By the way, the German Max Planck Institute has found in a study (sorry, German only) that data retention does not help with fighting any serious crime - terrorism, homicide, armed robbery or, remarkably, child pornography. It would only be of (limited) use for "petty" crimes of online fraud and for civil cases, mostly in the field of copyright infringement. Not that that was not clear from the start, but it sure is nice to see it spelled out in very clear language by a highly regarded internationally recognised scientific institution.
[...] a whole lot of attention from some high power folks.
Of all the people I have had to brief on new hardware or software those "high power folks" always were the ones who paid the least bit of attention. Well, of course, since whenever they forget which button to press they have a whole army of subordinates to call in and have them get it going for them. You probably could wire a whole fucking Christmas tree lighting to the system and they still would be hard-pressed to notice something happening when it is turned on.
OSM and GMaps will only ever compete in certain areas of use. What makes OSM great is (for the time being) not its renderer(s) and certainly not its search but the free availability of the underlying data that allows uses way beyond a mere street map. What makes GMaps greats is certainly not the timeliness, accuracy and level of detail of their spatial data but the interconnection with any other information you can google. Which is exactly why I doubt that Google deliberately attacked OSM: People go to Google for the services, not for the map itself. OSM does no offer those services. So what would Google gain from a few minor vandalising edits?
Have you recently used Facebook's interface without any browser extensions to alter it (Social Fixer etc.)? Name one thing there that does not deserve to be hated. Facebook as a website sucks. Hard.
And Microsoft? They still have no half-way sensible package management, installing their current OSes over a network still makes even the most extreme SM session look like wellness and I hate those damned ribbons!
And Google? They are a privacy nightmare. Like any other large company. And most governments.
Is it so irrational? Look at Japan. People there believed in progress, in technology, with an almost religious fervour. Until a disaster laid bare not flaws in the science, mind you, but flaws in the humans profiting off it. The same goes for our European anti-GM sentiments: Do you in all seriousness trust the likes of Monsanto or BASF not to put cash over lives? No matter how sound the science behind GM is, there already are enough reasons to be very mindful of what food I buy. And all of them are down to some greedy fucks trying to skim off just a little bit more. I do not need another layer of adverse interests thrown into the mix.
Is that so? Now that makes me feel so much better about GM food! And here I was thinking they had some grand scheme to control all links in our food chain, all concisely orchestrated by some great mastermind. Instead they just randomly throw genes around and see what happens. Phew, what a relief!
Let me rephrase that as "Kill those who would kill you for invading their homes, establishing oppressive regimes and exploiting your country's resources." Who is defending themselves against whom here, exactly? Pick up a history book and read for yourself which two nations put the vast majority of weapons into the hands of those people the US is now remotely blasting the shit out of, and who trained them and essentially funded them for decades. Hint: It is the same two who on several occasions very nearly turned the whole world into an irradiated waste land over their big heads.
People around the world do not need all that much encouragement to resent and attack the USA and the rest of our Western countries; we have given them more than enough reasons.
Is Oracle a mobile computing company? I don't think so. By killing Java they would shoot a whole industry in the foot - or the head, more likely. But Oracle itself? No. They could still develop the Java platform in-house for their own products - at least that is my understanding of what they bought in the Sun acquisition - and leave everyone else out in the rain.
[...] percentage wise Israelis are among the most humane, ethical, and moral people. [...] you are not a civilian if you are [...] parked in an area that was for 2 days announced it would be bombed/destroyed
Fascinating. I honestly cannot tell whether you are a troll or whether your moral compass stems from a wholly different dimension than mine.
1) wireless on a single location is not so complicated. Having WPA should give a firly good level of security.
Sure. Just hook an AP into the network somewhere, and slap some password on it. Completely sufficient to satisfy any legal or contractual requirements for infrastructure security, and so easy to manage and debug in case of issues.
2) Computers for guests. Why not ? (if they work with you, assume they have access to your informations anyway).
You could have a thousand computers for guests, that is not the issue. Putting and keeping them in a useful state is. You want to give them access to shared information, but you probably do not want them to sift through your brainstorms and concepts for future products, your accounting information or tenders from your partners' competitors.
3) Access to internet and download everything ? Why not ? (just use a fair amount of security on each workstation, first one being don't use Windows).
And who puts the "fair amount of security" - or another OS - onto the machines and maintains it? Would you propose sending each employee into the nearest WalMart to fetch a copy of Norton Security every other year? And why waste a lot of money and resources on the workstations when you can eliminate 2/3 of all threats by securing one gateway?
4) Files shares. Well, don't you give them file shares ? And buying one more 2 TB drive is not that pain, is it ?
Of course not. Buying 20 more drives plus a SAN to hold them plus a server to do anything useful with them plus integrating all this with your back-up and redundancy strategy is.
5) Keep track of critical data. Yes, of course. Offer a saved share, an anyone will put what matters on it (of course you also backup databases, etc...). Using a multi- hard drive solution (usb) + rdiff-backup (for example) will allow you to keep a lot of data (and history as well)
Sure. Except for the few couple of GB they conveniently store locally in their "My Documents" folder or on their desktop because they do not understand the concept behind a personal computer. Oh, and nevermind those legal requirements and other obligations (Remember those? They came up earlier already!), your insurance will be happy to whip out the check book if you tell them "But I stored everything important on a bunch of USB drives somewhere!", no questions asked. Consolidated centrally managed backups are completely overrated, y'know? Just let everybody do them themselves at their leisure.
6) really, your users want to do developpement ? Then they must know what they do. Why couldn't they just have a copy of the database they need ?
Really, my 8 year old nephew wants to drive a car? Then he must know what he does! Just give him the keys already!
Resources that are shared across organisational units have to be kept in sync everywhere. Letting someone, somewhere, play around with them at their leisure is a safe and proven way towards trouble. Development on such resources can well be done within individual departments or teams, but they need to be vetted by someone who sees the whole picture, not just the isolated needs and interests of one group. And someone has to sign off on any such project to take responsibility for any resulting damage.
And even within one company not everyone is permitted access to all of the data, for different reasons. Just handing out DB dumps may not be possible.
Some users may rightly complain about needlessly strict policies that hamper their legitimate efforts to get things done, but many have no clue what kind of responsibility and liability IT comes with. People are quick to demand administrative privileges on their machines or "easier file sharing" or "allowing that attachment type" or unfiltered internet access, but very few still do so after being asked to sign an agreement
I run a business that solely accepts Bitcoin for payment (www.bitvps.com shameless plug) and business is doing just great.
Unless you planned to spend a very significant amount of money on his/her service I see the idiot somewhere else in this discussion. I do not own a credit card. By your definition about 3/4 of all US-based online shops are run by idiots. Or maybe, just maybe I am not within their target audience for some reason.
God, how I long for the day when scientists prove that plants feel pain, and how I will relish the sound of a million goody two shoes' simultaneously shutting up.
I would not be so quick to rely on MAD. That the Cold War did not turn hot had more to do with sheer luck than any mutually understood philosophical dilemma. I highly recommend On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn. It may be quite dated, but to this day I have not found a better analysis of the dynamics in a 'nuclear' world. MAD only works as long as
both sides believe they will suffer destruction and
neither side is desperate enough to simply disregard the consequences and flip the switch.
[...] Most of the attack vectors were through execution of temporary files, Active X and security elevation. [....]
Which, in my experience, is exactly what ties those applications to IE 6 in the first place, so locking it down can only go so far and help so much.
[...] Just because a piece of software is unpatched doesn't mean you can't protect yourself against malware. [...]
Sure. But every layer of protection you build around such vulnerable software breaks something else. One of my previous employers decided to "mitigate" risks by disabling any kind of plugin and disabling any active content, including JS, in IE 6. Which rendered the websites of most of our business partners, suppliers and utilities all the way down to Google Maps unusable and prevented people from getting work done. The result? Everyone and their dog put Portable Firefox on their workstation, completely unsupervised, often unpatched and in insecure configurations.
Of course, you can get it right, given enough budget, time and the right people. But often it will not come all that much cheaper than getting rid of the problematic applications.
IE 6 is a decade old. Three major releases have come out since then. Using "But...but...but they said it would be so awesome!" as an excuse does not quite cut it anymore. IE 7 came out in 2006, and since then at the very latest the writing has been on the wall. And companies are complaining now, another five years later, about how evil Microsoft is? Making a stupid investment once can be excused, we all make mistakes. But they have had more than enough time to move off the Titanic.
Have you ever considered that such bias may come from experience? The US have a somewhat substellar record for respecting other nations' territory - may I remind you of the Iran Air Flight 655 incident? - and for acting truthfully - ever heard of the Gulf of Tonkin incident? - so yes, many of us are biased against the US.
To be honest I cannot be bothered to look up the details of this conflict on Wikipedia, but that was actually my point: I do not recall an instance in which Iran provoked another country into war, but I do know quite a list of such events conducted by the USA. Which makes the theory presented by fsckmnky rather unlikely.
If the police had first handed a nuke to your neighbor across the street with whom you have been exchanging death threats for decades but then turns around and forbids you to develop one, you may indeed see the neighbor and the police as aggressors.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, the German Max Planck Institute has found in a study (sorry, German only) that data retention does not help with fighting any serious crime - terrorism, homicide, armed robbery or, remarkably, child pornography. It would only be of (limited) use for "petty" crimes of online fraud and for civil cases, mostly in the field of copyright infringement. Not that that was not clear from the start, but it sure is nice to see it spelled out in very clear language by a highly regarded internationally recognised scientific institution.
Oh, you mean the very same EU Data Retention Directive that has been condemned by the EU's own data protection authority, slammed by legal experts and is currently under evaluation within the European Commission and which, after being found in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in Romania and staggeringly overpowered in Germany, will probably be either restricted so severely it will not matter much anymore or, if enough political pressure can be built in time, completely taken back.
Yeah, looks like a winner to me to introduce into your country now.
[...] a whole lot of attention from some high power folks.
Of all the people I have had to brief on new hardware or software those "high power folks" always were the ones who paid the least bit of attention. Well, of course, since whenever they forget which button to press they have a whole army of subordinates to call in and have them get it going for them. You probably could wire a whole fucking Christmas tree lighting to the system and they still would be hard-pressed to notice something happening when it is turned on.
OSM and GMaps will only ever compete in certain areas of use. What makes OSM great is (for the time being) not its renderer(s) and certainly not its search but the free availability of the underlying data that allows uses way beyond a mere street map. What makes GMaps greats is certainly not the timeliness, accuracy and level of detail of their spatial data but the interconnection with any other information you can google. Which is exactly why I doubt that Google deliberately attacked OSM: People go to Google for the services, not for the map itself. OSM does no offer those services. So what would Google gain from a few minor vandalising edits?
Have you recently used Facebook's interface without any browser extensions to alter it (Social Fixer etc.)? Name one thing there that does not deserve to be hated. Facebook as a website sucks. Hard.
And Microsoft? They still have no half-way sensible package management, installing their current OSes over a network still makes even the most extreme SM session look like wellness and I hate those damned ribbons!
And Google? They are a privacy nightmare. Like any other large company. And most governments.
Is it so irrational? Look at Japan. People there believed in progress, in technology, with an almost religious fervour. Until a disaster laid bare not flaws in the science, mind you, but flaws in the humans profiting off it. The same goes for our European anti-GM sentiments: Do you in all seriousness trust the likes of Monsanto or BASF not to put cash over lives? No matter how sound the science behind GM is, there already are enough reasons to be very mindful of what food I buy. And all of them are down to some greedy fucks trying to skim off just a little bit more. I do not need another layer of adverse interests thrown into the mix.
Is that so? Now that makes me feel so much better about GM food! And here I was thinking they had some grand scheme to control all links in our food chain, all concisely orchestrated by some great mastermind. Instead they just randomly throw genes around and see what happens. Phew, what a relief!
Let me rephrase that as "Kill those who would kill you for invading their homes, establishing oppressive regimes and exploiting your country's resources." Who is defending themselves against whom here, exactly? Pick up a history book and read for yourself which two nations put the vast majority of weapons into the hands of those people the US is now remotely blasting the shit out of, and who trained them and essentially funded them for decades. Hint: It is the same two who on several occasions very nearly turned the whole world into an irradiated waste land over their big heads.
People around the world do not need all that much encouragement to resent and attack the USA and the rest of our Western countries; we have given them more than enough reasons.
If they were not dispensable why would we be sending them into lethal danger by the truck-load?
Is Oracle a mobile computing company? I don't think so. By killing Java they would shoot a whole industry in the foot - or the head, more likely. But Oracle itself? No. They could still develop the Java platform in-house for their own products - at least that is my understanding of what they bought in the Sun acquisition - and leave everyone else out in the rain.
[...] percentage wise Israelis are among the most humane, ethical, and moral people. [...] you are not a civilian if you are [...] parked in an area that was for 2 days announced it would be bombed/destroyed
Fascinating. I honestly cannot tell whether you are a troll or whether your moral compass stems from a wholly different dimension than mine.
I am sorry, which side are you talking about? They have become so similar lately.
1) wireless on a single location is not so complicated. Having WPA should give a firly good level of security.
Sure. Just hook an AP into the network somewhere, and slap some password on it. Completely sufficient to satisfy any legal or contractual requirements for infrastructure security, and so easy to manage and debug in case of issues.
2) Computers for guests. Why not ? (if they work with you, assume they have access to your informations anyway).
You could have a thousand computers for guests, that is not the issue. Putting and keeping them in a useful state is. You want to give them access to shared information, but you probably do not want them to sift through your brainstorms and concepts for future products, your accounting information or tenders from your partners' competitors.
3) Access to internet and download everything ? Why not ? (just use a fair amount of security on each workstation, first one being don't use Windows).
And who puts the "fair amount of security" - or another OS - onto the machines and maintains it? Would you propose sending each employee into the nearest WalMart to fetch a copy of Norton Security every other year? And why waste a lot of money and resources on the workstations when you can eliminate 2/3 of all threats by securing one gateway?
4) Files shares. Well, don't you give them file shares ? And buying one more 2 TB drive is not that pain, is it ?
Of course not. Buying 20 more drives plus a SAN to hold them plus a server to do anything useful with them plus integrating all this with your back-up and redundancy strategy is.
5) Keep track of critical data. Yes, of course. Offer a saved share, an anyone will put what matters on it (of course you also backup databases, etc...). Using a multi- hard drive solution (usb) + rdiff-backup (for example) will allow you to keep a lot of data (and history as well)
Sure. Except for the few couple of GB they conveniently store locally in their "My Documents" folder or on their desktop because they do not understand the concept behind a personal computer. Oh, and nevermind those legal requirements and other obligations (Remember those? They came up earlier already!), your insurance will be happy to whip out the check book if you tell them "But I stored everything important on a bunch of USB drives somewhere!", no questions asked. Consolidated centrally managed backups are completely overrated, y'know? Just let everybody do them themselves at their leisure.
6) really, your users want to do developpement ? Then they must know what they do. Why couldn't they just have a copy of the database they need ?
Really, my 8 year old nephew wants to drive a car? Then he must know what he does! Just give him the keys already!
Resources that are shared across organisational units have to be kept in sync everywhere. Letting someone, somewhere, play around with them at their leisure is a safe and proven way towards trouble. Development on such resources can well be done within individual departments or teams, but they need to be vetted by someone who sees the whole picture, not just the isolated needs and interests of one group. And someone has to sign off on any such project to take responsibility for any resulting damage.
And even within one company not everyone is permitted access to all of the data, for different reasons. Just handing out DB dumps may not be possible.
Some users may rightly complain about needlessly strict policies that hamper their legitimate efforts to get things done, but many have no clue what kind of responsibility and liability IT comes with. People are quick to demand administrative privileges on their machines or "easier file sharing" or "allowing that attachment type" or unfiltered internet access, but very few still do so after being asked to sign an agreement
[...] We want a currency that can be adjusted on the fly [...]
Right. That has worked out so well for us in the past.
I run a business that solely accepts Bitcoin for payment (www.bitvps.com shameless plug) and business is doing just great.
Unless you planned to spend a very significant amount of money on his/her service I see the idiot somewhere else in this discussion. I do not own a credit card. By your definition about 3/4 of all US-based online shops are run by idiots. Or maybe, just maybe I am not within their target audience for some reason.
God, how I long for the day when scientists prove that plants feel pain, and how I will relish the sound of a million goody two shoes' simultaneously shutting up.
(Yes, I have got karma to burn. Bring it on.)
[...] Most of the attack vectors were through execution of temporary files, Active X and security elevation. [....]
Which, in my experience, is exactly what ties those applications to IE 6 in the first place, so locking it down can only go so far and help so much.
[...] Just because a piece of software is unpatched doesn't mean you can't protect yourself against malware. [...]
Sure. But every layer of protection you build around such vulnerable software breaks something else. One of my previous employers decided to "mitigate" risks by disabling any kind of plugin and disabling any active content, including JS, in IE 6. Which rendered the websites of most of our business partners, suppliers and utilities all the way down to Google Maps unusable and prevented people from getting work done. The result? Everyone and their dog put Portable Firefox on their workstation, completely unsupervised, often unpatched and in insecure configurations.
Of course, you can get it right, given enough budget, time and the right people. But often it will not come all that much cheaper than getting rid of the problematic applications.
Well, thank you very much for letting us know in just about every single thread in this discussion. That is so very kind of you.
IE 6 is a decade old. Three major releases have come out since then. Using "But...but...but they said it would be so awesome!" as an excuse does not quite cut it anymore. IE 7 came out in 2006, and since then at the very latest the writing has been on the wall. And companies are complaining now, another five years later, about how evil Microsoft is? Making a stupid investment once can be excused, we all make mistakes. But they have had more than enough time to move off the Titanic.
[...] It's not going to be used to take down legitimate sites. [...]
You do not spend much time on Slashdot, do you?
Why kill him? It would have been perfectly sufficient to bribe someone at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to admit him. His paintings were as abominable as his political ideas, but much less deadly.
Have you ever considered that such bias may come from experience? The US have a somewhat substellar record for respecting other nations' territory - may I remind you of the Iran Air Flight 655 incident? - and for acting truthfully - ever heard of the Gulf of Tonkin incident? - so yes, many of us are biased against the US.
To be honest I cannot be bothered to look up the details of this conflict on Wikipedia, but that was actually my point: I do not recall an instance in which Iran provoked another country into war, but I do know quite a list of such events conducted by the USA. Which makes the theory presented by fsckmnky rather unlikely.
If the police had first handed a nuke to your neighbor across the street with whom you have been exchanging death threats for decades but then turns around and forbids you to develop one, you may indeed see the neighbor and the police as aggressors.