The big danger of judging people by their character as a fit to a culture is that a particular character type becomes over-represented, and all decision-making could basically be made interchangeably by any member of the organization. Just as a gene pool that has little diversity is much more vulnerable to disaster, so to is the organization that believes that it will be more effective by stereotyping people according to their determination of their character.
And in the case where corporate and individual privacy rights are in conflict, guess which way the courts will likely rule. While a privately-owned company may have the right to completely hide its business dealings from the public, a publicly-traded one like AT&T shouldn't be allowed to hide behind "privacy" concerns when the real issue is that they've been caught doing dirty business.
I believe that people _will_ hear about cool features that an Android phone offers, buy an Android phone and find out, too late, that it's available on _other_ Android phones, not the one they bought.
This is rapidly becoming a problem with other smartphones as well, so it's just par for the course. It's sad when marketeers can collude with each other to provide the illusion of choice, when the reality is they all offer the same crappy deal except for killer feature x. I was most annoyed for instance, to find that BlackBerry Enterprise Server was not a feature of all BlackBerrys. Some carriers disable this functionality and charge extra for it, even though I'm administering the BES! They just assume that a home user is not capable of such a setup, and that it's a service that only they can provide.
They are irrelevant and dead probably more because of Java than Solaris. And Linux isn't a replacement for Solaris, anyway. Linux has its best potential in the small business market, where paying the Windows tax is not really an option. However, there's just too much Windows market share for Linux to realistically compete for the home desktop. Add that to the annoyances with WINE, and I don't see a lot of movement in that direction any time soon. Linux is not a replacement for Windows. It's not useless, either, but it would be better for Linux organizations to focus on its strengths rather than annoying users by pretending it's just like Windows.
Sentimentality in a situation like this is just bizarre.
I don't see how it's bizarre to have compassion for those who no longer have a job after working at this factory for years. It's logical to shut down the plant, yes, and to move to different technologies. However, it is not strange to have concern for someone who no longer has the means to make a living. The people who have been displaced need support, retraining and a new means to make a living. These days, however, business is only concerned about the move to new technologies, and not so much about the social impacts of the decisions they make.
This obsolescence issue is going to come up over and over again. While it's not the concern of the employer about whether a new technology will lead to employing less people, it should be somebody's concern. Unemployed people have a cost that is generally not considered: increased crime, increased need for resources such as counselling and psychiatric services, increased unhappiness and stress even for those in the workplace. More research is being done in these areas, and costs to business and state for things like workplace stress and mental illness which have been taken for granted are being consistently shown to be significant. Not only is it more humane to take these costs into account, but the likelihood of long-term savings in employment and productivity costs seems probable.
It's much easier to keep guidelines internal, and only release very general suggestions.
Of course it's easier to do so, since less people have a say as to what the guidelines should be. However, it's not really possible to claim that it's a transparent process as a result. The lack of transparency makes people think that Apple has something to hide, especially when it has not really been clear to this point why some apps are being rejected. Allowing input from the community on what those guidelines should be would create a public image that peoples' opinions matter, and that Apple is not arbitrarily deciding which apps will be sold. This is even more important, since the app store is effectively the only way to get new applications. If Apple prevents your app from being sold, there is really no other way to market it.
On the other hand, Apple is well-known for their high-handed, prescriptive approach to technology, so the fact that no other input was considered in determining who would be allowed to profit from the iPhone platform should come as no surprise.
It is interesting that 57,000 sites can be created per week at a cost which still allows for a profit. I know that some of these sites are created using phishing kits, but does every one of these 57,000 sites represent an individual effort? TFA doesn't give any details of how such high numbers of fake sites are created, but I would expect that a large number of them are programmatic variations of the same site, hosted on different machines/networks. How many people are actually employed by the phishing con game?
95% of the time, it's not the network. It's almost always the endpoints.
I'm guessing a new way of saying PIBCAK?
Stop crying about the network.
And start looking at where the real problem might be. The guy with an MBA from an online university and an entry-level Microsoft certification being responsible for the hiring just might have something to do with how IT is a great steaming shithole.
It would seem that the concern is over BES, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which works exactly the way you say it should. The difficulty seems to be that RIM does not, in fact, have access to the things that India wants access to. A BB device on BES communicates directly with the organization through an encrypted link, whose key is generated when the organization's BES administrator installs it. I don't see an easy technical way of solving this problem, since existing BB users would be required to replace their device with one that now invades their privacy, or a version of BES with a back door would be created. Either way, I don't see people rushing to comply.
As a Canadian, I'm happy to see RIM's success thus far, and obviously continued growth would need to take advantage of other markets, who have different laws. While it's not something RIM wants to do, I think they will eventually cave to India's demands.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, RIM is in business, not politics. It is not their place to try and change things in India, it is the Indians'. On the other hand, to be ethical, they cannot knowingly place responsibility on a different authority if it is known that they will then act unethically. Ultimately, I think it will be better for the Canadian IT market if RIM just holds their nose and makes it happen. This is simply not a battle they can, or should win. If Indians don't like the way their government treats their privacy, they need to change things themselves.
Your joke is more true than you know:
Search for "Unreliable Ferrari". Looks great, goes fast, expensive to maintain because it's constantly falling apart.
So they can't utilize technology, but they're still allowed to stand behind you and watch you work, right? The only difference between the two is the technology behind the first one.
The difference between a camera and your boss is that a camera has nothing better to do than watch you all day long (and record its results). Presumably your boss is your boss because he has more important things to do. If you work for an organization that can afford to employ an internal employee surveillance force, perhaps you should look for one that spends that same money on better salaries and benefits.
Actually, no, this is a simple Stack Buffer Overflow. Basically, by causing a running privileged process (e.g. X Server) to make a recursive call, the stack will grow into memory space owned by the unprivileged user. Now, all the unprivileged user has to do is put some code somewhere (perhaps by exploiting another buffer overflow) and rewrite the return address, which lives in its memory page.
The fix adds a guard page between the shared memory region and the system stack to protect against the stack growing into memory where it is no longer protected. At any rate, ProPolice would have prevented this mistake from being exploitable.
As far as I know, no one has successfully automated *nix hacking and certainly not any kind of effective drive-by attack.
Then you don't know where to look. I've found rootkits for MySQL, various ftpds, old versions of Apache, etc. Automating such rootkits is a trivial task. Writing C code given the explanation of the vulnerability is usually also a trivial task. Hell, the first Linux server I put on the 'net in '98 was rooted within a month through a vulnerability in wuftpd. It certainly wasn't any kind of targeted attack, as it simply put eggdrop in an obscure location and replaced/bin/ps to hide the process.
Even if the automated attack gets a foot in the door, they still have to manually find a way to escalate privileges.
And therein lies the rub. My Linux server was rooted because wuftpd ran with elevated privileges, as it was delivered by the distro. Older Windows versions did basically everything as Administrator, so the privilege escalation part was trivial. Later versions of Windows do not have this problem. Every single problem that you point to in Windows either no longer exists, or also existed in the default installation of a particular distro. Yeah, you can do your own security and do better, but you can say the same about any OS. The problem is that most people use the defaults, not having the time or inclination to become an expert in, say, SELinux.
Connect that same box running Windows directly to the internet and you don't even have to announce its presence. It's like auto-hork
OK, I'll do you one better. I've announced its presence but won't tell you where it is. It's running Server 2003 with SP3 and has a hardware firewall in front of it. That should be more than enough to root it if your boast is even remotely true.
If that were true then the exploits out in the wild should be relative to percentage of machines running that OS. And yet there aren't any.
Once again, you don't know where to look. And, the number of exploits available for Windows 7 is considerably lower than for previous versions, probably in part due to the stack protections in the.NET framework. Until ProPolice is implemented in every default Linux distro, Linux is more exploitable than Windows, as every single mistake that can lead to a buffer overflow is exploitable, whereas with stack protection it is not.
That popularity tripe was a talking point from a MSFT PR firm advertising campaign that went around a few years ago.
And let's not forget the fine marketing campaign from the Linux side. Information wants to be Free! Proprietary Software is Evil and will only be used to Invade Your Privacy and Sell You Stuff You Don't Want. Bask in the Free Goodness and Never Get Paid to Code Again! All marketing is bullshit, and frankly, there's so much FUD on all sides that I've decided that my loyalty is simply for sale. Maybe one day you will become hungry and desparate enough that it's simply not worth getting involved in the politics.
A path searching issue exists in iTunes. iTunes will search for a specific DLL in the current working directory. If someone places a maliciously crafted file with a specific name in a directory, opening another file in that directory in iTunes may lead to arbitrary code execution. This issue is addressed by removing the code that uses the DLL. This issue does not affect Mac OS X systems. Credit to Simon Raner of ACROS Security for reporting this issue.
This was the issue he reported in iTunes. Presumably, the same issue exists in other applications. However, it is only exploitable if a remote attacker is able to write the malicious DLL to the directory. Thus, securing any remotely accessable storage will prevent this attack.
Exploitable != Malicious. A system without stack protection is an accident waiting to happen. You should read up on how stack protections eliminate an entire class of exploits, and how subtle exploitable code really is. Even the.NET compiler includes stack protection. I have no idea why Linux has not adopted the use of ProPolice across the board.
My previous response was not a troll; it was based on years of experience running Windows, Linux, Mac and BSD machines. Linux is the most brittle of all of the systems I've used. Even remaining up-to-date from the distro is very little protection, since the underlying problem is not being addressed. Nearly every Linux distro could ship with better security, but SELinux and ProPolice are not enabled by default.
There are many reasons to use Linux, but better security is not one of them. If you still believe this, put up a Linux server completely exposed to the Internet, and broadcast all over IRC that your server is badass and can't be hacked. It is a common misconception among Linux zealots that Linux doesn't have the security issues that Windows does, but mostly it's because its less popular, and very few exploit writers target Linux machines. In fact, even though ProPolice has been around for years, many Linux distros (including default Ubuntu) do not take advantage of it, and thus open themselves to a myriad of exploits that even Windows XP did not have. The performance gain from not using ProPolice is negligible, and the expoitablility of such a machine, given the quality of code from many Linux apps, is almost guaranteed.
So, your smart-ass comment only shows your ignorance. Linux is pretty cool as a development environment, and it's not a half-bad desktop, especially given the price. But I would run Windows Server long before I would consider putting a Linux machine on the net without a decent firewall (i.e. not Linux) in front of it.
It took two years and a task force of how many, costing how much, to bring down three people?
Much less than it would have cost to let them run amok.
That sure says a lot about the state of network security, and law enforcement's ineptitude for technology.
While it says a lot about the state of network security, the fact that 8 to 12 million people were infected with a virus they didn't know about says more about the computer literacy of the average individual. And, despite the fact that the botnet was millions of machines large, providing nearly impenetrable anonymity, law enforcement was still able to find the people behind the whole thing. That is actually one of the rare cases where law enforcement has proven they are not technically inept. Maybe this is a sign of better things to come.
Don't get me wrong. I share your cynicism in general about the state of the Internet and all of the security holes you could pilot a starship through, but I don't think that mocking law enforcement when they actually catch somebody is the way to go. The people behind this botnet were responsible for creating international tensions that could have led to violence. They stole credit cards and banking information with no care for who they were harming, all to fuel their own egotistical ambitions. These were not good people, or hacker heroes, or anything of the sort. Sorry, but I'm siding with the FBI on this one.
Such a service would provide a gateway through which people could move away from Facebook if they don't like it without having to deal with the problem of losing access to all their friends and profiles.
And people would instantly start making their own communities and linking back to Facebook, which would ironically turn into a meta-community, providing directory and API services to connect a bunch of Facebook clones. Somehow I don't see this happening. Making Facebook better would destroy it.
I went back to school, and transferred to a university with an online curriculum. I'm very happy I made the choice, and wish I'd gone that route in the first place. If you're bored, get a job. Not an IT job, just a job to make some spending money. The nice thing about correspondence is that you don't have to be poor to go to school. You can have a nice laptop, a console gaming system and a sweet Internet connection. You don't have to live in a noisy dorm. All in all it makes the enduring of all the pointless academic work much easier. Yeah, I'm pissed that I still have to finish my degree, even though I'm a bad ass hacker. The jobs available to those without degrees, in a word, suck. That's my motivation for putting up with it, even though I have to pay to challenge courses like "Introduction to Computing" or some such thing even though they gave me credits for 3 advanced courses instead. Getting your degree sucks. Getting a real job, on the other hand, is something to look forward to. Correspondence makes it that much more bearable for those of us who can't stand the trite classroom bullshit.
Learning to deal with people you disagree with one-on-one rather than avoiding them really is the best option.
Sure, I'd agree with that in most cases. The problem exists when one side is willing to compromise, but the other is not. Nothing short of complete acquiesence will suit some people, and no amount of tolerance, rationality or charisma will change that. Enduring a relationship like that is to be avoided if at all possible, as it will have harmful long-term effects. Surprisingly, my anecdotal evidence suggests that both cyber- and meatspace have about the same proportion of complete asshats. At least you can logout of cyberspace.
Four jobs ago, I used to fire up nmap and scan the internal network, then tell the network admins where the trojans were! (No, I never put them there.)
Slashdot Mirror
The "Second American Revolution" is nothing short of a renegotiation of the social contract.
Wow! It's like you read my mind :-)
The big danger of judging people by their character as a fit to a culture is that a particular character type becomes over-represented, and all decision-making could basically be made interchangeably by any member of the organization. Just as a gene pool that has little diversity is much more vulnerable to disaster, so to is the organization that believes that it will be more effective by stereotyping people according to their determination of their character.
And in the case where corporate and individual privacy rights are in conflict, guess which way the courts will likely rule. While a privately-owned company may have the right to completely hide its business dealings from the public, a publicly-traded one like AT&T shouldn't be allowed to hide behind "privacy" concerns when the real issue is that they've been caught doing dirty business.
I believe that people _will_ hear about cool features that an Android phone offers, buy an Android phone and find out, too late, that it's available on _other_ Android phones, not the one they bought.
This is rapidly becoming a problem with other smartphones as well, so it's just par for the course. It's sad when marketeers can collude with each other to provide the illusion of choice, when the reality is they all offer the same crappy deal except for killer feature x. I was most annoyed for instance, to find that BlackBerry Enterprise Server was not a feature of all BlackBerrys. Some carriers disable this functionality and charge extra for it, even though I'm administering the BES! They just assume that a home user is not capable of such a setup, and that it's a service that only they can provide.
They are irrelevant and dead probably more because of Java than Solaris. And Linux isn't a replacement for Solaris, anyway. Linux has its best potential in the small business market, where paying the Windows tax is not really an option. However, there's just too much Windows market share for Linux to realistically compete for the home desktop. Add that to the annoyances with WINE, and I don't see a lot of movement in that direction any time soon. Linux is not a replacement for Windows. It's not useless, either, but it would be better for Linux organizations to focus on its strengths rather than annoying users by pretending it's just like Windows.
Sentimentality in a situation like this is just bizarre.
I don't see how it's bizarre to have compassion for those who no longer have a job after working at this factory for years. It's logical to shut down the plant, yes, and to move to different technologies. However, it is not strange to have concern for someone who no longer has the means to make a living. The people who have been displaced need support, retraining and a new means to make a living. These days, however, business is only concerned about the move to new technologies, and not so much about the social impacts of the decisions they make.
This obsolescence issue is going to come up over and over again. While it's not the concern of the employer about whether a new technology will lead to employing less people, it should be somebody's concern. Unemployed people have a cost that is generally not considered: increased crime, increased need for resources such as counselling and psychiatric services, increased unhappiness and stress even for those in the workplace. More research is being done in these areas, and costs to business and state for things like workplace stress and mental illness which have been taken for granted are being consistently shown to be significant. Not only is it more humane to take these costs into account, but the likelihood of long-term savings in employment and productivity costs seems probable.
It's much easier to keep guidelines internal, and only release very general suggestions.
Of course it's easier to do so, since less people have a say as to what the guidelines should be. However, it's not really possible to claim that it's a transparent process as a result. The lack of transparency makes people think that Apple has something to hide, especially when it has not really been clear to this point why some apps are being rejected. Allowing input from the community on what those guidelines should be would create a public image that peoples' opinions matter, and that Apple is not arbitrarily deciding which apps will be sold. This is even more important, since the app store is effectively the only way to get new applications. If Apple prevents your app from being sold, there is really no other way to market it.
On the other hand, Apple is well-known for their high-handed, prescriptive approach to technology, so the fact that no other input was considered in determining who would be allowed to profit from the iPhone platform should come as no surprise.
It is interesting that 57,000 sites can be created per week at a cost which still allows for a profit. I know that some of these sites are created using phishing kits, but does every one of these 57,000 sites represent an individual effort? TFA doesn't give any details of how such high numbers of fake sites are created, but I would expect that a large number of them are programmatic variations of the same site, hosted on different machines/networks. How many people are actually employed by the phishing con game?
95% of the time, it's not the network. It's almost always the endpoints.
I'm guessing a new way of saying PIBCAK?
Stop crying about the network.
And start looking at where the real problem might be. The guy with an MBA from an online university and an entry-level Microsoft certification being responsible for the hiring just might have something to do with how IT is a great steaming shithole.
It would seem that the concern is over BES, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which works exactly the way you say it should. The difficulty seems to be that RIM does not, in fact, have access to the things that India wants access to. A BB device on BES communicates directly with the organization through an encrypted link, whose key is generated when the organization's BES administrator installs it. I don't see an easy technical way of solving this problem, since existing BB users would be required to replace their device with one that now invades their privacy, or a version of BES with a back door would be created. Either way, I don't see people rushing to comply.
As a Canadian, I'm happy to see RIM's success thus far, and obviously continued growth would need to take advantage of other markets, who have different laws. While it's not something RIM wants to do, I think they will eventually cave to India's demands.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, RIM is in business, not politics. It is not their place to try and change things in India, it is the Indians'. On the other hand, to be ethical, they cannot knowingly place responsibility on a different authority if it is known that they will then act unethically. Ultimately, I think it will be better for the Canadian IT market if RIM just holds their nose and makes it happen. This is simply not a battle they can, or should win. If Indians don't like the way their government treats their privacy, they need to change things themselves.
Your joke is more true than you know: Search for "Unreliable Ferrari". Looks great, goes fast, expensive to maintain because it's constantly falling apart.
...people will use Linux is if it looks like Windows, I don't think we'll be seeing the Year of the Linux Desktop anytime soon.
So they can't utilize technology, but they're still allowed to stand behind you and watch you work, right? The only difference between the two is the technology behind the first one.
The difference between a camera and your boss is that a camera has nothing better to do than watch you all day long (and record its results). Presumably your boss is your boss because he has more important things to do. If you work for an organization that can afford to employ an internal employee surveillance force, perhaps you should look for one that spends that same money on better salaries and benefits.
Actually, no, this is a simple Stack Buffer Overflow. Basically, by causing a running privileged process (e.g. X Server) to make a recursive call, the stack will grow into memory space owned by the unprivileged user. Now, all the unprivileged user has to do is put some code somewhere (perhaps by exploiting another buffer overflow) and rewrite the return address, which lives in its memory page.
The fix adds a guard page between the shared memory region and the system stack to protect against the stack growing into memory where it is no longer protected. At any rate, ProPolice would have prevented this mistake from being exploitable.
As far as I know, no one has successfully automated *nix hacking and certainly not any kind of effective drive-by attack.
Then you don't know where to look. I've found rootkits for MySQL, various ftpds, old versions of Apache, etc. Automating such rootkits is a trivial task. Writing C code given the explanation of the vulnerability is usually also a trivial task. Hell, the first Linux server I put on the 'net in '98 was rooted within a month through a vulnerability in wuftpd. It certainly wasn't any kind of targeted attack, as it simply put eggdrop in an obscure location and replaced /bin/ps to hide the process.
Even if the automated attack gets a foot in the door, they still have to manually find a way to escalate privileges.
And therein lies the rub. My Linux server was rooted because wuftpd ran with elevated privileges, as it was delivered by the distro. Older Windows versions did basically everything as Administrator, so the privilege escalation part was trivial. Later versions of Windows do not have this problem. Every single problem that you point to in Windows either no longer exists, or also existed in the default installation of a particular distro. Yeah, you can do your own security and do better, but you can say the same about any OS. The problem is that most people use the defaults, not having the time or inclination to become an expert in, say, SELinux.
Connect that same box running Windows directly to the internet and you don't even have to announce its presence. It's like auto-hork
OK, I'll do you one better. I've announced its presence but won't tell you where it is. It's running Server 2003 with SP3 and has a hardware firewall in front of it. That should be more than enough to root it if your boast is even remotely true.
If that were true then the exploits out in the wild should be relative to percentage of machines running that OS. And yet there aren't any.
Once again, you don't know where to look. And, the number of exploits available for Windows 7 is considerably lower than for previous versions, probably in part due to the stack protections in the .NET framework. Until ProPolice is implemented in every default Linux distro, Linux is more exploitable than Windows, as every single mistake that can lead to a buffer overflow is exploitable, whereas with stack protection it is not.
That popularity tripe was a talking point from a MSFT PR firm advertising campaign that went around a few years ago.
And let's not forget the fine marketing campaign from the Linux side. Information wants to be Free! Proprietary Software is Evil and will only be used to Invade Your Privacy and Sell You Stuff You Don't Want. Bask in the Free Goodness and Never Get Paid to Code Again! All marketing is bullshit, and frankly, there's so much FUD on all sides that I've decided that my loyalty is simply for sale. Maybe one day you will become hungry and desparate enough that it's simply not worth getting involved in the politics.
A path searching issue exists in iTunes. iTunes will search for a specific DLL in the current working directory. If someone places a maliciously crafted file with a specific name in a directory, opening another file in that directory in iTunes may lead to arbitrary code execution. This issue is addressed by removing the code that uses the DLL. This issue does not affect Mac OS X systems. Credit to Simon Raner of ACROS Security for reporting this issue.
This was the issue he reported in iTunes. Presumably, the same issue exists in other applications. However, it is only exploitable if a remote attacker is able to write the malicious DLL to the directory. Thus, securing any remotely accessable storage will prevent this attack.
Exploitable != Malicious. A system without stack protection is an accident waiting to happen. You should read up on how stack protections eliminate an entire class of exploits, and how subtle exploitable code really is. Even the .NET compiler includes stack protection. I have no idea why Linux has not adopted the use of ProPolice across the board.
My previous response was not a troll; it was based on years of experience running Windows, Linux, Mac and BSD machines. Linux is the most brittle of all of the systems I've used. Even remaining up-to-date from the distro is very little protection, since the underlying problem is not being addressed. Nearly every Linux distro could ship with better security, but SELinux and ProPolice are not enabled by default.
There are many reasons to use Linux, but better security is not one of them. If you still believe this, put up a Linux server completely exposed to the Internet, and broadcast all over IRC that your server is badass and can't be hacked. It is a common misconception among Linux zealots that Linux doesn't have the security issues that Windows does, but mostly it's because its less popular, and very few exploit writers target Linux machines. In fact, even though ProPolice has been around for years, many Linux distros (including default Ubuntu) do not take advantage of it, and thus open themselves to a myriad of exploits that even Windows XP did not have. The performance gain from not using ProPolice is negligible, and the expoitablility of such a machine, given the quality of code from many Linux apps, is almost guaranteed.
So, your smart-ass comment only shows your ignorance. Linux is pretty cool as a development environment, and it's not a half-bad desktop, especially given the price. But I would run Windows Server long before I would consider putting a Linux machine on the net without a decent firewall (i.e. not Linux) in front of it.
It took two years and a task force of how many, costing how much, to bring down three people?
Much less than it would have cost to let them run amok.
That sure says a lot about the state of network security, and law enforcement's ineptitude for technology.
While it says a lot about the state of network security, the fact that 8 to 12 million people were infected with a virus they didn't know about says more about the computer literacy of the average individual. And, despite the fact that the botnet was millions of machines large, providing nearly impenetrable anonymity, law enforcement was still able to find the people behind the whole thing. That is actually one of the rare cases where law enforcement has proven they are not technically inept. Maybe this is a sign of better things to come.
Don't get me wrong. I share your cynicism in general about the state of the Internet and all of the security holes you could pilot a starship through, but I don't think that mocking law enforcement when they actually catch somebody is the way to go. The people behind this botnet were responsible for creating international tensions that could have led to violence. They stole credit cards and banking information with no care for who they were harming, all to fuel their own egotistical ambitions. These were not good people, or hacker heroes, or anything of the sort. Sorry, but I'm siding with the FBI on this one.
Such a service would provide a gateway through which people could move away from Facebook if they don't like it without having to deal with the problem of losing access to all their friends and profiles.
And people would instantly start making their own communities and linking back to Facebook, which would ironically turn into a meta-community, providing directory and API services to connect a bunch of Facebook clones. Somehow I don't see this happening. Making Facebook better would destroy it.
I am beating myself over the head until I forget all programming languages. There is not a single programming culture left that I can identify with. :(
I went back to school, and transferred to a university with an online curriculum. I'm very happy I made the choice, and wish I'd gone that route in the first place. If you're bored, get a job. Not an IT job, just a job to make some spending money. The nice thing about correspondence is that you don't have to be poor to go to school. You can have a nice laptop, a console gaming system and a sweet Internet connection. You don't have to live in a noisy dorm. All in all it makes the enduring of all the pointless academic work much easier. Yeah, I'm pissed that I still have to finish my degree, even though I'm a bad ass hacker. The jobs available to those without degrees, in a word, suck. That's my motivation for putting up with it, even though I have to pay to challenge courses like "Introduction to Computing" or some such thing even though they gave me credits for 3 advanced courses instead. Getting your degree sucks. Getting a real job, on the other hand, is something to look forward to. Correspondence makes it that much more bearable for those of us who can't stand the trite classroom bullshit.
Learning to deal with people you disagree with one-on-one rather than avoiding them really is the best option.
Sure, I'd agree with that in most cases. The problem exists when one side is willing to compromise, but the other is not. Nothing short of complete acquiesence will suit some people, and no amount of tolerance, rationality or charisma will change that. Enduring a relationship like that is to be avoided if at all possible, as it will have harmful long-term effects. Surprisingly, my anecdotal evidence suggests that both cyber- and meatspace have about the same proportion of complete asshats. At least you can logout of cyberspace.
Four jobs ago, I used to fire up nmap and scan the internal network, then tell the network admins where the trojans were! (No, I never put them there.)
That would explain why it was four jobs ago...