Nope. Everyone is assuming this is a torrent because it is the most popular form of file sharing. Many of the old school peer to peer file sharing apps *by default* shared your documents folder. You could turn it off, but most people don't.
Many confidential files have been leaked this way. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Citigroup-Customer-Data-Leaked-on-LimeWire/
There used to even be guides to tell you what were common digital camera prefixes so you could do a search for CIM*.jpg or DSC*.jpg and browse people's private folders.
If you were a company or nation involved in espionage, getting on a p2p network and searching for files with obvious names would be a good place to start.
It isn't just limewire of course, that's just the first one I could remember from years ago. There's also eMule and many others.
In addition to firing the person responsible, the entire IT staff should be reviewed if not fired. My guess though is that this is some ceo who specifically told IT that he was exempt from the security rules. C*Os are the biggest security risk because they tell people that the security rules don't apply to them. Remember that cdw? commercial about the boss who infects an entire office because he let's his kid use the company network?
Make sure you understand that you have a very, very, very wide range of users. I deal with non-tech graduate students all the time(the same age as the youngest teachers in the field) and they are not tech savvy. They can myspace and youtube, and maybe superpoke someone on facebook, but that's it. Don't expect the youngest teachers to be the most techy. You'll find good, older teachers near retirement that can give you a run for your money.
Be aware that most k-12 schools have almost no budget. They can get money for hardware/software purchases, but a *good* tech to handle some of the idiosyncrasies of F/OSS is out of their budgets. A 50 computer lab on a 4 year rotation(many schools would kill for computers that new) only costs around $15,000 a year. They'll come with an os installed and maybe a cheap educational copy of office. To hire someone, say 40k-50k a year + benefits, to put a different os on the desktops is a huge expense.
My suggestion would be to start small. Make the decision making process open and transparent. Ask schools to have a cost/benefit analysis of the software purchases. You'll see your biggest savings in server apps, not desktops.
See if you can get schools to have a traveling tech, consolidate servers, etc. This can be difficult. A lot depends on what state you are in. A midwestern state, with lots of small schools with low enrollments(30-50 in a graduating class) may be better served by server consolidation. On the other hand, if you are in a big city where the graduating class is bigger than the entire k-12 school I graduated from, you'll have a bigger budget and a better chance of getting an onsite tech.
Show them security. Student records are highly confidential. Show them how spending less on the server software can increase their security.
It really comes down to knowing your audience and what they want and expect.
On Windows it is really easy to use the msconfig tool and stop things like the itunes updater, google updater, quicktime assistant, acrobat speedup, tkbell(the realplayer app) and a host of others from starting.
Uncheck what you don't want to start. Decide you really like the updater? Go back and click the check box.
Because I actually tested the beta and compared it to Vista? I'm not saying it is the world's greatest operating system. Eventually, XP will die and neither Mac nor PC are going to be an option where I work. And in the enterprise, there are some good client management reasons to go with windows.
But anyway, on to the comparison of Vista and 7. On a Dell Optiplex 620 with 1 gig of ram, 7 runs faster and is more responsive than Vista. I gained about 30 seconds in boot time and application launches, while not really significantly faster, feel faster. I don't consider a 1 or 2 second load difference really significant.
The interface differences are going to confuse some people, but they'll learn.
Given a choice between XP, Vista and 7, for the very near term I would rate them XP, 7, and Vista in a distant third. But a year from now, we may be hard pressed to find XP drivers for new hardware. In our 2010 purchasing year, XP will be about 9 years old. Considering that the driver model changed, hardware manufacturers are going to have to choose between Vista/7 driver development and developing for a 9 year old os. I'm betting the opt for 7 drivers before XP.
I think the reason that everyone is so happy about 7 is that it means they can skip the oh so very painful Vista release entirely. I know I'm thinking that if we can just hang on to XP for another year, we can avoid Vista and go to 7, which isn't as bad as Vista.
You missed the point of the time capsule idea.:) The fun is for the students of today to add the personal notes about how cool a game is, or how cutting edge a computer is. Then the future kids get to be historians and examine and "unearth" the capsule.
Just about every item preserved in every school sponsored time capsule can be bought on e-bay today or just seen in a museum. That's not the point. The point is to give both sets of students a connection to history, to make it fun and part of their lives instead of just a one day field trip to a museum to see things they don't have a connection to.
Pop in a DBAN cd, hit enter. You can tell the boss that you've performed a wipe that meets DoD specifications. There's no real time difference in doing one wipe, which doesn't meet DoD specs, or the three that DBAN does by default. Unless, of course, you are sitting there watching the percent complete go up. If you have free time to do that, how can I apply for your job?
You should see some of the young students, early 20's, who have a mac but don't know how to really use it and are still confused by some of its features.
Not really complaining, just thinking about how the small changes affect our users. Personally, I like the gestures and some the new features. And I know how to turn them all off.
The problem I always have is that the farther away from a basic install of windows, the harder it is to tell our users to use generic help files for more information. If MS tells users to click X then Y then Z to do something, we can't expect our users follow the instructions if we disable Y. Which means we have to spend time re-writing instructions and it means they can't use all of the on-line resources available to them to help them learn the new system.
And yes, they can turn the features back on and then read the help, but that's a little frustrating too.
And the more we customize for each user, the harder it is on them when we give them a new imaged computer. They have to spend half a day remembering all of the little personalizations they've done.
We probably will leave the gestures on, then turn it off for the two or three people we support who have shaky hands.
You can use Ghostwalk, a utility that will change the sid. It reboots into the ghost partition, really just a 20-40 meg file in the root of the c:\ drive. It runs a version of dos, I forget which version, and then loads ghostwalk to change the sid.
Or you can tell it to run newsid (thanks, sysinternals! now bring out a vista version, please.) after the install to rename and change the sid.
I haven't gotten into the new vista windows image format, but it does look interesting. Right now, ghost is still the most efficient way for us and our number of users, but I can see that changing.
The users I support are going to have *huge* problems with the new taskbar. First, they have a problem with grouping tasks into one icon. They never did get the hang of that, so we ended up just unchecking that feature.
Second, the default is to have no text under the icon. They are going to have a hard time figuring out what is already running. They'll end up double clicking everything.
Third, the taskbar no longer appends each new application to the end of the running tasks. That will throw people off.
In addition, they are really going to confuse themselves with all of the new mouse gestures.
Other than that, windows 7, like Vista, and XP before it has the same basic interface as 9x. Taskbar at the bottom of the screen, Menu launcher in the lower left hand corner.
If something is done exactly the same way twice, that's a function. Heck, if something is sufficiently complicated that it makes the main code easier to read, that's a function too in my book.
Of course, I prefer my braces to line up vertically, so what do I know?
It all depends on what level of the profession you are at. There are plenty of doctors out there testing, theorizing, and working towards better treatments and prevention of all kinds of illnesses and injuries. That takes creativity. Some of them are designing better human beings through gene therapy, prosthetics, new surgical techniques and so on.
Sure a lot of them are doing routine work with nothing more exotic than poison oak, but there are lots of engineers in the same situation.
Right. If the submitter had actually read the article, this would have jumped out at him:
"The counterfeits were also discovered through customs seizures"
The fact that *after* they had seized the software, WGA was capable of detecting it when installed is just pr for WGA and not an indication that WGA is sending personal information to MS. It may or may not being doing that, but you couldn't prove it by this article.
If you really want to see what WGA is sending to Microsoft, just capture the packets on their way to the internet and see what's being sent. Has anyone done that and found anything of real interest?
Right. This is Windows 98 compared to Windows 95. No major change in theme or interface, but more stable and with a few of the sharper corners rounded off. See also windows 3.0 and windows 3.1.:)
You don't say what operating system you are running on the clients (I'm assuming windows of some variety), what network os you are using, or where the files are stored.
However, you want to turn on file access monitoring. It's pretty simple if you have one file server and all the files are there because you only have to turn it on once. Here's a good start:
If you are running linux, http://www.rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=10751 was the second article in a google search.
Depending on the number of users and files, your logs can fill up quite quickly. You may also want something like SNARE http://www.intersectalliance.com/projects/index.html to monitor workstations. They may be doing some server work this morning; I'm getting a time out on the web page.
The bigger question though is if your clients think you are cheating them, why will they believe your logs?
You may also want to get some books on windows and linux security monitoring.
While security is always something to be considered, this from the question:
"private network of retail stores connected to our corporate office (and to each other) with IPsec over DSL, and no access to the public internet"
Private network? Check. No access to public internet? Check.
So pretty much no way for the files to be seeded outside the company.
And even if there were a way to seed on the internet when they don't have access to it, password protect the file so only a client with the password can download it. That's not unbreakable, but if a competitor wanted the information there are easier ways to get it.
If I go to a restaurant and the food is bad, I can get a refund. If I walk out of a movie, I can get a refund. If I buy a book, I can return it. And for that matter, when I go to a bookstore I can actually read the book on the shelf and decide if it is crap before I buy it.
You may get all or a part of your money back depending on the situation or you may get store credit, but the point is that there is a mechanism in place for refunding all or part of the expense on those items if they are crap.
Software is one of the very few things that is almost impossible to return if the box has been opened. Here a few returns policies:
http://www.bestbuy.com/olspage.jsp?type=page&contentId=1117177044087&id=cat12098 - "Opened computer software, movies, music and video games can be exchanged for the identical item but cannot be returned for a refund."
http://www.newegg.com/HelpInfo/FAQDetail.aspx?Module=5 - "Retail Boxed software may only be returned for refund within 30 days of the invoice date if the packaging is unopened and factory sealed. Opened retail boxed software can only be returned for replacement if it is defective or damaged."
Amazon has probably the best software return policy: "Any CD, DVD, VHS tape, software, video game, cassette tape, or vinyl record that has been opened (taken out of its plastic wrap): 50% of item's price." http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=901926&#amount
1) Go to http://www.google.com 2) Click the More menu at the top of the page 3) Select Groups 4) Enter your search term: database group:comp.* 5) Get back about 3,000 responses
Slashdot Mirror
Flash can play multiple formats, so just because you don't like flv doesn't mean you can't use something else, like h264.
I got in just fine not 10 seconds ago.
Nope. Everyone is assuming this is a torrent because it is the most popular form of file sharing. Many of the old school peer to peer file sharing apps *by default* shared your documents folder. You could turn it off, but most people don't.
Many confidential files have been leaked this way. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Citigroup-Customer-Data-Leaked-on-LimeWire/
There used to even be guides to tell you what were common digital camera prefixes so you could do a search for CIM*.jpg or DSC*.jpg and browse people's private folders.
If you were a company or nation involved in espionage, getting on a p2p network and searching for files with obvious names would be a good place to start.
http://bizsecurity.about.com/b/2008/07/08/limewire-and-working-at-home.htm
It isn't just limewire of course, that's just the first one I could remember from years ago. There's also eMule and many others.
In addition to firing the person responsible, the entire IT staff should be reviewed if not fired. My guess though is that this is some ceo who specifically told IT that he was exempt from the security rules. C*Os are the biggest security risk because they tell people that the security rules don't apply to them. Remember that cdw? commercial about the boss who infects an entire office because he let's his kid use the company network?
Make sure you understand that you have a very, very, very wide range of users. I deal with non-tech graduate students all the time(the same age as the youngest teachers in the field) and they are not tech savvy. They can myspace and youtube, and maybe superpoke someone on facebook, but that's it. Don't expect the youngest teachers to be the most techy. You'll find good, older teachers near retirement that can give you a run for your money.
Be aware that most k-12 schools have almost no budget. They can get money for hardware/software purchases, but a *good* tech to handle some of the idiosyncrasies of F/OSS is out of their budgets. A 50 computer lab on a 4 year rotation(many schools would kill for computers that new) only costs around $15,000 a year. They'll come with an os installed and maybe a cheap educational copy of office. To hire someone, say 40k-50k a year + benefits, to put a different os on the desktops is a huge expense.
My suggestion would be to start small. Make the decision making process open and transparent. Ask schools to have a cost/benefit analysis of the software purchases. You'll see your biggest savings in server apps, not desktops.
See if you can get schools to have a traveling tech, consolidate servers, etc. This can be difficult. A lot depends on what state you are in. A midwestern state, with lots of small schools with low enrollments(30-50 in a graduating class) may be better served by server consolidation. On the other hand, if you are in a big city where the graduating class is bigger than the entire k-12 school I graduated from, you'll have a bigger budget and a better chance of getting an onsite tech.
Show them security. Student records are highly confidential. Show them how spending less on the server software can increase their security.
It really comes down to knowing your audience and what they want and expect.
Does hosting your own bbs count as peer to peer? I didn't do that, a little before my time, but many people did host files on their bbs boards.
On Windows it is really easy to use the msconfig tool and stop things like the itunes updater, google updater, quicktime assistant, acrobat speedup, tkbell(the realplayer app) and a host of others from starting.
Uncheck what you don't want to start. Decide you really like the updater? Go back and click the check box.
Because I actually tested the beta and compared it to Vista? I'm not saying it is the world's greatest operating system. Eventually, XP will die and neither Mac nor PC are going to be an option where I work. And in the enterprise, there are some good client management reasons to go with windows.
But anyway, on to the comparison of Vista and 7. On a Dell Optiplex 620 with 1 gig of ram, 7 runs faster and is more responsive than Vista. I gained about 30 seconds in boot time and application launches, while not really significantly faster, feel faster. I don't consider a 1 or 2 second load difference really significant.
The interface differences are going to confuse some people, but they'll learn.
Given a choice between XP, Vista and 7, for the very near term I would rate them XP, 7, and Vista in a distant third. But a year from now, we may be hard pressed to find XP drivers for new hardware. In our 2010 purchasing year, XP will be about 9 years old. Considering that the driver model changed, hardware manufacturers are going to have to choose between Vista/7 driver development and developing for a 9 year old os. I'm betting the opt for 7 drivers before XP.
I think the reason that everyone is so happy about 7 is that it means they can skip the oh so very painful Vista release entirely. I know I'm thinking that if we can just hang on to XP for another year, we can avoid Vista and go to 7, which isn't as bad as Vista.
You missed the point of the time capsule idea. :) The fun is for the students of today to add the personal notes about how cool a game is, or how cutting edge a computer is. Then the future kids get to be historians and examine and "unearth" the capsule.
Just about every item preserved in every school sponsored time capsule can be bought on e-bay today or just seen in a museum. That's not the point. The point is to give both sets of students a connection to history, to make it fun and part of their lives instead of just a one day field trip to a museum to see things they don't have a connection to.
Instead of 50 years, make it 25 or 20. Then their kids can be in middle school and see the computer their folks used to use.
There are plenty of pc's made in 1984 that can still work fine.
Pop in a DBAN cd, hit enter. You can tell the boss that you've performed a wipe that meets DoD specifications. There's no real time difference in doing one wipe, which doesn't meet DoD specs, or the three that DBAN does by default. Unless, of course, you are sitting there watching the percent complete go up. If you have free time to do that, how can I apply for your job?
For the google impaired, http://www.dban.org/
You should see some of the young students, early 20's, who have a mac but don't know how to really use it and are still confused by some of its features.
Not really complaining, just thinking about how the small changes affect our users. Personally, I like the gestures and some the new features. And I know how to turn them all off.
The problem I always have is that the farther away from a basic install of windows, the harder it is to tell our users to use generic help files for more information. If MS tells users to click X then Y then Z to do something, we can't expect our users follow the instructions if we disable Y. Which means we have to spend time re-writing instructions and it means they can't use all of the on-line resources available to them to help them learn the new system.
And yes, they can turn the features back on and then read the help, but that's a little frustrating too.
And the more we customize for each user, the harder it is on them when we give them a new imaged computer. They have to spend half a day remembering all of the little personalizations they've done.
We probably will leave the gestures on, then turn it off for the two or three people we support who have shaky hands.
The problem is that there's no right answer.
There's a reason I said it was overly complicated. :)
Yes, I have played with it a little as a plugin to the SCCM product. And immediately said we should stick with ghost.
You can use Ghostwalk, a utility that will change the sid. It reboots into the ghost partition, really just a 20-40 meg file in the root of the c:\ drive. It runs a version of dos, I forget which version, and then loads ghostwalk to change the sid.
Or you can tell it to run newsid (thanks, sysinternals! now bring out a vista version, please.) after the install to rename and change the sid.
I haven't gotten into the new vista windows image format, but it does look interesting. Right now, ghost is still the most efficient way for us and our number of users, but I can see that changing.
Ghost is your friend for os deployment. :) It isn't nearly as overly complicated as the MS way of deploying images.
But, you can still do a completely hands free install of Vista. At least, in theory. Check out Windows Deployment Services.
http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?EditorialsID=729
http://thelazyadmin.com/blogs/thelazyadmin/archive/2007/05/07/windows-deployment-services.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.11.deployment.aspx
The users I support are going to have *huge* problems with the new taskbar. First, they have a problem with grouping tasks into one icon. They never did get the hang of that, so we ended up just unchecking that feature.
Second, the default is to have no text under the icon. They are going to have a hard time figuring out what is already running. They'll end up double clicking everything.
Third, the taskbar no longer appends each new application to the end of the running tasks. That will throw people off.
In addition, they are really going to confuse themselves with all of the new mouse gestures.
Other than that, windows 7, like Vista, and XP before it has the same basic interface as 9x. Taskbar at the bottom of the screen, Menu launcher in the lower left hand corner.
Why not this:
function cleanup():void //do something
{
}
if (condition1 && condition2) {
cleanup();
}
if (issue1 || issue2) {
cleanup();
}
If something is done exactly the same way twice, that's a function. Heck, if something is sufficiently complicated that it makes the main code easier to read, that's a function too in my book.
Of course, I prefer my braces to line up vertically, so what do I know?
It all depends on what level of the profession you are at. There are plenty of doctors out there testing, theorizing, and working towards better treatments and prevention of all kinds of illnesses and injuries. That takes creativity. Some of them are designing better human beings through gene therapy, prosthetics, new surgical techniques and so on.
Sure a lot of them are doing routine work with nothing more exotic than poison oak, but there are lots of engineers in the same situation.
Right. If the submitter had actually read the article, this would have jumped out at him:
"The counterfeits were also discovered through customs seizures"
The fact that *after* they had seized the software, WGA was capable of detecting it when installed is just pr for WGA and not an indication that WGA is sending personal information to MS. It may or may not being doing that, but you couldn't prove it by this article.
If you really want to see what WGA is sending to Microsoft, just capture the packets on their way to the internet and see what's being sent. Has anyone done that and found anything of real interest?
Right. This is Windows 98 compared to Windows 95. No major change in theme or interface, but more stable and with a few of the sharper corners rounded off. See also windows 3.0 and windows 3.1. :)
You don't say what operating system you are running on the clients (I'm assuming windows of some variety), what network os you are using, or where the files are stored.
However, you want to turn on file access monitoring. It's pretty simple if you have one file server and all the files are there because you only have to turn it on once. Here's a good start:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/guidance/serversecurity/tcg/tcgch03n.mspx
If you are running linux, http://www.rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=10751 was the second article in a google search.
Depending on the number of users and files, your logs can fill up quite quickly. You may also want something like SNARE http://www.intersectalliance.com/projects/index.html to monitor workstations. They may be doing some server work this morning; I'm getting a time out on the web page.
The bigger question though is if your clients think you are cheating them, why will they believe your logs?
You may also want to get some books on windows and linux security monitoring.
While security is always something to be considered, this from the question:
"private network of retail stores connected to our corporate office (and to each other) with IPsec over DSL, and no access to the public internet"
Private network? Check.
No access to public internet? Check.
So pretty much no way for the files to be seeded outside the company.
And even if there were a way to seed on the internet when they don't have access to it, password protect the file so only a client with the password can download it. That's not unbreakable, but if a competitor wanted the information there are easier ways to get it.
Regarding point 1:
If I go to a restaurant and the food is bad, I can get a refund. If I walk out of a movie, I can get a refund. If I buy a book, I can return it. And for that matter, when I go to a bookstore I can actually read the book on the shelf and decide if it is crap before I buy it.
You may get all or a part of your money back depending on the situation or you may get store credit, but the point is that there is a mechanism in place for refunding all or part of the expense on those items if they are crap.
Software is one of the very few things that is almost impossible to return if the box has been opened. Here a few returns policies:
http://www.bestbuy.com/olspage.jsp?type=page&contentId=1117177044087&id=cat12098 - "Opened computer software, movies, music and video games can be exchanged for the identical item but cannot be returned for a refund."
http://www.newegg.com/HelpInfo/FAQDetail.aspx?Module=5 - "Retail Boxed software may only be returned for refund within 30 days of the invoice date if the packaging is unopened and factory sealed. Opened retail boxed software can only be returned for replacement if it is defective or damaged."
Amazon has probably the best software return policy: "Any CD, DVD, VHS tape, software, video game, cassette tape, or vinyl record that has been opened (taken out of its plastic wrap): 50% of item's price." http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=901926&#amount
I don't see what the problem is. It works fine.
1) Go to http://www.google.com
2) Click the More menu at the top of the page
3) Select Groups
4) Enter your search term: database group:comp.*
5) Get back about 3,000 responses
Are you sure that the discs really did burn correctly 3 years ago? Some burning software, Windows I'm looking at you, doesn't report errors correctly.
For stuff I care about, I always have Nero verify the data when done burning.