will never feel bad about working there.

You're mostly correct - you are mentioning the problem with having a "Global Secret". In that sense, a personal password is little different than a "Global Secret" that hasn't been distributed, yet.

The larger issue is almost always endpoint security, though. Endpoints are *both* ends - your local PC, and the server at the far side. In this case, the cost of engineering a competent solution was more than the cost of a compromise - the bulk of the cost of this hack will be paid by anyone BUT Stratfor execs. Even if the company goes belly up, the execs won't lose a penny - they'll still walk away with a metric truckload of cash - cash that they didn't spend on a competent solution.

In related news, I know a PR guy who's looking for a job...

Wouldn't that be 668, the neighbor of the beast? Or 667, the guy who lives across the street from the beast, or perhaps even 666B, the guy who lives in the apartment loft above the beast (no doubt against local zoning law)? Seems that all of those would fit the condition of "closer".

Err, you may have confused the term "outburst" with the phrase "sustained, ongoing exchange".

> Alongside the constant drumbeat in some circles that the government is out to get them, it's important to understand there are actual legitimate reasons for things the TSA is doing, seen and unseen.

Name three.

Note that pumping billions into a crony corporation is not considered legitimate.

> The beauty of email is that it is asynchronous

That's the problem - the senders often have a false expectation of email being real-time, and recipients feel that they are held-hostage to email being "high priority".

Your culture correctly asserts that an email demanding "immediate action" will be handled when you get to it, by virtue of the demand being sent via email. Other cultures stupidly assert that email has the exact same priority as a phone call - when a message comes in, everything stops until that message is inspected and prioritized, "just in case it requires immediate action". The end result is that ALL email "requires immediate action" until proven otherwise, under that scheme.

We used to get "crisis" text messages on our phones, for server-downs, building-on-fire, whatever. They were the only texts we'd get, so if you got that little "ding" sound on your phone... everything stopped. Now, there is so much crapflood via text that the scheme does not work - I've now made an outbound dialer that will call our cells instead. Your "if it's urgent, people will call" is not just for people.

^^ Mod parent funny!

Pretty sure that Emperor Xenu already tried something like that.

Felony.

^^ someone clearly thinks that "software RAID" is actually RAID.

Get a clue.

You seem to have a very cavalier attitude toward costs that caused by, but not paid by you.

Gimme a few seconds, I'll have a wikipedia entry that'll confirm every claim he's making.

Err...

...only on Earth would someone actually name a country "Belgium".

...millions of thousandares.