Bikini Kill - Slashdot User

Submission + - BYOL: Bring Your Own Lane (h2ovisions.com)

Submitted by hh4m on Wednesday July 01, 2009 @12:53PM

hh4m writes: Whether it's San Francisco, New York, or any bicyclistic city in between, you're destined to witness biker after biker dancing with danger, especially at night when visibility is uncomfortably low. Alex Tee and Evan Gant's LightLane device was recently just a concept but is soon to enter reality as a much-needed visual declaration of personal biking space. With a dire shortage of dedicated lanes, LightLane provides urban cyclists with a solution that adapts to them and any route they make take. The compact projector mounts easily to the rear of a bike frame and projects a bike lane-inspired linear pattern that provides great visibility and a familiarity that helps catch a driver's attention.

McColo Briefly Returns, Hands Off Botnet Control 242

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday November 18, 2008 @07:43PM from the should-have-used-a-stake-through-the-heart dept.

A week ago we discussed the takedown of McColo (and the morality of that action). McColo was reportedly the source of anywhere from 50% to 75% of the world's spam. On Saturday the malware network briefly returned to life in order to hand over command and control channels to a Russian network. "The rogue network provider regained connectivity for about 12 hours on Saturday by making use of a backup arrangement it had with Swedish internet service provider TeliaSonera. During that time, McColo was observed pushing as much as 15MB of data per second to servers located in Russia, according to ... Trend Micro. The brief resurrection allowed miscreants who rely on McColo to update a portion of the massive botnets they use to push spam and malware. Researchers from FireEye saw PCs infected by the Rustock botnet being updated so they'd report to a new server located at abilena.podolsk-mo.ru for instructions. That means the sharp drop in spam levels reported immediately after McColo's demise isn't likely to last."

Comment Re:ReadyNAS (Score 2, Interesting) 621

by Bikini Kill on Monday June 30, 2008 @01:05PM (#24003209) Attached to: What NAS To Buy?

Netgear/Infrant has never gone into the specifics of how it's done, but I'm guessing the drives are partitioned and the partitions are then RAIDed to ensure drive-level failure can't cause a problem. I know I've seen people do the same thing in software on x86 machines (in LVM, maybe?), so I'd guess that's what they're up to.

That's exactly how it's done. On my 1000S with v3 firmware, the raid partitions were sd[abcd]3 and were in raid 5 with one big lvm volume on top. Unfortunately, I know this because I had to recover my data this way after my 1000S went south due to firmware image corruption. Getting the raid reassembled under linux was easy: modprobe md, force reassembly of the raid, scan and activate the lvm volume group, mount the volume.

Netgear support was next to useless when reflashing the CF didn't solve the problem. I wouldn't call their tech support terrible; I figure that they probably solve at least 95% of their customers' issues. I suspect that they could have solved my issue as well, but once you're out of the warranty period, they really have no motivation to do so. The 1000S was only warrantied for a pitiful 1 year; at least the current versions come with a very respectable 5 year warranty.

The other sticky thing about purchasing these devices from any company is that while you may care about your data, they don't. Their responsibility within the warranty period is only to keep your hardware operational. Backups are wonderful, and presumably everyone will back up the super important stuff at regular intervals, but most people don't have another place on their network that will hold the full 1.5->4+ TB of data that these things can store. Sure, you could buy additional units/drives/whatever, but that's pricy if what you're protecting is just music/video files or something of that nature.

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