Well of course security through obscurity is ridiculous. We already have more downtime due to management chintzing on paying people for uptime, this will contribute to that.
I am not well-familiar with the entire American "infrastucture" (water tunnels, electrical grid etc.), but from what I do know about it, it would be easy for a group of say four people who knew what they were doing to cause major disruptions. I mean, even when you have people working to keep things up, we still have had major blackouts on the West Coast and East Coast in the past few years.
On territory I'm more familiar with, telecommunications, there are chokepoints in the system. Fiber cuts at several specific points in a large city would take down a large percentage of the network. As far as the x.25 networks, or Internet, there are many such chokepoints as well. For the Internet, from the root name servers to core routers and their routing tables, there are chokepoints which are not difficult to DOS, never mind take over.
These things are very "vulnerable" as the corporate media nomenclature calls it. But vulnerable from whom? Saudi nationalists like Osama Bin Laden who (after the US helped Pakistan train him to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan) wanted the US military to leave Saudi Arabia? Perhaps disgruntled workers like those in Los Angeles in 1992 who had a short lived uprising until the army marched in? I myself sleep better knowing how "vulnerable" these things are, when anti-imperialists and workers go to the trouble to muck with these things, it's usually for a good reason.
If you consider the world has several billion workers, only a small percentage of them currently have the ability to say, use gdb to find an error in a program. This is in a world where half of the people on it have never made a phone call. In fact, half of the people on earth are either chronically malnourished or literally do not know where there next meal is coming from. Again, the number of people who like Mr. Graham, take their Lexuses onto route 101 or 280 and drive to their corporate offices on Kifer Road where they pull in a six figure salary is quite small. Marx talked about these people in Capital - he called them the petit bourgeoisie. They are, in Marx's model, a class between the capitalists (e.g. the smallest group of people who own 51% of business in, say, the United States - which according to the Federal Reserve is the richest 1% of the US) and the proletariat (e.g. what you might call blue collars workers, who make up 80% of the US population if you include some skilled workers who don't make the cut to the 20% of white collar workers). And Marx says they are in some ways symbiotic to the capitalists. Actually, Marx is more interested in the interplay between the 80% of blue-collar workers and 1% of capitalists than this small group caught in between, but he does account for them, and talks about how the relationship between the petit bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie is in certain historical periods symbiotic.
This person seems to have no grasp of political economy.
First off, he says he is coming from the vantage point of Yahoo.com. When Yahoo IPO'd, I knew "the market" had gotten ridiculous (the fact that Yahoo, was IPO'ing, never mind what it IPO'd at and went to). I had been buying stocks up to them using the fundamental analysis technique pioneered by Benjamin Graham. This is the technique the best stock pickers of the second half of the 20th century - Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch - use. Among all things it concentrates on profit and profit growth. Yahoo had made no profit, in fact it was losing money, so I knew it was ridiculous. In fact, I remember most clearly August 10th, 1995 when Netscape IPO'd and went to over 100. That's when the stock market bubble started in most estimations. I actually bought Netscape that day, and even made money on it. But I always felt the market was unstable after that, and I was right.
All this person sees is the small piece of ice on the top of a giant iceberg. He's still speaking in bubble-speak. The only thing connected to reality is #10, productivity. And everything he says within that is nonsense.
One thing neglected in all of his delusions that IPO's and Venture Capital in the mid-1990's created the massive Internet that we have today is the decades of government paid R&D, in the billions of dollars, through DARPA, that actually created the Internet. The Internet was a socialist, or, to be technical about it, a fascistly modelled (business/government cooperation) economic program. Decades of taxpayer dollars poured into R&D which creates something which *starting* in the mid-1990s can be used to start increasing productivity.
Economists have been debating whether or not productivity increased due to the Internet thus far and it very may well not have - it may take decades for that to hit. Despite all of the technical innovations in the early 20th century (cars, assembly lines), it wasn't until the end of World War II that any of this productivity was significantly felt, and that was after massive government involvement in the economy, starting with the New Deal, through the WWII almost total takeover of the economy by the government including rationing, on to Eisenhower and his "military" buildup. It wasn't all to strictly military purposes, the highway system was originally sold as a military expense (Original name the National Defense Highway System) along with the government funded R&D that created transistors, computers and so forth.
Also not mentioned is the severe world economic crisis that became apparent starting in the mid-1960's, started affecting things obviously in the early 1970's and which is still with us today. The average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage is below what it was 30 years ago. That does not sound like the economic utopia he is talking about - the US (and industrialized world) has been digging a whole for 30 years, with brief respites in the mid 1980s and late 1990s, where capital went hog wild during the short lived good period.
This person doesn't even seem to understand equity fundamental analysis within the current dominant economic viewpoint, never mind alternative economic viewpoints which see the economic system as even more fragile, which I subscribe to. Even dominant psyche stalwarts like Alan Greenspan or chief economists on Wall Street like Stephen Roach often speak gloomy things which you can read about in the Wall Street Journal, but not in the local newspaper for idiots with a big sports section on the back cover and local murder news on the front.
I work with the local Green party and followed the primary campaign where you were elected.
For those who haven't followed this: The Green party is divided into two factions, the "realos" (also called the Demogreens) and the "fundis". The realos are who nominated Cobb. You can read about it in several places including the Counterpunch article
"Rigged Convention; Divided Party - How David Cobb Became the Green Nominee Even Though He Only Got 12 Percent of the Votes". The fundis want to build our party and win elections, the realo/Demogreens are more concerned about the Democrats winning than the Greens. Cobb is a realo/Demogreen.
The article makes the very good point that the states where there is a large green base and where voters actually voted in the primaries (California, Massachusetts, Washington DC), Camejo (who is a Green "fundi", and is now running as Nader's VP) got 72.7% of the vote. Cobb only got 12.2% of the vote. Nonetheless, in the Green version of the electoral college, Cobb managed to win due to delegates from states like Iowa voting for him. Iowa has 90 registered Greens and had 9 delegates to the Green convention - 1 delegate for every 10 Greens! California had 132 delegates for the over 150,000 registered Greens in California. So in the case of California, 1 delegate represented over 1,000 Greens. This sort of thing is how someone who got 12.2% of the vote (from Demogreens) versus 72.7% of the vote (fundis) nevertheless won the election.
Cobb's candidacy has probably destroyed the Green party which is probably what the Demogreens wanted anyway. Anyhow, in some ways I am not sad to see it go because the Greens are a little too hippy-dippy granola and Birkenstocks anyhow. Nader attracted me to the Greens (even though he was never a Green party member) because he talked about things I care about like repealing Taft-Hartley and so forth which the DLC Democrats never talk about any more. 70% of white men in the US voted Republican in 2000, which tells you how far these DLC Democrats have drifted from the working class roots it had on some level in the early 20th century. Now they are all for NAFTA, screwing workers and so forth just like the Republicans, they're just for gay marriage, abortion and things conservative Christians in rural areas are against.
The only solution for change I see is to do what happened in England a century ago - for militant rank-and-file run unions to be formed, and, if they find it strategically wise to do so, to form a Labor party like they did in England. It might not even be strategically wise to do so, but it would beat backing the Democrats if they were going to get into the electoral game.
So my question goes back to what I was saying earlier: do you feel you are a legitimate Green candidate if most of the Greens in the country prefer Nader and Camejo to yourself? In many ways your election was like Bush's, except the majority vote went way against you instead of by a few percent.
This is a popular topic in some circles. I already see modded +5 comments here already about "I would never hire a hacker", which is what you always here. What a joke. The IT security community is full of ("ex")-hackers, in fact, I'd say most security administrators are ex-hackers. At least the ones who work at Symantec, ISS, At Stake and all of the big security companies, not to mention people who work on security at Accenture, Ernst and Young and other management consulting companies. In fact, many of these people have been convicted of hacking-related felonies, never mind were hackers without a criminal record (having not gotten caught).
In magazine or TV interviews, I see executives at security companies or departments say that they would never hire a hacker they have no hackers blah blah blah. Of course that's what they'd answer but all of them do. There is no major security company that does not have current or former hackers. I can state this because I know at least one at least former hacker in every major security company (or in security departments like the consulting departments of accounting companies).
In fact security work is the main job ex-hackers get. I have known many hackers from the 1980s until now and this is the most common job. I take a different tack though. Instead of "Should the boss (e.g. owner) hire a former hacker?", I ask, "should a former hacker go into security work?" I consider going into security work to be somewhat of a sellout. Information wants to be free, the means of production in the workers hands and all of that. Some hackers become sysadmins or programmers, which is what I did. I think the question as asked puts out a bad way to think - it shouldn't be, will I be forgiven for my supposed transgressions by the holy boss/owner who decides if I eat or not, the question should be, have the idle class parasites assimilated people who (at least used to) rebel against the concept that they have the right to control the means of production.
How is this different than a president who believes there is a man in the clouds who controls everything, that some guy 2000 years ago was born of a virgin, had magic powers and came back from the dead before flying off to the clouds, that people don't die and live forever in the clouds and so on and so forth? If you read about the president's beliefs, some Korean folk tradition about a water spring whose water has special powers starts to sound normal.
I recently worked to get a Green on the ballot for assemblyman. We needed hundreds of signatures. Only people within his district, or notary publics, could witness the petition. I spent hours on three different days trying to get signatures and got none (well, I was with someone and let them get a signature of someone who would sign, so I sort of shared one).
The people I talked to usually didn't speak English, weren't from the district, or weren't registered voters (and you can't legally register someone and have them sign on the same day). If I could find a registered voter who lived in the district, often they didn't sign for a variety of reasons (too busy, scared the Democrat might lose, wanted to think it over).
When the Green Party was on the New York state ballot, you only needed a dozen or so signatures, not hundreds with all of those conditions. Miraculously, he made it on the ballot, but there is no way he would have survived a challenge if one had been made.
It gave me a new appreciation of the whole talk about the two party system and so forth. Plus, the two parties work together to keep their monopoly of power, from election laws, to debates, to whatever. Only a large social movement united around cohesive goals could launch a challenge to it. The last time this happened was in the middle of the 19th century, with the Republican party. Since then, third parties have been co-opted by other political parties - the right wing of the Socialist party drifted into the Democratic party, most of the Dixiecrats entered the Republican party.
Some of the people who came up with this idea were the ITAA, a lobbying group funded by Microsoft, Intel, IBM and other companies.
The employers have their heads together figuring out how to screw over IT workers, I think IT workers getting together to protect our interests is a good idea as well. You can take your pick of which group, Washtech, Techs United, the Programmers Guild and so forth. The CWA in New York has meetings were people come together and discuss things. The important thing is programmers and admins get together with each other and find a way to protect our interests, just as the owners do in the ITAA and such organizations. These organizations are already out there so check them out.
What you're implying is completely ridiculous, and you obviously know nothing of either the steel or the textile businesses.
What you imply about unionized textile jobs moving overseas is the most ridiculous because virtually none of the textile jobs moving overseas were union jobs. North Carolina has been the hardest hit state for textile outsourcing, and North Carolina is also the least unionized state in the country. This covers almost all of the North Carolina textile business as well.
As far as the steel business, outsourcing has had very little effect on the industry. The automation of steel plants has contributed much more to steel jobs lost than outsourcing. Automation has been what has led to the decrease of steel jobs (with the same amount of steel output), with outsourcing having little to no effect.
Get the government out? What is the body that determines your boss owns a piece of capital, and you don't, or more precisely, has the right to expropriate surplus value ("profit") from any worker who valorizes a piece of capital.
In other words, you want the policemen to come in to enforce this relationship where you can expropriate profit from anyone who uses certain capital, in fact you demand it because without the policemen at your disposal there is nothing determing who takes from who in valorizing a piece of capital. The person claiming the right to expropriate profit from capital is the one who needs the government, workers don't.
Wikipedia has been OK for some of the science stuff I have looked at, but I feel the site's historical articles are biased. Most of them seem to reflect a conservative, white, upper middle class, American (with a little English/Canadian/Australian flavor) view of the world.
Novices might say "anyone can edit", but it's not that simple - Jimbo Wales, who runs Wikipedia (and is an Ayn Rand fanatic) chose who the administrators are. They're people like Ed Poor, a Moonie who does nothing but change every article to a very right wing point of view when he's not removing any negative information about the Moonies.
It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the US State Department's web page, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the history of Colombia article.
Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wiki's out there such as InfoshopWiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wiki's like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.
Anyhow, I think this is just something I learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of InfoshopWiki.
There are dozens of Indymedias - in South America, in Asia, in Europe, in the US. Each site can use whatever software it wants, with many using one of three popular software kits they developed. Each has its own policies as well. I can't recall nyc.indymedia.org deleting any messages. They do hide messages sometimes, but in that respect it is like Slashdot, you can view the -1 trolls if you wish. Of course, some other Indymedia locals have more draconian rules with deletions, banning and so forth. Each local is autonomous.
As far as illegal info on Slashdot, please. Like there weren't 1,000,000 links on Slashdot to how to get Windows source code when that was illegally released. And that is similar to Indymedia - the information was not released from Indymedia from what I understand, it was on various places on the net so someone posted it to Indymedia. It might not have even been the person who originally had gotten their hands on the data.
I'm just trying to separate the facts from the opinions. I don't want people who know nothing of Indymedia thinking the people who run it are the ones who decided to post this info of their own volition. They did not have a meeting and say lets post this info, it was just put up there. You can have an opinion on what they should do at that point, but they are coming in at step 2, they were not the protagonist at step 1.
I see several posts here saying Indymedia did this, Indymedia posted the names. Indymedia did NOT post the names. Indymedia is like Slashdot, ANYONE can post. Blaming Indymedia for something a poster said would be like saying CmdrTaco was supporting what some anonymous Slashdot poster said, or blaming the Usenet cabal for a posting by some anonymous Usenet poster. I just wanted to make this clear as several people have said here that Indymedia took this position. I don't think they understand what Indymedia is. Yesterday I read through a dozen posts by people who hate the protestors on the nyc.indymedia.org site. nyc.indymedia.org is in many ways just like Slashdot in terms of anonymous posters and so forth. They can't be blamed for every bozo that comes along.
I agree that H1-Bs, outsourcing to India and so forth have a negative impact on American IT workers. One thing that is neglected however is how jobs are disappearing permanently - not just IT jobs, but manufacturing jobs and other jobs. Doug Henwood has a good, short article about this.
The current economic orthodoxy says that if you lose your job, after a short period of time and maybe some retraining you will get a new job at the same wage you were receiving before. You really have to search to find economists who disagree, and they are all really out of the mainstream. IMHO, the unorthodox economists are right on this, and the mainstream economists at the big colleges, think tanks and on Wall Street are all affected by herd mentality. I feel it's a case of the economists who have discovered the correct models being voices crying in the wilderness.
The capital does not belong to the CEO, the capital belongs to the owners, the shareholders. According to the
Federal Reserve, 42.2% of American equities belong to the wealthiest 1%, while the 90% of Americans not within the wealthiest 10% collectively own only 15.6% of outstanding equities. In other words, a very small idle class elite extracts the dividends and profits from corporations, the majority of people only make money by their own wages. All wealth is created by workers, the profit/dividends the idle heir capital-owners get is that which they expropriate from the people who create it.
Whence does the "right" of these idle class heirs to the wealth created by workers come from? Well, robber baron George Baer talked about the divine right of capital a century ago, but in actual practice, it is easy enough to see by what means the rentier expropriates for himself if one observes what happens to
tenants who does not pay their landlord, or workers who refuse to let capital-owners expropriate profit (like at
Argentina's Brukman factory).
The concept you're talking about is not called comparative efficiency, it is called comparative advantage. The theory was spelled out in the early 19th century by the economist David Ricardo. Ricardo said Portugal is better at making wine than England, and England is better at making cloth than Portugal, so both countries are better off doing what they're best at and trading. That is the theory of comparitive advantage. Now, if you want to think about the validity of this theory, ask yourself, 185 years later, if Portugal was better off economically sticking to agriculture while England was busy building textile mills and industrializing.
You also talk about these people having a better life. Well if you have someone with a good-paying job and someone else making little or unemployed, and then give the good-paying job (by now, slightly less good-paying) to the little-payed/unemployed person, of course that person will be better off. If one accepts de facto the tyranny of idle class owners telling workers whether they can work or not depending on the owners profit rate, one can still ask why this better job does not come out of the productivity growth of the foreign country, or even of the US. Why does an old job (as opposed to a new job) have to be moved? Why does it have to be zero-sum?
The answer of course is growth is not the most important thing to the owner, nor, of course, is the workers welfare, by any means. The important thing is profit, and the owner cans the worker and sends the job overseas at a lower wage, so he can extract more profit from the wealth the foreign worker will create.
Well of course, you are articulating the point of view of the owners, or their lieutenants in the companies, management. It is not an articulation from the point of view of the worker, who asks why, if there is global production growth every year, why the new jobs can't move to these places instead of the existing jobs. The answer to this from the owners point of view is profits - in terms of the wealth created by the American or African worker, the owner can take more of the created value from the African worker.
The real difference is the scope in looking at it. The owner is looking at what is immediately before him, from his vantage, it makes no sense to not move jobs to Africa if it means more profit for him. The American worker (and even the African worker eventually) looks at the political and economic system, and realizes that an economic and political dynamic, and system, which undercuts his wages and ships his job overseas is not to his benefit, and is actually to his detriment.
In fact the American economic system has done poorly over the past thirty years compared to the prior 30 years. From 1944-1974 there was enormous productivity growth and wage growth in the US. From 1974 to present, according to the BLS, the average US inflation adjusted hourly wage has actually dropped. And production growth is much less than it was in the prior thrity years.
You talk about blame, justification, and moral crusading as if this is an argument about gay marriage or gay bishops or something where consensus can be reached. It is not, it is a simple economic matter where the interests of the IT workers in the US is in direct conflict with the IT owners in the US. Most owners and management look at it from one perspective, most workers look at it from the oppositive perspective.
I have no desire to see them punished whatsoever, I do know though if you hack into a computer and it becomes known, there's a good chance the law might become involved just like night follows day. Computers are capital, computers are property, and as property is nine tenths of the law, it's not unlikely that the property owners will ask the police will get involved.
I don't desire for them to be punished, but I am capable of observing, and performing some simple Cartesian logic, so I ask myself - what were they thinking? Why would they want to publish this data in the newspaper that those other than the property owners could have easy access to the property? I don't really see what is to be gained from that by anyone - not them, not the property-owners, and not the general public. I could really care less if it easy for someone to use property that someone else claims is "their" property.
I remember on the old GNU machines, Richard Stallman's username was rms, and his password was rms as well. People used to hop around talking about that, how great they were for having "guessed" it and how supposedly "insecure" his account was, but I think they missed the whole point, and the much bigger picture.
I do the same thing on Linux servers that I do on most UNIX servers.
The first thing I do is security - if any programs are running on any ports that I don't need, I shut it down. The only port open will be ssh, plus whatever the server is doing. I also unSUID any SUID programs I don't plan on using. Plus getting security updates.
Then I get programs I like to have on my servers if they're not there already. Like ntp, which I set up so that the clock will not drift. GNU findutils is another one - I run updatedb regularly and can locate filename, which is much quicker than find / -name filename. I also like the screen program, so I can have multiple sessions from one terminal. I like to use BASH.
I also do customizations - my shell prompt is usually hostname:/file/system$ I put PATHs I need in my PATH. And so forth.
Another thing I do on many systems is log at debug according to facility for syslog. Everything gets logged, according to its facility. If too much is being logged, I can lower it from debug. You usually don't have to, as only mail usually fills it up, but you usually want to log that.
All of this makes my life easier. I am logged into a host and know if I am me or root, what host it is, what directory I am in, where a file is located if I need to know, and the clock and all of the log files are logged normally. And with screen I can have multiple sessions on that host or multiple hosts in that one window.
"The sad truth is that the state of personal computing is exatly(sic) what the market (i.e. the consumers) wanted. They want games and pr0n and free music. No about of hand wringing or high falutin' pondering is going to change that."
Personal computing is exactly what the "market" and "consumers" did not want. Most of the technology to build personal computers came from R&D paid for by the US military. This goes back to the 1940s, all the way up to 1980s. If it was left to laissez faire capitalism and the "market" and consumers, we certainly would not have had computers by now since we probably would not even have had transistors by now. Nothing could have been decided by a consortium of government and business bureaucrats more, with the market and consumers having nothing to do with it, yet you're blaming the consumer for what was produced, since you think it can only come out of the market. The Internet, 'nee the ARPAnet, is another example of this - the first RFC was written in 1969, and DARPA/NSF did not hand it off to private enterprise until the mid 1990s. Another technology whose creation the "market" had absolutely nothing to do with.
If my company didn't buy me a pager or cell phone I wouldn't carry one. I once worked at a company that wanted my credit card number for the cell phone. I told them I didn't have a credit card, which was true. They got one for me anyhow.
There is a collective struggle between workers and owners (and their proxies, bosses). This series of events shows the subjective weakening power of the workers side here. They want you to pay for the privilege of being a 24/7 on-call wage slave. There's not much you can do as an individual, although if your company gets worse than industry average you can split.
What you can do is band together with other IT workers and educate and organize. You may remember recently there was a desire to retract the FLSA laws from even moe people. Most IT people legally have no right to overtime anyhow, despite the 19th century battles for an eight hour day. In fact, your time is now around-the-clock, and at your expense. Communicating and organizing with organizations like TechsUnite, the Programmers Guild, Washtech and whatnot will keep you appraised of these things. The ITAA, the IT owners lobbying group, has been lobbying in Washington DC for years, and was flooding newspapers with stories of IT labor shortages in the late 1990s. This has been a common industry tactic - industries used to flood newspapers with stories of labor shortages in the early 20th century, which newspapers like the Industrial Worker used to mock.
The two big factors in the struggle are hours worked and pay per hour. Employers always are trying to expand hours worked, workers if they have any power are trying to reduce the number of required hours. In terms of pay per hour, the fight is over how much of the wealth you create, and workers create all the wealth, goes to you in wages, and what percentage goes to the owner in profit.
Something people say is companies are getting tighter due to the economy, as if political economy was something completely alien from people like the weather. On the contrary, employers felt their expected rate of profit was falling in 2000 so they stopped capital spending, thereby creating unemployment, which drives down wages. They do this until their expected profit rate comes into their expectation range again.
Wikipedia is run by Jimbo Wales, who made most of his money in porn. He is also an Ayn Rand fanatic, running mailing lists devoted to her. The people who he gave admin privileges are of a similar ilk, one prominent one is a Moonie, and they work together.
As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia. For example, the entry for East Germany (before I came across it) East Germany opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.
The admin cabal on Wikipedia are ideological fanatics and spend their time going down their ideological lists. They don't tolerate facts that do not conform to their perception of things. I should also note that the history of the world's countries almost all come from state department or CIA documents originally, which were then modified in Wikipedia. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in. Just something to keep in mind - Wikipedia has it's own slanted view of history and the world, there are other wiki's with different points of view, and more close to reality in my opinion.
I hate Microsoft for many reasons, one being the way in which their products suck. For a long time Netscape was better than IE. Then IE hit a version where it did not suck as much, but I still used Netscape. IE also came prepackaged with Windows, and you did not have to download a few megs of Netscape at 56Kbps (or was it 28.8KBps back then?). By the time AOL bought Netscape, usage of Netscape had plummeted, IE had risen, and I finally threw in the towel and started using IE when I got a new computer. I had gone to thge trouble of downloading Netscape more out of spite for about a year or so before that
When Mozilla came out, I switched back to it. I *like* Mozilla more than IE. With Mozilla I can right click and do a view image. I can open tabs on my browser. I can easily manage cookies and forms. I can block images from certain sites.
Slashdot Mirror
v2v, a grassroots news network associated with Indymedia, is currently doing this.
I am not well-familiar with the entire American "infrastucture" (water tunnels, electrical grid etc.), but from what I do know about it, it would be easy for a group of say four people who knew what they were doing to cause major disruptions. I mean, even when you have people working to keep things up, we still have had major blackouts on the West Coast and East Coast in the past few years.
On territory I'm more familiar with, telecommunications, there are chokepoints in the system. Fiber cuts at several specific points in a large city would take down a large percentage of the network. As far as the x.25 networks, or Internet, there are many such chokepoints as well. For the Internet, from the root name servers to core routers and their routing tables, there are chokepoints which are not difficult to DOS, never mind take over.
These things are very "vulnerable" as the corporate media nomenclature calls it. But vulnerable from whom? Saudi nationalists like Osama Bin Laden who (after the US helped Pakistan train him to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan) wanted the US military to leave Saudi Arabia? Perhaps disgruntled workers like those in Los Angeles in 1992 who had a short lived uprising until the army marched in? I myself sleep better knowing how "vulnerable" these things are, when anti-imperialists and workers go to the trouble to muck with these things, it's usually for a good reason.
If you consider the world has several billion workers, only a small percentage of them currently have the ability to say, use gdb to find an error in a program. This is in a world where half of the people on it have never made a phone call. In fact, half of the people on earth are either chronically malnourished or literally do not know where there next meal is coming from. Again, the number of people who like Mr. Graham, take their Lexuses onto route 101 or 280 and drive to their corporate offices on Kifer Road where they pull in a six figure salary is quite small. Marx talked about these people in Capital - he called them the petit bourgeoisie. They are, in Marx's model, a class between the capitalists (e.g. the smallest group of people who own 51% of business in, say, the United States - which according to the Federal Reserve is the richest 1% of the US) and the proletariat (e.g. what you might call blue collars workers, who make up 80% of the US population if you include some skilled workers who don't make the cut to the 20% of white collar workers). And Marx says they are in some ways symbiotic to the capitalists. Actually, Marx is more interested in the interplay between the 80% of blue-collar workers and 1% of capitalists than this small group caught in between, but he does account for them, and talks about how the relationship between the petit bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie is in certain historical periods symbiotic.
First off, he says he is coming from the vantage point of Yahoo.com. When Yahoo IPO'd, I knew "the market" had gotten ridiculous (the fact that Yahoo, was IPO'ing, never mind what it IPO'd at and went to). I had been buying stocks up to them using the fundamental analysis technique pioneered by Benjamin Graham. This is the technique the best stock pickers of the second half of the 20th century - Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch - use. Among all things it concentrates on profit and profit growth. Yahoo had made no profit, in fact it was losing money, so I knew it was ridiculous. In fact, I remember most clearly August 10th, 1995 when Netscape IPO'd and went to over 100. That's when the stock market bubble started in most estimations. I actually bought Netscape that day, and even made money on it. But I always felt the market was unstable after that, and I was right.
All this person sees is the small piece of ice on the top of a giant iceberg. He's still speaking in bubble-speak. The only thing connected to reality is #10, productivity. And everything he says within that is nonsense.
One thing neglected in all of his delusions that IPO's and Venture Capital in the mid-1990's created the massive Internet that we have today is the decades of government paid R&D, in the billions of dollars, through DARPA, that actually created the Internet. The Internet was a socialist, or, to be technical about it, a fascistly modelled (business/government cooperation) economic program. Decades of taxpayer dollars poured into R&D which creates something which *starting* in the mid-1990s can be used to start increasing productivity.
Economists have been debating whether or not productivity increased due to the Internet thus far and it very may well not have - it may take decades for that to hit. Despite all of the technical innovations in the early 20th century (cars, assembly lines), it wasn't until the end of World War II that any of this productivity was significantly felt, and that was after massive government involvement in the economy, starting with the New Deal, through the WWII almost total takeover of the economy by the government including rationing, on to Eisenhower and his "military" buildup. It wasn't all to strictly military purposes, the highway system was originally sold as a military expense (Original name the National Defense Highway System) along with the government funded R&D that created transistors, computers and so forth.
Also not mentioned is the severe world economic crisis that became apparent starting in the mid-1960's, started affecting things obviously in the early 1970's and which is still with us today. The average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage is below what it was 30 years ago. That does not sound like the economic utopia he is talking about - the US (and industrialized world) has been digging a whole for 30 years, with brief respites in the mid 1980s and late 1990s, where capital went hog wild during the short lived good period.
This person doesn't even seem to understand equity fundamental analysis within the current dominant economic viewpoint, never mind alternative economic viewpoints which see the economic system as even more fragile, which I subscribe to. Even dominant psyche stalwarts like Alan Greenspan or chief economists on Wall Street like Stephen Roach often speak gloomy things which you can read about in the Wall Street Journal, but not in the local newspaper for idiots with a big sports section on the back cover and local murder news on the front.
For those who haven't followed this: The Green party is divided into two factions, the "realos" (also called the Demogreens) and the "fundis". The realos are who nominated Cobb. You can read about it in several places including the Counterpunch article "Rigged Convention; Divided Party - How David Cobb Became the Green Nominee Even Though He Only Got 12 Percent of the Votes". The fundis want to build our party and win elections, the realo/Demogreens are more concerned about the Democrats winning than the Greens. Cobb is a realo/Demogreen.
The article makes the very good point that the states where there is a large green base and where voters actually voted in the primaries (California, Massachusetts, Washington DC), Camejo (who is a Green "fundi", and is now running as Nader's VP) got 72.7% of the vote. Cobb only got 12.2% of the vote. Nonetheless, in the Green version of the electoral college, Cobb managed to win due to delegates from states like Iowa voting for him. Iowa has 90 registered Greens and had 9 delegates to the Green convention - 1 delegate for every 10 Greens! California had 132 delegates for the over 150,000 registered Greens in California. So in the case of California, 1 delegate represented over 1,000 Greens. This sort of thing is how someone who got 12.2% of the vote (from Demogreens) versus 72.7% of the vote (fundis) nevertheless won the election.
Cobb's candidacy has probably destroyed the Green party which is probably what the Demogreens wanted anyway. Anyhow, in some ways I am not sad to see it go because the Greens are a little too hippy-dippy granola and Birkenstocks anyhow. Nader attracted me to the Greens (even though he was never a Green party member) because he talked about things I care about like repealing Taft-Hartley and so forth which the DLC Democrats never talk about any more. 70% of white men in the US voted Republican in 2000, which tells you how far these DLC Democrats have drifted from the working class roots it had on some level in the early 20th century. Now they are all for NAFTA, screwing workers and so forth just like the Republicans, they're just for gay marriage, abortion and things conservative Christians in rural areas are against.
The only solution for change I see is to do what happened in England a century ago - for militant rank-and-file run unions to be formed, and, if they find it strategically wise to do so, to form a Labor party like they did in England. It might not even be strategically wise to do so, but it would beat backing the Democrats if they were going to get into the electoral game.
So my question goes back to what I was saying earlier: do you feel you are a legitimate Green candidate if most of the Greens in the country prefer Nader and Camejo to yourself? In many ways your election was like Bush's, except the majority vote went way against you instead of by a few percent.
In magazine or TV interviews, I see executives at security companies or departments say that they would never hire a hacker they have no hackers blah blah blah. Of course that's what they'd answer but all of them do. There is no major security company that does not have current or former hackers. I can state this because I know at least one at least former hacker in every major security company (or in security departments like the consulting departments of accounting companies).
In fact security work is the main job ex-hackers get. I have known many hackers from the 1980s until now and this is the most common job. I take a different tack though. Instead of "Should the boss (e.g. owner) hire a former hacker?", I ask, "should a former hacker go into security work?" I consider going into security work to be somewhat of a sellout. Information wants to be free, the means of production in the workers hands and all of that. Some hackers become sysadmins or programmers, which is what I did. I think the question as asked puts out a bad way to think - it shouldn't be, will I be forgiven for my supposed transgressions by the holy boss/owner who decides if I eat or not, the question should be, have the idle class parasites assimilated people who (at least used to) rebel against the concept that they have the right to control the means of production.
How is this different than a president who believes there is a man in the clouds who controls everything, that some guy 2000 years ago was born of a virgin, had magic powers and came back from the dead before flying off to the clouds, that people don't die and live forever in the clouds and so on and so forth? If you read about the president's beliefs, some Korean folk tradition about a water spring whose water has special powers starts to sound normal.
The people I talked to usually didn't speak English, weren't from the district, or weren't registered voters (and you can't legally register someone and have them sign on the same day). If I could find a registered voter who lived in the district, often they didn't sign for a variety of reasons (too busy, scared the Democrat might lose, wanted to think it over).
When the Green Party was on the New York state ballot, you only needed a dozen or so signatures, not hundreds with all of those conditions. Miraculously, he made it on the ballot, but there is no way he would have survived a challenge if one had been made.
It gave me a new appreciation of the whole talk about the two party system and so forth. Plus, the two parties work together to keep their monopoly of power, from election laws, to debates, to whatever. Only a large social movement united around cohesive goals could launch a challenge to it. The last time this happened was in the middle of the 19th century, with the Republican party. Since then, third parties have been co-opted by other political parties - the right wing of the Socialist party drifted into the Democratic party, most of the Dixiecrats entered the Republican party.
I'm sharing it on Gnutella with the original title "comingsoon hamill swdvd1". I suppose a search for swdvd1 on Gnutella would find it.
The employers have their heads together figuring out how to screw over IT workers, I think IT workers getting together to protect our interests is a good idea as well. You can take your pick of which group, Washtech, Techs United, the Programmers Guild and so forth. The CWA in New York has meetings were people come together and discuss things. The important thing is programmers and admins get together with each other and find a way to protect our interests, just as the owners do in the ITAA and such organizations. These organizations are already out there so check them out.
What you imply about unionized textile jobs moving overseas is the most ridiculous because virtually none of the textile jobs moving overseas were union jobs. North Carolina has been the hardest hit state for textile outsourcing, and North Carolina is also the least unionized state in the country. This covers almost all of the North Carolina textile business as well.
As far as the steel business, outsourcing has had very little effect on the industry. The automation of steel plants has contributed much more to steel jobs lost than outsourcing. Automation has been what has led to the decrease of steel jobs (with the same amount of steel output), with outsourcing having little to no effect.
In other words, you want the policemen to come in to enforce this relationship where you can expropriate profit from anyone who uses certain capital, in fact you demand it because without the policemen at your disposal there is nothing determing who takes from who in valorizing a piece of capital. The person claiming the right to expropriate profit from capital is the one who needs the government, workers don't.
Novices might say "anyone can edit", but it's not that simple - Jimbo Wales, who runs Wikipedia (and is an Ayn Rand fanatic) chose who the administrators are. They're people like Ed Poor, a Moonie who does nothing but change every article to a very right wing point of view when he's not removing any negative information about the Moonies.
It just presents a very upper middle class American view of the world. Muslims/Arabs/Middle Easterners are always in the wrong, the US and Israel is always right. All socialist countries, from the Eastern Europeans to the Chinese to Latin American ones and so forth, are all bad, while the US was spreading freedom and democracy around the world, from Vietnam to Chile. In fact, most of the history of countries comes from the US State Department's web page, or even the Overseas Private Investment Corporation like the history of Colombia article.
Anyhow, it's become apparent to me and other people that this is just the way it is, and will be as long as Jimbo Wales runs it and his cabal controls it. There are alternative wiki's out there such as InfoshopWiki which is a wiki where a "people's history" of the world is beginning to be written. There are also other good wiki's like Disinfopedia which deal with lobbyists, PACs, PR firms and so forth.
Anyhow, I think this is just something I learned after a long time on Wikipedia seeing how it was this way, and despite anyone supposedly being able to edit and a supposed neutral point of view policy, the inability of that to exist since there is a cabal of administrators trying to keep their point of view on top. If you want to read a history of the world not written by the US State Department, I suggest looking at the nascent efforts of InfoshopWiki.
There are dozens of Indymedias - in South America, in Asia, in Europe, in the US. Each site can use whatever software it wants, with many using one of three popular software kits they developed. Each has its own policies as well. I can't recall nyc.indymedia.org deleting any messages. They do hide messages sometimes, but in that respect it is like Slashdot, you can view the -1 trolls if you wish. Of course, some other Indymedia locals have more draconian rules with deletions, banning and so forth. Each local is autonomous.
As far as illegal info on Slashdot, please. Like there weren't 1,000,000 links on Slashdot to how to get Windows source code when that was illegally released. And that is similar to Indymedia - the information was not released from Indymedia from what I understand, it was on various places on the net so someone posted it to Indymedia. It might not have even been the person who originally had gotten their hands on the data.
I'm just trying to separate the facts from the opinions. I don't want people who know nothing of Indymedia thinking the people who run it are the ones who decided to post this info of their own volition. They did not have a meeting and say lets post this info, it was just put up there. You can have an opinion on what they should do at that point, but they are coming in at step 2, they were not the protagonist at step 1.
I see several posts here saying Indymedia did this, Indymedia posted the names. Indymedia did NOT post the names. Indymedia is like Slashdot, ANYONE can post. Blaming Indymedia for something a poster said would be like saying CmdrTaco was supporting what some anonymous Slashdot poster said, or blaming the Usenet cabal for a posting by some anonymous Usenet poster. I just wanted to make this clear as several people have said here that Indymedia took this position. I don't think they understand what Indymedia is. Yesterday I read through a dozen posts by people who hate the protestors on the nyc.indymedia.org site. nyc.indymedia.org is in many ways just like Slashdot in terms of anonymous posters and so forth. They can't be blamed for every bozo that comes along.
The current economic orthodoxy says that if you lose your job, after a short period of time and maybe some retraining you will get a new job at the same wage you were receiving before. You really have to search to find economists who disagree, and they are all really out of the mainstream. IMHO, the unorthodox economists are right on this, and the mainstream economists at the big colleges, think tanks and on Wall Street are all affected by herd mentality. I feel it's a case of the economists who have discovered the correct models being voices crying in the wilderness.
Whence does the "right" of these idle class heirs to the wealth created by workers come from? Well, robber baron George Baer talked about the divine right of capital a century ago, but in actual practice, it is easy enough to see by what means the rentier expropriates for himself if one observes what happens to tenants who does not pay their landlord, or workers who refuse to let capital-owners expropriate profit (like at Argentina's Brukman factory).
You also talk about these people having a better life. Well if you have someone with a good-paying job and someone else making little or unemployed, and then give the good-paying job (by now, slightly less good-paying) to the little-payed/unemployed person, of course that person will be better off. If one accepts de facto the tyranny of idle class owners telling workers whether they can work or not depending on the owners profit rate, one can still ask why this better job does not come out of the productivity growth of the foreign country, or even of the US. Why does an old job (as opposed to a new job) have to be moved? Why does it have to be zero-sum?
The answer of course is growth is not the most important thing to the owner, nor, of course, is the workers welfare, by any means. The important thing is profit, and the owner cans the worker and sends the job overseas at a lower wage, so he can extract more profit from the wealth the foreign worker will create.
The real difference is the scope in looking at it. The owner is looking at what is immediately before him, from his vantage, it makes no sense to not move jobs to Africa if it means more profit for him. The American worker (and even the African worker eventually) looks at the political and economic system, and realizes that an economic and political dynamic, and system, which undercuts his wages and ships his job overseas is not to his benefit, and is actually to his detriment.
In fact the American economic system has done poorly over the past thirty years compared to the prior 30 years. From 1944-1974 there was enormous productivity growth and wage growth in the US. From 1974 to present, according to the BLS, the average US inflation adjusted hourly wage has actually dropped. And production growth is much less than it was in the prior thrity years.
You talk about blame, justification, and moral crusading as if this is an argument about gay marriage or gay bishops or something where consensus can be reached. It is not, it is a simple economic matter where the interests of the IT workers in the US is in direct conflict with the IT owners in the US. Most owners and management look at it from one perspective, most workers look at it from the oppositive perspective.
I don't desire for them to be punished, but I am capable of observing, and performing some simple Cartesian logic, so I ask myself - what were they thinking? Why would they want to publish this data in the newspaper that those other than the property owners could have easy access to the property? I don't really see what is to be gained from that by anyone - not them, not the property-owners, and not the general public. I could really care less if it easy for someone to use property that someone else claims is "their" property.
I remember on the old GNU machines, Richard Stallman's username was rms, and his password was rms as well. People used to hop around talking about that, how great they were for having "guessed" it and how supposedly "insecure" his account was, but I think they missed the whole point, and the much bigger picture.
The first thing I do is security - if any programs are running on any ports that I don't need, I shut it down. The only port open will be ssh, plus whatever the server is doing. I also unSUID any SUID programs I don't plan on using. Plus getting security updates.
Then I get programs I like to have on my servers if they're not there already. Like ntp, which I set up so that the clock will not drift. GNU findutils is another one - I run updatedb regularly and can locate filename, which is much quicker than find / -name filename. I also like the screen program, so I can have multiple sessions from one terminal. I like to use BASH.
I also do customizations - my shell prompt is usually hostname:/file/system$ I put PATHs I need in my PATH. And so forth.
Another thing I do on many systems is log at debug according to facility for syslog. Everything gets logged, according to its facility. If too much is being logged, I can lower it from debug. You usually don't have to, as only mail usually fills it up, but you usually want to log that.
All of this makes my life easier. I am logged into a host and know if I am me or root, what host it is, what directory I am in, where a file is located if I need to know, and the clock and all of the log files are logged normally. And with screen I can have multiple sessions on that host or multiple hosts in that one window.
Personal computing is exactly what the "market" and "consumers" did not want. Most of the technology to build personal computers came from R&D paid for by the US military. This goes back to the 1940s, all the way up to 1980s. If it was left to laissez faire capitalism and the "market" and consumers, we certainly would not have had computers by now since we probably would not even have had transistors by now. Nothing could have been decided by a consortium of government and business bureaucrats more, with the market and consumers having nothing to do with it, yet you're blaming the consumer for what was produced, since you think it can only come out of the market. The Internet, 'nee the ARPAnet, is another example of this - the first RFC was written in 1969, and DARPA/NSF did not hand it off to private enterprise until the mid 1990s. Another technology whose creation the "market" had absolutely nothing to do with.
There is a collective struggle between workers and owners (and their proxies, bosses). This series of events shows the subjective weakening power of the workers side here. They want you to pay for the privilege of being a 24/7 on-call wage slave. There's not much you can do as an individual, although if your company gets worse than industry average you can split.
What you can do is band together with other IT workers and educate and organize. You may remember recently there was a desire to retract the FLSA laws from even moe people. Most IT people legally have no right to overtime anyhow, despite the 19th century battles for an eight hour day. In fact, your time is now around-the-clock, and at your expense. Communicating and organizing with organizations like TechsUnite, the Programmers Guild, Washtech and whatnot will keep you appraised of these things. The ITAA, the IT owners lobbying group, has been lobbying in Washington DC for years, and was flooding newspapers with stories of IT labor shortages in the late 1990s. This has been a common industry tactic - industries used to flood newspapers with stories of labor shortages in the early 20th century, which newspapers like the Industrial Worker used to mock.
The two big factors in the struggle are hours worked and pay per hour. Employers always are trying to expand hours worked, workers if they have any power are trying to reduce the number of required hours. In terms of pay per hour, the fight is over how much of the wealth you create, and workers create all the wealth, goes to you in wages, and what percentage goes to the owner in profit.
Something people say is companies are getting tighter due to the economy, as if political economy was something completely alien from people like the weather. On the contrary, employers felt their expected rate of profit was falling in 2000 so they stopped capital spending, thereby creating unemployment, which drives down wages. They do this until their expected profit rate comes into their expectation range again.
As far as entries on this or that, Wikipedia may be fine. As far as articles about history, news, or politics, there is a very heavy American bias, in fact it is basically a white collar American's view of the world encyclopedia. For example, the entry for East Germany (before I came across it) East Germany opened with: "East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), was a Communist satellite state of the former Soviet Union which, together with West Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990 in Germany." One wonders why it would be said on the East Germany page that it was a "satellite state of the former Soviet Union" and someone of that point of view would not say that West Germany was a satellite state of the USA.
The admin cabal on Wikipedia are ideological fanatics and spend their time going down their ideological lists. They don't tolerate facts that do not conform to their perception of things. I should also note that the history of the world's countries almost all come from state department or CIA documents originally, which were then modified in Wikipedia. That gives you an idea of what this history is grounded in. Just something to keep in mind - Wikipedia has it's own slanted view of history and the world, there are other wiki's with different points of view, and more close to reality in my opinion.
When Mozilla came out, I switched back to it. I *like* Mozilla more than IE. With Mozilla I can right click and do a view image. I can open tabs on my browser. I can easily manage cookies and forms. I can block images from certain sites.