The problem with working in education is that your right to free speech is almost non-existant. Say something that some jumped up "think of the children" zealot doesn't like, and you end up having your right to be in the presence of "impressionable children" questioned. While they're questioning, you frequently end up not being allowed to do your job "just in case". With the option of quietly quitting, having all the hassle, but being able to get a place elsewhere, or having your name plastered across the media (news outlets just LOVE to play with this kind of story) and never being able to work in the profession again, you know what's on the cards as soon as this comes up. It's a hard and gruelling task, to go through those inquisitions.
Each system you support has a cost of outage. You may be able to get around maintenance windows if you have high availability systems in place.
What you need management to be aware of is that there is a risk of financial (plus possibile reputation) losses when a system falls over, and significantly more if data is lost.
A good start is to feed back with a report of "money lost due to infrastructure weaknesses" on a monthly basis. Have this categorised by things such as failures due to aging, random blindsiding that may be able to be prevented with extra investment, that kind of thing.. This way, they get to see that you're not actually costing them money, you're one of the guardians (if not THE guardian) stopping them going down the pan.
Most metrics (calls, bandwidth etc are useless; bandwidth is handled through accounting anyway as a payment, calls can be anything and are a useless metric, uptime, the same).
Actually, they're easy to pull out and put in (plugs are shaped to have good grasp). Tripped over many, and never done damage to the wall sockets (they're put in pretty solidly). After doing a fair bit of travelling round the world (China, Russia, Indonesia, USA, Italy, Germany, Spain, France etc.) I still prefer the solidity of the connection of the UK plugs. Not tried the Australian ones, Danish or Swiss yet.. Maybe I need to travel there again to check!
"found out" and "were told by" are two very different phrases. In many walks of life, they end up very much the same in many ways. People "are told by" someone that something happens, or that people are members of something or other. And without ever substantiating it, people react en masse. This can make life very difficult for people who have this directed at them. Even if you have a side of the story that is actually the valid one, and it's diametrically opposed to the story that originally inflamed "the masses", you end up having to fight it on a one by one basis, with people who are already dead set against you. Now, if you take time to substantiate an accusation, you may "find out" that the story is, or isn't true, and you can act accordingly. However, in 90+% cases (as a ballpark figure), people are too lazy to "find out" and "being told by" suffices. Whether the allegations are true or not.. I don't know.. I don't have time to "find out". "Being told by" the media doesn't really cut it for me, so yes, I'm vaguely interested to see what falls out the other end of this, but I'm not about to decide one way or another for myself, as I honestly don't know enough to have a valid opinion.
Well, considering "Mandy" has already been forced to resign from Labour twice already for scandals (involving borrowing money from someone he was supposed to be investigating to buy a lovely house in central london among other activities), one wonders if he's caught with his hand in the cookie jar yet again, will this third strike resignation force his exclusion from Politics? Allegedly, he'd shown no interest in this whatsoever before going for a meal at a lovely retreat owned by a movie producer, and a few days holiday.. On his return, this was basically mandated with no consultation. Yay for unelected politicians who keep coming back despite being forced to resign in shame.
Seeing as I'm running full diagnostics on it, the hardware was fine on XP before a complete clean and rebuild, then the issue is with Win7. If it's with the vendor supplied drivers, then fine. I can't do what I want without them, so it's still to do with the whole experience and readiness of the product. There are issues I've come across that are most certainly MS, as the whole dependancy chain is MS stamped on the vendor sigs. This was a statement of fact, not a flame on Win 7. It's new, and I push machines quite hard (i.e. I run all the stress tests on it that I'd run on the servers I commission, and subject it to the same standards at built). I'd not put it in a business environment as the support margin would be too high. I'd not recommend it for the average home user to whom reliability is of paramount importance either yet. For the early adopters and people who are content to have things not work quite right, it's fine. Windows is Windows. It's an OS, and it's heading in the path of progression. Personally, I'd be happier to give my opinion of the OS in 6 months when they have it bedded in. For now, what I say is what I see. There are issues. They will be fixed. I'm going to be awaiting those.
Interesting.. I'm counting 2 BSODs, 6 complete lock ups and a few failures to activate disk drives waking up from sleep mode since Monday (I got the UK preorder, which came early due to the postal strikes here). So, your end of story isn't quite the end of the story it seems (isn't that always the way with someone that says "end of story"? It usually means "I can't think of any evidence, or any proof, so don't want to talk anymore in case you prove me wrong").
I was most perplexed to get up yesterday, anticipating having a day off work to just unwind and go for a walk, and find Windows 7 arrived in the post... Now in and working, and pottering around with it to see how it handles.. I was part of the pre-order group, so the pro version only cost about £70 or so, which I think is reasonable for an OS.. Must say, good PR for MS to allow the early release, rather than have these things stuck in the post (which means probably never arriving)..
Interestingly, in the UK, we've found that since the Left (Labour) came in, we've seen the expansion of initiatives that track and scrutinise the populace (eletronic sensors in the bins to see what we throw away, pervasive CCTV, speed cameras, databases of just about everything, Phorm for the online tracking given the green light and so on). It's not a 'right v left' thing methinks, it's a lobbying and corruption thing. Oh, and also an ignorance thing. If someone presents a package and an argument as to why it's going to devastate the economy, and you never get to see the opposing argument.. Manipulating ignorance is what Lobbyists do best.
When I have a laptop with me, it usually has very sensitive information on it. Rule 1 is that it does NOT leave my sight. Given I work until the day's activities are rounded off (which is an arbitrary time), if I want to catch friends at an evening out, I often go straight from work. Carrying your laptop doesn't mean you're going to use it; it frequently means that the data on it (encrypted or not; mine's encrypted) is a real pain in the arse to lose. You have to declare it lost even if it's encrypted. And sometimes, that's what's known as a severely career limiting move. So, if someone pulls that one on me at a cinema, I will be asking for refunds for myself, the group and travel costs. Possibly even a 'damages' for time wasting if they haven't advertised the policy in plain on the site I get the ticket from. And if they do advertise, I just won't take my custom to that chain. There's always choice. I'll vote with my wallet thanks very much.
Also, ask for a refund of the fuel you've used to get to the cinema, and a fee to cover the time you've wasted on the journey and you'd booked out to go and see the movie too.. At a base rate of about $20 perh hour.. That'll easily be $50+ for expenses on top of the ticket refund. Sadly, I'm assuming not to many lawyers would support that (anyone care to comment who has more of a clue as to the best way of spinning that to help put a roadblock up against these increasingly intrusive measures?).
You aren't. That's the power of political pressure. You state that someone is in a particular state (which is one that's stated to be against the good of people at large), and that they're blind to that state. As soon as you postulate this, it's almost impossible for them to argue against it. You give no hard evidence, or statements of fact that can be disputed, just vague assertions that "everybody should know it, but you don't get it do you", make sure they're guaranteed to be of emotional impact rather than intellectual, and you can guarantee to have someone completely at your mercy. It's a very strong bullying tactic, which is why I don't like it. Turning round and saying "I have a problem with a,b and c because of x" is fine. Turning round and throwing pseudo statistics and tarring a whole swathe of people because of some fuzzy accusation is nothing short of attempting to bully the masses by exploiting unfounded feelings of guilt.
Yes, it makes me think that women don't, by and large, go in for the hardcore coding section that makes up the broad majority of FOSS. Pay them money to do a job, and they'll happily join commercial software (where design is often as well resourced as the hard core dev work). They tend to prefer the arty side (UI design, user testing etc) that lends itself to the predominantly feminine preferences (females make better communicators, by and large). There are hardcore women coders out there, and they're as spectacular as the guys, where they feel that's what they want to do.. Just the majority of women don't want to be tied to a computer terminal. This whole article seems to be based on the words of a few people, and blown out of all proportion. Yes, there's sexism everywhere. On BOTH sides. That's life. I'm wondering why, when there's a feminist rant about men being evil, it's acceptable and everyone should rally round. When it's a guy saying exactly the same, but about women, it's evil (though MikeeUSA is WAY over the top)..
Interesting. I work for the NHS in the UK at the moment. I went there due to the fact that they saved a family member of mine from what should, medically speaking, have been a highly probable death. Nothing I could do in my specialist area could help bring them back to health, and it put a lot of things in perspective for me... When a role came up in the hospital that I could actually help with, I jumped at it (leaving work with far higher renumeration, but less athical appeal). I do 60+ hour weeks because the NHS simply can't afford the people needed to do the job. I work with a lot of other competent people who do the 'extra hours' too.. And why? Well, if we didn't, then things wouldn't be in place to support the front line medical staff, or would be more vulnerable than they are. And if the front line medical staff aren't kept rolling at maximum efficiency, then in the end, it's the patients that suffer. There are many cases where this kind of argument holds up; I'm not going so far as to flame you, but I think your statement and argument is at best naïve and poorly considered.
Yes. Socially laudable. However, they're big business that will use exactly the laws they're ignoring to ride someone else into the ground when it suits them. Should Copyright and Patent law become sane (i.e. all this becomes legal), then they lose a lot of the 'rights' under law that they currently want to keep. Interestingly, what DVD players don't honour the intellectual property of content holders? Again, the content providers are playing dirty; they use labour from a worldwide market, yet arbitrarily turn round and say "Ah, but you're not allowed to play content from one area of the world in another". That's not dishonouring their IP at all, it's not accepting that the DVD consortium don't honour their customers' rights to what they've purchased. There is no honour in blindly accepting the dishonourable.
100% with you, our current IP regime sucks, and needs to be replaced. Over time, I'm sure it will be, but for now these little (and not so little) battles need to be fought until someone, somewhere gets the ounce of sense necessary to make the right decisions, balanced correctly against all opposing fronts.
What's the job of a locksmith anyway? If you're advocating this, then all people who pick locks should be fined, with the money going to locksmiths to make it better. Wrong. It's a part of business; it's the requirement of the company/organisation to keep improving. If they aren't good enough, then they fail (due to being rubbish), or rightly slated. Nowhere in the world does a lock picker have to pay locksmiths for working out ways to trick their locks, only the locksmiths look bad.
When you're 5 or 6, you can't take care of you though.. That's what family and parents are for; the world's one big adventure, and you can cross oceans sailing in a top hat, with no food or water, and it'll be fine! For every hour of every day, it's overkill, but if you're going out to the local mall, and your kid's just at the age where they're free to wander a little, it may be a good idea.. I can remember (very vaguely) as a kid starting to explore away from the parents' house. I wandered up some side streets and got lost.. I was absolutely terrified, and so were they.. I wanted to go home and had no idea where home was, and they had no idea where I was.. Thankfully, back then, the community was more closely knit, and one of my mother's friends saw me and escorted me back home. So, yes, I can see some perfectly valid cases where this'll head off a lot of grief on both sides if used judiciously. Think it could sell as a student tool too (if I pass out in a ditch after a few too many, come pick me up please!!)..
There aren't more machines because there aren't the people to put them in, or the money to buy them. And when they're in, there aren't the people to maintain them. So, user tells you they want something. You let them know it's not possible in the physical and financial constraints of the organisation. Sounds like you're a doctor. If/when you lose a patient, and you're asked why you couldn't save them, what do you say? There was nothing you could do. Valid answer. The constraints you were forced to operate in denied you the desired outcome. Now, if someone told you that a patient's family told you they wanted that person to survive, so it was up to you, and all your fault that person died, does that make you think you've done something wrong? Nope. You do what you can with what's known, available and possible. Maybe better equipment or a particular expensive drug avalable on hand would have swung it. Why didn't Pharmacy have it on hand to give you you, or the hospital have the machine in place?
You'd be amazed at the work that actually goes on to make sure the medical staff don't need to know about the infrastructure keeping them running... Like all machinery, it only works when the supporting infrastructure is there. That breaks, and everything grinds to a halt. Yes, medics get a huge amount of well deserved respect.. But when you tinker with a system, make sure you understand it before you make the calls and apply the pressure. Thankfully, most doctors I know are pretty good about this. There are however ones that really don't think.. And that upsets more than they realise.
The only true security is a physical disconnect. If you can transmit packets, information can propogate. Seriously though, if you think it's that easy, give it a shot. Spend some time in a medical environment and see what you can get done. It's not as easy as you think.. And the constraints are annoyingly largely political and financial.
*Cough* Really? When something's displayed is the point it's scraped. Doesn't matter where you hold your data beyond that. Oh, and when your 'net connection fails at the hospital boundary for any reason, you lose your data centre. That means no patient records.. Which means a lot of them will die due to lack of knowledge about their abreactions.
Umm.. You know about malware infection vectors and privilege escalation, yes? You don't need an admin level privilige to cause this particular type of compromise. And given that there may well be many flaws in an OS that aren't yet patched, any given vuln can be exploited to gain admin.
If you're advocating multiple physically separated networks, you worked out the cost of doing that in a distributed campus (what most hospitals are)? Given that IT has no budget anyway, that doesn't fly. If you're talking about VLans, then you can vlan hop if you're clever enough anyway.
I suspect what you may be advocating is "have some PCs on a network that access the internet, and others that don't". Yes, there are some closed area machines that have no access to the 'net.. However,for keeping the clinical departments working efficiently (especially with GP communication, inter hospital consultant communication etc. along with research materials in various off site databases), having the spread of machines is unfeasible. And when someone needs to send one of those particular pieces of data offsite, how do they do that? USB keys and writable media are disabled for users, which leaves the net.. Which isn't connected to anything that can transmit it.. There are a LOT of issues to this environment, and not enough people to address them and implement them. The simple solution is to stop any computer accessing any network. Lo, you're secure. Useless, and you'll kill patients by lack of info, sure.. But you're secure..
That's my well recognised tactic when I really need to butt heads with the directorate. Take a piece of paper to a meeting and say 'if you want this done, it'll need your signature to say you take the responsibility'..
Trust me, the backups are multiplexed, offsite covered, validated and verified along with being encrypted and fingerprinted. Doesn't help when the user accessed data (which needs to be human readable by definition) gets accessed and ripped by malware.
Forensics, identifying exactly what the spyware was, conducting a thorough scan of all the network to see if it had spread, identifying what data was transferred, the infection vector, the administrative overheads of stopping the normal work to call an 'emergency situation' in which the sysadmins will concentrate on this exclusively, possibly not doing other maintenance work, or systems commissioning thus holding up medical projects (with the cost to them too). Administrative time throughout the hospital, as a fair part of the management chain will have this as a high profile to concentrate on, police liaison (and having time to have them on site to investigate in situ, and having technical staff support them), communications time to liaise with press, people to field the phone calls that come in, extra load on the patient support lines to cope with frantic patients who aren't in the best state of mind anyway after suffering cardiac problems, who are now worrying about what of their information is in the wild.. That's the tip of the iceberg by the way. Begin to see how that racks up to the big numbers? The machines aren't the expense, they're practically disposable. Unfortunately, data isn't tangible, so the non-IT staff don't see this shiny big item, and thus (out of sight, out of mind) don't consider it worth spending money over. All they see is that clicking a button makes data appear. Magic. Doesn't take effort, so why do they need an IT team to make it work? They decide they don't, cut IT funding (or never put it there), and eventually something like this happens because there isn't resource to make a secure network. And when it does, who gets the blame? Even from supposed 'geeks' who are supposed to understand what it's like being in an intensive overstressed IT role?
The hospital will be compensated for material damages. They are bound by law to inform the patients that their data has been released. Those patients will take up law suits against the hospital, which will be investigated, and they will recieve large amounts of compensation. Odds on, if you look at the structure, you'll see the IT dept is over worked and under funded, so the real responsibility lies with the Directorate of the hospital, penny pinching on a department they don't see as shiny enough to be well funded.
Right. Ever worked in that environment? Nope? Thought not.. I have.. You're faced with:
Consultant (medical doctor) says "I need to access the net to be able to read research papers, proposals, and various ad hoc sites that contain research on the subjects that I deal with, along with external mail that I use because I move from hospital to hospital quite regularly.". IT says: "You can't access the net from that machine". Consultant goes to see hospital directors, stamps feet, and IT get overridden.
Bear in mind there are several thousand PCs on a lot of hospital sites, with maybe 3 technicians to go fix and maybe one or 2 sysadmins. Hospital HR frequently sees IT as just waving a magic wand and things happen miraculously, so it's a "good way to save costs". If you tie machine names down that can't access the net, I can guarantee a consultant will find a way to get a machine in the area that does, even if it's moving someone else's there. As for breaking terms and conditions of use. Who do you think will win that pissing competition? Someone in the beleagured and under funded/under resourced IT department who is overlooked and overworked, or the consultant with the hand shakes and the ear of the board of directors?
Coupled with the fact that not all antivirus and anti-malware will spot every variant. It'll get 90+ percent, but you always hear about the ones that get through. I'm surprised an executable got through the proxy filtering there, but hey.. Without knowing all the ins and outs of this in detail, I'm going to reserve judgement.
The real world can be a messy morass of politics.. Working in a hospital, or academia, really has that in excess.. Try working in one if you think it's easy.. I'd be interested in hearing your opinion after doing it for a while..
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The problem with working in education is that your right to free speech is almost non-existant.
Say something that some jumped up "think of the children" zealot doesn't like, and you end up having your right to be in the presence of "impressionable children" questioned. While they're questioning, you frequently end up not being allowed to do your job "just in case".
With the option of quietly quitting, having all the hassle, but being able to get a place elsewhere, or having your name plastered across the media (news outlets just LOVE to play with this kind of story) and never being able to work in the profession again, you know what's on the cards as soon as this comes up. It's a hard and gruelling task, to go through those inquisitions.
Each system you support has a cost of outage. You may be able to get around maintenance windows if you have high availability systems in place. What you need management to be aware of is that there is a risk of financial (plus possibile reputation) losses when a system falls over, and significantly more if data is lost. A good start is to feed back with a report of "money lost due to infrastructure weaknesses" on a monthly basis. Have this categorised by things such as failures due to aging, random blindsiding that may be able to be prevented with extra investment, that kind of thing.. This way, they get to see that you're not actually costing them money, you're one of the guardians (if not THE guardian) stopping them going down the pan. Most metrics (calls, bandwidth etc are useless; bandwidth is handled through accounting anyway as a payment, calls can be anything and are a useless metric, uptime, the same).
Actually, they're easy to pull out and put in (plugs are shaped to have good grasp).
Tripped over many, and never done damage to the wall sockets (they're put in pretty solidly).
After doing a fair bit of travelling round the world (China, Russia, Indonesia, USA, Italy, Germany, Spain, France etc.) I still prefer the solidity of the connection of the UK plugs. Not tried the Australian ones, Danish or Swiss yet.. Maybe I need to travel there again to check!
"found out" and "were told by" are two very different phrases.
In many walks of life, they end up very much the same in many ways. People "are told by" someone that something happens, or that people are members of something or other. And without ever substantiating it, people react en masse. This can make life very difficult for people who have this directed at them. Even if you have a side of the story that is actually the valid one, and it's diametrically opposed to the story that originally inflamed "the masses", you end up having to fight it on a one by one basis, with people who are already dead set against you.
Now, if you take time to substantiate an accusation, you may "find out" that the story is, or isn't true, and you can act accordingly.
However, in 90+% cases (as a ballpark figure), people are too lazy to "find out" and "being told by" suffices.
Whether the allegations are true or not.. I don't know.. I don't have time to "find out". "Being told by" the media doesn't really cut it for me, so yes, I'm vaguely interested to see what falls out the other end of this, but I'm not about to decide one way or another for myself, as I honestly don't know enough to have a valid opinion.
Well, considering "Mandy" has already been forced to resign from Labour twice already for scandals (involving borrowing money from someone he was supposed to be investigating to buy a lovely house in central london among other activities), one wonders if he's caught with his hand in the cookie jar yet again, will this third strike resignation force his exclusion from Politics?
Allegedly, he'd shown no interest in this whatsoever before going for a meal at a lovely retreat owned by a movie producer, and a few days holiday.. On his return, this was basically mandated with no consultation.
Yay for unelected politicians who keep coming back despite being forced to resign in shame.
Seeing as I'm running full diagnostics on it, the hardware was fine on XP before a complete clean and rebuild, then the issue is with Win7.
If it's with the vendor supplied drivers, then fine. I can't do what I want without them, so it's still to do with the whole experience and readiness of the product. There are issues I've come across that are most certainly MS, as the whole dependancy chain is MS stamped on the vendor sigs.
This was a statement of fact, not a flame on Win 7. It's new, and I push machines quite hard (i.e. I run all the stress tests on it that I'd run on the servers I commission, and subject it to the same standards at built).
I'd not put it in a business environment as the support margin would be too high. I'd not recommend it for the average home user to whom reliability is of paramount importance either yet. For the early adopters and people who are content to have things not work quite right, it's fine. Windows is Windows. It's an OS, and it's heading in the path of progression.
Personally, I'd be happier to give my opinion of the OS in 6 months when they have it bedded in. For now, what I say is what I see. There are issues. They will be fixed. I'm going to be awaiting those.
Interesting.. I'm counting 2 BSODs, 6 complete lock ups and a few failures to activate disk drives waking up from sleep mode since Monday (I got the UK preorder, which came early due to the postal strikes here).
So, your end of story isn't quite the end of the story it seems (isn't that always the way with someone that says "end of story"? It usually means "I can't think of any evidence, or any proof, so don't want to talk anymore in case you prove me wrong").
I was most perplexed to get up yesterday, anticipating having a day off work to just unwind and go for a walk, and find Windows 7 arrived in the post...
Now in and working, and pottering around with it to see how it handles.. I was part of the pre-order group, so the pro version only cost about £70 or so, which I think is reasonable for an OS..
Must say, good PR for MS to allow the early release, rather than have these things stuck in the post (which means probably never arriving)..
Interestingly, in the UK, we've found that since the Left (Labour) came in, we've seen the expansion of initiatives that track and scrutinise the populace (eletronic sensors in the bins to see what we throw away, pervasive CCTV, speed cameras, databases of just about everything, Phorm for the online tracking given the green light and so on).
It's not a 'right v left' thing methinks, it's a lobbying and corruption thing. Oh, and also an ignorance thing. If someone presents a package and an argument as to why it's going to devastate the economy, and you never get to see the opposing argument.. Manipulating ignorance is what Lobbyists do best.
When I have a laptop with me, it usually has very sensitive information on it. Rule 1 is that it does NOT leave my sight.
Given I work until the day's activities are rounded off (which is an arbitrary time), if I want to catch friends at an evening out, I often go straight from work.
Carrying your laptop doesn't mean you're going to use it; it frequently means that the data on it (encrypted or not; mine's encrypted) is a real pain in the arse to lose. You have to declare it lost even if it's encrypted. And sometimes, that's what's known as a severely career limiting move.
So, if someone pulls that one on me at a cinema, I will be asking for refunds for myself, the group and travel costs. Possibly even a 'damages' for time wasting if they haven't advertised the policy in plain on the site I get the ticket from.
And if they do advertise, I just won't take my custom to that chain. There's always choice. I'll vote with my wallet thanks very much.
Also, ask for a refund of the fuel you've used to get to the cinema, and a fee to cover the time you've wasted on the journey and you'd booked out to go and see the movie too.. At a base rate of about $20 perh hour.. That'll easily be $50+ for expenses on top of the ticket refund.
Sadly, I'm assuming not to many lawyers would support that (anyone care to comment who has more of a clue as to the best way of spinning that to help put a roadblock up against these increasingly intrusive measures?).
You aren't. That's the power of political pressure. You state that someone is in a particular state (which is one that's stated to be against the good of people at large), and that they're blind to that state. As soon as you postulate this, it's almost impossible for them to argue against it. You give no hard evidence, or statements of fact that can be disputed, just vague assertions that "everybody should know it, but you don't get it do you", make sure they're guaranteed to be of emotional impact rather than intellectual, and you can guarantee to have someone completely at your mercy.
It's a very strong bullying tactic, which is why I don't like it.
Turning round and saying "I have a problem with a,b and c because of x" is fine. Turning round and throwing pseudo statistics and tarring a whole swathe of people because of some fuzzy accusation is nothing short of attempting to bully the masses by exploiting unfounded feelings of guilt.
Yes, it makes me think that women don't, by and large, go in for the hardcore coding section that makes up the broad majority of FOSS. Pay them money to do a job, and they'll happily join commercial software (where design is often as well resourced as the hard core dev work).
They tend to prefer the arty side (UI design, user testing etc) that lends itself to the predominantly feminine preferences (females make better communicators, by and large).
There are hardcore women coders out there, and they're as spectacular as the guys, where they feel that's what they want to do.. Just the majority of women don't want to be tied to a computer terminal.
This whole article seems to be based on the words of a few people, and blown out of all proportion.
Yes, there's sexism everywhere. On BOTH sides. That's life.
I'm wondering why, when there's a feminist rant about men being evil, it's acceptable and everyone should rally round. When it's a guy saying exactly the same, but about women, it's evil (though MikeeUSA is WAY over the top)..
Interesting. I work for the NHS in the UK at the moment. I went there due to the fact that they saved a family member of mine from what should, medically speaking, have been a highly probable death.
Nothing I could do in my specialist area could help bring them back to health, and it put a lot of things in perspective for me...
When a role came up in the hospital that I could actually help with, I jumped at it (leaving work with far higher renumeration, but less athical appeal). I do 60+ hour weeks because the NHS simply can't afford the people needed to do the job. I work with a lot of other competent people who do the 'extra hours' too.. And why? Well, if we didn't, then things wouldn't be in place to support the front line medical staff, or would be more vulnerable than they are. And if the front line medical staff aren't kept rolling at maximum efficiency, then in the end, it's the patients that suffer.
There are many cases where this kind of argument holds up; I'm not going so far as to flame you, but I think your statement and argument is at best naïve and poorly considered.
Yes. Socially laudable. However, they're big business that will use exactly the laws they're ignoring to ride someone else into the ground when it suits them.
Should Copyright and Patent law become sane (i.e. all this becomes legal), then they lose a lot of the 'rights' under law that they currently want to keep.
Interestingly, what DVD players don't honour the intellectual property of content holders? Again, the content providers are playing dirty; they use labour from a worldwide market, yet arbitrarily turn round and say "Ah, but you're not allowed to play content from one area of the world in another". That's not dishonouring their IP at all, it's not accepting that the DVD consortium don't honour their customers' rights to what they've purchased. There is no honour in blindly accepting the dishonourable.
100% with you, our current IP regime sucks, and needs to be replaced. Over time, I'm sure it will be, but for now these little (and not so little) battles need to be fought until someone, somewhere gets the ounce of sense necessary to make the right decisions, balanced correctly against all opposing fronts.
What's the job of a locksmith anyway?
If you're advocating this, then all people who pick locks should be fined, with the money going to locksmiths to make it better.
Wrong. It's a part of business; it's the requirement of the company/organisation to keep improving. If they aren't good enough, then they fail (due to being rubbish), or rightly slated.
Nowhere in the world does a lock picker have to pay locksmiths for working out ways to trick their locks, only the locksmiths look bad.
When you're 5 or 6, you can't take care of you though.. That's what family and parents are for; the world's one big adventure, and you can cross oceans sailing in a top hat, with no food or water, and it'll be fine!
For every hour of every day, it's overkill, but if you're going out to the local mall, and your kid's just at the age where they're free to wander a little, it may be a good idea.. I can remember (very vaguely) as a kid starting to explore away from the parents' house. I wandered up some side streets and got lost.. I was absolutely terrified, and so were they.. I wanted to go home and had no idea where home was, and they had no idea where I was.. Thankfully, back then, the community was more closely knit, and one of my mother's friends saw me and escorted me back home.
So, yes, I can see some perfectly valid cases where this'll head off a lot of grief on both sides if used judiciously.
Think it could sell as a student tool too (if I pass out in a ditch after a few too many, come pick me up please!!)..
There aren't more machines because there aren't the people to put them in, or the money to buy them.
And when they're in, there aren't the people to maintain them.
So, user tells you they want something. You let them know it's not possible in the physical and financial constraints of the organisation.
Sounds like you're a doctor. If/when you lose a patient, and you're asked why you couldn't save them, what do you say? There was nothing you could do. Valid answer. The constraints you were forced to operate in denied you the desired outcome. Now, if someone told you that a patient's family told you they wanted that person to survive, so it was up to you, and all your fault that person died, does that make you think you've done something wrong?
Nope. You do what you can with what's known, available and possible. Maybe better equipment or a particular expensive drug avalable on hand would have swung it. Why didn't Pharmacy have it on hand to give you you, or the hospital have the machine in place?
You'd be amazed at the work that actually goes on to make sure the medical staff don't need to know about the infrastructure keeping them running... Like all machinery, it only works when the supporting infrastructure is there. That breaks, and everything grinds to a halt.
Yes, medics get a huge amount of well deserved respect.. But when you tinker with a system, make sure you understand it before you make the calls and apply the pressure. Thankfully, most doctors I know are pretty good about this. There are however ones that really don't think.. And that upsets more than they realise.
The only true security is a physical disconnect. If you can transmit packets, information can propogate.
Seriously though, if you think it's that easy, give it a shot. Spend some time in a medical environment and see what you can get done. It's not as easy as you think.. And the constraints are annoyingly largely political and financial.
*Cough* Really? When something's displayed is the point it's scraped. Doesn't matter where you hold your data beyond that.
Oh, and when your 'net connection fails at the hospital boundary for any reason, you lose your data centre. That means no patient records.. Which means a lot of them will die due to lack of knowledge about their abreactions.
Umm.. You know about malware infection vectors and privilege escalation, yes?
You don't need an admin level privilige to cause this particular type of compromise. And given that there may well be many flaws in an OS that aren't yet patched, any given vuln can be exploited to gain admin.
If you're advocating multiple physically separated networks, you worked out the cost of doing that in a distributed campus (what most hospitals are)? Given that IT has no budget anyway, that doesn't fly.
If you're talking about VLans, then you can vlan hop if you're clever enough anyway.
I suspect what you may be advocating is "have some PCs on a network that access the internet, and others that don't". Yes, there are some closed area machines that have no access to the 'net.. However,for keeping the clinical departments working efficiently (especially with GP communication, inter hospital consultant communication etc. along with research materials in various off site databases), having the spread of machines is unfeasible. And when someone needs to send one of those particular pieces of data offsite, how do they do that? USB keys and writable media are disabled for users, which leaves the net.. Which isn't connected to anything that can transmit it..
There are a LOT of issues to this environment, and not enough people to address them and implement them.
The simple solution is to stop any computer accessing any network. Lo, you're secure. Useless, and you'll kill patients by lack of info, sure.. But you're secure..
That's my well recognised tactic when I really need to butt heads with the directorate. Take a piece of paper to a meeting and say 'if you want this done, it'll need your signature to say you take the responsibility'.. Trust me, the backups are multiplexed, offsite covered, validated and verified along with being encrypted and fingerprinted. Doesn't help when the user accessed data (which needs to be human readable by definition) gets accessed and ripped by malware.
Forensics, identifying exactly what the spyware was, conducting a thorough scan of all the network to see if it had spread, identifying what data was transferred, the infection vector, the administrative overheads of stopping the normal work to call an 'emergency situation' in which the sysadmins will concentrate on this exclusively, possibly not doing other maintenance work, or systems commissioning thus holding up medical projects (with the cost to them too).
Administrative time throughout the hospital, as a fair part of the management chain will have this as a high profile to concentrate on, police liaison (and having time to have them on site to investigate in situ, and having technical staff support them), communications time to liaise with press, people to field the phone calls that come in, extra load on the patient support lines to cope with frantic patients who aren't in the best state of mind anyway after suffering cardiac problems, who are now worrying about what of their information is in the wild.. That's the tip of the iceberg by the way.
Begin to see how that racks up to the big numbers? The machines aren't the expense, they're practically disposable. Unfortunately, data isn't tangible, so the non-IT staff don't see this shiny big item, and thus (out of sight, out of mind) don't consider it worth spending money over. All they see is that clicking a button makes data appear. Magic. Doesn't take effort, so why do they need an IT team to make it work? They decide they don't, cut IT funding (or never put it there), and eventually something like this happens because there isn't resource to make a secure network. And when it does, who gets the blame? Even from supposed 'geeks' who are supposed to understand what it's like being in an intensive overstressed IT role?
The hospital will be compensated for material damages. They are bound by law to inform the patients that their data has been released. Those patients will take up law suits against the hospital, which will be investigated, and they will recieve large amounts of compensation.
Odds on, if you look at the structure, you'll see the IT dept is over worked and under funded, so the real responsibility lies with the Directorate of the hospital, penny pinching on a department they don't see as shiny enough to be well funded.
Right. Ever worked in that environment? Nope? Thought not.. I have..
You're faced with:
Consultant (medical doctor) says "I need to access the net to be able to read research papers, proposals, and various ad hoc sites that contain research on the subjects that I deal with, along with external mail that I use because I move from hospital to hospital quite regularly.".
IT says: "You can't access the net from that machine".
Consultant goes to see hospital directors, stamps feet, and IT get overridden.
Bear in mind there are several thousand PCs on a lot of hospital sites, with maybe 3 technicians to go fix and maybe one or 2 sysadmins. Hospital HR frequently sees IT as just waving a magic wand and things happen miraculously, so it's a "good way to save costs".
If you tie machine names down that can't access the net, I can guarantee a consultant will find a way to get a machine in the area that does, even if it's moving someone else's there.
As for breaking terms and conditions of use. Who do you think will win that pissing competition? Someone in the beleagured and under funded/under resourced IT department who is overlooked and overworked, or the consultant with the hand shakes and the ear of the board of directors?
Coupled with the fact that not all antivirus and anti-malware will spot every variant. It'll get 90+ percent, but you always hear about the ones that get through.
I'm surprised an executable got through the proxy filtering there, but hey.. Without knowing all the ins and outs of this in detail, I'm going to reserve judgement.
The real world can be a messy morass of politics.. Working in a hospital, or academia, really has that in excess.. Try working in one if you think it's easy.. I'd be interested in hearing your opinion after doing it for a while..