You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field.
Actually, you would think that after all the trouble people keep having with Micrsoft shit, that people would dump Microsoft. Wallstreet did and others are too. We can only hope that upper management everywhere gets the message: M$ is broke and it is not getting better.
It's move in week, and the 30 of us on staff are working 60+ hours this week. 8,000 or so computers are coming back, of those, we expect about 5,600 to be unpatched, and we expect that of those 5,600, that only 1,400 or so will be able to follow our documentation.
So why don't you ban M$ computers? Surely, you have better things to do with your time and school money than support Microsoft's broken shit. With the kind of time and resources you have, you could have every one of those computers running Debian in a week. Yes, I imagine one peroson can sit over 3 or 4 hand installs an hour, just like I can. Practice makes perfect and you are sure to get better than that. Oh well, good luck.
There's a correct solution, dump M$ to the problem and a wrong one, get screwed by M$ forever. Paladium will make things much worse and destroy the value of the networks.
As most people who had to fight this worm already know, a firewall doesn't do you a whole lot of good if you have users with laptops who plug in at home, then bring in their infected PCs and plug them into your internal network.
Laptop? That should be the least of your concerns. Worms get in through IE exploits on port 80 and email. They require no user action. A firewall won't protect your soft monoculture underbelly. Once the worm is in, it's off and external control can be established through alowed ports.
Microsoft has had more than a year to fix their goofey browser and mail clients but have dicked around with other unimportant things instead. DRM, WMP spyware, IM "fixes" to block other clients are all massive wastes of resources at a company with so many security problems. The only fix for those idiots is replacement.
I'm not going to defend the use of Microsoft in this application, or any application anywhere. The people in charge of a similar system where I used to work loathed it. Microsoft on the desktop to talk to such a stupid system was unacceptable as well. While I worked there, I got, reported and was ignored about a worm. I and the people who adminisered the "business" network, knew that it was full of holes. Yet give the operators some credit, the plant was never put at risk and scrutiny like this can move them in the right direction, away from Microsoft.
The worm I got and the reaction I got from the mail administrators was very disturbing. The thing exploded out of Outlook's preview window, spawened multiple porn browsers and did God knows what else. I turned the computer off hard. The IIS people at corporate cenrtal did not believe me, executed to completion the thing by remote control without realizing it, recomended that I simply not use the preview screen and said that they got stuff like that all the time and it was "a normal part of advertising." It made me sick. They thought I was worried about being shit canned for looking at porn and were oblivious to the implications of rooting a desktop that could remote into any other desktop in the company. STUPID FUCKING MICROSOFT CERTIFIED ASSES. Whew, I really was angry and I still am.
My plant's server was also a pain. It was some goofey overpriced Dell "server" that collected information from plant systems and made it available. It failed often and required many late nights for the people in charge of it. There were many such system but the newest one had the most information. It also had the least abiltity to do real damage. For all it's faults, it was an improvement over what was there but was not required for the safe operation of the plant. It could have been done much better had Microsoft not had anything to do with it.
The answer is not to dissconect the "business" network from the plant information systems, it's to fix the network in a fundamental way. First, the network needed to be split into an Engineering section and an Adnministrative section, with Engineers only having partial access to the Administrative network and Administration haveing NO access to plant data systems. Data systems already have NO access to control systems, and this is a good thing. These architectual changes are valid regardless of software used but Microsoft must be eliminated from all of it. From a pure business perspective, having your information available to sabotage is unacceptable and that's what Microsoft's poor security record yields. Free software is superior from a security, and functionality standpoint and is now equal in ease of use. If running Microsoft keeps engineers from viewing plant data, while giving competitors and sabatours full access to such data, the costs of Microsoft is obviouly too high. Seperating engineers from their data, as Security Focus's write up implies, would be a costly mistake. I have every confidence that power plant operators will make the right choice soon.
Hell yes, I'm mad. I just about screemed this at the top of my lungs while I was there and was ignored. When the business comes, I'm more than happy to work for someone getting it done.
What about infected end user machines that are being used as anonymizing zombies?
Let them try it. The traffic controling them can be traced back if it's against the law. Once again, difficulty in enforcemant is no reason to give up.
You mention that "we all know" that MS is behind it; can you please fill me in?
A very superficial examination is enough to raise suspision. Microsoft is funding them and they are saying all the same things Microsoft used to. There's always more when you are dealing with liars, but the superficial details should be enough. If it stinks, don't put it in your mouth.
Microsoft is the only member of the technical community to pay SCO's Linux extortion. This comes despite the fact that Microsoft has no Linux software and publically states that they have no plans for any either. Microsoft has used BSD code forever and that was sufficient, until recently, for their Unix products. SCO has one other corporate custormer that they refuse to identify. I imagine that they have suffered a devistating DLoP (Distributed Lack of Purchasing) attack that makes their former poor sales look great. Without Micfosoft's money, SCO would be bankrupt by now. They will go that way, a great tragedy for all those employed there who made the great Caldera Linux packages and other good software.
All the things that SCO is now saying sound exactly like the FUD that M$ used to put out about the GPL and free software. They insinuate that free software is dishonest and stollen as if only commercial software writers ever have a novel idea or are able to read computer science texts. They claim irresposisble tracking of contributions because free software developers can't look at the code comercial software vendors keep hidden, and claim this creates liabilities for users of free software. All of this, of course, is the kind of double talk that's been comming out of Bill Gates mouth from the beninning of his career, pay up you thieves, or you will have no quality software. The treat was bullshit then and it is bullshit now. People can and did co-operate to build software that's both superior to comercial software and honestly free. People realize that, and Microsoft understood that thier anti-GPL campaign, calling the GPL a cancer, unAmerican hippy ware and all that, had backfired. SCO is now saying all the same things under Microsoft's pay.
Microsoft thinks it's getting their money's worth out of SCO investment, but they are wrong. Their scheeming is transparent, easy to explain and will blow up in their faces. Thier other missdeeds and poor performance proved they were an evil company. Security problems convinced me not to use their software for networking. Their anti-GPL campaign convinced me to avoid their software and vocally oppose them. This SCO shit makes me want to throw rocks at them. Here, I am, Microsoft free, and still I have to worry about their nonsense. It should convince everyone that there is no escaping Microsoft's influence and misdeeds until they are out of business.
Linus hasn't said anything about fraud yet, and indeed, that's the responsibility of the SEC and the justice system.
The justice system can only document, judge and enforce what people say. You can't catch criminals if the populance is silent. Witnesses must step forward to build a case.
Linus might be bright enough to keep his mouth shut, but someone has to cry foul. In his position, it makes sense for him to keep his opinions to himself. CNN does not camp out on my door step, so I feel a little less restrained.
Oh... and just *HOW* do you propose that we do that? Follow the return address?
Why do people always ask that question?
You catch spammers by, well, catching them! ISPs and other interested parties can trace IP numbers back to the machine that sent them, no matter how "fake" they are set. That's the same kind of detective work and reliance on witnesses that any normal crime is solved by. ISPs constantly cut off these creeps and they have to keep going from ISP to ISP to get their word out. It would be very sweet indeed for an ISP to be able to report their spammers to the police.
In any case, outlawing spamming will get rid of a large volume of crap. Jackasses who brag about the volume of spam they are able to send from their freaking mansions will be shut down right away. So will lots of other losers who have been investing in equipment to annoy the rest of us. Good riddance. It may not get rid of all of them, but it will get rid of a lot of them.
as long as anonymity is allowed to exist in email, spam will exist
As long as people exist, spam, murder, and all sorts of other foul things will exist. None of it will ever be defeated by any police state but the confines of a police state are more odius than pure anarchy. Laws that follow morals are good things. Laws that "surrender to practicality" they way you would are flawed and hateful.
What crap! Anonymity is a crucial part of free speech. Atempts to eliminate it from email are about as unAmerican as unique CPU numbers or bar-code tatoos. They are also technically unnecessary. IP numbers do not have to reveal a user's identity to be blocked. Laws that attempt to elimiante spam by making it technically imposible are about as sensible as making murder technically imposible by outlawing privacy and pointy metal objects. I'm sick of such stupid shit.
The solution is to outlaw spam outright. Spammers will be caught the same way murders and and crackers are cautht today. It does not require a fundamental loss of privacy or anonymity on the web. Spamming will be reduced to a tollerable level the same way speed limit laws reduce traffic deaths. Spamming and the "cost shifting" involved are simply wrong and it's right to make laws against things that are wrong regardless of how well they work.
that SCO seems to be under the misapprehension that the BFP is their own code to begin with - that seems to imply that they illegally stripped a copyright notice somewhere along the way.
Indeed Bruce aludes to this:
I was able to determine the origin of BPF after a few minutes of web searches on google.com . Why couldn't a "pattern-recognition team" do the same? It's difficult to believe they simply didn't bother to check. It's also likely that SCO dropped attribution of the Lab's copyright from the System V copy of the BPF source code, or the team would have known.
Great stuff. It's hard to tell what happened to the attribution. SCO is careless, dishonest or both. In general, dishonest people only think they are smarter than those around them.
He's been smart enough to keep his mouth shut about things he can't prove. In this interview, he did not tell us that McBitch and friends are trying to get rich off a stock market fraud of massive proportions. Nor did he tell us that Microsoft is behind the whole thing as a means of scaring people away from free software. We know that these things are true, but it's impossible to prove another person's motives or negative existance. He simply said, what's here is bullshit, show us the code please and it will be replaced before you lose another nickel.
Those are some big punches to pull and the only reason to pull them is to cover your ass in case someone really presents something infringing. If you say it's all BS instead of demanding a look, you hurt your credibility. By continuing to demand an honest answer from SCO, the free software world continues to show that SCO is not being honest. You can only refute SCO's nonsense as they put it before you. You can demolish claims on end users, you can show monitary damages don't exist, you can show revealed code is public, but you can't prove that there's no infringing code at all. If you do that, it makes you look irresponsible and that is something free software coders are not.
The "smoking crack" phrase is just a figure of speech for deranged and fradulent, which the current claims are based on the code presented. It would be very difficult to prove that cocaine is actually part of McBitch's Microsoft compensation package, so I doubt someone level headed like Linus would use the phrase literally. Not yet at least.
Although he always clearly states his opinion, he usually avoids getting into this sort of direct attack on an organization or person.
You can only attack what you can see. Until recently, SCO had put nothing real on the table. What can anyone say about nothing? Now that there's something to talk about, Linus accurately describes it. There is nothing at all odd about that, he simply refused to speculate about what kind of fairy tale SCO was going to make up or their motives.
While it might be obvious that SCO's leadership is deranged, fruadulent and bribed, Linus has been smart enough to keep his mouth shut about things he can't prove. Good for him, he's got better things to do.
Microsoft reserves the right to replace, modify or upgrade the SOFTWARE at any time by offering you a replacement or modified version of the SOFTWARE or such upgrade and to charge for such replacement, modification or upgrade.
That is unbelievable. They think they can just charge you what they feel like when they feel like because you use their goofey IM client. Nuts, it must be part of their new forced update OS revenue scheme. That pluss Paladium will make the old upgrade train abuse look trivial. Fuck that company.
Trillian rocks for me... I actually *bought* it, (funny concept, buying software, eh, linux users?)
No, there's plenty of software worth buying. Games and Star Office come to mind. Some people even sell ISOs that you could download and burn yourself. I bought a Zaurus, mostly for the fact that it came with Linux on it and I could get Open Zaurus, which rocks. Free software is like that.
After 10/15 I won't be able to use the last version of MSN that works on the Classic MacOS!
So, do you think this is just another finger in Apples's eye after killing IE Mac? M$ really wants to isolate their users. It's a huge mistake in a world that's used to open networks and standardized communications protocals.
Microsoft gives me their server and I give them the finger. They can't keep people out of their freaking, double secret, National Security Risk but sold to China software source or Hotmail, do they think they are going to keep people from using a chat server? They might keep users of their own OS from such services, but denying service for loads of money is what they are all about. Blow me, Microsoft.
Peterdaly writes that Microsoft might do something as useful as Slashdot of Google. Silly Perterdaly.
It's more like Microsft is going to try to filter the usenet to say something good about them and harass those that don't like them. M$ is going to make the rules and give all the points. Anyone who trusts them to give them anything honest is going to be disapointed or blinded by that misplaced faith. What do you think a company that pays people to lie in newsgroups, write letters to politicians on their behalf from dead people, and says all sorts of vile things about free software is going to do with the information?
If ANYONE wants to read and study how people interact on this most public of forums, I fail to see how anyone can object.
Read, fine. Study, great. Honestly disiminate? Right, you think Microsoft is going to tell you the truth or something? Give me a break.
Microsoft has a track record of Astroturfing a mile long, extending all the way back to Steve Barkto's spamming of newsgroups. They hire PR firms to pretend to be Apple to M$ switchers, to write letters on their behalf from dead people to politicians, lie about company afiliations at meetings of shcool teachers. All of this is outside their usual multi-billion dollar marketing blitz to buy your trust. Sorry, good products and software don't need that kind of promotion and stuff built to facilitate it is junk.
Given that kind of record, we can only expect bad things out of Microsoft's newsgroups efforts. I imagine they will steer their OS users without their knowledge or consent, make it even more difficult to get anything useful out of the internet with their sortware, and focus their trolling on forums and newsgroups that don't favor them.
Marc says he's been working on this for four years. I'd love to see what he has found and how he presents it to his boss. "Boss, we looked at newsgroups and what we found was widespread, virulent and well earned hatred of us. Ouside our astroturfers, no one has anything nice to say and the repitition of phrases is embarassingly noticable. We need more buzzwords."
Like I said, reading and study is fine. What Microsoft is liable to do with it is not, judging by the way they have abused their resources in the past.
Newgroups work great. With clueful search engines like Google, it's better than ever. People all over have the same problems and can find solutions with very little effort now, without catalogs user manuals and other junk. This truely is an information revolution. Free software is a direct result of this kind of knowledge sharing, but it has spilled out into all fields.
Microsoft has hated it forever. For much the same reasons movie makers and other large advertisers of shoddy junk hate information exchange. Large forums, such as TV/Radio, Slashdot, your local, state and federal governments can be astroturfed. Micorsoft's problem with smaller groups, like your local lug, is that they can't spam them all. They don't have the resources and never will to create trused users in all of those groups. So long as reliable search engines exist, we will all continue to enjoy honest information from impartial sources.
Marc Smith's efforts represent Microsoft's response to such groups. Efforts to "add core value" and rank newsgroups from a company that's proved it's willingness to lie to the public should not be trusted. Poor Marc has been at this for four years, but Microsoft's search engine, mail client and web browser all still blow.
What I imagine M$ will do is start steering users of their OS to M$ friendly newsgroups. They will also try to destroy the structure of newsgroups themselves and limit who can run them and focus harrasment on groups unfavorable to them. They won't win but they will try. They have already forced most large ISPs to block ports on cable modems and DSL so that the average person has a hard time serving information. The push for control of information is ongoing.
Wait a second here. What smoke are you blowing? The patch works fine. It was out a month before there were any exploits around. It was out, very visibly, in the "critical updates" section of windows update, so even the most braindead users could install it.
Not true. Competent system administrators are saying that the update utility downloaded the patch but did not install it, yet reported it installed. Some help that is.
Why does it [Microsoft software] blow?
Development model, marketing model, distributio model, design problems and bad attitude and ethical problems. Where do you want me to start? The results are in, every few months when an new exploit costs everyone lots of grief.
Try subscribing to the DEBIAN-SECURITY mailing list and tell me linux never has security holes.
I've got http://security.debian.org in my/etc/apt/sources.list file and it works great. Free software is like that. You need to look at the uptime lists on netcraft before you mouth off about the security and stabilty of free software as opposed to MicroShit.
Considering the original and first variant of the MSBlaster worm made major headlines, why were these systems still vulnerable? Are each of those systems equipped with a 9-volt battery and a cheap Somebody Else's Problem field?
From what I read here, M$'s little tools said the machines were "patched" when they were not.
And don't give me that shit about airline computers having to be 24x7. If that were the case, they wouldn't be running Windows in the first place.
I won't and they be making that mistake for much longer either. That roaring sound you hear is not a jet engine, it's the sound of millions of IT pros wispering, "I told you so," as they write yet another paper recomending free software everywhere M$ is. M$ TCO is way more than the M$ tax.
multiple firewalls.. worth nothing if
your users dont protect their networks at home.
Perfect. It's not your fault for recomending and using Microsoft crap, it's your user's fault for not taking precations? No, the root cause of this failure is in Redmond, but your use of their crap is a larger contributing cause to your company's problems than anything any of your users do. Take responsibility for your decisions and fix that mess the right way. How many times are you going to shell out big bucks only to be burnt by the next Microsft Transmitted Disease?
It is way past time to dump Windows. It's not hard to do, really, and you will be much better off in the long run to start using free software now. Good luck cleaning that mess up. Don't be too hard on the owner of that laptop, there were as many ways for that thing to get on your network as IE has exploits. When you finish restricting your users to things that are "safe" on an M$ network, what exactly will you be providing your users? Free software requires far fewer restrictions while offereing much better services and ease of data trasport. When you factor worms like this and bandwith costs for "patching" into your TCO, free software is a real bargain.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you would think that after all the trouble people keep having with Micrsoft shit, that people would dump Microsoft. Wallstreet did and others are too. We can only hope that upper management everywhere gets the message: M$ is broke and it is not getting better.
So why don't you ban M$ computers? Surely, you have better things to do with your time and school money than support Microsoft's broken shit. With the kind of time and resources you have, you could have every one of those computers running Debian in a week. Yes, I imagine one peroson can sit over 3 or 4 hand installs an hour, just like I can. Practice makes perfect and you are sure to get better than that. Oh well, good luck.
Laptop? That should be the least of your concerns. Worms get in through IE exploits on port 80 and email. They require no user action. A firewall won't protect your soft monoculture underbelly. Once the worm is in, it's off and external control can be established through alowed ports.
Microsoft has had more than a year to fix their goofey browser and mail clients but have dicked around with other unimportant things instead. DRM, WMP spyware, IM "fixes" to block other clients are all massive wastes of resources at a company with so many security problems. The only fix for those idiots is replacement.
The worm I got and the reaction I got from the mail administrators was very disturbing. The thing exploded out of Outlook's preview window, spawened multiple porn browsers and did God knows what else. I turned the computer off hard. The IIS people at corporate cenrtal did not believe me, executed to completion the thing by remote control without realizing it, recomended that I simply not use the preview screen and said that they got stuff like that all the time and it was "a normal part of advertising." It made me sick. They thought I was worried about being shit canned for looking at porn and were oblivious to the implications of rooting a desktop that could remote into any other desktop in the company. STUPID FUCKING MICROSOFT CERTIFIED ASSES. Whew, I really was angry and I still am.
My plant's server was also a pain. It was some goofey overpriced Dell "server" that collected information from plant systems and made it available. It failed often and required many late nights for the people in charge of it. There were many such system but the newest one had the most information. It also had the least abiltity to do real damage. For all it's faults, it was an improvement over what was there but was not required for the safe operation of the plant. It could have been done much better had Microsoft not had anything to do with it.
The answer is not to dissconect the "business" network from the plant information systems, it's to fix the network in a fundamental way. First, the network needed to be split into an Engineering section and an Adnministrative section, with Engineers only having partial access to the Administrative network and Administration haveing NO access to plant data systems. Data systems already have NO access to control systems, and this is a good thing. These architectual changes are valid regardless of software used but Microsoft must be eliminated from all of it. From a pure business perspective, having your information available to sabotage is unacceptable and that's what Microsoft's poor security record yields. Free software is superior from a security, and functionality standpoint and is now equal in ease of use. If running Microsoft keeps engineers from viewing plant data, while giving competitors and sabatours full access to such data, the costs of Microsoft is obviouly too high. Seperating engineers from their data, as Security Focus's write up implies, would be a costly mistake. I have every confidence that power plant operators will make the right choice soon.
Hell yes, I'm mad. I just about screemed this at the top of my lungs while I was there and was ignored. When the business comes, I'm more than happy to work for someone getting it done.
Let them try it. The traffic controling them can be traced back if it's against the law. Once again, difficulty in enforcemant is no reason to give up.
A very superficial examination is enough to raise suspision. Microsoft is funding them and they are saying all the same things Microsoft used to. There's always more when you are dealing with liars, but the superficial details should be enough. If it stinks, don't put it in your mouth.
Microsoft is the only member of the technical community to pay SCO's Linux extortion. This comes despite the fact that Microsoft has no Linux software and publically states that they have no plans for any either. Microsoft has used BSD code forever and that was sufficient, until recently, for their Unix products. SCO has one other corporate custormer that they refuse to identify. I imagine that they have suffered a devistating DLoP (Distributed Lack of Purchasing) attack that makes their former poor sales look great. Without Micfosoft's money, SCO would be bankrupt by now. They will go that way, a great tragedy for all those employed there who made the great Caldera Linux packages and other good software.
All the things that SCO is now saying sound exactly like the FUD that M$ used to put out about the GPL and free software. They insinuate that free software is dishonest and stollen as if only commercial software writers ever have a novel idea or are able to read computer science texts. They claim irresposisble tracking of contributions because free software developers can't look at the code comercial software vendors keep hidden, and claim this creates liabilities for users of free software. All of this, of course, is the kind of double talk that's been comming out of Bill Gates mouth from the beninning of his career, pay up you thieves, or you will have no quality software. The treat was bullshit then and it is bullshit now. People can and did co-operate to build software that's both superior to comercial software and honestly free. People realize that, and Microsoft understood that thier anti-GPL campaign, calling the GPL a cancer, unAmerican hippy ware and all that, had backfired. SCO is now saying all the same things under Microsoft's pay.
Microsoft thinks it's getting their money's worth out of SCO investment, but they are wrong. Their scheeming is transparent, easy to explain and will blow up in their faces. Thier other missdeeds and poor performance proved they were an evil company. Security problems convinced me not to use their software for networking. Their anti-GPL campaign convinced me to avoid their software and vocally oppose them. This SCO shit makes me want to throw rocks at them. Here, I am, Microsoft free, and still I have to worry about their nonsense. It should convince everyone that there is no escaping Microsoft's influence and misdeeds until they are out of business.
The justice system can only document, judge and enforce what people say. You can't catch criminals if the populance is silent. Witnesses must step forward to build a case.
Linus might be bright enough to keep his mouth shut, but someone has to cry foul. In his position, it makes sense for him to keep his opinions to himself. CNN does not camp out on my door step, so I feel a little less restrained.
Why do people always ask that question?
You catch spammers by, well, catching them! ISPs and other interested parties can trace IP numbers back to the machine that sent them, no matter how "fake" they are set. That's the same kind of detective work and reliance on witnesses that any normal crime is solved by. ISPs constantly cut off these creeps and they have to keep going from ISP to ISP to get their word out. It would be very sweet indeed for an ISP to be able to report their spammers to the police.
In any case, outlawing spamming will get rid of a large volume of crap. Jackasses who brag about the volume of spam they are able to send from their freaking mansions will be shut down right away. So will lots of other losers who have been investing in equipment to annoy the rest of us. Good riddance. It may not get rid of all of them, but it will get rid of a lot of them.
as long as anonymity is allowed to exist in email, spam will exist
As long as people exist, spam, murder, and all sorts of other foul things will exist. None of it will ever be defeated by any police state but the confines of a police state are more odius than pure anarchy. Laws that follow morals are good things. Laws that "surrender to practicality" they way you would are flawed and hateful.
The solution is to outlaw spam outright. Spammers will be caught the same way murders and and crackers are cautht today. It does not require a fundamental loss of privacy or anonymity on the web. Spamming will be reduced to a tollerable level the same way speed limit laws reduce traffic deaths. Spamming and the "cost shifting" involved are simply wrong and it's right to make laws against things that are wrong regardless of how well they work.
Indeed Bruce aludes to this:
I was able to determine the origin of BPF after a few minutes of web searches on google.com . Why couldn't a "pattern-recognition team" do the same? It's difficult to believe they simply didn't bother to check. It's also likely that SCO dropped attribution of the Lab's copyright from the System V copy of the BPF source code, or the team would have known.
Great stuff. It's hard to tell what happened to the attribution. SCO is careless, dishonest or both. In general, dishonest people only think they are smarter than those around them.
Those are some big punches to pull and the only reason to pull them is to cover your ass in case someone really presents something infringing. If you say it's all BS instead of demanding a look, you hurt your credibility. By continuing to demand an honest answer from SCO, the free software world continues to show that SCO is not being honest. You can only refute SCO's nonsense as they put it before you. You can demolish claims on end users, you can show monitary damages don't exist, you can show revealed code is public, but you can't prove that there's no infringing code at all. If you do that, it makes you look irresponsible and that is something free software coders are not.
The "smoking crack" phrase is just a figure of speech for deranged and fradulent, which the current claims are based on the code presented. It would be very difficult to prove that cocaine is actually part of McBitch's Microsoft compensation package, so I doubt someone level headed like Linus would use the phrase literally. Not yet at least.
You can only attack what you can see. Until recently, SCO had put nothing real on the table. What can anyone say about nothing? Now that there's something to talk about, Linus accurately describes it. There is nothing at all odd about that, he simply refused to speculate about what kind of fairy tale SCO was going to make up or their motives.
While it might be obvious that SCO's leadership is deranged, fruadulent and bribed, Linus has been smart enough to keep his mouth shut about things he can't prove. Good for him, he's got better things to do.
Microsoft reserves the right to replace, modify or upgrade the SOFTWARE at any time by offering you a replacement or modified version of the SOFTWARE or such upgrade and to charge for such replacement, modification or upgrade.
That is unbelievable. They think they can just charge you what they feel like when they feel like because you use their goofey IM client. Nuts, it must be part of their new forced update OS revenue scheme. That pluss Paladium will make the old upgrade train abuse look trivial. Fuck that company.
No, there's plenty of software worth buying. Games and Star Office come to mind. Some people even sell ISOs that you could download and burn yourself. I bought a Zaurus, mostly for the fact that it came with Linux on it and I could get Open Zaurus, which rocks. Free software is like that.
So, do you think this is just another finger in Apples's eye after killing IE Mac? M$ really wants to isolate their users. It's a huge mistake in a world that's used to open networks and standardized communications protocals.
What M$ makes it a pain in the ass to IRC?
[6]People get sick of software that does not work.
[7]Microsoft dies.
You are realy between 6 and 7.
No one need Microsoft-using friends because no one needs Microsoft.
Do you think someone with a sig like mine could miss this post?
It's more like Microsft is going to try to filter the usenet to say something good about them and harass those that don't like them. M$ is going to make the rules and give all the points. Anyone who trusts them to give them anything honest is going to be disapointed or blinded by that misplaced faith. What do you think a company that pays people to lie in newsgroups, write letters to politicians on their behalf from dead people, and says all sorts of vile things about free software is going to do with the information?
Read, fine. Study, great. Honestly disiminate? Right, you think Microsoft is going to tell you the truth or something? Give me a break.
Microsoft has a track record of Astroturfing a mile long, extending all the way back to Steve Barkto's spamming of newsgroups. They hire PR firms to pretend to be Apple to M$ switchers, to write letters on their behalf from dead people to politicians, lie about company afiliations at meetings of shcool teachers. All of this is outside their usual multi-billion dollar marketing blitz to buy your trust. Sorry, good products and software don't need that kind of promotion and stuff built to facilitate it is junk.
Given that kind of record, we can only expect bad things out of Microsoft's newsgroups efforts. I imagine they will steer their OS users without their knowledge or consent, make it even more difficult to get anything useful out of the internet with their sortware, and focus their trolling on forums and newsgroups that don't favor them.
Marc says he's been working on this for four years. I'd love to see what he has found and how he presents it to his boss. "Boss, we looked at newsgroups and what we found was widespread, virulent and well earned hatred of us. Ouside our astroturfers, no one has anything nice to say and the repitition of phrases is embarassingly noticable. We need more buzzwords."
Like I said, reading and study is fine. What Microsoft is liable to do with it is not, judging by the way they have abused their resources in the past.
Microsoft has hated it forever. For much the same reasons movie makers and other large advertisers of shoddy junk hate information exchange. Large forums, such as TV/Radio, Slashdot, your local, state and federal governments can be astroturfed. Micorsoft's problem with smaller groups, like your local lug, is that they can't spam them all. They don't have the resources and never will to create trused users in all of those groups. So long as reliable search engines exist, we will all continue to enjoy honest information from impartial sources.
Marc Smith's efforts represent Microsoft's response to such groups. Efforts to "add core value" and rank newsgroups from a company that's proved it's willingness to lie to the public should not be trusted. Poor Marc has been at this for four years, but Microsoft's search engine, mail client and web browser all still blow. What I imagine M$ will do is start steering users of their OS to M$ friendly newsgroups. They will also try to destroy the structure of newsgroups themselves and limit who can run them and focus harrasment on groups unfavorable to them. They won't win but they will try. They have already forced most large ISPs to block ports on cable modems and DSL so that the average person has a hard time serving information. The push for control of information is ongoing.
Not true. Competent system administrators are saying that the update utility downloaded the patch but did not install it, yet reported it installed. Some help that is.
Why does it [Microsoft software] blow?
Development model, marketing model, distributio model, design problems and bad attitude and ethical problems. Where do you want me to start? The results are in, every few months when an new exploit costs everyone lots of grief. Try subscribing to the DEBIAN-SECURITY mailing list and tell me linux never has security holes.
I've got http://security.debian.org in my /etc/apt/sources.list file and it works great. Free software is like that. You need to look at the uptime lists on netcraft before you mouth off about the security and stabilty of free software as opposed to MicroShit.
From what I read here, M$'s little tools said the machines were "patched" when they were not.
And don't give me that shit about airline computers having to be 24x7. If that were the case, they wouldn't be running Windows in the first place.
I won't and they be making that mistake for much longer either. That roaring sound you hear is not a jet engine, it's the sound of millions of IT pros wispering, "I told you so," as they write yet another paper recomending free software everywhere M$ is. M$ TCO is way more than the M$ tax.
Perfect. It's not your fault for recomending and using Microsoft crap, it's your user's fault for not taking precations? No, the root cause of this failure is in Redmond, but your use of their crap is a larger contributing cause to your company's problems than anything any of your users do. Take responsibility for your decisions and fix that mess the right way. How many times are you going to shell out big bucks only to be burnt by the next Microsft Transmitted Disease?
It is way past time to dump Windows. It's not hard to do, really, and you will be much better off in the long run to start using free software now. Good luck cleaning that mess up. Don't be too hard on the owner of that laptop, there were as many ways for that thing to get on your network as IE has exploits. When you finish restricting your users to things that are "safe" on an M$ network, what exactly will you be providing your users? Free software requires far fewer restrictions while offereing much better services and ease of data trasport. When you factor worms like this and bandwith costs for "patching" into your TCO, free software is a real bargain.