At last year's CeBIT trade show there was a company selling paper they claimed could not be photocopied. It was about 50euros for a box of 25 sheets, or I'd have bought some (I'm going again this year, so if I see that booth again I'm buying a box). The pages appeared to be covered with pale yellow circles that would trigger the anti-currency algorithms in photocopiers. There was also some moire-pattern thin blue lines around the corners, very thin but probably enough to be picked up by the optics.
Supposedly the exact spacing and pattern of circles is trademarked and copyrighted. But I could see making it a watermark pattern for my important documents, but now I'll have to make sure I use a printer which doesn't have anti-currency technology. As a matter of fact, that would make a good test document to screw with sales droid's heads. Now I'll have to DL a pirate copy of photoshop CS so I can test the pattern and spacing:-)
An even cooler application would be a rubber stamp with a pad of pale yellow ink that fluoresces. Stamp it all over documents you don't want government departments to easily photocopy. The circles would be almost invisible to the naked eye, the poor civil service drones would probably give up the case after a few attempts keep breaking their machines.
Chloe would be good if the production remains all brit. But I fear that hollywood distributors will ask for a bigger name american bimbo-slut star. (no, I'm not making any suggestions, I'd be pasting URLs all night)
Karma whoring so I can sell my 5 digit/. login on ebay:-)
in the words of my girlfriend - must mean that the author was simply having a bad day and couldn't be writing this as a serious article
Amy is it? Does she have access to your/. account:-)
I read the article last night when I was a bit sleepy and I did post a response about my IPv6 experiences (its here, deal). He's either clueless, or was told by the publishers what kind of slant they wanted to bash IPv6. I recently had a conversation with a potential client who wanted me to rid their network of anything which could cause a security breach by unknowingly being on IPv6, this article brought back that discussion.
After re-reading the article today with a good night's sleep, I think the author wrote the article in two separate sittings, and was pressed by an 800 lb. deadline to write something, anything. So he dusted off an old, unfinished article about migrating to IPv6, added some non-researched controversy, and submitted the article.
That makes the best excuse for this drivel I can come up with. He's a hack, and since he managed to piss me off (and most of/.), from now on I'm just going to consider him another clueless journalist.
the AC And I'm snarfing your analog/gsm phone analogy for my next conversation with clueless gits
I have IPv6 from my ISP. Its enabled by default for every one of their clients, and has been for more than 2 years. Most of the other small providers in Europe are now offering it standard, and I have talked with one large telco who will be trialing it this year, for a rollout before a big marketing push in September.
But as the whingey Garfinkel points out, the U.S. is very much behind the curve in IPv6 rollouts. Typical corporate american incompetence.
As for routers, all real routers have it. It takes more effort today to get a cisco router without IPv6, because all the machines being delivered recently come with a version of IOS which has IPv6 installed. Just waiting for a Cisco Certified Button Pusher to configure it correctly, and bob's your uncle.
I have my own/48 block of IPv6 at home. All my machines speak it, Solaris, Mac, Windoze, BSD, cisco, Nokia, Ericsson. My firewall filters both IPv4 and IPv6 with no problem, the rulesets are quite similar. With autodiscovery, router advertisements, and all the other cool protocols built into the IPv6 specs, adding a new machine means it just works.
While typing this response, I ran some statistics on web servers I manage. Approximately 5% of the traffic was IPv6 during the month of December, up from about 2% last June. That means that 5% of the PCs out there have IPv6 enabled, connected to an ISP offering IPv6, and are using an IPv6 capable browser like mozilla or IE6.
What about the burn marks from the heat? 512 Gigs of memory would have to dissipate an awful lot of heat, and the body doesn't make that good a conductor.
Of course, this is/. and we know what the editor meant. 512 bytes of memory and 16 toggle switches:-)
24 days per month, 7 hours per day, 265 days per year is pricey? That is good reliability in an all micro$oft environment:-) Oh, powerbook! never mind.
There are accent issues... The real issue is the training and scripting
A former colleague who grew up near Bangalore told me this story recently. The only detail I don't remember clearly is his word for the local Hindi dialect he speaks.
He called a tech support line for a major american company, and heard a familiar accent on the other end of the conversation. So he switched to Hindi. The CSR on the other end was in a complete hysterical panic after that. Imploring him to speak only in English, because almost all the calls are monitored to make sure the CSRs only spoke in English, and use American sounding names. The CSRs would be fired if they spoke even one word of Hindi on the job, not just on the phone, the local language was outlawed everywhere in the building.
The call got worse after that. My friend has an obviously Indian name, and the CSR asked him if he could use an American sounding name for the rest of the call. Seems big brother could not distinguish the two sides of the conversation, and would assume it was the CSR using his real name or speaking in Hindi.
The poor CSR's English was so bad, and the scripts so poorly written, he had to just hang up. He called the sales slime directly to tell him the many million $$$ support contract was about to be suspended pending a cancellation hearing. That got him a call directly from a US based technician who fixed the problem quickly, then told him that the support subcontractor in India had a turnover of almost 700 people per week, and that certainly "Mike" in India had already lost his job. That is the new reality in customer support areas.
Here are some things I've done in between serious periods of technical consulting. Not for everyone, but every few years its good to go out and do something different.
Travel Writer. While you are still in school, take journalism and creative writing classes. Learn to sell your articles. Use your computer skills to create a website, and maintain your articles in a database or wiki where you can pull one up and quickly re-write it into a new article. Then every time you travel, make sure about 4 hours of each day are spent working on your article(s) of the trip. Take digital photos of lots of things, keep the captions straight. Research hotel prices, interesting things in the area (plagiarize directly from other travel guides, then verify, they often have intentionally misleading info), and keep a diary on some kind of mobile computing device. Make sure you have a website where you can try selling your articles in near-real-time, and if an editor wants a specific angle on a story, you can work it up while there. Start while you are still in school, to have a good base of editorial contacts.
Technical Trainer. For some products a company needs a trainer to follow up the sale with a few days or a week of on-site training. Good trainers are hard to find, good trainers with extensive technical background are very rare indeed. Only a few companies actually realise this and pay accordingly, but I know one who travels to cities all over the place and earns about 150k euros/year (30 weeks X 5,000 Euros). When he gets an assignment to a location he has never been before, he always adds a few days to his trip for traveling in the area. Needless to say, he is single.
Events Coordinator. Specifically, hi-tech events. There is a need to work alongside the other coordinators for things like internet access, power requirements, cabling, and speciality telecoms and satellite access. There is also a whole field around event security, providing the big burly guys with working radios, a command centre with computers and video surveillance, and other security related items. There has to be a hands-on techie to ensure smooth operation. Speaking multiple languages is also a key requirement, at least here in Europe.
There are lots of early career organisations, like the Peace Corps, or Ingenieurs Sans Frontiers, who will place you in a village somewhere for a year to earn some work experience. The only travel involved is in getting to the place, and back home after a year. But its a good way to see at least one other small part of the world. Take lots of language courses while you can, english only goes so far if you want to actually work in non-anglo parts of the world.
As others have pointed out, serious relationships and a travel career are mutually exclusive. Having children almost certainly means you need to settle down. So plan on having the travel career right after school, while you are still free enough to enjoy it, and expect to change into a cubicle job later.
I have a friend who clears mines with the ICRC in former war zones like Rwanda and Serbia. Depending on who the sub-contractor is, there might be an ambulance and a medical team next to the operation, or there might not. The descriptions of injuries they sustain are pretty gruesome.
Those stories make me appreciate the relatively low risk the IT industry is, but I have been arrested once because of a stupid fuckwit recruiter. The job was for a security cleared individual, with a security rating that matched some acronym on my CV. The fuckwit recruiter scum just assumed because I had the TLA and the word security, that was enough. He never told me the "security clearance" part, or the "Ministry of Defence" part, just that the employer was the national phone company, and they needed a security analyst specialising in big secure networks to work at a client site for a few weeks filling in for a sick Cisco specialist.
I showed up at the unmarked HQ of the ministry of defence in a country which doesn't have a sense of humour. So they kept me for a few days. Non-stop questioning with no food or water, sleep deprivation, bright lights and a painfully loud klaxxon every time my head nodded or I closed my eyes. Meanwhile they checked out my story, and eventually decided I was the victim of a fuckhead agency. Then I was allowed back to my hotel, ordered to return the next day to start work. So for one day I was the star techie in the group, the project manager had tons of technical questions for me, and lots of shooting the breeze. They then expelled me from the country later that friday afternoon. The sleazy headhunter guy was fired before I even got back, the company said he had been an independent, and refused to deal with me. I never got my new 486 laptop back, or paid for my lost week. I had to get a new passport, because they put a big red stamp in it stating "expelled permanently for economic espionage". Quite worrying for a while, since a spying charge there carried the death penalty.
I vet all my contracts very carefully now, and refuse all jobs that ask "can you start tomorrow or next monday".
I have developed an answer to this, since you have to answer positively to get past the fuckwit HR drones who wrote the job spec.
Yes, I have 10 years of Solaris 9 experience, starting with the early beta program known as Solaris 2.1 in 1993, continuing through each of the updates for the last decade. I even have experience with the pre-release versions of Solaris, known as SunOS 4.1.
Same thing for Win2k or XP. Yes, I have 14 years total experience with XP, starting with the early alpha releases known as Windoze 1.0. Yes, these are all versions of Windoze XP, merely the marketing name changes, but the product is still built on the same code base for 14 years, and I know all of it. I am also a certified micro$loth developer, and thus I am already working on the next version of Windoze, but I am not allowed to tell you the new name unless I am hired as a full time employee and bring this company into the fold under an NDA. By hiring me, you will be two years advanced on your nearest competitors who are still hiring for Win2k laggards.
After that, you end up as a sysadmin doing backups and writing simple perl scripts, but the company thinks you are just barely qualified with your 10 years of experience.
it's hard to use more than 100% of your allocated IP addresses
No, its not hard at all to use more than 100% of your addresses. That is why when I was a network admin, I kept a large bottle of scotch and some wire cutters handy. Did you perhaps mean "intentionally"?
I keep seeing articles about switching over from one addressing scheme to another. DJB rants about how it will cost trillions and trillions of dollars and everyone must one day suddenly turn off all IPv4 machines, and switch on v6 machines. His narrowminded buttheadedness is as good a reason as any to avoid his holier-than-everyone-else-ware.
All modern machines are shipping with IPv6 built in, ready to turn on. Its not an exclusive switch, both stacks peacefully co-exist, and resolvers are capable of returning one preferred scheme over another.
So for the next few years we'll see more and more IPv6 enabled machines, running both v4 and v6. Until one day some marketing fscktard figures out it is THE great bullet item to differentiate his product from all the others, then there will be an avalanche of "Newest Generation Internet" products.
Microshaft is already beating the IPv6 drum to developers who want to sell into the.gov.us space, showing how WinXP, longhorn, and the.net infrastructure are already IPv6 enabled. By developing your products on a windoze platform, then automatically you meet one of the newest checklist items. There is no mention about how Solaris, some-but-not-all linuxes, and OS X all have IPv6 ready to go.
There is still a ways to go for other equipment manufacturers. Cisco consumer grade products can't deal with IPv6 at all, and they are digging their heels in to prevent home users to have IPv6, but with no rational explanation except it might somehow hurt their revenue. Other SOHO router products are a mixed bag, but over the next year or two it will become a mandatory feature.
There are lots of cariers in Europe now offering IPv6, and IPv6 exchange points are opening up. Some of the more progressive IXes offer it to their customers, although pricing is still very random because the traffic is too small at the moment. Within a year or two, IPv6 will just be offered along side IPv4 all over Europe, because traffic is just traffic. Then all those little islands will join up and we'll see a long period of co-existence between stodgy nostalgic backwards looking IPv4 types and businesses who need to be on the latest version of the internet.
No need to encode the times into 3 bits, there is a lot more information available at video bandwidths. No longer are we sending tiny streams of data from big old dinosaur iron to terminals. Just encode either an absolute or relative date.
That said, having a field which tells PVRs how long it can keep the copy would also affect advertising rates. If a show can only be viewed once at broadcast time, and never seen again by the general public, it will have a smaller advertising base. When the broadcasters allow a show to be viewed unlimited numbers of times, then the advertisers will pay more, especially now that the commercials are embedded in the shows.
So the length of time citizens can time shift their shows will directly affect advertising revenues. Which is why this kind of proposal was killed a few years ago by a greedy broadcast lobby, even though the advertising lobby wanted it.
I think this law will go the way of zone encoding on DVDs, easily bypassed by anyone who cares, and eventually abandoned by the broadcast industry because they can charge more by turning the bit off.
Its theAge, one of australia's least professional news outlets. I'd be surprised if any of their employees ever even took a 'journalism' course in their lives. If they were to hire a junior highschool student, the content would be significantly improved.
They do have plenty of tits and teeth photos, though, which makes it palatable to the average aussie male. The ghost of Murdoch lives on.
the world controlled by the IT department... are out of my control Then this is not your problem, its the IT director's problem. Or a CxO's problem.
we do not have good physical control of our environment Again, if you are not the one in charge of physical security, its neither your job nor your responsibility.
we are stuck with Win boxes as clients You're fucked! Seriously, the security of files comes from properly configured and admined win servers, not from the clients.
I would like the 'something you have,' attached to engineer's car key ring... and open source preferred Mutually exclusive. Keyfobs, smartcards, card readers, usb dongles, all have proprietary software running the authentication server. There might be some freeware projects out there, but none of them come close to the completeness of a commercial product. I suppose you want the keyfobs for free too?
There are some OSS projects where the dongle is an applet which runs on PalmPilots or iPaqs, and holds a local key generated by the server. But then you need either kerberos or radius authentication servers, not windoze domain controllers. And then there is the cost of supplying every engineer with a Palm equivalent, much more than a box of dongles.
Some other points why this is NOT your job:
The 'resale' value of our files is very large. You did not mention what kind of budget you have been given. Its the first question I ask a potential client in a situation like this, because effective security costs money. If your boss was serious, you would have a budget equal to about 10% of the IT spending of the whole company, and you wouldn't be worried about free software or free dongles.
engineers need to be able to securely take files home
No they don't, if you want anything even resembling security. This is why amateurs like yourself should never be allowed to have anything to do with security. This is like saying that bank tellers should be allowed to take home cash every evening so they can count it. It isn't done in a secure environment.
You need to take this problem to your corporate legal department, and explain to them this may signal a very serious risk to the future of the company. If the IT group is as incompetent as you indicate, its a problem for upper management, not you. Go to your boss and tell him you refuse the job, because it is impossible to carry out without a budget, support from above him, and authority to make significant changes.
Then, make sure your resume is up to date, because one way or another, you are being made the scapegoatse.
The bad thing about toll-free numbers, and special-toll numbers (1-800, 1-888, 1-900, etc. in the U.S.) is that the dialing number is always passed to the terminating equipment. Nothing[1] you can do can block this number from being delivered.
But with a normal number (1-317-ppp-nnnn), it is possible to block your number. Use calling ID suppression (*67 or whatever your CLASS activation code is) before dialing this number, so they can't claim "prior business relationship".
the AC
[1] Its possible to make calls without a traceable ID, but its difficult and requires an SS7 connection
A work is ONLY a work for hire if it is created by an employee in the scope of his employment, or under certain circumstances which rarely apply.... Card -- being only an author AFAIK -- probably only would've encountered this if he were comissioned to create a part of a collective work (e.g. a sf anthology) and signed an agreement to that effect. Just writing something, unless he's an honest to god employee...
You are missing his point, since its clear you have never dealt with book publishers in the last 20 years. Section 101 of the 1976 Copyright Act defines WfH, and the european equivalent was made to match the US, despite no mention of Work-for-Hire in the Berne Convention. WfH was left out of Berne, because all authors thought it a bad idea, and addressed under the section on Moral Rights. Berne did not go far enough and specifically state that WfH should be outlawed in national copyright laws, because the US had already had it for almost 70 years.
Most large publishers require authors to sign an agreement declaring their work was really done as a Hired Work, and forfeit all associated rights. Don't want to sign their contract? Then go find a different publisher. There are a few good publishing houses which will allow you to keep the copyright, Nolo Press is a good one for authors rights, but all the big ones claim all works as their own.
I've written a couple of books, the last has not (yet) been published because I spent several years of my time putting all my creativity and ideas into it and I refuse to give up my rights to greedy publishers. The earlier works were all just technical books, and I didn't much care for holding the rights because the publishers waved a big check and guaranteed to keep my name as author. But after that one big check, no more income. If one of the books had become a best seller (not unlikely), then the publisher would have made a fortune, and I would have only my initial payment. If you look at the copyright page in O'Reilly books, the copyright is always assigned to the publisher, not the authors.
Look at Ender's Game, and the copyright is to Card, because he signed away his rights on a bunch of earlier stuff to earn enough of a name to find a publisher willing to let him keep his rights. The same holds with the Harry Potter books, the first one JK Rowling had to sign over all the rights to the publisher, but subsequent books she kept the copyrights, so she sees no futher income from the first book past her one payment, but has become the highest earning woman in Britain from the later books. Her first publisher is making a fortune off her first book and doesn't ever give her any of it.
That is the way the law has been twisted by greedy businesses, and its not going to get better until our MEPs and CongressCritters act in the interests of the individual again. Rants by Card and other respected artists, even if slightly mis-informed, can only help to educate the only people who can change the law back towards the public good.
That information is about 3 years old. And the info about the Ukraine is completely wrong.
Recently I heard from a recruiter who was looking for a CCIE candidate in the UK. After putting the very narrowly defined job spec up on a couple of job boards (I saw it on jobserve), he received over 50 qualified CVs within an hour. After 1 whole day, he had over 100 CCIE's contact him looking for a job. He also got about 500 Cisco Certified but not quite CCIE level responses, deleted instantly.
The market for Cisco Certs is very saturated right now. Cisco worked hard to get millions of techies trained up during the dotcom boom, and now all those guys are keeping the rates depressed.
There are probably only 13 CCIE's in the Ukraine, and thousands of lesser certs. There are 1400 CCIE's in Britain, and 400 just in Belgium. Of course, 50 of those work for Cisco:-)
Did you RTFA? The numbers seem to come from talking with execs who have seen additional costs, told the writer what they were, and she then calculated the percentages from the cost of the projects. No company will give over exact numbers, but a good journalist can extrapolate from getting anecdotal numbers from a few sources.
CIO magazine has an agenda, clearly they are trying to show there are no short term gains from offshoring, and long term gains only start to kick in after a whole bunch of other problems are solved. Many points in this article echo discussions I've had with people managing offshore developers.
I've set up communication systems for companies who expect that on the Indian side a T1 can be ordered with a week of lead time, and are then stunned to learn it will cost US$60,000 up front before starting the 1+ year installation of a network connection to their new partners. Ever tried to transfer several megs of data per day over 9600 baud dial up? Over international links which often have such bad quality the modems drop back to 1200 baud or lose the call 30 times or more in a 12 hour session? When the phone bills, travel bills, equipment bills, and a ton of miscellaneous charges come in, with the end of the project still a year or two out, they drop the Indians and hire new locals. Of course, at that point, since they botched the layoffs, they have such a bad repuation only desperate losers will work for them.
The only companies who will save money are the ones prepared for a 5 to 10 year investment to reduce their huge programmer costs. All the others are just putting themselves out of business by botching the offshoring. Let corporate darwinism take its course, I say. There is still a ton of jobs here for experienced engineers, now that all the dotbomb boomers have gone back to waiting tables and painting houses. I've been approached several times since the end of August by companies who now realise one good engineer is worth more than 20 or 30 newbies.
This is the main reason China and Korea seem to be the origin of most spam, owned machines. Most of the spammers, probably more than 90%, are physically in the United States, but they crack machines in other countries to make it difficult for prosecutors to go after them.
Many companies in China do the absolute minimum to set up their computers, and to connect them to a local ISP. Firewalls, applying security patches, locking down systems, and other basic sysadmin functions are ignored because the companies directors don't know any better. Most of the press about hacking, spam, security and other problems are in English, very little of that makes it into the local papers and in the local language. So the problem will just continue until American prosecutors go after the criminals in the U.S. breaking into computers physically in other countries.
2bits, did you contact the abuse people at the upstream ISPs in the US and Mexico? Did you send them a detailed report of a criminal activity, breaking into your machines and stealing all your bandwidth? Did you do your part to help get these spammers off the internet, or did you just take money from your clients and not fix the problem.
Its not that difficult to get into the machines spammers are using, they tend to install pirated copies of PCAnywhere or BackOrifice, and not bother with passwords. So then you can check back and see where the spammers are, and mostly they are in the U.S. The biggest problem right now is getting US authorities to file charges against the spammers, because a real cyber-crime case is actually very difficult to prosecute, and the prosecutors tend to be very technophobic.
I gave up a long time ago trying to provide evidence to US Attorneys General to shut down spammers, and many spam fighters are turning to vigilantism now to chase the spammers from the net. Even/. has gotten into the act of exposing spammers
If your dorms are wired with ethernet switches supporting 802.1x MAC level authentication, turn it on. Cisco, 3con, broadcom, enterasys switches and many others support it. WinXP has a supplicant built in, and there are supplicants for linux and other *nixes. Have disks ready to go for everyone without supplicant software so they can load it up under lab rat supervision.
Students don't get a login until they bring their machine to the computer lab to be checked out. Since you force them to come to you, they have to do all the heavy grunt work, just have lots of tables with power and a network drop, like a big LAN party. While they are there, you can teach them about the 802.1x login procedure.
Those running unsecure OSes must show they have a licensed, up-to-date virus scanner, that it has been run immediately before coming in, and they have the latest M$ patches installed. Until they can do that, in person, they don't get access anywhere on campus. Since the MAC address of the ethernet card goes along with their login, they can't just use their room-mate's ID. Students smart enough to know how to switch the MAC, and then forge an 802.1x login are clued enough to really fsck up your network and tend not to run viru$-ware from Redmond.
While you have the loser's machine just sitting there, don't just check for anti-virus and licenses, but also port-map their machine, make sure all useless services are turned off. No rogue DHCP servers, no faux-root DNS servers, no win messenger, no RPC, or back-orifice. In XP, make sure the firewall is enabled. Make sure they understand (have a sheet for them to sign) they are responsible for staying patched and AV'ed, and if they infect the network they lose access for the rest of the school year. People without access will be forced to use the old Macintosh Pluses sitting in the lab to do their school work.
And any loser running *nix, check they have a/. ID of 5 digits or less, and a karma level of excellent:-)
All the way to the far reaches of Brabant, I'd better start planning my journey now. See you at 11h00 somewhere in the Place du Lux. I'll be the one wearing a black T-shirt, so I shouldn't be hard to miss:-)
My domain mailservers have been overwhelmed the last few days with bounces from the sobig worm. All those obsolete and fucking annoying auto-replies are being generated because someone with a windoze infected PC has my email in thier address book, more like several hundred people, clients, losers, friends, etc.
With several M$ worms now spoofing the From: header, its time to target anyone who still uses an AV scanner which sends out auto-replies. Treat them like spammers, complain to their upstream ISPs about violating their AUPs, contact their legal department and threaten legal action, or just blackhole them. When their clueless admins and legal department finally turn off that stupid auto-responder, then they can be let back on the internet.
I'm just a little bitter because this morning I had over 30,000 messages from anti-virus scanners telling me someone with a windoze virus had sent them an infected email, often dozens of times per minute. There were a few hundred in my inbox which required 30 minutes of my time to write some new filter rules. Since I deleted those bounces about 2 hours ago, I have received another 2000, in the same time 4717 copies of sobig.f (and 4 klez) caught by Amavis. My MRTG graphs look like my domain has been fairly active the last few days, roughly 20-40 Kbps, and almost all of that traffic is due to lack of security in M$ products (pings, copies of worms, auto-responder shit, blaster probes).
Since this hit yesterday, I've had lots of friends call me up wondering if I can fix their machines.
Of course, 75 euros if you bring me your machine, 100 euros if I have to visit. So far, 6 people have brought me their machines, the local computer repair shops are charging people something like 199 euros just to slap on a patch and a service pack.
There was a recent thread about what you have on your USB flash key dongles, this is another addition I can carry around and make money off of.
Slashdot Mirror
At last year's CeBIT trade show there was a company selling paper they claimed could not be photocopied. It was about 50euros for a box of 25 sheets, or I'd have bought some (I'm going again this year, so if I see that booth again I'm buying a box). The pages appeared to be covered with pale yellow circles that would trigger the anti-currency algorithms in photocopiers. There was also some moire-pattern thin blue lines around the corners, very thin but probably enough to be picked up by the optics.
:-)
Supposedly the exact spacing and pattern of circles is trademarked and copyrighted. But I could see making it a watermark pattern for my important documents, but now I'll have to make sure I use a printer which doesn't have anti-currency technology. As a matter of fact, that would make a good test document to screw with sales droid's heads. Now I'll have to DL a pirate copy of photoshop CS so I can test the pattern and spacing
An even cooler application would be a rubber stamp with a pad of pale yellow ink that fluoresces. Stamp it all over documents you don't want government departments to easily photocopy. The circles would be almost invisible to the naked eye, the poor civil service drones would probably give up the case after a few attempts keep breaking their machines.
the AC
There goes my evening...
Try some shots from her FHM layout, or her official actors headshot.
/. login on ebay :-)
Chloe would be good if the production remains all brit. But I fear that hollywood distributors will ask for a bigger name american bimbo-slut star. (no, I'm not making any suggestions, I'd be pasting URLs all night)
Karma whoring so I can sell my 5 digit
the AC
in the words of my girlfriend - must mean that the author was simply having a bad day and couldn't be writing this as a serious article
/. account :-)
/.), from now on I'm just going to consider him another clueless journalist.
Amy is it? Does she have access to your
I read the article last night when I was a bit sleepy and I did post a response about my IPv6 experiences (its here, deal). He's either clueless, or was told by the publishers what kind of slant they wanted to bash IPv6. I recently had a conversation with a potential client who wanted me to rid their network of anything which could cause a security breach by unknowingly being on IPv6, this article brought back that discussion.
After re-reading the article today with a good night's sleep, I think the author wrote the article in two separate sittings, and was pressed by an 800 lb. deadline to write something, anything. So he dusted off an old, unfinished article about migrating to IPv6, added some non-researched controversy, and submitted the article.
That makes the best excuse for this drivel I can come up with. He's a hack, and since he managed to piss me off (and most of
the AC
And I'm snarfing your analog/gsm phone analogy for my next conversation with clueless gits
I have IPv6 from my ISP. Its enabled by default for every one of their clients, and has been for more than 2 years. Most of the other small providers in Europe are now offering it standard, and I have talked with one large telco who will be trialing it this year, for a rollout before a big marketing push in September.
/48 block of IPv6 at home. All my machines speak it, Solaris, Mac, Windoze, BSD, cisco, Nokia, Ericsson. My firewall filters both IPv4 and IPv6 with no problem, the rulesets are quite similar. With autodiscovery, router advertisements, and all the other cool protocols built into the IPv6 specs, adding a new machine means it just works.
But as the whingey Garfinkel points out, the U.S. is very much behind the curve in IPv6 rollouts. Typical corporate american incompetence.
As for routers, all real routers have it. It takes more effort today to get a cisco router without IPv6, because all the machines being delivered recently come with a version of IOS which has IPv6 installed. Just waiting for a Cisco Certified Button Pusher to configure it correctly, and bob's your uncle.
I have my own
While typing this response, I ran some statistics on web servers I manage. Approximately 5% of the traffic was IPv6 during the month of December, up from about 2% last June. That means that 5% of the PCs out there have IPv6 enabled, connected to an ISP offering IPv6, and are using an IPv6 capable browser like mozilla or IE6.
the AC
What about the burn marks from the heat? 512 Gigs of memory would have to dissipate an awful lot of heat, and the body doesn't make that good a conductor.
/. and we know what the editor meant. 512 bytes of memory and 16 toggle switches :-)
Of course, this is
the AC
24/7/265
:-) Oh, powerbook! never mind.
24 days per month, 7 hours per day, 265 days per year is pricey? That is good reliability in an all micro$oft environment
the AC
There are accent issues... The real issue is the training and scripting
A former colleague who grew up near Bangalore told me this story recently. The only detail I don't remember clearly is his word for the local Hindi dialect he speaks.
He called a tech support line for a major american company, and heard a familiar accent on the other end of the conversation. So he switched to Hindi. The CSR on the other end was in a complete hysterical panic after that. Imploring him to speak only in English, because almost all the calls are monitored to make sure the CSRs only spoke in English, and use American sounding names. The CSRs would be fired if they spoke even one word of Hindi on the job, not just on the phone, the local language was outlawed everywhere in the building.
The call got worse after that. My friend has an obviously Indian name, and the CSR asked him if he could use an American sounding name for the rest of the call. Seems big brother could not distinguish the two sides of the conversation, and would assume it was the CSR using his real name or speaking in Hindi.
The poor CSR's English was so bad, and the scripts so poorly written, he had to just hang up. He called the sales slime directly to tell him the many million $$$ support contract was about to be suspended pending a cancellation hearing. That got him a call directly from a US based technician who fixed the problem quickly, then told him that the support subcontractor in India had a turnover of almost 700 people per week, and that certainly "Mike" in India had already lost his job. That is the new reality in customer support areas.
the AC
Here are some things I've done in between serious periods of technical consulting. Not for everyone, but every few years its good to go out and do something different.
Travel Writer. While you are still in school, take journalism and creative writing classes. Learn to sell your articles. Use your computer skills to create a website, and maintain your articles in a database or wiki where you can pull one up and quickly re-write it into a new article. Then every time you travel, make sure about 4 hours of each day are spent working on your article(s) of the trip. Take digital photos of lots of things, keep the captions straight. Research hotel prices, interesting things in the area (plagiarize directly from other travel guides, then verify, they often have intentionally misleading info), and keep a diary on some kind of mobile computing device. Make sure you have a website where you can try selling your articles in near-real-time, and if an editor wants a specific angle on a story, you can work it up while there. Start while you are still in school, to have a good base of editorial contacts.
Technical Trainer. For some products a company needs a trainer to follow up the sale with a few days or a week of on-site training. Good trainers are hard to find, good trainers with extensive technical background are very rare indeed. Only a few companies actually realise this and pay accordingly, but I know one who travels to cities all over the place and earns about 150k euros/year (30 weeks X 5,000 Euros). When he gets an assignment to a location he has never been before, he always adds a few days to his trip for traveling in the area. Needless to say, he is single.
Events Coordinator. Specifically, hi-tech events. There is a need to work alongside the other coordinators for things like internet access, power requirements, cabling, and speciality telecoms and satellite access. There is also a whole field around event security, providing the big burly guys with working radios, a command centre with computers and video surveillance, and other security related items. There has to be a hands-on techie to ensure smooth operation. Speaking multiple languages is also a key requirement, at least here in Europe.
There are lots of early career organisations, like the Peace Corps, or Ingenieurs Sans Frontiers, who will place you in a village somewhere for a year to earn some work experience. The only travel involved is in getting to the place, and back home after a year. But its a good way to see at least one other small part of the world. Take lots of language courses while you can, english only goes so far if you want to actually work in non-anglo parts of the world.
As others have pointed out, serious relationships and a travel career are mutually exclusive. Having children almost certainly means you need to settle down. So plan on having the travel career right after school, while you are still free enough to enjoy it, and expect to change into a cubicle job later.
the AC
I have a friend who clears mines with the ICRC in former war zones like Rwanda and Serbia. Depending on who the sub-contractor is, there might be an ambulance and a medical team next to the operation, or there might not. The descriptions of injuries they sustain are pretty gruesome.
Those stories make me appreciate the relatively low risk the IT industry is, but I have been arrested once because of a stupid fuckwit recruiter. The job was for a security cleared individual, with a security rating that matched some acronym on my CV. The fuckwit recruiter scum just assumed because I had the TLA and the word security, that was enough. He never told me the "security clearance" part, or the "Ministry of Defence" part, just that the employer was the national phone company, and they needed a security analyst specialising in big secure networks to work at a client site for a few weeks filling in for a sick Cisco specialist.
I showed up at the unmarked HQ of the ministry of defence in a country which doesn't have a sense of humour. So they kept me for a few days. Non-stop questioning with no food or water, sleep deprivation, bright lights and a painfully loud klaxxon every time my head nodded or I closed my eyes. Meanwhile they checked out my story, and eventually decided I was the victim of a fuckhead agency. Then I was allowed back to my hotel, ordered to return the next day to start work. So for one day I was the star techie in the group, the project manager had tons of technical questions for me, and lots of shooting the breeze. They then expelled me from the country later that friday afternoon. The sleazy headhunter guy was fired before I even got back, the company said he had been an independent, and refused to deal with me. I never got my new 486 laptop back, or paid for my lost week. I had to get a new passport, because they put a big red stamp in it stating "expelled permanently for economic espionage". Quite worrying for a while, since a spying charge there carried the death penalty.
I vet all my contracts very carefully now, and refuse all jobs that ask "can you start tomorrow or next monday".
the AC
I have developed an answer to this, since you have to answer positively to get past the fuckwit HR drones who wrote the job spec.
Yes, I have 10 years of Solaris 9 experience, starting with the early beta program known as Solaris 2.1 in 1993, continuing through each of the updates for the last decade. I even have experience with the pre-release versions of Solaris, known as SunOS 4.1.
Same thing for Win2k or XP. Yes, I have 14 years total experience with XP, starting with the early alpha releases known as Windoze 1.0. Yes, these are all versions of Windoze XP, merely the marketing name changes, but the product is still built on the same code base for 14 years, and I know all of it. I am also a certified micro$loth developer, and thus I am already working on the next version of Windoze, but I am not allowed to tell you the new name unless I am hired as a full time employee and bring this company into the fold under an NDA. By hiring me, you will be two years advanced on your nearest competitors who are still hiring for Win2k laggards.
After that, you end up as a sysadmin doing backups and writing simple perl scripts, but the company thinks you are just barely qualified with your 10 years of experience.
the AC
civilization is still arguing over silly stuff like this
:-)
These are americans arguing over this, nothing to do with civilization at all
the AC
it's hard to use more than 100% of your allocated IP addresses
No, its not hard at all to use more than 100% of your addresses. That is why when I was a network admin, I kept a large bottle of scotch and some wire cutters handy. Did you perhaps mean "intentionally"?
the AC
I keep seeing articles about switching over from one addressing scheme to another. DJB rants about how it will cost trillions and trillions of dollars and everyone must one day suddenly turn off all IPv4 machines, and switch on v6 machines. His narrowminded buttheadedness is as good a reason as any to avoid his holier-than-everyone-else-ware.
.gov.us space, showing how WinXP, longhorn, and the .net infrastructure are already IPv6 enabled. By developing your products on a windoze platform, then automatically you meet one of the newest checklist items. There is no mention about how Solaris, some-but-not-all linuxes, and OS X all have IPv6 ready to go.
All modern machines are shipping with IPv6 built in, ready to turn on. Its not an exclusive switch, both stacks peacefully co-exist, and resolvers are capable of returning one preferred scheme over another.
So for the next few years we'll see more and more IPv6 enabled machines, running both v4 and v6. Until one day some marketing fscktard figures out it is THE great bullet item to differentiate his product from all the others, then there will be an avalanche of "Newest Generation Internet" products.
Microshaft is already beating the IPv6 drum to developers who want to sell into the
There is still a ways to go for other equipment manufacturers. Cisco consumer grade products can't deal with IPv6 at all, and they are digging their heels in to prevent home users to have IPv6, but with no rational explanation except it might somehow hurt their revenue. Other SOHO router products are a mixed bag, but over the next year or two it will become a mandatory feature.
There are lots of cariers in Europe now offering IPv6, and IPv6 exchange points are opening up. Some of the more progressive IXes offer it to their customers, although pricing is still very random because the traffic is too small at the moment. Within a year or two, IPv6 will just be offered along side IPv4 all over Europe, because traffic is just traffic. Then all those little islands will join up and we'll see a long period of co-existence between stodgy nostalgic backwards looking IPv4 types and businesses who need to be on the latest version of the internet.
the AC
No need to encode the times into 3 bits, there is a lot more information available at video bandwidths. No longer are we sending tiny streams of data from big old dinosaur iron to terminals. Just encode either an absolute or relative date.
That said, having a field which tells PVRs how long it can keep the copy would also affect advertising rates. If a show can only be viewed once at broadcast time, and never seen again by the general public, it will have a smaller advertising base. When the broadcasters allow a show to be viewed unlimited numbers of times, then the advertisers will pay more, especially now that the commercials are embedded in the shows.
So the length of time citizens can time shift their shows will directly affect advertising revenues. Which is why this kind of proposal was killed a few years ago by a greedy broadcast lobby, even though the advertising lobby wanted it.
I think this law will go the way of zone encoding on DVDs, easily bypassed by anyone who cares, and eventually abandoned by the broadcast industry because they can charge more by turning the bit off.
the AC
Its theAge, one of australia's least professional news outlets. I'd be surprised if any of their employees ever even took a 'journalism' course in their lives. If they were to hire a junior highschool student, the content would be significantly improved.
They do have plenty of tits and teeth photos, though, which makes it palatable to the average aussie male. The ghost of Murdoch lives on.
the AC
the world controlled by the IT department... are out of my control
Then this is not your problem, its the IT director's problem. Or a CxO's problem.
we do not have good physical control of our environment
Again, if you are not the one in charge of physical security, its neither your job nor your responsibility.
we are stuck with Win boxes as clients
You're fucked! Seriously, the security of files comes from properly configured and admined win servers, not from the clients.
I would like the 'something you have,' attached to engineer's car key ring... and open source preferred
Mutually exclusive. Keyfobs, smartcards, card readers, usb dongles, all have proprietary software running the authentication server. There might be some freeware projects out there, but none of them come close to the completeness of a commercial product. I suppose you want the keyfobs for free too?
There are some OSS projects where the dongle is an applet which runs on PalmPilots or iPaqs, and holds a local key generated by the server. But then you need either kerberos or radius authentication servers, not windoze domain controllers. And then there is the cost of supplying every engineer with a Palm equivalent, much more than a box of dongles.
Some other points why this is NOT your job:
The 'resale' value of our files is very large.
You did not mention what kind of budget you have been given. Its the first question I ask a potential client in a situation like this, because effective security costs money. If your boss was serious, you would have a budget equal to about 10% of the IT spending of the whole company, and you wouldn't be worried about free software or free dongles.
engineers need to be able to securely take files home
No they don't, if you want anything even resembling security. This is why amateurs like yourself should never be allowed to have anything to do with security. This is like saying that bank tellers should be allowed to take home cash every evening so they can count it. It isn't done in a secure environment.
You need to take this problem to your corporate legal department, and explain to them this may signal a very serious risk to the future of the company. If the IT group is as incompetent as you indicate, its a problem for upper management, not you. Go to your boss and tell him you refuse the job, because it is impossible to carry out without a budget, support from above him, and authority to make significant changes.
Then, make sure your resume is up to date, because one way or another, you are being made the scapegoatse.
the AC
The bad thing about toll-free numbers, and special-toll numbers (1-800, 1-888, 1-900, etc. in the U.S.) is that the dialing number is always passed to the terminating equipment. Nothing[1] you can do can block this number from being delivered.
But with a normal number (1-317-ppp-nnnn), it is possible to block your number. Use calling ID suppression (*67 or whatever your CLASS activation code is) before dialing this number, so they can't claim "prior business relationship".
the AC
[1] Its possible to make calls without a traceable ID, but its difficult and requires an SS7 connection
A work is ONLY a work for hire if it is created by an employee in the scope of his employment, or under certain circumstances which rarely apply. ... Card -- being only an author AFAIK -- probably only would've encountered this if he were comissioned to create a part of a collective work (e.g. a sf anthology) and signed an agreement to that effect. Just writing something, unless he's an honest to god employee...
You are missing his point, since its clear you have never dealt with book publishers in the last 20 years. Section 101 of the 1976 Copyright Act defines WfH, and the european equivalent was made to match the US, despite no mention of Work-for-Hire in the Berne Convention. WfH was left out of Berne, because all authors thought it a bad idea, and addressed under the section on Moral Rights. Berne did not go far enough and specifically state that WfH should be outlawed in national copyright laws, because the US had already had it for almost 70 years.
Most large publishers require authors to sign an agreement declaring their work was really done as a Hired Work, and forfeit all associated rights. Don't want to sign their contract? Then go find a different publisher. There are a few good publishing houses which will allow you to keep the copyright, Nolo Press is a good one for authors rights, but all the big ones claim all works as their own.
I've written a couple of books, the last has not (yet) been published because I spent several years of my time putting all my creativity and ideas into it and I refuse to give up my rights to greedy publishers. The earlier works were all just technical books, and I didn't much care for holding the rights because the publishers waved a big check and guaranteed to keep my name as author. But after that one big check, no more income. If one of the books had become a best seller (not unlikely), then the publisher would have made a fortune, and I would have only my initial payment. If you look at the copyright page in O'Reilly books, the copyright is always assigned to the publisher, not the authors.
Look at Ender's Game, and the copyright is to Card, because he signed away his rights on a bunch of earlier stuff to earn enough of a name to find a publisher willing to let him keep his rights. The same holds with the Harry Potter books, the first one JK Rowling had to sign over all the rights to the publisher, but subsequent books she kept the copyrights, so she sees no futher income from the first book past her one payment, but has become the highest earning woman in Britain from the later books. Her first publisher is making a fortune off her first book and doesn't ever give her any of it.
That is the way the law has been twisted by greedy businesses, and its not going to get better until our MEPs and CongressCritters act in the interests of the individual again. Rants by Card and other respected artists, even if slightly mis-informed, can only help to educate the only people who can change the law back towards the public good.
the AC
That information is about 3 years old. And the info about the Ukraine is completely wrong.
:-)
Recently I heard from a recruiter who was looking for a CCIE candidate in the UK. After putting the very narrowly defined job spec up on a couple of job boards (I saw it on jobserve), he received over 50 qualified CVs within an hour. After 1 whole day, he had over 100 CCIE's contact him looking for a job. He also got about 500 Cisco Certified but not quite CCIE level responses, deleted instantly.
The market for Cisco Certs is very saturated right now. Cisco worked hard to get millions of techies trained up during the dotcom boom, and now all those guys are keeping the rates depressed.
There are probably only 13 CCIE's in the Ukraine, and thousands of lesser certs. There are 1400 CCIE's in Britain, and 400 just in Belgium. Of course, 50 of those work for Cisco
the AC
Did you RTFA? The numbers seem to come from talking with execs who have seen additional costs, told the writer what they were, and she then calculated the percentages from the cost of the projects. No company will give over exact numbers, but a good journalist can extrapolate from getting anecdotal numbers from a few sources.
CIO magazine has an agenda, clearly they are trying to show there are no short term gains from offshoring, and long term gains only start to kick in after a whole bunch of other problems are solved. Many points in this article echo discussions I've had with people managing offshore developers.
I've set up communication systems for companies who expect that on the Indian side a T1 can be ordered with a week of lead time, and are then stunned to learn it will cost US$60,000 up front before starting the 1+ year installation of a network connection to their new partners. Ever tried to transfer several megs of data per day over 9600 baud dial up? Over international links which often have such bad quality the modems drop back to 1200 baud or lose the call 30 times or more in a 12 hour session? When the phone bills, travel bills, equipment bills, and a ton of miscellaneous charges come in, with the end of the project still a year or two out, they drop the Indians and hire new locals. Of course, at that point, since they botched the layoffs, they have such a bad repuation only desperate losers will work for them.
The only companies who will save money are the ones prepared for a 5 to 10 year investment to reduce their huge programmer costs. All the others are just putting themselves out of business by botching the offshoring. Let corporate darwinism take its course, I say. There is still a ton of jobs here for experienced engineers, now that all the dotbomb boomers have gone back to waiting tables and painting houses. I've been approached several times since the end of August by companies who now realise one good engineer is worth more than 20 or 30 newbies.
the AC
This is the main reason China and Korea seem to be the origin of most spam, owned machines. Most of the spammers, probably more than 90%, are physically in the United States, but they crack machines in other countries to make it difficult for prosecutors to go after them.
/. has gotten into the act of exposing spammers
Many companies in China do the absolute minimum to set up their computers, and to connect them to a local ISP. Firewalls, applying security patches, locking down systems, and other basic sysadmin functions are ignored because the companies directors don't know any better. Most of the press about hacking, spam, security and other problems are in English, very little of that makes it into the local papers and in the local language. So the problem will just continue until American prosecutors go after the criminals in the U.S. breaking into computers physically in other countries.
2bits, did you contact the abuse people at the upstream ISPs in the US and Mexico? Did you send them a detailed report of a criminal activity, breaking into your machines and stealing all your bandwidth? Did you do your part to help get these spammers off the internet, or did you just take money from your clients and not fix the problem.
Its not that difficult to get into the machines spammers are using, they tend to install pirated copies of PCAnywhere or BackOrifice, and not bother with passwords. So then you can check back and see where the spammers are, and mostly they are in the U.S. The biggest problem right now is getting US authorities to file charges against the spammers, because a real cyber-crime case is actually very difficult to prosecute, and the prosecutors tend to be very technophobic.
I gave up a long time ago trying to provide evidence to US Attorneys General to shut down spammers, and many spam fighters are turning to vigilantism now to chase the spammers from the net. Even
the AC
If your dorms are wired with ethernet switches supporting 802.1x MAC level authentication, turn it on. Cisco, 3con, broadcom, enterasys switches and many others support it. WinXP has a supplicant built in, and there are supplicants for linux and other *nixes. Have disks ready to go for everyone without supplicant software so they can load it up under lab rat supervision.
/. ID of 5 digits or less, and a karma level of excellent :-)
Students don't get a login until they bring their machine to the computer lab to be checked out. Since you force them to come to you, they have to do all the heavy grunt work, just have lots of tables with power and a network drop, like a big LAN party. While they are there, you can teach them about the 802.1x login procedure.
Those running unsecure OSes must show they have a licensed, up-to-date virus scanner, that it has been run immediately before coming in, and they have the latest M$ patches installed. Until they can do that, in person, they don't get access anywhere on campus. Since the MAC address of the ethernet card goes along with their login, they can't just use their room-mate's ID. Students smart enough to know how to switch the MAC, and then forge an 802.1x login are clued enough to really fsck up your network and tend not to run viru$-ware from Redmond.
While you have the loser's machine just sitting there, don't just check for anti-virus and licenses, but also port-map their machine, make sure all useless services are turned off. No rogue DHCP servers, no faux-root DNS servers, no win messenger, no RPC, or back-orifice. In XP, make sure the firewall is enabled. Make sure they understand (have a sheet for them to sign) they are responsible for staying patched and AV'ed, and if they infect the network they lose access for the rest of the school year. People without access will be forced to use the old Macintosh Pluses sitting in the lab to do their school work.
And any loser running *nix, check they have a
the AC
All the way to the far reaches of Brabant, I'd better start planning my journey now. See you at 11h00 somewhere in the Place du Lux. I'll be the one wearing a black T-shirt, so I shouldn't be hard to miss :-)
Naar Leuven,
the AC
My domain mailservers have been overwhelmed the last few days with bounces from the sobig worm. All those obsolete and fucking annoying auto-replies are being generated because someone with a windoze infected PC has my email in thier address book, more like several hundred people, clients, losers, friends, etc.
With several M$ worms now spoofing the From: header, its time to target anyone who still uses an AV scanner which sends out auto-replies. Treat them like spammers, complain to their upstream ISPs about violating their AUPs, contact their legal department and threaten legal action, or just blackhole them. When their clueless admins and legal department finally turn off that stupid auto-responder, then they can be let back on the internet.
I'm just a little bitter because this morning I had over 30,000 messages from anti-virus scanners telling me someone with a windoze virus had sent them an infected email, often dozens of times per minute. There were a few hundred in my inbox which required 30 minutes of my time to write some new filter rules. Since I deleted those bounces about 2 hours ago, I have received another 2000, in the same time 4717 copies of sobig.f (and 4 klez) caught by Amavis. My MRTG graphs look like my domain has been fairly active the last few days, roughly 20-40 Kbps, and almost all of that traffic is due to lack of security in M$ products (pings, copies of worms, auto-responder shit, blaster probes).
the AC
Since this hit yesterday, I've had lots of friends call me up wondering if I can fix their machines.
;-)
Of course, 75 euros if you bring me your machine, 100 euros if I have to visit. So far, 6 people have brought me their machines, the local computer repair shops are charging people something like 199 euros just to slap on a patch and a service pack.
There was a recent thread about what you have on your USB flash key dongles, this is another addition I can carry around and make money off of.
Thank you M$, for making such sucky software
the AC