Do you have any examples of software that works in XP and needs rewriting for Vista?
Uhm... yeah... Actually, there's tons of it. Most of the software used by the company I work for fails to install or fails to run under Vista. Heck, even Microsoft's own products aren't compatible with Vista: Office, Zune... The list goes on. Want more? Google is your friend. Try a query for "not compatible with Windows Vista" or "Vista incompatible".
Oh, and lest you think I'm some Microsoft-bashing fanboi - I'm a Microsoft Certified Professional, and I work for a Windows-only software company. We don't support Vista, yet, either. -- Nuf Sed.
From the pictures i saw once I got around to reading the full article, I noticed that he was dressed in slacks and a tshirt. From the pictures I saw in the full article, I saw college students (gasp!) dressed in jeans and tshirts (GASP!)
Maybe you should check the stick in your ass before bitching about the splinter in my eye.
I've been trying, really trying. I can't stop myself from attacking you personally on this one.
YOU (SMACK) ARE (SMACK) MISSING (SMACK) THE (SMACK) MESSAGE!
First of all, the important factor here is THE SPEECH. This discussion is bogging down on whether he was wearing socks, and was his T-shirt Hanes or Jersee? WHO CARES?!? IT'S NOT IMPORTANT, STFU ALREADY!
To be completely honest, I think anyone who flips out over his attire is too stupid to get the message he was trying to give them.
Secondly, it's not $40. I can get a polo *AND* a pair of sneakers for less than $15... Within walking distance... Of damn near anywhere I'm likely to be.
... but I'm not likely to.
-- Understanding stupidity is kinda like cheering for silence.
Respectable/serious attire are necessary not to convince your audience that you are right, but to convince them that you are "normal" by everybody else's standards.
Uhm, no. I don't know anyone who wears a suit and tie, except on Sundays for church (and damn few of those). As for your statement that
The guy probably wears shoes outside his home, so why take them off to get on stage and deliver a speech to respected academics?
Well, I don't know him personally, but he may not wear shoes if it is at all possible. It is perfectly normal *to me* to have people come to my home that wear sandals only because footwear is legally required while driving, and take them off as soon as they come inside, or once they get to my patio, or even before they leave their vehicle (gasp!). Similarly, it is perfectly normal *to me* to have people wear jeans, shorts, "cutoffs", skirts, slacks, polos, t-shirts, no shirt, socks, no socks, or any number of other "outrageous" attires. It is the accepted norm in my household not to be offended by attire unless it is unsafe or unsanitary (which even being completely naked may not be, depending upon conditions).
It appears to me that you are being just as pig-headed as the people screaming that he needs to wear a suit. And before you go shouting that bare feet are unsanitary, please explain to us all how bare feet are somehow less clean than shoes? They go the same places, you know...
Oh, and one final rebuttal to your comments... you said
... it doesn't help when your leaders are barefoot lunatics who dislike shampoo and don't cut their hair.
So now you're not only advocating a dress code, but hair style as well? Having "longer than typical" hair doesn't make him unclean. How does he smell? Oh, you don't know? Then don't make judgments based on someone's appearance. Just in case you were wondering, you don't have to use shampoo to be clean, and just because you're not clean-shaven and/or wearing a crewcut doesn't mean you smell bad.
On the other hand, I don't know him, either, and I have yet to see any photos from the event (no, I haven't yet read the article, although I plan to. The minutes were cool, I'd love to see the YouTube Video of the entire event). All of this post was formed from my own reactions to your post.
-- This post has been sanitized to remove personal attacks, other than those required to make my point.
I have worn jeans and t-shirts to both of the occasions you mention. I assume the majority of those involved were of a similar mind, and felt that it was appropriate attire, as they were dressed "casually" as well. Not all of us were in shoes, for some of the events.
Am I a bad person for not dressing up? No. Did I show disrespect? No. Are you an ignorant twit for making a snap judgement? Maybe... What do you think?
it's ridiculous money-grubbing. it's a bunch of anal-retentive jackasses who are so self-important that no one can make a move without them raising a stink. it's a bunch of jackals and vultures feeding off content that they didn't even produce. it makes me sick.
it's not censorship. it's theft. theft of our time and money, based on a proposition that we owe someone money for something they didn't produce in the first place. let the artists make the money, if they're still alive, and let the lawyers starve.
I, too, have noticed an increase in XP issues since Vista came out, but until you mentioned it, I hadn't considered that Microsoft might be doing it intentionally... After all, why would they want to break their own product?
Then, thinking back to when XP launched, I seem to recall Windows 98 having similar "all of a sudden it's broken" issues... perhaps there *is* a link - Microsoft launches a new OS, and the previous flagship OS is sent a "kill switch" that causes it to write random data to random places? Say, one bit every umpteen or so cycles? Thereby guaranteeing that the previous "best thing EVAR" is no longer stable and reliable...
Hmm.
Perhaps we should all look to the EU's response to Vista, and switch to linux instead of switching to Vista. Perhaps we should all stop supporting Windows in any way, shape, or form.
... nah, most of us need money too badly to throw away what little we have. We should just face up to the fact that Microsoft has a lock on the IT sector, and we have no choice. We have been assimilated.
On a side note, if anyone wants to support me and my family while I forget my Microsoft indoctrination and learn linux well enough to make money supporting it, feel free to drop me a mail.
What are the chances that someone will be sitting by the computer, just waiting for it to reboot so they can steal the disk drive?
Ok, so imagine there's a piece of malware out there that doesn't do anything except look for PGP FDE... and turn this feature on. It doesn't necessarily even need to be "in the wild"... It gets sent to a specific user, using whatever delivery method - be it email, mailed software, hacking, or even just an autorun.inf on a thumbdrive (people will cheerfully stick unknown USB drives they found in the parking lot into their work pc, it's been done).
So now, every time the system boots, it skips the passphrase. The user doesn't think anything of it (if they even notice), and later in the week, or maybe even that night, their pc is stolen. Oops, good thing we're using FDE and no one can get to our data!
The next day, Bob's entire department starts getting emails from the thief, thanking Bob for leaving his disk unencrypted. Complete with those nasty photos he had hidden under "TPS Reports" in "My Documents". And all the details on the company's latest project, which he had under "Top Secret" in "My Documents".
Bob, you're fired.
Because that is essentially the only way for this to be exploited.
No, I can think of a number of situations where this could be exploited... some of them without even leaving the corporate chain. For example...
Bob has angered Sally by turning down her offer of a dinner date. Sally, being emotionally unstable, decides to ruin Bob's life. Sally thinks of the security lecture they all got yesterday when someone left a floppy lying unattended on a table. the one where the boss said he'd fire the next person he found not following security policy and procedure to the letter.
Sally drops the aforementioned piece of malware on Bob's computer while he's off freshening up his coffee, and then goes and gets the boss. She points out to the boss that Bob is not adhering to company policy as pertains to the disk encryption, as his system does not ask for the FDE password when it boots up. Boss reboots Bob's computer, and lo and behold, there's no password.
Bob, you're fired.
The possibilities are endless. No, they don't all require someone getting mad at Bob, but it's more fun that way. Bob getting fired is just my way of saying that bad things happen.
-- You don't have to be crazy to post here, but it helps.
My point exactly. Instead of pulling out the tinfoil hats, let's take this as a warning that without seeing the source, we don't know what our software is doing under the hood.
I understood what this feature does, and I am aware of the requirements to activate it. My "security through obscurity" comment was not reflecting the software, but the fact that they seemed to bury any references to the feature in their support forums, rather than spelling it out in the manual. This fact is beside the point, anyway.
My point was simply that we don't know for certain that PGP can't be broken by anyone with a stock password, or some other backdoor, and this was a glaring reminder of that. We don't know what closed source software does behind the scenes.
Let's not take this as an attack on PGP; let's instead keep it in mind when someone says "Why should I use this open source stuff, when there's a perfectly good (closed source) product I can purchase?"
Pompous or no, suddenly discovering a way to bypass my full-disk encryption, whether it be "only on the next boot" or not, makes me suddenly very leery of this closed-source software. What if they *DID* put in another backdoor? IMO, this gives PGP's credibility a fatal error.
As another poster stated, "In security software, any undocumented feature is a bug."
It feels to me very much like this "undocumented feature" was obfuscated by being not in the manual. I don't care if it's available if I jump through 17 hoops and happen to land in the right spot on their forums, it should have been documented from the get-go. It feels to me like they tried to hide it by burying it in the forums instead of coming right out and saying it in the manual. Preferably in BOLD TYPE.
As is commonly known, "Security through obscurity is not security."
What linux distro are you configuring, that you're dealing with text files?
Most end-users never see an OS installation. Sure, they install their word processing programs... some of them. I'm a Windows tech, and the majority of users I interact with are scared, even of installation scripts that have nothing but "next" and "back" buttons. An OS install of any flavor would send them screaming to the Psych ward - that's why they send their pc to a tech shop (or the IT department, if they're big enough) when it needs anything.
On the other hand, I managed to install ubuntu desktop on the hard drive from a LiveCD with just a few clicks, and never even saw a text file 'til I was looking at my new desktop (the one locally installed, not the one on the cd). The one place that anyone would have been frightened by the questions is when it asks you how you want to partition... but Windows installs do the same thing, and are completely text-mode at that point... not sitting in a window in a gui, with a firefox icon just sitting there, available for googling any questions you might have, or just plain surfing... *while the OS installs itself*.
To sum up this rambling response to your textfile whining, I think that the ubuntu install process is actually much friendlier than Windows, and less likely to result in a user having a coronary at being asked a question they don't know how to answer.
Moving right along... what's wrong with the default ubuntu install? I like the rich chocolate backdrop better than the default one, but other than that? Beats the heck out of default PlaySchool^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Windows themes. And speaking of themes, "Human" isn't bad, although I'm not big on orange.
To move on to your next piece of detritus: Mail server configuration giving you grief? Perhaps you should RTFM before you SMTP. 'Nuf Sed.
Marketing... yeah, we could use some more marketing... TV ads, radio spots... Great Idea! Tell ya what. You pony up a couple hundred thousand dollars, and I'll do some marketing for you. Until that point, you should realize that no one is making money off of this, and so there's no marketing budget. --
So send a bunch of people, who *should* act suspiciously, and may be told that they have dangerous (plans|items|thoughts), so they react appropriately, and...
Shut down all air traffic in that locality.
If you go a step further, and don't have any incriminating evidence in possession of your "terrorists", then they may actually get to walk away at the end of the day.
Send a dozen people to each of 3 or 4 airports in major cities, timed to get "caught" within minutes of each other, (read: trigger the airport security system), and shut down all air traffic in the country. ("Oh noes! It's an evil plot! We've caught (3|5|9|15) people from (insert nation of origin of choice) with our screens in the past 30 minutes! Shut it all down while we 'investigate' them! Bob, get the rubber hoses and meet me in the back room!")
The joy of this plan is that not only do you get to shut down air travel, but if you play your cards right, you get to not only keep your "terrorists", but you also get to file a couple dozen civil suits for racial profiling, false imprisonment, etc....especially if they all have minicams with transmitters, so that when they get tasered, beaten, or whatever, it's all on tape with "Jim" out in the parking lot.
And for those of you who think I'm being far-fetched, think of all the money it would bring in to win just *one* (heavily publicised) lawsuit against a major airline for these and other poor treatments of a passenger. Not just to the person bringing the charges, but to the airline. Now figure out how much, per person, the airline might be willing to spend to settle out of court. Sounds like a new source of terrorist funding to me...
-- Remember... Terrorism is only a good plan while the targets are fearful. Own guns! Obtain carry permits! An armed society is a polite society.
At one point in time I printed out a list of keyboard shortcuts, just because I was amazed at the number of things you can do that *don't* require a mouse on a Windows box - or at least, didn't used to.
You can't even do my favorite keyboard shutcut on Vista - "Ctrl-Esc (or Window/Super), U, U"
Don't mod me up just for bashing Microsoft. Any of you that have Windows experience know exactly what I'm talking about; they broke our non-mousing abilities.
I used to think Trillian was the be-all end-all... a single client that accesses half a dozen networks. Beautiful, right? Sure, until you realize that Trill cheerfully eats up to 80% cpu on a system when it's actively doing something; and the wiki interface, while very cool, breaks within a few weeks of "normal" usage. Hmm. Now that I think of it, those two items may be related.
It's great that they can scan my dna without leaving the scene and all, but wouldn't it be cool if it did it with a modified standard cdrom drive, like this chemical scanner?
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm... yeah... Actually, there's tons of it. Most of the software used by the company I work for fails to install or fails to run under Vista. Heck, even Microsoft's own products aren't compatible with Vista: Office, Zune... The list goes on. Want more? Google is your friend. Try a query for "not compatible with Windows Vista" or "Vista incompatible".
Oh, and lest you think I'm some Microsoft-bashing fanboi - I'm a Microsoft Certified Professional, and I work for a Windows-only software company. We don't support Vista, yet, either.
--
Nuf Sed.
From the pictures i saw once I got around to reading the full article, I noticed that he was dressed in slacks and a tshirt. From the pictures I saw in the full article, I saw college students (gasp!) dressed in jeans and tshirts (GASP!)
Maybe you should check the stick in your ass before bitching about the splinter in my eye.
I've been trying, really trying. I can't stop myself from attacking you personally on this one.
... but I'm not likely to.
YOU (SMACK) ARE (SMACK) MISSING (SMACK) THE (SMACK) MESSAGE!
First of all, the important factor here is THE SPEECH. This discussion is bogging down on whether he was wearing socks, and was his T-shirt Hanes or Jersee? WHO CARES?!? IT'S NOT IMPORTANT, STFU ALREADY!
To be completely honest, I think anyone who flips out over his attire is too stupid to get the message he was trying to give them.
Secondly, it's not $40. I can get a polo *AND* a pair of sneakers for less than $15... Within walking distance... Of damn near anywhere I'm likely to be.
--
Understanding stupidity is kinda like cheering for silence.
Uhm, no. I don't know anyone who wears a suit and tie, except on Sundays for church (and damn few of those). As for your statement that
Well, I don't know him personally, but he may not wear shoes if it is at all possible. It is perfectly normal *to me* to have people come to my home that wear sandals only because footwear is legally required while driving, and take them off as soon as they come inside, or once they get to my patio, or even before they leave their vehicle (gasp!). Similarly, it is perfectly normal *to me* to have people wear jeans, shorts, "cutoffs", skirts, slacks, polos, t-shirts, no shirt, socks, no socks, or any number of other "outrageous" attires. It is the accepted norm in my household not to be offended by attire unless it is unsafe or unsanitary (which even being completely naked may not be, depending upon conditions).It appears to me that you are being just as pig-headed as the people screaming that he needs to wear a suit. And before you go shouting that bare feet are unsanitary, please explain to us all how bare feet are somehow less clean than shoes? They go the same places, you know...
Oh, and one final rebuttal to your comments... you said
So now you're not only advocating a dress code, but hair style as well? Having "longer than typical" hair doesn't make him unclean. How does he smell? Oh, you don't know? Then don't make judgments based on someone's appearance. Just in case you were wondering, you don't have to use shampoo to be clean, and just because you're not clean-shaven and/or wearing a crewcut doesn't mean you smell bad.On the other hand, I don't know him, either, and I have yet to see any photos from the event (no, I haven't yet read the article, although I plan to. The minutes were cool, I'd love to see the YouTube Video of the entire event). All of this post was formed from my own reactions to your post.
--This post has been sanitized to remove personal attacks, other than those required to make my point.
I have worn jeans and t-shirts to both of the occasions you mention. I assume the majority of those involved were of a similar mind, and felt that it was appropriate attire, as they were dressed "casually" as well. Not all of us were in shoes, for some of the events.
Am I a bad person for not dressing up? No. Did I show disrespect? No. Are you an ignorant twit for making a snap judgement? Maybe... What do you think?
it's ridiculous money-grubbing. it's a bunch of anal-retentive jackasses who are so self-important that no one can make a move without them raising a stink. it's a bunch of jackals and vultures feeding off content that they didn't even produce. it makes me sick.
it's not censorship. it's theft. theft of our time and money, based on a proposition that we owe someone money for something they didn't produce in the first place. let the artists make the money, if they're still alive, and let the lawyers starve.
Transfer all the unprotected works to Gutenberg. Problem solved.
As a side benefit, Gutenberg gets a lot of free publicity (with people who care, anyway).
Then, thinking back to when XP launched, I seem to recall Windows 98 having similar "all of a sudden it's broken" issues... perhaps there *is* a link - Microsoft launches a new OS, and the previous flagship OS is sent a "kill switch" that causes it to write random data to random places? Say, one bit every umpteen or so cycles? Thereby guaranteeing that the previous "best thing EVAR" is no longer stable and reliable...
Hmm.
Perhaps we should all look to the EU's response to Vista, and switch to linux instead of switching to Vista.
Perhaps we should all stop supporting Windows in any way, shape, or form.
On a side note, if anyone wants to support me and my family while I forget my Microsoft indoctrination and learn linux well enough to make money supporting it, feel free to drop me a mail.
Ok, so imagine there's a piece of malware out there that doesn't do anything except look for PGP FDE... and turn this feature on. It doesn't necessarily even need to be "in the wild"... It gets sent to a specific user, using whatever delivery method - be it email, mailed software, hacking, or even just an autorun.inf on a thumbdrive (people will cheerfully stick unknown USB drives they found in the parking lot into their work pc, it's been done).
So now, every time the system boots, it skips the passphrase. The user doesn't think anything of it (if they even notice), and later in the week, or maybe even that night, their pc is stolen. Oops, good thing we're using FDE and no one can get to our data!
The next day, Bob's entire department starts getting emails from the thief, thanking Bob for leaving his disk unencrypted. Complete with those nasty photos he had hidden under "TPS Reports" in "My Documents". And all the details on the company's latest project, which he had under "Top Secret" in "My Documents".
Bob, you're fired.
No, I can think of a number of situations where this could be exploited... some of them without even leaving the corporate chain. For example...
Bob has angered Sally by turning down her offer of a dinner date. Sally, being emotionally unstable, decides to ruin Bob's life. Sally thinks of the security lecture they all got yesterday when someone left a floppy lying unattended on a table. the one where the boss said he'd fire the next person he found not following security policy and procedure to the letter.
Sally drops the aforementioned piece of malware on Bob's computer while he's off freshening up his coffee, and then goes and gets the boss. She points out to the boss that Bob is not adhering to company policy as pertains to the disk encryption, as his system does not ask for the FDE password when it boots up. Boss reboots Bob's computer, and lo and behold, there's no password.
Bob, you're fired.
The possibilities are endless. No, they don't all require someone getting mad at Bob, but it's more fun that way. Bob getting fired is just my way of saying that bad things happen.
--
You don't have to be crazy to post here, but it helps.
I think you missed my point. I wasn't whining about PGP, I was whining about closed source software.
My point exactly. Instead of pulling out the tinfoil hats, let's take this as a warning that without seeing the source, we don't know what our software is doing under the hood.
I understood what this feature does, and I am aware of the requirements to activate it. My "security through obscurity" comment was not reflecting the software, but the fact that they seemed to bury any references to the feature in their support forums, rather than spelling it out in the manual. This fact is beside the point, anyway.
My point was simply that we don't know for certain that PGP can't be broken by anyone with a stock password, or some other backdoor, and this was a glaring reminder of that. We don't know what closed source software does behind the scenes.
Let's not take this as an attack on PGP; let's instead keep it in mind when someone says "Why should I use this open source stuff, when there's a perfectly good (closed source) product I can purchase?"
Pompous or no, suddenly discovering a way to bypass my full-disk encryption, whether it be "only on the next boot" or not, makes me suddenly very leery of this closed-source software. What if they *DID* put in another backdoor? IMO, this gives PGP's credibility a fatal error.
As another poster stated, "In security software, any undocumented feature is a bug."
It feels to me very much like this "undocumented feature" was obfuscated by being not in the manual. I don't care if it's available if I jump through 17 hoops and happen to land in the right spot on their forums, it should have been documented from the get-go. It feels to me like they tried to hide it by burying it in the forums instead of coming right out and saying it in the manual. Preferably in BOLD TYPE.
As is commonly known, "Security through obscurity is not security."
--
My dogma ate my karma.
What linux distro are you configuring, that you're dealing with text files?
Most end-users never see an OS installation. Sure, they install their word processing programs... some of them. I'm a Windows tech, and the majority of users I interact with are scared, even of installation scripts that have nothing but "next" and "back" buttons. An OS install of any flavor would send them screaming to the Psych ward - that's why they send their pc to a tech shop (or the IT department, if they're big enough) when it needs anything.
On the other hand, I managed to install ubuntu desktop on the hard drive from a LiveCD with just a few clicks, and never even saw a text file 'til I was looking at my new desktop (the one locally installed, not the one on the cd). The one place that anyone would have been frightened by the questions is when it asks you how you want to partition... but Windows installs do the same thing, and are completely text-mode at that point... not sitting in a window in a gui, with a firefox icon just sitting there, available for googling any questions you might have, or just plain surfing... *while the OS installs itself*.
To sum up this rambling response to your textfile whining, I think that the ubuntu install process is actually much friendlier than Windows, and less likely to result in a user having a coronary at being asked a question they don't know how to answer.
Moving right along... what's wrong with the default ubuntu install? I like the rich chocolate backdrop better than the default one, but other than that? Beats the heck out of default PlaySchool^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Windows themes. And speaking of themes, "Human" isn't bad, although I'm not big on orange.
To move on to your next piece of detritus: Mail server configuration giving you grief? Perhaps you should RTFM before you SMTP. 'Nuf Sed.
Marketing... yeah, we could use some more marketing... TV ads, radio spots... Great Idea! Tell ya what. You pony up a couple hundred thousand dollars, and I'll do some marketing for you. Until that point, you should realize that no one is making money off of this, and so there's no marketing budget.
--
So send a bunch of people, who *should* act suspiciously, and may be told that they have dangerous (plans|items|thoughts), so they react appropriately, and...
...especially if they all have minicams with transmitters, so that when they get tasered, beaten, or whatever, it's all on tape with "Jim" out in the parking lot.
Shut down all air traffic in that locality.
If you go a step further, and don't have any incriminating evidence in possession of your "terrorists", then they may actually get to walk away at the end of the day.
Send a dozen people to each of 3 or 4 airports in major cities, timed to get "caught" within minutes of each other, (read: trigger the airport security system), and shut down all air traffic in the country. ("Oh noes! It's an evil plot! We've caught (3|5|9|15) people from (insert nation of origin of choice) with our screens in the past 30 minutes! Shut it all down while we 'investigate' them! Bob, get the rubber hoses and meet me in the back room!")
The joy of this plan is that not only do you get to shut down air travel, but if you play your cards right, you get to not only keep your "terrorists", but you also get to file a couple dozen civil suits for racial profiling, false imprisonment, etc.
And for those of you who think I'm being far-fetched, think of all the money it would bring in to win just *one* (heavily publicised) lawsuit against a major airline for these and other poor treatments of a passenger. Not just to the person bringing the charges, but to the airline. Now figure out how much, per person, the airline might be willing to spend to settle out of court. Sounds like a new source of terrorist funding to me...
--
Remember... Terrorism is only a good plan while the targets are fearful.
Own guns! Obtain carry permits!
An armed society is a polite society.
(n/t)
At one point in time I printed out a list of keyboard shortcuts, just because I was amazed at the number of things you can do that *don't* require a mouse on a Windows box - or at least, didn't used to. You can't even do my favorite keyboard shutcut on Vista - "Ctrl-Esc (or Window/Super), U, U" Don't mod me up just for bashing Microsoft. Any of you that have Windows experience know exactly what I'm talking about; they broke our non-mousing abilities.
I used to think Trillian was the be-all end-all... a single client that accesses half a dozen networks. Beautiful, right? Sure, until you realize that Trill cheerfully eats up to 80% cpu on a system when it's actively doing something; and the wiki interface, while very cool, breaks within a few weeks of "normal" usage. Hmm. Now that I think of it, those two items may be related.
It's great that they can scan my dna without leaving the scene and all, but wouldn't it be cool if it did it with a modified standard cdrom drive, like this chemical scanner?