Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

Who said anything about RAID? The worst thing I stand to lost is my Elite Dangerous control settings (that drive's already failed once). The rest is just torrented anime and Steam games....

The drives are rescued from a company that was throwing them out and there's more where they came from.

It's the standard thing to do when you have more than 1 drive....
 
Maryland Attorney General: If You Don't Want To Be Tracked, Turn Off Your Phone


The state attorney general of Maryland is taking an alarmingly aggressive stance on the use of controversial cell phone trackers known as cell site simulators, or StingRays, arguing in court that a suspect volunteered to be tracked simply by leaving his phone on.

In a brief filed earlier this week, Maryland attorney general Brian E. Frosh challenged a Baltimore court's decision in the case of Kerron Andrews, who was targeted by a cell site simulator, the once-secret surveillance device used by police and federal agents to track phones en-masse by impersonating cellphone towers, often without warrants.

Andrews, who faces multiple counts of attempted murder, had asked the court to dismiss the charges, citing Fourth Amendment concerns over the use of the surveillance device.

But the state argued that because cell phones constantly reveal their locations to carriers by pinging nearby cell towers, Andrews ?voluntarily shared this information with third parties,? including the police, merely by keeping his phone on.

In other words, if you don't shut off your phone, you're asking to be tracked.

?While cell phones are ubiquitous, they all come with 'off' switches,? the state responded in the brief. ?Because Andrews chose to keep his cell phone on, he was voluntarily sharing the location of his cell phone with third parties.?

The argument is a terrifying but not unprecedented escalation of previous rulings regarding cell phone location privacy. In the past, courts?usually relying on legal precedents established well before cell phones existed?have held that no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy when data is ?given? to third parties, even if that data is sent unwittingly or as part of the normal functioning of a device or service.

?The government has indeed repeatedly argued that there is no [reasonable expectation of privacy] in cell phone location information, in court and out,? Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU's speech, privacy and technology project, told Motherboard in an email. ?In cases involving historical cell site location information, the government has danced around this argument, arguing that phone users give up their expectation of privacy in their location information merely by making and receiving calls.?

Now the state of Maryland is saying that simply having a cell phone switched on is enough to nullify that protection, something which police, prosecutors and courts have hinted at before.

?Andrews ? was quite aware that he was bringing his own cell phone into the house. And he was quite capable of turning it off,? the state wrote. ?The issue is whether Andrews can claim an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in information which he was voluntarily broadcasting to third parties at all times.?

One flaw in this argument is that it?s possible to track phones even when they appear to be off. Malware reportedly used by the FBI and NSA can put a device into a low-power state when it?s switched off, allowing it to continue reporting its location to nearby towers. And since most phones no longer have removable batteries, there?s no way to be certain you?re not being tracked unless you invest in a good quality Faraday pouch.

It isn't the first time a court has heard this kind of argument. In a 2013 DEA case, a New York magistrate judge said that ?given the ubiquity and celebrity of geolocation technologies, an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the prospective location of a cellular telephone where that individual has failed to protect his privacy by taking the simple expedient of powering it off.?

The judge went on to claim that ?the newsworthiness of cell phone tracking as a concept has waned, confirming that geolocation has moved from the unfamiliar to the commonplace.?

Conversely, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that ?requiring a cell phone user to turn off their cell phone ? places an unreasonable burden on the user to forego necessary use of his cell phone, a device now considered essential by much of the populace.?

?In the government?s view, the only way to protect ourselves against warrantless tracking of our locations is to turn our cell phones into inert paperweights,? Wessler, the ACLU attorney, told Motherboard. ?But this would come at a significant cost, as having a functioning cell phone has become necessary to full participation in the civic, social, and economic life of the nation.?

He continued: ?Because Stingrays force phones to transmit information to the government that they would not otherwise transmit to the government, gather information about countless innocent bystanders, and probe the interiors of homes and other private spaces, a warrant is required.?
 
I have an AKG K702. Does anyone know where I can a cable like this, with the proper AKG port, but shorter and maybe a bit cheaper?

Together with the cable of my ModMic it twists itself all the time, annoying. Help much appreciated, couldn't find really anything apart from that link.
 
Don't you need redundancy, though? I mean...just having a couple of hard drives as separate drives, what can RAID do besides take away available capacity? (Serious)
 
Right, but let's say you have two 1tb drives...you either get 2TB and higher performance but then risk losing all data when one drive dies, or you lose half your capacity unless you buy twice as many drives...right?

On my NAS, I have 8 drives in a ZFS RAIDZ2 (about equivalent to RAID6). It gives me two things: ZFS will protect me from bitrot (the data on the disk being changed by external forces, like cosmic radiation) - something that's happened to me pretty much once a year once I moved to disks larger than 2TB; and allowing up to 2 disks to fail without losing any data.

Sure, I go from 32TB of raw space down to a mere 22TB of usable storage (RAID6 proper would be about 24TB of usable space, but ZFS needs to chomp some more data down for the checksumming needed to protect against bitrot), but my data is a lot safer now.

Yes it's big, yes it's expensive, yes it sucks up a ton of power, but I have 11.3TiB (12.5TB) of data on it, some of which is literally impossible to ever find again, no matter what I try.
 
OK, that is impressive...but this conversation started with someone with just 3 drives, and 3tb...to get the safety benefits of raid redundancy, that's at least two more 1TB drives (assuming one is a boot drive with easily re-installable OS and software), right? (Not trying to sound condescending or something...actually curious and want to make sure I understand it right!)
 
I like how 'only' 22tb is a bad thing. I struggle to need more than 2 because everything is streamed nowadays
 
OK, that is impressive...but this conversation started with someone with just 3 drives, and 3tb...to get the safety benefits of raid redundancy, that's at least two more 1TB drives (assuming one is a boot drive with easily re-installable OS and software), right? (Not trying to sound condescending or something...actually curious and want to make sure I understand it right!)
Yes and no.

The thing is that RAID just achieves higher availability (of course except Level RAID 0), it doesn't prevent from data loss by other means than one (or more) failing drive(s). Most home-users don't need the higher availability of a RAID so it's all a question of what you want to achieve.

If you want to achieve higher availability you'd need one more 1 TB drive since you can install whatever OS you want on the RAID as well (or just get an SSD which is much better anyway). With four 1 TB drives you can build a RAID 5 which has 3 TB net capacity or a RAID 10 which has 2 TB net capacity. The RAID 5 can cope with one failing drive, the RAID 10 as well.
In theory the RAID 10 can cope with two failing drives if they're the "right" ones - if the RAID 10 consists of two RAID 1 in one RAID 0 the RAID can cope with one failing drive in both RAID 1's; if the RAID 10 consists of two RAID 0 in one RAID 1 then the two drives of one RAID 0 can fail while the data is still available.

If you want to protect your data from being lost you have to have a (frequent) backup on an external HDD/NAS/whatever not in the same room as the main data, not a RAID. There are many more things which could destroy data:
  • A failing PSU which destroys all the HDDs by overvoltage
  • Accidental deletion of files
  • A worm which encrypts all your data
  • A fire
  • As ZeDestructor wrote "bitrot"
  • HDDs have a certain amount of read errors which ar a real hazard the bigger the HDDs get. When one HDD fails and is replaced, the data has to be reconstructed from the other HDDs. If you have 6 TB of data which has to be reconstructed on an 8 TB drive there is a real possibility that at some point the reconstruction fails because one ore more HDDs have read errors
A RAID (whichever level you instate) can't prevent data loss in those cases so you have to have a backup to restore it in those cases.
There will be a bit of data loss in those cases, but the majority of data is salvageable from a backup; if you just have a RAID-array without backup all data is lost. There are companies which specialize on data reconstruction, but that shit's expensive so it's usually not viable for home-users.
 
I bought a used Rift DK2 from a friend, it looks freaky though a camera with an lens and filter that only allow IR light.

 
You should take that camera out in daylight to see what the world looks like in IR only.
 
You should take that camera out in daylight to see what the world looks like in IR only.

Good idea, I'll have to do that soon.
 
OK, that is impressive...but this conversation started with someone with just 3 drives, and 3tb...to get the safety benefits of raid redundancy, that's at least two more 1TB drives (assuming one is a boot drive with easily re-installable OS and software), right? (Not trying to sound condescending or something...actually curious and want to make sure I understand it right!)

It's definitely something I've always seen as more serious than I am about my data. If I ever have a significant amount of important data I'm sure I'll figure it out, but for now, my method of data recovery is click the download button in my Steam library.

Oh, and I do have an SSD for OS drive, so that's all of my SATA ports taken, which my cheapo motherboard is very unhappy about.
 
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