emcrazyone

"I do believe MS has changed. They don't seem to be the conniving organisation they once were"

I think this ex-Microsoft employee might disagree with you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPFbAqICUJo

not a bad plan. I did something similar in 1998-1999 as a Y2K consultant. Companies at the time wanted to be certified Y2K compliant - some good years. I certified a lot of companies using medical equipment from Perkin Elmer and Khronos time clocks.

can anyone chime in as to why use PCIe over something more core to core direct? As I understand it, the CPU still needs to talk to a PCIe host/bridge controller. Why not have something that is more direct between processors?

I also have had countless problems with Razer products. I own a couple blackwidow keyboards and have had a few of their mice. The Naga Epic is littered with complains about the scroll wheel not working and their draconian approach to installing mouse drivers that remind me of how HP's printer drivers pop adds in the system tray. Apparently I was not alone in noticing these issues; ArsTechnica did a scathing story about this:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/why-the-hell-does-th...

They had a Linux port at one time. It was called Kylix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix

Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.

I get a 403 error, you've exceeded your quota.

cool project.. I'm curious about your experience working with China PCB manufacturer. The costs seem low from my experience ($10 for 10 boards + $25 shipping). Was the quality there? How fast was the shipping? Did you attempt any homebrew PCB etching?

I have to agree with you and couldn't have said it any better. Wholeheartedly agree with the "increasingly terse" comment.

so you're the exception to the norm; you're one data point against... ;)

"Dply blocks common SMTP ports by default in order to prevent abuse of the platform and be able to provide servers for free."

Why do this over simpler bandwidth throttling say after a certain threshold has been met?

Well for one, "hacking" emails doesn't equal votes as far as I can tell and the link you provided doesn't talk about tampering with ballots or voting equipment. Where is the connection? This sounds like more conspiracy theory but I'm listening.

Well there is this and the retaliation over the email server she had running coupled with the fact she was caught lying in front of a Senate hearing on Benghazzi. I would say she did something smart for a change. I.e. facts vs. some wild claims... And with all the BS with past Florida elections coupled with Trump's claims of a rigged election, my bet is the ballot casting and voting machines are more protected now a days than days past.

It's called experience. Invest well in your people and they will pay you back in dividends

I've not looked at MS-SQL in a long time. My business ships software using PostgreSQL.

Does anyone have, in their opinion, compelling reasons why one should consider MS-SQL on Linux for either a new project or potential migrating too?

Consider too, PostgreSQL runs under Windows as a service too.

What does MS-SQL have that PostgreSQL does not?

I'm curious about this myself but more so on the voter registration side. For example, how do they make sure each voter is casting a single vote?

In Illinois I registered to vote well before the deadline. I showed up to cast my ballot but my name wasn't in the "database." The folks managing the polling station had to manually re-enter all my details into an Android tablet. While this was happening, I took out my phone and scanned the WiFi network of the church I was in. I assume the tablets were connected via wifi. I saw no other connection to the tablet besides a power connection. To my surprised the WIFI was running WEP. Hmm, this day in age you would think WEP would be default=off. This was at a local Church too. So perhaps the tablets use cellular data plans?

They get all my PII data entered, I get my ballot, fill it out, and pass it through a machine. The machine is in the corner of the building in a large box so I can't tell if it's hardwired to some network or using the wifi.

Later that day (about an hour later after re-entering my details into the Android tablet) I went to the Illinois voter registration web site to look up my name and I can find my details.

Anyone have any information on the tablet software? Who writes it? How it's transmitted and stored? What about the electronic ballot counting machines? Are the phoning home some where?

The whole setup seems sketchy to me.

As an aside: I know a couple people who have homes in different states and claim they can cast multiple votes by driving/flying to the state where they have 2nd home to cast a 2nd ballot.

some home appliances use this technology. I have a refrigerator that can you hold your phone next too during a support call whereby the refrigerator emits some tones that the support person can receive presumably into some computer program designed to decipher the tones as some error or diagnostic codes.

I'm old enough to know all about those old school modems. I think this is stuff is cool for those niche type applications.

Some email services will allow you to "fetch" mail from another service. For example, I think it's possible with gmail to configure it to log in periodically to your yahoo account and fetch the email.

I run a hosting business and our email stack supports this feature. We use a combination of open source technologies to transfer email like imapsync for the initial transfer and then use a glorified version of fetchmail in a cron job.

simply not true. refusing to talk removes the cop's ability to use what is said against you. Talking to them gives them ammunition. Don't take it from me. See what a lawyer and a cop both say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

yes, for sure, totally agree. Which reminds me of the number one rule - don't talk. Shut up and ask for your attorney. She got lucky and is a prime example of an exception to the norm as many of us know what that means. Again, don't talk to cops. She was foolish to consent to the search without a warrant.

"Christian’s old Subaru had to have its engine rebuilt two or three times over the course of about 330,000 miles."

Which is it? An engine rebuild is a significant cost and down time and he's not sure how many times it has been rebuilt? Makes me question the validity of the rest of the article's data when you don't know your own basic facts/history especially for is a major repair item.

agreed, excellent point I wish more people would take note of or recognize.

agreed.. I live by a motto that goes:

First, seek to understand and then seek to be understood.

Active listening definitely works for me!

let's get something straight here.

Linux sucks implies the is something you don't agree with about Linux which is a kernel.

Complaining about GNOME and CentOS are vastly different. Why not say GNOME sucks or CentOS's distribution sucks?

It does on the Ti Jacinto6. In fact there are two MMUs. Cortex-M4 MMUs are implementation specific. The Jacinto6 (aka J6) M4s are housed in what they call an IPU. Each IPU (2 of them) have 2 Cortex-M4 cores for a total of 4. Each IPU has an IPU MMU (called an AMMU) and they also can access memory through the L3 MMU; the same that the A15 cores of that chip use.

So when you say the Cortex-M4 does not have an MMU, you're categorically wrong because it can and does have one on Ti J6 chips.

umm, that's not true. Not all CPUs with MMUs have hardware support for memory based exception handling often the job of a MPU (memory protection unit). The ARM Cortex-M4 says it's optional [1] and as such Ti Jacinto6 processors don't implement it.

[1] http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....

yes, excellent point, agree. I run the scan regardless in case I'm dealing with the non-intelligent exploiter type ;)

100% agree. Disclaimer I own a data center and have dealt with customer collocated equipment breaches. In addition to the above steps:

-> disable root being able to login inside your sshd_config file. Make sure PermitRootLogin no

-> rename the root account too so if they are using an exploit based on user authentication then perhaps they won't be able to elevate to root.

-> disable password based logins and go to cert based auth. This will shutdown brute force attacks.

-> lower MaxAuthTries in sshd_config to something like 1 or 2 to help slow down attackers.

-> change the port you listen on. A little security through obscurity while not very effective might slow future casual port scanners that are testing a single port. In practice I've seen this really eliminate a lot of reconnaissance or farming type activities.

-> Make sure you're openssl and openssh are at the latest stable releases.

-> If the perp is coming from the same IP, you can use an iptables rule to block the netblock. Again, not perfect but may help slow things down.

-> grab shell history of all the user accounts on the box. Example ~/.bash_history. This is more reconnaissance but may be helpful if they are sloppy - you might see what they were doing on the box.

-> look for any modified files or new ones. Obviously logs will show up in the list but you're looking for things that should not be there. Example: find / * -mtime -60 -print where 60 is how many days ago you want to go back.

-> look at chron file to see if any timed delay bombs exist.

-> look at ps -aux output for any running processes that don't make sense

-> look at iptraf for any suspicious traffic to IPs you can't reconcile.

Good luck!

concerning to say the least considering every galaxy/Android phone I've owned backs up to google in such a seamless & effortless way. My wife backs up all our family photos to google. Google offers "Unlimited free storage" if you allow them to compress your photos.

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en

It's hard to convince people, like my wife, that putting a NAS appliance in the house and explaining how to use it would be better but stories like this help.

I'm the lead software architect at a major agricultural and construction equipment manufacturer. I deal with this stuff every day.

I'm not aware of any efforts to make collected data available but what I can say about the company I work for is that we largely view the data the farmer or operator's personal property. We don't transmit it back to any data center presently but we do have ways to copy the captured data off to a USB stick for post processing which a number of 3rd party precision farming applications are on the market to read it.

What I can say about the data is that it's voluminous. Our software collect all kinds of data besides just precision farming data. For example, CAN bus faults, GPS history (vehicle guidance), weather conditions (temperature, humidity), etc... And the way the data is collected follows no industry set standard - it's pretty much proprietary formats.

Also, much of our data collection is stored locally in a binary format to save space and improve performance. We have tools that move the data back to a flat file/text format for post processing.

I'm not involved with the 3rd parties that use the data but my guess is that someone has shared with them the formats and such.

I often wonder about the electronics of 1969 and what was done to mitigate radiation problems.

For instance, the type of memory was called core rope memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

For anyone interested, XPrize winner Karsten Becker talks to popular youtube blogger David Jones about radiation, extreme heat & cold in space and specifically talks about bit flip and how electronic parts are sourced for such endeavors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JwNmdV2QPs

Interesting to me was the "paper work" cited in the interview for space harden components. In other words, people are concerned with stuff falling back to Earth (wouldn't it burn up?) or used for not so friendly purposes (war).