You're missing something... they don't need evidence to shut your site down. It only takes a mistake on some copyright holder's part, or some sort of ICE-style mistake.
Well, technically The Bible (most versions) isn't copyrightable due to the sheer age of the publication (it was the very first book off of Gutenberg's first press, FFS).
Maybe they thought SOPA would screw that up in some way?
I'm only half joking, but did want to raise the point that copyright laws have a nasty habit of unintended consequences, and maybe some crafty soul (bless him) scared 'em into thinking that they couldn't copy off and pass around hymns and such anymore.
At work, my health insurance plan charges me $70/month more for a literal tobacco surcharge. Personally, I find that I won't see the effects until long after I stop carrying their insurance, but that's their rule. Ostensibly, it has a good motive - to get their customers to quit smoking, or to pay for any additional incurred health care costs associated with smoking (to their credit, they provide everything to quit for free - nicotine patches, gum, Chantix, whatever). OTOH, even with that surcharge, I still pay far less than I would with other plans, and I do have options aplenty (even using the VA if I had no other choice).
I don't see how that would be an instance of government running my life.
Back in the day, the difference between a mid-range 386 box with 'good enough' Windows 3.1 on it, and a low-end Apple PC? About $500 or more. Nowadays, we're talking a difference between $49 for an iPhone 3gs (via AT&T), and the same or higher cost for a mid-range WP7 phone.
* The delivery is about three-four years too late * World+dog who has used Windows-based phones in the past have experience with WMP 6.5 (*shudder*) * App developers are looking at 'safe' (marketshare-wise) platforms to write apps for. iOS and Android are among them, while WP7 is not. * The UI tiles may be pretty, but that whole right-hand side of the screen is sitting there unused, making the whole thing look narrower, and therefore smaller * The ads aren't quite cutting it, and tend to be (IMHO) full of snafus. For instance, the latest sends the subtle message that only whipped boyfriends willing to wear yoga tights will use a Windows Phone.
There's lots more, but those stand out immediately...
You'd have to be nuts - even if you had a large, competent audit team to go over all the security procedures at big corporate network X
...you mean like a PCI audit (civilian), or a STIG inspection/audit (US gov't)? Those both involve external teams to come in periodically and check for compliance to published standards, then present plans to remedy any shortfalls, usually with a strict compliance date and re-inspection to insure it. I work in the banking industry, and I get to see the PCI audit teams yearly. I used to work for a defense contractor, and they had very similar inspections on an even tighter schedule.
1. be certain they follow the procedures/policies
See above. If you're big enough or in certain industries, you don't have a lot of choice in the matter; you follow them or you lose certification (and therefore contracts/money).
2. don't change the procedures/policies when the new manager is hired
The new manager has to follow the same externally-published and enforced guidelines that the old one did. Now if the new guy wants to be stricter, he's more than welcome to.
3. have a similar enough network to companies A - W that you can make up a generic risk analysis?
This is the only missing piece - not any lack of similarities, mind - but in having risk analysis tables comprised and cross-referenced by industry. OTOH, that's more of a failing on the insurance industry's part than the tech world's. The first insurance company that manages to pull it off will make a mint.
Question: Who gets to determine who "deserves" what? I can just as easily say that no one needs or deserves to have more than two children, or to marry once in their lifetimes, or to own one car at a time, or to own one computer at a time in any personal household... IMHO, maybe you ought to shy away from the subjective when making demands of government. It's bad enough that they've been taxing tobacco and alcohol to push specific moral agendas (most of which hits the poor harder than anyone) - let's not start pushing more of it, mm'kay?
IMHO, if they'd simply ditch all tax loopholes, tax all human and corporate entities with incomes above $75k/yr a flat 30%? You'd have perfect tax 'fairness'. 'course, no one wants to do that - and I do mean no one. The middle class wants their mortgage and EIC credits, the rich want their loopholes, corporations want theirs, etc...
So the only reason that you are good to other people is that you don't want to go to Hell?
If you think that is the one and only reason for loving God and keeping His dictates is to avoid Hell, then you really don't know much of anything about the one thing you've been criticizing so heavily. You completely missed out on the main reason for Christianity (albeit poorly followed by imperfect humanity): Love.
In Jewish society at the time, it meant protesting in a way that made the aggressor stop and think. I suspect it was likely a form of sarcasm, mixed with a form of saying 'you might be able to harm my body, but you cannot harm my soul'.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of either group, or stating a simple truth (that it is common for many people to exaggerate behaviors of a group that the individual person does not like) is certainly not a violation of Christ's demand that you "...turn the other cheek", no matter how you try to interpret it.
Actually, you cannot have any concept of free will without God.
From a purely objective and atheist standpoint*, you'd be nothing more than a mere captive to influences and environment: chemical, physical, social, medical, etc. As there is in atheology no divine spark (or soul, or whatever you care to label it), there is nothing in the human mind that should allow a person to decide anything for him or her self. In spite of that, people show the amazing ability to do that very thing quite often, when reason and influences state that their behaviors should be far different indeed.
If there is no divine component to a human mind, and yet there is an abundance of evidence showing individual minds successfully rebelling against what the composite of external influences should dictate, then what pray tell is the source of this free will in an atheistic reasoning?
On the other hand, in the case of religion, free will is implied, because love means allowing the individual being loved to return that love willingly, and not just parrot or reflect it as a mindless slave would. It's one of the reasons why most guys vastly prefer marrying a homely woman, than in owning a gorgeous sex doll or in paying for the occasional pretty prostitute's services - even though the latter examples are objectively cheaper, far more compliant, and are less intrusive to one's lifestyle, recreation, and career. Or, as a different example? A dog will curl up with and by all appearances 'love' its owner. My dog is doing this now. However, I know full well that the dog's 'love' is only ingrained pack behavior by a 'beta' male to his 'alpha', bred over time as 'loyalty' to be amplified. I know it's fake, because if I keeled over dead right now, that dog would start eating me the moment his food bowl got empty. OTOH, my wife willingly married me, and we spend our lives loving each other not because we feel we have to, but simply because we want to, and are eager to. There is nothing in the way of measurable factors (we don't and won't have children, we both work for a living, etc) that keeps us together otherwise.
Getting back to the point, that's why IM(religious)O we were granted free will by God. To know what we were given, and to return the love... or not, as is our individual choice to do. Even to deny if that is an individual's intent. Pretty much the same reason that good parents teach their kids to learn about the world, and not to raise mindless little slaves.
* this is only based on my own reasoning as a former atheist. If you have empirical evidence elsewhere that states the allowance for a soul or suchlike in atheism, please show it to me.
I think SharePoint is pretty good; why do you call it "the worst intranet platform in the world"?
...because it requires four servers to do, what one box running Apache and a competent open-source CMS with a few free modules can still do - that's why.
Yes I know there's a single-box SharePoint solution, but once you start scaling up the SP solution, things start getting ugly.
Personally, I'd like to see the DMCA amended to add one thing:
"If the claimed infringed work is owned by an incorporated entity, claimant shall post a bond equal to at least 1% of the annual income of that corporation for each claim, and if the claim is found to be false, claimant shall forfeit that bond to the person or entity being claimed against."...or something similar (and a lot more air-tight).
Make 'em put their money where their DMCA claim is.
It may be a sign of getting old, but seriously - if I laid down hard cash for something, I'm not in much mood to be a beta tester on it. This is doubly true for items which are locked down to one proprietary vendor. Triply true for an item (like, say, this tablet) which should be homogeneous to the point where developers really don't have to account for a wild variety of configurations, so the whole idea of accounting for differences should be pretty frickin' moot.
Now sure, I'll hackintosh my desktop box (which I had done) or happily goof off with a new Linux distro, but only because the former is assembled out of older parts, and the latter is in a VM first, before I decide whether or not to migrate it to my main home server box.
OTOH, the Kindle Fire is a product that (much like the iPad, to be fair) serves as nothing more than a front for Amazon's app/media store. Screw that - if they want me to test it out that bad for them, they can damned well pay me as a tester.
TFA describes a complete failure not only of the company's security setup, but of its specific architecture and design. Even if you have to use phpMyAdmin that frickin' badly? Unless you're a web hosting provider running the damned thing in a sandbox, you deny visibility to it from the outside network for starters. Then there's still the matter of the default password-less state of the DB.
I mean, damn... what high school kid did they get to set this thing up? It's not 2001 anymore, where brain farts like that could be ignored, and the worst you had to worry about is some script kiddie defacing your company home page.
Unfortunately, your statement is all too true in far too many cases.
Well, it is until the company gets bitten by the lack of it, in which case one or more of the following options are open:
1) fire the admin deemed most responsible for the breach (in this case, it'd be justified anyway)
2) over-react, spend a mountain of cash on security, and lock everything down to the point where nobody can use it without a lot of headache and heartache.
3) fire up the PR machine, and minimize as much of the reputation damage as possible.
The sad news is, most of the breaches aren't public, or even public enough. Sure, even the non-public ones will scare the crap out of the powers that be for awhile, and may even get you a bit of budget to clean the mess up. But, if you're the sysadmin? Unless you keep very careful records (and offsite copies for ready distribution to, say, Wikileaks) of budget refusals and of refusals to implement certain security controls, you're the one whose career is gonna fry for it.
"The hack was possible because the website was managed using PHP-MyAdmin, and this application allowed database access without a password."
I honestly don't know what to say. I mean, doing something like this on an internal network would be bone-headed enough, but doing it on an external-facing box? Under conditions where you would think security is paramount? I mean, you have to actually install and set up PHP MyAdmin - that shit isn't on by default.
But, the fault lies elsewhere as well. After all, who the fuck was supposed to be doing the compliance audits, pen-testing, network security, firewall security? You always hire a reputable outside person/company to do those things.
I honestly think the corp got what it deserved at this point... though the victim customers certainly don't deserve what they're about to get (a scramble for new certs, integrity checking, etc).
Agreed, and would like to add spam filtering to the pile. Training the filters effectively (to weed out false positives, catch the sneakier spam, etc) means seeing practically everyone's inbound emails until the initial tuning is done, and once in a great while after that for maintenance and upkeep. You just maintain the confidentiality required to know that yeah it's ugly and it's in there, but it's nobody's business. I only interacted with these mails enough to make my job more effective, and after that it all got forgotten and ignored.
Doing this helped me better tune the filters to block the political crap (DU, Limbaugh, etc) while at the same time allowing exceptions for a couple of execs in the company who actually did lobby in Washington DC, the state capital, etc. It allowed me to block the dating site and sex site emails (you'd be amazed unless you're an email admin, in which case you'd probably know already) while at the same time allowing the usual spousal romantic emails.
I didn't give a damn about the messages - I was in there to analyze content in order to catch spammers. The result was a happier group of employees who rarely if ever saw any spam, but at the same time could do most things within reason and company policy (it was fairly loose) and not lose any email.
I considered the whole thing subject to the same confidentiality restrictions as a doctor - yeah, you see the naughty bits in the full glory, but so what? You've got a job to do, so there's no real time or cause for you to be titillated, angry, outraged, or whatever. If you are, there'd better be a cause to inform the corp legal department and then the cops, because otherwise you're obviously not doing your job.
All said and done, at least in this aspect the AUP covers it perfectly - expect the contents of any email or data on the company wires to be seen by anyone. Of course that doesn't mean you get to go snooping around - violating trust is a great way to obliterate a career. OTOH, don't expect it to remain a perfect secret, either, because not all of us are going to be as professional about it.
Most of the kids I see coming in have a broad scope, but a very shallow knowledge base. Most (and sometimes all) of their troubleshooting involves Google. They know many of the "whats", but very few of the "whys" and "hows". Getting them to come up with their own creative solutions is tough going at best, and there's been more than once where I've seen resulting code, query, or script look like three or four other bits duct-taped together and barely working.
There are exceptions (treasure them, damnit!), but the rule is usually the cocky kid who would make a great power user, but a lousy admin or coder.
This is what you get with golf course deals people out side of IT makes deals like this and tell IT to make it work with out giving them the funds to make it work.
This why IT needs unions so they can stand up and say NO! we can't do it with the funds that we have. I hope that they don't place the blame on IT for something that is not there fault.
I hate to tell you this, but cronyism, kickbacks, and side deals exist just as much (if not more) in union shops as they do outside them.
The fault could lie with the architect being dumb enough to fall of the marketing "specs", or in not doing what every sysadmin does when speccing out an Exchange system: pad the resource demand to at least 150% of whatever Microsoft's Capacity Planner whitepaper says you should.
You see, here's the thing - while yes, there are instances of dumbassed CTO/CIOs running out and buying some stuff, then telling you to make it work? Most shops I worked in as a Sr. Sysadmin have always dragged me into the process, and at the very least I had to come up with some sort of capacity figures, and come up with a base amount of hardware, projected license usage, and the like. The only times where capacity had ever fallen short on my part has been systems I inherited, systems where an unexpected new use was found for the resource, spiking demand on it, or in rare cases where it wasn't critical, but some CxO wanted it done in spite of their being no real budget for it.
IMHO, no union on Earth can change such dynamics without seriously screwing up IT (and those working in it) in the process.
Depends. Usually, even for a school, allowing every employee to latch on their personal gear to the school network isn't exactly a good idea - if not for security reasons, then for liability reasons.
I should clarify the liability part: I know that schools are a bit more open (and less prone to having trade secrets), but there are still privacy issues (discussions of student behavior tends to stand out) that would demand a school limit just how far and wide (and on whose devices) their internal emails should go.
$1m spent on iPads only comes to ~2,000 iPads at most (assuming the cheapest model at around $500 each). According to Microsoft's handy little Capacity Planner (Exch 2010), it shouldn't take but perhaps (very rough calc here) 5 or 10 servers at most to handle that, unless they're also allowing every school employee to latch on their personal gear as well.
I'm guessing that something's missing from the story here...
You can certainly deny Comcast (or whoever) right-of-way from the street to your house, but only the local gov't can deny them right-of-way along the streets.
You're perfectly right in the very first sentence though. Utah tried putting something in some years ago (Google for UTOPIA), and both Comcast and Qwest immediately went ballistic. The two companies threw a metric ton of money at the state legislature, which in turn made it literally illegal for any cities not already in the UTOPIA network to build any fiber and join in.
Meanwhile, these two corps did absolutely nothing to bring broadband to folks outside of their little established fiefdoms (I lived on the "bench", or mountainside and found it impossible to get either to offer broadband service). No skin offa mine, though - I used Sprint Broadband wireless (roughly T1 speeds up and down) and DirecTV for years, and the two cost less combined than cable+internet would have.
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You're missing something... they don't need evidence to shut your site down. It only takes a mistake on some copyright holder's part, or some sort of ICE-style mistake.
Well, technically The Bible (most versions) isn't copyrightable due to the sheer age of the publication (it was the very first book off of Gutenberg's first press, FFS).
Maybe they thought SOPA would screw that up in some way?
I'm only half joking, but did want to raise the point that copyright laws have a nasty habit of unintended consequences, and maybe some crafty soul (bless him) scared 'em into thinking that they couldn't copy off and pass around hymns and such anymore.
Here's something for you to consider:
At work, my health insurance plan charges me $70/month more for a literal tobacco surcharge. Personally, I find that I won't see the effects until long after I stop carrying their insurance, but that's their rule. Ostensibly, it has a good motive - to get their customers to quit smoking, or to pay for any additional incurred health care costs associated with smoking (to their credit, they provide everything to quit for free - nicotine patches, gum, Chantix, whatever). OTOH, even with that surcharge, I still pay far less than I would with other plans, and I do have options aplenty (even using the VA if I had no other choice).
I don't see how that would be an instance of government running my life.
One small problem:
Back in the day, the difference between a mid-range 386 box with 'good enough' Windows 3.1 on it, and a low-end Apple PC? About $500 or more. Nowadays, we're talking a difference between $49 for an iPhone 3gs (via AT&T), and the same or higher cost for a mid-range WP7 phone.
In other words, what premium price?
Well, let's see here...
* The delivery is about three-four years too late
* World+dog who has used Windows-based phones in the past have experience with WMP 6.5 (*shudder*)
* App developers are looking at 'safe' (marketshare-wise) platforms to write apps for. iOS and Android are among them, while WP7 is not.
* The UI tiles may be pretty, but that whole right-hand side of the screen is sitting there unused, making the whole thing look narrower, and therefore smaller
* The ads aren't quite cutting it, and tend to be (IMHO) full of snafus. For instance, the latest sends the subtle message that only whipped boyfriends willing to wear yoga tights will use a Windows Phone.
There's lots more, but those stand out immediately...
You'd have to be nuts - even if you had a large, competent audit team to go over all the security procedures at big corporate network X
...you mean like a PCI audit (civilian), or a STIG inspection/audit (US gov't)? Those both involve external teams to come in periodically and check for compliance to published standards, then present plans to remedy any shortfalls, usually with a strict compliance date and re-inspection to insure it. I work in the banking industry, and I get to see the PCI audit teams yearly. I used to work for a defense contractor, and they had very similar inspections on an even tighter schedule.
1. be certain they follow the procedures/policies
See above. If you're big enough or in certain industries, you don't have a lot of choice in the matter; you follow them or you lose certification (and therefore contracts/money).
2. don't change the procedures/policies when the new manager is hired
The new manager has to follow the same externally-published and enforced guidelines that the old one did. Now if the new guy wants to be stricter, he's more than welcome to.
3. have a similar enough network to companies A - W that you can make up a generic risk analysis?
This is the only missing piece - not any lack of similarities, mind - but in having risk analysis tables comprised and cross-referenced by industry. OTOH, that's more of a failing on the insurance industry's part than the tech world's. The first insurance company that manages to pull it off will make a mint.
Question: Who gets to determine who "deserves" what? I can just as easily say that no one needs or deserves to have more than two children, or to marry once in their lifetimes, or to own one car at a time, or to own one computer at a time in any personal household... IMHO, maybe you ought to shy away from the subjective when making demands of government. It's bad enough that they've been taxing tobacco and alcohol to push specific moral agendas (most of which hits the poor harder than anyone) - let's not start pushing more of it, mm'kay?
IMHO, if they'd simply ditch all tax loopholes, tax all human and corporate entities with incomes above $75k/yr a flat 30%? You'd have perfect tax 'fairness'. 'course, no one wants to do that - and I do mean no one. The middle class wants their mortgage and EIC credits, the rich want their loopholes, corporations want theirs, etc...
So the only reason that you are good to other people is that you don't want to go to Hell?
If you think that is the one and only reason for loving God and keeping His dictates is to avoid Hell, then you really don't know much of anything about the one thing you've been criticizing so heavily. You completely missed out on the main reason for Christianity (albeit poorly followed by imperfect humanity): Love.
Depends on the context.
In Jewish society at the time, it meant protesting in a way that made the aggressor stop and think. I suspect it was likely a form of sarcasm, mixed with a form of saying 'you might be able to harm my body, but you cannot harm my soul'.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of either group, or stating a simple truth (that it is common for many people to exaggerate behaviors of a group that the individual person does not like) is certainly not a violation of Christ's demand that you "...turn the other cheek", no matter how you try to interpret it.
Actually, you cannot have any concept of free will without God.
From a purely objective and atheist standpoint*, you'd be nothing more than a mere captive to influences and environment: chemical, physical, social, medical, etc. As there is in atheology no divine spark (or soul, or whatever you care to label it), there is nothing in the human mind that should allow a person to decide anything for him or her self. In spite of that, people show the amazing ability to do that very thing quite often, when reason and influences state that their behaviors should be far different indeed.
If there is no divine component to a human mind, and yet there is an abundance of evidence showing individual minds successfully rebelling against what the composite of external influences should dictate, then what pray tell is the source of this free will in an atheistic reasoning?
On the other hand, in the case of religion, free will is implied, because love means allowing the individual being loved to return that love willingly, and not just parrot or reflect it as a mindless slave would. It's one of the reasons why most guys vastly prefer marrying a homely woman, than in owning a gorgeous sex doll or in paying for the occasional pretty prostitute's services - even though the latter examples are objectively cheaper, far more compliant, and are less intrusive to one's lifestyle, recreation, and career. Or, as a different example? A dog will curl up with and by all appearances 'love' its owner. My dog is doing this now. However, I know full well that the dog's 'love' is only ingrained pack behavior by a 'beta' male to his 'alpha', bred over time as 'loyalty' to be amplified. I know it's fake, because if I keeled over dead right now, that dog would start eating me the moment his food bowl got empty. OTOH, my wife willingly married me, and we spend our lives loving each other not because we feel we have to, but simply because we want to, and are eager to. There is nothing in the way of measurable factors (we don't and won't have children, we both work for a living, etc) that keeps us together otherwise.
Getting back to the point, that's why IM(religious)O we were granted free will by God. To know what we were given, and to return the love... or not, as is our individual choice to do. Even to deny if that is an individual's intent. Pretty much the same reason that good parents teach their kids to learn about the world, and not to raise mindless little slaves.
* this is only based on my own reasoning as a former atheist. If you have empirical evidence elsewhere that states the allowance for a soul or suchlike in atheism, please show it to me.
...or a boatload of misleading 'technology'.
I think SharePoint is pretty good; why do you call it "the worst intranet platform in the world"?
...because it requires four servers to do, what one box running Apache and a competent open-source CMS with a few free modules can still do - that's why.
Yes I know there's a single-box SharePoint solution, but once you start scaling up the SP solution, things start getting ugly.
Personally, I'd like to see the DMCA amended to add one thing:
"If the claimed infringed work is owned by an incorporated entity, claimant shall post a bond equal to at least 1% of the annual income of that corporation for each claim, and if the claim is found to be false, claimant shall forfeit that bond to the person or entity being claimed against." ...or something similar (and a lot more air-tight).
Make 'em put their money where their DMCA claim is.
It may be a sign of getting old, but seriously - if I laid down hard cash for something, I'm not in much mood to be a beta tester on it. This is doubly true for items which are locked down to one proprietary vendor. Triply true for an item (like, say, this tablet) which should be homogeneous to the point where developers really don't have to account for a wild variety of configurations, so the whole idea of accounting for differences should be pretty frickin' moot.
Now sure, I'll hackintosh my desktop box (which I had done) or happily goof off with a new Linux distro, but only because the former is assembled out of older parts, and the latter is in a VM first, before I decide whether or not to migrate it to my main home server box.
OTOH, the Kindle Fire is a product that (much like the iPad, to be fair) serves as nothing more than a front for Amazon's app/media store. Screw that - if they want me to test it out that bad for them, they can damned well pay me as a tester.
Someone please mod parent up.
TFA describes a complete failure not only of the company's security setup, but of its specific architecture and design. Even if you have to use phpMyAdmin that frickin' badly? Unless you're a web hosting provider running the damned thing in a sandbox, you deny visibility to it from the outside network for starters. Then there's still the matter of the default password-less state of the DB.
I mean, damn... what high school kid did they get to set this thing up? It's not 2001 anymore, where brain farts like that could be ignored, and the worst you had to worry about is some script kiddie defacing your company home page.
Unfortunately, your statement is all too true in far too many cases.
Well, it is until the company gets bitten by the lack of it, in which case one or more of the following options are open:
1) fire the admin deemed most responsible for the breach (in this case, it'd be justified anyway)
2) over-react, spend a mountain of cash on security, and lock everything down to the point where nobody can use it without a lot of headache and heartache.
3) fire up the PR machine, and minimize as much of the reputation damage as possible.
The sad news is, most of the breaches aren't public, or even public enough. Sure, even the non-public ones will scare the crap out of the powers that be for awhile, and may even get you a bit of budget to clean the mess up. But, if you're the sysadmin? Unless you keep very careful records (and offsite copies for ready distribution to, say, Wikileaks) of budget refusals and of refusals to implement certain security controls, you're the one whose career is gonna fry for it.
And replace it with... what?
CAs are a lot like democracy. They both suck, but they tend to suck less than all other forms that have been tried up to now.
"The hack was possible because the website was managed using PHP-MyAdmin, and this application allowed database access without a password."
I honestly don't know what to say. I mean, doing something like this on an internal network would be bone-headed enough, but doing it on an external-facing box? Under conditions where you would think security is paramount? I mean, you have to actually install and set up PHP MyAdmin - that shit isn't on by default.
But, the fault lies elsewhere as well. After all, who the fuck was supposed to be doing the compliance audits, pen-testing, network security, firewall security? You always hire a reputable outside person/company to do those things.
I honestly think the corp got what it deserved at this point... though the victim customers certainly don't deserve what they're about to get (a scramble for new certs, integrity checking, etc).
Agreed, and would like to add spam filtering to the pile. Training the filters effectively (to weed out false positives, catch the sneakier spam, etc) means seeing practically everyone's inbound emails until the initial tuning is done, and once in a great while after that for maintenance and upkeep. You just maintain the confidentiality required to know that yeah it's ugly and it's in there, but it's nobody's business. I only interacted with these mails enough to make my job more effective, and after that it all got forgotten and ignored.
Doing this helped me better tune the filters to block the political crap (DU, Limbaugh, etc) while at the same time allowing exceptions for a couple of execs in the company who actually did lobby in Washington DC, the state capital, etc. It allowed me to block the dating site and sex site emails (you'd be amazed unless you're an email admin, in which case you'd probably know already) while at the same time allowing the usual spousal romantic emails.
I didn't give a damn about the messages - I was in there to analyze content in order to catch spammers. The result was a happier group of employees who rarely if ever saw any spam, but at the same time could do most things within reason and company policy (it was fairly loose) and not lose any email.
I considered the whole thing subject to the same confidentiality restrictions as a doctor - yeah, you see the naughty bits in the full glory, but so what? You've got a job to do, so there's no real time or cause for you to be titillated, angry, outraged, or whatever. If you are, there'd better be a cause to inform the corp legal department and then the cops, because otherwise you're obviously not doing your job.
All said and done, at least in this aspect the AUP covers it perfectly - expect the contents of any email or data on the company wires to be seen by anyone. Of course that doesn't mean you get to go snooping around - violating trust is a great way to obliterate a career. OTOH, don't expect it to remain a perfect secret, either, because not all of us are going to be as professional about it.
I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Most of the kids I see coming in have a broad scope, but a very shallow knowledge base. Most (and sometimes all) of their troubleshooting involves Google. They know many of the "whats", but very few of the "whys" and "hows". Getting them to come up with their own creative solutions is tough going at best, and there's been more than once where I've seen resulting code, query, or script look like three or four other bits duct-taped together and barely working.
There are exceptions (treasure them, damnit!), but the rule is usually the cocky kid who would make a great power user, but a lousy admin or coder.
This is what you get with golf course deals people out side of IT makes deals like this and tell IT to make it work with out giving them the funds to make it work.
This why IT needs unions so they can stand up and say NO! we can't do it with the funds that we have. I hope that they don't place the blame on IT for something that is not there fault.
I hate to tell you this, but cronyism, kickbacks, and side deals exist just as much (if not more) in union shops as they do outside them.
The fault could lie with the architect being dumb enough to fall of the marketing "specs", or in not doing what every sysadmin does when speccing out an Exchange system: pad the resource demand to at least 150% of whatever Microsoft's Capacity Planner whitepaper says you should.
You see, here's the thing - while yes, there are instances of dumbassed CTO/CIOs running out and buying some stuff, then telling you to make it work? Most shops I worked in as a Sr. Sysadmin have always dragged me into the process, and at the very least I had to come up with some sort of capacity figures, and come up with a base amount of hardware, projected license usage, and the like. The only times where capacity had ever fallen short on my part has been systems I inherited, systems where an unexpected new use was found for the resource, spiking demand on it, or in rare cases where it wasn't critical, but some CxO wanted it done in spite of their being no real budget for it.
IMHO, no union on Earth can change such dynamics without seriously screwing up IT (and those working in it) in the process.
Depends. Usually, even for a school, allowing every employee to latch on their personal gear to the school network isn't exactly a good idea - if not for security reasons, then for liability reasons.
I should clarify the liability part: I know that schools are a bit more open (and less prone to having trade secrets), but there are still privacy issues (discussions of student behavior tends to stand out) that would demand a school limit just how far and wide (and on whose devices) their internal emails should go.
$1m spent on iPads only comes to ~2,000 iPads at most (assuming the cheapest model at around $500 each). According to Microsoft's handy little Capacity Planner (Exch 2010), it shouldn't take but perhaps (very rough calc here) 5 or 10 servers at most to handle that, unless they're also allowing every school employee to latch on their personal gear as well.
I'm guessing that something's missing from the story here...
You can certainly deny Comcast (or whoever) right-of-way from the street to your house, but only the local gov't can deny them right-of-way along the streets.
You're perfectly right in the very first sentence though. Utah tried putting something in some years ago (Google for UTOPIA), and both Comcast and Qwest immediately went ballistic. The two companies threw a metric ton of money at the state legislature, which in turn made it literally illegal for any cities not already in the UTOPIA network to build any fiber and join in.
Meanwhile, these two corps did absolutely nothing to bring broadband to folks outside of their little established fiefdoms (I lived on the "bench", or mountainside and found it impossible to get either to offer broadband service). No skin offa mine, though - I used Sprint Broadband wireless (roughly T1 speeds up and down) and DirecTV for years, and the two cost less combined than cable+internet would have.
You forgot "Overrated", which are apparently immune to meta-mods. ;)