SCO's research team announces break-through partnership with CIA, distributing their newly-announced SuperCrack(tm).
"Our field testing has proven very effective," says Ralph Synles, head of SCO R&D, "Subjects spend almost every waking moment in a projected fantasyland, and the way their hearts are racing, I would say they are high as fucking hell."
"Pink fuzzy secret code wonderful property tastes like intellectual NDA violations. Call my stock broker!" SCO's CEO, Daryl McBride, was quoted as saying, before giggling and waving around several blank sheets of printer paper.
think about it. how many of us who have jobs have badges to get in and out of secure locations? how many of those badges are electronic? i'd say all to both questions.
it's always some good excuse:
save the children
cut down on employee theft
stop terrorism
stop crime
keep little susie off drugs
and that's the way your freedoms are eroded. whether they're taking away your guns, your right to privacy, fair trial, monitoring your child, censoring your music, or tracking your movements, those who are afraid of themselves and the world around them keep cutting off our rights more and more.
technology is a great enabler for everything, including that jackboot that will be mashing itself into the human face, forever, to roughly quote george orwell.
that ain't nothing new...
me and Bubba been flash-freezin' squirrels for years. `Cept the ones my sister hit with the shotgun.
Squirrels and buckshot don't do too well...
For those who don't get the joke, it's a Texas thing. Quite a few people I've known had squirrels in the deep freezer. Makes decent stew, just a bit tough.
that "10-20" terabytes line has to be a typo.
I spoke w/ some people from CERN regarding their CASTOR HSM, and a few years ago they were up in the petabyte range already. By now, they're probably sitting at at least a few hundred TB online, and probably 5 PB offline, as a conservative guess.
IBM's been doing GPFS filesystems in the > 50 TB size, w/ > 1 GB/sec. throughput for years. That, and even's IBM's mid-tier FAStT products can confortably carry 12 TB on one dual-controller storage head.
Still, further abstracting the issue of locality is very exciting stuff. I'd be interested to see exactly how they go about doing it, and if it's anything that you can't get w/
Lustre when it's ready.
I agree w/ you on most of those points, but there are a lot of exceptions to the rule. A few people I know of, in an organization that shall remain nameless ( not that I work there or anything ), make up a special subset of the clueless group:
the ones who think they know what they are talking about
and won't listen to a single fscking word anyone else says. I'm not worried about the guys who admit to what they do and don't know. I'm nice to those people. It's their job to know what PO's to sign and when to hire more personnel. It's mine to take down $6M in gear and then bring it back up when we lose AC at 3am in the morning and the gear is about to fry. Or to benchmark new gear, design a system, whatever the job calls for.
What pisses me off are those people who get in management, will stay in management the rest of their lives, don't have a clue what they are managing, and won't listen to the resources they have that do. Those are the people that also tend to fuck people or the company over, and are the reason why a lot of techies don't have power windows on their vehicles : because we lost our jobs, raises, bonuses, whatever, due to their idiotic mismanagement.
Now for the bathing, date, etc. thing, you got me. I don't know anyone like that, in person at least. Most geeks I know have good hygiene, work out, at least try to date or are in a relationship, do social stuff, etc.
Running Linux - it's an O'Reilly, can't remember the author, but it helped me a while back.
as far as firewalling, use a distribution like Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, or SUSE, keep ALL of the patches updated - ALL THE TIME. Then read tldp.org ( The Linux Documentation Project ), it has a HOWTO on setting up iptables, masquerading + ip-forwarding, also check out the OpenVPN project ( Google for them, I'm late to work and don't have time to post direct links ) for your VPN needs. Also, VTUN over SSH works as well.
That should be enough to get you started.
Oh yeah : subscribe to mailing lists specific to whatever distribution you choose, preferrably newbie ones, and participate. You'll learn a lot.
1.19 How secure is VTun ?
Well. VTun doesn't try to be the MOST secure tunneling software in the
world, it tries to be fast, stable, rich of features, easy to use
and secure enough instead.
VTun uses Challenge Based Authentication and doesn't transfer passwords
in clear text. Encryption module uses MD5 for 128 bits key generation
and BlowFish algorithm for actual data encryption.
There could be some weaknesses in key generation method, we will try
to address them in future releases.
...
1.23 Can I use vtun over SSH ?
Yes, via the port forwarding feature of ssh. Don't enable vtun's
encryption as ssh does its own encryption. Also, make sure to select
the tcp protocol as SSH can forward tcp but not udp. An example
session might look something like this:
home$ ssh -L 5000:localhost:5000 work.megacorp.com
(authenticate if necessary)
work$ vtund -s home_tunnel_config...
home$ vtund home_tunnel_config localhost
Now, having said that, I use VTUN and haven't had any problems. But then again, I also have the boxen firewalled to hell and back, no services allowed but SSH from a few known hosts, no root SSH, etc. So even if you do crack my key, you're not getting much that will get you anywhere.
While I don't consider it the most secure tool, it does the trick well enough for now. Kudos to the VTUN team, and kudos to Peter for his examination.
as always, don't use a hammer to turn a screw, etcetera, etcetera.
if you have a solution that requires heavy compute, low-to-medium I/O, no large shared memory ( unless you cough up the money for Myrinet, SCI, or Quadrics ) go with a Linux cluster using x86, x86-64, or (shudder) Itanium2 CPUs.
if you need a high throughput environment w/ fairly good compute, shared memory or not, go w/ a large UNIX machine, like an SGI Altix or Origin 3000, IBM Power 4+ box, HP Superdome ( or whatever they're calling them now ), or Sun Ultrasparc III based machine.
If you need a machine that is up 24x7x365.5 freakin' days a year, multiple OS images, with good throughput and low CPU usage, go w/ a mainframe like the zSeries.
Just bear in mind that the more complex, fault-tolerant, high I/O machine you go with, the bigger the price tag gets. If your problem requires it, spend it.
now signing off, it's 3am and I'm working on an app server for our cluster.
...to my complaints, or else the Backstreet Boys + N'Sync would have died after a month of brutal torture, and Spears + Aguilera would have had their vocal cords surgically removed and would be chained to my bed...
just observe this tutorial :
(user) : I was looking on the web the other day, and I found this package that would let me-
(admin - me ) : no.
(user) : but I think it would help me...
(admin) : no.
(user walks off in a huff)
...
later that day :
(manager) : (user) tells me that you refused to install (stupid plugin totally unrelated to work) for him.
(admin) : no.
(manager) : no, what? No, you didn't say that, or no, you won't?
(admin) : no.
(manager) : no, WHAT!?!
(admin pauses quake3, SSHes to file server, runs find, a minute passess, opens files in ee)
(admin) : no, as translated into sysadmin, means fuck off you boring cunt. Do I have to explain it again?
(manager) : I'll have your job for this!
(admin) : Only if you can explain why 68 MBs of JPEGs all starting w/ asian_sluts_hcore are sitting in your projects/network_switch_refresh/ folder...
this made my morning. I work at a strictly Redhat shop, and I do like RPM ( no flames, please, Debian is great, so's Gentoo, so's FreeBSD, but so is Redhat + RPM ), and perl is an excellent way to get things done quickly.
In the past, I've had problems w/ wanting to use a module, which is dependent on 5 other modules, which is then dependent on 5 more, etc., so I end up building 10-20 RPMs for just 1 module. Which I will have to update sometime in the future...bugger! Which, when under time pressure, generally leads to me writing a replacement for the functionality I needed from that module.
So my life just got easier!
would be if they would develop intelligent employees...
or sane ones...
but that reminds me of an acquaintance from a few years ago. he worked for the USPS in one of their mail rooms. his job was to check that the zip codes on their letters that whizzed by him on a belt had the right zip code.
that's right - all day long, one letter after another.
kinda explains why people do stuff like
this
Other customers included the head of a credit-repair firm :
heh...a scammer getting scammed...
a chiropractor :
well, maybe he wanted to straighten out more than his patients' backs...
a veterinarian :
maybe he felt insecure after working around horses?
a landscaper :
Well, according to Hustler, these guys get loads of poontang from horny housewives and their nubile 18 year old daughters, so maybe he just needed it to keep up w/ business.
and several people from the military :
Private Johnson, don't ask, don't tell.
Numerous women also :
I guess penis pumps just aren't cutting it anymore...
I've always been taught to never coil or bend fibre cables tighter than about 45 degrees over a 2 inch span.
And don't pull hard on fibre cables, that tends to pull the heads away from the rubber coating, making the cables even more exposed to damage. Or to cause a kink that violates the bending contraints.
While this isn't a life or death situation, even in a production environment ( which should have redundant paths and whatnot built in ), it's probably a big pain in the ass for long runs.
Having said that, how is this anything new?
# Don't complain about lack of options. We're running out of countries. Those are the breaks.
# Feel free to suggest coup ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past history first.
# This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic campaign managers, firebombs. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
I think that you, and everyone else who replied to my comment, are missing the point. It's not about what nurses can and can't do, it's about false alarms being rung. I did RTFA. It wasn't about fucking nurses and the HIPAA, it was about presenting false tokens to intruders.
I showed a few scenarios whereby data might become interesting to someone. Maybe at a hospital, reading someone's records is illegal. Other places, it is not. I can look through your data at my job to my heart's content. It might not be ethical w/out a good reason, and will get your ass fired if you're doing something unethical, but it's not illegal.
To the original point : there could be a number of cases of false alarms for things like file accesses. Say I'm running du -m -s against the user's home directories on the file server, to figure out who the biggest users of space are. Or I'm running it against some other data repository. Either one would access a bogus account's files or some other trigger. Or you have a bug in a script that checks a database or...there's a million reasons why something could happen to set something like this off.
Now, for things like planting tokens ( passwords, etc. ) and then waiting for them to be used, there's very little chance of ever having a false positive. I didn't think I would have to point out what I didn't say, or explain what I did say to such a degree, but this is/., and we appear to have the marketed cornered on medical record experts whose hobbies include reading/. and the privacy laws as they pertain to celebrities and advertisement.
I can see someone accessing a record just because it's interesting.
A bored nurse at a hospital is browsing through patient files, sees "John F. Kennedy", and for shits and giggles, opens the record to see if he had a gunshot wound to the head.
Same if you call it "Bwana Guana the Flying Butt Monkey", or hide the file, or someone notices that it hasn't been accessed since last year, etc.
let me guess, Microsoft designed the onboard software, and it lives up to it's namesake :
the GPS forgets where it is, and the sensory equipment goes to sleep during long meetings.
Slashdot Mirror
Ximian will soon announce a syntax-compatible shell, codenamed DeezNuts.
Judging from your typing and sentence construction, they have.
SCO's research team announces break-through partnership with CIA, distributing their newly-announced SuperCrack(tm).
"Our field testing has proven very effective," says Ralph Synles, head of SCO R&D, "Subjects spend almost every waking moment in a projected fantasyland, and the way their hearts are racing, I would say they are high as fucking hell."
"Pink fuzzy secret code wonderful property tastes like intellectual NDA violations. Call my stock broker!" SCO's CEO, Daryl McBride, was quoted as saying, before giggling and waving around several blank sheets of printer paper.
RFID tags in employee badges.
:
think about it. how many of us who have jobs have badges to get in and out of secure locations? how many of those badges are electronic? i'd say all to both questions.
it's always some good excuse
save the children
cut down on employee theft
stop terrorism
stop crime
keep little susie off drugs
and that's the way your freedoms are eroded. whether they're taking away your guns, your right to privacy, fair trial, monitoring your child, censoring your music, or tracking your movements, those who are afraid of themselves and the world around them keep cutting off our rights more and more.
technology is a great enabler for everything, including that jackboot that will be mashing itself into the human face, forever, to roughly quote george orwell.
me and Bubba been flash-freezin' squirrels for years. `Cept the ones my sister hit with the shotgun.
Squirrels and buckshot don't do too well...
For those who don't get the joke, it's a Texas thing. Quite a few people I've known had squirrels in the deep freezer. Makes decent stew, just a bit tough.
that "10-20" terabytes line has to be a typo.
I spoke w/ some people from CERN regarding their CASTOR HSM, and a few years ago they were up in the petabyte range already. By now, they're probably sitting at at least a few hundred TB online, and probably 5 PB offline, as a conservative guess.
IBM's been doing GPFS filesystems in the > 50 TB size, w/ > 1 GB/sec. throughput for years. That, and even's IBM's mid-tier FAStT products can confortably carry 12 TB on one dual-controller storage head.
Still, further abstracting the issue of locality is very exciting stuff. I'd be interested to see exactly how they go about doing it, and if it's anything that you can't get w/ Lustre when it's ready.
I agree w/ you on most of those points, but there are a lot of exceptions to the rule. A few people I know of, in an organization that shall remain nameless ( not that I work there or anything ), make up a special subset of the clueless group :
the ones who think they know what they are talking about
and won't listen to a single fscking word anyone else says. I'm not worried about the guys who admit to what they do and don't know. I'm nice to those people. It's their job to know what PO's to sign and when to hire more personnel. It's mine to take down $6M in gear and then bring it back up when we lose AC at 3am in the morning and the gear is about to fry. Or to benchmark new gear, design a system, whatever the job calls for.
What pisses me off are those people who get in management, will stay in management the rest of their lives, don't have a clue what they are managing, and won't listen to the resources they have that do. Those are the people that also tend to fuck people or the company over, and are the reason why a lot of techies don't have power windows on their vehicles : because we lost our jobs, raises, bonuses, whatever, due to their idiotic mismanagement.
Now for the bathing, date, etc. thing, you got me. I don't know anyone like that, in person at least. Most geeks I know have good hygiene, work out, at least try to date or are in a relationship, do social stuff, etc.
Running Linux - it's an O'Reilly, can't remember the author, but it helped me a while back.
as far as firewalling, use a distribution like Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, or SUSE, keep ALL of the patches updated - ALL THE TIME. Then read tldp.org ( The Linux Documentation Project ), it has a HOWTO on setting up iptables, masquerading + ip-forwarding, also check out the OpenVPN project ( Google for them, I'm late to work and don't have time to post direct links ) for your VPN needs. Also, VTUN over SSH works as well.
That should be enough to get you started.
Oh yeah : subscribe to mailing lists specific to whatever distribution you choose, preferrably newbie ones, and participate. You'll learn a lot.
1.23 Can I use vtun over SSH ? Yes, via the port forwarding feature of ssh. Don't enable vtun's encryption as ssh does its own encryption. Also, make sure to select the tcp protocol as SSH can forward tcp but not udp. An example session might look something like this: home$ ssh -L 5000:localhost:5000 work.megacorp.com (authenticate if necessary) work$ vtund -s home_tunnel_config
Now, having said that, I use VTUN and haven't had any problems. But then again, I also have the boxen firewalled to hell and back, no services allowed but SSH from a few known hosts, no root SSH, etc. So even if you do crack my key, you're not getting much that will get you anywhere.
While I don't consider it the most secure tool, it does the trick well enough for now. Kudos to the VTUN team, and kudos to Peter for his examination.
as always, don't use a hammer to turn a screw, etcetera, etcetera.
if you have a solution that requires heavy compute, low-to-medium I/O, no large shared memory ( unless you cough up the money for Myrinet, SCI, or Quadrics ) go with a Linux cluster using x86, x86-64, or (shudder) Itanium2 CPUs.
if you need a high throughput environment w/ fairly good compute, shared memory or not, go w/ a large UNIX machine, like an SGI Altix or Origin 3000, IBM Power 4+ box, HP Superdome ( or whatever they're calling them now ), or Sun Ultrasparc III based machine.
If you need a machine that is up 24x7x365.5 freakin' days a year, multiple OS images, with good throughput and low CPU usage, go w/ a mainframe like the zSeries.
Just bear in mind that the more complex, fault-tolerant, high I/O machine you go with, the bigger the price tag gets. If your problem requires it, spend it.
now signing off, it's 3am and I'm working on an app server for our cluster.
...to my complaints, or else the Backstreet Boys + N'Sync would have died after a month of brutal torture, and Spears + Aguilera would have had their vocal cords surgically removed and would be chained to my bed...
just observe this tutorial :
...
(user) : I was looking on the web the other day, and I found this package that would let me-
(admin - me ) : no.
(user) : but I think it would help me...
(admin) : no.
(user walks off in a huff)
later that day :
(manager) : (user) tells me that you refused to install (stupid plugin totally unrelated to work) for him.
(admin) : no.
(manager) : no, what? No, you didn't say that, or no, you won't?
(admin) : no.
(manager) : no, WHAT!?!
(admin pauses quake3, SSHes to file server, runs find, a minute passess, opens files in ee)
(admin) : no, as translated into sysadmin, means fuck off you boring cunt. Do I have to explain it again?
(manager) : I'll have your job for this!
(admin) : Only if you can explain why 68 MBs of JPEGs all starting w/ asian_sluts_hcore are sitting in your projects/network_switch_refresh/ folder...
this made my morning. I work at a strictly Redhat shop, and I do like RPM ( no flames, please, Debian is great, so's Gentoo, so's FreeBSD, but so is Redhat + RPM ), and perl is an excellent way to get things done quickly.
In the past, I've had problems w/ wanting to use a module, which is dependent on 5 other modules, which is then dependent on 5 more, etc., so I end up building 10-20 RPMs for just 1 module. Which I will have to update sometime in the future...bugger! Which, when under time pressure, generally leads to me writing a replacement for the functionality I needed from that module.
So my life just got easier!
I've got some exponentially decaying pieces of chicken on my table...
and some exponentially growing forms of life in some beer cans...
does that count?
would be if they would develop intelligent employees...
or sane ones...
but that reminds me of an acquaintance from a few years ago. he worked for the USPS in one of their mail rooms. his job was to check that the zip codes on their letters that whizzed by him on a belt had the right zip code.
that's right - all day long, one letter after another.
kinda explains why people do stuff like this
Other customers included the head of a credit-repair firm :
heh...a scammer getting scammed...
a chiropractor :
well, maybe he wanted to straighten out more than his patients' backs...
a veterinarian :
maybe he felt insecure after working around horses?
a landscaper :
Well, according to Hustler, these guys get loads of poontang from horny housewives and their nubile 18 year old daughters, so maybe he just needed it to keep up w/ business.
and several people from the military :
Private Johnson, don't ask, don't tell.
Numerous women also :
I guess penis pumps just aren't cutting it anymore...
And don't pull hard on fibre cables, that tends to pull the heads away from the rubber coating, making the cables even more exposed to damage. Or to cause a kink that violates the bending contraints.
While this isn't a life or death situation, even in a production environment ( which should have redundant paths and whatnot built in ), it's probably a big pain in the ass for long runs.
Having said that, how is this anything new?
by the company one keeps.
Working for Microsoft's FUD squad ranks somewhere between selling crack to school children and the SCO management team.
In case you're wondering, the crack dealer is the more respectable of the three.
# Don't complain about lack of options. We're running out of countries. Those are the breaks.
# Feel free to suggest coup ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past history first.
# This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic campaign managers, firebombs. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
drops pants...
waves it around...
license this, SCO!
I think that you, and everyone else who replied to my comment, are missing the point. It's not about what nurses can and can't do, it's about false alarms being rung. I did RTFA. It wasn't about fucking nurses and the HIPAA, it was about presenting false tokens to intruders.
/., and we appear to have the marketed cornered on medical record experts whose hobbies include reading /. and the privacy laws as they pertain to celebrities and advertisement.
I showed a few scenarios whereby data might become interesting to someone. Maybe at a hospital, reading someone's records is illegal. Other places, it is not. I can look through your data at my job to my heart's content. It might not be ethical w/out a good reason, and will get your ass fired if you're doing something unethical, but it's not illegal.
To the original point : there could be a number of cases of false alarms for things like file accesses. Say I'm running du -m -s against the user's home directories on the file server, to figure out who the biggest users of space are. Or I'm running it against some other data repository. Either one would access a bogus account's files or some other trigger. Or you have a bug in a script that checks a database or...there's a million reasons why something could happen to set something like this off.
Now, for things like planting tokens ( passwords, etc. ) and then waiting for them to be used, there's very little chance of ever having a false positive. I didn't think I would have to point out what I didn't say, or explain what I did say to such a degree, but this is
I can see someone accessing a record just because it's interesting.
A bored nurse at a hospital is browsing through patient files, sees "John F. Kennedy", and for shits and giggles, opens the record to see if he had a gunshot wound to the head.
Same if you call it "Bwana Guana the Flying Butt Monkey", or hide the file, or someone notices that it hasn't been accessed since last year, etc.
let me guess, Microsoft designed the onboard software, and it lives up to it's namesake :
the GPS forgets where it is, and the sensory equipment goes to sleep during long meetings.
No, I'm one of those dumb Perl coders, so it's habit.
%myResponse = (
troll => 'you've been fed, now fuck off',
);
of that %19, %100 said noone noticed, even when the SCSI disks gave a last, belated whine and emitted the magic smoke.
another %6 answered that, after numerous beers on a friday night, they had actually urinated on their last remaining SCO server.
of those %6, %35 admitted to accidentally hitting the power supply.
of that %35, %15 said it was the best thrill they had in the past year. The other %65 just clutched their genitalia while answering the question.