The union idea will never happen--for IT guys, engineers, or scientists. Most of us are a lot closer to white collar than blue. We could, however, become 'accredited' by an agency/organization as a licenced "fill in the blank." Quite a few engineers have to do this now, actually (though it's usually a state license, I suppose).
That would, effectively, be a union. State BAR associations, the American Medical Association, American Dental Association, etc., are really just unions. They license, test, and bless people as a control against anyone just hanging up a shingle and claiming to be a professional when they could be charlatans. It also keeps the salary level up.
I'm not so sure that we're ready for that either, though. As much as we like to beat our chests about how important we are sometimes, the nature of our jobs usually allow us to fail a couple times before getting it right. That's not normally the case with heart surgery or defending a man on trial for murder, for example.
It would be interesting though. Can you imagine what a strike would look like? A big herd of nerds marching up on a state capitol--that would be a site. Hell, I'd join the union just for that.
You raise some good points, no doubt. But Adam Smith was a moral philosopher and happpened to write a book called the Wealth of Nations--the very founding of capitalism as an idea and social system. I suggest you read it.
I think you are largely right, but self-critisism will continue for as long as this country of ours remains--it's just the American way. Besides, there is a lot to criticize. However--and we probably both agree on this--I would much rather see criticism in the vein of "I don't like A, so I propose B, to be implemented like this" vs. "I don't like A but don't have a better idea of how to do it--just thought I would whine for a bit and then go back in my room and cry."
The world doesn't hate us becasue we have so much. But many in the world envy our power. It's the nature of anyone or any organization with power--expect envy and antipathy. I have traveled abroad (Asia, Europe, Latin America) and have felt it personally--though very rarely in Latin America. I know what it's like to be acosted on a subway, or when walking down a street, simply for the fact of being an American. I've seen my friends called 'black devils,' have been personally called 'an American bastard' a 'white devil,' an 'American pig,' heard 'Yankee go home,' etc. And it was hard for me to understand until I realized how simple the answer really is--jealousy. Plain and simple.
The US is such a behemoth that it can never tread lightly. If we move in any direction, make any sound, the world recognizes it. That makes us clumsy sometimes--and always does it reveal just how powerful we are. Were I a citizen of another country, it would have to seem ghastly sometimes. "My God! Who do they think they are? You just can't do that!" But, rightly or wrongly, we can. There isn't a square inch of this earth that we can't touch, and a very small action or operation, in our eyes, is viewed as huge in the eyes of others--precisely because it would truly be a huge endevour by them to do so, even if it were possible. Say, for example, parking a couple ships in the Indian Ocean and launching some missles at bin Laden back in '99. For us, no big deal, a morning's work and then time for lunch. For most other countries, not even possible or, at least, would be a huge operation. (I was jumped in an alley for that one). But now it's my turn becasue I'm back in my beloved, imperfect, sometimes garish, sometimes crude, but always beautiful and truly miraculous nation.
Europe, not too terribly long ago, 200,000 Muslim men, women, and children were butcherd just a few hours away from Rome, Paris, and Berlin while you did *nothing*. The US--on the other side of the Atlantic--finally said "that's enough" and did something about it. Only then were you all too glad to join on our coattails and try to salvage some dignity. I have friends there right now still fixing the mess in your backyard. Arabs are safer here, in the US, than Jews are in Europe. Germany and France contributed to the building of nuclear production facilities in Iraq and then condemned Israel for blowing it up when you lost your paychecks for it. The US spent thousands of lives fixing your fucked up politics for the 2nd time in 20 years, then spent 100s of billions of dollars propping you up after WWII--including it's former enemy countries. Then, while sipping your wine in safety and leisure, you swindled GIs on the streets and, to this day, talk of how garish and uncouth we are. We maintain a nation of thousands of square kilometers, between the two largest oceans in the world, with every religion, ethnicity, and culture imaginable within it, while the EU can't agree on the color of shit and won't even consider letting Turkey--a very deserving nation--into the most basic of government alliances, much less the EU.
Middle East, why does your elite insist on going to the West for education, medicine, and science instead of building it there? Why do you say the West is condemning you to poverty when the obvious recipe for economic prosperity is a vibrant democracy? Name one rich country that isn't democratic! Why are your monarchies--a wicked and vulgar form of government--never critisized by *anyone* in the Middle East or Arabs living abroad?
Asia, with the notable exeptions of Singapore and Japan, get some transparency in your governments and financial systems. Much is being done in this vein and it's encouraging, but along side of this, please bury your hatred for one another. I live in the States, where I've seen it action, people from different Asian cultures can and do get along. Koreans can date and be friends with Thais--Japanese with Taiwnaese, Vietnamese with Indonesians. Please make it a concious effort.
Latin America, you are my brothers and I love you (much of my family is Latin American, and living there). But don't try patronizing the US on cultural grounds. You have much to be proud of, but your culture is not inherently better than ours--or anyone else's, for that matter. Yes, tractor pulls in the US don't point toward an enlightened culture, but banging drums and blaring trumpets at a tennis match doesn't either. And, if you are going to be fatalistic about your governments' fraud and inefficacy, be prepared to accept the consequences. Especially in a democracy--people generally get the governments they deserve.
Now back to my crass, uncouth, and beautiful American life. I think it's time for a cheeseburger and horse trough full of beer. I love this place.
Generally speaking, sending stuff in the clear is bad juju. And though many here have criticized the previous advice of 'just click through the warnings', the reality is, that's what happens in an intranet situation--particularly with home-grown sites and webUI appliances. Who is really going to go to all the trouble and enormous expense of creating a SAS-70 proof pki and then getting their CA cert embedded in browsers--only to have to wait a few years until it's populated into userland browsers?
Is it perfect, defensible in a 3rd party audit, and sound? Not really, no. But it's a great improvement over clear text. And, how many people here really demand and examine the fingerprint of an ssh server? The truth is, you just know it's not telnet and that's a hell of an improvement.
Particularly with 133t 4ax0r wannabes working internal help desks and NT administration with their packet sniffers going, I would say some encrytpion is much better than none.
General rule: for intranet and non-customer facing, home-grown certs are ok--for truly sensitive things (employee health records, payroll, etc.) and externally facing things--spend the money on an ssl cert.
I can think of exactly 0 people who like working on them. They pump traffic, sure, but not well enough for the pain-in-the-ass factor.
To all the people finding this initial posting so terribly controversial, relax. This site is a glorified bbs, not an official newsletter for all the nerd community. The point is that the guts of the boxes are pretty simple. The huge price tag is for the proprietary IOS and support. If it's worth it to you, fine. But leave the little haxor monkey alone. 99% of the people--at least--on this page have done some pirating here and there. If you can't figure out that this is not legal and could land you in trouble if you throw it up somewhere visible, you should get at least 1-2 years for irretrievable stupidity.
It's just exposure, as you suggest. The lawsuit hell that the BSD flavors went through really hurt them--particularly when it coincided with Linux's rise in popularity.
Personally, I think the FreeBSD license makes more sense than the GPL--certainly for commercial markets--and will become more and more the OS of choice for those areas that can benefit from an Open Source OS.
But, in an extremely general sense, *BSD is to Linux as Linux is to M$. People in management (read: buzz word literate only) are starting to feel comfortable saying "perhaps Linux could be used here." For FreeBSD, the response is commonly, "what's that?"
As people become more familiar with both Linux and *BSD, people will be able to weigh the pros and cons of using either. OpenBSD here, Linux there, FreeBSD over there, which is the ultimate goal, right? Choice! Hallelujah!
I agree that PKI is the best way to go if you want to have something acceptable with the legal world and corporate America (or as close to acceptable as possible). And yes, the administration (bureaucratic process, not system) can be daunting. But iPlanet's Certificate Manager product really isn't that expensive. Though you would need to buy Sun hardware, the licensing is $5/cert--list price. Even having said that, however, you are still looking at a price tag well into the 5 figures, possibly 6 figures, once you include the HSMs, firewalls and/or routers to segment portions of the PKI off, facilities for it, etc. And, if you want to be ultra-compliant, you should probably have an independent auditor come in and write a SAS-70. But comparative to Entrust or Baltimore, iPlanet is still far cheaper without giving up functionality. Verisign's PKI was built with iPlanet and the DoD, Leahman Brothers, and Equifax are just a few of their customers.
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The union idea will never happen--for IT guys, engineers, or scientists. Most of us are a lot closer to white collar than blue. We could, however, become 'accredited' by an agency/organization as a licenced "fill in the blank." Quite a few engineers have to do this now, actually (though it's usually a state license, I suppose).
That would, effectively, be a union. State BAR associations, the American Medical Association, American Dental Association, etc., are really just unions. They license, test, and bless people as a control against anyone just hanging up a shingle and claiming to be a professional when they could be charlatans. It also keeps the salary level up.
I'm not so sure that we're ready for that either, though. As much as we like to beat our chests about how important we are sometimes, the nature of our jobs usually allow us to fail a couple times before getting it right. That's not normally the case with heart surgery or defending a man on trial for murder, for example.
It would be interesting though. Can you imagine what a strike would look like? A big herd of nerds marching up on a state capitol--that would be a site. Hell, I'd join the union just for that.
You raise some good points, no doubt. But Adam Smith was a moral philosopher and happpened to write a book called the Wealth of Nations--the very founding of capitalism as an idea and social system. I suggest you read it.
The world doesn't hate us becasue we have so much. But many in the world envy our power. It's the nature of anyone or any organization with power--expect envy and antipathy. I have traveled abroad (Asia, Europe, Latin America) and have felt it personally--though very rarely in Latin America. I know what it's like to be acosted on a subway, or when walking down a street, simply for the fact of being an American. I've seen my friends called 'black devils,' have been personally called 'an American bastard' a 'white devil,' an 'American pig,' heard 'Yankee go home,' etc. And it was hard for me to understand until I realized how simple the answer really is--jealousy. Plain and simple.
The US is such a behemoth that it can never tread lightly. If we move in any direction, make any sound, the world recognizes it. That makes us clumsy sometimes--and always does it reveal just how powerful we are. Were I a citizen of another country, it would have to seem ghastly sometimes. "My God! Who do they think they are? You just can't do that!" But, rightly or wrongly, we can. There isn't a square inch of this earth that we can't touch, and a very small action or operation, in our eyes, is viewed as huge in the eyes of others--precisely because it would truly be a huge endevour by them to do so, even if it were possible. Say, for example, parking a couple ships in the Indian Ocean and launching some missles at bin Laden back in '99. For us, no big deal, a morning's work and then time for lunch. For most other countries, not even possible or, at least, would be a huge operation. (I was jumped in an alley for that one). But now it's my turn becasue I'm back in my beloved, imperfect, sometimes garish, sometimes crude, but always beautiful and truly miraculous nation.
Europe, not too terribly long ago, 200,000 Muslim men, women, and children were butcherd just a few hours away from Rome, Paris, and Berlin while you did *nothing*. The US--on the other side of the Atlantic--finally said "that's enough" and did something about it. Only then were you all too glad to join on our coattails and try to salvage some dignity. I have friends there right now still fixing the mess in your backyard. Arabs are safer here, in the US, than Jews are in Europe. Germany and France contributed to the building of nuclear production facilities in Iraq and then condemned Israel for blowing it up when you lost your paychecks for it. The US spent thousands of lives fixing your fucked up politics for the 2nd time in 20 years, then spent 100s of billions of dollars propping you up after WWII--including it's former enemy countries. Then, while sipping your wine in safety and leisure, you swindled GIs on the streets and, to this day, talk of how garish and uncouth we are. We maintain a nation of thousands of square kilometers, between the two largest oceans in the world, with every religion, ethnicity, and culture imaginable within it, while the EU can't agree on the color of shit and won't even consider letting Turkey--a very deserving nation--into the most basic of government alliances, much less the EU.
Middle East, why does your elite insist on going to the West for education, medicine, and science instead of building it there? Why do you say the West is condemning you to poverty when the obvious recipe for economic prosperity is a vibrant democracy? Name one rich country that isn't democratic! Why are your monarchies--a wicked and vulgar form of government--never critisized by *anyone* in the Middle East or Arabs living abroad?
Asia, with the notable exeptions of Singapore and Japan, get some transparency in your governments and financial systems. Much is being done in this vein and it's encouraging, but along side of this, please bury your hatred for one another. I live in the States, where I've seen it action, people from different Asian cultures can and do get along. Koreans can date and be friends with Thais--Japanese with Taiwnaese, Vietnamese with Indonesians. Please make it a concious effort.
Latin America, you are my brothers and I love you (much of my family is Latin American, and living there). But don't try patronizing the US on cultural grounds. You have much to be proud of, but your culture is not inherently better than ours--or anyone else's, for that matter. Yes, tractor pulls in the US don't point toward an enlightened culture, but banging drums and blaring trumpets at a tennis match doesn't either. And, if you are going to be fatalistic about your governments' fraud and inefficacy, be prepared to accept the consequences. Especially in a democracy--people generally get the governments they deserve.
Now back to my crass, uncouth, and beautiful American life. I think it's time for a cheeseburger and horse trough full of beer. I love this place.
Generally speaking, sending stuff in the clear is bad juju. And though many here have criticized the previous advice of 'just click through the warnings', the reality is, that's what happens in an intranet situation--particularly with home-grown sites and webUI appliances. Who is really going to go to all the trouble and enormous expense of creating a SAS-70 proof pki and then getting their CA cert embedded in browsers--only to have to wait a few years until it's populated into userland browsers?
Is it perfect, defensible in a 3rd party audit, and sound? Not really, no. But it's a great improvement over clear text. And, how many people here really demand and examine the fingerprint of an ssh server? The truth is, you just know it's not telnet and that's a hell of an improvement.
Particularly with 133t 4ax0r wannabes working internal help desks and NT administration with their packet sniffers going, I would say some encrytpion is much better than none.
General rule: for intranet and non-customer facing, home-grown certs are ok--for truly sensitive things (employee health records, payroll, etc.) and externally facing things--spend the money on an ssl cert.
I can think of exactly 0 people who like working on them. They pump traffic, sure, but not well enough for the pain-in-the-ass factor.
To all the people finding this initial posting so terribly controversial, relax. This site is a glorified bbs, not an official newsletter for all the nerd community. The point is that the guts of the boxes are pretty simple. The huge price tag is for the proprietary IOS and support. If it's worth it to you, fine. But leave the little haxor monkey alone. 99% of the people--at least--on this page have done some pirating here and there. If you can't figure out that this is not legal and could land you in trouble if you throw it up somewhere visible, you should get at least 1-2 years for irretrievable stupidity.
It's just exposure, as you suggest. The lawsuit hell that the BSD flavors went through really hurt them--particularly when it coincided with Linux's rise in popularity.
Personally, I think the FreeBSD license makes more sense than the GPL--certainly for commercial markets--and will become more and more the OS of choice for those areas that can benefit from an Open Source OS.
But, in an extremely general sense, *BSD is to Linux as Linux is to M$. People in management (read: buzz word literate only) are starting to feel comfortable saying "perhaps Linux could be used here." For FreeBSD, the response is commonly, "what's that?"
As people become more familiar with both Linux and *BSD, people will be able to weigh the pros and cons of using either. OpenBSD here, Linux there, FreeBSD over there, which is the ultimate goal, right? Choice! Hallelujah!
I agree that PKI is the best way to go if you want to have something acceptable with the legal world and corporate America (or as close to acceptable as possible). And yes, the administration (bureaucratic process, not system) can be daunting. But iPlanet's Certificate Manager product really isn't that expensive. Though you would need to buy Sun hardware, the licensing is $5/cert--list price. Even having said that, however, you are still looking at a price tag well into the 5 figures, possibly 6 figures, once you include the HSMs, firewalls and/or routers to segment portions of the PKI off, facilities for it, etc. And, if you want to be ultra-compliant, you should probably have an independent auditor come in and write a SAS-70. But comparative to Entrust or Baltimore, iPlanet is still far cheaper without giving up functionality. Verisign's PKI was built with iPlanet and the DoD, Leahman Brothers, and Equifax are just a few of their customers.