Short of torturing us with twisted logic what, pray tell, does this have to do with the story? Not a blessed thing.
Meanwhile have fun with your trichorder. If you play an instrument as well as you construct an argument I want to know where you're playing live near me so I can get as far away for the site as I can.
James Watt's steam engine distrupted the prevailing economies if the time so much the Industrial Revolution came from it. Way simplified, I know.
Iron clad war ships disrupted how navy's operated. HMS Dreadnought disrupted that, as did the development of successful submarines.
Powered flight disrupted, well, continues to disrupt, almost anything it touches.
The desktop computer has disrupted almost everything that came before it. Film has died, how and with who we communicate has changed, business has been changed (often not for the better with the focus on spreadsheets these days) and our mating habits have changed. Where it was considered,once, a little odd to get a mate after a long exchange of letters by post, now we find ourselves in our most important relationship because of chat programs like MSN, Yahoo and IRC and no one bats an eye what it has already changed irrevocably, we have no idea what it may disrupt next and what that will mean.
Along came things like high speed access to the Internet and, perhaps as importantly, the World Wide Web. Suddenly things most of us paid no attention to like copyright and patents became culturally important rather than belonging to that esoteric realm we now call "content creators".
In many parts of the world, now, Internet access is now socially viewed as a right particularly by those who grew up with it.
And that disruption is far from over yet.
It'll come to as no surprise to our trolls and related critters (hi bob!) that I don't think for a microsecond that it's up to innovators to tell those who can't or won't adjust to the disruption(s) how to stay in business. It's up to those businesses.
Innovators will continue to innovate, creators will continue to create, artists will continue to produce work as they always have. Distribution of that work will change and has changed.
If the business entities who have made their livings being those who have distributed those works can't adjust too bad. Something or someone will come along who can and make money doing it in the new environment. That is called innovation.
You may be right in that the MEPs don't want their various paymasters to know they helped sink ACTA.
If they pass it they don't want their constituents to know about it either.
Either way the vote will be leaked, who voted what way, when and, maybe, why. Even the names of those who ducked into the washroom when the vote was called and stayed there till it was all over.
The only secret that is broken more quickly than a military one is who voted which way behind closed doors.
Almost 10 times that much now. Keep it coming as you dig Carreon three are a whole mess of baby animals cheering for you.
None of whom want to grow up to be a lawyer. Something with a little more class like a fully licensed carnivore, wolverine class with a special taste for lawyers.
Most router manufacturers recommend password protecting the network and the router which is a long, long way from saying that it's required.
Many, if not all, residential combined datasets and wireless routers come wide open out of the box that the customer picks up even should the TOS, in very tiny type, requires the user to "secure" it without any instructions on how to do that. Negligence would be difficult to establish under circumstances like that and just who who would be negligent would be open to some question. I have no idea how cable companies deal with that, or if they do, as I didn't work for a cableco before I retired.
Not to defend the banks but ideally when the banks loan a certain amount of depositors money they are using that money to bet that the result will be an increase in overall wealth. A decent example would be those who loaned to Ford Motor Company when it started up with the insane, at the time, idea of paying higher wages than the norm so that the workers could afford the products they were making. Simplified but there it is.
The bank gets to play the role of casino where the house never loses As 2008 proved that may not always be the case though in that case governments rushed in to bail out the "casinos" that were too big to fail.
While it is the role of banking to circulate money through the economy we ought to have noticed that something was seriously wrong when the normative paper shufflers became "wealthier" than the productive economy it was designed to serve is.
Banks do not create software, music, vehicles, computers or toasters. In general they aren't the consumers of large amounts of any of that. Ideally they facilitate that yet by 2008 they were more interested in investing depositor's money in opaque packages of poor quality which somehow had managed to get higher ratings than some of the wealthiest and most productive nations could get. Bond rating agencies morphed into high class book makers quite different from their alleged role of neutral investigators of bonds and investments.
These service industries, and never forget that that is all banking and related businesses are, forgot they were there to service the economy and became convinced they were the economy.
That, I suspect, is where they became, as you say, parasites. Worse, IMHO than governments can be, as they had and have no built in action that prevents them from destroying or eating their hosts. When the host is suddenly in critical condition they demand rescue no matter the cost to the host.
In that last sense the become similar to the parasite known as "IP" that has mutated beyond its original, possibly, useful function when they first appeared to the predator they've become when the host (technology and the resulting economy based on that) evolves into something radically different than what came before as the IP parasites mutate into something whose only purpose is the destruction of its host. For example software patents and their bastard children patent trolls and the ridiculous length and breadth of copyright as it now exists.
When I checked a few seconds ago Inman's drive to collect $20,000 for the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society has raised $177,020.
It seems that as well as the digging of a nearly endless hole the Carreon Effect may have positive effects on forest critters and Cancer patients and research. May Charles Carreon continue to dig! Thousands of baby bears, porcupines, raccoons and kittens will thank him!!!!
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Plenty of Linux boxes are out there just not all that many desktops comparably. (Android is a Linux flavour though.)
It's nice to blame C for the lack of security in OS installations rather than old code that should have been removed from the OS kernel years ago. In reality it's bad programming practices and bad testing prior to release that's the cause of most if the problems. If an organization is still using the utility that caused the buffer overflow error or a descendant of same 25 years on they should be slow roasted. C, remember, was designed to be one and a quarter steps removed from Assembler and not a high level language that takes care of a ton of stuff for the coder. I've never seen a claim that it was designed to be secure in and of itself from Kerrigan and Ritchie or anyone else. It was designed to produce operating systems. Unix, actually. Security was left to the programmer or programming team.
Now if you can name or come up with a mid-level or high level language that will be secure with an acceptably fast and small executable them please tell me what it is. One more to your liking because I can see your contempt for C and it's derivatives. And yes, it's an enormous pain at times.
Someone must think it's good enough because it's still widely used.
Windows flaws are well known and cracking it isn't difficult if someone really wants to which means that botnets are easier to establish on Windows systems than on *Nix systems not just because it's more widespread. Though that helps. They can be put on *Nix systems as proof of concept botnets have been established and tested on closed networks. We'll see if Win8 can reduce the flaws in Windows and reduce the number of botnet infected machines.
None of this has to do with using C or C++ to code but design of the OS itself, as much as C is an enormous pain to use. Or would you rather code an OS to assembler? ;-)
Meanwhile as far as an attack on critical systems are concerned we're back to enforcing the best practices possible on users and administrators. That and accepting that there is no such thing as a 100% secure system which doesn't mean trying to get there.
Big fellas like 767s do have fly by wire but somehow I don't think Boeing is stupid enough to connect the control and navigation system(s) to the Internet while in flight.
Crackers are more interested in something easier to break into than a big plane while there are easier options. Say the computer systems on Capital Hill in DC. Thing is that no one may ever notice.
If aircraft start falling out of the sky it'll be because of flocks of Canada Geese that have been cracked and programmed to fly into the engines of jets en masse. ;-)
I gotta admit that like PRMan I can't see a single reason for censoring her and her blog or the pictures.
While things may not be ideal I can't see that the school or the lunch program could buy better PR than they get from this blog. The global discussion about school lunches it's attracted is even better. If it brings some variety, increases in nutrition, which seems her main concern reading through a few of her posts then all the better.
Her charity page is over £53,000 pounds now.
A bunch of us have been bested by a 9 year old with more spunk than a lot of us have. Way to go, Martha!
On one hand they have annoyed and angry customers for their real money maker, the ISP part of the business and the other has NBC Universal who aren't as profitable.
The balance with copyright trolls, even owning a content company just doesn't work out.
That and, I suspect, their own legal department telling them it's time to draw a bright red line on the lawn due to cost and the fact that it's all more trouble than it's worth as they could lay themselves open to more trouble down the line from subscribers.
As someone deeply involved in that herculean effort to stave off the Y2K bug (in the telecom industry) the biggest disappointment was that it wasn't going to cause the mess predicted even on most older systems that hadn't been updated in a coons age. I can't speak for the nuclear power industry but I do know that the people involved in it all for the electrical generator and grid builder here were as disappointed as I was. Perhaps anticlimactic is more the word.
At the end of the day the most affected systems were the billing not operational systems. A few days prior to the millennium turnover IBM downloaded and activated the bug fix to our mainframes with nary a hiccup. All after we;d tested the hell out of things to determine that operational systems would have continued on just fine.
The night of Dec 31, 199 Jan 1, 2000 we watched and waited while all the mainframe apps ran smoothly on, most of the PC based systems were fine too with the single exception of SAP who hadn't delivered their database update to fix dates from 2 characters to four. so SAP crashed impressively. A couple of phone calls to Germany later, using every swear word imaginable we got SAP to restructure their database, stop and restart the system and kept them online till we were satisfied. And they got us in the correct time zone. :)
By Jan 2nd we had admin passwords to every part of SAP which, till then, they wouldn't give us. My low opinion of SAP didn't get any better.
That said, we knew what was coming and had sufficient lead time to be prepared and ensure that all but one, it turned out, of our vendors were prepared and ready.
If there ever is a cyber Pearl Harbour the problem is that we have no idea what form it will take so the defenses fall back on best practice as well as anyone can. Keeping in mind the human factor which means that someone will leave a Pad device, laptop, smart phone or whatever laying around where anyone can look into it. Insecure password/username combinations and all the rest of it. None of this means lowering vigilance, resting on laurels or anything like it. It does mean planning for the worst possible outcome and how to recover from it. It means that if the power grid HAS to remain in line for whatever ersatz reason that it be significantly hardened that it's extremely difficult to crack.
For all of that I'd be as or more concerned about an EMP like event and not even a terrestrial one. Strong solar flares matched with coronal mass ejections aimed at Earth have the potential to fry the planet's electrical grid. Less powerful ones have to potential to fry semiconductors, have been known to cause transformers to explode and to cause mass blackouts such as the one that hit Quebec and parts of eastern Ontario in 1989.
These are associated with "sunspot years" and we're in one of those right now. It's hard to call the Sun a terrorist but a flare/coronal mass ejection on the order of the one in 1859 would take out satellites, the Internet and almost all of the electrical grid planet wide. We know this could happen. We know at some point it will happen and that we're powerless when it does. All we can do it mitigate the damage when it does and pray we have enough hardware to begin to do that.
Whatever will constitute a "cyber Pearl Harbour" is more problematic. We have no idea who might launch it, what vector(s) it might use and just who has the motivation and skill to construct it. So all that can be done is broad defense against malware(s) that will make Stuxnet look like a programming exercise in middle school. Should be fun. But for all of that it can be done with existing resources if government departments and the private and public sectors simply apply and enforce "best practices" security. Which they should already be doing. Otherwise it's a matter of throwing good money after bad and that never, ever works.
"Clean" mountain air can be as smelly as what's at is foot a and and often is. If there's a pulp mill down there you'll smell it at 10,000 ft just like you will at 600ft. Maybe not as strong a stench but a stench.
If there's a forest fire you'll still be choking on the smoke all the way up.
Of course, there is an elevation where the stenches dissipate if no other reason that the air thinning.
And as for that pristine mountain stream water your favourite brewski is made of, if you believe the ads it's still sterilized before the beer is made just like the ugly water flowing through downtown streams.
And that bottled water you're drinking? A few days ago it came out of the bottling plant's tap.
Yet people pay for air fresheners with the scent of clean mountain air, pay obscene prices for the bottled water they can get from their tap and dryer sheets with no end of outside scents.
The value these people ascribe to these things isn't always about the price, though high prices are expected for bottled water. In the end what I'm saying is that price and value are two different things.
I may pay more for U2 record than I would for Metric one but I'll value the Metric record more than U2 because I like them better.
Incidentally value != valuable. Value is an emotional response not a rational one. I may, and do, value a couple of my old, dog eared, beat up books more than I do gold but that doesn't change the fact that gold is more valuable due to its scarcity. A small charge for a song/video doesn't make it more valuable though it will imply more value than a freebie to a new fan or someone just discovering an act. We're conditioned to consider free music as bad music due to the fact that for decades the first discounted LP or CD were the truly awful recordings. That that doesn't necessarily apply in the Internet age doesn't change years of conditioning. For some of us the small charge implies a value, rightly or wrongly. Keeping in mind that value and valuable are NOT the same thing.
Evans must have complained to his Meyer about the posts as it seems unlikely that Meyer himself would have been searching for "negative" information about his client on the Web.
You'd think, given Evans role as Captain America and past role as The Human Torch he could have looked after his himself. After all that's what would have happen in the comics or movies, right?
You need to read one of the earlier comments about how the banking system works.
Additionally if the depositor knew nothing an about the alleged criminal activities of the bank would not be automatically considered a criminal. Perhaps a suspect but not legally a criminal until AFTER a criminal trial had taken place. In our criminal justice system a person is innocent till proven guilty BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT.
Which means hat should criminal infringement charges be laid one day the prosecution still has to prove guilt for each and every user they charge. The defendant has to prove exactly nothing. Nor, at this stage has Megaupload or any of it's principles been proven, again beyond a reasonable doubt, to be a criminal operation.
That the DOJ says it is does not legally make it one. So far that's all anyone has. There's things like trials to go through yet.
There's nothing illegal about midget porn in Canada. So what? Beats your politician porn!
There are people who have made it clear they've used Megaupload for cloud storage. Often for archival files which they can identify and which contain enough identifying information to confirm it without needing an IP address or anything else. The reality is what the judge says it is, the US government has seized people's property and is refusing to return it or offer an explanation of why it can't be returned.
That YOU choose to believe that Megupload was only for infringing material isn't anyone's problem but your own. Though you have no evidence for that. (It had to be doesn't count.) I agree with Mike that as a file locker there was a lot of infringing material on Megaupload, perhaps even the majority of files there. None of that justifies the refusal to return non-infringing files.
It's the refusal not the status of these files as backups that's important. The DOJ is obligated to act the same way with files on a disk that it would with money in the bank.
What works in the physical realm (money) has to work in the electronic/Internet realm (files) without legal reason for it. For example that the file is needed as evidence at trial.
I'd wonder if most casual users of Megaupload had gmail or other disposable mail accounts or even knew that TOR exists.
None of that is the judge's point. But you really, really want it to be. His point is law, which I'm sure he knows better than you do.
A lot of it goes back to 19th Century fears that immigrant workers or entrepreneurs would undercut or fare better than those already in the United States (or Canada).
The entrepreneur class wasn't broadly popular when it first came in for any number of reasons, including racism, when it first came in in Canada. Too often it seemed like we had become a citizenship of convenience when trouble broke out "back home" where, the feeling was too many of them spent most of their time. The low point was reached when Canada had to rescue a large number of citizens, all dual citizens, the last time Lebanon threatened to melt down.
Mostly, though the major problem was that the Federal Government hadn't explained to Canadians and to the migrants themselves the benefits and expectations. That's largely been cleared up now.
Today we're facing a growing shortage in skilled and highly skilled trades. In part because the Boomers, like me, are retiring even if we're not exactly leaving the workforce full time.
Also in part because for years it was seen that a university degree was more desirable than a trades certificate. Put badly we're up to our eyeballs in university graduates but try to find a skilled carpenter, as in cabinet maker. Electricians are becoming scarce, as are high end metal workers, plumbers and more. And let's not even talk about IT workers. Or the more specialized trades required in pulp and paper, wood products and more that can be lumped in the category of millwright.
These days a trades certificate in a high skill trade will get you more money than 85% of university grads.
So, along with the needed entrepreneurs, we're also bringing in the high end trades people as fast as we can find them. Most of them have tried the USA but can't get in for one reason or another despite the US facing the same skilled labour shortage Canada has. So we'll take them thank you. With the blessing of of our CEOs and Unions.
The 19th Century is long gone and with it the fears of that time. Additionally there's the reality that apprentices in the highly skilled trades spend as much time in a classroom as they do on the job, if not more. They're not a place for the semi-literate anymore if they ever were.
So if it's 19th Century fears and biases that are keeping people out of the States you're shooting yourselves in the foot. But keep it up if you like. We'll take them. Silicon Valley will have to deal with Vancouver, just a wee trip north on I-5 instead of right next door in San Jose.
On the post: Google Books Data Mining Reveals Mad Men's Big Historical Flaw: Business Lingo
Re:
Meanwhile have fun with your trichorder. If you play an instrument as well as you construct an argument I want to know where you're playing live near me so I can get as far away for the site as I can.
On the post: NSA: Figuring Out How Many US Citizens We Illegally Spied On Would Violate Their Privacy
Re: Re:
On the post: Disruptive Innovation Is Not An Orderly Process
Disruptive is, well, disruption
Iron clad war ships disrupted how navy's operated. HMS Dreadnought disrupted that, as did the development of successful submarines.
Powered flight disrupted, well, continues to disrupt, almost anything it touches.
The desktop computer has disrupted almost everything that came before it. Film has died, how and with who we communicate has changed, business has been changed (often not for the better with the focus on spreadsheets these days) and our mating habits have changed. Where it was considered,once, a little odd to get a mate after a long exchange of letters by post, now we find ourselves in our most important relationship because of chat programs like MSN, Yahoo and IRC and no one bats an eye what it has already changed irrevocably, we have no idea what it may disrupt next and what that will mean.
Along came things like high speed access to the Internet and, perhaps as importantly, the World Wide Web. Suddenly things most of us paid no attention to like copyright and patents became culturally important rather than belonging to that esoteric realm we now call "content creators".
In many parts of the world, now, Internet access is now socially viewed as a right particularly by those who grew up with it.
And that disruption is far from over yet.
It'll come to as no surprise to our trolls and related critters (hi bob!) that I don't think for a microsecond that it's up to innovators to tell those who can't or won't adjust to the disruption(s) how to stay in business. It's up to those businesses.
Innovators will continue to innovate, creators will continue to create, artists will continue to produce work as they always have. Distribution of that work will change and has changed.
If the business entities who have made their livings being those who have distributed those works can't adjust too bad. Something or someone will come along who can and make money doing it in the new environment. That is called innovation.
On the post: ACTA Not Dead Yet: Supporters Make Final Push For EU Approval, May Seek Secret Ballot
Re: Falling
If they pass it they don't want their constituents to know about it either.
Either way the vote will be leaked, who voted what way, when and, maybe, why. Even the names of those who ducked into the washroom when the vote was called and stayed there till it was all over.
The only secret that is broken more quickly than a military one is who voted which way behind closed doors.
On the post: Carreon's Full Filing Reveals He Donated To Oatmeal Campaign Himself, Plus Other Assorted Nuttiness
Re:
None of whom want to grow up to be a lawyer. Something with a little more class like a fully licensed carnivore, wolverine class with a special taste for lawyers.
On the post: Carreon's Full Filing Reveals He Donated To Oatmeal Campaign Himself, Plus Other Assorted Nuttiness
Re: Re: Re: Relevance?
On the post: Once More, With Feeling: Having Open WiFi Does Not Make You 'Negligent' Under The Law
Many, if not all, residential combined datasets and wireless routers come wide open out of the box that the customer picks up even should the TOS, in very tiny type, requires the user to "secure" it without any instructions on how to do that. Negligence would be difficult to establish under circumstances like that and just who who would be negligent would be open to some question. I have no idea how cable companies deal with that, or if they do, as I didn't work for a cableco before I retired.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re:
The bank gets to play the role of casino where the house never loses As 2008 proved that may not always be the case though in that case governments rushed in to bail out the "casinos" that were too big to fail.
While it is the role of banking to circulate money through the economy we ought to have noticed that something was seriously wrong when the normative paper shufflers became "wealthier" than the productive economy it was designed to serve is.
Banks do not create software, music, vehicles, computers or toasters. In general they aren't the consumers of large amounts of any of that. Ideally they facilitate that yet by 2008 they were more interested in investing depositor's money in opaque packages of poor quality which somehow had managed to get higher ratings than some of the wealthiest and most productive nations could get. Bond rating agencies morphed into high class book makers quite different from their alleged role of neutral investigators of bonds and investments.
These service industries, and never forget that that is all banking and related businesses are, forgot they were there to service the economy and became convinced they were the economy.
That, I suspect, is where they became, as you say, parasites. Worse, IMHO than governments can be, as they had and have no built in action that prevents them from destroying or eating their hosts. When the host is suddenly in critical condition they demand rescue no matter the cost to the host.
In that last sense the become similar to the parasite known as "IP" that has mutated beyond its original, possibly, useful function when they first appeared to the predator they've become when the host (technology and the resulting economy based on that) evolves into something radically different than what came before as the IP parasites mutate into something whose only purpose is the destruction of its host. For example software patents and their bastard children patent trolls and the ridiculous length and breadth of copyright as it now exists.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Another result of the Carreon Effect
It seems that as well as the digging of a nearly endless hole the Carreon Effect may have positive effects on forest critters and Cancer patients and research. May Charles Carreon continue to dig! Thousands of baby bears, porcupines, raccoons and kittens will thank him!!!!
On the post: .Rip .Off: Highlights From The Top-Level Domain Scrum
Re: Dispose of TLDs
On the post: The Politicians Who Cried 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' Wolf
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Damned if you do, damned if you don't
It's nice to blame C for the lack of security in OS installations rather than old code that should have been removed from the OS kernel years ago. In reality it's bad programming practices and bad testing prior to release that's the cause of most if the problems. If an organization is still using the utility that caused the buffer overflow error or a descendant of same 25 years on they should be slow roasted. C, remember, was designed to be one and a quarter steps removed from Assembler and not a high level language that takes care of a ton of stuff for the coder. I've never seen a claim that it was designed to be secure in and of itself from Kerrigan and Ritchie or anyone else. It was designed to produce operating systems. Unix, actually. Security was left to the programmer or programming team.
Now if you can name or come up with a mid-level or high level language that will be secure with an acceptably fast and small executable them please tell me what it is. One more to your liking because I can see your contempt for C and it's derivatives. And yes, it's an enormous pain at times.
Someone must think it's good enough because it's still widely used.
Windows flaws are well known and cracking it isn't difficult if someone really wants to which means that botnets are easier to establish on Windows systems than on *Nix systems not just because it's more widespread. Though that helps. They can be put on *Nix systems as proof of concept botnets have been established and tested on closed networks. We'll see if Win8 can reduce the flaws in Windows and reduce the number of botnet infected machines.
None of this has to do with using C or C++ to code but design of the OS itself, as much as C is an enormous pain to use. Or would you rather code an OS to assembler? ;-)
Meanwhile as far as an attack on critical systems are concerned we're back to enforcing the best practices possible on users and administrators. That and accepting that there is no such thing as a 100% secure system which doesn't mean trying to get there.
On the post: The Politicians Who Cried 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' Wolf
Re: Airplanes will fall out of the sky! OMG!
Crackers are more interested in something easier to break into than a big plane while there are easier options. Say the computer systems on Capital Hill in DC. Thing is that no one may ever notice.
If aircraft start falling out of the sky it'll be because of flocks of Canada Geese that have been cracked and programmed to fly into the engines of jets en masse. ;-)
On the post: The Streisand Effect Wins Again: Scottish Council Reverses Ban On 9-Year Old Blogging About School Lunches
While things may not be ideal I can't see that the school or the lunch program could buy better PR than they get from this blog. The global discussion about school lunches it's attracted is even better. If it brings some variety, increases in nutrition, which seems her main concern reading through a few of her posts then all the better.
Her charity page is over £53,000 pounds now.
A bunch of us have been bested by a 9 year old with more spunk than a lot of us have. Way to go, Martha!
On the post: When Even Comcast Is Refusing To Identify Those Accused Of Infringement...
Re:
On one hand they have annoyed and angry customers for their real money maker, the ISP part of the business and the other has NBC Universal who aren't as profitable.
The balance with copyright trolls, even owning a content company just doesn't work out.
That and, I suspect, their own legal department telling them it's time to draw a bright red line on the lawn due to cost and the fact that it's all more trouble than it's worth as they could lay themselves open to more trouble down the line from subscribers.
On the post: The Politicians Who Cried 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' Wolf
Re: Damned if you do, damned if you don't
At the end of the day the most affected systems were the billing not operational systems. A few days prior to the millennium turnover IBM downloaded and activated the bug fix to our mainframes with nary a hiccup. All after we;d tested the hell out of things to determine that operational systems would have continued on just fine.
The night of Dec 31, 199 Jan 1, 2000 we watched and waited while all the mainframe apps ran smoothly on, most of the PC based systems were fine too with the single exception of SAP who hadn't delivered their database update to fix dates from 2 characters to four. so SAP crashed impressively. A couple of phone calls to Germany later, using every swear word imaginable we got SAP to restructure their database, stop and restart the system and kept them online till we were satisfied. And they got us in the correct time zone. :)
By Jan 2nd we had admin passwords to every part of SAP which, till then, they wouldn't give us. My low opinion of SAP didn't get any better.
That said, we knew what was coming and had sufficient lead time to be prepared and ensure that all but one, it turned out, of our vendors were prepared and ready.
If there ever is a cyber Pearl Harbour the problem is that we have no idea what form it will take so the defenses fall back on best practice as well as anyone can. Keeping in mind the human factor which means that someone will leave a Pad device, laptop, smart phone or whatever laying around where anyone can look into it. Insecure password/username combinations and all the rest of it. None of this means lowering vigilance, resting on laurels or anything like it. It does mean planning for the worst possible outcome and how to recover from it. It means that if the power grid HAS to remain in line for whatever ersatz reason that it be significantly hardened that it's extremely difficult to crack.
For all of that I'd be as or more concerned about an EMP like event and not even a terrestrial one. Strong solar flares matched with coronal mass ejections aimed at Earth have the potential to fry the planet's electrical grid. Less powerful ones have to potential to fry semiconductors, have been known to cause transformers to explode and to cause mass blackouts such as the one that hit Quebec and parts of eastern Ontario in 1989.
These are associated with "sunspot years" and we're in one of those right now. It's hard to call the Sun a terrorist but a flare/coronal mass ejection on the order of the one in 1859 would take out satellites, the Internet and almost all of the electrical grid planet wide. We know this could happen. We know at some point it will happen and that we're powerless when it does. All we can do it mitigate the damage when it does and pray we have enough hardware to begin to do that.
Whatever will constitute a "cyber Pearl Harbour" is more problematic. We have no idea who might launch it, what vector(s) it might use and just who has the motivation and skill to construct it. So all that can be done is broad defense against malware(s) that will make Stuxnet look like a programming exercise in middle school. Should be fun. But for all of that it can be done with existing resources if government departments and the private and public sectors simply apply and enforce "best practices" security. Which they should already be doing. Otherwise it's a matter of throwing good money after bad and that never, ever works.
On the post: The Role Of 'Perceived Value' In Music Is Small And Fading Fast
Re: A simple Analogy
If there's a forest fire you'll still be choking on the smoke all the way up.
Of course, there is an elevation where the stenches dissipate if no other reason that the air thinning.
And as for that pristine mountain stream water your favourite brewski is made of, if you believe the ads it's still sterilized before the beer is made just like the ugly water flowing through downtown streams.
And that bottled water you're drinking? A few days ago it came out of the bottling plant's tap.
Yet people pay for air fresheners with the scent of clean mountain air, pay obscene prices for the bottled water they can get from their tap and dryer sheets with no end of outside scents.
The value these people ascribe to these things isn't always about the price, though high prices are expected for bottled water. In the end what I'm saying is that price and value are two different things.
I may pay more for U2 record than I would for Metric one but I'll value the Metric record more than U2 because I like them better.
Incidentally value != valuable. Value is an emotional response not a rational one. I may, and do, value a couple of my old, dog eared, beat up books more than I do gold but that doesn't change the fact that gold is more valuable due to its scarcity. A small charge for a song/video doesn't make it more valuable though it will imply more value than a freebie to a new fan or someone just discovering an act. We're conditioned to consider free music as bad music due to the fact that for decades the first discounted LP or CD were the truly awful recordings. That that doesn't necessarily apply in the Internet age doesn't change years of conditioning. For some of us the small charge implies a value, rightly or wrongly. Keeping in mind that value and valuable are NOT the same thing.
On the post: Chris Evans' Lawyer Threatens Forum; Apparently Unfamiliar With Free Speech, Safe Harbors & Streisand Effect
You'd think, given Evans role as Captain America and past role as The Human Torch he could have looked after his himself. After all that's what would have happen in the comics or movies, right?
On the post: Former Federal Judge Calls US Prosecution Of Megaupload 'Really Outrageous'
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Additionally if the depositor knew nothing an about the alleged criminal activities of the bank would not be automatically considered a criminal. Perhaps a suspect but not legally a criminal until AFTER a criminal trial had taken place. In our criminal justice system a person is innocent till proven guilty BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT.
Which means hat should criminal infringement charges be laid one day the prosecution still has to prove guilt for each and every user they charge. The defendant has to prove exactly nothing. Nor, at this stage has Megaupload or any of it's principles been proven, again beyond a reasonable doubt, to be a criminal operation.
That the DOJ says it is does not legally make it one. So far that's all anyone has. There's things like trials to go through yet.
On the post: Former Federal Judge Calls US Prosecution Of Megaupload 'Really Outrageous'
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There are people who have made it clear they've used Megaupload for cloud storage. Often for archival files which they can identify and which contain enough identifying information to confirm it without needing an IP address or anything else. The reality is what the judge says it is, the US government has seized people's property and is refusing to return it or offer an explanation of why it can't be returned.
That YOU choose to believe that Megupload was only for infringing material isn't anyone's problem but your own. Though you have no evidence for that. (It had to be doesn't count.) I agree with Mike that as a file locker there was a lot of infringing material on Megaupload, perhaps even the majority of files there. None of that justifies the refusal to return non-infringing files.
It's the refusal not the status of these files as backups that's important. The DOJ is obligated to act the same way with files on a disk that it would with money in the bank.
What works in the physical realm (money) has to work in the electronic/Internet realm (files) without legal reason for it. For example that the file is needed as evidence at trial.
I'd wonder if most casual users of Megaupload had gmail or other disposable mail accounts or even knew that TOR exists.
None of that is the judge's point. But you really, really want it to be. His point is law, which I'm sure he knows better than you do.
On the post: Why Is The US So Hostile To Foreign Entrepreneurs Who Want To Build Businesses Here?
The entrepreneur class wasn't broadly popular when it first came in for any number of reasons, including racism, when it first came in in Canada. Too often it seemed like we had become a citizenship of convenience when trouble broke out "back home" where, the feeling was too many of them spent most of their time. The low point was reached when Canada had to rescue a large number of citizens, all dual citizens, the last time Lebanon threatened to melt down.
Mostly, though the major problem was that the Federal Government hadn't explained to Canadians and to the migrants themselves the benefits and expectations. That's largely been cleared up now.
Today we're facing a growing shortage in skilled and highly skilled trades. In part because the Boomers, like me, are retiring even if we're not exactly leaving the workforce full time.
Also in part because for years it was seen that a university degree was more desirable than a trades certificate. Put badly we're up to our eyeballs in university graduates but try to find a skilled carpenter, as in cabinet maker. Electricians are becoming scarce, as are high end metal workers, plumbers and more. And let's not even talk about IT workers. Or the more specialized trades required in pulp and paper, wood products and more that can be lumped in the category of millwright.
These days a trades certificate in a high skill trade will get you more money than 85% of university grads.
So, along with the needed entrepreneurs, we're also bringing in the high end trades people as fast as we can find them. Most of them have tried the USA but can't get in for one reason or another despite the US facing the same skilled labour shortage Canada has. So we'll take them thank you. With the blessing of of our CEOs and Unions.
The 19th Century is long gone and with it the fears of that time. Additionally there's the reality that apprentices in the highly skilled trades spend as much time in a classroom as they do on the job, if not more. They're not a place for the semi-literate anymore if they ever were.
So if it's 19th Century fears and biases that are keeping people out of the States you're shooting yourselves in the foot. But keep it up if you like. We'll take them. Silicon Valley will have to deal with Vancouver, just a wee trip north on I-5 instead of right next door in San Jose.
We're all the better off having them here.
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