Stop making the NSA the bogeyman of privacy
Snowden is my hero, but here's the thing: the NSA is the least of our worries. Firstly, their attention is foreign, not domestic. Secondly, they are relatively uncorrupt. Our attention should be focused on the corrupt domestic law-enforcement agencies, like the ATF, DEA, and FBI.I mention this because a lot of people seem concerned that the "cyber threat sharing" bills in congress (CISA/CISPA) will divulge private information to the NSA. This is nonsense. The issue is private information exposed to the FBI and other domestic agencies. It's the FBI, ATF, or DEA that will come break down your door and arrest you, not the NSA.
We see that recently where the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) has been caught slurping up international phone records going back to the 1990s. This appears as bad as the NSA phone records program that started the Snowden disclosures.
I know the FBI is corrupt because I've experienced it personally, when the threatened me in order to suppress a conference talk. We know they are corrupt in the way they hide cellphone interception devices ("stingray") from public disclosure. We know they are corrupt because their headquarters is named after J Edgar Hoover, the notoriously corrupt Continue reading
Saisei Tries to Stuff ‘Net Neutrality’ into a Virtual Box
Saisei's latest FlowCommand offering aims for the FCC's favorite buzzword.
Automate All The Things? Maybe Not
I’m fundamentally lazy. That’s why automation appeals: less work for me. Get the machine to do it instead. But automating everything isn’t always the right answer. Sometimes you need to ask yourself: Does this task need to be done at all? Or can I get someone else to do it for me?
Automating tasks carries some overhead. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll end up spending more time on the automation than doing it manually:
So if you can eliminate tasks, you’re in a much better position. Here’s a few contrived examples, based around a fictitious email provider:
Eliminating Tasks: Maximum Email Size for ‘Special’ Users
15-20 years ago we had limited bandwidth, and limited storage. It seemed reasonable to limit the maximum email message size. Otherwise people would send monstrous 2MB attachments. Of course, there were always ’special’ cases that needed to be able to send enormous 5MB AVI files. So we had special groups of users defined that could send large emails.
Users could put in a request to the Help Desk to get access to send large emails. That would go via some manager, who would of course approve it. Someone would then need to manually update that Continue reading
New Webinar: vSphere 6 Networking Deep Dive
The VMware Networking Deep Dive webinar was getting pretty old and outdated, but I always managed to get an excuse to postpone its refresh – first it was lack of new features in vSphere releases, then bad timing (doesn’t make sense to do a refresh in June with new release coming out in August), then lack of documentation (vSphere 6 was announced in August 2014; the documentation appeared in March 2015).
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