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Comment Re:Does US have any real jurisdiction over FIFA? (Score 1) 194

They claim evidence that the corruption was carried out on US soil using US banks. That's better reasoning to me than "Fifa is multinational and under no one's jurisdiction" as they will claim.

But frankly the fact the US isn't completely obsessed with the sport like some other nations will go a long way to keep things impartial. If fifa threatens to ban the US from world cup consideration you can expect a very heartfelt "oh darn" as a response and the investigation will continue.

By the FCPA, they wouldn't even need to claim that the corruption took place on US soils and/or using US banks. All it takes is either a US national or legal resident, or US company or US-based subsidiary of a foreign company (Traffic Sports USA) to engage in bribery of foreign officials, or be bribed by foreign officials. Bribery and being bribed by foreign officials is the hallmark of FIFA, and that organization pretty much screwed itself up the moment it established links with US companies.

So this is all about the US getting the 1994 World Cup through bribery?

I'll answer in the affirmative to satisfy your supposition.

Comment Re:How is this news for nerds? (Score 1) 194

According to the CIA World Factbook, Trinidad and Tobago has a population of about 1.2 million people, or about the size of Dallas, TX. Not exactly a huge place population wise - only 159th in the World.

But since its quality of development (and the discussion herein) centers in its GDP per capita, it kind of doesn't matter a flying turd if its population is just 1.2 mills, does it?

Comment Re:How is this news for nerds? (Score 2) 194

"Liberal racist fucker"? It's the LIBERALS that are racists now? LOL.

Oh yes, they can be. Should I provide you with examples? Now, I have no dog in this fight as of who is better or worse, liberals or conservatives. But anyone who thing racism is strictly a non-liberal trait is full of shit.

Comment Re:Does US have any real jurisdiction over FIFA? (Score 3, Interesting) 194

They claim evidence that the corruption was carried out on US soil using US banks. That's better reasoning to me than "Fifa is multinational and under no one's jurisdiction" as they will claim.

But frankly the fact the US isn't completely obsessed with the sport like some other nations will go a long way to keep things impartial. If fifa threatens to ban the US from world cup consideration you can expect a very heartfelt "oh darn" as a response and the investigation will continue.

By the FCPA, they wouldn't even need to claim that the corruption took place on US soils and/or using US banks. All it takes is either a US national or legal resident, or US company or US-based subsidiary of a foreign company (Traffic Sports USA) to engage in bribery of foreign officials, or be bribed by foreign officials. Bribery and being bribed by foreign officials is the hallmark of FIFA, and that organization pretty much screwed itself up the moment it established links with US companies.

The US is not alone in this. Many developed countries have similar provisions with a global scope (fraud/bribery of this type committed anywhere). A lot more have similar provisions only on a local scope (only those committed locally.)

This FIFA thing is a good thing, but unfortunately the penny arcade crowd is going to tear it down in their endless, nihilistic pursuit for yet another reason to be upset or whatever.

Comment Re:Does US have any real jurisdiction over FIFA? (Score 4, Informative) 194

This 'onion' issue is but a side-show of the indictment of FIFA officers by the Obama Administration

While everyone knows that FIFA is corrupt, we must also acknowledge the fact that the indictments from US is a kind of a long-stretch, for all I know FIFA does not belong to USA alone

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) allows the US to prosecute anyone, anywhere, irregardless of citizenship for specific forms of fraud so long as said person has caused US companies or US-based offices of foreign companies to commit said type of frauds or has used the US banking system to commit said type of frauds. Traffic Sports USA is a company being investigated for that that type of fraud, and so many other businesses tied to either FIFA or CONCACAF.

Now, when I say specific forms of fraud, the law strictly refers to fraud intended to manipulate of foreign politicians or foreign state agencies or to partake in exchange of benefits or gifts with a foreign politician or foreign state agency or representative. The nomination of Qatar for the next World Cup (as a result of a payment under the table to secure those right) falls into that category.

If there were no nationals (or national or US-based business entities) involved at all, then FCPA wouldn't apply at all, and there wouldn't be any news to blather and bloviate about.

Comment Re:CSV (Score 1) 366

In the meantime, the team is looking at several fixes to work around the software vulnerability once contact is reestablished. One is a Linux file redirect that would send the contents of the troublesome beacon.csv file to a null location, a sort-of software black hole. Lab testing on this fix has been promising—over a gigabyte of beacon packets have already been sent into nothingness without a system freeze.

Well, isn't that special. Now they test it. So if they can just link it to /dev/null, did they really even need that data? It's always fun to cause a mission to fail by recording data that wasn't even needed.

You hit it on the nail with this one.

Comment Wow + c'mon + wtf (Score 1) 366

I'm not one to go after very complex engineering endeavors that happen to have failures. But some of these things are just so goddamned plain, basic engineering 101 kind of stuff, I shake my head in sadness (sadness because I want these wonderful projects to thrive and win.)

The software controlling the main system board writes corresponding information to a file called beacon.csv. If you're not familiar with CSV files, you can think of them as simplified spreadsheets—in fact, most can be opened with Microsoft Excel. As more beacons are transmitted, the file grows in size. When it reaches 32 megabytes—roughly the size of ten compressed music files—it can crash the flight system."

Eng 101. Resources are not infinite. Didn't anyone thought about cycling logs? Or treat it as a circular buffer? What happened to capacity testing? Or better yet, catastrophe testing as is, what happens when the system runs out of space. This does not look like data that is critical to keep. Critical to capture yes, but not critical to keep. Most on board systems, embedded systems and/or systems with minimal resources use a circular buffer to capture control events for these reasons.

This is not a web site project, but an freaking spaceship. I can see clueless developers doing these kind of mistakes in web/enterprisey systems (I know, I've seen). I couldn't have imagine this on a much more critical type of system... but then we have the Ariane 5 incident.

Unfortunately, the only way to clear that CSV file is to reboot LightSail.

A control system should by default reboot itself and clear its non-critical logs when running out of space, or at worst, keep running without logging the events. This is so trivial to test, did the system and software engineers never saw a use case that capture this scenario.

It can be done remotely, but as anyone who deals with crashing computers understands, remote commands don't always work.

They don't always work if you don't test for them exhaustively... and they are not hard to test... and their continuous testing should be a priority at every release/test cycle. The engineers in this project are far more intelligent that I am, I'm sure of it. But man, this specific problem, I'm like "dude, wtf?"

Comment Re:Seems reasonable (Score 1) 119

First question(s) to ask: What is ...and where is... your company's most critical data? What networks and systems are used to provide this data? Degree of Protection should equal Degree of Data Criticality. THEN follow-on with everything you laid out. Companies can't/won't protect everything at the same level.

The questions I suggested are specific to individual systems and departments, not to be applied to the entire organization as a whole. Then the collection of the results per system or department constitute a global snapshot of how security is handled.

Comment Re:Education vs. H1B (Score 2) 208

Does it really make sense to spend money on CS education while importing cheap H1B labor?

Yes it does. Unless you do a job that requires direct person-to-person interaction (medicine, nursing) or tied to regulation by necessity (law), or that requires hand-on work (utilities), you are going to compete with H1B and and global workforce no matter what.

Deal with it. That has been the norm for, what now, 15 years? For 15 years I've been told that my career is going to go poof because H1B labor or because some guy in Bangalore makes 1/5 of what I make, as if software/IT work can be directly compared to picking up fruits or something. In my first 5 years of work, I doubled my salary, and in the 15 years that followed, I've doubled it again.

And I've also been laid off a couple of times, one time 6 days before my first child was born. Tough shit, such is life. You adapt, you fight, you learn, you re-learn, you borrowed Teddy Roosevelt advise ("“Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.")

We have to compete against H1B workers and a global workforce? Yes. End of the world? Yes if you suck.

To compete, you need to build your network, and you need to have specialized skills that are on demand. And that requires a baseline education, CS education or something comparable, or related experience.

This has been a fact like, forever. H1B workers and globalization are just a new constant in the polynomial.

Comment Re:Seems reasonable (Score 5, Informative) 119

The hard part is indeed establishing what the right level of security is and how to evaluate companies against that. At least over here, the exclusions for burglary are pretty clear cut: leaving your door or a window open, and for insuring more valuable stuff there are often extra provisions like requiring "x" star locks and bolt, or a class "y" safe or class "z" alarm system and so on. With IT security, it's not just about what stuff you have installed and what systems you have left open or not; IT security is about people and process, as much or more than it is about systems.

I would disagree with you on this (somewhat). There are well established practices on how to build secure systems, for each major development platform (JEE, .NET, RoR, etc) and also for general decision-making.

Any organization, big or small, needs to be able to come up with scenarios and questions for things that need care, and for which it might need to provide evidence of attention. The important thing is to execute due diligence when it comes to defending your business against attacks, and to demonstrate providing evidence of such due diligence.

If we are in e-business or are bound by PCI, HIPAA and/or SOX compliance, the following questions would come to mind (just an example):

  1. Are we addressing the top 10 risks identified by OWASP?
    1. If so, can we quickly identify how we address them?
    2. What other risks identified by OWASP do we address and how?
  2. How do we address CERT alerts and advisories?
  3. Are we on top of security patches?
  4. Are the underlying systems security patches up to date?
    1. If so, can we quickly provide evidence of this?
  5. If we are bound by HIPAA and/or SOX how do we address security concerns that might stem from these regulations?
    1. How do we quickly provide evidence (evidence of process and assurance)?
  6. Do we have a multi-tiered architecture, or do we run everything co-located?
  7. Are back-end databases on their own machines, in their own subnets outsize of a DMZ?
  8. Are "mid-tier" services on their own machines, separated from databases?
  9. Are they in a DMZ? Are they proxied by a HTTP server in different machines?
  10. Do we have firewalls? If so, do we keep an inventory of their rules?
  11. Are we up to date with patches for network assets (firewalls, SSL appliances, etc)?
  12. Are we still on SSL 3.0 or older versions of TLS?
  13. Do we specifically disable anonymous ciphers?
  14. If we use LDAP, do we disable anonymous binds?
  15. Do we use IPSec to secure all communication channels (even those internally, a requirement for banking in several countries)?
  16. If not why? How do we compensate?
  17. If we are in E-Commerce, how do we demonstrate that we are PCI-compliant?

In my opinion and experience, these questions present the starting point for a framework to determine the right level of security in a system. More should be piled on this list obviously, but anything less would open a system to preventable vulnerabilities.

And that is the thing. The right level of security is the one that helps you deal with preventable vulnerabilities that you, the generic you, should know well in advance, vulnerabilities that are well documented. How costly the prevention is, that is a different topic, and any business will be hard press to justify to an insurer that they forego to deal with a vulnerability because it was too expense.

Answers to those questions and evidence of such would constitute proof that an organization followed reasonable due diligence in establishing the right level of security. Moreover, it will have a much greater chance to disarm an insurer trying to find a way to avoid covering damages.

Notwithstanding the ongoing abuses done in the Insurance business, insurers have rights also. My general health and life insurance is not going to pay up my family if I kill myself while base jumping with blood alcohol levels up the wazoo.

Comment Re:"What happened to the dinosaurs?" (Score 1) 445

Uhh...wut? Just because they looked like overgrown lizards in Jurassic Park, doesn't mean they're related to lizards.

Well, some of them actually do look like lizards.

Tuataras are neither dinosaurs (clade Archosauromorpha), nor lizzards (order Squagmata). They are Rhynchocephalia, distantly related to the Squagmata, both orders being Lepidomorphs. It is almost as comparing Marsumials with Eutherians.

Comment Re:Plant? (Score 1) 382

Java is certainly not dead. If you're a software engineer, my gut feeling is that 70% of job offers involve Java programming. Java is widespread in the enterprise as well as open source frameworks and platforms.

But parent is right in the fact that Java in the browser is practically dead. Some office environments still require Java for entperise applications, but practically all ordinary users don't need Java in the browser.

It's a little ironic, since Java on the web was one of Java's main, original use cases. Now Java applets are niche and fading out, whereas Java is pretty much rampant everywhere else.

Java in the browser died 15-16 years ago. How is that relevant to any conversation nowadays? This is like saying "dinosaurs are dead" (no shit) while discussing bee colony collapse syndrome (a contemporary phenomenon.)

Comment Re:Plant? (Score 1) 382

Because Chrome is turning Java off and they're trying to make sure other browsers don't follow suit.

Seriously, I see no NEED for Java any more. I probably have more Silverlight things I like to use than I do Java, and neither are vital any more.

And the sooner we get out of the mindset of ancient-java-plugin being accepted as "more secure" for banking etc. the better. Hell, I remember the early days of the secure web where if you couldn't afford SSL, you pushed the transactions through a "secure" Java app.

And apparently you are still stuck in the early days (like 15-16 years ago) because I have not seen anything like that since the late 90's.

What do you NEED Java for nowadays? What do you NEED enough of it to justify a control panel icon, background services, etc.? Basically nothing.

OMFG, this tells me you are complete unfamiliar with the concept of "back-end" software, which is where Java/JEE runs supreme. Amazon, Google, a ton of shit that runs on those platforms, that's all Java. And we are not mentioning all the banking stuff that is out there also written in Java.

Seriously, you are stuck in the 90s', and thus, your opinions can (and should) be ignored without any doubt or feeling of guilt.

As such, Java is dead in the water, and a major browser ditching it could be the end.

What does Java has to do with a browser? Oh, let me guess, you are still in late-90's-applet-land?

However, as some of the comments on here show, it won't be missed.

It does make me wonder, however, quite what Oracle have left - Java is dead, MySQL is dead,

MySQL is dead? Really? Tell me where you get this information, fanboi?

Maybe that was the impetus for the whole Java/Dalvik thing?

Uh?

All that did was kill off Java and its derivatives even more.

So they have to find some news to keep the name of the language alive.

More uh?

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