The Weather Channel doesn't compete with the NOAA. It repackages and distributes NOAA information.
Actually - I was thinking The Weather Channel was behind attempts to limit public access to NOAA data to eliminate competition when, in fact, it was AccuWeather. And that outfit is definitely in competition with NOAA.
Read some of the other comments in this thread. They only exist because of an exception to the laws that grant the USPS a monopoly. They certainly don't compete with the USPS on the core business of the USPS which is first class and bulk mailings almost to the door.
True enough. However, keep in mind that the exception wasn't in play until well after Federal Express was operating. And the nature of the market has shifted in such a way that the USPS has had to change it's own operations to be more competitive with FedEx and UPS (DHL having bowed out at this point). Pretty good for private companies supposedly at such a competitive disadvantage against Federal organizations.
In 1979 Congress allowed an exception to the monopoly when it comes to 'extremely urgent' letters, which then allowed places like FedEx and UPS to deliver packages.
Good thing for Federal Express who had been operating since the early 70s. And expanding despite the claimed impossible nature of competing with a Government entity.
FedEx doesn't use stamps. You call them up and they'll deliver a pack of envelopes. You can then put your documents in that envelope and then either call or go to their web site to pay for shipment and arrange a pickup time. To be fair - you can do the same thing with the USPS as well.
\For example. why should I start my own competition to the NOAA, to provide for a cost, something which the NOAA provides for free?
You're right. Something like The Weather Channel would never work.
It's dumb to attempt to compete with government monopolies that don't need to make a profit and can undercut you (or sometimes even prohibit you from operating in the first place, such as duplicating the services of the US Postal Service).
FedEx? What a crazy idea. You can't complete with the US Postal Service. You sure as heck can't have multiple players in that market like UPS and DHL either.
Are all summer camp activities involving running, jumping, climbing trees (etc.)? Sure, three hours is a chunk of time. But it's not an entire day and it seems that the camp involves more than video games - which might actually be a subtle way to get kids running, jumping, climbing trees. As the article itself notes:
Brownrigg said a recent report by her group showed that on average, young people spend six hours a day in front of screens...
The camp might be a step towards working against that national average they're so concerned about.
It's not really PCs that they're predicting will die per se I think. It's the ability of companies like Dell and HP (and Apple, for that matter) and the like to make tons of cash selling PCs. People who use the PCs will have it great, though, since everything will be ever-so-cheap!
Wow, apk. You spent 20 minutes following around all my recent posts to add a copy-and-paste off-topic rant? And you included a link to a thread where I caught you providing irrelevant information that looked good unless someone looked at it? And you STILL think "perfect" is a measurement of uptime? Amazing. But then, this is all part of your MO, isn't it? Not so surprising after all. I hope people find this thread when they're Googleing around trying to understand what the heck you're about.
I'll just tag this with some of your formatting for easier searching:
Hehe - back at it again, apk? Thanks for providing the link to that thread. It shows exactly the kind of tactics you employ and how clueless you are. I think this may have been the greatest public service apk has ever done for this community.
That said, when your manager asks you for access to a system, you give it to them -- you can write for the record that you're doing so under protest and list the reasons, but you do it.
It bugs me that so many seem to be thinking this is the lesson to get out of all this. The lesson SHOULD be to ensure that you understand the policies that apply to situations like privileged access. And in the lack of a set policy, get someone to give you guidance in writing. Then follow that closely.
In simple environments, your manager is probably going to be on the short list of people that should have access. But that's not always the case. I've been in environments where my level of access was shared by some co-workers but it took climbing a couple levels of management before you'd find someone with the same authorization. And I've also had to insist on policy while dealing with politics and egos. This wasn't about me serving my ego or protecting my job (per se) - it was about me being very aware of my requirements to follow policy and how those policies worked.
Military lore has lots of examples. One story has a base commander visiting an ammo facility on a rainy day. He shows up early without his escort and the sky opens up. He dashes to the nearest shelter - an ammo bunker with a young airman on the other side of the security door. The airman checks the access list and, sure enough, the General isn't on it. The usual "do you know who I am" and "yes sir, but you are not authorized" conversation ensues until an aghast shop chief comes running up to the scene. The shop chief is on the list, rushes the VIP in to the shelter, and proceeds to chew out the young airman. The Base Commander interrupts, notes that procedure was properly followed, and praises the nervous troop on his proper conduct.
Of course, things don't always work out that way. Even when you have proper policies to follow. But if the legal paperwork starts to fly, you best find yourself on the right side of any policy that exists (and fight to make sure it does).
I'm glad you brought this up, because going through this trial I learned a lot about how -not- to lock down a network if you don't want to end up in this same scenario.
I would argue that he did a great job at making a very tamper resistant configuration. If I had to deploy sensitive gear in unsecured locations, I'd likely do a lot of this as well. However, I would also seek out a way to ensure I wasn't the only one who could access everything. A proper escrow and associated policy would have been key to turning this configuration from suspect paranoid to high thought out and well executed.
Now that I am able to speak about this case, I can give you my take on the matter as having been a juror on it.
Thanks for this and your other insightful posts. I'm one of the consistently sympathetic posters on this subject. I've been in situations where I've had to turn down requests from my bosses (and boss' bosses). But I've always done it with a specific policy in hand and complied as soon as the policy was met. So I find myself feeling rather uncomfortable with how this case proceeded and eventually turned out. But I find your insight fascinating and really appreciate you taking the time to describe the issues you and the rest of the jury had to tackle.
Re:It should read 'stoopid people hath spoken'
on
Terry Childs Found Guilty
·
· Score: 4, Informative
one of the jurors... one.
Have you not seen Twelve Angry Men?
It only takes one Not Guilty vote to prevent a conviction.
From the SF Gate article:
The jury deliberated for several days before a lone holdout against conviction was removed from the panel, for reasons that were not disclosed. After an alternate was put in that juror's place, the panel started over and reached a decision in a matter of hours.
There are a number of well known AV software providers out there that have been around since the dawn of time (relatively speaking). F-Prot, Command, etc are all very good products and cost a few sandwiches a year.
For the same reason that "the Internet" is IE (or at least the IE icon) to some people.
Isn't that just semantics? Of course it's not a physical dependency, and as such comparisons to drugs are misplaced, but the term 'addiction' is commonly used to include problems with both physical and psychological causes.
No. Obsessive / compulsive personalities can become focused on various activities. Would you then start calling washing your hands "addictive"?
Keep in mind, Android is not a phone. It's an operating system. In a greater scheme of things, consumers aren't buying Android. They're buying a Verizon smartphone or Motorola smartphone with their respective brands. So to say that "Android grew X % over Y period of time" is not really helpful for any meaningful metric.
iPhone is still the leader and will continue to be unless a strong competitor emerges out of the bunch and presents a unified front where they can clearly differentiate between devices.
Except for the fact that people, are in fact, buying Android phones. It doesn't matter if they buy from HTC or Motorola (or Samsung, etc.). They all plug in to the same software base and application market. When people buy an iPhone, they're not buying an AT&T phone. They're not buying an Apple phone. They're buying the iPhone that has access to the iPhone store.
Sure, the iPhone is all about unification. It is one device by one company (currently on one carrier). But that doesn't mean it's the only way to market. Android doesn't need a unified competitor. It just needs to grow it's economy to the same or larger scale than the iPhone economy. In the end, that's what happened to the microcomputer market.
It'd be hard for me to imagine that Apple -- the pseudosecretive company that it is -- wouldn't have stringent policies in place. Still, firing Powell would look less than heartless. I'd be shocked if any company as big as Apple didn't have such policies explicitly spelled out.
The big question directly applicable to the case is what exactly those policies are and how they're enforced. From the article:
On the other hand, if Apple doesn't have clear-cut rules, if Powell wasn't prohibited from taking the phone out of his office, if engineers routinely ignore or bypass security rules and -- as long as nothing bad happens -- no one complains, then Apple needs to understand that the system is more to blame than the individual. Most corporate security policies have this sort of problem. Security is important, but it's quickly jettisoned when there's an important job to be done. A common example is passwords: people aren't supposed to share them, unless it's really important and they have to. Another example is guest accounts. And doors that are supposed to remain locked but rarely are. People routinely bypass security policies if they get in the way, and if no one complains, those policies are effectively meaningless.
As you noted, one would expect that stringent policies are in place (and if Woz's comments are accurate, then that's probably true). But it's also a matter of how the corporate culture treats those policies. I've certainly been in environments where security policies were routinely ignored by anyone with any clout (especially when done as political favors) which completely undermines the overall effectiveness of those policies.
That seems to be the gist of Schneier's post. It's less about the incident in question and more about applying it to general concepts. It's always easier to explain these concepts when you've got real-world examples; even if just remotely applicable to your situation.
But with that in mind, I'm still curious as to what Apple's policies are. I would expect engineers have to do some sort of dogfood testing at some point - perhaps even sooner than later. And there's certainly value in taking a device you're developing and committing to it - making it the only device you use. In such a situation, corporate policy is going to have to accept a certain risk if they want to take advantage of that. Even with all the mitigation one can think of (there was a kill switch), there's still that risk.
If the whole rest of the planet isn't using it, what's the point? Facebook is what we're stuck with. Get over it.
The whole planet, huh? Interesting. Maybe that's true in your world. But it's not true in mine. The only people I know using Facebook are a few co-workers and my mother. There's plenty more room for another choice.
After all, if there wasn't, then what was Twitter? What was Facebook itself when Myspace existed first and before that, Friendster?
Yeah - sheer userbase numbers are important for this kind of thing. But it's far from game over.
Basically he's saying it's not as big a deal as everyone's making it out to be if they publish it on the Internet, because the US government is legally empowered to confiscate all of it without much due process.
It'd be great if we got a chance to have Schmidt clarify that quote. Your interpretation is entirely different than what I got out of the quote. My understanding is that he was warning us that Google is already being served by USA PATRIOT Act requests. Of course, by law, he's not allowed to comment on such requests.
You're pretty ignorant if you believe they offended "every religion in the world". *cough* Confucianism *cough* Daoism *cough* unimaginable other amounts of religions based off of Native American, African, tribes or other versions of Christianity, Judiasm, etc. etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed it for you. I removed the word "supposedly".
No, you vandalized my point by the lazy use of an over-used meme. :P
The Weather Channel doesn't compete with the NOAA. It repackages and distributes NOAA information.
Actually - I was thinking The Weather Channel was behind attempts to limit public access to NOAA data to eliminate competition when, in fact, it was AccuWeather. And that outfit is definitely in competition with NOAA.
Read some of the other comments in this thread. They only exist because of an exception to the laws that grant the USPS a monopoly. They certainly don't compete with the USPS on the core business of the USPS which is first class and bulk mailings almost to the door.
True enough. However, keep in mind that the exception wasn't in play until well after Federal Express was operating. And the nature of the market has shifted in such a way that the USPS has had to change it's own operations to be more competitive with FedEx and UPS (DHL having bowed out at this point). Pretty good for private companies supposedly at such a competitive disadvantage against Federal organizations.
In 1979 Congress allowed an exception to the monopoly when it comes to 'extremely urgent' letters, which then allowed places like FedEx and UPS to deliver packages.
Good thing for Federal Express who had been operating since the early 70s. And expanding despite the claimed impossible nature of competing with a Government entity.
FedEx doesn't use stamps. You call them up and they'll deliver a pack of envelopes. You can then put your documents in that envelope and then either call or go to their web site to pay for shipment and arrange a pickup time. To be fair - you can do the same thing with the USPS as well.
\For example. why should I start my own competition to the NOAA, to provide for a cost, something which the NOAA provides for free?
You're right. Something like The Weather Channel would never work.
It's dumb to attempt to compete with government monopolies that don't need to make a profit and can undercut you (or sometimes even prohibit you from operating in the first place, such as duplicating the services of the US Postal Service).
FedEx? What a crazy idea. You can't complete with the US Postal Service. You sure as heck can't have multiple players in that market like UPS and DHL either.
Not at all. Mistakes lead to the deaths of civilians and friendly forces.
Are all summer camp activities involving running, jumping, climbing trees (etc.)? Sure, three hours is a chunk of time. But it's not an entire day and it seems that the camp involves more than video games - which might actually be a subtle way to get kids running, jumping, climbing trees. As the article itself notes:
The camp might be a step towards working against that national average they're so concerned about.
It's not really PCs that they're predicting will die per se I think. It's the ability of companies like Dell and HP (and Apple, for that matter) and the like to make tons of cash selling PCs. People who use the PCs will have it great, though, since everything will be ever-so-cheap!
...it'll be like the 1990's all over again...
Wow, apk. You spent 20 minutes following around all my recent posts to add a copy-and-paste off-topic rant? And you included a link to a thread where I caught you providing irrelevant information that looked good unless someone looked at it? And you STILL think "perfect" is a measurement of uptime? Amazing. But then, this is all part of your MO, isn't it? Not so surprising after all. I hope people find this thread when they're Googleing around trying to understand what the heck you're about.
I'll just tag this with some of your formatting for easier searching:
APK
P.S.=>
What's wrong, apk? Does the phrase "obsessive / compulsive" touch a nerve?
Hehe - back at it again, apk? Thanks for providing the link to that thread. It shows exactly the kind of tactics you employ and how clueless you are. I think this may have been the greatest public service apk has ever done for this community.
That said, when your manager asks you for access to a system, you give it to them -- you can write for the record that you're doing so under protest and list the reasons, but you do it.
It bugs me that so many seem to be thinking this is the lesson to get out of all this. The lesson SHOULD be to ensure that you understand the policies that apply to situations like privileged access. And in the lack of a set policy, get someone to give you guidance in writing. Then follow that closely.
In simple environments, your manager is probably going to be on the short list of people that should have access. But that's not always the case. I've been in environments where my level of access was shared by some co-workers but it took climbing a couple levels of management before you'd find someone with the same authorization. And I've also had to insist on policy while dealing with politics and egos. This wasn't about me serving my ego or protecting my job (per se) - it was about me being very aware of my requirements to follow policy and how those policies worked.
Military lore has lots of examples. One story has a base commander visiting an ammo facility on a rainy day. He shows up early without his escort and the sky opens up. He dashes to the nearest shelter - an ammo bunker with a young airman on the other side of the security door. The airman checks the access list and, sure enough, the General isn't on it. The usual "do you know who I am" and "yes sir, but you are not authorized" conversation ensues until an aghast shop chief comes running up to the scene. The shop chief is on the list, rushes the VIP in to the shelter, and proceeds to chew out the young airman. The Base Commander interrupts, notes that procedure was properly followed, and praises the nervous troop on his proper conduct.
Of course, things don't always work out that way. Even when you have proper policies to follow. But if the legal paperwork starts to fly, you best find yourself on the right side of any policy that exists (and fight to make sure it does).
I'm glad you brought this up, because going through this trial I learned a lot about how -not- to lock down a network if you don't want to end up in this same scenario.
I would argue that he did a great job at making a very tamper resistant configuration. If I had to deploy sensitive gear in unsecured locations, I'd likely do a lot of this as well. However, I would also seek out a way to ensure I wasn't the only one who could access everything. A proper escrow and associated policy would have been key to turning this configuration from suspect paranoid to high thought out and well executed.
Now that I am able to speak about this case, I can give you my take on the matter as having been a juror on it.
Thanks for this and your other insightful posts. I'm one of the consistently sympathetic posters on this subject. I've been in situations where I've had to turn down requests from my bosses (and boss' bosses). But I've always done it with a specific policy in hand and complied as soon as the policy was met. So I find myself feeling rather uncomfortable with how this case proceeded and eventually turned out. But I find your insight fascinating and really appreciate you taking the time to describe the issues you and the rest of the jury had to tackle.
Have you not seen Twelve Angry Men?
It only takes one Not Guilty vote to prevent a conviction.
From the SF Gate article:
The jury deliberated for several days before a lone holdout against conviction was removed from the panel, for reasons that were not disclosed. After an alternate was put in that juror's place, the panel started over and reached a decision in a matter of hours.
Somehow, I don't think the phrase "the [internet] is the computer" was supposed to work out that way.
There are a number of well known AV software providers out there that have been around since the dawn of time (relatively speaking). F-Prot, Command, etc are all very good products and cost a few sandwiches a year.
For the same reason that "the Internet" is IE (or at least the IE icon) to some people.
Isn't that just semantics? Of course it's not a physical dependency, and as such comparisons to drugs are misplaced, but the term 'addiction' is commonly used to include problems with both physical and psychological causes.
No. Obsessive / compulsive personalities can become focused on various activities. Would you then start calling washing your hands "addictive"?
Even more telling: Old droid was from motorola. New droid is from HTC. Motorola put all their chips on the droid. buh-bye!!!
Don't read too much in to that. The Droid Eris is HTC as well.
Keep in mind, Android is not a phone. It's an operating system. In a greater scheme of things, consumers aren't buying Android. They're buying a Verizon smartphone or Motorola smartphone with their respective brands. So to say that "Android grew X % over Y period of time" is not really helpful for any meaningful metric.
iPhone is still the leader and will continue to be unless a strong competitor emerges out of the bunch and presents a unified front where they can clearly differentiate between devices.
Except for the fact that people, are in fact, buying Android phones. It doesn't matter if they buy from HTC or Motorola (or Samsung, etc.). They all plug in to the same software base and application market. When people buy an iPhone, they're not buying an AT&T phone. They're not buying an Apple phone. They're buying the iPhone that has access to the iPhone store.
Sure, the iPhone is all about unification. It is one device by one company (currently on one carrier). But that doesn't mean it's the only way to market. Android doesn't need a unified competitor. It just needs to grow it's economy to the same or larger scale than the iPhone economy. In the end, that's what happened to the microcomputer market.
It'd be hard for me to imagine that Apple -- the pseudosecretive company that it is -- wouldn't have stringent policies in place. Still, firing Powell would look less than heartless. I'd be shocked if any company as big as Apple didn't have such policies explicitly spelled out.
The big question directly applicable to the case is what exactly those policies are and how they're enforced. From the article:
As you noted, one would expect that stringent policies are in place (and if Woz's comments are accurate, then that's probably true). But it's also a matter of how the corporate culture treats those policies. I've certainly been in environments where security policies were routinely ignored by anyone with any clout (especially when done as political favors) which completely undermines the overall effectiveness of those policies.
That seems to be the gist of Schneier's post. It's less about the incident in question and more about applying it to general concepts. It's always easier to explain these concepts when you've got real-world examples; even if just remotely applicable to your situation.
But with that in mind, I'm still curious as to what Apple's policies are. I would expect engineers have to do some sort of dogfood testing at some point - perhaps even sooner than later. And there's certainly value in taking a device you're developing and committing to it - making it the only device you use. In such a situation, corporate policy is going to have to accept a certain risk if they want to take advantage of that. Even with all the mitigation one can think of (there was a kill switch), there's still that risk.
If the whole rest of the planet isn't using it, what's the point? Facebook is what we're stuck with. Get over it.
The whole planet, huh? Interesting. Maybe that's true in your world. But it's not true in mine. The only people I know using Facebook are a few co-workers and my mother. There's plenty more room for another choice.
After all, if there wasn't, then what was Twitter? What was Facebook itself when Myspace existed first and before that, Friendster?
Yeah - sheer userbase numbers are important for this kind of thing. But it's far from game over.
Basically he's saying it's not as big a deal as everyone's making it out to be if they publish it on the Internet, because the US government is legally empowered to confiscate all of it without much due process.
It'd be great if we got a chance to have Schmidt clarify that quote. Your interpretation is entirely different than what I got out of the quote. My understanding is that he was warning us that Google is already being served by USA PATRIOT Act requests. Of course, by law, he's not allowed to comment on such requests.
You're pretty ignorant if you believe they offended "every religion in the world". *cough* Confucianism *cough* Daoism *cough* unimaginable other amounts of religions based off of Native American, African, tribes or other versions of Christianity, Judiasm, etc. etc. etc.
They were offended by not being included.
It was a typo. But when I went to correct it, I thought it was rather amusing. So I left it in place.