Then I looked at the website for the tags - 5 years worth of service, regular MAC address, only transmits occasionally, never receives.
It would be great for cattle. Not bad for kids either, but I don't want to raise goats.
Oh wait, you want to treat you CHILD like livestock. I see. Damn the consequences, let me put my daughter in a commune, I mean daycare, with an ear tag and all so she does not get lost. They might even have a surveillance system so I can see her in her cage while I'm penned up in my cubicle. That's good training, it makes them pliable, errr, sociable.
don't you think they already have this information?
After you rent the tag, the company knows:
You and your children's names.
Your preferred method of payment for large amounts. You know they will charge you if you don't turn it back in. It's generally your credit card.
How well you read fine print. Did they extort the right to check your credit record? Did you agree to having the position of your cell phone tracked? Outside the park? Did you agree to helpful messages via SMS? Forever?
That you have a cell phone, its number and that it does SMS.
I'm not saying all of the above happens, after all carnivals are know for honest people. It's not like they are run by Gypsies who steal children is it? Caveat emptor and consider what price you pay for the gadget and what it does for you.
All you are going to gain from the bands is a false sense of security. As others have pointed out, this only tells you where the wristband is and it is not a substitute for responsible parenting. The low tech way of doing this was to lead the lost child to a help desk and page the parents over an intercom. If the park uses the tags to not hire as many people to watch the park, actual security will decrease and you might want to keep a sharper lookout than ever.
Geez, people treat.DOC as if it's some sort of Mecca of compatibility. Truth: It SUCKS and it's BROKEN. I mean, everything's cool, as long as you don't go back too many versions, or use the wrong copy of Works, right?
Don't forget these other show stoppers:
Using another printer. The fonts never match and everything moves.
Using another computer. The fonts never match and everything moves.
Using another version of Windoze. They never come with the same set of fonts and everything moves.
Changing versions of Office. You get a new set of default fonts and everything moves.
You were not ambitious / dumb enough to put macros in your work, were you?
When I say, everything moves, I mean everything. Graphs in spreadsheets, paragraphs on pages, the number of pages, everything.
Microsoft formats are a Byzantine mess that work only if nothing at all changes. It's almost as bad as the bad old days of never having a hope to read anything written on a different computer.
I can contrast this with moving work from Star Office 5.2 to 6.0 and OO on three different distributions. They looked the same everywhere I took them. PDF printing, of course, looks the same regardless of OS used and I've printed Star and Open Office pdfs on scores of computers. The only thing that's ever changed has been the quality and resolution of the printer.
While Benincasa estimates that FN Manufacturing would pay as much as $400 per seat for Microsoft Office 2003, Duke Energy's volume licensing agreement would make an upgrade to the latest Microsoft Office suite much less expensive, said Kevin Wilson, product line manager of desktop hardware at Duke Energy and an eWEEK Corporate Partner.
Total bullshit. I used to work for another, bigger entergy (opps, I just named it) company. They had zero training for and very poor understanding of M$ junk. Every "upgrade" broke formating worse than the conversion to OO does and caused massive compatibility headaches of the sort people like to say is a reason to avoid free software.
You claim:
At large corporations, smooth 2-way compatibility with MS Office is a must have and OO.o is not there yet.
I'd say M$ Office has a long way to go as well but I've had zero problems with other word processors. Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect all do a better job between versions, themselves and Microsoft Office.
A day will come when a Fortune 500 company makes the jump. It will look impressive, but it will just be the culmination of years of work by others on OO.o
How do you detect a virus that has control of the underlying hardware though...
The same way you detect a virus on any machine that has been compromised, with another machine and or a thorough understanding of normal operation and running processes. Nothing new here. Evaluate the harm done by a potential compromise and take steps accordingly.
There is no practical difference between a hardware and a software compromise and the remedy is the same. Indeed, for critical purposes, there's little difference between a hardware compromise and a simple failure. You should anticipate it and not get burnt. The bottom line is know your shit and be in control when strange things happen.
Security is a process and must be applied system wide. If you don't have reasonable configuration control, you are already lost. If you run junky closed software that's full of bugs and does not keep track of uid, pid or processes themselves you are always in for a rough ride. The trouble given you there will distract your operators, like it did for the last big blackout. Every piece has to be taken considered in context. It's not hard, it just takes time, organization and judgment.
I hate how Ludites always look at any new tool and cry out, "look how awful [insert wonderful new power] is!"
... you have to commit a German crime in Germany or against Germans for it to fall under German law, this treaty or not. I.E. you have to sell the Nazi stuff to a German, which would be illegal anyway. That's right, it is already illegal.
Soooo twisted. Don't get confused with details. What's important is not the freedoms we already have lost, it's the freedoms we will lost to this wrong headed treaty.
Now for details. I'm not in Germany. There's no US laws against me selling legally acquired material to a visiting German and I'd like to see a link to US laws forbiding export of war spoils to Germany or anywhere else.
How about Mexican laws against publishing anything that might offend the dignity of Mexican government officials. It's better law to consider than hacking into someone else's machine, which is a crime against property already well covered. If this treaty passes would the New York times have to pull articles on drug traffic and political corruption in Mexico? The fact that you and I have to consider the question shows how poorly crafted this treaty is.
, I guess if Russia doesn't work out for us liberty loving types we can always head for Mars
Sadly, you already have to go Russia to find a rocket that could get you to Mars. They need the money, but I don't think of Russia as a libertarian haven. It's still a place where government is abused for personal enrichment and is without proper civil law. A government that does not perform its proper functions can still be busy doing a great deal of harm.
To me, this makes perfect sense-- think about it. If someone from a European nation stole your credit card information, for example, you would want them to be accountable for their damages, even if you were an American, right?
This already happens. International law allows for extradition in the case of real crimes.
This treaty will jams all bad laws down on everyone. The logical result is that everyone will have to live by the most restrictive of everyone else's laws. It's like a selector for the worst of breed! How typical of government.
Let's examine some of the things US citizens will lose. Right now, it's not a crime in the US to say nice things about Nazis, sell "memorabilia" or war spoils or post pictures of naked Nazi babes on the internet. These things are crimes in Germany, France and many other countries. Here we consider it futile to use government money to supres speech. In fact, it's considered an explicit right to run presses anonymously, as anonymous speech is an essential part of free speech and speech that is limited in its expression in anyway is not free.
What did I gain for that? Nothing? Oh thanks.
What does everyone else lose? Everyone outside the US will learn how stupid US IP laws are. That's just what Microsoft and other big dumb companies wants. Your right, it does make perfect sense.
I'd rather Bush had a clue, than have to defend myself in court. While I'm sure the idiots who like domestic spying are very happy to have new excuses to pry on innocent peoples letters and personal effects, I'd rather not give them the power to pry in the first place. Tools should not be criminalized and this great country should not be at the beck and call of every petty dictator or European power with laws that clearly violate the US Constitution and it's basic principle: Your government is for the common defense and your tax money should not be spent pestering, annoying and otherwise enslaving you. I do NOT want to pay people to read my email, snoop on my browsing and dig through my files, punish me for my opinions and otherwise hinder my business and persuit of happines.
Measured by market cap, MSFT (297B) is much bigger than IBM (155B).
Until big dumb companies notice that free software does what M$ does. Then earnings and stock prices go into the toilet. It's already happening and M$'s power to coerce vendors and hardware makers alike is failing it. For Microsoft, this is a death spiral.
You might also consider public goodwill. IBM has plenty, Microsoft does not.
has anyone else noticed that arguments presented in selected media outlets has moved to ever more uninformed/poorly researched tripe?... That shit is just plain unprofessional and sloppy.
That's true, but there are some very encouraging signs too.
The problem is that some people are producing magazines that pretend to be news, but are really advertisements. These magazines will continue to ignore everything but their patron's wares and will always be clueless. They also continue to offer FUD to reassure clueless administrators their money was well spent. Microsoft planned to spend more than a billion dollars promoting XP and that kind of money feeds an entire ecosystem of shills and quacks. "Computer" magazines that don't cover free software but instead encourage you to purchase eXPensive junk are not worth reading.
The good news is that reputable news outlets are catching on. They are specifying what OS and software are effected by what they used to call "computer viruses". Most have penetrated the SCO FUD machine and reported it for what it is. Microsoft can shake their advertising budget at them still, but reputable news sources are going to pick credibility over the wishes of an advertiser.
Software should not be pushed for practical and philisophical reasons.
The whole point of free software is user control. Free software is big enough for you and I to agree to dissagree about it, you do things your way and I'll do them mine.
Here are some situations where you don't want auto updates:
Dial up connection
Unstable distro
Qualified systems
The above constitutes a majority of installations. Most people still have dial up. Most people prefer the hottest software around. It is difficult to get upgrades over a modem unless you scale back to stable and only take what security.debian.org offers.
How does Microsoft do the same thing, you might ask. Obviously, they don't.
I've been in the financial services industry since before this company was founded, and I've never heard of a comparable case.
With saying this:
All the way back to 1998, a whole six years ago. Now there's history for you. Almost dynastic in its scope..
Tell me, big investment man, is this unusual or not. I'm not sure I'll trust your answer having seen this piece of sparkling judgement from you:
The moral to me is to distrust Baystar as a potential investment partner.
You should already have known that Baystar is a Microsoft shill with poor judgement. Why would you have ever have trusted that?
What you might conclude is that the SCO stock fraud is coming undone sooner than expected. Must have been the whistle blower. Or was it was the federal put up or shut up order, or the complete lack of evidence produced before or after? It should be clear to even the dumbest, greediest "investor" that SCO never had anything but a big mouth and a purchased famous name.
It's the Microsoft way. When you can't compete, you buy or break your competition. They have done the same thing, over and over. They did it with backup programs, browsers, spreadsheets and office programs. It's why the Microsoft world is so shitty now.
With free software they are trying the same thing. While they can't really buy out free software, they can create the impression. It's all part of their "What if Linux gets hit by a bus" FUD. They will make as much use of their new hires as they made of Fastback and all the other nice things they have bought and buried. The free software world is much too large to be bought and these moves have no real effect.
You saw 1984, I saw Right to Read. I'm afraid that Blair understood people and Stallman understood how they would get there. I'm disgusted that any large University would give an outside organization the ability to effectively expel their students. How can a student without net access do their work? We all know the MPAA never makes mistakes, right? No one would ever abuse a system like this, would they? I don't have anything to worr[link terminated]
"Let us install this and we promise we won't prosecute you if we find any infringers".
The thing you and many others seem to be missing is false positives and the effect that will have. People like Stallman grasped the implications long ago. I suggest you read, The Right to Read and shudder at the fact that the MPAA has made the central premise a reality. Students without access to the network are unable to complete assignments and is equivalent to expulsion at most Universities. No reputable university would give that kind of power to any other organization.
when you're screaming "WINDOWS ISN'T SECURE!!!", nobody really listens and nobody really cares.
It works the other way around poor Microsoft security has ruined all computer security. Most "security" on Microsoft systems are nothing more than an inconvenience to the honest user. In a corporate environment all of the inconveniences add up to a huge ass pain and the user gets blamed when the system gets rooted again anyway. People using such systems know they don't work and are resentful. Worse, they are deeply suspicious of anyone who would tell them that there are good security practices that are not difficult to use.
I know, I've worked at a fortune 500 Microsoft Partner. It was big windows stupid and it sucked eggs. Reasonable security on an institutional scale was figured out decades ago and is implemented well at places like MIT. You can't just bandaid that kind of system into a single user OS that automatically opens runs email attachments.
Big dumb companies are especially hard pressed to deal with each other. They are so paranoid about losing their precious "IP" that they can't share anything without having you memorize a new random sequence of characters and signing a 10 page agreement to never tell anyone else what you know. It's a tin foil hat at the executive level that drives these half ass security measures. The same executive moron lets his favorite vendors remove his tin foil hat in the next instant and that's why you have all these stupid windows networks paining everyone to begin with. It's stupid from the top down.
He didn't reveal what sound card he was actually working with?
Well, duh, he expects you to read his mind. After all, he expects free software developers to be able to just know how sound cards work despite NDAs and all the sounds of silence you get from the manufacturer.
Let's take a guess. Intel chipset that works with Windoze 95... is it a 386? I know that I can't run XP on a real 386, 486 or even a 586. That cinches it.
Really, it's hard to take this guy seriously. He claims to have done a web search but did not come across any of the sound card support pages in the time it took him to load 9 Linux distros and four versions of windoze? He must have been working on it for a week but did not find:
Supply and demand is so simple, I shudder that a Berkeley School of Business misunderstands the situation:
"If you incur a fine of a billion dollars, but it protects that monopoly, that might be worth it from a pure dollars-and-cents perspective," said Carl Shapiro, a professor at the University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business, who once testified for the Justice Department in its case against Microsoft. "What's the Windows franchise worth?"
Good question, Doctor! Another good question would be, "Who really needs Microsoft to get things done?" The answer is.... no one.
When people realize this, demand will go to the replacement cost which is less than zero.
The sad fact is that Free software costs less up front and less to administer, so companies who switch out have only the cost of data transfer before they see savings. Because Microsoft screws around with their own data formats, getting your data out of Windows is a normal cost of doing business. Getting off the upgrade train saves you bundles of equipment spending, and immediatly cease payment to software licensees.
Their death will be quick. Microsoft's billions go out the door at an astonishing $10 billion a quarter or so. If their revenuse ever dipped, those expenses would eat their savings very quickly. Companies are already moving away and the losses are going to show up soon. When that happens, it's all over.
A Linux cluster gets compromised and they issue a press-conference.
A Washington Post story has more but questionable details. They rely on one or two anonymous sources and some big dogs at BIG buzzword projects. The picture, however, does point to a ssloppy and pointless attack on 20 or so high profile buzzword projects. This is either a routine script kiddie attack, or one planned by M$.
University buzzword projects have weak security. Most of the PhDs I know are too busy to keep up with computer nonsense and STILL use winblows, telnet and other junk that is the source of these problems. The bigger the dog, the bigger the head and the less time they have had to learn or update.
All the signs are there for Microsoft involvement. The Wintel press has been primed with bullshit about poor security of poorly managed Unix. The hack work was high profile, sloppy and looks like more of a "look at me" stunt than an attempt to gain resources. The wintel word will be dancing in the streets at the news and trying to take yet more ill deserved power.
IS at universities have already been bad. Their response to Winblows problems has already made life difficult for the responsible Unix user. Their ever escalating big dumb vendor solution has made their networks blocked, proprietary, buggy, painful and expensive. Administrators have turned their eyes and minds from publishing potential of networks to stupid copyright and Winblows nonsense. This is going to give those weenies a place to point and say, "See! I told you it was all the user's fault. Give me more control to fix your incompetence."
The optimist in me would like to think that good things can come out of this. Free software users can point to the fact that this was not a robot attack, that it is extremely rare and that the damage will be fixed in two shakes of a GNU tail. I'd even like to think that this will make job opportunities at Universities for competent Linux administrators to help secure systems. Professors need competent help and they are not getting enough of it now. If they were, they would not still be on Winblows, they would not be using Telnet and this attack would never have happened. The pessimist in me thinks that dumb asses are going to things even more difficult.
It's up to competent people to win the day here. It would be absurd for software that's routinly rooted by robots to win out here. You have the experience, you know the answers, get out there and kick some ass!
Mepis does the same and gives you an install GUI. The new version gives you KDE 3.2, which kicks any proprietary interface's ass, and was used to make this post.
Feather Linux nice for older computers and dead easy to use.
The Free and Open source comments quoted were true when they were written, but are not anymore. People really have gotten into the works enough to make many usable and easy interfaces. Like other "Free software will never do X" arguments, this one was false.
The gentle reader may remember these famous predictions. Free Software will never:
make a kernel
be useful in the Enterprise
make anyone any money
be able to work devices
As free software generated billions of dollars for big and small companies alike, runs on all manner of hardware for all kinds of companies that demand scalability and stability, we could be sure easy to use, polished interfaces were right around the conner. They are here and available to anyone with a good network connection.
Once Linux gets to the point that it can be administered by people who aren't dedicated specialists, it's inevitable they will try it out and that most of these people will be less careful administrators. After all they aren't dedicated *nix admins and will often wear many hats in their organization. This doesn't mean that Linux is insecure, it's just a growing pain that it has to go through.
You are overlooking the information sharing that's already happened. First, most distros come with reasonable default settings that get the job done. Second, efficient web searching and LUG lists have made it easy for just about anyone to get cluefull advice. This knowledge sharing is what free software is all about and it works for everyone.
Anyone who uses a current distribution of free software has already taken an enormous leap of increased security. They might be less secure than a shop that's looked over by someone with twenty years of experience, but they are much better off than those poor saps who put their faith in Microsoft and other vendors.
So, decreased "security" this way is a point function not a global problem. You will never see internet threatening worms from free software like you have from the Microsoft monoculture. There's too much variety and each individual that makes a new custom solution just adds that much more diversity to the net. Individuals might screw one or two things up, and no one will ever be able to stop the pros but security and data integrity can only get better than they are now.
Good practice comes from experience. Experience comes from someone making mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you are not doing anything.
If a desalination plant is used, that's 70 grams of salt being produced per person/day.
At most an individual is only going to require 1 gram of each mineral (Eg. sodium).
So around 65 grams/day of salt is going to have to be placed somewhere.
How about putting it in a box and selling it to someone that does not live next to the sea? They have to eat salt too. Also, I'm told that cold state have to throw salt on the roads to keep them from icing. Nah, that would never work. I'll just have to salt my flower garden to avoid really high blood pressure. Thanks for the insightful post. Salt, what a horrible, deadly pollutant.
You're just full of shit. Sitting there and proclaiming that "M$" is dying while making all these baseless, bogus rationalizations about how cool free software is smacks of pure and simple wishful thinking. There is a big problem out there, but you're sure as heck not helping to solve it in any meaningful way.
Oh, I suppose I should just shut up and purchase a copy of XP? Ha! I'm not sure why I'm going to bother to answer the rest of your post. It's clear you neither care nor have a usefull answer to the problems Microsoft has made for everyone.
Did you perchance notice that there were several high-profile Linux cracks in the past few months? Or did that just escape you?
Apt-get updates work for me. I did not notice the SSH problem, would you mind pointing it out to me?
And if you think they couldn't be sending out crap, search around for that recent article about the guy that found out his server had been rooted via PHP/Apache and was being used to send spam.
Show me yourself, if you have a real point to make. I don't have any heavy duty web serving needs, so I use Boa and never noticed any Apache problems. Nor have the 2/3 of the internet community that uses Apache to serve pages to the world, so I think that you are full of shit.
The fact of the matter is that there has NEVER been a full auto free software worm. It's not because of "market share" because free software runs most of the net. It's because free software is not using retarded "easy" autoload methods to handle content sent by strangers across the network. Microsoft has been hit by such things since they encouraged people to attach their crappy OS to the net.
Microsoft has repeatedly promissed that their next version would be "secure". They never made changes, they never fixed anything and their trust is broken. They are not dying, they are dead.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be great for cattle. Not bad for kids either, but I don't want to raise goats.
Oh wait, you want to treat you CHILD like livestock. I see. Damn the consequences, let me put my daughter in a commune, I mean daycare, with an ear tag and all so she does not get lost. They might even have a surveillance system so I can see her in her cage while I'm penned up in my cubicle. That's good training, it makes them pliable, errr, sociable.
After you rent the tag, the company knows:
I'm not saying all of the above happens, after all carnivals are know for honest people. It's not like they are run by Gypsies who steal children is it? Caveat emptor and consider what price you pay for the gadget and what it does for you.
All you are going to gain from the bands is a false sense of security. As others have pointed out, this only tells you where the wristband is and it is not a substitute for responsible parenting. The low tech way of doing this was to lead the lost child to a help desk and page the parents over an intercom. If the park uses the tags to not hire as many people to watch the park, actual security will decrease and you might want to keep a sharper lookout than ever.
Geez, people treat .DOC as if it's some sort of Mecca of compatibility. Truth: It SUCKS and it's BROKEN. I mean, everything's cool, as long as you don't go back too many versions, or use the wrong copy of Works, right?
Don't forget these other show stoppers:
Microsoft formats are a Byzantine mess that work only if nothing at all changes. It's almost as bad as the bad old days of never having a hope to read anything written on a different computer.
I can contrast this with moving work from Star Office 5.2 to 6.0 and OO on three different distributions. They looked the same everywhere I took them. PDF printing, of course, looks the same regardless of OS used and I've printed Star and Open Office pdfs on scores of computers. The only thing that's ever changed has been the quality and resolution of the printer.
While Benincasa estimates that FN Manufacturing would pay as much as $400 per seat for Microsoft Office 2003, Duke Energy's volume licensing agreement would make an upgrade to the latest Microsoft Office suite much less expensive, said Kevin Wilson, product line manager of desktop hardware at Duke Energy and an eWEEK Corporate Partner.
Total bullshit. I used to work for another, bigger entergy (opps, I just named it) company. They had zero training for and very poor understanding of M$ junk. Every "upgrade" broke formating worse than the conversion to OO does and caused massive compatibility headaches of the sort people like to say is a reason to avoid free software.
You claim:
At large corporations, smooth 2-way compatibility with MS Office is a must have and OO.o is not there yet.
I'd say M$ Office has a long way to go as well but I've had zero problems with other word processors. Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect all do a better job between versions, themselves and Microsoft Office.
A day will come when a Fortune 500 company makes the jump. It will look impressive, but it will just be the culmination of years of work by others on OO.o
It is always this way with big dumb companies.
The same way you detect a virus on any machine that has been compromised, with another machine and or a thorough understanding of normal operation and running processes. Nothing new here. Evaluate the harm done by a potential compromise and take steps accordingly.
There is no practical difference between a hardware and a software compromise and the remedy is the same. Indeed, for critical purposes, there's little difference between a hardware compromise and a simple failure. You should anticipate it and not get burnt. The bottom line is know your shit and be in control when strange things happen.
Security is a process and must be applied system wide. If you don't have reasonable configuration control, you are already lost. If you run junky closed software that's full of bugs and does not keep track of uid, pid or processes themselves you are always in for a rough ride. The trouble given you there will distract your operators, like it did for the last big blackout. Every piece has to be taken considered in context. It's not hard, it just takes time, organization and judgment.
I hate how Ludites always look at any new tool and cry out, "look how awful [insert wonderful new power] is!"
Soooo twisted. Don't get confused with details. What's important is not the freedoms we already have lost, it's the freedoms we will lost to this wrong headed treaty.
Now for details. I'm not in Germany. There's no US laws against me selling legally acquired material to a visiting German and I'd like to see a link to US laws forbiding export of war spoils to Germany or anywhere else.
How about Mexican laws against publishing anything that might offend the dignity of Mexican government officials. It's better law to consider than hacking into someone else's machine, which is a crime against property already well covered. If this treaty passes would the New York times have to pull articles on drug traffic and political corruption in Mexico? The fact that you and I have to consider the question shows how poorly crafted this treaty is.
Sadly, you already have to go Russia to find a rocket that could get you to Mars. They need the money, but I don't think of Russia as a libertarian haven. It's still a place where government is abused for personal enrichment and is without proper civil law. A government that does not perform its proper functions can still be busy doing a great deal of harm.
This already happens. International law allows for extradition in the case of real crimes.
This treaty will jams all bad laws down on everyone. The logical result is that everyone will have to live by the most restrictive of everyone else's laws. It's like a selector for the worst of breed! How typical of government.
Let's examine some of the things US citizens will lose. Right now, it's not a crime in the US to say nice things about Nazis, sell "memorabilia" or war spoils or post pictures of naked Nazi babes on the internet. These things are crimes in Germany, France and many other countries. Here we consider it futile to use government money to supres speech. In fact, it's considered an explicit right to run presses anonymously, as anonymous speech is an essential part of free speech and speech that is limited in its expression in anyway is not free.
What did I gain for that? Nothing? Oh thanks.
What does everyone else lose? Everyone outside the US will learn how stupid US IP laws are. That's just what Microsoft and other big dumb companies wants. Your right, it does make perfect sense.
Until big dumb companies notice that free software does what M$ does. Then earnings and stock prices go into the toilet. It's already happening and M$'s power to coerce vendors and hardware makers alike is failing it. For Microsoft, this is a death spiral.
You might also consider public goodwill. IBM has plenty, Microsoft does not.
That's true, but there are some very encouraging signs too.
The problem is that some people are producing magazines that pretend to be news, but are really advertisements. These magazines will continue to ignore everything but their patron's wares and will always be clueless. They also continue to offer FUD to reassure clueless administrators their money was well spent. Microsoft planned to spend more than a billion dollars promoting XP and that kind of money feeds an entire ecosystem of shills and quacks. "Computer" magazines that don't cover free software but instead encourage you to purchase eXPensive junk are not worth reading.
The good news is that reputable news outlets are catching on. They are specifying what OS and software are effected by what they used to call "computer viruses". Most have penetrated the SCO FUD machine and reported it for what it is. Microsoft can shake their advertising budget at them still, but reputable news sources are going to pick credibility over the wishes of an advertiser.
The whole point of free software is user control. Free software is big enough for you and I to agree to dissagree about it, you do things your way and I'll do them mine.
Here are some situations where you don't want auto updates:
The above constitutes a majority of installations. Most people still have dial up. Most people prefer the hottest software around. It is difficult to get upgrades over a modem unless you scale back to stable and only take what security.debian.org offers.
How does Microsoft do the same thing, you might ask. Obviously, they don't.
I've been in the financial services industry since before this company was founded, and I've never heard of a comparable case.
With saying this:
All the way back to 1998, a whole six years ago. Now there's history for you. Almost dynastic in its scope..
Tell me, big investment man, is this unusual or not. I'm not sure I'll trust your answer having seen this piece of sparkling judgement from you:
The moral to me is to distrust Baystar as a potential investment partner.
You should already have known that Baystar is a Microsoft shill with poor judgement. Why would you have ever have trusted that?
What you might conclude is that the SCO stock fraud is coming undone sooner than expected. Must have been the whistle blower. Or was it was the federal put up or shut up order, or the complete lack of evidence produced before or after? It should be clear to even the dumbest, greediest "investor" that SCO never had anything but a big mouth and a purchased famous name.
With free software they are trying the same thing. While they can't really buy out free software, they can create the impression. It's all part of their "What if Linux gets hit by a bus" FUD. They will make as much use of their new hires as they made of Fastback and all the other nice things they have bought and buried. The free software world is much too large to be bought and these moves have no real effect.
Signing that document does not mean that you agree to giving control of that network to the pimps who bring you softcore porn on 40 foot high screens.
What a nightmare.
The thing you and many others seem to be missing is false positives and the effect that will have. People like Stallman grasped the implications long ago. I suggest you read, The Right to Read and shudder at the fact that the MPAA has made the central premise a reality. Students without access to the network are unable to complete assignments and is equivalent to expulsion at most Universities. No reputable university would give that kind of power to any other organization.
It works the other way around poor Microsoft security has ruined all computer security. Most "security" on Microsoft systems are nothing more than an inconvenience to the honest user. In a corporate environment all of the inconveniences add up to a huge ass pain and the user gets blamed when the system gets rooted again anyway. People using such systems know they don't work and are resentful. Worse, they are deeply suspicious of anyone who would tell them that there are good security practices that are not difficult to use.
I know, I've worked at a fortune 500 Microsoft Partner. It was big windows stupid and it sucked eggs. Reasonable security on an institutional scale was figured out decades ago and is implemented well at places like MIT. You can't just bandaid that kind of system into a single user OS that automatically opens runs email attachments.
Big dumb companies are especially hard pressed to deal with each other. They are so paranoid about losing their precious "IP" that they can't share anything without having you memorize a new random sequence of characters and signing a 10 page agreement to never tell anyone else what you know. It's a tin foil hat at the executive level that drives these half ass security measures. The same executive moron lets his favorite vendors remove his tin foil hat in the next instant and that's why you have all these stupid windows networks paining everyone to begin with. It's stupid from the top down.
Well, duh, he expects you to read his mind. After all, he expects free software developers to be able to just know how sound cards work despite NDAs and all the sounds of silence you get from the manufacturer.
Let's take a guess. Intel chipset that works with Windoze 95... is it a 386? I know that I can't run XP on a real 386, 486 or even a 586. That cinches it.
Really, it's hard to take this guy seriously. He claims to have done a web search but did not come across any of the sound card support pages in the time it took him to load 9 Linux distros and four versions of windoze? He must have been working on it for a week but did not find:
It's hard to believe.
"If you incur a fine of a billion dollars, but it protects that monopoly, that might be worth it from a pure dollars-and-cents perspective," said Carl Shapiro, a professor at the University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business, who once testified for the Justice Department in its case against Microsoft. "What's the Windows franchise worth?"
Good question, Doctor! Another good question would be, "Who really needs Microsoft to get things done?" The answer is .... no one.
When people realize this, demand will go to the replacement cost which is less than zero.
The sad fact is that Free software costs less up front and less to administer, so companies who switch out have only the cost of data transfer before they see savings. Because Microsoft screws around with their own data formats, getting your data out of Windows is a normal cost of doing business. Getting off the upgrade train saves you bundles of equipment spending, and immediatly cease payment to software licensees.
Their death will be quick. Microsoft's billions go out the door at an astonishing $10 billion a quarter or so. If their revenuse ever dipped, those expenses would eat their savings very quickly. Companies are already moving away and the losses are going to show up soon. When that happens, it's all over.
A Washington Post story has more but questionable details. They rely on one or two anonymous sources and some big dogs at BIG buzzword projects. The picture, however, does point to a ssloppy and pointless attack on 20 or so high profile buzzword projects. This is either a routine script kiddie attack, or one planned by M$.
University buzzword projects have weak security. Most of the PhDs I know are too busy to keep up with computer nonsense and STILL use winblows, telnet and other junk that is the source of these problems. The bigger the dog, the bigger the head and the less time they have had to learn or update.
All the signs are there for Microsoft involvement. The Wintel press has been primed with bullshit about poor security of poorly managed Unix. The hack work was high profile, sloppy and looks like more of a "look at me" stunt than an attempt to gain resources. The wintel word will be dancing in the streets at the news and trying to take yet more ill deserved power.
IS at universities have already been bad. Their response to Winblows problems has already made life difficult for the responsible Unix user. Their ever escalating big dumb vendor solution has made their networks blocked, proprietary, buggy, painful and expensive. Administrators have turned their eyes and minds from publishing potential of networks to stupid copyright and Winblows nonsense. This is going to give those weenies a place to point and say, "See! I told you it was all the user's fault. Give me more control to fix your incompetence."
The optimist in me would like to think that good things can come out of this. Free software users can point to the fact that this was not a robot attack, that it is extremely rare and that the damage will be fixed in two shakes of a GNU tail. I'd even like to think that this will make job opportunities at Universities for competent Linux administrators to help secure systems. Professors need competent help and they are not getting enough of it now. If they were, they would not still be on Winblows, they would not be using Telnet and this attack would never have happened. The pessimist in me thinks that dumb asses are going to things even more difficult.
It's up to competent people to win the day here. It would be absurd for software that's routinly rooted by robots to win out here. You have the experience, you know the answers, get out there and kick some ass!
Now it's time to catch up with distros that are way easier to use than XP and have interfaces that also do much more:
The Free and Open source comments quoted were true when they were written, but are not anymore. People really have gotten into the works enough to make many usable and easy interfaces. Like other "Free software will never do X" arguments, this one was false.
The gentle reader may remember these famous predictions. Free Software will never:
As free software generated billions of dollars for big and small companies alike, runs on all manner of hardware for all kinds of companies that demand scalability and stability, we could be sure easy to use, polished interfaces were right around the conner. They are here and available to anyone with a good network connection.
Michelle, download and run Mepis today.
You are overlooking the information sharing that's already happened. First, most distros come with reasonable default settings that get the job done. Second, efficient web searching and LUG lists have made it easy for just about anyone to get cluefull advice. This knowledge sharing is what free software is all about and it works for everyone.
Anyone who uses a current distribution of free software has already taken an enormous leap of increased security. They might be less secure than a shop that's looked over by someone with twenty years of experience, but they are much better off than those poor saps who put their faith in Microsoft and other vendors.
So, decreased "security" this way is a point function not a global problem. You will never see internet threatening worms from free software like you have from the Microsoft monoculture. There's too much variety and each individual that makes a new custom solution just adds that much more diversity to the net. Individuals might screw one or two things up, and no one will ever be able to stop the pros but security and data integrity can only get better than they are now.
Good practice comes from experience. Experience comes from someone making mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you are not doing anything.
How about putting it in a box and selling it to someone that does not live next to the sea? They have to eat salt too. Also, I'm told that cold state have to throw salt on the roads to keep them from icing. Nah, that would never work. I'll just have to salt my flower garden to avoid really high blood pressure. Thanks for the insightful post. Salt, what a horrible, deadly pollutant.
Oh, I suppose I should just shut up and purchase a copy of XP? Ha! I'm not sure why I'm going to bother to answer the rest of your post. It's clear you neither care nor have a usefull answer to the problems Microsoft has made for everyone.
Did you perchance notice that there were several high-profile Linux cracks in the past few months? Or did that just escape you?
Apt-get updates work for me. I did not notice the SSH problem, would you mind pointing it out to me?
And if you think they couldn't be sending out crap, search around for that recent article about the guy that found out his server had been rooted via PHP/Apache and was being used to send spam.
Show me yourself, if you have a real point to make. I don't have any heavy duty web serving needs, so I use Boa and never noticed any Apache problems. Nor have the 2/3 of the internet community that uses Apache to serve pages to the world, so I think that you are full of shit.
The fact of the matter is that there has NEVER been a full auto free software worm. It's not because of "market share" because free software runs most of the net. It's because free software is not using retarded "easy" autoload methods to handle content sent by strangers across the network. Microsoft has been hit by such things since they encouraged people to attach their crappy OS to the net.
Microsoft has repeatedly promissed that their next version would be "secure". They never made changes, they never fixed anything and their trust is broken. They are not dying, they are dead.