MikeWeller - Slashdot User

Comment Re:CRC Errors (Score 1) 510

by MikeWeller on Wednesday October 17, 2012 @03:06AM (#41678687) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do SSDs Die?

I can confirm this bug. A few months back my company macbook started freezing up multiple times a day. I could see from the activity monitor that disk access stopped completely. The SMART status was OK, and all sorts of other disk tools could not find a problem. The drive is a Crucial M4 256 GB. After a few weeks of these random failures I realized they seemed to happen pretty consistently every hour, and eventually I found out about this firmware bug. After doing some calculations, the "5184 hours of Power-on time" matched up very nicely with the date I started using the drive and the almost 24/7 power-on time (I just leave it powered on at my desk). So I installed the firmware upgrade and the problem went away. It's a pretty crazy bug - there must be many thousands of these drives out there just waiting to hit this magic power-on time and start failing. How many of those users are going to know about the firmware update?

Comment Re:Epically bad. (Score 1) 528

by MikeWeller on Friday June 01, 2007 @08:26AM (#19350121) Attached to: New Anti-Forensics Tools Thwart Police

I don't know much about this stuff, but isn't it possible to analyze the entropy of the hard drive data to find areas that contain encrypted data?

I remember a while back reading about ways to scan a program's memory looking for encryption keys and encrypted data because that data is much more random (or seemingly random) than the surrounding data.

Surely this would also apply to a hard drive? Imagine amongst all the old text files, images, documents, there is suddenly a huge 1GB area of totally random data. That's got to raise suspicions.

Canadian Bill C-416 to Require Wiretapping 228

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday March 26, 2007 @10:54PM from the big-brother-to-the-north dept.

Matthew Skala writes "Bill C-416, recently introduced in the Canadian Parliament, would if passed require Internet providers to provide wiretapping facilities to law enforcement — without a warrant, and with 'confidentiality' requirements reminiscent of the secret-spying cases we've seen recently in the States. This new Act is a reprise of last Parliament's C-74, which failed when the Government's term ended. Coming back as a Liberal "private member's Bill" in a minority government, it will have little chance of success without cross-party support; but with the Conservatives in charge, all bets are off if they can find a way to claim it's about terrorism or child pornography."

Ballmer Says Google's Growth Is 'Insane' 420

Posted by Zonk on Friday March 16, 2007 @10:39AM from the doubling-the-doubled-growth-rate dept.

eldavojohn writes "Steve Ballmer spoke to the Seattle PI this week, commenting that Google's pace of employee growth is 'insane,' and the company has few successful businesses outside of Internet search and advertising. He referred to Google's non-search efforts as 'cute.' Google's current number of employees is nearly doubling each year. 'I don't really know that anybody's proven that a random collection of people doing their own thing actually creates value.' Mr. Ballmer went on complain that, in general, competition for good programmers has become an issue. Even 'hedge funds' are looking for skilled coders, making the HR fight between the two companies that much more challenging."

New Email Rules Effective Friday 193

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 01, 2006 @10:56AM from the kiss-your-conversations-goodbye dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As of today [Friday], certain U.S. companies will need to keep track of all the e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents generated by their employees, in accordance with new federal rules. In April the Supreme Court began requiring companies and other entities involved in federal litigation to produce 'electronically stored information' as part of the discovery process of a trial." From the article: "Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing the equivalent of 'virtual shredding,' said Alvin F. Lindsay, a partner at Hogan & Hartson LLP and expert on technology and litigation. 'There are hundreds of "e-discovery vendors" and these businesses raked in approximately $1.6 billion in 2006, [James Wright, director of electronic discovery at Halliburton Co.] said. .'"

Is Microsoft An Innovator? - The Winer-Scoble Debate 365

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 01, 2006 @10:22AM from the i've-got-the-popcorn dept.

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Bloggers Robert Scoble (a former Microsoft 'technical evangelist') and Dave Winer (longtime Microsoft critic) debate whether Microsoft is driving innovation or playing catch-up, in an email conversation published on WSJ.com. Winer writes, 'Microsoft isn't an innovator, and never was. They are always playing catch-up, by design. That's their M.O. They describe their development approach as "chasing tail lights." They aren't interested in markets until they're worth billions, so they let others develop the markets, and have been content to catch-up.' Scoble responds that Microsoft's innovation can be found in the little things: 'I remember when they improved the error messages you get in Internet Explorer, or when they improved fonts in Windows with ClearType technology. That improved our lives in a very tiny way. Not one that you usually read about, or probably even notice. Is Microsoft done innovating in those small ways? Absolutely not. Office 2007 lets me do some things (like cool looking charts) in seconds that used to take many minutes, maybe even hours for some people to do.'"

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