99% of my off-line time was spent on Torment, Baldur's Gate, X-Wing Alliance, etc. It wasn't worth rebooting just to run Linux to web surf and even then, I had to boot back into Win 98 to play EverQuest. Solution: Goodbye Linux partition...
You could have also tried VM Ware - it works like a dream. --
Fresh from their great success with Heavy Gear, the first port of a D3D game to Linux/OpenGL, I seriously doubt that Loki would consider this project a major challenge. It means there will be a lag of a few months before the Loki version comes out (I think it has to be a no-brainer that Loki will bid on this) and personally I'm happy to wait for it. Knowing Loki, the Linux/OpenGL port will be totally solid.
As far as I'm considered, if a game doesn't exist on Linux, it doesn't exist. --
"Oh yes they do, if their use of the field and non-disclosure of relevant technical details... "
Well, yes, the DOJ may force them to release it. But that's a special case; exempting direct government involvement under the Sherman Act, what they've done is not illegal.
Illegal is illegal, whether the government takes specific action or not. You're confusing "illegal" with "getting caught". --
It's not (most of the time) our managers who do nasty things like send out cease-and-desist letters or require massive EULAs. It's the lawyers...
Bill Neukom is a top executive at Microsoft. Bill Gate's dad is a lawyer, and I could swear Bill Gates thinks he's a lawyer from the way he acts. These are the guys that are doing the damage. --
The Kerberos spec includes empty fields for vendor use. Microsoft used one of these fields; they have no obligation to make info on their use of it public.
Oh yes they do, if their use of the field and non-disclosure of relevant technical details could be seen as part of an illegal product tie, or an attempt by a monopoly to extend its monopoly into a new market, or a strategem motivated more by a wish to harm competition rather than to benefit customers.
Yes, it's against the spirit of cooperation...
It's against more than that: it's also against ethics, against the interests of their customers, against the interests of consumers in general and finally, against the law (my opinion). --
Bill Gates has often dismissed his wealth, calling it infinite in practical terms since he'd never be able to spend it all... While I think Microsoft or any other company needs to be taken back a notch whenever the company transgresses the larger good, I do not think that stock price is a good target.
What you're forgetting is that Bill Gates no longer holds an absolute majority of Microsoft shares - in fact he's dropped down to somewhere around 15%. This would make it quite easy for an organized group of irate shareholders to remove him. That might be a very wise thing to do from the point of view of preserving shareholder value, since Bill is obviously doing his level best to drive the company into the ground right now, with a monumental set of strategic, legal, and public relations blunders. So, yes, the value of Microsoft's stock does matter a lot to people how are in a position to take effective action, and for this reason anything that hurts the stock price hurts Bill Gates too.
Let's face it - who is the real bad actor here? It's not Microsoft per se - it's Bill himself, and a small cabal of top managers. How many here would be prepared to bury the hatchet if Bill and his henchmen were really-gone, and not just pretend-gone? --
This is more a library than a full CAD environment but don't kid yourself - sticking a good front end on it is something you can do in a few weeks with Glade or QT. So I guess that means we'll have full-blown CAD, open source, GPL for Linux within the year. Let me very clear about this also: Open Cascade is to AutoCAD as a Bulldozer is to a wheelbarrow. --
I think this is a hard call. The reason I think it's a hard call is that I really think Microsoft has a legitimate claim that if they copyright something, and somehow it's on your site in violation of that copyright, somebody has to be responsible to take it down.
I'd agree with you, except that in this case I have to question the legitimacy of the licencing terms Microsoft is attempting to apply, since it's readily apparent to all that this is just part of a strategem to subvert the public Kerberos protocol. Considering that Microsoft is officially a monopolist, I think that makes the licence terms illegal, don't you? And that gives us not only the right, but the duty to violate them. --
I can tell you for a fact that you had to open the attachment through Windows Scripting Host for it to do ANYTHING!
Good for you. May I politely point out that scripting host is enabled by default - how is a clueless user going to know to turn it off? Second, I did hear that if you have the preview window open the script will execute without any further help from the user. Ugly. Caveat: I don't normally run Windows, so I didn't check this. --
Yes, I too am impressed and obviously these techniques are pretty common knowledge is certain circles. I'm not saying that wasn't very slick!
Ah, I'm sure he's trustworthy, but I changed my PW anyway:-)
I had already, by coicidence, taken the step of linking my cookies file to/dev/null a couple of days ago, and have since been reflecting on the desirability of being able to script my browser so I can set up a quick link to a site that requires cookies, with cookies enabled, then turn them off and delete the cookies as soon as I'm done. I guess I'll use Mozilla for that. Yet another reason why Mozilla is really cool.
Javascript is now off too.:-) Thanks for the clear demonstration. What a gaping security hole!
Java is still enabled over here, though. Until somebody demonstrates to me why that's a security risk too... --
"I sincerely hope that Slash is doing, and has been doing, the right thing and simply not keeping any records of anonymous posters."
Well, what is the answer to this one? Do I need to read the FAQ? You'll find the answer to the question by reading the source code. (I don't know the answer just now:) --
Hey, at least they're visiting the site.:) I wonder if the M$ guys have accounts?
Humm, maybe they're the Anonymous Cowards that do the first posts.... heheheh
/set conspiracy mode on Maybe it was somebody from Microsoft who actually made the anonymous posting? Yummy, what a tasty conspiracy theory. "Bill devises a strategem sure to discredit that pesky Slashdot site"/set conspiracy mode off
I propose the following: If Slashdot removes the comments without having been forced to by an actual court ruling, we boycott Slashdot.
What a dumb idea. Slashdot is us. Slashdot needs our support. Do you always turn on your friends when they suffer a setback? Whose side are you on, anyway? --
My real suggestion? Do what Yahoo recently when they were sued for liable because someone posted untrue statements on one of their stock ticker chat boards: Claim that Slashdot has no control over content, and the person they really need to go after is the poster, and if you (M$) provides the right kind of paper, then maybe we can give you some type of information on the poster of the content.
In other words, Slashdot would be required to keep records of all anonymous postings so the poster can be identified later at the whim of some government agency or corporation able to convince a Judge that it needs to strip away the poster's anonymity. This is the worst of all possible results. It would start a chain of results that would eventually tear away every shred of privacy on the internet.
I sincerely hope that Slash is doing, and has been doing, the right thing and simply not keeping any records of anonymous posters. The one case I can think of that would justify record-keeping is in the event that some sort of flood attack had to be defended against, and even in that case the record-keeping should stop as soon as the attack stops.
Do I have a better suggestion to offer? No. Not at this point. I think we've got a hard problem here. Personally, I would tend toward the opinion that Slashdot should remove the copyrighted material, after it's found by a court to be a genuine copyright violation. But for me, there's a big, big problem with that, and it's this: I believe that Microsoft has acted illegally in restricting this material, and indeed, in attempting to subvert the Kerberos standard in the first place; a court should find that Microsoft restricted the material illegally in the first place, and should in fact be stripped of it's right to impose any restriction on the use of this material at all. To put it in fewer words: antitrust law trumps copyright law.
If you look at the whole issue in that light, this turns into an act of civil disobediance, and that can actually excuse you from breaking certain laws. Let me say it again, in different words: I believe that Microsoft have broken the law by attempting to subvert the Kerberos standard and that the poster is justified in retaliated by making Micrsoft's restricted information public in the way he did. Yes, it's possible the poster broke copyright law in this case, but the principle of civil disobedience should excuse that.
I think the specs for Microsoft's perverted mods to Kerberos should stay right here on Slashdot until Microsoft has answered in a court of law for its latest trust-making strategem. --
This email notification is a statement made under penalty of perjury that we...
I find it a little ironic that Microsoft expects to add weight to *any* statement by using the word "perjury". Anybody who is interested in judging for themselves whether Microsoft thinks perjury is a problem can check out Bill Gates video testimony. Personally, I don't think perjury means a thing to this man or his company.
I wonder if it matters at all that Microsoft is quite likely breaking the law with its attack on Kerberos, and supporting that lawbreaking using the fig leaf of DCMA.
I wonder if Microsoft would rather that this post be removed also? --
Outlook will allow you to execute the attachment easily while the other clients make it a pain-in-the-ass to do so....That is a feature IMHO.
Yes it's a feature but the implementation is horribly, horribly wrong. Let me explain this to you in simple terms. We higher forms of life could be considerably simplified if we had no immune system and would not suffer from diseases like AIDS. But if we were to make use of the feature know as "breathing" we would quickly die of some infection.
Microsoft has implemented the breathing feature without implementing the immune system and the result of that, predictably, is a lot of diseased PC's. Why did they do this? Because it was easy, and for no other reason. "Look mom! All I had to do was feed the attachment to the VB interpreter and POOF! Animated Valentine's cards!" Well kids, it ain't that easy if you want your computer to stay alive.
If you want the executable attachment feature it absolutely must execute in a sandbox. To accomplish this you might implement a simple Basic front end on top of Java and take advantage of Java's byte code verifier. That would work pretty well but Microsoft won't do it because of their greed and self-interest. But in the end, what they did do - selling a completely unprotected system just to avoid expensive, time consuming development work, and trying to disclaim all responsiblity for the bad effects of doing that - will hurt them a lot more than eating humble pie and using the Java compiler ever would.
By the way, has anyone considered that, while Microsoft's shrinkwrap licence *may* protect them from liability for damage to a user's own computer caused by MS's negligence, it doesn't do anything to protect *another* user whose computer caused the damage? Once shit like that starts flying Microsoft may find that it's shrinkwrap disclaimer of responsiblity isn't such a perfect shield after all. --
Yes there is - the encoding/decoding algorithms are patented in such a general way that producing a codec that doesn't violate the patent is nigh on impossible. (If you can do it, please let us know!) Your only hope would be that the patent won't stand up in court, and if you want to test that, be my guest. Let us know how it turns out.
What makes you think that Ogg Vorbis wouldn't suffer from the same public relations goof ups that MP3 has?
The fact that I've been to the site, read the FAQ, gotten the code out of cvs, compiled it, read it, run it, read the license and joined the mailing list. Good enough for you? I also looked into my crystal ball and saw many streaming ogg plugins there.
The fact that the ogg encoder is both competitive with MP3 and explicity/entirely (L)GPL makes it a no-brainer for adoption by streaming broadcast servers. --
...is to have MicroBill.apps corp. port Outlook to linux while MicroBill.osRus corp. brings out its own Linux distro with root privilege for every user. Poof! No more Linux, back to business as usual. --
This virus has nothing to do with Outlook . It'll affect any mail client, be it Eudora Pro, Pegasus Mail, Outlook Express or any other that allows you to save attachments.
That's just plain wrong. The emailer has to *execute* it before anything bad happens. Hopefully you know the difference between "save" and "execute".
PDF documents really suck for online reading - pdf readers generally have crappy text search, if any at all - they're not internally hyperlinked, and you're restricted in your choice of readers.
The one good thing about pdf is it looks pretty when you print it out. But I for one never intend to print these out - if Intel's past policy is anything to go by, they will give you the official bound books for free.
Hasn't Intel heard of Docbook? Second question: has Intel good a clue who the target market for these docs are, and what their needs and desires are? --
...which is really funny because all the Microsoft spooks hanging on the list had a chance to demonstrate supreme ignorance by running it. I also received an advisory that the virus has been sent to me, and this, very intelligently, was not marked with linux-kernel header info so I picked it up in my personal email and read it before I ran into the virus. Being more than a little curious about it I hunted it down in the kernel list and popped it open... about 250 lines of kiddie-level vbs. The first few lines:
rem barok -loveletter(vbe) rem by: spyder / ispyder@mail.com / @GRAMMERSoft Group / Manila,Philippines On Error Resume Next dim fso,dirsystem,dirwin,dirtemp,eq,ctr,file,vbscopy,d ow eq="" ctr=0
Yuck! OK, this stuff takes me right back. The scary part is this:
What maniac decided that it was a good idea to make it easy for any anonymous person to mail code to you that can rewrite the registry in one, nice, easy-to-use line? Now that's innovation Bill, keep it up. Hey, this is like the city of Troy building their own hollow horse, putting it outside for a while until they're absolutely sure it's full of nasty men, then hauling it back inside and going to sleep.
But let it be a lesson for us, too. Even though Linux, BSD, *nix are vastly more immune to this kind of thing, it is still a crime to provide one-click execution of arbitrary code, and authors who write their code that way should be strung up by their thumbs. Every email program has to be able to obtain classification information from a trusted source about the delegate for each Mime types it wants to activate... when the delegate has potential destructive power the user has to be warned by default, and under no circumstances should an executable attachment be activated silently. --
There is not any reasonable likelihood of any of the "libre" options ( e.g. - PostgreSQL, InterBase, MySQL,... becoming reasonable alternatives at the Big Iron / Enterprise end of things any time soon.
I'm not sure what that has to do with Net PC's but I'm quite sure you're wrong. Postgres descends from Ingres - one of the first relational databases, came out just a little before DB2 (the big iron IBM db) - and begat Informix. That should tell you enough right there.
Posgres is now getting some serious corporate backing. That also should tell you something. --
Redhat is believed to be doing this to improve their stock prices, which plummeted when everyone realized that you shouldn't pay for milk when a cow is free...
And then began to rise steadily when someone pointed out that very few people have room for a cow in their kitchen. --
RedHat's revenues for the last four quarters totals about $24 million. The market valuation is around $3.5 billion. Ratio of cap/rev=145.
The market does not value a company based on its current earnings but rather on expected earnings.
Look at it this way... Right now Microsoft is valued at something around G$300. Redhat is valued at about 1% of that. Does the market expect Redhat to achieve as much as 1% of Microsoft's sales/earnings? You bet it does. In fact, 10% is a much more reasonable goal and by that measure Redhat's stock still has a lot of room to appreciate.
Ironically, the way Microsoft is playing it these days they may also be destined to achieve 10% of their current earnings. --
There is no excuse in the world for providing a method of executing untrusted code of any type out of an incoming email with a single click. So you'd want to stop all executable attachments then, I'm assuming?
It's insane to allow execution of arbitrary programs by naive users that arrive in your mailbox from unknown places.
I'm sorry, but that's just not realistic.
Please provide a shred of support for that statement.
I really don't see how this is Microsoft's fault at all.
Goodness me. It's Microsoft's fault for leaving a gun on the livingroom table where the kids can play with it. Or, equivalently, leaving the gate to their yard open where there is an empty swimming pool that kids can fall into.
Many, many mail programs allow running of attachments just with a single click...
That is utterly wrong. At best, java programs should be runnable, only in a sandbox. Or similarly restricted quasi-executables. Frankly, I don't see why *anyone* is better off by being able to execute attachments. Save them first, make them executable, then execute them. If that's too much work for you, you write a script yourself to do it. It's wrong for email programs to do this for you - it's an invitation to disaster as we've clearly seen.
it just so happened that this particular worm was written to interact with Outlook through MAPI.
Yes, and it happened that Outlook with MAPI was an ideal thing to interact with because its so brainlessly constructed. --
Slashdot Mirror
99% of my off-line time was spent on Torment, Baldur's Gate, X-Wing Alliance, etc. It wasn't worth rebooting just to run Linux to web surf and even then, I had to boot back into Win 98 to play EverQuest. Solution: Goodbye Linux partition...
You could have also tried VM Ware - it works like a dream.
--
Fresh from their great success with Heavy Gear, the first port of a D3D game to Linux/OpenGL, I seriously doubt that Loki would consider this project a major challenge. It means there will be a lag of a few months before the Loki version comes out (I think it has to be a no-brainer that Loki will bid on this) and personally I'm happy to wait for it. Knowing Loki, the Linux/OpenGL port will be totally solid.
As far as I'm considered, if a game doesn't exist on Linux, it doesn't exist.
--
"Oh yes they do, if their use of the field and non-disclosure of relevant technical details... "
Well, yes, the DOJ may force them to release it. But that's a special case; exempting direct government involvement under the Sherman Act, what they've done is not illegal.
Illegal is illegal, whether the government takes specific action or not. You're confusing "illegal" with "getting caught".
--
It's not (most of the time) our managers who do nasty things like send out cease-and-desist letters or require massive EULAs. It's the lawyers...
Bill Neukom is a top executive at Microsoft. Bill Gate's dad is a lawyer, and I could swear Bill Gates thinks he's a lawyer from the way he acts. These are the guys that are doing the damage.
--
The Kerberos spec includes empty fields for vendor use. Microsoft used one of these fields; they have no obligation to make info on their use of it public.
Oh yes they do, if their use of the field and non-disclosure of relevant technical details could be seen as part of an illegal product tie, or an attempt by a monopoly to extend its monopoly into a new market, or a strategem motivated more by a wish to harm competition rather than to benefit customers.
Yes, it's against the spirit of cooperation...
It's against more than that: it's also against ethics, against the interests of their customers, against the interests of consumers in general and finally, against the law (my opinion).
--
Bill Gates has often dismissed his wealth, calling it infinite in practical terms since he'd never be able to spend it all... While I think Microsoft or any other company needs to be taken back a notch whenever the company transgresses the larger good, I do not think that stock price is a good target.
What you're forgetting is that Bill Gates no longer holds an absolute majority of Microsoft shares - in fact he's dropped down to somewhere around 15%. This would make it quite easy for an organized group of irate shareholders to remove him. That might be a very wise thing to do from the point of view of preserving shareholder value, since Bill is obviously doing his level best to drive the company into the ground right now, with a monumental set of strategic, legal, and public relations blunders. So, yes, the value of Microsoft's stock does matter a lot to people how are in a position to take effective action, and for this reason anything that hurts the stock price hurts Bill Gates too.
Let's face it - who is the real bad actor here? It's not Microsoft per se - it's Bill himself, and a small cabal of top managers. How many here would be prepared to bury the hatchet if Bill and his henchmen were really-gone, and not just pretend-gone?
--
Unfortunately I have to use Win9x/NT at work because the software that is essential to my profession is only win based (AutoCAD R14)
Perhaps you haven't heard of Matra Open Cascade?
This is more a library than a full CAD environment but don't kid yourself - sticking a good front end on it is something you can do in a few weeks with Glade or QT. So I guess that means we'll have full-blown CAD, open source, GPL for Linux within the year. Let me very clear about this also: Open Cascade is to AutoCAD as a Bulldozer is to a wheelbarrow.
--
I think this is a hard call. The reason I think it's a hard call is that I really think Microsoft has a legitimate claim that if they copyright something, and somehow it's on your site in violation of that copyright, somebody has to be responsible to take it down.
I'd agree with you, except that in this case I have to question the legitimacy of the licencing terms Microsoft is attempting to apply, since it's readily apparent to all that this is just part of a strategem to subvert the public Kerberos protocol. Considering that Microsoft is officially a monopolist, I think that makes the licence terms illegal, don't you? And that gives us not only the right, but the duty to violate them.
--
I can tell you for a fact that you had to open the attachment through Windows Scripting Host for it to do ANYTHING!
Good for you. May I politely point out that scripting host is enabled by default - how is a clueless user going to know to turn it off? Second, I did hear that if you have the preview window open the script will execute without any further help from the user. Ugly. Caveat: I don't normally run Windows, so I didn't check this.
--
Yes, I too am impressed and obviously these techniques are pretty common knowledge is certain circles. I'm not saying that wasn't very slick!
:-)
/dev/null a couple of days ago, and have since been reflecting on the desirability of being able to script my browser so I can set up a quick link to a site that requires cookies, with cookies enabled, then turn them off and delete the cookies as soon as I'm done. I guess I'll use Mozilla for that. Yet another reason why Mozilla is really cool.
:-) Thanks for the clear demonstration. What a gaping security hole!
Ah, I'm sure he's trustworthy, but I changed my PW anyway
I had already, by coicidence, taken the step of linking my cookies file to
Javascript is now off too.
Java is still enabled over here, though. Until somebody demonstrates to me why that's a security risk too...
--
"I sincerely hope that Slash is doing, and has been doing, the right thing and simply not keeping any records of anonymous posters."
Well, what is the answer to this one? Do I need to read the FAQ? You'll find the answer to the question by reading the source code. (I don't know the answer just now:)
--
Maybe it was somebody from Microsoft who actually made the anonymous posting? Yummy, what a tasty conspiracy theory. "Bill devises a strategem sure to discredit that pesky Slashdot site"
--
I propose the following: If Slashdot removes the comments without having been forced to by an actual court ruling, we boycott Slashdot.
What a dumb idea. Slashdot is us. Slashdot needs our support. Do you always turn on your friends when they suffer a setback? Whose side are you on, anyway?
--
My real suggestion? Do what Yahoo recently when they were sued for liable because someone posted untrue statements on one of their stock ticker chat boards: Claim that Slashdot has no control over content, and the person they really need to go after is the poster, and if you (M$) provides the right kind of paper, then maybe we can give you some type of information on the poster of the content.
In other words, Slashdot would be required to keep records of all anonymous postings so the poster can be identified later at the whim of some government agency or corporation able to convince a Judge that it needs to strip away the poster's anonymity. This is the worst of all possible results. It would start a chain of results that would eventually tear away every shred of privacy on the internet.
I sincerely hope that Slash is doing, and has been doing, the right thing and simply not keeping any records of anonymous posters. The one case I can think of that would justify record-keeping is in the event that some sort of flood attack had to be defended against, and even in that case the record-keeping should stop as soon as the attack stops.
Do I have a better suggestion to offer? No. Not at this point. I think we've got a hard problem here. Personally, I would tend toward the opinion that Slashdot should remove the copyrighted material, after it's found by a court to be a genuine copyright violation. But for me, there's a big, big problem with that, and it's this: I believe that Microsoft has acted illegally in restricting this material, and indeed, in attempting to subvert the Kerberos standard in the first place; a court should find that Microsoft restricted the material illegally in the first place, and should in fact be stripped of it's right to impose any restriction on the use of this material at all. To put it in fewer words: antitrust law trumps copyright law.
If you look at the whole issue in that light, this turns into an act of civil disobediance, and that can actually excuse you from breaking certain laws. Let me say it again, in different words: I believe that Microsoft have broken the law by attempting to subvert the Kerberos standard and that the poster is justified in retaliated by making Micrsoft's restricted information public in the way he did. Yes, it's possible the poster broke copyright law in this case, but the principle of civil disobedience should excuse that.
I think the specs for Microsoft's perverted mods to Kerberos should stay right here on Slashdot until Microsoft has answered in a court of law for its latest trust-making strategem.
--
This email notification is a statement made under penalty of perjury that we...
I find it a little ironic that Microsoft expects to add weight to *any* statement by using the word "perjury". Anybody who is interested in judging for themselves whether Microsoft thinks perjury is a problem can check out Bill Gates video testimony. Personally, I don't think perjury means a thing to this man or his company.
I wonder if it matters at all that Microsoft is quite likely breaking the law with its attack on Kerberos, and supporting that lawbreaking using the fig leaf of DCMA.
I wonder if Microsoft would rather that this post be removed also?
--
Outlook will allow you to execute the attachment easily while the other clients make it a pain-in-the-ass to do so....That is a feature IMHO.
Yes it's a feature but the implementation is horribly, horribly wrong. Let me explain this to you in simple terms. We higher forms of life could be considerably simplified if we had no immune system and would not suffer from diseases like AIDS. But if we were to make use of the feature know as "breathing" we would quickly die of some infection.
Microsoft has implemented the breathing feature without implementing the immune system and the result of that, predictably, is a lot of diseased PC's. Why did they do this? Because it was easy, and for no other reason. "Look mom! All I had to do was feed the attachment to the VB interpreter and POOF! Animated Valentine's cards!" Well kids, it ain't that easy if you want your computer to stay alive.
If you want the executable attachment feature it absolutely must execute in a sandbox. To accomplish this you might implement a simple Basic front end on top of Java and take advantage of Java's byte code verifier. That would work pretty well but Microsoft won't do it because of their greed and self-interest. But in the end, what they did do - selling a completely unprotected system just to avoid expensive, time consuming development work, and trying to disclaim all responsiblity for the bad effects of doing that - will hurt them a lot more than eating humble pie and using the Java compiler ever would.
By the way, has anyone considered that, while Microsoft's shrinkwrap licence *may* protect them from liability for damage to a user's own computer caused by MS's negligence, it doesn't do anything to protect *another* user whose computer caused the damage? Once shit like that starts flying Microsoft may find that it's shrinkwrap disclaimer of responsiblity isn't such a perfect shield after all.
--
There's nothing wrong with MP3.
Yes there is - the encoding/decoding algorithms are patented in such a general way that producing a codec that doesn't violate the patent is nigh on impossible. (If you can do it, please let us know!) Your only hope would be that the patent won't stand up in court, and if you want to test that, be my guest. Let us know how it turns out.
What makes you think that Ogg Vorbis wouldn't suffer from the same public relations goof ups that MP3 has?
The fact that I've been to the site, read the FAQ, gotten the code out of cvs, compiled it, read it, run it, read the license and joined the mailing list. Good enough for you? I also looked into my crystal ball and saw many streaming ogg plugins there.
The fact that the ogg encoder is both competitive with MP3 and explicity/entirely (L)GPL makes it a no-brainer for adoption by streaming broadcast servers.
--
...is to have MicroBill.apps corp. port Outlook to linux while MicroBill.osRus corp. brings out its own Linux distro with root privilege for every user. Poof! No more Linux, back to business as usual.
--
This virus has nothing to do with Outlook . It'll affect any mail client, be it Eudora Pro, Pegasus Mail, Outlook Express or any other that allows you to save attachments.
That's just plain wrong. The emailer has to *execute* it before anything bad happens. Hopefully you know the difference between "save" and "execute".
Who moderated that post up to 3???
--
PDF documents really suck for online reading - pdf readers generally have crappy text search, if any at all - they're not internally hyperlinked, and you're restricted in your choice of readers.
The one good thing about pdf is it looks pretty when you print it out. But I for one never intend to print these out - if Intel's past policy is anything to go by, they will give you the official bound books for free.
Hasn't Intel heard of Docbook? Second question: has Intel good a clue who the target market for these docs are, and what their needs and desires are?
--
...which is really funny because all the Microsoft spooks hanging on the list had a chance to demonstrate supreme ignorance by running it. I also received an advisory that the virus has been sent to me, and this, very intelligently, was not marked with linux-kernel header info so I picked it up in my personal email and read it before I ran into the virus. Being more than a little curious about it I hunted it down in the kernel list and popped it open... about 250 lines of kiddie-level vbs. The first few lines:
d ow
rem barok -loveletter(vbe)
rem by: spyder / ispyder@mail.com / @GRAMMERSoft Group / Manila,Philippines
On Error Resume Next
dim fso,dirsystem,dirwin,dirtemp,eq,ctr,file,vbscopy,
eq=""
ctr=0
Yuck! OK, this stuff takes me right back. The scary part is this:
wscr.RegWrite "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Scripting Host\Settings\Timeout",0,"REG_DWORD"
What maniac decided that it was a good idea to make it easy for any anonymous person to mail code to you that can rewrite the registry in one, nice, easy-to-use line? Now that's innovation Bill, keep it up. Hey, this is like the city of Troy building their own hollow horse, putting it outside for a while until they're absolutely sure it's full of nasty men, then hauling it back inside and going to sleep.
But let it be a lesson for us, too. Even though Linux, BSD, *nix are vastly more immune to this kind of thing, it is still a crime to provide one-click execution of arbitrary code, and authors who write their code that way should be strung up by their thumbs. Every email program has to be able to obtain classification information from a trusted source about the delegate for each Mime types it wants to activate... when the delegate has potential destructive power the user has to be warned by default, and under no circumstances should an executable attachment be activated silently.
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There is not any reasonable likelihood of any of the "libre" options ( e.g. - PostgreSQL, InterBase, MySQL, ... becoming reasonable alternatives at the Big Iron / Enterprise end of things any time soon.
I'm not sure what that has to do with Net PC's but I'm quite sure you're wrong. Postgres descends from Ingres - one of the first relational databases, came out just a little before DB2 (the big iron IBM db) - and begat Informix. That should tell you enough right there.
Posgres is now getting some serious corporate backing. That also should tell you something.
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Redhat is believed to be doing this to improve their stock prices, which plummeted when everyone realized that you shouldn't pay for milk when a cow is free...
And then began to rise steadily when someone pointed out that very few people have room for a cow in their kitchen.
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RedHat's revenues for the last four quarters totals about $24 million. The market valuation is around $3.5 billion. Ratio of cap/rev=145.
The market does not value a company based on its current earnings but rather on expected earnings.
Look at it this way... Right now Microsoft is valued at something around G$300. Redhat is valued at about 1% of that. Does the market expect Redhat to achieve as much as 1% of Microsoft's sales/earnings? You bet it does. In fact, 10% is a much more reasonable goal and by that measure Redhat's stock still has a lot of room to appreciate.
Ironically, the way Microsoft is playing it these days they may also be destined to achieve 10% of their current earnings.
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There is no excuse in the world for providing a method of executing untrusted code of any type out of an incoming email with a single click. So you'd want to stop all executable attachments then, I'm assuming?
It's insane to allow execution of arbitrary programs by naive users that arrive in your mailbox from unknown places.
I'm sorry, but that's just not realistic.
Please provide a shred of support for that statement.
I really don't see how this is Microsoft's fault at all.
Goodness me. It's Microsoft's fault for leaving a gun on the livingroom table where the kids can play with it. Or, equivalently, leaving the gate to their yard open where there is an empty swimming pool that kids can fall into.
Many, many mail programs allow running of attachments just with a single click...
That is utterly wrong. At best, java programs should be runnable, only in a sandbox. Or similarly restricted quasi-executables. Frankly, I don't see why *anyone* is better off by being able to execute attachments. Save them first, make them executable, then execute them. If that's too much work for you, you write a script yourself to do it. It's wrong for email programs to do this for you - it's an invitation to disaster as we've clearly seen.
it just so happened that this particular worm was written to interact with Outlook through MAPI.
Yes, and it happened that Outlook with MAPI was an ideal thing to interact with because its so brainlessly constructed.
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