Something like this has happened to me on occasion when working in tech support and something goes critically wrong onsite at a customer. One of us would arrange to visit them to fix whatever and the account manager would specifically direct us to dress shabby otherwise the customer would not believe they were actually getting a deep-level tech person. In contrast I have also once been shown the door from a bank's datacenter for wearing a coat/jacket and tie but not actually a suit!
I see the green bars but the most noticeable difference is the large area of whitespace at the right of the page. Google ads are Gooooone. I'm using Proxomitron with pretty much its default settings and Google's ads usually do show.
Dear Niels I hate to break it to you but...
on
No Backdoor in Vista
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... you won't be in the loop if/when it gets compromised.
A quick look at the "Crypto AG" fiasco makes it plain how very much governments want backdoors. "For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries." Imagine the power some entity would have if it could peek into any Windows system at will - the temptation must be making their toes curl.
Whether or not there is a top-level agreement with top-level spooks it is still unlikely that local lawmen will be allowed to know about it. So what exactly IS Microsoft planning to do when they inevitably get a request to "help" with an encrypted drive?
I use one of these services to track my kids (www.fleetonline.net). I don't mean routinely just to snoop on them but on the occasion that I don't know where they are and am worried. Works pretty well in most areas; you don't need cruise-missile levels of resolution actually.
Implanting people like this is not really sustainable. There are the practical difficulties of sticking things in and out of people plus for many it will just be a flat-out perpetual refusal, job or no job.
But then when a "much more reasonable" alternative is presented, for example palm-vein biometric scan, then they hope people will go "oh great, tht's much better than having something stuck in my arm, yes sirr I'll enroll for that."
Plus the short-term publicity for the datacenter company.
I have an Acer N50 PDA with a 500MHz CPU and Skype really does work just fine. So does SJphone (SIP softphone) which can also make pretty good calls although seems more sensitive to weak wireless signal.
The portable player device market must surely be larger than PC market by volume even if not by value. Think billions of mobile phones worldwide; they don't all have media players but it's pretty hard to buy a new phone that doesn't and the typical refresh cycle is only a year or two for a phone. I personally don't own an ipod but I do own a Nokia 6230 with 1GB SD card. Plays great.
I used Netscape Certificate Server (as it was called) extensively about ten years ago and it was a very capable and solid product even then. Not actually used its eventual Red Hat incarnation but surely it can only have improved in that time. Good choice for a PKI I would say.
What would I like to see PKI-enabled? If we're talking Web Services then I think we're already there; Apache is well capable of logging me in when I supply a client cert via my browser and USB token. PKI-enabled shell is available as well via SSH (although I wish PuTTy would have better smartcard support.) IIRC though Novell's directory service provides fine-grained access control for a Windows client for all kinds of objects even filestore and can do this using either traditional password or credentials derived from its PKI. Not tried SuSE to see if they support all that in the Linux world but a similar Red Hat integration with Netscape Directory Server could be an idea.
You can already track the location of a cellphone. There are many service providers but the one I use is http://www.fleetonline.net/ You do need one-time physical access to a cellphone you want to track but other than that it's just a matter of paying a small fee per location-request. Accuracy depends on geographical factors but it's generally pretty good.
The problem with US rebates is that they are only valid for US residents. I'm in the UK, if I want to buy something from a US website which is advertised as "100 dollars with 50 dollar rebate" it means I'll be paying 100 dollars since I can't claim the rebate.
Microsoft has enough money, they don't honestly care if you copy a few games. It's all about establishing a hack-proof hardware box - and when/if they do, say goodbye to your privacy on anything. If they pwn your box they pwn your crypto, for example GPG will be useless.
I travel by foot/bus/train a lot and really depend upon personal audio to make the journeys bearable. So my mobile phone (which I need to carry around anyway) has an MP3 player and I spent a few extra quid on a 1GB MMC for it. End of story - maybe I'm not living the correct cool lifestyle but hey the music still comes out the headphones just fine.
From TFA:
Anthony Wing, manager of the anti-spam team at the ACMA [said] that the application, which took "some months" to build, can identify computers [...] that are being used for "illicit reasons".
I agree botnets are a problem and that my ISP has a right to stop me from being a nuisance to the rest of the internet. But outside of that do I really want my ISP taking broad arbitrary decisions on what I can do with my connection?
I don't have an iPod, with or without video, but how is it you need special pay-per porn movies? Couldn't you just download regular free porn movies and load them on? Movies or TV shows work great on mobile phones (have to convert them to.3GP format first) so why not iPod?
You think you jest.. in the early 1990's if you bought an analog phone in the UK then Nokia Mobira actually would offer to sign you to a ten-year contract!
You're right, perhaps this is a job for our old friend the Trusted Computing Box! The flash drive would refuse to boot unless first the PC certified it was horribly locked down and everything would be completely secure. Apart from the FBI back-door obviously.
Automatic descent, that's exactly what I thought. But then reality kicked in and I started asking myself if I really wanted to be in the plane directly underneath the one that just lost cabin pressure...
Recent bomb attacks have used mobile phones as control systems but not because they can be activated remotely. In the Madrid Atocha bombs for example mobile phones were used because the firmware provided a countdown timer function.
Nokia has this image as "king of the wireless" but in fact this has been slipping in the last couple of years as their primary product (handset) has been under threat of commoditisation by many other vendors primarily Far-Eastern.
To their credit Nokia saw this coming a long time ago and have strenuously tried to diversify into (a) server-side systems for mobile e.g. specialised mobile groupware and (b) network infrastructure with a security highlight such as dedicated (BSD) firewall boxes and VPN systems.
So maybe they do have something attractive for Cisco and might even view it as a merger.
Trivia: Nokia invented the first non-black Wellington Boot.
You just run up too hard against human nature when you get close to technical support. I know this from my own expectations:
- I want it as cheap as humanly possible and will frequently switch providers the minute I spot the opportunity to save a small amount of money on support costs.
- I want the best experience possible, I want the service tech to fix it even before it breaks but if that's not possible I want expert and friendly service that goes above and beyond the minimum required to provide a basic correction to my problem.
If you know how to reconcile those two then please go right ahead and claim the Nobel Prize for Advances in Customer Service.
Yeh right... here's what would REALLY happen. If you need your port re-opening all you'd have to do is call the ISP, navigate a large and confusing IVR system, get routed to an overseas callcenter, discover that you're 18th in line (but your call is important to them), and finally get to speak to a script-droid who has no idea what a port is but suggests that you should reinstall Windows. No thanks mate I'll stick with my real internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Something like this has happened to me on occasion when working in tech support and something goes critically wrong onsite at a customer. One of us would arrange to visit them to fix whatever and the account manager would specifically direct us to dress shabby otherwise the customer would not believe they were actually getting a deep-level tech person. In contrast I have also once been shown the door from a bank's datacenter for wearing a coat/jacket and tie but not actually a suit!
I see the green bars but the most noticeable difference is the large area of whitespace at the right of the page. Google ads are Gooooone. I'm using Proxomitron with pretty much its default settings and Google's ads usually do show.
Here it is then
And case they take it down, here's the Google cached version...
w ww.google.com/cl2/+site:www.google.com+inurl:cl2&h l=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&ie=UTF-8
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:4kukc10YIpwJ:
... you won't be in the loop if/when it gets compromised.
A quick look at the "Crypto AG" fiasco makes it plain how very much governments want backdoors. "For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries." Imagine the power some entity would have if it could peek into any Windows system at will - the temptation must be making their toes curl.
Whether or not there is a top-level agreement with top-level spooks it is still unlikely that local lawmen will be allowed to know about it. So what exactly IS Microsoft planning to do when they inevitably get a request to "help" with an encrypted drive?
I use one of these services to track my kids (www.fleetonline.net). I don't mean routinely just to snoop on them but on the occasion that I don't know where they are and am worried. Works pretty well in most areas; you don't need cruise-missile levels of resolution actually.
Implanting people like this is not really sustainable. There are the practical difficulties of sticking things in and out of people plus for many it will just be a flat-out perpetual refusal, job or no job.
But then when a "much more reasonable" alternative is presented, for example palm-vein biometric scan, then they hope people will go "oh great, tht's much better than having something stuck in my arm, yes sirr I'll enroll for that."
Plus the short-term publicity for the datacenter company.
I have an Acer N50 PDA with a 500MHz CPU and Skype really does work just fine. So does SJphone (SIP softphone) which can also make pretty good calls although seems more sensitive to weak wireless signal.
The portable player device market must surely be larger than PC market by volume even if not by value. Think billions of mobile phones worldwide; they don't all have media players but it's pretty hard to buy a new phone that doesn't and the typical refresh cycle is only a year or two for a phone. I personally don't own an ipod but I do own a Nokia 6230 with 1GB SD card. Plays great.
I used Netscape Certificate Server (as it was called) extensively about ten years ago and it was a very capable and solid product even then. Not actually used its eventual Red Hat incarnation but surely it can only have improved in that time. Good choice for a PKI I would say.
What would I like to see PKI-enabled? If we're talking Web Services then I think we're already there; Apache is well capable of logging me in when I supply a client cert via my browser and USB token. PKI-enabled shell is available as well via SSH (although I wish PuTTy would have better smartcard support.) IIRC though Novell's directory service provides fine-grained access control for a Windows client for all kinds of objects even filestore and can do this using either traditional password or credentials derived from its PKI. Not tried SuSE to see if they support all that in the Linux world but a similar Red Hat integration with Netscape Directory Server could be an idea.
You can already track the location of a cellphone. There are many service providers but the one I use is http://www.fleetonline.net/ You do need one-time physical access to a cellphone you want to track but other than that it's just a matter of paying a small fee per location-request. Accuracy depends on geographical factors but it's generally pretty good.
The problem with US rebates is that they are only valid for US residents. I'm in the UK, if I want to buy something from a US website which is advertised as "100 dollars with 50 dollar rebate" it means I'll be paying 100 dollars since I can't claim the rebate.
Microsoft has enough money, they don't honestly care if you copy a few games. It's all about establishing a hack-proof hardware box - and when/if they do, say goodbye to your privacy on anything. If they pwn your box they pwn your crypto, for example GPG will be useless.
These things are just too expensive.
I travel by foot/bus/train a lot and really depend upon personal audio to make the journeys bearable. So my mobile phone (which I need to carry around anyway) has an MP3 player and I spent a few extra quid on a 1GB MMC for it. End of story - maybe I'm not living the correct cool lifestyle but hey the music still comes out the headphones just fine.
I agree botnets are a problem and that my ISP has a right to stop me from being a nuisance to the rest of the internet. But outside of that do I really want my ISP taking broad arbitrary decisions on what I can do with my connection?
I don't have an iPod, with or without video, but how is it you need special pay-per porn movies? Couldn't you just download regular free porn movies and load them on? Movies or TV shows work great on mobile phones (have to convert them to .3GP format first) so why not iPod?
You think you jest.. in the early 1990's if you bought an analog phone in the UK then Nokia Mobira actually would offer to sign you to a ten-year contract!
You're right, perhaps this is a job for our old friend the Trusted Computing Box! The flash drive would refuse to boot unless first the PC certified it was horribly locked down and everything would be completely secure. Apart from the FBI back-door obviously.
Automatic descent, that's exactly what I thought. But then reality kicked in and I started asking myself if I really wanted to be in the plane directly underneath the one that just lost cabin pressure...
Recent bomb attacks have used mobile phones as control systems but not because they can be activated remotely. In the Madrid Atocha bombs for example mobile phones were used because the firmware provided a countdown timer function.
Nokia has this image as "king of the wireless" but in fact this has been slipping in the last couple of years as their primary product (handset) has been under threat of commoditisation by many other vendors primarily Far-Eastern.
To their credit Nokia saw this coming a long time ago and have strenuously tried to diversify into (a) server-side systems for mobile e.g. specialised mobile groupware and (b) network infrastructure with a security highlight such as dedicated (BSD) firewall boxes and VPN systems.
So maybe they do have something attractive for Cisco and might even view it as a merger.
Trivia: Nokia invented the first non-black Wellington Boot.
In UK http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/
In US http://www.dealmein.net/
Basically people sharing bargains they spotted, misprices on websites, etc.
I just don't believe you could do this by mistake. What if it's a scam, surely worth losing your job over a slice of 250 mil.
You just run up too hard against human nature when you get close to technical support. I know this from my own expectations:
- I want it as cheap as humanly possible and will frequently switch providers the minute I spot the opportunity to save a small amount of money on support costs.
- I want the best experience possible, I want the service tech to fix it even before it breaks but if that's not possible I want expert and friendly service that goes above and beyond the minimum required to provide a basic correction to my problem.
If you know how to reconcile those two then please go right ahead and claim the Nobel Prize for Advances in Customer Service.
Yeh right... here's what would REALLY happen. If you need your port re-opening all you'd have to do is call the ISP, navigate a large and confusing IVR system, get routed to an overseas callcenter, discover that you're 18th in line (but your call is important to them), and finally get to speak to a script-droid who has no idea what a port is but suggests that you should reinstall Windows. No thanks mate I'll stick with my real internet.