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http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/442099/air_force_scraps_massive_erp_project_after_racking_up_1_billion_costs/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Integrated_Military_Human_Resources_System#Some_Key_Features_of_DIMHRS

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/27/1228219/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243855/_War_Room_notes_describe_IT_chaos_at_Healthcare.gov

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labours-computer-blunders-cost-16326bn-1871967.html

My pet theory is that the key is knowing your requirements, understanding the difference between what it does and how it does it, and being able to distinguish genuinely important ones from "we've always done it like that, if you change it I won't be important any more"

Uh huh, that is why its selling so well and folks have so much "fun" with it is because they really wanted a sailphone for a PC, right.

Look its REALLY simple, Ballmer lost his shit because Apple became the largest company and instead of accepting that PCs had gotten "good enough" for most folks and that he should be trying to sell value add to the OS he instead....makes a sailphone OS. A sailphone OS that admins don't want, and gamers don't want and to top it off OEMs don't want it either.

Ya wanna know the REAL reason Android is selling? Its NOT because of mobility, its because Android IS WINDOWS, its Windows as it USED to be. Its simple to use,yet still easy to get to the system settings. It has an appstore sure, but it takes a single click to allow programs from anywhere. Its as easy to customize for Joe and Jane Average as changing a Windows wallpaper was, and it runs quite well on a multitude of devices. At the same time Android was rising MSFT was putting out the bloated piggie that was Vista and while 7 did well instead of learning and listening somebody decided that they could just "be Apple" and put out locked down high priced hardware...nope, I got better odds of winning the powerball.

You give folks what they want and they buy, give them shit and tell them "you don't need that" and watch them walk away...what is so hard to understand?

I recall a study from several years ago (10 years? possibly) that showed the probability of failure increased with the size (budget) of the project. Above about $5 million in then-dollars the probability was near 100%. As I recall failure was defined as either technical failure, or budget overruns going so high the project was cancelled. Of course, I have no citation. That would be too easy. :)

However, I did search for "Probability of Software Project Failure", and got some fascinating results. This is one of them: Statistics over IT projects failure rate - a summary review of several of the most definitive studies over the last 20 years. And this one: Healthcare.gov website 'didn't have a chance in hell' notes that:

The Standish Group, which has a database of some 50,000 development projects, looked at the outcomes of multimillion dollar development projects and ran the numbers for Computerworld.

Of 3,555 projects from 2003 to 2012 that had labor costs of at least $10 million, only 6.4% were successful. The Standish data showed that 52% of the large projects were "challenged," meaning they were over budget, behind schedule or didn't meet user expectations. The remaining 41.4% were failures -- they were either abandoned or started anew from scratch.

And I suppose this: £12bn NHS computer system is scrapped... and it's all YOUR money that Labour poured down the drain fits into this model pretty well. (Regardless of one's opinion about the Daily Mail.)

You mean like in some existing cars where you can just call their built-in cell phone and do a buffer overflow giving you full access to the CAN bus?

the problem isn't that I wouldn't trust a Robot Driver, but, how can you be sure it won't get hacked? or malfunction? Some things should always be left to be in control by a human. Intuition isn't something a robot can acquire.

Don't worry, you can already remotely hack existing new cars to do things like disable the brakes. Yes, really, car security is that bad. You don't need self-driving cars for such problems.

So you are advocating that journalists keep all their data on computer because we all know that if data is encrypted that computers are impregnable fortresses of data security -NOT. When data brokerage services, hundreds of U.S. companies, the Iranian nuclear program, and banks are hacked, botnets run wild, not to mention the NSA spying I would argue that even if you had an IT security department you might be safer keeping only paper records.

Let me try to explain this in simple terms for you. People do not blame Linux for Knight's trading losses because they do not believe the error had nothing to do with Linux. People do blame Microsoft for the LSE outage because they believe it had everything to do with Microsoft.

Note: the famous seven hour outage not the first, there were three others before it, all coinciding with high volume. Not particularly high volume compared to contemporaneous Linux platforms, but apparently too high for the Microsoft platform.

Incidentally, when LSE decided to eject the Microsoft platform, they also ejected the executive who brought in the Microsoft platform in the first place. Something to keep in mind for any exec contemplating going with Microsoft for a critical application.

Not an option on Win8.x tablets, unfortunately

What, all three of them?

We joke about "all three of them" when it comes to both Windows Phone and Win8 tablet market share and user base around here, but both of them have at least twice the end-user market share of Linux/GNU OS ("all 1.5 of them"?).

Source 1, 2, 3.

The worst downturn the industry has ever seen is a bit hysterical, seriously? The entire industry is losing billions of dollars over something that is being rejected by consumers at a level never before seen in history and you think I'm being hysterical? Do you pay any attention to the industry whatsoever?

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/10/08/northamber_fiscal_13/
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238326/Windows_8_takes_blame_for_brutal_PC_sales_slide
http://www.electronista.com/articles/13/04/10/apple.toshiba.beating.industry.average.still.suffering.downturns/
http://www.statesman.com/news/business/slump-deepens-for-global-pc-sales/nXH6c/

Things are so bad that some OEM's have stared risking inclusion of third party start menus in a desperate attempt to get consumers to start buying PC's again. Your right that the enterprise will keep using Windows 7 and skip over Windows 8 just like Vista. However unless Microsoft fixes things with Windows 9 (Windows Blue includes a transition to yearly updates to the OS) they will also skip other versions. By the time the enterprise is ready to transition off of Windows 7 it is entirely feasible that other companies (Apple, Ubuntu, Google etc) will finally be ready for the enterprise.

The Start Menu really is that big of a deal.

Based on polls of focus groups, technology companies scored highest among consumers, with a median score of 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 as the highest level of trust.

The geek builds his statistical arguments on sand.

The poll of focus groups was conducted June 10 to 27 and included three diverse consumer groups that included 32 people from Los Angeles, Chicago and Iselin, N.J. One-third of those surveyed were premium vehicle owners who were more interested in autonomous vehicles and self-driving technology.

KPMG conceded that the small number of people participating in the focus groups, while valuable for the qualitative and directional insights, was ''not statistically valid.''

Consumers would prefer to buy a self-driving car from Google over Ford

Iselin rang no bells whatever and I had to look it up:

Iselin is a census-designated place and unincorporated community within Woodbridge Township, in Middlesex County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the CDP population was 18,695.

The racial makeup of the CDP was 41.47% (7,753) White, 6.72% (1,257) Black or African American, 0.33% (62) Native American, 46.12% (8,623) Asian, 0.00% (0) Pacific Islander, 2.26% (423) from other races, and 3.09% (577) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 7.12% (1,332) of the population.

An area known as Metropark, consisting primarily of office parks and large office buildings, lies in the southwestern corner of Iselin and spills over into neighboring Edison. The New Jersey Transit and Amtrak Metropark Station is named for this area.

In addition to a Hilton Hotel and the train station, Metropark also features the headquarters of Ansell Limited, Engelhard Corporation (acquired by BASF in 2006) and Eaton Corporation's Filtration Division. Other corporate residents in the area include Siemens AG, Tata Consultancy Services, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Accenture, Level 3, BT (British Telecom), UBS AG and TIAA-CREF.

Iselin, New Jersey

Iselin's Asian population is Indian.

Iselin lies just west of Staten Island and is for all practical purposes just another corporate suburb of midtown Manhattan.

What do you expect would happen when you move to lower STEM wages.

Invisible hand my ass.

According to this Computerworld article from 2008, a lot of that "steaming pile of 1980s-style AI" is in use every day.

"Once tools get far enough out of the lab, they're no longer AI, just common computer science," says professor George Luger of the University of New Mexico. "AI just went to work."

I, for one, am looking forward to the payoff of this new, basic research 30 years from now.

Perfect Forward Secrecy can block the NSA from secure web pages, but no one uses it

I also hope they find and disable the software that is spying on them.

the refrence from my snide comment in case anyone thinks its too tinfoil:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9159278/Pa._school_district_denies_spying_on_students_with_MacBooks

So has snail mail and we use it much less today as we have a better technology called email.

Not comparable. The cost of email is in the infrastructure which is shared across hundreds of other uses.

Whether one is scanning a fingerprint, punching a card or signing a sheet of paper I see no difference.

Authoritarians tend towards a lack of empathy, so it is no surprise you come to that conclusion.

I can't find the reference but an article I read said that better sensors detect temperature and blood flow to counter the fake fingers.

Not applicable. Fake fingers (and dead fingers) are entirely different thing than a bit of gelatin that has the same temperature and capacitance as living human skin.

I also checked the article. The tape changed the fingerprint so they could not be recognized rather than match another print. It is a different issue.

That is a deliberate mis-reading of the article. Other reports of the same event specifically spell out that the tape contained prints from other people.

Three intellectually dishonest claims from you say to me that you are more interested in a pissing-match rather than finding truth, so I'm done.

Make a new fully open process, open source encryption system, fully peer-reviewed, global internet participation possible, global peer review possible.

You mean like AES? Or OpenSSL? Or...?

Use the global participation of Debian as a model.

You know it was Debian that fucked-up OpenSSL in an EPIC way, right? http://blogs.computerworld.com/fixing_debian_openssl

In the east it is more 50/50 windows vs mac.

Citation needed. Go ahead, I'll wait. While you're busy looking for that magical unicorn, articles like this continue to crop up suggesting that China doesn't want to pay the Apple tax.

You don't get it: "the east" is New York.

You have no idea how bad you have it with Windows.

Yeah, it's terrible. Having to worry about whether the latest game will run on the operating system I'm running... or buying hardware at OEM pricing online and incrementally upgrading my system instead of just buying a new one every year... and then there's that pesky problem of having to lug it into an official microsoft store whenever something breaks on it instead of the nearest 14 year old kid. It's rough.

Registry entries, malware, every free app including malware to slow down yoursystem including sourceforge using i3, eyecandy, ask, or whatever michevious crap!

Yes. Because malware authors target the OS with the biggest marketshare. Should Apple one day rule the world, and the Fanboys walk tall... they too shall feel the pain of worms, malware, and things being installed without your consent--oh wait, what was this article about again?

No fancy installers, no bizaare registry entries, simple folders, nothing hidden.

Yeah... that's really hard stuff there. Having to double click on an icon and click next a few times... or opening regedit and going through a tree-structure until you find the right entry, laid out just like any other filesystem.

So if the Mac turns into windows why spend 2x for the switch.

You're spending 2x now... you'll spend a lot more if Macintosh becomes the dominant OS... since you can only buy a Mac from Apple, and you can only buy the OS from Apple, and you can only get the apps from Apple, and all the peripherals are sold by... Apple. All that competition in the PC world sure does keep prices, er... really high, I guess.

While Apple still has bugs like in its store it is known as a superior platform...

To fanboys yes. To the rest of us, it's just another walled garden...

In the east it is more 50/50 windows vs mac.

Citation needed. Go ahead, I'll wait. While you're busy looking for that magical unicorn, articles like this continue to crop up suggesting that China doesn't want to pay the Apple tax.

I'll see you're isolated networks and raise you this:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218214/Government_tests_show_security_s_people_problem?pageNumber=1

As for write protecting... If it has ram, it'll be written to.

You just need to learn to love work that puts bread on the table. Electrical engineering is good at that.

It was, but is becoming less so. Would you feel entirely comfortable steering your kids towards a shrinking field? Read the following:

Computerworld - The number of electrical engineers in the workforce has declined over the last decade. It's not a steady decline, and it moves up and down, but the overall trend is not positive.

In 2002 the U.S. had 385,000 employed electrical engineers; in 2004, post dot.com bubble, it was at 343,000. It reached 382,000 in 2006, but has not risen above 350,000 since then, according to U.S. Labor Data.

There's also been some concern about the data coming out this year. In the first quarter of this year, unemployment for electrical engineers reached 6.5%, a figure the IEEE-USA, at the time, called "alarming."

Insightful, really mods? Got news for ya pal and its that NOBODY IS BUYING WIN 8! In fact I can get a refurb Win 7 machine sold in a few hours, i had a Win 8 machine sit SEVEN MONTHS before it sold, how did I sell it? Put Win 7 on it!

MSFT is screwed on two fronts, 1.- After the MHz Wars switched to the Core War PCs quickly became waaaaaay overpowered compared to the jobs that folks had to do, so that 5 year old C2D laptop, or Phenom I X3 desktop? it has more cycles to spare than Joe Average knows what to do with. 2.- When it does come time to get something new a lot of people are either having the machine they have fixed or are buying a Win 7 system because Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT, its Vista all over again with people using downgrade rights (I've had to deal with downgrades so often that I now charge extra if I have to call for a key) or buying OEM or getting a refurb unit, whatever it takes the vast majority will do because they hate Windows 8!

Dude its not even just the little guys like me, its gotten so bad for the OEMs that Lenovo and Acer are selling their PCs "pre hacked" with a third party shell already bolted on so the machine looks and acts like....Windows 7! That is fricking bad when the #1 OEM on the planet has to hack the shell just to get anybody to buy a PC with Windows 8 on it, I mean how piss poor do you have to be for sales to have the OEMs go out and buy a third party shell and bolt that shit on there just to move some units?

So try looking at those figures again before you say MSFT has the customers locked in, because between Android, ChromeOS, OSX, iOS, and Win 7 frankly there is a lot of choices for those that think Win 8 is a turd and judging by the adoption rates a hell of a lot more are ignoring or actively avoiding Win 8 than are buying.

RTM means release to manufacturing, i.e to the OEMs to test on beta hardware and with beta drivers.

Take Google, which just drops the new version of the Android SDK over the wall along with the hardware running the new version of the Android OS. I didn't notice any outrage there, perhaps because they don't allow comments on their blog posts(or they don't have blog posts). Or perhaps because if Google does it, it's okay.

This is just a low-effort manufactured story quoting blog comments, by the cookie cutter Computerworld "journalists" who can't even spell "sneak peak[sic]" and submitted by them to Slashdot to troll for pageviews. Another Slashdot low.

The author of this "article"? A certain Gregg Keizer, who is most well known for inteviewing a fake CEO(who was actually a computerworld writer himself) who faked Windows 7 benchmarks to spread FUD against Windows 7, which Slashdot predictably lapped up at the time. (now, Windows 7 is the best OS ever according to Slashdot though)

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9158258/Most_Windows_7_PCs_max_out_memory

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/why-we-dont-trust-devil-mountain-software-and-neither-should-you/31024

ComputerWorld reporter Gregg Keizer last week quoted a company source as boasting, “Outside of Microsoft, I don't think anyone knows more about Windows performance than us.”. ..
  ComputerWorld reporter Gregg Keizer has frequently been first on the scene with details when DMS has released a new study. We found at least a dozen stories under his by-line at ComputerWorld based on reports from XPNet, many including quotes from DMS Chief Technology Officer Barth. As we note later in this report, our reporting strongly suggests that “Craig Barth” does not exist and is in fact a pseudonym for InfoWorld contributing editor Kennedy since the late 1990s

Yet Slashdot continues to fall victim to this junk on multiple stories every week, the jokes on us. However, it's apparent that readership is dropping, as people with half a brain continue to quit, the moderation becomes even more brutal towards any comment that is not hating on Microsoft(see GP comment modded down, perhaps by Computerworld sockpuppets for calling out CWMike), and people lose interest in submitted stories to a dead place, resulting in Computerworld and HotHardware's MojoKid blogspam taking over the front page as they have a vested interest to submit stories and write flamebait headlines and summaries as they know Slashdot laps it up, and this causes more people to leave.. The problem seems to be taking care of itself.

This was my comment back in 2002 about Star/Open Office
http://www.computerworld.com/news/2002/story/0,11280,73896,00.html

When Microsoft abandons Silverlight, Windows users will still be able to watch Netflix through Pipelight through Netscape through Wine through Cygwin through, er, I must have missed a few steps or what ?

Not only that, Netflix is abandoning Silverlight too.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238421/Netflix_to_dump_Silverlight_Microsoft_s_stalled_technology

So we have....

HTML5 in a container in Silverlight through Flash through Netscape 4.7 running in Wine through Cygwin, through an HP41cx calculator.

--
BMO

Interestingly enough, there was a guy who was recently busted for putting a GPS jammer on his truck. It was discovered when he drove near an airport and impacted the testing of GPS-enhanced plane landing equipment.

Source.

The person was fined $32,000 and was fired by the company he was working for.

No,you just are not the target of that campaign, there are enough retards that will buy that claim. To put an example Now Windows 8.1 will use what is in your local disk to give you targetted ads. Remember Microsoft campaign of don't get scroogled? Probably the people that will install Windows 8.1 but complained about google's invasion of privacy fits pretty well into that category.

Google tried something like this years ago with Google apps for government. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179692/Google_rolls_out_Apps_for_Government_ Google did have quite a few people move over to the cloud system http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/05/10/2014246/boston-replacing-microsoft-exchange-with-google-apps But overall in Google earning reports they have said the product was not a great success. With Microsoft doing a cloud OS maybe but I don't have high hopes for the product.

The last report I read said they were switching to two-man tandem teams for Sys Admin's.

So did they double the Sys Admin count and then cut it by 90%?

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240151/Expanded_2_person_rule_could_help_plug_NSA_leaks

Congrats! You are one of the few, the proud, the readers of the FA.

Here's an article

and the government program

Very true. I saw this the other day. Over at the BBC, their Android development team is 3 times the size of their iOS team. http://blogs.computerworld.com/android/22269/android-fragmented-and-costly-says-bbc-it-denies-apple-bias As for PBS, I can see why they might be reluctant to step into that briar patch until they're sure they have the funds to do the job right. Until then making sure things work through the browser might be the best fallback position.

Nobody ever claimed 640k was enough for everybody by the way. It's actually an urban myth that Bill Gates said it - he never did, if anything he was pushing for the opposite during that time period.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9101699/The_640K_quote_won_t_go_away_but_did_Gates_really_say_it_

Same thing happened with GMail in Germany, and with the iPhone in Brazil. With each country having their own system for registering trademarks, it becomes problematic to come up with a name that doesn't infringe on anybody else's trademark. There really should be a single, global registry for all trademarks, because, with the internet, every business is a global business.

Yah, and that is why the "cloud" providers are less expensive. Do you really think there is a 7 figure EMC sitting behind an amazon storage node?

No! see apples to oranges again. For some reason its ok, for the cloud provider to run on cheezy hardware missing most of the "enterprise" features, but its not OK for random company to buy similar hardware.

Companies want to see the big Netapp or EMC name on the array so they can trust that the manufacturer knows what they are doing enough that their data is safe. Amazon and Google can get away with using cheap commodity hardware because they *are* the big name, and people trust that they can keep their data safe, so they don't need to turn around and buy hardware from the big storage vendors.

Are cloud providers really much cheaper? An entry level Netapp FAS2240 with 12TB of disk costs around $16K

Amazon charges $0.095/GB/month, or $1140/month for 12TB. So after 14 months on Amazon, you could have bought a local array.

You still have to back up (or replicate) the data from the local array, so that's not a true apples-to-apples comparison (assuming that you trust S3 enough that you don't keep your own backup of the data). a 12TB array is pretty small so you don't get much economy of scale, so once you get into the larger arrays with 100's of TB, I think the numbers swing farther away from S3 for corporate storage.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-10/dragon-systems-founders-take-goldman-to-trial-over-advice.html
"In a federal trial that began yesterday in Boston, the Bakers claim that shoddy work by Goldman Sachs on the $580 million all-stock sale of Dragon to a Belgian competitor, Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV, cost them their company and their fortune. Within months of the sale's June 2000 close, Lernout & Hauspie collapsed in an accounting scandal and its shares that the Bakers took as payment for their 51 percent stake in Dragon were worthless. Worse, according to Jim Baker, they no longer had access to the speech-recognition technology they had created. The patents underlying Dragon products including their popular dictation program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, were sold at a bankruptcy auction. "Dragon Systems and the Dragon technology was like our child," Jim Baker said in the interview in May."

That last part, losing access to working on the software, has to have been the worst part for the founders. My advisor at Princeton, George Miller, had mentored them too, and told me a little about the loss right after it happened. It is quite a cautionary tale -- losing both their life's work and all that money.

A recruiter connected to L&H tried to recruit me when I was working with the speech group at IBM Research back around 1999 on IBM's "Personal Speech Assistant" using IBM's embedded speech engine, which consisted of a Palm Pilot sitting in a larger cradling add-on that did the actual speech recognition on another CPU:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/41718/IBM_demos_voice_apps_for_Palms

Glad I passed on working at L&H given the financial disaster that was about to happen. Hard to beat the camaraderie of the IBM Speech group back then, even though it was constantly being poached by Wall Street (and others) for the stochastic algorithm knowledge. But like with many inventions at IBM Research, even with Lou Gerstner asking for a PSA to have in his office, the organization as a whole may have had trouble making the most of that lead as a "failure of the imagination" to see how such products for using handheld speech recognition could grow and blossom (in a way that Apple and now Google have commercialized).

An Apple recruiter contacted me a bit before Siri came out, and I assumed it was because I was on a PSA patent and they were doing embedded speech recognition stuff. But that was back when it was pretty obvious the CA housing market was about to collapse, so moving to CA would have meant losing vast amounts of money if buying a home (even though, no doubt, Apple would have been an interesting place to work). If i had not thought about that, working for Apple could have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in an underwater mortgage. It's interesting to see Apple now recruiting around Boston, which, while it has high house prices, are still not as crazy as around Silicon Valley (even now).

I would venture to guess that without the smart phone market taking off the way it has, that we wouldn't see as good of recovery in the software development sector. Thank goodness something came along. Oh, and here's the full article on one page.

Riiight, because Linux doesn't have problems which is why it did so well on netbooks, but that is to be expected with Linux having such a well thought out roadmap. Of course to have remote assistance you'd have to have functional hardware acceleration but who needs that, right? Why Linux is so secure and so much more stable than Windows why even needing that feature is unthinkable!

Huawei ... rumors

Am I the only one that remembers the actual holes? https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229785/Hackers_reveal_critical_vulnerabilities_in_Huawei_routers_at_Defcon

(Sure it might not have been an intentional backdoor but still works as one. I don't see why we shouldn't treat security issues like this.)

Because this THIS is revealing state secrets for personal gain, which is worse, much worse than what Manning, Snowden Tice , Drake , Klein, Binney , Kiriakou

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6

Tice,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/01/21/687340/-Exposed-NSA-Watching-Everything-on-Anyone-Illegally-Updated-x3#

Drake,
http://www.whistleblower.org/action-center/save-tom-drake

Kline,
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135645/The_NSA_wiretapping_story_nobody_wanted

Kiriakou
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/05/29/imprisoned-cia-torture-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-pens-letter-from-loretto/

Conclusion: you have to be extremely naive or engagged in a career enhancing self-serving thinking process to imagine that universal spying on ordinary Americans won't be used to in the basest way control the internal political trajectory of the nation by the next group of people like Cheney PErle Rumsfeld and Bolton.

Yes something very bad could and probably will happen . Yes we will lose relevant information by not constantly tapping all Americans , The but alternative path is worse. When bad actors get involved, there are often no good paths left.

the NSA does whatever policy makers tell them to do without getting all "philosophical" or "speculative" about whether it's exactly or even slightly legal or not. That's what we know for certain. Anyone able to worm themselves into a position of power - from the analyst level on up, has God power over The Database Of Guilt. Unelected officials - Perle Rice Rumsfeld Abrams Bolton Cohen etc can and will commandeer that database for their own illegal purposes and the NSA will comply because that's what they do. It may already be happening.

This is 100% unacceptable. This is no-go no-matter-what territory.

Secure Boot isn't secure nor is it a security feature. It's sole purpose is to keep Linux off of x86 computers. It's already easy to get around 'Secure Boot so I think it's broken as a concept. Security has to constantly evolve to meet evolving problems. Hardware can't do that.

+3 interesting? What's wrong with Slashdot that posts with the most misinformation are modded up? And then other people take these modded up posts as gospel and keep repeating the FUD.

Can you tell us how it's easy to get around Secure Boot?

Secure Boot isn't secure nor is it a security feature. It's sole purpose is to keep Linux off of x86 computers

Here's a couple of viruses that Secure Boot prevents.

http://www.chmag.in/article/sep2011/rootkits-are-back-boot-infection

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/16/tdl_rootkit_does_64_bit_windows/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217953/Rootkit_infection_requires_Windows_reinstall_says_Microsoft

I recommend reading atleast the first link.

Here's one juicy bit:

TDL4 is the most recent high tech and widely spread member of the TDSS family rootkit, targeting x64 operating systems too such as Windows Vista and Windows 7. One of the most striking features of TDL4 is that it is able to load its kernel-mode driver on systems with an enforced kernel-mode code signing policy (64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista and 7) and perform kernel-mode hooks with kernel-mode patch protection policy enabled.

When the driver is loaded into kernel-mode address space it overwrites the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the disk by sending SRB (SCSI Request Block) packets directly to the miniport device object, then it initializes its hidden file system. The bootkit’s modules are written into the hidden file system from the dropper.

The TDL4 bootkit controls two areas of the hard drive one is the MBR and other is the hidden file system created at the time of malware deployment. When any application reads the MBR, the bootkit changes data and returns the contents of the clean MBR i.e. prior to the infection, and also it takes care of Infected MBR by protecting it from overwriting.

The hidden file system with the malicious components also gets protected by the bootkit. So if any application is making an attempt to read sectors of the hard disk where the hidden file system is stored, It will return zeroed buffer instead of the original data.

The bootkit contains code that performs additional checks to prevent the malware from the cleanup. At every start of the system TDL4 bootkit driver gets loaded and initialized properly by performing tasks as follows: Reads the contents of the boot sector, compares it with the infected image stored in hidden file system, if it finds any difference between these two images it rewrites the infected image to the boot sector. Sets the DriverObject field of the miniport device object to point to the bootkit’s driver object and also hooks the DriverStartIo field of the miniport’s driver object. If kernel debugging is enabled then this TDL4 does not install any of it’s components.

TDL4 Rootkit hooks the ATAPI driver i.e. standard windows miniport drivers like atapi.sys. It keeps Device Object at lowest in the device stack, which makes a lot harder to dump TDL4 files.

All these striking features have made TDL4 most notorious Windows rootkit and it is also very important to mention that the key to its success is the boot sector infection.

Another bit:

The original MBR and driver component are stored in encrypted form using the same encryption. Driver component hooks ATAPI's DriverStartIo routine where

Mmm? Are you sure that's enough? It wouldn't be quite the first time NSA would have "helped" someone.

The justification for H1-Bs always sounds like lying with statistics... No, you're not having a harder time finding a job, the wages are just stuck where they were a decade ago, and despite the huge industry growth, there aren't any more jobs available than before.

The workers are often paid âoehome-country wagesâ in America. âoeThatâ(TM)s as low as $8,000 a yearâ with housing allowances, he says. The employers own the visas â" so the workers canâ(TM)t bargain for wages, and if they lose their job they have to leave the country.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-05-20/business/35232356_1_aegis-communications-indian-workers-customer-service/2

And though slightly different than H1-Bs:

The number of IT jobs at large corporations is decreasing significantly, and the decline can be largely attributed to offshoring
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225376/Offshoring_shrinks_number_of_IT_jobs_study_says_

Dude, you haven't noticed that you can group icons into columns, just like a newspaper?

http://www.askvg.com/tip-organize-windows-8-start-screen-tiles-in-groups-and-name-these-groups/

And you can shrink them down with a keystroke:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/sites/default/themes/cw_blogs/cache/files/u98/Win_8_groups.jpg

Organize your stuff.

Also, yes, you can get stuff out the start screen to the desktop. Easiest way is to pin it to the taskbar, then drag it wherever you want.

Huawei is good enough at compromising their own security though. I feel like I'm the only one that remembers this. https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229785/Hackers_reveal_critical_vulnerabilities_in_Huawei_routers_at_Defcon

It's an old article, but it's still relevant today: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks The worst characteristics of Sysadmins tend to emerge when the organization treats them badly. The stereotypes exist for a reason. The conditions that create them? Always the same.

That order was overturned on 5th amendment grounds. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239841/Child_porn_suspect_doesn_t_have_to_decrypt_seized_hard_drives_for_now

.

The looming retirement of Windows XP won't stem the dramatic drop in PC sales this year, but it may help bolster Microsoft's revenue, analysts said today. Although experts expect some business laggards to buy new hardware as they try to replace the 12-year-old XP before it's retired in April 2014, the quantities won't be enough to move the PC shipment needle to the positive side of the meter. "Replacements for Windows XP won't be enough to offset the declines on the consumer side," said David Daoud, an analyst with IDC.

It is complete and total bullshit. Why do mac fan boys continue to claim that OSX is more secure when time and time again this is has been proven false.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9072959/Mac_easiest_to_hack_says_10_000_winner

This was covered by many sources (for instance, Computerworld). Apparently the process that failed was the Nasdaq IPO Cross.

Microsoft: 9 out of 10 Windows PCs in China are running pirated copies of Windows
http://www.neowin.net/news/ballmer-9-out-of-10-copies-of-windows-in-china-is-pirated

Microsoft: 91% of the pirated versions of Windows in China are infected with malware
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234657/Microsoft_Most_PCs_running_pirated_Windows_in_China_have_security_issues

Thus China is botnet heaven. Anyone out there running a zombie network is going to have a metric fuckton of Chinese clients. Thus, when the botnet is used to get in somewhere it shouldn't and access files someone doesn't want accessed, the trail is always going to lead back to China.

Remember people walking around talking to themselves? Remember the "I'm not talking to you, I'm on the phone" hand gesture? It combined being rude with wearing a dorky looking apparatus. And that's what Google Glass is.

Yes, we all remember that, and it took exactly One exposure for people to realize that Bluetooth made a lot of sense in some situations, and didn't impact the privacy of others around the user.

When you whip out your camera and photograph my desk or back I am forewarned, and have time to rare back with the haymaker that will surely be your next experience. But there is no defense against people walking into your store, your office, your meeting wearing Google Glass.

Bluetooth affected only the wearer. The camera in google glass attempts to make everyone near it fair game.

Its odd that Eric Schmidt just a few days ago worried about Privacy in a world of Drones, yet his company is pushing a product to make everyone Google's Drone.

We should demand "recording" LEDs indicating when cell phone cameras are on, and the same for Google Glass.
Either that or remove the camera. 95% of everything Glass was designed to do can be done without the camera.