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May 282015
May 242015
Apparently there is some senile old fart who has decided to try and turn the clocks back to the 18th century and wants to bring back hunting with packs of ferrocious animals desperate to rip apart cute fluffy animals (with the assistence of a few hounds). It would seem that wannabee toffs have been nagging their Tory glove-puppets and David Cameron has caved in to their whispers.
For those who were too young back in the day, or for those who have forgotten, we used to let inbred morons ride around the countryside on horses (often crashing through land they didn't have a right of way over) with a gang of yapping hounds chasing around something they could kill – foxes, deer, peasants (well perhaps the later wasn't too common). During the Great Debate on hunting (which wasn't that great really as their excuses for hunting were really quite pathetic), the hunting lobby tried to convince everyone that they were only hunting for the good of agriculture.
Which had us all rolling aboutt the floor laughing of course.
Perhaps the most ridiculous comment about the prospect of removing the ban on hunting comes from the Countryside Alliance who clain that removing the ban will eliminate the risk of their supporters from being prosecuted for "accidental" fox killings whilst they are playing at hunting. A bit like claiming that murder should be made legal because if I fire off a shotgun repeatedly in a crowded supermarket, I might "accidentally" kill someone.
It's strange how easy it was to ban certain cruel "sports" (such as cock-fighting and bear baiting) which were more popular with the working class whereas the "sport" of the wannabee toffs is trying to make a comeback. Anyone would suspect that class differences are still important today.
But yes let's bring back hunting with a couple of small changes :-
- Hunts have to turn in their hounds in favour of Chihuahuas.
- They have to release and hunt Grizzlies.
That should either make hunting less popular, or at least reduce the number of hunters to an appropriate level (zero).
Just to pierce a few pre-conceptions about those opposed to hunting :-
- I don't like animals much.
- Whilst I live in a city, I grew up in a semi-rural area
May 222015
So on my upgrade from Wheezy to Jessie, I found myself (amongst other issues) looking at a graphical interface where the mouse worked fine, but no mouse pointer was visible. After trying a few other things, it turned out that :-
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.cursor active false
Did the trick.
Of course that tip came from somewhere else, but as it worked for me, it’s worth making a note of.
May 102015
Whilst messing around with malware, memory dumps, and memory forensics, it is kind of handy to be able to use VirtualBox. Particularly when that is your virtual machine "weapon of choice".
According to the documentation, Volatility can read core dumps from VirtualBox. Once you realise that you need to specify a “profile” to read the result, this is quite simple :-
✓ mike@pica» VBoxManage list vms | grep Windows
"Windows" {9cefc95e-eaf2-4052-b466-cb665c73a36a}
✓ mike@pica» VBoxManage debugvm "Windows" dumpguestcore --filename ~/windows.elf
✓ mike@pica» ls -l ~/windows.elf
-rw------- 1 mike mike 2.1G May 10 14:11 /home/mike/windows.elf
If you specify the right profile option, then Volatility can make use of this :-
✓ mike@pica» volatility -f ~/windows.elf --profile=Win7SP1x86 cmdline
Volatility Foundation Volatility Framework 2.4
************************************************************************
System pid: 4
************************************************************************
smss.exe pid: 260
Command line : \SystemRoot\System32\smss.exe
{Long list of processes removed}
All fairly obvious really, but if you do not specify the profile, volatility will present you an error that indicates it does not understand the format of the memory dump which is a bit confusing :-
✓ mike@pica» volatility -f ~/windows.elf cmdline
Volatility Foundation Volatility Framework 2.4
No suitable address space mapping found
Tried to open image as:
{Long list of memory image formats}
At least to someone as thick as me! Yes it took me ages to get this figured out.
May 092015
Well if you are a Tory supporter nothing went wrong; indeed you must be cock-a-hoop given that you have a Tory government when 64% of the voters wanted something else! But if you are against the Tories, you have to be wondering what went wrong.
The most obvious problem is the broken medieval electoral system we have. For practical reasons it made sense in the days of horse-drawn carts to ask each area to appoint a representative in parliament. But today we should be able to design an electoral system where MPs represent people not places, and where everybody can say their vote helped appoint someone to parliament.
As an example if all the votes for the Green party were distributed amongst the smallest UK consituencies (you did realise they are different sizes didn't you?), they would have ended up with 23 MPs instead of just 1! The Tories would end up with 240 seats rather than 331, which basically means that the Tories are very good at distributing their supporters.
In my case, my vote went towards a loser which means I'm "represented" by a politician whose policies and attitudes I find totally repulsive. There is nobody in parliament that I voted for. And the same applies to a huge swathe of the population who are now feeling alienated by the whole process.
And that is something that can and should be changed.
The alienation caused by the first past the post system is probably one of the causes of the low turnout; what is the point in voting if you live in a "safe" seat?
The most obvious difference in this election is the wholesale take-over of Scotland by the SNP, which surprised everyone. Which leads the new Tory government to a bit of a problem – with just one MP in Scotland, they essentially have no mandate to govern Scotland.
And even in England, the Tory majority is nothing to crow about – a majority of 5 is what would have been called a "fragile majority" in the past. A Tory leader with such a slim majorty is likely to run into problems if they try and ram through a radical programme.
The Tories managed to persuade many of us that a bit more self-flagellation is necessary, and punishing the poor and unfortunate is good for the country.
The effect on the Liberal Democrats is both surprising and entirely predictable. Joining a coalition with the Tories was always a mistake in terms of future elections – it was always seen as helping to put the Tories into power, and many Liberals were far less accepting of this than they would have been to see the party join a coalition with Labour. What the Liberal Democrats failed to sell was the idea that their presence in government helped to amerliorate the Tory extremes.
Labour's failure was probably down to several things :-
- The failure to demolish the myth of Labour's economic incompetance that "caused" the recession. It was the global failure of the banking system that caused that failure. Labour's spending was actually reasonably restrained until the need to rescue the banks arose.
- The failure to come up with a true alternative to the austerity plan of the Tories. Given the level of government debt that would be a hard job, but it could be started by pointing out (quite rightly) that simplistic austerity makes the debt problem worse.
- The inability to persuade that most voters are actually "working class". There is a historic problem with the class system by which people think of the working class as cloth-capped horned handed manual workers of one kind or another. In reality, everybody who works for a living is working class.
Of course whinging about it is not going to change things. We have five years of Tory mismanagement and punishing austerity to accept now.
