With a good telescope from a mountain, a high tree or from a high building it is possible to see you in your backyard.

This could be a psychological problem more than a real one. If I cant see who is actually looking at me I will feel better.

Oh yes, and the other is the virtual one. When hanging pictures on your property on a Facebook page, why to bother about drones?

My mistake ... mm, just put a LGA 1150 CPU there


Intel Core i7-4790K Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.40 GHz) (BX80646I74790K) $329.99


Not so big difference in price ... even more, the mini is not improved at all.


... trying a little deeper in apple site ...


Specifications
3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz)
16GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM
1TB Fusion Drive
Intel Iris Graphics
Apple USB SuperDrive
User's Guide (English)
Accessory Kit


$1,478.00


//
The i7-4790K has an Intel® HD Graphics 4600
So? There IRIS i7 based processor is the 4770R that must be purchased on specific brand motherboards ...
... but the i7-4790K is a better performer CPU, so just add around $150 for an NVIDIA GTX 750tI or similar graphics card, being much more superior than the IRIS.


Many numbers ....


The point is. The mini is a well built machine, but it is overpriced for modern standards.

I have a very nice Mac Mini latest 2012 with a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 Quad-Core processor with Eight logical threads. It has a 1TB disk and I put 16 GB memory to this machine, costing me around $900.

Now I see the options ... No i7 quad, only dual core, and many i5. No more than 16GB two years later. The disk options are neither better. What they did was to add a less than 2 GHz CPU for the $499 version (yes, the i5 and i7 have more MHz in the "options" but applications are becoming more parallel, so the extra cores are important).

From my perspective as a developer, these machines are not state of the art. They are really becoming "mini" in the current menu of computing options, so what I think is that Apple is reserving "something else", maybe a Server or something that it is not yet published.

And I made a little exploration in Amazon, just for comparison:

Lite-On 24X SATA Internal DVD+/-RW Drive Optical Drive IHAS124-14 $20.16
Intel Core i7-3770 Quad-Core Processor 3.4 GHz 4 Core LGA 1155 - BX80637I73770 $299.99
2 WD Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EZRX $82.99
Corsair CX Series 430 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Bronze ATX12V/EPS12V 384 Power Supply CX430M $49.99
Gigabyte LGA 1150 Intel H87 Dual LAN DVI HDMI UEFI DualBIOS Mini ITX DDR3 1600 Motherboard (GA-H87N) $111.22
Cooler Master Elite 130 No Power Supply Mini-ITX Tower Case- Midnight Black (RC-130-KKN1) $39.99
Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3L 1600MT/s (PC3-12800) DR x8 ECC UDIMM 240-Pin Server Memory CT2KIT102472BD160B $178.97


TOTAL $866.30


This is comparable by price, but as a machine this is two times the capacity of the mini. A real i7 Quad, 2 2TB disks and a much better, although not so beautiful box. And the motherboard has 10 USB ports, 2 Net ... etc.

"There are no guarantees" is the key of the problem.

You need to make them, it is not possible to trust blindly on anyone else, and this is a life fact, it is not related solely to cloud providers.

The problem with this type of behaviour is that the consequences are never the best ones.

The Internet could become a more dangerous place to be and the security measures the others, than the US, will take will make the traditional openness of the Internet a thing of the past, reducing the universality of the medium.

Although, if you think carefully, this stuff was partly developed by DARPA, so wouldn't be strange that what we see today in the news was in fact part of the hidden goals when they participated creating the Internet. It is simple. It is easier to observe people in a wire than in the open wild.

Yes!!!!!!! ... this is simply a backdoor with another name.

And all backdoors go bad at the end.

Microsoft can't quit an HTML engine from their OS because they need an HTML engine some place to draw their own screens when not having a browser installed (XHTML is a defacto standard for some GUI operations).

And ... mm ... that's all ... oh I forgot that MS made many proprietary products depending on IE ... if you quit IE then all these products won't work. First the need to clean everything else and to work with standards.

For me, a real OS must offer some way to attach an external composition engine for user interfaces if these engines have no security holes by themselves, in such case the OS will be broken on its roots.

Let's see.

That "particular" law (I don't know others by now), indicates that if one person can influence a big quantity (> 3000) of the population writing something publicly in a blog, this person must be able to be monitored by the State. Also, that it is oriented to Russian speakers, and if the foreign Russian sites don't apply this law they will be blocked in Russian territory.

It seems, as somebody said in the discussion, that they are giving blog writers the same treatment as journalists. And thinking carefully, bloggers with that quantity of readers are really journalists. So, I don't see a problem with that ... the problem could be in "what" they do with the journalists in general.

The other issue is related with the Internet technology in general. Because they are controlling what the people can read in Russia even produced in another country. And here the problem is how they apply their rules, because the rules are not wrong by themselves. If what they are blocking is information about how to commit suicide, how to kill your neighbour, pornography, how to make damage to children, about difamation and these types of things, then it is a more than welcomed task; but when the facilities are there, it is very easy to jump beyond what "bad" is and to arrive to political censorship... and then we are talking about something completely different.

Anyway, each person has a different concept about "what" "good" "is".

Then this means "no absolutes" here.

If an US citizen let something in Ireland (or whatever other place), then the Ireland located service provider can't guarantee than that information "never" will be acquired by the US government, as the US government would perform an international request to Ireland to obtain such data. And "if" Ireland agrees, will provide the data to US. In fact, this is not new in any country in the world.

But if an US based company, as Microsoft is, has data stored in another country and pretends than that data is outside US law, it seems not too be the case and the US law allows the US government to ask for such data. This is new.

But if a foreign ISP (i.e. non US company) offers services that can be accessed by an US citizen inside US, and the US courts declare that the information must be accessed by the US legal system for whatever purpose without passing through all the international legal system and without the aid of the foreign country, then this could be legal for US but illegal for the other country, and even declared as spying if the US proceed to obtain the data.

And if something is illegal in the US but it is not illegal in the other country, then the US legal system has nothing to do there (legally).



At least a miniseries could be developed from this :-)

This is like if you to go to a country border to talk with a friend you have at the other side. Each one will stay in their corresponding country without breaking any immigration law, but you can talk through the fences (the air is not restricted to one particular country .. yet). Then, your country authorities could demand the person, at the other side of the fences, to said them what you were talking about when you left the place. But this person has all the right to say nothing, because he/she is living in "another" country, with different rules and laws.

Also, this is co-related with what the Europe rules demand about information their citizen have in other countries. So, this means that each country is not an independent one and that anybody can break the physical borders in their quest about what they think, with their current laws and though, that justice could be?

It seems that a basic international ruling on the Internet it is needed to clarify limits before any judge in any country be able to invent whatever thing that, obviously, will break the other country laws.

Don't mistake it ... this doesn't mean that it is not necessary to think to have the job done.

This means that some people has the capability of turning off some parts of their brain that they don't need in some specific moment to focus better in what they are doing. This is not negative, this is a very special capacity.

I could call this the "soldier effect". A good soldier is the one that when given the order to kill perform the task without any complain. But a bad soldier could not to decide to kill because is thinking very much. The same happens with terror, then somebody is terrified he/she doesn't perform what is important, because the brain (that it is confused in that moment) will take the place of the automatic internal system that really knows what to do.

Corollary: to use very much the brain doesn't mean that we do a better job. It depends on what the job is.

The problem is NOT what they are trying to resolve.

As some pointed, there are ways to collect data that were in use several decades ago, combined with modern technology.

They need to perform a serious risk analysis to remake their procedures (all them), and to implant a serious educational programs with corresponding verifications (regular tests and checks).

To change computers by typewriters to resolve their problems is like to cure a cancer with a cup of tea.

I am recommending this without enough information about the problem.

In my case, I wrote my own multiuser access layer on top of SQLite and it works very well. I don't rely in any type of file access control because, as the SQLite documentation says, it could be not reliable.

But if you can make an application that works in only one place within one machine, SQLite is extremely more powerful than MS Access, and uses almost no resources. Also, if you need to backup the data or to send the data to another place, you only need to copy the data file.

There is a Firefox add-on for basic database management, and that's all, you need no other thing to work more than the way to present the data to your users.

****

One comment here.

When we have only hammers to work, we see every problem as a nail.

Depending on how you model your solution, SQLite is just enough as any other database system also, even XML or plain text files.

Other people recommended HSQLDB (Libre/Open Office); as I remember, the database works in memory and have a backup in disk with a statement based storage. When you start your application, this database runs ALL the statements and refill the memory structures. I am not sure if this works for you. In the case of SQLite, it is a standard database system and the database file is analogous to an Oracle datafile or MySQL data structure.

I was checking the source code of the original and the "official" (not the Akamai) patch itself.

In fact, the original code (with the bug) is more ordered and clear than the patch. But in general, the issue is that OpenSSL is a very big and complex piece of code maintained by a group of people with a very small quantity of resources, but being used by many important organisations around the world.

The problem is not that the software is open source. The proprietary source also have the same level of problems, being the only difference that we can check the open sourced products and we have no idea what they did on the proprietary (a.k.a. closed) products. The problem is that the Internet has not a good international and neutral organisation to help verify the important parts that make it work and the users of the technology invest no resources to verify how well these products are made.

And yes, if a Bank has a router having OpenSSL with the bug, the router has the bug. Or it is better to say that the router has been with that level of bug for nearly two years by now, and that it is possible somebody was able to bypass the security WHEN the SSL protocol is exposed.

So ... there are many sources of problems, much more than the web servers, although these vulnerabilities will become real problems depending on how well defined is the security of the network infrastructure. Good practices let to reduced exposition to existing vulnerabilities, this is why it is important to know, to understand and to apply these good practices.

I have more than 20 years coding, and lately I have been working with a security-oriented framework on C++.

I must admit my primary goal was security and I have been trying to be strict on security problems usually others have and that usually are defined as weaknesses. However, you also need to work with usability and effectiveness for having something really usable.

For me, elegant code helps you to express your needs following a very clear and understandable way, be for you in the future or for others to maintain. That code not only needs to be clear, but also needs to be secure and efficient. I do nothing inventing a beautiful piece of code that will use 100 times more CPU because it has been excessively layered, or that permits me to create beautiful pieces of crap that will leak any possible memory and to produce many different types of concurrent problems.

Elegant doesn't mean to hide responsibilities. I don't believe in the garbage collector "for everything" philosophy, because you lost the control on what you are dealing with, even in places where it is a must to have very precise control. Elegant code is clear, having well defined preconditions and postconditions, with no surprises. Every new has a delete (everything be created must be destroyed), and your programming rules are logical and built up your understanding about the problem you are resolving.

In a few words : elegant means you are in control.