Every hack you've ever heard of has been discovered -- that's why you've heard of it.
Right, and every hack that hasn't been generally discovered is being selectively utilized for malicious gain. I don't worry about the hacks we know about.
We could hypothetically get to the point where there was real, justifiable faith in the security of electronic voting, however people are understandably wary - with massively complex machines it is extremely difficult to vet the code to a degree that you can state with absolute certainty what falls within the realm of the possible and impossible. With electronic voting machines you would have to take it further and vet every single gate on every piece of hardware as well - a seemingly innocuous piece of maintenance code that resets the vote tally when someone introduces a certain external magnetic wage that affects a certain gate in a highly particular way, etc.
It's generally considered a lot easier to alter electronic records than it is to alter paper records. e.g. If 10,000,000 people vote, and you have 5,100,000 in var A, and 4,900,000 in var B, a couple of ops and you have 4,990,000 and 5,010,000 respectively, with no one the wiser. With paper you'd have to somehow rewrite the entire voting history (you couldn't do it in real time because each voter is a validator that the machine worked as expected).
How many other death notices have you seen on Apple's site? I'm going to wager that Apple has had quite a few employees, hundreds or thousands if you include past employees, over their history.
Or are you saying that Apple should show they care about their employees...by putting a tribute for one specific employee way back in their past?
In this context, the term circumnavigate historically meant by boat or ship, however recently aircraft have been added. Spacecraft aren't included in this illustrious set.
Whether they choose to be incompetent or not doesn't counter the fact that they are incompetent, as a general rule. Banking (like telecom was) is one industry where if you have a large organization all you need to do is sit back and scratch yourself while the billions come in. Just take a look at the history and outrageous mismanagement of RBC over the past decade, yet there's another billion in profits on the backs of Canadian consumers.
I think the think general idea is that the broadcasters, the studios, etc., have a lot more money than some of the other federal agencies.
Really the entertainment industry, while it is very in our faces and seems to be a dominant industry, is chump change in the overall financial world.
Regarding the deterrent factor, most, or many, nuclear power plants are privately owned and operated. While they are heavily regulated, ultimately it can be hugely beneficial for them to skirt a few regulatory corners wherever possible, and it can mean tens of millions of dollars in saved expenses. In the environmental realm, huge mega companies reaping in billions save millions skirting environmental laws, and again the federally mandated punishment is usually laughable.
Ultimately the FCC fines are all about one single thing - placating the bible belt. There's a bitter paradox that TV can be full of crime and brutal violence, just so long as you don't show a boob or utter a profanity.
As an aside, I think the point we're getting to is one where data such that I would provide to a bank or a credit issuer should be one-time use, and generally "public" -- these sorts of issues are becoming more and more regular, and it's going to reach a point where every single person has all of their information in the wild. If it isn't from backups, it's from sleazy employees and contractors at the dozens of organizations that we have to deal with in the modern era. We're long past the point where having a single magical master key SIN/SSN makes any sense at all.
I'm not proposing a solution (of course for the technically savvy perhaps the government runs a user->organization site where I can allocate special identifiers only for use and usefulness by specific organizations. Here Big Incompetent Bank, you can have number XYZ-123a that I generated specifically for you, correlating with me in the super-duper secure government master database, so if your douche-bag employees back it up to a USB key it's of little relevance.
You can opt out by unchecking the "Connect to the Internet" box about 10 years ago...
This statement stands out as nonsensical in an otherwise insightful post - this fault had nothing to do with the internet, nor have most other identity theft type of issues.
In this case it was a standard tape backup, in others it has been social engineering, and maybe a connection that could just as well been through a dial-up port. My wife had a credit issue where someone received a credit card under her name, apparently after dumpster diving at the outsourced payroll administration office.
What really makes this a modern issue is that it's the era of instant credit by terribly incompetent banks. With even the slightest amount of concern for actually running a solid, intelligent operation, both banks and credit agencies would have eliminated this problem long ago, but as it is someone can have a long paper trail pointing to one location, and somehow at the same time get a new credit card mailed to them half a continent away. In the case of my wife, someone got a credit card under her name, but with an entirely different face name, by claiming to be her brother. She neither has a brother, or lives in Quebec, and it was revealing that some low paid, low skilled credit hound found the real Mrs. Ergo98 in an instant yet the banks couldn't bother would the most rudimentary of checks when handing out easy credit.
The potential long term effect of ad companies advertising less
No, they'll advertise more. They'll just offer less compensation to those who carry it to offset the "ad shrinkage" (presuming they don't already only advertise based on performance click-through).
This is already happening with AdWords - Adwords were a pretty fine way for small, one man shops to earn a bit of income with some barely intrusive ads. Now with clickbots inevitably either the small guy will be cut out, or the payment per click will be dramatically reduced as a "fraud surcharge".
Any real modern DB system, such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase, DB2...any of the real ones...has extensive software support for recovery from failures.
Any system should robustly support rebooting, and it's a little disconcerting seeing seemingly regular stories of these sites with systems that they need to kick, cajole, or press "ANY KEY" to get the site operational again.
In the case of Wikipedia if they had a robust database backend the circuit would have been re-enabled, their systems would have powered on, and the world would be great again. At this colo the UPS was likely upstream of the breaker (like at LiveJournal).
No database can guarantee data integrity in the case of a power failure.
Barring a couple of extreme exceptions, of course a modern database system should protect integrity in the case of a power failure, or any other sudden system failure (kernel panic, GPF, whatever). In the case of the much maligned SQL Server, you can hit the power button all you want mid-transaction and you're going to get a blister on your finger before the database is corrupted.
Burlington, Ontario is actually a wonderful town. Of course I'm a 32-year old professional with a child, so maybe what makes this town great to me wouldn't make it great for a teenager or early 20-er.
Don't forget that the overhead of a grid infrastructure - packaging the task up, transmitting it to another machine through a glacially slow network, unpackaging the task, performing the work, packaging the results, transmitting it to another machine, unpacakaging the results, coordinating in the results in some sort of orchestrator.
Unless your task is signficantly computationally demanding, this overhead can significantly outweigh just doing the task directly, regardless of how parallel the task can be.
I'll take any speed boosts Intel wants to throw my way but I think their efforts would be better spent elsewhere.
Craig Barrett here.
Listen we apologize for this distraction, and apologize for not consulting with you first. I guess some of our engineers just got caught up in something silly and they went off and did this when instead they could be doing things more valuable to you.
We immediately begin work on the porn accelerator coprocessor.
I'm not questioning whether Google does a lot of neat stuff - obviously they do. I'm questioning this idea that every "geek" is agog over Google the great, desperately wishing they could work for such a benevolent overlord. There are geeks who feel this way, but there are a lot that find the Google love hard to comprehend.
It's just a large organization, and what they do really isn't that amazing. It isn't. 90% of Google's supremecy has to do with innovative business plans, not innovative software (Google is expending investments and development in areas that most other post-.com contenders pulled out as untenable), so if you want to look at why Google is huge right now, it's the annoying executives rather than the rank and file geeks.
If you think Google is mainly about "web apps that do typeahead", you know very little about them.
I realize that some people are blinded by their Google-awe, and in this case it led you to skip over the clear fact that my post actually said "Search and...". Hey, let's not let facts get in the way of our zealotry, right? If you don't think that Google is 99% about search, then you're beyond the point of any hope.
Google is not a special snowflake. The only reason Google rose to the ranks of low-level geek herodom is because they entered a market that many others were doing pretty well (when Google entered the market Excite was easily as competent at search, albeit their massive clutterfactory of an interface didn't make them the kiddy fans. OMG EXCITE@HOME! ), but Google brought a new, minimalist interface, and a business model to go along with it, as opposed to the massive cost-sinks of AltaVista/Excite. Wow. Sign me up.
Moving to some remote location to work for one specific employer, with no other viable employment in the region, sounds like a crazy plan. Once you're there, have a family and some roots, Google has the capability of turning the screws until you bleed.
There will come a time, possibly in the not so distant future, when Google is Just Another Employee, and they're battling for survival amongst a wide range of contenders to the throne. Suddenly they're not giving out raises, or asking for salary concessions, and the game room and free gym membership are closed down...
Slashdot Mirror
So you could almost say that their nanopolicy is in lots of tiny parts, scattered about, each individually working towards a common goal?
Sounds appropriate.
To be fair, US elections are vastly more complex as there is significantly more direct democracy. Things like judges, sherrifs, and so on.
Every hack you've ever heard of has been discovered -- that's why you've heard of it.
Right, and every hack that hasn't been generally discovered is being selectively utilized for malicious gain. I don't worry about the hacks we know about.
We could hypothetically get to the point where there was real, justifiable faith in the security of electronic voting, however people are understandably wary - with massively complex machines it is extremely difficult to vet the code to a degree that you can state with absolute certainty what falls within the realm of the possible and impossible. With electronic voting machines you would have to take it further and vet every single gate on every piece of hardware as well - a seemingly innocuous piece of maintenance code that resets the vote tally when someone introduces a certain external magnetic wage that affects a certain gate in a highly particular way, etc.
It's generally considered a lot easier to alter electronic records than it is to alter paper records. e.g. If 10,000,000 people vote, and you have 5,100,000 in var A, and 4,900,000 in var B, a couple of ops and you have 4,990,000 and 5,010,000 respectively, with no one the wiser. With paper you'd have to somehow rewrite the entire voting history (you couldn't do it in real time because each voter is a validator that the machine worked as expected).
Kinda dumb, but if I actually read that wikipedia page down near the bottom it includes spacecraft circumnavigations in the aerial set.
Nonetheless the term is normally reserved for boats and aircraft, and I only linked wikipedia because I know it's highly regarded around these parts.
they care about their employess alot
How many other death notices have you seen on Apple's site? I'm going to wager that Apple has had quite a few employees, hundreds or thousands if you include past employees, over their history.
Or are you saying that Apple should show they care about their employees...by putting a tribute for one specific employee way back in their past?
In this context, the term circumnavigate historically meant by boat or ship, however recently aircraft have been added. Spacecraft aren't included in this illustrious set.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumnavigation
The banks are not incompetent.
Whether they choose to be incompetent or not doesn't counter the fact that they are incompetent, as a general rule. Banking (like telecom was) is one industry where if you have a large organization all you need to do is sit back and scratch yourself while the billions come in. Just take a look at the history and outrageous mismanagement of RBC over the past decade, yet there's another billion in profits on the backs of Canadian consumers.
I think the think general idea is that the broadcasters, the studios, etc., have a lot more money than some of the other federal agencies.
Really the entertainment industry, while it is very in our faces and seems to be a dominant industry, is chump change in the overall financial world.
Regarding the deterrent factor, most, or many, nuclear power plants are privately owned and operated. While they are heavily regulated, ultimately it can be hugely beneficial for them to skirt a few regulatory corners wherever possible, and it can mean tens of millions of dollars in saved expenses. In the environmental realm, huge mega companies reaping in billions save millions skirting environmental laws, and again the federally mandated punishment is usually laughable.
Ultimately the FCC fines are all about one single thing - placating the bible belt. There's a bitter paradox that TV can be full of crime and brutal violence, just so long as you don't show a boob or utter a profanity.
As an aside, I think the point we're getting to is one where data such that I would provide to a bank or a credit issuer should be one-time use, and generally "public" -- these sorts of issues are becoming more and more regular, and it's going to reach a point where every single person has all of their information in the wild. If it isn't from backups, it's from sleazy employees and contractors at the dozens of organizations that we have to deal with in the modern era. We're long past the point where having a single magical master key SIN/SSN makes any sense at all.
I'm not proposing a solution (of course for the technically savvy perhaps the government runs a user->organization site where I can allocate special identifiers only for use and usefulness by specific organizations. Here Big Incompetent Bank, you can have number XYZ-123a that I generated specifically for you, correlating with me in the super-duper secure government master database, so if your douche-bag employees back it up to a USB key it's of little relevance.
You can opt out by unchecking the "Connect to the Internet" box about 10 years ago...
This statement stands out as nonsensical in an otherwise insightful post - this fault had nothing to do with the internet, nor have most other identity theft type of issues.
In this case it was a standard tape backup, in others it has been social engineering, and maybe a connection that could just as well been through a dial-up port. My wife had a credit issue where someone received a credit card under her name, apparently after dumpster diving at the outsourced payroll administration office.
What really makes this a modern issue is that it's the era of instant credit by terribly incompetent banks. With even the slightest amount of concern for actually running a solid, intelligent operation, both banks and credit agencies would have eliminated this problem long ago, but as it is someone can have a long paper trail pointing to one location, and somehow at the same time get a new credit card mailed to them half a continent away. In the case of my wife, someone got a credit card under her name, but with an entirely different face name, by claiming to be her brother. She neither has a brother, or lives in Quebec, and it was revealing that some low paid, low skilled credit hound found the real Mrs. Ergo98 in an instant yet the banks couldn't bother would the most rudimentary of checks when handing out easy credit.
On another note, anyone know which offsite backup provider BoA use? Just so we can all avoid them.
Why? The tapes were stolen during shipping if I've read correctly, so it is certainly not the fault of the backup storage.
The potential long term effect of ad companies advertising less
No, they'll advertise more. They'll just offer less compensation to those who carry it to offset the "ad shrinkage" (presuming they don't already only advertise based on performance click-through).
This is already happening with AdWords - Adwords were a pretty fine way for small, one man shops to earn a bit of income with some barely intrusive ads. Now with clickbots inevitably either the small guy will be cut out, or the payment per click will be dramatically reduced as a "fraud surcharge".
What kind of person thinks its OK to force others to see things they are not interested in.
What kind of person thinks its OK to force a site to only display precisely and only what they, a selfish serve-me user, wants?
Sure, if you're talking about crap DBAs.
Any real modern DB system, such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase, DB2...any of the real ones...has extensive software support for recovery from failures.
Any system should robustly support rebooting, and it's a little disconcerting seeing seemingly regular stories of these sites with systems that they need to kick, cajole, or press "ANY KEY" to get the site operational again.
In the case of Wikipedia if they had a robust database backend the circuit would have been re-enabled, their systems would have powered on, and the world would be great again. At this colo the UPS was likely upstream of the breaker (like at LiveJournal).
No database can guarantee data integrity in the case of a power failure.
Barring a couple of extreme exceptions, of course a modern database system should protect integrity in the case of a power failure, or any other sudden system failure (kernel panic, GPF, whatever). In the case of the much maligned SQL Server, you can hit the power button all you want mid-transaction and you're going to get a blister on your finger before the database is corrupted.
Burlington, Ontario is actually a wonderful town. Of course I'm a 32-year old professional with a child, so maybe what makes this town great to me wouldn't make it great for a teenager or early 20-er.
For me I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
Don't forget that the overhead of a grid infrastructure - packaging the task up, transmitting it to another machine through a glacially slow network, unpackaging the task, performing the work, packaging the results, transmitting it to another machine, unpacakaging the results, coordinating in the results in some sort of orchestrator.
Unless your task is signficantly computationally demanding, this overhead can significantly outweigh just doing the task directly, regardless of how parallel the task can be.
Hey I live in Burlington.
Irrelevant comment there. Carry on.
It's the best submission EVAR!
I'll take any speed boosts Intel wants to throw my way but I think their efforts would be better spent elsewhere.
Craig Barrett here.
Listen we apologize for this distraction, and apologize for not consulting with you first. I guess some of our engineers just got caught up in something silly and they went off and did this when instead they could be doing things more valuable to you.
We immediately begin work on the porn accelerator coprocessor.
I'm not questioning whether Google does a lot of neat stuff - obviously they do. I'm questioning this idea that every "geek" is agog over Google the great, desperately wishing they could work for such a benevolent overlord. There are geeks who feel this way, but there are a lot that find the Google love hard to comprehend.
It's just a large organization, and what they do really isn't that amazing. It isn't. 90% of Google's supremecy has to do with innovative business plans, not innovative software (Google is expending investments and development in areas that most other post-.com contenders pulled out as untenable), so if you want to look at why Google is huge right now, it's the annoying executives rather than the rank and file geeks.
If you think Google is mainly about "web apps that do typeahead", you know very little about them.
I realize that some people are blinded by their Google-awe, and in this case it led you to skip over the clear fact that my post actually said "Search and...". Hey, let's not let facts get in the way of our zealotry, right? If you don't think that Google is 99% about search, then you're beyond the point of any hope.
Google is not a special snowflake. The only reason Google rose to the ranks of low-level geek herodom is because they entered a market that many others were doing pretty well (when Google entered the market Excite was easily as competent at search, albeit their massive clutterfactory of an interface didn't make them the kiddy fans. OMG EXCITE@HOME! ), but Google brought a new, minimalist interface, and a business model to go along with it, as opposed to the massive cost-sinks of AltaVista/Excite. Wow. Sign me up.
Moving to some remote location to work for one specific employer, with no other viable employment in the region, sounds like a crazy plan. Once you're there, have a family and some roots, Google has the capability of turning the screws until you bleed.
There will come a time, possibly in the not so distant future, when Google is Just Another Employee, and they're battling for survival amongst a wide range of contenders to the throne. Suddenly they're not giving out raises, or asking for salary concessions, and the game room and free gym membership are closed down...