Voice Security
on
VoIP Security
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I care about security as much as the next guy but comparing POTS or even centrix security to VoIP is ridiculous. What about physical security that many have mentioned? I want to maintain 99.999 without having to worry about some jagoff with a backhoe whether he is driven by some virulent strain of Islam or is just a stupid ass. Much less a single leaky capacitor that has no backup system in place. So far it seems that even above ground, in my area, the ISPs have put more into redundant paths than the PSTN.
Hell, we ran into a single point of failure 120 miles away at a NOC on a cellular data network back haul router. Which took 6 hours to pinpoint by AT&T -> Sprint -> SBC -> Cingular -> AT&T/Cingular -> AT&T finger-pointing. At which point it was determined that the endpoint (AT&T GPRS private APN firewall router middleman) was flaky.... but they were totally able to loop up the T1 from the TELCO which proved there was no problem, bah!
The tech support were friendly but clueless and equipped with all the right info from the first minutes of the outage by myself...which WE detected 30 min after it happened through our own standard public safety system troubleshooting, and they were still totally unaware of it. Yeah 30 minutes is quite a lag time but consider I had to dial in from 3 towns away(26,400) after 10 minutes on the phone to verify dispatch wasn't just crazy. It took 10 minutes for them to notice the problem and qualify it for emergency service.
Yet a simple ISP with some nagios running would've found it faster but had dual paths to prevent (more than 30 seconds of) downtime. We intentionally took down our Internet link in an infrastructure replacement and the poor guy in the ISP NOC dug through outdated contact info for a while until he called his boss and eventually my cellphone to report the outage THAT'S SERVICE. He was actually concerned when he called too, could've been related to his boss but still. *I* had to calm *him* down, and there was definitely a sigh of relief on his end when I explained. I felt bad for not notifying him. He insisted I call back when we were done to verify connectivity. Where do you find that type of service?
TELCO didn't see the problem, or go to the trouble of calling us if they had. When we called them they were courteously-flippant and blamed us at every turn until they found they were wrong. Guilty until proved innocent is definitely their modus operandi.
Maybe my region is better, but I'm pretty much in Podunk. My vote is for VoIP. I realize that the cost is much more significant for the telco to do the same thing with available technology and infrastructure, that is my point exactly.
Simple solution, buy windows 2003 server, setup an active directory domain in your home network, and install WSUS. It is recommended that WSUS be installed on a non DC role machine, so buy another win2003 server to host it. Use group policy to enforce scheduled updates on your PC.
Easy, problem solved and Melinda buys something useful around the house with your cash.
Almost forgot, all of our sites along with the rest of the nation/world lost internet access if they relied upon the Content Filter service (premium). Their servers died 3-4 times in 2 months and have otherwise been OK. When they die your HTTP access to the world dies with them. Unless you choose the option to allow all traffic after a 4 second timeout...in which case people wanting to get to playboy.com get the same 4 second delay as those going to google.com.
And yes, every single access to the web passes through SonicWall servers. No content filter information is cached for a second...of course this introduces latency to everything not cached by your ISA server. This is more noticable some days than others.
Content filter (almost) keeps our employees from accessing porn and sexually harrassing each other.
The downside is when sites people actually need and are completely legit are classified as "whatever forbidden category." We have a fairly long "allowed sites" list and don't really use the internet much.
Their webcrawler or whatever makes the lists could benifit from a bayesian filter.
As a note: SonicWALL products are rough on the admin. I use 2 4060s in High Availability and have had issues with several things. Once a firmware upgrade nearly wiped it out. The online HA system of course upgraded to crap mode as well. Had to dump the primary firewall using a crippled HA Standby for the time being (VPN sites crappy, internet speed inexplicably slow, all "address objects" duplicated...) This entailed redoing all of the configuration options manually on the offline primary.
The last firmware upgrade, I powered off the HA standby just in case. I was right, had to enter into "safe mode" and pull a binary "backup" file back in, while the standby worked OK, unpoluted.
By pull backup I mean the binary for the firmware. Bringing the HA standby back into action required several attempts. This all required a serial console connection. The SonicWALL CLI is horrible and designed only for emergencies. Especailly when the bad to worse firmware upgrade jacks it to the point that upon boot the CLI yacks up "BLAH 0xHEXADDRESS EXCEPTION." The features that do work in CLI do so grudgingly.
The one good feature they've come up with in the past few revs is a "ghost" type feature which lets you take a firmware/settings snapshot and in case the usual happens, dump to factory defaults and transfer your old system back into it. via "safe mode" of course.
This is outside of the fact that the TELE3 and SOHO VPN gateway products require frequent power resets due to ??? Keepalive is a joke to these devices. I've even told NAGIOS to ignore these things. They will only stay connected if a client side requests resources on tunneled networks(despite keepalive)...and only 90% of the time.
Also, their licensing scheme is a little $$ intensive and you will pay for every little thing it does. Definately a subscription service. Stop paying, feature C-Z stop working. Each little thing that makes it more valuable than a Linksys costs extra/yr.
In short, wish the PHB didn't meet this slick guy at the trade show.
Yeah that's a perfectly reasonable reaction. Hope you dose adjustment goes well.
I was pointing out what the PHB will say. Get a grip. I hate dealing with knee jerk reactionary aholes like you all day.
Unlike most drag and drop implementations this lacks the ability to abort with the escape key. Surely would be in any real implementation, but would help the demo gain points in my book.
I'm all for this, but it gets fuzzy in the details.
What if any laws prevent the local Police CyberCrime division from throwing up a net of packet sniffers?
There are many positives to that scenario, the downside being a warrant-free monitoring scheme. You are using public resources, so I could see that throwing away your expectation of privacy.
I'm not an advocate of illegal internet use, but I like not expecting a knock on the door on the occasion that I start a legal torrent simply because some dumb filter looks at port traffic instead of conent.
I could also see surveilance as a big use for these. Most places don't have the backhaul to get info out of those traffic cameras. Until they have their own fiber net. There's a good side for emergency first responders at intersection traffic accidents, etc. Just depends on how much you trust your govt. I guess.
I still haven't seen many arguments on the net for what happens when a city full of grandmas and newbs have 5+Mbps symmetrical connections and unpatched versions of (you name it) and become a bigass DDOS net. When a handfull of PCs can flood a modest coorperation's net which the coorperation's local provider charges through the ceiling for, the disparity will become a nightmare. Not to mention the amount of SPAM a single zombie on that net can vomit out in a day.
Next headline: Lafayette becomes first entire city to have traffic blackholed.
Just a rant but doesn't it strike everyone as odd that if this dumbass had a small quantity of marijuana in the wrong state he would've done much more time and been viewed much more harshly.
Sure it can destroys lives, but when has it ever caused industrial downtime on a very large scale...any more than alcohol that is. Why doesn't the punishment fit the crime?
So, what is this? Why is being a badass 3l337 haXOR a guarantee of a lucrative job at a security firm after you get "street cred" doing time in white collar jail, or an "attention center?"
Wouldn't that encourage these IRC pwning guys to do something really big to ensure their infamy and land them a job immediately after going to prison. So where is the risk? It's all payoff with some tough times in between. What security firms are asking for is honor among thieves.
Why not do like several "white hat" groups and notify the vendor, then notify the public after a month of corporate inaction. Where is the honor anymore?
I agree that poorly written text conveys stupidity. However, (see that a however,) in certain situations i.e. (that is) social typing who gives a crap?
The formation of the sentence may convey the mind-set of the speaker. It is like public speaking vs. written word. In a forum where you are speaking your mind, perhaps your grammar and "phraseology"(see my implied contempt for that word) should count in an effort to convey your ideas. e.g. "get 'er done" vs. "complete the objective."
Redneck, yes. Sounds dumb, yeah. Appeals to a certain, perhaps targeted audience... hell mafakin yeah dude.
Choose the rallying war cry that works best for the situation in which it is used. "Eliminate the enemy and secure proof." or "Kick ass and take names."
Think about your audience. They aren't typically 1800s British fops that abhor hyphenation and apostrophes.
If everything on this site was purified English and management-ese I would definitely stop visiting the site. fur sure man.
I was astonished at how average and urban it looks from space. On major news outlet all you see is the same 5 or 6 cameras glued to a building somewhere or desert footage. This is cool.
Is it just me or does the ?palace? area look painfully spliced in from an earlier or censored image? (immediately northeast of airport)
Yeah that was kind of a joke. I use Gentoo in my server environment at work and even the optimizations (small thought they can be) are good in bulk. The flexablity you spoke of is excellent.
Why should I run X on my mail proxy? A GUI for dumb admins is the only reason I can think of. And we don't hire those...much.
I'm home and my linux box is on a KVM with the windows system.(heresy I know) It's arguably a step-child but I still love Gentoo with all my heart;) Until recently it was just a dedicated video re-encoder/PVR. So when I want to do something new I have to compile 3 other dependancies. I deal with it, as being part of the "world" is a great and holy thing.
Gentoo rules the planet.
Still emerging bittorrent in gentoo. *sigh* It's as though I've gained a patient composure through this distro. I should be grateful....it's optimized specifically for my hardware...so after 2 hours I saved 2 seconds. Yeah!
Am I the only one that wants to domain squat all of the obvious permutations of this to prevent fraud? Hopefully the pace of the phishing world stays slower than Firefox patches.
I am unfamiliar with IDN but made up this domain in about 2 seconds after doing a view source of the schmoo page. So any uncreative simp could use any citybank, bankofamerica...any url with bank and thus an opening for the "magic" a. Not to mention what someone who knows whats up with IDN could do.
Phishing ebay Seriously how long before this is either a vailid phishing link or an educational page about clicking dumb spam mails?
I see that slashdot's URL parser has messed up my example, saving the day like an IE incompatibility error? If you view source, put the link in an HTML file locally replacing the eb/ with eb&
It's not a valid site as of 11:50PM CST 2/7/2005 but you get the idea.
Does your workplace have centralized storage/indexing of every document it processes?
I want the bid response for company X to the 1998 RFP on computer modem replacement.
Or, I want your entire purchasing records from 1998-now.
It's unweildy and I think someone should come up with a good cost-effective solution for the public sector. If you have information please reply to this thread.
Right, well according to years of evolution, the most effective way to convert that into energy is through metabolism of some sort via chemical processes that rely on the sun.
Food does grow on trees.
While the efficiency is currently much better than solar cells, surely after some time the new robot overlords could come up with a better solution that is part of our little biosphere called earth.
Just saying humans are a good launch point at the current time. There are other benifits, with marketing taglines I'm sure the robots will ignore.
Builtin reproductive systems fine-tuned over millions of years. *The machine is the manufacturer*
Dexterity and mobility with an eye toward general-purpose functionality. *One multi-purpose tool for all your needs*
Open source building plans. *Your code, yours to modify* -requires experience in genetic engineering++.
Lightning fast durable self-reconstructing processor with fast backplane!! *It created you!*
what except randomness governed the first combination of proteins?
Sure that was random. What made it last is the question you should be asking. That particular grouping of things produced a reaction of some sort. It existed only to consume surrounding materials given some amount of activation energy for the reaction. It converted things into other things that were usefull for other things. I'm speaking in objects because I don't pretend to know the initial failed attempts at life. Which as we describe it is nothing but complex co-dependant chemical reactions.
Later, lower activation energy reactions given some fuel were more successful.
There was not a "purpose" in mind for these things, sure that's completely true.
The purpose comes in with destructive and regulatory processes within a given environment. Something that wildy consumes all of X will not last or at best be cyclical. While mankind has escalated an imbalance to a point that could be cataclysmic when our achieved artificial balance falls apart; that doesn't mean that before "intelligence" natural systems, over millions of years, filled every niche of the world quite well.
Life is almost unstoppable and far from divine.
If sufficient energy and time is available, given that matter is indestructable...and hopefully? doesn't leave the system, life is pretty damn hard to stop. There is the possibility that something could react everything to a point that requires too much energy or time to be reacted back and could destroy the system - temporarily.
Chaos != evolution. It's a necessary part of it but not the whole.
The number one problem with IT support is that without users you have no problems...you also don't have a job. So minimize the user threat to the machines.
If you want to keep all of your users in line, be a network Nazi. Use a web proxy and email the usage summaries to department heads. Mail a full summary to the top dog. The top dog will barely glance at it, but if the department heads know it's getting to him they'll definately look...no... stare at it. The result: nobody does anything because they think they're being watched. And trust me, their mind is very limited to cavorting about the internet...and that really is the source of 50% of your problems.
Don't worry proxy settings can be pushed via Group Policy before you close port 80 and 443...etc
Our users' whimsical flights of fancy with various spyware/you name it sites has gone down 99%. And I have the logs to prove it.:)
As an added bonus, block every outbound port(you should be doing this anyway) except for long-fought battles over services they really need. Even then, limit it to an IP range and put DHCP reservations in to make sure only certain consoles can do anything. Log everything, email to managers as described above.
Don't limit yourself to PCs. Many phone systems have a serial interface that dumps extension used, number dialed, duration of call, number of rings before answer... the list goes on. Use your imagination!
If you've learned anything from M$ or the Bush administration FUD controls people. Issue emails with dire consequences for the most simple idiot user habit. Tie in a $ amount and you're a golden boy.
Congratulations, now you can sit back and tidy up that resume, you may not need it but who the hell wants to be an IT janitor/paramedic/scientist/philosopher/guerilla warrior forever?
That was a joke, but seriously try the reports. I did and I'm so much happier. "software push of spyware removal tools? why? they're too scared to click accept! muwhahhah"
1. Like flipping burgers and writing a database application even fall into the same realm of compensation. You save them 300,000 they pay you 3,000. 2. Yeah right. 3. True 4. Try having a time-and-motion study carried out continously, by you. That is, every second of the day has to be "billable" to a person/department/organization and you have to log the time you spend loggin the time you spend logging the time.....Why? because you're too damn efficient. Your efforts aren't noticable because there's no downtime to fix. Hmmm...99.999(five 9s) uptime for the last 2 years...you're goofing off aren't you?
The worst part of being an IT manager is having a CIO that has an BCS and MBA and knew something about computers 10 years ago. (180 computer years).
We did the same thing a while back. The biggest problem was that the old programs were so old and poorly written that the newer AS400 got tied up when they'd do one of their overly broad database queries. So we had to buy a new one. (the programs came from a dinosaur onto a 4 year old box, then stayed on the 4 year old while the rest of the software migrated to the new box.)
So you're partially right, but what about all of those serially connected tractor-feed greenbar printers? And I'm talking twinax *shudders*
RTFA, Sure under normal conditions, your brick house will emmit more radiation than wood. When that same wood is next to a lot of radiation, "it is like sponge." Think about the sensitivity of our cockroach replacements! Years from now the wooden houses will be far worse for the insects and lichen! Get a grip people.
You have to somehow demonstrate losses of $5000 or more before the FBI cares. Does Gnome have a business model that this type of thing could put a $5000 plus dent in?
That's the problem with most OSS orginization cracks and even the last few waves of mostly benign virii.
Without demonstrable losses(and preferably press coverage on a cable network) the authorities aren't going lift a finger. I think the hacker community knows this.
Slashdot Mirror
I care about security as much as the next guy but comparing POTS or even centrix security to VoIP is ridiculous. What about physical security that many have mentioned? I want to maintain 99.999 without having to worry about some jagoff with a backhoe whether he is driven by some virulent strain of Islam or is just a stupid ass. Much less a single leaky capacitor that has no backup system in place. So far it seems that even above ground, in my area, the ISPs have put more into redundant paths than the PSTN.
Hell, we ran into a single point of failure 120 miles away at a NOC on a cellular data network back haul router. Which took 6 hours to pinpoint by AT&T -> Sprint -> SBC -> Cingular -> AT&T/Cingular -> AT&T finger-pointing. At which point it was determined that the endpoint (AT&T GPRS private APN firewall router middleman) was flaky.... but they were totally able to loop up the T1 from the TELCO which proved there was no problem, bah!
The tech support were friendly but clueless and equipped with all the right info from the first minutes of the outage by myself...which WE detected 30 min after it happened through our own standard public safety system troubleshooting, and they were still totally unaware of it. Yeah 30 minutes is quite a lag time but consider I had to dial in from 3 towns away(26,400) after 10 minutes on the phone to verify dispatch wasn't just crazy. It took 10 minutes for them to notice the problem and qualify it for emergency service.
Yet a simple ISP with some nagios running would've found it faster but had dual paths to prevent (more than 30 seconds of) downtime. We intentionally took down our Internet link in an infrastructure replacement and the poor guy in the ISP NOC dug through outdated contact info for a while until he called his boss and eventually my cellphone to report the outage THAT'S SERVICE. He was actually concerned when he called too, could've been related to his boss but still. *I* had to calm *him* down, and there was definitely a sigh of relief on his end when I explained. I felt bad for not notifying him. He insisted I call back when we were done to verify connectivity. Where do you find that type of service?
TELCO didn't see the problem, or go to the trouble of calling us if they had. When we called them they were courteously-flippant and blamed us at every turn until they found they were wrong. Guilty until proved innocent is definitely their modus operandi.
Maybe my region is better, but I'm pretty much in Podunk. My vote is for VoIP. I realize that the cost is much more significant for the telco to do the same thing with available technology and infrastructure, that is my point exactly.
Simple solution, buy windows 2003 server, setup an active directory domain in your home network, and install WSUS. It is recommended that WSUS be installed on a non DC role machine, so buy another win2003 server to host it. Use group policy to enforce scheduled updates on your PC. Easy, problem solved and Melinda buys something useful around the house with your cash.
Almost forgot, all of our sites along with the rest of the nation/world lost internet access if they relied upon the Content Filter service (premium). Their servers died 3-4 times in 2 months and have otherwise been OK. When they die your HTTP access to the world dies with them. Unless you choose the option to allow all traffic after a 4 second timeout...in which case people wanting to get to playboy.com get the same 4 second delay as those going to google.com.
And yes, every single access to the web passes through SonicWall servers. No content filter information is cached for a second...of course this introduces latency to everything not cached by your ISA server. This is more noticable some days than others.
Content filter (almost) keeps our employees from accessing porn and sexually harrassing each other.
The downside is when sites people actually need and are completely legit are classified as "whatever forbidden category." We have a fairly long "allowed sites" list and don't really use the internet much.
Their webcrawler or whatever makes the lists could benifit from a bayesian filter.
As a note: SonicWALL products are rough on the admin. I use 2 4060s in High Availability and have had issues with several things. Once a firmware upgrade nearly wiped it out. The online HA system of course upgraded to crap mode as well. Had to dump the primary firewall using a crippled HA Standby for the time being (VPN sites crappy, internet speed inexplicably slow, all "address objects" duplicated...) This entailed redoing all of the configuration options manually on the offline primary.
The last firmware upgrade, I powered off the HA standby just in case. I was right, had to enter into "safe mode" and pull a binary "backup" file back in, while the standby worked OK, unpoluted.
By pull backup I mean the binary for the firmware. Bringing the HA standby back into action required several attempts. This all required a serial console connection. The SonicWALL CLI is horrible and designed only for emergencies. Especailly when the bad to worse firmware upgrade jacks it to the point that upon boot the CLI yacks up "BLAH 0xHEXADDRESS EXCEPTION." The features that do work in CLI do so grudgingly.
The one good feature they've come up with in the past few revs is a "ghost" type feature which lets you take a firmware/settings snapshot and in case the usual happens, dump to factory defaults and transfer your old system back into it. via "safe mode" of course.
This is outside of the fact that the TELE3 and SOHO VPN gateway products require frequent power resets due to ??? Keepalive is a joke to these devices. I've even told NAGIOS to ignore these things. They will only stay connected if a client side requests resources on tunneled networks(despite keepalive)...and only 90% of the time.
Also, their licensing scheme is a little $$ intensive and you will pay for every little thing it does. Definately a subscription service. Stop paying, feature C-Z stop working. Each little thing that makes it more valuable than a Linksys costs extra/yr.
In short, wish the PHB didn't meet this slick guy at the trade show.
Yeah that's a perfectly reasonable reaction. Hope you dose adjustment goes well. I was pointing out what the PHB will say. Get a grip. I hate dealing with knee jerk reactionary aholes like you all day.
Unlike most drag and drop implementations this lacks the ability to abort with the escape key. Surely would be in any real implementation, but would help the demo gain points in my book.
I'm all for this, but it gets fuzzy in the details.
What if any laws prevent the local Police CyberCrime division from throwing up a net of packet sniffers?
There are many positives to that scenario, the downside being a warrant-free monitoring scheme. You are using public resources, so I could see that throwing away your expectation of privacy.
I'm not an advocate of illegal internet use, but I like not expecting a knock on the door on the occasion that I start a legal torrent simply because some dumb filter looks at port traffic instead of conent.
I could also see surveilance as a big use for these. Most places don't have the backhaul to get info out of those traffic cameras. Until they have their own fiber net. There's a good side for emergency first responders at intersection traffic accidents, etc. Just depends on how much you trust your govt. I guess.
I still haven't seen many arguments on the net for what happens when a city full of grandmas and newbs have 5+Mbps symmetrical connections and unpatched versions of (you name it) and become a bigass DDOS net. When a handfull of PCs can flood a modest coorperation's net which the coorperation's local provider charges through the ceiling for, the disparity will become a nightmare. Not to mention the amount of SPAM a single zombie on that net can vomit out in a day.
Next headline: Lafayette becomes first entire city to have traffic blackholed.
Just a rant but doesn't it strike everyone as odd that if this dumbass had a small quantity of marijuana in the wrong state he would've done much more time and been viewed much more harshly. Sure it can destroys lives, but when has it ever caused industrial downtime on a very large scale...any more than alcohol that is. Why doesn't the punishment fit the crime?
So, what is this? Why is being a badass 3l337 haXOR a guarantee of a lucrative job at a security firm after you get "street cred" doing time in white collar jail, or an "attention center?"
Wouldn't that encourage these IRC pwning guys to do something really big to ensure their infamy and land them a job immediately after going to prison. So where is the risk? It's all payoff with some tough times in between. What security firms are asking for is honor among thieves.
Why not do like several "white hat" groups and notify the vendor, then notify the public after a month of corporate inaction. Where is the honor anymore?
I agree that poorly written text conveys stupidity. However, (see that a however,) in certain situations i.e. (that is) social typing who gives a crap?
The formation of the sentence may convey the mind-set of the speaker. It is like public speaking vs. written word. In a forum where you are speaking your mind, perhaps your grammar and "phraseology"(see my implied contempt for that word) should count in an effort to convey your ideas. e.g. "get 'er done" vs. "complete the objective."
Redneck, yes. Sounds dumb, yeah. Appeals to a certain, perhaps targeted audience... hell mafakin yeah dude.
Choose the rallying war cry that works best for the situation in which it is used. "Eliminate the enemy and secure proof." or "Kick ass and take names."
Think about your audience. They aren't typically 1800s British fops that abhor hyphenation and apostrophes.
If everything on this site was purified English and management-ese I would definitely stop visiting the site. fur sure man.
I think the imagery is pre america blowing it up. Airport looks pristine. http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=baghdad&ll=33.2565 59,44.233618&spn=0.029740,0.042315&t=k&hl=enhttp:/ /maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=baghdad&ll=33.256559,44. 233618&spn=0.029740,0.042315&t=k&hl=en Google Map of Baghdad Airport
I was astonished at how average and urban it looks from space. On major news outlet all you see is the same 5 or 6 cameras glued to a building somewhere or desert footage. This is cool.
Is it just me or does the ?palace? area look painfully spliced in from an earlier or censored image? (immediately northeast of airport)
I retract my previous statement and plead ignorance. I also know where you glass house is located.
Yeah that was kind of a joke. I use Gentoo in my server environment at work and even the optimizations (small thought they can be) are good in bulk. The flexablity you spoke of is excellent.
;) Until recently it was just a dedicated video re-encoder/PVR. So when I want to do something new I have to compile 3 other dependancies. I deal with it, as being part of the "world" is a great and holy thing.
Gentoo rules the planet.
Why should I run X on my mail proxy? A GUI for dumb admins is the only reason I can think of. And we don't hire those...much.
I'm home and my linux box is on a KVM with the windows system.(heresy I know) It's arguably a step-child but I still love Gentoo with all my heart
Still emerging bittorrent in gentoo. *sigh* It's as though I've gained a patient composure through this distro. I should be grateful. ...it's optimized specifically for my hardware...so after 2 hours I saved 2 seconds. Yeah!
In it's death-throws PBX attempts to be user friendly. VoIP laughs while twisting the knife and requesting additional funding. Several trunks cry.
Am I the only one that wants to domain squat all of the obvious permutations of this to prevent fraud? Hopefully the pace of the phishing world stays slower than Firefox patches. I am unfamiliar with IDN but made up this domain in about 2 seconds after doing a view source of the schmoo page. So any uncreative simp could use any citybank, bankofamerica...any url with bank and thus an opening for the "magic" a. Not to mention what someone who knows whats up with IDN could do.
Phishing ebay Seriously how long before this is either a vailid phishing link or an educational page about clicking dumb spam mails?
I see that slashdot's URL parser has messed up my example, saving the day like an IE incompatibility error? If you view source, put the link in an HTML file locally replacing the eb/ with eb&
It's not a valid site as of 11:50PM CST 2/7/2005 but you get the idea.
Does your workplace have centralized storage/indexing of every document it processes? I want the bid response for company X to the 1998 RFP on computer modem replacement. Or, I want your entire purchasing records from 1998-now. It's unweildy and I think someone should come up with a good cost-effective solution for the public sector. If you have information please reply to this thread.
Right, well according to years of evolution, the most effective way to convert that into energy is through metabolism of some sort via chemical processes that rely on the sun.
Food does grow on trees.
While the efficiency is currently much better than solar cells, surely after some time the new robot overlords could come up with a better solution that is part of our little biosphere called earth.
Just saying humans are a good launch point at the current time. There are other benifits, with marketing taglines I'm sure the robots will ignore.
Builtin reproductive systems fine-tuned over millions of years. *The machine is the manufacturer*
Dexterity and mobility with an eye toward general-purpose functionality. *One multi-purpose tool for all your needs*
Open source building plans. *Your code, yours to modify* -requires experience in genetic engineering++.
Lightning fast durable self-reconstructing processor with fast backplane!! *It created you!*
So on and so forth.
what except randomness governed the first combination of proteins?
Sure that was random. What made it last is the question you should be asking. That particular grouping of things produced a reaction of some sort. It existed only to consume surrounding materials given some amount of activation energy for the reaction. It converted things into other things that were usefull for other things. I'm speaking in objects because I don't pretend to know the initial failed attempts at life. Which as we describe it is nothing but complex co-dependant chemical reactions.
Later, lower activation energy reactions given some fuel were more successful.
There was not a "purpose" in mind for these things, sure that's completely true.
The purpose comes in with destructive and regulatory processes within a given environment. Something that wildy consumes all of X will not last or at best be cyclical. While mankind has escalated an imbalance to a point that could be cataclysmic when our achieved artificial balance falls apart; that doesn't mean that before "intelligence" natural systems, over millions of years, filled every niche of the world quite well.
Life is almost unstoppable and far from divine.
If sufficient energy and time is available, given that matter is indestructable...and hopefully? doesn't leave the system, life is pretty damn hard to stop. There is the possibility that something could react everything to a point that requires too much energy or time to be reacted back and could destroy the system - temporarily. Chaos != evolution. It's a necessary part of it but not the whole.
The number one problem with IT support is that without users you have no problems...you also don't have a job. So minimize the user threat to the machines.
:)
If you want to keep all of your users in line, be a network Nazi. Use a web proxy and email the usage summaries to department heads. Mail a full summary to the top dog. The top dog will barely glance at it, but if the department heads know it's getting to him they'll definately look...no... stare at it. The result: nobody does anything because they think they're being watched. And trust me, their mind is very limited to cavorting about the internet...and that really is the source of 50% of your problems.
Don't worry proxy settings can be pushed via Group Policy before you close port 80 and 443...etc
Our users' whimsical flights of fancy with various spyware/you name it sites has gone down 99%. And I have the logs to prove it.
As an added bonus, block every outbound port(you should be doing this anyway) except for long-fought battles over services they really need. Even then, limit it to an IP range and put DHCP reservations in to make sure only certain consoles can do anything. Log everything, email to managers as described above.
Don't limit yourself to PCs. Many phone systems have a serial interface that dumps extension used, number dialed, duration of call, number of rings before answer... the list goes on. Use your imagination!
If you've learned anything from M$ or the Bush administration FUD controls people. Issue emails with dire consequences for the most simple idiot user habit. Tie in a $ amount and you're a golden boy.
Congratulations, now you can sit back and tidy up that resume, you may not need it but who the hell wants to be an IT janitor/paramedic/scientist/philosopher/guerilla warrior forever?
That was a joke, but seriously try the reports. I did and I'm so much happier. "software push of spyware removal tools? why? they're too scared to click accept! muwhahhah"
1. Like flipping burgers and writing a database application even fall into the same realm of compensation. You save them 300,000 they pay you 3,000.
2. Yeah right.
3. True
4. Try having a time-and-motion study carried out continously, by you. That is, every second of the day has to be "billable" to a person/department/organization and you have to log the time you spend loggin the time you spend logging the time.....Why? because you're too damn efficient. Your efforts aren't noticable because there's no downtime to fix. Hmmm...99.999(five 9s) uptime for the last 2 years...you're goofing off aren't you?
The worst part of being an IT manager is having a CIO that has an BCS and MBA and knew something about computers 10 years ago. (180 computer years).
MAN, I feel better.
We did the same thing a while back. The biggest problem was that the old programs were so old and poorly written that the newer AS400 got tied up when they'd do one of their overly broad database queries. So we had to buy a new one. (the programs came from a dinosaur onto a 4 year old box, then stayed on the 4 year old while the rest of the software migrated to the new box.) So you're partially right, but what about all of those serially connected tractor-feed greenbar printers? And I'm talking twinax *shudders*
RTFA, Sure under normal conditions, your brick house will emmit more radiation than wood. When that same wood is next to a lot of radiation, "it is like sponge." Think about the sensitivity of our cockroach replacements! Years from now the wooden houses will be far worse for the insects and lichen! Get a grip people.
You have to somehow demonstrate losses of $5000 or more before the FBI cares. Does Gnome have a business model that this type of thing could put a $5000 plus dent in?
That's the problem with most OSS orginization cracks and even the last few waves of mostly benign virii.
Without demonstrable losses(and preferably press coverage on a cable network) the authorities aren't going lift a finger. I think the hacker community knows this.