Beautiful though it is to imagine arrest warrants for treason in several countries - including a lot of banana republics that aren't exactly known for their progressive attitude towards capital punishment - against top-level Microsoft executives, I really don't think it's going to happen.
The only way it can happen is if all these countries which were previously shown to be corruptible suddenly decide that they have some principles after all and aren't afraid of the US bombing the hell out of them when they start executing extremely rich US citizens.
I can tell you how I solve it in a business context, but whether or not it could be scaled down to personal I'm not sure.
The problem: 2 sites each with 70-100GB of data needs offsite backup with similar criteria to your own. Bandwidth available to these sites is 2-4Mbps. The only OS involved is Linux, though I'm sure Windows could be shoehorned in somehow. A third site which has a tape streamer and someone to take tapes offsite is available. Data protection legislation means that storing it with a hosted service is illegal unless I encrypt it myself before sending it offsite - I'm only aware of one tool which claims to be able to do this and still send data as a binary delta (it uses the rsync library) and that tool is still not particularly common in Linux distributions and not very widely used. I'm nervous of trusting my backups to a tool that isn't on heavy use, particularly if strong encryption is being employed.
The Solution: A server in the third site and some judicious scripting with rsync allows it to mirror the data in the other two sites. The first sync is fairly painful, of course, but provided you don't have too much data regularly changing subsequent syncs aren't too bad. The server is backed up to tape which provides versioning capability so if someone only realises that they lost a file a week after the fact it can still be restored,
Initial effort to set up was pretty great but now it's done it JFW and requires no brain power whatsoever to run on a daily basis. I can make the data available over the VPN (of course the access speed will be dog slow) more-or-less immediately and I can make it available at LAN speed by copying it to a hard disk and courier it to the remote office in under 48 hours. A full restore of 100GB across a 2Mbps connection will take at least 4-5 days.
I was thinking along rather different lines, as it happens - lines which I suspect would be rather cheaper and wouldn't require a scanning electron microscope and team of chip design experts to verify.
Two separate machines built by two separate companies. The first is a touchscreen device similar to the existing ones, only it prints out a human and computer readable ballot - perhaps with MICR or something akin to those sheets of paper that are used for computer-marked tests with black bars in strategic places. The design of this ballot is pre-specified by a government body to be simple for both human and computer to understand.
One of the more common ideas mooted is "the human then places the human readable ballot in a box for later". My idea is a little more sophisticated - the slot in the box is actually an electronic ballot reader which forms the basis of the second machine. Once counted, the vote lands in a locked box.
Provided all goes according to plan, both machines should produce identical results. If there is significant discrepancy, count the paper ballots.
Ummm...Facebook has that. Actually. Well, admittedly, not to the level you're describing, but they are working that way. They do have groups which allows you to show/hide information on your page.
It does, and to a greater or lesser extent you can block which groups can see what things (depending on the application - the photo album supports it, for example).
However, it's hard to take seriously when it has been absolutely plagued with examples of it being possible to bypass the group security. Comes of facebook never really having been designed for it in the first place.
Open Source licencing is not necessary to build a system with high Nixon Number, nor is it assured that an OSS system will have one. However, I would argue that(barring substantial advances in static analysis of binaries, or the like) publicly auditable code,
Doesn't do you any good unless you can prove that the version running on the computer terminal at the polling station is the publicly audited version.
along with a publicly available trusted compiler,
A far greater mind than I has already discussed this and pointed out that with a sufficiently determined attacker, there's no such thing:
publicly disclosed hashes of all binaries, etc, etc. is in practice necessary to achieve a Nixon Number high enough to be considered for critical uses like voting.
How do you verify that the system is using the code that matches your hash rather than just ignoring it and running its own version?
End of the day, the GP's right. No matter how open or closed the voting system used, it can't really be trusted unless it provides a separate human-verifiable vote for checking purposes with every single vote cast.
They keep creating weird architectural constraints. A windows application at my site needs to spend an hour or so generating a report. Recently it stopped working and the cause turned out to be an IT policy mandating automatic screen lock after 10 minutes of inactivity. Integration between our application and Microsoft office seems to go through the UI and this isn't allowed to work when the screen is locked.
That's just plain laziness on the part of the app developers - Office has a perfectly well documented API which you can follow and totally ignore the UI.
Mind you, IME those developers are in very good company. It's remarkable how many companies have built a business around flogging some cheap & nasty VB monstrosity hacked up by the work experience kid over the course of a few afternoons.
OK can someone pleas hire these guys to work on handwriting recognition software? If they can ready these bizarrely twisted captchas why can't Palm read my name?
Because they're not using a computer to break it. They've done what a lot of global operations have done - if you can't easily automate it, move the part that requires expensive humans to a part of the world where humans are rather cheaper.
That won't work for anyone who cares about their own privacy. Why would I want to give anyone my credit or debit card number if I wasn't actually buying something from that site at that particular time?
Why would anyone who cares about their own privacy use an email system from a company that has "index every byte of data on the planet" as their mission?
(Having said that, I'd never give out my card information unless it was to buy something).
Last time I tried using inotify it slowed the system down unacceptably - possibly because it was an IMAP server with maildir mailstores so it was dealing with notifications for thousands of files. This was a few weeks ago on Debian Etch.
Bruce Schneier has a lot more credibility in the security field than the Washington Post, the State of Washington, and Microsoft all put together.
That doesn't mean much. My left arse cheek has a lot more credibility in the security field than the Washington Post, the State of Washington, and Microsoft all put together.
This might not be an Exchange issue (tho I've never used Exchange so I can't be 100% sure). But I've experienced similar symptoms with thunderbird with IMAP on other servers. The thing is, I can't pin down a single circumstance. Sometimes it happens when I access a folder with a huge amount of messages (200000 +), sometimes when I navigate away from a "search folder" (with a small number of messages on the source folder), etc.
POP3 works flawlessly, tho.
By default, Thunderbird opens several connections to the IMAP server for performance. It doesn't behave particularly intelligently if the IMAP server is configured to refuse more than 1 or 2 simultaneous connections.
However, she notes accommodating the clarified PCI rule on antivirus in many places will be "expensive."
So what would constitute compliance with this rule?
Most commercial AV products are also available in Linux versions because plenty of Linux systems have to interact with Windows and could become transmission vectors, even if they're not infected themselves.
This is certainly true of Sophos, McAfee and Symantec Enterprise.
The only minor problem is that they often offer realtime scanning and are therefore very distribution-specific because the only way they can do this is by hooking into the Linux kernel to intercept filesystem calls.
Possibly over time, AIDS would be replaced in the human population with a milder disease, like we see with flu strains from year to year. It's hard to tell without giving it a few hundred or thousand more years of evolution to be sure.
Possibly, but one big difference between AIDS and a lot of the other conditions that you mentioned is that you've had plenty of time to pass it on to others before it kills you.
You said it yourself: "supply a bit of calibration".
Colour perception and printing can be fiendishly involved - there's a difference between "what is technically correct, ie. no colour cast", "what looks pleasing to the eye" and "what looks pleasing to the eye when it's printed using this slightly different process which is necessary because suddenly we're printing on dirty great billboards rather than normal-size sheets of paper".
The printing industry uses CMYK and there's no standard way to say "this is the calibration you need to apply" - therefore you either work in CMYK or you put up with whatever comes out the other end when the result comes back from the printing firm. When your job is to come up with something that's pleasing to the eye, "putting up with whatever comes back from the printing firm" is not an option.
Re:FLOSS lets you control your destiny.
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GIMP 2.6 Released
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Paying someone to write a Gantt chart program would undoubtedly be much more expensive than just buying Microsoft Project. No efficiency gained there.
There are a couple of alternatives available now - Computer Associates opensourced their product, which is now called OpenWorkbench
The Hauppauge card was more a case of the IVTV developers lying to me. Don't tell me your driver supports that model of card if it doesn't.
It is not unknown - indeed it's quite common - to find that a manufacturer releases two totally different products which achieve the same end under the same model number.
It's quite possible that the developers weren't even aware that Hauppage had done this.
If someone knows enough to know that they need CMYK support, chances are they need CMYK support.
What disease is this that has people writing dirty great long articles about how a feature is unnecessary, not particularly useful and indeed sometimes dangerous when really what they mean is "My pet product doesn't support it and I'm ashamed to admit that - so instead of admitting it I'll try and tell anyone who will listen that the feature is a bad idea in the first place!"?
The people who write these articles invariably try and sound entirely authoritative, almost always talk down to their audience and are completely unaware of how damn stupid they sound when it is widely known that a rival product supports it without significant issue.
The estate of Sir Arthur Clarke and MGM might have a thing or two to say about attempting to claim 2010.
No such thing as prior art - it's trademark law. Which in the UK (not sure about elsewhere, suspect it's similar) can be boiled down to "you can't use this word or phrase in a context which is likely to confuse the customer into thinking you're somehow linked with some other organisation which has trademarked it."
Hence I would probably be in trouble if I set up a mail-order office supplies company called "Viking Office Supplies Ltd" because of Viking Direct but the radio station Viking FM is perfectly OK.
that they are able to subvert the host country's laws so effectively? I know that they have muscled around 'smaller' countries, but I would think that Canada wouldn't be so easily swayed. What am I missing that makes the IOC so powerful? Is it simply the 'investment opportunity' and business that the Olympics bring? Is national pride so easily wounded that we have to kowtow to their every whim? Its no secret that the IOC is incredibly corrupt and profit driven... how come modern democratic states aren't telling them to fuck off and clean up their act? Instead the US, Britain, Canada, etc. seem to be bowing and scraping to meet their every demand.
They've been getting special laws passed in the UK too.
Remember this isn't just one group of people with a lot of money. It's one group of people with a lot of money who will also make a lot of money for a lot of other people - for instance, when Coke sponsors the games, you won't be able to buy Pepsi in the olympic village. Money talks, and when there's a lot of money it not only talks, it gets up in Parliament, makes speeches and proposes laws.
(provided they're loans to people who can pay them back.. but if a bank is loaning to someone who can't pay they didn't do their due dilligence and deserve everything they get).
Yep, and there's a technical term for them. "Sub-prime mortgages".
Which plenty of banks have been lending quite happily because they can charge a much higher rate of interest and they assumed(!) that house prices will continue to rise - therefore if the worst comes to the worst they can repossess the house and still make their money back.
There's a discussion like this every few months on/., and it almost always boils down to the same argument:
"I can be trusted to do anything I like on a PC, therefore everyone in the company can be trusted to do anything they like on a PC, therefore locking them down achieves absolutely nothing and it pisses everyone off. Hell, don't even bother putting any software on them - just hand them out as they left the factory and let end-users do that. Much easier than having to wait for someone from IT to come down and click next next next...."
People like me clear up the mess that comes out of doing that. What you wind up with is:
Most factory builds of Windows are truly shocking. Even when you're buying as a business, you still wind up with "30 day evaluation!!11oneone" of McAfee. So the end-user thinks "Ah, I've got antivirus, I don't need to install the corporate one..." You can be trusted to uninstall McAfee and install the corporate AV. Can the sales team? Can your boss? Can his boss?
I've also noticed that OEM network card drivers in particular can be flaky, and some OEMs ship wireless configuration software to replace the Windows builtin applet - but the OEM wireless software doesn't always support WPA-Enterprise. So your IT department winds up dealing with a bunch of calls about how wireless doesn't work.
You know about file servers. You can be trusted to save anything that's important onto the fileserver because if your PC goes pop, there goes months or even years' worth of work. Can the payroll department? How do you feel about finding out that they can't the hard way?
IME, a large percentage of these locked-down systems have been locked down because person or persons in the past couldn't be trusted. Now, part of the job of the IT department is keep the lockdown at a reasonable level such that it prevents the most boneheaded of errors while still allowing people to work. If they're not doing this, then you haven't got a very good IT department.
Symantic would be happy to sell you some sort of "proactive compliance solution" to address this deep and serious problem that they were nice enough to convene a roundtable about.
Yep. Symantec Endpoint Compliance.
They've basically taken the antivirus product as far as it's possible to go so now when you buy the corporate version you get centrally managed antivirus, firewall, intrusion prevention and a certain degree of management over what devices may be plugged in and what software (if anything) may be executed.
Most of this can already be done with Group Policies in Active Directory so unless you haven't got AD or anything analogous to it, I can't really see what the benefit is.
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Beautiful though it is to imagine arrest warrants for treason in several countries - including a lot of banana republics that aren't exactly known for their progressive attitude towards capital punishment - against top-level Microsoft executives, I really don't think it's going to happen.
The only way it can happen is if all these countries which were previously shown to be corruptible suddenly decide that they have some principles after all and aren't afraid of the US bombing the hell out of them when they start executing extremely rich US citizens.
I can tell you how I solve it in a business context, but whether or not it could be scaled down to personal I'm not sure.
The problem: 2 sites each with 70-100GB of data needs offsite backup with similar criteria to your own. Bandwidth available to these sites is 2-4Mbps. The only OS involved is Linux, though I'm sure Windows could be shoehorned in somehow. A third site which has a tape streamer and someone to take tapes offsite is available. Data protection legislation means that storing it with a hosted service is illegal unless I encrypt it myself before sending it offsite - I'm only aware of one tool which claims to be able to do this and still send data as a binary delta (it uses the rsync library) and that tool is still not particularly common in Linux distributions and not very widely used. I'm nervous of trusting my backups to a tool that isn't on heavy use, particularly if strong encryption is being employed.
The Solution: A server in the third site and some judicious scripting with rsync allows it to mirror the data in the other two sites. The first sync is fairly painful, of course, but provided you don't have too much data regularly changing subsequent syncs aren't too bad. The server is backed up to tape which provides versioning capability so if someone only realises that they lost a file a week after the fact it can still be restored,
Initial effort to set up was pretty great but now it's done it JFW and requires no brain power whatsoever to run on a daily basis. I can make the data available over the VPN (of course the access speed will be dog slow) more-or-less immediately and I can make it available at LAN speed by copying it to a hard disk and courier it to the remote office in under 48 hours. A full restore of 100GB across a 2Mbps connection will take at least 4-5 days.
I was thinking along rather different lines, as it happens - lines which I suspect would be rather cheaper and wouldn't require a scanning electron microscope and team of chip design experts to verify.
Two separate machines built by two separate companies. The first is a touchscreen device similar to the existing ones, only it prints out a human and computer readable ballot - perhaps with MICR or something akin to those sheets of paper that are used for computer-marked tests with black bars in strategic places. The design of this ballot is pre-specified by a government body to be simple for both human and computer to understand.
One of the more common ideas mooted is "the human then places the human readable ballot in a box for later". My idea is a little more sophisticated - the slot in the box is actually an electronic ballot reader which forms the basis of the second machine. Once counted, the vote lands in a locked box.
Provided all goes according to plan, both machines should produce identical results. If there is significant discrepancy, count the paper ballots.
Ummm...Facebook has that. Actually. Well, admittedly, not to the level you're describing, but they are working that way. They do have groups which allows you to show/hide information on your page.
It does, and to a greater or lesser extent you can block which groups can see what things (depending on the application - the photo album supports it, for example).
However, it's hard to take seriously when it has been absolutely plagued with examples of it being possible to bypass the group security. Comes of facebook never really having been designed for it in the first place.
Hell, I live in London. Where's not nice by comparison?
Coventry.
Open Source licencing is not necessary to build a system with high Nixon Number, nor is it assured that an OSS system will have one. However, I would argue that(barring substantial advances in static analysis of binaries, or the like) publicly auditable code,
Doesn't do you any good unless you can prove that the version running on the computer terminal at the polling station is the publicly audited version.
along with a publicly available trusted compiler,
A far greater mind than I has already discussed this and pointed out that with a sufficiently determined attacker, there's no such thing:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
publicly disclosed hashes of all binaries, etc, etc. is in practice necessary to achieve a Nixon Number high enough to be considered for critical uses like voting.
How do you verify that the system is using the code that matches your hash rather than just ignoring it and running its own version?
End of the day, the GP's right. No matter how open or closed the voting system used, it can't really be trusted unless it provides a separate human-verifiable vote for checking purposes with every single vote cast.
They keep creating weird architectural constraints. A windows application at my site needs to spend an hour or so generating a report. Recently it stopped working and the cause turned out to be an IT policy mandating automatic screen lock after 10 minutes of inactivity. Integration between our application and Microsoft office seems to go through the UI and this isn't allowed to work when the screen is locked.
That's just plain laziness on the part of the app developers - Office has a perfectly well documented API which you can follow and totally ignore the UI.
Mind you, IME those developers are in very good company. It's remarkable how many companies have built a business around flogging some cheap & nasty VB monstrosity hacked up by the work experience kid over the course of a few afternoons.
OK can someone pleas hire these guys to work on handwriting recognition software? If they can ready these bizarrely twisted captchas why can't Palm read my name?
Because they're not using a computer to break it. They've done what a lot of global operations have done - if you can't easily automate it, move the part that requires expensive humans to a part of the world where humans are rather cheaper.
As someone else has already posted this link:
http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/Web-Promotion-Data-Processing/Gmail-Account-Creation-amp-Forms.html
That won't work for anyone who cares about their own privacy. Why would I want to give anyone my credit or debit card number if I wasn't actually buying something from that site at that particular time?
Why would anyone who cares about their own privacy use an email system from a company that has "index every byte of data on the planet" as their mission?
(Having said that, I'd never give out my card information unless it was to buy something).
Last time I tried using inotify it slowed the system down unacceptably - possibly because it was an IMAP server with maildir mailstores so it was dealing with notifications for thousands of files. This was a few weeks ago on Debian Etch.
Bruce Schneier has a lot more credibility in the security field than the Washington Post, the State of Washington, and Microsoft all put together.
That doesn't mean much. My left arse cheek has a lot more credibility in the security field than the Washington Post, the State of Washington, and Microsoft all put together.
Do you work for the same company as me?
This might not be an Exchange issue (tho I've never used Exchange so I can't be 100% sure). But I've experienced similar symptoms with thunderbird with IMAP on other servers. The thing is, I can't pin down a single circumstance. Sometimes it happens when I access a folder with a huge amount of messages (200000 +), sometimes when I navigate away from a "search folder" (with a small number of messages on the source folder), etc.
POP3 works flawlessly, tho.
By default, Thunderbird opens several connections to the IMAP server for performance. It doesn't behave particularly intelligently if the IMAP server is configured to refuse more than 1 or 2 simultaneous connections.
However, she notes accommodating the clarified PCI rule on antivirus in many places will be "expensive."
So what would constitute compliance with this rule?
Most commercial AV products are also available in Linux versions because plenty of Linux systems have to interact with Windows and could become transmission vectors, even if they're not infected themselves.
This is certainly true of Sophos, McAfee and Symantec Enterprise.
The only minor problem is that they often offer realtime scanning and are therefore very distribution-specific because the only way they can do this is by hooking into the Linux kernel to intercept filesystem calls.
Possibly over time, AIDS would be replaced in the human population with a milder disease, like we see with flu strains from year to year. It's hard to tell without giving it a few hundred or thousand more years of evolution to be sure.
Possibly, but one big difference between AIDS and a lot of the other conditions that you mentioned is that you've had plenty of time to pass it on to others before it kills you.
There is custom hardware. It's built into the BIOS on most modern Dell laptops.
You said it yourself: "supply a bit of calibration".
Colour perception and printing can be fiendishly involved - there's a difference between "what is technically correct, ie. no colour cast", "what looks pleasing to the eye" and "what looks pleasing to the eye when it's printed using this slightly different process which is necessary because suddenly we're printing on dirty great billboards rather than normal-size sheets of paper".
The printing industry uses CMYK and there's no standard way to say "this is the calibration you need to apply" - therefore you either work in CMYK or you put up with whatever comes out the other end when the result comes back from the printing firm. When your job is to come up with something that's pleasing to the eye, "putting up with whatever comes back from the printing firm" is not an option.
Paying someone to write a Gantt chart program would undoubtedly be much more expensive than just buying Microsoft Project. No efficiency gained there.
There are a couple of alternatives available now - Computer Associates opensourced their product, which is now called OpenWorkbench
The Hauppauge card was more a case of the IVTV developers lying to me. Don't tell me your driver supports that model of card if it doesn't.
It is not unknown - indeed it's quite common - to find that a manufacturer releases two totally different products which achieve the same end under the same model number.
It's quite possible that the developers weren't even aware that Hauppage had done this.
CMYK support for the GIMP - Why you might not need CMYK support in the GIMP.
If someone knows enough to know that they need CMYK support, chances are they need CMYK support.
What disease is this that has people writing dirty great long articles about how a feature is unnecessary, not particularly useful and indeed sometimes dangerous when really what they mean is "My pet product doesn't support it and I'm ashamed to admit that - so instead of admitting it I'll try and tell anyone who will listen that the feature is a bad idea in the first place!"?
The people who write these articles invariably try and sound entirely authoritative, almost always talk down to their audience and are completely unaware of how damn stupid they sound when it is widely known that a rival product supports it without significant issue.
The estate of Sir Arthur Clarke and MGM might have a thing or two to say about attempting to claim 2010.
No such thing as prior art - it's trademark law. Which in the UK (not sure about elsewhere, suspect it's similar) can be boiled down to "you can't use this word or phrase in a context which is likely to confuse the customer into thinking you're somehow linked with some other organisation which has trademarked it."
Hence I would probably be in trouble if I set up a mail-order office supplies company called "Viking Office Supplies Ltd" because of Viking Direct but the radio station Viking FM is perfectly OK.
that they are able to subvert the host country's laws so effectively? I know that they have muscled around 'smaller' countries, but I would think that Canada wouldn't be so easily swayed.
What am I missing that makes the IOC so powerful? Is it simply the 'investment opportunity' and business that the Olympics bring? Is national pride so easily wounded that we have to kowtow to their every whim? Its no secret that the IOC is incredibly corrupt and profit driven... how come modern democratic states aren't telling them to fuck off and clean up their act? Instead the US, Britain, Canada, etc. seem to be bowing and scraping to meet their every demand.
They've been getting special laws passed in the UK too.
Remember this isn't just one group of people with a lot of money. It's one group of people with a lot of money who will also make a lot of money for a lot of other people - for instance, when Coke sponsors the games, you won't be able to buy Pepsi in the olympic village. Money talks, and when there's a lot of money it not only talks, it gets up in Parliament, makes speeches and proposes laws.
Is it 2010 base 10, or 2010 base 8? 'Cause that still leaves a lot of wiggle room.
2010 base 8 would probably be written 02010 so I reckon you'd be fine.
(provided they're loans to people who can pay them back.. but if a bank is loaning to someone who can't pay they didn't do their due dilligence and deserve everything they get).
Yep, and there's a technical term for them. "Sub-prime mortgages".
Which plenty of banks have been lending quite happily because they can charge a much higher rate of interest and they assumed(!) that house prices will continue to rise - therefore if the worst comes to the worst they can repossess the house and still make their money back.
There's a discussion like this every few months on /., and it almost always boils down to the same argument:
"I can be trusted to do anything I like on a PC, therefore everyone in the company can be trusted to do anything they like on a PC, therefore locking them down achieves absolutely nothing and it pisses everyone off. Hell, don't even bother putting any software on them - just hand them out as they left the factory and let end-users do that. Much easier than having to wait for someone from IT to come down and click next next next...."
People like me clear up the mess that comes out of doing that. What you wind up with is:
IME, a large percentage of these locked-down systems have been locked down because person or persons in the past couldn't be trusted. Now, part of the job of the IT department is keep the lockdown at a reasonable level such that it prevents the most boneheaded of errors while still allowing people to work. If they're not doing this, then you haven't got a very good IT department.
Symantic would be happy to sell you some sort of "proactive compliance solution" to address this deep and serious problem that they were nice enough to convene a roundtable about.
Yep. Symantec Endpoint Compliance.
They've basically taken the antivirus product as far as it's possible to go so now when you buy the corporate version you get centrally managed antivirus, firewall, intrusion prevention and a certain degree of management over what devices may be plugged in and what software (if anything) may be executed.
Most of this can already be done with Group Policies in Active Directory so unless you haven't got AD or anything analogous to it, I can't really see what the benefit is.