Show me someone hacking through a default deny policy on a Cisco ASA and I will start to worry. Until then, this is going into the "mountains out of molehills" category.
The other side of the connection (the remote monitoring side, not the SCADA side) is a VPN tunnel with a single IP endpoint and a policy that only allows it to connect to the historian server. So first you'd have to hack the VPN concentrator and convince it to allow you to route traffic to a host that is not defined by the policy, and then you have to hack the ASA to convince it to pass traffic in the wrong direction against a rule explicitly defined to deny that exact behavior. And before you can do that, you have to MitM the WAN connection and convince it that you are the one IP address that is allowed to establish the other side of an IPsec/AES256/SHA tunnel. Because of course you already have the 32 character, randomly generated pre-shared key, right?
If the SCADA system is architected properly, remote monitoring is done via a Historian server that does not have the ability to affect the control systems.
I helped setup a Honeywell system to run a power plant in central California. My job was to architect the network piece of it. The hardware itself was completely mirrored in a typical master / slave relationship so that if the master failed, the slave was completely synchronized and could pick up the load.
There was a hardware firewall in between the production network and the Historian. The connection between the two was one way so that the it could report historical data for reporting purposes.
The corporate network connected to the historian via an IPSEC/AES-256 VPN connection. The switch fabric was redundant and the firewall used dual-homed, active/passive connections to mitigate against the potential of a switch failure.
I have been playing it more lately. I decided to go back and finish the Single Player campaign. Once that was done, I checked out multiplayer to see if it got any better. It is better. I am not sure how much of that has to do with Punkbuster, versus how much of it has to do with the hackers getting bored and playing another game. I have only seen two instances of aimbots in the last couple of weeks.
10-1 is not that unheard of. I went 13-2 last night on MoH:W and that is using the same engine as BF3. It really all comes down to latency. When I have the connection to myself, I do well. When my fiance is playing WoW on the other computer, I find myself doing less well. That has been my experience since the early days of online gaming. I was one of the best Q3 players in the world for a while when the game first came out. A little bit of it was skill, a lot of it was the 384k DSL line and 10ms pings I had.
Punkbuster is worthless. I broke my own rule and bought Medal of Honor Warfighter for the PC. This is after I went strictly PS3 for FPS games due to the hackers on the PC. Despite having Punkbuster, the game was completely overrun with hackers. Day 1 of the release there were already aimbots and wallhacks galore. The only thing that Punkbuster seems to do is guarantee a revenue stream for the coders who have to obfuscate the cheats from time to time to counteract the new Punkbuster signatures.
It is amazing. Their sales team is atrocious. The reason they are still around is because they continue to bring good hardware to the market, and support it with a solid support organization. You pay through the nose for it, but they meet their SLAs. Just make sure that you read the fine print on those contracts. They will nickle and dime you to death.
I'd be happy to work with EMC. Those guys have their fingers in a lot of pies and are well positioned for the next five to ten years. Some of the customers that they are working with are on the cutting edge of a lot of cool industries, mostly biotech and other fields that can really make use of Greenplum and "big data" (buzzword alert). EMC is probably one of the most stable companies in the world right now, and they have great growth prospects.
Dice.com is not as good as it used to be. I like indeed.com. They aggregate all of the major job resources and are nice enough to categorize them by pay for easy searching.
I agree. While I fully believe that there are many at RackSpace who fully embrace the idea of OpenStack and the philosophy behind it, this situation seems like the classic case of idealism meeting business realities. Like any company, RackSpace wants to deliver a good product and a good user experience. It is much easier to do that when a company can focus support staff on a fixed offering. The reality is that resources are limited, and a company that tries to be everything for everybody is going to quickly spread itself too thin and in the end, not do anything very well.
If the market can really support a large number of cloud providers running a variety of management tools, then the market will support it and additional providers will appear to fill in the gaps that RackSpace is leaving behind by dropping unconditional support of everything OpenStack.
The key take away from the summary is that RackSpace's customers want a management experience similar to what RackSpace offers. If that is true, and I do not have any reason to believe that it is not, then RackSpace is being smart by focusing on that market. As a service provider, the people who want to do everything themselves are usually the biggest pains in the ass. They are constantly complaining and take up measurably more support time than the rest of the customer base.
I do not blame RackSpace for taking a critical look at their business and the market and deciding, "We do not want to support HomeBrew OpenStack v0.023 beta" Would you? Do you want to waste your time in meetings with client developers who swear that they are following the published APIs, or using OpenStack best practices, but in reality they cannot code their way out of a wet paper bag? Do you want to be the director whose support department has to support Random Third-Party Addon v2.5 that 25% of your user base is dependent upon, but the developer gave up on and hasn't been updated in three years?
I will bet dollars to donuts that the internal discussion on this came down to support. At the end of the day, RackSpace decided that they did not want to be on the hook to support every random add-on that some college kid comes up with, the blogsphere declares the best thing since sliced bread, and then twelve months later no longer works with the latest version of OpenStack and the "developer" has moved onto other projects.
Maybe I have been reading too much Taoist philosophy, but I am full convinced that the best way to deal with your enemies is to operate from a position of power and make them your friends. Usually people are enemies because they have conflicting interests. Those interests are born out of the natural desire to have certain things, safety, food, and shelter being the primary ones. Power bases are built when people promise the masses those three things, sort of like Hamas promises prosperity for the Palestinians. We could do more to undermine Hamas and bring peace to the region by one, showing that Hamas just brings violence because violence begets violence, and two giving the Palestinians an economy.
Not to completely derail this further off onto a tangent, but we are giving the Israeli's hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in military aid. That money would go a long way to building housing and feeding people. Make the aid contingent upon doing what is good for the region. Let the Israeli's build their settlements, but make it a 1:1 deal. For every dwelling they build for an Israeli, they have to build a dwelling right next door for a Palestinian. Make them share the land with each other. It will be hard at first, but so what?
I bought the meme hook line and sinker. That's the good thing about/. though. Most of the posters are pretty damn smart, and being geeks and nerds, will fact check you. So I always try to do some research before blindly repeating things. The only information I found about CPI excluding energy and food was on some gold and silver website. The website did not have any links or supporting evidence. It was just a blanket statement. On the other hand, if you Google something like "cpi versus inflation" you will get all sorts of information about how the CPI is calculated and how it relates to the various types of inflation.
There is no doubt that CPI as it currently stands shows less inflation than it would if it were calculated the same way as it was in the 1980s. That variance comes from the shifting basket of goods though. (Filet versus t-bone for example).
Think for a moment how peaceful the world could be if America was giving Israel tractors and farm equipment to build up Palestine with, instead of guns and missiles to enslave it.
Same thing goes for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc
Imagine if we were deploying nuclear reactors to power the third world, instead of putting them in submarines that lurk beneath the ocean, ready to surface and launch population annihilating ICBMs.
An article I read a while ago said that the problem with your premise is that often times, the banks did not have a position that they were trading on. Therefore they did not have an actual figure to report on some days. That dynamic introduced additional leeway for manipulation, because in effect they were simply reporting what they "would" report IF they had anything to report.
I wish that I could find the article, because it was really detailed about exactly how the manipulation went down.
I was going to say the same thing, because there is a meme out there that the CPI leaves out some key things. Then I did some research, and it appears that the meme is actually a lie.
I suggest you do some research on your own. There are some issues with the CPI. Namely, the exact goods in each category can change. For example, for "meat" they might use "filet migon" one time and then "t-bone steak" the next. They claim that they do that because the CPI reflects consumer purchasing habits, and as costs go up, consumers purchase less expensive alternatives.
One of the primary facets of my personality that I have noticed in my thirty-five years of life is that left to its own devices, my mind is very problem focused. It makes me a great IT resource because I am constantly aware of the short comings of the systems, the holes in the programs, the potential for failure. I make a very good living by proactively addressing the problems that I see. Before that, I made a decent living by being very good at troubleshooting.
As much of an asset as that mindset is in my career, it is a hindrance in my personal relationships. Very few people enjoy spending time with someone who is frequently focused on what is wrong with the world. It also carries over into my work relationships. As good as I may be at my job, there is a significant amount of risk of being the guy who is often in the position to say "I told you so." Nobody really likes that guy, no matter how right I might be.
One of the biggest helps for me has been Neuro Linguistic Programming. It is like an instruction manual for the mind. That, combined with some good philosophy (primarily Taoist and Buddhist), have given me the tools to find ways to be positive. I did not start figuring these things out until my mid twenties though, and I still work on them daily.
For the younger guys, the teenagers and the college kids who are multiple times more intelligent that I am, I can imagine the despair and hopelessness they might feel at times. I remember how much 9/11 bothered me, and all of the unanswered questions. I remember before that, 2600 meetings and Defcon and being really interested in computer security, then realizing how much society hates and fears people who "speak truth to power" by pointing out problems with the systems. I spent some time being disillusioned by the political process here in America.
My "solution" was to tune it out, and to focus on myself, my friends, family and loved ones. We all only have one life, and changing things like a political system or any major organization is often more than a single person can handle. We can make our own lives better though. We can improve our health, both physical and mental, and by doing that become an example to others who might be inclined to do the same. We can mentor others, both at work and in our personal lives.
The highly intelligent have the "curse" of often times being unable to let things go. Most of us have probably dealt with it at one time or another. Maybe it was a problem at work that we kept thinking about long after coming home. Maybe it was a conversation that we had with someone that did not go as we would have liked it to, and so we play over thousands of different variations in our head. When that mindset, that inability to let things go, gets wrapped up in some of the massive challenges that face our generation.... climate change, loss of civil liberties, economic collapse, 10+ years in Federal prison for publishing some free works... it can be overwhelming. It can be overwhelming because there is not an obvious way to change things. The deck is so stacked. There are so many interests vested in the current system and actively opposed to anyone trying to change it. When those forces collide with a "hacker mentality" and someone who "needs" to be in control of their own future and their environment, I can see how suicide happens.
To your second point, if tryptophan is not available, 5HTP is a decent substitute. In either case, Jarrow Labs makes both of them, and their products are very pure.
I thought that 802.11A was already in the 5Ghz band, and "everyone" went to 2.4Ghz (B/G) because it performs better inside due to the shorter waves penetrating walls better.
I could RTFA but that would be against the true spirit of/. so I will just ask. Is there something about the new 802.11ac standard that makes it better for use inside buildings and other structurally dense environments?
In the early 1990s I was into Audix running on System 85s. I figured out that 800-##AUDIX and 800-AUDIX## were back end access to AT&T's entire Audix infrastructure. With the help of ToneLoc, myself and some like minded individuals were making short work of the ##AUDIX range. I was living at home with my parents at the time.
After a week or two (it was not long at all), I was at the dinner table and my mom explained to me that she had a long conversation with AT&T corporate security. They explained to her in no uncertain terms that what I was doing was highly illegal (toll fraud (since they were 800 numbers), illegal access to a computer system (the System85s that were running Audix), and some other things). My dad shared tales of blue boxing from Harvard in the 70s, my parents explained that I was not going to be using the modem for six months, and we all decided that a life of phone fraud and computer crime was not going to be part of my future.
By the mid to late 1990s after having spent a lot of time at 2600 meetings and Defcon, it was very obvious to me that the Feds were not going to take a light hand to those who them deemed a threat to the system. The "old school" mentality that Tufte experienced up close, and that I had a brief taste of, disappeared long ago. The shift makes sense because of how the culture has grown. It went from hackers in dorm rooms at a few colleges, to people on bulletin boards with only a few phone lines, to EVERYONE (practically) walking around with a full blown computer in their pocket that is continually connected to the net 24/7.
I think the difference between curious exploration of computer systems, and cracking with the intent of liberating information is an important one. In this day and age, the authorities are not in the mindset to tolerate either. It is a shame. Good IT people are those who are curious about how things work. Smart people of any stripe, no matter what their profession, will always be testing the boundaries of the system. The human mind wants to know. It thrives on knowledge. It is criminal to lock the knowledge away. Yet, in the system we live in, just the opposite is true. It is criminal to liberate information, and perfectly legal to embargo it.
The shrinking market for their products and the pressures on their margins. The company itself is fine. However it has been valued based on its ability to generate abnormally high profits and lots of volume. This article is an example of Apple purchasing fewer displays because they do not forecast as strong of a demand for their products as previously expected. There was an article last year about Samsung jacking up the price of the processors. Look for more of the same in the future. Fewer sales, fewer upgrades, reduced profit per unit. Just look at the release cycles. They are becoming shorter and shorter.
There are also macroeconomic pressures at play. The economy is heading for some rough waters ahead.
There are a lot of people short AAPL. The stock has had a good run but the fundamentals are against them. They cannot defend their price points anymore. Look no further than iPhones in Walmart for the handwriting on the wall.
Martial arts training (primarily tai chi with a bit of kung fu), running (a couple of miles, three to four times a week), meditation (nightly), stretching (following meditation, before and after running, before and after kung fu), qigong... and eating well.
I am in the best shape of my life at 35, despite working 60 hour weeks. The sedentary IT life is just an excuse that people use. Staying healthy is a life style choice. It is a serious pain in the ass at first, but once you get into a routine that works for you, it is easy. The endorphin system is wonderful. Exercise becomes its own reward. The mood improves. You do not get sick as often. Stress does not affect you as severely.
Slashdot Mirror
Show me someone hacking through a default deny policy on a Cisco ASA and I will start to worry. Until then, this is going into the "mountains out of molehills" category.
The other side of the connection (the remote monitoring side, not the SCADA side) is a VPN tunnel with a single IP endpoint and a policy that only allows it to connect to the historian server. So first you'd have to hack the VPN concentrator and convince it to allow you to route traffic to a host that is not defined by the policy, and then you have to hack the ASA to convince it to pass traffic in the wrong direction against a rule explicitly defined to deny that exact behavior. And before you can do that, you have to MitM the WAN connection and convince it that you are the one IP address that is allowed to establish the other side of an IPsec/AES256/SHA tunnel. Because of course you already have the 32 character, randomly generated pre-shared key, right?
I am relying on the firewall. If someone is hacking a Cisco ASA that is set to default deny, I have bigger problems.
If the SCADA system is architected properly, remote monitoring is done via a Historian server that does not have the ability to affect the control systems.
I helped setup a Honeywell system to run a power plant in central California. My job was to architect the network piece of it. The hardware itself was completely mirrored in a typical master / slave relationship so that if the master failed, the slave was completely synchronized and could pick up the load.
There was a hardware firewall in between the production network and the Historian. The connection between the two was one way so that the it could report historical data for reporting purposes.
The corporate network connected to the historian via an IPSEC/AES-256 VPN connection. The switch fabric was redundant and the firewall used dual-homed, active/passive connections to mitigate against the potential of a switch failure.
I have been playing it more lately. I decided to go back and finish the Single Player campaign. Once that was done, I checked out multiplayer to see if it got any better. It is better. I am not sure how much of that has to do with Punkbuster, versus how much of it has to do with the hackers getting bored and playing another game. I have only seen two instances of aimbots in the last couple of weeks.
10-1 is not that unheard of. I went 13-2 last night on MoH:W and that is using the same engine as BF3. It really all comes down to latency. When I have the connection to myself, I do well. When my fiance is playing WoW on the other computer, I find myself doing less well. That has been my experience since the early days of online gaming. I was one of the best Q3 players in the world for a while when the game first came out. A little bit of it was skill, a lot of it was the 384k DSL line and 10ms pings I had.
Punkbuster is worthless. I broke my own rule and bought Medal of Honor Warfighter for the PC. This is after I went strictly PS3 for FPS games due to the hackers on the PC. Despite having Punkbuster, the game was completely overrun with hackers. Day 1 of the release there were already aimbots and wallhacks galore. The only thing that Punkbuster seems to do is guarantee a revenue stream for the coders who have to obfuscate the cheats from time to time to counteract the new Punkbuster signatures.
It is amazing. Their sales team is atrocious. The reason they are still around is because they continue to bring good hardware to the market, and support it with a solid support organization. You pay through the nose for it, but they meet their SLAs. Just make sure that you read the fine print on those contracts. They will nickle and dime you to death.
I'd be happy to work with EMC. Those guys have their fingers in a lot of pies and are well positioned for the next five to ten years. Some of the customers that they are working with are on the cutting edge of a lot of cool industries, mostly biotech and other fields that can really make use of Greenplum and "big data" (buzzword alert). EMC is probably one of the most stable companies in the world right now, and they have great growth prospects.
Dice.com is not as good as it used to be. I like indeed.com. They aggregate all of the major job resources and are nice enough to categorize them by pay for easy searching.
I agree. While I fully believe that there are many at RackSpace who fully embrace the idea of OpenStack and the philosophy behind it, this situation seems like the classic case of idealism meeting business realities. Like any company, RackSpace wants to deliver a good product and a good user experience. It is much easier to do that when a company can focus support staff on a fixed offering. The reality is that resources are limited, and a company that tries to be everything for everybody is going to quickly spread itself too thin and in the end, not do anything very well.
If the market can really support a large number of cloud providers running a variety of management tools, then the market will support it and additional providers will appear to fill in the gaps that RackSpace is leaving behind by dropping unconditional support of everything OpenStack.
The key take away from the summary is that RackSpace's customers want a management experience similar to what RackSpace offers. If that is true, and I do not have any reason to believe that it is not, then RackSpace is being smart by focusing on that market. As a service provider, the people who want to do everything themselves are usually the biggest pains in the ass. They are constantly complaining and take up measurably more support time than the rest of the customer base.
I do not blame RackSpace for taking a critical look at their business and the market and deciding, "We do not want to support HomeBrew OpenStack v0.023 beta" Would you? Do you want to waste your time in meetings with client developers who swear that they are following the published APIs, or using OpenStack best practices, but in reality they cannot code their way out of a wet paper bag? Do you want to be the director whose support department has to support Random Third-Party Addon v2.5 that 25% of your user base is dependent upon, but the developer gave up on and hasn't been updated in three years?
I will bet dollars to donuts that the internal discussion on this came down to support. At the end of the day, RackSpace decided that they did not want to be on the hook to support every random add-on that some college kid comes up with, the blogsphere declares the best thing since sliced bread, and then twelve months later no longer works with the latest version of OpenStack and the "developer" has moved onto other projects.
Do you have any references to support that assertion?
Everything I have seen is that they are doing whatever they feel like and oppressing their neighbors with an iron boot in the name of security.
Maybe I have been reading too much Taoist philosophy, but I am full convinced that the best way to deal with your enemies is to operate from a position of power and make them your friends. Usually people are enemies because they have conflicting interests. Those interests are born out of the natural desire to have certain things, safety, food, and shelter being the primary ones. Power bases are built when people promise the masses those three things, sort of like Hamas promises prosperity for the Palestinians. We could do more to undermine Hamas and bring peace to the region by one, showing that Hamas just brings violence because violence begets violence, and two giving the Palestinians an economy.
Not to completely derail this further off onto a tangent, but we are giving the Israeli's hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in military aid. That money would go a long way to building housing and feeding people. Make the aid contingent upon doing what is good for the region. Let the Israeli's build their settlements, but make it a 1:1 deal. For every dwelling they build for an Israeli, they have to build a dwelling right next door for a Palestinian. Make them share the land with each other. It will be hard at first, but so what?
I bought the meme hook line and sinker. That's the good thing about /. though. Most of the posters are pretty damn smart, and being geeks and nerds, will fact check you. So I always try to do some research before blindly repeating things. The only information I found about CPI excluding energy and food was on some gold and silver website. The website did not have any links or supporting evidence. It was just a blanket statement. On the other hand, if you Google something like "cpi versus inflation" you will get all sorts of information about how the CPI is calculated and how it relates to the various types of inflation.
There is no doubt that CPI as it currently stands shows less inflation than it would if it were calculated the same way as it was in the 1980s. That variance comes from the shifting basket of goods though. (Filet versus t-bone for example).
When you're talking about the Scots, it is whisky. As an American with roots in Scotland, I'm with the OP.
You get an entire economy focused on WAR.
Think for a moment how peaceful the world could be if America was giving Israel tractors and farm equipment to build up Palestine with, instead of guns and missiles to enslave it.
Same thing goes for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc
Imagine if we were deploying nuclear reactors to power the third world, instead of putting them in submarines that lurk beneath the ocean, ready to surface and launch population annihilating ICBMs.
I will deal with the confusion for him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
Corporations have been recognized as people by the Supreme Court as early as the early 1800s.
I'm not sure which forums you are referring to, but the highest forum in the United States legal system considers corporations to be "people".
An article I read a while ago said that the problem with your premise is that often times, the banks did not have a position that they were trading on. Therefore they did not have an actual figure to report on some days. That dynamic introduced additional leeway for manipulation, because in effect they were simply reporting what they "would" report IF they had anything to report.
I wish that I could find the article, because it was really detailed about exactly how the manipulation went down.
I was going to say the same thing, because there is a meme out there that the CPI leaves out some key things. Then I did some research, and it appears that the meme is actually a lie.
http://www.bls.gov/dolfaq/bls_ques3.htm
I suggest you do some research on your own. There are some issues with the CPI. Namely, the exact goods in each category can change. For example, for "meat" they might use "filet migon" one time and then "t-bone steak" the next. They claim that they do that because the CPI reflects consumer purchasing habits, and as costs go up, consumers purchase less expensive alternatives.
You are right. Thank you.
One of the primary facets of my personality that I have noticed in my thirty-five years of life is that left to its own devices, my mind is very problem focused. It makes me a great IT resource because I am constantly aware of the short comings of the systems, the holes in the programs, the potential for failure. I make a very good living by proactively addressing the problems that I see. Before that, I made a decent living by being very good at troubleshooting.
As much of an asset as that mindset is in my career, it is a hindrance in my personal relationships. Very few people enjoy spending time with someone who is frequently focused on what is wrong with the world. It also carries over into my work relationships. As good as I may be at my job, there is a significant amount of risk of being the guy who is often in the position to say "I told you so." Nobody really likes that guy, no matter how right I might be.
One of the biggest helps for me has been Neuro Linguistic Programming. It is like an instruction manual for the mind. That, combined with some good philosophy (primarily Taoist and Buddhist), have given me the tools to find ways to be positive. I did not start figuring these things out until my mid twenties though, and I still work on them daily.
For the younger guys, the teenagers and the college kids who are multiple times more intelligent that I am, I can imagine the despair and hopelessness they might feel at times. I remember how much 9/11 bothered me, and all of the unanswered questions. I remember before that, 2600 meetings and Defcon and being really interested in computer security, then realizing how much society hates and fears people who "speak truth to power" by pointing out problems with the systems. I spent some time being disillusioned by the political process here in America.
My "solution" was to tune it out, and to focus on myself, my friends, family and loved ones. We all only have one life, and changing things like a political system or any major organization is often more than a single person can handle. We can make our own lives better though. We can improve our health, both physical and mental, and by doing that become an example to others who might be inclined to do the same. We can mentor others, both at work and in our personal lives.
The highly intelligent have the "curse" of often times being unable to let things go. Most of us have probably dealt with it at one time or another. Maybe it was a problem at work that we kept thinking about long after coming home. Maybe it was a conversation that we had with someone that did not go as we would have liked it to, and so we play over thousands of different variations in our head. When that mindset, that inability to let things go, gets wrapped up in some of the massive challenges that face our generation.... climate change, loss of civil liberties, economic collapse, 10+ years in Federal prison for publishing some free works... it can be overwhelming. It can be overwhelming because there is not an obvious way to change things. The deck is so stacked. There are so many interests vested in the current system and actively opposed to anyone trying to change it. When those forces collide with a "hacker mentality" and someone who "needs" to be in control of their own future and their environment, I can see how suicide happens.
To your second point, if tryptophan is not available, 5HTP is a decent substitute. In either case, Jarrow Labs makes both of them, and their products are very pure.
I thought that 802.11A was already in the 5Ghz band, and "everyone" went to 2.4Ghz (B/G) because it performs better inside due to the shorter waves penetrating walls better.
I could RTFA but that would be against the true spirit of /. so I will just ask. Is there something about the new 802.11ac standard that makes it better for use inside buildings and other structurally dense environments?
In the early 1990s I was into Audix running on System 85s. I figured out that 800-##AUDIX and 800-AUDIX## were back end access to AT&T's entire Audix infrastructure. With the help of ToneLoc, myself and some like minded individuals were making short work of the ##AUDIX range. I was living at home with my parents at the time.
After a week or two (it was not long at all), I was at the dinner table and my mom explained to me that she had a long conversation with AT&T corporate security. They explained to her in no uncertain terms that what I was doing was highly illegal (toll fraud (since they were 800 numbers), illegal access to a computer system (the System85s that were running Audix), and some other things). My dad shared tales of blue boxing from Harvard in the 70s, my parents explained that I was not going to be using the modem for six months, and we all decided that a life of phone fraud and computer crime was not going to be part of my future.
By the mid to late 1990s after having spent a lot of time at 2600 meetings and Defcon, it was very obvious to me that the Feds were not going to take a light hand to those who them deemed a threat to the system. The "old school" mentality that Tufte experienced up close, and that I had a brief taste of, disappeared long ago. The shift makes sense because of how the culture has grown. It went from hackers in dorm rooms at a few colleges, to people on bulletin boards with only a few phone lines, to EVERYONE (practically) walking around with a full blown computer in their pocket that is continually connected to the net 24/7.
I think the difference between curious exploration of computer systems, and cracking with the intent of liberating information is an important one. In this day and age, the authorities are not in the mindset to tolerate either. It is a shame. Good IT people are those who are curious about how things work. Smart people of any stripe, no matter what their profession, will always be testing the boundaries of the system. The human mind wants to know. It thrives on knowledge. It is criminal to lock the knowledge away. Yet, in the system we live in, just the opposite is true. It is criminal to liberate information, and perfectly legal to embargo it.
The shrinking market for their products and the pressures on their margins. The company itself is fine. However it has been valued based on its ability to generate abnormally high profits and lots of volume. This article is an example of Apple purchasing fewer displays because they do not forecast as strong of a demand for their products as previously expected. There was an article last year about Samsung jacking up the price of the processors. Look for more of the same in the future. Fewer sales, fewer upgrades, reduced profit per unit. Just look at the release cycles. They are becoming shorter and shorter.
There are also macroeconomic pressures at play. The economy is heading for some rough waters ahead.
There are a lot of people short AAPL. The stock has had a good run but the fundamentals are against them. They cannot defend their price points anymore. Look no further than iPhones in Walmart for the handwriting on the wall.
Martial arts training (primarily tai chi with a bit of kung fu), running (a couple of miles, three to four times a week), meditation (nightly), stretching (following meditation, before and after running, before and after kung fu), qigong... and eating well.
I am in the best shape of my life at 35, despite working 60 hour weeks. The sedentary IT life is just an excuse that people use. Staying healthy is a life style choice. It is a serious pain in the ass at first, but once you get into a routine that works for you, it is easy. The endorphin system is wonderful. Exercise becomes its own reward. The mood improves. You do not get sick as often. Stress does not affect you as severely.