The weather service (or at least the satellite services division) still gets effectively/.ed every time there's a hurricane about to make land fall. Learned that the hard way this year in Florida.
A faraday cage doesn't actually have to be charged. A connection to ground is sufficient. In the case of the passport, this would be the ground of the RFID circuit. However the cage + ground should fully enclose the item to be isolated, so in a passport, there would probably be some leakage along the open edge of the booklet unless other measures were taken.
We're talking about a "large IT organization" here, so the difference between sys admin and application admin becomes important. Unless your vendor is the OS vendor, the sys admin is unlikely to know how to fix the problem unless the application is actually related to administration of the system.
Unless the application has been "designed" (to use the term loosely) to be setup by root, the sys admin isn't likely to have been the person to install/configure a business application in a large organization. They just handle things at the OS level.
That being said, it's true that your internal application support team should be the first to look at application issues, and should be able to tell the long-suffering sysadmin if the vendor is blowing smoke when they say they need root access. And if they do need root, it's safer (at least from a legal standpoint) to grant it to your internal team than to the vendor themselves.
If you can afford to wait that long to have the vendor fix the problem, why not just use snail mail to send a copy of the file system(s) to the vendor and have them recreate the problem in-house?
And of course, leave all your boss's sensitive personal informatino intact in the image.
In situations like this, wouldn't sudo be appropriate? Allow someone to run a particular app as root. not gain access to the entire system. It wouldn't protect you from actual malware running under the authorized appliction, but it would protect you from most forms of vendor incompetence or fat-fingering.
Reality check: In any social system, behavior will evolve to maximize the individual return from that system. The system isn't being abused, it just hasn't evolved as fast as its users.
The trick is to create a system with negative feedback so that attempts to stretch the system in directions that harm society are resisted. This is especially tricky since there isn't always universal agreement as to what constitutes "harm". Those who are "abusing" the system are the most likely to disagree.
The problem I see with the patent situation isn't the patentability of certain types of innovations. It's the fact that a tool intended for the benefit of individual innovators is being used as a bludgeon by large organizations. I can think of two possible approaches: 1) we have to remove legal rights from all incorporated organizations above a certain size, for-profit, non-profit or whatever. This could include "freedom of speech" or other legal rights. 2) a more direct approach would be to simply make patents, copyrights and trademarks non-transferable and only ownable by individuals. Individuals can still license usage rights to corporations but they cannot reassign the patent or copyright itself. If we want to go whole hog, we could require corporations to divest their existing patents, but that's a bit heavy-handed. This would have beneficial effects in multiple industries including media (removes RIAA and MPAA's standing on piracy issues), and technology.
The flip side is that the individual patent or copyright holder will have fewer resources to go after pirates that steal their IP, but that is true even now, so nothing is lost under this scenario.
Of course so many companies are making so much money by "abusing" the system, that there is too much money resisting reform for it to happen. The time will come, though. If you think times are interesting now, just wait 4 to 8 years when the consequences of today's actions become more obvious.
I was with you up to the point where you said if we impose tariffs on countries that don't uphold American labor and environmental standards, the corporations and low-cost countries would roll over and live with it.
It might help a little, but it would probably increase smuggling, grey market products and counterfeiting/piracy.
And finally, what do we do about the US itself? Corporations in the US don't adhere to what the public perceives as the environmental and labor laws of this country. That's why EA is able to get away with stuff like this for so long.
I don't have a solution. We have to hold corporations to the fair practice standards we've established over the years, without enabling the "race to the bottom". As you mentioned, once our spending power is gone, nothing except dropping all standards will get jobs back into the country. Maybe we need to tax all offshore payments and conversions from dollars to foreign currencies, offset by credits for receipts or conversions from the corresponding country. This would also serve as a disincentive to the ballooning trade deficit.
My one hope is that the emerging Chinese middle class will revolt against the one-party state similar to the way the US revolted against the British after a mercantile and craftsman class was established here.
So your excuse for all of the transgressions of the government and people of the United States against the supposed core values of the people and the constitution of this country is that "everybody else was doing it too"?
That defense didn't work for the Nazis at Nuremberg, I don't see why it should work for you.
The fact is that no one outside the US believes the president anymore when he calls us the defenders of freedom in the world. They see that old "manifest destiny" rearing itself in another guise.
It's even harder if the email isn't spoofed, but the extortionist actually has control of a machine in the victim's domain from which they can send the CP. At that point the victim actually does have the material on their machine. And under US law, they could be charged at that point. The law here is posession of CP is illegal regardless of intent. The victim is screwed either way at this point: They have to admit that the computers were compromised in order to prove the CP isn't theirs.
Also, the latest versions of Spybot have 2 resident utilities for blocking spyware before it gets installed: 1) an "immunize" function that blocks known bad programs from running, and 2) a system monitoring function that requires the user to explicitly authorize modifications to the registry and other system areas. It also takes checkpoints of the registry and system files so you can restore to a known good restart point.
In the MS-DOS days, MS was definitely not "giving away everything you could possibly want to make an App". The end came because of competition from Borland and Turbo Pascal. At a time when MS-C and assembler were going for $500, Turbo Pascal was under $100.
MS started dumping compilers the way chip fabs dump memory chips, Borland couldn't crack Windows fast enough (partly thanks to MS use of undocumented features) to release an upgrade, and people started moving to MS.
See also Cringely's "Accidental Empires" (1993, HarperBusiness). He describes the flying incident and the failure to sign the NDA in Chapter 7, and later talks about how MS-DOS and QDOS (a 16-bit clone of CP/M) came about.
Life would have been interesting if the current incarnation of SCO had been around back then and owned the rights to CP/M.
I think I see what Bill is saying: If you click on a link/email/whatever that downloads a virus/trojan, you are downloading 3rd party software. Therefore microsoft is not responsible if said virus hoses up your system.
Sounds perfectly logical to me. In a microsoft way of course.
The presence of any virus at a DMV raises serious risks of identity theft through keystroke loggers, sniffers and god knows what else. If I lived in Colorado, I would apply for a replacement drivers license as soon as they get their sh*t together. Since that could take years based on the incompetence shown in the current situation, maybe it's time to establish residence in another state.
The cost for Wind power isn't.01/kwh, $.01/kwh is the premium over normal power costs:
The cost for wind power is more expensive than other options, but the cost has recently decreased.
The price used to be 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, but as of June it dropped to 1 cent per kwh.
. . .
Even though college students are known for having a tight budget, some believe shoveling out the extra cash is worth it.
Actually, BBC America shows the UK version of "Weakest Link" here in the US. And it isn't so weird, except that the "football" questions don't seem to make any sense;-).
The population of Chins is over 4x that of the US, so the Chinese economy will be "underutilized" even after all the high-tech jobs in the US have been absorbed.
Of course that assumes that they can give an equivalent percentage (about 25%) of their population a college education. That's not really such a far-fetched assumption.
On the other hand, it will be increasingly difficult for China to hang on to her techies as they graduate: The male/female ratio is really messed up due to their population reduction policies. Maybe they should limit their college admissions to women.
I always wonder what the heck is going on when the minister says "and by the power vested in me by the state of (fill-in-the-blank), I now pronounce you man and wife."
If we clean up the language on the government side of things, and restrict governments and states to recognizing "civil unions" or "families" rather than "marriages", then the churches can take care of marrying people, and the government can define what benefits civilized/unionized people get, and who is eligible to create a family.
And then (hopefully) the civil rights issue can be fought out without reference to religion.
Not a lawyer tax, an insurance company tax. The MDs are caught in a regulated market, just like auto insurance buyers: The state requires you to buy the insurance, so demand is constant regardless of cost, until the cost goes so high that people drop out of the market completely. As long as insurers stay within range of each other, the average market cost increases until we get an "insurance crisis" because prices are unaffordable.
This $100K premium is only buying on the order of $1M to $2M of liability coverage. You can't convince me that malpractice insurers incur $80,000 in costs per policy per year, even if there are a few million dollar awards each year.
We're going through this issue in Florida right now, and when the insurers were put under oath in the state house, NONE of them could confirm the statements they had been making in their marketing.
The AMA should provide a pool for doctors to self-insure, with a sliding scale of contribution/premium according to the total value of malpractice (or other professional liability) claims a doctor has had to pay in the previous 5 years (or pick a time frame).
Slashdot Mirror
The weather service (or at least the satellite services division) still gets effectively /.ed every time there's a hurricane about to make land fall. Learned that the hard way this year in Florida.
A faraday cage doesn't actually have to be charged. A connection to ground is sufficient. In the case of the passport, this would be the ground of the RFID circuit. However the cage + ground should fully enclose the item to be isolated, so in a passport, there would probably be some leakage along the open edge of the booklet unless other measures were taken.
We're talking about a "large IT organization" here, so the difference between sys admin and application admin becomes important. Unless your vendor is the OS vendor, the sys admin is unlikely to know how to fix the problem unless the application is actually related to administration of the system.
Unless the application has been "designed" (to use the term loosely) to be setup by root, the sys admin isn't likely to have been the person to install/configure a business application in a large organization. They just handle things at the OS level.
That being said, it's true that your internal application support team should be the first to look at application issues, and should be able to tell the long-suffering sysadmin if the vendor is blowing smoke when they say they need root access. And if they do need root, it's safer (at least from a legal standpoint) to grant it to your internal team than to the vendor themselves.
If you can afford to wait that long to have the vendor fix the problem, why not just use snail mail to send a copy of the file system(s) to the vendor and have them recreate the problem in-house?
And of course, leave all your boss's sensitive personal informatino intact in the image.
In situations like this, wouldn't sudo be appropriate? Allow someone to run a particular app as root. not gain access to the entire system. It wouldn't protect you from actual malware running under the authorized appliction, but it would protect you from most forms of vendor incompetence or fat-fingering.
Heck ATI still doesn't have an acceptable Windows driver for that product.
Reality check: In any social system, behavior will evolve to maximize the individual return from that system. The system isn't being abused, it just hasn't evolved as fast as its users.
The trick is to create a system with negative feedback so that attempts to stretch the system in directions that harm society are resisted. This is especially tricky since there isn't always universal agreement as to what constitutes "harm". Those who are "abusing" the system are the most likely to disagree.
The problem I see with the patent situation isn't the patentability of certain types of innovations. It's the fact that a tool intended for the benefit of individual innovators is being used as a bludgeon by large organizations. I can think of two possible approaches: 1) we have to remove legal rights from all incorporated organizations above a certain size, for-profit, non-profit or whatever. This could include "freedom of speech" or other legal rights. 2) a more direct approach would be to simply make patents, copyrights and trademarks non-transferable and only ownable by individuals. Individuals can still license usage rights to corporations but they cannot reassign the patent or copyright itself. If we want to go whole hog, we could require corporations to divest their existing patents, but that's a bit heavy-handed. This would have beneficial effects in multiple industries including media (removes RIAA and MPAA's standing on piracy issues), and technology.
The flip side is that the individual patent or copyright holder will have fewer resources to go after pirates that steal their IP, but that is true even now, so nothing is lost under this scenario.
Of course so many companies are making so much money by "abusing" the system, that there is too much money resisting reform for it to happen. The time will come, though. If you think times are interesting now, just wait 4 to 8 years when the consequences of today's actions become more obvious.
I was with you up to the point where you said if we impose tariffs on countries that don't uphold American labor and environmental standards, the corporations and low-cost countries would roll over and live with it.
It might help a little, but it would probably increase smuggling, grey market products and counterfeiting/piracy.
And finally, what do we do about the US itself? Corporations in the US don't adhere to what the public perceives as the environmental and labor laws of this country. That's why EA is able to get away with stuff like this for so long.
I don't have a solution. We have to hold corporations to the fair practice standards we've established over the years, without enabling the "race to the bottom". As you mentioned, once our spending power is gone, nothing except dropping all standards will get jobs back into the country. Maybe we need to tax all offshore payments and conversions from dollars to foreign currencies, offset by credits for receipts or conversions from the corresponding country. This would also serve as a disincentive to the ballooning trade deficit.
My one hope is that the emerging Chinese middle class will revolt against the one-party state similar to the way the US revolted against the British after a mercantile and craftsman class was established here.
So your excuse for all of the transgressions of the government and people of the United States against the supposed core values of the people and the constitution of this country is that "everybody else was doing it too"?
That defense didn't work for the Nazis at Nuremberg, I don't see why it should work for you.
The fact is that no one outside the US believes the president anymore when he calls us the defenders of freedom in the world. They see that old "manifest destiny" rearing itself in another guise.
It's even harder if the email isn't spoofed, but the extortionist actually has control of a machine in the victim's domain from which they can send the CP. At that point the victim actually does have the material on their machine. And under US law, they could be charged at that point. The law here is posession of CP is illegal regardless of intent. The victim is screwed either way at this point: They have to admit that the computers were compromised in order to prove the CP isn't theirs.
Also, the latest versions of Spybot have 2 resident utilities for blocking spyware before it gets installed: 1) an "immunize" function that blocks known bad programs from running, and 2) a system monitoring function that requires the user to explicitly authorize modifications to the registry and other system areas. It also takes checkpoints of the registry and system files so you can restore to a known good restart point.
In the MS-DOS days, MS was definitely not "giving away everything you could possibly want to make an App". The end came because of competition from Borland and Turbo Pascal. At a time when MS-C and assembler were going for $500, Turbo Pascal was under $100.
MS started dumping compilers the way chip fabs dump memory chips, Borland couldn't crack Windows fast enough (partly thanks to MS use of undocumented features) to release an upgrade, and people started moving to MS.
See also Cringely's "Accidental Empires" (1993, HarperBusiness). He describes the flying incident and the failure to sign the NDA in Chapter 7, and later talks about how MS-DOS and QDOS (a 16-bit clone of CP/M) came about.
Life would have been interesting if the current incarnation of SCO had been around back then and owned the rights to CP/M.
I think I see what Bill is saying: If you click on a link/email/whatever that downloads a virus/trojan, you are downloading 3rd party software. Therefore microsoft is not responsible if said virus hoses up your system.
Sounds perfectly logical to me. In a microsoft way of course.
I have to wonder though: Has NASA (or any government space agency) ever done two sub-orbital flights with the same spacecraft within 5 days?
-BC
The presence of any virus at a DMV raises serious risks of identity theft through keystroke loggers, sniffers and god knows what else. If I lived in Colorado, I would apply for a replacement drivers license as soon as they get their sh*t together. Since that could take years based on the incompetence shown in the current situation, maybe it's time to establish residence in another state.
Oh there will always be an environment. It just may not be able to support life at the multi-cellular level.
Actually, BBC America shows the UK version of "Weakest Link" here in the US. And it isn't so weird, except that the "football" questions don't seem to make any sense ;-).
The population of Chins is over 4x that of the US, so the Chinese economy will be "underutilized" even after all the high-tech jobs in the US have been absorbed.
Of course that assumes that they can give an equivalent percentage (about 25%) of their population a college education. That's not really such a far-fetched assumption.
On the other hand, it will be increasingly difficult for China to hang on to her techies as they graduate: The male/female ratio is really messed up due to their population reduction policies. Maybe they should limit their college admissions to women.
Earlier experiment was for goggles connecting to the brain. This experiment is inside the eye.
Hear, hear!
I always wonder what the heck is going on when the minister says "and by the power vested in me by the state of (fill-in-the-blank), I now pronounce you man and wife."
If we clean up the language on the government side of things, and restrict governments and states to recognizing "civil unions" or "families" rather than "marriages", then the churches can take care of marrying people, and the government can define what benefits civilized/unionized people get, and who is eligible to create a family.
And then (hopefully) the civil rights issue can be fought out without reference to religion.
Preferably under the RICO Act
The CNN article says that the infected websites are running (you guessed it) MS IIS.
Not a lawyer tax, an insurance company tax. The MDs are caught in a regulated market, just like auto insurance buyers: The state requires you to buy the insurance, so demand is constant regardless of cost, until the cost goes so high that people drop out of the market completely. As long as insurers stay within range of each other, the average market cost increases until we get an "insurance crisis" because prices are unaffordable.
This $100K premium is only buying on the order of $1M to $2M of liability coverage. You can't convince me that malpractice insurers incur $80,000 in costs per policy per year, even if there are a few million dollar awards each year.
We're going through this issue in Florida right now, and when the insurers were put under oath in the state house, NONE of them could confirm the statements they had been making in their marketing.
The AMA should provide a pool for doctors to self-insure, with a sliding scale of contribution/premium according to the total value of malpractice (or other professional liability) claims a doctor has had to pay in the previous 5 years (or pick a time frame).