And, said both Blanke and Gordon, the trauma of having electrodes implanted in one's skull, plus the fear and uncertainty that go along with a complex clinical procedure, could possibly help trigger such a misfiring of information, such as the case of the Geneva patient.
Then it wasn't the electrodes but the fear of becoming a Borg which caused the out-of-body experience.
If you're running your own DNS and email server, use email addresses with subdomains which will become invalid after some time.
For example, I'm a quite active Usenet poster, using "[something]@expires-[year][month].[mydomain]" as my email address. "expires-200209" means the entire subdomain will be kicked after Sep 30. After that time, the spammer won't find a MX record for that subdomain and has no possibility to annoy me with his junk.
For legitimate correspondents, I'm telling them email adresses with a subdomain which will never expire or only very far in the future.
The Familiar GNU/Linux distro has packages of ScummVM ready to install. Only the game data files have to be added, for Purple Tentacle to conquer the world on a iPAQ, Zaurus or Yopy.:-)
A lot of theme creators were motivated to make really good themes, and many of the themes-org-since-last-autumn submissions were actually very artful and usable.
Yet after some time, it was no longer a secret that only one person - the "reviewer" - set the marble rating according to his or her taste. The reviewer who constantly rated my themes didn't like my style (as it differed quite a bit from his design), so I didn't have any chance to get more than 4, at maximum 6 out of 10 marbles. Other submissions which more or less imitated a reviewer's style got 8, 9 or even 10 marbles even if they were at most average or a remake of a former theme.
Very soon the number of daily submissions decreased significantly, and many people complained about the unfair rating system. I made a few more themes even before themes.org became unusable but refused to submit them before the reviewing system gets redesigned.
Both at work and at home, Evolution is my primary email and PIM software. It is a really good idea for Ximian to provide a plugin capable of talking to a Microsoft Exchange server through its proprietary interfaces.
Yet a much more important issue is the other direction - open and freely accessible groupware protocols implemented by a free-as-in-speech server solution, with Outlook connectivity provided by a Windoze plugin. For example, the Bill Workgroup Server takes this approach.
Microsoft Exchange is not the only major proprietary groupware solution - Lotus Notes is here to stay, to be even more proprietary - it's quite impossible to read or write Lotus NSF files with anything but Lotus software. Free groupware standards exist and should be used by anyone. The user should have free choice between PHPgroupware, Evolution, Outlook and Lotus Notes, similar to IMAP providing choice between lots of different email clients.
...I don't see games improving security and stability on user workstations, especially on w1nd0z3 boxes. The worst things are multiplayer games which demand quite some bandwidth or even require alterations on the network infrastructure - yes, some people are smart enough... So if possible, please stay with rather non-intrusive games like Freecell or Pinball.
For *n?x people, text mode MUDs are great games to play. They don't affect any security issues (they run on an external host), and if you really hear your boss coming in too late, it's just one out of a dozen xterms on your desktop, so switching to a different one won't be suspicious at all.;-)
What about choosing a license for a library or a dynamic module between M$' "property" and Free software which does not count as IPR Imparing License but permits being used by GPL'd programs?
For example, the Linux kernel is GPL'd but allows non-Free modules to be loaded dynamically. Lots of Free programs may be linked against non-Free system libraries, e. g. on AIX or Solaris. Why can't we do the same with Samba? Of course, the module or library has to be optional, but so is a non-Free kernel module.
So it won't take very long until the *n?x people will get a lot of cheap or even free >1 GHz boxes which are too slow for Longhorn, just as a 400 MHz box is considered as underpowered for XP. Recycling at its best;-)
it doesn't gain the attacker anything (unlike rooting a box)
Sometimes DoS can be a not-really-fine but very effective method of self-defense. In Germany we have a quite big problem with spam advertising dialers - little programs which redirect a w1nd0z3 box's internet dialup connection to an extremely expensive special number which is normally used for phone sex or premium services. One short connection can cost up to 900 € (that's no joke, there's no limit), and as some dialers hide well while replacing the default connection, some people got a phone bill of more than 10000 € at the end of the month.
During the second halfth of March, I got about five of these dialer spams each day. Other people got even more. The web hoster - a company selling these dialers - didn't act against any incidence of spam, the download accounts remained open for weeks regardless of any complaints. Their uplink... well, UUnet. As the discussion on the Usenet forum "de.admin.net-abuse.mail" went on, even the web hoster's boss himself joined and couldn't understand to be responsible for knowingly tolerating his customers abusing his service - of course he made a lot of money even by spamvertised dialers.
About a week ago, some spam victims were completely fed up. As the legal methods didn't work at all, the dialer should be made unavailable by distributed mass-downloading. The threat escalated in a clear message to the site maintainer - either go against your spamming customers or see your dialer being downloaded until the server blows the whistle.
The story appeared on Heise News which has a quite large reader base in Germany, to be read by lots of angry people whose inboxes were full of dialer spam. The "Heise effect" was enough for the site maintainer to become really scared - lots of DSL and broadband users started to download the dialer not only once but as often as they could. The web server became too busy to serve dialers even to people who would want it. The company selling these dialers didn't have any choice - either stop supporting spammers or have their dialer server slashdotted until it blows the whistle. Only a day later the company's boss agreed on getting rid of and seeking legal action against spamming customers.
A few days later, another spam went around, advertising a dialer hosted on an Eastern-European web server. Same game: the spam victims squeezed the dialer out of the web server as many times as possible. The site got hosed so badly that even a few hours after the spam incident, the dialer was no longer available.
As a result, if you really want to hit a spammer, DoS^H^H^H/.ing his web site - especially large files or CGI scripts - has finally proved as much more effective than blacklisting, LARTing or anything else (which still remains useful, though). Even big providers will notice a gigabyte-large traffic peak towards only one target.
...to run a publicly accessible Internet server, no proof of qualification is required at all. In my experience, the worst security threats are neither open-source nor closed-source software, but the people who run it. Open email relays on Sendmail 8.8 (open source) oder Exchange 5.0 (closed source) with non-working postmaster recipients and dozens of open TCP/UDP ports show that their admins don't care at all about their system, they even seem to forget that it is connected to and reachable from the Internet. They will find it slow and unreactive, but they don't even have the slightest idea what could be wrong. Out-of-the-box systems which don't require even basic network knowledge are even worsening this problem - so if at all, include expire-features into these systems.
If providers of hosting and connectivity services require their customers to prove their knowledge with a standardized certification, the Internet would miss thousands of unsafe and dangerous systems, and upgrading server software will be one of the basic tasks of a qualified administrator.
AFAIR on the former FidoNet a few years ago my uplink really wanted to know if I was competent enough to run an official node, and FidoNet wasn't too easy to understand either.
Slashdot Mirror
How could my server ever reach 1000 days of uptime with Linus throwing out new major kernel releases every two years? ;-)
Then it wasn't the electrodes but the fear of becoming a Borg which caused the out-of-body experience.
For example, I'm a quite active Usenet poster, using "[something]@expires-[year][month].[mydomain]" as my email address. "expires-200209" means the entire subdomain will be kicked after Sep 30. After that time, the spammer won't find a MX record for that subdomain and has no possibility to annoy me with his junk.
For legitimate correspondents, I'm telling them email adresses with a subdomain which will never expire or only very far in the future.
Running the risk of having my cute web server /.'d until it blows the whistle, here is a more detailed draft.
DocSnyder.
# chmod 0 /bin/cp
/cdrom/warez /work/FileServer/w4r3z /bin/cp: Permission denied
$ cp -ra
bash:
So what? The dumb user will be satisfied with that solution, and the 1337 h4x0r will find a way around it anyway.
DocSnyder.
A small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind.
Wait a few weeks until Microsoft confirms to use OpenSSH code within WMP...
...for Palladium to get h4x0r3d and become as worthless as any existing DRM technologies?
The Familiar GNU/Linux distro has packages of ScummVM ready to install. Only the game data files have to be added, for Purple Tentacle to conquer the world on a iPAQ, Zaurus or Yopy. :-)
With WLAN or Bluetooth networking, you could even build a classroom-wide Beowulf cluster _with_ PDAs...
...and take that fscking helmet off your slashdotted web server.
...against the /. effect.
Yet after some time, it was no longer a secret that only one person - the "reviewer" - set the marble rating according to his or her taste. The reviewer who constantly rated my themes didn't like my style (as it differed quite a bit from his design), so I didn't have any chance to get more than 4, at maximum 6 out of 10 marbles. Other submissions which more or less imitated a reviewer's style got 8, 9 or even 10 marbles even if they were at most average or a remake of a former theme.
Very soon the number of daily submissions decreased significantly, and many people complained about the unfair rating system. I made a few more themes even before themes.org became unusable but refused to submit them before the reviewing system gets redesigned.
That's why they can't remove the browser...
Yet a much more important issue is the other direction - open and freely accessible groupware protocols implemented by a free-as-in-speech server solution, with Outlook connectivity provided by a Windoze plugin. For example, the Bill Workgroup Server takes this approach.
Microsoft Exchange is not the only major proprietary groupware solution - Lotus Notes is here to stay, to be even more proprietary - it's quite impossible to read or write Lotus NSF files with anything but Lotus software. Free groupware standards exist and should be used by anyone. The user should have free choice between PHPgroupware, Evolution, Outlook and Lotus Notes, similar to IMAP providing choice between lots of different email clients.
For *n?x people, text mode MUDs are great games to play. They don't affect any security issues (they run on an external host), and if you really hear your boss coming in too late, it's just one out of a dozen xterms on your desktop, so switching to a different one won't be suspicious at all. ;-)
Seattle Times is late with the story. It's April 18th, not April 1st... ;-)
If the music industry can't satisfy my wishes but the file sharing networks can, what do you expect me to do?
For example, the Linux kernel is GPL'd but allows non-Free modules to be loaded dynamically. Lots of Free programs may be linked against non-Free system libraries, e. g. on AIX or Solaris. Why can't we do the same with Samba? Of course, the module or library has to be optional, but so is a non-Free kernel module.
So it won't take very long until the *n?x people will get a lot of cheap or even free >1 GHz boxes which are too slow for Longhorn, just as a 400 MHz box is considered as underpowered for XP. Recycling at its best ;-)
- Yes-No dialogs with a CowboyNeal option
Sometimes DoS can be a not-really-fine but very effective method of self-defense. In Germany we have a quite big problem with spam advertising dialers - little programs which redirect a w1nd0z3 box's internet dialup connection to an extremely expensive special number which is normally used for phone sex or premium services. One short connection can cost up to 900 € (that's no joke, there's no limit), and as some dialers hide well while replacing the default connection, some people got a phone bill of more than 10000 € at the end of the month.
During the second halfth of March, I got about five of these dialer spams each day. Other people got even more. The web hoster - a company selling these dialers - didn't act against any incidence of spam, the download accounts remained open for weeks regardless of any complaints. Their uplink... well, UUnet. As the discussion on the Usenet forum "de.admin.net-abuse.mail" went on, even the web hoster's boss himself joined and couldn't understand to be responsible for knowingly tolerating his customers abusing his service - of course he made a lot of money even by spamvertised dialers.
About a week ago, some spam victims were completely fed up. As the legal methods didn't work at all, the dialer should be made unavailable by distributed mass-downloading. The threat escalated in a clear message to the site maintainer - either go against your spamming customers or see your dialer being downloaded until the server blows the whistle.
The story appeared on Heise News which has a quite large reader base in Germany, to be read by lots of angry people whose inboxes were full of dialer spam. The "Heise effect" was enough for the site maintainer to become really scared - lots of DSL and broadband users started to download the dialer not only once but as often as they could. The web server became too busy to serve dialers even to people who would want it. The company selling these dialers didn't have any choice - either stop supporting spammers or have their dialer server slashdotted until it blows the whistle. Only a day later the company's boss agreed on getting rid of and seeking legal action against spamming customers.
A few days later, another spam went around, advertising a dialer hosted on an Eastern-European web server. Same game: the spam victims squeezed the dialer out of the web server as many times as possible. The site got hosed so badly that even a few hours after the spam incident, the dialer was no longer available.
As a result, if you really want to hit a spammer, DoS^H^H^H/.ing his web site - especially large files or CGI scripts - has finally proved as much more effective than blacklisting, LARTing or anything else (which still remains useful, though). Even big providers will notice a gigabyte-large traffic peak towards only one target.
fsck 1.27 (8-Mar-2002)
Could not determine filesystem type for
You see, the CD is fscked.
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If providers of hosting and connectivity services require their customers to prove their knowledge with a standardized certification, the Internet would miss thousands of unsafe and dangerous systems, and upgrading server software will be one of the basic tasks of a qualified administrator.
AFAIR on the former FidoNet a few years ago my uplink really wanted to know if I was competent enough to run an official node, and FidoNet wasn't too easy to understand either.