That's probably the biggest reason to have good in-house security people. They don't have a financial interest to make breaches or lie about them. It's in their best interest to keep everything secure, and continue to look for new ways to attempt breaking into their own stuff.

I've never felt good about letting third parties in to do security testing. When someone above my rank decided to let a 3rd party do external tests, they'll pick anything and make it sound disastrous. One place was bitching about anything.

They complained that we had the current version of Bind running on the DNS servers. "But people can do DNS requests!" Yup.

They flagged the fact that we dropped unwanted traffic at the firewall. Yup. Get over it. They were upset it took forever to scan the network. Good.

They flagged us for having a web server providing static content. They were upset they couldn't find any way to exploit CGIs or do SQL injection. Yup. That was kind of the idea.

There were a whole bunch of other trivial things that they flagged us for. Then they were brought to the office, and got upset that we didn't provide wifi. Nope, that's a security risk. They wanted to plug their laptop into our network, so they were only given external access. Again, they bitched. But letting an unknown computer owned by an unauthorized party plug into our network is a security risk.

They eventually gave up trying to bully us into dropping our security precautions and gave us a pass.

I already habitually ran tests with privileged access to make sure even if all layers of protection failed, nothing really bad could happen.

Honestly, if they are given everything, they can find something. Give them administrative rights to everything, and credentials to everything, they can find something. Like, email accounts can be accessed with full admin rights. Funny how that works.

Yup, if it wasn't Microsoft, all kinds of other companies could have dominated the desktop market. IBM (OS/2), Quarterdeck (DESQview/X), Apple (Mac OS), NeXT (NeXT), any number of *nix companies (X11), and others.

Microsoft got big because they got the consumers interested, and questionable deals with vendors.

Plenty of people only know the tunnel-vision version of computer history and they believe Microsoft is it. They either don't remember (or are too young to have seen) software boxes (ahh, the good ol' days) had logos to indicate which OS they worked on so you could pick the right one.

Saying "We're sure he had..." without evidence is not evidence. They have to have the evidence that he actually *did* have what is claimed.

That's the hard part. They have to gather the evidence to get the conviction. Without evidence, they can't get a conviction. At least if you have a competent attorney. If you have a crappy one, you'll get the 5 years because they talked you into taking a pre-trial plea agreement. That's how innocent people go to jail.

Remember 7/11 buddy. 7/11. ... I think today is 2 for 1 Slurpee day.

That's what I was thinking. I didn't look it up, but I'd be pretty sure that the maintenance interval is shorter than 5,952 hours.

We could send up a shuttle to retrieve it ... oh ... mothballs.

Ah, I see they do offer comparable pricing to Boost. 1GB with service is $30. 2GB is $40, but if I use 1.5GB they credit the difference. Sounds like it's worth trying.

You can change his plan too. Boost offers 2GB/mo 4G LTE for $30/mo, which simply degrades to 3G when he hits 2GB.

I don't bother with the higher plans. I play Ingress a lot, use it constantly for mail, and I do a lot of web stuff when not home. Like searching for reviews and price comparisons when I'm out shopping. I also occasionally tether my laptop if I need to do something and don't have wifi available. At home and when I'm in an office, I get on wifi. It's not a bandwidth saving measure though, it's just faster to be on a fat pipe than anything wireless trying to penetrate buildings. When I check my usage, I'm usually only at 1.2 to 1.5 GB per month.

I ran into my first problem with Boost a month ago. They messed up provisioning Visual Voicemail when I switched phones, so it isn't sending transcribed messages to me.

It would seem that they're targeting a small market with this new plan.

Ah, they got their site up. It was throwing an error last night.

If that's the story I'm thinking of, we're not resurrecting the mammoth, we're cloning it. Those are usually introducing the DNA into somewhat comparable modern animals. It's not like the mammoth would wake up and say "Hey, what happened? Last thing I remember was eating frozen grass in the tundra." That's assuming mammoths could talk. :)

So you're saying that a dead 2 year old, who had already had half her brain removed and the other half was seriously damaged, and dunking that in liquid nitrogen with the hope that someday a new body could be built for her and she'd be perfectly normal again ... is a con?

Oh ... ya ... it is ...

I don't know how the fuck anyone falls for it. Really... Why would they think that even if their bodies were preserved that long, and the technology was invented to create what's missing, and repair all the damage done by the freezing process, that anyone would spend the 14 bazillion New Earth credits (or whatever currency there is in futureland) to bring some old fucker back?

In her case, the could have just saved a DNA sample. The story is clear about the condition her brain was in. Half was gone. The other half critically damaged.

I'd have to think that it would be questionable in futureland to resurrect a 20th century person, even if they were in pristine condition. Say 21 years old with much above average intelligence, who was taught everything that there is to know, with no medical issues, no trauma. Just frozen as-is without cellular damage. Why would anyone opt to wake them up? Just to ask "Hey, so what was life like in the 20th century?"

The whole cryogenics "industry" is a huge con.

If these people are religious in the least, they'd have to believe that the soul was trapped in that frozen body until it was awakened. If it wasn't, there would be no reason to reincarnate them. What if they picked the wrong part to freeze? Like, if the soul was really in the liver, or maybe in the spinal cord between C1 and C3. Oops, sorry, we cut that part off.

And if they aren't religious in the least, why bother? So they can wake up as a curiosity in the future? "Hi Cro-Magnon. Fire hot. We have spoken languages you don't understand. And try to wrap your mind around these three seashells. No more poison ivy toilet paper for you. No, don't hit females with a club to make them your mate/slave."

So you're saying it wasn't hyper quantum sticktation of the flux attitude gimble during the multiphasic delay sequence?

Damn, I should write science fiction. Or maybe I could work for the media. Both string scientific sounding words that mean absolutely nothing. :)

I'm thinking they need to figure out a better way rather than landing it vertical. Maybe when they get it that close, they could do some sort of net capture, rather than hoping it will stay upright. It would solve some of the more delicate problems. That could create all kinds of new problems though.

Well, ya, picking "off site" as the next office in your building would not be so good. :)

I knew one place in an area that was prone to rather bad weather, and their "off-site" choice was a guy's house about 10 miles from the primary site. Sure, it sounds good if the building burns down. Not so good if the area is flooded. His response was something to the effect that his house was 10 feet higher above sea level, so it was "safe".

That didn't matter. The tapes they were backing up to were never checked. They had no disaster recovery procedure in place, and when the day came that they needed to recover from a tape, they found out it hadn't actually recorded anything in years. Oops.

Sometimes being in the same country isn't really a good thing. If your primary site was Kiev, and the backup site was Vladivostok, things could have gotten touchy during that whole Soviet Union collapse thing.

We like to think the same can't happen here, but just as easily we could find that New York and Los Angeles end up in two distinct countries, possibly with other countries in between. I guess worrying about tax records from 1986 wouldn't be such a big deal then.

Exactly. You can't defend against every threat. The best you can do is go with redundancy. The chances of one site being destroyed by fire, flood, tornado, or loss to burglary is slim. The chances of 2, 3, or 10 sites all simultaneously suffering the same fate is very very slim.