Slashback: Vista Rewrite, Tuttle Travesty, Mac Botnets

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including Microsoft denies Vista rewrite, Tuttle Oklahoma city manager still doesn't get it, MS Virtual Server slips and VMWare fills the gap, Samsung execs plead guilty to price fixing charges, Tux in retail part 2, a renewed bid to register the Linux trademark in Australia, OpenSPARC.net shades of the past, and a follow up on Mac botnets -- Read on for details.

Microsoft denies Vista rewrite. moochfish writes "Contrary to a heavily doubted feature earlier this week, Business 2.0 magazine reports that Microsoft will not be rewriting large portions of its operating system. From the article, 'Microsoft's own blogger Robert Scoble checked into the story and got a denial from an executive at Microsoft's PR firm, who says he's not aware of any Xbox programmers working on Windows.'"

Tuttle Oklahoma city manager still doesn't get it. gEvil (beta) writes "The Register has posted a followup to this past week's wonderfully humorous story about Tuttle, Oklahoma's technically inept city manager, Jerry Taylor. It appears that Mr. Taylor is not pleased with the publicity he has received due to the incident, despite his prior statement of, 'I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity.' He sent an email to the Register's marketing team asking that people stop emailing him and making fun of him."

MS Virtual Server Slips and VMWare fills in the gap. nizo writes "On the heels of the announcement that Microsoft Virtual Server is slipping to 2007, VMware has announced the beta release of the VMware Virtual Machine Importer, which has the capability to convert system images stored in 3rd party formats (including Microsoft Virtual Server images) to VMware virtual machines. The good news is VMware released the importer as a free download."

Samsung execs plead guilty to price fixing charges. bdotcdot writes "Electronics News is running a story on Samsung executives who have plead guilty to the price fixing of DRAM. From the story 'According to the one-count felony charge filed in federal court in San Francisco, at various times during the period from April 1, 1999, to June 15, 2002, these three Samsung employees conspired with unnamed employees from other memory makers to fix the prices of DRAM sold to certain computer and server manufacturers in the U.S., in violation of the Sherman Act. The conspiracy directly affected sales to U.S. computer makers Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Company, Compaq Computer Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Apple Computer Inc. and Gateway Inc., the charge said.'"

Tux in retail part 2. silentbob4 writes "Mad Penguin brings us the second and final installment in their 'Tux in Retail' series, in which they interview Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony; Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos; Mepis Linux founder Warren Woodford; and Kevin Jones, Micro Center Vice President of Merchandising, to get their take Tux's jump into big box retail. The first installment was run as an earlier Slashdot article."

Renewed bid to register Linux trademark in Australia? daria42 writes "A renewed bid to register the word 'Linux' as an Australian trademark must meet an early April deadline or face defeat." From the article: "'The deadline to file a response to the Examiner's rejection has not yet passed, and LMI and its attorneys are still determining if they will respond,' a spokesperson for the body told ZDNet Australia in an emailed statement."

OpenSPARC.net, shades of the past. Andy Updegrove writes "In what must have seemed to many as a bold move, Sun Microsystems recently announced that it would release the source code for its UltraSparc T1 processor under the GPL, supported by a new organization that it calls OpenSPARC.net. But to those that have been around for a while, the announcement had an eerily familiar sound to it, and that sound was the echo of an organization called SPARC International. Formed 18 years ago to license the SPARC chip design to multiple vendors to ensure second sourcing for the hardware vendors that Sun hoped would adopt it, SPARC International seemed to be every bit as revolutionary for its time as Sun's new initiative does today. Motorola launched a somewhat similar group called 88open to support its own RISC chip design, and later IBM, Motorola and Apple launched the PowerOpen Association to promote the PowerPC. The Websites of the PowerOpen Association and 88open are long gone, and seem to have escaped even the WayBack Machine's reach. But SPARC International's site, looking very retro and neglected, can still be seen - at least for now."

Follow up on Mac botnets. An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com has an interesting follow up to skeptical claims as a result of a previous Slashdot story. Mac OS X systems have indeed been spotted in botnets, thanks largely to several worms going around that take advantage of Web-based applications running vulnerable PHP software. From the article: 'By leveraging this PHP flaw, the attackers were able to seed the Mac systems with several tools designed to turn them into drones for use in waging destructive distributed denial of service attacks.'

Comments

"Mac" botnets are nothing more than *NIX botnets

[daveschroeder]

And they usually come from the same place, as the followup notes:

A php-based web application (forum, blog, CMS, etc.) that has an exploit, usually php injection, whereby various script/botnet kiddie tools and irc-related items are installed, usually in /tmp or /var/tmp. Perhaps they'll install a php shell too. Sometimes, they'll try to run a rootkit against the local machine.

This is nothing new, and doesn't really have anything to do with "Macs". It has more to do with php and people not keeping their php-based web applications up to date than anything[1]. It is interesting, though, that since Mac OS X is essentially a UNIX, that it's certainly vulnerable to a whole slew of this family of exploits.

[1] Just as a Mac sitting on the internet with apache and ssh open doesn't really test anything beyond the security of the default configurations of apache and OpenSSH on that OS and architecture. And that's exactly the point.

Mr Tuttle

[rob1980]

It appears that Mr. Taylor is not pleased with the publicity he has received due to the incident, despite his prior statement of, 'I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity.'

Yeah, the publicity isn't so great when it's not the local ABC affiliate oohing and aahing over your latest plan to put a new tree in the city park, is it?

Re:Mr Tuttle

[LDoggg_]

There was a pretty good and mostly objective wikipedia page about the guy.

Unfortunately it has been removed.

Looks like Mr Taylor wasn't bluffing about his FBI connections.

Re:Mr Tuttle

[whitehatlurker]

The page was removed basically because the powers-that-be felt Taylor wasn't worth the waste of wiki space. That has to hurt even more than the publicity.

There was also concern that the page was an attack on Taylor. There were some sections that could have been reworded, but he's gotten more than his share of Warhol time.

Re:Mr Tuttle

[AndroidCat]

There's still the Talk page to see.

Re:Mr Tuttle

[Anonymous Coward]

Mein Gott ... this guy was an Internet Technologies manager!!!!

(From wikipedia) "Taylor earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from University of Texas at Arlington, a BA in management from National-Louis University's McLean, Virginia campus, and a MBA from Averett University in Danville, Virginia.[1]

Taylor worked for 22 years with E-Systems as a program manager, 17 of those years working on a classified government contract in Virginia. He later ran his own computer business and worked as an Internet technologies manager for Choctaw Electric Cooperative. Taylor was city manager of Harrah, Oklahoma and Hugo, Oklahoma.

Taylor was selected city manager of Tuttle in August 2005, after an absence of a manager for almost two years.[2] ...."

Re:Mr Tuttle

[47F0]

An open letter to City Manager Jerry A. Taylor, City of Tuttle, OK:

Sir,

As a former Oklahoman, a news item, which I am sure you are quite familiar with, caught my eye recently. For the record, it was in a British e-publication, 'The Register' at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_cen tos/

I read the article somewhat skeptically. After all, Brits having a bit of fun at the Yanks' expense, I figured, until I found the link to the actual email history. Sadly, the Brits, bless them, actually understated things.

Sir, from the very first sentence of your very first contact with the victims of your harassment you managed at once to be arrogant, ignorant and demanding. You are to be congratulated. Very few people can pull that off in just three sentences. I finished reading the email transcript, shook my head sadly and filed it away.

Until yesterday, when I read at the same publication that you literally expect 'The Register' to turn off the Internet. Because that is exactly and precisely what you request - "I think this is unjustified, and would like for it to stop". Sir, this is your genie that you let out of the bottle by stomping around like the 800 Lb. gorilla that you are NOT. Yet once again, you want everyone else to fix your problems. Sorry. Not happening this time.

I am frankly apalled that anyone who has achieved the lofty status of City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma could behave this way. I firmly expected that you were 1) a professional and 2) a man. Either or both should have led you to step up to the plate and admit that you were just plain wrong. It seems that you are neither.

Thanks to the Internet, you'll never be able to bury this in your litterbox.But there are a few things that really should be done, and might actually salvage the global perception that you have given the City of Tuttle, and by extension, Oklahomans in general.

1) CentOS, particularly Johnny Hughes are owed a very public apology from you personally, and from the City of Tuttle. They did absolutely nothing to cause any of your problems. Their only crime was working, mostly without compensation, to provide the operating system version that the City of Tuttle chose to use. Yes, you did choose it. You can't claim over two decades of computer experience and tell me you did no due diligence into the operating system being used to host the City website. To claim that is to claim even more gross incompetence and negligence than you have already exhibited.

2) CentOS is owed a generous consulting fee. They went above and beyond to research your problem, not because of, but in spite of your threats, your ignorance (something I find utterly inexcusable in anyone claiming "22 years in computer systems engineering and operation"), and your total refusal to provide any real information to CentOS to assist them in resolving your problem, which they did not create. In addition they are owed a percentage over and above the consulting fee just for putting up with you instead of very justifiably letting you hang yourself, and putting the City of Tuttle at risk legally and financially.

3) The good citizens of Tuttle are owed an apology from the Mayor, for hiring you, and from you - just for being you. They deserve better.

Please see a doctor. Immediately. If you can claim that your medications were out of adjustment, you may be able to scrape some of the richly deserved egg off of your face. At the very least, he may be able to help you with your other problem. Having both feet inserted in your mouth while having your head firmly lodged where it clearly is has to be causing all kinds of physical problems.

I doubt any Oklahoma publication will publish this particular bit of idiocy. So I'm publishing it in my own modest way, and urging my Oklahoma friends and acquaintances to do the same. Hopefully it will reach enough of the good folks it Tuttle for it to make what is clearly a much-needed change in the affairs and management of that city.

Regards,

A former Oklahoman

Re:Mr Tuttle

[47F0]

Well, I can kind of see your point. I have to squint and hold my head funny, but I can kind of see it.

However...

Sorry, but Mr. Taylor was obnoxious from jump. That has nothing to do with the uber geek elite, and everything to do with being a general asshat. He undoubtedly deals with the poor schmucks that mow the grass at the world-famous six-hole Tuttle country club the same way.

Secondly, Mr. Taylor IS a member of the geek elite. Just ask him. he has "22 years" of computer and administration experience. Sorry, no cookie there either. Read the email transcription for yourself.

So he's either a lying asshat, or an incompetent asshat. Take your choice, but I have bloody little sympathy for either.

Tuttle Oklahoma city manager: next step

[m_chan]

Email him a tinyurl warning him that Tuttle's site has been coopted by an outside suspect, likely terrorist-affiliated organization.

Re:Tuttle Oklahoma city manager: next step

[merreborn]

Man, the w3 HTML validator refuses to even try to validate the site:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftut tle-ok.gov%2F

Re:Tuttle Oklahoma city manager: next step

[ozmanjusri]

Tuttle's site has been coopted by an outside suspect, likely terrorist-affiliated organization.

I thought it was Buttle who was affiliated with terrorits, not Tuttle.

Re:Tuttle Oklahoma city manager: next step

[Sentry21]

If you tell the validator to force the encoding to windows-1252, then it will try to validate it, and choke on 45 errors. If you tell the validator to force the doctype to XHTML 1.0 (which a quick look at the source seems to indicate they were trying for), you get 100 errors. Fantastic.

The Scoop

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying there is any truth to the 60% rewrite figure, but if I wanted to verify it I woundn't ask an on-the-record PR guy. Blogger: So is Vista in the shitter? PR guy: Sure is Ken. (seemingly from nowhere a chair hits the PR guy)

Re:"Mac" botnets are nothing more than *NIX botnet

[Anonymous Coward]

by the way, php also runs on non-unix machines too... I think even windows is included in the supported platforms list.

Sent to citymgr@cityoftuttle.org

[anomaly]

I sent this to the city manager. I have not yet received a reply.

Sir,
I appreciate that you were frustrated that your city website was
non-functional, but it appears to me that the people to whom you
complained were not responsible, and that the tone of your messages tended
to be combative.

The folks from CentOS were being polite and helpful, based on my read of
the messages. I believe that you owe them an apology. they had
absolutely NOTHING to do with the problems you experienced, and tried to
assist you anyway. For you to respond with "I am sorry that we had to go
through the process and accusations to get the problem resolved" They did
nothing wrong. You accused them, and frankly it was uncharitable on your
part.

Please extend an official apology to those folks at www.centos.org. They
deserve it.

Please also note that I am not affiliated with CentOS in any way (except
that I use their Linux distribution quite happliy.) I read about this
spat on a technology-focused website known as slashdot
http://www.slashdot.org/

Respectfully,

Re:Sent to citymgr@cityoftuttle.org

[Anonymous Coward]

My note:

To the Honorable Lonnie Paxton and members of the Town Council of the City of Tuttle,

You may want to consider hiring a new town manager, replacing Mr. Jerry A. Taylor who recently earned the City of Tuttle worldwide embarrassment with his legal threats against Centos.

Mr. Taylor claims to have been a "Computer Systems Engineer" with 22 years of experience. However, upon discovering an extremely simple problem with the City of Tuttle web site, rather than proceeding to work with the hosting company responsible for the management of the City of Tuttle web site, Mr. Taylor chose to publicly harass and attempt to intimidate the developers responsible for designing a free operating system called CentOS.

What is CentOS? Like the well-known Microsoft Windows, it is an operating system. More specifically, CentOS is a FREE operating system built by volunteers, largely based on the also-free GNU and Linux projects.

Transcripts of the Mr. Taylor's juvenile threats toward CentOS are posted publicly on the Internet, and those transcripts underscore Mr. Taylor's utter incompetence, unwillingness to accept FREE help from folks who provided a FREE operating system, even though the CentOS developers have NO responsibility whatsoever to clean up Mr. Taylor's mess.

When Mr. Taylor FINALLY agreed that the Centos folks had nothing to do with the misconfiguration problem (the problem is actually due to two parties: the company hosting the City of Tuttle web site, and Mr. Jerry A. Taylor himself) he not only was not apologetic, but downright insulting in his response.

The City of Tuttle has earned worldwide ridicule in the face of this issue, and the dated and sophomoric appearance of Tuttle's now-well-publicized web site has earned widespread harsh criticism and ridicule as well.

Please consider replacing Mr. Jerry A. Taylor. Many of us feel sorry for the City of Tuttle as we believe that there are many people more deserving of his salary and who can perform a much better job were they given the opportunity to fill his position. Jerry A. Taylor's salary is money wasted right now.

Here are some of the web pages covering this story that you may wish to check out:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/tuttle_cen tos/
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/27/ 135221&tid=133
http://www.digg.com/security/Why_every_city_counci l_needs_at_least_one_geek_=%5D
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/27/tuttle_ema il/

Mr. Taylor's outbursts and threats toward the generous CentOS folks may be seen here:

http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

As you will note, Mr. Taylor's outbursts are unbecoming of a city official and earn little respect for the City of Tuttle. Even after realizing that the CentOS representatives were not to blame, but he and his web hosts are, and even after having received hundreds of emails from kind folks all over the world who are attempting to explain to him that the CentOS developers are not to blame, he is insisting that the CentOS folks would only help him after he threatened to contact the FBI. This is not only patently false, but downright slanderous and such statements could earn a defamation of character suit from CentOS. I know if I were that developer I would consider filing suit against Tuttle over such false statements made to the media.

Re:Sent to citymgr@cityoftuttle.org

[daeviltwin]

How much of your life did you waste writing that? Are you such an asshole that you actually believe you will get a response or better yet an apology? Keep firing off those letters, Sparky. You'll change the world someday. Fucking dipshit.

How much of your life did you waste writing that? Are you such an asshole that you actually believe you will get a response or better yet an apology? Keep firing off those letters, Sparky. You'll change the world someday. Fucking dipshit.

Re:Sent to citymgr@cityoftuttle.org

[Nimey]

That is a bulbous bouffont you have there.

Best part of this whole Tuttle thing...

[Heem]

Is that this guy just still hasn't got a clue..

Now I am being flooded with emails from CentOS users that after knowing the answer say the problem was simple.

What I can't stand more than anything is someone that can't admit that they were wrong, even at this stage of the game.

60% of an operating system in 6 months - NO WAY

[MerlynEmrys67]

Lets assume that Vista is as few as a 1000KLoc - (I'd bet another order of magnatude personally) That implies 600KLoc of new code written, tested debugged, etc. in 6 months. Uh - NO operating system development isn't that fast. I am not even sure I would buy the line that the current Vista codebase is 60% new/changed from XP (RTM - not SP2, patched to heck)

Re:60% of an operating system in 6 months - NO WAY

[WalterGR]

Lets assume that Vista is as few as a 1000KLoc - (I'd bet another order of magnatude personally)

FWIW, according to this article (PDF - sorry) from CyberDefense Magazine, Microsoft Word alone was 2 million lines of code... in 1995.

It also says that Windows 2000 had 35 million LOC, and XP has 40 million.

Assume that the growth between XP and Vista is the same: that means 45 million LOC for Vista. So 60% is 27 million lines of code. It would be ridiculous to re-write that much - let alone impossible.

Re:60% of an operating system in 6 months - NO WAY

[Chr0nik]

How big do you guys think the Windows group is at Microsoft? We're not talking about 20 or 30 guys tinkering around with an operating system here. That MAY be the numbers for one of the large sub groups like Kernel or something. But there are scores of subgroups with subgroups of their own, many of which borrow guys from completely disparate groups that have nothing to do with windows per-se. These guys are very focused doing everything from security, to graphics, to media, to whatever.... 1000Kloc is not that big a deal to these folks. And 1000Kloc where? Is that a total number of all the code in the various parts of the OS than need re-writing? If not, what part of the operating system? Which group? Does everyone split this load evenly? I doubt it. Also mis-statements can easily be made in situations like this. If a few major parts of the operating system need perhaps a moderate percentage of the code re-worked, in a few large groups that make up 60%, some moronic spokesperson spits out 60% when it's actually like 10-15%. We probably won't know the real situation till it's release party.

Re:60% of an operating system in 6 months - NO WAY

[EuroChild]

No, the other 400K lines are just being copied and pasted from OS X.

Easy!

VMware URL wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The URL for VMware Importer beta is wrong: It should be: http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/vmimporter/

OpenSPARC

[Brietech]

I was under the impression that opening up the design of the UltraSPARC T1 was partly just to bolster interest in it (and it really is an incredible design from a hardware perspective) and partly just to allow people like EE and computer architecture students, along with hobbyists and engineers, to understand how it actually works at its most basic level. Although I realize i'm in the vast minority, as someone that actually DOES do microprocessor design in their spare time (I just completed my first working CPU design!), this is a really cool thing for them to do. I'm still learning verilog, but I would definitely like to look over some of their design docs and source sometime! I hardly think their goal is to get other people to build their own T1 processors though.

Re:OpenSPARC

[joe_bruin]

Sun was always hoping, and still is, that others will take the SPARC design and implement their own chips. They want economies of scale to start playing into SPARC like it has into the x86 and ARM market. Obviously, joe hacker is not going to be doing this, but there are some companies that can and very well might.

Here's why other people would want to make SPARC chips: Linux. Oh no, here comes the zealot talk. Actually, not quite. Linux runs on the three leading server architectures, x86 (+AMD64), POWER, and SPARC. From a deployment and administration standpoint, you don't really care what CPU you're running on. With the T1, Sun released the CPU with the highest performance per Watt on the market (for some tasks). This is an attractive chip, but buying from Sun is not always appealing. Sun gear is pretty expensive.

Today, there are many Taiwanese and Chinese motherboard makers, and they sell lots and lots of hardware. But their chips must always come from Intel or AMD (or Via, who's never been competitive). They would love nothing more than to have a standard CPU architecture that they can manufacture (TSMC or PMC can fab these for them) and take the profit cut from instead of handing that business to Intel. With Sun's release, they now have the tools to make a chip that is not only competitive with x86 and Power, but is actually top of the line, and at no additional cost to them. It already runs Linux, it's ready for blades, they know it will sell.

Sun benefits by having cheaper SPARC CPUs on the market, driving down their costs and increasing their architecture share. The manufacturers benefit by being able to sell at the high end, and sell cheaper. Server buyers benefit, because there is now a cheap source for high end machines. Now, if these chips really move, don't be surprised to see Texas Instruments (who doesn't have a server chip, but does have the fabs and experience with SPARC) and even IBM (who will make whatever sells) start to make these.

CityManager Email

[AmigaAvenger]

Looks like he managed to figure out how to edit the frontpage site so that it no longer shows his email, so if any slashdot user wishes to express their opinions on this matter the corresponding public official, here they are!

city manager at citymgr@cityoftuttle.org,
mayor at mayor@cityoftuttle.org.

Enjoy!

Re:CityManager Email

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, this is just getting sad! Leave the poor (stupid idiot) alone already. This is like the entire school ganging up on the kid who's mentally challenged. It's just pathetic and far too easy.

To me, this is a classic example of how ignoring can be much more powerful than not. If the CentOS people had just ignored this guy after trying to help at first, he would have called the FBI and received his due justice from them for wasting their time. Instead, CentOS wasted time, slashdot readers wasted time, taxpayer money was wasted, etc... but it was all nevertheless good for a laugh.

Just ignore this guy and move on with your lives.

Re:"Mac" botnets are nothing more than *NIX botnet

[Bonker]

It's also worth noting that the exploits are against 'PHP applications' and not PHP itself.

I can't count the number of terrified middle managers who scream bloody murder to me about PHPNuke or PHPBB bugs, thinking that the flaws are in PHP itself.

Again, this boils down to keeping your software up to date. Careful pruning of your php.ini file also helps.

Great, look at what you just did.

[Spy der Mann]

Sorry, but I don't agree on harassing someone over e-mail. His public shame is enough, don't you think? PLUS, by posting his e-mail on the web, you just made his e-mail vulnerable to spammers.

Worse, the e-mail address will be still available AFTER he resigns or his government period finishes. Will the next mayor have to cope with this?

Re:Great, look at what you just did.

[Vellmont]

Sorry, but I don't agree on harassing someone over e-mail.

The poster GP post didn't call for harassment, he only posted his email for people to give replies to. Do you really think that the only possible use for email is harassment?

His public shame is enough, don't you think?

Not really. His latest responses of trying to deny he was responsible for the whole mess only show that he doesn't get it. He still thinks threatening to call the FBI is a Good Thing. Clearly the man has learned little through public shame. On the other hand I don't think this guy can learn anything because he's obviously too thick headed. By that I don't mean dumb, in which case he might be able to learn something. I mean that he's insulated himself so far from reality that it's too hard to penetrate into his skull. For that reason I won't email him because I believe it to be a waste of my time and effort.

As far as the spam goes, as others have pointed out you can't un-ring the bell. The email address has already been posted publically so they already have a spam problem.

Re:Great, look at what you just did.

[kimvette]

#4) He should resign as he acted in a manner unbecoming an elected official and for making false statements in an official capacity, which could cost Tuttle a heap of money were the CentOS team inclined to sue

Re:Great, look at what you just did.

[Monad is Missing]

Well, I doubt that "Jerry" pulled his email address from the website. He probably sent someone some threatening and harassing emails until it got done, then told them "I am sorry that we had to go through all of that...".

Tuttle NBC video

[dustwun]

Seems even the Tulsa NBC affiliate picked up the story. They've got a video online at http://www.kfor.com/global/category.asp?c=9667, it's the Tuesday 10pm news story. The CentOS bit starts at around 4 minutes 13 seconds, and is around 3 minutes long.

I'm not linking directly to it, because we've already crushed their bandwith enough for one week, but feel free to check it out.
It's not at all flattering to the City Manager...

Re:Tuttle NBC video

[assassinator42]

Well, it appears the video only works in IE, that will save bandwidth. I don't think I've ever seen a local news station have their whole news cast streamable online though. Most just have clips. And if this was available as a clip, it would've used less bandwidth than having people seek through the newscast. A little bit, at least.

Re:Tuttle NBC video

[internewt]

Well, it appears the video only works in IE, that will save bandwidth.

That's not quite true. The video can be accessed with WMP if you open this URL (watch for /. adding spaces)

http://www.kfor.com/Global/Video/WorldnowASX.asp?o s=&vt=v&clipid=734082

I watched the video in WMP 6.4 on Win2000, and no version of WMP higher than 6.4 has ever been installed... so I feel this video will probably be viewable in MPlayer, for example (i.e. this stream isn't DRM'd up).

Plausable Deniability?

[Black Copter Control]

... got a denial from an executive at Microsoft's PR firm, who says he's not aware of any Xbox programmers working on Windows.'"

I mean, like somebody's gonna randomly tell this PR Geek about technical matters? The obvious person to (not) ask (depending on whether or not you want a meaningfull answer) would be an executive in Microsoft's OS development group.

eg: The fact that I've never personally seen George Bush snorting coke or had him tell me about it doesn't tell you much about whether he has or not (given that I've never met the man). Getting that denial from his best friend would mean a little bit more.

Check your sources ...

[Bob Loblaw]

'Microsoft's own blogger Robert Scoble checked into the story and got a denial from an executive at Microsoft's PR firm, who says he's not aware of any Xbox programmers working on Windows.' ... because an executive from MS's PR firm is the *first* person I would go to for the "truth" ... : /

They are likely not aware of a lot of things ... that doesn't make them untrue.

Re:MS Virtual Server slips and VMWare fills the ga

[davidesh]

we have been running Virtual Server 2005 for a while now and it runs great. I was actually surprised.

This guy is the biggest tool ever

[porkThreeWays]

I still can't believe this tool. He actually thinks the threat to the FBI is what prompted the CentOS developer (lead dev if I remember correctly). More likely the developer got tired of this fagtart harassing him. The city manager justified his actions by saying that anyone who is experienced on the internet knows better than to follow directions on a website. When the directions are to consult your site's administrator, I think those are pretty safe instructions.

And I can't believe this twiddle dick STILL hasn't apologized. He shoots back with "there should have been better directions". It is mind boggling that in 20 years of his supposed IT experience he's never run into a default webserver page. I really think this ass clown is deserving of any and all harassment he gets. In fact, he is deserving of a bill for CentOS's wasted time. If I had go-go gadget balls, I'd teabag that butthole surfer from 12 states away.

Re:This guy is the biggest tool ever

[killjoe]

LOL, I was stationed in Altus AFB OK. I spent two years over there. I still have the T-Shirt front: "Where in the hell is Altus OK" Back:"About ten miles south of blair". When I left Altus I thought "Man I am never going back to that fucking state again" but alas for business reasons I have had the distinct misfortune of having to travel back there many many times.

Fuck man, if you want OK to look good don't tell people to go to that shithole of a town. Tulsa maybe, OKC maybe but Altus?? No freakin way. Having said that even Tulsa is nothing but a sea of white conservative suburbia occationally broken up by strip malls. I have never met so many rabid republitards and religious fundamentalists in my life. Man those people think BBQued bologna is gourmet!

Oh and while there are plenty of stupid people in my state it's nowhere near as many in OK.

Re:This guy is the biggest tool ever

[j-turkey]

Yes, please do. You could go to one of the conferences NASA holds there, or to visit Altus Air Force Base, where a bunch of "dumb Okies" teach Air Force pilots how to fly their jets to protect your freedom to make stupid bigoted statements on Slashdot. Or maybe you could meet some of thost stupid backwoods morons like astronauts Dr. Shannon Lucid, William Pogue, Owen Garriott, or any of the many other astronauts from Oklahoma. Or former Ambassador to the UN Jean Kirkpatrick. Or visit the birthplace of Wiley Post, who among other things discovered the jet stream and invented the space suit. Or visit the spaceport.

/me excitedly runs around the room, while clanging together pots above his head and screams "Oklahoma! Oklahoma! Oklahoma! Oklahoma!"

^^ GOATSE WARNING ^^

[merreborn]

Parent's link is a tinyurl of goatse.

Kinda figured it might be, personally, but I decided to click it anyway :p

Re:PowerOpen Association and 88open

[sartin]

Neither 88Open nor PowerOpen were open opening up the chip. Both were about creating Application Binary Interface (ABI) standards so that multiple vendors could provide compatible operating systems and Independent Software Vendors could count on compiling once and run safely on any compliant implementation.

The consortia produced standards that said what must work and what an application was allowed to assume. They produced test suites that could be used to verify a platform for compliance and test suites to verify an application for compliance. Theoretically, any certified application could run on any certified platform (possibly with certain extra hardware requirements).

SPARC International did much the same thing for the SPARC, but also had some emphasis on actually opening up the hardware. HP did something similar briefly with PA-RISC, creating a wildly incomplete and vague ABI which was next to useless because it didn't include critical parts of HP's proprietary linking and dynamic loading technology.

I worked at 88Open and was primary contractor for portions of the PowerOpen and PA-RISC test suites (working for a consulting firm that had also done some of the SPARC ABI work) in a former life.

The new effort seems to be to open up the CPU architecture as well.

Re:"Mac" botnets are nothing more than *NIX botnet

[Chmarr]

PHP is not totally blameless in this. It is VERY easy to write PHP code that is subject to injection-style attacks, mostly because it's SO easy to insert one string into another string without doing the appropriate quoting and character escaping. Ie, PHP makes it easy to do the wrong thing.

Whether or not this is PHP's fault, or the fault of a programming community that doesn't think enough about security, is left as an excercise for the reader :)

Re:PowerOpen Association and 88open

[alienw]

You are reading the wrong books. Look at some of the IEEE publications, they are full of cutting-edge research results that nobody had a chance to apply yet.

Let's add him to the language

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Should he be a noun, as in "that move was a real Jerry Taylor"?

Or is a verb phrase more appropriate, such as "pull a Jerry Taylor", "Jerry Taylorize", or "go totally Jerry Taylor on $INNOCENT_TARGET"?

Or should the winning entry be an adjective, as in "that email was *so* Jerry Taylor"?

Write a letter to Tuttle

[slamb]

I hope more people take the time to write to The City of Tuttle asking them to apologize. Dealing with people like this drains all motivation to get involved with projects like CentOS, so it's important to take care of this and prevent it from happening again.

Here's the email I just sent:

To: citymgr@cityoftuttle.org
CC: mayor@cityoftuttle.org
Subject: Apologize to CentOS

Mr. Taylor,

I'm writing in response to your recent letter to The Register [1]. I am appalled to learn of your continued hostility to the Johnny Hughes, the CentOS Team, and the open source community as a whole. I am a member of this community.

You wrote that you "only got help after threatening to contact the FBI" [2]. That's a misleading statement without also mentioning that you threatened to contact the FBI prior to describing the problem or asking for help. I quote from your initial email: "Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!"

Most organizations would have immediately directed you to their legal department and cut off all other contact. CentOS stuck with you through your lengthy email exchange and resolved your problem despite your threats and ingratitude. That shows a level of dedication and professionalism that you could never achieve. Even more so when you consider that they are volunteers and that you are not a paying customer. They are not obligated to help under even the best of circumstances.

After CentOS provided you with the publicity you welcomed, you apparently discovered that the open source community has no respect for those who abuse our movers and shakers. Realize that an apology is a necessary first step to repair the damage you have done to your city's reputation.

Sincerely,
Scott Lamb

[1] - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/27/tuttle_ema il/
[2] - http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127

Re:"Mac" botnets are nothing more than *NIX botnet

[tpgp]

doesn't really have anything to do with "Macs".

Don't be stupid. It has everything to do with "Macs" and any other unix-like operating system that runs perl & php.

Its worth knowing that that there is people attacking OS X in the wild and the vectors they are using.

Too many Mac users believe they're invlunerable & start to play around with internet facing services without adequately firewalling themselves.

Articles like this are a good reminder that any unix-like system can be made vulnerable, even if its its pretty well hardened by default.

City of Tuttle in Microsoft's Adverts

[steveoc]

It wont be long now until the next installment of microsoft's 'Get the facts' campaing includes the following headline :

City of Tuttle saves $ billions by migrating from Linux to Microsoft Windows.

After an extensive evaluation in which the City of Tuttle compared Windows® and Linux, the city selected Microsoft® Windows Server System(TM). Besides the obvious cost savings of moving to Windows, the city manager of Tuttle observed that security was of prime importance in the decision. "Ive worked with computers for 22 years, and Ive seen first hand how an interweb running on linux can easily be hijacked by hackers without MY permission."

Re:Google shows MANY Jerry Taylor's out there

[The_REAL_DZA]

our Jerry Taylor is currently #6 on the list.

Thanks to the publicity (and to his apparently endless ego) maybe we should say he's
"#6 with a bullet ."

Re:"Mac" botnets are nothing more than *NIX botnet

[Bonker]

While PHP does do an awful lot of making strings easy to mung, fold, spindle, and mutilate, I have to say that I personally think that adding a convenience to the language does not a security hole make.

I think that the real problem here lies in the fact that many PHP apps are coded incredibly sloppily... like most web content... ignoring even basic coding common sense.

How often would injection attacks take place if every coder obeyed one of the most basic tenants of web application development?

"THOU SHALT NOT EXECUTE USER INPUT"

How hard is that?