And, while we're at it, why not assign each individual a phone number that they keep for life, no matter where they move, like a domain name? I'd imagine that modern telco equipment could support this by now.
I'd say this poses a problem due to privacy issues. An email address is 'chosen', in the loosest sense of the word. This means that I can register a domain as I please (assuming it's not taken), then give myself an email address under that domain.
Phone numbers are assigned (at least the way voice switched networks work.) Email and phone calls have different ways of finding their way to their final destinations; in the case of a phone number, my provider gives me a number. I can't, broadly speaking, say 'I want number xyz with prefix 'abc'. Also, email addresses are portable across IP addresses, in addition to allowing you to have an unlimited number of them per DNS domain/subdomain.
It sounds vaguely paranoid, I'm aware, but a lot of people have an inherent distrust of a permanent, unique identifying number (SSN anyone?). With a permanently assigned unique phone number, you can dictate to an individual (unless the whole thing is voluntary) that "you will be reachable at this number, and you can be identified by it.", while with email I have more control over both where I receive my messages, and what my final address looks like.
The whole privacy thing and issues of tracking individuals geographically via their phone numbers is sort of a stretch, but I don't think excessively so.
There are a lot of comments comparing the increasing phone number address space to the coming of IPv6.
What I wonder is whether this will at some point lead to some halfway intelligent means of hierarchical human-readable "DNS" for phone numbers?
We have DNS for IP addresses, with all of its flaws (domain squatting, centralized hierarchy, etc.) and the phone book. Most of our mobile phones have important numbers stored as names, so I don't have to remember 123-4567, but rather can just select 'Bob's Work #'.
With DNS, I can set up an address space to show what country an email address is in, what sort of organization it belongs to, what the name of the outfit it is, and what organizational unit the recipient is grouped with (bob@eng.dobbcorp.co.uk being an example.) Same with an X.500 directory structure (OU, CN, DN, etc.)
Phone numbers give me some of this information (country code, area code, and maybe a certain group of numbers being allocated to a given neighborhood. However, it's not really intuitive or reliable once you get past the area code.
Does anyone know of a works in progress to create any kind of "telephone DNS", where a phone number can be (voluntarily?) mapped to a hierarchical namespace, allowing a caller to more easily find a number? Putting phone books online seems like sort of a kludgey, inelegant solution in the long term. Plus, you don't know which John Smith you're trying to reach in New York.
But, taking this ad absurdum, what if an out-of-control airliner threatens to drop on a major city? Are you allowed to shoot it down?
I can draw a (very vague) parallel between that, and a server farm full of zombie IIS taking out the nuclear power plant control computer or something equally silly.
1. Mullen's thesis essentially comes down to the idea that a compromised system is like a rabid dog. But this is a misleading, and emotional, simile; a worm does not pose the health dangers described by Mullen. Its threat is one to property, not safety, and thus the threshold to action is correspondingly higher.
In #3, you bring up an interesting counterpoint to this: "In the world of the author, all systems are evidently equal". I'm just nitpicking here, but what about hospital infrastructure? Fire department and emergency response computers? Military systems and communications satellites?
Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate letting an organization or government agency unleash 'Black Ice' on some hapless fool cracker based on the severity of a potential impact on it's IT systems, but under certain circumstances, a compromised system can, indeed, create a danger to health and safety.
Corollary 1: Depending on where you live, some forms of self-defence are not necessarily as frowned upon as they are in other places. Cops telling people who catch an inept burglar or mugger that "it might take us a while to arrive, and people have been known to break legs while running away" do exist.
On the other hand, all this assumes a degree of common sense that most people who'd practice this sort of vigilante pre-emptive strike/defense/retribution can't necessarily be assumed to possess...
Corollary 2: A swift beating is sometimes the best lesson. Why do so many sysadmins have hammers, pliers, and baseball bats in their offices? To fix servers? Hm?
Corollary 3: Bitch-slapping a script kiddie in another continent does have a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to it.
Not that I'd ever advocate anything like that, of course. Hm.
A peer review journal isn't necessarily a guarantee of reliability or quality, as we've seen with several pretty high-profile hoaxes recently.
Next, while the quantity of information (including alternative sources thereof) has certainly increased, I'd argue that the quality of peers available for review of that information has not necessarily even remained constant. The original poster has a good point, as far as I can tell, insofar that great number of theories and standpoints are driven by herd acceptance nowadays.
Just for argument's sake, take some highly touchy subjects, such as the holocaust, abortion and the death penalty (okay, dark matter and global warming if you want science instead of sociology.) Without in any way expressing my opinions on any of those topics, I can almost certainly assure you that, if I were to voice a given viewpoint on these issues, I would be shouted down by a large portion of my audience, regardless of how carefully thought out my presentation was. Rightfully so? You decide.
Rather, and this ties into the 'information is no longer under the control of the few' discussion, I am of the opinion that information has the tendency to concentrate on either end of the spectrum--a few large entities on one side, and a large number of 'bottom feeders' on the other. Witness the concentration of print and broadcast media through business consolidation (News Corp., Clear Channel, etc.) versus the proliferation of slashdots on the Internet.
Do you trust what you read on a blog? Maybe. What you read in a newspaper? Perhaps. More so than what you read in a Hearst paper from the 1930s? Could be. How will you decide? Joe Sixpack may now have the means to make his revolutionary quantum physics theory available to a wide audience, but how will you know whether or not he's a new Einstein, or a complete idiot? You have no way of telling. Rather, I'll guess that you will be more comfortable relying on what famous physicist X, who is an 'established' source of information, outlines to you on TV.
I heartily agree with you on your last sentence, though, with the possible addition that modern technology has opened up this dimension of liberal-prick-ness to a great big new audience:)
Judging from the comments here, I must have been living in contractor heaven.
I've been working as a freelancer for the last 30 months or so, 18 of them for the same large bank, and the rest for two other smaller clients. At all of them, I was treated like "part of the family"--the only difference being that, when I started and was clueless and stupid I got a chewing out for playing games (!) after work, and I had to pay full price for canteen meals.
My colleagues and I always had very casual, professional relationships, and people consulted me for my opinions very often.
Some of the remarks people here have made are food for thought though; since I started, I have disciplined myself pretty heavily, but I am getting the impression that I wasn't really aware of how lucky I was, contracting for the people I did...
I think you should bring this up with the gentlemen at Langley. After all, the CIA, the NSA, the military, the DIA, and every other TLA you can think of is publicly funded:)
I can only speak for (some of) the guys, but I know that what a lot of my colleagues would really dig is something which combines the usual tech guy's love of "cool stuff" (yes, deep down, a lot of us are just consumer whores) with an incentive to get off your ass and do something--something a lot of techies would love to do, if they had some motivation.
The Hokey Spokes are great. Maybe some cool snowboard gear (I just bought a pair of really nice Bolle goggles, as my old glasses were shit.) Whatever floats the geek's boat--I know that it's nice to receive things I think are "neat" and useful, but which don't necessarily have anything to do with what I do _every_goddamm_day...
Although if it's your boyfriend you're shopping for, a personal strip-o-gram is always a winner.:)
For a more luxurious version (and slightly larger) look at Kyosho Mini-Z racers. They're great, especially if you have tiled hallways at work. Wait until the cleaners come to drive their little floor cleaning buggies over them, and do some wicked spins on the wet floor!
I used to have one at my last job and would drive people nuts racing it around the office while talking on the phone.
Parallelize Joe Sixpack's mundane everyday computing tasks.
That way IE can format every hard drive in the company when it catches a malicious activeX control!
It will make your desktop support monkey's job more efficient and enjoyable, because every PC in a given environment will have the same crash at the same time every time!
You make some good points, and, even though I disagree with your fundamentals, they are honest.
However, there is one aspect that's often disregarded; it's that of quashing competition from free/sources using legal means.
Exactly the alternatives you subscribe to, such as using free software and buying non-mainstream music, are fundamentally threatened by commercial moves to technically and legally regulate how we consume information.
I realize that this is taking the slippery slope argument ad absurdum, but I can easily see something like broadcast flags (among other legally mandated means of content regulation/control on hardware devices--imagine that!) eventually leading to a world where I am prevented from consuming exactly those alternatives.
No, I do not own a DVD player, yes, I run FreeBSD, yes, I buy (mainly older and used) CDs--but what if I'm no longer allowed/able to access my entertainment because, say, new CD copy protection breaks my old bookshelf system, my PC doesn't work with my cable modem provider anymore because they require access to check my OS, and my (little-used) TV doesn't let me access even broadcast shows anymore because (a) free TV has been forced into some sort of content protection scheme which doesn't work on my old box?
When I first saw that headline, I misread "Jupiter" as "Juniper".
Now that's a way to sell routers--although, to be honest, it wouldn't be a whole lot different from what security software manufacturers have been doing on their end.
"Buy an M160 or spammers will CRUSH YOUR NETWORK AND EAT YOUR CHILDREN!"
No, if someone's modified the code, they didn't necessarily touch the configure script.
Plus, as many have mentioned, diddling with timestamps is fairly simple (bios clock, anyone?)
It also means this could have been around for longer:)
I wonder whether anyone references this stuff with the CVS/RCS/SCCS/whatever trees they use for updates. If the trojan segments aren't in source control, shouldn't it be trivial to rebuild a reasonably trusted source base from there? And if it's in source control, that might help track down who introduced it.
Tunnelling does not imply a direction in which a connection is initiated.
Take for example, SSH--port forwarding is possible both from the "server" and the "client" sides. All the client has to do is accept inbound connections across the SSH tunnel.
This can even be configured so the "server" accepts incoming connections from third hosts, which are then forwarded to the client.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, what I could see is a virtual IP stack residing on top of some application; maybe a packet forwarding equivalent of FreeNet. Applying the principle that you can tunnel anything across anything else, even a single TCP port open anywhere would sort of negate all this silly talk of packet filtering.
Proxies aren't an issue either, as anyone who's ever used something like this can attest.
While I'm fairly convinced that my experience in Russia was skewed by having visited only Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russian friends roll their eyes knowingly when I mention this), I have never been through as much bureaucratic hell as there.
I'm an American who speaks 3 languages fluently, and it's always bothered me that most American bureaucrats aren't required to do so--but I've usually encountered Americans abroad who've made an effort to communicate with foreigners--even if it means TALKING REAL LOUD (yes, you've all seen it.)
I never ran into so much demotivation and unfriendliness (downright hostility) as during my time in Russia--and I try to adapt, prepare, and be as flexible as a good guest ought to. Frankly, I left the country unable to help thinking "Yes, don't let any of the bastards into the US!" after being screamed at by the x-tieth babushka for mistakenly asking for the wrong type of train ticket. And they didn't seem to treat their compatriots any better.
Most assessments of US bureaucrats here are dead-on; the majority I've dealt with are ill-educated, hostile, and unmotivated. It's only at Atlanta airport where I've actually been treated civilly by security flunkies, and I travel quite a bit. However, I have a degree, however limited, of sympathy for the consular officials in Moscow issuing visas. Hell, I'd be demotivated after living there as an American.
Not that it's an excuse, but maybe understandable.
Re:Wardriving is not illegal
on
Wartrapping?
·
· Score: 1
A wireless network is being extended over common ground on an open (read: unregulated) frequency.
Common, is this case, means available for public usage. Sidewalks, parks, even the DMV count as 'commons'.
By doing this, you are making your resource available to me. If I were entering your company lobby physically with a laptop, your interpretation would be correct.
The trying-door-handles analogy breaks down, as it implies entering a space physically owned by you. I am not. You are projecting your belongings into public space--hence you lose claim to exclusive use. Unless, that is, you take steps to protect your belongings (i.e. use encryption, passwords, whatever.)
It's not as convenient as a can of Red Bull, but if you're really looking for the ultimate (!) caffeine kick, you want Turkish/Lebanese coffee--that's the thick, grainy stuff with cardamom.
It tastes great, and smells good too--the perfect solution if you don't mind a bit of, err, sand, in your drink. One tiny cup of the stuff will send you off the walls for hours.
It sums up what I have been trying to make clear (with moderate success) to acquaintances for quite a while now. In short, in order to be good at this type of work, you have to enjoy it--just like the MBA-types-turned-hot-dog-cooks, who go at the basic activity of creating and selling something with gusto, becaue that's what they like do do.
A lot of people are in technology jobs for the money or whatever silly reasons--there is a lot of misconception among non-technical people that "we" are pampered and overpaid--never mind the incredibly long hours and dedication many programmers, sysadmins, networkers, IT architects, or whatever-else-technical put in.
Funny enough, most of the good ones I know are those who'd probably be doing something similar even if they weren't being paid nearly as much or anything for it.
That being said, I've noticed that the proportion of those who really try to experience life, be it through travel, wine, opera, martial arts, whatever, seems to be far higher among my technically employed friends, who tend to put in long miserable hours doing their jobs well, than among the consultants, lawyers and traders I know.
A generalization? To be sure. However, I have heard the same thing from several people. Maybe putting so much dedication into what you enjoy makes you want to look for other interesting activities to balance out your life.
Slashdot Mirror
And, while we're at it, why not assign each individual a phone number that they keep for life, no matter where they move, like a domain name? I'd imagine that modern telco equipment could support this by now.
I'd say this poses a problem due to privacy issues. An email address is 'chosen', in the loosest sense of the word. This means that I can register a domain as I please (assuming it's not taken), then give myself an email address under that domain.
Phone numbers are assigned (at least the way voice switched networks work.) Email and phone calls have different ways of finding their way to their final destinations; in the case of a phone number, my provider gives me a number. I can't, broadly speaking, say 'I want number xyz with prefix 'abc'. Also, email addresses are portable across IP addresses, in addition to allowing you to have an unlimited number of them per DNS domain/subdomain.
It sounds vaguely paranoid, I'm aware, but a lot of people have an inherent distrust of a permanent, unique identifying number (SSN anyone?). With a permanently assigned unique phone number, you can dictate to an individual (unless the whole thing is voluntary) that "you will be reachable at this number, and you can be identified by it.", while with email I have more control over both where I receive my messages, and what my final address looks like.
The whole privacy thing and issues of tracking individuals geographically via their phone numbers is sort of a stretch, but I don't think excessively so.
There are a lot of comments comparing the increasing phone number address space to the coming of IPv6.
What I wonder is whether this will at some point lead to some halfway intelligent means of hierarchical human-readable "DNS" for phone numbers?
We have DNS for IP addresses, with all of its flaws (domain squatting, centralized hierarchy, etc.) and the phone book. Most of our mobile phones have important numbers stored as names, so I don't have to remember 123-4567, but rather can just select 'Bob's Work #'.
With DNS, I can set up an address space to show what country an email address is in, what sort of organization it belongs to, what the name of the outfit it is, and what organizational unit the recipient is grouped with (bob@eng.dobbcorp.co.uk being an example.) Same with an X.500 directory structure (OU, CN, DN, etc.)
Phone numbers give me some of this information (country code, area code, and maybe a certain group of numbers being allocated to a given neighborhood. However, it's not really intuitive or reliable once you get past the area code.
Does anyone know of a works in progress to create any kind of "telephone DNS", where a phone number can be (voluntarily?) mapped to a hierarchical namespace, allowing a caller to more easily find a number? Putting phone books online seems like sort of a kludgey, inelegant solution in the long term. Plus, you don't know which John Smith you're trying to reach in New York.
Sleeveless t-shirt under your other clothes marked 'bulletproof vest'. "Hey, I shot you!" "No, you didn't." *BANG*
Cardboard box inserted in someone's locker, with label 'thermonuclear device'.
Master the possibilities.
Good point, well spotted, I missed that.
But, taking this ad absurdum, what if an out-of-control airliner threatens to drop on a major city? Are you allowed to shoot it down?
I can draw a (very vague) parallel between that, and a server farm full of zombie IIS taking out the nuclear power plant control computer or something equally silly.
Arthur Haley, eat your heart out.
1. Mullen's thesis essentially comes down to the idea that a compromised system is like a rabid dog. But this is a misleading, and emotional, simile; a worm does not pose the health dangers described by Mullen. Its threat is one to property, not safety, and thus the threshold to action is correspondingly higher.
In #3, you bring up an interesting counterpoint to this: "In the world of the author, all systems are evidently equal". I'm just nitpicking here, but what about hospital infrastructure? Fire department and emergency response computers? Military systems and communications satellites?
Don't get me wrong, I don't advocate letting an organization or government agency unleash 'Black Ice' on some hapless fool cracker based on the severity of a potential impact on it's IT systems, but under certain circumstances, a compromised system can, indeed, create a danger to health and safety.
"can't" is such a strong word, young jedi.
Corollary 1: Depending on where you live, some forms of self-defence are not necessarily as frowned upon as they are in other places. Cops telling people who catch an inept burglar or mugger that "it might take us a while to arrive, and people have been known to break legs while running away" do exist.
On the other hand, all this assumes a degree of common sense that most people who'd practice this sort of vigilante pre-emptive strike/defense/retribution can't necessarily be assumed to possess...
Corollary 2: A swift beating is sometimes the best lesson. Why do so many sysadmins have hammers, pliers, and baseball bats in their offices? To fix servers? Hm?
Corollary 3: Bitch-slapping a script kiddie in another continent does have a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to it.
Not that I'd ever advocate anything like that, of course. Hm.
A peer review journal isn't necessarily a guarantee of reliability or quality, as we've seen with several pretty high-profile hoaxes recently.
Next, while the quantity of information (including alternative sources thereof) has certainly increased, I'd argue that the quality of peers available for review of that information has not necessarily even remained constant. The original poster has a good point, as far as I can tell, insofar that great number of theories and standpoints are driven by herd acceptance nowadays.
Just for argument's sake, take some highly touchy subjects, such as the holocaust, abortion and the death penalty (okay, dark matter and global warming if you want science instead of sociology.) Without in any way expressing my opinions on any of those topics, I can almost certainly assure you that, if I were to voice a given viewpoint on these issues, I would be shouted down by a large portion of my audience, regardless of how carefully thought out my presentation was. Rightfully so? You decide.
Rather, and this ties into the 'information is no longer under the control of the few' discussion, I am of the opinion that information has the tendency to concentrate on either end of the spectrum--a few large entities on one side, and a large number of 'bottom feeders' on the other. Witness the concentration of print and broadcast media through business consolidation (News Corp., Clear Channel, etc.) versus the proliferation of slashdots on the Internet.
Do you trust what you read on a blog? Maybe. What you read in a newspaper? Perhaps. More so than what you read in a Hearst paper from the 1930s? Could be. How will you decide? Joe Sixpack may now have the means to make his revolutionary quantum physics theory available to a wide audience, but how will you know whether or not he's a new Einstein, or a complete idiot? You have no way of telling. Rather, I'll guess that you will be more comfortable relying on what famous physicist X, who is an 'established' source of information, outlines to you on TV.
I heartily agree with you on your last sentence,
though, with the possible addition that modern technology has opened up this dimension of liberal-prick-ness to a great big new audience
It's a nice day outside.
This update has been brought to you by the what-is-that-bright-yellow-round-thing-that-hurts
Wow.
Judging from the comments here, I must have been living in contractor heaven.
I've been working as a freelancer for the last 30 months or so, 18 of them for the same large bank, and the rest for two other smaller clients. At all of them, I was treated like "part of the family"--the only difference being that, when I started and was clueless and stupid I got a chewing out for playing games (!) after work, and I had to pay full price for canteen meals.
My colleagues and I always had very casual, professional relationships, and people consulted me for my opinions very often.
Some of the remarks people here have made are food for thought though; since I started, I have disciplined myself pretty heavily, but I am getting the impression that I wasn't really aware of how lucky I was, contracting for the people I did...
It's all that dark matter slowing it down.
Good point
I think you should bring this up with the gentlemen at Langley. After all, the CIA, the NSA, the military, the DIA, and every other TLA you can think of is publicly funded
Yeah, but the Wasa was a spectacular ship-of-the-line, with some of the most beautiful decorations and advanced engineering work of the time.
And, because the King wanted it, a couple of extra gun decks, which caused it to tip over and sink.
Sound familiar to any of you working in tech?
I would imagine that a lot of the Hudson wrecks are garbage scows and lumber freighters and things like that.
I can only speak for (some of) the guys, but I know that what a lot of my colleagues would really dig is something which combines the usual tech guy's love of "cool stuff" (yes, deep down, a lot of us are just consumer whores) with an incentive to get off your ass and do something--something a lot of techies would love to do, if they had some motivation.
The Hokey Spokes are great. Maybe some cool snowboard gear (I just bought a pair of really nice Bolle goggles, as my old glasses were shit.)
Whatever floats the geek's boat--I know that it's nice to receive things I think are "neat" and useful, but which don't necessarily have anything to do with what I do _every_goddamm_day...
Although if it's your boyfriend you're shopping for, a personal strip-o-gram is always a winner.
Yes, and by going for a flight, one could win a Hugh prize.
Congratulations Orville, Wilbur. You've just made the first real controlled powered heavier-than-air flight. This here is Hugh. He's your prize.
Amusing speling eror on that link.
For a more luxurious version (and slightly larger) look at Kyosho Mini-Z racers. They're great, especially if you have tiled hallways at work. Wait until the cleaners come to drive their little floor cleaning buggies over them, and do some wicked spins on the wet floor!
I used to have one at my last job and would drive people nuts racing it around the office while talking on the phone.
Thank god, I had to pause for a moment there.
Could you editor types please clarify this kind of stuff? There are a lot of duplicate TLAs out there.
Oh ok this is a great idea--
Parallelize Joe Sixpack's mundane everyday computing tasks.
That way IE can format every hard drive in the company when it catches a malicious activeX control!
It will make your desktop support monkey's job more efficient and enjoyable, because every PC in a given environment will have the same crash at the same time every time!
You make some good points, and, even though I disagree with your fundamentals, they are honest.
However, there is one aspect that's often disregarded; it's that of quashing competition from free/sources using legal means.
Exactly the alternatives you subscribe to, such as using free software and buying non-mainstream music, are fundamentally threatened by commercial moves to technically and legally regulate how we consume information.
I realize that this is taking the slippery slope argument ad absurdum, but I can easily see something like broadcast flags (among other legally mandated means of content regulation/control on hardware devices--imagine that!) eventually leading to a world where I am prevented from consuming exactly those alternatives.
No, I do not own a DVD player, yes, I run FreeBSD, yes, I buy (mainly older and used) CDs--but what if I'm no longer allowed/able to access my entertainment because, say, new CD copy protection breaks my old bookshelf system, my PC doesn't work with my cable modem provider anymore because they require access to check my OS, and my (little-used) TV doesn't let me access even broadcast shows anymore because (a) free TV has been forced into some sort of content protection scheme which doesn't work on my old box?
Great prospects..
When I first saw that headline, I misread "Jupiter" as "Juniper".
Now that's a way to sell routers--although, to be honest, it wouldn't be a whole lot different from what security software manufacturers have been doing on their end.
"Buy an M160 or spammers will CRUSH YOUR NETWORK AND EAT YOUR CHILDREN!"
No, if someone's modified the code, they didn't
necessarily touch the configure script.
Plus, as many have mentioned, diddling with timestamps is fairly simple (bios clock, anyone?)
It also means this could have been around for longer
I wonder whether anyone references this stuff with the CVS/RCS/SCCS/whatever trees they use for updates. If the trojan segments aren't in source control, shouldn't it be trivial to rebuild a reasonably trusted source base from there? And if it's in source control, that might help track down who introduced it.
Tunnelling does not imply a direction in which a connection is initiated.
Take for example, SSH--port forwarding is possible both from the "server" and the "client" sides. All the client has to do is accept inbound connections across the SSH tunnel. This can even be configured so the "server" accepts incoming connections from third hosts, which are then forwarded to the client.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, what I could see is a virtual IP stack residing on top of some application; maybe a packet forwarding equivalent of FreeNet. Applying the principle that you can tunnel anything across anything else, even a single TCP port open anywhere would sort of negate all this silly talk of packet filtering.
Proxies aren't an issue either, as anyone who's ever used something like this can attest.
Are you kidding?
While I'm fairly convinced that my experience in Russia was skewed by having visited only Moscow and St. Petersburg (Russian friends roll their eyes knowingly when I mention this), I have never been through as much bureaucratic hell as there.
I'm an American who speaks 3 languages fluently, and it's always bothered me that most American bureaucrats aren't required to do so--but I've usually encountered Americans abroad who've made an effort to communicate with foreigners--even if it means TALKING REAL LOUD (yes, you've all seen it.)
I never ran into so much demotivation and unfriendliness (downright hostility) as during my time in Russia--and I try to adapt, prepare, and be as flexible as a good guest ought to. Frankly, I left the country unable to help thinking "Yes, don't let any of the bastards into the US!" after being screamed at by the x-tieth babushka for mistakenly asking for the wrong type of train ticket. And they didn't seem to treat their compatriots any better.
Most assessments of US bureaucrats here are dead-on; the majority I've dealt with are ill-educated, hostile, and unmotivated. It's only at Atlanta airport where I've actually been treated civilly by security flunkies, and I travel quite a bit. However, I have a degree, however limited, of sympathy for the consular officials in Moscow issuing visas. Hell, I'd be demotivated after living there as an American.
Not that it's an excuse, but maybe understandable.
A wireless network is being extended over common ground on an open (read: unregulated) frequency.
Common, is this case, means available for public usage. Sidewalks, parks, even the DMV count as 'commons'.
By doing this, you are making your resource available to me. If I were entering your company lobby physically with a laptop, your interpretation would be correct.
The trying-door-handles analogy breaks down, as it implies entering a space physically owned by you. I am not. You are projecting your belongings into public space--hence you lose claim to exclusive use. Unless, that is, you take steps to protect your belongings (i.e. use encryption, passwords, whatever.)
It's not as convenient as a can of Red Bull, but if you're really looking for the ultimate (!) caffeine kick, you want Turkish/Lebanese coffee--that's the thick, grainy stuff with cardamom.
It tastes great, and smells good too--the perfect solution if you don't mind a bit of, err, sand, in your drink. One tiny cup of the stuff will send you off the walls for hours.
This is an awesome comment--for several reasons.
It sums up what I have been trying to make clear (with moderate success) to acquaintances for quite a while now. In short, in order to be good at this type of work, you have to enjoy it--just like the MBA-types-turned-hot-dog-cooks, who go at the basic activity of creating and selling something with gusto, becaue that's what they like do do.
A lot of people are in technology jobs for the money or whatever silly reasons--there is a lot of misconception among non-technical people that "we" are pampered and overpaid--never mind the incredibly long hours and dedication many programmers, sysadmins, networkers, IT architects, or whatever-else-technical put in.
Funny enough, most of the good ones I know are those who'd probably be doing something similar even if they weren't being paid nearly as much or anything for it.
That being said, I've noticed that the proportion of those who really try to experience life, be it through travel, wine, opera, martial arts, whatever, seems to be far higher among my technically employed friends, who tend to put in long miserable hours doing their jobs well, than among the consultants, lawyers and traders I know.
A generalization? To be sure. However, I have heard the same thing from several people. Maybe putting so much dedication into what you enjoy makes you want to look for other interesting activities to balance out your life.