However, computers are very useful tools in *any* lifestyle and they help save a lot of time and resources. Living without computers and e-mail these days is nearly as cumbersome as being illiterate. Let me temporarily step into the shoes of Joe Shmoe. I get up in the morning, brush my teeth, take a shower, get dressed and head out to my construction job. I work hard for 8-9 hours. During the day I grab some coffee and some lunch. I listen to the radio. I come home to my wife at night, picking up some groceries on the way. We have dinner together. I go hang out with the guys at the bar for a while, we chat about the game on TV and whether we like Hillary or Obama better. I head back home, help put the kids to bed and turn in.
Why do I need to use a computer, and what is the big difference it's going to make in my life?
I often feel sad that I'm so tied to the computer and similar devices - there are plenty of people out there who I feel live a fuller life than I do simply because they're not attached so heavily to computers. While we're sitting here writing to each other on Slashdot about people who don't use e-mail, others who perhaps don't use e-mail are spending time with their families and friends. I would not say I'm envious of people who don't use e-mail, but I can see the positive side of it.
Why does everything come down to carbon emissions lately, and what does that have to do with the summary. But sure, I'll bite. You're using e-mail. The entire time you're writing it you're sitting at a computer using between 150W and 300W (typical). Probably half a dozen devices between your computer and the destination server are responsible for transmitting the packets over long distances (your modem, the various routers and mail servers). The NSA intercepts your e-mail, automatically runs AI on it in a massive data farm, which uses quite a lot of CPU time. Meanwhile a letter is read with zero power emissions at both ends, and it is transported with tens of thousands of other letters, the inefficient part of the transport being only near the local destination.
But honestly, I just pulled that out of my ass, and so did you, and probably so will anyone else who replies. But that will still be more interesting than the questions raised in the summary..
Darnit, I am going to have to RTFA. I want to know if they send and receive text messages. HI I R NIGERIAN, I HAVE $200K, NEED UR BANK DETAILS FOR TRANSACTION, HURRY, U WILL B RICH!
What are the implications of this statistic to our society? None. If people needed to use e-mail then they would use e-mail. The summary seems to imply that if you've never sent an e-mail there is something wrong with you or you fail at life. I can think of plenty of careers that don't even involve working with computers, and some people like to enjoy a more "disconnected" lifestyle.
Or are these people just Luddites who mourned the demise of the telegraph and have also never used a telephone? I don't know, TFA doesn't seem to mention that. Why don't you accuse them of being illiterate freaks or something while you're at it?
From TFA:
"Many people just don't see a reason to use computers and do not associate technology with the needs and demands of their daily lives," Barrett said. Shocker.
The problem with the "invisible to antivirus" argument is that it assumes the system is pre-infected. To root a remote system you need to get the code onto the system and execute the software that puts it in SMM, and during that process any anti-virus is able to inspect it. The question is will the anti-virus heuristics or signature-based methods actually catch it?
Basically you can't carry it out because every chipset blocks write access to this memory part by doing a complete remapping of the memory layout in hardware. But TFA says someone has carried it out and will demo it in August.
Fairlight group have earned their place on my personal "heroes" list.
Their demoscene releases are really classy productions, unlike many other scene releases that are just a mix-and-match rehash of old demo effects. If you are interested you should check out Track One, Come Clean, and Media Error as just a few examples.
Captures can be found on YouTube if you have problems running them yourself, TrackOne may report a missing D3D.dll file. You can find copies of it in their other releases, just drop it in the same folder.
I'm glad you replied, this was another point I wanted to make.
Not only would putting together a conspiracy like this be extraordinarily difficult given the number of people involved who would potentially leak information about said conspiracy, it would be a terrific success of social engineering coupled with a vastly incompetent plan to begin with. Hardly a month has gone by in the Bush administration where there wasn't a scandal, big news or a big decision of some sort that hit the newswire. From TFA:
According to McDevitt, the new system was set up and configured during 2005 and was "ready to go live" in August 2006. But the White House CIO, Theresa Payton, reportedly aborted the project in late 2006, citing perceived inadequacies with the system's performance and its ability segregate official presidential correspondence from political or personal materials. McDervitt resigned in protest soon afterwards. So basically the IT guys said to the administration in 2006, "Hey, you know that system you need to comply with retention laws? We've built it and it's ready to go!", and the administration replied, "Uh.. yeah... it's um.. it's uh... oh yes, too slow! It doesn't back up our e-mails nearly fast enough! Uh.. scrap it!".
This to me screams of a conspiracy to avoid the retention of e-mail. How can there be performance inadequacies on a system that presumably runs server side? End users (i.e. officials) would never even have been bothered with it. Of course, since they then contracted someone else, they will say "look, we tried to do the right thing!".
Sending a guy who works for white house IT to jail might make you feel better I don't want to see the guy in IT go to jail, it sounds like he/she/they did their job. It also sounds like McDervitt saw through the administrations efforts, which I maintain at face value looks like conspiracy, and resigned over it. I give a big thumbs up to that guy.
The part that I find difficult to swallow is that they decided to change to Exchange knowing that it didn't meet the retention requirements and knowing that they've have to have aides sorting through millions of e-mails. I can't even imagine the kind of thinking that allowed that to happen, other than to make a *cough* "plausible" *cough* case for e-mail going missing.
Still, how did such volumes of e-mail actually disappear? Either aides were sorting all e-mails into individual PST files and thus all the e-mails are archived, or they were selectively failing to sort some of the e-mails into the archives, which is illegal.
Files were "scattered across various servers" on the network of the Executive Office of the President, and there "was no consistently applied naming convention" for the files. It's hardly surprising that things tended to get lost. No, it is surprising. Unless someone was deleting the files and the network drive was not backed up (e.g. to tape), all the files should be recoverable and it seems like it should be quite easy to write some software that runs through backups and the network drive, grabs all the files that have mail headers, and compile all the unique message ID's into one archive.
Even more troubling, due to a lack of redundancy and proper access controls, anyone with access to the White House servers could have tampered with or deleted the e-mails in the archives. And without adequate logging facilities, there might be no way to determine who might have tampered with the files or what might have been changed. So what you're saying there is the White House has a huge file share with archives of everyones e-mails, the kind we can't even see because of the risk to national security, and it's not possible to know who might have deleted files because the list of people with access is so vast and there was no access control? Jesus. Public companies have stricter requirements than the US government.
Payton claims that the White House is working on yet another archiving system. But until it's completed--and it's now looking increasingly unlikely that it will be operational before the end of the administration Well there is a shocker. Imagine the Bush administration failing to finish a project during their term that might lead to them being held accountable later. I mean, it's not like they have tried to grant themselves retroactive immunity or anything..
A 2005 analysis performed by McDevitt (while he was still on the White House Staff) found over 700 days with e-mails apparently missing from the "journaling" archives, including 12 days in which all e-mails from the president's immediate office were missing, and 16 days when all e-mails from the Vice President's office were missing. So we aren't just talking about aides failing to archive the occasional e-mail.
As if that weren't bad enough, there is also evidence that some senior Bush administration officials have taken to using non-government e-mail accounts as a way to skirt the requirements of federal law. Great! How many senior Bush administration officials have faced federal prosecution for this? Nobody gets prosecuted = nobody cares about the law.
.. to have trade secret protection on a voting machine. In fact, any protection that prevents the public understanding exactly how the machine works ought to entirely undermine confidence in the system to such an extent that systems whose design and software is not in the public domain should be banned from use.
If we're talking tapes, we're probably talking old mainframe-level systems. Thats a bit of a supposition. How long has it been since tape drives hit the mainstream for large backups on cheap media? A really long time!
Why would you still use antiquated mainframes for your backups, particularly if it's 2 million records? If something happened at your site you'd need a similarly antiquated mainframe just to get your data back. That makes very little sense.
Encryption is never mentioned, and I believe if there had been any encryption that it certainly would have been, and that they would not even bother having someone try to decode data on a similar tape.
All they need to do is create a TrueCrypt container or the like and write the data to be backed up into it before copying it to the archival medium. Then you don't need an armored vehicle, or even a stun gun. You could literally walk down the street with a disk in your hand inviting people to steal it, because it wouldn't matter at that point - the data is secured to such a degree that it is questionable whether even the government could access it. Of course, you wouldn't handle the archive that way regardless, but I would not care so much if a disk containing my details was lost if it was encrypted with AES/256-bit key and upon investigation a reputable agency (i.e. the FBI) released a statement saying that the passphrase met certain standards for data security.
There needs to be a law regarding data encryption. Virtually every time data is stolen, be it on CDs, laptops, backup tapes, missing hard drives, and so forth, it is not encrypted. In fact, I can think of only one case that has made press in the last 4-5 years that I can remember encryption being used to safeguard the data.
Transporting confidential data off-site via any medium, including the Internet, without industry-recognized encryption (not something that is proprietary and untested) ought to be a criminal offense with severe penalties.
TFA talks about proprietary compression and encoding and not about encryption. I simply do not believe that it is difficult to recover that data - whatever proprietary software wrote those files can be obtained from somewhere for a price. You can probably Google the file extension or some information in the header to determine the format and/or software.
"The university feels confident that the person who took [the tapes] doesn't know what they have." They do now!
"Even though I am confident that our patients' data is safe, we felt that in the best interest of the physician-patient relationship we should be transparent in this matter." That data is not safe. At best it is in an obscure, but not secure format.
It's incredible, really. Since TrueCrypt 5.0 arrived,I don't even carry my work laptop or flash drives around without either full disk encryption or encrypted container files on them, and they do not contain anything as sensitive as 2 million medical records.
So then the government is violating your freedom by preventing your travel.
Also, the government could theoretically force you to waive my rights to do any number of things, why do you let them do it at the border? At the border, are Americans not American citizens on American soil? I could see invasive searches being reasonable at your destination, if it is outside the United States. The destination country is not subject to the US constitution.
I don't accept the argument that "this is how it is, deal with it" as an end to the discussion, although the government might like that.
Perhaps, but my point is that what is theoretically possible and what has been realized and is actually available are two very different things, and what is "theoretical" is not what you are actually paying for.
I'll happily sell you my desktop PC for $18,000. Theoretically, one day you'll be able to upgrade it to what is now considered a supercomputer for $300 in parts.
Data density is theoretically unlimited. No it isn't, it's 300GB per cartridge.
A scratch can easily damage either one of them, and repairs are not easy. Holographic Medium? Apparently not. I'll believe that when I see it and when you don't need to pay for expensive services to recover data from a damaged disk, i.e. any normal reader can do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I need to use a computer, and what is the big difference it's going to make in my life?
I often feel sad that I'm so tied to the computer and similar devices - there are plenty of people out there who I feel live a fuller life than I do simply because they're not attached so heavily to computers. While we're sitting here writing to each other on Slashdot about people who don't use e-mail, others who perhaps don't use e-mail are spending time with their families and friends. I would not say I'm envious of people who don't use e-mail, but I can see the positive side of it.
Why does everything come down to carbon emissions lately, and what does that have to do with the summary. But sure, I'll bite. You're using e-mail. The entire time you're writing it you're sitting at a computer using between 150W and 300W (typical). Probably half a dozen devices between your computer and the destination server are responsible for transmitting the packets over long distances (your modem, the various routers and mail servers). The NSA intercepts your e-mail, automatically runs AI on it in a massive data farm, which uses quite a lot of CPU time. Meanwhile a letter is read with zero power emissions at both ends, and it is transported with tens of thousands of other letters, the inefficient part of the transport being only near the local destination.
But honestly, I just pulled that out of my ass, and so did you, and probably so will anyone else who replies. But that will still be more interesting than the questions raised in the summary..
From TFA: "Many people just don't see a reason to use computers and do not associate technology with the needs and demands of their daily lives," Barrett said. Shocker.
Isn't inserting ads into pages creating unlicensed derivative works and subverting revenue ala Gator back in the day?
The problem with the "invisible to antivirus" argument is that it assumes the system is pre-infected. To root a remote system you need to get the code onto the system and execute the software that puts it in SMM, and during that process any anti-virus is able to inspect it. The question is will the anti-virus heuristics or signature-based methods actually catch it?
Maybe TorrentSpy should open-source their entire system and upload it to TPB...
UAVs Will Study Californians.
For more, see my post here.
Fairlight group have earned their place on my personal "heroes" list.
.dll file. You can find copies of it in their other releases, just drop it in the same folder.
Their demoscene releases are really classy productions, unlike many other scene releases that are just a mix-and-match rehash of old demo effects. If you are interested you should check out Track One, Come Clean, and Media Error as just a few examples.
Captures can be found on YouTube if you have problems running them yourself, TrackOne may report a missing D3D
This to me screams of a conspiracy to avoid the retention of e-mail. How can there be performance inadequacies on a system that presumably runs server side? End users (i.e. officials) would never even have been bothered with it. Of course, since they then contracted someone else, they will say "look, we tried to do the right thing!". Sending a guy who works for white house IT to jail might make you feel better I don't want to see the guy in IT go to jail, it sounds like he/she/they did their job. It also sounds like McDervitt saw through the administrations efforts, which I maintain at face value looks like conspiracy, and resigned over it. I give a big thumbs up to that guy.
Still, how did such volumes of e-mail actually disappear? Either aides were sorting all e-mails into individual PST files and thus all the e-mails are archived, or they were selectively failing to sort some of the e-mails into the archives, which is illegal. Files were "scattered across various servers" on the network of the Executive Office of the President, and there "was no consistently applied naming convention" for the files. It's hardly surprising that things tended to get lost. No, it is surprising. Unless someone was deleting the files and the network drive was not backed up (e.g. to tape), all the files should be recoverable and it seems like it should be quite easy to write some software that runs through backups and the network drive, grabs all the files that have mail headers, and compile all the unique message ID's into one archive. Even more troubling, due to a lack of redundancy and proper access controls, anyone with access to the White House servers could have tampered with or deleted the e-mails in the archives. And without adequate logging facilities, there might be no way to determine who might have tampered with the files or what might have been changed. So what you're saying there is the White House has a huge file share with archives of everyones e-mails, the kind we can't even see because of the risk to national security, and it's not possible to know who might have deleted files because the list of people with access is so vast and there was no access control? Jesus. Public companies have stricter requirements than the US government. Payton claims that the White House is working on yet another archiving system. But until it's completed--and it's now looking increasingly unlikely that it will be operational before the end of the administration Well there is a shocker. Imagine the Bush administration failing to finish a project during their term that might lead to them being held accountable later. I mean, it's not like they have tried to grant themselves retroactive immunity or anything.. A 2005 analysis performed by McDevitt (while he was still on the White House Staff) found over 700 days with e-mails apparently missing from the "journaling" archives, including 12 days in which all e-mails from the president's immediate office were missing, and 16 days when all e-mails from the Vice President's office were missing. So we aren't just talking about aides failing to archive the occasional e-mail. As if that weren't bad enough, there is also evidence that some senior Bush administration officials have taken to using non-government e-mail accounts as a way to skirt the requirements of federal law. Great! How many senior Bush administration officials have faced federal prosecution for this? Nobody gets prosecuted = nobody cares about the law.
.. to have trade secret protection on a voting machine. In fact, any protection that prevents the public understanding exactly how the machine works ought to entirely undermine confidence in the system to such an extent that systems whose design and software is not in the public domain should be banned from use.
I've seen nearly every episode of Star Trek and I've yet to spot a single Mac as anything other than an extra!
Why would you still use antiquated mainframes for your backups, particularly if it's 2 million records? If something happened at your site you'd need a similarly antiquated mainframe just to get your data back. That makes very little sense.
Encryption is never mentioned, and I believe if there had been any encryption that it certainly would have been, and that they would not even bother having someone try to decode data on a similar tape.
All they need to do is create a TrueCrypt container or the like and write the data to be backed up into it before copying it to the archival medium. Then you don't need an armored vehicle, or even a stun gun. You could literally walk down the street with a disk in your hand inviting people to steal it, because it wouldn't matter at that point - the data is secured to such a degree that it is questionable whether even the government could access it. Of course, you wouldn't handle the archive that way regardless, but I would not care so much if a disk containing my details was lost if it was encrypted with AES/256-bit key and upon investigation a reputable agency (i.e. the FBI) released a statement saying that the passphrase met certain standards for data security.
Transporting confidential data off-site via any medium, including the Internet, without industry-recognized encryption (not something that is proprietary and untested) ought to be a criminal offense with severe penalties.
TFA talks about proprietary compression and encoding and not about encryption. I simply do not believe that it is difficult to recover that data - whatever proprietary software wrote those files can be obtained from somewhere for a price. You can probably Google the file extension or some information in the header to determine the format and/or software. "The university feels confident that the person who took [the tapes] doesn't know what they have." They do now! "Even though I am confident that our patients' data is safe, we felt that in the best interest of the physician-patient relationship we should be transparent in this matter." That data is not safe. At best it is in an obscure, but not secure format.
It's incredible, really. Since TrueCrypt 5.0 arrived,I don't even carry my work laptop or flash drives around without either full disk encryption or encrypted container files on them, and they do not contain anything as sensitive as 2 million medical records.
Uh, force you to waive your rights.
Must.. remember... preview...
So then the government is violating your freedom by preventing your travel.
Also, the government could theoretically force you to waive my rights to do any number of things, why do you let them do it at the border? At the border, are Americans not American citizens on American soil? I could see invasive searches being reasonable at your destination, if it is outside the United States. The destination country is not subject to the US constitution.
I don't accept the argument that "this is how it is, deal with it" as an end to the discussion, although the government might like that.
Perhaps, but my point is that what is theoretically possible and what has been realized and is actually available are two very different things, and what is "theoretical" is not what you are actually paying for.
I'll happily sell you my desktop PC for $18,000. Theoretically, one day you'll be able to upgrade it to what is now considered a supercomputer for $300 in parts.
What happens when you divide by zero on a calculator using a physical engine?
Does it explode? Will it create a black hole? Could this be the next doomsday device?