Exactly why you want to be clear you won't leak any information. If they fear you are going to damage the company this kind of thing can happen. If they know you are going to keep your nose out of it beyond the memo they might actually work with you to fix things.
Don't even rely on email. Print out a memo and keep a copy for yourself. Warn them in a "I just want you to have all the facts because I care about you as a customer" way that they may be exposing themselves to legal trouble if any of their customers live in an area with laws about this kind of thing (or if they are a publicly traded company, or in certain regulated industries.) Also warn that while you wouldn't violate confidentiality a leak by someone else could devistate customer trust.
Hopefully that will encourage them to do the right thing. If not you have at least CYA before the news leaks out and the company blames it all on a consultant working for them.
This wasn't talking about a click-through or sign-on Eula. It was talking about an agreement the employee had to review and sign as part of their terms of employement. They had to re-sign in anually.
The guy "downloaded and stored" the images over the course of several years which means he had to have signed the agreement more than once. His argument seems to be that he was singled out and that others in higher positions have done the same thing and even given him some of the images he had saved. (Totally believeable actually.)
If so many interactive intranet app developers didn't use activex controls, MS tools and MS libraries that only work with IE then more would. We have FF installed and set as the default browser throughout our organization and almost all Internet sites our users need work just fine. A few do not. Our 2nd most used intranet app, however, only works with IE. (And not with IE 7)
Our accounting software vendor warned us last month that we had to block IE7 because the web interface to accounts (which is heavily used here) breaks utterly even though they use MS libraries and components to make it from what I understand.
I don't do anything illegal and I pay my taxes. I don't even speed (yes, I'm basically pretty boring.)
The issue I have with eroding privacy isn't that big, bad government is out to get me. I'm really not that interesting and it wouldn't be worth their time.
I'm more concerned with an individual or small group within the governement using the information in a negative way. Even more scarry is the prospect of it being done when they are convinced in their own minds that it's "for my own good" or for the good of the country."
Most blacklists work on the IP addresses of the sending host. (Those that don't are just asking to be abused.) Unfortunately that means most are useless against bot-net spamming zombies since they'd need to have the IP address of all of the Windows systems on the Internet.
There are a few that blacklist only DHCP or residential IPs but my experience has been that they inveriably also include businesses and other legitimate organizations. Sometimes it's because the ISP doesn't segregate its DHCP and static IPs and sometimes it's because the business went the cheap route and is trying to use a "home" account for business use. These lists also don't help protect from companies with dozens or hundreds of infected Windows PCs sending emails out through the company firewall.
If I could run all of the tests I want to I could iliminate a ton of the spam coming in. Unfortunately a lot of the domains my users need to receive email from don't follow basic RFCs much less recommended best practices. As a result many tests which seem great on the surface block far too much legitimate mail.
Heck even Yahoo can't be bothered to add an SPF record to their DNS. (Ok, it's not an RFC but it's a good idea just the same.)
How do you feel about emails that become the casualty of the domain owner's or postmaster's failure to do things right?
I don't agree that he has the right to look at the source code to everything installed on his computer. He does have the right to only install stuff that he can view the source code of but that's just called freedom of choice.
Where I live we have Verizon phone service and Charter cable. Neither of which care to offer broadband in the area. Fiber optics pass right by us near the highway on public right-of-way but can't be accessed. Enough people in the area would like broadband to cover expenses but the town can't offer it due to state regulations.
As a result the ONLY option at this point has been satellite or dial-up. Try using a VoIP phone on one of those connections!
In the case of these codecs though there is nothing to give any assurance that they are safe. The reputation of the author is unknown and whether the codec has made anyone sick or not is unknown. No certification body or board has approved or verified them. Based on all that, not knowing exactly what is in them and still using them is just plain dumb.
I wouldn't eat cake I found sitting out on a park bench either... even if it had a pretty hand-painted sign saying it was safe and the best cake ever made. If, however, I could accurately identify all of the ingredients and confirm it wasn't tainted then I'd probably have a bite.
9. Why is your CSS still so bad? We have only finite resources! (Though we're still the biggest software company in the world, by a fair margin -- please ignore that upstart Apple who is shipping an ACID2-passing browser.)
To me this points to one of MS's biggest problems in the web arena. In a medium where compatibility is critical they used their limited IE team resources to build in anti-phishing, tabs and RSS (all things already available as plugins AFAIK.) They didn't use resources to work on compatiblity with published standards. It's the "pretty-blinking-lights win out over technical substance" type of decision they are known for.
They know that the everage user will notice new gee-whizzy features but not notice CSS problems. And if they do see a problem they will blame the web site for it not IE. Your choice is to pop up a "This web site uses official web standards which Microsoft has decided not to support." message or kludge things so IE visitors will see what you indended.
They count on on their market share to force web developers to make the 2nd choice and do the work so MS doesn't have to fix things. I bet if IE fell to a minority out of the browsers on the Internet and developers stopped kludging their sites MS would fix compatibily almost instantly.
If that's true how is Oracle's support any better than Red Hats? They support RHEL for 7 years from release. Heck, we're still running v2.1 and getting updates.
So because *windows XP installer* didn't know how to use a keyboard it is the fault of the KB itself? Various other posts have claimed they've experienced the same problem even with MS branded USB keyboards. Also, two different Linux distros were able to use the keyboard even from the very first boot prompt (when only the bootloader had been run.)
Add all that together and, to me, it makes it a Windows XP installer problem and not hardware problem.
While XP itself may be 5 years old, SP2 is not nearly that old and I was installing from an XP SP2 installation CD.
whilst a mere two year old version of Linux needs a new kernel?
And you can get the very latest version of virtually every distro for free if you want. If a 2-year old version distro doesn't work you can just grab the latest one. Can you say the same for Windows? If I have Win2000 and some hardware is only supported under XP do I get a free upgrade?
Your sound and video were the gimped versions that are installed with the Linux distro.
I'll admit I didn't try any 3D/GL games under SUSE or Knoppix. Then again, my sound and video were "gimped" under the Windows install too... even more-so. Video was VGA 800x600 (and 8 colors) max until I updated and there was NO sound until I installed extra drivers. There was also no ethernet.
If you didn't have support for your USB keyboard or mouse you had non-standard components.
I don't remember the brand of KB and the mouse worked. Both worked just fine under both Linux distros including the SUSE installer.
XP HAS NEVER HAD A PROBLEM WITH PS2 DRIVERS, EVER.
re-read the post... I never said it did. That's why I went and got a PS/2 KB which worked fine.
If you have a problem it is your problem not XP.
I have at least 19 years experience installing, maintaining and administering DOS, Windows and networks for every version released from MS-DOS v3.3 through v6.22 and Windows v3.0 through XP & 2003 server. I have nearly that many years of experience with Linux from one of the first slackware releases up through the latest RHEL, Fedora, SUSE and Gentoo versions.
The point being I'm not some bumbling idiot who jammed an XP SP2 install CD in the drive and then was shocked a Genie didn't pop out and do everything for me. I actually do know how to install hardware, partition drives, install OSes, multiboot, etc. Yet even with that it still took far too long (IMHO) to install MS's flagship home OS latest version from brand new CDs.
Sure, I was able to walk away regularly and let it do it's thing (especially during the phase of formatting the drive) but it still needed far too much interaction, too many reboots and too many downloads. In the past 2 years, the only Linux install I've had that took that long (start to finish, including video drivers) was a Gentoo stage 1 install which took somewhere on the order of 30 hours (including all apps) and a fair amount of user interaction.
Anyhow, I'm just relating my most recent experience with installing XP Home on new hardware and saying it was similar to the GP post. I'll defend MS where they deserve it but installing on the latest hardware isn't one of those places. Whether this experience is typical or not isn't really relavent. (In fact I'm installing Server 2003 (sp2 standard edition) right now on a couple of production boxes and it's going very well.)
This could have been the problem. I didn't bother to check the BIOS since I had a ps/2 kb handy. It was still interesting that the Linux installer didn't have any issues and Linux was far easier to install yet all I seem to hear is how hard Linux is to install.
I don't know what your problem was, but it wasn't the OS.
Ahh.. of course. The fact that Linux *could* use the USB keyboard means nothing. Must be a hardware flaw that only pops up during a Windows install. Maybe the PC was alergic to the Windows installer.
I can just about mirror your experience. I recently built a PC for a friend who needed XP Home because of some Windows app that he needs for work. First though I booted up Knoppix to confirm all the parts were working. Everything worked... sound, network, video.. everything.
Since that went so well I tried an OpenSUSE install. Again, everything was detected and just worked on bootup. It took about 30 minutes from booting the CD to having a fully patched system. (He didn't want Linux so this was really just a chance to play with this combination of hardware and see if I wanted to build myself one just like it or not.)
The XP install (yes, the cd was XP-SP2.. full retail copy) was a real PITA. I had to go hunt down a keyboard with a ps/2 connector because I couldn't do the install with the USB KB. It took over 3 hours to get the OS installed and enough drivers added on to make everything work right along with all the patches.
After the pain of the XP install was over it worked just fine. He loves it... it's faster than any PC he has ever owned.
MS ignored the warnings - they were dire, loud and frequent - and...
And this is in keeping with their past actions. Can you say "DCOM'? Since even before the Internet was very popular MS has made design choices which were critisized by security experts while they were just initial marketing hype. Yet MS went ahead and implemented them anyhow.
Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention when I was 8 coming up to an intersection on my bike. Add improperly trimmed bushes blocking view of the road from the stopsign. Then add a 17 year old girl speeding (55 in a 25) and you can probably guess what happened.
It fscked me up and good. It took somewhere around 6 months to get out of the cast and another 3-4 to be able to ditch crutches and run again. If I had it to do over again I would, of course, avoid that little incident.
I'll tell you one thing though I am extremely alert to threats in my daily life since then. I'm not talking about the kind of "I don't want to go out the door it's dangerous out there" kind of alert. The "that nail sticking straight up out of a board as paper-keeper could be bad news if I trip on that box on the floor" kind of alert.
Is realizing that bad shit really can happen to you one of the major transitions into adulthood?
Anyhow bumps, bruises, cuts and scrapes are part of life. It's the stuff that is going to cost a child their life or long-term loss of use of body parts that we should worry about.
Do you think that, on his deathbed, Einstein was thinking "Oh, I wish I had paid more attention to my wife" No, he was thinking "I wish I had gotten to finish my unified theory of relativity"
That's leaping to conclusions if you ask me. In his later years he was very much a socialist and interested in the well being of other people. It seems that he became a people first type of guy and may very well have lamented not having closer relationships with his wife (take your pick) and children.
In fact if the unified theory was *that* important to him it seems he would have spent more time on it than on socialist and union-creating activities.
The search for the fourth bomb was carried out by means of a novel mathematical method, Bayesian search theory, which assigns probabilities to individual map grid squares, then updates these as the search progresses. The mathematical team, from Wagner Associates, was led by Dr John Craven. The method requires as input initial probabilities for the grid squares, and these probabilities made use of the fact that a local fisherman, Francisco Simó Orts, witnessed the bomb entering the water at a certain location.
Who would of thunk it. You must have to have an IQ of 160 to come up with the idea that the bomb has a higher chance of being close to where it was seen hitting the ocean. I bet people of only average IQ would have just set up a 100 square mile grid and started at the point furthest away from where the bomb landed.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly why you want to be clear you won't leak any information. If they fear you are going to damage the company this kind of thing can happen. If they know you are going to keep your nose out of it beyond the memo they might actually work with you to fix things.
Don't even rely on email. Print out a memo and keep a copy for yourself. Warn them in a "I just want you to have all the facts because I care about you as a customer" way that they may be exposing themselves to legal trouble if any of their customers live in an area with laws about this kind of thing (or if they are a publicly traded company, or in certain regulated industries.) Also warn that while you wouldn't violate confidentiality a leak by someone else could devistate customer trust.
Hopefully that will encourage them to do the right thing. If not you have at least CYA before the news leaks out and the company blames it all on a consultant working for them.
This wasn't talking about a click-through or sign-on Eula. It was talking about an agreement the employee had to review and sign as part of their terms of employement. They had to re-sign in anually.
The guy "downloaded and stored" the images over the course of several years which means he had to have signed the agreement more than once. His argument seems to be that he was singled out and that others in higher positions have done the same thing and even given him some of the images he had saved. (Totally believeable actually.)
If so many interactive intranet app developers didn't use activex controls, MS tools and MS libraries that only work with IE then more would. We have FF installed and set as the default browser throughout our organization and almost all Internet sites our users need work just fine. A few do not. Our 2nd most used intranet app, however, only works with IE. (And not with IE 7)
Our accounting software vendor warned us last month that we had to block IE7 because the web interface to accounts (which is heavily used here) breaks utterly even though they use MS libraries and components to make it from what I understand.
I don't do anything illegal and I pay my taxes. I don't even speed (yes, I'm basically pretty boring.) The issue I have with eroding privacy isn't that big, bad government is out to get me. I'm really not that interesting and it wouldn't be worth their time. I'm more concerned with an individual or small group within the governement using the information in a negative way. Even more scarry is the prospect of it being done when they are convinced in their own minds that it's "for my own good" or for the good of the country."
Most blacklists work on the IP addresses of the sending host. (Those that don't are just asking to be abused.) Unfortunately that means most are useless against bot-net spamming zombies since they'd need to have the IP address of all of the Windows systems on the Internet.
There are a few that blacklist only DHCP or residential IPs but my experience has been that they inveriably also include businesses and other legitimate organizations. Sometimes it's because the ISP doesn't segregate its DHCP and static IPs and sometimes it's because the business went the cheap route and is trying to use a "home" account for business use. These lists also don't help protect from companies with dozens or hundreds of infected Windows PCs sending emails out through the company firewall.
If I could run all of the tests I want to I could iliminate a ton of the spam coming in. Unfortunately a lot of the domains my users need to receive email from don't follow basic RFCs much less recommended best practices. As a result many tests which seem great on the surface block far too much legitimate mail.
Heck even Yahoo can't be bothered to add an SPF record to their DNS. (Ok, it's not an RFC but it's a good idea just the same.)
How do you feel about emails that become the casualty of the domain owner's or postmaster's failure to do things right?
Yes you *probably* are.
I don't agree that he has the right to look at the source code to everything installed on his computer. He does have the right to only install stuff that he can view the source code of but that's just called freedom of choice.
Where I live we have Verizon phone service and Charter cable. Neither of which care to offer broadband in the area. Fiber optics pass right by us near the highway on public right-of-way but can't be accessed. Enough people in the area would like broadband to cover expenses but the town can't offer it due to state regulations.
As a result the ONLY option at this point has been satellite or dial-up. Try using a VoIP phone on one of those connections!
In the case of these codecs though there is nothing to give any assurance that they are safe. The reputation of the author is unknown and whether the codec has made anyone sick or not is unknown. No certification body or board has approved or verified them. Based on all that, not knowing exactly what is in them and still using them is just plain dumb.
I wouldn't eat cake I found sitting out on a park bench either... even if it had a pretty hand-painted sign saying it was safe and the best cake ever made. If, however, I could accurately identify all of the ingredients and confirm it wasn't tainted then I'd probably have a bite.
To me this points to one of MS's biggest problems in the web arena. In a medium where compatibility is critical they used their limited IE team resources to build in anti-phishing, tabs and RSS (all things already available as plugins AFAIK.) They didn't use resources to work on compatiblity with published standards. It's the "pretty-blinking-lights win out over technical substance" type of decision they are known for.
They know that the everage user will notice new gee-whizzy features but not notice CSS problems. And if they do see a problem they will blame the web site for it not IE. Your choice is to pop up a "This web site uses official web standards which Microsoft has decided not to support." message or kludge things so IE visitors will see what you indended.
They count on on their market share to force web developers to make the 2nd choice and do the work so MS doesn't have to fix things. I bet if IE fell to a minority out of the browsers on the Internet and developers stopped kludging their sites MS would fix compatibily almost instantly.
If that's true how is Oracle's support any better than Red Hats? They support RHEL for 7 years from release. Heck, we're still running v2.1 and getting updates.
So because *windows XP installer* didn't know how to use a keyboard it is the fault of the KB itself? Various other posts have claimed they've experienced the same problem even with MS branded USB keyboards. Also, two different Linux distros were able to use the keyboard even from the very first boot prompt (when only the bootloader had been run.)
Add all that together and, to me, it makes it a Windows XP installer problem and not hardware problem.
While XP itself may be 5 years old, SP2 is not nearly that old and I was installing from an XP SP2 installation CD.
And you can get the very latest version of virtually every distro for free if you want. If a 2-year old version distro doesn't work you can just grab the latest one. Can you say the same for Windows? If I have Win2000 and some hardware is only supported under XP do I get a free upgrade?
I'll admit I didn't try any 3D/GL games under SUSE or Knoppix. Then again, my sound and video were "gimped" under the Windows install too... even more-so. Video was VGA 800x600 (and 8 colors) max until I updated and there was NO sound until I installed extra drivers. There was also no ethernet.
I don't remember the brand of KB and the mouse worked. Both worked just fine under both Linux distros including the SUSE installer.
re-read the post... I never said it did. That's why I went and got a PS/2 KB which worked fine.
I have at least 19 years experience installing, maintaining and administering DOS, Windows and networks for every version released from MS-DOS v3.3 through v6.22 and Windows v3.0 through XP & 2003 server. I have nearly that many years of experience with Linux from one of the first slackware releases up through the latest RHEL, Fedora, SUSE and Gentoo versions.
The point being I'm not some bumbling idiot who jammed an XP SP2 install CD in the drive and then was shocked a Genie didn't pop out and do everything for me. I actually do know how to install hardware, partition drives, install OSes, multiboot, etc. Yet even with that it still took far too long (IMHO) to install MS's flagship home OS latest version from brand new CDs.
Sure, I was able to walk away regularly and let it do it's thing (especially during the phase of formatting the drive) but it still needed far too much interaction, too many reboots and too many downloads. In the past 2 years, the only Linux install I've had that took that long (start to finish, including video drivers) was a Gentoo stage 1 install which took somewhere on the order of 30 hours (including all apps) and a fair amount of user interaction.
Anyhow, I'm just relating my most recent experience with installing XP Home on new hardware and saying it was similar to the GP post. I'll defend MS where they deserve it but installing on the latest hardware isn't one of those places. Whether this experience is typical or not isn't really relavent. (In fact I'm installing Server 2003 (sp2 standard edition) right now on a couple of production boxes and it's going very well.)
This could have been the problem. I didn't bother to check the BIOS since I had a ps/2 kb handy. It was still interesting that the Linux installer didn't have any issues and Linux was far easier to install yet all I seem to hear is how hard Linux is to install.
Ahh.. of course. The fact that Linux *could* use the USB keyboard means nothing. Must be a hardware flaw that only pops up during a Windows install. Maybe the PC was alergic to the Windows installer.
I can just about mirror your experience. I recently built a PC for a friend who needed XP Home because of some Windows app that he needs for work. First though I booted up Knoppix to confirm all the parts were working. Everything worked... sound, network, video.. everything.
Since that went so well I tried an OpenSUSE install. Again, everything was detected and just worked on bootup. It took about 30 minutes from booting the CD to having a fully patched system. (He didn't want Linux so this was really just a chance to play with this combination of hardware and see if I wanted to build myself one just like it or not.)
The XP install (yes, the cd was XP-SP2.. full retail copy) was a real PITA. I had to go hunt down a keyboard with a ps/2 connector because I couldn't do the install with the USB KB. It took over 3 hours to get the OS installed and enough drivers added on to make everything work right along with all the patches.
After the pain of the XP install was over it worked just fine. He loves it... it's faster than any PC he has ever owned.
And this is in keeping with their past actions. Can you say "DCOM'? Since even before the Internet was very popular MS has made design choices which were critisized by security experts while they were just initial marketing hype. Yet MS went ahead and implemented them anyhow.
Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention when I was 8 coming up to an intersection on my bike. Add improperly trimmed bushes blocking view of the road from the stopsign. Then add a 17 year old girl speeding (55 in a 25) and you can probably guess what happened. It fscked me up and good. It took somewhere around 6 months to get out of the cast and another 3-4 to be able to ditch crutches and run again. If I had it to do over again I would, of course, avoid that little incident. I'll tell you one thing though I am extremely alert to threats in my daily life since then. I'm not talking about the kind of "I don't want to go out the door it's dangerous out there" kind of alert. The "that nail sticking straight up out of a board as paper-keeper could be bad news if I trip on that box on the floor" kind of alert. Is realizing that bad shit really can happen to you one of the major transitions into adulthood? Anyhow bumps, bruises, cuts and scrapes are part of life. It's the stuff that is going to cost a child their life or long-term loss of use of body parts that we should worry about.
That's leaping to conclusions if you ask me. In his later years he was very much a socialist and interested in the well being of other people. It seems that he became a people first type of guy and may very well have lamented not having closer relationships with his wife (take your pick) and children.
In fact if the unified theory was *that* important to him it seems he would have spent more time on it than on socialist and union-creating activities.
Who would of thunk it. You must have to have an IQ of 160 to come up with the idea that the bomb has a higher chance of being close to where it was seen hitting the ocean. I bet people of only average IQ would have just set up a 100 square mile grid and started at the point furthest away from where the bomb landed.