zorbo

> Initial appraisals are that public-facing systems are likely not subject to shellshock.

All the managers I know will stop reading after this, sit back and think "aaah, those silly techies. Worrying about nothing".

I gave exactly the opposite advice: We should assume every public and non-public facing system is vulnerable (many were). I'd rather cause a big stinky scare and be proven wrong than downplaying the issue and being proven wrong.. the hard way.

You probably had a good reason for saying this to your organisation, but it's not something that other people should blindly re-use for their own purposes.

> Just small additions like the following would help a lot: "[The X seconds] spent in fsync [seen in diagram A] accounts for almost exactly the delay we were seeing [in diagram B]".

Exactly. I try to always point to the actual data when I'm telling my readers my conclusions.

"Calls to futex, epoll_wait and select are largely the same on both systems. The problem host does 1727 calls to fsync(), while the normal host does only 849 calls. The problem host spends 1.24% of its time in fsync(). The normal host only 0.48%. This makes fsync() our number 1 suspect."

This at least lets the reader refer back to the output and see corresponding entries.

How can you write tests if you're familiar with what the code is supposed to do?

I don't agree or disagree, because I honestly have no idea, because I don't think I've been getting much official Russian media information. It don't think it's much different then it is over here in the west. People get their information from all over the place. I'm guessing there's national Russian media (which is state controlled, biased and in general not to be trusted), but there's also plenty of pro-russian international media, which is not bound by whatever the Russian government dictates.

So in short, I think (but am not sure) that the whole concept of "State controlled Russian media" is a fallacy. Even if there's an agency that's state controlled, it doesn't matter. It would be like Fox news being owned by the U.S. government.

> needless escalation, when part of Ukraine is occupied by Russia?

The occupation of Ukraine is something that's only happening as of just now. Before that, the situation in Ukraine was much more akin to a civil war. The escalations by the Ukrainian government have been happening since the beginning of this whole thing.

I'm in a position where I'm mostly exposed to non-western information regarding the situation in Ukraine, since my girlfriend is Russian.

It's funny to see the exact opposite story as the western media is giving. Stories about pro-russians being harassed by pro-western Urkainians and the government were (and are) abundant. From their point of view, a pro-russian government was illegitimately overthrown. General opinion seems to be that democracy only matters to the west as long as it's not too inconvenient to them. Constant allegations and sanctions against Russia while they feel they have very little influence on what pro-russians are doing in Ukraine. Mostly, it seems like there's a feeling of pro-russian sentiments being repressed, the west not giving a damn and Russia's hand being tied via international pressure.

Meanwhile, when I look at the western media, it honestly disgusts me. While pro-russian media generally seems to ignore a lot of stories that put them in a negative light, the western media seems to actively be painting pro-russian and Russia in a bad light. It's a general trend I've noticed in where western media is often on the offensive, and the "counter-party" on the defensive. I guess it's a cultural thing.

Regardless, the Ukrainian government has been making a fool of itself in both the western and eastern media. Since this whole thing started, they've done nothing but make unfounded allegations, trying to "poke the bear" (Russia) and instigate unrest. I feel that they're responsible for a large part of the needless escalation in this conflict.

PS: Your use of the word "propaganda" is an excellent example of how we view things. Everything the "other" side says is propaganda, anything "our" side says is necessarily the truth. This happens on both sides of the conflict, and I think it's a large barrier to actually start solving the problems. Rather than claiming "propaganda", we should consider it points-of-view, and the first thing we should do is ask ourselves: why does the other side hold this point of view, and how come they view it as a completely legitimate moral view to have?

PPS: My girlfriend is, at times, greatly distressed by this whole thing. Like many Russians, almost half her family is in fact Ukrainian. Surprisingly, this seems to cause feelings of sympathy for those family members by both sides, yet they remain quite harsh against other Ukrainian or Russian viewpoints.

I was more interested in your claim of "Life on Earth would become impossible". You've shown that there are reactors, and that there is a risk involved with having them. But the claim that a few earthquakes in some parts of the world would wipe out all life on earth seems so to me an exaggeration, and I consider that fear mongering.

Can you back that up with some numbers, or a source perhaps? Because that just sounds like fearmongering. We've already had two nuclear plant meltdowns, and life on earth is doing just fine.

There's a nuclear detonation simulator here: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Here's a link with the numbers plugged in: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l...

Arkansas would not be "wiped out".

While driving a car, I get stung in the neck by a bee. I freak out. I hit someone. It's unintentional, there's consequential failures. Yet it's not negligence by any definition I know.

Language is so hard. It's no wonder communication is the cause of most of your conflicts.

Someone driving in a car who's not paying attention for a moment and hits someone else feels like an accident to me. The same could have happened with a missile. Strictly speaking, everything has a cause. So by that definition there are no accidents.

That's all just arguing semantics though. I even agree with you that the term "accident" is not correct, despite what I wrote above. (Although I don't agree with your reasoning behind it). I'd prefer the term "incident".

> Clean water would become an issue first though. I don't know where the nearest lake or stream is

Under your feet. :)

Interesting. I only noticed now that shift-insert in Firefox doesn't use PRIMARY but CLIPBOARD. I'm so used to middle mouse button paste that I never noticed. This is probably due to Firefox not using a native graphical toolkit.

> Copy paste

Out of curiosity, what do you feel is bad about copy-pasting under linux? It's inconsistent, but it's still the best copy-paste functionality I've experienced so far on any operating system. It'd be nice if all applications understood the dual clipboard, and if terminal applications behaved a bit better, but still.. by far the best of any OS as far as I'm concerned.

Meanwhile we're stuck with price-fixing on books (by law) in the Netherlands which, IMHO, is a much much larger problem than the legality of reselling of e-books. And although that law doesn't apply to e-books, retailers so far haven't deviated from that norm, probably because it let's them line their pockets too. For any other industry such price-fixing would be considered illegal, but for some reason the publishing and media industries have been exempt.

It is possible to use brute-force via timing attacks to determine whether accounts exists on hosts, and then either focus different attacks on those accounts or spam them.

It is amazing how much this needs to be repeated, but security is not an absolute. Fail2ban adds another layer of security, thus it is a good thing.

It still doesn't belong on here.

Thank you. The story has been removed from the frontpage at least. Worth the downvotes if I've given attention to the 'flag' option to even a few people.

I think it'll "hold up in court", for certain definitions of "hold up" Judges are not stupid. No single piece of evidence is 100% reliable and enough to get a conviction. A MAC address will just be another piece of the puzzle. Judges will familiarize themselves with what they are and that they can be spoofed, and will take that into account when evaluating the evidence.

Can you point out those comments, because I see nothing of the kind? The only thing that comes even close is "Of course it's Texas I men where else would it be..." and that is obviously a jab at the unique way in which Texas deals with the law regarding all things IT.

I use a lot of terminal applications for mail, irc, music player, chat. Then there are always about 9 permanent terminals for generic local stuff such as setting up tunnels, man pages, socks proxy, a calculator, etc. Then I've got 9 terminals per remote location / project I'm working on. These are shells for file system navigation, grepping, reference, editor, a few database sessions, log file tailing. Then there are the random terminals opened for who knows what. I generally keep the terminals for projects I work on the most open all the time.

30 sounds like a lot, but really it's a very easy workflow process to follow if you've got virtual desktops. For instance, all persistent stuff (irc, music player, chat) lives on desktop 1. Mail, password manager, todo list on desktop 2. Browser on 3. Local terminals on 4. Remote terminals in tabs on 5, etc. I've been using the same workflow for years (going on decades). I can switch to nearly every window in two keystrokes, which never change.

These alternative shells always get me really excited, until I try them out. Then the drawbacks become immediately and very painfully obvious:

- Some are extremely slow, especially those that rely on complete webservers / node.js / whatever as a backend

- Memory-hungry. I've got an average of about 30 terminals open at all times. 50 Mb per terminal really is a bit too much. 10 Mb is the upper limit on what a single terminal should ever use.

- Don't work remote. If it doesn't work remotely without installation (and none do), it's pointless to me.

- Don't integrate properly. For instance, copy-pasting is suddenly painfully impossible or unicode fails or it doesn't handle ncurses or escape sequences properly.

- Doesn't add anything that the history and copy-pasting don't already do nearly perfectly.

- Doesn't follow the "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible" philosophy. For example, catting large (10mb) log files or a binary file completely barfs it.

I wonder if Xiki is any different, as I haven't tried it yet. It seems unwieldy to use. Why would I want to physically move the cursor to a previous command 50 lines up when I can just do Ctrl-R <part of the command> and be done with it?

This all sounds a bit negative, which isn't my intention. It's just that I've become quite a skeptic when it comes to "(email|shell|editor|etc) reinvented" claims.

> How can you blame a company for doing something they are legally compelled to do?

They're not legally compelled to take action on every request they get. It's just that it's too expensive to look at each request individually.

> is practically guaranteed to be set by the manufacturer at its optimal value

The optimal value for what? Speed? Performance? Comfort? Economics? I don't drive a car, but wouldn't trade-offs apply to car tuning just like it does to everything else?

Ever since the introduction of roundabouts, car-on-cyclist accidents have risen in the Netherlands. Why? Because when a car leaves the roundabout, it basically has to take an almost blind right turn, where it's very difficult to see a cyclist approaching from the side / behind. Just a few months ago I was hit by a car in this exact scenario. It happens about two to three times a week where a car will not spot me in time when it leaves the roundabout (I cross about 50 roundabouts a week). I know this, so I adjust my cycling speed at roundabouts to near-nothing.

I'm not convinced right on red doesn't pose a dangerous situation, even if cars come to a full stop first. In a right on red scenario, the bicyclist always approaches from behind, in the blind spot of the mirror. I'm not saying the right on red policy should be abolished, just as I don't want roundabouts to be abolished in the Netherlands (I love those things). Just that, as a cyclist, it's primarily your duty to ensure cars have seen you. Let's hope that as cycling increases in the U.S., motorists become more aware of cyclists in the street.

No, I've never heard of anyone having a dashcam in the Netherlands. I've also never heard of (liability) insurance companies not paying out. Jumping in front of a car in order to sue for damages is pointless here, since you cannot sue for emotional damages. Since insurance pays for physical damage only, there's simply no point in trying to commit fraud in that way.

As a Dutch person, I think the US has a long way to go, and these proposed bike paths won't really help all that much. I also feel that the US and the Netherlands can't be compared when it comes to biking. Some of the problems I see with biking in the U.S.

* The speed limit in residential zones in the Netherlands is always 50 km/h (31 mph). This doesn't seem to be the case in the U.S.

* Bicyclists are considered full first-class participants in traffic on the road in the Netherlands.

* We have no policy of allowing turning-on-right here. It seems like a dangerous thing to have if bicyclists are involved in traffic. These new bike lanes might help with this.

* In accidents involving both a car and a bicyclist, the burden of proof always lies with the driver of the car, not the bicyclist.

* Our cities are way, way smaller and arranged completely differently. Everything I need in daily life is within a 3 mile radius of my house. Convenience stores, clothes shops, electronics stores, restaurants, etc. I've never been to the U.S, but I wonder if that's the case over there.

I think the biggest problem the U.S has is that car drivers and law enforcement don't give a shit about bicyclists.

It also seems to me that the people who bike in the U.S. take it way to seriously. I could very well be wrong on this; I'm not intimately familiar with bike culture in the U.S., but to me it seems you all ride extremely fancy bikes, work up a sweat on each ride and change clothes and shower every time you hop on or off a bike. That seems like a huge effort, and if I had to do it every time I took my bike, I'd probably just say "screw this, I'll take the car". In comparison, when I commute to work, I just get on my cheap $200 bike (not the cheapest category either) in my work clothes and slowly paddle to work. If there are hills, which we don't get much in the Netherlands of course, or if there are strong head-winds, which we do get a lot, I simply paddle slower. I could be completely mistaken of course, so please do point that out, but biking in the U.S. seems like a very tiring experience.

edit Some more differences:

* Round-abouts in the Netherlands are everywhere. Bikes and pedestrians have the right of way on these. Stop-light intersections are annoying and are easily avoided in the Netherlands.

* Nearly every city center (the shopping zones) is car-free in the Netherlands.

* The roads in our cities are layed out completely differently. There are usually a few main roads with heavy car traffic and lots of smaller side roads for destination-specific traffic. These side roads are much less crowded, and less car-friendly. That means cars generally stay on the "doorgaand verkeer" (passing-through traffic) roads. These generally have separate bike paths. This works because cars and bikes don't have to intermix all the time on those roads, unlike the grid-like road system in U.S. cities.

I don't consider what happens in religion bullshit as defined by the article. I think this sums it up pretty well:

> The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are.

Especially that last sentence is relevant. I may personally consider most of religion to be nonsense or untrue, but its proponents at least are guided by some underlying "truth" (belief). Bullshit - again, as defined by the article - goes beyond that. It doesn't have to be true or false. It's just.. bullshit. The infamous "leverage synergy" phrase comes to mind. It doesn't even mean anything.

The whole Game Theory element the bitcoiners keep throwing around surprises me the most. It's not as in you can apply game theory like that in practice. It also assumes rational players. People are anything but rational. Game theory works in numbers, but not on an individual level like that. Besides, there are plenty of profitable avenues if you control 51%.

Ah yes, the old X is faster than Y pointless nonsense. Let's ask the basic questions that always come to mind:

- Does X do all or at least most that Y does?

- Are the benchmarks sane? I.e. not the pointless arithmetic fibonacci that nobody really uses, but the useful stuff such as regexps etc.