This is really far-fetched, but could it be that some of the christian fundamentalists in the current administration wish to limit the effectiveness of non-military science?
Before, they've established means for limiting insight into and influence over what they do.
Now, they wish to further strangle information so that the people able to systematically pull their schemes apart will not be able to publish their work if they do so.
I just installed mandrake 8.1 on my laptop, and i was quite impressed by the ease of installation and how well it worked out of the box. The GUI-based configuration system also seems reasonably feature-complete for most use. Most.
If I was you (but i'm not) I would use Linux with a slightly dated yet powerful machine. Like - a year old or so. Good performance, and most bugs in the drivers have been ironed out. Looking through the list of supported hardware is also a good idea before ordering a machine or any other piece of hardware for that matter.
Then again, you can always use w2k or xp. Sadly, there are more drivers available there.
Wouldn't you say that the people in Brave New World were quite happy? Granted, monstrously clean and neat, but still rather happy? They had purpose in life, and seemed satisfied, gamma or alpha.
Anyhow, this is part of what makes great literature great. It is multifaceted and nuanced. You hear me, soulless action authors? John Grisham or whatever your name is?
I wish they had limited themselves to "bugfixes and security fixes". However, this is still much better than expecting granny Smith to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com whenever she reads about a new vulnerability on bugtraq.
Realistically, automatic updates are needed if you can ever expect home computers to be reasoably secure. Very few end users bother to keep up with all the new worms, and most don't even know how to retrieve the quickfix from microsoft.
Does anybody have stats on how quickly an out-of-the-box install gets hacked vs. how quickly an up-to-date box gets hacked?
Keeping track that the end result is according to specification is central. I'm not advocating meetingmania, but updates are quite crucial. After all, if things start to slide timewise or specwise, it is crucial to identify this at an early stage.
Letting them code is extremely imporant. However, it is equally important that they code the right thing.
Internet is the first many to many mass medium
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 2
The Internet has the potential of being even more revolutionary than it currently is. It has a many to many structure. TV is one to many. Face to face is few to few. Tests are many to one (from a teacher point of view).
The internet is many to many. The internet is many to many. Nopes. The magic doesn't go away if i repeat myself.
The magic is that the internet is quite hard to curb. There is no final omniscient editor that can filter out all unwanted messages. Why do you think the Chinese are trying so hard to censor the net? Why do you think the Taliban outlawed it?
It is thinner than the rest of the palm organizers. It is light, and it fits quite well in your inner pocket in your jacket. Not quite yet in your pants, though. Honestly, the m500 is a wonderful piece of pda. Relatively good battery life, IR connection to my cell phone so that I can email and surf the web if i really need it, and a great selection of useful and useless (read fun) software.
In biometric identification, I believe that retinal scanning is the only true way. You can chop of a finger, keep it artificially warm and pump fake blood through it.
If someone pokes out your eye, the retina will change.
If someone kills you, the retina will change.
If someone drugs you, the retina may change. Does anybody know anything about drugging the victim?
Anyhow, retinal scanning appears to be the most promising, possibly aside from / in conjuction with voice analysis.
Fingerprint technology should have been DOA for interactive, non-supervised terminals.
Tabbed interface is easily explained. Rather than having to open a new browser window if you don't want to replace the page you're looking at, you can open a new tab. In windows, the tabbed interface is used in many preferences windows in regular applications and in control panel subsections.
Basically, you don't get a bunch of browser windows on your task bar mixed with windows for other apps. Instead, you have all open pages within the same window, only you look at one at a time.
BTW - binary distributions of mozilla are still under 10 megs. That would not take forever, even for a 56Ker. At about 5KBytes/sec, that would take about 34 minutes. At your full 7KBytes/sec, it would take 25 mins. Not bad, compared to IE?
I'm posting this on my freshly downloaded 0.9.8. This thing is blazing. The rendering is quick, and the rest of the GUI appears to be faster as well. Try it out!
On a side note: One of my coworkers has converted to the way of the mozilla after watching me use the tabbed interface on a web application. That alone was worth it for him.
Let's be fair. Some of the malicious hackers are extremely good. Does source code peer reviews improve security? If the guy reviewing the code is dumber than mr. evil hacker, then he might leave open an exploit for mr. evil hacker to enjoy and abuse.
With closed source, mr. evil hacker will need to spend more time discovering the inner workings of the software than he will with open source.
So - will he then produce more exploits running through open source software grepping for common starting points for exploits than he will when dissecting closed source programs?
Remember - at any moments, the black hat community knows about exploits the rest of us don't know about. No computer has yet been classified as formally secure (to the best of my knowledge). We could all be at risk.
I believe you can use chroot to test new kernels without booting. I think I read it somewhere.
Anyhow, if the machine doesn't it, it doesn't boot. It's a fault. Big deal. The machine reboots, doesn't reply to pings - then have the machine monitoring it notify the standby sysadmin crew.
If your cellphone acted like a gateway, with PDA's and laptops and car systems connecting through it using bluetooth (or another short range solution), wouldn't that help out? You would still move the same amount of information, but through a common pipe. Am I mistaken that this would ease the load on the service provider equipment? There would be fewer circuits needed per person, eliminating some of the bandwidth used on protocol overhead.
Folks - am I way off? This is not my specialty, after all.
If a $400.000 server has (virtually) no downtime, and the $2000 server has several hours, that could really make a big difference in the balance sheet.
Not only does downtime mean lost transactions, it could also mean lost customer confidence.
Also, your $2000 estimate is off. A $2000 pc server, WITH a backup unit?
IBM has made some bbbbbaaaaaadddd choices in software on the desktop over the years, but will stick linux to the forefront, they are advertising the hell out of it and this is good, it gives managment a confidence in Linux that would be nearly IMPOSSIBLE to gain elsewhere.
They did not make a bad choice in developing OS/2. They just outdid themselves. The win 3.11 compatibility was probably part of the reason there was so little OS/2 native software available. Microsoft didn't develop for OS/2, and they already had the "standard" for office suites.
OS/2 was (technologically) about 8 years ago where Linux wishes to be in the future. Only it wasn't open sourced and free.
On a low-end pentium they made an OS that would rock your socks with voice recognition, stability and a kick-ass shell. Allegedly, OS/2 scales like a champ if you stick multiple processors in it.
However, the market wasn't there. Why get a new OS to run windows? Now you'd need 2 os licences to run word!
my context was not an american one, where corporations compete by litigation to a much larger extent than in the rest of the world (norway in this case. i attacked you, so you get a freebie cheap shot, if you're that kind a nerd).
so, there would not be a NEED for a document retention policy, aside from possibly removing what is blatanly irrelevant for future (say, restaurant receits from company dinners, etc).
therefore, throwing away all correspondence older than 9 months would be unwise (without a sense of history, we are doomed to repeat our failures).
also, if you look at the question and my response, i didn't state that ALL document retention policies are bad. his question seemed to be asking "i'm not sure my operation holds up in court. do any of you guys have any experience with how long you should keep possibly compromizing data?".
i think it is unethical to answer a hacker in a chatrom asking "how do i break into my bank's web server? it uses apache 1.3.12, running on some variation of red hat 6.2. i'm not sure of the backend, since they've firewalled everything but apache". from my viewpoint, answering the question seemed unethical at best.
(unrelated, but interesting:)
as another fella pointed out, purging emails is no guarantee the words cease to exist. people tend to reply to emails, so the discovery process might reveal external sources of information that can be subpoenaed. you're back in shit creek.
does this kinda fill in the blanks in my reasoning? i was not saying that a document retention policy makes a corporation criminal (unless it involves burning relevant documents after a situation arises), but i was saying that it was immoral to answer the guy, given that you perceive his motivations to be more pragmatical than law-abiding and upstanding.
Not all countries are as lawyer-run as the US of A. (Mind you, the lawyers are not allowed to defend the accused if defense conflicts with matters of national security). Some places, the courts would reject a lot of the crap you guys have to keep up with. They might even scorn you for wasting the time of the court if you got that far.
Granted, torts have given you as customers a lot in terms of safety, but this "document retention policy" is not as important in other countries.
According to popular myth, the US of A has enough lawyers for the entire world if you guys used the courts like the average world population does.
Anyhow, if you didn't have so many litigation concerns, storing documentation for a long period of time can be done relatively cheaply.
I'll ask tomorrow what our document retention policy is. Watch this space.
The music business works by legislation. File sharing is outside of their realm of control, but rather than embracing it they have chosen to fight an unwinnable fight. File sharing will always exist, since it is essentially indistinguishable from regular protocols. Heck, if push comes to shove, we'll just ssh-tunnel between our file sharing clients.
Back to my point.
The RIAA are history. After all, they've had limited positive effect on the artists they are supposed to ultimately serve. Wanna know how an artist makes serious money? They go on a tour. Then again, we need to hear about the artist and be excited about the artist in order to bother seeing the artist live. That's what the music industry has provided - 'till now.
I still buy albums that are genuinely good, but I usually check them out on mp3 first. Maybe I'll stop buying albums and start going to more concerts? They are more memorable than a slice of reflective surface, anyhow!
This is a non-discussion. Basically, the question is this:
"I'm making profit by breaking or flexing the law to such extent that my business would not survive the lighting in a courtroom. I know this is immoral. To further improve my profits, I wish to know what a good balance between keeping mails for reference and deleting mails for protection is. Do I keep compromising information for a few months? A year?"
Folks - give your worst advice possible.
Bill Gates wouldn't buy a Linux shop, but IBM?
on
Amazon Makes a Profit
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· Score: 2
I don't think Bill Gates would buy Amazon. Because they just migrated onto Linux, he would either face a new loss in migrating over to MS technologies, or he would have to live with owning a company saving cost by using Open Source software.
It's basically a lose-lose situation for Bill Gates.
For IBM, it could be interesting to invest in/run Amazon. They are putting a lot of effort and resources into Linux, and it would be nice to show to the world how Linux can be a good foundation for a profitable business.
I doubt they will actually run it, but perhaps they could offer to deal with the technical stuff? It could certainly be valuable experience for all parties.
I realize that there are problems with this approach, but is it more fundamentally flawed than the alternatives?
Would it not be possible to build anti-DOS features into routing protocols? If you detect a DOS attack from a link, wouldn't it be possible to push a block-list towards the router on the other side of the link? It needen't propagate, because you just want to get far enough out to block before the DOS packets reach high "density". Think avoiding them from entering the bottleneck. So if a router detects a problem, it will do a simple push in the direction.
The goal in approaching the problem like this, would be to avoid having the anti-DOS solution become an indirect DOS.
The block should only be temporary, too, and possibly protocol-specific, so we'll need a TTL, along with optional port numbers.
Whaddya think, fellow geeks? Has this been done? Should it be done?
Slashdot Mirror
This is really far-fetched, but could it be that some of the christian fundamentalists in the current administration wish to limit the effectiveness of non-military science?
Before, they've established means for limiting insight into and influence over what they do.
Now, they wish to further strangle information so that the people able to systematically pull their schemes apart will not be able to publish their work if they do so.
Long live big brother!
I just installed mandrake 8.1 on my laptop, and i was quite impressed by the ease of installation and how well it worked out of the box. The GUI-based configuration system also seems reasonably feature-complete for most use. Most.
Damned wannabe funny trolls.
Free your mind. It should be all about how well you implement the different ideas, and which ones are the good ones.
If I was you (but i'm not) I would use Linux with a slightly dated yet powerful machine. Like - a year old or so. Good performance, and most bugs in the drivers have been ironed out. Looking through the list of supported hardware is also a good idea before ordering a machine or any other piece of hardware for that matter.
Then again, you can always use w2k or xp. Sadly, there are more drivers available there.
Wouldn't you say that the people in Brave New World were quite happy? Granted, monstrously clean and neat, but still rather happy? They had purpose in life, and seemed satisfied, gamma or alpha.
Anyhow, this is part of what makes great literature great. It is multifaceted and nuanced. You hear me, soulless action authors? John Grisham or whatever your name is?
I wish they had limited themselves to "bugfixes and security fixes". However, this is still much better than expecting granny Smith to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com whenever she reads about a new vulnerability on bugtraq.
Realistically, automatic updates are needed if you can ever expect home computers to be reasoably secure. Very few end users bother to keep up with all the new worms, and most don't even know how to retrieve the quickfix from microsoft.
Does anybody have stats on how quickly an out-of-the-box install gets hacked vs. how quickly an up-to-date box gets hacked?
Keeping track that the end result is according to specification is central. I'm not advocating meetingmania, but updates are quite crucial. After all, if things start to slide timewise or specwise, it is crucial to identify this at an early stage.
Letting them code is extremely imporant. However, it is equally important that they code the right thing.
I bet Stile did it. Stile needs no motive.
The Internet has the potential of being even more revolutionary than it currently is. It has a many to many structure. TV is one to many. Face to face is few to few. Tests are many to one (from a teacher point of view).
The internet is many to many. The internet is many to many. Nopes. The magic doesn't go away if i repeat myself.
The magic is that the internet is quite hard to curb. There is no final omniscient editor that can filter out all unwanted messages. Why do you think the Chinese are trying so hard to censor the net? Why do you think the Taliban outlawed it?
It is thinner than the rest of the palm organizers. It is light, and it fits quite well in your inner pocket in your jacket. Not quite yet in your pants, though. Honestly, the m500 is a wonderful piece of pda. Relatively good battery life, IR connection to my cell phone so that I can email and surf the web if i really need it, and a great selection of useful and useless (read fun) software.
In biometric identification, I believe that retinal scanning is the only true way. You can chop of a finger, keep it artificially warm and pump fake blood through it.
If someone pokes out your eye, the retina will change.
If someone kills you, the retina will change.
If someone drugs you, the retina may change. Does anybody know anything about drugging the victim?
Anyhow, retinal scanning appears to be the most promising, possibly aside from / in conjuction with voice analysis.
Fingerprint technology should have been DOA for interactive, non-supervised terminals.
Tabbed interface is easily explained. Rather than having to open a new browser window if you don't want to replace the page you're looking at, you can open a new tab. In windows, the tabbed interface is used in many preferences windows in regular applications and in control panel subsections.
Basically, you don't get a bunch of browser windows on your task bar mixed with windows for other apps. Instead, you have all open pages within the same window, only you look at one at a time.
BTW - binary distributions of mozilla are still under 10 megs. That would not take forever, even for a 56Ker. At about 5KBytes/sec, that would take about 34 minutes. At your full 7KBytes/sec, it would take 25 mins. Not bad, compared to IE?
I'm posting this on my freshly downloaded 0.9.8. This thing is blazing. The rendering is quick, and the rest of the GUI appears to be faster as well. Try it out!
On a side note: One of my coworkers has converted to the way of the mozilla after watching me use the tabbed interface on a web application. That alone was worth it for him.
Let's be fair. Some of the malicious hackers are extremely good. Does source code peer reviews improve security? If the guy reviewing the code is dumber than mr. evil hacker, then he might leave open an exploit for mr. evil hacker to enjoy and abuse.
With closed source, mr. evil hacker will need to spend more time discovering the inner workings of the software than he will with open source.
So - will he then produce more exploits running through open source software grepping for common starting points for exploits than he will when dissecting closed source programs?
Remember - at any moments, the black hat community knows about exploits the rest of us don't know about. No computer has yet been classified as formally secure (to the best of my knowledge). We could all be at risk.
I believe you can use chroot to test new kernels without booting. I think I read it somewhere.
Anyhow, if the machine doesn't it, it doesn't boot. It's a fault. Big deal. The machine reboots, doesn't reply to pings - then have the machine monitoring it notify the standby sysadmin crew.
If your cellphone acted like a gateway, with PDA's and laptops and car systems connecting through it using bluetooth (or another short range solution), wouldn't that help out? You would still move the same amount of information, but through a common pipe. Am I mistaken that this would ease the load on the service provider equipment? There would be fewer circuits needed per person, eliminating some of the bandwidth used on protocol overhead.
Folks - am I way off? This is not my specialty, after all.
If a $400.000 server has (virtually) no downtime, and the $2000 server has several hours, that could really make a big difference in the balance sheet.
Not only does downtime mean lost transactions, it could also mean lost customer confidence.
Also, your $2000 estimate is off. A $2000 pc server, WITH a backup unit?
IBM has made some bbbbbaaaaaadddd choices in software on the desktop over the years, but will stick linux to the forefront, they are advertising the hell out of it and this is good, it gives managment a confidence in Linux that would be nearly IMPOSSIBLE to gain elsewhere.
They did not make a bad choice in developing OS/2. They just outdid themselves. The win 3.11 compatibility was probably part of the reason there was so little OS/2 native software available. Microsoft didn't develop for OS/2, and they already had the "standard" for office suites.
OS/2 was (technologically) about 8 years ago where Linux wishes to be in the future. Only it wasn't open sourced and free.
On a low-end pentium they made an OS that would rock your socks with voice recognition, stability and a kick-ass shell. Allegedly, OS/2 scales like a champ if you stick multiple processors in it.
However, the market wasn't there. Why get a new OS to run windows? Now you'd need 2 os licences to run word!
my context was not an american one, where corporations compete by litigation to a much larger extent than in the rest of the world (norway in this case. i attacked you, so you get a freebie cheap shot, if you're that kind a nerd).
:)
so, there would not be a NEED for a document retention policy, aside from possibly removing what is blatanly irrelevant for future (say, restaurant receits from company dinners, etc).
therefore, throwing away all correspondence older than 9 months would be unwise (without a sense of history, we are doomed to repeat our failures).
also, if you look at the question and my response, i didn't state that ALL document retention policies are bad. his question seemed to be asking "i'm not sure my operation holds up in court. do any of you guys have any experience with how long you should keep possibly compromizing data?".
i think it is unethical to answer a hacker in a chatrom asking "how do i break into my bank's web server? it uses apache 1.3.12, running on some variation of red hat 6.2. i'm not sure of the backend, since they've firewalled everything but apache". from my viewpoint, answering the question seemed unethical at best.
(unrelated, but interesting
as another fella pointed out, purging emails is no guarantee the words cease to exist. people tend to reply to emails, so the discovery process might reveal external sources of information that can be subpoenaed. you're back in shit creek.
does this kinda fill in the blanks in my reasoning? i was not saying that a document retention policy makes a corporation criminal (unless it involves burning relevant documents after a situation arises), but i was saying that it was immoral to answer the guy, given that you perceive his motivations to be more pragmatical than law-abiding and upstanding.
Not all countries are as lawyer-run as the US of A. (Mind you, the lawyers are not allowed to defend the accused if defense conflicts with matters of national security). Some places, the courts would reject a lot of the crap you guys have to keep up with. They might even scorn you for wasting the time of the court if you got that far.
Granted, torts have given you as customers a lot in terms of safety, but this "document retention policy" is not as important in other countries.
According to popular myth, the US of A has enough lawyers for the entire world if you guys used the courts like the average world population does.
Anyhow, if you didn't have so many litigation concerns, storing documentation for a long period of time can be done relatively cheaply.
I'll ask tomorrow what our document retention policy is. Watch this space.
The music business works by legislation. File sharing is outside of their realm of control, but rather than embracing it they have chosen to fight an unwinnable fight. File sharing will always exist, since it is essentially indistinguishable from regular protocols. Heck, if push comes to shove, we'll just ssh-tunnel between our file sharing clients.
Back to my point.
The RIAA are history. After all, they've had limited positive effect on the artists they are supposed to ultimately serve. Wanna know how an artist makes serious money? They go on a tour. Then again, we need to hear about the artist and be excited about the artist in order to bother seeing the artist live. That's what the music industry has provided - 'till now.
I still buy albums that are genuinely good, but I usually check them out on mp3 first. Maybe I'll stop buying albums and start going to more concerts? They are more memorable than a slice of reflective surface, anyhow!
This is a non-discussion. Basically, the question is this:
"I'm making profit by breaking or flexing the law to such extent that my business would not survive the lighting in a courtroom. I know this is immoral. To further improve my profits, I wish to know what a good balance between keeping mails for reference and deleting mails for protection is. Do I keep compromising information for a few months? A year?"
Folks - give your worst advice possible.
I don't think Bill Gates would buy Amazon. Because they just migrated onto Linux, he would either face a new loss in migrating over to MS technologies, or he would have to live with owning a company saving cost by using Open Source software.
It's basically a lose-lose situation for Bill Gates.
For IBM, it could be interesting to invest in/run Amazon. They are putting a lot of effort and resources into Linux, and it would be nice to show to the world how Linux can be a good foundation for a profitable business.
I doubt they will actually run it, but perhaps they could offer to deal with the technical stuff? It could certainly be valuable experience for all parties.
I realize that there are problems with this approach, but is it more fundamentally flawed than the alternatives?
Would it not be possible to build anti-DOS features into routing protocols? If you detect a DOS attack from a link, wouldn't it be possible to push a block-list towards the router on the other side of the link? It needen't propagate, because you just want to get far enough out to block before the DOS packets reach high "density". Think avoiding them from entering the bottleneck. So if a router detects a problem, it will do a simple push in the direction.
The goal in approaching the problem like this, would be to avoid having the anti-DOS solution become an indirect DOS.
The block should only be temporary, too, and possibly protocol-specific, so we'll need a TTL, along with optional port numbers.
Whaddya think, fellow geeks? Has this been done? Should it be done?