I don't think spying requires working for any given nation state. That being said, allegations that wikileaks was a source for blackmail have certainly made the rounds before any of the cables.
He's not distributing the truth, he's wholesale dumping as much onto the world as he can to cause as much anarchy as he can. Go read some of Assange's past writing from before wikileaks, he makes his intentions for anarchy quite clear. Was it really necessary that the world know Gadhaffi's security details or a thousand other similar things?
I'm sure if informed your hypothetical mother-in-law about your hypothetical dislike of her cooking, it would somehow not be ok? How about any number of other situations where privacy is required. So far the biggest alleged crime I have heard about is a request to gather some information on UN diplomats. Wholesale release of documents, just because they have them shows the claim of informing people of facts to be disingenuous.
He actively solicited classified government information, that's spying regardless of where you are. This was hardly a case of somebody dropping something in the mail that showed up on a reporters desktop without their involvement.
Civilians can spy, the Chinese and French governments in particular are well known for using civilians. Some of histories most famous spies were civilians.
Harm has been directly caused to diplomatic relations with superpower. How can harming the diplomatic relations of a fair share of this nations countries possibly be considered no harm?
Transparency isn't the issue, the issue s an attack on diplomacy itself. When nations don't feel like they can talk they are more likely to resolve their conflicts through non-diplomatic means. I don't think that's in anybodies best interest.
Wow, I'm surprised they didn't offer up anal probes in area 51 to go along with the rest... This guy needs to get a grip, get off his ego trip and realize that his stunts cause real harm to people the world over.
Of course the US is seeking to extradite him, to put him on trial for spying and other damages. That being said, execution for spies is a legal tradition going back to prehistory, so there's a few thousand plus years of precedent to call on.
Just remember, wikileaks next victim might be someone or something that you support. That's the problem with anarchy groups like wikileaks, they're as likely to turn against you as anything else.
Peer Review, Change Control, Auditing, Maintenance Windows, Testing all changes in a lab before production, source and version control / maintenance. These are all best practices, work regardless of operating system and don't require any special software.
Why o why do you want to use software to take the place of established best practices? Best practices are there for good reasons, and those reasons usually have multi-million dollar lessons attached to them. You don't need special software, just a heavy that says yes you/must/ do it this way and raises hell when you try otherwise...
I find this story to be one of scare mongering that simply wouldn't pass muster for most exchanges.
I've worked with some of the machines on stock exchange trading floors to deal with problems from trading delays. The guys who support these machines in a daily basis know every nuance of the systems from a load perspective. They know these machines far better than almost any server admin I've worked with.
Quite simply put, if there was a delay approaching 100 ms it was actively watched for and flagged. At 200 ms people were talking vocally about the issue, at 300 ms people were shouting, if something worked it's way up to 400 ms the room was screaming. To put it quite literally there are teams of people that do nothing but/very/ actively watch for slight delays in trades as those delays can cost millions of dollars per fraction of second.
This concern is why almost every stock exchange in the world is surrounded by office buildings that are dominated by data centers, just to physically shorten the distance to the exchange.
Incidentally my involvement came from setting up server monitoring software to look for delays like these. We then automated certain types of responses (if x consumes 15% of CPU than we do Y kind of thing). To put it quite literally, a delay such as what is proposed in the article would only ever happen once - and be taken as a glitch or the affected (and magically unfixable hacked system) taken offline within 10 minutes when it could not be restored to normal operating parameters.
I call bunk, as the machines that do the trading are the most actively monitored and arguably best known by their administrator staffs in the world.
Please stop, your making my head hurt. You obviously don't know what your talking about, and your fanboy responses aren't helping, so I'm going to offer you some free enlightenment from somebody who has done this kind of thing for a living for quite a few years now.
Enterprises choose what to deploy based on a combination of cost effective deployment & support costs and needs based requirements. The problem with Apple products is that they fundamentally defy most enterprise management utilities. This means that they require increased support costs (the days of old where large mac departments simply weren't managed have been effectively killed by regulation - you'll usually find these myth's propagated by people that think mac's can't get viruses or owned by hackers).
I'll throw out some examples I've dealt with in the last few years. First and foremost is a lack of PXE support for Mac's. That means it can't be deployed the way the other 99% of the computers in the world are deployed. They require their own special support services and methodologies than every other computer in the market (windows, *nix, Linux, VMWare).
A second example is the need to manage the computer. In the real world security standards like HIPAA and SOX carry large penalties (I've been involved in multi-million dollar cases). These violate not the privacy rights of one person, but millions of people. The bottom line is that a computer that is not managed is a security risk and should be fire-walled from the production network. Utilities for enterprise management of Mac's are far more limited in scope and ability than their equivalent variants for other platforms. Have fun with this one, find an enterprise management tool for an ipad. Recognize that entire industries can't allow them on their networks without said tool.
You've also got to cost effectively manage their day to day maintenance. Let's say you need to modify a firewall on all of your Mac's. While this may be easy enough to do one system, the tools to do something like that on an enterprise basis are what you call rather limited. How about installing apps to an ipad through a central server, apps that haven't been blessed by apple, that do things that apple might not like and may be internally developed. If I can't control, patch and audit a computer it doesn't belong on an enterprise network without being in some kind of fire-walled VLAN.
The fact that/you/ can make a given change on a given mac with ease is completely meaningless from an enterprise's standpoint. From their standpoint anything that deals with managing clients needs to be able to be easily done from a central management server.
Apple doesn't think enterprise, they never have and likely never will, it's just not in their culture. Heck they even got out of selling their x-servers. Until Apple starts to embrace more industry standards (pxe etc) and starts making the support of their computers on an enterprise basis a priority it's not going to change - regardless of how popular they are with users on the home front.
Ok, having worked in a recycling center doing IT work I would imagine that paper economies and plastic economies are much the same. The way it works is that depending on economic factors they would likely take the plastic for free, or might pay a small dividend for it.
It's really up to their providers to determine the costs of sorting the plastic out. If your already sorting plastic to begin with than it makes sense, if you aren't than the costs of sorting the plastic out of the garbage and transporting it would easily exceed the financial gain from selling your recycles.
The real costs have nothing to do with the supply costs. They are sunk into transportation, sorting (manpower), and machinery. Unless these types of factories sprout up by the thousands, there just isn't going to be a lot of demand to drive up the price - regardless of the cost of a barrel of oil. In this case the costs for getting the material vs disposal are going to be a far higher consideration for most areas than the amount of money to be gained from selling the oil.
A supplier isn't going to spend their own money to send them plastic vs the landfill unless they are already owned by the supplier or live in an area that already strictly dictates the sorting of plastics to begin with. The bottom line is that it has to cheaper for the supplier to send them the plastic than it is for them to get rid of it on their own.
They should be cheered at, not sneered at for being willing to take this kind of financial risk for a low profit margin endeavor. Whether you like government subsidies or not, I would imagine that a plant like this would probably be at least moderately dependent upon them. By all means, it is another form of recycling and we should embrace it and be grateful that another chunk of our garbage isn't going to a landfill.
This kind of things goes to show that wikileaks knows no bounds beyond it's ego. Previous defenders of it have often pulled the card that it only exposes government secrets.
The fallacy of that defense is now gone, and wikileaks is exposing itself for what it really is, an out of control organization holding itself above any law seeking to cause as much societal disruption to as they can. What's next, exposing people's bank records? Perhaps it's ok to expose bank records if we don't like the person will be used to justify this.
How would you like to have your company's business plans and secrets exposed to the world to see? Will this kind of thing still be ok when a Chinese company steals your R&D and beats you to the market resulting in your future job loss? I've called out this possibility before only to be flamed for suggesting such a thing and now it it has inevitably come true.
It is inevitable that in it's power hungry appetite wikileaks will continue to expose any and every secret that they can. At some point health records will be exposed (perhaps by justifying something like Americans are too fat), bank details will be exposed and anything else that can be had.
What people need to learn is that wikileaks is not the enemy of the United States, it is the enemy of humanity.
In fact any carbon based source can be used to make oil. The technology has in one form or another has existed at least since WWII when the nazi's used it to make fuel after losing a big chunk of their oil supplies. The South African's got pretty good at making their own during apartheid when they faced boycott's and couldn't buy what they need. The modern process is called thermal depolymerization with one proof of concept plant using turkey waste to make oil.
Ergo the oil argument that much of our oil supply is made from bacteria and not old dinosaurs. If the bacteria is supplied from the crust inside the earth, the oil fields can replenish and oil becomes much more sustainable than before.
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous. With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
Your going to have to better than that to break my suspension of disbelief. An official release date for GT5, where have I heard that before?????/me still waiting impatiently for the game....
I distinctly remember when a lack of bloat was one of Linux's bragging points. What happened to Red Hat? Time was they were also once cheaper than the windows servers they lampooned.
My first tech job was working for a fortune 50 company as a technician for their centralized HVAC and lighting systems. This was in the early 90's and we used primitive controllers with early modems to centrally control everything from headquarters. Local control was never allowed in any facility under any circumstances. Attempts to intervene such as additional heat or cooling sources could readily be picked up on our end.
I remember once catching a loading dock where that had occurred and calling it in. The wall sensor had been broken by local personnel. We sent out a service technician to fix it and talked with local management (which seemed completely surprised that we found out so quickly). We ended up having the now fixed stat busted the following day, only that time people at the local facility were fired. In the event of noisy office workers, many technicians would put in a dummy thermostat for an illusion of control - and it did make a difference.
The benefit of these zealous control systems were huge. Long before being green was in vogue we did these things to save energy. In the time I was with the company they expanded from 600 facilities to 720 and kept their energy bill at 100 million US dollars. That's a 20% expansion of their facilities with a 0% expansion of their energy consumption. It may not be sexy or hip, might even feel totalitarian, but that is the kind of real world change that is needed for a greener future.
The fact that Obama thinks that millions of previously American jobs that have been outsourced to India is somehow good shows just how out of touch Obama is with regular America. America needs jobs, and those jobs used to provide careers to Americans. What happened to the Democrat party defending American jobs?
Mr Obama, please get back in tough with the needs to of the American people. Didn't your parties recent thrashing in the election send a message that you need to listen to?
These types of services have been available for a very long time. Why would it surprise anyone that professional shill's would pick up newer comm methods like twitter?
Without doubt professional shills have accounts ready to go on just about any type of news site you can think of. Without question certain subjects bring up certain shills time after time on sites like Slashdot. Anymore this is just one more form of a perception management service to be offered by PR firms.
The best thing to do would be to have a law that would require disclosure of such shilling (similar to advertising shill regulation for places like amazon.com). It wont stop many of the shills, but the cost of discovery could be punitive enough to give pause to those that hire them.
The entire point of such systems is to ensure that a launch can occur despite a given failure, but only if authorized to do so. The concept of MAD (the most succesfull peace plan in history) is entirely depenant upon the ability to launch even in the advent of other failures.
This was a technical failure and the backup processes and systems all worked as designed. No missle somehow got a launch order and no missle lost the ability to launch if needed. The entire story is hyperbole fearmongering.
Executive's view of why 3D TV's aren't selling: Hey, why don't people want to pay for something with the latest technology? Avatar was awesome..
Consumers view of why 3D TV's aren't selling: Hey, I can pay a huge premium for something that will give me a headache, requires glasses and that almost no content can use. Besides most 3D movies were done after the fact and aren't avatar.
Tip to electronics executives, your market for 3D TV's wont be ready for another 5-10 years.
This is the kind of thing taxes are for - essential public services. The fact that the home burned to the ground was a travesty, but not so great as the lack of funding for the fire department in the first place. All that being said, charging residents $75 just in case is absurd. His county should pay his losses and fix their tax situation!
Perhaps he realized how overblown his ego looked when he tried claiming that their was a CIA conspiracy behind everything? Typically people making claims like that are conspiracy theory nutcases or third world dictators and dismissed accordingly...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think spying requires working for any given nation state. That being said, allegations that wikileaks was a source for blackmail have certainly made the rounds before any of the cables.
He's not distributing the truth, he's wholesale dumping as much onto the world as he can to cause as much anarchy as he can. Go read some of Assange's past writing from before wikileaks, he makes his intentions for anarchy quite clear. Was it really necessary that the world know Gadhaffi's security details or a thousand other similar things?
I'm sure if informed your hypothetical mother-in-law about your hypothetical dislike of her cooking, it would somehow not be ok? How about any number of other situations where privacy is required. So far the biggest alleged crime I have heard about is a request to gather some information on UN diplomats. Wholesale release of documents, just because they have them shows the claim of informing people of facts to be disingenuous.
He actively solicited classified government information, that's spying regardless of where you are. This was hardly a case of somebody dropping something in the mail that showed up on a reporters desktop without their involvement.
Civilians can spy, the Chinese and French governments in particular are well known for using civilians. Some of histories most famous spies were civilians.
Harm has been directly caused to diplomatic relations with superpower. How can harming the diplomatic relations of a fair share of this nations countries possibly be considered no harm?
Transparency isn't the issue, the issue s an attack on diplomacy itself. When nations don't feel like they can talk they are more likely to resolve their conflicts through non-diplomatic means. I don't think that's in anybodies best interest.
Why don't we start with his own admission of people getting killed in Kenya because of his actions?
Wow, I'm surprised they didn't offer up anal probes in area 51 to go along with the rest... This guy needs to get a grip, get off his ego trip and realize that his stunts cause real harm to people the world over.
Of course the US is seeking to extradite him, to put him on trial for spying and other damages. That being said, execution for spies is a legal tradition going back to prehistory, so there's a few thousand plus years of precedent to call on.
Just remember, wikileaks next victim might be someone or something that you support. That's the problem with anarchy groups like wikileaks, they're as likely to turn against you as anything else.
Budget cuts, the one divide by zero scenario science can't route around.
Peer Review, Change Control, Auditing, Maintenance Windows, Testing all changes in a lab before production, source and version control / maintenance. These are all best practices, work regardless of operating system and don't require any special software.
Why o why do you want to use software to take the place of established best practices? Best practices are there for good reasons, and those reasons usually have multi-million dollar lessons attached to them. You don't need special software, just a heavy that says yes you /must/ do it this way and raises hell when you try otherwise...
I find this story to be one of scare mongering that simply wouldn't pass muster for most exchanges.
I've worked with some of the machines on stock exchange trading floors to deal with problems from trading delays. The guys who support these machines in a daily basis know every nuance of the systems from a load perspective. They know these machines far better than almost any server admin I've worked with.
Quite simply put, if there was a delay approaching 100 ms it was actively watched for and flagged. At 200 ms people were talking vocally about the issue, at 300 ms people were shouting, if something worked it's way up to 400 ms the room was screaming. To put it quite literally there are teams of people that do nothing but /very/ actively watch for slight delays in trades as those delays can cost millions of dollars per fraction of second.
This concern is why almost every stock exchange in the world is surrounded by office buildings that are dominated by data centers, just to physically shorten the distance to the exchange.
Incidentally my involvement came from setting up server monitoring software to look for delays like these. We then automated certain types of responses (if x consumes 15% of CPU than we do Y kind of thing). To put it quite literally, a delay such as what is proposed in the article would only ever happen once - and be taken as a glitch or the affected (and magically unfixable hacked system) taken offline within 10 minutes when it could not be restored to normal operating parameters.
I call bunk, as the machines that do the trading are the most actively monitored and arguably best known by their administrator staffs in the world.
Please stop, your making my head hurt. You obviously don't know what your talking about, and your fanboy responses aren't helping, so I'm going to offer you some free enlightenment from somebody who has done this kind of thing for a living for quite a few years now.
Enterprises choose what to deploy based on a combination of cost effective deployment & support costs and needs based requirements. The problem with Apple products is that they fundamentally defy most enterprise management utilities. This means that they require increased support costs (the days of old where large mac departments simply weren't managed have been effectively killed by regulation - you'll usually find these myth's propagated by people that think mac's can't get viruses or owned by hackers).
I'll throw out some examples I've dealt with in the last few years. First and foremost is a lack of PXE support for Mac's. That means it can't be deployed the way the other 99% of the computers in the world are deployed. They require their own special support services and methodologies than every other computer in the market (windows, *nix, Linux, VMWare).
A second example is the need to manage the computer. In the real world security standards like HIPAA and SOX carry large penalties (I've been involved in multi-million dollar cases). These violate not the privacy rights of one person, but millions of people. The bottom line is that a computer that is not managed is a security risk and should be fire-walled from the production network. Utilities for enterprise management of Mac's are far more limited in scope and ability than their equivalent variants for other platforms. Have fun with this one, find an enterprise management tool for an ipad. Recognize that entire industries can't allow them on their networks without said tool.
You've also got to cost effectively manage their day to day maintenance. Let's say you need to modify a firewall on all of your Mac's. While this may be easy enough to do one system, the tools to do something like that on an enterprise basis are what you call rather limited. How about installing apps to an ipad through a central server, apps that haven't been blessed by apple, that do things that apple might not like and may be internally developed. If I can't control, patch and audit a computer it doesn't belong on an enterprise network without being in some kind of fire-walled VLAN.
The fact that /you/ can make a given change on a given mac with ease is completely meaningless from an enterprise's standpoint. From their standpoint anything that deals with managing clients needs to be able to be easily done from a central management server.
Apple doesn't think enterprise, they never have and likely never will, it's just not in their culture. Heck they even got out of selling their x-servers. Until Apple starts to embrace more industry standards (pxe etc) and starts making the support of their computers on an enterprise basis a priority it's not going to change - regardless of how popular they are with users on the home front.
Ok, having worked in a recycling center doing IT work I would imagine that paper economies and plastic economies are much the same. The way it works is that depending on economic factors they would likely take the plastic for free, or might pay a small dividend for it.
It's really up to their providers to determine the costs of sorting the plastic out. If your already sorting plastic to begin with than it makes sense, if you aren't than the costs of sorting the plastic out of the garbage and transporting it would easily exceed the financial gain from selling your recycles.
The real costs have nothing to do with the supply costs. They are sunk into transportation, sorting (manpower), and machinery. Unless these types of factories sprout up by the thousands, there just isn't going to be a lot of demand to drive up the price - regardless of the cost of a barrel of oil. In this case the costs for getting the material vs disposal are going to be a far higher consideration for most areas than the amount of money to be gained from selling the oil.
A supplier isn't going to spend their own money to send them plastic vs the landfill unless they are already owned by the supplier or live in an area that already strictly dictates the sorting of plastics to begin with. The bottom line is that it has to cheaper for the supplier to send them the plastic than it is for them to get rid of it on their own.
They should be cheered at, not sneered at for being willing to take this kind of financial risk for a low profit margin endeavor. Whether you like government subsidies or not, I would imagine that a plant like this would probably be at least moderately dependent upon them. By all means, it is another form of recycling and we should embrace it and be grateful that another chunk of our garbage isn't going to a landfill.
Certainly, how about 1300 people killed? Best yet, it's straight from Assange.
Let me know if 1300 dead and 350,000 displaced (homeless) people is under your acceptable collateral damage limit.
This kind of things goes to show that wikileaks knows no bounds beyond it's ego. Previous defenders of it have often pulled the card that it only exposes government secrets.
The fallacy of that defense is now gone, and wikileaks is exposing itself for what it really is, an out of control organization holding itself above any law seeking to cause as much societal disruption to as they can. What's next, exposing people's bank records? Perhaps it's ok to expose bank records if we don't like the person will be used to justify this.
How would you like to have your company's business plans and secrets exposed to the world to see? Will this kind of thing still be ok when a Chinese company steals your R&D and beats you to the market resulting in your future job loss? I've called out this possibility before only to be flamed for suggesting such a thing and now it it has inevitably come true.
It is inevitable that in it's power hungry appetite wikileaks will continue to expose any and every secret that they can. At some point health records will be exposed (perhaps by justifying something like Americans are too fat), bank details will be exposed and anything else that can be had.
What people need to learn is that wikileaks is not the enemy of the United States, it is the enemy of humanity.
In fact any carbon based source can be used to make oil. The technology has in one form or another has existed at least since WWII when the nazi's used it to make fuel after losing a big chunk of their oil supplies. The South African's got pretty good at making their own during apartheid when they faced boycott's and couldn't buy what they need. The modern process is called thermal depolymerization with one proof of concept plant using turkey waste to make oil.
Ergo the oil argument that much of our oil supply is made from bacteria and not old dinosaurs. If the bacteria is supplied from the crust inside the earth, the oil fields can replenish and oil becomes much more sustainable than before.
Any way you look at this the findings become politically charged as the impact this has on our future energy supply could be enormous. With a little bit of googling you can readily find oil fields from old that have mysteriously started refilling with oil.
Your going to have to better than that to break my suspension of disbelief. An official release date for GT5, where have I heard that before????? /me still waiting impatiently for the game....
I found your answer informative and civil. I wish more discourse on the Internet was like that.
I distinctly remember when a lack of bloat was one of Linux's bragging points. What happened to Red Hat? Time was they were also once cheaper than the windows servers they lampooned.
My first tech job was working for a fortune 50 company as a technician for their centralized HVAC and lighting systems. This was in the early 90's and we used primitive controllers with early modems to centrally control everything from headquarters. Local control was never allowed in any facility under any circumstances. Attempts to intervene such as additional heat or cooling sources could readily be picked up on our end.
I remember once catching a loading dock where that had occurred and calling it in. The wall sensor had been broken by local personnel. We sent out a service technician to fix it and talked with local management (which seemed completely surprised that we found out so quickly). We ended up having the now fixed stat busted the following day, only that time people at the local facility were fired. In the event of noisy office workers, many technicians would put in a dummy thermostat for an illusion of control - and it did make a difference.
The benefit of these zealous control systems were huge. Long before being green was in vogue we did these things to save energy. In the time I was with the company they expanded from 600 facilities to 720 and kept their energy bill at 100 million US dollars. That's a 20% expansion of their facilities with a 0% expansion of their energy consumption. It may not be sexy or hip, might even feel totalitarian, but that is the kind of real world change that is needed for a greener future.
The fact that Obama thinks that millions of previously American jobs that have been outsourced to India is somehow good shows just how out of touch Obama is with regular America. America needs jobs, and those jobs used to provide careers to Americans. What happened to the Democrat party defending American jobs?
Mr Obama, please get back in tough with the needs to of the American people. Didn't your parties recent thrashing in the election send a message that you need to listen to?
These types of services have been available for a very long time. Why would it surprise anyone that professional shill's would pick up newer comm methods like twitter?
Without doubt professional shills have accounts ready to go on just about any type of news site you can think of. Without question certain subjects bring up certain shills time after time on sites like Slashdot. Anymore this is just one more form of a perception management service to be offered by PR firms.
The best thing to do would be to have a law that would require disclosure of such shilling (similar to advertising shill regulation for places like amazon.com). It wont stop many of the shills, but the cost of discovery could be punitive enough to give pause to those that hire them.
The entire point of such systems is to ensure that a launch can occur despite a given failure, but only if authorized to do so. The concept of MAD (the most succesfull peace plan in history) is entirely depenant upon the ability to launch even in the advent of other failures. This was a technical failure and the backup processes and systems all worked as designed. No missle somehow got a launch order and no missle lost the ability to launch if needed. The entire story is hyperbole fearmongering.
And if this happens to leak, than he of all persons has no basis to complain...
Executive's view of why 3D TV's aren't selling:
Hey, why don't people want to pay for something with the latest technology? Avatar was awesome..
Consumers view of why 3D TV's aren't selling:
Hey, I can pay a huge premium for something that will give me a headache, requires glasses and that almost no content can use. Besides most 3D movies were done after the fact and aren't avatar.
Tip to electronics executives, your market for 3D TV's wont be ready for another 5-10 years.
This is the kind of thing taxes are for - essential public services. The fact that the home burned to the ground was a travesty, but not so great as the lack of funding for the fire department in the first place. All that being said, charging residents $75 just in case is absurd. His county should pay his losses and fix their tax situation!
Perhaps he realized how overblown his ego looked when he tried claiming that their was a CIA conspiracy behind everything? Typically people making claims like that are conspiracy theory nutcases or third world dictators and dismissed accordingly...