I (a white male) was accosted by the cops after I had the poor sense to report a crime I had witnessed seconds earlier. Being first on the scene, I was ASSumed to be the perp by other, later onlookers. Anyway, the cops would NOT listen to reason, and basically treated me as guilty until proven innocent.
I am still pretty angry when I think about it, and it was like 8 years ago.
My first thought after I was released after 20 minutes of bullshit with the arrogant jock with a badge was "Shit, this happens to black guys ALL the damn time".
I won't lay any white liberal "solidarity with the underclass" crap on you, but I was ready to friggin storm the barricades after this comparatively minor indignity. You ask me, black America has the patience of Job.
That is why the quotation about luser experience with operating system inconsistencies is irrelevant.
This is the flipside of clueless n00bs dissing UNIX because they don't like Emacs -- a Gnome fetishist thinking that a polished GUI with a consistently applied set of design principles makes the OS better.
Realistically, how much can anyone learn from a dinner with 80 people, the vast majority of whom are going to be complete strangers? This is going to be a chance for the executives to mouth platitudes, for the IT "leadership" to get their knees and noses dirty, and for the peons to get a dinner that will come out of the Christmas bonus, ultimately.
I advise you chat up the bartender, and try to get a six-pack or two into your laptop bag.
Re:What you can't say (if you're a friggin wussy)
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
My bad.
Quite easily done indeed. Loses a bit in the translation.
What you can't say (if you're a friggin wussy)
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Would it be heretical to point out that this piece makes Graham seem simultaneously like a master of the obvious, AND a self-important windbag?
At least I didn't catch any references to Copernicus or Galileo in the text, but I admit not reading very attentively after the first 4 paragraphs.
I'd expect something like this from a starstruck freshman (oops...I mean first-year student), but from someone who is actually past 30....shudder.
Mach is a BSD derivative, is it not? That is, it shares a family tree, probably since around 4.2BSD days. I realize "BSD" tends to mean "free UNIX ending with the letters B-S-D" these days, but as far as heritage goes, that's where Mach came from. Makes sense, since it began as an academic OS.
I can certainly see how a big player in the server consolidation biz might want to team up with a big player in the storage virtualization business.
If VMWare's developers are going to be assimilated into EMC, I'm pessimistic about this thing. On the other hand, if EMC allows VMWare to maintain substantial autonomy, then it may work.
I'm waiting for IBM to decide it wants to play bigtime in this space. They know how to run Linux on enterprise-caliber hardware, and could probably give "EMWare" a good fight.
Your home network is accessible via the company's intranet (via a VPN of some kind, I presume) and you can get fired if you have porn AT HOME?
Unless your employer is paying for your bandwidth or your home server(s), how is it that they have any say about what you do with your own property, in your own house, on your own time?
How many times do we need to hear the canard about NFS being insecure before we decide to RTFM?
UNIX auth isn't the only authentication flavor for NFS. It may be appropriate in may settings, it may be the default for many "distros", it may be the only authentication various n00bs are familiar with, but it isn't the only game in town.
Nonetheless, if they do get involved, this *might* be a good thing, utimately.
See, Walmart is all about keeping costs down thru cutting out as many middlemen as possible, standardizing as much of their supply chain as possible, and automation. There have been many stories in the business and popular press about Walmart requiring their suppliers to adopt certain computerized schemes, such as RFID, so that Walmart can move/track inventory more cheaply.
Well, if Walmart is successful in automating the supply chain running from musician to music marketplace, then all the pieces will be in place for some enterprising competitor to "leverage" their work. I can see how Walmart, if they are smart, might at first operate a closed market -- if you want music they sell, you need to be a member, etc. Like Sam's (Yecccch!) Club. Then they continue to run all the back-end stuff, and publish a Web Services API. Now, other storefronts can use their back-end to make tunes available. THEN, they cook up a means by which independent artists can add to the inventory, and in effect become a clearing house for musicians and music buyers (for a piece of the action, of course). The final stage is when this clearing-house function gets divorced from Walmart. That's when the good part finally arrives.
Thank you for providing some real world insight into this.
I'm not a programmer by trade, but even I know how hard it is to make even simple programs do the right thing, in the real world, with real users. The ATM analogy people use reveals their ignorance. ATMs are NOT at all idiot-proof or bug-free. The reason that they work is that banks calculate how much loss due to fraud, bugs, things that break, etc they will incur, and this is offset by the additional business the boxes bring in. A non-negligible amount of error is fine, as long as the liability for it is handled properly and is fixed in law, and as long as the banks can estimate it accurately. This is absolutely NOT the case with voting machines. Moreover, banks are subject to stringent auditing, including auditing of their IT systems. Are voting systems so audited? It sure doesn't look that way, does it?
Given the extremely complex requirements which a voting system (electronic or otherwise) must meet, and the lack of stringent auditing to make sure they meet them, it would seem prudent to stick with proven, reliable technologies, design methods, and safeguards, and to be slooooow in introducing fundamental changes.
I would say that Diebold and the other US E-voting schemes I have read about do not do any of those things.
And by the way, on this 144000 vote thing... didja notice how everyone was so happy when the "real" result of 5000 votes came out? Did it ever enter anyone's mind to think that THAT number could easily be completely bogus, too? How would they know if it was? Can they check, w/out calling the head geek at the company that built the voting machines?
"Then I hope that the next time you use poor judgement at work that they fire you and encourage everyone who reads Slashdot to never hire you again"
If I am a bank teller, and the "poor judgment" involves short-changing a customer by a trivial amount once every eight hours, when this is known in advance to NOT be my job, when I don't let customers know that I will be doing it until after the fact ("just fill out this form for a refund..."), and when I explain that I did it because it was easy and I didn't think it through, then yeah, I'd expect to have trouble finding future work as a bank teller. If I as a bank customer found out that my bank required its tellers to do this, I would find another bank and urge everyone I knew not to patronize the this one.
Routers should route, period. I always thought Belkin gear was cheesy, but I'd trust them to make a cable or whatever. Now they will NEVER get a dollar from me. If Eric Deming is the marketing genius behind this, he should be demoted, if not dismissed, in my opinion.
If Belkin wanted to drive traffic to their censorware site, they could have put a banner across the top of the router configuration screens -- it would be low-class, but acceptable. Hijacking TCP streams is beyond the pale.
I don't think they deserve it, but they should have seen it coming. As others have said, their information security practices were TERRIBLE on this one, and they got bit hard, right in the nads.
Back in the day, there was an easy-to-use UNIX variant that held the user's hand, had all sorts of fancy graphical gizmos to help n00bs do sysadminly things like add printers, had a graphical help system, had a spiffy SW updater/installer that understood dependencies and all sorts of neato stuff. Admins experienced with other UNICES were often startled by how easy many things were. That OS was called Irix, and it was also the least secure POS ever foisted on the UNIX community. But try telling that to the physics postdoc who just wants to do math with one. The only thing that stopped this bad boy from going critical was that:
a) Not every chowderhead who can put on his pants can become a physics postdoc, and
b) The boxes were expensive, as were all the commercial apps for them.
What Granneman, who should soon be granted the nickname "Master of the Obvious", is pointing out that if you want to sell to the masses, you need to make it simple, convenient, cheap, and inoffensive -- like Windows (or American beer). Well, except for the cheap part, that's what SGI did, within the context of the time. Linux, with its comparative n00b userbase, is going in nontrivial measure down that same road, but has way more boxes out there. An even easier-to-use Linux, with anything near the market share of Windows, would be just as susceptible to worms because they are the inevitable side effect of features demanded by people who do not care (enough) about security.
I think using DNS for these records is a kludge, but once you accept the argument that SMTP itself cannot be modified due to the large installed base, then by implication any remedy needs to be outside SMTP. DNS is the obvious candidate, since it already plays a central role in e-mail by virtue of MX records.
I think it inadvisable, however, to use DNS for application-specific data such as these SPF records if it means introducing a new RR type. WKS records are one (mis)step down this road, and SPF records would be another. TXT records seem to be a good compromise between inappropriately using DNS for application-specific data and getting a solution deployed quickly.
Re:What's wrong with national IDs?
on
Beyond Fear
·
· Score: 1
If you'd like to learn how it has made you less free, perhaps you'll ask your government to issue John Ashcroft a work visa, so he can run your interior ministry for a few years.
You can agree or not, but a market in equilibrium will make a good available for the minimum average cost of producing that good. Any 1st-year microeconomics course will cover this.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen, brother (no pun intended).
I (a white male) was accosted by the cops after I had the poor sense to report a crime I had witnessed seconds earlier. Being first on the scene, I was ASSumed to be the perp by other, later onlookers. Anyway, the cops would NOT listen to reason, and basically treated me as guilty until proven innocent.
I am still pretty angry when I think about it, and it was like 8 years ago.
My first thought after I was released after 20 minutes of bullshit with the arrogant jock with a badge was "Shit, this happens to black guys ALL the damn time".
I won't lay any white liberal "solidarity with the underclass" crap on you, but I was ready to friggin storm the barricades after this comparatively minor indignity. You ask me, black America has the patience of Job.
100 way? Hmmmm....they can do 64, last I cared, so maybe it's 100 octal.
Yes, TFA is about a GUI.
That is why the quotation about luser experience with operating system inconsistencies is irrelevant.
This is the flipside of clueless n00bs dissing UNIX because they don't like Emacs -- a Gnome fetishist thinking that a polished GUI with a consistently applied set of design principles makes the OS better.
"If McDonald's offered three free Big Macs for a DNA sample, there'd be lines around the block"
People like to make fun of California, and it is damn easy to do, fo sho.
Legislation like this is the OTHER side of that coin.
As a non-Californian, I thank you Chongo.
Realistically, how much can anyone learn from a dinner with 80 people, the vast majority of whom are going to be complete strangers? This is going to be a chance for the executives to mouth platitudes, for the IT "leadership" to get their knees and noses dirty, and for the peons to get a dinner that will come out of the Christmas bonus, ultimately.
I advise you chat up the bartender, and try to get a six-pack or two into your laptop bag.
My bad.
Quite easily done indeed. Loses a bit in the translation.
Would it be heretical to point out that this piece makes Graham seem simultaneously like a master of the obvious, AND a self-important windbag?
At least I didn't catch any references to Copernicus or Galileo in the text, but I admit not reading very attentively after the first 4 paragraphs.
I'd expect something like this from a starstruck freshman (oops...I mean first-year student), but from someone who is actually past 30....shudder.
ObHeresy: Emacs sucks!
Mach is a BSD derivative, is it not? That is, it shares a family tree, probably since around 4.2BSD days. I realize "BSD" tends to mean "free UNIX ending with the letters B-S-D" these days, but as far as heritage goes, that's where Mach came from. Makes sense, since it began as an academic OS.
pf crushes iptables
systrace
ubiquitous, audited, crypto
I can certainly see how a big player in the server consolidation biz might want to team up with a big player in the storage virtualization business.
If VMWare's developers are going to be assimilated into EMC, I'm pessimistic about this thing. On the other hand, if EMC allows VMWare to maintain substantial autonomy, then it may work.
I'm waiting for IBM to decide it wants to play bigtime in this space. They know how to run Linux on enterprise-caliber hardware, and could probably give "EMWare" a good fight.
Your home network is accessible via the company's intranet (via a VPN of some kind, I presume) and you can get fired if you have porn AT HOME?
Unless your employer is paying for your bandwidth or your home server(s), how is it that they have any say about what you do with your own property, in your own house, on your own time?
How many times do we need to hear the canard about NFS being insecure before we decide to RTFM?
UNIX auth isn't the only authentication flavor for NFS. It may be appropriate in may settings, it may be the default for many "distros", it may be the only authentication various n00bs are familiar with, but it isn't the only game in town.
I hate Walmart. Hate Hate Hate.
Nonetheless, if they do get involved, this *might* be a good thing, utimately.
See, Walmart is all about keeping costs down thru cutting out as many middlemen as possible, standardizing as much of their supply chain as possible, and automation. There have been many stories in the business and popular press about Walmart requiring their suppliers to adopt certain computerized schemes, such as RFID, so that Walmart can move/track inventory more cheaply.
Well, if Walmart is successful in automating the supply chain running from musician to music marketplace, then all the pieces will be in place for some enterprising competitor to "leverage" their work. I can see how Walmart, if they are smart, might at first operate a closed market -- if you want music they sell, you need to be a member, etc. Like Sam's (Yecccch!) Club. Then they continue to run all the back-end stuff, and publish a Web Services API. Now, other storefronts can use their back-end to make tunes available. THEN, they cook up a means by which independent artists can add to the inventory, and in effect become a clearing house for musicians and music buyers (for a piece of the action, of course). The final stage is when this clearing-house function gets divorced from Walmart. That's when the good part finally arrives.
Thank you for providing some real world insight into this.
I'm not a programmer by trade, but even I know how hard it is to make even simple programs do the right thing, in the real world, with real users. The ATM analogy people use reveals their ignorance. ATMs are NOT at all idiot-proof or bug-free. The reason that they work is that banks calculate how much loss due to fraud, bugs, things that break, etc they will incur, and this is offset by the additional business the boxes bring in. A non-negligible amount of error is fine, as long as the liability for it is handled properly and is fixed in law, and as long as the banks can estimate it accurately. This is absolutely NOT the case with voting machines. Moreover, banks are subject to stringent auditing, including auditing of their IT systems. Are voting systems so audited? It sure doesn't look that way, does it?
Given the extremely complex requirements which a voting system (electronic or otherwise) must meet, and the lack of stringent auditing to make sure they meet them, it would seem prudent to stick with proven, reliable technologies, design methods, and safeguards, and to be slooooow in introducing fundamental changes.
I would say that Diebold and the other US E-voting schemes I have read about do not do any of those things.
And by the way, on this 144000 vote thing... didja notice how everyone was so happy when the "real" result of 5000 votes came out? Did it ever enter anyone's mind to think that THAT number could easily be completely bogus, too? How would they know if it was? Can they check, w/out calling the head geek at the company that built the voting machines?
Why?
Ask VMWare.
The answer is server consolidation, for firms that only have M$ system administrators.
"Then I hope that the next time you use poor judgement at work that they fire you and encourage everyone who reads Slashdot to never hire you again"
If I am a bank teller, and the "poor judgment" involves short-changing a customer by a trivial amount once every eight hours, when this is known in advance to NOT be my job, when I don't let customers know that I will be doing it until after the fact ("just fill out this form for a refund..."), and when I explain that I did it because it was easy and I didn't think it through, then yeah, I'd expect to have trouble finding future work as a bank teller. If I as a bank customer found out that my bank required its tellers to do this, I would find another bank and urge everyone I knew not to patronize the this one.
Routers should route, period. I always thought Belkin gear was cheesy, but I'd trust them to make a cable or whatever. Now they will NEVER get a dollar from me. If Eric Deming is the marketing genius behind this, he should be demoted, if not dismissed, in my opinion.
If Belkin wanted to drive traffic to their censorware site, they could have put a banner across the top of the router configuration screens -- it would be low-class, but acceptable. Hijacking TCP streams is beyond the pale.
I never heard of this "Ghost in the" shell.
For me, you still can't beat Bourne.
I hope that Varian, et. al. realize that by publishing this study, they are adding to the problem.
In the long run, the second law of thermodynamics will take care of this.
I don't think they deserve it, but they should have seen it coming. As others have said, their information security practices were TERRIBLE on this one, and they got bit hard, right in the nads.
Back in the day, there was an easy-to-use UNIX variant that held the user's hand, had all sorts of fancy graphical gizmos to help n00bs do sysadminly things like add printers, had a graphical help system, had a spiffy SW updater/installer that understood dependencies and all sorts of neato stuff. Admins experienced with other UNICES were often startled by how easy many things were. That OS was called Irix, and it was also the least secure POS ever foisted on the UNIX community. But try telling that to the physics postdoc who just wants to do math with one. The only thing that stopped this bad boy from going critical was that:
a) Not every chowderhead who can put on his pants can become a physics postdoc, and
b) The boxes were expensive, as were all the commercial apps for them.
What Granneman, who should soon be granted the nickname "Master of the Obvious", is pointing out that if you want to sell to the masses, you need to make it simple, convenient, cheap, and inoffensive -- like Windows (or American beer). Well, except for the cheap part, that's what SGI did, within the context of the time. Linux, with its comparative n00b userbase, is going in nontrivial measure down that same road, but has way more boxes out there. An even easier-to-use Linux, with anything near the market share of Windows, would be just as susceptible to worms because they are the inevitable side effect of features demanded by people who do not care (enough) about security.
I think using DNS for these records is a kludge, but once you accept the argument that SMTP itself cannot be modified due to the large installed base, then by implication any remedy needs to be outside SMTP. DNS is the obvious candidate, since it already plays a central role in e-mail by virtue of MX records.
I think it inadvisable, however, to use DNS for application-specific data such as these SPF records if it means introducing a new RR type. WKS records are one (mis)step down this road, and SPF records would be another. TXT records seem to be a good compromise between inappropriately using DNS for application-specific data and getting a solution deployed quickly.
If you'd like to learn how it has made you less free, perhaps you'll ask your government to issue John Ashcroft a work visa, so he can run your interior ministry for a few years.
You will soon see....
This is a dumb idea.
It is antithetical to the UNIX design philosophy, and it betrays an ignorance of history.
IBM tried to "improve" the init sequence in AIX, which was a godawful mess. The concept has not improved over time.
You can agree or not, but a market in equilibrium will make a good available for the minimum average cost of producing that good. Any 1st-year microeconomics course will cover this.