Hackers raid eBay in historic breach, access 145 million records | Reuters.
Author: tongwing
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Migrating a failing hard disk
It happened. Or should I say, almost happened.
As we all know, the hard disk (mechanical ones, that is) is the component that has the highest chance of failure in any computer system. One day I was doing a routine backup of my notebook. My backup solution is rather simple, consisting of no more than rsync. I had left it running a full backup in the background before I went out, expecting it to complete before I return, since only differences are copied. To my surprise when I returned, it was still running and my notebook felt very hot. Much hotter than usual, and that says something, as my notebook reaches uncomfortably heaty temperature after long usage. I blame it on the GPU/hard disk. The copying appears to be stuck at 76% on a particular large file. After terminating it and manually copying the file to my backup hard disk, it remained stuck at 76%. First sign that something is wrong. To be sure that it wasn’t my backup hard disk that’s having problem, I made a copy of the file on the same drive. Yup same thing happened. I immediately stopped any attempts to access the file to avoid aggravating the problem. Conventional wisdom in hard disk recovery says that when a hard disk is showing signs of failure, do not access the “bad” parts ‘cos it could cause the problem to get worse.
A hard disk replacement is imminent, which is not a big deal. Except that it could mean reinstalling everything from scratch. Or not. I’m really not looking forward to spending days fighting with a new OS. So cloning the existing hard disk is my plan.
Step 1: research
Before doing anything that could lead to further data loss, it is always good to read up. My concerns were 1) data integrity 2) preservation of Windows license. As the Windows license that came with the notebook is an OEM license, I wasn’t sure if it could survive the cloning process – with a retail Windows license you could activate on up to X times I think. The recommended way to backup a Windows machine is to use Windows System Image Backup. Unfortunately it can’t be used in my case. My second idea was to use dd. However I’m aware that dd could run into trouble with reading bad parts. Finally I decided on ddrescue, as it appears to be addressing what I need from dd, but with more features targetted towards hard disk recovery.
Step 2: execute
I got a larger hard disk as recommended by most articles. I also needed a way to attach the new hard disk to my notebook. Here’s where my trusty SATA to USB adapter comes in handy. For the benefit of others who may want to do the same, the steps are:
- download Knoppix Linux ISO
- burn to CD, or if you’re lazy like me, create a bootable USB thumbdrive with it using Rufus
- boot up to Knoppix
- select shell
- lsusb to see what USB devices are attached
- insert SATA to USB adapter
- lsusb to see what’s added
- dmesg to see the newly added device. note the new device name
- (assuming old hard disk is /dev/sda and new hard disk is /dev/sdc) take a deep breath and type:
ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda /dev/sdc /root/rescue.log - if there are no errors, hurray! you can stop here. Otherwise, type:
ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/sda /dev/sdc /root/rescue.log
In my case there was 1 x 8192 bytes of error after the first command. After running the second command, it was reduced to 1024 bytes. Ok, it wasn’t as bad as I thought 🙂
Step 3: verify
- Unscrew the hard disk compartment and replace the old hard disk with the new one. Replace cover.
- Boot up.
At this point, if it works it should be pretty obvious. I’m glad to report that everything works as planned. wmic diskdrive shows the new hard disk details. Oh, and Windows didn’t complain. An unexpected good news is after the upgrade, things are speedier and my notebook doesn’t feel as hot as before. Hurray! 😀
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WinJS landing page Windows dev center
JavaScript is winning the race.
NSA Has Been Hijacking the Botnets of Other Hackers | Threat Level | WIRED.
Plausible deniability, plus why not take advantage of someone else’s work? 🙂
Not sure if it qualifies as an easter egg, but visiting Mozilla developer website like this with your console open and you’ll get the following message:
_.-~-.
7'' Q..\
_7 (_
_7 _/ _q. /
_7 . ___ /VVvv-'_ .
7/ / /~- \_\\ '-._ .-' / //
./ ( /-~-/||'=.__ '::. '-~'' { ___ / // ./{
V V-~-~| || __''_ ':::. ''~-~.___.-'' _/ // / {_ / { /
VV/-~-~-|/ \ .'__'. '. ':: _ _ _ ''.
/ /~~~~||VVV/ / \ ) \ _ __ ___ ___ ___(_) | | __ _ .::'
/ (~-~-~\\.-' / \' \::::. | '_ ` _ \ / _ \_ / | | |/ _` | :::'
/..\ /..\__/ ' '::: | | | | | | (_) / /| | | | (_| | ::'
vVVv vVVv ': |_| |_| |_|\___/___|_|_|_|\__,_| ''
Hi there, nice to meet you!
Interested in having a direct impact on hundreds of millions of users? Join
Mozilla, and become part of a global community that’s helping to build a
brighter future for the Web.
Visit https://careers.mozilla.org to learn about our current job openings.
Visit https://www.mozilla.org/contribute for more ways to get involved and
help support Mozilla.
Nice.
Another spying using webcam article. That’s why it’s always a good practice to place a sticky note in front of your webcam and only remove it when you need to.
Research shows how MacBook Webcams can spy on their users without warning.
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Acoustic cryptanalysis
Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps | Ars Technica.
Let’s see:
- multi-staged payload
- airgap infection mechanism
- targets multiple OSes
- no one knows how it works yet
This is serious stuff. Fascinating. Let’s see if this is another state-sponsored Stuxnet-like malware.
Categories
A Brief History of COLLADA
Some of you might know that COLLADA was not supposed to be used as an end-format in itself (like say OBJ) but more as a interchange format. To quote Wikipedia,
COLLADA was originally intended as an intermediate format for transporting data from one digital content creation (DCC) tool to another application.
It was meant to solve the difficulty of using digital assets across different tools. For example, if I scanned a 3D point cloud and processed it in Geomagic, I want to be able to use the result in say, 3DS Max for further work. 3DS Max obviously cannot open Geomagic files, so most of the time, the DCC artist have to figure out the intermediate format that’s supported by both software, and use that as a mid-point to bridge the gap. That is, instead of A->B, you go through an intermediary X, via A->X->B.
While it sounds logical, it usually doesn’t work in practice. First of all, 3D formats are not like image formats, which are fairly standard except for headers, compression etc. You can get pretty good results in image format conversions. Even though you might get some loss in image quality, the result is usually fairly acceptable.
Once you go into 3D, lo and behold, the problem size explodes. There are many types of mathematical models for 3D representation – polygonal, point cloud, parametric, volumetric, etc. Even within one representation you have tons of parameters. Each software chooses how it wants to use and interprets those parameters, and it varies widely from software to software. The result is that moving digital assets across software is a pain. In fact companies exist to sooth those pain (Right Hemisphere, Okino).
Sony Computer Entertainment, being a game company, must have faced a lot of such issues. The solution it created was COLLADA, to fill the missing X that plagues the industry. In 2004, it generously donated COLLADA to the community. The competing format back in the days was X3D, the successor to VRML. X3D was mainly driven by the academia, and did not have the kind of backing COLLADA has. It happens that Google Earth was looking to introduce support for 3D models around that time. Previously, it could only support imagery and terrain data. By a stroke of luck COLLADA was adopted as the native 3D format – even though it’s actually an interchange format. SketchUp soon followed, in a somewhat clever move – it was acquired by Google shortly after. By then, Autodesk and the rest of the big boys were on-board and the rest, as they say, is history.
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Splitting Thunderbird mailbox
Mozilla Thunderbird uses the mbox format, which makes it incredibly portable and easy to process. Unfortunately, it also means that all of your messages within a Thunderbird folder is in single file*. This can cause problems if you keep using a folder for many years. For instance I have a mbox file that is >1GB and it’s mounted in a network share. Opening, modifying, backing up takes quite a while. I finally gave up and decided to do something about it.
I wanted to organize my mailbox by year, while preserving its folder organization. A quick online search did not find anything I can use. So I whipped up my trusty PHP and wrote this.
https://github.com/boviner/splitmbox
Usual disclaimer applies.
* I’m simplifying here. If your folder contains subfolders, each subfolder actually has it’s own file