I think that another aspect of this should be to make sure that people talk to the delegation for their local (or favorite) government.
Make sure that they know that you dislike software patents and why. Make sure that they know that this is likely to bite them on the ass in the near future -- in the form of more expensive software and less choice in software and software implementations.
Would SCO's patents would become worthless? Poor Darl McBride... what would become of him?
If I remember correctly they have only one.
You mean they've patented holding Linux users hostage???
The bastards!
Re:GUI does not imply !(batchable||scriptable)
on
E-Postage for Linux?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...or otherwise unusable through automation. Many widely used, widely emulated GUI applications are usable through a command line or script interface.
Yeah, but we're talking about Windows here. It's not that MS-Windows apps aren't capable of doing scripting -- just that there seems to be something of a mindset in the windows world that just doesn't want to go there.
That would be ex-parte. That is a really dangerous game to play. If the judge believes that you lied to get the injunction you is in deep doo-doo. I don't see why there would be a need for secrecy in this instance however. If the case was urgent there should be a review this week, not three weeks after the initial order.
Ex-Parte orders in a case like this imply that the plaintif wants relief in a hurry (as opposed to in secret)... The ones that I've seen have had attached conditions that the defendant can make a motion to toss the injunction on 24-48 hours notice.
Although there is a presumption that a plaintif will move forward on such cases with speed, I've been involved in a case where -- 4 years after getting an interlocutory injunction, the lawyer for the plaintif was not only admitting, but actually arguing that not all the defendants had even been properly served with notice (and this was a seasoned lawyer -- she was called to the bench about 2 years later (Judges in Canada are appointed, not elected)).
I presume that different jurisdictions have different practices in the area of interim and ex-parte injunctions.
Another thing missing from the report is any mention of the reply filled by AOL? Was AOL even aware of the hearing? In most cases a court order does not have immediate effect, thus allowing the defendant to file an appeal. It seems unlikely that a court would issue an order with immediate effect given that AOL has had considerable success in preventing spammers gaining orders of this type in the past.
It looks like this order was gotten pretty much immediately on filing the lawsuit -- (I can't remember the name for this kind of injunctions).
These sorts of injunctions are considered 'emergency' in nature -- where there is a very easily recognizable ill effect of the defendants's actions and an apparent need for immediate remedy. On the other hand, since these are done without right to reply for the defendant, the moving party is required to give full disclosure of all relevant facts available to them to the court.
IF CI hosting is allowing spammers on their network and suggesting anything to the contrary to the court in their application for this injunction, they are likely to get seriously bitchslapped by the courts when that info comes out.
Does anybody have a list of CL IPs out there that I can check for spamming? (I've got a reasnoable archive of spam om my box).
I very nearly took them to court over it. CI Host has spammers as customers. I told them about a few that were causing problems for me, and they never did anything about them.
You might want to provide an affidavit to AOL on this. CI appears to have gotten their injunction on the basis of that they've got a really tight anti-spam policy. If they're providing support to commercial spammers, then AOL has (or should have) the right to block them.
I think that it may be something different about what AOL support is saying about CI hosting... It's one thing to simply report that AOL gets to much spam from CI customers -- it's another thing to call them spam bags.... (although I really like the term).
Spamming is illegal in many states, and congress is looking at making it nationally illegal. To say that you have a right to spam is silly.
Spamming is all about finances, and refusing to route IPs from a hosting company that supports spammers is a way to shift the finances against them allowing spammers on their net.
Consequently, I have a nice list of IP addresses of infected boxes. But they're mostly dsl users in Houston TX off of swbell.net. Who at swbell.net would be in a position to actually do anything about their problem?
Send a message to test.net@abuse.net and follow the instructions to sign up for the abuse.net service.
You can then send a message to swbell.net@abuse.net and they'll do a lookup of the best address to send spam complaints to (this would more or less qualify).
If you're not willing to do that, then you can always use the default of : abuse@swbell.net. Most sane domains will have some sort of respnse from abuse@thatdomain.com (it's specified in a couple of RFCs).
yeah distribute the updates through p2p and have the worms only install signed patches only the author has the private key so the worm can't be disabled by comprimiseing the net
On the other hand, posession of the private key would pretty much prove beyond a shadow of a doubt who's the "owner" of that worm.
The viruses will be 'calling home' every Friday and Sunday for the next few weeks. There's still lots of time to install such scripts.
If nothing else, put together a script that will log the IPs of machines that connect for further instructions and send a message to their responsible ISP asking them to have the users clean up their system.
I"ve already got a prototype set of scripts if anybody's intersted.
Ultimately, could Microsoft be blamed for these viruses?
Read the MS EULA. Microsoft may be indemnifying people against possible IP problems (for hidden software). On the other hand, damned if they're going to indemnify their users against real problems.
A better challenge would be to put together a prototype system with an easter egg for munching the results, and then challenge the electoral people to find the easter egg. -- just to prove how hard that is to do without the source and a paper trail.
Usually, someone should say "isn't hardcoding one single IP address for a service a bad design idea?"
They didn't hardcode just one address. They hardcoded a bunch of them but, by the time UWisc figured out what was happening, they were the only one of the public servers left standing (at least, at the original IP address). BTW: {,X}NTPD doesn't support DNS names for all parts of it's config file, either.
In other words, NetGear managed to DOS a number of public NTP servers out of existence.
The problem here really isn't one of hardcoding a single IP address. It's a problem of taking a shortcut to RFCs and other protocol documentation and not seriously considering the long term consequences. And it's not likely to be caught in a normal code review because the problem looks like the result of a reasonably high-level design trade off. (hard-coded ping times, no DNS and fixed source port all smell of trying to delete "unnecessary" code from the PROM).
This is rather like a littering problem: "It's just one candy wrapper" seems harmless, until you multiply it by 300,000 people using the same road daily and the 2 year+ lifetime of some plasticised wrappers. Similarly, "It's just one packet a second" sounds harmless until you consider the effects of a 1 Million unit product run.
(BTW: I'm guessing that UWM's most recent NTP spike was when the power came back on in NewYork and Ontario last week).
It's not just the razors you're shaving with. It's being able to track EVERYTHING that you buy... If I gain access to the database, I could find out that you're wearing shorts that were bought by a guy from Tulsa yesterday, and you've got a new set of condoms in your briefcase (minus two).
I remember a political cartoon, where a clerk is yelling to the back of the booth:
"The guy with hemeroids wants to know how much information we're collecting on him!"
In that case, you might consider just segmenting your internal network into 'cells', where the different cells have limited access to each other. (which, for most networks, is appropriate). That way, you cut down the work you have to do if one or two infected laptops make it into the system.
In a more extreme case, I have one friend who set up his network so that just about every server is on it's own leg of the firewall. Since each server has a limited need to be in communication with the others, only that limited connectivity is allowed.
Unless they're all running Kazza, those laptops are unlikely to have much need to communicate directly with each other. Take advantage of that in desiging your network security.
From the SecurityFocus article: ... but in lots of cases you've got switches and valves and little override buttons on this thing and that thing that could cause a component to shut down as quickly as any digital system," Davis says.
This may be true, but Osama's deputies can't push a physical override button from a laptop in Eastern Afghanistan, or turn a hand-valve with a targeted virus.
No firewall will save you from a manager with a laptop.
That's true of any minimal firewall. You can always put laptops on their own subnet(s) -- at least that way, the laptops might be able to infect themselves, but they'll need a good bit more work to infect the rest of the internal net.
Most laptop users do not need full access to the internal network. You can often limit them to web access to the outside world and direct access to the internal file/print servers. Give them their own secondary domain controller (Samba?) and lock that sucker down like alcatraz.
This won't completely secure your system, but it will give some real protection from the more common greeblies.
Giving laptops unrestricted access to the internal network is like dating a hooker who doesn't use condoms. You never know what you're gonna get the next time you're plugged in.
3) In response to Blaster probe, install itself on Blaster-infested machine and start over at 1).
I think you'd want to include some sort of mutex to make sure that only one copt of the program runs on a box. Once the program gets anywhere near common,, I'd expect that any box running the originaal worm would get hundreds (if not thousands) of counter-attacks.
On a tangent, I've got a script that allows me to use my firewall logs to auto-generate warning emails to the responsible ISP of the attacking system, After that thing was running for half an hour, I realized that I was effectively mail-bombing my ISP.
sigh....
SO, Linux needs to break into the homes. And for that to happen, it needs to be a little easier to set up, administer, and use
easy to set up and install will come when we've got more people getting Linux pre-installed as a standard.
I've set up Linux for two room-mates now. I did the first one on a lark -- (installed a spare hard drive with RH 7.3 from my dead secondary box on it). a couple of weeks later I thought that he wasn't using it, but it turns out that he was using it, but he'd just been having almost zero problems with it.
For my second room-mate, I set up RH8 and then added things like the MP3 mod for xmms and mplayer in place of xine (which seems to be non-functional). Oh yeah, I also installed the most recent version of gaim. I set it up after his MS Windows installation seemed to self-destruct on him (almost making the disk unreadable in the process). He's had very few problems since then, and most of them have been remote problems that he thought were the fault of Linux. I think it's been two months since he's asked me for help.
Every once in a while I install all the update RPMS.
for the most part, people's reluctance to use Windows has more to do with the fact that it's unfamiliar to them, and using Microsoft software has been traumatic enough that trying something 'experimental' has them scared shitless, than it has to do with any intrinsic problems with Linux.
It's kind of ironic that the one thing keeping most people from moving from Windows is precisely that Windows is sooooo bad. (( Microsoft Windows: perpetually beta software for production systems ))
Last I heard, you are now charged $8 for 4 (pretty crappy) chicken wings.
You've come a long way, baby...
I've been flying since I was a baby, and an early memory was being pissed off that the Air Canada stewardesses kept on insisting on pre-slicing my steak for me...
Steak and salad for lunch (steak just slightly pink in the middle) with fruit salad for desert. Real metal knifes and forks and plastic plates that were probably more indestructible than corningware.
Now, I feel lucky to get a chicken sandwich in a paper bag.
Slashdot Mirror
When she finds out what I did with the engagement ring I bought yesterday, I'll be lucky if I live long enough to sleep in the doghouse.
Make sure that they know that you dislike software patents and why. Make sure that they know that this is likely to bite them on the ass in the near future -- in the form of more expensive software and less choice in software and software implementations.
I think I'm going to patent the process!
If I remember correctly they have only one.
You mean they've patented holding Linux users hostage???
The bastards!
Yeah, but we're talking about Windows here. It's not that MS-Windows apps aren't capable of doing scripting -- just that there seems to be something of a mindset in the windows world that just doesn't want to go there.
Ex-Parte orders in a case like this imply that the plaintif wants relief in a hurry (as opposed to in secret)... The ones that I've seen have had attached conditions that the defendant can make a motion to toss the injunction on 24-48 hours notice.
Although there is a presumption that a plaintif will move forward on such cases with speed, I've been involved in a case where -- 4 years after getting an interlocutory injunction, the lawyer for the plaintif was not only admitting, but actually arguing that not all the defendants had even been properly served with notice (and this was a seasoned lawyer -- she was called to the bench about 2 years later (Judges in Canada are appointed, not elected)).
I presume that different jurisdictions have different practices in the area of interim and ex-parte injunctions.
It looks like this order was gotten pretty much immediately on filing the lawsuit -- (I can't remember the name for this kind of injunctions).
These sorts of injunctions are considered 'emergency' in nature -- where there is a very easily recognizable ill effect of the defendants's actions and an apparent need for immediate remedy. On the other hand, since these are done without right to reply for the defendant, the moving party is required to give full disclosure of all relevant facts available to them to the court.
IF CI hosting is allowing spammers on their network and suggesting anything to the contrary to the court in their application for this injunction, they are likely to get seriously bitchslapped by the courts when that info comes out.
Does anybody have a list of CL IPs out there that I can check for spamming? (I've got a reasnoable archive of spam om my box).
You might want to provide an affidavit to AOL on this. CI appears to have gotten their injunction on the basis of that they've got a really tight anti-spam policy. If they're providing support to commercial spammers, then AOL has (or should have) the right to block them.
I think that it may be something different about what AOL support is saying about CI hosting... It's one thing to simply report that AOL gets to much spam from CI customers -- it's another thing to call them spam bags.... (although I really like the term).
Spamming is illegal in many states, and congress is looking at making it nationally illegal. To say that you have a right to spam is silly.
Spamming is all about finances, and refusing to route IPs from a hosting company that supports spammers is a way to shift the finances against them allowing spammers on their net.
Send a message to test.net@abuse.net and follow the instructions to sign up for the abuse.net service.
You can then send a message to swbell.net@abuse.net and they'll do a lookup of the best address to send spam complaints to (this would more or less qualify).
If you're not willing to do that, then you can always use the default of : abuse@swbell.net. Most sane domains will have some sort of respnse from abuse@thatdomain.com (it's specified in a couple of RFCs).
I ignore the 'reply-to' field, and track the email via the Recieved lines from my box, or my ISP's Mailserver (whomever got the message first).
On the other hand, posession of the private key would pretty much prove beyond a shadow of a doubt who's the "owner" of that worm.
Shades of Colossus.... and, yeah, This is gonna happen sooner or later.
If nothing else, put together a script that will log the IPs of machines that connect for further instructions and send a message to their responsible ISP asking them to have the users clean up their system.
I"ve already got a prototype set of scripts if anybody's intersted.
Read the MS EULA. Microsoft may be indemnifying people against possible IP problems (for hidden software). On the other hand, damned if they're going to indemnify their users against real problems.
Buy it quick, or the offer goes up in smoke!
A better challenge would be to put together a prototype system with an easter egg for munching the results, and then challenge the electoral people to find the easter egg. -- just to prove how hard that is to do without the source and a paper trail.
They didn't hardcode just one address. They hardcoded a bunch of them but, by the time UWisc figured out what was happening, they were the only one of the public servers left standing (at least, at the original IP address). BTW: {,X}NTPD doesn't support DNS names for all parts of it's config file, either.
In other words, NetGear managed to DOS a number of public NTP servers out of existence.
The problem here really isn't one of hardcoding a single IP address. It's a problem of taking a shortcut to RFCs and other protocol documentation and not seriously considering the long term consequences. And it's not likely to be caught in a normal code review because the problem looks like the result of a reasonably high-level design trade off. (hard-coded ping times, no DNS and fixed source port all smell of trying to delete "unnecessary" code from the PROM).
This is rather like a littering problem: "It's just one candy wrapper" seems harmless, until you multiply it by 300,000 people using the same road daily and the 2 year+ lifetime of some plasticised wrappers. Similarly, "It's just one packet a second" sounds harmless until you consider the effects of a 1 Million unit product run.
(BTW: I'm guessing that UWM's most recent NTP spike was when the power came back on in NewYork and Ontario last week).
I remember a political cartoon, where a clerk is yelling to the back of the booth:
Anybody who tries to crack open his skull to see what's inside, will be stopped by his lawyers and forced to sign an NDA, first.
In a more extreme case, I have one friend who set up his network so that just about every server is on it's own leg of the firewall. Since each server has a limited need to be in communication with the others, only that limited connectivity is allowed.
Unless they're all running Kazza, those laptops are unlikely to have much need to communicate directly with each other. Take advantage of that in desiging your network security.
This may be true, but Osama's deputies can't push a physical override button from a laptop in Eastern Afghanistan, or turn a hand-valve with a targeted virus.
That's true of any minimal firewall. You can always put laptops on their own subnet(s) -- at least that way, the laptops might be able to infect themselves, but they'll need a good bit more work to infect the rest of the internal net.
Most laptop users do not need full access to the internal network. You can often limit them to web access to the outside world and direct access to the internal file/print servers. Give them their own secondary domain controller (Samba?) and lock that sucker down like alcatraz.
This won't completely secure your system, but it will give some real protection from the more common greeblies.
Giving laptops unrestricted access to the internal network is like dating a hooker who doesn't use condoms. You never know what you're gonna get the next time you're plugged in.
I think you'd want to include some sort of mutex to make sure that only one copt of the program runs on a box. Once the program gets anywhere near common,, I'd expect that any box running the originaal worm would get hundreds (if not thousands) of counter-attacks.
On a tangent, I've got a script that allows me to use my firewall logs to auto-generate warning emails to the responsible ISP of the attacking system, After that thing was running for half an hour, I realized that I was effectively mail-bombing my ISP. sigh....
Happily, they haven't cut off my account.
easy to set up and install will come when we've got more people getting Linux pre-installed as a standard.
I've set up Linux for two room-mates now. I did the first one on a lark -- (installed a spare hard drive with RH 7.3 from my dead secondary box on it). a couple of weeks later I thought that he wasn't using it, but it turns out that he was using it, but he'd just been having almost zero problems with it.
For my second room-mate, I set up RH8 and then added things like the MP3 mod for xmms and mplayer in place of xine (which seems to be non-functional). Oh yeah, I also installed the most recent version of gaim. I set it up after his MS Windows installation seemed to self-destruct on him (almost making the disk unreadable in the process). He's had very few problems since then, and most of them have been remote problems that he thought were the fault of Linux. I think it's been two months since he's asked me for help.
Every once in a while I install all the update RPMS.
for the most part, people's reluctance to use Windows has more to do with the fact that it's unfamiliar to them, and using Microsoft software has been traumatic enough that trying something 'experimental' has them scared shitless, than it has to do with any intrinsic problems with Linux.
It's kind of ironic that the one thing keeping most people from moving from Windows is precisely that Windows is sooooo bad. (( Microsoft Windows: perpetually beta software for production systems ))
You've come a long way, baby...
I've been flying since I was a baby, and an early memory was being pissed off that the Air Canada stewardesses kept on insisting on pre-slicing my steak for me...
Steak and salad for lunch (steak just slightly pink in the middle) with fruit salad for desert. Real metal knifes and forks and plastic plates that were probably more indestructible than corningware.
Now, I feel lucky to get a chicken sandwich in a paper bag.