You're admin already. Nothing is safe against a determined admin. An admin can gain access to any password, encrypted file, whatever, when their users access it. And possibly even without help from the users. All covertly of course.
In life, you have to trust other people, even if you do not know them personally. The admin of the network you're connecting to is one of them.
Do not store your data on US based servers (or UK based, they may be even worse). Maybe Canada is better? Or how about Sealand, does that still exist? It is really something holding me back to use gmail or google docs or so. I keep all my e-mail on my server, so if any government would want to have a look at it they would have to go through me. I use Debian as server and I do trust them (for being open-source) to not have back doors built in in their distribution. This for the fact they are open source, not a business but a huge group of volunteers, so irregularities will be found and published.
I think there is big business to be made to set up in a country that has strong privacy laws: start lobbying some island nation to be more than a tax haven. Have them lay a fat pipe to connect to the rest of the world, and have your data protected there well. No logging allowed for longer than a few months, no specific data retention, maximum permissions for privacy.
Oh but wait that will probably a haven for child pornographers as well. And for Al Qaeda. And for $villain-of-the-week.
Otherwise just dump it on a server in China or so. Then you don't have to worry. Then you can be sure they will listen in to it. With the US government you can't be sure about that yet.
Come on people what is this? Tagging such a story where someone asks about some security where some obscure attack may be possible and then tagging it "you aren't that important"?!
This is the same messageboard that wants https for everything, even for this board.
This is the same board that seems to hold privacy above all.
And on top of it, it is full of nerds that tend to love to go into this kind of obscure detail.
And then tag it "you aren't that important" implying "what are you worried about", or with a little further stretch "you have nothing to hide, so don't bother". This is quite ridiculous.
To me I am the most important person in the world, and I would like to live safe and secure. The poster is likely the most important person to himself, and he also wishes to live safe and secure. I wouldn't go as far as poster does, but that's besides the point. He does want to go this far, and has a genuine question that many may consider over the top for personal security but which may have consequences for entities that are under constant attack, where any minute attack vector may mean the difference between safe and 0wned.
"youarentthatimportant" is the worst tag I have ever seen. It's denigrating at best. It's stupid, and shows lack of respect for other people. I may hope this was intended as a joke and a joke alone.
In China, many people know that the news in newspapers or on TV is often whitewashed, and they generally consider them not reliable. It is even so that many people consider rumoured news they receive from friends more reliable. It's indeed getting that bad in China. It's not hard to imagine what that means: it becomes relatively easy to spread rumours, and thus stir up social unrest by people that wish to do so. Or even accidentally. And this is happening a lot now.
The potential closure of Google is by many in China seen as a great loss - even with filtering they were considered more reliable when it comes to searching for news (especially for those that can read English) than local search engines.
That same article also includes distributing and marketing into "publishing" so it's more than passively making it available. Then posting it on TPB is, in a way, "marketing".
Actually, in case of BitTorrent, the only case that I am aware of that someone has been prosecuted and punished (jail in this case) has been here in Hong Kong. A man was jailed for putting three movies on BitTorrent: he was the original seed, created the.torrent, uploaded it, etc. To me that is clearly publishing in the traditional sense. He actively made the material available with the intention of passing it on to other people.
That is why I mentioned taking the cost and so, taking that out of the equation. After all copying a paper book involves much more work than copying an e-book, which of course is why so few people are actually doing it. And that is where these real world vs the Internet analogies tend to break down.
Copying a CD to tape costs money (the tape), work and some practice (putting it all in the machine, pressing buttons at the right time, adjusting levels, whatnot), while downloading an mp3 file over the Internet is much easier. Copying a book is even more work.
In my opinion, making available is close to publishing. It is surely debatable whether "making available" is copyright infringement. I think the consensus here is that "publishing" a work that you have no copyright (license) of is copyright infringement. Then the question is how would "making available" differ from "publishing", and how would this clear one from infringement?
If I were to take a book (which is under copyright, and not mine) and make a dozen copies of that. As long as I keep those in my house and do not show it to anyone, it may fall under "fair use" depending on your jurisdiction. Actually probably this is already infringement but that's besides the point.
Now I go sit on a busy street corner, with those books on a table in front of me, for anyone who comes by to take a copy from me. I allow them, do not charge for the paper and printing cost or anything, that's my decision. Is this publishing or making available? What if no-one takes a copy, am I suddenly clear of copyright infringement?
Similar for when I would take this book, scan it electronically, make a torrent out of it, and publish it on a torrent site. Am I merely making it available? Am I publishing? And if so: what is the difference between "making available" and "publishing"?
What I said (or at least implied): the US government doesn't NEED cyber attacks because they already have mandated back doors available because of their direct control over US based software companies.
Linux applications (usually open-source) are considered highly portable and just a recompile away from running on ARM or whatever.
After porting the Windows OS and relevant libraries to ARM, what is stopping the software makers from doing "just a recompile" and have it run on ARM as well?
OS-X supports generic binaries: compiled to run on both PPC and X86. I don't see why Windows would be so different as to not allow that.
WinNT existed for more than just Intel, and has evolved to what is now Win7. MS has all the source code, they have thousands upon thousands of programmers in their ranks including many of the world's best I'm sure, and plenty of cash to throw against it.
There is no reason MS can NOT bring Windows to ARM, including compilers to help their developers to easily and relatively painlessly go multi-platform. Linux can do it, BSD can do it, Solaris can do it, Apple's OS-X can do it, Microsoft's Windows can not?!
And that while we all see laptops tend to grow in size.
A year or so ago I looked for a replacement for my 12" iBook. I bought that one partly for it's size: the smallest laptop with full-sized keyboard.
No 12" laptop available at the time from Apple. Only 14" and bigger. And heavier of course, bigger is heavier. But then I was really looking for a portable laptop, not a desktop replacement. Later I got an EEEPC instead.
Why is China more of a threat than the USA with their "war against terror", nuclear weapons (yes China has them too but China ALSO has a rule that they will only use them after they have been attached with nukes, they are the only country with such a directive), possible government control over the most-used operating system in the world, mandatory back doors in GMail and similar services (this was mentioned on/. before: the US government mandates back doors for covert snooping), etc. China also wants to snoop but they do not have that direct access to the software makers, thus have to do it in a different way. I have no idea how many back doors there are in Windows, for example. How many of those bugs that let in worms are actually back doors. How much the US government is already snooping on in-transit traffic (Internet or telephone).
China is up and coming, but has lots and lots of internal issues which may prevent them from becoming as powerful as the US is now. On the other hand they have some five times the number of people, and have the US at the balls with the enormous amount of foreign currency reserves held in US Dollars. Maybe it is time for you Americans to open up to the rest of the world and realise that you are not the only one. And maybe you could realise that you may live in peace with the rest of the world.
I live next to China and no I don't trust them but I do not trust the US government any better when it comes to security/privacy issues. Even when it comes to basic human rights the US is descending and may end up below China if they continue like this.
Mythbusters will never get one, or if they get one will never be allowed to show results. It would be too embarrassing... it will be busted, busted and busted again.
So when you are wearing leather pants, you have to take them off? Now that would be getting interesting. Asking people to strip before going through the scanner.
Sad times if you live under an oppressive regime, like China, States, or UK. Or a corrupt Eastern European country. There are plenty of quite easy going countries out there still.
Phillip.
No problems with absurd airport security in China, and most of Asia for that sake. Yes they have the liquids ban but shoes can stay on when you walk through the scanner. I have not noticed any serious changes in screening over the years. It's the same as like 10, 15 years ago in Europe. Except for the liquids.
For my work I have to fly quite regularly within Asia - flights within Mainland mostly departing from Shenzhen (just across the border, and then you fly domestic instead of international), other destinations from Hong Kong airport. Security is smooth; if there is a queue it tends to move quite fast. Often simply no queue.
And before you think those airports are small, think again. Hong Kong handles almost 50 mln passengers per year, the 12th busiest airport in the world in 2008. Shenzhen well over 20 mln. Numbers by Wikipedia.
Sadly it seems the UK and US are more oppressive than China by now. UK and US are tightening up, China is opening up (both internal and external).
Probably you (like me, I'm also a non-native) have learnt proper grammar in school. It was at least for me the cornerstone of English teaching.
Over the last few years I have been tutoring English. Knowing all those grammar rules from having had to learn them inside out really works. I can imagine many native speakers don't know the rules so well - I know that I know the English grammar better than I know Dutch. The rules that is. That doesn't mean my English is better or so, though I do my best.
Oh and as an employer I do tend to toss out resumes with too horrible language. Though my applicants being Chinese I know not to expect perfect language. I do however expect use of a spell checker.
I wonder how many extra downloads you get from your comment now, and am actually more curious on how this 50,000 number relates to your normal downloads. I just had a look at your web site and I can imagine that there are many slashdotters interested in it.
Unfortunately TFS doesn't even mention what the project is about. Which makes advice only very general, of the usefulness of your typical management/marketing self-improvement book.
However such a one-shot, 50,000 downloads shot, could be the break such a project needs. Though considering the current size mentioned unless he's hosting on sourceforge or so it may just as well break his server. If it's any good that is of course. It's enough to get a crowd big enough that word-of-mouth starts to spread, that it gets mentioned elsewhere on the Internet, etc. Too bad for the submitter that there is no link in TFS, not even a project name or so.
I have read about this before (sorry no links) but the main reason of this huge production of publications is because Chinese measure their student's and scientist's performance that way. A Chinese PhD will during his thesis easily publish a few dozen papers while a western PhD student may do one or two. Some Chinese PhD's publish more papers during their PhD study than many Western scientists during their whole career. China is doing quite some quality research these days for sure though they have a lot to catch up and frankly a lot of their output (not only the toys) is crap.
In the West, scientists are judged by their quality of work (this is hard to do, requires a lot of work by the assessor), while in China they are judged by the number of papers published (a nice easy number). This is what makes them so productive. Indeed the quality is often low, the advancements if any are little, but a paper is a paper and it adds to the tally.
So while China may lead in 2020 in numbers of papers published, I doubt they will lead in quality. I think US is still nr 1 in that, Europe as a whole a good second. That's where the money is to really do fundamental research that has no direct commercial use (if any at all - LHC is a nice example) but that costs a lot of money in man-hours and equipment.
That said, a lot of research done nowadays in the US especially is done by Asian PhD students, who may or may not stay in the US or go back to their home country.
That sounds like "computational expensive" which is what spammers likely do not like. After all my greylisting filter still works like a charm. They do not even retry sending spams, which I bet is cheaper than generating a new message every time.
On top of that, they are trying to sell something specific, thus there will be a very clear pattern in those spams nonetheless.
Even if they were bigger... there is little cost saving in building a server room for one rack vs a server room for four racks, even though you expect to use only one rack. However having to expand the server room later to accommodate a second rack now that's not just expensive but potentially disruptive to the school (construction is noisy and messy).
So it sounds like a sensible requirement to have a slightly over sized server room. And this being the government requirement possibly regardless of the school size. So there may be hardware savings, to call it 50-fold is baseless.
Having four servers for 230 students and maybe 30 staff or so sounds overkill to me even. But then again that's possibly designed with some redundancy in place, or with room for immediate expansion. Or are these application highly server based? Can also require more server power.
Not if that competitor is somewhere in Asia, for example. Or in almost any country in Europe. Or where-ever those patents are not valid, Canada may be an option as well. Then they do not have to pay said fee, and can still use h.264 as encoding format.
Now I know the vast majority of large international Internet companies are founded in the USA but that doesn't mean outside of the US there is no chance for those. Maybe some US investors would even like to invest abroad to set up such a competitor.
Slashdot Mirror
You're admin already. Nothing is safe against a determined admin. An admin can gain access to any password, encrypted file, whatever, when their users access it. And possibly even without help from the users. All covertly of course.
In life, you have to trust other people, even if you do not know them personally. The admin of the network you're connecting to is one of them.
Do not store your data on US based servers (or UK based, they may be even worse). Maybe Canada is better? Or how about Sealand, does that still exist? It is really something holding me back to use gmail or google docs or so. I keep all my e-mail on my server, so if any government would want to have a look at it they would have to go through me. I use Debian as server and I do trust them (for being open-source) to not have back doors built in in their distribution. This for the fact they are open source, not a business but a huge group of volunteers, so irregularities will be found and published.
I think there is big business to be made to set up in a country that has strong privacy laws: start lobbying some island nation to be more than a tax haven. Have them lay a fat pipe to connect to the rest of the world, and have your data protected there well. No logging allowed for longer than a few months, no specific data retention, maximum permissions for privacy.
Oh but wait that will probably a haven for child pornographers as well. And for Al Qaeda. And for $villain-of-the-week.
Otherwise just dump it on a server in China or so. Then you don't have to worry. Then you can be sure they will listen in to it. With the US government you can't be sure about that yet.
Come on people what is this? Tagging such a story where someone asks about some security where some obscure attack may be possible and then tagging it "you aren't that important"?!
This is the same messageboard that wants https for everything, even for this board.
This is the same board that seems to hold privacy above all.
And on top of it, it is full of nerds that tend to love to go into this kind of obscure detail.
And then tag it "you aren't that important" implying "what are you worried about", or with a little further stretch "you have nothing to hide, so don't bother". This is quite ridiculous.
To me I am the most important person in the world, and I would like to live safe and secure. The poster is likely the most important person to himself, and he also wishes to live safe and secure. I wouldn't go as far as poster does, but that's besides the point. He does want to go this far, and has a genuine question that many may consider over the top for personal security but which may have consequences for entities that are under constant attack, where any minute attack vector may mean the difference between safe and 0wned.
"youarentthatimportant" is the worst tag I have ever seen. It's denigrating at best. It's stupid, and shows lack of respect for other people. I may hope this was intended as a joke and a joke alone.
In China, many people know that the news in newspapers or on TV is often whitewashed, and they generally consider them not reliable. It is even so that many people consider rumoured news they receive from friends more reliable. It's indeed getting that bad in China. It's not hard to imagine what that means: it becomes relatively easy to spread rumours, and thus stir up social unrest by people that wish to do so. Or even accidentally. And this is happening a lot now.
The potential closure of Google is by many in China seen as a great loss - even with filtering they were considered more reliable when it comes to searching for news (especially for those that can read English) than local search engines.
That same article also includes distributing and marketing into "publishing" so it's more than passively making it available. Then posting it on TPB is, in a way, "marketing".
Actually, in case of BitTorrent, the only case that I am aware of that someone has been prosecuted and punished (jail in this case) has been here in Hong Kong. A man was jailed for putting three movies on BitTorrent: he was the original seed, created the .torrent, uploaded it, etc. To me that is clearly publishing in the traditional sense. He actively made the material available with the intention of passing it on to other people.
That is why I mentioned taking the cost and so, taking that out of the equation. After all copying a paper book involves much more work than copying an e-book, which of course is why so few people are actually doing it. And that is where these real world vs the Internet analogies tend to break down.
Copying a CD to tape costs money (the tape), work and some practice (putting it all in the machine, pressing buttons at the right time, adjusting levels, whatnot), while downloading an mp3 file over the Internet is much easier. Copying a book is even more work.
In my opinion, making available is close to publishing. It is surely debatable whether "making available" is copyright infringement. I think the consensus here is that "publishing" a work that you have no copyright (license) of is copyright infringement. Then the question is how would "making available" differ from "publishing", and how would this clear one from infringement?
If I were to take a book (which is under copyright, and not mine) and make a dozen copies of that. As long as I keep those in my house and do not show it to anyone, it may fall under "fair use" depending on your jurisdiction. Actually probably this is already infringement but that's besides the point.
Now I go sit on a busy street corner, with those books on a table in front of me, for anyone who comes by to take a copy from me. I allow them, do not charge for the paper and printing cost or anything, that's my decision. Is this publishing or making available? What if no-one takes a copy, am I suddenly clear of copyright infringement?
Similar for when I would take this book, scan it electronically, make a torrent out of it, and publish it on a torrent site. Am I merely making it available? Am I publishing? And if so: what is the difference between "making available" and "publishing"?
What I said (or at least implied): the US government doesn't NEED cyber attacks because they already have mandated back doors available because of their direct control over US based software companies.
Linux applications (usually open-source) are considered highly portable and just a recompile away from running on ARM or whatever.
After porting the Windows OS and relevant libraries to ARM, what is stopping the software makers from doing "just a recompile" and have it run on ARM as well?
OS-X supports generic binaries: compiled to run on both PPC and X86. I don't see why Windows would be so different as to not allow that.
WinNT existed for more than just Intel, and has evolved to what is now Win7. MS has all the source code, they have thousands upon thousands of programmers in their ranks including many of the world's best I'm sure, and plenty of cash to throw against it.
There is no reason MS can NOT bring Windows to ARM, including compilers to help their developers to easily and relatively painlessly go multi-platform. Linux can do it, BSD can do it, Solaris can do it, Apple's OS-X can do it, Microsoft's Windows can not?!
And that while we all see laptops tend to grow in size.
A year or so ago I looked for a replacement for my 12" iBook. I bought that one partly for it's size: the smallest laptop with full-sized keyboard.
No 12" laptop available at the time from Apple. Only 14" and bigger. And heavier of course, bigger is heavier. But then I was really looking for a portable laptop, not a desktop replacement. Later I got an EEEPC instead.
Why is China more of a threat than the USA with their "war against terror", nuclear weapons (yes China has them too but China ALSO has a rule that they will only use them after they have been attached with nukes, they are the only country with such a directive), possible government control over the most-used operating system in the world, mandatory back doors in GMail and similar services (this was mentioned on /. before: the US government mandates back doors for covert snooping), etc. China also wants to snoop but they do not have that direct access to the software makers, thus have to do it in a different way. I have no idea how many back doors there are in Windows, for example. How many of those bugs that let in worms are actually back doors. How much the US government is already snooping on in-transit traffic (Internet or telephone).
China is up and coming, but has lots and lots of internal issues which may prevent them from becoming as powerful as the US is now. On the other hand they have some five times the number of people, and have the US at the balls with the enormous amount of foreign currency reserves held in US Dollars. Maybe it is time for you Americans to open up to the rest of the world and realise that you are not the only one. And maybe you could realise that you may live in peace with the rest of the world.
I live next to China and no I don't trust them but I do not trust the US government any better when it comes to security/privacy issues. Even when it comes to basic human rights the US is descending and may end up below China if they continue like this.
Mythbusters will never get one, or if they get one will never be allowed to show results. It would be too embarrassing... it will be busted, busted and busted again.
So when you are wearing leather pants, you have to take them off? Now that would be getting interesting. Asking people to strip before going through the scanner.
Sad times if you live under an oppressive regime, like China, States, or UK. Or a corrupt Eastern European country. There are plenty of quite easy going countries out there still.
Phillip.
No problems with absurd airport security in China, and most of Asia for that sake. Yes they have the liquids ban but shoes can stay on when you walk through the scanner. I have not noticed any serious changes in screening over the years. It's the same as like 10, 15 years ago in Europe. Except for the liquids.
For my work I have to fly quite regularly within Asia - flights within Mainland mostly departing from Shenzhen (just across the border, and then you fly domestic instead of international), other destinations from Hong Kong airport. Security is smooth; if there is a queue it tends to move quite fast. Often simply no queue.
And before you think those airports are small, think again. Hong Kong handles almost 50 mln passengers per year, the 12th busiest airport in the world in 2008. Shenzhen well over 20 mln. Numbers by Wikipedia.
Sadly it seems the UK and US are more oppressive than China by now. UK and US are tightening up, China is opening up (both internal and external).
This is /.. Anything MS does is bad and evil. That's all. Nothing new under the sun here.
And if you fail... well that crocodile is taken from active duty until it's hungry again, right?
Probably you (like me, I'm also a non-native) have learnt proper grammar in school. It was at least for me the cornerstone of English teaching.
Over the last few years I have been tutoring English. Knowing all those grammar rules from having had to learn them inside out really works. I can imagine many native speakers don't know the rules so well - I know that I know the English grammar better than I know Dutch. The rules that is. That doesn't mean my English is better or so, though I do my best.
Oh and as an employer I do tend to toss out resumes with too horrible language. Though my applicants being Chinese I know not to expect perfect language. I do however expect use of a spell checker.
I wonder how many extra downloads you get from your comment now, and am actually more curious on how this 50,000 number relates to your normal downloads. I just had a look at your web site and I can imagine that there are many slashdotters interested in it.
Unfortunately TFS doesn't even mention what the project is about. Which makes advice only very general, of the usefulness of your typical management/marketing self-improvement book.
However such a one-shot, 50,000 downloads shot, could be the break such a project needs. Though considering the current size mentioned unless he's hosting on sourceforge or so it may just as well break his server. If it's any good that is of course. It's enough to get a crowd big enough that word-of-mouth starts to spread, that it gets mentioned elsewhere on the Internet, etc. Too bad for the submitter that there is no link in TFS, not even a project name or so.
It's just a car analogy, that's all.
US/UK/EU institutions
Euhm... contrary to popular belief (seems to be mainly from people from the UK), the UK as a matter of fact IS part of the EU.
I have read about this before (sorry no links) but the main reason of this huge production of publications is because Chinese measure their student's and scientist's performance that way. A Chinese PhD will during his thesis easily publish a few dozen papers while a western PhD student may do one or two. Some Chinese PhD's publish more papers during their PhD study than many Western scientists during their whole career. China is doing quite some quality research these days for sure though they have a lot to catch up and frankly a lot of their output (not only the toys) is crap.
In the West, scientists are judged by their quality of work (this is hard to do, requires a lot of work by the assessor), while in China they are judged by the number of papers published (a nice easy number). This is what makes them so productive. Indeed the quality is often low, the advancements if any are little, but a paper is a paper and it adds to the tally.
So while China may lead in 2020 in numbers of papers published, I doubt they will lead in quality. I think US is still nr 1 in that, Europe as a whole a good second. That's where the money is to really do fundamental research that has no direct commercial use (if any at all - LHC is a nice example) but that costs a lot of money in man-hours and equipment.
That said, a lot of research done nowadays in the US especially is done by Asian PhD students, who may or may not stay in the US or go back to their home country.
Just use greylisting then. Much cheaper on recipient's side.
That sounds like "computational expensive" which is what spammers likely do not like. After all my greylisting filter still works like a charm. They do not even retry sending spams, which I bet is cheaper than generating a new message every time.
On top of that, they are trying to sell something specific, thus there will be a very clear pattern in those spams nonetheless.
Even if they were bigger... there is little cost saving in building a server room for one rack vs a server room for four racks, even though you expect to use only one rack. However having to expand the server room later to accommodate a second rack now that's not just expensive but potentially disruptive to the school (construction is noisy and messy).
So it sounds like a sensible requirement to have a slightly over sized server room. And this being the government requirement possibly regardless of the school size. So there may be hardware savings, to call it 50-fold is baseless.
Having four servers for 230 students and maybe 30 staff or so sounds overkill to me even. But then again that's possibly designed with some redundancy in place, or with room for immediate expansion. Or are these application highly server based? Can also require more server power.
Not if that competitor is somewhere in Asia, for example. Or in almost any country in Europe. Or where-ever those patents are not valid, Canada may be an option as well. Then they do not have to pay said fee, and can still use h.264 as encoding format.
Now I know the vast majority of large international Internet companies are founded in the USA but that doesn't mean outside of the US there is no chance for those. Maybe some US investors would even like to invest abroad to set up such a competitor.