Or I was I should say. One of my previous employers had fourteen NT/Win2K and 4 Solaris boxes all with the combos of administrator/password and root/password. Nice eh? Their web server, ftp servers, domain controllers, everything. I tried twice to get them changed. I even started to put better passwords on new machines, but the CTO kept changing them.
"I don't want to have to remember 18 different passwords." You don't Genuis, give the same password if you must, but make them tough.
To this day, if I want to call an old co-worker, but can't remember their number, I look it up on their intranet.
Why would anyone care what OS the Slurpee dispenser is running?
No one would, but that's the point. Use linux and no one would notice or care. Install a Windows based OS and there would be stickers all over the damn thing. Not to mention the crashes.
you're officially worse than Microsoft.
How is he "officially" worse than Microsoft. Has he been endorsed by a standards body. Is he ANSI Worse or W3C Worse?
I know its easier said than done, but you've got to get out of there. It is one thing for a small company to say they haven't got the money to train people, but large enterprises have no excuse.
Training doesn't just help the employee grow, but the enterprise as well. Some employers will spend millions on recruiters, expensive job searches, taking people off of productive work to stand in at job fairs. They fail to realize had they spent $2-3k on Joe Computer Operator they would soon have Joe Jr. SysAdmin. The same goes for nearly every industry and career.
Good companies realize the value in keeping their employees educated on the things that are important to them. I've worked for a number of companies and they've all had very different opinions on education.
The President of one small software company I used to work for was excited that I wanted to pursue a career in database administration and gave me the time off to take some classes at Oracle, even though he couldn't justify paying for them because they didn't have any plans to use it. He was definitely an exception.
The company those classes got me into had the complete opposite view on training, "Don't take any." They didn't want any of their employees to better themselves and leave, so the employees left anyway. My next employer really liked the idea of training, but didn't want to pay for any of it. To his credit, he at least would come up with some creative ideas to spread the knowledge people had around.
My present employer (a large backbone/hosting company that rhymes with perpetuity), however has got to be the best I've ever heard of. They encourage us to take 2 training classes a year, offer hundreds of online learning materials, book reimbursement, and pay for all college level classes. If the class isn't job related, then you have to claim it as income on your taxes, otherwise its completely covered including books. This one of the big reasons I went there, I wanted a place where they encouraged people to continue to grow and become more knowledgable. In fact, they're very big on today's low level admins becoming tomorrow's engineers.
You know what you are so right. Screw the world, lets disband UNICEF, High Commission for Human Rights, High Commission for Refugees, UN Environment Programme, and Food Aid.
The United Nations is actually fairly ineffective at preserving the peace. Just look at Kosovo and the Congo for recent examples. They were moderately successful in Bosnia, and quite effective in Timor. But. It is in their humanitarian efforts were they truly shine.
Of course, I could be all wrong, they might be a fearsome fighting force, when they use their black helicopters, operating out of secret bases in the Pacific Northwest to take over the United States and establish a true world government.
So if I receive a personal FedEx shipment while I'm sitting in THEIR office, does it belong to them?
No, because they don't own the package.
When I put my bag with private notes from my bookie/girlfriend/boyfriend/connection in THEIR credenza, does that give them the right to search through it?
They don't have any right to your private notes, but they certainly have every right to go through their credenza. They own it, not you. You are simply permitted to use their credenza. As for delving into the contents of the bag, that is a little grey. They can demand to search through the bag, but they have to have a good reason like suspecting you of stealing. Of course, if they're wrong there isn't much you can do either.
I use my own (i.e. paid for out of my own pocket with my own money) notebook PC, hooked to THEIR network when I'm in the office. So what rights do they now have? Can they intercept my personal email while it's going through their POP server and on their pipe, but once it lands on MY system I'm home free?
This one is just as clear in the eyes of the legal system. They can't search your laptop, but they can legally sniff every single packet sent over their network if they so choose. Again, you are being permitted to use their network. Furthermore, any email resting on their servers regardless of origin or destination is theirs for the reading. Also, they can demand to search the laptop for trade secrets or confidential documents that shouldn't be leaving the office, but I don't think they can force you to without a court order. Not sure on that one.
I don't disagree with the concept of ensuring that people are productive while at work, and I don't disagree with a company taking appropriate steps to safeguard its own legal liability as a result of its employees' actions. However, I've never been in favour of such intrusive spying, surreptitious scanning of email, web usage and workstation hard drives. Acceptable use policies and goal-oriented management (as opposed to counting lines of code generated, for instance) should be enough for a competent management team. (Fair disclosure: I am a 40+ executive in a tech company.)
I agree completely, if a company cannot treat me with respect and resorts to draconian policies with regards to snooping, I'm gone. Its there perogative though, and if they want to be dicks and make their employee's lives difficult they're going to find themselves constantly looking for help.
Yes, and many do. In fact, if you've ever paid attention to the greetings on nearly every 800# in the world you will have noticed the alert that some calls are monitored for quality assurance. I used to work in a place like that and had absolutely no problem with it. My supervisor at the time would randomly listen to our calls with customers and then critique the sampling at the end of the month. Everyone knew about this and there were phones in the lounges and breakrooms that were never monitored. Furthermore, the policy was you can make personal calls from your desk, but realize that someone may have tapped into your phone expecting to hear a customer call. Of course, the good managers would come back to you when you were done, but there was no expectation of privacy. Did I mind? Not at all, it was a valuable tool for identifying rude and stupid reps.
Now, do I think its right to monitor people's phones who don't interact with customers over the phone? No, but it is the employer's right, and if I don't like it I don't have to work there.
You are _very_ correct, but where this little tool is truly dangerous is when you turn the tables and ask how can this little tool hurt the company.
Even if the IT group implements a fantastic security model with near perfect permissions and group heirarchy, the company will get burnt by this tool. I'd even wager that its guranteed to cause a company more harm than good.
No matter how hard you train/indoctrinate people, they are going to gossip, and someone is going to put it in an email or some other document. The next thing you know, items from an employee's confidential personnel file has found its way into the general index and the company is liable for that leak. As a paralegal, I've seen companies lose thousands for failing to properly safeguard personnel files in which one or two people improperly viewed them. This tool has the potential to raise the bar on the level of liability into the millions.
Now I'm not saying there are no beneficial uses to this program, but the article was right, this is an "Ivory Tower" tool.
The "example" links in the article were a bit absurd, but I can envision something like that happening.
Exactly. The links in the article were absurd they were meant to be, but there will be many cases were this feature will not be funny at all..
There is no way in hell, Microsoft isn't going to miss the opportunity to cause the word travel to link back to Expedia. This is something that in no circumstances should be allowed to happen by default. Microsoft can and will use this to draw people from other travel sites to their own.
What about the word "news", will it link to MSNBC? What about people with names similar to the names of celebrities or companies? Is John Dell's personal home page going to be littered with links to Dell Computers? What about critical software reviews? This technology is not intelligent. It doesn't know when and where it is appropriate to insert a tag or not, it merely does so blindly and without forethought.
IMHO, the only acceptable use of this technology is in the form of a wizard in a MS tool. If I create a page in Front Page, I could be asked if I want FP to create links based on the smart tags technology and then modify them. This would be convenient and put full control of web content in the hands of the author where it belongs.
Huh? What alternate universe did you get your copy of Debian from? Or more importantly, where do I get a chicken like that?
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Debian, but its installation can't touch those of Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE. While the install has come a long way, it is far from "chicken-friendly". The closest I've seen to claiming that title was Mandrake 8.0. Of course, I wasn't all that impressed with what the install left me with, it was definitely the easiest I've ever seen.
Well of course you can't you're using a graphing calculator.
- I connect to the NET.
- I share files using Samba.
- I open/save/share Office docs with StarOffice.
- I view web pages with Mozilla
- I've never written a lick of code, let alone a device driver or modified a network protocol.
- I've never written a patch for an application
- I chat on AOL IM and Yahoo! Messenger as well as IRC.
- My whole life is outside of programming.
Oh yeah, I use Linux.
Like a moth to a flame, I just can't resist flamebait.
I would agree whole-heartedly, but there is a shitload of people in that tent.
"Beware the power of stupid people in large groups" is a quote from a demotivator, and applies beautifully here.
Its supposed to be an investigation not a fishing expedition. The way criminal investigations work, police agencies are supposed to have probable cause to start investigating its citizens. Its supposed to start with, "John Doe is a suspected Right Wing terrorist, lets do a check and see if he bought some ammonium nitrate recently. Oh he did! Lets keep an eye on him, just in case." It however should never start with, "I'm bored lets go find out who bought some ammonium nitrate and see if we can shake something loose." The job of the police is to investigate, gather evidence, and ultimately arrest criminals, NOT to place all its citizens in a monstrous dragnet in the hopes that they will find some criminals. They call it the Tail wagging the dog.
Just look at the practice of "Racial Profiling". Cops, have a higher tendency to pull over black motorists, because many of them think they have a better chance of catching a drug dealer or gangbanger. But you say, if those negroes are innocent then they have nothing to worry about, so why should they mind if they randomly get detained for no apparent reason. Oh wait I forgot, "Driving While Black" _is_ probable cause in some parts of the country.
To put it plainly though, this is wrong and highly suspect on the scales of constitutionality. Then again I suppose the fourth amendment and the privacy act were only dreamed up to protect the guilty. The founding fathers didn't really have first hand experience with this kind of thing, they were merely looking out for the criminals.
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn?t speak up,
because I wasn?t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn?t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
What happens when they come for you, because you downloaded a song off napster, pirated a program, linked to DeCSS, or decided not to claim the $400 you made building your friend a new computer on your taxes. Sure these are all minor, but what happens when they decide that everyone who purchased Ammonium Nitrate from Gardener.com must be a domestic right wing terrorist and decide to start talking to your neighbors, coworkers, and former classmates.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not paranoid, in fact I think my own example highly unlikely, but thats not the point. The point is it could happen, and it shouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
"Devil's Advocate"?
I expected this request a _long_ time ago, AC's must be getting a little sluggish.
It was 127.0.0.1, hack to your heart's content.
Or I was I should say. One of my previous employers had fourteen NT/Win2K and 4 Solaris boxes all with the combos of administrator/password and root/password. Nice eh? Their web server, ftp servers, domain controllers, everything. I tried twice to get them changed. I even started to put better passwords on new machines, but the CTO kept changing them.
"I don't want to have to remember 18 different passwords." You don't Genuis, give the same password if you must, but make them tough.
To this day, if I want to call an old co-worker, but can't remember their number, I look it up on their intranet.
Distributed Annoyance.
Satan's outlook
I swear that was a coincidence.
Funny yes. True Yes.
Coming here for Microsoft's side of any story is like going to a Baptist Minister for Satan's outlook.
Sure you do.
Let me guess, its a red '88 Monte Carlo in desperate need of some new springs and a reindeer hood ornament complete with light up nose?
How about buying two of them and setting up an Oracle 9i clustered pair for a high availability OLTP application. You could probably get funding.
..snort..snort..
Damn, this is some good shit.
Why would anyone care what OS the Slurpee dispenser is running?
;)
No one would, but that's the point. Use linux and no one would notice or care. Install a Windows based OS and there would be stickers all over the damn thing. Not to mention the crashes.
you're officially worse than Microsoft.
How is he "officially" worse than Microsoft. Has he been endorsed by a standards body. Is he ANSI Worse or W3C Worse?
They could make them snap together like Legos and _build_ a supercomputer in the shape of the eiffel tower.
.
"Honey, have you seen the computer?"
"Yeah, I think I saw the cat playing with it again."
I know its easier said than done, but you've got to get out of there. It is one thing for a small company to say they haven't got the money to train people, but large enterprises have no excuse.
Training doesn't just help the employee grow, but the enterprise as well. Some employers will spend millions on recruiters, expensive job searches, taking people off of productive work to stand in at job fairs. They fail to realize had they spent $2-3k on Joe Computer Operator they would soon have Joe Jr. SysAdmin. The same goes for nearly every industry and career.
I'd start looking if I was you.
Good companies realize the value in keeping their employees educated on the things that are important to them. I've worked for a number of companies and they've all had very different opinions on education.
The President of one small software company I used to work for was excited that I wanted to pursue a career in database administration and gave me the time off to take some classes at Oracle, even though he couldn't justify paying for them because they didn't have any plans to use it. He was definitely an exception.
The company those classes got me into had the complete opposite view on training, "Don't take any." They didn't want any of their employees to better themselves and leave, so the employees left anyway. My next employer really liked the idea of training, but didn't want to pay for any of it. To his credit, he at least would come up with some creative ideas to spread the knowledge people had around.
My present employer (a large backbone/hosting company that rhymes with perpetuity), however has got to be the best I've ever heard of. They encourage us to take 2 training classes a year, offer hundreds of online learning materials, book reimbursement, and pay for all college level classes. If the class isn't job related, then you have to claim it as income on your taxes, otherwise its completely covered including books. This one of the big reasons I went there, I wanted a place where they encouraged people to continue to grow and become more knowledgable. In fact, they're very big on today's low level admins becoming tomorrow's engineers.
You know what you are so right. Screw the world, lets disband UNICEF, High Commission for Human Rights, High Commission for Refugees, UN Environment Programme, and Food Aid.
The United Nations is actually fairly ineffective at preserving the peace. Just look at Kosovo and the Congo for recent examples. They were moderately successful in Bosnia, and quite effective in Timor. But. It is in their humanitarian efforts were they truly shine.
Of course, I could be all wrong, they might be a fearsome fighting force, when they use their black helicopters, operating out of secret bases in the Pacific Northwest to take over the United States and establish a true world government.
So if I receive a personal FedEx shipment while I'm sitting in THEIR office, does it belong to them?
No, because they don't own the package.
When I put my bag with private notes from my bookie/girlfriend/boyfriend/connection in THEIR credenza, does that give them the right to search through it?
They don't have any right to your private notes, but they certainly have every right to go through their credenza. They own it, not you. You are simply permitted to use their credenza. As for delving into the contents of the bag, that is a little grey. They can demand to search through the bag, but they have to have a good reason like suspecting you of stealing. Of course, if they're wrong there isn't much you can do either.
I use my own (i.e. paid for out of my own pocket with my own money) notebook PC, hooked to THEIR network when I'm in the office. So what rights do they now have? Can they intercept my personal email while it's going through their POP server and on their pipe, but once it lands on MY system I'm home free?
This one is just as clear in the eyes of the legal system. They can't search your laptop, but they can legally sniff every single packet sent over their network if they so choose. Again, you are being permitted to use their network. Furthermore, any email resting on their servers regardless of origin or destination is theirs for the reading. Also, they can demand to search the laptop for trade secrets or confidential documents that shouldn't be leaving the office, but I don't think they can force you to without a court order. Not sure on that one.
I don't disagree with the concept of ensuring that people are productive while at work, and I don't disagree with a company taking appropriate steps to safeguard its own legal liability as a result of its employees' actions. However, I've never been in favour of such intrusive spying, surreptitious scanning of email, web usage and workstation hard drives. Acceptable use policies and goal-oriented management (as opposed to counting lines of code generated, for instance) should be enough for a competent management team. (Fair disclosure: I am a 40+ executive in a tech company.)
I agree completely, if a company cannot treat me with respect and resorts to draconian policies with regards to snooping, I'm gone. Its there perogative though, and if they want to be dicks and make their employee's lives difficult they're going to find themselves constantly looking for help.
Yes, and many do. In fact, if you've ever paid attention to the greetings on nearly every 800# in the world you will have noticed the alert that some calls are monitored for quality assurance. I used to work in a place like that and had absolutely no problem with it. My supervisor at the time would randomly listen to our calls with customers and then critique the sampling at the end of the month. Everyone knew about this and there were phones in the lounges and breakrooms that were never monitored. Furthermore, the policy was you can make personal calls from your desk, but realize that someone may have tapped into your phone expecting to hear a customer call. Of course, the good managers would come back to you when you were done, but there was no expectation of privacy. Did I mind? Not at all, it was a valuable tool for identifying rude and stupid reps.
Now, do I think its right to monitor people's phones who don't interact with customers over the phone? No, but it is the employer's right, and if I don't like it I don't have to work there.
You are _very_ correct, but where this little tool is truly dangerous is when you turn the tables and ask how can this little tool hurt the company.
Even if the IT group implements a fantastic security model with near perfect permissions and group heirarchy, the company will get burnt by this tool. I'd even wager that its guranteed to cause a company more harm than good.
No matter how hard you train/indoctrinate people, they are going to gossip, and someone is going to put it in an email or some other document. The next thing you know, items from an employee's confidential personnel file has found its way into the general index and the company is liable for that leak. As a paralegal, I've seen companies lose thousands for failing to properly safeguard personnel files in which one or two people improperly viewed them. This tool has the potential to raise the bar on the level of liability into the millions.
Now I'm not saying there are no beneficial uses to this program, but the article was right, this is an "Ivory Tower" tool.
So would running a web site out of your house.
Oh Damn! Ashcroft might get the idea that only pornographers run web sites out of their home.
The "example" links in the article were a bit absurd, but I can envision something like that happening.
Exactly. The links in the article were absurd they were meant to be, but there will be many cases were this feature will not be funny at all..
There is no way in hell, Microsoft isn't going to miss the opportunity to cause the word travel to link back to Expedia. This is something that in no circumstances should be allowed to happen by default. Microsoft can and will use this to draw people from other travel sites to their own.
What about the word "news", will it link to MSNBC? What about people with names similar to the names of celebrities or companies? Is John Dell's personal home page going to be littered with links to Dell Computers? What about critical software reviews? This technology is not intelligent. It doesn't know when and where it is appropriate to insert a tag or not, it merely does so blindly and without forethought.
IMHO, the only acceptable use of this technology is in the form of a wizard in a MS tool. If I create a page in Front Page, I could be asked if I want FP to create links based on the smart tags technology and then modify them. This would be convenient and put full control of web content in the hands of the author where it belongs.
Amen! It amazes HP-UX has lasted this long. HP even pushes MS's Windows on HP hardware more than they push HP's Unix on HP hardware.
Huh? What alternate universe did you get your copy of Debian from? Or more importantly, where do I get a chicken like that?
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Debian, but its installation can't touch those of Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE. While the install has come a long way, it is far from "chicken-friendly". The closest I've seen to claiming that title was Mandrake 8.0. Of course, I wasn't all that impressed with what the install left me with, it was definitely the easiest I've ever seen.
Well of course you can't you're using a graphing calculator.
- I connect to the NET.
- I share files using Samba.
- I open/save/share Office docs with StarOffice.
- I view web pages with Mozilla
- I've never written a lick of code, let alone a device driver or modified a network protocol.
- I've never written a patch for an application
- I chat on AOL IM and Yahoo! Messenger as well as IRC.
- My whole life is outside of programming.
Oh yeah, I use Linux.
Like a moth to a flame, I just can't resist flamebait.
I would agree whole-heartedly, but there is a shitload of people in that tent. "Beware the power of stupid people in large groups" is a quote from a demotivator, and applies beautifully here.
Its supposed to be an investigation not a fishing expedition. The way criminal investigations work, police agencies are supposed to have probable cause to start investigating its citizens. Its supposed to start with, "John Doe is a suspected Right Wing terrorist, lets do a check and see if he bought some ammonium nitrate recently. Oh he did! Lets keep an eye on him, just in case." It however should never start with, "I'm bored lets go find out who bought some ammonium nitrate and see if we can shake something loose." The job of the police is to investigate, gather evidence, and ultimately arrest criminals, NOT to place all its citizens in a monstrous dragnet in the hopes that they will find some criminals. They call it the Tail wagging the dog.
Just look at the practice of "Racial Profiling". Cops, have a higher tendency to pull over black motorists, because many of them think they have a better chance of catching a drug dealer or gangbanger. But you say, if those negroes are innocent then they have nothing to worry about, so why should they mind if they randomly get detained for no apparent reason. Oh wait I forgot, "Driving While Black" _is_ probable cause in some parts of the country.
To put it plainly though, this is wrong and highly suspect on the scales of constitutionality. Then again I suppose the fourth amendment and the privacy act were only dreamed up to protect the guilty. The founding fathers didn't really have first hand experience with this kind of thing, they were merely looking out for the criminals.
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up,
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn?t speak up,
because I wasn?t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn?t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
What happens when they come for you, because you downloaded a song off napster, pirated a program, linked to DeCSS, or decided not to claim the $400 you made building your friend a new computer on your taxes. Sure these are all minor, but what happens when they decide that everyone who purchased Ammonium Nitrate from Gardener.com must be a domestic right wing terrorist and decide to start talking to your neighbors, coworkers, and former classmates.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not paranoid, in fact I think my own example highly unlikely, but thats not the point. The point is it could happen, and it shouldn't.