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On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 09:30:56 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
> FAT32 can go up to 2TB with 512b sectors and 16TB with 4k sectors. There
> are lots of utilities that will allow you to format a disk >16GB with
> FAT32, but Windows insists on allowing only NTFS for anything greater
> than 16GB.
>
> So it is indeed Microsoft adopting a "Father knows best" attitude.
FAT32 is MS' filesystem, so they get to decide what features to support.
Like many companies, they probably want the older stuff to go away, and
this is one way of making that happen.
Supporting old and outdated technology is expensive, and even a company
as large as Microsoft has to watch what their operating expenses are.
> And, yes I want to complain about it, when the only way to recover a
> $150,000 network appliance is by booting a recovery utility off a USB
> device to reinstall the OS on the appliance itself.
That sounds like the fault of the network appliance manufacturer, not the
company that makes your desktop OS.
> Of course, this is one of the things you find out at 2am, when the only
> thing you have lying around is a 512GB external drive and 3 levels of
> management are looking over your shoulder, wondering if you're serious
> when you tell them you need a DOS 6.0 bootable floppy to run the
> BootitNG toolkit to reformat the drive.
I don't see how that's MS' fault, either, though. Sure, it's
inconvenient to learn this when you're in a crisis, but you can't blame
them for the time it became apparent to you, whether it was at 2AM in a
DR situation or in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday when you had
nothing going on.
Jim
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On 9/4/2013 11:28 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> Now....
>
> Suppose we take out the measures that prevent the non-standard behaviour
> that you're trying to use. Does the number of botnets /increase/ because
> there's a new option? Perhaps it does - so then it could be argued that
> those limitations are helpful (just like anti-murder/speeding laws have
> some utility, even if they don't prevent 100% of violations).
>
> Jim
>
Bad examples, all of them. This is more like the "drug war" or the
constant attempts to curtail "theft of music", which leads to totally
useless bs, no actual progress on the real problem, or idiotic rules,
like the recent, "It should be illegal to stream music you own.", never
mind things like some ISPs blocking bittorrent traffic. The solution to
the problem isn't to prevent supposedly "unusual" usages, its to do
something about the actual illegal ones. And, if your blocking
completely **fails** to do the later, then, you know.. its just possible
that the law is just adding to the problems, not correcting the problem.
It was a really poor, stopgap, solution, put in place because they
couldn't fix their own security. They, in effect, built a wall around
the city, because they couldn't figure out how to keep the thieves out
in the first place. That isn't law, its paranoia, and behind bars is
still "jail", even if the bars are, supposedly, keeping things out.
Only, they don't even do that, laughably, the whole point is, "If the
thief gets in, lets trap them inside the walls, with us, so they can't
terrorize any other towns." Kind of insane, if you think about it...
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On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 15:56:42 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Bad examples, all of them.
I'm not surprised you think so, because they undercut your assertion. I
happen to think they're pretty good examples because they reflect the
reality of the computing environments I've had to deal with in my life.
But what do I know - I only started as a systems admin about 20 years ago
and worked with technology for most of my life.
But I'll indulge in further discussion.
> This is more like the "drug war" or the
> constant attempts to curtail "theft of music", which leads to totally
> useless bs, no actual progress on the real problem, or idiotic rules,
> like the recent, "It should be illegal to stream music you own.", never
> mind things like some ISPs blocking bittorrent traffic. The solution to
> the problem isn't to prevent supposedly "unusual" usages, its to do
> something about the actual illegal ones.
Such as what, exactly? Got a better idea? Because I'm sure those who
work on operating systems would love to hear your wisdom on this, since
you clearly have superior knowledge to those who, you know, /actually/
work on this stuff for a living.
> And, if your blocking
> completely **fails** to do the later, then, you know.. its just possible
> that the law is just adding to the problems, not correcting the problem.
So how would you correct the problem?
> It was a really poor, stopgap, solution, put in place because they
> couldn't fix their own security. They, in effect, built a wall around
> the city, because they couldn't figure out how to keep the thieves out
> in the first place.
So what are your ideas for keeping the thieves out in the first place?
> That isn't law, its paranoia, and behind bars is
> still "jail", even if the bars are, supposedly, keeping things out.
> Only, they don't even do that, laughably, the whole point is, "If the
> thief gets in, lets trap them inside the walls, with us, so they can't
> terrorize any other towns." Kind of insane, if you think about it...
Maybe it is, but I'm not hearing any actual ideas of how to accomplish
the goal. If you're going to say that the way anyone's doing the job is
inadequate or unworkable, you must have a better idea. So share it.
Maybe you could make a fortune productizing it and selling it.
Jim
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Le 2013-09-05 12:36, Jim Henderson a écrit :
> On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 09:35:45 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>
>> If you remember, a few months ago, I was ranting about a very expensive
>> commercial network monitoring software suite that specifically mentioned
>> NOT using spaces in directory names for exactly that reason.
>>
>> Unfortunately the Windows port of that software suite is installed under
>> C:\Program files, so they require that the disk have short file names
>> enabled, so that they can use C:\PROGRA~1 instead.
>
> I don't see how that's an OS issue, though.
>
Never said it was an os issue.
> How's the shell supposed to know if you mean a space in a filename or a
> space between parameters unless you tell it which you mean?
>
100% Agreed. It's Patrick who was complaining that CMD.EXE still had
problems with that and I simply said that *nix shells weren't any better.
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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Le 2013-09-05 12:41, Jim Henderson a écrit :
> On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 09:30:56 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>
>> FAT32 can go up to 2TB with 512b sectors and 16TB with 4k sectors. There
>> are lots of utilities that will allow you to format a disk >16GB with
>> FAT32, but Windows insists on allowing only NTFS for anything greater
>> than 16GB.
>>
>> So it is indeed Microsoft adopting a "Father knows best" attitude.
>
> FAT32 is MS' filesystem, so they get to decide what features to support.
> Like many companies, they probably want the older stuff to go away, and
> this is one way of making that happen.
>
> Supporting old and outdated technology is expensive, and even a company
> as large as Microsoft has to watch what their operating expenses are.
>
Where are they saving money? The code to fdisk a drive with FAT32 is
still there in the code. In fact, they had to write even more code to
check the size of the disk before deciding if they would make FAT32 one
of the available formats.
>> And, yes I want to complain about it, when the only way to recover a
>> $150,000 network appliance is by booting a recovery utility off a USB
>> device to reinstall the OS on the appliance itself.
>
> That sounds like the fault of the network appliance manufacturer, not the
> company that makes your desktop OS.
>
Not just this network appliance vendor. for example, every camera maker
uses high capacity SD and XD cards that are formatted with FAT32, and
most of the newer ones are 16GB or more. There will be a lot of pissed
off users when they realize that the card they formatted in their laptop
is unreadable in their camera because Windows said, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm
afraid I can't do that."
All I'm saying is that for various reasons, people MAY need to use
FAT32, despite the fact that Daddy Microsoft doesn't like it. And as I
said, the code is already there in windows, why not let the user use it?
Which was the original topic: Microsoft not letting users do things
they should be able to do.
As for this particular instance, it's no longer an issue. My employer
has forced all of us off Windows and onto OSX or Linux, for security
reasons, and I have no problem formatting disks there.
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
/* @ */{P(0,a)P(a,b)P(b,c)P(2*a,2*b)P(2*b,b+c)P(b+c,<2,3>)
/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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On Fri, 06 Sep 2013 08:48:07 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
> Le 2013-09-05 12:41, Jim Henderson a écrit :
>> On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 09:30:56 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>>
>>> FAT32 can go up to 2TB with 512b sectors and 16TB with 4k sectors.
>>> There are lots of utilities that will allow you to format a disk >16GB
>>> with FAT32, but Windows insists on allowing only NTFS for anything
>>> greater than 16GB.
>>>
>>> So it is indeed Microsoft adopting a "Father knows best" attitude.
>>
>> FAT32 is MS' filesystem, so they get to decide what features to
>> support. Like many companies, they probably want the older stuff to go
>> away, and this is one way of making that happen.
>>
>> Supporting old and outdated technology is expensive, and even a company
>> as large as Microsoft has to watch what their operating expenses are.
>>
>>
> Where are they saving money? The code to fdisk a drive with FAT32 is
> still there in the code. In fact, they had to write even more code to
> check the size of the disk before deciding if they would make FAT32 one
> of the available formats.
I would guess that they need fewer staff to support fat32, fewer
developers to maintain it, fewer testers to test it, etc. It all adds up.
>>> And, yes I want to complain about it, when the only way to recover a
>>> $150,000 network appliance is by booting a recovery utility off a USB
>>> device to reinstall the OS on the appliance itself.
>>
>> That sounds like the fault of the network appliance manufacturer, not
>> the company that makes your desktop OS.
>>
>>
> Not just this network appliance vendor. for example, every camera maker
> uses high capacity SD and XD cards that are formatted with FAT32, and
> most of the newer ones are 16GB or more. There will be a lot of pissed
> off users when they realize that the card they formatted in their laptop
> is unreadable in their camera because Windows said, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm
> afraid I can't do that."
"will be"? High capacity SD cards have been around for a while.
> All I'm saying is that for various reasons, people MAY need to use
> FAT32, despite the fact that Daddy Microsoft doesn't like it. And as I
> said, the code is already there in windows, why not let the user use it?
>
> Which was the original topic: Microsoft not letting users do things
> they should be able to do.
It's not a question of "letting" users do things, it's a question of
making a financial decision to go a particular way. They must not see a
lot of profit in "fixing" this, because if they did, you can be sure that
as a business that wants to make money, they'd be on it if there was
money to be made in it.
> As for this particular instance, it's no longer an issue. My employer
> has forced all of us off Windows and onto OSX or Linux, for security
> reasons, and I have no problem formatting disks there.
See? Problem solved. :)
Jim
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Le 2013-09-06 11:50, Jim Henderson a écrit :
> On Fri, 06 Sep 2013 08:48:07 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>
>> Le 2013-09-05 12:41, Jim Henderson a écrit :
>>> On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 09:30:56 -0400, Francois Labreque wrote:
>>>
>>>> FAT32 can go up to 2TB with 512b sectors and 16TB with 4k sectors.
>>>> There are lots of utilities that will allow you to format a disk >16GB
>>>> with FAT32, but Windows insists on allowing only NTFS for anything
>>>> greater than 16GB.
>>>>
>>>> So it is indeed Microsoft adopting a "Father knows best" attitude.
>>>
>>> FAT32 is MS' filesystem, so they get to decide what features to
>>> support. Like many companies, they probably want the older stuff to go
>>> away, and this is one way of making that happen.
>>>
>>> Supporting old and outdated technology is expensive, and even a company
>>> as large as Microsoft has to watch what their operating expenses are.
>>>
>>>
>> Where are they saving money? The code to fdisk a drive with FAT32 is
>> still there in the code. In fact, they had to write even more code to
>> check the size of the disk before deciding if they would make FAT32 one
>> of the available formats.
>
> I would guess that they need fewer staff to support fat32, fewer
> developers to maintain it, fewer testers to test it, etc. It all adds up.
>
Why would they need fewer people to support FAT32 by arbitrarily
limiting the size of the drives you can use it on to 1/1000th of its
full potential?
> It's not a question of "letting" users do things, it's a question of
> making a financial decision to go a particular way. They must not see a
> lot of profit in "fixing" this, because if they did, you can be sure that
> as a business that wants to make money, they'd be on it if there was
> money to be made in it.
>
>> As for this particular instance, it's no longer an issue. My employer
>> has forced all of us off Windows and onto OSX or Linux, for security
>> reasons, and I have no problem formatting disks there.
>
> See? Problem solved. :)
>
Probably not in the way MS expected, though.
--
/*Francois Labreque*/#local a=x+y;#local b=x+a;#local c=a+b;#macro P(F//
/* flabreque */L)polygon{5,F,F+z,L+z,L,F pigment{rgb 9}}#end union
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/* gmail.com */}camera{orthographic location<6,1.25,-6>look_at a }
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On 9/5/2013 4:20 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 15:56:42 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>> Bad examples, all of them.
>
> I'm not surprised you think so, because they undercut your assertion. I
> happen to think they're pretty good examples because they reflect the
> reality of the computing environments I've had to deal with in my life.
> But what do I know - I only started as a systems admin about 20 years ago
> and worked with technology for most of my life.
>
> But I'll indulge in further discussion.
>
I consider them all bad examples because, in terms of computing, they
imply that a penny jar is "illegal", on the grounds that taking penny
from it is theft, since taking it from the cash register drawer is. This
is a complete absurdity, from the first word.
>> This is more like the "drug war" or the
>> constant attempts to curtail "theft of music", which leads to totally
>> useless bs, no actual progress on the real problem, or idiotic rules,
>> like the recent, "It should be illegal to stream music you own.", never
>> mind things like some ISPs blocking bittorrent traffic. The solution to
>> the problem isn't to prevent supposedly "unusual" usages, its to do
>> something about the actual illegal ones.
>
> Such as what, exactly? Got a better idea? Because I'm sure those who
> work on operating systems would love to hear your wisdom on this, since
> you clearly have superior knowledge to those who, you know, /actually/
> work on this stuff for a living.
>
Ur.. I would presume "security". See, the way I see it, this measure
they took wasn't to improve security at all, it was to damn up gaps in a
wall, so they thieves couldn't get out, while still letting them in
through the front gate.
Personally, with computers as they are now, I don't see a reasonable
argument why "small" programs, of the size that you get botnets out of,
couldn't run in a VM, by default, and have to be "allowed" into the
wider system, if you actually need them to do something. It minimum, it
would curtail most of the problem, since the only reason these things
get installed in the first place is because they "install" as part of an
non-legit process, from some fool running things they shouldn't. They
don't generally a) do anything else, or b) do what they claim to, in
some cases, or c) get attached to anything more complex than, say, a
flash video. They don't general have an impact no *nix systems, due to
the simple fact that you can't even run something like that on them,
even if they where an executable, without knowing how to enable them to
run in the first place.
That would, imho, be a damn good start on it. MS didn't want to fix
their core problem, so they came up with one that "broke" existing
functionality, probably even for more than just that class of
applications, then, 10+ years later they "finally" fixed some of the
actual security.
That said, security, it seems, is a total joke anyway. Read the latest
Snowden leaks? Seems, as usually, the NSA has been pressuring congress
to basically "legalize" what they have already been doing all along:
publishing encryption, custom built, with "master keys", which can be
used to decrypt ANYTHING that uses US government approved encryption,
which means, just to make things even funnier, *everyone*, world wide,
is compromised, including pretty much anything China uses (never mind
pretty much the entire western world, and anyone, at all, without their
own IT, who buys their stuff from the US, or anyone else using the same
'US Federal government approved' encryption systems. Most, including
just about everyone writing about how to use them, has no idea they
where compromised, from day one, in the papers describing them.
So, I would say another good argument might be, "Why the F do I care if
someone 'might' install a botnet on the machine, due to the vast lack of
security to stop someone accidentally doing so, if all someone that
wants to frack me over has to do is figure out what the magic numbers
are, which the NSA keeps hidden? Sigh...
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Francois Labreque <fla### [at] videotron ca> wrote:
> >> Where are they saving money? The code to fdisk a drive with FAT32 is
> >> still there in the code. In fact, they had to write even more code to
> >> check the size of the disk before deciding if they would make FAT32 one
> >> of the available formats.
> >
> > I would guess that they need fewer staff to support fat32, fewer
> > developers to maintain it, fewer testers to test it, etc. It all adds up.
> >
> Why would they need fewer people to support FAT32 by arbitrarily
> limiting the size of the drives you can use it on to 1/1000th of its
> full potential?
Is there a reason why someone would want to use FAT32 instead of eg. NTFS?
FAT32 is significantly slower than NTFS with some operations. (For example,
defragmenting a large FAT32 partition can take over 24 hours, while the
exact same partition with the exact same data as NTFS takes something
like 15 minutes to defragment.)
--
- Warp
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On Fri, 06 Sep 2013 20:35:10 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> On 9/5/2013 4:20 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Thu, 05 Sep 2013 15:56:42 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>
>>> Bad examples, all of them.
>>
>> I'm not surprised you think so, because they undercut your assertion.
>> I happen to think they're pretty good examples because they reflect the
>> reality of the computing environments I've had to deal with in my life.
>> But what do I know - I only started as a systems admin about 20 years
>> ago and worked with technology for most of my life.
>>
>> But I'll indulge in further discussion.
>>
> I consider them all bad examples because, in terms of computing, they
> imply that a penny jar is "illegal", on the grounds that taking penny
> from it is theft, since taking it from the cash register drawer is. This
> is a complete absurdity, from the first word.
So again, how would you distinguish - technologically - between a "valid"
odd request and a malicious one?
>> Such as what, exactly? Got a better idea? Because I'm sure those who
>> work on operating systems would love to hear your wisdom on this, since
>> you clearly have superior knowledge to those who, you know, /actually/
>> work on this stuff for a living.
>>
> Ur.. I would presume "security". See, the way I see it, this measure
> they took wasn't to improve security at all, it was to damn up gaps in a
> wall, so they thieves couldn't get out, while still letting them in
> through the front gate.
That's not a specific implementation, Patrick. Try again. You want to
say that the current system sucks, fine - but propose something better.
Dont' just say "security" as if that's a magic bullet. That's not
something specific to be implemented, it's a concept. You're smarter
than that.
> Personally, with computers as they are now, I don't see a reasonable
> argument why "small" programs, of the size that you get botnets out of,
> couldn't run in a VM, by default, and have to be "allowed" into the
> wider system, if you actually need them to do something. It minimum, it
> would curtail most of the problem, since the only reason these things
> get installed in the first place is because they "install" as part of an
> non-legit process, from some fool running things they shouldn't. They
> don't generally a) do anything else, or b) do what they claim to, in
> some cases, or c) get attached to anything more complex than, say, a
> flash video. They don't general have an impact no *nix systems, due to
> the simple fact that you can't even run something like that on them,
> even if they where an executable, without knowing how to enable them to
> run in the first place.
>
> That would, imho, be a damn good start on it. MS didn't want to fix
> their core problem, so they came up with one that "broke" existing
> functionality, probably even for more than just that class of
> applications, then, 10+ years later they "finally" fixed some of the
> actual security.
Technological implementation details, Patrick. Those are important. Not
general "just do it" type BS language. How do you tell if a "small"
program is a botnet or just a simple CLI utility (as is typical in the
*nix world) that does a specific task?
What is the specific threshold for a "small" program? Again, you're not
talking in specific technological steps that can be implemented, you're
talking in broad generalities, which are actually not implementation
plans or things that can be coded.
Show me the language that lets you code up:
if (program is not valid)
reject program's request to open a port (or whatever)
else
let program run without a problem
> So, I would say another good argument might be, "Why the F do I care if
> someone 'might' install a botnet on the machine, due to the vast lack of
> security to stop someone accidentally doing so, if all someone that
> wants to frack me over has to do is figure out what the magic numbers
> are, which the NSA keeps hidden? Sigh...
You might not care, but I can tell you that people who run a 'net
connection that has a monthly usage cap would certainly give a damn if
their computer started chatting with a bot network without their
knowledge. People understand when they have to pay penalties because
their ISP has decided they're only allowed, say, 300 MB per month on
their plan (I know someone in Spain with that limitation).
You're not making any practical suggestions at all, which just suggests
to me that you don't understand what you're talking about when it comes
to technology.
Because yeah, "security" - that's the specific and detailed answer you've
provided. Except it's not specific, and it certainly isn't detailed.
Jim
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