Plenty of Texans will tell you how incredibly proud they are that when the State was admitted to the Union, the State retained both the right to secede (which isn't really true) and the right to subdivide into 5 separate states (which is definitely true, but not unique). While there's always a home-grown movement to secede (it's more of a joke than anything else), occasionally someone floats the idea of subdividing into 5 states. That way, we'd pick up 8 additional senators. As attractive as that notion is to some people, it never gets very far. I think people intuitively realize that 2 powerful senators from a big state can probably accomplish more than 10 senators from 5 average-size states with potentially conflicting interests.
I never realized just how insane the American tax system is. I mean, taxation systems are usually deranged even at the best of times, but damn, Americans seem to get the very worst taxation out there.
There's good and bad. Remember that we're talking about a state taxation issue here. It's easy to find really good examples of sensible taxation in the U.S., such as (nationally) the Pittman-Robertson Act that taxes sporting goods to pay for conservation. In the U.S., it really is the case that hunters pay for (most) conservation. That seems sensible to me.
Most countries, when they want money for schools, just raise the sales tax or the income tax (depending on how the current administration feels about what the least harmful way of taxing people is).
In the U.S., most education money is sourced locally. The country doesn't pay for schools; the "school district" (or other name for the appropriate taxing entity) does. The money is usually collected locally and disbursed under guidelines set by the state. Usually.
In some states, that means that anything collected locally gets spent locally. Where rich people live in a suburb, the schools can be incredible. 30 miles away in a rusting downtown, the people don't have much money and the schools can look like they exist in a war zone.
Some time back, Texas tried to legislate that away. In what was called the "Robin Hood" plan, some portion of the taxes collected in rich locales was pushed over to poor schools. There have been problems with that plan and alternatives are being sought. Thus, the Texas legislature is busy working on ideas.
As for raising the income tax, Texas doesn't have one. That's highly unusual and it means we have high property taxes. Those property taxes are simply too high and, again, alternatives are being sought.
Taxes for particular goods or services are typically reserved for things that exact heavy costs on the nation, like alcohol or cigarettes.
And the same is true here. Among the other alternatives being examined, it looks like Texas is about to slap a USD$1-per-pack tax on cigarettes. That'll bring in some revenue. And some illegal cigarettes but, hey, everything has a downside.
Not an Aperture user, but I was struck by the review in Popular Photography that made some apologies for the horsepower needed to run it. Yes, imaging is tough, but the program was apparently too slow to test unless it was installed on the absolutely most-tricked-out, highly-upgraded Power Mac G5 you can lay your hands on. Usually, the creampuff reviews from such magazines will give this sort of thing only the barest mention. The fact that the review actually talked about it for a few sentences told me that the program had problems.
I really hate having to read between the lines of reviews from mainstream outfits. That's why I love my online sources.
First, the not. Specifically, I'm less concerned with Venezuela knowing what I'm up to than I am with the U.S. authorities knowing. I live in the U.S., so if I say something that would attract the attention of a TLA, to the govt of Venezuela that would be merely a curiosity. Revealed in the U.S. to said TLA, such conversations might lead to an uncomfortable conference with their representatives. I work for one of those TLAs and I hold opinions that I could never publicly discuss without being pointedly informed that said beliefs were at odds with our organizational mission and perhaps employment elsewhere would better suit me. It would be nice to be able to discuss those beliefs online without fear; that was on my mind when I initially posted.
Moving on, though, to other things, you make a good point when you lay out the criteria for an acceptable hosting location (proper Internet connection, legal strong crypto, and no data retention laws) and I believe you when you say that list is pretty short. That's a good case for locating in the U.S.
I completely missed your idea for having anonymous customers. In that vein, I am of two minds. Mailing cash sucks and M.O.s can be traceable. Both require paper that's a pain to process for you. The various precious metal exchanges are not anonymous, so I can see why you might want to limit your payment options in this way.
However, why not take credit cards? It's very simple to drop into any Ace Cash Express (or similar store) and pay $205 for a $200 Visa card with no name on it. You just ask for a "gift card." Those cards can be activated for online purchasing with any fake information the buyer wants to make up. If the cards are held a month or so before they're used (long enough for the video surveillance footage from the store to have been destroyed), then they're completely anonymous. You are seeking customers sophisticated enough that they should have no problems doing business this way and your workload would be substantially diminished.
OTOH, I know there's no small amount of red tape involved in accepting credit cards.
Perhaps a hybrid method would work well. Allow your users to send you cash via credit card. I'm talking about Western Union. Will you be accepting cash via that mechanism?
There's really no need to answer here, though I'd be appreciative. I've bookmarked the domain you provided earlier and I'll be checking back. Assuming reasonable affordability (or maybe even not so reasonable) you've probably made a customer of me.
OK, I don't get it. If the whole point (and, indeed, *my* point was ) "sidestepping fascism," then locating the server in the U.S. is self-defeating. Pursuant to a lawful order, a server operator can be required to begin logging traffic. Your intentions may be the best in the world, but I'm looking for a situation that relies less on the good intentions of the server owner than on larger issues that are more difficult for fascist enforcers to overcome. Specifically, locating a server (or a proxy service) in a country with poor relations with the U.S. means that anytime U.S. authorities want data, they're going to have to get it via wiretapping my encrypted tunnel which will reveal nothing. Then they'll have to move on to other methods of data-gathering that will be much more inconvenient/expensive/technically challenging. Eventually, absent overt acts on my part, the resources required to figure out what one little insignificant paranoid jerk like me is doing online will grow to the point that it's no longer worth the trouble.
See where I'm coming from? Heck, if I was a certain recently-empowered South American leader who enjoyed tweaking the nose of the U.S. at every opportunity, I'd be doing everything in my power to encourage ISPs in my country to offer secure accounts to U.S. customers just to piss off various U.S. government entities.
There's money to be made at this. I feel sure someone is going to jump on it eventually. As the U.S. becomes more and more intolerably fascist, the need becomes more acute. Eventually, plenty of people are going to be willing to pay another $25 a month to be reasonably sure they aren't being spied on. I'm ready to do it now and I'd pay more than that for a service such as you describe if it were located beyond the *practical* reach of various govt entities.
I realize that calmness and reason are routinely shouted down when this topic is being discussed, but the parent is so insightful it clearly deserves a 5 rating.
It's time to start compiling lists of proxy servers. Folks seem to want to concentrate on the ones that are just lying about, open and available. Well, I don't mind paying for something reliable, but if I'm going to pay for it my choices need to be:
Physically and legally located in countries that will either tell U.S. law enforcement authorities to fuck off or just give them an endless run-around,
Will pass every type of protocol/content without prejudice,
Don't log anything for a minute longer than necessary required to administer the network,
Don't cost an arm and a leg, and
Make it reasonably easy for semi-clueless users in the U.S. to securely tunnel to them so that everything easily available to U.S. LEOs is gibberish.
Recently, I've actually pondered colocating my own proxy somewhere outside the country. I'm thinking maybe I could start looking in Venezuela...Anybody got any other ideas?
I've installed and run investigative workstations for my employer. It ain't easy. Our methodology is to set up workstations that are as bulletproof as we can make them (considering the places we're going to visit, that's a given) and then let specialists try to develop leads. We have procedures to allow non-LEO personnel do the initial legwork; they surf and chat and poke around, extensively logging everything. When something interesting pops up, they're free to dig deeper. Eventually, when they think they have enough information to write up a report, they do so and turn it over for review. If it's picked up for serious investigation, either on the criminal or civil side, it passes from their hands and they never really know what becomes of it. That's fine with me; the initial lead development is what's fun, anyway. I'm one of the few people I know who can say he's spent a great deal of time being paid by Uncle Sam to surf porn (and other unsavory stuff).
What bugs me are the amateurs. There's a certain nexus between the sleazy side of the porn world and financial crimes, so I've spent a bunch of time in places that, at first blush, might seem more titillating than profitable. You would not believe how many transparently fake attempts are made by local, often small-town cops to entice people into illegal behavior. By far, the most common problem is the "I'm a 12-year-old girl. Would you like to talk to me about sex?" thing. Yes, some of them are that crude. Apparently, there are a bunch of Barney Fifes out there who have convinced their bosses to set up an AOL account for them in a back room at the police station for the purpose of generating a few easy, cheap, and sensational arrests that'll get the name of the local DA in the paper before the next election.
I used to wish they'd just go away, but afaik perhaps they already have. I haven't worked in lead generation for several years so I haven't been in any of those places in quite a while.
Anybody have any recent experience with this? Are there still woefully clueless LEOs out there popping up at inappropriate places pretending to be hot-to-trot preteens? God, I hope not; they were a royal pain in the ass.
shaking the box of baking soda into the fire, but the fire doesn't go out.
I had two more giant boxes of baking soda in the pantry, as well as a fire extinguisher. I grabbed the box first only because it was the solution that could be deployed most quickly.
Smart folks call 911 and then put the phone down and deal with the fire.
I'm old. My original post specifies that this was in the days before 911 service existed. While I was dealing with the fire, my Mom was paging through a directory and hitting "0" on the phone. If the fire had continued, she was working on the next step.
you might consider hanging around the room for another few minutes
I thought of that. Then I figured my Mom would let me know if it flared again. Also, I wanted her to know that I knew she could handle it from there. (See below for more.)
you should also consider using better manners with your mother, but then I suppose that's her job to fix
I gave her a hug as I left.
Actually, there's more to it. Since this is one of the few cases in life where I think I did exactly right, I'll explain. This happened very soon after my father died. Mom was an emotional wreck. She was depressed and her self-confidence was at a low ebb. She badly needed to know that I could take care of her. She badly needed to know that she could take care of herself. When she accidentally started this fire, I could see her look of utter helplessness. This was the sort of thing that could put her over the edge if it were any big deal. Now, normally any house fire IS a big deal, but as I walked to the kitchen I realized it was imperative I treat this whole incident as a mere trifle. By being cavalier about it, I assured her it was no big deal, she wasn't a screw-up, and it could happen to anybody. By offhandedly assuming she would clean up and handing off the situation to her, I demonstrated my confidence in her to take control. By being blase' in the moment, I showed her that even if something bad started to happen, she could rely on me to handle it.
I realize this all seems strange but I found the situation highly stressful. When I turned the corner from my room into the hallway, all I saw was a mass of flames framed in the opening ahead of me. I nearly freaked out; I was so stressed that time seemed to slow down (and this was long before I had ever heard of tachypsychia.) But during those four or five long steps from my room to the kitchen, I vividly remember consciously assessing her state of mind based on how she was moving and her facial expressions and then deliberately formulating a plan to make the entire situation as stress-free as possible for her.
To an observer, it would have looked rude. To her, as she told me later, it was one of those incidents that gives a person hope they can overcome their circumstances no matter what life throws at them. Her confidence in me, in herself (because I had confidence in her), and in the future got a perfectly timed and sorely needed boost from the incident.
Personally, I think this was the first time she ever saw me as fully adult and I think she was shocked. It was a good shock, to be sure, but it was also a turning point for the better in our relationship and solidified our mutual respect that had been battered by recent circumstances.
Side benefit - To live up to my demonstrated confidence in her, she cleaned the hell out of that kitchen.:-)
(No links provided because I'm at work and "Weapons" sites are filtered.)
Google for "Dial 911 and Die" and you'll find some interesting case studies by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Their point is that that you should be able to own guns because dialing 911 will frequently not produce a fast enough response to prevent a tragedy. The broader point is that 911 is surprisingly (to most people) unreliable. Generally, when you have a true emergency of the "We need help in two minutes or less or someone's going to die" sort, you're on your own.
Back before 911 when I was a kid, I was listening to music in my bedroom when I heard my mother scream. As I walked down the hall, I saw her trying to dial the phone while the entire top of the cooktop was engulfed in four feet of flames from a grease fire. I walked in, pulled her out of my path, opened the pantry, stuck my thumb into the side of a new box of baking soda, ripped the top clean off, stuck my arm into the fire, and vigorously shook all the powder out of the box over the fire. Then I turned off the burners and told my mom "I put it out; you clean it up."
I was back in my room and listening to music again in 90 seconds, 2 minutes, tops.
If I'd been stupid enough to rely on 911, the house would have burned down. It's amazing to me how many people don't realize that they need to be at least a little self-sufficient.
The trouble is, in IT, all the jobs that require your physical presence are generally 'IT technician' jobs - pulling cat5 through walls, swapping out hard disks in PCs and that kind of thing - the lower paid end of the IT spectrum...
Agreed. However, is that a bad thing? I personally like directly interacting with customers and showing them how to open a file. I get great satisfaction from taking a dead laptop from a tearful employee who thinks they've just lost a years work and returning to them, a few hours later, with a new laptop already set up with all their data. It's fun. It's satisfying.
I do this work for about USD$66K per year with good insurance, decent time off, reasonable autonomy, and a retirement plan that will, when that day comes, pay my basic expenses and continue to provide insurance. Is that a bad deal?
Here's my thought on that - Back in the day, I was thought of as some sort of Unix Wiz (I wasn't, but I was a good sysadmin) and I turned down several offers that would have tripled or quadrupled my salary. Those jobs would have also required me to wear a pager, work 60-hour weeks, and, frankly, would have ground me to a pulp in short order. Some people have an "always go for the money" attitude and might think I'm crazy. I hope what they do works for them. I, on the other hand, am quite happy with the path I chose.
Of course, something can always bite you on the butt. I will probably be laid off soon. This will occur close to the time that I'm eligible to retire. If it happens before I'm eligible, I'll receive a years pay for severance and a taxable lump-sum distribution of my retirement account (which would amount to about another years pay). That wouldn't be good, but I'd recover. If it happens after I'm eligible, I'll have a reduced annuity (barely enough to live on but certainly enough to act as a "personal safety net") and good insurance for life. Even my involuntary exit strategies are not all that horrendous.
In order to get to where I now am, I've given up a great deal of income over my life. I like the way things worked out. So is it a sin to aspire only to an "IT technician" job at "the lower paid end of the IT spectrum"? I don't think so.
A link for Simple Share NAS would be great, though I'm going to google it as soon as I finish writing this. Also, how strong is the encryption and have there been any administrative issues, flakiness, etc.?
You people are insane! Who has the kind of money you people are talking about and if you do have it to spend it on speakers?
Welcome to the world of high-end audio. Yes, there are lots of insane people there. The funny thing is, there are plenty of insane people with ridiculous amounts of money. Personally, I have about $3k invested in my simple, two-speaker record-playing system. At a high-end audio salon, that level marks me a total poverty case not worth pouring a glass of wine for.
On the other end, there are speaker cables that cost $10k per foot, plenty of amps that cost more than $50k per channel (minimum 2 required), an astounding variety of speakers priced at over $250k for a two-channel stereo setup, isolation tables designed for electron microscopes adapted to use under turntables for I-don't-want-to-think-about-it money, and designers who'll tear down and rebuild half your house to get the acoustics right. I have personally spent a great deal of time playing with turntables that cost nearly $40k with tonearm and cartridge.
Oh, and cartridges! This has always been one of my favorite areas. There are hideously expensive phono cartridges on the market that wear out and must be replaced so quickly that it would actually be cheaper to hire YoYo Ma to sit in your living room and play for you.
People with ridiculous money buy ridiculous things. Personally, I think that season tickets to the symphony are a far better buy than a ridiculous stereo system. That doesn't change the fact that there will always be a small but viable market for diamond-encrusted cell phones, solid gold bathroom fixtures, million-dollar cars, and stereo systems that can, yes, top a million dollars.
People have always been like that. Al Capone, iirc, was famous for having expensive custom suits made. He wore a new one every day then threw it away. High-end stereo is just, if you'll pardon the pun, a new verse in the same old song.
The GP post made mention of speakers being a mature technology worth investing in. It's awfully easy to spend USD$70k on speakers. When it comes to mature technologies that can actually make a difference in the quality of the entertainment experience, audio gear can get really expensive, really quick.
I'm in my 40s and my ears aren't so good anymore, so even if I were incredibly rich I would have no reason to buy the best speakers out there. Still, based on easily discernible quality differences I could justify $20k to $30k for a (standard 2-speaker) stereo system. (To be fair, I could get 90% of that performance out of a $5k system, but I hope you take my point.) Add to that the extra speakers required by a theater and by multi-room sound, plus the infrastructure, and you can easily spend $70k even if you do use a $50 DVD player.
They didn't do credit card processing for midget-granny-and-horse-porn.com did they?
No, but they did do credit card processing for sites featuring under-18 models doing "non-nude" work. Within the past couple of weeks, a group of those sites got busted and the FBI has announced intentions to prosecute them for selling child porn even though the models were clothed. (It seems the clothes were too small and/or the poses too racy.) Note that I don't know if any of the recently busted sites were using iBill and the point may already be moot since iBill has been defunct or close to it for a while.
However, according to TFA
The stolen data, examined by Wired News, includes names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses. Other fields in the compromised databases appear to be logins and passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts, but credit-card numbers are not included.
I have to figure if logins and passwords are there, then the websites accessible via those logins might also be in the data. If so, I imagine that at this moment a whole bunch of guys are pretty worried.
If you don't mind keeping your drawings on paper and if all you want otherwise is to take notes, it's hard to beat a mid-1980s Tandy 102. (Lots of good info and links on that page, btw.) I'm dead serious. Up until a few years ago, I regularly wrote for publication. The gig required extensive travel and *all* I needed was something with a good keyboard to record text. For that simple purpose, these things are still amazing. Instant-on, rugged, super-lightweight, 20 hours of battery life from 4 AA batteries, exactly the right size to actually throw on your lap and get *real* work done - these attributes are nothing to sneeze at.
Compare the typing experience on a 102 to that of a modern PDA with an accessory foldable keyboard. Compare it to one of those idiotic thumb-driven toys. There is no comparison. If you learned to type the old-fashioned way, via a manual typewriter or, at best, one of those brand-fangled new IBM Selectric things, then what passes for a "modern portable keyboard" is a joke. In my heyday, I could pour text into my 102 so fast that the sound of individual keystrokes begn to get lost in a sort of clackety hum.
Right now, I temporarily don't use it. In two years, when I retire from my day job and start writing on the road again, you better believe my 102 is coming out of storage and I'm putting it back to work.
at over 100,000 employees, almost all in the U.S. We're a nearly-all-MS shop running Outlook 2003 for clients and we're in the process of switching (we're mostly done) from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003. Normal users are allowed to send emails no bigger than 2 megabytes. Power users get to send 10 mb. Everyone can have all the *.pst files they want on their local drive, but they are allotted a maximum of 500 mb on a network share for storage. If they want to fill it up with *.pst files, that's fine with us though we try to educate people about how network shares can be a dangerous place to keep *.pst files. (Latency problems and corrupted *.pst files go hand-in-hand.) Exchange mail boxes are soft-limited to 90 megs; the warnings start going out. The hard limit kicks in at 95 megs; when the mailbox gets that big, the user can no longer send mail.
Comments about the pejorative connotation of "infectious" as used in this article should be read in light of why the authors say they use that word. They reference this paper as justification for their terminology. Seems reasonable to me; that document is informative and useful, as is the one from down under.
Is it something about Blackberries that makes people stupid? Or are those little things too hard to read so that it's difficult to tell to whom you're sending copies of mail? I don't have one so I don't know; in my organization of over 100,000 employees, we have less than 1000 people with Blackberries. A while back, when that number was under 300 and you just knew that any email with that little blurb at the bottom about being sent via Blackberry meant that the sender was one of our highest-powered executives, there was a rash of embarrassing forwards. Apparently, someone on our primary front-line support mailing list thought it would be fun to occasionally cc the executives. We would then be entertained by lengthy debates on technical subjects conducted via Blackberry and it was always, always, ALWAYS the Blackberry users who posted the most inane, pointless, or technically incompetent garbage to the discussions. It was fun, sure, but it occasionally sunk in that the people who were ultimately tasked with, say, setting our wireless use policy were would be dictating our daily tasks for years to come DESPITE their aggressive cluelessness.
Sobering thought. Fun as some of those emails were, they were, ultimately, just depressing.
OK, if you're cashing checks and, at least occasionally, buying things then you must have some sort of income. If you don't have a social security number, what do you put in those little blocks at the top of your yearly federal income tax return?
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of Texans will tell you how incredibly proud they are that when the State was admitted to the Union, the State retained both the right to secede (which isn't really true) and the right to subdivide into 5 separate states (which is definitely true, but not unique). While there's always a home-grown movement to secede (it's more of a joke than anything else), occasionally someone floats the idea of subdividing into 5 states. That way, we'd pick up 8 additional senators. As attractive as that notion is to some people, it never gets very far. I think people intuitively realize that 2 powerful senators from a big state can probably accomplish more than 10 senators from 5 average-size states with potentially conflicting interests.
There's good and bad. Remember that we're talking about a state taxation issue here. It's easy to find really good examples of sensible taxation in the U.S., such as (nationally) the Pittman-Robertson Act that taxes sporting goods to pay for conservation. In the U.S., it really is the case that hunters pay for (most) conservation. That seems sensible to me.
In the U.S., most education money is sourced locally. The country doesn't pay for schools; the "school district" (or other name for the appropriate taxing entity) does. The money is usually collected locally and disbursed under guidelines set by the state. Usually.
In some states, that means that anything collected locally gets spent locally. Where rich people live in a suburb, the schools can be incredible. 30 miles away in a rusting downtown, the people don't have much money and the schools can look like they exist in a war zone.
Some time back, Texas tried to legislate that away. In what was called the "Robin Hood" plan, some portion of the taxes collected in rich locales was pushed over to poor schools. There have been problems with that plan and alternatives are being sought. Thus, the Texas legislature is busy working on ideas.
As for raising the income tax, Texas doesn't have one. That's highly unusual and it means we have high property taxes. Those property taxes are simply too high and, again, alternatives are being sought.
And the same is true here. Among the other alternatives being examined, it looks like Texas is about to slap a USD$1-per-pack tax on cigarettes. That'll bring in some revenue. And some illegal cigarettes but, hey, everything has a downside.
Not an Aperture user, but I was struck by the review in Popular Photography that made some apologies for the horsepower needed to run it. Yes, imaging is tough, but the program was apparently too slow to test unless it was installed on the absolutely most-tricked-out, highly-upgraded Power Mac G5 you can lay your hands on. Usually, the creampuff reviews from such magazines will give this sort of thing only the barest mention. The fact that the review actually talked about it for a few sentences told me that the program had problems.
I really hate having to read between the lines of reviews from mainstream outfits. That's why I love my online sources.
Hmmm. Partially agreed, partially not.
First, the not. Specifically, I'm less concerned with Venezuela knowing what I'm up to than I am with the U.S. authorities knowing. I live in the U.S., so if I say something that would attract the attention of a TLA, to the govt of Venezuela that would be merely a curiosity. Revealed in the U.S. to said TLA, such conversations might lead to an uncomfortable conference with their representatives. I work for one of those TLAs and I hold opinions that I could never publicly discuss without being pointedly informed that said beliefs were at odds with our organizational mission and perhaps employment elsewhere would better suit me. It would be nice to be able to discuss those beliefs online without fear; that was on my mind when I initially posted.
Moving on, though, to other things, you make a good point when you lay out the criteria for an acceptable hosting location (proper Internet connection, legal strong crypto, and no data retention laws) and I believe you when you say that list is pretty short. That's a good case for locating in the U.S.
I completely missed your idea for having anonymous customers. In that vein, I am of two minds. Mailing cash sucks and M.O.s can be traceable. Both require paper that's a pain to process for you. The various precious metal exchanges are not anonymous, so I can see why you might want to limit your payment options in this way.
However, why not take credit cards? It's very simple to drop into any Ace Cash Express (or similar store) and pay $205 for a $200 Visa card with no name on it. You just ask for a "gift card." Those cards can be activated for online purchasing with any fake information the buyer wants to make up. If the cards are held a month or so before they're used (long enough for the video surveillance footage from the store to have been destroyed), then they're completely anonymous. You are seeking customers sophisticated enough that they should have no problems doing business this way and your workload would be substantially diminished.
OTOH, I know there's no small amount of red tape involved in accepting credit cards.
Perhaps a hybrid method would work well. Allow your users to send you cash via credit card. I'm talking about Western Union. Will you be accepting cash via that mechanism?
There's really no need to answer here, though I'd be appreciative. I've bookmarked the domain you provided earlier and I'll be checking back. Assuming reasonable affordability (or maybe even not so reasonable) you've probably made a customer of me.
OK, I don't get it. If the whole point (and, indeed, *my* point was ) "sidestepping fascism," then locating the server in the U.S. is self-defeating. Pursuant to a lawful order, a server operator can be required to begin logging traffic. Your intentions may be the best in the world, but I'm looking for a situation that relies less on the good intentions of the server owner than on larger issues that are more difficult for fascist enforcers to overcome. Specifically, locating a server (or a proxy service) in a country with poor relations with the U.S. means that anytime U.S. authorities want data, they're going to have to get it via wiretapping my encrypted tunnel which will reveal nothing. Then they'll have to move on to other methods of data-gathering that will be much more inconvenient/expensive/technically challenging. Eventually, absent overt acts on my part, the resources required to figure out what one little insignificant paranoid jerk like me is doing online will grow to the point that it's no longer worth the trouble.
See where I'm coming from? Heck, if I was a certain recently-empowered South American leader who enjoyed tweaking the nose of the U.S. at every opportunity, I'd be doing everything in my power to encourage ISPs in my country to offer secure accounts to U.S. customers just to piss off various U.S. government entities.
There's money to be made at this. I feel sure someone is going to jump on it eventually. As the U.S. becomes more and more intolerably fascist, the need becomes more acute. Eventually, plenty of people are going to be willing to pay another $25 a month to be reasonably sure they aren't being spied on. I'm ready to do it now and I'd pay more than that for a service such as you describe if it were located beyond the *practical* reach of various govt entities.
I realize that calmness and reason are routinely shouted down when this topic is being discussed, but the parent is so insightful it clearly deserves a 5 rating.
It's time to start compiling lists of proxy servers. Folks seem to want to concentrate on the ones that are just lying about, open and available. Well, I don't mind paying for something reliable, but if I'm going to pay for it my choices need to be:
Recently, I've actually pondered colocating my own proxy somewhere outside the country. I'm thinking maybe I could start looking in Venezuela...Anybody got any other ideas?
I've installed and run investigative workstations for my employer. It ain't easy. Our methodology is to set up workstations that are as bulletproof as we can make them (considering the places we're going to visit, that's a given) and then let specialists try to develop leads. We have procedures to allow non-LEO personnel do the initial legwork; they surf and chat and poke around, extensively logging everything. When something interesting pops up, they're free to dig deeper. Eventually, when they think they have enough information to write up a report, they do so and turn it over for review. If it's picked up for serious investigation, either on the criminal or civil side, it passes from their hands and they never really know what becomes of it. That's fine with me; the initial lead development is what's fun, anyway. I'm one of the few people I know who can say he's spent a great deal of time being paid by Uncle Sam to surf porn (and other unsavory stuff).
What bugs me are the amateurs. There's a certain nexus between the sleazy side of the porn world and financial crimes, so I've spent a bunch of time in places that, at first blush, might seem more titillating than profitable. You would not believe how many transparently fake attempts are made by local, often small-town cops to entice people into illegal behavior. By far, the most common problem is the "I'm a 12-year-old girl. Would you like to talk to me about sex?" thing. Yes, some of them are that crude. Apparently, there are a bunch of Barney Fifes out there who have convinced their bosses to set up an AOL account for them in a back room at the police station for the purpose of generating a few easy, cheap, and sensational arrests that'll get the name of the local DA in the paper before the next election.
I used to wish they'd just go away, but afaik perhaps they already have. I haven't worked in lead generation for several years so I haven't been in any of those places in quite a while.
Anybody have any recent experience with this? Are there still woefully clueless LEOs out there popping up at inappropriate places pretending to be hot-to-trot preteens? God, I hope not; they were a royal pain in the ass.
Many excellent points. Allow me to address a few.
I had two more giant boxes of baking soda in the pantry, as well as a fire extinguisher. I grabbed the box first only because it was the solution that could be deployed most quickly.
I'm old. My original post specifies that this was in the days before 911 service existed. While I was dealing with the fire, my Mom was paging through a directory and hitting "0" on the phone. If the fire had continued, she was working on the next step.
I thought of that. Then I figured my Mom would let me know if it flared again. Also, I wanted her to know that I knew she could handle it from there. (See below for more.)
I gave her a hug as I left.
Actually, there's more to it. Since this is one of the few cases in life where I think I did exactly right, I'll explain. This happened very soon after my father died. Mom was an emotional wreck. She was depressed and her self-confidence was at a low ebb. She badly needed to know that I could take care of her. She badly needed to know that she could take care of herself. When she accidentally started this fire, I could see her look of utter helplessness. This was the sort of thing that could put her over the edge if it were any big deal. Now, normally any house fire IS a big deal, but as I walked to the kitchen I realized it was imperative I treat this whole incident as a mere trifle. By being cavalier about it, I assured her it was no big deal, she wasn't a screw-up, and it could happen to anybody. By offhandedly assuming she would clean up and handing off the situation to her, I demonstrated my confidence in her to take control. By being blase' in the moment, I showed her that even if something bad started to happen, she could rely on me to handle it.
I realize this all seems strange but I found the situation highly stressful. When I turned the corner from my room into the hallway, all I saw was a mass of flames framed in the opening ahead of me. I nearly freaked out; I was so stressed that time seemed to slow down (and this was long before I had ever heard of tachypsychia.) But during those four or five long steps from my room to the kitchen, I vividly remember consciously assessing her state of mind based on how she was moving and her facial expressions and then deliberately formulating a plan to make the entire situation as stress-free as possible for her.
To an observer, it would have looked rude. To her, as she told me later, it was one of those incidents that gives a person hope they can overcome their circumstances no matter what life throws at them. Her confidence in me, in herself (because I had confidence in her), and in the future got a perfectly timed and sorely needed boost from the incident.
Personally, I think this was the first time she ever saw me as fully adult and I think she was shocked. It was a good shock, to be sure, but it was also a turning point for the better in our relationship and solidified our mutual respect that had been battered by recent circumstances.
Side benefit - To live up to my demonstrated confidence in her, she cleaned the hell out of that kitchen. :-)
(No links provided because I'm at work and "Weapons" sites are filtered.)
Google for "Dial 911 and Die" and you'll find some interesting case studies by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Their point is that that you should be able to own guns because dialing 911 will frequently not produce a fast enough response to prevent a tragedy. The broader point is that 911 is surprisingly (to most people) unreliable. Generally, when you have a true emergency of the "We need help in two minutes or less or someone's going to die" sort, you're on your own.
Back before 911 when I was a kid, I was listening to music in my bedroom when I heard my mother scream. As I walked down the hall, I saw her trying to dial the phone while the entire top of the cooktop was engulfed in four feet of flames from a grease fire. I walked in, pulled her out of my path, opened the pantry, stuck my thumb into the side of a new box of baking soda, ripped the top clean off, stuck my arm into the fire, and vigorously shook all the powder out of the box over the fire. Then I turned off the burners and told my mom "I put it out; you clean it up."
I was back in my room and listening to music again in 90 seconds, 2 minutes, tops.
If I'd been stupid enough to rely on 911, the house would have burned down. It's amazing to me how many people don't realize that they need to be at least a little self-sufficient.
Agreed. However, is that a bad thing? I personally like directly interacting with customers and showing them how to open a file. I get great satisfaction from taking a dead laptop from a tearful employee who thinks they've just lost a years work and returning to them, a few hours later, with a new laptop already set up with all their data. It's fun. It's satisfying.
I do this work for about USD$66K per year with good insurance, decent time off, reasonable autonomy, and a retirement plan that will, when that day comes, pay my basic expenses and continue to provide insurance. Is that a bad deal?
Here's my thought on that - Back in the day, I was thought of as some sort of Unix Wiz (I wasn't, but I was a good sysadmin) and I turned down several offers that would have tripled or quadrupled my salary. Those jobs would have also required me to wear a pager, work 60-hour weeks, and, frankly, would have ground me to a pulp in short order. Some people have an "always go for the money" attitude and might think I'm crazy. I hope what they do works for them. I, on the other hand, am quite happy with the path I chose.
Of course, something can always bite you on the butt. I will probably be laid off soon. This will occur close to the time that I'm eligible to retire. If it happens before I'm eligible, I'll receive a years pay for severance and a taxable lump-sum distribution of my retirement account (which would amount to about another years pay). That wouldn't be good, but I'd recover. If it happens after I'm eligible, I'll have a reduced annuity (barely enough to live on but certainly enough to act as a "personal safety net") and good insurance for life. Even my involuntary exit strategies are not all that horrendous.
In order to get to where I now am, I've given up a great deal of income over my life. I like the way things worked out. So is it a sin to aspire only to an "IT technician" job at "the lower paid end of the IT spectrum"? I don't think so.
Thank you so much for the information. I've been looking for something with this mix of features.
A link for Simple Share NAS would be great, though I'm going to google it as soon as I finish writing this. Also, how strong is the encryption and have there been any administrative issues, flakiness, etc.?
Thanks for the info, btw.
I work in a large organization with the sort of separation of duties described by the parent poster. It works very well.
Welcome to the world of high-end audio. Yes, there are lots of insane people there. The funny thing is, there are plenty of insane people with ridiculous amounts of money. Personally, I have about $3k invested in my simple, two-speaker record-playing system. At a high-end audio salon, that level marks me a total poverty case not worth pouring a glass of wine for.
On the other end, there are speaker cables that cost $10k per foot, plenty of amps that cost more than $50k per channel (minimum 2 required), an astounding variety of speakers priced at over $250k for a two-channel stereo setup, isolation tables designed for electron microscopes adapted to use under turntables for I-don't-want-to-think-about-it money, and designers who'll tear down and rebuild half your house to get the acoustics right. I have personally spent a great deal of time playing with turntables that cost nearly $40k with tonearm and cartridge.
Oh, and cartridges! This has always been one of my favorite areas. There are hideously expensive phono cartridges on the market that wear out and must be replaced so quickly that it would actually be cheaper to hire YoYo Ma to sit in your living room and play for you.
People with ridiculous money buy ridiculous things. Personally, I think that season tickets to the symphony are a far better buy than a ridiculous stereo system. That doesn't change the fact that there will always be a small but viable market for diamond-encrusted cell phones, solid gold bathroom fixtures, million-dollar cars, and stereo systems that can, yes, top a million dollars.
People have always been like that. Al Capone, iirc, was famous for having expensive custom suits made. He wore a new one every day then threw it away. High-end stereo is just, if you'll pardon the pun, a new verse in the same old song.
The GP post made mention of speakers being a mature technology worth investing in. It's awfully easy to spend USD$70k on speakers. When it comes to mature technologies that can actually make a difference in the quality of the entertainment experience, audio gear can get really expensive, really quick.
I'm in my 40s and my ears aren't so good anymore, so even if I were incredibly rich I would have no reason to buy the best speakers out there. Still, based on easily discernible quality differences I could justify $20k to $30k for a (standard 2-speaker) stereo system. (To be fair, I could get 90% of that performance out of a $5k system, but I hope you take my point.) Add to that the extra speakers required by a theater and by multi-room sound, plus the infrastructure, and you can easily spend $70k even if you do use a $50 DVD player.
It's now the BATFE, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
Sounds like everything I'd need to throw one helluva party.
No, but they did do credit card processing for sites featuring under-18 models doing "non-nude" work. Within the past couple of weeks, a group of those sites got busted and the FBI has announced intentions to prosecute them for selling child porn even though the models were clothed. (It seems the clothes were too small and/or the poses too racy.) Note that I don't know if any of the recently busted sites were using iBill and the point may already be moot since iBill has been defunct or close to it for a while.
However, according to TFA
I have to figure if logins and passwords are there, then the websites accessible via those logins might also be in the data. If so, I imagine that at this moment a whole bunch of guys are pretty worried.
There are several alternative methods.
If you don't mind keeping your drawings on paper and if all you want otherwise is to take notes, it's hard to beat a mid-1980s Tandy 102. (Lots of good info and links on that page, btw.) I'm dead serious. Up until a few years ago, I regularly wrote for publication. The gig required extensive travel and *all* I needed was something with a good keyboard to record text. For that simple purpose, these things are still amazing. Instant-on, rugged, super-lightweight, 20 hours of battery life from 4 AA batteries, exactly the right size to actually throw on your lap and get *real* work done - these attributes are nothing to sneeze at.
Compare the typing experience on a 102 to that of a modern PDA with an accessory foldable keyboard. Compare it to one of those idiotic thumb-driven toys. There is no comparison. If you learned to type the old-fashioned way, via a manual typewriter or, at best, one of those brand-fangled new IBM Selectric things, then what passes for a "modern portable keyboard" is a joke. In my heyday, I could pour text into my 102 so fast that the sound of individual keystrokes begn to get lost in a sort of clackety hum.
Right now, I temporarily don't use it. In two years, when I retire from my day job and start writing on the road again, you better believe my 102 is coming out of storage and I'm putting it back to work.
at over 100,000 employees, almost all in the U.S. We're a nearly-all-MS shop running Outlook 2003 for clients and we're in the process of switching (we're mostly done) from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003. Normal users are allowed to send emails no bigger than 2 megabytes. Power users get to send 10 mb. Everyone can have all the *.pst files they want on their local drive, but they are allotted a maximum of 500 mb on a network share for storage. If they want to fill it up with *.pst files, that's fine with us though we try to educate people about how network shares can be a dangerous place to keep *.pst files. (Latency problems and corrupted *.pst files go hand-in-hand.) Exchange mail boxes are soft-limited to 90 megs; the warnings start going out. The hard limit kicks in at 95 megs; when the mailbox gets that big, the user can no longer send mail.
Comments about the pejorative connotation of "infectious" as used in this article should be read in light of why the authors say they use that word. They reference this paper as justification for their terminology. Seems reasonable to me; that document is informative and useful, as is the one from down under.
Is it something about Blackberries that makes people stupid? Or are those little things too hard to read so that it's difficult to tell to whom you're sending copies of mail? I don't have one so I don't know; in my organization of over 100,000 employees, we have less than 1000 people with Blackberries. A while back, when that number was under 300 and you just knew that any email with that little blurb at the bottom about being sent via Blackberry meant that the sender was one of our highest-powered executives, there was a rash of embarrassing forwards. Apparently, someone on our primary front-line support mailing list thought it would be fun to occasionally cc the executives. We would then be entertained by lengthy debates on technical subjects conducted via Blackberry and it was always, always, ALWAYS the Blackberry users who posted the most inane, pointless, or technically incompetent garbage to the discussions. It was fun, sure, but it occasionally sunk in that the people who were ultimately tasked with, say, setting our wireless use policy were would be dictating our daily tasks for years to come DESPITE their aggressive cluelessness.
Sobering thought. Fun as some of those emails were, they were, ultimately, just depressing.
OK, if you're cashing checks and, at least occasionally, buying things then you must have some sort of income. If you don't have a social security number, what do you put in those little blocks at the top of your yearly federal income tax return?
Just curious.
Sorry. I thought we were talking about breathing in spent gunpowder smoke, not moon dust. That dust would, of course, be bad news.