With the proper encryption software on the endpoints, and properly encrypted storage, why does the server location even matter?
You're new here. Okay, from the top... If the server gets disappeared in some government raid, then the services offered by said server are no longer available. Sorta obvious there. The internet requires some types of centralization to function; As to any services that run on top of it. DNS, e-mail, Facebook, BGP, etc. -- everything on a packet-based network which lacks broadcast/multicast ability needs to have a static point of entry into whatever superstructure you build on top of it.
In this case, the server acts as a mediator of identities: Person A wants to talk to Person B, so Person A subs Person B's public key, and the server returns Person B's IP address, drop box, or whatever, thus allowing the transaction to complete.
It would seem to me the best solution would be for that server to have zero knowledge about the content of any data
The server would regard the data as a binary blob with a source and destination. You know, just like a router does. Except the data is encrypted, so the only useful data that can be recovered is where it's going, and where it's coming from.
But in no case should it contain un-encrypted data, and all logging should be to/dev/null.
But what if someone unlinked/dev/null? Server should immediately self-destruct, Mission Impossible style?:P
Almost all of this is available today using a variety of off the shelf software with PGP keys, etc.
One word: Convenience. And another word: Cheaper.
Wouldn't concentrating this traffic in a single place make it easier to monitor?
Dude, the NSA is building a massive data center under a mountain in Arizona to monitor every packet sent or received on the internet domestically as you read this. The "single place" is now the entire network. Europe is doing the same thing, but requiring ISPs to store all the data instead. If you want something hard to monitor, go back to sneakernet and drop boxes.
Wouldn't merely subscribing to such a service (and leaving a money trail) become a red flag?
I see that you're paying with cash, instead of credit card. You filthy terrorist. Well, actually, everything these days is a red flag. Carrying a bottle of water in your car? You must be using drugs. Breast implants? Possible weapons of mass distraction. Driving a car at the speed limit -- you're paying too close of attention, you must be up to no good. Ah, the rationalizations are endless. Look, there's no technology on this planet that's going to save you from a government that decides (for whatever reason) to make you disappear. All these laws, the constitution, your rights, it's all for show and it always has been. The powerful do whatever they want, and then give it post-facto legitimacy after the fact.
All that said, I do all my browsing on Tor. Which mostly includes posting to slashdot and reading the Skyrim wiki. If you encrypt everything, and everyone else does the same, then you have made stateful packet inspection a waste of time. Nobody should be sending packets in the clear these days anyway -- most of you are reading this from a processor with an AES encryption/decryption module built into the CPU that can run at gigabit speeds with very little overhead. -_-
I am not sure why it matters that she's the first female astronaut. Was there something about being a woman that made it problematic being in space? Does something strange happen to a vagina that doesn't happen to a penis? No, of course not. It's already been proven women can be in space, or in combat, or do just about anything else a man can do that doesn't require erectile tissue.
Congrats on joining the few members of the "50 mile high club", but I'll be a lot more impressed when the chinese get those people into a stable earth orbit and then return, not just breathe the thin air and then fall back... regardless of the sexual organs present in the cockpit. -_-
And if we take over the selling of our data, all those companies using it now have to respect us and abide by our standards.
That's adorable. You think corporations respect you. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are a means to an end, nothing more. Specifically, money. They'll do anything for money, and since they have way more of it than you, it's you that will be going to them for everything, not the other way around. You want that cell phone? Surrender your personal data. Car? Personal data, please. Internet access? Groceries? Housing? Furniture?
I have no stats to back this up, but on a national level, wont the storage requirement touch Petabytes per day? (or atleast 100's of Terabytes per day?)
Most of the data transferred on the internet is just a copy of another piece of data. So if you only store the new data, then the requirements drop to a much more manageable level.
You know, we had the same argument with RISC versus CISC architecture. And we know who lost that one. Badly. And the reason for that is because the bandwidth outside the processor, the I/O, is so damnably slow compared to what's possible on the die itself. That's why the data transfers to and from the CPU are only about 1/30th or less the speed at which the CPU runs internally. The only logical course of action is to do as much as you can on each byte of data coming off the bus as you can. Besides, look at Nvidia's GPU cores: They throw hundreds of cores onto the die, but it eats hundreds of watts as well. Massively parallel and simple instruction sets don't appear to translate into energy savings.
fter all, governments need a way to do their job, and simply opposing legislation like this doesn't exactly help them do their job.
Actually, it does. In the old days, when you wanted to know what someone was up to, you used something called an "eyeball" to watch them. Governments are lazy -- they want dragnets, they want all electronic data available for inspection for any reason, without a warrant. They want retroactive immunity for torturing and murdering civilians. But arguments that they can't do their job here are bullshit: I can put a video camera that watches your screen and keyboard and know what you're up to online, and those cost $15 at the computer store. If I want to know where you're driving off to, I don't need to install black boxes in every car... I just need to crawl under yours and attach a tracking device.
Law enforcement shouldn't be monitoring people's private communications or lives without a warrant, without cause, etc., child molesters, terrorists, and googly-eyed boogie men be damned. Just bending over and taking it like this hurts homeland security because it costs a lot of money for a minimal return on investment, it turns everyone into a spy for everyone else, and it winds up stifling the entire culture... if people are afraid to speak their mind, they're also afraid to innovate. If they're afraid to stand out in a crowd because of surveillance, then everyone becomes the same. The very essence of democracy is destroyed then -- there's no point in keeping who you voted for private if your internet searches are available to the government. They know who you voted for based on what you looked for online. There's no point in asking for warrants then, because they already have all the evidence sitting on a server somewhere... they can round up anyone at will because the laws are so complex, so dense, that nobody can avoid breaking at least one. And when you have such fine-grained knowledge on a person's daily life and activities, it means that you can arbitrarily point to someone and say "That one. Make them disappear," and find a legal justification for it.
Democracy cannot survive under such a system. It's simply not a democracy at that point in anything but name. If you people in Europe allow this to pass, whatever you are after this won't be a democracy... it'll be something else, something darker and not unlike what is happened to my country, the United States. We are a democracy in name only. Make this law, and you join us.
...and that once it's in service the cost of a flight to orbit may cost as little as 1/100 as much as it costs today.
Considering that the current cost is "We can't do it, we retired the space shuttles", I'm not sure what comparison you're making. Between this and what the Chinese are putting into orbit? Or the Russians? Or that other startup group that Slashdot seems to ignore?
I find this idea rather interesting, but I worry what might happen to someone who was placed in this pool by mistake?
If you read the terms of the EULA, you'll find out: You can beg for mercy, and perhaps Caesar will grant you a reprieve. Maybe. If he doesn't have gas that day from eating at Taco Bell. You have no rights to the aforementioned virtual world... you can be removed for any reason or no reason, and if you paid money, well tough nuts. You were informed by psychic eminations of the terms when you handed them your credit card, which was a binding and unappealable legal arrangement, and you can't return the product for a refund once you've opened it, you know, in order to read the terms. -_-
This is why I don't pay for software for personal use anymore; If a company can take away what's mine on a whim, then it wasn't really mine to begin with, and I don't spend money on things I don't get to keep.
Do you think your average Facebook using teenager would want to go back to, say, 1993 and spend hours fiddling with driver parameters to get a video card working in Windows, or OS/2, or DOS, or Linux?
First, the driver parameters for DOS were, uhh... "load=ansi.sys" Second, Windows didn't back then didn't really have video drivers to speak of. Third... Linux wasn't really useful in 1993 and only a few thousand people at most even knew of its existance at the time.
Or figuring out the magic incantations to get your 14.4 kbps modem to dial into an ISP?
BananaCom and other terminal programs handled that for you, but if you really felt like doing it manually: AT&D1&C2S95=55 followed by ATDT1235551212, and when you were done +++ATH0 got you where you needed to go. Not complicated. My passwords are harder to remember.
So, the group of people who "love building things with technology" is much smaller than the "love using technology to stay in contact with my social circle" group -- same as always.
It's not so much people love technology as they love what it enables them to do. That's always how it's been... IT or otherwise. Nobody loves cars, they loved that cars could get them from point A to point B in minutes instead of hours and you didn't have to scoop car poop out of your parking spot every day. But IT in the 90s was not overly difficult... Most kids grew up with Mac classics... a primitive but easy to use system. And they did pretty much what they do now with them: Play games and dial up BBS (except now BBS are 4chan, facebook, slashdot, etc.).
Younger people always think that new technology is some kind of paradigm shift. Older people know better: It's just evolution from one to another. 8 tracks became tape became compact discs became mp3 players became cell phones.
Normally teenagers are the gold standard for naive thinking, but they got it perfectly right on this one. I'm in IT. I've been here for a long time. I tell anyone considering a career in it to beat themselves soundly about the head and shoulders. How many ways is it bad? Ah, let us count the ways...
You'll rarely get any respect from your employer.
Most of us don't work for Google -- we work for MegaCorp(tm). MegaCorp's sole focus is on the end of quarter profit margin, and that means that everyone that isn't in sales is slowing us down. Cut those budgets! Trim those sales! Yarr, matey, we be bringin' in da gold this quarter! Nevermind that IT said it costs more and runs slower being powered by wind than a diesel engine. Your entire field is considered a bloated waste of money.
You will not be playing with the best technology, you will be helping others play with it.
Whatever is sitting on your desk is most likely a 3 coiled turd unless you are a programmer of some kind, or a manager. It's 3--5 years old, and so loaded down with antivirus, encryption, and at least 5 conflicting corporate 'big brother' programs to catalog your every keystroke that it runs slower than molasses uphill.
Your talents will be wasted.
Only the '20 year men' have a shot at getting something done and being recognized for it. And most likely they'll be looking for dumb kids like you to put in tons of overtime for a pat on the head.
... Facebook is running an open call data science competition to win an interview/job on their data science team.
Anyone with half a brain will run away screaming from that offer, but not for the obvious reasons. A company that's recently post-IPO has mostly multimillionaires for employees -- and they can and will treat anyone who isn't like dirt. In a few years, if Facebook manages to turn around it's epic failure of an IPO (Well, from a business standpoint... Zuckerberg and his crew are still flush with cash) and grows their employee base by a significant amount, it may be worth considering.
But right now, it's a job for the kids fresh out of college; they won't know that the mistreatment isn't normal and might actually stick around for a couple of years before burning out.
You're right, that's the most important question. What do you do once you've got their crown jewels?
Even if they handed you the keys to the kingdom, don't tell them you have the keys to the kingdom. I have also been that contractor with 'god level' access to everything. And then one day it was pointed out to management that all of this nonsense about using IDS and scanners to detect whether a USB drive had been plugged in or not would really only serve to get in the way of people trying to do their job; anyone with even 3 working neurons in their brain could figure out how to get around it (as one example, printing a binary file, and then going over to the printer, plugging in an SD card, and copying it. Windows group policies don't work on printers. It was pointed out that the entire IT department had the necessary rights on the network and technical know-how to do it. So, naturally management nuked everything from orbit. They fired over 50 people in the span of a few months in a political fiat between infosecurity and the rest of IT (Little known fact: many people who work in info security have no previous background in IT. They usually can't tell a router from a switch) So you know, security must have improved after that, eh? Well, actually it didn't; They were robbed of a significant chunk their customer's credit card and billing data six months later because when you fire a significant chunk of your IT staff in one go, minor things like security patches tend to get put on the backburner while everyone goes into crisis mode.
Anyway, people talk about employees walking off with confidential data, but for every person that does that, at least a hundred others got fired because management got paranoid... probably more. Usually the value of the data they're protecting is worth less than the cost of hiring and training new employees, because management got spooked about the old ones.
The problem with guns is the technology to kill people is very primitive and simple. We've been killing each other since before we could read and write. Guns are nothing more than a device for initiating a controlled rapid exothermic reaction resulting in a propulsive force to a projectile.
Most people have the necessary tools and items required to manufacture a simple gun in their garages, propellant included. So even in the ideal case where criminals don't just file off the microprinting in a few well-placed strokes, and in this magical world every bullet fired has a 1:1 parity with a registered gun owner, the problem isn't any closer to being solved... there's still hundreds of other ways to murder people, either with guns, or gun-like devices, or even without guns. Hell, the government routinely says tazers, water cannons, and microwaving protesters is "safe", yet people still somehow wind up just as dead.
Expecting violent criminals to care about legislation like this is like expecting a terrorist to care his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces.
But never, ever, assume any "scientific fact" above any controversy or debate. Dogmas have no place here.
There's no assumption, I just get tired of arguing with morons. I mean, yes, I could entertain the 'controversy' of evolution, but I would succeed only in wasting my own time, and adding not a lick of knowledge or wisdom to humanity in the process. Likewise, while there may be a debate to be had with climate change, I grow tired of dealing with morons who wish to argue every single nuance, because they've already made up their minds and now they're off on some big effort to assimilate everyone else into thinking the same way.
The earth is getting warmer, and it's most likely our fault. Ta-da, the end. I may be a scientist, but I'm also a human being -- when there is compelling evidence in a peer reviewed journal that humans are not the primary source of global warming, I will revisit the matter. And most scientists, amateur and professional, feel similarly: We're tired of arguing with people who refuse to acknowledge the fire even when it's burning their nose.
Inhospitable? You know the earth has been much warmer with humans living on it? Earth had a radically different climate 200 years ago, and 200 years before that, and 200 years before that. Define "radical" please.
No, the Earth has NOT had radically different climate change since the end of the last ice age... that's about 20,000 years of a pretty steady and unchanging climate. There have been a few glitches caused by volcanic eruption and the like, but it's always returned to baseline. Climate change has only really accelerated in the past 50--100 years, which is a drop in the bucket compared to that amount of time. Scientists are already pointing to climate changes observable within a single person's lifetime. In geological terms, that's massively fast. I would even say... radically so.
Then you finish with "we are directly responsible". That is the part being questioned.
It's the most likely possibility given the facts presently available. But like all new discoveries, it takes time to fully explore and document the relationships between so many complex variables and distill it into a simple truth. I'll start saying we aren't the cause when the body of assembled evidence weighs in the other direction. I can't say it has been settled with certainty, but then I also can't say prove the existance of the higgs-boson, yet I'm not about to discount the entire standard model because of it, anymore than I'm going to discount evolution because we're missing one fossil in a series of 100. Anyone can argue "There's not enough evidence!" for an infinity, but reasonable people draw conclusions based on available evidence, and if it's insufficient to do the responsible thing and gather more. You will never hear a scientist utter the phrase "But we have too much evidence!" If you truly feel there's another explanation then go find the evidence for it. This is the one field of inquiry where its participants are often heard to say "Why that's a very convincing argument. I must have been mistaken." I look forward to reading your peer-reviewed study on how humans have played a minority role in global warming.
Then you finish by saying earth will not be inhospitable. What is your opinion here???
At least in the United States, the majority of our water supply is derived from ground water sources. Most rivers are too polluted to be drinkable, and the quantity of fresh water existing in lakes is, and will continue, to decrease as a result of global warming. Considering that right now, today, at this moment there are states in the southern United States that are facing major water shortages, it's not hard to see how some areas could become uninhabitable due to a lack of drinkable water -- let alone have enough to farm the land.
In science, we form conclusions based on the available data. Now I'm only an amateur scientist, and I freely admit I am not a specialist in climate change. If there is a climatologist in the audience I would gladly yield to their authority; But I've read all the data in many journals, and there's two facts about this that are inescapable: First, that climate change is happening, and second that we're the most likely cause of it. At this point, it would take a significant new discovery to reverse that conclusion, and no such discoveries have been forthcoming -- every new piece of data I read about just further confirms that human beings are the cause. So I believe that what I've said is scientifically accurate. As to what to do about it... well, that's a lot more complicated and I'll just leave off by saying I think of all the available options, "do nothing" is the only one I'm firmly against.
So, we can review groundwater/sea-level scientific studies, but 'Climate Change' is a done deal.
It's a scientific fact that global warming is real. There is no debate, and no controversy, there. We've got too many satellites confirming it, along with thousands of ground stations and the upward trend is undeniable.
It's still up for discussion why it's happening or what it will eventually mean for us. Ethical scientists generally take the side of "Until we can predict with some confidence what will happen, we should do what we can to limit the impact," similar to the ideal behind the Hippocratic oath. Our present models, understanding, and theories point to rising sea levels, melting ice caps, and heating to the point where much of the ariable land along the equator will no longer be able to sustain industrial farming.
We're already seeing some of the effects of this rapid heating (in geological terms); In Japan, native moss is no longer used at several Zen shrines because it's become too warm for them to survive. Coral reefs are undergoing a mass-extinction event, and we are seeing weather patterns which roughly correspond to modelling predictions for a warmer Earth. If these trends continue, life will become increasingly inhospitable to humans. While long-term predictions aren't reliable, it is almost certain the Earth of 200 years from now will have a radically different climate than the Earth of today; We are directly responsible for this planet entering a new geological age with as much speed and force as the Cretaceousâ"Paleogene extinction event.
The debate really doesn't center on whether or not these things happen; The choice faced by our generation is not whether or not life after climate change is possible, but what kind of life it will be.
The difference is, the only real attention the media will give will be to the police, and this AP article illustrates this perfectly.
So long as people continue to watch media which only gives half the story, only half the story will be given. I go through a lot of effort to seek out alternative media and accounts of major stories, and what I've discovered is that domestic media only provides the appearance of impartiality; Just enough to suspend disbelief. This is most evident in how they give "equal time" to, say, creationism, as they would a scientist, when doing a report on the latest global warming. Domestic media is there to provide just enough facts for each 'side' to continue to perpetuate the idea of a controversy, when in fact, there very rarely is one. The media will even manufacture controversy if their corporate sponsors are paid enough; the recurring gay marriage stories and 'controversy', for example -- if you look, there wasn't much polarization before the general public was saturated with coverage of it.. people were like "Well, maybe I don't like it, but why the fuck do I care? There's about a billion other things more important than that." But the republicans needed a victory, so they pumped Murdock and behold, a polarizing story designed to get their voters to the polls to defeat their democratic rivals.
So yes, domestic media is totally corrupt, and they will happily splice and cut footage up, take people's quotes out of context, and generally 'spice' things up, but there is a very specific agenda behind such things. Indie media though is even worse... people desperate to get "their side" of the story or portray "the truth" often do such a piss-poor and slanted job of it that only the political activists in their own little microcosm would ever approve of it. I've tracked OccupyMN since they pitched their first tent... they've released hundreds of YouTube videos... all with only a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand at most, viewing it.
The Occupiers never got organized, they just barfed content onto the internet and made a cacaphony of conflicting statements, all basically saying "See! See! This proves what we've been saying all along!"... Of course, nobody really knows what it is they've been saying at all... the Occupy movement is sortof a blob of negative emotions projected by the working class onto the rich, and while some of it is justified, the lack of any real cohesion means it basically reduces to a king sized bitch fest.
And then there's 'Collateral Damage', a widely-watched indie media video produced by Wikileaks, which later led to it being hunted by the 'land of the free' with a zeal that harkens back to soviet-era media manipulation. Indie media had a great potential to show us the actual cost of war, and to underscore how drone attacks and remote bombing may not harm homeland security in the short-term, but it definately creates lasting hostility to this country which definately harms it in the long term. 9/11 was a direct consequence of this kind of media manipulation -- it forced political reactionaries abroad to use bombs to get the general public's attention, because what was going on on Afghanistan was so far removed from public view that few people on the street could even tell you what we were doing there.
And this is the loci of the problem: No matter which 'side' you're on, the concept of 'sides' is the real enemy in journalism. Democracy absolutely depends on impartial reporting; Democracy fails catastrophically when the population becomes illiterate and misinformed or underinformed (both are equally bad). And that's exactly what's happened in this country -- ever since the vietnam war protests, our government in concert with wealthy private interests have carefully constructed a sort of "glass curtain" around the country. Unlike an iron curtain, like the soviets had, or similar systems which the Chinese have, our form of censorship is subtle and depends on controlling the broadcast media via private corporations and individuals so the government has plausible deniability; But it accomplishes the same basic goal: To mislead the general public about government actions.
orthodox Judaism considers it (specifically, matrilineal descent) a requirement. And for the record, I consider both stances equally stupid.
The jews believe that the savior hasn't yet come, because Jesus couldn't pass (or refused) tests in the old testament. They're still waiting for their savior, and one of those tests is that the savior will be a descendant of a particular person. If anyone here is being stupid, it's you -- there is no jewish race. Either you descended from that specific person, or you didn't.
The jewish community has maintained geneology records to an unrivaled level of detail ever since; it's at the very heart of their religion. The scientific test is completely superfluous to them; they know who they are because they've maintained records since before we knew what DNA was. Also, a scientifically-valid test to determine whether a given person is a direct descendant of another person is a matter that has non-religious legal implications; For example, in estate proceedings.
I guess the bottom line here is that people have gotten twisted up about the definition of race and forgotten that the jewish community is a special case: Their religion is literally based on genetics, and has been unfairly lumped into racial politics; They don't care what 'race' you are today, only whether or not you descended from a specific person (or not). Science can already determine whether you've descended from Ghenghis Khan or not (there's actually a pretty good chance the answer is yes), and if you go back far enough, you'll find a point when humanity was nearly wiped out... and almost all of us are descended from one of about 20 women, the so called "genetic Eves". You can't dismiss the jewish community without dismissing good science as well.... hell, the records the jewish keep have scientific value themselves -- anyone who studies geneology will attest to this.
I got the job done every time, often doing more than was required, and typically for even less money than the meager pittance I was given for the project. Did it make an appreciable difference regarding my employer's attitude towards IT? You be the judge: I got fired for asking for a raise a week after finishing the most elaborate project ever for said employer (Totally automated, solar powered, Wifi enabled outdoor camera system, one I was quite proud of considering I literally cobbled 90% together from parts laying around the shop).
I assume you've learned your lesson then. I feel for you, I really do. I've had similar experiences; I once saved a Fortune 500 company from hiring about 50 people at $14 an hour to retrigger deployments by writing an application over a few lunch breaks that automated the process. Another department became so worried about this development they agitated with infosecurity to change the policies to prevent its use, and then fired me for violating said new security policy. As a society, we lose hundreds of billions yearly because of this kind of political gameplay and a lack of understanding or awareness by management of the actual value of their labor resources, the policies that constrain them, or the budget for various things. Everyone here that's got a shred of professionalism and talent has a similar story. Everyone.
It's a hard lesson to learn, but as a professional in this industry, it is not your job to fix these problems. Your job is to do the best you can with the limited resources given to you. If, in your professional estimation, you feel your work is undervalued, the budget is insufficient, or management lacks the necessary leadership qualities for you to do your work with a minimum of hassle... then do the minimum amount of work necessary to keep suspicion away and spend the rest of your energy finding another place to work. Some dumb 20-something kid with his degree from "PC Tech" college will be happy to slave away at it for peanuts -- and when that fails, they'll just import a billion dirt-poor workers to do it.
Those kinds of employers are predatory, and they get their business karma returned to them eventually in the form of high labor costs, low efficiency, and tiny profit margins. Eventually, they strangle themselves... but it takes time, sometimes decades, before the economics of the situation can no longer be ignored. The H1B visa program was designed to give extra life to these otherwise dying predators... and even that's running out. India has its own infrastructure right now, and they're giving a hearty "F U" to labor exploitation... many such employers have "in-sourced" and discontinued the practice, and the rest have moved on to exploit the Phillipines.
I'm only explaining this because if you are a hacker, you won't be content with just knowing what to do, you'll have to know why. Well, now you know. So don't concern yourself over-much with this state of affairs; Just focus on getting slotted in with a company that doesn't engage in exploitative behavior, and trust your instincts about it. If something doesn't feel right, it's because it isn't -- if you get that vibe, don't drop anchor there.
I don't need a hacker on staff. I'll just leave a few ports open, like FTP, Telnet, HTTP, RDP, etc. They'll find me and I won't have to spend a cent on payroll!;-)
That's like expecting your car's security will be improved by leaving the windows down in a well-visited parking ramp in an area with no security cameras. No, you'll just get robbed, and likely the inside will be trashed because if there's one thing criminals love more than a free lunch, it's shitting on someone else's hard work for thrills. There aren't many real hackers left in the world... it's all assholes looking for cheap thrills or cash. Those of us who still do it to teach ourselves about how these amazing little boxes of wires and boards work and make them do nifty things for us are about as plentiful as 20-something aged stamp collectors.
You're joking, right? A hacker is, by definition, someone overqualified for every job where the dress code includes the word "business" in its description. Why the hell would someone like that want to work for peanuts, creating miracles out of thin air with no budget? Because they find it challenging? Bitch, please -- we want to get paid, and if I'm working for a place that values IT so little they can't even come up with a budget for things that would (by your own definition!) render improvements to their infrastructure, what are the odds of promotion? A raise? Benefits? Answer: Zilch. Nothing. Nodda. Zero.
I know it's an unrelated field, and some of you will probably laugh, but when I was in school for graphic design (I already know enough for a degree in IT), one of the things my first teacher told me is: Don't work for free. You're not going to get any exposure, leads are worthless, and charity work doesn't get the bills paid. As a graphic designer, most of us are self-employed and it's essential we know to the nearest half-hour mark how long a project is going to take in billable hours. We need to make our own budget for every project, and everyone and I mean everyone is looking for free work or thinking they can do it themselves with photoshop.
IT is approaching the same commoditization of labor -- Many of us are "contractors" already, but eventually people are going to wise-up and become self-employed because contractors are paid shit and treated as such. Be ahead of the curve people: Don't work for peanuts, and if someone says "there's no budget for what you do," take the hint and move on.
If you have a critical service, have it at more than one host... That way when AWS has a bad hair day, you are still up.
While we're at it, we should probably backup the internet too. You'd think someone would have done it by now, in case it crashes, but I can't find any record of anyone doing it.
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With the proper encryption software on the endpoints, and properly encrypted storage, why does the server location even matter?
You're new here. Okay, from the top ... If the server gets disappeared in some government raid, then the services offered by said server are no longer available. Sorta obvious there. The internet requires some types of centralization to function; As to any services that run on top of it. DNS, e-mail, Facebook, BGP, etc. -- everything on a packet-based network which lacks broadcast/multicast ability needs to have a static point of entry into whatever superstructure you build on top of it.
In this case, the server acts as a mediator of identities: Person A wants to talk to Person B, so Person A subs Person B's public key, and the server returns Person B's IP address, drop box, or whatever, thus allowing the transaction to complete.
It would seem to me the best solution would be for that server to have zero knowledge about the content of any data
The server would regard the data as a binary blob with a source and destination. You know, just like a router does. Except the data is encrypted, so the only useful data that can be recovered is where it's going, and where it's coming from.
But in no case should it contain un-encrypted data, and all logging should be to /dev/null.
But what if someone unlinked /dev/null? Server should immediately self-destruct, Mission Impossible style? :P
Almost all of this is available today using a variety of off the shelf software with PGP keys, etc.
One word: Convenience. And another word: Cheaper.
Wouldn't concentrating this traffic in a single place make it easier to monitor?
Dude, the NSA is building a massive data center under a mountain in Arizona to monitor every packet sent or received on the internet domestically as you read this. The "single place" is now the entire network. Europe is doing the same thing, but requiring ISPs to store all the data instead. If you want something hard to monitor, go back to sneakernet and drop boxes.
Wouldn't merely subscribing to such a service (and leaving a money trail) become a red flag?
I see that you're paying with cash, instead of credit card. You filthy terrorist. Well, actually, everything these days is a red flag. Carrying a bottle of water in your car? You must be using drugs. Breast implants? Possible weapons of mass distraction. Driving a car at the speed limit -- you're paying too close of attention, you must be up to no good. Ah, the rationalizations are endless. Look, there's no technology on this planet that's going to save you from a government that decides (for whatever reason) to make you disappear. All these laws, the constitution, your rights, it's all for show and it always has been. The powerful do whatever they want, and then give it post-facto legitimacy after the fact.
All that said, I do all my browsing on Tor. Which mostly includes posting to slashdot and reading the Skyrim wiki. If you encrypt everything, and everyone else does the same, then you have made stateful packet inspection a waste of time. Nobody should be sending packets in the clear these days anyway -- most of you are reading this from a processor with an AES encryption/decryption module built into the CPU that can run at gigabit speeds with very little overhead. -_-
It may now be considered proper to spell and pronounce Neandertal with a 't' not a 'th' sound, but 'mdash' is still normally written as 'â"'.
Us Neandertal autor is are offended by your racial oppression of our linguistic atred of the 8t letter of the alpabet.
I am not sure why it matters that she's the first female astronaut. Was there something about being a woman that made it problematic being in space? Does something strange happen to a vagina that doesn't happen to a penis? No, of course not. It's already been proven women can be in space, or in combat, or do just about anything else a man can do that doesn't require erectile tissue.
Congrats on joining the few members of the "50 mile high club", but I'll be a lot more impressed when the chinese get those people into a stable earth orbit and then return, not just breathe the thin air and then fall back... regardless of the sexual organs present in the cockpit. -_-
And if we take over the selling of our data, all those companies using it now have to respect us and abide by our standards.
That's adorable. You think corporations respect you. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are a means to an end, nothing more. Specifically, money. They'll do anything for money, and since they have way more of it than you, it's you that will be going to them for everything, not the other way around. You want that cell phone? Surrender your personal data. Car? Personal data, please. Internet access? Groceries? Housing? Furniture?
Capitalism without restraint leads to depotism.
Government: "Hello there, Microsoft. This here is a really big gun. We want your source code."
Microsoft: "Ummm, okay."
The End
What's this crap about a mole again? Moles are for when you can't just walk in the front door and take whatever you want.
I have no stats to back this up, but on a national level, wont the storage requirement touch Petabytes per day? (or atleast 100's of Terabytes per day?)
Most of the data transferred on the internet is just a copy of another piece of data. So if you only store the new data, then the requirements drop to a much more manageable level.
You know, we had the same argument with RISC versus CISC architecture. And we know who lost that one. Badly. And the reason for that is because the bandwidth outside the processor, the I/O, is so damnably slow compared to what's possible on the die itself. That's why the data transfers to and from the CPU are only about 1/30th or less the speed at which the CPU runs internally. The only logical course of action is to do as much as you can on each byte of data coming off the bus as you can. Besides, look at Nvidia's GPU cores: They throw hundreds of cores onto the die, but it eats hundreds of watts as well. Massively parallel and simple instruction sets don't appear to translate into energy savings.
fter all, governments need a way to do their job, and simply opposing legislation like this doesn't exactly help them do their job.
Actually, it does. In the old days, when you wanted to know what someone was up to, you used something called an "eyeball" to watch them. Governments are lazy -- they want dragnets, they want all electronic data available for inspection for any reason, without a warrant. They want retroactive immunity for torturing and murdering civilians. But arguments that they can't do their job here are bullshit: I can put a video camera that watches your screen and keyboard and know what you're up to online, and those cost $15 at the computer store. If I want to know where you're driving off to, I don't need to install black boxes in every car... I just need to crawl under yours and attach a tracking device.
Law enforcement shouldn't be monitoring people's private communications or lives without a warrant, without cause, etc., child molesters, terrorists, and googly-eyed boogie men be damned. Just bending over and taking it like this hurts homeland security because it costs a lot of money for a minimal return on investment, it turns everyone into a spy for everyone else, and it winds up stifling the entire culture... if people are afraid to speak their mind, they're also afraid to innovate. If they're afraid to stand out in a crowd because of surveillance, then everyone becomes the same. The very essence of democracy is destroyed then -- there's no point in keeping who you voted for private if your internet searches are available to the government. They know who you voted for based on what you looked for online. There's no point in asking for warrants then, because they already have all the evidence sitting on a server somewhere... they can round up anyone at will because the laws are so complex, so dense, that nobody can avoid breaking at least one. And when you have such fine-grained knowledge on a person's daily life and activities, it means that you can arbitrarily point to someone and say "That one. Make them disappear," and find a legal justification for it.
Democracy cannot survive under such a system. It's simply not a democracy at that point in anything but name. If you people in Europe allow this to pass, whatever you are after this won't be a democracy... it'll be something else, something darker and not unlike what is happened to my country, the United States. We are a democracy in name only. Make this law, and you join us.
...and that once it's in service the cost of a flight to orbit may cost as little as 1/100 as much as it costs today.
Considering that the current cost is "We can't do it, we retired the space shuttles", I'm not sure what comparison you're making. Between this and what the Chinese are putting into orbit? Or the Russians? Or that other startup group that Slashdot seems to ignore?
I find this idea rather interesting, but I worry what might happen to someone who was placed in this pool by mistake?
If you read the terms of the EULA, you'll find out: You can beg for mercy, and perhaps Caesar will grant you a reprieve. Maybe. If he doesn't have gas that day from eating at Taco Bell. You have no rights to the aforementioned virtual world... you can be removed for any reason or no reason, and if you paid money, well tough nuts. You were informed by psychic eminations of the terms when you handed them your credit card, which was a binding and unappealable legal arrangement, and you can't return the product for a refund once you've opened it, you know, in order to read the terms. -_-
This is why I don't pay for software for personal use anymore; If a company can take away what's mine on a whim, then it wasn't really mine to begin with, and I don't spend money on things I don't get to keep.
Do you think your average Facebook using teenager would want to go back to, say, 1993 and spend hours fiddling with driver parameters to get a video card working in Windows, or OS/2, or DOS, or Linux?
First, the driver parameters for DOS were, uhh... "load=ansi.sys" Second, Windows didn't back then didn't really have video drivers to speak of. Third... Linux wasn't really useful in 1993 and only a few thousand people at most even knew of its existance at the time.
Or figuring out the magic incantations to get your 14.4 kbps modem to dial into an ISP?
BananaCom and other terminal programs handled that for you, but if you really felt like doing it manually: AT&D1&C2S95=55 followed by ATDT1235551212, and when you were done +++ATH0 got you where you needed to go. Not complicated. My passwords are harder to remember.
So, the group of people who "love building things with technology" is much smaller than the "love using technology to stay in contact with my social circle" group -- same as always.
It's not so much people love technology as they love what it enables them to do. That's always how it's been... IT or otherwise. Nobody loves cars, they loved that cars could get them from point A to point B in minutes instead of hours and you didn't have to scoop car poop out of your parking spot every day. But IT in the 90s was not overly difficult... Most kids grew up with Mac classics... a primitive but easy to use system. And they did pretty much what they do now with them: Play games and dial up BBS (except now BBS are 4chan, facebook, slashdot, etc.).
Younger people always think that new technology is some kind of paradigm shift. Older people know better: It's just evolution from one to another. 8 tracks became tape became compact discs became mp3 players became cell phones.
Normally teenagers are the gold standard for naive thinking, but they got it perfectly right on this one. I'm in IT. I've been here for a long time. I tell anyone considering a career in it to beat themselves soundly about the head and shoulders. How many ways is it bad? Ah, let us count the ways...
You'll rarely get any respect from your employer.
Most of us don't work for Google -- we work for MegaCorp(tm). MegaCorp's sole focus is on the end of quarter profit margin, and that means that everyone that isn't in sales is slowing us down. Cut those budgets! Trim those sales! Yarr, matey, we be bringin' in da gold this quarter! Nevermind that IT said it costs more and runs slower being powered by wind than a diesel engine. Your entire field is considered a bloated waste of money.
You will not be playing with the best technology, you will be helping others play with it.
Whatever is sitting on your desk is most likely a 3 coiled turd unless you are a programmer of some kind, or a manager. It's 3--5 years old, and so loaded down with antivirus, encryption, and at least 5 conflicting corporate 'big brother' programs to catalog your every keystroke that it runs slower than molasses uphill.
Your talents will be wasted.
Only the '20 year men' have a shot at getting something done and being recognized for it. And most likely they'll be looking for dumb kids like you to put in tons of overtime for a pat on the head.
epic failure of an IPO? The company's goal is to sell a share of itself for the highest price it can. How did Facebook fail?
By doing just about everything that would have raised its price wrong. Source: Pretty much every major news outlet that's reported on it. http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/tygrrrr-express/2012/may/25/why-facebook-ipo-failed/ http://www.theage.com.au/business/world-business/facebook-ipo-fail-may-cost-nasdaq-us100m-20120606-1zuys.html http://rt.com/usa/news/facebook-ipo-globe-internet-644/ http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/business/962290-192/signs-of-facebook-ipo-failure-dots-connecting.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/tykiisel/2012/05/23/facebooks-ipo-dealing-with-a-failed-project/
... Facebook is running an open call data science competition to win an interview/job on their data science team.
Anyone with half a brain will run away screaming from that offer, but not for the obvious reasons. A company that's recently post-IPO has mostly multimillionaires for employees -- and they can and will treat anyone who isn't like dirt. In a few years, if Facebook manages to turn around it's epic failure of an IPO (Well, from a business standpoint... Zuckerberg and his crew are still flush with cash) and grows their employee base by a significant amount, it may be worth considering.
But right now, it's a job for the kids fresh out of college; they won't know that the mistreatment isn't normal and might actually stick around for a couple of years before burning out.
You're right, that's the most important question. What do you do once you've got their crown jewels?
Even if they handed you the keys to the kingdom, don't tell them you have the keys to the kingdom. I have also been that contractor with 'god level' access to everything. And then one day it was pointed out to management that all of this nonsense about using IDS and scanners to detect whether a USB drive had been plugged in or not would really only serve to get in the way of people trying to do their job; anyone with even 3 working neurons in their brain could figure out how to get around it (as one example, printing a binary file, and then going over to the printer, plugging in an SD card, and copying it. Windows group policies don't work on printers. It was pointed out that the entire IT department had the necessary rights on the network and technical know-how to do it. So, naturally management nuked everything from orbit. They fired over 50 people in the span of a few months in a political fiat between infosecurity and the rest of IT (Little known fact: many people who work in info security have no previous background in IT. They usually can't tell a router from a switch) So you know, security must have improved after that, eh? Well, actually it didn't; They were robbed of a significant chunk their customer's credit card and billing data six months later because when you fire a significant chunk of your IT staff in one go, minor things like security patches tend to get put on the backburner while everyone goes into crisis mode.
Anyway, people talk about employees walking off with confidential data, but for every person that does that, at least a hundred others got fired because management got paranoid... probably more. Usually the value of the data they're protecting is worth less than the cost of hiring and training new employees, because management got spooked about the old ones.
The problem with guns is the technology to kill people is very primitive and simple. We've been killing each other since before we could read and write. Guns are nothing more than a device for initiating a controlled rapid exothermic reaction resulting in a propulsive force to a projectile.
Most people have the necessary tools and items required to manufacture a simple gun in their garages, propellant included. So even in the ideal case where criminals don't just file off the microprinting in a few well-placed strokes, and in this magical world every bullet fired has a 1:1 parity with a registered gun owner, the problem isn't any closer to being solved... there's still hundreds of other ways to murder people, either with guns, or gun-like devices, or even without guns. Hell, the government routinely says tazers, water cannons, and microwaving protesters is "safe", yet people still somehow wind up just as dead.
Expecting violent criminals to care about legislation like this is like expecting a terrorist to care his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces.
But never, ever, assume any "scientific fact" above any controversy or debate. Dogmas have no place here.
There's no assumption, I just get tired of arguing with morons. I mean, yes, I could entertain the 'controversy' of evolution, but I would succeed only in wasting my own time, and adding not a lick of knowledge or wisdom to humanity in the process. Likewise, while there may be a debate to be had with climate change, I grow tired of dealing with morons who wish to argue every single nuance, because they've already made up their minds and now they're off on some big effort to assimilate everyone else into thinking the same way.
The earth is getting warmer, and it's most likely our fault. Ta-da, the end. I may be a scientist, but I'm also a human being -- when there is compelling evidence in a peer reviewed journal that humans are not the primary source of global warming, I will revisit the matter. And most scientists, amateur and professional, feel similarly: We're tired of arguing with people who refuse to acknowledge the fire even when it's burning their nose.
Inhospitable? You know the earth has been much warmer with humans living on it? Earth had a radically different climate 200 years ago, and 200 years before that, and 200 years before that. Define "radical" please.
No, the Earth has NOT had radically different climate change since the end of the last ice age... that's about 20,000 years of a pretty steady and unchanging climate. There have been a few glitches caused by volcanic eruption and the like, but it's always returned to baseline. Climate change has only really accelerated in the past 50--100 years, which is a drop in the bucket compared to that amount of time. Scientists are already pointing to climate changes observable within a single person's lifetime. In geological terms, that's massively fast. I would even say... radically so.
Then you finish with "we are directly responsible". That is the part being questioned.
It's the most likely possibility given the facts presently available. But like all new discoveries, it takes time to fully explore and document the relationships between so many complex variables and distill it into a simple truth. I'll start saying we aren't the cause when the body of assembled evidence weighs in the other direction. I can't say it has been settled with certainty, but then I also can't say prove the existance of the higgs-boson, yet I'm not about to discount the entire standard model because of it, anymore than I'm going to discount evolution because we're missing one fossil in a series of 100. Anyone can argue "There's not enough evidence!" for an infinity, but reasonable people draw conclusions based on available evidence, and if it's insufficient to do the responsible thing and gather more. You will never hear a scientist utter the phrase "But we have too much evidence!" If you truly feel there's another explanation then go find the evidence for it. This is the one field of inquiry where its participants are often heard to say "Why that's a very convincing argument. I must have been mistaken." I look forward to reading your peer-reviewed study on how humans have played a minority role in global warming.
Then you finish by saying earth will not be inhospitable. What is your opinion here???
At least in the United States, the majority of our water supply is derived from ground water sources. Most rivers are too polluted to be drinkable, and the quantity of fresh water existing in lakes is, and will continue, to decrease as a result of global warming. Considering that right now, today, at this moment there are states in the southern United States that are facing major water shortages, it's not hard to see how some areas could become uninhabitable due to a lack of drinkable water -- let alone have enough to farm the land.
In science, we form conclusions based on the available data. Now I'm only an amateur scientist, and I freely admit I am not a specialist in climate change. If there is a climatologist in the audience I would gladly yield to their authority; But I've read all the data in many journals, and there's two facts about this that are inescapable: First, that climate change is happening, and second that we're the most likely cause of it. At this point, it would take a significant new discovery to reverse that conclusion, and no such discoveries have been forthcoming -- every new piece of data I read about just further confirms that human beings are the cause. So I believe that what I've said is scientifically accurate. As to what to do about it... well, that's a lot more complicated and I'll just leave off by saying I think of all the available options, "do nothing" is the only one I'm firmly against.
So, we can review groundwater/sea-level scientific studies, but 'Climate Change' is a done deal.
It's a scientific fact that global warming is real. There is no debate, and no controversy, there. We've got too many satellites confirming it, along with thousands of ground stations and the upward trend is undeniable.
It's still up for discussion why it's happening or what it will eventually mean for us. Ethical scientists generally take the side of "Until we can predict with some confidence what will happen, we should do what we can to limit the impact," similar to the ideal behind the Hippocratic oath. Our present models, understanding, and theories point to rising sea levels, melting ice caps, and heating to the point where much of the ariable land along the equator will no longer be able to sustain industrial farming.
We're already seeing some of the effects of this rapid heating (in geological terms); In Japan, native moss is no longer used at several Zen shrines because it's become too warm for them to survive. Coral reefs are undergoing a mass-extinction event, and we are seeing weather patterns which roughly correspond to modelling predictions for a warmer Earth. If these trends continue, life will become increasingly inhospitable to humans. While long-term predictions aren't reliable, it is almost certain the Earth of 200 years from now will have a radically different climate than the Earth of today; We are directly responsible for this planet entering a new geological age with as much speed and force as the Cretaceousâ"Paleogene extinction event.
The debate really doesn't center on whether or not these things happen; The choice faced by our generation is not whether or not life after climate change is possible, but what kind of life it will be.
The difference is, the only real attention the media will give will be to the police, and this AP article illustrates this perfectly.
So long as people continue to watch media which only gives half the story, only half the story will be given. I go through a lot of effort to seek out alternative media and accounts of major stories, and what I've discovered is that domestic media only provides the appearance of impartiality; Just enough to suspend disbelief. This is most evident in how they give "equal time" to, say, creationism, as they would a scientist, when doing a report on the latest global warming. Domestic media is there to provide just enough facts for each 'side' to continue to perpetuate the idea of a controversy, when in fact, there very rarely is one. The media will even manufacture controversy if their corporate sponsors are paid enough; the recurring gay marriage stories and 'controversy', for example -- if you look, there wasn't much polarization before the general public was saturated with coverage of it.. people were like "Well, maybe I don't like it, but why the fuck do I care? There's about a billion other things more important than that." But the republicans needed a victory, so they pumped Murdock and behold, a polarizing story designed to get their voters to the polls to defeat their democratic rivals.
So yes, domestic media is totally corrupt, and they will happily splice and cut footage up, take people's quotes out of context, and generally 'spice' things up, but there is a very specific agenda behind such things. Indie media though is even worse... people desperate to get "their side" of the story or portray "the truth" often do such a piss-poor and slanted job of it that only the political activists in their own little microcosm would ever approve of it. I've tracked OccupyMN since they pitched their first tent... they've released hundreds of YouTube videos... all with only a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand at most, viewing it.
The Occupiers never got organized, they just barfed content onto the internet and made a cacaphony of conflicting statements, all basically saying "See! See! This proves what we've been saying all along!" ... Of course, nobody really knows what it is they've been saying at all... the Occupy movement is sortof a blob of negative emotions projected by the working class onto the rich, and while some of it is justified, the lack of any real cohesion means it basically reduces to a king sized bitch fest.
And then there's 'Collateral Damage', a widely-watched indie media video produced by Wikileaks, which later led to it being hunted by the 'land of the free' with a zeal that harkens back to soviet-era media manipulation. Indie media had a great potential to show us the actual cost of war, and to underscore how drone attacks and remote bombing may not harm homeland security in the short-term, but it definately creates lasting hostility to this country which definately harms it in the long term. 9/11 was a direct consequence of this kind of media manipulation -- it forced political reactionaries abroad to use bombs to get the general public's attention, because what was going on on Afghanistan was so far removed from public view that few people on the street could even tell you what we were doing there.
And this is the loci of the problem: No matter which 'side' you're on, the concept of 'sides' is the real enemy in journalism. Democracy absolutely depends on impartial reporting; Democracy fails catastrophically when the population becomes illiterate and misinformed or underinformed (both are equally bad). And that's exactly what's happened in this country -- ever since the vietnam war protests, our government in concert with wealthy private interests have carefully constructed a sort of "glass curtain" around the country. Unlike an iron curtain, like the soviets had, or similar systems which the Chinese have, our form of censorship is subtle and depends on controlling the broadcast media via private corporations and individuals so the government has plausible deniability; But it accomplishes the same basic goal: To mislead the general public about government actions.
orthodox Judaism considers it (specifically, matrilineal descent) a requirement. And for the record, I consider both stances equally stupid.
The jews believe that the savior hasn't yet come, because Jesus couldn't pass (or refused) tests in the old testament. They're still waiting for their savior, and one of those tests is that the savior will be a descendant of a particular person. If anyone here is being stupid, it's you -- there is no jewish race. Either you descended from that specific person, or you didn't.
The jewish community has maintained geneology records to an unrivaled level of detail ever since; it's at the very heart of their religion. The scientific test is completely superfluous to them; they know who they are because they've maintained records since before we knew what DNA was. Also, a scientifically-valid test to determine whether a given person is a direct descendant of another person is a matter that has non-religious legal implications; For example, in estate proceedings.
I guess the bottom line here is that people have gotten twisted up about the definition of race and forgotten that the jewish community is a special case: Their religion is literally based on genetics, and has been unfairly lumped into racial politics; They don't care what 'race' you are today, only whether or not you descended from a specific person (or not). Science can already determine whether you've descended from Ghenghis Khan or not (there's actually a pretty good chance the answer is yes), and if you go back far enough, you'll find a point when humanity was nearly wiped out... and almost all of us are descended from one of about 20 women, the so called "genetic Eves". You can't dismiss the jewish community without dismissing good science as well.... hell, the records the jewish keep have scientific value themselves -- anyone who studies geneology will attest to this.
I got the job done every time, often doing more than was required, and typically for even less money than the meager pittance I was given for the project. Did it make an appreciable difference regarding my employer's attitude towards IT? You be the judge: I got fired for asking for a raise a week after finishing the most elaborate project ever for said employer (Totally automated, solar powered, Wifi enabled outdoor camera system, one I was quite proud of considering I literally cobbled 90% together from parts laying around the shop).
I assume you've learned your lesson then. I feel for you, I really do. I've had similar experiences; I once saved a Fortune 500 company from hiring about 50 people at $14 an hour to retrigger deployments by writing an application over a few lunch breaks that automated the process. Another department became so worried about this development they agitated with infosecurity to change the policies to prevent its use, and then fired me for violating said new security policy. As a society, we lose hundreds of billions yearly because of this kind of political gameplay and a lack of understanding or awareness by management of the actual value of their labor resources, the policies that constrain them, or the budget for various things. Everyone here that's got a shred of professionalism and talent has a similar story. Everyone.
It's a hard lesson to learn, but as a professional in this industry, it is not your job to fix these problems. Your job is to do the best you can with the limited resources given to you. If, in your professional estimation, you feel your work is undervalued, the budget is insufficient, or management lacks the necessary leadership qualities for you to do your work with a minimum of hassle... then do the minimum amount of work necessary to keep suspicion away and spend the rest of your energy finding another place to work. Some dumb 20-something kid with his degree from "PC Tech" college will be happy to slave away at it for peanuts -- and when that fails, they'll just import a billion dirt-poor workers to do it.
Those kinds of employers are predatory, and they get their business karma returned to them eventually in the form of high labor costs, low efficiency, and tiny profit margins. Eventually, they strangle themselves... but it takes time, sometimes decades, before the economics of the situation can no longer be ignored. The H1B visa program was designed to give extra life to these otherwise dying predators... and even that's running out. India has its own infrastructure right now, and they're giving a hearty "F U" to labor exploitation... many such employers have "in-sourced" and discontinued the practice, and the rest have moved on to exploit the Phillipines.
I'm only explaining this because if you are a hacker, you won't be content with just knowing what to do, you'll have to know why. Well, now you know. So don't concern yourself over-much with this state of affairs; Just focus on getting slotted in with a company that doesn't engage in exploitative behavior, and trust your instincts about it. If something doesn't feel right, it's because it isn't -- if you get that vibe, don't drop anchor there.
I don't need a hacker on staff. I'll just leave a few ports open, like FTP, Telnet, HTTP, RDP, etc. They'll find me and I won't have to spend a cent on payroll! ;-)
That's like expecting your car's security will be improved by leaving the windows down in a well-visited parking ramp in an area with no security cameras. No, you'll just get robbed, and likely the inside will be trashed because if there's one thing criminals love more than a free lunch, it's shitting on someone else's hard work for thrills. There aren't many real hackers left in the world... it's all assholes looking for cheap thrills or cash. Those of us who still do it to teach ourselves about how these amazing little boxes of wires and boards work and make them do nifty things for us are about as plentiful as 20-something aged stamp collectors.
You're joking, right? A hacker is, by definition, someone overqualified for every job where the dress code includes the word "business" in its description. Why the hell would someone like that want to work for peanuts, creating miracles out of thin air with no budget? Because they find it challenging? Bitch, please -- we want to get paid, and if I'm working for a place that values IT so little they can't even come up with a budget for things that would (by your own definition!) render improvements to their infrastructure, what are the odds of promotion? A raise? Benefits? Answer: Zilch. Nothing. Nodda. Zero.
I know it's an unrelated field, and some of you will probably laugh, but when I was in school for graphic design (I already know enough for a degree in IT), one of the things my first teacher told me is: Don't work for free. You're not going to get any exposure, leads are worthless, and charity work doesn't get the bills paid. As a graphic designer, most of us are self-employed and it's essential we know to the nearest half-hour mark how long a project is going to take in billable hours. We need to make our own budget for every project, and everyone and I mean everyone is looking for free work or thinking they can do it themselves with photoshop.
IT is approaching the same commoditization of labor -- Many of us are "contractors" already, but eventually people are going to wise-up and become self-employed because contractors are paid shit and treated as such. Be ahead of the curve people: Don't work for peanuts, and if someone says "there's no budget for what you do," take the hint and move on.
If you have a critical service, have it at more than one host... That way when AWS has a bad hair day, you are still up.
While we're at it, we should probably backup the internet too. You'd think someone would have done it by now, in case it crashes, but I can't find any record of anyone doing it.