Not having watched Caprica, I could just imagine that it goes something like this:
Humans arm robots Robots^WCylons take over moon Cylons create robotic civilization Cylons wage war against humans Cylons pursue Galactica and vow to wipe out the remaining humans
Around here we call them key coffins, but anyways, yes, keysafes are great. Highly suggest that you have one concealed outside for if and when you get locked out of the house. The around-the-doorknob ones are mainly useful for realtors, but any decent locksmith or real hardware store will happily sell you one that can be screwed to a wall. This is probably not a practical solution for everyday use; for that, an electronic lock is probably a better idea for routine entry/exit.
Yes, but lower resolution != higher quality as well. Since we were already discussing "high-quality sensors" (original topic), my point was simply that higher resolution would also be advantageous. I thought the quality requirement was implied by the discussion. The Axis 200 webcams I picked up many years ago are something like 100Kpixels at normal resolution and are sometimes full of noise when you compare frame-to-frame. At the time of the 200, which I made a crude R/C P/T unit for, an 18GB SCSI drive was "kind of" large, and we were using some custom code on a well-connected UNIX host to provide recording and viewing to a large user population. At 1fps, we were able to store several days per camera.
These days, with many times that amount of space available, I simply think it'd be useful to have cameras that are higher resolution than that, or even NTSC. For security purposes, detail is king. We've all seen crappy surveillance video of a bank or convenience store getting knocked off. They're often blurry and useless, a fabulous tradeoff where cheap gear is used to reduce cost, but also reduces usefulness. It's been over 10 years since the Axis 200. It'd be nice to see a boatload of quality cameras taking high-resolution, high-fps, and yes, high-quality images too.
A large percentage of the links off the CNN homepage these days are to the ireport web site, and they don't even differentiate them anymore like they used to. As a general rule, I don't care to see amateur news reporting, and this has been one reason I've used CNN less lately. I'd rather have less news but have it be high quality.
Especially with the advances in storage technology, it would seem like higher resolution for security purposes could sometimes be handy, certainly enough to justify paying at least a modest premium over 10-year-old technology.
Sorry, I see how that was unclear. I was intending to question the word _adult_. I'm used to kids who are able to keep an eye on what's going on and who report bad things to their parents, or will even step in if doing so will prevent someone from getting hurt. I meant to suggest that I know some kids who would be able to supervise those guards successfully, but I see how I failed to state that clearly.
When your kids can tell the difference between rude, mean, nasty, and actual danger, it makes you wonder why border guards cannot. Sorry for any confusion.
I set up a separate SSID and subnet on the OpenWRT, transparent proxied into Tor. Forced anonymous browsing == use that SSID, everything goes through Tor or else fails completely.
Speaking as someone who was working on what was probably the very earliest wave of hospital networks and integration back in the mid '90's, on those medical diagnostic devices you refer to, I'd have to disagree. Hospital networks are certainly a mess, but the risks of having a virus hopping around these devices is terrifying, because in many cases, the networks are connected in ways that the manufacturers never really thoroughly envisioned, so when your Windows-based CAT scanner gets a virus from some portable EHR laptop that was in turn infected because someone brought in an infected laptop that was briefly on a different network a few weeks ago, at the same time as the EHR laptop, suddenly you have a link from one to the other.
The encryption system probably doesn't do a whole lot to help the mess, I'll concede that.
The risks are immense. It's impressive that it hasn't all come crashing down and gone Skynet on us, haha.
What part of "this is a dispute about who was authorized, by the city's own policy, to receive those assets" do you not understand?
You don't hand your cellphone and laptop to the cleaning guy as you're departing the building.
Further, the whole point here is that this is a catastrophic management failure. An employee was allowed to build this thing that only he had keys to, and management just sat around. Apparently not managing anything.
Being reliant on an employee to "return" your "asset" if you suddenly decide you want it does you no good if the employee has been killed by a runaway bus, is simply forgetful, or gets into a disagreement about who's authorized. Any competent IT department has policies and procedures in place to handle this sort of thing.
Found that Holiday Inn and some of the other Intercontinental properties typically offer free Internet. Some of them, like Staybridge, will actually give you a ridiculously cheap rate on the weekends ($70 for a suite that has two separate bedrooms and a central living room/kitchen). The Internet isn't always wifi but is generally better than my impression of industry average.
Generally speaking, if projects or cases need to be formally transferred, you do that process by hiring the replacement *first* and then having the process proceed for a week, month, or even a year - while the soon-to-be-ex-employee is still working. Labor laws do not make an exemption for this. Further, if you're my employer and you tell me you're outsourcing my job to India, and I can expect that my next six months of employment will consist of the process of transferring, there is very little that you can do if I wish instead to give my two weeks notice and say that I've been feeling the urgent need for a vacation for some time.
Returning company property is a ten minute affair, and the last time you did it, you were probably still on the clock. Transferring the accumulated knowledge of a project is generally a lot more, at least for any high value employee. That's why it's Real Super Important for management to make sure that documentation is generated as the project proceeds. You never know when Terry Childs will be hit by an out-of-control bus or other catastrophe.
That, again, is different. In the case of passwords, short of getting out a scalpel and cutting out sections of your brain, there's no way NOT to "keep the data." I still remember passwords from many years ago. None of them do me any good and there is no value to me remembering them, but I remember them regardless.
Do you forget who your co-workers were, what their e-mail addresses were, where they sat, what their phone extensions were, etc., just because you leave your job? Do you need that data? Can you voluntarily forget it?
A work cell phone or laptop is physical property, easily and trivially returned. It is entirely unlike data, which can be copied. The laptop has to be in the employee's hands in order to be useful, and by definition must be out of the employer's possession in order to be used. Further, in many places, all you do for laptop or cell phone is confiscate them as the employee is being escorted out, or let them know that their final paycheck will be docked for the replacement amounts if they fail to return the items.
So let me give you a more comparable situation.
You're working for the hottest game manufacturer on the planet, because they saw some promise in your skills and you had some great ideas about how to implement the engine for their next jewel. One day, your employer finds you are spending most of your working hours surfing porn on the Internet. Angry, your boss fires you. Then he realizes that the product he's tasked with developing is reliant on the game engine, and that with you gone, so is the expertise to finish development of the game engine. So he...
1) Is out of luck because he fired your sorry butt?
2) Should take you to court and sue you to produce the information in your head?
This is not meant to be a strict parallel to the Childs case, but rather an example of how this is not a trivial case. This sort of stuff happens all the time, by the way, and the normal answer is generally "none of the above." It's usually
3) Offer to hire you on as a temp contractor, generally at insane rates, for the hours needed in order to get a coherent brain-dump.
In this case, though, it sounds like 3) would not have worked. What they probably should have done is:
4) Sucked it up, paid a few experts to start walking through the system node-by-node, resetting everything to a known state. There are always plenty of out-of-work network jocks.
If you've never built a large network, it's easy to underestimate what I'm saying. It's not just the passwords, but also how to use them. This isn't like sitting down in front of a Linux box and logging in. It probably includes needing to know the topology of the network, such as "if jonesville router 1a is down, its console is connected to the aux port on jonesville router 1b, but to get to that when the routing protocol has imploded, you might need to first dial in to the out-of-band modem on barton router 2a, ssh over to barton router 1b, then use the link address of jonesville router 1b to ssh to, then connect up to the console port."
As for harm, what actual harm did he actually do? Did he down the entire network? Did he allow criminals access to their network? Take a look at the "harm" claimed and see what portions of it you can actually attribute to him INSTEAD of the city.
His boss can head to jail for the very same reason he is; his boss caused denial of service by failing to guarantee that the city had unimpeded access to the network. What's good for the goose is good for the gander and all that.
Which is where this gets all goofy; he's already been fired, but he's expected to do *work* for them, in the form of enumerating passwords and associating them with what systems they're for and how to use them and how to get access to the systems in order to use them, etc.? Documentation of that sort could be very lengthy and quite a bit of work to write up.
If he had gone out binge drinking and incapacitated himself for a day after being fired, would this be considered "denial of service?"
If the city wished to be able to have unimpeded access to their network after firing the person who apparently held the only set of electronic master keys to the system, why wasn't it their responsibility to make sure that they had those keys - before firing him?
There are multiple failures on both sides of this issue, but in the end, the city (a large entity that presumably has many lawyers and expertise in dealing with human resources) has punished the employee (an individual who appears to be eccentric but probably harmless, and probably less-than-fully-informed about the legal aspects to it all). When considering the city vs the individual, the city had all the resources, but royally screwed the pooch, and yet it's still the individual left picking up the tab.
Some benefits, yes, but the primary problems remain unaddressed: relatively low RAM and relatively slow CPU, meaning that you'll be limited if you're using this for WiFi-to-LAN style access. Great for Internet access (as is the Soekris stuff), no doubt.
What'll be really fun is what happens when the streams are crossed... Was Spengler correct?
On one hand, you have "thou shalt encrypt", and on the other hand, the UK will throw you in prison if you won't cough up the decryption keys. Am I the only one that sees a paradox where a company refuses to provide decryption keys for sensitive information, and the employee with the laptop doesn't necessarily have the keys to decrypt the data that the UK wants decrypted?
Slashdot Mirror
Death of USENET predicted! Film at 11.
This has been predicted so many times all throughout the years, it's hard to take it seriously.
Ridiculous to charge 75c per gigabyte when wholesale bandwidth costs are less than $1/megabit.
Not having watched Caprica, I could just imagine that it goes something like this:
Humans arm robots
Robots^WCylons take over moon
Cylons create robotic civilization
Cylons wage war against humans
Cylons pursue Galactica and vow to wipe out the remaining humans
Arming robots, just don't do it. :-)
Yeah, I thought of that too. Do we really want to start arming the robots? ;-)
Around here we call them key coffins, but anyways, yes, keysafes are great. Highly suggest that you have one concealed outside for if and when you get locked out of the house. The around-the-doorknob ones are mainly useful for realtors, but any decent locksmith or real hardware store will happily sell you one that can be screwed to a wall. This is probably not a practical solution for everyday use; for that, an electronic lock is probably a better idea for routine entry/exit.
Yes, but lower resolution != higher quality as well. Since we were already discussing "high-quality sensors" (original topic), my point was simply that higher resolution would also be advantageous. I thought the quality requirement was implied by the discussion. The Axis 200 webcams I picked up many years ago are something like 100Kpixels at normal resolution and are sometimes full of noise when you compare frame-to-frame. At the time of the 200, which I made a crude R/C P/T unit for, an 18GB SCSI drive was "kind of" large, and we were using some custom code on a well-connected UNIX host to provide recording and viewing to a large user population. At 1fps, we were able to store several days per camera.
These days, with many times that amount of space available, I simply think it'd be useful to have cameras that are higher resolution than that, or even NTSC. For security purposes, detail is king. We've all seen crappy surveillance video of a bank or convenience store getting knocked off. They're often blurry and useless, a fabulous tradeoff where cheap gear is used to reduce cost, but also reduces usefulness. It's been over 10 years since the Axis 200. It'd be nice to see a boatload of quality cameras taking high-resolution, high-fps, and yes, high-quality images too.
We're not seeing too much of that. Sigh.
A large percentage of the links off the CNN homepage these days are to the ireport web site, and they don't even differentiate them anymore like they used to. As a general rule, I don't care to see amateur news reporting, and this has been one reason I've used CNN less lately. I'd rather have less news but have it be high quality.
Regarding the Aviosys 9100A, be advised that alternative firmware is available that might work better for some applications, such as ZoneMinder, see
http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Compatibility_List#Network_Digitizers
That looks very promising for integrating normal NTSC into a network. Of course, that's not high quality, but it's interesting regardless.
Especially with the advances in storage technology, it would seem like higher resolution for security purposes could sometimes be handy, certainly enough to justify paying at least a modest premium over 10-year-old technology.
Is what percentage of it ISN'T backed up AND should be (which will be something less than 25% but much greater than 0%).
"monopoly laws"???? Can you be more specific?
They're printed inside the box lid of every Monopoly game.
Sorry, I see how that was unclear. I was intending to question the word _adult_. I'm used to kids who are able to keep an eye on what's going on and who report bad things to their parents, or will even step in if doing so will prevent someone from getting hurt. I meant to suggest that I know some kids who would be able to supervise those guards successfully, but I see how I failed to state that clearly.
When your kids can tell the difference between rude, mean, nasty, and actual danger, it makes you wonder why border guards cannot. Sorry for any confusion.
I set up a separate SSID and subnet on the OpenWRT, transparent proxied into Tor. Forced anonymous browsing == use that SSID, everything goes through Tor or else fails completely.
Adult supervision? Heck, my kids know to behave better than those guards.
Speaking as someone who was working on what was probably the very earliest wave of hospital networks and integration back in the mid '90's, on those medical diagnostic devices you refer to, I'd have to disagree. Hospital networks are certainly a mess, but the risks of having a virus hopping around these devices is terrifying, because in many cases, the networks are connected in ways that the manufacturers never really thoroughly envisioned, so when your Windows-based CAT scanner gets a virus from some portable EHR laptop that was in turn infected because someone brought in an infected laptop that was briefly on a different network a few weeks ago, at the same time as the EHR laptop, suddenly you have a link from one to the other.
The encryption system probably doesn't do a whole lot to help the mess, I'll concede that.
The risks are immense. It's impressive that it hasn't all come crashing down and gone Skynet on us, haha.
What part of "this is a dispute about who was authorized, by the city's own policy, to receive those assets" do you not understand?
You don't hand your cellphone and laptop to the cleaning guy as you're departing the building.
Further, the whole point here is that this is a catastrophic management failure. An employee was allowed to build this thing that only he had keys to, and management just sat around. Apparently not managing anything.
Being reliant on an employee to "return" your "asset" if you suddenly decide you want it does you no good if the employee has been killed by a runaway bus, is simply forgetful, or gets into a disagreement about who's authorized. Any competent IT department has policies and procedures in place to handle this sort of thing.
Found that Holiday Inn and some of the other Intercontinental properties typically offer free Internet. Some of them, like Staybridge, will actually give you a ridiculously cheap rate on the weekends ($70 for a suite that has two separate bedrooms and a central living room/kitchen). The Internet isn't always wifi but is generally better than my impression of industry average.
Generally speaking, if projects or cases need to be formally transferred, you do that process by hiring the replacement *first* and then having the process proceed for a week, month, or even a year - while the soon-to-be-ex-employee is still working. Labor laws do not make an exemption for this. Further, if you're my employer and you tell me you're outsourcing my job to India, and I can expect that my next six months of employment will consist of the process of transferring, there is very little that you can do if I wish instead to give my two weeks notice and say that I've been feeling the urgent need for a vacation for some time.
Returning company property is a ten minute affair, and the last time you did it, you were probably still on the clock. Transferring the accumulated knowledge of a project is generally a lot more, at least for any high value employee. That's why it's Real Super Important for management to make sure that documentation is generated as the project proceeds. You never know when Terry Childs will be hit by an out-of-control bus or other catastrophe.
That, again, is different. In the case of passwords, short of getting out a scalpel and cutting out sections of your brain, there's no way NOT to "keep the data." I still remember passwords from many years ago. None of them do me any good and there is no value to me remembering them, but I remember them regardless.
Do you forget who your co-workers were, what their e-mail addresses were, where they sat, what their phone extensions were, etc., just because you leave your job? Do you need that data? Can you voluntarily forget it?
Again, what duty to your EX-employer do you have?
A work cell phone or laptop is physical property, easily and trivially returned. It is entirely unlike data, which can be copied. The laptop has to be in the employee's hands in order to be useful, and by definition must be out of the employer's possession in order to be used. Further, in many places, all you do for laptop or cell phone is confiscate them as the employee is being escorted out, or let them know that their final paycheck will be docked for the replacement amounts if they fail to return the items.
So let me give you a more comparable situation.
You're working for the hottest game manufacturer on the planet, because they saw some promise in your skills and you had some great ideas about how to implement the engine for their next jewel. One day, your employer finds you are spending most of your working hours surfing porn on the Internet. Angry, your boss fires you. Then he realizes that the product he's tasked with developing is reliant on the game engine, and that with you gone, so is the expertise to finish development of the game engine. So he ...
1) Is out of luck because he fired your sorry butt?
2) Should take you to court and sue you to produce the information in your head?
This is not meant to be a strict parallel to the Childs case, but rather an example of how this is not a trivial case. This sort of stuff happens all the time, by the way, and the normal answer is generally "none of the above." It's usually
3) Offer to hire you on as a temp contractor, generally at insane rates, for the hours needed in order to get a coherent brain-dump.
In this case, though, it sounds like 3) would not have worked. What they probably should have done is:
4) Sucked it up, paid a few experts to start walking through the system node-by-node, resetting everything to a known state. There are always plenty of out-of-work network jocks.
If you've never built a large network, it's easy to underestimate what I'm saying. It's not just the passwords, but also how to use them. This isn't like sitting down in front of a Linux box and logging in. It probably includes needing to know the topology of the network, such as "if jonesville router 1a is down, its console is connected to the aux port on jonesville router 1b, but to get to that when the routing protocol has imploded, you might need to first dial in to the out-of-band modem on barton router 2a, ssh over to barton router 1b, then use the link address of jonesville router 1b to ssh to, then connect up to the console port."
As for harm, what actual harm did he actually do? Did he down the entire network? Did he allow criminals access to their network? Take a look at the "harm" claimed and see what portions of it you can actually attribute to him INSTEAD of the city.
His boss can head to jail for the very same reason he is; his boss caused denial of service by failing to guarantee that the city had unimpeded access to the network. What's good for the goose is good for the gander and all that.
Which is where this gets all goofy; he's already been fired, but he's expected to do *work* for them, in the form of enumerating passwords and associating them with what systems they're for and how to use them and how to get access to the systems in order to use them, etc.? Documentation of that sort could be very lengthy and quite a bit of work to write up.
If he had gone out binge drinking and incapacitated himself for a day after being fired, would this be considered "denial of service?"
If the city wished to be able to have unimpeded access to their network after firing the person who apparently held the only set of electronic master keys to the system, why wasn't it their responsibility to make sure that they had those keys - before firing him?
There are multiple failures on both sides of this issue, but in the end, the city (a large entity that presumably has many lawyers and expertise in dealing with human resources) has punished the employee (an individual who appears to be eccentric but probably harmless, and probably less-than-fully-informed about the legal aspects to it all). When considering the city vs the individual, the city had all the resources, but royally screwed the pooch, and yet it's still the individual left picking up the tab.
His boss should be the one heading to jail.
Seen on the blog:
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/thatlost4gphone/
Some benefits, yes, but the primary problems remain unaddressed: relatively low RAM and relatively slow CPU, meaning that you'll be limited if you're using this for WiFi-to-LAN style access. Great for Internet access (as is the Soekris stuff), no doubt.
What'll be really fun is what happens when the streams are crossed... Was Spengler correct?
On one hand, you have "thou shalt encrypt", and on the other hand, the UK will throw you in prison if you won't cough up the decryption keys. Am I the only one that sees a paradox where a company refuses to provide decryption keys for sensitive information, and the employee with the laptop doesn't necessarily have the keys to decrypt the data that the UK wants decrypted?