I pay my ISP for internet access at a certain bandwidth. That's what they advertise and what I agreed to pay for. If they block or slow things, they are cheating me. Some ISPs want to redefine internet access as pieces and speeds but not sell it that way. That dishonesty is why net neutrality matters.
Cable TV could come with internet service, but when I agree to pay for cable and not internet, they block internet service. That is not cheating because they aren't failing to provide what I pay for.
I don't think I'm paying for any service from Bittorrent, so how can they cheat me? As soon as they take my money for something they fail to provide, then this net neutrality analogy can make sense, but until then, it is irrelevant.
For fifteen years governments and corporations have been trying to shut down citizen access to thepiratebay. I just checked to see if it was still up before starting this post and thepiratebay.org didn't load. For half a second I thought maybe they had lost the battle, but then I searched for them and pulled up another domain instantly. In a perfect world* we wouldn't need profit driven organizations fighting government and corporate rage, but until I'm elected, I'm glad there are people working out how to make a service resist all forms of censorship.
I expect that all sorts of dumb criminals will be caught and innocent citizens will have their privacy invaded as these sorts of government oppression succeed. I'm glad that math exists and is well enough disseminated that even as it becomes harder, those of us with pencil, paper, and knowledge can remain immune. I understand the cost to freedom this represents, but thankfully highly motivated criminals are out there fighting for our ability to resist the evils of government.
* Vote for me as supreme world dictator for life and I'll promise whatever lie you currently accept from your politicians.
Why argue technicalities? Oh yeah, that's what this account is for. So, you're saying that the law targets the things I mentioned, but that's not the same thing as being able to enforce it. Enforcement effectiveness is what I was questioning, not targets. Either they'll fail to enforce the law consistently or they'll effectively kill off internet access. I personally think the voters would revolt if they instituted a white-list internet access system, so I think enforcement will fail.
The voters have been deceived? So what? You must think voters actually care about issues more than making sure their team wins. How cute.
I see your frustration and disillusionment and I raise you four decades worth of cynicism.
Good question. The other one I'm curious about is whether they can enforce it against all the other apps that offer end to end encryption. Even if they manage to block the ones that do now, will they be able to keep up with all the new ones that spring up? How about every web page that takes a message and a public key to create encrypted text?
The sad thing is going to be how successful this sounds in the press releases put out by government representatives. There are plenty of stupid and petty criminals who won't know or bother to use something secure, and they'll get caught. Law enforcement and politicians will point to this as a shining example of success. Will the voters feel happy about that or will they actually care about their privacy?
I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Nobody but Hillary could have lost to Trump. If the Democratic party had run a 35 yr old potato, we'd have a potato-in-chief right now. Imagine how many Republicans voted, holding their nose in distaste, just out of hatred for Hillary. They'd have stayed home in droves if they hadn't been so motivated to vote against her. Gore would have won. Bernie would have won. Even Tim Kaine would have won. I'd have voted for Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice and among the demographic of people who've never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, I know for certain I'm not alone. I might not have voted for an actual potato, but I'd have been heavily conflicted between that and the third party vote I did cast.
For a decade or more, I voted for Republican candidates because I agreed more with their platform. After observing their self interested voting records and broken promises for a while, that changed. Mostly I voted for Libertarians, and I still disagree with the Democrat platform, but I'm planning to vote in 2019 based on which candidate is most likely to have a chance to vote for net neutrality so hey, congratulations liberals, you got a convert.
Dozens of policies I disagree with have no chance of changing, and neither do the ones I support, so screw standing on principle. I'm casting my next vote based on something I thoroughly understand and have the tiniest hope of seeing change. This is my new philosophy: vote based on any hope you can sustain that something might change, provided you don't actually vomit in the voting booth. I still won't vote for Hillary, but give me Mrs. Potatohead versus the Angry Cheeto and you've got my vote.
Yeah, yeah, lots of CAPS to EMPHASIZE your ideas....
The point of your comment is that there is an obligation on those companies that succeed in the US environment to contribute back to the economy. That's sweet. Also, that's naive.
It isn't about some social empathy issue, it's a math problem. How much does it cost to stay in Seattle vs how much does it cost to move to someplace else? The answer is what determines what a company should do in order to maximize profit... and make no mistake, that is all a company cares about. If it's more profitable to move, they'll move. This news is about the negotiation between a company with the objective to be profitable and the local city to get all the money they can out of said company without totally tanking their future.
It should be non-news. "Huge company negotiates with home city to determine tax structure agreeable to both" is hardly a catchy headline. Thus we see many emotional responses to what is really soulless math.
There with you, but slightly different experience.
We went from Openfire to Skype for Business as part of a move to Office 365. It wasn't entirely smooth, but that was partly on me, I treated our employees like people who understood the basics of computing, but they proved me drastically wrong. *Sigh.*
Some history first. When we started with O365 years before, we had recently finished moving from Communicator on our server to O365 based S4B. I had been experimenting with alternative options and had an Openfire server set up in testing but no real plan to utilize it when S4B had an outage. Our company was left without an IM client suddenly and we depended on it. It took me a matter of minutes to roll out Openfire and we were up and running. It was successful enough that when the outage ended, we didn't switch back. Fast forward a few years and the new boss moved us back onto what was now a much more reliable S4B service. We've been with it and mostly satisfied... so when I heard MS had transitioned some O365 companies to Teams involuntarily, I kinda panicked. Now a sane response might be to revisit Openfire, but no, the new boss is MS all the way. (What's up with that??) So, I tested Teams and found it better in some ways that interested me. It is superior in MFA, multiple sign on locations, and a couple other things. I had the conversation where I said "MS is moving to teams, it's not an option, so we had best get a jump on this while we still have a choice" and similar such.
We're doing some other transitions so our IT team moved to Teams... for about 5 minutes. That was all it took for us to determine that the Teams was not going to be anywhere remotely close to a smooth transition for the majority of our company employees. Thus we're still S4B and sticking with it until MS forces us off or MS actually makes Teams a usable replacement for our average employee. You mentioned Teams not "letting us know if someone is online, away, or offline" which is something Teams actually can and does do, but it's not obvious to our average user. That's the issue. It's not that it can't or doesn't but rather that it's not easy for the average user to see how to do.
If someone from MS is reading this, I have this to say to you: Please, please make Teams easy to use for someone who has been using Communicator/Lync for a decade.
Why? Having a fresh black eye myself makes me more empathetic and concerned when I see someone else with a fresh bruise.
America is very much like a person. We hold ideals that we completely fail to live up to. We proclaim that all men are created equal, but in the same breath we make sure that everyone understands we mean only white male land owners. Slowly we mature, maybe people who don't own land can have a vote. Maybe black people are nearly people so they get part of a vote. Women? They're kinda people, fine. You know what? Black people get to vote too. Everybody gets a vote, how do you like that? (No, of course we don't mean everybody, we do have standards! You can't be treating people who committed a felony as a kid like real people or filthy foreigners have a voice.)
Everybody gets guns so they can shoot government officials. Well on second thought, maybe only "good" people. Also, maybe just some kinds of guns. Now that we government officials think about it, no shooting government officials.
America is your racist, misogynist, bigoted great uncle Sal who is slowly, ever so slowly, realizing that people are people. Sure he still steals the silverware and punches other family members, but at least he is trying to improve himself. Still, despite all his stupid quirks and frankly evil past, you kinda love the guy. He really does seem to love everybody if you can see past his failings. He's slowly turning into a decent human being. He could even be a mature, respectable adult that you're glad came to the reunion... if he lives long enough. And would quit getting in drunken fights. And would stop trying to steal your wallet. And maybe quit spitting on your friends.
Meanwhile you just noticed Auntie Sarah started taking silverware too. Come on Sarah, you need to set an example here, for everybody, but especially for Sal!
I honestly cannot tell if you're trolling or not. If you are, then kudos for the subtlety, that's brilliant. If you aren't, then I might suggest a little research into the subject. You'll discover that practically every style and grammar guide disagrees with you while there are still really valid arguments in favor of double or at least larger spaces.
I was taught to double space when I learned to type, and back then we learned on a typewriter. Later in life I had to do some professional writing and I learned that I shouldn't. It was at that point that I ruthlessly broke the habit. Still later, I learned there is an interesting history behind the conflicting ideas. Anyone who double spaces and holds a strong opinion that it is "right" is an ignorant and apathetic reader whose opinion can be handily dismissed. Anyone who double spaces because it is "proven" to be better is someone to watch. They may be someone to watch because they're a person who reads to learn or they may be someone to watch because they're a liar, but either way, you should keep an eye on them.
Someone willing to break the law can knock innocent businesses and individuals off of the internet with practically zero fear of getting caught or stopped. That's the state of the internet right now. Truly fixing that situation is impossible without a degree of frightening fascism that would be the end of the internet as we know it. I'd love to see a world where there weren't millions of stupidly insecure devices connected to the internet, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of devices with reasonable security still managing to have vulnerabilities that haven't been patched yet. Without a single country controlling what is allowed to connect to the internet (a bad idea,) it's not a solvable problem.
People think that securing your own systems is sufficient to protect your company, but it isn't. In order to protect your business from malicious activity you need control of the fabric outside of your company. A typical small company can't protect the ISP routers that connect them to the internet, and so can't protect themselves against a DDOS. How many hops are between your customer and your website? Unless you're running your website through CloudFront, Azure, or Google; you won't have the resources to absorb the attack without losing business. I remember watching Microsoft get DDOS'd off of the internet, and Google. Even Amazon has had outages, so no matter what you do, your website isn't bulletproof.
The internet gives freedom, enormous freedom, to people, but it's disproportionate. Malicious attackers who don't have to follow the law have more power than people and companies required to do things legally. Bringing balance to that equation, by allowing victims to fight back, could have huge repercussions. They could be great or terrible, but I believe most organizations and people would do less harm than the current law breakers, if they had the freedom to fight back.
I understand the arguments against legalizing fighting back, but honestly the "innocent" people likely to be harmed are the people who were negligent in securing their own equipment. I have a hard time feeling bad for those people.
Some ISP is going to have routers with insecure firmware. Those routers are going to be roped into a DDOS attack that takes some sleezy spamming company's website down and the spammer company is going to kill thousands of innocent consumer routers, who couldn't have secured their routers even if they'd been interested in security and knowledgeable of their options. But what's the result of that?
It's evolution. The free market can solve this problem, but not if the government is so focused on protecting innocents that they protect the law breakers at the expense of those who have to follow the law. The criminals have freedom. I am in favor of giving law abiding people a limited subset of that freedom.
I can argue either side of this argument, but I choose this side to represent. See my user ID.
It sounds like a joke, but it's been true so far for me. I (and our team) have automated away about half of our IT jobs and our department has doubled in size. Our job is to do more with less, and each time we do more, we get more to do. IT went from being 25% of our company's work to 80%. The jobs that took up 90% of our department's workload 10 years ago don't exist anymore. What was done by a handful people then is done with no human interaction now. At the same time, half the work that our company does now is done by our department, where it was maybe 10% then.
The jobs of the future are human relations, art, and IT. They won't stay the same as they are now, but everything else can and will (eventually) be done by robots and AI. Some day in the far distant future, the year 2525 or such, if mankind is still alive, maybe even those will be done by machines. I'm not optimistic I'll live to see any of that, but I can imagine a world where computers understand me more fully than humans, art by machines is better than that producible by humans, and machines are better designed and managed by AI than humans.
If all goes well, in the next decade IT will be doing 90% of our company's work. If that happens, we'll have similarly proportionally more work and our company's workforce will grow slowly while our customer base grows near exponentially. That or we'll go our of business because some competitor transitioned faster than we did.
Breaking the law is bad business and it typically ends up costing more in lawyers and fines than following it would. That's kind of the point.
But who thinks the laws protect their private data? You click EULAs with these companies agreeing that they can do what they want and that you can't sue them for it. The laws protect the companies, if they didn't, they'd get new laws.
Well said. People making laws often have no clue about the technical details, so some stupid laws get made (thus we have sites everywhere with a "we use cookies" overlay.)
I have decided that the best way to explain to people how difficult it is to control the internet is to point out that people in China use The Pirate Bay. If you can't block a site that most countries want to block even in a country that firewalls their whole internet, the likelihood that your local congress critter or equivalent can fix an internet issue is practically zero.
If you want to load software on the phone, you need to sign it with the key. If you can do that, you can switch the boot loader so that it compromises the encryption.
That's what I'm thinking. The FBI makes this big show of going to court in an effort to secure the right to do what? Get access to Apple's key? No, to try to force Apple to build decryption tools. The FBI said it could ask for Apple's signing key... but they didn't. Obviously they already have that? Why would you assume Apple can keep their key secret from agencies that can put insane pressure on any employee they decide to?
No. Assume that all the three letter agencies already have the keys, they just don't want the public to know that. Poor show Russia, that's not how you misdirect the public.
Net Neutrality is available to anyone with a decent VPN. If Google, Apple, Facebook or Cloudflare or Amazon decide to do it, they have the ability to bring net neutrality back by offering free and easy VPNs. Want to win this fight? We need someone who can afford to run the infrastructure to join the battle. Google started the push to encrypt everywhere, which is half there. Maybe we can get them to take the fight to the next level.
Wow. That kind of comment is a little too familiar. You call learning new skills, constantly updating your understanding of new options incompetence? In my department, if you're not constantly refining your skills, constantly learning more about the systems you use and support and the alternatives available... well that's what we'd call incompetence. Your comment reminds me of two ex-coworkers who I suspect would have shared your perspective. I admit my reactions may be biased as a result, my own viewpoint is likely colored by that designation: ex-coworkers.
I can scarcely imagine what would have happened if I'd just stuck to the things they taught me in college, instead of poking at every corner of each new release or potential configuration of Windows. Showing my age a bit here, but it'd be hard to find a job where my expertise, even just managing my own workstation, is twenty years out of date. I honestly appreciate the reminder though. I do need to get back in the Windows Insiders Fast Ring. I dropped out for stability issues that actually did manage to irritate me, but I do feel like I need to get back in again, just to keep that one step ahead. The BSODs may have raised my blood pressure and cost me a handful of minutes, but I need the occasional reminder that it's important to focus on the learning instead of the irritants.
All that said, it really doesn't matter what Windows version, or even what OS is on my workstation, since I can jump to any of a half dozen various alternatives. (I worked for years with one of my workstations running Linux and never had any trouble doing the work at hand.) We have Windows 7 on hand and can go back to Windows XP in a pinch, but typically when I need something I haven't committed to on my current install, I just remote to one of the workstations (or VMs) with a current stable Windows release. Admittedly, if I couldn't manage my work due to the way I test each new workstation configuration, that'd be incompetent, but it'd be equally incompetent, maybe more so, if I couldn't work without a snowflake configuration on whatever machine that happens to sit in front of me.
What do you think the PCs we buy come with? Seriously.. "just lol"
The AC comments are strong in this thread. I shouldn't let it bother me, but I wonder how they/you keep track? I can't be bothered to look up my AC comments even the same day, let alone keeping up on a thread like this. I'm genuinely curious what techniques you use? Don't let that curb your trolling, just toss in a tip when you talk about my mom or whatever.
Most of my workstations have started out as Windows, or in one exception a Mac. On the Mac I used Windows with VMWare, on the windows workstations, they usually started out dual booting. My first personal workstation was Windows 3.1, which I used to get started in programming. Later I used it to learn about Linux and BSD. I ran it side by side with a Solaris box for a long time until an unfortunate incident with a screwdriver and escaping magic smoke. (My quite young daughter thought it was awesome Dad was setting off fireworks in the living room.)
I always try to get the new versions of Windows at home before they hit RTM and I need to support them at work. Linux is a little more stable; it's rare (bleh again to systemd) to need to learn much new. I recall fondly installing a new CPU and more RAM in my Windows 3.1 PC so I could install Windows 95. I learned about jumpers and motherboard diagrams for that. I'd say that was when I fell in love with computers as a career. I recall installing Red Hat on that same machine later just to learn about alternative OS designs. I'd say that's when I fell in love with computers as a hobby. I was very fortunate to learn enough to incorporate Linux and Unix into my career as well.
On a scale of LFS to Mandrake, how bad was your experience?
I'll be installing Linux when I have a week of downtime.
It takes me a couple months to transition a new workstation to Windows. Each time, I try to learn what the native software options are and whether they can meet my current needs. Where it doesn't, I install or use recommended software in most cases to see if it does what I need (WSL) though I do have exceptions for my personal favorite software in a few instances where I'm just unwilling to learn something new. (EditPlus, GIMP, VLC, Sysinternals, Putty.)
A new install of Linux takes the same process, but it has apt or yum or whatever which speeds things up pretty dramatically. With a new Linux desktop install, I just rarely have to learn too many new things... usually. (Eyeballing you hard here systemd!)
If I have to support any significant sized network, and if it's possible, I'd do Linux desktops everywhere. I'd rather use those admin systems than admin Windows... but I work in a job where I have to support Windows because that's all the core software runs on. As an admin, I can do about anything I need to on Microsoft servers and workstations. It'd be false modesty to say I'm not good at admin on Microsoft system. On the other hand, I have used Linux and various BSDs at home and work (on servers) since the late 90's. I could eliminate Microsoft in our workplace and cut our IT departmental work by maybe 30% if only our primary system ran on Linux. I'd miss some of the AD/DHCP/DNS/DFS stack. I'd miss Excel (running native) and Exchange/Outlook, but honestly, running the alternatives in the cloud or Libre would probably reduce our helpdesk workload after a year or two.
I'm good at my jobs, and whatever systems I admin, I'll learn to be good at. Given the ideal scenario, I could run several thousand workstations with the same effort I'd use for a couple hundred Windows workstations. The scenarios I have been hired to handle haven't been ideal, so I've learned to take advantage of the environments I'm in. I'm good at my jobs because I like to learn. I like tinkering, trying new things, scripting and writing real code. That makes me useful, maybe even it helps toward making me valuable.
On the other hand, my varied experiences and experimenting have made me aware that my own weakness is a desire to try new things. If I were designing the systems for a company responsible for my income, it wouldn't be Linux or Windows or Mac. It'd be PC-BSD on the workstations and AIX on the servers. They're boring. Boring is what I look for in a business network. Ideally, the network will be so stable that IT doesn't spend any time working on the backend systems, and that means boring is the goal. I like Linux because I'm always learning new stuff and I like Windows.. sorta, because I'm always being forced to learn new things. That's why I'm sorry to see AIX take a dip off the top 500, but I can see it; Linux is fun.
Encryption as a race is a good argument. It's weakness is the ignorance of the the general population. You say that anything with a backdoor will be shunned. I counter: Bitlocker.
Slashdot Mirror
I pay my ISP for internet access at a certain bandwidth. That's what they advertise and what I agreed to pay for. If they block or slow things, they are cheating me. Some ISPs want to redefine internet access as pieces and speeds but not sell it that way. That dishonesty is why net neutrality matters.
Cable TV could come with internet service, but when I agree to pay for cable and not internet, they block internet service. That is not cheating because they aren't failing to provide what I pay for.
I don't think I'm paying for any service from Bittorrent, so how can they cheat me? As soon as they take my money for something they fail to provide, then this net neutrality analogy can make sense, but until then, it is irrelevant.
For fifteen years governments and corporations have been trying to shut down citizen access to thepiratebay. I just checked to see if it was still up before starting this post and thepiratebay.org didn't load. For half a second I thought maybe they had lost the battle, but then I searched for them and pulled up another domain instantly. In a perfect world* we wouldn't need profit driven organizations fighting government and corporate rage, but until I'm elected, I'm glad there are people working out how to make a service resist all forms of censorship.
I expect that all sorts of dumb criminals will be caught and innocent citizens will have their privacy invaded as these sorts of government oppression succeed. I'm glad that math exists and is well enough disseminated that even as it becomes harder, those of us with pencil, paper, and knowledge can remain immune. I understand the cost to freedom this represents, but thankfully highly motivated criminals are out there fighting for our ability to resist the evils of government.
* Vote for me as supreme world dictator for life and I'll promise whatever lie you currently accept from your politicians.
Why argue technicalities? Oh yeah, that's what this account is for. So, you're saying that the law targets the things I mentioned, but that's not the same thing as being able to enforce it. Enforcement effectiveness is what I was questioning, not targets. Either they'll fail to enforce the law consistently or they'll effectively kill off internet access. I personally think the voters would revolt if they instituted a white-list internet access system, so I think enforcement will fail.
The voters have been deceived? So what? You must think voters actually care about issues more than making sure their team wins. How cute.
I see your frustration and disillusionment and I raise you four decades worth of cynicism.
Good question. The other one I'm curious about is whether they can enforce it against all the other apps that offer end to end encryption. Even if they manage to block the ones that do now, will they be able to keep up with all the new ones that spring up? How about every web page that takes a message and a public key to create encrypted text?
The sad thing is going to be how successful this sounds in the press releases put out by government representatives. There are plenty of stupid and petty criminals who won't know or bother to use something secure, and they'll get caught. Law enforcement and politicians will point to this as a shining example of success. Will the voters feel happy about that or will they actually care about their privacy?
I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Nobody but Hillary could have lost to Trump. If the Democratic party had run a 35 yr old potato, we'd have a potato-in-chief right now. Imagine how many Republicans voted, holding their nose in distaste, just out of hatred for Hillary. They'd have stayed home in droves if they hadn't been so motivated to vote against her. Gore would have won. Bernie would have won. Even Tim Kaine would have won. I'd have voted for Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice and among the demographic of people who've never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, I know for certain I'm not alone. I might not have voted for an actual potato, but I'd have been heavily conflicted between that and the third party vote I did cast.
For a decade or more, I voted for Republican candidates because I agreed more with their platform. After observing their self interested voting records and broken promises for a while, that changed. Mostly I voted for Libertarians, and I still disagree with the Democrat platform, but I'm planning to vote in 2019 based on which candidate is most likely to have a chance to vote for net neutrality so hey, congratulations liberals, you got a convert.
Dozens of policies I disagree with have no chance of changing, and neither do the ones I support, so screw standing on principle. I'm casting my next vote based on something I thoroughly understand and have the tiniest hope of seeing change. This is my new philosophy: vote based on any hope you can sustain that something might change, provided you don't actually vomit in the voting booth. I still won't vote for Hillary, but give me Mrs. Potatohead versus the Angry Cheeto and you've got my vote.
Oops, still forgot to uncheck the "Post Anonymously" box.
That much scotch. Salud.
Yeah, yeah, lots of CAPS to EMPHASIZE your ideas....
The point of your comment is that there is an obligation on those companies that succeed in the US environment to contribute back to the economy. That's sweet. Also, that's naive.
It isn't about some social empathy issue, it's a math problem. How much does it cost to stay in Seattle vs how much does it cost to move to someplace else? The answer is what determines what a company should do in order to maximize profit... and make no mistake, that is all a company cares about. If it's more profitable to move, they'll move. This news is about the negotiation between a company with the objective to be profitable and the local city to get all the money they can out of said company without totally tanking their future.
It should be non-news. "Huge company negotiates with home city to determine tax structure agreeable to both" is hardly a catchy headline. Thus we see many emotional responses to what is really soulless math.
Funny.
Not as funny as "We value your privacy - the folks we sell your privacy to value it even more."
That sentence deserves a Pulitzer or something.
3 of 5 stars! (Minus 1 for not being a news headline, minus another for not linking to your newsletter.)
There with you, but slightly different experience.
We went from Openfire to Skype for Business as part of a move to Office 365. It wasn't entirely smooth, but that was partly on me, I treated our employees like people who understood the basics of computing, but they proved me drastically wrong. *Sigh.*
Some history first. When we started with O365 years before, we had recently finished moving from Communicator on our server to O365 based S4B. I had been experimenting with alternative options and had an Openfire server set up in testing but no real plan to utilize it when S4B had an outage. Our company was left without an IM client suddenly and we depended on it. It took me a matter of minutes to roll out Openfire and we were up and running. It was successful enough that when the outage ended, we didn't switch back. Fast forward a few years and the new boss moved us back onto what was now a much more reliable S4B service. We've been with it and mostly satisfied... so when I heard MS had transitioned some O365 companies to Teams involuntarily, I kinda panicked. Now a sane response might be to revisit Openfire, but no, the new boss is MS all the way. (What's up with that??) So, I tested Teams and found it better in some ways that interested me. It is superior in MFA, multiple sign on locations, and a couple other things. I had the conversation where I said "MS is moving to teams, it's not an option, so we had best get a jump on this while we still have a choice" and similar such.
We're doing some other transitions so our IT team moved to Teams... for about 5 minutes. That was all it took for us to determine that the Teams was not going to be anywhere remotely close to a smooth transition for the majority of our company employees. Thus we're still S4B and sticking with it until MS forces us off or MS actually makes Teams a usable replacement for our average employee. You mentioned Teams not "letting us know if someone is online, away, or offline" which is something Teams actually can and does do, but it's not obvious to our average user. That's the issue. It's not that it can't or doesn't but rather that it's not easy for the average user to see how to do.
If someone from MS is reading this, I have this to say to you: Please, please make Teams easy to use for someone who has been using Communicator/Lync for a decade.
Why? Having a fresh black eye myself makes me more empathetic and concerned when I see someone else with a fresh bruise.
America is very much like a person. We hold ideals that we completely fail to live up to. We proclaim that all men are created equal, but in the same breath we make sure that everyone understands we mean only white male land owners. Slowly we mature, maybe people who don't own land can have a vote. Maybe black people are nearly people so they get part of a vote. Women? They're kinda people, fine. You know what? Black people get to vote too. Everybody gets a vote, how do you like that? (No, of course we don't mean everybody, we do have standards! You can't be treating people who committed a felony as a kid like real people or filthy foreigners have a voice.)
Everybody gets guns so they can shoot government officials. Well on second thought, maybe only "good" people. Also, maybe just some kinds of guns. Now that we government officials think about it, no shooting government officials.
America is your racist, misogynist, bigoted great uncle Sal who is slowly, ever so slowly, realizing that people are people. Sure he still steals the silverware and punches other family members, but at least he is trying to improve himself. Still, despite all his stupid quirks and frankly evil past, you kinda love the guy. He really does seem to love everybody if you can see past his failings. He's slowly turning into a decent human being. He could even be a mature, respectable adult that you're glad came to the reunion... if he lives long enough. And would quit getting in drunken fights. And would stop trying to steal your wallet. And maybe quit spitting on your friends.
Meanwhile you just noticed Auntie Sarah started taking silverware too. Come on Sarah, you need to set an example here, for everybody, but especially for Sal!
I honestly cannot tell if you're trolling or not. If you are, then kudos for the subtlety, that's brilliant. If you aren't, then I might suggest a little research into the subject. You'll discover that practically every style and grammar guide disagrees with you while there are still really valid arguments in favor of double or at least larger spaces.
I was taught to double space when I learned to type, and back then we learned on a typewriter. Later in life I had to do some professional writing and I learned that I shouldn't. It was at that point that I ruthlessly broke the habit. Still later, I learned there is an interesting history behind the conflicting ideas. Anyone who double spaces and holds a strong opinion that it is "right" is an ignorant and apathetic reader whose opinion can be handily dismissed. Anyone who double spaces because it is "proven" to be better is someone to watch. They may be someone to watch because they're a person who reads to learn or they may be someone to watch because they're a liar, but either way, you should keep an eye on them.
Someone willing to break the law can knock innocent businesses and individuals off of the internet with practically zero fear of getting caught or stopped. That's the state of the internet right now. Truly fixing that situation is impossible without a degree of frightening fascism that would be the end of the internet as we know it. I'd love to see a world where there weren't millions of stupidly insecure devices connected to the internet, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of devices with reasonable security still managing to have vulnerabilities that haven't been patched yet. Without a single country controlling what is allowed to connect to the internet (a bad idea,) it's not a solvable problem.
People think that securing your own systems is sufficient to protect your company, but it isn't. In order to protect your business from malicious activity you need control of the fabric outside of your company. A typical small company can't protect the ISP routers that connect them to the internet, and so can't protect themselves against a DDOS. How many hops are between your customer and your website? Unless you're running your website through CloudFront, Azure, or Google; you won't have the resources to absorb the attack without losing business. I remember watching Microsoft get DDOS'd off of the internet, and Google. Even Amazon has had outages, so no matter what you do, your website isn't bulletproof.
The internet gives freedom, enormous freedom, to people, but it's disproportionate. Malicious attackers who don't have to follow the law have more power than people and companies required to do things legally. Bringing balance to that equation, by allowing victims to fight back, could have huge repercussions. They could be great or terrible, but I believe most organizations and people would do less harm than the current law breakers, if they had the freedom to fight back.
I understand the arguments against legalizing fighting back, but honestly the "innocent" people likely to be harmed are the people who were negligent in securing their own equipment. I have a hard time feeling bad for those people.
Some ISP is going to have routers with insecure firmware. Those routers are going to be roped into a DDOS attack that takes some sleezy spamming company's website down and the spammer company is going to kill thousands of innocent consumer routers, who couldn't have secured their routers even if they'd been interested in security and knowledgeable of their options. But what's the result of that?
It's evolution. The free market can solve this problem, but not if the government is so focused on protecting innocents that they protect the law breakers at the expense of those who have to follow the law. The criminals have freedom. I am in favor of giving law abiding people a limited subset of that freedom.
I can argue either side of this argument, but I choose this side to represent. See my user ID.
It sounds like a joke, but it's been true so far for me. I (and our team) have automated away about half of our IT jobs and our department has doubled in size. Our job is to do more with less, and each time we do more, we get more to do. IT went from being 25% of our company's work to 80%. The jobs that took up 90% of our department's workload 10 years ago don't exist anymore. What was done by a handful people then is done with no human interaction now. At the same time, half the work that our company does now is done by our department, where it was maybe 10% then.
The jobs of the future are human relations, art, and IT. They won't stay the same as they are now, but everything else can and will (eventually) be done by robots and AI. Some day in the far distant future, the year 2525 or such, if mankind is still alive, maybe even those will be done by machines. I'm not optimistic I'll live to see any of that, but I can imagine a world where computers understand me more fully than humans, art by machines is better than that producible by humans, and machines are better designed and managed by AI than humans.
If all goes well, in the next decade IT will be doing 90% of our company's work. If that happens, we'll have similarly proportionally more work and our company's workforce will grow slowly while our customer base grows near exponentially. That or we'll go our of business because some competitor transitioned faster than we did.
Breaking the law is bad business and it typically ends up costing more in lawyers and fines than following it would. That's kind of the point.
But who thinks the laws protect their private data? You click EULAs with these companies agreeing that they can do what they want and that you can't sue them for it. The laws protect the companies, if they didn't, they'd get new laws.
Well said. People making laws often have no clue about the technical details, so some stupid laws get made (thus we have sites everywhere with a "we use cookies" overlay.)
I have decided that the best way to explain to people how difficult it is to control the internet is to point out that people in China use The Pirate Bay. If you can't block a site that most countries want to block even in a country that firewalls their whole internet, the likelihood that your local congress critter or equivalent can fix an internet issue is practically zero.
If you want to load software on the phone, you need to sign it with the key. If you can do that, you can switch the boot loader so that it compromises the encryption.
That's what I'm thinking. The FBI makes this big show of going to court in an effort to secure the right to do what? Get access to Apple's key? No, to try to force Apple to build decryption tools. The FBI said it could ask for Apple's signing key... but they didn't. Obviously they already have that? Why would you assume Apple can keep their key secret from agencies that can put insane pressure on any employee they decide to?
No. Assume that all the three letter agencies already have the keys, they just don't want the public to know that. Poor show Russia, that's not how you misdirect the public.
Somebody recently suggested just this sort of thing: https://slashdot.org/comments....
Oh wait. That was me. Only, I didn't suggest a single company benefiting.
I thought she had gained some serious computer security cred?
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSec...
And she's already mentioned this very issue:
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSec...
Net Neutrality is available to anyone with a decent VPN. If Google, Apple, Facebook or Cloudflare or Amazon decide to do it, they have the ability to bring net neutrality back by offering free and easy VPNs. Want to win this fight? We need someone who can afford to run the infrastructure to join the battle. Google started the push to encrypt everywhere, which is half there. Maybe we can get them to take the fight to the next level.
Wow. That kind of comment is a little too familiar. You call learning new skills, constantly updating your understanding of new options incompetence? In my department, if you're not constantly refining your skills, constantly learning more about the systems you use and support and the alternatives available... well that's what we'd call incompetence. Your comment reminds me of two ex-coworkers who I suspect would have shared your perspective. I admit my reactions may be biased as a result, my own viewpoint is likely colored by that designation: ex-coworkers.
I can scarcely imagine what would have happened if I'd just stuck to the things they taught me in college, instead of poking at every corner of each new release or potential configuration of Windows. Showing my age a bit here, but it'd be hard to find a job where my expertise, even just managing my own workstation, is twenty years out of date. I honestly appreciate the reminder though. I do need to get back in the Windows Insiders Fast Ring. I dropped out for stability issues that actually did manage to irritate me, but I do feel like I need to get back in again, just to keep that one step ahead. The BSODs may have raised my blood pressure and cost me a handful of minutes, but I need the occasional reminder that it's important to focus on the learning instead of the irritants.
All that said, it really doesn't matter what Windows version, or even what OS is on my workstation, since I can jump to any of a half dozen various alternatives. (I worked for years with one of my workstations running Linux and never had any trouble doing the work at hand.) We have Windows 7 on hand and can go back to Windows XP in a pinch, but typically when I need something I haven't committed to on my current install, I just remote to one of the workstations (or VMs) with a current stable Windows release. Admittedly, if I couldn't manage my work due to the way I test each new workstation configuration, that'd be incompetent, but it'd be equally incompetent, maybe more so, if I couldn't work without a snowflake configuration on whatever machine that happens to sit in front of me.
What do you think the PCs we buy come with? Seriously.. "just lol"
The AC comments are strong in this thread. I shouldn't let it bother me, but I wonder how they/you keep track? I can't be bothered to look up my AC comments even the same day, let alone keeping up on a thread like this. I'm genuinely curious what techniques you use? Don't let that curb your trolling, just toss in a tip when you talk about my mom or whatever.
Most of my workstations have started out as Windows, or in one exception a Mac. On the Mac I used Windows with VMWare, on the windows workstations, they usually started out dual booting. My first personal workstation was Windows 3.1, which I used to get started in programming. Later I used it to learn about Linux and BSD. I ran it side by side with a Solaris box for a long time until an unfortunate incident with a screwdriver and escaping magic smoke. (My quite young daughter thought it was awesome Dad was setting off fireworks in the living room.)
I always try to get the new versions of Windows at home before they hit RTM and I need to support them at work. Linux is a little more stable; it's rare (bleh again to systemd) to need to learn much new. I recall fondly installing a new CPU and more RAM in my Windows 3.1 PC so I could install Windows 95. I learned about jumpers and motherboard diagrams for that. I'd say that was when I fell in love with computers as a career. I recall installing Red Hat on that same machine later just to learn about alternative OS designs. I'd say that's when I fell in love with computers as a hobby. I was very fortunate to learn enough to incorporate Linux and Unix into my career as well.
On a scale of LFS to Mandrake, how bad was your experience?
I'll be installing Linux when I have a week of downtime.
It takes me a couple months to transition a new workstation to Windows. Each time, I try to learn what the native software options are and whether they can meet my current needs. Where it doesn't, I install or use recommended software in most cases to see if it does what I need (WSL) though I do have exceptions for my personal favorite software in a few instances where I'm just unwilling to learn something new. (EditPlus, GIMP, VLC, Sysinternals, Putty.)
A new install of Linux takes the same process, but it has apt or yum or whatever which speeds things up pretty dramatically. With a new Linux desktop install, I just rarely have to learn too many new things... usually. (Eyeballing you hard here systemd!)
If I have to support any significant sized network, and if it's possible, I'd do Linux desktops everywhere. I'd rather use those admin systems than admin Windows... but I work in a job where I have to support Windows because that's all the core software runs on. As an admin, I can do about anything I need to on Microsoft servers and workstations. It'd be false modesty to say I'm not good at admin on Microsoft system. On the other hand, I have used Linux and various BSDs at home and work (on servers) since the late 90's. I could eliminate Microsoft in our workplace and cut our IT departmental work by maybe 30% if only our primary system ran on Linux. I'd miss some of the AD/DHCP/DNS/DFS stack. I'd miss Excel (running native) and Exchange/Outlook, but honestly, running the alternatives in the cloud or Libre would probably reduce our helpdesk workload after a year or two.
I'm good at my jobs, and whatever systems I admin, I'll learn to be good at. Given the ideal scenario, I could run several thousand workstations with the same effort I'd use for a couple hundred Windows workstations. The scenarios I have been hired to handle haven't been ideal, so I've learned to take advantage of the environments I'm in. I'm good at my jobs because I like to learn. I like tinkering, trying new things, scripting and writing real code. That makes me useful, maybe even it helps toward making me valuable.
On the other hand, my varied experiences and experimenting have made me aware that my own weakness is a desire to try new things. If I were designing the systems for a company responsible for my income, it wouldn't be Linux or Windows or Mac. It'd be PC-BSD on the workstations and AIX on the servers. They're boring. Boring is what I look for in a business network. Ideally, the network will be so stable that IT doesn't spend any time working on the backend systems, and that means boring is the goal. I like Linux because I'm always learning new stuff and I like Windows.. sorta, because I'm always being forced to learn new things. That's why I'm sorry to see AIX take a dip off the top 500, but I can see it; Linux is fun.
Racist.
But interesting to consider. How can anyone look at the actual statistics and not wonder what's wrong?
I have lots of ideas, but I almost can't comment of them. Because just bringing them up is.. well it sounds racist.
Encryption as a race is a good argument. It's weakness is the ignorance of the the general population. You say that anything with a backdoor will be shunned. I counter: Bitlocker.