You won't know until you test. So I did. Here's my results:
With the aid of my girlfriend, I tested myself to see just what I could tell apart. The test music was "Veteran of the Psychic Wars", by Blue Oyster Cult, listening through some very high end Audio-Technica headphones I picked up in Akihabara earlier that year. I tested:
16bit WAV (GRIPped right from the CD, 1440 Kbit equivalent) 320Kbit LAME ABR MP3 256Kbit LAME ABR MP3 192Kbit LAME ABR MP3 128Kbit LAME ABR MP3
I found that the WAV and the 320Kbit LAME were "different", but I couldn't tell which was better. So, dead heat. I could tell that the 256Kbit LAME encoding was pretty damn close, but not quite as clean (the snare drums were the giveaway). Anything less was clearly not as good. 128Kbit was practically unlistenable when I A/Bed it against the WAV or 320Kbit, it was that bad.
So there; now when I rip my CDs I keep the.WAV and encode at 320Kbit ABR
The PROP-M carrier vehicle made it down- but failed after 20 seconds. If the rover even deployed, we never knew it, and we definitely never actually got data back.
Grammar is just an aid to clarity- when the two conflict, geek rule is that clarity trumps grammar.
For example, consider the old format:
Helen asked "How do you plan to do that"?
versus the newer:
Helen asked "How do you plan to do that?".
The first form, although "grammatically correct" according to S&W, is ambiguous - did the speaker state that Helen asked a question, or ask if Helen did so? The second form is unabiguous; the speaker states that Helen asked a question.
I was entering the MBTA T station at Porter square about two weeks ago, and was accosted by a Massachusetts State Policeman. He politely told me that I was "selected" for a search.
me: "And what does this search entail?" him: "We swab the outside of your bag and look for explosive residues". me: "And if I decline?" him: "You'll have to leave the station." me: [looking up thru the skylights at the nice day outside] me: "It's a beautiful day. Thank you officer, I think I'll walk." him: "Have a nice day." me: "You too." ..... and I turned, went up the escalators, and out of the station.
No problems, nobody followed me, shouted to me, nothing. And no Gitmo team either.
I'd say, by demonstration and experiment, you can just decline and walk out without any repercussions besides having to walk to the next T station, which is usually about a 15 minute walk away (worst case: catch a cab).
At least the supreme court has held that declining a search on public property is not cause for arrest nor for a search.
The folks at Mitsubishi Research actually came up with glasses that work like the ones in "They Live"... without the special glasses, you see one image, with the special glasses, you see another (secret) image.
Assuming the information on the hard drives is just PII, but not covered by HIPAA or some other government regulation, there are three quick and easy ways to destroy them that I've used. All three work at the "I have $10,000 to spend to recover the data" level of disk recovery (i.e. the NSA probably could pull some data and so could the FSB or Mossad, but not your local script kiddie).
1) Gun. Take 'em to the firing range and "pop a cap in 'em". Preferably several rounds each. The idea is to bend the platters enough that they can't be easily read. Note that this is step 1 in "military decommissioning". It is also a lot of fun.
2) Bandsaw. Cut the disks in half. This is much less fun than it seems; you will spend more time than you expect doing this. Wear eye and ear protection. Your local high school or tech/voc probably has a bandsaw you can use. Don't cut right through the hub, as the hardened steel ball bearings will really mess up the blade. Cut to the side of the hub only. DAMHIK.
3) Hydraulic press. This is what we currently use at work. Just push a 4 cm. steel bar endwise through the middle of the disk drive till it comes out the other end. We use a 20-ton press (from Harbor Freight - it's cheap enough that we don't care), with both hand and pneumatic pumps, and we can decommission a disk in about thirty seconds, without even having to remove it from the server cage sheet metal. Most machine shops as well as the tech-voc highschool will have a hydraulic press in this scale.
Major bugs in the assumptions of this paper: they assume the average commuter can do 14 MPH on an unassisted bicycle, that personal time is valueless, and that bicycles are as safe as cars.
I ride in Cambridge near MIT, and when I was in *decent* shape (i.e. doing half-century rides back-to-back) I was lucky to peak at 17 MPH and maintain an average of 10 MPH during traffic. I'm sure a Tour-de-France competitor could maintain 14 MPH in traffic, but I don't think an average Cambridgeite could come close.
They further assume that the person's time is valueless, so walking at 3.5 MPH and bicycling at 14 MPH have no impact on the overall quality of life. Similarly the time you "recover" (reading on the bus or subway, listening to the radio in the car) is zero-value as well.
Nor do they factor in the (significant in Cambridge) medical costs due to the high rate of bicycle-to-car and bicycle-to-pedestrian accidents. Since a single accident with an associated E.R. visit would cost ~$1000, that would completely invert the ranking and make the bicycle the most expensive transportation available.
The Economist published a study on exactly this about ten years ago. They took the full NHTSA collision database of all fatalities in multivehicle accidents, and looked for "significant effects".
There was only ONE indicator that rose to statistical significance- weight of the vehicle. More precisely, the probability of a person dying in a two-vehicle collision is proportional to the inverse square of the masses of the vehicles; heavier vehicle wins, and it wins by the _square_ of the ratio of the masses. Half the mass == FOUR TIMES LIKELIER TO DIE. A third the mass == NINE TIMES LIKELIER TO DIE.
The worse part: NOTHING ELSE MATTERED. Super-safe "brands" like Volvo and Mercedes did no better on a weight-by-weight basis than Subaru or Ford; the highly touted "design for safety" did absolutely _nothing_ (in a statistical sense) to help passengers survive.
In short- saving fuel may be good for politics, global warming, etc. Therefore it's a good idea to get everyone _else_ into small light cars, but it's an even better idea to keep yourself and those you hold dear into the heaviest vehicle you can afford to buy and operate.
I've played extensively with a Nook Color.... and dispite a luscious color screen, it's none too speedy even doing what it's supposed to be doing, being a bookreader. Pages stutter as they cross the page; the update rate is not only well below 10 Hz but it's also irregular.
I can only fear what it might be like running something "that should have more CPU available".
First the Big Custom Computer market (STRETCH, EDVAC, etc) was destroyed by the mass-market mainframe makers (IBM, CDC, Univac...)
Then the mainframe market (IBM, Honeywell, Univac... does Univac still exist any more?) was cannibalized by the minicomputer makers, like DEC, Silicon Graphics, and Data General.
Then the minicomputer market (DEC, SGI, DG, et al) were literally eaten alive by the PC makers (Microsoft in conjunction with Compaq, Dell, and a new piece of IBM)
Now it's the turn of the PC makers to be rendered irrelevant by the "little teensy computers" that masquerade as smart cellphones, book readers, or "mobile internet devices", whatever _those_ are.
It may well be a race to the bottom, but as long as Moore's Law and it's corrolaries hold up, it's gonna be fun.
They're lying to you. Update your resume. That company is in a death spiral and you're better off getting out as soon as possible.
I've been there. Same situation- work till you drop for a promise (not in writing, of course) of some trinket-level reward - in this case, a $5000 bonus for working six months of 16 to 18-hour days (call it two full quarters of extra effort, 1000 hours. So it was $5 an hour actual pay rate, but that's not important).
We delivered. Management said "We never thought you'd do it, so we didn't budget for it and Marketing isn't ready to release it so no bonus."
So no bonus.
We should have expected better, since this was the same management that did an _inverse_ stock split, but only for employee-owned shares, except for the four employees who were founders, those guys shares didn't inverse-split. After it all shook out, my $40,000 worth of "signing bonus options" turned out to be worth $427. Funny how vulture capitalists only issue non-diluting shares when you are acting in a position of power.
Expect NOTHING in return from your bosses when you deliver, except possibly layoffs since you are no longer necessary, and will probably have major health problems so your medical bills will be costing them money on the group insurance policy.
I would say tell your employees exactly what was told here, and hope they have the sense to say FSCK YOU to your boss. "You want that? We want twenty percent of the company, NON DILUTING SHARES (i.e. if the company issues additional shares, even billions of shares, you still own 20% of the company. Shares that aren't non-diluting are worthless, see above note on turning $40,000 into $427.)."
In fact, don't even talk to anyone else. Just update your resume, circulate it, interview, do a professional job of task handoff, documentation, etc. and leave with a polite, professional note of two weeks notice.
What I don't understand is why he's so easy on 'em. He's giving the cheaters a four-hour slap on the wrist and no permanent record.
What I would have done (and did; I taught college level computer engineering) is that cheating, if caught, is an automatic zero credit on whatever you cheated on.)
My conclusion is that their forensics is full of holes and they have absolutely no clue who cheated and who didn't; there's no other reason to offer such a tremendously good amnesty deal.
What I don't understand is why the *heck* the SCADA systems running Iran's { illegal | sooper-sekrit | stealth } nuclear weapons program aren't air-gapped! Isn't that something like standard procedure?
In fact, the evil IT people might well be following the law- HIPPA mandates some fairly strong controls on how personally-identifiable health information must be protected.
My suggestion is that if they want you to check email at home, they should provide you with a machine to do it with. And- this is actually what YOU want; that way, if the machine breaks, it's their problem; if it's stolen, it's their problem; if it gets compromised and all the credit card numbers get turned into a big TJX-style identity theft debacle, it's their problem; no matter WHAT happens, it's their problem.
Simple rule for an easy life: keep your hardware *yours*, and your employer's hardware *theirs*.
We dropped cable TV when we realized we were paying close to $100 a month for Robot Chicken and South Park - and not much else that wasn't already available on free broadcast TV. Much as I like Robot Chicken, it's not worth $25 an episode.
So we tossed the lot of it, and now rely on a tiny spare box running MythTV (the LinHES distro, get it at http://knoppmyth.net/ with a Hauppauge HVR-950 USB tuner-stick for all our over-the-air HDTV viewing. The antenna is just a fifteen-foot length of TV coax from Radio Shack with one connector cut off and the insulation and shield stripped back three feet, stuck out the crack of a window. It works great!
The ATSC HD TV is clearer than the analog cable we had. And for the movies, we use NetFlix; no commercials, no post-facto editing, and fifteen bucks a month.
In my opinion, if humanity cannot survive with democracy, then we do not deserve to survive.
Proof: survival with democracy indicates a stable system- any one person (or relatively small group) could get "hit by a bus" and no significant change occurs.
However, in a dictatorship, the life / death / fortune of the dictator has total impact and nobody else has impact; hence the system is unstable. Can't happen, you say? Go netflix "Valkyrie" (the bomb assassination of Hitler); it's pretty much a true story.
Given how accurate the 5 day *weather* forecasts have been, I fear that the climate service will be about as accurate as Dick Cheney shooting lawye... er, quail with a shotgun.
Here's a question on climate that anyone with a *good* clock can independently verify- why has the earth not slowed down in rotation? More specifically, the loss of glaciation over land (that is, non-floating) is supposed to be "tremendous". Using the figures published by the IPCC, if you do the calculation of the change in Izz (the moment of angular momentum of the Earth as it turns on it's axis, as a whole, as those glaciers melt down into equilibrium ocean), you see that it's on the order of a fraction of a part per million. That sounds tiny, but it's not- it's 2.6 seconds per month per PPM _every month_, so it's 2.6 seconds the first month, 5.2 seconds the second month, 7.8 seconds the third month, etc.
So, why is it that the earth spin rate / tidal drag equations from 30 years ago continue to predict the actual spin rate of the planet to parts-per-trillion accuracy? Something is clearly wrong when a simple measurement with a quality clock no better than Harrison could have built in 1761 can show that the Earth spin rate is simply not following what it must given the claimed rates of melting.
Consider this: if you make it just harder than trivial to circumvent the block, then you get three categories of people.
1) The ones who don't circumvent the block. These are sheep. You can ignore them.
2) The ones who circumvent the block. These are opposition ringleaders. Watch them carefully.
3) The ones who circumvent it but only after a known associate already circumvents it. These are motivated followers. Subvert and enlist them.
As Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot just by watching". In this case, UltraSurf provides a way for the Great Wall operators to _automatically_ find your enemies of the state- and prime followers.
I bought an Intel X25-M 160 Gb (MLC) from NewEgg within a month of them becoming available. I did do the Intel firmware update (from http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=17485 ) to get the 8850 firmware within a few days of the update coming out.
I can say "No problem, it *rocks*". I can boot Ubuntu 9.04 / Studio in about five seconds from Ubuntu splash to login prompt. Mac OSX Leopard is similarly fast.
Of course, I paid something north of $600 for this privilege. But to me, it's worth it.
There's really two items here: You versus your current employer, and you plus your current employer versus some third party who sues you both.
Yes, I'm there right now - not a lawyer, but I've been doing the "doing employer work on my own hardware" for nearly 20 years now and have "levelled up" a couple of times on the reality of the situation.
Case zero: nothing bad happens at all. Been there, and it's the most common case. But it's not the only case.
Case one: (you vs. employer) you can perhaps cope with it by getting (in writing) a supplement to your current employment agreement to clarify ownership of the laptop, and of the data thereon, AND explicit listing of what _you_ are doing on your own time and equipment. Be really, really explicit, and don't do anything _even after that_ that you expect to have in and of itself significant monetary value, because contracts can be abrogated (or it may come down to "sign this reassignment or you're fired". Yes, I've seen that too- the guy in question walked and now works for Google, but hey, not everybody can do that on a moment's notice.
As a subset of Case One that might not apply to you: case law on consultants and contractors may specify some particulars about ownership of data versus hardware that might be of use to you, if you happen to be a consultant or a contractor.
Case Two: (you plus your employer versus a third party), nothing you can do (including not using your laptop for work at all) can 100% keep it out of a third party subpeona, as the third party only need show that there's a reasonable liklihood that the you _did_ use the laptop for work, whether or not you really did so. Making sure that your personal equipment does NOT have the VPN software or VPN dongle or VPN access helps your case, but you still might lose the laptop to a subpeona to surrender it for forensics. I've never seen it happen, but I'm sure it has.
When we have to decomission drives, we just use a big shop vise.
Specifically, a McMaster-Carr P/N 4065A1, going for just $132.94 and in stock now.
It's also handy for crushing... well, anything else. Or just holding onto something while you do evil unto it.
And it doesn't just "bend the plate a little". It will easily squish the entire drive. Lengthwise. Disk-drive aluminium is no match for fifty pounds of nodular iron pushing high-carbon steel jaws.
You do want to do this over a wastebasket, especially for laptop drives that use glass (not alumninium) disks. The shower of fine glass shards is a pain to sweep up out of the carpet. DAMHIK
Actually, the price of oil _cannot_ go over around $70-$80 a barrel for long durations, because that's the price point where the chemical process known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis makes it worthwhile to turn coal into oil. The business managers at OPEC know this and do whatever is necessary to make _sure_ that never happens- because their business model requires that Fischer-Tropsch synthesis on a huge scale stays a historical note ( F-T synthesis was what provided nearly all of the gasoline, diesel, and lube oil for Nazi Germany; they had one small natural petroleum field in Poland. Every other liter of avgas, diesel, and lube oil came out of huge Third Reich F-T plants built near the coal fields of Alsace-Lorraine).
Fortunately, the USA has *huge* amounts of coal available for F-T synthesis - about 1000 years worth using F-T synthesis at current rates of consumption and growth of coal and oil - buried in Appalachia. Nowhere else in the world is there such huge amounts of coal. If the world goes F-T, then the USA is Saudi Arabia 10 times over.
There are bigger fish to fry than the price of crude. Sure, it could spike to $100 or even $150 a barrel, but it can't sustain those price levels even if it runs out- because the technology to make oil at $80 a barrel is well known.
Carbon, on the other hand, is a different red herring.
The trick is that yes, it does leak information- each time you use it, an eavesdropper gets a little more information, perhaps enough to "get in". Or perhaps not.
On the other hand, the server end knows what cells may or may not have been compromised and can optimize around that.
The beauty of such grilles (and they have been known for centuries) is that they are _cheap_ and it's not unreasonable for the server end to predict when a grille's private information has been used up and sends you a new one well before that time.
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You won't know until you test. So I did. Here's my results:
With the aid of my girlfriend, I tested myself to see just what I could tell apart. The test music was "Veteran of the Psychic Wars", by
Blue Oyster Cult, listening through some very high end Audio-Technica headphones I picked up in Akihabara earlier that year.
I tested:
16bit WAV (GRIPped right from the CD, 1440 Kbit equivalent)
320Kbit LAME ABR MP3
256Kbit LAME ABR MP3
192Kbit LAME ABR MP3
128Kbit LAME ABR MP3
I found that the WAV and the 320Kbit LAME were "different", but I couldn't tell which was better. So, dead heat. I could tell that the
256Kbit LAME encoding was pretty damn close, but not quite as clean (the snare drums were the giveaway). Anything less was
clearly not as good. 128Kbit was practically unlistenable when I A/Bed it against the WAV or 320Kbit, it was that bad.
So there; now when I rip my CDs I keep the .WAV and encode
at 320Kbit ABR
The PROP-M carrier vehicle made it down- but failed after 20
seconds. If the rover even deployed, we never knew it, and
we definitely never actually got data back.
Grammar is just an aid to clarity- when the two conflict, geek rule is that clarity trumps grammar.
For example, consider the old format:
Helen asked "How do you plan to do that"?
versus the newer:
Helen asked "How do you plan to do that?".
The first form, although "grammatically correct" according to S&W, is ambiguous - did the speaker state that Helen asked a question, or ask if Helen did so? The second form is unabiguous; the speaker states that Helen asked a question.
I was entering the MBTA T station at Porter square about two weeks ago, and was accosted by a Massachusetts State Policeman. He politely told me that I was "selected" for a search.
me: "And what does this search entail?"
him: "We swab the outside of your bag and look for explosive residues".
me: "And if I decline?"
him: "You'll have to leave the station."
me: [looking up thru the skylights at the nice day outside]
me: "It's a beautiful day. Thank you officer, I think I'll walk."
him: "Have a nice day."
me: "You too."
..... and I turned, went up the escalators, and out of the station.
No problems, nobody followed me, shouted to me, nothing.
And no Gitmo team either.
I'd say, by demonstration and experiment, you can just decline
and walk out without any repercussions besides having to walk
to the next T station, which is usually about a 15 minute
walk away (worst case: catch a cab).
At least the supreme court has held that declining a search on
public property is not cause for arrest nor for a search.
The folks at Mitsubishi Research actually came up with glasses that work like the ones in "They Live"... without the special glasses, you see one image, with the special glasses, you see another (secret) image.
Their paper is at
http://www.merl.com/publications/TR2002-011/
and the video is pretty darn amazing.
Assuming the information on the hard drives is just PII, but not
covered by HIPAA or some other government regulation, there are
three quick and easy ways to destroy them that I've used. All three
work at the "I have $10,000 to spend to recover the data" level of
disk recovery (i.e. the NSA probably could pull some data and
so could the FSB or Mossad, but not your local script kiddie).
1) Gun. Take 'em to the firing range and "pop a cap in 'em".
Preferably several rounds each. The idea is to bend the
platters enough that they can't be easily read. Note that this
is step 1 in "military decommissioning". It is also a lot
of fun.
2) Bandsaw. Cut the disks in half. This is much less fun
than it seems; you will spend more time than you expect
doing this. Wear eye and ear protection. Your local high
school or tech/voc probably has a bandsaw you can use.
Don't cut right through the hub, as the hardened steel ball
bearings will really mess up the blade. Cut to the side of
the hub only. DAMHIK.
3) Hydraulic press. This is what we currently use at work.
Just push a 4 cm. steel bar endwise through the middle of
the disk drive till it comes out the other end. We use a
20-ton press (from Harbor Freight - it's cheap enough
that we don't care), with both hand and pneumatic pumps, and
we can decommission a disk in about thirty seconds,
without even having to remove it from the server cage
sheet metal. Most machine shops as well as the
tech-voc highschool will have a hydraulic press in this
scale.
Major bugs in the assumptions of this paper: they assume the
average commuter can do 14 MPH on an unassisted bicycle,
that personal time is valueless, and that bicycles are as safe
as cars.
I ride in Cambridge near MIT, and when I was in *decent*
shape (i.e. doing half-century rides back-to-back) I was lucky to
peak at 17 MPH and maintain an average of 10 MPH during traffic.
I'm sure a Tour-de-France competitor could maintain 14 MPH in
traffic, but I don't think an average Cambridgeite could come close.
They further assume that the person's time is valueless, so walking
at 3.5 MPH and bicycling at 14 MPH have no impact on the overall
quality of life. Similarly the time you "recover" (reading on the bus
or subway, listening to the radio in the car) is zero-value as well.
Nor do they factor in the (significant in Cambridge) medical
costs due to the high rate of bicycle-to-car and bicycle-to-pedestrian
accidents. Since a single accident with an associated E.R. visit
would cost ~$1000, that would completely invert the ranking
and make the bicycle the most expensive transportation
available.
The Economist published a study on exactly this about ten years ago. They took the full NHTSA collision database of all fatalities in multivehicle accidents, and looked for "significant effects".
There was only ONE indicator that rose to statistical significance- weight of the vehicle. More precisely, the probability of a person dying in a two-vehicle collision is proportional to the inverse square of the masses of the vehicles; heavier vehicle wins, and it wins by the _square_ of the ratio of the masses. Half the mass == FOUR TIMES LIKELIER TO DIE. A third the mass == NINE TIMES LIKELIER TO DIE.
The worse part: NOTHING ELSE MATTERED. Super-safe "brands" like Volvo and Mercedes did no better on a weight-by-weight basis than Subaru or Ford; the highly touted "design for safety" did absolutely _nothing_ (in a statistical sense) to help passengers survive.
In short- saving fuel may be good for politics, global warming, etc. Therefore it's a good idea to get everyone _else_ into small light cars, but it's an even better idea to keep yourself and those you hold dear into the heaviest vehicle you can afford to buy and operate.
I've played extensively with a Nook Color.... and dispite a luscious color screen, it's none too speedy even doing what it's supposed to be doing, being a bookreader. Pages stutter as they cross the page; the update rate is not only well below 10 Hz but it's also irregular.
I can only fear what it might be like running something "that should have more CPU available".
That said, for $250, who cares? :)
First the Big Custom Computer market (STRETCH, EDVAC, etc) was destroyed by the mass-market mainframe makers (IBM, CDC, Univac...)
Then the mainframe market (IBM, Honeywell, Univac... does Univac still exist any more?) was cannibalized by the minicomputer makers, like DEC, Silicon Graphics, and Data General.
Then the minicomputer market (DEC, SGI, DG, et al) were literally eaten alive by the PC makers (Microsoft in conjunction with Compaq, Dell, and a new piece of IBM)
Now it's the turn of the PC makers to be rendered irrelevant by the "little teensy computers" that masquerade as smart cellphones, book readers, or "mobile internet devices", whatever _those_ are.
It may well be a race to the bottom, but as long as Moore's Law and it's corrolaries hold up, it's gonna be fun.
Edsac was not the first stored program digital computer.
Konrad Zuse's Z3 was running in 1941... turing complete, vacuum tubes, and all.
They're lying to you. Update your resume. That company is in a death spiral and you're better off getting out as soon as possible.
I've been there. Same situation- work till you drop for a promise (not in writing, of course) of some trinket-level reward - in this case, a $5000 bonus for working six months of 16 to 18-hour days (call it two full quarters of extra effort, 1000 hours. So it was $5 an hour actual pay rate, but that's not important).
We delivered. Management said "We never thought you'd do it, so we didn't budget for it and Marketing isn't ready to release it so no bonus."
So no bonus.
We should have expected better, since this was the same management that did an _inverse_ stock split, but only for employee-owned shares, except for the four employees who were founders, those guys shares didn't inverse-split. After it all shook out, my $40,000 worth of "signing bonus options" turned out to be worth $427. Funny how vulture capitalists only issue non-diluting shares when you are acting in a position of power.
Expect NOTHING in return from your bosses when you deliver, except possibly layoffs since you are no longer necessary, and will probably have major health problems so your medical bills will be costing them money on the group insurance policy.
I would say tell your employees exactly what was told here, and hope they have the sense to say FSCK YOU to your boss. "You want that? We want twenty percent of the company, NON DILUTING SHARES (i.e. if the company issues additional shares, even billions of shares, you still own 20% of the company. Shares that aren't non-diluting are worthless, see above note on turning $40,000 into $427.)."
In fact, don't even talk to anyone else. Just update your resume, circulate it, interview, do a professional job of task handoff, documentation, etc. and leave with a polite, professional note of two weeks notice.
What I don't understand is why he's so easy on 'em. He's giving the cheaters a four-hour slap on the wrist and no permanent record.
What I would have done (and did; I taught college level computer engineering) is that cheating, if caught, is an automatic zero credit on whatever you cheated on.)
My conclusion is that their forensics is full of holes and they have absolutely no clue who cheated and who didn't; there's no other reason to offer such a tremendously good amnesty deal.
What I don't understand is why the *heck* the SCADA systems running Iran's { illegal | sooper-sekrit | stealth } nuclear weapons program aren't air-gapped! Isn't that something like standard procedure?
You can do this automagically with a spam filter, with an accuracy around 99.9%
See the BlackHat 2010 paper "Keeping the Good Stuff In: Confidential Information
Firewalling with the CRM114 Spam Filter and Text Classifier".
Here's the URL to the PDF:
https://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-10/whitepapers/Yerazunis/BlackHat-USA-2010-Yerazunis-Confidential-Mail-Filtering-wp.pdf
In fact, the evil IT people might well be following the law- HIPPA mandates some fairly strong controls on how personally-identifiable health information must be protected.
My suggestion is that if they want you to check email at home, they should provide you with a machine to do it with. And- this is actually what YOU want; that way, if the machine breaks, it's their problem; if it's stolen, it's their problem; if it gets compromised and all the credit card numbers get turned into a big TJX-style identity theft debacle, it's their problem; no matter WHAT happens, it's their problem.
Simple rule for an easy life: keep your hardware *yours*, and your employer's hardware *theirs*.
We dropped cable TV when we realized we were paying close to $100 a month for Robot Chicken and South Park - and not much else that wasn't already available on free broadcast TV. Much as I like Robot Chicken, it's not worth $25 an episode.
So we tossed the lot of it, and now rely on a tiny spare box running MythTV (the LinHES distro, get it at http://knoppmyth.net/ with a Hauppauge HVR-950 USB tuner-stick for all our over-the-air HDTV viewing. The antenna is just a fifteen-foot length of TV coax from Radio Shack with one connector cut off and the insulation and shield stripped back three feet, stuck out the crack of a window. It works great!
The ATSC HD TV is clearer than the analog cable we had. And for the movies, we use NetFlix; no commercials, no post-facto editing, and fifteen bucks a month.
We're in bliss. :-)
In my opinion, if humanity cannot survive with democracy, then we do not deserve to survive.
Proof: survival with democracy indicates a stable system- any one person (or relatively small
group) could get "hit by a bus" and no significant change occurs.
However, in a dictatorship, the life / death / fortune of the dictator has total impact
and nobody else has impact; hence the system is unstable. Can't happen, you say? Go
netflix "Valkyrie" (the bomb assassination of Hitler); it's pretty much a true story.
Given how accurate the 5 day *weather* forecasts have been, I fear that the climate service will be about as accurate
as Dick Cheney shooting lawye... er, quail with a shotgun.
Here's a question on climate that anyone with a *good* clock can independently verify- why has the earth not slowed down in rotation? More specifically, the loss of glaciation over land (that is, non-floating) is supposed to be "tremendous". Using the figures published by the IPCC, if you do the calculation of the change in Izz (the moment of angular momentum of the Earth as it turns on it's axis, as a whole, as those glaciers melt down into equilibrium ocean), you see that it's on the order of a fraction of a part per million. That sounds tiny, but it's not- it's 2.6 seconds per month per PPM _every month_, so it's 2.6 seconds the first month, 5.2 seconds the second month, 7.8 seconds the third month, etc.
So, why is it that the earth spin rate / tidal drag equations from 30 years ago continue to predict the actual spin rate of the planet to parts-per-trillion accuracy? Something is clearly wrong when a simple measurement with a quality clock no better than Harrison could have built in 1761 can show that the Earth spin rate is simply not following what it must given the claimed rates of melting.
Consider this: if you make it just harder than trivial to circumvent the block, then you get three categories of people.
1) The ones who don't circumvent the block. These are sheep. You can ignore them.
2) The ones who circumvent the block. These are opposition ringleaders. Watch them carefully.
3) The ones who circumvent it but only after a known associate already circumvents it. These are motivated followers. Subvert and enlist them.
As Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot just by watching". In this case, UltraSurf provides a way for the Great Wall operators to _automatically_ find your enemies of the state- and prime followers.
I bought an Intel X25-M 160 Gb (MLC) from NewEgg within a month of them becoming
available. I did do the Intel firmware update (from http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=17485 )
to get the 8850 firmware within a few days of the update coming out.
I can say "No problem, it *rocks*". I can boot Ubuntu 9.04 / Studio in about five seconds from Ubuntu
splash to login prompt. Mac OSX Leopard is similarly fast.
Of course, I paid something north of $600 for this privilege. But to me, it's worth it.
There's really two items here: You versus your current employer, and you plus your current employer versus some third party
who sues you both.
Yes, I'm there right now - not a lawyer, but I've been doing the "doing employer work on my own hardware" for nearly 20 years now
and have "levelled up" a couple of times on the reality of the situation.
Case zero: nothing bad happens at all. Been there, and it's the most common case. But it's not the only case.
Case one: (you vs. employer) you can perhaps cope with it by getting (in writing) a supplement to your current employment
agreement to clarify ownership of the laptop, and of the data thereon, AND explicit listing of what _you_ are doing on
your own time and equipment. Be really, really explicit, and don't do anything _even after that_
that you expect to have in and of itself significant monetary value, because contracts can be abrogated (or it may come down
to "sign this reassignment or you're fired". Yes, I've seen that too- the guy in question walked and now works for Google,
but hey, not everybody can do that on a moment's notice.
As a subset of Case One that might not apply to you: case law on consultants and contractors may specify some
particulars about ownership of data versus hardware that might be of use to you, if you happen to be a consultant
or a contractor.
Case Two: (you plus your employer versus a third party), nothing you can do (including not using your laptop for work
at all) can 100% keep it out of a third party subpeona, as the third party only need show that there's a reasonable liklihood that
the you _did_ use the laptop for work, whether or not you really did so. Making sure that your personal equipment does NOT
have the VPN software or VPN dongle or VPN access helps your case, but you still might lose the laptop to a subpeona to
surrender it for forensics. I've never seen it happen, but I'm sure it has.
When we have to decomission drives, we just use a big shop vise.
Specifically, a McMaster-Carr P/N 4065A1, going for just $132.94
and in stock now.
It's also handy for crushing ... well, anything else. Or just
holding onto something while you do evil unto it.
And it doesn't just "bend the plate a little". It will easily squish the
entire drive. Lengthwise. Disk-drive aluminium is no match for
fifty pounds of nodular iron pushing high-carbon steel jaws.
You do want to do this over a wastebasket, especially for laptop
drives that use glass (not alumninium) disks. The shower of fine
glass shards is a pain to sweep up out of the carpet. DAMHIK
No, I am not making this up.
Actually, the price of oil _cannot_ go over around $70-$80 a barrel for long durations, because that's the price point where the chemical process known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis makes it worthwhile to turn coal into oil. The business managers at OPEC know this and do whatever is necessary to make _sure_ that never happens- because their business model requires that Fischer-Tropsch synthesis on a huge scale stays a historical note ( F-T synthesis was what provided nearly all of the gasoline, diesel, and lube oil for Nazi Germany; they had one small natural petroleum field in Poland. Every other liter of avgas, diesel, and lube oil came out of huge Third Reich F-T plants built near the coal fields of Alsace-Lorraine).
Fortunately, the USA has *huge* amounts of coal available for F-T synthesis - about 1000 years worth using F-T synthesis at current rates of consumption and growth of coal and oil - buried in Appalachia. Nowhere else in the world is there such huge amounts of coal. If the world goes F-T, then the USA is Saudi Arabia 10 times over.
There are bigger fish to fry than the price of crude. Sure, it could spike to $100 or even $150 a barrel, but it can't sustain those price levels even if it runs out- because the technology to make oil at $80 a barrel is well known.
Carbon, on the other hand, is a different red herring.
It's better than nothing.
The trick is that yes, it does leak information- each time you use it, an eavesdropper gets a little more information, perhaps enough to "get in". Or perhaps not.
On the other hand, the server end knows what cells may or may not have been compromised and can optimize around that.
The beauty of such grilles (and they have been known for centuries) is that they are _cheap_ and it's not unreasonable for the server end to predict when a grille's private information has been used up and sends you a new one well before that time.
So- not new, but not bad, either.