Troll story. Nothing else to say. I wish I could vote for a tag, but it's already there.

Sorry, this isn't Slashdot worthy. There are some things that affect lots of people that are sometimes slashdot worthy, but this isn't one of them. This story is about media baiting the gullible public (and how they are) into following a story. This is just another OJ.

The headline asks one question, but it's pretty clear that you just want to learn how to be an investor. Why don't you google it or ask the question you really want answered instead of not asking it.

We know how well this went last time somebody wanted a photo shoot.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/air-force-one-backup-rattles-new-york-nerve/

Create a nation of terrorized went-panty self-entitled anti-intellectuals and you get what you get.

The mere question of how to mitigate a DDOS indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of how IP networking and DDOS works.

You (the ISP customer) have no ability to control what packets are sent to you over your uplink circuits. You can control what you send, but you have no ability to control what you receive.

Read the sentence above. Repeat as necessary.

Even if you knew with 100% certainty which packets were "bad" packets and which were "good" packets, if your uplink is saturated, dropping them on your edge router/firewall/whatever is 100% ineffective.

The best mitigating strategy is that you need to have an agreement with your ISP and plan in place prior to an attack. Identify the hostile addresses, give them to your ISP, and they will null-route those sources either within their core or even at the edges of their networks to prevent entry. Your ISP has the capacity to mitigate a DDOS attack, you as the little customer do not.

I've noticed that you are taking the Digg 4.0 route of pissing off your readers, ignoring what the really want, pushing up the ads, all the while talking smack about how big your dick is.

Even the recent "we are listening" post made it pretty clear that you don't care what the community thinks, listening or not.

Oh yea, one more thing.

I had a huge problem: false positives. How do you keep the system from sending out notifications when you are home and it's you on camera? Well, zoneminder has no way to easily turn that on/off. There is a switch on the main user interface that does it, but I'm not going to break out my web browser every night when I go to sleep or when I go to work. There is no concept of "operating hours" for when notification should and should not be sent.

About two years ago I bought a new home and started looking for ways to set up an IP camera system. I had an old Axis IP camera and started to use that to test Zoneminder with.

Zoneminder appeared to be just about the only open-source linux-based solution out there. Unfortunately, Zoneminder is really not a great product. I wish it was.

Occasionally, the zm process would just start leaking memory until everything was consumed and the kernel killed it.

Configuration options are very complicated, and they make an effort to be generic with their camera support, but in turn, the support for ALL cameras is generic. Much customization and configuration was required for even basic operation.

Terminology and the user interface was very confusing, and the documentation was not a huge help.

Finally, the Debian package, which I tried to use at first, was something like six months out of date when I first started. Then, after they finally updated it, the update completely broke my system and I had to ditch it and start over with the raw project tarball.

I just gave up. I am in the process of moving again and I will probably look for some commercial solution next time, because Zoneminder just didn't work.

Let's name some names here. I don't have any particular beef with this company or individual. It's just what came to mind when the question came up.

Back in 2006 or so, I was looking for a new job and pegged an interview with a company called 41st Parameter. They were an financial anti-fraud company. Kind of like credit card fraud detection sort of stuff.

I had an interview with Ori Eisen, their founder. He didn't seem too terribly interested in my job-related abilities so much as my background and personal family situation. He asked about my marital status, parents, current family situation, where I had lived previously, personal life stuff. He focused in on ethnicity and all kinds of shit you just don't do. He went there. I seem to remember that he might of been Israeli and asked me something about my ethnicity related to that, but I don't recall exactly. I just remember that he basically was not interested in my technical abilities and just wanted to know about my family background and personal details.

In summary the guy when into HR no-no territory.

I obliged the man on some questions where I just didn't mind, but I refused to answer other questions. That seemed to piss him off. He was a very forceful and fast-paced guy. He wanted to know all about me but wasn't willing to answer any of my very basic questions about the company.

After that first interview, I wasn't interested in the job and I ended up working somewhere else soon after.

I can't say that I had another interview where I had been asked such inappropriate and career-irrelevant questions.

I like how when you saw the word "illegal" you put "immigrant" behind it. It's not the subject at hand and has nothing to do with the discussion.

For those who are not familiar with tape, LTO is the current technology. It is a vendor neutral/open standard, unlike DLT (Compaq), AIT (Sony), DAT (sucked), Mammoth (Exabyte), and others. Basically, it got commoditized after a long long fight to keep prices high and customers locked in to certain vendor technology.

I would really like to hear what people know about this process of standardization with tapes. It took forever for this to happen.

Because every tape and autoloader has been so different, it has been really hard for software vendors to write applications to support this huge number of libraries. Just as an example, Bacula, one of the most popular open-source backup apps out there has no support to eject a tape. I kid you not, if you use Bacula, you gotta bust out the mt eject command after telling Bacula to release the tape.

The great thing about LTO is that they recently added hardware encryption and partitioning in LTO5, along with a density increase. I don't know what the current status on LTO6 is, but I don't expect to see anything for another year or two. LTO5 just came out one year ago.

DLT S4 was keeping the density war up with DLT4 (800GB native), but Quantum killed it back in 2007 and there will not be a DLT S5. Anecdotally, I have a lot of trouble with my at-home DLT S4 drive that I've never seen with LTO3/4 drives. The problem seems to be that some tapes just go bad after awhile and despite Quantum's "lifetime guarantee", they will tell you to go f-- yourself if you try to RMA a two year old tape with four or five writes on it.

The one notable exception to this commoditization is Sun/Oracle's StorageTek T10000 tapes, which are something like 5TB. However, Oracle is not a research company; they will eventually just go LTO too is my guess. They already make LTO stuff.

Personally, I have a Quantium DLT S4 drive for my home backups, along with a small software RAID array that does nightlies. It has the benefit of being able to store everything I've got on a single tape. I use a custom script with GNU tar.

This is just an idea, so maybe it's not a great one.

The electronic equipment test has turned into a bit of a social test. If you can't behave and follow instructions for five minutes, it is probably a liability to keep you on a plane with 200+ other people for a three or twelve hour flight, where, should you throw a temper tantrum, it can have serious consequences. If you can't shut up and pay attention while the flight attendant explains how to use a seat belt and jump out of a burning plane for the whole 120 seconds or so it takes, then chances are you have a personal discipline or disrespect problem and you might be better off being walked off the plane by security. That goes for screaming two-year-olds, two-year-old teenagers, and two-year-old forty-year-old drunk guys who want to pick a fight with other passengers.

I think if the FAA was honest: This is a social test to see if you can behave for 120 seconds, then people would be a little more understanding. Of course, there needs to be exceptions for those with behavioral and mental disabilities but who are otherwise non-disruptive or dangerous.

There is no technical justification why electronic items need to be powered off, other than a failure for the FAA to make intellectual decisions and be properly managed.

FYI, I am against the TSA and their security theater, so don't think I am an authoritarian or anything. Sometimes, however, we do need to cooperate together, shut up, sit down, and pay attention.

Someone mod this up since I can not.

That guy just got himz a j-o-b.

PHP has always been a security nightmare. Can anyone speak about security issues, enhancements, etc, that us sysadmins should know about?