China's investment in Africa (and around the world) is centered on regimes that the US finds morally reprehensible. I am glad the US has isn't propping the Sudanese, Iranians, or Burmese.
Because we've done so much better with propping up al Qaeda, the Shah of Iran, and numerous puppet governments in Central America? How about our buddy in Afghanistan and his opium dealing brother?
I'm not disputing any of your assertions, nor am I claiming that there haven't been any disruptions or that Western culture prior to the birth of Christ was scrapped when he was born.
The point that I'm making is that Chinese culture exhibits more long term thinking than Western culture does. The 4700+ years of their calendar obviously isn't the most solid foundation to base that statement upon because as it has been shown, numbers are simply that. Over the span of milennia, of course there are going to be changes and trends that come and go.
You can dodge and not participate or speak to the assertion that the Chinese, as a culture, in the year 2010 are more inclined to long term thinking than our leaders in the west are. That's your perogotive.
I'd be interested to know more about the social engineering aspect of this attack.
I would think that aspect of this would be obvious. They obviously received an email from an ancient Tibetian monk who recently came into a large supply of enlightenment pills, but needs help getting them out of the country. The attached PDF document contained all of the information regarding the pills, but the recipients were encouraged to act quickly as enlightenment is a valued treasure of the Chinese culture and supplies might not last.
So far I've given some examples of short term Western thinking and long term Chinese thinking by offering specific ways that those thought processes manifest in the respective cultures. Do you have any counter points to offer? So far it seems like everyone is focused on arbitrary numbers and haven't offered up any counter points.
Here is a good format for you to work with...
"Our modern Western culture exemplifies long term thinking as evidenced by..."
Here's a freebie for you.
"...establishing military bases in key, resource rich regions like the Middle East."
I worked on enough Cisco hardware in the late 1990s to not only know that what you say is true, but to also decide that I didn't particularly want to be a CCIE anytime soon. Slight differences in IOS releases can lead to serious headaches. I've heard tales that the Cisco CCIE test is basically being thrown into a locked room with a bunch of misconfigured gear and told to make it work within a certain time frame. Thanks, but no thanks. My philosophy is that I'll let the ISPs and telcos handle bringing the circuit in and configuring their premise equipment. Give me a RJ45 jack to plug and a phone number to call if the line goes down.
As complex as Cisco configurations can be, it has been my experience that once they are configured, they are rock solid. The initial complexity seems to come with the trade off in reliability. It may be difficult to get up and running in the first place, but once it's running, you can focus on other things. My experience is limited to setting up ISDN and T1 point to point circuits, but at that level, I haven't run into any problems once the circuit is up.
I think it depends on what kind of code you're trying to write. If a person desires to write applications then you are right, they might as well write it in a high level language and let the compiler do the work. On the other hand if the person is interested in vulnerability research or security work, then learning ASM might as well be considered a requisite. An understanding of low level programming and code execution provides a programmer with a solid foundation. It gives the potential insights into what might be going wrong when their code isn't compiling or executing the way they want it to. It also gives them the tools to make their code better, as opposed to simply shrugging and saying, "I sure hope they fix this damn compiler..."
You can try to argue semantics all you want. The FACT of the matter is that Chinese culture has evolved a longer term thinking AS A WHOLE than Western culture has. There are examples abound. You didn't bother to refute my point about corporate profit and short term outlook. Here's another thing to consider. How many extended families exist in China versus the United States? By extended families I'm using the term to refer to the situation in which multiple generations live within the same home or very immediate vicinity.
And beyond that, just because a Linux box might support all of the protocols and implementations that Cisco has leveraged in their own products, it does not mean that the Linux box is going to configure itself. A lot of the reason that Cisco makes money is because they provide solutions. The solutions themselves leverage established technologies in many cases (RFCs are in the public domain), but Cisco makes them work together. It's the old discussion about Open Source vendors. They aren't making money selling people Linux because Linux is free. They are making money selling people Linux configured to perform specific tasks, and then selling support to keep the solution functioning and up to date.
I think that protectionist measures are a good thing and have their place. The larger point that I was trying to make is that in the past decade, China couldn't have included such a provision in their purchasing processes because they did not have a domestic industry capable of providing what they needed. Now that they have co-opted enough technical know how from foreign firms, they are starting to protect their own industries.
I don't place the fault on anyone. What we are seeing is the natural course of globalization. Economies are going to take from each other what they need. Being that economies are comprised of individuals, they will do what some individuals are inclined to do. Namely they will take short cuts and promote themselves and their friends at the expense of others. The funny thing is that Americans believe things like "intellectual property" laws will protect their R&D, or compensate them in the form of legal rewards. A government that oppresses its population with physical force and coercion isn't exactly a reliable partner.
Expecting China to seriously and strictly enforce IP laws is kind of like expecting the United States to back serious war crime accountability processes in the UN. Neither party is going to give an outside body the ability to influence fundamental power dynamics within their own economy.
It has been interesting to see how function keys have been depreciated. Having grown up with DOS and *nix programs, function keys were key (excuse the pun) to making the most of the programs. Each program had its own unique uses for the keys. In high school I was using Word Perfect 5.1 and that entire program was driven by the function keys.
This is what I love about Slashdot. The collective intelligence here is superb. Despite the frequent complaints about/. being behind the times when it comes to news, I find that topics are discussed here often months before traditional media sources pick them up. Reading the Wall Street Journal these last two days has been like a rehash of months old conversations, so much so that I was looking for the "dupe" tag to scrawl across the story in the paper.
Speak for yourself. Just because you arbitrarily decided to reset the clock 2009 years ago doesn't mean that the rest of us didn't count history before then. In fact, even non-atheists recognise that time did indeed exist before 1 AD.
I am not just speaking for myself. I am speaking for the Western world. I'm not a Christian and I could personally care less when Christ lived, died or did what he did. None the less, our "culture" has been around and is based upon a philosophical foundation that has been acknowledged for approximately 2000 years. Of course it didn't emerge in a vacuum, and it was built upon previous thoughts going back to the Greeks et al.
Like it or not, we're part of a culture that focuses heavily on the returns next quarter. If we're lucky, "long term" thinking manifests itself in a five year plan.
Who said anything about being malicious? I'm simply suggesting that there are a few subnet ranges that might contain systems upon which one might explore and experiment.
WTF are you talking about... suicide attacks? How did we go from digital commerce to fanatical extremism that results in the loss of life?
China also compromised servers in the US. RackSpace has been participating in the investigation because a compromised server in one of their data centers (I believe it was in Texas) played a key role in the attacks.
It isn't just Lenovo, it is Apple too. A couple years ago I broke down and bought a MacBook Pro (mostly for my girlfriend, but also because I wanted to see what all the hype was about). The single most annoying thing about the laptop is that the F keys don't default to being F keys. When I press F1, I want F1. I don't want to adjust my screen brightness damn it! If I want to adjust my screen brightness, I want to press Fn+F1. For all of the praise that Apple gets for their usability, their F-key decision is one big FAIL.
I think you need to give the Chinese more credit. As you've said, they have a billion more people than we do, yet those people are living on a similar sized landmass with similar resources. If there were a billion more people in America tomorrow, you can bet your ass that the interests on Wall Street would be aligned with Washington and implementing some serious production and other controls on the population. Look at what a big deal illegal immigration is. Americans are already stingy with resources and concerned about maintaining vague notions like "quality of life" for naturalized citizens. You can bet your ass that if there were a billion more people here, we'd have a Politburo like organization doing whatever was necessary to maintain their status while at the same time doing everything necessary to prevent a full on social uprising.
If you think China's government isn't effective, you have a very narrow view of the world. Spend a few hours researching what China is up to in Africa, and then contrast that with how well our State and Defense Departments are doing in that part of the world. Take a look at who is winning oil contracts in Iraq... Here, I'll save you the work (http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/05/news/international/iraq_oil/index.htm.. http://moneymorning.com/2008/08/22/china-iraq/) The Chinese don't have "terrorists" attacking their homeland because of misguided foreign policy blunders (warning, potential red herring).
Hacking Google does not help China develop its industries.
Yes it does. At least according to the Wall Street Journal, the compromise goes far beyond a Gmail compromise of a few accounts belong to some human rights activists. Google is claiming that they've suffered an intellectual property loss due to a server compromise. Any time that China steals research from someone else, they've improved their industry without having to invest in the R&D. Beyond Google, the official count is up to 34 companies far that have suffered severe breaches.
We are in an era where China is being more and more restrictive on foreign companies. China was open when it was beneficial to them. They were open when it brought foreign expertise into their country. They welcomed foreign companies with open arms because they stood to benefit from the knowledge those companies have. Now that the Chinese have the knowledge, they are becoming more nationalistic (as if that were possible). They are heavily favoring national companies. A recently passed government procurement process contained a provision that government agencies must find local suppliers for IT systems and software. The Chinese have stolen enough technical know how from HP and Dell and IBM and Cisco and the rest that they can produce hardware that is good enough for their needs. China is now the largest automobile market on the planet, and they're building cars based on designs and with processes stolen from American and Japanese manufacturing firms. I read a story last year where Ford or GM was suing a Chinese company for selling a car that was more or less based entirely on a design and manufacturing process that was stolen whole sale from (Ford/GM).
The Chinese are smart. Our year 2010 is the Chinese year 4707. They have an ANCIENT culture. All of the games that people play have been played, observed and pondered in China for A LONG TIME. For the past couple of decades they have been benefiting from American processes and technologies. Americans have benefited from a Chinese willingness to use our processes to provide us with affordable goods. At the same time, they have developed the knowledge to create goods for their own growing "middle class". One of their goals is to increase domestic consumption. As the years continue to go by, more and more of the world's resources are going to be going to China, for the good of the Chinese. There is a reason that the Chinese are playing such an active role in Africa.
The articles I've read have only had two details that are relevant to your question. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the primary focuses of the investigation is a compromised server at RackSpace (big surprise, right?). The details about the forensic analysis of that server haven't been available, but it appears to have been the equivalent of the digital dead drop through which information was passed. The second detail is that most if not all of the attacks appear to have originated in Taiwan. According to the article, the Chinese often use compromised Taiwanese machines to proxy their hacks through.
The Wall Street Journal had a great article about some of the details behind the scenes of this particular incident, and also another article that did a good job of summarizing what has been discussed here over the last couple of years. The main stream media is openly stating that the People's Liberation Army is actively encouraging "citizen cyber militias" to conduct "cyber attacks" (good Lord how I hate that term) against foreign (read, United States) corporations. Although they haven't gone so far as to state that those militias have active backing of the government, they have said that the government is turning a blind eye to their activities. Furthermore, the WSJ goes on to state that there are United States agencies involved in similar espionage activities.
Given that background, it seems like hacking Chinese companies should be fair game for up and coming "security researchers" here in the United States. In the 1990s the United States government made it quite clear that they were going to come down hard on people who mess with government and Fortune 500 systems. Given the option between really securing the systems and punishing those who exploit the lack of security, they went with the latter. A lot of people, myself included, decided that once we turned 18 and faced the threat of real Federal prosecution, the wise move was to turn off the war dialers, stop snarfing ESN/MIN pairs out of the air, and stop trying to run exploit code against computers that we don't control.
We can't hone our craft in the United States anymore. Although there is a whole market for securing IT resources against attack, there isn't a playground to pick up skills in. My suggestion is that China is that playground. My suggestion is that Chinese corporations in the United States are the targets. I mean lets face it, there are hundreds of thousands of compromised computers in the United States. The United States government can't be held accountable for malicious activity directed toward Chinese corporations. It would be unfortunate for those entities to be DDoS'd. It would be unfortunate for their internal workstations to be the target of vulnerability research.
Ahahahahaha! You are so right! I worked up there. They really do not want to be in the service business. The place is one giant nerd cage match. Anyone who can't keep up is pitied at best, more often despised. Of course that's pretty much all customers.
That is the sense that I got too. It seems to be a pretty common personality defect in most of the really smart people that I have known. They make the assumption that just because they can figure something out that everyone else should be able to also. They're the same people who got in arguments with their math teachers when they were told that they had to show their work. They felt like since they "knew the answer", there wasn't any need to actually write out the steps.
Google seems to be taking the route (with Google Apps at least) of pawning off the implementation onto third party providers. The problem is that the third party providers are in the same boat as the customers when it comes to needing fast answers to how it is supposed to work. I was evaluating Google Apps for my company and my conversation with the solution provider came down to, "We can implement what you see now, but we don't know anything about what features are going to be available in the future because Google doesn't tell us anything." Then Google says that they, "Listen carefully to what customers are asking for and focus development resources accordingly." But then when you try to ask them for any kind of product roadmap, they don't have one and don't show any interest what so ever in providing one.
They seem to have the attitude of, "We gave you the tools, what else do you want?" And heaven forbid that you mention that the tools aren't quite there yet...
Gmail and Gtalk aren't as great as they get made out to be. Gmail can't find mail over a year old that contains key words that I know should bring the mail up when I search for it. Gtalk has so many intermittent drop outs that if it isn't still in beta, it should be. And ever tried to use Gtalk on a desktop while it's still logged in on a mobile phone? A good portion of the time it doesn't know where it should receive its responses at, and rather than just sending to both, it seems to pick one at random.
If their customer support is anything like Google Apps, good luck with that one. My experience is that Google isn't geared toward customer service and it seems like they could care less. They seem to be coming from the position that everyone should be able to just figure out their products without any help.
My prediction for the year is that we see Google's stock price starting to decline as more and more people realize that beyond search, Google doesn't do anything very well. They have a lot of neat ideas, but their execution blows.
What FUD are you spewing? I am looking at an Exchange box right now that is hosting 100 mailboxes. Store.exe is using 683,000K of memory. The Symantec AV for Exchange services are eating another 700,000K. Combined that is under 2GB.
Something is wrong with your specific Exchange server.
Slashdot Mirror
China's investment in Africa (and around the world) is centered on regimes that the US finds morally reprehensible. I am glad the US has isn't propping the Sudanese, Iranians, or Burmese.
Because we've done so much better with propping up al Qaeda, the Shah of Iran, and numerous puppet governments in Central America? How about our buddy in Afghanistan and his opium dealing brother?
I'm not disputing any of your assertions, nor am I claiming that there haven't been any disruptions or that Western culture prior to the birth of Christ was scrapped when he was born.
The point that I'm making is that Chinese culture exhibits more long term thinking than Western culture does. The 4700+ years of their calendar obviously isn't the most solid foundation to base that statement upon because as it has been shown, numbers are simply that. Over the span of milennia, of course there are going to be changes and trends that come and go.
You can dodge and not participate or speak to the assertion that the Chinese, as a culture, in the year 2010 are more inclined to long term thinking than our leaders in the west are. That's your perogotive.
I'd be interested to know more about the social engineering aspect of this attack.
I would think that aspect of this would be obvious. They obviously received an email from an ancient Tibetian monk who recently came into a large supply of enlightenment pills, but needs help getting them out of the country. The attached PDF document contained all of the information regarding the pills, but the recipients were encouraged to act quickly as enlightenment is a valued treasure of the Chinese culture and supplies might not last.
So far I've given some examples of short term Western thinking and long term Chinese thinking by offering specific ways that those thought processes manifest in the respective cultures. Do you have any counter points to offer? So far it seems like everyone is focused on arbitrary numbers and haven't offered up any counter points.
Here is a good format for you to work with...
"Our modern Western culture exemplifies long term thinking as evidenced by..."
Here's a freebie for you.
"...establishing military bases in key, resource rich regions like the Middle East."
I worked on enough Cisco hardware in the late 1990s to not only know that what you say is true, but to also decide that I didn't particularly want to be a CCIE anytime soon. Slight differences in IOS releases can lead to serious headaches. I've heard tales that the Cisco CCIE test is basically being thrown into a locked room with a bunch of misconfigured gear and told to make it work within a certain time frame. Thanks, but no thanks. My philosophy is that I'll let the ISPs and telcos handle bringing the circuit in and configuring their premise equipment. Give me a RJ45 jack to plug and a phone number to call if the line goes down.
As complex as Cisco configurations can be, it has been my experience that once they are configured, they are rock solid. The initial complexity seems to come with the trade off in reliability. It may be difficult to get up and running in the first place, but once it's running, you can focus on other things. My experience is limited to setting up ISDN and T1 point to point circuits, but at that level, I haven't run into any problems once the circuit is up.
I think it depends on what kind of code you're trying to write. If a person desires to write applications then you are right, they might as well write it in a high level language and let the compiler do the work. On the other hand if the person is interested in vulnerability research or security work, then learning ASM might as well be considered a requisite. An understanding of low level programming and code execution provides a programmer with a solid foundation. It gives the potential insights into what might be going wrong when their code isn't compiling or executing the way they want it to. It also gives them the tools to make their code better, as opposed to simply shrugging and saying, "I sure hope they fix this damn compiler..."
You can try to argue semantics all you want. The FACT of the matter is that Chinese culture has evolved a longer term thinking AS A WHOLE than Western culture has. There are examples abound. You didn't bother to refute my point about corporate profit and short term outlook. Here's another thing to consider. How many extended families exist in China versus the United States? By extended families I'm using the term to refer to the situation in which multiple generations live within the same home or very immediate vicinity.
And beyond that, just because a Linux box might support all of the protocols and implementations that Cisco has leveraged in their own products, it does not mean that the Linux box is going to configure itself. A lot of the reason that Cisco makes money is because they provide solutions. The solutions themselves leverage established technologies in many cases (RFCs are in the public domain), but Cisco makes them work together. It's the old discussion about Open Source vendors. They aren't making money selling people Linux because Linux is free. They are making money selling people Linux configured to perform specific tasks, and then selling support to keep the solution functioning and up to date.
I think that protectionist measures are a good thing and have their place. The larger point that I was trying to make is that in the past decade, China couldn't have included such a provision in their purchasing processes because they did not have a domestic industry capable of providing what they needed. Now that they have co-opted enough technical know how from foreign firms, they are starting to protect their own industries.
I don't place the fault on anyone. What we are seeing is the natural course of globalization. Economies are going to take from each other what they need. Being that economies are comprised of individuals, they will do what some individuals are inclined to do. Namely they will take short cuts and promote themselves and their friends at the expense of others. The funny thing is that Americans believe things like "intellectual property" laws will protect their R&D, or compensate them in the form of legal rewards. A government that oppresses its population with physical force and coercion isn't exactly a reliable partner.
Expecting China to seriously and strictly enforce IP laws is kind of like expecting the United States to back serious war crime accountability processes in the UN. Neither party is going to give an outside body the ability to influence fundamental power dynamics within their own economy.
It has been interesting to see how function keys have been depreciated. Having grown up with DOS and *nix programs, function keys were key (excuse the pun) to making the most of the programs. Each program had its own unique uses for the keys. In high school I was using Word Perfect 5.1 and that entire program was driven by the function keys.
This is what I love about Slashdot. The collective intelligence here is superb. Despite the frequent complaints about /. being behind the times when it comes to news, I find that topics are discussed here often months before traditional media sources pick them up. Reading the Wall Street Journal these last two days has been like a rehash of months old conversations, so much so that I was looking for the "dupe" tag to scrawl across the story in the paper.
Speak for yourself. Just because you arbitrarily decided to reset the clock 2009 years ago doesn't mean that the rest of us didn't count history before then. In fact, even non-atheists recognise that time did indeed exist before 1 AD.
I am not just speaking for myself. I am speaking for the Western world. I'm not a Christian and I could personally care less when Christ lived, died or did what he did. None the less, our "culture" has been around and is based upon a philosophical foundation that has been acknowledged for approximately 2000 years. Of course it didn't emerge in a vacuum, and it was built upon previous thoughts going back to the Greeks et al.
Like it or not, we're part of a culture that focuses heavily on the returns next quarter. If we're lucky, "long term" thinking manifests itself in a five year plan.
Thank you!
Who said anything about being malicious? I'm simply suggesting that there are a few subnet ranges that might contain systems upon which one might explore and experiment.
WTF are you talking about... suicide attacks? How did we go from digital commerce to fanatical extremism that results in the loss of life?
China also compromised servers in the US. RackSpace has been participating in the investigation because a compromised server in one of their data centers (I believe it was in Texas) played a key role in the attacks.
It isn't just Lenovo, it is Apple too. A couple years ago I broke down and bought a MacBook Pro (mostly for my girlfriend, but also because I wanted to see what all the hype was about). The single most annoying thing about the laptop is that the F keys don't default to being F keys. When I press F1, I want F1. I don't want to adjust my screen brightness damn it! If I want to adjust my screen brightness, I want to press Fn+F1. For all of the praise that Apple gets for their usability, their F-key decision is one big FAIL.
I think you need to give the Chinese more credit. As you've said, they have a billion more people than we do, yet those people are living on a similar sized landmass with similar resources. If there were a billion more people in America tomorrow, you can bet your ass that the interests on Wall Street would be aligned with Washington and implementing some serious production and other controls on the population. Look at what a big deal illegal immigration is. Americans are already stingy with resources and concerned about maintaining vague notions like "quality of life" for naturalized citizens. You can bet your ass that if there were a billion more people here, we'd have a Politburo like organization doing whatever was necessary to maintain their status while at the same time doing everything necessary to prevent a full on social uprising.
If you think China's government isn't effective, you have a very narrow view of the world. Spend a few hours researching what China is up to in Africa, and then contrast that with how well our State and Defense Departments are doing in that part of the world. Take a look at who is winning oil contracts in Iraq... Here, I'll save you the work (http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/05/news/international/iraq_oil/index.htm .. http://moneymorning.com/2008/08/22/china-iraq/) The Chinese don't have "terrorists" attacking their homeland because of misguided foreign policy blunders (warning, potential red herring).
Hacking Google does not help China develop its industries.
Yes it does. At least according to the Wall Street Journal, the compromise goes far beyond a Gmail compromise of a few accounts belong to some human rights activists. Google is claiming that they've suffered an intellectual property loss due to a server compromise. Any time that China steals research from someone else, they've improved their industry without having to invest in the R&D. Beyond Google, the official count is up to 34 companies far that have suffered severe breaches.
We are in an era where China is being more and more restrictive on foreign companies. China was open when it was beneficial to them. They were open when it brought foreign expertise into their country. They welcomed foreign companies with open arms because they stood to benefit from the knowledge those companies have. Now that the Chinese have the knowledge, they are becoming more nationalistic (as if that were possible). They are heavily favoring national companies. A recently passed government procurement process contained a provision that government agencies must find local suppliers for IT systems and software. The Chinese have stolen enough technical know how from HP and Dell and IBM and Cisco and the rest that they can produce hardware that is good enough for their needs. China is now the largest automobile market on the planet, and they're building cars based on designs and with processes stolen from American and Japanese manufacturing firms. I read a story last year where Ford or GM was suing a Chinese company for selling a car that was more or less based entirely on a design and manufacturing process that was stolen whole sale from (Ford/GM).
The Chinese are smart. Our year 2010 is the Chinese year 4707. They have an ANCIENT culture. All of the games that people play have been played, observed and pondered in China for A LONG TIME. For the past couple of decades they have been benefiting from American processes and technologies. Americans have benefited from a Chinese willingness to use our processes to provide us with affordable goods. At the same time, they have developed the knowledge to create goods for their own growing "middle class". One of their goals is to increase domestic consumption. As the years continue to go by, more and more of the world's resources are going to be going to China, for the good of the Chinese. There is a reason that the Chinese are playing such an active role in Africa.
The articles I've read have only had two details that are relevant to your question. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the primary focuses of the investigation is a compromised server at RackSpace (big surprise, right?). The details about the forensic analysis of that server haven't been available, but it appears to have been the equivalent of the digital dead drop through which information was passed. The second detail is that most if not all of the attacks appear to have originated in Taiwan. According to the article, the Chinese often use compromised Taiwanese machines to proxy their hacks through.
The Wall Street Journal had a great article about some of the details behind the scenes of this particular incident, and also another article that did a good job of summarizing what has been discussed here over the last couple of years. The main stream media is openly stating that the People's Liberation Army is actively encouraging "citizen cyber militias" to conduct "cyber attacks" (good Lord how I hate that term) against foreign (read, United States) corporations. Although they haven't gone so far as to state that those militias have active backing of the government, they have said that the government is turning a blind eye to their activities. Furthermore, the WSJ goes on to state that there are United States agencies involved in similar espionage activities.
Given that background, it seems like hacking Chinese companies should be fair game for up and coming "security researchers" here in the United States. In the 1990s the United States government made it quite clear that they were going to come down hard on people who mess with government and Fortune 500 systems. Given the option between really securing the systems and punishing those who exploit the lack of security, they went with the latter. A lot of people, myself included, decided that once we turned 18 and faced the threat of real Federal prosecution, the wise move was to turn off the war dialers, stop snarfing ESN/MIN pairs out of the air, and stop trying to run exploit code against computers that we don't control.
We can't hone our craft in the United States anymore. Although there is a whole market for securing IT resources against attack, there isn't a playground to pick up skills in. My suggestion is that China is that playground. My suggestion is that Chinese corporations in the United States are the targets. I mean lets face it, there are hundreds of thousands of compromised computers in the United States. The United States government can't be held accountable for malicious activity directed toward Chinese corporations. It would be unfortunate for those entities to be DDoS'd. It would be unfortunate for their internal workstations to be the target of vulnerability research.
Ahahahahaha! You are so right! I worked up there. They really do not want to be in the service business. The place is one giant nerd cage match. Anyone who can't keep up is pitied at best, more often despised. Of course that's pretty much all customers.
That is the sense that I got too. It seems to be a pretty common personality defect in most of the really smart people that I have known. They make the assumption that just because they can figure something out that everyone else should be able to also. They're the same people who got in arguments with their math teachers when they were told that they had to show their work. They felt like since they "knew the answer", there wasn't any need to actually write out the steps.
Google seems to be taking the route (with Google Apps at least) of pawning off the implementation onto third party providers. The problem is that the third party providers are in the same boat as the customers when it comes to needing fast answers to how it is supposed to work. I was evaluating Google Apps for my company and my conversation with the solution provider came down to, "We can implement what you see now, but we don't know anything about what features are going to be available in the future because Google doesn't tell us anything." Then Google says that they, "Listen carefully to what customers are asking for and focus development resources accordingly." But then when you try to ask them for any kind of product roadmap, they don't have one and don't show any interest what so ever in providing one.
They seem to have the attitude of, "We gave you the tools, what else do you want?" And heaven forbid that you mention that the tools aren't quite there yet...
Gmail and Gtalk aren't as great as they get made out to be. Gmail can't find mail over a year old that contains key words that I know should bring the mail up when I search for it. Gtalk has so many intermittent drop outs that if it isn't still in beta, it should be. And ever tried to use Gtalk on a desktop while it's still logged in on a mobile phone? A good portion of the time it doesn't know where it should receive its responses at, and rather than just sending to both, it seems to pick one at random.
If their customer support is anything like Google Apps, good luck with that one. My experience is that Google isn't geared toward customer service and it seems like they could care less. They seem to be coming from the position that everyone should be able to just figure out their products without any help.
My prediction for the year is that we see Google's stock price starting to decline as more and more people realize that beyond search, Google doesn't do anything very well. They have a lot of neat ideas, but their execution blows.
What FUD are you spewing? I am looking at an Exchange box right now that is hosting 100 mailboxes. Store.exe is using 683,000K of memory. The Symantec AV for Exchange services are eating another 700,000K. Combined that is under 2GB.
Something is wrong with your specific Exchange server.
The TSA uses PDF forms for customs and shipping. The IRS uses them for tax forms.