Are they hiring people to write an OS for it? Eventually all of those nodes need to be able to talk to a video card, display something on a screen, talk to a network card and communicate with the network in a fashion that the general public will expect.
I wouldn't even do it for the money. Provide me with a suitable environment and I would do it just because it would be enjoyable. I cannot do it while sleeping on the street and eating peanut butter and jelly, though.
I am trying to figure out if it would be a sin to work on a project like that. If housing and support were dependent on me working on a project then it would be a sin. If someone would say,"We trust that what you do isn't 'evil', here's a place to stay and an allotment for meals and resources, here are the specs that we have now, and here's a whole room full of dry erase boards. Have at it."
The terrorists did it. Siberian officials will petition the UN for disaster relief and anti-terrorist funding. The United States will offer to foot the bill if and only if Siberian officials encourage the remainder of what was the USSR to support a UN backed move by US military into Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and anyone else who does not immediately agree to tithe to Obama (or the current reigning US political figure). US taxpayers will be on the hook for a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq, and rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Siberia. US military contractor executives will reap huge bonuses, taxpayers will be liable for another twenty years' worth of debt, and the banks who manage the finances will apply for another bailout in five years--putting US taxpayers, as well as Iraqi and Afghani taxpayers (through US proxy since, by then, we will own their economies), on the hook for another thirty years.
Profit.
(I love the USA and all that but, seriously, it is not even about nationalism anymore. This is pure global financial enslavement perpetuated by people who really do not give a rat's patoot about the USA)
When I walked from Georgetown, SC, to Savannah, GA I saw this turtle, about five miles outside of Savannah. It apparently had tried to cross the road and had been hit by a car. It was huge, probably about the size of a grown man's torso, maybe larger. As I walked by the turtle looked up at me and opened its mouth as if to say,"Heeeellllp me--look what they've done to me.". Its mouth was full of blood. That was an odd sight--all that red blood in the mouth of a primarily green turtle.
Still... that's about how Comcast (and most large corporate empires) views their customers--turtles who, if they dare to try and cross the road, will end up with cracked shells and blood in their mouths.
There are days when I am happy that I have given up all attachments to the corporate world.
Why should this be modded down? It's the logical conclusion to the system. We know the credit card system is insecure, we can fill the message boards with comments going back and forth about it... but that isn't the larger problem. Discussion centering around only the credit card system is bound to revolve around band-aid approaches to fixing the system. In order to truly avoid this sort of problem again we need to understand underlying flaws.
So, logically, you wonder why people need credit cards, and then you wonder why people need credit, and then you wonder why debt accumulates, and then you wonder who debt is important to, and then you wonder who the major players are in the system of debt and, eventually you come to understand that, yes indeed, it is a system of governments and big businesses exploiting capital. Once you reach that conclusion then, really and truly, all discussion around the credit card system becomes "offtopic" and the only topical discussion related to identity theft arising from financial systems concerns the security vulnerabilities in a capitalist system dominated by government and financial behemoths.
Of course, that wouldn't generate very much discussion, because acknowledging that everyone is trapped within an inherently flawed system is just depressing, and everyone leaves their computers to go find an ice cream sundae for comfort. Americans should be happy they live in a capitalist system. Under communism only the rich and powerful could afford a decent ice cream sundae. OTOH, under communism, your identity wasn't important in the first place.
So you can have one or the other: ice cream sundaes to comfort your stolen sense of identity, or no ice cream sundaes and no identity at all to steal.
It appears that you are trying to toast more than one piece of bread at a time. Consider buying another toaster, investing in a commercial model, or signing up for our maintenance plan which provides a live-in political officer to toast your bread for you.
If it is important enough then it may be written again. If it is not important enough then a stale sf.net page provides testimony to how unimportant it was.
The system was set up to work a particular way. Interfering with established web protocols could be, for a private citizen, prosecuted as a criminal act. Why should a corporation be allowed to do it for profit? Additionally, once you allow this sort of thing to happen, what is to prevent your ISP from monitoring, intercepting and redirecting all traffic? Imagine if you thought you were visiting Slashdot, because it looked and felt like Slashdot, but it was really your ISP's carefully scrubbed edition of Slashdot? Obviously you might enjoy it if they cleaned out all the trolls--but how about consider the implications of Slashdot losing a significant portion of its revenue because every ISP is redirecting all of the ad requests to their own ads?
Drag and drop is quite convenient. It is also a security chasm. Once you can drag and drop one thing then you want to be able to drag and drop anything. In the case of arbitrary file formats not only must you implement code to check the incoming data stream (thus exposing yourself to all of the security considerations of "how many different ways can someone try to wax my process of checking the incoming data stream?") but you must consider that a data stream which is valid using one codec algorithm may cause a fault using another codec algorithm. Competing algorithms exist for many data format structures and the presumed same data format may have three or four codecs at use between X, the WM, a monolithic app like a web browser, and a devoted data editor (eg. GIMP), and even a devoted data viewer (eg. a multiformat display application). It isn't the simplest consideration.
With so much of the problem and criticism with the reigning proprietary OS being security related the open source community has tried to remain a little more focused on security related issues. Combine that with the difference in conceptual organization--F/OSS guys don't get paid to go to in house meetings together--and it is completely logical that something as "simple" as drag and drop is not implemented across largely unrelated application development groups.
Within a particular desktop environment using apps which were written specifically for that desktop environment (often referred to as a desktop suite) there is probably a more consistent end user experience.
It is the culmination of (years of) similar situations which has brought many rifts in major F/OSS development groups.
I find myself personally familiar with the situation which caused Alan to leave. The difference is that Alan has enough financial backing and social connections behind him that he likely will not end up living on the streets.
Can you imagine a headline,"Major developer sick and tired of political crap, leaves development group, will take up a section of cardboard on the sidewalk just down the block from Slashdot's HomelessinLaJolla"?
is that any reason not to want to find a software solution to make his life easier?
That sounds great in theory but, mostly, it is the excuse of the incompetent who would like to have someone else do the work while they gather all the credit. The conceptual progression is no different than cheating on homework beginning in second grade.
I thought that was what software solutions were all about?
I think we've come a long way from the original path of software solutions. The system began as people who had computers at their disposal and who enjoyed working with them. They created solutions--heck, they created their own problems. They found new hardware, or new software, or new applications, and they had a simple interest to put things together and make them work. They created software solutions. Some of them began to sell their software solutions to people who needed them. The most inventive minds, however, continued to create their own solutions.
I think the largest problem is that management has even forgotten this. They want the job done. They do not want to spend money on it, they do not want to wait for it to happen, whatever the need is the managers want it done, now, at no cost. Part of this is just the crap rolling down hill from upper management who want something to report to the executives, and the executives just want to have material for their latest bout of grandstanding and speeches at various dinners, conferences, get-togethers, or golf outings, to have that edge to be able to feed to the investment partners, so that the numbers which drive their salaries and bonuses will go up. So the investment partners want something, that makes the executives want something, that means upper management wants something, that means middle management wants something, that means that front line managers want something done, and that means someone must do it.
So, rather than seeing people who have a genuine interest in developing and advancing computer, hardware, software, and programming technologies and art forms... we have an enormous population of what amounts to slightly more technically trained button pushing monkeys. These monkeys are slightly better than previous generations of monkeys in that these monkeys have been trained to be able to recognize more technical language and can follow the mouse pointer across the screen with their eyes.
I don't think the DoD wants "purchase, install, and deploy" monkeys--though quite likely the managers who will administer the posted position will (because monkeys are easier to push around and ride for their own professional profit than a real thinking human being). I think the requirements are set attempting to find those candidates who really and truly have a desire to work with those systems.
The desired effect is not what you think it is. The desired effect is not to ensure that the particular update releases of packages are whatever they are; that is a secondary and obligatory requirement. The desired effect is to ensure that anyone who is attempting to deploy a Linux type solution in the DoD has the requisite skills and understanding to create a stable system beginning with those requirements.
Imagine if the spec was "use distro XYZ". Great. Installers have become fairly streamlined and even newbs are able to install a given distro. If the spec was for older, more stable releases, then there would be little incentive to fill positions with people who are motivated to advance the technologies. The specs do not need to be completely bleeding edge and, for the sake of conceptual security and practical updates, the specs should be a little behind the latest releases hot off the press.
Tarballing on this many systems is nightmare and even then some things just don't seem to work.
Obviously I, as a homeless man, would be much more qualified for the position than you. I enjoy the challenge of inventing my own systematic solution for situations that are "nightmares" or "just don't seem to work". My skill set is likely to be precisely what they are looking for.
But DoD cannot have me. I work only for God. DoD is free to give me money, they are free to provide a place for me to live, they are free to provide an office and systems for me to use... but the very first moment that my manager tries to pull any of that political office crap where he covers up his complete blithering idiocy by invoking his age or the level of his academic degree then they would have to kiss my beautiful a$$ because I would walk out the door on a dime and not even bother to leave a single penny in change. Eff 'em to the end.
So, no matter how much more highly qualified I am than any other candidate for any given position, the fact that I refuse to put up with political bullsh*t from old men who feel that their age, combined with their white hair and their funny moustaches, entitles them to do whatever they want means that employers will happily accept a less qualified, but weaker willed, candidate.
Pay-per-click bots used to artificially adjust page rankings and for the generation of statistical data used by network administrators to promote their latest list of needed upgrades to their financial budget directors.
If your employer does not allow you to spend the time learning how to design your own system, if the management is so incompetent that they do not have faith in the down the road benefits of such an important long term commitment, then you do not want to work for them. Period. No excuses. You should walk out the door this very moment.
Until the jail guards do cell search and then they take all of the toilet paper away, put you on disciplinary restriction for hoarding toilet paper, and you're lucky if they give you a new roll next week.
When the media release admonishes that malicious attackers have been exploiting a flaw for nearly a week the real indication is that the core of the obfuscated code community has been exploiting it for far longer--probably since the day the vulnerable snippet of code was introduced. I will not tarry to read the full article and look at all of the related references but the summary indicates ActiveX on XP or server '03. Unless this is a relatively new addition to the AX library of functions you can rest assured that the vulnerability has been exploited since the day the software was shipped.
When you install an OS such as Debian, or LFS, or Ubuntu, or Slack, or RH, or Mandrake, or any of the BSD flavors, you become familiar with the concept of dependencies--either to compile from source or to install a package. Vulnerabilities are no different. Vulnerabilities have dependencies and, once all of the requisite dependencies are in place, then the vulnerability is available. Just as the installer of a source compilation or a package knows exactly when the dependencies are fulfilled and the program is available so too do the core researchers know almost immediately when the dependencies for a vulnerability have been fulfilled. Oftentimes those who have been writing and maintaining apps for a particular kernel and core set of libraries may even see the possibility for an exploit within their program but think to themselves,"Yeah, that portion could be exploited, but this-and-that-and-these aren't available and an attacker would need to figure out a way to inject executable bytecode into the stack using this hole, if they could get to it, and to do that they would need to know the user's particular kernel and libc, possibly shell and memory configuration, and they can't get that info through this opening." Then, two or three months later, some enormous library conglomerate, possibly within the environmental (gnome/qt/kde/etc) infrastructure becomes available, and _bing_, all of the dependencies to make the vulnerability a viable vector for exploit have been fulfilled.
This has long been the dichotomy between making an OS usable for the general population and maintaining it in a secure fashion. This is why I have always chosen X window managers which have been relatively bare bones (ude/blackbox/e16) and tried to minimize GUI dependency and remain at the shell/CLI interface. Automation and full integration within the OS is good for the general users but it also quickly fills all of the spaces between the lines of security; fulfilling and satisfying all of the dependencies for vulnerabilities. This was my major admonishment even as early as Win95--though at the time I was (and still largely am) ridiculed by those who want to have the features of computer use and appear computer knowledgeable but also want the ease of an OS that demands very little effort of learning from them.
All of that is relatively superficial, obviously, when you take those considerations to full completion. The exact same principle applied ten or twenty years ago. The exploitable software of ten or twenty years ago became solidified and standardized and those functions have now been made to be performed at the hardware level in the bridge chips and bus controllers. Those hackers (and crackers) who were the laser eyed math and logic geeks playing kernel/core wars ten and twenty years ago still know where those exploitable pathways are and, if they can (and believe me, they definitely can) find a way to executable memory from an exploitable codec or your web browser, they can own your exectuable memory space. They don't own it to bring your system down or to make it unusable, they own it to feed vast databases of information. Information is profiled, stored, categorized, and indexed in much the same way as the "warrantless" wiretapping we heard about several years ago. The government does not put active agents on every line: they screen the line through voice recognition systems which listen for key words and phrases. The
Sploosh was the name of a popular IRC channel bot coded by Joe Ciccone for use with the Linuxfromscratch IRC community. More information here.
Sometimes I really miss those days filled with IRC chat on multiple servers, endless hours of compiling (on 400 MHz P2 and K6-3 processor based systems), bug reporting, troubleshooting, cooking, brewing tea, tracking CNN, watching SciFi, and trying to manage a corporate career and still enjoy life.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they hiring people to write an OS for it? Eventually all of those nodes need to be able to talk to a video card, display something on a screen, talk to a network card and communicate with the network in a fashion that the general public will expect.
I wouldn't even do it for the money. Provide me with a suitable environment and I would do it just because it would be enjoyable. I cannot do it while sleeping on the street and eating peanut butter and jelly, though.
I am trying to figure out if it would be a sin to work on a project like that. If housing and support were dependent on me working on a project then it would be a sin. If someone would say,"We trust that what you do isn't 'evil', here's a place to stay and an allotment for meals and resources, here are the specs that we have now, and here's a whole room full of dry erase boards. Have at it."
The terrorists did it. Siberian officials will petition the UN for disaster relief and anti-terrorist funding. The United States will offer to foot the bill if and only if Siberian officials encourage the remainder of what was the USSR to support a UN backed move by US military into Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and anyone else who does not immediately agree to tithe to Obama (or the current reigning US political figure). US taxpayers will be on the hook for a war in Afghanistan, a war in Iraq, and rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Siberia. US military contractor executives will reap huge bonuses, taxpayers will be liable for another twenty years' worth of debt, and the banks who manage the finances will apply for another bailout in five years--putting US taxpayers, as well as Iraqi and Afghani taxpayers (through US proxy since, by then, we will own their economies), on the hook for another thirty years.
Profit.
(I love the USA and all that but, seriously, it is not even about nationalism anymore. This is pure global financial enslavement perpetuated by people who really do not give a rat's patoot about the USA)
In order to develop the meme of "whoosh" it is necessary for some mods to practice anti-modding.
When I walked from Georgetown, SC, to Savannah, GA I saw this turtle, about five miles outside of Savannah. It apparently had tried to cross the road and had been hit by a car. It was huge, probably about the size of a grown man's torso, maybe larger. As I walked by the turtle looked up at me and opened its mouth as if to say,"Heeeellllp me--look what they've done to me.". Its mouth was full of blood. That was an odd sight--all that red blood in the mouth of a primarily green turtle.
Still... that's about how Comcast (and most large corporate empires) views their customers--turtles who, if they dare to try and cross the road, will end up with cracked shells and blood in their mouths.
There are days when I am happy that I have given up all attachments to the corporate world.
Why should this be modded down? It's the logical conclusion to the system. We know the credit card system is insecure, we can fill the message boards with comments going back and forth about it... but that isn't the larger problem. Discussion centering around only the credit card system is bound to revolve around band-aid approaches to fixing the system. In order to truly avoid this sort of problem again we need to understand underlying flaws.
So, logically, you wonder why people need credit cards, and then you wonder why people need credit, and then you wonder why debt accumulates, and then you wonder who debt is important to, and then you wonder who the major players are in the system of debt and, eventually you come to understand that, yes indeed, it is a system of governments and big businesses exploiting capital. Once you reach that conclusion then, really and truly, all discussion around the credit card system becomes "offtopic" and the only topical discussion related to identity theft arising from financial systems concerns the security vulnerabilities in a capitalist system dominated by government and financial behemoths.
Of course, that wouldn't generate very much discussion, because acknowledging that everyone is trapped within an inherently flawed system is just depressing, and everyone leaves their computers to go find an ice cream sundae for comfort. Americans should be happy they live in a capitalist system. Under communism only the rich and powerful could afford a decent ice cream sundae. OTOH, under communism, your identity wasn't important in the first place.
So you can have one or the other: ice cream sundaes to comfort your stolen sense of identity, or no ice cream sundaes and no identity at all to steal.
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you a new and never before seen technique: the flowchart.
When the consideration is corporation vs. consumer, or government vs. citizen, FUD comes true nearly one hundred percent of the time.
It appears that you are trying to toast more than one piece of bread at a time. Consider buying another toaster, investing in a commercial model, or signing up for our maintenance plan which provides a live-in political officer to toast your bread for you.
Amen!
Up please!
Or, when running over a potential customer: "Hey! Hey! Hey!"
If it is important enough then it may be written again. If it is not important enough then a stale sf.net page provides testimony to how unimportant it was.
Insightful, funny, best post yet
The system was set up to work a particular way. Interfering with established web protocols could be, for a private citizen, prosecuted as a criminal act. Why should a corporation be allowed to do it for profit? Additionally, once you allow this sort of thing to happen, what is to prevent your ISP from monitoring, intercepting and redirecting all traffic? Imagine if you thought you were visiting Slashdot, because it looked and felt like Slashdot, but it was really your ISP's carefully scrubbed edition of Slashdot? Obviously you might enjoy it if they cleaned out all the trolls--but how about consider the implications of Slashdot losing a significant portion of its revenue because every ISP is redirecting all of the ad requests to their own ads?
Drag and drop is quite convenient. It is also a security chasm. Once you can drag and drop one thing then you want to be able to drag and drop anything. In the case of arbitrary file formats not only must you implement code to check the incoming data stream (thus exposing yourself to all of the security considerations of "how many different ways can someone try to wax my process of checking the incoming data stream?") but you must consider that a data stream which is valid using one codec algorithm may cause a fault using another codec algorithm. Competing algorithms exist for many data format structures and the presumed same data format may have three or four codecs at use between X, the WM, a monolithic app like a web browser, and a devoted data editor (eg. GIMP), and even a devoted data viewer (eg. a multiformat display application). It isn't the simplest consideration.
With so much of the problem and criticism with the reigning proprietary OS being security related the open source community has tried to remain a little more focused on security related issues. Combine that with the difference in conceptual organization--F/OSS guys don't get paid to go to in house meetings together--and it is completely logical that something as "simple" as drag and drop is not implemented across largely unrelated application development groups.
Within a particular desktop environment using apps which were written specifically for that desktop environment (often referred to as a desktop suite) there is probably a more consistent end user experience.
It is the culmination of (years of) similar situations which has brought many rifts in major F/OSS development groups.
I find myself personally familiar with the situation which caused Alan to leave. The difference is that Alan has enough financial backing and social connections behind him that he likely will not end up living on the streets.
Can you imagine a headline,"Major developer sick and tired of political crap, leaves development group, will take up a section of cardboard on the sidewalk just down the block from Slashdot's HomelessinLaJolla"?
I hear they're ginning up a new RFC to address that
As with most military projects it has been in the works for a long time.
is that any reason not to want to find a software solution to make his life easier?
That sounds great in theory but, mostly, it is the excuse of the incompetent who would like to have someone else do the work while they gather all the credit. The conceptual progression is no different than cheating on homework beginning in second grade.
I thought that was what software solutions were all about?
I think we've come a long way from the original path of software solutions. The system began as people who had computers at their disposal and who enjoyed working with them. They created solutions--heck, they created their own problems. They found new hardware, or new software, or new applications, and they had a simple interest to put things together and make them work. They created software solutions. Some of them began to sell their software solutions to people who needed them. The most inventive minds, however, continued to create their own solutions.
I think the largest problem is that management has even forgotten this. They want the job done. They do not want to spend money on it, they do not want to wait for it to happen, whatever the need is the managers want it done, now, at no cost. Part of this is just the crap rolling down hill from upper management who want something to report to the executives, and the executives just want to have material for their latest bout of grandstanding and speeches at various dinners, conferences, get-togethers, or golf outings, to have that edge to be able to feed to the investment partners, so that the numbers which drive their salaries and bonuses will go up. So the investment partners want something, that makes the executives want something, that means upper management wants something, that means middle management wants something, that means that front line managers want something done, and that means someone must do it.
So, rather than seeing people who have a genuine interest in developing and advancing computer, hardware, software, and programming technologies and art forms... we have an enormous population of what amounts to slightly more technically trained button pushing monkeys. These monkeys are slightly better than previous generations of monkeys in that these monkeys have been trained to be able to recognize more technical language and can follow the mouse pointer across the screen with their eyes.
I don't think the DoD wants "purchase, install, and deploy" monkeys--though quite likely the managers who will administer the posted position will (because monkeys are easier to push around and ride for their own professional profit than a real thinking human being). I think the requirements are set attempting to find those candidates who really and truly have a desire to work with those systems.
The desired effect is not what you think it is. The desired effect is not to ensure that the particular update releases of packages are whatever they are; that is a secondary and obligatory requirement. The desired effect is to ensure that anyone who is attempting to deploy a Linux type solution in the DoD has the requisite skills and understanding to create a stable system beginning with those requirements.
Imagine if the spec was "use distro XYZ". Great. Installers have become fairly streamlined and even newbs are able to install a given distro. If the spec was for older, more stable releases, then there would be little incentive to fill positions with people who are motivated to advance the technologies. The specs do not need to be completely bleeding edge and, for the sake of conceptual security and practical updates, the specs should be a little behind the latest releases hot off the press.
Tarballing on this many systems is nightmare and even then some things just don't seem to work.
Obviously I, as a homeless man, would be much more qualified for the position than you. I enjoy the challenge of inventing my own systematic solution for situations that are "nightmares" or "just don't seem to work". My skill set is likely to be precisely what they are looking for.
But DoD cannot have me. I work only for God. DoD is free to give me money, they are free to provide a place for me to live, they are free to provide an office and systems for me to use... but the very first moment that my manager tries to pull any of that political office crap where he covers up his complete blithering idiocy by invoking his age or the level of his academic degree then they would have to kiss my beautiful a$$ because I would walk out the door on a dime and not even bother to leave a single penny in change. Eff 'em to the end.
So, no matter how much more highly qualified I am than any other candidate for any given position, the fact that I refuse to put up with political bullsh*t from old men who feel that their age, combined with their white hair and their funny moustaches, entitles them to do whatever they want means that employers will happily accept a less qualified, but weaker willed, candidate.
The loss is theirs.
Pay-per-click bots used to artificially adjust page rankings and for the generation of statistical data used by network administrators to promote their latest list of needed upgrades to their financial budget directors.
zomgwtfbbq!!11
BBQ. Amen.
Favorite simple machine poll.
If your employer does not allow you to spend the time learning how to design your own system, if the management is so incompetent that they do not have faith in the down the road benefits of such an important long term commitment, then you do not want to work for them. Period. No excuses. You should walk out the door this very moment.
Until the jail guards do cell search and then they take all of the toilet paper away, put you on disciplinary restriction for hoarding toilet paper, and you're lucky if they give you a new roll next week.
When the media release admonishes that malicious attackers have been exploiting a flaw for nearly a week the real indication is that the core of the obfuscated code community has been exploiting it for far longer--probably since the day the vulnerable snippet of code was introduced. I will not tarry to read the full article and look at all of the related references but the summary indicates ActiveX on XP or server '03. Unless this is a relatively new addition to the AX library of functions you can rest assured that the vulnerability has been exploited since the day the software was shipped.
When you install an OS such as Debian, or LFS, or Ubuntu, or Slack, or RH, or Mandrake, or any of the BSD flavors, you become familiar with the concept of dependencies--either to compile from source or to install a package. Vulnerabilities are no different. Vulnerabilities have dependencies and, once all of the requisite dependencies are in place, then the vulnerability is available. Just as the installer of a source compilation or a package knows exactly when the dependencies are fulfilled and the program is available so too do the core researchers know almost immediately when the dependencies for a vulnerability have been fulfilled. Oftentimes those who have been writing and maintaining apps for a particular kernel and core set of libraries may even see the possibility for an exploit within their program but think to themselves,"Yeah, that portion could be exploited, but this-and-that-and-these aren't available and an attacker would need to figure out a way to inject executable bytecode into the stack using this hole, if they could get to it, and to do that they would need to know the user's particular kernel and libc, possibly shell and memory configuration, and they can't get that info through this opening." Then, two or three months later, some enormous library conglomerate, possibly within the environmental (gnome/qt/kde/etc) infrastructure becomes available, and _bing_, all of the dependencies to make the vulnerability a viable vector for exploit have been fulfilled.
This has long been the dichotomy between making an OS usable for the general population and maintaining it in a secure fashion. This is why I have always chosen X window managers which have been relatively bare bones (ude/blackbox/e16) and tried to minimize GUI dependency and remain at the shell/CLI interface. Automation and full integration within the OS is good for the general users but it also quickly fills all of the spaces between the lines of security; fulfilling and satisfying all of the dependencies for vulnerabilities. This was my major admonishment even as early as Win95--though at the time I was (and still largely am) ridiculed by those who want to have the features of computer use and appear computer knowledgeable but also want the ease of an OS that demands very little effort of learning from them.
All of that is relatively superficial, obviously, when you take those considerations to full completion. The exact same principle applied ten or twenty years ago. The exploitable software of ten or twenty years ago became solidified and standardized and those functions have now been made to be performed at the hardware level in the bridge chips and bus controllers. Those hackers (and crackers) who were the laser eyed math and logic geeks playing kernel/core wars ten and twenty years ago still know where those exploitable pathways are and, if they can (and believe me, they definitely can) find a way to executable memory from an exploitable codec or your web browser, they can own your exectuable memory space. They don't own it to bring your system down or to make it unusable, they own it to feed vast databases of information. Information is profiled, stored, categorized, and indexed in much the same way as the "warrantless" wiretapping we heard about several years ago. The government does not put active agents on every line: they screen the line through voice recognition systems which listen for key words and phrases. The
I have no idea what this story is about.
You must be new here.
Slashdot is now slow, bloated, and fucked up
How is this different from the state of modern computing in general?
Ontopic: How is this different from the state of modern government actions in general?
Sploosh was the name of a popular IRC channel bot coded by Joe Ciccone for use with the Linuxfromscratch IRC community. More information here.
Sometimes I really miss those days filled with IRC chat on multiple servers, endless hours of compiling (on 400 MHz P2 and K6-3 processor based systems), bug reporting, troubleshooting, cooking, brewing tea, tracking CNN, watching SciFi, and trying to manage a corporate career and still enjoy life.