My interpretation of AVG's reason for their free home edition, anti-virus is a lot like vaccinations. Each person is much better protected when everyone else is protected. AVG gives away free virus protection to protect their enterprise customers.
Even just one million computers with perfect protection against becoming a zombie of a botnet is no protection at all.
But is Microsoft or the F/OSS community better equipped to anticipate or handle any issues that might arise. Sure, you can change default settings to allow for root login to gnome or KDE, but the difference in Windows is that vulnerability is default.
I have found kernel exploits in Darwin 8, but I've been told they are going to be fixed in Darwin 9. I have friends that work at the Apple store and said they trust their policies and machines well enough to let me do whatever I like.:) Not a fan of Apple, and I wouldn't buy a mac (or any pre-built machine for that matter), but OSX is really quite impressive.
As far as I know, windows programs are very well jailed, and even if there was a bug in wine that was directly exploited by a virus, unless you were running Wine as root (Why the hell would you do that?!?) Linux (kernel) is very aggressive against rouge programs (unauthorized disk / memory / device access).
I have run viruses under wine to test it, and typically they don't do more than crash the session only requiring wine to be reconfigured to defaults. I have had more problems with buggy programs that crash windows crash wine, and very rarely those programs when running in full screen require you to reboot the machine, unless you have another machine for remote access. But you can most always fix anything with that, in my experience.
I have had anti-virus kill my computer no less than three times, does that count? Oh wait, that was on a mac and 2 windows machines. never mind...
The cure has always been worse than the disease, with the exception of AVG, but again, not on a Linux machine.
Not that I would consider myself an advanced programmer in any way, but I have tried to write viruses for linux, and too many of the usual exploits for windows just don't exist under Linux. I was in a (non-computer) store recently and inadvertently was able to access all the employees personal information due to a bug with the printer that would temporarily disable the group policy to allow whatever. The group policy they had in place was VERY strict to make the computer appear as a simple touch screen terminal... but alas, it was Windows XP.
I reported the problem right away to a manager and explained the issue. Too bad there probably isn't anything they can do about it since I don't think there was anything their tech people could have done any better... other than "the obvious".
Except that while Windows is very dominant, it is dominant in a particular place, x86 workstations. Windows server doesn't dominate the backbone of the internet. People LOVE hacking BSD all day because it is a real challenge, not to mention that you can get pretty big recognition, even if you can't necessarily fix it. I think there was an article last week about an old BSD bug someone found. The Halloween documents reveal some major design flaws in Windows development that DO NOT EXIST in F/OSS. HURD suffers from lack of developers to make it a strong rival, but I would be shocked if the Linux Kernel doesn't have many times the number of developers (in workhours/yr) than Microsoft for their Kernel.
Some very serious exploits have existed in the Windows kernel forever, not to mention the weaknesses of things such as NTFS.
Just because the sum of all malware companies can out develop Microsoft doesn't mean they can out develop the entire F/OSS community. IMHO, that's silly.
But it also seems there are often critical outstanding bugs that Microsoft doesn't choose to address. A problem in software development Microsoft identified long ago is that it is impossible to compete with software where users are capable of fixing their own bugs and submitting solutions upstream. OSX has a small advantage, but only for components that exist outside of their Darwin world. Windows doesn't even give you the tools necessary to make a descent bug report, let alone fix the problem yourself.
I worked in a small theater, meaning everyone has to do their part. There were people that specialized in certain skills of course, but they spent most of their time teaching others. Everyone took part in sewing costumes, building parts of the set, hunting down props, repainting the stage, handing out fliers, and selling tickets. I have never met an actor so good they should be excused from doing real work. Those people never lasted very long, and at very least never had as much fun.
There are various technicalities, but a child in the us is anyone under the age of 13. 13-17 is a minor. While people have been charged with child porn laws for porn of teenagers, it is often reduced to a lesser charge. Under 13 has no room for flexibility, to my understanding. This may have more to do with judicial discretion though.
My experience was more with a person, I feel, didn't understand, not to discount a degree of selfishness. However, I certainly wasn't trying to limit the range of motivation or justification made by pedophiles for their actions. I am not sure what I said to imply that the child is ever at fault; that wasn't intended.
I think all policies should be discussed and justified, even though if it is really easy. Also, sweeping anti-childporn legislation in the past has had some negative unintended consequences, from the famous Lolita. Until not terribly recent, if you had a diary with graphic depiction of your own childhood abuse, you could be imprisoned for possession of child porn.
While I can understand where you are coming, with respect to 'needing to defend it', I am just grateful we live in a day where people can actually have such discussions. I'll take criticism over censorship any day.
Uhhh... it was satirical. I was trying to make fun of the bootcamp/ipod/iphone brick updates that have been headlines of/. in the past. Seriously? No mod:funny? IMHO, if anyone really thinks I was trolling or thought this was serious, I fear for Apple.
Or maybe I should listen to my wife; she says I can't deliver a joke to save my life. Of well. *tear*
However, having been part of the BDSM community for many years, people that watch rape porn often enjoy safe, consensual, role-playing with a partner that enjoys the same. Rape fantasy can have safe outlets, and in some cases even be therapeutic. This isn't to say that all people with rape fantasies want to live them out... right away, but in the right crowd it is really quite the experience to test the boundaries of trust. Yes, there are bad apples out there, but healthy educated people are much safer and better off.
So my argument, by contrast, is that you can not make the same argument for child porn. Nambla makes the same argument (As sick as it is to read and try to understand, I believe in "know thy enemy") that all human beings have the right to consent and mutual pleasure. As much as pedophiles are driven by sexual urges, we all are, but the difference is that the pedophile doesn't (necessarily) understand that even though a child may be agreeable or coerced into sex, they do not understand what is happening to them on a developmental level; the child doesn't understand the damage they are allowing to be inflicted upon them.
There is little cause for concern for adults (male or female) that want to participate or experiment with BDSM. NO such subjectivity does, can, or should exist for child porn.
I agree, to the extent of your claim. Most all sexual abuse comes from parents, close relatives, and to a lesser extent neighbors that are family friends. I would have no sympathy for child pornographers being shot with probable cause, and distribution carrying a punishment that locks you away with Bubba for a very long time, but legalizing possession for the sake of investigative purposes, and allow distribution to be easier. This would let more of the right people be get caught.
A counter argument, and I think a strong one, is (I believe) many child molesters get caught because they take pornographic pictures of their victims. Frequently there can be insufficient evidence such as an unwilling witness to convict, but the pornography can be used for an easy to stick possession charge that under such circumstances can get the max penalty.
I am more on the side of detouring videographers by putting SEVERE penalties on their customers. One of the few successful prohibitions, and thank god for that. Too bad child sex slaves are easier to come by, as the news seems to report it.
Turns out there wasn't a phishing attack, but an Apple Update that didn't go as planned. Apple sent an update that caused every mac to flash their router with a AirPort/AppleTalk/IPX update. Everything went as planned, except for the few customers that had Mac computers on non-Airport based networks. Rumor has it Apple has regarded the issue as low priority, but will provide a patch for everyone that buys OSX10.6 and until then their official statement so far is "STFU, why weren't you using an Airport?", noting that use of non-Apple routing equipment can void your warranty, and that they have no legal obligation to resolve the issue with the few affected hackers.
??? You say that I am wrong, but then repeat exactly what I said from the other side. If you learn the software, in which I am saying is NOT intuitive, it is productive and easy to use AFTER you take the time to learn it. A lot of software, in my opinion, will go to great lengths to make an interface that is dual purpose tutorial / utility, which is terribly annoying once you have figured what you want. Blender is designed to maximize productivity and utility at a full sacrifice for the consideration of the difficulty of learning the software.
And honestly, is the documentation so terrible, or just not filling an unnecessarily large portion of the interface at all times?
Know what really annoys me? All these damn decals and warning labels all over the interior of a car that tell you what not to do. Yes, it was informative the first time, but do I really need it branded everywhere I look? Couldn't they just add this stuff to the license test? It is one thing to have an oil light, and another to have a voice coming on every time you start the car explaining the dangers of letting the car go too long without an oil change irrelevant to the last time it was checked. Most new cars seem to be right in the middle with that junk right now. BLEH!
That reminds me... THANK YOU Blender Foundation for keeping the Documentation and Tutorials where they should be, on the web site!
that bugged me too. I think it actually says in the documentation "everything is designed to assume you know what you are doing". How am I supposed to do anything if I need to already know it to do anything? Oh yeah, read the manual. I will admit that needing to read the documentation to save resulted in a long sigh. It was worse for rendering movies... but I'll admit that once I knew it, it was easy to remember, and beats the hell out of "Are you sure" or "didn't you forget to..." dialog boxes all over the damn place with "other software" (not necessarily 3d apps).
Agreed, if you saying what I think you saying. People that gripe about Blenders interface are not people that know it; it is all people, imho, that took one look at the simple boxy interface and giant menus, and maybe clicked on the cube with the left mouse button to discover nothing happens, and were immediately turned off, if not outright upset. That was my reaction. Once I finally took the time to learn it (years later after seeing demo videos) other people would watch me work in Blender and would be like WHAT!?! How do you do that? and I would say It is easy, but you must at least watch the interface tutorials (youtube's super3boy tutorials are great for starters, mind you he sounds 12 years old.
I am not going to bother to find the quote, but what made me take the time to learn Blender, or finally overcome what had appeared to be a wretched interface was an explanation in the documentation that stated that it wasn't designed to be easy to learn, it was designed to be easy to use! "No, we are not going to change the interface to make it easier to learn, but we swear once you understand it, you will wish all your applications worked like Blender".
This told me that even if it didn't make sense to me right away, that didn't make it inferior. This also said they put a LOT of effort into making an interface the right way! Productive! Same reason I prefer Linux in general.
3D Studio Max is great, and it does lots of hand holding through the whole experience... great tutorials, but I never got very far. I am not saying Blender is better (necessarly), it just didn't work for me. When I finally gave Blender a chance some months ago, it began with about a week of following video tutorials on YouTube (I spent my entire spring break with a friend learning blender / reading documentation / watching videos). During and shortly after that week I quickly found it easy to imagine what I wanted to create and type it all out in shortcuts very quickly. My only limit has been my imagination. I still get screwed up every once in a while neglecting to check which mode I am in, but my own mistake. It has also given me a medium to master my Python skills, though that hasn't gone quite as quickly.
Microsoft, stay the hell away from Blender!!! Too many good projects have DIED because of Microsoft involvement. I am so glad the Blender Foundation keeps an open mind, and knows better than to deal with those rats. Note to Novell: HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!
Microsoft 'forced'... hmm... Like they were 'forced to break up in the US, and 'forced' to pay huge fines in the EU? M$ seems to have its own feelings about 'forced'.
What Google has done is great, and I wish Google was allowed to interpret the censorship rules in the US the same way they do in China. What Google has UNIQUELY done (compared to every other search company as far as I know) is that they inform the user of when and why they are censored and the governmental department that has censored them. That is WAY better than what we have here where content is taken down and 'black bag' the content in such a way to make it appear that such information never existed, NOT that the government is trying to control your thoughts.
Hopefully Google will try to bring the same freedom to the US they have brought to China. Way to go shareholders for being informed voters and not paying attention to stupid articles like this one that trys to distort the facts for attention and ratings.
Amnesty International used to be more prudent about stuff like this. Shame on them.
Isn't the same old story? If you can't fix it, sell it! Vulnerabilities are now being 'sold' as police investigator tools. What next?
Also, if you read the EULA for Vista (Probably applies to XP also) Microsoft can already access any files on any machine remotely, so long as it has an active internet connection. I think it was also determined recently as a part of that there is a special root login that only Microsoft has for all Windows machines giving more access than a normal administrator. Remember, they own it, and you lease the right to use it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
...Linux gives you the whole house!!!
My interpretation of AVG's reason for their free home edition, anti-virus is a lot like vaccinations. Each person is much better protected when everyone else is protected. AVG gives away free virus protection to protect their enterprise customers.
Even just one million computers with perfect protection against becoming a zombie of a botnet is no protection at all.
But is Microsoft or the F/OSS community better equipped to anticipate or handle any issues that might arise. Sure, you can change default settings to allow for root login to gnome or KDE, but the difference in Windows is that vulnerability is default.
I have found kernel exploits in Darwin 8, but I've been told they are going to be fixed in Darwin 9. I have friends that work at the Apple store and said they trust their policies and machines well enough to let me do whatever I like. :) Not a fan of Apple, and I wouldn't buy a mac (or any pre-built machine for that matter), but OSX is really quite impressive.
As far as I know, windows programs are very well jailed, and even if there was a bug in wine that was directly exploited by a virus, unless you were running Wine as root (Why the hell would you do that?!?) Linux (kernel) is very aggressive against rouge programs (unauthorized disk / memory / device access).
I have run viruses under wine to test it, and typically they don't do more than crash the session only requiring wine to be reconfigured to defaults. I have had more problems with buggy programs that crash windows crash wine, and very rarely those programs when running in full screen require you to reboot the machine, unless you have another machine for remote access. But you can most always fix anything with that, in my experience.
I have had anti-virus kill my computer no less than three times, does that count? Oh wait, that was on a mac and 2 windows machines. never mind...
The cure has always been worse than the disease, with the exception of AVG, but again, not on a Linux machine.
Not that I would consider myself an advanced programmer in any way, but I have tried to write viruses for linux, and too many of the usual exploits for windows just don't exist under Linux. I was in a (non-computer) store recently and inadvertently was able to access all the employees personal information due to a bug with the printer that would temporarily disable the group policy to allow whatever. The group policy they had in place was VERY strict to make the computer appear as a simple touch screen terminal... but alas, it was Windows XP.
I reported the problem right away to a manager and explained the issue. Too bad there probably isn't anything they can do about it since I don't think there was anything their tech people could have done any better... other than "the obvious".
Except that while Windows is very dominant, it is dominant in a particular place, x86 workstations. Windows server doesn't dominate the backbone of the internet. People LOVE hacking BSD all day because it is a real challenge, not to mention that you can get pretty big recognition, even if you can't necessarily fix it. I think there was an article last week about an old BSD bug someone found. The Halloween documents reveal some major design flaws in Windows development that DO NOT EXIST in F/OSS. HURD suffers from lack of developers to make it a strong rival, but I would be shocked if the Linux Kernel doesn't have many times the number of developers (in workhours/yr) than Microsoft for their Kernel.
Some very serious exploits have existed in the Windows kernel forever, not to mention the weaknesses of things such as NTFS.
Just because the sum of all malware companies can out develop Microsoft doesn't mean they can out develop the entire F/OSS community. IMHO, that's silly.
But it also seems there are often critical outstanding bugs that Microsoft doesn't choose to address. A problem in software development Microsoft identified long ago is that it is impossible to compete with software where users are capable of fixing their own bugs and submitting solutions upstream. OSX has a small advantage, but only for components that exist outside of their Darwin world. Windows doesn't even give you the tools necessary to make a descent bug report, let alone fix the problem yourself.
I worked in a small theater, meaning everyone has to do their part. There were people that specialized in certain skills of course, but they spent most of their time teaching others. Everyone took part in sewing costumes, building parts of the set, hunting down props, repainting the stage, handing out fliers, and selling tickets. I have never met an actor so good they should be excused from doing real work. Those people never lasted very long, and at very least never had as much fun.
There are various technicalities, but a child in the us is anyone under the age of 13. 13-17 is a minor. While people have been charged with child porn laws for porn of teenagers, it is often reduced to a lesser charge. Under 13 has no room for flexibility, to my understanding. This may have more to do with judicial discretion though.
My experience was more with a person, I feel, didn't understand, not to discount a degree of selfishness. However, I certainly wasn't trying to limit the range of motivation or justification made by pedophiles for their actions. I am not sure what I said to imply that the child is ever at fault; that wasn't intended.
I think all policies should be discussed and justified, even though if it is really easy. Also, sweeping anti-childporn legislation in the past has had some negative unintended consequences, from the famous Lolita. Until not terribly recent, if you had a diary with graphic depiction of your own childhood abuse, you could be imprisoned for possession of child porn.
While I can understand where you are coming, with respect to 'needing to defend it', I am just grateful we live in a day where people can actually have such discussions. I'll take criticism over censorship any day.
Uhhh... it was satirical. I was trying to make fun of the bootcamp/ipod/iphone brick updates that have been headlines of /. in the past. Seriously? No mod:funny? IMHO, if anyone really thinks I was trolling or thought this was serious, I fear for Apple.
Or maybe I should listen to my wife; she says I can't deliver a joke to save my life. Of well. *tear*
However, having been part of the BDSM community for many years, people that watch rape porn often enjoy safe, consensual, role-playing with a partner that enjoys the same. Rape fantasy can have safe outlets, and in some cases even be therapeutic. This isn't to say that all people with rape fantasies want to live them out... right away, but in the right crowd it is really quite the experience to test the boundaries of trust. Yes, there are bad apples out there, but healthy educated people are much safer and better off.
So my argument, by contrast, is that you can not make the same argument for child porn. Nambla makes the same argument (As sick as it is to read and try to understand, I believe in "know thy enemy") that all human beings have the right to consent and mutual pleasure. As much as pedophiles are driven by sexual urges, we all are, but the difference is that the pedophile doesn't (necessarily) understand that even though a child may be agreeable or coerced into sex, they do not understand what is happening to them on a developmental level; the child doesn't understand the damage they are allowing to be inflicted upon them.
There is little cause for concern for adults (male or female) that want to participate or experiment with BDSM. NO such subjectivity does, can, or should exist for child porn.
I agree, to the extent of your claim. Most all sexual abuse comes from parents, close relatives, and to a lesser extent neighbors that are family friends. I would have no sympathy for child pornographers being shot with probable cause, and distribution carrying a punishment that locks you away with Bubba for a very long time, but legalizing possession for the sake of investigative purposes, and allow distribution to be easier. This would let more of the right people be get caught.
A counter argument, and I think a strong one, is (I believe) many child molesters get caught because they take pornographic pictures of their victims. Frequently there can be insufficient evidence such as an unwilling witness to convict, but the pornography can be used for an easy to stick possession charge that under such circumstances can get the max penalty.
I am more on the side of detouring videographers by putting SEVERE penalties on their customers. One of the few successful prohibitions, and thank god for that. Too bad child sex slaves are easier to come by, as the news seems to report it.
Turns out there wasn't a phishing attack, but an Apple Update that didn't go as planned. Apple sent an update that caused every mac to flash their router with a AirPort/AppleTalk/IPX update. Everything went as planned, except for the few customers that had Mac computers on non-Airport based networks. Rumor has it Apple has regarded the issue as low priority, but will provide a patch for everyone that buys OSX10.6 and until then their official statement so far is "STFU, why weren't you using an Airport?", noting that use of non-Apple routing equipment can void your warranty, and that they have no legal obligation to resolve the issue with the few affected hackers.
??? You say that I am wrong, but then repeat exactly what I said from the other side. If you learn the software, in which I am saying is NOT intuitive, it is productive and easy to use AFTER you take the time to learn it. A lot of software, in my opinion, will go to great lengths to make an interface that is dual purpose tutorial / utility, which is terribly annoying once you have figured what you want. Blender is designed to maximize productivity and utility at a full sacrifice for the consideration of the difficulty of learning the software.
:)
And honestly, is the documentation so terrible, or just not filling an unnecessarily large portion of the interface at all times?
Know what really annoys me? All these damn decals and warning labels all over the interior of a car that tell you what not to do. Yes, it was informative the first time, but do I really need it branded everywhere I look? Couldn't they just add this stuff to the license test? It is one thing to have an oil light, and another to have a voice coming on every time you start the car explaining the dangers of letting the car go too long without an oil change irrelevant to the last time it was checked. Most new cars seem to be right in the middle with that junk right now. BLEH!
That reminds me... THANK YOU Blender Foundation for keeping the Documentation and Tutorials where they should be, on the web site!
IMHO
Hey, at least Novell Netware... ha ha ha lol, I can't even finish typing that. Nevermind
that bugged me too. I think it actually says in the documentation "everything is designed to assume you know what you are doing". How am I supposed to do anything if I need to already know it to do anything? Oh yeah, read the manual. I will admit that needing to read the documentation to save resulted in a long sigh. It was worse for rendering movies... but I'll admit that once I knew it, it was easy to remember, and beats the hell out of "Are you sure" or "didn't you forget to..." dialog boxes all over the damn place with "other software" (not necessarily 3d apps).
Agreed, if you saying what I think you saying. People that gripe about Blenders interface are not people that know it; it is all people, imho, that took one look at the simple boxy interface and giant menus, and maybe clicked on the cube with the left mouse button to discover nothing happens, and were immediately turned off, if not outright upset. That was my reaction. Once I finally took the time to learn it (years later after seeing demo videos) other people would watch me work in Blender and would be like WHAT!?! How do you do that? and I would say It is easy, but you must at least watch the interface tutorials (youtube's super3boy tutorials are great for starters, mind you he sounds 12 years old.
I am not going to bother to find the quote, but what made me take the time to learn Blender, or finally overcome what had appeared to be a wretched interface was an explanation in the documentation that stated that it wasn't designed to be easy to learn, it was designed to be easy to use! "No, we are not going to change the interface to make it easier to learn, but we swear once you understand it, you will wish all your applications worked like Blender".
This told me that even if it didn't make sense to me right away, that didn't make it inferior. This also said they put a LOT of effort into making an interface the right way! Productive! Same reason I prefer Linux in general.
3D Studio Max is great, and it does lots of hand holding through the whole experience... great tutorials, but I never got very far. I am not saying Blender is better (necessarly), it just didn't work for me. When I finally gave Blender a chance some months ago, it began with about a week of following video tutorials on YouTube (I spent my entire spring break with a friend learning blender / reading documentation / watching videos). During and shortly after that week I quickly found it easy to imagine what I wanted to create and type it all out in shortcuts very quickly. My only limit has been my imagination. I still get screwed up every once in a while neglecting to check which mode I am in, but my own mistake. It has also given me a medium to master my Python skills, though that hasn't gone quite as quickly.
Microsoft, stay the hell away from Blender!!! Too many good projects have DIED because of Microsoft involvement. I am so glad the Blender Foundation keeps an open mind, and knows better than to deal with those rats. Note to Novell: HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!
Microsoft 'forced'... hmm... Like they were 'forced to break up in the US, and 'forced' to pay huge fines in the EU? M$ seems to have its own feelings about 'forced'.
Ok, maybe I really thought they used to try... you know, like the UN. hmm...
What Google has done is great, and I wish Google was allowed to interpret the censorship rules in the US the same way they do in China. What Google has UNIQUELY done (compared to every other search company as far as I know) is that they inform the user of when and why they are censored and the governmental department that has censored them. That is WAY better than what we have here where content is taken down and 'black bag' the content in such a way to make it appear that such information never existed, NOT that the government is trying to control your thoughts.
Hopefully Google will try to bring the same freedom to the US they have brought to China. Way to go shareholders for being informed voters and not paying attention to stupid articles like this one that trys to distort the facts for attention and ratings.
Amnesty International used to be more prudent about stuff like this. Shame on them.
I think Microsoft just took Knoppix off of TPB and renamed it claiming First Sale Doctrine.
Isn't the same old story? If you can't fix it, sell it! Vulnerabilities are now being 'sold' as police investigator tools. What next? Also, if you read the EULA for Vista (Probably applies to XP also) Microsoft can already access any files on any machine remotely, so long as it has an active internet connection. I think it was also determined recently as a part of that there is a special root login that only Microsoft has for all Windows machines giving more access than a normal administrator. Remember, they own it, and you lease the right to use it. :)