You are giving the Russian government way too much credit.
The cultural differences that exist between the US and Russia make it extremely difficult for them to interpret any intelligence gained through covert espionage. They can gather information to understand the current situation, but they are very poor at predicting next steps. This is why every actual Russian spy case sounds so laughably stupid when we do learn the details.
It is important to remember there is a huge difference between the capabilities of a government entity and those of a bunch of hackers. Many people on Slashdot are aware of the relative sophistication of organized hacker rings and syndicates in former soviet countries. These groups are motivated by profit and actually take the time to do their homework. That level of knowledge and sophsitication does not make its way up into government, which is highly stratified and operates on a system of preferrment similar to the old days of the party. The people who make decisions about operations and how to conduct them are very likely to have held positions in soviet era espionage outfits and are exactly the type of people who would launch a campaign using such unsophisticated tactics. They know no better.
In short, don't think of Russia as a homogenous whole, think of it as a back-asswards society with the same problems with innovation faced by every other society in the world. Cultural barriers to the adoption of modern practices exist over there the same way they do over here, and it will take a generation for the government to catch up with the innovations of the 1990s.
And there will be many, many silly stories like this between now and then...
My Dad just had a stroke and has no perception on the left side of his body.
All I have been thinking about the last month is how to do something like this, set up something that can do motion detection and help him avoid collisions.
You know, I would go for low resolution versus no resolution right now.
Friend of mine, his father is a senior researcher for NIH. One of the smartest fellas you will ever meet, has multiple PhDs, charming and really has his act together professionally.
Came back from a concert one night, there was a note taped to the door. "I owe you a microwave." Inside, the house smells like burning compost, his Dad still forgets he can't microwave food with a fork inside. Has never been able to operate a microwave oven and this is about the tenth time he has done it.
His Dad owns a lot of land in Montgomery County, Maryland. He has made a lot of money off real estate investments. He has had a lot of disasters over the years as well, for things that would have seemed apparent to anyone else. Like not leaving untreated wood lying in pile all winter, not parking a backhoe at the top of a pile of dirt, not purchasing residentail land and trying to have it rezoned for multilevel commercial, etc.
It's not just forgetfulness, he has a hard time processing these realities of life. Without his family, I don't think he could function.
Re: Salt Lake City - more than half the programmers I know in Las Vegas are mormons. Many of them have worked in both places without issue.
Something interesting about the gaming market, it is pretty easy to get a security clearance if you have held positions with major casinos. They look at you as someone who already has a good security posture.
I have lived in Las Vegas and become good friends with people in various IT positions in the gambling industry. These people hold jobs ranging from IT infrastructure and security, to developing computerized games, to enforcement and regulation with the Nevada Gaming Commission. I have also lived and worked in Washington DC as an IT contractor, for the government and defense agencies, and have quite a few friends there.
At the risk of starting an East Coast / West Coast debate: if anything, the people working in the gaming industry are smarter, sharper, and more attuned to potential problems with a technology package than their DC counterparts. They are less willing to accept defects in a product, more interested in understanding testing procedures and making sure they make sense, and possess a kind of intensity around getting the most out of whatever platform they are working on.
For example, I know a few people who design video slot machines for Bally's. The hardware for video slots machines is tightly regulated, consisting of a set of components that is probably less powerful than what you have in your mobile phone. All of the software they write is in C, not C++ or C sharp, it is in C. They write their software so that it can be tested and get every bit of performance out of those machines they possibly can. They understand regulations for how to develop games and work within those strictures without complaining. When there is a change, they are implementing them the first day they possibly can.
There is an impossible level of efficiency with these guys and I would hire any of them in a heartbeat.
M
This topic comes up every couple years or so. There is a good thread about archival media that is still surprisingly relevant today. My original response to the question is available here.
"For my clients, I always suggest the use of stone and / or clay tablets for all mission critical data archive projects, regardless of size or scope. Bablyonian and Greek models of data retention from as far back as 4,500 years ago are (in many cases) superior to the models we commonly use today, with much of the physical media having survived electrical storms, tornadoes, floods, fires, and wars on every scale imaginable with a data corruption rate of zero and without the benefit of a climate controlled room, dedicated security staff, or even a closet for media storage. Imagine the elegance of a 84'3/4 STROM (Stone Tablet Read Only Memory) machine hooked up to your Slackware Archive server for performing restorations, and the ST Binary Writer you have networked to your backup systems and kept physically over by the quarry... nice! The TCO for slab is far less than that of tape archives, considering you can store the media in a pile of mud and hose it down when you are ready for a restoration."
M
Maybe I am the only one, but I subscribe to the paper version of the NY Times and read the paper online. What I pay to them for the subscription covers the cost of my online access to their editorial writers. I read different things from the paper and the online version, it's a different experience.
Something that occured to me is that the semantic web may be a way to effectively monetize online news. People come to news sites for different reasons. The casual user needs access to the latest news, and that should always be free. The researcher, the people who want more detailed information are the ones who have the most incentive to pay for news content. Presenting them with related content that goes beyond stories, that dives into databases and other forms of content would be an interesting model to work with. It would be great to actually view source material that was annotated in some way, get access to related video, pull up figures and statistics cited in the article, and more.
Again, a different experience. I don't care to pay to read an editorial by some jerk I don't agree with, I would pay for in-depth coverage that is free from partisan slant and gives me access to source data so I can make up my own mind. Call it news plus.
M
The potential for catastrophic data loss using STROM differs based on the methods of storage, just as with any medium. For instance, if you leave CDRs in the sun too long, they are going to screw up. Factoring in long term data preservation goals when constructing your data retention plan and taking steps to secure the data is an essential part of any data retention strategy. Displaying your data backups in public squares, as part of reliefs on buildings of worship, or within the construction of walls of civic facilities is a recipe for disaster and there is a large set of case studies that prove this point. Mud, tar pits, caves, and just plain burying them with sand are all reliable methods of preserving information stored on STROM disks.
As for data corruption, yes, there is a data loss rate that accompanies the use of the physical medium over time, and modifications in formatting and codecs for decryption can affect the overall quality of the data. Again, this is no different than any other physical medium, and there are no alternative formats in existance that have survived as long as the earliest known examples of STROM disks.
M
This topic comes up every couple years or so. There is a good thread about archival media that is still surprisingly relevant today. My original response to the question is available here.
"For my clients, I always suggest the use of stone and / or clay tablets for all mission critical data archive projects, regardless of size or scope. Bablyonian and Greek models of data retention from as far back as 4,500 years ago are (in many cases) superior to the models we commonly use today, with much of the physical media having survived electrical storms, tornadoes, floods, fires, and wars on every scale imaginable with a data corruption rate of zero and without the benefit of a climate controlled room, dedicated security staff, or even a closet for media storage. Imagine the elegance of a 84'3/4 STROM (Stone Tablet Read Only Memory) machine hooked up to your Slackware Archive server for performing restorations, and the ST Binary Writer you have networked to your backup systems and kept physically over by the quarry... nice! The TCO for slab is far less than that of tape archives, considering you can store the media in a pile of mud and hose it down when you are ready for a restoration."
Back to the original point, I have had to hire a lot of developers in my career. I ask detailed technical questions about the projects they have been involved in, and look for failures as an example of lessons learned.
But you actually have to learn those lessons and change your ways. Stigma can follow you after the failure of a project especially if someone knows what went wrong. One person interviewed with me, he was a senior developer involved in the roll out of the original Toys-R-Us.com. For those that don't remember, it was launched in 1997-ish and had some serious performance and security problems. He seemed to be pretty straight up about the experience and explained what he would have done differently.
After taking a look at some of the projects he had worked on since, I could see that many of the original issues were still part of his developer MO. There was another e-commerce portal where he was a senior architect, I was able to view some details of other user accounts via a hack also worked on the old Toys-R-Us site. The moment I saw that I became a lot more critical and just ripped into his work. I was able to slow his sites down by just reloading pages a few thousand times. Looking at the actual markup on some pages that just failed, I noticed he had it set up to dump Oracle errors into comments on production web pages. There were issues with the quality of the images, there were these big uncompressed JPG files that were like 120 pixels square and 40k.
He claimed this was people at his agency not doing their jobs and blamed developers and designers who worked on his teams. For senior level positions, no one buys the argument that other people are causing the same problems over and over again.
If you have nothing to hide, government surveillance would not matter at all.
Just stop using the Internet, driving a car, visiting public places, using credit cards, signing up for lists at major US retailers, enrolling in any public organization or institution, talking on a cell phone, renting videos, or getting cable television. This should ensure your basic expectations of privacy are respected.
Dude, I am naked right now at the time I am writing this. Hate to break it to you, but EVERYONE in politics is delusional and likes to get naked. It is just what we do. You are a cracksmoker if you believe anything else.
Your comment comes out of nowhere. We are talking about how Republicans are chasing their own members out of the party and you are talking about how naked and delusional democrats are, like you never get naked and believe things that aren't true yourself.
The difference between democrats and republicans is that us Dems are bent on maintaining a majority, not withering it away at the behest of a fat POS talk radio host who hates everyone who does not agree with him (and the legions of dittoheads that adore him). The point of a political party is to effectively administer power in a political system. Removing power from the party is an act of self-destruction.
And WTF about saying that Dems were more cruel to Lieberman than the GOP was to Specter? Like you were there. Talk about rose colored asses... I mean glasses.
You know, this is a good move for Pennsylvania. Spector has been demonized by his own party for some time now. VERY wierd for a 30 year senator in a party that embraced Ted Stevens so fondly.
One of the important parts of all this is that Democrats agreed not to run a candidate against him in the primaries. The GOP has at least 3 candidates they wanted to run against him in the primaries before he made the switch.
The thing about the GOP that really sucks is that it eats it's own when it loses. Spector is not the only senator who has been castigated by his own party in a state that is becoming more progressive. Don't be surprised to see this happen again in the next 12 months.
I really don't care what technology they use, just make it work.
Today, the audio of the first 2 innings of the Red Sox game were replaced with a high pitching whining noise. Opening day and all I could do is turn off the sound.
Interesting perspective, but completely, utterly misses my original point. We're you trying to react to something some other person said?
Yes, I am aware of the substantial impact of interpretation and subjective criteria in the rulings of law and no, I do not look at the world as a spreadsheet. If it were that way, we would all just get a copy of Black's Law Dictionary when we turned 18 and be told to read it.
This is not a reductive argument, but one of equivalency. I mean, the law also uses fact and statistics as a primary determinant of judgements. We do still operate on the basis of reason, right?
There are estimates that there are over 100 million Americans who have downloaded copyrighted materials without proper licensing of copyright holders. There are about 160 million Internet users in the US. If I give someone, anyone, a computer and Internet access, the statistical odds heavily favor that person downloading materials. If TPB can be taken to trial over posting links on the Internet to copyrighted materials soemone else posted, why can't search engines, downloaders, news outlets, and others be held to the same standard? Better yet, why wouldn't they?
The legal point is whether or not someone is enabling others to commit copyright abuse / fraud / whatever people want to call it these days. And yes, ordinary people giving computers and access to their kids have been run through the legal mill over this already. That is exactly what the RIAA has been trying to argue in their civil suits and they have gotten courts to side with them.
There are bad, unenforceable, ill conceived laws out there, and this is one of them. Laws about enabling access for people to infringe on valid copyrights are often so broadly defined they have the ability to outlaw behaviors of a broad majority of the population that can be considered innoculous at best. There is plenty of evidence to suggest these laws do not actually protect the interests of creators or copyright holders, but instead distributors and middle men seeking to reinforce outdated business models moreso than represent talent.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I hear there were graphic depictions of live naked taranatulas on both slides, glad he pulled them.
M
Here are the slides.
http://www.slideshare.net/null0x00/raoul-nullcon2010-day1
He gave this presenation at nullcon already. Nothing too creepy there...
M
You are giving the Russian government way too much credit.
The cultural differences that exist between the US and Russia make it extremely difficult for them to interpret any intelligence gained through covert espionage. They can gather information to understand the current situation, but they are very poor at predicting next steps. This is why every actual Russian spy case sounds so laughably stupid when we do learn the details.
It is important to remember there is a huge difference between the capabilities of a government entity and those of a bunch of hackers. Many people on Slashdot are aware of the relative sophistication of organized hacker rings and syndicates in former soviet countries. These groups are motivated by profit and actually take the time to do their homework. That level of knowledge and sophsitication does not make its way up into government, which is highly stratified and operates on a system of preferrment similar to the old days of the party. The people who make decisions about operations and how to conduct them are very likely to have held positions in soviet era espionage outfits and are exactly the type of people who would launch a campaign using such unsophisticated tactics. They know no better.
In short, don't think of Russia as a homogenous whole, think of it as a back-asswards society with the same problems with innovation faced by every other society in the world. Cultural barriers to the adoption of modern practices exist over there the same way they do over here, and it will take a generation for the government to catch up with the innovations of the 1990s.
And there will be many, many silly stories like this between now and then...
M
Ooops wrong thread.
: /
M
By this logic, if I ran a rail through my head and the rail started to rust, that would be evidence that people can rust.
No thanks, I will wait for a computer to get staph before I accept this as evidence of a virus moving between person and machine.
M
My Dad just had a stroke and has no perception on the left side of his body.
All I have been thinking about the last month is how to do something like this, set up something that can do motion detection and help him avoid collisions.
You know, I would go for low resolution versus no resolution right now.
M
Forget customs. If he tried this coming in from Nova Scotia to North America, he would get shot down.
M
Friend of mine, his father is a senior researcher for NIH. One of the smartest fellas you will ever meet, has multiple PhDs, charming and really has his act together professionally.
Came back from a concert one night, there was a note taped to the door. "I owe you a microwave." Inside, the house smells like burning compost, his Dad still forgets he can't microwave food with a fork inside. Has never been able to operate a microwave oven and this is about the tenth time he has done it.
His Dad owns a lot of land in Montgomery County, Maryland. He has made a lot of money off real estate investments. He has had a lot of disasters over the years as well, for things that would have seemed apparent to anyone else. Like not leaving untreated wood lying in pile all winter, not parking a backhoe at the top of a pile of dirt, not purchasing residentail land and trying to have it rezoned for multilevel commercial, etc.
It's not just forgetfulness, he has a hard time processing these realities of life. Without his family, I don't think he could function.
M
Just fork it. I am never going to use Oracle MySQL for anything, I would sooner switch to PostGres for everything I do.
M
Re: Salt Lake City - more than half the programmers I know in Las Vegas are mormons. Many of them have worked in both places without issue.
Something interesting about the gaming market, it is pretty easy to get a security clearance if you have held positions with major casinos. They look at you as someone who already has a good security posture.
M
I have lived in Las Vegas and become good friends with people in various IT positions in the gambling industry. These people hold jobs ranging from IT infrastructure and security, to developing computerized games, to enforcement and regulation with the Nevada Gaming Commission. I have also lived and worked in Washington DC as an IT contractor, for the government and defense agencies, and have quite a few friends there. At the risk of starting an East Coast / West Coast debate: if anything, the people working in the gaming industry are smarter, sharper, and more attuned to potential problems with a technology package than their DC counterparts. They are less willing to accept defects in a product, more interested in understanding testing procedures and making sure they make sense, and possess a kind of intensity around getting the most out of whatever platform they are working on. For example, I know a few people who design video slot machines for Bally's. The hardware for video slots machines is tightly regulated, consisting of a set of components that is probably less powerful than what you have in your mobile phone. All of the software they write is in C, not C++ or C sharp, it is in C. They write their software so that it can be tested and get every bit of performance out of those machines they possibly can. They understand regulations for how to develop games and work within those strictures without complaining. When there is a change, they are implementing them the first day they possibly can. There is an impossible level of efficiency with these guys and I would hire any of them in a heartbeat. M
This topic comes up every couple years or so. There is a good thread about archival media that is still surprisingly relevant today. My original response to the question is available here. "For my clients, I always suggest the use of stone and / or clay tablets for all mission critical data archive projects, regardless of size or scope. Bablyonian and Greek models of data retention from as far back as 4,500 years ago are (in many cases) superior to the models we commonly use today, with much of the physical media having survived electrical storms, tornadoes, floods, fires, and wars on every scale imaginable with a data corruption rate of zero and without the benefit of a climate controlled room, dedicated security staff, or even a closet for media storage. Imagine the elegance of a 84'3/4 STROM (Stone Tablet Read Only Memory) machine hooked up to your Slackware Archive server for performing restorations, and the ST Binary Writer you have networked to your backup systems and kept physically over by the quarry... nice! The TCO for slab is far less than that of tape archives, considering you can store the media in a pile of mud and hose it down when you are ready for a restoration." M
Maybe I am the only one, but I subscribe to the paper version of the NY Times and read the paper online. What I pay to them for the subscription covers the cost of my online access to their editorial writers. I read different things from the paper and the online version, it's a different experience. Something that occured to me is that the semantic web may be a way to effectively monetize online news. People come to news sites for different reasons. The casual user needs access to the latest news, and that should always be free. The researcher, the people who want more detailed information are the ones who have the most incentive to pay for news content. Presenting them with related content that goes beyond stories, that dives into databases and other forms of content would be an interesting model to work with. It would be great to actually view source material that was annotated in some way, get access to related video, pull up figures and statistics cited in the article, and more. Again, a different experience. I don't care to pay to read an editorial by some jerk I don't agree with, I would pay for in-depth coverage that is free from partisan slant and gives me access to source data so I can make up my own mind. Call it news plus. M
The potential for catastrophic data loss using STROM differs based on the methods of storage, just as with any medium. For instance, if you leave CDRs in the sun too long, they are going to screw up. Factoring in long term data preservation goals when constructing your data retention plan and taking steps to secure the data is an essential part of any data retention strategy. Displaying your data backups in public squares, as part of reliefs on buildings of worship, or within the construction of walls of civic facilities is a recipe for disaster and there is a large set of case studies that prove this point. Mud, tar pits, caves, and just plain burying them with sand are all reliable methods of preserving information stored on STROM disks. As for data corruption, yes, there is a data loss rate that accompanies the use of the physical medium over time, and modifications in formatting and codecs for decryption can affect the overall quality of the data. Again, this is no different than any other physical medium, and there are no alternative formats in existance that have survived as long as the earliest known examples of STROM disks. M
"For my clients, I always suggest the use of stone and / or clay tablets for all mission critical data archive projects, regardless of size or scope. Bablyonian and Greek models of data retention from as far back as 4,500 years ago are (in many cases) superior to the models we commonly use today, with much of the physical media having survived electrical storms, tornadoes, floods, fires, and wars on every scale imaginable with a data corruption rate of zero and without the benefit of a climate controlled room, dedicated security staff, or even a closet for media storage. Imagine the elegance of a 84'3/4 STROM (Stone Tablet Read Only Memory) machine hooked up to your Slackware Archive server for performing restorations, and the ST Binary Writer you have networked to your backup systems and kept physically over by the quarry... nice! The TCO for slab is far less than that of tape archives, considering you can store the media in a pile of mud and hose it down when you are ready for a restoration."
M
Back to the original point, I have had to hire a lot of developers in my career. I ask detailed technical questions about the projects they have been involved in, and look for failures as an example of lessons learned.
But you actually have to learn those lessons and change your ways. Stigma can follow you after the failure of a project especially if someone knows what went wrong. One person interviewed with me, he was a senior developer involved in the roll out of the original Toys-R-Us.com. For those that don't remember, it was launched in 1997-ish and had some serious performance and security problems. He seemed to be pretty straight up about the experience and explained what he would have done differently.
After taking a look at some of the projects he had worked on since, I could see that many of the original issues were still part of his developer MO. There was another e-commerce portal where he was a senior architect, I was able to view some details of other user accounts via a hack also worked on the old Toys-R-Us site. The moment I saw that I became a lot more critical and just ripped into his work. I was able to slow his sites down by just reloading pages a few thousand times. Looking at the actual markup on some pages that just failed, I noticed he had it set up to dump Oracle errors into comments on production web pages. There were issues with the quality of the images, there were these big uncompressed JPG files that were like 120 pixels square and 40k.
He claimed this was people at his agency not doing their jobs and blamed developers and designers who worked on his teams. For senior level positions, no one buys the argument that other people are causing the same problems over and over again.
M
If you have nothing to hide, government surveillance would not matter at all.
Just stop using the Internet, driving a car, visiting public places, using credit cards, signing up for lists at major US retailers, enrolling in any public organization or institution, talking on a cell phone, renting videos, or getting cable television. This should ensure your basic expectations of privacy are respected.
M
Dude, I am naked right now at the time I am writing this. Hate to break it to you, but EVERYONE in politics is delusional and likes to get naked. It is just what we do. You are a cracksmoker if you believe anything else.
Your comment comes out of nowhere. We are talking about how Republicans are chasing their own members out of the party and you are talking about how naked and delusional democrats are, like you never get naked and believe things that aren't true yourself.
The difference between democrats and republicans is that us Dems are bent on maintaining a majority, not withering it away at the behest of a fat POS talk radio host who hates everyone who does not agree with him (and the legions of dittoheads that adore him). The point of a political party is to effectively administer power in a political system. Removing power from the party is an act of self-destruction.
And WTF about saying that Dems were more cruel to Lieberman than the GOP was to Specter? Like you were there. Talk about rose colored asses... I mean glasses.
M
For citizens, choice is a great thing.
For a 30 year Senator, it sends the message the party does not want him there.
The point is that the party is chasing out members, not that the public is doing so.
M
You know, this is a good move for Pennsylvania. Spector has been demonized by his own party for some time now. VERY wierd for a 30 year senator in a party that embraced Ted Stevens so fondly.
One of the important parts of all this is that Democrats agreed not to run a candidate against him in the primaries. The GOP has at least 3 candidates they wanted to run against him in the primaries before he made the switch.
The thing about the GOP that really sucks is that it eats it's own when it loses. Spector is not the only senator who has been castigated by his own party in a state that is becoming more progressive. Don't be surprised to see this happen again in the next 12 months.
M
Haha.. but seriously, April Fools day was weeks ago. These kind of jokes have no place on Slashdot.
M
There are many services out there, but Wikileaks is what lawyers should probably be using.
M
I really don't care what technology they use, just make it work.
Today, the audio of the first 2 innings of the Red Sox game were replaced with a high pitching whining noise. Opening day and all I could do is turn off the sound.
M
Silly Thais. The king should be protecting his people, not the other way around.
M
Interesting perspective, but completely, utterly misses my original point. We're you trying to react to something some other person said?
Yes, I am aware of the substantial impact of interpretation and subjective criteria in the rulings of law and no, I do not look at the world as a spreadsheet. If it were that way, we would all just get a copy of Black's Law Dictionary when we turned 18 and be told to read it.
This is not a reductive argument, but one of equivalency. I mean, the law also uses fact and statistics as a primary determinant of judgements. We do still operate on the basis of reason, right?
There are estimates that there are over 100 million Americans who have downloaded copyrighted materials without proper licensing of copyright holders. There are about 160 million Internet users in the US. If I give someone, anyone, a computer and Internet access, the statistical odds heavily favor that person downloading materials. If TPB can be taken to trial over posting links on the Internet to copyrighted materials soemone else posted, why can't search engines, downloaders, news outlets, and others be held to the same standard? Better yet, why wouldn't they?
The legal point is whether or not someone is enabling others to commit copyright abuse / fraud / whatever people want to call it these days. And yes, ordinary people giving computers and access to their kids have been run through the legal mill over this already. That is exactly what the RIAA has been trying to argue in their civil suits and they have gotten courts to side with them.
There are bad, unenforceable, ill conceived laws out there, and this is one of them. Laws about enabling access for people to infringe on valid copyrights are often so broadly defined they have the ability to outlaw behaviors of a broad majority of the population that can be considered innoculous at best. There is plenty of evidence to suggest these laws do not actually protect the interests of creators or copyright holders, but instead distributors and middle men seeking to reinforce outdated business models moreso than represent talent.
M