The US actually cared about an ATARI 2600 game?! How can you successfully depict "a cowboy raping a squaw" without out it looking like a ASCII drawing? (Quick answer: you can't.) How can you tell it's a Squaw indian, instead of another breed? How could you tell it's even a rape scene?
That couldn't be held up in court:
Lawyer: "So...did you willingly draw a rape scene between a cowboy and this Squaw indian?"
Artist: "Rape scene? What rape scene?"
Lawyer: "This one..."
[plays game scene]
Artist: "That's not a rape scene. That's...uhhh...a pigeon carrying a message to Custard. Any fool could see that!"
Lawyer: "Uhhh...well, I guess it does sorta look like that from this angle. No further questions."
wouldn't it be ironic if a russian company played a role in freeing america from an unjust law?
It's even more ironic that the term "Russian company" exists at all. Thank god the Cold War is over!
Unforunately, we hand them a unhealthy dose of corporate greed called capitalism. If only they kept the socialistic ideals with a democratic government.
Normal people (average boring non-techies) don't seem to blink much when MS gets into an anti-trust suit. Instead, Joe Public is wondering how this will affect their stocks, instead of thinking why some people think MS is in this anti-trust case in the first place.
(Of course, the stock market is the vilest entity ever created. This is here, and gambling is illegal?!)
When it comes down to it, normal people are just too damn stupid, or too apathy to even care, about things like these. We're a selfish breed in our most primitive form, and require some degree of intelligence to get out of that mode.
I really can't provide any solutions except boycott/pirate MS products and fight the (corporate) system with the (legal) system.
Nice. Let's throw some 1984ish references in there.
MS: "There's not pee in the pool; it's supposed to be yellow."
You: "But pool water is blue."
MS: "No, pool water is yellow."
You: "Yes, pool water is yellow. There's nothing wrong with the pool."
Please...Wu-FTP is flawed all over the place. I think most of the distros have already given up on it because it's too slow to give out the patchs and there's too many buggy routines (which return root-exploit after root-exploit).
And you can't really blame "Linux" in general over a third-party application's buggy code. As for Windows, it is indeed Microsoft who controls and maintains the code. Not to say that the open-source community doesn't run into its own serious bugs, but in general, we tend to report them a lot faster than the MS crew.
I'm not surprised by the responses we're seeing here. I just think it illustrates the unfortunate situation that a valuable concept like public domain or open source software has to be overly infested with thieves who believe that stealing software or pirating movies in the theaters "doesn't hurt anybody".
The problem is when they call it "pirating", as if they are some oversea rag-tag group that takes things away from other people. It's not taking away; it's making a copy. Most anti-pirate sources try to claim that every single copy is directly affected by the sales of the product. In fact, most pirates are just people who can't afford to buy the damn game anyway.
Say that when it's your own livelihood that's being stolen.
Please...I'd love for a product of mine to get pirated all over the place. Just look at id Software and Doom. More pirates = more popularity.
If you really want a comparison of numbers, try comparing the online games with serial numbers (which is a pretty effective anti-piracy agent right now) to the games without serial numbers. More or less, it's the same numbers.
"But I thought the Pentinum 4 would increase my fun on the Internet."
"No, Ma'am. The Pentinum 4 does absolutely nothing to the Internet on a 56K connection (or a cable modem for that matter). And no, AT&T can't really claim to have 'video e-mail' when it's slow as hell on a 56K connection."
"And you can 'think different' on a Macintosh, but it's just a 'different' monopoly. And no, AOL is not the Internet, either. They may have stupid morons on TV -claim- it's the Internet, but I'd like to see somebody challenge that in court."
I always thought it funny, hilarious even, that Mac users bash one monopoly (MS) and jump into another (Apple). Open-standards hardware forever! And I run a open-standard OS, too.
(Running a Mac with Linux is just as bad as running a PC with Windows.)
And throw a bunch of seeds on Mars! What better way to oxygenize the planet than to populate it with a fast-growing weed! Then we can land on the planet and have as much smoke as you want!:)
Oh, and you global-warming non-believers (or believers) should watch "After the Warming" by James Burke (Connections guy). I can't believe how many ignorant Slashdotters we have, who can't believe that us "innocent" humans would be destroying the planet.
You get an advisory for something, anything... then you check versions and patch the software. It really don't matter what the advisory says. After all, they aren't going to send out an advisory for something trivial. If it's on a security mailing list, it's a potential hack or DoA, or at the very least, a user escalation.
Especially for SSH. If -ANYTHING- for ssh comes up, just shut yo mouth and upgrade the damn software:)
When will people understand that 90% of the people are stupid idiots that don't give a rat's ass about "copy protection", just as long as they can buy their N*Sync albums and stare at Brintiny Spears' ass in concerts.
Of course, they'll have a short-term memory when something bad happens and forget to not vote for this one senator, otherwise we'd have the repubs kicked out for impeaching Clinton.
Democracy and capitalism is a bad combination. It's just as bad as a dictatorship and socialism (read: USSR). I still think the Sweds have the best government, though living in the US for the past 20 years has almost destroyed my faith in democracy. (Nevermind capitalism...I think it's the worse possible finacial system anybody's ever thought of.)
I work over there, so I know that they are trying hard. They are trying to get a FCC-approved reply about a 30-day grace period before any shutdowns. If we are shut down on Friday, there's going to be a lot of pissed off people, including me. Even so, I still hope AT&T wins and buys the company, because I'm not looking forward to a Roadrunner/AOL monopoly on cable.
There's some more information and an official statement from Insight here.
$130 is not expensive for an OS, considering the price for other mainstream OSs.
Huh?? Did I miss something? Unless the price for "other mainstream OSs" just doubled, I don't think $130 is in the "not expensive" range, considering Windows XP is about $85.
Of course, I think nobody should pay for a required element like an OS, but that's just my belief:)
Playing offense vs. playing defense...
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
While I somewhat argee with your stance, I really think there's no way to protect against BigCorp, Inc from suing Joe Blow over and over and over and over again, especially the way the RIAA has been doing. Nobody's been punishing the RIAA for all of these damned lawsuits because there's no way to counter it. Eventually, one of these lawsuits hit their mark and do some civil damage.
If the RIAA loses a suit, they wipe the dirt off their shoes, lose a little money (that they didn't need anyway), and try again.
If the RIAA wins a suit, people go to jail, get fined, have to pay massive lawyer fees, and freedoms get taken away.
See, freedom is losing because we can't take the offensive with these damn corporations. We can only hope to defend ourselves. Sure, we cheer when we win, but it's only another day before somebody attacks again.
Perhaps it's time for an CERT replacement that is open to the public.
CERT's been a poor (and untimely) source for security information for a long time. Most good sysadmins sign up on several security MLs, including CERT, but CERT is usually the last one to find out (or tell you).
This list is not against full disclosure in any way. It is simply a way for vendors to coordinate their fixes before the exploit is widely published.
Full disclosure = being widely published. After all, what's the point of only disclosing a hole to a certain number of people, when the people who DON'T get the announcement are the ones that need it?
And to the people who suspect some kind of nastiness on Red Hat's part for their early announcement, the individual at Red Hat who claims personal responsibility has already apologized on the private list, and has admitted to erring. The private list has existed for a long time and has worked very well in the past, allowing several vendors to all release fixes at once to a previously unknown vulnerability. It would have worked fine again in this case, except for the mistake by Red Hat.
I will personally e-mail Red Hat and the person/people involved with security publications to urge them to NOT punish the guy for his "mistake" and push for earlier releases for them.
If you want a step-by-step guide on how this process works, here it is (in order):
Cracker/hacker discovers a security hole.
S/he tells his close circle of cracker friends.
Somebody outside the cracker community finds out about the hole (usually because they were cracked) and tells the author of the software.
S/he tells a close circle of developer friends.
They tell the vendors, but say to "keep it a secret".
They work on fixing the problem for a few days/weeks.
The vendors FINALLY release a statement and the public gets notified.
All throughout steps 1-7, there are r00ted servers all over the place. This is usually over a long period of time, and nobody knows why because it's never public knowledge. If this was already known by step 3 (or at least step 5), then the sys admins can rush to turn off the daemons or lock down the boxes before they get r00ted.
Waiting for a patch for a security hole before telling the public is like waiting for a cure for AIDS before telling the public.
Re:This should have been public knowledge...
on
Wu-ftpd Remote Root Hole
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Because the people who discovered it didn't want it released before the patches were out.
Patches, smantchs...the only people who DON'T know about the bug are the sys admins with the servers! All of the script kiddies and crackers knew even before the guys at Wu-FTP knew! Waiting for a patch and not telling people about this major security hole is just inviting crackers to hack in and root the server!
Who says the OSS vendors had anything to do with the waiting? If software vendors want some notice on holes, then it's only right that if the discoverer of the hole wants to wait for patches, the software vendors should respect that.
Again, it's better to disable the FTP server or change the daemon while waiting for a patch, than letting a server sit WIDE OPEN for somebody to rip it apart! This whole situation is simple logic.
Well, I'll bash MS, and I'll bash the GNU and Linux guys for the same thing. Why was this not released SOONER?
The people who would really use the exploit already know about it in their cracker circles, so why are we limiting the public in this knowledge? Just tell us and we'll shut down the FTPs or temporarily switch the access to a different daemon while you write a patch for it.
Again, this is security by obsurity, and shame on the OSS community for trying to hide it!
I argee. There's something seriously wrong with the development tree of 2.4. Here it is almost a year later and they only now put out the 2.5 tree, only to find out that it's seriously buggy. On previous versions, we didn't rush the releases, and it took LESS time to produce the odd-numbered development version. Is Alan Cox learning some bad MS/RH tricks to get software up and going?
And who says Mozilla is at a slow pace? It's steady, but you don't have much problems with it any more, either. (Sure, it took a lot to REBUILD THE ENTIRE BROWSER, but now we have a product that is far better than IE or Netscape.)
I feel you on that note about TNG, which is a shame for people like me who are watching marathons on TNN. I'm watching these episodes now, and going "Wow...it looks so...errr...primative." Then I compare it to Farscape and it seems enjoyable, even the episodic episodes.
Was Roddenberry that formulatic? (Definately less formulatic than the completely brainless souls who did Voyager and Enterprise.)
In any case, Babylon 5 is still the best sci-fi series ever created, and I was saddened the several times that both TNT and that independant TV company before them had given JMS (producer/creator) the shaft. Crusade was an awesome series that was cancelled only after 13 episodes, probably because of a bad 10PM timeslot. (This is after TNT advertised the living frell outta Babylon 5 and yet left a potential cashcow out to dry.)
Don't get me wrong, though: I love Farscape, but nothing had the emotion and impact as the B5 series.
People need to stop associating the meaning of life with web browsing. Web browsing should be about looking at pages displayed clearly, and FAST. It shouldn't be about messaging, email, news groups, chicken soup and making coffee.
It depends on how you look at it. I love using Mozilla for my browser and my e-mail. After all, it's a little annoying clicking on a "mailto" link and having your non-default mailer pop up. So, I've used Mozilla's one forever. It has almost everything I need in a mailer, and I'd prefer to look at the new e-mail thing at the lower-left, rather than load up a seperate e-mail client and check my mail.
Fortunately for me, I've been using IE, which seems to be more stable then the above. It really helps to be using the hedgemonic browser. I'm not sure how these people got their IE browsers to crash, but I certainly remember Netscape crashing perpetually on Linux, since I had to muck with the X and Gnome/KDE settings to get it to work. I never have to do this with Windows, because It Just Works! And faster at that!
Your comparing Netscape/Linux with IE/Windows, which isn't that fair. (Netscape sucks, hands down.) Even with that comparison, though, Netscape will STILL beat IE in W3C standards. When IE 5 came out, I wanted to rip out Bill Gate's beating heart for releasing browser that was so fast and loose with the HTML/CSS standards that it cost millions of dollars for businesses to "repair the damage".
If a page doesn't look right in Mozilla, it's YOUR fault (as a webmaster), not the browsers. If your page is W3C compliant and it doesn't work on IE, bitch at Microsoft, not W3C, Mozilla, Netscape, or anybody else.
Slashdot Mirror
The US actually cared about an ATARI 2600 game?! How can you successfully depict "a cowboy raping a squaw" without out it looking like a ASCII drawing? (Quick answer: you can't.) How can you tell it's a Squaw indian, instead of another breed? How could you tell it's even a rape scene?
That couldn't be held up in court:
Lawyer: "So...did you willingly draw a rape scene between a cowboy and this Squaw indian?"
Artist: "Rape scene? What rape scene?"
Lawyer: "This one..."
[plays game scene]
Artist: "That's not a rape scene. That's...uhhh...a pigeon carrying a message to Custard. Any fool could see that!"
Lawyer: "Uhhh...well, I guess it does sorta look like that from this angle. No further questions."
wouldn't it be ironic if a russian company played a role in freeing america from an unjust law?
It's even more ironic that the term "Russian company" exists at all. Thank god the Cold War is over!
Unforunately, we hand them a unhealthy dose of corporate greed called capitalism. If only they kept the socialistic ideals with a democratic government.
Normal people (average boring non-techies) don't seem to blink much when MS gets into an anti-trust suit. Instead, Joe Public is wondering how this will affect their stocks, instead of thinking why some people think MS is in this anti-trust case in the first place.
(Of course, the stock market is the vilest entity ever created. This is here, and gambling is illegal?!)
When it comes down to it, normal people are just too damn stupid, or too apathy to even care, about things like these. We're a selfish breed in our most primitive form, and require some degree of intelligence to get out of that mode.
I really can't provide any solutions except boycott/pirate MS products and fight the (corporate) system with the (legal) system.
Nice. Let's throw some 1984ish references in there.
MS: "There's not pee in the pool; it's supposed to be yellow."
You: "But pool water is blue."
MS: "No, pool water is yellow."
You: "Yes, pool water is yellow. There's nothing wrong with the pool."
...that one guy copyrighted Linux and then try to sue companies for royalities? Really, we all know that TiVo came first. Why is this even an issue?
Or a better question: Why doesn't the patent guys bother to check if something else still exists? You can't patent something if it already exists.
I'm just waiting for Microsoft to copyright the word "software".
Please...Wu-FTP is flawed all over the place. I think most of the distros have already given up on it because it's too slow to give out the patchs and there's too many buggy routines (which return root-exploit after root-exploit).
And you can't really blame "Linux" in general over a third-party application's buggy code. As for Windows, it is indeed Microsoft who controls and maintains the code. Not to say that the open-source community doesn't run into its own serious bugs, but in general, we tend to report them a lot faster than the MS crew.
I'm not surprised by the responses we're seeing here. I just think it illustrates the unfortunate situation that a valuable concept like public domain or open source software has to be overly infested with thieves who believe that stealing software or pirating movies in the theaters "doesn't hurt anybody".
The problem is when they call it "pirating", as if they are some oversea rag-tag group that takes things away from other people. It's not taking away; it's making a copy. Most anti-pirate sources try to claim that every single copy is directly affected by the sales of the product. In fact, most pirates are just people who can't afford to buy the damn game anyway.
Say that when it's your own livelihood that's being stolen.
Please...I'd love for a product of mine to get pirated all over the place. Just look at id Software and Doom. More pirates = more popularity.
If you really want a comparison of numbers, try comparing the online games with serial numbers (which is a pretty effective anti-piracy agent right now) to the games without serial numbers. More or less, it's the same numbers.
"But I thought the Pentinum 4 would increase my fun on the Internet."
"No, Ma'am. The Pentinum 4 does absolutely nothing to the Internet on a 56K connection (or a cable modem for that matter). And no, AT&T can't really claim to have 'video e-mail' when it's slow as hell on a 56K connection."
"And you can 'think different' on a Macintosh, but it's just a 'different' monopoly. And no, AOL is not the Internet, either. They may have stupid morons on TV -claim- it's the Internet, but I'd like to see somebody challenge that in court."
I always thought it funny, hilarious even, that Mac users bash one monopoly (MS) and jump into another (Apple). Open-standards hardware forever! And I run a open-standard OS, too.
(Running a Mac with Linux is just as bad as running a PC with Windows.)
And throw a bunch of seeds on Mars! What better way to oxygenize the planet than to populate it with a fast-growing weed! Then we can land on the planet and have as much smoke as you want! :)
Oh, and you global-warming non-believers (or believers) should watch "After the Warming" by James Burke (Connections guy). I can't believe how many ignorant Slashdotters we have, who can't believe that us "innocent" humans would be destroying the planet.
You get an advisory for something, anything... then you check versions and patch the software. It really don't matter what the advisory says. After all, they aren't going to send out an advisory for something trivial. If it's on a security mailing list, it's a potential hack or DoA, or at the very least, a user escalation.
:)
Especially for SSH. If -ANYTHING- for ssh comes up, just shut yo mouth and upgrade the damn software
When will people understand that 90% of the people are stupid idiots that don't give a rat's ass about "copy protection", just as long as they can buy their N*Sync albums and stare at Brintiny Spears' ass in concerts.
Of course, they'll have a short-term memory when something bad happens and forget to not vote for this one senator, otherwise we'd have the repubs kicked out for impeaching Clinton.
Democracy and capitalism is a bad combination. It's just as bad as a dictatorship and socialism (read: USSR). I still think the Sweds have the best government, though living in the US for the past 20 years has almost destroyed my faith in democracy. (Nevermind capitalism...I think it's the worse possible finacial system anybody's ever thought of.)
I work over there, so I know that they are trying hard. They are trying to get a FCC-approved reply about a 30-day grace period before any shutdowns. If we are shut down on Friday, there's going to be a lot of pissed off people, including me. Even so, I still hope AT&T wins and buys the company, because I'm not looking forward to a Roadrunner/AOL monopoly on cable.
There's some more information and an official statement from Insight here.
You forget their connections to AOL, young grasshopper.
$130 is not expensive for an OS, considering the price for other mainstream OSs.
:)
Huh?? Did I miss something? Unless the price for "other mainstream OSs" just doubled, I don't think $130 is in the "not expensive" range, considering Windows XP is about $85.
Of course, I think nobody should pay for a required element like an OS, but that's just my belief
While I somewhat argee with your stance, I really think there's no way to protect against BigCorp, Inc from suing Joe Blow over and over and over and over again, especially the way the RIAA has been doing. Nobody's been punishing the RIAA for all of these damned lawsuits because there's no way to counter it. Eventually, one of these lawsuits hit their mark and do some civil damage.
If the RIAA loses a suit, they wipe the dirt off their shoes, lose a little money (that they didn't need anyway), and try again.
If the RIAA wins a suit, people go to jail, get fined, have to pay massive lawyer fees, and freedoms get taken away.
See, freedom is losing because we can't take the offensive with these damn corporations. We can only hope to defend ourselves. Sure, we cheer when we win, but it's only another day before somebody attacks again.
CERT's been a poor (and untimely) source for security information for a long time. Most good sysadmins sign up on several security MLs, including CERT, but CERT is usually the last one to find out (or tell you).
Full disclosure = being widely published. After all, what's the point of only disclosing a hole to a certain number of people, when the people who DON'T get the announcement are the ones that need it?
And to the people who suspect some kind of nastiness on Red Hat's part for their early announcement, the individual at Red Hat who claims personal responsibility has already apologized on the private list, and has admitted to erring. The private list has existed for a long time and has worked very well in the past, allowing several vendors to all release fixes at once to a previously unknown vulnerability. It would have worked fine again in this case, except for the mistake by Red Hat.
I will personally e-mail Red Hat and the person/people involved with security publications to urge them to NOT punish the guy for his "mistake" and push for earlier releases for them.
If you want a step-by-step guide on how this process works, here it is (in order):
- Cracker/hacker discovers a security hole.
- S/he tells his close circle of cracker friends.
- Somebody outside the cracker community finds out about the hole (usually because they were cracked) and tells the author of the software.
- S/he tells a close circle of developer friends.
- They tell the vendors, but say to "keep it a secret".
- They work on fixing the problem for a few days/weeks.
- The vendors FINALLY release a statement and the public gets notified.
All throughout steps 1-7, there are r00ted servers all over the place. This is usually over a long period of time, and nobody knows why because it's never public knowledge. If this was already known by step 3 (or at least step 5), then the sys admins can rush to turn off the daemons or lock down the boxes before they get r00ted.Waiting for a patch for a security hole before telling the public is like waiting for a cure for AIDS before telling the public.
Patches, smantchs...the only people who DON'T know about the bug are the sys admins with the servers! All of the script kiddies and crackers knew even before the guys at Wu-FTP knew! Waiting for a patch and not telling people about this major security hole is just inviting crackers to hack in and root the server!
Who says the OSS vendors had anything to do with the waiting? If software vendors want some notice on holes, then it's only right that if the discoverer of the hole wants to wait for patches, the software vendors should respect that.
Again, it's better to disable the FTP server or change the daemon while waiting for a patch, than letting a server sit WIDE OPEN for somebody to rip it apart! This whole situation is simple logic.
Well, I'll bash MS, and I'll bash the GNU and Linux guys for the same thing. Why was this not released SOONER?
The people who would really use the exploit already know about it in their cracker circles, so why are we limiting the public in this knowledge? Just tell us and we'll shut down the FTPs or temporarily switch the access to a different daemon while you write a patch for it.
Again, this is security by obsurity, and shame on the OSS community for trying to hide it!
One thought that about Napster, and look what happened to them...
I argee. There's something seriously wrong with the development tree of 2.4. Here it is almost a year later and they only now put out the 2.5 tree, only to find out that it's seriously buggy. On previous versions, we didn't rush the releases, and it took LESS time to produce the odd-numbered development version. Is Alan Cox learning some bad MS/RH tricks to get software up and going?
And who says Mozilla is at a slow pace? It's steady, but you don't have much problems with it any more, either. (Sure, it took a lot to REBUILD THE ENTIRE BROWSER, but now we have a product that is far better than IE or Netscape.)
I feel you on that note about TNG, which is a shame for people like me who are watching marathons on TNN. I'm watching these episodes now, and going "Wow...it looks so...errr...primative." Then I compare it to Farscape and it seems enjoyable, even the episodic episodes.
Was Roddenberry that formulatic? (Definately less formulatic than the completely brainless souls who did Voyager and Enterprise.)
In any case, Babylon 5 is still the best sci-fi series ever created, and I was saddened the several times that both TNT and that independant TV company before them had given JMS (producer/creator) the shaft. Crusade was an awesome series that was cancelled only after 13 episodes, probably because of a bad 10PM timeslot. (This is after TNT advertised the living frell outta Babylon 5 and yet left a potential cashcow out to dry.)
Don't get me wrong, though: I love Farscape, but nothing had the emotion and impact as the B5 series.
He did a song with Coldcut called "Every Home a Prison":
"Cuuuuurrrfew... Cuuuuuurrrfew..."
"It's just a nicer word, a more platable word...than martial law!"
Anyway, a little off-topic, but still related to banning kiddies off the streets.
People need to stop associating the meaning of life with web browsing. Web browsing should be about looking at pages displayed clearly, and FAST. It shouldn't be about messaging, email, news groups, chicken soup and making coffee.
It depends on how you look at it. I love using Mozilla for my browser and my e-mail. After all, it's a little annoying clicking on a "mailto" link and having your non-default mailer pop up. So, I've used Mozilla's one forever. It has almost everything I need in a mailer, and I'd prefer to look at the new e-mail thing at the lower-left, rather than load up a seperate e-mail client and check my mail.
Fortunately for me, I've been using IE, which seems to be more stable then the above. It really helps to be using the hedgemonic browser. I'm not sure how these people got their IE browsers to crash, but I certainly remember Netscape crashing perpetually on Linux, since I had to muck with the X and Gnome/KDE settings to get it to work. I never have to do this with Windows, because It Just Works! And faster at that!
Your comparing Netscape/Linux with IE/Windows, which isn't that fair. (Netscape sucks, hands down.) Even with that comparison, though, Netscape will STILL beat IE in W3C standards. When IE 5 came out, I wanted to rip out Bill Gate's beating heart for releasing browser that was so fast and loose with the HTML/CSS standards that it cost millions of dollars for businesses to "repair the damage".
If a page doesn't look right in Mozilla, it's YOUR fault (as a webmaster), not the browsers. If your page is W3C compliant and it doesn't work on IE, bitch at Microsoft, not W3C, Mozilla, Netscape, or anybody else.
Javascript popup disable feature -- Mandatory, mandatory, mandatory.
I'm watching this Mozilla bug entry closely :)
Image disablement. But let the user choose which ones to disable, such as banner adds.
Already in Mozilla, but I've requested a more powerful version.Speed and simplicity. Stop trying to cram everything into one "browser."
If it's a GNU project, why not? Isn't that what Linux is trying to be: the end-all OS for everybody? World domination through GNU!