You mean like using a cell-phone camera to take a picture of a screen?
You can also encode a LOT of info into just one jpg or png of the family dog.
As for printing, you can use a 600dpi laser to output the whole bible in encoded format on 5 sheets of paper. So yes, you could walk out with 250,000 cables pretty quickly.
Not every office has the kind of hardware (or every person the skillset) required to minimise documents at the drop of a hat like that. While I concede that methods for this are readily available on the internet a lot of people with access to this intelligence just don't have the expertise to step through it and that is a strong enough deterrent in a lot of cases.
Keep in mind I am limiting my discussion to internal patriotic staff members 'freeing America' etc and not a well placed terrorist or foreign intelligence officer--that would be an entirely different ball game and arguably more-so a problem for security vetting offices.
Cameras with cell phones are banned at most defence facilities in the US I would imagine. That being said satellite locations are obviously a serious concern given the origin of the diplomatic cables.
It's not that it is impossible to leak information--that's never a goal--the idea is to increase the difficulty and risk to such a level that it is not worth it for the average employee to attempt to leak whatever mediocre information they have access to and that the employees the skill and access are more loyal and less likely to attempt it. In this way it is different to DRM because there is no inherent risk associated (for most people) as you are not going to lose your job or risk federal/military prison for your actions and thus there is nothing to dissuade you from attempting it.
For the record it is not particularly easy to use a printer to duplicate, say, 250,000 diplomatic cables and walk out with them under your arms. It's not particularly difficult to prevent the average employee from accessing IRC/IM either and the obvious risks attached to e-mail are far too high. The approaches do need to be more sophisticated.
The RL equivilent would perhaps be announcing that every day one random person caught littering shall be executed - it's also hugely excessive as a punishment, but it's a whole lot cheaper than hireing enough police to give every litterer a small fine, and you can be sure that the streets would get a lot cleaner.
This is basically what happens in singapore.
These include jaywalking, littering and spitting. Singapore has a mandatory caning sentence for vandalism offenses.
I get the feeling that that's what this conference was about. I imagine it went kind of like:
"Oh no! All our students are turning to the internet to get some real value of self-education and we aren't all important anymore! How can we get back on top? Oh, I know, just mimic something popular and get some attention back!"
You make it sound like redundancy in network design is a no-cost upgrade. I would wager that dual homing every switch and/or load balancing physical locations over 2x the hardware would easily exceed the cost of buying PCs over dumb terminals. Combine this with the fact that you are often pigeonholing the way people work and as a result will likely alienate a few power users (or worse users who need architectural software that is often not accounted for, especially in governments or councils which contain tens of these types of people).
It is almost always better to absorb the cost of the infrastructure and stick with your current Dell solution. Money is more easily saved elsewhere.
And then the staff store the data on the removable storage and it makes it even easier to walk away with. Now instead of a desktop security breach, someone drops their usb drive on the train...
First, there is a difference between clicking on dancing_bunnies.gif and dancing_bunnies.exe, and it is possible to teach many users that. However, with extensions hidden they're likely to click on dancing_bunnies.gif.exe. That's a problem with MS Windows that I don't think exists elsewhere.
The average user doesn't know the difference between a gif and an exe. If show extensions was on by default and the website they downloaded dancing_bunnies.exe off told them to run the.exe because they would get fantastic dancing bunnies, they would do it.
You need the piece of education in the middle that drums in to their head that exe's are bad. This is fundamentally a people problem, one that transcends operating system boundaries.
No reward? I'd prefer to own thousands of linux servers for my botnet, not thousands of windows servers.
Thousands of Linux servers do not store peoples credit card information in text files on their desktop. The reality is that end users are a much juicier target after a cost-benefit-risk analysis.
Let's admit it, it's easier to hack a windows machine. Not because it's wildly used. But because it lacks fundamentals in its design. Their closed design and monopolistic approaches never let any kind of software repository to be build. So people got used to install software downloading from the Internet and double click on them. They don't have central update mechanism so that vendors can push their updates easily. They tried to be "user friendly" but it's evident that they created something "hacker friendly".
Nobody will dispute the fact that Windows has a lack of security in its fundamental design. I think it is a bad claim to make that the lack of a software repository is responsible for it, as well, since apt has only been around since 1998 and *nix still did not breed the same type of users Windows does. That being said Windows Update has been around since 1998 as well (though apt was preceded by dselect circa '95?).
I'm not arguing that Windows has bred the kind of users that are inherently stupid, for lack of a better word, when it comes to technology. The flipside is this idea is not going anywhere--the average users wants it done, they want it now, they want it to be easy and they don't want to have to know anything about the technology.
Linux is less used so it's not hacked in masses is a fallacious claim. Everyone knows it's hard to convince a Linux user to 'download and run' an application since it has longer path to convince users to do that. Of course nothing is fool-proof, but vast majority of people getting infected with these worms are not fools, they are just victims of stupid design decisions. Even very technical people get infected with viruses and worms in Windows, remember recent Google case in China to be convinced.
You are missing the central point of the argument that is its bread and butter. Let me lay it out for you.
Linux is less used: => People use it because they WANT to use it and they understand it => Millions of idiots do not use it => Millions of idiots do not click download run anything that pops up => Linux is targeted less often by malware because there is less people using it
I'm not arguing that if suddenly the 0.85% of users who use *nix were all cloned a million times and the average level of technical expertise remained the same. I'm arguing that if everyone who is currently using Windows (i.e. your parents, grandparents and kids) trying to get on Facebook started using it they would do whatever they had to do to get FarmVille to run.
Even if that's a sudo./MaliciousBinary.
I concede that if Windows popped up a giant box calling you a moron with red flashy lights then made you start-run-cmd and sudo it every time you attempted to run an exe then a whole lot less people would do stupid things. Right up until the malware designers came up with a way to bypass it, because it would be worth it.
The fundamental theory of security is that nothing is unbreakable with enough time and effort. If the motivation was there malicious software designers would spend that time on *nix, but it isn't because the largest group of technically incompetence users is on Windows; shift them to *nix and it would be a different story.
No amount of security can ever stop a user who is determined to see the latest dancing baby screensaver from opening an exe. Linux is safe for now because it's technically competent using it, people who go to the effort to install and use it and not your every day user. If you throw a couple of million mums, dads and teenagers on it I would like to see your stats then.
Nobody is arguing that *nix isn't inherently more secure, it is, but the reality is that nothing is unbreakable with enough time and effort. Malware creators invest time where there is a reward and that just isn't the *nix world right now.
Even if Microsoft did a complete ground up security re-design a few thousand Malware creators will invest 2x the amount of time Microsoft did in creating it and still overcome it. The best solution is to thin that population of creators out by throwing them in jail or removing the monetary reward (through the form of legal fees) until the number of people developing the malware is less than the number of guys defending against it.
The folks who use Mercurial are more likely to be on Windows.
Yep that's my experience as well--most likely cause being that Windows is a second class citizen when it comes to Git. Mercurial is Python based and less platform dependant.
In this case he isn't actually making any comment about open source, but rather open companies, and TFS is an edit of an already bad translation that entirely changes what he said.
But don't worry, you'll get modded +5 insightful because nobody bothered to read the actual article, that is 3 links away from TFS.
It is mindless MS bashing because the translations you included are not included in TFS or TFA which is not conducive to an accurate discussion.
I would welcome a discussion on the points you mentioned with the accurate translations to go along with them and not the sensationalism of "MS says open source is shit".
Perhaps the definition of humble has changed but where I come from it means to be meek and not arrogant or prideful; he was definitely not meet and had a hint of arrogance.
It looks as though some mindless MS hating monkey submitted another summary with the actual article being 2 links away from the "source". The sentence finished with:
The executive added: "When convenient, the companies say they are open. They use it for your own benefit. "
I think that's a pretty fair statement. The article headline appears to be badly translated; it looks as though he is saying that the company is incompetent when they are declaring themselves open in an effort to explain why they are not completing in the market (i.e. 'our product may not be better than yours, but its open'). In the interest of accuracy the article linked in the summary also modified the bad translation to make it seem more coherent, the direct translation (from the article TFA links) is:
Rincon also needled competition betting on open standards and free of charge, such as Google. "When you do not can compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence. "
I'm sure if they hadn't of edited it the bad translation would of been more obvious.
Both AdBlock and AdThwart for Chrome no longer download ads before blocking.
Except that chrome just doesn't let you do that for everything. Even the adblock page says "a few resources might still load before AdBlock can get to them".
Part of that is actually due to the speed of the rendering and how the extension API is handled. Sometimes extensions just can't get to elements before the browser renders them (in Google's mind the browsers primary function comes first, a good step imo, to prevent all the bloated crap that exists in some FF addons).
The same amount you would have to pay for a piece of software from one of these security firms that can solve the fraudulent domain registration problem.
Apparently access to source code and the ability to be compiled and run on platforms like BSD and Solaris doesn't count for anything any more.
If you are one of the 97% of the web who doesn't care about this, yep, that's exactly right. This hardly makes it hyperbolic flamebait because Firefox contains 1 feature that you personally benefit from--all of the other features he mentioned are almost "must-haves" for mum and pops and their flash games.
You should be more interested in making the use of FOSS more widespread for good reasons; not the pretty fact that you can install it on whichever random OS you choose to run on your desktop.
Slashdot is quite perky with the last couple of betas. But it's especially disheartening that the video "upgrades" in this most current release fall short on my platform. When viewing the demo page ( http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ ), I get 1 fps. I get 6 fps when running the same demo on Firefox inside a Parallels Windows XP SP3 VM. The VM is significantly faster... which boggles the mind actually.
So far as I remember, this was an Apple issue not necessarily a Mozilla issue, but still disappointing.
I find it funny that Chrome gets a 6 on this 'stress test'.
As an illustration consider the phrase 'to cash a check'.
I've heard a plain deposit called "put the check in the bank"; it's only "cashing" when the person making the deposit asks for currency back. But then my Walmart* Discover Card's "Cashback Bonus" does come in the form of $10 checks attached to the credit card bill.
I don't know about the US but in Australia checks (cheques!) take time to clear--usually 2 or 3 days--and you cannot immediately get the money. This would make the concept of requesting currency in printed money impossible and it is still phrased as cashing a cheque.
It's not journalists who do it, it's economists, business directories, financiers, etc. Essentially the entire business world regards anything that is not stocks, bonds, real estate or in an otherwise un-liquified state to be cash (as cash is something you can spend NOW with no other transaction required, not necessarily paper money).
As an illustration consider the phrase 'to cash a check'. If I'm not a good enough source, I'm sure Wiki is!
"In bookkeeping and finance, "cash" refers to current assets comprising currency or currency equivalents that can be accessed immediately or near-immediately (as in the case of money market accounts)."
In the interest of fairness it is probably worth noting that in the Chevron Niger Delta incident the activists took hostages inside the facility. Chevron was later cleared of all charges by a unanimous jury verdict that took under an hour to deliberate.
Slashdot Mirror
The approaches do need to be more sophisticated.
You mean like using a cell-phone camera to take a picture of a screen?
You can also encode a LOT of info into just one jpg or png of the family dog.
As for printing, you can use a 600dpi laser to output the whole bible in encoded format on 5 sheets of paper. So yes, you could walk out with 250,000 cables pretty quickly.
Not every office has the kind of hardware (or every person the skillset) required to minimise documents at the drop of a hat like that. While I concede that methods for this are readily available on the internet a lot of people with access to this intelligence just don't have the expertise to step through it and that is a strong enough deterrent in a lot of cases.
Keep in mind I am limiting my discussion to internal patriotic staff members 'freeing America' etc and not a well placed terrorist or foreign intelligence officer--that would be an entirely different ball game and arguably more-so a problem for security vetting offices.
Cameras with cell phones are banned at most defence facilities in the US I would imagine. That being said satellite locations are obviously a serious concern given the origin of the diplomatic cables.
It's not that it is impossible to leak information--that's never a goal--the idea is to increase the difficulty and risk to such a level that it is not worth it for the average employee to attempt to leak whatever mediocre information they have access to and that the employees the skill and access are more loyal and less likely to attempt it. In this way it is different to DRM because there is no inherent risk associated (for most people) as you are not going to lose your job or risk federal/military prison for your actions and thus there is nothing to dissuade you from attempting it.
For the record it is not particularly easy to use a printer to duplicate, say, 250,000 diplomatic cables and walk out with them under your arms. It's not particularly difficult to prevent the average employee from accessing IRC/IM either and the obvious risks attached to e-mail are far too high. The approaches do need to be more sophisticated.
The RL equivilent would perhaps be announcing that every day one random person caught littering shall be executed - it's also hugely excessive as a punishment, but it's a whole lot cheaper than hireing enough police to give every litterer a small fine, and you can be sure that the streets would get a lot cleaner.
This is basically what happens in singapore.
These include jaywalking, littering and spitting. Singapore has a mandatory caning sentence for vandalism offenses.
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1017.html
I get the feeling that that's what this conference was about. I imagine it went kind of like:
"Oh no! All our students are turning to the internet to get some real value of self-education and we aren't all important anymore! How can we get back on top? Oh, I know, just mimic something popular and get some attention back!"
Pass. Dumbest idea I've heard all day.
You make it sound like redundancy in network design is a no-cost upgrade. I would wager that dual homing every switch and/or load balancing physical locations over 2x the hardware would easily exceed the cost of buying PCs over dumb terminals. Combine this with the fact that you are often pigeonholing the way people work and as a result will likely alienate a few power users (or worse users who need architectural software that is often not accounted for, especially in governments or councils which contain tens of these types of people).
It is almost always better to absorb the cost of the infrastructure and stick with your current Dell solution. Money is more easily saved elsewhere.
And then the staff store the data on the removable storage and it makes it even easier to walk away with. Now instead of a desktop security breach, someone drops their usb drive on the train...
First, there is a difference between clicking on dancing_bunnies.gif and dancing_bunnies.exe, and it is possible to teach many users that. However, with extensions hidden they're likely to click on dancing_bunnies.gif.exe. That's a problem with MS Windows that I don't think exists elsewhere.
The average user doesn't know the difference between a gif and an exe. If show extensions was on by default and the website they downloaded dancing_bunnies.exe off told them to run the .exe because they would get fantastic dancing bunnies, they would do it.
You need the piece of education in the middle that drums in to their head that exe's are bad. This is fundamentally a people problem, one that transcends operating system boundaries.
No reward? I'd prefer to own thousands of linux servers for my botnet, not thousands of windows servers.
Thousands of Linux servers do not store peoples credit card information in text files on their desktop. The reality is that end users are a much juicier target after a cost-benefit-risk analysis.
Let's admit it, it's easier to hack a windows machine. Not because it's wildly used. But because it lacks fundamentals in its design. Their closed design and monopolistic approaches never let any kind of software repository to be build. So people got used to install software downloading from the Internet and double click on them. They don't have central update mechanism so that vendors can push their updates easily. They tried to be "user friendly" but it's evident that they created something "hacker friendly".
Nobody will dispute the fact that Windows has a lack of security in its fundamental design. I think it is a bad claim to make that the lack of a software repository is responsible for it, as well, since apt has only been around since 1998 and *nix still did not breed the same type of users Windows does. That being said Windows Update has been around since 1998 as well (though apt was preceded by dselect circa '95?).
I'm not arguing that Windows has bred the kind of users that are inherently stupid, for lack of a better word, when it comes to technology. The flipside is this idea is not going anywhere--the average users wants it done, they want it now, they want it to be easy and they don't want to have to know anything about the technology.
Linux is less used so it's not hacked in masses is a fallacious claim. Everyone knows it's hard to convince a Linux user to 'download and run' an application since it has longer path to convince users to do that. Of course nothing is fool-proof, but vast majority of people getting infected with these worms are not fools, they are just victims of stupid design decisions. Even very technical people get infected with viruses and worms in Windows, remember recent Google case in China to be convinced.
You are missing the central point of the argument that is its bread and butter. Let me lay it out for you.
Linux is less used:
=> People use it because they WANT to use it and they understand it
=> Millions of idiots do not use it
=> Millions of idiots do not click download run anything that pops up
=> Linux is targeted less often by malware because there is less people using it
I'm not arguing that if suddenly the 0.85% of users who use *nix were all cloned a million times and the average level of technical expertise remained the same. I'm arguing that if everyone who is currently using Windows (i.e. your parents, grandparents and kids) trying to get on Facebook started using it they would do whatever they had to do to get FarmVille to run.
Even if that's a sudo ./MaliciousBinary.
I concede that if Windows popped up a giant box calling you a moron with red flashy lights then made you start-run-cmd and sudo it every time you attempted to run an exe then a whole lot less people would do stupid things. Right up until the malware designers came up with a way to bypass it, because it would be worth it.
The fundamental theory of security is that nothing is unbreakable with enough time and effort. If the motivation was there malicious software designers would spend that time on *nix, but it isn't because the largest group of technically incompetence users is on Windows; shift them to *nix and it would be a different story.
Believing anything is ignorance.
I don't know what planet you are living in.
No amount of security can ever stop a user who is determined to see the latest dancing baby screensaver from opening an exe. Linux is safe for now because it's technically competent using it, people who go to the effort to install and use it and not your every day user. If you throw a couple of million mums, dads and teenagers on it I would like to see your stats then.
Nobody is arguing that *nix isn't inherently more secure, it is, but the reality is that nothing is unbreakable with enough time and effort. Malware creators invest time where there is a reward and that just isn't the *nix world right now.
Even if Microsoft did a complete ground up security re-design a few thousand Malware creators will invest 2x the amount of time Microsoft did in creating it and still overcome it. The best solution is to thin that population of creators out by throwing them in jail or removing the monetary reward (through the form of legal fees) until the number of people developing the malware is less than the number of guys defending against it.
The folks who use Mercurial are more likely to be on Windows.
Yep that's my experience as well--most likely cause being that Windows is a second class citizen when it comes to Git. Mercurial is Python based and less platform dependant.
You couldn't be more right with your advice.
In this case he isn't actually making any comment about open source, but rather open companies, and TFS is an edit of an already bad translation that entirely changes what he said.
But don't worry, you'll get modded +5 insightful because nobody bothered to read the actual article, that is 3 links away from TFS.
Thank you for the amazing accurate translations.
It is mindless MS bashing because the translations you included are not included in TFS or TFA which is not conducive to an accurate discussion.
I would welcome a discussion on the points you mentioned with the accurate translations to go along with them and not the sensationalism of "MS says open source is shit".
Perhaps the definition of humble has changed but where I come from it means to be meek and not arrogant or prideful; he was definitely not meet and had a hint of arrogance.
It looks as though some mindless MS hating monkey submitted another summary with the actual article being 2 links away from the "source". The sentence finished with:
The executive added: "When convenient, the companies say they are open. They use it for your own benefit. "
I think that's a pretty fair statement. The article headline appears to be badly translated; it looks as though he is saying that the company is incompetent when they are declaring themselves open in an effort to explain why they are not completing in the market (i.e. 'our product may not be better than yours, but its open'). In the interest of accuracy the article linked in the summary also modified the bad translation to make it seem more coherent, the direct translation (from the article TFA links) is:
Rincon also needled competition betting on open standards and free of charge, such as Google. "When you do not can compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence. "
I'm sure if they hadn't of edited it the bad translation would of been more obvious.
Uh, you must be new if you're posting dumbass assertions and then making 'are you new' comments when you have your idiocy pointed out.
Trying being humble and accepting it.
Except that chrome just doesn't let you do that for everything. Even the adblock page says "a few resources might still load before AdBlock can get to them".
Part of that is actually due to the speed of the rendering and how the extension API is handled. Sometimes extensions just can't get to elements before the browser renders them (in Google's mind the browsers primary function comes first, a good step imo, to prevent all the bloated crap that exists in some FF addons).
The same amount you would have to pay for a piece of software from one of these security firms that can solve the fraudulent domain registration problem.
You won't be disappointed. EV Nova is one of my favourite older games!
I wish I could mod this flamebait. The early preview speed tests for IE9 compete with Chrome very well.
Apparently access to source code and the ability to be compiled and run on platforms like BSD and Solaris doesn't count for anything any more.
If you are one of the 97% of the web who doesn't care about this, yep, that's exactly right. This hardly makes it hyperbolic flamebait because Firefox contains 1 feature that you personally benefit from--all of the other features he mentioned are almost "must-haves" for mum and pops and their flash games.
You should be more interested in making the use of FOSS more widespread for good reasons; not the pretty fact that you can install it on whichever random OS you choose to run on your desktop.
adblock is a total must-have, IMHO. Also a good feature about firefox is that you can trust it to not send all your traffic informations to Google...
AdBlock exists for Chrome.
Slashdot is quite perky with the last couple of betas. But it's especially disheartening that the video "upgrades" in this most current release fall short on my platform. When viewing the demo page ( http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ ), I get 1 fps. I get 6 fps when running the same demo on Firefox inside a Parallels Windows XP SP3 VM. The VM is significantly faster... which boggles the mind actually.
So far as I remember, this was an Apple issue not necessarily a Mozilla issue, but still disappointing.
I find it funny that Chrome gets a 6 on this 'stress test'.
As an illustration consider the phrase 'to cash a check'.
I've heard a plain deposit called "put the check in the bank"; it's only "cashing" when the person making the deposit asks for currency back. But then my Walmart* Discover Card's "Cashback Bonus" does come in the form of $10 checks attached to the credit card bill.
I don't know about the US but in Australia checks (cheques!) take time to clear--usually 2 or 3 days--and you cannot immediately get the money. This would make the concept of requesting currency in printed money impossible and it is still phrased as cashing a cheque.
It's not journalists who do it, it's economists, business directories, financiers, etc. Essentially the entire business world regards anything that is not stocks, bonds, real estate or in an otherwise un-liquified state to be cash (as cash is something you can spend NOW with no other transaction required, not necessarily paper money).
As an illustration consider the phrase 'to cash a check'. If I'm not a good enough source, I'm sure Wiki is!
"In bookkeeping and finance, "cash" refers to current assets comprising currency or currency equivalents that can be accessed immediately or near-immediately (as in the case of money market accounts)."
In the interest of fairness it is probably worth noting that in the Chevron Niger Delta incident the activists took hostages inside the facility. Chevron was later cleared of all charges by a unanimous jury verdict that took under an hour to deliberate.