> If it were really that important, why didn't Obama implement it early in his tenure?
The president was pretty busy, with Iraq and Afghanistan as wars he didn't start but needed to clean up, with the health care program, the difficulty of appointing any Cabinet staff in the face of an obstructionist Congress, and an economy reeling from two Asian wars and the housing market economic meltdown. I think we can safely say that he was _busy_.
Moreover, the FCC is supposed to be an independent agency from the White House. So any guidance or promotion of particular policies at the FCC can take much longer because it can't be done by presidential mandate.
According to Merriam Webster, one of the definitions of "hacker" is " a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system". I'm afraid that "spearfishing" would count as "hacking", especially with such a clear context.
> Reminder: Aaron Schwartz was looking at 35 years in prison for nothing more than a clever wget script.
This is incorrect. Aaron Swartz [check spelling] was attempting to download all of JSTOR, and its index information, in order to republish it for free. Doing this was not only criminal. It was stealing the resources of a non-profit which collects information and publishes, organized and usable, for medical and scientific research all over the world. It could make the resources available, for a short period, at a reduced burden, but would reduce or even eliminate the resources to collect and organize the data for the next year, or the year after that. It was not only shortsighted, but the excessive resources used for downloading crashed JSTOR services and made them unavailable to the students, the doctors, and the scientists who use it every day. JSTOR could not continue to supply MIT with service under this stress, and that would cut off a vital library resource for approximately 25,000 employees and students at MIT.
The others are different stories, but for Aaron Swartz, he already had a competent legal team funded by other people who saw his action as a "free speech" issue. It was not: it was theft of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property in the organization and cross-linking of JSTOR, and of unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material that JSTOR makes available for licensed use.
If I may beg your pardon, I assumed nothing. I tried to say "I[f] you're using your work VPN for Bittorrent or Netflix or gaming". Please excuse me if the missing "f" led you to assume that I was accusing you of anything foolish.
> if my employer had reason to believe I was using it for entertainment purposes or illegal activities
Then I suspect you wouldn't notice "Net Neutraility" style throttling, even if it were applied to your workplace VPN. You're probably not using enough bandwidth to even notice it.
It was a delight to see Robbie the Robot show, functioning, in a Columbo episode in 1974. I hope his new owners will maintain him and let him appear in other guest appearances.
I'm afraid it does. The patent trolls do not tend to bother large companies: large companies generally have much better lawyers already on staff, filing patents for the company, who can handle patent trolls as a matter of course. The patents filed by larger companies as a matter of course for them, and the patent suites they gather provide strong protection against smaller companies entering the business and potentially competing with the business. The result is that small companies with limited portfolios can be bankrupted and their intellectual property obtained for pennies on the dollar, then added to the larger companies patent portfolio.
If you have the opportunity, review a typical software based patent portfolio. Many if not all, will be "stupid". They're usually covered by prior art, are obvious to the practitioners in the field, or fail to be specific enough to be patentable. Sometimes they should have been unpatentable for all three reasons, but they are accepted as a matter of course if the patent attorney is familiar to the patent office.
Activating a VPN does little to nothing to solve the throttling issue. The throttling is done against the upstream services, at the routing or "network layer", where the ISP's organize connections to local hosts. Simply making that connection from another host in a preferred region leaves the connections to that remote region sill simply leave the remote region throttled, as well, especially if this "single solution" VPN solution is detectable at the routers or firewalls and can be preferentially throttled itself.
The tools to do this kind of throttling are already in place at the major ISP's. They're used to protect Quality Of Service for voice and streaming applications for their services they own, and protected channels for critical services. They're related to the tools that throttle customers who've paid for less service, so these throttles are not going away. Ignoring them and claiming that an extended VPN structure will somehow avoid service throttling is disingenuous at best, and may even be fraudulent.
Because of my age, I've had many colleagues and candidates who lacked degrees, especially advanced degrees. Most computing work was relatively new, and people strongly interested in it at the start of my career often did leave college to pursue the technologies that fascinated them. But over time, that technological fascination has become less critical. The interaction with managers, customers, and collaborators have come to matter more in the IT and developer world, and the educational opportunities have flourished. So the same person with the matching interests from 30 years ago can, and should, find educational opportunities in their fields. A _failure_ to do so in today's educational market is usually a sign of other issues.
If you can't invest the time and effort to get a degree, _now_, with the opportunities to link the degree to fields you find interesting or work that you find inspiring, there is little point to my hiring you or bringing you on my team. There have been exceptions: military service, and coping with poverty or familial responsibilities are challenges that test people in ways that can certainly match up to a college degree. But if you weren't busy between 18 and 22 with something involving commitment and learning real skills, your resume has to give me other very, very strong reasons to want you on my teams.
I you're using your work VPN for Bittorrent or Netflix or gaming, I suspect that your work network admins will explain firmly that that VPN is _not_ covered as part of your Comcast user agreement. Many business networks do, in fact, apply Quality of Service rules to protect critical services from employees who might abuse their workplace network for bulky, personal traffic.
"Different types of alcohol" can happen, but alternative alcohol usually methanol,, also known as "wood alcohol". It's toxic, and accidentally fermented and distilled instead of ethanol. A home distillation safety guide at http://homedistiller.org/intro... includes some useful notes to avoid distilling it. It's quite toxic, and I'd not expect to see any significant amount of it in any commercial alcohol drinks.
If there is any notable amount of any alcohol than ethanol, I'd strongly urge you _do not drink it_.
> What I would suggest is rather than getting yourself immersed in other people's business and trying to influence other people's minds because you have some ideal type of person that you think everyone else should be to arrive at utopia, just worry about your own stupid life and enjoy your time here.
I'm sorry: this is too easy to do. But if this is your approach, why are you posting to Slashdot to try and convince anyone of anything?
Google removing domains from search results can and will be a tool of other kinds of legal censorship, including political censorship. "Pirate sites" is not necessarily a well defined term. Is some of the material on those sites content that engages in satire, or other forms of fair use? Or has there been a rubber stamp of "piracy" for hosting content that is, even on casual review legal? Will a government or private "anti-piracy" agency review sites, hunt for a captured or quoted article, and get it pulled from Google search results under the guise of "anti-piracy"
Such censorship has certainly occurred on Youtube, which Google owns, and for Google mentioned search results. I'm concerned that Google is losing, if it ever had, the ability to refuse censorship requests.
> Philosophies can arise regarding nature but a philosophy doesn't change nature.
And I'm afraid that you followed up with a full paragraph of philosophy about "nature", rather than observation of nature itself.
> Your argument is based on an anthropomorphic point of view that is based on the idea that we are the center of the universe and possibly that the universe was created for u
No, my observation was about the "defending oneself with within nature" philosophical concept, which you raised. While I did speak about human behavior involving Hobbesian's interpretation of that concept and how it breaks down. The "rugged individualists" of a gun-wielding, each member as judge, jury, and executioner culture very quickly create guards, laws, leadership, and defensive alliances with designated guards, or conquering warlords taking advantage of the poor organization of these rugged individualists.
> We are just like every other animal just more evolved than the ones on this planet.
Hardly. We're mammals, so we raise a small number of young and invest resources heavily in them, We're extremely sexual, with family structure strongly affected by sexual activites. (Among primates, only the bonobos come close to our sexual activity levels.) Our life spans are very long, roughly 2 billion heartbeats coompared to 1 billion for other mammals and most creatures with hearts and lungs. We're extremely social and have extraordinarily high populaton density for animals our size.
> Nature is amoral. Therefore, while I may be interested in the topics you mention, they are not relevant to nature
Humans have morals, and ethics, far more sophisticated than other species due to our long memories, our language, our societies, and our sophisticated control of our environments that require a complex morality to remain stable and succeed in evolutionary terms. To discard this as "not part of nature" is to ignore the natural factors that generate, and the interactions that support, having a morality.
The idea that "nature is amoral" also ignores the patterns of behaviors within and outside of specific species. "Nature" makes agreements, symbioses, and competitions that affect entire ecosystems. And species _cheat_ in those agreements, which is also part of the system.
> To make this more clear, a judge cannot levy a judgment against nature. Nature simply dismisses it as irrelevant and goes on about its business.
If you mean that a judge does not treat nature as a plaintiff, you may have a point. But judges make judgments about property, natural resources, child custody, medical care, and death every day in every city of hte world. Nature does not simply "go on about its business" when a mine is dug, fields are harvested, the course of rivers are changed, and species are introduced to new environments with, or against, legal decisions. "Nature" is altered by humans and by humanity every day.
Do other species affect nature overall? Of course they do. And humans are affecting nature more profoundly than any species since plants evolved to use photosynthesis and generate oxygen, creating a new biosphere for all following life. It's confusing and disingenuous to make claims about how some underlying natural law makes humanity's choices irrelevant and not part of nature when those very acts can be considered a critical part _of_ nature.
It's more work. But the 2002 paper on geletin fingerprints showed how easy they were to obtain from even crude copies, including those left on smooth surfaces and those stored in police files. Mythbusters even did a very effective demonstration both of the gelatin fingers, and of how easy it was to obtain the original fingerprints from even a suspicious person.
That can be a useful step. There are tradeoffs. I've had difficulty discouraging SSH users from storing passphrase keys locally, and on remote gateway hosts they wish to SSH _from_ in the field without bothering with ssh-agent.
There is a real risk of "gelatin fingers". There are many videos, and some reliable newspaper stories, of people replicating fingerprints very successfully with gelatin or even Play-Doh. The approach was well documented in2002, at https://cryptome.org/gummy.htm .
What companies is Barry Diller involved in that will benefit from the loss of "Net Neutrality"?
It looks like USA Network and Fox Network, both of which he helped found. AC/InterActiveCorp, and Expedia. What possible motive would someone whose billions of dollars are tied to such media giants gain from getting people to ignore the issues of Net Neutrality? What control by business lobbyists might be gained if an informed citizenry pays no attention to it?
I believe this also answers the question of "what does Barry Diller know". He knows that the loss of Net Neutrality can benefit his highly capitalized companies in which he has enormous personal investments: favoring particular, paying media companies over other Internet traffic is highly beneficial to his large, existing companies.
> Outside of that, why WOULDN'T you write a section of code the simplest and most straightforward way possible?
* Because it doesn't report errors. * Because failures corrupt critical data. * Because it does not sanitize its inputs. * Because it consumes far more resources. * Because it's not testable without the * Because it's not secure. * Because "simple" and "straightforward" does not necessarily mean "intelligible". * Because it requires a complex set of upstream features which have proven unstable.
The list goes on. Balancing the factors to produce robust, reliable, performant code can become quite a challenge.
Similar results occur when a senior developer tries to expand capabilities or switch toolkits to one that they've heard of and want to explore, but which has no one else in the company has any familiarity with. My personnel get tasked with cleanup after _many_ such adventures: I'm quite proud of them for integrating, or helping companies decide to discard, many technologies that are ill fitted to their needs.
> it is misogynistic when you use phrasing like that "men and women are different and have different abilities and interests".
Please be cautious. It is often decried as misogynistic, but in terms of life insurance, medical insurance, and even the Olympics Committee handling transgender athletes, it is not.
No, it's not. But it's _very_ common to activate it foe personnel who use their more powerful desktop systems for telecommunication. It's also very standard to enable for Windows hosts in a machine room, unless you've the time and resources to set up a remote KVM or the hardware based remote consoles such as DRAC. Those hosts are often surprisingly vulnerable. The various security improvements of a server environment can be overwhelmed by the unwillingness to update, and reboot, production servers. It's also often overwhelmed by the need to support older software. I _still_ see critical XP systems in unprotected internal networks, used for legacy software or proprietary software for which an upgrade is very expensive.
Switching the SSH port is helpful as well, if you expose port 22 at all to the outside world. So is blocking and forcing users to use specified, non-standard VNC ports: too many personnel at home use that to work their way around workplace password management. I've personally encountered too many IT personnel who slip past their own workplace access policies by slipping a VNC installation onto their most critical servers, so they can access it as needed or share on-site screens with offsite access.
When in a rush, and with permission of the relevant manager, I've personally installed VNC surreptitiously on a worksite host to see exactly who was doing what to the server while I was offsite. It allowed me to see that someone was surreptitiously modifying the system during the maintenance window, and get someone onsite to go look and see who was logged in to the console. The resulting discussion with their employer was unpleasant, but necessary.
> And I would have thought the NSA would be better than the FBI at keeping secrets
You may wish to rethink that. The charter of the NSA is aimed primarily at investigate foreign communications, not protecting US communications. See https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Key...,
> We used to routinely institutionalize people with mental problems that radically interfere with their ability to function socially.
The fates of the mentally ill have varied throughout time, throughout cultures. I'm not comparing you to a Nazi, so I think I'm not "Godwin-ing" myself. But I will point out that during the Nazi genocides of WW II, Germany was cleared of almost all schizophrenics by murdering them. See the NIH publication at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... . There have been other terrible abuses in many cultures, including some US abuses.
> We have to make psychiatry into enough of a real science that homicidal behavior can be predicted and treated.
I very much agree with your goal. The way to that goal is littered with a dangerous minefield of patient rights, confidentiality, and of false positives. Of those who are depressed, suffer from PTSD, or participate in gang crimes, how many of them commit homicide? Can they be held against their will when the odds of their committing homicide are measurably higher than normal, but not above some arbitrary threshold? Whatever that threshold, how many false positives will be imprisoned, at taxpayer expense? How will incarceration affect their likelihood to commit homicide _in the facility_ that they'd not have committed outside the facility?
Slashdot Mirror
I can attest to this. It's not just Domino's that does this with small franchises.
> If it were really that important, why didn't Obama implement it early in his tenure?
The president was pretty busy, with Iraq and Afghanistan as wars he didn't start but needed to clean up, with the health care program, the difficulty of appointing any Cabinet staff in the face of an obstructionist Congress, and an economy reeling from two Asian wars and the housing market economic meltdown. I think we can safely say that he was _busy_.
Moreover, the FCC is supposed to be an independent agency from the White House. So any guidance or promotion of particular policies at the FCC can take much longer because it can't be done by presidential mandate.
According to Merriam Webster, one of the definitions of "hacker" is " a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system". I'm afraid that "spearfishing" would count as "hacking", especially with such a clear context.
> Reminder: Aaron Schwartz was looking at 35 years in prison for nothing more than a clever wget script.
This is incorrect. Aaron Swartz [check spelling] was attempting to download all of JSTOR, and its index information, in order to republish it for free. Doing this was not only criminal. It was stealing the resources of a non-profit which collects information and publishes, organized and usable, for medical and scientific research all over the world. It could make the resources available, for a short period, at a reduced burden, but would reduce or even eliminate the resources to collect and organize the data for the next year, or the year after that. It was not only shortsighted, but the excessive resources used for downloading crashed JSTOR services and made them unavailable to the students, the doctors, and the scientists who use it every day. JSTOR could not continue to supply MIT with service under this stress, and that would cut off a vital library resource for approximately 25,000 employees and students at MIT.
The others are different stories, but for Aaron Swartz, he already had a competent legal team funded by other people who saw his action as a "free speech" issue. It was not: it was theft of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property in the organization and cross-linking of JSTOR, and of unauthorized reproduction of copyrighted material that JSTOR makes available for licensed use.
> You assume much, and wrongly.
If I may beg your pardon, I assumed nothing. I tried to say "I[f] you're using your work VPN for Bittorrent or Netflix or gaming". Please excuse me if the missing "f" led you to assume that I was accusing you of anything foolish.
> if my employer had reason to believe I was using it for entertainment purposes or illegal activities
Then I suspect you wouldn't notice "Net Neutraility" style throttling, even if it were applied to your workplace VPN. You're probably not using enough bandwidth to even notice it.
It was a delight to see Robbie the Robot show, functioning, in a Columbo episode in 1974. I hope his new owners will maintain him and let him appear in other guest appearances.
I'm afraid it does. The patent trolls do not tend to bother large companies: large companies generally have much better lawyers already on staff, filing patents for the company, who can handle patent trolls as a matter of course. The patents filed by larger companies as a matter of course for them, and the patent suites they gather provide strong protection against smaller companies entering the business and potentially competing with the business. The result is that small companies with limited portfolios can be bankrupted and their intellectual property obtained for pennies on the dollar, then added to the larger companies patent portfolio.
If you have the opportunity, review a typical software based patent portfolio. Many if not all, will be "stupid". They're usually covered by prior art, are obvious to the practitioners in the field, or fail to be specific enough to be patentable. Sometimes they should have been unpatentable for all three reasons, but they are accepted as a matter of course if the patent attorney is familiar to the patent office.
Activating a VPN does little to nothing to solve the throttling issue. The throttling is done against the upstream services, at the routing or "network layer", where the ISP's organize connections to local hosts. Simply making that connection from another host in a preferred region leaves the connections to that remote region sill simply leave the remote region throttled, as well, especially if this "single solution" VPN solution is detectable at the routers or firewalls and can be preferentially throttled itself.
The tools to do this kind of throttling are already in place at the major ISP's. They're used to protect Quality Of Service for voice and streaming applications for their services they own, and protected channels for critical services. They're related to the tools that throttle customers who've paid for less service, so these throttles are not going away. Ignoring them and claiming that an extended VPN structure will somehow avoid service throttling is disingenuous at best, and may even be fraudulent.
Because of my age, I've had many colleagues and candidates who lacked degrees, especially advanced degrees. Most computing work was relatively new, and people strongly interested in it at the start of my career often did leave college to pursue the technologies that fascinated them. But over time, that technological fascination has become less critical. The interaction with managers, customers, and collaborators have come to matter more in the IT and developer world, and the educational opportunities have flourished. So the same person with the matching interests from 30 years ago can, and should, find educational opportunities in their fields. A _failure_ to do so in today's educational market is usually a sign of other issues.
If you can't invest the time and effort to get a degree, _now_, with the opportunities to link the degree to fields you find interesting or work that you find inspiring, there is little point to my hiring you or bringing you on my team. There have been exceptions: military service, and coping with poverty or familial responsibilities are challenges that test people in ways that can certainly match up to a college degree. But if you weren't busy between 18 and 22 with something involving commitment and learning real skills, your resume has to give me other very, very strong reasons to want you on my teams.
I you're using your work VPN for Bittorrent or Netflix or gaming, I suspect that your work network admins will explain firmly that that VPN is _not_ covered as part of your Comcast user agreement. Many business networks do, in fact, apply Quality of Service rules to protect critical services from employees who might abuse their workplace network for bulky, personal traffic.
"Different types of alcohol" can happen, but alternative alcohol usually methanol,, also known as "wood alcohol". It's toxic, and accidentally fermented and distilled instead of ethanol. A home distillation safety guide at http://homedistiller.org/intro... includes some useful notes to avoid distilling it. It's quite toxic, and I'd not expect to see any significant amount of it in any commercial alcohol drinks.
If there is any notable amount of any alcohol than ethanol, I'd strongly urge you _do not drink it_.
> What I would suggest is rather than getting yourself immersed in other people's business and trying to influence other people's minds because you have some ideal type of person that you think everyone else should be to arrive at utopia, just worry about your own stupid life and enjoy your time here.
I'm sorry: this is too easy to do. But if this is your approach, why are you posting to Slashdot to try and convince anyone of anything?
Google removing domains from search results can and will be a tool of other kinds of legal censorship, including political censorship. "Pirate sites" is not necessarily a well defined term. Is some of the material on those sites content that engages in satire, or other forms of fair use? Or has there been a rubber stamp of "piracy" for hosting content that is, even on casual review legal? Will a government or private "anti-piracy" agency review sites, hunt for a captured or quoted article, and get it pulled from Google search results under the guise of "anti-piracy"
Such censorship has certainly occurred on Youtube, which Google owns, and for Google mentioned search results. I'm concerned that Google is losing, if it ever had, the ability to refuse censorship requests.
> Philosophies can arise regarding nature but a philosophy doesn't change nature.
And I'm afraid that you followed up with a full paragraph of philosophy about "nature", rather than observation of nature itself.
> Your argument is based on an anthropomorphic point of view that is based on the idea that we are the center of the universe and possibly that the universe was created for u
No, my observation was about the "defending oneself with within nature" philosophical concept, which you raised. While I did speak about human behavior involving Hobbesian's interpretation of that concept and how it breaks down. The "rugged individualists" of a gun-wielding, each member as judge, jury, and executioner culture very quickly create guards, laws, leadership, and defensive alliances with designated guards, or conquering warlords taking advantage of the poor organization of these rugged individualists.
> We are just like every other animal just more evolved than the ones on this planet.
Hardly. We're mammals, so we raise a small number of young and invest resources heavily in them, We're extremely sexual, with family structure strongly affected by sexual activites. (Among primates, only the bonobos come close to our sexual activity levels.) Our life spans are very long, roughly 2 billion heartbeats coompared to 1 billion for other mammals and most creatures with hearts and lungs. We're extremely social and have extraordinarily high populaton density for animals our size.
> Nature is amoral. Therefore, while I may be interested in the topics you mention, they are not relevant to nature
Humans have morals, and ethics, far more sophisticated than other species due to our long memories, our language, our societies, and our sophisticated control of our environments that require a complex morality to remain stable and succeed in evolutionary terms. To discard this as "not part of nature" is to ignore the natural factors that generate, and the interactions that support, having a morality.
The idea that "nature is amoral" also ignores the patterns of behaviors within and outside of specific species. "Nature" makes agreements, symbioses, and competitions that affect entire ecosystems. And species _cheat_ in those agreements, which is also part of the system.
> To make this more clear, a judge cannot levy a judgment against nature. Nature simply dismisses it as irrelevant and goes on about its business.
If you mean that a judge does not treat nature as a plaintiff, you may have a point. But judges make judgments about property, natural resources, child custody, medical care, and death every day in every city of hte world. Nature does not simply "go on about its business" when a mine is dug, fields are harvested, the course of rivers are changed, and species are introduced to new environments with, or against, legal decisions. "Nature" is altered by humans and by humanity every day.
Do other species affect nature overall? Of course they do. And humans are affecting nature more profoundly than any species since plants evolved to use photosynthesis and generate oxygen, creating a new biosphere for all following life. It's confusing and disingenuous to make claims about how some underlying natural law makes humanity's choices irrelevant and not part of nature when those very acts can be considered a critical part _of_ nature.
It's more work. But the 2002 paper on geletin fingerprints showed how easy they were to obtain from even crude copies, including those left on smooth surfaces and those stored in police files. Mythbusters even did a very effective demonstration both of the gelatin fingers, and of how easy it was to obtain the original fingerprints from even a suspicious person.
That can be a useful step. There are tradeoffs. I've had difficulty discouraging SSH users from storing passphrase keys locally, and on remote gateway hosts they wish to SSH _from_ in the field without bothering with ssh-agent.
Quick to unlock, yes.
There is a real risk of "gelatin fingers". There are many videos, and some reliable newspaper stories, of people replicating fingerprints very successfully with gelatin or even Play-Doh. The approach was well documented in2002, at https://cryptome.org/gummy.htm .
What companies is Barry Diller involved in that will benefit from the loss of "Net Neutrality"?
It looks like USA Network and Fox Network, both of which he helped found. AC/InterActiveCorp, and Expedia. What possible motive would someone whose billions of dollars are tied to such media giants gain from getting people to ignore the issues of Net Neutrality? What control by business lobbyists might be gained if an informed citizenry pays no attention to it?
I believe this also answers the question of "what does Barry Diller know". He knows that the loss of Net Neutrality can benefit his highly capitalized companies in which he has enormous personal investments: favoring particular, paying media companies over other Internet traffic is highly beneficial to his large, existing companies.
> Outside of that, why WOULDN'T you write a section of code the simplest and most straightforward way possible?
* Because it doesn't report errors.
* Because failures corrupt critical data.
* Because it does not sanitize its inputs.
* Because it consumes far more resources.
* Because it's not testable without the
* Because it's not secure.
* Because "simple" and "straightforward" does not necessarily mean "intelligible".
* Because it requires a complex set of upstream features which have proven unstable.
The list goes on. Balancing the factors to produce robust, reliable, performant code can become quite a challenge.
Similar results occur when a senior developer tries to expand capabilities or switch toolkits to one that they've heard of and want to explore, but which has no one else in the company has any familiarity with. My personnel get tasked with cleanup after _many_ such adventures: I'm quite proud of them for integrating, or helping companies decide to discard, many technologies that are ill fitted to their needs.
> it is misogynistic when you use phrasing like that "men and women are different and have different abilities and interests".
Please be cautious. It is often decried as misogynistic, but in terms of life insurance, medical insurance, and even the Olympics Committee handling transgender athletes, it is not.
No, it's not. But it's _very_ common to activate it foe personnel who use their more powerful desktop systems for telecommunication. It's also very standard to enable for Windows hosts in a machine room, unless you've the time and resources to set up a remote KVM or the hardware based remote consoles such as DRAC. Those hosts are often surprisingly vulnerable. The various security improvements of a server environment can be overwhelmed by the unwillingness to update, and reboot, production servers. It's also often overwhelmed by the need to support older software. I _still_ see critical XP systems in unprotected internal networks, used for legacy software or proprietary software for which an upgrade is very expensive.
Switching the SSH port is helpful as well, if you expose port 22 at all to the outside world. So is blocking and forcing users to use specified, non-standard VNC ports: too many personnel at home use that to work their way around workplace password management. I've personally encountered too many IT personnel who slip past their own workplace access policies by slipping a VNC installation onto their most critical servers, so they can access it as needed or share on-site screens with offsite access.
When in a rush, and with permission of the relevant manager, I've personally installed VNC surreptitiously on a worksite host to see exactly who was doing what to the server while I was offsite. It allowed me to see that someone was surreptitiously modifying the system during the maintenance window, and get someone onsite to go look and see who was logged in to the console. The resulting discussion with their employer was unpleasant, but necessary.
> And I would have thought the NSA would be better than the FBI at keeping secrets
You may wish to rethink that. The charter of the NSA is aimed primarily at investigate foreign communications, not protecting US communications. See https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Key...,
> We used to routinely institutionalize people with mental problems that radically interfere with their ability to function socially.
The fates of the mentally ill have varied throughout time, throughout cultures. I'm not comparing you to a Nazi, so I think I'm not "Godwin-ing" myself. But I will point out that during the Nazi genocides of WW II, Germany was cleared of almost all schizophrenics by murdering them. See the NIH publication at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... . There have been other terrible abuses in many cultures, including some US abuses.
> We have to make psychiatry into enough of a real science that homicidal behavior can be predicted and treated.
I very much agree with your goal. The way to that goal is littered with a dangerous minefield of patient rights, confidentiality, and of false positives. Of those who are depressed, suffer from PTSD, or participate in gang crimes, how many of them commit homicide? Can they be held against their will when the odds of their committing homicide are measurably higher than normal, but not above some arbitrary threshold? Whatever that threshold, how many false positives will be imprisoned, at taxpayer expense? How will incarceration affect their likelihood to commit homicide _in the facility_ that they'd not have committed outside the facility?