I'm sick of hearing "Company A" committed fraud. Companies don't commit fraud, people do and they need to be charged, prosecuted, and if found guilty fined or jailed. Fining companies doesn't work because they (especially banks) just roll their fines into cost of doing business. If people were charged and had to pay the price this would stop or at least be slowed down.

Nope thatâ(TM)s not how they work. They donâ(TM)t speed up, even when restoring 100â(TM)s of gigabytes of data from Network Attached Server. Iâ(TM)ve seen this MANY times. Defies all logic, but trust me the power savings costs a lot of performance.

While I agree that many programmers have absolutely no idea what they are asking the system to do when they write code, there is a much easier fix to slow software that is just a BIOS setting away. I find that most computers that I touch that my clients are using have power savings turned on (Balanced Power in Windows control panel). I "theory" the CPU is supposed to slow down when little activity is going on and speed up when it gets busy. I the "real world" most machines never speed up or take so long to speed up that they never shift out of low power mode. I can't tell you how many 3+GHz systems I've touched that are running a 1+Ghz pretty much all the time. Turning this "crap" off in the BIOS ALWAYS speeds up the system by a significant amount. Yesterday I tripled (3x) the performance of a new Dell server that was being deployed by one of my clients by just turning off the power savings in the BIOS.

Some of the worst age-ism I've ever seen is in entry-level IT programming positions. Taking 40- or 50-something coal miners and making them programmers is totally unrealistic. Even if they were trained and competent NOBODY would hire them.

I would never expose RDP port to the Internet without using something like RDP Guard. You can set it up to protect RDP (and other ports as well) from brute force attacks. I'm an avid user of the software and recommend it to clients all the time. Best $79.00 you can spend to add a significant amount of protection to your servers.

Therein lies the problem (fraud?). DDS Safe is endorsed by the ADA but apparently they aren't really taking secure onsite and offsite backups as promised. Otherwise they would have just restored from the backup images. Also, everyone touting "just copy to an external hard drive and disconnect" don't understand the amount of data or the time that that solution will take for a dental office that has digital X-rays, 3D pans, etc. and you can't have enough hard drives to rotate through to protect yourself. We had one office where the ransomware infection slept for 10 days before kicking in (we were able to restore their program volume back 11 days and their data one day before the encryption to recover). Shameless plug: as a provider of backup and disaster recovery solutions for 15 years we can say that doing this properly and in a timely manner is WAY more difficult than it might first appear. Manually making a single copy of your entire server at the end of the day and disconnecting the drive would give you poor coverage (you can lose an entire day's production) and require hours per day to accomplish (many dental offices have >1TB of active data), which most offices are not willing to endure (nobody wants to stay around until 8:00-9:00pm to make the backups and leaving the drive connected makes it vulnerable). www.timetravelerbackups.com

Quit trying to make the damn laptop so thin and put a good keyboard in it. IMHO Apple's obsession with thin is form over function.

RICO act - The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as the RICO Act or simply RICO, is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. This has proven over and over to be a criminal organization and needs to be treated that way. How many times do they have to steal huge sums of money from their clients until something is done about it. BTW-there are other banks that fall into this same category (JP Morgan, HSBC).

Not entirely true. Since just about everything is measured against US dollars, a rise in bitcoin could be caused by a fall in the dollar. All depends in what you gauge the rise/fall against.

You are correct that regular CIFS shares (external USB/eSATA hard drives, shares that are accessed with user level security) don't work against the REALLY ugly versions of ramsom ware. My company (shadowsafe.com) found out years ago that this can be solved by placing your backups on a device that isn't accessed by any regular users and only by the application taking and maintaining the backups. You, of course, also need offsite copies of things, but that protects against a different set of events.

Some would say this is bad programming, but if you are programming a pacemaker, heart monitor or the like, an infinite loop is EXACTLY the construct you want. I've written some pretty ugly code (breaking out of deeply nested loops) when a simple GOTO would have cleaned things up a lot. They are all tools that have a place and time to be used.

Python not used in production code? Many of Google's services are (if I understand correctly) written in Python. I've written production applications in Python for 10+ years. I think you underestimate the power of this language both as a superb teaching tool and as a real world cross-platform application programming language.

This is fraud and the people that committed it should be arrested, tried, and convicted. Having them pay "fines" won't stop this sort of activity, but sending corporate management to jail will most certainly stop it. This is just like the banks who pay the fines and chalk it up as a cost of doing business.

A refund is nice, but until people go to jail for committing this fraud these big companies are going to just keep doing this to us. Companies don't commit crimes like these, people do.