If you watch Top Gear for responsible journalism, you are doing it wrong. This same show recently did a comparative review of a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, and a Mercedes Benz, but the Bentley was actually a Yugo, because Bentley didn't loan them the real car. It's an entertainment show. They had a point to make, that once you ran the batteries down on a Tesla roadster, you are stuck until it has time to recharge, which takes several hours. It's the biggest fundamental limitation of electric cars. It's what keeps me from wanting to purchase one, that's for sure. The fact that the car did not actually run out of juice during the limited time they were filming doesn't make it any less of a legit complaint. Filming for a series like Top Gear has a very tight schedule, especially filming on the track because you are limited to a narrow window when the sun is in the right spot to get the shots you want. So they faked it, the same way their races are fake (you don't think it's odd they somehow have cameramen in just the right places everytime? How every race comes down to a close finish?) It's television.

Tesla is full of shit, because instead of addressing the fact that what Top Gear said is true, they are trying to cover it up by claiming the means Top Gear used to say it are wrong. They took their car to a show that uses dramatics and hyperbole to make their points, and they are surprised that's what they got? I saw the episode when it came out and thought it was much more positive then I would have expected.

Enforcing arbitrary QoS based on traffic type is retarded. The correct thing to do would be to allow the customers to set what traffic they want to prioritize. Either way to insist that your youtube is more important then someone else's bittorrent makes no sense. You pay the same amount and expect the same service. Just because you feel your traffic is more important (and large commercial interests think http > all other traffic because it can serve ads). If you arbitrarily pick a protocol and restrict it, the next version of that protocol will be disguised as desirable traffic. Trying to apply QoS at the residential ISP service level is just trying to enforce the status quo on the net, which is morally wrong, economically wrong, and technically wrong. And all the time you spend on it would be better served improving your network and removing the need for QoS in the first place. I think the real future of ISP's needs to be complete revision of speed tiers. Just like cell phones have different rates for peak times of the day, give different speeds for peak and off-peak hours.

WestBoro Baptist Church is just a media whore stirring up trouble to provoke a reaction. Whoever claims to speak for anonymous is the same. "anonymous" is just a group of people, in the loosest sense of the term, with no leadership or agenda. You can not declare a warning from something you have no control over. As the wikileaks DDOS attacks have shown us, most of them barely even qualify as script kiddies, and are ridiculously easy to catch. There are some that know enough to do SQL injection attacks, or brute force passwords (or use the built in password reset) but super hackers they are not. The mainstream media is laughable in how clueless they are about it. They can't seem to understand that the internet makes it possible to have a group with common goals who is coordinated through group-think instead of a firm leadership. There is no monolithic entity, no membership, no initiation ritual or brotherhood. It's a loose group whose actions are dictated by a herd mentality.

Having done IT work in several law offices, I've found that the legal aids tend to also be young, pretty, and female. I don't know if a server in a rack (as opposed to with a rack) somewhere is going to be able to compete for the affection of your average lecherous lawyer.

People buy Cisco because A. they have a full stack of everything from end user switches to core switches to waps to routers to enterprise grade firewalls. That means everything from one vendor, which makes troubleshooting worlds easier. They also have an army of Cisco Certified Engineers. Almost everyone in the networking world has Cisco certs, they are the defacto standard. That means getting people who know the equipment is trivial. And although they have wavered in recent years, their equipment is rock solid. I have Cisco switches that have been in place for 5 years plus without a reboot or any issues. Although I am a big fan of HP switches, I can't say that. Having to pay for Smartnet for support is annoying, but it does mean I can call the TAC and have someone who actually knows what they are doing on the phone in 15 minutes. And most of their equipment has supported ipv6 for a very long time.

They do need a complete overhaul of their business practices though. The level of bureacracy is insane.Their website is one of the worst on the internet. And in a few years they will either have to lower their prices or their market share will plummet.

They are all convinced they are super smart industry leaders. As such, it is impossible that people might not think their game is not worth $50-$60 and not play it. So clearly if they haven't sold a copy for every man, woman, and child with access to a TV and electricity, the difference is clearly piracy.

"Most wireless routers have a mechanism called identifier broadcasting. Turn it off so your computer won't send a signal to any device in the vicinity announcing its presence."

I see this all the time and it's just retarded advice. If you turn SSID broadcast off, it still gets sent with every packet, it just doesn't respond to requests to announce it. It makes it slightly harder for someone who knows nothing to find it, but they arne't a threat anyways. Use an unique SSID, set your WPA2 key to something reasonably long and complicated, and don't worry about it. SSID, MAC filtering , turning it off, etc. are all bullshit. Any attacker sophisticated enough and determined enough (ie willing to dedicate massive resources) to break WPA2 is not even going to be slowed down. You trade a lot of inconvenience for the tiniest increase in security.

Security like this is worse then security through obscurity, it's security through reliance on incompetence. But to even get to those layers of security, you must first have demonstrated you are not incompetent. So they are worthless, and insisting on them just leads to more people saying fuck it and not having any encryption at all.

Which is exactly why you never, ever, ever, consent to a search from the police even if you have done nothing wrong. They can't plant fake evidence in your house if they don't have a reason to search it. They can't find things unrelated to the case they are investigating, but which may still be illegal, which you may not even know is illegal, if they don't search. No search can corroborate your innocence, because you can't prove a negative. The absence of evidence just means they haven't looked hard enough, or you were especially clever in removing it. For the same reason you should never talk to the police. An officer can't "mishear" what you said if you don't say anything. They can't confuse or trick you, or deprive you of sleep and food until they can convince you that you did something you did not, if you refuse to talk.

The modern police have nothing to do with justice, and everything to do with convictions. Their job is to arrest as many people as possible, so the state attorneys can convict as many people as possible, and the prison population can be as large as possible. The few good cops don't stay cops for long. How could anyone with a conscience send teenagers to jail for smoking weed (a conviction that will ruin their chances of a decent job or school)?

If someone steals your stuff, and you call the police, and in the rare case they catch the guy, you still don't get your stuff back. I know people who had to purchase their own property at police auction. If a policeman knocks on your door, ask them (through the door, do not open it, if you open it they can claim to have seen or smelled something inside) if they have a warrant. If they have any other reason, ask them to leave your property immediately.

Don't blame Windows Autorun for this, that's ridiculous. Autorun is easily disabled (every corporate environment with IT worth a damn has disabled it through GPO already) and if you already have technicians plugging untrusted USB thumbdrives into computers used to run industrial equipment, you've already lost the battle. Furthermore, Windows doesn't automatically load things from USB devices anymore, and it hasn't in a long time, I think at least since XP Sp1 or SP2. It scans the devices and brings up a menu asking you what to do, one of the options will be run whatever is labeled as auto-run. None of the systems that don't have this default behavior (fyi you can disable USB devices entirely as well, and most PC's have options to disable USB ports in the BIOS as well) are supported or receive security patches.

In this case, the attackers had lots of resources, enough to find and develop multiple 0-day vulnerabilities (as any security researcher will tell you, finding a vulnerability whether Windows or Linux, is simply a matter of looking hard enough), accurate and in-depth knowledge of the target's systems, equipment, and operating procedures, and could rely on poor security practices. In that environment it's hard to imagine them not succeeding.

It's pretty difficult to keep the fact you are heterosexual or homosexual out of the workplace entirely, especially in a situation like when you are in the military and around your coworkers for 99% of your day. Guys have pictures of their wives/girlfriends, they call home, they get care packages sent to them. I'm not saying they should have a gay rights parade in the middle of camp xray, but under the current policy, if a female soldier hits on a gay male soldier, and he says, sorry but Im gay, he can be discharged, and that;s ridiculous.

I was taught about the mistreatment of Native Americans in elementary school, again in Middle School, and again in high school, including the fact the US government routinely violated treaties and deliberately infected them with disease. I was also taught about Japanese internment camps, the illegal seizure of their properties, the supreme court decision made on clearly racist and reactionary grounds that allowed them, and the fact that despite their family was illegally forced into camps, many Japanese Americans still served their country with distinction in the military. America is, and always has been, a work in progress. "All men are equal" is an ideal to strive towards, not a statement of reality. Comparing Don't ask Don't tell to the government sanctioned wholesale murder and persecution of gays is ridiculous. One limits their ability to serve openly in the military, the other makes it impossible for them to exist openly at all. The punishment for one is a discharge from the military, the other is death. The reality is Don't ask Don't tell would be gone already if it weren't for the fact that Congress still has a lot of old white men who are from a time when Blacks couldn't sit at the same lunch counter as them, as they die off the ridiculous policies that exist to placate their homophobia will be gone too.

America is far from perfect when it comes to civil rights and treatment of minorities, but at least we are on a path to making things better, not worse. Men like the leaders of Iran are trying their hardest to go in the opposite direction.

At the same time, this disclosure may force the PRC to publicly announce it's position and in doing so force North Korea to the negotiating table faster. Unless of course it's "secret" message was just lies and bullshit. If they tell us they would support South Korea, but then tell North Korea the opposite, and never actually do anything in public, it's all meaningless anyways. China does not see above telling the US what they want to hear in order to get things they want, while telling North Korea the opposite to get things they want from them. I for one, want my diplomats to behave ethically and straightforward at all times, even if that means we get fewer "secret" overtures to get things we want.

The problem here is he's clearly in over his head. The small business market is crowded with companies with lots of experience. He's not asking "What would be the best method to do X for a small organization" where X is something discrete like backups, file server, etc. He's asking how to do everything. And that's a problem. Experience matters. I work for a company that provides IT services and support to the type of organization hes talking about. We constantly take over in the wake of people like this. Normally, they manage to coast for 6 to 12 months, something big happens, and the company winds up writing a big check to someone like us to clean up the mess. I've been doing it for several years now, and I still learn new, better ways to do things all the time, and learn about new potential pitfalls to avoid. I have the benefit of working with a team that has lots of experience so we can catch each others mistakes. Decisions made now will have big implications on the long term support costs.

Anyways, my two cents on how I would probably do it. The article is short on details, and of course you would need to find out exactly what their use case and budget is, but one fairly generic solution is Windows Small Business Server. It's pretty inexpensive, you get one beefy server and it gives you AD, Exchange, Sharepoint, and a file server. All of it is on premise and works if you lose internet connection. Buy Dell or HP desktops/laptops, make an image and if one gets messed up you can just reimage. Redirect all their folders so their desktop, my docs, etc. is all stored on the server. Use Group Policy in AD to lock the stations down as much as possible without interfering with their ability to work. An SSL cert combined with the remote web workplace feature gives them access to their e-mail and desktop machines anywhere they go. Pretty much anyone who works in an Office environment is familiar with Office and Exchange, so training costs are minimal. Have at least two separate forms of backup and make sure 1 goes off site. If you install the server as a VM using HyperV, you can easily bring it back up if the hardware dies. I know I will take some shit on Slashdot for recommending a MS solution, but I doubt this organization is going to want to be the guinea pig for him to learn Linux administration on.

Viruses running with admin privileges can yes, because anything running as admin can. Something running as root can do the EXACT SAME THING on a linux box. You can argue that Windows should make it harder to run things as admin all the time, and that's exactly what they have been doing with Vista and 7, and the result has been massive griping about it. The reality is most people are unqualified to administer their own box, and no amount of hand-waving and finger pointing will change that. The people that are confused by the registry would be confused by config files just as easily.

Huh? The system hives live in %systemroot%\system32\config and the user hives live in the root of their profile. The system hive is split into like 5 different files, each named for the section they are. I'm not sure why you would want to look at the files, If you want to back them up there are better ways then a flat file copy, and if you want to delete them you aren't going to be able to because they will be in use.

Splitting the hives between the system directory and the user directory makes a lot of sense from a permissions perspective, to consolidate them would mean giving non-admins (able to write to their hive but not the systems) access to directory of files they can't edit and able to see the hives of other users. Putting it in the profile also firmly attaches it to the user it belongs to in a logical way. Either way other then data recovery or forensics, I've never needed to manual access the registry files, and no normal user ever would.

As for the lack of ability to clear settings, the cause is also a part of the solution. The cause is because admins running programs as admins can do whatever they want with the registry, because they are admins. Run a shitty installer, it spews shit everywhere, because it has admin rights and you ran it. The solution to shit in places it doesn't belong is to give an admin user the ability to use a program to modify the registry and change entries that don't belong. The registry cruft problem is entirely one of developer laziness, and you could have the same thing with config files just as easily. If MS forbade admins from modifying the registry in unapproved ways, people would scream murder, and actual admins (as opposed to retards running as admin) would have a legitimate point. A shitty program is a shitty program, nothing stops you from tracking the changes you make to the registry and undoing them 100% later, you could even store that info in the registry!. The registry also fully supports permissions, so you can fully control who can change what, put of course if someone runs a program as an user who has full access rights to everything, and that program writes all over everything, whose fault is that? MS gave you the tools, but you hung yourself. Don't like it, complain to whoever wrote the program, the OS did what it was told by an user with the access rights to do it, a situation could just as easily have happened with config files (and in the pre-registry days, it happened all the fucking time, which is why the registry was invented in the first place).

If you want to actually understand the reasoning behind the implementation of the registry, instead of blindly railing at it because you don't like the result when you let programs you don't trust do thing you dont want to it with wild abandon, look here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/11/26/6523907.aspx

The reality is there's nothing wrong with the registry as a design decision, and everything wrong with the security model of run everything as admins, but the reality is even though Windows gives you all the tools to run things NOT as admin, everyone does anyways, even people who should know better, and when they try to do anything to fix it, everyone calls them retarded and annoying because it gets in the way of running everything as admin.