God and Security

I don't have much to add to this. Many interesting point here. Peter, as with many people taking an apologetic view (if you're not familiar with my use of "apologetic", follow the link) don't have the time or space to fully cover the issues, but he does an excellent job of providing some first arguments (which means there are a dozen counter-arguments and counter-counter arguments) to some interesting issues, as well as his classification of what makes the "new athiest", which is what I found the most interesting.

...before ye were corrupted by the Forces of Evil(tm). An acquaintance of mine just returned from Interop with a drawerfull of information which he showed to me. Having spent 18 months doing NAC deployments around the country and overseas, I was bummed at the direction many of the security^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsoftware companies are taking this technology. Let me clarify NAC (Network Access Control) for you. NAC is: -Verifying the security posture of a system and the identification of a user to allow the user to use the system to gain access to the appropriate network, such as the enterprise, management or guest network. (Authorization may then allow the user to access resources on said network). NAC is not: -Anti-Virus (A/V) -Anti Spyware (A/S) -Endpoint (personal) firewall (E/F) -posture/profile control (blocking USB devices, for example) -A patching system Once upon a time, NAC was a tool independent of the desktop security posture components (A/V, A/S, E/F, etc...) used to verify the ...

I recently saw a posting in which the blogger answers a question about "how PGP works. " I have no real context for why the question was asked (there's a reference I didn't follow at the beginning) but I found the description of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) a bit brief. So I'll give something more lengthy. Anyone who knows me knows that being verbose is *not* one of my gifts. However, I'll shoot for something between a brief one-line definition and a Wikipedia article . First, PGP's primary uses: Encrypting messages and files Digitally signing messages and files Encryption - Many people are familiar with a basic way to encrypt something on a computer. You put a password on it, and anyone who knows that password can read it. PGP is novel in that it uses a different paradigm. Rather than give you the specifics on how it works, I'll give you an illustration on how it functions: You have an unlimited number of safes (as in a safe you would put money or ...

Over the last three years, I have probably had to go through an airport security screening line on average of once per business day. I've seen *many* things. While its popular to attack airport screening , and I suppose it's apropos considering some of the lameness we've seen from the TSA , I'd like to take a turn at defending it...a bit. I've read articles about people who have had all kinds of problems. Most of them involve the elderly, the young or the handicapped. I'm not making a judgment call, I'm just relating what *I've* seen and how I feel it probably extends to the world beyond me. My first observation is that the bulk of issues I see at the screening points surround people not being aware of the rules. Let's pick one simple rule that, from my experience, makes up way over half of the "issues" at the TSA checkpoints: liquids. Now, take a walk with me. We're going to start at the ticket counter at Denver International Airp...

I know it's politically incorrect to generalize about a group of people. A small percentage of Mexicans enter this country illegally, and all Mexican-Americans feel the brunt of criticism. Similarly, when I was in college, if you were white and had a shaved head, you were probably a racist in most people's eyes even though I'd bet that "skinheads" were the minority of bald white men. At what point is something a problem? Recent census information shows about 41 million Hispanics in the US. With somewhere between 6 and 10 million illegal Hispanics in the country, that represents about 15% to 25% of Hispanics being here illegally (with the understanding that the percentage could be lower, as I have no numbers on how well the illegal aliens were counted in the census numbers, and therefore may add to the 41 million, instead of being a part of it.) If I were Hispanic (which I am) and I knew that some double-digit percentage of "my bros" were illegals, ...

Okay, you've heard the annoying commercials on the radio with the tagline "the biggest no brainer in the history of Earth." When it came time for me to refi (a few years ago), I decided to give them a shot, skeptical though I was. They did everything as advertised, to my great surprise! Why am I putting this in my blog? Because when I was researching them, I couldn't find anything about them. I couldn't find anyone who had blogged or posted or anything about them. So here you are, I used them and am happy. On an interesting side note, a local company ran a *brief* counter-ad which had the line "don't be fooled by no fee gimmicks..." That ad didn't stick around long, presumably because people are learning that they aren't "gimmicks". Well, at least mine didn't appear to be!

Let's review the situation With 105,000 + K-12 schools in the United States, I'll venture to say that we see at least one copycat by the end of this school year. By copycat, I'm saying that some student somewhere will claim to see a few suspicious people with the hopes of shutting down school for a day. Whereas a bomb threat is a felony, and most students know it's a _big_deal_, others might not realize that such a claim as a suspicious intruder can still land them in a comparable world of ...badness.