Exactly. My first instinct was that both their HR and budget process must suck completely if they need to take these kinds of drastic measures this quickly.
Sadly, there is no real (much less free) market in these industries, and with only a hand full of players to pick from, the government can't do the right thing, which would be to say "if you can't go through such a problem for even a few days without firing people, you are too unreliable and we're cancelling all your contracts".
You are a troll, you know it, and it makes you deeply unhappy, but you don't know what else to do with your sorry life. I do with mine, so goodbye, I'd be lying if I said I pity you, because I don't pity pathetic people.
You have almost 2.5 billion Internet users who use IP today. When you've figured out how to convince them of changing to something else, then you have something worth talking about. Until you've solved that fundamental issue, all you have is a cute tech idea.
Reworking the Internet (as necessary as it is, I agree on that) is not so much a technological problem.
This is the same company that wants you to rely on their security as the only way to their products now that they only rent a cloud based versions of Acrobat Suite.
This.
I was actually on the verge of buying some of their stuff just a week ago. Decided against it when I found out they don't sell standalone versions anymore.
because I've read history books and noticed again and again that the most ruthless, sociopathic, often bloodthirsty control freaks are the ones who want power so badly that they'll do anything to achieve it. That's the nature of government.
Give that man a cookie.
I had a few years in an elected position. In the end, I gave it up because I couldn't take standing up against the egomaniac psychopaths anymore whose only concern was themselves and their position. These people will win out because people like you or me will reach a point where we just can't take it any longer, but for them it's the meaning of life.
They don't care about the NSA because they "aren't doing anything wrong".
They are missing the experience of living in a police state, bless them. One of the reasons Germany is a little (not enough, but a little) less ignorant of this is that many of its citizens still remember the GDR and the Stasi.
Even risking to Gowdin this, but maybe it gets them thinking to tell them that the Jews in Germany also thought they didn't do anything wrong. The Nazis, on the other hand, were very happy that religious affiliation was on government record and were extremely efficient in rounding up all the Jews who, remember, didn't do anything wrong.
I mean that. Nothing has changed. The issue is still the same: At some point you have to trust someone. Not everyone can write their own software. Even fewer can write their own operating system. Only very few can write their own compiler. Almost nobody can build their own hardware. Unless you are a government agency with almost unlimited budget, you have to trust someone at some point.
It may not be the provider of your technology - it can be someone checking it. The way we don't bring every piece of food we buy in the supermarket to a lab to check it, but trust that by and large the checks in place make sure food is safe. And before you cite some case where it wasn't: Nothing is 100% perfect, but in many areas in our civilized world we are coming damn near close.
IT is still a toddler, and as such we don't yet have the experience and knowledge to deal with it very well. Plus it keeps growing and changing, making some plans obsolete.
But if this really changes anything you did in a fundamental way, then you did it wrong before. You should already treat unencrypted Internet communication as being public, for example. You should already assume that Google and Facebook are reading your data and doing stuff with it. You should already not be a bloody fool who trusts any idiot who comes along and says "hi".
You should actually look up the definition of things you say '.. is by definition'
Thanks for looking that up for me. While you were at it, please look up the word "context". Anyone whose life consists of more than living out xkcd 386 understood easily enough that a company of soldiers is unlikely to have an IT security department, and that while the company of a beautiful member of the opposite (or same, whatever your preference is) sex may be a fantastic way to spend the evening, it is unlikely to entail general issues of information security. As such, even Cyc would have correctly calculated the correct definition to apply towards a semantically correct interpretation.
Of course, being human beings, we are capable of intentionally focussing and the incorrect contextual hints in order to make a point, crack a joke or just be a troll of extraordinary density.
It's not my country, I'm proud to not be american.
And looking around anywhere on the planet should quickly educate anyone to what the chances are that the armed forces will not be putting down an uprising. Uh... it happens. Almost exclusively if said uprising is peaceful (e.g. arab spring). As soon as you take up arms, the army will squash you like a bug, 2nd amendment or not.
The only country where I'm quite certain the army would not stop an armed revolution is Switzerland.
In my experience, it's much more rare to find a company that knows about security than to find one that doesn't.
They are actually pretty easy to find.
If they have more than about 500 employees, check if they have an official IT security position. Might be some guy doing other stuff in addition, but he's got to be the official IT security guy.
If they have more than about 1000 employees, check if they have an IT security department with at least one full-time employee.
If they have more than 2000 employees, check if they have a CSO or CISO.
If they have, you just need to verify that it's not an alibi position to satisfy some compliance rules. If they don't have, you already know they got no clue.
Business can always be estimated by checking if they commit to a regular expense on a topic. Occasional security checks mean nothing, they're usually done when someone needs to cover their asses. A permanent financial commitment is the only thing that means something in a business context.
The problem is that they usually aren't. There is a lot of office politics that usually means that the higher up the hierarchy you are, the less secure your computer is going to be. One company I worked for made a company-wide security check and found a number of open, unsecured dial-in modems attached to phone lines on the one side and desktop computers on the corporate network on the other. All but one of them belonged to managers.
Aside from everyone working in IT security. Or everyone working in IT. Or everyone with 3 working brain cells. So, basically, everyone except middle management.
What I've seen in IT security in most companies is pretty pathetic. They would fall to the first dedicated attacker. And, indeed, reports like the yearly Verizon report show that they do.
But here's the catch: A company is by definition an entity that exists for the sole purpose of making money. As long as the damage from security incidents is lower than the cost to reduce them, it is actually the correct business decision to not improve security. If you view security without risk management, you are a fanatic.
constitution and the right to bear arms was written specifically because the founding fathers wanted to ensure that you guys had an option if you didn't trust your government.
It was also written before the invention of tanks, airplanes, combat helicopters, mass surveilance, chemical warfare and a thousand other things that make it extremely unlikely that a militia would be able to resist the army for even a day.
Note that the NSA's mandate is FOREIGN signals intelligence gathering.
Still, the extent and aggressiveness was revealing even to those of us who've been putting "president, attack, airplane, bomb" into our e-mails as a joke for a decade or so.
What kind of fantasy world are you living in where pissing off several of the most powerful intelligence agencies is not risking your life? These guys routinely kill people for a lot less.
Plus awards should be given for what you did and what good that caused to happen, not for what evil has befallen you. If that were what matters, there are many thousands who had it much worse than a headshot.
A great gain for Europeans, as far as awareness of human rights issues.
I wish.
Unfortunately, the global elite that's playing power games is super-national and has been for many years. It's been very, very obvious that nobody in my countries government really gave a shit about the whole NSA stuff. I personally think that half of them would easily be convicted of breaking their oath to protect the constitution and the people, if only someone had the guts to bring charges.
If that happens, the spectacle has officially won. Someone saying something that's a brave thing to say and getting an unusually extreme reaction to it isn't even on the same scale as someone revealing a world-wide illegal conspiracy affecting pretty much everyone in the civilized world.
They don't have that many smart people working there, in comparison with ALL of the rest of the world.
Actually, the NSA has for decades been the by far largest employer of mathematicians, world-wide.
The do have tons of smart people working for them, and contrary to the rest of the world, those don't work on optimizing Zynga games or production lines or any of the other million other areas, they all work on crypto, surveilance, etc.
In a crypto contest between the NSA and the rest of the world combined, I'd bet on the NSA. Mostly because the rest of the world would break apart in a flame war and uses 20 different languages.
Bitcoin uses a different philosophy. The below is pretty rough, as I've just started to understand it all myself.
Fiat currencies as we have them right now are unlimited money related to limited resources. If the number of goods in the economy grows, the money can grow as well, keeping it balance. But it doesn't have to, it can also grow slower or faster. In general, it grows faster, creating inflation.
Gold or other backed currencies were limited money related to limited resources. They would grow if the amount of gold (or whatever) grew, so the expansion of money was largely unrelated to the changes in the overall economy, which is pretty bad, but worked for a while because the amount of gold was not growing or shrinking dramatically. Until the spanish hauled it home by the boatload from the New World.
Bitcoin is the strange new beast: A limited amount of money related to a limited resource, but with a well known growth potential and limit. While also unrelated to the currency, this means that it is not erratic. It also tends towards deflation rather then inflation. Once the financial sector, which is built entirely on inflation, catches on, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple of fatal accidents. Bitcoin isn't undermining any particular currency, it is undermining the currency system.
And yes, the economic danger with Bitcoin is that as it becomes more valuable over time, hoarding it can be more profitable then investing it. Our current economic system is fueled by inflation because for the rich, investing is more profitable than being Scrooge McDuck. However that same system continuously shafts the non-rich, i.e. the 99%. If we had constant deflation instead of constant inflation, saving up for your retirement, or house, or car, would be so much easier.
Imagine you had started to work in 1950. You'd be about ready to retire. The accumulated inflation between 1950 and today is 870.4%. The first years of savings you may have accumulated are worth about 10% of what you put in today. Interest is the only thing saving your day. The game worked well for a couple decades, but interest rates have been laughable for a decade now with inflation staying largely constant.
Make no mistake. Inflation is not your friend if you aren't super-rich. A currency that won't inflate will have a dramatic impact on our economic system. What exactly remains to be seen, but at least the old games won't work anymore.
Robert A. Heinlein wrote "Take back your Government" in 1946. I'll simply assume everyone here knows Heinlein.
So you're telling me that in close to 50 years, you haven't been able to read that book or do what's written inside, which is basically a step-by-step instruction on exactly what the title says because of exactly the same problems you're having today?
Sorry, but I actually am with the terrorists on this one: Your government is your responsibility. Not yours personally, but plural-yours as in "the people".
As long as you keep electing these fuckers, it can't be so bad. Bad enough for some whining, but apparently not bad enough to get up, switch off the TV and fucking do something about it. Yes, it's gonna be a little bit more difficult than a raid in WoW. That's not a reason not to start. Today.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. My first instinct was that both their HR and budget process must suck completely if they need to take these kinds of drastic measures this quickly.
Sadly, there is no real (much less free) market in these industries, and with only a hand full of players to pick from, the government can't do the right thing, which would be to say "if you can't go through such a problem for even a few days without firing people, you are too unreliable and we're cancelling all your contracts".
You are a troll, you know it, and it makes you deeply unhappy, but you don't know what else to do with your sorry life. I do with mine, so goodbye, I'd be lying if I said I pity you, because I don't pity pathetic people.
Ah, another cute geek solution.
You have almost 2.5 billion Internet users who use IP today. When you've figured out how to convince them of changing to something else, then you have something worth talking about. Until you've solved that fundamental issue, all you have is a cute tech idea.
Reworking the Internet (as necessary as it is, I agree on that) is not so much a technological problem.
This is the same company that wants you to rely on their security as the only way to their products now that they only rent a cloud based versions of Acrobat Suite.
This.
I was actually on the verge of buying some of their stuff just a week ago. Decided against it when I found out they don't sell standalone versions anymore.
So, post a story when it is, not when it isn't. Because, you know, you could post that story daily.
because I've read history books and noticed again and again that the most ruthless, sociopathic, often bloodthirsty control freaks are the ones who want power so badly that they'll do anything to achieve it. That's the nature of government.
Give that man a cookie.
I had a few years in an elected position. In the end, I gave it up because I couldn't take standing up against the egomaniac psychopaths anymore whose only concern was themselves and their position. These people will win out because people like you or me will reach a point where we just can't take it any longer, but for them it's the meaning of life.
They don't care about the NSA because they "aren't doing anything wrong".
They are missing the experience of living in a police state, bless them. One of the reasons Germany is a little (not enough, but a little) less ignorant of this is that many of its citizens still remember the GDR and the Stasi.
Even risking to Gowdin this, but maybe it gets them thinking to tell them that the Jews in Germany also thought they didn't do anything wrong. The Nazis, on the other hand, were very happy that religious affiliation was on government record and were extremely efficient in rounding up all the Jews who, remember, didn't do anything wrong.
I mean that. Nothing has changed. The issue is still the same: At some point you have to trust someone. Not everyone can write their own software. Even fewer can write their own operating system. Only very few can write their own compiler. Almost nobody can build their own hardware. Unless you are a government agency with almost unlimited budget, you have to trust someone at some point.
It may not be the provider of your technology - it can be someone checking it. The way we don't bring every piece of food we buy in the supermarket to a lab to check it, but trust that by and large the checks in place make sure food is safe. And before you cite some case where it wasn't: Nothing is 100% perfect, but in many areas in our civilized world we are coming damn near close.
IT is still a toddler, and as such we don't yet have the experience and knowledge to deal with it very well. Plus it keeps growing and changing, making some plans obsolete.
But if this really changes anything you did in a fundamental way, then you did it wrong before. You should already treat unencrypted Internet communication as being public, for example. You should already assume that Google and Facebook are reading your data and doing stuff with it. You should already not be a bloody fool who trusts any idiot who comes along and says "hi".
You should actually look up the definition of things you say '.. is by definition'
Thanks for looking that up for me. While you were at it, please look up the word "context". Anyone whose life consists of more than living out xkcd 386 understood easily enough that a company of soldiers is unlikely to have an IT security department, and that while the company of a beautiful member of the opposite (or same, whatever your preference is) sex may be a fantastic way to spend the evening, it is unlikely to entail general issues of information security. As such, even Cyc would have correctly calculated the correct definition to apply towards a semantically correct interpretation.
Of course, being human beings, we are capable of intentionally focussing and the incorrect contextual hints in order to make a point, crack a joke or just be a troll of extraordinary density.
It's not my country, I'm proud to not be american.
And looking around anywhere on the planet should quickly educate anyone to what the chances are that the armed forces will not be putting down an uprising. Uh... it happens. Almost exclusively if said uprising is peaceful (e.g. arab spring). As soon as you take up arms, the army will squash you like a bug, 2nd amendment or not.
The only country where I'm quite certain the army would not stop an armed revolution is Switzerland.
In my experience, it's much more rare to find a company that knows about security than to find one that doesn't.
They are actually pretty easy to find.
If they have more than about 500 employees, check if they have an official IT security position. Might be some guy doing other stuff in addition, but he's got to be the official IT security guy.
If they have more than about 1000 employees, check if they have an IT security department with at least one full-time employee.
If they have more than 2000 employees, check if they have a CSO or CISO.
If they have, you just need to verify that it's not an alibi position to satisfy some compliance rules. If they don't have, you already know they got no clue.
Business can always be estimated by checking if they commit to a regular expense on a topic. Occasional security checks mean nothing, they're usually done when someone needs to cover their asses. A permanent financial commitment is the only thing that means something in a business context.
These considerations must be balanced.
The problem is that they usually aren't. There is a lot of office politics that usually means that the higher up the hierarchy you are, the less secure your computer is going to be. One company I worked for made a company-wide security check and found a number of open, unsecured dial-in modems attached to phone lines on the one side and desktop computers on the corporate network on the other. All but one of them belonged to managers.
Who would have thought?
Aside from everyone working in IT security. Or everyone working in IT. Or everyone with 3 working brain cells. So, basically, everyone except middle management.
What I've seen in IT security in most companies is pretty pathetic. They would fall to the first dedicated attacker. And, indeed, reports like the yearly Verizon report show that they do.
But here's the catch: A company is by definition an entity that exists for the sole purpose of making money. As long as the damage from security incidents is lower than the cost to reduce them, it is actually the correct business decision to not improve security. If you view security without risk management, you are a fanatic.
constitution and the right to bear arms was written specifically because the founding fathers wanted to ensure that you guys had an option if you didn't trust your government.
It was also written before the invention of tanks, airplanes, combat helicopters, mass surveilance, chemical warfare and a thousand other things that make it extremely unlikely that a militia would be able to resist the army for even a day.
What is it with you guys' inability to understand fifth grade English?
The day you write better german than I write english is the day you may complain.
epub is pretty good as it's basically HTML. I don't know about the free part (could be, could not).
Note that the NSA's mandate is FOREIGN signals intelligence gathering.
Still, the extent and aggressiveness was revealing even to those of us who've been putting "president, attack, airplane, bomb" into our e-mails as a joke for a decade or so.
Even then physical books have advantages. For example, lending an e-book still requires that the recipient uses that same reader.
Amen.
I'm sticking with actual books for most things. There are a couple exceptions where I really like the searchability of an e-book, for example.
Snowden only risked life behind bars.
What kind of fantasy world are you living in where pissing off several of the most powerful intelligence agencies is not risking your life? These guys routinely kill people for a lot less.
Plus awards should be given for what you did and what good that caused to happen, not for what evil has befallen you. If that were what matters, there are many thousands who had it much worse than a headshot.
A great gain for Europeans, as far as awareness of human rights issues.
I wish.
Unfortunately, the global elite that's playing power games is super-national and has been for many years. It's been very, very obvious that nobody in my countries government really gave a shit about the whole NSA stuff. I personally think that half of them would easily be convicted of breaking their oath to protect the constitution and the people, if only someone had the guts to bring charges.
Malala gets this one hands-down.
If that happens, the spectacle has officially won. Someone saying something that's a brave thing to say and getting an unusually extreme reaction to it isn't even on the same scale as someone revealing a world-wide illegal conspiracy affecting pretty much everyone in the civilized world.
They don't have that many smart people working there, in comparison with ALL of the rest of the world.
Actually, the NSA has for decades been the by far largest employer of mathematicians, world-wide.
The do have tons of smart people working for them, and contrary to the rest of the world, those don't work on optimizing Zynga games or production lines or any of the other million other areas, they all work on crypto, surveilance, etc.
In a crypto contest between the NSA and the rest of the world combined, I'd bet on the NSA. Mostly because the rest of the world would break apart in a flame war and uses 20 different languages.
Bitcoin uses a different philosophy. The below is pretty rough, as I've just started to understand it all myself.
Fiat currencies as we have them right now are unlimited money related to limited resources. If the number of goods in the economy grows, the money can grow as well, keeping it balance. But it doesn't have to, it can also grow slower or faster. In general, it grows faster, creating inflation.
Gold or other backed currencies were limited money related to limited resources. They would grow if the amount of gold (or whatever) grew, so the expansion of money was largely unrelated to the changes in the overall economy, which is pretty bad, but worked for a while because the amount of gold was not growing or shrinking dramatically. Until the spanish hauled it home by the boatload from the New World.
Bitcoin is the strange new beast: A limited amount of money related to a limited resource, but with a well known growth potential and limit. While also unrelated to the currency, this means that it is not erratic. It also tends towards deflation rather then inflation. Once the financial sector, which is built entirely on inflation, catches on, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple of fatal accidents. Bitcoin isn't undermining any particular currency, it is undermining the currency system.
And yes, the economic danger with Bitcoin is that as it becomes more valuable over time, hoarding it can be more profitable then investing it. Our current economic system is fueled by inflation because for the rich, investing is more profitable than being Scrooge McDuck. However that same system continuously shafts the non-rich, i.e. the 99%. If we had constant deflation instead of constant inflation, saving up for your retirement, or house, or car, would be so much easier.
Imagine you had started to work in 1950. You'd be about ready to retire. The accumulated inflation between 1950 and today is 870.4%. The first years of savings you may have accumulated are worth about 10% of what you put in today. Interest is the only thing saving your day. The game worked well for a couple decades, but interest rates have been laughable for a decade now with inflation staying largely constant.
Make no mistake. Inflation is not your friend if you aren't super-rich. A currency that won't inflate will have a dramatic impact on our economic system. What exactly remains to be seen, but at least the old games won't work anymore.
Robert A. Heinlein wrote "Take back your Government" in 1946.
I'll simply assume everyone here knows Heinlein.
So you're telling me that in close to 50 years, you haven't been able to read that book or do what's written inside, which is basically a step-by-step instruction on exactly what the title says because of exactly the same problems you're having today?
Sorry, but I actually am with the terrorists on this one: Your government is your responsibility. Not yours personally, but plural-yours as in "the people".
As long as you keep electing these fuckers, it can't be so bad. Bad enough for some whining, but apparently not bad enough to get up, switch off the TV and fucking do something about it. Yes, it's gonna be a little bit more difficult than a raid in WoW. That's not a reason not to start. Today.