Imagine being the poor bastard that had the misfortune to have registered his printer for warranty coverage but threw it out or sold it to someone who 'misused' it later on.
What now, we need to put all our electronic devices through a chipper/shredder too?
Sure maybe you wouldn't be charged per se, but I don't find much difference from being 'arrested' and serving a day in jail and being questioned or harrassed (more accurately) for an equivalent amount of time.
If you don't think investigators are brutally relentless...good for you to be so blissfully ignorant and may you never find out the truth. Your life can be trashed without any charges, merely because you were a suspect.
Just another reason why the EFF is right on this one.
Another lame excuse for journalism
on
Why FreeBSD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The article just gets to making a point, and then never makes it. Over and over again.
The net result is just a lame advocacy attempt.
Again the lame point about linux being merely a kernel is made. What decade is this author living in? Has anyone ever decided to deploy linux in the enterprise by simply downloading the latest kernel for the install? Hell no, linux is installed as a distribution, always. This tedious harping on semantics and unix purity is nonsense.
In the replies the lamo 'RPM doesn't handle dependencies' rears its ugly head yet again. What modern distro now doesn't have a package management wrapper? If you violate dependencies with RPM's or whatever your package of choice may be, it's because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how to manage your system of choice. I haven't had dependency issues *ever* using RPM's created for the installed base I was running. Sure if I chose to install rogue, poorly built RPM's from a source that doesn't use a consistent build environment, they will have issues...but that makes it my fault, not the fault of the system I'm running. The system, at least for now, isn't smart enough to keep me from using my free will and breaking it.
What happened to informative journalism? It's dead. Everyone from mainstream media to bloggers lives in a three sentence, paragraph header mentality. 90% of anything 'published' online now consists of a 'story' that is merely a collection of paragraph headers with no meat.
Just read all the 'security' articles weighing linux vs windows and it's evident. People with an obvious misunderstanding of both platforms, spouting off daily as though they are experts. The unfortunate part of all of this is that the average reader of any of these topics won't even realize the inherent flaws in the 'articles'.
Two companies, both extensively utilizing undocumented error codes in their products, both of whom don't make available any updates to software without a support contract. Both vendors sell you shrink-wrap with long out of date releases that are totally broken upon install without the updates.
It's a match made in heaven. Now Veritas can supply phone support via unskilled, scripted foreigners to complete the integration of the value-added services Symantec offers.
I quit buying CD's, from a three to six disc per week habit for years, simply because of the price gouging that started in the mid nineties. I've bought about six since 1994 or so.
Now, I will not ever buy a CD again if they have any copy protection scheme on them. Simple. The artists, the labels, the whole criminal organization of it can bite me. Don't even try to explain the food chain of that business to me, I used to work in it, they can bite me.
With DVD's, I've been buying quite a few of them, as the prices are generally a pretty reasonable value. Now this crap...
Simple enough, they can bite me again.
They come out with nonsense like this, it will be the day of my last DVD purchase.
This is the way to get the message accross, bankrupt the entire slimy industry, let it cave in.
Hell, I'd be better off going for a walk in the woods (still marginally free) than watching another movie anyway.
I generally advise people to use mnemonic passwords, mixing numbers for letters and never consisting of a complete word within the password. Additionally, setup a theme for the mnemonics used based on the category of server. Of course you can't 'publish' what that theme would be either.
Example
Theme is Led Zeppelin song lyrics for a tier of servers
There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
becomes +4lw5a+gig
All the user has to do is come up with their own system of transposing characters for letters and maybe mixing case as well, say, all vowels are capitalized.
I think what the poster was implying was, that the officer would have a bluetooth tag on their person, keyed to their own firearm. For their weapon to discharge, it would need to pick up the signal first.
They have systems like this already that use a ring worn on the firing hand. Without the ring on, the gun won't fire.
The funnier part to this is just how stupid the avg inhabitant of Los Angeles is that they never even thought to call it in. Too busy sucking on a soy latte and looking in their mirror to notice.
In NYC, they probably would have been shot or eaten by a police dog, and I would have laughed.
Just what I always wanted, yet another source of radio spectrum noise. No small issue, we're talking disruption of a service that most people aren't even aware of and is insignificant until there is a major disaster.
The H.R. rep with a 3000 sq ft McMansion and two new cars with kids in private schools and a pool in the backyard, makes the offer of $50k/yr to the advanced linux admin and is puzzled why they don't come crashing in to sign off on it. That same H.R. rep who gets paid to read email and file some paperwork occasionally is pulling down over six figures in the same marketplace/region.
Everyone wants to make their millions on the back of skilled admins they pay peanuts. Meanwhile it's not possible to have any standard of living on the salaries they offer and they start crying 'shortage of qualified staff'. There's not the shortage they make it out to be, there's just a shortage of employers that will reward the skilled employees they supposedly seek.
It is indeed greed that is creating the shortage. If the companies would have any semblance of loyalty and merit pay systems in place instead of trying to burn every living cent out of their engineering staff, there wouldn't be any shortage. Instead we get more and more H1's and the remaining few admins with true skills get further burned out having to clean up after them.
I agree with this. I deploy whenever I have the choice, Checkpoint on Nokia. The reason is that I never make that recommendation without also pushing towards Nokia as the single source support contract.
The latest versions of Checkpoint _finally_ have a logical GUI, it's actually quite remarkable. Addresses the age-old monster problem of finding out host->group->hosts relations. Trust me here, I spent literally months of time doing analysis of legacy Checkpoint installs to clean up and optimize rulesets and it was torture with the old releases.
Many times I deploy a solution and the client doesn't have the vision to realize it will require a dedicated staff to manage. This isn't a small office environment I refer to, these are networks with many tens of thousands of users on them. What happens most often is that I get a call four to six months later to come bail them out of their now unmaintained legacy. Keeps food on the table but it's so unnecessary.
The reason I lean towards Checkpoint/Nokia is ease of use. On spec alone they aren't the top dog, but for versatility and ease of use by what are often just LAN admins with no security background, the combination rules. As long as the site maintains patch level and keeps change control over the policy, they will have year-long uptimes with no problem.
When you toss IDS into the picture it's even messier. I'm baffled as to why the clients never seem to understand the need for staffing. They all seem to know they 'need' firewalls and IDS/HIDS but never plan for, nor admit the need for the staff to maintain the installations. What good is any of this information gathering without someone to interpret it? The riddle of the decade.
If you need Checkpoint, you also need support contracts and staff to manage the environment.
As for Cisco... I recently had the misfortune of deploying an entirely Cisco architecture, using PIX, IDS, their VPN concentrators, their web cache, switches and routers. They have good points, however when you realize that each product needs its own dedicated Windows box for management, with software that is nearly impossible to get installed and functioning stably...the whole picture falls apart. If Cisco would get their act together to integrate all of their product base into an actually robust CSPM or whatever they call it, they might actually be doing something.
Now really, for $7/hr do you think anyone in a CompUSA is going to be certified? I actually loved doing retail sales years ago and if I could pull down $70k/yr doing it in computer hardware I would, but it's impossible.
Anyone that knows what they are doing will NOT be working in one of the retail mega chain stores, they simply don't pay enough. The only way you would find a competent person on staff at these stores is if the poor guy is unemployed from 'real' work and had to take the gig to eat.
Also, those companies don't stand to gain anything by paying for their staff to get certs either. They will just be paying the staff to leave. The worst that even an MCSE stands to make is $15/hr, those stores simply won't pay that and therefore you'll never see competent staff beyond a 1/1000 super geek that lives in his parents basement and just isn't motivated to get a real paying job.
I attended a major farce of a tech school in NJ. I dropped out about 1/3 through it after finding out the 'SQL' class was how to program FoxPro in GUI mode only...not even the backend coding it could do. I too found out that there is no sort of consumer satisfaction for these schools. I tried to fight and get my money back but there is NO mechanism for a dissatisfied student to issue a complaint. All you can do believe it or not is call and find out if a school is 'on the list' of the schools where a refund will be issued. The way they get on the list is purely through a state initiated investigation, with no channel for a student to even add a complaint. Absolutely insane. Cost me about $5k.
What you said about grant students was also true there. At least 60% of the students in the tech school were going for free on some sort of unemployment training program. The school's only interest was pushing these students through 'the mill' to get the guaranteed funding. They had no business interest in failing anyone, and equally less motivation to actually provide a quality education.
Almost ten years later I told my brother and brother-in-law both *exactly* how the tech schools play out. They both 'graduated' and have been unable to find any work in the field with their certificates. They both told me to spare them the I told you so.
To Brick Computer Science Institute, I hope you wind up in jail for the scam you are pulling on people. It *should* be criminal, but luckily for you it seems your political wells run deep.
College is where you learn to understand how to do things. A job is where you learn how to do things.
Use the college time to learn things you always wanted to know about, physics, electronics, math, history, art, welding, pottery, whatever. Make your degree broad based and in a subject you are curious about, don't make it a focus of a vision of some job you'll have. You want the broadest base of tools possible allowing for flexible career moves later.
A huge majority of people who are regurgitated by the institutional educational system have no real work experience until they graduate. They come out expecting that the time they 'served' will equal career skills. Hardly. As a matter of fact, if you bring the skills you used to get through school into a workplace expecting to rely on them in business you wind up with bad coping skills, lack of communication skills, fundamentally challenged in dealing with the real world. Don't worry, that's about 90% of the business workplace staff.
If you really want to stand out, realize that college is its own little world, use the courses to broaden yourself as a person and expect that your next step is to then learn how to actually work. Start by getting yourself part-time work in the field. It will give you a much better view into how to better make use of course selections and give you an excellent idea if you really do want to work in IT as a career at all.
The things I found that I missed out on by not going through a formal degree are things like finance courses, business law, things that would make starting a business a bit less painful. If you get out into the workplace and discover that you aren't one of the sheep, content to live a cubicle life, you will find that the only way out from working for The Man is to start your own business. These courses will help you there.
It's easy to get a degree and get a job to match what it says. It's much harder to find a job that turns out to be what you really want to be doing. Don't limit yourself with a degree or actually the perception that a degree will make your career.
What? No Dominators??? Probably don't make those anymore.
Not only am I sick of hearing all the breathing about 1/3 of the stations on the dial as well as the cable TV broadcasters have dialed into the audio, but now they (Comcast) have taken to compressing the digital image signals so much that they are all pixellated now.
This is what you get for not paying audio engineers enough to live on. These $12/hr broadcast engineers you wind up with are a joke. The rest of us quit to go make a living in IT.
For a shell server with the purpose of user account logins yeah it would be o.k. sure but for a web server, in order to harden the box properly you ideally want the box stripped down to its task. That's part of the absurdity of a cgi shell as an access method for a hosting provider. The shell users shouldn't be on the web servers, it's an abomination for a hosting provider. For a home user goofing off or for an intranet server maybe.
Slashdot Mirror
Thought crimes my ass.
My manager gets ahold of one of these and the poor bastard will have a heart attack!
The whole group will be up on manslaughter charges.
Imagine being the poor bastard that had the misfortune to have registered his printer for warranty coverage but threw it out or sold it to someone who 'misused' it later on.
What now, we need to put all our electronic devices through a chipper/shredder too?
Sure maybe you wouldn't be charged per se, but I don't find much difference from being 'arrested' and serving a day in jail and being questioned or harrassed (more accurately) for an equivalent amount of time.
If you don't think investigators are brutally relentless...good for you to be so blissfully ignorant and may you never find out the truth. Your life can be trashed without any charges, merely because you were a suspect.
Just another reason why the EFF is right on this one.
The article just gets to making a point, and then never makes it. Over and over again.
The net result is just a lame advocacy attempt.
Again the lame point about linux being merely a kernel is made. What decade is this author living in? Has anyone ever decided to deploy linux in the enterprise by simply downloading the latest kernel for the install? Hell no, linux is installed as a distribution, always. This tedious harping on semantics and unix purity is nonsense.
In the replies the lamo 'RPM doesn't handle dependencies' rears its ugly head yet again. What modern distro now doesn't have a package management wrapper? If you violate dependencies with RPM's or whatever your package of choice may be, it's because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how to manage your system of choice. I haven't had dependency issues *ever* using RPM's created for the installed base I was running. Sure if I chose to install rogue, poorly built RPM's from a source that doesn't use a consistent build environment, they will have issues...but that makes it my fault, not the fault of the system I'm running. The system, at least for now, isn't smart enough to keep me from using my free will and breaking it.
What happened to informative journalism? It's dead. Everyone from mainstream media to bloggers lives in a three sentence, paragraph header mentality. 90% of anything 'published' online now consists of a 'story' that is merely a collection of paragraph headers with no meat.
Just read all the 'security' articles weighing linux vs windows and it's evident. People with an obvious misunderstanding of both platforms, spouting off daily as though they are experts. The unfortunate part of all of this is that the average reader of any of these topics won't even realize the inherent flaws in the 'articles'.
Two companies, both extensively utilizing undocumented error codes in their products, both of whom don't make available any updates to software without a support contract. Both vendors sell you shrink-wrap with long out of date releases that are totally broken upon install without the updates.
It's a match made in heaven. Now Veritas can supply phone support via unskilled, scripted foreigners to complete the integration of the value-added services Symantec offers.
Put a fork in them, they're done.
I quit buying CD's, from a three to six disc per week habit for years, simply because of the price gouging that started in the mid nineties. I've bought about six since 1994 or so.
Now, I will not ever buy a CD again if they have any copy protection scheme on them. Simple. The artists, the labels, the whole criminal organization of it can bite me. Don't even try to explain the food chain of that business to me, I used to work in it, they can bite me.
With DVD's, I've been buying quite a few of them, as the prices are generally a pretty reasonable value. Now this crap...
Simple enough, they can bite me again.
They come out with nonsense like this, it will be the day of my last DVD purchase.
This is the way to get the message accross, bankrupt the entire slimy industry, let it cave in.
Hell, I'd be better off going for a walk in the woods (still marginally free) than watching another movie anyway.
I generally advise people to use mnemonic passwords, mixing numbers for letters and never consisting of a complete word within the password. Additionally, setup a theme for the mnemonics used based on the category of server. Of course you can't 'publish' what that theme would be either.
Example
Theme is Led Zeppelin song lyrics for a tier of servers
There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
becomes +4lw5a+gig
All the user has to do is come up with their own system of transposing characters for letters and maybe mixing case as well, say, all vowels are capitalized.
Put up a reliable municipal Wi-Fi network, combined with something like this.
Netlink 802.11 phones
You won't need Verizon anymore.
I think what the poster was implying was, that the officer would have a bluetooth tag on their person, keyed to their own firearm. For their weapon to discharge, it would need to pick up the signal first.
They have systems like this already that use a ring worn on the firing hand. Without the ring on, the gun won't fire.
The funnier part to this is just how stupid the avg inhabitant of Los Angeles is that they never even thought to call it in. Too busy sucking on a soy latte and looking in their mirror to notice.
In NYC, they probably would have been shot or eaten by a police dog, and I would have laughed.
Just what I always wanted, yet another source of radio spectrum noise. No small issue, we're talking disruption of a service that most people aren't even aware of and is insignificant until there is a major disaster.
BPL info at ARRL.org
You posted this on /. without a clear release stating this was a joke.
Next up, The Onion will pick up your story and it will make headlines in China.
Those weren't villagers at all, they were attorneys!
It works like this.
The H.R. rep with a 3000 sq ft McMansion and two new cars with kids in private schools and a pool in the backyard, makes the offer of $50k/yr to the advanced linux admin and is puzzled why they don't come crashing in to sign off on it. That same H.R. rep who gets paid to read email and file some paperwork occasionally is pulling down over six figures in the same marketplace/region.
Everyone wants to make their millions on the back of skilled admins they pay peanuts. Meanwhile it's not possible to have any standard of living on the salaries they offer and they start crying 'shortage of qualified staff'. There's not the shortage they make it out to be, there's just a shortage of employers that will reward the skilled employees they supposedly seek.
It is indeed greed that is creating the shortage. If the companies would have any semblance of loyalty and merit pay systems in place instead of trying to burn every living cent out of their engineering staff, there wouldn't be any shortage. Instead we get more and more H1's and the remaining few admins with true skills get further burned out having to clean up after them.
"To whom do all your base belong?"
If he answers improperly, beat him with his Apple notebook until he makes time.
I agree with this. I deploy whenever I have the choice, Checkpoint on Nokia. The reason is that I never make that recommendation without also pushing towards Nokia as the single source support contract.
The latest versions of Checkpoint _finally_ have a logical GUI, it's actually quite remarkable. Addresses the age-old monster problem of finding out host->group->hosts relations. Trust me here, I spent literally months of time doing analysis of legacy Checkpoint installs to clean up and optimize rulesets and it was torture with the old releases.
Many times I deploy a solution and the client doesn't have the vision to realize it will require a dedicated staff to manage. This isn't a small office environment I refer to, these are networks with many tens of thousands of users on them. What happens most often is that I get a call four to six months later to come bail them out of their now unmaintained legacy. Keeps food on the table but it's so unnecessary.
The reason I lean towards Checkpoint/Nokia is ease of use. On spec alone they aren't the top dog, but for versatility and ease of use by what are often just LAN admins with no security background, the combination rules. As long as the site maintains patch level and keeps change control over the policy, they will have year-long uptimes with no problem.
When you toss IDS into the picture it's even messier. I'm baffled as to why the clients never seem to understand the need for staffing. They all seem to know they 'need' firewalls and IDS/HIDS but never plan for, nor admit the need for the staff to maintain the installations. What good is any of this information gathering without someone to interpret it? The riddle of the decade.
If you need Checkpoint, you also need support contracts and staff to manage the environment.
As for Cisco... I recently had the misfortune of deploying an entirely Cisco architecture, using PIX, IDS, their VPN concentrators, their web cache, switches and routers. They have good points, however when you realize that each product needs its own dedicated Windows box for management, with software that is nearly impossible to get installed and functioning stably...the whole picture falls apart. If Cisco would get their act together to integrate all of their product base into an actually robust CSPM or whatever they call it, they might actually be doing something.
Now really, for $7/hr do you think anyone in a CompUSA is going to be certified? I actually loved doing retail sales years ago and if I could pull down $70k/yr doing it in computer hardware I would, but it's impossible.
Anyone that knows what they are doing will NOT be working in one of the retail mega chain stores, they simply don't pay enough. The only way you would find a competent person on staff at these stores is if the poor guy is unemployed from 'real' work and had to take the gig to eat.
Also, those companies don't stand to gain anything by paying for their staff to get certs either. They will just be paying the staff to leave. The worst that even an MCSE stands to make is $15/hr, those stores simply won't pay that and therefore you'll never see competent staff beyond a 1/1000 super geek that lives in his parents basement and just isn't motivated to get a real paying job.
I attended a major farce of a tech school in NJ. I dropped out about 1/3 through it after finding out the 'SQL' class was how to program FoxPro in GUI mode only...not even the backend coding it could do. I too found out that there is no sort of consumer satisfaction for these schools. I tried to fight and get my money back but there is NO mechanism for a dissatisfied student to issue a complaint. All you can do believe it or not is call and find out if a school is 'on the list' of the schools where a refund will be issued. The way they get on the list is purely through a state initiated investigation, with no channel for a student to even add a complaint. Absolutely insane. Cost me about $5k.
What you said about grant students was also true there. At least 60% of the students in the tech school were going for free on some sort of unemployment training program. The school's only interest was pushing these students through 'the mill' to get the guaranteed funding. They had no business interest in failing anyone, and equally less motivation to actually provide a quality education.
Almost ten years later I told my brother and brother-in-law both *exactly* how the tech schools play out. They both 'graduated' and have been unable to find any work in the field with their certificates. They both told me to spare them the I told you so.
To Brick Computer Science Institute, I hope you wind up in jail for the scam you are pulling on people. It *should* be criminal, but luckily for you it seems your political wells run deep.
College is where you learn to understand how to do things. A job is where you learn how to do things.
Use the college time to learn things you always wanted to know about, physics, electronics, math, history, art, welding, pottery, whatever. Make your degree broad based and in a subject you are curious about, don't make it a focus of a vision of some job you'll have. You want the broadest base of tools possible allowing for flexible career moves later.
A huge majority of people who are regurgitated by the institutional educational system have no real work experience until they graduate. They come out expecting that the time they 'served' will equal career skills. Hardly. As a matter of fact, if you bring the skills you used to get through school into a workplace expecting to rely on them in business you wind up with bad coping skills, lack of communication skills, fundamentally challenged in dealing with the real world. Don't worry, that's about 90% of the business workplace staff.
If you really want to stand out, realize that college is its own little world, use the courses to broaden yourself as a person and expect that your next step is to then learn how to actually work. Start by getting yourself part-time work in the field. It will give you a much better view into how to better make use of course selections and give you an excellent idea if you really do want to work in IT as a career at all.
The things I found that I missed out on by not going through a formal degree are things like finance courses, business law, things that would make starting a business a bit less painful. If you get out into the workplace and discover that you aren't one of the sheep, content to live a cubicle life, you will find that the only way out from working for The Man is to start your own business. These courses will help you there.
It's easy to get a degree and get a job to match what it says. It's much harder to find a job that turns out to be what you really want to be doing. Don't limit yourself with a degree or actually the perception that a degree will make your career.
What? No Dominators??? Probably don't make those anymore.
Not only am I sick of hearing all the breathing about 1/3 of the stations on the dial as well as the cable TV broadcasters have dialed into the audio, but now they (Comcast) have taken to compressing the digital image signals so much that they are all pixellated now.
This is what you get for not paying audio engineers enough to live on. These $12/hr broadcast engineers you wind up with are a joke. The rest of us quit to go make a living in IT.
My TTL goes to eleven.
I'm sure there are plenty of people with boxes up running 2.0 still too or there wouldn't be continued effort on it.
For a shell server with the purpose of user account logins yeah it would be o.k. sure but for a web server, in order to harden the box properly you ideally want the box stripped down to its task. That's part of the absurdity of a cgi shell as an access method for a hosting provider. The shell users shouldn't be on the web servers, it's an abomination for a hosting provider. For a home user goofing off or for an intranet server maybe.
Damn. s/should/should\ not/ need more coffee.
X being installed on a server is what I meant, I wasn't clear. IMO 'xterm' should even be there.
People run X on servers? OMG, next thing you know people will be putting unpatched IIS installs on the net.