True, but Engineering is not the same as IT for example, and should be treated differently. Engineering is a direct cost of producing products, whereas IT is a G&A Expense, kind of like accounting, or building maintenance. The reality is that these days, IT is becoming a commodity.
You're right that they are different; you're wrong in that PHBs often fail to see a distinction, let alone a difference. They're still both "cost centers" to that manner of thinking.
Practically every security system is vulnerable at some level. All that matters is it's good enough for your purposes.
As far as I can see, the main threats to be protected against for an encrypted USB drive are
1) Misplacing the drive and having some random ne'er do well find it and read the data off of it. 2) Having a co-worker, family member or other person with occasional physical access to the drive read the data off of it.
This hole means the encryption substantially fails to protect against either threat. If this hole is acceptable to you, you probably could have used an unencrypted drive in the first place.
You insensitive clod! We have to pay for water! but only because the water from the spigot is contaminated from the diesel tanks that used to be here. Petroleum-flavored water? Count me out.
Oh, stop whining. Just separate it and you get free diesel AND free water.
IT IS a cost center. Any department that doesn't have direct revenue is a cost center.
Which means everything but sales and service. Which is a general problem with that way of looking at things. When you make a product and the departments with the people actually designing and building that product are looked at at cost centers to be trimmed, whereas the people who sell it are looked at as revenue sources who should be rewarded, it tends to breed resentment.
Every time anyone discovers some tiny vulnerability in any computer security system (WPA, TKIP, AES, etc) nerds everywhere leap into action, spreading FUD while shunning the now flawed protocol and anyone who still chooses to use it.
There's a difference between a "tiny vulnerability" and a "hole a blind man could drive an 18-wheeler through". This one is in the latter category.
All I ever wanted was to buy the LICENCE to the content which is what I'm really paying for and nevermind about how I get a copy. I want to sign up somewhere that I have a lifetime personal use licence to say, The Matrix.
You really want to enter into a license agreement with Hollywood? That's like accepting net points on a movie production; it's just asking to be cheated. Let's say you get your lifetime personal use license to "The Matrix". Well, you've got the license, but if you actually want to play it, you'll have to get the content somehow... that's going to cost extra. Per play. And that lifetime? That won't be your lifetime, or the copyright's lifetime.. that will be arbitrary thing they made up, like 1 year beyond the time they offer new Matrix licenses. Oh, the new Matrix Extra Special Producer's Cut? Sorry bud, that's not the same as "The Matrix" you bought, so you can't play that one (and when the ESPC came out, the original was discontinued, so you've got a year left on your "lifetime").
Even if you get an army of lawyers to write the agreement and manage to avoid any blatant cheating, they'll still cheat. They'll have "The Matrix" licensed by "Matrix Licensing Company Inc.". When they want everyone to re-buy the movie, "Matrix Licensing Company Inc." will go into bankruptcy, leaving all those licenses invalid. Then of course "Matrix Rescue Company Inc." will buy "substantially all the assets" of "Matrix Licensing Company Inc.", and offer new licenses to everyone.
That seems to be the USPTO's over-riding theory. Approve all the patents and then if people want to scream prior art, let them scream it to a judge.
The courts, in their turn, then defer to the USPTO and grant a presumption of validity to the patent. And so we have Microsoft successfully sued for breaking an XML file up into the text and the tags with pointers into the text. And nonsense like this. And also a new patent for a mousetrap which appears in ads in the 1920s...
the idea of being able to police the copying so that authors of creative works can be fairly compensated becomes impossible.
Yep. When I can select "foo.mp3" on my computer, hit command-D, and thereby committed a tort with statutory damages up to $100,000, something is totally broken. The music industry, however, doesn't see the problem as copyright law; they'd rather make my computer incapable of duplicating anything without their consent. If doing so makes it useless for me, tough luck.
The idea is that your sniffles don't require azithromycin, that your cough and throat ache don't need penicillin, and that your fever doesn't need ampicillin.
Are you sure? The throat ache may be strep; untreated it can lead to scarlet fever and death Sure, it's most likely not strep and even if it were it probably wouldn't progress... but do you feel lucky? And even if you do, why should you count on luck when we have modern medicine? Scarlet fever death used to be common; MRSA still isn't. (And strep has never developed a resistance to penicillin)
Contrary to what you stated, MRSA -is- a huge problem outside of the hospital and nursing home environments. Most urban locales now have high enough rates of MRSA floating around in the community (i.e. community-acquired MRSA, or CA-MRSA) that it has required some level of empiric MRSA coverage for skin infections.
MRSA didn't evolve in the community, thought; it has spread there from the hospitals. The OP's point stands, then; it's not overprescription of antibiotics outside hospitals which has resulted in MRSA.
You can lock down pretty well any network, the "clever" people stand out immediately in security logs and can be scrutinized further.
I worked at one company that had periodic cycles where they'd try to enforce no-personal-use policies on the Internet. Corporate was in one city, we were in another. We (one of the managers, rather, who forwarded it to everyone) got a really nasty note about how whoever owned the machine at 10.1.6.69 (not its real address, which I don't remember) was surfing a lot of porn and had better cut it out.
Unfortunately for IT, 10.1.6.69 was a public machine, in a public space, with no web browser and a black and white monitor besides. I figured it was a proxy, but I found out later that the guilty party had actually just run a program to make dummy requests in order to piss off the pompous IT head for amusement purposes. But the principal holds; the "clever" people can use proxies within the company and THEN what good are your logs?
This was the same IT department head who sent out an email announcing a new policy of "absolutely no personal email" at all... followed shortly by an announcement about a non-work-related event he was going to be in.
Why is it so tough for people to treat other human beings with a little respect?
At least in this case, because respect is so often tied up with subservience... and if someone is subservient to you, it behooves you to maintain that position by NOT responding too quickly to their requests.
There's two ways you can interpret that - either your network management team is incompetent, or they don't really mind you using SSH. Decide which one is the case.
Often enough the network management people aren't really BOFHs and don't care what you do as long as it doesn't break the network, and any blocks are there because their higher-ups required them. That's a much easier situation to deal with, because of course there will be holes galore, and as long as you don't do anything stupid (like use enough bandwidth to bring the connection to its knees), nobody who knows about it will care if you use them.
I don't understand why people always try to "get around" these restrictions. If there is a legitimate business need, then get it approved.
If you really don't understand, then delete "geek" from your username. Geeks, as a rule, simply don't think that way. A businessperson sees a policy restriction and thinks "Who do I have to contact to get around it?". A geek sees a technical barrier and thinks "What do I have to do to get around it?". Make it a firing offense to do things the geeks way, and you'll have few geeks working for you (most of them won't be fired; they'll just find the environment oppressive and leave).
Further, in my experience, "get it approved" is a heck of a lot easier said than done. Lots of hoops to jump through. Justifications, forms, signatures from people in management. Or worse, no approval process at all and a flat refusal from IT. More than once I've had to force things along by telling my boss or his boss that I couldn't do what they asked because IT refused to allow it. In one case IT refused even my boss's boss, and the job had to be done by literally bypassing them -- he had an employee of his run an Ethernet cable to the outgoing switch when IT wasn't looking.
So the Chinese citizens don't have any right to material wealth, only Americans?
That seems to be the position of the Chinese government, anyway. By keeping their currency low with respect to the dollar, they reduce the wealth of their own citizens while subsidizing Americans. Why does the Chinese government hate Chinese people?
The Chinese want a strong China, they aren't some maniacal Bond villan wanting world domination. There's only one country around who behaves like that anymore.
If you mean the one I think you do, Putin is going to feel left out.
We mostly don't have a command economy, while China mostly does. China is able to have long-term coherent planning that we can only dream of.
Yep, the efficiencies and advantages of a centrally planned economy are such that chaotic capitalistic and individualistic economies such as those in the West could never possibly match them. That's why Cuba, China, North Korea, etc, are kicking our asses...
Not really. In America (and other places, I'm sure) we're still allowed, by the government[*], to Think Different. But in China, the government (not Apple) outlaws thinking different.
China's not Oceania; there's no thoughtcrime there. You can think as different as you want, as long as you keep your mouth shut about it.
They figured... they'd sacrificed their principles... why not sacrifice some principals as well.
Once you let go on a little evil, why not go ahead for the big evil and save time.
It's Google which is known for "don't be evil" (and then knuckled under to China anyway rather than leave the market). Apple's unofficial motto is not "Don't be evil" but rather "Ooh, shiny!":-).
Proof, please. Imagining the worst possible motives and threats when you don't know what really went on is absolutely disgusting.
Absolute proof isn't a luxury often available, certainly not in this case. Which do you believe? That Nintendo convinced these people that making their film was actually harmful to Nintendo, and that they truly regretted it, or that Nintendo forced them to say so despite their belief otherwise?
I don't see any evidence at all for the former proposition aside from the bare statement itself. There's plenty of circumstantial evidence for the latter proposition, however, including Nintendo's known litigious nature and the existence of such high penalties in copyright law.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that they are different; you're wrong in that PHBs often fail to see a distinction, let alone a difference. They're still both "cost centers" to that manner of thinking.
As far as I can see, the main threats to be protected against for an encrypted USB drive are
1) Misplacing the drive and having some random ne'er do well find it and read the data off of it.
2) Having a co-worker, family member or other person with occasional physical access to the drive read the data off of it.
This hole means the encryption substantially fails to protect against either threat. If this hole is acceptable to you, you probably could have used an unencrypted drive in the first place.
Oh, stop whining. Just separate it and you get free diesel AND free water.
Which means everything but sales and service. Which is a general problem with that way of looking at things. When you make a product and the departments with the people actually designing and building that product are looked at at cost centers to be trimmed, whereas the people who sell it are looked at as revenue sources who should be rewarded, it tends to breed resentment.
There's a difference between a "tiny vulnerability" and a "hole a blind man could drive an 18-wheeler through". This one is in the latter category.
One patent is 4,937,968. Another is 562,879. The catalog (1908, sorry, not 1920) is here:
Mousetrap, captioned "The Mouse Trap that Catches Mice Catches Customers"
Here's a full-precision compressed representation of Pi. The trick, of course, is expanding it:
pi = 4 * sum(k,0,+inf, ((-1)^k)/(2k+1)))
You really want to enter into a license agreement with Hollywood? That's like accepting net points on a movie production; it's just asking to be cheated. Let's say you get your lifetime personal use license to "The Matrix". Well, you've got the license, but if you actually want to play it, you'll have to get the content somehow... that's going to cost extra. Per play. And that lifetime? That won't be your lifetime, or the copyright's lifetime.. that will be arbitrary thing they made up, like 1 year beyond the time they offer new Matrix licenses. Oh, the new Matrix Extra Special Producer's Cut? Sorry bud, that's not the same as "The Matrix" you bought, so you can't play that one (and when the ESPC came out, the original was discontinued, so you've got a year left on your "lifetime").
Even if you get an army of lawyers to write the agreement and manage to avoid any blatant cheating, they'll still cheat. They'll have "The Matrix" licensed by "Matrix Licensing Company Inc.". When they want everyone to re-buy the movie, "Matrix Licensing Company Inc." will go into bankruptcy, leaving all those licenses invalid. Then of course "Matrix Rescue Company Inc." will buy "substantially all the assets" of "Matrix Licensing Company Inc.", and offer new licenses to everyone.
The courts, in their turn, then defer to the USPTO and grant a presumption of validity to the patent. And so we have Microsoft successfully sued for breaking an XML file up into the text and the tags with pointers into the text. And nonsense like this. And also a new patent for a mousetrap which appears in ads in the 1920s...
Yep. When I can select "foo.mp3" on my computer, hit command-D, and thereby committed a tort with statutory damages up to $100,000, something is totally broken. The music industry, however, doesn't see the problem as copyright law; they'd rather make my computer incapable of duplicating anything without their consent. If doing so makes it useless for me, tough luck.
Are you sure? The throat ache may be strep; untreated it can lead to scarlet fever and death Sure, it's most likely not strep and even if it were it probably wouldn't progress... but do you feel lucky? And even if you do, why should you count on luck when we have modern medicine? Scarlet fever death used to be common; MRSA still isn't. (And strep has never developed a resistance to penicillin)
I worked at one company that had periodic cycles where they'd try to enforce no-personal-use policies on the Internet. Corporate was in one city, we were in another. We (one of the managers, rather, who forwarded it to everyone) got a really nasty note about how whoever owned the machine at 10.1.6.69 (not its real address, which I don't remember) was surfing a lot of porn and had better cut it out.
Unfortunately for IT, 10.1.6.69 was a public machine, in a public space, with no web browser and a black and white monitor besides. I figured it was a proxy, but I found out later that the guilty party had actually just run a program to make dummy requests in order to piss off the pompous IT head for amusement purposes. But the principal holds; the "clever" people can use proxies within the company and THEN what good are your logs?
This was the same IT department head who sent out an email announcing a new policy of "absolutely no personal email" at all... followed shortly by an announcement about a non-work-related event he was going to be in.
At least in this case, because respect is so often tied up with subservience... and if someone is subservient to you, it behooves you to maintain that position by NOT responding too quickly to their requests.
Often enough the network management people aren't really BOFHs and don't care what you do as long as it doesn't break the network, and any blocks are there because their higher-ups required them. That's a much easier situation to deal with, because of course there will be holes galore, and as long as you don't do anything stupid (like use enough bandwidth to bring the connection to its knees), nobody who knows about it will care if you use them.
If you really don't understand, then delete "geek" from your username. Geeks, as a rule, simply don't think that way. A businessperson sees a policy restriction and thinks "Who do I have to contact to get around it?". A geek sees a technical barrier and thinks "What do I have to do to get around it?". Make it a firing offense to do things the geeks way, and you'll have few geeks working for you (most of them won't be fired; they'll just find the environment oppressive and leave).
Further, in my experience, "get it approved" is a heck of a lot easier said than done. Lots of hoops to jump through. Justifications, forms, signatures from people in management. Or worse, no approval process at all and a flat refusal from IT. More than once I've had to force things along by telling my boss or his boss that I couldn't do what they asked because IT refused to allow it. In one case IT refused even my boss's boss, and the job had to be done by literally bypassing them -- he had an employee of his run an Ethernet cable to the outgoing switch when IT wasn't looking.
That seems to be the position of the Chinese government, anyway. By keeping their currency low with respect to the dollar, they reduce the wealth of their own citizens while subsidizing Americans. Why does the Chinese government hate Chinese people?
If you mean the one I think you do, Putin is going to feel left out.
Yep, the efficiencies and advantages of a centrally planned economy are such that chaotic capitalistic and individualistic economies such as those in the West could never possibly match them. That's why Cuba, China, North Korea, etc, are kicking our asses...
Sure you can. It's not really the best idea in the world as there's no recourse if it's lost or stolen, but there's no law against it.
Proof by darkly suggesting serious real-world consequences to advocating an opposing position. Amusing, but not rhetorically valid.
Good luck with that; I'm pretty sure it's the other guy with all the lawyers.
China's not Oceania; there's no thoughtcrime there. You can think as different as you want, as long as you keep your mouth shut about it.
It's Google which is known for "don't be evil" (and then knuckled under to China anyway rather than leave the market). Apple's unofficial motto is not "Don't be evil" but rather "Ooh, shiny!" :-).
Absolute proof isn't a luxury often available, certainly not in this case. Which do you believe? That Nintendo convinced these people that making their film was actually harmful to Nintendo, and that they truly regretted it, or that Nintendo forced them to say so despite their belief otherwise?
I don't see any evidence at all for the former proposition aside from the bare statement itself. There's plenty of circumstantial evidence for the latter proposition, however, including Nintendo's known litigious nature and the existence of such high penalties in copyright law.