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The Unspoken Taboo - The Never Expiring Password
anon writes "Every security savvy professional lives with the daily fear of the "never expiring password" being exposed. It's the unspoken taboo, the wide open back door in every corporate network. But no-one ever acknowledges it or discusses it. All applications have got pre-defined passwords that never change. Which means developers, privileged users and hosting third party service providers will all have access to these passwords."
Listen, folk. This isn't as much of a problem as you'd think it is. I like to think of the application as Social Darwinism. At the company that I own (about 723 people), I literally fire people who don't change their never-ending passwords. They are security risks and hackers. Beware of them. However, in recent years, I have learned to become accustomed to the actions of these "insecure users." Case-in-point, THEY ARE STILL TOO MUCH RISK TO ME. I had some issues in the past with legally firing these people, but since I am also an attorney, I have been able to legally manouvre around these ways.
Now, if I were a regular sysadmin, I'd have to say to be really careful. The Novell machine that I have our IT staff runs requires employees to change the password literally EVERY DAY. The password must also be different, and the employee is fired if he or she is caught writing it down. Sounds a little weird, eh? But we have not yet been hacked.
A Word Of Advice: You Can Never Be Too Prepared
Excelsior--
Are you really that ignorant of a what a free market is? Free market doesn't imply that there are no laws against the initiation of force. The correlation between freedom of markets and rule of law is quite the opposite I would argue (Libya, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Britain, New Zealand, USA). Your connection between the notion of property rights and the requirements for mass government regulations strikes me as somewhat disingenuous.
Crashed the economy? Have you looked at the latest economic indicators? We are currently looking at statistically the best economic times in the past half century in the US. Your dire predictions for 2007 are unsubstantiated and represent your own opinion, and are surely not reasonable for the purposes of proving an argument. Suffice it to say that in most quarters they are less than axiomatic. Some might even call them polemic or dogmatic.
Where did the parent poster say anything that is unique to Bush or would make you call him a "Bushite"? It seems more like an argument that an Alan Greenspan would make if you were going to classify it as any one individual. And what interest rate manipulation do you mean? The short term fiat rate has been raised (which certainly would not bode well for 2006 elections), and yet long term market rates have only moved up ever so slightly and still remain at historical lows. So I think that your argument about manipulating rates is either ignorant of the real world or intentionally a package of FUD. In either case, your post is clearly little more than the opinions of an uninformed and undeducated but loud-mouthed AC. Please do a little more homework and a little less toking on the bong when you decide to step into the economic arena.