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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--
Wow. Interesting. Does your girlfriend live in Tokyo? No wait, I meant to say shut the fuck up.
The moderators are idiots for calling this interesting. This is clearly the ramblings of an idiot. Now, for something completely unrelated but entirely more interesting, I turn to Walt Williams to discuss yet another subject about which you Slashdot moes know laughingly little.....
With all the recent hype and demagoguery about gasoline price-gouging, maybe it's time to talk about the basics of exchange. First, what is exchange? Exchange occurs when an owner transfers property rights or title to that which is his.
Here's the essence of what transpires when I purchase a gallon of gasoline. In effect, I tell the retailer that I hold title to $3. He tells me that he holds title to a gallon of gas. I offer to transfer my title to $3 to him if he'll transfer his title to a gallon of gas to me. If this exchange occurs voluntarily, what can be said about the transaction?
One thing we know for sure is that the retailer was free to retain his ownership of the gallon of gas and I my ownership of $3. That being the case, why would we exchange? The only answer is that I perceived myself as better off giving up my $3 for the gallon of gas and likewise the retailer perceived himself as better off giving up his gas for the $3.
Otherwise, why would we have exchanged?
Exchanges of this sort are called good-good exchanges, namely "I'll do something good for you if you do something good for me." Game theorists recognize this as a positive-sum game -- a transaction where both parties are better off as a result. Of course there's another type of exchange not typically sought, namely good-bad exchange. An example of that kind of exchange would be where I approached the retailer with a pistol telling him that if he didn't do something good for me, give me that gallon of gas, I'd do something bad to him, blow his brains out. Clearly, I'd be better off, but he would be worse off. Game theorists call that a zero-sum game -- a transaction where in order for one person to be better off, the other must be worse off. Zero-sum games are transactions mostly initiated by thieves and governments.
Some might argue that there's unequal bargaining power between me and the gas retailer. That's nonsense! The retailer has the power to charge any price he wishes, but I have the power to decide how much I'll buy, including none, at that price. You say, "Gas is a necessity, and we're forced to buy it." That too is nonsense. If I voluntarily purchase the gas, I do so because I deem it better than my next best alternative. Of course, at a high enough price, I wouldn't deem it as such.
In the wake of the spike in fuel prices, many Americans demand that politicians do something. You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. Despite a long history of their economic calamity, some Americans and politicians are calling for price controls or, what amounts to the same thing, anti price-gouging legislation. As Professor Thomas DiLorenzo points out in "Four Thousand Years of Price Control", price controls have produced calamities wherever and whenever they've been tried.
Economic ignorance, misconceptions, superstition, and enhanced belief in self-importance due to moronic posts on Slashdot and even more moronic approbation from the herd-folllowing drones that pack these pages drive us toward totalitarianism because they make us more willing to hand over greater control of our lives to politicians. That results in a diminution of our liberties. Think back to the gasoline price controls during the 1970s.
The price controls caused shortages. To deal with the shortages, restrictions were imposed on purchases. Then national highway speed limits were enacted. Then there were more calls for smaller and less crashworthy cars. With the recent gasoline supply shocks, we didn't experience the shortages, long lines and closed gas stations seen during the 1970s. Why?
Prices were allowed to perform their allocative function -- get people to use less gas and get suppliers to supply more. Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.
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.