No, I think you pretty much got it, except I didn't quite go into the disaster scenarios. If some idiot screws up the current keys, these guys get a free vacation to the US to rebuild the key. If it's anything worse we'll (oh my gosh) go back to plain old unsigned DNS.
Actually, if I know C4 and it's detonators right, the electrical charge goes to the small primer explosive, which detonates the whole package. I'd assume the vibrator motor could provide sufficient power, but it may need to trigger a relay to provide power from a larger power source (like a pack of D cell batteries). It makes "what wire do I cut" a lot easier.:)
I love writing paranoid movie plots. I can give the fun details, without having to drag it out to be a feature length film, or even a single television episode.
In my next episode, the secret evil government agency will start kidnapping Slashdot users with low UID's (see, you're safe), and post disinformation on their plans here, so anyone who thinks they know something about a secret government conspiracy can be written off as it being read on Slashdot first.:)
Oh, I'd love to write for someone like them.:) I can come up with all kinds of fun conspiracies, and ways criminals can do things. Talking to friends, I've worked through all kinds of different scenarios for crimes. Not that I'd do them, because I know my luck and I'd get arrested on the way to committing it.:) In the fictional contexts, it doesn't matter if the bad guy gets away or gets caught, I'm still free, and no one gets hurt.
I'd get bored though. Not with writing conspiracies and spy thriller action, but when the bosses come in and say "This episode must include....", and it's boring as shit, I wouldn't want to do it. Nifty thief steals an expensive painting/statue/jewelry from some uber-secure museum. Boring. They come in through an underground passage. They sneak in through a skylight dangling on ropes. They hide in the building until it closes, steal it, and then walk out in the morning like nothing happened. Like I said, it's all been done before. As it is, I already spot huge plot holes in Burn Notice. No good story should have a MacGuffin, Deus ex machina, pathetic plot device, etc, etc, just to make the plot work. "The robber steals the painting, runs out the side door, and someone happened to have left a Bugatti/Ferrari/Lamborghini with the engine running just outside the door. Or worse, a Mini Cooper, and the robber escapes making impossible maneuvers and then ditching the police in a narrow alley.
And dear god don't make me write in where a hacker has to break into a computer to steal some classified information, and the password is the target's dog's name or the name, the name of their kids favorite stuffed animal, or the ex-girlfriend that he's been pining over for years.
And.. no fucking stopping the bomb that's going to destroy the city or all of humanity, at 1 second before detonation by cutting a random wire. No, no, no, no, no and fuck that.
All a working assassination takes is one nutjob with a gun. He doesn't even have to escape, if he's crazy enough. It really doesn't even require a gun, but it's much easier to pop a person than to do it in a whole variety of manual ways. Of course, people look at movies and think of all the other options. "We could plant a pound of C4 under his car, and detonate it with a cell phone." Ya, good luck there, First you have to get the C4 and detonator. Then you have to convert a cell phone to be a trigger. Then there's testing. If you don't test your trigger, how do you know it'll work when the time is right? We all get spam phone calls. One call offering you a free trip to Disney ruins the whole plan. Then you, of cours,e have to plant the charge undetected, and pray that the whole thing works. Way too many places for it to mess up. You'll probably get caught trying to buy the C4 on Craigslist anyways.:)
Kidnapping takes significant planning. You have to get your guy in, and then both of them out without being detected. Then you need somewhere to store him. You gotta feed him, keep him healthy, etc, etc. A dead hostage isn't worth anything. An escaped hostage is not only not worth anything to you, but he'll point the cops right back to you. You have to keep the hostage alive and in custody to make it a viable plan.
All in all, it's easier to let them keep their silly keys and their silly plan. For as much planning as that would take, you could hit the central depository for any major bank chain in a major city, and make a whole lot more profit. Those are a lot easier to find too. Follow the armored trucks. If you're feeling really ballsy, there are the federal reserve banks, and gold reserves. Bring big trucks though if you want the big score, The US has 12 reserve banks, and there are about 8,100 tonnes of gold in them, along with all kinds of other fun commodities. I'd give any plan on those about a 0.1% chance of success.:)
They've never heard of assured continuity. It's a good plan if all other services are ok. If I read it right, the folks need to gather at a known point. That would assume air travel was still viable. We saw that stop during 9/11. Since they're smart cards, I'm assuming it would require the appropriate smart card readers. If the physical locations where they are to assemble aren't accessible, that makes it a bit rough. They mention two US sites as the places to gather, so civil unrest in the US could severely limit travel. While us Americans are very America-centric, I'm sure the rest of the world wouldn't be totally delighted if their Internet services stopped working just because we were having problems.
If it does take 5 of 7 to restore the key, that could be problematic. They named one. I'm sure brute force decryption (i.e., torture) could find out who at least two others are. So if 3 were taken out of the equation, that leaves 4 to carry on. As time goes on, it would be a shame if the cards were lost. Just because you stuck it in the safe doesn't mean that safe will always be the one you use. People move. Offices change. People die. When Joe-key-holder dies, and his coworkers don't realize what the keys are, they could easily end up in a file box marked "Joe's office stuff", and stuck in storage to be forgotten about after a few years of staff churn.
I don't see it as catastrophic. It's about as rough as when we were told "be sure to update your named.root file." Lots of people did it. Lots of people who should have didn't know. Even if you missed it, it didn't really break anything very much.
On 9/11, I had a professor whose reaction was, "eh, it was only a matter of time." Perhaps the idea has occurred to anyone who's played Microsoft flight simulator.
Silly me, I only flew to airports, and buzzed past buildings. I guess it's that whole self preservation instinct still working strong.:) It is fun to fly cross country using nothing but a compass and ground references. That, and no risk of actually crashing.:) I felt silly the first time, I made it all the way from LAX to TPA, and had to go around on my first landing because I misjudged the runway. I always preferred to make my landings on runways, rather than landing on highways.:)
Usually it's not that tough to get info. I always maintained an East coast US phone number, regardless of where I was working. I was always doing work things from my cell phone, like dealing with datacenter folks.
Sometimes in the course of normal work, I'd need to acquire access for a coworker to a site. My name was usually listed as a person authorized to make account changes. If it wasn't, I knew the people who would be. A few times, I called as the owner of the company, added myself to the list of people with site access and then scheduled myself to show up and get an access badge. It didn't matter that I was calling from a cell phone from the wrong side of the country. If those should fail, the good old "I just started work here yesterday, I was told to do this..." got it done. A few places wanted emails from authorized individuals to make changes. Oohh, spoofing an email, that's real tough to do.
From: William Gates
To: HR
Subject: JW Smythe
JW Smythe has been hired to work in the IT department. Provide him all the required credentials so he can begin work on August 2, 2010.
BG
It was easier where I knew all the right addresses, and the writing styles of the authorized folks. That, and I wouldn't get in trouble, since they actually did tell me to do it, even though the third party didn't know.
I haven't been to a Defcon yet. Shit always comes up. But, don't they still take cash at the door? Do you have to provide a photo ID? I've been to several conventions where I observed the people ahead of me and when they don't ask for an ID, I just give a fake name and pay cash. I used to have a bunch of ID badges for "JW Smythe" hanging on my office wall (when I had an office) from various places. I don't feel it's necessary for every schmuck in the world to know who I really am.
Sometimes that info comes from places you'd rather it not. I got a letter a couple years ago from the VA (United States Veterans Affairs). I was in the military for about a month, almost 20 years ago. (It was a preexisting disqualifying medical condition, for anyone who really wonders.) They sent it to a friends house where I frequently got mail. It stated that my personal information may have been compromised due to a breach of the VA computers. I had seen the news story about it about a month before and didn't think it would apply to me. It's so comforting that I was in a system I shouldn't have been in, and they lost my information to unknown parties, who could be doing almost anything with it. Since they knew a valid address for me, nowhere near where I lived when they collected the data, I have to assume they kept addresses updated from another source.
Ya, I'd rather not do business with the VA, but apparently they know about me.
Sometimes I wonder about banks that I've done business with in the past. Some have closed and merged so many times, I have no clue who they are now. A friend of mine got a nasty letter from a bank a couple years ago. He had closed his account with them over 20 years before that. Apparently when they merged with other banks, to fluff their "account holders" numbers, they reopened closed accounts. After the mergers, they started assessing fees to the accounts. He was now on the hook for all kinds of fees they assessed the closed account plus interest. When he tried to straighten it out, the bank couldn't find the record, other than the fact that he owed the money. He still gets calls from collections every once in a while asking for the money.
[ignores you like a homeless guy asking for a dollar for more booze and walks away]
Good try.
"Excuse me sir, I'm with the [state] joint anticrime taskforce." [flashes official looking id printed up not long before] "We're performing random checks on the citizens in this area. May I see a photo ID?"
[citizen hands him his drivers license].
"Thank you Mr " [reads last name from ID] ". We've already had several instances today where criminals have attempted to run when asked for their identification. Have a wonderful day. We appreciate your cooperation."
His middle name was Henry. He was born October 28, 1955.
I know, in the game you're not allowed to pretend to be from a government agency. It just made this easier. If you're digging for personal information, you just have to craft "who" you are to be something where they'd want to hand over the information without asking too many questions.
Understanding accents has helped me a lot. Since then, I've made friends with people from around the world, and the only time I have to ask them about something they said is when they are talking about something local, or using a phrase I'm unfamiliar with. For example, I was chatting online with a coworker on a project. He didn't believe his English was good enough to talk on the phone, so for the first few years we spoke via chat and email exclusively. He was talking about what he was eating for dinner one night, and told me that he was eating cancer. I asked him to clarify, and he said "like the astrological sign." I thought he meant crabs, and sent him a link to a picture of a crab. He said "no. cancer." and then sent me a link to picture of a crawfish. We don't all call a simple thing like a little crawfish the same thing.
I guess the difference was, we both wanted to understand each other, and we both had an opportunity to learn.
I was at a bar around Christmas time. There was a guy from England there (an oddity where I live), with a very thick accent. He was pretty drunk, so no one else could understand a word he said. We had a good time talking, and I had the opportunity to laugh my ass off as he made fun of other people in the bar that couldn't understand a word he said.:) It felt really weird translating English to English for people talking to him though.
What happened to the "customer is always right" OR "deserves the best service possible?"
Oh, that was replaced several years ago with "protect our bottom line" and "cover your ass".
No they don't. A vehicle does not have to stop and allow a pedestrian to cross unless there is a marked crossing.
But you will have to stop and wash the blood off if you don't. No one likes to drive around with a blood stained car, although it may be a great deterrent for anyone else to walk across in front of you.
Hmmmm.. I think this Halloween, I'll pick up some vinyl decals of bloody hand prints and other assorted nastiness and stick those on the front of my car. Good clean fun for the whole year, and it won't get me a vehicular manslaughter charge either.:)
While I agree that overseas support is more often than not hard to work with, we have to remember some of those experiences we've had here as well, such as a country boy with a heavy accent who isn't able to understand what we're saying.
Way back when, I had something similar happen. I was working in tech support for a small hosting provider in 1996. Our office hours were 8am to 6pm Eastern. I would show up late, and frequently work all kinds of ungodly late hours. That's the kind of person I am. Noon to midnight 5 days a week is perfect for me. I was paid on salary, so the bosses didn't mind at all.
We were a US based company, with primarily US customers, and we only really marketed to US customers. The phone rarely rang after about 8pm, so it gave me a great opportunity to catch up on the support email for the whole department. When the folks came in at 7:30am to 8am, they'd find the support queue just about empty. There were the occasional emails that came in between midnight and 8am, but not many.
So at about midnight one night, the phone rang. I was just about done with everything so I answered it. It was a nice guy with a very thick accent. He was in New Zealand. He'd tried every day for weeks to get someone on the phone, and never managed to do it. He had gone back and forth with support via email, but the morning folks couldn't figure out his problem. It was a little difficult. I have a plain midwestern type accent. Luckily I watched too much TV as a kid, so I picked up the midwestern accent instead of the local drawl. Since two of the 5 stations we could pick up on the antenna were PBS, I also watched a lot of BBC shows. That gave me a pretty good ear for understanding accents. His accent sounded like a mixture of what Americans know to be Australian from TV and movies, and a deep Southern US drawl. I had to speak a little slowly for him, and sometimes I asked him to repeat things for me, but we got through his problem fairly quickly. Weeks of email versus a few minutes of talking to someone who actually knew what they were doing made a world of difference for him.
I feel sorry for him, if he has to call an Indian call center now for anything.
You failed to say 'why' and this is absolutely a non-obvious statement. Imagine you're buying strawberries off of the side of the road, adjacent to the farm where they were grown. Now imagine those same strawberries being sold to you on the international space station. Still 'worth that same amount everywhere'? If not with commodities, like food, then why with labor?
That was a bad argument. Strawberries on the ISS are free to the consumer (the astronaut).
For tech support, the company looks at the bottom line. I expect the same level of tech support (i.e., good support), regardless of where I call. The average pay for tech support in India is 250,000 INR ($5,400 USD). Average pay for tech support in the US is $42,600. The level of support is lower, but they'll answer the phone and read from a script with the best of 'em, in at least broken English. The land is cheaper to build their office buildings on. The liability is moved off shore (They broke it? Tough. Sue the Indian corp.).
It's great if you are the corporation, since your profits increase, but it's lowering the satisfaction of your customers. It's all fun and games, until it starts to effect the economy. Eventually due to the outsourcing, companies will find that their consumer base can't afford their products, since they don't have jobs any more. Oh. That's already happened.
Another friend just found out that his department is going away, probably offshored. Over the last couple years, it's gone from most of the people I know being in the middle to senior levels of companies have found themselves out of work. Only only one has gotten back into real work, and even that is dependent on the survival of the company. Basically it's a "If the company survives, you'll have a great job." That's not the reliability that most of us want or need.
I had a strict schedule for 4 days on the road. Three hours of fucking around with a call center in India was not acceptable. Rather than being done at 11pm, I wasn't finished until 2am. I had a 3 hour drive ahead of me to get to the next site, which didn't happen on time.
There's very little about the call center being in India that lends to your situation. Don't be so bigoted. If they were Americans with the wrong address and in another location you still would have experienced what happens when you don't buffer your travel schedule.
I guess there's a lot more to explain about it, but it would take a lot more writing. Basically, to get access to the facility, it's all coordinated through the India call center, regardless of which facility it is. It's their job to coordinate between me and the facility to get me in. They wouldn't give me the direct number for the facility. They wouldn't initiate a 3 way call between me and the facility. I specifically asked to talk to someone at the facility, and they wouldn't do it.
I had allowed for some buffers in the trip, but due to scheduling with all parties it ended up being pretty close. I was suppose to leave their facility, do something else, and then sleep. Pushing the second task off until the next morning really messed things up. It wasn't anything that lost any clients, it just became a pain in the ass. I like to be on time, and get things done on time. A site visit to an established site for our company should be an easy thing. I usually allocate a whole day to a site visit for a new site, because anything and everything will go wrong. Or as I've told people, regardless of how well you plan a new site install, it'll all go wrong. They'll have installed the wrong racks, wrong power, no power, wrong connectivity, and usually take hours to bring connectivity up, even though they assured us it was already up.
From what I saw, the laptop wasn't extortion (coercion or threat). He conned her. She was dumb and fell for it.
If he had been in the US, there could have been charges. The most she can really hope for is a civil resolution with Dell. I'm sure they'll pass the buck to "Dell India", a subsidiary of Dell, Inc. Most companies are very careful to segregate parts so the company as a whole cannot be held liable for infractions by a part. Usually it's set up so a partition of the company can go bankrupt and not disrupt the entire company.
I wish her the best of luck. Suing someone in another country can be a pain in the ass. I worked at a company where we had a partnership with a foreign company. We shipped tens of thousands of dollars of equipment over. Once it was all set up and operational, they cut ties to us and used our equipment as their own. Our lawyers retained local lawyers in their jurisdiction, and it slowly made its way into court. We were warned "Because you are a foreign company, they will keep this tied up in court years, and you will still lose regardless of the proof that the equipment is yours." They pursued it anyways.
I worked there for several more years, and when I left we still hadn't seen our equipment. By then, it was all horribly outdated, but there was one particular piece of equipment that I would have liked to get back (a Sony PTZ camera). It would have been cheaper and easier to just buy a new one. The bosses wanted everything back, because it didn't belong to the other company.
Regardless of the local standard of living, they are being taken advantage of. If the job is worth a fixed amount, it should be worth that amount everywhere. Just because it can be outsourced to another country (India) for 10% or less of another country (USA), it isn't right to pay the lower rate.
The baseline pay rate should never be lowered. It should only be increased for areas of higher cost of living. Any company outsourcing knows that they can't pay the same rate in another country.
I'm still a firm believer that resources should be allocated to the area where they are provided. If you're providing service to a US customer, the resources for that product should be in the US.
A long time ago, I was dealing with a US cell provider. I'm on the east coast of the US. My support calls were always routed to the east coast of the US. I called after hours (local time), and did get routed to the west coast. The tech who answered the phone was a bit surprised and said "I usually don't get calls from over there." Routing calls outside of the local area should be the exception, not the rule. When I make a support call during normal working hours, I should be able to get a local technician on the phone.
I was dealing with IBM Managed Hosting Services. Every initial call was routed to India, regardless of where I was really at. I was doing a site visit after normal hours to work on a few machines. I flew into Atlanta, and drove my rental car to the address that they provided me. The building was locked up tight. I called, and they told me the building was accessible, even though my hand was on the door, and it was locked. I asked to speak with someone on the site, and they (India) said they'd call and then call me back.
Over the next hour, while I was standing outside in 40 degree weather with my gear watching homeless people walking by, I made several calls back. After my fourth call, they stopped answering my calls. All I could do was leave voicemails. My tone went from friendly, to aggravated, to downright pissed off.
Finally, I got a call from the Atlanta data center. They said "oh, we saw you on the security cameras, but didn't know who you were." Well dressed guy with a laptop bag and box of gear, at the time they were expecting me, who would have thought I was there to do work.
As it turned out, there were only two people in India handling the phones. They had given me the wrong address. Well, according to them it was right. The "correct" place to go was next door. To access the facility, I had to go to an unmarked door next door, push the buzzer to be allowed in. I'd then walk through a closed mall to another unmarked door in the back. From there, I'd be escorted around the corner to an elevator, up three stories, to a nondescript security desk. That was the first place where a human was sitting. From there, it was the normal datacenter access crap.
I had a strict schedule for 4 days on the road. Three hours of fucking around with a call center in India was not acceptable. Rather than being done at 11pm, I wasn't finished until 2am. I had a 3 hour drive ahead of me to get to the next site, which didn't happen on time. Tired, I parked in a rest area in the middle of nowhere and took a two hour nap. Cutting a few corners through the trip (mostly not sleeping) got me finished all my tasks, and made it in time for my return flight.
Another time, again with IBM's call center in India, the girl on the phone was amazingly broken english. Like, I didn't know how they put her on the phone. It took about 5 minutes to explain the name of our company (simple English words, spelled normally), and then she asked for the "internet protocol address of the host" (said in very broken English), we told her. She didn't understand numbers in English. How exactly do you get on the phone to do support for the US, when you can't understand English?
She's a classic scam victim. Obviously someone with extra cash who can be exploited. It's sad, but... well... people can't be stupid enough to fall for these scams.
They could have avoided the curve entirely by using a belt. Think like a conveyor belt. A variable speed belt sander on an incline would have probably achieved exactly what they needed. It would have been better to make a custom rig with three spindles and a wide belt. One spindle would be attached to a variable speed motor. The second spindle would just be a second fixed point. The third spindle would be a tensioner to ensure your flat moving surface is still flat.
Physicists shouldn't do tasks best left up to engineers.
I saw a video of a prototype of that once several years ago. It was the BMW "Gina". The whole skin of the car was a stretchable fabric, which did away with most of the body panel seams. Neat idea. Too expensive to produce.
It's silly to think that a car that changes shape is a good idea. It's easier for them to produce an aerodynamic car which performs well at the intended max speed, yet leaves enough room inside for the passengers. Why would you want to build a car with a suboptimal aerodynamic profile, for it to just change to the optimal profile when driving at high speed? It's not like they're building cars that need to transit the sound barrier or something, and the body does not provide lift (hopefully). Something like an F-14 needed to be able to change its configuration for low and high air speeds, but obviously that isn't necessary since most supersonic aircraft don't do it.
I think he may have been. I'm not sure he had to expand on it that much just to say "My family and I are organ donors."
Well, it did seem that he wanted to reassure himself that through organ donation he would live forever. Good luck with that one. I already know most of my inner parts are well pickled or otherwise preserved. If I die, I'll leave a beautiful corpse. Take what you want, leave the rest for the worms.
If I recall correctly, one of the large sites I worked for had about 10Gb to 15Gb online at any given time for one site. It was served off of cheap servers with IDE drives. But, since there were millions of daily visitors (somewhere between 4 million on a slow day, to over 8 millon on normal high days, and peaks well above that), the bandwidth costs were huge in comparison to anything else.
Some places, the content itself is more expensive than the bandwidth. Sometimes folks go nuts with the hardware, so a $50k server cost more than their content and bandwidth bills.
At one place, the cost of the staff well overwhelmed the cost of everything else. It didn't take a lot of space nor bandwidth, but it took a lot of people to keep it working something resembling properly.
In California, or at least Los Angeles, if a pedestrian looks like he MIGHT cross, he has the right of way. Some areas, they love handing out tickets to drivers for that. It doesn't matter that the pedestrian was crossing, it was just the fact he could have.
I'd spend smoke breaks outside on the sidewalk. I had to remember not to stand too close to the edge of the sidewalk, because I'd see cars come to dramatic stops, even if I was just walking around. I was warned by locals, "if it looks like he could put his foot off the sidewalk, stop or you WILL get a ticket.
Myself, I prefer to think of "right of way" rules as protection of the paint on my car. If there's a pedestrian walking out in front of me, he's going to get his blood all over my nice paint.:) But on the other had, as a pedestrian, I won't walk out in front of a moving car because my 155 pounds of flesh isn't much of a fair fight against a few thousand pounds of steel, regardless of what the law may be. I prefer to keep all my parts pretty much where they started. It seems in LA, the "I could sue and win" mentality overrides the "self preservation" instinct. I'd rather keep my fleshy bits intact than to win a few thousand in court as a vegetable.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I think you pretty much got it, except I didn't quite go into the disaster scenarios. If some idiot screws up the current keys, these guys get a free vacation to the US to rebuild the key. If it's anything worse we'll (oh my gosh) go back to plain old unsigned DNS.
Actually, if I know C4 and it's detonators right, the electrical charge goes to the small primer explosive, which detonates the whole package. I'd assume the vibrator motor could provide sufficient power, but it may need to trigger a relay to provide power from a larger power source (like a pack of D cell batteries). It makes "what wire do I cut" a lot easier. :)
I love writing paranoid movie plots. I can give the fun details, without having to drag it out to be a feature length film, or even a single television episode.
In my next episode, the secret evil government agency will start kidnapping Slashdot users with low UID's (see, you're safe), and post disinformation on their plans here, so anyone who thinks they know something about a secret government conspiracy can be written off as it being read on Slashdot first. :)
Oh, I'd love to write for someone like them. :) I can come up with all kinds of fun conspiracies, and ways criminals can do things. Talking to friends, I've worked through all kinds of different scenarios for crimes. Not that I'd do them, because I know my luck and I'd get arrested on the way to committing it. :) In the fictional contexts, it doesn't matter if the bad guy gets away or gets caught, I'm still free, and no one gets hurt.
I'd get bored though. Not with writing conspiracies and spy thriller action, but when the bosses come in and say "This episode must include ....", and it's boring as shit, I wouldn't want to do it. Nifty thief steals an expensive painting/statue/jewelry from some uber-secure museum. Boring. They come in through an underground passage. They sneak in through a skylight dangling on ropes. They hide in the building until it closes, steal it, and then walk out in the morning like nothing happened. Like I said, it's all been done before. As it is, I already spot huge plot holes in Burn Notice. No good story should have a MacGuffin, Deus ex machina, pathetic plot device, etc, etc, just to make the plot work. "The robber steals the painting, runs out the side door, and someone happened to have left a Bugatti/Ferrari/Lamborghini with the engine running just outside the door. Or worse, a Mini Cooper, and the robber escapes making impossible maneuvers and then ditching the police in a narrow alley.
And dear god don't make me write in where a hacker has to break into a computer to steal some classified information, and the password is the target's dog's name or the name, the name of their kids favorite stuffed animal, or the ex-girlfriend that he's been pining over for years.
And .. no fucking stopping the bomb that's going to destroy the city or all of humanity, at 1 second before detonation by cutting a random wire. No, no, no, no, no and fuck that.
But, that's half the fun. Damn.
Assassination is cheap. Kidnapping is expensive.
All a working assassination takes is one nutjob with a gun. He doesn't even have to escape, if he's crazy enough. It really doesn't even require a gun, but it's much easier to pop a person than to do it in a whole variety of manual ways. Of course, people look at movies and think of all the other options. "We could plant a pound of C4 under his car, and detonate it with a cell phone." Ya, good luck there, First you have to get the C4 and detonator. Then you have to convert a cell phone to be a trigger. Then there's testing. If you don't test your trigger, how do you know it'll work when the time is right? We all get spam phone calls. One call offering you a free trip to Disney ruins the whole plan. Then you, of cours,e have to plant the charge undetected, and pray that the whole thing works. Way too many places for it to mess up. You'll probably get caught trying to buy the C4 on Craigslist anyways. :)
Kidnapping takes significant planning. You have to get your guy in, and then both of them out without being detected. Then you need somewhere to store him. You gotta feed him, keep him healthy, etc, etc. A dead hostage isn't worth anything. An escaped hostage is not only not worth anything to you, but he'll point the cops right back to you. You have to keep the hostage alive and in custody to make it a viable plan.
All in all, it's easier to let them keep their silly keys and their silly plan. For as much planning as that would take, you could hit the central depository for any major bank chain in a major city, and make a whole lot more profit. Those are a lot easier to find too. Follow the armored trucks. If you're feeling really ballsy, there are the federal reserve banks, and gold reserves. Bring big trucks though if you want the big score, The US has 12 reserve banks, and there are about 8,100 tonnes of gold in them, along with all kinds of other fun commodities. I'd give any plan on those about a 0.1% chance of success. :)
Yup. Poor disaster planning.
They've never heard of assured continuity. It's a good plan if all other services are ok. If I read it right, the folks need to gather at a known point. That would assume air travel was still viable. We saw that stop during 9/11. Since they're smart cards, I'm assuming it would require the appropriate smart card readers. If the physical locations where they are to assemble aren't accessible, that makes it a bit rough. They mention two US sites as the places to gather, so civil unrest in the US could severely limit travel. While us Americans are very America-centric, I'm sure the rest of the world wouldn't be totally delighted if their Internet services stopped working just because we were having problems.
If it does take 5 of 7 to restore the key, that could be problematic. They named one. I'm sure brute force decryption (i.e., torture) could find out who at least two others are. So if 3 were taken out of the equation, that leaves 4 to carry on. As time goes on, it would be a shame if the cards were lost. Just because you stuck it in the safe doesn't mean that safe will always be the one you use. People move. Offices change. People die. When Joe-key-holder dies, and his coworkers don't realize what the keys are, they could easily end up in a file box marked "Joe's office stuff", and stuck in storage to be forgotten about after a few years of staff churn.
I don't see it as catastrophic. It's about as rough as when we were told "be sure to update your named.root file." Lots of people did it. Lots of people who should have didn't know. Even if you missed it, it didn't really break anything very much.
Silly me, I only flew to airports, and buzzed past buildings. I guess it's that whole self preservation instinct still working strong. :) It is fun to fly cross country using nothing but a compass and ground references. That, and no risk of actually crashing. :) I felt silly the first time, I made it all the way from LAX to TPA, and had to go around on my first landing because I misjudged the runway. I always preferred to make my landings on runways, rather than landing on highways. :)
Usually it's not that tough to get info. I always maintained an East coast US phone number, regardless of where I was working. I was always doing work things from my cell phone, like dealing with datacenter folks.
Sometimes in the course of normal work, I'd need to acquire access for a coworker to a site. My name was usually listed as a person authorized to make account changes. If it wasn't, I knew the people who would be. A few times, I called as the owner of the company, added myself to the list of people with site access and then scheduled myself to show up and get an access badge. It didn't matter that I was calling from a cell phone from the wrong side of the country. If those should fail, the good old "I just started work here yesterday, I was told to do this..." got it done. A few places wanted emails from authorized individuals to make changes. Oohh, spoofing an email, that's real tough to do.
It was easier where I knew all the right addresses, and the writing styles of the authorized folks. That, and I wouldn't get in trouble, since they actually did tell me to do it, even though the third party didn't know.
I haven't been to a Defcon yet. Shit always comes up. But, don't they still take cash at the door? Do you have to provide a photo ID? I've been to several conventions where I observed the people ahead of me and when they don't ask for an ID, I just give a fake name and pay cash. I used to have a bunch of ID badges for "JW Smythe" hanging on my office wall (when I had an office) from various places. I don't feel it's necessary for every schmuck in the world to know who I really am.
Sometimes that info comes from places you'd rather it not. I got a letter a couple years ago from the VA (United States Veterans Affairs). I was in the military for about a month, almost 20 years ago. (It was a preexisting disqualifying medical condition, for anyone who really wonders.) They sent it to a friends house where I frequently got mail. It stated that my personal information may have been compromised due to a breach of the VA computers. I had seen the news story about it about a month before and didn't think it would apply to me. It's so comforting that I was in a system I shouldn't have been in, and they lost my information to unknown parties, who could be doing almost anything with it. Since they knew a valid address for me, nowhere near where I lived when they collected the data, I have to assume they kept addresses updated from another source.
Ya, I'd rather not do business with the VA, but apparently they know about me.
Sometimes I wonder about banks that I've done business with in the past. Some have closed and merged so many times, I have no clue who they are now. A friend of mine got a nasty letter from a bank a couple years ago. He had closed his account with them over 20 years before that. Apparently when they merged with other banks, to fluff their "account holders" numbers, they reopened closed accounts. After the mergers, they started assessing fees to the accounts. He was now on the hook for all kinds of fees they assessed the closed account plus interest. When he tried to straighten it out, the bank couldn't find the record, other than the fact that he owed the money. He still gets calls from collections every once in a while asking for the money.
[ignores you like a homeless guy asking for a dollar for more booze and walks away]
Good try.
"Excuse me sir, I'm with the [state] joint anticrime taskforce." [flashes official looking id printed up not long before] "We're performing random checks on the citizens in this area. May I see a photo ID?"
[citizen hands him his drivers license].
"Thank you Mr " [reads last name from ID] ". We've already had several instances today where criminals have attempted to run when asked for their identification. Have a wonderful day. We appreciate your cooperation."
His middle name was Henry. He was born October 28, 1955.
I know, in the game you're not allowed to pretend to be from a government agency. It just made this easier. If you're digging for personal information, you just have to craft "who" you are to be something where they'd want to hand over the information without asking too many questions.
Understanding accents has helped me a lot. Since then, I've made friends with people from around the world, and the only time I have to ask them about something they said is when they are talking about something local, or using a phrase I'm unfamiliar with. For example, I was chatting online with a coworker on a project. He didn't believe his English was good enough to talk on the phone, so for the first few years we spoke via chat and email exclusively. He was talking about what he was eating for dinner one night, and told me that he was eating cancer. I asked him to clarify, and he said "like the astrological sign." I thought he meant crabs, and sent him a link to a picture of a crab. He said "no. cancer." and then sent me a link to picture of a crawfish. We don't all call a simple thing like a little crawfish the same thing.
I guess the difference was, we both wanted to understand each other, and we both had an opportunity to learn.
I was at a bar around Christmas time. There was a guy from England there (an oddity where I live), with a very thick accent. He was pretty drunk, so no one else could understand a word he said. We had a good time talking, and I had the opportunity to laugh my ass off as he made fun of other people in the bar that couldn't understand a word he said. :) It felt really weird translating English to English for people talking to him though.
Oh, that was replaced several years ago with "protect our bottom line" and "cover your ass".
But you will have to stop and wash the blood off if you don't. No one likes to drive around with a blood stained car, although it may be a great deterrent for anyone else to walk across in front of you.
Hmmmm.. I think this Halloween, I'll pick up some vinyl decals of bloody hand prints and other assorted nastiness and stick those on the front of my car. Good clean fun for the whole year, and it won't get me a vehicular manslaughter charge either. :)
Way back when, I had something similar happen. I was working in tech support for a small hosting provider in 1996. Our office hours were 8am to 6pm Eastern. I would show up late, and frequently work all kinds of ungodly late hours. That's the kind of person I am. Noon to midnight 5 days a week is perfect for me. I was paid on salary, so the bosses didn't mind at all.
We were a US based company, with primarily US customers, and we only really marketed to US customers. The phone rarely rang after about 8pm, so it gave me a great opportunity to catch up on the support email for the whole department. When the folks came in at 7:30am to 8am, they'd find the support queue just about empty. There were the occasional emails that came in between midnight and 8am, but not many.
So at about midnight one night, the phone rang. I was just about done with everything so I answered it. It was a nice guy with a very thick accent. He was in New Zealand. He'd tried every day for weeks to get someone on the phone, and never managed to do it. He had gone back and forth with support via email, but the morning folks couldn't figure out his problem. It was a little difficult. I have a plain midwestern type accent. Luckily I watched too much TV as a kid, so I picked up the midwestern accent instead of the local drawl. Since two of the 5 stations we could pick up on the antenna were PBS, I also watched a lot of BBC shows. That gave me a pretty good ear for understanding accents. His accent sounded like a mixture of what Americans know to be Australian from TV and movies, and a deep Southern US drawl. I had to speak a little slowly for him, and sometimes I asked him to repeat things for me, but we got through his problem fairly quickly. Weeks of email versus a few minutes of talking to someone who actually knew what they were doing made a world of difference for him.
I feel sorry for him, if he has to call an Indian call center now for anything.
That was a bad argument. Strawberries on the ISS are free to the consumer (the astronaut).
For tech support, the company looks at the bottom line. I expect the same level of tech support (i.e., good support), regardless of where I call. The average pay for tech support in India is 250,000 INR ($5,400 USD). Average pay for tech support in the US is $42,600. The level of support is lower, but they'll answer the phone and read from a script with the best of 'em, in at least broken English. The land is cheaper to build their office buildings on. The liability is moved off shore (They broke it? Tough. Sue the Indian corp.).
It's great if you are the corporation, since your profits increase, but it's lowering the satisfaction of your customers. It's all fun and games, until it starts to effect the economy. Eventually due to the outsourcing, companies will find that their consumer base can't afford their products, since they don't have jobs any more. Oh. That's already happened.
Another friend just found out that his department is going away, probably offshored. Over the last couple years, it's gone from most of the people I know being in the middle to senior levels of companies have found themselves out of work. Only only one has gotten back into real work, and even that is dependent on the survival of the company. Basically it's a "If the company survives, you'll have a great job." That's not the reliability that most of us want or need.
I guess there's a lot more to explain about it, but it would take a lot more writing. Basically, to get access to the facility, it's all coordinated through the India call center, regardless of which facility it is. It's their job to coordinate between me and the facility to get me in. They wouldn't give me the direct number for the facility. They wouldn't initiate a 3 way call between me and the facility. I specifically asked to talk to someone at the facility, and they wouldn't do it.
I had allowed for some buffers in the trip, but due to scheduling with all parties it ended up being pretty close. I was suppose to leave their facility, do something else, and then sleep. Pushing the second task off until the next morning really messed things up. It wasn't anything that lost any clients, it just became a pain in the ass. I like to be on time, and get things done on time. A site visit to an established site for our company should be an easy thing. I usually allocate a whole day to a site visit for a new site, because anything and everything will go wrong. Or as I've told people, regardless of how well you plan a new site install, it'll all go wrong. They'll have installed the wrong racks, wrong power, no power, wrong connectivity, and usually take hours to bring connectivity up, even though they assured us it was already up.
Which part? "I trusted him", "Dell technician" or just "Dell"?
From what I saw, the laptop wasn't extortion (coercion or threat). He conned her. She was dumb and fell for it.
If he had been in the US, there could have been charges. The most she can really hope for is a civil resolution with Dell. I'm sure they'll pass the buck to "Dell India", a subsidiary of Dell, Inc. Most companies are very careful to segregate parts so the company as a whole cannot be held liable for infractions by a part. Usually it's set up so a partition of the company can go bankrupt and not disrupt the entire company.
I wish her the best of luck. Suing someone in another country can be a pain in the ass. I worked at a company where we had a partnership with a foreign company. We shipped tens of thousands of dollars of equipment over. Once it was all set up and operational, they cut ties to us and used our equipment as their own. Our lawyers retained local lawyers in their jurisdiction, and it slowly made its way into court. We were warned "Because you are a foreign company, they will keep this tied up in court years, and you will still lose regardless of the proof that the equipment is yours." They pursued it anyways.
I worked there for several more years, and when I left we still hadn't seen our equipment. By then, it was all horribly outdated, but there was one particular piece of equipment that I would have liked to get back (a Sony PTZ camera). It would have been cheaper and easier to just buy a new one. The bosses wanted everything back, because it didn't belong to the other company.
Regardless of the local standard of living, they are being taken advantage of. If the job is worth a fixed amount, it should be worth that amount everywhere. Just because it can be outsourced to another country (India) for 10% or less of another country (USA), it isn't right to pay the lower rate.
The baseline pay rate should never be lowered. It should only be increased for areas of higher cost of living. Any company outsourcing knows that they can't pay the same rate in another country.
I'm still a firm believer that resources should be allocated to the area where they are provided. If you're providing service to a US customer, the resources for that product should be in the US.
A long time ago, I was dealing with a US cell provider. I'm on the east coast of the US. My support calls were always routed to the east coast of the US. I called after hours (local time), and did get routed to the west coast. The tech who answered the phone was a bit surprised and said "I usually don't get calls from over there." Routing calls outside of the local area should be the exception, not the rule. When I make a support call during normal working hours, I should be able to get a local technician on the phone.
I was dealing with IBM Managed Hosting Services. Every initial call was routed to India, regardless of where I was really at. I was doing a site visit after normal hours to work on a few machines. I flew into Atlanta, and drove my rental car to the address that they provided me. The building was locked up tight. I called, and they told me the building was accessible, even though my hand was on the door, and it was locked. I asked to speak with someone on the site, and they (India) said they'd call and then call me back.
Over the next hour, while I was standing outside in 40 degree weather with my gear watching homeless people walking by, I made several calls back. After my fourth call, they stopped answering my calls. All I could do was leave voicemails. My tone went from friendly, to aggravated, to downright pissed off.
Finally, I got a call from the Atlanta data center. They said "oh, we saw you on the security cameras, but didn't know who you were." Well dressed guy with a laptop bag and box of gear, at the time they were expecting me, who would have thought I was there to do work.
As it turned out, there were only two people in India handling the phones. They had given me the wrong address. Well, according to them it was right. The "correct" place to go was next door. To access the facility, I had to go to an unmarked door next door, push the buzzer to be allowed in. I'd then walk through a closed mall to another unmarked door in the back. From there, I'd be escorted around the corner to an elevator, up three stories, to a nondescript security desk. That was the first place where a human was sitting. From there, it was the normal datacenter access crap.
I had a strict schedule for 4 days on the road. Three hours of fucking around with a call center in India was not acceptable. Rather than being done at 11pm, I wasn't finished until 2am. I had a 3 hour drive ahead of me to get to the next site, which didn't happen on time. Tired, I parked in a rest area in the middle of nowhere and took a two hour nap. Cutting a few corners through the trip (mostly not sleeping) got me finished all my tasks, and made it in time for my return flight.
Another time, again with IBM's call center in India, the girl on the phone was amazingly broken english. Like, I didn't know how they put her on the phone. It took about 5 minutes to explain the name of our company (simple English words, spelled normally), and then she asked for the "internet protocol address of the host" (said in very broken English), we told her. She didn't understand numbers in English. How exactly do you get on the phone to do support for the US, when you can't understand English?
[rant mode off]
She's a classic scam victim. Obviously someone with extra cash who can be exploited. It's sad, but ... well ... people can't be stupid enough to fall for these scams.
They could have avoided the curve entirely by using a belt. Think like a conveyor belt. A variable speed belt sander on an incline would have probably achieved exactly what they needed. It would have been better to make a custom rig with three spindles and a wide belt. One spindle would be attached to a variable speed motor. The second spindle would just be a second fixed point. The third spindle would be a tensioner to ensure your flat moving surface is still flat.
Physicists shouldn't do tasks best left up to engineers.
I saw a video of a prototype of that once several years ago. It was the BMW "Gina". The whole skin of the car was a stretchable fabric, which did away with most of the body panel seams. Neat idea. Too expensive to produce.
It's silly to think that a car that changes shape is a good idea. It's easier for them to produce an aerodynamic car which performs well at the intended max speed, yet leaves enough room inside for the passengers. Why would you want to build a car with a suboptimal aerodynamic profile, for it to just change to the optimal profile when driving at high speed? It's not like they're building cars that need to transit the sound barrier or something, and the body does not provide lift (hopefully). Something like an F-14 needed to be able to change its configuration for low and high air speeds, but obviously that isn't necessary since most supersonic aircraft don't do it.
I think he may have been. I'm not sure he had to expand on it that much just to say "My family and I are organ donors."
Well, it did seem that he wanted to reassure himself that through organ donation he would live forever. Good luck with that one. I already know most of my inner parts are well pickled or otherwise preserved. If I die, I'll leave a beautiful corpse. Take what you want, leave the rest for the worms.
TCO is very dependent on what you're doing.
If I recall correctly, one of the large sites I worked for had about 10Gb to 15Gb online at any given time for one site. It was served off of cheap servers with IDE drives. But, since there were millions of daily visitors (somewhere between 4 million on a slow day, to over 8 millon on normal high days, and peaks well above that), the bandwidth costs were huge in comparison to anything else.
Some places, the content itself is more expensive than the bandwidth. Sometimes folks go nuts with the hardware, so a $50k server cost more than their content and bandwidth bills.
At one place, the cost of the staff well overwhelmed the cost of everything else. It didn't take a lot of space nor bandwidth, but it took a lot of people to keep it working something resembling properly.
In California, or at least Los Angeles, if a pedestrian looks like he MIGHT cross, he has the right of way. Some areas, they love handing out tickets to drivers for that. It doesn't matter that the pedestrian was crossing, it was just the fact he could have.
I'd spend smoke breaks outside on the sidewalk. I had to remember not to stand too close to the edge of the sidewalk, because I'd see cars come to dramatic stops, even if I was just walking around. I was warned by locals, "if it looks like he could put his foot off the sidewalk, stop or you WILL get a ticket.
Myself, I prefer to think of "right of way" rules as protection of the paint on my car. If there's a pedestrian walking out in front of me, he's going to get his blood all over my nice paint. :) But on the other had, as a pedestrian, I won't walk out in front of a moving car because my 155 pounds of flesh isn't much of a fair fight against a few thousand pounds of steel, regardless of what the law may be. I prefer to keep all my parts pretty much where they started. It seems in LA, the "I could sue and win" mentality overrides the "self preservation" instinct. I'd rather keep my fleshy bits intact than to win a few thousand in court as a vegetable.