You just can't rely on nothing but a system to take care of everything for you, not even when it's a well-designed system. If you try to do that, you'll breed a generation of crooks who are highly skilled at exploiting loopholes and circumventing that system.
Doesn't matter if they can find loopholes - if the press get wind of anything sufficiently juicy, the fact that what they're up to technically falls within the rules isn't going to help the politicians. The biggest issue is if most of the press comes under the control of one person and he* inevitably decides to use this to influence politics. In theory, it's both within politicians' powers to stop this and in their interests to do so. In practice, it doesn't work out that way.
More interestingly, this kind of monopoly over the press is bad for the free market as well as for integrity in politics. In order for free market economics to work, the general public needs accurate access to information to guide their buying decisions. Once one person owns the press, they can - and often do - bias or pull stories in order to support businesses they own or make money from.
* So far, the one person has always been male.
The way I see it, this is a problem because of the Baby Boomers and other politically powerful voters who tend to vote in collective blocs and also happen to get almost all of their news from newspapers and TV.
A generation is rising that gets almost all of its information from the Internet. That's a medium where you can usually call bullshit the moment you see bullshit. The propaganda isn't as effective there, and a monopoly is much harder to maintain there. I consider this a very good thing.
Also, if you haven't yet discovered this, I'll give you a strong hint: that "one person" of whom you speak is merely a puppet, a cog in a much larger machine. He may be a knight or a rook instead of a pawn, but he is still just a piece on the real masters' chessboard. He may have some autonomy but not on any really important point. He plays ball or he loses the support he needs to stay in business, same as any politician or media figure.
I think they don't actually realize that's what they're doing.
Acting out of ignorance, failing to learn about something by asking a few questions before they dive on in, or downright fucking with what they don't understand. Call it what you will. That's why I refer to this as "unwise".
If they realized what they were doing, I would not have called it "unwise". I'd have called it making a trade-off, knowingly taking a risk, or deciding that the data on their phone has no real value.
Just about every single technology story I have ever seen about someone getting screwed in some way amounts to the insistence on using what they do not understand and acting surprised when an unwanted result is obtained. This covers a lot of ground, ranging from this issue, to online financial scams, to computer security, and beyond. At some point I say people make their bed and lay in it. They can't be bothered to spend a few minutes Googling something or asking their IT guy what a process entails, well they're grown-ups and should not be shielded from the consequences.
As for me, I look before I leap. I make that tiny bit of extra effort. I go for the ounce of prevention so I tend not to need the pound of cure. A lot of people think they're entitled to skip that bit of extra effort, like spoiled children who think everything is someone else's responsibility, and are shocked when anything undesired happens. I describe that as a wake-up call. The people who experience this are certainly not victims by any measure.
In most companies, it is expected that equipment bought and paid for by the company is to be used only for business purposes.
Really? In my experience, it's standard practise that a certain amount of personal use is tolerated so long as the employee's work is still done. I'm on Slashdot now, and at some point in the next month I'll print a boarding pass and photocopy the important page from my passport. No one will care, and my manager won't hesitate to remind me of the photocopy password when I ask him.
I've even been known to write a personal shopping list on a company-owned piece of paper using a company-owned pen.
A manager is crazy if he gets mad over £5 worth of stationary "wasted" per year.
I said there is an expectation. I did not deny that a reasonable manager understands the pointlessness of trying to perfectly enforce every possible expectation or rule.
There is a definite tendency on Slashdot for somebody to interpret a statement in the most black-and-white and/or extreme manner possible, usually so they can nitpick it. I understand a lot of people (maybe not you) have a strong need to feel "right", especially the kind of "right" that makes the other guy "wrong". Still, nearly all of this is unnecessary hair-splitting.
So, to sum it up, I'll put it this way: if you spend seven hours out of an eight-hour day at the office reading Slashdot, and started missing deadlines at work, you can bet your use of company equipment for nonbusiness purposes is going to come up as an issue. If you are still reasonably productive and don't cause problems, nonbusiness usage will probably be overlooked. The better bosses out there establish a certain understanding that you could describe as "don't make this my problem and I won't make it your problem."
So the day after Windows 8 is released, will that have been "more than adequate time for an internal security audit to have found and fixed" a bug.
We were talking about "left over junk from older OSes". See that part about "older OSes"? For clarity, I'll ask if you see that part about "older OSes".
See, to the literate reader this implies that at least some code from older versions of Windows has been re-used and included in newer versions of Windows. I know, when you want to nitpick, that whole literacy thing just gets in the way... but this makes sense for a lot of reasons. For example it is economical to avoid reinventing the wheel.
The thing about reusing older code is that it's older code. Therefore, it has had more time to undergo security audits, audits that could have caught basic buffer overflows like that. I can break that down some more if you need me to but I hope at this point that won't be necessary.
Are you trying to say there has never been a single bug in OpenBSD that's existed for more than one release cycle ?
Nope. If I were "trying to say" that, I would have moved my fingers to a different set of keys on my keyboard and explicitly said it. See how I never made such a claim at all? You do see that, right? If not, there is no need to take my word for it, you can scroll up and verify that for yourself.
Fact: between the two of us, you are the only person who has mentioned "bugs... that existed for more than one release cycle."
I must admit, I do not possess your "talent" for seeing things that aren't there. I also have a hard time putting words into someone's mouth and then forgetting that I'm the one who put them there. So for me, doing what you just did feels phony and dishonest and is really no fun at all.
Still, if any part of this post is confusing or ambiguous, please re-read it thoroughly and take careful note of what I did and did not say. If anything is still unclear, let me know and I'll set you straight. Now, can we finally put to rest this epidemic of "reading one thing and then responding to some shit you made up" that's destroying the quality of discussion here on Slashdot?
You don't take the enhancements that Research has contributed to.Net, Visual Studio, Exchange, SQL Server, NT 6.0 / 6.1 seriously?
I take them seriously because they are highly effective business strategies for making money for Microsoft, in no small part because a shop using those would have great difficulty migrating to another platform.
Now if more of that research effort went into making Windows less prone to malware we'd start seeing some progress and the Internet would become a better place for everyone, including people who don't use Windows.
Easy buffer overflow problem that shouldn't be hard to fix
I believe you miss his point.
It's an easy buffer overflow problem that shouldn't have been hard to prevent if you have even a fraction of the talent and resources at Microsoft's disposal.
If this bug is as you say, and it exploits "left over junk from older OSes" that only means one thing: there has been more than adequate time for an internal security audit to have found and fixed this bug. Consider the personnel and capital available to the OpenBSD group, then compare that to the personnel and capital available to Microsoft. You're telling me Microsoft couldn't do better than the OpenBSD group?
Why do so many people want to give Microsoft a pass in these matters? It's hard to think of any other entity in the world that would be more capable of doing better than this. It's obvious they don't give a damn about security as long as the sales keep coming. That's what you want to excuse, portray as understandable, smooth over, and encourage by example in other companies? I won't.
...why would you use your own resources to access company resources?
If the company intends for you to be accessible via email remotely, then they can damn well supply you with the means to be accessible via email when out of the office.
Unless you get paid for the use of your own resources (and reimbursed for the cost of obtaining them) then there is no sane reason why you would use them.
You're using logic to (successfully) make this into a very simple matter. It's a fine Slashdot tradition to pretend that even the most trivial of matters are full of legitimate, nuanced debate. Clearly you must be new here.
Keep personal items and work items separate. CRAZY I KNOW.
Yes but that requires a little discipline. That's something people will work really hard to avoid. They will work so hard to avoid it that they will put many times the effort into avoiding it than the effort a little discipline might have taken in the worst-case scenario.
So that's why I met so much resistance when I was setting up a script to automatically check and process mail over IMAP. I thought it was still a standard default thing, but the server admin, who can design and set up entire Exchange systems, virtual servers, entire VPN infrastructures, etc, seemed confused when I asked him to enable and test IMAP.
Is there some major flaw in IMAP, or has Microsoft simply already embraced and extended it, and now they're moving on with phase 3?
I'm pretty sure that Lotus Notes already embraced-and-extended it, though I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft has done that too. That practice is a page from Microsoft's playbook, after all.
I don't think most folks are shocked at the remote wipe capability - they just expected that it would be confined to the exchange data only, not the MP3's, games, photos, etc.
Exactly. All the people saying "it's the company's data, don't like getting it wyped? tough!" should take heed of this point.
There's a really simple way to nullify that point.
If a company wants that kind of control over a device, they can pay for it and issue it to their employees.
The only reason this raises any concerns at all is because people want to take personal devices that they pay for and then submit to company control over those devices. That's simply unwise. I'm not shocked when people do something unwise and get an undesired result. Are you?
Sure, a person may have company documents on the phone, and therefore it is safest for the entire phone to wiped, but one thing mentioned in the program was that the reason they do is not only to protect against theft, but also against employee misconduct. A remote wipe does not protect insider misconduct. As long as the phone is backed up, the contents can be restored and secrets exposed.
I think it's intended to protect against the "thoughtless/ignorant/stupid fool" type of misconduct where people simply fail to consider the consequences of their actions. I doubt it's intended to protect against the "sophisticated, deliberate, malicious, planned" type of misconduct because such people would indeed use countermeasures like back-ups.
You'd be crazy to use your own phone for work related email or any other tasks. Work and business don't mix and this is a perfect example of that.
This is sort of like the concept that "when you insist on using what you do not understand, and refuse to learn how to understand it, don't be shocked if you get bad results" (think computer security for a good example). It's like that concept in that it's simple, easy to understand, and people will go to great lengths to remain in denial of it.
The solution is a simple one. If a company requires you to use a phone for business purposes that will be sending/receiving business e-mails and subject to remote wiping by that company, then that company needs to issue phones to their employees that may not be used for non-business purposes.
Why require they be used strictly for business? If the user is willing to take the risk of losing it all, then let them. One less low-value rule to worry about enforcing.
In most companies, it is expected that equipment bought and paid for by the company is to be used only for business purposes. This is standard practice with company computers, landline phones, etc. Not to mention it's rather unprofessional to conduct your personal business while you're on the clock and certainly a sign of poor time management.
Also, I support the notion of private property when I retain the right to eject an unwanted person from my home. I likewise support the notion of private property when a company that lends you a phone and pays all the costs of that phone gets to tell you how you may use that phone.
Now the requirement that company-paid phones should only be used for business might be backed up by potential disciplinary action. Or it might be backed up by "our company data has been secured; don't cry to us if you put something else on there and now it's gone". Either way is alright by me, and which one it is would be up to the company and employees to work out.
Would you prefer to be sued over loss of company data/secrets/etc in the event that you lose your phone?
If I ran a company and were truly worried about this, I'd have all sensitive data stored on a secure server that can be accessed remotely. Of course some care would need to go into how this is implemented but it can certainly be done.
It's amazing how infrequently you feel a need to litigate when you put a little thought into things.
Is this meaning that the Mails were deleted on the server?
No, that wouldn't wipe a phone or raise questions about it being bricked if not for backups. Did you even read the summary?
This is more like the inverse or the equal-and-opposite of (previous?) MS e-mail clients that would automatically execute code from unknown sources as a "feature". Instead of an MS e-mail client it's an MS e-mail server, and instead of downloading and executing code automatically without asking the user to confirm it wipes the phone automatically without asking the user to confirm.
The solution is a simple one. If a company requires you to use a phone for business purposes that will be sending/receiving business e-mails and subject to remote wiping by that company, then that company needs to issue phones to their employees that may not be used for non-business purposes. Then there wouldn't be any problems with a company wiping a phone that is actually company property.
One thing to consider is that what you believe to be fair punishment for a crime likely has some basis on what culture you were brought up in and how "tough" on crime that culture is.
The first step to becoming a free-thinking person is to question everything you were raised to believe, from your parents, family, culture, schooling, government, churches, etc, and then to reject everything that doesn't make sense. I don't care how old you are; you're not really an adult until you have done this.
All of the impressionable sheeple with their so conveniently malleable minds is precisely why society is so fucked up today, to put it bluntly.
How did you arrive at that question from the gp's comment?
The point made was rhetorical: it may seem like a harsh punishment, but the punishment if the situation were reverse would obviously be harsher. You really don't understand the reasoning when comparing China and America?
Oh, I get it. I just think it's invalid. I'll try to clarify.
And before we judge if that seems too harsh a punishment, I would ask if anyone knows what the Chinese government would do to an American engineer who did the same thing to a Chinese company.
If I believe that a punishment is too harsh, it's because the punishment doesn't fit the crime. How someone else would punish the same crime is a separate discussion. If the USA fined people ten million dollars for jaywalking, I would say that's too harsh even if I knew that China executed people for jaywalking. One is simply too harsh to a high degree, and the other is too harsh to an exceedingly high degree.
The only relativity I recognize as important is that which exists between the punishment and the crime. That means I am in no danger of thinking that one abuse is legitimate merely because worse abuses are known to occur. I don't view concepts like justice and injustice (among others) as trade goods that have a value or a "going rate" which is set by the market conditions. I consider that a requirement of free thought.
"When most of the country's population is a strong, independent middle class they want the government to take care of what is reasonable..."
But then you went on to this:
"People who can house themselves, feed themselves.....don't want the kinds of "help" (dependency) that the government can offer."
When our middle class was the strongest it has ever been, the vast majority of the country was very much in favor of medicare, medicaid, strong support for unions, etc.
Short answer: I said that people who can take care of their own needs don't want the kinds of "help" (dependency) that government can offer. By definition they don't need help; they can take care of their own needs.
That rules out everyone but the people who cannot take care of their own needs. It is they who may desire some help. If we really are helping and really are eradicating poverty with our helpfulness, then with time the number of people in the first category would increase while the number in the second category would shrink. That is not what's been happening.
Long answer:
I think you mean well and have generally benevolent intentions. That makes it hard to really understand the power-hungry and how they actually think. There's very little that is so inherently virtuous, so simple to implement, or so easy to understand that they can't warp, twist, and pervert to make it serve their goals.
The difficulty in understanding or accepting that is the main reason why the public has been so docile. Completely dominating a nation or a region takes such a level of determination, ruthlessness, and deception that the minds of decent people don't really understand what that means. Now, no dictator ever rose to power by running a campaign stating "I want to seize all political power and rule with an iron fist as a cruel dictator - vote for me!".
When most people have more than they need, they don't mind a little extra tax to help someone down on their luck.
The people who agreed with that and voted for the politicians who favored it, the people who pay that tax would generally agree with you. It is a good thing to want to look out for your fellow man. It's what a compassionate person who means well would want to do. So when people with power comes along and says we can do that, you want to believe them.
It doesn't take much to twist that good intent. It's simple, really. You need a complicated welfare system with lots of complications, so you have several different programs on the state and federal levels that narrowly target particular situations: food stamps, WIC, tax credits that not only cancel out any tax debt owed but also result in the government paying the recipient, various subsidies.
Then you administer them in a way that rewards poor behavior and never attempts to educate or train or counsel anyone to help them develop their skills and get off of welfare. Now you have a legion of guaranteed political support in the form of people who will vote for you because they fear losing the entire culture that has been created around this "help".
That's one of the more basic techniques used, unfortunately.
It's giving someone a fish instead of teaching them how to fish. It's choosing one or the other on purpose. If you taught someone how to fish then they wouldn't need you anymore. If you love power then you need to be needed. If you love freedom and independence then you're glad to help someone find it. There is no way you can take an objective look at the leaders we have today and conclude that they love freedom and independence.
Good. And before we judge if that seems too harsh a punishment, I would ask if anyone knows what the Chinese government would do to an American engineer who did the same thing to a Chinese company.
Playing Devil's advocate here: so we can commit injustice and that's okay, because another country's injustices justify it?
I'm not claiming that this punishment is too harsh or too lenient for that matter. I'm not familiar enough with this incident nor do I know why this is a criminal matter and not a civil tort. So I won't make that judgment. Instead, I'm asking you this because I just don't understand your reasoning.
It's all so pathetic. Rich people are so petty and stingy they're destroying their own future to make a little extra bread in the present. If they weren't destroying our future as well, I'd wish them bon voyage, but as it is they're taking the whole country down the tubes.
You're correct about the effect but mistaken about the motivation.
Yes, the ruling elite in America are destroying the middle class. No, they aren't doing that because they're stupid or can't figure out what that will do to the country. Destroying the middle class has taken generations of effort that is only just now coming to fruition.
They're acting in their own long-term interests, as usual. You see, when you already have a stranglehold on most of the wealth in a country, and can already buy anything you please, and can already secure the financial future of your great-great-great grandchildren, and you still aren't satisfied and you still want more and more and more... at that point only one thing remains: political power.
A strong, independent middle class is a gigantic barrier to this. When most of the country's population is a strong, independent middle class they want government to take care of what is reasonable and then to stay out of their lives and their wallets as much as possible. For those who don't think the US Federal Government is already more than powerful enough, that won't do. It won't do at all. People who can house themselves, feed themselves, and take care of their own children don't want the kind of "help" (dependency) that government can offer. People who have not just material and financial independence, but an independent spirit, well to the elites they also have this annoying habit of not easily cowering in the face of every little crisis.
For those reasons and many more, a society like that is easy to govern but incredibly difficult to rule.
Pass a constitutional amendment that strips Congress of civil immunity for their unconstitutional laws.
Trouble is that there is no real way to have a judicial review of laws to see if they are constitutional before making them laws. It would be a crapshoot especially if new laws are in untested legal waters to begin with (which would be one of the reason there would need to be new laws). Add to that that judicial opinions change, there really is no way of determining if a law is constitutional until it is made a law and then tested in court.
I don't know, man. To me, phrases like "Congress shall make no law" and "Shall not be infringed" are pretty damned unambiguous.
I suppose if I studied law and become a Constitutional scholar I could invent ways to make those ambiguous, but that's what it would take because the meaning and intent of the Constitution is really not difficult to understand.
As far as fixing the gigantic monster that is the federal government, that could be done with a court ruling. We need a ruling from the Supreme Court stating that any federal law concerning intrastate affairs is blatantly un-Constitutional and invalid. Couple that with a court ruling stating that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation and therefore not Constitutionally authorized to control currency and we'd be back on the road to freedom.
Yet, the suggestion that more than three men conspire to use governmental power for the goal of both power and monetary profit is
...assumed to be a possibility, which is why our political system is supposed to be designed to prevent it.
It seems to work about as well as all of those "hacker-proof" copy protection schemes. The ones that have cracks available a few days or weeks later.
You just can't rely on nothing but a system to take care of everything for you, not even when it's a well-designed system. If you try to do that, you'll breed a generation of crooks who are highly skilled at exploiting loopholes and circumventing that system. The system is an aid only. It just makes it easier to be vigilant but it won't do your vigilance for you.
Obviously you haven't read many of my posts dealing with politics and government.
Actually I was talking about myself only. See how all of those sentences began with "I"? Whether you feel the same way or not has nothing whatsoever to do with the point I was making. Your agreement with my politics is not necessary to demonstrate that lots of people would like to have control over how their tax money is used. That isn't a personal statement about you. Forgive me, but get over yourself. (that last sentence was a personal statement about you, if you're confused)
My primary point was that this particular involuntary use of tax money actually has some significant upsides. I'll connect the dots for you and say that what I am getting at is that the upside outweighs the downsides.
My secondary point was that if you want choices over how your taxes are used, there are bigger fish to fry than the comparatively benign issue of public campaign financing.
Come on, the lack of public funding does not prevent a person from running for office. If it were required no candidate would ever run, no one can simply decide to run and have public funds handed to them.
Public financing is not a matter of running or not running. I don't know how you miss the point so thoroughly. Rather, public financing is about how a candidate runs for office and the nature of that campaign. It's a qualitative change, not a quantitative one.
I suggest you do your own research, the candidate with the most money does not always win.
I did not use the word "always" for a reason. Apparently on Slashdot you have to make that bleedin' obvious because people are careless with their writing and expect you to be equally careless. Nope, if I don't say "always" or "in every possible case" it's because I don't mean those things. Anyway, research many Congressional and Presidential elections and you will find that the vast preponderence of the time, money is a huge deciding factor.
What was that you were saying about people making things up and/or failing to understand what you do and don't say? I seem to have heard some noise or another about that...
Rules exist even within capitalism. This is a case of fraud, not capitalism. Capitalism is just the veil that they choose to hide under.
It's hardly the only veil. Consider this conundrum: that three men conspired to create/use various organizations to accomplish the goal of scalping for monetary profit is not absurd to most people. They don't reject the notion out-of-hand and refuse to consider the merits of the position. Yet, the suggestion that more than three men conspire to use governmental power for the goal of both power and monetary profit is automatically written off as "can't possibly happen, especially not here". If anything the greater power of more than three men and a bigger, more powerful organization makes this more tempting to evil people, and therefore more likely that enough would be motivated to do so.
Really any philosophy that has its share of "true believer" followers has the same downside. They don't think critically and ideology is more important to them than a willingness to be proven wrong if the proof is adequate. That's a readily exploitable state. Capitalism, Communism, Statism, and various religions have all, at one time or another, been exploited for control.
So you want our politicians bribed by a select few.
No, I want to be able to give to those I support, and I don't want any tax money going to those I oppose. Years ago I used to check in a box on federal income tax forms saying I wanted a dollar to go to public financing, but I stopped doing it. I only want my money going to those I support.
Falcon
In that case...
I don't want my tax dollars being used to support a war I don't agree with. I don't want them used on entitlement programs that I consider to be straight-up vote-buying. I don't want them used to build a "bridge to nowhere" as part of typical pork-barrel politics. I don't want them used to support drug prohibition or any other victimless-crime enforcement because I oppose those on principle. I don't want them used to perpetually extend copyright. I don't want them used to pay a salary to people who spend even one picosecond looking for a way to censor the Internet.
Guess what? No government official cares what I want. I owe that tax money no matter how I feel about its use. If I don't pay up, the government will send men with guns (known as police) to take my wealth by force. If I really refuse to pay up they may also imprison me.
Where does this notion come from that you'd be deprived of some crucial choice if it were required that all elections be publically financed? There is no precedent for it. You don't get that choice anywhere else. You mean to say that of all the possible uses of your tax money that you might not like, this is the issue that troubles you? How is that even possible?
Personally I have no problem with public campaign financing. If it is implemented I hope the amount allocated to each candidate is extremely generous. Then I hope all other forms of campaign funding become illegal bribery with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 20 years for both the one offering the bribe and the recipient. The only reason there is so much corruption is because we so thoroughly tolerate it.
I'd be glad to fund politicians I dislike. This would serve a crucial function. It would mean that other voters can choose to vote for those candidates even if I personally wouldn't. I want them to have that choice and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.
The whole point of public financing is that the candidate most desired by the voters would win because money would be equal, assured, and thus taken out of the equation. Then the only differences among politicians would be their politics. Right now it's a contest of who can raise the most money and if you don't believe that, do the research yourself. Organizations (incl. corporations) wouldn't be able to support candidates for the same good reasons that organizations don't get to vote -- they're not human beings.
Slashdot Mirror
You just can't rely on nothing but a system to take care of everything for you, not even when it's a well-designed system. If you try to do that, you'll breed a generation of crooks who are highly skilled at exploiting loopholes and circumventing that system.
Doesn't matter if they can find loopholes - if the press get wind of anything sufficiently juicy, the fact that what they're up to technically falls within the rules isn't going to help the politicians. The biggest issue is if most of the press comes under the control of one person and he* inevitably decides to use this to influence politics. In theory, it's both within politicians' powers to stop this and in their interests to do so. In practice, it doesn't work out that way.
More interestingly, this kind of monopoly over the press is bad for the free market as well as for integrity in politics. In order for free market economics to work, the general public needs accurate access to information to guide their buying decisions. Once one person owns the press, they can - and often do - bias or pull stories in order to support businesses they own or make money from.
* So far, the one person has always been male.
The way I see it, this is a problem because of the Baby Boomers and other politically powerful voters who tend to vote in collective blocs and also happen to get almost all of their news from newspapers and TV.
A generation is rising that gets almost all of its information from the Internet. That's a medium where you can usually call bullshit the moment you see bullshit. The propaganda isn't as effective there, and a monopoly is much harder to maintain there. I consider this a very good thing.
Also, if you haven't yet discovered this, I'll give you a strong hint: that "one person" of whom you speak is merely a puppet, a cog in a much larger machine. He may be a knight or a rook instead of a pawn, but he is still just a piece on the real masters' chessboard. He may have some autonomy but not on any really important point. He plays ball or he loses the support he needs to stay in business, same as any politician or media figure.
Acting out of ignorance, failing to learn about something by asking a few questions before they dive on in, or downright fucking with what they don't understand. Call it what you will. That's why I refer to this as "unwise".
If they realized what they were doing, I would not have called it "unwise". I'd have called it making a trade-off, knowingly taking a risk, or deciding that the data on their phone has no real value.
Just about every single technology story I have ever seen about someone getting screwed in some way amounts to the insistence on using what they do not understand and acting surprised when an unwanted result is obtained. This covers a lot of ground, ranging from this issue, to online financial scams, to computer security, and beyond. At some point I say people make their bed and lay in it. They can't be bothered to spend a few minutes Googling something or asking their IT guy what a process entails, well they're grown-ups and should not be shielded from the consequences.
As for me, I look before I leap. I make that tiny bit of extra effort. I go for the ounce of prevention so I tend not to need the pound of cure. A lot of people think they're entitled to skip that bit of extra effort, like spoiled children who think everything is someone else's responsibility, and are shocked when anything undesired happens. I describe that as a wake-up call. The people who experience this are certainly not victims by any measure.
In most companies, it is expected that equipment bought and paid for by the company is to be used only for business purposes.
Really? In my experience, it's standard practise that a certain amount of personal use is tolerated so long as the employee's work is still done. I'm on Slashdot now, and at some point in the next month I'll print a boarding pass and photocopy the important page from my passport. No one will care, and my manager won't hesitate to remind me of the photocopy password when I ask him.
I've even been known to write a personal shopping list on a company-owned piece of paper using a company-owned pen.
A manager is crazy if he gets mad over £5 worth of stationary "wasted" per year.
I said there is an expectation. I did not deny that a reasonable manager understands the pointlessness of trying to perfectly enforce every possible expectation or rule.
There is a definite tendency on Slashdot for somebody to interpret a statement in the most black-and-white and/or extreme manner possible, usually so they can nitpick it. I understand a lot of people (maybe not you) have a strong need to feel "right", especially the kind of "right" that makes the other guy "wrong". Still, nearly all of this is unnecessary hair-splitting.
So, to sum it up, I'll put it this way: if you spend seven hours out of an eight-hour day at the office reading Slashdot, and started missing deadlines at work, you can bet your use of company equipment for nonbusiness purposes is going to come up as an issue. If you are still reasonably productive and don't cause problems, nonbusiness usage will probably be overlooked. The better bosses out there establish a certain understanding that you could describe as "don't make this my problem and I won't make it your problem."
We were talking about "left over junk from older OSes". See that part about "older OSes"? For clarity, I'll ask if you see that part about " older OSes".
See, to the literate reader this implies that at least some code from older versions of Windows has been re-used and included in newer versions of Windows. I know, when you want to nitpick, that whole literacy thing just gets in the way... but this makes sense for a lot of reasons. For example it is economical to avoid reinventing the wheel.
The thing about reusing older code is that it's older code. Therefore, it has had more time to undergo security audits, audits that could have caught basic buffer overflows like that. I can break that down some more if you need me to but I hope at this point that won't be necessary.
Nope. If I were "trying to say" that, I would have moved my fingers to a different set of keys on my keyboard and explicitly said it. See how I never made such a claim at all? You do see that, right? If not, there is no need to take my word for it, you can scroll up and verify that for yourself.
... that existed for more than one release cycle."
Fact: between the two of us, you are the only person who has mentioned "bugs
I must admit, I do not possess your "talent" for seeing things that aren't there. I also have a hard time putting words into someone's mouth and then forgetting that I'm the one who put them there. So for me, doing what you just did feels phony and dishonest and is really no fun at all.
Still, if any part of this post is confusing or ambiguous, please re-read it thoroughly and take careful note of what I did and did not say. If anything is still unclear, let me know and I'll set you straight. Now, can we finally put to rest this epidemic of "reading one thing and then responding to some shit you made up" that's destroying the quality of discussion here on Slashdot?
You don't take the enhancements that Research has contributed to .Net, Visual Studio, Exchange, SQL Server, NT 6.0 / 6.1 seriously?
I take them seriously because they are highly effective business strategies for making money for Microsoft, in no small part because a shop using those would have great difficulty migrating to another platform.
Now if more of that research effort went into making Windows less prone to malware we'd start seeing some progress and the Internet would become a better place for everyone, including people who don't use Windows.
I believe you miss his point.
It's an easy buffer overflow problem that shouldn't have been hard to prevent if you have even a fraction of the talent and resources at Microsoft's disposal.
If this bug is as you say, and it exploits "left over junk from older OSes" that only means one thing: there has been more than adequate time for an internal security audit to have found and fixed this bug. Consider the personnel and capital available to the OpenBSD group, then compare that to the personnel and capital available to Microsoft. You're telling me Microsoft couldn't do better than the OpenBSD group?
Why do so many people want to give Microsoft a pass in these matters? It's hard to think of any other entity in the world that would be more capable of doing better than this. It's obvious they don't give a damn about security as long as the sales keep coming. That's what you want to excuse, portray as understandable, smooth over, and encourage by example in other companies? I won't.
...why would you use your own resources to access company resources? If the company intends for you to be accessible via email remotely, then they can damn well supply you with the means to be accessible via email when out of the office. Unless you get paid for the use of your own resources (and reimbursed for the cost of obtaining them) then there is no sane reason why you would use them.
You're using logic to (successfully) make this into a very simple matter. It's a fine Slashdot tradition to pretend that even the most trivial of matters are full of legitimate, nuanced debate. Clearly you must be new here.
Keep personal items and work items separate. CRAZY I KNOW.
Yes but that requires a little discipline. That's something people will work really hard to avoid. They will work so hard to avoid it that they will put many times the effort into avoiding it than the effort a little discipline might have taken in the worst-case scenario.
So that's why I met so much resistance when I was setting up a script to automatically check and process mail over IMAP. I thought it was still a standard default thing, but the server admin, who can design and set up entire Exchange systems, virtual servers, entire VPN infrastructures, etc, seemed confused when I asked him to enable and test IMAP.
Is there some major flaw in IMAP, or has Microsoft simply already embraced and extended it, and now they're moving on with phase 3?
I'm pretty sure that Lotus Notes already embraced-and-extended it, though I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft has done that too. That practice is a page from Microsoft's playbook, after all.
I don't think most folks are shocked at the remote wipe capability - they just expected that it would be confined to the exchange data only, not the MP3's, games, photos, etc.
Exactly. All the people saying "it's the company's data, don't like getting it wyped? tough!" should take heed of this point.
There's a really simple way to nullify that point.
If a company wants that kind of control over a device, they can pay for it and issue it to their employees.
The only reason this raises any concerns at all is because people want to take personal devices that they pay for and then submit to company control over those devices. That's simply unwise. I'm not shocked when people do something unwise and get an undesired result. Are you?
I think it's intended to protect against the "thoughtless/ignorant/stupid fool" type of misconduct where people simply fail to consider the consequences of their actions. I doubt it's intended to protect against the "sophisticated, deliberate, malicious, planned" type of misconduct because such people would indeed use countermeasures like back-ups.
You'd be crazy to use your own phone for work related email or any other tasks. Work and business don't mix and this is a perfect example of that.
This is sort of like the concept that "when you insist on using what you do not understand, and refuse to learn how to understand it, don't be shocked if you get bad results" (think computer security for a good example). It's like that concept in that it's simple, easy to understand, and people will go to great lengths to remain in denial of it.
The solution is a simple one. If a company requires you to use a phone for business purposes that will be sending/receiving business e-mails and subject to remote wiping by that company, then that company needs to issue phones to their employees that may not be used for non-business purposes.
Why require they be used strictly for business? If the user is willing to take the risk of losing it all, then let them. One less low-value rule to worry about enforcing.
In most companies, it is expected that equipment bought and paid for by the company is to be used only for business purposes. This is standard practice with company computers, landline phones, etc. Not to mention it's rather unprofessional to conduct your personal business while you're on the clock and certainly a sign of poor time management.
Also, I support the notion of private property when I retain the right to eject an unwanted person from my home. I likewise support the notion of private property when a company that lends you a phone and pays all the costs of that phone gets to tell you how you may use that phone.
Now the requirement that company-paid phones should only be used for business might be backed up by potential disciplinary action. Or it might be backed up by "our company data has been secured; don't cry to us if you put something else on there and now it's gone". Either way is alright by me, and which one it is would be up to the company and employees to work out.
If I ran a company and were truly worried about this, I'd have all sensitive data stored on a secure server that can be accessed remotely. Of course some care would need to go into how this is implemented but it can certainly be done.
It's amazing how infrequently you feel a need to litigate when you put a little thought into things.
Is this meaning that the Mails were deleted on the server?
No, that wouldn't wipe a phone or raise questions about it being bricked if not for backups. Did you even read the summary?
This is more like the inverse or the equal-and-opposite of (previous?) MS e-mail clients that would automatically execute code from unknown sources as a "feature". Instead of an MS e-mail client it's an MS e-mail server, and instead of downloading and executing code automatically without asking the user to confirm it wipes the phone automatically without asking the user to confirm.
The solution is a simple one. If a company requires you to use a phone for business purposes that will be sending/receiving business e-mails and subject to remote wiping by that company, then that company needs to issue phones to their employees that may not be used for non-business purposes. Then there wouldn't be any problems with a company wiping a phone that is actually company property.
One thing to consider is that what you believe to be fair punishment for a crime likely has some basis on what culture you were brought up in and how "tough" on crime that culture is.
The first step to becoming a free-thinking person is to question everything you were raised to believe, from your parents, family, culture, schooling, government, churches, etc, and then to reject everything that doesn't make sense. I don't care how old you are; you're not really an adult until you have done this.
All of the impressionable sheeple with their so conveniently malleable minds is precisely why society is so fucked up today, to put it bluntly.
How did you arrive at that question from the gp's comment?
The point made was rhetorical: it may seem like a harsh punishment, but the punishment if the situation were reverse would obviously be harsher. You really don't understand the reasoning when comparing China and America?
Oh, I get it. I just think it's invalid. I'll try to clarify.
If I believe that a punishment is too harsh, it's because the punishment doesn't fit the crime. How someone else would punish the same crime is a separate discussion. If the USA fined people ten million dollars for jaywalking, I would say that's too harsh even if I knew that China executed people for jaywalking. One is simply too harsh to a high degree, and the other is too harsh to an exceedingly high degree.
The only relativity I recognize as important is that which exists between the punishment and the crime. That means I am in no danger of thinking that one abuse is legitimate merely because worse abuses are known to occur. I don't view concepts like justice and injustice (among others) as trade goods that have a value or a "going rate" which is set by the market conditions. I consider that a requirement of free thought.
Short answer: I said that people who can take care of their own needs don't want the kinds of "help" (dependency) that government can offer. By definition they don't need help; they can take care of their own needs.
That rules out everyone but the people who cannot take care of their own needs. It is they who may desire some help. If we really are helping and really are eradicating poverty with our helpfulness, then with time the number of people in the first category would increase while the number in the second category would shrink. That is not what's been happening.
Long answer:
I think you mean well and have generally benevolent intentions. That makes it hard to really understand the power-hungry and how they actually think. There's very little that is so inherently virtuous, so simple to implement, or so easy to understand that they can't warp, twist, and pervert to make it serve their goals.
The difficulty in understanding or accepting that is the main reason why the public has been so docile. Completely dominating a nation or a region takes such a level of determination, ruthlessness, and deception that the minds of decent people don't really understand what that means. Now, no dictator ever rose to power by running a campaign stating "I want to seize all political power and rule with an iron fist as a cruel dictator - vote for me!".
The people who agreed with that and voted for the politicians who favored it, the people who pay that tax would generally agree with you. It is a good thing to want to look out for your fellow man. It's what a compassionate person who means well would want to do. So when people with power comes along and says we can do that, you want to believe them.
It doesn't take much to twist that good intent. It's simple, really. You need a complicated welfare system with lots of complications, so you have several different programs on the state and federal levels that narrowly target particular situations: food stamps, WIC, tax credits that not only cancel out any tax debt owed but also result in the government paying the recipient, various subsidies.
Then you administer them in a way that rewards poor behavior and never attempts to educate or train or counsel anyone to help them develop their skills and get off of welfare. Now you have a legion of guaranteed political support in the form of people who will vote for you because they fear losing the entire culture that has been created around this "help".
That's one of the more basic techniques used, unfortunately.
It's giving someone a fish instead of teaching them how to fish. It's choosing one or the other on purpose. If you taught someone how to fish then they wouldn't need you anymore. If you love power then you need to be needed. If you love freedom and independence then you're glad to help someone find it. There is no way you can take an objective look at the leaders we have today and conclude that they love freedom and independence.
Playing Devil's advocate here: so we can commit injustice and that's okay, because another country's injustices justify it?
I'm not claiming that this punishment is too harsh or too lenient for that matter. I'm not familiar enough with this incident nor do I know why this is a criminal matter and not a civil tort. So I won't make that judgment. Instead, I'm asking you this because I just don't understand your reasoning.
You're correct about the effect but mistaken about the motivation.
... at that point only one thing remains: political power.
Yes, the ruling elite in America are destroying the middle class. No, they aren't doing that because they're stupid or can't figure out what that will do to the country. Destroying the middle class has taken generations of effort that is only just now coming to fruition.
They're acting in their own long-term interests, as usual. You see, when you already have a stranglehold on most of the wealth in a country, and can already buy anything you please, and can already secure the financial future of your great-great-great grandchildren, and you still aren't satisfied and you still want more and more and more
A strong, independent middle class is a gigantic barrier to this. When most of the country's population is a strong, independent middle class they want government to take care of what is reasonable and then to stay out of their lives and their wallets as much as possible. For those who don't think the US Federal Government is already more than powerful enough, that won't do. It won't do at all. People who can house themselves, feed themselves, and take care of their own children don't want the kind of "help" (dependency) that government can offer. People who have not just material and financial independence, but an independent spirit, well to the elites they also have this annoying habit of not easily cowering in the face of every little crisis.
For those reasons and many more, a society like that is easy to govern but incredibly difficult to rule.
Trouble is that there is no real way to have a judicial review of laws to see if they are constitutional before making them laws. It would be a crapshoot especially if new laws are in untested legal waters to begin with (which would be one of the reason there would need to be new laws). Add to that that judicial opinions change, there really is no way of determining if a law is constitutional until it is made a law and then tested in court.
I don't know, man. To me, phrases like "Congress shall make no law" and "Shall not be infringed" are pretty damned unambiguous.
I suppose if I studied law and become a Constitutional scholar I could invent ways to make those ambiguous, but that's what it would take because the meaning and intent of the Constitution is really not difficult to understand.
As far as fixing the gigantic monster that is the federal government, that could be done with a court ruling. We need a ruling from the Supreme Court stating that any federal law concerning intrastate affairs is blatantly un-Constitutional and invalid. Couple that with a court ruling stating that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation and therefore not Constitutionally authorized to control currency and we'd be back on the road to freedom.
Yet, the suggestion that more than three men conspire to use governmental power for the goal of both power and monetary profit is
...assumed to be a possibility, which is why our political system is supposed to be designed to prevent it.
It seems to work about as well as all of those "hacker-proof" copy protection schemes. The ones that have cracks available a few days or weeks later.
You just can't rely on nothing but a system to take care of everything for you, not even when it's a well-designed system. If you try to do that, you'll breed a generation of crooks who are highly skilled at exploiting loopholes and circumventing that system. The system is an aid only. It just makes it easier to be vigilant but it won't do your vigilance for you.
Actually I was talking about myself only. See how all of those sentences began with "I"? Whether you feel the same way or not has nothing whatsoever to do with the point I was making. Your agreement with my politics is not necessary to demonstrate that lots of people would like to have control over how their tax money is used. That isn't a personal statement about you. Forgive me, but get over yourself. (that last sentence was a personal statement about you, if you're confused)
My primary point was that this particular involuntary use of tax money actually has some significant upsides. I'll connect the dots for you and say that what I am getting at is that the upside outweighs the downsides.
My secondary point was that if you want choices over how your taxes are used, there are bigger fish to fry than the comparatively benign issue of public campaign financing.
Public financing is not a matter of running or not running. I don't know how you miss the point so thoroughly. Rather, public financing is about how a candidate runs for office and the nature of that campaign. It's a qualitative change, not a quantitative one.
I did not use the word "always" for a reason. Apparently on Slashdot you have to make that bleedin' obvious because people are careless with their writing and expect you to be equally careless. Nope, if I don't say "always" or "in every possible case" it's because I don't mean those things. Anyway, research many Congressional and Presidential elections and you will find that the vast preponderence of the time, money is a huge deciding factor.
What was that you were saying about people making things up and/or failing to understand what you do and don't say? I seem to have heard some noise or another about that...
It's hardly the only veil. Consider this conundrum: that three men conspired to create/use various organizations to accomplish the goal of scalping for monetary profit is not absurd to most people. They don't reject the notion out-of-hand and refuse to consider the merits of the position. Yet, the suggestion that more than three men conspire to use governmental power for the goal of both power and monetary profit is automatically written off as "can't possibly happen, especially not here". If anything the greater power of more than three men and a bigger, more powerful organization makes this more tempting to evil people, and therefore more likely that enough would be motivated to do so.
Really any philosophy that has its share of "true believer" followers has the same downside. They don't think critically and ideology is more important to them than a willingness to be proven wrong if the proof is adequate. That's a readily exploitable state. Capitalism, Communism, Statism, and various religions have all, at one time or another, been exploited for control.
So you want our politicians bribed by a select few.
No, I want to be able to give to those I support, and I don't want any tax money going to those I oppose. Years ago I used to check in a box on federal income tax forms saying I wanted a dollar to go to public financing, but I stopped doing it. I only want my money going to those I support.
Falcon
In that case...
I don't want my tax dollars being used to support a war I don't agree with. I don't want them used on entitlement programs that I consider to be straight-up vote-buying. I don't want them used to build a "bridge to nowhere" as part of typical pork-barrel politics. I don't want them used to support drug prohibition or any other victimless-crime enforcement because I oppose those on principle. I don't want them used to perpetually extend copyright. I don't want them used to pay a salary to people who spend even one picosecond looking for a way to censor the Internet.
Guess what? No government official cares what I want. I owe that tax money no matter how I feel about its use. If I don't pay up, the government will send men with guns (known as police) to take my wealth by force. If I really refuse to pay up they may also imprison me.
Where does this notion come from that you'd be deprived of some crucial choice if it were required that all elections be publically financed? There is no precedent for it. You don't get that choice anywhere else. You mean to say that of all the possible uses of your tax money that you might not like, this is the issue that troubles you? How is that even possible?
Personally I have no problem with public campaign financing. If it is implemented I hope the amount allocated to each candidate is extremely generous. Then I hope all other forms of campaign funding become illegal bribery with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 20 years for both the one offering the bribe and the recipient. The only reason there is so much corruption is because we so thoroughly tolerate it.
I'd be glad to fund politicians I dislike. This would serve a crucial function. It would mean that other voters can choose to vote for those candidates even if I personally wouldn't. I want them to have that choice and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is.
The whole point of public financing is that the candidate most desired by the voters would win because money would be equal, assured, and thus taken out of the equation. Then the only differences among politicians would be their politics. Right now it's a contest of who can raise the most money and if you don't believe that, do the research yourself. Organizations (incl. corporations) wouldn't be able to support candidates for the same good reasons that organizations don't get to vote -- they're not human beings.