It’s bad enough when massive banks which took millions, and in some cases billions, in taxpayer bailout money, import L1 and H1 visa workers with little to no care about either taxpayer opinion or national security. We’ve even gotten used to the “consulting firms” which were flying operatives over on tourist visas then billing them out as consultants to clients and paying these people on a 1099. Thankfully the IRS caught onto it as well and now there is a massive round up going on. Now, the colleges are even openly funding al-Qaeda. Of course, the IRS seems to have caught onto it at roughly the same time a guy was busted in Denver for buying lots of hydrogen peroxide for another group of guys in New York. Now CEO’s and HR executives are quaking in their boots because when the case goes to trial, those who signed the sponsorship will find out they agreed to serve the same sentence as the convicted.

Back in December, near the 15 ^th, a technical college in Madison Wisconsin put out an “ immediate need” requirement for a technical writer. In January, they decided to bundle all 89 IT project requirements they had into one massive bid. At no point was there a requirement that submitted candidates had to be a U.S. Citizen. Judging from the phone calls I received on this, there was also no requirement that any consulting firm submitting candidates for bid have a single U.S. Citizen on their payroll or in management. English certainly wasn’t required to be the primary language of anyone involved, which makes one wonder what the result of all the writing would be.

The “immediate need” still has not been filled. It’s now February 17 ^th, so this has gone on for more than two months. If a technical college is teaching their IT students “immediate need” means under three months, then they well and truly are turning out useless graduates, but, they don’t care, because they are directing our tax dollars into an area with the highest probability of those funds ending up in the hands of al-Qaeda. While it is true that there have been home grown terrorists in the U.S., the bulk of the recruits and funding still lies overseas. While federal authorities can track all of the charities in this country which sympathise with and are suspected of directly funding acts of terrorism against this country, It is a much more daunting task when the money leaves this country in the form of payroll or savings and enters a banking system which is not electronically monitored.

Earlier this week, the college managed to release counts, but not lists of names of those they selected. They have repeatedly had time to send out communications to all those submitting that “high bids” will not be short listed. There is no adequate description of what a “high bid” is. There is also no mention that as a school receiving federal money in one fashion or another that they are required to pay the prevailing wage AS DETERMINED BY THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR for each job.

Then again, you would think that a college, funded with federal tax dollars, either directly or indirectly via student loans and grants, and state tax dollars, either directly or indirectly, and the college savings accounts of U.S. Citizens in and around the area would demand that all contractors submitted be U.S. Citizens. It is the only ethical thing for them to do. So far, I have seen no evidence what-so-ever that is the case.

It’s been a while since all of the crimes happened. We still haven’t seen a criminal prosecution of Google executives, and as long as the Writer’s Guild has the drug induced fantasy that they will one day be adequately compensated, we never will see actual criminal justice handed out. This has lead to a new definition of “Googling”.

Googling The displaying on a Web site without permission or intent of financial compensation, copyrighted material, most notably books, in PDF or other easily pirated formats.

Given that nobody from Google has went to prison for it, this has become a new Internet Mega-Trend. There are now more and more sites engaging in the practice. One Googling site I discovered today doesn’t even try to look legitimate.

http://www.pdfqueen.com/

No ownership or contact information is displayed. Just like Google, they are breaking international law and they know it. It appears to have some serious crawling software behind it as well. When I was attempting to get my SOA book converted into EPUB format using Calibre, I found a number of bugs. I ended up sending the first 205 pages of the PDF file up as an attachment to the bug report as this file could reproduce every problem I was having. In order to look at that portion of the information in the bug database you had to be a valid registered user. I say this now because that very file and information leading back to it turned up on PDFQueen. There is no method listed for protesting the use of copyrighted material or requesting its removal.

Once again, I’ve been Googled.

Scammed this from a message in comp.os.vms

–2010 Date Recognition Problems

(January 5, 2010)

German payment cards are not the only technology to be hit with problems recognizing dates in the new year. (See story below.) Smartphone users running Windows Mobile are getting text messages dated 2016. Symantec’s Endpoint Protection manager is labeling signatures dated in the new year as being out-of-date; until the problem is addressed in an update, new malware signatures will be dated 12/31/2009 with increased revision numbers. Other vendors affected include Cisco, SpamAssassin.

ISC:

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7870

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=7873

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/The-year-2010-is-causing-I…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/symantec_y2k10_bug/

Yesterday was quite entertaining. I spoke on the phone with a pimp late in the day about a contract at a former client site of mine. This pimp was obviously not a native and was subbing work through the industry bottom feeder, US Tech (they’ve actually managed to take the title away from EDS which should tell you just how low the firm is.)

The hilarious part of the conversation wasn’t hearing from the pimp, but rather hearing a voice which was obviously not from the midwest of the USA lament about how the off-shoring and influx of illegals had trashed billing rates and slaughtered the quality industry wide. He received hundreds of positions every day he didn’t bother to post or work because the billing rates were so low you could only get someone that would end up putting you in prison via the sponsorship clause. (For those who don’t understand that, some time around the time of the Patriot Act the rules changed for sponsorship. If you sign on the line for someone who is caught planning or committing an act of terror against the country or the people you get the same sentence they do. If they get the death sentence, you’ll be the very next person strapped into the chair on that very same day.)

I found it odd that someone, who obviously knew his company made money with these people, would be so dead set against even working the positions. At least I found it odd until we got around to discussing my working on a 1099 basis only. He hem-hawed around about really prefering W-2, but finally admitted they could work 1099. They just had to fill out a bunch of paperwork for their lawyers because of some recent problems.

Ah, the truth starts to leak. Why haven’t we heard it on the news? I guess, indirectly we did. There were some business announcement about tax collections being up this year without any explanation as to why. Now, the truth has slipped out. Plane load after plane load of IT and other “consultants” have been coming here for years on tourist visas which do not allow for income generating work to be done. Well, a few firms finally got caught. You see, the tourist workers just plucked a company name out of the air without getting an EIN (Employer Identification Number), because they couldn’t.

Well, somebody slipped up and tried to issue a W-9 to one of these people. The IRS came to visit. The IRS went to a judge and got all of their payroll records for the past N years. The IRS collected all of the taxes on every person they had issued a check to, even if that person had already paid the taxes. It was a pay us now and fight to get your money back later situation. When the IRS got done collecting taxes and issuing fines, they sent all of the information they had gathered over to the Department of Immigration and Naturalization. When INS showed up it wasn’t a free visit either. I didn’t hear it from him, but there were a few contracts which suddenly re-opened within a few days of the INS visit as the people working on-site had to leave.

You’ve heard me complain for years about the incestuous relationship these off-shore companies have. When one of them gets a contract, the automated subbing network is so large that they all have the contract and are all trying to take a $5/hr cut. Well, the IRS is currently “following the family love trail”. If you watch postings on DICE it is pretty entertaining. You can almost chart the progress of the IRS. Off-shore companies which always flagged things CON_IND are suddenly updating positions to flag them CON_W2 or FULL_TIME. You can pretty much chart the day the IRS arrived.

Since none of those people could legally work here, none of them paid taxes. When they got sick they went to the emergency room and the taxpayer, not the off-shore consulting company, picked up the tab. Well, the bill is coming due. Guido and Vic are making the rounds and suddenly IRS collections are way up for the year.

I must confess that I was deeply saddened to learn that David Tennant would not be continuing as “the doctor” in Doctor Who. As a young kid, I was never that into Doctor Who. When the new series came about, I must tell you that I was less than impressed with the actor they had playing “the Doctor”. I watched some of the episodes because the scripts were so well done, but I couldn’t call myself a fan.

Things changed dramatically when they brought in David Tennant. I had no idea who he was or that he was even in the Royal Shakespeare company, let alone that he played Hamlet for them. The first thing to change was my buying of the premise. David’s acting ability is such that he was on screen for less than a minute and already I was simply along for the ride.

A few episodes into the new doctor I noticed that the level of writing for the show was skyrocketing. The scripts kept going farther and pushing the actors and they kept rising to the challenge. I must admit that I only “liked” the Rose Tyler character. Perhaps because the “wholesome blonde from a bad part of town” angle of her character seemed a bit cliché, perhaps because it was a bit too obvious everyone was trying to push for a love story with that character.

Then the writers introduced Donna Noble. What a treasure of a character! The chemistry between her and the doctor was simply could not be written into a script. During the all of the finally specials you heard several times people saying that David Tennant was an actor without limits. While I agree with that statement whole heartedly, I think a good many of the people saying such things failed to notice that Doctor Donna kept in locked step with the Doctor throughout her existence in the series.

It’s a horrible thing to watch the end of such a magnificent pairing and an even more tragic thing to see a young and brilliant actor walk away from such a remarkable show. I understand being young and wanting to branch out into other things. I also understand wanting to go out on top, rather than riding a once loved series all the way to the bottom as so many have done before. Speaking as one who is long in the tooth, at some point in the not too distant future, the energy of youth will fade and one will look back fondly on this time wondering why they didn’t try to make it last just a little longer.

One must pity any actor who thinks they can fill the shoes of David Tennant or that they will be given a companion character like Donna Noble or an actor (actress) like Cathrine Tate to play the role. Speaking as a published author who has never written screen play, I have to ask, where do the writers go after having written for David and Cathrine for so long? Do you continue lunging forward setting up the replacement for a spectacular flame out in just a couple of episodes or do you pull back to the level of writing we saw with the first new Doctor when I wasn’t a fan?

I am going to miss the Doctors without limits. Their particular DVD set may find its way into my collection.

I can’t read the following article without thinking they must have been hearing the opening bell from AC/DC’s “ Highway to Hell” throughout this entire demonstration.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Microsoft-shows-off-Windows-apf-68417458.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=4&asset=&ccode=

MickeyWare has failed each and every time it has pushed a tablet onto the public. Bloated software and bad design cannot be compensated for by marketing. I’ve been there since the beginning. Early in my DOS days I was writing route auditing systems for Waste Management using the GridPad computer and proprietary pen based OS. Try as Tandy might, they couldn’t speed up the interface enough to compensate for the fact it had an 8086 running under it. Probably the worst thing they ever did was to allow for the display of graphics because management wanted every button to have a bitmap once they found that out. Adding insult to injury was the fact we had what amounted to EEPROM cards for both software and data storage. The combination of these two things made every screen paint horribly slow.

This isn’t the first time MickeyMouse Ware has tried to push a tablet on us. Anyone reading this old enough to remember when PenWindows came out? http://danbricklin.com/tabletcomputing.htm It is nice to see that not much has changed since that blog was written in 2002. What is more impressive is the fact we have seen nearly every computer manufacturer drop one of these turds onto the market and, without exception, they have all failed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer Just take a look at the long list of convertible PCs at the end of that article. I’m not even certain the list is complete, but I remember the hype surrounding each one of those products as the plopped into the toilet of life.

The convertible was always the holy grail for hardware designers. In theory this allowed you to satisfy your existing notebook base while grabbing new sales territory. In reality, they simply polluted landfills faster. That flexy-twisty spot used some form of cable in every design and the cables always broke.

We shall see if Apple has figured it out. Microsoft is obviously a has been company given the joint announcement they had with HP about yet another market turd this week. They had to be rushing to have a conference in front of Apple just so they could try to make it sound like they didn’t attempt a cheap imitation of yet another Apple rip-off. Anyone remember Zune???

I’m willing to be Apple got it right. I’m willing to bet they ditched the “convertible” idea completely and simply provided extra USB and/or PS/2 ports on the side of a razor thin table. You see, today’s “gear kids” already go through keyboards like an older generation went through Boones Farm wine. Not only do they keep multiple keyboards laying around at the various places they tend to work (as do most business travellers today), but the younger crowd tends to carry these things in their backpack. http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/5a7f/ I’ve seen them for under $20 in some mail order catalogs. I’ve tried typing on them in a few stores. Definitely not the easiest on the fingers, but you can get through a couple of meetings with them, no problem.

What was once considered an oddity is now considered common place, and that is the true norm of life. I’ve had a habit for years of rotating out keyboards every so many weeks or months, just to break up the monotony of typing. You see, I have to blame Chicony for this. Some time, not long after I bought my AST Premium 286 PC, I bought a Chicony KB-5181 clicky keyboard. That keyboard was the absolute best! It had the perfect spring and it was loud with its clicks. Most of today’s keyboards (even the cheap ones) don’t make any noise, or simply make a plastic rattle when you type fast on them. The 5181 had IBM PS/2 keyboard users telling me I needed a quieter keyboard. (You might still be able to find a PS/2 keyboard to get an idea just how loud the 5181 was.) I moved that keyboard from machine to machine to machine.

The problem was that the old keyboard used a big-DIN connector. I had various adapters to take it down to PS/2, but they all seemed to fail after a while. Finally, it became apparent that the keyboard driver chips on “modern” computers simply wouldn’t support a keyboard that still had an XT/AT switch on the bottom of it. (Yes children, there was a time when you couldn’t move a keyboard from one computer to another without tossing a well hidden DIP switch on the keyboard.)

After having gotten to the point in life where I had to toss that (and the other old big-DIN) keyboards out I had accumulated over the years, I got into the habit of picking up keyboards if I happened to see one for under $12 (usually $6) that seemed to type nice. I was doing my travelling consulting bit then, and the one thing you could always leave out of your gear to save space/weight was a keyboard for your notebook. Oddly enough, there always seemed to be room to bring the keyboard back. I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.

I suppose if I hadn’t gotten into the “cheap keyboard” phase and hadn’t been travelling to client sites I wouldn’t have gotten into the accumulate keyboard phase. I simply would have went out and dropped another $60-$80 on a keyboard I loved and moved it from machine to machine again. Of course, I take computers with me more now that I have a notebook instead of a singer sewing machine to lug around. Unless you are really old, you probably don’t have any concept of what a 38lb portable computer the size of a portable sewing machine looked like. I even had trouble finding a picture on-line. Mine weighed in at 38LBs because I had the 9” color VGA monitor and a whopping 40Meg hard drive with a dual 5.25 and 3.5” floppy drive. Those of us who needed to be able to add cards into our computers (like Digiboard 8 port serial cards or PIO-48 cards to control relays) had no choice. Eventually “ lunch box” computers came out. They weighed less, and as long as you didn’t need to put in a full length ISA card, you could get by with them. All of them had a built in drop down or tilt out keyboard that “could” be used to type on, but most of us also lugged around a keyboard we liked. A lot of vendors now sell “ rugged” versions of these lunch box computers pretty much for the same reason many of us carried a sewing machine.

Before I confuse the younger crowd too much, there were no batteries with either the luggable sewing machine sized or lunch box sized portable computers. You still had a big black standard power cord wadded up in that box which had to find an outlet. You didn’t even think about trying to use such a thing on the plane or a train. In many ways I miss my 486DX laptop from those days. I could use it on a train and running DOS with WordPerfect or a programming text editor it got over 6 hours of battery life…sigh

So, HP and Microsoft are proving once again that they don’t have the vision required to open a can of beer, and the rest of us are waiting for Apple to come out with a tablet that allows a user to hook up their own keyboard if they want it.

There will be a significant business niche for a tablet computer, just not a consumer niche. The GridPad, while ignored by most of the PC trade rags, sold many units to business customers. Developers wrote customized business applications for them, and despite the cost of the units, they were put into the field. Until you think about just how hard it was to keep paper auditing forms clean and legible from inside the cab of a garbage truck, you cannot begin to understand how much money was saved by spending some on the GridPad and the auditing software. The data went straight into the corporate systems once the auditor got back. It wasn’t real time, but it was close enough for then.

I have seen UPS and other delivery companies steer away from pen based and touch screen based computers in their vehicles. Both companies appear to spend quite a bit of money on developing custom hand held computers. Part of me things the government should force both companies into handing some of that technology over to the U.S. Post Office so they could be a little more up to date on the package delivery side. Despite all of the brew-ha-ha you hear during the health care debate, The high end shipping companies don’t seem to have a problem with the Post Office being there. I have physically seen most of them come into my local Post Office to drop off packages for people. It appears the higher end carriers have some kind of arrangement for when shipping is light or doesn’t require signature that they simply drop it off at the local post office for delivery. In other words, the high end shipping companies have found a way to make money using the post office. I suspect the health insurance companies will do the same, much the way we now have Medicare with high end companies providing “supplemental” insurance.

Ah well, sorry, I veered off course there.

At any rate, the TabletPC is not going to be a “ wow gotta have it” product for consumers, especially in a down economy…unless Apple has found a way to get their smart phone to be solid at its current size, but expand to a full tablet with 24” monitor on demand, I don’t see the Tablet being more than a profitable niche. Actually, for Microsoft and HP, it won’t even be that.

From time to time you will add various image files from somewhere on your system as background images. At some point in the future, you may want to understand how to get them out of that combo box list labeled “Picture:” below.

The poor man’s cheat is to simply rename the file from A.JPG to B.JPG and the entry will “appear” to be removed from the list. The truth is, the entry is still there, but only verifiable entries are displayed. The information which populates this particular combo box is squirreled away in the file plasma_disktop_appletsrc. Under Karmic Koala (9.10) KUbuntu it can be found under .kde/share/config. Please note that the leading “.” is actually part of the name and indicates a hidden directory. If you are going to search for this file from Dolphin you need to turn on the little checkbox which tells Dolphin to show hidden files.

Once you have opened the file in your favorite text editor, you need to search for userswallpapers. That is the variable which contains the full path and file name of every item which will show up in that combo box. Simply delete the entry or entries you wish to remove.

We all get these phone calls. Well, this week I got another one. Here’s how the phone call went:

Caller ID: (312)-646-7089

Caller: this is blah from blah-blah-blah. I see you have some Linux in your background and I’m looking for a good Linux person, do you have time to talk?

Me: I’m kind of busy now, but, what is it you are looking for?

Caller: Well I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about your background and seeing if you were keeping yourself open for new opportunities.

Me: What is it you are looking for?

Caller: Well, as I stated, I’m looking for someone that is good with Linux and I saw you had some Linux in your background. Are you good with Linux?

Me: What do you mean by good?

Caller: You have a good day now. <click>

I expect these types of phone calls when it sounds like the person on the other end of the line has American English as their fourth or fifth language, not when the person sounds like they were born here. This guy obviously has about thirty two seconds of total IT experience and is trying to make a living with it. Anyone who actually understands the very first thing about IT knows just how absurd this guy sounds. They also know that this is the last person who should be recruiting geeks on the phone.

Since it appears that there are a lot of people working in HR for corporations, and as technical recruiters for consulting firms, let me add a few minutes to your education so you don’t sound like such a genetic misfit when you call a geek on the phone.

Linux is an Operating System. When it is actually running on a computer the combination of operating system and hardware are called a platform. “Good with Linux” is not a job title, it is a sub-requirement of an actual requirement. When you call up a geek and ask them if they are “good with Linux”, if they are even remotely qualified to fill the position you are trying to fill, they are going to ask you “what do you mean by good” or “what is it you’re looking for” or, they might choose to let you know just how far out your ass you are speaking by asking “what is it you are really looking for?”

Job Titles for geeks tend to include: Business Analyst, Technical Analyst, Technical Writer, Programmer, Programmer Analyst, Systems Analyst, Systems Administrator, Performance Analyst, Security Admin., etc. Each of these open requirements could have a sub-requirement of “good with Linux”, however, the definition of good is relevant to the skill set required for the actual job title. “Good with Linux” is a completely different set of skills when you are talking about a Programmer verses a Systems Analyst. A programmer needs to know about various tools, libraries, and languages for the development of software on the platform. The required set of tools + libraries + languages will be different for each and every shop looking for a programmer that is “good with Linux.” You cannot just drop a C++ Qt programmer into a Python Gtk shop.

Likewise, “good with Linux” has completely different definitions for Systems Administrators at a shop to shop level. It doesn’t matter if the “good with Linux” Systems Administrator you are talking with is a living god with the Tivoli tool set if the shop that put out the requirement doesn’t use Tivoli.

I didn’t publish the name of the person, or the company name, mainly because I didn’t bother to remember them. Caller ID helped out with the phone number though. Hopefully, the waste of oxygen who called me will read this, for it will exponentially increase their value in the universe.

I’m sure they eventually found someone that claimed to be “good with Linux.” I’m sure they presented that candidate with a glowing report. I’m also absolutely certain the time each client site manager spent reading that resume was nothing more than minutes of their life they will never get back.

So, even though you know better than to weight down an editor with a project environment bolted onto it, you have decided to learn/use Eclipse. At least, for some project (perhaps a Source Forge project) someone has mandated that you use Eclipse. Since your desktop OS is Ubuntu, that means you need to get Eclipse running on Ubuntu. You open up Synaptic and see quite a few packages with Eclipse in the name or description. Most importantly, you find the Java Development Tools and know that you will be doing your development with Java.

You try installing this, and click OK on the additional dependencies which are flagged as needed. After a bit you exit Synaptic and find Eclipse on your KUbuntu menu. It starts up. You tweak a few settings (like changing delete line from CTRL-D to CTRL-K so it matches Kate) then decide you are ready to start learning. You’ve already done a bit of Java coding and really aren’t into plunking down yet another $40 on a Java book which is going to burn half of its pages regurgitating the free Java language information, so you search around and find the free Eclipse and Java tutorials here:

http://eclipsetutorial.sourceforge.net/

Mark Dexter has done quite a job putting together this tutorial. While I have a few issues with some of the things taught, I find this to be a completely remarkable effort. As someone who authors advanced technical books, I know the level of effort it took to create such a series of lessons. (My issues are more philosophical than technical.)

You download and run the first tutorial without problems. There are some minor differences between the version of Eclipse he is using and the current 3.5.1 shipping with Ubuntu, but you manage to work your way through the tutorial as long as you don’t leave it on pause too long or run too many in sequence since there seems to be some kind of resource leakage in the video playback software used by both Opera and FireFox. (It appears you need to restart the browser after every fourth lesson or so. Putting a lesson on pause while you go to lunch is a definite no-no.)

Once you have complete this tutorial, you feel pretty good about your Eclipse installation. It seems that things went well and you believe you have all of the correct packages installed. Then you start the persistence tutorial. Once you get to the portion of the tutorial which tells you to open the generated XML file and view it in Design mode, the wheels come off the cart. The file gets opened up in raw text mode, not even “source” mode. There is no syntax highlighting nor is there a pair of tabs which will let you toggle between modes. Frantically you pause and back up the lesson to see if you happened to have missed something. No, even after you watch that little piece five times, you cannot find anything you didn’t do correctly. Life is sad.

Desperation sends you searching on the Web to find any and all places mentioning Eclipse, XML, and Ubuntu together. You find quite a few message threads with a phrase like “Are you using the version of Eclipse found in the distro? That has never worked for me…” Life is sadder still.

You download the Eclipse Java kit from the actual Eclipse Web site and install it into a local directory. This kind of sucks because it is no longer on the KUbuntu (or Ubuntu) menu and you need to create a shell script in your bin directory to invoke it. You also have to nuke your hidden “.eclipse” folder since the two versions don’t like to play nice. After you start it up though, the XML file opens just like it should. Thinking that it is simply a missing jar file you painstakingly compare the jar files in the Ubuntu distro plugins directory with the local version. A lot more than one are missing. It’s more than 50 and less than 200 which simply aren’t there. More angst. Do you just try to copy them in via sudo, or do they need other files in other parts of the tree?

More frantic Web searching, but now you are searching for Eclipse, Ubuntu, and missing files. If the deities your worship choose to smile on you, one of your searches will lead you to this site:

http://blog.yogarine.com/2009/10/eclipse-plugin-packages-for-ubuntu.html

There you will find someone who really went above and beyond the call. The went out and created debian packages for all of the missing files they could identify, and they did it for the current version of Ubuntu/KUbuntu. In case the blog is not accessible for some reason the source you add to Synaptic is:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/yogarine/eclipse/ubuntu karmic main

Then you need to import his key from the command line:

wget http://www2.yogarine.com/eclipse-ppa.key -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Finally you can perform the installation from the command line:

sudo apt-get install eclipse-pdt

Something like 111Meg later, your installation completes. This installs a lot more than you need for the tutorial, but everything you need for the tutorial will finally be where it is supposed to be. You find this out when you start up Eclipse from the KUbuntu menu, open the XML file, and see the designer come up.

Whoever Yogarine is, they are awesome!

One thing worthy of note: Even after you apply all of these patches/fixes/missing files, when you click on Help → Software Updates → Find and Install, the process will die with the following:

Network connection problems encountered during search.

Unable to access “http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo”.

Error accessing site stream. [Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd]

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Error accessing site stream. [Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd]

Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

Unable to access “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″.

Unable to access site: “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″ [Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.]

Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.

Unable to access site: “http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5″ [Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.]

Server returned HTTP response code: “403 Forbidden” for URL: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5.

Hopefully someone will find a work around for this.

There have been many disturbing trends in IT lately. It seems nearly every firm on the planet is using illegal aliens flown in on vacation visas instead of legally authorized workers. Even those companies selling super secret armored vehicles and other technology to the DOD have their entire IT department awash with non-citizens which haven’t even applied for a security clearance, let alone been granted one. It appears that high value military technology is there for the taking if you have an operative willing to work for $10/day.

Oh, there have been many arguments made that the super secret stuff is off on double password protected encrypted drives, but when the regular systems have had to have modifications to handle black ops shipments and warehousing, is there really any portion of the system that doesn’t need full security? I mean, just how smart does the $10/day terrorist spy have to be when the bill of lading module has a comment in the source like:

20090401 rrr Modifications to support black ops warehouse in Kuwait City

They simply have to know how to search with a text editor to find all of the modifications made to support that warehouse and they know how to identify any other black ops or DOD warehouses. Hell, they even know the city to begin looking in if they want to blow up an awful lot of supplies. Since most shops have a standard requiring most developers to put their initials or name in the main comments at the top, they even know who to get friendly with to find out more information.

What is even more disturbing now is that the argument “oh the directory is encrypted and requires an account with access they don’t have” is about to become completely bogus for most installations. The trend the Gartner Group is paid to market now is “data center outsourcing.” If any of you have read “Infinite Exposure” you will have a good understanding of the war and de-evolution that brings to the world. Even “Infinite Exposure” didn’t take into account just how little military suppliers actually care about the lives of those in the service. You will find most of these shops already in the process of whoring out 100% of their data centers to a third party which uses non-citizen labor.

We are not talking about swapping out staff, but the physical migration of the data centers into one or more monster data center owned by the company with the outsourcing contract. The people working in that data center have the IT operations of multiple companies, and some equipment for training/hot spare situations. Now, the al-Qaeda operatives don’t run any risk of getting caught stealing sensitive information like the complete schematics for all of the new armored vehicles. They are the people performing the disk to disk backups on the SAN. They simply take one of the backup copies (or an extra one they made) and plug it into the SAN used for training/hot spare. On that SAN, their account has the privs of God. No security alarms will go off as they burn their free time attempting to crack the encryption. Those directories which relied on super secret accounts with super secret privileges as protection are sent to other cells in a matter of seconds once the drive is mounted.

They might even download an OpenSource tool to crack the encryption. It won’t be hard. Most companies have paid the Gartner Group for the marketing glossies packaged as “industry analysis” which tells them they should be running their entire company on low powered $800 PCs. This means the drives on the SAN which actually are encrypted aren’t going to have 512 bit encryption because the hardware can’t do it. While the SAN itself may not offer up the encryption password, it may very well offer up the length of this password as a string of “*” characters. If you can tell the downloaded encryption hacking tool exactly how many characters are in the root encryption password (or seed) as some call it, you dramatically shorten the cracking time.

When does the DOD step in and stop these data center migrations? Are they even aware of the security breach which is about to happen? (if it hasn’t already)