There is an article here, about the latest vulns in the Synology NAS boxen.
The gist of it is, the Synology NAS boxes have a vulnerability in their internet facing side, and the author, a security professional for hire, also wants the company to tidy up their act, eg making the box so you are forced to change default passwords at setup etc.
Me, I don’t have a list of clients, all of whom I am charging top money for my time and advice, but that doesn’t change my thoughts.
My thoughts are, what the fuck are you doing putting a NAS box on the internet, and what the fuck are you doing thinking that the answer to this obvious problem is to add yet another internet facing service to the NAS box, in this case a firewall?
It’s Hi-Fi separates time, anyone, even a home user, who gives more than the slightest fuck about the security of their network and everything on it, should be running their own firewall / router between the internet and their network.
If you need to access your NAS box remotely over the internet, hey, that’s what VPN is for dumbass.
If you need to host a wordpress website and a twitter feed and a bunch of other shit, that’s also the job for dedicated server, or hosted content, in this day and age, the whole thing is as cheap as chips, one old laptop with a cheapo SSD will do all that good stuff, and keep everything separate from the NAS.
I can take my *work* laptop from the day job home, and let it access the wi-fi LAN, or directly plug it in to the gigabit LAN, and guess what, it can’t access the NAS boxen that are on the same network.
To be sure, they can see them as devices, and get served a web page that does nothing but allow them to download the windows server connector software, which as soon as you try and run it will ask for a username and password, both of which already have to have been created on the NAS or it simply won’t work.
In my case the NAS isn’t even on VPN, I keep thinking about it, but I have never had a pressing need and always managed without.
So, on the one hand, I can sort of see the argument the guy is making, and indeed that Synology and others are making, that customers *want* all these bells and whistles, and this guy is saying fine, just do them *properly* which costs money, which customer won’t like when the cost of the NAS box goes up.
But…..
“Properly” means not fucking doing them at all, on the same box, properly means what I said above, buy a separate fucking firewall, let *that* be your firewall… duh… and so on.
I dunno, it’s people’s alleged thought processes that I don’t get any more.
Y’all know I have been banging on lately about CO2 lasers, well, this person gets in touch, pimping their product, and yes, it is good, but SIX fucking times as good as a high end Chinese job? No fucking way, but the bastard *is* six times the fucking price…
And it CAN’T be justified, sure, there are several areas where things are a bit better, but, it has to be said, not a lot, as the high end Chinese stuff is using imported American lenses and imported Korean ball-screws and such, which are all as good as anything fitted to the six times the price shit.
But wait, the six times the price shit has a fucking ceramic laser head, not glass, not metal, ceramic…. http://www.iradionlaser.com/ … and guess what, all the promo video talks about is how ceramic is better than metal for a laser head as ceramic is inert and so on and so forth, well, guess fucking what, GLASS is fucking inert, it’s also a fraction of the fucking price to make a glass laser head…. you know, we’re in the realms of de-oxygenated copper Hi-Fi cables, you cut and engrave with a focused beam of coherent light generated by exciting some C02 gas and some trace elements…. there is fuck all connection between what you make the bottle out of that holds the CO2, and the beam itself… it’s not like a MDF speaker box makes a better sound than a neoprene one… it’s completely fucking different.
But guess what, iradion is in a legal battle with synrad, lawyers trousering money and the fucking costs go up.
BTW, this is 1.2 x 0.9 metre bed, so not desktop, but not exactly large industrial shit
So you look at their fucking prices, UK pounds sterling, 60w £37,000, 80w £40,000, 100w £43,000, 120w £46,000, 200w £62,000…. anyone think they are following the Epilog model and charging per fucking watt…. I do.
Oh, you want a water chiller, that’s another £3,300… for a fucking water chiller, for a machine that dissipates at most 750 watts…. fucking Chinese will bundle one for free, after all it’s no more than some industrial peltiers and a pond pump at heart…
I can, to all intents and purposes, buy a same size and power and capability machine from the Chinese for less than 8k, and these fuckers want 46k.
From the business perspective, 50 working weeks in the year, say 4 hours cutting or engraving time per day 4 days a week – 4 x 4 x 50 = 800 working hours a year.
Say I charge out machine time at 40 quid an hour, say I buy the Chinese machine today for 8k and my imaginary identical twin brother buys the other one today at 46k
4 x 4 x 40 = 640 quid a week, x 50 = 32k a year, / 365 for an average of £87.67 a day….. let’s call it £88…. this is gross earning mind, it assumes electric to run the thing is free, and my labour to run it is free, and so on…
8,000 / 88 = 90.9 days so come the 5th November 2014 the Chinese one is paid off.
46,000 / 88 = 522.73 days, so come the 11th January 2016 the other fucker will be paid off.
Out of me and my imaginary brother, guess which one of us will go bust.
£10/12k is TOPS for a European made 120 watt laser, people will pay the 2 to 4k premium for a locally made quality product, but that’s about it, but SIX TIMES THE FUCKING PRICE…
and no, you don’t get to trot out the tired old shit about vastly lower production and labour costs…. they have got sweet fuck all with you screwing with a perfectly good basic design for the product so you can go all high tech proprietary expensive bullshit just in the name of product branding differentiation.
There just are not the man hours in assembly, worst case scenario is one man could build one machine in a week, all by himself, that’s 50 a year, 50 x 46k = £2.3 million, so you could employ a German technician on top fucking wages and not notice it.
****THIS**** is why the Chinese are, and will continue to, eat our fucking lunch.
The next machine up from the expensive twats, it’s big enough you have to call it industrial grade, you couldn’t site it in a shop or soho workshop or car garage sized space.
So all that per watt pricing means it has to be more expensive that the lower models, right…. right… 60w £55,000, 100w £65,000, 200w £85,000, 400w £120,000
BTW, the cunts haven’t even mentioned VAT (Value Added Tax) ergo it’s a safe bet that’s not included, so add 20%…
These machines, if I want a demo, I have to go to osterreich, they don’t have one here in the UK to show me…. but what’s a European junket for someone considering splashing a tenth of a million quid on a fucking 200 watt laser… right…
The Chinese will sell me a kilowatt fibre laser with a bed 3 x 1.5 metres for less than that, and that will cut 10 mm steel…. and that’s not the big stuff… for the £120k budget we are (with the Chinese) into the realms of 6 axis robot arms with 1.5/2 metre reach, holding a 2kw fibre laser in the end, fucker will cut AND weld, and positioning accuracy, hey, 0.03 mm
EAT
OUR
FUCKING
LUNCH
I taken *straight* back to an early motorcycle trip to Greece of mine, this would have been mid to late 80’s, and basically the entire motorway across the north of Italy from east to west was bordered by industrial estate, and *lots* of them were making what were then called industrial robots, and most of the rest were using them, I remember coming back to the UK and looking at our industrial heartlands and 
thinking “we’re fucked”… just the industrial capacity on that stretch of road exceeded the entire UK capacity, at that time, by my judgement.
The image above, of ONE fucking Chinese factory, compared to the expensive osterreich fuckers, who are basically building to order and carry no stock to speak of…
See, the Chinese, they can tell me the beam “dot” size at the focus point, while the ostriches can tell me the Chinese shit is vastly inferior… but they can’t tell me their dot size.
A 50 watt laser focused to a spot 0.4 mm in diameter will give you a “power” of 400 watts per square mm, or 40 kW per square cm…. or 400 MW per square metre, they reckon the sun on a clear equatorial day will just about put 1 KW per square metre…
If you are putting energy in faster than it can get out, the temperature under the spot will rise, raise it enough and the material melts, raise it still more and the material sublimates, which means it goes straight from a solid to a gas.
Leaving aside the question of laser head efficiency, if we put a power meter into the beam itself and measure actual beam power, then 100 watts is 100 watts is 100 watts, whether it is generated by ceramic unicorns or old school glass tube.
If the beam quality is similar, and again, a good glass tube has good beam quality, then it’s all down to mirrors and lenses, and if they are all good… you’re getting the same power per square mm… so what the fuck are you paying six times the fucking price for?
It’s back to the top of the article, and the Synology NAS box that does everything else too, apparently, and that is why it is so fucking expensive…. much *more* expensive than the old school Hi-Fi separates approach, eg a Draytek 28xx firewall / router, a HP micro-nas, an old laptop with SSD running LAMP.
Eat their fucking lunch.
Remember 15 years ago when we were all in awe of the fucking Koreans, there we were rolling out 2 mbit asymmetric DSL connections to the home, and the fucking Koreans were rolling out symmetric 10 mbit fibre to the home for the same monthly fee, yes, we were in awe, and jealous, but what the fuck could they use it for eh…
Roll on 15 years and the fuckers totally dominate flat screen and mobile tech, and they now have far far more bandwidth, talking to a Korean student in town yesterday, she can’t believe what a fucking backward country she is in, her grandma back home has a 50/50 meg fibre circuit to her home, the halls of residence she is in, 50/50 shared between 100 students, 2 floors, 50 student bedsits a floor… I’m telling her there are still, literally, to this day, sites in Cornwall literally within 2 miles of where the transatlantic fibres come ashore that have to make do with a DSL connection that can barely make 750k as primary and a horrible latency satellite link that will do 1.2 meg as backup and http channel…. and this is a business employing 30 people…
Had to show her photos and shit before she would believe me…. she started giggling about the United Kingdom of North Korea…. cos, let’s face it, we are fucking 3rd world compared to these industrious bastards who just get shit done in the east.
Trust me, I’m an expert… we’re fucked….
