You know what was the best technique as a college student? Opening up a BOOK, starting at page 1 and finishing where it says "The End."
You forgot to mention under which tree in Africa this book can be found. It can be downloaded, though, for 0 distribution cost, from a postman truck's server when it comes around, and when someone else visits you the copy you have can be given to the visitor. Can you do the same with a physical book, even assuming that you have one?
Computers are unnecessary in 99% of jobs.
Computers are necessary, however, to learn how to do these jobs if there is no teacher. And what are the chances that your village has a teacher for every job that you might be interested in? If you have to rebuild the engine of the only car in the village, would it not be wise to download a video which explains how to do it, step by step and with comments in your native language? A working car might mean the difference between life and death if the nearest doctor is 50 miles away, and the nearest pride of lions is only 5 miles away.
Besides, English (as a foreign language) is learned best in live communication, reading and writing. This is because it exposes the student to speech patterns that textbooks lack. This laptop can be used, if not for real time/. access, for UUCP/FidoNet like messaging - and that was fine for the entire world for many years. Even SMTP email as we know it is not much faster - not all people are online 24/7.
How do Slashdot editors make connections between April Fool's Day and being gay? Is that an indication of poor social skills?
It is at least an indication that you are unaware of all the meanings of the word 'gay':
Main Entry: gay Pronunciation: 'gA Function: adjective Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French gai 1 a : happily excited : MERRY b : keenly alive and exuberant : having or inducing high spirits 2 a : BRIGHT, LIVELY <gay sunny meadows> b : brilliant in color 3 : given to social pleasures; also : LICENTIOUS 4 a : HOMOSEXUAL b : of, relating to, or used by homosexuals
The attacker in this scenario can gain physical access to the computer(s) that are doing the crypto work. For him a more efficient process might look like this:
Identify and store all PGP messages
Group the stored messages by senders/recipients
Select one (or several) PGP user to go after
Visit the subject, copy his HDD and install a keylogger
Decrypt all of his past, present and future messages. Impersonate his signatures if that is necessary.
This way instead of a trillion-dollar, unique and irreplaceable quantum supercomputer the attacker only needs to have a bunch of field agents who are only trained to install keyloggers and duplicate HDDs. For that no computer sk1llz are required.
but most tradesmen, cops and fireman I know have nothing more than a passing interest in computers...and even then it;s because they have to buy them for their kids.
One day they will realize that they pay subscription fee to read garbage news professionally spewed by professional garbage writers. Nobody in newspaper industry has time to research a subject; more often than not a journalist has 3 hours to fill a spot with 800 words, and here you are.
Or it may be that these people will never realize that they are just consumers of "infotainment" as industry [honestly] calls itself these days. Some people want predigested articles that tell them what to think. Too bad, but what can you do about it?
There will still be an audience for it. It will get smaller,
What will you do when the number of readers drops below 1?
I don't read newspapers for at least a decade. They are dirty (the ink smears), they are unwieldly and have to be folded endlessly, they kill trees and pollute water, they are ridiculously short-lived, they are a day late after all the news already happened and had been discussed and laid to rest, and worst of all, all the articles are written for the lowest common denominator.
I find it hard to believe that anything, even local news channels, still beat the newspaper for local news.
If you want to check the weather before heading home from work, what will you do:
Find a newspaper that has a weather forecast based on, say, 24 hours old data, or
Click on a Web site that has a weather forecast based on 10 minutes old data
That's as local as it gets. My coworkers check traffic on Internet, not in papers. In fact, I hardly ever see a newspaper brought in - and that's only when it contains something remarkable and worth having on paper.
There is plenty of software in use in companies, and the manufacturers send updates now and then. IT department does not have enough people on "instant response" to manage all these installs and uninstalls and reinstalls. Power users have their privileges for a reason. A common user can't even connect to a printer (this requires installing the driver.)
Your users ticked the box, right next to the clear warning of what it would do. Have you trained them not to do this?
Yes, they were trained. But they probably forgot already.
Are they being reckless anyway?
Yes they were. So what do you do about that? The company's data is already out there, and it won't be coming back even if you slowly torture the SOB.
Have you considered all the other ways they could get data out? Email, CD-R, USB key, taking their laptop home? Are you going to stop all of those?
No, but they don't abuse those privileges - because, probably, it's much more difficult to abuse? Besides, if the CD-R with sales projections is lost, it's not going to end up in a central place where it can do most harm and where it will be stored forever.
Did you install the Google Enterprise Desktop with the central control policies, forbidding installation of other copies of google desktop and forbidding copying of data offsite?
It is being installed and those settings will be in the group policy. However it takes time to deploy an application that I never wanted to have in first place. Now it seems this is the only reliable way to kick the unauthorized installs out...
Google deserves all the blame for this debacle. They took a harmless local search tool and turned it into a potential spyware, so now we either have to install their "enterprise" cousin or to try "whack-a-mole" putting GoogleDesktopSearch.exe into every proxy block list and in the group policy's "denied execution" list. That doesn't help at all. Google created tons of headache for corporate sysadmins.
You are talking about intentional breach of security, and that is always possible, and will always be possible. However Google Desktop allows plain, simple folks to do that, and the whole article here is about how IT fights this threat. Your scenario of willful removal of data has nothing to do with a regular low-level employee unwittingly and stupidly enabling the feature and causing company's data to be pushed to Google servers, to be put to unknown use.
You can't fire anyone unless you have a positive proof, to the point of eyewitness evidence, who exactly had the prohibited software installed. It's just too easy to do it on someone's else computer when the owner takes a bathroom break.
Try this for size. Your CFO, a true PHB, has tons of sensitive documents on his laptop. He also insists that he must have full admin rights on his laptop, and you can't do anything but to comply. And he clicks on anything that moves, and installs anything that is installable, and enables *all* options thinking that they let the software do more for him.
There are many people like that in sales, marketing, accounting. They may not have as much clout as a C*O would, but they are just as harmful and just as clueless. They need Intraweb access for banking, for interaction with customers, for research on competitors, for many legit purposes - and please go and try to tell them how to run their computers!
Then you train your employees not to turn it on, and punish them if they do.
I see that you are not working in a management position.
First, you can train employees until you are blue in the face, but some will be as ignorant as before. You can't blame your accountant for not understanding security issues, not any more than a sysadmin may be unfamiliar with accounting practices.
Second, the law does not give you many options for punishing people. You have practically only one option - to fire the employee. That in itself may be painful because you need the employee (you still have to do the accounting, for example.) Also, the employee can sue you for wrongful termination, arguing that security is not her responsibility, for example, and that she never enabled the feature in first place, and she doesn't know how this Google Desktop thingy got there. She (or he) will win unless you can come up with the audit trail, preferrably with a video record of the employee installing the app. Anything else... even if you still have the audit database, how can you tell if it was her vs. a coworker who did that?
As an old saying goes, the locks are used to keep honest people honest. Active blocking of Google Desktop does just that.
None of your examples can automatically, in background, send 160 GB of your HDD space to unknowable number of people - and keep sending even after you forgot about that setting (or after your wife or child configured this setting contrary to your intentions.)
He says he works for US DoD. There are a couple of guys over there who heard about security:-)
Sure, Google is "not evil" now, but who is to say in 2 years? Or a programming error that exposes it?
Or, more importantly, who are the people who may have the access to the data, and who are they working for, really? Various branches of the government ask these questions quite often, and for a good reason. A company like Google does not need to be evil to cause some real damage, it only needs to be infiltrated by one smart person - who may be already working for Google, for all we know.
CIO: labratuk, you are 100% correct, and I already ordered your work computer reconfigured. Only signed non-system executables - signed by my key that I just generated - will be permitted to run. In your case, that would be MS Excel. All the internet access rights have been revoked, naturally, since any browser can upload our secrets. Removable media ports on your computer have been also permanently disabled, in the hardware. BIOS has now a strong password, and the computer case has a lock with alarm sensor. Now, go back to your cubicle and enjoy your work!
There are 100 careless people for each crooked one. Your bank's CIO may have a policy of strong passwords, fingerprint authentication and such, but how will that help if Mary the teller sets up her Google account 'MarySmith' with password 'mary' ?
This is the crucial difference between shooting someone into the heart vs. letting a careless person to borrow your handgun. In former case you do the deed. In latter case you set up the trap and wait until someone falls in. You don't even care who, as long as enough people enable this feature. In a large company 999 employees may be wise, but it takes only one stupid secretary to publish the whole company's network shares that she can read - and Google says that they can't promise that the data - any data - will be ever fully deleted. Technically that might be true (due to backups, distributed storage, etc.)
Then why would that particular company allow the install of ANY software much less one that sends stuff out?
Legally allowing (or disallowing) installs is one thing; but people may install software even if it is not permitted. If someone is technically allowed to install a printer driver (as a power user), he may be allowed to install any driver; similarly, if a person is allowed to install a piece of production software, he may also have rights to install anything else. Besides, many programs will run even if not installed. WinZip's installer is just like that, it does the entire installation for you. In most cases it's just too painful to only permit execution of signed executables; in a large company it's probably impossible.
Well, the parent is moderated as "Score: 1, Troll" but I read the book too, and I must admit that I read better books. This particular house is full of unattached balconies that exist for no specific reason and serve no purpose (other than to increase the word count.) The whole idea of a dying man leaving an impossible, multi-layered riddle for his daughter to solve, after being gut-shot... may I say I don't believe it? Have you seen anyone doing that, on this planet, in his right mind? Normally people just leave a will. Writing someone's name and not mentioning that he is or is not the killer? The chain of conspiracy, as depicted, is also beyond belief; these things just don't happen. The major players in this story simply have to be cyborgs or aliens to be as efficient as they are shown.
But the real question is, if the work is NOT a true story, then can I still write about it all I want without violating copyright?
I believe you can write about the story as much as you want, that's what critics do. However you may not be allowed to use the story in your own writings or other creative works. This is because the story had been created, thought up by someone, and that someone has "copy rights" to it. So you may not copy without permission.
You still can write any similar story, though, as long as it is not "similar enough". For example, it would be unwise to remake "ST: TNG" with only making Picard as hairy as Oog. However a story where Oog discovers an unlocked spaceship and manages to take off, then wanders around and falls into autodoc - which instantly fixes him up for IQ 999 -... that might be just fine (though the theme of barbarians winning an alien spaceship and taking off to conquer new worlds is not new.)
the stuff way down would wrap around earth very slowly, kinda like a leaf falling down.
The cable will be long enough to wind itself up around the Earth. The cable's edges (or strands) will be extremely sharp. Much damage can occur when people or animals run into invisible threads that cut them in half. Larry Niven was quite illustrative about dangers of thin, strong threads (see Ringworld, Book 1.) How will you clean it up, across seas and mountains and forests?
Compared to that, the cabin can only kill its occupants and a few unfortunates on the ground, only once.
I'd say yes to that. Fortune 50 companies employ a lot of people all over the planet, and the work ethic in those companies is such that many employees feel relaxed and secure enough to use Google for personal purposes.
The TFA explains that governments are trying to suppress online suicide clubs - sites where people talk online about their plans and ideas and desires; the people are supposed to have a right to talk about pretty much anything. Classified correctly, IMO; it's not anyone's else business but those people themselves.
The professionals - like industrial spies, for example - don't kill without a reason. A good knock on the head starts the process, then a rag goes into victim's mouth, some rope around arms and legs, then the knife work - and after he is done the victim will be left tied up, gagged and bleeding freely. That victim is not likely to call the police, not for many hours (and he'd better be found by someone, or else he can die from blood loss and exposure if tied well.)
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot to mention under which tree in Africa this book can be found. It can be downloaded, though, for 0 distribution cost, from a postman truck's server when it comes around, and when someone else visits you the copy you have can be given to the visitor. Can you do the same with a physical book, even assuming that you have one?
Computers are unnecessary in 99% of jobs.
Computers are necessary, however, to learn how to do these jobs if there is no teacher. And what are the chances that your village has a teacher for every job that you might be interested in? If you have to rebuild the engine of the only car in the village, would it not be wise to download a video which explains how to do it, step by step and with comments in your native language? A working car might mean the difference between life and death if the nearest doctor is 50 miles away, and the nearest pride of lions is only 5 miles away.
Besides, English (as a foreign language) is learned best in live communication, reading and writing. This is because it exposes the student to speech patterns that textbooks lack. This laptop can be used, if not for real time /. access, for UUCP/FidoNet like messaging - and that was fine for the entire world for many years. Even SMTP email as we know it is not much faster - not all people are online 24/7.
It is at least an indication that you are unaware of all the meanings of the word 'gay':
The #4 is quite a recent addition.
This way instead of a trillion-dollar, unique and irreplaceable quantum supercomputer the attacker only needs to have a bunch of field agents who are only trained to install keyloggers and duplicate HDDs. For that no computer sk1llz are required.
I think sunlight is available aplenty in Africa, and solar panel's cost is not that outrageous.
One day they will realize that they pay subscription fee to read garbage news professionally spewed by professional garbage writers. Nobody in newspaper industry has time to research a subject; more often than not a journalist has 3 hours to fill a spot with 800 words, and here you are.
Or it may be that these people will never realize that they are just consumers of "infotainment" as industry [honestly] calls itself these days. Some people want predigested articles that tell them what to think. Too bad, but what can you do about it?
What will you do when the number of readers drops below 1?
I don't read newspapers for at least a decade. They are dirty (the ink smears), they are unwieldly and have to be folded endlessly, they kill trees and pollute water, they are ridiculously short-lived, they are a day late after all the news already happened and had been discussed and laid to rest, and worst of all, all the articles are written for the lowest common denominator.
I find it hard to believe that anything, even local news channels, still beat the newspaper for local news.
If you want to check the weather before heading home from work, what will you do:
That's as local as it gets. My coworkers check traffic on Internet, not in papers. In fact, I hardly ever see a newspaper brought in - and that's only when it contains something remarkable and worth having on paper.
There is plenty of software in use in companies, and the manufacturers send updates now and then. IT department does not have enough people on "instant response" to manage all these installs and uninstalls and reinstalls. Power users have their privileges for a reason. A common user can't even connect to a printer (this requires installing the driver.)
Your users ticked the box, right next to the clear warning of what it would do. Have you trained them not to do this?
Yes, they were trained. But they probably forgot already.
Are they being reckless anyway?
Yes they were. So what do you do about that? The company's data is already out there, and it won't be coming back even if you slowly torture the SOB.
Have you considered all the other ways they could get data out? Email, CD-R, USB key, taking their laptop home? Are you going to stop all of those?
No, but they don't abuse those privileges - because, probably, it's much more difficult to abuse? Besides, if the CD-R with sales projections is lost, it's not going to end up in a central place where it can do most harm and where it will be stored forever.
Did you install the Google Enterprise Desktop with the central control policies, forbidding installation of other copies of google desktop and forbidding copying of data offsite?
It is being installed and those settings will be in the group policy. However it takes time to deploy an application that I never wanted to have in first place. Now it seems this is the only reliable way to kick the unauthorized installs out...
Google deserves all the blame for this debacle. They took a harmless local search tool and turned it into a potential spyware, so now we either have to install their "enterprise" cousin or to try "whack-a-mole" putting GoogleDesktopSearch.exe into every proxy block list and in the group policy's "denied execution" list. That doesn't help at all. Google created tons of headache for corporate sysadmins.
You are talking about intentional breach of security, and that is always possible, and will always be possible. However Google Desktop allows plain, simple folks to do that, and the whole article here is about how IT fights this threat. Your scenario of willful removal of data has nothing to do with a regular low-level employee unwittingly and stupidly enabling the feature and causing company's data to be pushed to Google servers, to be put to unknown use.
You can't fire anyone unless you have a positive proof, to the point of eyewitness evidence, who exactly had the prohibited software installed. It's just too easy to do it on someone's else computer when the owner takes a bathroom break.
There are many people like that in sales, marketing, accounting. They may not have as much clout as a C*O would, but they are just as harmful and just as clueless. They need Intraweb access for banking, for interaction with customers, for research on competitors, for many legit purposes - and please go and try to tell them how to run their computers!
I see that you are not working in a management position.
First, you can train employees until you are blue in the face, but some will be as ignorant as before. You can't blame your accountant for not understanding security issues, not any more than a sysadmin may be unfamiliar with accounting practices.
Second, the law does not give you many options for punishing people. You have practically only one option - to fire the employee. That in itself may be painful because you need the employee (you still have to do the accounting, for example.) Also, the employee can sue you for wrongful termination, arguing that security is not her responsibility, for example, and that she never enabled the feature in first place, and she doesn't know how this Google Desktop thingy got there. She (or he) will win unless you can come up with the audit trail, preferrably with a video record of the employee installing the app. Anything else... even if you still have the audit database, how can you tell if it was her vs. a coworker who did that?
As an old saying goes, the locks are used to keep honest people honest. Active blocking of Google Desktop does just that.
It doesn't. The point here is that Google Desktop joined the crowd of old threats known as trojans.
None of your examples can automatically, in background, send 160 GB of your HDD space to unknowable number of people - and keep sending even after you forgot about that setting (or after your wife or child configured this setting contrary to your intentions.)
He says he works for US DoD. There are a couple of guys over there who heard about security :-)
Sure, Google is "not evil" now, but who is to say in 2 years? Or a programming error that exposes it?
Or, more importantly, who are the people who may have the access to the data, and who are they working for, really? Various branches of the government ask these questions quite often, and for a good reason. A company like Google does not need to be evil to cause some real damage, it only needs to be infiltrated by one smart person - who may be already working for Google, for all we know.
CIO: labratuk, you are 100% correct, and I already ordered your work computer reconfigured. Only signed non-system executables - signed by my key that I just generated - will be permitted to run. In your case, that would be MS Excel. All the internet access rights have been revoked, naturally, since any browser can upload our secrets. Removable media ports on your computer have been also permanently disabled, in the hardware. BIOS has now a strong password, and the computer case has a lock with alarm sensor. Now, go back to your cubicle and enjoy your work!
This is the crucial difference between shooting someone into the heart vs. letting a careless person to borrow your handgun. In former case you do the deed. In latter case you set up the trap and wait until someone falls in. You don't even care who, as long as enough people enable this feature. In a large company 999 employees may be wise, but it takes only one stupid secretary to publish the whole company's network shares that she can read - and Google says that they can't promise that the data - any data - will be ever fully deleted. Technically that might be true (due to backups, distributed storage, etc.)
Legally allowing (or disallowing) installs is one thing; but people may install software even if it is not permitted. If someone is technically allowed to install a printer driver (as a power user), he may be allowed to install any driver; similarly, if a person is allowed to install a piece of production software, he may also have rights to install anything else. Besides, many programs will run even if not installed. WinZip's installer is just like that, it does the entire installation for you. In most cases it's just too painful to only permit execution of signed executables; in a large company it's probably impossible.
Well, the parent is moderated as "Score: 1, Troll" but I read the book too, and I must admit that I read better books. This particular house is full of unattached balconies that exist for no specific reason and serve no purpose (other than to increase the word count.) The whole idea of a dying man leaving an impossible, multi-layered riddle for his daughter to solve, after being gut-shot... may I say I don't believe it? Have you seen anyone doing that, on this planet, in his right mind? Normally people just leave a will. Writing someone's name and not mentioning that he is or is not the killer? The chain of conspiracy, as depicted, is also beyond belief; these things just don't happen. The major players in this story simply have to be cyborgs or aliens to be as efficient as they are shown.
I believe you can write about the story as much as you want, that's what critics do. However you may not be allowed to use the story in your own writings or other creative works. This is because the story had been created, thought up by someone, and that someone has "copy rights" to it. So you may not copy without permission.
You still can write any similar story, though, as long as it is not "similar enough". For example, it would be unwise to remake "ST: TNG" with only making Picard as hairy as Oog. However a story where Oog discovers an unlocked spaceship and manages to take off, then wanders around and falls into autodoc - which instantly fixes him up for IQ 999 - ... that might be just fine (though the theme of barbarians winning an alien spaceship and taking off to conquer new worlds is not new.)
Ban only the machines that have an electrically operated access door at the height about 30" from the ground. All other machines are safe.
The cable will be long enough to wind itself up around the Earth. The cable's edges (or strands) will be extremely sharp. Much damage can occur when people or animals run into invisible threads that cut them in half. Larry Niven was quite illustrative about dangers of thin, strong threads (see Ringworld, Book 1.) How will you clean it up, across seas and mountains and forests?
Compared to that, the cabin can only kill its occupants and a few unfortunates on the ground, only once.
I'd say yes to that. Fortune 50 companies employ a lot of people all over the planet, and the work ethic in those companies is such that many employees feel relaxed and secure enough to use Google for personal purposes.
The TFA explains that governments are trying to suppress online suicide clubs - sites where people talk online about their plans and ideas and desires; the people are supposed to have a right to talk about pretty much anything. Classified correctly, IMO; it's not anyone's else business but those people themselves.
The professionals - like industrial spies, for example - don't kill without a reason. A good knock on the head starts the process, then a rag goes into victim's mouth, some rope around arms and legs, then the knife work - and after he is done the victim will be left tied up, gagged and bleeding freely. That victim is not likely to call the police, not for many hours (and he'd better be found by someone, or else he can die from blood loss and exposure if tied well.)