Windows' reliance on domain controllers' continuous correct operation...
Then I'd have to say you probably haven't worked much administering Windows networks of any size or complexity. That wasn't even true under Windows NT 3.51 when I worked with it in 1996.
all applications sit inside "containers" - little bubbles of software code that include everything an application needs to run.
So they're going back to the way that apps ran under DOS. I always thought that made sense, and since there isn't really a need to save disk space, CPU or memory any more (at least not like there used to be).
Jews are believers in the religion of Judaism. You could convert to Judaism tomorrow and become a Jew. Israelites were a semi-historical band of nomadic goat herders, supposedly descended from a single ancestor, who had enough moderately literate members they could write down their mythology. I think he means "Hebrews" to mean speakers of the Hebrew language, but I'm not sure. With the exception of a specific tribal group, the extremely inbred Cohens, the Jewish "race" is a convenient political fiction. Practitioners of Judaism vary from very black Ethiopians and Zimbabweans to Arabic Yemenis and North Africans to Asian Vietnamese and Chinese and to the Northern European Ashkenazi.
We mail a debit card for our account to my in-laws in Peru. Doing an international bank transfer used to cost $30 (probably more now), took 4 days to 4 weeks (twice they sent it to a branch in the wrong city, once to the wrong country), and $10 + 1% to withdraw there. Didn't matter if it was $100 or $5000. A cash machine withdrawal for up to $500 costs us $2 here plus $1.50 there, and as many as three withdrawals can be done in a day.
Even the internal staffing standards are ridiculous. I worked as a minimum wage Kelly Services temp for a time and ended up with a five month assignment to the trust department of a fairly large midwestern bank while the regular admin was on maternity leave. Two weeks after I started one of the trust managers gave me a list of several million dollars of checks to write as they were dissolving a large trust. I objected, "Rod, I'm just a temp. Are you sure I can do this?" Sure enough, not only did I have permissions to write checks and do transfers of over a million dollars, but the other admin decided to go to lunch and leave me alone in the office while I did it. And here we had closed our bank account in Peru just a few months earlier . ..
I had an instructor for Windows Server Security whose day job was doing pen tests of financial institutions. When they would arrive on a site and set up in a conference room he would unpack their equipment while his partner would get on the phone calling branch offices. "Hello, this is George, the new guy on the HelpDesk. I need to make some changes on the network equipment in your office, but I don't have the login details and my coworkers are at a benefits meeting. Since your branch manager has sufficient permissions can I ask a really big favor and get his login info?" In two years of pen testing he never failed to acquire branch manager credentials from at least one office by the time the equipment was even unpacked and set up.
You might find Catherine Austin Fitts' 3-part essay "NarcoDollars for Beginners" on the NarcoNews.com web site interesting. (It has been copied without attribution to other web sites as 'NarcoDollars for Dummies'.) She lays out in pretty undeniable logic why and how **ALL** of the large fortunes in the US today are involved in the drug trade one way or another, some of the ways that money is laundered and the effects it has on our economy and our communities, and some of the mechanisms that our politicians use to exploit it. A bit dated now, but still fascinating.
My wife has worked in retail for 20+ years, and during that time we've seen a shift from the highest losses moving from internal employee theft to salaries of the top two layers of management. I'm fairly certain that the Walton family, which brings nothing useful to the company and hasn't since Sam stepped down, sucks more out of WalMart (not her employer) than employee theft and shoplifters combined.
You must not have much imagination. I can think of many, many attacks that would cause medium to large scale loss of life or property just in my area that could be carried out by one or two people. No extensive communications network, no massive funding, just a couple of people who come across the border the same as any other mojado, work at the same jobs as any other illegal, and live the same quiet life that almost all other immigrants do, until they get a message on their Hotmail mentioning that their dead brother's birthday is on a date next month. It ain't rocket surgery.
Yep, and it works really, really well. Well enough that there are Windows machines sitting on the platforms of remote train terminals for years quietly doing their jobs without ever being cracked. I realize it's not the true way of Linux, which would be to create the settings, with all their obscure case-sensitive switches, in the myriad of scattered config files using vi or emacs, type all the hostnames into a text file, then download the settings to the client machine by a login script. If you're really good you might even cobble together a way to check after the fact to see if the settings got downloaded successfully. The idea of having a GUI that eliminates typing errors, simplifies operations, logs the success or failure, and shows at a glance what configurations are set where is just so 21st century. Why, even someone without years of experience could manage that! The horror!
Because we're all sure that Al Qaeda couldn't possibly find any rail lines in Europe without leaks and whistle blowers.
Seriously, unless you believe that the US has an impervious border (at which point you have issues that can't be solved simply by education) then it should be obvious that al Qaeda isn't what we're being told it is for the simple reason that WE'RE NOT BEING ATTACKED. A dozen guys armed with second hand deer rifles, working as landscapers and dishwashers, driving old beater cars, could take down the entire US electrical grid. No suicide attack necessary. If they work at the Tyson plant they could poison thousands or tens of thousands with biological agents that can be grown in home beer fermentation kits. They can make iron oxide and aluminum powder and burn out railroad bridges with simple thermite. And yet none of these things are happening. Instead we have a Shoe Bomber who forgets to bring matches with him, and the Underwear Bomber.
Samba4? Puppet? I take it you have deployed this in a small test setting, if at all. If you try rolling that out on a very large scale you'd best have a large herd of very well-paid people ready to make it work. The one place that I've worked with a very large Linux deployment uses AD for its LDAP authentication.
Group policies are a limited windows solution for solving a problem introduced by Windows.
Yes, that problem of allowing everyone in a company to have a computer on their desktop.
They can only automate to a point, and knocking off 90 percent of admins is far beyond that point. They may set up a web site to manage permissions where users will request access to files/folder/data types, but without human beans in the process flow it's going to be a crashing failure. Business rules will either be so lax as to allow access to too many users, or overly restrictive and prohibit access to those who need it. AI just isn't there yet, to be able to make those types of decisions in anything like an adequate manner.
It's really useful to be able to manage access, user permissions and configure updates across a couple hundred servers at a time, isn't it? Oh, that's right, you don't have a good LDAP implementation, or group policies, or an update server, so how do you do it? Do you have a magic wand? There are reasons why most of the truly large installations run Windows, it's because it was written with manageability in mind from the beginning. If I had a dozen systems I'd consider Linux, if I had a hundred there's no question which operating system would be more appropriate.
There are a dozen or more species of frogs which can freeze solid in the winter, which is about as dead as dead can be, only to thaw out and revive in the spring. Seventy percent of the water in their body turns to ice, and yet a few months later the frogcicle is merrily eating your crickets.
I am too, for now. I watched my grandmother succumb to Alzheimer's, and my grandfather is now 94 and essentially unable to do anything for himself. That's too long. My wife and I talked about this before, and once life is no longer enjoyable it's time for it to end. I wonder how many "accidents" where elderly couples drive off a cliff or something aren't actually planned.
Unix to the masses??? Apple could have put VMS or the Windows core under the hood, and "the masses" wouldn't have known the difference. Or cared much for that matter. OS X is the pretty interface to almost everyone who uses it, I can count on one had the Mac users that I know who have any idea what BSD even is.
One of the voting machine vendors (not Diebold) actually did this in order to pass testing to get approval. From Date 01 to Date 07 it would only run locally available code, but then from Date 08 onwards it would check for scripts available on the inserted compact flash card and run them if they existed. The CF cards were only supposed to be used for recording votes, but the company was also using it to update the machine's firmware. No one knows for sure whether the scripts were used to change votes or anything else, but the possibility was certainly there.
When I taught my nieces to drive the first thing that I did was make them change the oil on the truck, use jumper cables, and how to change a tire. Pointed out spark plugs, battery, air filter, etc. and how to change them. Not sure they've forgiven me yet. I was amused as hell when I found that one of them knew more about her car than her husband did, who wanted to call AAA when he left the radio on all night and ran the battery down.
Bing actually seems to index MSDN better then Google (and 100+ times better than MSDN indexes itself.) It's about the only time that I use it, but it's invaluable when I need it.
And how many of those Yahoo accounts are actually active? I try to remember to check mine every year or so, just in case one of the people who had that account have lost my Live or Gmail account info and wanted to get hold of me, but I haven't actually done anything with it since they shut down GeoCities.
People forget that the MS/Hotmail chat rooms and forums predated most of the other service (except GeoCities) and had a huge user base in their day. Since they were completely unable to make any money off the investment in those services I suspect that MS doesn't have a lot of incentive to repeat that experiment.
Google refused to provide any further information when contacted by Sky News Online
To be truthful, I'd refuse to provide any information to Sky News too. Not surprised that their technology "reporters" are unable to figure out how to connect to publicly available resources to look at the situation, their science "reporters" don't know the difference between an asteroid, a comet and meteor. At its best Sky News is one step above the National Enquirer, at its worse it makes the Weekly World News look positively brilliant.
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Windows' reliance on domain controllers' continuous correct operation...
Then I'd have to say you probably haven't worked much administering Windows networks of any size or complexity. That wasn't even true under Windows NT 3.51 when I worked with it in 1996.
all applications sit inside "containers" - little bubbles of software code that include everything an application needs to run.
So they're going back to the way that apps ran under DOS. I always thought that made sense, and since there isn't really a need to save disk space, CPU or memory any more (at least not like there used to be).
Jews are believers in the religion of Judaism. You could convert to Judaism tomorrow and become a Jew. Israelites were a semi-historical band of nomadic goat herders, supposedly descended from a single ancestor, who had enough moderately literate members they could write down their mythology. I think he means "Hebrews" to mean speakers of the Hebrew language, but I'm not sure. With the exception of a specific tribal group, the extremely inbred Cohens, the Jewish "race" is a convenient political fiction. Practitioners of Judaism vary from very black Ethiopians and Zimbabweans to Arabic Yemenis and North Africans to Asian Vietnamese and Chinese and to the Northern European Ashkenazi.
We mail a debit card for our account to my in-laws in Peru. Doing an international bank transfer used to cost $30 (probably more now), took 4 days to 4 weeks (twice they sent it to a branch in the wrong city, once to the wrong country), and $10 + 1% to withdraw there. Didn't matter if it was $100 or $5000. A cash machine withdrawal for up to $500 costs us $2 here plus $1.50 there, and as many as three withdrawals can be done in a day.
Even the internal staffing standards are ridiculous. I worked as a minimum wage Kelly Services temp for a time and ended up with a five month assignment to the trust department of a fairly large midwestern bank while the regular admin was on maternity leave. Two weeks after I started one of the trust managers gave me a list of several million dollars of checks to write as they were dissolving a large trust. I objected, "Rod, I'm just a temp. Are you sure I can do this?" Sure enough, not only did I have permissions to write checks and do transfers of over a million dollars, but the other admin decided to go to lunch and leave me alone in the office while I did it. And here we had closed our bank account in Peru just a few months earlier . . .
I had an instructor for Windows Server Security whose day job was doing pen tests of financial institutions. When they would arrive on a site and set up in a conference room he would unpack their equipment while his partner would get on the phone calling branch offices. "Hello, this is George, the new guy on the HelpDesk. I need to make some changes on the network equipment in your office, but I don't have the login details and my coworkers are at a benefits meeting. Since your branch manager has sufficient permissions can I ask a really big favor and get his login info?" In two years of pen testing he never failed to acquire branch manager credentials from at least one office by the time the equipment was even unpacked and set up.
You might find Catherine Austin Fitts' 3-part essay "NarcoDollars for Beginners" on the NarcoNews.com web site interesting. (It has been copied without attribution to other web sites as 'NarcoDollars for Dummies'.) She lays out in pretty undeniable logic why and how **ALL** of the large fortunes in the US today are involved in the drug trade one way or another, some of the ways that money is laundered and the effects it has on our economy and our communities, and some of the mechanisms that our politicians use to exploit it. A bit dated now, but still fascinating.
My wife has worked in retail for 20+ years, and during that time we've seen a shift from the highest losses moving from internal employee theft to salaries of the top two layers of management. I'm fairly certain that the Walton family, which brings nothing useful to the company and hasn't since Sam stepped down, sucks more out of WalMart (not her employer) than employee theft and shoplifters combined.
IIRC he was caught because he asked a stewardess for a lighter, I assumed he didn't have any matches.
You must not have much imagination. I can think of many, many attacks that would cause medium to large scale loss of life or property just in my area that could be carried out by one or two people. No extensive communications network, no massive funding, just a couple of people who come across the border the same as any other mojado, work at the same jobs as any other illegal, and live the same quiet life that almost all other immigrants do, until they get a message on their Hotmail mentioning that their dead brother's birthday is on a date next month. It ain't rocket surgery.
Yep, and it works really, really well. Well enough that there are Windows machines sitting on the platforms of remote train terminals for years quietly doing their jobs without ever being cracked. I realize it's not the true way of Linux, which would be to create the settings, with all their obscure case-sensitive switches, in the myriad of scattered config files using vi or emacs, type all the hostnames into a text file, then download the settings to the client machine by a login script. If you're really good you might even cobble together a way to check after the fact to see if the settings got downloaded successfully. The idea of having a GUI that eliminates typing errors, simplifies operations, logs the success or failure, and shows at a glance what configurations are set where is just so 21st century. Why, even someone without years of experience could manage that! The horror!
Because we're all sure that Al Qaeda couldn't possibly find any rail lines in Europe without leaks and whistle blowers.
Seriously, unless you believe that the US has an impervious border (at which point you have issues that can't be solved simply by education) then it should be obvious that al Qaeda isn't what we're being told it is for the simple reason that WE'RE NOT BEING ATTACKED. A dozen guys armed with second hand deer rifles, working as landscapers and dishwashers, driving old beater cars, could take down the entire US electrical grid. No suicide attack necessary. If they work at the Tyson plant they could poison thousands or tens of thousands with biological agents that can be grown in home beer fermentation kits. They can make iron oxide and aluminum powder and burn out railroad bridges with simple thermite. And yet none of these things are happening. Instead we have a Shoe Bomber who forgets to bring matches with him, and the Underwear Bomber.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Machine huns? Damn, the original Huns were bad enough when they were just mounted on horseback, now they're mechanized? :-)
Samba4? Puppet? I take it you have deployed this in a small test setting, if at all. If you try rolling that out on a very large scale you'd best have a large herd of very well-paid people ready to make it work. The one place that I've worked with a very large Linux deployment uses AD for its LDAP authentication.
Group policies are a limited windows solution for solving a problem introduced by Windows.
Yes, that problem of allowing everyone in a company to have a computer on their desktop.
They can only automate to a point, and knocking off 90 percent of admins is far beyond that point. They may set up a web site to manage permissions where users will request access to files/folder/data types, but without human beans in the process flow it's going to be a crashing failure. Business rules will either be so lax as to allow access to too many users, or overly restrictive and prohibit access to those who need it. AI just isn't there yet, to be able to make those types of decisions in anything like an adequate manner.
That would be pretty much every SlashDot discussion that has more than a dozen comments.
It's really useful to be able to manage access, user permissions and configure updates across a couple hundred servers at a time, isn't it? Oh, that's right, you don't have a good LDAP implementation, or group policies, or an update server, so how do you do it? Do you have a magic wand? There are reasons why most of the truly large installations run Windows, it's because it was written with manageability in mind from the beginning. If I had a dozen systems I'd consider Linux, if I had a hundred there's no question which operating system would be more appropriate.
There are a dozen or more species of frogs which can freeze solid in the winter, which is about as dead as dead can be, only to thaw out and revive in the spring. Seventy percent of the water in their body turns to ice, and yet a few months later the frogcicle is merrily eating your crickets.
I am too, for now. I watched my grandmother succumb to Alzheimer's, and my grandfather is now 94 and essentially unable to do anything for himself. That's too long. My wife and I talked about this before, and once life is no longer enjoyable it's time for it to end. I wonder how many "accidents" where elderly couples drive off a cliff or something aren't actually planned.
Unix to the masses??? Apple could have put VMS or the Windows core under the hood, and "the masses" wouldn't have known the difference. Or cared much for that matter. OS X is the pretty interface to almost everyone who uses it, I can count on one had the Mac users that I know who have any idea what BSD even is.
One of the voting machine vendors (not Diebold) actually did this in order to pass testing to get approval. From Date 01 to Date 07 it would only run locally available code, but then from Date 08 onwards it would check for scripts available on the inserted compact flash card and run them if they existed. The CF cards were only supposed to be used for recording votes, but the company was also using it to update the machine's firmware. No one knows for sure whether the scripts were used to change votes or anything else, but the possibility was certainly there.
When I taught my nieces to drive the first thing that I did was make them change the oil on the truck, use jumper cables, and how to change a tire. Pointed out spark plugs, battery, air filter, etc. and how to change them. Not sure they've forgiven me yet. I was amused as hell when I found that one of them knew more about her car than her husband did, who wanted to call AAA when he left the radio on all night and ran the battery down.
Bing actually seems to index MSDN better then Google (and 100+ times better than MSDN indexes itself.) It's about the only time that I use it, but it's invaluable when I need it.
And how many of those Yahoo accounts are actually active? I try to remember to check mine every year or so, just in case one of the people who had that account have lost my Live or Gmail account info and wanted to get hold of me, but I haven't actually done anything with it since they shut down GeoCities.
People forget that the MS/Hotmail chat rooms and forums predated most of the other service (except GeoCities) and had a huge user base in their day. Since they were completely unable to make any money off the investment in those services I suspect that MS doesn't have a lot of incentive to repeat that experiment.
Google refused to provide any further information when contacted by Sky News Online
To be truthful, I'd refuse to provide any information to Sky News too. Not surprised that their technology "reporters" are unable to figure out how to connect to publicly available resources to look at the situation, their science "reporters" don't know the difference between an asteroid, a comet and meteor. At its best Sky News is one step above the National Enquirer, at its worse it makes the Weekly World News look positively brilliant.