Raising the dead: Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive?

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This is a story of my efforts to repair the drive myself, my research into the question of whether or not users can repair modern hard drives, and the results of my efforts. If your drive is still detected in BIOS, you may be able to use software tools to retrieve your data. Here, we’re going to focus exclusively on hardware-related failures, and what your options are.

via Raising the dead: Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive? | ExtremeTech.

Surf the internet for more than two minutes, and you’ll find people who recommend you do one of the following things:

  • Stick your hard drive in the freezer
  • Pop your hard drive into the oven
  • Give it a few taps with a hammer or rubber mallet

LOL. I have been desparate to try the freezer trick a couple of times without luck.

Oracle Linux: A better alternative to CentOS

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We firmly believe that Oracle Linux is the best Linux distribution on the market today. It’s reliable, it’s affordable, it’s 100% compatible with your existing applications, and it gives you access to some of the most cutting-edge innovations in Linux like Ksplice and dtrace.

via Oracle Linux: A better alternative to CentOS.

Hmmm.  We’ll see about that.

How is this better than CentOS?

Well, for one, you’re getting the exact same bits our paying enterprise customers are getting. So that means a few things. Importantly, it means virtually no delay between when Red Hat releases a kernel and when Oracle Linux does:

Question for TN 78th candidates: Internet access

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You can imagine the lasting economic damage that would have been incurred if similar legislation had prevented CEMC from borrowing to roll out electricity in the 1940′s. This is a textbook case of rent-seeking behavior on the part of private ISP’s and regulatory capture on the part of the legislature, and was no doubt passed based both on some mixture of ideology unrestrained by real-world results, and private ISP’s increasing their political donations that year by a factor of 100 (as Upton Sinclair bitterly mused, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”)

via Question for TN 78th candidates: Internet access | Mathew Binkley’s Blog.

He also has an interesting comment on slashdot.

Skype makes chats and user data more available to police

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Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other user information available to police, said industry and government officials familiar with the changes.

via Skype makes chats and user data more available to police – The Washington Post.

Europe’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Inaugurated

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The SuperMUC, ranked fourth in the June TOP500 supercomputing listing, contains 147,456 cores using Intel Xeon 2.7-GHz, 8-core E5-2680 chips. IBM, which built the supercomputer, stated in a recent press release that the supercomputer actually includes more than 155,000 processor cores. It is located at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre) in Garching, Germany, near Munich.

via Europe’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Inaugurated.

OpenBSD’s de Raadt slams Red Hat, Canonical over ‘secure’ boot

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Responding to a query from iTWire about what OpenBSD, widely recognised as the most security-conscious UNIX, would be doing to cope with “secure” boot, De Raadt said: “We have no plans. I don’t know what we’ll do. We’ll watch the disaster and hope that someone with enough power sees sense.”

via OpenBSD’s de Raadt slams Red Hat, Canonical over ‘secure’ boot.

Red Hat’s method of ensuring that PCs certified for Windows 8 can boot GNU/Linux, announced by its community distribution Fedora, is to sign up to the Microsoft developer program and obtain a key which will be used to sign a “shim” bootloader.

using DD to image a disk over SSH

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What I like to do is log into the remote server and run “watch -n 1 iptables –list -v -n” to watch the byte count to give you an idea of how much data has been passed already. of course you’ll have to start iptables first if it isnt running.

via using DD to image a disk over SSH | daverdave.com.

This is pretty useful too.  I couldn’t do this using sshfs so googled and found that regular ssh works.  I do not like to image disks with disks running other than the one being imaged.  I find it too dangerous that a single mistype could wipe out a functioning disk.  Doing this over a nework seems much safer.  Here’s the command I used from the linked to article:

ssh desthost.domain.com “dd if=/dev/sda” | dd of=/dev/sda bs=1024k conv=notrunc,noerror

The destination host feeds the image.  The host that runs this command is a Knoppix live boot with the only HD running being the one being written to.  I suppose if I were to do this a lot then a dedicated image machine might prove useful with an HD to store the images and some OS and a burn HD in a hot swap slot.  The HD with OS and images would be expendible in that an accidental overwrite would be a mere inconvenience instead of actual loss of data.

Reverse-Engineered Irises Look So Real, They Fool Eye-Scanners

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The academics have found a way to recreate iris images that match digital iris codes that are stored in databases and used by iris-recognition systems to identify people. The replica images, they say, can trick commercial iris-recognition systems into believing they’re real images and could help someone thwart identification at border crossings or gain entry to secure facilities protected by biometric systems.

via Reverse-Engineered Irises Look So Real, They Fool Eye-Scanners | Threat Level | Wired.com.