Or are they saying that if the person gains access by guessing or brute forcing the password then the files themselves are un encypted?
Doesn't even need to be that -- if I gain physical access to your laptop, there's nothing stopping me bypassing your password entirely by simply removing your laptop's hard drive and plugging it into my own system. Which is likely what happened in this case. Your password controls access to the operating system and everything running on it, but when it comes to the underlying file system, it does sweet fuck all.
Thankfully, there are plenty of tools to do that in this day of age. All non-Home editions of Windows since Vista come with BitLocker, which provides full disk encryption, and the Lenovo-issued corporate laptop would likely have had this tool available (not having it, or an open-source equivalent, enabled is a monumental failure of Lenovo's internal IT policies). There's also VeraCrypt for the open-source world (people I know who have used it speak of it highly), and Wikipedia has a lengthy comparison of disk encryption software if you're interested further.
The summary mentioned Azure and Office 365 as examples where Microsoft gives some form of status dashboard to their customers. In those two cases, it seems rather apparent that Microsoft considers people that use those products as Microsoft customers.
However, given the initial free upgrades from prior Windows versions and the telemetry (or rather, spyware) that Windows 10 incorporates, one can argue the point that, much like Facebook, Windows 10 users are not considered Microsoft's customers, but a Microsoft product (the saying "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" comes to mind). Seen in that light, the lack of transparency (or any due diligence with respect to rolling out Windows 10 updates without show stopping bugs) makes sense: Microsoft apparently does not see themselves as answerable to their Windows 10 users, but instead answerable to those who they provide or sell data about those Windows 10 users to -- those are actually Microsoft's Windows 10 customers.
Can someone explain me the joke about Reynholm Industries?
Not sure, but I was strangely aroused by the link's intro:
"Reynholm Industries: a big hard business in a big hard building. Thrusting into the future strongly. Again and again. Pounding into the future, making the future beg for it. The future wants it, and Reynholm Industries wants to give it to the future..."
Red balls for all.
But that's just the type of place it is. A lot of sexy people not doing much work... and having affairs.
It's also notable for its IT department, consisting of a genius, a dynamic go-getter and a man from Ireland.
Try an 11 hour change in sleep patterns (which I get when I travel from New Zealand to visit friends and family back in South Africa). I guarantee you, there's nothing else that fucks up your sleep patterns as much as a sudden shift of almost half a day.
In fact, I would argue that the trip from here to South Africa is worse than the trip from here to Europe, because when flying to Europe, the time change is over a 25 hour flight, whereas flying to South Africa (via the most direct route for me, which is to first fly to Sydney and then catch the Sydney-Johannesburg flight, QF63) is a lot shorter: the longest leg (being the aforementioned QF63) has a 9 hour change in an 13.30 hour flight time -- and it's even worse on the return QF64 flight as the flight time is 2 hours shorter (QF63 has to battle some nasty headwinds, which become tailwinds for the return trip).
Another fun fact: the Qantas flight attendants absolutely detest being assigned to QF63: those 13.30 hours are entirely in daylight since the plane is quite literally chasing the sun across the Southern Indian Ocean. On the plus side, it routes close to the Antarctic coast fairly regularly as the headwinds there tend to be less powerful than if the flight simply followed the great circle routing, which for us nerds is one of the few ways to see Antarctica short of joining a polar expedition.
To summarize (for people without the inclination to read the whole thing):
Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:
causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable
necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
convolutes timetables, where present
means "days" are no longer the same as "days"
complicates both secular and religious law
is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
is not simpler.
As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.
Agree with AV1 codec being a possibility. I'm of the opinion that future data transmission of 8K content is a major factor for the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Google et. al. to be pushing the development of AV1 (notwithstanding the fact that HEVC is a legal minefield).
It's not just the large birds that one has to worry about. All of the European Barn Swallows have migrated down here, and 3 million of them choose to roost at Mount Moreland -- which is around 2.5 km from and directly in line with RWY 06 at Durban's airport.
The airport authorities are well aware of the potential danger and have installed a specialized radar system solely to keep an eye on the birds during the late evening swarm. If the swarm poses a danger to aircraft, ATC will pick it up and can then delay departures and/or put arrivals in a holding pattern as needed. The swarm, from my own observations when last I was in the area, only lasts around 10-15 minutes.
The local residents have now developed this into a small tourist attraction, which is popular with both bird and plane spotters.
Another fun story to add to the list: my mother has been visiting us in Cape Town and had a flight back to Durban (2 hours flying time). She misread her ticket: what she thought was her departure time was actually the arrival time in Durban. I realized her error too late, and we made it just as the baggage drop counter closed. Online check-in didn't save her since she had bags that needed to have been put in the hold; it would have saved her if she had carry-on luggage only (though, this is my mother -- she travels with the kitchen sink!).
It was also the last flight for that day, but the airline was very understanding -- they gave her a standby ticket for the next day at virtually no charge. We took her back the next morning, and she pretty much camped by the standby counter. Thankfully, there was a no-show on the early morning flight, so she managed to get on that.
How the hell do you get LTSB edition for Enterprise? Is it a unique SKU or some configuration preference applied to vanilla Enterprise?
Volume licensing channels or MSDN. Enterprise and Enterprise LTSB have different SKUs -- you can't reconfigure vanilla Enterprise to act as LTSB (not that I'm aware of, anyway).
TFA mentions Current Branch and Current Branch for Business, without explaining them too much. I doubt that many folks here are aware of them and the differences, so...
If you're on CB, you get major feature updates (e.g. the Anniversary Edition) pushed to you as soon as it's made generally available. Folks on CBB will still get those updates pushed to them, but a while later (MS says around four months delay), and with all the fixes made in that time.
Now, if you have the Pro or Enterprise editions (sorry Home users, you guys are stuck on CB only), you can quite easily switch between the two by means of checking (or unchecking) the "Defer upgrades" option that's somewhere in the Windows Update options. Want to live on MS's cutting edge? Leave it off. Want to use those Home peasants as your beta testers? Switch it on.
Then, there's the LTSB edition of Enterprise, which is basically RTM that just receives security patches and the like (MS will make newer versions available -- I believe there's a 2016 update to LTSB coming later this year -- but, as far as I'm aware, there's no obligation to upgrade to a newer LTSB version, and MS claims that they'll support each version for ~10 years anyway). Because MS doesn't want too many things in this edition to change, things like Edge, Cortana and the Windows Store are stripped out of it. MS's intended usage scenarios for this edition are things like POS machines and the like.
You can actually compare this to Ubuntu upgrades. If you're on CB, you're like the Ubuntu user who upgrades between point releases as soon as the new one becomes available. If you're on CBB, you're like the Ubuntu user who upgrades between point releases as soon as the old one is about to become unsupported. If you're on LTSB, then you're the Ubuntu user who only ever uses the LTS releases.
As someone who grew up in KZN, I find the correlation interesting. Bilharzia is a significant issue (don't even think about swimming in the rivers unless you're in the Drakensberg mountains -- particularly in northern KZN where one also has the possibility of crocodiles deciding that you'll be a tasty morsel), and KZN is also the province with South Africa's highest HIV infection rate. Obviously, the correlation does not imply causation, but from the information presented in TFA, it's certainly plausible and, in my opinion, worth researching further.
I'm going to back those that have already posted that it's worth treating bilharzia in it's own right. If it contributes to a reduction in the HIV infection rate, so much the better.
I will bet there are many people within M$ who disagree with the "Always On" requirement, and this is ammunition for their counter-argument. If it wasn't for this twitter-gaff, you might see Always-On, but because it happened, we will probably see this requirement removed.
In an ideal world, this would happen. Sadly, the world we live in is far from ideal, and, if past history with Microsoft is anything to go by, their stance will be a "my way or the highway" one. I have no doubt that there are indeed people within Microsoft who disagree with "always on", but I have serious doubts as to whether their counter-argument will be listened to, or even heard.
If one is looking for an example, the Metro interface (or whatever its official name is) in Windows 8 is a perfectly good one. User feedback regarding Metro was generally negative; Microsoft had a "suck it up" attitude and rammed it down our throats anyway, and one need only see how Windows 8 is shunned in these parts to see how that turned out. (Personal opinion: Microsoft really missed the boat with the Metro interface. They had a really nice idea, but the execution of said idea leaves a lot to be desired.)
The thing is: users are becoming more aware and more vocal regarding what they perceive as abuse of their freedoms, and alternatives to Microsoft and their products are far more viable to those who relied on the Microsoft ecosystem than they were in times gone by -- so Microsoft users, when faced with that "my way or the highway" stance, are now far more likely to take the latter where they would have previously taken the former. If anything, Microsoft seems to be making the same mistakes as the previous "Evil Empire" (IBM): unable and/or unwilling to react to shifts in the market until it becomes too late. They won't disappear entirely, but if they continue down the path they seem to be taking, they could well be a niche option in the not too distant future.
Replying to self: given the responses that were posted inbetween me reading the original article and getting my parent post in, substitute "quite possibly" with "most definitely".
To turn the article title around: "Gaming Console Users 'Doesn't Get' Always-On DRM Requirements". And based on the SimCity launch (there's been other examples, but this one is, in my opinion, the proverbial straw breaking the camel's back), this has been the reality for a long time.
Adam Orth has quite possibly done a fair bit of irreversible damage for the next-gen XBox's prospects.
Even poorer judgment, in fact, as his probability calculation relies on an actual rate of infection of 1 in 500. For such a highly contagious disease the rate of infection will grow (well, duh!) So if 1 in 500 gives about 83% false positives, when the infection rate reaches 1 in 50 the false positive chance drops to 33% and for 1 in 5 to 4%.
That said, one could argue that then the infection rate reaches those levels, it would be too late for the cure.
In fact, it may be able to prove (or disprove) this with the equations of motion that we learned back in elementary physics (here's a refresher if you've forgotten them). Substitute velocity with rate of infection, acceleration with how the rate of infection grows, and displacement with number of people infected (obviously, time stays as is), and you'd have a pretty decent starting point. Now, we just need to get Randall Munroe on this.
(Disclaimer: the "too late for cure" statement above obviously excludes Will Smith.)
The East African SEACOM cable has been having outages lately; they posted an outage notification due to a cable break off the Egyptian coast at 08:40 UTC yesterday (March 27th, 2013). Of course, this has been having knock-on effects: for instance, many South African ISPs use this cable as their primary international link, and have had to fall over to secondary links resulting in significant service degradation.
And these are just the ones we know about -- there may be yet older bugs (particularly in proprietary, closed-source systems, where the source cannot be reviewed by the general community).
Thing is, it was a small, young company still figuring out what the best practices were to follow. When I had started there, things were extremely ad-hoc: there was pretty much no process at all (not too dissimilar from this, actually!), and I knew pretty much nothing when I started. Towards the end of my stay, I had pretty much taught myself concepts such as proper source control, process models and that kind of thing, and was trying to get things implemented (despite resistance from the "greybeards"). At the time when all this was going on, things were moving in the right direction, but the whole system was still far from perfect. It's likely been sorted out since.
Like I said, sometimes it's necessary to learn the hard way.
One of my previous employers, a while back, employed an individual who I will henceforth refer to as the Office Freak From Hell (it had various freaky habits: no personal hygiene, odd behavioural patterns, that kind of thing). I kind of ignored it at first (except to avoid it as much as possible), until it was moved over to my team. It didn't take me long to realise how useless it was -- his code was often delivered late, and was always of a poor quality (example: using strings as every variable type -- really, what the FUCK?). Between my manager and myself, we tried to mentor him, correct him and all of that -- we couldn't fire him straight away as South Africa has really fucking stupid labour laws which makes firing a tedious and difficult process at best (and you'd better not slip up, otherwise the fucktard can successfully sue for damages and the old position back). Meanwhile, I was searching for alternative employment (although mainly because software development in Durban is a dead-end industry, the OFFH was a major contributing factor), received an offer that I couldn't refuse from a company in Cape Town, and put in my resignation. I still had to work a calendar month's notice period though (Americans, things work differently over here!).
That's when things got interesting.
My manager and I started the process of handing over all my projects -- most to the rest of my team, but a few went to the OFFH. It didn't take long for the OFFH to piss off one of my soon to be ex-clients to the extent where top level management got involved, the OFFH was finally pulled into a disciplinary hearing (wasn't fired, but received a final written warning), and I had to step back in and clean out the mess. The next day, the OFFH put in for leave on the Friday coming up, went away... and never came back. It was formally dismissed for absconding shortly afterwards.
That's when we found what was really going on. To summarise:
- The code that would be pushed through to production was often not the same code checked into the source code repository, and the production code was riddled with security holes, backdoors, and that kind of thing. (Since I used the code in the repos for code review purposes, I never picked this up.) A few months after I'd worked my notice period and left, I heard that they ended up writing new, parallel systems and chucking everything he'd worked on, while doing their best to maintain it until the parallel system was complete. (Side note: I left on friendly terms, and I still keep in contact with those guys.)
- When we went to try to get source code from his machine (see point above regarding the source repos), we discovered a whole lot of background services constantly maxxing out the CPU. We never found out exactly what they did, but given other discoveries, this pretty much resulted in the network team dropping everything and performing a full security audit of absolutely everything.
- He would often tag in after hours and during weekends. I remain convinced that he was up to absolutely no good during this time, particularly as I am in possession of an IRC log detailing an intrusion he was involved with on the South African XBox 360 fansite around mid-2009.
So, while we thought we were dealing with mere incompetence, in truth, the OFFH was a malevolent fucktard.
All of us involved has learned our lessons -- personally, I'm far more security conscious, and the folks I worked with are far stricter regarding who they hire, development practices and policies, and that kind of thing. As for the OFFH, it seems to have vanished into thin air...
... gamers will just need to order their cards from outside the EU.
This assumes that customs won't seize graphics cards in violation of the new regulations. Of course, none of us knows whether or not this may happen, but it's a scenario worth keeping in mind.
There's every chance that the Burning Legion is binding their time, waiting to come back. They're still out there: we merely prevented Kil'jaeden from getting summoned into Azeroth at the Sunwell, and of course, we're yet to go face to face with Sargeras. From reading the lore on both of those characters, they are certainly not happy with being on the losing side back in Outland, and I suspect that the time is coming when we'll be facing their full wrath.
Slashdot Mirror
Or are they saying that if the person gains access by guessing or brute forcing the password then the files themselves are un encypted?
Doesn't even need to be that -- if I gain physical access to your laptop, there's nothing stopping me bypassing your password entirely by simply removing your laptop's hard drive and plugging it into my own system. Which is likely what happened in this case. Your password controls access to the operating system and everything running on it, but when it comes to the underlying file system, it does sweet fuck all.
Thankfully, there are plenty of tools to do that in this day of age. All non-Home editions of Windows since Vista come with BitLocker, which provides full disk encryption, and the Lenovo-issued corporate laptop would likely have had this tool available (not having it, or an open-source equivalent, enabled is a monumental failure of Lenovo's internal IT policies). There's also VeraCrypt for the open-source world (people I know who have used it speak of it highly), and Wikipedia has a lengthy comparison of disk encryption software if you're interested further.
The summary mentioned Azure and Office 365 as examples where Microsoft gives some form of status dashboard to their customers. In those two cases, it seems rather apparent that Microsoft considers people that use those products as Microsoft customers.
However, given the initial free upgrades from prior Windows versions and the telemetry (or rather, spyware) that Windows 10 incorporates, one can argue the point that, much like Facebook, Windows 10 users are not considered Microsoft's customers, but a Microsoft product (the saying "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" comes to mind). Seen in that light, the lack of transparency (or any due diligence with respect to rolling out Windows 10 updates without show stopping bugs) makes sense: Microsoft apparently does not see themselves as answerable to their Windows 10 users, but instead answerable to those who they provide or sell data about those Windows 10 users to -- those are actually Microsoft's Windows 10 customers.
Can someone explain me the joke about Reynholm Industries?
Not sure, but I was strangely aroused by the link's intro:
"Reynholm Industries: a big hard business in a big hard building. Thrusting into the future strongly. Again and again. Pounding into the future, making the future beg for it. The future wants it, and Reynholm Industries wants to give it to the future..."
Red balls for all.
But that's just the type of place it is. A lot of sexy people not doing much work... and having affairs.
It's also notable for its IT department, consisting of a genius, a dynamic go-getter and a man from Ireland.
Try an 11 hour change in sleep patterns (which I get when I travel from New Zealand to visit friends and family back in South Africa). I guarantee you, there's nothing else that fucks up your sleep patterns as much as a sudden shift of almost half a day.
In fact, I would argue that the trip from here to South Africa is worse than the trip from here to Europe, because when flying to Europe, the time change is over a 25 hour flight, whereas flying to South Africa (via the most direct route for me, which is to first fly to Sydney and then catch the Sydney-Johannesburg flight, QF63) is a lot shorter: the longest leg (being the aforementioned QF63) has a 9 hour change in an 13.30 hour flight time -- and it's even worse on the return QF64 flight as the flight time is 2 hours shorter (QF63 has to battle some nasty headwinds, which become tailwinds for the return trip).
Another fun fact: the Qantas flight attendants absolutely detest being assigned to QF63: those 13.30 hours are entirely in daylight since the plane is quite literally chasing the sun across the Southern Indian Ocean. On the plus side, it routes close to the Antarctic coast fairly regularly as the headwinds there tend to be less powerful than if the flight simply followed the great circle routing, which for us nerds is one of the few ways to see Antarctica short of joining a polar expedition.
Let's just all switch to UTC and be done with the current mess already.
So You Want To Abolish Time Zones
To summarize (for people without the inclination to read the whole thing):
Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:
As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.
Agree with AV1 codec being a possibility. I'm of the opinion that future data transmission of 8K content is a major factor for the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Google et. al. to be pushing the development of AV1 (notwithstanding the fact that HEVC is a legal minefield).
... as if a legion of Flat Earthers suddenly cried out in terror and started online flamewars. I fear something terrible has happened.
Someone in my apartment block had "It Hurts When IP"
If only that were true for the other Zuma.
It's not just the large birds that one has to worry about. All of the European Barn Swallows have migrated down here, and 3 million of them choose to roost at Mount Moreland -- which is around 2.5 km from and directly in line with RWY 06 at Durban's airport.
The airport authorities are well aware of the potential danger and have installed a specialized radar system solely to keep an eye on the birds during the late evening swarm. If the swarm poses a danger to aircraft, ATC will pick it up and can then delay departures and/or put arrivals in a holding pattern as needed. The swarm, from my own observations when last I was in the area, only lasts around 10-15 minutes.
The local residents have now developed this into a small tourist attraction, which is popular with both bird and plane spotters.
Another fun story to add to the list: my mother has been visiting us in Cape Town and had a flight back to Durban (2 hours flying time). She misread her ticket: what she thought was her departure time was actually the arrival time in Durban. I realized her error too late, and we made it just as the baggage drop counter closed. Online check-in didn't save her since she had bags that needed to have been put in the hold; it would have saved her if she had carry-on luggage only (though, this is my mother -- she travels with the kitchen sink!).
It was also the last flight for that day, but the airline was very understanding -- they gave her a standby ticket for the next day at virtually no charge. We took her back the next morning, and she pretty much camped by the standby counter. Thankfully, there was a no-show on the early morning flight, so she managed to get on that.
How the hell do you get LTSB edition for Enterprise? Is it a unique SKU or some configuration preference applied to vanilla Enterprise?
Volume licensing channels or MSDN. Enterprise and Enterprise LTSB have different SKUs -- you can't reconfigure vanilla Enterprise to act as LTSB (not that I'm aware of, anyway).
TFA mentions Current Branch and Current Branch for Business, without explaining them too much. I doubt that many folks here are aware of them and the differences, so...
If you're on CB, you get major feature updates (e.g. the Anniversary Edition) pushed to you as soon as it's made generally available. Folks on CBB will still get those updates pushed to them, but a while later (MS says around four months delay), and with all the fixes made in that time.
Now, if you have the Pro or Enterprise editions (sorry Home users, you guys are stuck on CB only), you can quite easily switch between the two by means of checking (or unchecking) the "Defer upgrades" option that's somewhere in the Windows Update options. Want to live on MS's cutting edge? Leave it off. Want to use those Home peasants as your beta testers? Switch it on.
Then, there's the LTSB edition of Enterprise, which is basically RTM that just receives security patches and the like (MS will make newer versions available -- I believe there's a 2016 update to LTSB coming later this year -- but, as far as I'm aware, there's no obligation to upgrade to a newer LTSB version, and MS claims that they'll support each version for ~10 years anyway). Because MS doesn't want too many things in this edition to change, things like Edge, Cortana and the Windows Store are stripped out of it. MS's intended usage scenarios for this edition are things like POS machines and the like.
You can actually compare this to Ubuntu upgrades. If you're on CB, you're like the Ubuntu user who upgrades between point releases as soon as the new one becomes available. If you're on CBB, you're like the Ubuntu user who upgrades between point releases as soon as the old one is about to become unsupported. If you're on LTSB, then you're the Ubuntu user who only ever uses the LTS releases.
As someone who grew up in KZN, I find the correlation interesting. Bilharzia is a significant issue (don't even think about swimming in the rivers unless you're in the Drakensberg mountains -- particularly in northern KZN where one also has the possibility of crocodiles deciding that you'll be a tasty morsel), and KZN is also the province with South Africa's highest HIV infection rate. Obviously, the correlation does not imply causation, but from the information presented in TFA, it's certainly plausible and, in my opinion, worth researching further.
I'm going to back those that have already posted that it's worth treating bilharzia in it's own right. If it contributes to a reduction in the HIV infection rate, so much the better.
... read it as "Repo Man" Alan Cox, before doing a double-take?
I need to get out more.
I will bet there are many people within M$ who disagree with the "Always On" requirement, and this is ammunition for their counter-argument. If it wasn't for this twitter-gaff, you might see Always-On, but because it happened, we will probably see this requirement removed.
In an ideal world, this would happen. Sadly, the world we live in is far from ideal, and, if past history with Microsoft is anything to go by, their stance will be a "my way or the highway" one. I have no doubt that there are indeed people within Microsoft who disagree with "always on", but I have serious doubts as to whether their counter-argument will be listened to, or even heard.
If one is looking for an example, the Metro interface (or whatever its official name is) in Windows 8 is a perfectly good one. User feedback regarding Metro was generally negative; Microsoft had a "suck it up" attitude and rammed it down our throats anyway, and one need only see how Windows 8 is shunned in these parts to see how that turned out. (Personal opinion: Microsoft really missed the boat with the Metro interface. They had a really nice idea, but the execution of said idea leaves a lot to be desired.)
The thing is: users are becoming more aware and more vocal regarding what they perceive as abuse of their freedoms, and alternatives to Microsoft and their products are far more viable to those who relied on the Microsoft ecosystem than they were in times gone by -- so Microsoft users, when faced with that "my way or the highway" stance, are now far more likely to take the latter where they would have previously taken the former. If anything, Microsoft seems to be making the same mistakes as the previous "Evil Empire" (IBM): unable and/or unwilling to react to shifts in the market until it becomes too late. They won't disappear entirely, but if they continue down the path they seem to be taking, they could well be a niche option in the not too distant future.
Replying to self: given the responses that were posted inbetween me reading the original article and getting my parent post in, substitute "quite possibly" with "most definitely".
To turn the article title around: "Gaming Console Users 'Doesn't Get' Always-On DRM Requirements". And based on the SimCity launch (there's been other examples, but this one is, in my opinion, the proverbial straw breaking the camel's back), this has been the reality for a long time.
Adam Orth has quite possibly done a fair bit of irreversible damage for the next-gen XBox's prospects.
Even poorer judgment, in fact, as his probability calculation relies on an actual rate of infection of 1 in 500. For such a highly contagious disease the rate of infection will grow (well, duh!) So if 1 in 500 gives about 83% false positives, when the infection rate reaches 1 in 50 the false positive chance drops to 33% and for 1 in 5 to 4%.
That said, one could argue that then the infection rate reaches those levels, it would be too late for the cure.
In fact, it may be able to prove (or disprove) this with the equations of motion that we learned back in elementary physics (here's a refresher if you've forgotten them). Substitute velocity with rate of infection, acceleration with how the rate of infection grows, and displacement with number of people infected (obviously, time stays as is), and you'd have a pretty decent starting point. Now, we just need to get Randall Munroe on this.
(Disclaimer: the "too late for cure" statement above obviously excludes Will Smith.)
The East African SEACOM cable has been having outages lately; they posted an outage notification due to a cable break off the Egyptian coast at 08:40 UTC yesterday (March 27th, 2013). Of course, this has been having knock-on effects: for instance, many South African ISPs use this cable as their primary international link, and have had to fall over to secondary links resulting in significant service degradation.
Co-incidence? Perhaps, perhaps not...
...Slashdot reported on a 25 year old BSD bug being resolved back in May 2008.
And these are just the ones we know about -- there may be yet older bugs (particularly in proprietary, closed-source systems, where the source cannot be reviewed by the general community).
Thing is, it was a small, young company still figuring out what the best practices were to follow. When I had started there, things were extremely ad-hoc: there was pretty much no process at all (not too dissimilar from this, actually!), and I knew pretty much nothing when I started. Towards the end of my stay, I had pretty much taught myself concepts such as proper source control, process models and that kind of thing, and was trying to get things implemented (despite resistance from the "greybeards"). At the time when all this was going on, things were moving in the right direction, but the whole system was still far from perfect. It's likely been sorted out since.
Like I said, sometimes it's necessary to learn the hard way.
That's when things got interesting.
My manager and I started the process of handing over all my projects -- most to the rest of my team, but a few went to the OFFH. It didn't take long for the OFFH to piss off one of my soon to be ex-clients to the extent where top level management got involved, the OFFH was finally pulled into a disciplinary hearing (wasn't fired, but received a final written warning), and I had to step back in and clean out the mess. The next day, the OFFH put in for leave on the Friday coming up, went away... and never came back. It was formally dismissed for absconding shortly afterwards.
That's when we found what was really going on. To summarise:
So, while we thought we were dealing with mere incompetence, in truth, the OFFH was a malevolent fucktard.
All of us involved has learned our lessons -- personally, I'm far more security conscious, and the folks I worked with are far stricter regarding who they hire, development practices and policies, and that kind of thing. As for the OFFH, it seems to have vanished into thin air...
... gamers will just need to order their cards from outside the EU.
This assumes that customs won't seize graphics cards in violation of the new regulations. Of course, none of us knows whether or not this may happen, but it's a scenario worth keeping in mind.
There's every chance that the Burning Legion is binding their time, waiting to come back. They're still out there: we merely prevented Kil'jaeden from getting summoned into Azeroth at the Sunwell, and of course, we're yet to go face to face with Sargeras. From reading the lore on both of those characters, they are certainly not happy with being on the losing side back in Outland, and I suspect that the time is coming when we'll be facing their full wrath.
Perhaps this is what Wrathion is hinting at...