YI have a choice to not watch.
You do... for now. I fear the day when people track our purchases closely enough to notice when we aren't buying DVDs or cable. It's a small logical jump to come to the conclusion that because we are not buying we must (obviously) be torrenting, instead. The jackboots will then be dispatched forthwith. Think it can't happen?
It won't happen as long as they're selling books.
Oh, damn.
I'm not. Anyone familiar with medical records and computer security issues considers the security portions of HIPAA a joke.
The primary reason is that medical records are pretty much universally kept on MS Windows systems.
I guess I was lucky. Most of the medical software I've worked on has run on CentOS or RHEL systems.
There are several reasons why this makes data security a joke. The main one has been discussed here at
However, if you think about this for a few seconds, it obviously means that any time your Windows system is connected to the Internet, MS can silently install any new software they like. If your machine isn't reporting the contents of selected files to a
So if you're running Windows, you must assume that anyone who has "socially engineered" a connection at MS has access to all of your data.
And, less you think this is all spurious, you might look around in the records of the internet back in the 1990s when MS was first supplying systems with internet access. There are multiple reports of people getting curious about why their modem's lights were flickering when the machine was idle. Attaching a line monitor showed that the traffic was a list of the contents of the disk, being sent to a
This all has obvious application to HIPAA rules. My wife has worked with medical data for several decades now, at several employers. Every one of them worked exclusively on Windows systems. She has a Windows partition on her Mac "for work", and uses it a lot. She also has a work-supplied take-home Windows laptop. It's true that they use VPN to connect to the office computer systems. But this does nothing for the above issues. Since her Windows partition and laptop are connected to our home network, VPN just supplies an internet connection to her office machines, so their "silent upgrade" feature can work any time she's connected. This shoots down any claims that her office is protected from malicious sites (such as microsoft's
This is hardly a secret. We've discussed it here on
So the fact that HIPAA rules don't forbid the use of MS Windows makes those rules a joke. I'd bet that many medical records people understand all this. It should be no surprise that they treat HIPAA data security as a joke.
Oh, that's actually pretty simple. Block Microsoft's sites via firewall rules (not on a per-machine basis, that would be silly, but at the point of entry). You can still have machines outside of the network download all the security updates that a machine might need, put them on a DVD, and make that available to the workstations (via IT reps or whatever), but this way you control the flow of data.
It's interesting to consider non-MS systems in this light. Fully open-source systems are probably immune to such problems, since they'd be exposed fairly quickly. Apple systems are about half open-source, but most of the kernel and the UI have hidden source. Apple systems haven't been documented to have any behavior like those described above, so there's a good chance that such backdoors don't exist on Macs. But we can't prove this, because we aren't permitted access to the low-level source. Macs apparently don't do silent updates, but we can't prove that, either. Is there a way to either expose such backdoors or prove they don't exist on Macs?
Sure. Route the Mac's traffic through a device that's capable of inspecting the network traffic. If you don't have a decent router handy, any old box with a live linux distro would do.
Javascript executed faster === you get attacked faster.
FTFY.
Yeah, lots of very smart people working on making javascript much faster.
Too bad perl, python, ruby aren't getting faster as fast.
Luckily, Lua is.
Though I do prefer Python, I've got to hand it to the moonies, they're fricken fast!
how do I test software for IPv6 compatibility without any IPv6 connections? That would be like coding for Y2K compliance and never setting the clock on your test machine to anything after 1975
Well, Linux has been able to act as a router for a very long time; the same can be said about its ability to handle IPv6. So, to answer your question, you just have a section in your test suite that checks the software's ability to work with IPv6, just like you should have a section that tests handling IPv4 connections. With virtual interfaces, one doesn't even need to have multiple machines or network cards.
The Japanese spent ages working on a death ray in World War 2. How long til something like this ends up in active service?
Something like this?
Why does EVERY FOSS guy think it is about Windows and Office? Hint: It is NEVER about Windows and Office, it is about all those funky ass "mission critical" apps that do not run on Linux full stop. From the charting and accounting software, to the payroll apps, damned near everything in most business will NOT run on Linux, and a good 80% of them I'd say have NO equivalent on Linux.
[...]
So in conclusion while I'm sure it'd be nice for Linux adoption if all people did at work was use a browser or make documents, but that is rarely the case. It is all those OTHER apps that are used every single day that bite you in the ass, NOT Windows and Office.
QFT. You can make your X desktop look and feel like Windows, and you can install Open Office, Firefox, Chrome, etc, but good luck with the little vb6 app (of unknown origin, whose last known maintainer only speaks broken Swahili) that the entire company depends upon to run their day to day operations. But don't feel bad, because that same app has kept them from upgrading their Windows 2000 boxen to XP (let alone Windows 7) long before they ever heard of a "Lunix". (:
Unless you own a PS3.
...And are willing to let Sony yank features out of your firmware. I don't honestly think that 3D is worth losing the ability to boot Linux.
I noticed 2 things in this thread:
1. Several people got candid answers from Dell, and several got the run around.
2. The ones that got the run around were the ones that spoke to India.
This may have something to do with the fact that, in the US, many of the tech support reps are simply "doing their time". Unless they're really, really new, they don't give three shits about their job, and if a) they're at least moderately intelligent and b) happen to be speaking with someone who's at least moderately intelligent and the client is c) if not polite, then at least realistic, the rep will be quite forthcoming and helpful. This is sometimes to the detriment of the company that they work for - I consider this to be proof that karma (ENTERPRISE EDITION(TM)®!) does affect companies.
Or it might simply have something to do with my own, admittedly anecdotal, experiences.
Memory fault - where am I?