I'm afraid it is _not_ a good idea to comply. Getting a warrant is an expensive proposition, and the officer will be harassed by their own superiors if they do it too much. By allowing a search, you give them opportunity to find, or for corrupt police, to plant evidence of other infractions. You may not have the time to participate in this civil resistance. But if you can protect your privacy, and help protect that of other innocent people by making a show of it, resisting such searches early, politely, and not in the middle of a political roundup is the time to train people that innocent people do not want to be searched.
If it were profitable enough to pay for the armed guard, the merchants would have hired them. Paying for the armed guards via military or police forces just transfers the cost to taxpayers.
The pirates are *poor*, from a bankrupt country in the midst of rebellion, or their own country's military would arrest them when they docked.
Isn't it easier to "send blood flow" to a moving limb? Try warming up your hands or feet on a cold day without flexing them: it really does help to move them. Also, just thinking about the body movements, I think an animal that already has some motion going can dodge or jump more easily than one standing completely still. That tail gives some leverage to twist or turn the _rest_ of the body, doesn't it?
Did you publish the rattlesnake IR astronomy theory? That kind of analysis is one of the delights of science.
I'm afraid your premise is flawed. The ideal of "meritocracy" needs some standards to measure "merit". A degree in the relevant field is a very powerful and effective measure of that merit. It's not the _only_ such measure, but it's a very easy one for a hiring manager or interviewer who is not expert in the field to verify.
> Death can get a human being on Earth as easily as on Mars.
This is simply untrue. On Earth, you can walk around in shirtsleeves at least part of the year for most of the inhabited landmass, shelter is relatively easily built, the air is breathable, fresh water is within walking distance, and there is idible biomass. There may be _shortages_ of all these due to overpopulation, but there's a starting place. The necessary investment for all these is stunning, and the loss of any one for even a short period is lethal. Until we master closed ecologies a lot more effectively or set up a real delivery system to Mars system for these staples, in very large amounts, colonization by more than a few explorers is out of the question. And given the shipping costs, unless we do something like colonize the rings of Saturn for easily shippable water and rocket fuel, there's no point. If you've colonized asteroids and especially ice asteroids, why _bother_ with a planetary surface?
When the training and support for an individual colonist is so large, there is utterly no point in _wasting_ it on prisoners. There are plenty of volunteers, skilled and healthy and eager, to take up such posts.
No, Kevin engaged in active destruction, both deliberate and accidental, of the systems he probed. You seem to think he just engaged in social manipulation: while effective, it's hardly the only tool he used. And the destruction was as much from his _incompetence_ than from his expertise. By re-arranging and casually ruining core security systems he made production systems crash repeatedly, lose data and code, and cost developers, customers, and companies many millions in lost work. He also _kept_ doing it, even when he turned informant against other crackers and cut deals with the FBI to avoid prosecution.
Mitnick was, indeed, _much_ more dangerous than this guy. He was also too insistent to _stop_ after being caught repeatedly.
This could easily generate a dozen excellent merit badges, especially for Eagle Scouts. Hardware recycling projects or open source project creation would be wonderful. Preferably free software, but there are enough worthwhile Apache licensed projects to be worth doing. They could link conservation projects to hacking projects for tracking endangered species or park maintenance or scheduling urban renewal work.
Even simple tasks such as "build a server from scratch" could be awarded, and generate some early skills. I'd love to teach scouts how to handle equipment: the old skills of knot-tying and rope handling easily translate to skills of neat wiring that I'd welcome in new electronics and networking staff.
> So if you see anyone using violence of any kind at any political demonstration they MUST be being paid by groups opposed to the cause to smear it
Oh, no! Armed revolt was written into US Declaration of Indepencence, and certainly has historical uses. Even political graffiti has its uses. But badly spelled, misaimed, and inconsistent "graffiti" such as the Anonymous pranks lacks any intelligible message and discredits itself as a political factor with its incompetence.
For examples of effective non-violent social protest look at the history of Martin King and the Women's Suffrage movement in the US. For effective violent uprising, look at some of the Middle East protests over the last 2 years or the history of Ireland or even Afghanistan.
You've raised some fascinating legal points. Unfortunately, in practice, the entire set of legal restrictions are and have been worked around for years.
For illegal political or industrial espionage, the records and data from existing monitoring are never exposed to judicial review. There's no trustworthy way to verify that the monitoring is _only_ done legally, due to the secrecy of the raw data. This makes it far, far too easy to abuse in extra-legal fashions: the law can be, and is, treated as a meaningless scrap of paper because the courts and Congress at large _are not informed_ of the extent of the monitoring. The best recent case of this is the fiber optic taps on AT&T's core data lines, for which immunity was granted after the taps were publicly revealed by a whistleblower. (This is what whistleblowers are _for_.)
Another obvious issue is that the US security forces trade internationally for information. We don't need a warrant to obtain US communications that were monitored by UK, German, Turkish, or other allied security forces. We just need to swap data they are interested in that we gathered legally under the very laws you mention. This sort of jurisdictional horse-trading is precisely how the US conducts illegal torture of "terrorist" suspects and ignores international treaties on treatment of prisoners: we simply find a partner who can do it legally, or illegally, in their own country.
Hardly. Interpol helps arrest 25 drones who participate in semi-organized cyber-guerrilla warfare against political targets. The idea that Anonymous is serving the "greater good" is not implied by their targets or by their results. Anonymous is not _coherent_ enough to have a well defined purpose. They consistently mistake what is effectively electronic graffiti for meaningful protest, and fail to convey or enunciate what they actually want. Anonymous may well have a few technically competent core hackers, but they rely heavily on their much larger community of script kiddies and poorly skilled hangers on to form the necessary crowds.
Like the fools at political rallies who throw bottles at police and overturn cars, they actively _discredit_ the political causes they occasionally espouse. They encourage police and voters to think of the genuine political movements as similar vandals. And they're not _competent_ enough to be genuine threats to those they claim to battle: they've demonstrated that again and again. If they were competent enough to actually raid corporate email or financial records and get them to Wikileaks, then I'd take them far more seriously.
That happens to me in computer stores all the time. People will be hammering or confusing the overworked and underpaid sales staff, and I've bailed quite a few of them out with information about what the differences are between the cables, tools, or server characteristics. I do try not to interfere with the sale, but helping them get what they need quicker helps the sales person get free to answer _my_ question.
It's especially amusing if I can reach into my bag and pull out the particular device they really need, which I carry around for emergencies, and show it to the salesperson instead of wasting time explaining it.
That tactic is too common, and leaves people thinking you're an idiot because they get no chance to find out _why_ you did things certain ways. This role is in the same university: you do _not_ want to leave enemies behind in your old workgroup. Unless some other political issue is driving you out, plan a much longer hand-off period. Unless there's other staff that can fill him in on common practices after beginning, you should schedule time every day, then every week, then occasional emails to touch base. Have lunch with him and a notebook occasionally in the first month. Just be careful not to become a crutch.
The server admins and the networking group should remain on friendly terms: you're going to need favors from each other in the future, and keeping things helpful will help the server team grant those favors gracefully. It'll also let them know that when you say yes, it's as a colleague who wants everything to work, and when you say no, it's not personal.
I'd question "anonymous reader's" facts. It's difficult to believe such a restrictive setup would ever exist as a general, university-wide policy. It's much more likely that the "anonymous poster" failed to set up an IT required _proxy_ service, which is a quite common practice. It's also possible that the firewall is for a smaller, restricted part of the network, such as those handling confidential data. Well managed proxies in these environments can help manage network abuse, help prevent or control malware, and restrict potentially network expensive access to porn, P2P services, or to track use of university funded resources, and help manage unregistered clients plugged into the university's networks, especially those using poorly secured wi-fi access points.
I've also regularly seen people refuse to use the proxies who see them as limitations of their rights, and especially as interfering with their use of "their" computers, whether the university or company paid for them or not. This can usually be resolved with a short discussion with the person, explaining why the proxies have proven necessary. It cannot be resolved by giving Slashdot advice about how to work around the firewalls or proxies, because that creates a whole new set of potential problems.
I should have spelled it "root password". Forgive me, if you wish. My wrists are bothering me.
The additional steps you describe to secure the private key are simply not common practice, and do not accout for system backup, remote access, or failover of that critical configuration server. Each of those creates another vector or set of vectores to steal the keys: it's too many paths for any production environment, and the ease of setting up an ssh-agent makes such passphrase free keys evidence of simple laziness or incompetence for system administrators.
You may not believe I'm aware of the distinction of a private and public cryptographic key, but I'm afraid that I do. I also know what happens when fools who should know much better scatter unprotected administrative keys around, including poorly secured home directories, laptops, and backup media. Since there is no well-supported expiration for SSH keys, they remain an extremely dangerous hazard until the keys are altered: such updates and rebuilds are a management nightmare. I'm afraid it comes up several times a year professionally, with partneres that are at profound security risk and waste my group's time cleaning up before we can share resources with them.
I'm afraid that it's not overboard. The "sane method of securing the private keys" is the equivalent of keeping the aforementioned monitor in a locked office. It's better, but it's still vulnerable to similar access problems..
No. If you worked for me and I caught you doing this, I would first write you up for a direct security violation, and if I caught you doing it again I would fire you. Passphrase free keys leave your deployed network vulnerable to anyone who can steal the key from the hacked server, backup, or anyone who manages to walk off with that key by other means. Doing this is as bad, if not worse, than putting a post-it note with the rude password on your desktop monitor.
Setting up an ssh-agent to passphrase wrap such a remote root access key is a basic step. Restricting remote access to the designated management server is another basic step in protecting such a network from root key theft. Throwing such unprotected keys around is unfortunately, a very common practice among systems people who believe that "if they're inside our network, we have much bigger problems". Since these machines are laptops, they will be walking into and out of the network, and it's reasonable to assume that the network will be attacked from a machine inside. Basic security practices, such as system updates, password expiration, and access key handling should all get some attention to protect the network.
If you've got a month to learn puppet and master it, and a test bed of one each of the different designated configurations of the laptops, puppet can be very useful. If the laptops need to be _identical_ in configuration, you want a nightly imaging tool such as is used in public computer labs, not a highly context sensitive configuration management tool. This is especially true if people will be manipulating the configurations locally: the ability to ruin a configuration managed file service or website deployment with mis-installed, locally built packages is truly amazing, especially with developers using the perl "CPAN" or python or Maven based auto-component installation tools.
Laptop configurations are unfortunately extremely sensitive to driver mismatches and configuration mismatches. Ubuntu is actually a good distribution for such a use, it's one of the best integrated Linux releases for laptops. But for distributed laptops in a development environment, regular re-imaging is vital to preserve a consistent environment. Local users with developer or administrative privileges _will_ skew them from the centrally configured layout, enough to break it, and they _won't_ know how to resolve the puppet problems.
Oh, my. You've never had to deal with a search warrant, or a subpoena for computer documentation. If you do not unlock the door, or provide the data in a viewable format for the officers, you will be seen as refusing and the judge can hold you contempt of court, with rather arbitrary punishment for impeding the investigation. "Contempt" charges do not require a conviction or, in fact, anything but the whim of the judge, though most are cautious with its use.
Actually, the killing of deformed infants has numerous historical precedents. So does the killing of the children of slaves, and of the children of native populations by invaders. Even the killing of children too small to work in families facing starvation is not unheard of, historically: look up some of the tragic stories of the Irish potato famine in the 1740's.
So there are certainly logical _comparisons_, if not equivalence, between reasons given to justify abortion and the killing of children. It's not an absolute moral position to hold infant's lives to be sacred: it's never been universally applied, even by Christian nations.
Aspberger's does not create consistent brilliance in all fields of endeavor, nor does it prevent RSI from interfering with casual typing. And an Aspberger's patient who is not well educated due to having their autism misdiagnosed may not have had the excellent education in English grammar available to some of us. In fact, early diagnosis of both learning problems and of genius can help children be exposed to, and supported in the material they can handle.
And there _is_ treatment for autism in children, especially compared to misdiagnosing their distraction and difficulty with emotional interactions as ADD and giving them excess Ritalin, like one child I know. The switch after his re-diagnosis was profound. He's happier, his parents can handle his issues better, and he's progressing much faster at school. It can be difficult with a child to say how much is the treatment, and how much is just a separate stage of development, but his parents and school are convinced it's the treatment and different school programs for him.
I hope I do get points for this: the idea that "once they start abusing that ignored security feature, it's too late so we shouldn't think about it now" is a very common security approach that makes it difficult for my peers to clean up environments we work with. By reviewing and accepting your layers of protections in advance, you can provide much more effective protection should any one layer fail. The idea that "it's too late by then" is very helpful to guiding people down the slippery slope to a police state, because it _is_ too late by then.
Unfortunately, this "security feature" was not publicly set or even ackonwledged: The existence of the microdots is one aspect: providing the access to model information and serial numbers, as a monitoring practice, is quite another, and that occurred _without_ court order and without a legal framework, law, or regulations on when or how it should be provided. _That_ is a Big Brother tactic ripe for abuse. Without the legal trail of a warrant or subpoena, how can we know that the primary usage of such monitoring is _not_ political monitoring? And how can we even know whether it's ever been helpful to identify or prosecute a real counterfeiter?
Oh, dear. Another member of the "if they're inside our network, we have bigger problems" policy of ignoring basic security practices until it's far, far, far too late.
It's much safer to protect freedoms and rights earlier, before their loss has become accepted, than to try to roll back years or decades of common practice.
Have you reviewed any of Randi's debunking efforts, such as his class on how people interpret astrological predictions? Or the intercepted radio transmissions of the faith healer, Peter Popov, who was listening to radio messages from his wife to provide the "miraculous" informaiton about his audience members and whom he would "heal" even of entirely fictitious diseases? Or looked into his debunking of Uri Geller's use of stage magic tricks to claim mind over matter powers, bending spoons and keys?
It's science at its best, providing a testable hypothesis, and works extremely well.
James Randi is in the best of company in his late career. Harry Houdin became furious with people who claimed his feats of escape and stage magic were done with mystical powers such as teleportation. Harry devoted a great deal of effort to debunking the horrible and clumsy stage magicians who were conning people with seances and mystical powers. In the midst of the industrial revolution, this fascination with the miraculous was infuriating to someone like Houdine, and now to people like James Randi, who've mastered their crafts and see clumsy charlatans using them against innocent people.
This kind of debunking is in the very best scientific tradition: providing an alternative explanation that requires no violation of previous experiment or understood principles is at the basis of how science works, and helps teach us how to verify new claims properly. I genuinely wish more engineers had the time, or made the time, to study debunking to understand better how their own inattention or deceit by other people can confuse their results.
You mean Brooke Shields. She was apparently 14 when she made those ads, and I remember them. She looked rather seductive. She also did numerous nude scenes through her teens, some in the movie "Pretty Baby" about child prostitituion, which I've not seen but am now curious aobut.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid it is _not_ a good idea to comply. Getting a warrant is an expensive proposition, and the officer will be harassed by their own superiors if they do it too much. By allowing a search, you give them opportunity to find, or for corrupt police, to plant evidence of other infractions. You may not have the time to participate in this civil resistance. But if you can protect your privacy, and help protect that of other innocent people by making a show of it, resisting such searches early, politely, and not in the middle of a political roundup is the time to train people that innocent people do not want to be searched.
If it were profitable enough to pay for the armed guard, the merchants would have hired them. Paying for the armed guards via military or police forces just transfers the cost to taxpayers.
The pirates are *poor*, from a bankrupt country in the midst of rebellion, or their own country's military would arrest them when they docked.
Isn't it easier to "send blood flow" to a moving limb? Try warming up your hands or feet on a cold day without flexing them: it really does help to move them. Also, just thinking about the body movements, I think an animal that already has some motion going can dodge or jump more easily than one standing completely still. That tail gives some leverage to twist or turn the _rest_ of the body, doesn't it?
Did you publish the rattlesnake IR astronomy theory? That kind of analysis is one of the delights of science.
I'm afraid your premise is flawed. The ideal of "meritocracy" needs some standards to measure "merit". A degree in the relevant field is a very powerful and effective measure of that merit. It's not the _only_ such measure, but it's a very easy one for a hiring manager or interviewer who is not expert in the field to verify.
> Death can get a human being on Earth as easily as on Mars.
This is simply untrue. On Earth, you can walk around in shirtsleeves at least part of the year for most of the inhabited landmass, shelter is relatively easily built, the air is breathable, fresh water is within walking distance, and there is idible biomass. There may be _shortages_ of all these due to overpopulation, but there's a starting place. The necessary investment for all these is stunning, and the loss of any one for even a short period is lethal. Until we master closed ecologies a lot more effectively or set up a real delivery system to Mars system for these staples, in very large amounts, colonization by more than a few explorers is out of the question. And given the shipping costs, unless we do something like colonize the rings of Saturn for easily shippable water and rocket fuel, there's no point. If you've colonized asteroids and especially ice asteroids, why _bother_ with a planetary surface?
When the training and support for an individual colonist is so large, there is utterly no point in _wasting_ it on prisoners. There are plenty of volunteers, skilled and healthy and eager, to take up such posts.
No, Kevin engaged in active destruction, both deliberate and accidental, of the systems he probed. You seem to think he just engaged in social manipulation: while effective, it's hardly the only tool he used. And the destruction was as much from his _incompetence_ than from his expertise. By re-arranging and casually ruining core security systems he made production systems crash repeatedly, lose data and code, and cost developers, customers, and companies many millions in lost work. He also _kept_ doing it, even when he turned informant against other crackers and cut deals with the FBI to avoid prosecution.
Mitnick was, indeed, _much_ more dangerous than this guy. He was also too insistent to _stop_ after being caught repeatedly.
This could easily generate a dozen excellent merit badges, especially for Eagle Scouts. Hardware recycling projects or open source project creation would be wonderful. Preferably free software, but there are enough worthwhile Apache licensed projects to be worth doing. They could link conservation projects to hacking projects for tracking endangered species or park maintenance or scheduling urban renewal work.
Even simple tasks such as "build a server from scratch" could be awarded, and generate some early skills. I'd love to teach scouts how to handle equipment: the old skills of knot-tying and rope handling easily translate to skills of neat wiring that I'd welcome in new electronics and networking staff.
> So if you see anyone using violence of any kind at any political demonstration they MUST be being paid by groups opposed to the cause to smear it
Oh, no! Armed revolt was written into US Declaration of Indepencence, and certainly has historical uses. Even political graffiti has its uses. But badly spelled, misaimed, and inconsistent "graffiti" such as the Anonymous pranks lacks any intelligible message and discredits itself as a political factor with its incompetence.
For examples of effective non-violent social protest look at the history of Martin King and the Women's Suffrage movement in the US. For effective violent uprising, look at some of the Middle East protests over the last 2 years or the history of Ireland or even Afghanistan.
You've raised some fascinating legal points. Unfortunately, in practice, the entire set of legal restrictions are and have been worked around for years.
For illegal political or industrial espionage, the records and data from existing monitoring are never exposed to judicial review. There's no trustworthy way to verify that the monitoring is _only_ done legally, due to the secrecy of the raw data. This makes it far, far too easy to abuse in extra-legal fashions: the law can be, and is, treated as a meaningless scrap of paper because the courts and Congress at large _are not informed_ of the extent of the monitoring. The best recent case of this is the fiber optic taps on AT&T's core data lines, for which immunity was granted after the taps were publicly revealed by a whistleblower. (This is what whistleblowers are _for_.)
Another obvious issue is that the US security forces trade internationally for information. We don't need a warrant to obtain US communications that were monitored by UK, German, Turkish, or other allied security forces. We just need to swap data they are interested in that we gathered legally under the very laws you mention. This sort of jurisdictional horse-trading is precisely how the US conducts illegal torture of "terrorist" suspects and ignores international treaties on treatment of prisoners: we simply find a partner who can do it legally, or illegally, in their own country.
Hardly. Interpol helps arrest 25 drones who participate in semi-organized cyber-guerrilla warfare against political targets. The idea that Anonymous is serving the "greater good" is not implied by their targets or by their results. Anonymous is not _coherent_ enough to have a well defined purpose. They consistently mistake what is effectively electronic graffiti for meaningful protest, and fail to convey or enunciate what they actually want. Anonymous may well have a few technically competent core hackers, but they rely heavily on their much larger community of script kiddies and poorly skilled hangers on to form the necessary crowds.
Like the fools at political rallies who throw bottles at police and overturn cars, they actively _discredit_ the political causes they occasionally espouse. They encourage police and voters to think of the genuine political movements as similar vandals. And they're not _competent_ enough to be genuine threats to those they claim to battle: they've demonstrated that again and again. If they were competent enough to actually raid corporate email or financial records and get them to Wikileaks, then I'd take them far more seriously.
That happens to me in computer stores all the time. People will be hammering or confusing the overworked and underpaid sales staff, and I've bailed quite a few of them out with information about what the differences are between the cables, tools, or server characteristics. I do try not to interfere with the sale, but helping them get what they need quicker helps the sales person get free to answer _my_ question.
It's especially amusing if I can reach into my bag and pull out the particular device they really need, which I carry around for emergencies, and show it to the salesperson instead of wasting time explaining it.
That tactic is too common, and leaves people thinking you're an idiot because they get no chance to find out _why_ you did things certain ways. This role is in the same university: you do _not_ want to leave enemies behind in your old workgroup. Unless some other political issue is driving you out, plan a much longer hand-off period. Unless there's other staff that can fill him in on common practices after beginning, you should schedule time every day, then every week, then occasional emails to touch base. Have lunch with him and a notebook occasionally in the first month. Just be careful not to become a crutch.
The server admins and the networking group should remain on friendly terms: you're going to need favors from each other in the future, and keeping things helpful will help the server team grant those favors gracefully. It'll also let them know that when you say yes, it's as a colleague who wants everything to work, and when you say no, it's not personal.
I'd question "anonymous reader's" facts. It's difficult to believe such a restrictive setup would ever exist as a general, university-wide policy. It's much more likely that the "anonymous poster" failed to set up an IT required _proxy_ service, which is a quite common practice. It's also possible that the firewall is for a smaller, restricted part of the network, such as those handling confidential data. Well managed proxies in these environments can help manage network abuse, help prevent or control malware, and restrict potentially network expensive access to porn, P2P services, or to track use of university funded resources, and help manage unregistered clients plugged into the university's networks, especially those using poorly secured wi-fi access points.
I've also regularly seen people refuse to use the proxies who see them as limitations of their rights, and especially as interfering with their use of "their" computers, whether the university or company paid for them or not. This can usually be resolved with a short discussion with the person, explaining why the proxies have proven necessary. It cannot be resolved by giving Slashdot advice about how to work around the firewalls or proxies, because that creates a whole new set of potential problems.
I should have spelled it "root password". Forgive me, if you wish. My wrists are bothering me.
The additional steps you describe to secure the private key are simply not common practice, and do not accout for system backup, remote access, or failover of that critical configuration server. Each of those creates another vector or set of vectores to steal the keys: it's too many paths for any production environment, and the ease of setting up an ssh-agent makes such passphrase free keys evidence of simple laziness or incompetence for system administrators.
You may not believe I'm aware of the distinction of a private and public cryptographic key, but I'm afraid that I do. I also know what happens when fools who should know much better scatter unprotected administrative keys around, including poorly secured home directories, laptops, and backup media. Since there is no well-supported expiration for SSH keys, they remain an extremely dangerous hazard until the keys are altered: such updates and rebuilds are a management nightmare. I'm afraid it comes up several times a year professionally, with partneres that are at profound security risk and waste my group's time cleaning up before we can share resources with them.
I'm afraid that it's not overboard. The "sane method of securing the private keys" is the equivalent of keeping the aforementioned monitor in a locked office. It's better, but it's still vulnerable to similar access problems..
> Just set up a passwordless SSH key for root
No. If you worked for me and I caught you doing this, I would first write you up for a direct security violation, and if I caught you doing it again I would fire you. Passphrase free keys leave your deployed network vulnerable to anyone who can steal the key from the hacked server, backup, or anyone who manages to walk off with that key by other means. Doing this is as bad, if not worse, than putting a post-it note with the rude password on your desktop monitor.
Setting up an ssh-agent to passphrase wrap such a remote root access key is a basic step. Restricting remote access to the designated management server is another basic step in protecting such a network from root key theft. Throwing such unprotected keys around is unfortunately, a very common practice among systems people who believe that "if they're inside our network, we have much bigger problems". Since these machines are laptops, they will be walking into and out of the network, and it's reasonable to assume that the network will be attacked from a machine inside. Basic security practices, such as system updates, password expiration, and access key handling should all get some attention to protect the network.
If you've got a month to learn puppet and master it, and a test bed of one each of the different designated configurations of the laptops, puppet can be very useful. If the laptops need to be _identical_ in configuration, you want a nightly imaging tool such as is used in public computer labs, not a highly context sensitive configuration management tool. This is especially true if people will be manipulating the configurations locally: the ability to ruin a configuration managed file service or website deployment with mis-installed, locally built packages is truly amazing, especially with developers using the perl "CPAN" or python or Maven based auto-component installation tools.
Laptop configurations are unfortunately extremely sensitive to driver mismatches and configuration mismatches. Ubuntu is actually a good distribution for such a use, it's one of the best integrated Linux releases for laptops. But for distributed laptops in a development environment, regular re-imaging is vital to preserve a consistent environment. Local users with developer or administrative privileges _will_ skew them from the centrally configured layout, enough to break it, and they _won't_ know how to resolve the puppet problems.
Oh, my. You've never had to deal with a search warrant, or a subpoena for computer documentation. If you do not unlock the door, or provide the data in a viewable format for the officers, you will be seen as refusing and the judge can hold you contempt of court, with rather arbitrary punishment for impeding the investigation. "Contempt" charges do not require a conviction or, in fact, anything but the whim of the judge, though most are cautious with its use.
Actually, the killing of deformed infants has numerous historical precedents. So does the killing of the children of slaves, and of the children of native populations by invaders. Even the killing of children too small to work in families facing starvation is not unheard of, historically: look up some of the tragic stories of the Irish potato famine in the 1740's.
So there are certainly logical _comparisons_, if not equivalence, between reasons given to justify abortion and the killing of children. It's not an absolute moral position to hold infant's lives to be sacred: it's never been universally applied, even by Christian nations.
Aspberger's does not create consistent brilliance in all fields of endeavor, nor does it prevent RSI from interfering with casual typing. And an Aspberger's patient who is not well educated due to having their autism misdiagnosed may not have had the excellent education in English grammar available to some of us. In fact, early diagnosis of both learning problems and of genius can help children be exposed to, and supported in the material they can handle.
And there _is_ treatment for autism in children, especially compared to misdiagnosing their distraction and difficulty with emotional interactions as ADD and giving them excess Ritalin, like one child I know. The switch after his re-diagnosis was profound. He's happier, his parents can handle his issues better, and he's progressing much faster at school. It can be difficult with a child to say how much is the treatment, and how much is just a separate stage of development, but his parents and school are convinced it's the treatment and different school programs for him.
I hope I do get points for this: the idea that "once they start abusing that ignored security feature, it's too late so we shouldn't think about it now" is a very common security approach that makes it difficult for my peers to clean up environments we work with. By reviewing and accepting your layers of protections in advance, you can provide much more effective protection should any one layer fail. The idea that "it's too late by then" is very helpful to guiding people down the slippery slope to a police state, because it _is_ too late by then.
Unfortunately, this "security feature" was not publicly set or even ackonwledged: The existence of the microdots is one aspect: providing the access to model information and serial numbers, as a monitoring practice, is quite another, and that occurred _without_ court order and without a legal framework, law, or regulations on when or how it should be provided. _That_ is a Big Brother tactic ripe for abuse. Without the legal trail of a warrant or subpoena, how can we know that the primary usage of such monitoring is _not_ political monitoring? And how can we even know whether it's ever been helpful to identify or prosecute a real counterfeiter?
Oh, dear. Another member of the "if they're inside our network, we have bigger problems" policy of ignoring basic security practices until it's far, far, far too late.
It's much safer to protect freedoms and rights earlier, before their loss has become accepted, than to try to roll back years or decades of common practice.
Have you reviewed any of Randi's debunking efforts, such as his class on how people interpret astrological predictions? Or the intercepted radio transmissions of the faith healer, Peter Popov, who was listening to radio messages from his wife to provide the "miraculous" informaiton about his audience members and whom he would "heal" even of entirely fictitious diseases? Or looked into his debunking of Uri Geller's use of stage magic tricks to claim mind over matter powers, bending spoons and keys?
It's science at its best, providing a testable hypothesis, and works extremely well.
James Randi is in the best of company in his late career. Harry Houdin became furious with people who claimed his feats of escape and stage magic were done with mystical powers such as teleportation. Harry devoted a great deal of effort to debunking the horrible and clumsy stage magicians who were conning people with seances and mystical powers. In the midst of the industrial revolution, this fascination with the miraculous was infuriating to someone like Houdine, and now to people like James Randi, who've mastered their crafts and see clumsy charlatans using them against innocent people.
This kind of debunking is in the very best scientific tradition: providing an alternative explanation that requires no violation of previous experiment or understood principles is at the basis of how science works, and helps teach us how to verify new claims properly. I genuinely wish more engineers had the time, or made the time, to study debunking to understand better how their own inattention or deceit by other people can confuse their results.
You mean Brooke Shields. She was apparently 14 when she made those ads, and I remember them. She looked rather seductive. She also did numerous nude scenes through her teens, some in the movie "Pretty Baby" about child prostitituion, which I've not seen but am now curious aobut.