We weren't prevented from locking our baggage until a few years ago.
You're not prevented from locking your luggage. The TSA doesn't want you to lock your luggage because they're searching it after you check it. Therefore, locking it makes it difficult for them. However, if you lock it, they'll deal with it. You might not like the way they deal with it, but they'll deal with it and you've broken no law by locking your luggage. TSA does offer a compromise; you can use one of those locks they have keys to. It's not foolproof; there have been lots of reports of those locks being destroyed. However, it's worth a shot.
Some of us have been forced to learn the ins and outs of this crap in more detail than we wish. If, like me, you travel with firearms, you'll learn that the FAA is statutorily in charge of what can and can't be checked and the TSA can't order me to do anything that violates FAA regs. FAA regs mandate that luggage with firearms must be locked. Period.
There are some tips and tricks for dealing with this situation but they're beyond the scope of this discussion. My point is simply that it's incorrect to say that we're "prevented" from locking our baggage. We most assuredly are not.
I guess it's just due to where I'm from but I've never heard "gooseshit" used in that way.
Now, if you had said "Gooseshit == owl snot" I would've understood completely. "Slicker'n owl snot" is just plain and proper English, understood by all.
your IT Security people that they can just disable the USB drivers
We'd have to quell a revolt. Some of our people have repeated needs to move multi-gig data files from place to place. USB sticks have been a godsend. Given that some of our offices have such poor connectivity to the rest of the world, large file transfers used to require overnight or longer planning. Just moving a file from cube to manager's office for review could take hours. Now that they can sneakernet or mail a USB stick to move a big file, turning off that capability would have them hunting for our scalps.
That's funny stuff. I laughed, until I remembered that I used to be a field officer. During that time, part of my job was finding people who didn't want to be found. One time, nearly 20 years ago, I found a guy hiding in China. He owed very little money (less than $USD50K, given the size cases I had back then) but I just got a wild hair about finding him, worked all the angles, and eventually turned him up. Hint - If you can find someone's mother, you can find them.
BTW - What's HMRC? I thought the tax agency in the UK was called the Inland Revenue Service.
What if I find a disenfranchised employee, and offer money?
That has happened. But if the employee uses their own credentials to get the data, the leak will be traced to them. If you compromise an admin, you'll get caught even quicker because we're so closely monitored.
But, I'll grant you, it can happen. I've known of three cases that happened geographically close to me over the last 25 years. In two cases, the employees were marched out in handcuffs. In the third, the employee was arrested at home. Most of us aren't willing to throw away our pensions and/or spend multiple years in federal lockup just to sell some data. There are buyers, I suppose, but none that pay the kind of money that makes that sort of risk worthwhile to any of us with a brain.
what kind of tricky stuff are you doing to detect full-disk encryption on any machine that touches the network?
I don't know. I'm on the receiving end of those alerts, so I know they happen. Exactly how, I'm not sure. Our logon scripts do all sorts of stuff, including automatically installing updates to vertical apps, so checking for full disk encryption wouldn't seem to be too hard a task. I know there are certain files on the machines that do not exist until encryption has been installed and fully enabled. I assume that looking for them would be trivial. But that's just a guess.
To show you how tight our scans are, we had a contractor who plugged a personally-owned USB key into his IRS-issued laptop. It contained some basic maintenance tools as well as some network monitoring tools. He wanted some simple utility, I forget which one, and instead of asking for it through channels he just plugged in his copy. Literally *5* minutes after he plugged in the key, his machine was deleted from the domain and his personal identifier was wiped from all systems, just like we do when someone is fired. 5 minutes after that, his boss got a call from our security office explaining that the employee was being reviewed for termination. The boss explained that he was a good guy, new to the organization, just made a mistake, and asked for some slack. Ultimately, the guy got a two-week suspension and then had to re-build everything (system access permissions, etc.) as if he were newly hired.
I really don't question the notion that our monitoring does a good job of catching any funny business.
And more importantly (assuming that this requires a boot-time password; I've never bothered with any serious encryption), do you have something that detects the sticky note on the bottom of the laptop with said password?
This is one of the areas where we take a notably sensible approach. Our security rules that each person must sign and obey do NOT prohibit writing down passwords. It's officially discouraged but not prohibited. We take the attitude that as long as that list is protected, like people protect their ID card, door key card, and credit card, there's no problem.
Nobody puts a sticker on the bottom of their laptop or keyboard. We have constant security inspections, usually after hours, and doing crap like that gets you disciplined severely.
I wont go into excess detail (which, by itself, would be a violation of our security rules) but suffice it to say that if you wanted to steal and get data off an IRS laptop, you'd have to mug the user, get their password list, know their internal ID (which no one writes down because we use it constantly) then mug a different person with local machine administrator credentials, get logons and passwords from that person, then know exactly where to type all of them in without making more than three mistakes to lock up the machine.
The only people who could successfully get information off our laptops would be our admins. But we can get to that stuff internally, already, so that's not a realistic threat.
Realistically, the only thing a thief can do with a stolen IRS laptop is wipe it, install an OS, and use it.
how can you put people who don't believe in public infrastructure in charge of public infrastructure?
is one of the best questions I've ever seen posted on Slashdot. With an election looming, it's a question that every voter should ask themselves. Whoever modded it flamebait is a dufus.
Not really. Where I work, any laptop connected to the network is checked at every connection for the presence of active full disk encryption software. If it isn't found (which can happen when computers are being built and the encryption installation hasn't been completed) then an immediate alert is sent to the support staff nearest the machine. In response to that alert, the machine must be encrypted or seized immediately. We're talking same-day action, here, with the consequence of inaction being that someone gets fired.
The result is that when we lose (usually through theft but the method is unimportant in this context) a laptop, we can immediately report that said laptop was fully encrypted and no data was lost or is at risk.
If we need to let a contractor on our network, we set up one of our laptops to meet all security requirements and lend that hardware to the contractor. No contractor is allowed to put their machine on our network.
Finally, when data is written to removable media, it's encrypted. We run a software package (Guardian Edge) that forces all writes to removable media to be encrypted. It's a pain sometimes, but it's the least we can do to keep the publics private data safe.
Frankly, I'm shocked that the MOD would accept less stringent practices on the part of contractors. I know we don't.
I've seen two examples of disposal that made perfect sense in their environments yet left me so frustrated that it beggars description.
Many years ago at a government agency, where taking something out of the dumpster would get you fired and put in jail, we had a cleanout of old equipment. This was years overdue and there was *lots* of stuff. There had been some sort of foulup with our program to sell off or donate excess equipment, so everything was to go into the scrap dumpster. That dumpster was against an outside wall of the multi-story parking garage. So that no one would be tempted to retrieve anything from the dumpsters (Congress would have our heads on a platter if we gave something to an employee, even by routing through the dumpster), orders were given and all equipment was taken to the third story of the parking garage and dropped into the dumpster from there, smashing everything into uselessness. A gigantic, USD$30K line printer, new and still in the box (although it had been bought nearly a decade before) went over the wall. I nearly cried. I had worked with those printers for a long time and truly loved them for all their loud, clackety goodness and for the fact that they were as reliable as gravity. (Actually, that was why this machine was still in the box; it was bought to serve as a "hot spare" but none of the deployed equipment had ever failed.) The only good thing that came out of it was that I (and others) made so much noise over this waste that procedures were changed and good (or even just repairable) equipment is now given good homes with schools and charities. Nowadays, we have almost no scrap; everything is re-used by someone.
Second example - I had occasion to spend some time at the HQ campus of a major computer manufacturer. They disposed of equipment by putting it on a pallet and dragging it into a hallway. The employees were allowed to take whatever they could carry by themselves. This was a techy crowd, so dead computers got their drives, memory, video cards, etc. pulled. It was like one of those time-lapse shots on the Discovery channel of a swarm of ants disposing of some road kill. Pretty soon, there was just bones. The little left on the pallet was then recycled.
What was frustrating about that? I didn't work there, so I couldn't have any of the goodies.:-)
That's a dumb thing for the government to do. If someone is dumb enough to post obscenity to usenet, there's a good chance they're dumb enough to do so without covering their tracks so they can be found and prosecuted. If usenet goes away, the folks dedicated to that stuff will all move to Freenet (or one of the alternatives) where they can spread their stuff with impunity. The problem will get *worse,* won't it? Or am I missing something?
I'm in my union and have been for a quarter-century. I can't imagine doing business with the dicks that tend to rise to positions of authority without having some sort of collective bargaining power that forces them to, at minimum, adhere to some written rules of conduct regarding how employees are treated.
Now, how does this serve me these days, when all the talk is about outsourcing and rightsizing? Being a government worker, I never really thought that stuff would impact me but it finally has. In a couple of weeks my employer is going to brief my union on how many positions they want to cut to get us to what they call "most efficient organization" status, size-wise.
Why didn't they just fire everyone they didn't want? Because I have a union. Why are they being forced to brief the union first and give employees some advance notice? Because I have a union that fought for those work rules. Why are they being forced to offer early retirement to those within 5 years of elgibility instead of just firing us (which would be best for them; us oldsters represent the biggest potential savings in broad-based layoffs)? Because I have a union that negotiated those work rules decades ago.
I'm going to take early retirement. It's a pittance but it's (barely) enough to live on and it comes with good life and health insurance. Toss in my investments (modest but not shamefully so) and I can kick back and spend the rest of my life in peaceful mediation or use my (now-free) time to acquire/hone skills and start a new career. I have options. I'd rather stay on my job but with the reductions in force that are coming, I know the environment around here is going to deteriorate. So I feel I'm being forced out but I still have options. All those options are thanks 100% to my union that fought for and won various "soft landing" employee separation procedures long before I ever came to work here.
All you lone-wolf libertarians out there who think unions are evil might want to revisit the topic. Yes, evil unions are evil but some, like govt unions that generally don't have a right to strike (and, therefore, must actually do their job of negotiating with management instead of getting sidetracked building corrupt kingdoms of their own), are worth their weight in gold.
But I can't blame them for getting a good short-term deal and losing out on that relationship any more than I can blame the producer for
Generally, that's not what happens - suppliers don't, at least initially, agree to bad contracts. What happens is that Walmart negotiates good but tough contracts. Then, at renewal, they do the same for a bigger portion of the supplier's ability to produce. Eventually, they write a contract that is profitable for the supplier but sucks up so much of the suppliers capacity that the supplier essentially has just one customer - Walmart. They'll go out of business if they lose their Walmart contract.
Then...
At the next contract renewal, Walmart lays down terms that are untenable and doesn't budge. Look what happened to Levis. They produced more and cheaper and made money by selling to Walmart. Then, when they had become dependent on Walmart to stay in business, Walmart dropped the hammer on them, demanding prices so low that Levis was faced with just two choices - go completely out of business or go (essentially) completely out of business but save the company name by plastering it on cheaply made Chinese goods. They chose the latter. To the Americans (nearly all of them employed by Levis) who lost their jobs, the company might as well no longer exist. To those of us who remember the high-quality 501s of our youth, the company DOES no longer exist.
Walmart is evil and unethical in their basic business practices, only putting on a veneer of ethics when dealing with the only people who have power over them, the customers who bring dollars in the door. If, however, you're dependent on Walmart (as an employee or supplier), you have to accept that you're gonna get screwed eventually.
I've seen a large increase in SPAM with virus payloads.
I assume you mean SPAM as per the currently common definition, unsolicited email. I'd like to add that I've seen a big increase in virus-laden spam (in the original electronic sense) in the form of postings to usenet binary groups.
Hrm, seems you've found them to be behaving ethically...
AFAICT, the good reasons to hate on Wal*Mart are if you're in direct competition with them or are a union organizer.
Walmart tends to behave ethically towards the public that walks in the door and gives them money. The company also tends to support community causes that get them some positive press.
However, Walmart tends to be severely unethical in the way they treat employees and suppliers. The off-the-clock work scandals and other forms of employee abuse are now so common that they no longer make the news. The place would be a hell of a lot better for the community, overall, if the employees were able to force some basic changes in benefits and work practices. Realistically, that means those employees need a union. Walmart might have to raise prices a half-percent but I think they'd survive. Instead, Walmart has adopted an anti-labor mindset that's just toxic; if you've ever worked in such a shop, you know what that means.
As for squeezing suppliers, Walmart is famous. Yes, they help grow some businesses. Getting your product on the shelves at Walmart is a certified big deal. But for every little guy for whom Walmart is their big break, there are scores of examples of small and midsize suppliers whose businesses are wrecked by dancing with the Walmart devil. Levis and Vlasic, for example, are still out there (in severely altered form) but it's highly unlikely you could find anyone who worked there "back in the day" who would consider their deals with Walmart to have ultimately been a good thing.
I'm pretty stressed at the moment so I've been looking for good news. I found something that cheered my heart in the oddest place - Walmart. There are lots of good reasons to hate on Walmart but when I joined the early-morning throngs last Saturday on one last trip to Walmart for supplies in case the storm headed our way, I saw something that made me oddly and disproportianately happy.
My local Walmart had moved a bunch of carts right to the front of the store loaded with flashlights. With a hurricane coming, you can get USD$5 for *any* piece-o-crap flashlight. These were just very basic 2 D-cell plastic lights and as I approached them, I wondered just how overpriced they would be, especially since they included batteries.
They were 50 cents. Two for a buck.
OK, it's not much, but it brought a smile to my face. This morning, I think I'd rather dwell on things like that instead of marveling, again, at how my greedy and dishonest fellow humans are finding yet more ways to pervert a wonderful communications channel into a gauntlet of scammers.
I clicked through to the pics of his "studio" and I didn't see a record-cleaning machine. I heartily applaud this guy for his efforts. I really do. But it's not possible that anyone would go to this much work without doing the one thing that most effectively reduces noise and static, is it?
SecureDoc from WinMagic is the software solution we use at my big TLA. As administration headaches go, this one isn't so bad. The recovery processes are workable but not (that I can see) hackable by any thief. The way we have it set up, users get 15 shots at screwing up their machine before IT has to get involved, thus allowing most bozos to eventually get it right while not giving infinite opportunites to thieves. It's administrable over the network (in some ways) and, thus, suitable for big organizations.
At home, I still have one Windows machine and it's secured with PGP. I've never used it in a big networked environment so I can't comment on how easy it is to administer. It has one feature that I think is neat, though. You can hit TAB before typing in your passphrase and it will be displayed in clear text. (Normally your pass isn't echoed on screen.) Scoff if you will but on those bad days when I've had little sleep and am, perhaps, a bit hung over, my 59-character passphrase can sometimes be just one hurdle too far. Seeing the text on-screen can be a big help for those times when my head just isn't in the game.
Finally, hardware encryption is better. When my Windows machine was my primary (I now am almost entirely migrated to an Ubuntu installation that I installed from the alternate CD, enabling full disk encryption from the beginning) computer, I relied happily on Flagstone drives. I still have one of their USB Freedom drives for backups. The login schtick is more severe; you get few chances and your data goes bye-bye if you screw up. However, I like the fact that they are a real product, not vaporware like some of the encrypted drives from major manufacturers. You can call them up, give them a credit card number, and actually get the hardware. If you talk to the home office in England, you'll converse with smart, helpful, courteous people. All in all, they're a joy to deal with. Downsides? Prices are high and capacities low, but that's part of the deal when it comes to certified hardware such as they sell. Truly irritating downsides? The documentation, unless they've revised it recently, is not all that it should be. Still, I don't hesitate to recommend them.
...a truly reliable way to make me sick of it is to cheat--to get everything I want as fast as I want. End of all my interest in the game within a couple days to a week.
Interesting. I, on the other hand, loved Doom (Yes, that's how long it's been since I've done much gaming) but I'm just terrible at it. Really. Got killed immediately, consistently. I tried some settings that removed enemies, all the way down to none, iirc. That didn't help; it was boring to walk around in empty or near-empty spaces. Then I tried just flat-out cheating. I gave myself infinite ammo and invulnerability.
Oh, my, what a change. Previously, I'd start to play and quit in frustration after a few minutes or an hour. As much as I liked the game and always returned to it, I never played it consistently. After I got the ammo and invulnerability, however, I played and played and played, hours upon hours, for months. It became a wonderful obsession.
I don't think what I did was cheating, really. I got far more satisfaction from changing the nature of the game. I set different goals, mostly seeing how fast I could get through. I changed the game-type from "kill the baddies" to "run through this maze faster."
Oddly enough, I don't like racing games. I suck at those, too.:-)
Usenet is anarchy but what you're proposing is a real mess. Most group names are almost empty, anyway. If you need such a thing, move to an abandoned group rather than just chuck the whole hierarchy structure.
Be advised, though, that posting binaries in non-binary-name groups (that is, groups other than alt.binaries.*) is considered a violation of protocol. Giganews, for example, does not move any messages with binary content found in non-binary groups.
Now, who wants to recommend a provider with good completion and retention that carries all groups? Anyone? Is there such an animal left in the wild?
This is the way I did it the last time I did it. Another poster says this is no longer possible; I'm going to test and see for myself. But the way I used to do this was:
Go to an Ace Cash Express store and plunk down cash for an All-Access Visa Gift card. (See the bottom of the linked page.) No questions, no ID, no nothing - you just slide $255 under the bullet-resistant glass and they slide back under the glass to you a Visa card with $250 preloaded. You can take it to any store and use it immediately. However, if you want to use it online, you then go to the All-Access card site, plug in the codes on the card, and activate the card for online use. The activation process asks for identifying information but does not verify. Obviously, if you want something delivered to your home, you'll have to plug in the correct information. However, if you're using the card to pay for something like downloadable software, you can make up anything for a name, address, phone, etc.
Additional info: You can get the card for any amount up to $250. The cost of the card used to be $5. The card is not reloadable. Ace Cash Express sells lots of different kinds of cards and most of them are reloadable so if you're trying to buy one of these gift cards and they start asking you for identifying information, it means they're making a mistake and trying to sell you the wrong product, some sort of reloadable card. Getting the last little bit of cash out of it is difficult; I used to check the credit balance online then go buy exactly that much gas. And if you don't use it, you lose the money because the company charges a small monthly fee against the balance. I don't remember exactly how much (I think it was $5) but it's enough to eat up the balance and kill off the card, eventually.
Note that this info is old. The fees are probably higher and the allowable balances may be lower nowadays. Due to the fees and other hassles, the card is really only worthwhile for the occasional single online purchase that you want to keep anonymous. Still, I know that it *used* to be possible to buy online, anonymously, if you were willing to put up with the hassle.
This actually brings me 'round to my original question. Since the method described above is a bit of a hassle, does anybody have a better way to buy online and anonymously?
I guess I assumed most everyone was familiar with the way they used to work. Let me be a tad more verbose, then. A long time ago, Radio Shack wanted a full name and address for every purchase. If you refused that (and later, after people reacted badly to them asking for everything) they started just asking for a zip code. Thus, I always refused "to give them my zip or other information... to identify myself..."
Clear? If not, feel free to insert your own example. You must know at least one person who does something like swapping their loyalty cards with other people just to screw up the databases of the merchants. Some of us value privacy, even in the little things.
That loop-hole was closed off a couple of years ago
I guess it's been a couple of years since I've done it. You've made me just curious enough to run an experiment, though. If I get it done before this story closes to comments, I'll post back.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not prevented from locking your luggage. The TSA doesn't want you to lock your luggage because they're searching it after you check it. Therefore, locking it makes it difficult for them. However, if you lock it, they'll deal with it. You might not like the way they deal with it, but they'll deal with it and you've broken no law by locking your luggage. TSA does offer a compromise; you can use one of those locks they have keys to. It's not foolproof; there have been lots of reports of those locks being destroyed. However, it's worth a shot.
Some of us have been forced to learn the ins and outs of this crap in more detail than we wish. If, like me, you travel with firearms, you'll learn that the FAA is statutorily in charge of what can and can't be checked and the TSA can't order me to do anything that violates FAA regs. FAA regs mandate that luggage with firearms must be locked. Period.
There are some tips and tricks for dealing with this situation but they're beyond the scope of this discussion. My point is simply that it's incorrect to say that we're "prevented" from locking our baggage. We most assuredly are not.
I guess it's just due to where I'm from but I've never heard "gooseshit" used in that way.
Now, if you had said "Gooseshit == owl snot" I would've understood completely. "Slicker'n owl snot" is just plain and proper English, understood by all.
I didn't say the organization was run well. That's completely debatable. But our laptops are secure against data loss in the event they're stolen.
As for how well the organization is run? I could write a book...
We'd have to quell a revolt. Some of our people have repeated needs to move multi-gig data files from place to place. USB sticks have been a godsend. Given that some of our offices have such poor connectivity to the rest of the world, large file transfers used to require overnight or longer planning. Just moving a file from cube to manager's office for review could take hours. Now that they can sneakernet or mail a USB stick to move a big file, turning off that capability would have them hunting for our scalps.
That's funny stuff. I laughed, until I remembered that I used to be a field officer. During that time, part of my job was finding people who didn't want to be found. One time, nearly 20 years ago, I found a guy hiding in China. He owed very little money (less than $USD50K, given the size cases I had back then) but I just got a wild hair about finding him, worked all the angles, and eventually turned him up. Hint - If you can find someone's mother, you can find them.
BTW - What's HMRC? I thought the tax agency in the UK was called the Inland Revenue Service.
That has happened. But if the employee uses their own credentials to get the data, the leak will be traced to them. If you compromise an admin, you'll get caught even quicker because we're so closely monitored.
But, I'll grant you, it can happen. I've known of three cases that happened geographically close to me over the last 25 years. In two cases, the employees were marched out in handcuffs. In the third, the employee was arrested at home. Most of us aren't willing to throw away our pensions and/or spend multiple years in federal lockup just to sell some data. There are buyers, I suppose, but none that pay the kind of money that makes that sort of risk worthwhile to any of us with a brain.
I don't know. I'm on the receiving end of those alerts, so I know they happen. Exactly how, I'm not sure. Our logon scripts do all sorts of stuff, including automatically installing updates to vertical apps, so checking for full disk encryption wouldn't seem to be too hard a task. I know there are certain files on the machines that do not exist until encryption has been installed and fully enabled. I assume that looking for them would be trivial. But that's just a guess.
To show you how tight our scans are, we had a contractor who plugged a personally-owned USB key into his IRS-issued laptop. It contained some basic maintenance tools as well as some network monitoring tools. He wanted some simple utility, I forget which one, and instead of asking for it through channels he just plugged in his copy. Literally *5* minutes after he plugged in the key, his machine was deleted from the domain and his personal identifier was wiped from all systems, just like we do when someone is fired. 5 minutes after that, his boss got a call from our security office explaining that the employee was being reviewed for termination. The boss explained that he was a good guy, new to the organization, just made a mistake, and asked for some slack. Ultimately, the guy got a two-week suspension and then had to re-build everything (system access permissions, etc.) as if he were newly hired.
I really don't question the notion that our monitoring does a good job of catching any funny business.
This is one of the areas where we take a notably sensible approach. Our security rules that each person must sign and obey do NOT prohibit writing down passwords. It's officially discouraged but not prohibited. We take the attitude that as long as that list is protected, like people protect their ID card, door key card, and credit card, there's no problem.
Nobody puts a sticker on the bottom of their laptop or keyboard. We have constant security inspections, usually after hours, and doing crap like that gets you disciplined severely.
I wont go into excess detail (which, by itself, would be a violation of our security rules) but suffice it to say that if you wanted to steal and get data off an IRS laptop, you'd have to mug the user, get their password list, know their internal ID (which no one writes down because we use it constantly) then mug a different person with local machine administrator credentials, get logons and passwords from that person, then know exactly where to type all of them in without making more than three mistakes to lock up the machine.
The only people who could successfully get information off our laptops would be our admins. But we can get to that stuff internally, already, so that's not a realistic threat.
Realistically, the only thing a thief can do with a stolen IRS laptop is wipe it, install an OS, and use it.
This:
is one of the best questions I've ever seen posted on Slashdot. With an election looming, it's a question that every voter should ask themselves. Whoever modded it flamebait is a dufus.
Not really. Where I work, any laptop connected to the network is checked at every connection for the presence of active full disk encryption software. If it isn't found (which can happen when computers are being built and the encryption installation hasn't been completed) then an immediate alert is sent to the support staff nearest the machine. In response to that alert, the machine must be encrypted or seized immediately. We're talking same-day action, here, with the consequence of inaction being that someone gets fired.
The result is that when we lose (usually through theft but the method is unimportant in this context) a laptop, we can immediately report that said laptop was fully encrypted and no data was lost or is at risk.
If we need to let a contractor on our network, we set up one of our laptops to meet all security requirements and lend that hardware to the contractor. No contractor is allowed to put their machine on our network.
Finally, when data is written to removable media, it's encrypted. We run a software package (Guardian Edge) that forces all writes to removable media to be encrypted. It's a pain sometimes, but it's the least we can do to keep the publics private data safe.
Frankly, I'm shocked that the MOD would accept less stringent practices on the part of contractors. I know we don't.
That first sentence may be the most insightful thing I've read in a week.
I've seen two examples of disposal that made perfect sense in their environments yet left me so frustrated that it beggars description.
Many years ago at a government agency, where taking something out of the dumpster would get you fired and put in jail, we had a cleanout of old equipment. This was years overdue and there was *lots* of stuff. There had been some sort of foulup with our program to sell off or donate excess equipment, so everything was to go into the scrap dumpster. That dumpster was against an outside wall of the multi-story parking garage. So that no one would be tempted to retrieve anything from the dumpsters (Congress would have our heads on a platter if we gave something to an employee, even by routing through the dumpster), orders were given and all equipment was taken to the third story of the parking garage and dropped into the dumpster from there, smashing everything into uselessness. A gigantic, USD$30K line printer, new and still in the box (although it had been bought nearly a decade before) went over the wall. I nearly cried. I had worked with those printers for a long time and truly loved them for all their loud, clackety goodness and for the fact that they were as reliable as gravity. (Actually, that was why this machine was still in the box; it was bought to serve as a "hot spare" but none of the deployed equipment had ever failed.) The only good thing that came out of it was that I (and others) made so much noise over this waste that procedures were changed and good (or even just repairable) equipment is now given good homes with schools and charities. Nowadays, we have almost no scrap; everything is re-used by someone.
Second example - I had occasion to spend some time at the HQ campus of a major computer manufacturer. They disposed of equipment by putting it on a pallet and dragging it into a hallway. The employees were allowed to take whatever they could carry by themselves. This was a techy crowd, so dead computers got their drives, memory, video cards, etc. pulled. It was like one of those time-lapse shots on the Discovery channel of a swarm of ants disposing of some road kill. Pretty soon, there was just bones. The little left on the pallet was then recycled.
What was frustrating about that? I didn't work there, so I couldn't have any of the goodies. :-)
That's a dumb thing for the government to do. If someone is dumb enough to post obscenity to usenet, there's a good chance they're dumb enough to do so without covering their tracks so they can be found and prosecuted. If usenet goes away, the folks dedicated to that stuff will all move to Freenet (or one of the alternatives) where they can spread their stuff with impunity. The problem will get *worse,* won't it? Or am I missing something?
I'm in my union and have been for a quarter-century. I can't imagine doing business with the dicks that tend to rise to positions of authority without having some sort of collective bargaining power that forces them to, at minimum, adhere to some written rules of conduct regarding how employees are treated.
Now, how does this serve me these days, when all the talk is about outsourcing and rightsizing? Being a government worker, I never really thought that stuff would impact me but it finally has. In a couple of weeks my employer is going to brief my union on how many positions they want to cut to get us to what they call "most efficient organization" status, size-wise.
Why didn't they just fire everyone they didn't want? Because I have a union.
Why are they being forced to brief the union first and give employees some advance notice? Because I have a union that fought for those work rules.
Why are they being forced to offer early retirement to those within 5 years of elgibility instead of just firing us (which would be best for them; us oldsters represent the biggest potential savings in broad-based layoffs)? Because I have a union that negotiated those work rules decades ago.
I'm going to take early retirement. It's a pittance but it's (barely) enough to live on and it comes with good life and health insurance. Toss in my investments (modest but not shamefully so) and I can kick back and spend the rest of my life in peaceful mediation or use my (now-free) time to acquire/hone skills and start a new career. I have options. I'd rather stay on my job but with the reductions in force that are coming, I know the environment around here is going to deteriorate. So I feel I'm being forced out but I still have options. All those options are thanks 100% to my union that fought for and won various "soft landing" employee separation procedures long before I ever came to work here.
All you lone-wolf libertarians out there who think unions are evil might want to revisit the topic. Yes, evil unions are evil but some, like govt unions that generally don't have a right to strike (and, therefore, must actually do their job of negotiating with management instead of getting sidetracked building corrupt kingdoms of their own), are worth their weight in gold.
Generally, that's not what happens - suppliers don't, at least initially, agree to bad contracts. What happens is that Walmart negotiates good but tough contracts. Then, at renewal, they do the same for a bigger portion of the supplier's ability to produce. Eventually, they write a contract that is profitable for the supplier but sucks up so much of the suppliers capacity that the supplier essentially has just one customer - Walmart. They'll go out of business if they lose their Walmart contract.
Then...
At the next contract renewal, Walmart lays down terms that are untenable and doesn't budge. Look what happened to Levis. They produced more and cheaper and made money by selling to Walmart. Then, when they had become dependent on Walmart to stay in business, Walmart dropped the hammer on them, demanding prices so low that Levis was faced with just two choices - go completely out of business or go (essentially) completely out of business but save the company name by plastering it on cheaply made Chinese goods. They chose the latter. To the Americans (nearly all of them employed by Levis) who lost their jobs, the company might as well no longer exist. To those of us who remember the high-quality 501s of our youth, the company DOES no longer exist.
Walmart is evil and unethical in their basic business practices, only putting on a veneer of ethics when dealing with the only people who have power over them, the customers who bring dollars in the door. If, however, you're dependent on Walmart (as an employee or supplier), you have to accept that you're gonna get screwed eventually.
I assume you mean SPAM as per the currently common definition, unsolicited email. I'd like to add that I've seen a big increase in virus-laden spam (in the original electronic sense) in the form of postings to usenet binary groups.
I don't like this at all.
Walmart tends to behave ethically towards the public that walks in the door and gives them money. The company also tends to support community causes that get them some positive press.
However, Walmart tends to be severely unethical in the way they treat employees and suppliers. The off-the-clock work scandals and other forms of employee abuse are now so common that they no longer make the news. The place would be a hell of a lot better for the community, overall, if the employees were able to force some basic changes in benefits and work practices. Realistically, that means those employees need a union. Walmart might have to raise prices a half-percent but I think they'd survive. Instead, Walmart has adopted an anti-labor mindset that's just toxic; if you've ever worked in such a shop, you know what that means.
As for squeezing suppliers, Walmart is famous. Yes, they help grow some businesses. Getting your product on the shelves at Walmart is a certified big deal. But for every little guy for whom Walmart is their big break, there are scores of examples of small and midsize suppliers whose businesses are wrecked by dancing with the Walmart devil. Levis and Vlasic, for example, are still out there (in severely altered form) but it's highly unlikely you could find anyone who worked there "back in the day" who would consider their deals with Walmart to have ultimately been a good thing.
I'm pretty stressed at the moment so I've been looking for good news. I found something that cheered my heart in the oddest place - Walmart. There are lots of good reasons to hate on Walmart but when I joined the early-morning throngs last Saturday on one last trip to Walmart for supplies in case the storm headed our way, I saw something that made me oddly and disproportianately happy.
My local Walmart had moved a bunch of carts right to the front of the store loaded with flashlights. With a hurricane coming, you can get USD$5 for *any* piece-o-crap flashlight. These were just very basic 2 D-cell plastic lights and as I approached them, I wondered just how overpriced they would be, especially since they included batteries.
They were 50 cents. Two for a buck.
OK, it's not much, but it brought a smile to my face. This morning, I think I'd rather dwell on things like that instead of marveling, again, at how my greedy and dishonest fellow humans are finding yet more ways to pervert a wonderful communications channel into a gauntlet of scammers.
If I understand the circumstances under which he was convicted, he'd only want it if he could run it in reverse. By several years.
I clicked through to the pics of his "studio" and I didn't see a record-cleaning machine. I heartily applaud this guy for his efforts. I really do. But it's not possible that anyone would go to this much work without doing the one thing that most effectively reduces noise and static, is it?
I have useful experience with three products.
SecureDoc from WinMagic is the software solution we use at my big TLA. As administration headaches go, this one isn't so bad. The recovery processes are workable but not (that I can see) hackable by any thief. The way we have it set up, users get 15 shots at screwing up their machine before IT has to get involved, thus allowing most bozos to eventually get it right while not giving infinite opportunites to thieves. It's administrable over the network (in some ways) and, thus, suitable for big organizations.
At home, I still have one Windows machine and it's secured with PGP. I've never used it in a big networked environment so I can't comment on how easy it is to administer. It has one feature that I think is neat, though. You can hit TAB before typing in your passphrase and it will be displayed in clear text. (Normally your pass isn't echoed on screen.) Scoff if you will but on those bad days when I've had little sleep and am, perhaps, a bit hung over, my 59-character passphrase can sometimes be just one hurdle too far. Seeing the text on-screen can be a big help for those times when my head just isn't in the game.
Finally, hardware encryption is better. When my Windows machine was my primary (I now am almost entirely migrated to an Ubuntu installation that I installed from the alternate CD, enabling full disk encryption from the beginning) computer, I relied happily on Flagstone drives. I still have one of their USB Freedom drives for backups. The login schtick is more severe; you get few chances and your data goes bye-bye if you screw up. However, I like the fact that they are a real product, not vaporware like some of the encrypted drives from major manufacturers. You can call them up, give them a credit card number, and actually get the hardware. If you talk to the home office in England, you'll converse with smart, helpful, courteous people. All in all, they're a joy to deal with. Downsides? Prices are high and capacities low, but that's part of the deal when it comes to certified hardware such as they sell. Truly irritating downsides? The documentation, unless they've revised it recently, is not all that it should be. Still, I don't hesitate to recommend them.
Interesting. I, on the other hand, loved Doom (Yes, that's how long it's been since I've done much gaming) but I'm just terrible at it. Really. Got killed immediately, consistently. I tried some settings that removed enemies, all the way down to none, iirc. That didn't help; it was boring to walk around in empty or near-empty spaces. Then I tried just flat-out cheating. I gave myself infinite ammo and invulnerability.
Oh, my, what a change. Previously, I'd start to play and quit in frustration after a few minutes or an hour. As much as I liked the game and always returned to it, I never played it consistently. After I got the ammo and invulnerability, however, I played and played and played, hours upon hours, for months. It became a wonderful obsession.
I don't think what I did was cheating, really. I got far more satisfaction from changing the nature of the game. I set different goals, mostly seeing how fast I could get through. I changed the game-type from "kill the baddies" to "run through this maze faster."
Oddly enough, I don't like racing games. I suck at those, too. :-)
Usenet is anarchy but what you're proposing is a real mess. Most group names are almost empty, anyway. If you need such a thing, move to an abandoned group rather than just chuck the whole hierarchy structure.
Be advised, though, that posting binaries in non-binary-name groups (that is, groups other than alt.binaries.*) is considered a violation of protocol. Giganews, for example, does not move any messages with binary content found in non-binary groups.
Now, who wants to recommend a provider with good completion and retention that carries all groups? Anyone? Is there such an animal left in the wild?
This is the way I did it the last time I did it. Another poster says this is no longer possible; I'm going to test and see for myself. But the way I used to do this was:
Go to an Ace Cash Express store and plunk down cash for an All-Access Visa Gift card. (See the bottom of the linked page.) No questions, no ID, no nothing - you just slide $255 under the bullet-resistant glass and they slide back under the glass to you a Visa card with $250 preloaded. You can take it to any store and use it immediately. However, if you want to use it online, you then go to the All-Access card site, plug in the codes on the card, and activate the card for online use. The activation process asks for identifying information but does not verify. Obviously, if you want something delivered to your home, you'll have to plug in the correct information. However, if you're using the card to pay for something like downloadable software, you can make up anything for a name, address, phone, etc.
Additional info: You can get the card for any amount up to $250. The cost of the card used to be $5. The card is not reloadable. Ace Cash Express sells lots of different kinds of cards and most of them are reloadable so if you're trying to buy one of these gift cards and they start asking you for identifying information, it means they're making a mistake and trying to sell you the wrong product, some sort of reloadable card. Getting the last little bit of cash out of it is difficult; I used to check the credit balance online then go buy exactly that much gas. And if you don't use it, you lose the money because the company charges a small monthly fee against the balance. I don't remember exactly how much (I think it was $5) but it's enough to eat up the balance and kill off the card, eventually.
Note that this info is old. The fees are probably higher and the allowable balances may be lower nowadays. Due to the fees and other hassles, the card is really only worthwhile for the occasional single online purchase that you want to keep anonymous. Still, I know that it *used* to be possible to buy online, anonymously, if you were willing to put up with the hassle.
This actually brings me 'round to my original question. Since the method described above is a bit of a hassle, does anybody have a better way to buy online and anonymously?
I guess I assumed most everyone was familiar with the way they used to work. Let me be a tad more verbose, then. A long time ago, Radio Shack wanted a full name and address for every purchase. If you refused that (and later, after people reacted badly to them asking for everything) they started just asking for a zip code. Thus, I always refused "to give them my zip or other information ... to identify myself..."
Clear? If not, feel free to insert your own example. You must know at least one person who does something like swapping their loyalty cards with other people just to screw up the databases of the merchants. Some of us value privacy, even in the little things.
I guess it's been a couple of years since I've done it. You've made me just curious enough to run an experiment, though. If I get it done before this story closes to comments, I'll post back.