Now that we know the NSA can intercept and decrypt any message, doesn't it also mean that they can change the message to whatever they want, re-encrypt it, and pull it out in a court of law as evidence?

If they do, or even if they don't, I can now say they did, and they can't prove they didn't.

Have them debug a z/OS StandAlone dump with IPCS. That'll get their juices flowing.

Don't have one. Been asking for years.

Just about.

I had two people, one got taken away from me, the other wanted a different career path and moved into a Management position. Currently there's no one assigned to me, and the only other person in the Data Center who can do some of what I do will be retiring next year.

It takes several years of training and hands on experience to become a somewhat useful Systems Programmer.

I'm one of those geezers who's planning to retire in the next 5-10 years, currently with 34 years of zOS Systems Programmer experience behind me. if you want my job you're going to need to know;

S390 Assembler
How the operating system works
What to do when it doesn't
Data management.
Storage management.
Hardware configuration.
Data Encryption and security.
Networking.
Obscure business logic.
Knowing what to do, and more importantly why you MUST do it.
Knowing what NOT to do, and why it's a really bad idea.
Knowing what rules to make.
Knowing when to break the rules, and when not to.
Knowing when to tell Management they're an idiot, and they accept it because of your track record on being right.

Do you get the picture?

I have an entire box of unpunched punch cards that I'm willing to sell, for the right price.

I'm a zOS Systems Programmer and one of my most used resources is the IBM-MAIN mailing list. If you can find one in your field that you can contribute to, your name will become a searchable item.

The average non-technical user couldn't give a rats ass which OS they're using. They want their apps, they want it simple, they don't want to mess with the guts of the computer.

Your Honor,

This data isn't encrypted, these are records for my business written by a program that I do not have the source code for, and the company that wrote the program was incorporated in Outer Mongolia and is out of business. And your honor, the program that would be able to read these records was accidentally destroyed last month, and I have no backups.

--------

Let them prove me a liar.

It's all a government plot, aka Captain Trips to end life on Earth as we know it.

Agile is just the latest management fad. In a year or two something else will come along, and the lemmings will follow.

CEO wages only went up 3.6%.

Of course their wage base is slightly higher than us mere mortals.

Didn't you read the initial posting, or are you just being obstinate? These aren't average people. They're running a product that's required for their business, that only runs under XP. We were asked to come up with reasonable options, and the general consensus is to unplug these computers from the Internet.

I don't see your problem with the idea.

Prevent those few computers that are running the program from touching the Internet in anyway. No networking services, web, email, ... or anything else. Make them strictly one function standalone devices.