It depends on the time frame but the music industry has lost a fair number of digital masters that were kept on hard disk rather than digital tape. If I remember correctly the issue was heads sticking on drives that are left on a shelf for years but I could be wrong.
I guess it seemed like a good idea to scrap tape since the recordings in in question were direct digital recordings to disk. Analog tapes that are many years old can almost always be recovered at least long enough to make a duplicate. I've head stories about some pretty extraordinary steps being taken to recover damaged master tapes. Digital tape is a little more difficult but still much more recoverable.
Leroy said before the birth of Mahalia on December 1, his wife disapproved of his BlackBerry because he was always playing with it but now she has "changed her tune".
It would appear that Mayor Ravenstahl isn't familiar with the concept students (like tourists) bring money to his city and you really don't want them to leave. Cities fight to get tourist attractions to come to their city. Of course moving a university is harder than moving an amusement park so I guess it's safe to go after the university students. But if he makes it hard enough on the local universities and their students I'm sure they will find a way to express their displeasure and get rid of him.
The bad is that in the American legal system you sue whoever has the money. In this case that is Verizon.
The good is that maybe Verizon will think twice about keeping a psycho on their payroll. I think Verizon keeping this guy will show a court that they are not even attempting to weed out the bad actors on their payroll.
I figure the reality is that if this guy snapped once he will again. The next guy (or his relatives) will have a really good case when they sue Verizon. There will be no argument that this was an unforeseen probability.
I'm of the opinion that once an employee assaults a customer or another employee regardless of the circumstances, outside of self defense, he should be an ex-employee.
You know I might agree with you if Verizon had disciplined the employee but considering they are quoted in the article as saying he still works for them I am going to say maybe this is one of those suites that makes sense. I'd prefer to think any company that is going to send technicians to my house would have a no punching the customer "even if he really deserves it" policy but maybe that's just me. You can have the crazed employees in your house that get to punch the customer for something unreasonable like asking for ID which I would bet if you check Verizon's web site is even a suggested behavior when you have tech come out.
The fact the Verizon tech still has a job is interesting.
"In the months since this incident, his conduct has been blameless. As a result, we will not take further action," Young said.
The lesson here is if you work for Verizon you get to punch the customers as long as you only do it every now and then.
The code in question is dual licensed: you can use it either under the BSD license or the GPL. It's your choice. In this case the person chose the GPL (and not BSD).
Perhaps now the "BSD is the only free license!!!" zealots will admit that they too want to restrict what others can do with their code. (There is no "100% freedom".)
The lesson from all this is: do NOT pick a license based on politics, religion, and fashion. Read the license (or talk to a copyright lawyer) and pick the license that works the way you want it to -- not because RMS or Theo or Joe Blow says it is the only true and FREE!!! license.
I'll start off with I think your assessment of copyright law may be incorrect but IANAL. I don't even play one on Slashdot so I'm going to skip over that part of your argument and look at the social/political issues. Ultimately I think that most things open source come down to social issues anyway. Everyone wants their credit.
Ultimately most of these BSD vs Linus and BSD license vs GPL licenses all seem to feel like religious debates so forgive me is I use a few religious analogies.
It seems to me the problem here is that the GPL and the BSD licenses are incompatible for some uses. So the a Linux developer convinced an OpenBSD developer to dual license his code. So far so good. The code is licensed BSD for ultimate freedom of use and GPL to allow its inclusion in the Linux kernel where it has to be GPLed. Then the Linux developer decides that his religion is correct and decides to quit giving any credit back to the original developer by removing the original copyright and license. That seems difficult to defend legally but let's assume that the BSD licenses actually allows this. (If so I'm sure Microsoft is pissed right about now that they included the BSD license in their products for all those years.) So what we come down to is a social issue. The original BSD developer has had his credit removed (something even nasty old Microsoft didn't do) so that someone in the GPL world wouldn't have to look at that ungodly BSD licenses. There isn't a practical reason for removing the BSD licenses so it has to be a social/political move.
What's the outcome of all this?
OpenBSD/Linux relations are strained a little further. With de Raadt and RMS in these camps that's probably inevitable anyway. Strong personalities create strong enemies.
I would guess getting BSD licensed software dual licensed just got harder since that seems to be the logic used to allowing this to be relicensed exclusively under the GPL. That's bad for everyone. Of course the retaliation will be a lack of code going back the other direction but I seem to get the feeling that getting a GPL developer to license under dual with BSD was probably already mode difficult than getting a BSD developer to license under dual with GPL. It's a big loss all the way around. About the only people who win are the proprietary software developers. At least in the Microsoft case they never seemed to have an issue with giving credit to BSD when it was required. Rejoice Microsoft wins again.
In 1993 the district and IBM negotiated a long-term settlement that said the school district would pay the first of four $1.25 million installments beginning in 2008. Payments were deferred until then because 2008 was the year the district was scheduled to finish making state loan repayments under its previous loan plan, according to the Contra Costa story.
If I read this correctly the state waited for the school system to finish paying off a loan from the state before asking IBM to forgive a different loan? Charity starts at home and that goes for California as well. If California is so happy to help the school system out why not refund the loan payments the school system made to the state?
Personally I don't see this as the privacy invasion of the century. But all the same I hate having to talk to cold calling sales people and I figure the less of them that I hang up on the lower my chances of one of them having the balls to call back and complain to my boss about my rude behavior. So I went in and edited my contact info. E-mail address is now bogus and the phone number goes to local time and temperature. If by some chance someone wants to send me a letter that is OK with me. As an added bonus if you edit your own info no other user can edit afterwards. I don't use the service but you can edit your own record (or any record you can check the e-mail for) without signing up.
It's this thing called the slashdot effect. When you get way more traffic than normal the servers and/or networking equipment sometimes fail. 2600 does not seem to have a huge networking operation so it probably is not hard to overwhelm them. Throw the fact that the entire staff is busy with Hope and it's bound to happen. BTW 2600 and Hope site are up right now (Sunday July 23, 2006 11:23 am GMT).
On the subject of Rambam check out previous talks given at HOPE conferences. He's a good speaker and quite interesting on the topic of information availability. He stated a couple of weeks ago in an interview leading up to this conference's talk that he had planed to do the same basic presentation at the last hope but the "victim" got cold feet at the last moment after he realized just how much information was available and threatened to sue. If you listen to the old presentations he does make a point that almost any information is available legally but it is more difficult to get it legally than illegally. I have to believe from hearing him speak several time that what he would have done for this presentation would at least to be best of his knowledge been legal.
Just because you train someone and slap the title professor on them doesn't mean they can teach. I think everyone has had at least one teacher that they could not guess how they managed to keep a job. If they rush the production of teachers just to open schools, the problem becomes worse.
One final complaint, and that's about outlook/exchange: why the hell doesn't it treat "internally" sourced messages differently than "external"?
If you are talking about this specific example it is because of the way this was acquired. The e-mail appears to be the messages taken when enron went to court so this is not exactly as it would appear on the server. This is great since one of the huge problems with creating a corpus of ham and spam is getting good ham since it is inherently private e-mail. Since this was already in the public domain why not use it. The other method for distributable corpuses that I am aware of is to use mailing list traffic but that has an obvious skew.
Most spam filtering software that I have seen does treat internal mail differently than external e-mail.
Just because something comes in with a from of an internal address does not automatically make it spam. A number of web sites have options of sending a message to a friend. While I admit this is a horrible idea it does create some e-mail coming win with a from address that is local to the receiving server. This is one of those numerous examples of why spam filtering with low false positives is difficult. It's hard to know all of the possible legitimate actions that can look suspicious.
I have found a couple of things helpful in filtering these:
Look at the headers. Without knowing these people involved you can tell a lot by whether the headers are legitimate or not. As an example if you have a message between 2 Enron employees with no false headers you can probably safely say it's ham. It may be unwanted but it's not something I would typically filter.
All of these e-mails seem to come from the Enron e-mail exposed by the court case which sometimes gives context clues to what would be normal.
In JGC's defense I have gone through 250 or so of these and most are pretty obvious. There is a button for I don't know so if something looks questionable that's the button to hit.
For mailing lists. I'm in a good deposition to identify false positives in the corpus they have. The two FPs I have identified are Southwest's mailing list and Travelocity. These two mailing lists do often look spammy to automated filters but I get complaints when a filter blocks one. Which no longer happens thanks to tuning.
So yes a small part of the messages may be border line but I think that most stuff is pretty obviously whether I'm looking at my e-mail or some random strangers. I do think JGC will probably see more people identifying things incorrectly as spam that were really ham. Or at least that is my experience with my users when they are going through their own personal e-mail.
To a great extent the answer is it depends. I have had experience with Citrix in two different environments. In the first I was not directly involved but it was closer to what you are describing. It was a school lab situation.
The problems they ran into included multiple logins or simultaneous reboots are an issue. You essentially have all the machines hitting the server at one time. The hardware requirements that their vendor recommended were woefully inadequate. What was supposed to handle 40 users started to degrade at 10 and would start to fail around 20 or 25. The initial server was scraped and replaced with a much more robust solution. This issue was at least partially a vendor issue.
The second implementation is the one I support now. From this one I can say that ICA is not in my environment as fast as being on the local LAN if you are going over a busy WAN connection. I have not measured this yet but my theory is this is more related to latency than actual bandwidth exhaustion. On the LAN Citrix or Terminal Server are both very nice. Printers are a beast. This won't be much of a problem in a lab environment since it's just a mater of making sure you purchase printers that work but for an environment where you have people using home equipment it's a complete headache. Citrix knows this is a problem and things are getting better.
One of our apps is a resource hog so publishing it was horrible for the server. You definitely want to profile any applications before the implementation to make sure that they will work in a multi user environment. Thankfully this app is very rarely used by my Citrix users.
Something you probably want to consider is teaming the servers so if one goes down you do not completely loose access. Don't forget you have to be able to carry the whole load with missing machines or you are wasting your time.
My experience in both environments is that you can never lock the desktop/server down as much as you would like to. If you have a "nice" user base this may not be a problem but if you have people who want to tinker this can be a huge problem. Citrix does offer some advice and it will get you part way. Unfortunately anything that people can do to your locked down PCs now they will be trying to do to your server in a thin client environment. Personally for ease of management, I like Deep Freeze. That is the product that the university I worked for went to a few months after I left and the last time I asked they were having great results. But I know that is not what you are looking for.
Look at it this way. Assuming Tucows had fought, if you were an existing customer who's site went down for several days while Tucows fought would you have started looking for a new domain registrar who could keep DNS up. I think most people would have to answer yes if their presence means anything to them. Days of downtime are not acceptable. Tucows is in an interesting position they don't charge as much as some of their competitors but they also can't afford to spend as much on infrastructure. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
I noticed they used 2 different chips an Intel Pentium EE 955 and an Intel Pentium D 950. These are close but it's hard to believe that they would not have different overclocking tolerances. They also mention that one of the motherboards is a sample form the manufacturer that they detuned back to stock and the other is a retail unit. Who's to say these are actually identical boards.
To be fair I would say they would need to do all the tests twice once on each motherboard/CPU combination and average them. It might also be worth the cost of purchasing a truly matched set of hardware for this test instead of using hardware that is close to the same.
I have absolutely no experience with Sourcefire's support but if my experiecne with Check Point's support is any indication from a standpoint of support this merger would have been bad for Sourcefire. I'll agree Check Point's techs are generally good but it's murder to get one on the phone and in the last few months they have gone to a system where they immediately try to set up a call back the next day rather putting you in a queue. This is supposedly to allow the best person to handle your call. I have my doubts but I'll accept that may be partially true.
My most recent experience was being left on hold for an hour and a half after being told to expect a 35 minute hold time before someone came onto the line to ask me if they could set me up for a call back the next day. When I said I'd prefer to wait because I really needed to get my problem resolved I was told that I would probably not ever get to talk to a support tech because I have a Tier 2 support contract and people with Tier 1 contracts would continue to bump in front of me. Just because I didn't choose to pay for a Tier 1 contract should not mean that I don't get any support. I could have gotten that for free.
I talked to one of their managers today after calling my sales rep and explaining my displeasure and was assures that the person on the phone should not have told me I'd never get to talk to a support tech. I would have eventually gotten to the front of the queue. Well that's good to know. They didn't mention whether that would be the same day or not.
I'm considering my options for firewalls. I like the Check Point product but there are a lot more options available now than there were 5 years ago when I implemented this firewall. I think it may be reevaluation time.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on the time frame but the music industry has lost a fair number of digital masters that were kept on hard disk rather than digital tape. If I remember correctly the issue was heads sticking on drives that are left on a shelf for years but I could be wrong.
I guess it seemed like a good idea to scrap tape since the recordings in in question were direct digital recordings to disk. Analog tapes that are many years old can almost always be recovered at least long enough to make a duplicate. I've head stories about some pretty extraordinary steps being taken to recover damaged master tapes. Digital tape is a little more difficult but still much more recoverable.
Leroy said before the birth of Mahalia on December 1, his wife disapproved of his BlackBerry because he was always playing with it but now she has "changed her tune".
It would appear that Mayor Ravenstahl isn't familiar with the concept students (like tourists) bring money to his city and you really don't want them to leave. Cities fight to get tourist attractions to come to their city. Of course moving a university is harder than moving an amusement park so I guess it's safe to go after the university students. But if he makes it hard enough on the local universities and their students I'm sure they will find a way to express their displeasure and get rid of him.
The bad is that in the American legal system you sue whoever has the money. In this case that is Verizon.
The good is that maybe Verizon will think twice about keeping a psycho on their payroll. I think Verizon keeping this guy will show a court that they are not even attempting to weed out the bad actors on their payroll.
I figure the reality is that if this guy snapped once he will again. The next guy (or his relatives) will have a really good case when they sue Verizon. There will be no argument that this was an unforeseen probability.
I'm of the opinion that once an employee assaults a customer or another employee regardless of the circumstances, outside of self defense, he should be an ex-employee.
You know I might agree with you if Verizon had disciplined the employee but considering they are quoted in the article as saying he still works for them I am going to say maybe this is one of those suites that makes sense. I'd prefer to think any company that is going to send technicians to my house would have a no punching the customer "even if he really deserves it" policy but maybe that's just me. You can have the crazed employees in your house that get to punch the customer for something unreasonable like asking for ID which I would bet if you check Verizon's web site is even a suggested behavior when you have tech come out.
The fact the Verizon tech still has a job is interesting.
"In the months since this incident, his conduct has been blameless. As a result, we will not take further action," Young said.
The lesson here is if you work for Verizon you get to punch the customers as long as you only do it every now and then.
I'll start off with I think your assessment of copyright law may be incorrect but IANAL. I don't even play one on Slashdot so I'm going to skip over that part of your argument and look at the social/political issues. Ultimately I think that most things open source come down to social issues anyway. Everyone wants their credit.
Ultimately most of these BSD vs Linus and BSD license vs GPL licenses all seem to feel like religious debates so forgive me is I use a few religious analogies.
It seems to me the problem here is that the GPL and the BSD licenses are incompatible for some uses. So the a Linux developer convinced an OpenBSD developer to dual license his code. So far so good. The code is licensed BSD for ultimate freedom of use and GPL to allow its inclusion in the Linux kernel where it has to be GPLed. Then the Linux developer decides that his religion is correct and decides to quit giving any credit back to the original developer by removing the original copyright and license. That seems difficult to defend legally but let's assume that the BSD licenses actually allows this. (If so I'm sure Microsoft is pissed right about now that they included the BSD license in their products for all those years.) So what we come down to is a social issue. The original BSD developer has had his credit removed (something even nasty old Microsoft didn't do) so that someone in the GPL world wouldn't have to look at that ungodly BSD licenses. There isn't a practical reason for removing the BSD licenses so it has to be a social/political move.
What's the outcome of all this?
OpenBSD/Linux relations are strained a little further. With de Raadt and RMS in these camps that's probably inevitable anyway. Strong personalities create strong enemies.
I would guess getting BSD licensed software dual licensed just got harder since that seems to be the logic used to allowing this to be relicensed exclusively under the GPL. That's bad for everyone. Of course the retaliation will be a lack of code going back the other direction but I seem to get the feeling that getting a GPL developer to license under dual with BSD was probably already mode difficult than getting a BSD developer to license under dual with GPL. It's a big loss all the way around. About the only people who win are the proprietary software developers. At least in the Microsoft case they never seemed to have an issue with giving credit to BSD when it was required. Rejoice Microsoft wins again.
If I read this correctly the state waited for the school system to finish paying off a loan from the state before asking IBM to forgive a different loan? Charity starts at home and that goes for California as well. If California is so happy to help the school system out why not refund the loan payments the school system made to the state?
Personally I don't see this as the privacy invasion of the century. But all the same I hate having to talk to cold calling sales people and I figure the less of them that I hang up on the lower my chances of one of them having the balls to call back and complain to my boss about my rude behavior. So I went in and edited my contact info. E-mail address is now bogus and the phone number goes to local time and temperature. If by some chance someone wants to send me a letter that is OK with me. As an added bonus if you edit your own info no other user can edit afterwards. I don't use the service but you can edit your own record (or any record you can check the e-mail for) without signing up.
It's this thing called the slashdot effect. When you get way more traffic than normal the servers and/or networking equipment sometimes fail. 2600 does not seem to have a huge networking operation so it probably is not hard to overwhelm them. Throw the fact that the entire staff is busy with Hope and it's bound to happen. BTW 2600 and Hope site are up right now (Sunday July 23, 2006 11:23 am GMT).
On the subject of Rambam check out previous talks given at HOPE conferences. He's a good speaker and quite interesting on the topic of information availability. He stated a couple of weeks ago in an interview leading up to this conference's talk that he had planed to do the same basic presentation at the last hope but the "victim" got cold feet at the last moment after he realized just how much information was available and threatened to sue. If you listen to the old presentations he does make a point that almost any information is available legally but it is more difficult to get it legally than illegally. I have to believe from hearing him speak several time that what he would have done for this presentation would at least to be best of his knowledge been legal.
Four previous presentations.
Privacy - Not What It Used To Be
http://www.the-fifth-hope.org/mp3/privacy.mp3
Databases and Privacy
http://h2k2.hope.net/media/databases.mp3
Information on the Masses with Steve Rambam.
http://h2k.hope.net/post/panels/h2kinfo.mp3
Info for Masses
ftp://ftp.2600.com/pub/oth/beyondh/nfo4mses.ra
Yes according to Steve Rambam a character is based on him.
Wrong Inquirer. This is the UK based news service.
Just because you train someone and slap the title professor on them doesn't mean they can teach. I think everyone has had at least one teacher that they could not guess how they managed to keep a job. If they rush the production of teachers just to open schools, the problem becomes worse.
One final complaint, and that's about outlook/exchange: why the hell doesn't it treat "internally" sourced messages differently than "external"?
If you are talking about this specific example it is because of the way this was acquired. The e-mail appears to be the messages taken when enron went to court so this is not exactly as it would appear on the server. This is great since one of the huge problems with creating a corpus of ham and spam is getting good ham since it is inherently private e-mail. Since this was already in the public domain why not use it. The other method for distributable corpuses that I am aware of is to use mailing list traffic but that has an obvious skew.
Most spam filtering software that I have seen does treat internal mail differently than external e-mail.
Just because something comes in with a from of an internal address does not automatically make it spam. A number of web sites have options of sending a message to a friend. While I admit this is a horrible idea it does create some e-mail coming win with a from address that is local to the receiving server. This is one of those numerous examples of why spam filtering with low false positives is difficult. It's hard to know all of the possible legitimate actions that can look suspicious.
I have found a couple of things helpful in filtering these:
Look at the headers. Without knowing these people involved you can tell a lot by whether the headers are legitimate or not. As an example if you have a message between 2 Enron employees with no false headers you can probably safely say it's ham. It may be unwanted but it's not something I would typically filter.
All of these e-mails seem to come from the Enron e-mail exposed by the court case which sometimes gives context clues to what would be normal.
In JGC's defense I have gone through 250 or so of these and most are pretty obvious. There is a button for I don't know so if something looks questionable that's the button to hit.
For mailing lists. I'm in a good deposition to identify false positives in the corpus they have. The two FPs I have identified are Southwest's mailing list and Travelocity. These two mailing lists do often look spammy to automated filters but I get complaints when a filter blocks one. Which no longer happens thanks to tuning.
So yes a small part of the messages may be border line but I think that most stuff is pretty obviously whether I'm looking at my e-mail or some random strangers. I do think JGC will probably see more people identifying things incorrectly as spam that were really ham. Or at least that is my experience with my users when they are going through their own personal e-mail.
To a great extent the answer is it depends. I have had experience with Citrix in two different environments. In the first I was not directly involved but it was closer to what you are describing. It was a school lab situation.
The problems they ran into included multiple logins or simultaneous reboots are an issue. You essentially have all the machines hitting the server at one time. The hardware requirements that their vendor recommended were woefully inadequate. What was supposed to handle 40 users started to degrade at 10 and would start to fail around 20 or 25. The initial server was scraped and replaced with a much more robust solution. This issue was at least partially a vendor issue.
The second implementation is the one I support now. From this one I can say that ICA is not in my environment as fast as being on the local LAN if you are going over a busy WAN connection. I have not measured this yet but my theory is this is more related to latency than actual bandwidth exhaustion. On the LAN Citrix or Terminal Server are both very nice. Printers are a beast. This won't be much of a problem in a lab environment since it's just a mater of making sure you purchase printers that work but for an environment where you have people using home equipment it's a complete headache. Citrix knows this is a problem and things are getting better.
One of our apps is a resource hog so publishing it was horrible for the server. You definitely want to profile any applications before the implementation to make sure that they will work in a multi user environment. Thankfully this app is very rarely used by my Citrix users.
Something you probably want to consider is teaming the servers so if one goes down you do not completely loose access. Don't forget you have to be able to carry the whole load with missing machines or you are wasting your time.
My experience in both environments is that you can never lock the desktop/server down as much as you would like to. If you have a "nice" user base this may not be a problem but if you have people who want to tinker this can be a huge problem. Citrix does offer some advice and it will get you part way. Unfortunately anything that people can do to your locked down PCs now they will be trying to do to your server in a thin client environment. Personally for ease of management, I like Deep Freeze. That is the product that the university I worked for went to a few months after I left and the last time I asked they were having great results. But I know that is not what you are looking for.
Look at it this way. Assuming Tucows had fought, if you were an existing customer who's site went down for several days while Tucows fought would you have started looking for a new domain registrar who could keep DNS up. I think most people would have to answer yes if their presence means anything to them. Days of downtime are not acceptable. Tucows is in an interesting position they don't charge as much as some of their competitors but they also can't afford to spend as much on infrastructure. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
I noticed they used 2 different chips an Intel Pentium EE 955 and an Intel Pentium D 950. These are close but it's hard to believe that they would not have different overclocking tolerances. They also mention that one of the motherboards is a sample form the manufacturer that they detuned back to stock and the other is a retail unit. Who's to say these are actually identical boards.
To be fair I would say they would need to do all the tests twice once on each motherboard/CPU combination and average them. It might also be worth the cost of purchasing a truly matched set of hardware for this test instead of using hardware that is close to the same.
I have absolutely no experience with Sourcefire's support but if my experiecne with Check Point's support is any indication from a standpoint of support this merger would have been bad for Sourcefire. I'll agree Check Point's techs are generally good but it's murder to get one on the phone and in the last few months they have gone to a system where they immediately try to set up a call back the next day rather putting you in a queue. This is supposedly to allow the best person to handle your call. I have my doubts but I'll accept that may be partially true.
My most recent experience was being left on hold for an hour and a half after being told to expect a 35 minute hold time before someone came onto the line to ask me if they could set me up for a call back the next day. When I said I'd prefer to wait because I really needed to get my problem resolved I was told that I would probably not ever get to talk to a support tech because I have a Tier 2 support contract and people with Tier 1 contracts would continue to bump in front of me. Just because I didn't choose to pay for a Tier 1 contract should not mean that I don't get any support. I could have gotten that for free.
I talked to one of their managers today after calling my sales rep and explaining my displeasure and was assures that the person on the phone should not have told me I'd never get to talk to a support tech. I would have eventually gotten to the front of the queue. Well that's good to know. They didn't mention whether that would be the same day or not.
I'm considering my options for firewalls. I like the Check Point product but there are a lot more options available now than there were 5 years ago when I implemented this firewall. I think it may be reevaluation time.