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Data Storage

Portugal Is Considering a "Terabyte Tax" 353

An anonymous reader writes "As a proposal to avoid becoming the 'next Greece', a Portuguese opposition party has proposed a tax on storage. The party claims that the tax will not effect the average citizen and is mostly levied at business users, but internal storage on mobile phones means a 64GB iPhone could be €32 more expensive. From the article: 'The proposal would have consumers paying an extra €0.2 per gigabyte in tax, almost €21 extra per terabyte of data on hard drives. Devices with storage capacities in excess of 1TB would pay an aggravated tax of 2.5 cents per GB. That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB). External drives or “multimedia drives” as the proposed bill calls them, in capacities greater than 1TB, can be taxed to the tune of 5 cents per gigabyte, so in theory, a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB)."

Comment Re:SSHFP records in your DNS zone (Score 2) 284

Let me demonstrate the difference with some examples.

First a normal ssh connection to a new host. Without VerifyHostKeyDNS it doesn't matter if your SSHFP records are up-to-date, since they won't be checked.

$ ssh login@example.com
The authenticity of host 'example.com (127.0.0.1)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 01:23:45:67:89:ab:cd:ef:01:23:45:67:89:ab:cd:ef.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

With "VerifyHostKeyDNS yes" and up-to-date SSHFP records, it looks like this instead. Note the extra line of output.

$ ssh -o "VerifyHostKeyDNS yes" login@example.com
The authenticity of host 'example.com (127.0.0.1)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 01:23:45:67:89:ab:cd:ef:01:23:45:67:89:ab:cd:ef.
Matching host key fingerprint found in DNS.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

And this is what you get, if the SSHFP record ain't up-to-date:

$ ssh -o "VerifyHostKeyDNS yes" login@example.com
[Cut long line of @'s. Too many 'junk' characters for /.]
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
[Cut long line of @'s]
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that the RSA host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
01:23:45:67:89:ab:cd:ef:01:23:45:67:89:ab:cd:ef.
Please contact your system administrator.
Update the SSHFP RR in DNS with the new host key to get rid of this message.
The authenticity of host 'example.com (127.0.0.1)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 01:23:45:67:89:ab:cd:ef:01:23:45:67:89:ab:cd:ef.
No matching host key fingerprint found in DNS.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Compare that with the first case where you had absolutely no idea if the fingerprint was correct or not.

I'm not saying, you should just trust all SSHFP records, if you're paranoid. But even if you ain't paranoid, the warning about the mismatching SSHFP record should be enough to make you stop and think instead of just saying yes.

Comment Re:3L 2L (Score 1) 725

but for me comparing 623 millimetres to 1.01m (1010 millimetres) not only makes the comparison easy, but I get an intuitive feel that one is a little over a third larger than the other.

FTFY.

But then I guess the difference here isn't metric vs imperial, it's more that imperial seems to prefer fractions, whereas metric favours a decimal number. You never write 1/2cm, always 0.5cm or 5mm.

FTFY too...

Communications

Ham Radio Licenses Top 700,000, An All-Time High 358

Velcroman1 writes "The newest trend in American communication isn't another smartphone from Apple or Google but one of the elder statesmen of communication: Ham radio licenses are at an all time high, with over 700,000 licenses in the United States, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Ham radio first took the nation by storm nearly a hundred years ago. Last month the FCC logged 700,314 licenses, with nearly 40,000 new ones in the last five years. Compare that with 2005, when only 662,600 people hammed it up and you'll see why the American Radio Relay League — the authority on all things ham — is calling it a 'golden age' for ham. 'Over the last five years we've had 20-25,000 new hams,' said Allen Pitts, a spokesman for the group."

Comment Re:Pictures are large (Score 1) 487

Sure... You know how we use to have black&white images, then we got 8-bit color palettes, then 24 bits for RGB and later 32 bits for RGBA. This is just the next step...

8 bits for red, 8 bits for green, 8 bits for blue, 8 bits for the alpha channel, 32 bits for gamma correction, 64 bits of DRM and finally 128 bits for the IPv6 address of each pixel.

Comment Re:RIP (Score 1) 725

You know how to tell people who learned C before 1995 (or so) from people who learned it after?

The second category writes "x--" whenever they can, and "--x" only where they have to. The first one writes "--x" whenever they can, and "x--" only where they have to.

I started coding in C around 1990 and as far as I can remember I have almost always used the postfix version, i.e. x--;

Oh, and you can also save a couple chars here if you use puts() instead of printf() - it automatically adds "\n", and it's also faster because it doesn't have to parse the format string. ~

You're right, but for some reason I tend to avoid puts(). Probably because it reminds me too much of gets().

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