Well, in the terrorist's defense, getting a parking ticket right before his final suicide bombing could lower his karma enough to drop the count down to 71 virgins....or something...
For the record, nobody says those virgins are girls. They could all be old gay men that smell like old spice.
And open a new one where the FBI (or RIAA investigators) can simply "ask" the program, "What files were shared?", get a convenient generated list, and find all the evidence they need to make your day in court miserable.
And if my computer lies? Nobody said my computer has to be programmed to tell the truth.
The purpose of H.R. 1319 is to reduce inadvertent disclosures of sensitive information by making the users of this software more aware of the risks involved.
Sure it is. Now, how about taking a closer look;
the term "peer-to-peer file sharing program" means[...] to designate files available for transmission to another computer to transmit files directly to another computer; and to request the transmission of files from another computer.
Well, that's basically "using the internet". And using the definition of "protected computer", if you can add a tcp/ip stack to your toaster, it's a protected computer. So what will it be illegal to do using anything with a microprocessor and can communicate with the outside world? Also, "authorized user" -- I suspect a lot of EULAs are going to be updated so that every company that has a piece of networkable software installed on your system is now also an authorized user. Unintended consequences are a bitch, aren't they? Your system is now legally required to be insecure and full of backdoors....prevent the reasonable efforts of an owner or authorized user from blocking the installation [of a] program or function thereof
So installing is now okay. 'Using' not available for comment. So we can still f*ck with it at the operating system level, or neuter it in memory -- messing with the code after installation or during runtime isn't covered. Oops.
to fail to provide a reasonable and effective means to disable or remove from the protected computer...[excessive legalese deleted]
Translation: Installers should come with uninstallers. We need a law for this? And without a definition of what "reasonable and effective" constitutes -- well, need I say more? Anyone try uninstalling Norton Antivirus lately? It's quicker just to nuke the drive from orbit, and it's the only way to be sure you got everything. Can I expect federal pound me in the ass prison time for all the Norton executives? No? Why -- oh, right... they're rich. But you there, little open source developer -- we know you're evil. I mean, you don't even have a brand identity!
As much as people hate to hear it, the Windows OS is pretty good these days. Of course, MS as a company sucks ass. If they would stop trying to be the abby sitters for the media companies and pull out DRM, I suspect it would be an awesome OS.
Windows has the most applications. It is not the best by most any other measure. The APIs are horrible, the security architecture is a house of cards, and it's still too easy for a single application to go crazy and freeze the system -- either because your game crashes and the video card can't be reset, or some system resource locks and then the application zombifies and brings everything to its knees in short order, or one of a dozen other failure conditions that are the result of poor programming.
But it's what everybody knows and uses so we'll overlook all of those problems.
but, isn't it going a bit far on things that just are naturally aimed for normal people?
I happen to believe that this country's government should do everything possible to help those who want to contribute and be a part of society do so -- normality not withstanding. Most people don't make a choice to go deaf, blind, or become handicapped. It just happens (most of the time). I would feel a lot better going to bed each night if I knew that should such a calamity happen to me, my life wouldn't come to an end literally or figuratively. There's some things that are just humane to do. That's why the rules are there. No, they're not important for you but to someone else it might mean the world.
No, it's not going too far -- it's not going far enough. WHO estimated that in 2002 there were 161 million (about 2.6% of the world population) visually impaired people in the world, of whom 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind. For comparative purposes, it's guessed that Linux commands a 1.7% marketshare on the desktop. Which means, there's more people out there who are blind than use linux -- yet, were I to suggest that support for Linux not be included because it isn't something normal people use or care about, I'd be lynched.
Possession laws should be enforced, but carefully.
That's the problem: You're counting on the good will of the prosecutor, judge, jury, police, and everybody else to realize "Hey, this person isn't really a threat, so we should look the other way." Sadly, it doesn't work that way. Maybe the prosecutor is up for re-election. Maybe the police officer made a mistake filing the paperwork. Maybe the judge just had an argument with his wife over his teenage daughter, ate a chili cheese burrito half an hour ago, and has nothing but death in store for you.
See, bad laws are a problem because they're enforced by human beings, who are prone to making errors in judgment. Stop the chain of misfortune at the source: Make sure the laws are well-written to begin with.
Okay, for $9.5 million dollars I think they can afford to hire a web designer that knows how to make a website accessible. I mean, I made a website that was accessible for two cans of mountain dew and what was left of a can of pringles. Looked better too. Then again, I did it for this girl who I really hoped would notice me after (she didn't), so I might have underbid just a bit. Still -- I think I would do better than these guys did.:\
like with students I teach who are caught with contraband and later explain to the cop, "I swear, officer, someone put that XXXXXX in my bag, I don't know where it came from" - when possession itself is a crime, this could be problematic.
That's a judicial problem, not a technical one. And it's solved by firing (or killing, neutralizing, or otherwise removing) the people who write vague and badly-defined laws to "look tough on crime" and wind up incarcerating people who are no real threat to society (or even themselves) and criminalizing behavior that doesn't have any tangible cost to those around them.
We are addressing how you would quickly establish trust between devices...
In a word, don't. GSM phones today already have a PRNG built-in, which is specific to that SIM card. Use it! The only pieces of information any device in between the clients is source, destination, and maybe some QoS bits, and a few other transport-related fields. The content should be end-to-end encrypted, just like it would with IPv6.
Cell phone networks don't have strong trust models as it is right now -- so there's little point in making your "ad hoc" network more secure than the real one. Realistically, you just need to make it as secure as it is today (a low bar to beat). The goal here is rapid communication, not rapid secure communication.
Seriously people, you're the authors not them. You choose what rights others are offered -- that's the goal of Open Source: Giving you the choice, not them. But if you want to make bad choices about your intellectual property, such as signing all your rights over to a greedy corporation, we're not going to stop you. I fail to see why we're even discussing this, beyond pointing out so everyone knows Palm is not a company worth developing for.
If you're going to support open source, then do it already--stop complaining about companies that don't. In return, don't support them by buying their products. It's simple, really -- we like our freedom and we're willing to pay for it. Is there any other message we can realistically send as a community and have any credibility?
On the other hand, the girl from next door is offered free wireless in her bedroom! What could be wrong with that?
Two things: First, the photoshopped porn out there looks a lot better than me naked, so I'm not exactly worried about grainy black and white photos showing my outline getting any kind of popularity online. If these were at all popular, TSA employees would be getting fired left and right for sharing with their friends. Apparently, they're just not any kind of a turn-on. Secondly -- I have been teaching my friends how to access that free wireless and let me just say, Mr. Johnson, Age 34 of Sacremento, CA, that buying a HP laptop with integrated webcam has given us all a laugh. You've been weighed, measured, and found wanting. Also, are you ever planning on enabling Windows Firewall and patching past SP2?
Sincerely,
The girl next door.
P.S. Really sorry about the disconnect notice from Comcast, but it wasn't from filesharing like you're assuming. I wanted to mirror all the slashfic on fanfiction.net. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I've since deleted most of it -- too much harryxhermione, not enough malfoyxsnape.
Reducing the number of machines able to be infected reduces spread rate, which increases security since those who do get infected can get rid of it before it finds another host more often.
You forget that geometric progressions don't much care for the spread rate. Let's assume a few things:
1. We want to query every single IPv4 address space (brute force and stupid, since only a little over 2^27, 75%, is actually in use in some fashion). 2. We're going to say that 90% of the machines out there run Windows. Actual estimates vary. 3. If an infection is timed correctly, even an out of band emergency patch will hit less than half of all machines. So, a worm has 30 days to spread between Patch Tuesdays. 4. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume everyone's bandwidth is a mere 10KB/s bidirectional. 5. Also for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to say that it takes 10KB of data to probe a machine to see if its infected. 6. At any given point in time, I'm going to say only 5% of machines on the internet are accessible (turned on, and can receive connections). I have no factual basis for this -- it's an assumption. So based on 4 & 5, I can make 1 probe attempt per second. Last, a disclaimer -- I do not know much about statistics. If I made a mistake, sorry.
So, in a day, a single machine can probe 86,400 IPs, probing the space in a random fashion. Of those, 64,800 (75%) are "in use" in some fashion. 58,320 (90%) of those run Windows. And 2,916 are turned on and receiving connections. 1,458 (half) are unpatched for the first 30 days of the spread. It manages to infect 2 machines in the first hour it runs (rounded down; is actually about 2.5) The next hour, 6.25 machines are infected, and so on and so forth. In 24 hours, 3.5 billion machines have been probed and infected.
Geometric progressions like this are the reason why statistics like "An unpatched windows machine directly connected to the internet is compromised within 8 minutes" exists. The premise "Reducing the number of machines able to be infected reduces spread rate, which increases security" is not valid -- because the spread rate is almost completely irrelevant. Even if I say only 1 machine per hour is infected, in just over 30 hours we have the same number of infected machines -- even though we cut the rate from 2.5 to 1.
If you want to make a difference -- reduce the window of opportunity; PATCH NOW. The rate is wholly irrelevant.
This "jump" you're seeing has nothing to do with an increase in the problem; But rather an increase in the use of insecure technologies. Most crimes are crimes of opportunity, and IT security breaches are no exception. The reason for the uptick is due to an increase in attack surface area and the fact that a lot more people are slipping into poverty. An increase in unemployment and poverty has always resulted in an increase in the crime rate.
One of the big problems with open source encoders is not that the encoders are efficient, but rather that they're hard to use. MediaCoder, for example -- it took me several hours to figure out how to encode a single DVD, and when ripping something like Invader Zim where there are a lot of chapters and different languages, it's anything but a clean job.
And if someone plugs something in and pushes a virus onto the network - how different is that to pulling the fire alarm, or jamming the lifts in a skyscraper? The company should be dealing with it - first by basic prevention (no USB access or even no USB ports if they aren't needed), secondly by policies but most importantly by enforcement.
Pulling fire alarms generally lead to jail time. I don't think there are many courts that would view dismissing an employee every five days for using a computer kindly, let alone jailing them for years.
The *company* should be taking basic precautions with its customer's and its own business data - that means limiting access to the bare minimum required.
Which drives the costs up. Hey -- $50 for a bag of chips. $120 dollars a gallon for gas. You want perfect security? Pay for it.
especially if you have the right precautions in place to prevent it happening accidentally.
There is no precaution that can outsmart human stupidity. If you had more than a year of experience in the field, you'd know this. Damn armchair network admins...
I worked deployment for several years at a company with about 13,000 servers and 96,000 workstations, as well as over 25,000 POS systems. I can safely say that size is not the problem. Policies are the problem. There is always that one employee that thinks that he can sneak iTunes onto the network and download some mp3s to a flash drive despite the "no pen drives policy". Disabling them doesn't really help -- they have physical access to the machine of course.
If you figure that there are 150,000 employees in your company, and the consumer market has a 5% infection rate, and 1% of your employees decide to bring a flash drive in... Then every five days, someone is plugging an infected flash drive into your network. All the network management in the world cannot control that many people -- I can't replicate myself to stand over each user and remind them of the risks. And since they don't see the consequences as they happen, there's no chance for them to learn.
But blaming corporations for this is stupid. And blaming employees for it isn't productive. The truth of the matter is, as far as the business world is concerned -- viruses, worms, malware, spyware, and the like are the cost of doing business. It would cost way more to fix the problem than to simply let it eat at the margins.
Sorry to say, but your data isn't worth those kinds of expenses.
You will end up prosecuting (and possibly punishing) hundreds or thousands of innocent people for every guilty party you find.
And that's a bad thing? You harm enough innocent people, and their friends, and their families, and their friend's friends, and their family's families -- will all start to talk. They'll start debating. They'll be angry. And they will, eventually, despite warnings of spending thirty years in the electric chair and having a taser stuck up their ass and set to auto-repeat for life, they will still decide that enough is enough. It's an unethical and somewhat disgusting approach -- but it will work. Sacrifice enough innocent people, and some of them will become martyrs. Once the government has lost the support of the people, it's just a matter of time before it crashes.
Six months later, the Demon Internet CEO is replaced with the Fluffy Bunny CEO, after a sexual harassment lawsuit is filed by half of the board of directors. Fluffy Bunny commits to network neutrality, and cheap, high speed internet access for all. Demon Internet CEO seen a short while after the trial on the corner wearing black boy shorts and a bow tie as the newest strawberry in the unemployment line. Fluffy Bunny calls Sally into the office, makes her the new head network administrator, and she installs linux on everything, saving the company a fortune. And since this wouldn't be slashdot without some kind of sexual commentary -- Sally also sets up her own dungeon between several racks of blade servers, a webcam, and begins posting her payback sessions to fund some much-needed hardware upgrades.:P
You know what, after all these years in IT, I say... give 'em as much data as they want. They'll choke and drown on it. The FBI is the most massively disorganized organization in the US Government. I would not worry about your privacy... they have trouble figuring out how to dress themselves in the morning.
Third, no worries. A small, controlled population with a ratio of 1 male to 10 females properly sheltered will be able to keep society going. Naturally, the females will need to be chosen for their attractiveness and the males for the knowledge and skills they know (I'm thinking lots of engineers will be needed so sign me up).
First, you're a sexist pig. Okay, now that my inner feminist has spoken up. Why the hell do you think intelligence is going to be important in a post-apocalyptic world? As you've just pointed out -- society is dead at this point. If we're going to rebuild, we're going back to basics, and that means people capable of surviving. We need people that are strong, not smart -- we don't need many smart people to rebuild, just a lot of strong backs. And why would you choose females based on attractiveness? If you're talking about survival of the species, then repopulation, not physical attractiveness, is the important trait. Physical attractiveness in modern terms is almost counter-productive to this -- narrow hips, tall, and thin, make horrible baby-makers. You want women with wide hips, the ability to store body fat, and strong autoimmune systems. Oh yeah, and don't forget -- if you've only got 1 man per 10 women, any group with 10 men and 1 woman's going to kill that man. The existing sex distribution ratio exists precisely because it allows people to survive. You want no more than about 128 men for every 100 women -- and no less than about 98 men per 100 women, at birth. That's what 20,000 years of natural selection have decided... and you should listen. It's a lot more experienced at rebuilding society than you, a mere slashdot poster, could ever hope to achieve.
At the risk of stating the bleedingly obvious, since you're claiming to have been in the military, and you are stating something obviously directly related to national security... I can't imagine this would be unclassified at its inception and remain so. Therefore, for you to tell us this, it would have had to be declassified at some point, and you would have received a communication to this effect.
Please provide a citation with either the name of the authority who notified you of the new classification status, or whatever relevant information is required to get an authenticated document confirming this statement. Otherwise, you're seriously lacking in credibility and/or taking an enormous risk posting this publicly. Or you're just plain nuts.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in the terrorist's defense, getting a parking ticket right before his final suicide bombing could lower his karma enough to drop the count down to 71 virgins....or something...
For the record, nobody says those virgins are girls. They could all be old gay men that smell like old spice.
And open a new one where the FBI (or RIAA investigators) can simply "ask" the program, "What files were shared?", get a convenient generated list, and find all the evidence they need to make your day in court miserable.
And if my computer lies? Nobody said my computer has to be programmed to tell the truth.
This is of course, only possible if the writers of P2P software actually give two hoots about the bill.....
Yeah, it's like expecting a terrorist to care his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces.
You can't write laws that eliminate stupidity.
Doesn't stop them from trying.
The purpose of H.R. 1319 is to reduce inadvertent disclosures of sensitive information by making the users of this software more aware of the risks involved.
Sure it is. Now, how about taking a closer look;
the term "peer-to-peer file sharing program" means[...]
to designate files available for transmission to another computer
to transmit files directly to another computer; and
to request the transmission of files from another computer.
Well, that's basically "using the internet". And using the definition of "protected computer", if you can add a tcp/ip stack to your toaster, it's a protected computer. So what will it be illegal to do using anything with a microprocessor and can communicate with the outside world? Also, "authorized user" -- I suspect a lot of EULAs are going to be updated so that every company that has a piece of networkable software installed on your system is now also an authorized user. Unintended consequences are a bitch, aren't they? Your system is now legally required to be insecure and full of backdoors. ...prevent the reasonable efforts of an owner or authorized user from blocking the installation [of a] program or function thereof
So installing is now okay. 'Using' not available for comment. So we can still f*ck with it at the operating system level, or neuter it in memory -- messing with the code after installation or during runtime isn't covered. Oops.
to fail to provide a reasonable and effective means to disable or remove from the protected computer...[excessive legalese deleted]
Translation: Installers should come with uninstallers. We need a law for this? And without a definition of what "reasonable and effective" constitutes -- well, need I say more? Anyone try uninstalling Norton Antivirus lately? It's quicker just to nuke the drive from orbit, and it's the only way to be sure you got everything. Can I expect federal pound me in the ass prison time for all the Norton executives? No? Why -- oh, right... they're rich. But you there, little open source developer -- we know you're evil. I mean, you don't even have a brand identity!
Yeah... this ends well.
Thanks for the info. Sheesh. Probably doesn't even have an emotion chip, so it can't even feel gratitude for my help.
I think that's rather prejudiced. We know CowboyNeal is just a 7 line perl script, but we accept him just the way he is...
As much as people hate to hear it, the Windows OS is pretty good these days.
Of course, MS as a company sucks ass. If they would stop trying to be the abby sitters for the media companies and pull out DRM, I suspect it would be an awesome OS.
Windows has the most applications. It is not the best by most any other measure. The APIs are horrible, the security architecture is a house of cards, and it's still too easy for a single application to go crazy and freeze the system -- either because your game crashes and the video card can't be reset, or some system resource locks and then the application zombifies and brings everything to its knees in short order, or one of a dozen other failure conditions that are the result of poor programming.
But it's what everybody knows and uses so we'll overlook all of those problems.
but, isn't it going a bit far on things that just are naturally aimed for normal people?
I happen to believe that this country's government should do everything possible to help those who want to contribute and be a part of society do so -- normality not withstanding. Most people don't make a choice to go deaf, blind, or become handicapped. It just happens (most of the time). I would feel a lot better going to bed each night if I knew that should such a calamity happen to me, my life wouldn't come to an end literally or figuratively. There's some things that are just humane to do. That's why the rules are there. No, they're not important for you but to someone else it might mean the world.
No, it's not going too far -- it's not going far enough. WHO estimated that in 2002 there were 161 million (about 2.6% of the world population) visually impaired people in the world, of whom 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind. For comparative purposes, it's guessed that Linux commands a 1.7% marketshare on the desktop. Which means, there's more people out there who are blind than use linux -- yet, were I to suggest that support for Linux not be included because it isn't something normal people use or care about, I'd be lynched.
Possession laws should be enforced, but carefully.
That's the problem: You're counting on the good will of the prosecutor, judge, jury, police, and everybody else to realize "Hey, this person isn't really a threat, so we should look the other way." Sadly, it doesn't work that way. Maybe the prosecutor is up for re-election. Maybe the police officer made a mistake filing the paperwork. Maybe the judge just had an argument with his wife over his teenage daughter, ate a chili cheese burrito half an hour ago, and has nothing but death in store for you.
See, bad laws are a problem because they're enforced by human beings, who are prone to making errors in judgment. Stop the chain of misfortune at the source: Make sure the laws are well-written to begin with.
Okay, for $9.5 million dollars I think they can afford to hire a web designer that knows how to make a website accessible. I mean, I made a website that was accessible for two cans of mountain dew and what was left of a can of pringles. Looked better too. Then again, I did it for this girl who I really hoped would notice me after (she didn't), so I might have underbid just a bit. Still -- I think I would do better than these guys did. :\
like with students I teach who are caught with contraband and later explain to the cop, "I swear, officer, someone put that XXXXXX in my bag, I don't know where it came from" - when possession itself is a crime, this could be problematic.
That's a judicial problem, not a technical one. And it's solved by firing (or killing, neutralizing, or otherwise removing) the people who write vague and badly-defined laws to "look tough on crime" and wind up incarcerating people who are no real threat to society (or even themselves) and criminalizing behavior that doesn't have any tangible cost to those around them.
We are addressing how you would quickly establish trust between devices...
In a word, don't. GSM phones today already have a PRNG built-in, which is specific to that SIM card. Use it! The only pieces of information any device in between the clients is source, destination, and maybe some QoS bits, and a few other transport-related fields. The content should be end-to-end encrypted, just like it would with IPv6.
Cell phone networks don't have strong trust models as it is right now -- so there's little point in making your "ad hoc" network more secure than the real one. Realistically, you just need to make it as secure as it is today (a low bar to beat). The goal here is rapid communication, not rapid secure communication.
Seriously people, you're the authors not them. You choose what rights others are offered -- that's the goal of Open Source: Giving you the choice, not them. But if you want to make bad choices about your intellectual property, such as signing all your rights over to a greedy corporation, we're not going to stop you. I fail to see why we're even discussing this, beyond pointing out so everyone knows Palm is not a company worth developing for.
If you're going to support open source, then do it already--stop complaining about companies that don't. In return, don't support them by buying their products. It's simple, really -- we like our freedom and we're willing to pay for it. Is there any other message we can realistically send as a community and have any credibility?
On the other hand, the girl from next door is offered free wireless in her bedroom! What could be wrong with that?
Two things: First, the photoshopped porn out there looks a lot better than me naked, so I'm not exactly worried about grainy black and white photos showing my outline getting any kind of popularity online. If these were at all popular, TSA employees would be getting fired left and right for sharing with their friends. Apparently, they're just not any kind of a turn-on. Secondly -- I have been teaching my friends how to access that free wireless and let me just say, Mr. Johnson, Age 34 of Sacremento, CA, that buying a HP laptop with integrated webcam has given us all a laugh. You've been weighed, measured, and found wanting. Also, are you ever planning on enabling Windows Firewall and patching past SP2?
Sincerely,
The girl next door.
P.S. Really sorry about the disconnect notice from Comcast, but it wasn't from filesharing like you're assuming. I wanted to mirror all the slashfic on fanfiction.net. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I've since deleted most of it -- too much harryxhermione, not enough malfoyxsnape.
Reducing the number of machines able to be infected reduces spread rate, which increases security since those who do get infected can get rid of it before it finds another host more often.
You forget that geometric progressions don't much care for the spread rate. Let's assume a few things:
1. We want to query every single IPv4 address space (brute force and stupid, since only a little over 2^27, 75%, is actually in use in some fashion).
2. We're going to say that 90% of the machines out there run Windows. Actual estimates vary.
3. If an infection is timed correctly, even an out of band emergency patch will hit less than half of all machines. So, a worm has 30 days to spread between Patch Tuesdays.
4. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to assume everyone's bandwidth is a mere 10KB/s bidirectional.
5. Also for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to say that it takes 10KB of data to probe a machine to see if its infected.
6. At any given point in time, I'm going to say only 5% of machines on the internet are accessible (turned on, and can receive connections). I have no factual basis for this -- it's an assumption.
So based on 4 & 5, I can make 1 probe attempt per second.
Last, a disclaimer -- I do not know much about statistics. If I made a mistake, sorry.
So, in a day, a single machine can probe 86,400 IPs, probing the space in a random fashion. Of those, 64,800 (75%) are "in use" in some fashion. 58,320 (90%) of those run Windows. And 2,916 are turned on and receiving connections. 1,458 (half) are unpatched for the first 30 days of the spread. It manages to infect 2 machines in the first hour it runs (rounded down; is actually about 2.5) The next hour, 6.25 machines are infected, and so on and so forth. In 24 hours, 3.5 billion machines have been probed and infected.
Geometric progressions like this are the reason why statistics like "An unpatched windows machine directly connected to the internet is compromised within 8 minutes" exists. The premise "Reducing the number of machines able to be infected reduces spread rate, which increases security" is not valid -- because the spread rate is almost completely irrelevant. Even if I say only 1 machine per hour is infected, in just over 30 hours we have the same number of infected machines -- even though we cut the rate from 2.5 to 1.
If you want to make a difference -- reduce the window of opportunity; PATCH NOW. The rate is wholly irrelevant.
They have a bad reputation for a reason.
They have a better reputation than Sony.
This "jump" you're seeing has nothing to do with an increase in the problem; But rather an increase in the use of insecure technologies. Most crimes are crimes of opportunity, and IT security breaches are no exception. The reason for the uptick is due to an increase in attack surface area and the fact that a lot more people are slipping into poverty. An increase in unemployment and poverty has always resulted in an increase in the crime rate.
One of the big problems with open source encoders is not that the encoders are efficient, but rather that they're hard to use. MediaCoder, for example -- it took me several hours to figure out how to encode a single DVD, and when ripping something like Invader Zim where there are a lot of chapters and different languages, it's anything but a clean job.
And if someone plugs something in and pushes a virus onto the network - how different is that to pulling the fire alarm, or jamming the lifts in a skyscraper? The company should be dealing with it - first by basic prevention (no USB access or even no USB ports if they aren't needed), secondly by policies but most importantly by enforcement.
Pulling fire alarms generally lead to jail time. I don't think there are many courts that would view dismissing an employee every five days for using a computer kindly, let alone jailing them for years.
The *company* should be taking basic precautions with its customer's and its own business data - that means limiting access to the bare minimum required.
Which drives the costs up. Hey -- $50 for a bag of chips. $120 dollars a gallon for gas. You want perfect security? Pay for it.
especially if you have the right precautions in place to prevent it happening accidentally.
There is no precaution that can outsmart human stupidity. If you had more than a year of experience in the field, you'd know this. Damn armchair network admins...
Why do people blame the company for this?
I worked deployment for several years at a company with about 13,000 servers and 96,000 workstations, as well as over 25,000 POS systems. I can safely say that size is not the problem. Policies are the problem. There is always that one employee that thinks that he can sneak iTunes onto the network and download some mp3s to a flash drive despite the "no pen drives policy". Disabling them doesn't really help -- they have physical access to the machine of course.
If you figure that there are 150,000 employees in your company, and the consumer market has a 5% infection rate, and 1% of your employees decide to bring a flash drive in... Then every five days, someone is plugging an infected flash drive into your network. All the network management in the world cannot control that many people -- I can't replicate myself to stand over each user and remind them of the risks. And since they don't see the consequences as they happen, there's no chance for them to learn.
But blaming corporations for this is stupid. And blaming employees for it isn't productive. The truth of the matter is, as far as the business world is concerned -- viruses, worms, malware, spyware, and the like are the cost of doing business. It would cost way more to fix the problem than to simply let it eat at the margins.
Sorry to say, but your data isn't worth those kinds of expenses.
You will end up prosecuting (and possibly punishing) hundreds or thousands of innocent people for every guilty party you find.
And that's a bad thing? You harm enough innocent people, and their friends, and their families, and their friend's friends, and their family's families -- will all start to talk. They'll start debating. They'll be angry. And they will, eventually, despite warnings of spending thirty years in the electric chair and having a taser stuck up their ass and set to auto-repeat for life, they will still decide that enough is enough. It's an unethical and somewhat disgusting approach -- but it will work. Sacrifice enough innocent people, and some of them will become martyrs. Once the government has lost the support of the people, it's just a matter of time before it crashes.
Oh yeah, and then the terrorists win.
Six months later, the Demon Internet CEO is replaced with the Fluffy Bunny CEO, after a sexual harassment lawsuit is filed by half of the board of directors. Fluffy Bunny commits to network neutrality, and cheap, high speed internet access for all. Demon Internet CEO seen a short while after the trial on the corner wearing black boy shorts and a bow tie as the newest strawberry in the unemployment line. Fluffy Bunny calls Sally into the office, makes her the new head network administrator, and she installs linux on everything, saving the company a fortune. And since this wouldn't be slashdot without some kind of sexual commentary -- Sally also sets up her own dungeon between several racks of blade servers, a webcam, and begins posting her payback sessions to fund some much-needed hardware upgrades. :P
You know what, after all these years in IT, I say... give 'em as much data as they want. They'll choke and drown on it. The FBI is the most massively disorganized organization in the US Government. I would not worry about your privacy... they have trouble figuring out how to dress themselves in the morning.
Third, no worries. A small, controlled population with a ratio of 1 male to 10 females properly sheltered will be able to keep society going. Naturally, the females will need to be chosen for their attractiveness and the males for the knowledge and skills they know (I'm thinking lots of engineers will be needed so sign me up).
First, you're a sexist pig. Okay, now that my inner feminist has spoken up. Why the hell do you think intelligence is going to be important in a post-apocalyptic world? As you've just pointed out -- society is dead at this point. If we're going to rebuild, we're going back to basics, and that means people capable of surviving. We need people that are strong, not smart -- we don't need many smart people to rebuild, just a lot of strong backs. And why would you choose females based on attractiveness? If you're talking about survival of the species, then repopulation, not physical attractiveness, is the important trait. Physical attractiveness in modern terms is almost counter-productive to this -- narrow hips, tall, and thin, make horrible baby-makers. You want women with wide hips, the ability to store body fat, and strong autoimmune systems. Oh yeah, and don't forget -- if you've only got 1 man per 10 women, any group with 10 men and 1 woman's going to kill that man. The existing sex distribution ratio exists precisely because it allows people to survive. You want no more than about 128 men for every 100 women -- and no less than about 98 men per 100 women, at birth. That's what 20,000 years of natural selection have decided... and you should listen. It's a lot more experienced at rebuilding society than you, a mere slashdot poster, could ever hope to achieve.
At the risk of stating the bleedingly obvious, since you're claiming to have been in the military, and you are stating something obviously directly related to national security... I can't imagine this would be unclassified at its inception and remain so. Therefore, for you to tell us this, it would have had to be declassified at some point, and you would have received a communication to this effect.
Please provide a citation with either the name of the authority who notified you of the new classification status, or whatever relevant information is required to get an authenticated document confirming this statement. Otherwise, you're seriously lacking in credibility and/or taking an enormous risk posting this publicly. Or you're just plain nuts.