I spent nearly a decade working for local government as the IT Director of a County. The long and short of this is that yes, this does happen as a matter of policy quite often and across many industries. I have noticed that so far many of the posts here treat data classifications with very broad strokes, however when you are working with in the government every bit of data has a classification and is part of what is called a retention schedule. Once the data has reached the end of it's retention schedule it can be destroyed, and no this is not destruction of Government Property or Data as somebody previously posted. It is more akin to tossing out the spoiled milk in the fridge than anything. However some data never expires, but if we had to keep every shred of every piece of data collected through normal day to day operations every tiny municipality in the nation would require multi-terrabyte storage arrays. Plain and simple house cleaning is required from time to time. I'm sure I might pick up a flame or two for that, but the point is if any data is past it's shelf life you can't get pissed or cry foul if it is purged. Now I am not saying that is the case here at all, because I doubt that myself very much, I'm just laying out the framework.
Now for the physical destruction of hard drives, yup did it all the time. Granted 99% of those were workstation drives and not server hardware unless all of the data had been migrated. Our general policy though was that no drive ever left us intact. Equipment that was later donated came sans hard drives. The drives were usually disassembled and the platters destroyed. It was much more easy on the man hours than sitting there watching a drive over write to Government specifications. The same was done for backup tapes that had physically failed, those were melted down, others stored in vaults untile the data expired and then they were destroyed.
Since when did a walk through of Dynamism's gadget inventory rate as a story? And not available in the US? WTF? That is exactly what Dynamism does, they are a tech importer for international product lines who also provides specialty tech support of the products that they sell.
It's not that allofmp3.com wasn't paying the labels. They were functioning under a loophole in Russian law. They were collecting royalties to pay artists/labels, money which was help is some sort of escrow. But the American industry refused to accept the payments because they were to low. Accepting them would have legitimized what they were doing.
Why do some of you people keep saying 4,000 years ago? The "Young Earth Creationists" generally refer to the date of creation to be ~6,000-10,000 years ago. The "Mesopotamian Wars of the Early Dynastic Period" were around 2900 B.C. folks. Never mind that we have have recoded histories dating back at least 5,000 years. So what's the deal, am I missing something here?
I run Vista Business Edition on an AMD64 X2 4200 with 2 Gigs of ram. Performance wise I haven't had any real issues with this exception. I read several posts, flamers and fan boys aside here are my results. I used a folder containing 51 files for a grand total of 142 megs. When I copied this folder from one hard drive to another on my box (both are WD Raptor 10k rpm sata drives) and viewing the "More Details" on the copy dialog Vista reported a speed of 22Mb/sec. When I copied the same folder from my desktop to one of my network shares the dialog reported a top speed of 441kb/sec and said it would finish in 7 minutes. When I ftp the folder to one of my servers it averaged out to 7,997.3kb/sec and took 24.63 seconds. Seems to me something is a bit off...
Why wouldn't you simply spend a couple grand on sending the drives to somebody like Ontrack? Several years ago one of the techs at a firm I worked for did the same thing to an accounting firms server. Our insurance paid for the Ontrack recovery. During the process I got a mini-tour of one of their facilities. These guys are seriously hard core about recovery. If it was just a simple format they could have probably handled it via a remote connection.
You know I took the time to write out a nice bit picking apart you little tantrum here. I previewed it and it was well done. Then I read your garbage once again and decided you were not worth the effort. So I am instead settling on this simple comment, "You sir are a Turd Sandwich".
If implemented properly how is a National ID a bad thing? Before you start warming up your keyboard to start flaming me with your rants from one side or the other think about it objectively for a second. A few points to consider:
"But what about Big Brother?" Does anyone here honestly think that any Federal Law Enforcement Agency can not access all of the information tied to your Drivers License?
"What about my privacy?" Once again, how does this lessen your privacy? You willfully submit all of this information to your State to obtain an ID card or drivers license. Once again do you honestly think the Feds can not access this already?
"What about my guns?" Once again when you purchase that weapon depending on the type and or State you reside in, you willfully fork over all sorts of personal information to the government.
Ok now lets think about convenience for a few minutes. Having lived all over the Country for work I have had to switch my drivers license from State to State. I moved from one State to another and getting my new license was a breeze $15 and 10 minutes of my time, however when I moved back to my home State a few years later I was forced to pay a large fee and retake the written exam over again; then wait 6 weeks for the new one, even though my out of State license was valid. What if you never had to do that again?
What if when a police officer makes a traffic stop on an out of state vehicle he was actually able to, with a high degree of certainty, identify the person? There are numerous accounts in law enforcement of wanted criminals going unnoticed because a small local agency was unable to identify the person.
States who object to this aren't trying to protect your privacy or security, they are protecting the revenue that they generate through licensing fees. If you disagree with that, please before you rip on that point I encourage you to take a walk over to the DMV and grab a copy of the fee schedule. Look closely at the number of various fees and the amounts. All of those fees are set by each individual state. A unified system would also mean level fees across all states, which would be set by the Feds and not the individual States.
Funny coming from an anonymous coward... The state is Minnesota and the County is irrelevant, the same rules apply to all 87 of them. What they are doing is absolutely legal and what they are planning to do is as well. This has been common place for quite some time. It might seem distasteful, it might feel like an invasion, but at the end of the day according to the letter of the law it is legal. If you don't like it, lobby your legislators.
I run the IT Department for a small County. I can tell you that this is nothing new or special. We are constantly being hit up by one company or another that wants access to our tax payer database and our property assessment records. These companies mine our data and resell "comparables" to real estate agencies, banks and property appraisers. They always ask for imaging if we have it as well. Here the assessors visit your property once every two years to evaluate your home for tax purposes. Every time on site they take several digital pictures of your property for the records. These images are then part of the public record and anyone can have access to them. This is extremely common place. How this is a privacy issue I have no clue. Mountain out of a mole hill etc...
I am the IT Director for a county, I can tell you that AutoCAD is used heavily outside of teaching. Not only does our Highway Department use it exclusively for designing civil engineering projects such as roads and bridges, but the State Department of Transport also uses it for nearly every aspect of their projects. I have several friends who work in many different aspects of design and engineering from CNC work to design prototyping for medical devices. Surprise! They all use CAD products from Autodesk.
Radioactive munitions? Ummmmm do you mean depleted uranium? If you do, go back to school or pick up a book you twit. The topsoil in your back yard has more radiation than a DU round. And before you spit some dumbass answer back, I personally worked with DU for several years, can you say the same?
Weird...I am 34 with what I would consider questionable hearing after a tour in the Navy and I can hear that just fine. Although I can also hear a CRT monitor whine in a large room, maybe I have some sort of mutant hearing specially tuned to annoying frequencies.
I am very disappointed with many aspects of my party and I for one fully intend to show my displeasure tomorrow at the polls. I hope everyone does the same. Stop voting the party line and vote for whom ever you think will do the best job, be it Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or an Independent candidate.
Ok before I get flamed for my subject, I'm a Republican, not a NeoCon, I am very moderate by anyones standards.
Here is a little story about a local Republican race here in Minnesota. It is just before the primary, there is a heated race between two individuals for the Rep. Senate nomination. A flier is sent out smearing one candidate, he previously was accused of physically assaulting his daughter, a charge he was later found not guilty of by jury. The flier contained so many false statements it was crazy, to top it off the people who wrote the flier included a graphical logo to make it look like it was sent by our Sheriff's Dept. Unfortunately I was the person who designed that logo for our website. I am the system administrator for that County. Long story short, through my web logs it was discovered that the authors of the flier were members of his own party on the State level. Apparently they felt that the previous accusations against him would be a problem down the line. So they pulled their dirty tricks on one of their own. The best part is that he won the primary. But once again his party stepped in and told him to step aside. He refused and they withheld all party support for his campaign. Just another case of a party that is struggling with scandal doing anything to hold on and keep from falling out of power.
I attended a small security lecture with about 25 people, he was the presenter. He walked through some real time hacks against Microsoft products that he had running in VPC. Nothig to stunning for me, but most of the people there had no clue about security so they were all blown away. I didn't see anything special. One thing of note that amused me, was the bumper sticker on his laptop that read "My other box is your Linux box". I said that I couldn't fit "My other box is a 10,000 node zombie cluster of Windows machines" on a bumper sticker....he chuckled...
If you run his name on Amazon you will find his book, which is really very good if you are a Windows Server Admin and are new to the security game.
I would actually love to see an increase in border security, it is a screen door on a submarine right now. And yes there are plenty of other issues that also need to be addressed. But there comes a time and a place when you just have to start taking care of home. Am I crazy about the problem with illegal immigration? No. Do I think that there are plenty of jobs that need to be filled by this demographic? Sure. But if the problem is approached on a reasonable level it can be made at least workable.
The left is clammoring for rights for illegals, the right is calling for a fence. Why? When the middle ground makes more sense. Create a special category work visa, make it almost trivial to get one. Give incentives to the companies that already employ illegals to use the documented workers instead. Tax the income. This is simple and win/win. The work still gets done, and taxes are collected. If it is easy to do, you will drastically reduce the foot traffic over the fence. You can assume anyone jumping the fence really is up to no good and treat it appropriately. You reduce the human trafficing factor. I don't see wht this is so damn hard?
It's exactly like installing Gentoo on just about any other bit of hardware. You insert the proper liveCD for your arch and install normally. I was working with Gustavoz (Gentoo Sparc Guy), he provided the test ISOs for me to try and I reported back any issues. The main thing is that you need a bleeding edge kernel to support the T1 Niagra and the T-2000 uses SAS drives. Other than that it was completely standard feeling to me.
About three weeks ago I successfuly got Gentoo loaded onto the Sun T-2000 that I am currently benchmarking with the help of a Gentoo release engineer. Unfortunately there are java issuse still. But hell it was fun watching it run just the same. It is back running Solaris 10 now however.
Actually the Phalanx (CIWS) is a remarkable bit of hardware. I worked with the system for four years and I have fired it in manual mode several times. The current incarnations of Phalanx are incredibly advanced even compared to the mods that were in service during the Gulf War. Since its original deployment it has undergone a steady evolution, from the drive train, to the radar systems, even the ammunition. But much like any other system it will only perform as well as the crew that is behind it. It must be tested, calibrated, and carefully maintained. The Wikipedia article calls it the "last line of defense", but onboard a ship it is called the first line of damage control. After all the system is designed to engage fast moving inbound targets, so even if you destroy the inbound target, you are still left with all if the inbound shrapnel traveling at high speeds. Not ideal, but it sure beats taking a live warhead from an anti-ship cruise missile. One other little tid-bit, the CIWS is unloaded every time a ship enters port and it may not be loaded again until you have crossed a specific distance marker outside of a port. That is a safety measure after an unfortunate incident in Hawaii where a few rounds were sent into the side of a hill while in port.
This is about the dumbest thing I have heard in a long time. You seriously think that would help? Without central IT who manages the infrastructure? Would each individual department manage a seperate segment? Ummm no... Who decides on security policy, everyone decides for themself? Ummm no... Who manages simple organizational tasks like anti-spam, anti-virus, and e-mail? Would you have a mail server in each department potentialy all running something else? Ummm no... The IT staff should answer to you? Ok for that one I'm just going to call you an arrogant prick. If you have a group of 40 coders what makes you think you are equipped to manage IT infrastructure? What because you read Slashdot? Please...
Slashdot Mirror
I spent nearly a decade working for local government as the IT Director of a County. The long and short of this is that yes, this does happen as a matter of policy quite often and across many industries. I have noticed that so far many of the posts here treat data classifications with very broad strokes, however when you are working with in the government every bit of data has a classification and is part of what is called a retention schedule. Once the data has reached the end of it's retention schedule it can be destroyed, and no this is not destruction of Government Property or Data as somebody previously posted. It is more akin to tossing out the spoiled milk in the fridge than anything. However some data never expires, but if we had to keep every shred of every piece of data collected through normal day to day operations every tiny municipality in the nation would require multi-terrabyte storage arrays. Plain and simple house cleaning is required from time to time. I'm sure I might pick up a flame or two for that, but the point is if any data is past it's shelf life you can't get pissed or cry foul if it is purged. Now I am not saying that is the case here at all, because I doubt that myself very much, I'm just laying out the framework.
Now for the physical destruction of hard drives, yup did it all the time. Granted 99% of those were workstation drives and not server hardware unless all of the data had been migrated. Our general policy though was that no drive ever left us intact. Equipment that was later donated came sans hard drives. The drives were usually disassembled and the platters destroyed. It was much more easy on the man hours than sitting there watching a drive over write to Government specifications. The same was done for backup tapes that had physically failed, those were melted down, others stored in vaults untile the data expired and then they were destroyed.
Since when did a walk through of Dynamism's gadget inventory rate as a story? And not available in the US? WTF? That is exactly what Dynamism does, they are a tech importer for international product lines who also provides specialty tech support of the products that they sell.
It's not that allofmp3.com wasn't paying the labels. They were functioning under a loophole in Russian law. They were collecting royalties to pay artists/labels, money which was help is some sort of escrow. But the American industry refused to accept the payments because they were to low. Accepting them would have legitimized what they were doing.
Why do some of you people keep saying 4,000 years ago? The "Young Earth Creationists" generally refer to the date of creation to be ~6,000-10,000 years ago. The "Mesopotamian Wars of the Early Dynastic Period" were around 2900 B.C. folks. Never mind that we have have recoded histories dating back at least 5,000 years. So what's the deal, am I missing something here?
I run Vista Business Edition on an AMD64 X2 4200 with 2 Gigs of ram. Performance wise I haven't had any real issues with this exception. I read several posts, flamers and fan boys aside here are my results. I used a folder containing 51 files for a grand total of 142 megs. When I copied this folder from one hard drive to another on my box (both are WD Raptor 10k rpm sata drives) and viewing the "More Details" on the copy dialog Vista reported a speed of 22Mb/sec. When I copied the same folder from my desktop to one of my network shares the dialog reported a top speed of 441kb/sec and said it would finish in 7 minutes. When I ftp the folder to one of my servers it averaged out to 7,997.3kb/sec and took 24.63 seconds. Seems to me something is a bit off...
Why wouldn't you simply spend a couple grand on sending the drives to somebody like Ontrack? Several years ago one of the techs at a firm I worked for did the same thing to an accounting firms server. Our insurance paid for the Ontrack recovery. During the process I got a mini-tour of one of their facilities. These guys are seriously hard core about recovery. If it was just a simple format they could have probably handled it via a remote connection.
You know I took the time to write out a nice bit picking apart you little tantrum here. I previewed it and it was well done. Then I read your garbage once again and decided you were not worth the effort. So I am instead settling on this simple comment, "You sir are a Turd Sandwich".
If implemented properly how is a National ID a bad thing? Before you start warming up your keyboard to start flaming me with your rants from one side or the other think about it objectively for a second. A few points to consider:
"But what about Big Brother?"
Does anyone here honestly think that any Federal Law Enforcement Agency can not access all of the information tied to your Drivers License?
"What about my privacy?"
Once again, how does this lessen your privacy? You willfully submit all of this information to your State to obtain an ID card or drivers license. Once again do you honestly think the Feds can not access this already?
"What about my guns?"
Once again when you purchase that weapon depending on the type and or State you reside in, you willfully fork over all sorts of personal information to the government.
Ok now lets think about convenience for a few minutes. Having lived all over the Country for work I have had to switch my drivers license from State to State. I moved from one State to another and getting my new license was a breeze $15 and 10 minutes of my time, however when I moved back to my home State a few years later I was forced to pay a large fee and retake the written exam over again; then wait 6 weeks for the new one, even though my out of State license was valid. What if you never had to do that again?
What if when a police officer makes a traffic stop on an out of state vehicle he was actually able to, with a high degree of certainty, identify the person? There are numerous accounts in law enforcement of wanted criminals going unnoticed because a small local agency was unable to identify the person.
States who object to this aren't trying to protect your privacy or security, they are protecting the revenue that they generate through licensing fees. If you disagree with that, please before you rip on that point I encourage you to take a walk over to the DMV and grab a copy of the fee schedule. Look closely at the number of various fees and the amounts. All of those fees are set by each individual state. A unified system would also mean level fees across all states, which would be set by the Feds and not the individual States.
Just a little food for thought...
Funny coming from an anonymous coward... The state is Minnesota and the County is irrelevant, the same rules apply to all 87 of them. What they are doing is absolutely legal and what they are planning to do is as well. This has been common place for quite some time. It might seem distasteful, it might feel like an invasion, but at the end of the day according to the letter of the law it is legal. If you don't like it, lobby your legislators.
//You might want to loosen the tin foil a bit.
I run the IT Department for a small County. I can tell you that this is nothing new or special. We are constantly being hit up by one company or another that wants access to our tax payer database and our property assessment records. These companies mine our data and resell "comparables" to real estate agencies, banks and property appraisers. They always ask for imaging if we have it as well. Here the assessors visit your property once every two years to evaluate your home for tax purposes. Every time on site they take several digital pictures of your property for the records. These images are then part of the public record and anyone can have access to them. This is extremely common place. How this is a privacy issue I have no clue. Mountain out of a mole hill etc...
I am the IT Director for a county, I can tell you that AutoCAD is used heavily outside of teaching. Not only does our Highway Department use it exclusively for designing civil engineering projects such as roads and bridges, but the State Department of Transport also uses it for nearly every aspect of their projects. I have several friends who work in many different aspects of design and engineering from CNC work to design prototyping for medical devices. Surprise! They all use CAD products from Autodesk.
Ooopsie, my bad
Radioactive munitions? Ummmmm do you mean depleted uranium? If you do, go back to school or pick up a book you twit. The topsoil in your back yard has more radiation than a DU round. And before you spit some dumbass answer back, I personally worked with DU for several years, can you say the same?
Weird...I am 34 with what I would consider questionable hearing after a tour in the Navy and I can hear that just fine. Although I can also hear a CRT monitor whine in a large room, maybe I have some sort of mutant hearing specially tuned to annoying frequencies.
I am very disappointed with many aspects of my party and I for one fully intend to show my displeasure tomorrow at the polls. I hope everyone does the same. Stop voting the party line and vote for whom ever you think will do the best job, be it Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or an Independent candidate.
And this has what to do with my post? If I were a Troll I'd post as an Anonymous Coward...oh wait...
Ok before I get flamed for my subject, I'm a Republican, not a NeoCon, I am very moderate by anyones standards.
Here is a little story about a local Republican race here in Minnesota. It is just before the primary, there is a heated race between two individuals for the Rep. Senate nomination. A flier is sent out smearing one candidate, he previously was accused of physically assaulting his daughter, a charge he was later found not guilty of by jury. The flier contained so many false statements it was crazy, to top it off the people who wrote the flier included a graphical logo to make it look like it was sent by our Sheriff's Dept. Unfortunately I was the person who designed that logo for our website. I am the system administrator for that County. Long story short, through my web logs it was discovered that the authors of the flier were members of his own party on the State level. Apparently they felt that the previous accusations against him would be a problem down the line. So they pulled their dirty tricks on one of their own. The best part is that he won the primary. But once again his party stepped in and told him to step aside. He refused and they withheld all party support for his campaign. Just another case of a party that is struggling with scandal doing anything to hold on and keep from falling out of power.
I attended a small security lecture with about 25 people, he was the presenter. He walked through some real time hacks against Microsoft products that he had running in VPC. Nothig to stunning for me, but most of the people there had no clue about security so they were all blown away. I didn't see anything special. One thing of note that amused me, was the bumper sticker on his laptop that read "My other box is your Linux box". I said that I couldn't fit "My other box is a 10,000 node zombie cluster of Windows machines" on a bumper sticker....he chuckled...
If you run his name on Amazon you will find his book, which is really very good if you are a Windows Server Admin and are new to the security game.
I would actually love to see an increase in border security, it is a screen door on a submarine right now. And yes there are plenty of other issues that also need to be addressed. But there comes a time and a place when you just have to start taking care of home. Am I crazy about the problem with illegal immigration? No. Do I think that there are plenty of jobs that need to be filled by this demographic? Sure. But if the problem is approached on a reasonable level it can be made at least workable.
The left is clammoring for rights for illegals, the right is calling for a fence. Why? When the middle ground makes more sense. Create a special category work visa, make it almost trivial to get one. Give incentives to the companies that already employ illegals to use the documented workers instead. Tax the income. This is simple and win/win. The work still gets done, and taxes are collected. If it is easy to do, you will drastically reduce the foot traffic over the fence. You can assume anyone jumping the fence really is up to no good and treat it appropriately. You reduce the human trafficing factor. I don't see wht this is so damn hard?
Guess it is a good thing that I haven't seen enough added value to justify a move from Word 2000 to 2003 in our organization.
It's exactly like installing Gentoo on just about any other bit of hardware. You insert the proper liveCD for your arch and install normally. I was working with Gustavoz (Gentoo Sparc Guy), he provided the test ISOs for me to try and I reported back any issues. The main thing is that you need a bleeding edge kernel to support the T1 Niagra and the T-2000 uses SAS drives. Other than that it was completely standard feeling to me.
About three weeks ago I successfuly got Gentoo loaded onto the Sun T-2000 that I am currently benchmarking with the help of a Gentoo release engineer. Unfortunately there are java issuse still. But hell it was fun watching it run just the same. It is back running Solaris 10 now however.
I just suggested this to a friend and he reported back that it says it can not be uninstalled.
Actually the Phalanx (CIWS) is a remarkable bit of hardware. I worked with the system for four years and I have fired it in manual mode several times. The current incarnations of Phalanx are incredibly advanced even compared to the mods that were in service during the Gulf War. Since its original deployment it has undergone a steady evolution, from the drive train, to the radar systems, even the ammunition. But much like any other system it will only perform as well as the crew that is behind it. It must be tested, calibrated, and carefully maintained. The Wikipedia article calls it the "last line of defense", but onboard a ship it is called the first line of damage control. After all the system is designed to engage fast moving inbound targets, so even if you destroy the inbound target, you are still left with all if the inbound shrapnel traveling at high speeds. Not ideal, but it sure beats taking a live warhead from an anti-ship cruise missile. One other little tid-bit, the CIWS is unloaded every time a ship enters port and it may not be loaded again until you have crossed a specific distance marker outside of a port. That is a safety measure after an unfortunate incident in Hawaii where a few rounds were sent into the side of a hill while in port.
This is about the dumbest thing I have heard in a long time. You seriously think that would help? Without central IT who manages the infrastructure? Would each individual department manage a seperate segment? Ummm no... Who decides on security policy, everyone decides for themself? Ummm no... Who manages simple organizational tasks like anti-spam, anti-virus, and e-mail? Would you have a mail server in each department potentialy all running something else? Ummm no... The IT staff should answer to you? Ok for that one I'm just going to call you an arrogant prick. If you have a group of 40 coders what makes you think you are equipped to manage IT infrastructure? What because you read Slashdot? Please...