You can create a custom pen drive/bootable CD with scripting to accomplish this, or if you want to make it more efficient, PXE booting is the way to go. There are tons of options available to you. You'll just have to put some time into putting a solution together. If you come up with something, be sure to make it available. I'm sure there are others that would benefit from your work.
Yes, *highly* recommend the museum of science and industry.
Lots of other regular stuff to do in Chicago too. Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, Navy Pier, Wrigley Field, Riverboat Tour, etc. Also lots of night life and other stuff to do.
They already have the technology to help people when they get frustrated, it's called not making you jump through 10 different IVR menus to get to a live person.
Right, but you've also got to recognize that there's a significant difference in fuel cost. I don't have hard numbers, but I'm assuming you get something like 6-8 mpg in a big motorhome or maybe 10 in a smaller one. Compare that to a midsize car getting maybe 18-20 mpg and you can see that you're easily doubling your gas intake for the TV, and at $3.50/gal that's not a small cost.
So it realistically looks something like this:
Price/night at a 2-3 star motel is probably averaging $65, a little less than than what others suggested.
Let's call the price of the RV $80k
If we travel 15000 miles a year for 5 years, that's 75000 miles. If we do it in the RV at 8 mpg that's 9375 gallons of fuel, if we do it in a car at 18 mpg thats 4162 gallons of fuel. At $3.50/gal that's $32812.5 for the RV or $14567 for the car.
Cost of RV (80k) + cost of fuel ($32812.5) - resale value of RV after 5 years with 75k miles (32k, assuming 40% of what you paid for it) = $80812.5
For the car, staying in a hotel:
Cost of car (30k) + cost of fuel ($14567) - resale value of the car (12k assuming the same 40%) = $32564
Of course this isn't taking into account the extra taxes and upkeep cost you'll have on an RV, or the fact that you can cook in an RV so your meal costs will be lower, but you can see that the RV is still over twice as expensive as a car and a hotel over five years. I think it's mainly that there's something to be said for the fun and independance that an RV bring, and that's worth a lot to some people.
...why don't folks just burn the documents instead of shredding them? Think of the advantages - you don't need a shredder, you don't need electricity to run a shredder, and most important, if you burn your secret docs, then there is a much lower chance that someone can come along and reconstruct them after the fact.
NAT is dead simple. It's on by default in just about every IPv4 consumer level router. Want to turn it on in an enterprise router, sure no problem:
interface fastEthernet 0/0
ip nat outside
!
interface fastEthernet 0/1
ip nat inside
!
It is equally easy to turn on in enterprise firewalls.
I guess I will be the one to ask the obvious question here.
With IPv4, people buy routers because ISPs only give you one IP address, so you need something that does NAT in order to connect more than one device to the Internet. With IPv6 there will be no such need, so the question is not if IPv6 routers will have stateful or stateless firewalls, it seems to me that the real question ought to be, why the heck would anyone even need a router with IPv6 to begin with? Just plug your modem into a switch or wireless access point, everything ought to connect just fine with no router, no NAT, no firewall.
Of course not having a firewall is indeed bad as has been pointed out, but the point I am raising here in this comment is the fact that without a router being an absolute necessity as they were with IPv4, you will see people start to do with out them.
Unless you get a windows based tablet, I wouldn't count on your eBook's DRM being supported. All the textbook rental places I've used require a hideous piece of DRM to be installed on your computer before you can read any textbooks. Also, don't discount the benefit of having a physical book in your hand to refer to. In many situations, having the book in one hand and notes in the other sure beats having to constantly switch between your textbook and note taking apps.
These comments make me question your experience with lawyers in the real world. Rule one when drafting a contract is that you always write it so that it gives you everything you could ever possibly want without making you look like a total dick. Contracts are drafted with the assumption that the other party will review it and strike what they don't like (redlining), then you reach an agreement on the language both parties are willing to live with. There is no justifiable reason to write "nice" contracts, you write it the way you want it and then compromise until a happy medium is agreed upon.
Valve say that passwords were salted and hashed in the db and CC info was encrypted. It sounds like they followed best practices in storing this info. Can we at least give them some kudos for doing this? It would be a lot easier for them to store that info in clear text, so it seems like the least we can do is thank them for taking appropriate security precautions.
Whenever someone is doing something you don't like, the most effective method of getting them to stop is usually the same...lawyer up. This is especially true when whatever they are doing is illegal or legally questionable. People tend to do what they think they can get away with. If you suddenly make them think they're about to get sued and incur a lot of costs, they will probably take you off their lists.
The problem with iTunes is that Apple have designed it to work on a consumer level. For example, if I buy my employee an iPhone or iPad, I then probably need to buy him some apps so he can do work, i.e. an app to work with MS Office files, and probably one or two other apps. The apps have to be purchased under an iTunes account so we put it under his corporate e-mail, now what happens when he leaves? How do I transfer those licenses to his replacement? With just about EVERY other company out there that produces commercial software intended for business use, a license is not tied to an individual. I.E. Adobe, Microsoft, Cisco, etc. You puchase XX number of licenses and can reassign them at will, a license is never tied to a specific person, you only need to make sure you have sufficient licenses to cover the number of people using the software.
What I don't understand is why companies don't simply use the same model for apps. What's stopping a developer from releasing their app for free on the app store and requiring the use to input an unlock code before they can use it? This is how it works on PCs. You can download the trial version of Photoshop, use it for 30 days, and then if you want to continue using it you have to purchase it and enter the product key. Why would this not work with apps?
Also, don't even get me started on the fact that you have to have a credit card on file to even purchase apps in the first place. Corporations don't like to give out corporate CC numbers to every employee that needs to purchase apps, so you end up with employees purchasing apps and expensing them, which creates a lot of extra work for the finance dept since they now have a huge influx of expense reports to process. Then when that employee leaves, you have no way to use the app you've bought and paid for and have to buy it again. The system is fundamentally broken from a business perspective.
Plus, you have the employees who get a corporate iPhone / iPad and then fill it up with their music collection and complain that they run out of HDD space when they sync it to their laptop, AND they bitch that their music and photos weren't backed up when their laptop dies. "What do you mean you didn't back up my 30GB of music, photos and movies? Surely you budgeted to allocate 30GB of space on the SAN for every single user to store their personal data which is not related to their jobs in any way!"
I think the easiest thing to do would be to use layered encryption. I.e. put a password-protected keypass file in a truecrypt volume, which is in a secure rar file that is PGP'd. Each layer would have a separate password and/or key file. Give the password for each layer to two or three people (redundancy in case one of them dies before you do). Make sure that there is no overlap (i.e. don't let any one person or group of people such as a husband and wife have the passwords to more than one layer of encryption). Optionally keep a listing of the people that have the passwords to make it easier to open the password list in the event of your death. It will be easier this way, but if you're worried about subpoenas you can omit it. As far as subpoenas, as long as you have a sufficient number of encryption layers, then you may not need to worry about them because opening your password vault would require a number of subpoenas equal to the number of layers of encryption, and even if they generate all those subpoenas, if you are relying on trusted friends, it's easy for one or several of them to claim that they no longer remember what you told them and it would be very difficult if not impossible for someone to prove otherwise.
The second part is making sure that the actual file itself remains available. I would recommend keeping it on a couple thumb drives in safe areas as well as distributing it to all the people that have parts of the password chain on a regular basis (i.e. every time you update it).
The one thing to keep in mind is that this scheme relies on the cryptographic algorithms' ability to protect your data. In 10 years, today's encryption may be relatively easy to break, so you'll probably want to keep it up to date.
One reason why XP is still so prevalent in businesses is that stack of custom apps. With everything going to webapps and the cloud now, here's hoping that this will be the last time we have to worry about app compatibility. Hopefully some of these big companies have taken the hint and realized that if they have to sink all this effort into testing app compatibility, why not just take it a step further and put the app stack in the cloud and never have to worry about it again.
It just so happened that the trouble started right at the end of the month, when lots of people are trying to make mortgage payments. My mortgage with BofA specifies that I have to make my payments online, I am charged a service fee if I try to walk into a banking center and pay it. Luckily I was able to get in after about 10 minutes of trying, but I wonder if they've got the stones to try and charge folks service fees if they went to the bank because they couldn't log in online...
If you're worried the NSA is investigating you then you may have justification for taking extreme measures, but if you're just a normal person looking to get rid of old drives I think a hammer or even a screwdriver will do just fine. When we have drives fail at work, I usually use a screwdriver to physically break off the SATA/IDE connector and poke some holes in any exposed circuit boards. This is sufficient to prevent dumpster divers from getting your data.
If you have access to tools, a drill press seems like a pretty easy way to render drives inoperable. I think that's what I'll do next time I have some drives to get rid of. Just make sure you use bits you don't care about as I would imagine going through a hdd will leave them a little worse for wear.
This question seems to come up a lot and the answer I give is the same every time - just use hard drives. They're dirt cheap and faster and easier to use than just about any other option out there. The trick here is to buy in multiples of three. Keep one at home where you keep your live data. The other two should be used as rotating offsite storage. Get a safe deposit box and rotate them between it. In other words, every week (or whatever other interval you're comfortable with) back up your live data to one of the two rotating offsite drives, then take that drive to the safe deposit box and bring the one that's there home. Now just continue to repeat this process forever. I usually replace drives every year (that way they still have some resale value) to keep them within warranty periods and up with current technologies. All told, this ought to cost you about $200-300 up front and maybe $150 annually...well worth it in my opinion.
This should be enough protection for just about anyone, but if you really want to be thorough, combine this with an online backup service and you're pretty much guaranteed not to lose data in the event of a hardware failure, malice, virus, theft, or natural disaster.
DRM servers that either don't work or are taken down 6 months after the game is released because the publisher feels the title isn't doing well enough.
The GTA "hot coffee" incident.
Malware on game media.
Those are just a few off the top of my head. The real question is if this is even enforceable. IANAL but I had to take a law class in college and from what I recall, contracts cannot force the parties to give up their right to sue. Otherwise every contract in the world would do so because who wants to get sued? They can say you have to go to arbitration, but that's not really the same thing.
I'd argue that VLC is used by a large percentage of folks that regularly watch media other than Netflix or Youtube on their PCs. Their interface isn't the best but as far as functionality it can do just about anything you'd want.
Particle board is bad in almost all cases, but plywood does have very real advantages over solid wood. For instance, plywood is much more stable over time and is not nearly as subject to the expansion and contraction due to changes in humidity as solid wood is. Go to any million dollar home and look at their kitchen cabinets - the faces will be solid wood but the side, top, bottom and back panels will all be plywood. It's more durable and less hassle, it's not used because it costs less, it's used because it's better for that particular purpose.
Particle board yes, but some form of plywood is used in almost all "real" furniture. We're talking hardwood veneered plywood that you get from a lumber dealer, not the crap you can buy down at Home Depot, but even so, plywood is not synonymous with crappy furniture.
I purchased a Chevy vehicle equipped with OnStar for my wife and cancelled the OnStar service on day 1 because I don't like the idea of GPS location history of my vehicle's whereabouts sitting in a database somewhere. I also don't like the idea of GM being able to get access to my maintenance history so they can say "Oh, looks like you went 500 miles over on your last scheduled oil change, no warranty for you!".
I was *very* clear with the rep I spoke to that I didn't want my vehicle to send any data to OnStar, but you can never tell with those $10/hr phone monkeys working in the call centers. They probably get a day of training and then are turned loose on the phones. Who knows if they know what they're talking about, and companies make it impossible to actually talk to someone that would have that info.
Is there something I can physically unplug to disable the data connection?
I agree, would love to see a showdown between Q and the Star Wars baddies. They've got the force, but he's got unlimited control of space, matter and time.
Whenever I sign up for some random site that I'll never visit again, I use an e-mail alias so I can track what they send me, who they're selling my e-mail address to, or who hacked them and stole my information. It's simple enough, just set up a catch-all e-mail address on a domain, then when you sign up for www.uselesssite.com, use the e-mail address uselesssite.com@yourdomain.com. If you start getting a bunch of spam to that address, it's pretty hard for them to refute that they're the cause of it.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 to parent
You can create a custom pen drive/bootable CD with scripting to accomplish this, or if you want to make it more efficient, PXE booting is the way to go. There are tons of options available to you. You'll just have to put some time into putting a solution together. If you come up with something, be sure to make it available. I'm sure there are others that would benefit from your work.
Yes, *highly* recommend the museum of science and industry. Lots of other regular stuff to do in Chicago too. Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, Navy Pier, Wrigley Field, Riverboat Tour, etc. Also lots of night life and other stuff to do.
They already have the technology to help people when they get frustrated, it's called not making you jump through 10 different IVR menus to get to a live person.
Right, but you've also got to recognize that there's a significant difference in fuel cost. I don't have hard numbers, but I'm assuming you get something like 6-8 mpg in a big motorhome or maybe 10 in a smaller one. Compare that to a midsize car getting maybe 18-20 mpg and you can see that you're easily doubling your gas intake for the TV, and at $3.50/gal that's not a small cost.
So it realistically looks something like this:
Price/night at a 2-3 star motel is probably averaging $65, a little less than than what others suggested.
Let's call the price of the RV $80k
If we travel 15000 miles a year for 5 years, that's 75000 miles. If we do it in the RV at 8 mpg that's 9375 gallons of fuel, if we do it in a car at 18 mpg thats 4162 gallons of fuel. At $3.50/gal that's $32812.5 for the RV or $14567 for the car.
Cost of RV (80k) + cost of fuel ($32812.5) - resale value of RV after 5 years with 75k miles (32k, assuming 40% of what you paid for it) = $80812.5
For the car, staying in a hotel:
Cost of car (30k) + cost of fuel ($14567) - resale value of the car (12k assuming the same 40%) = $32564
Of course this isn't taking into account the extra taxes and upkeep cost you'll have on an RV, or the fact that you can cook in an RV so your meal costs will be lower, but you can see that the RV is still over twice as expensive as a car and a hotel over five years. I think it's mainly that there's something to be said for the fun and independance that an RV bring, and that's worth a lot to some people.
...why don't folks just burn the documents instead of shredding them? Think of the advantages - you don't need a shredder, you don't need electricity to run a shredder, and most important, if you burn your secret docs, then there is a much lower chance that someone can come along and reconstruct them after the fact.
NAT is dead simple. It's on by default in just about every IPv4 consumer level router. Want to turn it on in an enterprise router, sure no problem: interface fastEthernet 0/0 ip nat outside ! interface fastEthernet 0/1 ip nat inside ! It is equally easy to turn on in enterprise firewalls.
I guess I will be the one to ask the obvious question here.
With IPv4, people buy routers because ISPs only give you one IP address, so you need something that does NAT in order to connect more than one device to the Internet. With IPv6 there will be no such need, so the question is not if IPv6 routers will have stateful or stateless firewalls, it seems to me that the real question ought to be, why the heck would anyone even need a router with IPv6 to begin with? Just plug your modem into a switch or wireless access point, everything ought to connect just fine with no router, no NAT, no firewall.
Of course not having a firewall is indeed bad as has been pointed out, but the point I am raising here in this comment is the fact that without a router being an absolute necessity as they were with IPv4, you will see people start to do with out them.
WHO IS THIS?!
Unless you get a windows based tablet, I wouldn't count on your eBook's DRM being supported. All the textbook rental places I've used require a hideous piece of DRM to be installed on your computer before you can read any textbooks. Also, don't discount the benefit of having a physical book in your hand to refer to. In many situations, having the book in one hand and notes in the other sure beats having to constantly switch between your textbook and note taking apps.
These comments make me question your experience with lawyers in the real world. Rule one when drafting a contract is that you always write it so that it gives you everything you could ever possibly want without making you look like a total dick. Contracts are drafted with the assumption that the other party will review it and strike what they don't like (redlining), then you reach an agreement on the language both parties are willing to live with. There is no justifiable reason to write "nice" contracts, you write it the way you want it and then compromise until a happy medium is agreed upon.
Valve say that passwords were salted and hashed in the db and CC info was encrypted. It sounds like they followed best practices in storing this info. Can we at least give them some kudos for doing this? It would be a lot easier for them to store that info in clear text, so it seems like the least we can do is thank them for taking appropriate security precautions.
Whenever someone is doing something you don't like, the most effective method of getting them to stop is usually the same...lawyer up. This is especially true when whatever they are doing is illegal or legally questionable. People tend to do what they think they can get away with. If you suddenly make them think they're about to get sued and incur a lot of costs, they will probably take you off their lists.
The problem with iTunes is that Apple have designed it to work on a consumer level. For example, if I buy my employee an iPhone or iPad, I then probably need to buy him some apps so he can do work, i.e. an app to work with MS Office files, and probably one or two other apps. The apps have to be purchased under an iTunes account so we put it under his corporate e-mail, now what happens when he leaves? How do I transfer those licenses to his replacement? With just about EVERY other company out there that produces commercial software intended for business use, a license is not tied to an individual. I.E. Adobe, Microsoft, Cisco, etc. You puchase XX number of licenses and can reassign them at will, a license is never tied to a specific person, you only need to make sure you have sufficient licenses to cover the number of people using the software.
What I don't understand is why companies don't simply use the same model for apps. What's stopping a developer from releasing their app for free on the app store and requiring the use to input an unlock code before they can use it? This is how it works on PCs. You can download the trial version of Photoshop, use it for 30 days, and then if you want to continue using it you have to purchase it and enter the product key. Why would this not work with apps?
Also, don't even get me started on the fact that you have to have a credit card on file to even purchase apps in the first place. Corporations don't like to give out corporate CC numbers to every employee that needs to purchase apps, so you end up with employees purchasing apps and expensing them, which creates a lot of extra work for the finance dept since they now have a huge influx of expense reports to process. Then when that employee leaves, you have no way to use the app you've bought and paid for and have to buy it again. The system is fundamentally broken from a business perspective.
Plus, you have the employees who get a corporate iPhone / iPad and then fill it up with their music collection and complain that they run out of HDD space when they sync it to their laptop, AND they bitch that their music and photos weren't backed up when their laptop dies. "What do you mean you didn't back up my 30GB of music, photos and movies? Surely you budgeted to allocate 30GB of space on the SAN for every single user to store their personal data which is not related to their jobs in any way!"
I think the easiest thing to do would be to use layered encryption. I.e. put a password-protected keypass file in a truecrypt volume, which is in a secure rar file that is PGP'd. Each layer would have a separate password and/or key file. Give the password for each layer to two or three people (redundancy in case one of them dies before you do). Make sure that there is no overlap (i.e. don't let any one person or group of people such as a husband and wife have the passwords to more than one layer of encryption). Optionally keep a listing of the people that have the passwords to make it easier to open the password list in the event of your death. It will be easier this way, but if you're worried about subpoenas you can omit it. As far as subpoenas, as long as you have a sufficient number of encryption layers, then you may not need to worry about them because opening your password vault would require a number of subpoenas equal to the number of layers of encryption, and even if they generate all those subpoenas, if you are relying on trusted friends, it's easy for one or several of them to claim that they no longer remember what you told them and it would be very difficult if not impossible for someone to prove otherwise.
The second part is making sure that the actual file itself remains available. I would recommend keeping it on a couple thumb drives in safe areas as well as distributing it to all the people that have parts of the password chain on a regular basis (i.e. every time you update it).
The one thing to keep in mind is that this scheme relies on the cryptographic algorithms' ability to protect your data. In 10 years, today's encryption may be relatively easy to break, so you'll probably want to keep it up to date.
One reason why XP is still so prevalent in businesses is that stack of custom apps. With everything going to webapps and the cloud now, here's hoping that this will be the last time we have to worry about app compatibility. Hopefully some of these big companies have taken the hint and realized that if they have to sink all this effort into testing app compatibility, why not just take it a step further and put the app stack in the cloud and never have to worry about it again.
It just so happened that the trouble started right at the end of the month, when lots of people are trying to make mortgage payments. My mortgage with BofA specifies that I have to make my payments online, I am charged a service fee if I try to walk into a banking center and pay it. Luckily I was able to get in after about 10 minutes of trying, but I wonder if they've got the stones to try and charge folks service fees if they went to the bank because they couldn't log in online...
If you're worried the NSA is investigating you then you may have justification for taking extreme measures, but if you're just a normal person looking to get rid of old drives I think a hammer or even a screwdriver will do just fine. When we have drives fail at work, I usually use a screwdriver to physically break off the SATA/IDE connector and poke some holes in any exposed circuit boards. This is sufficient to prevent dumpster divers from getting your data.
If you have access to tools, a drill press seems like a pretty easy way to render drives inoperable. I think that's what I'll do next time I have some drives to get rid of. Just make sure you use bits you don't care about as I would imagine going through a hdd will leave them a little worse for wear.
This question seems to come up a lot and the answer I give is the same every time - just use hard drives. They're dirt cheap and faster and easier to use than just about any other option out there. The trick here is to buy in multiples of three. Keep one at home where you keep your live data. The other two should be used as rotating offsite storage. Get a safe deposit box and rotate them between it. In other words, every week (or whatever other interval you're comfortable with) back up your live data to one of the two rotating offsite drives, then take that drive to the safe deposit box and bring the one that's there home. Now just continue to repeat this process forever. I usually replace drives every year (that way they still have some resale value) to keep them within warranty periods and up with current technologies. All told, this ought to cost you about $200-300 up front and maybe $150 annually...well worth it in my opinion.
This should be enough protection for just about anyone, but if you really want to be thorough, combine this with an online backup service and you're pretty much guaranteed not to lose data in the event of a hardware failure, malice, virus, theft, or natural disaster.
DRM servers that either don't work or are taken down 6 months after the game is released because the publisher feels the title isn't doing well enough.
The GTA "hot coffee" incident.
Malware on game media.
Those are just a few off the top of my head. The real question is if this is even enforceable. IANAL but I had to take a law class in college and from what I recall, contracts cannot force the parties to give up their right to sue. Otherwise every contract in the world would do so because who wants to get sued? They can say you have to go to arbitration, but that's not really the same thing.
I'd argue that VLC is used by a large percentage of folks that regularly watch media other than Netflix or Youtube on their PCs. Their interface isn't the best but as far as functionality it can do just about anything you'd want.
Particle board is bad in almost all cases, but plywood does have very real advantages over solid wood. For instance, plywood is much more stable over time and is not nearly as subject to the expansion and contraction due to changes in humidity as solid wood is. Go to any million dollar home and look at their kitchen cabinets - the faces will be solid wood but the side, top, bottom and back panels will all be plywood. It's more durable and less hassle, it's not used because it costs less, it's used because it's better for that particular purpose.
Particle board yes, but some form of plywood is used in almost all "real" furniture. We're talking hardwood veneered plywood that you get from a lumber dealer, not the crap you can buy down at Home Depot, but even so, plywood is not synonymous with crappy furniture.
I purchased a Chevy vehicle equipped with OnStar for my wife and cancelled the OnStar service on day 1 because I don't like the idea of GPS location history of my vehicle's whereabouts sitting in a database somewhere. I also don't like the idea of GM being able to get access to my maintenance history so they can say "Oh, looks like you went 500 miles over on your last scheduled oil change, no warranty for you!".
I was *very* clear with the rep I spoke to that I didn't want my vehicle to send any data to OnStar, but you can never tell with those $10/hr phone monkeys working in the call centers. They probably get a day of training and then are turned loose on the phones. Who knows if they know what they're talking about, and companies make it impossible to actually talk to someone that would have that info.
Is there something I can physically unplug to disable the data connection?
I agree, would love to see a showdown between Q and the Star Wars baddies. They've got the force, but he's got unlimited control of space, matter and time.
Whenever I sign up for some random site that I'll never visit again, I use an e-mail alias so I can track what they send me, who they're selling my e-mail address to, or who hacked them and stole my information. It's simple enough, just set up a catch-all e-mail address on a domain, then when you sign up for www.uselesssite.com, use the e-mail address uselesssite.com@yourdomain.com. If you start getting a bunch of spam to that address, it's pretty hard for them to refute that they're the cause of it.