Remove An Garda Síochána Ireland’s National Police Service Virus

January 5th, 2013

Our friend the National Police Service Virus/Ransomware seems to have mutated, and removing it using the usual removal option listed below, seems to fail.

http://www.f-secure.com/en/web/labs_global/removal/removing-ransomware

One successful way of dealing with it is to use Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 (https://support.kaspersky.com/4131) as running Malwarebytes or F-Secure in Safe mode fails to work, there is no changes to the registry or the Start-up folders do not have the .ink files in there. Probably the best prevention technique for virsus is to run the systems in non administrative mode, preventing rouge installs of viruses.

 

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Passwords and passphrases

January 4th, 2013

People still seem to be using passwords instead of passphrases, and I’ve been getting calls from people telling the’re MSN or what ever was hacked, now you can test your password strength on Microsoft’s password checker (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/pc-security/password-checker.aspx) which is worth while if you don’t want your password cracked, and your account hacked.

 

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Shopping for a windows 8 machine

November 8th, 2012

Well we are in silly season, windows 8 has been launched, so Microsoft will be doing its best to get the product out there. So should we run to Windows 8, or should we shy away. I don’t believe a operating system gets good until at least Service Pack 1 is released, but if you want to jump in with two feet, here is whats coming out.

So what kind of machines are out their

Dell have the following

http://www.dell.com/us/p/d/campaigns/windows-8-consumer

So dell are selling us flip hinges, touch screens

 

HP are doing more less the same

http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/static/page-windows8

 

And PC world are selling everything Windows 8

http://www.pcworld.ie/aspx/Homepage.aspx

Prices seem to vary a lot, and the minimum requirements are low enough (below), but I expect this is bottom run of the lader, so you may have to spend to get good user experance.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/system-requirements

 

Windows 8 has been designed for touch, so all devices shoud have a touch screen to get the most out of it, but the question is was will physically work best.

Destops could be an intersting case in point, as holding you hand out and touching a screen while sittng down could get pretty tiring after a bit, anyone that has ever painted a wall will testify that its hard work. So will this compromise the path to least restance or in this case user adoption.

Or will the tablet take over as a  the new input device. What has to change to make this happen ? …. well processors will have to get quicker, as the physical swich is hard to replicate in terms of speed and feedback. In terms of data entry, I’m touch typing here, and this could be the major down fall of a tablet, as in it will be very hard to give the “feeling” of typing (haptic feedback), Blackberry tried this before with the Blackberry Curve, but this didn’t go so well for them.

 

 

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Googles Data Centers

October 22nd, 2012

So if your wondering what is inside Google’s Data centers, please see below. There’s a bit of PR and “saving the world” but it dose give an insite in to a data center.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/

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The college Laptop/back to school Laptop

October 3rd, 2012

So your back in college and you need a computer. So what to buy well it’s always a tough choice, but you don’t need to go into the thousands for a PC these days. the lower end laptop will do the job for most things, and the way to go here is low end.

  • Keyboards: if your buying a laptop be sure to try it out and type on it, and type a paragraph on it, cause if it’s a bad keyboard your stuck with it for 3-4 years.
  • Memory, go for as much memory as you can, Memory is not hard disk space, we’re looking here at on-board memory, it will be quoted like 4096MB which is More than enough if your running windows 7, also make sure you can expand it.
  • Hard drive space: Don’t worry about hard drive space 160GB will be enough for most people, if your into music and video, you can always get an external USB drive. USB if you can come across USB 3.0 on a system, then that’s a plus.
  • Screen size, rember the bigger the screen the more its going to cost to replace it if some one sits on it, of if it falls off the bed/desk or what ever!, a 17inch screen is going around €200 for a replacment, and its not an easy job.

The next thing is software:

  • Office software, well Microsoft office is the standard, but you can use open office or libre office, once you have made sure that you save everything as Microsoft file format and it will work fine.
  • Photo-shop is a standard but GIMP gives you all the functionality that most people need, it’s also open source.
  • The Zotero plug-in for Mozilla FireFox, is great for citations.
  • LYX is great for producing papers and Theseus, and is much better at handling documentation than word.
  • If your a publisher look at scribus, its open source desktop publishing system, you could always pay for quark.

Happy shopping, and don’t spend too much!

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We got to make the tubes bigger

September 14th, 2012

Ireland’s great broadband project, to empower the poor misfortunates out in the “sticks” that’s country to you or me, Is happening again, with another minister for communications present.It provides a great photo op for some nice people in the leafy suburbs of Dublin to give their country cousins cake, in this case let them eat 30Mbs.

So how are we going to eat 30Mbs? Or more to the point how are we going to make the 30Mbs cake:

we we could use:

LTE (telecommunication)

LTE Advanced – the successor to LTE

WiMAX – a competitor to LTE

HSPA+ -an enhancement of the 3GPP HSPA standard

 

and that’s just the wireless options

Or we could just learn from the South Koreans http://gigaom.com/broadband/south-korea-europe-rule-planet-broadband/ where they have a rate of over 17Mbs and have been at the top of the broadband charts for years, you should think about that when you connection fails or that movie that your are trying to download slows to a snails pace. So what do the Koreans use to make there broadband fast? well they use VDSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL), it runs over standard copper lines.

On the wireless side we should be also looking to Korea cause they have 100% wireless broadband in the country also (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57477593-94/south-korea-hits-100-mark-in-wireless-broadband/)

So why bother,well it seems to be a case of get with it or get out of it, looking at how Korea uses its technology in education, could be a simple justification for using broadband getting us to these high levels of Internet speeds, for example south Korea are moving away from paper based exams to electronic based exams, Sick children do not miss out on class, cause they can watch their teacher from their bed using IP TV (http://www.advancedtechnologykorea.com/8000).

But back to Ireland, so how are we going to do it, well if  you look at table 2 on the national broadband plan (http://www.dcenr.gov.ie/Communications/Communications+Policy/Next+Generation+Broadband/), you can see DSL flat lining after 2010, so it looks like nothing has happend there, and mobile has grown in a big way up to about 600k on a par with DSL at about 800k, so it looks like we’re going to have to go 50% wireless 50% fixed line…..but we want speed, and the only way to get speed is with Fibre, accross the pond Google are showing us the way with their Fibre role out in Kansas http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.ie/2012/09/building-180-fiberhoodsconstruction.html I think there may be a lesson here, Google haven’t used wireless, they are using Fiber, and the simple reason is that it’s faster, less complicated, and standardised, after all is been with us since 1966, so maybe it might be time to replace the phone cables throught out the country with optical cables!

 

 

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Banks and people, and databases in the sky!

July 5th, 2012

It seems we have another banking crisis, but this time it’s IT related, so what could be occurring at any of the said banks that are having these issues.

Well all these systems are interlinked, fail proofed and secured to the maximum……We hope! No bank will come out and tell you exactly what way they are doing this, or it will be hidden behind some PR brefing document.

So lets ponder what a typical bank set up might be:
well its going to be at the base level, storage, processing, and display

So lets have a look at storage:
We can presume that any bank would have a SAN or Storage Area network, this could be fiber or network, but these systems tend to be legacy based, so will probably be fiber. Their should be actually at least two sans, on as a mirror, so there would be fail-over. At a disk level there would be at least a RAID array (We would hope)and their would be a back up solution.

On the Processing side:
They could have a private cloud running vmware or Linux or M$ or some other cloud vendor, or they could be on plain hardware which hopefully would be on a cluster. These boxes would hopefully run Linux or M$.

Then we’re going to have some processing software, remember at all these systems core is a database that keeps your name, account number and the current balance in your account, that’s the main function of a bank. That would be fine if there was nothing else happening, and when you credited or withdrawn money form the bank, well then your current balance would be credited of debited, however the trouble is that when you have millions of these occurring, you then have a problem, or in some cases 20 million plus occurring, then if it goes wrong then you have a bigger problem.

The Display part, is simply putting the information on the screen, however if the information is wrong in the screen, well then you have a problem.

This seems to be whats happening at the moment, as shown in the regester:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/rbs_natwest_what_went_wrong/

But I just wonder about the people that may ask the questions at our enquires, what skill set will they have?, will they have the technical competency to know or understand even the basics of these systems?, I not aware of any member of the oireachtas, coming out and stating that they have a Degree in IT related discipline or having a Technical officer asking the questions that need to be asked.

Even looking at the committees list (http://www.oireachtas.ie/parliament/oireachtasbusiness/committees_list/) we don’t even have a mention of information technology, and I surpose I’m looking for it in the wrong place, but even so, I just wonder how tech competent the oireachtas members are?

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Even with Rabbits Ears mobile-phone phone reception may not be possible in rural Ireland in the future.

June 21st, 2012

Looking in Mondays (18/6/2012) examiner (Irish Examiner http://www.irishexaminer.com/archives/2012/0618/opinion/mobile-phones–send-the-right-signal-197733.html ) it seems that we may be seeing the start of a worrying trend.

ComReg our beloved communications regulator has failed to notice, that people do live in rural Ireland and not just in cities. The fact that some of our mobile phone licensing structures seem to now be wrote to allow operaters cover only 70% of the country.

It makes me think about how Marconi tested his wireless system in Clifden in 1907 and was able to receive signals all the way from America, but it seems with our communications regulator, the poor people in Clidften and other rural parts of Ireland may not be able to receive signals from some of our mobile-phone operators, if the mobile-phone operators invest in a 70% coverage license.

Even with if the “Rabbits ears” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rabbit-ears_dipole_antenna_with_UHF_loop_20090204.jpg) firmly tuned in, Reception will be impossible in rural Ireland if you live in the 30% of Ireland with out the opportunity to receive the mobile-phone signals, apparently in Dublin South West the signal will be picked up, as it is in the 70%. however. We do have three Mobile-phone operators that have 100% licenses, but is this the start of a slippery slope? Do Rural people need the market in Ireland distorted this way, so that if they are lucky they may only have one provider, if they have reception, and I’m sure people could find plenty of spots in Ireland where there is no mobile-phone reception currently.

I’m not the only “Crazy person” out there if your interested you might be worth having a read of http://irelandoffline.org/2012/06/comreg-and-70-population-coverage/ where they show a map of Ireland with 70% population coverage.

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Whats my new ultra book going to have?!

June 1st, 2012

Your next laptop, so Intel were at a little conference in Computex in Taipei, where the talk about there specks to the manufacturers, so the manufacturers know what to put around Intel’s chips. So looking at their ultra books, aka a mac book air look alike, there looking at some serious battery specks, and will be pushing 8 hours. It will have thunderbolt or USB 3.  Their also looking Windows 8 with touchscreens, so we are going to be treated to a number of technologies, and a step change in ultra-book/laptop technologies. so if anyone can wait to buy a laptop, now would be a good time to wait, it will probably take a year or so before these hit the main stream and have got through maturity stage of their product life cycle curve.

More info on

http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/31/intel-to-show-third-gen-ultrabooks-requires-usb-3-or-thunderbolt/

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LVM and USB drives

May 14th, 2012

I was in a computer store in San Francisco last week and a guy that ran an Architecture shop was in there trying to buy a NAS drive system, the poor guy never heard about LVM partitioning, so the sales man as per usual was just sealing the deal, but not giving him the full picture, I suppose being a sales man he was trying to have the “Quick sale” and not worry about the long term implications about selling such devices, and the best way to configure these devices. So as the sale was being made, I had a look at the box, and said to the guy to make sure to put LVM partitions on there, he and the sales man turned around a looked at me blank and said “whats LVM”, so I dindn’t want to get in to a explnation in to LVM, but I said google it, but I also said I give him a few links, so here they are below. So why is LVM so handy, Well picture the situation, you have disk that is full, or filling up and you need to make it bigger or worse you have a system that is configured to work with that disk set up an having to change the set up is going to be a serious problem, in terms of downtime and confiuration, I you use LVM partitions when setting up the disk in the first place you can add a disk to the filling up disk and make it look like on big disk that is really comprised off two or more physical disks.

 

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/40702/how-to-manage-and-use-lvm-logical-volume-management-in-ubuntu/

and

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/LVM-HOWTO/#initdisks

 

Posted in hardware, Partitioning, storage, windows | Comments Off on LVM and USB drives

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