Who in their right mind thinks that DRM increases piracy.
Well, actually, everyone.
* If I need to put the disc in every time I play the game.. I'm going to download a pirated version which will run without the disc. That's purely because it's a headfuck to find the disc, put it in, wait for the disc to spin up at critical times when it checks it's still there and freezes while my DVD drive powers back on (takes a few seconds to spin up; old drive).
* If the DRM makes it incompatible with some drives people who paid for it will probably go and download the pirate version.
* If the DRM makes it unstable then people will pirate it without DRM
* If I am not sure if it's going to be any good, work on my PC, etc then I'll download a demo. Oh, demos are a thing of the past because it's all too fucking hard for the game companies now. I'll just pirate the full game and see.
* I brought the game second hand off some dipshit who didn't take care of it. The disc won't read. Said game company charges full price (or some other arm and a leg) to ship replacement media and I need to send them my discs and I may never see them again or it'll take weeks. Bugger it. I'll just download it.
* The list goes on.
So, we can say about piracy two things:
1. Some people who pirated the game actually paid for it in the first place and needed/wanted more convenience.
2. Some people who pirated the game liked it and went on to pay for it.
Given the current rate of post-natal depression among new mothers, I think legalising such a barbaric act could be a very, very bad thing.
That's your view. And playing the devils advocate here...
Perhaps we would remove a lot of the burden on the health and welfare systems if we legalised it. Mothers won't suffer so much PND and will be less reliant on support services. There's also be less infants who are poorly cared for and hospitalised. We could certainly use the population reduction that it would bring - there's a lot of babies made simply for the sake of having sex. Perhaps if there were a lot less of them we wouldn't be in the shit we're in now?
They're limiting the maximum throughput of the system to 12MBPS and trying to say that a real-world load of hundreds of customers at that rate will also work.
This closed trial is carefully designed to further "prove" that their flawed system isn't.
Well if it were me, I wouldn't build it with a hash function; choosing a good hash function is difficult when the data is not known ahead of time and higher quality hash functions are generally more CPU intensive.
Actually, a lookup in a tree of 10,000 requires on average 13 lookups and a 1,000,000 entries requires an average of 20 lookups. That larger tree definitely requires more lookups.
Multiply that amount of work by the number of requests per second (probably tens of millions) and they're talking a fuckload of computer power just to lookup against a small list. Throw dynamic filtering and SSL interception (yes, all but one of the products tested claimed to do MITM attacks on knowns SSL traffic) and you're talking an infeasible project.
Anyway, the gumbiment doesn't know what they're talking about. They're trying to push something through to further their own agenda. Whether it will work or not is not up for debate. Whether it will buy them votes in the senate is.
The general idea is straightforward. Partial derivatives are just the concept of a derivative generalized to higher dimensions. Just as a derivative is a tangent to a curve, a partial derivative is is a tangent plane to a surface.
I recall studying PDEs in a 3rd year undergrad course. How you can get to Ph.D level in maths and not have at least a working (basic) understanding of them is beyond me.
Kismet for the Mac (KisMac) would do that. I tried it on my own AP with a friend once but had very little luck; they attack is unreliable. If you're using strong keys that attack is hard to pull off.
It seems this new attack is much more reliable and easy to pull off in only 15 minutes. That's quite scary. I'd move to WPA2 if I could get all my gear to support it!
From my experience in a calibration lab for two different major electronics companies in the past few years, I can wholeheartedly say that Agilent products are generally the best of said brands.
No argument there, but the price tag is usually at least 50% more for similar spec gear. I've used a variety of Agilent and Tek gear before. I actually prefer the interface on the Tek stuff. It's far easier to get to the common features of the tool and the interface is more responsive.
What it really comes down to is that the OP should go and talk with the engineers who will be using the gear and work out their requirements. Once you know what they need (and they'll be happy to tell you in the right language too) you can find a best cost/match for that. All the gear mentioned was good, so now all that is needed is to find one that the engineers are comfortable using. Most would be familiar with Tek gear because it comes at a decent price; that might be the go.
That would be my biggest worry. There's a lot on my laptop of importance to the right people. SSH keys, SSL keys, etc, and the configuration to make it pretty obvious which key belongs to which server. It's a matter of ease of use for me.
Keeping the disk encrypted is a good (not perfect) way to keep a casual thief from rifling through my stuff. It's a good way to keep a less casual thief from gaining access to the several gigabits of Internet bandwidth that my servers sit behind. It is also a good way to keep prying eyes out of things like (possibly) my Internet banking details and other 'sensitive' crap that people keep on their laptops.
Unfortunately keeping the disk encrypted is a sure fire way to get red-flagged in the very unlikely event that your PC does get searched at the border crossing.
It comes down to a game of numbers. Do you risk having your lappy stolen and your personal data (some of which may be of interest to even a casual observer) compromised or do you risk getting red-flagged in an unlikely search? The choice is yours to make!
If your dinky iPhone's rf-out could mess with your navcom, think about what the n*100W tower is doing when you fly over it at 3000ft agl.... please....
Two things:
1. The cell phone company wants its radiation to stay on the ground. They use arrays of directional antennas to spread it 360 degress and toward the ground. They don't want to waste most of their energy by sending it up into the sky!
2. Inverse square law. Your dinky (sp)iPhone can generate up to 1W of radiated power (usually less) and is less than a few measly feet from the control systems interconnects of the aircraft. The field strength of that dinky phone is far higher than that of the tower, and there could be 100+ passengers with all kinds of RF goodness on a plane.
Sure, I'd expect them to have multiple redundant error corrected links, but most aircraft were built before the popularity of 802.11 and GSM equipment. It is not unthinkable that the design was performed not thinking that there would one day be huge and continuous amounts of radiation in that range of the spectrum.
And to top it all off, perhaps it wasn't a control systems failure? The media is all about spin, and blame to dazzle its sheep viewers. There could be more to the story than we're being told by the lay-media!
Nagios is good, but people have gotta start learning its limitations. I recently brought up the issue of security with some people and their answer: Nagios... There is the right tool for the right job, and Nagios is one small tool in the admin's arsenal to solve one problem. It's being touted as a universal panacea by those with little real knowledge and it's a little scary.
This is quite amusing to me. "Don't realize how much personal or sensitive info they're putting out?!" Uh, at what point does your brain fail to see problems with giving Facebook your credit card number for a gift to your friend? Goddamn klaxons go off with red spots exploding in my vision for me. Here's a picture of me free basing a controlled substance, what a great idea to put out online for all to see/have! Again, the old noggin' kicks in with "Danger! Danger Will Robinson!"
And still Facebook continues to offer that as a service because enough idiots actually do put their CC details into it to but a gift for their friend. There are enough idiots who do put pictures on there of dubious legality, pictures of their friends (even if said friends don't want to be online). I know I am on there in pictures, and tagged by name even though I don't want to be. It's all very scary.
There are a lot of idiots out there. There are a lot of companies out there who seek to know everything there is to know about you for a number of reasons, not limited to selling advertising and profiling you to determine if you're a criminal. These are the very same people pushing the 'cloud' idea.
1. Make cloud 2. Make it uber convenient so everyone starts using it 3. Make it so you can't communicate outside the cloud so everyone has to get all their idiot friends to join 4. ? 5. Profit
Sure, there were a few more steps than normal in there, but at the end of the day it's all about getting everyone on there for profit!
They still count downloads to all other sites even those that are hosted within their own network
They still have to get that data from person A to person B. That involves back haul costs, particularly if you aren't localised on the same networking gear (ADSL concentrator, etc). Telstra run a lot of their own back haul so the costs would likely be less, but a lot of other ISPs don't.
If you're on fibre you're usually sharing the bandwidth with everyone in your neighbourhood so free data to people in your street might seem good to you, but it is actually detrimental because there is only a finite amount of bandwidth to play with.
Adam Internet provide a cool service to users on the same ADSL gear. They call it 'Community Net' and basically if you're on the same ADSL concentrator then you can set up a second virtual connection on a network that is private to that gear. It means you get free data (doesn't leave the concentrator so they don't have to provide back haul for it) to some people in your neighbourhood. It's also not supported so if it breaks you're S.O.L.
Internode provide a neat file mirror with a bunch of useful things. The common Linux distros are on there, as are a bunch of useful Windows tools. It's too bad they can't provide Windows updates as well because that would be cool. Internode also have a bunch of 'radio' reflectors for some streaming stations that don't count toward your usage cap. That's a neat feature because there's something in there to cater for almost everyone.
I'm equally amazed that nobody suggested just dumping OSX and installing Ubuntu on your mac. ReFit is your friend. If you don't want to dual boot then just piss off the EFI partition and install Linux over the whole disk (not recommended because you won't be able to install firmware updates easily).
OSX is lovely and shiny, but Unixy and all but they've hacked out just enough of the Unix-ness to make it annoying for hardcore (and seasoned) junkies.
People hear the phrase "electromagnetic energy" and they act like someone is pointing a cancer ray gun at their head.
Try explaining the inverse square law to someone who has "researched" the dangerous radiation and how it can give you cancer and all that bad stuff. I had an interesting physics lecturer in first year uni. One of his first lectures was "so who sleeps with an electric blanket on?". Then he went on to do a bit of math and it's interesting to note the EM field strength from your nice blanked is comparable (well, in the same ballpark) to that of a nice high tension overhead power line. We won't even get into the field strength from your nice shiny mobile phone and how the cell company doesn't want all its energy going in little johnny's bedroom window and giving him cancer.
But magnetic bracelets protect you from the dangerous EM fields didn't you know that?
Except for the fact that the patent system was created when technology wasn't moving anywhere near as fast and has expanded to cover even dumb things like computer programs and even ideas that you never intend to build (patent whoring).
I personally think that the time for a patent monopoly should be dependent on the type of patent and definitely not 14 years for rapidly advancing industries.
Patents were useful when they were invented but have not really evolved with the changing landscape of technology and seem to be really holding back innovation by everyone but the zillion dollar companies who can afford to fend off the lawsuits if they come about.
We're talking about IT people, here, a group whose job it is to believe in risk (whether that be from intruders or just hardware failure) and try to mitigate it.
You actually believe IT people believe in risk? You'll be surprised at the "who would hack us, we're too small" mentality that abounds. Unfortunately these are the same people who think just adding a firewall to a server will protect them from all the nasties. Ignore the fact it's swiss cheese to allow connectivity in and out as mandated by the clueless managerbot.
I think the number of IT n00bs who pass themselves off as experts who are capable of spotting a breach, let-alone protecting from it is 0%. These same n00bs number greater than 99% of all "IT professionals".
It's really very scary, and I actually deal with these kinds of people daily in my line of work. Out of all our customers, not one has a genuine understanding of how and why they should secure their systems. They trust tools like firewalls and virus scanners (on windows) to protect them. Some think they know about security but when you take one look at their systems you could find a hundred easy targets for breaking into it without even trying to find them.
Prepare a brief for the management-level at your company. Show them basic tools for managing software quality. Dig up documents that show different ways of improving software quality. Talk about development methods (agile, etc).
Tools like Redmine are very pretty and manager-friendly (and free). Show them how easy it is to add tickets, approve and deny work, track changes to the software as it evolves and isolate changes until they are tested properly.
Point out that there is a potential legal minefield if they get something wrong and it's proved to be the software at fault. Show them that tracking each and every change along with who authorised it, who did the work, who approved the changed software to run, etc will help lift some of that liability.
Managers aren't all clueless, and all ones that I know are genuinely willing to do things better. Often they are too caught up in doing things to appease the board that they don't have time to look at things that seem menial to them.
If you don't prepare a brief and suggest a really good solution or two they'll eventuall get a contractor in who will charge a fortune, tell them that everything sucks and then leave. Then you'll be stuck with a half-arsed process based on some pie in the sky ideas from a contractor who really can't know the day to day ins and outs of what you do.
At the end of the day what you need to demonstrate is that by putting a process in place and then tools/staff to support it you'll be able to achieve better results.
I bet you have an automatic machine that chases whipper-snappers off your lawn
Why bother? They're all inside on the Intarwebs forgetting how to do actual things like socialise and play on my lawn.
$GOD forbid that they learn a skill like electronics, computers, whatever.
To all the other people that decided that I was some grey-haired grandpa: I'm actually a lot younger than you think.
I just think that this "information whenever you want it" crowd have lost sight of the real issue at hand: how to actually think for long enough to create new information.
It's all well and good to say that everyone is out there not reinventing the wheel because they can just look up how to do it, but the old teach a man to fish analogy applies here. Teach a man to always "google-it" and a man will always google it, no matter how trivial it is. That man will never learn to think and solve NEW problems for himself.
Don't you have 100 tacos to buy and a Doctor Who marathon to watch?
Yes, but because I took the time to fucking think about it, the PVR in my PC is working just fine so I'll timeshift the Dr Who marathon a bit and take the time to reply to you. Anyway, the Tacos are on their way and it takes a while to stuff 100 of them into the delivery guy's car (so i hear).
I agree with the parent's sentiment - what has happened to the nerd way of doing something because it needed to be done? Very few people want to think about their problems anymore.
The powerful scientific pocket calculator was the start of all this hoo haa. Kids were dumbed down and started forgetting to do basic arithmetic (yes, there are many who can't work out how much change I get when the till is down and I've just ordered a hundred tacos).
The Intarwebs has been the other downfall. People are only too happy to put "i want to do X" into Google and click pages. If no useful results come up they bitch and moan that there is no way to do X (maybe X is just something so menially boring that nobody documented it, or it's just dumb, or nobody ever thought of it yet) but these people don't care.
What you're seeing people is the well-established decline in intelligence and determination which comes with the "google-it" culture.
He can rely on them for backup, but he can't rely on them to be discreet and not browse the files.
Perhaps they are a shitty online backup provider who provide an SLA and agree to archive your backups to tape but their SLA also doesn't grants them the right to investigate the content of your files? (Yes, I know one solution where that is actually the case, and yes they did snoop, no I won't say who).
Are you sure about that? I consider my SSH connections secure even tho' they traverse untrusted links.
Nothing can be truly trusted - encrypted or not. Sure, with a sufficiently large key and matching cipher then the content might be secret for your lifetime.
Nothing is secure because it's only a matter of time/computing power to brute force it.
Slashdot Mirror
Who in their right mind thinks that DRM increases piracy.
Well, actually, everyone.
* If I need to put the disc in every time I play the game.. I'm going to download a pirated version which will run without the disc. That's purely because it's a headfuck to find the disc, put it in, wait for the disc to spin up at critical times when it checks it's still there and freezes while my DVD drive powers back on (takes a few seconds to spin up; old drive).
* If the DRM makes it incompatible with some drives people who paid for it will probably go and download the pirate version.
* If the DRM makes it unstable then people will pirate it without DRM
* If I am not sure if it's going to be any good, work on my PC, etc then I'll download a demo. Oh, demos are a thing of the past because it's all too fucking hard for the game companies now. I'll just pirate the full game and see.
* I brought the game second hand off some dipshit who didn't take care of it. The disc won't read. Said game company charges full price (or some other arm and a leg) to ship replacement media and I need to send them my discs and I may never see them again or it'll take weeks. Bugger it. I'll just download it.
* The list goes on.
So, we can say about piracy two things:
1. Some people who pirated the game actually paid for it in the first place and needed/wanted more convenience.
2. Some people who pirated the game liked it and went on to pay for it.
Given the current rate of post-natal depression among new mothers, I think legalising such a barbaric act could be a very, very bad thing.
That's your view. And playing the devils advocate here...
Perhaps we would remove a lot of the burden on the health and welfare systems if we legalised it. Mothers won't suffer so much PND and will be less reliant on support services. There's also be less infants who are poorly cared for and hospitalised. We could certainly use the population reduction that it would bring - there's a lot of babies made simply for the sake of having sex. Perhaps if there were a lot less of them we wouldn't be in the shit we're in now?
There might be positives. You never know!
I was going to say just that.
They're limiting the maximum throughput of the system to 12MBPS and trying to say that a real-world load of hundreds of customers at that rate will also work.
This closed trial is carefully designed to further "prove" that their flawed system isn't.
Well if it were me, I wouldn't build it with a hash function; choosing a good hash function is difficult when the data is not known ahead of time and higher quality hash functions are generally more CPU intensive.
Actually, a lookup in a tree of 10,000 requires on average 13 lookups and a 1,000,000 entries requires an average of 20 lookups. That larger tree definitely requires more lookups.
Multiply that amount of work by the number of requests per second (probably tens of millions) and they're talking a fuckload of computer power just to lookup against a small list. Throw dynamic filtering and SSL interception (yes, all but one of the products tested claimed to do MITM attacks on knowns SSL traffic) and you're talking an infeasible project.
Anyway, the gumbiment doesn't know what they're talking about. They're trying to push something through to further their own agenda. Whether it will work or not is not up for debate. Whether it will buy them votes in the senate is.
It was just another QANTAS jet having problems!
The general idea is straightforward. Partial derivatives are just the concept of a derivative generalized to higher dimensions. Just as a derivative is a tangent to a curve, a partial derivative is is a tangent plane to a surface.
I recall studying PDEs in a 3rd year undergrad course. How you can get to Ph.D level in maths and not have at least a working (basic) understanding of them is beyond me.
Kismet for the Mac (KisMac) would do that. I tried it on my own AP with a friend once but had very little luck; they attack is unreliable. If you're using strong keys that attack is hard to pull off.
It seems this new attack is much more reliable and easy to pull off in only 15 minutes. That's quite scary. I'd move to WPA2 if I could get all my gear to support it!
AES is also not supported everywhere yet. Windows XP won't do AES when it's running on my Macbook (I tried a proof of concept).
If you have machines which won't do AES or WPA2 then you're S.O.L when it comes to WPA; you're stuck with TKIP.
From my experience in a calibration lab for two different major electronics companies in the past few years, I can wholeheartedly say that Agilent products are generally the best of said brands.
No argument there, but the price tag is usually at least 50% more for similar spec gear. I've used a variety of Agilent and Tek gear before. I actually prefer the interface on the Tek stuff. It's far easier to get to the common features of the tool and the interface is more responsive.
What it really comes down to is that the OP should go and talk with the engineers who will be using the gear and work out their requirements. Once you know what they need (and they'll be happy to tell you in the right language too) you can find a best cost/match for that. All the gear mentioned was good, so now all that is needed is to find one that the engineers are comfortable using. Most would be familiar with Tek gear because it comes at a decent price; that might be the go.
Unless someone steals it.
That would be my biggest worry. There's a lot on my laptop of importance to the right people. SSH keys, SSL keys, etc, and the configuration to make it pretty obvious which key belongs to which server. It's a matter of ease of use for me.
Keeping the disk encrypted is a good (not perfect) way to keep a casual thief from rifling through my stuff. It's a good way to keep a less casual thief from gaining access to the several gigabits of Internet bandwidth that my servers sit behind. It is also a good way to keep prying eyes out of things like (possibly) my Internet banking details and other 'sensitive' crap that people keep on their laptops.
Unfortunately keeping the disk encrypted is a sure fire way to get red-flagged in the very unlikely event that your PC does get searched at the border crossing.
It comes down to a game of numbers. Do you risk having your lappy stolen and your personal data (some of which may be of interest to even a casual observer) compromised or do you risk getting red-flagged in an unlikely search? The choice is yours to make!
If your dinky iPhone's rf-out could mess with your navcom, think about what the n*100W tower is doing when you fly over it at 3000ft agl.... please....
Two things:
1. The cell phone company wants its radiation to stay on the ground. They use arrays of directional antennas to spread it 360 degress and toward the ground. They don't want to waste most of their energy by sending it up into the sky!
2. Inverse square law. Your dinky (sp)iPhone can generate up to 1W of radiated power (usually less) and is less than a few measly feet from the control systems interconnects of the aircraft. The field strength of that dinky phone is far higher than that of the tower, and there could be 100+ passengers with all kinds of RF goodness on a plane.
Sure, I'd expect them to have multiple redundant error corrected links, but most aircraft were built before the popularity of 802.11 and GSM equipment. It is not unthinkable that the design was performed not thinking that there would one day be huge and continuous amounts of radiation in that range of the spectrum.
And to top it all off, perhaps it wasn't a control systems failure? The media is all about spin, and blame to dazzle its sheep viewers. There could be more to the story than we're being told by the lay-media!
Nagios is good, but people have gotta start learning its limitations. I recently brought up the issue of security with some people and their answer: Nagios... There is the right tool for the right job, and Nagios is one small tool in the admin's arsenal to solve one problem. It's being touted as a universal panacea by those with little real knowledge and it's a little scary.
This is quite amusing to me. "Don't realize how much personal or sensitive info they're putting out?!" Uh, at what point does your brain fail to see problems with giving Facebook your credit card number for a gift to your friend? Goddamn klaxons go off with red spots exploding in my vision for me. Here's a picture of me free basing a controlled substance, what a great idea to put out online for all to see/have! Again, the old noggin' kicks in with "Danger! Danger Will Robinson!"
And still Facebook continues to offer that as a service because enough idiots actually do put their CC details into it to but a gift for their friend. There are enough idiots who do put pictures on there of dubious legality, pictures of their friends (even if said friends don't want to be online). I know I am on there in pictures, and tagged by name even though I don't want to be. It's all very scary.
There are a lot of idiots out there. There are a lot of companies out there who seek to know everything there is to know about you for a number of reasons, not limited to selling advertising and profiling you to determine if you're a criminal. These are the very same people pushing the 'cloud' idea.
1. Make cloud
2. Make it uber convenient so everyone starts using it
3. Make it so you can't communicate outside the cloud so everyone has to get all their idiot friends to join
4. ?
5. Profit
Sure, there were a few more steps than normal in there, but at the end of the day it's all about getting everyone on there for profit!
They still count downloads to all other sites even those that are hosted within their own network
They still have to get that data from person A to person B. That involves back haul costs, particularly if you aren't localised on the same networking gear (ADSL concentrator, etc). Telstra run a lot of their own back haul so the costs would likely be less, but a lot of other ISPs don't.
If you're on fibre you're usually sharing the bandwidth with everyone in your neighbourhood so free data to people in your street might seem good to you, but it is actually detrimental because there is only a finite amount of bandwidth to play with.
Adam Internet provide a cool service to users on the same ADSL gear. They call it 'Community Net' and basically if you're on the same ADSL concentrator then you can set up a second virtual connection on a network that is private to that gear. It means you get free data (doesn't leave the concentrator so they don't have to provide back haul for it) to some people in your neighbourhood. It's also not supported so if it breaks you're S.O.L.
Internode provide a neat file mirror with a bunch of useful things. The common Linux distros are on there, as are a bunch of useful Windows tools. It's too bad they can't provide Windows updates as well because that would be cool. Internode also have a bunch of 'radio' reflectors for some streaming stations that don't count toward your usage cap. That's a neat feature because there's something in there to cater for almost everyone.
I'm equally amazed that nobody suggested just dumping OSX and installing Ubuntu on your mac. ReFit is your friend. If you don't want to dual boot then just piss off the EFI partition and install Linux over the whole disk (not recommended because you won't be able to install firmware updates easily).
OSX is lovely and shiny, but Unixy and all but they've hacked out just enough of the Unix-ness to make it annoying for hardcore (and seasoned) junkies.
running ~400hp on a 2 liter engine doesn't give many options!
Or much economy when you're not thrashing the fuck out of it, let-alone the amount of juice it consumes when you are.
People hear the phrase "electromagnetic energy" and they act like someone is pointing a cancer ray gun at their head.
Try explaining the inverse square law to someone who has "researched" the dangerous radiation and how it can give you cancer and all that bad stuff. I had an interesting physics lecturer in first year uni. One of his first lectures was "so who sleeps with an electric blanket on?". Then he went on to do a bit of math and it's interesting to note the EM field strength from your nice blanked is comparable (well, in the same ballpark) to that of a nice high tension overhead power line. We won't even get into the field strength from your nice shiny mobile phone and how the cell company doesn't want all its energy going in little johnny's bedroom window and giving him cancer.
But magnetic bracelets protect you from the dangerous EM fields didn't you know that?
Except for the fact that the patent system was created when technology wasn't moving anywhere near as fast and has expanded to cover even dumb things like computer programs and even ideas that you never intend to build (patent whoring).
I personally think that the time for a patent monopoly should be dependent on the type of patent and definitely not 14 years for rapidly advancing industries.
Patents were useful when they were invented but have not really evolved with the changing landscape of technology and seem to be really holding back innovation by everyone but the zillion dollar companies who can afford to fend off the lawsuits if they come about.
We're talking about IT people, here, a group whose job it is to believe in risk (whether that be from intruders or just hardware failure) and try to mitigate it.
You actually believe IT people believe in risk? You'll be surprised at the "who would hack us, we're too small" mentality that abounds. Unfortunately these are the same people who think just adding a firewall to a server will protect them from all the nasties. Ignore the fact it's swiss cheese to allow connectivity in and out as mandated by the clueless managerbot.
I think the number of IT n00bs who pass themselves off as experts who are capable of spotting a breach, let-alone protecting from it is 0%. These same n00bs number greater than 99% of all "IT professionals".
It's really very scary, and I actually deal with these kinds of people daily in my line of work. Out of all our customers, not one has a genuine understanding of how and why they should secure their systems. They trust tools like firewalls and virus scanners (on windows) to protect them. Some think they know about security but when you take one look at their systems you could find a hundred easy targets for breaking into it without even trying to find them.
Prepare a brief for the management-level at your company. Show them basic tools for managing software quality. Dig up documents that show different ways of improving software quality. Talk about development methods (agile, etc).
Tools like Redmine are very pretty and manager-friendly (and free). Show them how easy it is to add tickets, approve and deny work, track changes to the software as it evolves and isolate changes until they are tested properly.
Point out that there is a potential legal minefield if they get something wrong and it's proved to be the software at fault. Show them that tracking each and every change along with who authorised it, who did the work, who approved the changed software to run, etc will help lift some of that liability.
Managers aren't all clueless, and all ones that I know are genuinely willing to do things better. Often they are too caught up in doing things to appease the board that they don't have time to look at things that seem menial to them.
If you don't prepare a brief and suggest a really good solution or two they'll eventuall get a contractor in who will charge a fortune, tell them that everything sucks and then leave. Then you'll be stuck with a half-arsed process based on some pie in the sky ideas from a contractor who really can't know the day to day ins and outs of what you do.
At the end of the day what you need to demonstrate is that by putting a process in place and then tools/staff to support it you'll be able to achieve better results.
I bet you have an automatic machine that chases whipper-snappers off your lawn
Why bother? They're all inside on the Intarwebs forgetting how to do actual things like socialise and play on my lawn.
$GOD forbid that they learn a skill like electronics, computers, whatever.
To all the other people that decided that I was some grey-haired grandpa: I'm actually a lot younger than you think.
I just think that this "information whenever you want it" crowd have lost sight of the real issue at hand: how to actually think for long enough to create new information.
It's all well and good to say that everyone is out there not reinventing the wheel because they can just look up how to do it, but the old teach a man to fish analogy applies here. Teach a man to always "google-it" and a man will always google it, no matter how trivial it is. That man will never learn to think and solve NEW problems for himself.
Don't you have 100 tacos to buy and a Doctor Who marathon to watch?
Yes, but because I took the time to fucking think about it, the PVR in my PC is working just fine so I'll timeshift the Dr Who marathon a bit and take the time to reply to you. Anyway, the Tacos are on their way and it takes a while to stuff 100 of them into the delivery guy's car (so i hear).
I agree with the parent's sentiment - what has happened to the nerd way of doing something because it needed to be done? Very few people want to think about their problems anymore.
The powerful scientific pocket calculator was the start of all this hoo haa. Kids were dumbed down and started forgetting to do basic arithmetic (yes, there are many who can't work out how much change I get when the till is down and I've just ordered a hundred tacos).
The Intarwebs has been the other downfall. People are only too happy to put "i want to do X" into Google and click pages. If no useful results come up they bitch and moan that there is no way to do X (maybe X is just something so menially boring that nobody documented it, or it's just dumb, or nobody ever thought of it yet) but these people don't care.
What you're seeing people is the well-established decline in intelligence and determination which comes with the "google-it" culture.
He can rely on them for backup, but he can't rely on them to be discreet and not browse the files.
Perhaps they are a shitty online backup provider who provide an SLA and agree to archive your backups to tape but their SLA also doesn't grants them the right to investigate the content of your files? (Yes, I know one solution where that is actually the case, and yes they did snoop, no I won't say who).
Are you sure about that? I consider my SSH connections secure even tho' they traverse untrusted links.
Nothing can be truly trusted - encrypted or not. Sure, with a sufficiently large key and matching cipher then the content might be secret for your lifetime.
Nothing is secure because it's only a matter of time/computing power to brute force it.