Ashcroft launches C.H.I.P.
July 22, 2001 3:23 PM Subscribe
This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble
This is a sound move by Mr. Ashcroft.
posted by dagny at 4:12 PM on July 22, 2001
posted by willnot at 4:23 PM on July 22, 2001
I'm seeing both sides of the coin here. On one hand, hackers claim legitimacy by saying they are doing good work by showing people how their security systems are flawed, never noting that if the hackers weren't trying to shoot holes in the security system, the need probably wouldn't be there in the first place.
On the other hand, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a load of crap that prevents fair use, and the people paying Dubya and Ashcroft's show (ie. big business, publishing corporations, music industry) would be more than happy to force people to buy 3,4, or more licenses of one piece of music/book/etc in order to further line their pockets at the expense of authors/musicians. While I think sharing between one person and every person on the Internet is wrong, if I go out and buy a piece of music, or a movie, or what have you, I should have the right to view that piece of work in the way I see fit, and to produce back up copies. I am buying a license. The people running the show feel otherwise, and this is why this frightens me.
posted by benjh at 4:39 PM on July 22, 2001
Um... that can't be right! That sounds like one of those "We may have counted some figures multiple times as part of different sums" numbers... I thought the entire GNP of the US hovered around $9.3 trillion, which means more than 3% of all spending the US's economy was devoted to hackers and antiviruses alone? I find that extremely hard to believe. No company I've worked for as a sysadmin has spent anything remotely like that, unless you counted the entire IT department's salaries and budget as "devoted to hacking and virus prevention" which is of course a ludicrous statement on the face of it.
At the last company I worked for, 250+ employeesat their peak, the cost of the Norton Enterprise AV system, including licenses, worked out to about $12 a year per employee. The firewall I set up, two pairs of failover PIX 515's- which with NAT'ing and PAT'ing did much more than just protect against hackers, so the cost wasn't just to prevent hackers- cost a total of about $22,000 (a smaller company could use the built-in PAT'ing and basic firewall of their ISP provided router, or a $1500 dollar smaller office firewall). Setting up failover PIX 515's takes all of an hour or two, so add about $40-80 worth of my time to set it up initially (but then, I was already there anyway on my salary, so maybe it costs nothing since it was part of my job). Throw in some Exchange plugins- NEMX was purty neat for attachment extension filtering- and I'd estimate the total cost for two years would range in the $30,000-$40,000 range, or about .15-.20% of the amount spent on employee salaries alone. Hardly 3% of the company's outlay... This $300B figure smells terribly of shoddy or misleading math...
That said, I'm glad to hear that Ashcroft's program will enable Erik Estrada to find work again... :)
posted by hincandenza at 4:47 PM on July 22, 2001
posted by fooljay at 5:06 PM on July 22, 2001
posted by machaus at 5:23 PM on July 22, 2001
posted by fooljay at 5:27 PM on July 22, 2001
I'm disappointed in you people.
posted by Octaviuz at 5:34 PM on July 22, 2001
Uh... hel-LO?! Look up a few posts, fer cripety's sake!
posted by hincandenza at 8:19 PM on July 22, 2001
posted by shinji_ikari at 5:22 AM on July 23, 2001
posted by tolkhan at 9:46 AM on July 23, 2001
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posted by greyscale at 4:06 PM on July 22, 2001