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Comment Re:Depends.... (Score 1) 666

by wgibson (#37888692) Attached to: How Can I Justify Using Red Hat When CentOS Exists?

One of your key system daemons has just crashed (SEGFAULT). Restarting it causes yet another crash; what do you do? If you know C coding, you start doing stack traces. If you have a support contract, you call them up.

I'm sorry, but I live in the real world. I can't justify the risk of lost time involved with the options you provide. I will make a copy of the core-dump and the data currently "live" with that daemon, before rolling back to a backup from disk, VTL or tape.

99% of the time, the problem is gone, because 99% of the time the problem will be caused by bad data triggering a/the bug. And most likely, the copy+rollback took about the same amount of time as the phone-call to support would have taken (most often less), and unless you are very experienced at debugging other peoples code it is almost guaranteed to be faster than pulling out strace, gdb and the source.

Of course, there is a reason I say "make a copy of..". After rolling back and getting things running again, I am very much interested in figuring out what went wrong. But now I have plenty of time to either do the debugging, or seek out someone who knows how...

Science

Submission + - Fish Evolve Immunity To Toxic Sludge (economist.com) 2

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Fish in the Hudson River and the harbor in New Bedford, Mass., have evolved resistance to PCBs. In the Hudson, a species of tomcod has evolved a way for a very specific protein to simply not bind to PCBs, nearly eliminating the toxicity. In New Bedford, the Atlantic killifish has proteins that bind to the toxin (just as the do in mammals) but the fish aren't affected despite high levels of PCBs in their cells. Why the killifish survive is a mystery.

Comment Re:Noise? (Score 1) 86

by wgibson (#37311130) Attached to: First Fully Electric Manned Helicopter Flight
Well yes, but this is a coaxial design, so combining the removal of the noisy engine, with the noise reduction inherent in coaxial rotor configurations, it may well be noticeably quieter than a "conventional helicopter".

Reduced noise is a second advantage of the configuration - part of the loud 'slapping' noise associated with conventional helicopters arises from interaction between the airflows from the main and tail rotors, which in some designs can be severe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_rotors#Other_benefits

Comment Re:No data is actually encrypted..... (Score 1) 202

by wgibson (#34428564) Attached to: Ransomware Making a Comeback
See also this post from Prevx: http://www.prevx.com/blog/163/Ransomware-lands-on-the-MBR.html

All the data inside the hard drive is claimed to be encrypted, though this isn't actually true. The only thing that has been overwritten is the MBR.

[...]

Attempt by most users and technicians to fix the infection will be to run “fixmbr” to restore the MBR with a clean copy. Sadly it is not possible, because the rootkit wipes out the whole partition table section from the first sector of the hard drive - it is copied out to the fifth sector along with whole original MBR.

Comment Re:Claims in HTML (Score 0) 154

by wgibson (#33990152) Attached to: Who Invented the Linux-Based Wireless Router?
So, basically, they describe an integrated outdoor Wireless Mesh router with per-user traffic shaping, running a Unix-like operating system. Even though I personally find applying per-user accounting and QoS in wireless mesh networks a natural and obvious extension, the fact that they do describe a form of throttling/shaping may make finding prior art a bit harder.

Submission + - Smart Phones that Know Their Users by How They Wal

Submitted by mirgens
mirgens writes: Technology review has a short article on new work on doing gait analysis with the accelerometers built into many smart phones. The work was done at the Norwegian Information Security Laboratory ("Nislab"). The need for more security on mobile devices is increasing with new functionalities and features made available. To improve the device security Nislab proposed gait recognition as a protection mechanism — in other words, if somebody else walks away with your phone, it locks up. While previous work on gait recognition used video sources, for instance to identify people in airports or secure buildings, the Nislab researchers collected the gait data using a Google G1 phone containing the AK8976A embedded accelerometer.

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