Slashback: Dyn-O-Mite!, Paper, Sploits

Here is your regular irregular dose of Slashdot story updates and obsessive compulsion -- some of it sad, some amusing, some utterly neutral and of no caloric value. For instance: You can win more than 50 of Roblimo's personal dollars if you work really hard, and wait a really long time.

"Kilby ... Kilby .. Kilby ..." [WHACK!] BMagneton writes: "The Nobel Prize for Physics was just awarded to several electronics pioneers, notably Alferov and Kroemer, who invented a bunch of semiconductor device construction methods, and Jack Kilby, who pretty much invented the microchip. The Nobel seems to have gone to a more practical/applied achievement than it usually does." And sconeu writes: "Wired News reports that Jack Kilby have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the IC. The prize was split with Herbert Kroemer of UC Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov of Russia who worked on semiconductor development as well."

And as "Boo," acclaimed international film star Keanu Reeves! Godzookie2k writes: "I was bored out of my mind the other night, and stumbled to boo.com's old site to see what would pop up. Mouth agape, I read: 'Boo.com returns, October 30, 2000.' yippie, you can download the official "boo" screensaver and enter some contest. See for yourself."

Some things are worth bringing back (Old Coke, bermuda shorts), and others may not be. Frankly, I'd never heard of Boo except maybe vaguely in the background until they went bust, time number one. On the other hand, our friend Pee-Wee was pretty funny in Mystery Men, so maybe anything is possible.

A browser for your naked (P)PC; combine with image filtering, stir. Mozilla keeps getting better -- I'm not afraid to show it to anyone right now, for instance -- but it's not exactly lightweight. Anyone who's been following the progress of Galeon may be interested when Markos writes: "Tired of waiting for a lightweight browser, that supports https, frames and all the other good stuff? BrowseX may be what your looking for. 'BrowseX is an Open Source, cross-platform Web Browser written primarily in Tcl.' You can check out the screenshots, features, and download." Or, for those of the Motorola persuasion, you'll be happy to hear that, as sephus writes "Opera for Linux PPC is now available at http://opera.online.no/linux/tgz/ - by popular request from Slashdot readers :) Opera"

Remember, retailers, you better not install these on computer that you know full well are going to be loaded with a god-fearin' American OS-thingie, like Innernet 'Splorer!

"OK, Mr. Gates, Meet Mr. Ponzi. Howdya do?" robl writes "There was a suprisingly under-ranked comment in the Microsoft story yesterday [about Microsoft and Taxes], pointing to the Fool's take on Microsoft's tax situation. It does a great job of clarifying the sfgate article yesterday. You see, Microsoft exercises it's stock options by printing more stock certificates. So they really only lose the cost of the paper and toner to print the stock, and they gain the money from the employees who exercise the options."

In fairness, this is approximately the same system used to fill the hypothetical coffers of the Social Security administration, but MS probably doesn't pay $534.55 for each toner cartridge ;)

My god! And they claim to be secure!? sporri writes: "The OpenBSD homepage has been updated (or downgraded) and now announces "Three years without a remote hole in the default install!" after a root hole was discovered and exploted in a library used by chpass. The sad thing it was fixed in the "current" source tree in June.UpsideToday has an interview with Aaron Campbell." If that's the worst you can say about an OS's security, it's a pretty strong endorsement for it being exemplary in that regard. OpenBSD and Debian get my vote for Most Serious Projects. Comments on the strongest security for (any particular) default Linux distro? Makes me think about Bastille Linux ...

Comments

MS is not a Ponzi scheme

[TheDullBlade]

They don't guarantee a return on the purchase of their stock, as Mr. Ponzi did on his promissary notes.

However, their apparent profits are based on the same pyramid principle: new capital provides the return on investment for old investors.

This is what happens when people think that a simple extrapolation of past results is a reasonable model of future results.

An illustrative game: Gimme Double!
You hand someone a penny, and say "if you give me twice what I gave you, I might give you twice what you gave me".
They think "what the hell, it's only a penny!" and does it.
It goes back and forth for a while, with both players showing a 100% profit for each transaction (when it comes back to them), and wondering how far they should push it. Both want a significant profit, so they push it at least until it's enough money to care about.
Then one guys stops and keeps the money (hint, only play this game against compulsive gamblers).

In its purest form it's an honest game, just not a sensible one. The problem is when people don't recognize this game (the social stigma attached to gambling helps prevent people from learning these sorts of lessons).

Extend this to millions of players, add tokens to track who gave last, a system that lists the last payments as the "current price", and a class of professional analysts who pretend that it's all a sensible economic behavior, and you've created a pretty good model of a bubble stock like MS. Also, a pretty good model of the whole stock market. Not to mention a reasonable approximation of the monetary/banking system.

(BTW, anyone who sends me a penny at e-gold account number 134343 might get 2 pennies back... in some twisted alternate universe)

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Action Describing Words

[gtx]

My Stupid Patent (for those who care)

A Plan to use Action Describing or Implicating Words in the spoken or written language as a persuasive tool to sell goods and or services.

Our method of Action Describing or Implicating Words (trade name: "Verbs") increases rates of sales by allowing the licensee of the method to fully describe anything, be it an object or an action. This also allows for more persuasive sales pitches! These "Verbs" are the most important part of our method, and should be considered our Intellectual Property. Being that our sales plan relies on this Intellectual Property, all uses not licensed by we, the inventors, are prohibited. Prosecutors will be Violated :)

Yes. It's a patent on verbs.

Slackware

[dizee]

Definitely slackware.

Slackware has an appeal to me. Maybe it's the fact that it doesn't have a curses or X-based install, maybe I find pleasure in installing it on a laptop that has only a floppy drive so I have to use 25 disks. Maybe I like having to do it all myself instead of having to press 4 buttons and it be installed, security holes and all. Maybe I don't like package managers. Maybe I like to know where all of my stuff is on my system. Maybe I'm stubborn. Maybe I like to take pride in knowing how it all works.

The interesting part is that I like(d) to use Linux because it was difficult, it wasn't point and click. It was an adventure. Tackling some goal that I wanted to achieve with Linux was FUN. I came out of each one with a mastery over it. I figured out how it ticked! I know how it works. And I took pride in it. RedHat's taken a lot of that away from me.

Slackware is my distro of choice. I'm through with RedHat.

Mike

"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."

Remote holes in OpenBSD do exist.

[seifried]

OpenBSD has had remote holes, for example in their ftp server and the DHCP client, they however claim that since these are not turned on by default, they are "Secure by default". Realistically however most people using OpenBSD that need an ftp server were using the default one, and presto, they were vulnerable. Ditto for anyone using DHCP, which is extremely common on workstations, however the OpenBSD people argued that "no sane admin uses DHCP, it has to many security problems", while this is true to a degree (a "rogue" DHCP server can do quite a bit of damage) realistically unless you want to waste a lot of time configuring and maintaining network settings you use DHCP.

OTOH OpenBSD does have by far the best track record when it comes to exploits in the core distro, I should know, I write a weekly Linux digest and a weekly BSD digest, the BSD one takes a lot less effort.

BTW there is an all Linux security mailing list available now; Click here to sign up via the web form

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