Every Vista Computer Gets Its Own Domain Name

c_forq writes, "According to APC magazine, every new Windows Vista computer will be given its own domain name to access files remotely. There is a catch though: to use it one must be using IPv6. Is the push for Vista also going to be the push finally to switch everything from IPv4 to IPv6?" Microsoft, meanwhile, is trying to convince businesses to adopt both Vista and Office 2007 at once. An analyst is quoted: 'In all likelihood, enterprises will tie deployment of both Vista and Office 2007 with a hardware upgrade cycle.' His reasoning is that it will be easier for companies to handle one disruption to IT systems than two. Or three.

Comments

I have been waiting this...

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes my botnet administration much easier.

Re:I have been waiting this...

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes my botnet administration much easier.

no problem, boy. as i said: developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

--
stevie b.

Re:I have been waiting this...

[Barryke]

I've heard this being said in a movie once .. Hmmm director or title anyone?

Re:I have been waiting this...

[Xiph1980]

Voilà, I present you our good friend Steve Ballmer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSIMeRtVebM




Yeah yeah, that good friend was sarcastic...

Re:I have been waiting this...

[Zwaxy]

And the remix, in case you didn't already see it:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsIMOPwvFZE

Re:I have been waiting this...

[Woy]

Its only funny because its true.

Both at the same time, eh?

[DaveM753]

> "it will be easier for companies to handle one disruption to its IT systems than two. Or three."

I couldn't agree more: switch to BOTH Linux and OpenOffice.org 2.0 at the same time.

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[The_Wilschon]

Except then, when they decide they don't like OOo (just because it is unfamiliar), they'll decide that it is Linux's fault. So, they should switch to Linux but keep using MS office. Oh wait...

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[DragonWriter]

Except then, when they decide they don't like OOo (just because it is unfamiliar), they'll decide that it is Linux's fault. So, they should switch to Linux but keep using MS office.

From the screenshots I've seen of Office 2007, OOo 2.0 will probably be more immediately familiar to most Office 2003 (and previous) users than Office 2007.

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[afidel]

Yeah, it's called Crossover Office.

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Your post was modded funny, but this is exactly what I'm doing with my home PCs -- my wife's included. (Yes, I read /. *and* have a wife. Bow before me.)

I'll need to interact with Vista and all the .NET 3 crap at work, but damn if it isn't the slowest thing I've ever run in a VM. FC6 is finally close enough to "idiot proof Linux" that I feel confident running it at home, which means bye-bye to all the authoritarian DRM BS that Vista promulgates.

The app that really made this possible (besides FC6)? GnuCash, of all things. My wife balances the checkbook in our household (sucker), and she's used to MS Money. She's 100% non-technical, so I think it's a red letter day when a user like her can use Linux for everything she used to do on a Windows PC.

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[lga]

(Yes, I read /. *and* have a wife. Bow before me.)

That's nothing, I read Slashdot and have a wife, and she reads Slashdot too! Admittedly it's only when I say "Hey, here's an interesting science/religion article on Slashdot" but she does read it sometimes.

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[jimicus]

Methinks it likely that there will be an option to "Enable Classic UI" or somesuch which will wind up enabled on 70%+ of installations.

While OO.o isn't a serious competitor to Microsoft - yet - don't think they haven't noticed the few high-profile migrations to Sun's StarOffice. This is not the time to alienate your core customer base.

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[monsted]

Lies! There are no women on /.!

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[r3m0t]

Microsoft has *already* released Office to manufacturers (AFAICT this means they're making the master disks and the DVDs now), the business launch is the end of this month, the consumer launch is at the end of January, and they've said multiple times that there is no such option and there will not be one.

The non-UI changes (lots of extra conditional formatting in Excel, palettes, picture effects such as shadows) would be a lot of effort to put into the classic UI, so I doubt it'll ever happen.

It's worth noting that the keyboard shortcuts from older version (e.g. Alt-F, S) still work.

Re:Both at the same time, eh?

[Firefly1]

I think the analyst quoted has it backwards: implementing a new OS and new application suite at the same time is just asking for difficulties. Do that, and 'OS-specific issues' could be masked by 'issues specific to combination of OS and suite'. Implement your new OS, get that squared away, then - and only then - deploy the new app suite.

IPv6 adoption.

[caluml]

Anything that gets IPv6 in use.
When is Slashdot going to drag itself into the 21st century, out of interest? It's not that hard. And you can use a tunnel broker if your ISP don't supply native v6.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[KiloByte]

Or use the anycast gate, 192.88.99.1.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[garcia]

When is Slashdot going to drag itself into the 21st century, out of interest? It's not that hard. And you can use a tunnel broker if your ISP don't supply native v6.

Mmm, using IPv6 via a broker to read Slashdot which will be linking to hosts on IPv4 anyway. Nothing like waiting even longer than normal (300+ ms ping times) to realize that a page is Slashdotted.

I used IPv6 years ago to do the only thing it was useful for: make vanity hostnames on IRC. Other than that there was absolutely no reason to use IPv6.

Currently, I still don't see any reason to switch either. Like Slashdot will make a huge difference?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[caluml]

Why be so conservative? Get a jump on all the people that will have to scramble to get v6 experience to put on their CVs once it hits in a big way.

But mainly - why not?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cortana]

NAT is shit, IPv6 means we can get rid of it once and for all.

This should really be a Frequently Answered Question, it comes up every time a story about IPv6 is posted. :)

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[caluml]

"Name one practical, real world use, that isnt solved by natting."

I suppose your definition of "practical, real world use" is quite limited. But it's late, and I can't be bothered to explain.

You really want to start having to remember 8 groups of four hexidecimal digits just because "it da futar!"?
No. There's this new fangled thing recently been making itself known on the internet called DNS. Check it out sometime. Plus, once you're used to your network prefix (2001:141:3*), it's up to you how you manage the addressing within it. E.g. 2001:141:3::1 for your router, 2001:141:3::254 for your switch, or whatever you like. At work, I just map the 192.168.x.y to 2001:414:3:x::y, and it's easy to remember. IPv6 addresses **can**be shorter than the IPv4 equivalents too. 127.0.0.1 > ::1.

*This isn't my prefix.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[caluml]

Yup. NAT is the biggest Suxor evar. It truely is. People that Just Don't Get Why need to do some more networking.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Bryansix]

Name one practical, real world use, that isnt solved by natting

Can you remotely connect to your desktop when it has no real world IP address without buying additional software?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[93 Escort Wagon]

"I suppose your definition of "practical, real world use" is quite limited. But it's late, and I can't be bothered to explain."

Sounds like you couldn't think of anything...

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[binford2k]

Don't spout about something you know nothing of. NAT is a terrible (although very clever) hack that completely breaks the idea of a layered network stack. It doesn't "solve" anything.

Go read the RFCs.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Arthur B.]

- Using peer to peer communication (audio, video) without actually having to try and get around the NAT with clever tricks
- Running a server
- Faster and easier file transfers between you and your friends
- Easier to play games
- You can run a shell or a VNC and access it easily from outside
- IPsec included in the protocol, easy secure communications over any medium (wifi... )

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[holnet]

Yes, I do it all the time -- https://secure.logmein.com/welcome/get_logmein_fre e/signup.asp

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[welsh git]

NAT is shit, IPv6 means we can get rid of it once and for all

Whilst I agree about the problems NAT has caused, that's a rather glib statement. It has helped get people out of a hole, and the many home-routers these days with natd have helped insulate PCs from the net for newbies, which can only be a good thing.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[dissy]

Sorry, whats wrong with IPv4 and what problems that I have will be fixed with IPv6? You really want to start having to remember 8 groups of four hexidecimal digits just because "it da futar!"?
Name one practical, real world use, that isnt solved by natting.

The thing wrong with IPv4 is that it is expensive if not impossible to get a large block of IP addresses, one for each machine you desire you connect to the internet.

Now, maybe you only have one machine yourself, but that in itself proves your lack of qualification to give input on this subject. It is also not the target crowd for slashdot.

If you have 50 systems and want them all on the internet, NAT does not allow you to do that. It really only allows 1. The point is sometimes 1 isnt enough, and you need more systems on the net at the same time. So NAT has to be ruled out.

Even if you want to attempt to claim port forwarding works with NAT to fake it, you fortunatly provided my argument that it doesnt.
If you have 200 web servers, port forwarded from one IP, you yourself say you would hate to remember all those ports and which machine they go to, by your complaint at remembering IP addresses in IPv6.

Fortunatly the rest of us use DNS, which lets us not have to remember IPs. DNS doesn't much help with port mappings like you prefer to use.

The point is, your usage of the internet is very very limited, and atypical of the people here on slashdot.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[jandrese]

On the other hand, a good firewall on that same router would work just as well and not cause massive headaches for networking types. The number one reason I've been excited about IPv6 is to finally get rid of those annoying NAT boxes everywhere.

I have not been so excited about the relative complexity of IPv6 (it's a lot more than just more bits in the address) and the real second system effect it has. The biggest killer for me is that most ISPs are really dragging their feet on IPv6, so it's exceedingly difficult to try to go "native".

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[indie1982]

Yes using port mapping and ACL's on my shitty but these days standard cable router. Then I can VNC to any desktop on my network without buying any additional software.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[houghi]

I wonder what effect IPv6 will have. In SUSE (and perhaps other distro's as well) surfing is extremely slow, untill you turn off IPv6.

The problem is always the provider. So what wil happen if slowly many more people start complaining about the speed of their internetconnection after they install Vista?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cortana]

To be more explicit that the other reply to your post: NAT is not a packet filter. In the IPv6 world, people will still go out any buy £30 black boxes that they put in between their PCs and their Internet connection. But instead of doing NAT and packet filtering, these devices will just do packet filtering. The general population will still refer to them as 'routers'. :)

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[jandrese]

How about anything that requires two boxes to directly connect to each other over randomly chosen ports? Like, say, Netmeeting?

It's also a pain in the rear for FTP and a shed load of other protocols, especially games. In recent years people have designed their applications to work around NAT, but that's not to say they couldn't be more efficient and work better without having to deal with it.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cortana]

BTW, Internet users in asian and third-world countries already have to suffer through 4-5 layers of NAT. But I guess end-to-end connectivity isn't important for non-first-worlders?

I'll also take this opportunity to plug The Digital Imprimatur again:

Over time, this equality among Internet users has eroded, in large part due to technical workarounds to cope with the limited 32-bit address space of the present day Internet... With the advent of broadband DSL and cable television Internet connections, a segmentation of the Internet community is coming into being...

The typical home user never notices NAT; it just works. But that user is no longer a peer of all other Internet users as the original architecture of the network intended. In particular, the home user behind a NAT box has been relegated to the role of a consumer of Internet services. Such a user cannot create a Web site on their broadband connection, since the NAT box will not permit inbound connections from external sites. Nor can the user set up true peer to peer connections with other users behind NAT boxes, as there's an insuperable chicken and egg problem creating a bidirectional connection between them.

Sites with persistent, unrestricted Internet connections now constitute a privileged class, able to use the Internet in ways a consumer site cannot. They can set up servers, create new kinds of Internet services, establish peer to peer connections with other sites--employ the Internet in all of the ways it was originally intended to be used. We might term these sites "publishers" or "broadcasters", with the NATted/firewalled home users their consumers or audience.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[drdrea]

One useful side effect of being behind a NAT is security.

Out of the box, you pretty good protection against port scans from the outside, which
means you might just be able to install a Windows OS, and get updates before getting infected
by the virus de jour.

Of course, that isn't sufficient/perfect security, but it does help a lot.

Another benefit is privacy... People can't tell who in your company/home is doing
what (at least by simply sniffing packet headers).

For these benefits alone, most companies/homes probably will continue to use NAT
even if IPv6 is widely adopted.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[LordSnooty]

Yes, VNC + SSH = free goodness

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[welsh git]

With a NAT box in the standard 'home' configuration, where the local network uses private-ip address space, NATed to the single, common IP address, there *is* effective packet filtering (incoming, at least) - whether it's by design or consequence is not relevent!

Also, unlike a firewall, some viruses and things which may need to determine their 'public' IP address will find the situation harder behind a nat.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with the sentiments here, and personally have been using IPv6 on all my servers, and all my home machines for many years, and have been involved in big networking projects for many more.. Yes, NAT can be a pain in the butt, but it HAS helped keep Joe Public a little bit more secure!

Cheers

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[welsh git]

You can cook your food over elephant shit, too, but it's not the best way to keep your house smelling nice.You can cook your food over elephant shit, too, but it's not the best way to keep your house smelling nice.

But if you NEED to cook your food, and elephant shit is all you've got to do it, then maybe you won't mind it so much. I'm just saying that with these 'all in one' natd/firewall consumer modems, the natd DOES help 'firewall'. If the NATD aspect wasn't there, I doubt the firewall itself (or indeed the OS) would be made better. For the last time :) Joe Public is more insulated from evil due to these nat combos! so there!!

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[jfengel]

In each of these cases, you have to have some way to discover the computer you want to use. Depending on the IP address for that is tricky, since it's generally impractical to pass around even dotted-quads, much less the longer IPv6 addresses.

So there's some well-known rendezvous. For servers, it's DNS. For games, it's usually some web site. The same goes for peer-to-peer communications: you use some well-known site (tracker) to serve as your initial point of contact, and once you can provide it a port to get through your NAT. It's almost like expanding the address out to 48 bits (32 bit addressing + 16 bits for the port). The protocol is more complicated, but it's really not anything end users notice.

I'll concur that dynamic DNS is a terrible hack for things that depend on servers. Relatively few people do that; few enough that they can be given a static IP. But for games and other peer-to-peer communications you really won't depend on the IPv6 features anyway.

I'm all for gradually shifting to IPv6, because it has to be done sooner or later and so sooner is better than later. New opportunities may arise that nobody's thought of yet. But I really don't think that people are going to find many advantages to themselves in the near term.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Lehk228]

NAT is the single most important advancement in network security for home users.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[TCM]

*sigh* Here we go again.

Yes, NAT can be a pain in the butt, but it HAS helped keep Joe Public a little bit more secure!

That's a flawed argument. Getting rid of NAT changes absolutely nothing security-wise for Joe Public, while making many other things easier or even possible in the first place.

Also, unlike a firewall, some viruses and things which may need to determine their 'public' IP address will find the situation harder behind a nat.

What are you arguing here? There's no gain or loss in security, whether viruses know the public address or not.

There should be some law where anyone defending NAT in a discussion loses by default. It's sickening to read this crap over and over again.

NAT is a PITA with no gain in security. That perceived security comes from packet filters which don't need NAT or have anything to do with it.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cheater512]

Yeah lets hope that Vista gets rid of IPv4 and then Linux gets rid of Vista.
If we can pull it off the benefits will be wonderful.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Ambush Commander]

But then none of the other machines would get any ports!

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[TCM]

In SUSE (and perhaps other distro's as well) surfing is extremely slow, untill you turn off IPv6.

I suppose "surfing is extremely slow" is really meaning "DNS lookups take very long" or something like that. Or is your throughput really lower?

Strange that the BSDs doesn't have those ridiculous problems. If you aren't connected via IPv6, there should be no default route for IPv6 and applications ought to fall back to IPv4 immediately.

Check with netstat -rn whether that's the case or not. If there is no default route for IPv6 and you still get delays, there's something else amiss. But it's not the fault of IPv6. Go blame Linux amateurs maybe.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cheater512]

At least with IPv6 there is a *LOT* more addresses so trojans and viruses cant just sit there scanning ip ranges for new computers.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[houghi]

I suppose "surfing is extremely slow" is really meaning "DNS lookups take very long" or something like that. Or is your throughput really lower?

yes, DNS lookup is slow. For users it looks like a slow connection.

Check with netstat -rn whether that's the case or not. If there is no default route for IPv6 and you still get delays, there's something else amiss. But it's not the fault of IPv6. Go blame Linux amateurs maybe.

The Linux amateurs did not do anything, exept install SUSE. It realy depends on what provider you use, so I say it is a problem with the ISP that could happen with Vista as well.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cheater512]

Multicast is a good example of something new in IPv6.
It means less bandwidth consumption for stuff like streaming audio/video.

It also means that P2P is far faster. :D

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[RandomJoe]

I'm going to take your post as an opportunity to go off on a tangent - since you seem to be using IPv6 already...

I've toyed with the idea of playing with it, but am not sure from what I've read (been a while - forgot about it until recently, with the story on China and now this one) whether I can do what I'm thinking about.

Can I set up my home network (mostly Linux, one WinXP laptop for work, and occasionally a Mac Mini) to use IPv6 internally, then have my Linux router/firewall handle the translation to/from IPv4 for the cable connection? I assume my dumb/basic switches are fine, although I'm not sure about the WRT54G AP (or maybe one of the replacement firmwares for it supports IPv6?). Some of the stuff I read back when I thought about this last left me with the impression this might not work very well...

Secondarily, when I enable IPv6 on my laptops, I assume (would hope!) that Linux and XP can switch back and forth between the two without issue, for when I go connect to another network? (For that matter, I'm not sure what the company IT folks would say if I enabled it on the work laptop - would they necessarily even notice or care?)

Thanks for any info! Now I'll depart from Slashdot tradition and actually go do some reading of my own... :) Hopefully things are a little less confusing than they were last time...

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[shird]

errr... how about P2P?

"I'm behind a NAT, I use P2P fine" I hear you say.

Well that involves either having a UNP router which lets you open up a port, in which case thats not NAT (as you still require owndership of a WAN IP, and the transfer itself is not NAT'd). Or it involves one of the people in the transfer not being behind a NAT, again not NAT. Or it involves bloody slow transfers through a 3rd party.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Foolhardy]

That depends on if I control the NAT router that has the real address. If so, I can and have on many occations forwarded TCP port 3389 (Windows remote deskop), TCP port 23 for SSH (with optional tunneling of 3389 over that) or OpenVPN on 1194 from either/both ends (from one end, even if I only control one public IP). It can be ugly, but the implicit non-public routability of my private network is good for security.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Y0tsuya]

Assuming you have enough addresses for your servers, use proxy ARP for them and NAT the rest. There, problem solved.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

NAT isn't an advancement in security at all. It has almost nothing to do with security. It only rewrites the addresses and ports on packets. The stuff that actually does drop certain packets won't go away with IPv6. NAT doesn't have to either, but it won't be necessary anymore.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Name one practical, real world use, that isnt solved by natting.

It isn't that the problems can't be solved by NAT, its just that they can be solved far better if IP addresses were more abundant. Then the problems NAT "solves" would go away completely rather than require more layers of duct tape and bailing wire.

Here's an example I have to deal with all the time: two organizations want to exchange data in a variety of ways between their two private networks. So they decide to create a VPN between them to facilitate that. However they're both NATting their way out to the Internet and also using a lot of RFC1918 addresses and some of their addresses happen to conflict. So to "solve" this problem one of them could NAT the traffic going to the other's network to some addresses that do not conflict. What a mess. Even if they choose random RFC1918 addresses the odds of a conflict go up quickly with the size of the networks and number of connections to others in RFC1918 space. Wouldn't life be easier if it were possible for everyone to easily obtain globally unique IP addresses?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Multicast is a good example of something new in IPv6. It means less bandwidth consumption for stuff like streaming audio/video. It also means that P2P is far faster. :D

Err.. IPv4 always had multicast. Simply none of the ISPs chose to enable it on their routers.

What makes you think that they will treat IPv6 any different? Multicast from large media companies down to brainless consumers ... maybe ... for a significant extra fee. P2P? You gotta be kidding.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[rcw-home]

But if you NEED to cook your food, and elephant shit is all you've got to do it, then maybe you won't mind it so much.

"Here. Here's electricity and an electric range."

"I can't switch to that! Elephant shit COOKS MY FOOD!"

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Lehk228]

being able to drop certain packets is not the same as being totally unable to deliver certain packets without specific instructions from the user how to do so. the difference between tricking a router into thinking your malicious packet is actually good and doing the same thing, plus sending that packet to a machine that isn't routable from the internet is quite a large difference.

in particular one pretty much requires that you be able to execute malicious code on the router while the other only requires that you make bad packets look legit.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Lord Ender]

It's called a firewall. These hack-job NAT/Router devices will be replaced with ip6 firewall/router devices. They will be more flexible and equally if not more secure than the hack NAT trash.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[welsh git]

Well, in your situation, you can do just that - remove the NAT. As I said (time and time again, I'm talking about Mr. Joe public - the guy ripe to end up owning a zombie machine. And yes, it causes YOU problems and other nerds problems, but that very fact means that Joe publics machine (time five million for all the other joe publics who don't have a nerd to support them) are just that little bit more insulated from messing up things for the rest of us.

I know nats are a problem, and I've used ipv6 on ALL my machines for years, and I know nat doesn't make joe public invincible, I just think it has helped *US* more than you appreciate

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[welsh git]

That's a flawed argument. Getting rid of NAT changes absolutely nothing security-wise for Joe Public, while making many other things easier or even possible in the first place.

Those 2 comments contradict themselves. How can it make things SOO much harder for legitimate things, but not make it any harder for illicit things?

What are you arguing here? There's no gain or loss in security, whether viruses know the public address or not.

Off the top of my head, if something installs a trojan, the hacker needs to know what IP to connect to - that information could be slotted into an innocent looking email, sent via the isp. With Nat, the trojan has no choice but to open a direct connection to somewhere so the ip can be logged - far more likely to be spotted by local firewall security on the pc.

There should be some law where anyone defending NAT in a discussion loses by default. It's sickening to read this crap over and over again.

NAT is a PITA with no gain in security. That perceived security comes from packet filters which don't need NAT or have anything to do with it.

I'm not a NAT lover, I dislike NAT, but I do stand by my original statements, that in the broader scheme of things, it has helped secure joe public more than if he didn't have it.

You seem so blind in your anti-nat passion, you can't see the wood for the trees. - I guess that is why you also deliberately misread my 'defending' of nat in the first place...

There should be some law where anyone blindly holding some view like a religious zealot loses by default, but I guess that would ruin Slashdot, no ?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[welsh git]

It's called a firewall. These hack-job NAT/Router devices will be replaced with ip6 firewall/router devices. They will be more flexible and equally if not more secure than the hack NAT trash.

Another one who has trouble reading... Sigh, anyone would think I criticised the GPL with all this blind zealotry.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[TCM]

Those 2 comments contradict themselves. How can it make things SOO much harder for legitimate things, but not make it any harder for illicit things?

That's only if you (wrongly) assume that the security comes from NAT in the first place. It doesn't, hence it makes perfect sense.

1. NAT+packet filter: NAT prevents many things from working, filter protects user.

2. packet filter: many things work, user is still protected.

Off the top of my head, if something installs a trojan, the hacker needs to know what IP to connect to - that information could be slotted into an innocent looking email, sent via the isp. With Nat, the trojan has no choice but to open a direct connection to somewhere so the ip can be logged - far more likely to be spotted by local firewall security on the pc.

You are clinging to a tiny piece of obscurity when your security has already been circumvented entirely. You say it yourself, there's malicious code running on the machine. How can you trust the "firewall" on the PC itself to be even working?

I dislike NAT, but I do stand by my original statements, that in the broader scheme of things, it has helped secure joe public more than if he didn't have it.

Maybe you don't understand NAT enough to see that it absolutely makes no difference security-wise. NAT's "security" really comes from packet filters which can work without NAT just as well.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Rakishi]

That's only if you (wrongly) assume that the security comes from NAT in the first place. It doesn't, hence it makes perfect sense.

1. NAT+packet filter: NAT prevents many things from working, filter protects user.

2. packet filter: many things work, user is still protected.


NAT forces a 100%, unless specifically changed, inbound packet filter. Without NAT users would use no packet filtering at all, just look at what most users who directly connect to their ISPs modems do. Only now with things like built in firewalls and universal PnP on windows is the situation likely to not implode.

Maybe you don't understand NAT enough to see that it absolutely makes no difference security-wise. NAT's "security" really comes from packet filters which can work without NAT just as well.

The whole fucking point is that without NAT home users would NOT use any packet filtering, or at best some half assed automatic one which doesn't do anything.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[TCM]

NAT forces a 100%, unless specifically changed, inbound packet filter.

That's just plain wrong. Send a packet with a spoofed source address to a NAT-only host and watch the reply bounce into the LAN which should not happen with a proper filter. Any malicious ISP could set a route to your internal LAN via your public address and have complete access to all your LAN hosts. The reason why this probably wouldn't work is that most decent devices already contain a stateful packet filter in addition to NAT. Remove the NAT and nothing changes.

Without NAT users would use no packet filtering at all, just look at what most users who directly connect to their ISPs modems do.

How did we go from router hardware to hosts doing the connection themselves? Of course, if the host is directly connected, it's responsible for its own security. What has that got to do with a router and a stateful filter therein?

The whole fucking point is that without NAT home users would NOT use any packet filtering, or at best some half assed automatic one which doesn't do anything.

The filter is in the same little box that Joe Public installs and then forgets. Nothing would change from a dumb user's perspective! Any "half-assed automatic" stateful packet filter which allows only outbound connections is enough to get the same security we already have through NAT+filter, only without NAT.

NAT is useless for security. It gets boring to repeat but apparently it's necessary in order to fight the FUD surrounding NAT's removal.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cortana]

No. If your ISP wants access to your network, they can happily send you packets destined for 192.160.0.0/24, and your NAT box would happily pass them through. Unlessthe NAT box was also a packet filter, in which case your security comes through the filtering, which will not magically disappear just because people upgrade to IPv6.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Bert64]

It's probably defaulting to IPv6 and therefore trying to do AAAA (ipv6 address) DNS lookups first (which fail) and then doing normal A (ipv4 address) lookups afterwards. Depending on the dns servers in use, and how they respond to AAAA requests (return an error quickly, ignore the request so it has to time out etc) this could make browsing a LOT slower.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Bert64]

Very few modern viruses need to determine their real IP's, nor do they need the ability to accept incoming connections.
Maybe in the days of back orifice this would have been a problem, but today most malware makes an outbound connection to somewhere from which it can be controlled.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Bert64]

Viruses nowadays don't need to know their real ip's, or accept incoming connections...
They just need to make outbound connections, so they can connect to the server from which theyre being controlled, and make outbound connections to infect other machines. NAT doesnt help here.
As for a good firewall built in to every OS, this is true, no OS should ever be without some kind of built in packet filtering ability, but so long as regular users have superuser privileges on these systems, a host based firewall becomes worthless. Any virus which executes as a privileged user has the ability to disable whatever firewall is in place, and if every user is running the same firewall it becomes much easier since the virus now only has one program it needs to neuter.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[vought]

Anything that gets IPv6 in use.


Using Mac OS X since 2002? That qualifies.

Oh, wait - this article is about Microsoft innovating or something. I guess I'm not allowed to say Apple's been doing it for four years.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Bert64]

Viruses dont need to know the public address, viruses typically want to:
Connect OUTBOUND to other systems in order to infect them.
Connect OUTBOUND to a server (eg irc) from which they can be controlled.
Connect OUTBOUND to send spam.
Nat will not stop any of this... Modern malware doesn't open a listening port for incoming connections, this has already been rendered useless by the fact most isp's supply dynamic ip addresses.

As for local firewall security spotting malware, if the malware runs with superuser privileges then no local firewall will do any good since the malware can simply tamper with it and it's logs. And as to sending an email, you still have to send the email somewhere, and the outbound address will appear in the headers regardless.

And trojans, most trojans establish outbound connections to a server from which they can be controlled, a listening port is far more obvious than an outbound connection because it can be detected remotely, whereas an outbound connection can be hidden from the user by modifying the OS to hide it.

In the broader scheme of things, many p2p protocols are unusable, or don't work properly, when using nat, legitimate protocols that users will actually want to use, and the alternative is either opening holes in the nat (which means multiple users cant use the same port behind the same nat gateway) or using outbound connections to a central server, which increases latency and causes significant bandwidth usage on that central server.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[sanyam_y]

Microsoft may not have the expertise to develop it's own protocols but has got enough market-muscle to decide which technology would be in vogue. Having said that, if Microsoft decides to embrace IPv6 in a big way, days of IPv4 may eventually come to an end. Bill Gates once said that there was no need for Windows to support TCP/IP. Eventually it was forced to adopt TCP/IP and called it Microsoft TCP/IP. So what's next? Microsoft IPv6??

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[DohnJoe]

hmmm, it seems *you* don't understand NAT:
a pc behind a NAT router without firewall can't be reached from the outside unless ports are specifically forwarded to that pc. Packets belonging to an existing connection (which originated from the pc, obviously) *can* go through the firewall to the pc because the NAT router tracks the connections.

So the fact is that NAT without any firewall will already make a pc unreachable from the 'outside' and thus *will* help John Doe's pc be more secure against silly exploits in ssh/netbios/ftp/whatever daemons/services.

Of course it doesn't mean the NAT router itself has no open ports which are exploitable but most routers will only be reachable from within the local network by default nowadays anyway.

So the final list should be:
1. NAT+packet filter: NAT prevents some things from working, NAT *and* filter protects user.

2. packet filter: many things work, user is still protected.

3. NAT filter: pc unreachable, thus proteced. NAT prevents some things from working

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Mike89]

this article is about Microsoft innovating or something.

No it isn't

I guess I'm not allowed to say Apple's been doing it for four years.

Nope, you're not.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[jotok]

Can you be a bit more explicit? In my limited experience I don't understand how IPv6 is going to make things less complicated for me.

For example, I just set up a small business network for a friend. His 12 or so hosts get private IPs from the DHCP server, but we only leased one public IP from Comcast. In an IPv6 scheme, would I just end up getting several IPs from the ISP? And are they going to charge me more? In the end, it just seems easier to manage non-publicly-routable address space, but like I said I'm not too experienced. Shed some light please?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

in particular one pretty much requires that you be able to execute malicious code on the router while the other only requires that you make bad packets look legit.

You're assuming that there is a router between you and the attacker at all. Many types of broadband connections place a large number of customers on one big logical ethernet. All cable providers (at least in my area) work that way. No routing is involved in getting packets among a few hundred people in any given area.

It isn't wise to assume anything about other people's equipment when considering the security of your own wether that be your neighbor who is on the same network or your ISP.

.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Lehk228]

The problem is that if people could get away with buying a repeater instead of a NAT/Firewall/Switch and save $25 they would. The current "one IP one Account" type of service with most broadband services provide now requires people with a home network to buy an effective firewall.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Lehk228]

I meant execute malicious code on the NAT router in order to peek inside the LAN.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Oh, well, you don't have to that either. If it is only doing NAT and there are no filter rules telling it to drop, it will pass packets addressed for the LAN right through from the outside regardless of NAT.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[drsquare]

But mainly - why not?

300ms ping times?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[BoberFett]

Go ahead, send packets to that subnet on my LAN. Won't affect me.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[ookaze]

If you have 50 systems and want them all on the internet, NAT does not allow you to do that

BS, NAT allows that perfectly. You obviously don't understand NAT (or even PAT) at all.

Even if you want to attempt to claim port forwarding works with NAT to fake it, you fortunatly provided my argument that it doesnt

Port forwarding works perfectly thanks.

If you have 200 web servers, port forwarded from one IP, you yourself say you would hate to remember all those ports and which machine they go to, by your complaint at remembering IP addresses in IPv6

OMG ! You're really clueless. You know, there exist L7 analysing proxies/firewall that can NAT your 200 web servers without problem. There even are appliances that do that (and use Linux like Radware WSD). Even with my Linux router I can do that.
Fortunately, I don't have to define any port forwarding for the TV RTSP at home, especially since the port change everytime and I need definitions for every machines in my network. And yet it works automagically, and yes, even if I look at 2 different TV channels on two different computers at the same time in my private network.
The router will intelligently send the right packets back to the right computer. There are also HTTP, HTTPS intelligent routers, and for lots of others too (like FTP, IRC, ...).
This just shows you're wrong when you say that all my computers are not connected to the Internet while I'm NATed.

Fortunatly the rest of us use DNS, which lets us not have to remember IPs. DNS doesn't much help with port mappings like you prefer to use

I use DNS too, and it doesn't solve my RTSP problem for example, and I still use NAT.

The point is, your usage of the internet is very very limited, and atypical of the people here on slashdot

Rest assured that even for high end usage of the internet, NAT and all the technologies that come with it are pretty efficient.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[AliasN]

IPv6 basically allows the internet to have WAY more IP addresses than now possible with IPv4. Yes, with an IPv6 scheme, each machine would have it's own public IP address, pingable anywhere on the net. They SHOULDN'T charge you more, but you never know if you are going to get an asshat deciding pricing. I don't know what you are having to manage on your network. Do you have file servers for your LAN only? Is there something you think would make IPv6 w/o NAT more difficult?

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cheater512]

Multicast is in the best interest of the ISP. It means that their backbone carries less traffic which allows them to spend less money expanding their capacity.

Why not P2P? Multicasting is just a packet with multiple destination addresses.
P2P has a seeder who sends a chunks of a file to people who dont have the chunk.
Being able to upload the data once but have it addressed to many peers allows files to be transfered far faster.

I dont see any flaw in my logic but do tell me if you find a problem with using Multicast for P2P.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Bryansix]

Does VNC or Logmein solve the problem of not being able to see your printers over the net? I think not. Think about it. If every Printer had a real IP address and a password you could remote connect to a computer and then install your local printer on that remote machine and print to it. Now you need to pay Logmein.com for a premium account or use some obscure software like screwdrivers.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cortana]

Not at all! Without a packet filter, your ISP can send your NAT box a packet destined for your internal LAN and the NAT box will happily pass it along.

The security does not come from the NAT, it comes from the packet filter!

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[Kadin2048]

Well God knows how Comcast will decide to butcher their pricing to extort more money out of you, but the way it should work is that every computer would get its own IP address. Basically IPv6 gives you so many, that having a publicly routable IP address shouldn't be something you pay extra for anymore. Comcast might try for a time, and try to create some sort of artificial scarcity, but in the long run I don't think this is going to be possible.

So yes, all the machines would have routable IP addresses. Where you now have a NAT, you would probably want to set up some sort of intelligent, stateful firewall, unless you trust your clients to behave themselves and be secure. Given the increasing volume of spam/botnet attacks/bruteforceing, you'll probably want to spend the time you saved on a DHCP server, setting up a really nice firewall.

Also, since IPv6 gets rid of NAT, and NAT and SIP are like oil and water, deploying VoIP would be greatly simplified. That small-office rollout you did, in the Land Of IPv6, would almost certainly contain an internet telephony component. It would just be too simple to not do. You could have multiple phone lines behind the network gateway (whereas now, you can really only have one without a lot of complicated trickery), and if an employee brought in their phone and wanted to use it on the wireless LAN, it's not a huge issue; they can roam using their assigned IP address, even.

All in all, the advantage to somebody like you, is that instead of "managing non-publicly-routable" addresses, if you're sitting at the end of a consumer internet connection, you shouldn't be managing ANY addresses. You should be able to have everything from your TV set to your telephone to your toaster, grab them from Comcast's DHCP server (or whatever they call the IPv6 equivalent). Without the shortage of addresses, there's no need for an end user to have to do IP address administration of any kind. That should all be transparent to the user, and I think where Microsoft is going with this DNS-name-per-computer, is part of that.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Multicast is in the best interest of the ISP. It means that their backbone carries less traffic which allows them to spend less money expanding their capacity.

Except the ISPs are not interested in increasing the upload capacity of home users. Quite the oposite in fact.

Why not P2P? Multicasting is just a packet with multiple destination addresses. P2P has a seeder who sends a chunks of a file to people who dont have the chunk. Being able to upload the data once but have it addressed to many peers allows files to be transfered far faster.

All of which has been possible with IPv4 UDP multicast for ages and all of which has been purposefully disabled in nearly all the routers owned by the abovementioned ISPs.

I dont see any flaw in my logic but do tell me if you find a problem with using Multicast for P2P.

The flaw in your logic is that discrimination against end-user originating multicasts has been in effect for many years now and the ISPs have no incentive whatsoever to turn that feature back on just because you got yourself a shiny new protocol that re-implements the same old feature.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cheater512]

Then why are inbound multicasts disabled too?

I was under the impression that multicasting required beefier routers (espcially more memory).
At the time when the backbones were being created it seemed to be a little pointless but now we are streaming audio and video and now ISPs will want to minimise that traffic.

Since IPv6 requires various upgrades its a good oppotunity to reenable multicast.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Then why are inbound multicasts disabled too?

Because the peering agreements between ISPs get in the way of them charging extra for the service. Instead, the ISPs to which large hosts are connected are able to charge you 100 times the bandwith for 100 users instead of just once. You are new to the corporate way of thinking and you did miss the fact that lowering the host's bandwith usage means less profit for the ISP, didn't you? On top of that, multicast shifts the effort of duplication of packets from the originating host onto the ISPs that have to carry the "multi" part of the multicast. Needless to say they do not feel warm and fuzzy about the idea.

Since IPv6 requires various upgrades its a good oppotunity to reenable multicast.

Not unless network neutrality is destroyed or the ISPs come up with some way of charging for multicast packets that transcends peering agreements. One way or the other the only gain will be for the ISP profits and very little difference for the users.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cheater512]

Counting the number of hosts the packet is going to and multiplying that by the packet size isnt difficult.
ISPs can still rip off each other with multicast.

I'm in Australia so Net Neutrality isnt much of a concern and since international bandwidth is scarce ISPs would love to have multicast.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Counting the number of hosts the packet is going to and multiplying that by the packet size isnt difficult. ISPs can still rip off each other with multicast.

Then this offers no advantage of any kind to the originating host. Why bother if you are getting billed for sending multicast packets at the same rate as regular ones? The only winner would be the ISP who now can resell your bandwith to someone else. Unless a different billing scheme is offered as an incentive and unless all the ISPs of all of the destinations participate, this is simply is a lot of work for dubious gain. In fact an inferior result is likely, since if some of the ISPs do not participate, you end up losing those end-points.

I'm in Australia so Net Neutrality isnt much of a concern and since international bandwidth is scarce ISPs would love to have multicast.

Then the solution is compression. One only has to remove the payload of all but one of the packets with the same payload, and then restore it at the other end. In fact I am resonably sure that this is already being done. The only gain to be had by using multicast in this case is the additional compression of some header data which would become consolidated in a multicast packet.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[cheater512]

Its a large advantage to ISPs even if the are billed the same amount.
It means that they can have more data on their backbone while costing the same amount.
The extra capacity means they dont need to expand as rapidly.

Compression? Yeah lets just try compressing a ~750 gigabit fiber link. I'm sure that'll work.

Say you have 200 people in Australia listening to a stream. E.g. di.fm
If multicast was implemented then only 1 stream would be sent accross the ocean.
Popular streams would save massive amounts of bandwidth.

With Video streaming becoming more popular it will save even more bandwidth.

Re:IPv6 adoption.

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Its a large advantage to ISPs even if the are billed the same amount

Multicast requires that the originating hosts' software uses it. That means changes to customer's software for ISP's gain and a dubious advantage to the customer.

It means that they can have more data on their backbone while costing the same amount.

See above.

The extra capacity means they dont need to expand as rapidly.

It also means they get to charge less per customer.

Compression? Yeah lets just try compressing a ~750 gigabit fiber link. I'm sure that'll work.

The simplistic type of compression mentioned can be done easily. More complex solutions exist in hardware implementations for speed. Also how do you think that ~750 Gigabit link is being fed? Magic? Or perhaps there are fast routers (with fast CPUs running router software) that are attached to both ends of that thing, no?

If multicast was implemented then only 1 stream would be sent accross the ocean.

You stubbornly refuse to see the reality here. Let me give you a practical example: originating host is located in, say, Montana. A portion of the destinations is in Australia. That means that the host in Montana has to go to all the trouble of implementing multicast in its software, somehow compensate for the possibility of some ISPs in, say, Turkey lacking the ability, all for the purpose of saving the bandwith for an Australian ISP and other unrelated to its operations ISPs and all of it either for no monetary gain (the Montana ISP bills for the multiple of the packets times the number of destinations) or exclusively for the Australian ISP's and other ISP's gain, and the loss of revenue to the Montana ISP (who I am sure would be very excited about the idea). Now do you get it?

With Video streaming becoming more popular it will save even more bandwidth.

This technology existed since the inception of the commercial Internet and there is no interest from the ISPs in implementing it for all the reasons I mentioned. IPv6 changes absolutely nothing in this dynamics. Multicast puts the ISPs in the position of oil companies when being asked to support and promote fuel saving measures.

Office2007

[ElephanTS]

I've heard you can type much faster in Word2007. If that's not a reason to upgrade I don't know what is.

Re:Office2007

[Eberlin]

Liu kang ripe vedder width thee boys re-cog nation soft where ink clue dead width Vista!!!

Re:Office2007

[Larry Lightbulb]

But the reader needs to upgrade as well, otherwise there won't be any speed gained.

Re:Office2007

[no_pets]

Upgrade for Clippy 2007!

Re:Office2007

[MightyYar]

I heard it will finally support my FPU! Goodbye, Matlab.

Re:Office2007

[weteko]

You mean they finally upgraded Word to vi + LaTeX?

Re:Office2007

[elphins.son]

Okay, now THAT was funny!

Re:Office2007

[WilliamSChips]

...delete select all.

Re:Office2007

[PCM2]

I've heard you can type much faster in Word2007. If that's not a reason to upgrade I don't know what is.

Heh! From time to time I relate this story, and someday I hope somebody can produce an original copy of the ad, but...

In a very early issue of PC Magazine -- or PC World, or one of the others -- circa 1984, I saw an ad for this amazing new word processing program, called WordPerfect. The selling point of the program was that it, unlike other word processors of the time, was able to keep up with a 90wpm typist. Apparently the other word processors of the day couldn't keep pace with that speed. As people who've been around a while know, WordPerfect gained a strong foothold in law offices that persists to some degree to this day. I don't doubt that the emphasis on touch typing had something to do with that.

Re:Office2007

[Dolly_Llama]

It sounds like you have a cold!

Would you like help finding the nearest [MS advertiser] drugstore to your address of XXXX?

Naysayers, post here

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Anyone who wants to post comments claiming that IPv6 is never going to be deployed, please do so in this thread.

Re:Naysayers, post here

[betterunixthanunix]

I'll bite. By the time it is deployed on a large-scale basis, we will all be using IPv7

Re:Naysayers, post here

[rickb928]

I want to, but I can'...

nevermind...

sorry...

whatev..

stop it! stop it! STOP IT NOW!

sheesh.

Re:Naysayers, post here

[bigwang]

Nay! Well, I say nay.

domain names

[daeg]

Future domain names attached to Microsoft's name

microsoft-eats-children.share.live.com
nochildpornhere.share.live.com
microsoftupdate.com.share.live.com
update.paypal.com.share.live.com
freexxxdonkiesandmidgetsgonewild.share.live.com

Re:domain names

[saudadelinux]

How about

ms-prnp-is-the-digital-equivalent-of-bare-backing- on-meth.com

Re:domain names

[ShaunC]

I say we just have ICANN create a new TLD, .bot, for all Windows machines...

Re:domain names

[sharkey]

Why, is .POS taken?

Re:domain names

[ettlz]

You forgot sonnyand.share.live.com, wiveswholiketo.share.live.com and, of course, goat.cx.share.live.com.

Re:domain names

[DA-MAN]

Why, is .POS taken?

Yep, that belongs to the Gnome group . . .

Re:domain names

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Hmm.... Gives a whole new meaning to having a MAC address. :o)

Upgrade cycles

[fohat]

I don't think it is all that wise to upgrade both an OS and a full Office suite at the same time. It's really best to roll out one thing at a time, and make sure it all works. The UI changes alone are going to freak users out. I know of places that are just now rolling out XP, and they are doing it one section at a time. The more testing you do, the safer you are.

Re:Upgrade cycles

[Przemo-c]

What UI changes? Except of course "ohhhh shiny"

Re:Upgrade cycles

[BagOBones]

Office has significant UI changes.. VISTA.. is the one that is mostly shine.

Re:Upgrade cycles

[lexarius]

IPv5
Remember, odd version numbers are development versions. Not for use in a production environment.

Re:Upgrade cycles

[EXMSFT]

Most enterprise customers would disagree with you. Deploying Windows is not easy. Deploying Office is not incredibly hard, but I also wouldn't use the word "easy" to describe it. Most companies of any size use imaging - which results in a completely clean install of the OS with all applications. Thus, deployment - the most expensive aspect of migration - is reduced, since you have to only test one entire platform, not multiple applications at multiple times. May not be the way you work, but it's the way most customers I ever worked with did.

Re:Upgrade cycles

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

Let's see. Last time they replaced my machine. They did just that: replace the whole machine, OS and office. That's the standard way of doing things here. I suppose the amount of morons is much lower here or something, but this hasn't given any problems.
IMO if the users get a decent training, they'll be able to figure out the tiny differences between the OS's. It's not that there is such a big difference between what you did on win'95 and win XP. Stuff got a bit shinier, but I still double click on the little pictures to get an application to run. There is still the start-button. And there is still the clock on the bottom right of the screen.
Same for office, when I press 'a' I still get an 'a' on the screen. copy-paste got a bit more annoying and most of the advanced functions are placed at a different random menu, but anything I use daily remained the same.

Re:Upgrade cycles

[r3m0t]

Psst. They aren't random. I've never had to click on more than two tabs on the Ribbon to find the right command. Just think about it a bit first.

However, the UI change from 2003 to 2007 is a real problem for some users. I guess you've never really watched an inexperienced person try to use a word processor. *sigh*

Who knew?

[zptao]

Vista will actually be useful... 1) Fueling hardware upgrades 2) Encouraging, on a huge scale, migration to IPv6 3) Fixing a great deal of the holes in WinXP 4) Allowing hardware changes without requiring new installations of Vista 5) etc...

Re:Who knew?

[flyonthewall]

3)Fixing/\gnixif Transfering a great deal of the holes in/\ni from WinXP

There, fixed it up for ya!

Re:Who knew?

[Monchanger]

I'm a Linux guy so naturally I kind of ignore anything related to Vista.
But when I heard that it's going to introduce #5 ("etc..."), I tossed out my Linux right away!
Damn shame Vista isn't out yet- I have to go to the library to Slashdot :-(

I need "etc..." - I can't believe I've lived without it all these years.

We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[khasim]

Most of the spam blocking systems depend upon IP addresses.

With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers. "Effectively" because no one is going to run a database big enough to track them as fast as the spammers change them. Every message could come from its own IP address on a cracked system.

And the other article ... no way is it easier to upgrade the hardware, the OS and the apps at the same time. You'll waste too much time trying to find out if the problem is a bad motherboard or driver or ... anything.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[zptao]

The benefits outweigh the risks. In every great change, there will always be downsides and dissenters. It's an inevitable outcome of progress.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[kensai]

Most of the spam blocking systems depend upon IP addresses.

They'll just have to come up with a better way to block spam (anything is better than that braindead scheme) or fall by the wayside.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[marcosdumay]

I have a perfect alfgorithm to fight spam I can tell you... But you'll need to ditch IPv4 too.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[19thNervousBreakdown]

So track subnets. How is this hard?

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[complete loony]

IP4 blacklisting is often done at a subnet level, preventing many home DSL accounts from running their own mail servers if the ISP doesn't deal with spammers effectively.
IP6 wont change that, since the ISP will still be assigning one subnet per user, and probably have one subnet for all their DSL accounts.

I'd even go as far as saying the migration to IP6 would make it *easier* to block spammers and botnets because of the far more structured approach used to allocate addresses.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[Ant P.]

With IPv4 there's also a virtually unlimited number. The difference is that with IPv4 you tend to block an entire /16 subnet in which maybe only 1% of the users are causing problems, because the IPs are dynamic.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[syousef]

The benefits outweigh the risks. In every great change, there will always be downsides and dissenters. It's an inevitable outcome of progress.

Risks:
- Inherent and unknown risk of new unproven OS.
- Inability to do business due to hosed OS.
- Interoperability (incompatible older files)
- Incompatible software, particularly custom software will need to be upgraded or replaced.
- Underestimation of hardware required to run new hungry OS
- Increased costs takes away from business spending to allocate new hardware, software and training.

Benefit:
- Possibly a nicer looking OS.
- New features (none of which change or contribute to business functions)

Where do I sign up? Seriously name one new thing this OS offers businesses that they don't have with XP. Please don't start with security because that's farcical. XP was more stable than 98 and refined the UI. 98 more stable than 95 and improved support for new hardware. 95 made 3.11 look like a toy. 3.11 moved you to a GUI.

Vista does what better? A 3D desktop you can flip through. Gimme a break! The desktop doesn't need improving. Improved IPv6. Not useful at this point to most businesses. 3D graphics improvements with DX10? Not needed. Most of the rest has been stripped out.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[LoverOfJoy]

What benefits outweigh an exponential increase in spam?

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[Midnight Thunder]

Most of the spam blocking systems depend upon IP addresses.

Sounds like a good a time as any to update their systems. Quite honestly I would these system get updated before IPv6 starts to get widely used, rather than after.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[jandrese]

How about making it effectively impossible for Worms to spread by IP scanning? Without botnets deployed by worms the spammers will have a much more difficult time getting up and running.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[zptao]

Cool post. ... Too bad we're talking about IPv6.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[zptao]

LoverOfJoy: an address available for possibly every machine currently in existence. Whether it be this decade, the next, or in another generation, IPv4's pool of addresses will dry up. IPv6 fixes that.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[asuffield]

With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers.

Nonsense. You cannot just make up an IP address to use on the internet, if you expect it to work. You have to use the addresses allocated to you by your provider. No provider is going to assign you an effectively unlimited number of addresses to work with. Most of the IPv6 addresses are going to remain unallocated for a long time.

There will be approximately as many (same order of magnitude) allocated IPv6 addresses prefixes as there are IPv4 addresses, when the conversion is complete, because the number of users of both with be about the same. Ignoring for a moment the stupidity of maintaining a database of IP addresses used by spammers, such a scheme would be precisely as practical with IPv6 as it is with IPv4, because the mechanism by which they are allocated will be unchanged. The only appreciable difference with IPv6 is that you get allocated a block containing many addresses with a common prefix, instead of a single address. It is trivial to match based on the prefix instead of the entire address.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[DragonWriter]

Most of the spam blocking systems depend upon IP addresses.

With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers.

So, we'll have to block spam smarter (or, more likely, "allow mail" smarter, based on some kind of trust system.) But we've need that for a long time anyway, and IP address-based blocking doesn't really stop anywhere near enough spam.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[TheRaven64]

You can't just get a new arbitrary IP and use it, because the Internet won't know how to route to you. With IPv4, you (or, more likely, your ISP) will pick a subnet that the Internet already knows how to route to, and assign an address from this. The address will be composed to two parts, a subnet address and a machine address. The subnet address tells the Internet how to route to your ISP's router and the machine address tells the ISP's router how to reach you (note: the subnet / machine address split can occur in different places depending on where the packet is on the Internet).

A lot of ISPs dynamically assign addresses, since they don't have enough to go around all of their customers (or they want to be able to restructure their routing periodically). This means that you can't always identify a spam-bot by IP address, and so block lists tend to ban entire subnets.

With IPv6, there are enough addresses that everyone in the world can have quite a large subnet each. This means that an ISP can assign every customer a subnet of their own and not have to change it. Since the subnet uniquely identifies a customer, you can just log those, rather than having to block ranges of customers, making it a lot more accurate. A spammer can easily create a new IP address within their assigned subnet, but that doesn't help if the entire subnet is banned.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[ScrewMaster]

True, and in fact most of us accept that progress has a downside. The real issue is that the definition of "progress" is by no means universal.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[rapidweather]

Most of the spam blocking systems depend upon IP addresses.
Firefox 2.0 can download a list of known "phishing sites", and compare what you are looking at in the browser to that list. It's a big list, and probably will get bigger as time goes on. I wonder how the IPv6 discussion here would relate to that. Will the Firefox 2.0 list get extremely big? They have to manually update the list, and your browser downloads the list. Other choice is to have Google check the site for you, for each site.
I don't use either choice by default in my knoppix remaster, the list would take up /ramdisk space, unless the user has a "persistent home directory" set up on a hard drive partition, something very few will do. I use one, however, usually a 2 GB one, so I can have almost unlimited "/ramdisk" space, compared to what would be available on a 128 MB box, for instance. Not many users would want Google to "track" their Firefox 2.0 surfing.

-- Rapidweather

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[Cesa]

With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers. "Effectively" because no one is going to run a database big enough to track them as fast as the spammers change them. Every message could come from its own IP address on a cracked system.

Yeah, let's not build more roads, I know those few we have are jammed all the time, but if we build more it will be too easy for the bank robbers to get away.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[penguinbrat]

With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers.

That's not going to change anything that much, spammers exploit servers and desktops all the time to do their dirty work. However, the SPF record in DNS is used to add and restrict mail relays for a specific domain, IMHO I's a good idea if everyone starts really using it, and we could rely on it - all I would have to do is add my static IPv6 address to this record as another relay and I would be good to go =)

I don't know the ratio of people who have their own domain name, to those who could care less - but I bet it's not that high. If the above is in M$'s plan, it's pretty smart IMHO - they would know where and how to get to all of their customers directly at any time, because you would have to update your SPF record if anything changed and you want to send /recv email.

For the better or worse, it'll be left to be seen - I'll cross my fingers it'll be for the better =)

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[Pasquina]

I have a perfect alfgorithm to fight spam I can tell you... But you'll need to ditch IPv4 too

And you'll need to send money to me, Chief Bello Osagie of Nigeria. I only need enough money to burn it to a CD and I'll ship it to you!

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[TheLink]

what makes you think that ipv6 addresses are going to be that random?

For technical reasons I believe that ISPs will still get their own ranges, and it is likely that their ranges will still be listed as the ipv4 ones are nowadays. Also, I doubt any single ISP is going to be given 4 billion IP addresses just like that (if they are, I think it's crazy - it'll be like the old days where US universities were given 16 million addresses ;) ).

By the time they slice and dice the 128 bits out the search space might not be so small in practice. And as your botnet grows the searching could get faster ;).

BTW all the people here saying that NAT has _nothing_ to do with security are clueless.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[skinfitz]

With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers. "Effectively" because no one is going to run a database big enough to track them as fast as the spammers change them.

In that case you use a white-list of known good SMTP servers.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[syousef]

Cool putdown. Too bad the grandparent post was about Vista including IPv6 so we were talking about both. Please don't let silly things like facts or logic get in the way of a quick witted put down though....well quick is probably too strong a word.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[anticypher]

Currently, every ISP that wants a first IPv6 allocation gets a /32, and they are encouraged to pass out a /64 to single end users, or at most a /48 for a company. Even a /64 for a home user is billions upon billions of available addresses, or can be routed into dozens of subnets with a cheap IPv6 router/firewall unit. Every LAN I configure gets its own /64, so every server or host on the LAN just autoconfigs or statically assigns the correct local address (for those systems with a static DNS entry)

the AC

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[AliasN]

Yes, we need to block spam smarter, not harder.

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[anticypher]

What's this "We", luddite? Speak only for your own ignorance.

Those of us who want to stay employable in the near future have already learned about IPv6, work with it on a regular basis, realise that what was once the future is now here.

One of the nice side effects of IPv6 is that not only do poorly written anti-spam filters ignore it, but most web content filtering systems also don't know how do deal with IPv6 flows. That means that people in companies with strict no-pr0n rules can, for now, surf without getting blocked. The people running adult content sites realised this recently, and they are all clamoring for it. Probably half of the IPv6 traffic in Europe right now is Adult Oriented, because the people writing censoring filters haven't kept up.

With the Vista betas, all the ISPs around here have discovered people will be asking about IPv6, since not only is it enabled by default, some new features require a globally unique IPv6 address (as this article points out). When Vista starts hitting consumers in a few months, there will be marketing campaigns in place promoting "Vista ready internet (now with IPv6, not just the obsolete IPv4 of our competitors)".

IPv6 is becoming widespread everywhere except in the U.S. at this point. I would love to see slashdot get on IPv6, it would spur ISPs in the U.S. to adopt it faster. Hey, CmdrTaco and company, tell your hosting company to get their act together and get you IPv6, you'll be glad you did (in reality, you'll discover all the bugs and lack of support in PHP, Perl, Ruby and other en vogue programming languages)

the AC

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[TheLink]

Anyway, I think it'll still be a very searchable space - there are a relatively small number of ISPs and the way most give out addresses is not going to be random.

I'm sure there will be sites doing the following sort of stuff for IPv6:
http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS 12222
http://www.ripe.net/whois?searchtext=AS3292&form_t ype=simple

Also is the common method of ipv6 autoconfig random? Or is it based on the MAC? If it is based on the MAC then that narrows things down even more.

Basically if the advantages of IPv6 are used then everyone gets to be a "peer", that probably means that people running such servers will want to make it easy for others to find their servers (or zombies ;) ).

If "users" don't get to run their own servers, then it sounds a bit like NAT + IPv4 ;).

Re:We're not ready for IPv6 yet.

[gbjbaanb]

The IPv6 addresses are handed out as a subnet to each end-user, so you just block that subnet, not the full address. Also, because the spammers/phishers are assigned a fixed address, they won't be using a dynamic one that changes all the time. Put these together and you'll have a list that is roughly the same size as the current one, not exponentially larger as the naysayers FUD suggests.

Why upgrade?

[Carrot007]

Please try to convince my company to upgrade!

Every day I use such great microsoft products as NT 4, Office 97 (with outlook upgraded with the free 98 (about a year ago, OL 97 before that), IE 5.5, or is it 5.0? I forget.

Simple truth is most companies have no reason to upgrade. It aint gonna make them more money.

Re:Why upgrade?

[DaveM753]

Shhhhhhh! That's supposed to be a secret...

Re:Why upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! Is your company hiring? I'd love to be a reenactor in a Living History display.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Threni]

> Simple truth is most companies have no reason to upgrade. It aint gonna make them more money.

Large companies can afford it, no problem. Staff don't usually like having out of date skills; there are security issues with older software. You'll get no support, and when things go wrong and time/money IS lost, you'll have a hard job justifying it to those above you.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Carrot007]

I wish that were true, we have 9500 employees acording to wiki. I've also previously worked for banks still using nt 3.51.

In my experience the bigger companies keep with what they have and never upgrade.

Re:Why upgrade?

[miskatonic alumnus]

there are security issues with older software

Whew. It's a good thing there won't be security issues with any software released from this day forward.

Re:Why upgrade?

[networkBoy]

I've also previously worked for banks still using nt 3.51.

Who? I want to bank there. Seriously NT3.51 was the last secure version of NT.
-nB

Re:Why upgrade?

[egr]

there is a reason to upgrade so Bill Gates can buy himself a Christmas gift

Re:Why upgrade?

[TheRaven64]

I wouldn't. Most banks use OpenVMS, an OS that was banned from DEF CON for being too hard to crack.

Re:Why upgrade?

[sootman]

Sweet! Are they hiring? The 2.8 GHz/WinXP/Office XP Dell I got at work is slower than the PIII/933/Win2k/Office2k Dell it replaced. I'd take the old one back if I could.

Seriously, Microsoft is its own worst competition. I'm still on w2k/Office97 at home. The new live preview in Office 2007 is nice, but I don't format things that much so it's not that compelling of a feature.

Re:Why upgrade?

[Pixelmixer]

im sure he meant there are MORE security issues with older software

Re:Why upgrade?

[AliasN]

You mean, one that would cost more than the billions he already has? Woah..

More FPs?

[EmbeddedJanitor]

D'ya reckon you can type /. comments faster too?

1) Good 2) understandable

[joe 155]

Firstly the idea of each user having their own remote space is good in theory. This is actually something useful which comes with Vista... although there could be serious problems with it; how safe is it? I wouldn't be at all amazed if this was hacked about 3 seconds after the first user puts any files on this because people will refuse to use good passwords. But in principle its good. The T&Cs might change that. Everyone will have to move to IPv6 anyway at some time I think so we shouldn't be too worried about that

As for them pushing the update to Office 2007 - well, that's what they're in business for... I'm not amazed and I'm not disapointed.

Re:1) Good 2) understandable

[The_Wilschon]

Firstly the idea of each user having their own remote space is good in theory.

Except that it shouldn't come from the OS. This is about on par with bundling IE, WMP, and friends. It will make it just that much more difficult for people to switch. "You mean, with Linux, I won't get a share.live.com account any more!? Of course I'm not doing that!" Even if other perfectly good (and likely better) remote spaces are available, they will be anti-competed out of the public eye, if not out of existence.

The OS could reasonably come with good support for a remote space protocol, like WebDAV or somesuch. The OS making company could even provide an account conforming to such a protocol. However, having OS support for the OS maker's remote space and not for anybody else's is just going to be bad.

OTOH, if they simply automatically register you for the space when you buy a license, and provide only a web interface, or an OS interface that is compliant with some protocol, then I don't so much have a problem with it.

Sales guy's wet dream

[chill]

Vista and Office at the same time? Someone in the sales dept. is smoking crack and dreaming of an annual bonus. Hell, why not upgrade all the servers to 2003, Exchange, etc.!

How about changing one thing at a time and seeing how it works, first?

Re:Sales guy's wet dream

[Tibor the Hun]

My sysadmin side says, you're absolutely right, of course, but my marketing side says I've no idea what you're talking about? Works?

Re:Sales guy's wet dream

[LoverOfJoy]

Works? Sure. Buy Vista and Office together and we'll sell Microsoft Works to you for half price!

Re:Sales guy's wet dream

[nine-times]

Or how about changing neither, since I haven't seen a compelling reason to upgrade yet? If it's easier to handle one IT disruption rather than two, it would certainly be even easier to deal with no disruptions.

Re:Sales guy's wet dream

[ricky-road-flats]

It's even better than that... Exchange 2007 is also being released, possibly that same day!

Re:Sales guy's wet dream

[r3m0t]

I think "Office Basic" is going to replace Microsoft Works. I think it includes Word, Excel and Outlook, and maybe Powerpoint. (Microsoft website is blocked from my school.) It's only available to OEMs.

Admit it...

[Otter]

If Linux were introducing something like this, you'd be saying it's the bestestest thing ever...

Re:Admit it...

[DaveM753]

Even better than naked babes swimming in beer...

Re:Admit it...

[Ash-Fox]

If Linux were introducing something like this, you'd be saying it's the bestestest thing ever...

I don't I would be. It's also not a domain as they claim, it looks like it's some evolved Wins/Netbios system. I'll stick to DNS (dyndns services are easy to setup and no chance of name collisions). IPv6 has also been supported in the Linux kernel for many years, nothing new.

Re:Admit it...

[houghi]

Well, when you install SUSE, you get a domainname as well. It is something like xs4a442.linux

Not only does it give each machine a seperate domain, it even has its own TLD

Re:Admit it...

[tirnacopu]

One line from my log on SuSE: "Warning: ip6tables does not support state matching. Extended IPv6 support disabled". When this line is gone, I will consider switching.

Re:Admit it...

[fermion]

I am not sure if even if on Linux this would be a good idea, as I can see no reason to have every computer have it's own domain, or even IP. For most purposes, having a firewall or managed switch directing traffic between machines is safer and equally efficient.

But to speak to the point more specifically we can, with some confidence say that Linux would at least implement it so it would not be globally destructive. To illustrate this lets look at two comparable innovation. First, MS wanted to be part of the office network revolution, vis a vis MS Windows for workgroups and the following versions of MS Windows. However, all they really did was let anyone on your network, which became anyone on the internet, access your hardware. This was often the default setting, without user knowledge. Good Idea: A public folder. Bad Idea: a public hard disk.

For the second we can look at IE. MS wanted to get into this new fangled Internet thing, and so they bought some code, reworked it, and eventually got something that was good. It had advance features that let it go beyond a text layout, and achieve the status of an application front end. Of course by 1998 many of the extensions were no longer novel, and other browsers worked fine. For instance, Amazon has always worked on any browser. IE, while useful as an corporate application front end, ceded too much power to the web server, and in the process put the local machine at risk. It was certainly useful for demanding application, but went way to far for the ordinary user. Good idea: Powerful and free browser for the masses. Bad idea: Powerful and free browser that allows terrorists to commandeer any machine they wish.

the push finally to switch

[frovingslosh]

...going to be the push finally to switch everything from IPv4 to IPv6..

Yea, right. My ISP and may others are out there port blocking so that I can't share any files on my Windows boxes across the Internet with normal Windows file sharing techniques, and somehow we are expected to believe that with Vista will come a drastic change in mindset, rather than going out of their way to block ports to stop us from doing something, ISPs will suddenly expend effort to make connectivity better? Yea, sure, I believe that as much as I believe anything Microsoft says.

Re:the push finally to switch

[Ant P.]

ISPs will suddenly expend effort to make the flood of complaints go away.

There aren't many ISPs out there with a bigger PR department than MS.

Re:the push finally to switch

[massysett]

My ISP and may others are out there port blocking so that I can't share any files on my Windows boxes across the Internet with normal Windows file sharing techniques,

I think it's far more likely that your ISP is blocking ports 135 to 139 to protect users from their own poorly secured operating system. Using normal Windows file sharing techniques across a hostile network is a bad idea anyway.

Re:the push finally to switch

[AgentPhunk]

normal Windows file sharing techniques

You realize that the reason why your ISP is port blocking "normal Windows file sharing techniques" is because of how unbelievable insecure those techniques are, and how many viruses / worms have been written to take advantage of those insecurities? They're just damn sick of allowing scads of bots probing on TCP port 137 to find systems to add to their bot collective. You're right, even if Vista does improve security and/or give us a reason to move to IPv6, they're still going to block those ports, but only so they don't have to support the network traffic created by the legions of legacy WinXP and Win98 machines that will take YEARS, if ever, to upgrade.

Re:the push finally to switch

[glesga_kiss]

To further elaborate on the parent, from a remote host you can access the whole hard drive easily, even if only a few deeper folders are shared. And this is not an exploit, it's accepted functionality. All it takes is an edit to a boot script and your box is hacked. Windows file sharing does not belong on the internet. Use a VPN if you want to share stuff this way.

Re:the push finally to switch

[MulluskO]

Yeah, passwords can be derived from normal Windows file sharing techniques.

Definitely don't want anybody sniffing that.

IPv6? Don't make me laugh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the push for Vista also going to be the push finally to switch everything from IPv4 to IPv6?

No, unless THERE'S NO MORE IPv4 SUPPORT! Don't understand? Here's an analogy:

In other news, the US version of Vista comes with two identical manuals: one in English, and another in Esperanto.

Most Americans who need to read the manual speak English, use English to talk to each other, and do their daily business in English, but hey, Esperanto is so much cooler, for technical reasons that most Vista users don't care about.

Is the push for Vista also going to be the push finally to switch everything from English to Esperanto?

If you don't understand why IPv6 is a geek fantasy that no one will "switch" to, you either don't know what the word "switch" means (it means REPLACE), or you don't actually work in IT.

And if you like IPv6 so much, how come you're still on IPv4, accessing Slashdot?

Re:IPv6? Don't make me laugh!

[Ash-Fox]

And if you like IPv6 so much, how come you're still on IPv4, accessing Slashdot?

Slashdot's IPv6 addy is ::4223:FA96

Re:IPv6? Don't make me laugh!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If you don't understand why IPv6 is a geek fantasy that no one will "switch" to, you either don't know what the word "switch" means (it means REPLACE), or you don't actually work in IT.

IPv6 is for geeks. Geeks run the biggest networks in the world and understand the benefits. Or did you miss the fact that most of Comcast's network is IPv6 now, or that most tier 1 ISPs have at least their management network running IPv6? Most of this is invisible to the end user, but bringing IPv6 the rest of the way to the user can solve a lot of these big ISPs headaches. What is holding them back is proper support from OS manufacturers, and if Vista solves that, they will almost certainly make the move as Vista machines become the most common (with provisioning for older machines). They will probably market it as a feature too. Vista machines can take advantage of Iv6 for faster (as maintained by their QoS solution) internet connections.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[LaughingCoder]

... paying ridiculous prices for bug ridden software with DRM restrictions, ...

Uh, sorry to burst your bubble, but the vast majority of businesses are not opposed to their software infrastructure being "DRM infested" - in fact I suspect they prefer it. Believe it or not they would rather that their employees *not* spend all day listening to music or watching movies. And they are usually somewhat opposed to employees running P2P on their networks as well.

uh

[inKubus]

ICN and PNRP seem like a good idea but it's just like DNS writ large with a million levels rather than 3 or 4. It's basically the equivalent of everyone running their own DNS server on their computer that randomly accepts entries from other computers on the net and no root servers or authority at all. The "secured" name makes sure that when (if) you finally find your computer by randomly traversing the P2P network of PNRP servers, the client can compare the name with the hash address of the computer.

They have a whitepaper over at M$FT that talks a little about it. As always, it's one of those "features" that they will leverage themselves to speed up their MSN content delivery in return for a free windows "live" subscription. Lame.

So What?

[ewl1217]

This will still involve port forwarding, and probably wont be forcing itself on a user, so it will be nearly invisible and impossible to configure for the average user. Enough said...

Re:So What?

[Mostly a lurker]

This will still involve port forwarding, and probably wont be forcing itself on a user, so it will be nearly invisible and impossible to configure for the average user. Enough said...

The "average user" will not need to worry about how to configure it. Any good malware will take care of that quite nicely. As for it being nearly invisible, the "average user" seems not to worry about highly visible malware, judging by the various toolbars I see in the browsers of users complaining of poor performance. Microsoft had no need to make this "nearly invisible". Microsoft's enhancements in Vista to try to block installation of security software on users' machines, and to make tracking of bot networks nearly impossible, would have been sufficient assistance for the malware industry even without trying to hide the existence of malware on the machines.

Misleading Headline

[jonadab]

The headline doesn't actually say DNS, but it implies it. But the article makes it clear that it's not actually an internet domain that is being offered, but a "Windows Internet Computing Name", which is resolved using a protocol other than DNS (specifically, PNRP, whatever that is).

Re:Misleading Headline

[nateb]

PNRP =

Proprietary Network Resolution Protocol

Re:Misleading Headline

[archen]

It also uses different ports so is quite blockable at a firewall. Not that I'd want to do that since I TOTALLY trust microsoft with a nice repository of all registered windows copies all in one place.

Re:Misleading Headline

[initialE]

Instead, I'll just register me another dyndns account

Re:Misleading Headline

[anticypher]

Have you ever been on a network full of Macintoshes running OS-X? There are all kinds of wonderful little functions that take advantage of ZeroConf/Bonjour/Rendezvous. PNRP is an attempt to do ZeroConf but on a wider scale, where the lack of NAT in IPv6 means that Vista machines can find each other no matter where they are on the internet.

What Apple has done with ZeroConf is pretty cool, and being able to listen to any of my cow-orkers iTunes libraries while in the office is a good example. Lets not mention beacons or DAAPD, which make iTunes far too useful :-)

Apple does need to make Bonjour/ZeroConf work better with IPv6, if fact most systems on IPv6 networks don't seem to take advantage of as much as they could.

the AC

I shall call mine Mini-DRM

[WillAffleckUW]

That is, if I ever get a WinVista box. I'm probably saying sayonara to Windows after sticking with them since MS-DOS (think it was either 1.0 or 2.0, not sure which) for my base home machine (now a laptop). With Open Office and all the other web-based things, I just don't care anymore, and I've mostly switched to console gaming for the most part. Can always hold out six months till they release it for the Mac and use my son's Mac Mini if need be.

DNS entry != Domain name

[lthown]

sheesh, it's no like they're handing out .com's - there's just a DNS entry - chances are you have one already associated with your computer.

IPv6 Meme

[broward]

I was excited about IPv6 earlier this year when I read about U.S. military adoption. But I discovered that IPv6 has a history of false expectations and the buzz trend is still not positive.

From July 2006 -

http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entr y=ipv6_meme_update

IPv6 or IPv6[TM}?

[jc42]

One obvious question: Will Vista really use IPv6, or an "extended" IPv6-like protocol with patented MS extensions? Anyone know? Is there any chance that we could end up in court if we interoperate with it?

Re:IPv6 or IPv6[TM}?

[pilkul]

How the hell would that be possible? Microsoft doesn't control the router market.

Re:IPv6 or IPv6[TM}?

[Rufty]

Yet.

Re:IPv6 or IPv6[TM}?

[a.d.trick]

I'm not and expert, but I doubt there will be anything too screwy about the IPV6 implementation; however, the domain name isn't actually DNS appartently, but some Windows naming systems. I don't know what this windows names thing is about, but it seems like a bad case of NIH syndrome.

Re:IPv6 or IPv6[TM}?

[dotgain]

Given how thin on the ground IPv6 is at present, it's more than an opportunity for them to get in and do something stupid like implement ActiveX at Layer 2, if that's possible. I'm sure they dream of closed lower-layer networking protocols and given the chance could explain ten ways things like Ethernet have held back development and supported terrorism.

Re:IPv6 or IPv6[TM}?

[Tim C]

Will Vista really use IPv6, or an "extended" IPv6-like protocol with patented MS extensions?

How the hell would they do that? This is something that routers and other networking hardware needs to support, they can't just lock it up tight and sit back laughing at everyone. Unless they plan on selling their own networking gear, you wouldn't even be able to setup local networks of Vista machines, let alone connect them to the Internet (which is the whole point of this).

Job Security...

[__aaclcg7560]

Since I work on a Help Desk, I will find out early next year how much job security I will have when Vista/Office and hardware upgrades is rolled out. Of course, job security doesn't translate into good health. Got to pay the piper somewhere.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[kfg]

Believe it or not they would rather that their employees *not* spend all day listening to music or watching movies. And they are usually somewhat opposed to employees running P2P on their networks as well.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's perfectly easy to accomplish all of that in *nix and has been for decades.

No, the reason the vast majority of businesses are not opposed to their software infrastructure being "DRM infested" is the management of purely internal documents. The shit they don't want the SEC to see.

KFG

Chinese Torture

[mattwarden]

'In all likelihood, enterprises will tie deployment of both Vista and Office 2007 with a hardware upgrade cycle.' His reasoning is that it will be easier for companies to handle one disruption to its IT systems than two.

Of course. The Chinese used this reasoning when developing torture techniques. Would you rather die with a single gunshot to the brain, or millions of tiny paper cuts?

IT systems to Microsoft: "Please, just get it over with."

Security Hole anyone?

[pavera]

First off, I've never deployed anything on IPv6 so maybe it is a totally different system where security is concerned... Seems to me though, ok so all these Vista boxes are going to be out there on the net with a new name resolution system to allow hackers to scan through them, and as I understand it IPv6 doesn't have NAT or anything (the idea being IPv6 will let you put things directly on the net). So... how on earth are we trusting MS to secure the plague they are about to lose on the world?

Sure MS has their firewall now, but to make this remotely useful you're going to have to open up some ports. I just see this being a huge security nightmare. Yeah lets make it easy for everyone to put their systems right on the internet!

Old News

[JensenDied]

You can do this on ANY XP Home (SP2?) computer currently (i don't know if you could pre-sp2) network connections -> (any adapter) rclick:(propertys) -> install (ipv6) once you have ipv6 on the same window goto advanced -> windows firewall settings -> File and Printer Sharing -> Edit -> Change scope (allow any computer on the internet as opposed to default subnet) there same thing done, without the new hw or OS pricetag

Re:Old News

[JensenDied]

forgot the part about dns names, aside from the services from .tk and others that do redirects and iframes.

dyndns.org is also a fairly nice server which does offer free (sub).domains from their hosts plus some other stuff with a price tag. to bad their account services page has become a bit over cluttered since i first used them.

As Former IT...

[rdewalt]

I'd install Vista on a new computer if it came with Vista (I do not trust default loadouts. I -always- re-install, or at the minimum, print the drive from a ghosted image)

Office 2007, I'd do across the whole company. We had a procedure to upgrade people. Now mind you we had 120 employees, so our problems/solutions may not match yours. We had a requirement where -EVERY- user had to come to the IT room for the upgrade, and we checked off the whiteboard who got what. After $time, anyone who didn't, got locked off the network for not following procedures. (with upgrade paths and 'forgive' paths for certain classes)

This allowed us to track who got what license onto what machine, and allowed us to guarantee $x licenses of $y product.

Re:As Former IT...

[dbIII]

Office 2007, I'd do across the whole company

After the Office 97 compatibility debacle I would use the same install media for all of them if possible. The incompatible versions of Office 97 had identical packaging and labelling.

Frankly, I don't need IPV6

[Colin Smith]

IPV4 has been fine so far...

Can someone remind me again why we didn't go OSI instead? Rather than re-inventing the wheel again, that is. Oh yeah, design by committee...

IPV6 has been defined by a working group, not a committee... That's ok then...

C'mon, give me a reason to upgrade. What do I get out of it?

Re:Frankly, I don't need IPV6

[SkunkPussy]

Encryption available on all protocols without having to implement special for it (i.e. not in the transport layer not the application layer). https would be obsolete

Re:Slashdot tags

[HairyCanary]

That's kinda the point.

We're not ready for computers yet.

[Nahor]

There are not fully effective black list either. So lets burn all computers. ;)

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[ettlz]

Haven't I see this before? A pro-Linux copy-and-paste troll? [Head asplode.]

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's perfectly easy to accomplish all of that in *nix and has been for decades.

So, your argument for Linux is "it does what Windows does, only soooo much betterer".

And this, Sir, is what makes you Linux zealots so ridiculous and is the reason why I command my recruiters to ignore any resumées with "Linux", "GTK" or "Qt" in it.

Set Top Box!!

[mpapet]

Those handcuffs Microsoft are selling will look pretty good. The price will be right so no one will notice.

But then, as the handcuffs start to tighten when MS demands more and more in license costs then what? Where do enterprises go in 3-5 years?

You won't be able to switch to linux because MS will have Embraced/Extended/Extinguished it. (as mentioned here: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/07/ 1435204)

If you value your freedom, then you will switch OS's. Now. Mac/BSD/Linux are three to consider.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[Random Destruction]

Yes the zealots are annoying, but please don't be so damned ignorant.

Not all of us are like that, just the noisy half.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[kfg]

So, your argument for Linux is . . .

. . .completely unstated in this thread, so far.

Sir, . . . what makes you . . . zealots so ridiculous . . ."

. . .is canned resposes to arguments that have not been made.

KFG

And the reason is ...

[khasim]

In my experience the bigger companies keep with what they have and never upgrade.

And the reason for that, in my experience, is that the bigger companies have more time and expertise invested in their existing systems.

Changing a server OS & app when you have 10 people using it is far different than when you have 10,000 people using it.

Re:MAKE THE MADNESS STOP!

[Tibor the Hun]

Too much Sinaed O'Connor....

Seems like a ruse for marketing to me

[unity100]

just resembles the times when the hardware industry (mobo manufacturers, graphics card manufacturers and cpu manufacturers) 'invent' or 'reinvent' some technology and switch to it, making the mobo, graphics cards and cpu you bought 1 year ago due to 'upgradability', obsolete. so they force you to change all stuff in your box and force sales.

this very much resembles it. 'its better if you change them all' or implyingly, 'you have to change them all'. which is definitely something that came out of 'marketing' serpents.

i always say this; marketing, human resources divisions are the ones that totally mess up companies. marketing divisions mess up companies' reputation and credibility and clients, human resource sdivisions mess up companie's employees.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[Tim Browse]

Believe it or not they would rather that their employees *not* spend all day listening to music or watching movies

Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's perfectly easy to accomplish all of that in *nix and has been for decades.

Yeah, I heard those Linux media players suck, too.

The Simple Truth

[nurb432]

Is that most HAVE to upgrade, since they bought into the MOLP treadmill.

That and when you cant buy a PC with drivers for anything older then Vista you dont have many choices. its harder to support 2 flavors of an OS then just bite the bullet and upgrade the rest of them too.

not that im looking forward to it, but its going to come, regardless of how much we complain or wish it wouldnt. We said the same about XP.. it came..

How about stop charging for office?

[amplusquem]

"Microsoft, meanwhile, is trying to convince businesses to adopt both Vista and Office 2007 at once." Their method: charging hundreds of dollars for a simple document, spreadsheet, and slide editor when there are free programs available that do the exact same thing.

Re:How about stop charging for office?

[EXMSFT]

apples to oranges

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[argent]

Uh, sorry to burst your bubble, but the vast majority of businesses are not opposed to their software infrastructure being "DRM infested" - in fact I suspect they prefer it.

That's why Microsoft had to come up with special corporate versions of XP without the Windows XP activation process? I'll bet that they'll have a similar corporate exception for Vista, if not now then pretty soon after release...

Believe it or not they would rather that their employees *not* spend all day listening to music or watching movies.

DRM does absolutely nothing to stop you from listening to music or watching movies... what it prevents you from doing is giving someone else a usable copy of the music or movies you're listening to, *if* that music or movie is DRM-protected.

IPv6 and routers

[archcommus]

The article mentioned something about most current routers not being compatible with IPv6. I don't need to get a new router when I move to Vista do I? BTW this is a serious question, as I know nothing about this.

PNRP vs. zeroconf?

[*SECADM]

I am curious as to how PNRP works with Zeroconf. Does it 1)implement zeroconf, 2)interoperate with zeroconf, or 3)is completely incompatible with zeroconf? AFAIK zeroconf already does p2p name resolution and is an open standard. Is PNRP gonna be a standard?

.

Re:PNRP vs. zeroconf?

[symbolset]

PNRP is Microsoft's attempt to replace DNS with their own P2P naming system under IPV6. It's patented, so of course making stuff compatible with it outside of the Microsoft domain will be illegal, hazardous to your IP, or require a small percentage of your immortal soul.

Shortly after it's common, people are going to discover a number of things:

• A node can publish as many names as it wants. Billions of semi-randomly generated names per bot node could be fun.
• Frist psot: It sure makes it easier to manage a botnet.
• Millions of bots competetively and cooperatively poisoning the namespace will not be helpful.
• The implementation will have bugs that cause failures of the service or the whole computer.
• The implementation will have vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities will have exploits. Some of the exploits will have patches. Some of the patches will cause failures of the service or the whole computer. Some of the exploits will never be published or patched, so there will be more bots. It's the One Microsoft Way.
• Names are not unique -- so the label Natalie-Portman-hot-grits, "My Printer" and "office secret pr0n share" shall occur millions of times.

The whole replacing-DNS thing seems unlikely to work out. Yet another toxic service to turn off, it should set back IPv6 adoption three years or more.

Hah. Right.

[SocialEngineer]

I work for a somewhat small newspaper with a few windows machines (most of our boxes are Macs) - there is NO WAY we could afford to upgrade all our Windows machines with Vista AND get the latest office at the same time. I'm guessing that most small-to-medium sized shops are going to be the same - Especially given the huge hardware requirements for Vista.

Give us a cheap pro version of Vista, OEM (XP Pro OEM is only around 130 bucks), and we might consider it. Otherwise, no thanks. Too costly.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[drinkypoo]

So, your argument for Linux is "it does what Windows does, only soooo much betterer".

It's an operating system. Operating systems broker between computing resources and computer software.

As such, the argument for any superior operating system is "It does what (inferior system) does, only so much better."

Regardless, is the fact that it does the same thing better and cheaper not a reasonable argument for using it? Did we get transported into some parallel dimension where those are not desirable qualities? IS THIS THE EVIL UNIVERSE? *checks* No, I still have my goatee. Wait, I have a goatee! Maybe this IS the evil universe!

No wait, I'm still right-handed. *whew*

Vista upgrade too expensive

[tirnacopu]

For the first time in MS history, an OS release will make all your hardware obsolete. Every other iteration I have seen offered some features while promising to keep your current hardware alive (for a while). Got a 386 4MB RAM running DOS? Win3.x will run perfectly on it and provide a lot more features! I have installed Win95 on a 486 8MB. Win2000 on a PII300 64MB. WinXP on a PIII800 128MB (until SP2 came out, that forced an upgrade to 256MB). All those systems have been used for daily, useful tasks. Now Vista promises you'll have to throw in the garbage your Celeron > 1GHz 512MB RAM which proved so far to be more than enough for XP. VERY unpleasant. And a bitter side-note: Tiger runs BETTER than Jaguar on my 800MHz 512MB RAM iMac :(

Re:Vista upgrade too expensive

[Shados]

actualy, proportionaly speaking, the Vista hardware requirement closely match that of all previous versions of Windows and then some, as ironic as it is. Win XP on a P3 800? When WinXP came out, that was high end, buddy. I installed WinXP on a 333 mhz celeron, and that was rough. 500 mhz and you were okay-ish. 800 was flying. The fancy version of Vista actualy works fine on computers that are several years old (I got my computer about 3 years ago, and it runs circles around the requirements), and the low end (without aero, etc), can run on dinosaurs. I don't think you realise just how old a celeron 1 ghz is =P

Re:Vista upgrade too expensive

[drsmithy]

For the first time in MS history, an OS release will make all your hardware obsolete.

Vista RC2 is quite usable on a ~900Mhz P3 with 768M of RAM and a GeForce 5200. That's ~5 year old hardware, with extremely modest (ca. US$50) upgrades. How exactly is Vista going to "obselete" all my hardware ?

(And it's faster than OS X on a comparable Mac, as well.)

This is *exactly* why ISPs are dragging.

[zooblethorpe]

Your quote completely sums up about 50% of the business reasons behind why ISPs are dragging their feet about implementing IPv6. Obviously, there's some overhead, which I count as the other 50%, but this particular 50% has to do with these two choice bits:

...the home user behind a NAT box has been relegated to the role of a consumer of Internet services.

and:

Sites with persistent, unrestricted Internet connections now constitute a privileged class, able to use the Internet in ways a consumer site cannot. They can set up servers, create new kinds of Internet services, establish peer to peer connections with other sites--employ the Internet in all of the ways it was originally intended to be used. We might term these sites "publishers" or "broadcasters", with the NATted/firewalled home users their consumers or audience.

Practically *everything* we've seen about the major media companies (which are increasingly also ISPs) is that they're struggling to force the internet into the TV paradigm. Unwittingly perhaps, but it seems that the NAT workaround has helped them do that. I'm not in the least surprised that these companies would do all they could to keep their audiences captive, and putting off IPv6 sure seems like part of that effort.

Re:This is *exactly* why ISPs are dragging.

[OnlineAlias]

The ISP's already have a grip on this through bandwidth limitations upstream. If you need a server on a consumer connection all you need to know is how to configure your firewall properly and to buy enough bandwidth. This is no different than on IPV6...ports are not just going to be magically secured because of it. NAT has nothing to do with this, other than inbound ports do become magically (far more) secure when NATed...

Re:This is *exactly* why ISPs are dragging.

[zooblethorpe]

Oh no, I agree, port security is a different issue and yes, IPv6 is indeed no magic bullet. My main point is simply that IPv6 makes it much easier for the whole peer-to-peer thing (and by peer-to-peer here, I mean much more than just P2P filesharing) that has the major media companies scared, so it makes sense that they wouldn't be exactly gung-ho to implement it. And as the GPP post notes, server connections via IPv4 NAT are much more limited than the straight-to-the-net possibilities found with IPv6.

Cheers,

what's the harm?

[DaveJay]

No harm could ever come of this. There's no way that a security hole could possibly be found that exploits this somehow. There's no way that a user, confronted with router difficulties (from firewall misconfiguration or no IPv6 support) would decide "eh, I'll just run it without the router/firewall." There's no way that a person could, say, spoof another person's non-secure name, and get them sued by the RIAA or picked up on kiddy porn charges because lawyers and law enforcement don't understand technology.

Nope, nothing bad at all. Nosir.

In other news, Microsoft just landed a gig to run all the traffic lights in your town. Each traffic light will be connected to every other traffic light via a network, and will report its current ID and status (red, yellow, green) to the other lights. Via peer-to-peer technology, they'll regulate traffic on their own. What could go wrong?

Re:what's the harm?

[Joe The Dragon]

Most traffic lights are linked to each other now days anyways.

just one more notch in microsoft's bedpost

[sdnoob]

granted ipv6 will take a little time for adoption around the world..

however, you can basically add dynamic dns services (such as dyndns.org) to the list of industries and businesses that microsoft is trying to takeover/monopolize/etc through bundling extra features in windows that have absolutely nothing to do with the core functions of an "operating system".

Re:MAKE THE MADNESS STOP!

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

For those new to Slashdot who are wondering what's wrong:

Slashdot is a tough place. We all do our best, but every now and again, someone mentally cracks and posts a long and desperate rant. And to support them, other Slashdotters mod them -1 Flamebait.

Yah!

[PHAEDRU5]

And ven ve know your ICBM address, ve vill be able to drop single kiloton nukes on your software-stealing ass.

That would involve windows corporate bitches:

[DaedalusHKX]

A) Knowing what DRM is.
B) Knowing why the developers conformed with a bloated media industry and a growing world police state standard (aka DRM)
C) Understanding that if you use Linux, you owe little to anyone save yourself.
D) Understanding that if you use a corporate OS, including corporate Linux, you are no longer responsible, the other guy is... this means that you can be an irresponsible twit and blame the other guy... this is the "new american way".
E) Understanding that if you use another guy's product and he has limitations on it, he owns your balls and always will.

Won't help

[topham]

It won't help.

My ISP, an otherwise decent company to get service from, provides me with 2 IP address' because of the level of service I pay for.

I don't use the second one, I don't have a particular need for it, if I did I'd find a way to get my NAT router to get 2 addresses and use the second mapped to a machine; except I'm not allowed to run servers anyway!

IP6 isn't going to change that, I expect ISP's will require some tool be run to register the 'primary' machine or something and only allow 1 or 2 machines on the network, not the full subnets worth.

Which means we have the same problem, slightly shifted.

Why would anybody think ISP's would make it easier to get more machines on the Internet? they have no reason to.

Re:Won't help

[profplump]

Maybe because their customers expect to be able to connect more than one machine to the Internet and are willing to pay for their ISP for such services? I know it's complicated, but even unmitigated greed requires that you encourage people to give you money; giving them a good or service for more than it's worth to you is an easy way to do that, and is in fact the basis of most ISP's business plans.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[jonadab]

> Yeah, I heard those Linux media players suck, too.

Yeah, they suck, because all they do mostly is just play your music and stuff. They don't have all those totally cool features the popular commerical media players have, like connecting the web to look for plugins and updates, nagging you every time you play anything that you need to buy another related product (*cough* Real *cough*), and filling up your screen with stupid "visualizations" of your music. (Okay, so xmms does have the stupid visualizations, although by default it's just an oscilloscope-like thing, nowhere near so annoying as that nonsense Windows Media Player shows you. I'm sure there must be a way to turn the visualizations off altogether. Maybe someday I'll find it.) I mean, if you don't use Windows, then you're really missing out on all those *extra* features that a media player could have, besides just playing media.

But we're getting pretty far off track. The reason businesses don't care about DRM in the operating system is because they have other things to worry about than philosophical issues about user rights. Frankly they're more interested in whether they can lock down the user's desktop to have only the shortcuts they want than they are in whether the user can shift music from one computer to another. What they really want to know is more along the lines of, "Can we buy this product from our regular vendor, does it come with a support contract, and what has my boss read about it in his management magazines?"

aren't you all missing the point?

[DragonTHC]

This just means that every vista computer will be running microsoft's DNS server on it tied to the SMB file sharing service.

That's not a good thing.

This just means one more security headache to put up with.

Just one more way for a windows box to be rooted.

order now, free set of ginzou knives

[wardk]

but wait, that's not all, order now and recieve this plastic coated keyfob with the microsoft logo, turn over for small mirror. yes, that's the image of a "mark" ...but wait

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[yo_tuco]

"I command my recruiters to ignore any resumées with "Linux", "GTK" or "Qt" in it."

Which makes you the same kind of person you despise. You turn down potentially perfectly good applicants just because they may be able to program in .NET and GTK or QT? That sounds like a plus not a negative.

sucker199938.real.stupid.user.microsoft.com

[thorkyl]

I like XP, 2000 even better, damn small Linux even more.

--
If I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[entropy123]

I'd really consider it...but I cannot get my VPN connection or my wireless card to work in Linux. I nearly lost my job trying to make it work out. Tell you what, if the Linux community takes on hardware compatibility in a serious and systematic way I will migrate to Linux. If not, I'll go with my bosses and migrate to Vista.

Just tell me what hardware will work with what distro and what options and I am in. In the 100 or so person IT department maybe one of them understands how to configure a VPN in Linux...and they will not show me since I only do research in computational biology...

*shakes head*

[scdeimos]

It's always nice to see that Technical Writers for IT magazines are savy enough to know the difference between a Domain Name and a Host Name.

Yup, it's faster

[eclectro]

Dear aunt, let's set double the killer delete select all

NAT != Security

[Mariner28]

NAT actually breaks security. How can you truly know that the IPSec-capable host you're talking to behind that NAT router is the host you think it is? Authentication and non-repudiation are also part and parcel of security. It's a two-way street - both parties have to be confident they're talking to the right entity...

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[Divebus]

If I see Windoze this and Windoze that all over a resumé, whoever it is turns out to be a moron drone. They don't get hired unless they also have Linux and OS X under their belt.

Re:I've been trying

[zippthorne]

hmm.. have you tried knoppix? There are a lot more live-cd distributions than the ubuntoos. (which I'll add, as an inexperienced, occasional linux user, i've been disappointed in as well. Is it because they combined the installation CD with the live CD for the recent version?)

In my (admittedly limited) experience however, live-distributions have tended to be squirrelly compared even to their own installed versions.

Bypass firewall....

[alexandreracine]

Also, all firewall will have to be reconfigure..., so get security company in there too...

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[jonadab]

> XMMS is dead. Long dead. For three years.

Oddly, it seems to still work here.

> BMP was the main fork

I'm familiar with BMP as a file format, but I can't seem to find a media player with that name in the ports tree. Apparently it is more dead than xmms.

> (Audacious was another), and BMPx is the rewrite of BMP

Those two do seem to be in the ports tree. If xmms stops working or I start having problems with it, maybe I'll try one of them.

Bear in mind, pretty much all I want a media player to do is play music and otherwise stay out of my way. The only format I really need it to support is WAV. (I don't like lossy compression. It sounds bad. I guess I'm picky.) It doesn't even need shuffle or advanced playlist features -- if it can open a directory full of symbolic links and play them in asciibetical order, I'm good. (I have my own Perl/MySQL solution for generating the list and creating the symlinks. My shuffling algorithm is very good, plays songs that I've rated higher more often, spread out evenly through the list, never puts the same genre back-to-back, generates in parallel a special playlist consisting only of tracks with no lyrics (for when I want background music that won't distract me), et cetera.) Basically, all it's gotta do is play music.

The only problem I ever had with xmms was when I tried to get that scrobbler thing to work. I'm pretty sure it was the scrobbler thing that was the problem there, and in any case I was only fooling around with it on a whim. (I don't really expect to get good music recommendations from such a service. My tastes are fairly particular. My current playlist is over 45% baroque, although that percentage might go down a bit when I get my other hard drive hooked back up, which contains most of my a capella music collection; then again, it might not -- there's quite a bit of Bach on there too, including most of the Wendy Carlos boxed set. If there's any such thing as too much Bach music, I'm sure my budget cannot afford to buy that amount of it -- at least, not in good quality recordings.) So anyway, scrobbler is not a sufficiently enticing prospect to lure me to experiment with new music players. What I have works.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[tinkertim]

>> Our company did last year, cities of Vienna and Munich did, it should work out very nicely for you too. Our
>> former XP users love KDE.

You wouldn't be interested in sharing what KDE applications you left in your typical workstation setup? I'm guessing Firefox, open office stuff, evolution (or similar) and possibly GAIM or some other IM client.

What else did you leave in that you find people actually using that's not further confusing them, if you don't mind sharing (and even realize I asked because you [understandably] posted anon)?

VLC ( found here ) overcame the last hurdle I had with transitioning some client networks .. media playback was the breaking point in selling. Are you using it? How do the users seem to like it vs Media Player if so?

This goes out to any other anon cowards who would like to share (or non anon cowards, too!) :)

Re:NAT != Security

[Lehk228]

i'm not familiar with how IPSec works, but if a NAT router breaks it, it's already broken as any compromised router between you and your destination could do the same thing.

Re:I've been trying

[the_womble]

There is something badly wrong?

Are you sure your CDs are OK? IF you downloaded and burnt them yourself have youverified the checksum? I have done multiple linux installs (first Mandrake then Kubuntu on all the PCs on a small network) and upgrades and used several live CDs over the last six years and the only reason I have ever had a complete failure to boot was a bad CD.

I once took a Knoppix CD into work at and it worked on LOTS of PCs (lots of people wanted to try it and it got passed around). This was three years ago so hardware support should be much better now.

You may just be incredibly unlucky and hit on three combinations of hardware that Linux will not work on. I think the suggestion that you try some more live CDs (knoppix, slax or puppy) is sound, but please verify the burnt CDs, and perhaps try them in yet another PC if it still fails.

hey

[tonycheese]

"According to a Microsoft spokeswoman, Microsoft recently placed an order for 500,000 CD labels, CD sleeves, and packaging boxes labeled "Windows Server 2007", but has also ordered an equal number of small "8" stickers, "just in case.""

Added Value

[The Raven]

Honestly, this seems like a perfectly valid move to me. The proper way to combat piracy is to add value for legitimate purchasers via services... services are a dozen times harder to 'steal' than just bits. A MS operated DNS (even if it is ipv6 only) is a perfectly reasonable service to convince the medium-skill techies (who can format a machine, but not setup a DNS service) to buy rather than copy. These mid-level windows users are the most common casual copiers of the MS OS... they know enough to copy Windows and install a machine, but not enough to delve into Linux.

So, all in all, I think this is a move in the right direction. Added value to the legit buyers, rather than bullshit like 'Genuine Advantage' that only benefits MS.

Re:Added Value

[r3m0t]

It isn't a service from Microsoft. It's a peer-to-peer DNS-like system.

VoIP

[rantingkitten]

A real, practical situation that NAT sucks for?

VoIP.

I cannot tell you how much NAT and associated single routable addresses which mean using PAT as well, suck for VoIP applications, particularly if they're using SIP. A huge portion of my time at work is spent inventing lame workarounds for NAT-related problems for my VoIP users (and explaining how to do it, to people that barely know what a router even is).

Re:NAT != Security

[T-Ranger]

Not "broken" as in "looks like it works, but without any security" but "broken" as in "broken". IPSec does not work through NAT. Period.

Re:NAT != Security

[Jaime2]

Yes, but that is the point. IPSec, among other things, verifies that the packet header has not been altered. NAT alters the packet header. You are correct in stating that if any other router between the source and the destination alters the packet (including the IP header), then IPSec will freak out. Why would a router alter your packet? A router might fragment the packet, but the destination machine should put it back together again. A router will change the MAC header, but that isn't authenticated by IPSec. Only an attempted hijack or man-in-the-middle attack would alter the IP packet header. Maybe an old school ping-of-death would do it too. Personally, I would like my protocol to reject MITM attempts.

Are you suggesting that traffic should be able to flow normally across a compromised router?

first off..

[Sfing_ter]

This kind of thing almost NEVER happens, oh, the PHB's want it too, they want to brag to other PHB's, "we have Vista and Office 2007! whoot!!" What happens usually is they see the tab and they back-step. I don't think Microsoft is looking for a quick pay-off here. They are shooting long term, but that what all this means is hardware and software upgrades; new spyware releases; new trojans and virii. So you consultants out there get on your knees and thank Saint Bill and Saint Steve (the thrower of chairs), for all the duckets you got comin' your way.

It's all about the Pentiums, Baby
- Wierd Al

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[angrykeyboarder]

You'd think people would have figured that out by now, but nevertheless it seems that even in the newest Linux (e.g. Ubuntu) distros, new (and old) users want that crappy old microscopic winamp-ripoff ugly-ass-ancient-GTK1 app. Personally I'll never get why WinAMP and it's clones are popular. I'd like an interface that at least somewhat resembles the rest of my applications, thank you.

But for those who feel differently, why are you using XMMS when BMP, BMPx, Audacious and Zinf exist? All of them are newer and are based on newer code and have a nicer interface (albiet "nicer" in a cloning ugly-ass-WinAMP kind of way).

AmaroK (and to a slightly lesser degree - Rhythmbox, Banshee, Quod Libet and so forth) put WinAMP and it's X-Window clones to shame.

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[ningeo]

quote:

I have my own Perl/MySQL solution for generating the list and creating the symlinks. My shuffling algorithm is very good, plays songs that I've rated higher more often, spread out evenly through the list, never puts the same genre back-to-back, generates in parallel a special playlist consisting only of tracks with no lyrics (for when I want background music that won't distract me), et cetera.

sounds like 90% of the idea media player right there

Re:Thats Linux (TM) not GNU/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is a kernel, not an OS.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[jacksonj04]

I wouldn't want to work for any company who's hiring officer says "Windoze". It makes you sound like a bit of a prat.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[JonJ]

You wouldn't be interested in sharing what KDE applications you left in your typical workstation setup? I'm guessing Firefox, open office stuff, evolution (or similar) and possibly GAIM or some other IM client.

None of these are KDE applications. It'd probably be konqueror, koffice, kmail/kontact and kopete. If you're running pure KDE, like I do.

Those problems are not related

[nietsch]

And what good will that do? Waiting untill 'the spam problem' is solved will make you wait forever. If the problem is not directly related, there is no reason to make the solutions dependent.

privacy

[drac0n1z]

wont having a unique identification be the end of anonymity and allow microsoft to force legal copies of windows and other software utilising the unique id?

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[redcane]

Well, if you consider it ugly, the only thing I can offer you is the multitude of skins available for it. They are popular because they have a simple interface for playing music. Stop/play/FFWD/RWD easily accessible. volume. Playlist is simple to use. hit j to get any song from your playlist. I don't think any other player makes it that easy. Plus the zxcvb shortcut keys. I don't really understand the whole "it has to look like my other apps" thing.... If it looked like my other apps it would be less convenient to use. It's handy for apps where I need to *do* consistant things, like actually save a file. Or print... This is an app where you don't open one file to work on, and save them individually as you work on them. Most other apps work that way.

Re:Oh great I can see the domain names now

[rucs_hack]

The names will likely be randomly generated, and you'll have no choice, or a default provided and you'll have to check if yours available, which will probably take an absolute age.

Whatever, most people will probably take the default, botnet providers will figure out the random hostname generation algorithm, and anyone with a default generated name will be targetted.

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

The only format I really need it to support is WAV. (I don't like lossy compression. It sounds bad. I guess I'm picky.)

Why not use FLAC, then? It's lossless, and files are almost halved in size compared to WAV.

Microsoft DNS ..

[rs232]

It isn't IPV6 exactly but a combination of PNRP (Peer Name Resolution Protocol) and FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). See here where PNRP v2 is already incompatible with PNRP. According to this it's a combination of IPv4 and IPv6 called the Next Generation TCP/IP Stack and overcomes shortcomings in the DNS system. I find that article quite difficult to follow. Who would have thought name resolution would have been so complex. Is this one of those propriatry protocols that any third party has to pay MS royaltes to access. One of the protocols MS is being fined by the EU for not publicising. Some source code and API calls not being acceptable.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[MysteriousPreacher]

Looking on the brightside, he didn't say m$. That has to count for something.

just say NO to nonsense ..

[rs232]

"We cannot have IPv6 until the authorities and powers that be online, get a handle on the spam problem", mabu

By that logic spam is cause by IPV4. No, the real casue of spam is all those compromised Windows machines out there. How about making an OS that cannot be so easily be co-opted into a spambot network. How about the chief facilator of these spambots imdemnifying companies against getting spammed or hacked. Now that would be really innovative.

DNS name publication requires updates to DNS servers. Most people must contact a server administrator. This takes time and incurs costs. PNRP name publication is instantaneous, effortless, and free .. DNS relies heavily on caching to improve performance. Unfortunately, this means names cannot be reliably updated in real time.

Stateless autoconfiguration of hosts .. IPv6 hosts can be configured automatically when connected to a routed IPv6 network .. On 20 July 2004 ICANN that the root DNS servers for the Internet had been modified to support both IPv6 and IPv4.

was Just say NO to ipV6 (score 5 nonsence)

Re:just say NO to nonsense ..

[mabu]

I can't believe my post was modded as a troll. That's ridiculous.

You obviously don't know much about how spammers operate and how anti-spam systems work, or ipV6 for that matter.

The amount of spam on the Internet verses what ends up in peoples mailboxes is a lot different. Relay blacklisting is the most effective way of stopping spam, and because of this, most people don't even realize how much spam is blocked at the SMTP server before it even gets to your inbox. This is because RBLs use blacklists of known rogue IP space from which spammers operate. ipV6 will exponentially increase the IP space, effectively nullifying the value of RBLs for probably 10 or more years. Without RBL's, major ISPs across the planet could probably not adequately handle or process e-mail services for their customers.

This isn't the fault of ISPs. It is the fault of spammers, but the authorities aren't shutting the spammers down, and the best anti-spam technology we have right now involves IP blacklisting, which would be completely wiped out if IPv6 rolls out.

extend and deny protocols ..

[rs232]

"Will Vista really use IPv6, or an "extended" IPv6-like protocol with patented MS extensions? Anyone know? Is there any chance that we could end up in court if we interoperate with it?

Yes to the first and yes to the second only it is MS that is in court with the EU commision for not opening up the protocols. They provided API calls instead. It has been explicidly stated by a MS execitive that the purpose of MS protocols is prevent entry into the market of OSS projects. You can't be any cleared then that.

"OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."

was Re:IPv6 or IPv6[TM}?

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[Tim Browse]

Yeah, they suck, because all they do mostly is just play your music and stuff.

Sorry - I missed these tags out of my original post: <joke> and </joke>

xmms does have the stupid visualizations, although by default it's just an oscilloscope-like thing, nowhere near so annoying as that nonsense Windows Media Player shows you

I find oscillocope displays the most annoying. So by your logic xmms is teh ultimate suck.

I'm sure there must be a way to turn the visualizations off altogether. Maybe someday I'll find it.

Right click on the visualisation, choose 'No Visualisation'.

HTH

Re:I've been trying

[Magada]

Yup. There's something deeply wrong with latter-day Ubuntu releases: they suck badly and don't work out of the box. Check the forums, you don't have to take my word for it.

Way to invalidate IPv6's advantage.

[Poromenos1]

So far, I supported IPv6 mainly because it will provide so vast an address space that it will be impractical for worms to bruteforce (nowadays you can ping an IP address and it will probably reply). Now, Microsoft invalidates this advantage by adding hostnames for every machine. A 5 letter word is easier to brute force than an IPv4 address, and you KNOW there's someone running something vulnerable there. At least I hope to God it's not by default, using your network name or something (which is, thankfully, unlikely).

So what exactly is this useful for?

[biglig2]

You know, in the real world. I mean, getting a permanent internet name for your machine without you having to do anything sounds good until you think about it.

But, first off, that name is going to be biglig-p.p4562b4628ac54782dda52789038476237e7c7263 .pnrp.net so you're not going to tell your granny about it over the phone so she can browse to your holiday photos.

Secondly, if someone is connecting to your machine, that means you've got to have a service listening to it, right? So you have to configure the service, and your firewall. So why not spend another 5 minutes registering a DDNS name that doesn't look like you spilt coke on your numeric keypad?

Thirdly, what sort of service do you need to run on your PC? Web page to host your photos? Er.. Flickr. Web page of your diary? Er... Blogger. Video? Er... YourTube. Share your documents? Er... Writely. etc. etc. Only one I can think of is remote control so your granny can connect to your PC and fix it.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[epee1221]

You're either a coward or an asshole. Take your pick!

I think we can just look at his name. And yours too.

Re:I've been trying

[KlomDark]

I'm also a senior-level .NET developer, but I'm also pretty accomplished with Linux (Nearly 10 years). (But so what?)

Anyway, I ran into the same thing with the Ubuntu install CD. It really really sucks that they didn't test it on more hardware. However, what fixes it in about 90% of the installs that result in a kernel panic is simply adding "IDE=NODMA" to the boot parameters. (To do that, on the first menu that comes up after booting from the CD, hit F6 to bring up the boot parameters, get rid of the '--' on the end [Never did figure out what '--' is suppose to mean, anyone know?] and add IDE=NODMA to the end.) For some reason, the Ubuntu installer is trying to access the CD with something messed up in the Direct Memory Access (DMA).

However, I've still found the normal Ubuntu installation to be so problematic on some machines that if I have any problems, I switch over to the ubuntu-server iso and do the installation from that instead (Still doing the IDE=NODMA thing with that). You end up with a text-only install of Ubuntu, but can fix that once it's installed with 'sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop'.

I really like Ubuntu once it's installed, but the actual installation is a huge pain. (What's funny is that it installs under Microsoft Virtual Server with absolutely no problems (Other than having to tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf to drop the color depth down to 16 from the default 24 since Virtual Server doesn't support higher than 16 bit color, so your initial install looks all screwy.) which I thought would lead to more problems that installing on a physical machine.)

I'd also edit /etc/apt/sources.list and get rid (or comment out) the line that starts with 'deb cdrom:', and make sure the lines right below starting with 'deb http' and 'deb-src http' are NOT commented out, that way it get's it's updates from the net rather than the local CD which is occasionally flaky as well. Come to my Linux Messagebase if you have more questions.

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[AliasN]

If they are somewhat opposed to employees running P2P, why would they want to upgrade to vista when this P2P service is tied in?

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[AliasN]

Linux doesn't format partitions. A partitioner (such as fdisk) does that, and the disk has to be unmounted. And really, for the average user, why would they be wanting to format their drive with anything but the default setup?

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[AliasN]

I dunno, who do you work for?

Re:Multicast

[AliasN]

Unless a large number of people are watching pr0n and downloading warez.

Re:MAKE THE MADNESS STOP!

[AliasN]

I was bored with Halo after my fake serial stopped working online.

Long domain names

[aonaran]

Does it really make any sense to use the 52 character domain name vs the 25 character IPV6 address?

considering that the IPV6 address should remain constant (we have plenty of them to go around, so there is no reason not to have static IP addresses in IPV6) what advantage did he gain there?

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[drinkypoo]

Linux is a kernel. fdisk is a partitioning utility. It doesn't format partitions, however, it only creates them. The various mkfs_* tools format partitions. (That and mformat from ye olde mtools) The disk does have to be unmounted, but sometimes you can add partitions to disks which have partitions which are mounted.

Let me go over that again more slowly: You can mkfs an entire volume, and mount it. Disks don't need partition tables. At least, out in the real Unix world. I've never tried it in Linux.

...and now I have:

/dev/sdb on /mnt/sdb type xfs (rw)

You can actually format any file as a partition; in Unix devices tend to act like files (it's the "Unix way") so it all "Just Works". This is actually useful; you can mount these files (mount -o loop) and it's a neat way to move data around.

I have you both beat!

[TechOgre]

I ans my wife read /. AND I have a son!! I'm like a God!!

Re:I have you both beat!

[lga]

Yes, a god with no free time and whose computers are not safe from sticky kids...

Re:I have you both beat!

[TechOgre]

I have been Zinged! My hat is off to you sir/madam. :)

Re:Multicast

[cheater512]

Someone uploads a piece of a file and its addressed to multiple peers who dont have that piece.

You need to think outside the box with these things. Just because its not what multicast was designed to do doesnt mean that it wont work well.

Re:MAKE THE MADNESS STOP!

[Got Bits]

What is IPv6?

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[jonadab]

> Why not use FLAC, then?

I was thinking about it, but I haven't gotten around to it. I keep waiting for it to become widely supported, and it's happening _very_ gradually. I'll probably get around to trying it out eventually.

Although, a savings of 50% without loss of information seems _very_ unlikely on WAV files. They don't compress well, because they don't have a lot of redundancy in them. (A quick test with a Vivaldi concerto and bzip2 -9 yields less than 18% savings. I realize bzip2 compression is not the best available, but it's good enough that I don't see anything improving on it by an entire order of magnitude without loss of information. 20% space savings, to my way of thinking, isn't worth the computational overhead of running decompression every time I play a track.)

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I just did a quick test with the 1812 Overture (the Telarc release, if it matters), and it went from 160MB to 69MB for a 14-minute piece of music. Admittedly, this is probably one of the best results I have seen with flac, and I was using -8 (maximum compression), but still, savings of around 57% is pretty darn good. Bzip2 (-9) managed ~26%.

For good measure, I tried it with the other tracks from the same album and got ~50% compression on average with flac -8.

With more *ahem* modern music I get slightly worse compression, the worst case ~25%, but since it was a black metal track, it was pretty darn close to random noise anyway ;-)

Re:Migrate to GNU/Linux, not Vista

[jonadab]

> I find oscillocope displays the most annoying.

Actually, I'd changed it to the analyzer, which is somewhat less annoying... but neither is anything like as bad as what Windows Media Player does, which looks like a bad cross between a poor immitation of Disney's Fantasia and a B-movie special effects concept for a marajuana-smoking scene.

Off is altogether better than any of the above, though. Thank you.

(I should note that the version of WMP I'm referring to is the one that comes with Win98SE and WinMe. I do not recall seeing the version that comes with WinXP, because none of the computers at my house have XP. We have XP on a number of systems at work, but in that context I have rather a better idea what the TCP/IP settings dialog looks like, or for that matter the registry editor, than the media player. We've also got WS2003 on two systems, but for similar reasons I have no idea what its version of Windows Media Player looks like either.)

> So by your logic xmms is teh ultimate suck.

Defaults are allowed (indeed, expected) to suck, because they are (or should be) designed for clueless end users. For the rest of us, there are preferences.

With that said, the xmms prefs are not all that well organized, so that it's not always easy to figure out how to change even simple things about its setup. (I say that as someone who uses Emacs and has customized it extensively, mostly by writing a bunch of custom elisp, so it's not like I expect all apps to have unrealistically simple preference systems. The fact that there are options in the context menus that aren't in the preferences dialog is a good example of how things ought _not_ to be done.)

FWIW, I haven't ever found a pref for turning off the visualizations in Windows Media Player, either.

> Right click on the visualisation, choose 'No Visualisation'.

Oh, hey, yeah. (Actually, it's Visualization Mode Off, but close enough.) I had looked all through the preferences, numerous times, but I never context-clicked on the visualization area itself. That did it. Thanks.

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[jonadab]

> I just did a quick test with the 1812 Overture (the Telarc release, if it
> matters), and it went from 160MB to 69MB for a 14-minute piece of music.
> Admittedly, this is probably one of the best results I have seen with flac,

That's rather better compression than I would ever expect (losslessly) on recorded music. (MIDI is another matter, of course, but that's more like sheet music (err, sort of) than recorded music.)

Perhaps I will have a look at FLAC when I get another round tuit.

> With more *ahem* modern music

Music without counterpoint is like spaghetti without noodles.

(Okay, okay, so I do listen to some modern music, from several different genres. I don't have any metal in my collection though, although I do have two or three rock tracks that are sufficiently hard that I've heard industrial metal that's not as hard. The combination of instruments is wrong for metal, though, and the group in question (Petra) is definitely rock and does a lot of much lighter stuff; only the two or three tracks that I have are really hard.)

What the hell is Balmer smoking?

[Whatchamacallit]

No way in hell, will large corporate IT rollout both Vista and Office 2007 at the same time! For starters they are 1.0 releases of a new OS and new Office Suite. Then you've got the end user training issue; the interface has changed so radically that it will require extensive training. I don't know about you but putting 50,000 employees through Vista and Office 2007 training is not going to be cheap by any figment of the imagination! All the hardware will have to be Vista certified and from what I've seen have at least 2GB of RAM! FYI, enterprise hardware on the workstation side doesn't mean state of the art. It means economy desktops and laptops that are consistent over years! The IT staff hasn't been trained on Vista either. Only a handful of our tech's and engineers have even played with Vista RC1/RC2! Our engineers will wait for a release then have to figure out how to shutoff most of the Vista new features because they would be a security hazard or cause incompatibilities in our environment. i.e. we still run SP1 w/SP2 hotfixes without actually running SP2 because it breaks half our legacy apps!

It would be more likely for a large corporation to rollout a customized Ubuntu workstation that includes OpenOffice, FireFox 2.0, and a Citrix client. Authenticate it to LDAP and Siteminder that to ActiveDirectory. Run all the required Windows apps under Citrix Farms and keep our old ratty hardware for another 4 years to save money!

It would be even easier to switch everyone to Apple Mac's, again with the Citrix Farm. Mac OS X will already join into Active Directory better then Linux will. Using Office 2004 for the Mac (yeah I know, Rosetta but still pretty fast) and a plan to go to Open Office (er NeoOffice). OS X is more likely to work with folks cell phones and PDA's.

Re:XMMS is dead. BMPx is the successor.

[angrykeyboarder]

Well, if you consider it ugly, the only thing I can offer you is the multitude of skins available for it.

The same skins that work with Audacious, BMP and WinAMP.

They are popular because they have a simple interface for playing music.

.

That depends on how one defines simple. I like my controls easily accessible (i.e. a decent "target" for the cursor). I don't want to have to squint and focus to see the play/ff button. I'd like it to be as visible as buttons in other apps, thank you very much.

I don't really understand the whole "it has to look like my other apps" thing....

Well then, why do you suppose most GNOME, KDE, OS X and Windows applications have a similar look and feel. Why do most of them have similar controls located in the same places? Obviously quite a few people feel this way or GNOME, KDE, OS X and Windows apps would be a complete hodgepodge of applications that had no consistent look and feel. The learning curve would increase because common commands from one app to the other wouldn't exist or their menu items would be different in every application.

Some of this already happens of course, but most programmers try to be consistent with other applications (be they X-Window, OS X or MS Windows).

If it looked like my other apps it would be less convenient to use.

.

I'd say just the opposite. I find playlists much easier to navigate when I can see them. I guess I might "get it" if I was one of the lucky souls with perfect vision. It's an "over 40" thing I suppose. Most if not all of the apps I've mentioned have "mini-player" interfaces that keep the app out of your way, but at least you can still read the thing.

But I digress...

My main point was, GTK1 is soooo 20th century. GTK2 is both 20th and 21st century.

Ever tried BMPx or Audacious? Open a menu item on either and then do do the same in XMMS. You'll see what I mean.