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Get more BOFH right here: http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html

...and we have the videotape to prove it!

They should've saved some for Steve Ballmer. He needs to chill...

Thank you.

Given the alternative, I choose the Computer.

Check out Steve Ballmer at his finest.

This video shows a demonstration gone bad. It appears that a Windows CE handheld playing ancient Miami Sound Machine music shorted out while Balmer had it in his pocket.

when you can get the video?

Check out this link. It's a good scoop on what a day of a good sysadmin looks like. The second chapter actually has an interview scenario too. Hope this helps.

From the BOFH Archive:

So I'm interviewing for new Operators, and, as the Bastard System Manager from Hell, I have high standards. And as the Immediate Past Bastard Operator from Hell, I have even higher standards.

I get the first applicant in.

"Ok" I say "I'm just going to ask you some simple questions to guage your knowledge of Computing and Networking in relation to the Operations Field"

"Sure"

"Right. Question One. What's the best way to stop an individual posting nasty articles to news?"

"Close their account"

"Good - But can you elaborate?"

"Delete all their files, Change their password to `Knobhead' and Erase any backups of their account"

"Excellent. What is a killfile?"

"Uh. It's a list of usernames/topics/news items etc that you wish the news- reader to automatically skip so you don't have to wade through rubbish"

"Uh No. Remember I said pertaining to Operations. A killfile is in fact a file with a list of names of people you are going to kill."

"Oh. Of course."

"Never mind. What is DCE?"

"Delete, Close and Erase"

"Good. DTR?"

"DON'T TRY to RING. The Operator's watchword"

"Well done. DBMS?"

"Dont Bug My Supervisor. Probably the most important acronym around"

"You betcha. Ok. A user comes to you with a complaint about another user sending sexually explicit email messages to them. What do you do?"

"Take a copy of the messages, close the complainant's account (by accident) and extort money from the mailer by threatening to show their parents"

"Good. I think you'll do nicely. Hang onto this wire..."

"I don't think so."

"Excellent. You passed the final test. You start tommorrow. Please leave by that door so as not to disturb the other applicants."

BZZZZZEEEERETTT!

Electrified Door Handle. Gets them every time. I think it's the "Complaints Dept" sign that draws them to it like moths to a globe...

I push the body out onto the fire escape.

"NEXT!"

There is loads of highly concentrated wisdom in here

Direct links to boston, LA, and seattle information are at boston.freesklyarov.org, la.freesklyarov.org, and seattle.freesklyarov.orb.

Protests are also scheduled in NY and LA. There's interest in the UK as well, see ntk.net for more details.

Once you have learned from this book of knowledge you can humble/homicide anyone.

>LOL... The leakage of 802.11... Hey, if you call yourself "Nerd" you can't blame 802.11 for the idiotism of BOFHs neither knowing about the built-in encryption features of 802.11 nor about the possibility to setup IPSec (in eNTe it requires nothing but a mouse-click, on Kinderunix you have to apply some patches...).

Dear Sir/Madam.

It comes to my attention that apparently you're insinuating that some BOFHs are idiots, and/or is the possibility that they somehow don't know about encryption. Is this correct ?

You'll be larted for this. With a very big, heavy and painful lart.

You don't seem to grasp the concept of being a BOFH. Maybe this can enlighten you. And don't you DARE to do it again.

It can be really difficult to explain to a newbie what is needed to hookup a few PC's via ethernet - this would make it much easier - "just plug this USB device into a wall outlet".

We covered this back in Febuary: Jason Kitcat applied under the Freedom of Information Act for more details. The government's e-envoy has also funded a research project into providing Free Software support for their PKI. If you've got some expertise, I'm sure the project leaders would appreciate your assistance.

I don't actually think that the IE exclusion is the most damaging part of this story. The tacit support by the government for a handful of commercial authentication services (at least one of which, Chambersign, appears to involve private key escrow) looks to be more pernicious.

d.

Kitcat's FOIA report
Original report
Follow-up, including mention of the Open Source project, with details of how you can help.

We covered this back in Febuary: Jason Kitcat applied under the Freedom of Information Act for more details. The government's e-envoy has also funded a research project into providing Free Software support for their PKI. If you've got some expertise, I'm sure the project leaders would appreciate your assistance.

I don't actually think that the IE exclusion is the most damaging part of this story. The tacit support by the government for a handful of commercial authentication services (at least one of which, Chambersign, appears to involve private key escrow) looks to be more pernicious.

d.

Kitcat's FOIA report
Original report
Follow-up, including mention of the Open Source project, with details of how you can help.

(before you cry: read the BOFH)

The BBC already used that one... prepare for the writ ;)

Seriously... I'm finding it hard to express how upset I am about this. I got into Hithc-hiker's Guide more than twenty years ago (my father made me listen to it on the radio because they went to the same school)... devoured the books, taped as much as I could manage when the radio series were repeated in 1985-6, then listened to those obsessively ever since.

Douglas Adams, his unfortunate obsesion with Macs aside, was always interested in computers, ever since the original InfoGames adaption of HHG as a text adventure. I saw a piece on that on the BBC's 'Microcoputers' show & taped the audio for that, too - I remember him saying that he offered to do the actual programming, to which the developers "politely told me that they'd like it to come out this century, and if I could stick to writing the jokes,..."

If you haven't heard the original radio shows, do yourself a big favour and get them now *NOT* the audio book - IMHO they're better than the books, as well as following a different (and more coherent) plot as well. And there's lots of stuff that didn't make it to the books: Zaphod and Ford falling from a mysterious cold white cave, fifteen miles up in the air...

Ford: I can't stand heights!
ZB: Don't worry, we're on our way down... listen, we may be alright, we might land in the water you know? Can you swim?
Ford: I don't know.
ZB: You don't *know*?
Ford: Well, I never liked to go into water in any great detail...
ZB: What kind of traveller are you, man? Don't like heights, don't like water...
Ford: Simply natural. I just get a kick out of being on the ground.
ZB: Well any minute now you'll have the biggest kick of your life...

I feel as if I've lost a member of my family. It's only 90 minutes since I heard this, and it still hasn't sunk in.

I really hope the HHG site doesn't get any more messed up by the BBC (see this week's NTK... and I hope the film still happens, as he was sounding really upbeat about it last I heard (his Ask Slashdot interview I think.)

:(
--

Open Source Advocate Has Yet To Rebut Craig Mundie

Jeff Parns considers himself a model for free software advocacy: helping out at installfests, answering questions on the Central Kansas Free Unix User's Group mailing list, working in his spare time on a user-friendly graphical interface to cron. Why, then, has he yet to write a long-winded essay rebutting Microsoft exec Craig Mundie's recent remarks about open source?

Our crack interviewing team cornerned Parns in his home, where he was conspicuously not combing through the text of Mundie's remarks, just as he had not been in attendance at NYU's Stern School of Business on May 3 to hear Mundie speak. What justified this weird behavior?

"I really think there are enough rebuttals already, " said Parns. "I mean, have you even read all those things? "

Eric S. Raymond, whose two preemptive rebuttals sparked the craze, was pessimistic about the chances for a Parns rebuttal in the future. "Obviously, we can't force him to write a rebuttal to Mundie's wrong-headed remarks about open source," said Raymond. "However, it's possible that my new paper, 'How I Rebutted Craig Mundie's Wrong-Headed Remarks About Open Source In Copious Detail--And How You Can Too' will give him some ideas. In fact, there's sort of a little form rebuttal in Appendix C which he can sign his name to and get it linked from Linux Today."

"As a full-time programmer, my day is pretty busy," said Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Software Foundation, whose anti-Mundie remarks were picked up by Infoworld. "Yet even I managed to stop by Mundie's speech and make a few remarks to the press. I don't think this Parns is even trying. I mean, even Steve Ballmer published a 3000-word Mundie rebuttal. Sic transit gloria Mundie, I guess."

Even Parns' neighbors have begun to notice this gap in the open source ranks. "The way he helped me with my Red Hat install, I was sure he was some sort of hot-shot free software advocate," said Millie Leman, a local dominatrix and mother of two. "But I haven't heard one word from him about this Mundie thing. It makes a person wonder."

"Look, it's spring, my son's about to graduate from junior high, I'm trying to get KCron to 1.0," said Parns, shooing this reporter out his front door. "Just leave me alone."

Will Parns rebut? Already, rebuttals with his name on them have begun showing up, though he denies authorship. Watch for the rebuttal signed with Parns' Gnu Privacy Guard key, and keep reading Segfault.org for complete coverage of every Mundie rebuttal ever written.

Tomorrow: An in-depth look at the rebuttal that Mark Billings of London saved to ~mark/mundie.txt, but never showed to anybody.

(This 'story' was first shown at Segfault.org here, and was written by Leonard Richardson)

Agreed -- the details are devistating to Craig Mundie's argument. How he got and kept his job is a wonder.

If you get a chance, take a look at Alan Toffer's Future Shock in a used book store. It's quite funny, but was also taken very seriously back in the 70s. The difference being that Craig Mundie has a bad track record now and Toffer didn't back then.

You can't stick a postfix next to a variable these days
without causing the imminent collapse of society. The day
after US assistant attorney Daniel Alter told a New York court
that DeCSS was like "software programs that shut down
navigational programs in airplanes or smoke detectors in
hotels" (you know, *those* programs), Microsoft's CRAIG MUNDIE
was across town, declaiming that the GPL was a virus that
would shut down intellectual property inside people's heads.
Craig's speech is all about the nightmarish future of an open
source world, and is rather heavy on predictions. But then
Craig's job at Microsoft is to make gambles on the future of
technology. According Marlin Eller's account in "Barbarians
Led By Bill Gates", one of Mundie's first acts at Microsoft was
killing the company's 1993 low-bandwidth Net project in favour
of the *real* future - broadband interactive TV. That said,
once Gates caught on to this Interweb thing, Mundie was first
to catch on. "We'll tune it for all the platforms, then get
hardware companies to build accelerators for it", he
predicted, of the Net's most guaranteed success - VRML. Oh,
then he masterminded that whole WebTV deal, spending $425m MS
mad money on the sure-fire Internet/TV convergence. "We view
the Internet as one of the 'features' of digital TV services",
he eerily prophesised in 1998. "PC this year, PC-TV's next
year", he again predicted - in 1997. Going further back,
Mundie features in "Soul of a New Machine" as the nameless guy
who loses the race to build a supercomputer. His own
supercomputer company went bust in 1992. Should anyone believe
his observations about the future of Open Source? As Mundie
himself once said "We persist. We're driven by some innate
belief about how these things are going to unfold." Even, it
seems, when they unfold in completely the opposite
direction.

Simon did this in 1995 Search the page for the phrase "The Bastard wreaks his terrible revenge" and you'll have your reference.

--

The Guardian [...] is seen as a trendy middle-class pseudo-intellectual broadsheet,

The Grauniad is reasonably objective, but the ICA is gaining an increasingly bad reputation for black-turtlenecked post-modern wankerdom from the technically illiterate chattering classes.

I think it looks like a good background text on the beginnings of linux, so I bought it.
--

I think it looks like a good background text on the beginnings of linux, so I bought it.
--

From NTK: you kids and your new-fangled Amigas!

From NTK: you kids and your new-fangled Amigas!

and the main theme tune was stollen from 'lazy jones', a c64 game, as mentioned by ntk

>> REVIEW OF THE YEAR, 2000 <<

It was shit. Give us another one.

False. The distribution has nothing to do with it. Edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and change ONE LINE, which will be a very intuitive process if you know about that file.

Sadly, this is where the People Who Know What They Are Doing go wrong.

From the perspective of the Average User, you just spouted off some mumbo-jumbo that will never make any sense. "/etc/Xwhat? Wazzat?"

The Average User, as the article pointed out, does not even understand Windows! This is a nightmare situation! These people open up .txt files in Word, save things wherever the application tells them to, and don't delete the redundant backups of autoexec.bat and config.sys that everything under the sun makes.

Text files scare these people. Even 'resolution' scares these people. If you ever work with Average Users, you tell them, in regards to resolution, that the text becomes smaller but they fit more on the screen. Color depth is a little more concrete, bur don't even get started about 'bits'.

There is a market for 'protecting' software that hides and read-protects all important system files for a reson. Even given the (addmittedly usable) GUI of all Win9x, users will still manage to destroy their system.

And now you ask them to edit text files to change settings. What a brilliant idea! I'm sure their computer experience will increase (and their concurring fear of computers' flexibility decrease) once they have to fire up a bona-fide editor to change settings.

The GUI is there to protect people. People find it complex, we add in a graphical layer to organize all reasonable commands and (most importantly) limit the range of options to possible, if not strictly reasonable, values. All forms of Linux, although I love them and the respect for the user that they come with, simply do not have that kind of protection suitable for the end user.

In short, I agree with the original article - ignoring all other faults, Linux distributions are too complex for the average user. Interfaces are quickly moving the way of a single, gigantic button that says "OK," and Linux represents the opposite end of the spectrum. Not that it is a bad thing.

(On a side note, I suggest everyone read the BOFH archives. Funnyfunnyfunny.)

Using an OTP system with a software implementation will get rid of your giant keyfob at least...

Since we are on the subject, check the Original Series

The Guardian/Observer are reknowned in the Brit tech community as over-excitable and inaccurate (see NTK pretty much any week for details.

Tunnelling over port 80 is (part of) the answer. The other part is having a server on the other side of the facist firewall that proxies for you. Oddly, this weeks Need to Know mentions this problem. See http://http-tunnel.com/newpage/icqp.htm for Windows software that does it and http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html for Unix software.

"The whole point of a peer-to- peer system is that anyone can swap any file with anyone else - if BMG are going to restrict it to certain approved promo tracks, or run compensatory payment tracking for every file on the system (which'd be fun for bands who are signed to different labels in different territories), they might as well do it with a few industrial strength ftp-sites. And if they don't, they continue to run the risk of copyright actions from, ooh - off the top of our heads, every other record company in the world. And even if the Nap magically chases the *bad* files out of its walled garden, won't the action move to more staid (and more heartily defended) "Napster for workgroups" projects like .NET and Groove? BMG don't seem to have the faintest inkling of how intimately P2P and piracy are interlinked - but, hey, they're a major label, and therefore their job is to waste huge amounts of money on what the kids seem to like. Also, it'll be far funnier to watch, if the Napster/ BMG deal turns out less like AOL buying Netscape, and more like the Sex Pistols signing to EMI."

I think it goes without saying that the Ultimate *Nix Systems Admin Handbook, heck, the Ultimate Systems Admin Handbook period, is the BOFH. (Also available here and here)

I think all of us can relate

Good to see NTK leads to /. .... it'll probably make this weeks digest....
____________________________
One Piece short of Legoland

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Wide-spread problems like these are happening all the time. This Register article from today has another exploit (not a bug, but very common misconfiguration) that has recently been used to compromise 160+ sites in the UK. A full explanation was helpfully dumped on one of the compromised sites, and they still haven't noticed (source www.ntk.net). If you read the explanation of the exploit it could have been used for any purpose including DDOS.

It is amazing how many computers can go down in one blow. As the hacker left in his explanation: "If you think education is expensive, then try ignorance"

Of course, if you need more ideas, i suggest this site

This was published in NTK a while back, but I still think its rather cool: dig @138.195.138.195 goret.org. axfr | grep '^c..\..*A' | sort | cut -b5-36 | perl -e 'while(){print pack("H32",$_)}' | gzip -d

Find more at ntk.net

...They often work by enticing teens and young adults with the promise of free software and beer, before they start encouraging them to read parable-laced screeds that further indoctrinate them into the cult... (presumably /. is one such screed).

You didn't know that? Check out Citizens United for a Decent Internet, (in particular the March 8th story) referred in this weeks excellent NTK . I always have trouble telling if these rather extreme christian things are serious or not, but I think it is.

I didn't have any problems with raging in w3m or lynx... Could you explain what kind of problems you are refering to? To me google is #1, especially when it comes to the results... and their initiative to keep a cached copy is simply great!

Damn you, I was going to mention the BOFH first. :) Normally that wouldn't warrant a reply, BUT...

Here's a useful snippet. This is the address to the *complete* BOFH archives.. I don't think this can be disputed as it's the author's own page, and has material as recent as 1999!

I've been reading this for about three weeks now off and on... damn good reading.

But they are NOT free, you are paying with BT connection charges.

In most parts of the US, local calls are free, known as flat rate calling plan. So freewwweb had to get their revenue from advertising.

So the "free" ISPs in England still cost for all the time you are connected, which is why the average brit is only online for 7 minutes per day, and the average american is online for 33 minutes/day.

Go read NTK for the continuing saga of oftel trying to force BT into offering an american style flat local calling fee for anyone who wants it. The same fight is shaping up in france and germany.

Its a shame a good service like freewwweb can't make it in the american market place. They were very friendly to all users, not just the windoze users, and that made the BSD/linux/mac/amiga communities very happy. Juno is a horrific company who pander only to those who they can make huge profits from with very little in return. They target the completely ignorant users who don't realise what a real connection to the internet should be.

the AC

June 30, 2000: MP3 Summit Ian at MP3 Summit webcast
You can find Ian's hour long talk at the MP3 Summit about 1 hour 8 minutes into the Wednesday webcast.

June 16, 2000: Guardian Free market fight for music moguls
Interesting article in a British national newspaper.

May 27, 2000: LA Weekly Genie 1, Bottle 0
Very amusing article on Freenet and copyright. Highly recommended.

May 24, 2000: Channel 4 News Hackers stay one step ahead
A very cool news item talking about recent attempts by the British government to censor the Internet and how Freenet will make this very difficult. Includes text and streaming video of the item.

May 23, 2000: Libération L'anarchie est au bout du clavier
An interesting French article about Freenet, concentrating on the freedom of information aspects of the system rather than just copyright.

May 12, 2000: National Post Napster secured page in Internet history
Interesting description of why Freenet is not vulnerable in the same way that Napster is, although I must say that their "final thought" is slightly perplexing!

May 12, 2000: O'Reilly Network Gnutella and Freenet represent true technological innovation
A nice article concentrating, for a change, on the technical side of Freenet and Gnutella. Reasonably accurate, although it understates the efficiency improvement that Freenet should provide (describing it as of comparable efficiency to the WWW where it should be much more efficient).

May 12, 2000: Het Nieuwsblad Vrijheid van downloaden
A Belgian article about Freenet.

May 10, 2000: Houston Chronicle Software developer pledges to foil all intellectual property watchdogs
A version of the article below, doesn't require that you register.

May 10, 2000: New York Times The Concept of Copyright Fights for Internet Survival
One of the better articles; concentrates on the copyright issue. Requires free registration.

April 27, 2000: PCFormat Daily FreeNet
A brief article on Freenet.

April 27, 2000: Heise News-Ticker World Wide Anarchy: Netz ohne Kontrolle
A German article on Freenet.

April 26, 2000: CNET.com Free, anonymous information on the anarchists' Net
Entertaining article with some nice quotes.

April 17, 2000: The Irish Times Anarchy Rules Alternative Web
A rather amusing article on Freenet.

April 16, 2000: Freshmeat Client As Server: The New Model
An interesting article discussing distributed systems and how systems like Freenet are actually in a similar spirit to the original Internet.

April 13, 2000: El País Freenet propone una red sin censuras, alternativa a la WWW
A Spanish article about Freenet.

April 10, 2000: Slashdot.org FreeNet's Ian Clarke Answers Privacy Questions
A very informative interview conducted by the readership of SlashDot.org, probably the closest thing to a FAQ, aside from our faq.

March 25, 2000: ABC News Freedom on the Net?
A rehash of the New Scientist article below, but likely to reach a much larger audience.

March 25, 2000: New Scientist Out of control
A "big bad Internet"-style article, but it is reasonably well researched and seeks the opinions of those who might be considered Freenet's opposition.

March 23, 2000: Heise.de Ein Netzwerk, das Zensur unmöglich machen soll
A German article on Freenet.

March 14, 2000: OLinux Freenet, a polemic concept to deal with WWW
An English translation of a Brazilian interview with Ian Clarke. Focuses on the technical aspects of Freenet, and goes into a reasonable amount of detail as to how the system works.

March 10, 2000: Webwereld Anoniem Freenet ultieme schuilplaats voor piraten
A Dutch article on Freenet. My Dutch is a little rusty but it looks like it is primarily inspired by the Wired article below.

March 8, 2000: no spoon FreeNet : le réseau anonyme distribué qui supplantera le Web
An excellent French article on Freenet, draws an interesting parallel between Freenet and the writings of Neal Stephenson.

March 3, 2000: Need To Know sufficiently advanced technology: the gathering
A brief but excellent article again approaching Freenet from a pro-freedom standpoint.

February 24, 2000: PigDog Journal Get in on the Ground Floor of Freedom
A very positive little article describing Freenet and why they think it is interesting using some rather "colorful" language.

August 14, 1999: Brave Gnu World FreeNET
One of the first articles about Freenet back when it was 100% theory. Still an excellent introduction to the way Freenet works.

It's at times like this I'm glad I joined the ACLU. It, and other similar groups, have consistently defended us against encroachments on the First Amendment like the CDA and COPA and others, with varied success. Somebody's got to fight the bad guys, eh? Other countries without any Bill of Rights, like Australia and England, have had even more serious problems with idiot lawmakers. Those of you who read NTK now will remember news about the law in Britain which required people to prove that they did not possess a cryptographic key, and the many prudish laws passed by the Australian government are famous. Us 'Murricans still have to be on our guard, however. We, too, have moron lawmakers, and we can't always count on the conservative Supreme Court to protect us. Also, if Dubya gets elected, the precarious political balance on the Court will slip even farther to the right, and we can expect more unfavorable rulings.

Read the BOFH stories and arrange an "accident".
--