Heh. That sounds like what I always wanted do, get a phone line without touchtone support so I didn't have to pay that fee. Almost every phone can switch to pulse dialing, and it would have been especially nice for my dorm phone line, which was only used for internet access.
Sadly, I was informed by the phone company that they do not actually sell such lines.
They also were flabbergasted when I said I wanted a line without long distance. No, I didn't want it blocked, especially if that cost money. I just didn't want any service whatsoever. They eventually said that they could put me on them for 'local long distance' and no actual long distance plan at all, which might result in extremely high charges if I actually made a long distance call because whoever carried the call between LATA could charge me whatever they wanted.
Incidentally, when did the phone number of a battered women's shelter become secret? Are they really that hard to find out? How do women contact them? I know the address is somewhat confidential, but having the phone number doesn't mean people have the address. They can't magically trace the phone line.
If the secret is that the woman is in a shelter, I'm failing to see any way to hide that fact. Either she's at some identifiable location, or, duh, she's in a shelter. It's not rocket science.
I guess that knowing what shelter it is might be damaging, but that could be solved simply by a nationwide call forwarding service for shelters, where the shelter calls it, and it calls out for them. It would cost some money, sure, but probably less than one person staying at a shelter, for every shelter in the nation to have access to it. It seems sorta idiotic this doesn't already exist as a tax-write off for a phone company.(1)
Everyone has the right to know who's calling them before they answer. Even if that person is in a shelter, and calling their abuser. We don't need to revoke random rights from random sets of criminals, that's just completely confusing.
Now, abusers don't have the right to show up and harass their victims, but that's entirely different, and solvable by simply stationing a police officer there to arrest such harassers for trespassing and stalking. (Most domestic abusers are not psychopaths, and aren't going to shoot their way into a shelter.)
1) Incidentally, there are ways around this unblocking, by using call forwarding services. Non-telephone company call forwarding services often forward your caller-ID, but that's the key...they forward your actual caller-ID, not the information that 1-800 lines get. If you block your caller ID, that can't get passed on, and the 1-800 ID will just show the forwarding point (Because that's who the phone company is basing the billing off of.), not who originally called.
I'm failing to see how a USB+2.5mm would be weaker than a USB by itself. (Incidentally, 2.5mm wasn't a typo. I was talking about the even smaller headset jack that cell phones, and some wired phones, use. The one with audio in.)
The point is to have a standard 'docking station' cable for mp3 players and phones to plug into and recharge and pipe audio elsewhere, for cars and alarm clocks and stuff. There is not intended for 'stress' or any movement at all.
There should also be some way to detect this so as to switch off the internal amp. Maybe if you plug in charge-only USB and the headset within a quarter second of each other, it should assume you've docked it. (And mp3 players might just assume it regardless, as they'd probably have a 3.5mm plug somewhere else for headphones, and the 2.5mm next to the USB would only be for line out.)
Just headsets, of course, could plug into just the headset plug, by themselves. They'd be no more restricted than currently are. Same with USB. That's the point of using the existing plugs and just putting them a set distance from each other...it's no more expensive than currently, so will get adopted. Unlike any new standard, which wouldn't. (As far as I know, the iPod plug isn't patented or anything, but I've never seen another device designed to plug into a dock.)
Both accept anything from 5V to 30VDC for charging, according to the etching on the backs of the units. I charge them frequently from USB ports, but I also have an aftermarket charger which outputs 10.5V -- both work fine.
Which, um, was the point about my 'why iPods are so expensive' comment. That was a fairly silly design choice on the part of Apple, to have so many voltage inputs, instead of just one. In short, 'Logic' said that Apple's iPod connector was a very good design. I said, in some ways that's good, but there are a few very obvious stupidities in it. Accepting three different voltages to charge with was just one of them, along with dedicated pins for said voltages, (And different grounds for each one!) and it's even worse based on what you say because apparently one of those pins can accept a random voltage.
Likewise with s-video and composite outputs, when s-video can be turned into composite simply by wiring the two s-video lines together with a 10 cent low-pass filter in it. That's why it's called composite. It's a composite of the luminance and color, which are the two wires in s-video. (Plus two grounds.) Apple should have just provided s-video, and any 'video dock' or plug that wants to provide composite can trivially make their own.
He says he a) didn't take any pictures of her, b) didn't know there was any sort of audit scheduled, and c) she was walking around with a hard drive.
So, basically, he asserts that he questioned a random person who showed up and started poking around his network and possibly stealing stuff. (It doesn't sound like it was one of his hard drives, but random, non-IT people walking around workplaces with hard drives are inherently suspicious. He's network admin, but that doesn't mean he didn't know who the IT staff were at his office and that she wasn't one of them.)
And, yeah, there's no indication that, even if her story is completely true and not exaggerated at all, that he committed any crime at all, so it's hard to see why they'd mention this except to taint public opinion.
You should never try to remove any of the methods that allow for password recovery when you have physical access to the device if the device is kept in a secured location.
Except, as various articles have pointed out, and the city has totally ignored, he only did this to devices that weren't physically secured.
It's a city-wide network. Half the devices on it are going to be routers sitting in the breakroom of the tax office or whatever. Of course he disabled the password recovery on those things.
I think the point that people are missing is that even if you have the right to demand the key back (Or, actually the right to make your own copy of it, as we're being careful in the distinction between physical property and ownership of knowledge.), you don't have the right to arrest the person if they fail to do so, even if you're the government.
You want to force them to do something, you do it the same way that everyone does...you bring suit against them. Even if you have the 'right' to force them to do something, even if it's an actual law stating you have a right to that knowledge, you can't just arrest people for failing to turn it over...you show up in civil court, present your case, and get a judgment decreeing they must turn said key over to you. At which point, if they still refuse, they will be held in contempt of court and arrested for that.
The city, however, owns and operates the police, so apparently someone decided to take a bit of a shortcut here.
Wrong. If the company policy says one thing, and your bosses say another, the company policy is still correct. If the company policy says management doesn't get the password, they don't.
Anyway, the point isn't whether or not he should be fired. The city could fire them if they wanted, although good luck finding a replacement.
That's just idiotic, and possibly criminal. (Unlike what Childs did.)
Not to mention it's totally unethical behavior as a network admin. We can argue if it's sometimes ethical to take down a network, like if it's used for spamming or something, but it's certainly unethical to do it as a protest of an unrelated court case.
The correct thing for net admin to do is to explain their job responsibilities in regard to this case. Many people have no idea what network administrators actually do besides run wires to hook computers together.
So stuff like 'network sniffer' sounds a lot worse than it actually is. If people knew there were commercial products you could purchase to 'make sure harmful things weren't passing over the network' called 'network sniffers', and that responsible net admin purchased them and set them up and informed them of what sort of data they should be seeing on the network, and alter them when something else shows up, people would understand that and it wouldn't sound so bad.
They'd probably have the wrong mental image of how and at what layer this was working, but that's not important, anymore than it's important that I know how a mechanic replaces a fuel injector...the mere knowledge that he does replace parts changes what assume is happening if I were to hear about a 'bad' car mechanic who has 'removed the fuel injector from a car in his workshop'. I, and most people, would be very confused as to how this was unethical behavior, as we'd presume he was either replacing or testing it, and not that he was somehow inexplicably planning on stealing it.
Well, congratulations on making up laws, but, no, there's no law requiring you tell people passwords, even to their own systems. At all. Barring some sort of court order requiring that, which does not exist in this case.
And that's not what he's charged with. He's charged with, essentially, doing his job, with lots of evidence of doing his job introduced as evidence.
Like keeping detailed diagrams of the network at his house....the network he built by hand.
Or installing network sniffers...commericial network sniffers that monitor the network for viruses and hack attempts, like he was supposed to as part of his job.
Or having a modem installed...that paged him in case of network problems.
Or configuring routers to not let people do a 'password reset'...in unsecured locations, like thousands of network admin do to routers they can't lock up to keep people from screwing with them.
Or confronting someone who claims they're doing an 'audit' of his systems and, as he claims, walking out with a hard drive. (They were doing an audit, but he didn't know that.)
They have decided all this means he was planning to bring the network down for some unspecified reason. Of course he could bring the network, any network admin knows enough to bring the network down. If they don't, they don't know enough to do their job keeping it up.
Can someone even explain what he's charged with and what his specific actions were?
Refusing to do your job and inform management of passwords is not illegal. (It's pretty strange behavior, but not illegal.)
The only thing I can glean from reading both links is 'three modems', one of this was a DSL one he didn't set up for testing and whatnot, one of them was to operate his pager, and one of them was to link the city's network in emergencies. None of them even vaguely look like backdoors, but, more important, none of them were used as backdoors to a system he had access to anyway. (You don't install secret backdoors in cabinets in your office.)
I know Childs can't talk because his lawyers says not to, but there's a fucking document called a 'arrest report' that actually lays out charges against him and the specific actions he took that were in violation of the law. What are they?
Googling throws a lot of nonsense around, including the fact they've charged him with supposedly planning to use a planned power outage to do something bad, when said power outage wouldn't have affected those system. (And what 'something bad' is very vague.)
And, also, when the police search his house, they found weapons ammo. This is presumably relevant somehow.
I wish Google could see my location on the map. Either my phone as no GPS, or it's just unable to access it. I'd really love a 'center on my location' button, perhaps with one of those phone prompts showing up, like the ones that ask if I want to let the application send data.
My brother's iPhone doesn't do GPS either, but his can center off cell towers, which at least gets him close. My normal java application doesn't even do that.
Trying to 'fix' insurance that everyone needs is incredibly moronic. The only way to fix it is to force insurance companies to treat everyone the same, and at that point it's not 'insurance' anymore, it's 'taxes' which a private company skims a profit off of.
Or, to rephrase better: Anything that has the vast majority of society buying insurance, or the vast majority of a category of society, is broken, especially if such requirement is an actual law. Both car insurance, which is an actual law, and health insurance, which isn't required but need to function and is legally required in a backdoor manner for hospitals, aka, the emergency room loophole, fit into this. They are totally broken system that would be better operated simply by taxes.
Insurance is for people to choose to purchase to reduce their risk, once it's for everyone the model stops working, because then people want it to be 'fair'. Insurance isn't supposed to be fair, but it's not supposed to be mass-produced and sold to consumers either. It's supposed to be individual, a company walking through an art museum actually judging the security and setting a price.
We shouldn't run around putting 'rules' on what companies can and can't make us pay for, but normal human beings should never need to deal with insurance companies at all anyway! If normal human beings can't handle the inherent risk in some nationwide activity, like 'driving' and 'living', the government should be covering said risk via taxes on said activity.
And if you wish to discourage high-risk behavior within that thing, you tax it more to help pay for the cost. (Or, in the case of driving, seriously raise the price of tickets and fines for bad driving and accidents.) It's not rocket science.
(Of course, when I say 'insurance companies should be able to set costs based whatever they want', I don't mean they should be exempt from anti-discrimination laws. Those are something entirely different.)
I have read the first of that series, in fact. It was a horrible book with aweird sexist preachy message. And unbelievable characters, to boot.
Which is strange, as I liked both Calculating God and Flashforward, although those both had poor endings and Calculating God was, essentially, sorta stupid.
But I thought it was funny the author had come up with basically the same idea I had, except for some reason he'd allowed the courts access to it, which I think is a bad idea.
I'd rather do it the other way, not accessible by court order at all. Because I don't think people are willing to record their life if they might ever be forced to turn it over, and the societal gain if the vast majority of people do it is immeasurable.
I think we can deal if everyone is recording, and hence people could demonstrate that their recording is not faked by showing someone near them recorded the same thing.
I.e., if I say I'm across town, the police ask for people who were near me to come forward and present recordings that are close to my location at exactly the same time. The background noises should match.(1)
The one thing it wouldn't help are 'I was at home alone' alibis, and even there it helps a little. It's easy to fake recordings, but it's pretty hard to splice recordings to exactly match. If I can demonstrate I was in a crowd where other people picked me up, and I have an unbroken recording of background noise until the police knock at my door, then I probably didn't edit out the 'Help, I'm being mugged' cry for help.
Granted, this doesn't help if the criminal has an accomplice who moved the recording device around, but that's not incredibly important...the intent isn't really to provide an alibi at all, it's to provide a recording of the crime from the victim's perspective. Criminals probably wouldn't have them at all, they'd 'leave them at home' or the batteries 'would be dead'.
And once it has video, we're getting into 'Perfect Murder' levels of planning to pull off a crime without getting caught. A crime happens, people nearby get asked for footage. Everyone in said footage is identified.
It might not stop a really determined person, and professional assassins will cope, and there are plenty of total morons out there who commit obviously solveable crimes, but I'd expect the crime rate to drop at least 80% once half the people have these, with the rest of the crimes shifted to really remote locations.
1) What would be really clever is if everyone's device broadcasted a changing public key at all times, and other people's device would record it, and you had to be within a dozen feet to do that. Then, when people needed to locate people who had been near them at specific times, for an alibi, or whatever, they could simply post notices encrypted with said keys on the internet, and get responses. (Or not, if the other person chooses not to respond.) Cars should do this too. Changing every ten minutes or so so that people can't be tracked with it, but each key is stored along with the recording.
...but that's because Google has the data. But let me tell you my vision of the future:
In about 20 years, everyone will be recording not only their movements, but basically everything they do. Audio at first and then video. This, however, will not be public information, it will be either stored on a device under the user's control at their house, or with a company that promises not to look at it or turn it over except in case of a warrant. (Google's just a problem because it doesn't promise this.) It will probably be via 'cell phone' at first, although it will probably subsume cell phones in the end.
Why would people do this? To stop crime. Not them committing crime, other people committing crimes against them, and to demonstrate that they were not the person who committed a crime. The first hardware like this will come with a panic button, which would send the last two minutes of audio, plus a live stream, and your location to the police. This will quickly evolve into ways of monitoring to see if you're in distress.
They will also have various other features. By that time, voice recognition should be workable so expect transcribed conversation, and expect the ability to look up information simply by talking about it. Expect a 'distress' code phrase to replace the panic button.
Expect it to automatically recognize when you're supposed to be meeting someone and work with the other person's device to navigate you two together, or even if you're not meeting but happen to be near each other and are friends. Likewise, expect the ability to tell the device to lie so you don't have to talk to that boring guy who thinks you're friends.
And let me clarify that by 'vision' I mean 'What I see happening', not 'Grand and noble scheme'. It's not what should happen or what I want to happen. I'd actually rather dislike it. I'd like the Supreme Court to decide that we have the right to record ourselves without it being subject to a search. At the very least it should be minimized...if the police assert you committed a crime at a specific time you should be able to demonstrate the recorder has you somewhere else without specifically stating where or what you were doing at that time.
Basically, think Brin's transparent society, but instead of society recording everyone, and showing it to everyone, like he hypothesizes, or the police recording everyone which is the worse case scenario, everyone would simply be recording themselves and be able to produce a recording for themselves. And various parts of that would be automatically accessible to other people.
Oh, and incidentally, I know that such a device would be illegal in many states, thanks to laws about audio recording. The laws will very quickly change to let you record anything you could have heard with normal hearing. (Laws outlawing the recording of something you could be sitting there transcribing are pretty surreal to start with.)
I agree. My phone doesn't have a USB plug on it, but when I use the data cable and plug that into USB I get two choices: Modem and some weird data mode.
First of all, modes? Why not having it be one of those USB devices that shows multiple devices, like a USB headset I have that also has input buttons, so it shows up as a two devices, one a sound card and one a HID?
My phone has two data storage devices, the internal memory and an miniSD card, and it should be showing up as two 'flash drives'. I'd understand if some of the phone's internal memory was not accessible that way, but the browseable-within-the-phone part should be. I should plug it in, and Windows should magically get two new drives. (And a new modem.)
Instead, I have to use some application called 'BitPim' that works poorly, or their custom software. Simply to get pictures off the phone and put mp3s on. It's so much work I usually just make sure they're on the miniSD card and pull that out and read it! What the hell's the point of the cable?
If they additionally want to expose some interface to edit the address book and whatnot, fine, but there are standard ways to expose a filesystem over USB, and my phone doesn't appear to do that at all.
The only thing I actually can easily do using the cable is a dialup connection to the internet, and as both my computer and phone have bluetooth, I just use the bluetooth instead.
I would complain about the inability to transfer files easily via bluetooth, but it appears to be a Windows failure there. Windows does not 'mount' Bluetooth filesystems, which is somewhat annoying. But the USB thing is pure Samsung stupidity.
My Samsung doesn't have a USB port at all, it's got a weird plug that is headset and USB. (And it does wall charging, but possibly that's just via 'USB'.)
Hell, that's nothing. When you buy a printer, stores will try to sell you a $2 dollar data cable for $20 when it is in the box. The second biggest pick of advice I give when buying computer accessories(1) is do not, under any circumstances at all, buy a cable. Even if the clerk explictly says you need one. Even if they have a sale. It will almost also come with one, and, if it won't, I'll give you one. If it turns out you do need it and I don't have a cable of that kind, I'll drive to a store and buy the damn thing for you the next day. I've had to give out a cable exactly once, I've never needed go buy one.
Or the analogy I make: Cables:electronic store::soft drinks:fast food places. They sell you stuff at a reasonable markup, but they also have drinks/cables that are dirt cheap that they sell at absurd markups.
On the subject of MP3 players, I buy cheap-ass MP3 players, and, amazingly, they sound just like iPods. Better, depending on the headphones. Spend 30 dollars on headphones and 10 on an mp3 player instead of 10 dollars on headphones and 200 dollars on an mp3 player.
Oh, and the best mp3 player I ever found for the price was a cigarette lighter FM transmitter with the ability to read MP3s on SD cards and USB flash drives. It wasn't much more expensive than cheap FM transmitters, and it plus a few SD cards together were a good deal cheaper than the FM transmitter Apple wants to sell people to go with the iPod.
No chargers, unlikely to get stolen, doesn't fall in the floorboard, cheaper than an accessory of the iPod. I got it Frys, the automobile section, I've forgotten the brand, and last I checked they'd actually stopped having that model and had one with just a USB flash drive plug and no SD slot.
1) The biggest piece of advice when buying a printer is to not compare the price of the printers. Compare the price of the printers plus four ink cartridges.
What they actually should standardize is spacing between existing standards, so cable can be manufactured that plug into all of them at one. Like a mini-USB port with a 2.5 headset port 3mm to the left or something.
As for one plug, we're unlikely to ever have a standard that can do everything we're going to need it to do, unless we have it merely a data transfer cable and have the other end negotiate what it wants, and in that case we might as well use USB. Apple was luckily paying attention when it make iPods and make a port with a bajillion empty wires it could later stick video and whatnot on, but that the options are either huge ports or programmable ports.
And not all their choices were the best. S-video and composite? They are aware that it is trivially easy to turn s-video into composite without any circuitry at all, right? Likewise, the USB and Firewire connections really should be using the same pins and switchable...you're not going to use both of those at once. And the serial connection should be on those wires, too.
And what they should have done is, on all the firewire connections, a resistor to drop the 12v to 5v, and just designed the device around charging using that voltage. Instead they have 12, 5, and 3.3 for some reason. (Now I'm starting to see why iPods are so expensive.) It's even more silly now that the newest iPods can't connect using firewire, just charge using it.
A good choice of theirs, OTOH, was the use of a resister to indicate what is connected, which reduces the logic in the connected device.
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Heh. That sounds like what I always wanted do, get a phone line without touchtone support so I didn't have to pay that fee. Almost every phone can switch to pulse dialing, and it would have been especially nice for my dorm phone line, which was only used for internet access.
Sadly, I was informed by the phone company that they do not actually sell such lines.
They also were flabbergasted when I said I wanted a line without long distance. No, I didn't want it blocked, especially if that cost money. I just didn't want any service whatsoever. They eventually said that they could put me on them for 'local long distance' and no actual long distance plan at all, which might result in extremely high charges if I actually made a long distance call because whoever carried the call between LATA could charge me whatever they wanted.
No kidding.
Incidentally, when did the phone number of a battered women's shelter become secret? Are they really that hard to find out? How do women contact them? I know the address is somewhat confidential, but having the phone number doesn't mean people have the address. They can't magically trace the phone line.
If the secret is that the woman is in a shelter, I'm failing to see any way to hide that fact. Either she's at some identifiable location, or, duh, she's in a shelter. It's not rocket science.
I guess that knowing what shelter it is might be damaging, but that could be solved simply by a nationwide call forwarding service for shelters, where the shelter calls it, and it calls out for them. It would cost some money, sure, but probably less than one person staying at a shelter, for every shelter in the nation to have access to it. It seems sorta idiotic this doesn't already exist as a tax-write off for a phone company.(1)
Everyone has the right to know who's calling them before they answer. Even if that person is in a shelter, and calling their abuser. We don't need to revoke random rights from random sets of criminals, that's just completely confusing.
Now, abusers don't have the right to show up and harass their victims, but that's entirely different, and solvable by simply stationing a police officer there to arrest such harassers for trespassing and stalking. (Most domestic abusers are not psychopaths, and aren't going to shoot their way into a shelter.)
1) Incidentally, there are ways around this unblocking, by using call forwarding services. Non-telephone company call forwarding services often forward your caller-ID, but that's the key...they forward your actual caller-ID, not the information that 1-800 lines get. If you block your caller ID, that can't get passed on, and the 1-800 ID will just show the forwarding point (Because that's who the phone company is basing the billing off of.), not who originally called.
I'm failing to see how a USB+2.5mm would be weaker than a USB by itself. (Incidentally, 2.5mm wasn't a typo. I was talking about the even smaller headset jack that cell phones, and some wired phones, use. The one with audio in.)
The point is to have a standard 'docking station' cable for mp3 players and phones to plug into and recharge and pipe audio elsewhere, for cars and alarm clocks and stuff. There is not intended for 'stress' or any movement at all.
There should also be some way to detect this so as to switch off the internal amp. Maybe if you plug in charge-only USB and the headset within a quarter second of each other, it should assume you've docked it. (And mp3 players might just assume it regardless, as they'd probably have a 3.5mm plug somewhere else for headphones, and the 2.5mm next to the USB would only be for line out.)
Just headsets, of course, could plug into just the headset plug, by themselves. They'd be no more restricted than currently are. Same with USB. That's the point of using the existing plugs and just putting them a set distance from each other...it's no more expensive than currently, so will get adopted. Unlike any new standard, which wouldn't. (As far as I know, the iPod plug isn't patented or anything, but I've never seen another device designed to plug into a dock.)
Both accept anything from 5V to 30VDC for charging, according to the etching on the backs of the units. I charge them frequently from USB ports, but I also have an aftermarket charger which outputs 10.5V -- both work fine.
Which, um, was the point about my 'why iPods are so expensive' comment. That was a fairly silly design choice on the part of Apple, to have so many voltage inputs, instead of just one. In short, 'Logic' said that Apple's iPod connector was a very good design. I said, in some ways that's good, but there are a few very obvious stupidities in it. Accepting three different voltages to charge with was just one of them, along with dedicated pins for said voltages, (And different grounds for each one!) and it's even worse based on what you say because apparently one of those pins can accept a random voltage.
Likewise with s-video and composite outputs, when s-video can be turned into composite simply by wiring the two s-video lines together with a 10 cent low-pass filter in it. That's why it's called composite. It's a composite of the luminance and color, which are the two wires in s-video. (Plus two grounds.) Apple should have just provided s-video, and any 'video dock' or plug that wants to provide composite can trivially make their own.
He says he a) didn't take any pictures of her, b) didn't know there was any sort of audit scheduled, and c) she was walking around with a hard drive.
So, basically, he asserts that he questioned a random person who showed up and started poking around his network and possibly stealing stuff. (It doesn't sound like it was one of his hard drives, but random, non-IT people walking around workplaces with hard drives are inherently suspicious. He's network admin, but that doesn't mean he didn't know who the IT staff were at his office and that she wasn't one of them.)
And, yeah, there's no indication that, even if her story is completely true and not exaggerated at all, that he committed any crime at all, so it's hard to see why they'd mention this except to taint public opinion.
You should never try to remove any of the methods that allow for password recovery when you have physical access to the device if the device is kept in a secured location.
Except, as various articles have pointed out, and the city has totally ignored, he only did this to devices that weren't physically secured.
It's a city-wide network. Half the devices on it are going to be routers sitting in the breakroom of the tax office or whatever. Of course he disabled the password recovery on those things.
I think the point that people are missing is that even if you have the right to demand the key back (Or, actually the right to make your own copy of it, as we're being careful in the distinction between physical property and ownership of knowledge.), you don't have the right to arrest the person if they fail to do so, even if you're the government.
You want to force them to do something, you do it the same way that everyone does...you bring suit against them. Even if you have the 'right' to force them to do something, even if it's an actual law stating you have a right to that knowledge, you can't just arrest people for failing to turn it over...you show up in civil court, present your case, and get a judgment decreeing they must turn said key over to you. At which point, if they still refuse, they will be held in contempt of court and arrested for that.
The city, however, owns and operates the police, so apparently someone decided to take a bit of a shortcut here.
Wrong. If the company policy says one thing, and your bosses say another, the company policy is still correct. If the company policy says management doesn't get the password, they don't.
Anyway, the point isn't whether or not he should be fired. The city could fire them if they wanted, although good luck finding a replacement.
What they did, however, was have him arrested.
he handled it poorly when management could have just come in and said "you're fired, give us the passwords and leave."
He was probably expecting that to happen.
Instead they arrested him.
Rule #1: Be wary of pissing off the people who control the police.
That's just idiotic, and possibly criminal. (Unlike what Childs did.)
Not to mention it's totally unethical behavior as a network admin. We can argue if it's sometimes ethical to take down a network, like if it's used for spamming or something, but it's certainly unethical to do it as a protest of an unrelated court case.
The correct thing for net admin to do is to explain their job responsibilities in regard to this case. Many people have no idea what network administrators actually do besides run wires to hook computers together. So stuff like 'network sniffer' sounds a lot worse than it actually is. If people knew there were commercial products you could purchase to 'make sure harmful things weren't passing over the network' called 'network sniffers', and that responsible net admin purchased them and set them up and informed them of what sort of data they should be seeing on the network, and alter them when something else shows up, people would understand that and it wouldn't sound so bad.
They'd probably have the wrong mental image of how and at what layer this was working, but that's not important, anymore than it's important that I know how a mechanic replaces a fuel injector...the mere knowledge that he does replace parts changes what assume is happening if I were to hear about a 'bad' car mechanic who has 'removed the fuel injector from a car in his workshop'. I, and most people, would be very confused as to how this was unethical behavior, as we'd presume he was either replacing or testing it, and not that he was somehow inexplicably planning on stealing it.
Well, congratulations on making up laws, but, no, there's no law requiring you tell people passwords, even to their own systems. At all. Barring some sort of court order requiring that, which does not exist in this case.
And that's not what he's charged with. He's charged with, essentially, doing his job, with lots of evidence of doing his job introduced as evidence.
Like keeping detailed diagrams of the network at his house....the network he built by hand.
Or installing network sniffers...commericial network sniffers that monitor the network for viruses and hack attempts, like he was supposed to as part of his job.
Or having a modem installed...that paged him in case of network problems.
Or configuring routers to not let people do a 'password reset'...in unsecured locations, like thousands of network admin do to routers they can't lock up to keep people from screwing with them.
Or confronting someone who claims they're doing an 'audit' of his systems and, as he claims, walking out with a hard drive. (They were doing an audit, but he didn't know that.)
They have decided all this means he was planning to bring the network down for some unspecified reason. Of course he could bring the network, any network admin knows enough to bring the network down. If they don't, they don't know enough to do their job keeping it up.
Can someone even explain what he's charged with and what his specific actions were?
Refusing to do your job and inform management of passwords is not illegal. (It's pretty strange behavior, but not illegal.)
The only thing I can glean from reading both links is 'three modems', one of this was a DSL one he didn't set up for testing and whatnot, one of them was to operate his pager, and one of them was to link the city's network in emergencies. None of them even vaguely look like backdoors, but, more important, none of them were used as backdoors to a system he had access to anyway. (You don't install secret backdoors in cabinets in your office.)
I know Childs can't talk because his lawyers says not to, but there's a fucking document called a 'arrest report' that actually lays out charges against him and the specific actions he took that were in violation of the law. What are they?
Googling throws a lot of nonsense around, including the fact they've charged him with supposedly planning to use a planned power outage to do something bad, when said power outage wouldn't have affected those system. (And what 'something bad' is very vague.)
And, also, when the police search his house, they found weapons ammo. This is presumably relevant somehow.
You are not anyone's friend. And it's not just you that would get it, anyone on this site would.
That makes it fundamentally different than what Google is doing.
I wish Google could see my location on the map. Either my phone as no GPS, or it's just unable to access it. I'd really love a 'center on my location' button, perhaps with one of those phone prompts showing up, like the ones that ask if I want to let the application send data.
My brother's iPhone doesn't do GPS either, but his can center off cell towers, which at least gets him close. My normal java application doesn't even do that.
Me too!</AOL>
Trying to 'fix' insurance that everyone needs is incredibly moronic. The only way to fix it is to force insurance companies to treat everyone the same, and at that point it's not 'insurance' anymore, it's 'taxes' which a private company skims a profit off of.
Or, to rephrase better: Anything that has the vast majority of society buying insurance, or the vast majority of a category of society, is broken, especially if such requirement is an actual law. Both car insurance, which is an actual law, and health insurance, which isn't required but need to function and is legally required in a backdoor manner for hospitals, aka, the emergency room loophole, fit into this. They are totally broken system that would be better operated simply by taxes.
Insurance is for people to choose to purchase to reduce their risk, once it's for everyone the model stops working, because then people want it to be 'fair'. Insurance isn't supposed to be fair, but it's not supposed to be mass-produced and sold to consumers either. It's supposed to be individual, a company walking through an art museum actually judging the security and setting a price.
We shouldn't run around putting 'rules' on what companies can and can't make us pay for, but normal human beings should never need to deal with insurance companies at all anyway! If normal human beings can't handle the inherent risk in some nationwide activity, like 'driving' and 'living', the government should be covering said risk via taxes on said activity.
And if you wish to discourage high-risk behavior within that thing, you tax it more to help pay for the cost. (Or, in the case of driving, seriously raise the price of tickets and fines for bad driving and accidents.) It's not rocket science.
(Of course, when I say 'insurance companies should be able to set costs based whatever they want', I don't mean they should be exempt from anti-discrimination laws. Those are something entirely different.)
I have read the first of that series, in fact. It was a horrible book with aweird sexist preachy message. And unbelievable characters, to boot.
Which is strange, as I liked both Calculating God and Flashforward, although those both had poor endings and Calculating God was, essentially, sorta stupid.
But I thought it was funny the author had come up with basically the same idea I had, except for some reason he'd allowed the courts access to it, which I think is a bad idea.
I'd rather do it the other way, not accessible by court order at all. Because I don't think people are willing to record their life if they might ever be forced to turn it over, and the societal gain if the vast majority of people do it is immeasurable.
It should.
It doesn't.
I think we can deal if everyone is recording, and hence people could demonstrate that their recording is not faked by showing someone near them recorded the same thing.
I.e., if I say I'm across town, the police ask for people who were near me to come forward and present recordings that are close to my location at exactly the same time. The background noises should match.(1)
The one thing it wouldn't help are 'I was at home alone' alibis, and even there it helps a little. It's easy to fake recordings, but it's pretty hard to splice recordings to exactly match. If I can demonstrate I was in a crowd where other people picked me up, and I have an unbroken recording of background noise until the police knock at my door, then I probably didn't edit out the 'Help, I'm being mugged' cry for help.
Granted, this doesn't help if the criminal has an accomplice who moved the recording device around, but that's not incredibly important...the intent isn't really to provide an alibi at all, it's to provide a recording of the crime from the victim's perspective. Criminals probably wouldn't have them at all, they'd 'leave them at home' or the batteries 'would be dead'.
And once it has video, we're getting into 'Perfect Murder' levels of planning to pull off a crime without getting caught. A crime happens, people nearby get asked for footage. Everyone in said footage is identified.
It might not stop a really determined person, and professional assassins will cope, and there are plenty of total morons out there who commit obviously solveable crimes, but I'd expect the crime rate to drop at least 80% once half the people have these, with the rest of the crimes shifted to really remote locations.
1) What would be really clever is if everyone's device broadcasted a changing public key at all times, and other people's device would record it, and you had to be within a dozen feet to do that. Then, when people needed to locate people who had been near them at specific times, for an alibi, or whatever, they could simply post notices encrypted with said keys on the internet, and get responses. (Or not, if the other person chooses not to respond.) Cars should do this too. Changing every ten minutes or so so that people can't be tracked with it, but each key is stored along with the recording.
...but that's because Google has the data. But let me tell you my vision of the future:
In about 20 years, everyone will be recording not only their movements, but basically everything they do. Audio at first and then video. This, however, will not be public information, it will be either stored on a device under the user's control at their house, or with a company that promises not to look at it or turn it over except in case of a warrant. (Google's just a problem because it doesn't promise this.) It will probably be via 'cell phone' at first, although it will probably subsume cell phones in the end.
Why would people do this? To stop crime. Not them committing crime, other people committing crimes against them, and to demonstrate that they were not the person who committed a crime. The first hardware like this will come with a panic button, which would send the last two minutes of audio, plus a live stream, and your location to the police. This will quickly evolve into ways of monitoring to see if you're in distress.
They will also have various other features. By that time, voice recognition should be workable so expect transcribed conversation, and expect the ability to look up information simply by talking about it. Expect a 'distress' code phrase to replace the panic button.
Expect it to automatically recognize when you're supposed to be meeting someone and work with the other person's device to navigate you two together, or even if you're not meeting but happen to be near each other and are friends. Likewise, expect the ability to tell the device to lie so you don't have to talk to that boring guy who thinks you're friends.
And let me clarify that by 'vision' I mean 'What I see happening', not 'Grand and noble scheme'. It's not what should happen or what I want to happen. I'd actually rather dislike it. I'd like the Supreme Court to decide that we have the right to record ourselves without it being subject to a search. At the very least it should be minimized...if the police assert you committed a crime at a specific time you should be able to demonstrate the recorder has you somewhere else without specifically stating where or what you were doing at that time.
Basically, think Brin's transparent society, but instead of society recording everyone, and showing it to everyone, like he hypothesizes, or the police recording everyone which is the worse case scenario, everyone would simply be recording themselves and be able to produce a recording for themselves. And various parts of that would be automatically accessible to other people.
Oh, and incidentally, I know that such a device would be illegal in many states, thanks to laws about audio recording. The laws will very quickly change to let you record anything you could have heard with normal hearing. (Laws outlawing the recording of something you could be sitting there transcribing are pretty surreal to start with.)
I agree. My phone doesn't have a USB plug on it, but when I use the data cable and plug that into USB I get two choices: Modem and some weird data mode.
First of all, modes? Why not having it be one of those USB devices that shows multiple devices, like a USB headset I have that also has input buttons, so it shows up as a two devices, one a sound card and one a HID?
My phone has two data storage devices, the internal memory and an miniSD card, and it should be showing up as two 'flash drives'. I'd understand if some of the phone's internal memory was not accessible that way, but the browseable-within-the-phone part should be. I should plug it in, and Windows should magically get two new drives. (And a new modem.)
Instead, I have to use some application called 'BitPim' that works poorly, or their custom software. Simply to get pictures off the phone and put mp3s on. It's so much work I usually just make sure they're on the miniSD card and pull that out and read it! What the hell's the point of the cable?
If they additionally want to expose some interface to edit the address book and whatnot, fine, but there are standard ways to expose a filesystem over USB, and my phone doesn't appear to do that at all.
The only thing I actually can easily do using the cable is a dialup connection to the internet, and as both my computer and phone have bluetooth, I just use the bluetooth instead.
I would complain about the inability to transfer files easily via bluetooth, but it appears to be a Windows failure there. Windows does not 'mount' Bluetooth filesystems, which is somewhat annoying. But the USB thing is pure Samsung stupidity.
My Samsung doesn't have a USB port at all, it's got a weird plug that is headset and USB. (And it does wall charging, but possibly that's just via 'USB'.)
It's an A717, a few years old, though.
Hell, that's nothing. When you buy a printer, stores will try to sell you a $2 dollar data cable for $20 when it is in the box. The second biggest pick of advice I give when buying computer accessories(1) is do not, under any circumstances at all, buy a cable. Even if the clerk explictly says you need one. Even if they have a sale. It will almost also come with one, and, if it won't, I'll give you one. If it turns out you do need it and I don't have a cable of that kind, I'll drive to a store and buy the damn thing for you the next day. I've had to give out a cable exactly once, I've never needed go buy one.
Or the analogy I make: Cables:electronic store::soft drinks:fast food places. They sell you stuff at a reasonable markup, but they also have drinks/cables that are dirt cheap that they sell at absurd markups.
On the subject of MP3 players, I buy cheap-ass MP3 players, and, amazingly, they sound just like iPods. Better, depending on the headphones. Spend 30 dollars on headphones and 10 on an mp3 player instead of 10 dollars on headphones and 200 dollars on an mp3 player.
Oh, and the best mp3 player I ever found for the price was a cigarette lighter FM transmitter with the ability to read MP3s on SD cards and USB flash drives. It wasn't much more expensive than cheap FM transmitters, and it plus a few SD cards together were a good deal cheaper than the FM transmitter Apple wants to sell people to go with the iPod.
No chargers, unlikely to get stolen, doesn't fall in the floorboard, cheaper than an accessory of the iPod. I got it Frys, the automobile section, I've forgotten the brand, and last I checked they'd actually stopped having that model and had one with just a USB flash drive plug and no SD slot.
1) The biggest piece of advice when buying a printer is to not compare the price of the printers. Compare the price of the printers plus four ink cartridges.
Gold plated Monster cables make the phone charge faster, you philistine!
Pffft, I bet you're driving around on tires inflated with used air.
EPIC TROLL.
What they actually should standardize is spacing between existing standards, so cable can be manufactured that plug into all of them at one. Like a mini-USB port with a 2.5 headset port 3mm to the left or something.
As for one plug, we're unlikely to ever have a standard that can do everything we're going to need it to do, unless we have it merely a data transfer cable and have the other end negotiate what it wants, and in that case we might as well use USB. Apple was luckily paying attention when it make iPods and make a port with a bajillion empty wires it could later stick video and whatnot on, but that the options are either huge ports or programmable ports.
And not all their choices were the best. S-video and composite? They are aware that it is trivially easy to turn s-video into composite without any circuitry at all, right? Likewise, the USB and Firewire connections really should be using the same pins and switchable...you're not going to use both of those at once. And the serial connection should be on those wires, too.
And what they should have done is, on all the firewire connections, a resistor to drop the 12v to 5v, and just designed the device around charging using that voltage. Instead they have 12, 5, and 3.3 for some reason. (Now I'm starting to see why iPods are so expensive.) It's even more silly now that the newest iPods can't connect using firewire, just charge using it.
A good choice of theirs, OTOH, was the use of a resister to indicate what is connected, which reduces the logic in the connected device.