Lights - Not every location has a light switch. Some use special "key" like devices to operate the lights, others are automated and use limited lighting in off hours. Also, you don't go walking through turning on every light in the building while en route to your location inside the building, so you're still cruising with your mag light, even when you can turn the lights on.
Repo men - I'm not a repo man. I work in Bankruptcy administration. I work for a consultation firm that is normally employed by the Trustee (who represents the unsecured creditors in a bankruptcy). It is not always an option to shut down a business, because the Trustee faces liability if the business can continue to operate and bring in money still tied up WIP (work in progress). Sometimes "operational cooperation" is important. Most of the time we have the ability to walk into the office during normal operating hours and image someone's hard drive on the spot. It all depends on the goals.
Education - I wish I had more information for you here. There are a wide range of individuals in computer forensics. Some are law enforcement who fell into the computer field. Some are IT workers who are drawn to forensics. Rather than educational recommendations, I'd recommend that you get comfortable with some of the tools. There are some free forensic tools out there that are based on common Unix utilities, as well as some commercial products. EnCase is one of the more popular. Being handy with regular expressions is a huge plus when performing analysis. One of the biggest challenges is weeding through too much information. Also, the field requires a lot of diversity. You'll be dealing with all types of systems; sometimes not even a computer. One growing area is acquiring office products. A lot of copy machines have hard disks in them. Digital copiers scan the image to disk then run the copies from the cached image. We try to recover this data. Diversity is key.
The smoking gun - Definitely a thrill. We recently delivered key evidence in a pretty significant case. The person being prosecuted was infamous in their circle. A Google search for this person turned up a lot of flaming results. That made me feel really good to have a hand in putting him in prison (this was a state receivership turned criminal).
-Users don't run as Administrator by default in a domain Yet the admin/user model is still broken in XP
-Fast switching isn't useful in most domains Says who? It'd be nice to FUS to an admin account without repeating, "Do you need to save this?" ten times to a user.
*You can do system images for fairly disparate hardware already, but not completely different. And all the fun that comes along with changing the SID and testing to make sure your hardware changes don't break the image? I'll take any improvement we can get here.
-There are already public recovery disks Which are hacks that violate the EULA
-You can already get real shells You will hear no complaints from me if MS wants to improve the default shell.
*I'm sure a more advanced task scheduler is useful _somewhere_ Uuuh yeah. The current scheduler is pretty weak. Improvements welcome... again.
Some of these are very welcome improvements to Windows. I think you downplay them too much.
Honestly, this job is probably the coolest I've done. We get the run of any joint we enter. We get to crack people's passwords, read their stuff, and pry into the details that they're trying to hide.
Outside of the unreal timeframe, it is a bit like television. I've been on location at 1 AM acquiring hard drives so that the debtor principles didn't know what we were doing. Walking through the data center with my mag light at that hour of the morning comes pretty close to that feeling you get when you watch CSI on TV. Most of the time, we tell the people on location we're making "backups" of the data so that we can preserve the data in the event of a crash. There's definitely a social element to forensic work (at least in bankruptcy cases).
A typical acquisition may go something like this:
You set up, pull your forms, start noting observations, pull the drives, hook them up to the little black box connected to your laptop's firewire port (a write-blocker), and start having a look at the data. If you've got what you're looking for, you acquire the drive and put everything back together. Boot it all up and be on your way.
You may be doing this in the CEO's office, or in the data center looking for a mail server. The top officers are usually the most important, since they have the most important correspondence and data.
It's a fun job. It's every bit as exciting as what you see on television (for once).
What what -at, did did -id, you you -ou, say say -ay?
I have Vonage, and I'd say that 7 out of 10 calls I make have some sort of quality issue. Usually Echo, sometimes stutter. I have 3072/768 kbps DSL, and I've tested the SnR at 15dB myself. My xDSL test set says the line will handle close to 6 mbps, so I know the connection is solid.
Here's a quote from the Vonage site on the echo issue:
"We recommend asking the other party to lower the phone volume in order to reduce the feedback of your voice. If the problem is originating electrically, advise the other party that their telephone cables may need to be replaced."
I told that to a friend at a publishing company. He and I had a good laugh. He'll go ahead and have the lines replaced right away.
Frankly, I think you're full of it. I'm a Mac owner, so I have no horse in this race, but everything I've seen indicates that emulated games run slower on Linux. If that's not a problem for you, cool, but don't misinform people just to defend your choice.
"Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point. Period. Allow me to repeat this. Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point."
I'm so sick to death of hearing this. Windows will NOT connect to an unsecured wireless network automatically with the SP2 wireless tools. The connection will show up in your list, but you have to click the connect button before it will actually connect you. Once you've connected, the network shows up in your profile, and the OS will continue to use the network until you delete it.
The fact is you must actively select the unsecured wireless network in order to use it.
To add insult to injury, he later states, "For IE users, you can use the eDrawings internet plugin to view a 3d rotatable version here." Make up your mind already!
The statement "I'd run OS X if I could run it on cheap hardware" is moot. Joe user upgrades operating systems when he upgrades PCs, and Apple already offers an inexpensive solution.
There's always the argument that you and I (people who know how to install an operating system) would run it on existing hardware, but that's comparatively small when you look at the entire market.
It really doesn't make sense for Apple to license OS X for use on just any box.
I don't understand why Scientology isn't more popular with Slashdotters. I mean, how many religions are there where you can level up to a Level III Operating Thetan?
Rather than buy more companies, why not develop some of their current ideas beyond the point of "Beta".
Sometimes I think that Google uses the term Beta just to make users feel like their in some kind of exclusive, pre-release club. Beta as a branding concept. Who would have thought!?
I know a lot of people who work with Macs daily (in the publishing business), and they were pretty put out by the OS X change because it was such a revolution, and their existing software (lots of it, and expensive) ran like shit on 10.1. Five licenses of Quark at almost $700 a piece ain't cheap. This alienated them, and they're still running OS 9.2 on older hardware because of it.
They're slowly warming up to OS X, but now Apple is about to hit their user base with another HUGE change. No doubt, vendors like Adobe are facing a huge task now that Apple has gone x86. This means yet another round of application optimization and changes, because let's face it, binaries intended for one platform WILL take a hit on another.
In the future, will people who own a PPC based machine running OS X be part of a small niche within a niche?
I'm facing the same challenge as the article submitter. The boss has a log cabin in NC, but no cable or broadband service. If you want to know what works, talk to installers. Starband/Direcway is crap. The upload bandwidth sucks. An installer in Sylva, NC has turned me on to a company called DataBahn. I don't know how much of their pitch is signal vs noise, but it sounds interesting:
I'm pretty sure there is actually a trojan at work here. It is attempting to download an exe to my computer. Even if it's not a trojan, I don't want anyone attempting to download executables to my computer. Consider the link questionable.
Sidenote: It may be the SWF? Don't know if that's even possible.
I think Anita's point was that we see far to many paper launches these days. This obviously isn't ATI/nVidia or AMD/Intel levels of paper-launchdom, but the product isn't in the supply chain yet, so it's not actually launched.
Slashdot Mirror
Couple points of clarification:
Lights - Not every location has a light switch. Some use special "key" like devices to operate the lights, others are automated and use limited lighting in off hours. Also, you don't go walking through turning on every light in the building while en route to your location inside the building, so you're still cruising with your mag light, even when you can turn the lights on.
Repo men - I'm not a repo man. I work in Bankruptcy administration. I work for a consultation firm that is normally employed by the Trustee (who represents the unsecured creditors in a bankruptcy). It is not always an option to shut down a business, because the Trustee faces liability if the business can continue to operate and bring in money still tied up WIP (work in progress). Sometimes "operational cooperation" is important. Most of the time we have the ability to walk into the office during normal operating hours and image someone's hard drive on the spot. It all depends on the goals.
Education - I wish I had more information for you here. There are a wide range of individuals in computer forensics. Some are law enforcement who fell into the computer field. Some are IT workers who are drawn to forensics. Rather than educational recommendations, I'd recommend that you get comfortable with some of the tools. There are some free forensic tools out there that are based on common Unix utilities, as well as some commercial products. EnCase is one of the more popular. Being handy with regular expressions is a huge plus when performing analysis. One of the biggest challenges is weeding through too much information. Also, the field requires a lot of diversity. You'll be dealing with all types of systems; sometimes not even a computer. One growing area is acquiring office products. A lot of copy machines have hard disks in them. Digital copiers scan the image to disk then run the copies from the cached image. We try to recover this data. Diversity is key.
The smoking gun - Definitely a thrill. We recently delivered key evidence in a pretty significant case. The person being prosecuted was infamous in their circle. A Google search for this person turned up a lot of flaming results. That made me feel really good to have a hand in putting him in prison (this was a state receivership turned criminal).
-Users don't run as Administrator by default in a domain
Yet the admin/user model is still broken in XP
-Fast switching isn't useful in most domains
Says who? It'd be nice to FUS to an admin account without repeating, "Do you need to save this?" ten times to a user.
*You can do system images for fairly disparate hardware already, but not completely different.
And all the fun that comes along with changing the SID and testing to make sure your hardware changes don't break the image? I'll take any improvement we can get here.
-There are already public recovery disks
Which are hacks that violate the EULA
-You can already get real shells
You will hear no complaints from me if MS wants to improve the default shell.
*I'm sure a more advanced task scheduler is useful _somewhere_
Uuuh yeah. The current scheduler is pretty weak. Improvements welcome... again.
Some of these are very welcome improvements to Windows. I think you downplay them too much.
Honestly, this job is probably the coolest I've done. We get the run of any joint we enter. We get to crack people's passwords, read their stuff, and pry into the details that they're trying to hide.
Outside of the unreal timeframe, it is a bit like television. I've been on location at 1 AM acquiring hard drives so that the debtor principles didn't know what we were doing. Walking through the data center with my mag light at that hour of the morning comes pretty close to that feeling you get when you watch CSI on TV. Most of the time, we tell the people on location we're making "backups" of the data so that we can preserve the data in the event of a crash. There's definitely a social element to forensic work (at least in bankruptcy cases).
A typical acquisition may go something like this:
You set up, pull your forms, start noting observations, pull the drives, hook them up to the little black box connected to your laptop's firewire port (a write-blocker), and start having a look at the data. If you've got what you're looking for, you acquire the drive and put everything back together. Boot it all up and be on your way.
You may be doing this in the CEO's office, or in the data center looking for a mail server. The top officers are usually the most important, since they have the most important correspondence and data.
It's a fun job. It's every bit as exciting as what you see on television (for once).
What what -at, did did -id, you you -ou, say say -ay?
I have Vonage, and I'd say that 7 out of 10 calls I make have some sort of quality issue. Usually Echo, sometimes stutter. I have 3072/768 kbps DSL, and I've tested the SnR at 15dB myself. My xDSL test set says the line will handle close to 6 mbps, so I know the connection is solid.
Here's a quote from the Vonage site on the echo issue:
"We recommend asking the other party to lower the phone volume in order to reduce the feedback of your voice. If the problem is originating electrically, advise the other party that their telephone cables may need to be replaced."
I told that to a friend at a publishing company. He and I had a good laugh. He'll go ahead and have the lines replaced right away.
According to the benchmarks I've seen, it doesn't even afford much in the way of performance, either.
1 01
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Frankly, I think you're full of it. I'm a Mac owner, so I have no horse in this race, but everything I've seen indicates that emulated games run slower on Linux. If that's not a problem for you, cool, but don't misinform people just to defend your choice.
"Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point. Period. Allow me to repeat this. Any Windows machine with a wireless card will automatically connect to any unsecured wireless access point." I'm so sick to death of hearing this. Windows will NOT connect to an unsecured wireless network automatically with the SP2 wireless tools. The connection will show up in your list, but you have to click the connect button before it will actually connect you. Once you've connected, the network shows up in your profile, and the OS will continue to use the network until you delete it. The fact is you must actively select the unsecured wireless network in order to use it.
To add insult to injury, he later states, "For IE users, you can use the eDrawings internet plugin to view a 3d rotatable version here." Make up your mind already!
I currently run AMD in everything I own, but they went through a real lull in the K6-2 generation. It's not been all roses.
The statement "I'd run OS X if I could run it on cheap hardware" is moot. Joe user upgrades operating systems when he upgrades PCs, and Apple already offers an inexpensive solution.
There's always the argument that you and I (people who know how to install an operating system) would run it on existing hardware, but that's comparatively small when you look at the entire market.
It really doesn't make sense for Apple to license OS X for use on just any box.
Doesn't mean they like it.
I don't understand why Scientology isn't more popular with Slashdotters. I mean, how many religions are there where you can level up to a Level III Operating Thetan?
That's because it's the weekend and no one is at work. Who has time to browse slashdot on their own time?
all the people crying about insignificant editorial differences. Seriously, does it hurt your head all that much to read a little slang?
News organizations ought to supply full transcripts of interviews so readers can determine exactly how on the mark the editing is.
Process Explorer is overkill for this purpose. Unlocker works nicely. http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/index.htm#redirec t
...Windows XP support "officially ends" before Longhorn is released?
Rather than buy more companies, why not develop some of their current ideas beyond the point of "Beta".
Sometimes I think that Google uses the term Beta just to make users feel like their in some kind of exclusive, pre-release club. Beta as a branding concept. Who would have thought!?
...the guts of a washing machine into a refrigerator, do I get my press release on slashdot too?
http://www.spectorsoft.com/
We use their eBlaster product. I'm pretty sure it captures key strokes based on window title hooks, so https won't do anybody any good.
Precisely. What about the users!?
I know a lot of people who work with Macs daily (in the publishing business), and they were pretty put out by the OS X change because it was such a revolution, and their existing software (lots of it, and expensive) ran like shit on 10.1. Five licenses of Quark at almost $700 a piece ain't cheap. This alienated them, and they're still running OS 9.2 on older hardware because of it.
They're slowly warming up to OS X, but now Apple is about to hit their user base with another HUGE change. No doubt, vendors like Adobe are facing a huge task now that Apple has gone x86. This means yet another round of application optimization and changes, because let's face it, binaries intended for one platform WILL take a hit on another.
In the future, will people who own a PPC based machine running OS X be part of a small niche within a niche?
I'm facing the same challenge as the article submitter. The boss has a log cabin in NC, but no cable or broadband service. If you want to know what works, talk to installers. Starband/Direcway is crap. The upload bandwidth sucks. An installer in Sylva, NC has turned me on to a company called DataBahn. I don't know how much of their pitch is signal vs noise, but it sounds interesting:
DataBahn products page
Anyone have any experience with this company? Testaments? Ridicule?
I'm pretty sure there is actually a trojan at work here. It is attempting to download an exe to my computer. Even if it's not a trojan, I don't want anyone attempting to download executables to my computer. Consider the link questionable.
Sidenote: It may be the SWF? Don't know if that's even possible.
the yuppie leechers go out and spend $120 on a spare battery... to save fifty cents on a cup of coffee.
Leeching, it's not just an activity, it's a way of life.
I think Anita's point was that we see far to many paper launches these days. This obviously isn't ATI/nVidia or AMD/Intel levels of paper-launchdom, but the product isn't in the supply chain yet, so it's not actually launched.
"Expected" = wake me up when they're here