That is a big big difference in the MS software culture vs. linux or just open source in general. Software is signed, and from day one users are bombarded with notices about the package signing and instructions on how to use them. Until I started using open source, I don't remember ever once being told to checksum windows software before installing.
I have even on occasion grabbed torrents of distros from relatively shady torrent sites because they had more seeds or whatever closer to my home, unconcerned about the final download because I had the signature from a trusted source to check once it was down to insure it was for real. The simple checking culture makes malware infiltration difficult (although not impossible) in to open source software.
The pointless MS astroturfing for win 7 seems fairly blatant around slashdot today. You would be like number 20 on this topic alone, that has not contributed anything other than to stroke MS.
So, let me see, if I get this right. For some reason my web hosting (collocated dedicated server, visualization, load balancing servers) has just become "cloud computing" because they take place somewhere other than my desktop?
So what the f*** have I been doing for the last 10-15 years? For that matter, anything else that has happened on a network or the Internet over say the last 30 years or more?
It is a silly piece of marketing to rebrand the client / server paradigm.
Thank god I started by making my business an all Linux / open source shop from the start. It is hard to put real numbers to it, but I suspect it has saved me an easy $30,000 a year in IT cost for a small shop of around 6 employees (it will scale to around 12-24 easily without much investment). Perhaps something around $100,000 is a fair number to date in savings over the last 4 years. A case could be made for saving a whole lot more, if you add up the cost of all the propitiatory equivalents we use in terms of databases, hosting, mail servers, open source web packages, and so on ( three linux servers of various sorts). Even the routers use open firmware. My total IT budget is around $2,000 a year ($4,000 for everything including bandwidth and phone lines).
I might add, I am not including my own labor in this number. Just the cost of the hardware and software. Honestly, I remember spending a whole lot more time screwing with viruse infested crashing messes at my last job that was all windows network (and that was not even my job), then I ever do maintaining my linux systems.
Because I run Linux, I have been able to run old computers in to the ground that I would have needed to replace at least once or twice by now, plus figure a copy of xp, vista, and now windows 7 in the time we have been open. The only reason I replace a PC is because the hardware fails. In fact, that is really the way it should be. Not because the software is more bloated. My oldest system still in everyday use is a PIII IBM T-22 notebook with 500 mb of ram, and half the office is still running single core Semprons just fine. The only thing making me considering upgrading currently is the possibility of energy savings with mini systems that use less juice and still get the job done. I am looking to downgrade basically. I am waiting for the industry to sort out the linux smart phone situation a bit more, and I will deploy linux phones to all my staff. Hell if that goes well, I will get rid of the cost of the frigen office all together. There, I found $2000 in cost conversion to linux. What it will cost me to break my office lease and sell the furniture.
Yea, the suckers are sufficiently stupid to fund our telescopes. We are getting some very nice hardware for nothing.
It was holding one of the the clearest and most unpolluted skies over their head that made them cry uncle and beg to built it, and they just keep on coming. Not our problem they f***ed up their environment to the point that no one in the northern hemisphere can see the stars anymore.
Just wait, in 50 years Chile is going repo those telescopes and charge by the star. It is all an elaborate plot by Chile to take over the Universe.
You need to get to know China a bit better, and what they are doing.
They lifted a population equal to or greater than the U.S. population out of extrema poverty in less than a generation. Most of my friends in China have stories about relatives and friends that starved to death. I am not talking 50 years ago either. I mean like 10 years ago.
It would be impossible with a population that large to simply flip on the democracy light. Millions really would die in civil war and unrest. I am not advocating repression, but it is simply a practical fact of having population of more than billion people. The "communist" in communist party is mostly just symbolic now. Yes, it is corrupt. In fact, I believe China on some level is only functioning because the corruption keeps things moving. There is very little in common with western ideas of "communism" and "socialism". Perhaps an oligarchy is s better description of what they have. It in many ways today is much more free than many of the "allies" of the United States (e.g. all of the middle east), not to mention how well Russia is doing on that front.
An Nobel winning economist (can not remember his name right off hand), in an interview once pointed out that the big difference between the transition of Russia to open markets and democracy and the transition of China, is that the Chinese even under extreme repressive communism always had a tradition of commerce and trade. Local markets functioned, trade of goods and services went on. Russia never had that. Russia had even under the royal families a tradition of tightly controlled centralized resources.
First, that is a joke. I know the infrastructure is built on mostly unix. That is not my reference.
It is the rampant adoption of unsecured MS computers that is the source of most of the malware / viruses / botnets / vulnerability on the Internet that is the weapon of mass disconnection around the World.
We could likely eliminate something like 90% of all problems (major problems) with the Internet overnight by outlawing the use of MS products. Imagine a spam free, virus free, bot free internet, or at least a reduction to about 1/10 of what it is or better right now in one go. We just need to eliminate one company's product from the Internet, to free up massive amounts of bandwidth, waisted resources, criminal activity. aaaahhh the utopia that could be.
By the way all you MS people that are going to do the, "but windows security is better now" can kiss my ass. Most of the World does not, and will not ever use windows 7 or even vista. They are forced to use outdated / illegal copies because windows is too frigen expensive. Tell all those schools in China and the rest of the developing World to fork over hundreds of dollars a copy (a years pay for some) vs. no computers at all.
Just lived through heart of the South American H1N1 flue (without getting any flue), it is way more than time involved in distinguishing it. For example, fever is one of the core distinguishing symptoms. Which you may or may not get right off the bat with H1N1, at least at a detectable level.
That is kind of ironic. Racism is/was often invoked as a motive for anyone critical of the Republican / Bush administration policies.
I have lived all over the World, and the U.S. is still hands down one of the countries with the most racial issues to sort out. We paper over the problems with a lot of politically correct b.s., yet neither the left nor the right will engage it because it is a deep ready source of political leverage against the other side.
I really don't see why all the head scratching here is about. A proper bit of research on Google would answer this. This is a fairly trivial task with most any linux distro on both ends (Tomato or similar flashed routers would likly be able to do it also). I guess the limit on this is how many connections can you plug in (your hardware or kernel handle), and how many will your isp sell you.
I have to use multiple ISP where I live because none are reliable for 100% up time, and none will sell much more than 4 mb-6mb per connection but they will allow me to stack dsl connections as much as I want. SSH is my choice for VPN solution, but I suspect any other VPN will do the trick with some tweaking of the iptables and such.
Here is the problem. All the IT people here are looking like this as a XOR problem. Either it is good or it is not. The law really does not work that way. What has likely protected GPL from real challenges more than what letter of the law says, is simply most everyone that used it was more or less judgment proof. It was only recent years that big money started getting in to the picture. Very few lawyers that are worth a dam would bring a law suit against the one man band in his basement coding in his spare time, and few of those one man bands would have the resources to take on say the likes of IBM or whatever over not following the licenses.
Now however we are getting in to problems. The money is there.
Still, on a real practical level the purpose and goal of the GPL has been met. Basically, to either force or encourage people to share their work. Yea, there might be a few real court challenges, but will everyone just one day come along and claim that all GPL built can somehow be claimed to be closed? The very nature of the way it came about, insures that gene is not going back in the bottle for 99.9% of all works covered by it.
Let's see (even for the enterprise), $0.10 cent cd (max $50 deployment cost for stack of a thousand cds) vs thousands of dollars in hardware, software, and support. All that money and time, and it is not clear exactly how those solutions would still solve the security problem. I might go so far as to buy some sort of virtual machines with read only images, and the cost of just one machine in the office dedicated to being the secure machine.
I think I would rather be the guy in a board room pitching the $50 solution rather than the $1,000,000 solution.
Personally, I went with an all linux / opensource office from the start.
yea, fairly obvious you are not familiar with how linux works. More importantly, the malware writers would have to be very very familiar with exactly how your particular disto and bios works together, how you write the cd (including the os you are working on), among other things, and get lucky with a sort of probability that if you have that sort of luck you should be at a casino in vegas not trying to steel some random persons code. Basically you would have a better chance of just guessing the password on the first try.
There are two dirty secrets that the environmental movement does not like to talk about or engage in because either it is not politically correct among the politically correct or they do not gain much in the way of donations and support for it.
1. Population control. God for bid we would encourage people to have less Children as a way to help the environment.
2. Cleaning up a place that is already spoiled (not talking about picking up trash in the national park). Yes, there is some of this that goes on, but for the most part toxic dumps do not sell. Saving a 1,000 year old tree gets donations, but trying to cleanup a toxic site is just not sexy. It is expensive and time consuming, sometimes requiring generations and millions of dollars.
Why do you think the tech industry holds comdex, defcon, and other IT shows in Las Vegas?
On the other hand after living in Vegas for many years, I can tell you that the gambling industry does not really think much of IT people as customers. In Las Vegas the guys that go to comdex (defcon) have a bad rep among the casinos. It seems IT people are flush with cash, cheap, and not willing to gamble much because they know the frigen systems are rigged against them. The biggest strike they have against them is they do not tip well.
You would likely have less of black mark on your carrier than if you where a waitress in Vegas and then tried to get job in some other part of the U.S.
I have to hand it to Google for trying to break the proprietary locked cell phone one trick pony problem, but so far everything I have seen indicates that we just have another locked up OS. This is free software for the handset makers, not the end user.
What we want and need is a fully Linux, no bs platform, no hidden anything. So far, the nokia n900 looks like it will do that. Especially with the announcement of the qt libraries will be in the next versions of maemo.
I am sick of being treated like a criminal for jail-breaking / accessing my own hardware and software that I payed lots of money to own and use as I see fit. F*** Google and all their handset Android makers. I am voting with my dollars and my companies dollars, and going with a full linux distro I can customize as needed for my business.
Now I just hope Nokia does not get stupid and drop the ball. They seem to have a tendency to loose their momentum.
I think I was being a bit too sarcastic with my last post, and my point was lost.
Your attack assumes that you can insert a fake download and publish a fake md5sum. Which either you have access to the site that it is posted on, access to the real Firefox (or whatever browser), or the particular end user's computer / connection is already breached in some other serious fashion. Any of which I would think would be such a serious exploit to make messing around with a fake CA rather pointless. All the data your fake CA was suppose to gather, is already available by less complicated means.
Of the thousands of open source projects out there that publish free software on their sites along with the md5sum to verify it, I am not aware of any instances of anyone pulling this off. There have been a few cases of malicious code being uploaded to the servers and published, but they are caught rather quickly by the community because of the trickle down review effect.
They where however direct exploits inserted in to the code, not intercepting the download.
It is rarely the case that an md5sum is published in one and only one place (at least for big projects). I would also point out that most browsers (at least in Linux land) are distributed by the distro updates, not directly with firefox or whatever.
A bigger threat along these lines from my perspective would be the threat of a fully rogue linux distro being published. It has gotten fairly easy for people to spin their own, and there is sure a growing number of new users out there (both using and working on projects). What is to stop someone from pushing out one with malicious software in it?
Yes, and how do know that the browser that you originally installed with your operating system was not forged? How do you know your OS or your bios can be trusted? Hell, for that matter how do you know you can be trusted?
Ooooooohhh the horror!!!!
Not to be a troll, but you are really pushing that off in to fantasy land. My point it that security vulnerabilities based on 'just so' hypotheticals, are less likly to be a real world threat. Possible yes. Likely no.
We just got through the H1N1 flue and regular flue season in Chile. It was bad, but not anything like the way they are hyping it up in the States. People got sick, a few people died, but life went on as normal just fine. The only real thing that set it apart was the age of those that died.
Before the season hit I paid to have all my employees get the normal flue shot. My reasoning was that at least it would lower the confusion if anyone did get sick it might be easier to dignose if there was lower probability that someone was just getting the seasonal flue. The problem we faced when it started here was it was so early in the outbreak around the World that it was not even clear what the symptoms, treatment, or progression was going to be like. It was a good call, because it turned out there was no real way to differentiate it from the normal flue. The Chilean government quit trying to test and quarantine very early on, and just prescribed H1N1 meds to anyone that presented a fever and one other classic symptom. They did not waist resources or time testing everyone. They made tamiflue and related medication widely available to everyone in the country for free with no questions asked.
All told, I know a couple of people that got the flue personally and where formally diagnosed with it. I am almost certain two of my employees did contract it, one got the seasonal flue shot and one did not. Neither got medication for it, and just rode it out like the normal flue.
All and all it was just a bad flue season, and honestly I believe I have lived through much worse when I lived in the Northern Hemisphere. The initial psychological panic around it was more damaging than the bug. Even that passed as everyone realized we where not all going to turn in to zombies and start eating human brains.
The thing that scares me is the boomerang effect next year. That bug is going to go off to places like the U.S., where they health care system is a disaster, it will go through the super bug wash of various mixes of over-prescribed antibiotics or populations that can not afford treatment, and then it is going to return next year more of a super bug. I doubt however there is anyone left in south America that has not been exposed to it. The U.S. and much of the Northern hemisphere I do not believe can just provide free medication to everyone. The populations are too big. People are going to hesitate to go to doctors, not buy the medication, and it is going to spread much faster than it did here.
One more piece of layman's medical advice / observation about H1N1. Watch out for handling money. All the banks (and other locations with high cash flows) I went to seemed to be the hardest hit locations (like 30% or more of the staff out or sick), even more than the hospital staff it seemed. As I understand it can live on money for like 12 to 48 hours. Just think of how many hands say your average $1 or $5 bills goes through in a 48 hour period. Stick to using your plastic when possible to pay for things. Petty cash is the fastest way to spread anything.
Someone who is smarter than me, please enlighten me to why we are not converting cell networks in to simple wireless networks and loading them up with VOIP services, other than the need to screw people out of multi-year contract? Why is there no wireless mesh networking just outright replacing cell towers everywhere?
wifi g - n signals (I am sure we will have better to work with someday) can be beamed a hundred miles, the technology is relatively cheap and robust (as in make in your basement cheap and robust). Why are we still goofing around with cell towers? Hell, why do we even have cell phone companies?
All the technology exists, is tested, and works. It just needs to be deployed.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a big big difference in the MS software culture vs. linux or just open source in general. Software is signed, and from day one users are bombarded with notices about the package signing and instructions on how to use them. Until I started using open source, I don't remember ever once being told to checksum windows software before installing.
I have even on occasion grabbed torrents of distros from relatively shady torrent sites because they had more seeds or whatever closer to my home, unconcerned about the final download because I had the signature from a trusted source to check once it was down to insure it was for real. The simple checking culture makes malware infiltration difficult (although not impossible) in to open source software.
Do you guys not see the massive MS astroturfing going on in this topic, not to mention the original article?
People please?
Is slash getting a paycheck for this one?
The pointless MS astroturfing for win 7 seems fairly blatant around slashdot today. You would be like number 20 on this topic alone, that has not contributed anything other than to stroke MS.
MOD these suckers!!!!
So, let me see, if I get this right. For some reason my web hosting (collocated dedicated server, visualization, load balancing servers) has just become "cloud computing" because they take place somewhere other than my desktop?
So what the f*** have I been doing for the last 10-15 years? For that matter, anything else that has happened on a network or the Internet over say the last 30 years or more?
It is a silly piece of marketing to rebrand the client / server paradigm.
Thank god I started by making my business an all Linux / open source shop from the start. It is hard to put real numbers to it, but I suspect it has saved me an easy $30,000 a year in IT cost for a small shop of around 6 employees (it will scale to around 12-24 easily without much investment). Perhaps something around $100,000 is a fair number to date in savings over the last 4 years. A case could be made for saving a whole lot more, if you add up the cost of all the propitiatory equivalents we use in terms of databases, hosting, mail servers, open source web packages, and so on ( three linux servers of various sorts). Even the routers use open firmware. My total IT budget is around $2,000 a year ($4,000 for everything including bandwidth and phone lines).
I might add, I am not including my own labor in this number. Just the cost of the hardware and software. Honestly, I remember spending a whole lot more time screwing with viruse infested crashing messes at my last job that was all windows network (and that was not even my job), then I ever do maintaining my linux systems.
Because I run Linux, I have been able to run old computers in to the ground that I would have needed to replace at least once or twice by now, plus figure a copy of xp, vista, and now windows 7 in the time we have been open. The only reason I replace a PC is because the hardware fails. In fact, that is really the way it should be. Not because the software is more bloated. My oldest system still in everyday use is a PIII IBM T-22 notebook with 500 mb of ram, and half the office is still running single core Semprons just fine. The only thing making me considering upgrading currently is the possibility of energy savings with mini systems that use less juice and still get the job done. I am looking to downgrade basically. I am waiting for the industry to sort out the linux smart phone situation a bit more, and I will deploy linux phones to all my staff. Hell if that goes well, I will get rid of the cost of the frigen office all together. There, I found $2000 in cost conversion to linux. What it will cost me to break my office lease and sell the furniture.
Chile Puede!!!!!!!!!!
Yea, the suckers are sufficiently stupid to fund our telescopes. We are getting some very nice hardware for nothing.
It was holding one of the the clearest and most unpolluted skies over their head that made them cry uncle and beg to built it, and they just keep on coming. Not our problem they f***ed up their environment to the point that no one in the northern hemisphere can see the stars anymore.
Just wait, in 50 years Chile is going repo those telescopes and charge by the star. It is all an elaborate plot by Chile to take over the Universe.
You need to get to know China a bit better, and what they are doing.
They lifted a population equal to or greater than the U.S. population out of extrema poverty in less than a generation. Most of my friends in China have stories about relatives and friends that starved to death. I am not talking 50 years ago either. I mean like 10 years ago.
It would be impossible with a population that large to simply flip on the democracy light. Millions really would die in civil war and unrest. I am not advocating repression, but it is simply a practical fact of having population of more than billion people. The "communist" in communist party is mostly just symbolic now. Yes, it is corrupt. In fact, I believe China on some level is only functioning because the corruption keeps things moving. There is very little in common with western ideas of "communism" and "socialism". Perhaps an oligarchy is s better description of what they have. It in many ways today is much more free than many of the "allies" of the United States (e.g. all of the middle east), not to mention how well Russia is doing on that front.
An Nobel winning economist (can not remember his name right off hand), in an interview once pointed out that the big difference between the transition of Russia to open markets and democracy and the transition of China, is that the Chinese even under extreme repressive communism always had a tradition of commerce and trade. Local markets functioned, trade of goods and services went on. Russia never had that. Russia had even under the royal families a tradition of tightly controlled centralized resources.
First, that is a joke. I know the infrastructure is built on mostly unix. That is not my reference.
It is the rampant adoption of unsecured MS computers that is the source of most of the malware / viruses / botnets / vulnerability on the Internet that is the weapon of mass disconnection around the World.
We could likely eliminate something like 90% of all problems (major problems) with the Internet overnight by outlawing the use of MS products. Imagine a spam free, virus free, bot free internet, or at least a reduction to about 1/10 of what it is or better right now in one go. We just need to eliminate one company's product from the Internet, to free up massive amounts of bandwidth, waisted resources, criminal activity. aaaahhh the utopia that could be.
By the way all you MS people that are going to do the, "but windows security is better now" can kiss my ass. Most of the World does not, and will not ever use windows 7 or even vista. They are forced to use outdated / illegal copies because windows is too frigen expensive. Tell all those schools in China and the rest of the developing World to fork over hundreds of dollars a copy (a years pay for some) vs. no computers at all.
You obviously do not have sufficient experience as either an employee or and employer.
Just lived through heart of the South American H1N1 flue (without getting any flue), it is way more than time involved in distinguishing it. For example, fever is one of the core distinguishing symptoms. Which you may or may not get right off the bat with H1N1, at least at a detectable level.
That is kind of ironic. Racism is/was often invoked as a motive for anyone critical of the Republican / Bush administration policies.
I have lived all over the World, and the U.S. is still hands down one of the countries with the most racial issues to sort out. We paper over the problems with a lot of politically correct b.s., yet neither the left nor the right will engage it because it is a deep ready source of political leverage against the other side.
Yea, imagine the destruction and havoc you could cause by creating an Internet using mostly Microsoft software. Wait, we already did that. Never mind.
I really don't see why all the head scratching here is about. A proper bit of research on Google would answer this. This is a fairly trivial task with most any linux distro on both ends (Tomato or similar flashed routers would likly be able to do it also). I guess the limit on this is how many connections can you plug in (your hardware or kernel handle), and how many will your isp sell you.
I have to use multiple ISP where I live because none are reliable for 100% up time, and none will sell much more than 4 mb-6mb per connection but they will allow me to stack dsl connections as much as I want. SSH is my choice for VPN solution, but I suspect any other VPN will do the trick with some tweaking of the iptables and such.
Here is the problem. All the IT people here are looking like this as a XOR problem. Either it is good or it is not. The law really does not work that way. What has likely protected GPL from real challenges more than what letter of the law says, is simply most everyone that used it was more or less judgment proof. It was only recent years that big money started getting in to the picture. Very few lawyers that are worth a dam would bring a law suit against the one man band in his basement coding in his spare time, and few of those one man bands would have the resources to take on say the likes of IBM or whatever over not following the licenses.
Now however we are getting in to problems. The money is there.
Still, on a real practical level the purpose and goal of the GPL has been met. Basically, to either force or encourage people to share their work. Yea, there might be a few real court challenges, but will everyone just one day come along and claim that all GPL built can somehow be claimed to be closed? The very nature of the way it came about, insures that gene is not going back in the bottle for 99.9% of all works covered by it.
Let's see (even for the enterprise), $0.10 cent cd (max $50 deployment cost for stack of a thousand cds) vs thousands of dollars in hardware, software, and support. All that money and time, and it is not clear exactly how those solutions would still solve the security problem. I might go so far as to buy some sort of virtual machines with read only images, and the cost of just one machine in the office dedicated to being the secure machine.
I think I would rather be the guy in a board room pitching the $50 solution rather than the $1,000,000 solution.
Personally, I went with an all linux / opensource office from the start.
yea, fairly obvious you are not familiar with how linux works. More importantly, the malware writers would have to be very very familiar with exactly how your particular disto and bios works together, how you write the cd (including the os you are working on), among other things, and get lucky with a sort of probability that if you have that sort of luck you should be at a casino in vegas not trying to steel some random persons code. Basically you would have a better chance of just guessing the password on the first try.
There are two dirty secrets that the environmental movement does not like to talk about or engage in because either it is not politically correct among the politically correct or they do not gain much in the way of donations and support for it.
1. Population control. God for bid we would encourage people to have less Children as a way to help the environment.
2. Cleaning up a place that is already spoiled (not talking about picking up trash in the national park). Yes, there is some of this that goes on, but for the most part toxic dumps do not sell. Saving a 1,000 year old tree gets donations, but trying to cleanup a toxic site is just not sexy. It is expensive and time consuming, sometimes requiring generations and millions of dollars.
Why do you think the tech industry holds comdex, defcon, and other IT shows in Las Vegas?
On the other hand after living in Vegas for many years, I can tell you that the gambling industry does not really think much of IT people as customers. In Las Vegas the guys that go to comdex (defcon) have a bad rep among the casinos. It seems IT people are flush with cash, cheap, and not willing to gamble much because they know the frigen systems are rigged against them. The biggest strike they have against them is they do not tip well.
You would likely have less of black mark on your carrier than if you where a waitress in Vegas and then tried to get job in some other part of the U.S.
If you figure out how to do it, Please post. It would finally be a secure connection to pay pal I can trust. Now if I could just trust pay pal.
I have to hand it to Google for trying to break the proprietary locked cell phone one trick pony problem, but so far everything I have seen indicates that we just have another locked up OS. This is free software for the handset makers, not the end user.
What we want and need is a fully Linux, no bs platform, no hidden anything. So far, the nokia n900 looks like it will do that. Especially with the announcement of the qt libraries will be in the next versions of maemo.
I am sick of being treated like a criminal for jail-breaking / accessing my own hardware and software that I payed lots of money to own and use as I see fit. F*** Google and all their handset Android makers. I am voting with my dollars and my companies dollars, and going with a full linux distro I can customize as needed for my business.
Now I just hope Nokia does not get stupid and drop the ball. They seem to have a tendency to loose their momentum.
I think I was being a bit too sarcastic with my last post, and my point was lost.
Your attack assumes that you can insert a fake download and publish a fake md5sum. Which either you have access to the site that it is posted on, access to the real Firefox (or whatever browser), or the particular end user's computer / connection is already breached in some other serious fashion. Any of which I would think would be such a serious exploit to make messing around with a fake CA rather pointless. All the data your fake CA was suppose to gather, is already available by less complicated means.
Of the thousands of open source projects out there that publish free software on their sites along with the md5sum to verify it, I am not aware of any instances of anyone pulling this off. There have been a few cases of malicious code being uploaded to the servers and published, but they are caught rather quickly by the community because of the trickle down review effect.
They where however direct exploits inserted in to the code, not intercepting the download.
It is rarely the case that an md5sum is published in one and only one place (at least for big projects). I would also point out that most browsers (at least in Linux land) are distributed by the distro updates, not directly with firefox or whatever.
A bigger threat along these lines from my perspective would be the threat of a fully rogue linux distro being published. It has gotten fairly easy for people to spin their own, and there is sure a growing number of new users out there (both using and working on projects). What is to stop someone from pushing out one with malicious software in it?
Yes, and how do know that the browser that you originally installed with your operating system was not forged? How do you know your OS or your bios can be trusted? Hell, for that matter how do you know you can be trusted?
Ooooooohhh the horror!!!!
Not to be a troll, but you are really pushing that off in to fantasy land. My point it that security vulnerabilities based on 'just so' hypotheticals, are less likly to be a real world threat. Possible yes. Likely no.
We just got through the H1N1 flue and regular flue season in Chile. It was bad, but not anything like the way they are hyping it up in the States. People got sick, a few people died, but life went on as normal just fine. The only real thing that set it apart was the age of those that died.
Before the season hit I paid to have all my employees get the normal flue shot. My reasoning was that at least it would lower the confusion if anyone did get sick it might be easier to dignose if there was lower probability that someone was just getting the seasonal flue. The problem we faced when it started here was it was so early in the outbreak around the World that it was not even clear what the symptoms, treatment, or progression was going to be like. It was a good call, because it turned out there was no real way to differentiate it from the normal flue. The Chilean government quit trying to test and quarantine very early on, and just prescribed H1N1 meds to anyone that presented a fever and one other classic symptom. They did not waist resources or time testing everyone. They made tamiflue and related medication widely available to everyone in the country for free with no questions asked.
All told, I know a couple of people that got the flue personally and where formally diagnosed with it. I am almost certain two of my employees did contract it, one got the seasonal flue shot and one did not. Neither got medication for it, and just rode it out like the normal flue.
All and all it was just a bad flue season, and honestly I believe I have lived through much worse when I lived in the Northern Hemisphere. The initial psychological panic around it was more damaging than the bug. Even that passed as everyone realized we where not all going to turn in to zombies and start eating human brains.
The thing that scares me is the boomerang effect next year. That bug is going to go off to places like the U.S., where they health care system is a disaster, it will go through the super bug wash of various mixes of over-prescribed antibiotics or populations that can not afford treatment, and then it is going to return next year more of a super bug. I doubt however there is anyone left in south America that has not been exposed to it. The U.S. and much of the Northern hemisphere I do not believe can just provide free medication to everyone. The populations are too big. People are going to hesitate to go to doctors, not buy the medication, and it is going to spread much faster than it did here.
One more piece of layman's medical advice / observation about H1N1. Watch out for handling money. All the banks (and other locations with high cash flows) I went to seemed to be the hardest hit locations (like 30% or more of the staff out or sick), even more than the hospital staff it seemed. As I understand it can live on money for like 12 to 48 hours. Just think of how many hands say your average $1 or $5 bills goes through in a 48 hour period. Stick to using your plastic when possible to pay for things. Petty cash is the fastest way to spread anything.
Someone who is smarter than me, please enlighten me to why we are not converting cell networks in to simple wireless networks and loading them up with VOIP services, other than the need to screw people out of multi-year contract? Why is there no wireless mesh networking just outright replacing cell towers everywhere?
wifi g - n signals (I am sure we will have better to work with someday) can be beamed a hundred miles, the technology is relatively cheap and robust (as in make in your basement cheap and robust). Why are we still goofing around with cell towers? Hell, why do we even have cell phone companies?
All the technology exists, is tested, and works. It just needs to be deployed.