Nope, that won't change your SteamId either. The only thing that will is signing up for a new steam account and buy the game again under that.
What you can do though it to log the MAC address of the card, IP, SteamID and cross reference all of them across all steam games. That way if someone gets caught cheating then tries to set up a new steam account without changing their MAC address then the ban comes with them.
You should also make that information available to users so every player can lookup any other player and see a list of all the MAC addresses (minus the last 2 digits), IP's and SteamIDs that the player has had in the past. In the past I used to play a lot of AA2 and that used to have this and it's still online even though the game is dead. None of those bit of information are really that much of a secret, but it did make it much more difficult for the average clueless, non-techie to hide it when they had been caught cheating in the past using a different account.
Err, no. Every last person who loads up a cheat then plays against other people on the net on non-cheat server is a complete dick. It is like entering a public chess tournament with a hidden computer. It utterly detracts from the fun for other legit players who just want to enjoy themselves in a competitive, but also fair environment. If you can not get you head round how to enjoy playing a game online and also doing ok at it, then fine just give up or whatever. Don't try and ruin for everyone else though because that to me is being about as petty as you can get.
Being anti nuclear today = being pro coal. As simple as that. Only those in favor of all non fossil fuels are really anti coal and anti natural gas.
Not even close. I have hung around with a few ardent environmentalists in the past and most of them actually think we should just use less electricity in the first place.
For instance, one of the things that may drive up global electricity consumption over the next few decades is electric cars replacing good old gasoline and petrol. If you ask quite a few environmental types though the solution here is clearly that you simply throw away the idea of a car and move to mass transit and walking or cycling instead. They do kind of have a point in that we use cars for plenty of journeys we could do without if we were forced to, well the answer is clearly to force us to:)
Also, what about things like dishwashers or tumble driers. They use more electricity than washing plates by hand or drying clothes on lines but are far more convenient.
These are just a few (not that good) examples as I am coming to the end of my lunch break and don't have time to think of better ones. The important thing though is that there are plenty of ways that us as human beings could use far less electricity if we were to put up with a ton of extra inconvenience, and many people actually believe that the additional inconvenience should be something you choose to live with.
It is worth noting at this point that the people I knew who believed this generally lived by their own ideals. They rarely owner cars (or had car share schemes so only used one for essential journeys), walked and cycled everywhere (including to work, they were mostly older working types rather than the layabouts you would assume watching fox news or whatever) and few owned dishwashers or tumble driers. They thought this was everyone's responsibility to behave in the same manner.
I personally admired their dedication their ideals even if I did not always agree with all of them.
You call it waste, I call it fuel. Actually I call it a fear stick, because of the insanely disproportionate fear attached to the hunk of metal known as a spent fuel rod.
Spent fuel rods are actually quite easy to dispose of comparatively to what is being discussed here. This is about decommissioning a nuclear reactor, the problem here is that you have a huge metal container that is now slightly radioactive as a result of being exposed to other radioactivity for its entire life and being expected to contain it. You pretty much end up have to take the entire building away to be treated in the same was the fuel rods.
Need a Venn Diagram for the subsidies that the Koch brothers oppose.
Draw a large circle, and write "government subsidies of any kind" in it. Then, draw a larger circle around it, and label it "subsidies that the Koch brothers oppose.
Yes, the Koch brothers oppose solar subsidies, because they are subsidies.
It is also disingenuous to say they want surtaxes on solar. While it may be true, the context is that there are surtaxes on other forms of energy, and they want a level playing field.
This is a very bad summary.
But that is stupid. The whole point of putting surtaxes on non-renewable forms of energy is that they are non-renewable so by using them today you are storing up costs for the future when they are gone. The problems can be to do with having to mitigate the effects of more CO2 in the atmosphere or with them simply running out but either way we know there will be a cost down the line, so since government will ultimately have to foot the bill either way they impose a tax to mitigate that (in theory anyway, even if they do then spend it on some other crap).
With solar power however the energy gained is absolutely free at the point of generation. If you don't put a solar panel in the way then that solar energy would have just contributed to warming the planet when it hit the ground underneath. This is (or should be) the main reason why no tax is paid on energy from solar. Maybe you should even get a tax-rebate for using solar to generate electricity as the energy you generate would normally have contributed to global warming as it hit the ground and heated it. (ok, I studied years of physics so know this is a stretch but I still think it a net benefit, however minute)
I can understand (although I do not agree with, we need to encourage more solar use, not less) the idea of putting a small tax on solar panels themselves as they are quite polluting to produce, but once they are built they actually do far more good for the planet than bad, unlike all the fossil fuels the Kock brothers make their money from.
Beyond that, the Alaska Native peoples got something less of a raw deal than the rest of the indigenous populations.
Yup, but would that still be the case if we caused a massive oil leak then decided we could not be bothered to clean it up as only they lived there? I personally think not, even if they don't live near the spill I reckon you wouldn't have to kill to many animals with an oil slick to make it much hard for them to feed themselves.
What the parent poster was suggesting was pretty stupid, and I rather think that if you asked the average Innuit whether they mind me lumping them in with Eskimos while suggesting that we should do our best to avoid or at least clean up afterwards an oil slick on their lands they wouldn't mind too much:)
Birth control is subsidized. Abortions, the pill, hysterectomies and vasectomies are free. Oh, you mean in the US? Well, that's a different matter.
This is called pragmatism. Not allowing poor people free or cheap access to birth control results in lots of unwanted kids to crap parents who don't really want to be parents, those end up costing a fortune when they grow up and are more likely to turn to crime.
You might think it morally repugnant to pay for someone to have an abortion, but that is far cheaper in the long term than a poor 16 year old single mom firing out 10 kids who all grow up into people we have to imprison for most of their lives as prison is so damn expensive. It also makes it much more difficult for the mother to decide she wants to make something of here life and go to night school or something in her twenties if she already has 2 kids before then and is on welfare.
By pouring it into the sea, they have prevented it from being burned and poured into the sky as CO2.
Instead it's eaten by bacteria and such and released into the environment as CO2, without even the benefits of us burning it.
But you are not taking into account the benefit of the oil killing a bunch of CO2 creating (ie: oxygen breathing) marine life, surely that will balance that out.
I expect I know how the mods will treat this, but - who cares? Why bother to clean it up at all? It will clot up and have negligible impact, and no one lives there.
Firstly, people do live there, they are an indigenous people called Eskimo. I suppose they just one more form of indigenous people that the US can shit on though in addition to the native Americans you stole a whole country from.
Secondly, the problem with "just leave it there" is it stinks from a moral standpoint. It is basically saying "we fully expect to make a huge mess of some other area of the planet an not cleaning it up because we cannot be bothered". If the US wants to carry on behaving in that manner do not be too surprised when more and more countries turn a blind eye to people training for terrorist attacks on the US, especially if those countries start getting hit by environmental fallout. How countries act on a global stage and how they are perceived has an impact on how likely they are have terrorist scum bags flying planes into buildings.
Is it? I had a generally very good sys-admin previously insist we move to key based from passwords specifically because he thought it was 2 factor. It did not ring true in my mind when he said that though so I thought about it on the way home and then explained the above to him the next day. I wondered if this was a commonly held misconception about SSH?
I have done ride alongs. The police assume everyone is a criminal. There are only two types of people. Cops and criminals. We never played "cops and innocent bystanders" as kids. We are trained that there are two sides. Long gone are the beat cops that proactively prevented crime by building relationships with the neighborhood. The cops swoop in arrest everyone, and let the lawyers sort it out. Cops that want to rise will work on beating out confessions to protect conviction rates. After all, if you are talking to a cop, you are a criminal, they just might not have proven it yet.
No, a ride along doesn't give justification as to why the armed cop is beating the unarmed person. The number one reason people are beat is "contempt of cop". If you don't follow orders fast enough, you are resisting. If you are resisting arrest, they can beat you. That's how it's done.
I think one solution to this is for us to remind them they are actually our public servants as often as possible. If you are lost, then go up and ask them for directions if they seem to be standing around doing nothing. Hell, maybe even ask them if you are not lost just so they get to talk to a law abiding citizen for a change. Then, if they are helpful, be polite and courteous and make sure you say thanks.
They will still have to deal with utter some scumbags, but maybe if they spent more time dealing with people who are not then they might find it easier to not treat everyone like they are.
Google Maps already has so many major problems that it just doesn't make sense to go on a rampage adding more half-baked features. I really miss being able to drag the little guy to the map to get to street view. Now, that doesn't work. Only a Republican would think adding features to something you can't get to is the right thing to do. Seriously, fix getting to street view before adding features. It's asinine of them to do this.
its not really broken is it? They just changed the way it worked so now you tap on the map where you want to get the street view option instead of having to drag some weird icon from the top left corner. I know that it was nice and easy once you knew what that man was, but it was not exactly intuitive for nooblets. Now when ever you click anywhere on the map it brings up a little box with the streetview here button in it.
But hey, your right, Google should never be allowed to change user interface stuff, ever.
Not to mention that most pen tests stop the very second even a single vulnerability is found. Some tester might drop a bunch of flash drives in the parking lot, wait for an employee to take one inside, and then conclude that they've penetrated the building and that the test is finished. They never find the fact that you could clone someone's badge from 50 feet away, or that the network ports in the public lobby aren't VLANed separately from the network ports in the high-security areas, or...
Have you ever been through a real pen test?
I have (twice, two different security companies several years apart on the same web application) and they certainly did not stop after the first thing they found. They kept trying and trying and provided a report detailing every single issue they found, coded on a 1 to 5 scale based on importance. The reports came both came to pages and pages for probably less that 20 issues, less than 5 critical. Obviously in both cased the only sent us the reports in encrypted form and only gave us the decryption pass phrase over the phone, when they were 100% sure they were speaking to the correct people.
If you get a pen test done and they stop after the first thing they found then the company you hired is crap.
Is your IT system set up this way? Why not? Two-factor auth is easy, off-the-shelf stuff these days
How do you do 2 factor auth with SSH and is it more secure than a decent password requirement?
I ask because I had this argument a few years back and realised that password protected private keys are not really 2 factor auth since if someone gets the private key then they can brute force the passphraase out of it client side since they have unlimited attempts without the possibility of lockout (the passphrase is only used to unlock the private key, not exchanged with the server as part of the auth process). Compare that to a decent password policy, where the server locks the user out after a few wrong attempts and which is more secure?
I am not advocating one over the other but it is worth remembering that both have their drawbacks. Strong two factor auth in my book would be a private key coupled with a password that was only validated server side.
What about Ruby Ridge? There is a reason we paid that family millions of dollars in compensation.
Not saying either were great people. But look at Nevada, a 1,000 man militia. Probably the first time a battalion size militia has been active in the U.S.
Sure you can argue Mr. Bundy was breaking the law. But one can also argue the Feds enacted unethical policies and mis-used laws, in an abusive way.
Remember EVERYTHING the British did to the colonialists was 'legal'. The point of the Second Amendment is for those times when what is legal (or what is illegal) is WRONG!!!!!
But of course the big problem is that the one thing you can guarantee is that any attempt to resist the federal US government by force would end in failure thanks to the US military. The only hope would be to use the power of the people to resist and that can be done without a single shot being fired if enough people agree.
Who cares what the founding fathers said or meant, they did not foresee the US having the largest full time, professional standing army on the the face of the planet. That alone might have scared them. Then on top of that include all the trained FBI, ATF and god knows who else armed and trained swat style officers who stand ready to clamp down on any armed resistance from the population. I bet if you showed the current state of the US to most of them they would have a very different idea of what to write anyway.
The upshot of all of this is that the second amendment now is largely irrelevant to the freedom of the american people. Any sort of government movement to restrict said freedom can only be prevented if the US population en mass see it as such and resist. The form that resistance would take is largely irrelevant since it is the numbers that make the biggest difference over the method. It might even be the case that peaceful resistance is more effective since it makes it much harder for the government to win any sort of propaganda war.
What the second amendment does do however is massively help the US arms industry as it has a huge home market to bolster its bottom line. That alone makes it highly unlikely it will ever be amended.
"Yes men", or "enablers" as you call them, are the root cause of the out-of-control bureaucracy problem.
The problem is that according to this particular management theory the opposite of an "enabler" is a "blocker". You do not want to come across as one of them if you value your job and future employment prospects for large organisations that subscribe to such things.
The crown was an insane rule that every new hyperlink had to be aproved not just by a department head but by the vice chancellor himself.
At that point you should have just emailed everyone on the committee, and copied in the vice-chancellor with some stats on exactly how many approvals this would generate on a daily basis. Include the actual statistics for the previous 7 days so if this was generating 50 pages per day you had some clear number to back this up while still in the planning stage. That was clearly why you were put on the committee, to stop a bunch of know nothings from coming up with a stupid policy, you failed.
The way to succeed as a techie is not about being technically brilliant any more, it is about how you can talk people round to your way of thinking and use evidence to back up your points of view.
They want bureaucracy, they make the paperwork. Tell them to track windows and distro security pages, the changes are there.
Yep. They're the "experts". Just tell them the Microsoft KB number, that's all the information they need.
Yup, follow this advice and come across like an unhelpful douchbag.
Or, bend over backwards to help them. Provide them with a break down on every single patch (a few line summary with a link to the KB article for the full details), then give each patch a priority based on its impact and come up with different deployment routes for each one, then explain to your manager who allocates your time why patch management for the CAB board just became a full time job.
Also, if they ever reject any and you end up a dependency hell where you cannot install a critical patch because of a low impact one you rejected (you do test each patch deployment run on a dummy server don't you?) then explain why the process failed, politely, without saying thing like "I told you this was dumb years ago!".
Alternatively, if the system runs for a few months and every single patch sent to the CAB board has been approved then you can clearly demonstrate the do not really add anything and start making rational arguments to abandon the process from a sound basis while demonstrating you are an excellent team player who easily adapts.
But if you would rather come across like a non-team player who hates any interference in your system admin fiefdom then, just go with the douche bag option and watch your job get outsourced in 6 months.
In my experience the world of work is full of crap like this, times when processes that are overly bureaucratic are forced on us techies even though we clearly see them as a waste of our time. Unfortunately this is generally just stuff we have to lap up as part of our job, if you can, you generally end up earning more and with the greater long term job security that working as part of a larger company provides.
An excellent book on this sort of business related stuff is called "Who moved my cheese" and the gist of it is that you want to come across as and "enabler" rather than a "blocker". That often means trying your best to make what is clearly a stupid idea a success.
The other truth is... the American Revolution wasn't started by a bunch of serfs, it was started by rich land owners who didn't like their deal...
That is the truth about almost any revolution there ever was. In reality any uprising of the masses that did not get organized by some silly or evil group from the top, failed.
It is worth reading some of the sections of Goldstein's book in George Orwell's 1984 regarding this.
He suggests that all revolutions are actually started and driven by the middle classes so it is them who you really need to watch as they who possess the skills like leadership needed to stir the proletariat into action. Thus generally the result of most revolutions is that the old ruling class is destroyed and the middle class replace them, the proletariat however generally stay in the same position apart from a few who are elevated to form the new middle class along with some members of the previous ruling class who didn't put up too much of a fight and went quietly.
I'm from Europe. I know what it is like if you actually DO have parties with diverging world views. There are countries where you actually have everything from far left to far right to choose from.
And if you look at certain parts of Europe (ie, anywhere not the UK) you have proportional representation where people with politically diverse views actually have to work together to get stuff done. The problem is that makes for a "weak" government because it tends to be more responsive to the public who elected them. Can't have that:)
"A failing road car stops on the road. Not always ideal, but generally a controllable event"
Far from ideal, quite often fatal. A failing car on a crowded interstate can result in an accident involving many vehicles with lots of casualties, and this happens shockingly often.
"A failing flying car drops out of the sky."
Unlikely. You have redundant systems, if your main control system fails the backup kicks in, you have 8 engines and still have limited flight abilities even if over half of them fail simultaneously, and even if absolutely everything else fails there is a parachute big enough to bring the entire car down relatively gently.
"Therefore it has to be orders of magnitude more reliable than your typical car."
Yes, that part is correct.
What happens when some terrorist scumbag deliberately crashes it into a heavily populated are laden with gasoline and soap (napalm). Or they go for a very tall building but fill the vehicle with high explosive instead.
Flying cars open up a whole new avenue of terrorist targets as they are far more manoeuvrable then a light aircraft. If they became ubiquitous they also have the problem that it would become commonplace for people to get lost and accidentally fly into restricted airspace so you could not just shoot down anyone that did on sight.
The reality is that flying cars are not ever likely to happen in our lifetimes because it is in governments interest to keep most of us on the ground and only let a small minority fly around. It used to be that costs of manufacture prohibited flying cars but if this price ever comes down then government will just come up with some insane airworthiness test or similar that costs billions to put a vehicle through. Or just keep the pilots licence requirement, not matter how simple that a flying car could actually be made.
Well, I see you haven't established that the Koch brothers are actually right wing.
All the Koch brothers care about is making themselves richer and paying less in tax. They mostly donate case to conservative campaigns and think tanks, that counts as right wing in my book.
"Charles also organizes twice yearly meetings[20] with Republican donors.[16]"
I would have linked directly the the references above but they are pay walled.
I could not give a crap about the Gmail example, but the fact is that "libertarianism" in the US is just a front, funded by the likes of the Koch brothers (and others) and designed to facilitate a tax regime friendly to the richest 1% of the population. If that does not count as right wing I do not know what does.
That sounds like a Mint thing. Seriously, Debian (the great grandparent of Mint) had the patch as fast as anybody. Heck, by the time I logged into my Mac at work, MacPorts had pushed the patch.
I wouldn't make such a sweeping statement about the "situation" when you've hitched your wagon to a project that's pulling from a project that's pulling from a project that's (etc).
Interestingly our Debian servers are completely unaffected by this bug since we use Debian 6:) Sometimes it pays to be a little behind the times.
In this case, there was a simple fix, recompiling OpenSSL with the proper flag and going, so letting people know as soon as possible is the best option. Those who are serious about security don't wait for Ubuntu to update their apt servers.
Recompiling something from source is often a complete no-no, not because the sysadmin is unable to, but because he his forbidden from doing so by his corporate overlords. It is trusted binaries (via checksum) from the likes of RedHat or nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
A modem reboot won't reset SteamID.
Ipconfig /flushdns ?
Nope, that won't change your SteamId either. The only thing that will is signing up for a new steam account and buy the game again under that.
What you can do though it to log the MAC address of the card, IP, SteamID and cross reference all of them across all steam games. That way if someone gets caught cheating then tries to set up a new steam account without changing their MAC address then the ban comes with them.
You should also make that information available to users so every player can lookup any other player and see a list of all the MAC addresses (minus the last 2 digits), IP's and SteamIDs that the player has had in the past. In the past I used to play a lot of AA2 and that used to have this and it's still online even though the game is dead. None of those bit of information are really that much of a secret, but it did make it much more difficult for the average clueless, non-techie to hide it when they had been caught cheating in the past using a different account.
... and a few are just plain dicks.
Err, no. Every last person who loads up a cheat then plays against other people on the net on non-cheat server is a complete dick. It is like entering a public chess tournament with a hidden computer. It utterly detracts from the fun for other legit players who just want to enjoy themselves in a competitive, but also fair environment. If you can not get you head round how to enjoy playing a game online and also doing ok at it, then fine just give up or whatever. Don't try and ruin for everyone else though because that to me is being about as petty as you can get.
Being anti nuclear today = being pro coal. As simple as that. Only those in favor of all non fossil fuels are really anti coal and anti natural gas.
Not even close. I have hung around with a few ardent environmentalists in the past and most of them actually think we should just use less electricity in the first place.
For instance, one of the things that may drive up global electricity consumption over the next few decades is electric cars replacing good old gasoline and petrol. If you ask quite a few environmental types though the solution here is clearly that you simply throw away the idea of a car and move to mass transit and walking or cycling instead. They do kind of have a point in that we use cars for plenty of journeys we could do without if we were forced to, well the answer is clearly to force us to :)
Also, what about things like dishwashers or tumble driers. They use more electricity than washing plates by hand or drying clothes on lines but are far more convenient.
These are just a few (not that good) examples as I am coming to the end of my lunch break and don't have time to think of better ones. The important thing though is that there are plenty of ways that us as human beings could use far less electricity if we were to put up with a ton of extra inconvenience, and many people actually believe that the additional inconvenience should be something you choose to live with.
It is worth noting at this point that the people I knew who believed this generally lived by their own ideals. They rarely owner cars (or had car share schemes so only used one for essential journeys), walked and cycled everywhere (including to work, they were mostly older working types rather than the layabouts you would assume watching fox news or whatever) and few owned dishwashers or tumble driers. They thought this was everyone's responsibility to behave in the same manner.
I personally admired their dedication their ideals even if I did not always agree with all of them.
You call it waste, I call it fuel. Actually I call it a fear stick, because of the insanely disproportionate fear attached to the hunk of metal known as a spent fuel rod.
Spent fuel rods are actually quite easy to dispose of comparatively to what is being discussed here. This is about decommissioning a nuclear reactor, the problem here is that you have a huge metal container that is now slightly radioactive as a result of being exposed to other radioactivity for its entire life and being expected to contain it. You pretty much end up have to take the entire building away to be treated in the same was the fuel rods.
(Oblig Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...)
Need a Venn Diagram for the subsidies that the Koch brothers oppose.
Draw a large circle, and write "government subsidies of any kind" in it. Then, draw a larger circle around it, and label it "subsidies that the Koch brothers oppose.
Yes, the Koch brothers oppose solar subsidies, because they are subsidies.
It is also disingenuous to say they want surtaxes on solar. While it may be true, the context is that there are surtaxes on other forms of energy, and they want a level playing field.
This is a very bad summary.
But that is stupid. The whole point of putting surtaxes on non-renewable forms of energy is that they are non-renewable so by using them today you are storing up costs for the future when they are gone. The problems can be to do with having to mitigate the effects of more CO2 in the atmosphere or with them simply running out but either way we know there will be a cost down the line, so since government will ultimately have to foot the bill either way they impose a tax to mitigate that (in theory anyway, even if they do then spend it on some other crap).
With solar power however the energy gained is absolutely free at the point of generation. If you don't put a solar panel in the way then that solar energy would have just contributed to warming the planet when it hit the ground underneath. This is (or should be) the main reason why no tax is paid on energy from solar. Maybe you should even get a tax-rebate for using solar to generate electricity as the energy you generate would normally have contributed to global warming as it hit the ground and heated it. (ok, I studied years of physics so know this is a stretch but I still think it a net benefit, however minute)
I can understand (although I do not agree with, we need to encourage more solar use, not less) the idea of putting a small tax on solar panels themselves as they are quite polluting to produce, but once they are built they actually do far more good for the planet than bad, unlike all the fossil fuels the Kock brothers make their money from.
Beyond that, the Alaska Native peoples got something less of a raw deal than the rest of the indigenous populations.
Yup, but would that still be the case if we caused a massive oil leak then decided we could not be bothered to clean it up as only they lived there? I personally think not, even if they don't live near the spill I reckon you wouldn't have to kill to many animals with an oil slick to make it much hard for them to feed themselves.
What the parent poster was suggesting was pretty stupid, and I rather think that if you asked the average Innuit whether they mind me lumping them in with Eskimos while suggesting that we should do our best to avoid or at least clean up afterwards an oil slick on their lands they wouldn't mind too much :)
Birth control is subsidized. Abortions, the pill, hysterectomies and vasectomies are free. Oh, you mean in the US? Well, that's a different matter.
This is called pragmatism. Not allowing poor people free or cheap access to birth control results in lots of unwanted kids to crap parents who don't really want to be parents, those end up costing a fortune when they grow up and are more likely to turn to crime.
You might think it morally repugnant to pay for someone to have an abortion, but that is far cheaper in the long term than a poor 16 year old single mom firing out 10 kids who all grow up into people we have to imprison for most of their lives as prison is so damn expensive. It also makes it much more difficult for the mother to decide she wants to make something of here life and go to night school or something in her twenties if she already has 2 kids before then and is on welfare.
By pouring it into the sea, they have prevented it from being burned and poured into the sky as CO2.
Instead it's eaten by bacteria and such and released into the environment as CO2, without even the benefits of us burning it.
But you are not taking into account the benefit of the oil killing a bunch of CO2 creating (ie: oxygen breathing) marine life, surely that will balance that out.
I expect I know how the mods will treat this, but - who cares? Why bother to clean it up at all? It will clot up and have negligible impact, and no one lives there.
Firstly, people do live there, they are an indigenous people called Eskimo. I suppose they just one more form of indigenous people that the US can shit on though in addition to the native Americans you stole a whole country from.
Secondly, the problem with "just leave it there" is it stinks from a moral standpoint. It is basically saying "we fully expect to make a huge mess of some other area of the planet an not cleaning it up because we cannot be bothered". If the US wants to carry on behaving in that manner do not be too surprised when more and more countries turn a blind eye to people training for terrorist attacks on the US, especially if those countries start getting hit by environmental fallout. How countries act on a global stage and how they are perceived has an impact on how likely they are have terrorist scum bags flying planes into buildings.
It's obvious that ssh key login is 1-factor.
Is it? I had a generally very good sys-admin previously insist we move to key based from passwords specifically because he thought it was 2 factor. It did not ring true in my mind when he said that though so I thought about it on the way home and then explained the above to him the next day. I wondered if this was a commonly held misconception about SSH?
I have done ride alongs. The police assume everyone is a criminal. There are only two types of people. Cops and criminals. We never played "cops and innocent bystanders" as kids. We are trained that there are two sides. Long gone are the beat cops that proactively prevented crime by building relationships with the neighborhood. The cops swoop in arrest everyone, and let the lawyers sort it out. Cops that want to rise will work on beating out confessions to protect conviction rates. After all, if you are talking to a cop, you are a criminal, they just might not have proven it yet.
No, a ride along doesn't give justification as to why the armed cop is beating the unarmed person. The number one reason people are beat is "contempt of cop". If you don't follow orders fast enough, you are resisting. If you are resisting arrest, they can beat you. That's how it's done.
I think one solution to this is for us to remind them they are actually our public servants as often as possible. If you are lost, then go up and ask them for directions if they seem to be standing around doing nothing. Hell, maybe even ask them if you are not lost just so they get to talk to a law abiding citizen for a change. Then, if they are helpful, be polite and courteous and make sure you say thanks.
They will still have to deal with utter some scumbags, but maybe if they spent more time dealing with people who are not then they might find it easier to not treat everyone like they are.
Google Maps already has so many major problems that it just doesn't make sense to go on a rampage adding more half-baked features. I really miss being able to drag the little guy to the map to get to street view. Now, that doesn't work. Only a Republican would think adding features to something you can't get to is the right thing to do. Seriously, fix getting to street view before adding features. It's asinine of them to do this.
its not really broken is it? They just changed the way it worked so now you tap on the map where you want to get the street view option instead of having to drag some weird icon from the top left corner. I know that it was nice and easy once you knew what that man was, but it was not exactly intuitive for nooblets. Now when ever you click anywhere on the map it brings up a little box with the streetview here button in it.
But hey, your right, Google should never be allowed to change user interface stuff, ever.
Not to mention that most pen tests stop the very second even a single vulnerability is found. Some tester might drop a bunch of flash drives in the parking lot, wait for an employee to take one inside, and then conclude that they've penetrated the building and that the test is finished. They never find the fact that you could clone someone's badge from 50 feet away, or that the network ports in the public lobby aren't VLANed separately from the network ports in the high-security areas, or...
Have you ever been through a real pen test?
I have (twice, two different security companies several years apart on the same web application) and they certainly did not stop after the first thing they found. They kept trying and trying and provided a report detailing every single issue they found, coded on a 1 to 5 scale based on importance. The reports came both came to pages and pages for probably less that 20 issues, less than 5 critical. Obviously in both cased the only sent us the reports in encrypted form and only gave us the decryption pass phrase over the phone, when they were 100% sure they were speaking to the correct people.
If you get a pen test done and they stop after the first thing they found then the company you hired is crap.
Is your IT system set up this way? Why not? Two-factor auth is easy, off-the-shelf stuff these days
How do you do 2 factor auth with SSH and is it more secure than a decent password requirement?
I ask because I had this argument a few years back and realised that password protected private keys are not really 2 factor auth since if someone gets the private key then they can brute force the passphraase out of it client side since they have unlimited attempts without the possibility of lockout (the passphrase is only used to unlock the private key, not exchanged with the server as part of the auth process). Compare that to a decent password policy, where the server locks the user out after a few wrong attempts and which is more secure?
I am not advocating one over the other but it is worth remembering that both have their drawbacks. Strong two factor auth in my book would be a private key coupled with a password that was only validated server side.
Really, what were they doing?
What about Ruby Ridge? There is a reason we paid that family millions of dollars in compensation.
Not saying either were great people. But look at Nevada, a 1,000 man militia. Probably the first time a battalion size militia has been active in the U.S.
Sure you can argue Mr. Bundy was breaking the law. But one can also argue the Feds enacted unethical policies and mis-used laws, in an abusive way.
Remember EVERYTHING the British did to the colonialists was 'legal'. The point of the Second Amendment is for those times when what is legal (or what is illegal) is WRONG!!!!!
But of course the big problem is that the one thing you can guarantee is that any attempt to resist the federal US government by force would end in failure thanks to the US military. The only hope would be to use the power of the people to resist and that can be done without a single shot being fired if enough people agree.
Who cares what the founding fathers said or meant, they did not foresee the US having the largest full time, professional standing army on the the face of the planet. That alone might have scared them. Then on top of that include all the trained FBI, ATF and god knows who else armed and trained swat style officers who stand ready to clamp down on any armed resistance from the population. I bet if you showed the current state of the US to most of them they would have a very different idea of what to write anyway.
The upshot of all of this is that the second amendment now is largely irrelevant to the freedom of the american people. Any sort of government movement to restrict said freedom can only be prevented if the US population en mass see it as such and resist. The form that resistance would take is largely irrelevant since it is the numbers that make the biggest difference over the method. It might even be the case that peaceful resistance is more effective since it makes it much harder for the government to win any sort of propaganda war.
What the second amendment does do however is massively help the US arms industry as it has a huge home market to bolster its bottom line. That alone makes it highly unlikely it will ever be amended.
"Yes men", or "enablers" as you call them, are the root cause of the out-of-control bureaucracy problem.
The problem is that according to this particular management theory the opposite of an "enabler" is a "blocker". You do not want to come across as one of them if you value your job and future employment prospects for large organisations that subscribe to such things.
The crown was an insane rule that every new hyperlink had to be aproved not just by a department head but by the vice chancellor himself.
At that point you should have just emailed everyone on the committee, and copied in the vice-chancellor with some stats on exactly how many approvals this would generate on a daily basis. Include the actual statistics for the previous 7 days so if this was generating 50 pages per day you had some clear number to back this up while still in the planning stage. That was clearly why you were put on the committee, to stop a bunch of know nothings from coming up with a stupid policy, you failed.
The way to succeed as a techie is not about being technically brilliant any more, it is about how you can talk people round to your way of thinking and use evidence to back up your points of view.
They want bureaucracy, they make the paperwork. Tell them to track windows and distro security pages, the changes are there.
Yep. They're the "experts". Just tell them the Microsoft KB number, that's all the information they need.
Yup, follow this advice and come across like an unhelpful douchbag.
Or, bend over backwards to help them. Provide them with a break down on every single patch (a few line summary with a link to the KB article for the full details), then give each patch a priority based on its impact and come up with different deployment routes for each one, then explain to your manager who allocates your time why patch management for the CAB board just became a full time job.
Also, if they ever reject any and you end up a dependency hell where you cannot install a critical patch because of a low impact one you rejected (you do test each patch deployment run on a dummy server don't you?) then explain why the process failed, politely, without saying thing like "I told you this was dumb years ago!".
Alternatively, if the system runs for a few months and every single patch sent to the CAB board has been approved then you can clearly demonstrate the do not really add anything and start making rational arguments to abandon the process from a sound basis while demonstrating you are an excellent team player who easily adapts.
But if you would rather come across like a non-team player who hates any interference in your system admin fiefdom then, just go with the douche bag option and watch your job get outsourced in 6 months.
In my experience the world of work is full of crap like this, times when processes that are overly bureaucratic are forced on us techies even though we clearly see them as a waste of our time. Unfortunately this is generally just stuff we have to lap up as part of our job, if you can, you generally end up earning more and with the greater long term job security that working as part of a larger company provides.
An excellent book on this sort of business related stuff is called "Who moved my cheese" and the gist of it is that you want to come across as and "enabler" rather than a "blocker". That often means trying your best to make what is clearly a stupid idea a success.
...
The other truth is... the American Revolution wasn't started by a bunch of serfs, it was started by rich land owners who didn't like their deal...
That is the truth about almost any revolution there ever was. In reality any uprising of the masses that did not get organized by some silly or evil group from the top, failed.
It is worth reading some of the sections of Goldstein's book in George Orwell's 1984 regarding this.
He suggests that all revolutions are actually started and driven by the middle classes so it is them who you really need to watch as they who possess the skills like leadership needed to stir the proletariat into action. Thus generally the result of most revolutions is that the old ruling class is destroyed and the middle class replace them, the proletariat however generally stay in the same position apart from a few who are elevated to form the new middle class along with some members of the previous ruling class who didn't put up too much of a fight and went quietly.
I'm from Europe. I know what it is like if you actually DO have parties with diverging world views. There are countries where you actually have everything from far left to far right to choose from.
And if you look at certain parts of Europe (ie, anywhere not the UK) you have proportional representation where people with politically diverse views actually have to work together to get stuff done. The problem is that makes for a "weak" government because it tends to be more responsive to the public who elected them. Can't have that :)
It's never been a front for the rich.
Well the like of the Koch brothers have made it so now, but you are obviously too indoctrinated by the US media to realise this. Never mind.
"A failing road car stops on the road. Not always ideal, but generally a controllable event"
Far from ideal, quite often fatal. A failing car on a crowded interstate can result in an accident involving many vehicles with lots of casualties, and this happens shockingly often.
"A failing flying car drops out of the sky."
Unlikely. You have redundant systems, if your main control system fails the backup kicks in, you have 8 engines and still have limited flight abilities even if over half of them fail simultaneously, and even if absolutely everything else fails there is a parachute big enough to bring the entire car down relatively gently.
"Therefore it has to be orders of magnitude more reliable than your typical car."
Yes, that part is correct.
What happens when some terrorist scumbag deliberately crashes it into a heavily populated are laden with gasoline and soap (napalm). Or they go for a very tall building but fill the vehicle with high explosive instead.
Flying cars open up a whole new avenue of terrorist targets as they are far more manoeuvrable then a light aircraft. If they became ubiquitous they also have the problem that it would become commonplace for people to get lost and accidentally fly into restricted airspace so you could not just shoot down anyone that did on sight.
The reality is that flying cars are not ever likely to happen in our lifetimes because it is in governments interest to keep most of us on the ground and only let a small minority fly around. It used to be that costs of manufacture prohibited flying cars but if this price ever comes down then government will just come up with some insane airworthiness test or similar that costs billions to put a vehicle through. Or just keep the pilots licence requirement, not matter how simple that a flying car could actually be made.
I believe the term is "artificial scarcity"
Well, I see you haven't established that the Koch brothers are actually right wing.
All the Koch brothers care about is making themselves richer and paying less in tax. They mostly donate case to conservative campaigns and think tanks, that counts as right wing in my book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Also note this bit:
"Charles also organizes twice yearly meetings[20] with Republican donors.[16]"
I would have linked directly the the references above but they are pay walled.
I could not give a crap about the Gmail example, but the fact is that "libertarianism" in the US is just a front, funded by the likes of the Koch brothers (and others) and designed to facilitate a tax regime friendly to the richest 1% of the population. If that does not count as right wing I do not know what does.
That sounds like a Mint thing. Seriously, Debian (the great grandparent of Mint) had the patch as fast as anybody. Heck, by the time I logged into my Mac at work, MacPorts had pushed the patch.
I wouldn't make such a sweeping statement about the "situation" when you've hitched your wagon to a project that's pulling from a project that's pulling from a project that's (etc).
Interestingly our Debian servers are completely unaffected by this bug since we use Debian 6 :) Sometimes it pays to be a little behind the times.
In this case, there was a simple fix, recompiling OpenSSL with the proper flag and going, so letting people know as soon as possible is the best option. Those who are serious about security don't wait for Ubuntu to update their apt servers.
Recompiling something from source is often a complete no-no, not because the sysadmin is unable to, but because he his forbidden from doing so by his corporate overlords. It is trusted binaries (via checksum) from the likes of RedHat or nothing.