As someone who does forensic analysis, no, the thing you want to do is not tell an untrained amateur how to try to do it, point them at tools, and hope for the best. It's actually time consuming and can be hard. By far the simplest solution is wipe and reinstall. If you want an actual forensic analysis done, unplug the network cable, step away and DO NOT TOUCH THE BOX AGAIN! Then call a pro.
Everybody's going to tell you the obvious right answer. You wipe the box and start over with a clean install, fully patched, with a firewall and AV. Anything less is really just asking for whatever happens next.
Subsequent to that, you need to have a serious talk with your dad about sharing control over his finances with someone trustworthy (you, maybe). If he's handing out his social security number to any random nutjob who calls him, he's going to give away his life savings to some scammer someday. The time to prevent that is now, not later. I am seriously planning to do that myself, that is put something in place so that when (not if) I'm no longer competent to handle my own affairs, my kids will have the legal ability to seamlessly keep me from bankrupting myself. I have decades before this needs to happen, but the time to do it is when you are of sound, not failing, mind.
I'd also look into putting a fraud warning on his credit report with all three credit bureaus. I'm not going to pretend that's something I know much about, so research it and confirm for yourself what good it will do and what harm before you act. I do think you want to limit the ability of any random goofball who knows your dad's SSN and name from opening credit in his name.
Of course you don't. Reading the terms of things when you buy them is a good idea. I know pretty much all of Slashdot opposes this, and frankly I agree with them, but if you're on this site at all you most likely already know this is how ebooks on these DRMed platforms work.
I love the idea of ebooks. I love my safari subscription. I also love the couple thousand books that line my living room walls because no one will ever take them away from me, they will never expire, and I can let anyone and everyone read them any time I care to. Add to that the fact that some ebooks cost darn near what the real book does, and I have very little use for many ebooks. When they are at a significant discount to the dead tree version, I'll read it and consider it a disposable purchase.
The critical bit of information you're missing is that vaccination doesn't make 100% of people 100% immune. I googled a bit and found a study that showed polio vaccine to be 82% after one dose, 96% after two, and 98% after three.
So there you go. Imagine a room with 100 people in it, all of whom have had their three doses, and then you walk in, shedding active polio virus. Two of those vaccinated individuals contract polio.
In other words, it's been proven and is very well documented.
Actually, banks don't have to sue for this, they can (and sometimes do) simply say that the customer is responsible for the loss, and then you're out the money. If you disagree, you can sue them.
Look, this sort of thing is already done in other industries. I have absolutely no intention of working for $XX/hour writing software for X million users, each of which might conceivably sue me for some nontrivial loss. No way, ain't gonna happen. It's simply financially stupid to do so. What I'd end up doing is exactly what doctors do. Write software that might end up getting me sued for $millions, and have a giant malpractice policy standing by. You'll get your more secure software, but you'll also pay for it because I'm absolutely transferring that cost to you. If the market won't bear what I have to charge, I'll find other work.
How is that better than them paying something that approximates the actual damage they caused? I've never gotten a class action settlement notice that was worth doing anything about it. Woo! A check for 23 cents! Into the shredder.
As I understand it, a few people actually bring the lawsuit, and get actual money. Say $20,000 each. Then a million or so people get 23 cents each, and the lawyers get $500,000. This is a boneheaded system that works for the lawyers and really no one else. Instead, give each of the million people the same $20,000 the filers get. I know. OMG, that'll put companies out of business! Yes. Yes, it will. Perhaps screwing over a million people should put companies out of business. Perhaps then they'll stop doing it.
Until then, class action lawsuits are merely a way to make lawyers rich.
Wearing a funny shirt doesn't make one a prankster. People wear funny shirts all the time.
Incidentally, one of the marks of a good organization, whether governmental or otherwise, is willingness to be criticized. Denying criticism is refusing to entertain the idea that someone outside your organization might possibly see that you're doing something wrong. Criticism is good. It makes you better if you bother to listen to it and sort the valid from the invalid.
Cloud Computing = Running your software and storing your data on a computer that you do not own and cannot control
Here's my problem. I was doing that 20 years ago. I know others were doing it longer ago than that. If that's truly all cloud computing is, then cloud computing is precisely nothing new at all.
IMO, cloud is a real thing, but it entails more than just putting your apps and data on someone else's server.
I haven't forgotten. My university education was 75% taxpayer funded. Were that not true, my loan payments would have been 4x higher. Still well worth it for me.
the one concrete suggestion they have come up to save money is to simply ban all university research.
When I worked for a university, research was not paid for by the university, it was paid for by external grants. The university tacked a hefty percentage on top of that to cover their costs, so overall, university research was a cash cow, not a cost.
I'll answer that one. Because education requires educators. Educators have to eat, which means someone has to pay them. Education requires materials, whether of the books and pencils variety, or IT infrastructure and course materials. These also cost money to make. Traditional education requires buildings holding classrooms and dorms. Those cost money, too. As a result, education is not and never will be free.
Incidentally, public education is also not free. You pay for it through your taxes.
I have a degree from a top tier US university. I paid for it with loans that had a payment less than my car payment. My salary went up 10x more than the loan cost upon graduation. Education IS worthwhile if you get one that actually has a career future, and don't massively overpay for it. Yes, it's entirely possible to pay way more for your education than you should, and there are people who are happy to sell you an education for a lot of money that has no hope of getting you a decent return on it.
Education can and should be cheaper. As long as there's massive demand to get into the big name, high price universities, it won't get cheaper.
Eh, almost. This is why it should be a true "inter" net. If Saudi Arabia doesn't want those TLDs to resolve, they can implement it on their name servers. If the US does, they can implement that on their name servers.
Democracy is great, but what I like even more is choices. I'd abhor living in Saudi Arabia, but if that's your kind of thing, go ahead, just leave me alone to live the way I want over here.
I'm curious, can you point to any nation that has successfully printed it's way out of debt?
Printing money to pay debts isn't really different from partially defaulting on them. We can certainly do either, but there are consequences to both. If you're willing to swear off borrowing from the nations you just stiffed, by all means do it. Unfortunately, I don't think the US has any credible way to stop borrowing from outside its borders in the near future.
If the US experiences a major economic collapse, there is no place in the world where you won't feel the effects of that. Or at least, no place in the world where you can hold a job as an "IT researcher".
Yep. Pretty much this. If we get into a hole we can't get out of, we'll simply not pay back all that money we borrowed from the rest of you. That sounds really ugly until you look at the interest rates we're paying you. Really low, aren't they? That implies all of you think the likelihood of a US default is very, very low.
That's not to say we don't need to get our financial ship in order. We do. Not doing so is the path to being the next Greece or Spain. You can only borrow your way to temporary prosperity, and the cost is your children's poverty.
Considering cost to educate a student per year is something like $6-7K around these parts, nah, $5/kid isn't expensive. It may not be competitive, in that you can get the job done for less. Then again, NY is the rocket-scientist city that paid something like $600 million for a system to manage time and attendance. $7.5 million could be a huge bargain.
Few customers have the knowledge and experience to touch the hardware and see if it's "done right". If they had that much expertise in-house, they'd probably just set it up themselves.
I don't know about "few", but certainly there's a large population of small to mid-sized businesses that have no need to run their own datacenters. Of course, I wouldn't agree that you need to run a "data center" if you're talking about relatively few machines. The companies I work with are very large. They absolutely have the knowledge and experience to do this themselves, and for cheaper than cloud providers can do it. Nevertheless, the lure of the buzzword is strong, and will remain so until enough people are bitten, meaning either suffer some kind of unexpected and unplanned failure, or more often, things go just fine, but cost more than they used to.
But for the vast majority of customers that just want someplace to host a few servers, nearly any cloud provider is going to be better than doing it themselves
Probably true. If you're looking at a few servers, the simple cost of owning the hardware is unattractive vs. renting them. And yes, I can tell you from personal experience, small companies whose primary job is not IT are prone to screwing very important things up, like not doing backups, not testing them, not patching anything ever, having default passwords, etc.
There is a role for cloud. I don't dispute that. I dispute that merely punting the problem to someone else without considering the impact on YOUR business if they botch it is a good idea. If you're a startup running on a shoestring budget, maybe it's the only option you have. If so, the only option you have is by definition the best one.
This is actually one of the major risks with "cloud". When you run your own data centers, you can touch the hardware, talk to the people, and check behind them to make sure things are actually being done right. In the worst case with cloud, you simply trust that "their data is safe", when in fact it might not be at all. In the less bad case, you get a nice contract with SLAs that specify exactly what data being safe means, and what recourse you have if they blow it. This is still not great, because if the past 5 years have taught you nothing else, they should have taught you that YES companies will make bets that end their business if they bet wrong.
I wouldn't say don't use the so-called cloud providers. Just don't naively believe they're doing everything right just because they haven't had a catastrophic failure or screwed up YOUR data yet.
You don't. You can register in a country-specific TLD. The current system is really rather stupid, with the TLDs becoming all but meaningless. If you want wide exposure, get a.com, regardless of whether you're a commercial enterprise or not. Better yet, get.*, because you wouldn't want anyone else to "steal" your name, even if they happen to run a nonprofit, school, or whatever else with a similar name to yours.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who does forensic analysis, no, the thing you want to do is not tell an untrained amateur how to try to do it, point them at tools, and hope for the best. It's actually time consuming and can be hard. By far the simplest solution is wipe and reinstall. If you want an actual forensic analysis done, unplug the network cable, step away and DO NOT TOUCH THE BOX AGAIN! Then call a pro.
Everybody's going to tell you the obvious right answer. You wipe the box and start over with a clean install, fully patched, with a firewall and AV. Anything less is really just asking for whatever happens next.
Subsequent to that, you need to have a serious talk with your dad about sharing control over his finances with someone trustworthy (you, maybe). If he's handing out his social security number to any random nutjob who calls him, he's going to give away his life savings to some scammer someday. The time to prevent that is now, not later. I am seriously planning to do that myself, that is put something in place so that when (not if) I'm no longer competent to handle my own affairs, my kids will have the legal ability to seamlessly keep me from bankrupting myself. I have decades before this needs to happen, but the time to do it is when you are of sound, not failing, mind.
I'd also look into putting a fraud warning on his credit report with all three credit bureaus. I'm not going to pretend that's something I know much about, so research it and confirm for yourself what good it will do and what harm before you act. I do think you want to limit the ability of any random goofball who knows your dad's SSN and name from opening credit in his name.
Of course you don't. Reading the terms of things when you buy them is a good idea. I know pretty much all of Slashdot opposes this, and frankly I agree with them, but if you're on this site at all you most likely already know this is how ebooks on these DRMed platforms work.
I love the idea of ebooks. I love my safari subscription. I also love the couple thousand books that line my living room walls because no one will ever take them away from me, they will never expire, and I can let anyone and everyone read them any time I care to. Add to that the fact that some ebooks cost darn near what the real book does, and I have very little use for many ebooks. When they are at a significant discount to the dead tree version, I'll read it and consider it a disposable purchase.
The critical bit of information you're missing is that vaccination doesn't make 100% of people 100% immune. I googled a bit and found a study that showed polio vaccine to be 82% after one dose, 96% after two, and 98% after three.
So there you go. Imagine a room with 100 people in it, all of whom have had their three doses, and then you walk in, shedding active polio virus. Two of those vaccinated individuals contract polio.
In other words, it's been proven and is very well documented.
Actually, banks don't have to sue for this, they can (and sometimes do) simply say that the customer is responsible for the loss, and then you're out the money. If you disagree, you can sue them.
Look, this sort of thing is already done in other industries. I have absolutely no intention of working for $XX/hour writing software for X million users, each of which might conceivably sue me for some nontrivial loss. No way, ain't gonna happen. It's simply financially stupid to do so. What I'd end up doing is exactly what doctors do. Write software that might end up getting me sued for $millions, and have a giant malpractice policy standing by. You'll get your more secure software, but you'll also pay for it because I'm absolutely transferring that cost to you. If the market won't bear what I have to charge, I'll find other work.
How is that better than them paying something that approximates the actual damage they caused? I've never gotten a class action settlement notice that was worth doing anything about it. Woo! A check for 23 cents! Into the shredder.
As I understand it, a few people actually bring the lawsuit, and get actual money. Say $20,000 each. Then a million or so people get 23 cents each, and the lawyers get $500,000. This is a boneheaded system that works for the lawyers and really no one else. Instead, give each of the million people the same $20,000 the filers get. I know. OMG, that'll put companies out of business! Yes. Yes, it will. Perhaps screwing over a million people should put companies out of business. Perhaps then they'll stop doing it.
Until then, class action lawsuits are merely a way to make lawyers rich.
Wearing a funny shirt doesn't make one a prankster. People wear funny shirts all the time.
Incidentally, one of the marks of a good organization, whether governmental or otherwise, is willingness to be criticized. Denying criticism is refusing to entertain the idea that someone outside your organization might possibly see that you're doing something wrong. Criticism is good. It makes you better if you bother to listen to it and sort the valid from the invalid.
Here's my problem. I was doing that 20 years ago. I know others were doing it longer ago than that. If that's truly all cloud computing is, then cloud computing is precisely nothing new at all.
IMO, cloud is a real thing, but it entails more than just putting your apps and data on someone else's server.
And everybody tries to pretend it doesn't cost more in the long run.
In other words, it has no such properties, but some people believe it does.
I trust they also dispensed with that whole abstinence thing too, then?
I haven't forgotten. My university education was 75% taxpayer funded. Were that not true, my loan payments would have been 4x higher. Still well worth it for me.
When I worked for a university, research was not paid for by the university, it was paid for by external grants. The university tacked a hefty percentage on top of that to cover their costs, so overall, university research was a cash cow, not a cost.
I'll answer that one. Because education requires educators. Educators have to eat, which means someone has to pay them. Education requires materials, whether of the books and pencils variety, or IT infrastructure and course materials. These also cost money to make. Traditional education requires buildings holding classrooms and dorms. Those cost money, too. As a result, education is not and never will be free.
Incidentally, public education is also not free. You pay for it through your taxes.
I have a degree from a top tier US university. I paid for it with loans that had a payment less than my car payment. My salary went up 10x more than the loan cost upon graduation. Education IS worthwhile if you get one that actually has a career future, and don't massively overpay for it. Yes, it's entirely possible to pay way more for your education than you should, and there are people who are happy to sell you an education for a lot of money that has no hope of getting you a decent return on it.
Education can and should be cheaper. As long as there's massive demand to get into the big name, high price universities, it won't get cheaper.
Eh, almost. This is why it should be a true "inter" net. If Saudi Arabia doesn't want those TLDs to resolve, they can implement it on their name servers. If the US does, they can implement that on their name servers.
Democracy is great, but what I like even more is choices. I'd abhor living in Saudi Arabia, but if that's your kind of thing, go ahead, just leave me alone to live the way I want over here.
I'm curious, can you point to any nation that has successfully printed it's way out of debt?
Printing money to pay debts isn't really different from partially defaulting on them. We can certainly do either, but there are consequences to both. If you're willing to swear off borrowing from the nations you just stiffed, by all means do it. Unfortunately, I don't think the US has any credible way to stop borrowing from outside its borders in the near future.
Yep. Pretty much this. If we get into a hole we can't get out of, we'll simply not pay back all that money we borrowed from the rest of you. That sounds really ugly until you look at the interest rates we're paying you. Really low, aren't they? That implies all of you think the likelihood of a US default is very, very low.
That's not to say we don't need to get our financial ship in order. We do. Not doing so is the path to being the next Greece or Spain. You can only borrow your way to temporary prosperity, and the cost is your children's poverty.
Considering cost to educate a student per year is something like $6-7K around these parts, nah, $5/kid isn't expensive. It may not be competitive, in that you can get the job done for less. Then again, NY is the rocket-scientist city that paid something like $600 million for a system to manage time and attendance. $7.5 million could be a huge bargain.
Riiiight. And what do T10KC drives cost again?
I don't know about "few", but certainly there's a large population of small to mid-sized businesses that have no need to run their own datacenters. Of course, I wouldn't agree that you need to run a "data center" if you're talking about relatively few machines. The companies I work with are very large. They absolutely have the knowledge and experience to do this themselves, and for cheaper than cloud providers can do it. Nevertheless, the lure of the buzzword is strong, and will remain so until enough people are bitten, meaning either suffer some kind of unexpected and unplanned failure, or more often, things go just fine, but cost more than they used to.
Probably true. If you're looking at a few servers, the simple cost of owning the hardware is unattractive vs. renting them. And yes, I can tell you from personal experience, small companies whose primary job is not IT are prone to screwing very important things up, like not doing backups, not testing them, not patching anything ever, having default passwords, etc.
There is a role for cloud. I don't dispute that. I dispute that merely punting the problem to someone else without considering the impact on YOUR business if they botch it is a good idea. If you're a startup running on a shoestring budget, maybe it's the only option you have. If so, the only option you have is by definition the best one.
This is actually one of the major risks with "cloud". When you run your own data centers, you can touch the hardware, talk to the people, and check behind them to make sure things are actually being done right. In the worst case with cloud, you simply trust that "their data is safe", when in fact it might not be at all. In the less bad case, you get a nice contract with SLAs that specify exactly what data being safe means, and what recourse you have if they blow it. This is still not great, because if the past 5 years have taught you nothing else, they should have taught you that YES companies will make bets that end their business if they bet wrong.
I wouldn't say don't use the so-called cloud providers. Just don't naively believe they're doing everything right just because they haven't had a catastrophic failure or screwed up YOUR data yet.
The WWW is not the Internet. You're looking a little black, there, Kettle.
You don't. You can register in a country-specific TLD. The current system is really rather stupid, with the TLDs becoming all but meaningless. If you want wide exposure, get a .com, regardless of whether you're a commercial enterprise or not. Better yet, get .*, because you wouldn't want anyone else to "steal" your name, even if they happen to run a nonprofit, school, or whatever else with a similar name to yours.
Good point. He should price it at $250,000. He'll sell one copy to every major news outlet that doesn't want to get scooped.
Scuse me. I need to go patent this.