Failure analysis is a pretty well established science, and when every failure leads to a lawsuit, the analysis is done with a very specific intent.
In this case, Dell will be able to point at Sony as the cause of the problem, unless Sony can produce a demand by Dell for cheap batteries that used inferior design.
Now so far as the science behind exploding batteries, it is hinted at that the battery cells were filled with an inferior product. The particles that carried the charge were too large, which allowed them to carry more energy (heat, in this case) in a concentrated space. Maybe. My bad but best guess.
You would "only" have to prove negligence, that Dell willfully ignored data pointing to batteries that catch fire. They'd have to have documented that somewhere along the line, someone emailed someone else with orders to go ahead and sell the batteries despite the danger.
You won't find that evidence. Dell didn't know that the things would catch fire because they don't test as well as they should. Their own incompetence would protect them from such a suit.
That doesn't mean it won't be tried. Dell is sued every day of every week for something.
for six years, and the one thing you, as a consumer, have to know about Dell (and possibly companies like it) is that there are two forces that drive their decisions: money and litigation. Dell has cut cost to the bone, not just in their supply chain but throughout their enterprise. Every dime is scrutinized, every step planned to the Nth to determine if the cost / benefit hits a sweet spot. The main driver behind product launches is schedule, and not quality. With the right schedule, Dell can be to the market at a price that makes profit.
If there are problems with the equipment, those problems are weighed against the overall cost they contain. If Dell determined that their notebooks blew up, they'd have to weigh the odds, the cost of litigation, and the cost of bad press versus the cost of fixing the problem.
The only bad thing about this way of thinking from a business perspective is that economy overrides lesson learned. Dell has had battery recalls more than a few times in the past, and this latest may cement the idea with people that Dell = exploding batteries. But rather than proactively develop test plans and more rigorous standards for their suppliers, they simply look at the bottom line.
Ultimately this has served them well from a cash perspective, but this past year has seen a lot of their karma catch up with them; their process (which is King at Dell) has run out of wiggle room for cost cutting, and bad press like this (combined with the cost to replace those batteries) may start to chip away at their altar of the almighty dollar.
You'd be amazed, though, how myopic quarter to quarter thinking makes a corporation.
An audio engineer explained to me once that if you can hear the surround, then the engineer fucked up. The trick is to make the surround sound channels a fabric, an ambient floor, subtle, just enough to convince your head that you aren't in a theater. Dramatic spatialization makes sound engineers cringe. The best test: If the theater suddenly shut down to stereo? You'd know it right away.
Seriously, I'll do it. They're *stopping* technology in the name of their own greed. Nothing flies in the face of the intent of technology more than this.
They don't even *do* anything. They just enforce IP. They don't contribute to the community from which they take.
So yeah, I'll do it. I don't own a gun or have any kind of weapon, but I can use my bare hands.
Scepticism is the nature of geeks these days. That and a crushing cynicism. Geeks refuse to believe that anything touted as good is, indeed, good. They refuse to believe any statement of faith. And absolutes (such as my statements here) are to be questioned to death. The geek mindset and attitude is driven by cynical mistrust. Marketing lies, media is owned, and the internet is a vast miasma of idiots....so anytime a claim is made, a hundred million geek voices will shun that claim, destroy it, and create an air of threat around anyone who attempts to bring new solutions to old problems.
And that's *not* my two cents. It's the truth.
Re:But the events don't occur that way....
on
Taking On A Spammer
·
· Score: 1
Hrm. I would think that the screenshot happened *after* he breached the machine....Maybe we should ask him. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.
Re:New Slashdot poll: How many people believe this
on
Taking On A Spammer
·
· Score: 1
Now *that* would be funny. Server the revenge page from the harddrives of the victim. And they'd never figure it out, until they were slashdotted. Heh. Check the IP he gives, maybe the C: drive is still available? Not that I'm suggesting anyone *actually* do this..... OK, maybe I am.
Re:New Slashdot poll: How many people believe this
on
Taking On A Spammer
·
· Score: 2
What's so hard to believe? 1. He never says the name of his employer because he doesn't want to get fired and get them sued. Probably did a lot of this on company time. 2. No contact info for someone who maliciously cracks into a machine? Imagine my surprise. 3. He didn't convince them to trojan the machine. They shared their C: drives to anyone on their LAN. Anyone. No authentication. And the LAN was connected to a high speed link. So he placed the trojan and the command to install it himself(either thru win.ini or some registry merge). 4. Why "hack" an entire site into existance? Let some free server handle the load. It's anonymous and free. Plus, the guy probably (hell, most likely) doesn't have the skill to hack a site into creation.
My guess is that people suffer from some form of envy for his simple prank, and have deemed it "impossible" based on their jealousy.
I covered this in another reply, but feel this bears mentioning again because you UNIX kids don't take the time to consider what a weak security model like win9x offers. The victim was sharing her entire C: drive over a LAN that was connected to a high speed link of some type (read the story, don't just stare at the middle-aged pr0n). With this share wide open, the "hacker" can place the trojan.exe anywhere on the victim machine, then simply tell the machine to run the trojan on the next boot by placing the command "run=c:\pathtoexe\trojan.exe" in the c:\windows\win.ini file.
This is part of the problem: a lot of people think that win9x has some security. It was never meant to.
How the screenshot was done (and the LAN setup)
on
Taking On A Spammer
·
· Score: 1
The network setup is described in the page. Basically, they had some type of dedicated fast connection (T1?) and had that hooked into the LAN. They then had shares set up on the machines....the shares were things like the C:\ drive of the machine....with no passwords. That's the way win95 can work. You can share your resources to everyone. The "hacker" at this point places Back Orifice or some such in the c:\windows\system folder, edits win.ini to include the line "run=backorifice.exe" (or whatever he called it) and waits patiently for the victim to reboot (about a day?). Once she has rebooted, he can snag screenshots and control the machine...plus he still has access to her C: drive. He mentions that the victim only used dialups for spamming (and not the high speed connection) to cover her tracks. No having to mow through AOL proxies....her LAN was connected 24/7 with win9x weak ass security model.
Will we get the MPAA to help the FBI to destroy the life of the guy in China that is shutting Yahoo down? Seriously, if I have servers in china, s.e. asia, australia, and brasil all running trin00, and the master control is in Zaire...what the hell is the FBI going to do about it? Get angry?
One of my biggest issues as a geek and professional computer worker is the weight placed on university degrees (especially CS degrees) as opposed to the weight placed on experience. It's an age old argument.
In our wacky culture (I almost said "wacky little culture", but it's huge these days), what do you think is the most important aspect of a well rounded life: education through books or education through experience? No easy answers here: let's be unrealistic and say you get one or the other but not both.
Along the same lines, in an era of synthetic realities (where all information is filtered through the likes of TV and alashdot) what do you recommend for young geeks to help them get the most out of the world and their lives? How does technology help and / or hinder this?
I think the statement regarding the testing procedures VA uses vs the (implied flawed) testing that MSFT uses to certify a platform is unfair. The testing process doesn't end at certification for most manufacturers...granted, certification is a big part of testing, but the platforms undergo more than just the microsoft HCT or novell test kit. Where I work, we devote most of the platform lifecycle to testing. Forget hundreds of thousands of hours....some common components have undergone testing for longer than VA has been around. We're *very* serious about platforms being more than capable of a 99.999 uptime percentage. The fact that you use heavier parts, bigger cables, larger capacitors, and more cooling is nice, but don't discount other manufacturers. Our linux testing is intense, ongoing, and (in my opinion) the toughest in the industry...and it's the same testing that we do on our NT and Novell platforms.
I think he'll opt for silent option number 3: No Comment. Your point, though, is very well taken. I started reading the article from his perspective, having seen what a wasteland some web based boards have been, and having been flamed in some very evil and creative ways over the years....but you're right. Katz seems to want this slashdot thing to be his own personal forum....or he wants us enlightened/.'ers to *like him more than we do* because he feels he deserves it.
You have to *earn* respect. You can't whine for it. And the fact that a few months ago you were hot at hotwired means NOTHING five minutes later....not in this world....not these days.
The one thing flames force you to do is check yourself...your facts, your arguments, and your belief. And your spelling.
If you were Seve Wozniak, would *you* be depressed about anything? Seriously, I think he looks at everything with the same engineer / hacker eye: everything can be broken down into logical elements and solved to your satisfaction....everything. Any problem.
I thknk if more geeks put the same problem solving skills to work on their personal lives (and the society around them) there would be slightly less geek angst. I mean, the typical hack / geek / engineer has more non-linear problem solving ability than the average psych(ologist)(iatrist). And it sounds like mr. wozniak is content with his place in life, as well.
I'm not sure what to think of him and his belief (and judgement) that all of our inquiries are immature and stupid. I would say that the same could be said of him (which leads to a lot of childish "i know you are but what am i" type arguments). In any event, I haven't seen any decent example of skill on his part.
And that's what gets to the security community: lack of skill while professing to know it all. Skill is the only real currency infosec people know. Well, that and money.
Still and all, if he's getting attacked a lot (and he is), then even a complete moron could learn more *in that environment* than any of us could *in this cubicle I'm in* and that's important: he's under fire, and is probably learning modes and methods from it...including stuff we've never seen.
Now if he would just stop being so darned *smug* about it, I'd feel better. Personally. But that's not his job, or yours, or anyone else's...it's mine. And I don't need to hire or recommend him.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
So....uh....hrm. How's the weather?
They created that as a lessons learned from another recall.
Because you're a Dell employee. Until I left that job, I was my job.
Prove it.
They met with regards to a defect, not with regards to destruction of property.
Failure analysis is a pretty well established science, and when every failure leads to a lawsuit, the analysis is done with a very specific intent.
In this case, Dell will be able to point at Sony as the cause of the problem, unless Sony can produce a demand by Dell for cheap batteries that used inferior design.
Now so far as the science behind exploding batteries, it is hinted at that the battery cells were filled with an inferior product. The particles that carried the charge were too large, which allowed them to carry more energy (heat, in this case) in a concentrated space. Maybe. My bad but best guess.
You would "only" have to prove negligence, that Dell willfully ignored data pointing to batteries that catch fire. They'd have to have documented that somewhere along the line, someone emailed someone else with orders to go ahead and sell the batteries despite the danger.
You won't find that evidence. Dell didn't know that the things would catch fire because they don't test as well as they should. Their own incompetence would protect them from such a suit.
That doesn't mean it won't be tried. Dell is sued every day of every week for something.
for six years, and the one thing you, as a consumer, have to know about Dell (and possibly companies like it) is that there are two forces that drive their decisions: money and litigation. Dell has cut cost to the bone, not just in their supply chain but throughout their enterprise. Every dime is scrutinized, every step planned to the Nth to determine if the cost / benefit hits a sweet spot. The main driver behind product launches is schedule, and not quality. With the right schedule, Dell can be to the market at a price that makes profit.
If there are problems with the equipment, those problems are weighed against the overall cost they contain. If Dell determined that their notebooks blew up, they'd have to weigh the odds, the cost of litigation, and the cost of bad press versus the cost of fixing the problem.
The only bad thing about this way of thinking from a business perspective is that economy overrides lesson learned. Dell has had battery recalls more than a few times in the past, and this latest may cement the idea with people that Dell = exploding batteries. But rather than proactively develop test plans and more rigorous standards for their suppliers, they simply look at the bottom line.
Ultimately this has served them well from a cash perspective, but this past year has seen a lot of their karma catch up with them; their process (which is King at Dell) has run out of wiggle room for cost cutting, and bad press like this (combined with the cost to replace those batteries) may start to chip away at their altar of the almighty dollar.
You'd be amazed, though, how myopic quarter to quarter thinking makes a corporation.
An audio engineer explained to me once that if you can hear the surround, then the engineer fucked up. The trick is to make the surround sound channels a fabric, an ambient floor, subtle, just enough to convince your head that you aren't in a theater. Dramatic spatialization makes sound engineers cringe. The best test: If the theater suddenly shut down to stereo? You'd know it right away.
Seriously, I'll do it. They're *stopping* technology in the name of their own greed. Nothing flies in the face of the intent of technology more than this. They don't even *do* anything. They just enforce IP. They don't contribute to the community from which they take. So yeah, I'll do it. I don't own a gun or have any kind of weapon, but I can use my bare hands.
When you move to a permanent job, it's no longer called being a prostitute. It's called "being a housewife."
Scepticism is the nature of geeks these days. That and a crushing cynicism. Geeks refuse to believe that anything touted as good is, indeed, good. They refuse to believe any statement of faith. And absolutes (such as my statements here) are to be questioned to death. The geek mindset and attitude is driven by cynical mistrust. Marketing lies, media is owned, and the internet is a vast miasma of idiots....so anytime a claim is made, a hundred million geek voices will shun that claim, destroy it, and create an air of threat around anyone who attempts to bring new solutions to old problems.
And that's *not* my two cents. It's the truth.
Hrm. I would think that the screenshot happened *after* he breached the machine....Maybe we should ask him. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.
Now *that* would be funny. Server the revenge page from the harddrives of the victim. And they'd never figure it out, until they were slashdotted. Heh. Check the IP he gives, maybe the C: drive is still available? Not that I'm suggesting anyone *actually* do this..... OK, maybe I am.
What's so hard to believe?
1. He never says the name of his employer because he doesn't want to get fired and get them sued. Probably did a lot of this on company time.
2. No contact info for someone who maliciously cracks into a machine? Imagine my surprise.
3. He didn't convince them to trojan the machine. They shared their C: drives to anyone on their LAN. Anyone. No authentication. And the LAN was connected to a high speed link. So he placed the trojan and the command to install it himself(either thru win.ini or some registry merge).
4. Why "hack" an entire site into existance? Let some free server handle the load. It's anonymous and free. Plus, the guy probably (hell, most likely) doesn't have the skill to hack a site into creation.
My guess is that people suffer from some form of envy for his simple prank, and have deemed it "impossible" based on their jealousy.
I covered this in another reply, but feel this bears mentioning again because you UNIX kids don't take the time to consider what a weak security model like win9x offers. The victim was sharing her entire C: drive over a LAN that was connected to a high speed link of some type (read the story, don't just stare at the middle-aged pr0n). With this share wide open, the "hacker" can place the trojan .exe anywhere on the victim machine, then simply tell the machine to run the trojan on the next boot by placing the command "run=c:\pathtoexe\trojan.exe" in the c:\windows\win.ini file.
This is part of the problem: a lot of people think that win9x has some security. It was never meant to.
The network setup is described in the page. Basically, they had some type of dedicated fast connection (T1?) and had that hooked into the LAN. They then had shares set up on the machines....the shares were things like the C:\ drive of the machine....with no passwords. That's the way win95 can work. You can share your resources to everyone. The "hacker" at this point places Back Orifice or some such in the c:\windows\system folder, edits win.ini to include the line "run=backorifice.exe" (or whatever he called it) and waits patiently for the victim to reboot (about a day?). Once she has rebooted, he can snag screenshots and control the machine...plus he still has access to her C: drive. He mentions that the victim only used dialups for spamming (and not the high speed connection) to cover her tracks. No having to mow through AOL proxies....her LAN was connected 24/7 with win9x weak ass security model.
with 666 lines of code. Damn.
Will we get the MPAA to help the FBI to destroy the life of the guy in China that is shutting Yahoo down? Seriously, if I have servers in china, s.e. asia, australia, and brasil all running trin00, and the master control is in Zaire...what the hell is the FBI going to do about it? Get angry?
One of my biggest issues as a geek and professional computer worker is the weight placed on university degrees (especially CS degrees) as opposed to the weight placed on experience. It's an age old argument.
In our wacky culture (I almost said "wacky little culture", but it's huge these days), what do you think is the most important aspect of a well rounded life: education through books or education through experience? No easy answers here: let's be unrealistic and say you get one or the other but not both.
Along the same lines, in an era of synthetic realities (where all information is filtered through the likes of TV and alashdot) what do you recommend for young geeks to help them get the most out of the world and their lives? How does technology help and / or hinder this?
I think the statement regarding the testing procedures VA uses vs the (implied flawed) testing that MSFT uses to certify a platform is unfair. The testing process doesn't end at certification for most manufacturers...granted, certification is a big part of testing, but the platforms undergo more than just the microsoft HCT or novell test kit. Where I work, we devote most of the platform lifecycle to testing. Forget hundreds of thousands of hours....some common components have undergone testing for longer than VA has been around. We're *very* serious about platforms being more than capable of a 99.999 uptime percentage.
The fact that you use heavier parts, bigger cables, larger capacitors, and more cooling is nice, but don't discount other manufacturers. Our linux testing is intense, ongoing, and (in my opinion) the toughest in the industry...and it's the same testing that we do on our NT and Novell platforms.
I think he'll opt for silent option number 3: No Comment. Your point, though, is very well taken. I started reading the article from his perspective, having seen what a wasteland some web based boards have been, and having been flamed in some very evil and creative ways over the years....but you're right. Katz seems to want this slashdot thing to be his own personal forum....or he wants us enlightened /.'ers to *like him more than we do* because he feels he deserves it.
You have to *earn* respect. You can't whine for it. And the fact that a few months ago you were hot at hotwired means NOTHING five minutes later....not in this world....not these days.
The one thing flames force you to do is check yourself...your facts, your arguments, and your belief. And your spelling.
If you were Seve Wozniak, would *you* be depressed about anything? Seriously, I think he looks at everything with the same engineer / hacker eye: everything can be broken down into logical elements and solved to your satisfaction....everything. Any problem.
I thknk if more geeks put the same problem solving skills to work on their personal lives (and the society around them) there would be slightly less geek angst. I mean, the typical hack / geek / engineer has more non-linear problem solving ability than the average psych(ologist)(iatrist). And it sounds like mr. wozniak is content with his place in life, as well.
You haven't had any problems with it because it's a RedHat distro, and they're pretty good at that kind of thing.
http://www.thesynthesis.com/tech/antionline/index. html
Pretty decent history, fills in some gaps.
I'm not sure what to think of him and his belief (and judgement) that all of our inquiries are immature and stupid. I would say that the same could be said of him (which leads to a lot of childish "i know you are but what am i" type arguments). In any event, I haven't seen any decent example of skill on his part.
And that's what gets to the security community: lack of skill while professing to know it all. Skill is the only real currency infosec people know. Well, that and money.
Still and all, if he's getting attacked a lot (and he is), then even a complete moron could learn more *in that environment* than any of us could *in this cubicle I'm in* and that's important: he's under fire, and is probably learning modes and methods from it...including stuff we've never seen.
Now if he would just stop being so darned *smug* about it, I'd feel better. Personally. But that's not his job, or yours, or anyone else's...it's mine. And I don't need to hire or recommend him.