lol yeah actually your description of the topic didn't make it sound interesting enough to be worth going out and researching.
That's an excuse for your own laziness. It wouldn't be laziness except that you insist on passing judgment on this subject. That's what adds the requirement that you know something about it, a requirement you have consistently failed.
And it does sound like you're being paranoid.
That's the judgment.
Whenever you talk about what they are doing based on theories of human interaction without actually having concrete evidence that those theories apply in the case at hand, then you are going to sound conspiratorial.
By "they" I refer to well-documented rulers throughout history. Documentation available for you to read if you are so inclined.
Which is what you did.
Suggesting that people tend to act in their own interests and that people with political power are no exception is conspiratorial? Suggesting that statecraft is like any other craft, where the state of the art is advanced through the progress made by one's predecessors is conspiratorial? Okay.
You seem unwilling to reason with me so "okay" is my only answer. Believe what you will. I gave you a chance to see this a different way. That's the closest thing to duty or responsibility that I have here. What you do with that is not my concern. It's a shame that you are so full of yourself, for you are otherwise rather clever. That's the difference between cleverness and wisdom. I'm sure you'll have some kind of rebuttal to that, so I say do your worst.
Did you notice the story is about targeted attacks? OS doesn't have much to do with those. In fact since these are companies internal networks and servers and not workstations, I suspect they actually run some UNIX variant.
On that one you are absolutely correct and it is good that someone pointed this out. What Unix and Unix-like systems and their users tend to be highly resistant to are the automated attacks to which Windows systems and users are often vulnerable. These include trojans, self-propogating worms and viruses, and items of that nature. In the case of an automated attack, one system (the malware) is being pitted against another system (Windows, Unix, etc). Unix and Unix-like systems and their users generally do not experience automated viruses infecting machines in the wild today. After the Morris worm they tend to have learned not to repeat the mistakes that make such things feasible.
However, a targeted attack conducted by a determined adversary is an entirely different scenario. This is not one system pitted against another system. This is an attacker using any system pitted against a defender using any system. In that sense it's more like a game of chess. There is a very real chance of the attacker prevailing. In some ways, the deck is stacked against the defender because the defender must correctly deal with all practical methods of compromise while the attacker only needs to find the one thing that was overlooked. That might be a technical attack or it might be a low-tech social engineering attack, or both.
For automated attacks you only need to be secure enough to raise the bar beyond the capabilities that can be expected from a scripted program. Since we do not have true artificial intelligence, this is feasible. For a knowledgable and truly determined adversary, what you really want is perfect security but this is not possible. The best you can do is to be so difficult to compromise that the cost of doing so is higher than anything the attacker would gain from succeeding. Even then there may be a personal vendetta that makes the attacker irrationally persist at any cost. It's an entirely different threat model.
Or if you believe it's the superior choice, you can worry about the material construction of my hat.
I love it when you give me choices! I'll guess that your hat is made of a paper/nylon blend, and looks something like this. And I must say, excellent choice. I like the brim.
That's an amusing and somewhat skillful way to save face after admitting you don't know what someone is talking about and accusing them of paranoia based on a subject you admit you know nothing about. It made me chuckle, anyway.
I spoke more directly about preventing in the first place the situation for which that parent poster offered a solution. The method of prevention and the viewpoint that accompanies it can indeed be applied to the realm of technical support and how to avoid being roped into it against one's will. That's what the parent poster's comment about "when they come to you for help, say 'I don't know/support Macs'" amounts to, and rather plainly at that.
That makes my statement as on-topic as the post to which it was a response. The fact that it is generally true and therefore can also be applied to many otherwise unrelated things does not make it less on-topic for the sub-thread about reluctant tech support.
Post 33017392 is merely a recognition that its parent post was speaking in terms of strategy, the engineering of an outcome, manipulation, or however you care to phrase it. In that post I explain why that's not really a necessary or desirable approach. I disagree that this amounts to "turn[ing] this around into starting a thread" about some unrelated subject.
If anything, advocating a simple viewpoint that works for a multitude of situations as opposed to a custom strategy for a particular situation that won't work for others is like an instance of Occam's Razor.
It is possible some mods felt this entire sub-thread was bordering off-topic discourse, but parent less grievously so than the reply, or contained significant on-topic discourse.
Or it's possible that one post hit a little too close to home than the other, and therefore "offended" someone. If you know anything about the easily offended, you have observed that they generally want to silence, censor, demagogue, demonize, marginalize, or shout down whatever it is they dislike. That's easier for them than questioning why they have such a strong reaction to the harmless speech of another. Around here, a down-mod based on a flimsy excuse is the closest thing to getting their wish that is available.
I have no clue what you are talking about. You sound like you're wearing a tinfoil hat.
I gave three terms for a single concept for a reason. Try plugging them into Google. What you will find is a good understanding of statecraft. I'd say "of modern statecraft" except that these ideas are not new. To choose one example of many, the rulers of ancient Rome understood them in a less sophisitcated way that was known as "bread and circus".
If you refuse to research those terms and are currently unfamiliar with this subject, it's no mystery that you don't understand what I am talking about. That's a good recipe for not understanding any subject, after all.
Or if you believe it's the superior choice, you can worry about the material construction of my hat.
After all, this is the same SEC that couldn't catch Madoff or Stanford, even though there were people begging them to check those two out. Regulation is only as good as the regulator enforcing it.
I think you miss the point. They were supposed to turn a blind eye to it. Otherwise you'd waste an opportunity to implement Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis aka Problem, Reaction, Solution aka the Hegelian Dialectic. No one with any real power would have benefitted from preventing this. So they didn't act on any of the tips about Madoff or Stanford. From the point of view of the real "powers that be", these are good regulators, the very best that money can buy -- once someone buys them, or those who appoint them, they stay bought!
I don't usually reply to my own posts, but this should be called out.
All references to moderation scores are current at the time of this writing but may change, and should change.
A post talking about how to avoid being a reluctant tech-support guy is modded Informative. Another post (mine, the parent post) talking about another way to avoid being a reluctant tech-support guy is modded Offtopic.
You cannot have this both ways. Either both are off-topic because they are not directly related to iPhone users' satisfaction with AT&T, or, both are on-topic because they were a natural evolution arising from a discussion about iPhone users' satisfaction with AT&T. Otherwise we have an unresolved contradiction.
What will override a moderator's ability to see that this is a contradiction is not difficult to discern. What I said about having a spine embarasses the many people who don't have one and prefer to use subterfuge because they get their self-image and their sense of well-being from the subservient approval of others. They don't like having this pointed out.
It's natural that they'd prefer to mod me as off-topic (a form of dismissal without examination) and ignore the contradiction this creates rather than engage me in disputation and explain why they believe I am misguided, which they cannot genuinely do because I told the truth. They can get upset and call me names but it's likely they are smart enough to realize that this would only help to prove my point. So they mod me down.
I have been at the karma cap for a long, long time now. Mod me down if you like. In this instance, I'll know why you did it, and now you will too. Enjoy:-)
You did the switch wrong. If you aren't a Mac-fanboy you need to find the relative that is the one that gets fed up and tries a Mac and begins drinking the kool-aid. Then you need to let them evangelize Macs so your other relatives purchase them. Then when a computer eventually has a problem, HDD crashes, they delete something they didn't want to, who knows. When they come to you for help you just turn around and say, "I don't know/support Macs". At this point you are no longer the family tech support guy.
You really believe all of this plotting and planning is better than setting clear boundies concerning what is and is not a reasonable degree of assistance, making it understood that any help rendered is out of the kindness of your heart and not out of obligation, and that if anyone is dissatisfied with the quality or quantity of your free assistance then there are many for-pay options available? There's nothing rude about deciding not to allow people to walk all over you, so long as it's done matter-of-factly and not out of anger. If they hate you for that and withdraw their kindness or affection for this reason, then their kindness was always phony, a way to get you to do their bidding, you haven't really lost anything, and you are better off without such people.
It's called having a spine. Do that wrongly, with anger, and you'll just be an asshole. Do that correctly and it is genuinely respectable and others can see that anything you do for them is a free choice motivated by genuine kindness. By contrast, what you suggest is more like out-manipulating the manipulators who would try to make you take care of their problems not because service to others is a genuine joy, but because of false obligation where none really exists and to avoid the unspoken threat of some kind of retaliation from them. Why would you want to play their game and engage in these petty, catty politics when it isn't difficult to see what sort of person (knowingly or unwittingly) plays these games?
The funny thing is that when you see the truth of this, people generally won't try to manipulate you in the first place. It is as though understanding the dynamic places you above or outside of it. When you are afraid of losing the approval of anyone, to where you replace loving service with reluctant subservience, you actually tempt them to take advantage of that. That's how you end up being the guy who runs around putting out everyone else's fires, receiving little gratitude for doing so but hearing much complaint when not. This applies to many things, not just technical support.
in fact a big reason why successful malware "in the wild" is all but unheard-of on this platform?
Are you joking? The reason they call them 'rootkits' is because they get you root access.
I believe you are unfamiliar with what is meant by "in the wild" when used to describe malware. It generally refers to a self-propagating piece of malware, such as a worm or a virus, that can spread by infecting other hosts in a fully automated fashion. Blaster and Code Red for Windows are examples of successful malware that was in the wild. That is not what a rootkit does.
Linux has proof-of-concept viruses and worms. Linux generally does not have viruses and worms that are actually infecting computers and continuing to spread themselves. To begin to explain why would require a very long post, but suffice to say that Linux as a platform has not been a successful breeding ground for self-propogating malware.
On Linux, a rootkit is something a human (i.e. non-automated) attacker uses after making a targeted attack against a specific system and successfully compromising it. In common parlance, the definition has been expanded a bit to include the exploit code actually used to gain root, but this is not the original definition of "rootkit".
Everything that follows is the original definition of "rootkit":
A rootkit will replace various system utilities (the "ps" command being a good example) with malicious copies. The replaced utilities will work in concert to hide the presence of the attacker. For example, a sysadmin might normally be able to use standard system tools to notice that a particular user is running an unauthorized server, or is using a high amount of CPU time, or that a root-owned process he's never seen before is now running. With a rootkit installed, the sysadmin can check for these telltale signs and find nothing because the malicious versions of system utilities will not report certain information to him.
But if you want to replace system utilities (which are executables owned by root and writable only by root) with malicious versions, you first have to be the root user. Once you have root, a rootkit can help you to avoid discovery and thus maintain control of the compromised system. That's all they are for.
Windows can have rootkits too. In fact I think the consolidation of various exploit code, rootkits, worms, etc. for the Windows platform into single packages used by script kiddies is a big reason why "rootkit" has departed from its more specific original definition. It's a bit like the way the line has been blurred between a virus and a worm.
I was careful to specify a "corporeal" being who levitates in Earth's atmosphere. Don't let that halt your condemnation though. I've read the Bible and it quite plainly teaches that God is spirit, is omnipresent, and has other qualities not compatible with having a corporeal (and thus physical/material) existence. The Bible argues for a transcendental God, one who exists beyond creation.
The idea of an old man with a long beard who sits up in the clouds someplace might be a way to simplify the concept for a small child. It is not serious theology.
Also, I'm very much aware of Catholic belief. I also know what the letters on the cookie taken during Communion actually represent and where they came from (hint: ancient Egypt). Also, since you feel free to assume since it helps you to get on your high horse, when I say "our ancestors" I am referring to the USA's Founding Fathers. They were manifestly not Catholic. Many Protestents wouldn't like their beliefs either, as they tended towards Deist philosophy. You could have asked me what I meant by that ("whose ancestors?") but that would be the sort of calm dispassionate discourse that wouldn't help your rant now would it?
I'll show how fundamentally absurd your little rant there is. You said that one man, Jerry Falwell, talked about the establishment of the Kingdom of God after Armageddon as "moving his headquarters from planet Heaven to planet Earth". Right there you admit that per your reference, Falwell, God is not currently occupying planet Earth, unless of course you are prepared to argue that Falwell viewed Armageddon as a past event and not a future event, which is manifestly false. Like most Baptists, and most Christians for that matter, he believed that the book of Revelation is a book of prophecy concerning future events.
I'll parody your closing line: so please, before you reply to my post, inform yourself as to what my post does and does not say. That way you won't embarass yourself quite so much with the way getting on your high horse can override your basic reading comprehension abilities.
Like I said, I know of no serious Christian who seriously believes that God is an old man in Earth's skies. If Christians did go around claiming that, a few satellite photos would destroy their entire religion. Really now, I can't believe you think this is a point of debate. Why not just come out and say "they believe in a religion in which I do not believe, therefore they're all idiots"?
Maybe you like to belittle religious people and use the "man in the clouds" routine in order to do so. I have heard many an atheist use such terms in order to trivialize monotheistic religions. It's a shame that some people (not all people and not all atheists either) would rather not study and understand a thing before deciding whether to be for or against it. At any rate, perhaps you have such venom towards me for not helping you belittle religious people.
Whatever your problem is, this is not quality debate. Whatever your beliefs are, if they are derived from degrading others then they are quite sad no matter how correct. The truth is that I have thoroughly studied most major religions and several rather obscure ones. Still, it doesn't matter much to me if you would like to judge me as knowing little about this one.
Read this part well: You clearly make this judgment of me based on the flimsiest of evidence merely because I said one thing ("juvenile") that obviously stuck in your craw. Guess what that is? That's right, it's a juvenile thing to do, for it allows emotion to override reason, just like you'd expect from a child or an angry little man who never really grew up. Want to hate me now? Go for it, but I warn you, you harm yourself by so doing.
It's a shame that so many are in the business of impressing others, so they kow-tow to this kind of personal attack and try to win back your good graces. I won't. Accuse me of ignorance, stupidity, call me names, do anything you like. What I will do is much simpler and imposes no burden on me: I'll see that you're out of order and say "hmm, that's too bad, we could have had good conversation".
First, UAVs have got WAYYYYYYY more uses than spying on people. Unmanned utility wire monitoring, atmospheric replacements for satellites, land surveys, search and rescue, etc. etc. etc. Spying is just a little teeny tiny subset of the things you can do with a UAV (for instance, we're using predator drones over the gulf right now to monitor the oil spill...we're doing this because they drones can stay in the air for a very long time).
Second, you're advocating a device that would indiscriminately destroy electronic equipment with a range long enough that it could take out a airplane. Are you fucking insane? People with pacemakers, or artificial hearts...just kill them?
Destroy everybody within 200 yards' telephone, laptop, pager, e-reader, etc. because you're paranoid that some scary OMG GUBBMINT guy is watching you buy a donut?
Stay classy, slashdot.
You don't handle tongue-in-cheek sarcasm very well, do you?
"One would wonder how the hell our ancestors managed to survive without living in a surveillance society. "
They believed that some old man in the sky was watching them all the time.
That's a rather juvenile way to put it as I don't know any serious Christian who honestly believes the transcendental God of the Bible is a corporeal being who levitates in Earth's atmosphere.... but okay. They believed "that some old man in the sky was watching them all the time." They did not believe that some old man in the sky was coming up with clever ways for them to watch their neighbors all the time. That's the difference.
The MIT engineers' answer is to send their 30-centimetre-wide micro air vehicle (MAV) into a controlled stall, pointing its nose up at just the right point in its trajectory to collide with and hook onto the cable.
Once it hooks the cable, it is a passive system. Check the video...it hasn't been/.ed (yet.)
This is all very interesting but... do we really need another way to spy on people? One would wonder how the hell our ancestors managed to survive without living in a surveillance society.
<hypothetical>It's getting to the point that there may be a market for portable personal EMP devices when battery or supercapacitor technology advances enough. Just fire an EMP burst every so often and take out any such devices that may be near you, assuring your privacy that shouldn't have been threatened in the first place. If that harms cell phones or the computers controlling car engines and such, just do what the government does and call it "collateral damage" in the "war for privacy". You'd be putting it in terms that they understand.</hypothetical>
You're either a kick-ass troll, or you've got some serious inferiority-complex issues. (So do I, from time to time, so I understand and won't hold it against you.) [Or just bitter and angry about reality, something a lot of us here will understand with the current conditions in our world.]
So treating others as equals and believeing I am neither better nor worse than them as a human being, though believing that some ideas are far superior to other ideas, means I have an inferiority complex? Or I have to be angry and bitter to see things this way? I reject all of the above since you have carefully crafted them to be a no-win for me. New option: I have a rather healthy perspective and accusations by you of arrogance, trolling, psychological disorders, and bitterness are an attempt to belittle what you cannot understand.
Here's the part you are having a hard time with: I can see plainly what is wrong with something, even use strong language to call it out, without getting upset by it. I also can't be concerned with whom it offends or what they might accuse me of or how they might try to belittle me because I didn't fit their preconceptions.
The point I was trying to make was from a slightly different point of view looking at the evidence that they already knew of the vulnerability, but had taken reasonable steps to mitigate the risk with the signed driver requirement. Can a certificate trust system ever be fully trusted? No, it's only as strong as it's weakest link.
What's the point in fixating on the signed driver system when the.lnk vulnerability can be used to install backdoors, botnets, and any other form of malware that doesn't involve a device driver?
If you want to really impress me, then come up with a better (real world) solution than the signed requirement solution, and doesn't involve just disabling autorun functionality.
Impressing you is a silly ego-level game I don't care to play. That would amount to shaping my actions and speech according to winning your approval, as though you were some kind of king. I bet you'd like that, but I'm not going to give you that.
At any rate, you can have the most perfect signed-driver requirement in the world with totally unbroken trust and it still wouldn't protect you from all the other ways to abuse the.lnk vulnerability. Please give up this red herring.
As far as Linux/Windows - I was a Systems Engineer/Systems Architect/Network Architect/Break/Fix technician supporting both Windows and Linux production servers for some big-ass companies over ten years ago. I've compiled my own kernel many times. So I'll take you on in either arena.
You cannot humiliate me because I won't be humiliated no matter how hard you try. If you try that, I'll just see that you want to get your jollies in an unhealthy way, that trying to lower others is the only elevation you know.
What you can do is correct me, and I can make constructive use of that no matter what you intended. Though, it really is a shame if you are now going to waste time out of your mortal life chasing my posting history just to further some petty pissing contest that exists only in your mind. If I were really the arrogant, pathological, bitter person you describe me as, then I shouldn't be worth that much effort. Whether you recognize that contradiction is up to you.
Those expectations may have been ignorant, but you don't sign up for facebook -after- investigating their privacy policy, that's just not how normal people work.
Then those "normal people" experience needless and preventable suffering anytime they get outraged about a privacy policy that they could have investigated before jumping on board. I therefore do not see them as victims.
Note, that still does not excuse Facebook's conduct. I'd rather live in a world where companies universally fear behaving this way because they know it will lead to widespread boycotts capable of putting them out of business. But you're never going to get that as long as "grab your ankles" is the average user's way of dealing with things.
Yes, it actually says several things. Your contempt for the site and its users is quite obvious, and understandable enough.
I have no contempt for them or other form of spite towards them. I don't care to waste my energy and reduce my quality of life by getting irritated at a thing just because I can see what's wrong with it. That would amount to allowing externals to control how I feel and that would be unacceptable. Like Richard S. Bach once said, "if your happiness depends on what other people do, then I guess you do have a problem."
I am merely saying that a business which fails to satisfy its users does not deserve to remain in business. That's all.
Anything else you state falls under what I really meant by "for those who are perceptive....". Obviously there are reasons they continue to use a site with which they are dissatisfied. Those reasons are not difficult to discern.
I personally have no need for social networking sites, as I view communicating with people I care about as something too important for me to entrust to the likes of Facebook or MySpace. Even so, that's my personal needs. In general non-personal terms, I am not even arguing against the existence of the social networking site as a concept. I am arguing against the way they have thus far been implemented. There is simply no excuse for shoddy quality, nor for playing word games with ToS and such to justify publishing data when an agreement existed that it would remain private.
I also see what is wrong with a company about which one can say "if they enjoy revenue, it's not because they are good and offer compelling reasons to use their services, it's only because everyone else is so much worse." That just lowers the bar for everyone. It exists because so many people put up with it. If the users decided that they would do without social networking before they'd put up with this arrangement, it would not be the end of all social networking sites. It would reform them for the better because going out of business would be their other option.
I never said anything about EULAs. I merely state that if information is online, only a fool thinks it is safe.
You can put stuff on facebook and hope it doesn't get misused because they have good privacy in place, or you can NOT put stuff on facebook, which will never be compromised.
I choose to put stuff on facebook, because they do a 'good enough' job for my privacy tolerance levels. People who bitch about it are free to not use it.
The EULA or "terms of use" are what allows them to change their privacy policies, even concerning data submitted under previous agreements, at any time they want. They contain clauses specifically allowing this, which is a CYA measure so that users have no real recourse when they get stung by such a practice.
You are right though, in the modern consumerist society, satisfaction is easily found at the touch of a button or injection of a drug.
That's a lie. If it weren't a lie, then the rates of things like depression, alcoholism, and suicide would steadily decrease as we become more and more of a consumerist society. What is actually happening is exactly the reverse. What can be found at the touch of a button is not satisfaction but mere indulgence. Indulgence is a way of denying that there is a problem, that you're really OK just the way you are, that there's nothing wrong with the way you look at life, that you're not missing something basic and fundamental in all the hustle and bustle and reaching after external things to complete yourself, and that you can feel good without really improving your character and your understanding and your status as a human being. It's a lie.
The first noble truth of Buddhism, sometimes translated: "Life is filled with a deep sense of unsatisfaction."
I do wish religious groups would stop projecting their own failings on all of humanity (even though I admit that's a common psychological defense mechanism). I am quite satisfied with my life thankyouverymuch. I'm not entirely happy but that's a small price to pay for satisfaction and I imagine there's lots of people like that in the world.
If you are happy it's because you have found a way to live that overcomes the suffering and dissatisfaction that one often experiences in life. I've never heard of a Buddhist who argues that happiness is not possible or that suffering can never be overcome. In fact they put a great deal of effort into understanding suffering for the purpose of transcending it.
I don't believe this qualifies as projecting failures onto all of humanity. That sounds like a categorical judgment of an entire belief system based on a one-liner appearing in Slashdot. If you want to evaluate Buddhism, your best resource are the Buddhists themselves and their actual teachings.
No, he's saying you're perfectly free to move along if you don't like it. Who the hell forces you to use facespace?
Actually the above is why I don't personally use it, but we were not talking about me personally until you attempted to make that the focus of this conversation. I can easily show why that's silly and useless and probably an attempt to distract.
The fact that I don't personally use it does not make it alright for Facebook to poorly treat those who do use it. It's really that simple. I never claimed that anyone is forced to use Facebook. Nothing I have said depends on anyone being forced to use Facebook. Can you quote me as having said that? No? So what point did you think you were making, exactly? Did you imagine that some trivial statement of the obvious is a staggering objection that destroys every point I have made?
There is no excuse for a corporation making promises it refuses to keep. Saying that something will be private and then publishing that information is simply dishonest. The fact that I don't personally use Facebook doesn't make this ok. What kind of ethics/morality do you have there? "It didn't happen to me, therefore there is nothing wrong with it?" Would you like to abandon this reasoning of yours, or will you contend with me by defending it? If you choose not to respond I will assume you wish to abandon this faulty reasoning.
If you read my other posts in this discussion, I do indeed think there is something wrong with people who really don't like a service but continue to use it anyway. I think their vanity gets the best of their judgment which is why they tolerate it. That part is the users' responsibility. I also think there is something wrong with a corporation that is dishonest with its users, breaks promises, and treats them poorly as evidenced by low satisfaction rates. That part is the corporation's responsibility. These are not mutually exclusive.
If they are unsatisfied and stop using the service (which they will when the next big-splash social site opens), Facebook finds itself with less and less value to offer their customers.
If those users had any backbone then they'd do without a non-critical service before they'd use one that they don't like. And no, a vanity page is not a critical service that one could never live without. Because they have no such backbone, Facebook can collect revenue even when it does a terrible job.
For something that's free, people sure do get enraged when it changes in the slightest, or has bugs, or decides to try to profit from the information that people love to dump on it.
It's an equal exchange. Facebook as a corporation would go out of business in a hurry if not for its users. The users are doing their part. Facebook is failing to do theirs in a way that satisfies the very users who make its existence possible. It's perfectly legitimate to raise an objection about this.
You're essentially saying "shut up and take what you're given" as though Facebook were a charity. They absolutely are not, and it's intellectually dishonest to speak about them as though they were.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll take that to mean you refuse to research Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.
That's an excuse for your own laziness. It wouldn't be laziness except that you insist on passing judgment on this subject. That's what adds the requirement that you know something about it, a requirement you have consistently failed.
That's the judgment.
By "they" I refer to well-documented rulers throughout history. Documentation available for you to read if you are so inclined.
Suggesting that people tend to act in their own interests and that people with political power are no exception is conspiratorial? Suggesting that statecraft is like any other craft, where the state of the art is advanced through the progress made by one's predecessors is conspiratorial? Okay.
You seem unwilling to reason with me so "okay" is my only answer. Believe what you will. I gave you a chance to see this a different way. That's the closest thing to duty or responsibility that I have here. What you do with that is not my concern. It's a shame that you are so full of yourself, for you are otherwise rather clever. That's the difference between cleverness and wisdom. I'm sure you'll have some kind of rebuttal to that, so I say do your worst.
Did you notice the story is about targeted attacks? OS doesn't have much to do with those. In fact since these are companies internal networks and servers and not workstations, I suspect they actually run some UNIX variant.
On that one you are absolutely correct and it is good that someone pointed this out. What Unix and Unix-like systems and their users tend to be highly resistant to are the automated attacks to which Windows systems and users are often vulnerable. These include trojans, self-propogating worms and viruses, and items of that nature. In the case of an automated attack, one system (the malware) is being pitted against another system (Windows, Unix, etc). Unix and Unix-like systems and their users generally do not experience automated viruses infecting machines in the wild today. After the Morris worm they tend to have learned not to repeat the mistakes that make such things feasible.
However, a targeted attack conducted by a determined adversary is an entirely different scenario. This is not one system pitted against another system. This is an attacker using any system pitted against a defender using any system. In that sense it's more like a game of chess. There is a very real chance of the attacker prevailing. In some ways, the deck is stacked against the defender because the defender must correctly deal with all practical methods of compromise while the attacker only needs to find the one thing that was overlooked. That might be a technical attack or it might be a low-tech social engineering attack, or both.
For automated attacks you only need to be secure enough to raise the bar beyond the capabilities that can be expected from a scripted program. Since we do not have true artificial intelligence, this is feasible. For a knowledgable and truly determined adversary, what you really want is perfect security but this is not possible. The best you can do is to be so difficult to compromise that the cost of doing so is higher than anything the attacker would gain from succeeding. Even then there may be a personal vendetta that makes the attacker irrationally persist at any cost. It's an entirely different threat model.
Or if you believe it's the superior choice, you can worry about the material construction of my hat.
I love it when you give me choices! I'll guess that your hat is made of a paper/nylon blend, and looks something like this. And I must say, excellent choice. I like the brim.
That's an amusing and somewhat skillful way to save face after admitting you don't know what someone is talking about and accusing them of paranoia based on a subject you admit you know nothing about. It made me chuckle, anyway.
That makes my statement as on-topic as the post to which it was a response. The fact that it is generally true and therefore can also be applied to many otherwise unrelated things does not make it less on-topic for the sub-thread about reluctant tech support.
Post 33017392 is merely a recognition that its parent post was speaking in terms of strategy, the engineering of an outcome, manipulation, or however you care to phrase it. In that post I explain why that's not really a necessary or desirable approach. I disagree that this amounts to "turn[ing] this around into starting a thread" about some unrelated subject.
If anything, advocating a simple viewpoint that works for a multitude of situations as opposed to a custom strategy for a particular situation that won't work for others is like an instance of Occam's Razor.
Or it's possible that one post hit a little too close to home than the other, and therefore "offended" someone. If you know anything about the easily offended, you have observed that they generally want to silence, censor, demagogue, demonize, marginalize, or shout down whatever it is they dislike. That's easier for them than questioning why they have such a strong reaction to the harmless speech of another. Around here, a down-mod based on a flimsy excuse is the closest thing to getting their wish that is available.
I have no clue what you are talking about. You sound like you're wearing a tinfoil hat.
I gave three terms for a single concept for a reason. Try plugging them into Google. What you will find is a good understanding of statecraft. I'd say "of modern statecraft" except that these ideas are not new. To choose one example of many, the rulers of ancient Rome understood them in a less sophisitcated way that was known as "bread and circus".
If you refuse to research those terms and are currently unfamiliar with this subject, it's no mystery that you don't understand what I am talking about. That's a good recipe for not understanding any subject, after all.
Or if you believe it's the superior choice, you can worry about the material construction of my hat.
After all, this is the same SEC that couldn't catch Madoff or Stanford, even though there were people begging them to check those two out. Regulation is only as good as the regulator enforcing it.
I think you miss the point. They were supposed to turn a blind eye to it. Otherwise you'd waste an opportunity to implement Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis aka Problem, Reaction, Solution aka the Hegelian Dialectic. No one with any real power would have benefitted from preventing this. So they didn't act on any of the tips about Madoff or Stanford. From the point of view of the real "powers that be", these are good regulators, the very best that money can buy -- once someone buys them, or those who appoint them, they stay bought!
I don't usually reply to my own posts, but this should be called out.
:-)
All references to moderation scores are current at the time of this writing but may change, and should change.
A post talking about how to avoid being a reluctant tech-support guy is modded Informative. Another post (mine, the parent post) talking about another way to avoid being a reluctant tech-support guy is modded Offtopic.
You cannot have this both ways. Either both are off-topic because they are not directly related to iPhone users' satisfaction with AT&T, or, both are on-topic because they were a natural evolution arising from a discussion about iPhone users' satisfaction with AT&T. Otherwise we have an unresolved contradiction.
What will override a moderator's ability to see that this is a contradiction is not difficult to discern. What I said about having a spine embarasses the many people who don't have one and prefer to use subterfuge because they get their self-image and their sense of well-being from the subservient approval of others. They don't like having this pointed out.
It's natural that they'd prefer to mod me as off-topic (a form of dismissal without examination) and ignore the contradiction this creates rather than engage me in disputation and explain why they believe I am misguided, which they cannot genuinely do because I told the truth. They can get upset and call me names but it's likely they are smart enough to realize that this would only help to prove my point. So they mod me down.
I have been at the karma cap for a long, long time now. Mod me down if you like. In this instance, I'll know why you did it, and now you will too. Enjoy
You did the switch wrong. If you aren't a Mac-fanboy you need to find the relative that is the one that gets fed up and tries a Mac and begins drinking the kool-aid. Then you need to let them evangelize Macs so your other relatives purchase them. Then when a computer eventually has a problem, HDD crashes, they delete something they didn't want to, who knows. When they come to you for help you just turn around and say, "I don't know/support Macs". At this point you are no longer the family tech support guy.
You really believe all of this plotting and planning is better than setting clear boundies concerning what is and is not a reasonable degree of assistance, making it understood that any help rendered is out of the kindness of your heart and not out of obligation, and that if anyone is dissatisfied with the quality or quantity of your free assistance then there are many for-pay options available? There's nothing rude about deciding not to allow people to walk all over you, so long as it's done matter-of-factly and not out of anger. If they hate you for that and withdraw their kindness or affection for this reason, then their kindness was always phony, a way to get you to do their bidding, you haven't really lost anything, and you are better off without such people.
It's called having a spine. Do that wrongly, with anger, and you'll just be an asshole. Do that correctly and it is genuinely respectable and others can see that anything you do for them is a free choice motivated by genuine kindness. By contrast, what you suggest is more like out-manipulating the manipulators who would try to make you take care of their problems not because service to others is a genuine joy, but because of false obligation where none really exists and to avoid the unspoken threat of some kind of retaliation from them. Why would you want to play their game and engage in these petty, catty politics when it isn't difficult to see what sort of person (knowingly or unwittingly) plays these games?
The funny thing is that when you see the truth of this, people generally won't try to manipulate you in the first place. It is as though understanding the dynamic places you above or outside of it. When you are afraid of losing the approval of anyone, to where you replace loving service with reluctant subservience, you actually tempt them to take advantage of that. That's how you end up being the guy who runs around putting out everyone else's fires, receiving little gratitude for doing so but hearing much complaint when not. This applies to many things, not just technical support.
in fact a big reason why successful malware "in the wild" is all but unheard-of on this platform?
Are you joking? The reason they call them 'rootkits' is because they get you root access.
I believe you are unfamiliar with what is meant by "in the wild" when used to describe malware. It generally refers to a self-propagating piece of malware, such as a worm or a virus, that can spread by infecting other hosts in a fully automated fashion. Blaster and Code Red for Windows are examples of successful malware that was in the wild. That is not what a rootkit does.
Linux has proof-of-concept viruses and worms. Linux generally does not have viruses and worms that are actually infecting computers and continuing to spread themselves. To begin to explain why would require a very long post, but suffice to say that Linux as a platform has not been a successful breeding ground for self-propogating malware.
On Linux, a rootkit is something a human (i.e. non-automated) attacker uses after making a targeted attack against a specific system and successfully compromising it. In common parlance, the definition has been expanded a bit to include the exploit code actually used to gain root, but this is not the original definition of "rootkit".
Everything that follows is the original definition of "rootkit":
A rootkit will replace various system utilities (the "ps" command being a good example) with malicious copies. The replaced utilities will work in concert to hide the presence of the attacker. For example, a sysadmin might normally be able to use standard system tools to notice that a particular user is running an unauthorized server, or is using a high amount of CPU time, or that a root-owned process he's never seen before is now running. With a rootkit installed, the sysadmin can check for these telltale signs and find nothing because the malicious versions of system utilities will not report certain information to him.
But if you want to replace system utilities (which are executables owned by root and writable only by root) with malicious versions, you first have to be the root user. Once you have root, a rootkit can help you to avoid discovery and thus maintain control of the compromised system. That's all they are for.
Windows can have rootkits too. In fact I think the consolidation of various exploit code, rootkits, worms, etc. for the Windows platform into single packages used by script kiddies is a big reason why "rootkit" has departed from its more specific original definition. It's a bit like the way the line has been blurred between a virus and a worm.
I was careful to specify a "corporeal" being who levitates in Earth's atmosphere. Don't let that halt your condemnation though. I've read the Bible and it quite plainly teaches that God is spirit, is omnipresent, and has other qualities not compatible with having a corporeal (and thus physical/material) existence. The Bible argues for a transcendental God, one who exists beyond creation.
The idea of an old man with a long beard who sits up in the clouds someplace might be a way to simplify the concept for a small child. It is not serious theology.
Also, I'm very much aware of Catholic belief. I also know what the letters on the cookie taken during Communion actually represent and where they came from (hint: ancient Egypt). Also, since you feel free to assume since it helps you to get on your high horse, when I say "our ancestors" I am referring to the USA's Founding Fathers. They were manifestly not Catholic. Many Protestents wouldn't like their beliefs either, as they tended towards Deist philosophy. You could have asked me what I meant by that ("whose ancestors?") but that would be the sort of calm dispassionate discourse that wouldn't help your rant now would it?
I'll show how fundamentally absurd your little rant there is. You said that one man, Jerry Falwell, talked about the establishment of the Kingdom of God after Armageddon as "moving his headquarters from planet Heaven to planet Earth". Right there you admit that per your reference, Falwell, God is not currently occupying planet Earth, unless of course you are prepared to argue that Falwell viewed Armageddon as a past event and not a future event, which is manifestly false. Like most Baptists, and most Christians for that matter, he believed that the book of Revelation is a book of prophecy concerning future events.
I'll parody your closing line: so please, before you reply to my post, inform yourself as to what my post does and does not say. That way you won't embarass yourself quite so much with the way getting on your high horse can override your basic reading comprehension abilities.
Like I said, I know of no serious Christian who seriously believes that God is an old man in Earth's skies. If Christians did go around claiming that, a few satellite photos would destroy their entire religion. Really now, I can't believe you think this is a point of debate. Why not just come out and say "they believe in a religion in which I do not believe, therefore they're all idiots"?
Maybe you like to belittle religious people and use the "man in the clouds" routine in order to do so. I have heard many an atheist use such terms in order to trivialize monotheistic religions. It's a shame that some people (not all people and not all atheists either) would rather not study and understand a thing before deciding whether to be for or against it. At any rate, perhaps you have such venom towards me for not helping you belittle religious people.
Whatever your problem is, this is not quality debate. Whatever your beliefs are, if they are derived from degrading others then they are quite sad no matter how correct. The truth is that I have thoroughly studied most major religions and several rather obscure ones. Still, it doesn't matter much to me if you would like to judge me as knowing little about this one.
Read this part well: You clearly make this judgment of me based on the flimsiest of evidence merely because I said one thing ("juvenile") that obviously stuck in your craw. Guess what that is? That's right, it's a juvenile thing to do, for it allows emotion to override reason, just like you'd expect from a child or an angry little man who never really grew up. Want to hate me now? Go for it, but I warn you, you harm yourself by so doing.
It's a shame that so many are in the business of impressing others, so they kow-tow to this kind of personal attack and try to win back your good graces. I won't. Accuse me of ignorance, stupidity, call me names, do anything you like. What I will do is much simpler and imposes no burden on me: I'll see that you're out of order and say "hmm, that's too bad, we could have had good conversation".
Are you off of your meds or something?
First, UAVs have got WAYYYYYYY more uses than spying on people. Unmanned utility wire monitoring, atmospheric replacements for satellites, land surveys, search and rescue, etc. etc. etc. Spying is just a little teeny tiny subset of the things you can do with a UAV (for instance, we're using predator drones over the gulf right now to monitor the oil spill...we're doing this because they drones can stay in the air for a very long time).
Second, you're advocating a device that would indiscriminately destroy electronic equipment with a range long enough that it could take out a airplane. Are you fucking insane? People with pacemakers, or artificial hearts...just kill them?
Destroy everybody within 200 yards' telephone, laptop, pager, e-reader, etc. because you're paranoid that some scary OMG GUBBMINT guy is watching you buy a donut?
Stay classy, slashdot.
You don't handle tongue-in-cheek sarcasm very well, do you?
"One would wonder how the hell our ancestors managed to survive without living in a surveillance society. "
They believed that some old man in the sky was watching them all the time.
That's a rather juvenile way to put it as I don't know any serious Christian who honestly believes the transcendental God of the Bible is a corporeal being who levitates in Earth's atmosphere.... but okay. They believed "that some old man in the sky was watching them all the time." They did not believe that some old man in the sky was coming up with clever ways for them to watch their neighbors all the time. That's the difference.
The 'perch' is actually quite bat-like. FTA:
The MIT engineers' answer is to send their 30-centimetre-wide micro air vehicle (MAV) into a controlled stall, pointing its nose up at just the right point in its trajectory to collide with and hook onto the cable.
Once it hooks the cable, it is a passive system. Check the video...it hasn't been /.ed (yet.)
This is all very interesting but ... do we really need another way to spy on people? One would wonder how the hell our ancestors managed to survive without living in a surveillance society.
<hypothetical>It's getting to the point that there may be a market for portable personal EMP devices when battery or supercapacitor technology advances enough. Just fire an EMP burst every so often and take out any such devices that may be near you, assuring your privacy that shouldn't have been threatened in the first place. If that harms cell phones or the computers controlling car engines and such, just do what the government does and call it "collateral damage" in the "war for privacy". You'd be putting it in terms that they understand.</hypothetical>
Obviously there are reasons they continue to use a site with which they say they are dissatisfied.
If one is going to say they are lying about that, the burden of proof will be on the person making that claim.
So treating others as equals and believeing I am neither better nor worse than them as a human being, though believing that some ideas are far superior to other ideas, means I have an inferiority complex? Or I have to be angry and bitter to see things this way? I reject all of the above since you have carefully crafted them to be a no-win for me. New option: I have a rather healthy perspective and accusations by you of arrogance, trolling, psychological disorders, and bitterness are an attempt to belittle what you cannot understand.
Here's the part you are having a hard time with: I can see plainly what is wrong with something, even use strong language to call it out, without getting upset by it. I also can't be concerned with whom it offends or what they might accuse me of or how they might try to belittle me because I didn't fit their preconceptions.
What's the point in fixating on the signed driver system when the .lnk vulnerability can be used to install backdoors, botnets, and any other form of malware that doesn't involve a device driver?
Impressing you is a silly ego-level game I don't care to play. That would amount to shaping my actions and speech according to winning your approval, as though you were some kind of king. I bet you'd like that, but I'm not going to give you that.
.lnk vulnerability. Please give up this red herring.
At any rate, you can have the most perfect signed-driver requirement in the world with totally unbroken trust and it still wouldn't protect you from all the other ways to abuse the
You cannot humiliate me because I won't be humiliated no matter how hard you try. If you try that, I'll just see that you want to get your jollies in an unhealthy way, that trying to lower others is the only elevation you know.
What you can do is correct me, and I can make constructive use of that no matter what you intended. Though, it really is a shame if you are now going to waste time out of your mortal life chasing my posting history just to further some petty pissing contest that exists only in your mind. If I were really the arrogant, pathological, bitter person you describe me as, then I shouldn't be worth that much effort. Whether you recognize that contradiction is up to you.
Then those "normal people" experience needless and preventable suffering anytime they get outraged about a privacy policy that they could have investigated before jumping on board. I therefore do not see them as victims.
Note, that still does not excuse Facebook's conduct. I'd rather live in a world where companies universally fear behaving this way because they know it will lead to widespread boycotts capable of putting them out of business. But you're never going to get that as long as "grab your ankles" is the average user's way of dealing with things.
I have no contempt for them or other form of spite towards them. I don't care to waste my energy and reduce my quality of life by getting irritated at a thing just because I can see what's wrong with it. That would amount to allowing externals to control how I feel and that would be unacceptable. Like Richard S. Bach once said, "if your happiness depends on what other people do, then I guess you do have a problem."
....". Obviously there are reasons they continue to use a site with which they are dissatisfied. Those reasons are not difficult to discern.
I am merely saying that a business which fails to satisfy its users does not deserve to remain in business. That's all.
Anything else you state falls under what I really meant by "for those who are perceptive
I personally have no need for social networking sites, as I view communicating with people I care about as something too important for me to entrust to the likes of Facebook or MySpace. Even so, that's my personal needs. In general non-personal terms, I am not even arguing against the existence of the social networking site as a concept. I am arguing against the way they have thus far been implemented. There is simply no excuse for shoddy quality, nor for playing word games with ToS and such to justify publishing data when an agreement existed that it would remain private.
I also see what is wrong with a company about which one can say "if they enjoy revenue, it's not because they are good and offer compelling reasons to use their services, it's only because everyone else is so much worse." That just lowers the bar for everyone. It exists because so many people put up with it. If the users decided that they would do without social networking before they'd put up with this arrangement, it would not be the end of all social networking sites. It would reform them for the better because going out of business would be their other option.
I never said anything about EULAs. I merely state that if information is online, only a fool thinks it is safe.
You can put stuff on facebook and hope it doesn't get misused because they have good privacy in place, or you can NOT put stuff on facebook, which will never be compromised.
I choose to put stuff on facebook, because they do a 'good enough' job for my privacy tolerance levels. People who bitch about it are free to not use it.
The EULA or "terms of use" are what allows them to change their privacy policies, even concerning data submitted under previous agreements, at any time they want. They contain clauses specifically allowing this, which is a CYA measure so that users have no real recourse when they get stung by such a practice.
Of course perfect security is impossible. Having said that... if not for the promise-breaking, it would be reasonably secure.
That's a lie. If it weren't a lie, then the rates of things like depression, alcoholism, and suicide would steadily decrease as we become more and more of a consumerist society. What is actually happening is exactly the reverse. What can be found at the touch of a button is not satisfaction but mere indulgence. Indulgence is a way of denying that there is a problem, that you're really OK just the way you are, that there's nothing wrong with the way you look at life, that you're not missing something basic and fundamental in all the hustle and bustle and reaching after external things to complete yourself, and that you can feel good without really improving your character and your understanding and your status as a human being. It's a lie.
The first noble truth of Buddhism, sometimes translated: "Life is filled with a deep sense of unsatisfaction."
I do wish religious groups would stop projecting their own failings on all of humanity (even though I admit that's a common psychological defense mechanism). I am quite satisfied with my life thankyouverymuch. I'm not entirely happy but that's a small price to pay for satisfaction and I imagine there's lots of people like that in the world.
If you are happy it's because you have found a way to live that overcomes the suffering and dissatisfaction that one often experiences in life. I've never heard of a Buddhist who argues that happiness is not possible or that suffering can never be overcome. In fact they put a great deal of effort into understanding suffering for the purpose of transcending it.
I don't believe this qualifies as projecting failures onto all of humanity. That sounds like a categorical judgment of an entire belief system based on a one-liner appearing in Slashdot. If you want to evaluate Buddhism, your best resource are the Buddhists themselves and their actual teachings.
No, he's saying you're perfectly free to move along if you don't like it. Who the hell forces you to use facespace?
Actually the above is why I don't personally use it, but we were not talking about me personally until you attempted to make that the focus of this conversation. I can easily show why that's silly and useless and probably an attempt to distract.
The fact that I don't personally use it does not make it alright for Facebook to poorly treat those who do use it. It's really that simple. I never claimed that anyone is forced to use Facebook. Nothing I have said depends on anyone being forced to use Facebook. Can you quote me as having said that? No? So what point did you think you were making, exactly? Did you imagine that some trivial statement of the obvious is a staggering objection that destroys every point I have made?
There is no excuse for a corporation making promises it refuses to keep. Saying that something will be private and then publishing that information is simply dishonest. The fact that I don't personally use Facebook doesn't make this ok. What kind of ethics/morality do you have there? "It didn't happen to me, therefore there is nothing wrong with it?" Would you like to abandon this reasoning of yours, or will you contend with me by defending it? If you choose not to respond I will assume you wish to abandon this faulty reasoning.
If you read my other posts in this discussion, I do indeed think there is something wrong with people who really don't like a service but continue to use it anyway. I think their vanity gets the best of their judgment which is why they tolerate it. That part is the users' responsibility. I also think there is something wrong with a corporation that is dishonest with its users, breaks promises, and treats them poorly as evidenced by low satisfaction rates. That part is the corporation's responsibility. These are not mutually exclusive.
If those users had any backbone then they'd do without a non-critical service before they'd use one that they don't like. And no, a vanity page is not a critical service that one could never live without. Because they have no such backbone, Facebook can collect revenue even when it does a terrible job.
For something that's free, people sure do get enraged when it changes in the slightest, or has bugs, or decides to try to profit from the information that people love to dump on it.
It's an equal exchange. Facebook as a corporation would go out of business in a hurry if not for its users. The users are doing their part. Facebook is failing to do theirs in a way that satisfies the very users who make its existence possible. It's perfectly legitimate to raise an objection about this.
You're essentially saying "shut up and take what you're given" as though Facebook were a charity. They absolutely are not, and it's intellectually dishonest to speak about them as though they were.