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Media in concerted racist christianphobic rant

I’ve just been listening to a DUP representative being given a hard time on Radio 4’s Today program over his religious views. How could May work with these bigots?

Actually, their views are taken direct from the Christian Bible, and somewhat watered down at that. Yet their religious convictions are considered fair game.

Compare and contrast the media treatment of politicians from other religions, which can basically be summarized as deferential respect.

So the Bible comes out strongly against abortion, homosexuality and a lot of stuff that modern society considers perfectly acceptable. The people are entitled to vote for representatives holding whatever views they like, and in Northern Ireland these views are mainstream. The Catholic church uses the same Bible, and Mohammedans have similar rules written down. The media says nothing to them.

Sadiq Khan, socialist mayor of London, happens to be a Muslim. This doesn’t appear to have bothered the people who elected him, but does seem of concern to some people. However, his religion-inspired views are unknown because they’re off-limits to the media. Personally, I doubt I’d have a problem with them although I find non-scientific views in general problematic. However, neither I nor his critics have ever even heard them. By not questioning everyone to the same standard the media leaves the public to draw conclusions that may be wholly unjustified.

But the BBC sees fit to attack representatives of one group and question their beliefs.

And spare a thought for poor Tim Farron, Christian leader of the Liberal Democrats. The media was obsessed with asking him if homosexuality was a sin. Of course it’s a sin; it says it’s a sin in the Bible. So are a lot of other things, like feeling jealous of someone. If you follow Christian teaching, everyone’s a sinner (baby), including homosexuals. So what? This line of questioning was very unfair indeed, as non-Christians would have a completely different understanding of the answer. And I’d hazard a guess that most Christians don’t understand their religion that well either.

Now I’m not against questioning religious beliefs. But it has to be ALL religious beliefs. If people wish to elect representatives who are also guided by a particular religion that’s their right; it’s how our democracy works. But unequal treatment of religions by the media cannot be allowed.

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Why May did badly (and Corbyn did well)

There’s a lot of soul-searching going on as to why so many people voted for Crobyn’s Labour instead of Mrs “Strong and Stable” May

It’s not that hard, and neither was it unexpected outside the Westminster/Media echo chamber. And it wasn’t because May hacked off the elderly by appearing to raid their savings to pay for care that’s give to others for nothing, although it really didn’t help.

Neither was it because May is perceived boring in a superficial celebrity world.

It’s because Corbyn offered to give people free money and they believed him. People like free money.

There was an age-based split in the voting. A lot of young people, who haven’t lived through the false promise of socialism, have no reason to question the reality of what is being proposed. (And Blair’s government wasn’t socialist).

So, tell young people they’ll be let off paying university tuition fees and they’ll love you. Even better, refund fees already paid and even more people, and their parents, will love you.

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Policies like nationalising the railways play well to anyone under the age of 50. If you’re older than this you’ll know just what a mess British Rail was and would never want a return to the bad old days (unless you’re a Rail Union).

But to young people, quick fixes and free money are always going to be a vote winner. As the population ages towards 2022 and more of those with long memories have dropped off their perch, the balance may well tip.

Labour, in order to be a credible opposition, needs to do something about this. Most Labour MP’s know the score, which is why they were so distraught when Corbyn became their leader. (At least I hope it was this rather than concern for their re-electability). If they can’t, the Conservatives need to learn how to fight fire with fire. And they need better leadership.

Higher Education doesn’t need more subsidy, it needs major reform; we’re failing or children by putting them through inappropriate degrees and charging them for it. The academic world is complicit as there are a lot of people making a good living at their expense, paid for by the young people who believe it’s the thing they need to do.

The UK has five years to get it’s politics in order or we’re all in trouble. I told you so.

Update:

You couldn’t make this up. Everyone in the country heard Labour say they’d scrap tuition fees and write off student loans. Now Corbyn is claiming he only said he’d “look at the problem”. ‘sfunny, but that’s not the impression he gave. Everyone from Twitter to those I met on the doorstep were really excited about the prospect of free money. Labour activists were repeating it ad-nauseum. Did the leadership do anything to prevent this lie from spreading? I don’t remember a word being said.

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Trump 1, LePen 0, Corbyn ? How to succeed in politics with cynicism.

This is going to appear after the polls have closed in the general election, but before the results. The Conservatives have had a disastrous campaign, by assuming that if Corbyn was a fool then no one would vote for him. I’ve been saying for years that this is a really stupid assumption. I hope my predictions prove wrong.

In the meantime, watching the disaster that is Trump unfold, I’ve been really struck with the parallels he has with Corbyn.

  1. Both have privileged backgrounds, and have achieved their place in life following a leg-up.
  2. Both have cultivated an image that puts them outside the political establishment.
  3. Both speak plainly in words that a simpleton can understand.
  4. Both tell people what they want to hear.
  5. Both have no particular difficulty with telling lies.
  6. Both whip up hatred for the mob against particular sections of society likely to oppose them.
  7. Both are clearly not great thinkers.
  8. Both are hated by their MPs/Representatives so have nothing to temper their excess.
  9. Both were elected by party members, not MPs/Congressmen. They were the activist people’s choices.
  10. No one believed either could possibly get the nomination or get the top job, and they were regarded as a joke.

Following this simple formula, you can probably get enough people to vote for you – those who feel hard done by (especially if you keep on telling them they are). Trump told the workers that he was going to bring back jobs and build a wall. Corbyn told young people he was going to give them money from the magic tree. Trump blamed foreigners. Corbyn blamed rich people (a bit rich given his background),

As I said back in 2015, Corbyn could win in the right circumstances. This is if people are fed up. They voted for Ken Livingstone because they were fed up with the establishment and wanted to cause maximum annoyance. He made a career out of spouting rubbish, which added to his appeal.

The economy has done well under the Conservatives, seeing off the nightmare scenario. However, Theresa May is gaff prone.  She clearly has some silly ideas, one of which is that she’s in touch. Some people seem to like her; I’m not a fan.

Could the British public be as foolish as the Americans? The French voted for anyone but LePen; will Britain vote for anyone but Corbyn? Or will they blindly believe he can deliver these impossible promises because they really want to believe them, and put reason and arithmetic to one side.

I really hope I’ve been wrong all along.

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ESXi, NFS, ZFS and vfs.nfsd.async

So there I was, reading the source code to FreeBSD’s nfsd (as you do), trying to figure out why ESXi’s performance was so bad when used with an NFS datastore in a ZFS dataset. Actually, I had some idea. There’s a lot out there on the interweb about whether it’s safe to tweak it to ignore requests to flush the write cache using the sysctl tunable vfs.zfs.cache_flush_disable. (For what it’s worth, I’d say that if your drives are on a UPS it’s fine).

But why does ESXis suck so badly in this respect with NFS connected datastores? What is this excessive cache flushing all about? I decided to install it on an HP Microserver and get to some serious debugging.

Okay, here is how ZFS writes work. When you write something it doesn’t actually write, it puts it in the ZIL. This is an Intent Log – i.e. writes intended to happen.  Not exactly a write cache, but it has the same effect, and because of the way ZFS works it’s perfectly safe for avoiding data corruption. If a transaction is waiting in the ZIL when the music stops, the transaction is lots but the disk isn’t trashed. (NB. It’s also possible to put a ZIL on a log drive rather than RAM – I won’t discuss this here).

This should speed things up, right? Normally it does, but not when NFS is being abused. Let me explain. NFS has a transaction commit instruction. The client can tell NFS to flush everything in a transaction to permanent storage and not return until it’s finished. Sometimes you really need this, like if you’re updating the super-block in a database structure. Most of the time you don’t.

Enter ESXi running brain-dead Windows guest machines. How does it know when they’re writing something it isn’t a super-block? It doesn’t. So its solution (as far as I can tell) is to send NFS a commit after every single write and hang around waiting until it’s done it. There’s no point in having the ZIL at all, as it needs to be flushed every time. Putting the ZIL on disk is even worse, as you get an extra write/read for each transaction. I’ve seen people trying to put fast SSDs on the system to try and overcome this – best of luck with that.

As you move further down the chain, FreeBSD, being POSIX compliant whenever possible, will pass on the request for a synchronous write all the way to the disk. Send a block to a SATA or SAS drive and it will initially be cached, right? The write will then complete and the data actually written in the background while the rest of the system zips along. Except that it then issues a SATA or SAS “flush cache” command and waits until everything in its cache has been committed.

In tests this paranoid behaviour lead to running at 20% throughput or less.

Now, if you’re backing an emulated Windows disk you’re always at risk of data corruption, because FAT and NTFS are corruptable. And, dare I say it, crash rather too often. Let’s face it, if you’re worried about stuff like that you wouldn’t be running Windows – never mind as a VM, So lets be sensible about it.

So why was I reading the nfsd code? Well the obvious answer to this performance problem would be to simply ignore NTFS commit commands coming from the client. This is better than killing off all synchronous writes using the tunable vfs.zfs.cache_flush_disable because ZFS itself might be updating its uberblock and have a valid reason for doing it.

My plan was to hack the code – I’ve seen this done elsewhere. But wanting to do things properly I thought I should make it a system tunable. So I took a look at where the synchronous writes were happening – vdev_disk.c and vdev_geom.c (depending on whether you were hitting the raw drive or the GEOM). Lo and behold there was a global called nfs_sync that was compared along with the SYNC flag, and if either were true the sync request was ignored.  So where did nfs_async come from? Digging further back it comes from nfs_nfsdserv.c , where it’s set by a system tuneable – vfs.nfsd.async. Now that’s an interesting name! Follow the stable auto variable in nfsrvd_write() and the nfs_async global if you want to see what I’m on about.

A quick Google for vfs.nfsd.async revealed – nothing. I seem to have found another useful tunable that’s yet to be documented. although it’s been in the source since at least 10.0. So I’ll get on to documenting after I’ve done a few more tests.

But if you’re having Windows/NFS problems, especially with ESXi, try setting  vfs.nfsd.async instead of crudely disabling cache flushing with vfs.zfs.cache_flush_disable. Let me know how you get on.

Incidentally, you can disable synchronous writes to a dataset using the “sync=disabled” ZFS option. It helps, but not much. I’m still digging to find out why.
Or you could just use Virtualbox instead.

 

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NHS not exactly target of “cyber-attack”

The Security and Intelligence Committee takes all this cyber-thingy stuff very seriously.

I got home, put on BBC News and there was some dope being interviewed about a “cyber-attack on the NHS”, blithering on about their M3 network and how secure it is. I turned over to Sky, and there was someone from Alienvault talking sense, but not detail. Followed by the chair of the Security and Intelligence Committee, Dominic Grieve, blustering on about how seriously the government took cyber-security but admitting he didn’t know anything about technology, in case it wasn’t obvious. I have never met anyone in parliament who does (see previous rants).

So what’s actually happening? It’s not an attack on the NHS. It’s a bunch of criminals taking advantage of a bug in Microsoft’s server software. Almost certainly MS17-010. An attack based on this exploit was used by NSA in America (Equation Group) until someone snaffled it and leaked it (allegedly Shadow Brokers). It’s been used in a family of ransomware called WannaCrypt, and it’s being used to extort money all over the place. I see no reason to believe the NHS has been targeted specifically. It’s targeting everyone vulnerable, all over the world. Poorer countries where they are running  more old software, or running bootleg version that don’t receive updates,  are worst hit.

So why is the news full of it being the NHS, and only the NHS? One reason is that Microsoft issued a patch for MS17-010 a good while back. And the NHS didn’t apply it. Why? Because they’re still using Windows XP and Microsoft didn’t issue the patch for Windows XP. Simple.

A lot (repeat A LOT) of companies use older Microsoft systems because (a) they’ve bought them, why should they pay again; and (b) Microsoft abandoned backward compatibility with Windows 7, so a lot of legacy software (dating back to the 1980’s) won’t run any more. Upgrading isn’t so simple.

There’s a lot of money (from Crapita Illogica (CGI), Atos and G4S – amongst others) in flogging dodgy Microsoft-based IT to government projects. Microsoft Servers are considered Job Security for people who can only understand how to use a wizard, but know it’ll break down regularly and they’ll be called upon to reinstall it.

No one who knows how computers work would ever use Microsoft servers except as a last resort.

Update 13-May-2017

Guess what? Microsoft has now released a patch for older versions of their server software (ie. Server 2003 and Windows XP). That was jolly quick; it’s like they had it already but didn’t release it to punish those who refused to “upgrade”.

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Blue Whale Challenge

Blue Whale at the Marine Life Hall, American Museum of Natural History
This is a blue whale. Nothing to do with the latest chain letter hoax.
People seem to be getting really worked up about a so-called “Blue Whale Challenge” social media game. And understandably so – it’s a game where vulnerable children are targeted and given progressive challenge, culminating in something that will kill them.

I saw this first a couple of months ago, and each time it turns up the lurid details have been embellished further. It sounds too macabre to be true. And it’s not.

About a year ago someone in Russia published an on-line article hoping to explain the high number of teenage suicides in the country, and blaming it on the Internet. Apparently a statistically significant number of teenagers belonging to one particular on-line group had died; the on-line group must therefore be to blame.

Wrong! If you have an on-line group of depressed teenagers then you are going to have a higher proportion of suicides amongst them. The writers have confused cause and effect.

However, facts never got in the way of a good lurid story and this one seems to have bounced around Russia for most of 2016, where it morphed into an evil on-line challenge game. It then jumped the language gap to English in winter 2017.

The story spreads as a cautionary tale, with the suggestion that you should pass it on to everyone you know so they can check their kids for early signs they are being targeted (specifically, cutting a picture of a whale in to their arm). In other words, a classic email urban legend. It’s only a matter of time before the neighbourhood watch people add it to their newsletters.

Update:

The Daily Mail has reported this as fact, so I must be wrong and it must be true. Or perhaps I’m right and they have nothing to back their carefully worded account. Wouldn’t be the first time…

 

 

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More Fraud on Amazon Marketplace

Fancy a roll of sellotape for £215.62? Amazon has this and 708,032 other products listed by a seller called linkedeu, who’s full range can be found here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?merchant=AA722TCREQZHH.

This isn’t the first time sellers like this have appeared, and it won’t be the last. However, this time I’ve reported it to Amazon and I intend to time their response. How could they let some fraudster list nearly quarter of a million items without anyone checking?

The seller does have a business address in California, but I suspect this is fake too, and the name and address may well be a legitimate company.

 

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ParentPay seriously broken (again)

400 Bad Request
ParentPay, the Microsoft-based school payment system that’s the bane of so many parents’ lives, has yet another problem. Since Saturday, every time I go to their web site I get a page back that displays as above. Eh? Where does this page come from – it’s not a browser message. A look at the source reveals what they’re up to:

<html>
<head><title>400 Request Header Or Cookie Too Large</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<center>Request Header Or Cookie Too Large</center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>
<!-- a padding to disable MSIE and Chrome friendly error page -->
<!-- a padding to disable MSIE and Chrome friendly error page -->
<!-- a padding to disable MSIE and Chrome friendly error page -->
<!-- a padding to disable MSIE and Chrome friendly error page -->
<!-- a padding to disable MSIE and Chrome friendly error page -->
<!-- a padding to disable MSIE and Chrome friendly error page -->

 

Okay, but what the hell is wrong? This is using Chrome Version 56.0 on a Windows platform. Can ParentPay not cope with its standard request header? If a cookie is too large, the only culprit can be ParentPay itself for storing too much in its own cookie.

I’ve given them three days to fix it.

Unfortunately, parents of children at schools are forced to use this flaky web site and hand over their credit card details. How much confidence do I have in their technology? Take a guess!

Solution

So what to do about this? Well they have the URL https://parentpay.com, so I tried that too. It redirected to the original site, with a slightly different error message sent from the remote server – one that omitted mention of cookies. So it was definitely Chrome’s header? Upgrade Chrome for 56.0 to 57.0, just in case…. No dice.

A look at the cookies it stored was interesting. 67 cookies belonging to this site? I know Microsoft stuff is flabby, but this is ridiculous! Rather than trawling through them, I just decided to delete the lot.

That worked.

It appears ParentPay’s bonkers ASP code had stored more data in my browser than it was prepared to accept back. Stunning!

 

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BT Internet Mail Fail (again)

BT Internet’s email system is broken AGAIN. It rejects everything it gets as “spam” (554 Message rejected, policy (3.2.1.1) – Your message looks like SPAM or has been reported as SPAM please read…)

Having checked against blacklists, and sent perfectly innocuous test text messages to friends account, it’s definitely busted.

My advice to anyone using BT Internet for important email is to get a proper account with a proper provider (or handle your email in-house if your name is not Fred and you don’t work from a shed).