me : Wondering about something to do with HP Recovery…
[An agent will be with you shortly.]
[You are now chatting with Foster M .]
Foster M :
Welcome to HP Total Care. My name is Foster. Please give me a few moments while I review your problem description details.
Foster M : Okay,Let me try my best to help you take care of this issue.
Foster M : Before that May I know the model number, serial number, product number and operating system of your computer?
me : hp pavillion t560a, don’t know where serial number is, don’t know what product number is, windows xp home sp3
Foster M : Are chatting with the same computer/
me : no.
Foster M : So your chatting with the Different computer?
me : yes. the t560a is currently off.
Foster M : You can Find the model number & other information on the back of the computer. The label on the
back of the HP Pavilion computer lists the Information.
me : serial number is *snip*
me : i cannot find the product number
Foster M : Are you getting the information at the back side of the tower from the white sticker bar code?
me : yes
Foster M : Thank you for the Information.
me : …
Foster M : *snip*,May I know the reason for performing recovery.
me : i am not wishing to perform recovery, i wish to ask a question about it
Foster M : *snip*, If you perofrm a recovery you will lose all the Data which is stored will be lost & computer will be back to factory settings.
me : i already know that.
me : i wish to know that if i installed an operating system (linux, windows etc) replacing the C: partition… would i still be able to perform recovery at a later time to get windows xp back
me : the recovery partition is D:
me : and i have made the set of recovery disks
Foster M : No, You cannot perform because the D partition will be not accessible & use a recovery Cds .
me : ?
me : are you saying that if i were to overwrite the c partition ONLY, leaving the d partition i will not be able to perform a recovery from the boot menu nor my recovery discs?
me : hello?
me : hello?
Foster M : Using recovery cds you can perform but not from Boot menu.
me : ok, say i installed windows 2000, overwriting c (not a thing i would do, but this is an example…), in that case i would be able to go back to xp with the recovery discs?
Foster M : Yes you are you will be able to go back to Xp with Recovery Discs .
Foster M : Yes you are right you will be able to go back to Xp with Recovery Discs .
me : ok. thank you for the information.
Foster M : I’m still researching this issue; please give me a few more minutes.
Foster M : Sorry about that Is there any other technical queries that I may assist you with.
me : no
Foster M : Is there any other technical queries that I may assist you with.
Foster M : May I close this chat session with your permission,
me : yes
Foster M : Thank you for contacting HP Total Care Real-Time chat support. If you need further assistance, please contact us again at:
http://www.hp.com/support/chat. Chat support is available 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week.
For information on keeping your HP and Compaq products up and running, please visit our Web site at:
http://www.hp.com/go/totalcare
Here’s a post I found on Whirlpool:
Tyrial writes…
Out of curiosity does anyone know what speed internet these tests were actually run on?
–
Yeah.
They ran the filters on a Gig-E link on a Cisco 6500.
They wanted to simulate a large number of users, so they configured their test systems to offer thousands of simultaneous sessions at the filters.
If you do the math and work out how any kilobits each user gets when you divide their Gig-E by the number of test users, you end up with each user running at dialup speeds.
In their efforts to show the performance under saturation conditions, they effectively rate-limited the per-user experience.
The performance metrics need to be measured against that standard, by the way. Where they say 87% performance degradation, that means the end-user’s achieved performance was 13% of dialup speeds.
This is in a world where the very same Minister wants an NBN that runs 500 times faster than dialup speeds.
Australia continues to ignore its own government-funded studies from 2006 that show ISP-level filtering to be ineffective and costly. The Australian government’s disregard for those prior studies suggests that the driving force behind the current plan is more political than technical.
Not only that, it could mean less competition as a result:
Existing reports (some even conducted by the Australian Government) show that ISPs and customers will be forced to pay if mandatory filtering is introduced. The 2003 Ovum report on filtering commissioned by the Howard Government even finds that smaller ISPs will not be able to absorb the costs like large ISPs.
Also, take a look at this page… have a look at the most interesting parts:
h2>Why a mandatory filter will not enhance online safety
A filtered internet feed, if it could be fully implemented, would help only to mitigate so-called “content risks” - the risk of a child being exposed to content inappropriate for their age or maturity level. However, even the Government’s own literature suggests that content risks are the least serious of concerns to parents or children themselves. The 2008 ACMA report Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety identifies the further categories of “communication risks” and “e-security” risks. The former include issues such as scams, inappropriate advances from strangers, and online harassment, while the latter includes things such as viruses, spam, and the theft of personal information.
Labor’s own policy document, Labor’s Plan for Cyber-safety, identifies several risks children face online, including:
online identity theft
cyber-bullying
having photos published online without their permission
computer addiction
picking up a virus or trojan
online activities of child predators
None of these risks would be in any way mitigated by the clean feed internet filter. This all suggests that resources to protect and educate children about online risks and appropriate online behaviour could be spent better than on the clean feed, especially as free filters are already available to all parents concerned with content risks for their children.
It’s pretty much obvious. Labor’s intended filter wants to keep children (like us) out of harm. But how does that help in things such as cyberbullying? I’ve been a target of cyberbullying on Wikipedia. Let’s see how the filter manages to keep that away?
The use of the term “clean feed” to describe such a sytem system is highly misleading. The system would not result in anything remotely like a “clean feed” and would be nothing more than a token gesture in terms of protecting children. If Labor’s system were to be implemented under the misnomer “clean feed”, it would have very high potential to lure some parents into a false sense of security in relation to their children’s online safety.
No comment, that’s bloody obvious…
Would ISP server level filtering slow the Internet down?
“Ovum [U.K. based consultants commissioned by DCITA] states that index [URL-based] filtering is now more feasible in a proxy system [at the ISP level] than it was at the commencement of the Scheme. Index filtering technologies are based on blocking access to pre-determined lists of URLs (uniform resource locators- alpha-numeric web addresses) and/or IP addresses (Internet protocol addresses- 32-bit numbers identifying points on the Internet).Ovum states that improvements in index filtering, including more sophisticated search algorithms and greater processing power at the server level, have reduced the delay of such filtering at the ISP level to approximately ten milliseconds per request. This delay generally is not noticeable to the end-user.
…
While the Ovum report states that index filtering at the ISP-level would not make broadband unfeasible (p. 24), this conclusion is not supported by the Internet industry or its representative body which has argued that mandating the use of filters at the ISP-level could significantly reduce the access speed of broadband connections. Speed is the leading value proposition for broadband customers, and any reduction in performance may impact on this key advantage. One Australian ISP consulted during the Review stated that it offers ISP-level filtering on its narrowband connection but not on its broadband connection, due in part to the time lag of the filtering. It stated that the delays associated with the filtering it employs are not noticeable on the slower narrowband connections, but would be noticeable to end-users on its broadband connections. In this context, the ISP recommends that broadband subscribers use a PC-based filtering tool.“
It should be noted that Ovum’s “10 millisecond” figure was the delay claimed by vendors of filtering products. According to Ovum’s report[20], cumulative delays caused by multiple simultaneous accesses would lead to bottlenecks:
“They [filtering vendors] said that to minimise the delay, a server running their products should have a large amount of RAM (ideally 1GB or more) and be configured to locally store copies of downloaded pages, to speed up future accesses. (Note: this requires a large amount of hard disk and may not necessarily be the way an ISP wants to set up such a service).
A small whitelist of sites introduces a delay of about 1-2 milliseconds per URL, whereas a large (multi-million address) blacklist would introduce a delay of about 10 milliseconds per URL. This delay, in common with all delays given, would be experienced at around the same average value regardless of how many users are on the system, up to the point of saturation (i.e. where the system is handling as many URL requests as it can, dependent on the system configuration). Beyond saturation point, the delay will increase with the number of extra users attempting to use the system.“
“Findings from recent NetAlert research into the use of filters in the broadband environment confirms that accessing the Internet through a content filter at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level leads to a significant reduction in network performance.The research shows that network performance was reduced by 18 per cent for the best performing filter and almost 78 per cent on the worst performing filter. The research also demonstrated variable filter performance across the different categories of restricted content. Even the most effective filter in terms of accuracy, only blocked 76 per cent of the selected list of potentially offensive URLs used in the testing. The research also demonstrated that the technical challenges for ISPs would be significant. …“
A February 2008 ACMA study, “Developments in Internet Content Filter and Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety” examined the performance impacts of ISP-level filtering and concluded that any filtering beyond a very small list would inevitably cause performance issues and would result in a need for significant expenditure on networking equipment:
“As a general rule, solutions that have been deployed in other countries to filter and block illegal content using index filtering cause no more than a small reduction in the performance of the network in which they are installed. This is because the magnitude of the task (blocking content associated with up to a few thousand URLs) does not significantly
increase the demand on the processing resources of the hardware on which the solution is installed.
“However, filtering and blocking solutions that must manage and process much larger indexes, or undertake complex analysis of content, or both, inevitably create a more significant drain on processing resources, and can cause a corresponding reduction in the
performance of the hardware or the particular network…
For ISPs that implement filtering and blocking solutions, the size of the task is closely related to the number of subscribers whose internet access is filtered. Without substantially augmenting the processing capability of its existing hardware, an appreciable reduction in network performance is inevitable... For ISPs, the cost of such upgrading or augmenting the expensive hardware that they typically deploy may be substantial, particularly for smaller providers.” (Page 42, emphasis added)
Look at that? As a result of implementing the filter, the already shoddy rate of this country’s internet would be further slowed down. This would therefore force everyone who cares about speed onto the national broadband network once it is built, but we would have to put up with crap speed until that happens, and the national broadband network is merely infrastructure; the Federal Government is responsible for other things related to it, and they’d be obviously keen to carry on their filter to it.
Why an Opt-Out (or Opt-In) government mandated system is not appropriate
Through an opt-out system, adults who still want to view currently legal content would advise their ISP that they want to opt out of the “clean feed”, and would then face the same regulations which currently apply.
Whether or not an opt out system is technically feasible and technically practical, a system that requires users to opt out of having their Internet access filtered is totally inappropriate and breaches the fundamental human right to privacy.
Such an approach appears to have the objective of discouraging people from opting out because the only way of opting out is, in effect, to tell a stranger (i.e. an ISP staff member) that they wish to access content that some other people find offensive (but which is not illegal for adults to view or access either online or offline).
Further, any persons who support a mandatory ISP based filtering system on the theory that they themselves would be able to opt out should give careful consideration to the fact that once the infrastructure of a national ISP based filtering system is in place, any government/parliament (either the one that established the system, or one elected at a future time) could mandate that ISPs switch off the ‘optional’ component of the system. The same risk exists in relation to any mandatory national ISP based filtering system established on an ‘opt in’ basis.
Have fun adults! Calling up your ISP for pr0n will sure be fun!
Anyway, this is also too easy to bypass. It would be like the time before the DET had its new (retarded) filtering system; just set up proxy after proxy. Unlike the DET, setting up a new category “uncategorised” would annoy so many people, as the internet has a limitless amount of pages. It is therefore not feasible to attempt to have countermeasures for things like proxies. You could say heuristic detection, but it would not be hard to counter that as well. PHProxy is GNU GPL licensed code; it can be easily modified to provide an unblocked proxy.
And anyway, Australia already has NetAlert, so wtf? Looks like the government’s promise of high speed broadband was also a trap…
I want to get rid of the elevator ENTIRELY though, so I’ll probably do something like a ladder. But still, even with water, there’s a lot of height to cover. Especially since I just found out my height measurements from the underground all the way to the top of the cliff area are WRONG. >_<
November 19th, 2008 
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