I don't mind the heads-up about a little-used piece of Gnu software (as pointed out, most distros push OpenSSL), but I do mind astro-turfing the Microsoft PR line of "Nobody's responsible if Linux fails!"
The irony, of course, is that most people haven't read Microsoft's EULA which effectively says 'Not only are we not responsible if Windows fails, but we'll sue you if you try to fix it yourself.'
This is really gonna bite the hundreds of millions running XP who will be orphaned this year when Microsoft stops supporting it. Not only do they face the prospect, in a matter of weeks, of never again seeing security updates from Microsoft, but it will be illegal to even try to fix future bugs themselves (or hire a third party to do it).
This last bit is something that Linux users have as a right
No support (not even 3rd party) for XP, and Windows 8 is just short of an entirely differend OS. You call THAT continuity?
At least with Linux, you have the option of (banding together with a group of like-minded entities, and) doing your own support, until you decide it's time to retire you old software/hardware combination.
That's the real choice and freedom you get when you use Free and/or Open Source software.
When Microsoft EOL's Vista (possibly as early as a couple of years from now), the people who tore their hair out getting used to it, are going to have to tear their hair out getting used to whatever Microsoft is shoving down people's throats then -- irrespective of whether or not the Vista based systems they have are really ready to be retired.
Well, supposedly, the study took levels of exercise into account -- and driving to work in the morning would account for 30 minutes of sunlight exposure, without any real exercise.
I often keep a dozen or more windows open on my web browsers. Doing that, and a couple more things, you can sometimes break 4GB RAM -- and that's using Linux. For Windows 8 users, you need a couple of Gig just to get the machine off of the ground. more than 4 is needed to do almost anything more than stare at a blank screen.
Macs are essentially an OS with the hardware attached, rather than the other way 'round. -- and they also have an OS 'tax' assigned to them. Macs also have well under 10% of the market, last time I looked.
This really only leaves Chromebooks, which, essentially are netbooks, not full blown notebooks or desktops.
If a consumer wants a 'real' machine with a choice of OS (or no OS at all), the pickings are incredibly thin -- and many of those pickings are from manufacturers who pay the tax to Microsoft, whether or not they ship the box with an OS on it. Often, they even pay an extra tax if they sell too many macines without a Microsoft OS on them.
If only Microsoft would stop doing things like using 'secure boot' to make life harder on Linux users -- rather than just competing on quality and features.
Consider that Al Qiaida killed about as many people in 2001 as drunk drivers kill Every couple months.
If this was about keeping us and our kids safe, We'd be paying a couple billion a month to MADD.
Personally, I think any TSA employee in charge of TSA procedures needs to go through said procedure/screening every day before work.
Actually, they need to be fired and replaced by people with proper risk management training, as opposed to risk avoidance.
Risk Avoidance: Do everything in your power to prevent some risk, no matter the cost
Risk Management: Assess the risk, consider the liklihood of the risk, the damage it will cost if it happens, then look at mitigations, how likely they are to work, how much they'll cost, etc... And make the cheapest decision. IE if on average the mitigation will prevent more loss than it costs, you impliment it. Otherwise you just accept the risk.
It may be legal for a carrier to administrate their network for quality control purposes, but when they start throttling a service that they compete with, they run into all sorts of legal barriers...
unfair competition.
interference with contractual obligations
false advertising (they advertised N Mbit/sed.. they're delivering X<<N, without good reason)
If Chad Oulson had had his own gun, he might be alive and well in jail today -- and the retired police officer (along with, possibly a couple of innocent bystanders) might be dead instead. Oh.. hold on, Florida is a 'stand your ground' state... So: other people might be dead, but Oulson would probably be a free man.
BTW: According to FBI murder stats, if you own a gun, It's about 3-5 times more likely to kill a member of your family than to kill an intruder or other criminal.
In other words, if you care more about protecting your family from criminals than you care about keeping them alive, then you should definitely buy a gun.
To properly debate this, Bill Nye needs to powerfully understand both Science and the bible -- so that he can point out the biblical fallacies inherent in Creationism. -- such as the internal inconsistencies within the biblical bits, and the fact that the length of God's day is never specified in Genesis... (how long is a day where the earth doesn't yet exist? When does the sun set for god? What order do things REALLY occur in? What is god's image?
A proper understanding of the bible would allow him to argue that so-called 'literal' creationism is neither literal nor necessary to an appreciation and belief in god, Jesus and/or Christianity.
The NSA and Homeland security aren't particularly interested in stopping terrorism. I'd say that they're far more interested in tracking dissent The occasional successful attack justifies their existence.
Less than a year after 9/11, and during a CODE RED alert weekend, I had a kid on my game server who had talked to me about being a fundamental muslim and having issues within that realm make a comment
"That's OK I"ll be dead tomorrow anyways".
Now, if ever there was a case that just stood out like a sore thumb and asked to be investigated, I couldn't think of something better. I was also, at that point just worried about his mental health, generally.
Turns out that the much-touted 1-800 terrorism hotline was already shut down.
It took me almost an entire day to find someone who would take my 'tip' and do something with it.... and that was pretty much in the middle of the post 9/11 hysteria. That's right... we're supposed to turn in tips about possible terrorism but almost all of the avenues of reporting have been shut down.
Not that I took the terrorism hype very seriously to begin with, but you'd think that they'd at least keep up the first layer after the facade.
Many years ago, a friend of mine told me a story about her 'original' land rover... She said that, using it's lowest gear (almost never used in normal driving), she was able to tow a snowed-in tow truck out of her back alley... sideways.
(Bob Beck, if you're reading this: yes, this is your mother I'm talking about.)
I started back in the early '80s when that was all there is, and I probably have a shell open on my machines most of the time.
On the other hand, I have absolutely no problem using the GUI solutions for most of the simple stuff. I would suggest that one of the first things you need to do is teach newbies when each tool is most appropriate -- not that one is unconditionally better than the other.
Hospitals are required to take care of people who have critical injuries -- at least as long as it takes them to be able to walk away -- so you not wearing a seatbelt costs me when I have to go to the hospital (or -- given that I live in Canada), when I pay my taxes.
Run a set of single wires, and remote switches.
Put a switch/router in the middle (or a side) of the ceiling, and run a small number of wires along the walls to switches on the floor near where you have clusters of people.Running from the cieling to the floor, you can follow the brick mortar lines (you'll get half on the mortar, half on the brick.. you can spray paint the half running over brick the same colour as the brick -- this will break the lines, and camouflage what you're doing.
Put the switches inside of pretty, wood cases... with or without locks, depending on how much you trust the staff to play nice.
Unless you've got dozens of people running video, gigabit backbone runs should be enough... run multiple ggabit lines to the central switches if you have to, single gigabit to the floor switches.
Generally, bandwidth use tends to be sporadic, so network congestion shouldn't be that bad.. There's rarely any real need to run single gigibit lines from the server room to every client. For most services, 100Meg should be enough to the clients (helps to moderate burst loads), and gigabit for trunking.
a company with a history of botching huge government contracts, gets another huge government contract -- and botches it.
I was wondering why this contract was costing so much to do so little.... It is all becoming a log clearer now. These people don't make money off of well managed projects (from the customer's point of view), they make money from BIG projects... no matter how small they actually needed to be.
I'm sure that the botch is well documented ISO9000 style and all, but success was not necessary for them to get paid.
It's something of a chicken and egg problem. The presumption of Capitalism is that, as a company or business works to maximize it's profits, it will benefit society. -- The job of the government is to ensure that the rules are set such that, as a company's striving to maximize profit, it will necessarily benefit society. this was enforced by the principle of "one man, one vote".
The problem now, is that companies and their money are the primary contributor to election campaigns.. and this means that the politicians who control government are now beholden to the companies that they're supposed to be regulating. We've gone from one man one vote to one dollar one vote. This now puts the inmates in charge of the asylum of society.
If they're getting to you within minutes, then they're getting help from inside. It may be as simple as your router being configured for Dynamic DNS, or one or more of your machines is compromised... or -- as others said, they may be getting info from your game server.
Rather than paying gigabucks for a hardware router/firewall, take an ancient machine, add a second ethernet card to it and install OpenBSD onto it.OpenBSD will do you as well as anything hardware based, in terms of protecting your network -- even if it is bit more work to get properly configured. You can also then install stuff like Snort and wireshark to REALLY watch what your system is doing.
It won't take much in terms of hardware -- even a sub 1Gz machine will be more than sufficient for a 20 megabit feed.
Provide the option to disable the capability. Some distros will make it the default. Others won't... but it will ultimately allow users to decide -- which is the whole point of Open Source.
Just don't force people to hack the source juet to restore the capability.
The NSA stores all encrypted communications until they can decrypt them -- How do you determine that (parts of) a call or communication is encrypted without downloading and processing the actual content of the connection?
The NSA doesn't need direct access to Google's servers to read your mail. All that they need is access to google's data pipes and a copy of their private key. There's probably a FISA order telling Google to give them access to Google's private keys -- and the person who received the order isn't allowed to talk about it.
If you live in the US, then the NSA can legally intercept anything that you send out of the US. Encrypting it makes it harder for them to read, but they've still intercepted the encrypted message. If they've got, or can extract the decoding private key, then they've also intercepted your cleartext message (effectively).
Slashdot Mirror
What Netflix is paying for is "a peering tie-in inside of Comcast's data centers".
You can call 'protection money' whatever you want. It's still Extortion.
The irony, of course, is that most people haven't read Microsoft's EULA which effectively says 'Not only are we not responsible if Windows fails, but we'll sue you if you try to fix it yourself.'
This is really gonna bite the hundreds of millions running XP who will be orphaned this year when Microsoft stops supporting it. Not only do they face the prospect, in a matter of weeks, of never again seeing security updates from Microsoft, but it will be illegal to even try to fix future bugs themselves (or hire a third party to do it).
This last bit is something that Linux users have as a right
At least with Linux, you have the option of (banding together with a group of like-minded entities, and) doing your own support, until you decide it's time to retire you old software/hardware combination.
That's the real choice and freedom you get when you use Free and/or Open Source software.
When Microsoft EOL's Vista (possibly as early as a couple of years from now), the people who tore their hair out getting used to it, are going to have to tear their hair out getting used to whatever Microsoft is shoving down people's throats then -- irrespective of whether or not the Vista based systems they have are really ready to be retired.
Well, supposedly, the study took levels of exercise into account -- and driving to work in the morning would account for 30 minutes of sunlight exposure, without any real exercise.
I often keep a dozen or more windows open on my web browsers. Doing that, and a couple more things, you can sometimes break 4GB RAM -- and that's using Linux.
For Windows 8 users, you need a couple of Gig just to get the machine off of the ground. more than 4 is needed to do almost anything more than stare at a blank screen.
I'm presuming that the beeps are Morse code for some silly message, but I only know enough Morse to recognize it, not 'read' it.
This really only leaves Chromebooks, which, essentially are netbooks, not full blown notebooks or desktops.
If a consumer wants a 'real' machine with a choice of OS (or no OS at all), the pickings are incredibly thin -- and many of those pickings are from manufacturers who pay the tax to Microsoft, whether or not they ship the box with an OS on it. Often, they even pay an extra tax if they sell too many macines without a Microsoft OS on them.
If only Microsoft would stop doing things like using 'secure boot' to make life harder on Linux users -- rather than just competing on quality and features.
If this was about keeping us and our kids safe, We'd be paying a couple billion a month to MADD.
Personally, I think any TSA employee in charge of TSA procedures needs to go through said procedure/screening every day before work.
Actually, they need to be fired and replaced by people with proper risk management training, as opposed to risk avoidance.
Risk Avoidance: Do everything in your power to prevent some risk, no matter the cost
Risk Management: Assess the risk, consider the liklihood of the risk, the damage it will cost if it happens, then look at mitigations, how likely they are to work, how much they'll cost, etc... And make the cheapest decision. IE if on average the mitigation will prevent more loss than it costs, you impliment it. Otherwise you just accept the risk.
Class action lawsuit, anyone?
If Chad Oulson had had his own gun, he might be alive and well in jail today -- and the retired police officer (along with, possibly a couple of innocent bystanders) might be dead instead. Oh .. hold on, Florida is a 'stand your ground' state... So: other people might be dead, but Oulson would probably be a free man.
BTW: According to FBI murder stats, if you own a gun, It's about 3-5 times more likely to kill a member of your family than to kill an intruder or other criminal.
In other words, if you care more about protecting your family from criminals than you care about keeping them alive, then you should definitely buy a gun.
It's Darwinism in action.
A proper understanding of the bible would allow him to argue that so-called 'literal' creationism is neither literal nor necessary to an appreciation and belief in god, Jesus and/or Christianity.
Less than a year after 9/11, and during a CODE RED alert weekend, I had a kid on my game server who had talked to me about being a fundamental muslim and having issues within that realm make a comment
Now, if ever there was a case that just stood out like a sore thumb and asked to be investigated, I couldn't think of something better. I was also, at that point just worried about his mental health, generally.
Turns out that the much-touted 1-800 terrorism hotline was already shut down.
It took me almost an entire day to find someone who would take my 'tip' and do something with it.... and that was pretty much in the middle of the post 9/11 hysteria. That's right... we're supposed to turn in tips about possible terrorism but almost all of the avenues of reporting have been shut down.
Not that I took the terrorism hype very seriously to begin with, but you'd think that they'd at least keep up the first layer after the facade.
Remember: No expectation of privacy -- which means that secrecy is a complete no-go..
Many years ago, a friend of mine told me a story about her 'original' land rover... She said that, using it's lowest gear (almost never used in normal driving), she was able to tow a snowed-in tow truck out of her back alley ... sideways.
(Bob Beck, if you're reading this: yes, this is your mother I'm talking about.)
On the other hand, I have absolutely no problem using the GUI solutions for most of the simple stuff. I would suggest that one of the first things you need to do is teach newbies when each tool is most appropriate -- not that one is unconditionally better than the other.
Hospitals are required to take care of people who have critical injuries -- at least as long as it takes them to be able to walk away -- so you not wearing a seatbelt costs me when I have to go to the hospital (or -- given that I live in Canada), when I pay my taxes.
Put the switches inside of pretty, wood cases... with or without locks, depending on how much you trust the staff to play nice.
Unless you've got dozens of people running video, gigabit backbone runs should be enough... run multiple ggabit lines to the central switches if you have to, single gigabit to the floor switches. .. There's rarely any real need to run single gigibit lines from the server room to every client. For most services, 100Meg should be enough to the clients (helps to moderate burst loads), and gigabit for trunking.
Generally, bandwidth use tends to be sporadic, so network congestion shouldn't be that bad
I was wondering why this contract was costing so much to do so little.... It is all becoming a log clearer now. These people don't make money off of well managed projects (from the customer's point of view), they make money from BIG projects ... no matter how small they actually needed to be.
I'm sure that the botch is well documented ISO9000 style and all, but success was not necessary for them to get paid.
The problem now, is that companies and their money are the primary contributor to election campaigns .. and this means that the politicians who control government are now beholden to the companies that they're supposed to be regulating. We've gone from one man one vote to one dollar one vote. This now puts the inmates in charge of the asylum of society.
Rather than paying gigabucks for a hardware router/firewall, take an ancient machine, add a second ethernet card to it and install OpenBSD onto it.OpenBSD will do you as well as anything hardware based, in terms of protecting your network -- even if it is bit more work to get properly configured. You can also then install stuff like Snort and wireshark to REALLY watch what your system is doing.
It won't take much in terms of hardware -- even a sub 1Gz machine will be more than sufficient for a 20 megabit feed.
Just don't force people to hack the source juet to restore the capability.
The NSA stores all encrypted communications until they can decrypt them -- How do you determine that (parts of) a call or communication is encrypted without downloading and processing the actual content of the connection?
The NSA doesn't need direct access to Google's servers to read your mail. All that they need is access to google's data pipes and a copy of their private key. There's probably a FISA order telling Google to give them access to Google's private keys -- and the person who received the order isn't allowed to talk about it.
If you live in the US, then the NSA can legally intercept anything that you send out of the US. Encrypting it makes it harder for them to read, but they've still intercepted the encrypted message. If they've got, or can extract the decoding private key, then they've also intercepted your cleartext message (effectively).