Unless they are carrying a weapon and a REAL badge, you can probably tell them to fly a kite (especially if it's not a standard gateway procedure such as those as airports)... not sure how that'd stand up under scrutiny... but, they aren't "officers of the law" unless they ARE "officers"... very few of them if any are actually LE...
So by logic then, I think the release of the new Battleship film should lend itself to an interesting scenario....
Chinese (but Nigerian 409 flagged) cargo vessel carrying pirated copies of the Battleship movie, filmed in VHS-C and upscaled on an iMac knockoff with a pirated copy of iMovie in the nearest combination opium-den multiplex, gets sunk by a U.S. Cruiser outside of the Port of Los Angeles... damn, you sunk my Battleships?!
Anyhow, as commentary, I doubt this will go much of anywhere... much like you can find pirated DVDs sold by crackheads in the NYC subway... trying to dissuade or even outright prevent IP theft, etc. from occurring in a place like China is absurd.
As I've found out in government, rules, laws and otherwise are there to make certain people feel better but rarely do they help or actually enforced universally and without bias. Sorry... just feeling a little malaise at this point.
The key thing to eyeball here, with all the FUD that has been stirred up, is there are OS vulnerabilities and application vulnerabilities. Much like the annual brew-haha when we comapre Linux versus Windows, you must make a clear differentiation.
Like Linux, I would never count, say an Apache hole against Mac nor Linux, since it's an application that is added after a base install. However, unlike Mac or Linux, Windows flaws are very much a hybrid. Windows really doesn't function much as Windows without IE (try reviewing a browser hijack, and see that the file explorer uses the IE render engine to see that an IE flaw is an OS flaw), and subsequent issues with IE are counted against the OS.
The issues found recently with Bluetooh OBEX and the Safari "open anything" flaw are two examples of differentiators. the OBEX flaw, is yes, a core OS issue, however, it was identified and patched two patches ago (10.4.3), Apple is no longer shipping the OS in that rev anymore. Minus one to OS security for Apple. Hoever, Safari, an application above the core OS, had a "bad settings default" besides the overall flaw in the app. In short, both are avoidable through an alteration in settings or application of an old patch. To be surprised that the Mac is "insecure" by the press FUD is rediculous.
Windows, as I sit on Microsoft briefings to my company each month, have not only application security issues on a predictable and regular basis (slow months in the summer and December are do to staff vacations), but because many of those apps are so tied into the core workings of the Operating System, that each new flaw opens a bigger hole that build upon each other. A standard install of XP out of the box takes 38 patches plus the two required to just upgerade to the latest version of Windows Update. WTF?! And that does even cover the OS settings needed to make it "generaly" safe to put on the Internet.
I feel safe putting ANY Mac, BSD or Linux box on the net for a half hour while I patch, because, in general are most of the distributions have reasonable defaults set, but, as they stay current, it makes it much less appetizing for the latest virus, worm, or hax0r than your default XP install. As it is with big business security, you don't nessesarily have to be the most secure, you just have to be less appetizing than the next guy down the row.
I'm truly sick of the news media (print, on-line, and TV) spreading unknowledgeable FUD to the masses, just because it's "something different" without recognizing why it may be different, let alone the overall truths. Remember kids, duck and cover!
I got my LaCie d2 drive (with the NEC 16x, Dl, blah blah) last week. Been using it with 4x media burning backups, but it is a lot faster that my old Pioneer 104 drive, noticeably so, that backing up (using Retrospect) which took a week or so on the Pioneer took 1 day using the new drive (about 68 GB of data, with delays for sleep and other breaks between disc inserts).
Biggest hassle was that the driver from Dantz to support the drive is better using the old driver and not the updated one (why I dunno). But from personal experience (this is a dual Firewire USB external enclosure), the NEC does what it says.. damn glad it was a useful purchase...
One of the nicest things about Macs is what can save you here. There are multiple proggies out there for making disk images and DVD images, and some even strip the region and CSS encoding for you. Just copy the images using one of those programs, save the disc images to a disk array (or load up an old G4 with a big ole set of 250 GB drives raided)... use a wireless mouse system to menu the DVD player on the Mac, and viola... DVD on demand.. heck, I may end up doign that on mine.... oh, and the menu system works since it's the DVD image...
Sorry, trying to get a "first post", and now for more details.
Anyhow, my tenure has been at a large document and imaging company, a not-for-profit professional organization, entertainment conglomerate, internet security development company, e-learning and training company, a small IT consulting firm, and now a large energy company. The easiest minds, at least I encountered, were at the small companies, less levels of crufty management to deal with. It also counted that I had a bit of autonomy in driving the technology vision, mainly because whatever I was tasked with "had to get done". So, I think size combinied with mission critical decisions may help leverage a case.
The "shouting" match occurred at the entertainment company and at the not-for-profit. The first was in the case of some top brass brought in to trim budgets, where we had everything successfully running on open source stuff (which used to run on expensively leased Sun hardware [E250] and software) but was moved to some discarded Acer desktops and FreeBSD. THe stuff ran better and without any hassles on the open source stuff, but because these jokers couldn't get out of their lease with Exodus for the hardware, I was told to support the Sun environment or walk out the door, I chose the door. The latter, in the not-for-profit, the shouting match there ocurred with one of the three (yes three) IT Directors we had there during my tenure. He didn't like the idea of open source at all, in fact, that old argument of "I can get a manager from Sun on the phone 24x7" for support was met with my retort "yes, but can that manager ever give you a technical solution. WHen was the last time he sat in fron of an E450 wondering what happened to the OS when it took a dump". It was later brought up that the organization supposedly didn't run any open sourced software for important tasks (he'd been there about 4 months at the time) and I think he took a look at our SUn, Windows, and Apple machiens at the time and thought that, but I said... "well, what about Sendmail...", he replied, "well, that's and exception...", "then how about BIND?","um, well", "and Perl?!", "well, that's not... but um..."... suffice it to say, making him look bad during a pissing contest in front of his subordinates in the meeting room was not a good way to intorduce myself. He later quit after not feeling he "fit in" to the organization (that, and he physically assaulted me when a hacker broke in through a few of their misconfigured Windows and Sun servers, then got yelled at by the president of the organization... I think his name was Terry White)
I think the best thing to do is to subtlely play to Open Source software's strengths... I wish you well.
Okay, okay.. we're in a PC world... big deal. However, being a student of computers, journalism, statisitcs, and analysis, there are some glaring omissions from these reports as well as the press release. One of the largest is about which OS each was running. Given the lag time of when articles are written and published, I'm guessing this benchmark article was done actually around the April timeframe, well before Jaguar (OS 10.2) was released, and was welcomed as a mature version of the OS. Same thing goes for whatever windows version was involved. Truly, you still can;t compare apples to oranges because of the actual underlying operating system layer because they still function quite differently. I would recommend anybody to read, as well, the article mentioned a few months ago on processor architecture over at I believe ARSTechnica. It's pretty lengthy and technical, but it'll explain why ceratin procedures WOULD take less/longer time on the two different machines. I hate supposed application benchmark testing because it's never really comparing the true speed (and ease of use) of the whole experience of the application, if you want to complain or compliment computing architectures and the OSes that run on them, use the tried and true benchmarking rather that this type of subjective review... geez.
Well, if anybody checks, if you go to their home page, the "about us" they are FUNDED by Microsoft and CompUSA. They were the last folks on the microphone on C-SPAN when Jackson issued his dissent (sic) decree. Mostly a bunch of irreverent jerks. That's JMHO...
When I joined our company, actually, even when I worked up at Xerox, everything was PC and Novell, even though our department had a mixed environmnet with Macs, PCs, and Suns. So, wheat better to do than flip to NT to service the PCs and Macs, right? Wrong... best way to go was to install FreeBSD and Samba, Netatalk, and NFS with similar mounts... well, due to Xerox being stuck in the 1950s (still), I left before the master plan could be implemented. However, where I work now I ran into an already installed NT base, an decided it needed to be interoperable with the rest of our web development environment, hence similar filesystesm between PCs and Macs... viola... install the free stuff and away it chugged.... and still is chugging. I can't see why Microsoft makes such a case for thier software having such QUALITY when the most reliable stuff that works with their antiquated idea of an OS runs on UNIX and comes to the user free of charge...
Slashdot Mirror
That's the Telecom Law of 1996, not 1966
Unless they are carrying a weapon and a REAL badge, you can probably tell them to fly a kite (especially if it's not a standard gateway procedure such as those as airports)... not sure how that'd stand up under scrutiny... but, they aren't "officers of the law" unless they ARE "officers"... very few of them if any are actually LE...
Good luck!
So by logic then, I think the release of the new Battleship film should lend itself to an interesting scenario....
Chinese (but Nigerian 409 flagged) cargo vessel carrying pirated copies of the Battleship movie, filmed in VHS-C and upscaled on an iMac knockoff with a pirated copy of iMovie in the nearest combination opium-den multiplex, gets sunk by a U.S. Cruiser outside of the Port of Los Angeles... damn, you sunk my Battleships?!
Just sayin'
Sorry was my first...
Anyhow, as commentary, I doubt this will go much of anywhere... much like you can find pirated DVDs sold by crackheads in the NYC subway... trying to dissuade or even outright prevent IP theft, etc. from occurring in a place like China is absurd.
As I've found out in government, rules, laws and otherwise are there to make certain people feel better but rarely do they help or actually enforced universally and without bias. Sorry... just feeling a little malaise at this point.
FP
Folks,
The key thing to eyeball here, with all the FUD that has been stirred up, is there are OS vulnerabilities and application vulnerabilities. Much like the annual brew-haha when we comapre Linux versus Windows, you must make a clear differentiation.
Like Linux, I would never count, say an Apache hole against Mac nor Linux, since it's an application that is added after a base install. However, unlike Mac or Linux, Windows flaws are very much a hybrid. Windows really doesn't function much as Windows without IE (try reviewing a browser hijack, and see that the file explorer uses the IE render engine to see that an IE flaw is an OS flaw), and subsequent issues with IE are counted against the OS.
The issues found recently with Bluetooh OBEX and the Safari "open anything" flaw are two examples of differentiators. the OBEX flaw, is yes, a core OS issue, however, it was identified and patched two patches ago (10.4.3), Apple is no longer shipping the OS in that rev anymore. Minus one to OS security for Apple. Hoever, Safari, an application above the core OS, had a "bad settings default" besides the overall flaw in the app. In short, both are avoidable through an alteration in settings or application of an old patch. To be surprised that the Mac is "insecure" by the press FUD is rediculous.
Windows, as I sit on Microsoft briefings to my company each month, have not only application security issues on a predictable and regular basis (slow months in the summer and December are do to staff vacations), but because many of those apps are so tied into the core workings of the Operating System, that each new flaw opens a bigger hole that build upon each other. A standard install of XP out of the box takes 38 patches plus the two required to just upgerade to the latest version of Windows Update. WTF?! And that does even cover the OS settings needed to make it "generaly" safe to put on the Internet.
I feel safe putting ANY Mac, BSD or Linux box on the net for a half hour while I patch, because, in general are most of the distributions have reasonable defaults set, but, as they stay current, it makes it much less appetizing for the latest virus, worm, or hax0r than your default XP install. As it is with big business security, you don't nessesarily have to be the most secure, you just have to be less appetizing than the next guy down the row.
I'm truly sick of the news media (print, on-line, and TV) spreading unknowledgeable FUD to the masses, just because it's "something different" without recognizing why it may be different, let alone the overall truths. Remember kids, duck and cover!
I got my LaCie d2 drive (with the NEC 16x, Dl, blah blah) last week. Been using it with 4x media burning backups, but it is a lot faster that my old Pioneer 104 drive, noticeably so, that backing up (using Retrospect) which took a week or so on the Pioneer took 1 day using the new drive (about 68 GB of data, with delays for sleep and other breaks between disc inserts).
Biggest hassle was that the driver from Dantz to support the drive is better using the old driver and not the updated one (why I dunno). But from personal experience (this is a dual Firewire USB external enclosure), the NEC does what it says.. damn glad it was a useful purchase...
One of the nicest things about Macs is what can save you here. There are multiple proggies out there for making disk images and DVD images, and some even strip the region and CSS encoding for you. Just copy the images using one of those programs, save the disc images to a disk array (or load up an old G4 with a big ole set of 250 GB drives raided)... use a wireless mouse system to menu the DVD player on the Mac, and viola... DVD on demand.. heck, I may end up doign that on mine.... oh, and the menu system works since it's the DVD image...
;-)
Damn linux folks, expand your horizons!
Sorry, trying to get a "first post", and now for more details.
Anyhow, my tenure has been at a large document and imaging company, a not-for-profit professional organization, entertainment conglomerate, internet security development company, e-learning and training company, a small IT consulting firm, and now a large energy company. The easiest minds, at least I encountered, were at the small companies, less levels of crufty management to deal with. It also counted that I had a bit of autonomy in driving the technology vision, mainly because whatever I was tasked with "had to get done". So, I think size combinied with mission critical decisions may help leverage a case.
The "shouting" match occurred at the entertainment company and at the not-for-profit. The first was in the case of some top brass brought in to trim budgets, where we had everything successfully running on open source stuff (which used to run on expensively leased Sun hardware [E250] and software) but was moved to some discarded Acer desktops and FreeBSD. THe stuff ran better and without any hassles on the open source stuff, but because these jokers couldn't get out of their lease with Exodus for the hardware, I was told to support the Sun environment or walk out the door, I chose the door. The latter, in the not-for-profit, the shouting match there ocurred with one of the three (yes three) IT Directors we had there during my tenure. He didn't like the idea of open source at all, in fact, that old argument of "I can get a manager from Sun on the phone 24x7" for support was met with my retort "yes, but can that manager ever give you a technical solution. WHen was the last time he sat in fron of an E450 wondering what happened to the OS when it took a dump". It was later brought up that the organization supposedly didn't run any open sourced software for important tasks (he'd been there about 4 months at the time) and I think he took a look at our SUn, Windows, and Apple machiens at the time and thought that, but I said... "well, what about Sendmail...", he replied, "well, that's and exception...", "then how about BIND?","um, well", "and Perl?!", "well, that's not... but um..."... suffice it to say, making him look bad during a pissing contest in front of his subordinates in the meeting room was not a good way to intorduce myself. He later quit after not feeling he "fit in" to the organization (that, and he physically assaulted me when a hacker broke in through a few of their misconfigured Windows and Sun servers, then got yelled at by the president of the organization... I think his name was Terry White)
I think the best thing to do is to subtlely play to Open Source software's strengths... I wish you well.
I've had the same problem at all organizations I've been at, except for one.
It usually ended up in me in a shouting match
Okay, okay.. we're in a PC world... big deal. However, being a student of computers, journalism, statisitcs, and analysis, there are some glaring omissions from these reports as well as the press release. One of the largest is about which OS each was running. Given the lag time of when articles are written and published, I'm guessing this benchmark article was done actually around the April timeframe, well before Jaguar (OS 10.2) was released, and was welcomed as a mature version of the OS. Same thing goes for whatever windows version was involved. Truly, you still can;t compare apples to oranges because of the actual underlying operating system layer because they still function quite differently. I would recommend anybody to read, as well, the article mentioned a few months ago on processor architecture over at I believe ARSTechnica. It's pretty lengthy and technical, but it'll explain why ceratin procedures WOULD take less/longer time on the two different machines. I hate supposed application benchmark testing because it's never really comparing the true speed (and ease of use) of the whole experience of the application, if you want to complain or compliment computing architectures and the OSes that run on them, use the tried and true benchmarking rather that this type of subjective review... geez.
Well, if anybody checks, if you go to their home page, the "about us" they are FUNDED by Microsoft and CompUSA. They were the last folks on the microphone on C-SPAN when Jackson issued his dissent (sic) decree. Mostly a bunch of irreverent jerks. That's JMHO...
When I joined our company, actually, even when I worked up at Xerox, everything was PC and Novell, even though our department had a mixed environmnet with Macs, PCs, and Suns. So, wheat better to do than flip to NT to service the PCs and Macs, right? Wrong... best way to go was to install FreeBSD and Samba, Netatalk, and NFS with similar mounts... well, due to Xerox being stuck in the 1950s (still), I left before the master plan could be implemented. However, where I work now I ran into an already installed NT base, an decided it needed to be interoperable with the rest of our web development environment, hence similar filesystesm between PCs and Macs... viola... install the free stuff and away it chugged.... and still is chugging. I can't see why Microsoft makes such a case for thier software having such QUALITY when the most reliable stuff that works with their antiquated idea of an OS runs on UNIX and comes to the user free of charge...