The US government has a Fraud Waste and Abuse hotline for things like this. You can report anonymously, or not. If I recall correctly, too, there are also whistleblower provisions where they pay a share of any fine or settlement to the whistleblower.
Eventually we're going to hit a point where the competitive economic value of unskilled human labor is simply too low to earn someone a living. We may already be edging to that point, at least in the developed world. I don't mean to be snarky when I ask what the solution is? Not everyone is smart enough or trainable, so do we just let them starve? When we have that much productivity, I think it's honestly time to reexamine our Calvinist moral ideas about work and value. My notion is that we'd have to move to something like Milton Friedman's idea of a guaranteed basic income, and then rather than view those who don't "work" negatively, we instead value those who do create/work/etc positively. I don't think we're there yet, but it's where we're going.
North Korea doesn't always brag about its provocations. Consider the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which was sunk by a mysterious explosion that was later assessed to have been a torpedo, while off a South Korean island within spitting distance of North Korean waters. North Korea denied any involvement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROKS_Cheonan_sinking). Also, while hacker and hacktivist groups tend to be quite open about claiming credit, nation-state hackers tend to be very quiet about it (I don't think any country anywhere has officially claimed credit for hacking, offhand). Given what I've read on various sites, I certainly think it's a credible theory that North Korea was behind it (Motive, Means, and it matches their style), though I certainly don't think I'd rule out other possibilities completely.
What Sony did wasn't quite the same as Apple's game. The big difference was that Sony's game wasn't "get everyone to buy our players and only our players" but rather "get our proprietary media format to become the industry standard, so we can make money on licensing that". Sony was happy for others to make the players, because Sony was getting a cut of that. Some of these efforts fell flat on their face (Betamax, Minidisc, Memstick) while others (Blu-ray for example) took off.
Unemployment is generally time limited, and notably less than your previous job paid. It is also usually conditioned on your continued reasonable efforts to seek/apply for new jobs. If you are (for example) an IT professional, it probably does not make sense for you to take a minimum wage job rather than remain on your (temporary) unemployment while you look for something in your field. If by unemployment you meant long-term public assistance/welfare benefits in general, then that's a different point, and I don't know how those stack up compared to working minimum wage (where you might still qualify for some or all of those benefits).
What really interests me is whether this is a change in their data retention posture, or if it's the same that they've been doing all along. The Einstein program didn't start in 2011, it dates back to something like 2004. If this has been the protocol all along, then I don't think there's any serious reason for concern. Keeping this much data stored in any easily accessible/usable form isn't cheap.
I'm not a Constitutional Scholar or Lawyer, so I'm not really qualified to draw the line between where the line is drawn between what is explicitly required and what is just tradition and processes created on top of that framework. Certainly though there's some room for interpretation, as electoral methods vary state by state. Some states have runoffs if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote (such as is currently the case in the Louisiana Senate race). This is still a winner-take-all system though. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that by geographically delimiting the voting area for each office, the Constitution does explicitly rule out a number of things such as nationwide proportional representation (I'm not sure if statewide would be, but again, IANACSOL).
The U.S. Constitution wasn't written with parties in mind. Several of the founding fathers hoped to avoid the sort of political parties and factionalism that were features of the British Parliament; or at least that's often inferred from things like Federalist No. 10. That said, it is a consequence of "Winner-take-all"/"First Past the Post" voting systems, such as the US, but it's hardly a US-only phenomenon. The same pressures exist in Canada, for instance, and can be seen in the way the Canadian Conservative Party has dominated ever since it formed from the merger of the two right-wing parties, leaving the NDP and Liberals to split the left.
Short version: this is a bunch of IDS logs and similar data that DHS (mainly US-CERT) has kept from various federal agencies. This isn't secretly collected information, it's records of things being sent to the government (email, web traffic, whatever).
According to TFA, Civil Libertarians are apparently for the deletion, because releasing it means everyone gets to see what you sent the government. This assumes (and that's a big if) that there's nothing in there that DHS wants to hide.
SANS doesn't think it should be deleted after only three years, because they think the research data (for intrusion activity) is still relevant (and by comparison SANS keeps theirs for 12 years).
The EINSTEIN Program long predates the current administration, as it dates back to 2004.
In fairness, though, we could ask whether this is in keeping with past treatment of such records - that is, has DHS always done this with these records, or is this new?
EINSTEIN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_%28US-CERT_program%29) isn't a Snowden-esque spying program, it's an IDS system. Basically this is the IDS logs for several federal agencies they're talking about purging.
Comprehensive list of skills, in multiple languages, free to use for non-commercial purposes...
So will the RPG they're making with this be a purely skill based system, or will it be tied to attributes and levels? Will there be perks available?
Yes, it's a very small percentage. Look at who does get promoted to the highest ranks though - every Chief of Staff of the Air Force has been a pilot, unless I've missed one somewhere. That's not to say you will never get promoted if you're not a pilot, just that it's the one with the best potential.
Part of the reason that morale is so low is that not only is the work long and tedious, but it's also horrible in terms of career path. The most desirable/promotable career path in the Air Force is that of a pilot, and (at least as I understand) the missile officers are about as far from that as it gets.
Because right now we're getting the worst of both worlds - a (state/local) government granted monopoly, and no oversight or regulation to anywhere near the extent that your actual utilities (such as water or gas) are. There are different ways to approach solving this problem. Heavily regulated utility status is one, but not nearly the only option. Perhaps a better solution would be to separate the pipes themselves from the service provided over them. To use a car analogy, right now Comcast owns the roads, and if you want to travel on them, you have use the Comcast Bus or Comcast Taxi service. Separating the infrastructure from the service provided, and regulating the infrastructure, would mean that there would be a level playing field for competition in service. That way, you or I could choose from any number of Bus or Taxi services, or starting up your own carpool (stretching the analogy a little, perhaps, but that's the general idea).
My understanding is that as a security professional, this is part of my job. It's risk management, not risk elimination. I need to be able to make the case that the security controls I'm proposing will make economic sense for the company. To use a physical example, sure, I could probably eliminate shoplifting if I put TSA style guards and nude scanners at the entrances of every store, but between the cost of all the machines and guards, and the fact that nobody would shop there anymore, it far outweighs any benefit in reduced shrink. From the sound of it though, you've experienced all this as a regular Admin who was shoehorned into also providing security work, probably because the company was too cheap to hire people specifically for that, which says a lot just to begin with. What follows is utterly unpredictable, and you're absolutely right to document everything you can, and hope that your next job is with a company that's at least slightly less mismanaged.
Any sort of human endeavor is subject to corruption, whether it is governmental, corporate, or otherwise. That doesn't mean that any of them are inherently evil, just that they can easily become so if allowed to run unchecked. Regulatory capture is bad, no regulation isn't better, so what's needed is reform and oversight, preferably before we "hire a dingo as a babysitter" (to borrow John Oliver's description). As for Net Neutrality, there are market competition based solutions that could address the problems, and possibly do a much better job than turning ISP service into a bunch of heavily regulated local monopolies. We're just not hearing about them because the only politicians that are actively proposing solutions seem to be on one side (which is a bad thing, in my opinion).
This is why I wish we were having a debate about solutions to the problems we're facing, rather than people like Ted Cruz shouting that this is the Obamacare of the Internet. There are conservative/libertarian ideas for addressing this, but they're not being brought up by Republican politicians (with perhaps a few exceptions, but by and large). We need reasonable debate, not just so that the problems get fixed, but that the fixes we get aren't themselves problematic, and are more acceptable to the widest possible number of people. That's how democracy is supposed to work.
That's what I find sad here. Rather than having a debate about what to do about a given problem, the trend seems to have been to deny that any problem even exists. Thus, rather than having a debate about whether to move to a highly regulated utility monopoly model, or finding ways to enable real competition in the ISP space, it's "We need Net Neutrality!" versus a chorus of denials and misdirections. We wind up being lucky to get any solution to the problem, and have to be happy with whatever we can get, instead of working out the best one.
It's a question of what is meant by "deregulation". I suspect what the GP means is not "no more rules/laissez faire", but rather that the pipes are regulated, and anyone can deliver service via those pipes. In your neighborhood, Comcast would be forced to separate operating the pipes and providing service. They could still offer ISP service, but they'd have to charge their ISP division the same (regulated) rate that they charge anyone else who wants to operate an ISP over those pipes. You, the customer, would then have a choice of any number of ISPs operating over those same pipes, and those ISPs would compete on a level playing field. This is not a perfect solution, perhaps, but it does eliminate (or at least severely regulate/restrict) the ability of Comcast to leverage its pipeline monopoly into an ISP monopoly.
Moral Panics are by no means the exclusive preserve of conservatives, because having the government police morals is something of a separate spectrum. The US political spectrum doesn't always match it, since there are libertarians on the right, and nanny-staters on the left, just as there are religious moralists and civil liberties people respectively. A lot of it can depend on the issue (abortion, guns, etc), too.
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The US government has a Fraud Waste and Abuse hotline for things like this. You can report anonymously, or not. If I recall correctly, too, there are also whistleblower provisions where they pay a share of any fine or settlement to the whistleblower.
Eventually we're going to hit a point where the competitive economic value of unskilled human labor is simply too low to earn someone a living. We may already be edging to that point, at least in the developed world. I don't mean to be snarky when I ask what the solution is? Not everyone is smart enough or trainable, so do we just let them starve? When we have that much productivity, I think it's honestly time to reexamine our Calvinist moral ideas about work and value. My notion is that we'd have to move to something like Milton Friedman's idea of a guaranteed basic income, and then rather than view those who don't "work" negatively, we instead value those who do create/work/etc positively. I don't think we're there yet, but it's where we're going.
North Korea doesn't always brag about its provocations. Consider the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which was sunk by a mysterious explosion that was later assessed to have been a torpedo, while off a South Korean island within spitting distance of North Korean waters. North Korea denied any involvement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROKS_Cheonan_sinking). Also, while hacker and hacktivist groups tend to be quite open about claiming credit, nation-state hackers tend to be very quiet about it (I don't think any country anywhere has officially claimed credit for hacking, offhand). Given what I've read on various sites, I certainly think it's a credible theory that North Korea was behind it (Motive, Means, and it matches their style), though I certainly don't think I'd rule out other possibilities completely.
What Sony did wasn't quite the same as Apple's game. The big difference was that Sony's game wasn't "get everyone to buy our players and only our players" but rather "get our proprietary media format to become the industry standard, so we can make money on licensing that". Sony was happy for others to make the players, because Sony was getting a cut of that. Some of these efforts fell flat on their face (Betamax, Minidisc, Memstick) while others (Blu-ray for example) took off.
Woops, I need to check my math. I'm off by a factor of roughly seven figures there...
It's roughly 83 Cubic Kessel Runs by the Millenium Falcon.
Unemployment is generally time limited, and notably less than your previous job paid. It is also usually conditioned on your continued reasonable efforts to seek/apply for new jobs. If you are (for example) an IT professional, it probably does not make sense for you to take a minimum wage job rather than remain on your (temporary) unemployment while you look for something in your field. If by unemployment you meant long-term public assistance/welfare benefits in general, then that's a different point, and I don't know how those stack up compared to working minimum wage (where you might still qualify for some or all of those benefits).
What really interests me is whether this is a change in their data retention posture, or if it's the same that they've been doing all along. The Einstein program didn't start in 2011, it dates back to something like 2004. If this has been the protocol all along, then I don't think there's any serious reason for concern. Keeping this much data stored in any easily accessible/usable form isn't cheap.
I'm not a Constitutional Scholar or Lawyer, so I'm not really qualified to draw the line between where the line is drawn between what is explicitly required and what is just tradition and processes created on top of that framework. Certainly though there's some room for interpretation, as electoral methods vary state by state. Some states have runoffs if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote (such as is currently the case in the Louisiana Senate race). This is still a winner-take-all system though. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that by geographically delimiting the voting area for each office, the Constitution does explicitly rule out a number of things such as nationwide proportional representation (I'm not sure if statewide would be, but again, IANACSOL).
The U.S. Constitution wasn't written with parties in mind. Several of the founding fathers hoped to avoid the sort of political parties and factionalism that were features of the British Parliament; or at least that's often inferred from things like Federalist No. 10. That said, it is a consequence of "Winner-take-all"/"First Past the Post" voting systems, such as the US, but it's hardly a US-only phenomenon. The same pressures exist in Canada, for instance, and can be seen in the way the Canadian Conservative Party has dominated ever since it formed from the merger of the two right-wing parties, leaving the NDP and Liberals to split the left.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Short version: this is a bunch of IDS logs and similar data that DHS (mainly US-CERT) has kept from various federal agencies. This isn't secretly collected information, it's records of things being sent to the government (email, web traffic, whatever). According to TFA, Civil Libertarians are apparently for the deletion, because releasing it means everyone gets to see what you sent the government. This assumes (and that's a big if) that there's nothing in there that DHS wants to hide. SANS doesn't think it should be deleted after only three years, because they think the research data (for intrusion activity) is still relevant (and by comparison SANS keeps theirs for 12 years).
The EINSTEIN Program long predates the current administration, as it dates back to 2004. In fairness, though, we could ask whether this is in keeping with past treatment of such records - that is, has DHS always done this with these records, or is this new?
EINSTEIN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_%28US-CERT_program%29) isn't a Snowden-esque spying program, it's an IDS system. Basically this is the IDS logs for several federal agencies they're talking about purging.
Comprehensive list of skills, in multiple languages, free to use for non-commercial purposes... So will the RPG they're making with this be a purely skill based system, or will it be tied to attributes and levels? Will there be perks available?
Here's hoping this means that Wheeler's plan to split the baby in half is dead, and we'll get some real action in terms of Title II classification.
Yes, it's a very small percentage. Look at who does get promoted to the highest ranks though - every Chief of Staff of the Air Force has been a pilot, unless I've missed one somewhere. That's not to say you will never get promoted if you're not a pilot, just that it's the one with the best potential.
Part of the reason that morale is so low is that not only is the work long and tedious, but it's also horrible in terms of career path. The most desirable/promotable career path in the Air Force is that of a pilot, and (at least as I understand) the missile officers are about as far from that as it gets.
Because right now we're getting the worst of both worlds - a (state/local) government granted monopoly, and no oversight or regulation to anywhere near the extent that your actual utilities (such as water or gas) are. There are different ways to approach solving this problem. Heavily regulated utility status is one, but not nearly the only option. Perhaps a better solution would be to separate the pipes themselves from the service provided over them. To use a car analogy, right now Comcast owns the roads, and if you want to travel on them, you have use the Comcast Bus or Comcast Taxi service. Separating the infrastructure from the service provided, and regulating the infrastructure, would mean that there would be a level playing field for competition in service. That way, you or I could choose from any number of Bus or Taxi services, or starting up your own carpool (stretching the analogy a little, perhaps, but that's the general idea).
My understanding is that as a security professional, this is part of my job. It's risk management, not risk elimination. I need to be able to make the case that the security controls I'm proposing will make economic sense for the company. To use a physical example, sure, I could probably eliminate shoplifting if I put TSA style guards and nude scanners at the entrances of every store, but between the cost of all the machines and guards, and the fact that nobody would shop there anymore, it far outweighs any benefit in reduced shrink. From the sound of it though, you've experienced all this as a regular Admin who was shoehorned into also providing security work, probably because the company was too cheap to hire people specifically for that, which says a lot just to begin with. What follows is utterly unpredictable, and you're absolutely right to document everything you can, and hope that your next job is with a company that's at least slightly less mismanaged.
Any sort of human endeavor is subject to corruption, whether it is governmental, corporate, or otherwise. That doesn't mean that any of them are inherently evil, just that they can easily become so if allowed to run unchecked. Regulatory capture is bad, no regulation isn't better, so what's needed is reform and oversight, preferably before we "hire a dingo as a babysitter" (to borrow John Oliver's description). As for Net Neutrality, there are market competition based solutions that could address the problems, and possibly do a much better job than turning ISP service into a bunch of heavily regulated local monopolies. We're just not hearing about them because the only politicians that are actively proposing solutions seem to be on one side (which is a bad thing, in my opinion).
This is why I wish we were having a debate about solutions to the problems we're facing, rather than people like Ted Cruz shouting that this is the Obamacare of the Internet. There are conservative/libertarian ideas for addressing this, but they're not being brought up by Republican politicians (with perhaps a few exceptions, but by and large). We need reasonable debate, not just so that the problems get fixed, but that the fixes we get aren't themselves problematic, and are more acceptable to the widest possible number of people. That's how democracy is supposed to work.
That's what I find sad here. Rather than having a debate about what to do about a given problem, the trend seems to have been to deny that any problem even exists. Thus, rather than having a debate about whether to move to a highly regulated utility monopoly model, or finding ways to enable real competition in the ISP space, it's "We need Net Neutrality!" versus a chorus of denials and misdirections. We wind up being lucky to get any solution to the problem, and have to be happy with whatever we can get, instead of working out the best one.
It's a question of what is meant by "deregulation". I suspect what the GP means is not "no more rules/laissez faire", but rather that the pipes are regulated, and anyone can deliver service via those pipes. In your neighborhood, Comcast would be forced to separate operating the pipes and providing service. They could still offer ISP service, but they'd have to charge their ISP division the same (regulated) rate that they charge anyone else who wants to operate an ISP over those pipes. You, the customer, would then have a choice of any number of ISPs operating over those same pipes, and those ISPs would compete on a level playing field. This is not a perfect solution, perhaps, but it does eliminate (or at least severely regulate/restrict) the ability of Comcast to leverage its pipeline monopoly into an ISP monopoly.
Moral Panics are by no means the exclusive preserve of conservatives, because having the government police morals is something of a separate spectrum. The US political spectrum doesn't always match it, since there are libertarians on the right, and nanny-staters on the left, just as there are religious moralists and civil liberties people respectively. A lot of it can depend on the issue (abortion, guns, etc), too.