"I have nothing to hide, go ahead test me. Or, sure officer, you can look in my trunk. Or, I am not a psycho I don't mind that test."
This is another example of the governments continual assult on our Bill of Rights, in particular, our right to privacy.
You're right. Moderate this guy up, folks.
I had said in a couple posts here that I advocate lying on these tests. Your analogy changed my mind. Refuse to take them. (If you are forced, then lie. Don't let them trick you into taking it, make them force you.) By willfully giving up an important freedom, you help that freedom be taken away from everybody else, and you have no right to do that. Psych tests of this sort are not very different from other forms of searches.
PS: If you ever have to take a test like this, answer honestly. They can tell if you are fudging the answers, unless you know what you're doing, which you don't if you're still in high school (unless you've taken several college-level psych courses, and, even then, probably had to help write the test to know the "answers").
I don't believe that, but I do have little understanding of psychology (more of a fan of the hard sciences, as I'm sure many others here are), and you seem to know what you're talking about. So, how can I find a test of this sort (on the net, or a textbook, or anywhere), and the information I need to score it. I firmly believe that I can take it three times (without cheating) - one honestly, one to score on one extreme, and one to score on the other. It would be interesting to find out that I'm wrong.
Even if they are purely using statistical techniques, and the questions do not mean anything by themselves, I could pick people I know who would be one extreme or the other, and answer as if I were them. If someone's been a good friend for a long time, you should know enough about them to take a multiple-choice psych test as them, and answer almost identically to how they would. (Not counting the worthless tests where frequently none of the answers are appropriate - I can't even answer those consistantly for myself).
I still have to strongly advise lying. Remember, tell the truth to your friends, but lie to those who are trying to get information out of you for either their own purposes or to hurt you.
How many of you, when you were young, had some sort of non-graded test given to you in school for the purpose of compiling information on average students? How many of you tried as hard as you could to make it look like you were completely nuts and something to worry about?
We were given a whole lot of these, but I answered in the opposite way. There's a certain type of psychological test where you are asked many questions, but there are many repeats, re-worded. When given these, even as a small child, I could realize they're trying to trick me, and I'd better answer this carefully so as to not get in trouble.
In retrospect, the worst trouble I could have gotten into would have probably been being sent to see the school shrink, but I'd certainly have considered that being "in trouble". With today's world (my how things change in a short time), I would advise any intelligent children to be quite careful when taking psychological tests in school. If I had children, and if I sent them to public school, I would tell them to refuse to take any psychological test, any test where they are not told what the purpose is for it, or told they will not be able to see their score, or where they are singled out personally, or where only a small group of people and not the entirety of the class is taking the test. They don't need to be studied (or lied to) like I was, especially in a world where computers will be scoring the tests and deciding who to punish before they've even done anything wrong. In fact, I advise parents to do that. If you aren't willing to fight it all the way, at least let it be known how you feel. Enough complaints and they may stop doing it - more realistically, you'll give support to people who are willing to fight it all the way that they aren't the only ones who feel that way.
Remember, your children's teachers work for you. They have no authority over you, and the only (legitimate) authority over your children they have is what you grant them. Make your children know where the authority of teachers, police, and strangers starts and stops.
Older than smurf is pingfloods from a few different networks. This is the oldest common distributed DoS attack that I know of, no doubt its obviousness and the use of a standard system utility contributed strongly to that.
But the article is not quite about distributed pingfloods, or smurf attacks. It's about widely distributed attacks (from 100s-1000s of hosts), that appear to be legitimate connections. The scary thing about an attack like this is that you *can not stop* a determined and intelligent attacker if you're running a public service. The comforting thing is that if the attacker is that determined, he'll probably just rm one of your machines, which in most cases is much less costly if you have good backups.
This is only interesting because it is finally commonplace. It's always been obvious. Anyone who thinks for a minute about how to protect against remote resource starvation attacks will come to an attack like this as the extreme example of what you can't defend against. The people coming up with new DoS attacks realize the same thing.
With a name like that, you know that it can't be a legitimate organization. The name should give some idea of what the organization does. This name sounds like something intentionally made up to be as generic as possible - which of course is what it is.
Imagine how far that money would go if they spent even 1/10 of it on open source software development instead of purchasing ready made software. That's $200 million. What do you suppose the Gnome project could do with $10 million? Maybe give Linus a big fat check just for being a nice guy. Send the samba folks a couple million. No sweat.
The simple fact is that the majority of the money will be simply given to Microsoft. (and some other large companies). But what if they spent it *all* on open source development for everything they need? Two *billion* dollars per year could pay a $100k/year salary for an army of programmers 20,000 strong. This army would be difficult to manage and coordinate, but it could be done. And imagine the wonderous results.
The internic used to require (or perhaps just strongly advise) that there be nameservers for each domain in separate geographical locations, with separate internet feeds. Seems like that would have been a good idea at a time like this.
Being lefties, nothing is made "right" for us. Scissors, door knobs, twist ties are all problems.
OK, I'm confused. Door knobs are on the opposite side of the door whether you're going in or out, and can be turned either way to open (at least as far as I can remember, and all the doorknobs in my immediate vicinity). And where I'm from, twist ties are a piece of metal covered by paper, and are symmetrical. The efforts to close one and open one are the inverse of each other, so left vs right handed won't make a difference, just the same as doorknob positioning.
My last memories of Prodigy ($P$), from years ago, are more negative than positive. Where I lived, they were the _only_ online service available for a local call. I remember the frequently arbitrary censorship on the message boards (all posts had to be approved by moderators before they appeared!) This censorship system was slow, people took to posting the current date and time at the bottom of their messages, so that others could see how long it took to get posted. 1200 bps max when most people had 2400bps modems, then they upgraded to 2400 by the time a great many people had 9600 and 14400 modems. 40 column text everywhere. A half-hour inactivity timeout that applied while you were writing a message (email or public). Run over it, and you lost what you wrote. Lose your modem connection while writing a message and you lose what you wrote. Write an email to an invalid address, and the bounce doesn't give you the ability to re-send it. You have to re-type it. And this is only a tiny sampling of the problems.
As for missing features, notable were no real-time chat, and no internet email access. I believe internet email was later added, at a cost per message. There was 3rd party software available to make up for many missing features - saving messages to a file, for example. Very clever software indeed. (And very slow).
Then they started charging for email within the $P$ system - I think it was 10c each, with a handful "free" each month. Then, they started charging per the hour, even though they *still* had the banner ads up. That's right, dial into their ancient slow modems, and pay per the hour to look at banner ads and wrestle with their slow system.
It seemed great at the time (until they started throwing more fees at us), but when I finally got net access, I realized how worthless $P$ had been. Now the net is going (or has gone) the same way (although not for the same reasons). The Usenet that once existed is dead, destroyed by Usenet spam, fear of email spam, and the huge influx of clueless newbies who have no desire to learn about a society that existed long before they found out about it. And, ease of access has, of course, lowered the bar, so more people of average to below average intelligence are posting. Sigh. The irony is, a service like $P$ is almost starting to make more sense, something private, where the rifraff can be kept out.
and if you go against them and don't do the scans, they prolly will terminate you.
That depends on your value to the company. If it would cost more to lose you than to have some porn floating about unnoticed. Nowhere I have worked would I have been fired for refusing to do this. They go through enough work to keep me from quitting on my own, they're not going to just fire me over something silly like this.
If they did (or if they forced me to quit), good. I will make sure that my coworkers know exactly why I'm leaving. Their anger over the situation will more than be sufficient revenge.
The answer is probably: yes, they can snoop on email, yes they can force you to do it, and so you probably should.
They can not force you to do it. You can refuse, threaten to quit, and carry out the threat to quit. If your convictions in this matter are not stronger than your love for the job, perhaps you have other options. You can email everybody with a warning a few days ahead of time. One generic enough that you probably won't get fired over it, but specific enough that people realize to be careful. Defend your actions with "I was just making everyone aware of company policy. Why is that wrong?"
If I were asked to do this, I'd have to do some thinking. Not whether or not I would do it, I know I wouldn't, I would just have to consider the manner in which I refused. I would probably explain (nicely) to my superiors that I feel I'm being asked to commit a grievous violation of people's privacy, without any good reason. This is not investigating one problem user to see what's going on, it's searching to see who is doing immoral things. It's not about bandwidth or disk space or other resources - if it were, we'd look at who's using the most and why. Or, we'd search for other types of non business related data, like games. It's certainly not about who's wasting time instead of doing work - people who do that have a lot of choices, and it's not like taking one away would have any impact.
I imagine that I consider assisting in a witch-hunt of this sort a vastly more serious violation of my morals than the people calling for the witch-hunt consider the porn a violation of theirs. I could not be forced to do this, I would quit if necessary. I would make sure what's going on is made public knowledge. The job market is good. At least at my current employer, while being caught looking at porn is a serious offense, the proxy logs are only looked at for a specific user when there's a specific reason. And nobody's email is *ever* being read to see what they're up to. And it will not be as long as I'm employed here.
I realize that the company owns the machines, and it's theirs to do with as they please. But unless there's a strong reason to investigate a specific person (probable cause, perhaps), the company should respect their employees' privacy. Compare it to parents searching their children's rooms, reading their email/snail mail/diary, or listening to their phone calls. It's just wrong.
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This is another example of the governments continual assult on our Bill of Rights, in particular, our right to privacy.
You're right. Moderate this guy up, folks.
I had said in a couple posts here that I advocate lying on these tests. Your analogy changed my mind. Refuse to take them. (If you are forced, then lie. Don't let them trick you into taking it, make them force you.) By willfully giving up an important freedom, you help that freedom be taken away from everybody else, and you have no right to do that. Psych tests of this sort are not very different from other forms of searches.
PS: If you ever have to take a test like this, answer honestly. They can tell if you are fudging the
answers, unless you know what you're doing, which you don't if you're still in high school
(unless you've taken several college-level psych courses, and, even then, probably had to
help write the test to know the "answers").
I don't believe that, but I do have little understanding of psychology (more of a fan of the hard sciences, as I'm sure many others here are), and you seem to know what you're talking about. So, how can I find a test of this sort (on the net, or a textbook, or anywhere), and the information I need to score it. I firmly believe that I can take it three times (without cheating) - one honestly, one to score on one extreme, and one to score on the other. It would be interesting to find out that I'm wrong.
Even if they are purely using statistical techniques, and the questions do not mean anything by themselves, I could pick people I know who would be one extreme or the other, and answer as if I were them. If someone's been a good friend for a long time, you should know enough about them to take a multiple-choice psych test as them, and answer almost identically to how they would. (Not counting the worthless tests where frequently none of the answers are appropriate - I can't even answer those consistantly for myself).
I still have to strongly advise lying. Remember, tell the truth to your friends, but lie to those who are trying to get information out of you for either their own purposes or to hurt you.
school for the purpose of compiling information on average students? How many of you tried
as hard as you could to make it look like you were completely nuts and something to worry
about?
We were given a whole lot of these, but I answered in the opposite way. There's a certain type of psychological test where you are asked many questions, but there are many repeats, re-worded. When given these, even as a small child, I could realize they're trying to trick me, and I'd better answer this carefully so as to not get in trouble.
In retrospect, the worst trouble I could have gotten into would have probably been being sent to see the school shrink, but I'd certainly have considered that being "in trouble". With today's world (my how things change in a short time), I would advise any intelligent children to be quite careful when taking psychological tests in school. If I had children, and if I sent them to public school, I would tell them to refuse to take any psychological test, any test where they are not told what the purpose is for it, or told they will not be able to see their score, or where they are singled out personally, or where only a small group of people and not the entirety of the class is taking the test. They don't need to be studied (or lied to) like I was, especially in a world where computers will be scoring the tests and deciding who to punish before they've even done anything wrong. In fact, I advise parents to do that. If you aren't willing to fight it all the way, at least let it be known how you feel. Enough complaints and they may stop doing it - more realistically, you'll give support to people who are willing to fight it all the way that they aren't the only ones who feel that way.
Remember, your children's teachers work for you. They have no authority over you, and the only (legitimate) authority over your children they have is what you grant them. Make your children know where the authority of teachers, police, and strangers starts and stops.
Children are people too.
If you're going to use the most condensed form possible, 127.1 is almost as easy to type as ::1
Older than smurf is pingfloods from a few different networks. This is the oldest common distributed DoS attack that I know of, no doubt its obviousness and the use of a standard system utility contributed strongly to that.
But the article is not quite about distributed pingfloods, or smurf attacks. It's about widely distributed attacks (from 100s-1000s of hosts), that appear to be legitimate connections. The scary thing about an attack like this is that you *can not stop* a determined and intelligent attacker if you're running a public service. The comforting thing is that if the attacker is that determined, he'll probably just rm one of your machines, which in most cases is much less costly if you have good backups.
This is only interesting because it is finally commonplace. It's always been obvious. Anyone who thinks for a minute about how to protect against remote resource starvation attacks will come to an attack like this as the extreme example of what you can't defend against. The people coming up with new DoS attacks realize the same thing.
With a name like that, you know that it can't be a legitimate organization. The name should give some idea of what the organization does. This name sounds like something intentionally made up to be as generic as possible - which of course is what it is.
It's not working now, but perhaps the cgi checks that the url it is giving out at least has a valid hostname.
Imagine how far that money would go if they spent even 1/10 of it on open source software
development instead of purchasing ready made software. That's $200 million. What do you
suppose the Gnome project could do with $10 million? Maybe give Linus a big fat check just
for being a nice guy. Send the samba folks a couple million. No sweat.
The simple fact is that the majority of the money will be simply given to Microsoft. (and some other large companies). But what if they spent it *all* on open source development for everything they need? Two *billion* dollars per year could pay a $100k/year salary for an army of programmers 20,000 strong. This army would be difficult to manage and coordinate, but it could be done. And imagine the wonderous results.
The internic used to require (or perhaps just strongly advise) that there be nameservers for each domain in separate geographical locations, with separate internet feeds. Seems like that would have been a good idea at a time like this.
OK, I'm confused. Door knobs are on the opposite side of the door whether you're going in or out, and can be turned either way to open (at least as far as I can remember, and all the doorknobs in my immediate vicinity). And where I'm from, twist ties are a piece of metal covered by paper, and are symmetrical. The efforts to close one and open one are the inverse of each other, so left vs right handed won't make a difference, just the same as doorknob positioning.
My last memories of Prodigy ($P$), from years ago, are more negative than positive. Where I lived, they were the _only_ online service available for a local call. I remember the frequently arbitrary censorship on the message boards (all posts had to be approved by moderators before they appeared!) This censorship system was slow, people took to posting the current date and time at the bottom of their messages, so that others could see how long it took to get posted. 1200 bps max when most people had 2400bps modems, then they upgraded to 2400 by the time a great many people had 9600 and 14400 modems. 40 column text everywhere. A half-hour inactivity timeout that applied while you were writing a message (email or public). Run over it, and you lost what you wrote. Lose your modem connection while writing a message and you lose what you wrote. Write an email to an invalid address, and the bounce doesn't give you the ability to re-send it. You have to re-type it. And this is only a tiny sampling of the problems.
As for missing features, notable were no real-time chat, and no internet email access. I believe internet email was later added, at a cost per message. There was 3rd party software available to make up for many missing features - saving messages to a file, for example. Very clever software indeed. (And very slow).
Then they started charging for email within the $P$ system - I think it was 10c each, with a handful "free" each month. Then, they started charging per the hour, even though they *still* had the banner ads up. That's right, dial into their ancient slow modems, and pay per the hour to look at banner ads and wrestle with their slow system.
It seemed great at the time (until they started throwing more fees at us), but when I finally got net access, I realized how worthless $P$ had been. Now the net is going (or has gone) the same way (although not for the same reasons). The Usenet that once existed is dead, destroyed by Usenet spam, fear of email spam, and the huge influx of clueless newbies who have no desire to learn about a society that existed long before they found out about it. And, ease of access has, of course, lowered the bar, so more people of average to below average intelligence are posting. Sigh. The irony is, a service like $P$ is almost starting to make more sense, something private, where the rifraff can be kept out.
That depends on your value to the company. If it would cost more to lose you than to have some porn floating about unnoticed. Nowhere I have worked would I have been fired for refusing to do this. They go through enough work to keep me from quitting on my own, they're not going to just fire me over something silly like this.
If they did (or if they forced me to quit), good. I will make sure that my coworkers know exactly why I'm leaving. Their anger over the situation will more than be sufficient revenge.
you probably should.
They can not force you to do it. You can refuse, threaten to quit, and carry out the threat to quit. If your convictions in this matter are not stronger than your love for the job, perhaps you have other options. You can email everybody with a warning a few days ahead of time. One generic enough that you probably won't get fired over it, but specific enough that people realize to be careful. Defend your actions with "I was just making everyone aware of company policy. Why is that wrong?"
If I were asked to do this, I'd have to do some thinking. Not whether or not I would do it, I know I wouldn't, I would just have to consider the manner in which I refused. I would probably explain (nicely) to my superiors that I feel I'm being asked to commit a grievous violation of people's privacy, without any good reason. This is not investigating one problem user to see what's going on, it's searching to see who is doing immoral things. It's not about bandwidth or disk space or other resources - if it were, we'd look at who's using the most and why. Or, we'd search for other types of non business related data, like games. It's certainly not about who's wasting time instead of doing work - people who do that have a lot of choices, and it's not like taking one away would have any impact.
I imagine that I consider assisting in a witch-hunt of this sort a vastly more serious violation of my morals than the people calling for the witch-hunt consider the porn a violation of theirs. I could not be forced to do this, I would quit if necessary. I would make sure what's going on is made public knowledge. The job market is good. At least at my current employer, while being caught looking at porn is a serious offense, the proxy logs are only looked at for a specific user when there's a specific reason. And nobody's email is *ever* being read to see what they're up to. And it will not be as long as I'm employed here.
I realize that the company owns the machines, and it's theirs to do with as they please. But unless there's a strong reason to investigate a specific person (probable cause, perhaps), the company should respect their employees' privacy. Compare it to parents searching their children's rooms, reading their email/snail mail/diary, or listening to their phone calls. It's just wrong.