Recent Posts

376

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 10 Announced

« Last post by f0dder on March 19, 2015, 02:48 PM »

So those of you who are thinking in terms of business and commercial uses, please understand Microsoft isn't going to be doing anything to get you there for free. This deal is for "makers" - or "tinkerers" as I like to think of them. The EULA can be found here. This part (highlighted) is where it's shows the restriction:

1. INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS.

a. Installation and Use.

·         You may install and test one copy of the software on your premises.

·         You may not test the software in a live operating environment unless Microsoft permits you to do so under another agreement.

b. Third Party Programs. The software contains third party programs.  The terms that come with those programs apply, unless otherwise stated in those terms.

 Strictly for dev testing. No live use.

-40hz (February 04, 2015, 07:01 PM)

Fair enough, IMHO - you can play with it for free, use it for hobby projects et cetera. Or you can use it while prototyping an idea - if it seems like you can monetize that idea, it's not really that unfair to pay for licenses

377

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2015, 11:07 AM »

Just finished The Psychopath Test, which was a nice read. Jon Ronson has an engaging and humorous writing style, without feeling crude or silly, given the somewhat serious topic.

Next up is Halting State, while I'm waiting for the paperback edition of The Rhesus Chart to become available. I have the rest of the laundry files in that format, so getting the hardcover edition would clash with the rest of series in the bookshelf

378

Living Room / Re: Once-in-a-century Pi Day 03/14/15

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2015, 10:47 AM »

Here's the pi-e p3lb0x and I did yesterday

379

Living Room / Re: 10th Anniversary - long time member check-in thread

« Last post by f0dder on March 15, 2015, 06:15 AM »

Hi!

So, ummm, I got a software developer job back in 2011, and after that it seemed like less fun doing hobby development. After having forgotten to check in at DC for a while due to real-life stuff, I guess it's been a nagging sense of guilt that has kept me away - including not having worked on fSekrit for far too long. That, and the overwhelming thought of "how the heck will I ever be able to read through the backlog of unread posts?". There's 103 pages of those, so that's about ~4100 posts. I think I'll skip catching up

Other than that, I've been thoroughly disillusioned with the opposite sex, and have given up the idea of a happy ever-after. Instead I've developed a serious relationship with World of Warcrack, which is a time-consuming polygamy of 8x level 100 toons (and counting). Yep, that game has also just had its 10-year anniversary.

Still got the job. After having worked for some 3 years with Adobe's crapjob AEM CMS system, I'm currently working on back-end integration stuff in Java on the JBOSS platform. I'm slowly reaching the conclusion that RedHat makes up version numbers by adding the various 0.x versions of alpha-quality software, but I guess that's what Open Source gives you... can't make the software too good, or you won't be able to make an income on supporting the hackjob :p

Using a shiny macbook for work now, but won't be switching away from Windows for my home workstation anytime soon. OSX is just too unstable and full of suckyness.

380

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: SecuSend - Software for secure file sharing.

« Last post by f0dder on June 13, 2013, 09:45 AM »

Decent idea, and looks like a user friendly interface.
Some questions:

What's TDEA? Another name for triple-DES? (And why include such an algorithm?)
Which mode is AES used in? (CBC, XTS, ...?)
Why MD5 for hash?
Which public-key algorithm is used, and which bitsize? Which PRNG, and how is it seeded?

Are both file contents and filenames encrypted? Is any compression involved?

381

Living Room / Re: Legitimate app breaks popular encryption - EFS, BitLocker, TrueCrypt ...

« Last post by f0dder on June 13, 2013, 09:34 AM »

Anyone ever come across THIS?

-pilgrim (June 13, 2013, 06:40 AM)

Not an all bad idea, but see 40Hz' post above - the xkcd post is somewhat controversial, but I agree with the gist of it.

Also, you can rule out a whole bunch of the symbols on the card, since (even when including non-alphanumeric characters) you don't wants passwords that are too short.

382

Living Room / Re: Legitimate app breaks popular encryption - EFS, BitLocker, TrueCrypt ...

« Last post by f0dder on June 13, 2013, 12:14 AM »

I wonder why all the funky-characters stuff ended up in this thread?

While it'll screw up dictionary-based attacks, FYI it will do nothing to mitigate against the attack originally posted about.

383

General Software Discussion / Re: Samsung device drivers failed to installed

« Last post by f0dder on June 07, 2013, 12:58 PM »

If it's an android phone, install MyPhoneExplorer Client on the phone (available through the appstore) and MyPhoneExplorer on your PC, and forget all about USB cables and drivers.

Be very careful with the MPE installer, though, as it wants to install crapware (and iirc the checkbox is of the double-negation type, so read carefully!). Haven't found anything that works better for managing my phone, so I'm still using it even though I frown at the crapware-bundling.

384

Finished Programs / Re: DONE: Sync folders by renaming files

« Last post by f0dder on June 05, 2013, 05:33 PM »

It's good to have a checksum option, but i just checked a couple hundred .jpgs and videos and couldn't find a single pair of files that were exactly the same size, even pix taken within seconds of each other. i do have lots of videos too, and i'm afraid checksums would take a long time.

-DyNama (June 03, 2013, 02:35 AM)

Unless you're going to check several gigabytes at a time, checksumming isn't too bad - even for several years old computers, the hashing speed will be I/O limited, even for hashes that are stronger than md5. A slightly sophisticated tool could hash source and destination files at the same time (given that they're on different physical media), which should be pretty fast.

OK, an USB2 enclosure will max out at ~25MB/s regardless of how fast the disk inside is, but even if you're processing a chunk of a couple of gigabytes, that's less than two minutes of extra processing, to be sure that things are going to be all in order. Two minutes might sound like a fair chunk of time, but how long is it going to take you to recreate the photos? - or, if nothing has been lost, just the time spent sorting out the mess?

385

General Software Discussion / Re: From the B.F.D. Dept. - Microsoft releases first video preview of Win 8.1

« Last post by f0dder on June 05, 2013, 05:15 PM »

At least my little crush is still alive...

-40hz (June 05, 2013, 04:51 PM)

Man, all those pesky bodyguards!

Back on track, another 'meh' on integrating Windows Search with ze intarwebs. I actually quite like how it works in Vista, Win7 and Win8... it works pretty well for finding 'easy' stuff on my machine. If I want webstuff, I'm gonna open a friggin' browser.

386

General Software Discussion / Re: From the B.F.D. Dept. - Microsoft releases first video preview of Win 8.1

« Last post by f0dder on June 05, 2013, 03:58 PM »

Distilled: 'meh'.

387

Living Room / Re: Google Reader gone

« Last post by f0dder on June 05, 2013, 12:27 PM »

I'm using Website Watcher - since I'm already using it to watch for changes on sites that don't have feeds, I might as well use it for feeds too. Works decently enough, even if it has a few quirks.

388

Living Room / Re: No way out? SecureBoot's latest wrinkle for non-Windows users.

« Last post by f0dder on June 03, 2013, 08:10 AM »

OK, that's what I thought, although I was hoping to take advantage of all the good things UEFI was supposed to bring to the table.  Whatevs. 

-Edvard (June 02, 2013, 09:00 PM)

UEFI doesn't mandate SecureBoot.

389

Living Room / Re: SSD's - How They Work Plus Tips

« Last post by f0dder on June 03, 2013, 07:48 AM »

SSD's ain't worth the risk.

-Tinman57 (June 02, 2013, 07:25 PM)

Oh, but they are - they definitely are. I'm not going back to HDDs for my OS+Applications drive. And you ought to have a working backup setup anyway, so...

390

Living Room / Re: SSD's - How They Work Plus Tips

« Last post by f0dder on June 02, 2013, 04:09 PM »

Whether the SSD breaks, or the controller breaks, BROKE IS BROKE!   

-Tinman57 (June 01, 2013, 05:08 PM)

Sure - but the distinction is important nonetheless; if the drives died from erase-cycle wear & tear, you'd have a decent idea when you could expect the drive to die... heck, you should be able to get a pretty precise idea from looking at SMART data. But when it's a firmware bug or a controller that fries without warning?

Isn't the controller built into the SSD?  Can the built-in controller be swapped out without having to send it to the factory?  Can you even find a replacement built-in controller?

-Tinman57 (June 01, 2013, 05:08 PM)

Probably not - here's a few snaps of my dead X25-E SSD.

391

General Software Discussion / Re: 2013 Version: Browser Wars

« Last post by f0dder on June 02, 2013, 04:05 PM »

FYI Nordea works just fine with standard FireFox as well as Chrome, so it's probably a Waterfox thing.

392

Post New Requests Here / Re: Patch to Disable ACL access-control-lists

« Last post by f0dder on June 02, 2013, 04:01 PM »

FAT32 performs better on smaller partitions.

-mraeryceos (June 02, 2013, 04:49 AM)

Quantify "performs better", please?

While ACLs and metadata journaling does "cost a bit", NTFS is a lot more efficient for file lookup than FAT is, and small files can have their content stored directly in the file's MFT record.

393

Living Room / Re: No way out? SecureBoot's latest wrinkle for non-Windows users.

« Last post by f0dder on June 02, 2013, 03:45 PM »

I know for a fact I will not be buying a pre-built machine, so the real question is, what can I expect when I put my install disc in the new computer I just built from parts?

-Edvard (June 01, 2013, 08:51 PM)

No problems whatsoever - and you don't need to enable SecureBoot if you don't feel like using it.

394

General Software Discussion / Re: 2013 Version: Browser Wars

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2013, 01:08 PM »

I can only visit my bank account via IE or Maxthon ("IE de Luxe")

-Curt (May 30, 2013, 11:52 AM)

In 2013? O_o - which bank is that?

395

Living Room / Re: No way out? SecureBoot's latest wrinkle for non-Windows users.

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2013, 07:32 AM »

Which Microsoft has anticipated and is now trying to proactively make as difficult as possible going forward.
 

-40hz (May 29, 2013, 08:38 PM)

Hm, "fast boot" being done deliberately to foil entering the firmware? That sounds a bit too tinfoil-hatty.

i8042 setup takes very, very, very, very, very, very, very little time. But if the built-in mouse/keyboard is really USB HID devices emulating i8042, the story is different.

396

Living Room / Re: SAP to bring in autistic workers as software testers and programmers

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2013, 07:25 AM »

Why is that different from what they did so far?

-Ath (May 21, 2013, 09:17 AM)

That was extremely offensive towards autistic people, Ath! - I would have written something witty about monkeys, but that'd have been offensive the poor monkeys as well

Interesting to see that it's 'Specialisterne' they're going to work with - they've got a pretty cool background story.

397

Post New Requests Here / Re: Patch to Disable ACL access-control-lists

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2013, 07:14 AM »

Ideally, the system efficiency would be improved because ACL does not exist in the registry or file system.

-mraeryceos (May 23, 2013, 12:41 AM)

I doubt you'd br able to measure any performance difference, as a lot of care has gone into optimizing & caching the ACL checks. And you wouldn't be able to get rid of the structures without some very heavy system modifications; patching AccessCheck() should be doable, though.

398

Living Room / Re: SSD's - How They Work Plus Tips

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2013, 07:10 AM »

From everything I've read, I think Mark0 is right in that most problems are down to faulty controllers/firmware.

-johnk (May 29, 2013, 08:47 AM)

That's my experience as well, from my limited sampling size (two SSDs of my own, and a friends).

You need to do your research and buy with care.

-johnk (May 29, 2013, 08:47 AM)

What's even more important is a solid backup plan. Even enterprise-grade drives fail without notice (my X25-E certainly did).


It's common for people who have switched to SSD to say that it's the biggest single performance improvement they have made to their computer. I'd agree with that. To me, any marginal increase in the risk of disk death is more than worth it. But of course I never encourage anyone to switch, because if you did and they subsequently lost any data...

PS: just upgraded my main PC from a 64GB SSD system disk to a 250GB SSD. I will move the 64GB disk to one of my other systems.

399

General Software Discussion / Re: Raymond.cc compares antivirus memory usage

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2013, 07:04 AM »

And that's something that damned few of 'em do at all, much less do well.  All they do is provide a false sense of security, letting folk think they can go anywhere and do anything on the Web with complete impunity.

-barney (May 29, 2013, 09:23 PM)

...Alternate line of thought: they protect you against drive-by attacks on legitimate but compromised sites. The mass-infection-drive-by attacks usually don't use the very latest 0-day exploits, but a truckload of slightly older exploits. Bleeding-edge exploits are normally used in very targeted attacks.

400

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Conflict with LibreOffice/OpenOffice

« Last post by f0dder on May 30, 2013, 06:59 AM »

In case the problem ends up being fixed, can you detail your changes, mouser? Might be suitable for ClipX as well