On Thu, 2017-06-29 at 19:34 -0700, stan wrote: > The consensus seems to agree with me, that this is a minor threat > as threats go. > > I thought I was paranoid about security. But after the comments in > this > thread, I think maybe I'm not paranoid enough. That the IT security > professionals are paranoid enough to cover their cameras? If they're > that worried they're vulnerable, it's a good bet I should be. :-) > The thing that amazes me about the Window and Mac worlds is that people never seem to wipe their boxes. I know people who run their machines for four or five years without ever doing a clean reinstall. I worked at a place that ran Windows XP well beyond its out of service date -- going as far as buying separate service contracts to keep it going. For *eight* years, as far as I know, the desktop box in my office never had its disk wiped. Now, sure, I only used it for very limited stuff, but still, the entire organization -- hundreds and hundreds of machines -- was like that. The interesting thing was they they were locked into it by the government. This was a healthcare organization, which dealt in private health data. Their case management system had FDA approval to run on Windows XP, but did not have FDA approval for running on Win 7 or Win 10. I was told it would cost around 15 million dollars and take two years to go through the FDA approval process -- by which time the validation would already be obsolete. I *think* they were going to try to skip all the way to Win 10, but the validation process was always running behind the release of the new Windows. It amazed me -- the FDA, by it's byzantine rules for validation and such for protected health information, made it impossible for companies to update their software in a timely manner in order to protect it. I never actually tried to do an intrusion -- why ask for the hassle. It's hard to do without leaving fingerprints if people are watching hard enough. owever, once in extremis I *did* unplug my desktop from the net and boot up with a live fedora distro so I could use some linux software I had. I had left my laptop at home that day, and needed to do some processing on some images. I kept a bootable disk image of a recent backup in my backpack all the time back then, so I could go places with just a portable 1 TB drive instead of my laptop. It came up fine, and the Windows disk was not encrypted... billo _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
