Right, but even in that event, you haven't lost a whole lot. Most of your stuff you can get back over the air after restoring your Android credentials. What's probably gone forever is the stuff you were doing most recently, which is the idea.
And of course, the police could get the same information from the phone company as they're trying to get from your phone in New Jersey, but the phone company would require a warrant. Which is also the idea.
> Err....don't most people lock their phones with a code?
Mine is a company phone. Locking and remote wipe are requirements. I suspect that even with password protection, law enforcement would argue that you're required to give them the password.
Had I a consumer phone in New Jersey, I'd look for (or build) an app that unlocks the phone on one password, and does a complete wipe and factory reset on being fed an alternate "special" password. "Gee, officer, I don't know what happened." Hand him the phone. "You might as well keep this." You could put in a preset delay with a way to abort and, I dunno "Self-destruct sequence has been initiated. Self destruct in five, four, three" Or maybe not.
> then he’s got to do what? Subpoena the service to see if the phone was actively used or not?'"
Lemme see.... YES. That's exactly what he's got to do, and that's what law enforcement has to do now. It's called
Let's see, how could this be misused? When daughter and I ride in her car, her phone says "text messageeeeee". At her request, I (the passenger) pick it up, see that it's a question from someone I also know, send the answer and am about to set it back down when there's an accident. In NJ she's absolutely screwed because it's my word against the cops that she was not handling the phone at the time of the accident. No, I suspect forensic DNA evidence would not be sought in a traffic accident.
Or,,,, if "the passenger was the one using the phone" becomes an acceptable excuse, everyone would use it whether it's true or not. Either way, the law serves no purpose except to screw with people. If this passes, it seems like a clear 4th amendment constitutional case. I feel for the police and the tough job they have, but they still better have a warrant before they touch my stuff.
Agreed. Anyone with experience with an Indian call center might think that if their military is anything like this, perhaps robots (even primitive ones) might do a better job. The thing is, I've worked with the Indian military, and I found them smart, well trained and well motivated. So I don't understand this at all.
"We have communicated to the vendor, and there needs to being a patch to OS, and being an update to the number three logic board. We will be doing that now.
"Wait, we need to do updates after hours..."
"I am reminding you that it is after hours."
"It's after hours *there*. It's still ten in the morning here! Wait, the lights on the robot have gone out."
(a long time later)
"We are very sorry to be reporting that the logic board has failed after the update. The vendor has been contacted. We are expect the replacement being onsite in three weeks."
"You've bricked my robot."
"The logic board has failed. The vendor is being sending a replacement...."
"Ok ok ok. At least it's not trying to kill me anymore."
And instead plunged billions into the toilet marked "robots on the front line". Because, to a great extent, it's the process that's the problem, not necessarily the product.
I agree. Parenthetically, the reason stuff like this happens in the first place is that the vendor has probably outsourced their maintenance operations to a minimal-cost minimal-experience crew who blindly follow the procedures handed to them. They do the updates because the script tells them to, and it doesn't matter that the customer has told them not to. We get this all the time. Offshore admins will "patch" production equipment because their procedures tell them to push out patches as they are made available, and it doesn't matter that customer doesn't want this. They get distressed when we say "don't do that" or at least "don't do that until the weekend" because they're doing what their scripts tell them to do and they don't know any different. It's a continuous struggle.
...is the Adobe Creative Suite. Specifically, Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere. Once that's native on a Linux or Android based platform, I'll quit Windows and never look back.
(Yes, I know it works on Apple. I was initially on Macintosh, but switched to Windows when Apple and Adobe began their pissing contest awhile back. I don't trust the platform now.)
But management is usually gauged, by their superiors or the board of directors, on results. A major production outage is not a good result. This can be used as leverage to get the process changed, if one has the guts to pursue it.
> but reality is that IT gets overridden by the Process Control department in a manufacturing business
It happens in a lot of industries. We're forever chasing vendors who think it's ok to pull our systems out from under us to apply updates, sometimes (thankfully rarely) bricking the systems keeping us down until they can make physical repairs.
I don't think there's a surefire technical solution. We disallow access from outside directly to our hardware via our firewall (the best solution -- don't think christmas tree timer, think firewall or switch controls) but since the outsourcing, our firewall is itself under management from an outside group (albeit a different one) and they don't seem to know what they're doing, except to call an operator to press the reset button when a problem is reported.
But the point is, the problem is a social one, not a technical one. I know you haven't had good results so far, but this needs to be fought in management, not in technology. A major production outage gives you fuel -- get riled up, and go talk to some people. Make it plain that the next time the vendor makes any change at all without first approval from a cross-department board, will be the last act that particular vendor does in your company. Put some teeth in your service contract. Hop to it. Your company is at stake.
I can see the attraction of hosted solutions for a smaller company, but the problem is, the small company typically doesn't have much slack in their operations, and it doesn't take many outages to put one under. Infrastructure failure taking everything down (sales, financials, ar/ap, development, web services, most forms of communication, anything that depends on that one connection to the internet) or a third world former bus driver dropping a critical table and then discovering they don't have a valid backup, or offshore admins, ostensibly diagnosing a prod server crash, following vendor advice, applying an unneeded firmware upgrade to "bring it current" and bricking the server. (Usually three days to replace, but general incompetence across the silos causes total offline time to be over 3 weeks.)
All of these are real examples. A large company can often take the hit and keep going, if only on inertia. Small companies fold quickly.
Oh, and the first large internet infrastructure outage will prevent a large number of companies from doing business, even internally, even companies who don't depend on a web presence to do business. People who question the logic of this setup will be banished to the basement and their red stapler taken away. At the second large internet infrastructure outage, the same thing will happen. And the third.
Server rooms will look pretty much the same, but they'll be larger, serve multiple companies, and only the smallest companies will have their own machines onsite.
IT will still be IT, except experience will be hard to come by (and expensive) and Dilbert will have a 3rd world accent.
Exchange in "the cloud". All the disadvantages of Exchange plus all the disadvantages of internet-based services, plus all the disadvantages of offshore admin.
A/D in the cloud. See above. Three weeks to get someone added to an A/D group.
Certificate treadmills -- agreed.
Migration to virtualization/blades, check.
Autotiering plus offshore, not-totally-engaged admins equals nobody knows where the data actually resides, or what hardware it touches. (We had an issue just this morning where it was discovered that key development data resided on hardware that "slipped through the cracks" and was not supported either by the offshore admins nor by the company. Discovered it when it stopped working.)
All in all, IT hardware will become more centralized, management/planning/administration will be suppressed by cost issues to operator levels, and we'll all long for the days of Dilbert.
Just sayin'.
Ten - fifteen years from now: Small companies with agile, cost-effective, local IT departments will succeed while massive companies buying IT as a service will generally fail. Some of those small companies will be seduced by outsource salescreatures, will throw away their core competency, and go out of business. The ones who do not do this will thrive.
In all fairness, I'm told that the later Galaxys are a lot more reliable. Still, before I left the store I'd download the free gps testing app, go outside, and see how many satellites it finds. If only one or two, you may have trouble.
Fair enough. Daughter went through six Galaxy phones before I paid off ATT and she switched to a Verizon Bionic. But it did seem like a whole pallet of Galaxies had fallen off a truck on the way to the ATT store and they decided to sell them anyway. Lots of different bizarre issues, of which lack of GPS was only the most common.
...the quality of our outsourced IT. Here I was assuming that they were just pulling food vendors off the street. (I mean really... a Linux admin who doesn't know "top"?) Now I wonder if they really did due diligence, but the applicants' grades were inflated. (By a lot, apparently.)
> What I would like to see a class action for is the broken GPS on the Galaxy S that I carried for 3 years
Yes! Hell yes! Why that wasn't a fiasco of biblical proportions I'll never know. I finally ate the penalty to end the contract so daughter could get a phone that actually worked. We haven't bought a Samsung product since.
That and the total inability to get the AT&T techs to understand that approx positioning via cell tower is NOT the same as GPS satellite lock. No, it's not. Not even a little bit. Not the same thing. No. Not better. Not equivalent either. Gaaah. Now I have to take another Tums. Being a former Samsung/ATT customer is like having PTSD.
Enh. First, bravo. But... there's still popular stuff that only works on Winders (some of which, granted, also works on OSX, but not Linux, and wine... erg). And I use XP regularly, and Win7 (on computers purchased since XP became unavailable) and Win7 is ok. (We also have a copy of Win8, and it's absolute pants. Nobody wants to use that machine.) I would say honestly, speaking as a M$ detractor, that Win7 SP1 is their last good desktop OS. (Windows Server 2008 is ok also...)
Steam client for Linux... ok ok, granted, but see, people have been predicting Microsoft's inevitable demise for quite a long time now. Of course, like the Second Coming, they have to be right eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
...make you think it's a really good idea to zap vague areas of your brain with electricity based on the hilariously incomplete field of neuroscience?
Any part, apparently.
Right, but even in that event, you haven't lost a whole lot. Most of your stuff you can get back over the air after restoring your Android credentials. What's probably gone forever is the stuff you were doing most recently, which is the idea.
And of course, the police could get the same information from the phone company as they're trying to get from your phone in New Jersey, but the phone company would require a warrant. Which is also the idea.
> Err....don't most people lock their phones with a code?
Mine is a company phone. Locking and remote wipe are requirements. I suspect that even with password protection, law enforcement would argue that you're required to give them the password.
Had I a consumer phone in New Jersey, I'd look for (or build) an app that unlocks the phone on one password, and does a complete wipe and factory reset on being fed an alternate "special" password. "Gee, officer, I don't know what happened." Hand him the phone. "You might as well keep this." You could put in a preset delay with a way to abort and, I dunno "Self-destruct sequence has been initiated. Self destruct in five, four, three" Or maybe not.
> then he’s got to do what? Subpoena the service to see if the phone was actively used or not?'"
Lemme see.... YES. That's exactly what he's got to do, and that's what law enforcement has to do now. It's called
Let's see, how could this be misused? When daughter and I ride in her car, her phone says "text messageeeeee". At her request, I (the passenger) pick it up, see that it's a question from someone I also know, send the answer and am about to set it back down when there's an accident. In NJ she's absolutely screwed because it's my word against the cops that she was not handling the phone at the time of the accident. No, I suspect forensic DNA evidence would not be sought in a traffic accident.
Or,,,, if "the passenger was the one using the phone" becomes an acceptable excuse, everyone would use it whether it's true or not. Either way, the law serves no purpose except to screw with people. If this passes, it seems like a clear 4th amendment constitutional case. I feel for the police and the tough job they have, but they still better have a warrant before they touch my stuff.
More meat for everyone else.
> You can't target communications networks as it's wireless with no central point of attack.
EMP. Done. (Did you fall asleep before the end of The Avengers?)
Agreed. Anyone with experience with an Indian call center might think that if their military is anything like this, perhaps robots (even primitive ones) might do a better job. The thing is, I've worked with the Indian military, and I found them smart, well trained and well motivated. So I don't understand this at all.
"We have communicated to the vendor, and there needs to being a patch to OS, and being an update to the number three logic board. We will be doing that now.
"Wait, we need to do updates after hours..."
"I am reminding you that it is after hours."
"It's after hours *there*. It's still ten in the morning here! Wait, the lights on the robot have gone out."
(a long time later)
"We are very sorry to be reporting that the logic board has failed after the update. The vendor has been contacted. We are expect the replacement being onsite in three weeks."
"You've bricked my robot."
"The logic board has failed. The vendor is being sending a replacement...."
"Ok ok ok. At least it's not trying to kill me anymore."
Nah, that would be outsourced to... no wait...
And instead plunged billions into the toilet marked "robots on the front line". Because, to a great extent, it's the process that's the problem, not necessarily the product.
I agree. Parenthetically, the reason stuff like this happens in the first place is that the vendor has probably outsourced their maintenance operations to a minimal-cost minimal-experience crew who blindly follow the procedures handed to them. They do the updates because the script tells them to, and it doesn't matter that the customer has told them not to. We get this all the time. Offshore admins will "patch" production equipment because their procedures tell them to push out patches as they are made available, and it doesn't matter that customer doesn't want this. They get distressed when we say "don't do that" or at least "don't do that until the weekend" because they're doing what their scripts tell them to do and they don't know any different. It's a continuous struggle.
(Yes, I know it works on Apple. I was initially on Macintosh, but switched to Windows when Apple and Adobe began their pissing contest awhile back. I don't trust the platform now.)
But management is usually gauged, by their superiors or the board of directors, on results. A major production outage is not a good result. This can be used as leverage to get the process changed, if one has the guts to pursue it.
> but reality is that IT gets overridden by the Process Control department in a manufacturing business
It happens in a lot of industries. We're forever chasing vendors who think it's ok to pull our systems out from under us to apply updates, sometimes (thankfully rarely) bricking the systems keeping us down until they can make physical repairs.
I don't think there's a surefire technical solution. We disallow access from outside directly to our hardware via our firewall (the best solution -- don't think christmas tree timer, think firewall or switch controls) but since the outsourcing, our firewall is itself under management from an outside group (albeit a different one) and they don't seem to know what they're doing, except to call an operator to press the reset button when a problem is reported.
But the point is, the problem is a social one, not a technical one. I know you haven't had good results so far, but this needs to be fought in management, not in technology. A major production outage gives you fuel -- get riled up, and go talk to some people. Make it plain that the next time the vendor makes any change at all without first approval from a cross-department board, will be the last act that particular vendor does in your company. Put some teeth in your service contract. Hop to it. Your company is at stake.
I can see the attraction of hosted solutions for a smaller company, but the problem is, the small company typically doesn't have much slack in their operations, and it doesn't take many outages to put one under. Infrastructure failure taking everything down (sales, financials, ar/ap, development, web services, most forms of communication, anything that depends on that one connection to the internet) or a third world former bus driver dropping a critical table and then discovering they don't have a valid backup, or offshore admins, ostensibly diagnosing a prod server crash, following vendor advice, applying an unneeded firmware upgrade to "bring it current" and bricking the server. (Usually three days to replace, but general incompetence across the silos causes total offline time to be over 3 weeks.)
All of these are real examples. A large company can often take the hit and keep going, if only on inertia. Small companies fold quickly.
Oh, and the first large internet infrastructure outage will prevent a large number of companies from doing business, even internally, even companies who don't depend on a web presence to do business. People who question the logic of this setup will be banished to the basement and their red stapler taken away. At the second large internet infrastructure outage, the same thing will happen. And the third.
Server rooms will look pretty much the same, but they'll be larger, serve multiple companies, and only the smallest companies will have their own machines onsite.
IT will still be IT, except experience will be hard to come by (and expensive) and Dilbert will have a 3rd world accent.
Exchange in "the cloud". All the disadvantages of Exchange plus all the disadvantages of internet-based services, plus all the disadvantages of offshore admin.
A/D in the cloud. See above. Three weeks to get someone added to an A/D group.
Certificate treadmills -- agreed.
Migration to virtualization/blades, check.
Autotiering plus offshore, not-totally-engaged admins equals nobody knows where the data actually resides, or what hardware it touches. (We had an issue just this morning where it was discovered that key development data resided on hardware that "slipped through the cracks" and was not supported either by the offshore admins nor by the company. Discovered it when it stopped working.)
All in all, IT hardware will become more centralized, management/planning/administration will be suppressed by cost issues to operator levels, and we'll all long for the days of Dilbert.
Just sayin'.
Ten - fifteen years from now: Small companies with agile, cost-effective, local IT departments will succeed while massive companies buying IT as a service will generally fail. Some of those small companies will be seduced by outsource salescreatures, will throw away their core competency, and go out of business. The ones who do not do this will thrive.
Everyone is eventually right, even conspiracy nuts.
In 5 years: What's an IT department?
In all fairness, I'm told that the later Galaxys are a lot more reliable. Still, before I left the store I'd download the free gps testing app, go outside, and see how many satellites it finds. If only one or two, you may have trouble.
Fair enough. Daughter went through six Galaxy phones before I paid off ATT and she switched to a Verizon Bionic. But it did seem like a whole pallet of Galaxies had fallen off a truck on the way to the ATT store and they decided to sell them anyway. Lots of different bizarre issues, of which lack of GPS was only the most common.
> What I would like to see a class action for is the broken GPS on the Galaxy S that I carried for 3 years
Yes! Hell yes! Why that wasn't a fiasco of biblical proportions I'll never know. I finally ate the penalty to end the contract so daughter could get a phone that actually worked. We haven't bought a Samsung product since.
That and the total inability to get the AT&T techs to understand that approx positioning via cell tower is NOT the same as GPS satellite lock. No, it's not. Not even a little bit. Not the same thing. No. Not better. Not equivalent either. Gaaah. Now I have to take another Tums. Being a former Samsung/ATT customer is like having PTSD.
> Did you buy an Acer laptop with Vista and less than 1 GB of RAM?
Um, no, because I'm not an idiot.
Enh. First, bravo. But ... there's still popular stuff that only works on Winders (some of which, granted, also works on OSX, but not Linux, and wine... erg). And I use XP regularly, and Win7 (on computers purchased since XP became unavailable) and Win7 is ok. (We also have a copy of Win8, and it's absolute pants. Nobody wants to use that machine.) I would say honestly, speaking as a M$ detractor, that Win7 SP1 is their last good desktop OS. (Windows Server 2008 is ok also...)
Steam client for Linux... ok ok, granted, but see, people have been predicting Microsoft's inevitable demise for quite a long time now. Of course, like the Second Coming, they have to be right eventually.