The Google/Youtube/Alphabet people are justifying why they are going to get into the business of shooting people, and making drones that shoot people, and you're trying to stir up sympathy for them by saying they were shot? Just as they decide to become murderers, a woman comes in and shoots a bunch of them. Not too many tears in my eyes.
I worked and was taxed, and these taxes built the Internet. That I should not use something that was built from my indirect work seems to follow the logic all the rest of this does though.
As the Google/Youtube/Alphabet crew make plans to become murderers, in their catered, air conditioned offices, to the endless justifications in this thread, I have a big smile on my face as I think of the woman who went in yesterday and shot at these murdering scum. Google/Youtube/Alphabet workers are about to become murderers, and they just got some big blowback yesterday, paying them back in their own coin. Thinking of it puts a big smile on my face. Especially reading all the justifications here for the need to work towards militancy.
> I see employment relationships mostly the same way
Apparently they did not.
At the end of the day, the people working at the company are the ones who are doing the work, and who have control of the means of production. The ex-admin's bosses probably thought they were the important ones, and that this worker was a replacable cog, but they found out the hard way that this was not the case.
I worked at a Fortune 100 investment bank where this happened. Everyone knew layoffs were coming. One week after layoffs came, a digital "bomb" went off wrecking many servers. So security went through, trying to find evidence (nothing incriminating from what I heard, although they had a strong suspect) and also looking for more bombs. They missed out on finding and defusing one, because another one went off a month later.
The view from the pinnacle, people counting the dividends on the checks that they inherited is that they're the job creators, and everyone else is dispensable. This company just found out that is not the case.
> For a long time, I've wondered what would finally be the Securitypocalypse, the thing that finally caused our industry as a whole to take security seriously.
Nothing. If the economic system revolves around capital's valorization of itself, security is a distraction from that. I have to spend five seconds typing my password in every time I sit at my desk? I can't just easily e-mail this executable file to my co-worker and have them run it? My desktop is locked down by the desktop admins to prevent me being able to do this, and many other things? Every implementation of security costs money for the personnel to do it and possibly the product cost. Plus any lost productivity it might cause (15 seconds to type in a password each time one sits at their desk, compounded).
Donn Parker wrote one of the first books on computer security in 1976, Crime by Computer. The opening words are as apt for corporate security now as it was then. The #1 fear for the corporate manager are the employees of that company. They are the ones with the greatest control over the means of production, so to speak, even more than the managers themselves who are de jure in charge, but are de facto one step away from actual control. Look at how much access someone like Snowden had at Booz Allen.
Obviously, if all products have wide open holes, script kiddies will be able to get control. Some minimal security will always be done to stop this sort of thing. On the other hand, one (or better yet, several) dedicated people who want to get past some security arrangement can almost always get in. Even if the firewall is supposedly impenetrable, the wifi or the building security or the social engineering credulity of employees or something will be there. There will be some weak link in the chain. Especially for a company that needs to make a profit.
The real security is that semi-intelligent, persistent agents that seek to access and control systems without authorization are lacking. Things depend on the conditions that cause this to rise or diminish. Because once it rises, there is little that can be done. I forget who said that the czar's Russian Okhrana was one of the largest, most extensive security forces that existed. That meant little when Russia began collapsing in 1916 though - all it meant was that they were even more aware that virtually everyone in the country was becoming the czar's enemy.
Securitypocalypse events due result in business and government putting more focus on security for a while, but time moves on, and attention drifts back to the main focus. These things go in waves, and total security is never something of the highest priority.
I may have written that article...mine was published in 1994 ( http://mail.blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/2600/2600_11-2_Page_18... ). Another one had been printed in 1989, and then another in 1988. I mentioned that Radio Shack had the scanners in my article, but suggested people look around for better bargains.
The 800 MHz radio shack scanners at the time had some kind of daughterboard that blocked scanning cellular frequencies, but there were instructions on the Internet of how to get in there with your soldering gun and dike it out, and get access to that bandwidth. I later learned from a Radio Shack manager the undocumented key punch sequence that bypassed the daughterboard, so you could scan cellular without going through all that trouble.
The Google/Youtube/Alphabet people are justifying why they are going to get into the business of shooting people, and making drones that shoot people, and you're trying to stir up sympathy for them by saying they were shot? Just as they decide to become murderers, a woman comes in and shoots a bunch of them. Not too many tears in my eyes.