How will Congress know it's happening to write a law preventing it? It's not like a company will announce "Hey! Over here! Look! I'm firing all my laywers & hiring ones from India!" By the time Congress hears about it, it'll be in the Wall Street Journal, which will mean that it's already in place on the ground, and a major trend.
In fact, a good case could be made for letting companies outsource their legal departments, if they want to...after all, the word of the Legal dept is not law. It's legal advice. If you buy legal advice from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, that's your problem, not Congress'. Caveat Emptor.
If you're saying that we'll never offshore (notice I do not say outsource) *trial* lawyers, then you're right. Anything that requires you to physically be somewhere is difficult to outsource overseas. Likewise, firemen, policemen and the like will never be offshored. They may very well be outsourced, but the job will remain in America.
Mangement will never be outsourced. Everything else will be, though. There is no task, aside from management, that absolutely can *not* be outsourced, and so, eventually, it all will be. Management (in their opinion) defines a company, so can not (by definition) be outsourced. Everything else (from Legal to Financial to actual reseach and production) can be done more efficiently by someone else, and so eventually will be.
Mark my words, in 20 years, there will be several companies that will consist of nothing but management and consultants/outsourced labor.
Re:Take it one step further; share what you filter
on
DSPAM v2.10 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And how exactly do you keep the spammers from submitting their own IPs as "good" or from submitting real ISPs as "bad"? I didn't see anything on that website to indicate how you're managing potential liars making submissions, which will kill this system pretty quickly if it ever becomes commonly used.
Patent examiners are also now being evaluated based on how "efficient" they are. Which means how many applications they process in a particular time cycle. So, while it's easy to bounce it back the first time (and most do), by the second or third try it actually takes more time to figure out if they're full of it than to just grant the patent, so most folks just grant the patent on the second or third time through.
The contract between Verisign and ICANN can only be terminated if: 1) the Department of Commerce asks ICANN to terminate it. or 2) One of the high-ups at Verisign is convicted by a jury of a felony or of financial misconduct.
Those appear to be the only ways to get out of the contract between Verisign and ICANN. Whoever at ICANN agreed to this is a moron, but that's a whole other story.
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/regi stry-agmt-com-25may01.htm
"16. Termination ...
B. In the event of termination by DOC of its Cooperative Agreement with Registry Operator pursuant to Section 1.B.8 of Amendment ___ to that
Agreement, ICANN shall, after receiving express notification of that fact from DOC and a request from DOC to terminate Registry Operator as the
operator of the Registry TLD, terminate Registry Operator's rights under this Agreement, and shall cooperate with DOC to facilitate the transfer of
the operation of the Registry Database to a successor registry
C. This Agreement may also be terminated in the by ICANN on written notice given at least forty days after the final and nonappealable
occurrence of either of the following events:
(i) Registry Operator:
(a) is convicted by a court of competent jurisdiction of a felony or other serious offense related to financial activities, or is the subject of a determination by a court of competent jurisdiction that ICANN reasonably deems as the substantive equivalent of those offenses ; or
(b) is disciplined by the government of its domicile for conduct involving dishonesty or misuse of funds of others
ii) Any officer or director of Registry Operator is convicted of a felony or of a misdemeanor related to financial activities, or is judged by a court to have committed fraud or breach of fiduciary duty, or is the subject of a judicial determination that ICANN deems as the substantive equivalent of any of these"
So, the only real ways to break the contract between Verisign and ICANN is for the DOC to ask for it to be broken (ha), or for lead officials at Verisign to be convicted of a felony (ha).
1) Public IP addresses must be globally unique. If they weren't, routing traffic would be effectively impossible
2) Public DNS names must be globally unique. This one isn't nearly as obvious as addressing, but it's still clear once you think about it, and is even enshrined into one of the RFC's on the subject.
Given that we require uniqueness, someone has to manage the systems to check that uniqueness and dole out addresses (both IP and names). That task fell to ICANN, who have since sub-contracted that work out to other entities. But still, someone has to run the central database, or there'd be chaos.
Yes, it would. But, that forces Verisign to build a lot of infrastructure, which they don't have in place right now. Right now, they're just using the gtld-servers, which can handle a lot of load, and the wildcard isn't adding any load to that. If they give the system NS records and point them somewhere else (likely the only way to get around delegation-only), then they have to build up a set of SiteFinder DNS servers to handle that query load, which will be an infrastructure and operational expense they weren't planning on. They had to build the webserver cluster, sure, but the cluster they had was clearly not up to the task (kept crashing), and now they'll have to add a nameserver cluster...all this for questionable revenue and a lot of bad blood in the community. The more expensive we make this, the less likely it is to happen.
I'm also secretly hoping that Paul Vixie & co will figure out a way to filter that step, once it comes to it.
By the way, this sort of arms race of action-filter is exactly what ICANN is terrified of. The last thing they want to see is an all-out war over the DNS...it causes instability. This is why it's at least somewhat likely that ICANN will stop Verisign. I can't guarantee that they will act, but they *really* don't want to see an arms race occur.
I have to think you're trolling, but I"ll bite anyway. You're falling into the common trap of only thinking of DNS as affecting Web traffic. What about email? If you fat-finger your friend's email address, don't you *want* that email to come back, rather than dissappearing into the void that is Verisign? The wildcard they're putting into the DNS isn't just about web traffic. It's *all* DNS queries...that's going to affect email, ssh, nntp, everything. Once of the basic spam filters, for instance, is a check to see if the sender's domain exists. With the wildcard, *all* domains exist, causing you to get more spam.
SiteFinder the search service is fine. The DNS wildcard to *force* you to SiteFinder is what makes people angry.
Actually, rather than ban the SiteFinder IP, ISPs will probably just accelerate their plans to move to bind 9.2.3, so they can use the "delegation-only" option, which solves the problem once and for all.
If you just ban the SiteFinder IP, Verisign can move it..and then you're just playing whack-a-mole. If you mark.com and.net as delegation-only zones, then bind will drop the SiteFinder responses as invalid, no matter what IP Verisign responds with.
It was both (not proving their case and not speaking up), but you're right that the blame lies not with the techies but with management. The engineers that did speak up were slapped down, which convinced the others that they should not speak up. (a lovely example of a "Chilling effect") A good summary of this all (which was posted in a response to the story on this a few days ago):
'cause some of us young whippersnappers like to actually *use* this new-fangled Internet-thingy, rather than just putz around with it like you old geezers. Jeez...old farts still think that we should all use hosts files or something.
The relative cost of labor overseas has very little to do with currency exchange rates. It's all to do with the cost of living, and the expected standard of living in the area. That's why you'll see call centers moving to the middle of nowhere, 'cause people there don't expect $60k/year to answer phones. They're happy with $25k or less. The reason: the standard of living is lower out there, and the cost of living out there is lower. Extrapolate that out to a third world country, and you'll see why that same thinking leads to overseas workers...they're happy with the equivalent of $8k or so.
Changing the exchange rate won't do a damned thing to stop offshoring. That's a complete red herring. The only thing that will effectively raise the price of offshoring is raising the standard of living and the cost of living in the countries that we're offshoring to. But that's hard, and won't happen quickly, so don't expect to see the economics of offshoring change anytime in the next few decades.
Close, but still slightly wrong. "A" is not the master for the others. "A" and all the others are actually slaves off of a "hidden master." The hidden master only accepts connections from the root servers, which makes the system just that little bit harder to attack (rather than just having to DoS A to take down everything, you have to find the master, then DoS it, and hope that they don't move it in the meantime).
Think about what you're proposing here...you're proposing replacing a system that has only one device at each end (the fax machine), with a system that has, what, 4? 6? a dozen? machines in the chain between sender and reciever. That's orders of magnitude more likely to fail, which makes it a bad replacement.
There's a time and place for non-conformism, and this isn't it.
I was with you until that line. There doesn't seem to be any logical connection between your earlier statements and that line, though. Conclusion: your last line is wrong. The rest of it's fine.
It's interesting to read the First Energy "denial." It's not really a denial, more of a "yeah, we had a problem, but hey! look over there!" Honestly, it reads like an attempt to distract, rather than deny. For instance:
"We recognize that our computer system experienced problems that day, which we discussed publicly immediately following the outage."
Is followed a paragraph later by:
"By focusing its analysis on a few selected events, the conclusions the Task Force reached don't address the complexity and magnitude of operations on the interconnected grid."
Translation: yeah, we had a problem, but the fact that our problem could take down the whole grid isn't our fault. Honestly, it sounds like a pretty stupid excuse, but then, that's just my reading of it.
The one problem with this is salescritters. They expect to get emails from unknown folks...those are called sales leads. Of course, salescritters are also notorious for being fools (no, your customers will never write to say "I LOVE YOU"), but your attitude ignores that some people need to open emails that come from unknown sources.
First rule of litigation: never go into a lawsuit without a lawyer, even if you're a witness. Maybe you can use one of the lawyers already involved, but if you're being compelled to testify, and aren't one of the central characters, you should have a lawyer.
In a way, lawyers like firewalls: it's possible to be safe without them, but it takes knowledge and skill that some folks don't have the time to gather.
You lose your voting rights in the USA if you're convicted of a crime?
Only if it's a felony. That's one of the ways that they make the penalty for felonies more serious than misdemeanors. They may have the same jail time or monetary penalty, but there are other effects for felony convictions that make them nastier.
In general, I'm okay with making it illegal to share pre-release videos/music...after all, that goes after personal acts, not technology, which is an appropriate use for law.
My only concern is whether the punishment fits the crime. Is sharing one movie really grounds to lose your right to vote for the rest of your life?
Slashdot Mirror
How will Congress know it's happening to write a law preventing it? It's not like a company will announce "Hey! Over here! Look! I'm firing all my laywers & hiring ones from India!" By the time Congress hears about it, it'll be in the Wall Street Journal, which will mean that it's already in place on the ground, and a major trend.
In fact, a good case could be made for letting companies outsource their legal departments, if they want to...after all, the word of the Legal dept is not law. It's legal advice. If you buy legal advice from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, that's your problem, not Congress'. Caveat Emptor.
If you're saying that we'll never offshore (notice I do not say outsource) *trial* lawyers, then you're right. Anything that requires you to physically be somewhere is difficult to outsource overseas. Likewise, firemen, policemen and the like will never be offshored. They may very well be outsourced, but the job will remain in America.
Mangement will never be outsourced. Everything else will be, though. There is no task, aside from management, that absolutely can *not* be outsourced, and so, eventually, it all will be. Management (in their opinion) defines a company, so can not (by definition) be outsourced. Everything else (from Legal to Financial to actual reseach and production) can be done more efficiently by someone else, and so eventually will be.
Mark my words, in 20 years, there will be several companies that will consist of nothing but management and consultants/outsourced labor.
And how exactly do you keep the spammers from submitting their own IPs as "good" or from submitting real ISPs as "bad"? I didn't see anything on that website to indicate how you're managing potential liars making submissions, which will kill this system pretty quickly if it ever becomes commonly used.
Hello! It looks like you're trying to kill someone! Would you like to:
* Fire a missle!
* Drop a bomb!
* Strafe!
Patent examiners are also now being evaluated based on how "efficient" they are. Which means how many applications they process in a particular time cycle. So, while it's easy to bounce it back the first time (and most do), by the second or third try it actually takes more time to figure out if they're full of it than to just grant the patent, so most folks just grant the patent on the second or third time through.
The contract between Verisign and ICANN can only be terminated if:
1) the Department of Commerce asks ICANN to terminate it.
or
2) One of the high-ups at Verisign is convicted by a jury of a felony or of financial misconduct.
Those appear to be the only ways to get out of the contract between Verisign and ICANN. Whoever at ICANN agreed to this is a moron, but that's a whole other story.
So, the only real ways to break the contract between Verisign and ICANN is for the DOC to ask for it to be broken (ha), or for lead officials at Verisign to be convicted of a felony (ha).
Your second paragraph effectively proves why your first paragraph is impossible. I'd refute you, but you beat me to it.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and *Numbers*. IANA is subassigned from ICANN.
1) Public IP addresses must be globally unique. If they weren't, routing traffic would be effectively impossible
2) Public DNS names must be globally unique. This one isn't nearly as obvious as addressing, but it's still clear once you think about it, and is even enshrined into one of the RFC's on the subject.
Given that we require uniqueness, someone has to manage the systems to check that uniqueness and dole out addresses (both IP and names). That task fell to ICANN, who have since sub-contracted that work out to other entities. But still, someone has to run the central database, or there'd be chaos.
Yes, it would. But, that forces Verisign to build a lot of infrastructure, which they don't have in place right now. Right now, they're just using the gtld-servers, which can handle a lot of load, and the wildcard isn't adding any load to that. If they give the system NS records and point them somewhere else (likely the only way to get around delegation-only), then they have to build up a set of SiteFinder DNS servers to handle that query load, which will be an infrastructure and operational expense they weren't planning on. They had to build the webserver cluster, sure, but the cluster they had was clearly not up to the task (kept crashing), and now they'll have to add a nameserver cluster...all this for questionable revenue and a lot of bad blood in the community. The more expensive we make this, the less likely it is to happen.
I'm also secretly hoping that Paul Vixie & co will figure out a way to filter that step, once it comes to it.
By the way, this sort of arms race of action-filter is exactly what ICANN is terrified of. The last thing they want to see is an all-out war over the DNS...it causes instability. This is why it's at least somewhat likely that ICANN will stop Verisign. I can't guarantee that they will act, but they *really* don't want to see an arms race occur.
I have to think you're trolling, but I"ll bite anyway. You're falling into the common trap of only thinking of DNS as affecting Web traffic. What about email? If you fat-finger your friend's email address, don't you *want* that email to come back, rather than dissappearing into the void that is Verisign? The wildcard they're putting into the DNS isn't just about web traffic. It's *all* DNS queries...that's going to affect email, ssh, nntp, everything. Once of the basic spam filters, for instance, is a check to see if the sender's domain exists. With the wildcard, *all* domains exist, causing you to get more spam.
SiteFinder the search service is fine. The DNS wildcard to *force* you to SiteFinder is what makes people angry.
Actually, rather than ban the SiteFinder IP, ISPs will probably just accelerate their plans to move to bind 9.2.3, so they can use the "delegation-only" option, which solves the problem once and for all.
.com and .net as delegation-only zones, then bind will drop the SiteFinder responses as invalid, no matter what IP Verisign responds with.
If you just ban the SiteFinder IP, Verisign can move it..and then you're just playing whack-a-mole. If you mark
It was both (not proving their case and not speaking up), but you're right that the blame lies not with the techies but with management. The engineers that did speak up were slapped down, which convinced the others that they should not speak up. (a lovely example of a "Chilling effect") A good summary of this all (which was posted in a response to the story on this a few days ago):
w ie sche.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/11/lange
'cause some of us young whippersnappers like to actually *use* this new-fangled Internet-thingy, rather than just putz around with it like you old geezers. Jeez...old farts still think that we should all use hosts files or something.
The relative cost of labor overseas has very little to do with currency exchange rates. It's all to do with the cost of living, and the expected standard of living in the area. That's why you'll see call centers moving to the middle of nowhere, 'cause people there don't expect $60k/year to answer phones. They're happy with $25k or less. The reason: the standard of living is lower out there, and the cost of living out there is lower. Extrapolate that out to a third world country, and you'll see why that same thinking leads to overseas workers...they're happy with the equivalent of $8k or so.
Changing the exchange rate won't do a damned thing to stop offshoring. That's a complete red herring. The only thing that will effectively raise the price of offshoring is raising the standard of living and the cost of living in the countries that we're offshoring to. But that's hard, and won't happen quickly, so don't expect to see the economics of offshoring change anytime in the next few decades.
Close, but still slightly wrong. "A" is not the master for the others. "A" and all the others are actually slaves off of a "hidden master." The hidden master only accepts connections from the root servers, which makes the system just that little bit harder to attack (rather than just having to DoS A to take down everything, you have to find the master, then DoS it, and hope that they don't move it in the meantime).
Yet.
Think about what you're proposing here...you're proposing replacing a system that has only one device at each end (the fax machine), with a system that has, what, 4? 6? a dozen? machines in the chain between sender and reciever. That's orders of magnitude more likely to fail, which makes it a bad replacement.
I was with you until that line. There doesn't seem to be any logical connection between your earlier statements and that line, though. Conclusion: your last line is wrong. The rest of it's fine.
It's interesting to read the First Energy "denial." It's not really a denial, more of a "yeah, we had a problem, but hey! look over there!" Honestly, it reads like an attempt to distract, rather than deny. For instance:
"We recognize that our computer system experienced problems that day, which we discussed publicly immediately following the outage."
Is followed a paragraph later by:
"By focusing its analysis on a few selected events, the conclusions the Task Force reached don't address the complexity and magnitude of operations on the interconnected grid."
Translation: yeah, we had a problem, but the fact that our problem could take down the whole grid isn't our fault. Honestly, it sounds like a pretty stupid excuse, but then, that's just my reading of it.
The one problem with this is salescritters. They expect to get emails from unknown folks...those are called sales leads. Of course, salescritters are also notorious for being fools (no, your customers will never write to say "I LOVE YOU"), but your attitude ignores that some people need to open emails that come from unknown sources.
First rule of litigation: never go into a lawsuit without a lawyer, even if you're a witness. Maybe you can use one of the lawyers already involved, but if you're being compelled to testify, and aren't one of the central characters, you should have a lawyer.
In a way, lawyers like firewalls: it's possible to be safe without them, but it takes knowledge and skill that some folks don't have the time to gather.
Only if it's a felony. That's one of the ways that they make the penalty for felonies more serious than misdemeanors. They may have the same jail time or monetary penalty, but there are other effects for felony convictions that make them nastier.
In general, I'm okay with making it illegal to share pre-release videos/music...after all, that goes after personal acts, not technology, which is an appropriate use for law.
My only concern is whether the punishment fits the crime. Is sharing one movie really grounds to lose your right to vote for the rest of your life?