I just spent some time reading the articles on deadspin, along with a myriad of comments that really don't paint the complainers in a very good light either. Sure PayPal's policy might be annoying in a case like this, but name calling, mud slinging, foot stamping and whining is not the way to make your case. They're not keeping the money... they're following the policies they've put in place, and publicly posted, to protect their own interests as well as those of the vast number of customers they serve every day. In case you haven't noticed, there's a shitload of bad people out there who spend every waking hour of the day trying to take hard-earned money out of our pockets with a never-ending parade of scams, rip-offs, lies, etc... and many times try to do so using PayPal. Making it inconvenient for a few might just possibly be saving tons of money for many would-be targets. It's not a desire to piss you off, it's a by-product of doing large scale business in a hostile environment. If you think ganging up on PayPal is going to force them into changing their policies, you're most likely in for yet more disappointment in your life. Maybe it would be more beneficial to take some of the energy being put into slamming PayPal and redirecting it towards public education.... and no, I don't mean letting the world know that PayPal sucks.. I mean let your readers benefit from your situation by describing what went wrong and how they might avoid the same trap if they choose to use PayPal for such an activity. It's called constructive journalism.... it wins awards and shit... really.
... It's the negligent PC owners. As long as the general Internet-connected public is dumb enough to let this kind of crap continue the bad guys will prevail. The average user just can't be convinced to keep their PC patched, their antivirus def's current or sweep for malware regularly. The average user just can't resist reading those oh-so-friggin-cute, malware laden eGreetingCards, launching email attachments promising a fun new game or nekkid pics of Brittany, or spending countless hours surfing infected porn sites (and you thought we didn't know.. right?). The average user buys a computer, gets the neighbor's kid to get them on the net and calls it good. See where I'm goin' here? The average computer user needs to be a bit more educated in the ways of safe computing. They need to know that most of the content they encounter is malicious and when they ignore the threats they make it worse for everyone... not just themselves. It's not about Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac (even though Linux rules baby!) it's about bad, but clever people vs. nice, but stupid people... IMHO
Can you say this again a little louder? Maybe someone at Microsoft will hear it.. They've got the promoting part down pat... and they have what they call "enhancements"... but that whole "not trying to degrade competitors" thing they seem to be missing.
Dropping a virus into unused memory space on network cards is old news... I can't remember how many years ago it was when I first heard of it being done... but it was quite a few:)
It seems to me that DRM and SPAM have a whole lot in common. They both flourish because we, the consumers, encourage them to do so. If EVERYONE simply deleted SPAM as soon as it hit their inboxes, it would simply wither and disappear... however there are dumbasses that actually patronize the purveyors of SPAM and make is profitable for the mass-mailing scumbags, ensuring that our spam-filters will never get bored. The same can be said about companies that sell products with debilitating DRM. Their restricted-use products continue to be profitable because we continue to buy them... we whine, cry, complain, piss and moan... but we still buy them. I personally have purchased hundreds and hundreds of music CD's over the years. I have encoded each and every one of them to high bitrate MP3's which live on my home media server and the original CD media is packed away, safe and sound in my basement. If I want to listen to some of my music in the car, I burn some MP3's to a disc and I'm good to go. If I want to take some music for a walk, I drag some MP3's over to my Treo and I'm good to go. Now some of the more recently purchased CD's have not been easy to add to my MP3 collection and as a result I no longer patronize the merchants that insist on making it hard to use what I've legally purchased from them.... and the merchant boycott extends to all of the products sold by that company. It's my personal choice and my consumer voice that I'm exercising. If more people stood up for themselves in this way the DRM infested products would no longer be profitable... see where I'm going here? (Sony... are you listening?)
Our annual expense for M$ corporate volume licensing would feed, clothe and heat a small country, yet when installing our standard XP corporate image on my new company owned laptop and running updates, WGA tells me I'm running a bogus copy... yet my co-worker installs the very same image, from the very same CD, on his identical new company owned laptop and it's just fine. This is the problem.. the billions of dollars Microsoft invested in developing this anti-piracy technology was NOT money well spent as the technology is not reliable..... yet this beta software is forced upon us anyway. If I did indeed install a downloaded/bootlegged copy and I got found out, well then woot! shame on me and congrats to Bill for catching me... but when we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to Bill Inc. and still get labeled as "pirates" because they can't differentiate between beta code and production-ready applications, that is disturbing... disturbing enough that our new CIO is budgeting for development of a new corporate desktop based on Open Source solutions to occupy the thousands of desktops on our network. If other entities start thinking this way, MS's anit-piracy measure may just result in more losses that piracy itself.
We mean you no harm.... here.. sit down... have a coke..... enjoy this dry tootsie-roll... you are happy... you are happy.... hey... why don't you turn on the TV... I think American Gladiators is on.... watch American Gladiators.... we are your friends... have anoher coke... there's a new episode of Survivor coming on soon.... we are your friends..
I'd guess I fall into the "heavy user" category. We're on the 5-disc plan and sometime rotate through 8 - 10 discs per week. We don't subscribe to cable or satellite TV, we don't watch local programming, so pretty much everything that lights up the home theater is on DVD. With me, the chiq and the kids, 8-10 discs a week is average. NetFlix has a return depot right here in Portland, so I drop 'em in the box at the central post office early in the morning and either that same day or then next day, they've shipped out the next batch... like clockwork. This DVD "pipeline" has been moving without delays or interruption for a couple of years now. The policy may say that they'll delay shipments to heavy users, but I just haven't seen it happen here.
A decade ago it was not unusual for corporate networks to have little or no restrictions on end users. Workstations, servers and even printers had publicly routable addresses and free access to the internet as it was. Back then we had to deal with relatively few miscreants... the occasional "ping of death", "teardrop" or the dreaded "smurf" attack. Malicious activities could be deflected by a few simple firewall rules.
Flip the calendar ahead 10 years... The internet is ripe with malicious content. Organized groups of crackers, writing exploit code for every system vulnerability imaginable... Script kiddies gaining "respect" relative to the number of machines they can compromise for addition to their bot-nets... Spammers building their armies of compromised boxes to anonymously sell viagra and fake rolexes... the list goes on and on. In short, the need for network security is real and sometimes the end user is inconvenienced in the process of running a tight ship.
In an ideal corporate world, the bad guys would stay out and the users would have everything they want. In the real world there is a balancing act that weighs a security "best effort" against business needs. It sounds to me as if the original poster's company is in the early stages of making this happen. Security measures are being taken and users are feeling the pain. The next step is for the users to identify the needs that are not being met and challenge their management and IT resources to provide for those needs while making a best effort to do so securely. This, unfortunately, often involves plenty of corporate political bullshit and associated headaches, but if you can show a LEGIT business need, it should make it through the process.
I manage all internet connectiity and perimeter security for a very large healthcare foundation that includes several hospitals, physicians offices and research facilities. Not a day goes by without some kind of request for additional access to some resource. Most are reasonable and can be accomodated with little or no impact on security. Some are not so reasonable politely rejected with a comprehensive explanation of why it's not gonna happen and where applicable, alternative solutions are offered.
As for the original poster's situation... should end users be applying system patches? hell no. IT folks get paid to do that. Should individual workstations be sending SMTP traffic beyond the network perimeter? hell no! IT folks should make a suitably secured SMTP gateway available. Should users be able to go anywhere on the 'net they want? hell no! The company pays for the bandwidth and owns the workstations... they can say "no" to anything they consider to be unrelated to doing business. If users need to get somewhere on the filtered list, it should be easy enough to justify it to management. Do the homework and make your case... you'll get much farther than someone that just pisses and moans about how restrictive those IT bastards are.
If the RIAA *wants* to be a world super-power with the muscle to dictate international political behaviour, let let's treat them like the "super-power" their actions define them as......which of course means it's time for some RIAA carpet bombing ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H er.. "police actions".. We can justify it.. they ARE a weapon of mass destruction.
that if one didn't have anything intelligent to say, it generally best to not say anything at all... except, of course, when posting a reply to something like this:)
my '94 sedan deville has realtime and average mpg on the dash.. useful?? eh.. maybe when i'm really low on fuel and trying to 'economize' my way to the next gas station:)
I'm soooooo glad this was posted yet again.. there were a few things I missed in the first three stories and my BACK button is broken.. (yes.. I've called the help desk about the broken BACK button)
Forget the long hair.. nevermind the tie-dye shirt.. I'm sure those wouldn't make any difference at all to my neighbors, but I don't have a single Windows machine in the house! I'd never fit in.
Back in the day when I was programming for Lockheed, they called me a "Software Engineer"... but now that I think about it, I've *always* loved bananas.
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I just spent some time reading the articles on deadspin, along with a myriad of comments that really don't paint the complainers in a very good light either. Sure PayPal's policy might be annoying in a case like this, but name calling, mud slinging, foot stamping and whining is not the way to make your case. They're not keeping the money... they're following the policies they've put in place, and publicly posted, to protect their own interests as well as those of the vast number of customers they serve every day. In case you haven't noticed, there's a shitload of bad people out there who spend every waking hour of the day trying to take hard-earned money out of our pockets with a never-ending parade of scams, rip-offs, lies, etc... and many times try to do so using PayPal. Making it inconvenient for a few might just possibly be saving tons of money for many would-be targets. It's not a desire to piss you off, it's a by-product of doing large scale business in a hostile environment. If you think ganging up on PayPal is going to force them into changing their policies, you're most likely in for yet more disappointment in your life. Maybe it would be more beneficial to take some of the energy being put into slamming PayPal and redirecting it towards public education.... and no, I don't mean letting the world know that PayPal sucks.. I mean let your readers benefit from your situation by describing what went wrong and how they might avoid the same trap if they choose to use PayPal for such an activity. It's called constructive journalism.... it wins awards and shit... really.
... It's the negligent PC owners. As long as the general Internet-connected public is dumb enough to let this kind of crap continue the bad guys will prevail. The average user just can't be convinced to keep their PC patched, their antivirus def's current or sweep for malware regularly. The average user just can't resist reading those oh-so-friggin-cute, malware laden eGreetingCards, launching email attachments promising a fun new game or nekkid pics of Brittany, or spending countless hours surfing infected porn sites (and you thought we didn't know.. right?). The average user buys a computer, gets the neighbor's kid to get them on the net and calls it good. See where I'm goin' here? The average computer user needs to be a bit more educated in the ways of safe computing. They need to know that most of the content they encounter is malicious and when they ignore the threats they make it worse for everyone... not just themselves. It's not about Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac (even though Linux rules baby!) it's about bad, but clever people vs. nice, but stupid people... IMHO
Can you say this again a little louder? Maybe someone at Microsoft will hear it.. They've got the promoting part down pat... and they have what they call "enhancements"... but that whole "not trying to degrade competitors" thing they seem to be missing.
Dropping a virus into unused memory space on network cards is old news... I can't remember how many years ago it was when I first heard of it being done... but it was quite a few :)
It seems to me that DRM and SPAM have a whole lot in common. They both flourish because we, the consumers, encourage them to do so. If EVERYONE simply deleted SPAM as soon as it hit their inboxes, it would simply wither and disappear... however there are dumbasses that actually patronize the purveyors of SPAM and make is profitable for the mass-mailing scumbags, ensuring that our spam-filters will never get bored. The same can be said about companies that sell products with debilitating DRM. Their restricted-use products continue to be profitable because we continue to buy them... we whine, cry, complain, piss and moan... but we still buy them. I personally have purchased hundreds and hundreds of music CD's over the years. I have encoded each and every one of them to high bitrate MP3's which live on my home media server and the original CD media is packed away, safe and sound in my basement. If I want to listen to some of my music in the car, I burn some MP3's to a disc and I'm good to go. If I want to take some music for a walk, I drag some MP3's over to my Treo and I'm good to go. Now some of the more recently purchased CD's have not been easy to add to my MP3 collection and as a result I no longer patronize the merchants that insist on making it hard to use what I've legally purchased from them.... and the merchant boycott extends to all of the products sold by that company. It's my personal choice and my consumer voice that I'm exercising. If more people stood up for themselves in this way the DRM infested products would no longer be profitable... see where I'm going here? (Sony... are you listening?)
Recently hired Microsoft executive, Montgomery Burns, was recently overheard saying...
"...Smithers.... get me Novell on the phone.... I've got... a plan...... Mwaahaahaahaaa!"
Our annual expense for M$ corporate volume licensing would feed, clothe and heat a small country, yet when installing our standard XP corporate image on my new company owned laptop and running updates, WGA tells me I'm running a bogus copy... yet my co-worker installs the very same image, from the very same CD, on his identical new company owned laptop and it's just fine. This is the problem.. the billions of dollars Microsoft invested in developing this anti-piracy technology was NOT money well spent as the technology is not reliable..... yet this beta software is forced upon us anyway. If I did indeed install a downloaded/bootlegged copy and I got found out, well then woot! shame on me and congrats to Bill for catching me... but when we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to Bill Inc. and still get labeled as "pirates" because they can't differentiate between beta code and production-ready applications, that is disturbing... disturbing enough that our new CIO is budgeting for development of a new corporate desktop based on Open Source solutions to occupy the thousands of desktops on our network. If other entities start thinking this way, MS's anit-piracy measure may just result in more losses that piracy itself.
..... but I can't stop laughing !!
You mean if you've got skype, you've got hot ChiXors from EU and Asia calling you? What have I been missing?!?!
We mean you no harm.... here.. sit down... have a coke..... enjoy this dry tootsie-roll... you are happy... you are happy.... hey... why don't you turn on the TV... I think American Gladiators is on.... watch American Gladiators.... we are your friends... have anoher coke... there's a new episode of Survivor coming on soon.... we are your friends..
I'd guess I fall into the "heavy user" category. We're on the 5-disc plan and sometime rotate through 8 - 10 discs per week. We don't subscribe to cable or satellite TV, we don't watch local programming, so pretty much everything that lights up the home theater is on DVD. With me, the chiq and the kids, 8-10 discs a week is average. NetFlix has a return depot right here in Portland, so I drop 'em in the box at the central post office early in the morning and either that same day or then next day, they've shipped out the next batch... like clockwork. This DVD "pipeline" has been moving without delays or interruption for a couple of years now. The policy may say that they'll delay shipments to heavy users, but I just haven't seen it happen here.
... I had some of the drugs these guys are doing... they must be excellent!
A decade ago it was not unusual for corporate networks to have little or no restrictions on end users. Workstations, servers and even printers had publicly routable addresses and free access to the internet as it was. Back then we had to deal with relatively few miscreants... the occasional "ping of death", "teardrop" or the dreaded "smurf" attack. Malicious activities could be deflected by a few simple firewall rules.
Flip the calendar ahead 10 years... The internet is ripe with malicious content. Organized groups of crackers, writing exploit code for every system vulnerability imaginable... Script kiddies gaining "respect" relative to the number of machines they can compromise for addition to their bot-nets... Spammers building their armies of compromised boxes to anonymously sell viagra and fake rolexes... the list goes on and on. In short, the need for network security is real and sometimes the end user is inconvenienced in the process of running a tight ship.
In an ideal corporate world, the bad guys would stay out and the users would have everything they want. In the real world there is a balancing act that weighs a security "best effort" against business needs. It sounds to me as if the original poster's company is in the early stages of making this happen. Security measures are being taken and users are feeling the pain. The next step is for the users to identify the needs that are not being met and challenge their management and IT resources to provide for those needs while making a best effort to do so securely. This, unfortunately, often involves plenty of corporate political bullshit and associated headaches, but if you can show a LEGIT business need, it should make it through the process.
I manage all internet connectiity and perimeter security for a very large healthcare foundation that includes several hospitals, physicians offices and research facilities. Not a day goes by without some kind of request for additional access to some resource. Most are reasonable and can be accomodated with little or no impact on security. Some are not so reasonable politely rejected with a comprehensive explanation of why it's not gonna happen and where applicable, alternative solutions are offered.
As for the original poster's situation... should end users be applying system patches? hell no. IT folks get paid to do that. Should individual workstations be sending SMTP traffic beyond the network perimeter? hell no! IT folks should make a suitably secured SMTP gateway available. Should users be able to go anywhere on the 'net they want? hell no! The company pays for the bandwidth and owns the workstations... they can say "no" to anything they consider to be unrelated to doing business. If users need to get somewhere on the filtered list, it should be easy enough to justify it to management. Do the homework and make your case... you'll get much farther than someone that just pisses and moans about how restrictive those IT bastards are.
Best of luck.
If the RIAA *wants* to be a world super-power with the muscle to dictate international political behaviour, let let's treat them like the "super-power" their actions define them as... ...which of course means it's time for some RIAA carpet bombing ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H er.. "police actions".. We can justify it.. they ARE a weapon of mass destruction.
... that Microsoft now holds the patent on T & A ?? That certainly encourages a large viewer audience.
this is simply the most retarded thing I've read today.... and I read a LOT of retarded things.
set up a porn server at a lan-party..
My kids read your honor students email...
that if one didn't have anything intelligent to say, it generally best to not say anything at all... except, of course, when posting a reply to something like this :)
my '94 sedan deville has realtime and average mpg on the dash.. useful?? eh.. maybe when i'm really low on fuel and trying to 'economize' my way to the next gas station :)
Stop it SCO!... All this laughing is starting to hurt!
April Fool's day was over two weeks ago... this story is just a little bit late, doncha think?
I'm soooooo glad this was posted yet again.. there were a few things I missed in the first three stories and my BACK button is broken.. (yes.. I've called the help desk about the broken BACK button)
Forget the long hair.. nevermind the tie-dye shirt.. I'm sure those wouldn't make any difference at all to my neighbors, but I don't have a single Windows machine in the house! I'd never fit in.
Back in the day when I was programming for Lockheed, they called me a "Software Engineer"... but now that I think about it, I've *always* loved bananas.