"They set a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel. "
And information about commiting fraud (and getting away with it) has been available online for decades. At 13 I knew about all of that thanks to the local BBS. Paying a hotel bill with a stolen card is just about as bad as using a stolen calling card from your home phone.
You brought up a similar point to the one I was going to make. In a production environment, down time costs money. Often times the quickest way to get an application back into production is to restore the machine to a known good state. With virtualization that is trivial to do. If the problem keeps recurring then you need to dig deeper to figure out what is going on.
I work for a firm that is involved with digital forensics and has worked closely with the SEC and DOJ on criminal investigations. The firm also works with corporations who suspect that their employees are up to no good, and who need a neutral third party to come in and investigate. I'd name names, but that is frowned upon.
The original point I made was that other than the touchpad, a Macbook Pro is more or less the same as any other laptop out there. The response I got was a link to a Wikipedia article, which presumably went into details about how a MBP is not just another laptop.
I actually own a MBP and think it is a decent piece of hardware. However it is still just a computer. It has a CPU, some RAM, a hard drive and it runs an OS that lets me do things like organize files, create documents and access the web. It suffers from the same problems (programs don't work like they should, hardware has problems) as any other computer I've ever worked with.
Why does it always come down to the "government spying on citizens". There are plenty of uses for digital forensics that do not involve tin-foil hats. The only time the government is going to doing forensics on a drive is during a criminal investigation. Those investigations are well documented.
Look at it from the other side of the coin. "Well your honor, we know that those bastards at Enron cooked the books, and we have the data... but the MD5 fingerprint does not match, so all of that evidence is inadmissable." or "Yes your honor, we know Madoff was running this crazy Ponzi scheme. We have all of his drives and data, but the MD5 fingerprint does not match because the garbage collection on the drive ran. You're going to have to let him go because the evidence is 'tainted'."
On the other hand, these techniques are just as routinely abused now to go after people for political noncriminal reasons that don't serve the Common Good at all, people and organizations like Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opponents... you name it.
Citation needed.
For every one case like the one you mentioned above, there are dozens of cases where the SEC or the DOJ are going after some shady corporations who are trying their best to get rid of evidence. If it is not the Feds going after a company, it is the company trying to protect itself from sleazy employees who are siphoning money away, cooking the books to make their department look good, making questionable "expenditures" to companies owned by friends of the family, etc.
Unless you can back up your claim of ROUTINE abuse for "political noncriminal reasons", I think you're full of crap. We are talking about digital forensics here. It is pretty hard to abuse them in an offensive manner. In the case of Chamber of Commerce, how is forensics even involved in that? You're talking out your ass.
Does that page reference the douchery of their owners, and how those owners seem to need to point out how their laptops are different from every other laptop out there?
The only thing that sets the MBP apart from other laptops is the touch pad interface. Other than that they are the same as every other laptop out there. That touch pad is the only thing I miss when I'm working on other computers.
Seconded. I can get into all of my servers remotely. I could care less about my home computer. I'm in the same boat as you... Not worth the hassle. I spend enough of my life dealing with computers already. The last thing I want to do when I finally get away from them is to hop back on one.
Share Point is great for a lot of things. Unfortunately, being a trustworthy repository for data and making good use of servers are not some of those things.
Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Not trustworthy? Not a good use of servers? I've seen 1000+ users on a 4 server SharePoint farm accessing over 10TB of data, day in, day out.
This is a great example of Microsoft taking a problem and creating a huge piece of software that makes the problem bigger. If you are often filling out the same forms over and over again, there is your problem. Now, you must either stop filling the forms (if they are not data aquisition), or at least stop making they flow around like they were useable data (if they are data aquisition).
You have no idea what you are talking about. Businesses live on standardization. If you create a new way of doing things for every project you do, you're an idiot. You've obviously never done business with the government, or in the legal world, or pretty much anywhere if you haven't dealt with a standardized way of doing things. What exactly do you do, besides talk out of your ass and make proclimations about things you obviously know jack shit about?
If you're going to spew nonsense, at least try to find something valid to harp on. Next thing you're going to say something like, "Microsoft is being stupid because they make it easy to re-use functions in Visual Studio. If you're re-using the same function over and over again, you either need to stop doing it, or you need to find another language to program in that doesn't use functions."
SharePoint is good for a lot of things, but I would put Google Docs like collaboration pretty far down the list. It's great for large projects. I've seen construction companies and law firms leverage it very successfully. But for 10 people, Google Docs is probably all you need.
The thing I like about SharePoint is the way it supports processes and work flows. For example, if you have something like a construction bidding process where you're often filling out the same forms over and over again, and a lot of people are involved at different phases of the process, you can setup a work flow to route the documents from person to person. SharePoint handles the noticing "Hey Bob, it's time for you to sign off on X, Y and Z! Click here."
In short, support for Google Apps is hit and miss with the majority of the cases being a miss. Google seems to have zero interest in supporting their product, so they foist the responsibility off on the resellers. The problem is that the resellers run into the same problems as everyone else, and they have to rely on Google for support. Since Google is not really interested in offering support, it is a viscious cycle.
If the OP really does have a high speed "business" connection, then that connection should come with a static IP. That static IP should provide the foundation for a stable mail server. Other than the static IP, all you really need is a reverse DNS and a PTR record for your IP that matches the A record on the MX record for the domain.
I used to do consulting for the SMB market. I setup more local mail servers than you can shake a stick at. It is a simple and straight forward process. I have yet to see an ISP block port 25 on a business circuit. If that is what is happening in this case, you need to take it up with the ISP. They are not giving you what you are paying for. If they won't play ball, switch ISPs. There are enough of them out there.
The internet has never been open if you're a tool. On the other hand, back when AOL et al were walling off "the internet", anyone with half a brain and a modem could setup a SLIP connection and do whatever they wanted on the net.
Is there any real solution to personalized data that does not involve some sort of monolithic trust entity? It seems to me like public key cryptography already solves most of the problems. A person just needs a USB key with all of their information on it. If a company / government / etc wants access to that information, they need to perform a key exchange with the individual. The individual can then audit data access by third parties.
The "problem" with that approach is that it ends up being a mark of the beast type system. You lose anonymity in exchange for something close to a guarantee of exclusivity over your data.
Given the choice between consuming content about how to have a better society and government, or Facebook and sports, society has by and large decided that they want the latter. Having everyone running a server with some free software on it will not make the internet any better than it currently is. The utility of the internet is not being severely hampered or impeded by the government "watching every twitch of our fingers". Its utility is being diminished by the users failing to leverage it to its full potential.
Do you work for the government? That is the only place I see Novell anymore. Governments and school districts. They cannot get off of the platform because it would cost too much. Lots of luck going to the voters for a few billion dollars to rip and replace Novell.
What are you talking about? The information in the site is already public knowledge. The application would not need to be much more than a queryable set of a few tables. How many columns do you really need? State, zip code and tax rate? Maybe a couple tax rate tables for various taxes (Federal, local, etc).
It should be maintained by the IRS. If they want the tax, they should eat the cost of maintaining the infrastructure to simplify the collection of the tax.
I'm not even a security architect and I could design a secure system for this. You only need a read-only web server farmer that the public accesses. That farm only accepts updates from an authoritive server on the other side of a firewall. The firewally only allows outbound connections from the master server to the farm.
Slashdot Mirror
"They set a Slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel. "
And information about commiting fraud (and getting away with it) has been available online for decades. At 13 I knew about all of that thanks to the local BBS. Paying a hotel bill with a stolen card is just about as bad as using a stolen calling card from your home phone.
You brought up a similar point to the one I was going to make. In a production environment, down time costs money. Often times the quickest way to get an application back into production is to restore the machine to a known good state. With virtualization that is trivial to do. If the problem keeps recurring then you need to dig deeper to figure out what is going on.
I work for a firm that is involved with digital forensics and has worked closely with the SEC and DOJ on criminal investigations. The firm also works with corporations who suspect that their employees are up to no good, and who need a neutral third party to come in and investigate. I'd name names, but that is frowned upon.
The original point I made was that other than the touchpad, a Macbook Pro is more or less the same as any other laptop out there. The response I got was a link to a Wikipedia article, which presumably went into details about how a MBP is not just another laptop.
I actually own a MBP and think it is a decent piece of hardware. However it is still just a computer. It has a CPU, some RAM, a hard drive and it runs an OS that lets me do things like organize files, create documents and access the web. It suffers from the same problems (programs don't work like they should, hardware has problems) as any other computer I've ever worked with.
Why does it always come down to the "government spying on citizens". There are plenty of uses for digital forensics that do not involve tin-foil hats. The only time the government is going to doing forensics on a drive is during a criminal investigation. Those investigations are well documented.
Look at it from the other side of the coin. "Well your honor, we know that those bastards at Enron cooked the books, and we have the data... but the MD5 fingerprint does not match, so all of that evidence is inadmissable." or "Yes your honor, we know Madoff was running this crazy Ponzi scheme. We have all of his drives and data, but the MD5 fingerprint does not match because the garbage collection on the drive ran. You're going to have to let him go because the evidence is 'tainted'."
On the other hand, these techniques are just as routinely abused now to go after people for political noncriminal reasons that don't serve the Common Good at all, people and organizations like Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Bradley Manning, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opponents... you name it.
Citation needed.
For every one case like the one you mentioned above, there are dozens of cases where the SEC or the DOJ are going after some shady corporations who are trying their best to get rid of evidence. If it is not the Feds going after a company, it is the company trying to protect itself from sleazy employees who are siphoning money away, cooking the books to make their department look good, making questionable "expenditures" to companies owned by friends of the family, etc.
Unless you can back up your claim of ROUTINE abuse for "political noncriminal reasons", I think you're full of crap. We are talking about digital forensics here. It is pretty hard to abuse them in an offensive manner. In the case of Chamber of Commerce, how is forensics even involved in that? You're talking out your ass.
Does that page reference the douchery of their owners, and how those owners seem to need to point out how their laptops are different from every other laptop out there?
The only thing that sets the MBP apart from other laptops is the touch pad interface. Other than that they are the same as every other laptop out there. That touch pad is the only thing I miss when I'm working on other computers.
All that will happen is that HBGary's competitors will update their marketing material. "Don't pull an HBGary. Use XYZ Security instead."
Seconded. I can get into all of my servers remotely. I could care less about my home computer. I'm in the same boat as you... Not worth the hassle. I spend enough of my life dealing with computers already. The last thing I want to do when I finally get away from them is to hop back on one.
Share Point is great for a lot of things. Unfortunately, being a trustworthy repository for data and making good use of servers are not some of those things.
Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Not trustworthy? Not a good use of servers? I've seen 1000+ users on a 4 server SharePoint farm accessing over 10TB of data, day in, day out.
This is a great example of Microsoft taking a problem and creating a huge piece of software that makes the problem bigger. If you are often filling out the same forms over and over again, there is your problem. Now, you must either stop filling the forms (if they are not data aquisition), or at least stop making they flow around like they were useable data (if they are data aquisition).
You have no idea what you are talking about. Businesses live on standardization. If you create a new way of doing things for every project you do, you're an idiot. You've obviously never done business with the government, or in the legal world, or pretty much anywhere if you haven't dealt with a standardized way of doing things. What exactly do you do, besides talk out of your ass and make proclimations about things you obviously know jack shit about?
If you're going to spew nonsense, at least try to find something valid to harp on. Next thing you're going to say something like, "Microsoft is being stupid because they make it easy to re-use functions in Visual Studio. If you're re-using the same function over and over again, you either need to stop doing it, or you need to find another language to program in that doesn't use functions."
SharePoint is good for a lot of things, but I would put Google Docs like collaboration pretty far down the list. It's great for large projects. I've seen construction companies and law firms leverage it very successfully. But for 10 people, Google Docs is probably all you need.
The thing I like about SharePoint is the way it supports processes and work flows. For example, if you have something like a construction bidding process where you're often filling out the same forms over and over again, and a lot of people are involved at different phases of the process, you can setup a work flow to route the documents from person to person. SharePoint handles the noticing "Hey Bob, it's time for you to sign off on X, Y and Z! Click here."
They are taking aim at SharePoint. Now users can collaborate on documents without needing Microsoft's solution (SharePoint).
Check out this thread in their support forum regarding the effectiveness of their support.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?hl=en&tid=384dd0d72db87c6d
In short, support for Google Apps is hit and miss with the majority of the cases being a miss. Google seems to have zero interest in supporting their product, so they foist the responsibility off on the resellers. The problem is that the resellers run into the same problems as everyone else, and they have to rely on Google for support. Since Google is not really interested in offering support, it is a viscious cycle.
If the OP really does have a high speed "business" connection, then that connection should come with a static IP. That static IP should provide the foundation for a stable mail server. Other than the static IP, all you really need is a reverse DNS and a PTR record for your IP that matches the A record on the MX record for the domain.
I used to do consulting for the SMB market. I setup more local mail servers than you can shake a stick at. It is a simple and straight forward process. I have yet to see an ISP block port 25 on a business circuit. If that is what is happening in this case, you need to take it up with the ISP. They are not giving you what you are paying for. If they won't play ball, switch ISPs. There are enough of them out there.
The internet has never been open if you're a tool. On the other hand, back when AOL et al were walling off "the internet", anyone with half a brain and a modem could setup a SLIP connection and do whatever they wanted on the net.
It's on par with what Sterling wrote in The Hacker Crackdown.
First post?!
Is there any real solution to personalized data that does not involve some sort of monolithic trust entity? It seems to me like public key cryptography already solves most of the problems. A person just needs a USB key with all of their information on it. If a company / government / etc wants access to that information, they need to perform a key exchange with the individual. The individual can then audit data access by third parties.
The "problem" with that approach is that it ends up being a mark of the beast type system. You lose anonymity in exchange for something close to a guarantee of exclusivity over your data.
Given the choice between consuming content about how to have a better society and government, or Facebook and sports, society has by and large decided that they want the latter. Having everyone running a server with some free software on it will not make the internet any better than it currently is. The utility of the internet is not being severely hampered or impeded by the government "watching every twitch of our fingers". Its utility is being diminished by the users failing to leverage it to its full potential.
Do you work for the government? That is the only place I see Novell anymore. Governments and school districts. They cannot get off of the platform because it would cost too much. Lots of luck going to the voters for a few billion dollars to rip and replace Novell.
What are you talking about? The information in the site is already public knowledge. The application would not need to be much more than a queryable set of a few tables. How many columns do you really need? State, zip code and tax rate? Maybe a couple tax rate tables for various taxes (Federal, local, etc).
It should be maintained by the IRS. If they want the tax, they should eat the cost of maintaining the infrastructure to simplify the collection of the tax.
I'm not even a security architect and I could design a secure system for this. You only need a read-only web server farmer that the public accesses. That farm only accepts updates from an authoritive server on the other side of a firewall. The firewally only allows outbound connections from the master server to the farm.
Typo alert.
Should have read..
The client workstations all need .Net and IE for the application to work.
It was a typo. I put IIS where I should have put IE.