tacoman

The only technically interesting thing here is the lousy remote management setup BT seems to be using.

It's not mentioned in the article, but I'm not aware of a DSL provider in North America NOT using TR-69 to remotely manage the routers given to customers. To properly support customers, you simply need to use something that gives you remote admin capabilities.

"e.g. with remote access via a CPE backdoor, the local ethernet port on the CPE can be put into "promiscuous mode" and all ethernet frames on the local network snagged. Allowing, for example, the snooping of traffic to a networked local printer in an office."

I've actually done this, with the permission of the customer, to diagnose a problem inside the customer's home network. It was actually a badly broken printer killing the wifi.

I know it's not always possible, but if you don't trust the ISP in your home network, don't use the ISP's gear. I don't and I work for one.

Given how huge the mobile phone industry, it don't understand why some manufacturer* hasn't carved out a niche for keyboard phones. Since all the manufactures have arrived at the roughly the same form factor and spec, maybe we'll start to see one of them try something different again.

* Other than Blackberry. Despite being a BB10 user, I can understand why the general population isn't attracted to it.

“The lack of growth there comes from Twitter’s relative lack of innovation,” said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester who studies social media. “The experience on Twitter today is the same experience people have always had on Twitter.”

I don't need innovation, I just want it to work sensibly. I stopped using twitter on my phone because I found it distracting. I decided to try and use it on the web only, but there are two really big problems I see.

1. Each and every time I login, it doesn't remember where I left off, so I have to scroll down to about where I think I was and go from there.

2. Once in a while, I'll leave it open, then see the notification "xx new tweets." I then click on that and it takes me to the most recent tweet, not where I was in the timeline before I loaded all the new tweets.

I can't figure out if these are really big oversights or I'm not using it as it was intended. As it is, it certainly isn't a consistent experience with the mobile client.

Other than for altruistic or PR reasons, I'm not sure why they would.

Currently, they aren't preventing Tor users from reaching the web sites of their customers, they're just making it a little more difficult.

I would tend to agree with this overall. I'm a daily user of Tor for random browsing, but I use it on what is essentially a throw-away tablet using a Tor-only router.

e.g.

https://rednerd.com/2014/10/16/tor-transparent-proxy-on-a-gl...

https://rednerd.com/2013/12/07/portal-for-debian/

Using the TBB gives me the feeling of painting a giant target on my back.

I use Tor every day for random ordinary things, like looking up recipes or researching banal purchases. The responsiveness of the Tor network has improved dramatically in the last year.

It seems that the biggest threat to the Tor network right now, are web sites that treat Tor users differently. For example, Cloudflare is currently serving captchas to Tor users. It's an automated response based on reports of abuse from the exit node IP at some point in the past.

Some individual sites have been doing this for a while to tackle abuse problems, but for a service that handles as much internet traffic as Cloudflare does, this is not a good sign for Tor.

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/call-arms-helping-internet-...

Sure. For example I imagine you'll have some kind of 12v receptacle in the wall where you could plug in a computer or a lamp of some kind. Is there a standard for this type of thing?

What sort of plugs and connectors are you going to use for this?

CRI (or at least what's advertised) has really improved in the last year. It not difficult to find 90+ bulbs at places like Home Depot.

Wiping it actually increased responsiveness? I guess I'll give that a try.

I had the same experience. The devices is noticeably slower. I feel like I had no choice because of the potential security problems of staying on iOS 7.

e.g. https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/iOS+7+1+x+Exploit+Released...

There are a bunch of daemons running on a fully configured My Cloud. I haven't had much success in finding anything yet, but yeah, it has the bug.

  nas:~# bash --version | head -1
  GNU bash, version 4.2.37(1)-release (arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf)
  nas:~# uname -a
  Linux nas 3.2.26 #1 SMP Tue Jun 17 15:53:22 PDT 2014 wd-2.2-rel armv7l GNU/Linux
  nas:~# env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test"
  vulnerable
  this is a test

EDIT: formatting.

I don't really know much about this sort of thing. I assume that to the retailer that gets pwned, they get a few weeks or months of bad press then pass the cost of that breach on to future customers.

The "regular guy" in me thinks, "Meh, I'll probably ending up paying 5 cents more for light bulbs because of this. Oh well."

I feel bad for the sysadmin/security guys at these companies, probably screaming for budget and not getting it. What do you think they're doing now? Helping some high paid IR consultant restore logs from backups. Good times!

Blackberry 10 has this feature also for BBM and SMS. It's great.

This mirrors my experience pretty closely and I think is really good advice, especially the comment regarding RF performance. Dedicated APs (especially the Ubiquiti devices) seem to have far superior performance than anything I've ever built myself.

I ended up buying an APU1C to play with, but in the end that's all I'm doing with it.

I live in a newish neighbourhood. There were about 8 households that moved in within the same 2 months. One couple decided to have a get-together and put flyers in mailboxes (in January in Canada). 10 years later, some of the people I met that night have become my best friends. The folks that took the initiative are long gone, but what they did for the neighbourhood with that one leaflet has had a real impact.

Childcare is a thing people feel really strongly about and there is clearly no right answer. It's all about what's best for the kid(s).

"They need focused attention and the cognitive difference between kids that used childcare and had focused attention (at 2 years old) is very visible."

I think this is true for some kids, but not mine. My kids both started daycare at 13 months. The caregiver to child ratio was 1:2 until about 20 months, then it was 1:4.

My kids at 3 and 5 are more verbal and handle social situations better than any other kids I know. The have the ability to focus on tasks like no other kids I've spent any amount of time with. Maybe this is genetic or was a result of being home full time with their parents for the first year of their lives. (The norm in Canada)

We decided against a nanny because of what we saw in the neighbourhood. The nannies we saw were most of the time detached from the situation and not paying attention to the kids. The interactions were generally not positive. It was rather sad to see.

An accredited daycare on the other hand is staffed by professionals where non-positive interactions are not tolerated. Staff can take breaks and get help when they need it.

It took us a long time to find a daycare we like though.

We went through all this over the last few years with two kids and grandparents/family on the other side of the country. Both of us work full time and have the kids in daycare. I live in Canada though where a parent (mother or father) is given 12 months of leave after the birth of a child, so the first year is a lot less stressful than it could be.

If you're letting your house get dirty and the lawn grow wild it sounds like you're doing a good job or prioritizing things. It can be a tough thing to let go of, but anything not directly related to your health or paying bills can wait until you have more time.

"Life feels like one long, never ending to-do list where we can never perform well in any area of our life (work, being parents, home, etc), and we're both exhausted."

Yes, it's really fricken hard at times. There is no other way to put it. If you have family nearby, get as much help as you can from them.

This is cheesy and annoying advice, but live in the moment when you're with your kids. The days are loooong and the years are so short.

"the CTU research team provided the BGP evidence to the upstream ISP closest to the origin of the malicious activity."

I think this likely means it's a smaller ISP.

I started with Owncloud 6. I'm syncing about 300MB of files which are mostly text documents, scripts and various collected bits of stuff. It's only about 400 files altogether, but it changes quite a bit and the syncing has been flawless.

I'm one of those 15%. I have a first gen Intel MacMini that I bought in 2006. I've since put in a 64-bit Core 2 Duo CPU, SSD and 4GB of RAM. It runs everything perfectly, but 10.6.8 is the newest OS I can use. I'm pretty sure it's not getting security updates so I'm considering replacing it only because of that.

I think it can run 10.7 unofficially, but it requires a little bit of hacking.

For things related to security, risky.biz is very good and the production quality is very high.

Maybe food is more expensive in Canada, but my family of 4 never eats out and we spend $250-275/week. I cook most things from scratch and I buy mostly local or organic dairy and produce which costs me an extra 25-30% depending on the season.

This is great, my kids love the books.

I work for a cable tv-like operator. I get everything for free, including OTT content on tablets and stuff. My primary-school age kids only watch Netflix. They don't even know the brand name of the TV product I work on day to day.

Thankfully their grandparents don't know what a Netflix is, have no idea that almost everything can be had on demand, and continue to watch and pay for overpriced old-school linear content.

I was doing this sort of thing back in the 90's with a product called AbirNet SessionWall. Managers in the gov't department I worked for wanted to know how much time their employees where spending on the internet and what they were doing.

This is anecdotal of course but I can't imagine what were were doing back then was unique or isolated. It's trivial.

I couldn't agree more. The Ubiquiti wifi hardware is better than any of the SOHO (Linksys, Asus, etc) I've ever used. I've changed most of my friends and family to using Ubiquiti stuff and I never hear about wifi problems anymore. The Nanostation and Rocket product lines are what I usually get.

I put 4 Unifi's in a friend's large house and it the performance is great.

I have not, but in speaking with other people on my team, it has been mentioned as helping a lot. It's probably a lot more effective than a bunch of coffee.

I get about 8 hours a night following my week of sleep deprivation. I would probably try and get more but my problem is compounded by having young children.

There are many, many companies that provide customer-facing services that don't develop their own software in house and rely on vendors for all their systems. The TV services provided by telcos and cablecos are one example. Of all the "major" telcos in the world that provide a TV service, I only know of one that does anything in house.

I work primarily in operations on an entertainment service not too dissimilar from Netflix. Every couple of months I have pager duty for a week. I'm lucky to get 6 hours of consecutive sleep in a day. It seems to take a week to recover from it. Everyone I know who works in operations on services with similar availability requirements seems to have the same problem. It can be extremely difficult at times especially when you're under pressure to get something resolved and your cognitive abilities are shot.

There isn't much point to this comment I guess other than to say that yes, good sleep is very important and more important than people realize.