tacoman

I work for a boring company in Canada that requires significant IT skill and experience. The salaries at this company are decent. In the last ~6 years, I've lost coworkers to Cisco (2 people), Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yelp.

They're leaving for the experience of working for those companies, not the money.

The Passport running BB10 is best computerphone I've ever used. Hopefully BlackBerry continues to at least put out security updates until the hardware is close to obsolete.

This is so obviously true, I can't help but think I'm missing something. It's certainly not limited to the US. It's a world wide phenomenon and exists everywhere people aren't living a subsistence existence.

Everyone's bullshit is someone else's reason for existence. The product I work on is completely superfluous to my life, but over a million people pay for it including some of my coworkers.

I'm anti-cloud. e.g. I run my own mail server and do web hosting for fun. I have a poster of Snowden in my office.

But I signed up for Pocket because it does two things very well. It lets me send things to my Kobo e-reader via email and gets around pay-walled content. I don't recall ever seeing ads either.

I don't pay for the service because I don't need the for-pay features, but would in fact pay for the basic service if it wasn't free. I wouldn't even mind if they in turn payed NYT, New Yorker, etc for the content I'm getting.

I don't, but this basically sums up how I fell about these types of books. I think the answer though is to practise until it doesn't feel like a that.

Reading vulnerability and exploit analysis is (and always will be) a hobby of mine. Despite being someone that is fairly comfortable in a debugger, familiar with x86 assembly and has spent 2 decades troubleshooting complex software in large environments, the skill needed to pull off exploiting these vulnerabilities is incredible. When you take into account the work required to bypass somewhat recent developments like stack protection schemes, DEP, and ASLR, building the software to exploit these memory corruption problems is something you can spend your entire life failing at.

Sometimes, I have a hard enough time getting software to do what it's legitimately supposed to do, never mind something it's NOT supposed to do!

As a side note, there is are some folks that are pretty critical of Project Zero. The argument is that Google should be using these brilliant resources on creating defensive measures rather than playing whack-a-mole.

I don't know one way or the other, but I sure enjoy reading what they post on that blog.

Yeah, definitely. I have a few memories like this. I can very clearly remember seeing the Easter bunny when I was a kid. Obviously this never happened, but I can describe the scenario and what the human-sized rabbit looked like. Also, I have a memory of my brother which is logistically impossible for me to have.

These are just examples of things I realize aren't real memories because the situations were never possible.

I was recently talking to some coworkers about a problem we had about 3 years ago. We all had different accounts of some of the details, but we were all about equally certain about our recollection of events. After digging through some old email, it turns out only one of the four of us was right.

The fallibility of our memories is something I think most of us significantly underestimate.

I've been a a sysadmin for about 20 years. I currently work on a large system with about a million paying customers. I think I'm competent technically. Troubleshooting broken stuff is something I gravitate to and I've put a lot of effort into learning and developing processes for doing it effectively.

However, being able to "remain calm in the face of disaster" is something I struggle with to this day. I think I have gotten quite good at hiding it from my peers, but it's the one thing that sometimes makes me question my choice of career.

What follows the quote above is also very good advice.

Different people will adapt to handling crisis situations in different ways. Some will adopt the detached, analytical calm of a surgeon. Others will take a few deep breaths to calm themselves before digging in to analyze the problem. The ability to stay calm in the face of disaster is more important than the method by which calm is achieved. It will take practice to reach the point of reacting to a disaster calmly.

A family member works for a large chain of car dealerships. They regularly buy vehicles at auction. It's not uncommon that they find trackers on the vehicles. Here's a picture of one he sent me to play with a couple years ago.

The battery pack on the left, and the tracker on the right were in a magnetic Pelican case attached to the underside of a black Escalade. The sim in the tracker was from some US MVNO that I didn't recognize.

https://i.imgur.com/VLzTPt4.jpg

A friend of mine hired someone to gather data on his cheating wife. A device that looked similar to this was used on her car. $400 for a month of real-time location data. Maybe this has nothing to do with conference this person was attending.

I tried to setup a mailing list a few times. What I found out is that even though I live in neighbourhood where most people are white collar and sit at a computer all day long, a lot of people don't use email outside of work. Accountants, lawyers, engineers, various business analysts of different types - none of them use email other than to sign up for whatever social networks they use.

This is incredibly hard to do well and takes a great deal of discipline. Unless you're a Belgacom or Gemalto sysadmin, the consequences of cross-contamination aren't grave. It's easy enough to burn an identity and create a new one.

If I read this right, Canada's largest single export is cars (probably from GM Canada to GM America)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#mediaviewer/...

Russia is the Saudi Arabia with snow:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russia_Export_Treema...

Thinkpads have this sensor that is meant to protect the hard drive from sudden shock. I bet it could be used for something like that.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Active_Protection_System

Came here to say this. He's been the closest thing to a rockstar sysadmin for as long as I can remember and even before he taught the world how to use Dtrace.

I read this post a dozen times. As a sysadmin for a sizable ISP in a non-US/UK country, the Belgacom story has haunted me.

Is this the first time you've talked about it?

Yup, it is. I use this to control my HTPC. It works very well.

I stumbled upon this PAVP thing in an old Thinkpad just last week. My first thought after reading about it was basically this. Somewhere, some very talented software developers probably spent years working on this obscure, essentially useless thing.

I had a Laser computer with the same specs. Even slowed down to 8Mhz, some games that were meant for an XT weren't playable. I popped the cpu out of the socket and I've had it on my key chain since 1995.

https://i.imgur.com/qgjDzbm.png

"This seems like a good moment to reiterate that everything less than TLS 1.2 with an AEAD cipher suite is cryptographically broken."

So this means AES-GCM essentially?

Darn. I thought this said "a Quaint Job in France" and I clicked on it. I was disappointed.

This is a good summary of the problems with the x240.

http://senk9.wordpress.com/2014/02/21/lenovox220/

This seems high and would seem to amount to an ACK for almost every second downstream packet. Since I pcap ALL THE THINGS, I looked at some Netflix streaming sessions from a 3 different clients over a week.

Stream 1: 43MB down, 21KB up

Stream 2: 56MB down, 28KB up

Stream 3: 126MB down, 62KB up

That's using Wireshark to count the bytes in the TCP conversation.

I'm near sighted. My eyeglass prescription is about -6.5. Using either windows or linux, anything over about 105 dpi is too small and I need to get closer to the monitor than what is acceptable from an ergonomics stand point.

If I need to use something with a higher dpi for any length of time, I have crank up the font size which causes some problems in some applications.

Right now I use a 19" 1280x1024 and a 20" 1600x1200. A monitor like this would be great.

If I knew more about Colin Percival, I'd make a Colin Percival facts web site. e.g.

Colin Percival could crash the entire bitcoin economy with the amount of bitcoins he's accidentally mined in his head, while sleeping.

When I do the same exercise, it seems to come down to not much more than hard work. The more skilled and knowledgeable people are those that generally work hard and persevere through difficult challenges.

I'm a techie for life and work for Bigco (probably for life) and I see this sort of thing weekly. A decision comes down that is derided as stupid because "management is clueless" is often not because the people that made the decision understand this basic principle.

Ha ha, exactly. I've been there a couple of times and it really made me reflect on what I'd do when I had the time and energy again.

This caused me to reminisce about all the software that I've worked on and used. The vast majority of it is gone and completely irrelevant.

It is, however I find that sometimes I get a sore and after a couple hours of use and I have to switch to a mouse.