I have never seen a good case for Group Policy control of the browser
Have you ever worked with Citrix or Terminal Services? The former more so than the latter leverages Group Policy to the umpteenth degree, especially IE policies. We host a.Net application that requires IE and ActiveX. We use Citrix to present IE to the clients. It is locked down so that it only goes to the URL of the web application.
Before people come up with snarky, "If it's IE, why do you run it through Citrix" comments, the app is a document review tool. There are often 15-20MB files being reviewed. In most cases it is more efficient to load the files at gigabit speeds into the Citrix server and then present them to the client.
There are admin templates for Firefox that allow it to be configured via Group Policy. It does not allow the same level of control, but it is enough for most IT departments. All of the basics are there (proxy settings, etc)
Furthermore, anyone who knows anything about Tesla knows that this has been part of their plan for some time.
You are 100% correct about this. A friend of mine went to work for Tesla about a year ago. He was telling about all of the planning that they were doing to shift their production from the roadster to the sedan.
Above and beyond that, Tesla has a lot of patents. They have the best batteries in the industry. Tesla is a long way from going out of business. If anything their biggest concern is probably trying to figure out how to not get gobbled up by another company who just wants their intellectual property.
Not sure how many PS3 fanboys they lost over the recent debacle
They finally lost me. Just the other day I was in the market for a Blu-ray player. I asked around the office for anecdotal from the co-workers about which players they had and liked. The large majority of them have Sony's and love them. I went with a Samsung.
After Sony's CEO summed up the whole situation with, "We will not do anything about being hacked, suck it up and get used to it." I wrote them off entirely. I love the PS3 hardware, but I can't support the company anymore.
I was thinking about alternative choices as I was writing the original post. What can people realistically do? There are at least two or three other free PDF viewing utilities out there that I am aware of. What is to say that any of those are significantly more secure than Acrobat? For all their faults, at least Adobe has the resources to throw at a problem when something goes wrong. Can the same be said about PrimoPDF devs?
I get the sense that Adobe has finally reached the tipping point. Their software has been exploited too many times, and in too many high profile incidents. They have to fix it now. The horse has left the barn, but at least going forward, they might end up with a secure product. A more or less bulletproof Acrobat is probably a good two to three years away. Adobe is still playing whack a mole and not fully investing in re-architecting the application to make it secure. They might not ever get there.
There must be some serious pressure on them if they are patching that frequently. It's not like Senate.gov or Google are getting hacked or anything. People are not really using the internet, and malicious files to go after anything pertinent, at places like Lockheed, or other RSA customers. None of those places would use Adobe Reader to open those RFPs or other thousands of forms sent to them by Uncle Sam, right?
Barn door, meet the horse's ass that has already run away from you.
I don't think that anyone has digitized my 1st grade crayon drawings yet. I think those are still safe.
It is hard to find a good acupuncturist in the States. Unfortunately it is a fairly "new" treatment and is fighting an uphill battle to gain acceptance. If you were in California I could give you a couple of good recommendations.
You can try to contact these people http://yosan.edu/ and see if they have any graduates in your area. They are the real deal.
For last nearly two years at this point, I have been dealing with chronic sciatic nerve pain. I have a couple of herniated discs (L4/L5, L5/S1) that are impinging on the sciatic nerve. I was not really aware of how my emotions and overall levels of stress impacted the pain until after I read what Sarno had to say. Although there is an undeniable physical component to my pain, it definitely fluctuates based on the amount of stress I'm under.
The man has written a couple of books about the role that the mind plays in back pain. When the book first came out it was pretty revolutionary. Now the ideas are pretty widely accepted as being fairly obvious. The man has not said that ALL back pain is related to the mind. However he has laid out a very plausible hypothesis to explain how the mind uses chronic pain to distract itself from deeply repressed emotions.
Negative emotions can wreak all sorts of havoc on the body. Acupuncture can be a good adjunct to therapy, especially for long held emotions. You might consider it, if you haven't already found other ways to move on.
RSA does offer tools to program your own tokens. They offer software tokens and you do not even need a fob. You can get the token on your PC or smart phone. If the token gets compromised or lost, the administrator can deactivate it and issue a new one. There's a convenient web interface for managing the whole process, both for users and admins.
I have always said that it is all about Intel Xeon processors in commodity servers and that AMD was a passing fad. It looks like AMD finally agreed and has implicitly conceded the market to Intel.
A government IT department should be a cloud service provider. They should be virtualized and SAN backed and replicated to DR sites. When an initiative requires more computing resources, they should be able to spin up a couple of VMs and present them to the team(s) that need the resources.
I know that "cloud" gets over used a lot, and the term still has some ambiguities to it. It helps if you realize that when the vendors are talking about clouds, they are talking about abstracted resource pools. Instead of buying "a server" with x procs and y GB of RAM, you are buying/renting a VM.
It is quite likely that the ambiguity in the article about whether or not the "cloud" project has been cancelled by the government has a lot to do with the definition and scope of the project. In all likelihood, HP is still going to help the UK government develop a "private cloud".
It comes down to a shift in thinking. In my environment I am dealing with an old school app developer who still thinks that he needs a physical server for every application. I had to do an end run around him and explain to others that the concept of n+1 physical boxes per application is dead. "There's this nifty thing called VMware... ooooo, aaaaahhhhhhh" The developer finally got on board with the program. Our provisioning process is more efficient too. Now instead of buying beefy servers "just in case" the application experiences growth, I spin up a minimal VM and add resources to it as necessary.
Back to your original point, the "cloud" only means outsourcing IT in the SMB market. For small businesses, it makes more sense for them to treat IT as a utility, like electricity or water. They want to be able to flip the switch and make it work. They don't want to have an electrician and a plumber on staff to maintain the building. Unless there are performance issues with the hosting environment, there is no reason that they can't use Citrix or even some sort of web based applications hosted and maintained by someone else. With a proper SLA and a redundant internet feed, they should be fine.
For the enterprise, the cloud is just an abstraction of data center resources. I think that is what Schmidt might have been saying when he said that IT people either need to get with the cloud or get run over. Because of virtualization, the old concept of buying new physical servers all the time and dividing applications across physical boxes is dying. With the exception of database servers that need dozens of cores and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, everything else can be virtualized.
It is inevitable at this point. At the last pwn2own competition, security researchers were able to launch an application and write a file once the user visited a webpage. The article does not say whether or not the file was written to a protected directory or not. They just mention that the browser's sandbox feature was defeated.
the idiots spoofed our email domain name from their "cloud" server to "personalise" them.
That is a pretty common practice. We host an application that sends out legal hold notices. We are not the ones that the notices are coming from, our clients are. We spoof the domain names so that they appear to come from the client.
It is a pretty simple setup. As part of the initial engagement, we work with the client's IT department and ensure that our mail server is on their SPF record as a valid sender for their domain.
Now? Not many. Five years from now will be a completely different story. AT&T is already rolling out caps. My local cable provider (Charter) is talking about caps.
EA is releasing Battlefield 3 soon. As much as I enjoyed MW2, I will not purchase another Activision game. They have built their business on screwing over developers and customers. EA is not much better. It's sort of like voting for President at this point.. the lesser of two evils.
Oooooo, "biometric data entry terminals". That seems like an awfully fancy way of saying "hand scanners". One of the local manufacturing companies that I consulted for did that. It sure did not cost them $750 million dollars.
When Johnny Mnemonic came out I was so excited to see one of Gibson's books on the screen. The movie was horrible and completely butchered the material. There is no way that they can screw up Neuromancer that badly.
The only stupid question is one that isn't asked. Nobody knows everything (and I asked the question before I had my first cup of coffee). I got my UID by being on slashdot ten years or so ago. I'm 59 years old and my synapses aren't as well oiled as they used to be.
My first computer was a slide rule. My second computer I built out of two potentiometers, a voltmeter, and a battery. When I was a teenager I made a little extra cash by converting cheap transistor radios into guitar fuzzboxes and selling them to friends.
These days it's fashionable to be a nerd, but I was a nerd back when we were pariahs.
Since Linux runs well on ARM, then I don't see what the big deal is about not being able to run legacy Windows apps in Win 8. All you'd have to do would be to install Linux dual-boot on your Windows 8 machine, and run your legacy Windows apps under Wine in Linux. Maybe I still need more coffee...
You forgot something in your post-- "GET OFF MY LAWN!!!"
At 59, he's going to be forgetting more than that soon.;)
So one of the benefits that might come out of this is a more uniform tax code, implemented at the Federal level. It would be great to have something along the lines of, 'If you sell goods through the internet, you have to remit 5% of the total sale price of the item to the state where the buyer lives." The states can continue to collect their arcanely computed taxes locally, but they will also get revenue from internet sales.
Corporations (and even small mom and pop LLCs / LLPs) want to be treated like people. It would be great if they could act like responsible, reasonable adults and work out win-win agreements that benefit everyone. Instead, it seems like greed is the largest driver of corporate behavior, and Amazon personifies that by basically saying, "No, we won't share our revenue with you." I hate to get all socialist on the subject, but seriously, corporations should enrich the country, not just themselves. I could be talking out of my ass here, but I could have sworn that when corporate charters were first established, the whole point of them was that the government gives them the right to operate for the good of country.
It seems to me to be completely the opposite. Now I know why Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon. His ability to put his credibility on the line in a bold faced attempt to redefine reality is astounding. I sure hope that he has the best legal minds in the world at his disposal, for only a legion of lawyers could "legally" redefine the truth in such a 180 degrees away from reality manner.
Amazon is the epitome of interstate commerce. They collect money from residents of all fifty states (and probably some non-American business from over seas as well) and they ship goods to people in all fifty states. Now given that the Federal government has pinned the entire premise of their enforcement ability on "interstate commerce". The UCC is all about regulating interstate commerce.
This case is going to go to the Supreme Court, and the court is going to have to strike it down in favor of the government. Otherwise, the Federal government will never be able to tax or regulate commerce on the internet.
As much as I dislike the government, I am going to have to root for Uncle Sam on this one. Corporations already have enough tax dodges. Jeff Bezos can cough up some of the millions of dollars he made last year. His senior management can cough up some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that they made. The majority of that money can disappear into the beast that is the Federal government, and in the end some of it might trickle down to the states.
The country would be better off if Bezos would recognize that we all live in the same country and just pay his taxes to the states that are asking for them. Instead he is paying a bunch of lawyers, which I guess is okay, it's "his" money as he represents the shareholders. The fact that the both the state and Federal governments are wasting money on their legal department to chase after him is not okay. They will recoup the costs, because they will win. But that's besides the point, because winning will take years and waste Lord only knows how many tens of millions of dollars, and untold hundreds of thousands of hours of people's time.
There are much better uses for that money, both at the state and Federal level. Last I checked, a good third of the country is flooded right now. I wonder what portion of rebuilding cost could be covered by what Amazon + numerous states + the Feds are going to pay on legal fees.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never seen a good case for Group Policy control of the browser
Have you ever worked with Citrix or Terminal Services? The former more so than the latter leverages Group Policy to the umpteenth degree, especially IE policies. We host a .Net application that requires IE and ActiveX. We use Citrix to present IE to the clients. It is locked down so that it only goes to the URL of the web application.
Before people come up with snarky, "If it's IE, why do you run it through Citrix" comments, the app is a document review tool. There are often 15-20MB files being reviewed. In most cases it is more efficient to load the files at gigabit speeds into the Citrix server and then present them to the client.
There are admin templates for Firefox that allow it to be configured via Group Policy. It does not allow the same level of control, but it is enough for most IT departments. All of the basics are there (proxy settings, etc)
Furthermore, anyone who knows anything about Tesla knows that this has been part of their plan for some time.
You are 100% correct about this. A friend of mine went to work for Tesla about a year ago. He was telling about all of the planning that they were doing to shift their production from the roadster to the sedan.
Above and beyond that, Tesla has a lot of patents. They have the best batteries in the industry. Tesla is a long way from going out of business. If anything their biggest concern is probably trying to figure out how to not get gobbled up by another company who just wants their intellectual property.
Not sure how many PS3 fanboys they lost over the recent debacle
They finally lost me. Just the other day I was in the market for a Blu-ray player. I asked around the office for anecdotal from the co-workers about which players they had and liked. The large majority of them have Sony's and love them. I went with a Samsung.
After Sony's CEO summed up the whole situation with, "We will not do anything about being hacked, suck it up and get used to it." I wrote them off entirely. I love the PS3 hardware, but I can't support the company anymore.
I was thinking about alternative choices as I was writing the original post. What can people realistically do? There are at least two or three other free PDF viewing utilities out there that I am aware of. What is to say that any of those are significantly more secure than Acrobat? For all their faults, at least Adobe has the resources to throw at a problem when something goes wrong. Can the same be said about PrimoPDF devs?
I get the sense that Adobe has finally reached the tipping point. Their software has been exploited too many times, and in too many high profile incidents. They have to fix it now. The horse has left the barn, but at least going forward, they might end up with a secure product. A more or less bulletproof Acrobat is probably a good two to three years away. Adobe is still playing whack a mole and not fully investing in re-architecting the application to make it secure. They might not ever get there.
There must be some serious pressure on them if they are patching that frequently. It's not like Senate.gov or Google are getting hacked or anything. People are not really using the internet, and malicious files to go after anything pertinent, at places like Lockheed, or other RSA customers. None of those places would use Adobe Reader to open those RFPs or other thousands of forms sent to them by Uncle Sam, right?
Barn door, meet the horse's ass that has already run away from you.
I don't think that anyone has digitized my 1st grade crayon drawings yet. I think those are still safe.
It is hard to find a good acupuncturist in the States. Unfortunately it is a fairly "new" treatment and is fighting an uphill battle to gain acceptance. If you were in California I could give you a couple of good recommendations.
You can try to contact these people http://yosan.edu/ and see if they have any graduates in your area. They are the real deal.
For last nearly two years at this point, I have been dealing with chronic sciatic nerve pain. I have a couple of herniated discs (L4/L5, L5/S1) that are impinging on the sciatic nerve. I was not really aware of how my emotions and overall levels of stress impacted the pain until after I read what Sarno had to say. Although there is an undeniable physical component to my pain, it definitely fluctuates based on the amount of stress I'm under.
The man has written a couple of books about the role that the mind plays in back pain. When the book first came out it was pretty revolutionary. Now the ideas are pretty widely accepted as being fairly obvious. The man has not said that ALL back pain is related to the mind. However he has laid out a very plausible hypothesis to explain how the mind uses chronic pain to distract itself from deeply repressed emotions.
Thanks for sharing. Seriously.
Negative emotions can wreak all sorts of havoc on the body. Acupuncture can be a good adjunct to therapy, especially for long held emotions. You might consider it, if you haven't already found other ways to move on.
RSA does offer tools to program your own tokens. They offer software tokens and you do not even need a fob. You can get the token on your PC or smart phone. If the token gets compromised or lost, the administrator can deactivate it and issue a new one. There's a convenient web interface for managing the whole process, both for users and admins.
I have always said that it is all about Intel Xeon processors in commodity servers and that AMD was a passing fad. It looks like AMD finally agreed and has implicitly conceded the market to Intel.
You need to do some research about the realities of Israel's geopolitical situation.
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20110530-israels-borders-and-national-security?utm_source=GWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=110531&utm_content=readmore&elq=6521bd09197a40ca98499beb42c07023
Israel can't develop its own arms and it NEEDS US support to maintain it's current geography and military plans.
A government IT department should be a cloud service provider. They should be virtualized and SAN backed and replicated to DR sites. When an initiative requires more computing resources, they should be able to spin up a couple of VMs and present them to the team(s) that need the resources.
I know that "cloud" gets over used a lot, and the term still has some ambiguities to it. It helps if you realize that when the vendors are talking about clouds, they are talking about abstracted resource pools. Instead of buying "a server" with x procs and y GB of RAM, you are buying/renting a VM.
It is quite likely that the ambiguity in the article about whether or not the "cloud" project has been cancelled by the government has a lot to do with the definition and scope of the project. In all likelihood, HP is still going to help the UK government develop a "private cloud".
It comes down to a shift in thinking. In my environment I am dealing with an old school app developer who still thinks that he needs a physical server for every application. I had to do an end run around him and explain to others that the concept of n+1 physical boxes per application is dead. "There's this nifty thing called VMware... ooooo, aaaaahhhhhhh" The developer finally got on board with the program. Our provisioning process is more efficient too. Now instead of buying beefy servers "just in case" the application experiences growth, I spin up a minimal VM and add resources to it as necessary.
Back to your original point, the "cloud" only means outsourcing IT in the SMB market. For small businesses, it makes more sense for them to treat IT as a utility, like electricity or water. They want to be able to flip the switch and make it work. They don't want to have an electrician and a plumber on staff to maintain the building. Unless there are performance issues with the hosting environment, there is no reason that they can't use Citrix or even some sort of web based applications hosted and maintained by someone else. With a proper SLA and a redundant internet feed, they should be fine.
For the enterprise, the cloud is just an abstraction of data center resources. I think that is what Schmidt might have been saying when he said that IT people either need to get with the cloud or get run over. Because of virtualization, the old concept of buying new physical servers all the time and dividing applications across physical boxes is dying. With the exception of database servers that need dozens of cores and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, everything else can be virtualized.
It is inevitable at this point. At the last pwn2own competition, security researchers were able to launch an application and write a file once the user visited a webpage. The article does not say whether or not the file was written to a protected directory or not. They just mention that the browser's sandbox feature was defeated.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/03/09/os-x-and-safari-first-casualty-at-pwn2own-hacking-contest/
the idiots spoofed our email domain name from their "cloud" server to "personalise" them.
That is a pretty common practice. We host an application that sends out legal hold notices. We are not the ones that the notices are coming from, our clients are. We spoof the domain names so that they appear to come from the client.
It is a pretty simple setup. As part of the initial engagement, we work with the client's IT department and ensure that our mail server is on their SPF record as a valid sender for their domain.
Ding ding ding ding. Give this man a mod point, he gets it.
Now? Not many. Five years from now will be a completely different story. AT&T is already rolling out caps. My local cable provider (Charter) is talking about caps.
EA is releasing Battlefield 3 soon. As much as I enjoyed MW2, I will not purchase another Activision game. They have built their business on screwing over developers and customers. EA is not much better. It's sort of like voting for President at this point.. the lesser of two evils.
Oooooo, "biometric data entry terminals". That seems like an awfully fancy way of saying "hand scanners". One of the local manufacturing companies that I consulted for did that. It sure did not cost them $750 million dollars.
When Johnny Mnemonic came out I was so excited to see one of Gibson's books on the screen. The movie was horrible and completely butchered the material. There is no way that they can screw up Neuromancer that badly.
The only stupid question is one that isn't asked. Nobody knows everything (and I asked the question before I had my first cup of coffee). I got my UID by being on slashdot ten years or so ago. I'm 59 years old and my synapses aren't as well oiled as they used to be.
My first computer was a slide rule. My second computer I built out of two potentiometers, a voltmeter, and a battery. When I was a teenager I made a little extra cash by converting cheap transistor radios into guitar fuzzboxes and selling them to friends.
These days it's fashionable to be a nerd, but I was a nerd back when we were pariahs.
Since Linux runs well on ARM, then I don't see what the big deal is about not being able to run legacy Windows apps in Win 8. All you'd have to do would be to install Linux dual-boot on your Windows 8 machine, and run your legacy Windows apps under Wine in Linux. Maybe I still need more coffee...
You forgot something in your post-- "GET OFF MY LAWN!!!"
At 59, he's going to be forgetting more than that soon. ;)
We laughed at people who used AOL. What crack is this guy smoking?
So one of the benefits that might come out of this is a more uniform tax code, implemented at the Federal level. It would be great to have something along the lines of, 'If you sell goods through the internet, you have to remit 5% of the total sale price of the item to the state where the buyer lives." The states can continue to collect their arcanely computed taxes locally, but they will also get revenue from internet sales.
Corporations (and even small mom and pop LLCs / LLPs) want to be treated like people. It would be great if they could act like responsible, reasonable adults and work out win-win agreements that benefit everyone. Instead, it seems like greed is the largest driver of corporate behavior, and Amazon personifies that by basically saying, "No, we won't share our revenue with you." I hate to get all socialist on the subject, but seriously, corporations should enrich the country, not just themselves. I could be talking out of my ass here, but I could have sworn that when corporate charters were first established, the whole point of them was that the government gives them the right to operate for the good of country.
Share the dough or GTFO.
It seems to me to be completely the opposite. Now I know why Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon. His ability to put his credibility on the line in a bold faced attempt to redefine reality is astounding. I sure hope that he has the best legal minds in the world at his disposal, for only a legion of lawyers could "legally" redefine the truth in such a 180 degrees away from reality manner.
Amazon is the epitome of interstate commerce. They collect money from residents of all fifty states (and probably some non-American business from over seas as well) and they ship goods to people in all fifty states. Now given that the Federal government has pinned the entire premise of their enforcement ability on "interstate commerce". The UCC is all about regulating interstate commerce.
This case is going to go to the Supreme Court, and the court is going to have to strike it down in favor of the government. Otherwise, the Federal government will never be able to tax or regulate commerce on the internet.
As much as I dislike the government, I am going to have to root for Uncle Sam on this one. Corporations already have enough tax dodges. Jeff Bezos can cough up some of the millions of dollars he made last year. His senior management can cough up some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that they made. The majority of that money can disappear into the beast that is the Federal government, and in the end some of it might trickle down to the states.
The country would be better off if Bezos would recognize that we all live in the same country and just pay his taxes to the states that are asking for them. Instead he is paying a bunch of lawyers, which I guess is okay, it's "his" money as he represents the shareholders. The fact that the both the state and Federal governments are wasting money on their legal department to chase after him is not okay. They will recoup the costs, because they will win. But that's besides the point, because winning will take years and waste Lord only knows how many tens of millions of dollars, and untold hundreds of thousands of hours of people's time.
There are much better uses for that money, both at the state and Federal level. Last I checked, a good third of the country is flooded right now. I wonder what portion of rebuilding cost could be covered by what Amazon + numerous states + the Feds are going to pay on legal fees.