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Comment: Its all about privacy protection and nothing else (Score 3, Interesting) 275

by mlwmohawk (#47745539) Attached to: Dropbox Caught Between Warring Giants Amazon and Google

Dropbox had a great claim, originally, that your data was secure not even "dropbox" could see it. Well, it turned out that was a lie.

The bigger issue is privacy protection. If I upload non-public information to one of these services, which one can I trust to keep that private? If there is no clear answer, then price is the only differentiator. Who's going to protect your privacy when presented with an NSL? Answer: no one. After that, who cares?

I believe that if a storage company wants to stand out and charge a premium, it needs to hire lawyers, a lot of them, to defend the rights of its customers. When you store your data on your property, you are protected by the 4th amendment, the warrant requirement, and the legal right to a defense, when you store your data in the cloud, you have little, if any, protection, and the service provider has no duty to protect your data from government requests.

Criminals, lawyers, and the general public have the same needs. If you can't protect criminals, you can't protect the general public. Data storage has never been about the bits. It has always been about the meta requirements: security, longevity, recoverability, and yes, cost. The google/amazon threat is about cost, what about the other requirements?

Comment: Cynical attempt to lower tech wages (Score 2) 253

by mlwmohawk (#47413829) Attached to: US Tech Firms Recruiting High Schoolers (And Younger)

Tech companies want to make sure the Zuckerbergs make a gazillion dollars, but tech wages get driven down. 501(C) organization like are all about getting "immigration reform" which includes a lot more H1B, which means you distort the intellectual capital market by bringing in more workers and thus driving down pay. Why pay money to an american with school loans when you can lobby government to get someone who can work for less as an H1B serf.

Paying kids is a new twist on this game. So, why even pay people who have careers, lets pay our employees even less by hiring children?

It is a race to the bottom, and make no mistake, it is so the rich can get richer. I don't want to sound like an "occupy wall street" loony, but don't workers deserve reward for their work just as much as industrialists. 40 years ago, CEOs only made a few hundred times more than their average employee, and that was scandalous.

These guys complain about the "economy," but that facts are clear, the U.S. economy was better when we had more wealth distribution, stronger unions, and a growing middle class. They want us to be China, and unless we figure out how to stop it, we will be.

Comment: Re:Who are you? (Score 1) 646

by mlwmohawk (#47309277) Attached to: Washington Redskins Stripped of Trademarks

So you're a Mohawk and you think it would be a good gesture for the European aggressors to make up for the centuries of genocide by... not calling a football team the Redskins?

It would be a fantastic start for the "European aggressors" to stop thinking of the indigenous peoples as something other than mascots, yes. Once they realize the blood they spilled taking this continent from its rightful owners was, in fact, human blood, the blood of people, they may be more humane.

Comment: Re:Who are you? (Score 1) 646

by mlwmohawk (#47294079) Attached to: Washington Redskins Stripped of Trademarks

Yea, Mohawk. LOL. Seriously, the French call themselves French, being "European" is fairly a new thing.

The Mohawk are part of the Iroquois which is huge number for tribes from Canada down to Florida on the east coast who share a basic language. The Lakota are in the midwestern USA in the dakotas and Sioux is probably the tribe you know best. There were over 500 different nations with a population more than twice Europe before Columbus came here. It wasn't until the white's diseases came here that decimated the indigenous populations.

Remember what the "black death" did to europe in the 1350s, the diseases the white man brought to this continent did about the same to its population. In europe every one got it at roughly the same time, so no invaders could capitalize on it. The indigenous people of this continent were not so lucky.

Comment: Who are you? (Score 3, Insightful) 646

by mlwmohawk (#47267617) Attached to: Washington Redskins Stripped of Trademarks

My great grandfather was Mohawk. I typically say I'm part Mohawk, not indian or native American.

What is going on is the idea that a race of people were/are in the process of genocide against the native population of a continent for over 500 years. The whites have dehumanized the various peoples to the point where individual customs and ways are nothing more than trendy new-age fads. Rather than a proud people, the whites depict them as mascots and comic book characters. When they take offense to being dehumanized, they are told to get over it.

The whites did not win the Americas (stupid name), it was the european diseases that did. If the natives were not in decline because of new diseases, the europeans would never have token hold. The whites merely capitalized on continent wide pandemic that they brought here.

So, if the people who had democratic representation and centralized trade routes BEFORE the magna carta, whos only offense is being in the way of white european aggression, say stop dehumanizing them, maybe it would be a good gesture.

Comment: Re:So sick of Google This Google That (Score 2) 358

by mlwmohawk (#46806433) Attached to: Google: Better To Be a 'B' CS Grad Than an 'A+' English Grad

From the fate of other 'search' companies (some of which were very good), I'd say the board at FAST were correct - and that you're the idiot.

So, you are saying, two competing companies doing about the same thing. One quits the business, the other goes on to be HUGELY successful, and I'm the idiot for calling the quitting company's manegement idiots? Sorry Bjorn and Larvik screwed the pooch and killed a potentially golden goose.

Google isn't a multi-billion dollar company because they're exceedingly good at search - they're a multi-billion dollar company that's exceedingly good at delivering advertisements (only a fraction of which are on their search pages).

You may have missed what I wrote: "Google sells ads, nothing else even comes close on their books."

Comment: So sick of Google This Google That (Score 5, Insightful) 358

by mlwmohawk (#46804815) Attached to: Google: Better To Be a 'B' CS Grad Than an 'A+' English Grad

In 1999 Fast Search and Transfer was neck and neck with google for speed, volume, and accuracy. The board at FAST were idiots and said there was no money in search and basically stopped trying and let google win.

What I learned in this time is that Google was no better than FAST, and is no better than any other company. They won because viable competition walked away. Google's only real innovation was thier revenue model. Right now, Google has BILLIONS to toss at projects. We hear about a LOT of successful or nearly successful projects, but how many failures are there that we never hear about? Its easy to be innovative when you are grossly profitable.

For any "hiring practice" to be better than any other, you need to *prove* that the cost of labor compared to productivity (innovation, etc.) that is directly related to revenue has a better ratio than that in other companies. Frankly, I don't see it. Google sells ads, nothing else even comes close on their books.

Google is just the Microsoft of the late '80 and early '90s. A pundit's darling, a fictional yardstick by which the ignorant measure what they don't understand.

Comment: Elephant in the room (Score 1) 233

by mlwmohawk (#46667233) Attached to: Most Expensive Aviation Search: $53 Million To Find Flight MH370

OK, lets say it. Bullshit. We all know it didn't crash.

It takes a series of catastrophic failures for a 777 to crash. Sure, it happens, but it is very rare. It is an extremely unlikely event.
Now, we also know that the various telemetry devices on the plane were manually disabled by the flight crew.
We also know from the telemetry they didn't know about (or could shut of, the engine pings) that the engines ran for about 5 hours after other telemetry was turned off.
We know the plane turned "off course" after the last radio contact.

Given all these facts, do you really think it crashed? Of course not. It landed somewhere.

The cruising speed of the plane is about 560 miles/hour. It was in the air for 5 hours after it's last known location, that's a 2800 mile radius. This gives us a 24 million square mile area to search. If we have 1000 crews searching the area, 80 hours a week. If it takes 1 hour to search a square mile, it will take almost 6 years to find it.

Someone or something was on that plane that someone wanted. The plane was stolen, BY THE PILOTS, and landed somewhere. We will not find the black box, well, maybe on ebay.

Comment: Nothing will save you from your own carelessness (Score 0) 983

by mlwmohawk (#46463171) Attached to: How Do You Backup 20TB of Data?

If you set up a RAID6 system and keep tabs on it, replace drives as they come and go, then you'll probably be OK unless you do something stupid, or have a fire, flood, or what ever. The ONLY way to really have backup of important information is geographically separate redundant copies.

Comment: Just eastablish a new fork (Score 2) 119

by mlwmohawk (#46004577) Attached to: Nagios-Plugins Web Site Taken Over By Nagios

Nagios is a stupid name, and now they are acting like a stupid company. You can't buy good will, but you can certainly spend it out of existence. Create an entity, or something, pull a GPL nagios, change trademarks, and point to That really is the only way to deal with companies that behave this way.

Then contact Debian, RedHat et. al. they will probably deal with the new fork after this crap.

Comment: Makes perfect sense (Score 4, Informative) 186

by mlwmohawk (#45894587) Attached to: Red Hat To Help Develop CentOS

Its actually about time. We old timers remember when RedHat was free and support was the money maker for RedHat. Then they split to RHEL and Fedora, that was bad and caused a lot of initial distrust of RedHat. Fortunately, RedHat didn't screw everyone and is doing largely the right thing.

The problem with the RHEL/Fedora split was it made two different strategies. If it were not for CentOS, RHEL may have lost a lot of business. Now that Oracle wants to steal RedHat business, keeping CentOS viable keeps the mind-share of people who neither need nor want support using the equivalent of RHEL while RedHat keeps its customers.

Comment: Stored Credentials are bad (Score 1) 341

by mlwmohawk (#45829351) Attached to: Linux Distributions Storing Wi-Fi Passwords In Plain Text

As bad as it sounds, NetworkManager is probably doing almost the right thing. There is no way to safely encrypt a password so that it may be used for access to another system without requiring another password.The only thing that you can do is use the permission structure of the OS to protect the password. (As they have done)

Now, they could have "scrambled" or encrypted the password with a known key. That will prevent the slim chance that a "casual" intruder with root access will get your password, however, any moderately intent intruder who can gain root access will, by design, be able to reverse the password mutation. You can't MD5 or SHA the passwords because you *need* them to gain access to the external system.

I had this fight at a company a while back about accessing Windows servers and storing their credentials, I ended up base64 the creds into a database row or an encrypted database. You needed a password to open the database, so they were safe, but management didn't want to be able to "see" the password once they did. It wasn't real security, but it shut them up.

NetworkManager needs to do something similarly stupid so that stupid people don't say stupid things about a stupid problem. If you can't trust your computer to store your password, then don't trust your computer to store your password. duh!

Comment: Freedom's free ride is over (Score 1) 153

by mlwmohawk (#45828099) Attached to: UK Introduces Warrantless Detention

We hear all the time that freedom is not free it must be paid for periodically. Well, I think the western tradition of freedom is under attack and it is time that the citizens of the USA and the UK band agains their governments becoming like the repressive governments of Hitler and Stallen that they supposidly weren't. My only hope is that we have not built up so much "freedom debt" that we must pay for it with violen revolution.

Does anyone have a viable plan to stop this wholesale nonsense?
