While I agree that Computers are a distraction and do not aid learning in many subjects, I think this takes a good idea too far. Kids today do need to understand how to use computers - it is a needed skill for almost any and all jobs, from a Lawyer, to a Doctor, to an Engineer. While I agree that computers should be kept in the computer lab, let's not keep them out of schools entirely.
Am I the only one disappointed that this revision doesn't support the Thunderbolt port? Even if few motherboards would ship with it at least the chipset should have the support.
Skype is such a poor company which such a poor product that this can only be good news. I struggle to see how Microsoft could make Skype any worse than it already is.
The Windows software just barely works, and frankly the mobile software (e.g. Android, iPhone, etc) is just an absolute joke. It is great software when it works, but that is a rare occasion indeed.
Skype's "support" is actually worse than Google, and Google doesn't really offer any support (except Adwords). Even if you have a Skype subscription and a Skype number, you're shit out of luck if anything goes wrong or you need help. Worse still they just introduced a new techsupport package which costs you an addition $5/month(!) just for the "pleasure" of having them not be able to help you.
If you ask me the ONLY reason why Skype still even exists as a serious competitor is simply because that entire sector is full of broken terrible software made very poorly (e.g. Live Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Voice). Worse still nobody is really rolling out links into the existing telephone infrastructure (Google seems to have quit).
Honestly, this is an industry that needs a serious kick in the nads. So poor in so many ways....
This petition and the signers of it just show that they're ignorant of the technology and the implementation of it. Unfortunately you might have government bodies thinking there is no smoke without fire, and making threats about this or that. But truth is this is a manufactured story that really has yet to cause anyone any problems.
Let me ask you this: Who has built a system with a UEFI subsystem which doesn't allow Secure Boot to be disabled by the user? Answer: Nobody.
The SAM file on Windows is impossible to retrieve while the Windows kernel is running. The kernel has an exclusive read/write lock on the file and any attempt to access it will be denied. It is possible to read an NTFS file-system outside of the OS even while the OS is running but we're talking about deep-file system inspection.
I was expecting to read one of the normal fear-mongering stories that we often see on/. (e.g. "Drop Box sends passwords in plain text!!") but actually this is one of the most serious OS level holes I've seen in years. Not only can you retrieve the password for any user on the system but you can also reset their password without having to know what it was.
People have posted "they're still hashes so you still have to break them" which is of course true, but if you keep reading down he shows you how to reset the other user's password without ever having to know them.
Is this really surprising to anyone? There are two ways to hide traffic. The first is illegal and it will cover your tracks because you can use hacked machines without any logging. The second is legal and it is very hard to hide yourself. The only legal way which might actually work is if you bounced through a country with no diplomatic ties to the West but very few of those are even on the internet.
So back to this company. Does it surprise anyone that a company located in the UK of all places would have to give up logs when a judge orders it to? It is that way in almost every Western state. If US law enforcement requested such information I see no reason why a UK court shouldn't grant it (although you'd have to decide on a case by case basis).
/. is on the same level in terms of its importance to Microsoft's business. Tons of technical people read/. including Network Admin, Programmers, and just your local technical handy-man. We are who most non-technical people get their recommendations and knowledge from. If we say something bad about Microsoft then the people we influence will listen.
That is why Vista failed. The technical people said it was bad so it was bad. That's why Microsoft has gone to such pains with Windows 7 and Windows 8 to keep us as a group happy and so far it has worked for them.
This list is fairly poor, but I just wanted to draw negative attention to UltraDefrag and all third party defrag programs. A lot of people use third party solutions but very few actually know why they are using them, except for claims like "they are better!" The truth is that defragging a hard drive is a fairly simple process that is hard to get wrong, you literally just re-organise chunks together into blocks. Windows Defrag gets it right, and to be honest you cannot improve on just getting it right, so why do third party solutions need to offer an alternative? The best they could accomplish is matching the Windows Defragger, and the worst is that they could do a poorer job...
Why are they trying to buy a failed OS that nobody uses? I could understand it if it came with some IP of note, but it doesn't. Plus let's be honest it will expand their consumer base by almost nobody that matters - a few geeks who made a poor purchasing decision.
I'm not one to harp on about Open Source and Linux, but in this one case it is a situation where HTC should be investing that cash into their own Linux/Android branch rather than buying WebOS which is worth little or nothing.
You're asking if Open Source will "take off" in the UK government but last time I checked Linux servers were already heavily used within UK government organisations (although, granted, Windows Server is also).
As a UK CS grad, let me say that there are far too many unemployed I.T. people at the moment, many of which have a decade of experience. You want someone who knows your system already rather than someone you need to train up to that standard.
The UK is broadly speaking a service industry country which means we can support lot's of I.T. people in good-times, but also means we have a lot of excess employees when the economy goes tits up.
In other, related, news the US [software and methods] patent system is completely fucked up - beyond broken. Everybody knows it but nobody is willing to fix it.
So not only did they hide a break-in from the internet at large, including companies (e.g. Google) which were by extension the target, but they also aren't able to tell how many or what kinds of fake certificates got generated by the break-in? If you ask me their entire CA needs to be revoked, and a new one started. They can then re-issue all legitimate certificates under the new CA. That is the only safe way to do it.
Is anyone really surprised that promoting violent actions on the internet gets the authorities involved? How many incidents has the Secret Service in the United States been involved in since Obama took office? I remember one extremely similar to this in which someone from New Mexico I believe posted on their private Facebook page about hurting Obama, and someone reported them, so the SS "had" to investigate, and it turns out it is like a middle-school kid.
Long story short, if you go posting about how you want to hurt X or Y, even if they're in a country the popular media has on its propaganda of evil list at the moment it is still illegal and immoral.
If the US had real competition you would have providers offering $10 broadband as standard without any income requirements. The rest of the Western world (ex. Canada) seem to be able to manage it. How long is the US going to let themselves be held hostage by the big two providers?
Sorry, but this assessment shows huge ignorance. Not only does he misunderstand how LuzSec and Anon' operate, he also entirely fails to explain either how a foreign government would benefit from infiltrating them or how they would go about doing so in such a spread out group.
I think a lot of military people are stuck in the past. They don't understand the internet age. They call things "cyber wars" with "cyber armies" and imagine these big well organised forces likely well financed via the normal means.
Fact is both LuzSec and Anon' are a threat. But that threat doesn't require another government or organised group to exist. It doesn't require millions in military aid. In fact it is just a rag-tag group of people who want to do what they want to do. It is very similar to terrorism, and the military are just as incapable dealing with online threats as they are terrorism threats.
To be honest I think people like Mr. Moores are part of the problem. Part of the reason the military cannot understand these threats. Fire his and the old guys, hire in some experts who know shit about the 21st century.
I believe the reason why they are claiming "illegal immigration" is to combat the issue of passenger switching. Essentially passenger A transits through the UK on their way to another destination - which means they have no legal right to leave the airport terminal. Passenger B buys an inter-EU/UK ticket, passenger A and B switch identities, and then A enters the UK illegally. Passenger B who was legal anyway just comes home using a second passport (normally issued by their native country before getting UK resident status).
That being said, I don't think the facial scanners will do jack shit to combat this. I think you'll have tons of false positive. I think their motivations are other than what they claim.
We want to jump on the NoSQL ship. I won't bore you with all of the details but briefly put SQL databases and tables are too restrictive for our work. Unfortunately because there are SO many NoSQL solutions, and none of them are backed by big names nobody here has the balls to sign off on one. Unfortunately, and ironically, NoSQL's biggest downside is the lack of cross compatibility. Once you make that call you're stuck with it good or bad.
The other issue, is that because all of these solutions are relatively young the toolsets simply don't exist for many of them. No libraries, backup solutions, third party support, etc. I wish we'd see someone like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, or any big name roll out some kind of complete solution (in particular XML compatible). I know a few big Cloud solutions exist but again we come back to being locked into a solution.
Unfortunately the data might just prove that good programmers continue to older age while their less skilled kin get promoted out of it. I also hold the opinion that older programmers who were typically maths graduates are far more skilled than the younger "computer science" graduates (I include myself in the latter group).
Exactly what else did the doctor suggest you try? Counselling, Group Theory, Dietary changes? Or was it just, you go in, BANG, prescription for drugs and problem solved?
That would be a fair point, if the US had tons of small inter-state cellular companies, with a few big evil cross-state providers. But that isn't the situation. Fact is, almost NO small businesses are currently operating in the US cellular sector. There is almost no competition at all in the US, the big two just make agreements on territory so they can both keep their prices high.
Honestly the EU isn't perfect but at least competition is healthy. The US has become so bad, the only solution I see at this stage is to make it illegal for a company to own both the core infrastructure and to also sell to the end consumer. That is what they did with the UK's BT monopoly. Broke it into three companies - consumer, wholesale, and Open Reach. And that was an massively successful route to take, with competition in the UK being extremely good.
That is an accurate summation of the article; but calling things "right" and "wrong" is a little nieve. Windows treats this information very differently to Linux, and BIOS manufacturers are caught between the two. Simply advertising ASPM sounds good, unless it causes Windows to treat card without ASPM support as if they have it just because the bios advertised that the system supported it. Now current versions of Windows might act rationally in this regard, but XP and older are still highly prevalent particularly amongst corporate clients and governments.
So I guess my point is - it isn't a simple right or wrong/black or white scenario. It is a messy, ugly, undocumented hack, that ultimately leaves nobody happy. Linux will likely wind up having to implement a hack too to fix this, which makes them no better or no worse than the bios manufacturers who did exactly the same thing.
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While I agree that Computers are a distraction and do not aid learning in many subjects, I think this takes a good idea too far. Kids today do need to understand how to use computers - it is a needed skill for almost any and all jobs, from a Lawyer, to a Doctor, to an Engineer. While I agree that computers should be kept in the computer lab, let's not keep them out of schools entirely.
Am I the only one disappointed that this revision doesn't support the Thunderbolt port? Even if few motherboards would ship with it at least the chipset should have the support.
Skype is such a poor company which such a poor product that this can only be good news. I struggle to see how Microsoft could make Skype any worse than it already is.
The Windows software just barely works, and frankly the mobile software (e.g. Android, iPhone, etc) is just an absolute joke. It is great software when it works, but that is a rare occasion indeed.
Skype's "support" is actually worse than Google, and Google doesn't really offer any support (except Adwords). Even if you have a Skype subscription and a Skype number, you're shit out of luck if anything goes wrong or you need help. Worse still they just introduced a new techsupport package which costs you an addition $5/month(!) just for the "pleasure" of having them not be able to help you.
If you ask me the ONLY reason why Skype still even exists as a serious competitor is simply because that entire sector is full of broken terrible software made very poorly (e.g. Live Messenger, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Voice). Worse still nobody is really rolling out links into the existing telephone infrastructure (Google seems to have quit).
Honestly, this is an industry that needs a serious kick in the nads. So poor in so many ways....
This petition and the signers of it just show that they're ignorant of the technology and the implementation of it. Unfortunately you might have government bodies thinking there is no smoke without fire, and making threats about this or that. But truth is this is a manufactured story that really has yet to cause anyone any problems.
Let me ask you this: Who has built a system with a UEFI subsystem which doesn't allow Secure Boot to be disabled by the user? Answer: Nobody.
The SAM file on Windows is impossible to retrieve while the Windows kernel is running. The kernel has an exclusive read/write lock on the file and any attempt to access it will be denied. It is possible to read an NTFS file-system outside of the OS even while the OS is running but we're talking about deep-file system inspection.
I was expecting to read one of the normal fear-mongering stories that we often see on /. (e.g. "Drop Box sends passwords in plain text!!") but actually this is one of the most serious OS level holes I've seen in years. Not only can you retrieve the password for any user on the system but you can also reset their password without having to know what it was.
People have posted "they're still hashes so you still have to break them" which is of course true, but if you keep reading down he shows you how to reset the other user's password without ever having to know them.
Is this really surprising to anyone? There are two ways to hide traffic. The first is illegal and it will cover your tracks because you can use hacked machines without any logging. The second is legal and it is very hard to hide yourself. The only legal way which might actually work is if you bounced through a country with no diplomatic ties to the West but very few of those are even on the internet.
So back to this company. Does it surprise anyone that a company located in the UK of all places would have to give up logs when a judge orders it to? It is that way in almost every Western state. If US law enforcement requested such information I see no reason why a UK court shouldn't grant it (although you'd have to decide on a case by case basis).
/. is on the same level in terms of its importance to Microsoft's business. Tons of technical people read /. including Network Admin, Programmers, and just your local technical handy-man. We are who most non-technical people get their recommendations and knowledge from. If we say something bad about Microsoft then the people we influence will listen.
That is why Vista failed. The technical people said it was bad so it was bad. That's why Microsoft has gone to such pains with Windows 7 and Windows 8 to keep us as a group happy and so far it has worked for them.
This list is fairly poor, but I just wanted to draw negative attention to UltraDefrag and all third party defrag programs. A lot of people use third party solutions but very few actually know why they are using them, except for claims like "they are better!" The truth is that defragging a hard drive is a fairly simple process that is hard to get wrong, you literally just re-organise chunks together into blocks. Windows Defrag gets it right, and to be honest you cannot improve on just getting it right, so why do third party solutions need to offer an alternative? The best they could accomplish is matching the Windows Defragger, and the worst is that they could do a poorer job...
Why are they trying to buy a failed OS that nobody uses? I could understand it if it came with some IP of note, but it doesn't. Plus let's be honest it will expand their consumer base by almost nobody that matters - a few geeks who made a poor purchasing decision.
I'm not one to harp on about Open Source and Linux, but in this one case it is a situation where HTC should be investing that cash into their own Linux/Android branch rather than buying WebOS which is worth little or nothing.
You're asking if Open Source will "take off" in the UK government but last time I checked Linux servers were already heavily used within UK government organisations (although, granted, Windows Server is also).
As a UK CS grad, let me say that there are far too many unemployed I.T. people at the moment, many of which have a decade of experience. You want someone who knows your system already rather than someone you need to train up to that standard.
The UK is broadly speaking a service industry country which means we can support lot's of I.T. people in good-times, but also means we have a lot of excess employees when the economy goes tits up.
In other, related, news the US [software and methods] patent system is completely fucked up - beyond broken. Everybody knows it but nobody is willing to fix it.
So not only did they hide a break-in from the internet at large, including companies (e.g. Google) which were by extension the target, but they also aren't able to tell how many or what kinds of fake certificates got generated by the break-in? If you ask me their entire CA needs to be revoked, and a new one started. They can then re-issue all legitimate certificates under the new CA. That is the only safe way to do it.
http://www.tenba.com/products/Messenger--Photo-Laptop-Daypack.aspx
Is anyone really surprised that promoting violent actions on the internet gets the authorities involved? How many incidents has the Secret Service in the United States been involved in since Obama took office? I remember one extremely similar to this in which someone from New Mexico I believe posted on their private Facebook page about hurting Obama, and someone reported them, so the SS "had" to investigate, and it turns out it is like a middle-school kid.
Long story short, if you go posting about how you want to hurt X or Y, even if they're in a country the popular media has on its propaganda of evil list at the moment it is still illegal and immoral.
But what if the pilot got hold of a weapon they could use to hurt people! Like an aircraft for example... Oh wait....
If the US had real competition you would have providers offering $10 broadband as standard without any income requirements. The rest of the Western world (ex. Canada) seem to be able to manage it. How long is the US going to let themselves be held hostage by the big two providers?
Sorry, but this assessment shows huge ignorance. Not only does he misunderstand how LuzSec and Anon' operate, he also entirely fails to explain either how a foreign government would benefit from infiltrating them or how they would go about doing so in such a spread out group.
I think a lot of military people are stuck in the past. They don't understand the internet age. They call things "cyber wars" with "cyber armies" and imagine these big well organised forces likely well financed via the normal means.
Fact is both LuzSec and Anon' are a threat. But that threat doesn't require another government or organised group to exist. It doesn't require millions in military aid. In fact it is just a rag-tag group of people who want to do what they want to do. It is very similar to terrorism, and the military are just as incapable dealing with online threats as they are terrorism threats.
To be honest I think people like Mr. Moores are part of the problem. Part of the reason the military cannot understand these threats. Fire his and the old guys, hire in some experts who know shit about the 21st century.
I believe the reason why they are claiming "illegal immigration" is to combat the issue of passenger switching. Essentially passenger A transits through the UK on their way to another destination - which means they have no legal right to leave the airport terminal. Passenger B buys an inter-EU/UK ticket, passenger A and B switch identities, and then A enters the UK illegally. Passenger B who was legal anyway just comes home using a second passport (normally issued by their native country before getting UK resident status).
That being said, I don't think the facial scanners will do jack shit to combat this. I think you'll have tons of false positive. I think their motivations are other than what they claim.
We want to jump on the NoSQL ship. I won't bore you with all of the details but briefly put SQL databases and tables are too restrictive for our work. Unfortunately because there are SO many NoSQL solutions, and none of them are backed by big names nobody here has the balls to sign off on one. Unfortunately, and ironically, NoSQL's biggest downside is the lack of cross compatibility. Once you make that call you're stuck with it good or bad.
The other issue, is that because all of these solutions are relatively young the toolsets simply don't exist for many of them. No libraries, backup solutions, third party support, etc. I wish we'd see someone like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, or any big name roll out some kind of complete solution (in particular XML compatible). I know a few big Cloud solutions exist but again we come back to being locked into a solution.
Unfortunately the data might just prove that good programmers continue to older age while their less skilled kin get promoted out of it. I also hold the opinion that older programmers who were typically maths graduates are far more skilled than the younger "computer science" graduates (I include myself in the latter group).
Exactly what else did the doctor suggest you try? Counselling, Group Theory, Dietary changes? Or was it just, you go in, BANG, prescription for drugs and problem solved?
That would be a fair point, if the US had tons of small inter-state cellular companies, with a few big evil cross-state providers. But that isn't the situation. Fact is, almost NO small businesses are currently operating in the US cellular sector. There is almost no competition at all in the US, the big two just make agreements on territory so they can both keep their prices high.
Honestly the EU isn't perfect but at least competition is healthy. The US has become so bad, the only solution I see at this stage is to make it illegal for a company to own both the core infrastructure and to also sell to the end consumer. That is what they did with the UK's BT monopoly. Broke it into three companies - consumer, wholesale, and Open Reach. And that was an massively successful route to take, with competition in the UK being extremely good.
That is an accurate summation of the article; but calling things "right" and "wrong" is a little nieve. Windows treats this information very differently to Linux, and BIOS manufacturers are caught between the two. Simply advertising ASPM sounds good, unless it causes Windows to treat card without ASPM support as if they have it just because the bios advertised that the system supported it. Now current versions of Windows might act rationally in this regard, but XP and older are still highly prevalent particularly amongst corporate clients and governments.
So I guess my point is - it isn't a simple right or wrong/black or white scenario. It is a messy, ugly, undocumented hack, that ultimately leaves nobody happy. Linux will likely wind up having to implement a hack too to fix this, which makes them no better or no worse than the bios manufacturers who did exactly the same thing.