Slashdot Mirror
Who Is Downloading the Torrented Facebook Files?
eldavojohn writes "Gizmodo's got an interesting scoop on a list of IPs acquired from Peer Block revealing who is downloading the Facebook user data torrented this week: Apple, the Church of Scientology, Disney, Intel, IBM and several major government contractors just to name a few. The article notes that this doesn't mean it's sanctioned by these companies or even known to be happening, but the IP addresses of requests coming to one of the users' machines match to lists of IP blocks for each company."
Or, it could be a random NSA employee posting to provide a cover of plausible deniability to the monitoring! But seriously, the only thing the torrent does is make the information more easily obtained at one go. You can still click through the whole database and get all the information at http://facebook.com/directory. I really don't see where any actual news is involved in this story, even from the beginning.
I bet they are.
At the company I worked for the IT department had a machine which was always on and whose only purpose was to download files like that over BitTorrent. Of course only a few people inside IT knew about this machine.
The company had about 10'000 employees. I guess a company like Intel (which has around 80'000 employees) downloading some random file over BitTorrent is absolutely nothing special.
Which highlights the point that whoever is downloading the torrent at Intel must be doing so with authorization.
..." I can answer that one. Last place I worked as IT manager, but not by my choice, I wanted to lock the firewall down and block everything but web, email and a VPN port. I was overridden by the Boss, seems one of the guy in the machine shop (who also did the IT support before me, Goddess! what a mess!) had been downloading torrents of MS Office, Solidworks, MasterCam, Win XP and just about every software app they had in the office. Every time I tried to bring up the issue and try to get auth to start getting licenses I was told it would be too expensive. This was during the same time that the boss/owner took $400,000 out of the company accounts to buy a new house, he was also laying people off because their wasn't enough work for them.
As to your question of "what kind of IT department
When the employee count got down to 25 I was laid off too on the premise that they didn't think they needed a full time IT department, the guy from the machine shop was going to babysit the network again. Thing that pisses me off if as long as he doesn't fuck with it will run smoothly until a hardware failure. I had set everything up to be just about idiot proof. Makes me think I did my job too well but its the only way I know how to do things.
That's the best way to do it. It makes your job easier while you're there. As we've learned, there is no company loyalty. They expect us (the employees) to be loyal to the company, but when the time comes to save money, they aren't loyal to us.
Don't worry, I'm sure he took your nicely configured system, and managed to mangle it in horrendous ways.
The last real big place that I worked, I had everything running like clockwork. It looked like it was easy, because I did it so well. Within a month of them letting me go ungracefully, people started dropping me emails saying there were problems. They weren't related to the company, they just knew I ran everything. My only answer for them was "They fired me. I don't care. If they want me to fix it, I'd only go back with a huge raise and a bulletproof contract on my terms." They fixed problems. They made worse problems. Still, a few years later, I get the occasional email "their site is down.", which always gets the same response, "I don't care." :) The day they stopped paying me was the day I stopped caring. I do miss that job though. There's a certain feeling of accomplishment to have a well tuned machine running like clockwork.
The thing in both of our cases is, we know they cut us loose because someone else said they could do it for a fraction of our price. And for that, we know they got someone with a fraction of our ability.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.