You really have to have an anti-governance frame to believe that. And that has to come from some essentially religious assumptions. Of the David Koresh caliber. Wrecking the governments' finances is not a rational approach to limiting government. It's irresponsible, and cowardly. Cut what you think should be cut, and honestly take the heat at the ballot box. Tax and spend beats borrow and spend.
Clinton/Gore reversed the growth of the Federal govt., provided the military that rolled over Afghanistan and Iraq, and balanced the budget. Remember Gulf War 1 when Cheney said you win with the previous regime's military? He was right, for once.
Bush has increased the Federal payroll by hiring a vast swarm of freedom/privacy violating goons - all the reasonable suspicions a principled conservative should have of the power of government are confirmed in this administration. Hint: no more habeous corpus. I don't recall him campaigning on a promise to get medeival on MY ass. Government has grown in exactly the wrong direction.
Bush et al have chewed up the military by invading the WRONG FUCKING COUNTRY without a plan to handle it after the end of major fighting. Wolfowitz recently tried to score some debate points with a reporter. He said, essentially, that they DID have a post-conflict plan, but the conflict has been ongoing. Hint: if things were going well the war would be over. Another hint: if things were going well, politically connected contractors wouldn't be scrambling to account for BILLIONS OF FUCKING DOLLARS.
In every case he's privatized security for the chicken house and cut a sweetheart deal with GOP contributing foxes.
Republicans never run on what they do. It's all themes and spin. "Save social security!" s/save/wreck Don't even use the word "privatize" for the plan to privatize it. Agh. Lying weasels. Hint: if you are focus-grouping your every word, you are going to hell.
Bush is responsible for a $40,000 birth tax on my son (his share of the Bush deficit so far) but Paris Hilton gets a free pass. I look forward to the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy.
I LOVE Neuromancer, but I haven't been able to finish some of the others.
I've dug everything Stephenson wrote except Big U - he was still learning. Some nice ideas, but a little too easy, somehow. I may not get through Baroque Cycle. The first was o.k., but didn't grab me nearly as much as Cryptonomicon. I was looking forward to it, too. Mmmm...5000 pages of stephenson...I think part of my problem was in placing stephensonisms in a historical context. When people acted a little post-modern in the 1930s-40s in Cryptonomicon, they were still anatomically modern humans. Also, ODD anatomically modern humans, so grant the author latitude to describe odd behavior. Going back an extra 400 years, well, it took me out of the world of the story. You can be glib about total catastrophe if EVERYTHING is subject to glib, ironic detachment. But the seige of Vienna was too real, and to have characters react to that like they would to situations in Snow Crash - hmm. Couldn't buy it, I guess.
4) Who would win? (Score:5, Funny) - by Call Me Black Cloud
In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?
Neal:
You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.
The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.
The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.
Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Ca
/listens to www.kexp.org and the counter-elitist snobbery.
Ftr, the Onion article I aspire to is: 37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster ATHENS, GA--Thirty-seven record-store clerks are missing and feared dead in the aftermath of a partial roof collapse during a Yo La Tengo concert Monday. "We're trying our best to rescue these... 3813 | 10 April 2002 | News
So was anything inaccurate or misleading in my post? And why the reflexive dumbass conservative usage of "elitism" ? If elitist means not the dumbest motherfucker in the room, I'm usually guilty.
pgp is a bfd. an open web is a bfd. users controlling the hardware they own is a bfd.
You do appear too ignorant/stupid to recognize what they've done for you. They ARE better than you. Sorry.
The one that the community gained through providing the fruits of their labors to the world gratis?
The one that they gained through fewer defects/line of code?
The one they gained for advancing the cause of human freedom? (Encryption, keeping the web out of monopoly hands) 1984 is no nightmare for the proprietary software outfits - BB is a nice cohesive market. Contrast with Carly's ambition: building DRM into every product HP makes...
The OSS community has a great rep for anybody that has heard of it.
I can even hang with some of the poster's intent: seems to me OP feels there is condescenion (based on unconscious racism) on the part of Bill. I don't follow it that closely, so I can't say whether it is justified or not, but I have seen donors incrediby impressed with themselves and unable to identify with the recipients at all.
I hit their site, bunch of book listings shoved in my face. I noticed a "Why was this recommended?" link above each entry. Based on a record of my past searches, it decided I was "interested". I removed each entry.
Got a generic page, with Harry Potter and..."On Bullshit" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691 122946/qid=1111027850/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/102-7806 153-5984110?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Presumably because of my penchant for fsking with busybody datamining/privacy invading outfits. Pretty clever.
There is an argument for security by obscurity. I am completely unconvinced by it, but it's there. So now you take a product that is highly dependent upon obscurity for its security and you let (world - dog) check it out. Now the set of people who can audit for vulnerabilities is larger. Oooh - I'm sure there's no economic espionage coming from China! I'm sure there's no maladjusted contract programmer at THIS Fortune 1000 company going to share the shared source on IRC. But we're still gonna cut off peer review and correction.
Depending on GPO to install software updates is foolish. The manually running Windows Update results in silent failure for some patches - I've seen it myself. And you trust that a policy will be better?
And what about all the breakage patching can do? Do you have the staff to test every one of a dozen patches in isolation and the wherewithal to set them up separately?
And Step 2) Install AD is easy? STFU
"Where's your enterprise directory?(don't even start on about Novell...)" STFU! AD is novell-lite, you fuck wit. AD is the equivalent of those star trek episodes filmed by fans, compared to TNG. (How's that for a geeky analogy?)
Most of those unpatched boxes had vulnerabilities that were predictable YEARS before the OS was released. How far back do you think you'd have to go to find the first advice to "turn off unnecessary services"? I will leave it as an exercise for the reader, but you know it was before they were deep in the design cycle for win2k. It was a knowable thing that UPnP was a bad idea. etc. Did they open more ports, or fewer? Ick.
I felt I was in Stepford Wives, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Buncha pod people talking about "being passionate" about...ick.
I tested for a while there, jumped for a couple of cool jobs, then moved back to Seattle. Had to weigh two offers, one was a contract position for Volt at MS testing an Exchange testing tool that would have given me much insight and put me on a lucrative career path. The other as the net admin with a small (ultimately kind of lame) software company for small businesses.
The MS job looked like 50% more money, easily. But working on Exchange...ick. The folks seemed sort of cool and pretty smart, but the product still inspires revulsion and ultimately I think I'd have lost faith in them - they were passionate about crud. How do you bond with someone who can do that?
There was also sort of an anti Yankee sentiment in my decision. I've never understood people rooting for the Yankees. It's not interesting when the overdog wins. "Their payroll is higher than the bottom 10 teams combined - YES! YANKEES WIN! Oh my gosh, never expected THAT!" Or players joining them (listening, Randy?). So what if you win - you were expected to. Winning the world series is pass/fail for you. You can't achieve, you can only meet expectations. Schilling in Boston did something. He made a huge difference. Without Johnson, the Yanks are still probably gonna win it. I knew that my efforts would have no effect on share price, or anything else, really. Except possibly Exchange. Ick.
Don't mean to rag on you - just on your (and formerly my) employer. I freely grant that I'm spoiled.
I don't see the point of the activity. Maybe I just identify too closely with the long run. I don't expect to sit in a favorable cluster of events.
watching the wheel go around and seeing what happens - that's what turntables are for.
I don't think I'm risk-averse - if the odds were even, I'd probably throw down some dough. If they were in my favor, I'd play pretty seriously. I recognize that the house edge is pretty thin for some games, and you need to average over thousands of outcomes to realize the edge. I wouldn't put it all on red even if I got the 0 && 00.
gambling is a stupidity tax. Man it is depressing walking past a bank of zombies punishing themselves. Skinner's pigeons got nothing on the blue haired ladies.
Even if you are playing poker, the house is still a parasite. The rake is unbelievable. Maybe the rake buys you a clean game, but I kind of doubt it. The ethics of mobsters and corporations are no better than that of home game weasels. The only thing saving you is that the overhead of a fix is probably not worth the trouble. Still more do I doubt that a clean game with the rake is worth it: it puts the players in the position of fighting in a burning house.
Hmm...burning the House, not a bad idea. The indoor air quality probably wouldn't suffer. Vegas is the right place for resuming above ground nuclear testing. We could probably rent space to Iran and N. Korea.
One of the myths about Windows is that there is a company behind it you can hold responsible for flaws that impact an organization. If you read the EULA of any MS product, even an update, it disclaims any responsibility whatever. They specifically avow that they are not fit for any purpose.
So what's up with that?
Open source licenses usually have the same thing, but those are generally free products. You guys have taken in a couple hundred billion. Plus, we can use the code as we like. So you can't claim any kind of equivalence.
when someone sells his/her soul and is assimilated into the Borg, the implant naturally makes them less spontanious.
I'm only partly kidding. I was a contract tester there and the culture was eerily sterile. Even those people who pursued outside interests seemed a little like Data researching humor. Not just nerds not getting social conventions, really missing some fundamental aspect of humanity.
A company newsletter had an article hyping an employee, whose secret for success was "be passionate about what you do" yet her listed projects were the very definition of that which one could not be passionate about: bland consumer crap in the service of an evil goal. I don't remember exactly which ones she worked on, but they were icky.
It was like the original "Stepford Wives" A bot will have no problem staying on message.
Northcutt et. al. have a seriousness assessment that is completely broken. Their model rates an incident by a formula that does not make sense:
S = (C + L) - (HCM + NCM)
Where: S = severity C = Criticality (how important the target host is) L = Lethality of attack HCM = Host-based countermeasures NCM = network-based countermeasures
They use different variable names, I think.
Assign a value from 1-5 for C,L,HCM, and NCM
Remember ordinal numbers? You can't multiply them (or do other operations on them) and get any sensible result. For example, last year the Mariners finished 4th (last) in the AL West. You can't multiply their rank of 4 by anything. They aren't 4 times as sucky as Oakland or 4/3rds as sucky as Texas. They are ranked 4th and that's all you can say. More sucky than Texas. If they finish 1 game behind #3, they are ranked 4th same as if they finish 150 games behind.
Similarly, you can't say a Criticality=5 host is 25% more important than a C=4 host. Adding Lethality to Criticality is like adding Favorite Ice Cream to AL West Standings.
Further, Lethality probably has no sensible 5 step progression. I count 4 max steps. No lethality, recon, user-level, 0wn3d. If a step is not at all lethal, why does that increase the severity? (Should be 0-5)
Beyond the mathematics, I have some other conceptual problems: subtracting the assessment of network-based countermeasures. Well, let me see. Give the assessment for network-based countermeasures a high value if it stopped the attack and a low value if it didn't. This tautology advances our interests how? If the exercise doesn't provide the severity, but instead takes it as an input, then the exercise is just busywork. Or take an independent assessment of the network countermeasures- we're proud of our kick-ass firewall, score it 5. It didn't stop the attack, as the vector was entirely within permitted traffic. How does a cool firewall that didn't stop the attack reduce the severity of the event?
The same argument holds for host-based countermeasures (host firewall, av, tripwire, current patching, etc)
I grant that the folks proposing this model have a lot more experience than I do, but they should probably admit that people pull these numbers out of their asses to fit a predetermined conclusion. The severity rating should inform decisions about response. Most of the steps should give binary results: respond | not respond
Is this an attack/hostile? yes/no Is the target something we care about? yes/no Did the attack succeed? yes/no Does it represent a threat even if it failed? yes/no and so on
The prioratization of responses is probably inevitably a second calculation.
It bugged me that I had to use this methodology to get my certification.
I am otherwise impressed: do not hold SANS/GIAC certs in the same contempt that the CNE and MCSE deserve. The GCIA was a massive amount of work that actually exercised the skills being evaluated. The papers of those who pass it are publically available at the SANS website so you can see someone's chops and writing style, if you are checking someone out for a job or contract.
No idea what generates his income, but I have to disagree with your assessment. _Tao_ is rigorous in giving proper attribution to researchers. I thought the book was very well organized and written, and there's a massive appendix on the intellectual history of Net. Security Monitoring. He's certainly not claiming the work of others as his own, which your statement might be taken to imply. Much like sguil, the IDS/NSM console that cross-pimps with him, his book assembles info from a number of sources into coherence. That's an achievement.
There is some self-promotion, but my impression is his ego is no more swollen than many alpha-geeks. I'd happily buy him a beer in a non-smoking pub.
I dig Snort, been using it a while. The SANS training made it USEFUL. The course filled in gaps in my knowledge at a rapid rate, and I usually HATE computer training courses precisely because the bandwidth is too low.
Richard Beijtlich wrote "Tao of Network Security Monitoring" which is a really, really good next step.(http://www.bookpool.com/.x/kzaxqc7ob1/sm/032 1246772) It covers the use of a variety of different types of intrusion indicators to quickly get to the meat of the matter. He's critical of the SANS course as too bit-addled. I can see what he means - you do spend 2 days (of 6) on tcpdump, vs. just one on Snort per se, but that gives you a great background to use tons of other tools. Once you have that, the other tools are easy.
SANS also has security auditing, incident handling, firewall + VPN, and some PHB type classes.
Slashdot Mirror
You really have to have an anti-governance frame to believe that. And that has to come from some essentially religious assumptions. Of the David Koresh caliber. Wrecking the governments' finances is not a rational approach to limiting government. It's irresponsible, and cowardly. Cut what you think should be cut, and honestly take the heat at the ballot box. Tax and spend beats borrow and spend.
Clinton/Gore reversed the growth of the Federal govt., provided the military that rolled over Afghanistan and Iraq, and balanced the budget. Remember Gulf War 1 when Cheney said you win with the previous regime's military? He was right, for once.
Bush has increased the Federal payroll by hiring a vast swarm of freedom/privacy violating goons - all the reasonable suspicions a principled conservative should have of the power of government are confirmed in this administration. Hint: no more habeous corpus. I don't recall him campaigning on a promise to get medeival on MY ass. Government has grown in exactly the wrong direction.
Bush et al have chewed up the military by invading the WRONG FUCKING COUNTRY without a plan to handle it after the end of major fighting. Wolfowitz recently tried to score some debate points with a reporter. He said, essentially, that they DID have a post-conflict plan, but the conflict has been ongoing. Hint: if things were going well the war would be over. Another hint: if things were going well, politically connected contractors wouldn't be scrambling to account for BILLIONS OF FUCKING DOLLARS.
In every case he's privatized security for the chicken house and cut a sweetheart deal with GOP contributing foxes.
Republicans never run on what they do. It's all themes and spin. "Save social security!" s/save/wreck Don't even use the word "privatize" for the plan to privatize it. Agh. Lying weasels. Hint: if you are focus-grouping your every word, you are going to hell.
Bush is responsible for a $40,000 birth tax on my son (his share of the Bush deficit so far) but Paris Hilton gets a free pass. I look forward to the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy.
I LOVE Neuromancer, but I haven't been able to finish some of the others.
I've dug everything Stephenson wrote except Big U - he was still learning. Some nice ideas, but a little too easy, somehow. I may not get through Baroque Cycle. The first was o.k., but didn't grab me nearly as much as Cryptonomicon. I was looking forward to it, too. Mmmm...5000 pages of stephenson...I think part of my problem was in placing stephensonisms in a historical context. When people acted a little post-modern in the 1930s-40s in Cryptonomicon, they were still anatomically modern humans. Also, ODD anatomically modern humans, so grant the author latitude to describe odd behavior. Going back an extra 400 years, well, it took me out of the world of the story. You can be glib about total catastrophe if EVERYTHING is subject to glib, ironic detachment. But the seige of Vienna was too real, and to have characters react to that like they would to situations in Snow Crash - hmm. Couldn't buy it, I guess.
Gaiman also can rock hard.
http://www.dshield.org/
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/1 0/20/1518217&tid=192&tid=214&tid=126&tid=11
4) Who would win? (Score:5, Funny) - by Call Me Black Cloud
In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?
Neal:
You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.
The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.
The second time was a few years later when Gibson came through Seattle on his IDORU tour. Between doing some drive-by signings at local bookstores, he came and devastated my quarter of the city. I had been in a trance for seven days and seven nights and was unaware of these goings-on, but he came to me in a vision and taunted me, and left a message on my cellphone. That evening he was doing a reading at Kane Hall on the University of Washington campus. Swathed in black, I climbed to the top of the hall, mesmerized his snipers, sliced a hole in the roof using a plasma cutter, let myself into the catwalks above the stage, and then leapt down upon him from forty feet above. But I had forgotten that he had once studied in the same monastery as I, and knew all of my techniques. He rolled away at the last moment. I struck only the lectern, smashing it to kindling. Snatching up one jagged shard of oak I adopted the Mountain Tiger position just as you would expect. He pulled off his wireless mike and began to whirl it around his head. From there, the fight proceeded along predictable lines. As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group, which eventually to the collapse of the building's roof and the loss of eight hundred lives. But as they were only peasants, we did not care.
Our third fight occurred at the Peace Arch on the U.S./Canadian border between Seattle and Vancouver. Gibson wished to retire from that sort of lifestyle that required ceaseless training in the martial arts and sleeping outdoors under the rain. He only wished to sit in his garden brushing out novels on rice paper. But honor dictated that he must fight me for a third time first. Of course the Peace Arch did not remain standing for long. Before long my sword arm hung useless at my side. One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Ca
So it would have been "...the Vampire Slayer"
Nice finale though. I thought the series held up remarkably well over its run.
/listens to www.kexp.org
and the counter-elitist snobbery.
Ftr, the Onion article I aspire to is:
37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster
ATHENS, GA--Thirty-seven record-store clerks are missing and feared dead in the aftermath of a partial roof collapse during a Yo La Tengo concert Monday. "We're trying our best to rescue these...
3813 | 10 April 2002 | News
So was anything inaccurate or misleading in my post? And why the reflexive dumbass conservative usage of "elitism" ? If elitist means not the dumbest motherfucker in the room, I'm usually guilty.
pgp is a bfd.
an open web is a bfd.
users controlling the hardware they own is a bfd.
You do appear too ignorant/stupid to recognize what they've done for you. They ARE better than you. Sorry.
The one that the community gained through providing the fruits of their labors to the world gratis?
The one that they gained through fewer defects/line of code?
The one they gained for advancing the cause of human freedom? (Encryption, keeping the web out of monopoly hands) 1984 is no nightmare for the proprietary software outfits - BB is a nice cohesive market. Contrast with Carly's ambition: building DRM into every product HP makes...
The OSS community has a great rep for anybody that has heard of it.
I can even hang with some of the poster's intent: seems to me OP feels there is condescenion (based on unconscious racism) on the part of Bill. I don't follow it that closely, so I can't say whether it is justified or not, but I have seen donors incrediby impressed with themselves and unable to identify with the recipients at all.
I hit their site, bunch of book listings shoved in my face. I noticed a "Why was this recommended?" link above each entry. Based on a record of my past searches, it decided I was "interested". I removed each entry.
1 122946/qid=1111027850/sr=8-2/ref=pd_csp_2/102-7806 153-5984110?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Got a generic page, with Harry Potter and..."On Bullshit" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/069
Presumably because of my penchant for fsking with busybody datamining/privacy invading outfits. Pretty clever.
Still not at 52 week low. YET
Die, sleazoids, die!
Beat me to it. I am teh l4m3!
Shared source is bullshit.
There is an argument for security by obscurity. I am completely unconvinced by it, but it's there. So now you take a product that is highly dependent upon obscurity for its security and you let (world - dog) check it out. Now the set of people who can audit for vulnerabilities is larger. Oooh - I'm sure there's no economic espionage coming from China! I'm sure there's no maladjusted contract programmer at THIS Fortune 1000 company going to share the shared source on IRC. But we're still gonna cut off peer review and correction.
It's the worst of both worlds.
WTF and WTP (What's The Point).
Depending on GPO to install software updates is foolish. The manually running Windows Update results in silent failure for some patches - I've seen it myself. And you trust that a policy will be better?
And what about all the breakage patching can do? Do you have the staff to test every one of a dozen patches in isolation and the wherewithal to set them up separately?
And Step 2) Install AD is easy? STFU
"Where's your enterprise directory?(don't even start on about Novell...)" STFU! AD is novell-lite, you fuck wit. AD is the equivalent of those star trek episodes filmed by fans, compared to TNG. (How's that for a geeky analogy?)
Most of those unpatched boxes had vulnerabilities that were predictable YEARS before the OS was released. How far back do you think you'd have to go to find the first advice to "turn off unnecessary services"? I will leave it as an exercise for the reader, but you know it was before they were deep in the design cycle for win2k. It was a knowable thing that UPnP was a bad idea. etc. Did they open more ports, or fewer? Ick.
I felt I was in Stepford Wives, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Buncha pod people talking about "being passionate" about...ick.
I tested for a while there, jumped for a couple of cool jobs, then moved back to Seattle. Had to weigh two offers, one was a contract position for Volt at MS testing an Exchange testing tool that would have given me much insight and put me on a lucrative career path. The other as the net admin with a small (ultimately kind of lame) software company for small businesses.
The MS job looked like 50% more money, easily. But working on Exchange...ick. The folks seemed sort of cool and pretty smart, but the product still inspires revulsion and ultimately I think I'd have lost faith in them - they were passionate about crud. How do you bond with someone who can do that?
There was also sort of an anti Yankee sentiment in my decision. I've never understood people rooting for the Yankees. It's not interesting when the overdog wins. "Their payroll is higher than the bottom 10 teams combined - YES! YANKEES WIN! Oh my gosh, never expected THAT!" Or players joining them (listening, Randy?). So what if you win - you were expected to. Winning the world series is pass/fail for you. You can't achieve, you can only meet expectations. Schilling in Boston did something. He made a huge difference. Without Johnson, the Yanks are still probably gonna win it. I knew that my efforts would have no effect on share price, or anything else, really. Except possibly Exchange. Ick.
Don't mean to rag on you - just on your (and formerly my) employer. I freely grant that I'm spoiled.
I don't see the point of the activity. Maybe I just identify too closely with the long run. I don't expect to sit in a favorable cluster of events.
watching the wheel go around and seeing what happens - that's what turntables are for.
I don't think I'm risk-averse - if the odds were even, I'd probably throw down some dough. If they were in my favor, I'd play pretty seriously. I recognize that the house edge is pretty thin for some games, and you need to average over thousands of outcomes to realize the edge. I wouldn't put it all on red even if I got the 0 && 00.
gambling is a stupidity tax. Man it is depressing walking past a bank of zombies punishing themselves. Skinner's pigeons got nothing on the blue haired ladies.
Even if you are playing poker, the house is still a parasite. The rake is unbelievable. Maybe the rake buys you a clean game, but I kind of doubt it. The ethics of mobsters and corporations are no better than that of home game weasels. The only thing saving you is that the overhead of a fix is probably not worth the trouble. Still more do I doubt that a clean game with the rake is worth it: it puts the players in the position of fighting in a burning house.
Hmm...burning the House, not a bad idea. The indoor air quality probably wouldn't suffer. Vegas is the right place for resuming above ground nuclear testing. We could probably rent space to Iran and N. Korea.
I think these are on no matter what. You can hide the icons, that's about it. Otherwise, you are talking root canal.
In IE, the list of bookmarks always includes a "links" folder.
What kind of bookmark could I have that wouldn't be a link?
Why was it thought necessary to hard-code a check for the existance of this folder, and replace it if missing?
One of the myths about Windows is that there is a company behind it you can hold responsible for flaws that impact an organization. If you read the EULA of any MS product, even an update, it disclaims any responsibility whatever. They specifically avow that they are not fit for any purpose.
So what's up with that?
Open source licenses usually have the same thing, but those are generally free products. You guys have taken in a couple hundred billion. Plus, we can use the code as we like. So you can't claim any kind of equivalence.
when someone sells his/her soul and is assimilated into the Borg, the implant naturally makes them less spontanious.
I'm only partly kidding. I was a contract tester there and the culture was eerily sterile. Even those people who pursued outside interests seemed a little like Data researching humor. Not just nerds not getting social conventions, really missing some fundamental aspect of humanity.
A company newsletter had an article hyping an employee, whose secret for success was "be passionate about what you do" yet her listed projects were the very definition of that which one could not be passionate about: bland consumer crap in the service of an evil goal. I don't remember exactly which ones she worked on, but they were icky.
It was like the original "Stepford Wives" A bot will have no problem staying on message.
Northcutt et. al. have a seriousness assessment that is completely broken. Their model rates an incident by a formula that does not make sense:
S = (C + L) - (HCM + NCM)
Where:
S = severity
C = Criticality (how important the target host is)
L = Lethality of attack
HCM = Host-based countermeasures
NCM = network-based countermeasures
They use different variable names, I think.
Assign a value from 1-5 for C,L,HCM, and NCM
Remember ordinal numbers? You can't multiply them (or do other operations on them) and get any sensible result. For example, last year the Mariners finished 4th (last) in the AL West. You can't multiply their rank of 4 by anything. They aren't 4 times as sucky as Oakland or 4/3rds as sucky as Texas. They are ranked 4th and that's all you can say. More sucky than Texas. If they finish 1 game behind #3, they are ranked 4th same as if they finish 150 games behind.
Similarly, you can't say a Criticality=5 host is 25% more important than a C=4 host. Adding Lethality to Criticality is like adding Favorite Ice Cream to AL West Standings.
Further, Lethality probably has no sensible 5 step progression. I count 4 max steps. No lethality, recon, user-level, 0wn3d. If a step is not at all lethal, why does that increase the severity? (Should be 0-5)
Beyond the mathematics, I have some other conceptual problems: subtracting the assessment of network-based countermeasures. Well, let me see. Give the assessment for network-based countermeasures a high value if it stopped the attack and a low value if it didn't. This tautology advances our interests how? If the exercise doesn't provide the severity, but instead takes it as an input, then the exercise is just busywork. Or take an independent assessment of the network countermeasures- we're proud of our kick-ass firewall, score it 5. It didn't stop the attack, as the vector was entirely within permitted traffic. How does a cool firewall that didn't stop the attack reduce the severity of the event?
The same argument holds for host-based countermeasures (host firewall, av, tripwire, current patching, etc)
I grant that the folks proposing this model have a lot more experience than I do, but they should probably admit that people pull these numbers out of their asses to fit a predetermined conclusion. The severity rating should inform decisions about response. Most of the steps should give binary results: respond | not respond
Is this an attack/hostile? yes/no
Is the target something we care about? yes/no
Did the attack succeed? yes/no
Does it represent a threat even if it failed? yes/no
and so on
The prioratization of responses is probably inevitably a second calculation.
It bugged me that I had to use this methodology to get my certification.
I am otherwise impressed: do not hold SANS/GIAC certs in the same contempt that the CNE and MCSE deserve. The GCIA was a massive amount of work that actually exercised the skills being evaluated. The papers of those who pass it are publically available at the SANS website so you can see someone's chops and writing style, if you are checking someone out for a job or contract.
No idea what generates his income, but I have to disagree with your assessment. _Tao_ is rigorous in giving proper attribution to researchers. I thought the book was very well organized and written, and there's a massive appendix on the intellectual history of Net. Security Monitoring. He's certainly not claiming the work of others as his own, which your statement might be taken to imply. Much like sguil, the IDS/NSM console that cross-pimps with him, his book assembles info from a number of sources into coherence. That's an achievement.
There is some self-promotion, but my impression is his ego is no more swollen than many alpha-geeks. I'd happily buy him a beer in a non-smoking pub.
Amen! Go if you can.
2 1246772)
I dig Snort, been using it a while. The SANS training made it USEFUL. The course filled in gaps in my knowledge at a rapid rate, and I usually HATE computer training courses precisely because the bandwidth is too low.
Richard Beijtlich wrote "Tao of Network Security Monitoring" which is a really, really good next step.(http://www.bookpool.com/.x/kzaxqc7ob1/sm/03
It covers the use of a variety of different types of intrusion indicators to quickly get to the meat of the matter. He's critical of the SANS course as too bit-addled. I can see what he means - you do spend 2 days (of 6) on tcpdump, vs. just one on Snort per se, but that gives you a great background to use tons of other tools. Once you have that, the other tools are easy.
SANS also has security auditing, incident handling, firewall + VPN, and some PHB type classes.
I'm a fanboy.
"Putin Vows Zero Tolerance for Terrorists, Hostages"
Not in my experience (6 years ago or so).
4 permatemps in an office with room enough for 4 tables and workstations - but no more.
And that one guy kept playing the same CD. With that whiney "Where are all the Cowboys" song.