I used to think that way, but more and more I think it's going the other way.
Governments seldom get anything right. Look at the NSA. It's big, it's grabbing data so fast that it has 1.) Nowhere to put it and 2.) Nothing to analyze it with.
Meanwhile, the general population is growing data at exponential rates AND is increasing its own awareness of government's interest AND is taking steps to muck things up for the NSA.
In my view, the people are smarter than their government.
Write a technology policy that is comprehensive regarding logging off at night, securing passwords, prohibiting Facebook and other non-productive activities.
Insist that all emails are for business use only, etc.
Tighten that puppy up and have the employee sign it the first day while they are wading through other, more relevant (to them) documents, and you're in.
!.) Like some of the other documents, they didn't read it and 2.) It's so comprehensive they are bound to over-step.
In one case, the terminated employee said, "Well, everybody knows that everybody was doing all that stuff."
I said, "Please add another violation, 4.1.a wherein it states, "You must report all violations or suspected violations."
I am Mac stupid and I read up on Little Snitch to see if there's something in my world that would have helped.
I use two tools that I would have gone to: TCPView and Microsoft Network Monitor (MNM), both free.
TCPView is very simple and is really a GUI, more-informative, netstat. What it does is show the computer's current connections whether Listening or Established. It doesn't really show bandwidth per connection, but it certainly answers the question, "What the heck is my computer doing when it's supposed to be doing nothing?"
MNM is much more robust and usually reveals way more than we want to know. However, it displays each incoming/outgoing packet, complete with IP addresses and ports. It is so intense that I don't understand all I know about it.
It's like WireShark, except it compartmentalizes processes so we can see, for instance, only what Outlook or Firefox, etc. is doing.
I agree with the general observation that, from Windows 7 and up, the on-board firewall Resource Monitor would probably be the easiest tool.
Also, I agree that these tools would only be good for doing what Little Snitch apparently did, and that was to eliminate a particular computer as suspect.
I've been thinking about this whole security issue be it residential, commercial, government or other...
The problem I see is that there is hardly any negative impact on the source of the breach, be it Microsoft's code, the incorrect implementation of their products, lack of diligence on IT departments, etc.
Recalling the Target hack, accusation from Congress that China hacked some computers, other major incidences, I don't see where those armed with hoes and rakes and torches are storming the source in an effort to identify culpability.
If this keeps up, it might be a boon to the United States Postal Service (and equivalent in other countries), fax machine sales, and mechanical credit card readers, as we begin to switch back to proven, low-tech solutions.
While the calculations are interesting, practical application is nonproductive.
We need to get MUCH higher percentages.
As you point out, the payload/fuel ratio prevents a motorcycle from reaching c with internal fuel.
As NemionSpace alludes below, If we were to switch to an external fuel source, the universe does not contain enough energy to get us there, either.
All I did was float around the Big Pond (East coast) in Uncle Sam's Yacht Club DURING the Vietnam era. I also got a medal for behaving 4 years in a row.
This guy actually did something. I enjoyed the article.
Internal fuel would do us no good.
Notice that the LHC can't rely on photons' internal fuel. In order to get them puppies off their butts and straighten up and fly right at very high speeds relative to us, we have to pour in EXTERNAL fuel.
A common question is, "Can a motorcycle go the speed of light using the fuel it has in its tank?"
The answer is, "No, the motorcycle must use energy from the universe its embedded in."
We don't need no steenkin fuel. What we need is an engine that gathers external sources of energy to convert into motion.
More to the point, law firms often share documents with other law firms, clients, expert witnesses, and others as deemed appropriate and not all exhibits and evidence in the custody of the firms are in the public domain.
The recent "business associates" classification assigned to law firms regarding HIPAA demands that employees be educated regarding disposition of documents and knowledge.
In addition, computer data storage of the HIPAA protected material calls for a "Chinese Wall," isolating the collection from other, general, storage with some measure of control like (perhaps) a "check-out" log that documents the who, what, where, and why of exposure.
While law firms are "business associates," they are not alone, in my mind.
Law firms recently received instructions regarding "secondary" violations of HIPAA. For instance, a firm might store X-ray images and depositions, expert affidavits, diagnoses, etc. that are strictly controlled at the source, but not necessarily at law firms, be the form of retention paper or digital.
It would seem logical that all parties who have access to, or store, HIPAA-covered information should be regulated the same.
An interesting point of view...
I would think that "copyright" as applied to police and government would raise the question as to ownership of the material. Further, I would tend to support the idea that police and government actions are subject to freedom of information claims, and that citizens have rights to observe and record.
A related issue, I think, is police reaction to bystanders recording police activities. Police reaction varies from, "Just please don't use a flash; don't get too close; and be safe," to confiscation of the camera phone and actual destruction.
Target customers should have filed a class action lawsuit. The evidence is pretty clear that Target flubbed the dub.
Let Target look over its shoulder for responsible parties it can sue for damages.
Let those look for scapegoats, as well.
The buck stops somewhere.
Someone didn't plug holes or a software has an exploit or an operating system is porous.
In other cases (see Snowden, see Manning) the problem is non-hardware/software related. The justice department should have filed charges for dereliction.
The custodians of the data have got to have an incentive to lock the freaking doors.
"The wink of an eye" is much slower than the speed of our disappearance. When we think like a photon, time dilation and length contraction tells us that we got to where we were going instantly.
All the energy and mass have long disappeared from the universe. We happen to be in the middle of the instantaneous event and, because of our frame of reference, we work in units of billions of light years.
The Higgs field, I think, is simply another clue to the bigger questions we have, and does not contradict what we think we know and don't know.
I think every ISP needs to charge, say, one penny for each email sent.
It's sorta like a "stamp."
Spammers use emails as cheap marketing. Emails are free. There are no penalties for sending out millions of emails or one.
The charge places email in the scope of commerce and, therefore, regulation.
The originator will have to pony up to send a million emails.
Regarding spam bots, today those are hard to detect and hard to identify. Someone, somewhere, will be getting a bill from an ISP for sending out a brazillion emails.
Just as we are not liable for false charges on our credit cards in case of theft, we would have the same structure in place.
What the charge DOES do, is bring to light that there IS a botnet, and fingers the infected machines, possibly providing the forensics for finding the perps.
At a minimum, the bots will come down.
Not all ISPs will want to participate and each country can opt in as they see fit.
The gentle email recipient can also block those ISPs.
My plan is a work in progress and is in need of tweaking, so your comments are welcome.
Desk top computers, for non-business use, are the pianos of a garage band.
They are huge, stationary, fully functional and easy to on the fingers.
People are moving away from the desktop and using small devices to do business with Amazon which means that Amazon is not a point-topoint business model.
I think it only reasonable that Amazon wants to tap into the entire business model.
If they do it right, it'll be a big hit.
If not, it's back to the drawing board.
You tease us with the statement, "Firefox OS is unwanted..." We're here to learn from you.
I know nothing about Firefox OS and would like to know more from you, please.
Thank you.
I agree with your assessment and conclusion, and while I can't refute that apathetic users are a problem, I submit that apathetic users should NOT be a problem.
In our current state of the art, users take a lot of blame for not implementing best practices regarding credential quality, changing passwords frequently, failing to read warnings, privacy statements and terms of conditions, etc.
Users are also held accountable for not updating their operating systems and the programs that ride on the (Flash, Java, Other).
The real burden, in my opinion, rests solely with the experts in the field.
Users are reading about Heartbleed, OpenSSL, Man In The Middle, client, server, encryption,...
Users want to level up on Candy Crush Saga and they want to leave all that mumbo-jumbo to people like we here on this board.
I think that's fair.
That could be a bad thing. Conservation laws (all of them) tell us that, essentially, we would be importing one universe into another.
Besides, we'd need an environmental impact study.
A show-stopper is the amount of energy required to get a ship to move at any relativistic speed. Look at the hardware the LHC has to have in order to accelerate protons to near light speed.
A proton, because it has mass, cannot reach the speed of light. There just isn't enough energy in the universe to do the job.
A caveat: That limitation is based on the theories we have now.
Slashdot Mirror
What, precisely, is the conflict?
I agree, except for the conclusion.
The spirit of the law, or perhaps the spirit of economics? This bloke is not a Verizon.
I used to think that way, but more and more I think it's going the other way.
Governments seldom get anything right. Look at the NSA. It's big, it's grabbing data so fast that it has 1.) Nowhere to put it and 2.) Nothing to analyze it with.
Meanwhile, the general population is growing data at exponential rates AND is increasing its own awareness of government's interest AND is taking steps to muck things up for the NSA.
In my view, the people are smarter than their government.
They know. They don't care.
Neither does the consumer, apparently.
The entire computing industry from top to bottom, hardware to software, and IT shops, needs to be lashed by the whip of litigation.
Similar to how we got sprinklers at work.
Yeah, I wondered about that, too.
Seriously? IE8?
I had to dump IE8, 9 and 10 at work because some sites objected.
I had banks and e-file systems people tell me to just get Firefox, please.
I am a scientist and it does not threaten my faith.
The two are separate and I don't pit one against the other.
Both are tools to be used on a different scopes of work.
I keep the two isolated except at the very end of each day.
I wonder what the hell is going on and it's so elusive, I appeal to the gods for help.
Write a technology policy that is comprehensive regarding logging off at night, securing passwords, prohibiting Facebook and other non-productive activities.
Insist that all emails are for business use only, etc.
Tighten that puppy up and have the employee sign it the first day while they are wading through other, more relevant (to them) documents, and you're in.
!.) Like some of the other documents, they didn't read it and 2.) It's so comprehensive they are bound to over-step.
In one case, the terminated employee said, "Well, everybody knows that everybody was doing all that stuff."
I said, "Please add another violation, 4.1.a wherein it states, "You must report all violations or suspected violations."
This is the very best summary I've ever read on the current state of security.
Thanks for the link.
I am Mac stupid and I read up on Little Snitch to see if there's something in my world that would have helped.
I use two tools that I would have gone to: TCPView and Microsoft Network Monitor (MNM), both free.
TCPView is very simple and is really a GUI, more-informative, netstat. What it does is show the computer's current connections whether Listening or Established. It doesn't really show bandwidth per connection, but it certainly answers the question, "What the heck is my computer doing when it's supposed to be doing nothing?"
MNM is much more robust and usually reveals way more than we want to know. However, it displays each incoming/outgoing packet, complete with IP addresses and ports. It is so intense that I don't understand all I know about it.
It's like WireShark, except it compartmentalizes processes so we can see, for instance, only what Outlook or Firefox, etc. is doing.
I agree with the general observation that, from Windows 7 and up, the on-board firewall Resource Monitor would probably be the easiest tool.
Also, I agree that these tools would only be good for doing what Little Snitch apparently did, and that was to eliminate a particular computer as suspect.
I've been thinking about this whole security issue be it residential, commercial, government or other ...
The problem I see is that there is hardly any negative impact on the source of the breach, be it Microsoft's code, the incorrect implementation of their products, lack of diligence on IT departments, etc.
Recalling the Target hack, accusation from Congress that China hacked some computers, other major incidences, I don't see where those armed with hoes and rakes and torches are storming the source in an effort to identify culpability.
If this keeps up, it might be a boon to the United States Postal Service (and equivalent in other countries), fax machine sales, and mechanical credit card readers, as we begin to switch back to proven, low-tech solutions.
While the calculations are interesting, practical application is nonproductive. We need to get MUCH higher percentages. As you point out, the payload/fuel ratio prevents a motorcycle from reaching c with internal fuel. As NemionSpace alludes below, If we were to switch to an external fuel source, the universe does not contain enough energy to get us there, either.
All I did was float around the Big Pond (East coast) in Uncle Sam's Yacht Club DURING the Vietnam era. I also got a medal for behaving 4 years in a row. This guy actually did something. I enjoyed the article.
Internal fuel would do us no good. Notice that the LHC can't rely on photons' internal fuel. In order to get them puppies off their butts and straighten up and fly right at very high speeds relative to us, we have to pour in EXTERNAL fuel. A common question is, "Can a motorcycle go the speed of light using the fuel it has in its tank?" The answer is, "No, the motorcycle must use energy from the universe its embedded in." We don't need no steenkin fuel. What we need is an engine that gathers external sources of energy to convert into motion.
More to the point, law firms often share documents with other law firms, clients, expert witnesses, and others as deemed appropriate and not all exhibits and evidence in the custody of the firms are in the public domain. The recent "business associates" classification assigned to law firms regarding HIPAA demands that employees be educated regarding disposition of documents and knowledge. In addition, computer data storage of the HIPAA protected material calls for a "Chinese Wall," isolating the collection from other, general, storage with some measure of control like (perhaps) a "check-out" log that documents the who, what, where, and why of exposure. While law firms are "business associates," they are not alone, in my mind.
Smart people signing up for a dating sight is like engineers outfitted with radiometers curiously examining the interior of a nuclear reactor.
Law firms recently received instructions regarding "secondary" violations of HIPAA. For instance, a firm might store X-ray images and depositions, expert affidavits, diagnoses, etc. that are strictly controlled at the source, but not necessarily at law firms, be the form of retention paper or digital. It would seem logical that all parties who have access to, or store, HIPAA-covered information should be regulated the same.
An interesting point of view ...
I would think that "copyright" as applied to police and government would raise the question as to ownership of the material. Further, I would tend to support the idea that police and government actions are subject to freedom of information claims, and that citizens have rights to observe and record.
A related issue, I think, is police reaction to bystanders recording police activities. Police reaction varies from, "Just please don't use a flash; don't get too close; and be safe," to confiscation of the camera phone and actual destruction.
Target customers should have filed a class action lawsuit. The evidence is pretty clear that Target flubbed the dub. Let Target look over its shoulder for responsible parties it can sue for damages. Let those look for scapegoats, as well. The buck stops somewhere. Someone didn't plug holes or a software has an exploit or an operating system is porous. In other cases (see Snowden, see Manning) the problem is non-hardware/software related. The justice department should have filed charges for dereliction. The custodians of the data have got to have an incentive to lock the freaking doors.
"The wink of an eye" is much slower than the speed of our disappearance. When we think like a photon, time dilation and length contraction tells us that we got to where we were going instantly. All the energy and mass have long disappeared from the universe. We happen to be in the middle of the instantaneous event and, because of our frame of reference, we work in units of billions of light years. The Higgs field, I think, is simply another clue to the bigger questions we have, and does not contradict what we think we know and don't know.
I think every ISP needs to charge, say, one penny for each email sent. It's sorta like a "stamp." Spammers use emails as cheap marketing. Emails are free. There are no penalties for sending out millions of emails or one. The charge places email in the scope of commerce and, therefore, regulation. The originator will have to pony up to send a million emails. Regarding spam bots, today those are hard to detect and hard to identify. Someone, somewhere, will be getting a bill from an ISP for sending out a brazillion emails. Just as we are not liable for false charges on our credit cards in case of theft, we would have the same structure in place. What the charge DOES do, is bring to light that there IS a botnet, and fingers the infected machines, possibly providing the forensics for finding the perps. At a minimum, the bots will come down. Not all ISPs will want to participate and each country can opt in as they see fit. The gentle email recipient can also block those ISPs. My plan is a work in progress and is in need of tweaking, so your comments are welcome.
Desk top computers, for non-business use, are the pianos of a garage band. They are huge, stationary, fully functional and easy to on the fingers. People are moving away from the desktop and using small devices to do business with Amazon which means that Amazon is not a point-topoint business model. I think it only reasonable that Amazon wants to tap into the entire business model. If they do it right, it'll be a big hit. If not, it's back to the drawing board.
You tease us with the statement, "Firefox OS is unwanted ..." We're here to learn from you.
I know nothing about Firefox OS and would like to know more from you, please.
Thank you.
I agree with your assessment and conclusion, and while I can't refute that apathetic users are a problem, I submit that apathetic users should NOT be a problem. In our current state of the art, users take a lot of blame for not implementing best practices regarding credential quality, changing passwords frequently, failing to read warnings, privacy statements and terms of conditions, etc. Users are also held accountable for not updating their operating systems and the programs that ride on the (Flash, Java, Other). The real burden, in my opinion, rests solely with the experts in the field. Users are reading about Heartbleed, OpenSSL, Man In The Middle, client, server, encryption, ...
Users want to level up on Candy Crush Saga and they want to leave all that mumbo-jumbo to people like we here on this board.
I think that's fair.
That could be a bad thing. Conservation laws (all of them) tell us that, essentially, we would be importing one universe into another. Besides, we'd need an environmental impact study.
A show-stopper is the amount of energy required to get a ship to move at any relativistic speed. Look at the hardware the LHC has to have in order to accelerate protons to near light speed. A proton, because it has mass, cannot reach the speed of light. There just isn't enough energy in the universe to do the job. A caveat: That limitation is based on the theories we have now.