Interesting Reading
Charlie Stross puts forth a theory in his post, Snowden leaks: the real take-home, that is worth a look.
He is British so the language might be tricky if you aren’t used to reading it, but I personally find the basic hypothesis interesting: Generation Y has no innate understanding of loyalty to its employers because employers no longer have any loyalty to their workers. Essentially Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher created Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.
As a Boomer I saw the process that Stross is talking about and watched it happen. In the military my Father had a better retirement package than was offered to me, and my package was overwhelmingly better than what anyone gets in today’s military.
WalMart was actually a pretty good job, when Sam Walton ran the company, but that died with him, as it died in almost all companies. Workers were no longer guaranteed anything more than a paycheck, so there was no reason to hang around, because you moved up by going somewhere else to work.
Using contractors for intel is insane, plain and simple. Contract employees have no incentive to stay around, and no more reason to honor a contract than that of the company that wrote it. Loyalty is a two-way street, and as the Boomers leave the workforce, the people who will replace them have no illusions about loyalty to their job.
23 comments
That was an excellent article by Charlie! And he said it much better than I could have, but he is absolutely dead right (as you have been on this whole issue. But like myself, we were there).
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the people doing the hiring really have no concept of ‘Loyalty’. And they completely confuse patriotism with loyalty! They are not at all the same thing. I am as patriotic to my Nation as anyone, but I wouldn’t trust any Politicians an inch! They don’t gave a spit about me (and have proven it) so I don’t see why the hell I should give a damn about them! They are only people, and are usually not there for long. It’s *JUST* a damned job! Just because a person is a ‘Politician’ and even worse, just because they are in Government, doesn’t suddenly make them super-human and 100 trustworthy, ethical, moral and a genius! Most of them are dumber than rabbits and as ethical and trustworthy as Enron, BP or NewsCorp executives (which most of them probably know personally anyway, and maybe even went to school with)! There are some exceptions of course, but they are in the minority and generally in the background and kept busy and out of trouble (to the others who have to tolerate these damned trouble-making do-gooders)!
BTW, I didn’t have any problem with the language. 😐 I mean, it was just standard English, you know… the language of the English. 😕 I have no idea what you mean mate. 😉 😛
Oh, this blog of Charlie’s was good also. And I think he’s right again. 🙂
The next moves in the Spooks v. News cold war
Yeah, it’s going to be interesting. 😉
Actually, what it boils down to for me, is that the people doing the leaking are showing their loyalty to the United States embodied by the Constitution, and not the government that is just temporary. When the government breaks the law or violates the Constitution the real patriot will raise hell about it, because the real purpose of the US Constitution is to limit the power of the government, not excuse it.
Governments are using the Global War on Terrorism™ to grab power and punish anyone who tries to object. The Snowden leaks are much more targeted at the government overreach than the Manning-Wikileaks case. They are being crafted to highlight that overreach, and reacting when the government does it, as in the interference in the flight of Bolivia’s President, and the detention of David Miranda. Things are getting worse for the government when sources for media outlets not privy to the leaked material start to break ranks and talk about abuses, like the Wall Street Journal article.
Charlie has a point and I think the UK and US government would like to have more control, but this could cost them the control they currently have. People were already talking about Internationalizing the Internet, and this will push that argument up the priority list.
What control the US currently has is because of their control of the root DNS servers, and that is a matter of defaults set by OS and web browser makers. Unfortunately as long as most consumers are using their ISP’s DNS server that’s going to be hard to change, at least here in the US. When the Feds took down the DNS of various sites accused of copyright violations, somebody created a Firefox plugin that would resolve the sites again, but nobody’s using it…
Talking about control, I am the network administrator for my company’s network. One of our employees, a snot-nosed kid in his first real job, decided to get irate about a simple request to not touch a piece of development infrastructure without telling us that he’s going to do it and yelled not only at me but at my boss. Let me get this straight, I control whether you will be allowed to go to the Internet or not, and can make your life very miserable by locking down the development infrastructure entirely so that you can’t even even see it, and you’re going to yell at me? Talk about your career limiting moves :twisted:. Just call me the BOFH :).
LOL @ Badtux! Yeah, I can relate! I’ve had similar experiences at various companies or project with dumb newbies! And I’ve taught them valuable life lessons. I usually fire them, after explaining the boss — newbie relationship and the fact that it would take me all of 10 minutes to replace them. Just call me an evil bugger! 😈
PS. This was after I was taught a valuable lesson as a newbie manager after giving a young know-it-all two more chances (because I actually liked the person and felt a little sorry for him/her) which eventually cost the company a large contract and I almost lost my own job! Some people just don’t learn or listen! But I sure learned my lesson!
This sounds like a potential member of the new password a week club, as well as the mandatory log-in after 10 minutes of inactivity. Those were features of the ‘SOB Group’ on the system I administered. I did stop requiring two forms of ID to pick up the new password after a while as a compromise with my boss.
Relating to your mentioning the US control of tier-1 & 2 DNS servers (mainly via ICANN) Badtux…
I’ve been investigating the OpenNIC Project for awhile now, and I’ve decided to sign up and make a donation.
Hmm, Some background is in order.
I’ve been having some problems with my DNS registrar(CrazyDomains) and asked my hoster Prometeus who they use and recommend. They pointed me to NameCheap who I discovered have an amazing deal going now. The problem for me is they don’t/can’t manage .au domains. I thought about it, and decided that what they offered for my .com/net/info domains was very good. And I liked their TOS/Privacy and many great reviews. I found that OpenNIC can give me a .oz domain (and it’s free) which actually appealed to me (Kryten42 . oz, adaptwww . oz, wizewebhost . oz) I like them, short and memorable. 😀 So, I moved my three .com domains to NameCheap (and one of them was transferred in about 3 hours! The other two are still pending.)
The deal I got was this:
Transfer 3 .com domains for 12 Months (with the ICANN xfer fee),
WhoisGuard protection for 12 months (on all domains),
Comodo PositiveSSL cirtificates for 12 months (for 3 domains)
All for a total cost of: US$$32.88!! :O
Domain xfer: US$$8.97 / yr each
WhoisGuard: Free
PositiveSSL Cirts: US$1.99 / yr each.
So, I was thinking about the discussion a while ago about your getting a Cirt Bryan. I think you can do it with Namecheap by using their free “NameCheap FreeDNS” service and a PositiveSSL cirt, and you don’t have to have your domain registered with them to do it. 🙂 It’s worth looking into.
Anyway, I really hope that OpenDNS takes off and they put a lot of pressure on ICANN! I’ll do my bit, you can be assured! 😉 😀
In other news:
CyberGhost is working great so far! 😀
The F-Secure Internet Security 2014 Beta testing is a PITA (as I expected of course!) I just submitted my 4th (original) bug report. *sigh* But, security is too important to leave it to *amateurs*! 😈 😉 😆
One of the NDA’s I sighed for this new WC Gaming rig design (which is scheduled to be ready for Xmas) expired last week. It was for a gag on the new 2.5″ SSD from Samsung. The Samsung 840 EVO Series includes SSD’s up to 1 TB with 1GB DDR3 cache. The RRP on the 1TB drive is AU$799, but we will be doing them somewhat less than that! And they are damned fast! 😉
I can also confirm that AMD will be charging over $1k for the 5GHz FX9590, but the 4.4GHz FX9370 has dropped to $400. Both MUST have a water-cooler (as they are already overclocked to max!)
Oh, and I found out why I was having so many weird results with the Intel Core i7 4770K! It seems Intel have been caught red-handed lying (yet again) about it. Rather than have the actual internal CPU chip (die) connected either directly (or via a copper spacer) to the IHS (the metal container & part that actually plugs into the MoBo socket), they have used standard type TIM (Thermal Interface Material, ie ‘grease’! The problem with that is that type of TIM degrades fairly quickly and has a life expectancy of about 2-3 years max before the CPU will burn out, and the manufacturing process apparently applies a relatively ‘thick’ layer which actually makes cooling them much harder! Also, the performance of that CPU will vary especially in overclocking (which the K series are supposedly designed for). On a few forums some of the more ‘enthusiastic’ overclockers have removed the IHS and the black grease Intel used, and replaced it with a special metal TIM (which I’m actually using for this design) called ‘Liquid Metal’ and have dropped the full working temp’s by around 15c (different people will get different results).
Ah well… Corp’s will do anything to save a few cents here and there! typical. 😆
I’ll look at NameCheap when I can come up for air. I’m readying an apartment that my Mother manages for a new tenant, as well as dealing the phone issues, so time is in short supply.
Yes, that Intel kludge is so damned typical of corporations these days. If they wanted the extra pennies, just include them in the price and stop jerking people around. Car makers are renowned for that kind of crap. A friend who was fond of Corvettes, would buy them used and then spend less than $100 on various parts to put in as soon as he got the car home. He said that $100 doubled the useable life of the car as the parts replaced cheap crap that was put in when they were built to save money. He paid $100 retail, so you know the better parts wouldn’t have cost Chevrolet anything like that on a car that sold for tens of thousands of dollars.
When you are a monopoly where are people going to go if you sell them garbage?
I switched all my domains to Namecheap last renewal cycle, other than two domains that must stay where they are for another year for various reasons. As for Intel cheapness, I’m running Xeons, which are hysterically underclocked, because I value reliability over performance. AMD had the chance to take that market from Intel with the Opteron, back in the day, but then they got caught up in their own internal dramatics and pissed it away. A shame, I worked on a quad-Opteron system in the early part of the Oughts that, once they released a dual-core Opteron, was seriously fast. Especially once we hung a disk controller chip directly off a Hypertransport channel :twisted:.
Kryten, the kid had three people including his boss pissed at him because he’d broken something on the development infrastructure after being repeatedly asked to tell us before doing something that’d affect the rest of us, and didn’t seem to get it. Well, he’s not doing that again. The passwords are changed and he ain’t getting them, and when he comes asking for the password to do something, I’ll just say “No, you already proven multiple times that you cannot be trusted with that password, tell me what you want to do and I’ll make sure it gets done.” I don’t know how he expects to get a job after this. I can’t imagine that his boss is going to have anything to say but “well, he seems to be a competent web jockey, but he has problems working as part of a team.” They won’t hear anything from before the “but”.
So it goes. This will be the third such dolt incapable of operating as part of a team that I’ve encountered in 30 years of doing this, and undoubtedly will suffer the same eventual fate as the others as soon as his replacement is hired. And no, this isn’t a GenY thing, the rest of his team is the same generation and they get along with each other just fine. Other than when this guy pisses them off by just doing shit without telling anybody.
You have to be super-good to get away with being an asshole. You have to write error-free code extremely quickly that meets all of the expectations of the client, and you had better want to be an outside contractor, because no organization will hire you full-time.
Your best shot at success is to create a killer app that everyone sees as solving a problem. Otherwise, it will be years of feast or famine, so you better also learn how to budget your money.
I’ve only known two people who managed to pull that off.
The only real ‘problem’ with GenY is that they don’t really expect much out of life. Their ‘dream’ is more limited than those who went before them. And no one can blame them for that.
I’ve only known one person who pulled it off (being a giant asshole plus being successful as a software engineer), but he’s currently in jail for killing his wife so I don’t know that he really counts.
I could be *really* mean to the kid (amazing what you can do with iptables firewall rules :twisted:, not to mention that I also control the corporate firewall so can redirect all his outside traffic to a page that does nothing but play the Barney theme song over and over again :twisted:), but I won’t unless it becomes necessary. I still don’t understand why he thinks pissing off his sysadmin is a good idea. It certainly isn’t going to make his life easier or more pleasant just with the things that I implemented to protect the team from him…
Hmmm. “Linus Torvalds” name springs to mind. And a few others… 😉
Here’s an article if anyone is interested (with pic’s) about what Intel have done (again! It’s not the first time).
Two Ways to Cool Down Your Defective Overheating Intel CPU
It’s a useful site I use now and then. 🙂 They have a good article on “Planned Obsolescence” by Manufacturers.
Thou Shalt Consume: The Story of Consumer Electronics [Feature]
I used to design very high-end multimedia workstations up until a year or so ago. I generally used a dual 8- or 12-core Opteron design (it depended on the requirements). They performed much better than the Xeon’s and were quite a bit cheaper also. The last system I designed for a large MM house over 2 years ago that is still working and hasn’t missed a beat. Mind you, these systems generally cost around $55k Not exactly *Consumer* grade! 😀 The hardest part of my design was trying to find some 2.5″to 3.5″bay adapters that would fit 16 HGST Ultrastar C10K900 SAS drives in a Promise VTrak VTE610sD! Most of my trouble was with Promise! Long story for another time. Idiots.
BTW, originally I was going to use the Seagate Savvio SAS drives, but these HGST’s had surprising (and significant) better performance, in the order of 100k IOPS R/W (from memory) for not a lot more in price. The client had 24 in total (plus 4 spares) and only had one fail in two years. Not bad. They just replaced them with new 1.2 GB versions (pretty good capacity for a 2.5″ fast drive). The client replaces all their HDD’s every two years to avoid problems. *shrug* They can afford to! The ROI on their systems is typically 6 Mths! 😆
Linus Torvalds can be a bit of a jerk, but he has to be in order to keep Linux from bloating into total collapse. He’s capable of working with other people, and does so every day. Everything he does is communicated well and out in the open, he doesn’t do sh*t in secret that annoys other people, he tells people what he’s about to do, gets their feedback, then does what he thinks is right for the reasons he thinks are right. Annoying a lot of people is just a side effect of no technical project ever being able to satisfy *everybody*.
AMD could have *owned* the high end server market. They had four-socket Opteron motherboards and Opterons to go into them, and now that virtualization and “cloud” is the big thing, could have pumped so much memory into those beasts that one of them could run several hundred virtual machines. At the manufacturer in question we were working closely with AMD to debug the issues with quad-socket Opterons… and then AMD suddenly decided to not give us the time of day, maybe because we were only selling hundreds of the high end beasts rather than millions and they wanted to sell millions. Well, our *low end* two-CPU machine sold for $39,000 (our high end quad-CPU one fully loaded with multiple hypertransport-connected disk controllers and multiple disk cabinets was $450,000), and there was plenty of profit to be made there. AMD could have sold us CPU’s at $5K apiece and we would have just shrugged and passed the cost on to our customers, there certainly wasn’t a Xeon at the time that could have compared. Instead, they decided to focus on consumer chips and make their money on volume by selling each consumer CPU at below their cost to manufacture. The TI-99/4A of CPU chips. Yeah, that always works out well…
It is all part of the narcissism that is normally referred to as being an asshole. Believing you are the best only works in the real world when you are. Being ‘good’ isn’t nearly good enough.
The Barney theme?!! Come on, there are international conventions against things like that, Badtux.
Linus makes decisions that can be really annoying, but they are generally because of a vision of the overall effect, and he does listen. He is difficult, but not impossible to work with, and he is very good. Linux was his creation, so he has inherent rights of control. He makes the final decision, but there are a lot of filters before it gets to him.
Yep, everyone wants to be MalWart and depend on volume while ignoring the huge number of people who are willing to pay for quality if they see it. Winning the war for the mass market requires a hell of a lot more money than producing high-end, quality products.
LOL Yeah, I was having some fun at Linus’s expense. I’ve dealt with him a couple times.
I’m still checking out VPN & security *stuff*. CyberGhost seems good so far, but it’s early day’s yet.
I just found this one (based in Dublin Ireland) and they have a very interesting setup. 🙂 I also discovered they have a 3 mth free trial of their Premium plan (called JADEITE), but you MUST sign up today! The other thing is that if you use Bitcoin, you will get a 50% discount off their plans.
They are called SecurityKISS
I’m actually interested in their ‘Ultimate plan’ because you get a dedicated IP and unlimited data transfer / mth (the Premium plan limits you to 50 GB / mth, which is enough for most people.) 🙂 Anyway, the dedicated IP would simplify things for me (since I have a dynamic IP with my ISP and they want way too much for a dedicated IP!)
Their Octopus & Exclusive Tunneling options look quite interesting. 🙂
Anyway, just thought I’d let you all know in case anyone is interested in the freebie. 🙂
Damn. I left out a couple details on the freebie.
“This giveaway will start at 2013-08-23 23:59:59 and finish at 2013-08-26 23:59:59” (I don’t know what TZ they are using, sorry).
To get it, you have to d/l their installer, install it, it will open a web page with the free offer and you just have to enter an eMail address. The s/w is a custom version of OpenVPN.
http://38.113.189.66/SecurityKISS/builds/00000000973f7dc1/SecurityKISSsetup.exe
Once you have your account, the email will give you details to d/l a version that is setup specifically for you (with all the cirt’s and logon details all ready to go). Makes it quite easy to use. 🙂
They have a lot of quite useful info on their site (even if you don’t want to use their services). 🙂
Tsk, tsk, tsk, Kryten, you are acting like you want ‘curtain on your windows’ and don’t believe ‘we are from the government, and we’re here to help you’ 😉
It is more than extremely annoying that people have to spend money and get involved with technical issues in order to achieve what should be the default – your data is your data unless you choose to make it public. There are a lot of reasons well beyond criminal activity that makes people want to keep their e-mail and comments private, and there is nothing unreasonable in making the government show they have a valid reason for looking at it. Obtaining a warrant from a regular judge is not exactly rocket science, it is generally speaking a boiler-plate form. ‘Probable cause’ is not exactly a monumental barrier to be overcome, and a warrant certainly makes the trial a hell of a lot easier for the prosecutor.
and a warrant certainly makes the trial a hell of a lot easier for the prosecutor.
trials? we don’t need no steenkin’ trials! 😈
That is the real problem with what they are doing – nothing they find will stand up in court if the defense figures out that it came from this hoovering operation. I fully expect this to become a major mess in large cases as the high-priced defense attorneys start getting evidence thrown out as tainted.
Bryan, the tact they’re taking right now is that a) the evidence was gathered with a valid warrant from the FISA court, but b) the warrant itself is top secret (as is the data) and you aren’t allowed to see it. The only person who is allowed to see it is a judge that has been cleared with a security clearance to see it and the only thing he’s allowed to do is ascertain that the evidence proves guilt as described, he’s not allowed to disclose any part of it to the defense.
People being put into prison based on secret evidence that they’ve never been allowed to see sounds un-American, but that’s how things work now here in the Soviet States of America…
– Badtux the Sovok Penguin
That might fly in a ‘military tribunal’, but it is going nowhere in a regular Federal court. The trial judge is going to want to see a warrant with the defendant’s name on it, and the FISA courts don’t provide that. That’s why the DEA et al. are hiding the source of the information, because they know they can’t get a valid warrant based on something from this hoovering operation. I assume they are using the world famous ‘confidential informant’ dodge to supply the ‘probable cause’ for a legal warrant. They may find that harder to do now that everyone knows what has been going on for years.
You need to re-read that legal brief again, Bryan. US v. Hammadi *was* in a regular Federal court, not a “military tribunal”. Hammadi went to jail without ever getting to see the evidence against him, basically knee-capping any hope of a defense (thus why he was forced to accept a really bad plea bargain agreement).
That’s “Justice”. For a Soviet definition of such, that is.
That was a terrorism case, and the FISA warrant was actually targeted at him, which is why it isn’t included in the ‘successes’ of the NSA hoovering program. That was a case that was actually the reason the FISA court was created, because it involved foreign communications.
His lawyers were arguing against the admission of evidence that was gathered under the warrant, arguing the warrant wasn’t valid. The trial judge reviewed the warrant and judged it valid.
The warrant was secret, but the evidence wasn’t.
What I’m talking about are non-terror related cases that are based on evidence from the hoovering operation and don’t involve foreign communications.