I once worked with software that queried a credit reporting agency. Their security was completely nuts, and all I was doing was querying credit scores. Think leased lines, short-timeout encrypted access tokens, multiple layers of transport encryption, custom transport layers with multiple transaction verification schemes. They also did some heavy-duty traffic analysis - if you did anything even slightly weird you'd get a mail asking what was going on.
So that's why it takes three days to transfer money from one bank account to another over a secured network that's not routed to the Internet. Security theatre up the wazoo.
Didn't even slow down that insider who lost.5 billion for Credit Swisse.
It's not a value judgement, guys, because Australia as a country exceeds most others. But as a place with enough gravity to influence standards? No, no it isn't.
Perhaps not alone it isn't. However, cumulatively along with the likes of Canada, Poland, Brazil & etc., it might begin to add up.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around that comment above about this merely being another iteration of the repeated exercise in beating MS over the head in order to get a discount.
second off, your "proof" that a "very competent IT people" can't use excel hardly proves your point that all people are idiots...
That was hardly what I was attempting to prove. Now I know why so many of your whizbang docs are "jut fine." Your reading comprehension skills appear to be just as lacking.
I'm posting this AC so you can't mod me down...
I wouldn't dream of it, especially seeing as you just did that to yourself. Try hitting the "Preview" button every once in a while, just to see what your posts actually look like.
Jebus you [think] people are real idiots, don't you? I can't imagine being married to you. Everybody in my work group uses office for some seriously tricked out documents and spreadsheets, and we all get by [just] fine. 95% of [the] time is spent on content creation, and we can share and edit group docs with no problem. We're not all fucking retards just because we prefer a GUI to a command line.
Not all of you, no. As for "getting by jut fine", I beg to differ. I dare you to hand off one of your "jut fine" docs to me. No, just because this is a throwaway post on/. doesn't get you a pass. For some of us, correct composition always matters. We care about those who're going to read it because exact comprehension often matters.
I've seen very competent IT people create files that were a simple, single list of lines, in a spreadsheet program (Excel)! They can't even choose the correct tool to use within the GUI suite.
I'd much prefer everyone to use a simple text editor to write up their content, then hand it to a specialist who knows how to use a GUI word processor/DTP program "to make it pretty."
Because I want to be the master of what I watch, not someone else.
Gee, that's just what the content producers are saying about what they produce.
No, he as the customer is right about that, and you and especially Hollywood are wrong. I paid for that DVD, I should have the RIGHT to watch it however I want to watch it, and it burns my balls that I, a non-pirate, must sit through five minutes of FBI piracy warnings...
I agree, you shouldn't have to do that. So don't buy their damned, crippled media!
I hate the DRM regime as much as the next guy, but if that's the way the content producer wants to play, our options are go by their rules or don't consume it. It's ridiculous to expect us to have to buy a copy for each of the devices we want to play it on. It's stupid that we are no longer legally allowed to treat a DVD player like a VCR or a tape recorder. It's infantile for them to believe that piracy is costing them $billions in lost sales. However, since they've now bought your politicians, that's the law of the land, and continuing to pirate locked down media just encourages them to make the law even more draconian.
Boycott the bastards! Arguing that you've a right to get it some other way that goes around the content producer's scheme just ends up with them ramping up the war against all of us: SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/TPP/..., subverting democratic institutions, individual freedom,...
In the old days, we had a saying: If you don't like what's on (TV), turn the channel. There's other things you could be watching besides Transformers and Iron Man. Find alternative sources which don't treat you like a potential criminal for wanting to enjoy their works.
Not only you are not magically entitled to everything for free...
You're the one who's acting like a troll, AC. Try reading what he wrote. He buys non-DRM media (music), and does boycott DRM'd media. He's not "stealing" anything.
Add to that, he uses a system that doesn't/can't legally comply with DRM (FLOSS) because of how DRM is designed to work.
Go back under your bridge. Your clueless invective fools no-one.
I could live my life without watching anything HOLLYWOOD produces. I don't, but I will NEVER use any platform that endorses DRM *ever*
Good, boycott them. Oh, you don't?
Because I want to be the master of what I watch, not someone else.
Gee, that's just what the content producers are saying about what they produce.
And last, DRM are just forcing people to use piracy, nothing else. It's been that way since the beginning of DRM and it will not stop. DRM enables piracy because DRM is doomed to begin with - since it's ultimate goal is to prevent people from watching the very thing they're trying to watch through DRM!!!
And arguably, it's people like you who are encouraging (they may say forcing) content producers to push !@#$ like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP, and DRM itself on us. It's a back and forth escalating war between those who produce content and those who refuse to boycott them, all with the rest of us wandering innocently into the line of fire on the battlefield, with our individual rights and freedom in the balance.
I don't think either of you have the moral high ground here. You, especially. At least the content producers produce something (arguably, of questionable value but apparently not to you).
Some people worry about being tracked by the police/security services too.
The police & security services worry about being tracked too. Another article I read about this (either the Register or Inquirer) theorized this whole thing was being caused by the local authorities driving by and overloading the transmitters with jamming signals. "Ha haaa!"
Pretty stupid too since they could have just installed an off switch for the times they didn't need to be tracked (on their way to a bust).
Shut it all down. Continuing to run it in that condition's just going to degrade it further. Send the kids home with a note explaining what the incompetent !@#$hole forced you to do to their kids. Cc: the note to the news media.
Oh, and get another job. You'll need it. Hell, you need it now.
A !@#$storm like this can only blow up in your face. No point putting the solution off until it does.
The sad part, is everyone is a slave - even the billionaires...
No, that's not how it works. Push too far, expect the unreasonable, and even regular people will stand up and die for what they believe. They owe it to their children, or grandchildren. Besides, killing tyrants can be fun (or at least profitable).
"'Should'a taken the money, Toombs."
Or: "Do you know what your sin is Mal?" "I'm a fan of all several, but right now, I'm going to go with wrath. I'm going to show you a world without sin."
Don't push me! Don't tread on me! You will be sorry.
The Nazis thought they could just waltz into Stalingrad once they bombed the crap out of it. All that bombing did was provide cover for the defender's snipers.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaa! Unintended consequences; gotta love 'em!:-|
yes, the quote has been misquoted, taken out of context, and then taken on a life of its own as an example of meaning that has nothing to do with shakespeare... not by me, but in the wider society and culture for many decades
Ya gotta love a language that's still alive.
"Dont! Stop! Don't stop!"
I'd also like to point out here that it's very disconcerting to see so many of you people writing pretty much the same damned thing I was just about to write. Herd mind, anybody?
DEC Alphas were gloriously sexy boxes. OSF/1 (True64) was the nicest *nix I'd ever seen to that point. It was as funny as hell to watch my VMS colleagues fume for months because VMS hadn't yet been ported to the Alpha. Simulations (nuclear waste management Fortran) I was running on OSF/1 Alphas were blowing the doors off simulations running on everything else, to the point that I just stopped staging runs on everything else. There was no point in bothering with them.
As a network admin, I laugh at the thought of buying and using Sempron machines at home.
My Sempron is getting pretty long in the tooth, so it's my backup/sandbox machine. It mostly runs distributed.net's client at 99% CPU utilization: (0) kiak/home/keeling_ cat/proc/cpuinfo ... cpu family : 15 model : 44 model name : Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3300+ stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 2000.000 cache size : 128 KB ... (0) kiak/home/keeling_ uptime
08:36:03 up 30 days, 13:51, 2 users, load average: 1.11, 1.05, 1.01
Even with that running in the background, it's still very usable as a typical web surfer box (Debian stable + Firefox...). It has no trouble with youtube videos. It's a pretty good box for a second hand machine. It even runs cooler than my HP Pavilion dv4. I'd definitely recommend it.
On the other hand, I've no idea how Win* would run on it. Don't care.:-)
Yeah, they've always given better value for the dollar spent but that's not especially useful when you're 10-20% behind in performance.
AMD's always thought smarter. What's raw performance worth if you've a piddly amount of L2 cache? AMD thinks priorities. "More cache, and the CPU won't be idling waiting for RAM. Woohoo!"
Intel just tries to crush the opposition with lawyers. I'll be buying AMD. Bite me, Intel.
BS. Intel was fashionable, that's all. AMD has always been at least neck and neck with Intel if they weren't ahead of them, despite all of Intel's dirty tricks. I've been very satisfied with AMD ever since my 486DX3-100, and my Sempron and Turion based boxes just build upon that. Was Intel smart enough to buy ATI, or is it more familiar to associate them with nVidia? Need we mention Itanium? Who sold 64 bit CPUs first?
Oh, come on. "Equivocating"'s just a word. It describes a process. It needn't be taken as an insult (nor was that my intention). Being human means we're neither omnipotent nor omnicient. We can make mistakes without having evil intentions.
A market is free, not free, or somewhat free.
There you go again! Sheesh! "Somewhat free" == "somewhat not free", yes? So, not free?
I will readily admit I'm a pie in the sky dreamer, begging for a reality that almost certainly will never exist. However, I prefer to stand with Aristotle on this; "Things as they could, and should, be..." I want to live in a world where my closest friend has a positronic brain, where I have a tricorder on my belt, and where Deanna Troi knows and understands what I'm thinking. If we don't hope and dream about impossibilities like that, how'll we ever get anywhere?
Most countries do not permit prostitution: sex is effectively free to distribute between people, so long as it's a gift. It's a service you just aren't permitted to sell.
Yeah. So? What's that have to do with us? Some humans are stupid Puritans but thankfully places like the Netherlands exist, where women (and men) if they so wish are free to sell sexual favours. Yay.
Back when the value was backed by specie, such metals ALSO had to be traded through the government, or else through licensed buyers (a fact most people who fantasize about the gold standard seem to have forgotten).
Yes, and why was that considered necessary? I'm thinking of a Greek running through the streets shouting, "Eureka!" here. Why was it ever considered necessary for the gov't to stick its nose into that private transaction? Because it could? So it would get a cut? How does that help anyone buying or selling gold? Gov't == Mafia protection racket?
A consumer would never choose to buy poisonous food, or faulty cribs, but since they can't know 100% what they're buying, the market distortion is necessary.
Sigh. We've got gov't up the wazoo, yet we're still discovering baby food containing melamine on the market. So, what were we paying the gov't for, actually?
I choose to respectfully disagree. The solution you offer (gov't regulation of a free market) is incapable of doing what you think it will (protecting buyers and sellers) and is little better than Mafia protection rackets. I suspect the Mafia would do it cheaper too.
They hire people away from 3 letter government agencies to do security.
I've worked for ops that did the same. They're not always as good as they're thought to be, and some of us can be pretty sneaky, and have plenty of time. IT 101: physical access == insecure && where there's a will, there may be a way.
Case in point, my b-in-law's laptop was sold with a fingerprint reader installed. The reader is driven by the installed Windows OS. Somebody (actually lots of people) at a major manufacturer thought that would be bulletproof security! Care to guess what happens when you boot it via a FLOSS live CD/DVD?
Sometimes, all you have to do is look at them and they fall over. Deer in the headlights. Good thing I'm a good guy.
Slashdot Mirror
I once worked with software that queried a credit reporting agency. Their security was completely nuts, and all I was doing was querying credit scores. Think leased lines, short-timeout encrypted access tokens, multiple layers of transport encryption, custom transport layers with multiple transaction verification schemes. They also did some heavy-duty traffic analysis - if you did anything even slightly weird you'd get a mail asking what was going on.
So that's why it takes three days to transfer money from one bank account to another over a secured network that's not routed to the Internet. Security theatre up the wazoo.
Didn't even slow down that insider who lost .5 billion for Credit Swisse.
It's not a value judgement, guys, because Australia as a country exceeds most others. But as a place with enough gravity to influence standards? No, no it isn't.
Perhaps not alone it isn't. However, cumulatively along with the likes of Canada, Poland, Brazil & etc., it might begin to add up.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around that comment above about this merely being another iteration of the repeated exercise in beating MS over the head in order to get a discount.
Well, get off the treadmill, already!
second off, your "proof" that a "very competent IT people" can't use excel hardly proves your point that all people are idiots ...
That was hardly what I was attempting to prove. Now I know why so many of your whizbang docs are "jut fine." Your reading comprehension skills appear to be just as lacking.
I'm posting this AC so you can't mod me down ...
I wouldn't dream of it, especially seeing as you just did that to yourself. Try hitting the "Preview" button every once in a while, just to see what your posts actually look like.
Jebus you [think] people are real idiots, don't you? I can't imagine being married to you. Everybody in my work group uses office for some seriously tricked out documents and spreadsheets, and we all get by [just] fine. 95% of [the] time is spent on content creation, and we can share and edit group docs with no problem. We're not all fucking retards just because we prefer a GUI to a command line.
Not all of you, no. As for "getting by jut fine", I beg to differ. I dare you to hand off one of your "jut fine" docs to me. No, just because this is a throwaway post on /. doesn't get you a pass. For some of us, correct composition always matters. We care about those who're going to read it because exact comprehension often matters.
I've seen very competent IT people create files that were a simple, single list of lines, in a spreadsheet program (Excel)! They can't even choose the correct tool to use within the GUI suite.
I'd much prefer everyone to use a simple text editor to write up their content, then hand it to a specialist who knows how to use a GUI word processor/DTP program "to make it pretty."
Unfortunately, welcome to the 21st Century.
Because I want to be the master of what I watch, not someone else.
Gee, that's just what the content producers are saying about what they produce.
No, he as the customer is right about that, and you and especially Hollywood are wrong. I paid for that DVD, I should have the RIGHT to watch it however I want to watch it, and it burns my balls that I, a non-pirate, must sit through five minutes of FBI piracy warnings ...
I agree, you shouldn't have to do that. So don't buy their damned, crippled media!
I hate the DRM regime as much as the next guy, but if that's the way the content producer wants to play, our options are go by their rules or don't consume it. It's ridiculous to expect us to have to buy a copy for each of the devices we want to play it on. It's stupid that we are no longer legally allowed to treat a DVD player like a VCR or a tape recorder. It's infantile for them to believe that piracy is costing them $billions in lost sales. However, since they've now bought your politicians, that's the law of the land, and continuing to pirate locked down media just encourages them to make the law even more draconian.
Boycott the bastards! Arguing that you've a right to get it some other way that goes around the content producer's scheme just ends up with them ramping up the war against all of us: SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/TPP/..., subverting democratic institutions, individual freedom, ...
In the old days, we had a saying: If you don't like what's on (TV), turn the channel. There's other things you could be watching besides Transformers and Iron Man. Find alternative sources which don't treat you like a potential criminal for wanting to enjoy their works.
If you are interested in my answer, here it is: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2689135&cid=39144575
Good clarification. See my reply to your AC haranguer.
Not only you are not magically entitled to everything for free ...
You're the one who's acting like a troll, AC. Try reading what he wrote. He buys non-DRM media (music), and does boycott DRM'd media. He's not "stealing" anything.
Add to that, he uses a system that doesn't/can't legally comply with DRM (FLOSS) because of how DRM is designed to work.
Go back under your bridge. Your clueless invective fools no-one.
I could live my life without watching anything HOLLYWOOD produces. I don't, but I will NEVER use any platform that endorses DRM *ever*
Good, boycott them. Oh, you don't?
Because I want to be the master of what I watch, not someone else.
Gee, that's just what the content producers are saying about what they produce.
And last, DRM are just forcing people to use piracy, nothing else. It's been that way since the beginning of DRM and it will not stop. DRM enables piracy because DRM is doomed to begin with - since it's ultimate goal is to prevent people from watching the very thing they're trying to watch through DRM!!!
And arguably, it's people like you who are encouraging (they may say forcing) content producers to push !@#$ like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP, and DRM itself on us. It's a back and forth escalating war between those who produce content and those who refuse to boycott them, all with the rest of us wandering innocently into the line of fire on the battlefield, with our individual rights and freedom in the balance.
I don't think either of you have the moral high ground here. You, especially. At least the content producers produce something (arguably, of questionable value but apparently not to you).
Some people worry about being tracked by the police/security services too.
The police & security services worry about being tracked too. Another article I read about this (either the Register or Inquirer) theorized this whole thing was being caused by the local authorities driving by and overloading the transmitters with jamming signals. "Ha haaa!"
Pretty stupid too since they could have just installed an off switch for the times they didn't need to be tracked (on their way to a bust).
Shut it all down. Continuing to run it in that condition's just going to degrade it further. Send the kids home with a note explaining what the incompetent !@#$hole forced you to do to their kids. Cc: the note to the news media.
Oh, and get another job. You'll need it. Hell, you need it now.
A !@#$storm like this can only blow up in your face. No point putting the solution off until it does.
i really wish you didn't post AC so i could mod you up.
Not to worry, AC. Others weren't so stupid as you. It's at +5 Insightful as I read it.
No, that's not how it works. Push too far, expect the unreasonable, and even regular people will stand up and die for what they believe.
No, most of them will simply change their beliefs, and think you are foolish or evil for not changing yours to be in line with those in authority.
"Most of them" don't matter in the long run.
"Do you know what your sin is Mal?"
Mal's side had lost before the show even started.
I think I'd still go with wrath. He lost a battle, not the war, and I don't give a damn what the Alliance thinks happened.
The sad part, is everyone is a slave - even the billionaires ...
No, that's not how it works. Push too far, expect the unreasonable, and even regular people will stand up and die for what they believe. They owe it to their children, or grandchildren. Besides, killing tyrants can be fun (or at least profitable).
"'Should'a taken the money, Toombs."
Or: "Do you know what your sin is Mal?"
"I'm a fan of all several, but right now, I'm going to go with wrath. I'm going to show you a world without sin."
Don't push me! Don't tread on me! You will be sorry.
Got any ready examples of "winnable" fights?
The Nazis thought they could just waltz into Stalingrad once they bombed the crap out of it. All that bombing did was provide cover for the defender's snipers.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaa! Unintended consequences; gotta love 'em! :-|
Frog in the kettle and all that.
I don't like that game; no humans like that game, and we're not amphibians. We can't play that game.
Eventually it gets too hot and people revolt and murder their leaders.
"Eventually" is a pretty amorphous word. It might mean milennia, centuries, decades, or nanoseconds. Are we really going to roll those dice?
I can't believe this. Who hired these !@#$holes? :-( Sedition is the flavour of the day?
And anyone who says they're not an alcoholic is just in denial, right?
"I don't have a drinking problem. I drink, I get drunk, no problem."
["Said (British) pounds (Sterling) in fire?!?" Said pounds in fire?!? "Let us conflagrate."]
yes, the quote has been misquoted, taken out of context, and then taken on a life of its own as an example of meaning that has nothing to do with shakespeare... not by me, but in the wider society and culture for many decades
Ya gotta love a language that's still alive.
"Dont! Stop! Don't stop!"
I'd also like to point out here that it's very disconcerting to see so many of you people writing pretty much the same damned thing I was just about to write. Herd mind, anybody?
Moo.
/. bottom page bubble:
The public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble. -- Thomas Carlyle
I think that's the best thing I've seen /. say in quite a while. Keep it up.
Ah, !@#$. Does this mean I'm going to get sued now?
Good luck with that.
Giant assholes.
Well, since everybody else appears to be doing it, I guess I need to chime in too.
They are kock connected to.
That would be Koch Bros? s/to/too/ ?
I would if anon would do a group mob hit buy?
s/would/wonder/ ? I think they do it for the "lulz." No buy necessary.
Just tryin' to help ...
Who sold 64 bit CPUs first?
If you want to get technical: DEC ...
Yeah, I should have said, "Between the two, ...".
DEC Alphas were gloriously sexy boxes. OSF/1 (True64) was the nicest *nix I'd ever seen to that point. It was as funny as hell to watch my VMS colleagues fume for months because VMS hadn't yet been ported to the Alpha. Simulations (nuclear waste management Fortran) I was running on OSF/1 Alphas were blowing the doors off simulations running on everything else, to the point that I just stopped staging runs on everything else. There was no point in bothering with them.
As a network admin, I laugh at the thought of buying and using Sempron machines at home.
My Sempron is getting pretty long in the tooth, so it's my backup/sandbox machine. It mostly runs distributed.net's client at 99% CPU utilization:
/home/keeling_ cat /proc/cpuinfo
...
... /home/keeling_ uptime
...). It has no trouble with youtube videos. It's a pretty good box for a second hand machine. It even runs cooler than my HP Pavilion dv4. I'd definitely recommend it.
(0) kiak
cpu family : 15
model : 44
model name : Mobile AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 3300+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 2000.000
cache size : 128 KB
(0) kiak
08:36:03 up 30 days, 13:51, 2 users, load average: 1.11, 1.05, 1.01
Even with that running in the background, it's still very usable as a typical web surfer box (Debian stable + Firefox
On the other hand, I've no idea how Win* would run on it. Don't care. :-)
Yeah, they've always given better value for the dollar spent but that's not especially useful when you're 10-20% behind in performance.
AMD's always thought smarter. What's raw performance worth if you've a piddly amount of L2 cache? AMD thinks priorities. "More cache, and the CPU won't be idling waiting for RAM. Woohoo!"
Intel just tries to crush the opposition with lawyers. I'll be buying AMD. Bite me, Intel.
It's really simple--Intel made better products.
BS. Intel was fashionable, that's all. AMD has always been at least neck and neck with Intel if they weren't ahead of them, despite all of Intel's dirty tricks. I've been very satisfied with AMD ever since my 486DX3-100, and my Sempron and Turion based boxes just build upon that. Was Intel smart enough to buy ATI, or is it more familiar to associate them with nVidia? Need we mention Itanium? Who sold 64 bit CPUs first?
Going through old comments. This will probably never be read, but what the hell:
"Surprise, surprise, surprise!" -- Gomer Pyle.
re: equivocating
Forethought + disagreement = shilling.
Oh, come on. "Equivocating"'s just a word. It describes a process. It needn't be taken as an insult (nor was that my intention). Being human means we're neither omnipotent nor omnicient. We can make mistakes without having evil intentions.
A market is free, not free, or somewhat free.
There you go again! Sheesh! "Somewhat free" == "somewhat not free", yes? So, not free?
I will readily admit I'm a pie in the sky dreamer, begging for a reality that almost certainly will never exist. However, I prefer to stand with Aristotle on this; "Things as they could, and should, be ..." I want to live in a world where my closest friend has a positronic brain, where I have a tricorder on my belt, and where Deanna Troi knows and understands what I'm thinking. If we don't hope and dream about impossibilities like that, how'll we ever get anywhere?
Most countries do not permit prostitution: sex is effectively free to distribute between people, so long as it's a gift. It's a service you just aren't permitted to sell.
Yeah. So? What's that have to do with us? Some humans are stupid Puritans but thankfully places like the Netherlands exist, where women (and men) if they so wish are free to sell sexual favours. Yay.
Back when the value was backed by specie, such metals ALSO had to be traded through the government, or else through licensed buyers (a fact most people who fantasize about the gold standard seem to have forgotten).
Yes, and why was that considered necessary? I'm thinking of a Greek running through the streets shouting, "Eureka!" here. Why was it ever considered necessary for the gov't to stick its nose into that private transaction? Because it could? So it would get a cut? How does that help anyone buying or selling gold? Gov't == Mafia protection racket?
A consumer would never choose to buy poisonous food, or faulty cribs, but since they can't know 100% what they're buying, the market distortion is necessary.
Sigh. We've got gov't up the wazoo, yet we're still discovering baby food containing melamine on the market. So, what were we paying the gov't for, actually?
I choose to respectfully disagree. The solution you offer (gov't regulation of a free market) is incapable of doing what you think it will (protecting buyers and sellers) and is little better than Mafia protection rackets. I suspect the Mafia would do it cheaper too.
They hire people away from 3 letter government agencies to do security.
I've worked for ops that did the same. They're not always as good as they're thought to be, and some of us can be pretty sneaky, and have plenty of time. IT 101: physical access == insecure && where there's a will, there may be a way.
Case in point, my b-in-law's laptop was sold with a fingerprint reader installed. The reader is driven by the installed Windows OS. Somebody (actually lots of people) at a major manufacturer thought that would be bulletproof security! Care to guess what happens when you boot it via a FLOSS live CD/DVD?
Sometimes, all you have to do is look at them and they fall over. Deer in the headlights. Good thing I'm a good guy.