The law that he broke was a section CA Penal Code 502, specifically that he disrupted or denied computer service to an authorized user and he did so without permission.
Refusing to provide a password is absolutely not a denial of service. That's like claiming losing keys to a rack in a data center is a denial of service.
However, he made one of the biggest mistakes then that he could have. While under police surveillance, he decided then to leave the state and make cash withdrawals of over $10,000. He was arrested, and that's where it became a criminal matter instead of simply an employment matter.
How this is a criminal act? Was he under court order to stay within the state of California and not touch his money?
This whole case was never a criminal matter.
Can you confirm the order of events: 1. Terry Childs employment was terminated. 2. As an ex-employee he refused to provide any passwords. 3. He was arrested.
The precedent set here is that network administrators are required to produce passwords for ex-employers. So the only way as a network administrator to protect yourself against imprisonment from a former employer is to have difficulty remembering, AKA the Alberto Gonzales defense.
No, change the default SSH port. It's so rare that actual humans are behind brute force attacks anymore that changing ports makes a huge difference in automated port-scanners from even bothering with your servers.
For all unsubsidized Stafford loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2006, the interest rate is fixed at 6.8 percent. The interest rate for subsidized Stafford loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2009 is fixed at 5.6 percent.
PLUS loans? Parents should have been saving since the child was born.
I've never seen a scholarship or grant which required you to take a loan.
There is at least one alternative. You work full-time and go to school. In fact, that's how I ended up a Network Admin rather than an Advertising Executive, by working 2nd shift at the Internet Service Providers.
I think it's wonderful that you believe you are entitled to a college education; there's no such entitlement, nor should there be. If we're going to make the system of higher-education based on entitlements then we'll have to go to a competitive system where only the top X number of students of some federal test are allowed to go to apply for university.
A masters in IT Management? Trust me, kid. No one in IT Management needs a college degree to spew buzzwords, create/attend pointless meeting, ask stupid questions, and otherwise hinder IT Workers from doing real work.
If you're testing to certify cat5, cat5e, or cat6 you need a cable tester. If you cannot certify the cable to a category you cannot guarantee the cable will work. So the cable is always suspect when you have connectivity issues.
Keep the OSI model in mind, errors at the physical layer cause the whole stack to collapse.
The advantage of cabling over wireless is that you can guarantee that the cable will work where there's no such promise with unlicensed RF spectrum.
Electronic banking is heavily regulated. If you feel your concerns are being taken seriously by the bank you need to head on over to the federal reserves website and file a complaint. The Federal Reserve will forward the complaint to the correct regulating facility and banks will respond or be fined.
Hurricane Ike knocked out power across Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. We need to divert this money away from worrying about preventing a power grid outage due to an extremely unlikely nuclear strike and towards finding ways to keep natural, regularly occuring forces from bringing down power for 6 million people across the center of the US.
I do not typically use "You are an idiot" as a greeting. I prefer to use that phrase as a goodbye.
Wii is too close to WWII
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
As soon as I saw the name I immediately considered how thoughtless it is for a Japanese company to think of releasing a product that could even remotely remind anyone of World War II.
They could provide in-game incentives for characters to move to another server. I would guess the server architecture is such that as the population moves they could adjust the number of servers in the server clusters.
I had Speakeasy IDSL (DSL over an ISDN connection) 18 months ago in Houston due to my distance from the nearest CO. It worked great for two years, but when it finally did break the finger pointing began:
It's a problem with your router, it's a problem with Covad, it's a problem with SBC, it's a problem with your router.
After two weeks I was still unable to get things back up and working and they wanted me to put a deposit down for a Covad engineer to visit between 9am and 4pm weekdays only. Keep in mind this is for a service that I was paying $140 a month for a 144k connection.
Needless to say, I called up SBC and had a DSL connection in place and running two days later--they had just installed a remote shelf in my neighborhood.
The prices they are charging for "naked DSL" just happens to be the same price I'm paying for a phone line and DSL from SBC. Since I've never had an extended issue with my SBC DSL I haven't seen the reason to pay the same amount but lose my landline.
It's ashame because SpeakEasy is by far the best customer service you can get from an ISP, but until they own copper into my house they just don't control enough of the variables.
Since this happened in Florida. How about we look at what Florida law says:
815.03 Definitions.--As used in this chapter, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise:
(1) "Access" means to approach, instruct, communicate with, store data in, retrieve data from, or otherwise make use of any resources of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
815.06 Offenses against computer users.--
(1) Whoever willfully, knowingly, and without authorization:
(a) Accesses or causes to be accessed any computer, computer system, or computer network;
commits an offense against computer users.
(2)(a) Except as provided in paragraphs (b) and (c), whoever violates subsection (1) commits a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
It's pretty clear, in Florida if you access a network without permission you've committed a third degree felony.
Get a Packeteer Packetshaper. Block all Peer-to-Peer application protocols and definately IRC protocols. The Packetshaper works at layer 7 instead of layer 4.
You don't have to be doing anything wrong for an officer to pull you over. I've gone through about 20 spot checks over the last 15 years; all because the officers were pulling over random people and checking to see if they're drunk.
The suspicion? I was driving soon after the bars closed. Why was I driving at 2am and 3am in the morning? Because I worked at the bars as a DJ.
All the same, I have enough brains in my head to agree with whatever the nice man with the gun says and not cause unnecessary trouble.
Don't pick up the phone. I don't want to waste time talking to you when I could be getting work done.
I definately don't want to see you in person unless it's a social visit and I happen to have a moment of freetime.
I want you to list out, in written detail, exactly what you need so I can reply, in written detail, with useful information. Be clear, consise, and detailed.
I plan to pull up this email next week when you claim we never discussed the topic. I'll kindly remind you that we did discuss the topic and you agreed to take care of your business. If I asked to record the phone call, you'd probably have a panic attack.
If you really have something important to discuss, you can write it down. Spoken words are meaningless and forgettable.
Phone calls are interruptions that require my full attention. Emails can be replied to as my time becomes available.
The Harris County Tollroad Authority already uses RFID tags (call EZ Tags) to pay for tolls. Recently, the Houston and Dallas toll systems were integrated so drivers from one city could pay for tolls in the other city with their RFID tag.
The tags could be easily abused to monitor speeding, but they are not. Real-time traffic maps are generated from the travel speed data:
I just had to do some research to find out what "bulk data" meant. So for all you other network engineers, here's what I'm assuming this change brings...
By bulk data they're setting the packets DiffServ, I presume according to RFC 2597. I still use good old IP Precedence rather than DiffServ, but after seeing RFC 2597 I have to say Assured Forwarding looks like a great standard for setting up DiffServ. Cisco has a decent article on DiffServ and QoS which has a great table showing off Assured Forwarding's model for traffic control.
The recommended setting for Bulk Data is AF11. "Excess" bulk data, that is bulk data beyond whatever thresholds you've configured, is set to AF12 or AF13. So class 1 data (bulk and excess bulk) gets a certain share of bandwidth, with the excess bulk more likely to get dropped in the event of congestion.
By volunteering to mark BitTorrent traffic as AF11, there's always a chance that more sites that block BitTorrent will be more likely to just QoS it into a happy corner.
I'll let you networking folks do your own searches for more information. I've been fortunate in my current workplace that congestion is rarely an issue--since we've never had much network congestion (100 Meg to the desktop, Gig to the closet, Gig links to our remote sites, Gig Internet pipe, 4 Gig core backbone) QoS hasn't been a priority. But I'm happy to see where DiffServ is going.
Sadly, I recently had to shut down BitTorrent at our site because of a few jerks downloading movies. IRC, P2P, BitTorrent... when 99% of their use is illegal, many times it's the Legal department and not IT that decides the course of action.
Seriously, Slashdot needs to give up the nerd dictionary crusade. Hacker is a bad guy with a computer. Cracker is a white guy.
You won't see people referring to bundle of kindling wood as a faggot anymore--languages evolve new meanings. If you tell someone you threw a faggot on the fire last weekend you'll end up in jail for a hate crime.
Who the fuck needs more bills passed? We have enough damn laws as it is. How about the Representatives and Senators start reading bills, go back to only being in session a few months of the year, and stop sneaking bullshit into law by hiding it under 100 pages of legal gibberish.
Hell yes congressmen should be reading the bills. It's not just their job, it's their sworn duty.
Jon Postel said it best:
"Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."
A web browser that crashes due to invalid HTML fails this test. Execution must stop at once... yes, but the program should handle the error. A program that crashes is the Operating System handling a program with bug.
See RFC 1122 for more details about the Requirements for Internet Hosts. Section 1.2.2 about the Robustness Principle explains better than I can why you're wrong.
First, a firewall doesn't protect you from jack now-a-days. The perimeter is compromised and the enemy is every Windows XP machine.
It's near impossible to keep a Windows network operational since MSBlast first hit the net. TCP port 445 is every network admins' favorite port--you need it somewhat open for users to get to file shares and it just so happens to be the favorite TCP port of every virus I've encountered over the last six months.
Second, some kind of antivirus filter on the mail server protects you only from non-zero day exploits, and only those that travel through email. The same is true for antivirus software on the workstations.
Fourth, you finally got one right, keeping systems updated with patches is the best way to actually avoid most virus/worms. The problem with that is finding an affordable patch management system and actually having someone in upper management who understands why such a system is essential. Usually it takes a massive network outage to get the message through.
These people who run networks for $8/hr probably don't run networks with 250,000 users across 318 sites like I do. (If they do then they are either crazy or stupid.) When you get to some real numbers of users all your simple rules go out the window.
One user installing an trojan can and will bring down the network. It's only through heavy-handed use of access-lists and static mac-address-table entries that my network has stayed up acceptably this week while our virus provider analysed three new worm variants.
Patched workstations would have avoided the problems all together, but I just run the network here, I can't (yet) force the machines to be up to date on patches... come on 802.1x rollout.
Fairplay DRM may be one of the fairest rights management systems out there, but that's just an excellent example of why all DRM is stupid. When I buy a physical CD and rip it to MP3s, I can do all sorts of wonderful things with the music that I paid for: such as stream it to my TiVo.
I download songs from iTunes, and all the sudden I need to reconfigure my stereo setup and wireless network to stream music? Hell no! I don't care what bullshit license agreement I agreed to--copyright was never intended to be a permanent prison for intellectual property. The whole point of copyright is to encourage authors to share their creations.
And for anyone who remembers the really old days, before there was PC Link, there was an online service for the Commodore 64 called Quantum Link. Q-Link for short.
Sure, there was Compuserve and GEnie, but Q-Link was the first of the "Graphical" online services.
Slashdot Mirror
Refusing to provide a password is absolutely not a denial of service. That's like claiming losing keys to a rack in a data center is a denial of service.
How this is a criminal act? Was he under court order to stay within the state of California and not touch his money? This whole case was never a criminal matter.
Can you confirm the order of events:
1. Terry Childs employment was terminated.
2. As an ex-employee he refused to provide any passwords.
3. He was arrested.
The precedent set here is that network administrators are required to produce passwords for ex-employers. So the only way as a network administrator to protect yourself against imprisonment from a former employer is to have difficulty remembering, AKA the Alberto Gonzales defense.
No, change the default SSH port. It's so rare that actual humans are behind brute force attacks anymore that changing ports makes a huge difference in automated port-scanners from even bothering with your servers.
For all unsubsidized Stafford loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2006, the interest rate is fixed at 6.8 percent. The interest rate for subsidized Stafford loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2009 is fixed at 5.6 percent.
PLUS loans? Parents should have been saving since the child was born.
I've never seen a scholarship or grant which required you to take a loan.
There is at least one alternative. You work full-time and go to school. In fact, that's how I ended up a Network Admin rather than an Advertising Executive, by working 2nd shift at the Internet Service Providers.
I think it's wonderful that you believe you are entitled to a college education; there's no such entitlement, nor should there be. If we're going to make the system of higher-education based on entitlements then we'll have to go to a competitive system where only the top X number of students of some federal test are allowed to go to apply for university.
A masters in IT Management? Trust me, kid. No one in IT Management needs a college degree to spew buzzwords, create/attend pointless meeting, ask stupid questions, and otherwise hinder IT Workers from doing real work.
If you're testing to certify cat5, cat5e, or cat6 you need a cable tester. If you cannot certify the cable to a category you cannot guarantee the cable will work. So the cable is always suspect when you have connectivity issues.
Keep the OSI model in mind, errors at the physical layer cause the whole stack to collapse.
The advantage of cabling over wireless is that you can guarantee that the cable will work where there's no such promise with unlicensed RF spectrum.
Electronic banking is heavily regulated. If you feel your concerns are being taken seriously by the bank you need to head on over to the federal reserves website and file a complaint. The Federal Reserve will forward the complaint to the correct regulating facility and banks will respond or be fined.
http://www.federalreserveconsumerhelp.gov/
Hurricane Ike knocked out power across Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. We need to divert this money away from worrying about preventing a power grid outage due to an extremely unlikely nuclear strike and towards finding ways to keep natural, regularly occuring forces from bringing down power for 6 million people across the center of the US.
I do not typically use "You are an idiot" as a greeting. I prefer to use that phrase as a goodbye.
As soon as I saw the name I immediately considered how thoughtless it is for a Japanese company to think of releasing a product that could even remotely remind anyone of World War II.
They could provide in-game incentives for characters to move to another server. I would guess the server architecture is such that as the population moves they could adjust the number of servers in the server clusters.
I had Speakeasy IDSL (DSL over an ISDN connection) 18 months ago in Houston due to my distance from the nearest CO. It worked great for two years, but when it finally did break the finger pointing began:
It's a problem with your router, it's a problem with Covad, it's a problem with SBC, it's a problem with your router.
After two weeks I was still unable to get things back up and working and they wanted me to put a deposit down for a Covad engineer to visit between 9am and 4pm weekdays only. Keep in mind this is for a service that I was paying $140 a month for a 144k connection.
Needless to say, I called up SBC and had a DSL connection in place and running two days later--they had just installed a remote shelf in my neighborhood.
The prices they are charging for "naked DSL" just happens to be the same price I'm paying for a phone line and DSL from SBC. Since I've never had an extended issue with my SBC DSL I haven't seen the reason to pay the same amount but lose my landline.
It's ashame because SpeakEasy is by far the best customer service you can get from an ISP, but until they own copper into my house they just don't control enough of the variables.
Since this happened in Florida. How about we look at what Florida law says:
815.03 Definitions.--As used in this chapter, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise:
(1) "Access" means to approach, instruct, communicate with, store data in, retrieve data from, or otherwise make use of any resources of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
815.06 Offenses against computer users.--
(1) Whoever willfully, knowingly, and without authorization:
(a) Accesses or causes to be accessed any computer, computer system, or computer network;
commits an offense against computer users.
(2)(a) Except as provided in paragraphs (b) and (c), whoever violates subsection (1) commits a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.
It's pretty clear, in Florida if you access a network without permission you've committed a third degree felony.
Get a Packeteer Packetshaper. Block all Peer-to-Peer application protocols and definately IRC protocols. The Packetshaper works at layer 7 instead of layer 4.
You don't have to be doing anything wrong for an officer to pull you over. I've gone through about 20 spot checks over the last 15 years; all because the officers were pulling over random people and checking to see if they're drunk.
The suspicion? I was driving soon after the bars closed. Why was I driving at 2am and 3am in the morning? Because I worked at the bars as a DJ.
All the same, I have enough brains in my head to agree with whatever the nice man with the gun says and not cause unnecessary trouble.
Don't pick up the phone. I don't want to waste time talking to you when I could be getting work done.
I definately don't want to see you in person unless it's a social visit and I happen to have a moment of freetime.
I want you to list out, in written detail, exactly what you need so I can reply, in written detail, with useful information. Be clear, consise, and detailed.
I plan to pull up this email next week when you claim we never discussed the topic. I'll kindly remind you that we did discuss the topic and you agreed to take care of your business. If I asked to record the phone call, you'd probably have a panic attack.
If you really have something important to discuss, you can write it down. Spoken words are meaningless and forgettable.
Phone calls are interruptions that require my full attention. Emails can be replied to as my time becomes available.
The Harris County Tollroad Authority already uses RFID tags (call EZ Tags) to pay for tolls. Recently, the Houston and Dallas toll systems were integrated so drivers from one city could pay for tolls in the other city with their RFID tag.
The tags could be easily abused to monitor speeding, but they are not. Real-time traffic maps are generated from the travel speed data:
http://www.houstontranstar.org/
I just had to do some research to find out what "bulk data" meant. So for all you other network engineers, here's what I'm assuming this change brings...
By bulk data they're setting the packets DiffServ, I presume according to RFC 2597. I still use good old IP Precedence rather than DiffServ, but after seeing RFC 2597 I have to say Assured Forwarding looks like a great standard for setting up DiffServ. Cisco has a decent article on DiffServ and QoS which has a great table showing off Assured Forwarding's model for traffic control.
The recommended setting for Bulk Data is AF11. "Excess" bulk data, that is bulk data beyond whatever thresholds you've configured, is set to AF12 or AF13. So class 1 data (bulk and excess bulk) gets a certain share of bandwidth, with the excess bulk more likely to get dropped in the event of congestion.
By volunteering to mark BitTorrent traffic as AF11, there's always a chance that more sites that block BitTorrent will be more likely to just QoS it into a happy corner.
I'll let you networking folks do your own searches for more information. I've been fortunate in my current workplace that congestion is rarely an issue--since we've never had much network congestion (100 Meg to the desktop, Gig to the closet, Gig links to our remote sites, Gig Internet pipe, 4 Gig core backbone) QoS hasn't been a priority. But I'm happy to see where DiffServ is going.
Sadly, I recently had to shut down BitTorrent at our site because of a few jerks downloading movies. IRC, P2P, BitTorrent... when 99% of their use is illegal, many times it's the Legal department and not IT that decides the course of action.
Crazy crackers, first eminem... now this.
Seriously, Slashdot needs to give up the nerd dictionary crusade. Hacker is a bad guy with a computer. Cracker is a white guy.
You won't see people referring to bundle of kindling wood as a faggot anymore--languages evolve new meanings. If you tell someone you threw a faggot on the fire last weekend you'll end up in jail for a hate crime.
Who the fuck needs more bills passed? We have enough damn laws as it is. How about the Representatives and Senators start reading bills, go back to only being in session a few months of the year, and stop sneaking bullshit into law by hiding it under 100 pages of legal gibberish.
Hell yes congressmen should be reading the bills. It's not just their job, it's their sworn duty.
Jon Postel said it best: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." A web browser that crashes due to invalid HTML fails this test. Execution must stop at once... yes, but the program should handle the error. A program that crashes is the Operating System handling a program with bug. See RFC 1122 for more details about the Requirements for Internet Hosts. Section 1.2.2 about the Robustness Principle explains better than I can why you're wrong.
First, a firewall doesn't protect you from jack now-a-days. The perimeter is compromised and the enemy is every Windows XP machine.
It's near impossible to keep a Windows network operational since MSBlast first hit the net. TCP port 445 is every network admins' favorite port--you need it somewhat open for users to get to file shares and it just so happens to be the favorite TCP port of every virus I've encountered over the last six months.
Second, some kind of antivirus filter on the mail server protects you only from non-zero day exploits, and only those that travel through email. The same is true for antivirus software on the workstations.
Fourth, you finally got one right, keeping systems updated with patches is the best way to actually avoid most virus/worms. The problem with that is finding an affordable patch management system and actually having someone in upper management who understands why such a system is essential. Usually it takes a massive network outage to get the message through.
These people who run networks for $8/hr probably don't run networks with 250,000 users across 318 sites like I do. (If they do then they are either crazy or stupid.) When you get to some real numbers of users all your simple rules go out the window.
One user installing an trojan can and will bring down the network. It's only through heavy-handed use of access-lists and static mac-address-table entries that my network has stayed up acceptably this week while our virus provider analysed three new worm variants.
Patched workstations would have avoided the problems all together, but I just run the network here, I can't (yet) force the machines to be up to date on patches... come on 802.1x rollout.
Fairplay DRM may be one of the fairest rights management systems out there, but that's just an excellent example of why all DRM is stupid. When I buy a physical CD and rip it to MP3s, I can do all sorts of wonderful things with the music that I paid for: such as stream it to my TiVo.
I download songs from iTunes, and all the sudden I need to reconfigure my stereo setup and wireless network to stream music? Hell no! I don't care what bullshit license agreement I agreed to--copyright was never intended to be a permanent prison for intellectual property. The whole point of copyright is to encourage authors to share their creations.
And for anyone who remembers the really old days, before there was PC Link, there was an online service for the Commodore 64 called Quantum Link. Q-Link for short.
Sure, there was Compuserve and GEnie, but Q-Link was the first of the "Graphical" online services.