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Comment: Re:Nuke it from orbit (Score 1) 547

by 1karmik1 (#40800611) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Clean Up My Work Computer Before I Leave?
Also, backing up to a server only works for non deleted data. DBAN is very useful to scrape off the disk any trace of stuff *you already deleted*. So in this sense, DBAN would still work perfectly as long as that sensible data never left your pc and was deleted before any kind of backup took place. If your sensible data was on a network data store, tough luck.

Comment: Re:Field Engineers & Specialists (Score 1) 220

This. This this this and then THIS. I've been working as a field engineer for a cisco partner since last september and i just *love* the kind of interaction and diverse working experience i'm picking up.

I got my CCNA in May and there is just no end to the amount of fuckeduppery you get to meet on a daily basis. If you like puzzles and you feel a hint of pride when you solve a high pressure situation, its the job for you. (I recently got back online a leased line that , when offline, halted 400 industrial workers from doing their job. It took the 40 longest minutes of my life with both the facility director and the IT supervisor on my neck from start to finish. It was hell while i was there but after that it felt awesome).

Comment: I may be oversimplifying but... (Score 1) 240

by 1karmik1 (#40652705) Attached to: Former Pentagon Analyst: China Has Backdoors To 80% of Telecoms

I don't understand how can this subject be brought up without talking about CALEA-compliant hardware?

The compliance to this wiretapping law may be usually implemented at a much-higher and easier-to-circument level but in spirit it very much achieves the same.

All Network hardware *is* backdoored, regardless of the manufacturer's country and that's a FACT. The only thing we can do is improve awareness of this so we system engineers, developers, system integrators can design, code and implement around that, as much as humanly possible.

The related news about cellphones as trackers helps drawing the bigger picture just as well.

My 2c.

Comment: Re:Good. (Score 1) 378

by 1karmik1 (#40574359) Attached to: Mozilla Downshifting Development of Thunderbird E-Mail Client
POP3 is legacy. It's crippled. It's broken. It's wrong. If you're still using it, you're doing it wrong. It's still widespread, i grant you that, but it has the same usefulness, clunkyness and tendency to catastrophic failure of floppy disks. Just dump it. Not everything *needs* to be supported. Gopher support went the way of the dodo 15 years ago, it's time for POP3 to join it.

These are not facts, just my educated opinion (I run a small network with roughly 100 unsavvy users that NEED historical emails and they're stuck on POP3. Maintaining the system costs their company thousands of euros every year that they could save by migrating to an IMAP solution, i'm pushing for it but they're making opposition)

Comment: Re:Just what they want Linux to become ? (Score 1) 1134

by 1karmik1 (#40514781) Attached to: Has the Command Line Outstayed Its Welcome?
The last 3 week of my current job were made up *exclusively* of writing scripts to automate image generation for Windows Deployment. Using cmd.exe batch scripts, yes. There is still no proper way to automate those processes without a CLI, not even in Windows. One of the best tools i've seen churned out by Microsoft (DISM) is a CLI-only tool. So yeah.

Comment: Re:Don't be stupid. Hire someone. (Score 1) 257

by 1karmik1 (#40206425) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Provisioning Internet For Condo Association?

I don't know about you, but i work with people that learn new things and innovate all the time, even on clients way smaller than this.

There are several options to solve a problem like this. Selling them an average, more-or-less working solution at the market price is daily work.
Nailing a tailored solution at the right price is the brilliance is was referring to :) You can live with the first, and no one will die because of it but why can't you aim for the latter if you have to pick someone anyway?

Comment: Re:Don't be stupid. Hire someone. (Score 5, Informative) 257

by 1karmik1 (#40206287) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Provisioning Internet For Condo Association?
I'll go with the crowd here. As a matter of fact, i work for a company that would fit your profile brilliantly (Cisco Partner and working with Small and Medium Businesses). Too bad we operate in Italy :P Network Design (more than anything else) and cabling are very very very delicate and complex operations and easy to screw up. Your idea is mighty fine, grouping together will allow you to have a much better bartering ability in working out the service delivered by the ISP. It means, on average, your condo will have better internet than their surrounding buildings (if the Network Engineer you'll hire is good). A few pointers on who to hire: 1 - Get a company that does ONLY this. No behemoths that do everything. Don't ask the ISP directly (if it does managed services). 2 - Get a company with some, but not too much, history in the field. Meaning a company that has been operating for 4-5 years (less likely to go under *during* your delivery) but not one that has been in the field 20-30 years. You want fresh people with brilliant ideas that can still deliver them. 3 - I'll blow my own trumpet here, but get certified professionals. I'm not saying you should go with a Cisco partner necessarily (you should), but get a company that does networking as their bread and butter. This usually means Cisco or Juniper partners (even at the lowest level, which in Cisco's case is SELECT level). I'll get hate for this post and i know it.

Comment: Re:I say stay away from D-Link too (Score 1) 398

by 1karmik1 (#37438372) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Good Gigabit 802.11N Home Router?
I'm not debating that D-Link products aren't poor overall (most consumer hardware is). But i found that DIR-300 units with DD-WRT on it make excellent "cheap/fast" setups. Highest bandwidth setup i used them in is FTTH 10mbit and 11g wireless with WPA2. So far working extremely well.

Comment: Re:The entire industry is built on piracy (Score 1) 361

by 1karmik1 (#37376374) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Where Can I Buy Legal Game ROMs?
Although brilliant and evocative, so far i don't think Amazon or Barnes and Nobles have ever even heard of the Gutemberg Project. I do agree there is a problem with limiting "old" content to circulate freely but i don't think it's part of an agenda by media moguls.

Serving the amount of content we are talking about is a massive feat. At this time there might just not be enough push for it. And yes, we _are_ going to lose very invaluable things. In the history of this civilization, the 20 years around 2010 will be a huge black hole in the records of the information age.

We have no widespread, easily replicable, established way of preserving data and we're generating more and more every day, without knowing how to practice safekeeping on the important stuff.

Comment: Re:This won't fly... (Score 1) 87

by 1karmik1 (#37337960) Attached to: Delivering Medicine By UAV
A sound footprint in the audible band is relevant only in extremely close range. Have you ever sat close to an F-117 "Stealth" Fighter in full thrust? It's silent only after it has blown your ear drums. What you want is Radar stealth. On top of that, Quadcopters of this size _also_ have optical stealth due to their small size.

Comment: Re:Where's the "idiots" tag? (Score 4, Insightful) 848

by 1karmik1 (#36439050) Attached to: Italy Votes To Abandon Nuclear Power

You all are completely missing a key part of the picture. Regardless of the environmental issues around nuclear waste disposal and all the arguments against coal power generation, Italy has one crucial difference with the rest of the world: Mafia. Mafia is in every aspect of the public life, especially public investment programmes and subsidies.

We have buildings crumbling and killing dozen of people, chemical plants exploding, all because of negligence tied to assigning public funds to mafia-owned companies that drain public money knowingly saving on safety measures because they are above the law and they will never pay if someone dies because of it.

Can you imagine what would happen in a power plant built using mafia contractors in the south of italy, close to rivers and farming fields? No thanks. We have far more pressing issues to solve before we can venture in something so volatile and risky.

We have a chemical chernobyl in the countryside region outside naples, lymphatic and bone cancers skyrocketing because of the widespread, systematic illegal disposal of wastes from the whole europe. Endemic corruption.

Even if i was in favor of nuclear power (which i am not, except for research), i cannot see how this technology can even be remotely safe in Italy. Italian scientists, traditionally supporting nuclear power, agree with me (cfr: Margherita Hack's claims about the vote).

This vote is not against nuclear power per se. It's against nuclear power *in Italy*, because we know we don't have the social, economical stability to tackle such a venture. The same reasons led to very harsh protests against building a massive bridge between mainland Italy and sicily. We can't really face modernization unless we get rid of this plague, and a lot of Italian people know this and voted accordingly.


Pandora Subpoenaed In Probe of Mobile-App Privacy 50

Posted by Soulskill
from the investigating-at-the-speed-of-government dept.
ideaz writes "Pandora Media Inc., the largest Internet radio company, said it's been asked for information as part of a federal grand-jury probe into the way smartphone software developers handle personal data. Pandora isn't a specific target of the investigation and similar subpoenas have been issued to other publishers of apps that run on Apple's iPhone and Google's Android operating system, the company said in a securities filing today."
