It's an interesting idea... except you aren't the first to come up with it.
I worked for a.com that went bust a few years ago. We were developing a web portal that did pretty much what Google is testing plus what you are suggesting. A localized search engine (searchable by city, state and zip) that included putting up billboard type web pages for local businesses who didn't have their own, and also selling a ad space targeted to the zip code that people searched. There were some other localization features included as well.
I'll be interested to see what comes of this. (And if the folks I worked for take notice of it.)
The Internet used to be by and for the technical user. Those days seem to some to be gone, but I think more realistically the Internet has simply grown to a huge extent. With that growth has come a vast new group of interested parties.
"Why do we need the Internet?" isn't a simple question anymore. There are many many different answers to that question depending on who it's put to.
There are many more uses than there used to be. There are many more users and as a result there are many more useful resources and many more bits of useless cruft.
Sometimes it's easy to let our technical biases make us yearn for the "good old days" when the frontier town wasn't so cluttered up with "city folk."
It's digital so the sound quality should be (and is) quite good. No lags. I've almost never heard any distortion of any kind.
Their customer service people are extremely helpful and courteous. They even took time to give me some suggestions (that worked!) for troubleshooting my ReplayTV's connection over the Vonage system -- even though using a modem device over Vonage is officially unsupported.
Contrast this with the local phone company in Minneapolis who transferred my telephone to Iowa rather than to a new address a few blocks from my old one (and took three days to move it back. And were *not* courteous about it.)
I am the one who made the original post. If you'd been paying any attention you would have noticed that.
Why don't you go back and read the posts and lose your bad attitude?
It's obvious you have no problems with banking folks who think this is a good idea based on your previous posts. I disagree with what seems to me to be your blind faith in them and in Microsoft not to screw up this "hacking down of Windows" process. You're entitled to your opinion and I am entitled to mine. It happens that I worked in the technology end of the banking industry in a previous position. My comments are based on the "clue" that I gathered from that experience.
When you make statements that show you didn't really read the article or my original post (or reply to your follow-up) you show that you weren't really paying attention. You were just pushing an agenda.
When you then start getting personal about my name, or my experience level (which is greater than you seem to think) you're just being a Troll.
Ummm... Hate to break it to you but I used to work for a bank that operated out of several cities. Once you popped open that burnished stainless steel ATM front, what was inside was essentially a very old stripped down desktop PC.
So you're not at all concerned that an ATM running Windows could pick up a worm that's spreading across the bank's LAN during one of those periods when it phones home over the dialup or ISDN line? It's not beyond the wildest realms of possibility.
You're talking as though the only danger is someone standing in front of the ATM and inserting their magic ATM cracking widget to the card slot (a la the kid in Terminator 2).
I'm not speaking as a "raving hippy freak Windows hater". I'm a net admin who deals with MS products on a daily basis. They've got their uses. In fact, I also used to work as a tech for a banking corporation.
I'm not so sure I think that this particular use is the best application of technology to a mission.
I'm a bit skeptical that this will be more efficient, and more secure than something designed from the ground up to be nothing more than an ATM. And that no "cruft" that turns into future security vulnerabilities left over from whatever version of Windows they hack this down from will end up in the ATMs.
Using Windows for an ATM sounds a bit like using a pile driver to plant the posts for a 3' high picket fence.
RTFA or the comment which quoted from the article before you post.
The point was that they want to use Windows because it is compatible with their networks... why would you care if it's compatible if you didn't have a whacked idea about actually doing something with it?
Yes, that's freaking crazy and no sane person would want to do that but your quibble is with the fine banking folks who think this is a good idea.
The article indicates that there are PHB's out there who ARE crazy in this among other ways.
Read carefully before you break out that flamethrower, young Skywalker.
My comment was pretty clearly about the article itself and about the PHB's who'd want to link their ATM's into their corporate networks.
I'm very much aware of who Bruce Schneier is.
1. I'm guessing that the whole "compatability with our networks" thing wasn't discussed with Schneier previous to his comment.
2. Get a clue yourself -- before you flame.
Insightful? Your comment? Informative to anyone who doesn't have a clue who Schneier is (and has obviously lived too long in a cave), but not insightful.
"They would prefer Windows, a platform they consider 'open' in that it is compatible with their internal corporate networks. Also, it's so ubiquitous that they can add features to all their ATMs without having to write multiple pieces of code for different machines." Bruce Schneier, a security company official, states that ATM do not operate online and are therefore not vulnerable to malicious viruses and internet attacks. No word on the blue screen of death."
ATM's don't currently operate online and this is a GOOD THING. However that goes out the "Window" if the whole point of going to Windows to the PHB's is that it's "compatible with their internal corporate networks"...
The article would seem to indicate that doing away with the very caveat that Bruce Schneier's quote uses to make this seem "okay" is part of the point of the exercise.
What is this obsession with trying to chop MS Windows down and shoehorn it into every device ever imagined? (Silly question -- lazy Microsoft wants world dominion and the resulting cash cow for the least amount of work possible...)
ATMs perform very specific functions. Wouldn't it just make more sense to develop something from scratch that doesn't do *anything* more than the ATM functions than to take something already developed for other uses and take a hatchet to it and try to make it fit?
I don't *need* Windows in my telephone or my cable box, let alone in my ATM... what's next? Windows in my refrigerator, of course. And my bathroom medicine cabinet. And then my sock drawer...
Me: "I'm sorry that I'm not wearing socks this week, but my sock drawer crashed and I haven't had time to reinstall Windows so that the drawer will open."
It looks like a LOT of ISPs are taking action against Verisign.
Comcast appears to have blocked it. As I noted elsewhere, I cannot get the Sitefinder page to come up when I type in a bad domain name at home (Comcast) but at the same time systems at my office (TransEdge DSL) pull it up every time.
Some major ISPs and probably many many smaller ones have already blocked this. As of last night I discovered that I was no longer getting the Sitefinder page when I entered a bad domain from home (Comcast cable modem) but would just get a blank page every time.
At the same time as I could not get the "sleaze-jacking" page to come up from home, I remoted to a system at my office and that system was able to get to the "sleaze-jacking" Sitefinder page every time.
Your mileage will vary -- and hopefully Verisign's mileage will shrink like a willy in cold water.
Is there any hope on the horizon that someone somewhere will b*tch-slap Verisign over this one?
And you're surprised that someone from the Ashcroft in-Justice Department would think that increased powers for... well... anyone who claims to be "punishing evil-doers"... is a GOOD thing?
I mean, these are the guys who aren't happy with the over-reaching Patriot Act -- they want a second act that goes even further. And according to recent press they've begun giving the nudge to prosecutors to find ways to get non-terrorists nailed on terrorist charges to radically increase the penalties for other violations of the law.
But of course, all those of us who think that the government would ever transgress our liberties are just paranoid terrorist supporters...
Here's a question:
If I'm sending email to a client and I accidentally type "joeshmoe@doughbot.com" instead of "joeshmoe@doughboy.com" -- supposing that doughbot.com isn't registered for a moment (probably is) -- my message is going to get sent to the MTA that's listening at Verisign's IP address, right?
Is that MTA functioning to the extent that I'm going to get an "undeliverable" back or is my email message simply going to disappear into the innermost ring of Verisign hell, leaving me to believe that it actually got delivered successfully to my client?
If my concern is valid, this is going to screw over a *lot* of people!
For these very obvious reasons, the air space around the elevator would be restricted and so would the sea lanes. Remember, this though would be far out in the Pacific, very very far from anywhere (hundreds of miles - not a 15 minute jog). It's not like you could sneak up on the thing.
I'd like to see those Lear Jets that could evade F-16s in any air space, let alone over the open Pacific. It's not like they can pretend to be Clint Eastwood in Firefox and dive down a canyon or something. Shoulder mounted missiles? Fired from where? A guy bobbing in a life preserver who swam out there?
Besides, terrorists could blow up airplanes, mine harbors, poison water supplies, gas subways, fly planes into more buildings, put truck bombs on major bridges or in garages of major business buildings... If we're going to worry about the sky falling, we might as well just hang up our guns and slink off into the sunset.
Outlook and Exchange use TCP/135 to communicate. Not everyone uses a VPN to read their Exchange-served email when remote you know.
The fact that it's possible to use Outlook over the open Internet to get into an Exchange server if you leave a dangerous port open through a firewall does *not* make it a good idea.
If you want to use Outlook type functionality from your Exchange server remotely, use OWA. That's what it's there for.
There are things that are possible with a *nix server across a LAN that are foolish to do over the open Internet. You can do them if you open up the port through the firewall but why would you do that?
So you don't plan to include any email applications, web browsing, or any other applications that communicate with machines outside that firewall then? And that none of your users will bring in any laptops that have been outside of your network or any form of electronic media that's been used outside of your network?
What kind of business can meet all of those conditions and get anything done?
The philosophy you just espoused would be perfectly safe if you operate in an environment that is completely disconnected from reality.
You may not like the patches and they may come with problems of their own, but if you run the Microsoft operating systems and you don't install the critical updates I would hate to be dependent on your network.
The nasty thing about Microsoft vulnerabilities is that so many of them are things that people can take advantage of using email worms or automated attacks on common ports. (or both)
It would have made a lot more sense if you'd just said that you didn't trust Microsoft patches so you were going to use another OS. I'm puzzled how your comment got rated insightful...
The misery of Microsoft vulnerabilities spreads so badly because there are so many people who are willing to share.
It's nice to see them doing something, but I have to note that the times that I've tried to get something done about a server hosted in China that's attacking one of my client's IP addresses have gotten NIL results. Zilch.
That's in contrast to efforts to contact the named administrators of a given block of IP addresses in other countries. Not always responsive but it's been known to happen which creates a contrast.
Good to know they'll try to quash what they see as SPAM when it affects themselves. Be nice if they'd "act globally" and put a halt to practices regularly carried out by servers in their balliwick against users and servers elsewhere.
Oh, come on... if you've read Bloom County you know about the dandelion breaks.
=)
I was truly saddened to see Opus go. It's good to hear that he'll be back although I admit some trepidation at the idea of a "movie" about Opus. (Hopefully we aren't talking live-action but rather animation...)
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You sell a lot of stuff by email, don't you?
I worked for a .com that went bust a few years ago. We were developing a web portal that did pretty much what Google is testing plus what you are suggesting. A localized search engine (searchable by city, state and zip) that included putting up billboard type web pages for local businesses who didn't have their own, and also selling a ad space targeted to the zip code that people searched. There were some other localization features included as well.
I'll be interested to see what comes of this. (And if the folks I worked for take notice of it.)
"Why do we need the Internet?" isn't a simple question anymore. There are many many different answers to that question depending on who it's put to.
There are many more uses than there used to be. There are many more users and as a result there are many more useful resources and many more bits of useless cruft.
Sometimes it's easy to let our technical biases make us yearn for the "good old days" when the frontier town wasn't so cluttered up with "city folk."
Their customer service people are extremely helpful and courteous. They even took time to give me some suggestions (that worked!) for troubleshooting my ReplayTV's connection over the Vonage system -- even though using a modem device over Vonage is officially unsupported.
Contrast this with the local phone company in Minneapolis who transferred my telephone to Iowa rather than to a new address a few blocks from my old one (and took three days to move it back. And were *not* courteous about it.)
Why don't you go back and read the posts and lose your bad attitude?
It's obvious you have no problems with banking folks who think this is a good idea based on your previous posts. I disagree with what seems to me to be your blind faith in them and in Microsoft not to screw up this "hacking down of Windows" process. You're entitled to your opinion and I am entitled to mine. It happens that I worked in the technology end of the banking industry in a previous position. My comments are based on the "clue" that I gathered from that experience.
When you make statements that show you didn't really read the article or my original post (or reply to your follow-up) you show that you weren't really paying attention. You were just pushing an agenda.
When you then start getting personal about my name, or my experience level (which is greater than you seem to think) you're just being a Troll.
You really need to grow up.
Someone please MOD PARENT DOWN.
You're talking as though the only danger is someone standing in front of the ATM and inserting their magic ATM cracking widget to the card slot (a la the kid in Terminator 2).
I'm not speaking as a "raving hippy freak Windows hater". I'm a net admin who deals with MS products on a daily basis. They've got their uses. In fact, I also used to work as a tech for a banking corporation.
I'm not so sure I think that this particular use is the best application of technology to a mission.
I'm a bit skeptical that this will be more efficient, and more secure than something designed from the ground up to be nothing more than an ATM. And that no "cruft" that turns into future security vulnerabilities left over from whatever version of Windows they hack this down from will end up in the ATMs.
Using Windows for an ATM sounds a bit like using a pile driver to plant the posts for a 3' high picket fence.
The point was that they want to use Windows because it is compatible with their networks... why would you care if it's compatible if you didn't have a whacked idea about actually doing something with it?
Yes, that's freaking crazy and no sane person would want to do that but your quibble is with the fine banking folks who think this is a good idea. The article indicates that there are PHB's out there who ARE crazy in this among other ways.
Read carefully before you break out that flamethrower, young Skywalker.
I'm very much aware of who Bruce Schneier is.
1. I'm guessing that the whole "compatability with our networks" thing wasn't discussed with Schneier previous to his comment.
2. Get a clue yourself -- before you flame.
Insightful? Your comment? Informative to anyone who doesn't have a clue who Schneier is (and has obviously lived too long in a cave), but not insightful.
"They would prefer Windows, a platform they consider 'open' in that it is compatible with their internal corporate networks. Also, it's so ubiquitous that they can add features to all their ATMs without having to write multiple pieces of code for different machines." Bruce Schneier, a security company official, states that ATM do not operate online and are therefore not vulnerable to malicious viruses and internet attacks. No word on the blue screen of death."
ATM's don't currently operate online and this is a GOOD THING. However that goes out the "Window" if the whole point of going to Windows to the PHB's is that it's "compatible with their internal corporate networks"...
The article would seem to indicate that doing away with the very caveat that Bruce Schneier's quote uses to make this seem "okay" is part of the point of the exercise.
(shakes head in disbelief...)
ATMs perform very specific functions. Wouldn't it just make more sense to develop something from scratch that doesn't do *anything* more than the ATM functions than to take something already developed for other uses and take a hatchet to it and try to make it fit?
I don't *need* Windows in my telephone or my cable box, let alone in my ATM... what's next? Windows in my refrigerator, of course. And my bathroom medicine cabinet. And then my sock drawer...
Me: "I'm sorry that I'm not wearing socks this week, but my sock drawer crashed and I haven't had time to reinstall Windows so that the drawer will open."
Will it never end?
(kidding of course... but I'll bet someone out there does.)
Valuable data on a Commodore 64. Now there's a concept.
An army of zombie C64 machines would be like an army of zombie field mice.
The worst part was the errors in the listings of source code in the magazines. A whole lot of typing just to see the program not actually work.
Ah, yes, those were the days...
It made a dorm mate's Macintosh seem nothing short of miraculous when I went to my first year of college a couple of years later.
Using a C64 to cruise the Internet? That would be a strange experience indeed!
Comcast appears to have blocked it. As I noted elsewhere, I cannot get the Sitefinder page to come up when I type in a bad domain name at home (Comcast) but at the same time systems at my office (TransEdge DSL) pull it up every time.
Comcast -- for once, god bless 'em.
I'm surprised by that since normally EVERYONE has a legal opinion...
(Somebody just pretend that this was SCO or Microsoft that did this for a minute -- that should generate some legal opinions...)
At the same time as I could not get the "sleaze-jacking" page to come up from home, I remoted to a system at my office and that system was able to get to the "sleaze-jacking" Sitefinder page every time.
Your mileage will vary -- and hopefully Verisign's mileage will shrink like a willy in cold water.
Is there any hope on the horizon that someone somewhere will b*tch-slap Verisign over this one?
(Anybody?)
I mean, these are the guys who aren't happy with the over-reaching Patriot Act -- they want a second act that goes even further. And according to recent press they've begun giving the nudge to prosecutors to find ways to get non-terrorists nailed on terrorist charges to radically increase the penalties for other violations of the law.
But of course, all those of us who think that the government would ever transgress our liberties are just paranoid terrorist supporters...
Is that MTA functioning to the extent that I'm going to get an "undeliverable" back or is my email message simply going to disappear into the innermost ring of Verisign hell, leaving me to believe that it actually got delivered successfully to my client?
If my concern is valid, this is going to screw over a *lot* of people!
For these very obvious reasons, the air space around the elevator would be restricted and so would the sea lanes. Remember, this though would be far out in the Pacific, very very far from anywhere (hundreds of miles - not a 15 minute jog). It's not like you could sneak up on the thing.
I'd like to see those Lear Jets that could evade F-16s in any air space, let alone over the open Pacific. It's not like they can pretend to be Clint Eastwood in Firefox and dive down a canyon or something. Shoulder mounted missiles? Fired from where? A guy bobbing in a life preserver who swam out there?
Besides, terrorists could blow up airplanes, mine harbors, poison water supplies, gas subways, fly planes into more buildings, put truck bombs on major bridges or in garages of major business buildings... If we're going to worry about the sky falling, we might as well just hang up our guns and slink off into the sunset.
The fact that it's possible to use Outlook over the open Internet to get into an Exchange server if you leave a dangerous port open through a firewall does *not* make it a good idea.
If you want to use Outlook type functionality from your Exchange server remotely, use OWA. That's what it's there for.
There are things that are possible with a *nix server across a LAN that are foolish to do over the open Internet. You can do them if you open up the port through the firewall but why would you do that?
Same idea.
What kind of business can meet all of those conditions and get anything done?
The philosophy you just espoused would be perfectly safe if you operate in an environment that is completely disconnected from reality.
You may not like the patches and they may come with problems of their own, but if you run the Microsoft operating systems and you don't install the critical updates I would hate to be dependent on your network.
The nasty thing about Microsoft vulnerabilities is that so many of them are things that people can take advantage of using email worms or automated attacks on common ports. (or both)
It would have made a lot more sense if you'd just said that you didn't trust Microsoft patches so you were going to use another OS. I'm puzzled how your comment got rated insightful...
The misery of Microsoft vulnerabilities spreads so badly because there are so many people who are willing to share.
That's in contrast to efforts to contact the named administrators of a given block of IP addresses in other countries. Not always responsive but it's been known to happen which creates a contrast.
Good to know they'll try to quash what they see as SPAM when it affects themselves. Be nice if they'd "act globally" and put a halt to practices regularly carried out by servers in their balliwick against users and servers elsewhere.
I was truly saddened to see Opus go. It's good to hear that he'll be back although I admit some trepidation at the idea of a "movie" about Opus. (Hopefully we aren't talking live-action but rather animation...)