Its expensive, complex, and will take at least a week to set up, but one of these will scrub all traffic for things like SSNs and other pattern-matchable data inside HTTP packets and other TCP traffic.
No, it isn't. Copyright is part of the _civil_ code. You can't go to gen-pop at a federal maximum security prison and make your own personal rendition of Oz for copyright violations.
Don't confuse criminal law and civil law. Violence is substantially different than disobedience.
Just because 0.00004% of the population might get murdured in a given year doesn't mean that the laws aren't needed to maintain the government's monopoly on violence, but the original poster was pointing out that when the behavior of the people is out of whack with the action of the government, the government is at fault first, then the people, not the other way around.
Rule of thumb definitions: privacy - the things which you wouldn't do or announce in the town square (or relevant 21st century equivalent); anonymity - a more general case than privacy, related the ability to tie a person's identity to actions taken in public places because of the difficulty of accounting for the scope of a public place (lots of people, lots of real estate, lots of activity, etc.).
If those thumbnail definitions can be accepted, then the real question becomes, "Is the Internet, and by extension the Web, the 21st Century town square?" If the answer is "Yes" then why are we permitting the marketplace to demand/extort/require the kind of information that we wouldn't tell someone in public during a face-to-face interaction? Another question might be why we aren't protecting that information once it is delivered. The problem isn't necessarily that we give out the info voluntarily, but that once we give it out, it becomes a commodity and an asset listed on the corporate balance sheet. Its not an unreasonable request to have one set of rules instead of 50, but my first reaction is that the Federal guidelines should simply be a minimum standard that can be added to by the states, not a set of all encompassing rules to predict every situation. We simply don't have legislators who comprehend information as an object, so the efforts are like a shotgun blast delivered to a buffalo.
(Its hearsay, but I have a friend who tells me that in the State of Washington, the regulatory oversight and constraints in place for lotto machines, video poker, and computerized slots is higher (substantially higher) than for electronic voting machines and ATMs.)
On the other hand, behavior collection and analysis, like a buying pattern or a click path, is less an issue of privacy than it is an issue of anonymity. If I want to follow you around as you walk through town, there isn't any particular reason why I can't. Should I be able to follow you around the Internet? Should I be able to follow everyone around the Internet? Those are hard questions to answer, as is the disposition and capitalization of the gathered information. They are hard to answer because we feel like the Internet, because we generally access it from private, should itself be a private domain, not a public one. When we do something, even surf the Internet, from behind physical doors, we expect that action to be protected by an expectation of privacy, not simply one of anonymity. Consequently, we have to ask these kinds of questions in seperate conversations or else we get lost in a thicket of semantic tangents and nuance.
Whether or not we, collectively, want to engage in these conversations, they will take place, and if the doors are closed around them because the decision is being driven by someone with a business or security agenda, then we stand to lose in the end.
I don't know what the limits of JFS are, but it sounds like a nice set up.
This article in Linux Journal ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149 ) talks about doing just that. The hardware costs ring up and don't scale as you get into your capacity ranges unless you can get a deal buying bulk HDDs - something like $10K per 7.5 terabytes
What I mean is, how hard is it, really, to 'call the bluff' so to speak of the US Dept of Commerce? How hard is it to hijack DNS root servers and gTLD resgistrars? How hard would the gTLD registrars fight if someone tried to take them but promised commercial gain to the registrars? What if the commercial viability of the registration was eliminated altogether?
I can imagine a theoretical feature set of BIND 10.0 - is unicode aware, allowing native language DNS resolution (along with patches to Firefox, etc.); uses digital sigs to validate self-registration of gTLDs with the core registrar and ccTLDs with the national registrar; settles gTLD disputes automatically with a competitive decision market; uses an encrypted peering system (perhaps something like waste) to replicate zone info (including gTLDs) and query horizontally across the DNS tree; changes the DNS network from a hierarchical tree into a mesh topology without changing how DNS itself works. A DNS server network with those features seems to make this pissing contest irrelevent, and those features seem to have been implemented in other places already, so putting them into a DNS server, while non-trivial, is do-able.
1. I never said I was a lawyer and this isn't about the law, it is about the political philosophy. I respect that the legal profession has created a set of precedents that they believe are valid and binding, but they aren't necessarily talking about the current reality. They apply only to cases that are like in character, and the difference between an industrial age precedent between a corporation and human being and an information age contract between a corporation and a human being is sufficient that it should be examined, not just dismissed with an air of arrogance for those who aren't members of the bar. The constitution isn't simply the law of the land, it is the elements of an axiomatic system, and from those elements it is possible to reconsider long-held beliefs in a way that is both consistent and complete and arrive at different conclusions. In fact, we are obliged to do this.
2. The issue isn't whether or not a contract can be entered into and enforced later, it is whether or not a contract can be used to deprive a person of their livlihood. The 14th Amendment cite was, in fact, referring to the due process requirement, and it is that requirement that corporations used successfully in the 19th century to secure "legal person" status from the Supreme Court and therfore the right to own property, sue individuals, and engage in one-to-one contracts with human beings. Prior to that era, corporations were temporarily chartered to a particular task under a very limited scope. The question remains as to whether or not a non-compete agreement is constitutional when it is between a corporation and an artistic or creative person - specifically, does this person do something that no one else can do, and is the market place unbalanced by an attempt to retain exclusive rights to the fruits of their labor after the period of employment. You completely ignore that question when you dismiss the whole issue as a contracts law arguement.
3. Google, is a citizen of the State of California, Microsoft is a citizen of the State of Washington. Neither can claim citizenship in anyother State, I presume, since they have only one charter each. The issues at stake here are the importation of foreign capital and the governance of that foregin capital once they are no longer being employed, namely the computer scientist of Chinese descent who may or may not be an American citizen (It wasn't clear to me his status - if he is actually a Chinese citizen, then this isn't even a debate, since it becomes a foreign trade issue over which neither State can rule.). This is clearly an issue of this man being so valuable that Microsoft feels the need to restrict his labor utility to the competition through a non-cometition contract. The jurisdiction of the non-competition contract would not be at issue except that the State of California has decided that, like riding motorcycles, riding in cars, and smoking heroin, engaging in non-competition agreements is a method of self-assualt that requires that the people be protected from themselves. We have rules of prohibition because the prohibited acts are ostensibly both dangerous and alluring. California is, in effect saying, we don't care if the contract exists, because you cannot enforce the contract, nor can you claim damages if it is broken because it is essentially asocial to commoditize the employee, claim ownership over his future labor, and use that ownership to manipulate the market to your benefit.
You use the example of marriage - a social contract - to illustrate your arguement that the contracts law must be honored under the full faith and credit provisions. I agree. But the reverse is also true. If an abnormal situation is the destination, not the origin of the interstate travel, the more permissive environment also applies. If the person moves from New York to Utah, they are now permitted to marry a 14 year old, despite any previous restriction that New York imposed upon them. Likewise, it is possible to secure a divorce in
If this goes all the way to SCOTUS it will be a commerce clause argument: "Do states have the right to govern the labor practices of companies who employ workers who live in the boundaries of the state, even if those companies are engaged in interstate commerse?"
Yes, the contract was established in Washington, but the contractractual arrangement could never have been established in California, so does it still have force when the worker moves to California and seeks employment? Can a contract, that is valid in Washington be enforced in California where it is invalid? Is the contract prejudicial if applied to the employee who lives in Washington but not one who immigrates to California? Pejudicial to whom?
And at the bottom of the issue is whether or not a corporation, in claiming personhood, and therfore inclusion in 14th amendment's right to property, can deprive a human being of their own 14th amendment rights to liberty by denying them the right to engage in securing their livelihood by future labor based upon past experiences through the use of a contractual instrument that claims ownership over the specialized and singular labor potential of the human being.
In essence Microsoft's position is that any future labor that this person does is owned, whole or in part, by Microsoft because of this non-competition contract, and that Microsoft reserves the right to refuse license to that future labor to other corporations at will as a means of denying competition in the marketplace.
Oregon State University's Open Source lab has a tool specifically designed to find rogue wifi access point on univerisity networks, and it's available here: rogue detect
that universities often NAT their network, and the most likely thief is another student, so if you do have it 'phoning home' you need to capture the local LAN IP address and package it up to actually send to the log server, not just ping the server and record the origin of the ping.
Paying for insourcing isn't as simple as it sounds - I worked once helping get rid of an insourcing contractor. They will provide exactly those services that you ask them to, and any changes will be charged a contract modification fee. They will try to take profits in the 35% range on your fee, primarily by under staffing your IT shop. They will assure their permenance by not not documenting anything, or making the system documentation the proprietary property of the insourcing corporation. Not only will it not be cheaper, but it will most likely cost more.
The lesson I learned was that those tricks you use to make your accountants happy and keep your payroll low are short-sighted and ill-concieved. You should be managing the IT budget to make itemized accounting anyhow, and keeping your payroll low just off-sets the true cost of IT, which, until the software stops having bugs, the malicious code stops beign written by human beings, and active intrusion stops originating in people, will remain a something that ranges from just above menial thinking to substantial serious talent. You just can't have enough brains when running enterprise IT.
If your company can turn off the LAN and still turn profits, then they shouldn't even have an IT shop, but if that isn't the case, your company needs to look at IT as an essential horizontal business unit that sits at the table for every strategic discussion, not a cost center where savings can be made by cutting labor.
It sounds like they intend to use some of Intel's fancy-schmancy new chipsets that have DRM built into them and are tailored to specific needs: This one for Apple, and maybe the RIAA & MPAA set.
Then Apple will have instructions in the startup process (launchd?) to look for the Apple specific key encoded in the Intel hardware, and it will die if it fails.
Finally, future version upgrades might be 'upgrade only' so that your $129 doesn't get you a bare-metal installable OS, just a launch-from-the-finder or launch from the BIOS OS improvement package. The only way to get the new version of OS X might be to have the old version of OS X that came pre-installed on your Apple hardware.
It might be hackable, but then again, it might not. By crafting the OS and hardware together, even on commodity architecture, Apple maintains the ability to create sufficient interlocks, interdependencies, and failsafes to prevent ramant redistribution of their OS, something MIcrosoft has never had.
Two things that remain to be seen: is not opening OS X to commodity boxes the same mistake that not allowing clones was, and will Microsoft care if Apple starts selling dual core systems that can run NT or Longhorn kernel programs without the Windows desktop/Windows explorer?
It seems to me that if the charter of a legislature (whether it is internal rules or in the appropriate Constitution) should compel the legislature to engage in a kind of zero-sum game with regards to the body of law.
If it took a two-thirds or five-eighths majority to add a law without removing a law, those old laws would get cleaned out pretty quickly.
If the also had to reduce the body of law by five or ten percent before the end of every legislative session we'd accomplish the same thing.
dude, the law doesn't care if it is true or false
on
Bluetooth on an Airplane?
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· Score: 4, Informative
it is my understanding that there are two issues with cellphones and transmitters on commercial airplanes - neither of which were issues with military arcraft when I was on active duty (the 1990s).
Issue one is that airplanes move through cells too fast for most cellphones to deal with it, and that causes them to ramp up their RF signal strength and the frequency of their outbound conenction traffic in an attempt to maintain a conenction to the network. (cell phones weren't allowed on transports but our UHF, SHF, and VHF radios worked fine)
Issue two is that avionics packages are not always shielded to spec in older airframes and there is the outside chance that 'something' could go wrong. (just like the outside chance that 'something' could go wrong at the gas pump) (military airframes are emissions shielded by guys who make the tinfoil hat brigade look sane)
The technical problems are exaserbated by the social problems - namely that there isn't a lot of significant science on the validity of the fears, that there are issues of profit to be had by airlines for 'owning' connectivity onto and off of a plane in flight, and that the technology landscape is a too fluid for the legislative response to be valid. Add to this the blanket of "security" as a catch all excuse for anything feasable but hard, and you begin to get a real picture of the situation that results in the "no transmitters" rule.
The bottom line is that, while there may be no compelling technical reason to ban transmitters (my opinion) no one wants to be responsible for making the call and then have an NTSB report come back naming cell phones as the cause of a airline crash.
Until that changes, it is illegal, just like replicating digital instances of copyrighted material, carrying a disposable lighter or wooden matches through security, making jokes about something being "da bomb", asking to see the regulations on presenting ID at the gate, or telling your less geeky pal how to defeat the ROT-13 encryption on his e-book.
Turn off your wifi and bluetooth before you get on the plane.
if you want to make sure that the RF is only being sent and recieved by you, you have to set up a system where the frequency "hops" - changes very rapidly in what appears to an outsider as randomness. You do this by using cryptography to establish a connection and share a seed value for the variable that initiates the hopping sequence and a synchonization pulse for their internal clocks.
Then you need to build a transmitter and a reciever that will be able to change frequencies very very fast (hundreds or thousands of times per second), keep in sync with one another, and send packetized digital data between them.
If you are really paraniod, you encrypt the signals going to the transmitter, allow the transmitter to encrypt them again, the reverse the process at the receiver side.
If you are really, really paranoid, you iterate that cascading pattern over several layers of the network, multiplex the signal to the radio, and broadcast a solid stream of encrypted information, filling it the gaps between "real" information with garbage so that there isn't any variation in the RF between when you are saying something and when you aren't.
If you are more paraniod than that, you unplug everything, use very low tech methods executed by fanatically loyal zealots who would rather die horribly painful deaths than bring shame on their families, betray the cause, or endanger their eternal soul.
If you want to stop the paranoid, really paraniod, and really really paraniod folks from communicating, you build your own frequency hopping device, add a modulation hopping function, connect it to a really big tesla coil mounted on an electronically isolated & shielded truck, and broadcast megawatts of RF into the atmosphere while driving around in arbitrary paths.
If you want to stop the zealots, pull a Keiser Soze on them and kill them and everyone they've ever known, their dog, their neighbor, the guy who sold them coffee this morning, etc. Iterate until there aren't any more zealots.
Privacy is not the diametric to freedom, it is a freedom.
Privacy is the freedom to control access to information about yourself and your behavior from those who you would rather not know it because it is embarrassing, incriminating, or simply against your wishes.
Freedom is not synonymous with an open society either, in fact an fully open society is the least free (libre) arrangement of human interaction because there isn't any haven from the will of others to impose themselves or their ideas upon you. No thought may go unchecked by the group, no dream unconfirmed to the mores of the society at large.
You cleave to the idea that there is the 'truly moral' while simultaneously evoking that the 'government is us', which I find a little silly.
If the government is in fact 'us', then the tyranny of the mass is reason enough to demand and safeguard our privacy, and insist on something less than an fully open society.
If there is a 'truly moral' way of living, then there cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people because it would imply either that this moral truth is known by people, thereby rendering moot the need for government at all, or that in the absence of this knowledge personally, the collective acts of a nation can be somehow conformed to a superior standard of conduct, which betrays the notion that the people are self-governing, since they do not possess the knowledge of the moral truth themselves and are instead being governed by the ideology that is external to them.
It is a logical fallacy that we are somehow "safe" from a sub-set of the population that is opposed to a particular behavior or belief and is empowered to act with authority to eliminate that behavior.
There is an enormous difference between what is moral and what is legal. Legality is the thing of government and of power. Morality is the thing of humanity and of ethics.
What is criminal today can overnight become legal, and vice versa, simply by the caprice of a majority of 538 human beings in the District of Columbia. That isn't a complaint, it is a fact. To live under the illusion that you aren't potentially a target of someone's bias, prejudice, or ideological action is really pretty foolish.
I'm sure that few people in the Arab-American or American-Islamic communities realized they would become the enemy, subject to seizure, torture, imprisonment without charge, and social stigma simply for the way the looked, who they spent time with, the books they read, or the location of their religious centers on September 10th 2001. They likely felt just as most Japanese-Americans did on December 6th 1941.
Just because what you do is "what everyone is doing" doesn't make it morally OK. It makes it popular. It was popular to ignore the Nazi rise to power and the lynchings in the deep south and the Inquisition, too. None of those are considered morally OK. Morality, when viewed through the lens of history, generally is the opposition to power being abused, not the tacit acquiescence to brutality.
Living a life shrouded in secrecy isn't an un-free life if you are doing it because you choose not to share the intimate details of your life, not because you have to. Living a life under surveillance and scrutiny by anonymous actors who believe they are above reproach and constantly on the lookout for any small breech of one of a myriad of civil and criminal laws that no one can abide by is not freedom. When everything is a crime and the enforcers pick and choose to whom and when the law will apply, that is not government by the people. When you think that what you are doing is truly morally OK, and that the government will never think you aren't, you are living a life that is not free.
IT is becoming a commodity
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Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think what it means is that Information Technology is, from the point of view of a company that isn't writing code, making hardware, or providing connectivity, a dead horse. The corporate world doesn't need in-house geeks soaking up the payroll and hoarding the sacred knowledge of esoteric, arcane legacy systems that don't work.
That equates to corporate IT being a pre-capped stove pipe within any given non-tech company - something women who are looking for good paying positions with the possibility of advancement aren't finding attractive. It may be that they aren't drawn naturally to the "me geek, me play with cool toys" life, but that life has limited applicability outside of the tech sector. Why would anyone intentionally choose to enter a career track that leads to becoming the digital equivalent to a cafeteria server or a janitor?
Until someone comes along and changes the landscape of Information within business (and society) to something that more closely approximates electricity - Information Utility - there won't be any truely good reason to get into anything but the super creative core disciplines of IT in a shrinking number of tech firms that are charting the course for the future of business computing.
Because women constitute both a more observed and a smaller population, trends will appear sooner in their group within the IT world as a whole. I think they are leaving because it's smart to be leaving this particular ship if you aren't in a position to steer a new course.
This is an honest question, coming from a legitimate source, so all of those who think no one is out there stumbling along trying to understand all at once everything you have learned over the course of years need to take a deep breath.
To the question: Yes, you can phase out your Windows 2000/2003 server in favor of Linux servers. Whether it is worth it is up to you to determine - if you have a lot invested in your Windows server admin skills, and you don't have time to devote to raising your Linux server admin skills, this may not be for you. Both OS's require a degree of skill to manage, particularly for networks of desktops being employed by people who need the desktop to be perfect all the time (which is what my experience tells me small non-profit users expect).
If you are willing/able to meet the skill requirements for the system & network administration, and can translate that into desktop support that meets or exceeds that you deliver now, you need to come to an agreement with the organization about how best to deliver services using Linux. Some services can be moved off of Windows relatively transparently, but those which users seem to be most sensitive to generally aren't as easy to migrate.
If you are running Exchange, particularly if you are using group calendars, there isn't a terrific free-as-in-beer Linux solution. SuSE Openexchange Server offers what looks like a nice solution, but the pricing isn't a significant difference to the Microsoft non-profit pricings that I've experienced, and it comes with a recurring annual client license fee.
If you are extensively using Windows DFS for your file service, then the transition to a system that uses SAMBA, NFS, or DAV will be visible to the desktop user, with all the associated gnashing of teeth that brings. If you haven't implemented DFS, then the reproduction of home directories and shared directories with SAMBA should be simple and, with group policies, transparent.
Authentication of users against the Active Directory to Linux network services isn't as hard as it might seem. By installing the Microsoft Services for Unix (or whatever they are calling it this week) you will get POSIX fields in the Active Directory schema that can be used to write LDAP queries against for authentication via PAM, Apache modules, and PHP, Perl, and Java applications. Likewise, logins on Linux servers and workstations with AD credentials can be directed against the AD via LDAP, and SuSE has this option included in their default install process.
Finally, there are likely applications that are seen as critical to the success of the organization that are only supported on Windows. These niche applications will necessarily govern how much you can remove Windows from your back office.
In general, the introduction of a few Linux server into your back office is as painful as you want to make it. Moving user or customer facing services to Linux has to be an organizational decision, but it doesn't present a lot of technical problems. The biggest thing to remember is that you are meddling with the culture of the organization. These 50 people are doing something they consider very important, and they are not interested in what is cool to a bunch of geeks. If you thing Linux will save you enough money to buy 'IT goodies' then you shouldn't even bother, because it isn't the right motivation. Linux can save money, it can be more secure, and it can be more stable, but all of those things are irrelevant if they users are pissed off because 'it worked fine before you changed things'.
My advice is to use Linux to deploy new services, integrate it into the existing network, but only replace something that works when it is time to upgrade (since it will break anyway) or when it stops working. Be open and honest when you deploy something, when it breaks as well as when it works fine, and if you blow it up, take responsibility and don't blame someone else.
it's not a short-term solution, and it won't work in research facilities quite as easily, but as you replace desktop PC's, replace them with thin-clients. There are many kinds, they use many OS's, they are cheap, easy, and practically bulletproof, and they save you money (once again, in the long run) on licensed application fees.
I like these ( http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray170/index.xml ), but any system will do.
Finally, they return actual control over the desktop to central IT, while preserving the illusion of control in the consumer of information's experience.
The suspension is of the idyllic notion that is the esteemed ideal of American government, namely that it is a democracy populated by noble do-gooders seeking the best for the Nation. This is the ideal established by 50 years of public education's civics classes and people want to believe it.
Additionally, the scope of the corruption is the thing of movies - we can easily imagine DeNiro as Al Capone or Beatty as Bugsy Siegel pulling threads of influence to advance their position - so seeing the sitting President acting more like a gangster than Lincoln or Washington requires a suspension of disbelief because you 'know' that Presisdents 'don't act like that'.
Political corruption usually templates out in a way that the big cheese is involved after the crime in the cover up - a la Watergate and Iran-Contra - not as the initiator of the crime, not as the facilitator of the crime through intermediaries clearly connected to the principal, and not as an attacker and enemy of the Constitution.
The problem with this story is that it is too fantastic. Even if it were true, the depth of the corruption is so widespread, among so many high-profile characters and big power families, that it requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Security through incredulity, anyone?
just put all your scripts and whatnot into cvs, then write a nice little webservice interface to your cvs server and have your windows admin write a group policy to reference the URI of the script as a desktop icon via the Windows.NET framework and Active Desktop. The current/stable version is always called when the icon is executed and the user gets all the in-house widgets they need as part of the login process. All you have to do is manage your Active Directory and group membership.
you can set up an streaming server / music repository on a Linux box that doesn't have to have X running on it or even a CD-Rom that you can then use from any iTunes client and if you really want to, you might be able to get it to stream from the repository to a stereo via an AirPort Express.
Furthermore, you can still have the songs available for other streaming servers, and you get to bury it in a closet or the garage or something and SSH to the command line so you don't have to listen to the fan.
Slashdot Mirror
Own your own distributed DNS infrastructure that comes with its own openAPI.
http://www.f5.com/products/big-ip/product-modules/global-traffic-manager.html
Its expensive, complex, and will take at least a week to set up, but one of these will scrub all traffic for things like SSNs and other pattern-matchable data inside HTTP packets and other TCP traffic.
No, it isn't. Copyright is part of the _civil_ code. You can't go to gen-pop at a federal maximum security prison and make your own personal rendition of Oz for copyright violations.
Don't confuse criminal law and civil law. Violence is substantially different than disobedience.
Just because 0.00004% of the population might get murdured in a given year doesn't mean that the laws aren't needed to maintain the government's monopoly on violence, but the original poster was pointing out that when the behavior of the people is out of whack with the action of the government, the government is at fault first, then the people, not the other way around.
Rule of thumb definitions: privacy - the things which you wouldn't do or announce in the town square (or relevant 21st century equivalent); anonymity - a more general case than privacy, related the ability to tie a person's identity to actions taken in public places because of the difficulty of accounting for the scope of a public place (lots of people, lots of real estate, lots of activity, etc.).
If those thumbnail definitions can be accepted, then the real question becomes, "Is the Internet, and by extension the Web, the 21st Century town square?" If the answer is "Yes" then why are we permitting the marketplace to demand/extort/require the kind of information that we wouldn't tell someone in public during a face-to-face interaction? Another question might be why we aren't protecting that information once it is delivered. The problem isn't necessarily that we give out the info voluntarily, but that once we give it out, it becomes a commodity and an asset listed on the corporate balance sheet. Its not an unreasonable request to have one set of rules instead of 50, but my first reaction is that the Federal guidelines should simply be a minimum standard that can be added to by the states, not a set of all encompassing rules to predict every situation. We simply don't have legislators who comprehend information as an object, so the efforts are like a shotgun blast delivered to a buffalo.
(Its hearsay, but I have a friend who tells me that in the State of Washington, the regulatory oversight and constraints in place for lotto machines, video poker, and computerized slots is higher (substantially higher) than for electronic voting machines and ATMs.)
On the other hand, behavior collection and analysis, like a buying pattern or a click path, is less an issue of privacy than it is an issue of anonymity. If I want to follow you around as you walk through town, there isn't any particular reason why I can't. Should I be able to follow you around the Internet? Should I be able to follow everyone around the Internet? Those are hard questions to answer, as is the disposition and capitalization of the gathered information. They are hard to answer because we feel like the Internet, because we generally access it from private, should itself be a private domain, not a public one. When we do something, even surf the Internet, from behind physical doors, we expect that action to be protected by an expectation of privacy, not simply one of anonymity. Consequently, we have to ask these kinds of questions in seperate conversations or else we get lost in a thicket of semantic tangents and nuance.
Whether or not we, collectively, want to engage in these conversations, they will take place, and if the doors are closed around them because the decision is being driven by someone with a business or security agenda, then we stand to lose in the end.
I don't know what the limits of JFS are, but it sounds like a nice set up.
This article in Linux Journal ( http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149 ) talks about doing just that. The hardware costs ring up and don't scale as you get into your capacity ranges unless you can get a deal buying bulk HDDs - something like $10K per 7.5 terabytes
... or is it a question of politics?
What I mean is, how hard is it, really, to 'call the bluff' so to speak of the US Dept of Commerce? How hard is it to hijack DNS root servers and gTLD resgistrars? How hard would the gTLD registrars fight if someone tried to take them but promised commercial gain to the registrars? What if the commercial viability of the registration was eliminated altogether?
I can imagine a theoretical feature set of BIND 10.0 - is unicode aware, allowing native language DNS resolution (along with patches to Firefox, etc.); uses digital sigs to validate self-registration of gTLDs with the core registrar and ccTLDs with the national registrar; settles gTLD disputes automatically with a competitive decision market; uses an encrypted peering system (perhaps something like waste) to replicate zone info (including gTLDs) and query horizontally across the DNS tree; changes the DNS network from a hierarchical tree into a mesh topology without changing how DNS itself works. A DNS server network with those features seems to make this pissing contest irrelevent, and those features seem to have been implemented in other places already, so putting them into a DNS server, while non-trivial, is do-able.
Is this totally off the radar?
ok, three things:
1. I never said I was a lawyer and this isn't about the law, it is about the political philosophy. I respect that the legal profession has created a set of precedents that they believe are valid and binding, but they aren't necessarily talking about the current reality. They apply only to cases that are like in character, and the difference between an industrial age precedent between a corporation and human being and an information age contract between a corporation and a human being is sufficient that it should be examined, not just dismissed with an air of arrogance for those who aren't members of the bar. The constitution isn't simply the law of the land, it is the elements of an axiomatic system, and from those elements it is possible to reconsider long-held beliefs in a way that is both consistent and complete and arrive at different conclusions. In fact, we are obliged to do this.
2. The issue isn't whether or not a contract can be entered into and enforced later, it is whether or not a contract can be used to deprive a person of their livlihood. The 14th Amendment cite was, in fact, referring to the due process requirement, and it is that requirement that corporations used successfully in the 19th century to secure "legal person" status from the Supreme Court and therfore the right to own property, sue individuals, and engage in one-to-one contracts with human beings. Prior to that era, corporations were temporarily chartered to a particular task under a very limited scope. The question remains as to whether or not a non-compete agreement is constitutional when it is between a corporation and an artistic or creative person - specifically, does this person do something that no one else can do, and is the market place unbalanced by an attempt to retain exclusive rights to the fruits of their labor after the period of employment. You completely ignore that question when you dismiss the whole issue as a contracts law arguement.
3. Google, is a citizen of the State of California, Microsoft is a citizen of the State of Washington. Neither can claim citizenship in anyother State, I presume, since they have only one charter each. The issues at stake here are the importation of foreign capital and the governance of that foregin capital once they are no longer being employed, namely the computer scientist of Chinese descent who may or may not be an American citizen (It wasn't clear to me his status - if he is actually a Chinese citizen, then this isn't even a debate, since it becomes a foreign trade issue over which neither State can rule.). This is clearly an issue of this man being so valuable that Microsoft feels the need to restrict his labor utility to the competition through a non-cometition contract. The jurisdiction of the non-competition contract would not be at issue except that the State of California has decided that, like riding motorcycles, riding in cars, and smoking heroin, engaging in non-competition agreements is a method of self-assualt that requires that the people be protected from themselves. We have rules of prohibition because the prohibited acts are ostensibly both dangerous and alluring. California is, in effect saying, we don't care if the contract exists, because you cannot enforce the contract, nor can you claim damages if it is broken because it is essentially asocial to commoditize the employee, claim ownership over his future labor, and use that ownership to manipulate the market to your benefit.
You use the example of marriage - a social contract - to illustrate your arguement that the contracts law must be honored under the full faith and credit provisions. I agree. But the reverse is also true. If an abnormal situation is the destination, not the origin of the interstate travel, the more permissive environment also applies. If the person moves from New York to Utah, they are now permitted to marry a 14 year old, despite any previous restriction that New York imposed upon them. Likewise, it is possible to secure a divorce in
If this goes all the way to SCOTUS it will be a commerce clause argument: "Do states have the right to govern the labor practices of companies who employ workers who live in the boundaries of the state, even if those companies are engaged in interstate commerse?"
Yes, the contract was established in Washington, but the contractractual arrangement could never have been established in California, so does it still have force when the worker moves to California and seeks employment? Can a contract, that is valid in Washington be enforced in California where it is invalid? Is the contract prejudicial if applied to the employee who lives in Washington but not one who immigrates to California? Pejudicial to whom?
And at the bottom of the issue is whether or not a corporation, in claiming personhood, and therfore inclusion in 14th amendment's right to property, can deprive a human being of their own 14th amendment rights to liberty by denying them the right to engage in securing their livelihood by future labor based upon past experiences through the use of a contractual instrument that claims ownership over the specialized and singular labor potential of the human being.
In essence Microsoft's position is that any future labor that this person does is owned, whole or in part, by Microsoft because of this non-competition contract, and that Microsoft reserves the right to refuse license to that future labor to other corporations at will as a means of denying competition in the marketplace.
Oregon State University's Open Source lab has a tool specifically designed to find rogue wifi access point on univerisity networks, and it's available here: rogue detect
that universities often NAT their network, and the most likely thief is another student, so if you do have it 'phoning home' you need to capture the local LAN IP address and package it up to actually send to the log server, not just ping the server and record the origin of the ping.
Paying for insourcing isn't as simple as it sounds - I worked once helping get rid of an insourcing contractor. They will provide exactly those services that you ask them to, and any changes will be charged a contract modification fee. They will try to take profits in the 35% range on your fee, primarily by under staffing your IT shop. They will assure their permenance by not not documenting anything, or making the system documentation the proprietary property of the insourcing corporation. Not only will it not be cheaper, but it will most likely cost more.
The lesson I learned was that those tricks you use to make your accountants happy and keep your payroll low are short-sighted and ill-concieved. You should be managing the IT budget to make itemized accounting anyhow, and keeping your payroll low just off-sets the true cost of IT, which, until the software stops having bugs, the malicious code stops beign written by human beings, and active intrusion stops originating in people, will remain a something that ranges from just above menial thinking to substantial serious talent. You just can't have enough brains when running enterprise IT.
If your company can turn off the LAN and still turn profits, then they shouldn't even have an IT shop, but if that isn't the case, your company needs to look at IT as an essential horizontal business unit that sits at the table for every strategic discussion, not a cost center where savings can be made by cutting labor.
It sounds like they intend to use some of Intel's fancy-schmancy new chipsets that have DRM built into them and are tailored to specific needs: This one for Apple, and maybe the RIAA & MPAA set.
Then Apple will have instructions in the startup process (launchd?) to look for the Apple specific key encoded in the Intel hardware, and it will die if it fails.
Finally, future version upgrades might be 'upgrade only' so that your $129 doesn't get you a bare-metal installable OS, just a launch-from-the-finder or launch from the BIOS OS improvement package. The only way to get the new version of OS X might be to have the old version of OS X that came pre-installed on your Apple hardware.
It might be hackable, but then again, it might not. By crafting the OS and hardware together, even on commodity architecture, Apple maintains the ability to create sufficient interlocks, interdependencies, and failsafes to prevent ramant redistribution of their OS, something MIcrosoft has never had.
Two things that remain to be seen: is not opening OS X to commodity boxes the same mistake that not allowing clones was, and will Microsoft care if Apple starts selling dual core systems that can run NT or Longhorn kernel programs without the Windows desktop/Windows explorer?
It seems to me that if the charter of a legislature (whether it is internal rules or in the appropriate Constitution) should compel the legislature to engage in a kind of zero-sum game with regards to the body of law.
If it took a two-thirds or five-eighths majority to add a law without removing a law, those old laws would get cleaned out pretty quickly.
If the also had to reduce the body of law by five or ten percent before the end of every legislative session we'd accomplish the same thing.
it is my understanding that there are two issues with cellphones and transmitters on commercial airplanes - neither of which were issues with military arcraft when I was on active duty (the 1990s).
Issue one is that airplanes move through cells too fast for most cellphones to deal with it, and that causes them to ramp up their RF signal strength and the frequency of their outbound conenction traffic in an attempt to maintain a conenction to the network. (cell phones weren't allowed on transports but our UHF, SHF, and VHF radios worked fine)
Issue two is that avionics packages are not always shielded to spec in older airframes and there is the outside chance that 'something' could go wrong. (just like the outside chance that 'something' could go wrong at the gas pump) (military airframes are emissions shielded by guys who make the tinfoil hat brigade look sane)
The technical problems are exaserbated by the social problems - namely that there isn't a lot of significant science on the validity of the fears, that there are issues of profit to be had by airlines for 'owning' connectivity onto and off of a plane in flight, and that the technology landscape is a too fluid for the legislative response to be valid. Add to this the blanket of "security" as a catch all excuse for anything feasable but hard, and you begin to get a real picture of the situation that results in the "no transmitters" rule.
The bottom line is that, while there may be no compelling technical reason to ban transmitters (my opinion) no one wants to be responsible for making the call and then have an NTSB report come back naming cell phones as the cause of a airline crash.
Until that changes, it is illegal, just like replicating digital instances of copyrighted material, carrying a disposable lighter or wooden matches through security, making jokes about something being "da bomb", asking to see the regulations on presenting ID at the gate, or telling your less geeky pal how to defeat the ROT-13 encryption on his e-book.
Turn off your wifi and bluetooth before you get on the plane.
if you want to make sure that the RF is only being sent and recieved by you, you have to set up a system where the frequency "hops" - changes very rapidly in what appears to an outsider as randomness. You do this by using cryptography to establish a connection and share a seed value for the variable that initiates the hopping sequence and a synchonization pulse for their internal clocks.
Then you need to build a transmitter and a reciever that will be able to change frequencies very very fast (hundreds or thousands of times per second), keep in sync with one another, and send packetized digital data between them.
If you are really paraniod, you encrypt the signals going to the transmitter, allow the transmitter to encrypt them again, the reverse the process at the receiver side.
If you are really, really paranoid, you iterate that cascading pattern over several layers of the network, multiplex the signal to the radio, and broadcast a solid stream of encrypted information, filling it the gaps between "real" information with garbage so that there isn't any variation in the RF between when you are saying something and when you aren't.
If you are more paraniod than that, you unplug everything, use very low tech methods executed by fanatically loyal zealots who would rather die horribly painful deaths than bring shame on their families, betray the cause, or endanger their eternal soul.
If you want to stop the paranoid, really paraniod, and really really paraniod folks from communicating, you build your own frequency hopping device, add a modulation hopping function, connect it to a really big tesla coil mounted on an electronically isolated & shielded truck, and broadcast megawatts of RF into the atmosphere while driving around in arbitrary paths.
If you want to stop the zealots, pull a Keiser Soze on them and kill them and everyone they've ever known, their dog, their neighbor, the guy who sold them coffee this morning, etc. Iterate until there aren't any more zealots.
Privacy is not the diametric to freedom, it is a freedom.
Privacy is the freedom to control access to information about yourself and your behavior from those who you would rather not know it because it is embarrassing, incriminating, or simply against your wishes.
Freedom is not synonymous with an open society either, in fact an fully open society is the least free (libre) arrangement of human interaction because there isn't any haven from the will of others to impose themselves or their ideas upon you. No thought may go unchecked by the group, no dream unconfirmed to the mores of the society at large.
You cleave to the idea that there is the 'truly moral' while simultaneously evoking that the 'government is us', which I find a little silly.
If the government is in fact 'us', then the tyranny of the mass is reason enough to demand and safeguard our privacy, and insist on something less than an fully open society.
If there is a 'truly moral' way of living, then there cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people because it would imply either that this moral truth is known by people, thereby rendering moot the need for government at all, or that in the absence of this knowledge personally, the collective acts of a nation can be somehow conformed to a superior standard of conduct, which betrays the notion that the people are self-governing, since they do not possess the knowledge of the moral truth themselves and are instead being governed by the ideology that is external to them.
It is a logical fallacy that we are somehow "safe" from a sub-set of the population that is opposed to a particular behavior or belief and is empowered to act with authority to eliminate that behavior.
There is an enormous difference between what is moral and what is legal. Legality is the thing of government and of power. Morality is the thing of humanity and of ethics.
What is criminal today can overnight become legal, and vice versa, simply by the caprice of a majority of 538 human beings in the District of Columbia. That isn't a complaint, it is a fact. To live under the illusion that you aren't potentially a target of someone's bias, prejudice, or ideological action is really pretty foolish.
I'm sure that few people in the Arab-American or American-Islamic communities realized they would become the enemy, subject to seizure, torture, imprisonment without charge, and social stigma simply for the way the looked, who they spent time with, the books they read, or the location of their religious centers on September 10th 2001. They likely felt just as most Japanese-Americans did on December 6th 1941.
Just because what you do is "what everyone is doing" doesn't make it morally OK. It makes it popular. It was popular to ignore the Nazi rise to power and the lynchings in the deep south and the Inquisition, too. None of those are considered morally OK. Morality, when viewed through the lens of history, generally is the opposition to power being abused, not the tacit acquiescence to brutality.
Living a life shrouded in secrecy isn't an un-free life if you are doing it because you choose not to share the intimate details of your life, not because you have to. Living a life under surveillance and scrutiny by anonymous actors who believe they are above reproach and constantly on the lookout for any small breech of one of a myriad of civil and criminal laws that no one can abide by is not freedom. When everything is a crime and the enforcers pick and choose to whom and when the law will apply, that is not government by the people. When you think that what you are doing is truly morally OK, and that the government will never think you aren't, you are living a life that is not free.
I think what it means is that Information Technology is, from the point of view of a company that isn't writing code, making hardware, or providing connectivity, a dead horse. The corporate world doesn't need in-house geeks soaking up the payroll and hoarding the sacred knowledge of esoteric, arcane legacy systems that don't work.
That equates to corporate IT being a pre-capped stove pipe within any given non-tech company - something women who are looking for good paying positions with the possibility of advancement aren't finding attractive. It may be that they aren't drawn naturally to the "me geek, me play with cool toys" life, but that life has limited applicability outside of the tech sector. Why would anyone intentionally choose to enter a career track that leads to becoming the digital equivalent to a cafeteria server or a janitor?
Until someone comes along and changes the landscape of Information within business (and society) to something that more closely approximates electricity - Information Utility - there won't be any truely good reason to get into anything but the super creative core disciplines of IT in a shrinking number of tech firms that are charting the course for the future of business computing.
Because women constitute both a more observed and a smaller population, trends will appear sooner in their group within the IT world as a whole. I think they are leaving because it's smart to be leaving this particular ship if you aren't in a position to steer a new course.
This is an honest question, coming from a legitimate source, so all of those who think no one is out there stumbling along trying to understand all at once everything you have learned over the course of years need to take a deep breath.
To the question: Yes, you can phase out your Windows 2000/2003 server in favor of Linux servers. Whether it is worth it is up to you to determine - if you have a lot invested in your Windows server admin skills, and you don't have time to devote to raising your Linux server admin skills, this may not be for you. Both OS's require a degree of skill to manage, particularly for networks of desktops being employed by people who need the desktop to be perfect all the time (which is what my experience tells me small non-profit users expect).
If you are willing/able to meet the skill requirements for the system & network administration, and can translate that into desktop support that meets or exceeds that you deliver now, you need to come to an agreement with the organization about how best to deliver services using Linux. Some services can be moved off of Windows relatively transparently, but those which users seem to be most sensitive to generally aren't as easy to migrate.
If you are running Exchange, particularly if you are using group calendars, there isn't a terrific free-as-in-beer Linux solution. SuSE Openexchange Server offers what looks like a nice solution, but the pricing isn't a significant difference to the Microsoft non-profit pricings that I've experienced, and it comes with a recurring annual client license fee.
If you are extensively using Windows DFS for your file service, then the transition to a system that uses SAMBA, NFS, or DAV will be visible to the desktop user, with all the associated gnashing of teeth that brings. If you haven't implemented DFS, then the reproduction of home directories and shared directories with SAMBA should be simple and, with group policies, transparent.
Authentication of users against the Active Directory to Linux network services isn't as hard as it might seem. By installing the Microsoft Services for Unix (or whatever they are calling it this week) you will get POSIX fields in the Active Directory schema that can be used to write LDAP queries against for authentication via PAM, Apache modules, and PHP, Perl, and Java applications. Likewise, logins on Linux servers and workstations with AD credentials can be directed against the AD via LDAP, and SuSE has this option included in their default install process.
Finally, there are likely applications that are seen as critical to the success of the organization that are only supported on Windows. These niche applications will necessarily govern how much you can remove Windows from your back office.
In general, the introduction of a few Linux server into your back office is as painful as you want to make it. Moving user or customer facing services to Linux has to be an organizational decision, but it doesn't present a lot of technical problems. The biggest thing to remember is that you are meddling with the culture of the organization. These 50 people are doing something they consider very important, and they are not interested in what is cool to a bunch of geeks. If you thing Linux will save you enough money to buy 'IT goodies' then you shouldn't even bother, because it isn't the right motivation. Linux can save money, it can be more secure, and it can be more stable, but all of those things are irrelevant if they users are pissed off because 'it worked fine before you changed things'.
My advice is to use Linux to deploy new services, integrate it into the existing network, but only replace something that works when it is time to upgrade (since it will break anyway) or when it stops working. Be open and honest when you deploy something, when it breaks as well as when it works fine, and if you blow it up, take responsibility and don't blame someone else.
it's not a short-term solution, and it won't work in research facilities quite as easily, but as you replace desktop PC's, replace them with thin-clients. There are many kinds, they use many OS's, they are cheap, easy, and practically bulletproof, and they save you money (once again, in the long run) on licensed application fees.
I like these ( http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray170/index.xml ), but any system will do.
Finally, they return actual control over the desktop to central IT, while preserving the illusion of control in the consumer of information's experience.
The suspension is of the idyllic notion that is the esteemed ideal of American government, namely that it is a democracy populated by noble do-gooders seeking the best for the Nation. This is the ideal established by 50 years of public education's civics classes and people want to believe it.
Additionally, the scope of the corruption is the thing of movies - we can easily imagine DeNiro as Al Capone or Beatty as Bugsy Siegel pulling threads of influence to advance their position - so seeing the sitting President acting more like a gangster than Lincoln or Washington requires a suspension of disbelief because you 'know' that Presisdents 'don't act like that'.
Political corruption usually templates out in a way that the big cheese is involved after the crime in the cover up - a la Watergate and Iran-Contra - not as the initiator of the crime, not as the facilitator of the crime through intermediaries clearly connected to the principal, and not as an attacker and enemy of the Constitution.
The problem with this story is that it is too fantastic. Even if it were true, the depth of the corruption is so widespread, among so many high-profile characters and big power families, that it requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Security through incredulity, anyone?
Conspiracy theorists of the world unite.
just put all your scripts and whatnot into cvs, then write a nice little webservice interface to your cvs server and have your windows admin write a group policy to reference the URI of the script as a desktop icon via the Windows .NET framework and Active Desktop. The current/stable version is always called when the icon is executed and the user gets all the in-house widgets they need as part of the login process. All you have to do is manage your Active Directory and group membership.
it's called the crapper... it is your friend, your fortress of solitude, and the throne of knowedge.
you can set up an streaming server / music repository on a Linux box that doesn't have to have X running on it or even a CD-Rom that you can then use from any iTunes client and if you really want to, you might be able to get it to stream from the repository to a stereo via an AirPort Express.
here is the link.
Furthermore, you can still have the songs available for other streaming servers, and you get to bury it in a closet or the garage or something and SSH to the command line so you don't have to listen to the fan.