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Comment: IP address AND the power switch (Score 1) 101

by billstewart (#46492837) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Management Interface On an IT Appliance?

You've got to set an IP address somehow. Typing a MAC address into your DHCP server isn't a cool way to do it, and you need an address that you know from the outside, not just an address the device can use to talk to servers it already knows about.

The equipment I've been using recently added a front-panel LCD/pushbutton mechanism that lets you set the IP address; previous versions of the hardware required you to either log in with an RS232 console that got a shell prompt or else use a VGA monitor and keyboard (and stupidly, the default on some versions of it required you to use the VGA/keyboard to tell the device to use the serial console.)

And while almost all the rest of the administration gets done using a web GUI, the system (which ran a custom Linux) didn't have an X server, so you typically needed to bring a VGA monitor and keyboard AND a laptop; the current versions let you do a bit more from CLI, so that's slightly less annoying.

But if you want to reimage the box (which you have to do for major version upgrades), ALMOST all of the steps can be done via the serial console. Except for the one step in the middle, where the box remembers its IP address settings but forgets that you were using a serial console instead of VGA, so you still need to have a technician onsite with a VGA, instead of being able to use a modem.

Comment: "Out of Print" may still be in electronic form (Score 1) 74

by billstewart (#46492369) Attached to: Why Are There More Old Songs On iTunes Than Old eBooks?

Lots of books are out of print that were printed since the publishing industry went to digital production systems. That fiction book that's more than a year old and wasn't selling well? It's not coming out on dead trees again, but they've got it in Word. Older books may be in older formats, but even if they're proprietary formats, extracting the text (for books without pictures) isn't that hard.

It's a problem with publishing rights and contracts and publishers' predictions about profitability.

And even with books that require scanning, Dover Books did surprisingly good business for years selling fuzzy images of out-of-copyright books; these days it wouldn't be too hard to OCR and reimage most of them, but alternatively bits are cheap enough these days that they could be available in image formats instead of OCR.

Comment: Harald Bluetooth, he dead (Score 1) 432

by billstewart (#46485001) Attached to: Lies Programmers Tell Themselves

Bluetooth is dead - Netcraft\\\\\\\
I've seen his tomb - he's buried in Roskilde Cathedral. It's about 30km west of Copenhagen, but you can get there with the Copenhagen city transit pass, and don't need to burn a trip on your railpass. Good museum of Viking ships there, which they'd found sunk in the harbor.

Comment: My cats know when I'm up to something. (Score 2) 62

by billstewart (#46452595) Attached to: Study: Elephants Have Learned To Tell Certain Languages Apart

Sure, they're nowhere near as smart as elephants, but my cats generally know when I'm up to something, whether that's something that could be used to talk me into giving them treats, or something that might get them locked up into the bathroom and maybe shoved in a box and taken to the vet. One of my cats is better at figuring out treats, and usually pretty dumb about being herded somewhere, while the other one's better at figuring out potential bad stuff, but most cats have at least some clue.

Comment: Snowden revealed metadata about NSA (Score 1) 116

by billstewart (#46452581) Attached to: SXSW: Edward Snowden Swipes At NSA

Metadata about you is unimportant and can be obtained by an NSA/FBI/DEA/police/dog-catcher letter saying "please".

Metadata about the NSA is CLASSIFIED NATIONAL SECURITY NOFORN BURN-BEFORE-READING SOURCES AND METHODS that COULD TELL TERRORISTS HOW TO KILL YOUR MAMA and needs to be protected from anybody untrusted, like you, or journalists, or the American public, or the Congresscritters that set their budget.

It's really not that hard, citizen!

Comment: Blog cred, and easier than Arduino (Score 2) 70

RPi already comes with an ethernet port on it, and you don't have to bitbang USB like you would for the standard Arduinos (though there are libraries like V-USB that'll do that for you), and the CPU's a lot faster so you don't have to optimize crypto libraries yourself.) And you can easily attach a keyboard to it for inputting passphrases instead of using the PC, which is critical for doing the security right.

This is an application where you don't need a lot of speed - if it takes a second to cough up a password, that's fine, so you don't need a $3 hardware crypto chip to go with the $1 ARM CPU, though of course you certainly could make a much cheaper piece of ARM hardware if you wanted.

Comment: Words are MUCH less secure than random chars (Score 2) 70

English words average between 1-2 bits per character. 10 random characters may be good for 80 bits if you can really use 2^8 values, or maybe 65 bits if you're only choosing randomly over 92 values per character, but if you choose actual words for your password, it's a lot less. The OED has about 200K words (~18 bits), so you get maybe 20-24 bits depending on word endings, l33t-spellings, capitalization variants, combinations of short words, etc.

128 bits is theoretically sort of secure today, as long as it's used in ways that aren't susceptible to birthday attacks (probably not an issue here), and as long as there's enough real entropy used to generate those bits. Even that's a realistic problem here - are you going to remember a passphrase that has 8-10 random words from the OED? Or are you going to have to keep them written on a yellow sticky note in your office, or dogear the pages in your dictionary that have words highlighted in 7 different colors so you know what order they're in?

Comment: Salaries are public records (Score 1) 235

by billstewart (#46438437) Attached to: Facebook To Pay City $200K-a-Year For a Neighborhood Cop

You can look them up; I saw them in the local newspaper a few years ago. I don't remember what the grunt officers made, but the police chiefs in Palo Alto and Mountain View make about $300K (and I think even the second most expensive cops were over $200K.) And that's in a town where almost all the crime is white collar.

On the other hand, Facebook's closer to East Palo Alto, which is across the county line from Palo Alto, and is the town where the poor people were allowed to live back when there was racial segregation.

Comment: Actually cheap for Palo Alto (Score 1) 235

by billstewart (#46438431) Attached to: Facebook To Pay City $200K-a-Year For a Neighborhood Cop

Not only is there the cost for insurance and pensions, and equipment like police cars, but also 1/N the cost of their boss, and 1/N**2 the cost of their boss's boss.
And if you look up the salaries of Palo Alto employees (which are public record), you'll find that cops in Silicon Valley get paid a lot; I think the police chief makes $300K (which probably includes benefits), but I may be mixing that up with Mountain View's police chief. And yes, these are towns where almost all the crime is white collar. I doubt Menlo Park is cheaper.

Comment: Radio Shacks in Silicon Valley (Score 1) 423

by billstewart (#46406051) Attached to: RadioShack To Close 1,100 Stores

I started playing with Arduinos a couple of years ago (no, not "before it was cool", but before Radio Shack started carrying them ;-) While I've gotten many of the parts I use off the Internet, or at Fry's, it's been really convenient to be able to go to the neighborhood Radio Shack and pick up a couple of components (e.g., when I need some more resistors, or when I just fried the last green LED.) They all have a couple feet of cabinets with drawers full of components. Yeah, they cost more than Fry's, but the gas for driving an extra 5 miles will get you lots of green LEDs.

(Of course, it's much more interesting to get components at Hal-Ted or Weird Stuff, but that's a much different market.)

Comment: Army may be downsizing, War Machine not (Score 1) 506

by billstewart (#46365133) Attached to: US War Machine Downsizing?

No, lifehacksaur111, this doesn't mean that the military-industrial complex is being dismantled or that the war machine is being downsized. It just means that the military understands that they aren't going to be able to get enough budget to pay for both the important stuff (pork-barrel military-industrial-complex spending) and having lots of soldiers around needing pay, housing, and medical care, so they're prioritizing how they'll spend the money.

And if later they need more soldiers for cannon-fodder in a large war, they'll see about cranking up a draft or something, but for now they don't want to lose the pork barrel.
