Re:Bummer, trees
on
The Art of SQL
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I basically agree with your post, but you're overlooking a significant part of the audience for this book -- people who didn't design the data structures they're querying. You're absolutely correct that tree structured data is a terrible hack in most databases, but if you're writing reports, or writing code to update legacy data, or the data was converted from another system altogether (perhaps written in Cobol or Quick Basic or some horrible old language where hierarchical data was a way to wring out some performance), then it's good to know ways to access it.
My specialty for the past 15 years or so has been conversions and writing applications that glue together multiple systems and data formats. What I'm most interested to learn (and I'm still learning every day) is what's the best way to get a desired result set from the data that exists, as it exists. If I had designed the data architecture in the first place, it wouldn't be a problem.
I'd be willing to bet that most of the SQL that exists is written by people who didn't design the data structures. Most of the relational data that exists wasn't originally designed for the relational database in which it's stored. Terabyte databases (even Gigabyte databases) aren't always populated with clean, 3rd normal form data-- they're messes of OLTP data, optimized for some oddball data entry scheme, converted flat tables from some branch offices, the data warehouse some consultants put together 10 years ago just before they got fired or moved on to other projects, a nightly feed from overseas, a weekly bank account reconciliation, etc., etc.. SQL can glue all this data together, and allow relating otherwise discrete data and getting meaningful information out. For me, the more theory I can learn to understand what data is there, and how to relate it to the company's other data, the better I can do my job.
And yes, we do design, test, and deploy conversions and data re-factoring, when time and resources permit. We also do Oracle upgrades, regular OLTP system updates and maintenance, and test and update various front-ends, from Business Objects, to.NET, to FoxPro.
Re:Useless to all but theoraticians
on
The Art of SQL
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· Score: 1
I know that Transact SQL book you're talking about, and thought of it when I read this review. That's the best book on SQL I've ever read (by far) and I learned more about Oracle SQL from reading it than I have from reading at least a dozen more specifically Oracle-centric books. Fantastic book, I think it's called Advanced Transact SQL or some such. There's some proprietary stuff in there that's specific to MS SQL, but mostly it's a great overview of various ways to get a specific result set, and various ways to deal with problems that arise-- duplicates, nulls, poor performance, strange data relationships, etc., and it has a good discussion of functions and stored procedures as well.
Good luck with your new Oracle career. I wish our DBA knew SQL!
If the spammer took out a public enough target, the authorities would have had to get involved.
The spammer took out several public targets-- the Blue Security site and the LiveJournal blogger site, as well as the ISP which hosted them last. The authorities aren't going to do anything. The "good guys" in this case are a scrappy web software company in Israel. The "bad guys" are contract "advertisers" for some (probably shady but not proven so) corporations who clog up the internet with crap. Most of "the authorities" can't even seem to figure out what's happened, to say nothing of acting on it. The "authorities" pretty much depend on corporations to define good guys, bad guys, and bad actions. This model doesn't work in this case.
It's sad, and I keep wondering why the FBI isn't investigating the blatant blackmail sent by the spammer(s) to try and intimidate Blue Security users, especially when it was followed by an obvious and admitted DDoS attack on servers, including the LiveJournal site. For me, the whole flap was enough to get me to install and use the program. It allowed me to empty my Yahoo bulk mail inbox (it only holds 30 days of spam, and it hovers between 2500 and 4000 messages all the time), but that wasn't enough. Maybe this new initiative will work. I will check it out. Spam sucks and makes the internet a much worse place to be. I applaud and support anyone who attempts to do anything about it. And I always feel bad when the bad guys win.
No Serbian atrocities occurred before the American bombing? That is total, utter crap, A/C. I'd love to see some of that "overwhelming majority of public information" on this. Time for ditto-head to take some more Oxy and go back to sleep.
You are, of course, absolutely correct. For awhile I've been saying that the problem with the current administration (and the rest of government, in fact) is that it's alll become very corporate. Every corporation has a set of guiding principles, vague nostrums like "the corporation shall act ethically and honestly with the purpose of delivering the best possible product and service to its customers." Look at the annual report of any company who has screwed you over recently, and you'll see some nonsense like this. These policies are rarely invoked, and can almost always be screwed around to fit whatever actions the chief executive cares to do.
Now think of how the Constitution is being used by the Halliburton/Kellog, Brown, & Root...errr, I mean the current administation. I am pretty sure they figure the Constitution is a set of vague guiding principles to which they must pay lip service in order to stay in power.
It's up to the legislative and judiciary branches to keep them more-or-less toeing the line. They've already demonstrated they're capable of pulling laws out of their butts to protect their own-- Bush said he was just "unclassifying" some documents to explain the Scooter Libby / Valerie Plame outing. Hocus, pocus, poof! No more problem. If they decide to monitor citizens' phone conversations, it's surely OK, because they're the good guys by definition, and the legislature has already let them know the American people want to be protected from big-bad Osama. Service to the customers, after all.
The only problem is the legislative and judiciary are falling all over the administration to try and give them everything they ask for, and not confront them when they step over the line. The EFF is onto something here (maybe), but they will likely be rebuffed by the judiciary in the name of letting the executive have what they want. I'm just glad this administration is almost over, and that the mess they're leaving is obvious.
Take my word for it (I'm over fifty, and grew up in a small town), kids have been committing vandalism and bragging about it to their friends for a looooong time. The difference between now and 35 years ago is now they can brag to 66 million "friends" on MySpace about it.
I didn't watch the video, but what they're calling firebombing sounds to me like vandalism-- the property was abandoned and deserted and no permanent damage was done. Vandalism isn't new. The cops' getting leads from the "friends" isn't new (most of this kind of crime is solved by leaning on other people who might know who the perps are). In this case, MySpace is a commercial forum (it's owned by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., who also own Fox Broadcasting), and despite the possibility of its being some incredible new social networking virtual world, the fact remains there was an actual piece of property that was damaged, and some kids that need a slap up side the head to let them know that's not an appropriate outlet for their creativity/destructivity.
I doubt there are a lot of officers working on surveillance in MySpace, because frankly, it's probably not worth the effort. The grand thing about the internet is that it is too huge to surveill. Think of a school of fish. They stick together because the presence of thousands of them reduces the chances that any one of them gets eaten. Google may change all that, but maybe not.
Rupert Murdoch is interested in MySpace (like the previous owners, who developed the concept and software and sold if for almost 600 million bucks) because it has the potential to make a lot of money. If police surveillance is part of that, I doubt he minds in the least. No one promised anyone that posting there would be like confessing to your priest. If it was that, no one would post there anyway.
Someone needs to teach the kids that doing something wrong and bragging about it isn't right, period. My only problem with the story is that USA Today wants to call it a "firebombing of an aircraft hangar" and not some stupid vandalism prank in an abandoned building carried out by kids with no clue. Nowadays, instead of a slap on the head and attitude adjustment, that kind of prank can get them years behind bars.
The fact the cops found out "whodunnit" by reading MySpace rather than twisting the arm of one of the perp's cronies-- who might have shoplifted or stolen a bike and hence would give up his pals in a heartbeat-- is less than newsworthy. And solving a vandalism case by reading MySpace seems like a pretty random event. I'm glad they caught them. I hope they charge them right-- with vandalism (or attempted vandalism), and not terrorism or using weapons of mass destruction or something.
First off, this "IT" guy is total boob, and should have to pay out of his pocket the rate for the CentOS lead developer who did his homework for him. If he was, in fact, qualified for the job he has, he would have done those steps before he started threatening to call in the FBI.
That being said, though (and considering that CentOS has already changed the text of the boilerplate Apache start page since this happened), isn't the idea of advertising on the default start page odd? Isn't that a little like pasting ads onto airbags? There's no telling who's going to be reading it, or under what circumstances. All you can be sure of is that it's not going to be a good situation a good part of the time.
Feh, I don't guess there's much to do about it... personally, I always think it's a good thing when I see that page. It means the upgrade worked and it's time to get to work moving the site to the new server.
So are the editors saying this isn't some legitimate, hard-working businessman just trying to make a buck on the internet? Yeah! Let him rot for all I care.
But you're talking about pols and civil servants. Do you think any of them is motivated to go and search for that 400,000,000 error when everyone else is standing around high-fiving each other and popping their cuff links? The article indicates this piece of software has been chugging along since at least 1995. I think all the human staff just figured the increase was a result of their good work and positive attitude, and probably meant their homes and businesses were worth more and their taxes would be less. Heck, real estate has a mind of its own, right?
The problem appears to be simply that someone left an executable that updates the database in place after they updated the code. TFA mentions that the program was originally written in 1995.
I'm going to guess this is not a program that's written to a "modern" database, where the database itself can validate updates. It's likely an old Access or Foxpro or dBase or whatever app. The data has stayed in the same place, but the application (which holds all the validation logic) has changed. The old and new systems were probably left side-by-side (and the executables named similarly) to help during the transition. By the time the system was deemed satisfactory, the programmer was likely on another project.
That could also explain why the county agent fixed the mistake, but the fix wasn't replicated. He probably used the NEW program to fix it, and it's more isolated than the old one, and doesn't know it needs to fix the related data.
What seems strange to me is TFA implies that the old executable is available "remotely," and that there's some kind of command line, if the user has to type the name of the program (R-E-D or R-E-R). That's just stupid, and someone, either the IT staff or the programmer/consultant who wasn't diligent enough to hide/disable/delete the old executable, needs to be slapped.
The rest of the story is just the results of sloth and greed- the higher valuation resulted in a slight decrease in the mil rate, everyone thinks it's great so don't check to see if it's a mistake, tax bills go out, clusterfsck ensues.
The place where I work has a system that has a similar problem-- we paid for a large update to a legacy system, but it was never implemented, and instead the old system was replaced and is about to be discarded. The original (unused) update was written to do an automatic in-place one-way schema update when first run, however, and for years we joked that if someone was so rash as to run the wrong executable, the system would self-update, and we'd be toast! Obviously, that excutable isn't anywhere the users can find or execute.
You are absolutely correct, sir. This aricle has absolutely nothing to do with "trustworthy computing," (aside from the use of the word "trust"). It is perhaps interesting that the headline was enough to persuade me to read the summary, and click the link to the story. Maybe, in some strange way, they're demonstrating how the exploit works.
That's a very deep observation... and I agree.
It's because the Republicans (and Americans in general) have finally wised up that the ID crowd are just the same old religious zealots, and figured out their agenda isn't something they want to be associated with. ID is in the process of being flushed down the toilet of intellectually dishonest false starts, and as the flush-water swirls, they're clinging to any possible floating lifesaver. Desperate people will say desperate things-- actually they will say anything! Now they're being religiously persecuted, and hence, in some way, are both the victims of, and calling for protection in the name of, the same separation doctrine they've been trying so hard to undermine.
Why do I get the impression that parents who protest their high school kid isn't getting the "whole story" when it comes to Evuhlution vs. ID don't really expect their kid to progress past high school, and maybe get the "real truth" later in their eddication?
ID is an anti-intellectual, fundamentalist, religious generalization designed to stifle intellectual and empirical exploration. The "real truth" is that we can only know what we explore, discover, and record. And even the concept of "know" is problematic (ever have a discussion with college freshmen and sophmores about what knowledge is?).
Many people are content to terminate their quest for understanding by adopting some interpretation of a book (the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, Naked Lunch, the Upanishads, the Little Red Book), but that doesn't contradict science, and it doesn't mean they should get special stickers pasted on HS textbooks. And little junior ain't gonna remember enough of his Evolution unit from bio class to challenge his beliefs within two weeks of his first job after high school.
many voices have challenged the very fact that Creationism is a falsifiable scientific theory at all
This is crap. Just from reading your post, it's clear that ID proponents can't tell whether they're talking about biology, chemistry, geology, cosmology, or what! This is not clear thinking. What's to keep us from interrupting music theory class with the "information" that some think the 12-tone scale was invented by a higher being (well, I guess it was-- by J.S. Bach)? ID is destined to fail as an intellectual discipline because it is neither intellectual nor disciplined. Sloppy thinking about large subjects is the mark of charlatans and philistines. Please just do what dorks throughout the ages have done, and go read your book by yourself somewhere, and let the rest of the world get on with the business of the pursuit of knowledge.
Thank you. Great suggestion. I suggest ID be taught in political science classes, as an example of a debunked and now disreputable attempt on the part of the religious right to sneak the Bible and Christianity into the back door of our schools. They've become so obvious that they're losing credibility and support even from the Republicans, who have previously been supporters (because that whole toxic crowd votes).
Evolution is the attempt to create and understand a working model of reality. Its value is to allow predictions and to check them against known facts. ID is a value judgement, with deep strains of anti-intellectualism and, of course Fundamentalist Biblicalism. It isn't even remotely science.
The fact that Evolution can't be proved does not mean we should turn instead to fairy tales. ID is fast becoming a thoroughly discredited political move by the religious right. I'm guessing in 20 years it will be completely forgotten, and there will be some new religious pabulum we'll be fighting against.
So do you seriously think there's enough risk that some student who orders the book is going to be inspired to murder "somewhere between sixty and eighty million people" that they should be personally visited by federal authorities?
The Bible (both old and new Tesaments) and the Koran together have inspired much more murder than that.
This is a simple case of the government having so much money, power, and manpower to fight a mostly non-existent threat that they have to make up threats to investigate. You can be sure, there's some "good old boy" in the organization, three years from retirement, who remembers how sometime back in the old days (when we KNEW who the enemy was) that Mao's Little Red Book was dangerous. He figgered it was a good idea to check out this little commie pinko creep.
from the article: Correction: An earlier version of this story overstated the number of complaints that the FTC had received about DirecTV. CNN/Money regrets the error.
Good call! CNN published a correction of their numbers, reducing it from 1.4 million complaints to maybe a few thousand. In fact, on rereading the article, there's now no reference to the number of complaints received. Probably hushed up in the settlement terms.
That's a significant reduction! Of course, no one really cares-- Direct TV is out a few million (cost of goods sold), a couple of sub-contractors will have their wrists slapped (find new customers in second mortgages or credit cards), any illegal activity will disappear behind the terms of the legal settlement, and you and me and granny still have their dinner interrupted by those idiot calls. I guess it's better than nothing, but it could be so much better if someone would just clear out the corporations from the halls of Congress.
You're totally right. Educating users is hard work! Look at the social engineering side of this. The computer support department (that's what I do, too, though in a very small company) is perceived as a bunch of stick-in-the-mud's who don't want anyone to have fun with their computer, just work, drudgery, and ugly interface. Then some website offers them pretty screensavers, or a cool game (isn't the 180 Solutions infection vector Zango a game?) or a toolbar with some easy, timesaving buttons. They're all "free" (so if they're free, they can't be bad, right?) and our users go ahead and download. So what if ZoneAlarm goes nuts? They just click ignore through it, because this is just an innocuous little game for fun. ZoneAlarm and Norton or whatever program complains is just like the computer support guys-- just can't get with the "free and fun" program.
My ex-GF got her computer so completely infected-- twice-- that it required fdisk and reinstall to clear it out. Once was from opening email that offered fun free stuff (a video), and the other time from downloading and installing a "free" game. People think "free" is good and legit, and that there are places that only want to offer fun and pretty screens "for free" to the whole world. I want to holler to anyone who will listen: There's no such thing as free!! Why would a company give away something for free? They don't! They've got a way to make it back. Your name, email address, IP address, keystrokes, mailing address, email habits, etc., are worth something. The only way a company will give you a free pretty screensaver or maze game is by getting something from you and selling it to someone. 180 Solutions seems to be an example of the worst kind-- they don't even know if they're legit or crooks, and seem to do business with anyone. If someone calls them malware purveyors (which is short for "despicable scum sucking leeches on society") they sue. Ugggh...
Of course, the irony here is that one of the best forms of protection is Linux/Firefox, which are, in fact, free. Despite that, I still think a good part of user education is to tell them, "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS FREE!" online, or anywhere else.
Be careful with that assumption. I have found that, with the exception of very large volume items (top 50 CD's, new bestseller fiction in hardcover, etc.), this simply is not true. In the last several months I found that checking the websites of music publishers (small, indie labels), buying a CD direct from the publisher can save a couple of bucks over the Amazon price (I assume this applies to Borders and B&N as well). I recently bought three Bright Eyes CD's for my daughter, and the publisher (Saddle Creek Records) had them for a couple dollars less than Amazon. And because I bought three, they shipped them free, and I got them overnight. Net savings-- about $10.00 on a $30.00 order. Once this summer, I found a CD (Shpongle, an obscure import a few years old), which Amazon wanted to sell me for $36.00 plus shipping. I called the local warehouse of a small local chain of record stores, and lo and behold, they had the CD (used) for under $10.00 and less than 10 minutes drive away.
Amazon started out by selling everything cheaper than anyone else could. They didn't make a profit for years, and in that time put countless brick and mortar businesses out of business. They're not taking losses now-- hence the higher prices on non-volume items-- and it's often worthwhile to look for other sources.
I keep a wishlist at Amazon, because a lot of times, I can't remember which album (or book, but that's more rare) I was interested in. I don't buy from them for many reasons --their patent policy, for one, and because I would rather buy locally or direct from the publisher-- but the service of having them remember the CD I heard online last weekend (lots of online music sources (like SomaFM) link directly to Amazon) is great. If I decide to buy some CD's next week, I'll just hop over to Amazon.com, click my wishlist, and write down the CD's I want. I know, that means they're keeping track of my buying habits, but I guess that's the cost I'm willing to pay for an automatic notetaker. If you want to keep them from knowing everything about you, pepper them with some false demographic data.
Does anyone else think the worst thing about this whole affair is that in order to get the rootkit, you have to listen to Celine Dion's Greatest Hits? (I know, there are others, but not that many.) Arrrgh... Don't listen to that crap! The listening experience has got to be as bad as the rootkit experience-- worse!! Maybe this will succeed in killing off the worst thing that has happened to our culture in the last 100 years-- the growth of "hitmakers" music. Gaaack!
If you'd posted NON-anonymously, I'd have tossed you an "insightful" point. You're absolutely correct on all counts. What Google is giving their users is whatever they can collect (and crunch). It's not perfect, and in many cases it's misleading (giving screen resolution is not very useful! I never surf with my browser maximized, and I'm behind a NAT, so no matter which computer or browser I use, the information will be folded into one IP address). The point is they're collecting whatever is available.
On the other hand, what a great idea for using all that huge computing machine they've put together. I'll venture out on a limb here and conjecture that a little (potentially over-simplified, and possibly misleading) data is better than none at all. The interestng stuff, like which link on a page are people clicking, are probably priceless, and not something that's easy to find using existing tools. One of these days I predict we'll all look up and realize that the Godzilla-Google computer beast is proxying everything we do on the web. If I had the slightest interest in web traffic, you can bet I'd be pasting their code into my website, instead of typing this reply.
Yeah, but when did the FCC decide that libraries and universities are de-facto ISP's? I'm not really blaming either political party, I'm just saying giving the ability to perform ubiquitous, nearly unregulated surveillance on huge segmants of the population to the FBI is not something we (Americans) should do. It's too easy to abuse, too difficult to control, and will be difficult or impossible to roll back.
Good information, though. I didn't know that law went all the way back to 1994. Thanks for making that clear.
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I basically agree with your post, but you're overlooking a significant part of the audience for this book -- people who didn't design the data structures they're querying. You're absolutely correct that tree structured data is a terrible hack in most databases, but if you're writing reports, or writing code to update legacy data, or the data was converted from another system altogether (perhaps written in Cobol or Quick Basic or some horrible old language where hierarchical data was a way to wring out some performance), then it's good to know ways to access it.
My specialty for the past 15 years or so has been conversions and writing applications that glue together multiple systems and data formats. What I'm most interested to learn (and I'm still learning every day) is what's the best way to get a desired result set from the data that exists, as it exists. If I had designed the data architecture in the first place, it wouldn't be a problem.
I'd be willing to bet that most of the SQL that exists is written by people who didn't design the data structures. Most of the relational data that exists wasn't originally designed for the relational database in which it's stored. Terabyte databases (even Gigabyte databases) aren't always populated with clean, 3rd normal form data-- they're messes of OLTP data, optimized for some oddball data entry scheme, converted flat tables from some branch offices, the data warehouse some consultants put together 10 years ago just before they got fired or moved on to other projects, a nightly feed from overseas, a weekly bank account reconciliation, etc., etc.. SQL can glue all this data together, and allow relating otherwise discrete data and getting meaningful information out. For me, the more theory I can learn to understand what data is there, and how to relate it to the company's other data, the better I can do my job.
And yes, we do design, test, and deploy conversions and data re-factoring, when time and resources permit. We also do Oracle upgrades, regular OLTP system updates and maintenance, and test and update various front-ends, from Business Objects, to .NET, to FoxPro.
I know that Transact SQL book you're talking about, and thought of it when I read this review. That's the best book on SQL I've ever read (by far) and I learned more about Oracle SQL from reading it than I have from reading at least a dozen more specifically Oracle-centric books. Fantastic book, I think it's called Advanced Transact SQL or some such. There's some proprietary stuff in there that's specific to MS SQL, but mostly it's a great overview of various ways to get a specific result set, and various ways to deal with problems that arise-- duplicates, nulls, poor performance, strange data relationships, etc., and it has a good discussion of functions and stored procedures as well.
Good luck with your new Oracle career. I wish our DBA knew SQL!
The spammer took out several public targets-- the Blue Security site and the LiveJournal blogger site, as well as the ISP which hosted them last. The authorities aren't going to do anything. The "good guys" in this case are a scrappy web software company in Israel. The "bad guys" are contract "advertisers" for some (probably shady but not proven so) corporations who clog up the internet with crap. Most of "the authorities" can't even seem to figure out what's happened, to say nothing of acting on it. The "authorities" pretty much depend on corporations to define good guys, bad guys, and bad actions. This model doesn't work in this case.
It's sad, and I keep wondering why the FBI isn't investigating the blatant blackmail sent by the spammer(s) to try and intimidate Blue Security users, especially when it was followed by an obvious and admitted DDoS attack on servers, including the LiveJournal site. For me, the whole flap was enough to get me to install and use the program. It allowed me to empty my Yahoo bulk mail inbox (it only holds 30 days of spam, and it hovers between 2500 and 4000 messages all the time), but that wasn't enough. Maybe this new initiative will work. I will check it out. Spam sucks and makes the internet a much worse place to be. I applaud and support anyone who attempts to do anything about it. And I always feel bad when the bad guys win.
No Serbian atrocities occurred before the American bombing? That is total, utter crap, A/C. I'd love to see some of that "overwhelming majority of public information" on this. Time for ditto-head to take some more Oxy and go back to sleep.
Sorry to have to break it to you, but Congress IS the "legislative."
You are, of course, absolutely correct. For awhile I've been saying that the problem with the current administration (and the rest of government, in fact) is that it's alll become very corporate. Every corporation has a set of guiding principles, vague nostrums like "the corporation shall act ethically and honestly with the purpose of delivering the best possible product and service to its customers." Look at the annual report of any company who has screwed you over recently, and you'll see some nonsense like this. These policies are rarely invoked, and can almost always be screwed around to fit whatever actions the chief executive cares to do.
Now think of how the Constitution is being used by the Halliburton/Kellog, Brown, & Root...errr, I mean the current administation. I am pretty sure they figure the Constitution is a set of vague guiding principles to which they must pay lip service in order to stay in power.
It's up to the legislative and judiciary branches to keep them more-or-less toeing the line. They've already demonstrated they're capable of pulling laws out of their butts to protect their own-- Bush said he was just "unclassifying" some documents to explain the Scooter Libby / Valerie Plame outing. Hocus, pocus, poof! No more problem. If they decide to monitor citizens' phone conversations, it's surely OK, because they're the good guys by definition, and the legislature has already let them know the American people want to be protected from big-bad Osama. Service to the customers, after all.
The only problem is the legislative and judiciary are falling all over the administration to try and give them everything they ask for, and not confront them when they step over the line. The EFF is onto something here (maybe), but they will likely be rebuffed by the judiciary in the name of letting the executive have what they want. I'm just glad this administration is almost over, and that the mess they're leaving is obvious.
Take my word for it (I'm over fifty, and grew up in a small town), kids have been committing vandalism and bragging about it to their friends for a looooong time. The difference between now and 35 years ago is now they can brag to 66 million "friends" on MySpace about it.
I didn't watch the video, but what they're calling firebombing sounds to me like vandalism-- the property was abandoned and deserted and no permanent damage was done. Vandalism isn't new. The cops' getting leads from the "friends" isn't new (most of this kind of crime is solved by leaning on other people who might know who the perps are). In this case, MySpace is a commercial forum (it's owned by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., who also own Fox Broadcasting), and despite the possibility of its being some incredible new social networking virtual world, the fact remains there was an actual piece of property that was damaged, and some kids that need a slap up side the head to let them know that's not an appropriate outlet for their creativity/destructivity.
I doubt there are a lot of officers working on surveillance in MySpace, because frankly, it's probably not worth the effort. The grand thing about the internet is that it is too huge to surveill. Think of a school of fish. They stick together because the presence of thousands of them reduces the chances that any one of them gets eaten. Google may change all that, but maybe not. Rupert Murdoch is interested in MySpace (like the previous owners, who developed the concept and software and sold if for almost 600 million bucks) because it has the potential to make a lot of money. If police surveillance is part of that, I doubt he minds in the least. No one promised anyone that posting there would be like confessing to your priest. If it was that, no one would post there anyway.
Someone needs to teach the kids that doing something wrong and bragging about it isn't right, period. My only problem with the story is that USA Today wants to call it a "firebombing of an aircraft hangar" and not some stupid vandalism prank in an abandoned building carried out by kids with no clue. Nowadays, instead of a slap on the head and attitude adjustment, that kind of prank can get them years behind bars. The fact the cops found out "whodunnit" by reading MySpace rather than twisting the arm of one of the perp's cronies-- who might have shoplifted or stolen a bike and hence would give up his pals in a heartbeat-- is less than newsworthy. And solving a vandalism case by reading MySpace seems like a pretty random event. I'm glad they caught them. I hope they charge them right-- with vandalism (or attempted vandalism), and not terrorism or using weapons of mass destruction or something.
First off, this "IT" guy is total boob, and should have to pay out of his pocket the rate for the CentOS lead developer who did his homework for him. If he was, in fact, qualified for the job he has, he would have done those steps before he started threatening to call in the FBI.
That being said, though (and considering that CentOS has already changed the text of the boilerplate Apache start page since this happened), isn't the idea of advertising on the default start page odd? Isn't that a little like pasting ads onto airbags? There's no telling who's going to be reading it, or under what circumstances. All you can be sure of is that it's not going to be a good situation a good part of the time.
Feh, I don't guess there's much to do about it... personally, I always think it's a good thing when I see that page. It means the upgrade worked and it's time to get to work moving the site to the new server.
So are the editors saying this isn't some legitimate, hard-working businessman just trying to make a buck on the internet? Yeah! Let him rot for all I care.
But you're talking about pols and civil servants. Do you think any of them is motivated to go and search for that 400,000,000 error when everyone else is standing around high-fiving each other and popping their cuff links? The article indicates this piece of software has been chugging along since at least 1995. I think all the human staff just figured the increase was a result of their good work and positive attitude, and probably meant their homes and businesses were worth more and their taxes would be less. Heck, real estate has a mind of its own, right?
I'm going to guess this is not a program that's written to a "modern" database, where the database itself can validate updates. It's likely an old Access or Foxpro or dBase or whatever app. The data has stayed in the same place, but the application (which holds all the validation logic) has changed. The old and new systems were probably left side-by-side (and the executables named similarly) to help during the transition. By the time the system was deemed satisfactory, the programmer was likely on another project.
That could also explain why the county agent fixed the mistake, but the fix wasn't replicated. He probably used the NEW program to fix it, and it's more isolated than the old one, and doesn't know it needs to fix the related data.
What seems strange to me is TFA implies that the old executable is available "remotely," and that there's some kind of command line, if the user has to type the name of the program (R-E-D or R-E-R). That's just stupid, and someone, either the IT staff or the programmer/consultant who wasn't diligent enough to hide/disable/delete the old executable, needs to be slapped.
The rest of the story is just the results of sloth and greed- the higher valuation resulted in a slight decrease in the mil rate, everyone thinks it's great so don't check to see if it's a mistake, tax bills go out, clusterfsck ensues.
The place where I work has a system that has a similar problem-- we paid for a large update to a legacy system, but it was never implemented, and instead the old system was replaced and is about to be discarded. The original (unused) update was written to do an automatic in-place one-way schema update when first run, however, and for years we joked that if someone was so rash as to run the wrong executable, the system would self-update, and we'd be toast! Obviously, that excutable isn't anywhere the users can find or execute.
You are absolutely correct, sir. This aricle has absolutely nothing to do with "trustworthy computing," (aside from the use of the word "trust"). It is perhaps interesting that the headline was enough to persuade me to read the summary, and click the link to the story. Maybe, in some strange way, they're demonstrating how the exploit works.
That's a very deep observation... and I agree. It's because the Republicans (and Americans in general) have finally wised up that the ID crowd are just the same old religious zealots, and figured out their agenda isn't something they want to be associated with. ID is in the process of being flushed down the toilet of intellectually dishonest false starts, and as the flush-water swirls, they're clinging to any possible floating lifesaver. Desperate people will say desperate things-- actually they will say anything! Now they're being religiously persecuted, and hence, in some way, are both the victims of, and calling for protection in the name of, the same separation doctrine they've been trying so hard to undermine.
ID is an anti-intellectual, fundamentalist, religious generalization designed to stifle intellectual and empirical exploration. The "real truth" is that we can only know what we explore, discover, and record. And even the concept of "know" is problematic (ever have a discussion with college freshmen and sophmores about what knowledge is?).
Many people are content to terminate their quest for understanding by adopting some interpretation of a book (the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, Naked Lunch, the Upanishads, the Little Red Book), but that doesn't contradict science, and it doesn't mean they should get special stickers pasted on HS textbooks. And little junior ain't gonna remember enough of his Evolution unit from bio class to challenge his beliefs within two weeks of his first job after high school.
Evolution is the attempt to create and understand a working model of reality. Its value is to allow predictions and to check them against known facts. ID is a value judgement, with deep strains of anti-intellectualism and, of course Fundamentalist Biblicalism. It isn't even remotely science.
The fact that Evolution can't be proved does not mean we should turn instead to fairy tales. ID is fast becoming a thoroughly discredited political move by the religious right. I'm guessing in 20 years it will be completely forgotten, and there will be some new religious pabulum we'll be fighting against.
So do you seriously think there's enough risk that some student who orders the book is going to be inspired to murder "somewhere between sixty and eighty million people" that they should be personally visited by federal authorities?
The Bible (both old and new Tesaments) and the Koran together have inspired much more murder than that.
This is a simple case of the government having so much money, power, and manpower to fight a mostly non-existent threat that they have to make up threats to investigate. You can be sure, there's some "good old boy" in the organization, three years from retirement, who remembers how sometime back in the old days (when we KNEW who the enemy was) that Mao's Little Red Book was dangerous. He figgered it was a good idea to check out this little commie pinko creep.
It's pathetic. That's all.
from the article: Correction: An earlier version of this story overstated the number of complaints that the FTC had received about DirecTV. CNN/Money regrets the error.
Good call! CNN published a correction of their numbers, reducing it from 1.4 million complaints to maybe a few thousand. In fact, on rereading the article, there's now no reference to the number of complaints received. Probably hushed up in the settlement terms.
That's a significant reduction! Of course, no one really cares-- Direct TV is out a few million (cost of goods sold), a couple of sub-contractors will have their wrists slapped (find new customers in second mortgages or credit cards), any illegal activity will disappear behind the terms of the legal settlement, and you and me and granny still have their dinner interrupted by those idiot calls. I guess it's better than nothing, but it could be so much better if someone would just clear out the corporations from the halls of Congress.
My ex-GF got her computer so completely infected-- twice-- that it required fdisk and reinstall to clear it out. Once was from opening email that offered fun free stuff (a video), and the other time from downloading and installing a "free" game. People think "free" is good and legit, and that there are places that only want to offer fun and pretty screens "for free" to the whole world. I want to holler to anyone who will listen: There's no such thing as free!! Why would a company give away something for free? They don't! They've got a way to make it back. Your name, email address, IP address, keystrokes, mailing address, email habits, etc., are worth something. The only way a company will give you a free pretty screensaver or maze game is by getting something from you and selling it to someone. 180 Solutions seems to be an example of the worst kind-- they don't even know if they're legit or crooks, and seem to do business with anyone. If someone calls them malware purveyors (which is short for "despicable scum sucking leeches on society") they sue. Ugggh...
Of course, the irony here is that one of the best forms of protection is Linux/Firefox, which are, in fact, free. Despite that, I still think a good part of user education is to tell them, "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS FREE!" online, or anywhere else.
Be careful with that assumption. I have found that, with the exception of very large volume items (top 50 CD's, new bestseller fiction in hardcover, etc.), this simply is not true. In the last several months I found that checking the websites of music publishers (small, indie labels), buying a CD direct from the publisher can save a couple of bucks over the Amazon price (I assume this applies to Borders and B&N as well). I recently bought three Bright Eyes CD's for my daughter, and the publisher (Saddle Creek Records) had them for a couple dollars less than Amazon. And because I bought three, they shipped them free, and I got them overnight. Net savings-- about $10.00 on a $30.00 order. Once this summer, I found a CD (Shpongle, an obscure import a few years old), which Amazon wanted to sell me for $36.00 plus shipping. I called the local warehouse of a small local chain of record stores, and lo and behold, they had the CD (used) for under $10.00 and less than 10 minutes drive away.
Amazon started out by selling everything cheaper than anyone else could. They didn't make a profit for years, and in that time put countless brick and mortar businesses out of business. They're not taking losses now-- hence the higher prices on non-volume items-- and it's often worthwhile to look for other sources.
I keep a wishlist at Amazon, because a lot of times, I can't remember which album (or book, but that's more rare) I was interested in. I don't buy from them for many reasons --their patent policy, for one, and because I would rather buy locally or direct from the publisher-- but the service of having them remember the CD I heard online last weekend (lots of online music sources (like SomaFM) link directly to Amazon) is great. If I decide to buy some CD's next week, I'll just hop over to Amazon.com, click my wishlist, and write down the CD's I want. I know, that means they're keeping track of my buying habits, but I guess that's the cost I'm willing to pay for an automatic notetaker. If you want to keep them from knowing everything about you, pepper them with some false demographic data.
Does anyone else think the worst thing about this whole affair is that in order to get the rootkit, you have to listen to Celine Dion's Greatest Hits? (I know, there are others, but not that many.) Arrrgh... Don't listen to that crap! The listening experience has got to be as bad as the rootkit experience-- worse!! Maybe this will succeed in killing off the worst thing that has happened to our culture in the last 100 years-- the growth of "hitmakers" music. Gaaack!
Gotta love the code comments! Searching for "Evil" turns up nothing. It's gotta be OK, right? Thx.
On the other hand, what a great idea for using all that huge computing machine they've put together. I'll venture out on a limb here and conjecture that a little (potentially over-simplified, and possibly misleading) data is better than none at all. The interestng stuff, like which link on a page are people clicking, are probably priceless, and not something that's easy to find using existing tools. One of these days I predict we'll all look up and realize that the Godzilla-Google computer beast is proxying everything we do on the web. If I had the slightest interest in web traffic, you can bet I'd be pasting their code into my website, instead of typing this reply.
Good information, though. I didn't know that law went all the way back to 1994. Thanks for making that clear.