This is a false dichotomy. We can improve the infant mortality rates in the USA and help infants in 3rd world countries. The skills required are different. In this country we need improved hospital standards, better doctor training, increased access to prenatal care, and better education and care for expectant mothers in general. In Brazil they need plastic backpacks with incubators. These guys had the skills and the ideas to do the later, but not the ability to do the former, so they did what they could. It is far more then bitching about it on Slashdot will ever do.
The problems of the US health care system are entirely political. Doctors, inventors, engineers, can't do much to help on the large scale. We have the technology, we have the funding, we have the infrastructure. These guys saw a problem it was within their power to fix, or at least try to help, so they did it.
I had a customer with a Drobo. They bought it as a backup device. In my experience it was quite terrible compared to stuffing a bunch of drives in a box and running FreeNas or something on it. The device itself is quite expensive, and we had lots of problems with it, and finally wound up relegating it to a 3rd tier backup role. Among the problems we had; 1. It takes a LONG time to rebuild. It took 3 days to rebuild after a drive failure, during which another drive failure would have caused complete data loss. 2. I/O performance was sub par. I don't remember the exact rates, but in our testing backups would take 3x as long to the Drobo as they would to a simple 1 tb USB drive. 3. We ran into issues with very large files (>50 gigabytes) which the filesystem it was formatted in supported without issue. 4. When we had a hardware failure in the device, which caused it to constantly fail a drive that independent testing showed was fine, and despite the customer purchasing the additional "Drobocare" extended warranty, between getting the run around from their support (who kept making the same suggestions over and over instead of escalating the case) it took over a month to get it replaced, and by the time it was done it would have been cheaper to throw it in the trash. I wouldn't want to rely on them for anything.
Overall it was a very negative experience. The only thing I could recommend them for would be for graphic artists or something that works solo and doesn't have the tech skills to set up a better solution.
The unions of the Prison Guards are one of the biggest players in the "prisoner industry". Even in government run prisons, they have a vested interest in high prisoner populations, and have a lot of political clout. Anytime a politician tries to reform prisons, he can be guaranteed to be slammed for being "soft on crime". The reality is most prisoners are from the poor and minorities and have little to no political clout. They are an easy target, and the few brave enough to stand up for their rights are trampled down by the reflex to "punish" rather then reform.
If that is the case, why pull it when they got "caught"? There is no "source" to compare too, the crack is made by decompiling the original exe into assembly, looking for the DRM checks, and removing them or replacing them with code that always returns the check as passed. The crack exe is normally much smaller then the original, because a lot of assembly has been stripped out. Given the nature of the work and the age of the game, it's doubtful the original group is even around, much less willing to assist an entity that spends most of it's time calling crackers like them the scum of the universe, responsible for every lost sale since the beginning of time.
At the time, it was normal to have working cracks within 24 hours of release, so it can't be that difficult. Given the only way to prove the binary is harmless is to go through it line by line in assembly, it would be easier to develop a crack from scratch then verify an existing one, especially considering they have access to the source to look and see exactly where the DRM would be called to start with.
I think the crack is probably harmless, 99% of them are. But every time you run an exe as admin(as most of the people who buy this on steam will), you are pretty much letting it do whatever it wants. And that means caution needs to be exercised, especially when the exe has been modified by a source that is inherently untrustworthy. Verifying a binary is harmless is pretty much impossible, even ones made without malicious intent can be dangerous because of bugs. So we are left to the source of the binary to give us our strongest indicator of whether or not it is safe. In this case Rockstar is claiming to be the source, because gamers will trust them, but the actual source is an unknown, unverifiable hacker group known only by an alias and an irc channel. Since the main technical benefit of purchasing the retail product (ethical implications aside) is NOT having to run binaries from shady hacker groups, this is a betrayal of their customers.
The bigger problem is the game industry is always telling us game cracks are full of viruses and trojans. And while I generally don't believe them, I wouldn't use a 3rd party game crack on a pc that had any sensitive information on it. In this case, they are redistributing a binary that they didn't code, and without extensive analysis (ie more work then creating a new patch from scratch) have no way to tell it does not contain malicious code. The fact that Rockstar distributed a binary of unknown origin with no Q+A done on it is a bad, bad thing.
That's an accounting problem, not a technical problem. It can be solved quickly and easily. Raise the pay to whatever is necessary to attract appropriate talent. HR departments across the world somehow manage to figure this out. I know government jobs are fond of pay grades and other such nonsense, but if our legislators gave a crap about the security and prosperity of our nation they could fix the issue in an afternoon.
It's a sad state of affairs, but when you think about it, modern ISP's must be treated as a malicious and disruptive man in the middle attack when it comes to DNS. Not only do they constantly interfere in proper dns operation to run various scams, they do so blatantly and with no fear of recrimination. DNSSEC can't get here fast enough, I just hope ISPs don't start rewriting destination addresses to continue their abuse.
Nlite is nice, but a number of drivers have odd issues that require weird hacks when slipstreaming. I always use the mass storage pack from http://driverpacks.net/ after I use nlite but before I create the iso. I have yet to find a system it didn't support, and it keeps from wasting a lot of time and effort when you can reuse the same cd over hundreds of different controllerrs.
Re:It should read 'stoopid people hath spoken'
on
Terry Childs Found Guilty
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Every little piss-ant city employee is not a highly paid professional who designed, built, and maintained the city governments entire network infrastructure. When the street sweepers refuse to turn their keys in to anyone but they Mayor, tell them to fuck off. When someone who you have given a lot of money and entrusted with the security and reliability of the systems that keep critical city infrastructure wants 10 minutes of your time, it's probably a good idea to fucking listen. If the city's top lawyer wanted a word with the mayor on a matter he considered urgent, do you think he'd wait?
The whole thing is a farce. Terry Childs may have deserved to be fired. From the sounds of it, he allowed himself to become a critical, irreplaceable part of the infrastructure, which in of itself is a good reason to fire him. Clearly his ego and misguided sense of dedication to his job was clouding his judgment. His managers should be fired for being completely incompetent. They allowed a situation to develop where Childs was irreplaceable. They then decided to fire him, but developed no plan on how to smoothly transition away. And after they fired him, and realized how incredibly they had fucked up, they threw him in jail, turning a bad situation into a disaster. They passed over repeated chances to defuse the situation, all to save face. They proceeded to try their best to ruin a man's life just to avoid admitting they had made mistakes, and it looks like they have succeeded. By all accounts the city's network worked flawlessly the entire time. They were apparently convinced he would use his passwords to bring the network down just because he was upset about being fired, but there is no evidence he attempted to do so or would have attempted. To do so would have destroyed his career, that he clearly cared a lot about if he invested the time and effort into getting a CCIE. Furthermore, it's doubtful that had he given all the passwords, he would have lost his ability to do so. Given how much they relied on him, and his knowledge of the network, he couldn't have found a way even if they changed all the passwords he gave them? Theres always a backup account somewhere, or a forgotten out-of-band management tool, etc.
The precedent this court case leaves is "support your former employers for free, forever, or go to jail". I for one am not looking forward to getting calls from a former employer at 3 am because even though I left 6 months ago, they forgot to ask me for the password to the backup system, and now it's on the fritz, and I refuse to answer and tell them how to login, and the account credentials, they will call the cops.
Not all promises are of equal merit. Most are too vague to have any real meaning, some are much more important then others. Consider (from your link) "No. 119: Appoint a special adviser to the president on violence against women". He could knock that out in 5 minutes and still have time for a beer afterward. No one will oppose it, so he expends no political capital nor threatens any big campaign spenders. Consider a broken promise: "No. 511: Recognize the Armenian genocide" I intentionally chose an example that he could accomplish just as easily. He needs only write it down and sign his name. You can't blame Congress for it. But he hasn't done it, because it is no longer politically convenient to do so. He made it clear in his campaign he intended to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he has instead dove deeper in.
There's some bullshit in modern computer hardware design too though. Consider X86. It's inferior to man architectures, but it still exists because the install base for it is so huge it can't be stopped. BIOS seriously sucks, they are all different, love to use arcane terms, often vary wildly even in models form the same vendor in the same product line, and the process to upgrade them is often fraught with danger. Printers need drivers, that are generally platform specific, even on basic models. Hard drives can fail (and fail often) in ways that silently corrupt data with no indication to the user or the OS. ECC has existed for decades yet consumer machines never have it, leading to memory problems causing seemingly random, unrelated issues, that only an in depth low level memory analysis can solve ( requiring you to know the problem before you know the cause). Hardware RAID is often arcane, and a simple mistake can destroy your entire array. Manufacturers save pennies on parts like capacitors by using parts with ratings lower then the design required, resulting in expensive repairs. OEM's release equipment using draft or early revisions of specs that cause weird, hard to diagnose compatibility problems. SSD's could be the single largest performance increase for your average office user in 5-10 years, but they are severely limited because we do not have a good technology to interface with them, and shoehorn them into the tech used for mechanical drives for compatibility reasons. If you were to design the PC platform from scratch today, there's a lot of arcane, outdated cruft you could remove that's only there for backwards compatibility reasons.
Not going to "those" sites is not enough anymore. An employee of ours recently got a virus from a pdf exploit from the website for the Professional photographer for a family wedding. Her website got hacked, and without realizing it she was infecting all the customers she sent links to review their photos so they could order copies. I confirmed it myself with a VM. It blew right through a fully updated AV, and reader plug-in was only about 30 days out of date. Telling users not to go to the "bad" places is not an answer. Staying up to date is way more complicated then it should be, and the most frequent offender is Adobe.
I realize that, but it still only legally runs on Apple hardware. So the price/performance/power of the new xserve's would have to beat their existing Intel boxes ( wherever they get them from) to make it worthwhile, or even interesting. It's one thing to beat them at specific workloads with something fairly exotic (like ARM, or IBM Power chips), if you can beat them on more or less identical architectures even with Apple's significant price premium, especially when they would have to pay for OS X server and they get Windows and Linux/BSD for free, it would mean somewhere in their current system is huge inefficiency. If you can show them what that is, that all their engineers have missed, I'm sure they would hire you in a heartbeat. I just did a quick comparison, a new Xserve configured the way I would configure it for a web server, compared to an almost identical dell server, the price difference was a little over $3,000.
If you can make Mac servers running OS X beat their existing intel servers on price, performance, and power consumption (presumably the goal of the whole experiment) I think they would be extremely interested.
Pfft, you guys are small time compared to us here in Florida. We surrounded 3 sides of our state with ocean and the last side with Georgia and Alabama, making any over the border excursions likely to be either very unpleasant or very wet. It's a 6 hour drive from Miami to the nearest state border. Only Alaska and Hawaii can beat us.
The UPnP standard lacks any authentication mechanism. Turning it on means anything in your network can open any ports to anywhere it wants. According to this site https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/347812 and here http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/flash-upnp-attack-faq/ there is even a flash exploit that can be used with uPnP to reconfigure your router. UPnP was dead on arrival. Any router vendor that doesn't ship with it off by default is a retard.
There is, it's called uPnP. It sucks, terribly. It was made by a pack of gibbering idiots. Different vendors having dick sizing competitions managed to implement it in ways that are completely incompatible and broken. The home users stupid enough to really need it own cheap, shitty routers (often provided by their ISP) that implement it in a broken manner if it all. The users with better routers that implement it correctly all disable it, because the creators did not bother to include any sort of authentication, making it a security hole (also the fact that even in the best of conditions it only works to sporadically). If you want the router to just accept a text file, which presumably means logging into the router, and manually uploading it, how is that any easier then setting the port forwards? How do you handle it when it wants to forward a port that is already forwarded to a different ip? How do you handle it when a lazy game dev (and it will happen) just says fuck and sets all the ports open? Look at any support forum for a modern multiplayer game. There will be people with NAT issues, and the support staffs first (and often only) suggestion is to either remove the firewall completely of forward everything to the PC.
Setting port forwards is simple on any decent router. If your router makes it complicated, blame the vendor. You don't need anything special, you don't need an external server to do NAT traversal, you just need a screen to come up when you host the game telling you to forward port X (you only need one per game, more then that is bad design) to ip Y, where Y is the IP of the system you are on. If you feel generous, put a link to portforward.com or something to help them find documentation. If they can't figure that out, they probably should not be opening ports to begin with. Point them at the nearest gamestop and tell them to purchase an xbox 360 and an xbox live subscription they aren't ready for the real internet.
"The H1B's (as opposed to "outsourced jobs") are paid the same as an American worker would." That's bullshit. The job market is just that, a market. Supply and demand. Restrict supply wages go up, increase supply wages go down. Any increase in the supply automatically reduces wages. If there really is a shortage of skilled IT workers, how about investing in education? If people see wages on the rise, you can guarantee more will seek education in the field. If we aren't turning out qualified candidates, look for the reason why. Our math and science education sucks. Importing the products of other, more successful education systems merely hides the fact and covers it up for a little while, until eventual wages between us and them normalize to the point they have no interest in coming here. I for one am not interested in turning America into a 3rd world shit hole so you can find the cheap programmers you want to make some extra profit right now. If there is a real lack of talent, we need a long term solution, and that means improving education, improving access to the education, and letting the market set wages that actually makes the time, effort, and money spent on that education a sound investment.
Furthermore, if we are going to allow immigration (and I think we definitely should) there are much, much better ways then the H1-B program. Ways that lead to citizenship, and a real investment in the future of our country. Ways that enable them to bring their families here, to be represented fairly in our government, and to quit their job if their boss is being abusive or paying them an unfair wage without fear of being deported. H1-B is and always has been a shortcut to cheap labor in the immigration system. If the regular system is to slow and corrupt, FIX THAT, don't make shortcuts.
Because everyone knows the state attorney general is always eager to royally piss off the huge, multinational corporation with an army of lawyers who is headquartered in his state and contributes a massive amount of tax revenue and jobs to the local economy. Especially when the accusation comes from some people off the internet who aren't even in his jurisdiction and he is completely unqualified to even understand the nature of the attacks beyond "bad people doing bad things according to this guy....on the internet". If its not child porn or drugs, or can make a big flashy headline, they aren't interested. And the actual data centers where the actual evidence might be are probably spread all over the world.
As a youth in high school, I knew the passwords for 90% of the administration. With it I could have changed the grades, class schedule, modify the student record, or even suspend any student in any school in the entire county. How did I know it? I didn't hack anything. Teachers frequently told me their passwords so I could help them with computer problems (the only full time IT staff at the school was hired because he was someone's cousin, and a good basketball coach, and the county wouldn't give them funding to hire an actual basketball coach). It didn't take long for me to realize they followed a simple pattern based off the teacher's name. It was an easy jump to realize the administrators had the same pattern. They were supposed to change it when they logged in the first time but few knew how and even fewer bothered. I could have easily caused a lot of mischief, accessed confidential student records, or boosted my grades (something that would never be noticed because the scantron system teachers used to input grades frequently made errors, and administrators would fix them with only verbal confirmation) but I didn't, because it would have meant violating the trust of a couple of excellent educators who had truly gone above and beyond in a system that rewarded politics and actively punished excellence.
The point being, security in schools is often terrible, and it does not require hacking skills to acquire the credentials or access to systems a student should not have access to.
If you already have a Windows environment, using AD and Exchange, it is generally easier to just pay MS their pound of flesh to use their client then bother fighting with a "free" solution. If anyone knows a free solution that can pull account and profile info from AD, server info from AD (or otherwise auto config based off the user logged in without resorting to maintenance intensive logon scripts) and support encryption, centralized logging, clients for multiple platforms, redundant servers, etc without resorting to hiring on a programmer or consultant to make some heavily customized solution (that will require more consultants to update and maintain later on) I'd very much like to hear about it. For very large organizations it would be worth it, but for most it's cheaper in the long run to just buy MS's drop in and go solution. That's assuming of course you have a Windows environment. If you don't, all bets are off.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a false dichotomy. We can improve the infant mortality rates in the USA and help infants in 3rd world countries. The skills required are different. In this country we need improved hospital standards, better doctor training, increased access to prenatal care, and better education and care for expectant mothers in general. In Brazil they need plastic backpacks with incubators. These guys had the skills and the ideas to do the later, but not the ability to do the former, so they did what they could. It is far more then bitching about it on Slashdot will ever do.
The problems of the US health care system are entirely political. Doctors, inventors, engineers, can't do much to help on the large scale. We have the technology, we have the funding, we have the infrastructure. These guys saw a problem it was within their power to fix, or at least try to help, so they did it.
I had a customer with a Drobo. They bought it as a backup device. In my experience it was quite terrible compared to stuffing a bunch of drives in a box and running FreeNas or something on it. The device itself is quite expensive, and we had lots of problems with it, and finally wound up relegating it to a 3rd tier backup role. Among the problems we had;
1. It takes a LONG time to rebuild. It took 3 days to rebuild after a drive failure, during which another drive failure would have caused complete data loss.
2. I/O performance was sub par. I don't remember the exact rates, but in our testing backups would take 3x as long to the Drobo as they would to a simple 1 tb USB drive.
3. We ran into issues with very large files (>50 gigabytes) which the filesystem it was formatted in supported without issue.
4. When we had a hardware failure in the device, which caused it to constantly fail a drive that independent testing showed was fine, and despite the customer purchasing the additional "Drobocare" extended warranty, between getting the run around from their support (who kept making the same suggestions over and over instead of escalating the case) it took over a month to get it replaced, and by the time it was done it would have been cheaper to throw it in the trash. I wouldn't want to rely on them for anything.
Overall it was a very negative experience. The only thing I could recommend them for would be for graphic artists or something that works solo and doesn't have the tech skills to set up a better solution.
In related news, ShakaUVM is upset about the kids on his lawn, music these days, and how television never has the shows he likes anymore.
The unions of the Prison Guards are one of the biggest players in the "prisoner industry". Even in government run prisons, they have a vested interest in high prisoner populations, and have a lot of political clout. Anytime a politician tries to reform prisons, he can be guaranteed to be slammed for being "soft on crime". The reality is most prisoners are from the poor and minorities and have little to no political clout. They are an easy target, and the few brave enough to stand up for their rights are trampled down by the reflex to "punish" rather then reform.
If that is the case, why pull it when they got "caught"? There is no "source" to compare too, the crack is made by decompiling the original exe into assembly, looking for the DRM checks, and removing them or replacing them with code that always returns the check as passed. The crack exe is normally much smaller then the original, because a lot of assembly has been stripped out. Given the nature of the work and the age of the game, it's doubtful the original group is even around, much less willing to assist an entity that spends most of it's time calling crackers like them the scum of the universe, responsible for every lost sale since the beginning of time.
At the time, it was normal to have working cracks within 24 hours of release, so it can't be that difficult. Given the only way to prove the binary is harmless is to go through it line by line in assembly, it would be easier to develop a crack from scratch then verify an existing one, especially considering they have access to the source to look and see exactly where the DRM would be called to start with.
I think the crack is probably harmless, 99% of them are. But every time you run an exe as admin(as most of the people who buy this on steam will), you are pretty much letting it do whatever it wants. And that means caution needs to be exercised, especially when the exe has been modified by a source that is inherently untrustworthy. Verifying a binary is harmless is pretty much impossible, even ones made without malicious intent can be dangerous because of bugs. So we are left to the source of the binary to give us our strongest indicator of whether or not it is safe. In this case Rockstar is claiming to be the source, because gamers will trust them, but the actual source is an unknown, unverifiable hacker group known only by an alias and an irc channel. Since the main technical benefit of purchasing the retail product (ethical implications aside) is NOT having to run binaries from shady hacker groups, this is a betrayal of their customers.
The bigger problem is the game industry is always telling us game cracks are full of viruses and trojans. And while I generally don't believe them, I wouldn't use a 3rd party game crack on a pc that had any sensitive information on it. In this case, they are redistributing a binary that they didn't code, and without extensive analysis (ie more work then creating a new patch from scratch) have no way to tell it does not contain malicious code. The fact that Rockstar distributed a binary of unknown origin with no Q+A done on it is a bad, bad thing.
That's an accounting problem, not a technical problem. It can be solved quickly and easily. Raise the pay to whatever is necessary to attract appropriate talent. HR departments across the world somehow manage to figure this out. I know government jobs are fond of pay grades and other such nonsense, but if our legislators gave a crap about the security and prosperity of our nation they could fix the issue in an afternoon.
It's a sad state of affairs, but when you think about it, modern ISP's must be treated as a malicious and disruptive man in the middle attack when it comes to DNS. Not only do they constantly interfere in proper dns operation to run various scams, they do so blatantly and with no fear of recrimination. DNSSEC can't get here fast enough, I just hope ISPs don't start rewriting destination addresses to continue their abuse.
Nlite is nice, but a number of drivers have odd issues that require weird hacks when slipstreaming. I always use the mass storage pack from http://driverpacks.net/ after I use nlite but before I create the iso. I have yet to find a system it didn't support, and it keeps from wasting a lot of time and effort when you can reuse the same cd over hundreds of different controllerrs.
Every little piss-ant city employee is not a highly paid professional who designed, built, and maintained the city governments entire network infrastructure. When the street sweepers refuse to turn their keys in to anyone but they Mayor, tell them to fuck off. When someone who you have given a lot of money and entrusted with the security and reliability of the systems that keep critical city infrastructure wants 10 minutes of your time, it's probably a good idea to fucking listen. If the city's top lawyer wanted a word with the mayor on a matter he considered urgent, do you think he'd wait?
The whole thing is a farce. Terry Childs may have deserved to be fired. From the sounds of it, he allowed himself to become a critical, irreplaceable part of the infrastructure, which in of itself is a good reason to fire him. Clearly his ego and misguided sense of dedication to his job was clouding his judgment. His managers should be fired for being completely incompetent. They allowed a situation to develop where Childs was irreplaceable. They then decided to fire him, but developed no plan on how to smoothly transition away. And after they fired him, and realized how incredibly they had fucked up, they threw him in jail, turning a bad situation into a disaster. They passed over repeated chances to defuse the situation, all to save face. They proceeded to try their best to ruin a man's life just to avoid admitting they had made mistakes, and it looks like they have succeeded. By all accounts the city's network worked flawlessly the entire time. They were apparently convinced he would use his passwords to bring the network down just because he was upset about being fired, but there is no evidence he attempted to do so or would have attempted. To do so would have destroyed his career, that he clearly cared a lot about if he invested the time and effort into getting a CCIE. Furthermore, it's doubtful that had he given all the passwords, he would have lost his ability to do so. Given how much they relied on him, and his knowledge of the network, he couldn't have found a way even if they changed all the passwords he gave them? Theres always a backup account somewhere, or a forgotten out-of-band management tool, etc.
The precedent this court case leaves is "support your former employers for free, forever, or go to jail". I for one am not looking forward to getting calls from a former employer at 3 am because even though I left 6 months ago, they forgot to ask me for the password to the backup system, and now it's on the fritz, and I refuse to answer and tell them how to login, and the account credentials, they will call the cops.
Not all promises are of equal merit. Most are too vague to have any real meaning, some are much more important then others. Consider (from your link) "No. 119: Appoint a special adviser to the president on violence against women". He could knock that out in 5 minutes and still have time for a beer afterward. No one will oppose it, so he expends no political capital nor threatens any big campaign spenders. Consider a broken promise: "No. 511: Recognize the Armenian genocide" I intentionally chose an example that he could accomplish just as easily. He needs only write it down and sign his name. You can't blame Congress for it. But he hasn't done it, because it is no longer politically convenient to do so. He made it clear in his campaign he intended to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he has instead dove deeper in.
There's some bullshit in modern computer hardware design too though. Consider X86. It's inferior to man architectures, but it still exists because the install base for it is so huge it can't be stopped. BIOS seriously sucks, they are all different, love to use arcane terms, often vary wildly even in models form the same vendor in the same product line, and the process to upgrade them is often fraught with danger. Printers need drivers, that are generally platform specific, even on basic models. Hard drives can fail (and fail often) in ways that silently corrupt data with no indication to the user or the OS. ECC has existed for decades yet consumer machines never have it, leading to memory problems causing seemingly random, unrelated issues, that only an in depth low level memory analysis can solve ( requiring you to know the problem before you know the cause). Hardware RAID is often arcane, and a simple mistake can destroy your entire array. Manufacturers save pennies on parts like capacitors by using parts with ratings lower then the design required, resulting in expensive repairs. OEM's release equipment using draft or early revisions of specs that cause weird, hard to diagnose compatibility problems. SSD's could be the single largest performance increase for your average office user in 5-10 years, but they are severely limited because we do not have a good technology to interface with them, and shoehorn them into the tech used for mechanical drives for compatibility reasons. If you were to design the PC platform from scratch today, there's a lot of arcane, outdated cruft you could remove that's only there for backwards compatibility reasons.
What a surprisingly reasonable policy.
Not going to "those" sites is not enough anymore. An employee of ours recently got a virus from a pdf exploit from the website for the Professional photographer for a family wedding. Her website got hacked, and without realizing it she was infecting all the customers she sent links to review their photos so they could order copies. I confirmed it myself with a VM. It blew right through a fully updated AV, and reader plug-in was only about 30 days out of date. Telling users not to go to the "bad" places is not an answer. Staying up to date is way more complicated then it should be, and the most frequent offender is Adobe.
No Playstation Network also means no updates to games to fix critical bugs. It's not much of an option.
I realize that, but it still only legally runs on Apple hardware. So the price/performance/power of the new xserve's would have to beat their existing Intel boxes ( wherever they get them from) to make it worthwhile, or even interesting. It's one thing to beat them at specific workloads with something fairly exotic (like ARM, or IBM Power chips), if you can beat them on more or less identical architectures even with Apple's significant price premium, especially when they would have to pay for OS X server and they get Windows and Linux/BSD for free, it would mean somewhere in their current system is huge inefficiency. If you can show them what that is, that all their engineers have missed, I'm sure they would hire you in a heartbeat. I just did a quick comparison, a new Xserve configured the way I would configure it for a web server, compared to an almost identical dell server, the price difference was a little over $3,000.
If you can make Mac servers running OS X beat their existing intel servers on price, performance, and power consumption (presumably the goal of the whole experiment) I think they would be extremely interested.
Pfft, you guys are small time compared to us here in Florida. We surrounded 3 sides of our state with ocean and the last side with Georgia and Alabama, making any over the border excursions likely to be either very unpleasant or very wet. It's a 6 hour drive from Miami to the nearest state border. Only Alaska and Hawaii can beat us.
The UPnP standard lacks any authentication mechanism. Turning it on means anything in your network can open any ports to anywhere it wants. According to this site https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/347812 and here http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/flash-upnp-attack-faq/ there is even a flash exploit that can be used with uPnP to reconfigure your router. UPnP was dead on arrival. Any router vendor that doesn't ship with it off by default is a retard.
There is, it's called uPnP. It sucks, terribly. It was made by a pack of gibbering idiots. Different vendors having dick sizing competitions managed to implement it in ways that are completely incompatible and broken. The home users stupid enough to really need it own cheap, shitty routers (often provided by their ISP) that implement it in a broken manner if it all. The users with better routers that implement it correctly all disable it, because the creators did not bother to include any sort of authentication, making it a security hole (also the fact that even in the best of conditions it only works to sporadically). If you want the router to just accept a text file, which presumably means logging into the router, and manually uploading it, how is that any easier then setting the port forwards? How do you handle it when it wants to forward a port that is already forwarded to a different ip? How do you handle it when a lazy game dev (and it will happen) just says fuck and sets all the ports open? Look at any support forum for a modern multiplayer game. There will be people with NAT issues, and the support staffs first (and often only) suggestion is to either remove the firewall completely of forward everything to the PC.
Setting port forwards is simple on any decent router. If your router makes it complicated, blame the vendor. You don't need anything special, you don't need an external server to do NAT traversal, you just need a screen to come up when you host the game telling you to forward port X (you only need one per game, more then that is bad design) to ip Y, where Y is the IP of the system you are on. If you feel generous, put a link to portforward.com or something to help them find documentation. If they can't figure that out, they probably should not be opening ports to begin with. Point them at the nearest gamestop and tell them to purchase an xbox 360 and an xbox live subscription they aren't ready for the real internet.
"The H1B's (as opposed to "outsourced jobs") are paid the same as an American worker would." That's bullshit. The job market is just that, a market. Supply and demand. Restrict supply wages go up, increase supply wages go down. Any increase in the supply automatically reduces wages. If there really is a shortage of skilled IT workers, how about investing in education? If people see wages on the rise, you can guarantee more will seek education in the field. If we aren't turning out qualified candidates, look for the reason why. Our math and science education sucks. Importing the products of other, more successful education systems merely hides the fact and covers it up for a little while, until eventual wages between us and them normalize to the point they have no interest in coming here. I for one am not interested in turning America into a 3rd world shit hole so you can find the cheap programmers you want to make some extra profit right now. If there is a real lack of talent, we need a long term solution, and that means improving education, improving access to the education, and letting the market set wages that actually makes the time, effort, and money spent on that education a sound investment.
Furthermore, if we are going to allow immigration (and I think we definitely should) there are much, much better ways then the H1-B program. Ways that lead to citizenship, and a real investment in the future of our country. Ways that enable them to bring their families here, to be represented fairly in our government, and to quit their job if their boss is being abusive or paying them an unfair wage without fear of being deported. H1-B is and always has been a shortcut to cheap labor in the immigration system. If the regular system is to slow and corrupt, FIX THAT, don't make shortcuts.
Because everyone knows the state attorney general is always eager to royally piss off the huge, multinational corporation with an army of lawyers who is headquartered in his state and contributes a massive amount of tax revenue and jobs to the local economy. Especially when the accusation comes from some people off the internet who aren't even in his jurisdiction and he is completely unqualified to even understand the nature of the attacks beyond "bad people doing bad things according to this guy....on the internet". If its not child porn or drugs, or can make a big flashy headline, they aren't interested. And the actual data centers where the actual evidence might be are probably spread all over the world.
As a youth in high school, I knew the passwords for 90% of the administration. With it I could have changed the grades, class schedule, modify the student record, or even suspend any student in any school in the entire county. How did I know it? I didn't hack anything. Teachers frequently told me their passwords so I could help them with computer problems (the only full time IT staff at the school was hired because he was someone's cousin, and a good basketball coach, and the county wouldn't give them funding to hire an actual basketball coach). It didn't take long for me to realize they followed a simple pattern based off the teacher's name. It was an easy jump to realize the administrators had the same pattern. They were supposed to change it when they logged in the first time but few knew how and even fewer bothered. I could have easily caused a lot of mischief, accessed confidential student records, or boosted my grades (something that would never be noticed because the scantron system teachers used to input grades frequently made errors, and administrators would fix them with only verbal confirmation) but I didn't, because it would have meant violating the trust of a couple of excellent educators who had truly gone above and beyond in a system that rewarded politics and actively punished excellence.
The point being, security in schools is often terrible, and it does not require hacking skills to acquire the credentials or access to systems a student should not have access to.
The Java SE page has downloads that don't have the obnoxious toolbar/trial crap in them
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
If you already have a Windows environment, using AD and Exchange, it is generally easier to just pay MS their pound of flesh to use their client then bother fighting with a "free" solution. If anyone knows a free solution that can pull account and profile info from AD, server info from AD (or otherwise auto config based off the user logged in without resorting to maintenance intensive logon scripts) and support encryption, centralized logging, clients for multiple platforms, redundant servers, etc without resorting to hiring on a programmer or consultant to make some heavily customized solution (that will require more consultants to update and maintain later on) I'd very much like to hear about it. For very large organizations it would be worth it, but for most it's cheaper in the long run to just buy MS's drop in and go solution. That's assuming of course you have a Windows environment. If you don't, all bets are off.