Posts by Trevor_Pott 6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010
And fuck you too. Half the commenters on this site qualify as hackers. Myself included. And no matter the colour of their hats, nobody deserves to be killed for cracking a system, mate. You're also failing to distinguish between ethical hackers, hacktivists, white hats, black hats, grey hats, mercenaries and so forth.
Kill off all the hackers and you'd wipe out 95% of the top talent in our industry. Fancy going back to running society on TI-83s?
That's not how it's analysed by CxOs. They ask "how likely is it to happen to us?" Then they balance cost versus perceived risk.
So let's say that this whole fiasco woudl have cost $35M to avoid in the first place by doing security right. Currently costs are at $43M, with that likely to reach $250M by the time it's all done.
So, that same $35M, invested into something else - let's say Apple stock - over the 10 years it would have taken to spend that all and evolve their systems into something properly secure (these sorts of security issues are cumulative and the result of organic growth and lack of joined up planning.) Is the rate of return equal to or higher than $250M? And what is the likelihood you'll see be hacked, even with bad security?
Understand that Home Depot may well still be financially ahead after this hack, despite the high headline numbers. That's what's the most horrible about all of this.
100% agree. And the fact that it's such a mess - remember, Microsoft has tried to "own" online authentication with it's own online mechanisms at least three times prior to this - is what gives Microsoft the advantage.
Everyone else - including Microsoft's past incarnations - have all been lackluster attempts to create what amounts to a separate online authentication system only very loosely coupled to AD. This time, Microsoft basically took AD and threw it in the cloud, then cut back as much of it as possible until they could declare a compromise made between security and functionality.
Microsoft then lashed it together with the onsite version and voila: a hybrid auth system that A) works and B) stands out from the pack. Everyone else has essentially the same auth system, just backed by a different player. This is your old, familiar auth system "stretched" into the cloud.
That will give it a hold that no other auth system will be able to match. Like it or not, Microsoft are still the 800lb gorilla of enterprise authentication. Now they have a real product for handling people outside the corporate firewall.
Everyone else who is out there trying to extend a consumer identity system into something enterprises will accept might as well just pack up and go home. This game is over.
Now, who will own the consumer identity space...that's a whole other question. But if Microsoft gets enough uptake from cloud services for Azure Active Directory, they may well win that too.
Yes, FIM requires "some help". I have, in fact, worked with it. It's a bitch the first time you do it. Not so much the second time. It is absolutely one of those things where your everyday sysadmin isn't going to make it work, but a capable expert can.
What's more important is that FIM is not required for Azure AD to work. It is used mostly to tie in third-party non-cloud applications.
The problem with all the other identity services out there is that they lack support. Some have sen uptake here and there, but it's nowhere near as universal as Active Directory. Microsoft is seeing explosive growth of AAD, and the latest version really does address (most of) the problems that the previous iterations had.
Also, if you're going to come on here and attempt to wave around Gartner as some indication of what's going on in the world, I will call you a fool. Gartner is an indication of what everyone was doing eighteen months ago. It has no bearing on what's going on today, unless you are hyper-conservative in your product selection.
Azure AD is, for all intents and purposes, newly minted as a viable product. Despite this, it is seeing massive uptake, especially from enterprises. This is because it is as close to a push-button extension of their own on-premises AD setups as possible. It is about eleventy billion times easier to use than FIM and it's predecessor - AD itself - is so widely distributed that it is the de facto standard for corporate identity across the planet.
Nobody - not even Centrify - can seriously challenge Microsoft here.
Now if you want to dispute the above, you go right ahead. But the instant you attempt to say things like I'm somehow writing what Microsoft wants me to write you're proving yourself to be nothing more than someone with an axe to grind (or a product to sell?)
My posting history on this site - as a commenter and an author - will prove that there is no love lost between myself and Microsoft. I am one of Microsoft's loudest and most vocal critics. I have managed to get myself put on the "do not communicate with under any circumstances" list at Microsoft.
To put it bluntly, Microsoft and I are emphatically not friends.
You won't catch me using Azure Active Directory. Not because the technology is bad, but because it's limited (at the moment) to the American Public Cloud. I'm no NSA sock puppet, and I won't hand my customers over to them.
But that quirk of mine doesn't extend to the whole rest of the world. Globally, while there is a great deal of resistance to adoption of the American Public Cloud, there is also a great deal of acceptance. We're split, and those that are doing the embracing are funneling hundreds of billions every year into it. That's more than enough for Microsoft to establish dominance and force us to use it through sheer inevitability.
The hell of it is...it's a good product. Azure Active Directory as it exists today is actually worth a look, from a purely technical standpoint. If it existed for regional service providers without any tie back to Big Mamma Azure's NSA cloud, I'd be all over it like white on rice for every network I run.
So, hey, hate all you want, mate. But you'll still end up being wrong. Microsoft have this one in the bag. I'm not happy about that, but they do.
Azure AD, done properly, jacks in to your onsite AD. So outages really don't hurt too much. (Except for roaming users...and they do cache creds until the next beacon.)
Azure AD was crap. Then it was mostly not crap. Now it's Microsoft Official Version 3 Working Edition. So we kinda can't ignore it any more.
This one, we just gotta learn to use..
What passion? Do I strike you as a Microsoft champion? Hmm?
No mate, Metro was a wobble about who is in charge of how a computer looks at feels: the customer or Microsoft. Microsoft lost.
Azure Active Directory is about making computers work no matter where they are in the world. This is something enterprises are screaming for, and Microsoft delivered. What they've got works, it works well and there is huge demand for it.
Hate on it all you want, it's already the de facto standard, and it ain't going anywhere. We're stuck with it.
No, I mean it in an absolute sense. Virtuozzo provide the best container tech at the moment. It's the most fully instrumented, the most stable, the most secure, the easiest to use. Even more so than Docker. Currently, they set the bar for excellence.
For the record, I'm a Linux admin by trade. I was a Windows admin for 20 years, but we largely parted ways about 3 years back. I'd been using Linux for about 15 years in production at that point, but about three years ago it became over 90% of new installs. Today, Windows administration makes up less than 20% of the systems I oversee. And that is dropping.
The sad part is, it's the Windows customers who bring in the real money. Linux customers are - in my experience - cheap barstwards who don't call you in until something is right good and broken. Windows clients are quite used to the idea of needing regular monthly maintenance.
Indeed.
If you want to find evidence of abuse by Google, look at their advertising agreements and ask "are Google saying you can't advertise with other search engines?" Look at Android and ask if they are preventing people from feilding phones based on other OSes if they choose to feild a Google-branded Android one. Can they feild a Fire-based and an Android-based phone at the same time?
"We are advertising our services on our own website while we also give others the ability to advertise on our own website" is not abuse.
Promoting your own products isn't abuse. Especially when you offer avenues for of the companies to promote their products, and you aren't locking customers in.
Your personal hatred for Google doesn't make them abusive. It just makes you unable to be objective.
Bullshit, witch hunter. Bull fucking shit. Steaming piles of it.
A monopoly is allowed to advertise adjacent services in conjunction with their primary service. They aren't allowed to lock you into it, or attempt to use their monopoly to force or coerce you to use their adjacent services.
Google are not doing any of the above. They are promoting their services on their site...but they also provide a mechanism for others to promote competing services on their site. There is no lock in. There is no exclusivity in advertising. They are not abusing their near-monopoly in any way.
Just as my local telco can offer me "quad play" services by giving me discounts for bundling mobile, television, land line and internet, so too can Google advertise their other services.
In fact, Google aren't even offering a "discount" for using their services. There isn't anything remotely like the sort of high-pressure lock-in I get from a telco. I can give you at least 50 really good examples of companies that abuse their monopoly or near-monopoly positions, but in this case, Google is not doing that.
There are a hundred damned good reasons to hate on Google and try to see them censured. Why the metric fucknobbin are you lot screaming into the inky blackness of despair with only the one fucking thing they aren't actually doing wrong as your candle?
Jesus metric monkey fuck, people. if you want to hammer Google get them for something that will actually stand up in court. They aren't abusing a search monopoly. This is nothing more than a witch hunt and you lot can't figure out how much a fucking duck weighs.
So build some fucking alternatives.
Google is dominant because nobody else is capable. breaking up a company "Because protectionism" sets a horrible precedent and will seriously hinder international investment in the EU. In turn, that will leave EU companies unable to compete with their global counterparts.
The solution here is investment in innovation and promotion of alternatives. Throw money at retaining and concentrating smart people until a better mousetrap emerges. If China can do it, why the hell is Europe so fucking incapable?
Google can weather a share price drop.
I doubt very much if the EU can weather the resultant economic downturn as all their businesses cease to be competitive with their global peers overnight. The resulting shitstorm will not hit Google, it will destroy the careers of the politicians in question.
If there are alternatives that actually work, let the government promote them and let the people decide.
I suspect I know which they'll choose.
"It is high time Europe stops being a US digital backyard. "
100% agree. So when are they going to stop with this "break up Google" foolishness and start work on developing software and services that excel, and thus compete with Google? Hmm?
Hating America - and I doubt very much you hate them more than I - is not a rational or valid reason to kick Google in the goolies. if you want Google out of your backyard, build something that's actually competitive. You've got eleventy billion governments over there. Get some fucking grants going!
It didn't violate my EULA to blow away Android and put Cyanogenmod on it. Though my service provider said they can't provide me technical support, because they don't keep staff on hand that know Cyanogenmod. That's fair enough; that's what I pay Cyanogenmod for. And that's between my and my mobile provider anyways; Google's not involved in that discussion at all.
"Neither did Microsoft wake up one morning and find that they were the biggest OS vendor. Either way, if you're going to abuse (or be seen to be abusing) a dominant position or monopoly in the market, you run the risk of the competition authorities coming along and jumping up and down on you."
Google isn't abusing - or aiming to abuse - it's position. Microsoft did and then continued to do so for the next 20 years abuse it's position to lock in customers and obliterate any form of competition.
Google doesn't care that you compete with them. Google find a service they feel they can do better and the go forth and do it better.
If there's something wrong with that, then Microsoft should not have been allowed to integrate a hypervisor into Windows Server. Microsoft should not have been allowed to integrate Storage Replica into Windows Server. Microsoft should not have been allowed to integrate deduplication into Windows Server. Etc. All examples of Microsoft building a feature into their product after several other versions were on the market.
Why is this bad for Google to do and not Microsoft? Microsoft is more of an abusive monopoly than Google. Google doesn't lock you in or punish you for leaving. Microsoft has spent hundreds of billions locking customers into their ecosystem and they absolutely punish you for attempting to leave.
Please, do explain.
So you want your economies to collapse because you drove out the most efficient IT services in a number of sectors and willingly crippled the ability of your local businesses to compete on a global stage?
It's not like the EU has local anything that can actually compete with Google at virtually anything it does. Hell, you don't even have a Bing, and Bing is terrible.
"Most non-IT people don't seem to know that there are other search engines and it has become a catch 22 situation as no-one can effectively enter the market as it simply costs too much. Small players are feeling the squeeze and that only leaves two alternatives which most people don't use."
Why should Google subsidise it's competition? And the barrier to entry isn't the cost of advertising, mate. It's the 24/7 global datacenter setup required to handle the exabytes of data you have to process to come close to Google's capabilities. Even Microsoft can't match Google.
This is the internet. Build a better mousetrap and the entire world will ditch Google in a heartbeat.
Myspace, meet Facebook.
Digg meet Reddit.
Every IM ever, meet Whatsapp.
Google meet...
Google meet...
Google meet...
...oh, that's right, nobody has made a better mousetrap yet.
Suspect that
A) the majors don't feel the need to advertise with Google for rankings
B) Google's internal teams don't feel like allocating the budget for advertising with the search team either for the exact same reasons.
Why advertise when everyone knows you name? People don't search for "cloud storage" they search for "Dropbox". They don't search for "free webmail" they search for "Gmail". When you're Kleenex you don't advertise against the keyword "tissue".
"Should Google be giving its products prominence over others, just because they belong to Google?"
Yes. Just like every other fucking company on earth is allowed to do.
"Is that a misuse of their position in search. "
No. Because decent alternatives exist, and you are not forced to use Google. In fact, you must go out of your way to do so. Regardless of the past, today good alternatives exist. At least "god enough" for the average punter. People use Google because they want to. Why should it be hobbled artificially with restrictions that don't apply to it's competitors when it isn't locking anyone in to anything?
This is very different from an actual monopoly abusing it's dominant position.
What is perhaps the most important element here is that the consumer is not harmed by Google's actions. They are getting the superior service for the lowest possible price available and are not prevented or even discouraged from looking for alternative services. The only people who face any difficulties are A) Google's competitors who must actually pay for advertising and B) Politicos who cannot control the people if they cannot control the message.
"fifty-year farrago of lies and deceit, bribery and political bullying"
Which, of course, is naturally worse than 1000 years of the same, plus murder, rape, incest, pedophilia, war, more war, pointless war, religious war, the burning of witches, crusades, and hounding homosexuals to suicide. Oh, and the publicly stated desire to not be bound by the "shackles" of human rights.
Yeah, I can really see why the alternative is so attractive you.
"You didn't address my point, which was that there is a conflict of interest between the best search results for the user (ie. most relevant) and for google (ie. promotes their other products). Care to engage on that?"
Google run the fucking website. Search is not a public service. It's not pay for by any government or tax dollars. There are many alternatives to Google. Search costs money; without it, you can't run a search engine of any kind, let alone at Google's scale. People acutally want Google services. The majority of searches for relevant services are predicated with "Google": for example, "Google Maps".
There's no reason Google shouldn't be able to promote it's own services on it's own website. You aren't forced to use it. Two out of the three top browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) which are responsible for 75% of the browser market between them default to Yahoo and Bing (respectively).
With the exception of Chromebooks, Google Chorme is not shipped by default with the operating system. (It doesn't ship by default on Samsung Android devices, which make up the overwhelming majority of Android, and it isn't on iOS devices either.)
Users are making a conscious choice to choose Google. They are choosing Google willingly. They like Google as it is, and they don't want it changed. They prefer Google services to those of others because they are legitimately superior.
Why should WalMart not be allowed to sell own-branded goods in it's own stores? Should Amazon not be allowed to sell/promote it's video or cloud computing services on it's main website? Why is Microsoft allowed to build in support for Azure Active Directory to Windows 10 or Azure Hyper-V Replica into Windows Server? Why should Apple be allowed to build iCloud into their phones instead of offering a choice that includes Dropbox?
There is no reason. Like Google, none of those examples are monopolies. In fact, some of them are defaults; something Google emphatically is not.
This isn't "Microsoft bundling IE." People must make an actual choice</I. to use Google's services here, and there are umpteen alternatives. In fact, there are alternatives enabled <i>by default that they must bypass to get to Google.
Does that address your bullshit?
"I'd like to know which species tried and failed to decode their own genomes."
Intellectualus Propertyus Lawyerus tried, but they failed. Sadly, the ecohippies and their biodiversity hullabaloo say we can't just wipe the species out. I get the preservation of most species, but - like the mosquito - I feel this one should be erased. We'll sort out the consequences later.
Give me 64 nodes and I will get you 100M IOPS with at plenty of room to spare. If you honestly think that's difficult to achieve you have not been playing with good gear. As the other chap said: Micron p420m PCI-E SSDs will get you there with room to spare. That's before we look into Diablo MCS or start lashing things together with A3Cube.
100M IOPS per cluster is so "done". The new push is to get 250M sustainable. And I can point you at at least three groups who claim to have hit that in lab. I'm told we're to see 500M IOPS in a single cluster by VMworld.
Yeah, induction cooking. It sounds like a great plan. Until they change the standard and you need to throw out all your frying pans when you get a new stove or vice versa. I'll stick with stuff that can be cooked over an open flame. Monopolies can't patent away my ability to make fucking fire.
Because it didn't happen. Azure is the perfect expression of the American Public Cloud. You can move your workloads from your local systems onto Azure and forget about them. They'll run perfectly, forever, with no load issues, never go down, never need backups and be cheaper than running on your own site!
Whereas in Canada the use of force must be proportionate by law. By law, unless you have legitimate reason to believe your life (or the lives of your family) are in immediate danger, there is no legitimate reason to engage in activity that may harm - let alone kill - a potential or actual intruder in your home.
The presence of an intruder in your home is not enough to qualify as reason to believe you life (or the lives of your family) are in danger. If you have the capability and/or training to disarm, disable or subdue an intruder without harming them then you are not allowed to use more force than that. If the intruder can be sent on his merry with a few trinkets and no harm to either party, then that is the option you must choose.
It is up to the police to capture the intruder, not you. And possessions are not worth lives; yours or theirs.
The concept that you can shoot someone dead for trying to get in to your house, and where they've made no threat to your (or your family's) life is...bizarre. At least to this Canadian. Possessions are not worth lives.
It's a fair question. The longer Microsoft can delay payment the better the chances that the amount of money in question will be less meaningful. Microsoft will grow as a company (in theory, anyways) and inflation will make tomorrow's billion worth less than today's. As long as the interest charged is less than inflation, litigation is a good bet in these situations.
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