Yeah yeah, says the German. And sure, most American major brands suck, and the stuff we import which starts out good generally isn't handled properly so it loses its flavor... but there are some excellent microbreweries around. Not hard to find either, and they do turn out some good brews.
It's that our nation's schools are run by a bunch of bozos who pay teachers on the basis of seniority instead of performance, bozos who disparage being elite academically, but celebrate athletic elitism, and frankly that among the ranks of our teachers are some of the dumbest people in our society.
Yes indeed. I'll give you an example that will tend to support your point.
I was engaged to an college English teacher many years ago. That didn't work out because she was also a selfish bitch, but that's neither here nor there. At the time, she was teaching first-year college English. Most of (and I mean, 80+ percent) of incoming freshmen couldn't write in full sentences. Seriously... so in effect she was teaching remedial English.
She would bring home papers to grade, and I would read some of them. It was truly incredible. These were kids that (somehow) managed to graduate high-school, yet were very nearly illiterate. I remember that one of her first assignments was to write down every detail of their trip home from school that day, just to get a feel for their capabilities. A typical result would be something on the order of: "Left school. Side door. Went to car. Got in. Went home." How in the nine hells did they ever earn a high school diploma? Scary. And this was twenty-odd years ago, and I can't believe matters have improved much. Probably quite the opposite.
Worse yet, the school's star basketball player was one of her students at one point. Big black guy, very proud of his athletic skills (keep in mind that this school diverted a lot of funds to the team, and it brought in a lot of money each year.) So this idiot made it class once or twice the whole year, turned in no assignments and took no tests. Yet, he was very angry that he received a well-deserved "F". He told her flatly, "I'm just here to play basketball, why you fuckin' wit me." Actually, he said a lot more than that, stuff which would have put the bastard in jail if she'd had a recorder on. Anyway, the problem from his perspective was if that F went through, he'd be kicked out. For any ordinary student that would be tough bananas, but the school's President wanted this guy kept around.
She submits her grades to the school computer, and next thing you know her boss comes storming in, wanting to know how dare she give the star basketball player an F!!! She pointed out that he had only showed up a couple of times for class, and done no work. You know what he said? He said, "Huh. Any way we can get a 'B' out of this?" She told him no, because that was the right thing for the student. He agrees and leaves, and goes right into the database and changes the guy's grade to a "B", updates all the paperwork, and left my fiancee's name on everything so it appeared that she had approved it.
I told her that either this administrative asshole changes the damn grade back, or she should quit. A lawyer friend told us that if there were any repercussions from her supervisor's actions, she could be held liable. He wouldn't change it (naturally) so she wrote a formal letter of resignation, sent it to him and various other faculty members (so he couldn't just sweep it under the rug) and quit.
This kind of crap goes on all the time, I discovered, and it's not hard to see why anyone who actually gives a damn about the students or quality teaching might just say "fuck it" and go into something else.
Not here in europe. My cell phone provider charges a flat fee (20 euros a month) and I get to call and send how many SMS messages I wish. Well, less than 1500 SMS messages a day.
Yeah, well, that's all well and good but we have better pizza.
The US government has a long history of conjuring up fictitious demons in order to justify bringing in more police state measures.
I bet we're about to hear of a clampdown on the Internet, "to safeguard freedom and the effective operation of world markets".
Of course, the reason our government does that is because it is a government By, Of and For The People. That means our leaders are (to a limited degree) accountable to us, and have to sell us on any such nonsense they wish to implement. That they're able to do that is speaks more to the caliber of the American citizen than anything else. We should be a harder sell than we are, that's for sure. As it is, just mention children or terrorists and we'll bend right over.
Put it this way: the reason that national governments of countries such as China, or Russia, or North Korea don't have to run a con on their citizens is because those people are nothing more than subjects, serfs in fact. They have no say in what their governments do, so their governments do whatever the hell they want.
Verizon is a CELL PHONE PROVIDER. When you make (or receive) a cell phone call you burn minutes whether you made (or received) that call. Cell phone companies have been double-dipping for decades. This BS is no different.
A few years is one thing, but these people are living senile and miserable (they are rarely happy with anything) for 10-20yrs. I don't know many loving parents who wish for their kids to throw away 25% of their own life to care for them.
Yes, but that wasn't what I said. I went through it by myself as a result of the way things are now. In the past, when you had an entire extended family around, it was possible to keep that old one around for a long time without destroying anyone's life.
I'm sure you're right. The World Bank, however, is not a bank per se, more a non-profit organisation. Not saying' they'd be any better in terms of investing in IT security.
Oh sure, but this kind of thing has been happening at financial institutions and other information-aggregators for some time now, and for pretty much the same reason.
Because bankers are traditionally among the cheapest bastards on the planet. Rich people frequently are... it's part of why they got to be rich in the first place. Furthermore, in the modern world the contents of a bank's hard drives are much more valuable than what's in their steel-lined vaults. I don't think they've fully come to grips with that, or they'd have spent more money on information security.
These days financial institutions consider IT (and other) security as something that costs them money, without giving them any benefit.
Will this wake them up?
I hear the question "Can we afford"? when talking about security in IT shops. The question that I am coming back with is "Can we afford not to"?
Just how many more banks machines are compromised? How about Federal and Local Government's machines and networks.
If you had enough financial data somebody could cause an economic collapse - I wonder what it would look like.
For most financial institutions their primary goal when it comes to information assurance is to pass audits. As you stated security is usually a cost center and they do what ever they can to keep that cost down. This generally means doing just enough work to make them compliant and as well all know, compliant != secure.
I do not beleive these incidents will change anything unless the financial institutions are forced to a higher standard.
I will continue to hope that they will see the light.
Under ordinary economic circumstances you would be absolutely correct, i.e., why should they care about security, leaks don't cost them anything. Right now, though, they're being hit in the parts of their anatomy they love best... their wallets. Furthermore, as many people have pointed out the survival of banking institutions is as much a matter of perception as it is liquidity, and I know how I perceive the World Bank Group right about now. It doesn't take much for already-skittish investors and bank customers to start shifting their money elsewhere. In this case, WBG has taken a big hit in the trust department, and the only way out of this is to invest big in security, and hope people believe them when they say they've fixed the problem.
When did it become accepted to just dump them on the corner for other people to pay for?
Probably around the same time that two incomes became necessary to support a family.
Well, that's most certainly an issue but I think it goes back further than that. Up until modern transportation systems were developed, people by and large lived and died not very far from where they were born. You knew ALL your relatives, saw them every day, and you knew you could count on their support to take care of family members who could no longer care for themselves.
However, once it became easy to simply pick up and move across the country and settle in another state, that basic family cohesiveness disappeared. It's very hard to maintain a significant emotional connection with a relative that's a couple of thousand miles away. We're human beings, we need proximity. And even then, what do you do when you've made a life somewhere else, and you are called upon to help? You probably owe it to that person to dig in and do what's right... but it's really easy to rationalize doing nothing, or very little, because it would be too inconvenient. "I have responsibilities here, I can't just leave them hanging. Sorry." Whether or not you like your parents is irrelevant: if they raised you, you owe them. Oh sure, there are exceptions, such as parents that abused their children. But in far too many cases, we as a people shirk our responsibility to the previous generation.
We've become a downright emotionally cold culture since we began dismantling the family unit. Sure, we have families, but the kids grow up, move out and away, and when the parents get old it's expected that the State will care for them. Or, if there's sufficient money in the equation then a private nursing home: either way, if you know anything about such facilities they're usually hellholes. Anyone who willingly stuffs a member of their family in one of those places should be kneecapped.
I've been through all of this: my father was very ill for several years before he died, and I gave up my consulting business and my fiancee to take care of him. I had promised him I'd never put him in a nursing home, and kept that promise. It wasn't easy, and honestly I'm not sure if I could do it again, but it was the right thing to do. Most of the rest of the family was uninterested in helping out, so I was forced to go it alone. Now that I know where I stand with them, I'm building another life somewhere else, with a family that does care. Life's too short, really, it is.
Harry Chapin said it best: you see, the new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu... but it's sure nice talkin' to you, Dad, sure nice talkin' to you. That's what family means to a lot of us nowadays, and that's too bad.
A recent court decision has affirmed that Fifth Amendment protections apply to encrypted data... if the password is in your head, you can't legally be forced to reveal it.
There's bad news too, judges have ruled US Customs can confiscate laptops. And if they do you don't know when, or if, you'll get it back.
Falcon
True, but if you encrypt anything important all you have to worry about is replacing the hardware.
Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.
Efficiency is relative. The Romans had (once the aqueducts were built) an effectively unlimited source of fresh water. Consequently, efficiency as a matter of conservation was irrelevant.
Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.
Their system did what it was designed to do: efficiently deliver water to the citizens of Rome. The fact that they used lead piping for much of it had nothing to do with efficiency: it just made it risky. In fact, there's often an inverse relationship between efficiency and risk. Industrial systems of all kinds can be made very efficient, if you don't bother taking safety into account.
Short answer: Truecrypt (as you mentioned in the summary.)
Is it worth looking into? Yes.
Are you being overly paranoid? No. Seriously, have you noticed the big brother trends recently? Truecrypt is very simply and effective encryption, in several forms, from simple encrypted containers to hidden O/S partitions. To take such a simple precaution is not, IMHO, overly paranoid.
What you're recommending is an effective deterrent to data loss to government employees or criminals. So effective, in fact, that some countries have made it a crime to not divulge your passphrase to law enforcment. The idea being, I suppose, that if you are hiding something, you're presumed guilty of something and punished anyway. In the current legal climate in the United States encryption is a good idea... but if you're traveling to England you might want to find another solution to protecting your data.
so people might want to do a cost-benefit analysis before doing something like encrypting the whole hard drive with Truecrypt.
Cost-benef... honestly, what are you talking about? TrueCrypt is not only open-source, but free. There is no cost involved, only increased security. Okay, so you lose an hour or so while it encrypts your partition. Big deal. TrueCrypt is not the only solution out there either.
I routinely encrypt all forms of portable storage that I use, just as a matter of principle. Forget the TSA and airlines: anything you carry with you has the possibility of being lost or stolen, and ending up in the wrong hands. Am I a terrorist? No. Am I a paedophile? Hardly. But what's mine is mine, and if you don't have a court order (and maybe not even then) you have no right to it. Furthermore, the law can't protect your personal informatoin (and in many cases wants to do quite the opposite) so you have to protect it yourself.
Look, unless you're just transporting public domain files from the Gutenberg Project or something equally innocuous, just encrypt it and be done with it. We live in an increasingly criminal society. Take the proper steps, keep your data safe from prying eyes. It's easy, costs nothing, and may save you a heap o' trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah yeah, says the German. And sure, most American major brands suck, and the stuff we import which starts out good generally isn't handled properly so it loses its flavor ... but there are some excellent microbreweries around. Not hard to find either, and they do turn out some good brews.
It's that our nation's schools are run by a bunch of bozos who pay teachers on the basis of seniority instead of performance, bozos who disparage being elite academically, but celebrate athletic elitism, and frankly that among the ranks of our teachers are some of the dumbest people in our society.
Yes indeed. I'll give you an example that will tend to support your point.
... so in effect she was teaching remedial English.
I was engaged to an college English teacher many years ago. That didn't work out because she was also a selfish bitch, but that's neither here nor there. At the time, she was teaching first-year college English. Most of (and I mean, 80+ percent) of incoming freshmen couldn't write in full sentences. Seriously
She would bring home papers to grade, and I would read some of them. It was truly incredible. These were kids that (somehow) managed to graduate high-school, yet were very nearly illiterate. I remember that one of her first assignments was to write down every detail of their trip home from school that day, just to get a feel for their capabilities. A typical result would be something on the order of: "Left school. Side door. Went to car. Got in. Went home." How in the nine hells did they ever earn a high school diploma? Scary. And this was twenty-odd years ago, and I can't believe matters have improved much. Probably quite the opposite.
Worse yet, the school's star basketball player was one of her students at one point. Big black guy, very proud of his athletic skills (keep in mind that this school diverted a lot of funds to the team, and it brought in a lot of money each year.) So this idiot made it class once or twice the whole year, turned in no assignments and took no tests. Yet, he was very angry that he received a well-deserved "F". He told her flatly, "I'm just here to play basketball, why you fuckin' wit me." Actually, he said a lot more than that, stuff which would have put the bastard in jail if she'd had a recorder on. Anyway, the problem from his perspective was if that F went through, he'd be kicked out. For any ordinary student that would be tough bananas, but the school's President wanted this guy kept around.
She submits her grades to the school computer, and next thing you know her boss comes storming in, wanting to know how dare she give the star basketball player an F!!! She pointed out that he had only showed up a couple of times for class, and done no work. You know what he said? He said, "Huh. Any way we can get a 'B' out of this?" She told him no, because that was the right thing for the student. He agrees and leaves, and goes right into the database and changes the guy's grade to a "B", updates all the paperwork, and left my fiancee's name on everything so it appeared that she had approved it.
I told her that either this administrative asshole changes the damn grade back, or she should quit. A lawyer friend told us that if there were any repercussions from her supervisor's actions, she could be held liable. He wouldn't change it (naturally) so she wrote a formal letter of resignation, sent it to him and various other faculty members (so he couldn't just sweep it under the rug) and quit.
This kind of crap goes on all the time, I discovered, and it's not hard to see why anyone who actually gives a damn about the students or quality teaching might just say "fuck it" and go into something else.
Bill Gates is considered by many (of the non-programming crowd) to be the biggest nerd/genius in this respect.
So true. Of course, to most of us real nerds the guy is one of the biggest assholes on the planet in every other respect.
Not here in europe. My cell phone provider charges a flat fee (20 euros a month) and I get to call and send how many SMS messages I wish. Well, less than 1500 SMS messages a day.
Yeah, well, that's all well and good but we have better pizza.
The US government has a long history of conjuring up fictitious demons in order to justify bringing in more police state measures.
I bet we're about to hear of a clampdown on the Internet, "to safeguard freedom and the effective operation of world markets".
Of course, the reason our government does that is because it is a government By, Of and For The People. That means our leaders are (to a limited degree) accountable to us, and have to sell us on any such nonsense they wish to implement. That they're able to do that is speaks more to the caliber of the American citizen than anything else. We should be a harder sell than we are, that's for sure. As it is, just mention children or terrorists and we'll bend right over.
Put it this way: the reason that national governments of countries such as China, or Russia, or North Korea don't have to run a con on their citizens is because those people are nothing more than subjects, serfs in fact. They have no say in what their governments do, so their governments do whatever the hell they want.
Verizon is a CELL PHONE PROVIDER. When you make (or receive) a cell phone call you burn minutes whether you made (or received) that call. Cell phone companies have been double-dipping for decades. This BS is no different.
Bloodsuckers, all of them.
A few years is one thing, but these people are living senile and miserable (they are rarely happy with anything) for 10-20yrs. I don't know many loving parents who wish for their kids to throw away 25% of their own life to care for them.
Yes, but that wasn't what I said. I went through it by myself as a result of the way things are now. In the past, when you had an entire extended family around, it was possible to keep that old one around for a long time without destroying anyone's life.
As Pete Seeger wrote, "When will they ever learn?"
They've had centuries to figure this out. Apparently they still haven't. I feel safe in assuming that they never will.
I'm sure you're right. The World Bank, however, is not a bank per se, more a non-profit organisation. Not saying' they'd be any better in terms of investing in IT security.
Oh sure, but this kind of thing has been happening at financial institutions and other information-aggregators for some time now, and for pretty much the same reason.
Because bankers are traditionally among the cheapest bastards on the planet. Rich people frequently are ... it's part of why they got to be rich in the first place. Furthermore, in the modern world the contents of a bank's hard drives are much more valuable than what's in their steel-lined vaults. I don't think they've fully come to grips with that, or they'd have spent more money on information security.
These days financial institutions consider IT (and other) security as something that costs them money, without giving them any benefit.
Will this wake them up?
I hear the question "Can we afford"? when talking about security in IT shops. The question that I am coming back with is "Can we afford not to"?
Just how many more banks machines are compromised? How about Federal and Local Government's machines and networks.
If you had enough financial data somebody could cause an economic collapse - I wonder what it would look like.
For most financial institutions their primary goal when it comes to information assurance is to pass audits. As you stated security is usually a cost center and they do what ever they can to keep that cost down. This generally means doing just enough work to make them compliant and as well all know, compliant != secure. I do not beleive these incidents will change anything unless the financial institutions are forced to a higher standard. I will continue to hope that they will see the light.
Under ordinary economic circumstances you would be absolutely correct, i.e., why should they care about security, leaks don't cost them anything. Right now, though, they're being hit in the parts of their anatomy they love best ... their wallets. Furthermore, as many people have pointed out the survival of banking institutions is as much a matter of perception as it is liquidity, and I know how I perceive the World Bank Group right about now. It doesn't take much for already-skittish investors and bank customers to start shifting their money elsewhere. In this case, WBG has taken a big hit in the trust department, and the only way out of this is to invest big in security, and hope people believe them when they say they've fixed the problem.
can you imagine the size of computer-based espionage departments they could have going no problem?
Yes well, maybe it turns out that this newfangled Internet-thingy wasn't such a good idea after all. History will be the judge.
Yes, well, all that 4 digit ID means is that you've wasted that much more of your life than I have.
And I'd mode you up, but I heard that the moderators are Chinese hackers.
Which would probably explain a lot.
If you had enough financial data somebody could cause an economic collapse - I wonder what it would look like.
Probably something like this.
Cyberdyne, a new company in Tsukuba outside Tokyo, will mass-produce HAL.
Cyberdyne? Will produce HAL? Outlook not so good.
Ask about Exchange Server next!
Probably around the same time that two incomes became necessary to support a family.
Well, that's most certainly an issue but I think it goes back further than that. Up until modern transportation systems were developed, people by and large lived and died not very far from where they were born. You knew ALL your relatives, saw them every day, and you knew you could count on their support to take care of family members who could no longer care for themselves.
... but it's really easy to rationalize doing nothing, or very little, because it would be too inconvenient. "I have responsibilities here, I can't just leave them hanging. Sorry." Whether or not you like your parents is irrelevant: if they raised you, you owe them. Oh sure, there are exceptions, such as parents that abused their children. But in far too many cases, we as a people shirk our responsibility to the previous generation.
... but it's sure nice talkin' to you, Dad, sure nice talkin' to you. That's what family means to a lot of us nowadays, and that's too bad.
However, once it became easy to simply pick up and move across the country and settle in another state, that basic family cohesiveness disappeared. It's very hard to maintain a significant emotional connection with a relative that's a couple of thousand miles away. We're human beings, we need proximity. And even then, what do you do when you've made a life somewhere else, and you are called upon to help? You probably owe it to that person to dig in and do what's right
We've become a downright emotionally cold culture since we began dismantling the family unit. Sure, we have families, but the kids grow up, move out and away, and when the parents get old it's expected that the State will care for them. Or, if there's sufficient money in the equation then a private nursing home: either way, if you know anything about such facilities they're usually hellholes. Anyone who willingly stuffs a member of their family in one of those places should be kneecapped.
I've been through all of this: my father was very ill for several years before he died, and I gave up my consulting business and my fiancee to take care of him. I had promised him I'd never put him in a nursing home, and kept that promise. It wasn't easy, and honestly I'm not sure if I could do it again, but it was the right thing to do. Most of the rest of the family was uninterested in helping out, so I was forced to go it alone. Now that I know where I stand with them, I'm building another life somewhere else, with a family that does care. Life's too short, really, it is.
Harry Chapin said it best: you see, the new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu
In some countries the government actually serves and reflects the opinions of it's population.
So the government takes care of the elderly because the taxpayers want it to.
-- I know it sounds funny, which is what makes it so sad.
Please be more specific. Which countries?
A recent court decision has affirmed that Fifth Amendment protections apply to encrypted data ... if the password is in your head, you can't legally be forced to reveal it.
There's bad news too, judges have ruled US Customs can confiscate laptops. And if they do you don't know when, or if, you'll get it back.
Falcon
True, but if you encrypt anything important all you have to worry about is replacing the hardware.
Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.
Efficiency is relative. The Romans had (once the aqueducts were built) an effectively unlimited source of fresh water. Consequently, efficiency as a matter of conservation was irrelevant.
Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.
Their system did what it was designed to do: efficiently deliver water to the citizens of Rome. The fact that they used lead piping for much of it had nothing to do with efficiency: it just made it risky. In fact, there's often an inverse relationship between efficiency and risk. Industrial systems of all kinds can be made very efficient, if you don't bother taking safety into account.
Well, the pun is the sincerest form of wit, you know.
Short answer: Truecrypt (as you mentioned in the summary.) Is it worth looking into? Yes. Are you being overly paranoid? No. Seriously, have you noticed the big brother trends recently? Truecrypt is very simply and effective encryption, in several forms, from simple encrypted containers to hidden O/S partitions. To take such a simple precaution is not, IMHO, overly paranoid.
What you're recommending is an effective deterrent to data loss to government employees or criminals. So effective, in fact, that some countries have made it a crime to not divulge your passphrase to law enforcment. The idea being, I suppose, that if you are hiding something, you're presumed guilty of something and punished anyway. In the current legal climate in the United States encryption is a good idea ... but if you're traveling to England you might want to find another solution to protecting your data.
I still let my kids go to public school.
Ok that's just silly.
Yeah, he lost me on that one too.
Not our friends across the Atlantic.
We the People are still your friends. It's the folks with tiny penises currently running our government who are not. Keep that in mind.
so people might want to do a cost-benefit analysis before doing something like encrypting the whole hard drive with Truecrypt.
Cost-benef ... honestly, what are you talking about? TrueCrypt is not only open-source, but free. There is no cost involved, only increased security. Okay, so you lose an hour or so while it encrypts your partition. Big deal. TrueCrypt is not the only solution out there either.
I routinely encrypt all forms of portable storage that I use, just as a matter of principle. Forget the TSA and airlines: anything you carry with you has the possibility of being lost or stolen, and ending up in the wrong hands. Am I a terrorist? No. Am I a paedophile? Hardly. But what's mine is mine, and if you don't have a court order (and maybe not even then) you have no right to it. Furthermore, the law can't protect your personal informatoin (and in many cases wants to do quite the opposite) so you have to protect it yourself.
Look, unless you're just transporting public domain files from the Gutenberg Project or something equally innocuous, just encrypt it and be done with it. We live in an increasingly criminal society. Take the proper steps, keep your data safe from prying eyes. It's easy, costs nothing, and may save you a heap o' trouble.
It's one less thing to worry about.