Differences in ground potential between houses can destroy equipment, cause a shock or even be a fire hazard.
And this information might sound alarmist, but there's even more to it -- crossing a legal boundary point (i.e. a mailing address) is against the law. You can be held responsible if you run a wire from one building into another, and that line causes damage. I used to work for a dialup ISP, and we ran some cat5 from one 5 story building to another, underneath the street. We found out what we did was completely illegal, and if that building ever caught on fire, we'd be screwed big time if that line were still there.
gps companies like gtk and teleatlas and many others all have giant workcenters for data pluggers -- they just sit there with lists of nodes to verify. they have to use multiple souces to update an error. it's no surprise with the amount of red tape involved with getting a correction done that the updates are delayed.
we use postini.com for our ingress mail filtering service. they just sit there with giant filters that get reprogrammed daily, and your mail flows through them. you just point your MX their way, and then secretly give them your real mail server IP. if you dont have anyone hard coded with your old mail server IP for direct send, you can firewall it and listen to just postini. We cant. anyways, it's been over 2 years and we find spammers still remember our MX. once you publish one, it's known forever.
Perhaps the birth rate in Africa is higher because Africa's mothers do not have the proper education about contraceptives, nor sometimes the freedom to make their own choices. I've never been educated in the matter so it's a fool's speculation on my part. I have heard that population growth comes into check once a society has educated females treated as equals to the men. I realize Africa is large and has a diverse societal background, and that making such blanket statements is dangerous . . .
thats right. us ISPs dont pay by the bit, we just pay a flat rate -- our upstreams know we're going to peg the connection so it's not a crapshoot like consumer grade broadband, sending out abuse letters and such. we use what we buy. that said, blocking egress traffic is just going to piss people off. (yeah sure it'll save some people too). But there's no money to be made when someone trying to get out can't, and calls us. Now, when everyone's just getting infected all the time, we don't care about that, and we're more than happy to refer the customer to a company arm that fixes infected PCs -- for big profit. Why would we want to patch the biggest problem causing issue (inet access) our customers have when it makes us most of our money?
I'm writing this as the clueful user, neither the newbie nor the guru.
I have always had an issue with the few attributes that can be assigned to a file with a linux system. I won't bother going into my file heirarchy like everyone else has because it is very similiar. I will say that I have a 'www' folder that is available on the web. This is most frustrating!!! Why should I have to maintain a seperate tree for stuff I want online? What happens when I have yet another division I want? Files that are also on the samba network, or, files that are pornographic? Files that are recipes I want shared on Kazaa? each one splits it up more, and provides a need for duplicate files in multiple locations.
horrible!
i want to set meta information about the file. I want to
chmod +web portman.jpg
in my home directory and have it show up as a available on my website!
I once thought I could implement this in the filenames. Each attribute could be unique and part of the filename.
mv portman.jpg portman.web.jpg
mv portman.web.jpg portman.samba.recipes.web.jpg
et cetera. i never did it. maybe cause its dumb. i there was something that can do what i want to do.
I'd have to ask why a company's main systems are online at all. I was disturbed to learn my bank's accounting system is online. Why should it be? I asked them. They said they didn't need it to be, it was just that they have only one network. Oh, good.
I am a sysadmin, a poor one, and I can definitely say I could spend 100% of my time trying to patch holes and cracks in our system and still not have enough time left over. And I have a sneaking suspicion that someone who knows what's going on could redo our environment entirely such that I wouldn't have to. What an unfortunate thing! I don't even know what I'd do with all those extra resources freed up. I think our company had something to do with turning profits, long ago...
Anyone else want to share some of their favorite overused phrases with IT security?
My favorite phrase is "... working hard to ensure this never happens again". We usually hear that within 4 hours of a customer calling and using the phrase "you people". "You people lost my database again!" "We can assure you we are working hard to ensure this never happens again". We've had a 0 dollar buildout and maintenence budget for 4 years. They actually get MORE surprised each time something breaks, cause we're supposed to be getting better at using the tools we have.
Ok here's a different question -- anyone ever had to use their own property to band-aid something within the company about ready to explode?
if you needed a 155 megabit oc3 and converted to a couple 30 megabit fiber connections, someone would probably have your head on a platter. a couple of very expensive T1 lines with IP on them (maybe 450 bucks each per port plus the distance run, which could be about 0 to double the cost again). fortunately, the 30 meg cap is assuredly an artificial limit, and they will be able to ramp that number up for quite a few years, whenever the competition starts getting their attention.
capping it would be the ultimate frustration. i haven't gotten The Call from my current provider, comcast, yet. is it general slashdot knowlege that the magic number at which you get their attention is 90 gigabytes within a 30 day window? 3 gig a day is hard to chew up without stealing 4 movies every night. in 2004, that is:D
if they block the mail port, or worse (and impossibly, at this stage of the game i think) the web port, they ugh... hell, i'd rather have the 3 meg service from comcast for a higher price.
i dont want the people passing me watching TV while they're driving. the only thing they should be doing is driving. i dont want cars that park themselves, and i dont want cars that alert me when i'm getting sleepy. its unfortunate that the move is cowardly, but fortunate that it's the safer result.
The Internet works almost every single day for me. I can't remember my last outage. Some day someone will attack my infrastructure and take it down for a while. And when it comes back up, I would be upset if I learned I too started calling the Internet a complete war zone.
i'm 25, so i've been driving for what, 9 years? well, at 25, i can safely say i'm still a horrible driver, for one reason -- only 9 years of experience. every half a year i still find myself doing something stupid. last one was, i was backing out of a parking spot. looked left. looked right. i never realized i wasnt also looking back. another car was pulling out, and i almost hit them. little stuff like that that makes me realize that none of my same aged friends are anywhere as near the good drivers we think we are in our heads.
A small portion of people cannot tune out background noise such as television, but the disruption caused by random outages will disturb the people who DO tune it out. The brain filters out patterns; when patterns change, we notice them. We don't notice the water dripping, but we do when it stops; some of us cannot fall asleep unless there's a stream of white noise such as a fan or waterfall outside. Then there's the issue that people might actually be watching the darned thing in the first place! If I owned a public place, the first time I realized someone was turning off my TVs, I'd just cover the sensors with tape, and make everyone watch whatever I feel like instead, causing more annoyance.
i've worked in a cell center, and well, probably half of slashdot has. asking for the next level up will often get you whomever happens to be sitting next to you randomly. "everyone is a 'manager'" is a good policy to keep unassuming, upset customers confused. it's such a small amount of attitude that a customer has to give you before you don't want to help them, too. tech support work can get pretty draining, and taking it out on a customer, although unfortunate, is a regular activity under the right load.
anyways, if you were working for a medium sized company or larger, it would have probably been cheaper just to throw the AP out and get a new one than to spend 2 hours getting an RMA:D
Techs should feel lucky there's yet another thing out there creating a job market for them, whether they're still based in the USA, or shipped off to another country. You know, I thought Dell had the worst Dell tech support for sure, but I had to call Dlink last week to clarify on something, and I got into an argument from India about what was written on the configuration page of a cheap office router. It's up in the air -- The Dell tech couldn't read, and the Dlink tech said what I was reading was not possible. Hrm.
i wouldn't switch to it. the instant they switched to x86, they'd lose what they have going for them, and their product would suck. they have such a tight os cause the environment is so tight. they control all the hardware.
at least thats my understanding of how it works. now what if they could promise that stability on x86 hardware? hrmm. i might switch. i'd venture a guess that the people who use linux and friends who also use windows dont have the typical end user problems that vex most windows computers. i'm no world class guru and i find myself on year 2 of a stable XP install with no firewalls or virus scanners, other than being NATted and knowing where not to step on the web. so i'm pretty happy with what i've got, i'd have to say.
if you knew what a shoestring budget some of us isps run off of, you'd do it too. you're basically a litigation focal point, what with half of your customers always trying some illegal way to make an extra buck, or save a buck. if me and my boss run an isp and break even and never have enough time, we're going to fail when we have to go to court, even if we win.
And in a similar vein, on anyone else's box, the only way to get root is to be given root (or taking root) If you have to ask for root, that's the single biggest sign you don't deserve it.
I love those little digital PIN devices... I thought they cost a lot more than that. Are those feasable for do it yourselfers to use at home for their SSH authentication? Once I was thinking about writing a script that changes the user ID of my remote login account every X minutes, and sends an SMS to my cell phone with the ID each time it changes, like my own cheap ripoff...
Slashdot Mirror
Differences in ground potential between houses can destroy equipment, cause a shock or even be a fire hazard.
:)
And this information might sound alarmist, but there's even more to it -- crossing a legal boundary point (i.e. a mailing address) is against the law. You can be held responsible if you run a wire from one building into another, and that line causes damage. I used to work for a dialup ISP, and we ran some cat5 from one 5 story building to another, underneath the street. We found out what we did was completely illegal, and if that building ever caught on fire, we'd be screwed big time if that line were still there.
So wireless has more than just tech advantages
you are teh CLEVAR
gps companies like gtk and teleatlas and many others all have giant workcenters for data pluggers -- they just sit there with lists of nodes to verify. they have to use multiple souces to update an error. it's no surprise with the amount of red tape involved with getting a correction done that the updates are delayed.
I mean, in the worst case scenario I delete something that I do indeed plan to watch again, I can *gasp* download it again!
Because "These people [who] are just stupid" are the ones serving it up to you!
we use postini.com for our ingress mail filtering service. they just sit there with giant filters that get reprogrammed daily, and your mail flows through them. you just point your MX their way, and then secretly give them your real mail server IP. if you dont have anyone hard coded with your old mail server IP for direct send, you can firewall it and listen to just postini. We cant. anyways, it's been over 2 years and we find spammers still remember our MX. once you publish one, it's known forever.
i just make an alias pointing to my real account for anything sketchy, and if they ever leak the address, i delete it and give them a new one.
Perhaps the birth rate in Africa is higher because Africa's mothers do not have the proper education about contraceptives, nor sometimes the freedom to make their own choices. I've never been educated in the matter so it's a fool's speculation on my part. I have heard that population growth comes into check once a society has educated females treated as equals to the men. I realize Africa is large and has a diverse societal background, and that making such blanket statements is dangerous . . .
thats right. us ISPs dont pay by the bit, we just pay a flat rate -- our upstreams know we're going to peg the connection so it's not a crapshoot like consumer grade broadband, sending out abuse letters and such. we use what we buy. that said, blocking egress traffic is just going to piss people off. (yeah sure it'll save some people too). But there's no money to be made when someone trying to get out can't, and calls us. Now, when everyone's just getting infected all the time, we don't care about that, and we're more than happy to refer the customer to a company arm that fixes infected PCs -- for big profit. Why would we want to patch the biggest problem causing issue (inet access) our customers have when it makes us most of our money?
I'm writing this as the clueful user, neither the newbie nor the guru.
I have always had an issue with the few attributes that can be assigned to a file with a linux system. I won't bother going into my file heirarchy like everyone else has because it is very similiar. I will say that I have a 'www' folder that is available on the web. This is most frustrating!!! Why should I have to maintain a seperate tree for stuff I want online? What happens when I have yet another division I want? Files that are also on the samba network, or, files that are pornographic? Files that are recipes I want shared on Kazaa? each one splits it up more, and provides a need for duplicate files in multiple locations.
horrible!
i want to set meta information about the file. I want to
chmod +web portman.jpg
in my home directory and have it show up as a available on my website!
I once thought I could implement this in the filenames. Each attribute could be unique and part of the filename.
mv portman.jpg portman.web.jpg
mv portman.web.jpg portman.samba.recipes.web.jpg
et cetera. i never did it. maybe cause its dumb. i there was something that can do what i want to do.
I'd have to ask why a company's main systems are online at all. I was disturbed to learn my bank's accounting system is online. Why should it be? I asked them. They said they didn't need it to be, it was just that they have only one network. Oh, good.
I am a sysadmin, a poor one, and I can definitely say I could spend 100% of my time trying to patch holes and cracks in our system and still not have enough time left over. And I have a sneaking suspicion that someone who knows what's going on could redo our environment entirely such that I wouldn't have to. What an unfortunate thing! I don't even know what I'd do with all those extra resources freed up. I think our company had something to do with turning profits, long ago ...
i'll miss the CRAB acronym! someone told me those letters stood for the order in which the USA was run :D
Anyone else want to share some of their favorite overused phrases with IT security?
My favorite phrase is "... working hard to ensure this never happens again". We usually hear that within 4 hours of a customer calling and using the phrase "you people". "You people lost my database again!" "We can assure you we are working hard to ensure this never happens again". We've had a 0 dollar buildout and maintenence budget for 4 years. They actually get MORE surprised each time something breaks, cause we're supposed to be getting better at using the tools we have.
Ok here's a different question -- anyone ever had to use their own property to band-aid something within the company about ready to explode?
if you needed a 155 megabit oc3 and converted to a couple 30 megabit fiber connections, someone would probably have your head on a platter. a couple of very expensive T1 lines with IP on them (maybe 450 bucks each per port plus the distance run, which could be about 0 to double the cost again). fortunately, the 30 meg cap is assuredly an artificial limit, and they will be able to ramp that number up for quite a few years, whenever the competition starts getting their attention.
:D
capping it would be the ultimate frustration. i haven't gotten The Call from my current provider, comcast, yet. is it general slashdot knowlege that the magic number at which you get their attention is 90 gigabytes within a 30 day window? 3 gig a day is hard to chew up without stealing 4 movies every night. in 2004, that is
if they block the mail port, or worse (and impossibly, at this stage of the game i think) the web port, they ugh... hell, i'd rather have the 3 meg service from comcast for a higher price.
i dont want the people passing me watching TV while they're driving. the only thing they should be doing is driving. i dont want cars that park themselves, and i dont want cars that alert me when i'm getting sleepy. its unfortunate that the move is cowardly, but fortunate that it's the safer result.
into a complete war zone.
The Internet works almost every single day for me. I can't remember my last outage. Some day someone will attack my infrastructure and take it down for a while. And when it comes back up, I would be upset if I learned I too started calling the Internet a complete war zone.
i'm 25, so i've been driving for what, 9 years? well, at 25, i can safely say i'm still a horrible driver, for one reason -- only 9 years of experience. every half a year i still find myself doing something stupid. last one was, i was backing out of a parking spot. looked left. looked right. i never realized i wasnt also looking back. another car was pulling out, and i almost hit them. little stuff like that that makes me realize that none of my same aged friends are anywhere as near the good drivers we think we are in our heads.
A small portion of people cannot tune out background noise such as television, but the disruption caused by random outages will disturb the people who DO tune it out. The brain filters out patterns; when patterns change, we notice them. We don't notice the water dripping, but we do when it stops; some of us cannot fall asleep unless there's a stream of white noise such as a fan or waterfall outside. Then there's the issue that people might actually be watching the darned thing in the first place! If I owned a public place, the first time I realized someone was turning off my TVs, I'd just cover the sensors with tape, and make everyone watch whatever I feel like instead, causing more annoyance.
i've worked in a cell center, and well, probably half of slashdot has. asking for the next level up will often get you whomever happens to be sitting next to you randomly. "everyone is a 'manager'" is a good policy to keep unassuming, upset customers confused. it's such a small amount of attitude that a customer has to give you before you don't want to help them, too. tech support work can get pretty draining, and taking it out on a customer, although unfortunate, is a regular activity under the right load.
:D
anyways, if you were working for a medium sized company or larger, it would have probably been cheaper just to throw the AP out and get a new one than to spend 2 hours getting an RMA
Techs should feel lucky there's yet another thing out there creating a job market for them, whether they're still based in the USA, or shipped off to another country. You know, I thought Dell had the worst Dell tech support for sure, but I had to call Dlink last week to clarify on something, and I got into an argument from India about what was written on the configuration page of a cheap office router. It's up in the air -- The Dell tech couldn't read, and the Dlink tech said what I was reading was not possible. Hrm.
i wouldn't switch to it. the instant they switched to x86, they'd lose what they have going for them, and their product would suck. they have such a tight os cause the environment is so tight. they control all the hardware.
at least thats my understanding of how it works. now what if they could promise that stability on x86 hardware? hrmm. i might switch. i'd venture a guess that the people who use linux and friends who also use windows dont have the typical end user problems that vex most windows computers. i'm no world class guru and i find myself on year 2 of a stable XP install with no firewalls or virus scanners, other than being NATted and knowing where not to step on the web. so i'm pretty happy with what i've got, i'd have to say.
if you knew what a shoestring budget some of us isps run off of, you'd do it too. you're basically a litigation focal point, what with half of your customers always trying some illegal way to make an extra buck, or save a buck. if me and my boss run an isp and break even and never have enough time, we're going to fail when we have to go to court, even if we win.
It's a bloody difficult keeping them in the right lane
Oh well that's your problem. On our interstates you are supposed to drive in the left lane. (Just the interstates, though)
And in a similar vein, on anyone else's box, the only way to get root is to be given root (or taking root) If you have to ask for root, that's the single biggest sign you don't deserve it.
I love those little digital PIN devices... I thought they cost a lot more than that. Are those feasable for do it yourselfers to use at home for their SSH authentication? Once I was thinking about writing a script that changes the user ID of my remote login account every X minutes, and sends an SMS to my cell phone with the ID each time it changes, like my own cheap ripoff...