And the main problem with computer security are people who think that security can be "achieved". Security is a system of processed - not a state. You cannot achieve security any more than you can achieve good health.
One cannot blame British doctors for realizing the obvious. It is unproductive (from a cold capitalist point of view) to treat the old, the fat, and the smoking. But they treat them anyway because treatment is paid for by the people and guaranteed by the state. The situation is different in the US, where health insurance companies routinely deny coverage to these "risk groups" and even people with health insurance cannot obtain approval from their HMOs for medically-necessary procedures. The funny part is that the vast majority of those opposing nationalized health care in the US will experience on their own skin the ugly side of the "health maintenance" business.
In other words, don't accuse the government -- it just follows the people's wishes... In other words, people's wishes are for a more socialist society. You know, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". There is nothing wrong with having free higher education, nationalized medical care, better public transportation system, or affordable and accessible childcare.
You were a child once, remember? Maybe even a college student. Almost certainly one day you will be old and sick, staring at some mind-boggling hospital bill, or a denial-of-coverage letter from your insurance company, or a CNN "breaking news" report saying Medicare finally went bust. A bottle of arthritis pills will cost half of your monthly pension. I don't think you'll be spending too much time typing away on your computer.
America is supposedly the richest country in the world. But we are neither the healthiest nor the smartest developed nation in the world. Not by a long shot. Why, you ask? We have some brain defect that makes us go bananas at the thought of paying 35% tax, and yet allows us to tolerate with remarkable ease health insurance industry, half-a-trillion defense budget, our president's private war and all the other wonderful things other people buy with our 35%.
Perhaps the high taxes we pay are only half of the problem. How this money is spent is the other half. If we had free higher education and free medical care, I wouldn't mind paying 40% in taxes. It will actually save me money.
Today's defense budget is compared to military spendings in 1944 taking into account the change in purchasing power of the dollar. How is this irrelevant? On the other hand, there is no direct relationship between the GDP and the defense budget. If you want to look at the defense budget as percentage of GDP, then you also need to consider issues of budget deficit and national debt.
Microwave energy is reflected by the aluminum layer, forming electric arcs between adjacent peaks and between loops of the spiral and generating heat, which fractures and melts the sub-nanometer peak-and-valley structure of the polycarbonate plastic. Re-coating the disk with a fresh layer of aluminum will not restore this structure.
If you have any data that you may need to destroy quickly and permanently, I would suggest using DVDs. Sure, it's slow and a hassle but, when you need to get rid of a large volume of information in a hurry, you just take your DVDs and put them in a microwave for a few seconds.
The damage microwave radiation causes to the data on the DVD extends beyond visible damage to the metal layer. That is to say that, even though it may seem like there are undamaged areas left on the DVD's surface, they are still unreadable. And it only takes 2-3 seconds to completely destroy a whole stack of DVDs, if they are arranged in a microwave with some space between them. Rewriting a hard drive with multiple passes may take hours and still leaves a possibility that some data may be recovered.
It seems to me that with SSD data recovery should work better than with conventional hard drives. You may need to overwrite the entire disk multiple times, as opposed to overwriting just the selected data, as you would with a conventional hard drive.
I think Bill's logic regarding this "capitalism for the masses" thing goes something like this: 1) Linux and Linux-based software are Microsoft's fastest-growing competitors; 2) most future Linux users will not be Unix-savvy geeks, but mostly people who don't fully understand all advantages of Linux; 3) the main reason these people will chose Linux is because it's free; 4) Windows is not; 5) The fewer poor people there are, the bigger will be the potential future customer base for Windows.
I wish I could get this deal. I would gladly take the money for all the overtime I put in over the years. I will compensate for the 15% salary cut by doing 15.5% less work.
The primary concern is the scope and impact of these vulnerabilities and other bugs. Their quantity is a secondary consideration. For example, Solaris 10 did not have many security bugs either, but one particular bug - with the telnet server - probably outweighed all the Solaris 8 and 9 security vulnerabilities put together.
Whatever specific definition of intelligence you use, the bottom line is: it's an ability we are born with. As far as we know, computers do not have this ability built in. A child will be able to learn through interaction with the environment. There is no need for intelligent guidance or supervision. The quality of this learning process will be lower than with supervision, but it will occur and it will occur spontaneously. A computer cannot learn on its own because it does not possess whatever it is that is necessary to find meaning in facts. To put the problems of AI research in computer terms: we don't have the hardware to make it work. And we don't know how to build this hardware, because we don't know how the original functions.
Intelligence is a means of turning information into knowledge. A newborn child possesses none of the facts in your trivia database and yet he is already intelligent. You think dogs have four legs and you will program this fact into your AI machine. Imagine how many circuits it will burn out when it sees a three-legged dog.
I see no logical connection between building a mega-database of basic facts and creating AI. Access to information is neither a prerequisite for intelligence, nor a source of it. You may succeed in creating something that complex and convoluted enough to make someone think for a minute they are dealing with intelligence.
The unfortunate reality of AI research is that we don't understand were we are going. Instead we are concentrating on how to get there. Hey, what if we build a really big neural net, or an exact functional electronic copy of the human brain, or a huge database of everyday information - maybe then we will somehow stumble upon artificial intelligence. Not exactly a scientific approach.
There was a world of difference between Singh and McKinstry: one was an academic researcher and the other - an amateur with little theoretical training. But in the end, both of them got burned out by a task that turned out to be far more complex than anyone cares to admit. The only known working example of intelligence we can attempt to copy is our own. Creating AI with enormous databases of trivial knowledge is a completely preposterous idea: knowledge is the result of intelligence - not a source of it. One can't create an machine approximation of human intelligence without first understanding how human intelligence works on a physical level.
As a senior sysadmin I have a good deal of "down time" to deal with every day. In my fresh-out-college years I hardly had any free time on my hands: like an idiot I would always find some work-related project to work on. But no more. The work of a sysadmin is an emotional roller coaster. One moment you are sitting in your office picking your nose and the next moment you are running around the datacenter trying to put some Solaris humpty dumpty back together.
They pay me my salary so that I fix their outdated crap quickly and get them back in business. Whenever stuff breaks - New Year's Eve, my birthday party, 3am on Saturday morning after hours of heavy drinking at a local bar - they expect me to be fresh as a daisy and to know my shit. I always am and I always do. And if my boss ever has a problem with me playing Tetris, he can kiss my fat Russian ass. I'll find another job by the end of the week and get a raise out of it too.
If you have the resources, hiring the best minds from around the world to do your R&D is the most economical option. But the funny thing about money is that today you have it and tomorrow you lose it all in some mortgage industry crisis.
Consider Russia's recent experience: in the 1980s USSR had some of the best scientists in the world and the vast majority of them were homegrown. In terms of science and technology the Soviets rivaled the most developed nations in the world. While the quality of consumer goods in the USSR left much to be desired due to economic reasons, the quality of their most high-tech products - everything from nuclear submarines to space vehicles - was among the best in the world.
And then within a couple of years the USSR tore itself apart, its economy collapsed, and its many R&D programs disappeared. Many scientists and engineers left the country, but majority remained, allowing the country to maintain its hi-tech industries and continue developing new technologies.
Imagine a similar economic crisis in the US and tell me what all those foreign scientists and engineers will do, if the US can no longer pay the top dollar for their services or offer them the best environment for their research?
The scheme you are proposing will never work. Sudo for sysadmins instead of root? You must be confusing them with operators. Who is setting up and maintaining sudo? Root password for IT managers? They don't need it, they wouldn't know what to do with it. You cannot configure or recover a system without root access. Sudo is OK for the ops to keep things running, but sysadmins need root access to do their daily work.
You cannot completely separate data storage, backups, and servers. Servers access data from SAN or NAS, for example, giving the sysadmin access to the data either directly or via a user account. To do backups, you need to load, say, NetBackup client onto the server. Sysadmin controls the the client configuration. I can create an exclude or redirect list and your NetBackup admin will be running dummy backups without ever suspecting a thing.
Outsourcing networking will compromise security - not improve it. In real world, even when storage and server support is outsourced, in most cases networking is kept in-house. In any case, sysadmins have on-site physical access to servers. Even without knowing a root password, say, on a Solaris box, I can boot it from CD, mount/etc and overwrite the shadow file. The whole thing will only take 10-20 minutes. This is just the simplest of examples.
I work in an environment with thousands of servers and, naturally, we have sudo, multiple root passwords, several departments supporting various elements of the infrastructure. I never had to get access to the Exchange servers and I don't know the password, but I can break in if I really want to. Or, as a NetBackup admin, I can restore a shadow file to an alternate server and crack any password I need.
As a sysadmin, I can set up a backdoor on a server that will work even if I am canned and my access to the company network is terminated. You just pick a server with access to the Web, create a cron job that runs a script, create a script that wgets a command from a Web site and executes it on the server. You can create daemons, dummy accounts, 'at' jobs, and do a myriad other things that are exceedingly easy for a sysadmin to do.
You need someone to constantly watch for these type of surprises. And how do you do this with thousands of servers and hundreds of people? As a manager, you keep an eye on your backups, treat people right, cross your fingers and hope nobody gets pissed off enough to do something like this. In any groups of sysadmins you will always have a few guys who are really very good at what they do. It would be a terrible thing for a manager to do to upset these guys, for no amount of security and data recovery consultants will ever put your IT humpty dumpty back together.
You are not a sysadmin, are you? A sysadmin is the guy with complete, absolute, total, unrestricted control of a number of your critical servers and a good chunk of your data. Not everything, but a sizable piece of your infrastructure. In a big enterprise the IT infrastructure support may be divided among multiple groups of sysadmins. Still, many sysadmins have sufficient access to take your business down for a long time, if not permanently.
Backups? If this Yung-Hsun Lin character was any good, you would have no usable backups to recover from. And he would have never been caught either. In a big enterprise the IT infrastructure can be enormous with hundreds, even thousands of people supporting it. In an environment like this, bordering areas of responsibility seep into each other. Often the same people may be supporting your data storage, Unix servers and backups, for example. And then management gets greedy and tries to get the same people handle more work, so the same sysadmin eventually end up with almost total control of everything. Outsourcing is another reason for too much control being concentrated in too few hands.
Why plant a logic bomb? In my experience, there are many sysadmins with no concern for their professional reputation, because they don't have any to begin with. They are not professionals and many have no experience and clue what they are doing. But then there are also clueless IT managers, who fail to understand the extent to which sysadmins control the business and treat them like garbage. This attitude sometimes hits a nerve even with professional sysadmins.
Yes exactly what? Marlon was arrested for something unrelated to SEO. If an owner of an adult book store gets arrested for tax evasion, would you see this as proof that adult book stores are unethical?
Matt Marlon of Traffic Power was arrested for running a mortgage scam, not for breaking Google rules for SEO. Cutts is just using this to push his agenda. God help us all if some other SEO boss gets arrested for shoplifting or grand theft auto.
Well, then if the goal is to develop software that behaves "intelligently", you should call it "AI" and not AI. So not to confuse the journalists. Unless, of course, getting extra publicity is the real aim of these "AI" researchers.
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...security is not too difficult to achieveAnd the main problem with computer security are people who think that security can be "achieved". Security is a system of processed - not a state. You cannot achieve security any more than you can achieve good health.
One cannot blame British doctors for realizing the obvious. It is unproductive (from a cold capitalist point of view) to treat the old, the fat, and the smoking. But they treat them anyway because treatment is paid for by the people and guaranteed by the state. The situation is different in the US, where health insurance companies routinely deny coverage to these "risk groups" and even people with health insurance cannot obtain approval from their HMOs for medically-necessary procedures. The funny part is that the vast majority of those opposing nationalized health care in the US will experience on their own skin the ugly side of the "health maintenance" business.
Today's defense budget is compared to military spendings in 1944 taking into account the change in purchasing power of the dollar. How is this irrelevant? On the other hand, there is no direct relationship between the GDP and the defense budget. If you want to look at the defense budget as percentage of GDP, then you also need to consider issues of budget deficit and national debt.
So your assumption is: the more money we earn, the more of it the government should spend?
In the other news - the defense budget is biggest since WWII.
This is true, but you have ample time to securely erase the data off your hard drive, once it has been transferred to DVD.
Microwave energy is reflected by the aluminum layer, forming electric arcs between adjacent peaks and between loops of the spiral and generating heat, which fractures and melts the sub-nanometer peak-and-valley structure of the polycarbonate plastic. Re-coating the disk with a fresh layer of aluminum will not restore this structure.
If you have any data that you may need to destroy quickly and permanently, I would suggest using DVDs. Sure, it's slow and a hassle but, when you need to get rid of a large volume of information in a hurry, you just take your DVDs and put them in a microwave for a few seconds.
The damage microwave radiation causes to the data on the DVD extends beyond visible damage to the metal layer. That is to say that, even though it may seem like there are undamaged areas left on the DVD's surface, they are still unreadable. And it only takes 2-3 seconds to completely destroy a whole stack of DVDs, if they are arranged in a microwave with some space between them. Rewriting a hard drive with multiple passes may take hours and still leaves a possibility that some data may be recovered.
It seems to me that with SSD data recovery should work better than with conventional hard drives. You may need to overwrite the entire disk multiple times, as opposed to overwriting just the selected data, as you would with a conventional hard drive.
I think Bill's logic regarding this "capitalism for the masses" thing goes something like this: 1) Linux and Linux-based software are Microsoft's fastest-growing competitors; 2) most future Linux users will not be Unix-savvy geeks, but mostly people who don't fully understand all advantages of Linux; 3) the main reason these people will chose Linux is because it's free; 4) Windows is not; 5) The fewer poor people there are, the bigger will be the potential future customer base for Windows.
I wish I could get this deal. I would gladly take the money for all the overtime I put in over the years. I will compensate for the 15% salary cut by doing 15.5% less work.
The primary concern is the scope and impact of these vulnerabilities and other bugs. Their quantity is a secondary consideration. For example, Solaris 10 did not have many security bugs either, but one particular bug - with the telnet server - probably outweighed all the Solaris 8 and 9 security vulnerabilities put together.
Whatever specific definition of intelligence you use, the bottom line is: it's an ability we are born with. As far as we know, computers do not have this ability built in. A child will be able to learn through interaction with the environment. There is no need for intelligent guidance or supervision. The quality of this learning process will be lower than with supervision, but it will occur and it will occur spontaneously. A computer cannot learn on its own because it does not possess whatever it is that is necessary to find meaning in facts. To put the problems of AI research in computer terms: we don't have the hardware to make it work. And we don't know how to build this hardware, because we don't know how the original functions.
Intelligence is a means of turning information into knowledge. A newborn child possesses none of the facts in your trivia database and yet he is already intelligent. You think dogs have four legs and you will program this fact into your AI machine. Imagine how many circuits it will burn out when it sees a three-legged dog.
I see no logical connection between building a mega-database of basic facts and creating AI. Access to information is neither a prerequisite for intelligence, nor a source of it. You may succeed in creating something that complex and convoluted enough to make someone think for a minute they are dealing with intelligence.
The unfortunate reality of AI research is that we don't understand were we are going. Instead we are concentrating on how to get there. Hey, what if we build a really big neural net, or an exact functional electronic copy of the human brain, or a huge database of everyday information - maybe then we will somehow stumble upon artificial intelligence. Not exactly a scientific approach.
There was a world of difference between Singh and McKinstry: one was an academic researcher and the other - an amateur with little theoretical training. But in the end, both of them got burned out by a task that turned out to be far more complex than anyone cares to admit. The only known working example of intelligence we can attempt to copy is our own. Creating AI with enormous databases of trivial knowledge is a completely preposterous idea: knowledge is the result of intelligence - not a source of it. One can't create an machine approximation of human intelligence without first understanding how human intelligence works on a physical level.
As a senior sysadmin I have a good deal of "down time" to deal with every day. In my fresh-out-college years I hardly had any free time on my hands: like an idiot I would always find some work-related project to work on. But no more. The work of a sysadmin is an emotional roller coaster. One moment you are sitting in your office picking your nose and the next moment you are running around the datacenter trying to put some Solaris humpty dumpty back together.
They pay me my salary so that I fix their outdated crap quickly and get them back in business. Whenever stuff breaks - New Year's Eve, my birthday party, 3am on Saturday morning after hours of heavy drinking at a local bar - they expect me to be fresh as a daisy and to know my shit. I always am and I always do. And if my boss ever has a problem with me playing Tetris, he can kiss my fat Russian ass. I'll find another job by the end of the week and get a raise out of it too.
If you have the resources, hiring the best minds from around the world to do your R&D is the most economical option. But the funny thing about money is that today you have it and tomorrow you lose it all in some mortgage industry crisis.
Consider Russia's recent experience: in the 1980s USSR had some of the best scientists in the world and the vast majority of them were homegrown. In terms of science and technology the Soviets rivaled the most developed nations in the world. While the quality of consumer goods in the USSR left much to be desired due to economic reasons, the quality of their most high-tech products - everything from nuclear submarines to space vehicles - was among the best in the world.
And then within a couple of years the USSR tore itself apart, its economy collapsed, and its many R&D programs disappeared. Many scientists and engineers left the country, but majority remained, allowing the country to maintain its hi-tech industries and continue developing new technologies.
Imagine a similar economic crisis in the US and tell me what all those foreign scientists and engineers will do, if the US can no longer pay the top dollar for their services or offer them the best environment for their research?
The scheme you are proposing will never work. Sudo for sysadmins instead of root? You must be confusing them with operators. Who is setting up and maintaining sudo? Root password for IT managers? They don't need it, they wouldn't know what to do with it. You cannot configure or recover a system without root access. Sudo is OK for the ops to keep things running, but sysadmins need root access to do their daily work.
/etc and overwrite the shadow file. The whole thing will only take 10-20 minutes. This is just the simplest of examples.
You cannot completely separate data storage, backups, and servers. Servers access data from SAN or NAS, for example, giving the sysadmin access to the data either directly or via a user account. To do backups, you need to load, say, NetBackup client onto the server. Sysadmin controls the the client configuration. I can create an exclude or redirect list and your NetBackup admin will be running dummy backups without ever suspecting a thing.
Outsourcing networking will compromise security - not improve it. In real world, even when storage and server support is outsourced, in most cases networking is kept in-house. In any case, sysadmins have on-site physical access to servers. Even without knowing a root password, say, on a Solaris box, I can boot it from CD, mount
I work in an environment with thousands of servers and, naturally, we have sudo, multiple root passwords, several departments supporting various elements of the infrastructure. I never had to get access to the Exchange servers and I don't know the password, but I can break in if I really want to. Or, as a NetBackup admin, I can restore a shadow file to an alternate server and crack any password I need.
As a sysadmin, I can set up a backdoor on a server that will work even if I am canned and my access to the company network is terminated. You just pick a server with access to the Web, create a cron job that runs a script, create a script that wgets a command from a Web site and executes it on the server. You can create daemons, dummy accounts, 'at' jobs, and do a myriad other things that are exceedingly easy for a sysadmin to do.
You need someone to constantly watch for these type of surprises. And how do you do this with thousands of servers and hundreds of people? As a manager, you keep an eye on your backups, treat people right, cross your fingers and hope nobody gets pissed off enough to do something like this. In any groups of sysadmins you will always have a few guys who are really very good at what they do. It would be a terrible thing for a manager to do to upset these guys, for no amount of security and data recovery consultants will ever put your IT humpty dumpty back together.
You are not a sysadmin, are you? A sysadmin is the guy with complete, absolute, total, unrestricted control of a number of your critical servers and a good chunk of your data. Not everything, but a sizable piece of your infrastructure. In a big enterprise the IT infrastructure support may be divided among multiple groups of sysadmins. Still, many sysadmins have sufficient access to take your business down for a long time, if not permanently.
Backups? If this Yung-Hsun Lin character was any good, you would have no usable backups to recover from. And he would have never been caught either. In a big enterprise the IT infrastructure can be enormous with hundreds, even thousands of people supporting it. In an environment like this, bordering areas of responsibility seep into each other. Often the same people may be supporting your data storage, Unix servers and backups, for example. And then management gets greedy and tries to get the same people handle more work, so the same sysadmin eventually end up with almost total control of everything. Outsourcing is another reason for too much control being concentrated in too few hands.
Why plant a logic bomb? In my experience, there are many sysadmins with no concern for their professional reputation, because they don't have any to begin with. They are not professionals and many have no experience and clue what they are doing. But then there are also clueless IT managers, who fail to understand the extent to which sysadmins control the business and treat them like garbage. This attitude sometimes hits a nerve even with professional sysadmins.
The point of the article is that there will always be plenty of guys like you to take it seriously.
Yes exactly what? Marlon was arrested for something unrelated to SEO. If an owner of an adult book store gets arrested for tax evasion, would you see this as proof that adult book stores are unethical?
Matt Marlon of Traffic Power was arrested for running a mortgage scam, not for breaking Google rules for SEO. Cutts is just using this to push his agenda. God help us all if some other SEO boss gets arrested for shoplifting or grand theft auto.
Maybe the Russians will hire you to help them plan this mission the right way.
Well, then if the goal is to develop software that behaves "intelligently", you should call it "AI" and not AI. So not to confuse the journalists. Unless, of course, getting extra publicity is the real aim of these "AI" researchers.