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Comment Re:ceph (Score 2) 219

we use Ceph, its fast, redundant, and crazy scalable, oh did i mention free (paid support)? ceph.com

Personally I've been using Ceph for the last few years myself. It has to be one of the best DFS's I've ever used. It includes security, speed, easy to expand by adding additional nodes. The free part was great. I found it looking through the repos one day. You can even tie it into other projects such as Hadoop (at least I recall reading it had a plug in a couple years ago).

Great product!

Comment Re:Meta data? (Score 2) 292

Well if things said about the law are used by lawmakers and judges to interpret the laws then yes, they should not be copyrightable. If a Harvard law textbook was being used by lawyers and judges to prosecute the law, then that textbook's copyright should be null and void also. Otherwise the law cannot apply equally to all.

Comment Re:Nope. (Score 1) 114

Not only that but TrueCrypt was designed to do secret volumes within volumes, so if someone coerces your password from you they only get the outer, more innocuous volume. The inner volume containing the real private data is still locked and you can't even prove it's there.

Comment Re:Summary is wrong, management didn't "freak" (Score 1) 430

Wow, a $125 spot bonus will get you maybe a day's worth of meals (3+starbucks) in the valley.

Spot bonuses are generally much larger than $125. The spot bonuses I've received have been several thousand dollars each. Peer bonuses are $125. And Googlers don't pay for meals :-)

(I do pay for my meals, but that's because I work remotely. So I don't get all the on-campus perks... but I also don't have the insane cost of living.)

Comment Re:Summary is wrong, management didn't "freak" (Score 1) 430

But that doesn't fit the "boo hoo sexism" narrative!

It's orthogonal to that narrative. It could be that Erica's manager decided not to give her the bonuses because she's a woman, or because she's black, and the other manager decided to give her colleague the bonuses because he's a man, or white (assuming he is -- I don't know, but it's probable given the demographics). Or not. Given the vast array of possible reasons for the two managers to choose differently, I don't see any reason to assume it's because they're bigots. My wild guess is that her manager was annoyed by the spreadsheet and the other guy's manager thought it was cool, so her manager found reasons in the rules to reject her bonuses until beaten down by the volume, and the other manager approved them all.

Seems far more likely than sexism or racism to me. But I could be wrong. We don't know, and never will.

Comment Summary is wrong, management didn't "freak" (Score 5, Informative) 430

Management didn't "freak". The spreadsheet in question is alive and well, and Google employees continue adding their information to it (I did). If management really wanted gone, it would be taken down. Erica Baker's manager wasn't happy about it, and she was invited to talk to her manager about it. It may or may not have bothered someone above her manager; Erica doesn't know and neither do we.

Her manager also chose to interpret the peer bonus rules such that the bonuses peers sent her forward weren't given to her. That's at least partly correct on her manager's part. The peer bonus rules say that any given action/effort can only be rewarded once. If the manager feels that it was a really valuable contribution the manager can choose to discard the peer bonus ($125) and instead award a larger spot bonus (amount variable), but only one peer bonus per act.

What is a little bit weird was that Erica said peer bonuses were rejected before one was approved, so the rejections before the approval weren't due to the one PB per action rule. Also weird is that Erica said her colleague got multiple bonuses for the spreadsheet. That shouldn't normally happen.

Comment Re:What Security Experts Can Learn From Non Expert (Score 1) 112

Even better, move all applications to the web, so everything runs on central servers which are much easier to manage and secure than a fleet of personal computers. Give users Chromebooks or another thin client configuration and don't let them install software.

This is presumptuous. You're a security guy. You don't know enough about the myriad and varied work the company's employees do to make birght-line rules about how they must do it. Nor will you with any amount of training.

You're presumptuously assuming that I don't understand that there are exceptions.

The approach I recommend will, however, work for the vast majority of employees, assuming the necessary apps exist or can be built (or front-ended... ick, but it sometimes is the best option). Then, with the majority use cases out of they way, the security team can turn their attention to dealing with the special cases -- isolating them, locking them down to the degree possible and monitoring what can't be locked down. Or, in really special cases, training the users and making them responsible for their own security. That last tends to be the best option with developers.

Comment Re:Too Far Away (Score 1) 134

" Even if we point SETI-type radio telescopes at it and monitor it for signals, they will have spent 1400 years getting to us and there is no guarantee that whatever civilization was there is still there."
"Interesting discovery, but I can't muster up much excitement about this one."
Really? You are an idiot.
The discovery of life in another solar system would be a HUGE discovery. Finding a technologically advanced civilisation would change everything. There is no telling what we could find out if we could read the data from the signals over time. However just knowing that we are not the only life in the Universe would be huge.
Sorry sparky this is science not Star Wars.

Comment Re:What Security Experts Can Learn From Non Expert (Score 4, Insightful) 112

The solution, which security people hate to hear, is to get better at installing and maintaining multiple levels of firewall

Firewalls are not a solution. They're a small piece of a solution, but that's all. Firewalls segment networks, which is good because it reduces the scope of the attacks that have to be considered, but any good security design should assume that attackers will be able to get onto any network that has users.

application sandboxing and/or streaming applications for all office applications

Even better, move all applications to the web, so everything runs on central servers which are much easier to manage and secure than a fleet of personal computers. Give users Chromebooks or another thin client configuration and don't let them install software.

improving intrusion detection

IDS is good, but primarily for reducing the duration of an intrusion and trying to estimate the scope of the damage. IDS almost never reacts quickly enough to stop an intrusion.

dynamic virus removal in real time

Preventing the installation of viruses is far better than removing them.

NOT training users not to download suspicious executables

If the users can't install and run what they download, then it doesn't matter what they download.

or engage in fantastic feats of memory regarding passwords.

Totally. Most enterprise password policies are ridiculous. High-entropy passwords are neither necessary nor sufficient for securing systems. Multi-factor auth is more secure, and makes it possible to set reasonable password policies. Say, eight characters, alphanumeric, maybe require one non-alphanumeric symbol. Annual rotation is good, unless there is some reason to believe the password may have been compromised. Users can deal with that.

Three-factor authentication is great, and not actually all that difficult. One factor is the password. Another is some sort of one-time password generator or, even better, a USB dongle that requires user activation (OTPs can be phished -- a user you can social engineer into giving you their password will also give you an OTP, in fact it's even easier to phish an OTP than a normal password). The third is a client-side digital certificate installed on the machine after verification that it complies with corporate security policies. Use Puppet or similar to not only keep the machine up to date, but identify if it gets out of date and if it does, revoke the certificate.

Another crucial key to successful security is single sign-on. I can remember one moderately good password easily. Require me to know several and I'll have to write them down or reuse the same one everywhere. If I reuse the password we have none of the security benefits of multiple passwords and all of the password management headaches. So users should have one, strongly-secured, account that crosses all company systems. This is another benefit of web apps over local applications: You can secure all of your web apps behind a single set of authentication credentials by deploying them behind a reverse proxy server. That server handles authentication and provides a signed, time-limited user ID token to the systems it fronts.

Comment Re:Look for other users of the S/W for advice (Score 1) 150

Exactly. You have a specific task and probably specific software for that task. If the software supports CUDA then you might want to spend money on Tesla cards over CPUs. Does it use Open CL? Then you might want to look at AMD GPU compute cards.
Do you need a large memory space?
Do you need a lot of threads or just a few really fast ones.
If you have 50k for the system then I suggest you spend a little of it on someone that really knows this subject.
It may make more sense to just use Amazon E2C.

Comment Re:Lore Harp sounds awful (Score 1) 191

Actually I knew people buying CP/M machines as late as 85 actually I knew some vertical markets that sold CP/M machines well into the early 90s.
Truth is that MS-DOS was not a lot better than CP/M for many years. It really was not until Lotus 123 and WordPerfect came out that MS-DOS was a lot better than CP/M. That combined with the price drop from the clone makers and you finally had the death of CP/M.
However by 1985 you had the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and the Mac. All of which were far better machines than the IBM intel based PC.
I blame the decline of those machine in part to the magazines of the day. They lived and died by ads so could never say the PC was really outdated. It is simple math. Do you want ads from IBM, Compaq, Kaypro, Corona, Sanyo, and all the rest of the clone makers or do you want ads from just Commodore, Apple, and Atari?
Pushing PCs meant more ads.

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