You're freaking high bro. Unless the artist is performing with nothing more than their vocal cords or using their body as an instrument and you were listening to it live, then it's not free. Those instruments cost money. The venue that they play in costs money. The time that those artists spend making music instead of trading stocks, or selling coffee or whatever represents an investment of time that could have been spent doing other things that would have made them some money. Whether you choose to realize it or not, there was an investment of money that went into making the music that you claim is free.
And with the way the laws are written, if they want to broadcast or share that content with others, they need to pay to do so. The one person who bought the CD doesn't even come close to paying for the production cost of the CD. The process of making music keeps a lot of people employed. If you like an album enough to listen to it more than once, you should purchase it. If you don't want to buy the entire album then you should pay to download the tracks off of iTunes. I pirated a lot of warez in my time, but every single game that I truly enjoyed I went out and bought for the simple fact of the matter that I wanted to encourage the developers to continue doing what they were doing. I think that Microsoft had a "feature" on the Zune that allowed you to share your music with other people and they could play the track a limited number of times. That seems like a great idea. I'm all for "try before you buy" but the older I get, the more I realize that "try and never buy" really does fuck good people over. If we had morals and respect for our fellow human beings, we wouldn't need organizations like RIAA to go after music pirates. I'm not going to even try to defend their tactics and the way they go about their "business", but the fact of the matter is that they are representing real, honest to goodness WORKING members of society who are trying to make a living. It's really easy to whine and bitch and moan about "big evil recording companies", but when you step into reality you see that those "big evil record companies" are really a big network of professionals, from the artists, to the recording engineers, to the studio people who keep the equipment working, to the companies that actually press the CDs, to the graphics people who make the album artwork, the marketting people who sell the stuff, the radio stations that play it... and so on and so on.
And how many people were really affected by the WGA breakdown? Last I checked if you can't activate your copy of Windows, it still functions for 30 days with nothing more than a little popup from the system tray after every reboot that reminds you that you only have xx days remaining to activate the system. The other day I setup a server and installed Backup Exec on it but didn't input the serial numbers. It went into 60 day evaluation mode. Is Backup Exec evil because I have to put in a serial number to validate that I have a license to use it?
Have you ever tried bringing up a VPN connection over a satellite link? That's where the latency really starts to become a serious PITA. I have a client that owns some power plants in the middle of central California. They are seriously out in the middle of farmland with no infrastructure to speak of around there. Satellite is their only option and it sucks.
When I was a 17 year old kid I had an unlocked Oki 900 that I used on AT&T's network. I'm pretty sure they weren't too happy that the phone could switch between five different sets of ESN/MIN pairs.
oh, and if your network is secure then you should *welcome* people to test it. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke.
You can have a really secure network that is still vulnerable to a DoS attack. According to the firewall and SNORT logs, there are already more than enough people "testing" the network already. Those folks combined with the internal users testing my patience are more than enough for me to deal with. =)
It's pretty simple, unless you're willing to say who you are, you can't claim to be an expert and expect people to just take your word for it.
Yet this is/. and we're on the Internet. The Internet is filled with people who have nothing better to do than fuck with others who are more successful than they are. I make a conscious effort to never post any details that can be used to identify any my clients. I do that because of the of the fact that the last thing I need is some socially incompetent fucktard deciding that he doesn't like my stance my some obscure topic, and in order to prove himself better than me, making the decision to spend the next two weeks of his miserable life trying to penetrate a network that I'm responsible for.
It is really easy to determine whether or not someone is an expert. You can ask them questions about the field that they claim to be an expert in. In the context of this thread, the guy talked about signing an NDA with some governmental sounding agency. It should be pretty easy to do a Google search and figure out if that agency even exists and if they're operating the realm of what is being discussed. If you care about the expert status of an individual, it is probably because you're interested in what they claim to be an expert in. If you want to engage them in a dialogue, go ahead and do it. If they can answer your questions, then they're obviously expert enough. If you don't have any questions, then why the fuck do you care whether or not they're qualified to talk about a topic?
Your SCADA system shouldn't be accessible via the internet. It should be on its own locked down network, seperate from the other networks. Most of the patches that Microsoft releases are either security related, or product enhancements. If the SCADA system will run just fine on out of the box, unpatched Windows, then why are patches being installed? If the system is so mission critical that it can't be rebooted, then why are automatic updates enabled?
To offer a car analogy... I can get my car up to 150mph and jerk the wheel hard to the right which will probably cause the car to roll and quite likely kill me. Does that mean that I have to do that?
The only reason to constantly patch your MS box (or *nix box) is if it is deployed in such a way that it will be attacked. If it's locked down on a secure subnet that isn't connected to the internet or any other hardware that could be compromised, then there isn't any reason to patch it unless the application that you are running requires a patch to the system DLLs.
A client of mine is in the waste management industry and over the last fourty years has grown in size from his humble beginnings of picking up recyclables in the back of his pickup truck, to running a multi-million dollar a year operation that includes the ownership of two power plants to burn green waste. He is an insanely smart individual but he has so many plates spinning at the same time that he rarely has time to completely grasp the subtle nuiances involved in implementing everything that he asks for. In the case of the power plants he wanted to be able to monitor them in real time from 500+ miles away. The only internet connection at the facility was used by the power plant staff, and of course they were all over Myspace and MSN and all the typical security nightmares. There was no way in hell that I was putting the control systems anywhere near the facility network. My solution was to pull a secondary line exclusively for the control system. That was a huge fight because the client couldn't understand why they needed another "Internet" when they already had one of them. After winning that battle, I setup a VPN back to the main office and then ran VNC to give him access to the machines that he wanted to look at. I'm sure that there was a better solution than VNC, but my client is a cheap bastard^H^H^Hfiscally conservative individual and he didn't want to pay for the remote solution that was offered by the vendor who installed the control system. Despite his chea^H^H^H^H conservative nature, he did see the necessity of paying for redundant server hardware so I can't fault him too much.
And for those of you who are curious, no, it doesn't run on Linux. All of the control systems are Windows based and run on Server 2003 Standard. I'm 99% certain it comes from either Honeywell or Siemens.
They are stealing high MPG cars with more and more frequency. Sure, they aren't 'pretty' but they are being stolen.
Most professional car theft rings are stealing the cars to strip them for parts that are then resold to mechanics who use the parts to repair other vehicles. That "business model" is why the most often stolen cars are often the most common (Toyota Camry, Honda Accord, etc).
I agree with that assessment. The same thing happened where I work. The store brought in a kiosk from a particular vendor to sell a certain type of merchandise. They needed the thing connected to the network so that it could have Internet access to validate credit card transactions. Nobody bothered to tell us that the damn thing was showing up until it was already here. The attitude from the store people was, "We're just going to plug it into the network. Make it work." We ended up making them pay for the cost of enabling an optional port on the Sonicwall 3060 so we could throw the thing on it's own isolated network segment.
I can only imagine the kind of headache that such a kiosk implementation would cause in an organization like TJX with stores spread across the nation. It also makes me wonder how many other retailers that have similar kiosks (Home Depot, Target, etc) also have similarly insecure setups.
That doesn't surprise me. Knowing *nix right now is kind of like knowing networking (TCP/IP, etc.) was in the early 1990s. Companies are so desperate for people with talent that they will take anyone with basic knowledge who is a quick learner. And I'm not saying that to knock people who get hired because of it. I secured my first job in 1996 because I could configure a firewall and a Cisco router at a time when having a dual-channel ISDN line to the Internet was pretty fast (with a full T1 being blazing fast).
If you think the struggle is never going to be over; you're absolutely right. Until we get everybody in the country as committed to destroying al-qaeda as they are to protecting moslems from being offended and suspected terrorist's phone calls from being interpreted, nothing is going to get accomplished.
I am going to assume that you received the +1 Insightful mod for the first half of your post and not the second part that I quoted above. The struggle will never be over because it is a struggle that has been going on for over a thousand years at this point. It is a struggle that involves the irrationality of religion. It involves a small portion of land next to a sea in the Middle East, and thousands upon thousands of fantatics on both sides of the aisle who claim that their long dead guy had a better idea of how to live life than the other side's long dead guy did.
People do not seem to understand that just because grandma can pick it up doesnt mean there is no cost related in training employees for completely new software.
This is a good point. Microsoft seems so focused on hooking new users that they don't particularly care about what people have grown accustomed to. I've found a few people who actually like the Office 2007 interface, but they're all relatively new to computers. The problem, as far as I see it, is that the Microsoft UI has been the opposite of intuitive for so long that we've gotten used to it. When they make it intuitive, we all freak out because we've already wired our brain the "wrong" way.
Where's the employer responsibility factor? As a person who is very out of shape, I can 100% attribute it to being forced to work like a slave for most of my career. I'd love to have more time to exercise. I would only accept higher insurance premiums if I could really ding my employer for not hiring enough people to meet the work demand. But I honestly don't know how you would go about measuring such things.
Forget employer responsibility. Your lifestyle is your responsibility. Period, end of story. You choose where you work. I had to make a hard decision last year. I could keep consulting and make a good amount of money while working crazy hours, or I could go to work full time for one of my clients, make less money, but have more free time and a regular schedule. I made the decision to make less money and have a predictable schedule. With that predictable schedule I can work out regularly (I study a martial art and train 4-6 days a week). I can also cook for myself because I know when I'm going to be home. Staying healthy is pretty simple. You need to eat well and exercise. You only need about 30 minutes of cardio three to four times a week and a good diet to maintain above average health.
I'm sorry that you sold yourself into slavery. I was out walking between buildings a couple of hours ago and I walked past the smoking area. There were two women sitting there bitching about how they don't have time to work out. One of them brought up the fact that she doesn't get home til 7pm and there's no way she's going to work out then. If she really cared about not being an obese, smoking blight to her own health she'd take care of it. For her it is easier to make an excuse and get some sympathy from the other obese, smoking cow she was sharing cigarette smoke with. After all, she doesn't have to take responsibility for her own health if her big, evil nasty employer makes her work so late that she doesn't get home until... *gasp* 7pm at night. I bet the cow has more than enough time to watch some television.
I had to re-read it. All I can say is that it's a good book to read in middle school 20 years ago. It doesn't hold up very well.
I completely agree. When I was in school I thought that he was a great writer and that his books were excellent. They were great books, but having read them again recently the prose and syntatic structure doesn't seem as great as it did when I first read it. None the less, I still think he has a great way with words. The opening line from Neuromancer will always be in my mind... "The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel."
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You're freaking high bro. Unless the artist is performing with nothing more than their vocal cords or using their body as an instrument and you were listening to it live, then it's not free. Those instruments cost money. The venue that they play in costs money. The time that those artists spend making music instead of trading stocks, or selling coffee or whatever represents an investment of time that could have been spent doing other things that would have made them some money. Whether you choose to realize it or not, there was an investment of money that went into making the music that you claim is free.
And with the way the laws are written, if they want to broadcast or share that content with others, they need to pay to do so. The one person who bought the CD doesn't even come close to paying for the production cost of the CD. The process of making music keeps a lot of people employed. If you like an album enough to listen to it more than once, you should purchase it. If you don't want to buy the entire album then you should pay to download the tracks off of iTunes. I pirated a lot of warez in my time, but every single game that I truly enjoyed I went out and bought for the simple fact of the matter that I wanted to encourage the developers to continue doing what they were doing. I think that Microsoft had a "feature" on the Zune that allowed you to share your music with other people and they could play the track a limited number of times. That seems like a great idea. I'm all for "try before you buy" but the older I get, the more I realize that "try and never buy" really does fuck good people over. If we had morals and respect for our fellow human beings, we wouldn't need organizations like RIAA to go after music pirates. I'm not going to even try to defend their tactics and the way they go about their "business", but the fact of the matter is that they are representing real, honest to goodness WORKING members of society who are trying to make a living. It's really easy to whine and bitch and moan about "big evil recording companies", but when you step into reality you see that those "big evil record companies" are really a big network of professionals, from the artists, to the recording engineers, to the studio people who keep the equipment working, to the companies that actually press the CDs, to the graphics people who make the album artwork, the marketting people who sell the stuff, the radio stations that play it... and so on and so on.
I call bullshit. You're too busy posting on /. and stroking your ego. Just like the rest of us. ;)
And how many people were really affected by the WGA breakdown? Last I checked if you can't activate your copy of Windows, it still functions for 30 days with nothing more than a little popup from the system tray after every reboot that reminds you that you only have xx days remaining to activate the system. The other day I setup a server and installed Backup Exec on it but didn't input the serial numbers. It went into 60 day evaluation mode. Is Backup Exec evil because I have to put in a serial number to validate that I have a license to use it?
Have you ever tried bringing up a VPN connection over a satellite link? That's where the latency really starts to become a serious PITA. I have a client that owns some power plants in the middle of central California. They are seriously out in the middle of farmland with no infrastructure to speak of around there. Satellite is their only option and it sucks.
When I was a 17 year old kid I had an unlocked Oki 900 that I used on AT&T's network. I'm pretty sure they weren't too happy that the phone could switch between five different sets of ESN/MIN pairs.
You can have a really secure network that is still vulnerable to a DoS attack. According to the firewall and SNORT logs, there are already more than enough people "testing" the network already. Those folks combined with the internal users testing my patience are more than enough for me to deal with. =)
Yet this is /. and we're on the Internet. The Internet is filled with people who have nothing better to do than fuck with others who are more successful than they are. I make a conscious effort to never post any details that can be used to identify any my clients. I do that because of the of the fact that the last thing I need is some socially incompetent fucktard deciding that he doesn't like my stance my some obscure topic, and in order to prove himself better than me, making the decision to spend the next two weeks of his miserable life trying to penetrate a network that I'm responsible for.
It is really easy to determine whether or not someone is an expert. You can ask them questions about the field that they claim to be an expert in. In the context of this thread, the guy talked about signing an NDA with some governmental sounding agency. It should be pretty easy to do a Google search and figure out if that agency even exists and if they're operating the realm of what is being discussed. If you care about the expert status of an individual, it is probably because you're interested in what they claim to be an expert in. If you want to engage them in a dialogue, go ahead and do it. If they can answer your questions, then they're obviously expert enough. If you don't have any questions, then why the fuck do you care whether or not they're qualified to talk about a topic?
ABB are the guys who installed the system at the plant that I used in my example.
Your SCADA system shouldn't be accessible via the internet. It should be on its own locked down network, seperate from the other networks. Most of the patches that Microsoft releases are either security related, or product enhancements. If the SCADA system will run just fine on out of the box, unpatched Windows, then why are patches being installed? If the system is so mission critical that it can't be rebooted, then why are automatic updates enabled?
To offer a car analogy... I can get my car up to 150mph and jerk the wheel hard to the right which will probably cause the car to roll and quite likely kill me. Does that mean that I have to do that?
The only reason to constantly patch your MS box (or *nix box) is if it is deployed in such a way that it will be attacked. If it's locked down on a secure subnet that isn't connected to the internet or any other hardware that could be compromised, then there isn't any reason to patch it unless the application that you are running requires a patch to the system DLLs.
And for those of you who are curious, no, it doesn't run on Linux. All of the control systems are Windows based and run on Server 2003 Standard. I'm 99% certain it comes from either Honeywell or Siemens.
Yup. I can park my dirty 1992 Volvo 940 anywhere I want and not worry about it.
Most professional car theft rings are stealing the cars to strip them for parts that are then resold to mechanics who use the parts to repair other vehicles. That "business model" is why the most often stolen cars are often the most common (Toyota Camry, Honda Accord, etc).
But think of all those children strapped into their safety seats in the back of mom's minivan!!
I can only imagine the kind of headache that such a kiosk implementation would cause in an organization like TJX with stores spread across the nation. It also makes me wonder how many other retailers that have similar kiosks (Home Depot, Target, etc) also have similarly insecure setups.
The first time I got any drugs what so ever was at Defcon 2 of all places. Those were free... although I think they cost me some of my sanity. =)
That doesn't surprise me. Knowing *nix right now is kind of like knowing networking (TCP/IP, etc.) was in the early 1990s. Companies are so desperate for people with talent that they will take anyone with basic knowledge who is a quick learner. And I'm not saying that to knock people who get hired because of it. I secured my first job in 1996 because I could configure a firewall and a Cisco router at a time when having a dual-channel ISDN line to the Internet was pretty fast (with a full T1 being blazing fast).
It has been a while. XP will often times default to 16bit color at 1024x768 if not higher.
....if only your time means nothing.
Ya ya, gimme the karma hit. It was too funny and too easy to pass up.
I want to meet one of those drug dealers. They give me the first one free, then they come to me with money after that? Where do I sign up?!
They concentrated all of the redundancy dollars into layer B of the OSI model... the bureaucracy. There wasn't anything left for the lower layers.
I am going to assume that you received the +1 Insightful mod for the first half of your post and not the second part that I quoted above. The struggle will never be over because it is a struggle that has been going on for over a thousand years at this point. It is a struggle that involves the irrationality of religion. It involves a small portion of land next to a sea in the Middle East, and thousands upon thousands of fantatics on both sides of the aisle who claim that their long dead guy had a better idea of how to live life than the other side's long dead guy did.
This is a good point. Microsoft seems so focused on hooking new users that they don't particularly care about what people have grown accustomed to. I've found a few people who actually like the Office 2007 interface, but they're all relatively new to computers. The problem, as far as I see it, is that the Microsoft UI has been the opposite of intuitive for so long that we've gotten used to it. When they make it intuitive, we all freak out because we've already wired our brain the "wrong" way.
Forget employer responsibility. Your lifestyle is your responsibility. Period, end of story. You choose where you work. I had to make a hard decision last year. I could keep consulting and make a good amount of money while working crazy hours, or I could go to work full time for one of my clients, make less money, but have more free time and a regular schedule. I made the decision to make less money and have a predictable schedule. With that predictable schedule I can work out regularly (I study a martial art and train 4-6 days a week). I can also cook for myself because I know when I'm going to be home. Staying healthy is pretty simple. You need to eat well and exercise. You only need about 30 minutes of cardio three to four times a week and a good diet to maintain above average health.
I'm sorry that you sold yourself into slavery. I was out walking between buildings a couple of hours ago and I walked past the smoking area. There were two women sitting there bitching about how they don't have time to work out. One of them brought up the fact that she doesn't get home til 7pm and there's no way she's going to work out then. If she really cared about not being an obese, smoking blight to her own health she'd take care of it. For her it is easier to make an excuse and get some sympathy from the other obese, smoking cow she was sharing cigarette smoke with. After all, she doesn't have to take responsibility for her own health if her big, evil nasty employer makes her work so late that she doesn't get home until... *gasp* 7pm at night. I bet the cow has more than enough time to watch some television.
I completely agree. When I was in school I thought that he was a great writer and that his books were excellent. They were great books, but having read them again recently the prose and syntatic structure doesn't seem as great as it did when I first read it. None the less, I still think he has a great way with words. The opening line from Neuromancer will always be in my mind... "The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel."