seattle-based IOActive, used a $250 Motorola RFID reader and an antenna mounted in a car's side window and drove for 20 minutes around San Francisco, with a colleague videoing the demonstration. During the demonstration he picked up the details of two US passport cards. Using the data gleaned it would be relatively simple to make cloned passport cards he said. Paget is best known for having to abandon presenting a paper at the Black Hat security conference in Washington in 2007 after an RFID company threatened him with legal action." Apparently this is a little unfair — he sniffed the data, he didn't actually make a fake passport.

Microsoft Update Slips In a Firefox Extension 803

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 01, 2009 @11:45PM from the hitch-hiker dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While doing a weekly scrub of my Windows systems, which includes checking for driver updates and running virus scans, I found Firefox notifying me of a new add-on. It's labelled 'Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant,' and it 'Adds ClickOnce support and the ability to report installed .NET versions to the web server.' The add-on could not be uninstalled in the usual way. A little Net searching turned up a number of sites offering advice on getting rid of the unrequested add-on." The unasked-for extension has been hitchhiking along with updates to Visual Studio, and perhaps other products that depend on .NET, since August. It appears to have gone wider recently, coming in with updates to XP SP3.

Largest Data Breach Disclosed During Inauguration 168

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 20, 2009 @03:44PM from the debit-cards-at-risk dept.

rmogull writes "Brian Krebs over at the Washington Post just published a story that Heartland Payment Systems disclosed what may be the largest data breach in history. Today. During the inauguration. Heartland processes over 100 million transactions a month, mostly from small to medium-sized businesses, and doesn't know how many cards were compromised. The breach was discovered after tracing fraud in the system back to Heartland, and involved malicious software snooping their internal network. I've written some additional analysis on this and similar breaches. It's interesting that the biggest breaches now involve attacks installing malicious software to sniff data — including TJX, Hannaford, Cardsystems, and now Heartland Payment Systems." One bit of good news out of this massive breach is that, according to Heartland's CFO, "The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are actually quite difficult for the bad guys to do because one piece of information we know they did not get was an address." Heartland just put up a press release on the breach.