The real problem is the Angolans aren't morons (which isn't actually a problem). But apparently the people who set them up with this crippled internet assumed they were (which is their problem, not the Angolans).
Nobody built special hooks to keep them honest, either because they assumed the Angolans would be so grateful they wouldn't dare misuse it, or because they thought the Angolans would never figure out something as sophisticated as renaming a file.
So, unless Facebook and Wikipedia deployed special versions which said "we must assume they're all sneaky bastards and actively prevent them from doing anything else", when the Angolans showed themselves to be clever sneaky bastards (and I do mean that in the nicest possible way) Facebook and Wikipedia found themselves going "no fair, you cheated".
Trying to prevent them from doing this is now going to be an arms race, which means it's probably almost impossible to rein it in.
This is a clever hack, to work around an intentionally crippled system which was probably doomed to fail from the get go.
Their use of the technology will get them to make it better, which benefits everyone.
Well, let me offer a counter point (as someone who knows nothing about China based on what we see in the news)...
Widespread corruption and skirting of environmental laws will make a hell of a mess as people get swindled or they wreck their environment even further.
The pattern seems to be that someone gets rich, a lot of other someones die or have their town ruined, and then the show trial comes in to try to make it look like someone is being held accountable.
I wouldn't expect sunshine and rainbows all around just yet.
Remember the melamine which showed up in pet food a couple of years back? In China, that showed up in baby formula.
The problem is you can't seriously expect people to be told "this part of the internet is special and magical and you can only have it if you use it this way."
You can't just slap it together and then be all shocked that people said "I reject your limited reality and substitute my own". You gave them a means to exchange data and a place to host files and expected them to only use it the way you told them they were allowed to.
Which is kind of like putting up a public graffiti wall and then being outraged someone put up a dick joke.
Have you ever seen something which someone said "you may use this as long as you play nicely and only according to what we've told you that you're allowed to do", and not seen it misused?
Bypassing the intended use was pretty much inevitable... if you only have Facebook and Wikipedia, then Wikipedia is suddenly your file sharing network.
Can I stop the possibility that Angola could lose cheap network access because they refuse to be dictated to? Nope. Am I at all surprised that human ingenuity worked around a crippled network to use it for something else? Not even in the slightest.
As much as I understand it's not literally all porn in the sense of boobies... volumetrically modeled porn and neural network porn is no different from food porn and automobile porn.
It's all porn of some kind for someone, even it allegedly not porn.;-)
You know, at its core I did get the point of the message... there were many many years where Microsoft really only saw the world as Office+Outlook+Exchange in corporate environments.
When Apple was giving video editing tools and useful stuff for having a digital life, Microsoft... well, Microsoft still had Solitaire.
Apple's reputation for a seamlessly working ecosystem is well earned when the guy who installed my fireplace was all happy he lived in an Apple household and hadn't had to fight with technology in a long time.
My Windows 8.1 box (once I disabled Metro, their start screen, and their annoying store)... well, it seems to have the exact same utilities in it as it did in Windows 2003. For a company who spends billions on research, that's pretty pathetic.
But Apple always shunned the whole "compete on specs" thing, so that their marketing guy is suddenly doing this seems like they've got a new breed running the show, and that's a shame if this is the attitude it's bringing..
And it just seems so patronizing... oh, look at these poor backwards Angolans without the interwebs... we should give them Facebook and Wikipedia so they can uplift themselves from their savagery.
Meanwhile "the poor backwards Angolans" have said "what, you think we're idiots? Screw you, we want movies, porn, music, and picture's of Nicki Minaj's ass (apparently), just like everyone else on the interwebs."
I don't see this as misuse. I see this as flipping the bird to the patronizing attempts to give them a tiny bit of the internet and expect them to be all "thank you boss" about it.
I think this is hilarious, and I applaud them for doing it.
Well, it's also amazing how quickly people realize "wait, this is free and that isn't, so if I rename this to look like that it's free"
If you tell people they can only use a communication medium one or two ways, they'll eventually figure out how to do all of the rest by piggy-backing on those methods.
This isn't "this is why we can't have nice things". This is telling people "we have nice things, but you can't have nice things so you get these things". And then those people turned around and said "no, we can have nice things too".
Yeah, no shit... there is no TFA... there's just "some guys want to do some stuff but due to our own ineptitude we failed to provide any relevant links to anything, so talk among yourselves."
'the fusion center, virtualization environment, and cyber-physical capabilities needed to analyze, prepare, and prevent threats like these from harming the nation, its organizations, or its people.'
Buzzword bingo, bitches!!
This just needs a missions statement generator and a set of power point slides, and it'll be ready for vast sums of money to pay for travel junkets and hookers for years.
Sure, but my point is for the average person who could get screwed by this vulnerability, this does no good at all.
My mother-in-law isn't going to google for what registry key needs to be put in to solve a problem she doesn't understand.
If the best Microsoft can do to fix this problem is a half-assed fix which is only applicable to corporate controlled networks or advanced users, it completely misses all of those other people who don't have this and are more likely to be vulnerable.
This isn't a solution, it's a cheap work around which benefits a small subset of their user base. And I'm no longer willing to cut Microsoft slack for their shit security they build into products because they don't think stuff through and want to run anything they encounter.
Letting admins turn it off doesn't solve anything, because the people impacted by this won't all have admins.
Saying "it takes no more than a Google or a dig through an admx file" is a bullshit response, because it boils down to forcing every home user to know about this shit and act on it. If Microsoft is going to write the suck, they need to write better fixes than this.
That, or they should say "well, unless you have an admin you should use Google Docs because we're too damned lazy to come up with a real fix". That would at least be honest.
And your nick is one character away from including the word "reamer", and two letters away from being "screamer".
It is simply not possible to exclude every word which is one or two letters away from offending some random idiot who thinks being one letter away is the same thing.
People can give something a name which is totally innocuous to them and which someone else is going to get into a hissy fit about.
So, what's more likely, he had no idea some random guy on the interwebs would make the comparison to a racial slur, or he used a word which sounded cool to him?
I've always thought this interconnected pile of stuff, linking across a bunch of domains was lazy, dangerous, and likely to be very brittle.
Sorry, but the interwebs have shown me I can't afford to trust arbitrary code from all over the place, which can change at a moments notice, and which I know nothing about.
If you've created an infrastructure where tons of stuff breaks because some asshole corporation forces some guy to say "fuck you, you can't have my code", you have a terrible mess. What happens if someone adds some malicious code?
What I find really odd is they've over-ruled him and said "no, you can't un-publish your own stuff, we own it". So, what, they've decided his stuff was too important to still be his own? So he got fucked because of corporate assholes only to have his copyright infringed?
Jenga tower indeed, it sounds like the state of the art is a bunch of brittle dependencies controlled by a few places, and subject to causing a shit top of things to happen when someone makes a change.
This reminds me of a company I worked at which had a universal build system... everything build from scratch every day and wouldn't build if any of its dependencies didn't build. So when some guy broke a components 3 components upstream, nobody could get anything compiled because the system was too stupid to go with the last known good... and hundreds of developers sat around all day going "but, what do you mean we can't do anything because some guy checked in shit code".
And that's how JavaScript app development works in 2016.
Well, that and sometimes artists die and stuff... I'm sure all those fans of Hendrix or Nirvana (or countless other artists) are just refusing to listen to that because they can't get tickets to a live show.
A band playing near you, playing stuff you give a crap about, and doing it in a way you can afford to keep doing? Yeah, right.
By all means, support live music if you like... but don't for a minute think it can substitute for a personal collection of music. It's not the same thing.
So if sysadmins can set this via GPO, basically MS is doing their usual bullshit and assuming all people are running Windows in corporate environments to use Office and Exchange?
And how will this help the rest of us? Microsoft hasn't fixed anything, they've allowed corporate environments to turn off some functionality without really addressing the actual underlying problem -- their tendency to run everything silently without stopping to realize how that's a terrible idea.
But, that's OK... I don't see much value in Office for personal use anyway, and except for the OS, Notepad and Calculator, I don't think I rely on any of Microsoft's stuff for anything anyway.
It just amazes me how much they continue to embody the cluelessness embodies in those "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" commercials... keep it up guys, keep believing the world runs on spreadsheets and Exchange.
Not only do I not have a nearby place with live music, let alone playing the kind of music I want... I want to be able to listen to music while I work, while I'm on a plane, while I'm on vacation, while I'm in my backyard while in my car, or hanging out with friends in my living room.
I also want a large amount of variety in my music, and have little interest in going to a live venue where I get gouged for cover, over-priced drinks, and leave with ringing ears. And, no, I don't want to hear yet another damned version of Mustang Sally by a cover band. I want to listen to music FAR more often than that, and I sure don't want whatever pop tune is going to play 10 times that day.
Why was the concept of owning music farcical? We had it for a VERY long time as a model, and for some of us it still works quite well.
Artists get paid far better from a CD purchase than a streaming play, and I have no fucking interest in having ads shoved in my face so some asshole can track me and try to monetize my listening experience.
Me, I buy CDs, rip 'em to MP3, and use them on all of my devices how I see fit, where I see fit, and when I see fit. Two or three times a year I buy 20-30 CDs (more if you account for multi-disk sets), rip 'em, put in my library and as much as possible try to play through my entire library through the year -- because I have big giant random playlists based on least recently played.
No ad company gets money when I play my music, no asshole can tell me the DRM has expired and I'm not allowed to listen to it, no analytics company can gather information about me when I play music, and I'm not dependent on an internet connection to re-download something I already own.
As far as I'm concerned, the only way to avoid the corruption of the music industry is buy CDs from artists I like, or buy compilation CDs I like, let them get paid, and then never have them have any inputs on how I use my music ever again.
Sorry, for me buying a CD and ripping it to MP3 is pretty much the only way I can freely enjoy my music in the way I choose to listen to it without allowing someone to try to apply constraints or make more money off the purchase. It's a one shot deal, and then the recording industry is out of the picture... and I'm not supporting artists I don't like.
No way I'm willing to hand control of how I play my music to anybody else, and no way I'm going to rely on the radio or live venues to provide all of the music and variety I choose. I'll take care of that myself, precisely by owning my own music library.
Me, I figure any civilization making elaborate stone pillars? They didn't do that before agriculture. They did it much much later. Or at least much later than some form of dealing with food which allowed them to store and preserve and feed larger amounts of people over longer time frames.
My personal guess is agriculture in some form is FAR older than people realize, and you can't get to the level of sophistication shown by that link you gave without having solved the problem of feeding yourself and being able to keep the people who built it fed and sheltered. I'd bet some basic forms of agriculture and tending animals are tens of thousands of years old, if not even older.
This is from your own link:
Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in sequence to wild wheat found on Karaca DaÄY 20 miles (32 km) away from the site, suggesting that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated.[34] Such scholars suggest that the Neolithic revolution, i.e., the beginnings of grain cultivation, took place here
They had agriculture, they probably had a relatively sophisticated culture compared to the loin-cloth savages everybody expects, there probably had been religions (of a sort), simple cuisine, some basic medicine, basic textiles and clothing... there's no way you have tools to carve stone pillars without probably already having woven cloth and the like. You can't stay in one place long enough to carve elaborate stone structures if you haven't solved the problem of feeding people. And you sure as hell don't make these things which are separate from where you live unless you have solved a lot of the problems of having some form of villages.
I contend you simply cannot have features like "rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime" without having gone through a LOT of development of many things in far less durable materials for a VERY long period of time.
Me, I think in ancient Turkey and likely a LOT of other places there had been societies with simple farming, raising of animals, weaving, art, culture, likely music, probably a good understanding of seasons and some basic astronomy, and buildings for FAR longer than we have evidence for. You don't go directly from living in furs and rooting around in the muck and foraging for berries to making stone structures -- civilization had to have been around for thousands of years before anybody came along and build stone pillars or temples.
If the Australian aborigines have been genetically separated for over 60,000 years there's several tens of thousands of years of humanity which nobody is even close to accounting for.
And me? Me I think in that time a lot more interesting stuff was happening than crawling around in the mud foraging for our food.
By the time the civilizations we think of as "classical antiquity" came along, there had been literally tens of thousands of years of human cultures and societies which had happened.
I think stuff like this is awesome, because undermining the absurd notion that anything prior to about 5,000BC and humans weren't already showing many signs of civilization is a good thing. There's a lot of evidence that much before that there was some fairly advanced things that people aren't really aware of, so they keep acting like before that man was primitive and didn't know anything.
Before I retire, I would like to see IT including software development start acting more like professional engineers (real PEs) and less like a bunch of cowboys with no guidance or standards
Yeah, no kidding.
I've spent a lot of years in regulated industries where overseeing agencies have no patience for "oops". And lives, huge fines, or both can be on the line.
As such my approach to change management is very rigid, very paranoid, and to some people, way over the top. The people I've worked with have all come to see it as a good thing, because they know damned well we're not just making changes without telling someone just because it's easier. I had one manager defend me to someone who went over my head because he "just wanted to make a quick change", and the manager said "hell no, you follow his way or you don't touch the machine". The next day the guy who wanted to make the quick change brought down another prod system by doing something stupid and ad hoc. Nobody ever questioned my apparent paranoia about the production systems again, and my manager knew damned well I was doing it to look out for the company's interests. Quick change guy? I'm not sure he lasted much longer, because it was a very risk averse environment and he didn't get that.
I've known a lot of people who are like "oh, I did that wrong, OK, I'll just make a quick tweak on the Prod system and fix the mistake". I've seen several instances of things being suddenly dead in the water and someone nervously saying "no, I don't know what happened" even though they basically caused the outage and knew it. Getting caught being the culprit AND getting caught trying to hide it is not a good choice.
Building stuff, or maintaining stuff, is a lot harder to do if you insist on not cutting corners. Sucks to be that guy standing there sheepishly trying to explain how you were just making one tiny little harmless change, that turned out to be not so harmless.
For some stuff, sure, agile and off the cuff is probably OK. But when the stakes go up, the rigor needs to go up as well. And the cowboys don't understand that they can't just keep winging it and saying "don't worry, it'll be fine". Because when it's not fine, someone's ass might be on the line.
And while I could relax my paranoia about change management in the right environment (but it wouldn't be my natural instinct), the people who do stuff by the seat of their pants can't suddenly start doing more rigorous stuff, because they never learned and don't see why they'd do it. Which means they always try to cut corners and believe that nothing will happen.
Apparently I was doing things like ITSM before I knew what it was.
The world needs more technical types to stand up and say "this is a terrible idea, and we should not do this", exactly like this guy did. What's really sad is these guys predicted a massive tragedy which could have been avoided, and nobody listened -- and that as often as not someone in management is overruling that and saying "shut up, we need to do this now".
Because those people are often the first to try to blame someone else, usually the people they overruled in the first place.
Well, then it's the next batch of cluprits... PR and management. Which I gather in this case is exactly what happened.
The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them.
That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up."
When Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, Ebeling and his colleagues sat stunned in a conference room at Thiokol's headquarters outside Brigham City, Utah. They watched the spacecraft explode on a giant television screen and they knew exactly what had happened.
Three weeks later, Ebeling and another engineer separately and anonymously detailed to NPR the first account of that contentious pre-launch meeting. Both were despondent and in tears as they described hours of data review and arguments. The data showed that the rubber seals on the shuttle's booster rockets wouldn't seal properly in cold temperatures and this would be the coldest launch ever.
What's really sad is this poor bastard did everything he could to avert it, and got told to STFU.
It's sad that he carried guilt for something he properly identified and did everything he could to prevent it.
"I think that was one of the mistakes that God made," Ebeling says softly. "He shouldn't have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I'm gonna ask him, 'Why me. You picked a loser.' "
No sir, that's not how the rest of us interpret that.
that there's this group of elites who have this power to break in, or not. The problem with this mythology isn't how true it is- it seems to be pretty accurate, and it pretty fun and interesting
You know, reading TFA, I refuse to believe "elites" had a damned thing to do with it.
This absolutely screams of being a place which could have been taken down by a couple of bored script kiddies on their first day out.
These guys could have been skilled, but the security reads like it was so bad that it defies explanation how they hadn't already been hacked. The security lapses they describe show a pretty fundamental level of clueless.
and the payments app contained an INI file with the administrative password for the central router
You know, every time I have encountered anything this moronic I've raised bloody hell over it.
Why the hell would a fscking payment app need the administrative password for the damned router, and what idiot allowed this on their network. On at least three occasions I've said "no way in hell I'm going to put a plaintext password into an INI file, and if you want me to do it you're going to have to send me an email and CC a lot of other people demanding it". (Reading TFA, it wasn't the actual payment app, but they got it off a web server they compromised which had it in an INI file, so bad job in the summary).
I swear, security is often either non-existent or written by idiots.
And that's before you even get to the epic stupidity of having your SCADA stuff to your normal network. I've been in places that had SCADA stuff, and NOTHING was on that network which wasn't fully vetted.
This whole article reads like "what happens when unqualified people run critical systems" -- right down to the fact that they also had access to "2.5 million customer and financial records".
I'd like to say I'm astonished, but that would imply that I keep being surprised at just how bad companies suck at fairly basic security.
LOL, hmmm... I wonder if the rental Jetta I just had opened the doors as well with that thing.
I'll feel like a right fool if I could have just walked up to it and opened the door instead of pulling out the fob to open the doors and then putting it back in my pocket before I got in.
Because that struck me as kind of a waste of time.
I was so baffled when I first couldn't figure out where to put the key to start the car it never even occurred to me it opened the doors as well. I spent over 5 minutes trying to figure out where to put the key (yes, I'm special like that).
Which is the problem with rental cars, by the time you figure out some of the seemingly simple things it's time to return the car. I once had to pull out the manual to figure out how to put in the gas nozzle in some Fiat thingy I'd rented, and even with the manual I found myself thinking "why the hell is this step necessary?"
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem is the Angolans aren't morons (which isn't actually a problem). But apparently the people who set them up with this crippled internet assumed they were (which is their problem, not the Angolans).
Nobody built special hooks to keep them honest, either because they assumed the Angolans would be so grateful they wouldn't dare misuse it, or because they thought the Angolans would never figure out something as sophisticated as renaming a file.
So, unless Facebook and Wikipedia deployed special versions which said "we must assume they're all sneaky bastards and actively prevent them from doing anything else", when the Angolans showed themselves to be clever sneaky bastards (and I do mean that in the nicest possible way) Facebook and Wikipedia found themselves going "no fair, you cheated".
Trying to prevent them from doing this is now going to be an arms race, which means it's probably almost impossible to rein it in.
This is a clever hack, to work around an intentionally crippled system which was probably doomed to fail from the get go.
Well, let me offer a counter point (as someone who knows nothing about China based on what we see in the news) ...
Widespread corruption and skirting of environmental laws will make a hell of a mess as people get swindled or they wreck their environment even further.
The pattern seems to be that someone gets rich, a lot of other someones die or have their town ruined, and then the show trial comes in to try to make it look like someone is being held accountable.
I wouldn't expect sunshine and rainbows all around just yet.
Remember the melamine which showed up in pet food a couple of years back? In China, that showed up in baby formula.
The problem is you can't seriously expect people to be told "this part of the internet is special and magical and you can only have it if you use it this way."
You can't just slap it together and then be all shocked that people said "I reject your limited reality and substitute my own". You gave them a means to exchange data and a place to host files and expected them to only use it the way you told them they were allowed to.
Which is kind of like putting up a public graffiti wall and then being outraged someone put up a dick joke.
Have you ever seen something which someone said "you may use this as long as you play nicely and only according to what we've told you that you're allowed to do", and not seen it misused?
Bypassing the intended use was pretty much inevitable ... if you only have Facebook and Wikipedia, then Wikipedia is suddenly your file sharing network.
Can I stop the possibility that Angola could lose cheap network access because they refuse to be dictated to? Nope. Am I at all surprised that human ingenuity worked around a crippled network to use it for something else? Not even in the slightest.
As much as I understand it's not literally all porn in the sense of boobies ... volumetrically modeled porn and neural network porn is no different from food porn and automobile porn.
It's all porn of some kind for someone, even it allegedly not porn. ;-)
I remember being all excited to have a video card with 1MB of RAM which would do 1024x768.
My desktop has 16GB of RAM.
What kind of porn are you guys watching you need a 24GB video card?
You know, at its core I did get the point of the message ... there were many many years where Microsoft really only saw the world as Office+Outlook+Exchange in corporate environments.
When Apple was giving video editing tools and useful stuff for having a digital life, Microsoft ... well, Microsoft still had Solitaire.
Apple's reputation for a seamlessly working ecosystem is well earned when the guy who installed my fireplace was all happy he lived in an Apple household and hadn't had to fight with technology in a long time.
My Windows 8.1 box (once I disabled Metro, their start screen, and their annoying store) ... well, it seems to have the exact same utilities in it as it did in Windows 2003. For a company who spends billions on research, that's pretty pathetic.
But Apple always shunned the whole "compete on specs" thing, so that their marketing guy is suddenly doing this seems like they've got a new breed running the show, and that's a shame if this is the attitude it's bringing..
Pretty much, yeah.
And it just seems so patronizing ... oh, look at these poor backwards Angolans without the interwebs ... we should give them Facebook and Wikipedia so they can uplift themselves from their savagery.
Meanwhile "the poor backwards Angolans" have said "what, you think we're idiots? Screw you, we want movies, porn, music, and picture's of Nicki Minaj's ass (apparently), just like everyone else on the interwebs."
I don't see this as misuse. I see this as flipping the bird to the patronizing attempts to give them a tiny bit of the internet and expect them to be all "thank you boss" about it.
I think this is hilarious, and I applaud them for doing it.
The Apple Marketing really are targeting the shallow and vacuous assholes who want to feel smug about the latest shiny?
My last PC was over 6 years old before it keeled over, and I hope this one lasts about the same.
Know what I still don't have? My first gen iPad that Apple updated until they made it useless. Know what I do have? A 3.5 year old Android tablet.
Huge amounts of people are running older machines ... and, once again, people in marketing are shallow idiots.
Well, it's also amazing how quickly people realize "wait, this is free and that isn't, so if I rename this to look like that it's free"
If you tell people they can only use a communication medium one or two ways, they'll eventually figure out how to do all of the rest by piggy-backing on those methods.
This isn't "this is why we can't have nice things". This is telling people "we have nice things, but you can't have nice things so you get these things". And then those people turned around and said "no, we can have nice things too".
Yeah, no shit ... there is no TFA ... there's just "some guys want to do some stuff but due to our own ineptitude we failed to provide any relevant links to anything, so talk among yourselves."
Buzzword bingo, bitches!!
This just needs a missions statement generator and a set of power point slides, and it'll be ready for vast sums of money to pay for travel junkets and hookers for years.
Sure, but my point is for the average person who could get screwed by this vulnerability, this does no good at all.
My mother-in-law isn't going to google for what registry key needs to be put in to solve a problem she doesn't understand.
If the best Microsoft can do to fix this problem is a half-assed fix which is only applicable to corporate controlled networks or advanced users, it completely misses all of those other people who don't have this and are more likely to be vulnerable.
This isn't a solution, it's a cheap work around which benefits a small subset of their user base. And I'm no longer willing to cut Microsoft slack for their shit security they build into products because they don't think stuff through and want to run anything they encounter.
Letting admins turn it off doesn't solve anything, because the people impacted by this won't all have admins.
Saying "it takes no more than a Google or a dig through an admx file" is a bullshit response, because it boils down to forcing every home user to know about this shit and act on it. If Microsoft is going to write the suck, they need to write better fixes than this.
That, or they should say "well, unless you have an admin you should use Google Docs because we're too damned lazy to come up with a real fix". That would at least be honest.
And your nick is one character away from including the word "reamer", and two letters away from being "screamer".
It is simply not possible to exclude every word which is one or two letters away from offending some random idiot who thinks being one letter away is the same thing.
People can give something a name which is totally innocuous to them and which someone else is going to get into a hissy fit about.
So, what's more likely, he had no idea some random guy on the interwebs would make the comparison to a racial slur, or he used a word which sounded cool to him?
I've always thought this interconnected pile of stuff, linking across a bunch of domains was lazy, dangerous, and likely to be very brittle.
Sorry, but the interwebs have shown me I can't afford to trust arbitrary code from all over the place, which can change at a moments notice, and which I know nothing about.
If you've created an infrastructure where tons of stuff breaks because some asshole corporation forces some guy to say "fuck you, you can't have my code", you have a terrible mess. What happens if someone adds some malicious code?
What I find really odd is they've over-ruled him and said "no, you can't un-publish your own stuff, we own it". So, what, they've decided his stuff was too important to still be his own? So he got fucked because of corporate assholes only to have his copyright infringed?
Jenga tower indeed, it sounds like the state of the art is a bunch of brittle dependencies controlled by a few places, and subject to causing a shit top of things to happen when someone makes a change.
This reminds me of a company I worked at which had a universal build system ... everything build from scratch every day and wouldn't build if any of its dependencies didn't build. So when some guy broke a components 3 components upstream, nobody could get anything compiled because the system was too stupid to go with the last known good ... and hundreds of developers sat around all day going "but, what do you mean we can't do anything because some guy checked in shit code".
Wow, just wow.
Steaming Heaps of Innovative Technology.
Well, that and sometimes artists die and stuff ... I'm sure all those fans of Hendrix or Nirvana (or countless other artists) are just refusing to listen to that because they can't get tickets to a live show.
A band playing near you, playing stuff you give a crap about, and doing it in a way you can afford to keep doing? Yeah, right.
By all means, support live music if you like ... but don't for a minute think it can substitute for a personal collection of music. It's not the same thing.
So if sysadmins can set this via GPO, basically MS is doing their usual bullshit and assuming all people are running Windows in corporate environments to use Office and Exchange?
And how will this help the rest of us? Microsoft hasn't fixed anything, they've allowed corporate environments to turn off some functionality without really addressing the actual underlying problem -- their tendency to run everything silently without stopping to realize how that's a terrible idea.
But, that's OK ... I don't see much value in Office for personal use anyway, and except for the OS, Notepad and Calculator, I don't think I rely on any of Microsoft's stuff for anything anyway.
It just amazes me how much they continue to embody the cluelessness embodies in those "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" commercials ... keep it up guys, keep believing the world runs on spreadsheets and Exchange.
I disagree.
Not only do I not have a nearby place with live music, let alone playing the kind of music I want ... I want to be able to listen to music while I work, while I'm on a plane, while I'm on vacation, while I'm in my backyard while in my car, or hanging out with friends in my living room.
I also want a large amount of variety in my music, and have little interest in going to a live venue where I get gouged for cover, over-priced drinks, and leave with ringing ears. And, no, I don't want to hear yet another damned version of Mustang Sally by a cover band. I want to listen to music FAR more often than that, and I sure don't want whatever pop tune is going to play 10 times that day.
Why was the concept of owning music farcical? We had it for a VERY long time as a model, and for some of us it still works quite well.
Artists get paid far better from a CD purchase than a streaming play, and I have no fucking interest in having ads shoved in my face so some asshole can track me and try to monetize my listening experience.
Me, I buy CDs, rip 'em to MP3, and use them on all of my devices how I see fit, where I see fit, and when I see fit. Two or three times a year I buy 20-30 CDs (more if you account for multi-disk sets), rip 'em, put in my library and as much as possible try to play through my entire library through the year -- because I have big giant random playlists based on least recently played.
No ad company gets money when I play my music, no asshole can tell me the DRM has expired and I'm not allowed to listen to it, no analytics company can gather information about me when I play music, and I'm not dependent on an internet connection to re-download something I already own.
As far as I'm concerned, the only way to avoid the corruption of the music industry is buy CDs from artists I like, or buy compilation CDs I like, let them get paid, and then never have them have any inputs on how I use my music ever again.
Sorry, for me buying a CD and ripping it to MP3 is pretty much the only way I can freely enjoy my music in the way I choose to listen to it without allowing someone to try to apply constraints or make more money off the purchase. It's a one shot deal, and then the recording industry is out of the picture ... and I'm not supporting artists I don't like.
No way I'm willing to hand control of how I play my music to anybody else, and no way I'm going to rely on the radio or live venues to provide all of the music and variety I choose. I'll take care of that myself, precisely by owning my own music library.
Not so wasted then, was it? ;-)
Me, I figure any civilization making elaborate stone pillars? They didn't do that before agriculture. They did it much much later. Or at least much later than some form of dealing with food which allowed them to store and preserve and feed larger amounts of people over longer time frames.
My personal guess is agriculture in some form is FAR older than people realize, and you can't get to the level of sophistication shown by that link you gave without having solved the problem of feeding yourself and being able to keep the people who built it fed and sheltered. I'd bet some basic forms of agriculture and tending animals are tens of thousands of years old, if not even older.
This is from your own link:
They had agriculture, they probably had a relatively sophisticated culture compared to the loin-cloth savages everybody expects, there probably had been religions (of a sort), simple cuisine, some basic medicine, basic textiles and clothing ... there's no way you have tools to carve stone pillars without probably already having woven cloth and the like. You can't stay in one place long enough to carve elaborate stone structures if you haven't solved the problem of feeding people. And you sure as hell don't make these things which are separate from where you live unless you have solved a lot of the problems of having some form of villages.
I contend you simply cannot have features like "rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime" without having gone through a LOT of development of many things in far less durable materials for a VERY long period of time.
Me, I think in ancient Turkey and likely a LOT of other places there had been societies with simple farming, raising of animals, weaving, art, culture, likely music, probably a good understanding of seasons and some basic astronomy, and buildings for FAR longer than we have evidence for. You don't go directly from living in furs and rooting around in the muck and foraging for berries to making stone structures -- civilization had to have been around for thousands of years before anybody came along and build stone pillars or temples.
If the Australian aborigines have been genetically separated for over 60,000 years there's several tens of thousands of years of humanity which nobody is even close to accounting for.
And me? Me I think in that time a lot more interesting stuff was happening than crawling around in the mud foraging for our food.
By the time the civilizations we think of as "classical antiquity" came along, there had been literally tens of thousands of years of human cultures and societies which had happened.
I think stuff like this is awesome, because undermining the absurd notion that anything prior to about 5,000BC and humans weren't already showing many signs of civilization is a good thing. There's a lot of evidence that much before that there was some fairly advanced things that people aren't really aware of, so they keep acting like before that man was primitive and didn't know anything.
Yeah, no kidding.
I've spent a lot of years in regulated industries where overseeing agencies have no patience for "oops". And lives, huge fines, or both can be on the line.
As such my approach to change management is very rigid, very paranoid, and to some people, way over the top. The people I've worked with have all come to see it as a good thing, because they know damned well we're not just making changes without telling someone just because it's easier. I had one manager defend me to someone who went over my head because he "just wanted to make a quick change", and the manager said "hell no, you follow his way or you don't touch the machine". The next day the guy who wanted to make the quick change brought down another prod system by doing something stupid and ad hoc. Nobody ever questioned my apparent paranoia about the production systems again, and my manager knew damned well I was doing it to look out for the company's interests. Quick change guy? I'm not sure he lasted much longer, because it was a very risk averse environment and he didn't get that.
I've known a lot of people who are like "oh, I did that wrong, OK, I'll just make a quick tweak on the Prod system and fix the mistake". I've seen several instances of things being suddenly dead in the water and someone nervously saying "no, I don't know what happened" even though they basically caused the outage and knew it. Getting caught being the culprit AND getting caught trying to hide it is not a good choice.
Building stuff, or maintaining stuff, is a lot harder to do if you insist on not cutting corners. Sucks to be that guy standing there sheepishly trying to explain how you were just making one tiny little harmless change, that turned out to be not so harmless.
For some stuff, sure, agile and off the cuff is probably OK. But when the stakes go up, the rigor needs to go up as well. And the cowboys don't understand that they can't just keep winging it and saying "don't worry, it'll be fine". Because when it's not fine, someone's ass might be on the line.
And while I could relax my paranoia about change management in the right environment (but it wouldn't be my natural instinct), the people who do stuff by the seat of their pants can't suddenly start doing more rigorous stuff, because they never learned and don't see why they'd do it. Which means they always try to cut corners and believe that nothing will happen.
Apparently I was doing things like ITSM before I knew what it was.
The world needs more technical types to stand up and say "this is a terrible idea, and we should not do this", exactly like this guy did. What's really sad is these guys predicted a massive tragedy which could have been avoided, and nobody listened -- and that as often as not someone in management is overruling that and saying "shut up, we need to do this now".
Because those people are often the first to try to blame someone else, usually the people they overruled in the first place.
Well, then it's the next batch of cluprits ... PR and management. Which I gather in this case is exactly what happened.
What's really sad is this poor bastard did everything he could to avert it, and got told to STFU.
It's sad that he carried guilt for something he properly identified and did everything he could to prevent it.
No sir, that's not how the rest of us interpret that.
You know, reading TFA, I refuse to believe "elites" had a damned thing to do with it.
This absolutely screams of being a place which could have been taken down by a couple of bored script kiddies on their first day out.
These guys could have been skilled, but the security reads like it was so bad that it defies explanation how they hadn't already been hacked. The security lapses they describe show a pretty fundamental level of clueless.
You know, every time I have encountered anything this moronic I've raised bloody hell over it.
Why the hell would a fscking payment app need the administrative password for the damned router, and what idiot allowed this on their network. On at least three occasions I've said "no way in hell I'm going to put a plaintext password into an INI file, and if you want me to do it you're going to have to send me an email and CC a lot of other people demanding it". (Reading TFA, it wasn't the actual payment app, but they got it off a web server they compromised which had it in an INI file, so bad job in the summary).
I swear, security is often either non-existent or written by idiots.
And that's before you even get to the epic stupidity of having your SCADA stuff to your normal network. I've been in places that had SCADA stuff, and NOTHING was on that network which wasn't fully vetted.
This whole article reads like "what happens when unqualified people run critical systems" -- right down to the fact that they also had access to "2.5 million customer and financial records".
I'd like to say I'm astonished, but that would imply that I keep being surprised at just how bad companies suck at fairly basic security.
That was Gondor, wasn't it? ;-)
LOL, hmmm ... I wonder if the rental Jetta I just had opened the doors as well with that thing.
I'll feel like a right fool if I could have just walked up to it and opened the door instead of pulling out the fob to open the doors and then putting it back in my pocket before I got in.
Because that struck me as kind of a waste of time.
I was so baffled when I first couldn't figure out where to put the key to start the car it never even occurred to me it opened the doors as well. I spent over 5 minutes trying to figure out where to put the key (yes, I'm special like that).
Which is the problem with rental cars, by the time you figure out some of the seemingly simple things it's time to return the car. I once had to pull out the manual to figure out how to put in the gas nozzle in some Fiat thingy I'd rented, and even with the manual I found myself thinking "why the hell is this step necessary?"