I thought tying smart meters into the internet was an idiotic idea from the beginning as it would be my first hack should I ever work with gangs/drug-users/ordinary-criminals (pick one or several). Given how competent the existing security on the grid already is, well....
On the bright side, now I can think up lovely hacks of the robot internet (stuff the cloud nonsense) which would be even more fun(??)! Picture a worm giving the robotic version of enemas....
That's the first sensible analysis of the requirements yet! Fortunately, unless I'm out in the field, the separation between bed and work is two feet. This has been interesting so far (as witnessed by where this is posted). Nice suggestions all.
I'm intreged by the idea of parenting in the same political philosophy that you would apply to governments. Libertarian children would be interesting. I'd love to see an infant earn his wage, rather than just sucking off his parents teets like a litte socialist rat.
It worked out rather well in my case. I was expected to do the chores (cooking, cleaning) from age 6 on with my younger brothers picking up chores as they became capable. [I should also add that I was learning electronic engineering at that age, taught by my mother to my Dad and myself. Lissitude patterns are fun.] Then again, the very first book my mother handed me when I figured out how to read, age 3, was Robert A. Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel."
Further it should be no surprise that I grew up a Libertarian, able to independently function with or without society, and entered the military for a first career. Funny how standards change. In any rational society, your children are inherent labor force for the family unit. Draw your own conclusions from that.
your vpn is going to have another end, which could have the same problems as your end
Really depends on if and how your VPN handles DNS leakage. As always, caveat emptor. I picked mine on the basis that I had a choice of whether and how it was handled before I paid.
Proper configuration is the part that kills most servers and it isn't something to take lightly. Distributed Denial of Service (DNS amplification) attacks are enabled by any idiot setting up a DNS server without knowing WTF they are doing. So yeah, go ahead and do it.
On the other hand (I'm also an economist, sue me!), when/if Google were to try this, there would be open rebellion among the interneterati. Not that most people would even notice, but then again, they don't seem to think much, if at all, about the NSA spying scandals either. For those of us that actually might care about this, couple of clicks or one shell-script and we're invisible.
Partially true, at best. If you are serious about using GPU's for anything whose erroneous result can kill people, you don't use consumer-grade GPU cards. I don't know what you have but I only use workstation-grade and then I verify the results, just as I would do with anything hazardous. As an engineer, I can't afford those types of mistakes.
And on the whole database thang? The GPU is chained to a database-eating machine (5.65 GBps SSD array, and yes, that's GigaBytes). Yeah, it can make pretty graphics with the results of a crunching session, but that was not why it was picked. Taking lots of big data and teasing out predictive analytics was the chosen role. 'Sides, I don't twitch right.
I get your point but mostly due to the fact that I've been a heretic for the last forty-four years. The funny part is, what I was doing then is what everyone else is doing now, just twenty or so years later. The difference being, in one case, having to forklift my big data into the data center. It keeps me amused.
Frankly I'd resign before working with an EHR system on XP that was also even remotely (pun intended) facing the internet. The penalties from the government alone are frightening and should a patient be harmed or di?. No way. I've done every kind of engineering and analysis that even remotely touch the medical field and I also know the laws around medical systems. If what you represent is true, run. now. Maybe you'll get far enough away.
That needs a real answer. For close on a decade, the first thing to go on any Windows system here was the desktop. I can tolerate Windows 8 and 8.1 enough to use it. And on the Server side if they had a bunch of apps that displayed useful information, it'd be usable over there but that's a lack of foresight and also the fact most people don't even look at a server most of the time. [I use the high-end servers for my workstations as the memory management just works.] But I'm an old Amiga heretic, so....
Yes, those alternative history stories are what immediately brought this to mind in reference to Mandela. And on the bright side, alternative history based stories have actually created paid employment for historians. [Rather than being bus drivers,....]
And another nice piece of analysis. If you haven't been anywhere outside the 'First World' then you haven't got even a glimmering of the 'truth.' Sadly, much of the governing on this planet is less than useless since they don't even attempt to enforce anything resembling justice and even will take the opportunity to shake you down for more than the criminals got. Come to think of it, that's true in the 'First World.' You have to see it and experience it before you understand just what power means and how often it is misused.
Then you get back home and guess what, you begin to 'notice things.'
Actually, Wikileaks has the same problem as the NSA and CIA (& other TLA agencies); far and away too much data assembled. They could definitely use a hell of a lot more eyes tied to brains that aren't turned to mush. There are torrent links to the various bodies of data out there if you want to help.
Unfortunately, Ad Hominem far too often works, which is why it is so often used. Interesting coincidence that a rape charge is brought somewhat far in the future after the Wikileaks/Manning incident. I don't believe in coincidence.
Monitoring the hell out of your environment before you ship anything there is the key to running anything on someone else's datacenter. Then run it through the sausage-making estimation routines to find an approximate costs. I keep looking at the player's cost structures here and to be honest, it's not cost effective. Yet.
This. You can add Facebook to the list of growing their own servers. Google, Amazon, and Facebook, as well as many other players, are buying hardware components in railroad consist consignments (whole trains) direct from the components manufacturers. HP, Dell, IBM and the rest of the large players have three stark choices. Grow up and provide datacenter based "Cloud" services in competition against Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et. al. Two, grow up and get the hell out of providing hardware to anyone, even themselves. Three, wither on the vine. It's actually kind of funny, in a tragic way, watching the consultancies blowing sunshine up the collective asses of so many firms, but there you are. Not for the first time either, by a long shot.
Just as with the various flavors of fortune tellers of the world, nobody seems to recall the massive number of blown calls by Gartner, IDC, and all the rest. They only recall when they got it right. Roll the dice enough times and you'll get double-six; seven on a really easy call.
You don't get it, do you? The NSA doesn't have to obey the data privacy laws inside or outside the USA. Next, it is the very country's intelligence agencies that are providing the take (intelligence collections) that give the NSA their data streams in violation of those same country's privacy laws. And, to make the deal all the sweeter, the NSA provides a nice sweet intelligence package on those country's citizens and the NSA just so happens to get a nice sweet intelligence package on US citizens in direct contravention (my opinion that I used to enforce with weapons) of our Constitution.
And that's if they don't do things messy, like GCHQ did to Belgian telecoms systems.
Programming really is absurdly simple as are all the forms of engineering (done all but two to date). It's the critical thinking that is required to determine the solution that trips most up as it isn't taught in any school I've run across prior to college where it is a core requirement. [Got an A+ myself. No surprise there.] If you can'[t decompose the problem to describe the solution using any of the maths applicable, and don't kid yourself every technique (iterative, functional, OOP,...) they all found somewhere in maths, you're less than useless in this or any other maths oriented field.
The sad and sorry truth is that our school system does try every once in a rare while to teach critical thinking (e.g. word problems), but it's piecemeal without bothering to tie all the other classes in logics and maths to give these kids a head start. For years I would look at the maths and sciences tests administered around the world. Tough doesn't even describe them. The only way to survive them is to either have the solution sets memorized by practical experience or to know how to approach these problems in an aware manner.
AC: I seriously don't think I qualify as a crappy programmer (engineer) as I'm not typing this from a federal prison which is where I would have ended up by being a crappy programmer. [QA/QC is an absolute necessity.] I'm also not optimistic. Realist on my good days. Terminally depressed on the bad ones. Literally, terminally depressed.
Simple answer? The best people at that kind of work are puzzle-people. The only differences I have detected over the last forty-five years is what knowledge domain they are best suited for solving problems in this manner. When they decide to enter the field, computer science or engineering or programming (coding), they face a curriculum that is seriously disconnected with their passion around reasoning out and solving problems. It's a one size fits all curriculum that winnows the wheat rather than the chaff.
As with your example, I started when I was ten. My personal computer occupied the entire first floor of the Science building at the university. Everyone thought it was "cute" that someone so young was picking it up quickly. By the time I was 14 I was a teaching assistant and doing consulting. Back then, it was all about solving problems. That changed rather quickly over the next few years as the computer science, then computer engineering, even the set of courses within various departments were seriously over-subscribed. Then the curbs were brought in to reduce the number of successful candidates and to winnow out anyone except those who would tough it out. You also see this in pre-med and pre-law programs for the same reason.
There's no easy fix either. They can yell up and down about a shortage of STEM graduates but until the systemic restrictions are centered about actually selecting people that are "the best and brightest," it isn't going to change. Meanwhile, "our global competitors" are about getting people through to the job market with what they need to know rather than equipped with knowledge that is useless in real-world problems.
Not strictly true. There are those of us so paranoid that we monitor whom our computers are connecting to and from whom data is transferred to them, as well as recording the data in transit each way. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass and you have no control over what is done with the data at rest on the receiver nor in flight away from the other end of the connection, but it is helpful in a modest level of verification. Which is why you encounter postings about unauthorized data transfers every so often that are more than unintended consequences of poor coding.
I don't know enough about my fellow paranoiacs to speak to their procedures but, until I'm comfortable with a piece of software, micro to enterprise, it has to get an authorization before it can do anything. Extensive white-lists here. And yes, another serious pain in the ass and it doesn't do a thing for certain categories of vulnerabilities. This isn't a PC-compatible, whatever the OS, only kind of thang. I was doing the same as far back as the '80's on mainframes and mi Amigas.
I haven't seen it yet and I've been asking that question a lot over the years. Here especially! While I was wearing the uniform injuries or the death of personnel and equipment casualties as a result of my engineering was going to result in a Court Martial followed by federal prison and, if someone died, the possibility of capital punishment. Even after I left, the other gig where I used code a lot was for, again, the federal government. And if some federal attorney felt like making an example, same deal.
Over the years I've done quite a bit of greenfield engineering, almost half of those weapon systems. I didn't like the probable consequences to others so I shelved them. Only one has come online since and judging by the fact that none of the follow-on systems from that initial device are in evidence, and it's been 15+ years, I hope no one ever does. Looking back, a conscience is nice to have around if you're given the option. All the work done on those systems was not done while I was in uniform. The first actually was before I even took the oath.
So be glad that most coders/engineers don't face those hazards. Although there are more than a few examples that I'd to make, but that's me;-).
Slashdot Mirror
I thought tying smart meters into the internet was an idiotic idea from the beginning as it would be my first hack should I ever work with gangs/drug-users/ordinary-criminals (pick one or several). Given how competent the existing security on the grid already is, well....
On the bright side, now I can think up lovely hacks of the robot internet (stuff the cloud nonsense) which would be even more fun(??)! Picture a worm giving the robotic version of enemas....
That's the first sensible analysis of the requirements yet! Fortunately, unless I'm out in the field, the separation between bed and work is two feet. This has been interesting so far (as witnessed by where this is posted). Nice suggestions all.
I'm intreged by the idea of parenting in the same political philosophy that you would apply to governments. Libertarian children would be interesting. I'd love to see an infant earn his wage, rather than just sucking off his parents teets like a litte socialist rat.
It worked out rather well in my case. I was expected to do the chores (cooking, cleaning) from age 6 on with my younger brothers picking up chores as they became capable. [I should also add that I was learning electronic engineering at that age, taught by my mother to my Dad and myself. Lissitude patterns are fun.] Then again, the very first book my mother handed me when I figured out how to read, age 3, was Robert A. Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel."
Further it should be no surprise that I grew up a Libertarian, able to independently function with or without society, and entered the military for a first career. Funny how standards change. In any rational society, your children are inherent labor force for the family unit. Draw your own conclusions from that.
your vpn is going to have another end, which could have the same problems as your end
Really depends on if and how your VPN handles DNS leakage. As always, caveat emptor. I picked mine on the basis that I had a choice of whether and how it was handled before I paid.
Proper configuration is the part that kills most servers and it isn't something to take lightly. Distributed Denial of Service (DNS amplification) attacks are enabled by any idiot setting up a DNS server without knowing WTF they are doing. So yeah, go ahead and do it.
The one day I don't have mod-points. +5 ROFLMAO.
On the other hand (I'm also an economist, sue me!), when/if Google were to try this, there would be open rebellion among the interneterati. Not that most people would even notice, but then again, they don't seem to think much, if at all, about the NSA spying scandals either. For those of us that actually might care about this, couple of clicks or one shell-script and we're invisible.
Partially true, at best. If you are serious about using GPU's for anything whose erroneous result can kill people, you don't use consumer-grade GPU cards. I don't know what you have but I only use workstation-grade and then I verify the results, just as I would do with anything hazardous. As an engineer, I can't afford those types of mistakes.
And on the whole database thang? The GPU is chained to a database-eating machine (5.65 GBps SSD array, and yes, that's GigaBytes). Yeah, it can make pretty graphics with the results of a crunching session, but that was not why it was picked. Taking lots of big data and teasing out predictive analytics was the chosen role. 'Sides, I don't twitch right.
I get your point but mostly due to the fact that I've been a heretic for the last forty-four years. The funny part is, what I was doing then is what everyone else is doing now, just twenty or so years later. The difference being, in one case, having to forklift my big data into the data center. It keeps me amused.
Frankly I'd resign before working with an EHR system on XP that was also even remotely (pun intended) facing the internet. The penalties from the government alone are frightening and should a patient be harmed or di?. No way. I've done every kind of engineering and analysis that even remotely touch the medical field and I also know the laws around medical systems. If what you represent is true, run. now. Maybe you'll get far enough away.
That needs a real answer. For close on a decade, the first thing to go on any Windows system here was the desktop. I can tolerate Windows 8 and 8.1 enough to use it. And on the Server side if they had a bunch of apps that displayed useful information, it'd be usable over there but that's a lack of foresight and also the fact most people don't even look at a server most of the time. [I use the high-end servers for my workstations as the memory management just works.] But I'm an old Amiga heretic, so ....
Thank you!
Got a chuckle here.
Yes, those alternative history stories are what immediately brought this to mind in reference to Mandela. And on the bright side, alternative history based stories have actually created paid employment for historians. [Rather than being bus drivers, ....]
And another nice piece of analysis. If you haven't been anywhere outside the 'First World' then you haven't got even a glimmering of the 'truth.' Sadly, much of the governing on this planet is less than useless since they don't even attempt to enforce anything resembling justice and even will take the opportunity to shake you down for more than the criminals got. Come to think of it, that's true in the 'First World.' You have to see it and experience it before you understand just what power means and how often it is misused. Then you get back home and guess what, you begin to 'notice things.'
Nice. Thank you for that. Ghandi was lucky in that his opponent, the British Empire, did accede to a non-violent approach.
Actually, Wikileaks has the same problem as the NSA and CIA (& other TLA agencies); far and away too much data assembled. They could definitely use a hell of a lot more eyes tied to brains that aren't turned to mush. There are torrent links to the various bodies of data out there if you want to help.
Unfortunately, Ad Hominem far too often works, which is why it is so often used. Interesting coincidence that a rape charge is brought somewhat far in the future after the Wikileaks/Manning incident. I don't believe in coincidence.
Monitoring the hell out of your environment before you ship anything there is the key to running anything on someone else's datacenter. Then run it through the sausage-making estimation routines to find an approximate costs. I keep looking at the player's cost structures here and to be honest, it's not cost effective. Yet.
This. You can add Facebook to the list of growing their own servers. Google, Amazon, and Facebook, as well as many other players, are buying hardware components in railroad consist consignments (whole trains) direct from the components manufacturers. HP, Dell, IBM and the rest of the large players have three stark choices. Grow up and provide datacenter based "Cloud" services in competition against Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et. al. Two, grow up and get the hell out of providing hardware to anyone, even themselves. Three, wither on the vine. It's actually kind of funny, in a tragic way, watching the consultancies blowing sunshine up the collective asses of so many firms, but there you are. Not for the first time either, by a long shot.
Just as with the various flavors of fortune tellers of the world, nobody seems to recall the massive number of blown calls by Gartner, IDC, and all the rest. They only recall when they got it right. Roll the dice enough times and you'll get double-six; seven on a really easy call.
You don't get it, do you? The NSA doesn't have to obey the data privacy laws inside or outside the USA. Next, it is the very country's intelligence agencies that are providing the take (intelligence collections) that give the NSA their data streams in violation of those same country's privacy laws. And, to make the deal all the sweeter, the NSA provides a nice sweet intelligence package on those country's citizens and the NSA just so happens to get a nice sweet intelligence package on US citizens in direct contravention (my opinion that I used to enforce with weapons) of our Constitution.
And that's if they don't do things messy, like GCHQ did to Belgian telecoms systems.
Programming really is absurdly simple as are all the forms of engineering (done all but two to date). It's the critical thinking that is required to determine the solution that trips most up as it isn't taught in any school I've run across prior to college where it is a core requirement. [Got an A+ myself. No surprise there.] If you can'[t decompose the problem to describe the solution using any of the maths applicable, and don't kid yourself every technique (iterative, functional, OOP, ...) they all found somewhere in maths, you're less than useless in this or any other maths oriented field.
The sad and sorry truth is that our school system does try every once in a rare while to teach critical thinking (e.g. word problems), but it's piecemeal without bothering to tie all the other classes in logics and maths to give these kids a head start. For years I would look at the maths and sciences tests administered around the world. Tough doesn't even describe them. The only way to survive them is to either have the solution sets memorized by practical experience or to know how to approach these problems in an aware manner.
AC: I seriously don't think I qualify as a crappy programmer (engineer) as I'm not typing this from a federal prison which is where I would have ended up by being a crappy programmer. [QA/QC is an absolute necessity.] I'm also not optimistic. Realist on my good days. Terminally depressed on the bad ones. Literally, terminally depressed.
Simple answer? The best people at that kind of work are puzzle-people. The only differences I have detected over the last forty-five years is what knowledge domain they are best suited for solving problems in this manner. When they decide to enter the field, computer science or engineering or programming (coding), they face a curriculum that is seriously disconnected with their passion around reasoning out and solving problems. It's a one size fits all curriculum that winnows the wheat rather than the chaff.
As with your example, I started when I was ten. My personal computer occupied the entire first floor of the Science building at the university. Everyone thought it was "cute" that someone so young was picking it up quickly. By the time I was 14 I was a teaching assistant and doing consulting. Back then, it was all about solving problems. That changed rather quickly over the next few years as the computer science, then computer engineering, even the set of courses within various departments were seriously over-subscribed. Then the curbs were brought in to reduce the number of successful candidates and to winnow out anyone except those who would tough it out. You also see this in pre-med and pre-law programs for the same reason.
There's no easy fix either. They can yell up and down about a shortage of STEM graduates but until the systemic restrictions are centered about actually selecting people that are "the best and brightest," it isn't going to change. Meanwhile, "our global competitors" are about getting people through to the job market with what they need to know rather than equipped with knowledge that is useless in real-world problems.
Not strictly true. There are those of us so paranoid that we monitor whom our computers are connecting to and from whom data is transferred to them, as well as recording the data in transit each way. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass and you have no control over what is done with the data at rest on the receiver nor in flight away from the other end of the connection, but it is helpful in a modest level of verification. Which is why you encounter postings about unauthorized data transfers every so often that are more than unintended consequences of poor coding.
I don't know enough about my fellow paranoiacs to speak to their procedures but, until I'm comfortable with a piece of software, micro to enterprise, it has to get an authorization before it can do anything. Extensive white-lists here. And yes, another serious pain in the ass and it doesn't do a thing for certain categories of vulnerabilities. This isn't a PC-compatible, whatever the OS, only kind of thang. I was doing the same as far back as the '80's on mainframes and mi Amigas.
I haven't seen it yet and I've been asking that question a lot over the years. Here especially! While I was wearing the uniform injuries or the death of personnel and equipment casualties as a result of my engineering was going to result in a Court Martial followed by federal prison and, if someone died, the possibility of capital punishment. Even after I left, the other gig where I used code a lot was for, again, the federal government. And if some federal attorney felt like making an example, same deal.
;-).
Over the years I've done quite a bit of greenfield engineering, almost half of those weapon systems. I didn't like the probable consequences to others so I shelved them. Only one has come online since and judging by the fact that none of the follow-on systems from that initial device are in evidence, and it's been 15+ years, I hope no one ever does. Looking back, a conscience is nice to have around if you're given the option. All the work done on those systems was not done while I was in uniform. The first actually was before I even took the oath.
So be glad that most coders/engineers don't face those hazards. Although there are more than a few examples that I'd to make, but that's me