DESIRED=<N> Specifies the desired amount of space in megabytes (MB) to reduce the size of the volume by. If a desired amount is not specified, the volume will be reduced by the maximum amount of free space available on the volume.
Basically "You can shrink this volume by 54GB" "Shrink it by 54GB" "Computer says no" "Shrink it by 0.1GB" "Computer says no"
It's a shame I can't bloody find my Windows 10 install/recovery USB stick which I used last week to clone this volume in the first place
I have a Windows 8 install disk... but it won't mount a Windows 10 Bitlocker volume
I could make the Win 8 USB into a Win 10 USB but that'd take ages
Or I could make one of these random 120GB SSDs into a Win 10 install disk, but that'd take ages, because the install tool wants to redownload the whole 4GB image that I already have sat here...
Or I could go the brute force route, and clone the Win 8 install disk onto a SSD, then overwrite it with the Win 10 installer files, because I'm too lazy to figure out the two commands it takes to make any old disk into a Windows install disk
Also @Bob: I tried the new O2 "5G" masts.... 88Mbps
Granted, it's new, just installed, and carrier aggregation isn't working, and they've only deployed half the "5G" TDD spectrum
Didn't have time to figure out the TDD DL/UL configuration... cause I only had 10 minutes before the last bus, might have it in a screenshot somewhere...
But in theory with the full the spectrum deployed, with a suitable phone (I don't think my S7 can actually CA TDD2300 with FDD800/1800/2100, and also doesn't do 4x4 MIMO on TDD2300) it could do a little over 500Mbps.
Sadly no sign of Vodafone L2600 or 15Mhz L2100, despite the hardware being capable of it... maybe corporate politics, maybe just teething issues/beta install/not fully setup yet
I noticed you posted one or two screenshots but that was during the two weeks the crypto markets went haywire so I had my eyes glued to my trading charts 20 hours a day.
@Bob I'm guessing you're only able to access the foreigner/roamer frequencies and not the Japanese native 5G frequencies, whatever they are.... L1500 and 3600 or something
I know my S7 can't do any of them, I'm not sure any current "global" i.e. non-japanese handset can
Actually I have no idea what frequencies they're using for LTE in Japan, if you're getting 50Mbps, it suggests they may actually be using ITU standards instead of their own proprietary frequencies
So the critical unmovable file, that prevented me from shrinking my system drive, even offline and unmounted, wasn't any Windows OS file, pagefile, hibernation or system restore data. Anyone wanna guess what it was?
> Error: during volume shrink initiated on volume (C:), we failed to move a movable file extent.
Diagnostic details: - The last unmovable file appears to be: \ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\NvTelemetry\events.dat::$DATA
NVidia wanted their hidden telemetry data locked down so hard even offline, admin, unmounted access couldn't move the file...
This abrasion wound is taking a long time to heal... it does not help that each time I remove the gauze, some of the tissue sticks to it and is pulled off, reopening the wound. (I've since learned to wet the gauze before removing it so that it separates from the tissue.)
Looks like most frequencies your S9? should be capable of. It's just the 1500Mhz Band 21 that most non-Japanese phones don't do. The rest of the proprietary bands are mostly 3G
In fact, LTE wise, NTT Docomo Band 21 (1500) is the only band my S7 can't do. So actually you should have had access to just about all the frequencies. That said 1500 has been the primary historical band in Japan so I don't know how heavily they rely on it
Oddly that means I wouldn't actually be able to make phone calls on most Japanese networks if I were roaming (no VoLTE roaming, and my phone supports very few of the 3G bands)
> However, the Dragonfly teams were instructed that they were not permitted to discuss the issue directly with Brin or other members of Google’s senior leadership team, including Pichai, co-founder Larry Page, and legal chief Kent Walker.
> “[Beaumont’s] endgame was very simple — his ideal circumstance was that most people would find out about this project the day it launched,” said one Google source. “He wanted to make sure there would be no opportunity for any internal or external resistance to Dragonfly, but he failed.”
I mean Google has already abandoned its mission to be impartial long ago, and the regular Google search engine is already highly censored (I actually prefer Bing now).
This is more than just the occasional fetish being censored and a few Google dorks being less effective than they once were. This is a major human rights issue.
> The search engine was designed by Google to censor phrases about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict censorship rules enforced by China’s authoritarian government. The search platform would link Chinese users’ search records to their cellphone numbers and share people’s search histories with a Chinese partner company — meaning that Chinese security agencies, which routinely target activists and critics, could obtain the data.
@bwDraco They actually decided to give up on their mission of being impartial because the shareholders said so. A while back (forget exactly when), the CEO asked whether or not Google should be 100% unbiased, being nothing more than a search engine that blocks nothing whatsoever that it is not legally required to block. It was close, but the shareholders just barely went pro-censorship.
Right now, they censor a lot, everywhere. They modify search results to support particular points of view (not talking about the silly conspiracy theories behind the last US presidential election). They act as the moral police.
You wind up with clashes between customers and shareholders, which can impose conflicting requirements on a company - and favoring the customers can get a publicly-traded company in more trouble than favoring the investors.
For example, they alias "datasheet" with "manual" when doing some searches, which makes it difficult to find microprocessor datasheets.
So looking up "<some IC here> datasheet" gives you a lot of user manuals. You have to find a word or phrases that are only used in datasheets and search for that in order to bypass their alias.
> Investors don't like seeing companies spending huge amounts of money with the expectation that they would only make it back several years down the road; they want to see profit now, even if it means hurting customer satisfaction and loyalty.
> The gambling-like nature of loot boxes has also drawn sharp criticism from both the press and the player community, which consider such systems to be predatory to consumers while degrading the game experience for those who do not pay for loot boxes. Compounding this is the fact that players already need to spend up to US$60 to begin playing the game in the first place.
Yep, the gaming industry is quite corrupt.
Gambling is fine if people know they are gambling and are explicitly looking to gamble, but when it's used as a psychological trick to scam people out of money? That's bad.
This is why I support piracy. The game industry is full of thieves.
That's why we need to have legal regulations to prevent abuses.
For an information processing system, there needs to be laws that require impartial and uncensored processing for any system that is not designed explicitly for that purpose (e.g. search engines must not censor, but "child-safe search engines" can).
I've long believed that when you put customers first, shareholder value will naturally follow. But most shareholders aren't interested in waiting several years for an investment in customer satisfaction to pay off. They want to see profits now, not at some unknown point in the future.
Same with privacy violations. Selling peoples' data to foreign governments and to random companies that want to buy it (Intellius and the like) is repulsive. There needs to be legal regulation preventing a company from doing that on such a scale.
> The needed repair: Put customers first, rather than shareholders. Companies that do this, such as Apple, such as Johnson & Johnson, manage their businesses much differently. They think long term, rather than quarter by quarter. They are cognizant of their impact on society and the environment. They try to bring out the best in their employees. When you do these things correctly, the companies reason, the share price will follow.
@HornOKPlease Practically nobody else except, perhaps, Microsoft (with their Surface line) cares about build quality in a consumer (non-corporate) device.
I remember reading on some Apple forum how people were all talking about how brilliant and innovative some shiny silver/white AA battery charger was. It was literally a cheap plastic charger that cost like $100 and had horrible build quality.
@forest I'm an engineer / tech enthusiast who uses just about every platform (heavy Linux user, heavy Windows user, and even moderately heavy iOS and macOS user; the only major platform I don't use at least weekly is Android.) -- My observation is that Apple does some things that are objectively better from a technical standpoint than competitors on certain products, and does other things that are worse.
Some Apple users may be ideological sheep, but in my view, I buy Apple products when and if I'm willing to live with the limitations because I want the benefits, and if I don't, then I don't.
When I switched jobs this year, company gave me a choice of a ~2015 Dell ultrabook with a 256 GB SSD, or a 2015 15" Macbook Pro with a 256 GB SSD. Neither system is amazing, but I'm required to do work with a work issued machine. I picked the Mac. I enjoy when my coworkers share their screen and I watch them sitting there waiting for their IDE to start or for a Windows installer to load, because they have a boat anchor of company required security software to keep Windows secure. Our Macs only -
@HornOKPlease As someone who works in infosec, I agree that they do some things right. The security for the iOS kernel is actually pretty damn good as far as mobile devices go. But the price for the product compared to the sum of the price of its parts?
The security software they load down the Windows boxes with makes decent SATA SSDs feel like 5400 RPM HDDs in terms of I/O perf, whereas my not-incredible Mac (hardware-wise it's only decent) flies.
come to think of it, I could probably do all the development I do for work on a bog standard Linux desktop distro
but the company won't let me run Linux, probably
@forest The addon fees for decent quantities of SSD storage on their phones, tablets and laptops is pretty hideous, but the base price for the base storage is reasonable -- considering at least their mobile devices are objectively the fastest (in terms of FLOPS) for their device class
@HornOKPlease The speed of a CPU is really hard to compare. You can say they're very fast for, say, FLOPS, but a mobile CPU will always be much slower than a desktop CPU for things such as SIMD and a number of microarchitectural optimizations.
Memory bandwidth in particular is far lower (e.g. LPDDR4 has a small bus width).
@forest of course they will, but comparing apples to apples (no pun intended), similarly sized devices with similarly sized batteries from other vendors have slower solid state storage, slower CPUs and slower GPUs than the latest generation of iOS devices, at least for about 6-8 months of the year after they're released, and then maaaaybe the latest Samsung devices match or slightly leapfrog them for 4-6 months at best
you don't notice the CPU speed difference for much, but you really feel the storage performance difference when updating
it's jarring how slow the NAND is in most Android devices
it's like most Android devices, even Samsung's flagships, solder a bog standard microSD card onto the board and call it a day :P that's what it feels like, anyway :P
It comes with downsides like putting your phone in a slightly too-humid environment triggering its environmental sensors and automatically voiding your warranty.
@forest not anymore; if you're referring to the helium thing affecting MEMS sensors, that's a known issue, but humidity doesn't affect iDevices anymore
NVMe storage is expensive. An SoC manufacturer would have to implement an NVMe storage controller on the chip, a feature that adds significant cost and would not be used by many OEMs. Apple can get away with this because they have total vertical integration: they don't have to worry about whether OEMs will use all features on the chip because they design their own chips and can put exactly what they need and nothing more on the silicon.
@forest IIRC that's extremely common nowadays for "cover your ass" purposes, so companies have physical proof of water damage so consumers can't drop their devices in water and then claim "it just broke!"
iDevices are still pretty fragile and need a case, and although IP68 certified, I wouldn't necessarily trust it swimming, showering, etc -- basically only get them wet by accident, not on purpose
but they're also supported with security updates from the vendor for much longer than most Android devices
to be fair, the entire industry, except for Nokia, CAT and other specialty/niche products, is moving in that direction - LG, Samsung, and Apple are moving toward more fragile phones in favor of the "beautiful" appearance of all-glass
As for Android devices, Android is a class of operating systems from AOSP. Each OEM has their own version of Android, so some OEMs only give security updates for a short time, others provide security updates for longer than Apple.
yeah, really depends on your manufacturer, to be sure, but the point is, there are drawbacks to other vendors who may do certain things better than Apple -- you're not going to find all desirable features and capabilities of a device bundled into a single device, so you have to make an informed choice
I barely ever game on my phone, but it's probably my primary video watching and music listening device, my GPS, my wake-up alarm, reminder for things (I'm forgetful), chat program, email client for work, the only digital camera I use, and keeps my car insurance information, movie/event tickets, and even a convenient way to pay for services if I forget my wallet or lose it and desperately need gas, or something
yeah, fortunately I have a backup in my watch, so if someone snatches my phone out of my hand and runs away, I can call 911 from my LTE-enabled Apple Watch, then call my parents, and even pay for gas if I need to :P
I'm not a huge fan of IoT FWIW. I use quite a few smart devices, but I tend not to trust things like smart TVs because manufacturers tend not to take security seriously.
as someone who practices decent to good (imo) personal OpSec, I have to say, combining my opsec practices with the info in that video, I really would rather trust iOS than most Android devices whose security model is completely undocumented other than what you can glean from various xda hackers
chance of being ripped off remotely by a Chinese hacker is still non-zero in any case
I run a modded Android device with LineageOS and root. I know that's taking security into my own hands, but I'm smart enough not to install random apps.
@bwDraco I've been fooled into downloading at least icky adware (with intrusive ads that try to redirect you through a loop of attack pages) from Android apps on the Play Store in the past; never received such treatment from an iOS app
IMO, root is dangerous if you don't know what you're doing, but a savvy user can take advantage it to make a rooted phone more secure than otherwise possible.
I recall a study that showed that Android folk had better opsec on average than iOS folk, especially when it comes to installing random programs. iOS users were more trusting and gullible than Android users, and could be more easily social engineered.
I had a horrific experience or three along those lines just trying to accomplish simple tasks on Android a couple years ago. is the Play Store any less crowded with knock-off and deceptive apps now?
@bwDraco "Antivirus" is trivial to bypass, for example. Almost anyone can write malware with 100% evasion rate. It's only good for old, dead malware (the kind you might get on PC when downloading dolphin screensavers).
So while it's already next to useless, it also parses everything thrown at it with high privileges, a recipe for privilege escalation vulnerabilities.
but yeah, I guess I do ultimately value features over objective security; I'm not willing to go the Stallman / luddite / NetBSD / TAILS route for my entire life... if there's stuff that I feel needs that level of protection, I will do it, but I really don't care if someone knows I bought pizza at 4:28 PM, and I have excellent contingencies in place in the event of ID theft or billing info compromise
namely, the only "cards" (credit/debit) I have are ones that have a fantastic policy for handling card fraud so you are never stuck with bills for things you didn't buy
@HornOKPlease The problem is that the same app that you bought pizza with at 4:28 AM is running on the same physical processor as the app that takes your credit card number. Which is not great.
@forest Whether you run Android or iOS, every app is sandboxed. Barring a privilege escalation vulnerability, it should not be possible to obtain data across apps without the user knowing.
And no platform is free of vulnerabilities of this kind.
but handing over your billing information, I'd say, the attack surface is greater, and the risks are greater, in supplying that information to the remote server that processes your payment -- both in the transit of the information through the Internet using not-entirely-foolproof TLS and the like, and the storage/use of that information on the company's backend
there are tons and tons and tons of billing information leaks due to server-side compromises, so having a client-side weakness is only slightly increasing your exposure IMO
@bwDraco The sandboxing is done with SELinux (for Android at least). Kernel vulnerabilities (Linux kernel is... not great) is more what I was thinking. Not to mention things like Spectre and related microarchitectural vulnerabilities.
@HornOKPlease When it's server-side, you can sue, when client side, it's "your" fault.
@forest mm? not in the opinion of my credit card companies, who will issue you a new card and zero out all the transactions that were fraudulently placed... it's a hassle, to be sure, but in the end you get to keep your money/credit
I'm actually really resisting getting too far into "IoT" devices, especially in the realm of security; you know, things like door locks, garage doors and the like.
I'm very skeptical of them at this point... they might get better once there are high profile hacks and the companies realize they will be fucked if they don't step up their game
A thief will have a field day if they're sold up-to-date data that contains a list of whenever someone is likely in their house or out by checking their light status.
Not to mention, a hacked device can do a lot of nasty stuff to your network. DDoS, spam email (actually, some refrigerators have been found sending spam email!), even running a proxy for the "bad guys".
So sure, turning lights on and off is not the end of the world, but using a device that's trivial to compromise and which is on your own network is not smart.
What do you guys then think about the concept of devices like this, regardless of what you think of the company Bitdefender and their trustworthiness? Just the concept of a device like that as a router
@HornOKPlease As a rule, any one-time-setup "set and forget" security solutions do not work well at all. You can only do some very basic things with devices like that.
Exactly. You can secure your LAN with a hardware firewall, but you have to configure it yourself (or pay someone to configure it) to work for your specific needs.
it would legitimately be pretty good if it were performing active blocking and NIDS (using something like a subscription to Snort) at the router level, wouldn't it? Snort could push rules whenever, say, an IoT attack is discovered
Though it still can't be set and forget without making it a TLS interception proxy, which requires installing a root certificate generated by it onto all your devices.
Otherwise it can't really perform its NIDS activities for many connections.
it's always better to have the end device be well protected and designed itself, but failing that, having an active NIDS/HIDS built into the router seems like a viable layer of defense, though not bulletproof
heh, all of that is cool and I probably would've rolled something like that based on a NUC at some point in the not too distant past, but I value my time too much these days - when is a vendor going to come out with an open source based shrinkwrapped solution that does these things out of the box, and has great WiFi antennas, an up-to-date chipset, generous hardware, and CoDel? :P
yeah, I kinda need the good wifi - house doesn't have enough wall outlets and places to put things (space is at a premium at the moment) to put repeaters everywhere.... My current router (Netgear Nighthawk X10) can push 5 GHZ WiFi @ 300 Mbps through two (wooden) floors and in all rooms of those floors
single device solution, very tidy
and very stable since they fixed the early bugs :P
