I work in the email security industry, and the biggest problem with domain keys is that hardly anyone uses it.
Yahoo: check eBay: check PayPal: check
My bank? Nope. My wife's bank? Nope. Any other bank whose legit mail I have seen? Nope.
Domain keys are an excellent way to fight phishing, and they really help in that area. They are less helpful on fake Yahoo spam because a lot of people set their From address to be their Yahoo address even when not sending through Yahoo.
eBay and PayPal phishing is easy to nail because of the fact that they do use domain keys. Bank phishing is tougher because few if any banks are using them. If they start doing it, fighting phishing be easier. DK(IM) is not a magic bullet, but it's one more thing we can use.
In my building, it's not at all unusual to see people walking around with their laptops open, cradled in the crook of their elbows, because of poor hand-offs between access points. Recent updates to OS X seem to have fixed the problem for Macs (most of us in engineering in my section have Macs), although most Mac users still carry open out of habit. The Windows users also all carry their notebooks around open. I'm one of the few people who actually closes his notebook when carrying it around the building.
Jumping topics to the original one of whether people are dissatisfied with Windows or not, I think the question isn't framed correctly. Many people are dissatisfied with Windows, all you have to do is talk to people to hear this. The question, then, should be "Are they dissatisfied enough to switch to a different software and/or hardware platform, with the attendant expense in either dollars or effort, plus the learning curve?" The answer seems to be "No." If that were not the case, dissatisfied Windows users with money would be buying Macs by the pallet, and ones who couldn't or wouldn't buy a new machine to get away from Windows would be installing Linux by the pallet.
Of course, there's also the question of education. If most dissatisfied Windows users actually knew from experience how much better a Mac is than Windows, or how much better Linux is than Windows in most respects, there'd be a lot more switching. I can tell you this much: the Mac I'm typing this on is my first Mac, and it's so much better than Windows that I'd never go back. It came from the IT dept. with XP in Parallels, but I never use it. Haven't booted it in something like two months. I do run Linux in Parallels for those areas where the Mac falls short of Linux (it doesn't fall short of Windows anywhere, at least for my needs), and it would be really nice if Parallels would get Parallels Tools for Linux out the door to enable file system and clipboard sharing.
Of course, when they do I might use the Linux VM for everything and only use the Mac as a host platform:)
OJ didn't beat the rap because he had money, he beat the rap because he had a jury dumber than rocks. If he'd had a jury with a cumulative IQ of greater than, say, 6, he'd be doing time right now. While bribes are not common in the US legal system, whoever has the best/most expensive lawyer does often prevail in civil cases and some criminal cases, however, I'd be surprised indeed if that wasn't true in most places.
As a countercase, there's SCO, who spent everything they've got on expensive lawyers and are still being pasted by IBM's expensive lawyers, so the merits of a case do matter.
While I can agree with you that if no money changes hands it's simple copyright infringement, not piracy, what we believe is moral or immoral is really irrelevant to the case. Legal or illegal is all that matters in court. Even in cases where the law is stupid, it will be followed, except in cases of jury nullification, something judges and lawyers on both sides don't really want people to know about. Of course, this is in reference to US law. Many countries do not have a jury system and even those that do may allow jury nullification. Indian law is doubtless different on that point and may (or may not; I don't know) be different on what does or does not constitute piracy and/or copyright infringement.
The argument that it's likely not depriving MS of any actual sales is spot-on; I lived in a country poorer than India for about a year and couldn't have bought a legit copy of Windows there if I'd wanted one (I was running Linux, so I had no need for Windows,legit or otherwise). The fact on the ground was that almost no one there could afford legit Windows, so only pirated copies were available (for about a dollar) in CD shops. MS likely had near-zero legit sales there, and if they could have stamped out piracy (they weren't even trying), they still would have had near-zero legit sales, at least unless they sold real copies of XP Pro for a buck.
WRT length of copyright, I think it's totally out of hand. I'd like to see length of copyright shortened to the lifetime of the author or thirty years, whichever comes first. I realize that would see the works of many living authors pass into the public domain, but after thirty years you've had a pretty good ride out of anything you wrote. Plus, that doesn't mean people won't keep buying your published editions.
If that's too extreme, there could always be a clause that says "after thirty years, anyone can copy and publish your work, with or without permission, but they have to pay some small percentage of sales to you as a royalty." Either way, I think 30 years or life of author is a reasonable term. I could accept fifty years, but I think that's really pushing it.
Well, first of all, he's 38. Even if "30 is the new 20" he hardly qualifies as a kid. When I was 38 (but hey, 40 is the new 30, so I can be 38 again ina a few years ), I knew at least a few things. I knew the difference between right and wrong, legal and illegal, smart and stupid. In the latter category comes the idea that "If my definition of right and wrong differs from the law's definition, I should not do about enacting my definition in a public and noticeable way, lest I get busted." Clearly, he didn't get the difference between smart and stupid.
Secondly, he wasn't imprisoned for copying a file (funny how we expect copyright to be followed when bringing companies to task for violating the GPL but not when some individual violates copyright; the GPL is founded on copyright law, after all, not contract law), he was sentenced for *distributing* the copyrighted content that he copied. That's a far greater transgression under copyright law.
Finally, don't look now, but the only troll in this picture is you.
The number and severity of its security problems certainly qualify as "horrible." Obvious? Depends on who you ask. I'm in IT; I think so. Most people in IT would probably agree with that. End users? Maybe not. They have a different idea of "obvious" than most/. readers.
Having to reboot for practically any security update is horrible, at least in my book. Obvious? Hard to say. Most people use either Windows or a Mac (which also suffer this problem; I love my Mac, but WTF do I have to reboot after updates?), and they don't know any better. If they tried Linux or *BSD, they'd realize that you don't have to reboot to update anything but the kernel.
It's pretty clear that Windows has some pretty horrible flaws, and they are also obvious for at least some values of obvious. The most horrible flaw, though, and the least obvious one to people outside of the industry, is that these flaws are so persistent and so hard to fix because they come from the design choices made in Windows. The reason Unix-based systems have so many fewer flaws and they are mostly less severe is, again, because of basic design choices. Is it horrible that an OS designed in the late 1960s, when the industry was still so young and inexperienced with security, is better-designed than NT and its descendents, which were designed twenty years later?
I'll leave that answer as an exercise for the reader.
It's really disturbing that no one has either modded this up funny or replied to it up to now. Could it be that so few/.ers today recognize the source of your quotation? Has it been that long since getting sound set up in Linux actually required testing to make sure it worked?
Hmm, I guess it has been. I know I haven't heard that recording on over three years myself.
First of all, I think you can make a pretty good argument that Estonian is not a race. Nationality? Yes. Ethnicity? OK. Race? Estonians are white, so no, Estonian is not a race. White is a race.
Secondly, it's well attested that Eastern Europe is a major center of online criminal activity. As someone who has been in the security field for the past four years, I can say that there are days when I wish I could put a firewall around all of it, to keep things *in*
The assumption that it would be a teenager is actually the part least likely to be accurate. It could be - they call them script kiddies for a reason - OTOH, a lot of adults are involved in computer crime, and they are involved in it for profit.
While his remark was flippant, it was not nearly as inaccurate as you might think.
As someone who has partially done that, I take a personal interest in your question and hope I can help at least a little.
Like you, I have been in IT for 20+ years and like you, was finding it to be more work than play. I have also considered, and to some extent done, things to get out of IT.
My short list of things I'd like to do: buy or open a Vietnamese restaurant, be a Starbucks manager, be an In-N-Out Burger manager (really), own a franchised small business, own a fishing tackle shop, be a real estate agent.
Of those, being a real estate agent is something I have done, and I find that I really enjoy it. Last year, I got my license and joined a real estate office on a part-time basis.
About six months later, as I was leaving my previous employer at the end of a long transition package (I was working for a startup that was acquired by a much larger company and I declined to be transferred to headquarters, so I transitioned out over a year and a half while working from a home office) I received an offer from another startup in the greater Silicon Valley area. That was a much shorter transfer than the other company wanted me to make, and the salary kick was huge, so I took it. That mean putting my real estate career on hold for a while, but I plan to restart it later this year or early next year when I have some more time. In the six months I was active part-time in real estate I did sell a house and I loved the experience. It was really great. It's hard work, but so is anything worthwhile. In the meantime, I love my new job and it has put the fun and challenge and play aspect back into IT for me. This is a great company and I'm doing cool, challenging, satisfying stuff.
I liked it so much that if I didn't have a family to support, I would have just walked away from IT when my previous job ended and thrown myself into real estate full time. However, since almost no new agents and even quite a few experienced agents don't make what I make in IT (and you have to consider that since that's a 100% commission gig, you need to make at least 50% more, and probably closer to double, to account for covering your own insurance, 401K, etc.). Few agents, even among experienced ones, are making double what I make in my new job.
That may or may not be for you, but what you can take from that is making a radical career change can be very satisfying if you make the right choice, it might be possible to ease in part-time, and that if you have a family to support, it might be the only way.
Finally, one more piece of perspective: the most satisfying thing I do is support my wife and kids, and even if I'm in a job that's not all that great, my family's well-being is more important than loving my job. That said, my wife is really happy that I love my new gig and having a job you love does make your family life better, too.
There's a much better and more secure solution than that (and let's not kid ourselves; the best phishers *would* find a way around the.bank TLD problem; heck, even now they routinely send people to sites that aren't their bank and fleece them. It's foolish to think a.bank TLD will change anything).
This simple solution is used by at least some local Board of Realtors affiliates, such as Pacific West in Orange County, California. They give you a one-time password generator, a userid, and a PIN. This takes password/userid theft attacks almost totally out of the game, since each password from the generator is only good once and also requires the PIN. Even if someone had your userid and PIN, they'd also need physical possession of the device.
Even if someone used a sophisticate man-in-the-middle attack to intercept the data and pass it on to the real site, then hijacked the session to steal money from a bank account, it would only work once. This would raise the bar far more than anything else they could do.
How badly do I want this for my bank account? I would move all of my deposits to the first bank to implement this, and I'd even be willing to pay for the one-time password device myself.
They can keep using siteid and anything else that floats their boats, but give me that one-time password generator and I'll be happy.
As an American, I agree with you, but for reasons having nothing to do with prison rape (which, incidentally, happens far more in state prisons than in federal prisons, and rarely if ever in the "club fed" type of minimum security prison to which a copyright offender would typically be sent).
My objection to this is over the simple fact that whatever crime(s) he may have committed were committed in Australia, so whether or not he should go to prison, and where and for how long, or even whether he should be arrested and tried, is purely a matter for the Australian government to decide. Extraditing him is ludicrous.
This is very different than, say, picking some terrorist up on the battlefield, finding he's an Australian citizen, and remanding him to the Australian government to serve his sentence in Australia after being convicted and sentenced. If that guy, who is a far worse criminal than a copyright offender, can serve his sentence in Australia, the accused in the present case should most certainly not be extradited at all.
Has the Australian government lost all concept of national sovereignty?
Required where I work too, at least for anyone with access to the code, probably for anyone else, too. In addition, they give you a laptop lock so that if you're going to leave it in the office, you can shackle it to your cubicle.
Beyond the lack of crypto on the drive, I'm just left wondering WTF someone had placed all that information on an *external* drive in the first place. That was stupid, and to then go on to leave it sitting out somewhere and not under lock and key boggles the mind.
That clarifies things a great deal, since this whole outsourcing and layoff thing started far before Bush was president, and is not his fault (or Clinton's, or Bush V.1's, or any other president's, really).
WRT the concept that people should provide for themselves, I by and large support that. A single-payer health insurance system would be nice, but that's so hard to get right that I don't want our government to try it. The only nation I'm aware of that has tried it and not significantSocly fucked it up is Japan, and even there it has solvency issues.
Social Security? Hah. If they would release me from any further participation in the program, they could *keep* everything I've already payed in, and that's not a small amount. I'm in my forties and have been continuously employed since I was 16.
Welfare? I don't think it should be scrapped - there ought to be some sort of safety net for people who legitimately fall on hard times like a lot of IBMers are about to do - but I believe there should be caps on it. Something like a 2 or 3 years out of 5 (or 10?) usage cap, and perhaps a lifetime maximum usage cap as well. Of course, there should be exceptions for people with permanent disabilities as a result of things like auto accidents and severe birth defects, but if you are an able-bodied person, you can and should get your arse out and work.
If we're going to have anything resembling a welfare state, the chief investment should be in the area of education. Make it as cheap and easy as possible for people to get a quality education as you can, and you will minimize the people who may wind up on welfare. And by education, I don't just mean college. That should cover vocational programs of all sorts, too. If being a plumber or electrician is what floats your boat, there should be support for that, too, not just for people going to college.
One thing is for certain: government is so bloated and out of control and beyond the intended limits of authority that it makes even Windows Vista look lean and trim in comparison. As it has been succinctly said, "Government is not the answer; government is the problem."
Unfortunately, Bush is not really a small government guy, and he's not all that much of an America-first guy, either. One has to look no farther than his foolish policies on illegal aliens and border security to know that. To make matters worse, when I look at the slate of candidates running for president in 2008, every potentially viable candidate is at least as bad as he is, and most are worse.
That's a rather poorly thought out argument. Some of you are no doubt old enough to remember the immense pressure that was brought against the South African government to end Apartheid, pressure which was successful. The most important part of that was divestiture in South African assets by public and private investors, universities, governments, you name it.
This had a very negative impact on the South African economy and eventually the government caved and repealed Apartheid.
Now, let's s/ReiserFS/Apartheid/g in your argument.
"Honestly, whatever the South African government has done on a social level has NOTHING to do with the technical merits/achievements of South Africa, and we should not divest ourselves of South African stocks, bonds, or Krugerrands just because they are keeping blacks in near-slavery through Apartheid laws."
That doesn't sound so good, does it?
How about another one?
"Honestly, whatever Google, Cisco, etc. have done to prevent political freedom and freedom of speech in China by building the great firewall, that has NOTHING to do with the technical merits of their products, and we should not turn away from them merely because they are helping keep people in chains."
How about one more, dating to the 1970s:
"Honestly, whatever Nestle has done or failed to do by pushing its baby formula in the third world without educating parents to the dangers of using formula without access to clean water, that has NOTHING to do with the technical quality of their products, and we should boycott them merely because their marketing practices (may have) contributed to the deaths and illnesses of many thousands of infants."
Those sounds ridiculous at best, or morally reprehensible at worst, and they are. I would counter your statement about Reiser that if it is found he killed his wife, then yes, we should abandon his work over that reason alone.
If that is not enough for you, then, as others have pointed out before me, I will resort to solid technical reasons. Hans Reiser is the chief architect and principle developer of ReiserFS. If he is convicted and sentenced to a long prison term or to death, that puts both the present release version and all future versions of ReiserFS in jeopardy. If I were using ReiserFS, I would have already migrated off of it as a precaution
As a father of two young kids, I can assure you that there are doubtless tiny drops of blood at various points in my house:p Adults sometimes do that, too, of course. You cut yourself on something, maybe get a nosebleed, etc. You clean it up, sure, but can you be certain you got every tiny bit? I can't.
The very first thing you need to do is get your resume up-to-date and begin a job search, if you haven't already. Any company that would order you to take such a step is clearly in financial trouble. Even if you are the only sysadmin, sooner or later your job will evaporate, maybe along with everyone else's, maybe before. Don't be there when that happens. Start the process of getting out now, when you can choose a new job at your leisure, not when you become unemployed or the get busted and you are embroiled in it.
Also, you need to buy 30 or 60 minutes of a lawyer's time. Probably an IP specialist. You may be able to find one local to you through the lawyer search on http://www.handelonthelaw.com/Default.aspx. IANAL and the following is not legal advice, blahblahblah.
I would go ahead and install the software, but then, as I stated above, start looking for a job. Your ethical obligation to not violate copyright does not trump your obligation to support any dependents you may have, or your right to feed yourself and keep a roof over your head.
Before installing it, thoroughly document what you have been asked to do, and that it is under duress b/c you would be fired if you refused, and document that you proposed using a free alternative and were refused. Get the document notarized, and lock it away in a safety deposit box. Do anything else the lawyer tells you to do to protect yourself. If you have emails showing them telling you to do it, preserve those in both electronic and hard copies. Keep them in the safety deposit box, too
Then install the software.
Once you start your new job (really; don't do this before you've left this company and are actually working at a new job), at your discretion you could make an anonymous tip to the BSA that the company willfully installed more copies of software than they had a license for. Even if the company fingers you for it, you'll have documentation showing they told you to do it, and the BSA is not likely to be interested in you per se; they are after the money, and the company has that and is the real violator. Plus, if push comes to shove at that point, you probably have nothing to lose by telling the BSA (under advice from your lawyer, of course; if the shit hits the fan, you'll need to get one) that it was you who turned them in because you couldn't leave that on your conscience, that they made you do it but you quit because of it, then turned them in.
Good luck to you. It sucks to be working for a company like that. I hope you can find a new job that is open source friendly.
I converted from Windows (diehard) to Linux diehard in the late nineties and have used it as my exclusive home desktop OS ever since and usually mw work desktop OS. The exceptions to that are the period of time when I worked for Microsoft (and even then, I used it a lot), and now, where my work machine is a Mac (could use Linux if I wanted too, but the MacBook Pro was just too nice to pass up; but I do have Kubuntu in Parallels).
I know Windows pretty well (even had Windows 286 back in the day; what a POS. But I digress), Linux, BSD, Mac a bit of Solaris and Irix. I've used a lot of stuff. My rankings of usability would be 1) Mac OS X 2) Linux + KDE (esp. Kubuntu) 3) Linux + Gnome (esp. Ubuntu) 4) Windows XP.
Specific areas where I consider KDE and Gnome to be better than Windows are the install - OK, that's not a KDE or Gnome thing per se, but installing (K)Ubuntu and several other popular distros is easier than installing XP and way easier than doing an upgrade install of XP from Win2K. The fact that Windows has an application and settings transfer wizard for that is a sign of what a PITA it is (and it doesn't even find all your stuff; Yahoo Messenger archives, for example) to upgrade Windows.
Software installation is another. This might cause you to do a double-take at first, but it's true. Just fire up Synaptic (or Adept, in Kubuntu), type in a search term, it finds packages that match by name or description, you mark them for install, click Apply, and there you go. This is an area where I find the Linux approach to be even better than Mac (not to disparage Mac; the Apple approach is also very good and I love my Mac).
Out of the box driver support (for most stuff) is another. A modern Linux distro supports far more hardware out of the box than XP does. The only fly in the ointment here is that if it's not supported out of the box, it may not be supported at all, or if it is, you may have to either compile a driver or do a jig and dance beyond the ability (or desire) of most beginners to get a binary driver working, so this area is not perfect. Nevertheless, for most things, a Linux distro has much better driver support than out of the box XP.
Foreign filesystems. XP can only read two filesystems: NTFS and FAT. Linux can read and write NTFS, FAT, and most other filesystems. This is a non-issue for most people, maybe, but it's something I've used a lot.
Completeness. After you install XP (or after you take your Mac out of the box) you still have to acquire and install a bunch of extra software to do much. Word processing, spreadsheet, etc. With a typical Linux distro, that stuff is there and waiting for you when the install is done. If it's not, just fire up Synaptic and it's a few clicks away. If there's a usability issue with Linux and software, it's that there is so much available that it can be hard to know which one to pick. OTOH, because it's all at your fingertips and free, it's not hard to try a few things and see what works best for you.
Virtual desktops. Even the best virtual desktop solutions for Windows pale in comparison to the native ones in KDE, Gnome, and most other X environments, and all of them have to be downloaded and installed.
System updates: the only update that requires a reboot in Linux is a kernel replacement, and even then, it can be done at your leisure. Windows (and OS X as well, for some stupid reason) requires a reboot for fairly trivial updates that most certainly should not require a reboot. This is actually my number one gripe about OS X, and a big one with Windows, too.
Countercases: In my experience, online documentation still tends to be better in Windows, but the gap is no longer large. Apple blows away everyone on this point. Games. If games are your main reason for having a PC, you probably should have XP. Using on a Windows network. Using Samba is often more work than using Windows on a Windows network, although it's not unreasonable. Of course, the answer to this is to replace all
Funny, I could have wound up there, but I declined the transfer when Microsoft moved my team to Redmond (we were previously in California) and took the transition package instead. I wound up with a much better job at a much better salary and got to pocket the transition bonus , so all's well that ends well.
I agree completely. A dolt he may be, but the "tubes" description itself wasn't bad. After all, do we not (at least if you've ever been a network engineer) call a fast connection a big pipe? The Internet, from a layman's eye view, is a great deal like a water system (or sewage system, if you will ).
It can be re-routed around breaks, it can get clogged up in parts if you try to run too much through it at once. Leaks (packet loss), as you said.
I have no respect for Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens, but the tubes thing was actually not unreasonable.
I disagree. Not only is the assertion that the reason Microsoft wins is because a monoculture not spot-on, it couldn't be much more wrong.
The top two reasons Microsoft wins most of the time are far simpler and much more plausible than that:
1) Microsoft was there first. They were in the right place at the right time when IBM needed an OS for the IBM PC, and later executed pretty well in following up with Windows and Windows NT. Microsoft had far more successes than failures in those days, and actually produced a lot of software that was better (often far better) than the competition. Excel didn't unseat Lotus 1-2-3 because of vendor lock-in and bundling. It did it because it was already number one on Mac and MS successfully ported it to Windows. MS Word unseated Word Perfect and Wordstar because it was better than them. A lot better. Microsoft's monopoly/lock-in power came later, as a result of the huge success of products like Word, Excel, Access, and Windows 95.
2) Going against Microsoft is going against a powerful, market-dominating player which, apart from its bag of dirty tricks (people like me, who started out in mainframes, remember the adage "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), can guarantee a developer a much larger market for his/her product(s) than Apple, the entire Linux/BSD camp, or both of those together. That's something that's going to be true for years to come. So, if you're a developer looking to sell a proprietary product (including shareware), which platform are you most likely to be drawn to? Yup. Windows.
Not all developers are going to go that way, of course. Some of them are just Mac or Linux users and have no wish to develop for Windows, not even for a larger market share. Plus, of course, most Linux and BSD developers are not putting out proprietary software anyway, they're releasing under the GPL, the BSD license, or some other open source license.
No, it's completely wrong to say Microsoft wins among (proprietary) developers are about too much choice (did anyone notice that Apple offers the same number of IDEs as Microsoft? One.) It's just about the money. If Linux were the dominant operating system in the home and/or corporate desktops and you could practically sell proprietary software into that market (a tough proposition indeed, because there's always some free or Free product that is as good as the proprietary stuff, or close enough that almost no one can justify paying for the proprietary stuff).
It's also worth noting that Microsoft probably has less developer mindshare today than at any time in the last ten years. If its monoculture were such an opposition killer, this would be strange indeed. I'm aware this is not a scientific measurement, but, FWIW I do live and work near the Silicon Valley area, and everywhere I go I find tremendous interest in both Apple and Linux. The majority of my colleagues are not using Windows; most of us (including me) have either Macs on our desks, FreeBSD, or Linux.
Microsoft will continue to dominate developer mindshare for a long time to come. Like the Willie Sutton quote on robbing banks (although he never said it, just as Bill Gates never made the pronouncement on 640K that is widely attributed to him), why do people program for Windows? Because that's where the money is? You may not like the Windows environment as much as Apple, or KDE, or GNOME, or whatever floats your boat. Or maybe you do like it. Either way, jobs writing for the Microsoft platform are plentiful and will be for a long time to come.
My example was *precisely* that of something non-obvious to someone skilled in the art; don't look now, but it's not my reasoning that's failing here.
The patent law meaning of non-obvious is really something more like "novel." The problem we are having is that the bar is set (far) too low for what is considered novel/obvious, with the result that very pedestrian solutions - often with prior art out there - get awarded patents.
If multiple people came up with the same idea independently and they did so before your patent, and especially if they weren't even people particularly skilled in the art, that has great relevance. Not only is your patent then in danger on prior art grounds, but also on obviousness grounds.
I'm not a lawyer, but one thing is clear: you need no such disclosure. It's patently obvious.
That is a very good point. I lived for a while in SE Asia in a country that has a lot of garment and shoe factories, including ones that produce for Nike. My wife is a native of this particular country, so my connections and insight into it are pretty good.
At that time, it was common to read articles decrying the exploitation of workers at these factories, but the facts on the ground are, well, just a bit different.
When someone puts up a shoe factory there to manufacture for, say, Nike, or a garment factory to manufacture for some major retail chain, people will line up around the block to get a job there and if anyone quits they don't even have to advertise b/c people are always trying to get there friends or relatives in there.
Why? B/c the pay and benefits are both generally better than the going rate. The working conditions often are, too.
What some well-meaning but misguided and poorly informed people in the industrialized world call exploitation is known by another term altogether by the people in the newly industrializing world who are getting those jobs: opportunity.
Stop buying the exploitation poster product du jour and all you do is make it a lot harder for someone who may be truly poor - not what passes for poor in the G-8 - to make a living.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in the email security industry, and the biggest problem with domain keys is that hardly anyone uses it.
Yahoo: check
eBay: check
PayPal: check
My bank? Nope.
My wife's bank? Nope.
Any other bank whose legit mail I have seen? Nope.
Domain keys are an excellent way to fight phishing, and they really help in that area. They are less helpful on fake Yahoo spam because a lot of people set their From address to be their Yahoo address even when not sending through Yahoo.
eBay and PayPal phishing is easy to nail because of the fact that they do use domain keys. Bank phishing is tougher because few if any banks are using them. If they start doing it, fighting phishing be easier. DK(IM) is not a magic bullet, but it's one more thing we can use.
I think we might both work for the same company
:)
In my building, it's not at all unusual to see people walking around with their laptops open, cradled in the crook of their elbows, because of poor hand-offs between access points. Recent updates to OS X seem to have fixed the problem for Macs (most of us in engineering in my section have Macs), although most Mac users still carry open out of habit. The Windows users also all carry their notebooks around open. I'm one of the few people who actually closes his notebook when carrying it around the building.
Jumping topics to the original one of whether people are dissatisfied with Windows or not, I think the question isn't framed correctly. Many people are dissatisfied with Windows, all you have to do is talk to people to hear this. The question, then, should be "Are they dissatisfied enough to switch to a different software and/or hardware platform, with the attendant expense in either dollars or effort, plus the learning curve?" The answer seems to be "No." If that were not the case, dissatisfied Windows users with money would be buying Macs by the pallet, and ones who couldn't or wouldn't buy a new machine to get away from Windows would be installing Linux by the pallet.
Of course, there's also the question of education. If most dissatisfied Windows users actually knew from experience how much better a Mac is than Windows, or how much better Linux is than Windows in most respects, there'd be a lot more switching. I can tell you this much: the Mac I'm typing this on is my first Mac, and it's so much better than Windows that I'd never go back. It came from the IT dept. with XP in Parallels, but I never use it. Haven't booted it in something like two months. I do run Linux in Parallels for those areas where the Mac falls short of Linux (it doesn't fall short of Windows anywhere, at least for my needs), and it would be really nice if Parallels would get Parallels Tools for Linux out the door to enable file system and clipboard sharing.
Of course, when they do I might use the Linux VM for everything and only use the Mac as a host platform
OJ didn't beat the rap because he had money, he beat the rap because he had a jury dumber than rocks. If he'd had a jury with a cumulative IQ of greater than, say, 6, he'd be doing time right now. While bribes are not common in the US legal system, whoever has the best/most expensive lawyer does often prevail in civil cases and some criminal cases, however, I'd be surprised indeed if that wasn't true in most places.
As a countercase, there's SCO, who spent everything they've got on expensive lawyers and are still being pasted by IBM's expensive lawyers, so the merits of a case do matter.
While I can agree with you that if no money changes hands it's simple copyright infringement, not piracy, what we believe is moral or immoral is really irrelevant to the case. Legal or illegal is all that matters in court. Even in cases where the law is stupid, it will be followed, except in cases of jury nullification, something judges and lawyers on both sides don't really want people to know about. Of course, this is in reference to US law. Many countries do not have a jury system and even those that do may allow jury nullification. Indian law is doubtless different on that point and may (or may not; I don't know) be different on what does or does not constitute piracy and/or copyright infringement.
The argument that it's likely not depriving MS of any actual sales is spot-on; I lived in a country poorer than India for about a year and couldn't have bought a legit copy of Windows there if I'd wanted one (I was running Linux, so I had no need for Windows,legit or otherwise). The fact on the ground was that almost no one there could afford legit Windows, so only pirated copies were available (for about a dollar) in CD shops. MS likely had near-zero legit sales there, and if they could have stamped out piracy (they weren't even trying), they still would have had near-zero legit sales, at least unless they sold real copies of XP Pro for a buck.
WRT length of copyright, I think it's totally out of hand. I'd like to see length of copyright shortened to the lifetime of the author or thirty years, whichever comes first. I realize that would see the works of many living authors pass into the public domain, but after thirty years you've had a pretty good ride out of anything you wrote. Plus, that doesn't mean people won't keep buying your published editions.
If that's too extreme, there could always be a clause that says "after thirty years, anyone can copy and publish your work, with or without permission, but they have to pay some small percentage of sales to you as a royalty." Either way, I think 30 years or life of author is a reasonable term. I could accept fifty years, but I think that's really pushing it.
Well, first of all, he's 38. Even if "30 is the new 20" he hardly qualifies as a kid. When I was 38 (but hey, 40 is the new 30, so I can be 38 again ina a few years ), I knew at least a few things. I knew the difference between right and wrong, legal and illegal, smart and stupid. In the latter category comes the idea that "If my definition of right and wrong differs from the law's definition, I should not do about enacting my definition in a public and noticeable way, lest I get busted." Clearly, he didn't get the difference between smart and stupid.
Secondly, he wasn't imprisoned for copying a file (funny how we expect copyright to be followed when bringing companies to task for violating the GPL but not when some individual violates copyright; the GPL is founded on copyright law, after all, not contract law), he was sentenced for *distributing* the copyrighted content that he copied. That's a far greater transgression under copyright law.
Finally, don't look now, but the only troll in this picture is you.
The number and severity of its security problems certainly qualify as "horrible." Obvious? Depends on who you ask. I'm in IT; I think so. Most people in IT would probably agree with that. End users? Maybe not. They have a different idea of "obvious" than most /. readers.
Having to reboot for practically any security update is horrible, at least in my book. Obvious? Hard to say. Most people use either Windows or a Mac (which also suffer this problem; I love my Mac, but WTF do I have to reboot after updates?), and they don't know any better. If they tried Linux or *BSD, they'd realize that you don't have to reboot to update anything but the kernel.
It's pretty clear that Windows has some pretty horrible flaws, and they are also obvious for at least some values of obvious. The most horrible flaw, though, and the least obvious one to people outside of the industry, is that these flaws are so persistent and so hard to fix because they come from the design choices made in Windows. The reason Unix-based systems have so many fewer flaws and they are mostly less severe is, again, because of basic design choices. Is it horrible that an OS designed in the late 1960s, when the industry was still so young and inexperienced with security, is better-designed than NT and its descendents, which were designed twenty years later?
I'll leave that answer as an exercise for the reader.
It's really disturbing that no one has either modded this up funny or replied to it up to now. Could it be that so few /.ers today recognize the source of your quotation? Has it been that long since getting sound set up in Linux actually required testing to make sure it worked?
Hmm, I guess it has been. I know I haven't heard that recording on over three years myself.
White is a race. Black is a race. I can think of a couple other skin colors that qualify, too.
/. is, umm, you.
Don't look now, but the dumbest thing on
First of all, I think you can make a pretty good argument that Estonian is not a race. Nationality? Yes. Ethnicity? OK. Race? Estonians are white, so no, Estonian is not a race. White is a race.
Secondly, it's well attested that Eastern Europe is a major center of online criminal activity. As someone who has been in the security field for the past four years, I can say that there are days when I wish I could put a firewall around all of it, to keep things *in*
The assumption that it would be a teenager is actually the part least likely to be accurate. It could be - they call them script kiddies for a reason - OTOH, a lot of adults are involved in computer crime, and they are involved in it for profit.
While his remark was flippant, it was not nearly as inaccurate as you might think.
No, the monkey sounds are in Redmond too...
As someone who has partially done that, I take a personal interest in your question and hope I can help at least a little.
Like you, I have been in IT for 20+ years and like you, was finding it to be more work than play. I have also considered, and to some extent done, things to get out of IT.
My short list of things I'd like to do: buy or open a Vietnamese restaurant, be a Starbucks manager, be an In-N-Out Burger manager (really), own a franchised small business, own a fishing tackle shop, be a real estate agent.
Of those, being a real estate agent is something I have done, and I find that I really enjoy it. Last year, I got my license and joined a real estate office on a part-time basis.
About six months later, as I was leaving my previous employer at the end of a long transition package (I was working for a startup that was acquired by a much larger company and I declined to be transferred to headquarters, so I transitioned out over a year and a half while working from a home office) I received an offer from another startup in the greater Silicon Valley area. That was a much shorter transfer than the other company wanted me to make, and the salary kick was huge, so I took it. That mean putting my real estate career on hold for a while, but I plan to restart it later this year or early next year when I have some more time. In the six months I was active part-time in real estate I did sell a house and I loved the experience. It was really great. It's hard work, but so is anything worthwhile. In the meantime, I love my new job and it has put the fun and challenge and play aspect back into IT for me. This is a great company and I'm doing cool, challenging, satisfying stuff.
I liked it so much that if I didn't have a family to support, I would have just walked away from IT when my previous job ended and thrown myself into real estate full time. However, since almost no new agents and even quite a few experienced agents don't make what I make in IT (and you have to consider that since that's a 100% commission gig, you need to make at least 50% more, and probably closer to double, to account for covering your own insurance, 401K, etc.). Few agents, even among experienced ones, are making double what I make in my new job.
That may or may not be for you, but what you can take from that is making a radical career change can be very satisfying if you make the right choice, it might be possible to ease in part-time, and that if you have a family to support, it might be the only way.
Finally, one more piece of perspective: the most satisfying thing I do is support my wife and kids, and even if I'm in a job that's not all that great, my family's well-being is more important than loving my job. That said, my wife is really happy that I love my new gig and having a job you love does make your family life better, too.
Good luck to you in whatever choice you make.
There's a much better and more secure solution than that (and let's not kid ourselves; the best phishers *would* find a way around the .bank TLD problem; heck, even now they routinely send people to sites that aren't their bank and fleece them. It's foolish to think a .bank TLD will change anything).
This simple solution is used by at least some local Board of Realtors affiliates, such as Pacific West in Orange County, California. They give you a one-time password generator, a userid, and a PIN. This takes password/userid theft attacks almost totally out of the game, since each password from the generator is only good once and also requires the PIN. Even if someone had your userid and PIN, they'd also need physical possession of the device.
Even if someone used a sophisticate man-in-the-middle attack to intercept the data and pass it on to the real site, then hijacked the session to steal money from a bank account, it would only work once. This would raise the bar far more than anything else they could do.
How badly do I want this for my bank account? I would move all of my deposits to the first bank to implement this, and I'd even be willing to pay for the one-time password device myself.
They can keep using siteid and anything else that floats their boats, but give me that one-time password generator and I'll be happy.
As an American, I agree with you, but for reasons having nothing to do with prison rape (which, incidentally, happens far more in state prisons than in federal prisons, and rarely if ever in the "club fed" type of minimum security prison to which a copyright offender would typically be sent).
My objection to this is over the simple fact that whatever crime(s) he may have committed were committed in Australia, so whether or not he should go to prison, and where and for how long, or even whether he should be arrested and tried, is purely a matter for the Australian government to decide. Extraditing him is ludicrous.
This is very different than, say, picking some terrorist up on the battlefield, finding he's an Australian citizen, and remanding him to the Australian government to serve his sentence in Australia after being convicted and sentenced. If that guy, who is a far worse criminal than a copyright offender, can serve his sentence in Australia, the accused in the present case should most certainly not be extradited at all.
Has the Australian government lost all concept of national sovereignty?
Required where I work too, at least for anyone with access to the code, probably for anyone else, too. In addition, they give you a laptop lock so that if you're going to leave it in the office, you can shackle it to your cubicle.
Beyond the lack of crypto on the drive, I'm just left wondering WTF someone had placed all that information on an *external* drive in the first place. That was stupid, and to then go on to leave it sitting out somewhere and not under lock and key boggles the mind.
That clarifies things a great deal, since this whole outsourcing and layoff thing started far before Bush was president, and is not his fault (or Clinton's, or Bush V.1's, or any other president's, really).
WRT the concept that people should provide for themselves, I by and large support that. A single-payer health insurance system would be nice, but that's so hard to get right that I don't want our government to try it. The only nation I'm aware of that has tried it and not significantSocly fucked it up is Japan, and even there it has solvency issues.
Social Security? Hah. If they would release me from any further participation in the program, they could *keep* everything I've already payed in, and that's not a small amount. I'm in my forties and have been continuously employed since I was 16.
Welfare? I don't think it should be scrapped - there ought to be some sort of safety net for people who legitimately fall on hard times like a lot of IBMers are about to do - but I believe there should be caps on it. Something like a 2 or 3 years out of 5 (or 10?) usage cap, and perhaps a lifetime maximum usage cap as well. Of course, there should be exceptions for people with permanent disabilities as a result of things like auto accidents and severe birth defects, but if you are an able-bodied person, you can and should get your arse out and work.
If we're going to have anything resembling a welfare state, the chief investment should be in the area of education. Make it as cheap and easy as possible for people to get a quality education as you can, and you will minimize the people who may wind up on welfare. And by education, I don't just mean college. That should cover vocational programs of all sorts, too. If being a plumber or electrician is what floats your boat, there should be support for that, too, not just for people going to college.
One thing is for certain: government is so bloated and out of control and beyond the intended limits of authority that it makes even Windows Vista look lean and trim in comparison. As it has been succinctly said, "Government is not the answer; government is the problem."
Unfortunately, Bush is not really a small government guy, and he's not all that much of an America-first guy, either. One has to look no farther than his foolish policies on illegal aliens and border security to know that. To make matters worse, when I look at the slate of candidates running for president in 2008, every potentially viable candidate is at least as bad as he is, and most are worse.
We're screwed.
That's a rather poorly thought out argument. Some of you are no doubt old enough to remember the immense pressure that was brought against the South African government to end Apartheid, pressure which was successful. The most important part of that was divestiture in South African assets by public and private investors, universities, governments, you name it.
This had a very negative impact on the South African economy and eventually the government caved and repealed Apartheid.
Now, let's s/ReiserFS/Apartheid/g in your argument.
"Honestly, whatever the South African government has done on a social level has NOTHING to do with the technical merits/achievements of South Africa, and we should not divest ourselves of South African stocks, bonds, or Krugerrands just because they are keeping blacks in near-slavery through Apartheid laws."
That doesn't sound so good, does it?
How about another one?
"Honestly, whatever Google, Cisco, etc. have done to prevent political freedom and freedom of speech in China by building the great firewall, that has NOTHING to do with the technical merits of their products, and we should not turn away from them merely because they are helping keep people in chains."
How about one more, dating to the 1970s:
"Honestly, whatever Nestle has done or failed to do by pushing its baby formula in the third world without educating parents to the dangers of using formula without access to clean water, that has NOTHING to do with the technical quality of their products, and we should boycott them merely because their marketing practices (may have) contributed to the deaths and illnesses of many thousands of infants."
Those sounds ridiculous at best, or morally reprehensible at worst, and they are. I would counter your statement about Reiser that if it is found he killed his wife, then yes, we should abandon his work over that reason alone.
If that is not enough for you, then, as others have pointed out before me, I will resort to solid technical reasons. Hans Reiser is the chief architect and principle developer of ReiserFS. If he is convicted and sentenced to a long prison term or to death, that puts both the present release version and all future versions of ReiserFS in jeopardy. If I were using ReiserFS, I would have already migrated off of it as a precaution
As a father of two young kids, I can assure you that there are doubtless tiny drops of blood at various points in my house :p Adults sometimes do that, too, of course. You cut yourself on something, maybe get a nosebleed, etc. You clean it up, sure, but can you be certain you got every tiny bit? I can't.
The very first thing you need to do is get your resume up-to-date and begin a job search, if you haven't already. Any company that would order you to take such a step is clearly in financial trouble. Even if you are the only sysadmin, sooner or later your job will evaporate, maybe along with everyone else's, maybe before. Don't be there when that happens. Start the process of getting out now, when you can choose a new job at your leisure, not when you become unemployed or the get busted and you are embroiled in it.
Also, you need to buy 30 or 60 minutes of a lawyer's time. Probably an IP specialist. You may be able to find one local to you through the lawyer search on http://www.handelonthelaw.com/Default.aspx. IANAL and the following is not legal advice, blahblahblah.
I would go ahead and install the software, but then, as I stated above, start looking for a job. Your ethical obligation to not violate copyright does not trump your obligation to support any dependents you may have, or your right to feed yourself and keep a roof over your head.
Before installing it, thoroughly document what you have been asked to do, and that it is under duress b/c you would be fired if you refused, and document that you proposed using a free alternative and were refused. Get the document notarized, and lock it away in a safety deposit box. Do anything else the lawyer tells you to do to protect yourself. If you have emails showing them telling you to do it, preserve those in both electronic and hard copies. Keep them in the safety deposit box, too
Then install the software.
Once you start your new job (really; don't do this before you've left this company and are actually working at a new job), at your discretion you could make an anonymous tip to the BSA that the company willfully installed more copies of software than they had a license for. Even if the company fingers you for it, you'll have documentation showing they told you to do it, and the BSA is not likely to be interested in you per se; they are after the money, and the company has that and is the real violator. Plus, if push comes to shove at that point, you probably have nothing to lose by telling the BSA (under advice from your lawyer, of course; if the shit hits the fan, you'll need to get one) that it was you who turned them in because you couldn't leave that on your conscience, that they made you do it but you quit because of it, then turned them in.
Good luck to you. It sucks to be working for a company like that. I hope you can find a new job that is open source friendly.
OK, it stands out to me.
I converted from Windows (diehard) to Linux diehard in the late nineties and have used it as my exclusive home desktop OS ever since and usually mw work desktop OS. The exceptions to that are the period of time when I worked for Microsoft (and even then, I used it a lot), and now, where my work machine is a Mac (could use Linux if I wanted too, but the MacBook Pro was just too nice to pass up; but I do have Kubuntu in Parallels).
I know Windows pretty well (even had Windows 286 back in the day; what a POS. But I digress), Linux, BSD, Mac a bit of Solaris and Irix. I've used a lot of stuff. My rankings of usability would be 1) Mac OS X 2) Linux + KDE (esp. Kubuntu) 3) Linux + Gnome (esp. Ubuntu) 4) Windows XP.
Specific areas where I consider KDE and Gnome to be better than Windows are the install - OK, that's not a KDE or Gnome thing per se, but installing (K)Ubuntu and several other popular distros is easier than installing XP and way easier than doing an upgrade install of XP from Win2K. The fact that Windows has an application and settings transfer wizard for that is a sign of what a PITA it is (and it doesn't even find all your stuff; Yahoo Messenger archives, for example) to upgrade Windows.
Software installation is another. This might cause you to do a double-take at first, but it's true. Just fire up Synaptic (or Adept, in Kubuntu), type in a search term, it finds packages that match by name or description, you mark them for install, click Apply, and there you go. This is an area where I find the Linux approach to be even better than Mac (not to disparage Mac; the Apple approach is also very good and I love my Mac).
Out of the box driver support (for most stuff) is another. A modern Linux distro supports far more hardware out of the box than XP does. The only fly in the ointment here is that if it's not supported out of the box, it may not be supported at all, or if it is, you may have to either compile a driver or do a jig and dance beyond the ability (or desire) of most beginners to get a binary driver working, so this area is not perfect. Nevertheless, for most things, a Linux distro has much better driver support than out of the box XP.
Foreign filesystems. XP can only read two filesystems: NTFS and FAT. Linux can read and write NTFS, FAT, and most other filesystems. This is a non-issue for most people, maybe, but it's something I've used a lot.
Completeness. After you install XP (or after you take your Mac out of the box) you still have to acquire and install a bunch of extra software to do much. Word processing, spreadsheet, etc. With a typical Linux distro, that stuff is there and waiting for you when the install is done. If it's not, just fire up Synaptic and it's a few clicks away. If there's a usability issue with Linux and software, it's that there is so much available that it can be hard to know which one to pick. OTOH, because it's all at your fingertips and free, it's not hard to try a few things and see what works best for you.
Virtual desktops. Even the best virtual desktop solutions for Windows pale in comparison to the native ones in KDE, Gnome, and most other X environments, and all of them have to be downloaded and installed.
System updates: the only update that requires a reboot in Linux is a kernel replacement, and even then, it can be done at your leisure. Windows (and OS X as well, for some stupid reason) requires a reboot for fairly trivial updates that most certainly should not require a reboot. This is actually my number one gripe about OS X, and a big one with Windows, too.
Countercases: In my experience, online documentation still tends to be better in Windows, but the gap is no longer large. Apple blows away everyone on this point. Games. If games are your main reason for having a PC, you probably should have XP. Using on a Windows network. Using Samba is often more work than using Windows on a Windows network, although it's not unreasonable. Of course, the answer to this is to replace all
Funny, I could have wound up there, but I declined the transfer when Microsoft moved my team to Redmond (we were previously in California) and took the transition package instead. I wound up with a much better job at a much better salary and got to pocket the transition bonus , so all's well that ends well.
Your mortage is less than it would cost to rent? I think I need to buy some investment property there, where do you live?
I agree completely. A dolt he may be, but the "tubes" description itself wasn't bad. After all, do we not (at least if you've ever been a network engineer) call a fast connection a big pipe? The Internet, from a layman's eye view, is a great deal like a water system (or sewage system, if you will ).
It can be re-routed around breaks, it can get clogged up in parts if you try to run too much through it at once. Leaks (packet loss), as you said.
I have no respect for Ted "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens, but the tubes thing was actually not unreasonable.
I disagree. Not only is the assertion that the reason Microsoft wins is because a monoculture not spot-on, it couldn't be much more wrong.
The top two reasons Microsoft wins most of the time are far simpler and much more plausible than that:
1) Microsoft was there first. They were in the right place at the right time when IBM needed an OS for the IBM PC, and later executed pretty well in following up with Windows and Windows NT. Microsoft had far more successes than failures in those days, and actually produced a lot of software that was better (often far better) than the competition. Excel didn't unseat Lotus 1-2-3 because of vendor lock-in and bundling. It did it because it was already number one on Mac and MS successfully ported it to Windows. MS Word unseated Word Perfect and Wordstar because it was better than them. A lot better. Microsoft's monopoly/lock-in power came later, as a result of the huge success of products like Word, Excel, Access, and Windows 95.
2) Going against Microsoft is going against a powerful, market-dominating player which, apart from its bag of dirty tricks (people like me, who started out in mainframes, remember the adage "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), can guarantee a developer a much larger market for his/her product(s) than Apple, the entire Linux/BSD camp, or both of those together. That's something that's going to be true for years to come. So, if you're a developer looking to sell a proprietary product (including shareware), which platform are you most likely to be drawn to? Yup. Windows.
Not all developers are going to go that way, of course. Some of them are just Mac or Linux users and have no wish to develop for Windows, not even for a larger market share. Plus, of course, most Linux and BSD developers are not putting out proprietary software anyway, they're releasing under the GPL, the BSD license, or some other open source license.
No, it's completely wrong to say Microsoft wins among (proprietary) developers are about too much choice (did anyone notice that Apple offers the same number of IDEs as Microsoft? One.) It's just about the money. If Linux were the dominant operating system in the home and/or corporate desktops and you could practically sell proprietary software into that market (a tough proposition indeed, because there's always some free or Free product that is as good as the proprietary stuff, or close enough that almost no one can justify paying for the proprietary stuff).
It's also worth noting that Microsoft probably has less developer mindshare today than at any time in the last ten years. If its monoculture were such an opposition killer, this would be strange indeed. I'm aware this is not a scientific measurement, but, FWIW I do live and work near the Silicon Valley area, and everywhere I go I find tremendous interest in both Apple and Linux. The majority of my colleagues are not using Windows; most of us (including me) have either Macs on our desks, FreeBSD, or Linux.
Microsoft will continue to dominate developer mindshare for a long time to come. Like the Willie Sutton quote on robbing banks (although he never said it, just as Bill Gates never made the pronouncement on 640K that is widely attributed to him), why do people program for Windows? Because that's where the money is? You may not like the Windows environment as much as Apple, or KDE, or GNOME, or whatever floats your boat. Or maybe you do like it. Either way, jobs writing for the Microsoft platform are plentiful and will be for a long time to come.
My example was *precisely* that of something non-obvious to someone skilled in the art; don't look now, but it's not my reasoning that's failing here.
The patent law meaning of non-obvious is really something more like "novel." The problem we are having is that the bar is set (far) too low for what is considered novel/obvious, with the result that very pedestrian solutions - often with prior art out there - get awarded patents.
If multiple people came up with the same idea independently and they did so before your patent, and especially if they weren't even people particularly skilled in the art, that has great relevance. Not only is your patent then in danger on prior art grounds, but also on obviousness grounds.
I'm not a lawyer, but one thing is clear: you need no such disclosure. It's patently obvious.
That is a very good point. I lived for a while in SE Asia in a country that has a lot of garment and shoe factories, including ones that produce for Nike. My wife is a native of this particular country, so my connections and insight into it are pretty good.
At that time, it was common to read articles decrying the exploitation of workers at these factories, but the facts on the ground are, well, just a bit different.
When someone puts up a shoe factory there to manufacture for, say, Nike, or a garment factory to manufacture for some major retail chain, people will line up around the block to get a job there and if anyone quits they don't even have to advertise b/c people are always trying to get there friends or relatives in there.
Why? B/c the pay and benefits are both generally better than the going rate. The working conditions often are, too.
What some well-meaning but misguided and poorly informed people in the industrialized world call exploitation is known by another term altogether by the people in the newly industrializing world who are getting those jobs: opportunity.
Stop buying the exploitation poster product du jour and all you do is make it a lot harder for someone who may be truly poor - not what passes for poor in the G-8 - to make a living.