claiming his service didn't work as promised and he knew it wouldn't, because the service had failed even him.
Isn't the fact that he got his identity stolen due to use of the system more or less hard proof that he didn't know it wouldn't work?
Not necessarily. He might done a cost/benefit analysis and determined that the publicity stunt would make him more money through his business than he would lose through identity theft.
"Getting excessive"? The iPhone was hyped every six months for 6 years before it was announced. I say this as someone who's only been a Mac user for the past 6 years, so it may have been going on before that!
Seriously, though, I've been visiting Mac news sites now and then for the past several years, and they're always hyping products before they're announced.
Well this was also years ago-- probably late 90s or early 00s-- when e-mail was still relatively new to the mainstream. I don't know for sure whether people are still this clueless about e-mail, because now I work for a smaller company with smarter people.
However, the employee was lucky that it happened while e-mail was still new to the mainstream, because later on in the same company's history, we wouldn't have been able to delete the email and make it go away. They instituted archiving policies that meant it would have taken serious effort for us to delete the email. Also, they started a policy where the IT department was told they were supposed to report stuff like this to HR.
At the time it happened, we didn't have archives like that, and there was no policy. The head of IT just used his best judgement.
Anyway, after the events I described, I made a policy of telling people constantly, "I don't read your e-mail on purpose, but assume I do. Because I *can*, and every once in a while, I might *have to*. So when you're going to send a personal e-mail through your work account, imagine me reading it. If that thought makes you uncomfortable, don't send it through your work account."
I used to be a helpdesk tech, and I would see people's e-mail all the time, and not even intentionally. Like I would walk up to their desk and they'd have it open. After that I was a network tech, and I often had to search through people's mailboxes for various reasons, and also I'd have to check the spam filters to make sure they were working properly.
I wasn't "snooping" or "monitoring", I just saw their e-mail all the time. And it was awful sometimes. The worst example was when a particular e-mail to someone in the company got caught in our quarantine. It was from his mistress, and she wrote him this big long letter about how she was afraid of his wife finding out that they'd spent the weekend in a hotel snorting coke.
I wasn't looking for it, I didn't want to see it, and I didn't want to have to report anything to anyone. I told my boss, asked him what I should do. He said to delete it, and then he went to the employee in question and informed him not to engage in those sorts of e-mail discussions through his company account.
So that's the key thing-- don't use your company account. In many cases, companies are legally bound to store all e-mails in an archive for a set period of time, so even if you delete the email, it isn't deleted. And your IT staff might see it, even if they aren't looking.
Instead, use webmail (gmail, for example), and preferably don't do it at work.
When someone with the word "Director" in his job title "tasks" me with doing something, then you better believe I'll be doing what I'm told...
And what if the word "Director" is in *your* job title. Sometimes it's not sufficient to say, "I just did what I was told" because sometimes part of your job (depending on exactly what rung on the ladder you exist on) is to speak up when you see someone else in the company about to do something stupid.
I see in the summary that the poster is being asked what his company's security policy is, which implies to me that he doesn't simply have someone higher up to defer to.
If, at your job, someone is asking you what the security policy is, and you're answering the question based on your own judgement-- i.e. you have no official security policy to point to, and you have no superior that you can direct the question to-- then covering your ass is not enough. If your in the position to be using your own judgement, then you had better exercise your judgement. CYA is not enough.
I guess that depends on your situation. If you're in a position where you can just CYA and not worry, then CYA and don't worry.
However, sometimes doing the wrong thing will get you fired, even if someone asked you to, because you should know better. Also, some people like to do "the right thing" even if doing stupid things won't get you in trouble.
If they don't give people what they want, which is honest standards, they will just speed migration away from them.
Sorry, but most people actually couldn't give a crap about standards.
Well most people may not give a crap about standards, but when talking about the success of MS Office, you're not talking about "most people". You're talking about "most people (likely to buy MS Office)".
I'd bet IT workers account for a substantial portion of MS Office sales, and further I'd bet that a substantial portion of IT people are sick of dealing with incompatible file formats and vendor lock-in.
Oh, I really really hate this. When will printer manufacturers learn that I don't want to install your stupid little utilities?!
Give me plain, unadulterated drivers, not software installs. Give me a PPD/INF/whatever that I can point my OS to and use all of the built-in OS printing functions. That's all I want.
Same with cameras, scanners, and pretty much any other hardware out there. Give me the driver and leave me alone.
It seems to me that many Linux distributions are now using a sort of combination of 1+2+7, and are probably more secure as a result.
Now, you're going to say, "Linux runs non-preinstalled software just fine." And that's true. But where are you going to get that software, and how are you going to install it? Unless you really know what you're doing, 9 times out of 10 you'll be installing your software from a software repository. Every piece of software in the default repository will be signed and approved by the people making your individual distribution.
So when I install Ubuntu somewhere, there's a very good chance that I'll only install software from the APT sources that are in the default install, and those are safe from malware. It'd take a fairly sophisticated attack to get malware in there. Most of the software that Linux users install come from the distro's respective repository of signed, high-quality, malware free software that can be installed free, over the internet.
Other operating systems may do well to consider such systems. Of course, proprietary software developers would probably sell access to their repository, and give free access to adware developers if they simply pay the right price. Or knowing Microsoft, they'd make sure OpenOffice got marked as "untrustworthy" while MS Office would get special placement.
This is also why I think projects like SETI@Home are ridiculously stupid. Even if other intelligent life did evolve elsewhere in the galaxy or universe, unless they evolved sooner than us (by at least the amount of time it would take for signals to travel from their world(s) ) their signals likely wouldn't have reached us yet. It's also possible that they evolved, developed RF technology, then either died out (and so stopped sending coherent signals), or moved on to FTL comms that we currently have no idea how to receive, or even the basic principles that they are based on (since we currently have no notion of any possible way for information to travel faster than the speed of light).
Well I'm not so sure we'll ever figure out how to send a message faster than light, but I agree-- we don't know how another civilization on a distant planet would send messages. Light/RF, neutrinos, or something else we haven't thought of yet, we just don't know. However, that don't see why that should stop us from monitoring some of the obvious candidates for inter-stellar communication.
Since we've only been receiving RF signals for about 100 years, the window of opportunity for other civilizations' RF signals to reach us during the period in which we were 'listening' is ridiculously small.
Sounds like a window of 100 years, which is small when put in perspective of how long the universe has been around. But that window won't get bigger by not-listening.
Neutrino comms might be good for communicating inside of our Solar system, but unless they travel FTL, it would take a message a little over 4 years just to reach the next closest star to our Solar system. That seems pretty useless to me.
I don't know if I'd say "useless". Who knows what civilizations might have existed when and where. If there were intelligent life within, let's just say, 20 light years, we could still have meaningful communication. There'd be a lag, but I doubt our attitude would be, "Oh, there's no point in talking to the aliens because there's too much latency."
Now I don't know how frequent the emergence of intelligent life is in the universe, but then again, neither do you. Now I'm not going to devote my life listening for signals, but if someone else wants to, more power to him.
So I'm not sure I understand the big idea here, but let me give it a shot. Shuttleworth is suggesting that if the big distributions all synchronized their releases, it would set clear targets for the upstream developers, e.g. the people at OpenOffice could say, "Let's be sure to get a new release ready for all the November '09 Linux distribution releases."
So it would start a sort of natural schedule for developers to work on stabilizing their projects at regular intervals... or something like that. Is that what he's getting at? Am i close?
I spent a week checking for an update before looking to their blog, in which I found a posting suggesting that users live with the problem until the final version was released.
it was at that point that I gave up and started using CoRD instead. It's far from perfect, but I haven't seen any evidence that the developers have contempt for their users' needs.
Sure, everything looks nice and just works...because they spent several months working on a single piece of hardware (which is often no longer on the bleeding edge).
Yeah, like that outdated hardware used in the Macbook Air. I'm sure Dell and HP and your average homebrew system had the same chipsets for 6 months before the MBA came out!</sarcasm>
Where's the ability to make whatever modifications you wish to the computer and then simply download a driver for it (easily, I mean)?
I understand that there are some people for whom that's a highly desirable thing. I used to be one of them when I was younger, but then I got a job doing helpdesk support and saw tons of retarded problems coming from various homebrew systems. Sure, sometimes you get get a great system. And sometimes you get a series of hardware/driver conflicts that cause endless headaches. Unless you're actually doing something weird where a pre-built system won't do the job, you'll often save yourself a lot of hassle-- along with time and money-- if you just buy a Dell/Apple/HP system in a standard configuration.
Given all this, I don't understand why people insist on hacking the Mac for use on PCs. Why not use Linux? Even on bizarre hardware this would give a more pleasant experience.
I agree with you here though. If you want to use OSX, the smart thing is to ignore the option of hacking it to run on a generic PC and buy a Mac. If you have a generic PC, you'll probably get a better (and more stable) experience from running a good Linux distro. Either option has some advantages/disadvantages, and similar feature sets.
However, if an Apple machine fits your needs and budget, they're worth looking into because they give you the option of running OSX, Linux, and/or Windows without much hassle.
Apple usually won't release a new design or new product unless it's at an event where Jobs is giving the keynote, but they're release updates to the systems (faster processors, bigger drives) in between.
Still, it might be true that they don't make changes to that stuff as often. On the other hand, it's not all bad. It means that they have somewhat more stable hardware configurations, which I'm sure simplifies support for Apple, and means that a given configuration will be better supported, crash less, etc. It kind of sucks when you buy hardware at the wrong time, and it becomes some obscure/weird piece that isn't really supported because it only existed for two months and only a handful exist.
Of course, not only would they be facing the risk of whether their hardware can stand on its own merits, but it'll also require Apple to support additional hardware-- and in some cases, crappy hardware, poorly designed hardware, or hardware where the vendors have done a horrible job writing the drivers.
I'm not a Microsoft fan, but it is true that a fair amount of the instability comes from crappy drivers. Linux overcomes this by using (mostly) open source drivers and not the manufacturer's proprietary drivers. (ironic, right?) Apple overcomes this by controlling most of the hardware/drivers themselves.
Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know.
From what little I know, it seems like the team that develops Office for Windows and the team that develops Office for Mac are entirely separate, and don't work together. So the Mac team looks at the Windows version and ports over what features they can, but the Windows people don't do anything to make that process easy. So as a result, you don't get real Exchange support in Entourage, and you don't get VB support.
It's also worth noting that the Mac team is either under-resourced or mentally retarded, as evidenced by stupid little incidents like the recent Intel Remote Desktop beta. Essentially they released a beta with an expiration date, and then didn't release a new beta before the expiration date. The software didn't stop working, but it stopped working properly. Their response to the problem was, "It still mostly works, and we'll release the final in a few months. Live with it."
If that's true at all, and Microsoft were to purposefully sabotage Windows XP, it would be incredibly stupid of them. Microsoft may be annoyed that people want to stick with XP, but at least it doesn't disturb the whole vendor lock-in they have going on. However, if you make people dissatisfied with both Windows XP and Vista, and people might just jump-ship to OSX/Linux.
IANAE, but wouldn't it at least encourage developers to support OpenGL instead of (or in addition to) DirectX? It's always seemed to me that developers are more likely to develop for an additional platform once they're already developing for more than 1.
It's like, if you're making Windows-only software, then why not rely on all of Microsoft's proprietary little bells and whistles? But once you're developing for Mac, you're thinking about how to do proper cross-platform development and whatnot. The extra step to support Linux seems a little smaller, right?
Of course, I'm not a programmer at all, so what do I know.
Wolfenstein, Doom, and Doom 2 were all good games for the time period they were released. They were repetitive, but games generally were at that point in the development of video games.
As games developed, id Software stayed relevant for a while by continuing to develop advanced engines that they licensed out to other companies. However, I don't think I've seen any innovations in gameplay come out of id Software in the past 10 years.
the whole Nazis on the moon thing tipped me off that this might not be a documentary.
I was kind of hoping it wouldn't be a "comedy", but instead a situation where they were cleverly taking old science-fiction ideas and applying them as though they were still considered possible.
You know, sort of like Fallout or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I mean, I guess Fallout had a comedic element, but it wasn't exactly a "spoof".
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Not necessarily. He might done a cost/benefit analysis and determined that the publicity stunt would make him more money through his business than he would lose through identity theft.
"Getting excessive"? The iPhone was hyped every six months for 6 years before it was announced. I say this as someone who's only been a Mac user for the past 6 years, so it may have been going on before that!
Seriously, though, I've been visiting Mac news sites now and then for the past several years, and they're always hyping products before they're announced.
Well this was also years ago-- probably late 90s or early 00s-- when e-mail was still relatively new to the mainstream. I don't know for sure whether people are still this clueless about e-mail, because now I work for a smaller company with smarter people.
However, the employee was lucky that it happened while e-mail was still new to the mainstream, because later on in the same company's history, we wouldn't have been able to delete the email and make it go away. They instituted archiving policies that meant it would have taken serious effort for us to delete the email. Also, they started a policy where the IT department was told they were supposed to report stuff like this to HR.
At the time it happened, we didn't have archives like that, and there was no policy. The head of IT just used his best judgement.
Anyway, after the events I described, I made a policy of telling people constantly, "I don't read your e-mail on purpose, but assume I do. Because I *can*, and every once in a while, I might *have to*. So when you're going to send a personal e-mail through your work account, imagine me reading it. If that thought makes you uncomfortable, don't send it through your work account."
Seriously.
I used to be a helpdesk tech, and I would see people's e-mail all the time, and not even intentionally. Like I would walk up to their desk and they'd have it open. After that I was a network tech, and I often had to search through people's mailboxes for various reasons, and also I'd have to check the spam filters to make sure they were working properly.
I wasn't "snooping" or "monitoring", I just saw their e-mail all the time. And it was awful sometimes. The worst example was when a particular e-mail to someone in the company got caught in our quarantine. It was from his mistress, and she wrote him this big long letter about how she was afraid of his wife finding out that they'd spent the weekend in a hotel snorting coke.
I wasn't looking for it, I didn't want to see it, and I didn't want to have to report anything to anyone. I told my boss, asked him what I should do. He said to delete it, and then he went to the employee in question and informed him not to engage in those sorts of e-mail discussions through his company account.
So that's the key thing-- don't use your company account. In many cases, companies are legally bound to store all e-mails in an archive for a set period of time, so even if you delete the email, it isn't deleted. And your IT staff might see it, even if they aren't looking.
Instead, use webmail (gmail, for example), and preferably don't do it at work.
And what if the word "Director" is in *your* job title. Sometimes it's not sufficient to say, "I just did what I was told" because sometimes part of your job (depending on exactly what rung on the ladder you exist on) is to speak up when you see someone else in the company about to do something stupid.
I see in the summary that the poster is being asked what his company's security policy is, which implies to me that he doesn't simply have someone higher up to defer to.
If, at your job, someone is asking you what the security policy is, and you're answering the question based on your own judgement-- i.e. you have no official security policy to point to, and you have no superior that you can direct the question to-- then covering your ass is not enough. If your in the position to be using your own judgement, then you had better exercise your judgement. CYA is not enough.
I guess that depends on your situation. If you're in a position where you can just CYA and not worry, then CYA and don't worry.
However, sometimes doing the wrong thing will get you fired, even if someone asked you to, because you should know better. Also, some people like to do "the right thing" even if doing stupid things won't get you in trouble.
I think he was saying FTP over VPN.
Well most people may not give a crap about standards, but when talking about the success of MS Office, you're not talking about "most people". You're talking about "most people (likely to buy MS Office)".
I'd bet IT workers account for a substantial portion of MS Office sales, and further I'd bet that a substantial portion of IT people are sick of dealing with incompatible file formats and vendor lock-in.
If I were a MS shareholder, I'd be more upset for other reasons-- e.g. that their strategy doesn't seem to include making good products.
Actually Canon usually isn't too bad about it either. They often have additional software, but don't make you install it.
HP has been the worst offender in my experience, but I've really only used Brother, Canon, Epson, and HP.
Oh, I really really hate this. When will printer manufacturers learn that I don't want to install your stupid little utilities?!
Give me plain, unadulterated drivers, not software installs. Give me a PPD/INF/whatever that I can point my OS to and use all of the built-in OS printing functions. That's all I want.
Same with cameras, scanners, and pretty much any other hardware out there. Give me the driver and leave me alone.
It seems to me that many Linux distributions are now using a sort of combination of 1+2+7, and are probably more secure as a result.
Now, you're going to say, "Linux runs non-preinstalled software just fine." And that's true. But where are you going to get that software, and how are you going to install it? Unless you really know what you're doing, 9 times out of 10 you'll be installing your software from a software repository. Every piece of software in the default repository will be signed and approved by the people making your individual distribution.
So when I install Ubuntu somewhere, there's a very good chance that I'll only install software from the APT sources that are in the default install, and those are safe from malware. It'd take a fairly sophisticated attack to get malware in there. Most of the software that Linux users install come from the distro's respective repository of signed, high-quality, malware free software that can be installed free, over the internet.
Other operating systems may do well to consider such systems. Of course, proprietary software developers would probably sell access to their repository, and give free access to adware developers if they simply pay the right price. Or knowing Microsoft, they'd make sure OpenOffice got marked as "untrustworthy" while MS Office would get special placement.
Well I'm not so sure we'll ever figure out how to send a message faster than light, but I agree-- we don't know how another civilization on a distant planet would send messages. Light/RF, neutrinos, or something else we haven't thought of yet, we just don't know. However, that don't see why that should stop us from monitoring some of the obvious candidates for inter-stellar communication.
Since we've only been receiving RF signals for about 100 years, the window of opportunity for other civilizations' RF signals to reach us during the period in which we were 'listening' is ridiculously small.Sounds like a window of 100 years, which is small when put in perspective of how long the universe has been around. But that window won't get bigger by not-listening.
Neutrino comms might be good for communicating inside of our Solar system, but unless they travel FTL, it would take a message a little over 4 years just to reach the next closest star to our Solar system. That seems pretty useless to me.I don't know if I'd say "useless". Who knows what civilizations might have existed when and where. If there were intelligent life within, let's just say, 20 light years, we could still have meaningful communication. There'd be a lag, but I doubt our attitude would be, "Oh, there's no point in talking to the aliens because there's too much latency."
Now I don't know how frequent the emergence of intelligent life is in the universe, but then again, neither do you. Now I'm not going to devote my life listening for signals, but if someone else wants to, more power to him.
The sun emits a hell of a lot of photons, too.
So I'm not sure I understand the big idea here, but let me give it a shot. Shuttleworth is suggesting that if the big distributions all synchronized their releases, it would set clear targets for the upstream developers, e.g. the people at OpenOffice could say, "Let's be sure to get a new release ready for all the November '09 Linux distribution releases."
So it would start a sort of natural schedule for developers to work on stabilizing their projects at regular intervals... or something like that. Is that what he's getting at? Am i close?
I spent a week checking for an update before looking to their blog, in which I found a posting suggesting that users live with the problem until the final version was released.
it was at that point that I gave up and started using CoRD instead. It's far from perfect, but I haven't seen any evidence that the developers have contempt for their users' needs.
Yeah, like that outdated hardware used in the Macbook Air. I'm sure Dell and HP and your average homebrew system had the same chipsets for 6 months before the MBA came out!</sarcasm>
Where's the ability to make whatever modifications you wish to the computer and then simply download a driver for it (easily, I mean)?I understand that there are some people for whom that's a highly desirable thing. I used to be one of them when I was younger, but then I got a job doing helpdesk support and saw tons of retarded problems coming from various homebrew systems. Sure, sometimes you get get a great system. And sometimes you get a series of hardware/driver conflicts that cause endless headaches. Unless you're actually doing something weird where a pre-built system won't do the job, you'll often save yourself a lot of hassle-- along with time and money-- if you just buy a Dell/Apple/HP system in a standard configuration.
Given all this, I don't understand why people insist on hacking the Mac for use on PCs. Why not use Linux? Even on bizarre hardware this would give a more pleasant experience.I agree with you here though. If you want to use OSX, the smart thing is to ignore the option of hacking it to run on a generic PC and buy a Mac. If you have a generic PC, you'll probably get a better (and more stable) experience from running a good Linux distro. Either option has some advantages/disadvantages, and similar feature sets.
However, if an Apple machine fits your needs and budget, they're worth looking into because they give you the option of running OSX, Linux, and/or Windows without much hassle.
Apple usually won't release a new design or new product unless it's at an event where Jobs is giving the keynote, but they're release updates to the systems (faster processors, bigger drives) in between.
Still, it might be true that they don't make changes to that stuff as often. On the other hand, it's not all bad. It means that they have somewhat more stable hardware configurations, which I'm sure simplifies support for Apple, and means that a given configuration will be better supported, crash less, etc. It kind of sucks when you buy hardware at the wrong time, and it becomes some obscure/weird piece that isn't really supported because it only existed for two months and only a handful exist.
It's still a bit of a victory. It again validates Linux, and also ensures that Asus will be making sure their hardware has Linux support.
Of course, not only would they be facing the risk of whether their hardware can stand on its own merits, but it'll also require Apple to support additional hardware-- and in some cases, crappy hardware, poorly designed hardware, or hardware where the vendors have done a horrible job writing the drivers.
I'm not a Microsoft fan, but it is true that a fair amount of the instability comes from crappy drivers. Linux overcomes this by using (mostly) open source drivers and not the manufacturer's proprietary drivers. (ironic, right?) Apple overcomes this by controlling most of the hardware/drivers themselves.
From what little I know, it seems like the team that develops Office for Windows and the team that develops Office for Mac are entirely separate, and don't work together. So the Mac team looks at the Windows version and ports over what features they can, but the Windows people don't do anything to make that process easy. So as a result, you don't get real Exchange support in Entourage, and you don't get VB support.
It's also worth noting that the Mac team is either under-resourced or mentally retarded, as evidenced by stupid little incidents like the recent Intel Remote Desktop beta. Essentially they released a beta with an expiration date, and then didn't release a new beta before the expiration date. The software didn't stop working, but it stopped working properly. Their response to the problem was, "It still mostly works, and we'll release the final in a few months. Live with it."
If that's true at all, and Microsoft were to purposefully sabotage Windows XP, it would be incredibly stupid of them. Microsoft may be annoyed that people want to stick with XP, but at least it doesn't disturb the whole vendor lock-in they have going on. However, if you make people dissatisfied with both Windows XP and Vista, and people might just jump-ship to OSX/Linux.
IANAE, but wouldn't it at least encourage developers to support OpenGL instead of (or in addition to) DirectX? It's always seemed to me that developers are more likely to develop for an additional platform once they're already developing for more than 1.
It's like, if you're making Windows-only software, then why not rely on all of Microsoft's proprietary little bells and whistles? But once you're developing for Mac, you're thinking about how to do proper cross-platform development and whatnot. The extra step to support Linux seems a little smaller, right?
Of course, I'm not a programmer at all, so what do I know.
Wolfenstein, Doom, and Doom 2 were all good games for the time period they were released. They were repetitive, but games generally were at that point in the development of video games.
As games developed, id Software stayed relevant for a while by continuing to develop advanced engines that they licensed out to other companies. However, I don't think I've seen any innovations in gameplay come out of id Software in the past 10 years.
I was kind of hoping it wouldn't be a "comedy", but instead a situation where they were cleverly taking old science-fiction ideas and applying them as though they were still considered possible.
You know, sort of like Fallout or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I mean, I guess Fallout had a comedic element, but it wasn't exactly a "spoof".