I would take an offer of assistance from Adolph Hitler
Your problem is that you're then willfully ignoring the fact that Adolf may simply be looking for more victims.
All you need to do is to look at what the Gates Foundation did in its early days: support was strangely codependent on procurement decisions. It seems they have either learned their lesson or learned to hide their tracks better..
I'm the first to agree that Mr Negroponte appears to have somewhat of an ego problem, but that doesn't diminish his analysis of what Intel is doing (and MS
The Wintel club's problem is quite simply that they were not involved in what is technically quite an achievement. I've always wondered why I still have to wait for a system despite having about 300x more power under the hood (and Windows Vista Business is completely hopeless, it's the first system I've had that lags about 2 seconds for a simple system beep and then sounds like it can't quite free enough resources for it. And that on a 'Vista ready' laptop (Sony SZ4))..
So, we have the happy Wintel collective up in arms because they've been shown up as unusable for something that needs to be conservative in resource and energy use. They can't afford industry to realise they've been had for many years, hence the fight.
The problem is that they have more marketing dollars, and both corruption and lack of technological knowledge hasn't exactly died out yet, so it's not going to be nice for a while - until OLPC delivers. Because when they do, the show is over for Wintel.
I'm very familiar with this situation. I had that about 12 years ago when I was involved in developing a country network, and because few understood what we were doing the main telco competition didn't even bother to bid.
When they finally grew a clue (i.e. when we had developed the concept so far that it was clearly visible we had resolved all the problems), they were even trying to give connectivity for free to get a stake..
Too late, but very irritating because you always get people who have only understood 10% of the picture who then go and clamour loudly to "save costs" and thus ruin the whole project framework.
Yes, I know exactly what Mr Negroponte is going through. I'd be livid too - he's had the cold shoulder from them and now he's proven them wrong they're trying to muscle in. Weak. Very weak.
Well, it's a Microsoft statement. I can see that being a statement that will make their new "partner" Novell very happy. Thespian, happy now?
I've worked with Open Source, Free Software, freeware, shareware as well as proprietary for as long as I've been using computers.
They all have their place, rule #1 is that It Has To Work For Me. From a risk management point of view Anything But Microsoft seems to become more and more THE rule to prevent slow recovery and exposure to malware, not to mention the improved costs basis..
It's not on Amazon because it's a limited audience production, and, frankly, I don't expect it to be available for long. You need to go to his website and browse through the products.
You will not find this product on the main page because he's stopped doing card tricks (let's face it, there's little competition in what he does now - the guy is so good it's scary), it's in the section "for magicians only".
For anyone on the Internet I can't see it being a problem to answer the question that will gain you entrance to that section.
You will note one thing, though - he is absolutely meticulous in giving credit to the relevant performers for the elements he used, that impressed me even more than his smoothness. IMHO it's a huge promotion to go and read up on the basics (which he doesn't cover because the DVD is aimed at practising magicians).
I just read The Full Facts of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland, and I would recommend this as basic education for anyone wanting to become aware of manipulation. In this book, Ian shows how 'mentalists', tarot card readers and those who predict the future actually ply their trade. It's a bit too much broken down IMHO, but Ian knows his stuff and brings it with a wry sense of humour (evident in little asides like how to identify an English football fan).
Other stuff to read is anything about the sort of tricks that Derren Brown gets up to - he has done a 2 DVD pack with card tricks of which the second one is mostly about psychological manipulation like how to make people think of one particular card in a full 52 deck.
Study, and be amazed as to just how easy it is to put someone on the wrong track. The "church" (bit of an insult to the word) makes full use of this. Start an argument on false premises and then walk away, witter away at one flaw in a story to invalidate the whole story.. hey! Where did I hear that before?
Part of the reason why we use those specific packages is because we also consider the issue of support and possible outsourcing of any adjustment, bespoke code or improvements.
It's all jolly well to pick any kind of package that promises the earth and/or has good starting motives, but you are trusting your business to this.
The packages I listed are the ones we felt it would be possible to either get paid support for if needed, or would offer us the ability to subcontract our needs if we couldn't meet them internally. In other words, we have maximum flexibility. We need it because the group I work with is international which means multiple nationalities, currencies, languages, legal frameworks and, above all, ability to integrate. The latter was the prime driver to go completely Open Source, it's much easier to get everything standardised across multiple systems.
As for desktops, I fully expect to end Q3 with thin, LTSP based Ubuntu or Kubuntu desktops, and maybe an Asterisk core to bring VoIP inhouse if we feel that Skype is no longer providing what we need (so far, so good, it's a backup option).
Going back to what I started with, this doesn't mean we wholly exclude new developments. The nice thing about a stable core is that you can experiment without blowing things up, and I'm always interested in new ideas (both as a mental exercise and to see if we can improve the way we operate or serve our customers). We just keep core business and 'nice to have' well separated:-).
Pablo, I wish your nation good luck with this project.
I was saddened to see that even this charitable project got quickly buried in commercially driven politics - keep your eye on your goals and you should be fine.
The cost of licensing and IP involved should feature very high in your project as that creates a time bomb under any economic benefit you may have, but NONE should feature so high as the "ability to tinker".
You can't learn about car mechanics by just staring at the car and buying pre-manufactured 'black box' engines, ditto with IT. Open Systems are the only way to go here because you need to understand how things work first - breaking, fixing and changing things so they work for you is the best way for that.
If you need to connect up with other nations going through the same process, I attended a conference at FLOSSPOLS once which had representatives there of the Spanish project in the Extremedura region of Spain. I strongly recommend you contact those Spanish people as they have created a whole infrastructure (i.e. also for business and government use). If you can't find details, contact the Ubuntu project (ubunto.com) instead. I know there have been talks so they should be able to point you in the right direction - and you can then also discuss their 'SchoolTools' project too!
Vtiger is a SugarCRM fork which is IMHO further developed (Sugar seems to have stopped when it went commercial), and in 'further' I include the ability to integrate with practically the whole Office suite. We don't use half of that because we ditched MS Office for OpenOffice.org and, where possible, Open Source we can use instead - the aim is to abandon the Windows platform altogether. (note to Skype: get video to work on Linux).
Ledger SMB is a SQL Ledger fork which started out of frustrreation with unaddressed security issues in SQL Ledger but which has since moved to do a complete code overhaul (i.e. a large debugging session) and is heading for a 1.3 release with a much cleaner code base which will support APIs for integration. Just lurk on the mailing list and you'll see just how active this project is. IMHO a good sign if you're about to commit your business finance to it, but make sure you gave it firewalled. Not because you have to (code seems to be reasonably OK), but because you should (it's your money we're talking about).
Joomla is a CMS which allows you to knock up a website pretty quickly. Set up DB, instal template and off you go, especially if you use Joomla Cloner for backup. It takes a while to get used to, but CMS is the only way to go for an average size business.
You're absolutely right - it's the ONE thing that makes that hacking different from the regular approach.
Personally, I think this is a completely overlooked field (which is understandable as they're all under the table). I think we should immediately seek Congressional funding and investigate if being in physical symbiosis with an attractive member of the opposite sex improves crypto and code breaking performance (I'm using 'physical symbiosis' to indicate that such research shouldn't be limited to just one specific approach - be thorough).
Who knows, Clinton may have simply been ahead of his time 8-).
.. and unless they tie the data to the chip on the controller board, a bit of mechanical work will see it replaced with a board YOU control - bye bye data. If you're not concerned about longetivity of the data you could pollute the platter space and swap them out (a data thief doesn't need years of uptime, only as long as it takes to copy the data elsewhere).
The bit that gets me is that it appears someone let a marketing clown loose on what they've created. "Never" is the right word to get every cracker and his/her mum to have a go, so well done whoever used THAT word (you'll get this anyway, but the use of "Never" is absolutely begging on your knees in global TV commercials, newspaper wide ads and banners to get royally done over with.. (continue the analogy at will, you know what I mean).
Ask DVD Jon what 'never' looks like. WEP keys? Minutes (etc etc). The word doesn't apply, it MAY just be harder - at this moment in time.
Maybe these guys need to spend a bit of time learning at the Institute for General Semantics ("the map is not the territory" etc)..
The problem lies in authenticating the ballots, and ensuring the counting is done properly as well. The postal system has multiple points of failure, for example "lost" post from certain demographics - a technique apparently used in the US elections to control the results in some states. Works better by mail, I guess, all you need is to control the sorting..
So, maybe you need to revise the Ohio results too?
Not a problem, just send me the results when you're done. By post:-).
Quite a few years back I had some work to do in the data basement of a very large bank. An IT contractor had just finished and was about to leave through the maglock controlled doors.
Like many others have reported the Big Red Button was NOT a door release, and I will never forget the guys' face after the mass spindown started and he realised just what he'd pressed. He got exonerated because it had been on the risk reviews for 2 years running, I just don't think anyone expected that someone would prove the point - could have been a bit heavy on the liability cover..
It's quite awesome to be in a room full of noisy gear and hear it collectively spin down (the airco was ducted in). The post event silence is impressive.
I had some old CDs which must have been 4 speed or something, and when they were spun up in a new system (at 48x) they first read (2 secs), and then failed. The drive res-started the spin, I could here it spin up after which there was quite a loud bang.
The CD had come completely to pieces, destroying the optics in the process.
There are TWO lessons from this, though.
(1) Old CDs may not be usable unless you have an old (slow) drive around (2) Copy protection WILL result in information loss. I copied all the old CDs onto new disks - if they had been copy protected I would have lost that data. Without copy protection you can at least keep up with technological progress..
I personally believe the Borland "treat it as a book" license was the most sensible. As long as only one copy was ever active you were compliant. I know that's a sod to prove, but I've been brought up in the belief that someone has to prove my guilt, not that I have to prove my innocence.
That leads me to a fun question for BSA/FAST: if I have a machine for which I have a logo sticker but no longer a proof of purchase, how can you allege it's a copy if the serial number is not used on any other machine in the world? WGA works against you there..
It's been a long time since I've been near any kind of routing, wouldn't that require access to two separate Autonomous Systems? I'd be interested to know how this works, good refresher:-)
I personally thought that using VLANs would be a quicker way to go about it, but that's obviously a more localised solution. But you're right in looking for solutions at network level, there's too much ignoring of DNS TTL values going on (AOL being the example we all love) to make any other measure quick enough.
Comes in various guises, but usually has a detection bar and a couple of special pen holders so the board can track the position of the pens (and the eraser).
(1) You label those who have started to use Ubuntu as people without judgement? Well, sorry, I don't consider myself *that* clueless. I've used Slackware (since it came on floppies), SuSE since v5 or so, RH from when they started, Mandrake, enfin, to cut a long story short, I experiment. And Ubuntu has gone from nothing to my preferred desktop, with Fedora and SuSE running a close 2nd (although I'm not very impressed with OpenSuSE, and the MS tie in makes it less likely I'll ever use it in production).
(2) I know Mark and occasionally meet up with him (not often, we're both rather busy). He is genuine, and genuinely on a mission. The code develops alongside that thinking, which is for me a much stronger argument than anything else to support Ubuntu. I like people that do as they say and he's definitely in that category.
Now, I *am* interested why you call Ubuntu 'hyped', as far as I can tell they deliver. Don't equate interviews and what the press states with reality - I have yet to come across ONE, repeat ONE interview that completely matches what was said, and I've been quoted enough in the press not to expect any different..
.. you STILL have to ensure you commented, in a nice way, before you go and cry wolf. If you get know as the person who goes outside as soon as you find something questionable you're not going to find a job. Mistakes happen too (and are more common than malicious intent)..
The first question to ask is if the students know the rules, and consequences for breaking them.
The second question is if the students understand WHY the rules are there. 80% of the security problems I come across are simply lack of education, and this is a school..
The third question is what the students were trying to reach and what argument there was to stop them. If it was something sensible maybe a solution could be found. Often security is too tight, which creates the desire to work around it.
Combine the above education with dialog about solutions (maybe a cyber cafe?) and you end up at something sensible in collaboration, not in opposition. Users that collaborate are safer in my experience, and education + dialog is usually well worth the investment because it creates insight. Those wannabee hackers may suddenly realise what hazard they cause (hell, even get them involved in discussing the security policies to create shared responsibility).
Sure, there are nut cases who just don't get the point, but they are in my experience rare. It's a matter of bringing it in the right way. Beating them up on first violation isn't productive.
In a big company procurement is handled differently from installation and sometimes gaps appear. We don't know the right circumstances - the installation may not be illegal at all.
It's all well being drastic about it, but the step I've missed here is simply MAKING the observation that they could be short of licenses. Copyright violations don't actually hit staff if they've asked the question or have made the observation, because it's reasonable to assume that your boss wouldn't want to risk prison and thus do the right thing.
Unless, of course, you're the one in charge of license management..
Write an email that states your concern, but camouflage it a bit so it gets responded to.
You could say, "I have been told to install this software on xx machines, but I haven't been able to clearly establish our position on licensing. Could you please confirm you will take care of license compliance?"
The issue is that you have been ordered to install software, not manage licenses, and maybe someone is haggling with MS to get a better price (by threatening to convert to Linux, for instance). The above guarantees that you will have asked the question, and you should save your question and the answer OFFLINE, preferably in a different mail account. As you're not responsible for licensing it's not your problem.
I think the key problem is to find a way to enable the debate without letting defamation creep in. I disagree/entirely/ with trying to shut the site down because that is blunt censorship, but there has to be accountability.
How to impose that without violating the right to privacy is another matter, but it's not right that you go and call someone names without being responsible for your words - what's to stop someone maliciously claiming one of those teachers does strange things with furry animals (I'm keeping this light, I'm sure you can come up with worse)?
So, I think the site idea is good, even though teachers may not like it, but it needs moderation, right of reply and accountability without voiding the anonymous nature (as that would otherwise stop the debate for want of damage to grades and/or expulsion).
Bottomline, however, is that there appears to be quite a disconnect between teachers/management and the students. It would be wise for the teachers to start thinking about that and maybe find a solution for debate closer to home. This is what leadership (and teaching) is supposed to be about..
Slashdot Mirror
Your problem is that you're then willfully ignoring the fact that Adolf may simply be looking for more victims.
All you need to do is to look at what the Gates Foundation did in its early days: support was strangely codependent on procurement decisions. It seems they have either learned their lesson or learned to hide their tracks better..
I'm the first to agree that Mr Negroponte appears to have somewhat of an ego problem, but that doesn't diminish his analysis of what Intel is doing (and MS
The Wintel club's problem is quite simply that they were not involved in what is technically quite an achievement. I've always wondered why I still have to wait for a system despite having about 300x more power under the hood (and Windows Vista Business is completely hopeless, it's the first system I've had that lags about 2 seconds for a simple system beep and then sounds like it can't quite free enough resources for it. And that on a 'Vista ready' laptop (Sony SZ4))..
So, we have the happy Wintel collective up in arms because they've been shown up as unusable for something that needs to be conservative in resource and energy use. They can't afford industry to realise they've been had for many years, hence the fight.
The problem is that they have more marketing dollars, and both corruption and lack of technological knowledge hasn't exactly died out yet, so it's not going to be nice for a while - until OLPC delivers. Because when they do, the show is over for Wintel.
I'm very familiar with this situation. I had that about 12 years ago when I was involved in developing a country network, and because few understood what we were doing the main telco competition didn't even bother to bid.
When they finally grew a clue (i.e. when we had developed the concept so far that it was clearly visible we had resolved all the problems), they were even trying to give connectivity for free to get a stake..
Too late, but very irritating because you always get people who have only understood 10% of the picture who then go and clamour loudly to "save costs" and thus ruin the whole project framework.
Yes, I know exactly what Mr Negroponte is going through. I'd be livid too - he's had the cold shoulder from them and now he's proven them wrong they're trying to muscle in. Weak. Very weak.
Sorry, I though you had that heads up .. :-)
Well, it's a Microsoft statement. I can see that being a statement that will make their new "partner" Novell very happy. Thespian, happy now?
I've worked with Open Source, Free Software, freeware, shareware as well as proprietary for as long as I've been using computers.
They all have their place, rule #1 is that It Has To Work For Me. From a risk management point of view Anything But Microsoft seems to become more and more THE rule to prevent slow recovery and exposure to malware, not to mention the improved costs basis..
Panic, methinks..
It's not on Amazon because it's a limited audience production, and, frankly, I don't expect it to be available for long. You need to go to his website and browse through the products.
You will not find this product on the main page because he's stopped doing card tricks (let's face it, there's little competition in what he does now - the guy is so good it's scary), it's in the section "for magicians only".
For anyone on the Internet I can't see it being a problem to answer the question that will gain you entrance to that section.
You will note one thing, though - he is absolutely meticulous in giving credit to the relevant performers for the elements he used, that impressed me even more than his smoothness. IMHO it's a huge promotion to go and read up on the basics (which he doesn't cover because the DVD is aimed at practising magicians).
Other stuff to read is anything about the sort of tricks that Derren Brown gets up to - he has done a 2 DVD pack with card tricks of which the second one is mostly about psychological manipulation like how to make people think of one particular card in a full 52 deck.
Study, and be amazed as to just how easy it is to put someone on the wrong track. The "church" (bit of an insult to the word) makes full use of this. Start an argument on false premises and then walk away, witter away at one flaw in a story to invalidate the whole story .. hey! Where did I hear that before?
Part of the reason why we use those specific packages is because we also consider the issue of support and possible outsourcing of any adjustment, bespoke code or improvements.
:-).
It's all jolly well to pick any kind of package that promises the earth and/or has good starting motives, but you are trusting your business to this.
The packages I listed are the ones we felt it would be possible to either get paid support for if needed, or would offer us the ability to subcontract our needs if we couldn't meet them internally. In other words, we have maximum flexibility. We need it because the group I work with is international which means multiple nationalities, currencies, languages, legal frameworks and, above all, ability to integrate. The latter was the prime driver to go completely Open Source, it's much easier to get everything standardised across multiple systems.
As for desktops, I fully expect to end Q3 with thin, LTSP based Ubuntu or Kubuntu desktops, and maybe an Asterisk core to bring VoIP inhouse if we feel that Skype is no longer providing what we need (so far, so good, it's a backup option).
Going back to what I started with, this doesn't mean we wholly exclude new developments. The nice thing about a stable core is that you can experiment without blowing things up, and I'm always interested in new ideas (both as a mental exercise and to see if we can improve the way we operate or serve our customers). We just keep core business and 'nice to have' well separated
Pablo, I wish your nation good luck with this project.
:-)
I was saddened to see that even this charitable project got quickly buried in commercially driven politics - keep your eye on your goals and you should be fine.
The cost of licensing and IP involved should feature very high in your project as that creates a time bomb under any economic benefit you may have, but NONE should feature so high as the "ability to tinker".
You can't learn about car mechanics by just staring at the car and buying pre-manufactured 'black box' engines, ditto with IT. Open Systems are the only way to go here because you need to understand how things work first - breaking, fixing and changing things so they work for you is the best way for that.
If you need to connect up with other nations going through the same process, I attended a conference at FLOSSPOLS once which had representatives there of the Spanish project in the Extremedura region of Spain. I strongly recommend you contact those Spanish people as they have created a whole infrastructure (i.e. also for business and government use). If you can't find details, contact the Ubuntu project (ubunto.com) instead. I know there have been talks so they should be able to point you in the right direction - and you can then also discuss their 'SchoolTools' project too!
Good luck
Vtiger is a SugarCRM fork which is IMHO further developed (Sugar seems to have stopped when it went commercial), and in 'further' I include the ability to integrate with practically the whole Office suite. We don't use half of that because we ditched MS Office for OpenOffice.org and, where possible, Open Source we can use instead - the aim is to abandon the Windows platform altogether. (note to Skype: get video to work on Linux).
:-).
Ledger SMB is a SQL Ledger fork which started out of frustrreation with unaddressed security issues in SQL Ledger but which has since moved to do a complete code overhaul (i.e. a large debugging session) and is heading for a 1.3 release with a much cleaner code base which will support APIs for integration. Just lurk on the mailing list and you'll see just how active this project is. IMHO a good sign if you're about to commit your business finance to it, but make sure you gave it firewalled. Not because you have to (code seems to be reasonably OK), but because you should (it's your money we're talking about).
Joomla is a CMS which allows you to knock up a website pretty quickly. Set up DB, instal template and off you go, especially if you use Joomla Cloner for backup. It takes a while to get used to, but CMS is the only way to go for an average size business.
There you go
You're absolutely right - it's the ONE thing that makes that hacking different from the regular approach.
Personally, I think this is a completely overlooked field (which is understandable as they're all under the table). I think we should immediately seek Congressional funding and investigate if being in physical symbiosis with an attractive member of the opposite sex improves crypto and code breaking performance (I'm using 'physical symbiosis' to indicate that such research shouldn't be limited to just one specific approach - be thorough).
Who knows, Clinton may have simply been ahead of his time 8-).
.. and unless they tie the data to the chip on the controller board, a bit of mechanical work will see it replaced with a board YOU control - bye bye data. If you're not concerned about longetivity of the data you could pollute the platter space and swap them out (a data thief doesn't need years of uptime, only as long as it takes to copy the data elsewhere).
The bit that gets me is that it appears someone let a marketing clown loose on what they've created. "Never" is the right word to get every cracker and his/her mum to have a go, so well done whoever used THAT word (you'll get this anyway, but the use of "Never" is absolutely begging on your knees in global TV commercials, newspaper wide ads and banners to get royally done over with.. (continue the analogy at will, you know what I mean).
Ask DVD Jon what 'never' looks like. WEP keys? Minutes (etc etc). The word doesn't apply, it MAY just be harder - at this moment in time.
Maybe these guys need to spend a bit of time learning at the Institute for General Semantics ("the map is not the territory" etc)..
.. or he would have seen this one coming :)
What a goon..
.
:-).
The problem lies in authenticating the ballots, and ensuring the counting is done properly as well. The postal system has multiple points of failure, for example "lost" post from certain demographics - a technique apparently used in the US elections to control the results in some states. Works better by mail, I guess, all you need is to control the sorting..
So, maybe you need to revise the Ohio results too?
Not a problem, just send me the results when you're done. By post
Quite a few years back I had some work to do in the data basement of a very large bank. An IT contractor had just finished and was about to leave through the maglock controlled doors.
:-)
Like many others have reported the Big Red Button was NOT a door release, and I will never forget the guys' face after the mass spindown started and he realised just what he'd pressed. He got exonerated because it had been on the risk reviews for 2 years running, I just don't think anyone expected that someone would prove the point - could have been a bit heavy on the liability cover..
It's quite awesome to be in a room full of noisy gear and hear it collectively spin down (the airco was ducted in). The post event silence is impressive.
And I've not seen anyone quite as white since
I had some old CDs which must have been 4 speed or something, and when they were spun up in a new system (at 48x) they first read (2 secs), and then failed. The drive res-started the spin, I could here it spin up after which there was quite a loud bang.
The CD had come completely to pieces, destroying the optics in the process.
There are TWO lessons from this, though.
(1) Old CDs may not be usable unless you have an old (slow) drive around
(2) Copy protection WILL result in information loss. I copied all the old CDs onto new disks - if they had been copy protected I would have lost that data. Without copy protection you can at least keep up with technological progress..
I personally believe the Borland "treat it as a book" license was the most sensible. As long as only one copy was ever active you were compliant. I know that's a sod to prove, but I've been brought up in the belief that someone has to prove my guilt, not that I have to prove my innocence.
That leads me to a fun question for BSA/FAST: if I have a machine for which I have a logo sticker but no longer a proof of purchase, how can you allege it's a copy if the serial number is not used on any other machine in the world? WGA works against you there..
Ah, I see, that's what you meant. I appreciate the effort, now go and have a beer to recover :-).
It's been a long time since I've been near any kind of routing, wouldn't that require access to two separate Autonomous Systems? I'd be interested to know how this works, good refresher :-)
I personally thought that using VLANs would be a quicker way to go about it, but that's obviously a more localised solution. But you're right in looking for solutions at network level, there's too much ignoring of DNS TTL values going on (AOL being the example we all love) to make any other measure quick enough.
= Ch =
And you base that assessment on what, exactly? Can't be historic trends AFAIK.
There is principly no evidence either way.
= Ch =
Comes in various guises, but usually has a detection bar and a couple of special pen holders so the board can track the position of the pens (and the eraser).
I disagree, for two reasons.
(1) You label those who have started to use Ubuntu as people without judgement? Well, sorry, I don't consider myself *that* clueless. I've used Slackware (since it came on floppies), SuSE since v5 or so, RH from when they started, Mandrake, enfin, to cut a long story short, I experiment. And Ubuntu has gone from nothing to my preferred desktop, with Fedora and SuSE running a close 2nd (although I'm not very impressed with OpenSuSE, and the MS tie in makes it less likely I'll ever use it in production).
(2) I know Mark and occasionally meet up with him (not often, we're both rather busy). He is genuine, and genuinely on a mission. The code develops alongside that thinking, which is for me a much stronger argument than anything else to support Ubuntu. I like people that do as they say and he's definitely in that category.
Now, I *am* interested why you call Ubuntu 'hyped', as far as I can tell they deliver. Don't equate interviews and what the press states with reality - I have yet to come across ONE, repeat ONE interview that completely matches what was said, and I've been quoted enough in the press not to expect any different..
.. you STILL have to ensure you commented, in a nice way, before you go and cry wolf. If you get know as the person who goes outside as soon as you find something questionable you're not going to find a job. Mistakes happen too (and are more common than malicious intent)..
The first question to ask is if the students know the rules, and consequences for breaking them.
The second question is if the students understand WHY the rules are there. 80% of the security problems I come across are simply lack of education, and this is a school..
The third question is what the students were trying to reach and what argument there was to stop them. If it was something sensible maybe a solution could be found. Often security is too tight, which creates the desire to work around it.
Combine the above education with dialog about solutions (maybe a cyber cafe?) and you end up at something sensible in collaboration, not in opposition. Users that collaborate are safer in my experience, and education + dialog is usually well worth the investment because it creates insight. Those wannabee hackers may suddenly realise what hazard they cause (hell, even get them involved in discussing the security policies to create shared responsibility).
Sure, there are nut cases who just don't get the point, but they are in my experience rare. It's a matter of bringing it in the right way. Beating them up on first violation isn't productive.
In a big company procurement is handled differently from installation and sometimes gaps appear. We don't know the right circumstances - the installation may not be illegal at all.
It's all well being drastic about it, but the step I've missed here is simply MAKING the observation that they could be short of licenses. Copyright violations don't actually hit staff if they've asked the question or have made the observation, because it's reasonable to assume that your boss wouldn't want to risk prison and thus do the right thing.
Unless, of course, you're the one in charge of license management..
Write an email that states your concern, but camouflage it a bit so it gets responded to.
You could say, "I have been told to install this software on xx machines, but I haven't been able to clearly establish our position on licensing. Could you please confirm you will take care of license compliance?"
The issue is that you have been ordered to install software, not manage licenses, and maybe someone is haggling with MS to get a better price (by threatening to convert to Linux, for instance). The above guarantees that you will have asked the question, and you should save your question and the answer OFFLINE, preferably in a different mail account. As you're not responsible for licensing it's not your problem.
I think the key problem is to find a way to enable the debate without letting defamation creep in. I disagree /entirely/ with trying to shut the site down because that is blunt censorship, but there has to be accountability.
How to impose that without violating the right to privacy is another matter, but it's not right that you go and call someone names without being responsible for your words - what's to stop someone maliciously claiming one of those teachers does strange things with furry animals (I'm keeping this light, I'm sure you can come up with worse)?
So, I think the site idea is good, even though teachers may not like it, but it needs moderation, right of reply and accountability without voiding the anonymous nature (as that would otherwise stop the debate for want of damage to grades and/or expulsion).
Bottomline, however, is that there appears to be quite a disconnect between teachers/management and the students. It would be wise for the teachers to start thinking about that and maybe find a solution for debate closer to home. This is what leadership (and teaching) is supposed to be about..
If a subocean powerline breaks it could be quite interesting to light a cigarette on the surface, I think..