Fine, as long as you work my hours. I work in a job where I may be setting up at 0500 for a multi-person network-heavy presentation scheduled to go at 0630, and I have zero time for argument.
Sounds like you may very well be the kind of user that makes IT staff bitter and hostile. If you didn't make arrangements with the IT staff for your presentation before your presentation is scheduled to start, how is that my problem? One thing that never fails to draw the ire of IT staff is a user who consistently doesn't tell anyone what they need until it's time to go live, then expects said IT staff to drop everything to accommodate their needs at the last minute.
I've had great support and lousy support, and yes, I bring my own network hardware in case the local admin doesn't have what I need.
That's reasonable. However, depending upon what you bring, the local admin may or may not be willing to plug your gear into his network. As the local admin, I am the guy that gets called on the carpet when rogue equipment takes down the network. If I don't know what the gear is or what it will do on my network, it doesn't get installed until it's been tested in a sandbox first. In the past, I've had rogue equipment cause routing loops which in turn caused spanning tree on my switch to turn off the port to the offending network drop, taking out most of a department (they had installed a SOHO switch because they needed more ports, but never told us). I've seen rogue equipment replying to DHCP requests causing conflicting IP addresses or IP addresses that were in an entirely different subnet than the main network. I could go on, but you get the picture. So please excuse me if I don't just take your word for it that your equipment won't break things, unless I know you and know that you really do know what you are talking about.
That said, I almost never have a problem, because good network admins do indeed work with me, and lousy ones either (a) aren't there to complain, or (b) trust me far more than they should.
As long as you are reasonable in your requests and are willing to compromise with the admins on your network, most admins, IMHO, will do their best to find a solution that both they and you can live with. From what I've seen, while the BOFH does indeed exist, he is more of an exception than the rule.
Oh, and I ask (and explain and discuss and compromise) long before any equipment sees power. It's only polite.
That goes a very long ways towards earning the trust of the local admin. I withdraw my first comment about how you sound like the type of user who causes IT staff to become bitter and hostile. I'll bend over backwards -- even at the last minute -- for someone who tries to work with me and/or has shown me that I can trust them.
I've never (ten years or so) had a local hardware issue extend into the host network. It seems to be fairly hard to do that if you're not an idiot (and if your own equipment is truly solid, which mine is).
There's the catch. While most people are reasonably intelligent, there are enough people who aren't to make network admins suspicious of others, if we don't know their technical competency. There are many users who think they know more about networking than the admins who built the network. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it isn't. At my current job, there is a user that I trust very, very much. He held my job before I did, and still probably knows more about the network than I do (he left for a different department because he got fed up with the guy who used to manage the department). OTOH, there is another user who thinks he is God's gift to networking. While he does have a little knowledge...well, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
They don't necessarily have a "secret room", but as I understand, CALEA, etc., requires every telco to have a plan in place to apply a tap to every circuit that they provide.
Yes, I am a network administrator at a telco, and yes, the company I had to work for had to produce a CALEA-compliance plan about a year ago.
Do other/.'ers have experience with being forced to turn over 3rd party private data?
Where I used to work (an ISP), I would occasionally have to provide usage logs, etc. on customers. However, the requests *always* came from the ISP's legal department. If ever I received a direct request (IIRC, it happened once or twice), I sent it to legal before replying with the information. I'd *pull* the data as soon as I got a notice, but I absolutely, positively did not divulge it until my legal department ok'd the request. For that matter, as I recall (it's been a while...), I only gave the information to legal, as well.
That's just rationalizing unethical behaviour. You seem to misunderstand what you quoted at the beginning of your post, and, in fact, use it to prove the opposite of what it is really saying. "...the indifference of good men" is someone saying, "It's not my problem, so I am just going to ignore it." It is working for an unethical company -- even if you are not required to do anything unethical yourself -- rather than leaving in protest, blowing the whistle, etc. It is most definitely not accepting unethical tasks so you can feed your family. As the old saying goes, you were looking for a job when you found this one, so you know you can find another one; it is highly unlikely that your family will starve if you quit the crappy job you have right now, even in our current economy.
What happens when you quit a job in protest, and then your next prospective employer calls for a reference and is told that you weren't a team player, balked at management direction, etc.? It's not a written "do not hire" list per se, but I would imagine it can be rather difficult to land a new job if your previous employer is giving bad recommendations.
Even if your previous employer is smart enough to be very discrete when answering questions, companies that have been in business for very long know how to ask and answer the important questions without exposing themselves to liability:
Prospective Employer: "Would you consider re-hiring this employee?" Previous Employer: "No."
or Previous Employer: "This employee was let go for cause." (if applicable).
You have no control over what anyone else does or does not do. All that you can control is what you yourself do. If he explains why this is a bad idea, explains the ethical considerations, and his boss says to do it anyway, then what more would you have the employee do? At that point, walking away from the job is the only ethical option you have, since you can't compel anyone else to forgo the job. All you can do once you leave is hope that anyone coming after you will refuse to do the job as well.
Things like posted schedules, imho, are the real legitimate use for scrapers.
I agree. That's the one and only time I actually scripted a scraper for work. One of the senior execs was having trouble downloading an airline schedule (we frequently had to fly techs to our remote locations), so I added a task to cron to wget the schedule from the airline's web page. Downloading the schedule and reposting it on our internal web server was, IMHO, a lot easier and faster than trying to figure out why an exec couldn't download the schedule from his desktop.
In the interests of playing nicely, I set the task to download the schedule once a week so that it wouldn't waste the airline's bandwidth.
Tawnos is correct. Whether you are talking about SSH on Debian or SMB on Windows, the concept is the same. OS's *should* ship with services turned off by default. If you don't know enough to turn on the service then you don't know enough to secure it and you probably don't need it. That's one of the things I like about a lot of Linux distros -- they ask you if you want the various services turned on during install, and leave them off if you don't (or, like Gentoo, simply leave them off until you manually turn them on during/after install).
Since this is/., I'll follow up with a bad car analogy: if you don't know how to start the car, you have no business driving it on the roads with other people.
I've put all of our Windows servers where I work and all of the Windows desktops at my wife's two businesses on NOD32 as well. I lost faith in Kaspersky after a virus outbreak on a network I manage despite running Kaspersky on the desktops and servers.
The only problem I've seen with NOD32 is that if your Internet connection isn't rock solid and reasonably fast, it will sometimes have trouble updating. I have a Windows server in a remote location that's across a satellite hop, and found that I couldn't update NOD32 on it from Eset's web site, but I *could* update it from a mirror on another server in my main office. Also, one of my wife's businesses is on a rather flaky ADSL connection, and I have had a lot of problems updating the machines there from Eset's web site as well.
That was what I was thinking to all of the people who had posted along the lines of "I've used Windows since with no anti-virus, and I've never been infected!"
No, it's a greatly oversimplified analogy. It's easy to blame the end-user for doing stupid things on a networked computer -- and a lot of times, it's true -- but not all viruses and worms are contracted by visiting...ummm...questionable?...websites or clicking attachments in an e-mail.
If you recall, neither Slammer, Code Red or Nimda required user action -- they propagated by establishing connections to open ports. While "safe surfing" might be adequate for a techie users on a home network behind a highly restricted firewall, if you are responsible for maintaining a Windows network for a business, you absolutely *better* be using some kind of A/V on the corporate desktops and servers.
In my opinion, GoogleEarth/Google Maps is an excellent research tool. I use it for flight planning, vacation planning, navigating around unfamiliar cities, etc. This summer, I finally got my airplane flying and spent a while checking out areas I thought I might like to fly to. I've used it to research 4x4 trails to explore in my truck. I went to Tennessee for a conference this summer and used Google Maps to research hotels near the conference venue, and to find directions to and from places I needed to go while I was there. In short, Google Earth and Google Maps help me get *out* and explore more than I would before these tools became more available.
I'm not exactly sure how taking a picture of something detracts from the world. I can't rock climb a cliff on Google Earth, nor can I kayak a photo of an awesome whitewater river. Even the best, most detailed photographs fall far short of the experience of actually *being* somewhere, so it's not like people are going to opt for Google's imagery over actually going to scenic/interesting places.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't put any bets on the AlphaJet in a matchup against an F-22, though.
If you aren't familiar with computer terminology, WTF are you doing on /.?
The Deep, Deep, Dark, Dark, Deep, Dark Web...coming soon to a web browser near you!
Fine, as long as you work my hours. I work in a job where I may be setting up at 0500 for a multi-person network-heavy presentation scheduled to go at 0630, and I have zero time for argument.
Sounds like you may very well be the kind of user that makes IT staff bitter and hostile. If you didn't make arrangements with the IT staff for your presentation before your presentation is scheduled to start, how is that my problem? One thing that never fails to draw the ire of IT staff is a user who consistently doesn't tell anyone what they need until it's time to go live, then expects said IT staff to drop everything to accommodate their needs at the last minute.
I've had great support and lousy support, and yes, I bring my own network hardware in case the local admin doesn't have what I need.
That's reasonable. However, depending upon what you bring, the local admin may or may not be willing to plug your gear into his network. As the local admin, I am the guy that gets called on the carpet when rogue equipment takes down the network. If I don't know what the gear is or what it will do on my network, it doesn't get installed until it's been tested in a sandbox first. In the past, I've had rogue equipment cause routing loops which in turn caused spanning tree on my switch to turn off the port to the offending network drop, taking out most of a department (they had installed a SOHO switch because they needed more ports, but never told us). I've seen rogue equipment replying to DHCP requests causing conflicting IP addresses or IP addresses that were in an entirely different subnet than the main network. I could go on, but you get the picture. So please excuse me if I don't just take your word for it that your equipment won't break things, unless I know you and know that you really do know what you are talking about.
That said, I almost never have a problem, because good network admins do indeed work with me, and lousy ones either (a) aren't there to complain, or (b) trust me far more than they should.
As long as you are reasonable in your requests and are willing to compromise with the admins on your network, most admins, IMHO, will do their best to find a solution that both they and you can live with. From what I've seen, while the BOFH does indeed exist, he is more of an exception than the rule.
Oh, and I ask (and explain and discuss and compromise) long before any equipment sees power. It's only polite.
That goes a very long ways towards earning the trust of the local admin. I withdraw my first comment about how you sound like the type of user who causes IT staff to become bitter and hostile. I'll bend over backwards -- even at the last minute -- for someone who tries to work with me and/or has shown me that I can trust them.
I've never (ten years or so) had a local hardware issue extend into the host network. It seems to be fairly hard to do that if you're not an idiot (and if your own equipment is truly solid, which mine is).
There's the catch. While most people are reasonably intelligent, there are enough people who aren't to make network admins suspicious of others, if we don't know their technical competency. There are many users who think they know more about networking than the admins who built the network. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it isn't. At my current job, there is a user that I trust very, very much. He held my job before I did, and still probably knows more about the network than I do (he left for a different department because he got fed up with the guy who used to manage the department). OTOH, there is another user who thinks he is God's gift to networking. While he does have a little knowledge...well, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
"Which brings us into the world of under-the-table bribes and bonuses, and I'm quite sure none of us want to go *there*... so do you have a plan B?"
Sweet :)
In the US, the ability to wiretap voice communications is required under CALEA.
Not just voice -- ISP's providing broadband Internet service must provide the ability to tap customers' Internet traffic as well.
They don't necessarily have a "secret room", but as I understand, CALEA, etc., requires every telco to have a plan in place to apply a tap to every circuit that they provide.
Yes, I am a network administrator at a telco, and yes, the company I had to work for had to produce a CALEA-compliance plan about a year ago.
Do other /.'ers have experience with being forced to turn over 3rd party private data?
Where I used to work (an ISP), I would occasionally have to provide usage logs, etc. on customers. However, the requests *always* came from the ISP's legal department. If ever I received a direct request (IIRC, it happened once or twice), I sent it to legal before replying with the information. I'd *pull* the data as soon as I got a notice, but I absolutely, positively did not divulge it until my legal department ok'd the request. For that matter, as I recall (it's been a while...), I only gave the information to legal, as well.
IANAL, but that seems to open up a whole new can of worms that, IMHO, you really don't want to get involved with. YMMV, of course.
You make me wish I hadn't already posted, just so I could mod you up. Well said!
That's just rationalizing unethical behaviour. You seem to misunderstand what you quoted at the beginning of your post, and, in fact, use it to prove the opposite of what it is really saying. "...the indifference of good men" is someone saying, "It's not my problem, so I am just going to ignore it." It is working for an unethical company -- even if you are not required to do anything unethical yourself -- rather than leaving in protest, blowing the whistle, etc. It is most definitely not accepting unethical tasks so you can feed your family. As the old saying goes, you were looking for a job when you found this one, so you know you can find another one; it is highly unlikely that your family will starve if you quit the crappy job you have right now, even in our current economy.
What happens when you quit a job in protest, and then your next prospective employer calls for a reference and is told that you weren't a team player, balked at management direction, etc.? It's not a written "do not hire" list per se, but I would imagine it can be rather difficult to land a new job if your previous employer is giving bad recommendations.
Even if your previous employer is smart enough to be very discrete when answering questions, companies that have been in business for very long know how to ask and answer the important questions without exposing themselves to liability:
Prospective Employer: "Would you consider re-hiring this employee?"
Previous Employer: "No."
or Previous Employer: "This employee was let go for cause." (if applicable).
Are you serious?
You have no control over what anyone else does or does not do. All that you can control is what you yourself do. If he explains why this is a bad idea, explains the ethical considerations, and his boss says to do it anyway, then what more would you have the employee do? At that point, walking away from the job is the only ethical option you have, since you can't compel anyone else to forgo the job. All you can do once you leave is hope that anyone coming after you will refuse to do the job as well.
Things like posted schedules, imho, are the real legitimate use for scrapers.
I agree. That's the one and only time I actually scripted a scraper for work. One of the senior execs was having trouble downloading an airline schedule (we frequently had to fly techs to our remote locations), so I added a task to cron to wget the schedule from the airline's web page. Downloading the schedule and reposting it on our internal web server was, IMHO, a lot easier and faster than trying to figure out why an exec couldn't download the schedule from his desktop.
In the interests of playing nicely, I set the task to download the schedule once a week so that it wouldn't waste the airline's bandwidth.
No, you didn't RTFA. It's an AlphaJet, not a BetaJet ;)
If I had the money to buy an AlphaJet, I'd buy one, too. I've always thought they were beautiful airplanes.
Tawnos is correct. Whether you are talking about SSH on Debian or SMB on Windows, the concept is the same. OS's *should* ship with services turned off by default. If you don't know enough to turn on the service then you don't know enough to secure it and you probably don't need it. That's one of the things I like about a lot of Linux distros -- they ask you if you want the various services turned on during install, and leave them off if you don't (or, like Gentoo, simply leave them off until you manually turn them on during/after install).
/., I'll follow up with a bad car analogy: if you don't know how to start the car, you have no business driving it on the roads with other people.
Since this is
Very true, but be aware that chkrootkit tends to have a lot of false positives. Still, it's better than nothing.
I've put all of our Windows servers where I work and all of the Windows desktops at my wife's two businesses on NOD32 as well. I lost faith in Kaspersky after a virus outbreak on a network I manage despite running Kaspersky on the desktops and servers.
The only problem I've seen with NOD32 is that if your Internet connection isn't rock solid and reasonably fast, it will sometimes have trouble updating. I have a Windows server in a remote location that's across a satellite hop, and found that I couldn't update NOD32 on it from Eset's web site, but I *could* update it from a mirror on another server in my main office. Also, one of my wife's businesses is on a rather flaky ADSL connection, and I have had a lot of problems updating the machines there from Eset's web site as well.
That was what I was thinking to all of the people who had posted along the lines of "I've used Windows since with no anti-virus, and I've never been infected!"
If you don't check, how would you know ???
No, it's a greatly oversimplified analogy. It's easy to blame the end-user for doing stupid things on a networked computer -- and a lot of times, it's true -- but not all viruses and worms are contracted by visiting...ummm...questionable?...websites or clicking attachments in an e-mail.
If you recall, neither Slammer, Code Red or Nimda required user action -- they propagated by establishing connections to open ports. While "safe surfing" might be adequate for a techie users on a home network behind a highly restricted firewall, if you are responsible for maintaining a Windows network for a business, you absolutely *better* be using some kind of A/V on the corporate desktops and servers.
Nicely done! I needed that laugh today :)
In my opinion, GoogleEarth/Google Maps is an excellent research tool. I use it for flight planning, vacation planning, navigating around unfamiliar cities, etc. This summer, I finally got my airplane flying and spent a while checking out areas I thought I might like to fly to. I've used it to research 4x4 trails to explore in my truck. I went to Tennessee for a conference this summer and used Google Maps to research hotels near the conference venue, and to find directions to and from places I needed to go while I was there. In short, Google Earth and Google Maps help me get *out* and explore more than I would before these tools became more available.
I'm not exactly sure how taking a picture of something detracts from the world. I can't rock climb a cliff on Google Earth, nor can I kayak a photo of an awesome whitewater river. Even the best, most detailed photographs fall far short of the experience of actually *being* somewhere, so it's not like people are going to opt for Google's imagery over actually going to scenic/interesting places.
Because you are actually the unwitting star of a reality TV show.
Smile!
No, I fly my own airplane, usually solo. No one to hear me talk except, well, the person I'm talking to.
Hmmmm...Maybe they complained to the FCC.