...but to my knowledge they haven't prevented a single attack.
Again, I'm in agreement. I don't know either. I suspect that precious few people really do. Not experiencing an attack since September 11 doesn't mean that the government has prevented one, but it doesn't imply the opposite, either.
I'm no more happy about warrantless searches from this administration than I am of those from the previous administration, but I'm certainly not more scared of the US government than I am of terrorists. Actually, I'm scared of neither.
I wear neither blinders nor rose-colored glasses. And I don't rely on Fox News or CNN for all of my news.
I prefer to think of it as 12 people and leave it at that.
Well, of course, but then the comment wouldn't have have been germane to the topic under discussion. It's always appropriate to consider the context of the statement before getting too high and mighty.
Incidentally, in my small corner of a 10,000 employee campus, we are mostly white males with a smattering of a few women. The non caucasion contingent is made up of a Pakistani woman and a Nepalese man. Add in three caucasion women and we look pretty pale. However, the age balance is definitely skewed to the over 40 crowd.
I vaguely remember an email that HR shot around a while back about there being something like 53 different native languages spoken on the campus and god knows how many different ethnicities represented. Not what you'd expect from an archly conservative region in a solidly red state.
I'm no rabid Firefly fan (honest!), but I did like the show and the movie. The movie looks like it broke even at the box office, but if you add DVD sales in, it surely must have done reasonably well - the DVD has been in the top 5 at Amazon since it was released. For that matter, the Firefly box set has been up there, too, which ought to make Fox happy.
I'm not surprised that Fox stuck it to the show. It's not so much that the axe innovative shows as it is that they are locked into the short-term TV on the cheap program. Reality shows cost next to nothing and make a metric buttload of money. They're easy to promote. Firefly was an expensive show that didn't fit the Fox mold. It was easy to preempt because it was virtually unmarketable from Fox's point of view. But at some point, somebody at Fox is going to realize that having four or five shows to syndicate is a pretty slim library - I don't think that American Idol will do all that well in reruns.
Firefly was here and gone before I ever heard about it. My first exposure was the movie, then I bought the TV DVDs. I vaguely remember hearing something about the show, but I always thought that it was a SciFi Network program - and I'm not that out of touch with my TV.
I think that this case underscores how little government bureaucrats understand about the technology being used in their own buildings right under their very noses.
The technology thing is a red herring. What the case really underscores is the lack of oversight of employees using government purchasing cards. A $1000 limit to trigger review of a purchase may be too low, depending on the level of the employee.
In the next city over from me, this happened last year. Some city employees were using the cards like their own personal cash stash and buying everything from personal electronics to baby clothes. It cost the mayor, his chief of staff and the chief of police their jobs. The mayor, his chief of staff and at least one other employee went to jail.
Now the purchasing cards are tightly controlled and all purchases are reviewed at least monthly.
In this case, the purchases were related to computers, but they could have been anything. The point is that there must be accountability for government spending, no matter what level of government is concerned.
But it's vital to electricity generation/transmission...
Most power lines use steel reinforced aluminum cable, and have since the 1950's. It's a lot cheaper and a lot lighter than copper. The drawback is that, at high voltages, the aluminum gets hot, hotter than the steel, and sags. There is a fair amount of research going on into better aluminum alloys to avoid the problem.
Your comment makes no sense. If you use your own time for investigation and recovery, who do you send the bill to? Yourself? You have no monetary loss. On the other hand, a company who pays somebody to perform the investigation and recovery can demonstrate a monetary loss.
Now, if you hire somebody to do the investigation and recovery, then you can make a case for restitution. Or, if you had to take time off of work to do the investigation and recovery (and didn't get paid), then you can make a case for restitution.
Or, if you feel that your time is worth something, you can file a civil case and sue the hacker for the value of your time.
Check around a bit - you'll find that the US judicial system is quite liberal when it comes to recovering damages in a criminal case.
And that, folks, is why there's no reason to use an analogy when the point that you're trying to make is so simple - you're likely to use one that doesn't apply to the situation.
As a hint: the crime in question was not a property crime.
I agree with you. What he did was no accident. The first time that he logged into the account, he showed a serious error in judgement. That was a mistake. And if it had ended there, then no harm, no foul. But he went beyond mistake when he kept on logging in. Deleting the account was well beyond a mistake.
I understand that and I don't have any problem with it - RH took a responsible position, given that they provided the affected program. But you left out the rest of Cox's quote:
"Microsoft customers were left on their own," Cox said. "For several days the only way customers could find out about this issue was from the Microsoft security team Weblog or if they read something in the press about Flash vulnerabilities and realized they had it installed. Later, Microsoft issued an advisory telling customers to visit the Macromedia site to obtain an update."
And this is why I wondered how far does it go? Is the OS vendor responsible for security update notification for all software that runs under that OS? Or for popular software? If so, what determines which software is popular?
Incidentally, I'm with the group that doesn't put a lot of credence into the US-CERT summary because it seems to compare apples with oranges.
What about Cox's boasting that Red Hat took the initiative to notify its users about the Flash issue? According to him, Microsoft left its customers in the dark - but the security issue had absolutely nothing to do with either Red Hat or Microsoft. Are we now to depend upon our OS vendor to provide us with security updates for our third party applications? How far does it go?
The whole Linux versus Microsoft thing is like arguing politics. You've got a few zealots on the fringes and a vast number of people who are perfectly happy with what they've got. The zealots are loud and shrill but, in the the end, they represent a tiny minority.
Want a bad analogy? It's like Ford saying that you should buy a Mustang because a Camaro sucks (yes, I know that Chevy doesn't make Camaros anymore - work with me here).
MySQL is on the GSA schedule - but thousands upon thousands of products are available on the GSA schedule. Just being on the GSA schedule isn't particularly dramatic, though. And the headline (and even the summary) are quite a bit more breathless and quite a bit less accurate than the real story.
I see that The Reg is suffering from the/. Editor Effect. "Tablet Mac draws bidders on eBay". Bidders? Unless zero has taken on a new value that I don't know about, I'd disagree.
Oh, and, for what it's worth, the auction does say that the computer will ship outside of the US. Although I honestly can't imagine who would care to risk their money on something that doesn't even exist.
I've got to say that I'm a little confused about the shipping time, too. The auction text says that it ships after it's modified - oh, and allow some time for the vendor to order one after you pay up. And for the touchscreen to arrive. But at the bottom of the auction, it ships a day after payment clears.
I'm really at a loss for a reason why this is on either/. or The Reg. Maybe it's not a scam, but it's certainly not news.
Dunno...at my company, most workstations run either Linux or Windows (depends on the software requirements). The main servers are all Sun. There are "server" farms that run on Linux, but they are for processing data (running electrical simulations, etc), not really acting as servers, per se. The heart of the company's research and development network is all Sun. Anything that is mission critical runs on those servers. And the UNIX admins cite the same reason as the article did for using Solaris 8 on the servers - the workstations are all running RHEL.
When I ran tech support for a (former) top five computer manufacturer, the mantra that the whole company chanted was "inventory turn". We were number one in the industry for inventory turn. And from a support point of view, particularly for the servers we sold, it was an absolute nightmare. Obviously new sales took priority for parts availability and there was no consideration given to additional inventory for support issues, so if there was no "refurbished" (read: used parts pulled from returned systems) part available, we had to compete for new parts with the assembly floor. And if (or, more usually, when) supply was tight, we (meaning the existing customer) lost and the replacement part was delayed.
Suffice to say that the company is no longer anywhere near the top five, has a different name - and I'm long gone from them.
Yeah, I get emails from AnySystem because I bought an Ultra 5 from you guys on Ebay. Overpriced does not even begin to describe your prices. I have to admit that the emails start off very exciting, telling me about the great deals that you have to offer, but when it comes down to price, I can't say that paying near original retail for a Sun Blade 100 that's worth, oh, about 50 bucks is very exciting to me (although if somebody pays you, I'm sure it's quite exciting!)
In 2001 I broke an engine mount on a 1986 car and there was only 1 of that part left in North America (by computer search anyway.) I had to scrap the car.
I don't buy it, or else you're not very smart - five year old cars are the bread and butter of junkyards throughout the US. And even if you couldn't come up with a used one, fabricating a new one isn't exactly rocket science to a good metal shop.
And, uh, if there was only one of that part left in NA, why didn't you buy it?
Slashdot Mirror
So true. Definitely not for me.
Again, I'm in agreement. I don't know either. I suspect that precious few people really do. Not experiencing an attack since September 11 doesn't mean that the government has prevented one, but it doesn't imply the opposite, either.
I'm no more happy about warrantless searches from this administration than I am of those from the previous administration, but I'm certainly not more scared of the US government than I am of terrorists. Actually, I'm scared of neither.
I wear neither blinders nor rose-colored glasses. And I don't rely on Fox News or CNN for all of my news.
-h-
I prefer to think of it as 12 people and leave it at that.
Well, of course, but then the comment wouldn't have have been germane to the topic under discussion. It's always appropriate to consider the context of the statement before getting too high and mighty.
Incidentally, in my small corner of a 10,000 employee campus, we are mostly white males with a smattering of a few women. The non caucasion contingent is made up of a Pakistani woman and a Nepalese man. Add in three caucasion women and we look pretty pale. However, the age balance is definitely skewed to the over 40 crowd.
I vaguely remember an email that HR shot around a while back about there being something like 53 different native languages spoken on the campus and god knows how many different ethnicities represented. Not what you'd expect from an archly conservative region in a solidly red state.
-h-
I'm no rabid Firefly fan (honest!), but I did like the show and the movie. The movie looks like it broke even at the box office, but if you add DVD sales in, it surely must have done reasonably well - the DVD has been in the top 5 at Amazon since it was released. For that matter, the Firefly box set has been up there, too, which ought to make Fox happy.
I'm not surprised that Fox stuck it to the show. It's not so much that the axe innovative shows as it is that they are locked into the short-term TV on the cheap program. Reality shows cost next to nothing and make a metric buttload of money. They're easy to promote. Firefly was an expensive show that didn't fit the Fox mold. It was easy to preempt because it was virtually unmarketable from Fox's point of view. But at some point, somebody at Fox is going to realize that having four or five shows to syndicate is a pretty slim library - I don't think that American Idol will do all that well in reruns.
Firefly was here and gone before I ever heard about it. My first exposure was the movie, then I bought the TV DVDs. I vaguely remember hearing something about the show, but I always thought that it was a SciFi Network program - and I'm not that out of touch with my TV.
-h-
I think that this case underscores how little government bureaucrats understand about the technology being used in their own buildings right under their very noses.
The technology thing is a red herring. What the case really underscores is the lack of oversight of employees using government purchasing cards. A $1000 limit to trigger review of a purchase may be too low, depending on the level of the employee.
In the next city over from me, this happened last year. Some city employees were using the cards like their own personal cash stash and buying everything from personal electronics to baby clothes. It cost the mayor, his chief of staff and the chief of police their jobs. The mayor, his chief of staff and at least one other employee went to jail.
Now the purchasing cards are tightly controlled and all purchases are reviewed at least monthly.
In this case, the purchases were related to computers, but they could have been anything. The point is that there must be accountability for government spending, no matter what level of government is concerned.
-h-
But it's vital to electricity generation/transmission...
Most power lines use steel reinforced aluminum cable, and have since the 1950's. It's a lot cheaper and a lot lighter than copper. The drawback is that, at high voltages, the aluminum gets hot, hotter than the steel, and sags. There is a fair amount of research going on into better aluminum alloys to avoid the problem.
-h-
That's a HILARIOUS comment, because Intel also recently announced that they would retire "Intel Inside".
But the logo doesn't change. Check out the artwork.
-h-
Your comment makes no sense. If you use your own time for investigation and recovery, who do you send the bill to? Yourself? You have no monetary loss. On the other hand, a company who pays somebody to perform the investigation and recovery can demonstrate a monetary loss.
Now, if you hire somebody to do the investigation and recovery, then you can make a case for restitution. Or, if you had to take time off of work to do the investigation and recovery (and didn't get paid), then you can make a case for restitution.
Or, if you feel that your time is worth something, you can file a civil case and sue the hacker for the value of your time.
Check around a bit - you'll find that the US judicial system is quite liberal when it comes to recovering damages in a criminal case.
-h-
And that, folks, is why there's no reason to use an analogy when the point that you're trying to make is so simple - you're likely to use one that doesn't apply to the situation.
As a hint: the crime in question was not a property crime.
-h-
You know what? Fuck you buddy.
This is NOT real crime.
This is at most a civil matter.
IP theft should NOT be criminal.
Let me clear my throat....
Fuck you buddy.
Heheh, critical reasoning from an AC.
-h-
I agree with you. What he did was no accident. The first time that he logged into the account, he showed a serious error in judgement. That was a mistake. And if it had ended there, then no harm, no foul. But he went beyond mistake when he kept on logging in. Deleting the account was well beyond a mistake.
-h-
First, people can make mistakes.
To me, a mistake would be logging onto the system once after getting fired. I don't think that the guy made a "mistake".
-h-
I understand that and I don't have any problem with it - RH took a responsible position, given that they provided the affected program. But you left out the rest of Cox's quote:
"Microsoft customers were left on their own," Cox said. "For several days the only way customers could find out about this issue was from the Microsoft security team Weblog or if they read something in the press about Flash vulnerabilities and realized they had it installed. Later, Microsoft issued an advisory telling customers to visit the Macromedia site to obtain an update."
And this is why I wondered how far does it go? Is the OS vendor responsible for security update notification for all software that runs under that OS? Or for popular software? If so, what determines which software is popular?
Incidentally, I'm with the group that doesn't put a lot of credence into the US-CERT summary because it seems to compare apples with oranges.
-h-
XP still doesn't have support for Bluetooth...
You mean the Bluetooth connection between my notebook and my cellphone that I use to connect to the Internet on the road doesn't really work? Uh oh...
-h-
What about Cox's boasting that Red Hat took the initiative to notify its users about the Flash issue? According to him, Microsoft left its customers in the dark - but the security issue had absolutely nothing to do with either Red Hat or Microsoft. Are we now to depend upon our OS vendor to provide us with security updates for our third party applications? How far does it go?
The whole Linux versus Microsoft thing is like arguing politics. You've got a few zealots on the fringes and a vast number of people who are perfectly happy with what they've got. The zealots are loud and shrill but, in the the end, they represent a tiny minority.
Want a bad analogy? It's like Ford saying that you should buy a Mustang because a Camaro sucks (yes, I know that Chevy doesn't make Camaros anymore - work with me here).
-h-
MySQL is on the GSA schedule - but thousands upon thousands of products are available on the GSA schedule. Just being on the GSA schedule isn't particularly dramatic, though. And the headline (and even the summary) are quite a bit more breathless and quite a bit less accurate than the real story.
-h-
Even better, check out "Sam's Custom Built Computers". It's as vaporous as the iTab. But you can "Rock your next lan party".
Why do I feel like I'm looking at Something Awful's Awful Link of the Day?
-h-
I see that The Reg is suffering from the /. Editor Effect. "Tablet Mac draws bidders on eBay". Bidders? Unless zero has taken on a new value that I don't know about, I'd disagree.
/. or The Reg. Maybe it's not a scam, but it's certainly not news.
Oh, and, for what it's worth, the auction does say that the computer will ship outside of the US. Although I honestly can't imagine who would care to risk their money on something that doesn't even exist.
I've got to say that I'm a little confused about the shipping time, too. The auction text says that it ships after it's modified - oh, and allow some time for the vendor to order one after you pay up. And for the touchscreen to arrive. But at the bottom of the auction, it ships a day after payment clears.
I'm really at a loss for a reason why this is on either
-h-
Dunno...at my company, most workstations run either Linux or Windows (depends on the software requirements). The main servers are all Sun. There are "server" farms that run on Linux, but they are for processing data (running electrical simulations, etc), not really acting as servers, per se. The heart of the company's research and development network is all Sun. Anything that is mission critical runs on those servers. And the UNIX admins cite the same reason as the article did for using Solaris 8 on the servers - the workstations are all running RHEL.
-h-
Surely almost all companies are immoral, i.e. without morals.
I think you mean "amoral".
Oh man, there ought to be a hall of fame for comments like that...ow...ow...ow...
DOODEE!!!!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 15 years, I know. That's what I meant.
When I ran tech support for a (former) top five computer manufacturer, the mantra that the whole company chanted was "inventory turn". We were number one in the industry for inventory turn. And from a support point of view, particularly for the servers we sold, it was an absolute nightmare. Obviously new sales took priority for parts availability and there was no consideration given to additional inventory for support issues, so if there was no "refurbished" (read: used parts pulled from returned systems) part available, we had to compete for new parts with the assembly floor. And if (or, more usually, when) supply was tight, we (meaning the existing customer) lost and the replacement part was delayed.
Suffice to say that the company is no longer anywhere near the top five, has a different name - and I'm long gone from them.
-h-
Yeah, I get emails from AnySystem because I bought an Ultra 5 from you guys on Ebay. Overpriced does not even begin to describe your prices. I have to admit that the emails start off very exciting, telling me about the great deals that you have to offer, but when it comes down to price, I can't say that paying near original retail for a Sun Blade 100 that's worth, oh, about 50 bucks is very exciting to me (although if somebody pays you, I'm sure it's quite exciting!)
-h-
In 2001 I broke an engine mount on a 1986 car and there was only 1 of that part left in North America (by computer search anyway.) I had to scrap the car.
I don't buy it, or else you're not very smart - five year old cars are the bread and butter of junkyards throughout the US. And even if you couldn't come up with a used one, fabricating a new one isn't exactly rocket science to a good metal shop.
And, uh, if there was only one of that part left in NA, why didn't you buy it?
-h-