> There's absolutely nothing to stop anybody from installing an executable > that runs automatically under a user account, without ever needing root. > And that executable can do a lot of the things it may want to do without > ever needing root access, either.
This is the whole point of SELinux. Not saying SELinux is uncrackable, but it is designed to counter such attacks. Although properly setting up a fully protected SELinux environment may be tedious and frustrating, it does work.
Fedora has been working on deploying SELinux on desktop machines and there seems to be a whole lot of work remaining to be done so far. Well, Do they have SELinux disabled on their servers?
Exactly. But there is a workaround. Just sign up for an OpenDNS free account and you can turn their "features" off in your preferences. Once configured OpenDNS works just like normal DNS servers that return NXDOMAIN on unknown domains, which is all I want.
For dynamic IP users like me a bit more work is necessary: find a way to report the IP to OpenDNS so it knows it is you. I use the ddclient daemon to update my IP information to OpenDNS and things are working reasonably well so far.
This is a very good question. Frankly, I don't know. As I have said, I never trust OpenDNS out of security reasons. I use it for my desktop browsing, not for anything worthy enough to be protected.
But I know from my own experience that some Chinese ISPs are seriously incompetent in managing security risks. I have seen some of their mistakes in securing their service so that I wouldn't trust them again. OTOH I know I have to buy their services to get online and put these rants here and that sound like a paradox. Maybe it is.
Finally we have to trust somebody else. That's how we make our lives. I just chose to deal with one who has *already* made a bad reputation as little as possible.
... I feel a bit lucky because I never trust my ISP's name servers. I knew this day would come. If possible, I always use the OpenDNS servers. (Disclaimer here: I'm not saying the OpenDNS service is recommended for security. It's just a matter about reputation.)
Why do you have to "know the complicated terminal commands" to "force" a shutdown? Look at the man page of shutdown(8) for the not-so-complicated commands including one that aborts a running shutdown. With most DE/WMs you can still power off the machine from the GUI, though.
And what is a "forced" shutdown? Everything a computer does is forced by the programmer or the user. Maybe the closest thing to a forced shutdown is cutting the power physically.
Sounds like Linux is finally catching up by having Windows drop down to its level and heading the wrong way past!
No. There's nothing wrong in providing both the CLI and the GUI available for the same task (in this case, shutting down the system). The GUI provides the most used functionality ("shut down the machine NOW!") and rare but useful things like aborting a running shutdown goes to the CLI. I think this is a very good interface design for both OS'es.
And what is "dropping down to its level"? I can't see you point here. As I said above, there's nothing wrong with the CLI. Although using the CLI requires steeper learning curve, this is not required for everything (e.g. shutdown), and nobody is forcing an average user to learn the CLI. Of course if you master it you can do a lot more, but is that something inferior in "levels"?
And if my memory serves correctly, the CLI shutdown for Windows is nothing new.
The 3-part article tells very little about PS3-specific hacks. Basically, the author was telling you how to strip the Fedora system so that it could run on the resource-limited hardware without being too slow. This includes stopping unecessary daemons, ditch GNOME for twm, and running the X server on another box (or getting rid of X altogether).
This also apply to everything that Fedora can run on.
I fail to see how this is related to ``developing on the PS3 under Fedora''. The article didn't say much about development. If by ``developing'' you mean compiling your code in Fedora running inside a PS3 (which is under a virtualized environment) may be you have some points. But this is not developing for the PS3 platform. This is developing for a virtualized Linux platform.
The difference, I see, is that Land was the chief guy people expected all tech advances to come; once Land left there wasn't any one person to keep their eye on the industry. Jobs, however, is not the tech guy; he has a *lot* of good people who are clearly making great stuff, only to be held in check by Jobs until he's satisfied they "have a product".
This reminds me of the "What if Guido van Rossum was hit by a bus" discussion on the Python list. And also the "What if Linus died" thing. With Linus (Guido) as the ``Dictator'' of Linux Kernel (Python) because of their talent in technology AND their vision AND their role in the community as The Irreplaceable who has final say on everything. I believe good programmers as Linus and Guido are not scarce, but if they as ultimate leaders of large, loosely organized communities, were no longer there, what will happen to the community? Can they adept to the new situation fast enough? Or will it end up like a ``warring state'' situation and being divided-and-conquered by the Extend-Embrace-Extinguish tactic?
DISCLAIMER: sorry for the kill(1) thing, but I really mean only the Unix command. Blame Thompson and Ritchie for not inventing euphemism for Unix commands.
> There is even some kind of urban myth over there which says that Bittorrent will wear off your hard drive because of excessive hard drive activity.
About five years ago this was a widespread rumor among Windows users, perhaps because of the old Windows filesystem being prone to heavy fragmentation. I have never tested myself, though.
Many colleges in Beijing have IPv6 connection. Use an IPv4-to-IPv6 broker (There are free ones. STFW for them.) and you have access to the ``banned'' IPv4 sites through IPv6 traffic.
Many of my fellow Chinese don't read slashdot because: * they can't read English (Most of them); * they are not interested in the topics (News for nerds); * they prefer other sites such as ArsTechnica etc (Some of them don't feel good in the slashdot atmosphere). Or * They can read/. but can't express their opinions fluently in English. So they don't show up by sending in their comments.
I also tried Tiananmen and was returned a blank face (I'm in China). This is many Chinese people's first benchmark at a new search engine. For me, the result is expected, since the Great Firewall is a hybrid of generic and Google/Yahoo/etc-targeted implementations.
Slashdot Mirror
and this is from Xinhua:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-09/06/content_9815338.htm
Blame the editor.
And here is a story on El Reg: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/07/china_to_launch_manned_space_mission_by_end_of_month/
Or simply "ohtzrabg.pbz"
No matter how strong the material is, it changes with time.
You should have understood the redundancy-reliability tradeoff.
Get your redundant array of inexpensive wedding bands now!
> Your medium is dying!
Has NetCraft confirmed it?
> There's absolutely nothing to stop anybody from installing an executable
> that runs automatically under a user account, without ever needing root.
> And that executable can do a lot of the things it may want to do without
> ever needing root access, either.
This is the whole point of SELinux. Not saying SELinux is uncrackable, but it is designed to counter such attacks. Although properly setting up a fully protected SELinux environment may be tedious and frustrating, it does work.
Fedora has been working on deploying SELinux on desktop machines and there seems to be a whole lot of work remaining to be done so far. Well, Do they have SELinux disabled on their servers?
Exactly. But there is a workaround. Just sign up for an OpenDNS free account and you can turn their "features" off in your preferences. Once configured OpenDNS works just like normal DNS servers that return NXDOMAIN on unknown domains, which is all I want.
For dynamic IP users like me a bit more work is necessary: find a way to report the IP to OpenDNS so it knows it is you. I use the ddclient daemon to update my IP information to OpenDNS and things are working reasonably well so far.
This is a very good question. Frankly, I don't know. As I have said, I never trust OpenDNS out of security reasons. I use it for my desktop browsing, not for anything worthy enough to be protected. But I know from my own experience that some Chinese ISPs are seriously incompetent in managing security risks. I have seen some of their mistakes in securing their service so that I wouldn't trust them again. OTOH I know I have to buy their services to get online and put these rants here and that sound like a paradox. Maybe it is. Finally we have to trust somebody else. That's how we make our lives. I just chose to deal with one who has *already* made a bad reputation as little as possible.
... I feel a bit lucky because I never trust my ISP's name servers. I knew this day would come. If possible, I always use the OpenDNS servers. (Disclaimer here: I'm not saying the OpenDNS service is recommended for security. It's just a matter about reputation.)
The Chinese ISPs has been known to use manipulated DNS records as a censorship measure, too. See here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/18/1824230
... for someone to write a Lisp script that hijack the clipboard from EMACS.
Why do you have to "know the complicated terminal commands" to "force" a shutdown? Look at the man page of shutdown(8) for the not-so-complicated commands including one that aborts a running shutdown. With most DE/WMs you can still power off the machine from the GUI, though.
And what is a "forced" shutdown? Everything a computer does is forced by the programmer or the user. Maybe the closest thing to a forced shutdown is cutting the power physically.
Sounds like Linux is finally catching up by having Windows drop down to its level and heading the wrong way past!
No. There's nothing wrong in providing both the CLI and the GUI available for the same task (in this case, shutting down the system). The GUI provides the most used functionality ("shut down the machine NOW!") and rare but useful things like aborting a running shutdown goes to the CLI. I think this is a very good interface design for both OS'es.
And what is "dropping down to its level"? I can't see you point here. As I said above, there's nothing wrong with the CLI. Although using the CLI requires steeper learning curve, this is not required for everything (e.g. shutdown), and nobody is forcing an average user to learn the CLI. Of course if you master it you can do a lot more, but is that something inferior in "levels"?
And if my memory serves correctly, the CLI shutdown for Windows is nothing new.
on pages 8-10 there are raw images for the ones used in the press release
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/raw-images-list1.html
This is the NASA page for the raw images from the flyby.
kuroddo
Is this a transliteration of "clod"???
The 3-part article tells very little about PS3-specific hacks. Basically, the author was telling you how to strip the Fedora system so that it could run on the resource-limited hardware without being too slow. This includes stopping unecessary daemons, ditch GNOME for twm, and running the X server on another box (or getting rid of X altogether).
This also apply to everything that Fedora can run on.
I fail to see how this is related to ``developing on the PS3 under Fedora''. The article didn't say much about development. If by ``developing'' you mean compiling your code in Fedora running inside a PS3 (which is under a virtualized environment) may be you have some points. But this is not developing for the PS3 platform. This is developing for a virtualized Linux platform.
The difference, I see, is that Land was the chief guy people expected all tech advances to come; once Land left there wasn't any one person to keep their eye on the industry. Jobs, however, is not the tech guy; he has a *lot* of good people who are clearly making great stuff, only to be held in check by Jobs until he's satisfied they "have a product".
This reminds me of the "What if Guido van Rossum was hit by a bus" discussion on the Python list. And also the "What if Linus died" thing. With Linus (Guido) as the ``Dictator'' of Linux Kernel (Python) because of their talent in technology AND their vision AND their role in the community as The Irreplaceable who has final say on everything. I believe good programmers as Linus and Guido are not scarce, but if they as ultimate leaders of large, loosely organized communities, were no longer there, what will happen to the community? Can they adept to the new situation fast enough? Or will it end up like a ``warring state'' situation and being divided-and-conquered by the Extend-Embrace-Extinguish tactic?
DISCLAIMER: sorry for the kill(1) thing, but I really mean only the Unix command. Blame Thompson and Ritchie for not inventing euphemism for Unix commands.
> There is even some kind of urban myth over there which says that Bittorrent will wear off your hard drive because of excessive hard drive activity.
About five years ago this was a widespread rumor among Windows users, perhaps because of the old Windows filesystem being prone to heavy fragmentation. I have never tested myself, though.
Thanks for the brilliant link :)
However there's a real shocker:
http://initiative.yo2.cn/archives/629858
And they are yet to implement IPv6 wiretapping.
Many colleges in Beijing have IPv6 connection. Use an IPv4-to-IPv6 broker (There are free ones. STFW for them.) and you have access to the ``banned'' IPv4 sites through IPv6 traffic.
you mean actual persons using computers? or the total number of individual user accounts on all the computers?
Here's mine:
But this is on my personal laptop ;-)
Here I am, reading /.
Many of my fellow Chinese don't read slashdot because: /. but can't express their opinions fluently in English. So they don't show up by sending in their comments.
* they can't read English (Most of them);
* they are not interested in the topics (News for nerds);
* they prefer other sites such as ArsTechnica etc (Some of them don't feel good in the slashdot atmosphere).
Or
* They can read
seems to be fixed.
I also tried Tiananmen and was returned a blank face (I'm in China). This is many Chinese people's first benchmark at a new search engine. For me, the result is expected, since the Great Firewall is a hybrid of generic and Google/Yahoo/etc-targeted implementations.
> stick a satellite dish out your window
This is illegal in China unless you have authorized licenses to do so, and acquiring a license is time-consuming.
However, sharing the connection using a wireless router sounds fine.
> You can step into most Starbucks and use the free wireless in there.
Is the free wireless at Starbucks secure enough? As far as I know many of the public free wireless networks are not doing enough in encryption.