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Comment: Heart of the matter (Score 1) 94

by shipofgold (#46487725) Attached to: Target Ignored Signs of Data Breach

From TFA:

"With today's amount of detection data, just signaling an alarm isn't enough. The operator/analyst should be able to understand the risk as well as the recommendation of each incident, in order to be able to prioritize."

My experience is that companies skimp on the 7x24 NetworkOperationCenter personnel. Get cheap "eyes" on the logs and then hope that they are trained to recognize what is going on.....In most cases they just forward to someone else, and when you get the 15 false positive everybody relaxes and assumes the 16th is false as well...this is where the professionalism comes in.

Comment: Re:only 50Kg? (Score 1) 57

by shipofgold (#46409451) Attached to: Italian Researchers Demonstrate 'Powerloader' Suit



The other challenge will be the power supply....

Comment: Re:Some simple questions (Score 5, Informative) 361

by shipofgold (#46275253) Attached to: Killing Net Neutrality Could Be Good For You

I have been in the telecom industry for for many years. The issue that most people don't understand is that the infrastructure is "shared" amongst all subscribers and somebody has to pay for it.

One of the common questions I always got from Telco operators is "how many subscribers can your mobile system handle"? My snide answer is "100 billion"....as long as nobody makes any calls. The question they should be asking is "how many simultaneous calls can your system handle?". Then the answer becomes 100,000 peak busy hour calls. The Telco customer should know what their *expected calls per hour per subscriber* are and then they can calculate the number subscribers they can handle.

The "expected calls per hour per subscriber" (or expected bandwidth per subscriber in this case) changes the calculation significantly. Netflix and other content providers have been a game changer in recent years because they have drastically changed that number. The ISPs know they can't provide every subscriber peak bandwidth at the same time. When subscribers used their "promised bandwidth" in 2 second bursts to quickly load a WWW page, the ISPs had no problem providing it. But now that subscribers are demanding their "promised bandwidth" in 2 hour "bursts", the playing field changes dramatically. ISPs, of course, can engineer for that load, but then "somebody" needs to pay for it. That "somebody" is either the subscriber in the form of higher ISP subscription rates, or the content providers in the form of "throttling fees" which they will undoubtedly pass on to their customers or advertisers.

Net neutrality simply shifts who is paying for the cost of all that equipment for our access. One way the end user will end up paying for it directly, and the other way the end user pays for it indirectly through higher content fees, or goods and services that are more expensive due to higher advertising fees. In the end we all have to pay for it.

I tend to fall on the side of Net Neutrality (and consequently would be willing to pay the ISP more for access), because otherwise the big players (Netflix, Google, etc.) will become more entrenched as they are able to pay the throttling fees while some upstart with a great service can't afford it.

Comment: Re: Your task: explain how Net Neutrality stops th (Score 2) 298

by shipofgold (#46166829) Attached to: Is Verizon Already Slowing Netflix Down?

I agree...the blogger has two data points, connects them and thinks its a "trend".

If you look at the traceroutes at the bottom of the blog, which he seems to believe make an argument for his point, the top two IP addresses are different between business and residence. The "residential" route could simply be overloaded due to everybody firing up netflix when they get home.

The OP has a genuine beef that he should get better bandwidth to Netflix, but he would have made a much better argument if he would have posted speed results to YouTube, dslreports, and other diverse sites not hosted on AWS....

Until then just two data points connected by a straight line...

Comment: Re:write it yourself (Score 4, Informative) 243

I second exiftool. Lots of options to rename files. If you rename files based on createtime and perhaps other fields like resolution you will end up with unique filenames and then you can filter the duplicates

Here is a quick command which will rename every file in a directory according to createDate

  exiftool "-FileNameCreateDate" -d "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S.%%e" DIR

If the files were all captured with the same device it is probably super easy since the exif info will be consistent. If the files are from lots of different sources...good luck.

Comment: Re:How stupid do they think their students are? (Score 2) 47

by shipofgold (#46006881) Attached to: Building An Uncensorable Course Guide At Yale

I am guessing that the motivation has more to do with a couple of profs complaining that their courses were not being taken, or their reputations were demeaned because the averages sucked.

Certainly anybody can do the averages, but the time to gather the data and complete the calculation for every one of the courses a student would be considering is probably not something the average student will do. But if it is simply a click away, then all students will do it, and some professors will suffer as the ratings make them look bad.

Comment: what they don't say... (Score 2) 90

by shipofgold (#45997801) Attached to: The Spamming Refrigerator

is what the compromised software really was. I am guessing that these "devices" all used the same opensource embedded WWW server that had a vulnerability.

Probably the biggest issue is that the fridge makers embed this stuff and don't bother to test it for vulnerabilities, assuming that someone else has already done the testing.

While I am a big fan of opensource, blindly using it in a commercial product will lead to all sorts of these types of incidents.

Comment: Re:What is this? (Score 1) 383

by shipofgold (#45836625) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Command Line Interfaces -- What Is Out There?

You are missing the point of the OP. While not elegantly worded, the original request is valid....

What are your secret CLI commands? These are the things that go INSIDE those bash scripts that make bash useful....Or maybe a bash construct that makes life super easy.

A new F18 HTPC install that I just did has 1897 different commands in /usr/bin, and an F20 upgrade that has been in service for a number of years now has over 3300 "commands" in /usr/bin....While I like to think myself a BASH power user, I am guessing that I actually know only about 10-20% of those commands. I know that many of those commands start GUIs and are probably not useful as CLI. But there may be a nugget of gold in the other 70% that I have missed after all these years.

My list is of useful commands:
- "Handbrake-CLI" for converting videos. It uses ffmpeg under the hood, but I don't need to remember all those parameters...I could just script ffmpeg, but Handbrake-CLI has already done that.
- "netcat" for just about anything over a network
- "flite" (festival) for voice synthesis (although I just discovered espeak)
- "sox" for converting audio files
- "asterisk" for making outgoing voice calls (not strictly CLI, but I can trigger a synthesized outgoing voice call with a bash script)

The one command I haven't found, that I want, is a speech to text command that will output on the stdout.

Comment: Re:Officials say? (Score 1) 644

by shipofgold (#45569073) Attached to: Officials Say HealthCare.gov Site Now Performing Well

What you fail to realize is that your $165 plan would NEVER stay at $165...even with the absence of Obamacare. You will be aging. Healthcare costs continue to rise. I would wager that in 15 years your total premium outlay will be less under Obamacare than if you stuck with your $165 plan...especially if you start a family.

This is all about what is best for the American way of life. You will end up winning in the end.

Comment: Re:Complete overhaul please (Score 1) 462

by shipofgold (#45318905) Attached to: Re: Daylight Saving Time, I would most like

Not sure how this would help anybody but perhaps computer programmer who would no longer need to deal with timezones.

Current Situation:

I need to figure out what timezone, and consequently what time it is where my friend lives in Singapore. But once I know what time it is there, I can pretty much guess what he is doing (02:00 he is probably sleeping...12:00 he is probably lunching...). I know when the "day off period" (ie. weekend) starts.

Under your plan,

I know it is 02:00 everywhere...but what the hell is my friend doing? would need WWW site to tell me the customs in Singapore.

Not to mention humans most places enjoy a 5 day work/ 2 day no work schedule...how would I figure out whether they are working or not? What time does Saturday start?.

Only thing of merit in this plan is the 24 hour clock.

Comment: Re:Keep the phone ban (Score 2) 221

by shipofgold (#45293417) Attached to: FAA To Allow Use of Most Electronic Devices Throughout Flights

If the FCC/FAA were to allow cellphone calls, I am guessing that the Airlines would install their own cellular antenna's on the planes and your phone would lock onto that. I haven't thought through the details but I am sure there is some way the airlines could make a buck on Roaming charges. The cell antenna to ground link would be out of the normal phone range.

They do that with WIFI today.

The phones automatically adjust their transmit power levels according to the distance to the tower and the messaging between the phones and the towers attempts to keep the RX power levels in a band. The (W)CDMA technologies spread that power over a wide frequency band (spread spectrum) with many phones transmitting in the same band, and each looking like RF noise to the others.

If the towers are 5 miles straight down (flying over a city), or 8-10 miles at some angle to the ground, then the phone is going to be transmitting on maximum power attempting to connect. If the antenna is in the cabin, then the phone is going to be at minimum power.

Comment: Re:Any more.... (Score 1) 61

by shipofgold (#45286099) Attached to: Insect-Inspired Flying Robot Handles Collisions And Keeps Going




Comment: Re:Typo? (Score 2, Insightful) 233

by shipofgold (#45143083) Attached to: Security Researchers Want To Fully Audit Truecrypt

While it could have been worded better, I did understand the author's intent of the comment.....

A lot of people apparently use Truecrypt 6.0a and earlier. I don't believe sourcecode for those earlier versions has ever been published. That means people could be using a binary that is completely different than the Truecrypt 7...complete with backdoors or other vulnerabilities. No matter how much you analyze Truecrypt 7 software, all Truecrypt 6.0a and earlier versions should be considered vulnerable.

Comment: Re:Moral dilemma for Cowards (Score 1) 411

by shipofgold (#45050923) Attached to: US Intelligence Chief Defends Attempts To Break Tor

A few thousand died at the hands of terrorists, but now hundreds of millions suffer every day at their loss of privacy.

Suffering generally means you are conscious of your predicament and the loss has caused some sort of physical or mental pain that can be quantified. I would argue that very few have suffered....yet. Those that have suffered probably deserve it, at least in my ethical/moral belief system.

The danger in Clapper's mentality, isn't what has already happened, it is the potential for what might happen if a Hitler type figure emerges and decides to make arbitrary lists of "good" and "bad". Then what Clapper is doing today will influence who ends up on the "bad" list and the suffering will begin.
