Encryption is like locking your front door. It make keep out the neighbors. It make keep out the twerp up the street who lusts after your stereo. It may even keep out a beginning burgular. However, you wouldn't keep an original Van Gough in your living room and expect that lock to keep out a cat burgular intent on stealing your really valuable bit of art.
p>If I devote a big enough cluster to cracking your encryption, I can crack it in a relatively short period of time. Computing power is such that none of the encryption algorythms are safe from being cracked within a few hours (days at most) by a REALLY determined person or group with deep enough pockets.
The trick with encryption these days is to make the decryption process take long enough that the informations value has expired. For example, if I'm going to meet you next Tuesday (ONLY HYPOTHETICAL) and I send you a message then I want to be sure that even if Bob can crack the message, he won't be able to do so until Wednesday. We will have had our Tuesday meeting and be long gone.
So quit whining about encrypting this and having keys to that. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter. It hasn't in years. Instead you should be worried about who has access to this information, not how to encrypt it. Encryption is not a magic bullet to protect your privacy.
According to the "media pundits", all hacking is bad (refer to Ziff-Davis, etc. ad nauseum). Hackers are evil and dangerous. Now we have them working in our government, and in law enforcement, no less. Wonder how long it will take them to turn their "reverse hacking" techniques on the unsuspecting public?
The only good news is that I know several of these "in-duh-viduals" and they wouldn't be able to hack their way out of a wet paper bag with a chain saw. How they got lucky (or even if they did) with the Russian Hackers beyond me.
I used to mess with holograms. We would suspend the platform on rubber balls (balloons for small objects). You know the same red ones you used to play dodge ball with. They will damp virutally all vibration and support an amazing amount of weight.
Build a plywood platform big enough to hold your rack and to sit off the floor with the equipment on in. Put the balls under the rack platform. Presto change-o and you are done.
You'd be surprised how much weight those cheesy playground balls will take under these circumstances and how well they dampen vibration. We once did a hologram of a lifesize bronze statue which weighed in at just over 1800 lbs. using this technique.
I don't really care if you love what you do in any profession. I think that it is a shame and a waste of a significant portion of your life if you don't. You will spend 50 years of your life working. Why anyone would want to spend it doing something they hate is mind boggling to me. You wouldn't spend that much time with a spouse you despised. You'd get a divorce.
If you check the top 15% of the people in almost any field, you will find that they do what they do not because of the pay check but because they love what they do. In fact, statiscally speaking, most of them were doing what they were doing long before it was cool. They did it because it was cool. If you do what you think is cool long enough, someone will come along who also thinks that its really cool and offer to pay you. Linus Torvald didn't write Linux to become famous. He wrote it because he likes writing code.
Loving what you do may not be a necessary job qualification, but if you want an employee who will be dedicated to the job, accomplish near-impossible feats of (fill in the blank with your area of need) then you need to look for someone who genuinely loves what they do.
The first question I ask on an interview is "What do you have on your network at home?". This is the quickest way to seperate out the wanna-bes from the real deals. I want to hire people whos heart is in what they do because I know that it will make them excell at what they do. In order for them to excell, they must keep up with current and emerging technologies. If your heart is in what you do, you understand this without needing to have it pointed out to you.
For the mouth breathers who seem to think that just reading the advertisement is sufficient, here goes. How do you know what is advertising hype and what is actually a good product? Even the best brands like Cisco, IBM, etc. have all produced a dud now and then. How do you find out how well that latest thingamabob from Thingys, Inc. really stacks up against the thingamajig from OtherThingys, Inc.? There is only one way to really find out. You have to get your hands dirty. You get them and play with them. You test them in your particular application.
This is how your IT people figure out that maybe the new Windows ought to be skipped, that you want to get the NEW router, or that you can rework some old machines into a new cluster. This is also how your IT people stay current and continue to add value to your department. It keeps you from having to fire them every time you change technology. It's much cheaper to keep an employee than to replace one.
Much of what I see regarding complaints about "playing" here are managment issues. What good is an IT staff that hides in the server room and won't be available? That's NOT an IT issue. That's an HR issue. HR issues in IT deparments typically aren't addressed. IT managers are normally promoted due to skill and usually lack the management experience necessary to properly handle staff. One of the best IT deparments I ever worked in was run by a PhD in Business, he wasn't a techie but if we could prove to him why we wanted to needed "X", we got "X". We also went through a fair amount of staff because he expected things to be "by the book". Instead of whining about it on slashdot, why don't you file a complaint with your management and then your HR department next time you see this kind of behaviour?
Slashdot Mirror
Encryption is like locking your front door. It make keep out the neighbors. It make keep out the twerp up the street who lusts after your stereo. It may even keep out a beginning burgular. However, you wouldn't keep an original Van Gough in your living room and expect that lock to keep out a cat burgular intent on stealing your really valuable bit of art.
p>If I devote a big enough cluster to cracking your encryption, I can crack it in a relatively short period of time. Computing power is such that none of the encryption algorythms are safe from being cracked within a few hours (days at most) by a REALLY determined person or group with deep enough pockets.The trick with encryption these days is to make the decryption process take long enough that the informations value has expired. For example, if I'm going to meet you next Tuesday (ONLY HYPOTHETICAL) and I send you a message then I want to be sure that even if Bob can crack the message, he won't be able to do so until Wednesday. We will have had our Tuesday meeting and be long gone.
So quit whining about encrypting this and having keys to that. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter. It hasn't in years. Instead you should be worried about who has access to this information, not how to encrypt it. Encryption is not a magic bullet to protect your privacy.
According to the "media pundits", all hacking is bad (refer to Ziff-Davis, etc. ad nauseum). Hackers are evil and dangerous. Now we have them working in our government, and in law enforcement, no less. Wonder how long it will take them to turn their "reverse hacking" techniques on the unsuspecting public?
The only good news is that I know several of these "in-duh-viduals" and they wouldn't be able to hack their way out of a wet paper bag with a chain saw. How they got lucky (or even if they did) with the Russian Hackers beyond me.
I used to mess with holograms. We would suspend the platform on rubber balls (balloons for small objects). You know the same red ones you used to play dodge ball with. They will damp virutally all vibration and support an amazing amount of weight.
Build a plywood platform big enough to hold your rack and to sit off the floor with the equipment on in. Put the balls under the rack platform. Presto change-o and you are done.
You'd be surprised how much weight those cheesy playground balls will take under these circumstances and how well they dampen vibration. We once did a hologram of a lifesize bronze statue which weighed in at just over 1800 lbs. using this technique.
I don't really care if you love what you do in any profession. I think that it is a shame and a waste of a significant portion of your life if you don't. You will spend 50 years of your life working. Why anyone would want to spend it doing something they hate is mind boggling to me. You wouldn't spend that much time with a spouse you despised. You'd get a divorce.
If you check the top 15% of the people in almost any field, you will find that they do what they do not because of the pay check but because they love what they do. In fact, statiscally speaking, most of them were doing what they were doing long before it was cool. They did it because it was cool. If you do what you think is cool long enough, someone will come along who also thinks that its really cool and offer to pay you. Linus Torvald didn't write Linux to become famous. He wrote it because he likes writing code.
Loving what you do may not be a necessary job qualification, but if you want an employee who will be dedicated to the job, accomplish near-impossible feats of (fill in the blank with your area of need) then you need to look for someone who genuinely loves what they do.
The first question I ask on an interview is "What do you have on your network at home?". This is the quickest way to seperate out the wanna-bes from the real deals. I want to hire people whos heart is in what they do because I know that it will make them excell at what they do. In order for them to excell, they must keep up with current and emerging technologies. If your heart is in what you do, you understand this without needing to have it pointed out to you.
For the mouth breathers who seem to think that just reading the advertisement is sufficient, here goes. How do you know what is advertising hype and what is actually a good product? Even the best brands like Cisco, IBM, etc. have all produced a dud now and then. How do you find out how well that latest thingamabob from Thingys, Inc. really stacks up against the thingamajig from OtherThingys, Inc.? There is only one way to really find out. You have to get your hands dirty. You get them and play with them. You test them in your particular application.
This is how your IT people figure out that maybe the new Windows ought to be skipped, that you want to get the NEW router, or that you can rework some old machines into a new cluster. This is also how your IT people stay current and continue to add value to your department. It keeps you from having to fire them every time you change technology. It's much cheaper to keep an employee than to replace one.
Much of what I see regarding complaints about "playing" here are managment issues. What good is an IT staff that hides in the server room and won't be available? That's NOT an IT issue. That's an HR issue. HR issues in IT deparments typically aren't addressed. IT managers are normally promoted due to skill and usually lack the management experience necessary to properly handle staff. One of the best IT deparments I ever worked in was run by a PhD in Business, he wasn't a techie but if we could prove to him why we wanted to needed "X", we got "X". We also went through a fair amount of staff because he expected things to be "by the book". Instead of whining about it on slashdot, why don't you file a complaint with your management and then your HR department next time you see this kind of behaviour?