I would think this would have much better uses than advertising. PSA's for example; "Mind the gap" "Walk on the left side" "Remember your reusable grocery bag" etc.
I remember picking up a magazine in the early 90's, and reading about the "Gopher Site of the Year." Which included, if one were to "walk" into the restroom in the tavern, the ability to read a limerick from my server.
Ahhh....my 15 minutes a fame. When most everyone didn't even know what the Internet was yet.
just move the listening port to something other than 22 for fucks sake.
Which will move their attempts to another port....Oops, sorry. Forgot to say "for fucks sake."
The way you solve this, is by installing Fail2Ban (and change the default time) or other similar products. Automatically utilizing the system firewall (iptables and the like) to prevent them from even trying.
And yes, 59,000 attempts is a problem that needs to be addressed. If for no other reason, than it's stealing bandwidth, and slowing down the entire server / connection.
"Due to the fear of mass suicides from the mental anguish caused by elections, the Death With Dignity Act would be suspended three months prior to all elections. "Not wanting to live like this (being exposed to non-stop presidential advertisements)" would not be sufficient excuse to superseded a very important aspect of the law, said spokesperson Dr. Marcia Angell. Everyone choosing this option must be "deemed capable of making an informed decision." It's well documented that during an election season, this is virtually, if not completely impossible."
I ran into this with a customer of one of my clients recently. The insurance company was using a setup from Websense to snoop on all HTTPS traffic. As best as I could tell, they were snooping ALL traffic (banking, healthcare included), not just "safe" sites.
Surely this breaks privacy laws in numerous instances. HIPAA? Banking laws? Shoot, there's a federal law that could make snooping in on your NetFlicks traffic (video rentals) illegal. Ironically, if SOPA/PIPA had passed, HTTPS snooping would have been legal.
As for the moral aspect of this, and all the people that say "you shouldn't do personal stuff at work," a few points to keep in mind. 1) Only the IT staff at this company new what was going on. No one outside the IT department could find any reference, or notification. 2) This was REQUIRED on all home PC's that utilized their VPN network (kinda shoots down doing your home stuff at home). 3) From what I was told by their IT staff (remember I was a 3rd party, trying to get our networks connections to work), the IT staff regularly "audited" HTTPS traffic. That means someone in-house was regularly looking at bank account information, and health care information of their fellow employees, and they weren't making this known to the general population within the company.
I tried to get some main stream press attention on this topic a while back. No one would bite.
More than likely any "auditing" that may occur will be based solely on ID3 tags. Simply audit all of the ID3 tags (probably just the comments field) for anything that might be incriminating. (find . -name "*.mp3" -exec mp3info2 -p '%c: %F\n' {} \; | egrep "bad tags|more bad tags")
For that matter deleting everything in the comments fields would probably remove all possibility of incrimination. (find . -name "*.mp3" -exec mp3info2 -c "" {} \;)
I'm in a similar situation with memory loss due to a sleeping disorder. In short, the worse I sleep, the less I'm able to immediately remember. I'm not talking about things like arcane switches to iptables (I mention iptables because I was recently passed over for a job because I couldn't list all of the switches and what they are used for, in the middle of an interview). I'm talking about names of people I've known for years, or forgetting what a red-light means (thank God I'm rarely that bad, and it's never caused any accidents).
Proper sleep hygiene is absolutely necessary for both short term, and long term memory access. I say memory access because I believe most everything is retained, but the difficulty comes in pulling it back up again.
The only method I've had for successfully offsetting bad sleep patterns has been nutritional supplements. Personally speaking, I use a product called Memorin from Vaxa http://www.vaxa.com/663.cfm (disclaimer, yes I have a distributorship with the company to save money, no this link DOES NOT reference me in any way, and I will NOT be getting a kick back from any sales it generates). It has never made me jittery, or agitated like caffeine, or speed type supplements. Generally the only way I know it's working is that I'm able to remember stuff easier then normal, and focus a little better.
If supplements aren't your thing, I have a friend that has gone through a major diet change to offset excessive memory fatigue. No hydrogenated fats, no preservatives, reduced (cane) sugar intake, those type of things. Personally speaking I couldn't do it. But hey, to each his own.
I'd just like to point out that GigE connections are becoming more and more available. Most corporate networks that are being built, or upgraded are being built with GigE to the desktop. Granted, most are set to 100k, but all it takes is one non-so-tech-savvy manager that demands er..."requires" GigE be turned on for his desktop, to be infected by spyware / some random virus.
The rest of the story will be blamed on the DNS administrator.
Precedence is the true problem here, not searching for kiddie porn.
It's quite reasonable to say that customs inspectors do not have time to dig through someone's laptop. In the future, as the number of international flights continues to rise, the time a customs inspector has to look over your luggage will drop significantly.
Therefor, it's quite reasonable to presume that at some point in time in the future customs officials will have at their disposal a mechanism to quickly backup the hard drive for "inspection" by a third party. Of course this will be made easier with some new standard that is required in all "portable computers."
The problem then is not if the customs agent is reading your personal documents. The problem becomes what does the third party, contracted to review all data, do with that data while they have posession? Share your love letters with the FBI? Share your medical data with your insurance companies? The possibilities are endless, and it all starts with the expectation that customs officials have the "right" to view all data on your person.
Engineers have lost control of their IT departments. In truth, this might have happened long ago, but as the topic suggests, I've just come to that conclusion this (now past) year.
For a long time now MBA's, and management types in general have struggled to understand, cut costs, and in general quantify something that is not quantifiable. After all, if a system administrator does their job correctly, you never know they're doing their job at all.
So the management types end up coming up with obtuse questions for which they expect hard answers. How many trouble tickets a day should a system administrator be able to close? Why didn't you have a "satisfactory" response from the end user when you closed the ticket? What justifies "spending extra time" on a problem? Why wasn't something done to prevent the problem?
These are all arbitrary questions that can't be answered with simple solutions. More importantly, these are all arbitrary questions that can't be quantified. They don't fit well into a spreadsheet. They don't take into account being woken up in the middle of the night, and prodded for an answer. They don't take into account carrying a pager 24/7. They don't take into account someone saying something to you in a hall way, and expecting you to remember it like your life depends on it. And they certainly don't take into account the basic fact that computer administration is an art, not a science.
So the MBA's of the world have started "laying down the law." Everyone must start work at 8AM, no exceptions (we don't care when you were paged). You must track all of your time spent through out the day (no potty breaks for you!). You must close X amount of tickets a day. You must carry on doing the work of the department, even though we have cut half the positions in an attempt to bolster the management bonuses. You must keep abreast of all current changes in technology, in your personal time. You will be expected to be able to answer about any new technical matter, but you can not spend work time learning about it, unless it was approved in writing first.
System administration in the way that I know it, having grown up in Bell Labs (literally), will go the way of the computer operator. There will be set shifts. There will be a union. There will be no creativity. Everything will be done in an organized fashion, and signed in triplicate.
This is one of those moves where some abandonware is being open sourced. Usually this happens with software, but here it's happening for hardware. The SPARC line is in decline; Sun is moving to x86 machines. Sun's hardware business is on the same trajectory as SGI's, but about five years behind. (Remember SGI, the MIPS processors, the overpriced x86 workstations, the bankruptcy?)
That theory might hold water, if Sun hasn't seen one of it's best years in recent history.
Sun Microsystems Exceeds Profit Target; Reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2007 ... Net income for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007 on a GAAP basis was $329 million, or $0.09 per share on a diluted basis. For the full fiscal year, net income was $473 million, or $0.13 per share, on a diluted basis, as compared with a net loss of $864 million, or ($0.25) per share, for fiscal 2006.
WebMink:
And... Oh, sorry, you were just trolling, right?
Oops! Is he really just trolling?
Oh, sorry Animats. Didn't mean to step on your trolling line there...
...mutter...mutter...gotta learn to shut up, and read further ahead more often...
Ahm, yea, right! They're just heading for financial collapse! They're just making lots of money along the way! Yea, Yea, that's the ticket!;)
One thing that the RIAA likes to forget about is a little court case that allowed "time shifting."
Time shifting is the recording of programming to a storage medium to be viewed or listened to at a time more convenient to the consumer. Typically, this refers to TV programming but can also refer to radio shows via podcasts.Time Shifting
What tools would you use to "time shift" a webcast but a stream-ripper? Therefore, eliminating the stream-rippers effectively rewrites the law.
Give it time. Even if they actually get webcast streams intertwined with DRM (which I highly doubt), it won't be long until someone sues because they can't exercise their rights under the law.
For now, the parties involved in what's described as ongoing negotiations have agreed to waive at least temporarily the minimum charge of $6,000 per channel required under a scheme created by the Copyright Royalty Board, or CRB.
Ahm, thats $500/per channel. Now with the lack of definition of "what is a channel" from the CRB, an individual station / site could end up paying $6000 or MORE (ie: Pandora with it's 7 channels per user could end up paying BILLIONS).
Shane
(General Manager, of the internet radio station Big Blue Swing.com)
MRI uses huge magnetic fields that researchers are exposed to on a daily basis and there is no solid data that it causes biologic harm If you want to see what effect huge magnetic fields have on cell life, ask your local hospital if they have any plants in/around their MRI suite. If there is, ask them exactly how healthy they are.
The weird thing is plants seem to flourish, almost coming back from the dead when they spend time in the general MRI area. We saw a regular turn over of flowers from people that were looking to revive their plants.
Anything that has that drastic of an outcome on simple life forms, definitely needs to be studied longer to ascertain it's effect on other life forms. Whether it's good, or bad.
United Nuclear is run by Bob Lazar, who some 20 years ago claimed to have worked on alien spaceships on a secret military base in Nevada, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Lazar was unavailable for comment on Tuesday.
Did this paragraph strike anyone else as nothing more than sensationalism in the article? Did someone along the line actually say "hey, this doesn't have all that much pizzazz, so let's make the owner seem like a real nut job." I mean, come on! How does what the owner claimed he did 20 years ago, have bearing on the current story?
Shane
(These comments brought to you by a guy that claimed some 10 years ago, that he worked in the sweat shop owned by pre-historic midget squirrels. "My past employment with IBM doesn't have any bearing on this story," he's repeatedly stated.)
What if Micky$oft hadn't included Mapudungun as a language option?
What repercussions of anti-Mapudungun fudd would we be seeing? Would the story read, "Microsoft sued for racial profiling against the Mapuche?" Would we also see quotes from the Mapuche tribe saying, "Microsoft is nothing more than language bigots for not recognizing our people, and their language as part of the human race?"
Either way, I'm not surprised this story came about, and I won't be surprised if it happens again in the future. One way or another, I can't help but think this all boils down to...money.
Shane
(yes, I'm shamelessly publishing links to my servers for all the Slashdot community to hit. After all, they have to have some reason to keep me employed!;)
A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto
Sounds about right. Most cameramen I know (including myself) are just big hams!
Stop fixating on the mAh's!!
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
At least stop fixating on mAh's if you're doing anything that requires a fast discharge (i.e.:fast action photography work that requires a flash).
My main beef with how batteries (rechargeable, or disposable) are rated these days, has to do with the fact that most of them don't disclose the internal resistance of the battery. The AA battery could have 4000 mAh, but if it's resistance is so slow that my flash takes 15-20 seconds to recharge, it's useless. I'll gladly take a 1000 mAh battery that recharges my flash in 5 seconds, even if I have to change batteries three times in a shoot.
As for everyone that's going to try to say "well if you bought a better camera," well let me shoot a few holes in that theory. First off, I'm a professional photographer that does a majority of my work out of the studio. Often I'm at public events that require lots of pictures, in short bursts. In low light condition I rely on my hot-shoe flash to handle the lighting. My options in this setup are either walk around with a brick (large battery designed specifically to power camera equipment) around my neck, or use AA batteries. Consequently I go buy the Energizer lithium eight pack of AA batteries or two pack of CRV3's for about $20.
If I could get some guaranteed good, low resistance, rechargeable batteries, I would buy them in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, the technical specs on most batteries just aren't available, because everyone fixates on "how much power they hold."
Nope, they just flipped the switch from "magic," to "more magic."
(Kudos to all anyone who recognizes that!)
As far as tours, and such, check out the AMSE - American Museum of Science and Energy. I don't know that they stop by the labs, but you'll get a pretty good idea of "The Secret City project," Oak Ridge's history during WWII, and how OR is morphing into a center for research in all areas.
(Disclaimer: I work for the DOE, in Oak Ridge, so I see this stuff all the time.)
Slashdot Mirror
I would think this would have much better uses than advertising. PSA's for example;
"Mind the gap"
"Walk on the left side"
"Remember your reusable grocery bag"
etc.
I remember picking up a magazine in the early 90's, and reading about the "Gopher Site of the Year." Which included, if one were to "walk" into the restroom in the tavern, the ability to read a limerick from my server.
Ahhh....my 15 minutes a fame. When most everyone didn't even know what the Internet was yet.
just move the listening port to something other than 22 for fucks sake.
Which will move their attempts to another port. ...Oops, sorry. Forgot to say "for fucks sake."
The way you solve this, is by installing Fail2Ban (and change the default time) or other similar products. Automatically utilizing the system firewall (iptables and the like) to prevent them from even trying.
And yes, 59,000 attempts is a problem that needs to be addressed. If for no other reason, than it's stealing bandwidth, and slowing down the entire server / connection.
One slight item missing from the article...
"Due to the fear of mass suicides from the mental anguish caused by elections, the Death With Dignity Act would be suspended three months prior to all elections. "Not wanting to live like this (being exposed to non-stop presidential advertisements)" would not be sufficient excuse to superseded a very important aspect of the law, said spokesperson Dr. Marcia Angell. Everyone choosing this option must be "deemed capable of making an informed decision." It's well documented that during an election season, this is virtually, if not completely impossible."
I ran into this with a customer of one of my clients recently. The insurance company was using a setup from Websense to snoop on all HTTPS traffic. As best as I could tell, they were snooping ALL traffic (banking, healthcare included), not just "safe" sites.
Surely this breaks privacy laws in numerous instances. HIPAA? Banking laws? Shoot, there's a federal law that could make snooping in on your NetFlicks traffic (video rentals) illegal. Ironically, if SOPA/PIPA had passed, HTTPS snooping would have been legal.
As for the moral aspect of this, and all the people that say "you shouldn't do personal stuff at work," a few points to keep in mind. 1) Only the IT staff at this company new what was going on. No one outside the IT department could find any reference, or notification. 2) This was REQUIRED on all home PC's that utilized their VPN network (kinda shoots down doing your home stuff at home). 3) From what I was told by their IT staff (remember I was a 3rd party, trying to get our networks connections to work), the IT staff regularly "audited" HTTPS traffic. That means someone in-house was regularly looking at bank account information, and health care information of their fellow employees, and they weren't making this known to the general population within the company.
I tried to get some main stream press attention on this topic a while back. No one would bite.
More than likely any "auditing" that may occur will be based solely on ID3 tags. Simply audit all of the ID3 tags (probably just the comments field) for anything that might be incriminating. (find . -name "*.mp3" -exec mp3info2 -p '%c: %F\n' {} \; | egrep "bad tags|more bad tags")
For that matter deleting everything in the comments fields would probably remove all possibility of incrimination. (find . -name "*.mp3" -exec mp3info2 -c "" {} \;)
Fortunately there's a few left...
https://twitter.com/#!/repronpaul/status/10716266021003264
Did anyone else read this as "IKEA Forms Nuclear Fuel Bank?"
My first thought was, "Man, those stores really do have everything!"
I'm in a similar situation with memory loss due to a sleeping disorder. In short, the worse I sleep, the less I'm able to immediately remember. I'm not talking about things like arcane switches to iptables (I mention iptables because I was recently passed over for a job because I couldn't list all of the switches and what they are used for, in the middle of an interview). I'm talking about names of people I've known for years, or forgetting what a red-light means (thank God I'm rarely that bad, and it's never caused any accidents).
Proper sleep hygiene is absolutely necessary for both short term, and long term memory access. I say memory access because I believe most everything is retained, but the difficulty comes in pulling it back up again.
The only method I've had for successfully offsetting bad sleep patterns has been nutritional supplements. Personally speaking, I use a product called Memorin from Vaxa http://www.vaxa.com/663.cfm (disclaimer, yes I have a distributorship with the company to save money, no this link DOES NOT reference me in any way, and I will NOT be getting a kick back from any sales it generates). It has never made me jittery, or agitated like caffeine, or speed type supplements. Generally the only way I know it's working is that I'm able to remember stuff easier then normal, and focus a little better.
If supplements aren't your thing, I have a friend that has gone through a major diet change to offset excessive memory fatigue. No hydrogenated fats, no preservatives, reduced (cane) sugar intake, those type of things. Personally speaking I couldn't do it. But hey, to each his own.
I'd just like to point out that GigE connections are becoming more and more available. Most corporate networks that are being built, or upgraded are being built with GigE to the desktop. Granted, most are set to 100k, but all it takes is one non-so-tech-savvy manager that demands er..."requires" GigE be turned on for his desktop, to be infected by spyware / some random virus.
The rest of the story will be blamed on the DNS administrator.
Precedence is the true problem here, not searching for kiddie porn.
It's quite reasonable to say that customs inspectors do not have time to dig through someone's laptop. In the future, as the number of international flights continues to rise, the time a customs inspector has to look over your luggage will drop significantly.
Therefor, it's quite reasonable to presume that at some point in time in the future customs officials will have at their disposal a mechanism to quickly backup the hard drive for "inspection" by a third party. Of course this will be made easier with some new standard that is required in all "portable computers."
The problem then is not if the customs agent is reading your personal documents. The problem becomes what does the third party, contracted to review all data, do with that data while they have posession? Share your love letters with the FBI? Share your medical data with your insurance companies? The possibilities are endless, and it all starts with the expectation that customs officials have the "right" to view all data on your person.
Shane
Engineers have lost control of their IT departments. In truth, this might have happened long ago, but as the topic suggests, I've just come to that conclusion this (now past) year.
For a long time now MBA's, and management types in general have struggled to understand, cut costs, and in general quantify something that is not quantifiable. After all, if a system administrator does their job correctly, you never know they're doing their job at all.
So the management types end up coming up with obtuse questions for which they expect hard answers. How many trouble tickets a day should a system administrator be able to close? Why didn't you have a "satisfactory" response from the end user when you closed the ticket? What justifies "spending extra time" on a problem? Why wasn't something done to prevent the problem?
These are all arbitrary questions that can't be answered with simple solutions. More importantly, these are all arbitrary questions that can't be quantified. They don't fit well into a spreadsheet. They don't take into account being woken up in the middle of the night, and prodded for an answer. They don't take into account carrying a pager 24/7. They don't take into account someone saying something to you in a hall way, and expecting you to remember it like your life depends on it. And they certainly don't take into account the basic fact that computer administration is an art, not a science.
So the MBA's of the world have started "laying down the law." Everyone must start work at 8AM, no exceptions (we don't care when you were paged). You must track all of your time spent through out the day (no potty breaks for you!). You must close X amount of tickets a day. You must carry on doing the work of the department, even though we have cut half the positions in an attempt to bolster the management bonuses. You must keep abreast of all current changes in technology, in your personal time. You will be expected to be able to answer about any new technical matter, but you can not spend work time learning about it, unless it was approved in writing first.
System administration in the way that I know it, having grown up in Bell Labs (literally), will go the way of the computer operator. There will be set shifts. There will be a union. There will be no creativity. Everything will be done in an organized fashion, and signed in triplicate.
No exceptions.
That theory might hold water, if Sun hasn't seen one of it's best years in recent history.
WebMink:
Oops! Is he really just trolling?Oh, sorry Animats. Didn't mean to step on your trolling line there...
Ahm, yea, right! They're just heading for financial collapse! They're just making lots of money along the way! Yea, Yea, that's the ticket! ;)
Shane
It could have been worse.
They could have invited him to go hunting with Dick "Buckshot" Cheney!
Shane
Time shifting is the recording of programming to a storage medium to be viewed or listened to at a time more convenient to the consumer. Typically, this refers to TV programming but can also refer to radio shows via podcasts. Time Shifting
What tools would you use to "time shift" a webcast but a stream-ripper? Therefore, eliminating the stream-rippers effectively rewrites the law.
Give it time. Even if they actually get webcast streams intertwined with DRM (which I highly doubt), it won't be long until someone sues because they can't exercise their rights under the law.
Shane
General Manager,
Big Blue Swing.com
Ahm, thats $500/per channel. Now with the lack of definition of "what is a channel" from the CRB, an individual station / site could end up paying $6000 or MORE (ie: Pandora with it's 7 channels per user could end up paying BILLIONS).
Shane (General Manager, of the internet radio station Big Blue Swing.com)
The weird thing is plants seem to flourish, almost coming back from the dead when they spend time in the general MRI area. We saw a regular turn over of flowers from people that were looking to revive their plants.
Anything that has that drastic of an outcome on simple life forms, definitely needs to be studied longer to ascertain it's effect on other life forms. Whether it's good, or bad.
Shane
Top of the line Acer's? Isn't that an oxymoron?
Did this paragraph strike anyone else as nothing more than sensationalism in the article? Did someone along the line actually say "hey, this doesn't have all that much pizzazz, so let's make the owner seem like a real nut job." I mean, come on! How does what the owner claimed he did 20 years ago, have bearing on the current story?
Shane
(These comments brought to you by a guy that claimed some 10 years ago, that he worked in the sweat shop owned by pre-historic midget squirrels. "My past employment with IBM doesn't have any bearing on this story," he's repeatedly stated.)
What if Micky$oft hadn't included Mapudungun as a language option?
What repercussions of anti-Mapudungun fudd would we be seeing? Would the story read, "Microsoft sued for racial profiling against the Mapuche?" Would we also see quotes from the Mapuche tribe saying, "Microsoft is nothing more than language bigots for not recognizing our people, and their language as part of the human race?"
Either way, I'm not surprised this story came about, and I won't be surprised if it happens again in the future. One way or another, I can't help but think this all boils down to...money.
Shane
In addition, there are 101 references for "Electrostatic Confinement Fusion."
Shane ;)
(yes, I'm shamelessly publishing links to my servers for all the Slashdot community to hit. After all, they have to have some reason to keep me employed!
Sounds about right. Most cameramen I know (including myself) are just big hams!
At least stop fixating on mAh's if you're doing anything that requires a fast discharge (i.e.:fast action photography work that requires a flash).
My main beef with how batteries (rechargeable, or disposable) are rated these days, has to do with the fact that most of them don't disclose the internal resistance of the battery. The AA battery could have 4000 mAh, but if it's resistance is so slow that my flash takes 15-20 seconds to recharge, it's useless. I'll gladly take a 1000 mAh battery that recharges my flash in 5 seconds, even if I have to change batteries three times in a shoot.
As for everyone that's going to try to say "well if you bought a better camera," well let me shoot a few holes in that theory. First off, I'm a professional photographer that does a majority of my work out of the studio. Often I'm at public events that require lots of pictures, in short bursts. In low light condition I rely on my hot-shoe flash to handle the lighting. My options in this setup are either walk around with a brick (large battery designed specifically to power camera equipment) around my neck, or use AA batteries. Consequently I go buy the Energizer lithium eight pack of AA batteries or two pack of CRV3's for about $20.
If I could get some guaranteed good, low resistance, rechargeable batteries, I would buy them in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, the technical specs on most batteries just aren't available, because everyone fixates on "how much power they hold."
(Kudos to all anyone who recognizes that!)
As far as tours, and such, check out the AMSE - American Museum of Science and Energy. I don't know that they stop by the labs, but you'll get a pretty good idea of "The Secret City project," Oak Ridge's history during WWII, and how OR is morphing into a center for research in all areas.
(Disclaimer: I work for the DOE, in Oak Ridge, so I see this stuff all the time.)
Shane
Curiosity killed the first cat, the second died of boredom.