This is bullshit. When they arrive at the station and their train is not there, usually they'll ask someone working there or start to complain to someone working there, at which point they'll get informed about the facts of life.
You've obviously never been in a public facing position with an angry New Yorker who's Tom Tom is telling them to go down a road that's closed either. Why should they require their staff to put up with rude and aggressive asshats when the situation is caused by something totally out of their control? Particularly if a guy is pointing to a train schedule on his little computer. Do we honestly expect the average station worker to understand that the schedule on the little computer is someone's hobby? It's hard enough to get one of them to tell you where the public toilets are.
The problem is, a third party service is required to spread the information. In the UK, there are at least 10 different websites, where you can search, book and print anything you could possibly need (including a bus service or a taxi at the destination), and if you're on the move already, you can just send an SMS, and they'll text you back with the information you need.
Yes I know...I've been there done that. I don't know how all of those systems play together but I'd be willing to bet that they are not dependent on some well meaning guy sitting down with a copy of the schedule keying in timetables by hand. Chance are there is an official API or some other way for all the third parties to grab the data directly which cuts the risk of human error down significantly. In an ideal world MTA would come up with a way to accommodate what is obviously a public demand for the information.
Again I don't agree with what MTA's doing, but this is the only place where I think they might have a legitimate concern. It does not justify horrid abuses of copyright law however.
Not to mention stupid. It's their own best interest to make that information as widely available as possible.
Not that I agree with what the MTA is doing, but I can see where they might be coming from, if for no other reason from an accuracy standpoint. I'm sure they wouldn't disagree that it is in their best interest to make the information as widely available as possible. However, you'll note that it says that Schoenfeld enters the data manually. What happens when he has a typo or transcribes a column wrong and borks an entire train? Customers get angry because they miss expected connections and blame MTA not Schoenfeld.
Of course they've got other issues where they've supposedly got a deal with some vendor to provide some kind of mobile scheduling service, but I wonder most about the liability MTA could face if people rely on someone's home grown hobby and it goes bad. Sure in the end they'd come out OK, but there'd be lots of bad press and time spent cleaning up the mess.
As one of the posters to the blog pointed out copyright law isn't the proper way to go about this objective. Sadly it's probably just the first thing that came to mind when Director Somensmuck called Legal and said "Johnson? We've got a problem. I want to know what you're going to do about it before you go home tonight."
Half the time when im out, I have no idea where I am. I am where my gps told me to be. This bothers me sometimes, but the tradeoff is that I can literally go anywhere I want. Now when people start to tell me directions I just tune out and know I'll just do what the gps says. I can and have driven across the state with no problem. Guess what? I don't have a GPS and I can literally go anywhere I want too. Not knowing where you are should bother you a little bit. GPS is great until you encounter real world situations where you have to make a quick decision that takes you off the route. Many times in my part time work as a police officer I've had to close a road due to an accident, a fire or something like that. In my city, the main streets are roughly N-S and E-W. If one road is closed, you backtrack to the last major street, make a turn and then turn the same direction up the parallel road.
I can't tell you how many LOCAL people have gotten irate with me when I tell them that the road is closed and they'll have to detour. Citizen: "But my TOM TOM says I HAVE TO GO THIS WAY." Me: "Sorry sir, road's closed - bad accident." Citizen: "(demandingly) OK, what do I need to do then." Me: "You'll have to go back to the first light and work your way over to the next road which is Pine. Pine parallels this street and will take you to Miller Road as well." Citizen: "I can't do that. There's no way to put that in my Tom Tom!" Me: "Sir, you've gotta move, there's 100 cars behind you and I've got a firetruck trying to get through the jam." Citizen: "But I'm LOST and it's YOUR fault because you closed MY road!" Me: "You're right sir, it is my fault. Tell you what, I'll draw you a map on the back of a ticket for obstructing traffic."
Many people know one and only one way to get home, and they are utterly incapable of dealing with everyday hiccups that make them think. When you're being flagged into a detour in rush hour traffic there's no time to stop in the road and try to reprogram your GPS. Even if you don't know the street names, understanding how a town is laid out combined with a little common sense can make a huge difference. I really believe that those who constantly rely on a GPS lack the ability to spatially reference themselves because it's a skill they just don't use. Throw in an emergency where you don't have five minutes to think out a course of action and you've got a real problem.
I wonder how much the 'browsing the Internet' bit really matters. As others have pointed out, there have been other studies that promote the benefits of massages, naps, etc. Seems to me the common denominator is taking a break at natural intervals. I spend enough time at the keyboard during the day that my Internet usage is really minimal (no, seriously!). On the other hand, if you walk in my office you're always going to find the Wall Street Journal opened up to some article on the side of my desk. I will periodically peek over and read for a few minutes after finishing a task while waiting to start the next one, such as the five minute lull at the start of conference calls where the host keeps saying "Let's give the others a few more minutes to join..." An aside - I start my conference calls on time. After a year, even my boss was trained to be no more than 30 seconds late.
In terms of workload, I consistently fall into the 'exceeds expectations' category when it comes time to figure out year-end ratings. Yet I also keep a fairly regular schedule. I'm not in the office 12 hours a day like the guys across the hall who consider it a badge of honor to eat lunch AND dinner at work yet bitch when their reviews keep coming back as 'meets expectations.' And yes, we more or less have the same job duties.
When you terminate a contractor or employee it is wise to also terminate their access to your servers... Unfortunately it's not as simple as this. At my company we have "Service Accounts" which are not owned by individuals, but by technical groups. Any program that is not going to be run interactively is supposed to be run via a service account. The password is controlled by the group and does not expire. The idea is that if Jack quits and his ID is disabled all the cron/task scheduler jobs won't quit working and cause a massive outage. Likewise an expired password could cause big problems.
In 99% of the cases the service account has extremely limited rights so it's actually not a bad model. However there are at least a dozen accounts that I know of that are members of the Domain Admins group or some other group that effectively gives admin rights on almost all servers. These are typically used for security patches, server audits and the like. I left one of the support groups over three years ago but I still remember a Domain Admin service account password. Hell, after setting up scheduled tasks for four years it's kind of hard to forget it. If I wanted to be really malicious I'd wait until the next round of layoffs were rumored and then I would set my script up using the service account and have it check a few random people's logon ID's to see if any were disabled. I'd pick some highly technical, somewhat eccentric individuals. Later on the forensic investigators would show up and the first thing they're going to do is look at the list of highly technical people in the AD support group who were set up as triggers. "Hey, didn't we fire Peter Gibbons last week? Well he's one of three people who would trigger this thing...plus his friends Michael and Samir...Naga...Naga...NotGonnaWorkHereAnyLonger"
That's still not entirely accurate. The Republicans were making all sorts of noise about putting tighter controls on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while the Democrats were screaming that we needed to open the spigots further and let them engage in even riskier activities. All at the same time that Chris Dodd (D-Conn) was getting a "special deal" from Countrywide Mortgage, which he is yet to disclose the details of despite promising six months that he would share the details shortly.
For my day job I work for a bank, and not one that made risky loans. We're actually turning a modest profit right now. In the last five years, the amount of regulation that we've been forced to endure is incredible. I for one would like to know how my industry has been deregulated in the last eight years where such regulation has been entirely at the behest of the Republicans. I work in the sector that's having the meltdown and I'm yet to figure out exactly what has been deregulated. Every single year the percentage of time I spend on regulatory activities goes up and yet my job has remained basically the same. In general each year the regulators get more savvy, more risk-adverse, and more demanding.
It's not as cut and dry as some would like to make it out to be. To say it's the conservative's fault or it's the Republican's fault is disingenuous. I'm going to go with the poster who says that a better tag for this one would be "Bipartisan."
There are lots of good reasons. What do you do when you're called to a traffic accident on the freeway and your car is blocking traffic for six hours with the lights on? Multiply that by the three or four cars that respond and note that our system records both the forward view out the windshield and the in-car (facing backseat) camera, that's a lot of footage of nothing. Yes, "storage is cheap" but when you consider an indefinite retention period and a discoverable chain of custody, it's very expensive relative to the budget of the average department.
I like the system in the cars my department has. It starts recording when you hit RECORD or active the overheads. When it starts recording, it automatically saves the 60 seconds immediately prior to the activation event. When you turn the lights off or hit STOP, it will keep recording for 45 seconds and then really stop. Thus for each activation event you're going to get a minimum of 1:45 recorded, including a full minute before you hit the lights. This look back feature really helps to put recordings in their proper context.
While you certainly can stop recording at any time, it's going to look really bad if you've always recorded your stops to completion and then a nasty allegation is made against you at the same event where you hit STOP right in the middle of the contact.
Incidentally our systems are tape-free. Each car has a WiFi antenna and it will automatically upload any new files when the car drives into one of several zones in the city. For example, there's a WiFi zone at the service garage pumps and in the station lot. However, the cameras also pipe a feed to the MDT which is connected to the network through a Verizon Air Card. Even though it's not streaming video, dispatch does have the ability to pull up real-time video from any car. It works well for our purposes, and probably a lot cheaper than the solution this town is looking at.
... for traveling light. Avoid checking any luggage at all, carry on only! Not only do you save time by not having to wait around for your luggage (which may never arrive) at the belt, but you can also stay within view of your gear.
This works fine for me when I go on short personal trips, but most of the time I find it's not just not practical. I'm always carrying something prohibited. The carry-on restrictions with regards to liquids finally pushed me over the edge. I wear contacts, use hair gel, like deodorant, prefer to brush my teeth and actually shave. This pushes me beyond the one small clear bag that I can hold up while some goon pretends to be able to tell if it's potentially explosive.
Then there's the problem that when I travel for work, I'm usually carrying a firearm. Even if I'm not, being from southern Ohio I never go anywhere without my trusty pocket knife (which has to be checked).
Believe it or not I was once told by a TSA supervisor that by having a gun in my luggage I'm probably least likely to be ripped off. Since it's in a locked case in my suitcase, presumably the thief would think it's valuable and try to bust it open. Upon finding it's a gun if he's smart he'll close it up and run away. If I get to my destination and find my gun is missing, unlike say a stolen iPod, both airports will likely go on lockdown until it can be accounted for. Even a $7.00 hour grunt realizes that everybody down there will be searched and all the video tape will be immediately reviewed. As an added bonus, TSA hand screens my checked luggage in front of me when I check in. They then seal it up with the "Passed TSA Security" sticker while I stand there. Theoretically it then goes straight to the airline and bypasses the other checked luggage that has to be screened by some unknown down below.
Many good suggestions have been provided and I think you'd be hard pressed to really find a serious weakness with any of them. At the end of the day all that matters is that the convention is logical and consistent. As several posters have pointed out, ideally your end users will never see the server names. So long as each server is uniquely identified and is convenient for the people who will actually refer to the servers by name it really doesn't matter what you use.
The bigger question though is how to keep track of all of these servers. A naming convention certainly helps but all that really matters is that each server be uniquely identified. Heck I worked for a place that simply used SVR###### where they started with 00001 and just added one each time a new server arrived.
Regardless of naming convention a good asset and configuration database is essential. Heck, even an Excel spreadsheet would work for a place your size. It's there that you keep track of all the essential details such as make/model/serial number/OS/switch port assignment/applications/etc.
The idea of a server naming convention is to give a quick and dirty (but repeatable) method to the madness. There's a lot more information that could be conveyed in a server name but I'd argue that the name is not the proper place for it.
"Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?" I don't think this is asking the right question as some other posters have alluded to. We're talking corporate IT departments versus a branch of the Federal Government. We're also talking about destruction of the only copy of a given piece of data rather than destruction of one of several means of storing it.
It is absolutely usual for my corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy; but I work for a bank. I don't work for the government where I'm required by law to archive anything and everything. After a person no longer needs a workstation, the workstation is kept in a locked room for about 90 days just in case anything pops up (oh crap, I forgot to copy my personal folder over to my new machine!). After that, the drive is securely erased. If the machine is going to be redeployed to a new user we then load a fresh install of the OS onto it and it's put in another secured room and marked as "Available for Redeploy" in the asset database. If it's not going to be redeployed then the hard drive will be removed and run through a degaussing machine and then put in a pallet box to be picked up by our secure shredding company. The company will shred the drives on site and take the materials to be recycled.
Servers are much the same way, except that by policy, we back servers up at least once a day. While the drive that originally contained the information may be long gone, the data lives on for whatever the normal retention policy is. For email I believe it's a year, unless there's a reason for that box to be kept indefinitely (e.g. if a notice of discovery has been received).
So to answer the question posed in the story posting, yes it is normal for corporate IT departments to completely destroy hard drives, but that's not germane to the discussion. A better question would be "Is it normal for corporate IT departments to destroy hard drives by policy without any suitable forms of backup or other mechanisms to make sure any retention policies mandated by law or policy are enforced." Of course that's a lot longer than the original question and the Slashdot eds probably would have gotten lost and not posted the article!:)
Of course all the big names are listed (Bank of America, Regions, etc), but it's too bad you can't zoom in on the screen shots. My local financial institution has been getting phished like crazy lately and it's always the same basic kit. Makes me wonder if it's this kit or something else. Whenever I get one of the emails I just have to check it out on my Mac Book in Firefox with JS disabled just to see if it's anything novel. Never is.
Naturally Netcraft won't tell you the real site name:-)
This isn't about that. Google already has a service that reports and detects sites that try to phish your personal information or try to install malware on your machine. No, this effort is to try to purge the Google index of sites that sell malware creation and deployment toolkits to black-hats. IMHO, the original poster is correct. This wouldn't make it much more difficult for script-kiddies and black-hats to get their hands on malware kits, while making it more difficult for white-hats to find information about these programs.
Not to drift too far off topic but I've never been very impressed with the Google phishing site service. On the one hand they say that solicit feedback from the user community as to what is a web forgery I don't know that they ever listen. I deal with phishing sites as part of my job and I've had situations where at least 10 or 12 customers have told us that they submitted the page to Google's Web Forgery report page but it never gets flagged. The only time I've ever seen them flag a site is when one of the major anti-phishing players classifies it as such. I've done some experiments where I've watched phishing sites stay online for a while. It seems that without fail within an hour of a major vendor like Symantec announcing the forgery Google will flag it. Otherwise users can spam the Google report link for a week and it'll never get flagged.
With this new service it makes me wonder if they have any plans to actually respond to user input or if the user input will be up only for good PR. Will all the accepted submissions come from professional security firms who have a vested interest in knowing about malware leaving your more casual security researcher unable to a) effectively report malware pages and b) learn about new threats once the big players have done their research and told Google to de-index the page.
Now I understand that if you get a report from Symantec the credibility is very high as opposed to web-based reports from anybody who can read squiggly letters in a box, but it does make me wonder if the public submission forms are just for show so people can feel like they're doing a good thing.
With all the video....I'm guessing that is why my atty. friend suggested to literally say nothing if you know you're gonna be busted. You don't speak any more that absolutely necessary, and don't get out of the car to do field tests where they can tape you. If you don't have a DWI record, and you give them as little evidence as possible...get a good lawyer, and they can usually get you out of the DWI charge...possibly down to something like wreckless driving which sucks, but, doesn't have the problems a real DWI comes with.
That's good advice from a legal standpoint regardless of the situation. A smart suspect keeps their mouth shut, and I respect that. The problem is even if you say very little, you probably still smell like booze and there was probable cause for the stop. Most drunks I've found don't know how drunk they are and despite the advice they received when they were sober want to try to show that they're stone cold sober. You don't have to do the field tests, but at that point the officer does have the right to detain you for a certified test. Lucky you, the cops won't let you drive yourself to the station to participate. You've got to get out of the car and walk back to the cruiser for transport. Again, not prima facie but if you're having trouble making that straight walk back, it'll be on tape for the prosecutor to review.
The other thing to keep in mind is that if you're charged with DUI and plead it to reckless op, your record may still reflect that you were CHARGED with DUI, CONVICTED of RO. Now, this is not the same as having been convicted of DUI. You don't have to get the party plates and other fun activities, but next time you're out on the road and pulled over for weaving while smelling like booze, the fact that you were previously charged with DUI can come back to bite you because it's added into the pot of evidence.
There's plenty of studies showing that talking on the phone impairs drivers more than a 0.08 BAC. If we accept the premise that drivers should be criminally liable for driving while impaired that means one of two things: a) the laws for driving while phoning are too lenient or b) the legal limit of blood alcohol content is too low.
I pull imapired drivers over all the time. Yeah I'm frequently called a dickhead for charging a cellphone user with failure to control or assured clear distance, but so be it. "Ma'am, I stopped you because you appear to be impaired. You've put your entire car over the line at least seven times since I've been following you in the last mile and a half. Is everything OK?" "Oh yeah, just fine, I haven't been drinking or anything, I'm just talking on my phone." (More than half the time the driver is still on the phone when you approach the vehicle).
Do I think it sucks that a person pulled over for DUI faces significantly higher penalties even if they don't cause an accident versus someone simply not paying attention? Yeah, but I don't write the laws. Now, there is a difference between distracted driving and driving drunk. A distracted driver who is on the phone, putting on makeup, etc, can turn it off and become 100% focused on driving again. A drunk can't do this. They're impaired until the alcohol wears off. Thus the exposure time for a drunk driver is 100% of the time that they're behind the wheel. If traffic gets hairy or the weather turns bad, a distracted driver can hang up and drive. Am I implying that all distracted drivers do this when the situation requires more attention or am I saying that when traffic is light you're free to goof off? Absolutely not, but at least the ability to focus again is there while drunks don't have the option. My policy is if you're driving like you're impaired you probably are and I will make contact to determine what the issue is.
Personally I like non-DUI impaired driving cases. It's much easier to write someone a citation or a warning and send them on their way than to have to go through the rigmarole associated with a full-blown DUI arrest. In my mind both groups are equally dangerous on the road, but the former is much easier to deal with and get back to patrol. A drunk might take two hours from violation to calling 10-8 (back in service).
Well, if you are in this situation...and can do it....refuse the field test, and say you'll submit to test at station WHEN you can do so in the presence of your lawyer. This can buy you time to process alcohol out of your system....
This can work to a degree. Most states have a fairly tight time limit in which a person must be tested for the results to be considered valid. Usually it's 2-4 hours. The problem is while flunking the machine is prima facie evidence that you are over the limit, it's not the only acceptable evidence. Even if you refuse the test, or if for some reason the machine isn't working, you can still be charged with and convicted of DUI in many states. How can this be? Like I said, flunking the machine is prima facie, but it's not the only way you can be considered drunk. Admittedly it's harder to prove in court, but a dash cam video of you driving all over the road, reacting slowly to the officer's commands as if you're having trouble understanding, the arrest report that documents the fact that alcohol was clearly on your breath, the booking video (oh? you didn't know that almost all jail facilities video and audio tape their processing areas?) of you having trouble standing, slurring your speech, etc, all can lead to a preponderance of evidence that you were, in fact, driving drunk. That's enough to file charges, and if it's so overwhelming as to be beyond a reasonable doubt, you're off to party plate land. (For those that don't know, in my state of Ohio, we make all DUI offenders get yellow license plates with red numbers for a few years after a DUI conviction. These are sometimes referred to as Party Plates).
The other problem is that alcohol has been shown to be metabolized at a fairly fixed rate of one "drink" per hour, and your BAC can be estimated based on your body weight. Say you manage to delay a test for 1.9 hours after your arrest and register 0.07%. Here they can say that you're at 0.07% now, but having observed you ingest nothing for the last 1.9 hours they can estimate that your BAC at the time of arrest would have been somewhere between 0.12 and 0.14 (I'm just making these numbers up). This figure isn't as solid as a printout showing you over the limit at the time of the test, but again, it can and will add to the list of factors considered in deciding what to charge you with.
Where I work we currently run two mainframes in a sysplex environment for all the core transactions. It's a very optimized environment and handles millions of financial transactions a day. In mid-2006, IBM started giving us zLinux engines to "try out" and they gave us all of the software we needed to make a go of it. Kind of like a playground drug dealer, they hoped that by giving us a bit for free we'd get hooked and become dedicated customers. The problem was, for the type of workload that typically runs on our servers (high CPU, moderate I/O) we were experiencing poor performance on the mainframe VMs. IBM sent all their engineers out to help make tweaks and tune all sorts of things. Despite all the tuning and tweaking that took place, we could never get a single engine to perform better than a $5,000 server. Keep in mind that a single engine was retailing for around $80,000 after discounts.
We did some calculations and determined that for the price of a zLinux engine we could buy an entire rack of high-end HP servers that would outperform the single engine by a factor of 200:1. Again, maybe it was just the workload we were doing, but even IBM couldn't figure it out and our server work profile isn't exactly uncommon. Granted you can cram a lot of guests onto a host system provided that none of the guests want to use more than 10% of their CPU at any given time, but that defeats the purpose. I could probably run a VMWare host with 100 guests and call it a success, provided they all sat idle.
It was kind of funny because the IBM engineers would shake their heads and admit that for our workload it just wasn't going to work out. Then the next week the sales guy would call and ask if we were ready to buy that third mainframe since he just read the engineer's report and our visit was obviously a smashing success.
I'm not knocking the whole Linux on the mainframe concept, I'm just sharing our experience and how the whole thing seemed to be like someone in IBM Marketing declared "we need to sell Linux on the mainframe" and the Dilberts were forced to sell a product that worked about as well as a chocolate fireguard. It was a very awkward experience and even the IBM engineers seemed like they were stuck in an uncomfortable position of supporting sales for a product that even moderately demanding customers wouldn't be able to run with.
Personally I consider Linux on the mainframe to be on par with running Linux on an iPhone. Sure you probably can, but does it actually do anything uniquely useful for the business? I have a hard time selling technology to the CIO on the grounds that because it's Linux it's a good business decision regardless of the context.
Probably a big dump. Why can't people shit at home? They were just there half an hour ago.
Expense reduction. The company's doing it, so why shouldn't I? They expect more productivity out of me and instant availability at no extra cost to them. Since it's costing me more to work there, I need to cut my expenses as well. Until I got married, it was possible for me to go an entire month on a single roll of toilet paper because I "timed" everything to always have to take that "7:30 conference call" in room 4-RM (4th floor Men's Restroom).
Of course my boss still got the last laugh. He gave me a Blackberry. Now I take a dump while my computer boots up, but I use the extra time to get a jump start on my emails using the Blackberry. Drat, foiled again...
Plus I'd rather be in the building at 7:30 and seen for a short while than show up at work at 7:45 because I opted to take care of business at home first. Yes my current job is like something out of Office Space.
It sounds like your phone had a bug in it, my phone never switched to Roaming or Strongest Signal.
I thought that at first, but considering that my daughter and I had totally different brands of phones, and both were susceptible to it, that suspicion went out the window. Especially once I started watching it closely and they'd almost always revert within 12 hours of each other. One was a Motorola and the other was a Sanyo (too bad, because otherwise I loved the Sanyo phone!)
This is precisely why I left Sprint early this year. Doing simple math, if they say that people who call 25 times a month are doing so 40 times more than usual, that works out to 0.625 times per month, or about eight times a year. EIGHT times a year. I'm sorry, but that's crappy service if your customers have a 67% chance of calling about a given bill. Not once have I ever called about my DSL bill, or my cable bill. I've only called my credit card company once. Yet, calling Sprint was an almost monthly affair.
Granted I know there's assholes who have nothing better to do but call customer support all day long. You get these people in any industry. However, I would consider myself an "average" Sprint customer. According to my records, I called them 46 times over the course of my 5.5 year history with them. It was always stupid stuff, usually no more than $0.50 but it's the principle of the thing. I specifically set both phones on the line to never roam and use Sprint Only. Yet, every few weeks the setting would silently revert to Strongest Signal. A couple of times I got charged roaming AND long distance to check my voicemail while in my home city. I would accept that maybe I screwed up and made a roaming call, but by Sprint's own admission, calling from the same city in which my voice mail is located should never be a long distance call. Fuck you, build a better system.
Before we had a text messaging plan I'd get random text spam sent to my phone. Each time I followed the CSR's advice and deleted it before it was opened. Still got charged...after a few calls it was discovered that the "delete without opening" trick only works for text messages sent from other Sprint customers. Messages from the web are automatically billed, regardless of whether you open them. Fuck you, build a better system.
Then we did get text messaging and my daughter got charged for 15 International text messages one month. The first CSR knew right away what the problem was - the Sprint computer thought all text messages were international for about a week or so. Credits were being automatically issued. Imagine my lack of surprise when no automated credits showed up, so I had to call each month until they finally broke down and gave me a manual credit. Fuck you, build a better system.
So here I sit now with AT&T and not once have I had to call and complain about my bill. They were even able to put a purchasing block on my daughter's phone the day we activated. Sprint had no way of keeping her from "accidentally" buying ringtones and other phone shit that she's not allowed to have (Fuck you, build a better system...except that this one would deny you short-term income at the long term expense of losing customers). Oh, and three months into my contract AT&T happily unlocked my phone so I can use my Orange SIM when I'm visiting the UK...
I thought about that when I was "picking my profession", and I did talk to some lawyers and others I knew. At first it seemed a natural fit for me, but as I dug in deeper, I discovered that it wasn't as black and white as I'd hoped.
First, as another poster indicated, there's lots of "if then but else if" clauses. As black and white as a case my appear at first glance, the law is very gray. One can have two courts arrive at two entirely different conclusions on the same basic point, and then the appeals court decide to not take it up because the case isn't interesting. At that point, the implication is that both courts are right (or maybe they're both wrong), but it's no longer a simple truth. Don't even get me started on what one lawyer told me about the words "reasonable" and "prudent" in the context of any legal code.
Second, as strange as it may seem, a lot of practicing law is a matter of avoiding the real issue at hand. Take the SCO case - very little time has been spent addressing the case itself. Almost all the time has been spent on discovery motions, procedural arguments, evidence rules, etc. As a geek, I like to see results fairly quickly in a repeatable and consistent manner. If you told me that I had to write a perl program to compute the area of a triangle, I'd say cool. However, if you then told me that first I had to prove the theorem I'll use, but first I have to agree on the method in which my theorem will be proved, but first I have to decide whether the requester even has standing to ask me to write a program...you get the idea.
Third, I don't disagree on your point about geeks making good researchers. Certainly there's no question we're good at digging stuff up. What remains to be seen is whether we're good at digging everything up. This goes back to my other points. In a way, legal research is like the halting problem - you're never 100% confident that you've pulled every relevant law and ruling. Legal researchers also have to be completely free of bias. Most geeks I know (myself included) tend to feel very strongly on certain issues, and it's only natural that we'd favor facts that support our bias and disfavor those that don't. A good researcher can research the hell out of an issue that they vehemently oppose for the side that they despise. That takes something beyond being good at Google and Lexus.
As a part-time law enforcement officer in Ohio, I have to agree that the Ohio system is done pretty well. Absolutely everything is logged and routinely monitored. Try talking to any of your good cop buddies to see if they'll run a plate for you. Most of them will say "oh hell no!" and run as fast as they can. We had an officer get fired two years ago for abusing the LEADS system. He was running plates "on the side" for some friends of his. All went well until one day he ran the plate of someone wanted for assault. Naturally the log analyzer program went nuts when it found that one of our officers ran the plate of a wanted individual, but we had no corresponding arrest record. So it went onto the exception report and was reviewed by the Captain a few days later. Turns out he'd only run five or six plates as favors, but the Chief asked for his badge and gun then and there in exchange for not shipping the case to the prosecutor. After the guy was walked out the door, the Chief sent the case to the prosecutor anyway.
Of course, the problem with accountability being at this level is that without further review up above, local corruption could skate right by. I do, however, remember of the town of New Rome (when it still existed) losing access to the state LEADS system for something like 90 days when someone claimed that he was being harassed by the local police and it was discovered that the mayor was having the police chief look up the records of people he didn't like and do things like put BOLOs (Be on the lookout) on them so they'd get stopped for no reason any time another officer ran their plates.
The fact that he doesn't have to pay taxes isn't the issue. It's the fact that if you live & telecommute in one state, but work for a company in another other state you have to pay both states taxes when you telecommute. For instance, I live on the border in Wisconsin, yet work in St. Paul, Minnesota. I telecommute occasionaly, and I don't want to have to pay taxes to both states for those times when I don't go into the office. That is the issue at hand.
This is one of the rare occasions where I can say that I think Ohio has done something decent. If you live in Ohio but work in one of the border states, your state taxes are due only for the state in which you live, and vice versa. This applies even if you physically work in the other state. I went to school in southern Ohio and there were a ton of student workers who lived in Indiana or Kentucky and they had no Ohio taxes withheld from their paychecks, nor did they owe any at the end of the year. The sucker for them was that they had to cut a check to their home state as required, at the home state's rate (usually quarterly), it wasn't withheld in Ohio automatically. I know it's the same amount of money, but when you're a college kid, money in hand is money spent yesterday, so having to remember to cough up your home state's tax quartlery could be a bitch.
Of course, this rule wasn't put in place for Telecommuting, since they never figured that someone in Ohio would commute to Illinois to work, so it only applies to the border states. You *might* be able to make a case for someone living in far North East Ohio and working in New York by cutting the top corner of PA, but that'd be a commute of well over an hour. So if I telecommute to Tennessee, I do owe taxes to both, but not if I do it to Kentucky.
...or I guess I'll have to resume the environmentally unfriendly practice of using the incinerator in the basement of my house. Don't think anyone's used that thing in 20 years beyond a place to shove their cigarette butts during parties!
I bet the fumes from the tags will be great for all involved!
Must be a linux DHCP server I guess? Dont think Windows DHCP is that smart:/
Answer: Yes, but irrelevant:). There's a network probe on the wire between the switch and the DHCP servers, all it does is watch the requests and responses go by. The DHCP server itself is none the wiser. All the logic happens on the probe.
I'd be interested to know what software you use to perform all this.. Any chance of telling?:)
Nothing fancy actually - it's pretty much all Active Directory, SMS, and Perl scripting. Some strategically placed network probes on the DHCP server allow us to listen for incoming DHCP requests, and the response with the IP address allocated. A filter with an event handling logic runs on the probe which then calls a Perl script to runs an NBTSTAT against the computer to see what it's a member of and does an LDAP lookup to see that the workstation name is in one of the offcial AD OUs. The script has the ability to manage the switch and shutdown ports, send emails, etc.
I'm not entirely sure of how exactly it's all accomplished since that's a different area of my department, but I know the 10,000 foot view. I do not know what Network filtering software they're using for the sniffer probe. Really, the trick is effective use of Group Policy, and the grunts to physically back it up (that is, enforcing the policy outside the computer world - the guys who make visits to you and your manager for violators, etc). As to the different physical segments for the network, that's as simple as having the electricians run extra Cat5 to a different patch panel in a different room and then connecting the different segments via Stonegate firewalls.
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This is bullshit. When they arrive at the station and their train is not there, usually they'll ask someone working there or start to complain to someone working there, at which point they'll get informed about the facts of life.
You've obviously never been in a public facing position with an angry New Yorker who's Tom Tom is telling them to go down a road that's closed either. Why should they require their staff to put up with rude and aggressive asshats when the situation is caused by something totally out of their control? Particularly if a guy is pointing to a train schedule on his little computer. Do we honestly expect the average station worker to understand that the schedule on the little computer is someone's hobby? It's hard enough to get one of them to tell you where the public toilets are.
The problem is, a third party service is required to spread the information. In the UK, there are at least 10 different websites, where you can search, book and print anything you could possibly need (including a bus service or a taxi at the destination), and if you're on the move already, you can just send an SMS, and they'll text you back with the information you need.
Yes I know...I've been there done that. I don't know how all of those systems play together but I'd be willing to bet that they are not dependent on some well meaning guy sitting down with a copy of the schedule keying in timetables by hand. Chance are there is an official API or some other way for all the third parties to grab the data directly which cuts the risk of human error down significantly. In an ideal world MTA would come up with a way to accommodate what is obviously a public demand for the information.
Again I don't agree with what MTA's doing, but this is the only place where I think they might have a legitimate concern. It does not justify horrid abuses of copyright law however.
Not to mention stupid. It's their own best interest to make that information as widely available as possible.
Not that I agree with what the MTA is doing, but I can see where they might be coming from, if for no other reason from an accuracy standpoint. I'm sure they wouldn't disagree that it is in their best interest to make the information as widely available as possible. However, you'll note that it says that Schoenfeld enters the data manually. What happens when he has a typo or transcribes a column wrong and borks an entire train? Customers get angry because they miss expected connections and blame MTA not Schoenfeld.
Of course they've got other issues where they've supposedly got a deal with some vendor to provide some kind of mobile scheduling service, but I wonder most about the liability MTA could face if people rely on someone's home grown hobby and it goes bad. Sure in the end they'd come out OK, but there'd be lots of bad press and time spent cleaning up the mess.
As one of the posters to the blog pointed out copyright law isn't the proper way to go about this objective. Sadly it's probably just the first thing that came to mind when Director Somensmuck called Legal and said "Johnson? We've got a problem. I want to know what you're going to do about it before you go home tonight."
Half the time when im out, I have no idea where I am. I am where my gps told me to be. This bothers me sometimes, but the tradeoff is that I can literally go anywhere I want. Now when people start to tell me directions I just tune out and know I'll just do what the gps says. I can and have driven across the state with no problem.
Guess what? I don't have a GPS and I can literally go anywhere I want too. Not knowing where you are should bother you a little bit. GPS is great until you encounter real world situations where you have to make a quick decision that takes you off the route. Many times in my part time work as a police officer I've had to close a road due to an accident, a fire or something like that. In my city, the main streets are roughly N-S and E-W. If one road is closed, you backtrack to the last major street, make a turn and then turn the same direction up the parallel road.
I can't tell you how many LOCAL people have gotten irate with me when I tell them that the road is closed and they'll have to detour.
Citizen: "But my TOM TOM says I HAVE TO GO THIS WAY."
Me: "Sorry sir, road's closed - bad accident."
Citizen: "(demandingly) OK, what do I need to do then."
Me: "You'll have to go back to the first light and work your way over to the next road which is Pine. Pine parallels this street and will take you to Miller Road as well."
Citizen: "I can't do that. There's no way to put that in my Tom Tom!"
Me: "Sir, you've gotta move, there's 100 cars behind you and I've got a firetruck trying to get through the jam."
Citizen: "But I'm LOST and it's YOUR fault because you closed MY road!"
Me: "You're right sir, it is my fault. Tell you what, I'll draw you a map on the back of a ticket for obstructing traffic."
Many people know one and only one way to get home, and they are utterly incapable of dealing with everyday hiccups that make them think. When you're being flagged into a detour in rush hour traffic there's no time to stop in the road and try to reprogram your GPS. Even if you don't know the street names, understanding how a town is laid out combined with a little common sense can make a huge difference. I really believe that those who constantly rely on a GPS lack the ability to spatially reference themselves because it's a skill they just don't use. Throw in an emergency where you don't have five minutes to think out a course of action and you've got a real problem.
I wonder how much the 'browsing the Internet' bit really matters. As others have pointed out, there have been other studies that promote the benefits of massages, naps, etc. Seems to me the common denominator is taking a break at natural intervals. I spend enough time at the keyboard during the day that my Internet usage is really minimal (no, seriously!). On the other hand, if you walk in my office you're always going to find the Wall Street Journal opened up to some article on the side of my desk. I will periodically peek over and read for a few minutes after finishing a task while waiting to start the next one, such as the five minute lull at the start of conference calls where the host keeps saying "Let's give the others a few more minutes to join..." An aside - I start my conference calls on time. After a year, even my boss was trained to be no more than 30 seconds late.
In terms of workload, I consistently fall into the 'exceeds expectations' category when it comes time to figure out year-end ratings. Yet I also keep a fairly regular schedule. I'm not in the office 12 hours a day like the guys across the hall who consider it a badge of honor to eat lunch AND dinner at work yet bitch when their reviews keep coming back as 'meets expectations.' And yes, we more or less have the same job duties.
When you terminate a contractor or employee it is wise to also terminate their access to your servers...
Unfortunately it's not as simple as this. At my company we have "Service Accounts" which are not owned by individuals, but by technical groups. Any program that is not going to be run interactively is supposed to be run via a service account. The password is controlled by the group and does not expire. The idea is that if Jack quits and his ID is disabled all the cron/task scheduler jobs won't quit working and cause a massive outage. Likewise an expired password could cause big problems.
In 99% of the cases the service account has extremely limited rights so it's actually not a bad model. However there are at least a dozen accounts that I know of that are members of the Domain Admins group or some other group that effectively gives admin rights on almost all servers. These are typically used for security patches, server audits and the like. I left one of the support groups over three years ago but I still remember a Domain Admin service account password. Hell, after setting up scheduled tasks for four years it's kind of hard to forget it. If I wanted to be really malicious I'd wait until the next round of layoffs were rumored and then I would set my script up using the service account and have it check a few random people's logon ID's to see if any were disabled. I'd pick some highly technical, somewhat eccentric individuals. Later on the forensic investigators would show up and the first thing they're going to do is look at the list of highly technical people in the AD support group who were set up as triggers. "Hey, didn't we fire Peter Gibbons last week? Well he's one of three people who would trigger this thing...plus his friends Michael and Samir...Naga...Naga...NotGonnaWorkHereAnyLonger"
That's still not entirely accurate. The Republicans were making all sorts of noise about putting tighter controls on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while the Democrats were screaming that we needed to open the spigots further and let them engage in even riskier activities. All at the same time that Chris Dodd (D-Conn) was getting a "special deal" from Countrywide Mortgage, which he is yet to disclose the details of despite promising six months that he would share the details shortly.
For my day job I work for a bank, and not one that made risky loans. We're actually turning a modest profit right now. In the last five years, the amount of regulation that we've been forced to endure is incredible. I for one would like to know how my industry has been deregulated in the last eight years where such regulation has been entirely at the behest of the Republicans. I work in the sector that's having the meltdown and I'm yet to figure out exactly what has been deregulated. Every single year the percentage of time I spend on regulatory activities goes up and yet my job has remained basically the same. In general each year the regulators get more savvy, more risk-adverse, and more demanding.
It's not as cut and dry as some would like to make it out to be. To say it's the conservative's fault or it's the Republican's fault is disingenuous. I'm going to go with the poster who says that a better tag for this one would be "Bipartisan."
"why would they want to turn off the camera?"
There are lots of good reasons. What do you do when you're called to a traffic accident on the freeway and your car is blocking traffic for six hours with the lights on? Multiply that by the three or four cars that respond and note that our system records both the forward view out the windshield and the in-car (facing backseat) camera, that's a lot of footage of nothing. Yes, "storage is cheap" but when you consider an indefinite retention period and a discoverable chain of custody, it's very expensive relative to the budget of the average department.
I like the system in the cars my department has. It starts recording when you hit RECORD or active the overheads. When it starts recording, it automatically saves the 60 seconds immediately prior to the activation event. When you turn the lights off or hit STOP, it will keep recording for 45 seconds and then really stop. Thus for each activation event you're going to get a minimum of 1:45 recorded, including a full minute before you hit the lights. This look back feature really helps to put recordings in their proper context.
While you certainly can stop recording at any time, it's going to look really bad if you've always recorded your stops to completion and then a nasty allegation is made against you at the same event where you hit STOP right in the middle of the contact.
Incidentally our systems are tape-free. Each car has a WiFi antenna and it will automatically upload any new files when the car drives into one of several zones in the city. For example, there's a WiFi zone at the service garage pumps and in the station lot. However, the cameras also pipe a feed to the MDT which is connected to the network through a Verizon Air Card. Even though it's not streaming video, dispatch does have the ability to pull up real-time video from any car. It works well for our purposes, and probably a lot cheaper than the solution this town is looking at.
... for traveling light. Avoid checking any luggage at all, carry on only! Not only do you save time by not having to wait around for your luggage (which may never arrive) at the belt, but you can also stay within view of your gear.
This works fine for me when I go on short personal trips, but most of the time I find it's not just not practical. I'm always carrying something prohibited. The carry-on restrictions with regards to liquids finally pushed me over the edge. I wear contacts, use hair gel, like deodorant, prefer to brush my teeth and actually shave. This pushes me beyond the one small clear bag that I can hold up while some goon pretends to be able to tell if it's potentially explosive.
Then there's the problem that when I travel for work, I'm usually carrying a firearm. Even if I'm not, being from southern Ohio I never go anywhere without my trusty pocket knife (which has to be checked).
Believe it or not I was once told by a TSA supervisor that by having a gun in my luggage I'm probably least likely to be ripped off. Since it's in a locked case in my suitcase, presumably the thief would think it's valuable and try to bust it open. Upon finding it's a gun if he's smart he'll close it up and run away. If I get to my destination and find my gun is missing, unlike say a stolen iPod, both airports will likely go on lockdown until it can be accounted for. Even a $7.00 hour grunt realizes that everybody down there will be searched and all the video tape will be immediately reviewed. As an added bonus, TSA hand screens my checked luggage in front of me when I check in. They then seal it up with the "Passed TSA Security" sticker while I stand there. Theoretically it then goes straight to the airline and bypasses the other checked luggage that has to be screened by some unknown down below.
Many good suggestions have been provided and I think you'd be hard pressed to really find a serious weakness with any of them. At the end of the day all that matters is that the convention is logical and consistent. As several posters have pointed out, ideally your end users will never see the server names. So long as each server is uniquely identified and is convenient for the people who will actually refer to the servers by name it really doesn't matter what you use.
The bigger question though is how to keep track of all of these servers. A naming convention certainly helps but all that really matters is that each server be uniquely identified. Heck I worked for a place that simply used SVR###### where they started with 00001 and just added one each time a new server arrived.
Regardless of naming convention a good asset and configuration database is essential. Heck, even an Excel spreadsheet would work for a place your size. It's there that you keep track of all the essential details such as make/model/serial number/OS/switch port assignment/applications/etc.
The idea of a server naming convention is to give a quick and dirty (but repeatable) method to the madness. There's a lot more information that could be conveyed in a server name but I'd argue that the name is not the proper place for it.
"Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?"
:)
I don't think this is asking the right question as some other posters have alluded to. We're talking corporate IT departments versus a branch of the Federal Government. We're also talking about destruction of the only copy of a given piece of data rather than destruction of one of several means of storing it.
It is absolutely usual for my corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy; but I work for a bank. I don't work for the government where I'm required by law to archive anything and everything. After a person no longer needs a workstation, the workstation is kept in a locked room for about 90 days just in case anything pops up (oh crap, I forgot to copy my personal folder over to my new machine!). After that, the drive is securely erased. If the machine is going to be redeployed to a new user we then load a fresh install of the OS onto it and it's put in another secured room and marked as "Available for Redeploy" in the asset database. If it's not going to be redeployed then the hard drive will be removed and run through a degaussing machine and then put in a pallet box to be picked up by our secure shredding company. The company will shred the drives on site and take the materials to be recycled.
Servers are much the same way, except that by policy, we back servers up at least once a day. While the drive that originally contained the information may be long gone, the data lives on for whatever the normal retention policy is. For email I believe it's a year, unless there's a reason for that box to be kept indefinitely (e.g. if a notice of discovery has been received).
So to answer the question posed in the story posting, yes it is normal for corporate IT departments to completely destroy hard drives, but that's not germane to the discussion. A better question would be "Is it normal for corporate IT departments to destroy hard drives by policy without any suitable forms of backup or other mechanisms to make sure any retention policies mandated by law or policy are enforced." Of course that's a lot longer than the original question and the Slashdot eds probably would have gotten lost and not posted the article!
Of course all the big names are listed (Bank of America, Regions, etc), but it's too bad you can't zoom in on the screen shots. My local financial institution has been getting phished like crazy lately and it's always the same basic kit. Makes me wonder if it's this kit or something else. Whenever I get one of the emails I just have to check it out on my Mac Book in Firefox with JS disabled just to see if it's anything novel. Never is.
:-)
Naturally Netcraft won't tell you the real site name
This isn't about that. Google already has a service that reports and detects sites that try to phish your personal information or try to install malware on your machine. No, this effort is to try to purge the Google index of sites that sell malware creation and deployment toolkits to black-hats. IMHO, the original poster is correct. This wouldn't make it much more difficult for script-kiddies and black-hats to get their hands on malware kits, while making it more difficult for white-hats to find information about these programs.
Not to drift too far off topic but I've never been very impressed with the Google phishing site service. On the one hand they say that solicit feedback from the user community as to what is a web forgery I don't know that they ever listen. I deal with phishing sites as part of my job and I've had situations where at least 10 or 12 customers have told us that they submitted the page to Google's Web Forgery report page but it never gets flagged. The only time I've ever seen them flag a site is when one of the major anti-phishing players classifies it as such. I've done some experiments where I've watched phishing sites stay online for a while. It seems that without fail within an hour of a major vendor like Symantec announcing the forgery Google will flag it. Otherwise users can spam the Google report link for a week and it'll never get flagged.
With this new service it makes me wonder if they have any plans to actually respond to user input or if the user input will be up only for good PR. Will all the accepted submissions come from professional security firms who have a vested interest in knowing about malware leaving your more casual security researcher unable to a) effectively report malware pages and b) learn about new threats once the big players have done their research and told Google to de-index the page.
Now I understand that if you get a report from Symantec the credibility is very high as opposed to web-based reports from anybody who can read squiggly letters in a box, but it does make me wonder if the public submission forms are just for show so people can feel like they're doing a good thing.
With all the video....I'm guessing that is why my atty. friend suggested to literally say nothing if you know you're gonna be busted. You don't speak any more that absolutely necessary, and don't get out of the car to do field tests where they can tape you. If you don't have a DWI record, and you give them as little evidence as possible...get a good lawyer, and they can usually get you out of the DWI charge...possibly down to something like wreckless driving which sucks, but, doesn't have the problems a real DWI comes with.
That's good advice from a legal standpoint regardless of the situation. A smart suspect keeps their mouth shut, and I respect that. The problem is even if you say very little, you probably still smell like booze and there was probable cause for the stop. Most drunks I've found don't know how drunk they are and despite the advice they received when they were sober want to try to show that they're stone cold sober. You don't have to do the field tests, but at that point the officer does have the right to detain you for a certified test. Lucky you, the cops won't let you drive yourself to the station to participate. You've got to get out of the car and walk back to the cruiser for transport. Again, not prima facie but if you're having trouble making that straight walk back, it'll be on tape for the prosecutor to review.
The other thing to keep in mind is that if you're charged with DUI and plead it to reckless op, your record may still reflect that you were CHARGED with DUI, CONVICTED of RO. Now, this is not the same as having been convicted of DUI. You don't have to get the party plates and other fun activities, but next time you're out on the road and pulled over for weaving while smelling like booze, the fact that you were previously charged with DUI can come back to bite you because it's added into the pot of evidence.
There's plenty of studies showing that talking on the phone impairs drivers more than a 0.08 BAC. If we accept the premise that drivers should be criminally liable for driving while impaired that means one of two things: a) the laws for driving while phoning are too lenient or b) the legal limit of blood alcohol content is too low.
I pull imapired drivers over all the time. Yeah I'm frequently called a dickhead for charging a cellphone user with failure to control or assured clear distance, but so be it. "Ma'am, I stopped you because you appear to be impaired. You've put your entire car over the line at least seven times since I've been following you in the last mile and a half. Is everything OK?" "Oh yeah, just fine, I haven't been drinking or anything, I'm just talking on my phone." (More than half the time the driver is still on the phone when you approach the vehicle).
Do I think it sucks that a person pulled over for DUI faces significantly higher penalties even if they don't cause an accident versus someone simply not paying attention? Yeah, but I don't write the laws. Now, there is a difference between distracted driving and driving drunk. A distracted driver who is on the phone, putting on makeup, etc, can turn it off and become 100% focused on driving again. A drunk can't do this. They're impaired until the alcohol wears off. Thus the exposure time for a drunk driver is 100% of the time that they're behind the wheel. If traffic gets hairy or the weather turns bad, a distracted driver can hang up and drive. Am I implying that all distracted drivers do this when the situation requires more attention or am I saying that when traffic is light you're free to goof off? Absolutely not, but at least the ability to focus again is there while drunks don't have the option. My policy is if you're driving like you're impaired you probably are and I will make contact to determine what the issue is.
Personally I like non-DUI impaired driving cases. It's much easier to write someone a citation or a warning and send them on their way than to have to go through the rigmarole associated with a full-blown DUI arrest. In my mind both groups are equally dangerous on the road, but the former is much easier to deal with and get back to patrol. A drunk might take two hours from violation to calling 10-8 (back in service).
Well, if you are in this situation...and can do it....refuse the field test, and say you'll submit to test at station WHEN you can do so in the presence of your lawyer. This can buy you time to process alcohol out of your system....
This can work to a degree. Most states have a fairly tight time limit in which a person must be tested for the results to be considered valid. Usually it's 2-4 hours. The problem is while flunking the machine is prima facie evidence that you are over the limit, it's not the only acceptable evidence. Even if you refuse the test, or if for some reason the machine isn't working, you can still be charged with and convicted of DUI in many states. How can this be? Like I said, flunking the machine is prima facie, but it's not the only way you can be considered drunk. Admittedly it's harder to prove in court, but a dash cam video of you driving all over the road, reacting slowly to the officer's commands as if you're having trouble understanding, the arrest report that documents the fact that alcohol was clearly on your breath, the booking video (oh? you didn't know that almost all jail facilities video and audio tape their processing areas?) of you having trouble standing, slurring your speech, etc, all can lead to a preponderance of evidence that you were, in fact, driving drunk. That's enough to file charges, and if it's so overwhelming as to be beyond a reasonable doubt, you're off to party plate land. (For those that don't know, in my state of Ohio, we make all DUI offenders get yellow license plates with red numbers for a few years after a DUI conviction. These are sometimes referred to as Party Plates).
The other problem is that alcohol has been shown to be metabolized at a fairly fixed rate of one "drink" per hour, and your BAC can be estimated based on your body weight. Say you manage to delay a test for 1.9 hours after your arrest and register 0.07%. Here they can say that you're at 0.07% now, but having observed you ingest nothing for the last 1.9 hours they can estimate that your BAC at the time of arrest would have been somewhere between 0.12 and 0.14 (I'm just making these numbers up). This figure isn't as solid as a printout showing you over the limit at the time of the test, but again, it can and will add to the list of factors considered in deciding what to charge you with.
Where I work we currently run two mainframes in a sysplex environment for all the core transactions. It's a very optimized environment and handles millions of financial transactions a day. In mid-2006, IBM started giving us zLinux engines to "try out" and they gave us all of the software we needed to make a go of it. Kind of like a playground drug dealer, they hoped that by giving us a bit for free we'd get hooked and become dedicated customers. The problem was, for the type of workload that typically runs on our servers (high CPU, moderate I/O) we were experiencing poor performance on the mainframe VMs. IBM sent all their engineers out to help make tweaks and tune all sorts of things. Despite all the tuning and tweaking that took place, we could never get a single engine to perform better than a $5,000 server. Keep in mind that a single engine was retailing for around $80,000 after discounts.
We did some calculations and determined that for the price of a zLinux engine we could buy an entire rack of high-end HP servers that would outperform the single engine by a factor of 200:1. Again, maybe it was just the workload we were doing, but even IBM couldn't figure it out and our server work profile isn't exactly uncommon. Granted you can cram a lot of guests onto a host system provided that none of the guests want to use more than 10% of their CPU at any given time, but that defeats the purpose. I could probably run a VMWare host with 100 guests and call it a success, provided they all sat idle.
It was kind of funny because the IBM engineers would shake their heads and admit that for our workload it just wasn't going to work out. Then the next week the sales guy would call and ask if we were ready to buy that third mainframe since he just read the engineer's report and our visit was obviously a smashing success.
I'm not knocking the whole Linux on the mainframe concept, I'm just sharing our experience and how the whole thing seemed to be like someone in IBM Marketing declared "we need to sell Linux on the mainframe" and the Dilberts were forced to sell a product that worked about as well as a chocolate fireguard. It was a very awkward experience and even the IBM engineers seemed like they were stuck in an uncomfortable position of supporting sales for a product that even moderately demanding customers wouldn't be able to run with.
Personally I consider Linux on the mainframe to be on par with running Linux on an iPhone. Sure you probably can, but does it actually do anything uniquely useful for the business? I have a hard time selling technology to the CIO on the grounds that because it's Linux it's a good business decision regardless of the context.
Probably a big dump. Why can't people shit at home? They were just there half an hour ago.
Expense reduction. The company's doing it, so why shouldn't I? They expect more productivity out of me and instant availability at no extra cost to them. Since it's costing me more to work there, I need to cut my expenses as well. Until I got married, it was possible for me to go an entire month on a single roll of toilet paper because I "timed" everything to always have to take that "7:30 conference call" in room 4-RM (4th floor Men's Restroom).
Of course my boss still got the last laugh. He gave me a Blackberry. Now I take a dump while my computer boots up, but I use the extra time to get a jump start on my emails using the Blackberry. Drat, foiled again...
Plus I'd rather be in the building at 7:30 and seen for a short while than show up at work at 7:45 because I opted to take care of business at home first. Yes my current job is like something out of Office Space.
It sounds like your phone had a bug in it, my phone never switched to Roaming or Strongest Signal.
I thought that at first, but considering that my daughter and I had totally different brands of phones, and both were susceptible to it, that suspicion went out the window. Especially once I started watching it closely and they'd almost always revert within 12 hours of each other. One was a Motorola and the other was a Sanyo (too bad, because otherwise I loved the Sanyo phone!)
This is precisely why I left Sprint early this year. Doing simple math, if they say that people who call 25 times a month are doing so 40 times more than usual, that works out to 0.625 times per month, or about eight times a year. EIGHT times a year. I'm sorry, but that's crappy service if your customers have a 67% chance of calling about a given bill. Not once have I ever called about my DSL bill, or my cable bill. I've only called my credit card company once. Yet, calling Sprint was an almost monthly affair.
Granted I know there's assholes who have nothing better to do but call customer support all day long. You get these people in any industry. However, I would consider myself an "average" Sprint customer. According to my records, I called them 46 times over the course of my 5.5 year history with them. It was always stupid stuff, usually no more than $0.50 but it's the principle of the thing. I specifically set both phones on the line to never roam and use Sprint Only. Yet, every few weeks the setting would silently revert to Strongest Signal. A couple of times I got charged roaming AND long distance to check my voicemail while in my home city. I would accept that maybe I screwed up and made a roaming call, but by Sprint's own admission, calling from the same city in which my voice mail is located should never be a long distance call. Fuck you, build a better system.
Before we had a text messaging plan I'd get random text spam sent to my phone. Each time I followed the CSR's advice and deleted it before it was opened. Still got charged...after a few calls it was discovered that the "delete without opening" trick only works for text messages sent from other Sprint customers. Messages from the web are automatically billed, regardless of whether you open them. Fuck you, build a better system.
Then we did get text messaging and my daughter got charged for 15 International text messages one month. The first CSR knew right away what the problem was - the Sprint computer thought all text messages were international for about a week or so. Credits were being automatically issued. Imagine my lack of surprise when no automated credits showed up, so I had to call each month until they finally broke down and gave me a manual credit. Fuck you, build a better system.
So here I sit now with AT&T and not once have I had to call and complain about my bill. They were even able to put a purchasing block on my daughter's phone the day we activated. Sprint had no way of keeping her from "accidentally" buying ringtones and other phone shit that she's not allowed to have (Fuck you, build a better system...except that this one would deny you short-term income at the long term expense of losing customers). Oh, and three months into my contract AT&T happily unlocked my phone so I can use my Orange SIM when I'm visiting the UK...
I thought about that when I was "picking my profession", and I did talk to some lawyers and others I knew. At first it seemed a natural fit for me, but as I dug in deeper, I discovered that it wasn't as black and white as I'd hoped.
First, as another poster indicated, there's lots of "if then but else if" clauses. As black and white as a case my appear at first glance, the law is very gray. One can have two courts arrive at two entirely different conclusions on the same basic point, and then the appeals court decide to not take it up because the case isn't interesting. At that point, the implication is that both courts are right (or maybe they're both wrong), but it's no longer a simple truth. Don't even get me started on what one lawyer told me about the words "reasonable" and "prudent" in the context of any legal code.
Second, as strange as it may seem, a lot of practicing law is a matter of avoiding the real issue at hand. Take the SCO case - very little time has been spent addressing the case itself. Almost all the time has been spent on discovery motions, procedural arguments, evidence rules, etc. As a geek, I like to see results fairly quickly in a repeatable and consistent manner. If you told me that I had to write a perl program to compute the area of a triangle, I'd say cool. However, if you then told me that first I had to prove the theorem I'll use, but first I have to agree on the method in which my theorem will be proved, but first I have to decide whether the requester even has standing to ask me to write a program...you get the idea.
Third, I don't disagree on your point about geeks making good researchers. Certainly there's no question we're good at digging stuff up. What remains to be seen is whether we're good at digging everything up. This goes back to my other points. In a way, legal research is like the halting problem - you're never 100% confident that you've pulled every relevant law and ruling. Legal researchers also have to be completely free of bias. Most geeks I know (myself included) tend to feel very strongly on certain issues, and it's only natural that we'd favor facts that support our bias and disfavor those that don't. A good researcher can research the hell out of an issue that they vehemently oppose for the side that they despise. That takes something beyond being good at Google and Lexus.
As a part-time law enforcement officer in Ohio, I have to agree that the Ohio system is done pretty well. Absolutely everything is logged and routinely monitored. Try talking to any of your good cop buddies to see if they'll run a plate for you. Most of them will say "oh hell no!" and run as fast as they can. We had an officer get fired two years ago for abusing the LEADS system. He was running plates "on the side" for some friends of his. All went well until one day he ran the plate of someone wanted for assault. Naturally the log analyzer program went nuts when it found that one of our officers ran the plate of a wanted individual, but we had no corresponding arrest record. So it went onto the exception report and was reviewed by the Captain a few days later. Turns out he'd only run five or six plates as favors, but the Chief asked for his badge and gun then and there in exchange for not shipping the case to the prosecutor. After the guy was walked out the door, the Chief sent the case to the prosecutor anyway.
Of course, the problem with accountability being at this level is that without further review up above, local corruption could skate right by. I do, however, remember of the town of New Rome (when it still existed) losing access to the state LEADS system for something like 90 days when someone claimed that he was being harassed by the local police and it was discovered that the mayor was having the police chief look up the records of people he didn't like and do things like put BOLOs (Be on the lookout) on them so they'd get stopped for no reason any time another officer ran their plates.
The fact that he doesn't have to pay taxes isn't the issue. It's the fact that if you live & telecommute in one state, but work for a company in another other state you have to pay both states taxes when you telecommute. For instance, I live on the border in Wisconsin, yet work in St. Paul, Minnesota. I telecommute occasionaly, and I don't want to have to pay taxes to both states for those times when I don't go into the office. That is the issue at hand.
This is one of the rare occasions where I can say that I think Ohio has done something decent. If you live in Ohio but work in one of the border states, your state taxes are due only for the state in which you live, and vice versa. This applies even if you physically work in the other state. I went to school in southern Ohio and there were a ton of student workers who lived in Indiana or Kentucky and they had no Ohio taxes withheld from their paychecks, nor did they owe any at the end of the year. The sucker for them was that they had to cut a check to their home state as required, at the home state's rate (usually quarterly), it wasn't withheld in Ohio automatically. I know it's the same amount of money, but when you're a college kid, money in hand is money spent yesterday, so having to remember to cough up your home state's tax quartlery could be a bitch.
Of course, this rule wasn't put in place for Telecommuting, since they never figured that someone in Ohio would commute to Illinois to work, so it only applies to the border states. You *might* be able to make a case for someone living in far North East Ohio and working in New York by cutting the top corner of PA, but that'd be a commute of well over an hour. So if I telecommute to Tennessee, I do owe taxes to both, but not if I do it to Kentucky.
...or I guess I'll have to resume the environmentally unfriendly practice of using the incinerator in the basement of my house. Don't think anyone's used that thing in 20 years beyond a place to shove their cigarette butts during parties!
I bet the fumes from the tags will be great for all involved!
Must be a linux DHCP server I guess? Dont think Windows DHCP is that smart :/
:). There's a network probe on the wire between the switch and the DHCP servers, all it does is watch the requests and responses go by. The DHCP server itself is none the wiser. All the logic happens on the probe.
Answer:
Yes, but irrelevant
I'd be interested to know what software you use to perform all this.. Any chance of telling? :)
Nothing fancy actually - it's pretty much all Active Directory, SMS, and Perl scripting. Some strategically placed network probes on the DHCP server allow us to listen for incoming DHCP requests, and the response with the IP address allocated. A filter with an event handling logic runs on the probe which then calls a Perl script to runs an NBTSTAT against the computer to see what it's a member of and does an LDAP lookup to see that the workstation name is in one of the offcial AD OUs. The script has the ability to manage the switch and shutdown ports, send emails, etc.
I'm not entirely sure of how exactly it's all accomplished since that's a different area of my department, but I know the 10,000 foot view. I do not know what Network filtering software they're using for the sniffer probe. Really, the trick is effective use of Group Policy, and the grunts to physically back it up (that is, enforcing the policy outside the computer world - the guys who make visits to you and your manager for violators, etc). As to the different physical segments for the network, that's as simple as having the electricians run extra Cat5 to a different patch panel in a different room and then connecting the different segments via Stonegate firewalls.