Posts by Trevor_Pott

Well now...

"If you as an individual could reasonably expect to be banged up as a result of ripping data out of the airwaves then any corporation should be just as liable."

That's the funniest thing I have read in a very long time. I thought the past few decades made these matters perfectly clear to everyone: corporations have more rights and freedoms than do ordinary citizens. Sad, but proven repeatedly to be true...

@Dave 54

Mitigation isn't a bad thing. Changing the balance between liberty and security too far towards security and not caring about lost liberty is a terrible thing. I repeat: you will find NO PURCHASE HERE for your ideas, sir.

I, and many other Reg commenters, would rather live with a little insecurity in order to have liberty.

Also: you can deplore my view of the people in power all you want, but it's true. True, true true, and true again. If the past fifty years of history haven't taught you this lesson painfully and repeatedly, then there is no hope for us ever to find a common understanding.

I find your take on the world a little Orwellian, and terrifying. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear?” I have PLENTY to hide. I’m a normal, every day citizen. I have beliefs that I don’t need certain people to know about. I don’t need to deal with the fallout that comes from bigoted narrow-minded ****s. I engage in activities from time to time that I really don’t need those same people peering in on.

Maybe I’m sneaking out to cheat on my significant other. Maybe I’m illicitly collecting original 1970’s Dr. Pepper bottle caps. Maybe I’m drag racing down a 10 kilometre long stretch of open prairie where there are no turn offs and no animals or people.

Maybe I am putting up political posters that encourage people to think critically and vote out the current bunch of twats, or donning my Guy Fawkes mask before joining Anonymous in a Scientology protest.

Maybe I got SO DRUNK at the bar trying to work up the courage to ask out that cute redhead that I passed out in a puddle of my own sick on the way home, or maybe I took the time to doodle on a friend’s face who did so instead.

These are all things that in various societies are considered crimes, but that I believe any individual should be allowed to engage in. IF our whole society were monitored ALL THE TIME, then we might as well give up, and live under Sharia law. TO be monitored all the time is to control your behaviour all the time.

I don’t want to control my behaviour all the time. I want to think critically and not endanger others with my behaviour, but I believe there needs to be a large amount of flexibility in the application of these “grey area” laws. Your world has everyone acting like perfect little automatons in public, terrified constantly of stepping over the line, or so rigidly personally controlled they never make a mistake, never screw up, and most importantly NEVER HAVE FUN.

I don’t know about you sir, but I’m 18 with less than a decade’s experience.

I /require/ the ability to go out in the world and make some dumb mistake. I need to ***up, to have fun, get drunk, party hard and LIVE my life. I won’t have the opportunity to do so for long; eventually I will be older, with even more responsibilities than I have now, and frankly…the cool beautiful people won’t want to play with me because I’m old. So I will have, in my old age, only the memories of the times I DIDN’T WASTE in my life to live on.

If I am not endangering anyone else with my antics, then the man can eat 10,000 buckets of foul and expire.

If you want to be all proper and stiff upper lip all the time, you go right ahead. I’m going to go put some posters up, dress up like a statue and cause clucky old hens to freak out when they see me on CCTV.

@intractible postherd

Litteral minded much?

a) Help an old lady across the street: of course you ask first. She might be offended if you just help her across, being an individual who has a psychological need to do things herself. It's still called "not being a douche" if you help someone you see trying to cross the street who is having problems.

b) Driving with due care. If there is an open stretch of hiway with no turnoffs for kilometres down the way, it’s perfectly flat prairie with nothing in your way, then I personally don’t see a single thing wrong with taking a few kilometres to enjoy yourself. IN our province however, speed fines double when passing emergency workers or through construction zones for a reason. What might be morally okay to get away with on highway number backwoods when you can see forever down the road (say speeding or stunting,) is emphatically /not/ okay when you are in a position to hurt others.

c) Report crimes when you see them. An example would be “phoning in an impaired driver.” A major campaign in our province right now, and quite a successful one. If you see eomeone nick jewels from a store, CALL IT IN. If you see a couple of lowlifes beat a dude up then leave, CALL IT IN. (See if the dude is okay as well, and maybe get an ambulance.) As with anything else there’s BALANCE to think about here; don’t call in your neighbour because he has some donkey porn. That’s his bloody business, and noone else’s. Don’t call the cops because you don’t like the look of some chavs. DO call the cops if those chavs are sitting around comparing weapons in public. Critical thinking! It should be a required skill to be allowed to pass grade school.

d) Wear your hard hat in a construction zone ALONE would save more lives than anti-terrorism legislation. The number of people killed each year because they didn’t bother to wear a hardhat in a constriction zone. And yes, it’s a danger to others. I didn’t mention seat belts, but I WILL mention hard heats. You are NOT taking a risk with your own life. You are taking a risk with the lives of EVERYONE ON THAT PROJECT. Any construction worker will tell you that when on a job, you all are relying on eachother to keep an eye out for one another. If you get killed because you were a dumbass, then there the folks you were supposed to be keeping an eye on are now left without your services. If they don’t know you died due to excessive stupidity, and they are counting on you to see if “that giant wire is getting lose, and will snap out and bisect me,” then it might end very badly for them.

e) Call before you dig. I don’t know how it works where you live, but here in Alberta out power lines are largely underground. We actually have a reasonable number of deaths each year in this province from some idiot going through the mains with a backhoe. (Or even a shovel!) Simple things, you know. They save lives.

Anti-terrorism spending doesn’t.

@dave45

You are wrong.

What history has shown unequivocally is that those who are the greediest are the greatest threat to the common good. The problem with placing your faith in the state is that those who rose to power in the state are those who craved this power. They are, to an individual, greedy. They will do anything they can not only to retain the power they have, but to perpetually increase it.

You argue that human nature means that “bad people walk among us.” I can’t and won’t argue that is wrong; but I will state that the worst offenders are most often those in power over the rest of us.

Everything in life is a risk; and we all of us have to accept that living in a “free” society bears with it the risk that we may be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We hedge this by employing police forces, intelligence services and military personnel to protect us against the worst threats. Still, there is a balance to be had between the liberties of individuals and the common good. No one side of that equation can ever be allowed to hold too much sway.

The only way to perfectly secure a computer is to disconnect any network cables from it, remove all possibility of physical access, and bury the thing in some magical hole where neither war nor natural disaster can harm it. (Which is impossible since eventually the sun will expand and destroy the Earth anyways.)

Similarly the only way to perfectly secure a society is to completely isolate every member of society one from the other, pad them in bubblewrap and prevent them from being exposed to germs, ideas, improper foods and every anything else. Unfortunately humans are an imperfect species and we will eventually succumb to various genetic defects or simply “old age.”

Just as a computer buried under 80,000 tonnes of cement in the worlds darkest bunker sealed from any human ever accessing it is completely and utterly pointless; so is a society in which there is no freedom, but perfect security.

I fear that you will not be able to convince the commenters of this forum that the society you seek is just, and they (and I) tend to believe the balance between liberty and security lies much further towards liberty than the world you describe.

I am find with having my family and my person left “at risk” to nebulous domestic terrorism. There are bigger fish to fry; more important places to spend the time and manpower that would have a more immediate effect on reducing the chances of my dying suddenly.

If every dollar put into domestic terrorism prevention, (and indeed invading the countries of brown people to steal their oil,) were put into helping the homeless of my city with their various substance abuse problems, My chances for survival would go up dramatically. You could build interchanges at some of the busy and fatality-accident-prone intersections in my province, saving dozens, maybe hundreds of lives a year. (“Terrorism prevention” has saved how many lives? Even one?)

Diverting funding from invading other countries to actually paying our military personnel properly would provide us with a standing army of competent, well trained, happy individuals whose services we can retain for over a decade each. These individuals can be deployed to help with disaster relief efforts both domestically and in other jurisdictions. When necessary, they could don a blue beret and make us proud by keeping the peace in the areas of the world that need it most. (Very different task from invasion.)

If the monies that were wasted on telephone interception of ordinary citizens, spy cameras, speed cameras, red light cameras, camera here, camera there, ID card this, database that, track, track , track were actually spent on hiring, training and retaining competent wetware, then we’d be far ahead of the game. Good polices and intelligence services, paid well, with proper oversight and no monetary reasons to turn corrupt can do wonders for a community.

Not only enforcement, but helping citizens in need out, doing active crime prevention via education, training and awareness efforts as well . We don’t need to know what Joe and Jane normal are doing all the damned time in order to “prevent the crimeses!!!!”

We need to work every day with regular people to make them more alert of their environment, the people around them, responsible for their own actions, and most importantly putting caring, responsive figures of authority in easily (and rapidly) acceptable places for when something goes wrong.

You can’t predict Bad Things, and you can’t fully prevent them However, a society that cares about it’s individual members, as well as the good of the whole can work together to raise the alarm when Bad Things do happen. If you haven’t wasted your budget on stupid pointless cameras, you can get some boots on the ground and on scene quickly.

When people realise that they *will* eventually be caught, because there is enough manpower to never give up, then the only crimes left are crimes of passion, or extremist (usually suicidal) belief. Neither of which anyone will /ever/ be able to prevent.

Precrime is impossible; so do your bit to make the world a better place instead. Help an old lady across the street. Don’t speed through construction zones or anywhere else you are likely to kill someone. Report crimes when you see them; even if it’s “just” an impaired driver. Don’t let your buddies drive drunk, and sure as hell don’t be that dumb yourself. Wear your hard hat in a construction zone, call before you dig, and don’t get between a sysadmin and his coffee.

If even “most” of our society paid attention to the suggestions in the previous paragraph, it would save more lives in a year than “anti-terrorism” spending has saved, well…

…ever.

@Intractible Postherd

If you're ever in Alberta, I'd be delighted to spot you a pint!

@Sarah

Oh, well if you wrote the headline...

...that's okay then. There's more leniency for the Moderatrix than most.

@Irish donkey

Hear hear!

@Irish donkey

Stick around. El Reg seems to be expanding it's author base. While I have my problems with the opinions expressed by many of them, I think you'd be hard pressed to find many news publications with a more diverse set of opinions on virtually any topic.

It's impossible to please everyone. There seem to be to responses to this truth, the first to pick a camp and please only them. (Daily mail, Fox news, etc.) The second seems to be to displease everyone equally. For all the faults and flaws of El Reg and all the very human people who work there...

...I think displeasing everyone equally is the more honest approach to take. You may get an article (like this one) that angers one set of people (supporters of Stallman,) but a couple of days later a different author will write an article telling us how evil ACTA is, and why it needs to be buried in a shallow grave.

There are many complaints you can level at El Reg, but organisation bias is not one of them. Individual authors have biases. (Myself included; I’m human, how could I not have some biases about some things?) El Reg as a collective does not.

It just hangs around and takes the piss out of everyone all the time. Isn’t that better than the “fair and objective” style of shameless biased Fox-news style reporting almost every news organisation on the planet is guilty of?

That’s not rhetorical…after all the “I’m done with El Reg, GTFO” moaning in this thread I am legitimately curious. It would be nice to know if the things I value in a news organisation are considered “totally out to lunch” by others.

@Quxy

Please do not believe that all of us at El Reg share the same opinions about, well...anything.

The opinions of the various authors are as diverse as those of the commenters, I assure you. To counterbalance the article here, I would point you at Michael Geist’s blog.

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

Well worth the time spend reading it, and he updates is quite regularly with new, relevant information.

@Ed Vim

People are okay with the idea of "going over there to kill some people that are also over there." The instant the idea becomes "some people over there want to kill one of us people over here" the world starts to seem a little smaller.

Almost everyone in the western world has committed “crimes” punishable by some pretty terrible punishments according to strict Sharia law. I can say this without reservation, and frankly about 99.9%+ of the population of the western world because so very few of us understand the real differences between the two cultures. Anything from using Mohammed’s name in vain to “carnal relations” under about a squillion different contexts to looking at the wrong woman improperly are all pretty damning in their culture.

We like to think of them as simply crazy, or misguided, or any of a dozen different things that boil down to “their view on life is wrong and ours is right.” To them, we are beneath contempt; sinners of the worst sort and defilers not only of their God, but of everything they believe to be important. Oh, the average Muslim in a poor country probably doesn’t care two hoots about any Western country. But the even slightly better off folks; those with education and exposure to foreign media…it is from them that the fanatics are plucked.

As with out culture, it is also from these same affluent people that our leaders are chosen. In our case, we have leaders steeped in the cult of “me, me, me,” and thus our culture has moved towards the glorification of the self above all other interests. We have only been a “culture” for a few hundred years, and yet look how very deep that influence has become.

To contrast, there has been over a thousand years Muslim leaders who have felt their religion, and with it the strict control of behaviour is critically important. “Me, me ,me” isn’t what rose to the top in their society; “conform, conform, conform” is what did.

We can’t understand it. I’ve studied it for years, and taken quite a lot of time out to discuss the topic at length with academics, devout hard line Muslims, and others. I still can only barely wrap my mind around how truly different our cultures are.

So the idea that these people that we don’t understand, who believe in things we find scary are willing to work through the “proper channels” of our society to get what they want is ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING to us. It means we have to look at the situation and say “we might not understand them AT ALL, but they obviously are beginning to understand us quite a lot.”

Since we are all of us guilty, it brings forth a primal fear: what if they come for me next?

It is perhaps unlikely, but that doesn’t stop people from being afraid, and what people fear, they lash out at.

@Pete 2

Remind me never to hire you for anything ever...

@Shaun 2

What kind of world do you live in? "Long term savings?" The setup you are describing would cost me more in a single year than I have budget for THE NEXT FIVE. Not my “Server budget” for the next five, but my entire IT budget. Desktops, switches, servers and licensing. I work for a small business; thus my blog is about what helps SMEs try to get the same quality of hardware and software as the big guys without having to spend more on IT than the annual company revenue.

It might be viable if you are a large corporation with over a thousand people, or a medium-sized municipality. For a company with 60 people, what you propose simply isn’t going to happen. It also needs to be mentioned that “4 hour response” isn’t remotely good enough. If something goes down, the VMs need to be moved and fired back up immediately. 4 hours downtime on the wrong day would see the difference between profit and loss that year. That means not only collapsing all your eggs into a small number of baskets; but having an extra super-expensive basket to boot.

What you do with really expensive hardware and software we do with wetware. Manually having someone yard the drives out of server 1, and put them into server 2 is a downtime of about 5 minutes while the backup boots. The servers themselves cost less than $2000, and software is free. In the worst case, where we have to move VMs the old fashioned way, we are down for a couple of hours while they stream across the network to their new home.

What we pay in extra wetware time to do this kind of maintenance is, (and I did the numbers) about a twentieth the cost of the licensing alone. Licensing would be cheaper if we had fewer servers, but then we need significantly more complicated and expensive servers. There is no escape from that game except refusing to play.

At the end of the day, we have a choice: get locked into an American vendor, and send our money into the back pocket of some rich guys we never met, or spend less than that amount to pay the salary of someone locally.

You say all the “problems” with virtualisation go away with the right software and hardware. Well, you’re not 100% right about that; I have played quite extensively with the niftier virtualisation software. It’s CLOSE…but it’s not there YET. Still, it’s far easier than doing it by hand, I agree.

The "problems" I am highlighting are that UNLESS you buy the ridiculous software, and get very complicated and expensive servers, these are real, honest-to-god issues. Did you read the article, sir? I am pretty darn sure that I mentioned that very blatantly.

Or are you just trolling? If you are, I give you +1 internets, because I bit.

@AC

I used to use Virtual Server 2005. I then moved to VMWare server, (both 1 and 2). I have tested or put into production Hyper-V, KVM, XEN, Virtualbox, VMware Server 3, 3.5 ESXi 3.5 and I currently run my entire network on ESXi 4.

(Admittedly, I have VMWare Server 2 on a few overpowered file server as super-emergency backup capacity, since it will handle the same virtual infrastructure version.)

As to "more reliable solution," ESXi 4 is FANTASTIC. I use "VHD" because "virtual hard drive" makes sense when you say it in English, and the acronym then decodes into something meaningful. What the merry nether fnord does VMDK decode into that normal people can understand?

As to the boat analogy, your version uses numbers and percentages. PHB’s eyes glaze over right about…

…there.

@Shaun 2

How are the six shiny new servers and management software that costs more than real estate going to help me with the eggs in one basket problem?

And where am I getting the money for the overpriced software?

@Tom Chiverton 1

Well first off, because I use ESXi. There are possibly extant applications that can do this, but I have no understanding of how to accomplish what you are describing in ESXi 4. (In 3.5 it was possible; the service console wasn't crippled.)

The applications I have seen that would give users access are actually reasonably information-dense. They would require the user to know what the heck they are doing. Also; there are, (at last count,) something like 15 VMs they would have to be aware of, and dozens more that Touching Would Be Bad.

I could lock them out of a certain set of VMs, depending on the management software. The question though is where do you draw the line? As soon as they can manipulate their VDI VMs, they will want access to the other VMs their work depends on.

Take for example VM X, which is a VM hosting a rendering engine that backs onto VM Y which hosts a database…they are going to demand access to VM Y for the odd occasions VM Y does something strange. Then what happens if they decide VM Y is doing something strange, when it’s not? (Perhaps it is just heavily loaded, thus laggy.) They reboot VM Y without turning off the rendering VMs, and I end up having a very bad week.

In other words; it’s not quite as easy as all that…

@AC

If no corporations offer the product I require, then the corporate community has indeed failed to deliver. "The open source community" doesn't get a free pass just because it's open source. If I went to a car dealership and required a car that had both anti-lock breaks and an MP3 player, I would consider it a failure of car manufacturers to anticipate demand if there were no models available with both options.

I don’t care if “the open source community” has no single CEO or board of directors. “The open source community” gets no slack, special favours or happy meal points from me simply because of their business model. If it wants to think of itself either as a bunch of individuals with no cohesive direction, or a hivemind monstrosity there is no difference to me. “The open source community” in whatever format he/she/it/they/pie chooses to look at itself as simply hasn’t produced the right shaped peg for this particular hole.

It is not up to the implementers of software to adapt to the whims of developers; it is up to developers to anticipate the needs of implementers. In this case, developers have failed to recognise and exploit an open niche. To me that is a (to date) failure. You can disagree with that all you like, or try to argue semantics or terminology, but as far as I am concerned it simply is a failure to recognise need and opportunity.

You choose to take my words as complaint; they aren't. They are merely statement of fact. In the case of "delivering what I require for desktop management software," the open source community has failed. For that matter, the paid community has largely failed as well. As good as Spiceworks is, there are some holes in it that need work.

Pointing out gaps in offerings isn’t complaining. It’s merely being observant. There’s also dash of holding everyone, regardless of business model or software licensing terms, to a high standard.

You can of course take the typical open source evangelists’ approach of “well, if there isn’t the application/script/etc. that you want, then you write it and quite expecting someone else to.” I’m not a developer by trade; I’m a sysadmin. I can script, but I certainly can’t write anything the quality of Nagios or Spiceworks. I also shouldn’t be expected to have to be a developer of that calibre just to maintain a network. “IT” is so large that it requires many different people of many different skill sets to keep operational. My job is to find the best of what is available and put it to use. It is the job of other people to identify software niches and fill them.

Those people have in this case failed. With luck, a group of developers is right now working on a product to fill exactly this gap; if so, I applaud them and look forward to trying their software out.