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No, RMS, Linux is not GNU/Linux

"One guy, Linus Torvalds, used GCC to make his operating system (yes, Linux is an OS -- more on this later). He named it 'Linux' with a little help from his friends. Why doesn't he call it GNU/Linux? Because he wrote it, with more help from his friends, not you. You named your stuff, I named my stuff -- including the software I wrote using GCC -- and Linus named his stuff. The proper name is Linux because Linus Torvalds says so. Linus has spoken. Accept his authority. To do otherwise is to become a nag. You don't want to be known as a nag, do you?"

LINUX use is growing 30% / year!

"Linux use is growing 30 per cent year-on-year and while it hasn't been targeted as much, Linux is going to be targeted. Any application - open source or otherwise - will have weaknesses," he added.

...AND SLASHDOT published astronomy shit on frontpage... not these NEWS!

> I think the obvious next move is for Microsoft to buy Sega.
They already have tried:
http://www.redherring.com/insider/2002/0716/sega07 1602.html

And after that they tried to buy Nintendo for 25Bn(I think to remember 2.5Bn,
but in the news sites I found it says 25Bn!):
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1131308
http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=263

I don't remember much, I just found this links by looking in google for less
than one minute, I'm sure you can find some better info elsewhere in the net.

My favorite part of this history is the answer of Nintendo: "We weren't sure
what to think when Microsoft made the offer. In fact I was surprised - we
didn't need the money. I thought it was a joke."

hehehe...

I wonder what will they try next, it's obvious that they are desperate for
finding some other business now that the software licensing is going to become
obsolete thanks to opensource, I think they should stick to what(only) they are
good at: mouses ;)

\\Uriel

Just a small note to the original poster regarding his witty comment about spammers in China...

Spammers tend to be citizens of western countries for sure. They just exploit mis-configured, open Chinese, Korean, Indian and so on mailservers that allow one to freely relay messages through them. How would a random Chinese kid TRYING TO MAKE MONEY FAST by offering you life with 89% LESS BODY FAT and 48% LARGER PENIS FOR FREE know or care that minority of his target audience can potentially be fooled by marketing these things that match with values so important to most/many spoiled American/Western Europe people but that make no sense to his neighbours? Nope, it comes from inside, we (who have the privilege to live in welfare states, I'm from Finland by the way) shouldn't blame no-one but ourselves for this.

Go check Google with words like "spam chinese relay" and you'll get loads of matches like this which furher explains the problem.

Because governent computers are so secure themselves... HA!

[If something does't seem completely logical or contradictory somewhere, like MS being on the same level with RedHat in one place and with Sun in another, that's probably because I'm merging things I found in two different articles that were written almost half a year apart]

You could look at it this way: for the past couple of years, the number of vulnerabilities discovered in WinNT and 2000 combined has been at approximately the same level as that for RedHat linux alone, and at about 50% of all linux distros combined. The absolute leader in the vulnerability top 100 is Mandrake, with M$ sharing the 4th position with Sun.
It's not because headlines don't cry out that the world is about to end everytime a hole is found in linux/solaris/unix, that none are found.

Only this year, and that's because MS expressly started searching for them, the number of vulnerabilities found in Win2000 is rising - above RedHat, but (at the time of the article I can't find anymore - see below) it still looked like it wouldn't surpass all of linux combined.

So where do you think attacks would me more successful?

Source: "here or here, "Windows more secure than Linux?"

I thought I saw another article last Friday with more recent figures (including the first months of 2002) and saying that this ratio, except for the peak in 2002, has been constant for a couple of years, but I can't find the blasted thing anymore.

Also interesting is this page where a number of people explain their ideas about win/lin security. I suppose most /. nerds are going to call it biased because linux doesn't exactly come out good.

Some people reacted to the first article that comparing a single OS to all flavors of linux combined isn't honest, but (1) NT and 2000 aren't a single OS any more than linux is and they represent a larger installed system base, (2) even in the case of a few individual linux distro's MS still wins, and (3) neither is combining all the good sides of different linux flavors, or comparing the holes in an OS plus those in all its apps to just an OS alone, and all of these are daily habits in linux advocacy if it fits the linux side.

http://www.vnunet.com/News/1133397

Even more interesting quote: (I didn't notice it at first.)

The officers were involved in an international operation to catch the website operators because, although they were created in Italy, the internet service providers were based in Washington DC and California.

Found searching Google:

http://www.vnunet.com/News/1133397

More info, according to it they have been mixing pornography with religion.

"They then went on to show a nun in suggestive clothes [and] other things in poor taste."

Yep. Strong encryption is the key. I got concerned enough about this issue that I spent several hundred hours writing an open source software package for secure, peer-to-peer networking with "vapor keys" that disappear after you're done with a session. For those of you folks in the U.K. living under the R.I.P. law, that's cool because you can't be forced to give up keys that you no longer have. You can get it (I guess this is a shamelesss plug, but what the heck, it's free software) here -Ed Suominen

But that's old news ("Google has also cut access to one or two pages cited in Deutsche Bahn's request letter").

The story author, James Middleton, is a known troll and MS banner-waver, check out http://www.vnunet.com/News/1128907
Either that, or he is very susceptible to marketing hype from corporate interests, and taking it as news.

According to this AT&T aren't doing so good. Could it be that they've decided to try and make some money? Yeah it's crap for those of you who have to pay an extra $7 a month or whatever but at the end of the day big companies are always gonna try and make money. I guess cable modem users are just an easy target.

Linux was made by G33ks who hate mycr0z0f! and like to piss in each others anus!

LINUX SUCKS LINUX SUCKS LINUX SUCKS

THIS IS PAINFUL but its only a millionth of the pain you will endure while using linux!

There is no modem support
no printer support
no sound support
and no technical support

Linux is also very buggy and filled with security holes!

This article SHOWS THAT MICROSOFT WINDOWS HAS LESS HOLES THAN LINUX!

Go on, mod me as a troll, but remember this IS THE TRUTH AND THE PERSOn who moderates this is fucking lyer who fucking likes fucking goatsex while typing on a fucking command line!

The gui in linux sucks! The gnome desktop is a blatent rip off of the high quality motif desktop found in real unices! The fonts suck and if you want to install software you either compile it or use packages which have more dependancies than luxury palace in ceasar 3!

BOTTOM LINE LINUX SUCKS! and here is a command that crashes linux without being root and can be exploited!

$ yes > /dev/mem

You can sign up to become a Beta tester for the Xbox Live here

What I really wanted to say was Sony has decided to release the PS2 Linux kit in Europe. Sign up Linux Play
Looks like Sony is covering all their based. Look at the deal they just made with IBM about Setbox technology that I am sure will find its way into PS3 related stuff.

OK, I made this submission too, but my links were to vnunet.com. Guess the moderators don't like AC's, do they?

• Microsoft, States Debate Remedies (eWeek, March 18)
• Microsoft Back in Court (internet.com, March 18)
• States ask for broad sanctions on Microsoft (USA Today, March 18)
• Microsoft 'killed Dell Linux' - States (Register, March 19)
• Microsoft pressured Dell to drop Linux (The Inquirer, March 19)
• Microsoft caught in the anti-Linux act (vnunet.com, March 19)

• Case Filings
• District Court Opinions

I've noticed that whenever Meta group report on Linux they always denigrate it. There have been articles on ZDNET and similar places where positive things have been said by Gartner, IDC etc., but then at the end there are some words of doom from Meta Group: "it may not be ready", "there might be problems", "you can't yet run Linux on 1000 processor machines...".

For example, look at this article about Linux in investment banks. Positive news all the way through until:

But Meta Group programme director Ashim Pal says the cost of the platform is not the only consideration. 'The operating system is a relatively small part of the total cost of ownership. Purely focusing on the cost of the platform is deluded,' he said.

If you go their web-site and look for recent documents featuring Linux in the title you will find:

- Linux on the Mainframe: Nice Place to Visit, But...
- No Advantage From Linux PDAs
- Choose Palm or Pocket PC - Linux Only for Custom Apps
- Linux PDAs Offer Alternative for Low-End and Specialized Markets
- Companies Should Consider Limited Server-Based Linux Implementations
- Microsoft Criticizes Linux as Operating System Issues Move to Web Services Level
- ... Linux Management: More Hype than Substance
- Linux Dreams of Management Promotion.,
- Linux: Application Server Tiers or Tears?

I guess you can make your own minds up. BTW, Meta Group have been having a few problems themselves recently.

• First pay some cash
• Blair savaged over Microsoft visit - The Labour Party was yesterday accused of having an unhealthy relationship with business after a visit to Microsoft UK
• Microsoft gets a Tony for party political broadcast - The "special relationship" between the UK and the US hit rather a rocky patch this week
• Then enjoy the results
• Blair hands wireless internet to BT & Microsoft

After all, everyone knows that Java is the preferred language for child rapists

In fact, Patrick Naughton who told me that he was an inventor of Java, used the language to hunt down little girls on the internet.

As part of a plea, he used Java to trap his former friends in an FBI sting.

Any computer expert could look at the Java language and see its child-molestor roots. That's why I don't use Java, and I prohibit anyone on my staff from using it.

One more thing: If you like Java, you too must be a pedophile.

>Do that, for the same or lower price than you can do it with Minidisc, and we'll talk.

Already done. From what I remember of UK MD prices this is about equal.

Now please stop telling the world MD is cheaper. It isn't.

I spotted this on vnunet.com. clip:
The Church of Scientology has forced Google to remove sites from its search engine using the controversial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Lawyers representing the group, created by former science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard, used the DMCA to force Google to remove links to copyrighted material and has compared its actions to fighting terrorism.

The whole article is here

ps. simultaneously, this was my 11th rejected posting of 11 postings! - HOORAY!! :)

I spotted this on vnunet.com. clip:
The Church of Scientology has forced Google to remove sites from its search engine using the controversial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Lawyers representing the group, created by former science fiction writer L Ron Hubbard, used the DMCA to force Google to remove links to copyrighted material and has compared its actions to fighting terrorism.

The whole article is here

ps. simultaneously, this was my 11th rejected posting of 11 postings! - HOORAY!! :)

there was a story up about this on vnunet on monday. but they mention that Apache was threatening to give Sun 60 days to get it sorted. then what?

Outlook has significant problems scaling to the degree a behemoth like AOL-TW demands. It's beyond the almost complete absence of security that makes Outlook a really poor choice in large corporate envornments - Outlook basically falls prey to the same ills as AOL's client software: It's intended originally for ease-of-use over security and scalability.

I have definite biases here (as I prefer corporate mail solutions that run on a variety of platforms, scale out the wazoo, and Just Work), but they're rooted firmly in practical experience (first-hand and otherwise) of replacing 10's of Exchange boxes with several different solutions that actually SOLVED user requirements.

It's modded (+3, funny) as I type, but it really is true ...

See http://www.vnunet.com/News/105831 and http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19981009S 0021 for details.

But you knew that anyway and went on to troll and insult me.

How much is M$ paying you, and was it worth it for your soul ?

Yep - hardware is all the magic.... It's the way Steve Jobs wants it.

There was a post on Slashdot awhile ago (I know I should go find the link) that was pretty insightful to the way Steve thinks. Steve is a fully paid up member of the Style Council - cool design is his thing, remember the Cube - totally cool, and this was a total reprise of the NeXT Cube and they both bombed. Steve has an obsession about cool hardware and if you've eveer seen him demo OSX you can see him drooling over his candy coloured OS too. And do you get his "oh and one more thing' surprise fetish?

The point is could Steve ever bear to see his beautiful OS run on a beige box? Probably not. And he's a wealthy man having the time of his life - so why bother?. He has this company making these great looking computers, running a beautiful cutting edge OS and when he has time he can duck over to Pixar. I bet his idea of a great time is watching Monsters Inc on a Cinema Display running OS X. I have to agree - it's mindblowing.

So what's the motivation for going to Intel for Steve? He's having all the fun he wants, the business model is dubious - Apple is a hardware company.... I repeat HARDWARE company. Do you think that iPod is going to drive sales of computers for Apple... No. It's just more cool hardware. There's nothing about moving to Intel that does it for him.

I figure that Apple will begin to release more and more hardware products alongside their range of iComputers. It's much much more likely that Apple will support Intel based computers and operating systems for these other products... iPod will be the first of many.

So Cringley is way off - he doesn't get how Apple and Steve Jobs tick - he should stick to technology - this whole topic is too much about people for him to grok.

Although the statistics so far only go up to August 2001, aggregated distributions of the Linux operating system suffered 96 vulnerabilities while Windows NT/2000 suffered only 42.

Breaking the figures down by distribution, Mandrake Linux 7.2 notched up 33 vulnerabilities, Red Hat 7.0 suffered 28, Mandrake 7.1 had 27 and Debian 2.2 had 26.

another take can be found on this story, here: vnunet and here .

another take can be found on this story, here: vnunet and here .

If your product requires some crucial part of it to remain secure, then that will be its biggest weakness. As soon as that one thing comes out into the open, a huge swathe of the security it offered is gone. Think CSS here.

However, if your product is secure despite everyone knowning about it (because you published it), then it will be more secure than one relying on people not knowing how it works. Think DES and friends here.

There is quite a short article on Security by Obscurity with microsoft as the case study here. Alternatly, pick up your nearest book by Bruce Schneier

Actually, I remember seeing someone port Melissa to Linux as a shellscript (rather then a VBscript) on k5 a while back. Sure, the user would have to manually save it and run it, since most Linux mail apps wouldn't do it for you, but the code was still there.

Also, there have been a few viruses on Linux, to say otherwise is the height of idiocy. Just do a damn google search.

As far as spyware goes? Yeh, there is none (that we know off...) But that doesn't mean that there won't be in the future. There's no technical reason why it couldn't be there.

Happens all the time. I fear anything I do good, from making charitible contributions to writing software could end up putting me in jail.

Either post links, facts, or other references, or don't expect anyone to listen to you.

And I especially don't care for users who think they've got clout just because they have a low UID. Remember, if you win a race in the special olympics you may have first place, but you're still retarded.

• there's so much breathless enthusiasm for an API that has repeatedly failed to catch on;
• people actually think that Cocoa is going to seduce a significant numbers of Carbon, Windows, or Linux/Unix developers -- isn't it a little late in the game for that kind of realignment?
• this discussion seems to be dominated by Objective C people; wasn't a big part of the development effort to make this OS accessible to other languages?
• why this whole thing took so long -- this isn't a new OS, it's a port of an existing one!

Lol... well there's this which although wasn't exactly what I was thinking of as "driving" is obviously a factor. (I thought that article was a send-up on first reading).

I think what I was getting at is that the online porn industry has driven many innovations, such as pop-ups (I didn't say you had to like it). Here's another article supporting my claim. This one points out some ways in which the online porn business model was adopted by the e-commerce pioneers.

Here's the link, sorry. I was sure I did a preview and it showed up, oh well.

Not write software without thinking about security?

Already being done. Microsoft has learned there lesson, it seems. A third-party security review, available here (PDF file) of the .NET framework has shown that it's pretty darn secure (yes, Microsoft commissioned the review. Conspiracy theories can now commence.) (though as with anything, if the developers writing .NET services don't employ the security features available in .NET, it won't mean much. Microsoft is taking this seriously, but it'll be up to third parties to use the provided security framework). Office XP has many features with security in mind, such as the default and automatic stripping of malicious scripts and attachments in Outlook XP. Windows XP includes a built-in firewall, which while fairly primitve (it's essentially a packet filter, on par with ipchains or iptables, and not a more powerful proxy firewall), is a good step for home users who would otherwise not install anything like Black Ice Defender or other firewall products.

You can't change the past, but you can change the future. Microsoft has provided security hotfixes for their mistakes in the past, and are working with security in mind for current and future products. Don't sell them short based on years-old work. Look at what they're currently doing.

I assume that this is sarcasm in light of the track record of one EU country's leader.
However some European countries are flying the flag for Free Software and open standards :-)

- Derwen

This is where Pixar's RENDERFARM is put to work. For a Bug's Life, 150 dual-processor Silicon Graphics OCTANE[tm] workstations and an Onyx2[tm] visual system were employed.

Actually, since the early days Pixar has used Sun computers for their renderfarm. They even took out a full-page ad to thank Sun Microsystems right after Toy Story came out.

The SGI computers are mainly just for animator's worstations.

From one page about a Pixar programmer and A Bug's Life:

At one point they had about 1,000 processors in the render farm

And for Toy Story 2, it was

No less than 300 SGI Octane workstations and 120 Sun Enterprise 4500 servers, along with a 4.5 Terabyte Sun StorEdge Array and a Cisco Fast EtherChannel network - a gigabit Ethernet switched network - powers Toy Story 2.

And for A Bug's Life, it was

a switched Ethernet network of 100 Sun Enterprise 4000 servers, each with 14 processors, and 24 StorEdge A3000 disk arrays

Since I've been out of the Palm world for a while now, I was curious about this Documents to Go feature. It's basically a document viewer and editor that lets you peek and mess with Office and Lotus files. I don't believe most people will be actually editing files on such as mall screen and with limited input devices. I think, however, that most business people would be glad just to be able to read files they use/created on the desktop.

Why has nobody either sent out a worm to patch machines, or created a script to patch the sender of a worm?

The second vnunet article has a minor problem:

The program displays some virus-like qualities such as self-replication via email. It also installs a backdoor in the infected host, listening on UDP port 5503 or higher.

An attacker could connect to this port via TCP and potentially take control of the machine, as they would have shell access at the permission level of the user executing the virus.

Umm... UDP and TCP are two different protocols in the IP stack. You don't connect to UDP ports at all, it's a connectionless protocol. You especially don't open a TCP socket to a UDP port. So, which is it? Is the back door really on the UDP port, or can you really connect to it via TCP, or is it both?

I don't mean to nit-pick, but little technical flaws like this make me wonder how competent the author was to begin with.

from vunet
> The program displays some virus-like qualities
> such as self-replication via email
Where does it take the addresses?
Does it infect sendmail?
> it commonly arrives via binary email attachments
... and you need to execute the attached code
ROTFL
it sounds like the old "Albanian virus" joke.

> It also installs a backdoor in the infected host,
> listening on UDP port 5503 or higher.
>
> An attacker could connect to this port via TCP and ...

According to qualys' actual release, an incoming UDP packet will trigger the compromised machine to initiate an outgoing TCP connection. Similar effect, but different net traffic.

Don't look here to the UK for a shining example of honour. M$ are pretty much camped in 10 Downing Street, and Blair appeared on TV showing off WinXP (another src). All government services are due to be online 2005 but will only be accessibly by Microsoft browsers. The Register has good articles here and here. Makes me sick. Especially as we used to have a thriving computer business of our own (Acorn) which the government did nothing to help whilst it was killed off by M$ anti-competative practices. When will the UK government realise that 'IT' is not solely churning out secretaries that can use Word but to give encouragement to those that might become programmers or other similarly skilled professions instead of holding them back. Sorry to turn this post even more UK-centric, but we could mitigate some of Blair's damage if WE LET THE TEACHERS CHOOSE WHAT OS THEY WANT TO USE (instead of easily bought LEA officials). Oh and paying extra for teachers with industry experience so for a change the teacher knows more about IT than the pupils.

Phillip.

The first such anti-virus virus, Den_Zuko, was discovered in 1988. Check out this article on VNUnet, which has more info on the history of such software and why it's a bad idea.

More recently, the Linux.Cheese.Worm has done similar things for Linux users infected by the Linux.Lion.Worm.

Apparantly Adobe Cracked and dropped the charges.

http://www.vnunet.com/News/1124182

Might be worth getting some advice from Michael of Sealand. But it can be quite exciting,as reported here.

Maybe the reason for the move is, MS could be waiting for the fed (Greenspan) to announce yet another raise or cut in interest rates (which is due for for May the last was to boost the economy sort of a freebie) which could also determine whether companies would jump up and buy buy buy, or wait wait wait. Analysts predict a stronger growth in the third quarter since most people are vactioning and sell off stocks in the summer, etc, etc. (no bs I dig the stock market)

Or perhaps some security flaws (which are high in MS) prompted developers to assess those in order to make it more attractive as opposed to the launch of Windows2000 where speculation was the product had over 60k bugs. By releasing YACP (yet another crappy product) MS could lose huge revenues all over the place, which is crucial especially when alternative OS' have been making their marks. Also remember their so called "Anti Piracy" feature was cracked recently.

Which reminds me... I remember when I was working on Theories in DoS, I made this program called Bubonic which was messing up Windows2000 and NT machines. I repeatedly tried to benchmark what was going on when I made the program and submitted it to Bugtraq since it messed up Windows' rpc crap entirely. Well after the advosry MS released a patch for rpc stuff saying they discovered an undiscovered flaw that affected rpc yadda yadda.

Hardcore Crypto

Microsoft has admitted that the Xbox will not be released in Europe before 2002. Read this article:
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1115777