A well crafted virus can be a remarkable technical challenge. Those of us who remember RTM's 'accident,' boot sector viruses (with code length measured in hundreds of bytes) will realise that this is a field of technology and skill. Although it may give me pause for thought, teaching a course in it is the only way to effectively combat the problem. (and perhaps making the course mandatory for programmers, so they can learn to code properly!)
Spam is different. Read the RFCs in an afternoon, find an open relay, and you can write a $#@(& shell script to spam half the planet. Want something more clever? It's still essentially trivial.
Spam exists because (a) the protocol allows it, and (b) society allows it. Teaching people to spam won't help solve the problem because it's not a technical problem to begin with--it's a social one.
"How to spam" shouldn't be a separate course. It should be three hours of lectures in a full semester mandatory course on ethics, morality, and law. The way to stop spam is to throw the criminals into jail, and quit pussyfooting around with second-rate specialty laws, or courses designed to teach what every third year student should already know.
"Seriously. Why would Mobil build and support an RFID system protected under a 40 bit key? I thought at the very least those speedpass systems had a 64 bit key."
Because they're cheap, lazy, and blind. Like all companies.
Really, can you imagine writing really steamy letters to your sweetie with one of these? It could crush the world of email, and reinvent the art of penmanship!
Fascinating answer. My newer boxes all have both serial and network LOM ports. The older ones only have serial ports, but they give me console access from power-on to OS boot. Servers Shouldn't Have Video Cards.
This 'digital 35mm film cartridge' was originally mentioned in 1997, for a 1998 debut. It made the Wired list two (or maybe three?) years. Now it's seven years later, and you STILL can't buy it, although the company STILL claims it exists.
This should be the first to get a lifetime award, ahead of Duke Nukem.
Re:Moore's Law isn't Speed Doubling, it's Transist
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
Hmm. Makes me think you should be running stuff like this on a different platform entirely. A Sun V490 would probably rip through that in seconds.
Re:Moore's Law isn't Speed Doubling, it's Transist
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
"Unless you've got a REALLY fat pipe, there's a limit on how much pr0n you can process"
First of all, so what? Make a CRT with higher pixel resolution than an LCD if it bugs you, but those 'less defined' pixels lead to a smoother picture.
Regardless, LCDs don't have nearly the black level that CRTs do, nor the dynamic range. They also still have limited viewing angle vs. CRTs, and suffer from shadowing for fast action. They're not bad, they're getting better, but they're still not as good as CRTs.
Al Gore NEVER CLAIMED TO HAVE INVENTED THE INTERNET!!!
NEVER!
NOT ONCE!
He did claim to have pushed for financing of it, which led to the development of it beyond its original boundaries. This is actually true! But he never claimed to have invented the internet.
While I generally agree with you, there are a few counterarguments that need be considered:
"If DDOSing a site you don't like becomes generally acceptable behavior, the net is in some serious trouble."
Keep in mind that this isn't about sites that we don't like, or sites that offend us--it attacks the sites that CRIMINALS use to perpetrate their CRIMES. Theft of service and fraud are pretty obvious, but I can't believe that most spamming isn't tied into organised crime these days.
As for the 'net being founded on people generally playing nice together (with some minor checks and balances), well that's what has led to spammers having as much power and as big of a market as they do. They have abused that basic premise, to the point that the net we once knew and loved has been destroyed.
Doesn't happen. Aside from asinine license keys tied to the MAC address of a system, I've never seen any stupid copy protection schemes anywhere except at the consumer/small business level.
It DOES stimulate the glassmaker and glazier microeconomy. Similarly, promoting spyware and spyware prevention (instead of eradicating the problem) DOES stimulate the desktop computer economy. There is a cost, but the cost is incurred by a different segment (R&D, for instance).
Furthermore, as a society we effectively do bomb ourselves to stimulate the economy. However, we call it planned obsolescence.
Re:Having worked there... fairly recently...
on
Buy a Piece of Acclaim
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Was it a nice desk?
It's not the desk's fault. Buy Greg's ass instead.
If the collateral damage goes up exponentially, maybe people will start paying more attention to the _source_ of the problem. Get rid of the spammers, and all of the enormous energy, bandwidth, and time that goes into fighting them will be dropped. That's a theory, at least.
I don't know if it'll work--I don't think anyone will, until it's been tried.
I think the idea is, 'you can run but you can't hide.' Furthermore, there's no official way turn a spammer into a smoking ruin, so fighting dirty with criminals might be the only answer.
I'm not sure it's a good answer, but it's better than filters.
They upgraded seven machines and 80,000 died? That sounds weird, but maybe they were the AD servers. Why then, on a small number of such critical boxes, didn't they just restore from backups?
Re:Labor Unions unappreciated
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
There's a problem with labour unions. When bad conditions exist, unions should arise naturally. Workers should band together to force employers to behave fairly. There are a lot of problems with this simple 'natural' progression, but that's a fairly decent starter theory.
The problem is that after a union has done its primary work, its focus shifts to maintanance, and policing. At this point, there's little benefit to working for a union in a unionised industry.
So the union guys look at their paychecks (slightly smaller, because of the union dues) and their time (slightly less, because of union functions), and their security (more, because the union will holler bloody murder if they're fired, regardless of the reasons), and see no reason to work as hard as their non-union neighbor.
Perhaps Unions should be dissolved every ten years, and have to be reformed from the ground up each time.
Ah, now you're talking about some interesting stuff. I have the highest regard for OpenVMS, in terms of uptime/availability. But generally, I think that as openVMS is to Sun, Sun is about three times to Linux.
"Sun hardware/software isn't that much more reliable/available as decent PC hardware/software..."
I disagree with that. The HP/Compaq guys at work still have more unanticipated hardware failures than the Sun/HP bunch, and I don't know who makes better x86 servers than HP. Sun's preventative diagnostics are just better (and that's not in the E10k, but the more modern stuff).
At the end of the day, _real_ HA needs clustering of some sort on every platform. Sun hardware and Solaris, in my experience, is better at pseudo-HA on a single system than x86/Linux at every turn. Linux is good, it's improving, but Sun still wins out in many arenas.
To be fair, Schwartz seems to have a religious hatred of Linux. Sun as a company though, has finally got their act together. As a direct result, we're about to buy 25 Sun Linux workstations.
Slashdot Mirror
"If she had been a man she would have been crucified but it seems nobody wanted to look like a misogynist."
I call bullshit. I've been ranting against her since the day she was hired, and many many others have as well.
CEOs don't get crucified. Look at what Jeff Immelt is doing to GE, and he's still getting praised.
A well crafted virus can be a remarkable technical challenge. Those of us who remember RTM's 'accident,' boot sector viruses (with code length measured in hundreds of bytes) will realise that this is a field of technology and skill. Although it may give me pause for thought, teaching a course in it is the only way to effectively combat the problem. (and perhaps making the course mandatory for programmers, so they can learn to code properly!)
Spam is different. Read the RFCs in an afternoon, find an open relay, and you can write a $#@(& shell script to spam half the planet. Want something more clever? It's still essentially trivial.
Spam exists because (a) the protocol allows it, and (b) society allows it. Teaching people to spam won't help solve the problem because it's not a technical problem to begin with--it's a social one.
"How to spam" shouldn't be a separate course. It should be three hours of lectures in a full semester mandatory course on ethics, morality, and law. The way to stop spam is to throw the criminals into jail, and quit pussyfooting around with second-rate specialty laws, or courses designed to teach what every third year student should already know.
White hat hackers by definition don't break into any systems other than their own, and those they're contracted to attack (by the owners).
Good UPSes and mag tape. It's still what companies use.
"Seriously. Why would Mobil build and support an RFID system protected under a 40 bit key? I thought at the very least those speedpass systems had a 64 bit key."
Because they're cheap, lazy, and blind. Like all companies.
They already make better products. Better than Linux, at any rate.
Really, can you imagine writing really steamy letters to your sweetie with one of these? It could crush the world of email, and reinvent the art of penmanship!
Fascinating answer. My newer boxes all have both serial and network LOM ports. The older ones only have serial ports, but they give me console access from power-on to OS boot. Servers Shouldn't Have Video Cards.
This 'digital 35mm film cartridge' was originally mentioned in 1997, for a 1998 debut. It made the Wired list two (or maybe three?) years. Now it's seven years later, and you STILL can't buy it, although the company STILL claims it exists.
This should be the first to get a lifetime award, ahead of Duke Nukem.
Hmm. Makes me think you should be running stuff like this on a different platform entirely. A Sun V490 would probably rip through that in seconds.
"Unless you've got a REALLY fat pipe, there's a limit on how much pr0n you can process"
Amateur!!!
First of all, so what? Make a CRT with higher pixel resolution than an LCD if it bugs you, but those 'less defined' pixels lead to a smoother picture.
Regardless, LCDs don't have nearly the black level that CRTs do, nor the dynamic range. They also still have limited viewing angle vs. CRTs, and suffer from shadowing for fast action. They're not bad, they're getting better, but they're still not as good as CRTs.
How, precisely, are you measuring market share?
I'd love to see some numbers on that.
Al Gore NEVER CLAIMED TO HAVE INVENTED THE INTERNET!!!
NEVER!
NOT ONCE!
He did claim to have pushed for financing of it, which led to the development of it beyond its original boundaries. This is actually true! But he never claimed to have invented the internet.
While I generally agree with you, there are a few counterarguments that need be considered:
"If DDOSing a site you don't like becomes generally acceptable behavior, the net is in some serious trouble."
Keep in mind that this isn't about sites that we don't like, or sites that offend us--it attacks the sites that CRIMINALS use to perpetrate their CRIMES. Theft of service and fraud are pretty obvious, but I can't believe that most spamming isn't tied into organised crime these days.
As for the 'net being founded on people generally playing nice together (with some minor checks and balances), well that's what has led to spammers having as much power and as big of a market as they do. They have abused that basic premise, to the point that the net we once knew and loved has been destroyed.
In enterprise software?
Doesn't happen. Aside from asinine license keys tied to the MAC address of a system, I've never seen any stupid copy protection schemes anywhere except at the consumer/small business level.
There are two important points to remember.
It DOES stimulate the glassmaker and glazier microeconomy. Similarly, promoting spyware and spyware prevention (instead of eradicating the problem) DOES stimulate the desktop computer economy. There is a cost, but the cost is incurred by a different segment (R&D, for instance).
Furthermore, as a society we effectively do bomb ourselves to stimulate the economy. However, we call it planned obsolescence.
Was it a nice desk?
It's not the desk's fault. Buy Greg's ass instead.
So which nation gets dibs?
I'm not sure.
If the collateral damage goes up exponentially, maybe people will start paying more attention to the _source_ of the problem. Get rid of the spammers, and all of the enormous energy, bandwidth, and time that goes into fighting them will be dropped. That's a theory, at least.
I don't know if it'll work--I don't think anyone will, until it's been tried.
I think the idea is, 'you can run but you can't hide.' Furthermore, there's no official way turn a spammer into a smoking ruin, so fighting dirty with criminals might be the only answer.
I'm not sure it's a good answer, but it's better than filters.
They upgraded seven machines and 80,000 died? That sounds weird, but maybe they were the AD servers. Why then, on a small number of such critical boxes, didn't they just restore from backups?
There's a problem with labour unions. When bad conditions exist, unions should arise naturally. Workers should band together to force employers to behave fairly. There are a lot of problems with this simple 'natural' progression, but that's a fairly decent starter theory.
The problem is that after a union has done its primary work, its focus shifts to maintanance, and policing. At this point, there's little benefit to working for a union in a unionised industry.
So the union guys look at their paychecks (slightly smaller, because of the union dues) and their time (slightly less, because of union functions), and their security (more, because the union will holler bloody murder if they're fired, regardless of the reasons), and see no reason to work as hard as their non-union neighbor.
Perhaps Unions should be dissolved every ten years, and have to be reformed from the ground up each time.
Ah, now you're talking about some interesting stuff. I have the highest regard for OpenVMS, in terms of uptime/availability. But generally, I think that as openVMS is to Sun, Sun is about three times to Linux.
"Sun hardware/software isn't that much more reliable/available as decent PC hardware/software..."
I disagree with that. The HP/Compaq guys at work still have more unanticipated hardware failures than the Sun/HP bunch, and I don't know who makes better x86 servers than HP. Sun's preventative diagnostics are just better (and that's not in the E10k, but the more modern stuff).
At the end of the day, _real_ HA needs clustering of some sort on every platform. Sun hardware and Solaris, in my experience, is better at pseudo-HA on a single system than x86/Linux at every turn. Linux is good, it's improving, but Sun still wins out in many arenas.
To be fair, Schwartz seems to have a religious hatred of Linux. Sun as a company though, has finally got their act together. As a direct result, we're about to buy 25 Sun Linux workstations.