In the "old days" it was relatively easy to hook anything up to anything. Now the Security Bureaucracy makes cross-server and cross machine and cross-app communication a sea of red tape. I suppose it's necessary in this age of mass internet hacking, but I sure miss the old days where it was easier to get shit done. And get off my lawn! ---- And some people wonder why I study weird IP protocols. Stateful firewalls don't do much with protocols they don't understand. --BottomMind ---- Quicker, easier, and less problematic to circumvent or subvert the imposed security than to go through the proper channels? Encourages the use of unofficial (and possibly insecure) resources, the installation of back doors to enable necessary work to get done, and the duplication of data to locations outside of the secure controlled zone for processing. In other words, masochistic self-defeating security policies that force people to adopt insecure behaviors and cause things to become less secure. Tends to coincide with things like overzealous filtering/blocking systems that automagically block (and summarily discard) important communications or information, causing further mayhem. ---- And ''that'', my friends, is why it's so easy to confuse hacking with cracking. To get things done on the politically controlled mainframes (to even do what the politicians in charge hired you to do!) you had to circumvent security. You had to crack to achieve laudable goals, so if you weren't cracking, you weren't hacking. Then somebody came up with the idea of cracking ''for profit''... ------ CategorySecurity