That's 1250W for the *entire rack* - six servers (three of which are enterprise grade), router, VoIP, two 24-port switches, modem, WAP
It's a hobby. Some people fix cars, some people build model planes, I play with servers. Electricity is about $0.06/kWh here. It's cheaper than a lot of hobbies out there. If I were doing it for purely practical reasons, then I would probably get rid of everything except the Athlon II X2 box ( 45W normal load) and a NAS.
It gets nice and toasty, even idling, but it's in the basement which stays cool year-round and keeps the fan noise where it won't bother anyone. The waste heat is pointed at the water heater a few feet away (only place the rack would fit), so hopefully it's saving me a few bucks by keeping that a little warmer.
Anecdotally, don't trust whomever wired your building. Found out the hard way that one outlet in the basement is, for unknown reasons, on the same circuit as the entire second floor... including the master bathroom. Got my girlfriend a new hairdryer for Christmas and didn't have any UPS units then... you can see where this is going. On the bright side, it only fried the power supply of the backup server ($20 to replace). I spent the $50 to get a trio of 1500VA UPS off Craigslist and moved the whole thing to it's own circuit that it only shares with a few CFLs in the basement.
This would be Step 1 - getting control of the money. Once you have control of the money, then you can worry about moving it to an untraceable, irreversible account or withdrawing it as cash. Step 1 is merely the most difficult to do.
I agree on hardware costs. The most I've paid for a server is $200 and that's for dual dual-core Xeons, 16GB RAM, 6 SCSI drives on a RAID card, redundant PSUs and all very clean. Most of my stuff was free or dirt cheap off Craigslist. Memory is the only thing that may need to be upgraded on most servers and that can be pretty cheap - especially if you're using desktop hardware.
I just have to put in my username, password and some sort of online PIN or security question for each account. As far as I'm aware, only one of my banks even offers any sort of additional security like you describe.
I have a half dozen servers and assorted other gear in a rack at home primarily because of bandwidth. With a home Internet connection, the download rate is pretty good but upload is atrocious. For anything that requires 2-way communication, the upload restriction is a killer. None of the local ISPs, including Frontier and TWC, offer any consumer-level packages with remotely good upload speeds no matter how fast download is.
On the bright side, home servers don't draw a lot of power depending on the hardware. My entire rack draws about 1250W under normal load, but only the file server and terminal server stay on 24/7 (as well as the router, VoIP, modem, etc). Those devices account for about 400W. By my estimate, I pay about $240/yr or $20/mo in energy costs. My most expensive server, a dual dual-core Xeon with 16GB RAM, I picked up used for $200 and can expect it to last a minimum of 2 years, so let's round it up to another $10/mo. That's $30/mo to run a pretty beefy server for home use. Throw in some power saving options and it's competitive with what I've seen for hosting. If I had built a server with low power consumption in mind, I'm sure I could get something sufficient that draws under 100W for about $400.
Of course, energy costs vary widely by location and availability. If you're someplace with cheaper energy and you value network speed, I'd go with a home server. If you need to be able to connect to it from anywhere or energy costs are high, go with hosted.
Most financial institutions do batch processing, not real-time processing. Your average bank will do all of the deposits first, around 3pm each business day, and then do all withdrawals. That's the main reason most transactions take a minimum of one business day.
Some banks, like ING Direct, even allow you to transfer money between two phones if you have their app installed. Steal someone's phone, find they have their passwords saved, install the app on your phone and transfer away.
I have accounts with First Niagara (they acquired my HSBC account), ING Direct (recently acquired by CapitalOne) and Ally Banks. I frequently move money between them through the web interface - real easy to set up, you just need to be able to log in to both accounts you're transferring between. Furthermore, my girlfriend has an account with Keybank and we transfer money from her account to mine about once a month to cover living expenses (I pay for almost everything up front, she pays me her share monthly). All I needed from her to set it up was her password.
If I get your banking login info, I can probably get a good chunk of your money before you realize it. Fortunately, many banks offer email alerts for transfers over X amount or if another account has been added. However, if you target someone who doesn't check their balance or email more than once or twice a week, you can probably get away with it before they know it's happening.
1. Latency - All these little, cheap wifi networks are going to add up to huge latency before you make it out of your neighborhood, nevermind another city. 2. Assholes - There will always be a few guys who are an essential link connecting a neighborhood or street to the rest of the network that decide to turn their wifi off just to fuck with people.
So... what's the point? You're either limited to a LAN-sized network within a building or campus, or you're laying fiber yourself to create a WAN and you'll end up spending more than the bandwidth they can't afford anyway. At any rate, the point is people want access to Internet resources, which requires connection to an ISP at some point in the chain and therefore bandwidth charges.
I don't think he was referring to hacker vs cracker in the sense that "hackers are good, crackers are bad". He was saying "No hacking, good or bad, occurred here. Just good, old-fashioned criminal activity that just happens to involve a computer." This is mostly obvious by the fact he never mentioned the term "cracker".
It broke the expected functionality of third-party websites. But I agree that Internet is not Facebook. At most, you might be able to claim Facebook broke a chunk of the WWW, but certainly not the Internet as only websites were affected. It's like saying a minor design flaw in a part used by many different car manufacturers completely disrupted our entire transportation infrastructure.
I use Facebook, I admit it. However, I only use Facebook for Facebook. If I log in to another site, I don't use the "Connect with Facebook" option to log in. If the site only allows you to log in with Facebook, I leave. I've yet to find a mission critical site like banks, etc that use Facebook or another service. Therefore, I'm doing my part to save humanity from the single point of failure.
The third-party sites load a chunk of Facebook onto their site, so if you're logged into Facebook then you're logged into that chunk on the third-party site. The third-party site doesn't have your login or information - it's passed between you and the chunk of Facebook on that site. Or at least, that's how it's supposed to work.
It's not the 90's anymore... you can load a page that's connected to dozens of different services that are almost completely independent of each other and the page you're on.
I think some places encourage short passwords. StudentLoans.com is Citibank's site for, you guessed it, student loans. The MAX password length is eight characters. That only encouraged me to pay off my loan to them faster just so I wouldn't have to deal with security like that.
Of course, nowhere in the signup do they warn you that only the first eight characters of your password will be accepted, nor does the login box limit you to inputting eight characters. I signed up with abcdef12345678 and tried signing in with abcdef12345678 but it gave me password refused. By luck, I tried abcdef12 and it worked. Screw Citi and all of the others still using password schemes from the early 90s
A good professor will work with a student who already knows the material to help them advance to the next level and to refine their code from functional to beautiful.
I completely forget about Exxon unless it's in a news story, but they seem to be doing ok without me. Something about 7 billion other humans on the planet.
I'm saying it's inefficient compared to batch files when it comes to the very simplest scripts, but once you need to do anything complex, BASH is much easier and more powerful to use.
FreeDOSH would fit right in the Linux culture of giving things names with multiple meanings. (In this case, dosh is slang for money).
I have converted a few batch files to BASH. BASH is surprisingly inefficient for simple batch file tasks, but quickly makes up for it once you add any complexity at all.
If you're familiar with the system, a text interface will win in speed almost every time, although keyboard shortcuts and a well thought-out UI can make it neck and neck.
If you're unfamiliar with the system, then a GUI is usually better as pictographs can be much more intuitive.
The ones I'm familiar with, such as SeaTools, just use DOS as bootable environment. I don't see any real reason they couldn't have used Linux or even a light version of XP if there were no modern DOS. Where there's a competent programmer and a problem, there's a solution.
That covers the hardware, which is mostly irrelevant to anti-virus other than how long it takes to scan. What service pack is installed? What patches? Hotfixes? Third party programs? What malware is on there? What files are corrupt? What settings has the user changed? Is it Home or Pro? Once an XP machine has a year or two since the last OS reinstall, there's thousands of variables. Once an XP machine has four or five years with an average user, it's almost unrecognizable.
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That's 1250W for the *entire rack* - six servers (three of which are enterprise grade), router, VoIP, two 24-port switches, modem, WAP
It's a hobby. Some people fix cars, some people build model planes, I play with servers. Electricity is about $0.06/kWh here. It's cheaper than a lot of hobbies out there. If I were doing it for purely practical reasons, then I would probably get rid of everything except the Athlon II X2 box ( 45W normal load) and a NAS.
It gets nice and toasty, even idling, but it's in the basement which stays cool year-round and keeps the fan noise where it won't bother anyone. The waste heat is pointed at the water heater a few feet away (only place the rack would fit), so hopefully it's saving me a few bucks by keeping that a little warmer.
Anecdotally, don't trust whomever wired your building. Found out the hard way that one outlet in the basement is, for unknown reasons, on the same circuit as the entire second floor... including the master bathroom. Got my girlfriend a new hairdryer for Christmas and didn't have any UPS units then... you can see where this is going. On the bright side, it only fried the power supply of the backup server ($20 to replace). I spent the $50 to get a trio of 1500VA UPS off Craigslist and moved the whole thing to it's own circuit that it only shares with a few CFLs in the basement.
This would be Step 1 - getting control of the money. Once you have control of the money, then you can worry about moving it to an untraceable, irreversible account or withdrawing it as cash. Step 1 is merely the most difficult to do.
I agree on hardware costs. The most I've paid for a server is $200 and that's for dual dual-core Xeons, 16GB RAM, 6 SCSI drives on a RAID card, redundant PSUs and all very clean. Most of my stuff was free or dirt cheap off Craigslist. Memory is the only thing that may need to be upgraded on most servers and that can be pretty cheap - especially if you're using desktop hardware.
I just have to put in my username, password and some sort of online PIN or security question for each account. As far as I'm aware, only one of my banks even offers any sort of additional security like you describe.
I have a half dozen servers and assorted other gear in a rack at home primarily because of bandwidth. With a home Internet connection, the download rate is pretty good but upload is atrocious. For anything that requires 2-way communication, the upload restriction is a killer. None of the local ISPs, including Frontier and TWC, offer any consumer-level packages with remotely good upload speeds no matter how fast download is.
On the bright side, home servers don't draw a lot of power depending on the hardware. My entire rack draws about 1250W under normal load, but only the file server and terminal server stay on 24/7 (as well as the router, VoIP, modem, etc). Those devices account for about 400W. By my estimate, I pay about $240/yr or $20/mo in energy costs. My most expensive server, a dual dual-core Xeon with 16GB RAM, I picked up used for $200 and can expect it to last a minimum of 2 years, so let's round it up to another $10/mo. That's $30/mo to run a pretty beefy server for home use. Throw in some power saving options and it's competitive with what I've seen for hosting. If I had built a server with low power consumption in mind, I'm sure I could get something sufficient that draws under 100W for about $400.
Of course, energy costs vary widely by location and availability. If you're someplace with cheaper energy and you value network speed, I'd go with a home server. If you need to be able to connect to it from anywhere or energy costs are high, go with hosted.
Most financial institutions do batch processing, not real-time processing. Your average bank will do all of the deposits first, around 3pm each business day, and then do all withdrawals. That's the main reason most transactions take a minimum of one business day.
Some banks, like ING Direct, even allow you to transfer money between two phones if you have their app installed. Steal someone's phone, find they have their passwords saved, install the app on your phone and transfer away.
I have accounts with First Niagara (they acquired my HSBC account), ING Direct (recently acquired by CapitalOne) and Ally Banks. I frequently move money between them through the web interface - real easy to set up, you just need to be able to log in to both accounts you're transferring between. Furthermore, my girlfriend has an account with Keybank and we transfer money from her account to mine about once a month to cover living expenses (I pay for almost everything up front, she pays me her share monthly). All I needed from her to set it up was her password.
If I get your banking login info, I can probably get a good chunk of your money before you realize it. Fortunately, many banks offer email alerts for transfers over X amount or if another account has been added. However, if you target someone who doesn't check their balance or email more than once or twice a week, you can probably get away with it before they know it's happening.
It's a valid concept except for two issues:
1. Latency - All these little, cheap wifi networks are going to add up to huge latency before you make it out of your neighborhood, nevermind another city.
2. Assholes - There will always be a few guys who are an essential link connecting a neighborhood or street to the rest of the network that decide to turn their wifi off just to fuck with people.
Chromium is open source, Chrome is not.
The two are similar but not identical.
So... what's the point? You're either limited to a LAN-sized network within a building or campus, or you're laying fiber yourself to create a WAN and you'll end up spending more than the bandwidth they can't afford anyway. At any rate, the point is people want access to Internet resources, which requires connection to an ISP at some point in the chain and therefore bandwidth charges.
I don't think he was referring to hacker vs cracker in the sense that "hackers are good, crackers are bad". He was saying "No hacking, good or bad, occurred here. Just good, old-fashioned criminal activity that just happens to involve a computer." This is mostly obvious by the fact he never mentioned the term "cracker".
It broke the expected functionality of third-party websites. But I agree that Internet is not Facebook. At most, you might be able to claim Facebook broke a chunk of the WWW, but certainly not the Internet as only websites were affected. It's like saying a minor design flaw in a part used by many different car manufacturers completely disrupted our entire transportation infrastructure.
I use Facebook, I admit it. However, I only use Facebook for Facebook. If I log in to another site, I don't use the "Connect with Facebook" option to log in. If the site only allows you to log in with Facebook, I leave. I've yet to find a mission critical site like banks, etc that use Facebook or another service. Therefore, I'm doing my part to save humanity from the single point of failure.
The third-party sites load a chunk of Facebook onto their site, so if you're logged into Facebook then you're logged into that chunk on the third-party site. The third-party site doesn't have your login or information - it's passed between you and the chunk of Facebook on that site. Or at least, that's how it's supposed to work.
It's not the 90's anymore... you can load a page that's connected to dozens of different services that are almost completely independent of each other and the page you're on.
I think some places encourage short passwords. StudentLoans.com is Citibank's site for, you guessed it, student loans. The MAX password length is eight characters. That only encouraged me to pay off my loan to them faster just so I wouldn't have to deal with security like that.
Of course, nowhere in the signup do they warn you that only the first eight characters of your password will be accepted, nor does the login box limit you to inputting eight characters. I signed up with abcdef12345678 and tried signing in with abcdef12345678 but it gave me password refused. By luck, I tried abcdef12 and it worked. Screw Citi and all of the others still using password schemes from the early 90s
A good professor will work with a student who already knows the material to help them advance to the next level and to refine their code from functional to beautiful.
Of course, not all professors are good.
I completely forget about Exxon unless it's in a news story, but they seem to be doing ok without me. Something about 7 billion other humans on the planet.
I suppose Linus on the desktop is better than Linus on the laptop, he would probably break it.
I'm saying it's inefficient compared to batch files when it comes to the very simplest scripts, but once you need to do anything complex, BASH is much easier and more powerful to use.
FreeDOSH would fit right in the Linux culture of giving things names with multiple meanings. (In this case, dosh is slang for money).
I have converted a few batch files to BASH. BASH is surprisingly inefficient for simple batch file tasks, but quickly makes up for it once you add any complexity at all.
If you're familiar with the system, a text interface will win in speed almost every time, although keyboard shortcuts and a well thought-out UI can make it neck and neck.
If you're unfamiliar with the system, then a GUI is usually better as pictographs can be much more intuitive.
The ones I'm familiar with, such as SeaTools, just use DOS as bootable environment. I don't see any real reason they couldn't have used Linux or even a light version of XP if there were no modern DOS. Where there's a competent programmer and a problem, there's a solution.
That covers the hardware, which is mostly irrelevant to anti-virus other than how long it takes to scan. What service pack is installed? What patches? Hotfixes? Third party programs? What malware is on there? What files are corrupt? What settings has the user changed? Is it Home or Pro? Once an XP machine has a year or two since the last OS reinstall, there's thousands of variables. Once an XP machine has four or five years with an average user, it's almost unrecognizable.