Actually the government needs to subpoena whoever is in charge of IT at that time.
The new IT staff shouldn't be responsible of whatever happened during Bush's administration. They can try look for lost e-mails but there is no telling exactly what happened to them. I believe the deletions were on purpose to cover up whatever was going on at that time. The thing is they have to prove it.
Even the exchange server keeps transaction logs. They too can be purged.
Everything do get backed up on tapes but they are recycled after so many days or months. So if the retention policy is every 3 months then it'll get recycled.
When I was working for a large data center I created a backup policy as follows:
Daily backups are kept 30 days. Weekend backups are kept 90 days. Month end backups are kept for 1 year. Year end backups are kept for 3 years.
Problem with e-mails you can't rely on your backup software alone. You need another product like GFI MailArchiver which basically keeps every piece of email of the entire office in a separate database which is also backed up to tape and is kept up to three years before purging it from the systems.
The White House isn't some small mom and pop shop. We're talking about classified information and strict protocols which have to be followed. Which means everything is tracked and achieved in a vault somewhere. It's just a question of who have access to them.
What I do like the fact the.deb files via updates are signed by a trusted authority. Every once in awhile I would get an update saying this package can't be authenticated and asked me if I want to continue with the update. I usually say no unless I can actually trust the source.
Only time I ran into this is updating Open Office 3.0
Why should they put the burden on home users when they can't even friggin secure their WiFi access?!?!? The wireless routers should have WPA enabled by default forcing people to read the damn manual.
I can see manufacturer's marketing now "This router complies with the 'you lost your rights to privacy law' and keep out hackers too!
I thought about sending my logs to a server but haven't had the time to research it. I'm trying to setup a linux box to capture the logs and run it through a web-server to generate the reports I need on the fly. Any ideas? And yes I googled... too many old information out there.
Yep, I've actually heard a XT-PC power supply blew up in the office once. It sounded like a gun that went off. So when I went to see what happened all I saw was white smoke coming from the PC. I was like, "Ok, I guess I'll have to order a new power supply for it". LOL
Linux has gotten "good enough" on PC hardware that I just don't see any reason to even play the game anymore with Microsoft. Time to get off the ride. All of the "windows only" apps that I use seem to work under wine. The rest all have some open equivalent (firefox/thunderbird/openoffice/etc).
*shrug*
Same here. I've been using Ubuntu for the past several months and loving it. I pretty have almost all the apps I've been using under Windows I found native apps for.
You probably remember when some scientists noticed it was generating some math error in their applications so they contacted Intel about it.
Intel's response was, "Well, these are early processors in design and shouldn't affect 99% of the population". Of course the scientists created an awareness of this issue and public generated a stink about it even though 99% of them may never run into the bug that affects their applications.
So now 15+ years later this pops up saying it is OK to have these errors in non-critical applications for sake of speed. People are going to wonder about these chips in their products when something isn't working right and may cry afoul.
Probably the best way would be is use a standard electronic voting machine that everybody can agree on and print out the voter's vote on paper in both machine and human readable form to be deposited into the voting box by hand. This way the machines already have a running number of the votes and still have a paper trail.
They can have the best firewalls and anti-virus e-mail scanner on the planet but it takes ONE person with an infected laptop to plug it into the internal network and do it's dirty work without them knowing it in time.
It's possible they have been infected for months and didn't know it until things started to act funny.
To have that many PCs infected didn't surprise me as they didn't bother to take proper security precautions and audits. System admins didn't routinely check for viruses on their servers and didn't check their logs for anything out of the ordinary is asking for trouble.
I guess the system admins there figured, "Well, long as nobody is complaining about anything we're golden." It's possible they have a very small IT staff and outsource the security details to the vendor who they bought the system from who they are putting the blame on?
We have a security firewall appliance at work that does just about everything but I don't rely on it 100% to make sure it's doing it's job. I go through the logs daily and test it. Just have to be proactive on finding problems and fix it before anybody else notices it.
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You hope Cisco will provide the firmware update for free for those who don't have a current service contract on their routers.
Cisco charges for everything from stupid cables to firmware updates.
I guess the cat is out of the bag now...
Actually the government needs to subpoena whoever is in charge of IT at that time.
The new IT staff shouldn't be responsible of whatever happened during Bush's administration. They can try look for lost e-mails but there is no telling exactly what happened to them. I believe the deletions were on purpose to cover up whatever was going on at that time. The thing is they have to prove it.
Even the exchange server keeps transaction logs. They too can be purged.
I wish them luck finding the lost e-mails.
Kinda reminds me of Nixon days... Watergate mess.
Everything do get backed up on tapes but they are recycled after so many days or months. So if the retention policy is every 3 months then it'll get recycled.
When I was working for a large data center I created a backup policy as follows:
Daily backups are kept 30 days.
Weekend backups are kept 90 days.
Month end backups are kept for 1 year.
Year end backups are kept for 3 years.
Problem with e-mails you can't rely on your backup software alone. You need another product like GFI MailArchiver which basically keeps every piece of email of the entire office in a separate database which is also backed up to tape and is kept up to three years before purging it from the systems.
The White House isn't some small mom and pop shop. We're talking about classified information and strict protocols which have to be followed. Which means everything is tracked and achieved in a vault somewhere. It's just a question of who have access to them.
I do have flash installed on my 64bit Ubuntu and it works great.
So add me to that 99.9999999999 percentile.
Makes me wonder why Microsoft posted a bounty for the author(s) of this worm.
It's like, "Oh shit, we can't patch against this worm so we need to nab the author!"
Microsoft can't come up with a patch fast enough without proper testing and time. They figured go after the source of the problem.
Honestly $250,000 bounty is chump change so if they up the ante to $1,000,000 then people will listen.
Correction.. Windows been infected by people! So infection rate is 100%
What I do like the fact the .deb files via updates are signed by a trusted authority. Every once in awhile I would get an update saying this package can't be authenticated and asked me if I want to continue with the update. I usually say no unless I can actually trust the source.
Only time I ran into this is updating Open Office 3.0
Why should they put the burden on home users when they can't even friggin secure their WiFi access?!?!? The wireless routers should have WPA enabled by default forcing people to read the damn manual.
I can see manufacturer's marketing now "This router complies with the 'you lost your rights to privacy law' and keep out hackers too!
Unreal.
I use pfSense too.. great firewall btw.
I thought about sending my logs to a server but haven't had the time to research it. I'm trying to setup a linux box to capture the logs and run it through a web-server to generate the reports I need on the fly. Any ideas? And yes I googled... too many old information out there.
Yes, I know exactly where you're coming from but most decent RAID controllers via the web-bios you can disable the alarm.
Or open the case up and put a sticky tape over the stupid tiny little speaker so it'll STFU! LOL
Yep, those things almost never die or need a reboot.
Novell never breaks!
Yep, it's always fun smashing things into pieces for the thrill of it.
Yep, I've actually heard a XT-PC power supply blew up in the office once. It sounded like a gun that went off. So when I went to see what happened all I saw was white smoke coming from the PC. I was like, "Ok, I guess I'll have to order a new power supply for it". LOL
Personally, I wouldn't buy a Mac Mini to give in their whims about DRMs on their iPhones.
If you and millions did that then what will prevent Apple to say, "Maybe we shouldn't have used DRM in the first place?".
There is nothing wrong using Linux with the iPhone, just Apple want to make it difficult so they can sell more Mac hardware.
Or apt-get install ntfs-config
It'll install a nice GUI under system tools.
It's been working great for me. Even though I know how to modify the fstab file.
I think people are waiting for "Cloud 9" computing.
Linux has gotten "good enough" on PC hardware that I just don't see any reason to even play the game anymore with Microsoft. Time to get off the ride. All of the "windows only" apps that I use seem to work under wine. The rest all have some open equivalent (firefox/thunderbird/openoffice/etc).
*shrug*
Same here. I've been using Ubuntu for the past several months and loving it. I pretty have almost all the apps I've been using under Windows I found native apps for.
So no DRM issues here :)
In addition these satellite are orbiting in 3D space so it's not gotta cross an intersection like we do daily.
So somebody could have changed the alitiude a little bit to avoid collision. Ah well.
Not anymore.. Now it's just a pile of space junk.
You probably remember when some scientists noticed it was generating some math error in their applications so they contacted Intel about it.
Intel's response was, "Well, these are early processors in design and shouldn't affect 99% of the population". Of course the scientists created an awareness of this issue and public generated a stink about it even though 99% of them may never run into the bug that affects their applications.
So now 15+ years later this pops up saying it is OK to have these errors in non-critical applications for sake of speed. People are going to wonder about these chips in their products when something isn't working right and may cry afoul.
Probably the best way would be is use a standard electronic voting machine that everybody can agree on and print out the voter's vote on paper in both machine and human readable form to be deposited into the voting box by hand. This way the machines already have a running number of the votes and still have a paper trail.
They can have the best firewalls and anti-virus e-mail scanner on the planet but it takes ONE person with an infected laptop to plug it into the internal network and do it's dirty work without them knowing it in time.
It's possible they have been infected for months and didn't know it until things started to act funny.
To have that many PCs infected didn't surprise me as they didn't bother to take proper security precautions and audits. System admins didn't routinely check for viruses on their servers and didn't check their logs for anything out of the ordinary is asking for trouble.
I guess the system admins there figured, "Well, long as nobody is complaining about anything we're golden." It's possible they have a very small IT staff and outsource the security details to the vendor who they bought the system from who they are putting the blame on?
We have a security firewall appliance at work that does just about everything but I don't rely on it 100% to make sure it's doing it's job. I go through the logs daily and test it. Just have to be proactive on finding problems and fix it before anybody else notices it.
Thanks for the tip! :)