Have you ever seen IT infrastructure in an organization where departments can make independent purchasing decisions? It is very easy for a department to purchase some servers for themselves, put them in a closet, and suddenly you have a server room that nobody is aware of. I saw it all the time when I was an undergrad, and I see it all the time now as a grad student.
It was not that these systems were "lost," but rather that they were not accounted for. I am not surprised -- various departments, subdepartments, field offices, and so forth probably bought computers at various points in time over the past 30 years, and nobody bothered to keep track of where those computers were being installed (they were probably only required to report what they purchased and what the price was). The report was probably corrected because they missed a bunch of smaller data centers the first time around, or perhaps because there was confusion over what should be called a "data center" (does any server room count? what if it is just a closet with a handful of computers in it?).
I see the same sort of confusion over the term "server room." At my institution, all sorts of weird things are "server rooms" -- everything from a dedicated room with rows of rackmounts, backup power, HVAC, etc. to a closet with a few switches and a NAS in it. How many server rooms do we have? Who knows? I would not be surprised if many of these "data centers" turned out to be nothing more than a single rack in a field office somewhere.
Enough people will pay, especially for the New York Times. The goal is not for everyone to pay, and they could not care less about whether people have access to their newspaper. They just want to make money, and they probably will. There are enough universities out there willing to pay enormous subscription fees.
Remember back when the we had the World Wide Web, that ingenious system where any document could have a hyperlink to any other document? The problem with paywalls is that they kill that system -- your links suddenly become blocked with demands for money.
Not that anyone cares about the spirit of openness and cooperation. These paywalls won't fail; I believe that they will be a great success, insofar as they will make lots of money for the websites that operate them. Most people will not pay, but enough will.
Perhaps, although I think that scenario says more about universities than anything else (like the fact that you have to log in to lab computers just to type a short essay). I do not find myself in that situation too frequently though, although it could just be the way I work (I usually have my laptop available).
So libraries have out of date equipment, how does that help? That just means that this technology won't actually make it into libraries for a decade or so, not that it will never make it there.
Maybe because the photocopier is not enforcing "CONFIDENTIAL DO NOT COPY" -- it goes way beyond that, checking a blacklist of words? It is not that this technology itself is evil, it is more that it can be used for all sorts of evil things.
You seem to think that these machines will only be purchased by corporations. What gives you that idea? How do you know that public libraries won't have these machines installed? What about schools? The problem is that this technology can and most likely will be abused. Public libraries and schools already filter websites; this will take that sort of censorship to an entirely new level.
This has nothing to do with the FCC. I think this is a terrible idea too, but this is not the FCC doing anything. This is bad because it opens the door for all sorts of abuses, not because the abuses have happened yet.
Most people are not technically proficient/clever enough to do any of that. They'll just post the document on their personal webpage or Facebook profile or something.
I wonder if this sort of censorship will find its way into public libraries. You know, they'll claim there is a national security interest in prevent certain kinds of pamphlets from being printed, or something to that effect, and before you know it a routine trip to the library will turn into an interrogation in a back room somewhere.
Considering the level of in-depth technical knowledge that most people employed as programmers have today, I think we can finally see why so many terrible software patents are being awarded...
You never should imagine that your are invulnerable, regardless of what sort of measures you take. Even the measures taken by the government to protect TOP SECRET data can be defeated by a powerful enough adversary.
The real problem is the use of passwords at all. Passwords are a terrible security mechanism for a lot of reasons, the two most prominent being that people are terrible at creating random strings and even worse at memorizing them.
As for the issue of writing things down, to be honest, for the majority of people that is not such a bad thing. For most people, the threat model is anonymous crackers on the Internet trying to gain unauthorized access to an account; anonymous crackers are not going to be able to read a password that you wrote down and keep in your wallet.
FTFY. Passwords are probably the least secure method of authentication; I don't know why we still rely on them, when there are so many better ways to do things.
If a 61% stake isn't ownership... I don't know what is!
A 100% stake. A 61% stake means that the US government has control over the company, yes, but not that the government owns it (you might say that the government "owns part of the company," but that is the best you can do).
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Have you ever seen IT infrastructure in an organization where departments can make independent purchasing decisions? It is very easy for a department to purchase some servers for themselves, put them in a closet, and suddenly you have a server room that nobody is aware of. I saw it all the time when I was an undergrad, and I see it all the time now as a grad student.
It was not that these systems were "lost," but rather that they were not accounted for. I am not surprised -- various departments, subdepartments, field offices, and so forth probably bought computers at various points in time over the past 30 years, and nobody bothered to keep track of where those computers were being installed (they were probably only required to report what they purchased and what the price was). The report was probably corrected because they missed a bunch of smaller data centers the first time around, or perhaps because there was confusion over what should be called a "data center" (does any server room count? what if it is just a closet with a handful of computers in it?).
I see the same sort of confusion over the term "server room." At my institution, all sorts of weird things are "server rooms" -- everything from a dedicated room with rows of rackmounts, backup power, HVAC, etc. to a closet with a few switches and a NAS in it. How many server rooms do we have? Who knows? I would not be surprised if many of these "data centers" turned out to be nothing more than a single rack in a field office somewhere.
Enough people will pay, especially for the New York Times. The goal is not for everyone to pay, and they could not care less about whether people have access to their newspaper. They just want to make money, and they probably will. There are enough universities out there willing to pay enormous subscription fees.
Remember back when the we had the World Wide Web, that ingenious system where any document could have a hyperlink to any other document? The problem with paywalls is that they kill that system -- your links suddenly become blocked with demands for money.
Not that anyone cares about the spirit of openness and cooperation. These paywalls won't fail; I believe that they will be a great success, insofar as they will make lots of money for the websites that operate them. Most people will not pay, but enough will.
Perhaps, although I think that scenario says more about universities than anything else (like the fact that you have to log in to lab computers just to type a short essay). I do not find myself in that situation too frequently though, although it could just be the way I work (I usually have my laptop available).
What situations do you wind up in where you need to log in to an untrusted computer, and you don't have any time to go find one you trust?
If Facebook now stores people's sensitive data, we are in a lot of trouble...
Since when has Facebook started caring about user privacy? This is, as noted, an attempt to get more people to divulge their cell phone numbers.
So libraries have out of date equipment, how does that help? That just means that this technology won't actually make it into libraries for a decade or so, not that it will never make it there.
Maybe because the photocopier is not enforcing "CONFIDENTIAL DO NOT COPY" -- it goes way beyond that, checking a blacklist of words? It is not that this technology itself is evil, it is more that it can be used for all sorts of evil things.
You seem to think that these machines will only be purchased by corporations. What gives you that idea? How do you know that public libraries won't have these machines installed? What about schools? The problem is that this technology can and most likely will be abused. Public libraries and schools already filter websites; this will take that sort of censorship to an entirely new level.
This has nothing to do with the FCC. I think this is a terrible idea too, but this is not the FCC doing anything. This is bad because it opens the door for all sorts of abuses, not because the abuses have happened yet.
% cracklib-check
fffffffffiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee99999999222222llllllllaaatttt
fffffffffiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee99999999222222llllllllaaatttt: OK
So?
Most people are not technically proficient/clever enough to do any of that. They'll just post the document on their personal webpage or Facebook profile or something.
Or they will do something even worse, like posting the document on their publicly accessible webpage or something equally bad.
I wonder if this sort of censorship will find its way into public libraries. You know, they'll claim there is a national security interest in prevent certain kinds of pamphlets from being printed, or something to that effect, and before you know it a routine trip to the library will turn into an interrogation in a back room somewhere.
I guess they thought, "Well, it is no worse than IBM selling equipment to the Germans during World War II!"
Rum and coke? With that higher salary, I would expect some single malt scotch...
It's not like "War Games" or Mastermind where you're told when you get one of the characters right.
I would not be so sure about that, software sometimes does something silly like using strcmp() for a password check...
Considering the level of in-depth technical knowledge that most people employed as programmers have today, I think we can finally see why so many terrible software patents are being awarded...
"Utt(001010&i!B" is a fine password that has this date in it.
Cracklib begs to differ:
Utt(001010&i!B: it is too simplistic/systematic
But I don't imagine that I'm invulnerable
You never should imagine that your are invulnerable, regardless of what sort of measures you take. Even the measures taken by the government to protect TOP SECRET data can be defeated by a powerful enough adversary.
The real problem is the use of passwords at all. Passwords are a terrible security mechanism for a lot of reasons, the two most prominent being that people are terrible at creating random strings and even worse at memorizing them.
As for the issue of writing things down, to be honest, for the majority of people that is not such a bad thing. For most people, the threat model is anonymous crackers on the Internet trying to gain unauthorized access to an account; anonymous crackers are not going to be able to read a password that you wrote down and keep in your wallet.
The password systems were stupid to begin with
FTFY. Passwords are probably the least secure method of authentication; I don't know why we still rely on them, when there are so many better ways to do things.
If a 61% stake isn't ownership... I don't know what is!
A 100% stake. A 61% stake means that the US government has control over the company, yes, but not that the government owns it (you might say that the government "owns part of the company," but that is the best you can do).