If you are part of a truly large organisation, then, trust me - somewhere on your network a Time server already exists.
It would be cheaper still to state what you need (a valid reliable time source) and let the IT guys solve that problem - not "Some dork developer wants us to open up port what on the firewall?!?!?"
Your post seems to imply that you think your vote will be checked for correctness by some sort of official. Where do you live?
Here in Australia, where we do have mandatory voting, the concept of an anonymous ballot is still adhered to.
Put simply, this means that you get your name signed off the electoral roll on entry to a polling booth, get handed the ballot sheets, and then enter a private cubicle to complete the sheets.
The system is kinda flawed in that it is supposedly mandatory voting, but in reality is only compulsory attendance. I refuse to pick the lesser of two evils, and as such either protest vote (Greens, Dems, even One Nation once), or write something I think those counting the votes will find amusing.
I do believe that where a system of compulsory voting is instituted, that "None of the Above" should be an option (as mentioned by another poster).
Based on the apps you named, you're running a Windows environment. Why not use the tools that ship with those products and apply some group policies to restrict what can be run? And by this, I mean a whitelist. The IS dept of a corp that large should already have the automatic deployment mechanisms in place, which means you already know which apps should be running on any given machine
That, plus some sane ActiveX and script rules in your IE configuration (again, configurable through AD and GP) should tidy up most of your probs.
Thing is...this guys setup is not even that impressive...If you want to see a setup with domestic equipment that measures in the MEGApixels, have a look at this...
People _deserve_ nothing. Sorry, it's Nature's way. If you wish to give them something, that's your prerogative, freedom permits you the freedom to give. However, if you use your guns to take from me in order to satisfy your urge to gain pleasure by giving, then you're stealing from me and I'll use my guns to protect myself.
Why does everything come down to a matter of force when dealing with Americans? "Two words. Nuclear Fuckin' weapons..." The fallacy in this thinking is that you seem to believe it's a zero-sum game. It's not: especially when you have farmers plowing their crops back into the fields to increase their moetary yield.
'random birth' is bullshit quite frankly: my families fled oppression, social theft, and/or poverty in order to come to the USA......That's a self-selecting demographic
You're right, it is a self selecting demogarphic. Frightened people flee, and you still seem to be afraid of enough things to need to keep your guns around. Let's face it - you aren't going to face a military threat (you do have the most effective army), and your personal weapons aren't really going to help you against a terror attack. So tell me again, what are you afraid of? An Afghani coming over to steal your stuff?
Any other race, religion or culture can do the same. All they have to do is:
* respect each other's rights, including those of religion, speech, and property
* have a free and independent press
* have an open, multiparty democratic system with an ironclad separation of religion and state
Smash all non-democratic nations and force them to be democratic or nuke the shit out of them. Who needs six billion people anyway? New Hampshire has it right: Live Free or Die.
And this is the crux...why do you think people hate you? Why do you think people would want to commit terror attacks against you? It's because of exactly this sort of foreign policy thinking. It's about thinking that says it is acceptable to chase profits instead of raising living standards.
The rest if the world hates you like a poor innercity person hates the landlord.
You invest nothing in the third world but expect no jealousy?
Thank God America got the Puritans and Australia got the convicts....
I'm sure the audiophiles will correct me, but is it possible that this could be used to produce seriously high quality audio gear: specifically speakers?
My understanding of speaker technology is that at it's most basic, a cone is held attached in some way to a magnet, which is moved by modulating the intensity of an opposing magnetic field. The movement of the cone produces sound.
If you could build the magnet into the cone, ie make the cone out of magnetic plastic, that would have to eliminate a source of distortion from the reproduction, which would lead to better quality sound.
I see this as a more realistic first application than building platters out of plastic.
I don't know about overseas, but here in.au, business are required to be able to produce financial data for 13 years. That means we have an annual tape going back 13 years, a monthly tape going back 13 months, a weekly tape going back 5 weeks, and daily backups...
Yeah...given the way the time vs # of infections curve looks like for the Slammer type worms, you could do some serious damage in around 20 minutes. I think that is going to be the scenario that causes people to start taking proactive security more seriously.
With respect to your nasty twist...that's only really going to impact home users. Your serious corporate operators would have daily backups. Most of your Win32 backup platforms read the files through the native APIs, and so would backup the decrypted version of the file. So, yeah...you'd kill a lot of machines, but big corporate would just get a chance to properly test their DR plan, and lose a day.
If you wanted to cause serious disruption to big corporate, a better twist would be to hunt out General Ledger type databases, randomly inject\modify data, and then silently die.
The fallout from that sort of attack would be monstrous...
The idea of MS shutting down spammer's accounts, or the idea of them logging your e-mail (sending patterns?, actual content?, destination addresses?) so that they can refute false accusations of spamming on your behalf?
Even the dumbest safety check would involve MS monitoring and recording your online hotmail related activities.
Sorry, either they are the big evil empire who would track and log your activities online, or they are proactively trying to reduce Hotmail as a spam conduit.
As if you'd use Hotmail as anything other than a throwaway address for web registration anyway...
I'll capitulate to the point that Actual Reachability is a concern to reasonably savvy (read: professional) marketers.
However, professional marketers who wanted this kind of accuracy in their information would surely purchase mailing lists from reputable sources (ummm...people like Dun and Bradstreet spring to mind), where the demographical information is pretty much gold-plated.
They don't buy a CD from some Dodgy Brother, Inc e-bay auction. I mean, look at the results - 30% real addresses contained in the example in the article.
It seems to me that the type of people who try spamming as a method to make money do it because they are impressed by the big numbers. Wow, check it out d00d! 4 million e-mail addys!!!!. Kewl!!
All I was saying was that if you wanted to make some slightly more ethical cash, you could automate the process to pump out a 6 million address mailing list.
And it would be 50% better than the $300 one. You could charge $450 for it!
...would appear to be in the production and sale of address lists.
Seriously, it would be trivial to write a script to generate e-mail adresses (actual reachability is a moot point). All you would need is a list of registered DNS names with mx records, and a list of names (nationality doesn't matter either: as many nationalities as possible). Then just run through the common variables
firstname.lastname@mx.tld lastname.firstinitial @mx.tld first6charsoflastname.firstinitial@mx.tld and so on....
Costs to burn the CD Yup, that's where the real money is....
<br>OK<br><br>Let's say your parity algorithm* is to sum the information across the raid-ed disks. You have 5 disks. Disk 1 stripe = 6, Disk 2 stripe = 7, Disk 3 stripe = 8, Disk 4 stripe = 9 and your parity stripe on Disk 5 = (6+7+8+9) = 30.<br><br>If you lose one disk, can you calculate on the fly what the stripe on that disk contained? eg Disk 3 goes...regeneration calculation is x = 30 - (6-7-9) = 8. Is this value correct? yup.<br><br>clear as mud?<br><br>*This is not a real parity calculation algorithm...
Is it my fault for getting shot while driving through a bad neighborhood shouting slurs out the window? Probably not, but I'm certainly provoking the situation.
Brrrr. Wrong. It is your fault.
Unless you're saying that it is perfectly acceptable for people to come to your house and scream abuse at you, it IS YOUR FAULT.
You want to shout slurs about people when they are at home, you will get your ass kicked\shot. And it will be your fault.
I think motivation is important here. Honeypots by their nature are designed to entice black hats into attacking them...so that the owner of the honeypot can analyse what the latest and greatest black hats are going to look for, exploit etc
A darknet setup is passive in that it logs aberrant traffic. It tells you when something out there is actively scanning large gobs of your address space.
Ever played with Snort\ACID and a ruleset from somewhere like Whitehats on a live user subnet ? You get so many false positives that you start to pare down your ruleset. You keep doing this until you start to question the validity of the IDS in the first place.
I think this idea has some real utility....even if it is just to create another dataset to throw at MRTG !!:)
I may be an idiot, but it seems to me that most organisations could justify any of the amounts listed by doing some simple cost benefit analysis.
My understanding is that Spamhaus allows you to blackhole IP blocks that are known to tolerate\encourage spam.
If you step back and work out the cost of bandwidth to accept all of that spam, versus the cost to pay Spamhaus to blackhole it, it probably works out in favour of paying for Spamhaus.
Here in.au, I seem to remember that a 2Mb FR link to.sg (our next corporate uplink) was in the order of AU$10K a month. So 14.5K = approx US$18K = approx 2/12 FR service. Given that the current stats say the amount of spam crossing the internet as a percentage is HEAPS higher than that, it would have to work out as more cost effective to pay Spamhaus, and save the bandwidth.
I don't know what support you've gotten from IBM, but some of the stuff I've seen is pretty damn impressive.
At the hosted DRP site down here in Sydney.au, there is a little 620 AS/400.
It stands at a 45 degree angle to the ground.
The story goes, a Warehouse guy for one of the car manufacturing firms down here got laid off, so he drove his forklift into the main building, picked up the AS/400 on the forks, and dropped it out a 2 story window. He then drove out of the building and down to the gound level and repeatedly rammed it.
Now, it turns out that in AS/400 land (at least back then), the only controller that could read from an array was the controller that wrote to it. So the IBM support guys literally rebuilt the card. They then pulled the data off of that box and recovered.
That machine still sits there just to show potential customers I guess how far IBM will go to recover their data.
Say what you want dude, but IBM support, at least at the corporate end of the market, is worth it. GSA on the other hand.....*bleh*
Perhaps I didn't express my sentiment very well...
Linux IS a very difficult product to commoditize. Shall we install Debian, Suse, Redhat, Slackware, Gentoo, LFS or someother distro? What's the difference between the distros? How do I know I'm picking the right one?
Compare and contrast with for example the Microsoft way of doing things (and this is not an MS advocacy). There is Windows 2003 server. Want a File and Print box? W2K3. Want a Web Server? W2K3. Want a SQL server? W2K3 + one clearly defined addon. Want a Mail Server? W2K3 + one clearly defined addon.
Look at the Futures market. You don't buy Australian Pork Bellies, you don't buy US pork bellies, and you don't buy Chinese pork bellies. You buy Pork Bellies.
When you look at it like that, MS has a commoditized product, whereas the Linux 'marketplace' is fragmented.
It's for this very reason that when I evangelize, I push FreeBSD.
He holds an MBA in Information Technology and a BA in Economics and frequently speaks on the topics of Linux and offshore outsourcing.
and here is the root of the problem... Economists always seek commoditization and Linux is a very difficult product to commoditize. The very breadth of Linux, and cornucopia of environments\applications that the term refers to makes it a very difficult thing to quantify.
Also, note that the trend of outsourcing is pretty much technology independent, and recognizes that the people are the expensive part of the equation.
In short, I guess the answer is "Well, maybe, but that's not Linux's fault...;)"
and I can't wait to see how the slashbots reconcile an outsourcing expert talking up Linux:D
Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat is, I believe, a reference to one of Edward De Bono's books. De Bono is credited with inventing the term ' lateral thinking '.
If you are part of a truly large organisation, then, trust me - somewhere on your network a Time server already exists.
It would be cheaper still to state what you need (a valid reliable time source) and let the IT guys solve that problem - not "Some dork developer wants us to open up port what on the firewall?!?!?"
Sorry mate....when you can actually publish a 'commercial' page to the web that is free of spelling errors, I'll take you seriously.
Quiet tip....it's near the bottom, and something
Your post seems to imply that you think your vote will be checked for correctness by some sort of official. Where do you live?
Here in Australia, where we do have mandatory voting, the concept of an anonymous ballot is still adhered to.
Put simply, this means that you get your name signed off the electoral roll on entry to a polling booth, get handed the ballot sheets, and then enter a private cubicle to complete the sheets.
The system is kinda flawed in that it is supposedly mandatory voting, but in reality is only compulsory attendance. I refuse to pick the lesser of two evils, and as such either protest vote (Greens, Dems, even One Nation once), or write something I think those counting the votes will find amusing.
I do believe that where a system of compulsory voting is instituted, that "None of the Above" should be an option (as mentioned by another poster).
Based on the apps you named, you're running a Windows environment. Why not use the tools that ship with those products and apply some group policies to restrict what can be run? And by this, I mean a whitelist. The IS dept of a corp that large should already have the automatic deployment mechanisms in place, which means you already know which apps should be running on any given machine
That, plus some sane ActiveX and script rules in your IE configuration (again, configurable through AD and GP) should tidy up most of your probs.
Linkable goodness to get you started
Thing is...this guys setup is not even that impressive...If you want to see a setup with domestic equipment that measures in the MEGApixels, have a look at this...
10 MEGA-pixels
Thanks for the link....I don't know how I haven't found that site before...
:)
Hmmmmm....four-digit UID....couldn't be could it?
People _deserve_ nothing. Sorry, it's Nature's way. If you wish to give them something, that's your prerogative, freedom permits you the freedom to give. However, if you use your guns to take from me in order to satisfy your urge to gain pleasure by giving, then you're stealing from me and I'll use my guns to protect myself.
Why does everything come down to a matter of force when dealing with Americans? "Two words. Nuclear Fuckin' weapons..." The fallacy in this thinking is that you seem to believe it's a zero-sum game. It's not: especially when you have farmers plowing their crops back into the fields to increase their moetary yield.
'random birth' is bullshit quite frankly: my families fled oppression, social theft, and/or poverty in order to come to the USA
You're right, it is a self selecting demogarphic. Frightened people flee, and you still seem to be afraid of enough things to need to keep your guns around. Let's face it - you aren't going to face a military threat (you do have the most effective army), and your personal weapons aren't really going to help you against a terror attack. So tell me again, what are you afraid of? An Afghani coming over to steal your stuff?
Any other race, religion or culture can do the same. All they have to do is:
* respect each other's rights, including those of religion, speech, and property
* have a free and independent press
* have an open, multiparty democratic system with an ironclad separation of religion and state
Respect each other's rights - as long as;
you subscribe to Christianity or the cable broadcast version of it
just like yours
open multiparty democratic process as long as you can fund raise enough cash to actually run.
Smash all non-democratic nations and force them to be democratic or nuke the shit out of them. Who needs six billion people anyway? New Hampshire has it right: Live Free or Die.
And this is the crux...why do you think people hate you? Why do you think people would want to commit terror attacks against you? It's because of exactly this sort of foreign policy thinking. It's about thinking that says it is acceptable to chase profits instead of raising living standards.
The rest if the world hates you like a poor innercity person hates the landlord.
You invest nothing in the third world but expect no jealousy?
Thank God America got the Puritans and Australia got the convicts....
I'm sure the audiophiles will correct me, but is it possible that this could be used to produce seriously high quality audio gear: specifically speakers?
My understanding of speaker technology is that at it's most basic, a cone is held attached in some way to a magnet, which is moved by modulating the intensity of an opposing magnetic field. The movement of the cone produces sound.
If you could build the magnet into the cone, ie make the cone out of magnetic plastic, that would have to eliminate a source of distortion from the reproduction, which would lead to better quality sound.
I see this as a more realistic first application than building platters out of plastic.
What do the audiophiles have to say?
I don't know about overseas, but here in
Total pool for any given box is ~35 backup sets.
Yeah...given the way the time vs # of infections curve looks like for the Slammer type worms, you could do some serious damage in around 20 minutes. I think that is going to be the scenario that causes people to start taking proactive security more seriously.
With respect to your nasty twist...that's only really going to impact home users. Your serious corporate operators would have daily backups. Most of your Win32 backup platforms read the files through the native APIs, and so would backup the decrypted version of the file. So, yeah...you'd kill a lot of machines, but big corporate would just get a chance to properly test their DR plan, and lose a day.
If you wanted to cause serious disruption to big corporate, a better twist would be to hunt out General Ledger type databases, randomly inject\modify data, and then silently die.
The fallout from that sort of attack would be monstrous...
Seriously people, the AS/400 architecture, and the overlying OS/400 operating system is one of the nicest pieces of engineering you'll find.
They've been doing 'the file system is a database' since before Bill and Co were in long pants.
If you get a chance to catch that lecture, and have your x86-oriented mind blown away.
That lecture will probably not be performed by Jello, even though he blows minds for a living
Says who?
:)
Which do you prefer mate?
The idea of MS shutting down spammer's accounts, or the idea of them logging your e-mail (sending patterns?, actual content?, destination addresses?) so that they can refute false accusations of spamming on your behalf?
Even the dumbest safety check would involve MS monitoring and recording your online hotmail related activities.
Sorry, either they are the big evil empire who would track and log your activities online, or they are proactively trying to reduce Hotmail as a spam conduit.
As if you'd use Hotmail as anything other than a throwaway address for web registration anyway...
I'll capitulate to the point that Actual Reachability is a concern to reasonably savvy (read: professional) marketers
However, professional marketers who wanted this kind of accuracy in their information would surely purchase mailing lists from reputable sources (ummm...people like Dun and Bradstreet spring to mind), where the demographical information is pretty much gold-plated.
They don't buy a CD from some Dodgy Brother, Inc e-bay auction. I mean, look at the results - 30% real addresses contained in the example in the article.
It seems to me that the type of people who try spamming as a method to make money do it because they are impressed by the big numbers.
Wow, check it out d00d! 4 million e-mail addys!!!!. Kewl!!
All I was saying was that if you wanted to make some slightly more ethical cash, you could automate the process to pump out a 6 million address mailing list.
And it would be 50% better than the $300 one. You could charge $450 for it!
...would appear to be in the production and sale of address lists.
l @mx.tldd
Seriously, it would be trivial to write a script to generate e-mail adresses (actual reachability is a moot point). All you would need is a list of registered DNS names with mx records, and a list of names (nationality doesn't matter either: as many nationalities as possible). Then just run through the common variables
firstname.lastname@mx.tld
lastname.firstinitia
first6charsoflastname.firstinitial@mx.tl
and so on....
Costs to burn the CD
Yup, that's where the real money is....
<br>OK<br><br>Let's say your parity algorithm* is to sum the information across the raid-ed disks. You have 5 disks. Disk 1 stripe = 6, Disk 2 stripe = 7, Disk 3 stripe = 8, Disk 4 stripe = 9 and your parity stripe on Disk 5 = (6+7+8+9) = 30.<br><br>If you lose one disk, can you calculate on the fly what the stripe on that disk contained? eg Disk 3 goes...regeneration calculation is x = 30 - (6-7-9) = 8. Is this value correct? yup.<br><br>clear as mud?<br><br>*This is not a real parity calculation algorithm...
Is it my fault for getting shot while driving through a bad neighborhood shouting slurs out the window? Probably not, but I'm certainly provoking the situation.
Brrrr. Wrong. It is your fault.
Unless you're saying that it is perfectly acceptable for people to come to your house and scream abuse at you, it IS YOUR FAULT.
You want to shout slurs about people when they are at home, you will get your ass kicked\shot. And it will be your fault.
Yeah, agreed, but.....
I think motivation is important here. Honeypots by their nature are designed to entice black hats into attacking them...so that the owner of the honeypot can analyse what the latest and greatest black hats are going to look for, exploit etc
A darknet setup is passive in that it logs aberrant traffic. It tells you when something out there is actively scanning large gobs of your address space.
Ever played with Snort\ACID and a ruleset from somewhere like Whitehats on a live user subnet ? You get so many false positives that you start to pare down your ruleset. You keep doing this until you start to question the validity of the IDS in the first place.
I think this idea has some real utility....even if it is just to create another dataset to throw at MRTG !!
At the very least, this legitimizes the DRP testing that regulated industries (ie Pharmaaceutical) are required to carry out annually.
In many cases these are full blown restoration of service off the corporate network.
It happens now, but at least it will hapen in compliance with licensing agreements.
I may be an idiot, but it seems to me that most organisations could justify any of the amounts listed by doing some simple cost benefit analysis.
My understanding is that Spamhaus allows you to blackhole IP blocks that are known to tolerate\encourage spam.
If you step back and work out the cost of bandwidth to accept all of that spam, versus the cost to pay Spamhaus to blackhole it, it probably works out in favour of paying for Spamhaus.
Here in
I don't know what support you've gotten from IBM, but some of the stuff I've seen is pretty damn impressive.
At the hosted DRP site down here in Sydney
It stands at a 45 degree angle to the ground.
The story goes, a Warehouse guy for one of the car manufacturing firms down here got laid off, so he drove his forklift into the main building, picked up the AS/400 on the forks, and dropped it out a 2 story window. He then drove out of the building and down to the gound level and repeatedly rammed it.
Now, it turns out that in AS/400 land (at least back then), the only controller that could read from an array was the controller that wrote to it. So the IBM support guys literally rebuilt the card. They then pulled the data off of that box and recovered.
That machine still sits there just to show potential customers I guess how far IBM will go to recover their data.
Say what you want dude, but IBM support, at least at the corporate end of the market, is worth it. GSA on the other hand.....*bleh*
Just one thing....
In the gaming industry, it's turnover, not throughput...
Perhaps I didn't express my sentiment very well...
Linux IS a very difficult product to commoditize. Shall we install Debian, Suse, Redhat, Slackware, Gentoo, LFS or someother distro? What's the difference between the distros? How do I know I'm picking the right one?
Compare and contrast with for example the Microsoft way of doing things (and this is not an MS advocacy). There is Windows 2003 server. Want a File and Print box? W2K3. Want a Web Server? W2K3. Want a SQL server? W2K3 + one clearly defined addon. Want a Mail Server? W2K3 + one clearly defined addon.
Look at the Futures market. You don't buy Australian Pork Bellies, you don't buy US pork bellies, and you don't buy Chinese pork bellies. You buy Pork Bellies.
When you look at it like that, MS has a commoditized product, whereas the Linux 'marketplace' is fragmented.
It's for this very reason that when I evangelize, I push FreeBSD.
He holds an MBA in Information Technology and a BA in Economics and frequently speaks on the topics of Linux and offshore outsourcing.
;)"
:D
and here is the root of the problem... Economists always seek commoditization and Linux is a very difficult product to commoditize. The very breadth of Linux, and cornucopia of environments\applications that the term refers to makes it a very difficult thing to quantify.
Also, note that the trend of outsourcing is pretty much technology independent, and recognizes that the people are the expensive part of the equation.
In short, I guess the answer is "Well, maybe, but that's not Linux's fault...
and I can't wait to see how the slashbots reconcile an outsourcing expert talking up Linux