My girlfriend asked me about this earlier. I read an article and a PDF of the complaint (in court, against Mikkelson) and the best summary I could come up with was this:
1] He owned the company (Company A, which owns Snopes) 50/50 with his wife
2] They divorced badly, she sold her shares to Company B
3] Company A was founded such that a COMPANY cannot hold shares in it for smallprint legal reasons. So the 5 owners of company each INDIVIDUALLY got some shares of Company A
4] Company B has been doing a lot of the running of the Snopes.com website and controlled some aspects of it (this is unclear)
5] He (Mikkelson) has recently been courting one of the 5 owners of Company B to come over to his "side" so that he controls more than 50 per cent of Company (controls, not owns) and can do what he wants
6] The other four owners of Company B are angry, as the 5th guy appears to have defected. They claim variously that Mikkelson has used company funds to pay for personal stuff, that the 5th guy was legally bound, via an agreement, not to act against the interests of the other 4 guys, and that Mikkelson has done something wrong in enticing him to move to the "other side".
Mikkelson is now appealing on GoFundMe for money... so he can fight for ownership of the company and defend himself from the lawsuit brought by Company B.
And people are throwing money at him, a quarter of a million dollars in just 9 hours.
I don't know who is right, who is wrong, and what claims from the PDF are factual or not, but the general feel of the GoFundMe page is slimy. He is not raising funds to pay off some debt that Snopes owes (like Wikipedia), he is instead RAISING MONEY SO HE CAN FIGHT FOR OWNERSHIP OF THE BUSINESS THAT PAYS HIS SALARY. And if wins, the rest of the money is pure profit, which he could then pay himself with.
Even with the move toward more agile development and DevOps, vulnerabilities continue to take off...
*needs citation
Seriously, I'm a software developer and often have to be involved in a variety of security-related aspects of development and I've been doing it for twenty years. My anecdotal evidence is that security exploits are way *way* down in terms of risk and severity compared to when I entered the industry... I could be wrong (the plural of anecdote is not data) but it feels the opposite for me.
I actually read the article. There are many reasons why the CTO is incompetent, but one is that THE USERNAME AND PASSWORD FOR THE PRODUCTION DATABASE WERE IN PLAINTEXT IN A PIECE OF WIDELY DISTRIBUTED DOCUMENTATION. That alone is utterly crazy.
For the sake of making this post more positive, here's a few things the company could/should have done here:
1] Don't have credentials in documentation, they should be in a password vault.
2] PCs on the developer network should have ZERO access to a live environment, ever, even if they have the correct credentials
3] Have working backups, test them regularly. Have backups online and offline in multiple locations
4] Have a release manager or similar code-review or sense check *all* changes which could be deployed to live
It would have cost far less than the £100 million estimated cost of this incident
I agree that they should do it, but it is unlikely that the one-off cost of implementing always-on redundant systems would be this cheap, the scale and scope of the IT systems involved in the airline industry is enormous and it's likely it would cost significantly more than that. There are also ongoing costs to consider.
Source: Work in software development, have seen projects in organisations way smaller and simpler than British Airways with projected costs higher than that for less benefit.
This lawsuit won't last long. When the NSA and CIA have a vested interest in having Islamists out in the open and posting on well-known networks, there will have been many times they asked Twitter, Google and Facebook for communications, to leave accounts open etc to monitor contributors.
For this reason, this suit will go nowhere. The agencies don't want the tech companies to admit it, the tech companies don't want to admit it, and the agencies REALLY don't want eavesdropping tools to be taken away from them. Primarily for this last reason, nothing will happen here.
Admittedly I never finished my degree in physics because I chose to study computer science instead, however the last few words give a big clue as to what this is about...
Such hardware can be employed in dynamic beam steering operations.
It sounds like they're going to use a focused beam (rather than dissipate the energy indiscriminately in all directions) which can discover and track the phone, always pointing at it.
Energy losses by distance will be much smaller with a focused beam (depending on the efficiency of the technology, closing on 100%).
From all the browsing activity conducted through Google Chrome by people who have agreed to let them use anonymised browsing data for statistical purposes.
Each "change" (whether it is a fix or new feature) can be developed within its' own branch.
This branch is then deployed to one of your UAT environments for user testing (once it has passed QA, static analysis, code review etc.)
When the time comes for a release, you "roll up" your approved feature branches by merging them into a single release branch. On this branch you carry out extensive QA and regression testing. This is then the branch which is released (deployed).
Using this method any changes which have not been APPROVED as a feature branch never make it into your final deployment package. (though they still exist and can easily be added in future by merging).
(note if you have limited number of UAT environments this becomes complex and needs a schedule and conflicts can occur - or proper devops and more environments).
It can't drive up to a loading dock to load/unload.
It definitely could, in fact that task is one of the most trivial it could perform. The loading dock will be complete with its own transponders to let the truck know exactly where to position the trailer to the nearest mm and may also include metadata like height etc.
Compared with automated driving on roads, backing up to a loading dock is the easiest of all tasks.
a base salary of $160,000 a year, said his earnings are "pretty bad", adding that he pays $3000 rent for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco.
Soo this guy clears $105k after tax, pays rent of $36k (some of which he could offset by having a roommate) and yet somehow has a problem in that his $70k of disposable income a year - nearly 1500 bucks a week... is not enough?
Perhaps he needs to learn how to cook and get off the coke and hookers?
It's a combination of geo-targetting, data-mining, simply calendar comparison algorithms, trivial pattern matching and showing someone a picture alongside a binary choice.
I haven't used Antivirus Software in about 15 years, and I use a PC or similar device for 12+ hours a day. I haven't caused a single infection - the only time a computer of mine was infected was when someone snuck onto my computer to try a practical joke, loaded a porn website to set as my homepage *but did it in Internet Explorer* back in the days of IE6
Of course, I know what to click and what not to click. I know to examine dialogue boxes and have critical thinking skills to evaluate the website I am downloading from, or viewing.
My parents, maybe they need Antivirus... but then maybe not, as they get infected approximately annually despite actually having it anyway. So OP is probably right.
If a UNIVERSITY is outsourcing. They should instantly lose all federal and state funding.
What about if they buy a microscope that was made in China instead of the USA?
What about if they buy paper to print on that came from logs in South America instead of the USA?
Reading several of the statements about the issue on libreboot.org linked from other highly-voted comments on this thread, they all appear to be written by Leah Rowe, and read like those of a petulant child. There's a lack of maturity both in the tone of the posts and in the content. Some are borderline libellous and have no evidence to back it up - besides hearsay from other people. But not a link to their own post, or even a direct quote, just a load of spiel about what they said.
It's sad and pathetic, I suspect the FSF and GNU will be glad to see the back of anyone with that kind of attitude / lack of professionalism.
How on earth can it be so little? Let's say you worked there 5 days a week for one year, and you were denied a 30 minute lunch break on every shift. That would be around 130 hours of your time... or $1300 per employee per year... how does that become $95? If the practices were in place for 5 years, that could be $7500 for a full time worker who was there the whole time.
Please don't watch that, save your brains.
Thunderf00t is a musk-basher, that video is a total waste of time (content relevant to the videos title: probably a mix of fuel and oxygen... REALLY?) with some fairly simple and very rambly explanations of how rockets were made 60 years ago.
At the end he starts having a go at SpaceX because they are operating differently from how the military and NASA do (which is the whole point of privatisation). He's a tool with nothing meaningful to add to the public discourse.
This university should lose it's state and federal funding for doing something like this.
Why? Do they buy their pens from a company with a "Made in the USA" label on them?
Do they only run their vehicles on oil from Texas?
Do they buy only vehicles made in the USA - and if they do, do they ensure that EVERY component in the car is also made in the USA? If the bulbs for the
indicators are made in China, should they lose funding?
Your argument is grade-A batshit crazy. Outsourcing part of their IT operations is the same as outsizing where the car indicator bulbs are bought from. It's a measure which will make them more cost effective and efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend asked me about this earlier. I read an article and a PDF of the complaint (in court, against Mikkelson) and the best summary I could come up with was this:
1] He owned the company (Company A, which owns Snopes) 50/50 with his wife
2] They divorced badly, she sold her shares to Company B
3] Company A was founded such that a COMPANY cannot hold shares in it for smallprint legal reasons. So the 5 owners of company each INDIVIDUALLY got some shares of Company A
4] Company B has been doing a lot of the running of the Snopes.com website and controlled some aspects of it (this is unclear)
5] He (Mikkelson) has recently been courting one of the 5 owners of Company B to come over to his "side" so that he controls more than 50 per cent of Company (controls, not owns) and can do what he wants
6] The other four owners of Company B are angry, as the 5th guy appears to have defected. They claim variously that Mikkelson has used company funds to pay for personal stuff, that the 5th guy was legally bound, via an agreement, not to act against the interests of the other 4 guys, and that Mikkelson has done something wrong in enticing him to move to the "other side".
Mikkelson is now appealing on GoFundMe for money... so he can fight for ownership of the company and defend himself from the lawsuit brought by Company B.
And people are throwing money at him, a quarter of a million dollars in just 9 hours.
I don't know who is right, who is wrong, and what claims from the PDF are factual or not, but the general feel of the GoFundMe page is slimy. He is not raising funds to pay off some debt that Snopes owes (like Wikipedia), he is instead RAISING MONEY SO HE CAN FIGHT FOR OWNERSHIP OF THE BUSINESS THAT PAYS HIS SALARY. And if wins, the rest of the money is pure profit, which he could then pay himself with.
PDF of complaint:
http://www.poynter.org/wp-cont...
*needs citation Seriously, I'm a software developer and often have to be involved in a variety of security-related aspects of development and I've been doing it for twenty years. My anecdotal evidence is that security exploits are way *way* down in terms of risk and severity compared to when I entered the industry... I could be wrong (the plural of anecdote is not data) but it feels the opposite for me.
I actually read the article. There are many reasons why the CTO is incompetent, but one is that THE USERNAME AND PASSWORD FOR THE PRODUCTION DATABASE WERE IN PLAINTEXT IN A PIECE OF WIDELY DISTRIBUTED DOCUMENTATION. That alone is utterly crazy. For the sake of making this post more positive, here's a few things the company could/should have done here: 1] Don't have credentials in documentation, they should be in a password vault. 2] PCs on the developer network should have ZERO access to a live environment, ever, even if they have the correct credentials 3] Have working backups, test them regularly. Have backups online and offline in multiple locations 4] Have a release manager or similar code-review or sense check *all* changes which could be deployed to live
I agree that they should do it, but it is unlikely that the one-off cost of implementing always-on redundant systems would be this cheap, the scale and scope of the IT systems involved in the airline industry is enormous and it's likely it would cost significantly more than that. There are also ongoing costs to consider. Source: Work in software development, have seen projects in organisations way smaller and simpler than British Airways with projected costs higher than that for less benefit.
This lawsuit won't last long. When the NSA and CIA have a vested interest in having Islamists out in the open and posting on well-known networks, there will have been many times they asked Twitter, Google and Facebook for communications, to leave accounts open etc to monitor contributors. For this reason, this suit will go nowhere. The agencies don't want the tech companies to admit it, the tech companies don't want to admit it, and the agencies REALLY don't want eavesdropping tools to be taken away from them. Primarily for this last reason, nothing will happen here.
It sounds like they're going to use a focused beam (rather than dissipate the energy indiscriminately in all directions) which can discover and track the phone, always pointing at it. Energy losses by distance will be much smaller with a focused beam (depending on the efficiency of the technology, closing on 100%).
From all the browsing activity conducted through Google Chrome by people who have agreed to let them use anonymised browsing data for statistical purposes.
Each "change" (whether it is a fix or new feature) can be developed within its' own branch.
This branch is then deployed to one of your UAT environments for user testing (once it has passed QA, static analysis, code review etc.)
When the time comes for a release, you "roll up" your approved feature branches by merging them into a single release branch. On this branch you carry out extensive QA and regression testing. This is then the branch which is released (deployed).
Using this method any changes which have not been APPROVED as a feature branch never make it into your final deployment package. (though they still exist and can easily be added in future by merging).
(note if you have limited number of UAT environments this becomes complex and needs a schedule and conflicts can occur - or proper devops and more environments).
RTFA? "Canned him"? There's a pretty big blue paragraph heading stating he resigned. No evidence they canned him.
RTFA? It specifically mentions backups and how the used them.
It definitely could, in fact that task is one of the most trivial it could perform. The loading dock will be complete with its own transponders to let the truck know exactly where to position the trailer to the nearest mm and may also include metadata like height etc.
Compared with automated driving on roads, backing up to a loading dock is the easiest of all tasks.
They are attributing a 30-year trend to a company founded 10 years ago? Get this drivel off the front page please.
Soo this guy clears $105k after tax, pays rent of $36k (some of which he could offset by having a roommate) and yet somehow has a problem in that his $70k of disposable income a year - nearly 1500 bucks a week... is not enough? Perhaps he needs to learn how to cook and get off the coke and hookers?
It's a combination of geo-targetting, data-mining, simply calendar comparison algorithms, trivial pattern matching and showing someone a picture alongside a binary choice.
I haven't used Antivirus Software in about 15 years, and I use a PC or similar device for 12+ hours a day. I haven't caused a single infection - the only time a computer of mine was infected was when someone snuck onto my computer to try a practical joke, loaded a porn website to set as my homepage *but did it in Internet Explorer* back in the days of IE6
Of course, I know what to click and what not to click. I know to examine dialogue boxes and have critical thinking skills to evaluate the website I am downloading from, or viewing. My parents, maybe they need Antivirus... but then maybe not, as they get infected approximately annually despite actually having it anyway. So OP is probably right.
What about if they buy a microscope that was made in China instead of the USA?
What about if they buy paper to print on that came from logs in South America instead of the USA?
Reading several of the statements about the issue on libreboot.org linked from other highly-voted comments on this thread, they all appear to be written by Leah Rowe, and read like those of a petulant child. There's a lack of maturity both in the tone of the posts and in the content. Some are borderline libellous and have no evidence to back it up - besides hearsay from other people. But not a link to their own post, or even a direct quote, just a load of spiel about what they said. It's sad and pathetic, I suspect the FSF and GNU will be glad to see the back of anyone with that kind of attitude / lack of professionalism.
Yet time spent online is increasing by just about every metric. Reality disagrees.
Ooops $6500
How on earth can it be so little? Let's say you worked there 5 days a week for one year, and you were denied a 30 minute lunch break on every shift. That would be around 130 hours of your time... or $1300 per employee per year... how does that become $95? If the practices were in place for 5 years, that could be $7500 for a full time worker who was there the whole time.
Errr... three years ago an e-sports event became the fastest selling event ever to sellout the Staples Center... http://www.redbull.com/us/en/e...
Please don't watch that, save your brains. Thunderf00t is a musk-basher, that video is a total waste of time (content relevant to the videos title: probably a mix of fuel and oxygen... REALLY?) with some fairly simple and very rambly explanations of how rockets were made 60 years ago. At the end he starts having a go at SpaceX because they are operating differently from how the military and NASA do (which is the whole point of privatisation). He's a tool with nothing meaningful to add to the public discourse.
For about 6 bucks
http://www.fiftythree.org/ethe...
That's not capitalism, it's free market economics.
Why? Do they buy their pens from a company with a "Made in the USA" label on them?
Do they only run their vehicles on oil from Texas?
Do they buy only vehicles made in the USA - and if they do, do they ensure that EVERY component in the car is also made in the USA? If the bulbs for the indicators are made in China, should they lose funding?
Your argument is grade-A batshit crazy. Outsourcing part of their IT operations is the same as outsizing where the car indicator bulbs are bought from. It's a measure which will make them more cost effective and efficient.