Comment Re:Download Linux (Score 1) 224
So I signed up for a VPN, of course.
And dumped your ISP, right?
So I signed up for a VPN, of course.
And dumped your ISP, right?
You can get started for about $200 in supplies.
Gonna get one of these for my apartment, thanks for the link.
Eel Pie Island to make sure it was a real place and not some shit Apple Maps invented.
How easy it is to enforce the policy is irrelevant. The question is whether the policy should be allowed to exist at all, from a legal standpoint.
Personally I don't see why it shouldn't, if you're going to make use of a service, the person offering it should be allowed to know who it is they're offering the service to. So long as it's made clear what's being done with the information at hand there doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason to disallow it.
how important it was to stay out of the fucking 1980's with IT equipment that serves critical functions
Talk about blanket statements. I suspect that there is quite a bit of 1980s IT equipment in your life that you are not even aware of.
Possibly, but I'm aware that I do use a lot of tech that wasn't invented within the past decade. My last post was ambiguously worded and I apologize, it would have been better to say "not stay in the 1980's". Even people who know nothing about IT understand it's a poor decision to just implement the infrastructure and call it a day. When you're doing something that affects the security of the personal information of millions of people, there's a lot to carefully consider. I've yet to see a politician in California that honestly appreciates this fact.
The problem is not what decade the equipment comes from, it is whether or not the equipment meets its requirements. If equipment from the 1980s is continuing to meet the requirements that governments face today, then there is no reason to spend enormous amounts of tax money to replace that equipment unless doing so will pay for itself before the next upgrade. Unfortunately, there are few cases where such upgrades actually do pay for themselves, so in terms of what is best to do with tax dollars, upgrading old equipment that continues to function as needed is questionable.
It's not a matter of overhauling with every single upgrade; on top of maintaining machines as needed it can be as simple as a network-wide software patch. Maintaining IT equipment costs money, period. This isn't some kid's dedicated Counter-Strike server we're talking about here, this is a department that should be getting every cent necessary to ensure integrity. That politicians don't care to pay people who understand this sort of thing the money they ask for in order to watch over these systems is evidenced by them waiting till the problem is costing hundreds of millions of dollars, then paying a few more million dollars to get the problem... not fixed.
Now, if the equipment is not working, then it is time to replace it.
I would argue that there are more reasons to upgrade old equipment than it just not working altogether.
The real problem is that government contracts are not typically given to companies deemed best for the job, and so these situations arise. Contracts are awarded to companies that bid low and to companies that are well-connected, even when better companies are available.
That's certainly a problem, yes. And that just goes back to my original point, which is if they had even cared at all to understand the technology which they so heavily rely on they wouldn't be jackassing around like that.
you would think there would be a lot of good expertise in the computing arena for the state to tap in to.
Ahahaha, with our government? If they even had the slightest idea of how important it was to stay out of the fucking 1980's with IT equipment that serves critical functions for the state and its citizens, they wouldn't have waited for the problem to "cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars" to do anything about it.
If they can't get that much straight, how can they possibly hope to know what technical criterion to look for when hiring contractors?
I program, therefore I am.
