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Aaah run away! Godwin's rule, Godwin's rule!

As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

http://www.landfield.com/isn/mail-archive/2000/Oct /0029.html
...
"We fixed dozens if not over a hundred of format string vulnerabilities," says Aaron Campbell, an OpenBSD developer. "At the time, no exploits for format string problems were available. It was easy to crash programs, but methods for gaining elevated privileges were not publicly known and at the time it was largely theoretical."
...
Despite the effort, crackers still found a way to break into a system. Tuesday the friend of an OpenBSD developer had his OpenBSD 2.7 machine compromised by an exploit of the operating system's "chpass" utility -- a Unix tool that lets users edit database information associated with their account. Somebody had gained root access, the Unix equivalent of system administrator-level control.
...
"Are we surprised? No," says DeRaadt. "Should we have spent time checking each for exploitability? No, that's not the role we can play. And we cannot release a patch for 800 bugs, which may or may not be exploitable. We'd look like jerks."
Campbell says Tuesday's scare reaffirmed his faith in aggressive audits. Even though the bug was not known to be exploitable during the original summer audit, the fact that they identified and fixed it gave them a chance to seek out similar bugs, shoring up future versions of OpenBSD.
----------------
Took a while, but searching though google, I finally found the reference. It stuck in my mind because even OpenBSD can be vulnerable.

This discussion should be over pretty soon :)


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Santa Claus: "Ho ho ho!"

The Calendar Faq here has tons of cool information about calendars.

I am the Raxis.

Satellite imagery confirmed our suspicions that his lipids are dangerously elevated and also detected the presence of hemmorhoids.

MPPC - Microsoft Point-To-Point Compression

GSM - Global Standard for Mobile commnications (this one runs at 1800mhz, pretty standard, used throughout the world... with the notable absence of one country.)

HSCSD - High Speed Circuit Switched Data (this is a little like GRPS, however it's point-to-point based and provides more bandwidth than packet switched GPRS, but it isn't connected 24/7)

GRPS - General Packet Radio Service, (always on, packet based mobile network, ip based).

ASDF - Association of Synchronous Data Formats (the synchronous carrier format to provide a level of QoS and ensure delivery.)

LMNOP - ?? got me on that one, sounds like some protocol for binding ip to the wireless standard.

Very funny. Anyway, it is NOT an acronym. The word has clear relatives in other Germanic languages, which variously mean "to hit", "to push", or even "to have sex".

The other "backronym" that was invented to explain the word is "Fornication Under Consent of the King". Not true either.

See alt.usage.english FAQ, or Snopes.
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I'm actually quite surprised that most of the responses to this thread have been an offhanded slight. The Gopher system is a very well designed system. It was a solidly built way to share files without opening your network to the security risks of NFS or ftp. It toted a heirarchical organization of information for network wide distribution. And it originated at the University of Minnesota (um..."gopher"... the University mascot?).

Interesting Links

• Gopher RFC
• UMN's Gopher Info site
• UMN's ftp gopher directory

Nope. Check the Simpsons FAQ. (Search for the string "NRA4EVR".) The false rumor was actually planted in another episode.

IPv6-throughIPv4 tunneling, as described in RFC 1933.

This may be off-topic (actually it isn't, since there isn't a story), but why don't the Libertarians get as much press coverage as Ralph Nader or the Reform Party? I mean come on, the Libertarian party is the third largest party in the US, and it isn't even listed in Yahoo!'s 2000 Election section.

Have any of you Nader-voters actually read what Ralph Nader stands for? If you did, you wouldn't be so quick to vote for him.

Libertarian FAQ

Harry Browne, Libertarian for President

Thank you, have a nice day!

--

Does this surprise me? Yes and no. Yes, because I often look to Canada as our more enlightened neighbor to the north who's solved so many of the problems that did or have plagued us for so long: universal health care, rampant racial strife, rigorous environmental protections, etc. At the same time, Canada as a nation has long had a strange relationship with its children.

Most countries put children and minors into the same legal category as imbeciles and the insane, but Canada is much more aggressive about it and in the process, their parents are often in practice lumped in as well. Have you ever been to a supermarket in Canada and tried to buy caffeinated Mountain Dew or caffeinated rootbeer? It doesn't exist, because children can't be trusted with caffeine and their parents might be too stupid to realize that non-cola sodas may contain caffeine.

Frankly, it astonished me at first, because Canada is more dedicated than most countries to conducting research into children's psychology: if we understand our children, then we can change the world! That sort of thing. But what's even more surprising is that a recent study ; demonstrated that in spite of how much effort and funding was being poured into Canadian schools and Canadian children's programs (from prenatal and on), immigrant children still on average outperform native-born Canadian children. And that's in spite of the fact that Canada's immigrant children are in greater poverty and penury than their native counterparts; the education they received in foreign countries prior to arriving in Canada has helped them succeed where Canadian children without that opportunity languish.

I'm torn as to how to how to find a solution, of course. On the one hand, parents are proving insufficient, but at the same time, the government is proving incompetent to solve the problem. Clearly something has to be done, but who? The only choice I see is the UN, but they're usually unwilling (or not allowed) to get involved in purely domestic affairs, and you don't get any more domestic than child-rearing. But whatever Canada does, it must act soon. Certain industries (particularly the film industries in British Columbia) have been on the rise and have successfully drawn an international presence formerly reserved to the US. But if Jonny or Sally can't read, then when the children grow up to staff or lead those industries, the nation will find itself in a lot of trouble.

I only wish we in the US had something to offer in aid, but we've failed our children too. I suppose that ultimately, we'll have to rethink the legal status of children and perhaps move them into a more autonomous position and role, where they can think for themselves and make decisions in their own best interests, since obviously we can no longer trust ourselves to act in anyone's best interest but our own. First it was propertied white men who were enfranchised, and then came men of other races, and then finally ;wo men. It's time for children to join in the society of nations and receive their full share of human rights including the right to vote, not just in silly online polls but in elections that matter. They have voices of their own, and it's time we started listening.

Someone moderate this bloke's post down as stupid.

Buddy, AFS might be old but that doesn't mean it is "dead".

AFS is a superior distributed file system which has a _proven_ track record. It has extensible ACL's. It has redundancy. It has fault tolerance. It is scalable. It has backing up built into its architecture. Kerberos fits nicely into the picture.

Let's say you have a large corporation, maybe you merged with other corporations. So now there's one corporation with all these departments that trust/might not trust eachother. Unix file permissions _break down horribly_ here whereas AFS shines. Just make groups for each corporation, add group names you trust to the ACL list of your directory and you're done. But that's not all, you can add individual users to your directory.

AFS is perfect for today's dot-coms who are now merging and forming huge corporations. And now that it is open source, it will be improved upon hopefully - not too familiar with the license.

Please read about AFS before posting ignorant-bad-big-corporation posts such as yours.

We should stand up and demand that they fully support Open Source by releasing code to viable products. If hundreds of thousands of programmers can do it every day we should expect the big guys to find a way to make it work.

lmao. Thank you for amusing me.

I was thinking of OpenWindows from Sun, which is one of two wm's available on the sparcs in the computer labs where I work*. It is indeed slow and ugly, but at least I don't have that nasty app-bar that CDS insists on putting on the screen, taking up valuable desktop real-estate.

*There is also twm available, but you have to start your session in some sort of failsafe mode to use it, and it makes OpenWindows look like KDE2 by comparison.

Fist Prost

"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."

NAMBLA involves laws regarding the "age of consent." As far as I know its illegal in pretty much every state that an adult individual can not be in a physical relationship with a minor. I have no problems with laws which are created to protect a child from being taken advantage of. Which is the case of NAMBLA. Now if it were two adult males.. no.. no problem at all. Think before you type.

And I have to agree with Susan B. Anthony on all of her views, even if some of the others don't necessarily make as much sense as others? Or do you believe that if a person is right about one thing, they are automatically right about everything else? Mega-Dittoes, Rush!

Oh, you were being absurd? Thank GOD... I was afraid you might actually BELIEVE that crap you were slingin'!

Well, I guess when you have protestors later killing the doctors performing the abortions, you get the ball taken away. This is what FACE says:

FACE makes it illegal to use force, the threat of force, or "physical obstruction" intentionally to

1. "injure"
2. "intimidate"
3. "interfere with," or
4. attempt to injure/intimidate/interfere with

The same prohibition applies to these same acts committed against someone "lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship."

Finally, the law punishes anyone who intentionally damages or destroys a facility because it provides reproductive health services, or who "intentionally damages or destroys the property of a place of religious worship."

So, not only does it block VIOLENT (violence being defined as both physical and MENTAL) and aggressive protesting at Abortion Clinics, but.. *gasp*... religious institutions. So.. its not all bad after all, is it?

Hey, I'm not the one saying I'm worried to see two guys kissing on it. YOu did.

So you're practicing "sodomy"? Or you feel you have the right to give up other people's rights to meet your own agenda and beliefs? Its not your life; you do not have the right in our society to then tell people what they can and cannot do.

Your love of bringing up extreme cases to bolster your own argument just illuminates the lack of depth to your own. I'm sure your heart is in the right place, but maybe you should use your brain a bit as well.

And only can't you spell it, you don't understand it. Lookee here.

Pete

This first example is becoming cliche, but stick with me a moment: In Japan, acts of violence and depravity are commonplace in anime and manga, and are accepted... yadda yadda. And their people commit one of the lowest rates of real violence in the world.

Contrast that with Germany, where entertainment that depicts violence committed by one human against another is verboten. Command and Conquer had to be retouched and its manual rewritten to depict its soldiers as robots, not people. Even then, it was sold only to adults. Forget about playing Panzer General. And God Forbid you even link to a web page that mentions Nazis in anything but a contemptful light. This is a reaction to their Fascist era, a time when elected German leaders executed 6 million minority citizens.

So yes. It is cultural. IANASociologist, so I won't get all Jungian and speculate about archetypes and cultural personality, but each society has to find what works -- and what doesn't -- for them. And in every society except stagnant, isolated ones, it's an ongoing search.

Now I'm going to use a word that will make a lot of you want to invoke Godwin's Law. But I'm not using that word in the sense in which Godwin usually encountered it. I'm going to use it in it's original sense. It's important that we, as informed citizens, be able to talk about this word, and know what it really means.

Get out your dictionary and look up the first definition of fascism - it's not about goosestepping and stiffarm saluting and gassing minorities. It's about efficiency. Fascism is the principle that any order, any rule, any law, is justified if it means the state will benefit: be more efficient, run smoother, be safer. Beginning to sound familiar? It should.

Because that's exactly what a lot of legislators have aimed for lately, without regard for individual liberty: anti-smoking laws, censorship of violence in media, drug wars, gun control, three strikes mandatory sentencing. Even worse, if it hasn't been effective at safety and efficiency, it's been successfully sold as such.

And it's not only state-oriented fascism, it's corporate-oriented fascism. Washington legislators are more than happy to exchan ge votes for the contributions of major corporations in order that they may run more efficiently. Laws are continually passed "for the good of the people" when they are really just good for business. To hell with the constitution, there's a buck to be made.

It's scary how the children of men who fought against fascism in WW2 are so willing to embrace it. It's scary how easily we've forgotten. Too many liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike are willing to sacrifice our liberties for safety and efficiency. My grandfather, a WW2 B-29 pilot, is probably pounding the walls of his coffin in frustration.

But that's the dark corners of the big picture. We still have defenders of the liberties endowed upon us by the constitution: From the EFF to the NRA. The entire state of Nevada and most of Texas. From PETA and Greenpeace to Larry Flynt. The Libertarian Party and even Nader. Anyone who argues for the rights of anything other than big business and "what's best for the country."

We aren't going to wind up like modern Germany. There's an equilibrium somewhere between libertarian anarchy and fascism, and we're seeking it. There are too many of us who paid attention in high school Civics class and know what's in the bill of rights. There are too many of us who own guns and know how to use them properly... and accurately. There are too many of us who entertain ourselves simulating small unit combat and tactics...

So you see, in the end, FPS and RTS games are one of the weapons in our arsenal against bad government. They fit right in alongside free press and the right to bear arms. No wonder they're being condemned by government. I suggest that these games -- weapon and combat simulators, really -- should be protected under the second amendment, as well as the first.

that ten years figure could be way off. It sure *feels* like ten years though.

It's actually eleven years, and I recall the Lynx and Gameboy came out around the same time, which was sad given how much better the Lynx really was in terms of graphics and sound. But I believe the Gameboy had better battery life and Nintendo behind it, which is likely why it sells to this day.

Sad, really. I still love my Nomad, though.

I've always avoided the Atari Lynx because of what I had read about the resolution on screen:

Atari Lynx_____________: 160x102
Game Boy/GB color______: 160x144
Game Gear_____________: 160x144
Game.Com_____________: 200x160, touchscreen (in 8x8 blocks)
Neo Geo Pocket/NGP Color: 160x152

(Color doesn't mean much to me)

However, this Lynx FAQ says that a "160 x 102 "triad" standard resolution (16,320 addressable pixels) (A triad is three LCD elements: red, green, and blue) [A] Capability of 480 x 102 artificially high resolution" is possible.

Sounds squished. Can I flip it sideways and play shooter games that work better with a tall screen, like on the WonderSwan?

I always thought A/UX was the coolest OS around. Apparently, very few people used or seen it.

It ran on top of MacOS -- with all the danger inherent in that.

You are wrong. System 6.0.x ran on top of the UNIX core, and in later versions System 7.0.1 worked (I don't think it ever got to 7.5).

It was a somewhat strange unix for it's time -- SysV2 based, IIRC.

That's very true. I think GNU stuff worked, but it was painful.

More info is available from the A/UX FAQ.

Of course C-128 != C-64. I was pretty sure that the C-128 had a Z-80 and could do CP/M. (But not 100% certain, as I'm not Jim Brain, maintainer of the comp.sys.cbm FAQ after all.) The C-64, with just its 6510, can't run CP/M without a CPU addon such as the one you mention here.

Thanks for the info! Always love tech info for old machines.

Flux, do you even know what an active UDP is?

Read the FAQ:

http://www.stopspam.org/usenet/faqs/udp. html


Pathost aliasing is usually associated with passive UDP, and this is explicitly an active UDP.

Yes, messages do indeed get "actively deleted" off other servers.

That's not, as you called it, "a gaping security hole". It's the normal default functionality of most news server software. You have to explicitly remove that functionality for it to not be there, with most commonly-used news servers.

You might want to read this faq, as well:

http://www.landfield.com/faqs/ usenet/cancel-faq/part1/