Sorry, Bruce, but that is what the article says to you and I.
What it says to 'Clueless Joe' IT Manager who has never used anything else except MS products is that since this "horrible" program that he heard about on this "trustworthy" technical web site is open sourced, then all programs and projects associated with the current buzzword "Open Source" must be bad and he should never allow them into his domain.
It also preys upon their fears that there are armies of rabid "hackers" (/me shudders at the misuse) out there, like in the movies, who are just waiting to jump across the internet and own his boxes.
I agree that BO is an attempt to force MS to deal with their holes, but rather than interviewing cDc about it and finding their side of the story, the writer just let some "experts" blather on.
The whole idea that BO would now evolve into millions of strains that would keep Anti-Virus detection companies working 24x7 to fight them is even more sensational, so that was made the focus of the article.
Here is a copy of my response that I sent to their feedback address:
------------------------------------------------
This e-mail is in response to your online article dated July 19, 1999 entitled "Hackers Kick Open Back Door To NT". I (like many others, I presume) take exception to the way the article associates the CRACKER (cracker, not hacker, you idiots!!) community with the Open Source / Free Software community. The dangerous connections that you have made that "the Back Orifice programs are bad" and "the Back Orifice programs have the source available" leads the uninformed to believe that all open-sourced software could contain trojan horses or other viruses. In your very own article you state that the server part of the program is spread through an e-mail attachment, therefore the software responsible for delivering and allowing the release of the trojan horse is a very proprietary closed-source product.....Microsoft Outlook!!! (just as in the case of the melissa virus)
In case you were not aware, the cracker community has almost _always_ made the source code to their viruses, trojan horses, password crackers, port scanners, and other software available to other crackers. This way the other crackers can use them. The cracker community existed long before there was a Free Software community. The Free Software community is about spreading ideas and information about computing and programming to take advantage of the massive pool of talented HACKERS (programmers) available worldwide. I hesitate to use the term hackers, since even you people in the _technical_ media obviously still haven't grasped the distinction between hackers and crackers. Crackers are about breaking into phone and computer systems for fun and profit.
If your intent was to write an article about the possible problems with the proliferation of the BackOrifice2000 program, then you have failed miserably. It is obvious that you do not understand the problems yourself. You do not make a point of the fact that if Outlook and Word did not have such a poor excuse for security, then the program could not be spread as easily. You also do not understand the motivations of people like the cDc, who have decided that since MS will not fix the _very_ long-standing bugs in all of their windows operating systems and applications, then cDc will use them to create a program that does essentially what "PC Anywhere" does (without the large amount of money and signed NDA's Symantec had to give to receive the information to write PC Anywhere). If I attach a self-installable, pre configured copy of PC Anywhere to an email to someone, and use it to own their machine, should Symantec be sued for writing it? cDc and other "white-hat" cracking groups have made it clear for a long time that they are trying to warn MS about these security holes so THAT THEY WILL BE FIXED. MS has shown that unless widely publicized outrage at a security bug occurs (like the melissa virus), then all but the most serious bugs and holes either go unfixed for a long time (until the next service pack or so) or they just do not get fixed, ever!!
No, swing works just fine, it is the precomiled classes that have errors in them (not finding some of the jmax classes. I am in the process of recompiling all of the classes and recreating the jmax.jar file. I had to start at the bottom level and work my way up to make sure that the classes that other classes depend on get built properly. Make isn't doing them in the right order and errors out every time I try to do a top level "make java_all".
BTW, has anyone out there been able to get the java portions of this thing to compile? I am using the blackdown java port (1.1.7v3) and the swing 1.1.1fcs from Sun, and I can't get the stupid classes to compile. It dies every time on the first of the java files (after cranking away for a good five minutes) with a deprecation error. I don't program in java very much (although I've looked at it and written a small applet or two), but the SwingSet program and appletviewer program from the swing and java distributions work fine, so I'm sure it's not the actual java installation (unless the versions are mismatched or something).
I'm compiling this right now but I wanted to ask a question while I wait.
I would like to know how close the linux community is to something like Cakewalk Pro or Sound Forge for digital recording. I could care less about MIDI, I just want to set up a multitrack recording system on a linux box instead of buying the software mentioned above and NT. I am interested in this for personal as well as professional (programmer, live sound engineer, _and_ musician) reasons. I have been saving up to buy 2-3 4-channel analog I/O cards and the software to do digital recording/mixdown, but if I can do this on a linux box then I will be in hog heaven!
Please post any links to this sort of thing (I already know about the program named "multitrack", I just haven't taken the time to download a recent version and look at it). If there were a group devoted to working on this I would like to join and donate some time as both a programmer as well as a "sound guy"
Hate to tell you this, but E doesn't ever crash on me. Gnome apps crash all the time, so I don't use 'em, not even the panel. E runs great, even the 0.16 CVS release that I'm running right now. I love the eye candy!
Yeah, since when did employees stop being persons hired by the Personnel department, and staplers purchased by the Human Resources department???
I'm damn glad to work for a small company where my ideas are listened to and we all work together. I have vowed to never work for a company where I don't talk to (or even _see_) all of the employees every day.
I am a human being, and whether I am an employee or a customer, a company _owes_ me as much respect and loyalty as they expect in return. If they offer no respect, then I deliver none, and will give my patronage as a customer or my talents as an employee elsewhere.
Two things: 1. E runs great on a P90 laptop w/ 16 megs RAM (of course, I can only run 2 or 3 apps no matter what WM I use, its too slow!! But E runs nicely)
2.E is _not_ the default WM for GNOME. It was what redhat put as GNOME's WM for RH-6, and it is one of the few WM's that is GNOME-compliant.
I'm getting tired of the whole GNOME/KDE thing. I really don't use any of the apps from either environment (and I do have both installed). I don't really care about a file manager either, since I have gotten so used to a command line that it is really harder to use the limited capabilities of a file manager.
Who the hell are you to tell the other people here what kind of stories should/shouldn't be on Slashdot?
I happen to be interested in this story, since it not only concerns E (which I enjoy using), it also describes the internal attitude change at RedHat. I used to like RedHat, but lately more and more stories keep surfacing about how the tide is changing in North Carolina, and Raster's comments (have you even read them, BTW) are indicative of a company that is on the verge of losing sight of where they came from.
I also happen to be one of the people who stumbled on this sight long before it became Slashdot, and I almost always find the articles here to be interesting. Noticing your print jargon ("column-inches"), I assume that you think this site is supposed to be some sort of news portal. Well it isn't. The articles are on here because someone thought that this was interesting enough to post and Rob and crew agreed. End of story. If you don't like the article, then skip it. If you don't like a lot of the articles, then either submit ones about things you're interested in or go the hell away!
Um, no. Mulithead does not necessarily mean mutiple monitors driven by one card. In this case, Matrox cards will look for anothe video card at startup, and if it finds one it "turns off" its own "plain jane" VGA adresses. The system doesn't see these, and assumes its not a video card. After booting, if the X server supports it (MetroX does, AccelX does if you pay extra), it starts up another display attached to the system, and allows for you two have one keyboard/mouse and two monitors. If your mouse is on the left monitor, and you move it all the way to the right, it "jumps" to the right monitor and the focus goes accordingly. Each screen has it's own $DISPLAY variable, ":0.0" and:0.1", respectively.
Until RedHat stopped including MetroX in the boxed set (at 5.1) I ran a dual monitor system with generic Trident card and a Millenium I. It had a dip switch on it to trun off the VGA adresses, but the Mill II's and up autodetect for another VGA card. If you have 2 or more Mill II/200/400's then the first one detected is the VGA console, and the others are blank until X starts.
I was going to break down an get MetroX (and another 20" monitor, I already have the video cards), but if XFree 4.0 betas next month, I'll just wait till then. JOY!!!
Thank you for telling me that. I will now uninstall it from my machine (where various iterations of E have been running for almost 2 years now) and then delete all the code I wrote while using this Window Manager. I guess I'm just an idiot for realizing that my desktop can either look good or be useful but not both.
Don't degrade others who may be just as professional and who do "real work", yet who also will take the time to set up something that is competely customized to their tastes.
To all the people out there who say E is slow/memory intensive/blah blah blah, I am running E right now on my desktop (nice fast PII) and my oooolllldddd Pentium 90 (two digits!!!) with 16 megs of RAM. The latest versions of E have run quite smoothly on the laptop, since I mostly use it for troubleshooting on client sites and the occasional burst of creativity. On top of that, I also use the same theme as on my desktop, just not with all the fancy bells-and-whistles like opaque window move and Eterm transparency. But it still looks mighty nice and is very useful. By the way, it is not E that is the memory pig, it is all of the little Gnome programs that run in the background. Not only does each one eat memory, they all swell X to monumental proportions.
The only movie that I've seen him actually do a credible acting job in was "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" (about 1995?) and he was excellent as the "challenged" brother of Johnny Depp. It's obvious that he can act, I just wonder why he doesn't. I guess all the underwear that hits him in the head (thrown by 13-year old girls) makes it hard to concentrate on the job that the producers pay him millions of $$ to do.
As has been mentioned already, this is one of the few things that George could do to completely alienate his fans (besides that spin-off TV series he's working on entitled "Jar Jar and Erkel save the Universe")
Slashdot Mirror
If you dont't like the stories posted here, you can either:
A. Take your toys and go home crying because we won't play the way you like.
B. Submit an article or two about a news story on _your_ favorite operating operating system. This _is_ primarily a user-driven site, you know.
But if they swap in real printers and modems, the lack of the "MS tax" offsets the difference in price.
What it says to 'Clueless Joe' IT Manager who has never used anything else except MS products is that since this "horrible" program that he heard about on this "trustworthy" technical web site is open sourced, then all programs and projects associated with the current buzzword "Open Source" must be bad and he should never allow them into his domain.
It also preys upon their fears that there are armies of rabid "hackers" (/me shudders at the misuse) out there, like in the movies, who are just waiting to jump across the internet and own his boxes.
I agree that BO is an attempt to force MS to deal with their holes, but rather than interviewing cDc about it and finding their side of the story, the writer just let some "experts" blather on.
The whole idea that BO would now evolve into millions of strains that would keep Anti-Virus detection companies working 24x7 to fight them is even more sensational, so that was made the focus of the article.
See my response to the article in another post.
------------------------------------------------
This e-mail is in response to your online article dated July 19, 1999 entitled "Hackers Kick Open Back Door To NT". I (like many others, I presume) take exception to the way the article associates the CRACKER (cracker, not hacker, you idiots!!) community with the Open Source / Free Software community. The dangerous connections that you have made that "the Back Orifice programs are bad" and "the Back Orifice programs have the source available" leads the uninformed to believe that all open-sourced software could contain trojan horses or other viruses. In your very own article you state that the server part of the program is spread through an e-mail attachment, therefore the software responsible for delivering and allowing the release of the trojan horse is a very proprietary closed-source product.....Microsoft Outlook!!! (just as in the case of the melissa virus)
In case you were not aware, the cracker community has almost _always_ made the source code to their viruses, trojan horses, password crackers, port scanners, and other software available to other crackers. This way the other crackers can use them. The cracker community existed long before there was a Free Software community. The Free Software community is about spreading ideas and information about computing and programming to take advantage of the massive pool of talented HACKERS (programmers) available worldwide. I hesitate to use the term hackers, since even you people in the _technical_ media obviously still haven't grasped the distinction between hackers and crackers. Crackers are about breaking into phone and computer systems for fun and profit.
If your intent was to write an article about the possible problems with the proliferation of the BackOrifice2000 program, then you have failed miserably. It is obvious that you do not understand the problems yourself. You do not make a point of the fact that if Outlook and Word did not have such a poor excuse for security, then the program could not be spread as easily. You also do not understand the motivations of people like the cDc, who have decided that since MS will not fix the _very_ long-standing bugs in all of their windows operating systems and applications, then cDc will use them to create a program that does essentially what "PC Anywhere" does (without the large amount of money and signed NDA's Symantec had to give to receive the information to write PC Anywhere). If I attach a self-installable, pre configured copy of PC Anywhere to an email to someone, and use it to own their machine, should Symantec be sued for writing it? cDc and other "white-hat" cracking groups have made it clear for a long time that they are trying to warn MS about these security holes so THAT THEY WILL BE FIXED. MS has shown that unless widely publicized outrage at a security bug occurs (like the melissa virus), then all but the most serious bugs and holes either go unfixed for a long time (until the next service pack or so) or they just do not get fixed, ever!!
So all cops get slammed for your poor dead father?
If that really happened, then I'm sorry your family was the victim of some bad cops.
We're dealing with people here, and some of them are bad. Some are very good, but most are somewhere in between.
If the cops got caught and prosecuted and sentenced, then the law _was_ followed.
I'm sick of hearing all cops get maligned for the actions of a few bad apples!!
No, swing works just fine, it is the precomiled classes that have errors in them (not finding some of the jmax classes. I am in the process of recompiling all of the classes and recreating the jmax.jar file. I had to start at the bottom level and work my way up to make sure that the classes that other classes depend on get built properly. Make isn't doing them in the right order and errors out every time I try to do a top level "make java_all".
BTW, has anyone out there been able to get the java portions of this thing to compile? I am using the blackdown java port (1.1.7v3) and the swing 1.1.1fcs from Sun, and I can't get the stupid classes to compile. It dies every time on the first of the java files (after cranking away for a good five minutes) with a deprecation error. I don't program in java very much (although I've looked at it and written a small applet or two), but the SwingSet program and appletviewer program from the swing and java distributions work fine, so I'm sure it's not the actual java installation (unless the versions are mismatched or something).
Please post any tips. Thanks in advance!
I'm compiling this right now but I wanted to ask a question while I wait.
I would like to know how close the linux community is to something like Cakewalk Pro or Sound Forge for digital recording. I could care less about MIDI, I just want to set up a multitrack recording system on a linux box instead of buying the software mentioned above and NT. I am interested in this for personal as well as professional (programmer, live sound engineer, _and_ musician) reasons. I have been saving up to buy 2-3 4-channel analog I/O cards and the software to do digital recording/mixdown, but if I can do this on a linux box then I will be in hog heaven!
Please post any links to this sort of thing (I already know about the program named "multitrack", I just haven't taken the time to download a recent version and look at it). If there were a group devoted to working on this I would like to join and donate some time as both a programmer as well as a "sound guy"
Please make sure that the computer is on a different circuit than the fridge (and/or microwave, if your dorm allows them)!!!
The compressor can really wallop your system!!
HA HA HA!!!!
....laughdot :)
that was so funny,
Hate to tell you this, but E doesn't ever crash on me. Gnome apps crash all the time, so I don't use 'em, not even the panel. E runs great, even the 0.16 CVS release that I'm running right now. I love the eye candy!
Yeah, since when did employees stop being persons hired by the Personnel department, and staplers purchased by the Human Resources department???
I'm damn glad to work for a small company where my ideas are listened to and we all work together. I have vowed to never work for a company where I don't talk to (or even _see_) all of the employees every day.
I am a human being, and whether I am an employee or a customer, a company _owes_ me as much respect and loyalty as they expect in return. If they offer no respect, then I deliver none, and will give my patronage as a customer or my talents as an employee elsewhere.
What sucks is having to reboot when making the msot trivial of changes to the system, like modifying the DNS info or something.
Two things:
1. E runs great on a P90 laptop w/ 16 megs RAM
(of course, I can only run 2 or 3 apps no matter what WM I use, its too slow!! But E runs nicely)
2.E is _not_ the default WM for GNOME. It was what redhat put as GNOME's WM for RH-6, and it is one of the few WM's that is GNOME-compliant.
I'm getting tired of the whole GNOME/KDE thing. I really don't use any of the apps from either environment (and I do have both installed). I don't really care about a file manager either, since I have gotten so used to a command line that it is really harder to use the limited capabilities of a file manager.
I happen to be interested in this story, since it not only concerns E (which I enjoy using), it also describes the internal attitude change at RedHat. I used to like RedHat, but lately more and more stories keep surfacing about how the tide is changing in North Carolina, and Raster's comments (have you even read them, BTW) are indicative of a company that is on the verge of losing sight of where they came from.
I also happen to be one of the people who stumbled on this sight long before it became Slashdot, and I almost always find the articles here to be interesting. Noticing your print jargon ("column-inches"), I assume that you think this site is supposed to be some sort of news portal. Well it isn't. The articles are on here because someone thought that this was interesting enough to post and Rob and crew agreed. End of story. If you don't like the article, then skip it. If you don't like a lot of the articles, then either submit ones about things you're interested in or go the hell away!
FWIW, you don't need _outdated_ Matrox cards, all Matrox cards (except the Mystique) support multihead.
Um, no. :0.1", respectively.
Mulithead does not necessarily mean mutiple monitors driven by one card. In this case, Matrox cards will look for anothe video card at startup, and if it finds one it "turns off" its own "plain jane" VGA adresses. The system doesn't see these, and assumes its not a video card. After booting, if the X server supports it (MetroX does, AccelX does if you pay extra), it starts up another display attached to the system, and allows for you two have one keyboard/mouse and two monitors. If your mouse is on the left monitor, and you move it all the way to the right, it "jumps" to the right monitor and the focus goes accordingly. Each screen has it's own $DISPLAY variable, ":0.0" and
Until RedHat stopped including MetroX in the boxed set (at 5.1) I ran a dual monitor system with generic Trident card and a Millenium I. It had a dip switch on it to trun off the VGA adresses, but the Mill II's and up autodetect for another VGA card. If you have 2 or more Mill II/200/400's then the first one detected is the VGA console, and the others are blank until X starts.
I was going to break down an get MetroX (and another 20" monitor, I already have the video cards), but if XFree 4.0 betas next month, I'll just wait till then. JOY!!!
Thank you for telling me that. I will now uninstall it from my machine (where various iterations of E have been running for almost 2 years now) and then delete all the code I wrote while using this Window Manager. I guess I'm just an idiot for realizing that my desktop can either look good or be useful but not both.
Don't degrade others who may be just as professional and who do "real work", yet who also will take the time to set up something that is competely customized to their tastes.
To all the people out there who say E is slow/memory intensive/blah blah blah, I am running E right now on my desktop (nice fast PII) and my oooolllldddd Pentium 90 (two digits!!!) with 16 megs of RAM. The latest versions of E have run quite smoothly on the laptop, since I mostly use it for troubleshooting on client sites and the occasional burst of creativity. On top of that, I also use the same theme as on my desktop, just not with all the fancy bells-and-whistles like opaque window move and Eterm transparency. But it still looks mighty nice and is very useful. By the way, it is not E that is the memory pig, it is all of the little Gnome programs that run in the background. Not only does each one eat memory, they all swell X to monumental proportions.
The only movie that I've seen him actually do a credible acting job in was "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" (about 1995?) and he was excellent as the "challenged" brother of Johnny Depp. It's obvious that he can act, I just wonder why he doesn't. I guess all the underwear that hits him in the head (thrown by 13-year old girls) makes it hard to concentrate on the job that the producers pay him millions of $$ to do.
As has been mentioned already, this is one of the few things that George could do to completely alienate his fans (besides that spin-off TV series he's working on entitled "Jar Jar and Erkel save the Universe")
That was my very first thought on seeing this.
I will literally never see that movie if DiCrapio the Wonder Boy of Hollywood makes it into the movie.
I think he is too old to play a teenaged Anakin, though. This smells like just a rumor to me. And rumors that smell this bad usually aren't true.