Groups will camp the phones and sell time-slots and privacy to other inmates. The amounts they charge can be exorbitant, and are far too expensive for an inmate with a regular prison job to afford. Just for example, I knew a guy who liked to call his wife and kids every day. He worked in the prison kitchen making $18 a month, but the phone crew charged him $1/minute to use the phone.
This isn't a phone issue; it's an extortion issue. Take away the phones completely and that same "crew" could just charge your buddy $50 a month for continuing to breathe, or $1 per meal for not having his food stolen, or whatever. The solution for this is not "hey just let everyone have phones"; the solution is for the prisons to do a better job of preventing that type of abuse.
You're absolutely right, it's an extortion issue and the phones are just one aspect of it. Let me explain something.
Many things in prison are "official" on paper but not actually enforced. The guards are supposed to ensure everyone has equal access to the phones, as well as the laundry and everything else. They are supposed to stop extortion and things like that. However, it's kind of an unspoken rule that inmates are supposed to police themselves. The guards typically only get involved when that fails, and then everyone is in trouble. This is where many of these "crews" come from.
This double standard is where a lot of these crews come from. Many of them are malicious and dangerous, while others are more like defacto peacekeepers.
Typical example is the laundry. In the institute where I served my time there were washers and dryers inmates are supposed to have free access to. The inmates all encountered problems with this (in my block). The laundry room was a frequent place of violence and theft, among other things. The guards solved it by banning everyone from doing laundry each time anything happened in there.
Some guys got together and proposed the idea of a laundry crew. The idea was we would all agree to let these 4 guys into the laundry room, and we'd just pay them to do our laundry. It worked pretty well and more or less solved the problem, except for people who couldn't afford it. The guards knew about this, and even though is was totally against the prison's rules, they allowed and encouraged it.
What this does is encourage criminal behavior and thinking, as well as instill a distrust of authority and the law. Is that really the kind of environment we think, as a society, will encourage these people to re-enter society as productive, law abiding citizens?
When you say "crew" I assume that means you have no idea who is charging the $1/minute....
This isn't a prison gang, it's the DOC/phone company.
I'm not sure what you mean. I say crew because they are a group of inmates, who I wouldn't necessarily term a gang in a real sense. Sometimes it's a gang, other times it's just a group of people who have bunks near the phones.
Before cell phones there were letters. Seemed to work fine. Also, there are approved phones available in every prison. I see no need for a prisoner to have a way to bypass prison restrictions on communication. In fact, I see a lot of downsides to it.
But, congratulations if you got your life together.
You have a point, letters do work fine for most things. However, the GP is also correct it might take the perspective of someone who has been an inmate to understand this issue. Let me try to elaborate on the real issues surrounding phones in prison.
The phones inmates have access to aren't very useful, and can actually be dangerous. In a typical situation, there may be 4 phones for 400 inmates. They're first-come, first-serve so there is usually a line or crowd around them. Other inmates can and will use things they overhear against you, so it's not safe to discuss anything you wouldn't feel comfortable having written on your shirt. This also means making a call at any specific time or date isn't practical, and calls are frequently cut short by others.
Like everything else in prison, this creates a black market. Groups will camp the phones and sell time-slots and privacy to other inmates. The amounts they charge can be exorbitant, and are far too expensive for an inmate with a regular prison job to afford. Just for example, I knew a guy who liked to call his wife and kids every day. He worked in the prison kitchen making $18 a month, but the phone crew charged him $1/minute to use the phone. He stole food and condiments from the kitchen and sold them to other inmates to pay for his phone use.
Most people who use a smuggled phone in prison aren't using them to commit or plot crimes. It's more often about having privacy communicating with family, friends, etc. I've known a few people who had legitimate businesses on the outside, and used a smuggled phone to continue running their business.
Rather than blocking phones it might make more sense to issue each inmate a phone the prison can monitor. The whole situation around the payphones they provide drives a lot of violence and crime simply because there aren't enough of the phones.
It was a state-run prison. That said, Ohio also has several corporate prisons. While state-run prisons (in Ohio; it's all I can speak to) aren't for profit their operations seem heavily influenced by for-profit prisons.
The prison would have "outside food" days every couple of months, where inmates could place orders to the restaurant of the month (say KFC or Burger King). The prices were marked up about 50%
The prison commissary would stock mostly food like what you might find at the convenience store (ramen, sardines, chips, beef sticks) but the prices were all marked up about 25%, even though the prison was buying in much higher bulk than most grocery stores.
The prison had a list of local stores inmates could buy craft or music supplies from (paint, guitars, whatever) but the prices were much higher than in-store pricing.
That said, there are corporations that act as service providers to both private and government institutions. For example Secure Pak and JPay.
I agree that the phones are a privilege, badly managed in the situation I described. I was only providing some context for other people to understand the issue better.
The fact is most inmates will be released at some point, and some might be your neighbor. Think about that. Do you want someone who has been treated like an animal living next door to you or preparing your food? Wouldn't you rather have the guy who's been educated in better living, learned a skilled trade, and encouraged to seek guidance from his family, friends, and pastor? After all, we're talking about people who mostly offended because they lacked those things in the first place.
If you don't care, just consider the next time you get a letter that isn't addressed to you. If you do anything other than write "return to sender - intended recipient not at this address" and place it back in your mail box you too are a felon and should be put in prison, denied phone access, and treated like an animal. That's what the codified law says anyway.
None of this is cut and dry, and anybody trying to make it look that way is oversimplifying the issue.
I think you're missing something here. A lot of the people incarcerated right now are in prison for non-violent crimes. There are definitely people who've done something terrible and can't be rehabilitated. More of the people incarcerated are in prison because they did something non-violent because they were in a bad situation and made a bad decision.
For example, I knew a guy who was a union construction worker who made very good money for honest work. He got injured at work and the doctor prescribed him opiates for the pain until he could get into surgery. By the time he finally got in to have the problem fixed he was addicted to the pain meds. The doctor stopped the medication. For anyone who isn't aware, once a person is hooked on opiates the withdrawals are worse than the worst flu imaginable.
This guy started seeking illegal opiates. He wasn't doing it to get high. He was doing it so he wasn't too sick to go to work and provide for his wife and 2 kids. Does this guy really need to be in prison for drug possession? Can we really say this guy doesn't need some kind of rehabilitation and we should just kill him?
I realize this is kind of a straw-man argument, but as a society we have to understand our justice system as it exists works like this. There are plenty of people incarcerated who are still valuable humans who made bad decisions for respectable reasons. When we write them all off as the worst 1% we are doing ourselves a disservice.
Years ago I spent some time incarcerated in an Ohio prison (my life's changed since then, I just want to point out I have a certain perspective about this).
Most of the phone use I witnessed or heard about was just so people could make reasonable phone calls to family. Picture this: You've got 6 pay phones in a block housing 500 people, and the phones are only open for about 4 hours a day. It's Thanksgiving and the line to use the phone stays 30 people long. Fights happen over the phones. I have seen someone beaten by another inmate because he was on the phone for too long.
To add insult to injury it cost like $2.50 to make a phone call, and then about $1.00 a minute and the phones would disconnect and drops calls all the time (if I remember the prices correctly).
I've definitely experienced this with older games. I have a lot of older games (say 1995-2005 era) that simply don't work with Windows 10 or don't work well. Most of them work just fine with Wine.
This isn't good, but it doesn't seem to be a big deal either.
This isn't a big deal for the vast majority of Linux use-cases. Where something like this becomes a problem is kisok-like machines and certain "secure" environments.
For example, a certain US state's lottery machines, which run Linux. The machine has a list of USB device ID's it will accept, it's on a VPN, locked case, locked BIOS. All-in-all, pretty secure against tampering. However, the USB protection only goes so far because it's possible to craft a USB device which sends a fake ID.
That said, even if someone could plug a keyboard into such a machine very little can be done because of the BIOS and bootloader password protection. However, a bug like this would suddenly be a potentially huge problem.
I'm tired of people making bugs like this sound like earth shattering problems. At the same time there are a minority of situations where this type of thing is potentially a big issue. That said, we can't ignore stuff like this.
To my knowledge, there is no actual evidence to show that browsers are significantly better on security. The major ones all fix critical vulnerabilities regularly, it just doesn't get as widely publicised. (Don't believe me? Go check the changelogs for recent releases of your browser of choice.) Moreover, if browsers do start to offer all the same functionality as Flash but natively, they'll also increase their attack surface accordingly. Of course if you compare a browser against the same browser with a plugin then the second combination has a larger attack surface, but right now that is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
If we want to talk about attack surface Flash is a bit of an issue. Individual browsers these days have issues more often than Flash, as you've pointed out. However, the install base of Flash is greater than that of any individual browser. Therefore, a problem with Flash is a big fucking deal, as it effects many more people than say, a problem in Firefox. Adobe should handle the EOL of Flash more responsibly, by either presenting a framework for transition or open sourcing Flash so somebody else can do it. As it stands, Adobe is the only entity able to fix a bug found in Flash and all tools for converting Flash content to modern standards (AFIAK) are based on a black-box understanding of how Flash works.
Last year (?) a teenager was able to get over the perimeter fence and get on a plane. Later, they announced that they did not have the money to properly secure the fence. Depite this, exactly zero planes have been subject to terrorist attacks in the USA.
There was also this incident in May, where a 27 year old stole a plane and was talked down by air traffic control. If the security we have in place can't stop random incidents like the kid you mention or this guy in Vegas, what is it supposed to stop? I don't think it really has anything to do with terrorism, let alone the greater good.
The boss's plan of allowing users to override the web page filter is absolutely the CORRECT plan. You have a rare boss who understands that the most important thing is that workers be able to work without interference from know-it-alls. Please get with the program!
This plan is a good one. To curb your concerns you could follow this plan:
1) Allow users to login to unblock sites on an as-needed basis. Keep the process simple so workflow isn't encumbered.
2) Keep a log of every time a user logs in to request access. Possibly keep a log of what sites users are visiting with this access, but do not log the traffic. Just the sites.
3) Pair this log with your issue tracking system and possibly employee performance reviews.
If an employee's support tickets seem to be linked to the sites they are requesting, the employee can be approached and possible restrictions can be put in place if the problem isn't solved with a conversation. The same goes for browsing habits that might be linked to downturns in performance.
This way, you are allowing your employees/users their freedom to browse/work, and only restricting the people who keep presenting problems.
I think future trend will be a shift from more flexible universal operating systems to more modular, take every out that is not necessary for this particular appliance operating system, this to simplify security and even application level features become modules added into the operating system, so one quick boot to full functionality. So a much more modular operating system.
A little OT, but I think modifying Gentoo with a new build system to do the above would be a fun project.
Actually having experience. Oh and the fact that I just set up a new windows 7 VM and from the fresh install on the DVD and how it ran, compared to after applying all updates it lost all of it's speed.
Nothing installed but windows updates. on the exact same hardware. Absolute solid proof to me.
I've seen this before. I do a fair bit of computer repair on the side, and just recently someone brought me a Windows 7 Home Premium install that was acting this way. I cleaned the computer of malware and junk programs, but it was still using 50%+ memory when idle. It turned out that the windows update service itself was causing the problem. The biggest ram hog was svchost running makecab.exe repeatedly, eating up nearly 1GB of memory all by itself.
It turned out the issue was actually a corrupted.NET Framework 3.5.1 which was screwing up the installation of updates. Repairing it resolved the problem. Perhaps check your update history and see if you have any failed updates, especially relating to.NET 3.5.1. If you do, try going into Programs and Features, disabling.NET 3.5.1 under Windows Features, rebooting, and then re-enabling it.
"allegedly" violating it - he has not been convicted yet, and the presumption of innocence should prevail. We don't know if a jury would find sufficient cause, given the circumstances and the illegal acts that were being covered up, to find sufficient justification.
Kind of like "yes, I went through the red light, but I was carrying someone who had been shot and was bleeding profusely to the hospital as quickly as I could."
There's a problem here which Snowden has also voiced: In a "trial" of this nature justification isn't allowed as a defense. This is talked about in Citizen Four.
Actually, this isn't too far from the truth. I've heard of a few cases where simply changing the URL has brought up documents that should be private and the person who reported it was brought up on charges for "hacking". Unfortunately, the public does not understand the difference between simply poking around and trying to mess up someone's system for nefarious reasons. Perhaps someone here on/. will remember the particular cases involved but as sad as it sounds, you are on a shaky legal foundation.
I thought of one particular case as soon as I read the summary: https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v....
Aernheimer was charged under the CFAA for exposing a similar problem with AT&T's website.
You can surely find a lot more googling a little. I also recommend taking a look at Google image-search. The thing is, if you shoot someone in the head with a BB-gun there actually is quite a risk of bodily harm (torn eyes etc.) and loss of life. They're unlikely to kill you if you fire them somewhere other than the head, but they certainly are dangerous items and they can still cause damage to internal organs, depending where the shot lands and its angle. I have a BB-gun that's capable of easily piercing an aluminum can and I certainly wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of the barrel.
Just about anything can be used in some way to kill a person. That doesn't make everything a deadly weapon. I think "deadly weapon" ought to be redefined as something that it's actually practical to use to kill a person. Otherwise, we may as well criminalize butter knives, lawn darts, paintball guns, and sling shots.
6 months probation is about right for what he did anyway. I can't believe they're clogging prisons with petty criminals like this then turning violent criminals out because of over crowding. A BB gun as a deadly weapon? They're turning the legal system into a farce with that kind of bullshit.
Totally agree. I've seen it first hand. I got a year of prison for stealing a bicycle (while intoxicated). It was a felony because it was inside an open garage, which apparently makes it Breaking and Entering. I know what I did was wrong and I'm embarrassed about having done it. What's more embarrassing is when I tell people about it they don't believe me until I show them the court papers.
There is virtually no place in the US where someone who is homeless and jobless cannot get enough assistance from city/state/private agency to change their situation.
That may be true now, I have no current experience. 20+ years ago it was definitely NOT true. I suffered greatly being homeless. Hell, I suffered greatly even having a fucking job working 6 days a week being paid $3.35 an hour. Housing was, and is, not cheap. Sharing doesn't do any good if the people you share with refuse to ever pay their fair share.
Fuck it. At that point, crimes of theft are not such a big deal. Everyone needs to eat.
I was in a boat like this, and that's where the prior misdemeanor convictions come from. I was the lead software engineer at a promising startup. I turned to drugs to help me put in the hours. The company eventually tanked, and I was left with a bad habit and no income. I ended up homeless and stealing. I started a blog where I interviewed other homeless people and used the ad revenue to pay for a storage unit to live in.
This is what actually happened:
I was intoxicated (not that it should matter, but I don't think I'd have done this if I hadn't been). I was about 6 miles from home without a car or a phone and I saw somebody leave their house via their garage. While the door was open I saw some bicycles in there. After they left I went to the side door of the garage, went inside, and stole one of their bikes. I think the neighbor saw me and called the police. I was arrested about 20 minutes later and charged with Burglary (because it was an attached garage), and I accepted a plea deal for Breaking and Entering.
In Ohio, criminal records can be expunged except for first and second degree felonies or crimes considered violent- after they are settled and punishment and fines have been paid. There is a process that is sort of like asking for parole but ends up in court with a judge making the final decision.
He said he couldn't get the felonies expunged because he is in Ohio. This means it was either violent, or a serious enough felony that it was a first or second degree felony as defined by the state. I concur, it was not a crime he woke up one day not realizing he was committing or thought was a minor misdemeanor and got roped into a felony.
You're partially right. In Ohio you are also barred from expunging your record if you have more than 2 misdemeanors or more than 1 felony and 1 misdemeanor on your record. I have 1 minor felony and about 4 misdemeanors, all stemming from a 2 year long period. None of them were violent crimes, unless you want to count beating the hell out of a road sign with a hammer while I was drunk.
The thing is, in the good ol' US of A, where less than 10 years ago you could be a felon for owning 6 dildos
Somehow I doubt, the asker was convicted only of violating something as stupid as possession of dildos or innocent as that of marijuana — he would've said so (if any employer even paid attention to it in the first place).
No, he was, by all appearances, genuinely guilty of at least one violent crime — plus some misdemeanors. I'm not saying, he "deserves" never to work in IT at all, but I don't blame the IT-folks — most of whom have not hit anybody in anger since middle school — for not wanting to work (be under the same roof!) with such a guy.
Why would you choose to drag out your anti-Americanism over this, is beyond me...
What I did wasn't violent. While on a bender I stole a bicycle out of somebody's garage. In Ohio that's a 5th degree felony.
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Groups will camp the phones and sell time-slots and privacy to other inmates. The amounts they charge can be exorbitant, and are far too expensive for an inmate with a regular prison job to afford. Just for example, I knew a guy who liked to call his wife and kids every day. He worked in the prison kitchen making $18 a month, but the phone crew charged him $1/minute to use the phone.
This isn't a phone issue; it's an extortion issue. Take away the phones completely and that same "crew" could just charge your buddy $50 a month for continuing to breathe, or $1 per meal for not having his food stolen, or whatever. The solution for this is not "hey just let everyone have phones"; the solution is for the prisons to do a better job of preventing that type of abuse.
You're absolutely right, it's an extortion issue and the phones are just one aspect of it. Let me explain something.
Many things in prison are "official" on paper but not actually enforced. The guards are supposed to ensure everyone has equal access to the phones, as well as the laundry and everything else. They are supposed to stop extortion and things like that. However, it's kind of an unspoken rule that inmates are supposed to police themselves. The guards typically only get involved when that fails, and then everyone is in trouble. This is where many of these "crews" come from.
This double standard is where a lot of these crews come from. Many of them are malicious and dangerous, while others are more like defacto peacekeepers.
Typical example is the laundry. In the institute where I served my time there were washers and dryers inmates are supposed to have free access to. The inmates all encountered problems with this (in my block). The laundry room was a frequent place of violence and theft, among other things. The guards solved it by banning everyone from doing laundry each time anything happened in there.
Some guys got together and proposed the idea of a laundry crew. The idea was we would all agree to let these 4 guys into the laundry room, and we'd just pay them to do our laundry. It worked pretty well and more or less solved the problem, except for people who couldn't afford it. The guards knew about this, and even though is was totally against the prison's rules, they allowed and encouraged it.
What this does is encourage criminal behavior and thinking, as well as instill a distrust of authority and the law. Is that really the kind of environment we think, as a society, will encourage these people to re-enter society as productive, law abiding citizens?
When you say "crew" I assume that means you have no idea who is charging the $1/minute....
This isn't a prison gang, it's the DOC/phone company.
I'm not sure what you mean. I say crew because they are a group of inmates, who I wouldn't necessarily term a gang in a real sense. Sometimes it's a gang, other times it's just a group of people who have bunks near the phones.
Before cell phones there were letters. Seemed to work fine. Also, there are approved phones available in every prison. I see no need for a prisoner to have a way to bypass prison restrictions on communication. In fact, I see a lot of downsides to it.
But, congratulations if you got your life together.
You have a point, letters do work fine for most things. However, the GP is also correct it might take the perspective of someone who has been an inmate to understand this issue. Let me try to elaborate on the real issues surrounding phones in prison.
The phones inmates have access to aren't very useful, and can actually be dangerous. In a typical situation, there may be 4 phones for 400 inmates. They're first-come, first-serve so there is usually a line or crowd around them. Other inmates can and will use things they overhear against you, so it's not safe to discuss anything you wouldn't feel comfortable having written on your shirt. This also means making a call at any specific time or date isn't practical, and calls are frequently cut short by others.
Like everything else in prison, this creates a black market. Groups will camp the phones and sell time-slots and privacy to other inmates. The amounts they charge can be exorbitant, and are far too expensive for an inmate with a regular prison job to afford. Just for example, I knew a guy who liked to call his wife and kids every day. He worked in the prison kitchen making $18 a month, but the phone crew charged him $1/minute to use the phone. He stole food and condiments from the kitchen and sold them to other inmates to pay for his phone use.
Most people who use a smuggled phone in prison aren't using them to commit or plot crimes. It's more often about having privacy communicating with family, friends, etc. I've known a few people who had legitimate businesses on the outside, and used a smuggled phone to continue running their business.
Rather than blocking phones it might make more sense to issue each inmate a phone the prison can monitor. The whole situation around the payphones they provide drives a lot of violence and crime simply because there aren't enough of the phones.
Thanks for the sentiment.
It was a state-run prison. That said, Ohio also has several corporate prisons. While state-run prisons (in Ohio; it's all I can speak to) aren't for profit their operations seem heavily influenced by for-profit prisons.
That said, there are corporations that act as service providers to both private and government institutions. For example Secure Pak and JPay.
I agree that the phones are a privilege, badly managed in the situation I described. I was only providing some context for other people to understand the issue better.
The fact is most inmates will be released at some point, and some might be your neighbor. Think about that. Do you want someone who has been treated like an animal living next door to you or preparing your food? Wouldn't you rather have the guy who's been educated in better living, learned a skilled trade, and encouraged to seek guidance from his family, friends, and pastor? After all, we're talking about people who mostly offended because they lacked those things in the first place.
If you don't care, just consider the next time you get a letter that isn't addressed to you. If you do anything other than write "return to sender - intended recipient not at this address" and place it back in your mail box you too are a felon and should be put in prison, denied phone access, and treated like an animal. That's what the codified law says anyway.
None of this is cut and dry, and anybody trying to make it look that way is oversimplifying the issue.
I think you're missing something here. A lot of the people incarcerated right now are in prison for non-violent crimes. There are definitely people who've done something terrible and can't be rehabilitated. More of the people incarcerated are in prison because they did something non-violent because they were in a bad situation and made a bad decision.
For example, I knew a guy who was a union construction worker who made very good money for honest work. He got injured at work and the doctor prescribed him opiates for the pain until he could get into surgery. By the time he finally got in to have the problem fixed he was addicted to the pain meds. The doctor stopped the medication. For anyone who isn't aware, once a person is hooked on opiates the withdrawals are worse than the worst flu imaginable.
This guy started seeking illegal opiates. He wasn't doing it to get high. He was doing it so he wasn't too sick to go to work and provide for his wife and 2 kids. Does this guy really need to be in prison for drug possession? Can we really say this guy doesn't need some kind of rehabilitation and we should just kill him?
I realize this is kind of a straw-man argument, but as a society we have to understand our justice system as it exists works like this. There are plenty of people incarcerated who are still valuable humans who made bad decisions for respectable reasons. When we write them all off as the worst 1% we are doing ourselves a disservice.
Years ago I spent some time incarcerated in an Ohio prison (my life's changed since then, I just want to point out I have a certain perspective about this).
Most of the phone use I witnessed or heard about was just so people could make reasonable phone calls to family. Picture this: You've got 6 pay phones in a block housing 500 people, and the phones are only open for about 4 hours a day. It's Thanksgiving and the line to use the phone stays 30 people long. Fights happen over the phones. I have seen someone beaten by another inmate because he was on the phone for too long.
To add insult to injury it cost like $2.50 to make a phone call, and then about $1.00 a minute and the phones would disconnect and drops calls all the time (if I remember the prices correctly).
I've definitely experienced this with older games. I have a lot of older games (say 1995-2005 era) that simply don't work with Windows 10 or don't work well. Most of them work just fine with Wine.
I've seen a lot of people use this for things like AirBnb or opening the door for various kinds of service people.
This isn't good, but it doesn't seem to be a big deal either.
This isn't a big deal for the vast majority of Linux use-cases. Where something like this becomes a problem is kisok-like machines and certain "secure" environments.
For example, a certain US state's lottery machines, which run Linux. The machine has a list of USB device ID's it will accept, it's on a VPN, locked case, locked BIOS. All-in-all, pretty secure against tampering. However, the USB protection only goes so far because it's possible to craft a USB device which sends a fake ID.
That said, even if someone could plug a keyboard into such a machine very little can be done because of the BIOS and bootloader password protection. However, a bug like this would suddenly be a potentially huge problem.
I'm tired of people making bugs like this sound like earth shattering problems. At the same time there are a minority of situations where this type of thing is potentially a big issue. That said, we can't ignore stuff like this.
From my understanding Windows is actually deleting partitions in this case, not just overwriting the bootloader. Not the same thing at all.
To my knowledge, there is no actual evidence to show that browsers are significantly better on security. The major ones all fix critical vulnerabilities regularly, it just doesn't get as widely publicised. (Don't believe me? Go check the changelogs for recent releases of your browser of choice.) Moreover, if browsers do start to offer all the same functionality as Flash but natively, they'll also increase their attack surface accordingly. Of course if you compare a browser against the same browser with a plugin then the second combination has a larger attack surface, but right now that is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
If we want to talk about attack surface Flash is a bit of an issue. Individual browsers these days have issues more often than Flash, as you've pointed out. However, the install base of Flash is greater than that of any individual browser. Therefore, a problem with Flash is a big fucking deal, as it effects many more people than say, a problem in Firefox. Adobe should handle the EOL of Flash more responsibly, by either presenting a framework for transition or open sourcing Flash so somebody else can do it. As it stands, Adobe is the only entity able to fix a bug found in Flash and all tools for converting Flash content to modern standards (AFIAK) are based on a black-box understanding of how Flash works.
Last year (?) a teenager was able to get over the perimeter fence and get on a plane. Later, they announced that they did not have the money to properly secure the fence. Depite this, exactly zero planes have been subject to terrorist attacks in the USA.
There was also this incident in May, where a 27 year old stole a plane and was talked down by air traffic control. If the security we have in place can't stop random incidents like the kid you mention or this guy in Vegas, what is it supposed to stop? I don't think it really has anything to do with terrorism, let alone the greater good.
The boss's plan of allowing users to override the web page filter is absolutely the CORRECT plan. You have a rare boss who understands that the most important thing is that workers be able to work without interference from know-it-alls. Please get with the program!
This plan is a good one. To curb your concerns you could follow this plan:
If an employee's support tickets seem to be linked to the sites they are requesting, the employee can be approached and possible restrictions can be put in place if the problem isn't solved with a conversation. The same goes for browsing habits that might be linked to downturns in performance.
This way, you are allowing your employees/users their freedom to browse/work, and only restricting the people who keep presenting problems.
I think future trend will be a shift from more flexible universal operating systems to more modular, take every out that is not necessary for this particular appliance operating system, this to simplify security and even application level features become modules added into the operating system, so one quick boot to full functionality. So a much more modular operating system.
A little OT, but I think modifying Gentoo with a new build system to do the above would be a fun project.
Actually having experience. Oh and the fact that I just set up a new windows 7 VM and from the fresh install on the DVD and how it ran, compared to after applying all updates it lost all of it's speed.
Nothing installed but windows updates. on the exact same hardware. Absolute solid proof to me.
I've seen this before. I do a fair bit of computer repair on the side, and just recently someone brought me a Windows 7 Home Premium install that was acting this way. I cleaned the computer of malware and junk programs, but it was still using 50%+ memory when idle. It turned out that the windows update service itself was causing the problem. The biggest ram hog was svchost running makecab.exe repeatedly, eating up nearly 1GB of memory all by itself.
.NET Framework 3.5.1 which was screwing up the installation of updates. Repairing it resolved the problem. Perhaps check your update history and see if you have any failed updates, especially relating to .NET 3.5.1. If you do, try going into Programs and Features, disabling .NET 3.5.1 under Windows Features, rebooting, and then re-enabling it.
It turned out the issue was actually a corrupted
"allegedly" violating it - he has not been convicted yet, and the presumption of innocence should prevail. We don't know if a jury would find sufficient cause, given the circumstances and the illegal acts that were being covered up, to find sufficient justification.
Kind of like "yes, I went through the red light, but I was carrying someone who had been shot and was bleeding profusely to the hospital as quickly as I could."
There's a problem here which Snowden has also voiced: In a "trial" of this nature justification isn't allowed as a defense. This is talked about in Citizen Four.
Actually, this isn't too far from the truth. I've heard of a few cases where simply changing the URL has brought up documents that should be private and the person who reported it was brought up on charges for "hacking". Unfortunately, the public does not understand the difference between simply poking around and trying to mess up someone's system for nefarious reasons. Perhaps someone here on /. will remember the particular cases involved but as sad as it sounds, you are on a shaky legal foundation.
I thought of one particular case as soon as I read the summary: https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v....
Aernheimer was charged under the CFAA for exposing a similar problem with AT&T's website.
A gun-shaped object is just as scary as a gun, but clearly shows a lack of intent to actually harm anybody.
Boy, 10, dies after his brother accidentally shoots him in the head with a BB gun at close range: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... http://www.gloucestershireecho... BB gun accident takes life of a 20-year old boy: http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/...
You can surely find a lot more googling a little. I also recommend taking a look at Google image-search. The thing is, if you shoot someone in the head with a BB-gun there actually is quite a risk of bodily harm (torn eyes etc.) and loss of life. They're unlikely to kill you if you fire them somewhere other than the head, but they certainly are dangerous items and they can still cause damage to internal organs, depending where the shot lands and its angle. I have a BB-gun that's capable of easily piercing an aluminum can and I certainly wouldn't want to be on the wrong end of the barrel.
Just about anything can be used in some way to kill a person. That doesn't make everything a deadly weapon. I think "deadly weapon" ought to be redefined as something that it's actually practical to use to kill a person. Otherwise, we may as well criminalize butter knives, lawn darts, paintball guns, and sling shots.
6 months probation is about right for what he did anyway. I can't believe they're clogging prisons with petty criminals like this then turning violent criminals out because of over crowding. A BB gun as a deadly weapon? They're turning the legal system into a farce with that kind of bullshit.
Totally agree. I've seen it first hand. I got a year of prison for stealing a bicycle (while intoxicated). It was a felony because it was inside an open garage, which apparently makes it Breaking and Entering. I know what I did was wrong and I'm embarrassed about having done it. What's more embarrassing is when I tell people about it they don't believe me until I show them the court papers.
There is virtually no place in the US where someone who is homeless and jobless cannot get enough assistance from city/state/private agency to change their situation.
That may be true now, I have no current experience. 20+ years ago it was definitely NOT true. I suffered greatly being homeless. Hell, I suffered greatly even having a fucking job working 6 days a week being paid $3.35 an hour. Housing was, and is, not cheap. Sharing doesn't do any good if the people you share with refuse to ever pay their fair share.
Fuck it. At that point, crimes of theft are not such a big deal. Everyone needs to eat.
I was in a boat like this, and that's where the prior misdemeanor convictions come from. I was the lead software engineer at a promising startup. I turned to drugs to help me put in the hours. The company eventually tanked, and I was left with a bad habit and no income. I ended up homeless and stealing. I started a blog where I interviewed other homeless people and used the ad revenue to pay for a storage unit to live in.
This is what actually happened:
I was intoxicated (not that it should matter, but I don't think I'd have done this if I hadn't been). I was about 6 miles from home without a car or a phone and I saw somebody leave their house via their garage. While the door was open I saw some bicycles in there. After they left I went to the side door of the garage, went inside, and stole one of their bikes. I think the neighbor saw me and called the police. I was arrested about 20 minutes later and charged with Burglary (because it was an attached garage), and I accepted a plea deal for Breaking and Entering.
In Ohio, criminal records can be expunged except for first and second degree felonies or crimes considered violent- after they are settled and punishment and fines have been paid. There is a process that is sort of like asking for parole but ends up in court with a judge making the final decision.
He said he couldn't get the felonies expunged because he is in Ohio. This means it was either violent, or a serious enough felony that it was a first or second degree felony as defined by the state. I concur, it was not a crime he woke up one day not realizing he was committing or thought was a minor misdemeanor and got roped into a felony.
You're partially right. In Ohio you are also barred from expunging your record if you have more than 2 misdemeanors or more than 1 felony and 1 misdemeanor on your record. I have 1 minor felony and about 4 misdemeanors, all stemming from a 2 year long period. None of them were violent crimes, unless you want to count beating the hell out of a road sign with a hammer while I was drunk.
Somehow I doubt, the asker was convicted only of violating something as stupid as possession of dildos or innocent as that of marijuana — he would've said so (if any employer even paid attention to it in the first place).
No, he was, by all appearances, genuinely guilty of at least one violent crime — plus some misdemeanors. I'm not saying, he "deserves" never to work in IT at all, but I don't blame the IT-folks — most of whom have not hit anybody in anger since middle school — for not wanting to work (be under the same roof!) with such a guy.
Why would you choose to drag out your anti-Americanism over this, is beyond me...
What I did wasn't violent. While on a bender I stole a bicycle out of somebody's garage. In Ohio that's a 5th degree felony.