[Dave Rice]

Why would you want to use a GPU in such a machine? The Intel graphics are more than up to anything you’re going to use it for.

[Dave Rice]

Zoostorm Delta Pico Desktop PC £118.85

Intel Celeron 1037U 1.8GHz
4GB RAM + 500GB HDD + DVD Writer
Intel HD Graphics

Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Professional 32/64bit Digital License Download Key £9.99

[Dave Rice]

Ikea’s Home Planner software is OK.

[Dave Rice]

The answer is that it’s not 100% preventable. Just having a backup won’t do you any good if the ransomware can get at it i.e. it’s to an external USB drive that’s plugged in or on a network share.

You can have “device encryption” on W10 Home if you sign in with an MS account and the keys are stored in your profile on MS servers.

I have heard of scripts that can strip out and replace the keys on a drive already encrypted with Bitlocker but haven’t heard of any that have been weaponised. There’s probably no need to as the tool kits already available do the job.

[Dave Rice]

No one is saying you don’t try to keep it off, but if you rely on that you’ll come a cropper if it does.

To be able to recover from such an attack you must assume that one day it will succeed, but that doesn’t mean don’t you make it more difficult to.

A limited account helps but there are plenty of elevated rights exploits.

[Dave Rice]

Amazon don’t claim that all of their TV and films are free. In the same way as Sky don’t give you free access to all of the content they have.

[Dave Rice]

I love that whole area. Nearest I got to where you were was the Bodensee after a visit to Schaffhausen and the Rhine Falls.

That was when I was on a school exchange in 72 and 73 living in a village called Inzinglen near Lorrach which is near Basle in the Dreilaendereck. The whole extended area is on the list and the dream would be a river cruise to Basle to see the Black Forest again, then a trip on one of the classic Swiss Railway routes. Maybe even ending up in Milan or even Florence. Probably have to wait until Mrs R decides it’s time to pack work in.

But we’re off to Vienna in July and may be able to get in a trip to Graz through the Semmering Pass (Michael Portillo did that recently on the Beeb). But we also want to do a mini Danube cruise  http://tinyurl.com/mj627my one day too. 5 days isn’t going to be enough!

[Dave Rice]

I have no trouble with content dropping or being of poor quality with 2 exceptions:

1. Live sport.
2. Films before they are released on DVD. These are often filmed in the cinema.

I haven’t found anywhere better for “black” films than Exodus.

[Dave Rice]

@ Keef Ahh the kettle. The side panel port hole for the 2 stroke oil says it all for that era. My mate had the GT550 triple, but the Yamaha XS 500 I was always going to buy but never did would I think have been nicer.

What I really wanted, but would probably have killed me, was the Kawasaki Z1. I knew someone that owned a Z1B from new and lived to tell the tale. Before that the H1B was a legend – for all the wrong reasons but who cares when you’re young and single?

I ended up with the Goldwing as after my accident scratching was out (just getting back on a bike was physically difficult) and my priories had changed any way. I always wanted to own a Honda CBX just because it had those 6 cylinders hanging out, but I really, really wanted the Z1300 just because it was such a brute.

As I later found out, when my mate bought one, is the bike I was looking for all along was the Moto Guzzi 850 in one of it’s various guises depending on what I was looking for at the time. But you just hope you don’t have to go near the electrics…

[Dave Rice]

That’s the question, when to move on stuff. My Uncle left it too late for the Jaguar XK120; it’d rusted too much. The Matchless 650 twin and Greeves (?) trial bike went to homes that would appreciate them. As an 18 yo I remember trying to kick start the Matchless (couldn’t) and then riding it in the Cornish lanes (with manual advance and retard) without stalling it or stuffing it into the side (just about did it).

[Dave Rice]

I agree with your strategy for the in-laws. I’m just exploring other solutions for anyone who may be watching.

As far as laptops go I’m finding that i3 with SSD or hybrid are the best bang per buck. You know they’re perhaps a bit too over specced CPU wise and that it’s the SS(H)D makes all the difference, but the (so called) Pentiums are only £20ish cheaper.

The Lenovo B50-50 still floats my boat at £320 for a 128GB SSD or 500GB SSHD.

[Dave Rice]

The other answer is to keep everything in the cloud using Google Docs with no local folder. It’s well up to running a small business. Keep the accounting package online too.

I’m sure it could in theory be done using Office Online but I’ve not tried it.

[Dave Rice]

TT week is on the list.

[Dave Rice]

I remember them well, mid 80’s. A lot of my mates had Z650’s around then. One had the chopped one with the crossover exhausts.

I was still riding the Goldwing then, an old P reg K1 GL1000. This isn’t mine but it’s how it looked before the custom paint, K&Q saddle and Jardine weed burners. We’d do silly mileage each weekend to some rally somewhere.

[Dave Rice]

The charity I look after have 2 branches and use Cloud Station to share files between them. The site where the NAS is located is only ADSL so the upload is <1MB. This doesn’t have any noticeable effect in everyday use, your average document is very small, but the initial upload of 1.5 GB (8,700 files in 1,371 folders) can take all day. So I “seed” the new Cloud Station folder with files backed up from another PCs folder (or the server). All it then has to do is verify the files which it can do without downloading them.

From a business point of view a Synology DS115j w/ 1x 2TB WD Red Hard Drive and an external 2TB drive for backups is only £200 ex vat. (although I would always recommend a 2 bay for a RAID array which would add £100). You’d spend that on a desk and chair.

[Dave Rice]

Cloud shares would just get encrypted at the same time. If you can write access a file so can the ransomware. That’s where versioning is important i.e. the automatic saving of a previous version of a file. Dropbox does do versioning but is time limited to 30 days.

I’ve never heard of Crypto Locker before and I’ve done a lot of research into the whole ransomware thing. I can see how it works (it’s quite crude and if it worked why doesn’t Kaspersky etc. use the same technique)?  and it’s just a matter of time until a way is found around it, which it has in common with all other defences. That’s why I concentrate on how to mitigate against it’s effects rather than hoping I can keep it out.

[Dave Rice]

That’s where Cloud Station and versioning come in.

The Cloud Station folder on the PC holds the latest version of a file. The Cloud Station folder on the Synology is linked to a database which holds (up to) the last 32 versions of that file. You can restore whichever version you want. However, it requires at least one full copy of any given file as the base version for file history, so the selected shared folders will need doubled disk space. Only the differential data will be kept among different historical file versions.

There are no mapped drives in play here so the ransomware cannot get at the server, it can only encrypt the latest version on the PC. When this is synced to the NAS the original unencrypted file becomes version #2 on the server and is thus preserved.

You can have multiple Cloud Station folders on a PC linked to different folders on the NAS, you don’t have to just have one bucket of synced data. You can also have multiple users of a PC share a Cloud Station folder if it’s somewhere they can all access, like public\documents (one of my clients has this).

Note that the PC Cloud Station folder is a new discrete folder, you don’t enable it on an existing one like a share for instance. It is however enabled on an existing shared folder on the NAS.

[Dave Rice]

Good backups with versioning. Synology gives me all the tools I need to mitigate as much as I can.

Real time: Synology Cloud Station does versioning up to 32 deep and is not time limited.

Daily Backup: Hyper Backup allows you to keep 256 versions (9 months) and has compression and deduplication to keep the size down. A real world example from a client: Source size 133GB, 3o days rotation, total used 106GB. You can also lock a particular backup so that it’s retained.

Archive to AWS: Glacier backup allows you to archive to Amazon. This costs me less than $2 a month for 8 scheduled weekly jobs for myself and some clients. Everything is encrypted before it leaves the site. I have seen and used PC clients but they are really clunky.

[Dave Rice]

I won’t be drinking stupidly, it’d probably see me kick the bucket! But it’s got to be done.

There is more to it than the beer.

[Dave Rice]

To travel more.

We’ve been doing Northern Europe in the last couple of years (as opposed to the Med / Canaries on family holidays) but there’s a lot of the British Isles I’ve not seen, or not seen since I was a kid. Having been to Glasgow and Edinburgh a lot through work there are as many cultural and language issues awaiting you and the money is different too.

Ironically with cheap air travel and the efficiency of European public transport, it’s actually quicker and cheaper to go the Continent!

Oktoberfest should be ticked off the list this year. Vienna is already booked for July.

[Author]

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