It is not clear whether or not those accounts are the free accounts, or if they are paid for.

I switched from Drive to Dropbox a while ago. I wasn't cool with having a fair amount of important data locked up in a 'free' solution that could be turned off at any time. I'd rather pay the couple of dollars a month for Dropbox.

Gee, does that surprise you? They are being investigated by the FTC and who only knows how many private practice lawyers looking for a pay day on this one.

It would be stupid for him to apologize or offer any sort of statement that could be construed as culpability.

Am I the only person who thinks that this is going to be used by kids wanting to make games about shooting up their schools, or even worse, terrorists planning attacks in major urban centers?

The Army already has their own game, so it's not exactly far fetched fiction at this point.

https://www.americasarmy.com/

He may be an idiot but looking at this from a SIGINT point of view I have to ask myself: Why the hell did they arrest the guy? If they had a lick of sense they'd have flipped him, spiked the phones with some innovative spyware ...

IANAL, but my suspicion is that there are too many legal complexities involved in doing that. They would be tainting the evidence or something similar.

Just look at all of the blow back over the Playpen operation and the spyware that was used there.

That's the difference between law enforcement and the military. With law enforcement, there has to be some chance, however minute, that the actions taken are being done to eventually prosecute someone.

..shocked I tell..

Wait, no I'm not. This thing is the boondoggle of our generation and has been since the beginning.

If the legislature gave two shits about the citizens of California they would cut their losses and scrap the project. They don't and they won't.

Making Linux distros available is all about Azure. MS wants people to use their cloud platform, and they have acknowledged that there are more than Windows Servers on the internet.

If you look at all of their current marketing materials, they are taking the Big Tent approach to IaaS.

You can run the numbers for yourself if you want. "Work Miles" are miles with passengers in the car. "Total Miles" are miles that I drove that day with the app turned on.

Here is the spreadsheet that I sent to my tax guy for 2017

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uhw8...

One thing worth noting is that I got all of my "Tax Set Aside" back. I had been setting aside 50% of what I earned for taxes because Lyft 1099s the drivers and does not take any taxes out.

YMMV - I'm at about a ~30% tax rate from my primary job (earning over $150K / year) so that likely played into how much of the Lyft earnings I got to keep.

Thanks for the tip. I will have to ask my CPA about that next year. I am with State Farm and they just had to attach a rider to my regular policy. As long as 50% of the miles that I put on my car are related to Lyft, I do not need a separate commercial policy. The rider was pretty inexpensive, ~$10-15 / mo IIRC.

I have issues. Says the guy posting as AC trolling people on the Internet.

Right back atcha buddy.

That $75-100 is raw income. They 1099 the drivers. I was setting aside 50% for taxes out of an abundance of caution. I got all of it back, but I am not certain on what the breakdown was. I have a regular job as well, and I have a CPA who does my taxes.

In the last two months I averaged about 675 miles per month. I usually only drive on Friday and Saturday nights. Of those miles, ~45% of them are 'work' miles with customers in the car. The rest are just me driving around.

I usually keep driving. I drive for fun, not because I am trying to optimize my payout. I will choose a destination, like a place to eat dinner. Then I will drive there and get whatever rides I can along the way.

My perception is that I get more passengers when I am driving. That is purely subjective though. I do not have any metrics. The perception of time is likely different when I am parked and reading a book, versus driving around.

I drive for Lyft sometimes, but the pay is similar. I earn anywhere between $8 and $20 an hour. Mostly it averages in the $10-12 range. (In the Portland, Oregon area.) I have only been doing it for a few months. I have talked to some guys who were doing it when ride sharing first came to the region, and they said that they were making around $800 a night on the weekends. I pull around $200 for ~6-8 hours on Saturday. Any other night I am lucky to get between $75-100.

I do not understand how people can try to make a living doing it.

I do it for a few reasons. I like to drive and talk to people. It gets me out into the real world and off of the computer. I also appreciate that I can write off car maintenance, tires and things like that. I would also be able to write off my cell phone, but my main job already pays for that.

You have a pretty sharp tongue and a harsh attitude for an AC.

You seem like one of those trolls who expects perfection and is uncomfortable living in a world where nothing is perfect. Data breaches will happen to anybody. It is not a matter of if your systems are breached, but when.

Your future where things move back to private ownership are overlooking the increased scarcity of resources. Getting into, or staying in, the co-location business is only going to increase in cost.

Meltdown allowed you to dump the contents of memory of other VMs on the same nodes as you...

I know of at least one other critical Azure vulnerability that would have let tenants in separate VMs on the same hyper visor futz with each other's memory addresses. That one never made it public though, because the researcher responsibly disclosed. The only reason I know about it is because a guy I grew up with was in the Incident response chain at Microsoft and helped to coordinate the patching.

I got Azure patches for the Meltdown flaw a good couple of days before Cisco had the UCS patches available. MS even initially allowed us to schedule VMs in patches to mitigate the application impact. Though when we were about half way through, MS forced the reboots because the vulnerabilities were disclosed at that point.

What's your plan for preventing that in the future and for dealing with it if it's happened?

The future plan is the same as the current plan. Detect the breach. Verify the accessibility and integrity of the data. Notify the client.

Similarly, people are more likely to try to DDoS Azure or AWS than they are your in-house server.

Nobody can DDoS all of Azure. Have you seen how many regions they have? Plus, lots of luck DDoSing those ExpressRoute circuits. Totally different infrastructure and paths into the data center than the stuff that they front out via Azure to clients. Besides, haven't you heard of local caching? How long is the DDoS going to last? The business impact will be minimal. The drives in our laptops are 250GB of SSD. They can cache plenty of recently accessed files, and thanks to OneDrive, do so just fine. (Of course there are plenty of other places to get file services in the cloud, Box, etc.)

MS also offers geo-redundant storage for ridiculously affordable rates. All you need is a like set of VMs in another region and you can be back up and running in minutes, if that. Besides, the web tier for all of the major apps is already redundantly load balanced across regions. How long do you think it takes to play the transaction logs into a recovery database? That is assuming that you aren't already replicating the changes at the DB layer.

The danger of the cloud is that it's a single point of failure

A cloud failure is no more scary than an on-prem failure. Downtime is downtime. At the end of the day, who is going to give you the most resources to get your job done? The cloud is just another stack of hardware in a building somewhere. Or multiple stacks of similar hardware all over the global, depending how much you want to pay for redundancy. Who is going to recover from the failure faster?

Not only is it unlikely that he works for one of the biggest companies in the world, even if he does, they are blowing it big time.

We are only a mid-sized enterprise with ~5000 licenses from Microsoft. They have a whole squad of employees dedicated to our account. We have dedicated engineers and support escalation matrixes for the major technologies that we use (Skype for Business, O365 / Exchange and Azure). Anything I need a resource for, I can just email our account rep and he gets me connected with someone who actually knows what they are talking about. If we open a support ticket and are not happy with engineer assigned to it, we contact our support rep and she starts rattling cages.

When we did our O365 / Exchange migration, we had weekly meetings with Microsoft engineers and account reps to make sure that things were going well. It was all included "for free" as part of our enterprise agreement. I do not know how MS treats other clients, but they want us to succeed. Maybe it is the markets we are in, or the clients we work with, but they really treat us like a showcase for their technology. We have also been in a couple of Azure "Preview" programs for various technologies (mostly around backup and SQL), and their product managers are extremely receptive to feedback and product enhancement ideas.