Recent Comments

He's definitely right that the interface isn't as clear or user friendly as it could be, but I'm also new to ZFS, RAIDZ, and the like, so I'm learning too. I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending this to a non-tech person. But I'd rather have a not-fully-baked GUI on top of a powerful BSD system with ZFS, snapshots, rsync backups, and the like, over a great GUI for a NAS that doesn't have as much functionality. The FreeNAS plug-in architecture (it's run by ixsystems, the guys who do PC-BSD, which has the same architecture) is really pretty awesome. In two or three clicks you can install a jail and a sickbeard, plex, or bittorrent plug in and have it up and running. I've also got volumes exported under NFS and Appleshare and more. You get FTP access, full Root access, and more. I think it's the way to go. Just for now, you've got to do some reading and learning - the interface is definitely headed in the right direction but not quite there yet.

Gopher: content without the web's B.S.
Hi-Fi sets: you actually sat down in front of one and just listened to music

Reading my own post, I realize there is a common theme in the 2 technologies. Back in the day, content was king. Nowadays, content is just background noise. The mindless and fragmentary way we consume it reveals that it's completely devalued.

This is a great article on RAIDZ, maybe one of the best I've seen. I'm still trying to get my arms around ZFS and figure out all its advantages. What a clever file system. Still puzzling my way through this article.

Why would I run IPMI on a public network? If work needs done remotely, that's what VPNs, etc. are for. Not only that, they shouldn't even be accessible to any user (or even super user) on any computer (desktop, server, phone, etc.) that doesn't have direct access to the IPMI network. There's a damn good reason why IPMI usually runs on it's own nic. To me, it's the holy grail of hacking targets so of course it's either locked down tight by dividing it into it's own network with strictly guarded access or it's disabled. There should never be any in-between.

That review had quite an axe to grind against the new FreeNAS interface, among other things. Have you found it annoying or troublesome?

Their descriptions of difficulties in doing relatively simple things (AD/LDAP) had me thinking that the OpenMediaVault, mentioned in the commments, might be a better way to go. Only tradeoff might be going from ZFS to BTRFS.

Since cleaning up the original code and then crapping on the suite, the Mozilla Foundation has accomplished so little over a decade that it's scary.

Most software, proprietary or open-source falls into this boat as well. Software advancement has crawled to a sandstill in the past few years.

You can't oppose equal rights for certain minorities and not be "anti-[minority]".

If someone thinks black people should have separate water fountains, do you think they can still not be considered a bigot?

Snowden? Wasn't he the guy who spilled his guts to Yossarian?

The third joke is that this was CBC, not CBS, and it's "American" media only in a specific sense which is not the way that word is usually used.

Interesting (and I wish I'd seen this earlier). I'm absolutely, definitely running FreeBSD on RockVPS, but I just checked their page and it indeed seems they're not advertising it (it used to be right up front). Wonder if it has to do with some recent change of theirs that required me to change IP address and move my image to some new hardware? I'll have to look into alternatives.

Thanks for linking to that Ars article comparing the two NAS systems. I hadn't seen it and it's a good article. I just bought and set up a FreeNAS on ixSystems hardware. It was expensive but I don't regret it - the machine has tons of RAM and high bandwidth network cards and it runs at less than 35W, which is good enough for me. I'm still figuring out all the goodness of ZFS and the different plugins but despite my learning curve, it's at its heart a solid FreeBSD system I have full, root access to, and no worries that some crazy script is mining bitcoin on my hardware.

i agree. its nice to see the effort; i've always felt the bsd's took a"you'll find us when you're ready" approach, which is double-edged in that many stay with linux or other 'introductory' systems (no baiting intented) due to the knowledge gap

I run OpenBSD; it always just made more sense to me overall than the others. and has great documentation, and clean code styling - its easy to dig into the source to see whats going on with minimal programming experience

i'm not entirely sure the best method for posting these - since their format already covers content from other sites, should i continue to link the individual content referenced (& cite?), or just provide an overview and links to the current BSDNow episode page (thus consolidation of links, if any of them were to change post episode release)

furthermore, what kind of bsd fanbase does pipedot have atm? zafiro seems interested, anybody else? perhaps if more interest is shown and more articles, we could get a new topic that covers BSD or unix variants

ill post these as i have time/remember to : )

Also, NASes are more likely to run 24/24 than normal Windows PCs that the user will often switch off periodically (or will crash periodically :->).

Easy to hack
They open several common ports
and some do not update

Free ride!


How can the average user tell what their nas exposes on the net?

my guess is that its a better target than windows due to lack of scrutiny - windows gets much attention on the virus/malware front, and thus the likelyhood of it being found sooner (plus heuristics - it only has to look like its mining or being sketchy to get flagged, even if it hasnt been seen or previously identified in the wild.) Perfect example being that nobody noticed anything except slow device speed - this could have gone undetected for years if the hacker were more careful. security through obscurity, right?

theres also a chance they bet that the synology team were not capable of noticing, diagnosing or fixing the malware. many devices these days get rare-to-nil firmware updates, even fewer people ensure they are actually applied, and its a beautiful hole to your internal network for other uses.

Couldn't he have made far more using malware on traditional Windows PCs? Easy to infect, goes undetected for long periods, stupider users, etc.? NASes seem a pretty obscure and limited target.

I see a lot of Windows infections but haven'tnoticed any that do mining. Most still seem to be spam botnets and password stealers.

This would explain why the Seagate GoFlex is so crap..

Brick & Mortar, or Brick Your Mobile?

Thanks AC. I meant to pick up on that eerie coincidence myself.

Friends? I'm an anonymous poster on an obscure tech board. I have no friends. :)

Yeah but freshmeat was both usable and useful. When they went web2, rewrote it in ruby and rebranded as freecode... what the hell was that about?

Freecode is a pointless site that nobody will miss. There probably still is a place for something like freshmeat... Bryan?

So, if you "borow" other people's computers for cryptocoin mining, make sure to set the processes to run at a lower priority as to not affect the system's legitimate users.

Now if you could only hide their electric bill and somehow silence the squealing little fans that come on most of those little NAS boxes...

[...] tells me I'm living in strange new times indeed. A home network-storage appliance used over the Internet to create wealth out of nothing but electricity running some decryption code. These are concepts that just didn't even exist a short time ago.

this comment makes me think of the discussion earlier on AI, foreboding that AI will be able to create weapons we've never thought of or understand - although this was an individual hacker, its not a far reach that someday, AI could figure out that it could make money via these methods; or worse crowd-source it's own intellegence behind developers/scientists backs (exponential growth)...

going to be an interesting future when you need to code defensively against humans and machines (who, btw speak the native language....oh shit...)

No, it's happening to me too, and the blocking/overlay advert at the bottom of the page is frankly unforgivable, in my opinion. I really detest it.

Yay us! Please spread the word to your friends. Unless your friends are dorks, in which case, spread the word to your smart friends' friends instead :)

From: http://www.benzinga.com/news/14/06/4647356/underlying-tech-and-pricing-concerns-scorch-amazons-fire-phone

Assuming the purchase of the recommended 1GB Plan for the 32GB Fire phone, and not including taxes and additional fees, the cost for the phone equals $199.00 + ($65.00 x 24 months) + $99.00 for 1 year of prime membership (using the current promotion of one year free) = $1858.00.

The joke is that CBS took two serious things, made a ridiculous connection between them, added a terminator graphic, and made an ignorant, alarmist topic out of it. The second joke is that this qualifies as news in American mainstream media.

Is it really? Using Terminator as a source when talking about AI?

We haven't even come close to making truly intelligent machines yet. That's like some skinny dude saying he wants to work out but "doesn't want to be ripped". We don't have anywhere near the skill or knowledge required to make machine that could even begin to be a threat to us. Hell, we don't even really know what we're looking for; there is no consensus on what makes our brains so special that we are "intelligent" while our machines just follow instructions. They're basically all brute forcing the problems that are presented to them, with clever tricks being programmed in by humans to reduce the parameter space on hard problems. Ugh...

Is it me or is Hawking getting increasingly more alarmist as time goes on? In the past few years, he's warned us about nuclear war, aliens, machines... What's next? Bees? Should we be afraid of bees? Are they plotting to overthrow us? What time is it on the "Bee overthrow doomsday clock"? I must know!

This subject finally turned up on Slashdot today, and the discussion there to date is DREADFUL. The quality and intelligence of the comments here is far greater on this subject.

This has NOT usually been the case with other "cross posted" stories, and I'm glad to see it start happening.

While on the subject of /., is anopne else having their ad prefs ignored? They have added ads (bottom of page, top of comments), in addition to the header and sidebar. Now, I can recheck my ad prefs and they just all dont go away. Sometimes none do. At home I now surf with adblock on /. because of this. At work and on my mobile devices I have not gone so far yet.

I guess I am wondering if this is across the board or only 'random users' like beta. The do seem to be constantly givving me mod points.. maybe an attempt at compensation for the ads?

Wow - disappointing and totally inadvertent. I wrote the Pipedot poll without being aware of the Slashdot poll, which I now see ran earlier. Wonder if I was remembering it subconsciously, or if it's just an obvious question with obvious answer-choices? Anyway, rest assured it's just an unfortunate coincidence, not plagiarism, and it's certainly not an effort to just siphon content from the green site to here.

If you have any poll ideas, join the pipedot mailing list and send them in, please. The more the merrier.

Given the quality of reporting at places like CBS and CNN these days, there is reason to believe AI already exists, and is intentionally dumbing us down by feeding us a steady diet of Kim Kardashian articles, weight loss tips, and vapid sit-com programming. We may not have yet created artificial intelligence, but as far as I can tell, real intelligence is quickly fading. At least in America.

Wasn't that what WebOS was supposed to be? Wasn't that what iOS 1.0 was supposed to be?

Will no one learn this lesson without repeating the same mistakes first? Or is it Different This Time?

i'd start world takeover by changing wikipedia entries, and removing knowledge from the internet. then i'd take to comment systems like this one, and start to convince people one-by-one (or technically all at once) that the AI takeover is the best thing for them. No knowledge is No Power.

-Kim Jong-ai

You're right - fixed.

Agree. Also, the price is reasonable. The NYT offers quality reading, but their prices are very high. Almost unreasonably high.

Yeah, I agree. There are so many existing products out there - what could they be looking for that doesn't already exist? Disqus is perfectly reasonable for most purposes, for example.

Secondly, was this some sort of open tender that the Mozilla guys competed for and won on the strength of their proposal?

Hey, Brian! How does it feel to write code worth $3.9 Million in 1/6 the time?

As is per what I've come to expect from the NYT and Washington Post, they are lacking the details I am interested in. When a commenting system gets large enough, you either get group think or mass censorship to force opinion conformity. How are they going to solve that problem? Since they have a time estimate and a cost, they should have an answer.

The biggest security flaw in Android for me is the lack of user controlled fine granular permissions control. Fix that first, perhaps?

Wikipedia needs a lot of work before it is ready for prime time. The only wiki software I know of which comes close is Confluence.

I see a market for device that can detect the presence of these Amazon phones. The customers will be brick & mortar stores that don't want to let this camera-phone-cross-shopping-app into the store.

well, heres to hoping this closure cost Dice dearly


-i also noticed that the article links to http://www.freecode.com, which seems to 404, whereas http://freecode.com still shows the frozen site

Seems it would be easy to hire interns at $10/hr to moderate the comments on a newspaper's web site in real time, and also maybe contribute youth-oriented content (entertainment and restaurant reviews, etc) on the side.

sounds like an abuse of the grant money, at minimum waste - that could have been used to contribute and support journalism in so many other ways....the only result i see that could come of of this will essentially be fast, computer-assisted censorship:

• they still aren't going to be able to moderate every single comment (uphill battle)
• and the number of comments by volume will only grow with time, including proportionally trolls and spammers;

i really think its likely that a machine will end up deciding if you're comment is worth of anyone elses viewing or not. this progress journalism how?

am I just not understanding this?

Ugh... They are the same poll - just on a different site.
https://pipedot.org/poll/16/as-a-result-of-recent-snowden-etc-security-revelations-i-am
http://slashdot.org/poll/2755/in-the-year-since-snowdens-revelations-

LWN being Linux Weekly News.

I like the approach taken by LWN. Offer a subscription (starting at $3.50 per month) for full access to all articles. Once an article is over 2 weeks old, allow access to everyone.

If they can replicate Wikipedia and get good quality contributors for free, they can finally fire everyone they want and more than recoup the investment. Why they wouldn't do that via a download of Wiki code and a $100K consulting contract is beyond me too.

For 4 millions and 2 years, it will have to be muuuuch better than the dozens of existing systems. I lack imagination so I fail to see what great improvements can be brought to a system that fondamentally relies on the quality of what is posted. I fail to see how it may change the fact that most people commenting on newspapers websites cannot read and understand the articles, cannot spell and write coherent ideas, and/or continuously spam with their political obsessions, not caring how unrelated to the topic they are.