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Mr. Ballmer,

I think you hide from yourself the true nature of your business. Your company makes a lot of money because of many, many adversarial practices like tricky, closed file formats, mixing program files and operating system files, and actually encouraging piracy of your products so that competitors cannot make money.

Your company has never, as far as I am aware, released an excellent product. Windows XP was terribly buggy and troublesome until Service Pack 2. You waste the time of millions of well-educated people. You deliberately manage your business in such a way that programmers are not allowed to finish their jobs. Programmers know how to make very secure software, but your software has had literally hundreds of thousands of expoits. A large part of the money you make comes from people buying new computers because their old computers have become infected. When you are told of an exploit, you often take many months to fix it, showing your true self and your true belief in how to live in the world by taking advantage. (Internet Explorer was 78% unpatched when I wrote this.)

I think you should not think of yourself as primarily a business man. You should think of yourself as primarily an abuser.

Michael Jennings

Ooh! The HARD DRIVE!!! Wow, that's just great, congratulations on throwing off the yoke of control that a large faceless corporation has on your life.

And for the record, I don't use Windows and never will, I got fed up with proprietary "we control you" crap software like Windows and OS X a hell of a long time ago. What makes me laugh the most however are the people who go on about how Vista's built in copy protection is a great reason to switch to a Mac, which if anything is even more restrictive in what hardware you can and cannot use. Say what you want about Microsoft, but at least they don't have a monopoly on HARDWARE as well as software.

> Very true, I pesonally would never own a PDA, but I am sure you won't find one running UNIX or BSD.

You can run OpenBSD on the Sharp Zaurus.

http://www.openbsd.com/zaurus.html

Blob themesong

'nuff said

http://www.openbsd.com/lyrics.html#39

J.

What they need, instead of indecision, is an egomaniac whose single-mindedness of purpose can drive the whole space program forward.

Someone like Bill Gates ...

But in hindsight I should have used OpenBSD, just forgot to get the bloody CD's out.

I have to download a whole bunch of packages, make FLOPPIES

No, you don't. There is an install CD available. http://www.openbsd.com/faq/faq4.html#MkCD-ROM
Download the install ISO, burn to CD, ta-da! Very difficult, indeed...

As someone who has installed OpenBSD before, I can tell you, it's really not that difficult. Download the install CD ISO and follow this: http://www.openbsd.com/faq/faq4.html#Install

I have to download a whole bunch of packages, make FLOPPIES

No, you don't. There is an install CD available. http://www.openbsd.com/faq/faq4.html#MkCD-ROM
Download the install ISO, burn to CD, ta-da! Very difficult, indeed...

As someone who has installed OpenBSD before, I can tell you, it's really not that difficult. Download the install CD ISO and follow this: http://www.openbsd.com/faq/faq4.html#Install

Not to mention, most BSD systems use a heavy amount of GPL code these days

Really? Care to show me where this "heavy amount" is at?

What would your favorite BSD look like without any of it?

Well, this for one: http://www.openbsd.com/
What would Linux look like without non-GPL code? You'd have no OpenSSH, no Apache, no PostgreSQL, and no X.

...they're not willing to let the competition or some company to take their work, close source it, and sell it as something new and better to make bundles of cash.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard that argument before from the anti-BSD folks. Again, care to show me an example of where this actually happened?

well, another option would be to run OpenBSD. Even running it as a desktop OS it will give you enough apps for excellent productivity, and you always have the warm, fuzzy feeling in your belly that you're supporting peace-loving Canadians AND have a secure machine.

...use the GPL, because that's the only way you'll ever see the improvements.

Well hell... somebody better let these guys know then.

OpenBSD. Yes, it costs less than $100. It is free.

why would DeRaat say such hateful things?

Because Theo speaks his mind and doesn't care much about whether others agree (or so it seems). The man was one of the the 4 people who started NetBSD, and was later booted (more of less) from the project because of personality conflicts, which is why he started OpenBSD. That's just who he is.

I know a lot of *BSD people who don't care for Linux, and a lot of Linux people who don't care for *BSD. Probably the 2 top reasons for one not liking the other have to do with development model and licensing. Being that Theo is pretty well known and a little more vocal than most with his opinions, I think it was easier to get a nice juicy article by interviewing him as opposed to some other *BSD developer.

He's got a passion for what he does, and leads a group of people who develop a damn fine and secure OS, http://www.openbsd.com/, he just needs to work on his PR skills a little more (ok, maybe a lot more).

also making progress

Anticipating the shitstorm of people lining up to say 'how stupid' without reading the FA, here's a nice little summary.

The paper is not quite as stupid as it sounded by the description, but it misses/ignores a critical flaw in the argument.

His basic premise is that patching is expensive and people don't do it anyway - probably true for the majority of systems. Therefore, he argues, black-hats are alerted to the security holes by the disclosure. He shows that it doesn't really matter whether holes are discovered by black-hats and are fixes are released after the exploit, or discovered by white-hats and exploited after the fix has been released but not applied.

However, his arguments are based on averages. Where he's wrong is that if you have some systems that are simply so valuable that they cannot be comprimised, proactive bug fixing coupled with a manic obsession for patching your system the moment a patch is released is still the best way to stay safe

Interix used OpenBSD as is evidenced at deadly.org

So like 95% of it is just OpenBSD, mostly pulled from theh 3.0 release tree.

I wonder if this functionality would make it feasible to use md5Crypt hashed passwords on a NIS network with Solaris 9 systems. md5Crypt and scalable blowfish (see the OpenBSD blowfish crypt paper) are designed so that you can identify the hash function used by looking for specific prefixes in the hashed text.

Obviously NIS should be dead and buried, but in far too many places it is not, yet. It would be nice if it were possible to use a more worthy hash function in conjunction with NIS.

Hey, don't forget the 82nd blowfish division.

XP Home: http://shop4.outpost.com/product/3063039
XP Pro: http://shop4.outpost.com/product/3063019

Apple doesn't do "upgrade editions". Every time they sell a copy of their OS, they sell it as a full retail purchase. It's a bit of a bummer, but considering that their full retail price is a little over half what XP Pro full retail costs, and less than twice what XP Home Upgrade Edition costs, (XP Home is so neutered! Who'd want it?) it's clear that OS X is a bargain.

And, mais bien sur, Mandrake Linux, a worthy competitor to either one, is available for free download or $54 for the Powerpack Edition 7 CD-ROM set or 1 DVD-ROM set. Red Hat, for those who are conscientiously objecting to anything French, can be had without support in the basic pack for $40. For those who don't like Mandrake but do like KDE, SuSE is at the exact price point.

There is also ample evidence, even without MacOS X's liberal use of the codebase, that BSD isn't dying, exaggerated reports to the contrary.

not as good as my OpenBSD 2.5 devil cop shirt - that devil is so homoerotic Village People-esque its cool!

US encryption export restrictions were skirted by developing encryption outside of the US before importing it back in as well as throughout the rest of the world while the same encryption, developed inside of the US, would have been illegal to distribute, as per the OpenBSD team.
Would we have arrested a Canadian cryptographer upon setting foot in US soil for developing a program which only we seem to have a hang-up about to the world, including the US? Apparently we (remember: corporations are people, too) don't have any such qualms about slapping Russians in handcuffs.
While the Internet may have opened up the "virtual" world, if this gets tried and Dmitri convicted, the real world looks to be getting shackled down: a world of nations each with their corporation-friendly or religion-friendly or whatever-friendly laws for their tiny little vicarage that don't make sense anywhere else but, because of the pervasive nature of the Internet, can be enforced anywhere doesn't make for big tourism, does it?
Also, I'm still... does anyone have any actual proof that Dmitri or Elcomsoft ever sold the eBook decryptor inside the US? I've heard conflicting reports that he has, he hasn't, he was selling at DefCon, but nothing I'd consider concrete.
Easy does it!

--

Last month I got sick and was unable to get out of bed. Fortunately I had a junk old 486 running OpenBSD beside my bed which I could use to SSH into my normal computer. I could even SSH in to work.

1024x768? BA! 1152x864x32 or 80x25x2. Nothing in between!

Then why not make the default glibc strcpy/strcat etc safe?

OpenBSD have addressed this issue. glibc has not yet adopted their solution, although glib is expected to adopt g_strlcat and g_strlcpy in version 2.


http://www.openbsd.com/papers/strlcpy-paper.ps

For the disbelievers, here's an excerpt from the FAQ:

3.1.2 - Does OpenBSD provide an ISO image available for download?

You can't. The official OpenBSD CD-ROM layout is copyright Theo de Raadt, as an incentive for people to buy the CD set. Note that only the layout is copyrighted, OpenBSD itself is free. Nothing precludes someone else to just grab OpenBSD and make their own CD.

All generalizations are false.

if these guys are about defending anything and are in the military or security business then they have to be able to rely on an OS to be as secure as possible. Better than GNU/Linux in my mind would then be OpenBSD.

Opensource is great because it allows them to totally review whatever goes on in the OS and to tweak it to no end.

I use windows for two good reasons. One is to play games, two is to play with Adobe goodies.

I use GNU/Linux & OpenBSD for a great variety of other reasons - unfortunately not for gaming nor for working in Adobe.

I don't think the issue is to have them "break away from MS," if you value their opinion they need a system that does what they want it to do in the fashion they want it done. And then there are a great deal of choices, MS, Apple, GNU/Linux, BSD/UNIX, etc.