If you mess with a scammer involved in an "Organized Crime" gang
Which is what most of them are these days. The Belgian and Dutch police came around last year after a crackdown in Amsterdam sent the scammers scurrying for other countries. Some of them were so desperate they would drive up to the front of web hosting centres with a car full of old PCs and a few switches, and start asking around for contacts. After getting an icy reception in Belgium and France, their operations have started up again in Spain.
From what police told us about the gangs, its really well organised. This is translated from a Dutch presentation, which is not my native language so the words are not quite right.
There is a hierarchy in the gangs, different groups do different jobs, just like in a western corporation.
The foot soldiers are the ones buying spamming lists and sending out millions of emails. They work from apartments in Europe, rented for just a month or two, with DSL or cable broadband. Sometimes they are guys in cybercafes in Africa. Usually there are a bunch of guys living in a place, sleeping on a few matresses in one room, the other room full of workstations. Mostly these guys are recently arrived african immigrants, who have no scruples about ripping off Europeans or Americans, many are recruited with the promise to even the score with the white colonials who fucked over central africa a few centuries ago. Their job is to sort through the thousands of responses from spam filters, bounce messages, tons of flaming abuse, in the hopes they get a qualified lead (usually a few replies showing more than a passing interest). Leads are passed off to a handler.
The handlers are the real scam artists. They don't bother mucking about with the spam, they just work the few suckers dragged up each day. Once they have a sucker on the line, they slowly reel them in. When you read the 'baiters websites, you can tell when this happens because there is a change of email address/name on the other end. Handlers are typically foot soldiers who have earned enough trust within the crime organisation by showing they can keep a sucker around for a while. These are the ones who fake up certificates and create whatever seems right to reel in the sucker. Once a handler gets to the point where money will start flowing, they pass off the operation to the money team.
The money teams are the nasty criminals. They have a dozen different ways of getting money out of the UK or the US and into Africa or a European bank. Western Union, bank transfers, cashiers cheques. The goal is leave a break in the trail if/when the authorities start investigating, then launder the money so it looks legitimate. They tend to be well educated, understand western banking practices, and based in corrupt countries like Nigeria. The money gangs use a lot of local people as fronts, and control them with violence.
Once the money is laundered, it circulates back through the criminal organisation, with a large percentage going to the heads of the gangs.
These gangs have their own internal support organisations, technicians to buy the PCs for the foot soldiers and keep them running, fronts to rent apartments and order broadband, fixers setting up temporary email accounts by the thousands, and some geeks to run the spam botnets and help train new guys. Of the four identified organised crime gangs in Europe, they probably employ over a thousand people.
The only real danger from these gangs is from trying to follow them to Africa, where the nasty groups operate from. They rarely set up in Europe or the US, because they know they can buy both the police and the judicial system in their own country. Most attempts to bring them to justice go nowhere.
This point can't be hammered home hard enough. Know the political climate before you set foot in the country with a sack full of espionage equipment. If I can be forced by a Massachusetts state trooper to reformat my digital camera memory or face arrest on terrorism charges because I had a bridge in the background of a photo, expect it to be much worse in places with civil wars or low grade religious conflicts.
Make sure the organisation you are working for supports your mapping effort 100%. If this is just a personal whim, leave the high tech goodies at home, and think about doing a paper and pencil project. When (not if) you get arrested for waving a GPS wildly around at every crossroads and bridge, there better be a powerful politically connected group ready to put pressure on the local police to release you. If you don't have this, expect to spend a long time in jail until the appropriate fines/bribes can be paid.
You have to worry about the military and police, of course, but also private security guards working for the big money projects. Oil exploration, mining, civil construction projects all have their own cartography services, and there are certainly accurate and detailed maps of every part of western africa, but those maps are closely guarded secrets. In Nigeria, security guards for oil companies *are* the police in many cases.
Be discreet no matter what you do, and don't pull out espionage equipment until you have scoped out the area and know exactly what you will be measuring. If there is a military base just behind a hill, you don't want to be caught targeting its perimiter. Leave the kit at home until you are ready to go out and make measurements. Hire locals who know the landscape to help you avoid trouble when you venture beyond your base town.
I had a client who, one day, decided to become an ISP. Just like that! Threw away some money on some big cisco routers (purchased for almost nothing from a bankrupt dot.bomb) and bought a few 1U rackmount servers. They wanted me to set them up with a few internet feeds, BGP, and whatever else it takes to make the RIPE believe they were an ISP.
So I took a couple of servers, installed OpenBSD, and set them up as DNS+NTP servers. Hooked up the ciscos and got everything running. No problems at all.
A few weeks later, the client decides to take on a "security conslutant". He knows nothing, proves it by waving around his week old MCSE, and insists on putting firewalls everywhere. Not just any firewall, but windoze2000 based firewalls. Even the ciscos had to have a Win2k firewall between them and "the evil internet" on every port. Otherwise, how could the ciscos be protected from hackers?
I walked away from the insanity, told the client he could re-hire me when the M$ certified idiot and his auto-update-is-faster-than-any-hacker machines were no longer part of the network. A few weeks later, I got the call. They were asking me to explain why they were the laughing stock of all the ISPs, and why no ISPs seemed to have firewalls in their networks.
The Internet doesn't have firewalls in it. At the far edges of the Internet, there are firewalls to protect customer networks. The routers, servers and switches that make up the Internet don't have dozens of useless services running that can allow exploits. If an ISP is just running BIND on their DNS servers, they configure the application for secure operation. Don't want the whole internet to make recursive lookups? Its a few lines in some config files. Don't want your sendmail to relay? Don't use a firewall, just clean up your configuration. Every other useless service on your servers? Strip them off so they can't run. The security is in the applications, not in the firewall.
Sure, there are some ACLs in the routers that can clean up spoofed addresses, and limit garbage and bogons. Those could be considered basic firewalls, but each router or DNS server doesn't have a separate firewall to protect it.
The internet is a lot simpler than people imagine, but it works.
Here are some things one neighborhood did. I was the consulting network engineer in step -1, and I helped them get a 2400 meter monomode fibre from their division to a municipal fibre loop splicepoint. They pay about Eur450/month for leasing the right-of-way from the city, a single fibre pair in the loop, and a port on a switch with a 10Mbit commit. They have a/24 PI netblock hosted by their ISP. Startup costs were about Eur11,000 for 8 buildings, 4 apartments each. Every building has a multimode fibre terminating in a SX to copper el-cheapo switch. Every apartment has a copper GigEthernet connection to do with as they please, no caps, no limits, static IPs, anything but IRC servers.
-1) Before starting, hire (or at least talk to) a competent network engineer, with a working knowledge of fibre, used equipment, local ISPs, data centres and existing fibre runs. This may give you many ideas of how to get bandwidth to your neighborhood at a relatively cheap cost. Google can't help you for local fibre RoWs, that knowledge is arcane, closely guarded secrets.
0) Talk with a lawyer who works directly in "rights-of-way" and municipal law. Get accurate price quotes before proceeding, and understand the project will take a long time (6 months to 2 years) and cost a fair amount of money ($1000 to $2000 per household + monthly bandwidth costs $20/Mbit).
1) Once you and your neighbors understand the implications, costs, time line, and benefits, get each household to put up money. No money == no more participation in the co-op. Promises don't count. You should lock up around 75% of the initial startup costs in a special account, and provide a proper accounting to each investor at regular intervals. You'll need an external accountant for that function, don't let one of your neighbors say "I took an accounting course once, I'll do it for free", for down that path lies embezzlement and jail terms. Count on a second round of houses to join in after the network is up and running, and charge them more for the priviledge of not taking the initial risk.
2) After securing rights-of-way and approval from your local council, start digging. You will probably be forced to hire certified diggers who won't take a backhoe to the gas lines. If you are forced to take the aerial route, then you will need a contractor approved to work on poles around power/cable/telephone lines.
3) You need an external connection to an ISP somewhere. This will be the most expensive part of the project if there isn't one nearby. Negotiate an unlimited port on a router or a switch, and a block of addresses which you can route. Negotiate a reasonable commit price for what you expect to pull, and a burst rate which isn't too much more expensive. If you can't possibly get a fibre to an ISP, then you are stuck with a copper signal, which implies the local telco. Hopefully regulators in your area will force them to provide a T3/E3 at a reasonable price, but then you need a real router with an expensive interface card (or maybe two, if your ISP only deals with 100baseT).
4) You will need some kind of structure to act as your POP. This could be a concrete equipment vault buried at the edge of your division, or a shed on the side of someone's house. It is there you will have to terminate all the fibres from each house on a multi-fibre switch, and place a router to your upstream ISP. You may need an air conditioner if your summers are hot. Put in an electric meter so the co-op knows how much the electric bills are. Put a webcam so everyone can keep an eye on the kit.
5) At the houses, there will need to be a demarc point, where the co-op responsibility ends, and the homeowner takes over. Trust me on this, or your co-op will drown in a sea of pointing fingers and blame. At the demarc point, put a small SOHO 10/100/1000 switch with at least one SX fiber port. These are pretty common now, and you should be able to get them for around $150-$200. After that, its up to the homeowne
There are a whole bunch of reasons Indymedia can't really deal with backup servers competently.
1) It costs money. Every server in another hosting company costs bandwidth, rack space, hardware and maintenance. Indymedia is a bunch of Hippies in the sense that even the slightest cost seems to be too much for them. Even when presented with a donated old PC in the bottom of a rack with a solid but shared internet connection, the idea that one of them might have to do some work drives them away.
2) It requires some technical competence. The Indymedia folks are not exactly stupid, but most of the ones I've met dropped out of school as early as they possibly could. They prefer poorly educated ignorance as a way of life. I'm sure there are some highly educated agent-provacateurs leading these dolts around by their nose jewelry, but those people couldn't care less about keeping web servers up.
3) There is a victimisation ideal among Indymedia type folks. They think its much better press to have a server seized during a police investigation and make a big stink about it, rather than saying "the Bristol server was seized, but since it was mirrored on 3 continents nobody noticed one gone missing".
This has turned into a big, trolling rant. Sorry, but their anarchist, nobody-responsible-for-anything attitude wore thin a long time ago.
There are a number of companies selling VOIP to GSM gateways, you can see them all over the GSM world (which is everywhere except the U.S.). The boxes hold from a single GSM phone, up to a 19" rack which holds 32 GSM phones.
These boxes are the bane of every data centre in Europe. You walk around and see a cabinet with a few of these boxes, a single VOIP router, and hundreds of magnetic car mount GSM antennas around the inside. Any data comms equipment with 10 meters gets huge numbers of errors because of all the induced RF, servers nearby tend to randomly reboot, people who work in the data centres tend to have serious migranes, etc. When you get a few of these operators in a data centre, local GSM coverage is eliminated as they overwhelm all the local sites.
The economic model makes sense, though. To terminate international calls on a mobile phone, the GSM provider tends to charge a huge amount of money, like US$0.75 per minute. One of these GSM gateways can hold many SIM cards per phone, and then the calls appear as if they are local. If the operator has a good bucket plan, like 1000 minutes for $10/month if your call is on the same operator, or free on nights and weekends, then the numbers start to add up quickly. One 19" rack box with 30 active phones can terminate 20,000 minutes per month, which at US$0.40 per minute profit is quite a nice paycheck.
This is nothing new, but now someone has figured out a simple system for the stone-age american market.
Here the lamerz post other inside jokes, like the everpresent 1) in Soviet Farkistan,/. pwn3z you 2) ??? You get the idea, now go photoshop some pics of Nathalie Portman with hot grits, and take off every clothing for great 3) profit!
the AC
Thank the pantheon of godesses this is a text only site
I get to talk to elected and non-elected officials on a regular basis. They have a tremendous number of people talking at them all the time, with so many opposing points of view they can never keep up. The only bits that stick are the well presented ones, carefully crafted and without repetitions or ambiguities.
I've seen some of the FFII supporters talking to Parliamentarians, and frankly it was embarrassing watching a few of them. They had the nugget of an idea, but couldn't present it clearly and concisely. They would start a beautifully thought out thread, then before getting to a conclusion lose the train of thought and end up talking about something completely different, often repeating ideas already presented. Very annoying for all those very familiar with the issue, and certainly annoying and confusing for the intended audience.
The guy is a busy man... present for 30 minutes and give the rest for him to either ask questions
Not that you will have time to hone your presenting skills, but the best lobbyists present each idea in one to three minutes, then engage the politico with questions where they have to actually think about the issue. The guys who make the biggest money are schooled in the tradition of rhetoric, where every thought is presented as a series of conflicting questions (with spin) and as if...then statements. This requires the politician to make a concious decision on the spot on which way to think about a subject, and this forced thinking will most likely be the way they will vote later.
There is a whole debate on the best way to word the if...then statements, first, second or third person, singular or plural. Compare and contrast "if you support long term growth in rapidly changing fields, then are you prepared to oppose entrenched laws?" with "if our objectives are to protect ideas of individuals from the oppressive threat of corporate lawsuits, can we obtain a balance...". (N.B. there is no right way) Forcing immediate responses from an audience is orders of magnitude more effective in creating lasting impressions. Even more effective is to word the if...then statements so the politician comes to conclusions on his own, thus becoming his ideas.
Impassioned emotional pleas are no good here, construct a good well founded argument
Precisely. The issue of patents, copyright, and ideas having value goes back thousands of years, and is a very complicated area. Narrow down your arguments to a very limited discussion of a single domain, and be prepared to place it within the larger and global (historical) scope of the battle. The emotion should be evident by the fact you have taken the time to become politically active to protect what you believe in.
Do your homework throughly before going in
This is the most important idea in the post, buried right in the middle. Not only do your homework, but practice the presentation as well. Out loud, on real humans, several times. If you have a lawyer friend, ask them to hear your presentation and offer criticism (then listen to them and correct yourself). Lawyers who practice in front of courts have to be skilled at presenting clear and linear ideas. Even if you don't know any lawyers, just try out your presentation on a few people and ask for feedback. By the third or fourth time you will notice a huge improvement in which ideas get presented, and which ones you drop because they are not needed. Try videotaping your presentation and then review it later with friends, watch where you say "ummm..." or where you repeat yourself.
For material to study, browse the websites of the EFF and the FFII, and read this speech by Alan Greenspan. If you have an entire hour, you can effectively present four to six points with a limited background and context. Limit yourself to only these, avoid digression and monologing.
There was a bunch of fsckwits called dir.com who had a real nasty spider crawling all over the place a few months ago. It blatantly ignored robots.txt, tried dictionary attacks to detect unlinked parts of the website, and may have been trying exploits to crack systems to discover secrets normally protected by passwords or logins. Honeypot email addresses fed to the spider would be spammed within days.
After too many complaints from clients about this nasty behaviour, a number of carriers started blackholing the prefixes of bad spiders at the border routers. Nice simple solution, and then you don't even see the spider traffic. Last I looked, about 20 major ISPs were blackholing prefixes of the worst spider/bot offenders.
Nobody would dare to blackhole google, but there are hundreds of google wannabe's and a few of them are unethical enough to get blocked. And then they wonder why they can't see 75% of the internet.
Hardware by HP using Intel Itanium in 32bit mode, Software by M$, Project management by Accidenture, Financial oversight by Halliburton, Telecoms infrastructure by Verizon and Worldc^WMCI.
Oh, yes, it could be worse. I'll stop here before I give somebody ideas to really make this project a failure. HP+M$ is enough to guarantee failure.
If they just handed you a report from Nessus and a bill
. . . then they are quite similar to most of the fly-by-night security companies in existance today.
They really are a plague. Typically a small number of university students, or recent graduates, trying their hand at "start-up dotcom". There are two or three guys who know linux, a little about cisco routers, maybe had a course where they learned about Nessus. There will be fast talking marketing and sales slime involved as well. They are all very young and inexperienced, none of them will have spent any time in a large company with a complex IT infrastructure. Their M.O. will be to approach a company with the output of a Nessus scan of the firewall and web servers, showing a whole bunch of false problems, and try to get a security audit contract out of it.
if you're looking for someone to do a security assessment or pen testing
These external audit companies don't sit around waiting for an IT group to give them a call, because they'd never get one. They will not approach the head of IT, but a sales or a CEO level person with nary a clue. They leverage their way in from the initial external scan of the firewall and web servers. They get permission to run an internal scan, then hand over an unedited Nessus report, hundreds of pages long with their invoice.
The term over here is Cowboys. They ride into town unannounced, pretend to save the day, and ride into the sunset after claiming their reward, never to be seen again. Their victims, of course, are the struggling IT departments like the OP, who have done what they can with their limited budget, and suddenly have to answer to a mostly worthless Nessus report.
Many years ago, at $stripeyFruit company, there was a system extension that caused the monitor buffer to be copied upside down into the screen buffer. It was a popular prank, and everyone got good at detecting it and deleting it. The biggest challenge amongst the software guys was ways of hiding the extension, but the OS guys could detect this software in seconds using the debugger.
On April fools, the hardware guys went around and crosswired the monitors of a handful of people's machines, including the guy who wrote the original code.
So people flipped their machines upside down, and went to work with the debuggers. After a while, just before admitting defeat, one of them cracked the case on his machine and noticed the fresh solder joints on the deflection coils.
It was a good day.
It was the same day a competitor's hardware group at $bigBlazingHydrogenBallofDeath put Scott McNealy's ferrari in his office.
I know a bunch of American families attached to NATO here in Europe who send their kids through a program called the International Baccalaureat. It allows the kids to either apply to a European university or an American one, with the equivalence of a HS diploma.
From what I've heard, there are qualified schools just about anywhere there is a large ex-pat community. Egypt probably has them, but only in the areas where the petroleum companies have their compounds.
Supposedly the program is advanced enough to convince the French and the Brits it is the equivalent of a Bac or an A-levels, and leaves the kids at about the level of American University juniors. It requires the kids to be fluently tri-lingual, english, french, and one other. Typically the kids enter the program no later than about 12 years old, unless they are already bi-lingual.
Google turns up some info, about half a million links. Continue from there.
No, this is text based news. You can get a copy from places like slashdot.
Even better, you can wait until tomorrow and get a duplicate posting from slashdot.
And if you like your text news delivered as a weekend omnibus edition, CmdrTaco or Timothy will post yet another duplicate of this story over the weekend.
Of course, this story was about something that happened in NSW last october, so you may have recently seen it on ABC;-)
Disclaimer: I am not under any Apple NDA, nor does any of this information come directly from someone under NDA.
There is some new hardware coming out, sometime between "now" and "the end of 2005" (how is that for vague). This new hardware will require extra drivers and code to support some new features. The beta testers have only been able to run Tiger on this hardware, released versions of 10.X don't work much, or at all.
Since releasing Tiger before the hardware is announced means that legions of Mac fanatics will be picking it apart, they will quickly find the code relating to new hardware names. So it is almost a certainty that Apple will release Tiger at the same time they announce the new hardware. The hardware might ship later, but at least it will be announced by the Tiger ship date. Tiger may be announced as much as a month in advance of its ship date, if past announcements are any guide.
So the speculation is centred around which events in Apple's calendar would be good for announcing a new round of hardware upgrades and new models, as well as releasing Tiger. The WWDC has been a favorite target until recently, as it is now approaching rapidly and Tiger is still in beta, MacPsychics are looking further into the summer for good announce dates.
the AC My money is on the WWDC for a ship date
Re:No matter how careful you are, you aren't enoug
on
ID Theft Made Easy
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· Score: 2, Interesting
an attractive female working for Marlboro... By the way - I don't even smoke cigarettes.
Guess what? According to the insurance companies across America, you are now a smoker. Did you read the fine print on the clipboard underneath the license scanner? It clearly stated that by accepting their cheap free gifts, you were claiming that you are a smoker. This survey wasn't just sold to some sleazy marketers, but was created by a company selling the data to insurance companies.
Next time you try to get a job, or the next time your employer tries to negotiate health insurance for its workforce, this little "fact" will come up. With companies in the U.S. now legally allowed to discriminate based on health claims, you will never be offered that perfect job you were the most qualified for. Your current employer will be faced with much larger insurance bill if they keep smokers on the payroll. You sold away your employability for a packet of smokes and a cheap lighter.
Recently on a trip to the U.S. with some tobacco-addicted cow-orkers, they were approached by a girl giving away a packet of smokes. Since she required a U.S. driving permit she could swipe through her machine, she wouldn't let them take her survey. She did admit that is was just to generate marketing leads, but she was supposed to target obvious smokers. She even admitted that the packets she gave away each day were different brands, purchased on an Indian Reservation, so it wasn't just a single tobacco company marketing their products. She did tell them where to find the closest Indian Reservation for tax free smokes, and they were way over the limit on the return journey.
A friend is the admin for a major hotel chain here in Europe, they have 5 different names for their hotels based on the rating. The servers are all together in a big farm with load balancers and multi-homed links. Their traffic is a mix of home users, business users, and travel agencies.
His stats run about 19% for Firefox, and no more than 65% for all versions of IE combined. Contrast that with 88% market share this time last year for IE.
Because of the dynamic business nature of his sites, they have over 1% spider-bot traffic, he suspects the number is closer to 5%, since many spiders identify themselves as IE to avoid simple anti-spider countermeasures. Home users and travel agencies make up the bulk of the Firefox traffic, its only the brainless business users still using IE.
He also says that Macs now account for over 10% of their traffic, requiring their web developers to test all pages on Macs as well.
Firefox is quickly becoming a major player in the market, despite claims that "overall" it has only 5% or 6% share.
Je suis d'accord, bestuderen van taal is een goed idee, e fá-lo-á valioso.
I'm fluent in several languages, French, Dutch, and Portuguese, and can follow business meetings in Swedish, Italian, German and Spanish. I have a basic amount of Gaelic and Russian, enough to get a beer or my face slapped. I can read newspapers in about a dozen other languages and grok some basic understanding from the articles (although it helps if there are pictures:-)
One of the nice things about being an anglophone in computers/telecoms is the natural advantage you have when dealing with non-anglophones. You don't have to make an extra effort to translate or understand the material, its already in your language. If you are able to *fluently* communicate in a few other languages, enough that the natives don't have to drop into English for you, then you have a huge value to many employers in this world.
I am constantly running into Europeans who really know their stuff, but their English is limited to being able to read technical manuals or websites. They can deal effectively with most of their job, but when they have to communicate in English, either written or spoken, they just can't hack it. So employers are always looking for truely multi-lingual talent. When a Portuguese telecoms wants to make a deal with an Estonian telecoms, English is the only way to communicate.
There is another positive side to learning linguistics and a couple of foreign languages. If your field of CompSci is Natural Language Processing, or compiler/parser design, then you will have an extra level of insight.
The down side is that there are no real multi-lingual jobs in the US. If you are in the US (or UK or down-under) then english is the only language and your linguistics degree is pretty useless. But if the current political climate has you looking to spend a few years abroad until after the next election or three, then learning languages is an excellent choice for adding value to your current skill set.
Which is why I, as well as most intelligent and informed people I know, will be voting against the European Constitution. Most citizens of Europe have never even read a copy of the constitution, and are trusting their local governments with their yes votes. But the constitution codifies into law this corrupt structure, whereby abstentions or absences become a YES vote, where the power structures of Europe can ignore the powerless elected body of the parliament.
There is a huge list of things wrong with the European Constitution, way too long to post here. Concerned/.ers in Europe are urged to download a copy of the Constitution in their local language from the treaty site or the europa site.
Note that the nacional votes, recently in Spain, soon in France, are merely guides for governments to approve the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, and that if this treaty is taken into effect, only then will the actual text of the constitution be written, by a committee of jurists and corporate lawyers. Citizens will be barred from any participation in creating the actual Constitution, and it will be adopted without debate if this treaty is agreed to.
Please visit our publicly facing tracking site to ensure we have a reliable base of micro-skew signatures. This will enable us to quickly identify M$-hating, freedom-loving^W^Wterrorists.
I use pretty much every kind of system in my day to day tasks. Since I move around from client site to client site, I never have much of a choice which system I'll be using to get my job done.
I work with so many different kinds of equipment, routers, telco gear, speciality kit, funky electronic gadgets, servers, firewalls, data bases, CRM sytems, you name it, I've probably touched it in the last few years. Everything has a different access method, whether a telnet session, a console port, remote desktop, special proprietary apps. Some is local, some is thousands of kilometers distant.
Depending on what is available at the client site, I now have a nice hierarchy of preferred and hated systems. As this is/., I don't need to tell you that windoze 98/95 is at the bottom of the list as the most hated systems I have to work with.
At the top, its the latest Mac OS X. I never have to tweak an OS X system. I sit down and I'm working at full speed in 10 to 15 minutes, multiple windows open, email, M$ word documents, xterms, *nix CLI commands, google, network printers and file shares, all there. Compare that to a minimum one hour with any linux system, one to three hours with a *BSD system, and a full day or more lost if I have to get a windoze system cleaned up enough to support my work needs.
I'm a pretty experienced computer user. But I spend hours tearing my hair out with 'doze boxes, even those fresh from the OOBE. I had to set up a system this evening for a friend, the DSL modem took a few minutes, the WiFi took a few minutes, and the XP SP2 system took several hours to get it to behave like a real computer on the internet. The only saving grace is that I had a Mac Powerbook with me to verify where the problems lay, and to help google up some pretty obscure answers to the plague of problems a fresh clean XP machine can have. [\rant]
the AC
In second place, I'd have Cisco IOS, just for consistency across releases and through the years. Not exactly a General Purpose OS, but consistant
Slashdot Mirror
If you mess with a scammer involved in an "Organized Crime" gang
Which is what most of them are these days. The Belgian and Dutch police came around last year after a crackdown in Amsterdam sent the scammers scurrying for other countries. Some of them were so desperate they would drive up to the front of web hosting centres with a car full of old PCs and a few switches, and start asking around for contacts. After getting an icy reception in Belgium and France, their operations have started up again in Spain.
From what police told us about the gangs, its really well organised. This is translated from a Dutch presentation, which is not my native language so the words are not quite right.
There is a hierarchy in the gangs, different groups do different jobs, just like in a western corporation.
The foot soldiers are the ones buying spamming lists and sending out millions of emails. They work from apartments in Europe, rented for just a month or two, with DSL or cable broadband. Sometimes they are guys in cybercafes in Africa. Usually there are a bunch of guys living in a place, sleeping on a few matresses in one room, the other room full of workstations. Mostly these guys are recently arrived african immigrants, who have no scruples about ripping off Europeans or Americans, many are recruited with the promise to even the score with the white colonials who fucked over central africa a few centuries ago. Their job is to sort through the thousands of responses from spam filters, bounce messages, tons of flaming abuse, in the hopes they get a qualified lead (usually a few replies showing more than a passing interest). Leads are passed off to a handler.
The handlers are the real scam artists. They don't bother mucking about with the spam, they just work the few suckers dragged up each day. Once they have a sucker on the line, they slowly reel them in. When you read the 'baiters websites, you can tell when this happens because there is a change of email address/name on the other end. Handlers are typically foot soldiers who have earned enough trust within the crime organisation by showing they can keep a sucker around for a while. These are the ones who fake up certificates and create whatever seems right to reel in the sucker. Once a handler gets to the point where money will start flowing, they pass off the operation to the money team.
The money teams are the nasty criminals. They have a dozen different ways of getting money out of the UK or the US and into Africa or a European bank. Western Union, bank transfers, cashiers cheques. The goal is leave a break in the trail if/when the authorities start investigating, then launder the money so it looks legitimate. They tend to be well educated, understand western banking practices, and based in corrupt countries like Nigeria. The money gangs use a lot of local people as fronts, and control them with violence.
Once the money is laundered, it circulates back through the criminal organisation, with a large percentage going to the heads of the gangs.
These gangs have their own internal support organisations, technicians to buy the PCs for the foot soldiers and keep them running, fronts to rent apartments and order broadband, fixers setting up temporary email accounts by the thousands, and some geeks to run the spam botnets and help train new guys. Of the four identified organised crime gangs in Europe, they probably employ over a thousand people.
The only real danger from these gangs is from trying to follow them to Africa, where the nasty groups operate from. They rarely set up in Europe or the US, because they know they can buy both the police and the judicial system in their own country. Most attempts to bring them to justice go nowhere.
the AC
This point can't be hammered home hard enough. Know the political climate before you set foot in the country with a sack full of espionage equipment. If I can be forced by a Massachusetts state trooper to reformat my digital camera memory or face arrest on terrorism charges because I had a bridge in the background of a photo, expect it to be much worse in places with civil wars or low grade religious conflicts.
Make sure the organisation you are working for supports your mapping effort 100%. If this is just a personal whim, leave the high tech goodies at home, and think about doing a paper and pencil project. When (not if) you get arrested for waving a GPS wildly around at every crossroads and bridge, there better be a powerful politically connected group ready to put pressure on the local police to release you. If you don't have this, expect to spend a long time in jail until the appropriate fines/bribes can be paid.
You have to worry about the military and police, of course, but also private security guards working for the big money projects. Oil exploration, mining, civil construction projects all have their own cartography services, and there are certainly accurate and detailed maps of every part of western africa, but those maps are closely guarded secrets. In Nigeria, security guards for oil companies *are* the police in many cases.
Be discreet no matter what you do, and don't pull out espionage equipment until you have scoped out the area and know exactly what you will be measuring. If there is a military base just behind a hill, you don't want to be caught targeting its perimiter. Leave the kit at home until you are ready to go out and make measurements. Hire locals who know the landscape to help you avoid trouble when you venture beyond your base town.
the AC
I had a client who, one day, decided to become an ISP. Just like that! Threw away some money on some big cisco routers (purchased for almost nothing from a bankrupt dot.bomb) and bought a few 1U rackmount servers. They wanted me to set them up with a few internet feeds, BGP, and whatever else it takes to make the RIPE believe they were an ISP.
So I took a couple of servers, installed OpenBSD, and set them up as DNS+NTP servers. Hooked up the ciscos and got everything running. No problems at all.
A few weeks later, the client decides to take on a "security conslutant". He knows nothing, proves it by waving around his week old MCSE, and insists on putting firewalls everywhere. Not just any firewall, but windoze2000 based firewalls. Even the ciscos had to have a Win2k firewall between them and "the evil internet" on every port. Otherwise, how could the ciscos be protected from hackers?
I walked away from the insanity, told the client he could re-hire me when the M$ certified idiot and his auto-update-is-faster-than-any-hacker machines were no longer part of the network. A few weeks later, I got the call. They were asking me to explain why they were the laughing stock of all the ISPs, and why no ISPs seemed to have firewalls in their networks.
The Internet doesn't have firewalls in it. At the far edges of the Internet, there are firewalls to protect customer networks. The routers, servers and switches that make up the Internet don't have dozens of useless services running that can allow exploits. If an ISP is just running BIND on their DNS servers, they configure the application for secure operation. Don't want the whole internet to make recursive lookups? Its a few lines in some config files. Don't want your sendmail to relay? Don't use a firewall, just clean up your configuration. Every other useless service on your servers? Strip them off so they can't run. The security is in the applications, not in the firewall.
Sure, there are some ACLs in the routers that can clean up spoofed addresses, and limit garbage and bogons. Those could be considered basic firewalls, but each router or DNS server doesn't have a separate firewall to protect it.
The internet is a lot simpler than people imagine, but it works.
the AC
Here are some things one neighborhood did. I was the consulting network engineer in step -1, and I helped them get a 2400 meter monomode fibre from their division to a municipal fibre loop splicepoint. They pay about Eur450/month for leasing the right-of-way from the city, a single fibre pair in the loop, and a port on a switch with a 10Mbit commit. They have a /24 PI netblock hosted by their ISP. Startup costs were about Eur11,000 for 8 buildings, 4 apartments each. Every building has a multimode fibre terminating in a SX to copper el-cheapo switch. Every apartment has a copper GigEthernet connection to do with as they please, no caps, no limits, static IPs, anything but IRC servers.
-1) Before starting, hire (or at least talk to) a competent network engineer, with a working knowledge of fibre, used equipment, local ISPs, data centres and existing fibre runs. This may give you many ideas of how to get bandwidth to your neighborhood at a relatively cheap cost. Google can't help you for local fibre RoWs, that knowledge is arcane, closely guarded secrets.
0) Talk with a lawyer who works directly in "rights-of-way" and municipal law. Get accurate price quotes before proceeding, and understand the project will take a long time (6 months to 2 years) and cost a fair amount of money ($1000 to $2000 per household + monthly bandwidth costs $20/Mbit).
1) Once you and your neighbors understand the implications, costs, time line, and benefits, get each household to put up money. No money == no more participation in the co-op. Promises don't count. You should lock up around 75% of the initial startup costs in a special account, and provide a proper accounting to each investor at regular intervals. You'll need an external accountant for that function, don't let one of your neighbors say "I took an accounting course once, I'll do it for free", for down that path lies embezzlement and jail terms. Count on a second round of houses to join in after the network is up and running, and charge them more for the priviledge of not taking the initial risk.
2) After securing rights-of-way and approval from your local council, start digging. You will probably be forced to hire certified diggers who won't take a backhoe to the gas lines. If you are forced to take the aerial route, then you will need a contractor approved to work on poles around power/cable/telephone lines.
3) You need an external connection to an ISP somewhere. This will be the most expensive part of the project if there isn't one nearby. Negotiate an unlimited port on a router or a switch, and a block of addresses which you can route. Negotiate a reasonable commit price for what you expect to pull, and a burst rate which isn't too much more expensive. If you can't possibly get a fibre to an ISP, then you are stuck with a copper signal, which implies the local telco. Hopefully regulators in your area will force them to provide a T3/E3 at a reasonable price, but then you need a real router with an expensive interface card (or maybe two, if your ISP only deals with 100baseT).
4) You will need some kind of structure to act as your POP. This could be a concrete equipment vault buried at the edge of your division, or a shed on the side of someone's house. It is there you will have to terminate all the fibres from each house on a multi-fibre switch, and place a router to your upstream ISP. You may need an air conditioner if your summers are hot. Put in an electric meter so the co-op knows how much the electric bills are. Put a webcam so everyone can keep an eye on the kit.
5) At the houses, there will need to be a demarc point, where the co-op responsibility ends, and the homeowner takes over. Trust me on this, or your co-op will drown in a sea of pointing fingers and blame. At the demarc point, put a small SOHO 10/100/1000 switch with at least one SX fiber port. These are pretty common now, and you should be able to get them for around $150-$200. After that, its up to the homeowne
There are a whole bunch of reasons Indymedia can't really deal with backup servers competently.
1) It costs money. Every server in another hosting company costs bandwidth, rack space, hardware and maintenance. Indymedia is a bunch of Hippies in the sense that even the slightest cost seems to be too much for them. Even when presented with a donated old PC in the bottom of a rack with a solid but shared internet connection, the idea that one of them might have to do some work drives them away.
2) It requires some technical competence. The Indymedia folks are not exactly stupid, but most of the ones I've met dropped out of school as early as they possibly could. They prefer poorly educated ignorance as a way of life. I'm sure there are some highly educated agent-provacateurs leading these dolts around by their nose jewelry, but those people couldn't care less about keeping web servers up.
3) There is a victimisation ideal among Indymedia type folks. They think its much better press to have a server seized during a police investigation and make a big stink about it, rather than saying "the Bristol server was seized, but since it was mirrored on 3 continents nobody noticed one gone missing".
This has turned into a big, trolling rant. Sorry, but their anarchist, nobody-responsible-for-anything attitude wore thin a long time ago.
the AC
There are a number of companies selling VOIP to GSM gateways, you can see them all over the GSM world (which is everywhere except the U.S.). The boxes hold from a single GSM phone, up to a 19" rack which holds 32 GSM phones.
These boxes are the bane of every data centre in Europe. You walk around and see a cabinet with a few of these boxes, a single VOIP router, and hundreds of magnetic car mount GSM antennas around the inside. Any data comms equipment with 10 meters gets huge numbers of errors because of all the induced RF, servers nearby tend to randomly reboot, people who work in the data centres tend to have serious migranes, etc. When you get a few of these operators in a data centre, local GSM coverage is eliminated as they overwhelm all the local sites.
The economic model makes sense, though. To terminate international calls on a mobile phone, the GSM provider tends to charge a huge amount of money, like US$0.75 per minute. One of these GSM gateways can hold many SIM cards per phone, and then the calls appear as if they are local. If the operator has a good bucket plan, like 1000 minutes for $10/month if your call is on the same operator, or free on nights and weekends, then the numbers start to add up quickly. One 19" rack box with 30 active phones can terminate 20,000 minutes per month, which at US$0.40 per minute profit is quite a nice paycheck.
This is nothing new, but now someone has figured out a simple system for the stone-age american market.
the AC
This is /.
/. pwn3z you
Here the lamerz post other inside jokes, like the everpresent
1) in Soviet Farkistan,
2) ???
You get the idea, now go photoshop some pics of Nathalie Portman with hot grits, and take off every clothing for great
3) profit!
the AC
Thank the pantheon of godesses this is a text only site
I get to talk to elected and non-elected officials on a regular basis. They have a tremendous number of people talking at them all the time, with so many opposing points of view they can never keep up. The only bits that stick are the well presented ones, carefully crafted and without repetitions or ambiguities.
... present for 30 minutes and give the rest for him to either ask questions
I've seen some of the FFII supporters talking to Parliamentarians, and frankly it was embarrassing watching a few of them. They had the nugget of an idea, but couldn't present it clearly and concisely. They would start a beautifully thought out thread, then before getting to a conclusion lose the train of thought and end up talking about something completely different, often repeating ideas already presented. Very annoying for all those very familiar with the issue, and certainly annoying and confusing for the intended audience.
The guy is a busy man
Not that you will have time to hone your presenting skills, but the best lobbyists present each idea in one to three minutes, then engage the politico with questions where they have to actually think about the issue. The guys who make the biggest money are schooled in the tradition of rhetoric, where every thought is presented as a series of conflicting questions (with spin) and as if...then statements. This requires the politician to make a concious decision on the spot on which way to think about a subject, and this forced thinking will most likely be the way they will vote later.
There is a whole debate on the best way to word the if...then statements, first, second or third person, singular or plural. Compare and contrast "if you support long term growth in rapidly changing fields, then are you prepared to oppose entrenched laws?" with "if our objectives are to protect ideas of individuals from the oppressive threat of corporate lawsuits, can we obtain a balance...". (N.B. there is no right way) Forcing immediate responses from an audience is orders of magnitude more effective in creating lasting impressions. Even more effective is to word the if...then statements so the politician comes to conclusions on his own, thus becoming his ideas.
Impassioned emotional pleas are no good here, construct a good well founded argument
Precisely. The issue of patents, copyright, and ideas having value goes back thousands of years, and is a very complicated area. Narrow down your arguments to a very limited discussion of a single domain, and be prepared to place it within the larger and global (historical) scope of the battle. The emotion should be evident by the fact you have taken the time to become politically active to protect what you believe in.
Do your homework throughly before going in
This is the most important idea in the post, buried right in the middle. Not only do your homework, but practice the presentation as well. Out loud, on real humans, several times. If you have a lawyer friend, ask them to hear your presentation and offer criticism (then listen to them and correct yourself). Lawyers who practice in front of courts have to be skilled at presenting clear and linear ideas. Even if you don't know any lawyers, just try out your presentation on a few people and ask for feedback. By the third or fourth time you will notice a huge improvement in which ideas get presented, and which ones you drop because they are not needed. Try videotaping your presentation and then review it later with friends, watch where you say "ummm..." or where you repeat yourself.
For material to study, browse the websites of the EFF and the FFII, and read this speech by Alan Greenspan. If you have an entire hour, you can effectively present four to six points with a limited background and context. Limit yourself to only these, avoid digression and monologing.
the AC
There was a bunch of fsckwits called dir.com who had a real nasty spider crawling all over the place a few months ago. It blatantly ignored robots.txt, tried dictionary attacks to detect unlinked parts of the website, and may have been trying exploits to crack systems to discover secrets normally protected by passwords or logins. Honeypot email addresses fed to the spider would be spammed within days.
After too many complaints from clients about this nasty behaviour, a number of carriers started blackholing the prefixes of bad spiders at the border routers. Nice simple solution, and then you don't even see the spider traffic. Last I looked, about 20 major ISPs were blackholing prefixes of the worst spider/bot offenders.
Nobody would dare to blackhole google, but there are hundreds of google wannabe's and a few of them are unethical enough to get blocked. And then they wonder why they can't see 75% of the internet.
the AC
It could be worse...
Hardware by HP using Intel Itanium in 32bit mode,
Software by M$,
Project management by Accidenture,
Financial oversight by Halliburton,
Telecoms infrastructure by Verizon and Worldc^WMCI.
Oh, yes, it could be worse. I'll stop here before I give somebody ideas to really make this project a failure. HP+M$ is enough to guarantee failure.
the AC
Sweden (who's song totally sucked)
And this is different from all the other country's entries how?
the AC
who got invited to at least 3 eurovision parties this year
If they just handed you a report from Nessus and a bill
. . . then they are quite similar to most of the fly-by-night security companies in existance today.
They really are a plague. Typically a small number of university students, or recent graduates, trying their hand at "start-up dotcom". There are two or three guys who know linux, a little about cisco routers, maybe had a course where they learned about Nessus. There will be fast talking marketing and sales slime involved as well. They are all very young and inexperienced, none of them will have spent any time in a large company with a complex IT infrastructure. Their M.O. will be to approach a company with the output of a Nessus scan of the firewall and web servers, showing a whole bunch of false problems, and try to get a security audit contract out of it.
if you're looking for someone to do a security assessment or pen testing
These external audit companies don't sit around waiting for an IT group to give them a call, because they'd never get one. They will not approach the head of IT, but a sales or a CEO level person with nary a clue. They leverage their way in from the initial external scan of the firewall and web servers. They get permission to run an internal scan, then hand over an unedited Nessus report, hundreds of pages long with their invoice.
The term over here is Cowboys. They ride into town unannounced, pretend to save the day, and ride into the sunset after claiming their reward, never to be seen again. Their victims, of course, are the struggling IT departments like the OP, who have done what they can with their limited budget, and suddenly have to answer to a mostly worthless Nessus report.
the AC
Yes, you get the four Canadian seasons
Almost winter
Winter
Still winter
Mosquitoes
the AC
Many years ago, at $stripeyFruit company, there was a system extension that caused the monitor buffer to be copied upside down into the screen buffer. It was a popular prank, and everyone got good at detecting it and deleting it. The biggest challenge amongst the software guys was ways of hiding the extension, but the OS guys could detect this software in seconds using the debugger.
On April fools, the hardware guys went around and crosswired the monitors of a handful of people's machines, including the guy who wrote the original code.
So people flipped their machines upside down, and went to work with the debuggers. After a while, just before admitting defeat, one of them cracked the case on his machine and noticed the fresh solder joints on the deflection coils.
It was a good day.
It was the same day a competitor's hardware group at $bigBlazingHydrogenBallofDeath put Scott McNealy's ferrari in his office.
the AC
I know a bunch of American families attached to NATO here in Europe who send their kids through a program called the International Baccalaureat. It allows the kids to either apply to a European university or an American one, with the equivalence of a HS diploma.
From what I've heard, there are qualified schools just about anywhere there is a large ex-pat community. Egypt probably has them, but only in the areas where the petroleum companies have their compounds.
Supposedly the program is advanced enough to convince the French and the Brits it is the equivalent of a Bac or an A-levels, and leaves the kids at about the level of American University juniors. It requires the kids to be fluently tri-lingual, english, french, and one other. Typically the kids enter the program no later than about 12 years old, unless they are already bi-lingual.
Google turns up some info, about half a million links. Continue from there.
the AC
No, this is text based news. You can get a copy from places like slashdot.
;-)
Even better, you can wait until tomorrow and get a duplicate posting from slashdot.
And if you like your text news delivered as a weekend omnibus edition, CmdrTaco or Timothy will post yet another duplicate of this story over the weekend.
Of course, this story was about something that happened in NSW last october, so you may have recently seen it on ABC
the AC
Disclaimer: I am not under any Apple NDA, nor does any of this information come directly from someone under NDA.
There is some new hardware coming out, sometime between "now" and "the end of 2005" (how is that for vague). This new hardware will require extra drivers and code to support some new features. The beta testers have only been able to run Tiger on this hardware, released versions of 10.X don't work much, or at all.
Since releasing Tiger before the hardware is announced means that legions of Mac fanatics will be picking it apart, they will quickly find the code relating to new hardware names. So it is almost a certainty that Apple will release Tiger at the same time they announce the new hardware. The hardware might ship later, but at least it will be announced by the Tiger ship date. Tiger may be announced as much as a month in advance of its ship date, if past announcements are any guide.
So the speculation is centred around which events in Apple's calendar would be good for announcing a new round of hardware upgrades and new models, as well as releasing Tiger. The WWDC has been a favorite target until recently, as it is now approaching rapidly and Tiger is still in beta, MacPsychics are looking further into the summer for good announce dates.
the AC
My money is on the WWDC for a ship date
an attractive female working for Marlboro... By the way - I don't even smoke cigarettes.
Guess what? According to the insurance companies across America, you are now a smoker. Did you read the fine print on the clipboard underneath the license scanner? It clearly stated that by accepting their cheap free gifts, you were claiming that you are a smoker. This survey wasn't just sold to some sleazy marketers, but was created by a company selling the data to insurance companies.
Next time you try to get a job, or the next time your employer tries to negotiate health insurance for its workforce, this little "fact" will come up. With companies in the U.S. now legally allowed to discriminate based on health claims, you will never be offered that perfect job you were the most qualified for. Your current employer will be faced with much larger insurance bill if they keep smokers on the payroll. You sold away your employability for a packet of smokes and a cheap lighter.
Recently on a trip to the U.S. with some tobacco-addicted cow-orkers, they were approached by a girl giving away a packet of smokes. Since she required a U.S. driving permit she could swipe through her machine, she wouldn't let them take her survey. She did admit that is was just to generate marketing leads, but she was supposed to target obvious smokers. She even admitted that the packets she gave away each day were different brands, purchased on an Indian Reservation, so it wasn't just a single tobacco company marketing their products. She did tell them where to find the closest Indian Reservation for tax free smokes, and they were way over the limit on the return journey.
the AC
Ooh, you guys are gonna pay me $$$ restitution!
How about we just give you 5 brand new shiny moderator points, and we'll call it even.
the AC
A friend is the admin for a major hotel chain here in Europe, they have 5 different names for their hotels based on the rating. The servers are all together in a big farm with load balancers and multi-homed links. Their traffic is a mix of home users, business users, and travel agencies.
His stats run about 19% for Firefox, and no more than 65% for all versions of IE combined. Contrast that with 88% market share this time last year for IE.
Because of the dynamic business nature of his sites, they have over 1% spider-bot traffic, he suspects the number is closer to 5%, since many spiders identify themselves as IE to avoid simple anti-spider countermeasures. Home users and travel agencies make up the bulk of the Firefox traffic, its only the brainless business users still using IE.
He also says that Macs now account for over 10% of their traffic, requiring their web developers to test all pages on Macs as well.
Firefox is quickly becoming a major player in the market, despite claims that "overall" it has only 5% or 6% share.
the AC
Je suis d'accord, bestuderen van taal is een goed idee, e fá-lo-á valioso.
:-)
I'm fluent in several languages, French, Dutch, and Portuguese, and can follow business meetings in Swedish, Italian, German and Spanish. I have a basic amount of Gaelic and Russian, enough to get a beer or my face slapped. I can read newspapers in about a dozen other languages and grok some basic understanding from the articles (although it helps if there are pictures
One of the nice things about being an anglophone in computers/telecoms is the natural advantage you have when dealing with non-anglophones. You don't have to make an extra effort to translate or understand the material, its already in your language. If you are able to *fluently* communicate in a few other languages, enough that the natives don't have to drop into English for you, then you have a huge value to many employers in this world.
I am constantly running into Europeans who really know their stuff, but their English is limited to being able to read technical manuals or websites. They can deal effectively with most of their job, but when they have to communicate in English, either written or spoken, they just can't hack it. So employers are always looking for truely multi-lingual talent. When a Portuguese telecoms wants to make a deal with an Estonian telecoms, English is the only way to communicate.
There is another positive side to learning linguistics and a couple of foreign languages. If your field of CompSci is Natural Language Processing, or compiler/parser design, then you will have an extra level of insight.
The down side is that there are no real multi-lingual jobs in the US. If you are in the US (or UK or down-under) then english is the only language and your linguistics degree is pretty useless. But if the current political climate has you looking to spend a few years abroad until after the next election or three, then learning languages is an excellent choice for adding value to your current skill set.
the AC
seems to be corruption is build into system
/.ers in Europe are urged to download a copy of the Constitution in their local language from the treaty site or the europa site.
Which is why I, as well as most intelligent and informed people I know, will be voting against the European Constitution. Most citizens of Europe have never even read a copy of the constitution, and are trusting their local governments with their yes votes. But the constitution codifies into law this corrupt structure, whereby abstentions or absences become a YES vote, where the power structures of Europe can ignore the powerless elected body of the parliament.
There is a huge list of things wrong with the European Constitution, way too long to post here. Concerned
Note that the nacional votes, recently in Spain, soon in France, are merely guides for governments to approve the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, and that if this treaty is taken into effect, only then will the actual text of the constitution be written, by a committee of jurists and corporate lawyers. Citizens will be barred from any participation in creating the actual Constitution, and it will be adopted without debate if this treaty is agreed to.
The AC
I wonder if anyone at the IRS actually checks what job title you put on your tax forms?
I used to put down Taxpayer. When I was working in the states, just over one half of what I earned went to the government, so it was accurate.
the AC
Please visit our publicly facing tracking site to ensure we have a reliable base of micro-skew signatures. This will enable us to quickly identify M$-hating, freedom-loving^W^Wterrorists.
the NSA^Wanticypher
Its the /. advocacy flame war.
/., I don't need to tell you that windoze 98/95 is at the bottom of the list as the most hated systems I have to work with.
I use pretty much every kind of system in my day to day tasks. Since I move around from client site to client site, I never have much of a choice which system I'll be using to get my job done.
I work with so many different kinds of equipment, routers, telco gear, speciality kit, funky electronic gadgets, servers, firewalls, data bases, CRM sytems, you name it, I've probably touched it in the last few years. Everything has a different access method, whether a telnet session, a console port, remote desktop, special proprietary apps. Some is local, some is thousands of kilometers distant.
Depending on what is available at the client site, I now have a nice hierarchy of preferred and hated systems. As this is
At the top, its the latest Mac OS X. I never have to tweak an OS X system. I sit down and I'm working at full speed in 10 to 15 minutes, multiple windows open, email, M$ word documents, xterms, *nix CLI commands, google, network printers and file shares, all there. Compare that to a minimum one hour with any linux system, one to three hours with a *BSD system, and a full day or more lost if I have to get a windoze system cleaned up enough to support my work needs.
I'm a pretty experienced computer user. But I spend hours tearing my hair out with 'doze boxes, even those fresh from the OOBE. I had to set up a system this evening for a friend, the DSL modem took a few minutes, the WiFi took a few minutes, and the XP SP2 system took several hours to get it to behave like a real computer on the internet. The only saving grace is that I had a Mac Powerbook with me to verify where the problems lay, and to help google up some pretty obscure answers to the plague of problems a fresh clean XP machine can have. [\rant]
the AC
In second place, I'd have Cisco IOS, just for consistency across releases and through the years. Not exactly a General Purpose OS, but consistant