Somehow I think you're mistaken. I suspect that it very strongly depends on a) what side of the border you are on, and b) whether you are a citizen. Why? Because if you are an American citizen on the US side of a border checkpoint, you are technically in US territory and should have all of the rights and protection of all of the laws available to a US citizen in the US. The TSA or ICE may beg to differ, but I'd be willing to bet that we can find a whole lot of judges who disagree.
Oh, and my laptop might be tricky to search... I wonder what procedures they have in place for people travelling with computers running alternative operating systems or simply in a language the officer cannot understand. 200 translators waiting behind the security booth? sounds practical.
The article title is "Examining the Search and Seizure of Electronics at Airports". What part of "Seizure" don't you comprehend? This is one place where running a non-Windows PC doesn't help you at all. In fact, it probably hurts you by guaranteeing that your laptop will be confiscated instead of merely searched.
BTW, from what I had heard they were only allowed to do this to non-citizens are ports of entry/exit. If you're a citizen or travelling on a domestic flight you should be OK, right?
There's a simple fix to this. TrueCrypt supports hidden volumes. So you create a TrueCrypt encrypted volume, say of 2GB in size. Then you put a couple megabytes of data in it. Then you create the hidden volume within the encrypted volume, and put your real private data in there, using a different passphrase to encrypt the two volumes.
Now when someone looks at your hard disk they see a single 2GB encrypted volume. They can get your password and decrypt that volume, but they can't see the second encrypted volume within the first. And because all of the data is encrypted you cannot tell the whitespace from encrypted data on the disk. It's pretty slick actually.
I'd like to think that if I were confronted with this that I would tell the TSA agent to fuck off, then point out that anyone who wanted to get "contraband" material into or outside of the country wouldn't store it on their laptop to begin with. They'd put it on a memory stick that's hidden in their suitcase, or, more likely, keep in on a server outside of the US and access it remotely from a free WiFi AP at Panera. But once again we have security theatre at it's best.
I think Yahoo! makes a big mistake here. Stock will fall even lower then the $19,18 it was at the moment of the hostile take over from MSFT. We'll see what happens.
Microsoft will win this one anyway. What people forget is that Yahoo's management has a fiduciary responsibility to the company's owners, aka the shareholders. Unless the Yahoo execs can convince shareholders that they a plan to somehow generate more value than Microsoft's buyout price, they are neglecting their duty. You can probably expect shareholder lawsuits over this if it doesn't eventually go through, ESPECIALLY because Yahoo has been on the downswing for the past couple of years.
Realistically, the Yahoo management is probably just trying to hold out for an even more ridiculous sum of money. Microsoft will probably tell Yahoo that they can either take the current offer or MS will appeal directly to the shareholders. In fact, Ballmer said as much in his original offer letter:
Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.
Even if Yahoo management says no, it is the Yahoo shareholders who have the final say. This is far from over.
Yes, but you guys actually have competition and choice in the mobile space. You can go buy whatever phone you like, then go to a carrier, buy a SIM card and be up and running. If you don't like the service you can switch to another carrier.
Here in the US you get to choose between 4-5 major carriers. However, most of them use different signalling technologies that make their phones incompatible with most of the other carriers. Because of this you can't just buy a phone somewhere and hook up with a carrier. Instead you have to get the phone from the carrier, and it's usually locked to their network. They do give you the phone "for free" if you sign a 2-year contract for their service. Obviously the phone isn't free, it's subsidized by the contract fees. If you terminate the contract early you're charged a several hundred dollar penalty. Of course once you've completed the terms of the contract you still usually can't take the phone to another carrier, so if you want to switch the whole process starts over again.
So while consumers do have a choice between multiple carriers, the carriers all design their services in ways that make it next to impossible to switch service if you are dissatisfied. This lowers the amount of competition, which means that the carriers don't have to spend as much money building out/improving their network or adding new features to bring in new customers. Let's face it, if you want mobile service in the US it's like choosing between three shit sandwiches. You don't want any of them, but you still have to choose.
That's one of the reasons that AT&T has suddenly started doing so well in the US market. Because they were the exclusive US carrier of the iPhone they actually had something different that people wanted, so millions of people switched to their service. But even that works to tie consumers to AT&T, because even if you can unlock the iPhone the only other US carrier that supports that signalling technology (GSM?) is T-Mobile, and they don't have anywhere near the market penetration or coverage area that the other big carriers do.
Incidentally, the same sorts of entrenched interests that make the US lag so far behind the rest of the developed world in the mobile communications space are responsible for making the US lag so far behind the rest of the world in other communications formats, like broadband Internet access.
I still disagree. If they cannot provide the service then they shouldn't be selling it. If they buy an OC-12 from an upstream provider then they have every right to expect the full use of that OC-12 24/7. If they sell a 7Mb/1.5Mb cable connection to consumers, then why shouldn't the consumers have every right to expect full use of that connection too?
Cable companies are trying to pull a fast one on us. They started offerring an ISP service, and in order to compete with other ISPs they kept ratcheting up the speed without building out capacity. Now they're allegedly oversubscribed and need to build out upstream capacity to handle the increased traffic, but that would actually require investment. So instead they want to put caps on/disconnect people who actually use the service that they're paying for and keep only the people who underutilize the service. They're perfectly happy to take our money for their service as long as we're not going to use everything that they're selling. But when people actually do start using their entire bandwidth allotment they cry foul.
Here's an idea...if you can only accommodate users with 1.5Mb/512Kb connections, don't sell services rated at 7.5Mb/1.5Mb. Don't promise what you can't deliver and you won't have problems. Oh, wait. I forgot. Cable companies are big businesses, so they're allowed to screw you coming and going. If they had to advertise service levels that they could actually meet 100% of the time then nobody would buy their services. Sounds like the problem is their business model, not their user base. And playing these games with their user base is only going to temporarily forestall the inevitable...more users will use more bandwidth and the companies will have to either a) cut off most of their customers or b) invest in more bandwidth.
I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte. A heavy user should be paying more, this isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is when ISPs advertise unlimited and then put a cap in the fine print.
I disagree. Putting in the data pipes costs ISPs a certain amount of money. Putting in bigger pipes costs ISPs more money than putting in smaller pipes. But ISPs do not pay for their connections to the Internet on a per gigabyte basis. They pay for a pipe capable of sending X amount of data per second, and they're allowed to use up to that limit. So why should we be charged differently? If someone pays for a 7Mb down/1.5Mb up connection they should be able to use 7Mb/1.5Mb. If two people are neighbors and they bother pay for a 7Mb/1.5Mb connection, why should one of them have to pay more for using the connection more often? If I pay to have an analog phone line installed should I pay more if I make twice as many local calls as my neighbor? If my neighbor and I both have cable installed, should I have to pay more if I watch twice as much TV as my neighbor? If I pay for satellite radio, should I have to pay more if I listen to it twice as much as the next guy?
You have already bought into the greedy ISPs way of thinking, that somehow bandwidth is metered. It's not. We are paying for a data connection to be installed. We can pay more or less based on how much data that pipe can transfer in a second. We shouldn't have to pay extra on top of that for actually using the pipe too.
While it is a screwed up situation, it's not exactly what it seems on it's face. There was a story about it on NPR the other day that went into more detail. Apparently the journalism student is the younger brother of a journalist who has been openly critical of one of the provincial governors in the press. That governor is also a former warlord, so he's used to having things more or less his way. There was apparently no evidence whatsoever that the younger brother actually distributed the offensive material, but he was charged, convicted, and sentenced by the courts in the province anyway. The prevailing opinion is that it is the warlord trying to get at the older brother through the younger. The last time I heard, the case was being appealed to higher courts who would be outside the influence of the warlord. Hamid Kharzai is also supposedly on the brother's side as well. When they interviewed the older brother he didn't seem to concerned about the situation, saying that everyone was pretty confident that the conviction would be overturned and his brother would be freed.
Still, that's a pretty fucked up situation, but it's not quite as bad as people are painting it.
OK, so I think that we're all agreed that IBM can't Open Source OS/2 because they don't own the rights to all of it. But what is the difference between OS/2 and eComStation? I heard that eComStation was actually where future OS/2 development was going.
Excluding minor offenses such as the ones you mentioned seem so uncontroversial that it's not worth addressing.
Three problems with that. The first is that those "minor offenses" still get on the list. Secondly is that many states publish lists of offenders but don't actually list what they were convicted of. Thirdly, if you are on the list, you're on the list (usually for life). The school that you work for doesn't care that you're on it for pissing on a bush because you are now unemployable for simply being on the list. Your crazy-ass overprotective neighbors don't care that you're on the list for pissing on a bush because they think you're out to ass-rape their children. See where I'm going here?
And what makes it even worse these days is all of the paranoia about allegedly "activist judges," so now in many jurisdictions the judge doesn't have the discretion to determine whether your crime warrants going on the list.
I feel for you, man. The simple truth is that the courts are biased against men. Some people believe that in the past the courts had been heavily biased in favor of men, and that women got shafted. Many of those people now believe that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction in a misguided attempt to "correct the injustices of the past." In the past, many victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, or child abuse were not believed. As a result of re-education efforts an accuser is always believed to be telling the truth, even if there is a lack of evidence (or evidence to the contrary). The end result is that the courts are always biased in favor of the accuser, and almost always against men.
What this means is:
If you are accused of sexual assault, you are presumed guilty. Your life will be ruined unless you can prove your innocence, and even then you will have already suffered severe damage to your reputation and mental state.
If you are accused of domestic violence, you are presumed guilty. Your life will be ruined unless you can prove your innocence, and even then you will have already suffered severe damage to your reputation and mental state.
If you are accused of child abuse...well...you get the picture.
If you are in a custody dispute with you ex-wife, you will not get custody of your children unless you can prove that your ex is an unfit mother (and in most cases they would have to be a homeless crack whore to lose their rights).
If a woman gives birth to a child and names you as the father and you don't contest it immediately, you can be forced to pay child support even if you believe that the child isn't yours. And once you've started paying child support you're on the hook for it until they turn 18, even if you can prove through DNA evidence that the child could not possibly be yours. In most states if you happen to be married to the woman when she gives birth you can't contest paternity at all for purposes of child supprt. I didn't believe this myself until I started looking into case law.
So the next time that a woman starts crying about equal rights, you might want to remind her about the many "swords of Damocles" hanging over our heads. She just might change her tune (but probably not).
I'm guessing that the submitter is a Linux guy looking to make some anti-Microsoft noise on a slow news day. Why?
Digging in a bit I found myself confused not only by what the program portends to be but why it would be called it 'Open Value Subscription' unless they were hoping to leverage buzzwords and concepts related to open source and SaaS (software as a service).
It's not an attempt to trade on buzzwords and concepts related to Open Source and SaaS. Microsoft has used the term "Open" for years in their licensing programs (at least a decade that I'm aware of).
For years there have been three main categories of volume licenses. They are "Open" (for small businesses who only buy a handful of licenses at a time), "Select" (for large businesses with higher purchasing requirements) and "Enterprise" (for the largest organizations). As you move up the tiers the per-license cost gets lower and the associated benefits increase. For example, if you have an Open license you are expected to buy a license before deploying software. With the higher level agreements you are required to perform a regular "true-up" where you audit the number of licenses in use, compare that count to the number of licenses you own, and then buy enough to cover the gap. At the highest level you are only required to true-up annually. As you can imagine, this makes it a lot more difficult for the BSA to come in and claim that you're using unlicensed software.
The "Value" part of the name refers to features that are included with the volume license plans, and the actual "Value" increases as you move up the tiers. "Value" benefits can include a set number of Microsoft Consulting hours per year, a number of "free" support incidents, and a number of units of training on Microsoft products. Some even include vouchers for Microsoft certification exams.
The "Subscription" part of the name refers to the fact that you are paying an annual licensing fee. This used to be simply called Software Assurance, but nobody was buying it. Instead they started bundling more benefits and called it what it is, an annual subscription.
So there's no mystery there, and certainly nobody trying to trade on the good names of "Open Source" and "SaaS."
I just love how people who know nothing about Microsoft other than "I'm supposed to hate them" are always jumping to the most nefarious conclusions based on the most flimsy and innocuous of evidence.
But I always believed that a diamond was so "shiny, sparkly, and beautiful" because of it's high refractive index. That's also why moissanite (which is often used a less expensive substitute for diamonds in jewelry) has such a similar "fire".
Misusing a company resource? Your argument (which is not based on any facts since you admit you're completely unfamiliar with the case) is that she was fired not for brining the company into public disrepute but for sending a personal email????
That's not what I said at all. If you think I'm a troll, just look back over the hundreds of posts that I've made on Slashdot and how they've been moderated. I'm clearly not a troll. What I said was:
I'm willing to bet that the termination had more to do with misusing company resources/having a blowjob story tied with the law firm's email address and signature than what she said in the email.
You should know that since you quoted it. In what way is "having a blowjob story tied with the law firm's email address and signature" not "bringing the company into public disrepute"? Seriously, did you even read my post before you quoted me? Now, having had experience with similar cases (from the company's email administrator side, not the terminated employee's side) I can tell you that while they're usually fired for bringing the company name into disrepute, they're technically let go for misusing company resources (sending non work-related emails from work). Why? Because most companies have an policy against using company resources for personal purposes, so they don't have to spell out that sending emails about blowjobs is forbidden. It covers multiple circumstances.
Now, as far as not knowing about the specific case goes, I did make an effort to locate the specifics via Google but couldn't find anything. Normally I wouldn't bother going that far, but I hadn't heard of that particular case before (I do try to stay up on these sorts of issues) and I was hoping to find out if it was an actual event or one of the ever so common "urban legend" stories. The closest case that I am aware of is the infamous "Bradley Chait/Claire Swire blwojob emails" from 2000, and that may very well be the one that you're referring to. Unfortunately the circumstances of that incident don't actually match what you stated because:
1. It was the man who was the lawyer, not the woman.
2. It was the man who underwent disciplinary action from his employer, not the woman.
3. As near as I can tell from reading the various articles out at the time, nobody was ever able to conclusively identify the woman or who she worked for.
4. Even though the man and several co-workers were disciplined for "bringing the company name into disrepute and abusing the company's email system" none of them were fired.
Oddly enough, the phrase "bringing the company name into disrepute and abusing the company's email system" sounds an awful lot like "had more to do with misusing company resources/having a blowjob story tied with the law firm's email address and signature". I also find it interesting that the company only found out about the email after it had been forwarded around the world and people started calling the law firm to ask about it. That makes the "If she [he] had sent it from a Gmail account she'd [he'd] probably be fine" look like it's right on the money.
No it doesn't. There is nothing stopping a IT security 'investigator' gaining a PI license,
Isn't there? Call me crazy, but I don't think that holding the typical PI and the computer forensics specialist to the same licensing standard is reasonable. How many PI's do you think have the proper training and experience to conduct computer forensics? I've worked in IT for almost 10 years and I know that I don't, so how someone can say that a former beat cop/detective with access to Lexis-Nexis is qualified to perform computer forensics is beyond me. Likewise, someone with a computer science degree who has done computer forensics work for years most likely doesn't have the knowledge and skill necessary to do traditional PI work.
So, if we assume that the licensing process means anything at all (i.e., it is a reasonable test of required knowledge of techniques) then it is unreasonable to assume that a PI can do forensics or a computer forensics expert can do PI work. Therefore the license requirement is unreasonable. Of course, there's always the possibility that in your state all you have to do is sign a form and pay a license fee to get licensed, in which case there is absolutely no value in requiring computer forensics experts to become licensed PIs. Either way it's a bad law.
Typically investigation is defined as for hire and examining other peoples' data, not your own. So investigating your own logs, and even a company having permanent staff to investigate their own logs could constitute "security", but hiring someone from another firm to examine your logs after the fact could be "investigation".
Yes, but where do you draw the line? It's easy to say that you can investigate anything from within your company. But what if an attack originates from outside your network, comes across the Internet, and compromises machines on your network. Do you start investigating it internally as "security", and then hand it off to someone else once (presumably licensed) you get outside of your network? If that's the case, then won't the perpetrator have a built-in defense in court by claiming that the "internal" part of the investigation that generated the data that was fed to the "outside" investigator wasn't held to the same forensic standards?
I do see some serious problems with this. Firstly, most PIs are not what I would consider computer forensic experts, computer security experts, or even technology experts. So allowing them to collect forensic data from computers while excluding legitimate computer forensic experts (computer science types) actually lowers the standards. That doesn't make sense. The second problem is that in some states it is not easy to get a PI license, especially if your only investigative training is in computer forensics. Thirdly, because of the global nature of the Internet it means that a forensic investigator who is investigating a compromise in New York may also need to have a PI license in all 49 other states just in case they might have to collect evidence from a system in one of those states. It just doesn't make sense.
Then there's the fact that this law will dramatically reduce the number of people legally allowed to practice computer forensics and testify in court. How does that affect expert witnesses? If you're charged with a computer-related crime and the only 7 firms licensed as PI/Computer Forensic Experts in the state all work with police departments, how do you find an expert witness to rebut their testimony? I can forsee circumstances where a traditional PI with a "point and click" forensics program provides the police with allegedly ironclad evidence that is more full of holes than swiss cheese, and the defendant not being able to discredit/rebut the evidence because their own expert witness isn't licensed in the state.
I used these extremes to make a point. However the argument is still valid for most professions in that an employer may be publicly embaraseed or their business damaged if the employee's ethics and morality come into question. Take for example the lawyer that got fired the other year for forwarding an email to her fling regarding a blow job, which then became public knowledge. If that's still too lofty a profession, imagine if this were an advertising firm or something similar.
I'm not familiar with that particular case, and have been unable to find anything via Google that resembles what you describe, but I'm willing to bet that the termination had more to do with misusing company resources/having a blowjob story tied with the law firm's email address and signature than what she said in the email. If she had sent it from a Gmail account she'd probably be fine.
You can argue that anything your staff does affects the reputation and image of any organisation. Rightly or wrongly public image is important.
That depends. If you're the CEO, definitely. If you're someone who has regular public interaction on behalf of the company, definitely. If you're someone that nobody even knows is affiliated with the company then it's irrelevant.
Agreed. There's big difference between this guy and someone else in the same situation. First of all, high school principals shouldn't be drinking and driving. Secondly, if they are pulled over for a DUI they shouldn't be calling their friends on the police force to get them out of it. But I'm a systems engineer. I'm not held to the same standard, and my getting a DUI shouldn't affect my ability to work.
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer. No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer. The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.
This argument isn't valid because you came up with three professions that have higher than usual ethical standards and then presented situations where people in those positions would clearly be in opposition to those ethics (except for maybe the schoolteacher part, but I'll give you that for the sake of argument). For starters, if you've been convicted of fraud then you're not going to get hired at a bank. If you're an ex-con you're not going to get to be a cop. If you're a convicted drug dealer you're not going to be able to be a pharmacist. But none of these examples are cases where your activities outside of work could cost you your job, these are examples where laws or professional standards of conduct were broken. These are cases where you would clearly be precluded from holding those positions by laws or professional ethics. In short, they are job-related activities even though they took place outside of work. The article is talking about much less severe cases that are not work related.
For example, what happens if you go out with your friends on a Friday night and have a few too many beers and pass out. Should you lose your job if someone at work finds out about it? What if you're married and it turns out that you're fooling around on the side? What if you're a total man-whore who's hooking up with every skank in town after hours, but shows up for work on time every day and does a good job? Should you be fired just because your boss doesn't like your social activities?
What if your boss is a staunch Republican and contributes to the Mike Huckabee election campaign, and he sees a picture of you on TV or on the web at a Barack Obama rally? Or even worse, at an anti-Chuck Norris rally? Should he be allowed to fire you for that? What if your boss is deeply religious and he notices on your Myspace profile that you're a staunch atheist and linked to the Brights web site? Or how about the reverse? Heck, what if you're a Muslim of caucasian heritage (i.e., you don't have an Arab name) and your boss finds out about your religion and fires you? If a person wants to go to a pro-life or pro-choice rally, should they have to worry about losing their job if someone that they know from work sees them there?
We're not talking about criminal behavior here, or other behavior that would legally or ethically preclude you from holding a specific job. We're talking about behavior that is truly outside the scope of anything related to the business that could still end up costing a person their job under the right circumstances.
Why would that be? The reason is that the unix tools for creating this type of setup are simple and transparent, while the windows tools for creating the type of setup include shades of obscurity, clunkiness, and conflict with various bits of (probably badly written) certain windows apps. The fact that windows has these features is certainly a bullet point that you will find in certain sales presentations, but the experience of setting up a network to provide these features isn't so pleasant, and it's not something most users are even aware is possible.
Wow...you really have no idea what you're talking about. Want to set up a roaming profile for a user? It's really simple, when you create the user account specify a network path for the profile to be stored on the line that says "Profile". Oh shit, you're right! That was incredibly obscure, clunky, and conflicting with software!
Want to minimize the size of the roaming profile by assuring that the My Documents, Application Data, etc folders are not stored locally or in the profile? Set up a Group Policy in your domain to activate folder redirection. It will take you about 3 minutes to conifgure the folder redirection, and it will apply TO EVERYONE. Damn that was hard.
Too lazy to add the profile path on the profile line when you create an account? Write a script that automates the account creation process and automatically populates the path field with the correct data based on the username, along with any other fields that you would manually have to fill out. Oh fuck! You can write scripts in Windows to manage the system? That's as easy as using Linux!
Windows does provide (at the insistence of some very large customers) for the possibility of having network-available home environment/desktops. The thing is... this setup is not the default in windows environments, even in large networked windows environments, while it IS the default in medium size (50 workstations and up) unix workstation environments.
Do you know why it's not the default? For the same reason that any of 9000 other settings are not the default. Because it's easier to start with something small and build on it. Because not everybody wants that functionality enabled by default, so you start with the lowest common denominator and give people the CHOICE to enable the functionality that they need and disable the functionality that they don't need. When you think about it, how many people really need roaming profiles? In some businesses it makes sense, but at most companies the same person will be using the same PC every day. Why add another layer if you don't need it?
I agree, I haven't paid for porn for years. Between USENET and pr0n "blogs" offering free photo and video previews of dozens of sites a day, there's more free porn out there (at just the places I hit) than even I can look at in a day.
Why can't Microsoft just bundle Virtual PC and use it as a sort of WOWOW? Mac OS X did something similar to run "classic" apps designed for Mac OS 7.5 through 9.
Virtual PC is free and does work on Vista, but the guest OS license is not.
I never thought I'd actually live to see there day where someone on Slashdot is actually in favor of Microsoft bundling more into the OS.
Because the iPhone isn't Vista logo certified. Most hardware manufacturers would go ahead and get logo certified because people actually like to make sure that their hardware is compatible. Apple doesn't care, because they're Apple. You buy their stuff and if it doesn't work with your PC, that's your problem because they're Apple.
The problem with 64-bit Windows is twofold: First of all, in general you need 64-bit drivers - which is not an issue for notebook manufacturers generally, although if a customer is installing software or external devices that require drivers or other kernel mode extensions they may find that it won't run under 64-bit Windows. Naturally the notebook makers would be reluctant to annoy their customers, so for the time being they'll probably leave it for their customers to decide if they want to upgrade to 64-bits.
64-bit drivers aren't an issue with Vista drivers either. If a company produces a 32-bit Vista driver then they have to produce a 64-bit Vista driver as well to get Microsoft's approval. And since MS has to sign the drivers for Vista...you do the math.
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Somehow I think you're mistaken. I suspect that it very strongly depends on a) what side of the border you are on, and b) whether you are a citizen. Why? Because if you are an American citizen on the US side of a border checkpoint, you are technically in US territory and should have all of the rights and protection of all of the laws available to a US citizen in the US. The TSA or ICE may beg to differ, but I'd be willing to bet that we can find a whole lot of judges who disagree.
Oh, and my laptop might be tricky to search... I wonder what procedures they have in place for people travelling with computers running alternative operating systems or simply in a language the officer cannot understand. 200 translators waiting behind the security booth? sounds practical.
The article title is "Examining the Search and Seizure of Electronics at Airports". What part of "Seizure" don't you comprehend? This is one place where running a non-Windows PC doesn't help you at all. In fact, it probably hurts you by guaranteeing that your laptop will be confiscated instead of merely searched.
BTW, from what I had heard they were only allowed to do this to non-citizens are ports of entry/exit. If you're a citizen or travelling on a domestic flight you should be OK, right?
There's a simple fix to this. TrueCrypt supports hidden volumes. So you create a TrueCrypt encrypted volume, say of 2GB in size. Then you put a couple megabytes of data in it. Then you create the hidden volume within the encrypted volume, and put your real private data in there, using a different passphrase to encrypt the two volumes.
Now when someone looks at your hard disk they see a single 2GB encrypted volume. They can get your password and decrypt that volume, but they can't see the second encrypted volume within the first. And because all of the data is encrypted you cannot tell the whitespace from encrypted data on the disk. It's pretty slick actually.
I'd like to think that if I were confronted with this that I would tell the TSA agent to fuck off, then point out that anyone who wanted to get "contraband" material into or outside of the country wouldn't store it on their laptop to begin with. They'd put it on a memory stick that's hidden in their suitcase, or, more likely, keep in on a server outside of the US and access it remotely from a free WiFi AP at Panera. But once again we have security theatre at it's best.
I think Yahoo! makes a big mistake here. Stock will fall even lower then the $19,18 it was at the moment of the hostile take over from MSFT. We'll see what happens.
Microsoft will win this one anyway. What people forget is that Yahoo's management has a fiduciary responsibility to the company's owners, aka the shareholders. Unless the Yahoo execs can convince shareholders that they a plan to somehow generate more value than Microsoft's buyout price, they are neglecting their duty. You can probably expect shareholder lawsuits over this if it doesn't eventually go through, ESPECIALLY because Yahoo has been on the downswing for the past couple of years.
Realistically, the Yahoo management is probably just trying to hold out for an even more ridiculous sum of money. Microsoft will probably tell Yahoo that they can either take the current offer or MS will appeal directly to the shareholders. In fact, Ballmer said as much in his original offer letter:
Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.
Even if Yahoo management says no, it is the Yahoo shareholders who have the final say. This is far from over.
Yes, but you guys actually have competition and choice in the mobile space. You can go buy whatever phone you like, then go to a carrier, buy a SIM card and be up and running. If you don't like the service you can switch to another carrier.
Here in the US you get to choose between 4-5 major carriers. However, most of them use different signalling technologies that make their phones incompatible with most of the other carriers. Because of this you can't just buy a phone somewhere and hook up with a carrier. Instead you have to get the phone from the carrier, and it's usually locked to their network. They do give you the phone "for free" if you sign a 2-year contract for their service. Obviously the phone isn't free, it's subsidized by the contract fees. If you terminate the contract early you're charged a several hundred dollar penalty. Of course once you've completed the terms of the contract you still usually can't take the phone to another carrier, so if you want to switch the whole process starts over again.
So while consumers do have a choice between multiple carriers, the carriers all design their services in ways that make it next to impossible to switch service if you are dissatisfied. This lowers the amount of competition, which means that the carriers don't have to spend as much money building out/improving their network or adding new features to bring in new customers. Let's face it, if you want mobile service in the US it's like choosing between three shit sandwiches. You don't want any of them, but you still have to choose.
That's one of the reasons that AT&T has suddenly started doing so well in the US market. Because they were the exclusive US carrier of the iPhone they actually had something different that people wanted, so millions of people switched to their service. But even that works to tie consumers to AT&T, because even if you can unlock the iPhone the only other US carrier that supports that signalling technology (GSM?) is T-Mobile, and they don't have anywhere near the market penetration or coverage area that the other big carriers do.
Incidentally, the same sorts of entrenched interests that make the US lag so far behind the rest of the developed world in the mobile communications space are responsible for making the US lag so far behind the rest of the world in other communications formats, like broadband Internet access.
I still disagree. If they cannot provide the service then they shouldn't be selling it. If they buy an OC-12 from an upstream provider then they have every right to expect the full use of that OC-12 24/7. If they sell a 7Mb/1.5Mb cable connection to consumers, then why shouldn't the consumers have every right to expect full use of that connection too?
Cable companies are trying to pull a fast one on us. They started offerring an ISP service, and in order to compete with other ISPs they kept ratcheting up the speed without building out capacity. Now they're allegedly oversubscribed and need to build out upstream capacity to handle the increased traffic, but that would actually require investment. So instead they want to put caps on/disconnect people who actually use the service that they're paying for and keep only the people who underutilize the service. They're perfectly happy to take our money for their service as long as we're not going to use everything that they're selling. But when people actually do start using their entire bandwidth allotment they cry foul.
Here's an idea...if you can only accommodate users with 1.5Mb/512Kb connections, don't sell services rated at 7.5Mb/1.5Mb. Don't promise what you can't deliver and you won't have problems. Oh, wait. I forgot. Cable companies are big businesses, so they're allowed to screw you coming and going. If they had to advertise service levels that they could actually meet 100% of the time then nobody would buy their services. Sounds like the problem is their business model, not their user base. And playing these games with their user base is only going to temporarily forestall the inevitable...more users will use more bandwidth and the companies will have to either a) cut off most of their customers or b) invest in more bandwidth.
I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte. A heavy user should be paying more, this isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is when ISPs advertise unlimited and then put a cap in the fine print.
I disagree. Putting in the data pipes costs ISPs a certain amount of money. Putting in bigger pipes costs ISPs more money than putting in smaller pipes. But ISPs do not pay for their connections to the Internet on a per gigabyte basis. They pay for a pipe capable of sending X amount of data per second, and they're allowed to use up to that limit. So why should we be charged differently? If someone pays for a 7Mb down/1.5Mb up connection they should be able to use 7Mb/1.5Mb. If two people are neighbors and they bother pay for a 7Mb/1.5Mb connection, why should one of them have to pay more for using the connection more often? If I pay to have an analog phone line installed should I pay more if I make twice as many local calls as my neighbor? If my neighbor and I both have cable installed, should I have to pay more if I watch twice as much TV as my neighbor? If I pay for satellite radio, should I have to pay more if I listen to it twice as much as the next guy?
You have already bought into the greedy ISPs way of thinking, that somehow bandwidth is metered. It's not. We are paying for a data connection to be installed. We can pay more or less based on how much data that pipe can transfer in a second. We shouldn't have to pay extra on top of that for actually using the pipe too.
While it is a screwed up situation, it's not exactly what it seems on it's face. There was a story about it on NPR the other day that went into more detail. Apparently the journalism student is the younger brother of a journalist who has been openly critical of one of the provincial governors in the press. That governor is also a former warlord, so he's used to having things more or less his way. There was apparently no evidence whatsoever that the younger brother actually distributed the offensive material, but he was charged, convicted, and sentenced by the courts in the province anyway. The prevailing opinion is that it is the warlord trying to get at the older brother through the younger. The last time I heard, the case was being appealed to higher courts who would be outside the influence of the warlord. Hamid Kharzai is also supposedly on the brother's side as well. When they interviewed the older brother he didn't seem to concerned about the situation, saying that everyone was pretty confident that the conviction would be overturned and his brother would be freed.
Still, that's a pretty fucked up situation, but it's not quite as bad as people are painting it.
OK, so I think that we're all agreed that IBM can't Open Source OS/2 because they don't own the rights to all of it. But what is the difference between OS/2 and eComStation? I heard that eComStation was actually where future OS/2 development was going.
Excluding minor offenses such as the ones you mentioned seem so uncontroversial that it's not worth addressing.
Three problems with that. The first is that those "minor offenses" still get on the list. Secondly is that many states publish lists of offenders but don't actually list what they were convicted of. Thirdly, if you are on the list, you're on the list (usually for life). The school that you work for doesn't care that you're on it for pissing on a bush because you are now unemployable for simply being on the list. Your crazy-ass overprotective neighbors don't care that you're on the list for pissing on a bush because they think you're out to ass-rape their children. See where I'm going here?
And what makes it even worse these days is all of the paranoia about allegedly "activist judges," so now in many jurisdictions the judge doesn't have the discretion to determine whether your crime warrants going on the list.
I feel for you, man. The simple truth is that the courts are biased against men. Some people believe that in the past the courts had been heavily biased in favor of men, and that women got shafted. Many of those people now believe that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction in a misguided attempt to "correct the injustices of the past." In the past, many victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, or child abuse were not believed. As a result of re-education efforts an accuser is always believed to be telling the truth, even if there is a lack of evidence (or evidence to the contrary). The end result is that the courts are always biased in favor of the accuser, and almost always against men.
What this means is:
If you are accused of sexual assault, you are presumed guilty. Your life will be ruined unless you can prove your innocence, and even then you will have already suffered severe damage to your reputation and mental state.
If you are accused of domestic violence, you are presumed guilty. Your life will be ruined unless you can prove your innocence, and even then you will have already suffered severe damage to your reputation and mental state.
If you are accused of child abuse...well...you get the picture.
If you are in a custody dispute with you ex-wife, you will not get custody of your children unless you can prove that your ex is an unfit mother (and in most cases they would have to be a homeless crack whore to lose their rights).
If a woman gives birth to a child and names you as the father and you don't contest it immediately, you can be forced to pay child support even if you believe that the child isn't yours. And once you've started paying child support you're on the hook for it until they turn 18, even if you can prove through DNA evidence that the child could not possibly be yours. In most states if you happen to be married to the woman when she gives birth you can't contest paternity at all for purposes of child supprt. I didn't believe this myself until I started looking into case law.
So the next time that a woman starts crying about equal rights, you might want to remind her about the many "swords of Damocles" hanging over our heads. She just might change her tune (but probably not).
Oh please. This is America; nobody's going to coerce my vote. They're going to buy it, fair and square.
Ironically, you're right about your vote being bought.
I say ironically because when your vote is being bought you're not the one doing the selling or collecting the money. Diebold/ESS/whoever are.
I'm guessing that the submitter is a Linux guy looking to make some anti-Microsoft noise on a slow news day. Why?
Digging in a bit I found myself confused not only by what the program portends to be but why it would be called it 'Open Value Subscription' unless they were hoping to leverage buzzwords and concepts related to open source and SaaS (software as a service).
It's not an attempt to trade on buzzwords and concepts related to Open Source and SaaS. Microsoft has used the term "Open" for years in their licensing programs (at least a decade that I'm aware of).
For years there have been three main categories of volume licenses. They are "Open" (for small businesses who only buy a handful of licenses at a time), "Select" (for large businesses with higher purchasing requirements) and "Enterprise" (for the largest organizations). As you move up the tiers the per-license cost gets lower and the associated benefits increase. For example, if you have an Open license you are expected to buy a license before deploying software. With the higher level agreements you are required to perform a regular "true-up" where you audit the number of licenses in use, compare that count to the number of licenses you own, and then buy enough to cover the gap. At the highest level you are only required to true-up annually. As you can imagine, this makes it a lot more difficult for the BSA to come in and claim that you're using unlicensed software.
The "Value" part of the name refers to features that are included with the volume license plans, and the actual "Value" increases as you move up the tiers. "Value" benefits can include a set number of Microsoft Consulting hours per year, a number of "free" support incidents, and a number of units of training on Microsoft products. Some even include vouchers for Microsoft certification exams.
The "Subscription" part of the name refers to the fact that you are paying an annual licensing fee. This used to be simply called Software Assurance, but nobody was buying it. Instead they started bundling more benefits and called it what it is, an annual subscription.
So there's no mystery there, and certainly nobody trying to trade on the good names of "Open Source" and "SaaS."
I just love how people who know nothing about Microsoft other than "I'm supposed to hate them" are always jumping to the most nefarious conclusions based on the most flimsy and innocuous of evidence.
But I always believed that a diamond was so "shiny, sparkly, and beautiful" because of it's high refractive index. That's also why moissanite (which is often used a less expensive substitute for diamonds in jewelry) has such a similar "fire".
Misusing a company resource? Your argument (which is not based on any facts since you admit you're completely unfamiliar with the case) is that she was fired not for brining the company into public disrepute but for sending a personal email????
That's not what I said at all. If you think I'm a troll, just look back over the hundreds of posts that I've made on Slashdot and how they've been moderated. I'm clearly not a troll. What I said was:
I'm willing to bet that the termination had more to do with misusing company resources/having a blowjob story tied with the law firm's email address and signature than what she said in the email.
You should know that since you quoted it. In what way is "having a blowjob story tied with the law firm's email address and signature" not "bringing the company into public disrepute"? Seriously, did you even read my post before you quoted me? Now, having had experience with similar cases (from the company's email administrator side, not the terminated employee's side) I can tell you that while they're usually fired for bringing the company name into disrepute, they're technically let go for misusing company resources (sending non work-related emails from work). Why? Because most companies have an policy against using company resources for personal purposes, so they don't have to spell out that sending emails about blowjobs is forbidden. It covers multiple circumstances.
Now, as far as not knowing about the specific case goes, I did make an effort to locate the specifics via Google but couldn't find anything. Normally I wouldn't bother going that far, but I hadn't heard of that particular case before (I do try to stay up on these sorts of issues) and I was hoping to find out if it was an actual event or one of the ever so common "urban legend" stories. The closest case that I am aware of is the infamous "Bradley Chait/Claire Swire blwojob emails" from 2000, and that may very well be the one that you're referring to. Unfortunately the circumstances of that incident don't actually match what you stated because:
1. It was the man who was the lawyer, not the woman.
2. It was the man who underwent disciplinary action from his employer, not the woman.
3. As near as I can tell from reading the various articles out at the time, nobody was ever able to conclusively identify the woman or who she worked for.
4. Even though the man and several co-workers were disciplined for "bringing the company name into disrepute and abusing the company's email system" none of them were fired.
Oddly enough, the phrase "bringing the company name into disrepute and abusing the company's email system" sounds an awful lot like "had more to do with misusing company resources/having a blowjob story tied with the law firm's email address and signature". I also find it interesting that the company only found out about the email after it had been forwarded around the world and people started calling the law firm to ask about it. That makes the "If she [he] had sent it from a Gmail account she'd [he'd] probably be fine" look like it's right on the money.
No it doesn't. There is nothing stopping a IT security 'investigator' gaining a PI license,
Isn't there? Call me crazy, but I don't think that holding the typical PI and the computer forensics specialist to the same licensing standard is reasonable. How many PI's do you think have the proper training and experience to conduct computer forensics? I've worked in IT for almost 10 years and I know that I don't, so how someone can say that a former beat cop/detective with access to Lexis-Nexis is qualified to perform computer forensics is beyond me. Likewise, someone with a computer science degree who has done computer forensics work for years most likely doesn't have the knowledge and skill necessary to do traditional PI work.
So, if we assume that the licensing process means anything at all (i.e., it is a reasonable test of required knowledge of techniques) then it is unreasonable to assume that a PI can do forensics or a computer forensics expert can do PI work. Therefore the license requirement is unreasonable. Of course, there's always the possibility that in your state all you have to do is sign a form and pay a license fee to get licensed, in which case there is absolutely no value in requiring computer forensics experts to become licensed PIs. Either way it's a bad law.
Typically investigation is defined as for hire and examining other peoples' data, not your own. So investigating your own logs, and even a company having permanent staff to investigate their own logs could constitute "security", but hiring someone from another firm to examine your logs after the fact could be "investigation".
Yes, but where do you draw the line? It's easy to say that you can investigate anything from within your company. But what if an attack originates from outside your network, comes across the Internet, and compromises machines on your network. Do you start investigating it internally as "security", and then hand it off to someone else once (presumably licensed) you get outside of your network? If that's the case, then won't the perpetrator have a built-in defense in court by claiming that the "internal" part of the investigation that generated the data that was fed to the "outside" investigator wasn't held to the same forensic standards?
I do see some serious problems with this. Firstly, most PIs are not what I would consider computer forensic experts, computer security experts, or even technology experts. So allowing them to collect forensic data from computers while excluding legitimate computer forensic experts (computer science types) actually lowers the standards. That doesn't make sense. The second problem is that in some states it is not easy to get a PI license, especially if your only investigative training is in computer forensics. Thirdly, because of the global nature of the Internet it means that a forensic investigator who is investigating a compromise in New York may also need to have a PI license in all 49 other states just in case they might have to collect evidence from a system in one of those states. It just doesn't make sense.
Then there's the fact that this law will dramatically reduce the number of people legally allowed to practice computer forensics and testify in court. How does that affect expert witnesses? If you're charged with a computer-related crime and the only 7 firms licensed as PI/Computer Forensic Experts in the state all work with police departments, how do you find an expert witness to rebut their testimony? I can forsee circumstances where a traditional PI with a "point and click" forensics program provides the police with allegedly ironclad evidence that is more full of holes than swiss cheese, and the defendant not being able to discredit/rebut the evidence because their own expert witness isn't licensed in the state.
I used these extremes to make a point. However the argument is still valid for most professions in that an employer may be publicly embaraseed or their business damaged if the employee's ethics and morality come into question. Take for example the lawyer that got fired the other year for forwarding an email to her fling regarding a blow job, which then became public knowledge. If that's still too lofty a profession, imagine if this were an advertising firm or something similar.
I'm not familiar with that particular case, and have been unable to find anything via Google that resembles what you describe, but I'm willing to bet that the termination had more to do with misusing company resources/having a blowjob story tied with the law firm's email address and signature than what she said in the email. If she had sent it from a Gmail account she'd probably be fine.
You can argue that anything your staff does affects the reputation and image of any organisation. Rightly or wrongly public image is important.
That depends. If you're the CEO, definitely. If you're someone who has regular public interaction on behalf of the company, definitely. If you're someone that nobody even knows is affiliated with the company then it's irrelevant.
Agreed. There's big difference between this guy and someone else in the same situation. First of all, high school principals shouldn't be drinking and driving. Secondly, if they are pulled over for a DUI they shouldn't be calling their friends on the police force to get them out of it. But I'm a systems engineer. I'm not held to the same standard, and my getting a DUI shouldn't affect my ability to work.
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer. No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer. The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.
This argument isn't valid because you came up with three professions that have higher than usual ethical standards and then presented situations where people in those positions would clearly be in opposition to those ethics (except for maybe the schoolteacher part, but I'll give you that for the sake of argument). For starters, if you've been convicted of fraud then you're not going to get hired at a bank. If you're an ex-con you're not going to get to be a cop. If you're a convicted drug dealer you're not going to be able to be a pharmacist. But none of these examples are cases where your activities outside of work could cost you your job, these are examples where laws or professional standards of conduct were broken. These are cases where you would clearly be precluded from holding those positions by laws or professional ethics. In short, they are job-related activities even though they took place outside of work. The article is talking about much less severe cases that are not work related.
For example, what happens if you go out with your friends on a Friday night and have a few too many beers and pass out. Should you lose your job if someone at work finds out about it? What if you're married and it turns out that you're fooling around on the side? What if you're a total man-whore who's hooking up with every skank in town after hours, but shows up for work on time every day and does a good job? Should you be fired just because your boss doesn't like your social activities?
What if your boss is a staunch Republican and contributes to the Mike Huckabee election campaign, and he sees a picture of you on TV or on the web at a Barack Obama rally? Or even worse, at an anti-Chuck Norris rally? Should he be allowed to fire you for that? What if your boss is deeply religious and he notices on your Myspace profile that you're a staunch atheist and linked to the Brights web site? Or how about the reverse? Heck, what if you're a Muslim of caucasian heritage (i.e., you don't have an Arab name) and your boss finds out about your religion and fires you? If a person wants to go to a pro-life or pro-choice rally, should they have to worry about losing their job if someone that they know from work sees them there?
We're not talking about criminal behavior here, or other behavior that would legally or ethically preclude you from holding a specific job. We're talking about behavior that is truly outside the scope of anything related to the business that could still end up costing a person their job under the right circumstances.
Why would that be? The reason is that the unix tools for creating this type of setup are simple and transparent, while the windows tools for creating the type of setup include shades of obscurity, clunkiness, and conflict with various bits of (probably badly written) certain windows apps. The fact that windows has these features is certainly a bullet point that you will find in certain sales presentations, but the experience of setting up a network to provide these features isn't so pleasant, and it's not something most users are even aware is possible.
Wow...you really have no idea what you're talking about. Want to set up a roaming profile for a user? It's really simple, when you create the user account specify a network path for the profile to be stored on the line that says "Profile". Oh shit, you're right! That was incredibly obscure, clunky, and conflicting with software!
Want to minimize the size of the roaming profile by assuring that the My Documents, Application Data, etc folders are not stored locally or in the profile? Set up a Group Policy in your domain to activate folder redirection. It will take you about 3 minutes to conifgure the folder redirection, and it will apply TO EVERYONE. Damn that was hard.
Too lazy to add the profile path on the profile line when you create an account? Write a script that automates the account creation process and automatically populates the path field with the correct data based on the username, along with any other fields that you would manually have to fill out. Oh fuck! You can write scripts in Windows to manage the system? That's as easy as using Linux!
Windows does provide (at the insistence of some very large customers) for the possibility of having network-available home environment/desktops. The thing is... this setup is not the default in windows environments, even in large networked windows environments, while it IS the default in medium size (50 workstations and up) unix workstation environments.
Do you know why it's not the default? For the same reason that any of 9000 other settings are not the default. Because it's easier to start with something small and build on it. Because not everybody wants that functionality enabled by default, so you start with the lowest common denominator and give people the CHOICE to enable the functionality that they need and disable the functionality that they don't need. When you think about it, how many people really need roaming profiles? In some businesses it makes sense, but at most companies the same person will be using the same PC every day. Why add another layer if you don't need it?
I agree, I haven't paid for porn for years. Between USENET and pr0n "blogs" offering free photo and video previews of dozens of sites a day, there's more free porn out there (at just the places I hit) than even I can look at in a day.
Why can't Microsoft just bundle Virtual PC and use it as a sort of WOWOW? Mac OS X did something similar to run "classic" apps designed for Mac OS 7.5 through 9.
Virtual PC is free and does work on Vista, but the guest OS license is not.
I never thought I'd actually live to see there day where someone on Slashdot is actually in favor of Microsoft bundling more into the OS.
Because the iPhone isn't Vista logo certified. Most hardware manufacturers would go ahead and get logo certified because people actually like to make sure that their hardware is compatible. Apple doesn't care, because they're Apple. You buy their stuff and if it doesn't work with your PC, that's your problem because they're Apple.
The problem with 64-bit Windows is twofold: First of all, in general you need 64-bit drivers - which is not an issue for notebook manufacturers generally, although if a customer is installing software or external devices that require drivers or other kernel mode extensions they may find that it won't run under 64-bit Windows. Naturally the notebook makers would be reluctant to annoy their customers, so for the time being they'll probably leave it for their customers to decide if they want to upgrade to 64-bits.
64-bit drivers aren't an issue with Vista drivers either. If a company produces a 32-bit Vista driver then they have to produce a 64-bit Vista driver as well to get Microsoft's approval. And since MS has to sign the drivers for Vista...you do the math.