The argument advanced in the publishing of censorious material were ridiculous and a simple parallel would have disposed of the risk to the ISP.
ISPs are no more liable for the contents of the sites they host than British Telecom is for the telephone conversations they carry, for exactly the same reasons.
The only other solution is for all ISP to move off the Isles and host their sites in the Netherlands and the government can kiss those revenues (businesses and citizens good bye.)
Its been done before. There's a whole continent here "across the pond" which is laughing in its beard.
The only remedy is the one that is already in place.
Leave M$ on the x86 and ONLY on the x86. Declare it a dead loss. Since they have no presence on any other platform it requires no change.
But the x86 platform is going away, you say... (Not even Intel wants to do it anymore:-) People need faster machines, different forms, bigger, better, you say... Yup!
Let M$ go the way of DRI. Superceeded by superior software on superior hardware. (Linux is ALREADY on Merced/Itanium, PPC, Alpha, AS400, S390, Cray, hand-helds...)
That's the only remedy that's required. Nail them to their own coffin.
Tell her your future is Barbie-less unless they rein in their lawyers on their Hot Wheels.
Then I went further.
I wrote to their competition and asked them if they could prove that their sites or their distributor's sites weren't on the "censored sites list"
To paraphrase Shakespeare: "The Lady Doth Protest Too Much..." Why are they so nervous about using their product to do good, unless they're using it to merely do well. By choking the competition.
I don't like secrecy. Its usually people doing things they're ashamed of.
Sorry but companies don't retrain so when they don't need your skill set, its: "Geez I'm sorry but we're going to have to let you go..." And then the office manager escorts you to your desk with a box and waits while you put in all your sh*t before showing you to the door. (This I know from [bitter?] personal experience...)
The other side of the coin is that if you're employed by a company to do , you can expect to be bored sh*tless because you've been pegged as "the <x> person" and the rest of your life you're going to be "the <x> person." (Been there too...)
The copyright laws are just doing what they're supposed to. The principle was never meant for the advancement of mankind but for the protecting the interests of a few self-serving few.
The advent of making the patent office into a profit center just realigned them into efficiency and now that things are happening at internet speed, we can see the effects of protectionism in terms of the harm self-interest causes to the greater good. (Namely US!)
That's why the pattern of protectionism in patent and copyright has to be replaced/supplanted by some other method of sharing and equitable distribution...
We'tre coming to an awareness that the system is working like its supposed to and it really, really wants to get in your face.
Good luck.finding a solution but one will be found or its going to be a sadder world full of IP criminals...
Well, "J'en perd mon Latin!" Uh, before you criticise peoples vocabulary, make sure of you facts and just because you abbridged dick-tionary only carries four letter words doesn't mean that they're necessarily germaine to the subject at hand.
Talk about a clueless opening paragraph. And it wasn't exactly up-hill from there.< sigh >
Maybe we should explain to them that there aren't any Linux viri because there's nowhere in the open source for them to hide...
The peer review process also makes it unlikely that code will be released with such dark recesses, (unchecked bounderies on buffered input streams being chief offenders.) There's always a bunch of people to help make sure that these things get stomped on.
But the article did hint that the Linux community must take precautions to insure that its OS is not a vector.
That's why we have to take precautions against hosting killer client- and server-side scripts and shoving virus and Trojan horse infected e-mail and shoving such potentially lethal packets on to their destination without warning the recipient.
I wrote in [it was rejected] about how M$ was going to follow Apple's lead [yet again] and have client services available (like site visibility ?) ONLY to its desktops connecting to its IIS servers.
Now you'll have to pay a tithe to M$ to list you site on a (M$) DNS and you may or may not be able to see anyone else's site.
Running/. on IIS guys? Then there goes half your readership.
If its as stupid as either of my cats, it CAN'T recognize its name.
One of them, Flatulent is the least congenial creature I can imagine saddling any pet owner with. The other, Brain Damage is about as lively as a dead carp...
They make wonderful evening companions after a beer bash. Flatulent is as ornery, uncoordinated and swilled as I've ever managed to get and Brain Dead is a great pal, if you like to hang around the coma ward at the hospital
And they only ever say two things:
When dinner?and
Everything here is mine!
Like what kind of an idiot would shell out good dough for, uh, I did. And worse.. Like Frankenstein's monster They're, Alive!!
Never mind...
Open ROMS -> no M$ Windows juggernaut...
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 1
They would have killed Microsoft in its cradle. That might have server us all well.
There more dorks like you at home?
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 1
To put it terms that you might understan'...
Apple sell major hardware, d00d. Like, a 500mHz G4 is not a wheezy, rinky-dink Panty-um.
But lets not quibble over details here. Todays benchmark benchpresser is tomorrow's print server...
OS X is the answer to the question: How do you move some major hardware? OS X will allow your granny and mine to use some major hardware with a solid OS (BSD is not crap d00d. Its the real thing!).
Linux is not for your granny. Linux is barely for MIS shops where they hire graduates from schools where they give MCSE certification...
So before you run down some people who are poised to do some damage to M$ and let you keep some money for even more awesome hardware, you might want to check your opinions first.
Quit bitchin' and help:-)
Will Apple finally see OpenSource light at last?
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 4
Apple's Mac OS X is based on a solid, secure and dependable implementation of Unix (like Linux no?:-) and they are putting good usable hardware products out the door.
Now, remember, like VA, they make their money on the hardware. The OS income is almost chump change to them except that without an OS they're dead in the water. Apple will continue to make their money from their hardware.
Is Apple beginning to see that, by holding the software close to its vest back in 84, it practically created the M$ behemoth we all know and loathe?
If Apple had loosed the ROM APIs and licensed the ROM to the extremely competitive Intel world this would be very different planet.
Instead the fate the economy rests in the hands of people whose greed has not shown any sign of abating since Gates whined in Byte magazine that people were ripping off his MITS/ Altair 8080 BASIC interpreter and changed an open source world into a hermetic, failure prone process where a business plan now often reads "Get big enough to be noticed by M$ and sell out!"
Lets hope Apple comes to its senses and sets the APIs free (those that aren't already, what with Darwin, [read BSD,] OpenGL, the data management infrestructure etcetera,) to put a severe kink in the strategies of Redmond.
With luck we'll stop the cash hemmorhage that's made M$ a stomping ground for millionnaires, billionnaires and the richest man that has ever lived.
Apple, OS X and Intel/AMD, Linux have a chance to stop the incredible waste that the Microsoft approach has wrought upon the world.
We have lost or lost access to uncountable lines of code because too many consider them proprietary, secret and their own property. Projects die for many reasons and the code disappears forever regardless of whether it was good or useful and could be so again.
The Microsoft approach has led to the perpetual reinvention of the wheel. Unlike Newton who saw far because he stood on the shoulders of giants, we are perpetually rooting around the sty like nearsighted pigs, wallowing in a shallow mire because we are kept there by people who's greed exceeds their sense of history and they believe that they can coopt the information revolution to enrich themselves.
Open source was the norm before Bill Gates and his MITS Altair Basic inerpreter.
Gates has done more to stifle creativity that the education system.
We have lost or lost access to millions of lines of code that didn't make it because they or the management team around a project we're quite good enough or the timing was wrong or a bee farted in Ireland.
In trying to think of a single original contribution that Microsoft has ever made, all I come up with Bob! Isn't that pathetic? We would all be using MS Dos 3.3, CLIs only and computers would be strictly for penny-pinchers in accounting.
Its time to return to open source and stop the financial and intellectual hemmorage.
My biggest question, apart from what dirty diapers will be aired, uh, what portions of the OS will be exposed, is:
Will M$ ever accept a single mod suggested by anyone else or will it just be Bu$ineSS aS USual!
OpenSource is more that just putting the code out there (since it doesn't have to be ther real code or the current code,) OpenSource listening to some unpleasant truths about the quality and quantity of code that M$ has produced to date.
My advice would be to handle it like a baby's diaper. You KNOW what its full of. You know where it belongs. Just put it there and shut the lid:-)
Maybe M$ will get smart, put their billions of dollars of investment in their cash cow, uh, operating system, out to pasture, become an application company and build their business around Linux, but I wouldn't hold my breath (unlike during the diaper disposal.) Not as long as there's a dollar to be squzed from the wallets of the gullible.
The other part of the knowledge worker employment picture that they don't talk about (apart from 27-hour Thursdays followed by 12 hour Fridays, followed by x-hour Saturdays & Sundays,) is that the moment that your knowledge becomes obsolete, they feel that they have to let you go.
Retraining is not an option. It costs too much and impacts the competitive bottom line.
Where do they get these writers?
on
Quake Wedding
·
· Score: 1
When I read something like:
But Baddigan also points out that many IT departments cannot run an open-source software product because their system's interface doesn't support it.
I sort of lose interest because the article's credibility is shot.
I ordered LinuxPPC 1999Q3 for my 7200/75 and an ADSL line from Bell Atlantic at the same time last year.
Linux came. I installed it (Just make sure that you RTFI TWICE before you think you can install it. There's a "gotcha" for all those who skip the instructions. But apart from that its great.) I hooked it up to my home LAN to my other Macs and the occasional PC Laptop and iBook, got to play with it (its greal BTW), took a course in e-business, found clients, installed shopping carts and the databases to drive them, and now LinuxPPC2K is here and I'm going to buy and install it.
AND I"M STILL WAITING FOR BELL-ATLANTIC TO DELIVER THE #&$^%#& ADSL LINE.
Hey man, I'm Pissed! I should be sucking up pages from an ADSL fat pipe through my Linux server and instead I'm sipping through a 56k modem (HA! Like it ever hits that,) straw on my G3.
But LinuxPPC is just great. I wholeheartedly recommend it over committing your older Macs and iMacs to the landfill.:-)
And it would be a really dumb platform to use too when there a bazillion NT machines hooked to the 'Net 24/7.
My guess is that somebody has figured out that you can even attach a few bytes to a Ping packet, like a note to a carrier pigeon's leg (holding the 'victim' IP address and the date and time of the attack.) They even have Ping on Windows NT.
Actually Ping would be the perfect program to infect. Its a system service so its always running. It has fast response to an incoming stream coming it on it has it sown socket and the machine is definitely hooked up to a network.
If Ping can get a response to a ping of the 'victim,' it can participate in the attack. If not, it just waits for the next "carrier pigeon" ping.
At the appointed date and time Ping it the ideal weapon to unleash a small stream of packets to the network.
Ten thousand small streams from ten thousand sources makes for a flood on the 'victim' address.
It doesn't even have to be spread by virus. It could have been done years ago by someone on the inside at Microsoft. As long as the code doers what its supposed to, nobody in QA ever seems to check what _else_ it can do. (There's a made-for-TV movie plot in there somewhere.)
Lets face it MS and the media have got the FUD flying fast and furious. But this is a BIG problem.
If we can't trust the internet we, the techies, the industry, the commercial world, the whole bloody infrastructure-dependent-modern-world are all screwed.
The Luddites will win.
Or might this be an attack by a Foreign government? What would Iraq or somebody else who'se pissed at the US have to loose by bringing down e*trade... A couple of Sun work stations in a communications closet somewhere? The web is world-wide. The closets might be in Indonesia where the channels are clear at that time of the day. And they're out of jurisdiction...
What if the attacks are coming from Trojan horses on PC through-out the planet controlled by simple Pings with a target IP address a date and time. Total cost of operation of a DDoS attack is $0.00.
This is Bad Juju!
To put MS in its place and stop the commercial exploitation of this debacle the only things to do are: 1) cooperate with the FBI in finding out who unleashed this beast. 2) write one for NT and unleash it at a stated date and time on MS themselves. And publish the code with hints as to how to defeat it so that sites will be safer in the future.
People forget that the article made an excellent point. Poorly administered systems are more vulnerable to being usurped for this kind of mischief.
There are millions of Linux systems out there (pretty much set up and adminstered by techies,) and there are hundreds of millions of Windows boxes out there that are NOT properly administered or even virus checked. MS is far more exposed in this respect than Linux is.
But until we find out who did it and how (Fat chance! I can think of a couple of schemes that would make the entire assault vehicles pretty much invisible and make the attack coordinator almost undetectable, never mind who inserted it in the first place,) or exploit similar weaknesses in MS OSes, and demonstrate them in a dramatic manner, we're just whistling in the dark.
DDoS attacks are exploiting a feature of the design of the internet and TCP/IP. MS OSes are just as vulnerable as Linux, Unix(es), MacOS X. The problem lies at the bottom of the stack, not the top.
I just had a second though. Dont laugh, it happens...
The RAM requirements of a 200DPI display are enormous.
I have 13", 17" and 21" monitors hooked up to my G3. Obviously, what I want/need is screen real-estate. I shudder at what a card for a decent sized (30":-) flat-screen 200dpi monitor would cost me!
And the acceleration needed to handle all those pixels per square inch... I'd need a water cooled side-car.
There is a very simple solution to the problems of handicap access, multi-nationalization, national language support, alternative displays, etc. Its over fifteen years old too.
Do it the way Apple does with resource forks to files or the way its done in the Microsoft & Unix world (when its done at all) with resource files.
Instead we have literals hard-coded right into the delivery medium (web pages, applets, ASPs, PERL and Java scripts,) which means that the medium is a bitch to retrofit and always suffer from a lack of understanding of any disabilities the programmer doesn't have.
(Also from other QA problems like testing for input that overflows buffers, is inconsistent or plain incorrect because the person that programs things always tests to make things work instead of make things break. That's why they think they hate QA:-)
If you have to start off right with resource forks or files and don't have the opportunity to screw up the literal handling right from the beginning, that kind of thing can be addressed after the programmers have got the delivery mechanisms working properly.
But we have got to get literals out of the programmer's hands.
Slashdot Mirror
The argument advanced in the publishing of censorious material were ridiculous and a simple parallel would have disposed of the risk to the ISP.
ISPs are no more liable for the contents of the sites they host than British Telecom is for the telephone conversations they carry, for exactly the same reasons.
The only other solution is for all ISP to move off the Isles and host their sites in the Netherlands and the government can kiss those revenues (businesses and citizens good bye.)
Its been done before. There's a whole continent here "across the pond" which is laughing in its beard.
The only remedy is the one that is already in place.
:-) People need faster machines, different forms, bigger, better, you say... Yup!
Leave M$ on the x86 and ONLY on the x86. Declare it a dead loss. Since they have no presence on any other platform it requires no change.
But the x86 platform is going away, you say... (Not even Intel wants to do it anymore
Let M$ go the way of DRI. Superceeded by superior software on superior hardware. (Linux is ALREADY on Merced/Itanium, PPC, Alpha, AS400, S390, Cray, hand-helds...)
That's the only remedy that's required. Nail them to their own coffin.
You can't be taking this seriously...
Complain to the CEO of Mattel:
Jill E. Barad
Mattel, Inc.
333 Continental Boulevard
El Segundo, CA 90245-5012
Tell her your future is Barbie-less unless they rein in their lawyers on their Hot Wheels.
Then I went further.
I wrote to their competition and asked them if they could prove that their sites or their distributor's sites weren't on the "censored sites list"
To paraphrase Shakespeare: "The Lady Doth Protest Too Much..." Why are they so nervous about using their product to do good, unless they're using it to merely do well. By choking the competition.
I don't like secrecy. Its usually people doing things they're ashamed of.
Did I read that the sites hosting the craked list had been black balled on a revised list?
Hmm... Do Hasbro, Irwin and the other toy makers know what kind of anti competition power a closed list gives Mattel?
How do they know that sites listing/selling their toys aren't on there? The list is a secret... Why? What's supposed to be a big secret.
Its Mattel's and only an idiot would try to steal what's freely available unless they've done things in there they'd rather we not know about.
Like, suddenly the only toys left in the world are Hot Wheels and Barbie...
If I was the competition I'd wonder about WHY does Mattel want the list to remain secret and why are they pursuing that goal so doggedly?
Just a word to the wise.
Sorry but companies don't retrain so when they don't need your skill set, its: "Geez I'm sorry but we're going to have to let you go..." And then the office manager escorts you to your desk with a box and waits while you put in all your sh*t before showing you to the door. (This I know from [bitter?] personal experience...)
The other side of the coin is that if you're employed by a company to do , you can expect to be bored sh*tless because you've been pegged as "the <x> person" and the rest of your life you're going to be "the <x> person." (Been there too...)
What's the answer? Like, I doan 'no' Eh?
The copyright laws are just doing what they're supposed to. The principle was never meant for the advancement of mankind but for the protecting the interests of a few self-serving few.
The advent of making the patent office into a profit center just realigned them into efficiency and now that things are happening at internet speed, we can see the effects of protectionism in terms of the harm self-interest causes to the greater good. (Namely US!)
That's why the pattern of protectionism in patent and copyright has to be replaced/supplanted by some other method of sharing and equitable distribution...
We'tre coming to an awareness that the system is working like its supposed to and it really, really wants to get in your face.
Good luck.finding a solution but one will be found or its going to be a sadder world full of IP criminals...
Well, "J'en perd mon Latin!" Uh, before you criticise peoples vocabulary, make sure of you facts and just because you abbridged dick-tionary only carries four letter words doesn't mean that they're necessarily germaine to the subject at hand.
Talk about a clueless opening paragraph. And it wasn't exactly up-hill from there.< sigh >
Maybe we should explain to them that there aren't any Linux viri because there's nowhere in the open source for them to hide...
The peer review process also makes it unlikely that code will be released with such dark recesses, (unchecked bounderies on buffered input streams being chief offenders.) There's always a bunch of people to help make sure that these things get stomped on.
But the article did hint that the Linux community must take precautions to insure that its OS is not a vector.
That's why we have to take precautions against hosting killer client- and server-side scripts and shoving virus and Trojan horse infected e-mail and shoving such potentially lethal packets on to their destination without warning the recipient.
Hey, this is a great opportunity for Open Source software.
[Sales voice-over pitch]
How can you know that your vendor isn't setting you up for UCITA extortion later?
Don't buy software without the source code.
I say let those who would try this idiocy try to spread it far and wide. It will just hasten their demise.
I wrote in [it was rejected] about how M$ was going to follow Apple's lead [yet again] and have client services available (like site visibility ?) ONLY to its desktops connecting to its IIS servers.
/. on IIS guys? Then there goes half your readership.
Now you'll have to pay a tithe to M$ to list you site on a (M$) DNS and you may or may not be able to see anyone else's site.
Running
If its as stupid as either of my cats, it CAN'T recognize its name.
One of them, Flatulent is the least congenial creature I can imagine saddling any pet owner with. The other, Brain Damage is about as lively as a dead carp...
They make wonderful evening companions after a beer bash. Flatulent is as ornery, uncoordinated and swilled as I've ever managed to get and Brain Dead is a great pal, if you like to hang around the coma ward at the hospital
And they only ever say two things:
When dinner?and
Everything here is mine!
Like what kind of an idiot would shell out good dough for, uh, I did. And worse.. Like Frankenstein's monster They're, Alive!!
Never mind...
They would have killed Microsoft in its cradle. That might have server us all well.
To put it terms that you might understan'...
:-)
Apple sell major hardware, d00d. Like, a 500mHz G4 is not a wheezy, rinky-dink Panty-um.
But lets not quibble over details here. Todays benchmark benchpresser is tomorrow's print server...
OS X is the answer to the question: How do you move some major hardware? OS X will allow your granny and mine to use some major hardware with a solid OS (BSD is not crap d00d. Its the real thing!).
Linux is not for your granny. Linux is barely for MIS shops where they hire graduates from schools where they give MCSE certification...
So before you run down some people who are poised to do some damage to M$ and let you keep some money for even more awesome hardware, you might want to check your opinions first.
Quit bitchin' and help
Apple's Mac OS X is based on a solid, secure and dependable implementation of Unix (like Linux no? :-) and they are putting good usable hardware products out the door.
Now, remember, like VA, they make their money on the hardware. The OS income is almost chump change to them except that without an OS they're dead in the water. Apple will continue to make their money from their hardware.
Is Apple beginning to see that, by holding the software close to its vest back in 84, it practically created the M$ behemoth we all know and loathe?
If Apple had loosed the ROM APIs and licensed the ROM to the extremely competitive Intel world this would be very different planet.
Instead the fate the economy rests in the hands of people whose greed has not shown any sign of abating since Gates whined in Byte magazine that people were ripping off his MITS/ Altair 8080 BASIC interpreter and changed an open source world into a hermetic, failure prone process where a business plan now often reads "Get big enough to be noticed by M$ and sell out!"
Lets hope Apple comes to its senses and sets the APIs free (those that aren't already, what with Darwin, [read BSD,] OpenGL, the data management infrestructure etcetera,) to put a severe kink in the strategies of Redmond.
With luck we'll stop the cash hemmorhage that's made M$ a stomping ground for millionnaires, billionnaires and the richest man that has ever lived.
Apple, OS X and Intel/AMD, Linux have a chance to stop the incredible waste that the Microsoft approach has wrought upon the world.
We have lost or lost access to uncountable lines of code because too many consider them proprietary, secret and their own property. Projects die for many reasons and the code disappears forever regardless of whether it was good or useful and could be so again.
The Microsoft approach has led to the perpetual reinvention of the wheel. Unlike Newton who saw far because he stood on the shoulders of giants, we are perpetually rooting around the sty like nearsighted pigs, wallowing in a shallow mire because we are kept there by people who's greed exceeds their sense of history and they believe that they can coopt the information revolution to enrich themselves.
Open source was the norm before Bill Gates and his MITS Altair Basic inerpreter.
Gates has done more to stifle creativity that the education system.
We have lost or lost access to millions of lines of code that didn't make it because they or the management team around a project we're quite good enough or the timing was wrong or a bee farted in Ireland.
In trying to think of a single original contribution that Microsoft has ever made, all I come up with Bob! Isn't that pathetic? We would all be using MS Dos 3.3, CLIs only and computers would be strictly for penny-pinchers in accounting.
Its time to return to open source and stop the financial and intellectual hemmorage.
I'm no Susan Powter but lets "Stop The Insanity!"
My biggest question, apart from what dirty diapers will be aired, uh, what portions of the OS will be exposed, is:
:-)
Will M$ ever accept a single mod suggested by anyone else or will it just be Bu$ineSS aS USual!
OpenSource is more that just putting the code out there (since it doesn't have to be ther real code or the current code,) OpenSource listening to some unpleasant truths about the quality and quantity of code that M$ has produced to date.
My advice would be to handle it like a baby's diaper. You KNOW what its full of. You know where it belongs. Just put it there and shut the lid
Maybe M$ will get smart, put their billions of dollars of investment in their cash cow, uh, operating system, out to pasture, become an application company and build their business around Linux, but I wouldn't hold my breath (unlike during the diaper disposal.) Not as long as there's a dollar to be squzed from the wallets of the gullible.
The other part of the knowledge worker employment picture that they don't talk about (apart from 27-hour Thursdays followed by 12 hour Fridays, followed by x-hour Saturdays & Sundays,) is that the moment that your knowledge becomes obsolete, they feel that they have to let you go.
Retraining is not an option. It costs too much and impacts the competitive bottom line.
When I read something like:
But Baddigan also points out that many IT departments cannot run an open-source software product because their system's interface doesn't support it.
I sort of lose interest because the article's credibility is shot.
Sorry fellas,
Man, this must be a record of some kind.
:-)
I ordered LinuxPPC 1999Q3 for my 7200/75 and an ADSL line from Bell Atlantic at the same time last year.
Linux came. I installed it (Just make sure that you RTFI TWICE before you think you can install it. There's a "gotcha" for all those who skip the instructions. But apart from that its great.) I hooked it up to my home LAN to my other Macs and the occasional PC Laptop and iBook, got to play with it (its greal BTW), took a course in e-business, found clients, installed shopping carts and the databases to drive them, and now LinuxPPC2K is here and I'm going to buy and install it.
AND I"M STILL WAITING FOR BELL-ATLANTIC TO DELIVER THE #&$^%#& ADSL LINE.
Hey man, I'm Pissed! I should be sucking up pages from an ADSL fat pipe through my Linux server and instead I'm sipping through a 56k modem (HA! Like it ever hits that,) straw on my G3.
But LinuxPPC is just great. I wholeheartedly recommend it over committing your older Macs and iMacs to the landfill.
And it would be a really dumb platform to use too when there a bazillion NT machines hooked to the 'Net 24/7.
My guess is that somebody has figured out that you can even attach a few bytes to a Ping packet,
like a note to a carrier pigeon's leg (holding the 'victim' IP address and the date and time of the attack.) They even have Ping on Windows NT.
Actually Ping would be the perfect program to infect. Its a system service so its always running. It has fast response to an incoming stream coming it on it has it sown socket and the machine is definitely hooked up to a network.
If Ping can get a response to a ping of the 'victim,' it can participate in the attack. If not, it just waits for the next "carrier pigeon" ping.
At the appointed date and time Ping it the ideal weapon to unleash a small stream of packets to the network.
Ten thousand small streams from ten thousand sources makes for a flood on the 'victim' address.
It doesn't even have to be spread by virus. It could have been done years ago by someone on the inside at Microsoft. As long as the code doers what its supposed to, nobody in QA ever seems to check what _else_ it can do. (There's a made-for-TV movie plot in there somewhere.)
Lets face it MS and the media have got the FUD flying fast and furious. But this is a BIG problem.
If we can't trust the internet we, the techies, the industry, the commercial world, the whole bloody infrastructure-dependent-modern-world are all screwed.
The Luddites will win.
Or might this be an attack by a Foreign government? What would Iraq or somebody else who'se pissed at the US have to loose by bringing down e*trade... A couple of Sun work stations in a communications closet somewhere? The web is world-wide. The closets might be in Indonesia where the channels are clear at that time of the day. And they're out of jurisdiction...
What if the attacks are coming from Trojan horses on PC through-out the planet controlled by simple Pings with a target IP address a date and time. Total cost of operation of a DDoS attack is $0.00.
This is Bad Juju!
To put MS in its place and stop the commercial exploitation of this debacle the only things to do are:
1) cooperate with the FBI in finding out who unleashed this beast.
2) write one for NT and unleash it at a stated date and time on MS themselves. And publish the code with hints as to how to defeat it so that sites will be safer in the future.
People forget that the article made an excellent point. Poorly administered systems are more vulnerable to being usurped for this kind of mischief.
There are millions of Linux systems out there (pretty much set up and adminstered by techies,) and there are hundreds of millions of Windows boxes out there that are NOT properly administered or even virus checked. MS is far more exposed in this respect than Linux is.
But until we find out who did it and how (Fat chance! I can think of a couple of schemes that would make the entire assault vehicles pretty much invisible and make the attack coordinator almost undetectable, never mind who inserted it in the first place,) or exploit similar weaknesses in MS OSes, and demonstrate them in a dramatic manner, we're just whistling in the dark.
DDoS attacks are exploiting a feature of the design of the internet and TCP/IP. MS OSes are just as vulnerable as Linux, Unix(es), MacOS X. The problem lies at the bottom of the stack, not the top.
Of course it does.
Gates always said: "Make it more Mac like"
Seriously, Display PostScript was a better solution since day none.
Microsoft suffers from IBM's old problem. "NIH"ilism. We'll see if it survives it when the world switches to 64-bit architectures.
I just had a second though. Dont laugh, it happens...
:-) flat-screen 200dpi monitor would cost me!
:-)
The RAM requirements of a 200DPI display are enormous.
I have 13", 17" and 21" monitors hooked up to my G3. Obviously, what I want/need is screen real-estate. I shudder at what a card for a decent sized (30"
And the acceleration needed to handle all those pixels per square inch... I'd need a water cooled side-car.
But Tomb Raider would really be worth playing.
Hello,
:-)
There is a very simple solution to the problems of handicap access, multi-nationalization, national language support, alternative displays, etc. Its over fifteen years old too.
Do it the way Apple does with resource forks to files or the way its done in the Microsoft & Unix world (when its done at all) with resource files.
Instead we have literals hard-coded right into the delivery medium (web pages, applets, ASPs, PERL and Java scripts,) which means that the medium is a bitch to retrofit and always suffer from a lack of understanding of any disabilities the programmer doesn't have.
(Also from other QA problems like testing for input that overflows buffers, is inconsistent or plain incorrect because the person that programs things always tests to make things work instead of make things break. That's why they think they hate QA
If you have to start off right with resource forks or files and don't have the opportunity to screw up the literal handling right from the beginning, that kind of thing can be addressed after the programmers have got the delivery mechanisms working properly.
But we have got to get literals out of the programmer's hands.