If they started using the cameras to randomly take pictures of students than the school is looking at a well deserved lawsuit. Without question this is a violation of any number of laws. If the web cam pictures were taken in response to a lost or stolen laptop, than this entire thing has been much ado about nothing and the lawsuit is without merit. The only question of note on this is if the web-cams were activated for tracking anything other than lost or stolen laptops. If this kid was incidentally caught because he stole the laptop and was captured when they used the webcam to track the laptop than it changes the entire story.
Certainly people have occasionally tracked down their stolen laptop, iphone or whatnot by remotely activating the cameras before. Such stories have run on Slashdot before and the consensus has always been along the lines of/hoot!/ The fact that the tracking is done by a third party shouldn't change the view that it's ok try to recover your lost or stolen property. This is a very different issue than routine monitoring software that monitors the usage of the laptops. That kind of software is used by employers and schools on a daily basis, and I've seen some people mix up the two issues when they are unrelated.
Your assuming I was the one with the pollution problem. I could play games with no pollution of any level (pollution related stuff for my cities was at a minimum) and still have all of my lands turn to desert or otherwise because someone else had pollution issues.
I have loved many of the old versions of Civ, spending far too many hours playing them. Heck, learning how to hack the original Civ was a siginifant contributing factoring to me choosing IT over business.
All that being said, the last version turned into the green eco-facist game from hell. Any game that extended too long became one giant environmental nag session. Didn't matter how 'green' you were, someone else was polluting and everything quickly turned to waste with reasonable way to get restore things.
I'm not opposed to the pollution bit to some level, it's always been a part of the game, but it should never/become/ the game. The bottom line was that the fun got stripped away, because someone took their green preaching too far! The game wasn't fun to play, and I simply stopped playing.
Nothing to worry about here at all Coax is very strong and won't break on you as pull on it to bring in some cat 6. Otherwise if you really wanted you could go back to the days of vampire taps and 10base2...
Having been there, I really must recommend wiring your own house. It's a great way to learn a lot and in the end you get what you wanted where you wanted. All that being said, if at all possible, run some small pvc piping through the walls and wire things that way. If your that adverse to getting your hands dirty and doing the hardwork of wiring you could also look at things like Ethernet over power.
I'm from Minnesota, if this thing works that well I'll be tempted to pick it up and put it on a plinth in my backyard. Between that and my mosquito deleto I just might be able to enjoy a mosquito free evenening....
Of course not, that would mean they would have to be more active about following industry standards like PXE boot and remote management. The enterprise tools that are available for apple are very limited compared to what they can do with Windows (Altiris etc). If apple wants to get into the enterprise market and out of their present niches they need to start working with enterprise management companies on enterprise management.
In many countries spying results in the death penalty, why not in this case? Spying is a grevious crime against one's country and has been handled by the death penalty across countless cultures since before recorded history. For that matter, if your in a position of trust (vs just sneaking around) than it isn't spying, but treason. With a sentence of 15 years we appear to be weak, not strong from the eyes of someone who could consider the crime.
Certainly a spy that was caught by China would receive the death penalty, so nothing new there. Nothing against the Chinese (vs another nationality), but this business of pandering to foreign governments that spy against us has got to end.
Using Wikipedia, pfft! I am well aware that Alaska is within North America. The continental US is a term typically used to define the 48 contiguous lower states (even though it would be technically inaccurate the term is still popularly used). I am not including Alaska in my statement.
This makes me feel better. It's nice being reminded there are places where people live that are much colder than where I live (Minnesota -15C) (MN has the record for cold temperature in the continental US and it can at times be colder here than Alaska's Arctic shore)
I'm one of those people that does have a hearing range greater than 25kHz. I don't know how high because my hearing range extends beyond the testing capabilities of my local ear specialist testing chamber. The army also tested me as fairly exceeding 25kHz so I've got multiple hearing tests that are in agreement. Supposedly this makes me one of the people that this cable would be useful too.
That being said, in the real world when your hearing does extend to that range, the length of a cable like that is the least of my worries. Of greater concern is the high pitch whine many electronics make and other background noise. Unless you can create a chamber (such as a hearing test chamber) that isolates out all real world noise, and have electronics that don't generate a high pitch whine, things like the phase difference of a cable are moot.
In short I'm agreeing with you in calling this cable bunk, as even if you do have that hearing range it would utterly useless outside of a studio environment. Certainly a cable like that would make no difference in audio quality. If they really want to appeal to people with that kind of hearing range they'll make sure they're electronic equipment doesn't create it's own high pitch whine.
Slate did this, the NYT should talk to their management about lessons learedn.
They used to be a popular well read site that decided that a paywall was the way to, regardless of what their readers told them. They later added an interactive ad that you had to get through as a means of allowing people to visit without paying. By the time the word they changed back to an ad based site for free the damage was done. By then it was too late and a fair part of their user base had been alienated and simply moved on.
How many people would be surprised that Slate is no longer a pay site, and you can simply read it without any hoops? I would imagine a fair number of people as they probably haven't visited the site in years. For the meanwhile, the damage has been done and Slate is a shadow of their former self.
I've said before, and I'll say it again, the news is a commodity, if you want visitors you have to differentiate yourself against Reuters and the Associated Press. You can either do that with original reporting and or a better experience. Adding a paywall only works with a substantial investment in one or both, witness the Wall Street Journal which has original repoorting of high quality for an example and has been behind a paywall for years.
Has anyone at NASA tried contacting their local truck loving redneck to see if they could get it unstuck? You know, right before abandoning their multi-million dollar rover, just let their local mud loving red neck (with years of experience offroad) go to work and see what they can do. Once the engineers have given up, I can't see the harm, and there's that given chance that they can get it out.
with better trust and built-in identity management.
.
This is the part I worry about, it sounds like what the **AA's would love to have, an Internet without anonymity, one where everything is trusted.
Much like the trusted computing module put onto motherboards, I simply can't have faith in "trusted" Internet. Remember your TPM has nothing to with you being able to trust anyone, and everything to do with you not being trusted with your own computer.
The model we're using today is just wrong. It can't be made to work. We need a much more information-oriented view of security, where the context of information and the trust of information have to be much more central."
It may not be the researchers intent, but this sounds a lot like a euphemism for centralized content licensing management. The Internet community has been burned to many times, with trust becoming a euphemism for DRM and licensing. These researchers need to understand, that if nothing else they are going to have an image problem, even if they have no intentions of centralizing content management. One way to further look into this to see if this indeed the case would be to look and see what companies are helping to bankroll the research. Depending on the company, they will expect (demand) that things are built in a manner that they would as resolving their licensing issues.
News agencies have already been turned into commodities, they just don't realize it yet. Now the reporter is being sent down that same drain. With original reporting set to become a 'premium' by the news agencies, their market is only shrinking.
Where were the reporters when millions of jobs were outsourced by H1B's or sent overseas? At best most stories were brief, with no follow up, and no outrage at the loss of middle class America. The same thing has happened in Europe and elsewhere as well.
Now the reporter faces the inevitable market forces that they previously ignored, and they expect anyone left to care? The programs will only get better, the markets and stories it applies to will only improve, and for the vast majority of stories the quality will be imperceivable to the average person.
Why do so many terrorists have a complete failure to use their training or logic? There are so many logical holes in the theater we call security, an engineer should be able to exploit them like there's no tomorrow. Yet they continue to do show incompetence on large scale attacks due to logical flaws in their planning. Meanwhile countless exploitable targets go unchallenged on a routine basis. Perhaps it is failed engineers that become terrorists?
A computer law is needed here, it is a simple best practice that someone needs to carve into stone. "Thou shalt not practice security through obscurity". Nice and simple, covers so very very much and could have saved this anti-virus vendor some public humiliation. This law applies to any operating system or application without fail.
The conspiracy nuts will now be convinced that Google controls the back end and the front end of today's society. I'm just waiting for Google to buy out a transit agency or six in order to start giving the world Google Bus so they can advertise to those offline. They will then transport you to your destination using Google Bus after you will have picked it based upon finding them in Google Maps and reviewing them on Google Yelp.
Meanwhile the rest of the world will be grateful that Google will not try to extort them for ad revenue to get a good rating.
I was initially very skeptical of Childs until additional information came out about the case that changed the story notably.
Their policy prohibited Childs from simply handing passwords over to his boss, when asked by the mayor he handed them over as requested. I think the bigger issue is one of policy on security and a lack of industry best practices by the city. What holds the greater weight, policy or your bosses request? Depending on where you work, handing over your passwords to anyone can readily be a criminal infraction. At a minimum they could have asked Childs to create an additional account with full administrative access and that account could then have been used to disable Childs account.
I know at my employer I am not allowed to share my passwords with anyone, including my supervisor. I have an official backup with equivalent access to myself and my refusal to hand over passwords would not prevent anyone else from taking over for me. If my employer wanted they could simply reset my password and gain access to my account. The issue in San Francisco is there wasn't anyone else who had equivalent access to begin with. Their network was complex and the city had cut to the bone on staffing ahead of time.
Lessons can be learned from this from a management standpoint, the city took an antagonistic approach and did not update their policy and instead asked Childs to break it. Their security personal should have known industry best practices and instead asked Childs to violate them and hand over his password. Ultimately the case showed incompetence in city management and embarrassed them, and that's the only reason I can think of the city pressed the case.
I think we're on the same page with this now. I wasn't trying to say they weren't spending any money on their network, more along the lines that they simply aren't spending the money that they should have, and they didn't plan properly for the load. As for Android, it looks pretty good, I've got one of their phones (Droid) and I have to wonder how long AT&T will let that one go. Would you believe I'm not even a bitter AT&T customer?
Interesting article, and on the face of it this sounds like it really makes a point. I'll take two quotes from it to help illustrate my original point after translating their executive speak to plain English.
But they wouldn't go so far as to admit that there is an actual problem. Instead they pointed to the rapid growth of data usage on their wireless network and the change in customer usage patterns.
This tells me that they refuse to admit that they have issues, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They then blame their customers ~ "Change in customer usage patterns".
There have been big changes in usage, which has forced us to throw our traditional planning models out the window.
In other words they were completely sidelined by the usage they saw and failed to properly plan for it. The fact that their spending is dropping by 10% to 15% from 2008 to 2009 tells me that they panic spent in 2008 to try and keep up with demand and in 2009 tried to rein costs back in. In other words their corporate strategy has not changed and they desperately want to go back to the status quo. They want the users that come with the Jesus phone, without making the investment in their infrastructure necessary to support a modern network.
Actually they have, if fairly recently. However they are farther along with open source than many people believe, they've even started their own version of sourceforge called CodePlex that hosts open source projects and developer tools. You can search directly by license type for software released under a number of licenses, including GPL.
The bigger news is not that Microsoft open sourced the tool after their GPL violation (that was inevitable). The news here is that Microsoft kept the open source tool instead of replacing it with one of their own. Microsoft has open sourced portions of their code before, that really isn't newsworthy. Keeping an open source tool that will be used to deploy their crown jewel operating system by millions of people - that's newsworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
If they started using the cameras to randomly take pictures of students than the school is looking at a well deserved lawsuit. Without question this is a violation of any number of laws. If the web cam pictures were taken in response to a lost or stolen laptop, than this entire thing has been much ado about nothing and the lawsuit is without merit. The only question of note on this is if the web-cams were activated for tracking anything other than lost or stolen laptops. If this kid was incidentally caught because he stole the laptop and was captured when they used the webcam to track the laptop than it changes the entire story.
Certainly people have occasionally tracked down their stolen laptop, iphone or whatnot by remotely activating the cameras before. Such stories have run on Slashdot before and the consensus has always been along the lines of /hoot!/ The fact that the tracking is done by a third party shouldn't change the view that it's ok try to recover your lost or stolen property. This is a very different issue than routine monitoring software that monitors the usage of the laptops. That kind of software is used by employers and schools on a daily basis, and I've seen some people mix up the two issues when they are unrelated.
Very true, bribing friends with Chinese food is always a good idea when working these projects ;)
Your assuming I was the one with the pollution problem. I could play games with no pollution of any level (pollution related stuff for my cities was at a minimum) and still have all of my lands turn to desert or otherwise because someone else had pollution issues.
I have loved many of the old versions of Civ, spending far too many hours playing them. Heck, learning how to hack the original Civ was a siginifant contributing factoring to me choosing IT over business.
All that being said, the last version turned into the green eco-facist game from hell. Any game that extended too long became one giant environmental nag session. Didn't matter how 'green' you were, someone else was polluting and everything quickly turned to waste with reasonable way to get restore things.
I'm not opposed to the pollution bit to some level, it's always been a part of the game, but it should never /become/ the game. The bottom line was that the fun got stripped away, because someone took their green preaching too far! The game wasn't fun to play, and I simply stopped playing.
Nothing to worry about here at all Coax is very strong and won't break on you as pull on it to bring in some cat 6. Otherwise if you really wanted you could go back to the days of vampire taps and 10base2...
Having been there, I really must recommend wiring your own house. It's a great way to learn a lot and in the end you get what you wanted where you wanted. All that being said, if at all possible, run some small pvc piping through the walls and wire things that way. If your that adverse to getting your hands dirty and doing the hardwork of wiring you could also look at things like Ethernet over power.
I'm from Minnesota, if this thing works that well I'll be tempted to pick it up and put it on a plinth in my backyard. Between that and my mosquito deleto I just might be able to enjoy a mosquito free evenening....
Of course not, that would mean they would have to be more active about following industry standards like PXE boot and remote management. The enterprise tools that are available for apple are very limited compared to what they can do with Windows (Altiris etc). If apple wants to get into the enterprise market and out of their present niches they need to start working with enterprise management companies on enterprise management.
In many countries spying results in the death penalty, why not in this case? Spying is a grevious crime against one's country and has been handled by the death penalty across countless cultures since before recorded history. For that matter, if your in a position of trust (vs just sneaking around) than it isn't spying, but treason. With a sentence of 15 years we appear to be weak, not strong from the eyes of someone who could consider the crime.
Certainly a spy that was caught by China would receive the death penalty, so nothing new there. Nothing against the Chinese (vs another nationality), but this business of pandering to foreign governments that spy against us has got to end.
Using Wikipedia, pfft! I am well aware that Alaska is within North America. The continental US is a term typically used to define the 48 contiguous lower states (even though it would be technically inaccurate the term is still popularly used). I am not including Alaska in my statement.
This makes me feel better. It's nice being reminded there are places where people live that are much colder than where I live (Minnesota -15C) (MN has the record for cold temperature in the continental US and it can at times be colder here than Alaska's Arctic shore)
I'm one of those people that does have a hearing range greater than 25kHz. I don't know how high because my hearing range extends beyond the testing capabilities of my local ear specialist testing chamber. The army also tested me as fairly exceeding 25kHz so I've got multiple hearing tests that are in agreement. Supposedly this makes me one of the people that this cable would be useful too.
That being said, in the real world when your hearing does extend to that range, the length of a cable like that is the least of my worries. Of greater concern is the high pitch whine many electronics make and other background noise. Unless you can create a chamber (such as a hearing test chamber) that isolates out all real world noise, and have electronics that don't generate a high pitch whine, things like the phase difference of a cable are moot.
In short I'm agreeing with you in calling this cable bunk, as even if you do have that hearing range it would utterly useless outside of a studio environment. Certainly a cable like that would make no difference in audio quality. If they really want to appeal to people with that kind of hearing range they'll make sure they're electronic equipment doesn't create it's own high pitch whine.
In the words of Homer Simpson "D'oh". You are right and I wrote Slate when I met Salon....
Slate did this, the NYT should talk to their management about lessons learedn.
They used to be a popular well read site that decided that a paywall was the way to, regardless of what their readers told them. They later added an interactive ad that you had to get through as a means of allowing people to visit without paying. By the time the word they changed back to an ad based site for free the damage was done. By then it was too late and a fair part of their user base had been alienated and simply moved on.
How many people would be surprised that Slate is no longer a pay site, and you can simply read it without any hoops? I would imagine a fair number of people as they probably haven't visited the site in years. For the meanwhile, the damage has been done and Slate is a shadow of their former self.
I've said before, and I'll say it again, the news is a commodity, if you want visitors you have to differentiate yourself against Reuters and the Associated Press. You can either do that with original reporting and or a better experience. Adding a paywall only works with a substantial investment in one or both, witness the Wall Street Journal which has original repoorting of high quality for an example and has been behind a paywall for years.
Has anyone at NASA tried contacting their local truck loving redneck to see if they could get it unstuck? You know, right before abandoning their multi-million dollar rover, just let their local mud loving red neck (with years of experience offroad) go to work and see what they can do. Once the engineers have given up, I can't see the harm, and there's that given chance that they can get it out.
. This is the part I worry about, it sounds like what the **AA's would love to have, an Internet without anonymity, one where everything is trusted.
Much like the trusted computing module put onto motherboards, I simply can't have faith in "trusted" Internet. Remember your TPM has nothing to with you being able to trust anyone, and everything to do with you not being trusted with your own computer.
It may not be the researchers intent, but this sounds a lot like a euphemism for centralized content licensing management. The Internet community has been burned to many times, with trust becoming a euphemism for DRM and licensing. These researchers need to understand, that if nothing else they are going to have an image problem, even if they have no intentions of centralizing content management. One way to further look into this to see if this indeed the case would be to look and see what companies are helping to bankroll the research. Depending on the company, they will expect (demand) that things are built in a manner that they would as resolving their licensing issues.
News agencies have already been turned into commodities, they just don't realize it yet. Now the reporter is being sent down that same drain. With original reporting set to become a 'premium' by the news agencies, their market is only shrinking.
Where were the reporters when millions of jobs were outsourced by H1B's or sent overseas? At best most stories were brief, with no follow up, and no outrage at the loss of middle class America. The same thing has happened in Europe and elsewhere as well.
Now the reporter faces the inevitable market forces that they previously ignored, and they expect anyone left to care? The programs will only get better, the markets and stories it applies to will only improve, and for the vast majority of stories the quality will be imperceivable to the average person.
Why do so many terrorists have a complete failure to use their training or logic? There are so many logical holes in the theater we call security, an engineer should be able to exploit them like there's no tomorrow. Yet they continue to do show incompetence on large scale attacks due to logical flaws in their planning. Meanwhile countless exploitable targets go unchallenged on a routine basis. Perhaps it is failed engineers that become terrorists?
A computer law is needed here, it is a simple best practice that someone needs to carve into stone. "Thou shalt not practice security through obscurity". Nice and simple, covers so very very much and could have saved this anti-virus vendor some public humiliation. This law applies to any operating system or application without fail.
Meanwhile the rest of the world will be grateful that Google will not try to extort them for ad revenue to get a good rating.
I was initially very skeptical of Childs until additional information came out about the case that changed the story notably.
Their policy prohibited Childs from simply handing passwords over to his boss, when asked by the mayor he handed them over as requested. I think the bigger issue is one of policy on security and a lack of industry best practices by the city. What holds the greater weight, policy or your bosses request? Depending on where you work, handing over your passwords to anyone can readily be a criminal infraction. At a minimum they could have asked Childs to create an additional account with full administrative access and that account could then have been used to disable Childs account.
I know at my employer I am not allowed to share my passwords with anyone, including my supervisor. I have an official backup with equivalent access to myself and my refusal to hand over passwords would not prevent anyone else from taking over for me. If my employer wanted they could simply reset my password and gain access to my account. The issue in San Francisco is there wasn't anyone else who had equivalent access to begin with. Their network was complex and the city had cut to the bone on staffing ahead of time.
Lessons can be learned from this from a management standpoint, the city took an antagonistic approach and did not update their policy and instead asked Childs to break it. Their security personal should have known industry best practices and instead asked Childs to violate them and hand over his password. Ultimately the case showed incompetence in city management and embarrassed them, and that's the only reason I can think of the city pressed the case.
This is what real conspiracies look like. Note the distinct lack of "CIA", "Masons", "NSA" or other such favorites.
I think we're on the same page with this now. I wasn't trying to say they weren't spending any money on their network, more along the lines that they simply aren't spending the money that they should have, and they didn't plan properly for the load. As for Android, it looks pretty good, I've got one of their phones (Droid) and I have to wonder how long AT&T will let that one go. Would you believe I'm not even a bitter AT&T customer?
This tells me that they refuse to admit that they have issues, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They then blame their customers ~ "Change in customer usage patterns".
In other words they were completely sidelined by the usage they saw and failed to properly plan for it. The fact that their spending is dropping by 10% to 15% from 2008 to 2009 tells me that they panic spent in 2008 to try and keep up with demand and in 2009 tried to rein costs back in. In other words their corporate strategy has not changed and they desperately want to go back to the status quo. They want the users that come with the Jesus phone, without making the investment in their infrastructure necessary to support a modern network.
Actually they have, if fairly recently. However they are farther along with open source than many people believe, they've even started their own version of sourceforge called CodePlex that hosts open source projects and developer tools. You can search directly by license type for software released under a number of licenses, including GPL.
The bigger news is not that Microsoft open sourced the tool after their GPL violation (that was inevitable). The news here is that Microsoft kept the open source tool instead of replacing it with one of their own. Microsoft has open sourced portions of their code before, that really isn't newsworthy. Keeping an open source tool that will be used to deploy their crown jewel operating system by millions of people - that's newsworthy.