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U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers

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Re: U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers

#41
post #12

AP style should really push journalists to use the term "cybercriminals" over "hackers". I'm not the first to say it but the issue is growing, and it's only going to make the public more leery of any tech-minded but innocent kid or professional pentesting adult who uses the term "hacker".

Journalists aren't that bright, they get confused at the difference.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers

#44
post #7

Don't put extremely sensitive information on the internet.

On the other hand, we want digital public services, to be able to pay taxes electronically, to be able to vote electronically etc. I don't think the "don't put sensitive information on the Internet" idea really holds any water unless we expect our public services to be done with pen and paper for evermore, while everything else goes digital. (Yes, machines could be disconnected from the network and so on... but that'…

> "we want [...] to be able to vote electronically etc."

Speak for yourself. I see no upsides.

Re: U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers

#45

Stop posting WSJ paywall articles. This isn’t a paywall advertisement service.

If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers

#47
post #6

Replace "cities" with "any organization that is not tech first" and you'll still find hundreds of win 7/vista/xp machines that have never been patched, and ad-hoc network closet/cloud hybrid rigged solutions for everything. There is literally no way to fix all this dumb fragile infrastructure without a massive government program that accepts responsibility for doing so. You need thousands of smart people going throug…

"any organization that is not tech first"

Then why do all the tech first companies keep getting hacked too?

Re: U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers

#48
post #6

Replace "cities" with "any organization that is not tech first" and you'll still find hundreds of win 7/vista/xp machines that have never been patched, and ad-hoc network closet/cloud hybrid rigged solutions for everything. There is literally no way to fix all this dumb fragile infrastructure without a massive government program that accepts responsibility for doing so. You need thousands of smart people going throug…

Have the NSA attack domestic systems and make the ransom fixes for the the vulnerabilities they just exploited! haha, might just be crazy enough to work

Re: U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just perpetuates the problem. Smaller cities don't have the financial wherewithal to competently run internet-facing services. Usually the best administered parts of a city are in police departments where sworn officers are filling IT roles, aided by injections of grant-driven projects done by consultants. That's not a good situation for anyone. The winning move is not to play. I regularly hire people from citie…

"...dump money into rolling out modern solutions." Yep. Ongoing maintenance and pro-active replacement is a cost. A cost that needs to be solidified as an ongoing expense. A lot of the people in leadership positions see technology as a one-time cost. ("I still have the computer I bought 10 years ago at home! It works just fine. Why do we need to buy new computers?")

Absolutely.

I volunteer at my son's school and the overall security/integrity of the place is 10x better than it was a few years ago. That's because of Chromebook, and Google's management model of paying a fixed cost to manage the device for the life of the device.

Re: U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers

#50

AP style should really push journalists to use the term "cybercriminals" over "hackers". I'm not the first to say it but the issue is growing, and it's only going to make the public more leery of any tech-minded but innocent kid or professional pentesting adult who uses the term "hacker".

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