Also, I had no idea 165 MILLION people were already using Passport
They AREN'T. They're using Hotmail, (mostly), MSN , and the MSDN. Microsoft migrated the authentication backend for these services to use their new Passport service. It inflates their "subscriber" numbers, making it appear that millions of suckers actually "chose" Passport out of their own volition and interest. Now Windows XP will get thrown into the mix, with built-in nags to persuade you like a piece of bad shareware to sign up for it.
If it weren't for the last mile problem (ethernet or fiber to every home, like any other basic utility) Microsoft could tie your XP login password to a Passport account over the internet. Then every single sale of XP could've been counted towards their Passport "subscriber" base. It's just a matter of broadband before the way is clear...
Microsoft has also adopted what it calls a "federation" model for Passport that will allow other authentication vendors to create systems that interoperate with Microsoft's platform.
"Interoperate", eh? Imagine that. It's the undocumented "Borg" mode that the rest of us are worried about.
Or Microsoft PR got their cheques in to everyone on time except Infoworld. Blame it on Sep 11. The feds probably thought the Microsoft MindControl dust (OEM version) inside was Antrax powder.
An even better example would be the people of Afghanistan, who... even took on the Soviet Army and beat them back, albeit with a good bit of help from the USA. (Emphasis mine)
Yet another major campaign in the Cold War, again a proxy war in fairly worthless territory, territory that neither nation would have bothered with were it not for the other superpower.
You're kidding, right?
Does the phrase "warm water port" mean anything to you? The former Soviet Union had the largest amount of oceanic coastline of any nation in the world, but almost all of it was arctic. The year-road coastal ice and ship-wreaking icebergs meandering just off shore made the USSR's coastlines nearly useless for military and commercial ship deployment.
The USSR basically had three viable ports: the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the most southerly coasts of Sibera nearest Korea. All of those ports could EASILY be blockaded by foreign navies via the North Sea, the Dardenells or the entire Mediterranean, and bases in Alaska, Japan, and South Korea. Notice the strong Allied presence in all of those areas.
Despite Russia's Marxist rhetoric, the Soviet Union could barely support its internal needs for basics like food, medicine, and power, without imports. In an all-out war, it would have been fairly straightforward to cut off the USSR from all shipments and starve them out.
So one of Russian big goals in the cold war was to conquer its way to a warm water seaport, and the quickest way was through Afghanistan, since Russian provinces already surrounded it. From there, they planned to continue on to the Indian Ocean, which would have given them enough tropical coast to make a blockade very hard for us to enforce.
Besides missle counts, the oceans were a big theatre of the cold war, especially involving submarine movements. Part of Vietnam's value was it's proximity to both the Indian and Pacific oceans. Used as a soviet/chinese naval base, ships and subs could patrol from there to destroy US subs and ships.
So don't call Afghanistan a "worthless" territory to fight over. It may have seemed pointless to you, and maybe all war really is pointless, but it wasn't pointless to the Russians to take it, or pointless for us to help the Afghanis keep it. It was just a move and countermove in a big, impersonal game of chess with nations.
That was true of 5.1, that StarOffice monopolized your X desktop. This has been fixed in 5.2 and 6.x version of StarOffice and OpenOffice. But you're right, it is iritating the way 5.1 takes over.
More of an outliner than a word-processor or even an editor. It's not Word, but it's not bad. And hey, IT'S NOT WORD!! XML files, exports to HTML and ASCII, and maybe others (that's all I use).
You can get binaries for Win32 or Linux. I've compiled it on NetBSD without ncurses and it's works OK.
I sure hope you are not using non-dairy creamer in your coffee--the aluminum in that may increase your risk for Alzheimers.
That theory about aluminum catalyzing the onset of Alzheimers has been scrapped. You can safely go back to drinking out of cans again and stop intaking artificial estrogen residue from the plastic in pop bottles. Your voice should re-deepen naturally with a few years...
Another bonus is that it will help these countries get an immediate return on their university computer science programs. Money funneled into cs education will yield graduates capable of filling whatever needs the government may have by porting and extending existing free software, and of course translating the English UI to Spanish and/or Portuguese. If an application doesn't exist in free form, the government can always contract the creation of a new piece of software. But the CS graduates their universities generate will be in a better position to evaluate pre-existing applications to find applicable code.
So Microsoft (and many other US companies) will lose sales in South America unless they sell it under a liscence acceptable to those governments. The challenge for the US will be to figure out how to convert the money that once went toward Microsoft EULAs and CAs into sales for other companies. Unless Microsoft is prepared to come around... What I hear from Microsoft is that they're willing to divulge code, but they tack on a price in addition to their current liscencing schemes. It doesn't sound like that would be compatible with these new policies (and it would raise the price even further for them).
Then you get to maintain and run those thousand boxes. Consider power, floor space, and most importantly, people requirements. (Are you going to maintain those systems yourself? Two or three people, maybe? I don't think so.)
It's only hard if you don't know how to prepare the setup required to maintain $1 millon in PC hosts:
Computers are amazingly good at automatic repetetive logical tasks. 99% of all systems administration involves repetitive logical tasks. The trick is to make the machines do all the work of maintaining themselves that they can programmatically handle.
So if you're a clueless "paper" sysadmin, yep, it's impossible -- can't be done.
Re:PDF Virus a *Proof of Concept*, not a real thre
on
PDF Virus Spotted
·
· Score: 1
Yes, it's a proof of concept... for now.
After being invoked, the worm already has the code to find arbitrary files and create new files. If the problem of invoking the virus sidesteps the social engineering -- tricking the viewer into clicking on a game -- then it could move on to the following:
- scan all disks and shares for PDF files and insert the trojan and worm code into all of them.
- save a DLL, Acrobat plugin, or postscript dictionary into Acrobat's directories, permanantly modifying Acrobat's behavior. It could then infect every PDF viewed and saved from then on.
- Trojan Acrobat Distiller, which is just a glorified PS/EPS -> PDF RIP. Like most RIPs, the PostScript VM gets its settings by interpreting ASCII PostScript code in some startup files. You might be able to "infect" Distiller to trojan all PDF files it's used to create.
- Trojan Distiller watch folders. The *.options, prologue.ps, or epilogue.ps could be infected with the worm to create infected PDFs.
Of course most people don't have the full Acrobat, let alone Distiller, unless they traffic in warez or do graphics work out of their house. But DTP/Publishing houses are different. Almost every Mac on this floor has the full version of Acrobat AND Distiller AND Microsoft Outlook. And if you have Office installed, guess what? You're Mac has VB on it. It's just a matter of crafting the script to not depend on Windows file paths. Then there's the shops that use Windows NT for their DTP/Pre-Press workstations...
We get many, many PDF files from AP and ad designers from outside the company. If this worm improved its triggerability, it might get as bad as Word macro viruses. That's all that's holding it back.
>>Now for a display of massive ignorance:
>>I wonder what a PDF virus could do on a
>>system whose GUI is based on PDF (Mac OS X)?
I don't know. On Display PostScript GUIs, the widgets themselves are literally snippets of PostScript code. The difference between PostScript and PDF code if that PDF code _is_ PostScript, but it must be completely inline. No loops, conditionals, procedure calls, or recursion. So ability of PDF itself to do this is limited.
However, if DPDF on MacOS X supports embedding foreign files in the PDF code, then the answer is "It's hunting season! And we're hunting Macintoshes!" faster than you can say Elmer FUD. Any widget on the GUI might be able to contain either the worm or a link to the worm, depending on what you had to do to invoke it. This PoC worm needs you to click on it. So you might be able to trojan a DPDF widget to execute the worm on a mouseclick. An improved worm might execute by just being viewed, like JavaScript code in a webpage or email.
But Apple has to license DPDF from Adobe for real money per copy sold, so in a negotiation to keep the cost down and license a less featureful version, the answer is probably no, or at least, not yet.
2. I remeber NT 3.5.... it didn't get far! NT4 (Chicago) was meant to solve all this by bringing all the dos users up to the NT codebse... it failed and NT gained a server role for MS but not spectacular numbers (think NT V 9x boxes). Me... I don't know a single person who runs it (though I know many who ditched it). Win 9x is everywhere... the latest efforts are getting a very very slow rollout! Of and the 2000 you never montioned, it's struggling to replace NT on servers and is still being left on the shelf for the 9x (or maybe Me) line on the Desktop. MS are successful and sell a lot of products, but their performance is really becoming a lot less spectacular (hence subscriptions are coming).
Don't get ahead of yourself. MS's basic market is best described as "businesses with money". That's not you. Just because you don't know any NT users is meaningless. Vendors, "Solution Providers" (ha ha), OEMs, and VARs are selling NT in droves, for better or for worse.
FE, in the newspaper/publishing industry, almost every vendor production system runs on NT, followed distantly by Solaris, and then by the occasional AIX, VMS, BSD/OS, Linux, or Tru64 system. For the past several years our company has been replacing all of its old SunOS and VMS systems, and what we've found while shopping around is that the vast vast majority of system offerings are NT4 with MSSQL (6.5, 7, or 2000), with some Solaris options (but that's fading), and Windows 2000 systems just on the horizon. Sometimes you can get Sybase or Oracle, but the basic system recipe is NT + PostScript/PDF + SQL. If you want to buy a backend publishing system, you better like NT, because that's basically all that's for sale.
A good recent example is the Associated Press. You know who they are, right? All of their turnkey solutions they used to sell ran OS/2 for whatever reason. Now all AP products are W2K, across the board. Whether you want it or not, if you want AP gear, that's what's for sale.
The only Linux publishing vendors I've found are YARC (RIPs embedded on a PowerPC PCI card), Caldera, and I think SCS (could be wrong).
I'm not saying whether this is good or bad. NT gives the impression of being easier to learn, more integratable, faster, and cheaper than Sun or DEC gear... but most of those promises pretty much disintegrate in the details, especially when you start dealing with scalability, upgrades, or security. Linux or BSD products could make a killing in publishing, if anyone had the guts to actually sell them. NT's big advantage is its familiarity: the ease of getting employees who know it, the Windows 95 GUI, non-proprietary PC gear.
Anybody out their in the industry know otherwise? Are any newspapers using Linux- or BSD-based vendor systems?
C?! Java?! That's like arguing which bunch of politians are more honest, Democrats or Republicans. The answer is "none of the above".
A learning language has several requirements different from a application development language (like C or VB+Access) or a scripting language for a production evironment (Perl, any UNIX shell, DCL). Students need a language that is
- free. As in: here, have a diskette to take home.
- light. Low system requirements. Run on any old computer students may own or schools may be saddled with. Were talking 8 bit here, not 16 or 32.
- small. The entire run-time and development environment should fit on a $1 3.5" floppy. Not a CD-ROM. Students may not own or have access to computers with 660 free Megabytes of hard drives space to install the software.
- portable. Students do not all own the same kind of computer, if they own one at all. Same with schools.
- low-level. Students should be able to learn about the assembly language underpinnings of the language: registers, stacks, zero-page, addressing...
- FAST. on slow/obsolete hardware.
- Interactive. None of this edit/compile/link/run/crash/repeat BS. It's easier to learn when you can try out the syntax at a prompt, like BASIC or any shell.
- Toolable. You should be able to write tools in the lanuage to help you write programs faster and more easily. If you can write your own syntax-sensitive IDE and source code tools, students will see how programs can make programming itself easier. The easiest example would be an editor that accepts scripts written in the language their learning to modify the current file. They can write easy stuff, like Comment/Uncomment, to make it easier to get their homework done.
Few languages fit all these requirements. Most require a "Developer-class Workstation" eg. a fast CPU with generous RAM and lots and lots of free disk space. It's not fair to kids to assume they have that available at home or that they can stay after school to use the lab. Kids should be taught languages they can use on any PC they can afford, obtain, or borrow.
And that'd be FORTH. It's essentially a reverse-polish notation macro for raw assembly. It's easy to port by essentially porting the macros to a new CPU/architectures. It'll run on ANYTHING. You can learn it on an Apple II+, a PC/jr, an AT, a 286 clone picked up at Goodwill for $30, or the family Macintosh Plus (or iMac for that matter). Procedures can be built interactively and/or in an editor -- compilation is optional. It has everything C(++) has -- pointers, structs, file I/O, OOP, flow control, and access to the hardware at the lowest levels. GNU has gforth available.
From there, you can teach them PostScript, which is basically FORTH, only easier to read and with easier built-in datatypes. Students can learn on GhostScript and GSView, with a final copy for turned-in homework sent to a printer and RIP'd without errors and with correct output on the paper (use an overlay for grading). PostScript is a nice intro to 2D graphics programming (no animation though), and you learn how printers and fonts work. If students don't have a PC or Mac that can run GSView, it would be trivial to build a web interface to Ghostscript that accepted their.ps or.eps code and sent back a.JPG of the output and a text log of the RIP messages. Then they could do their assignments on web access PCs at any public library.
Then, you graduate to not Java, but the Java VM itself, which is also stack-based, and operates along the same lines as PostScript and FORTH. You can teach them Java, and show how the sytax of Java is compiled into the JVM bytecodes that act just like the FORTH they alread know and hate/love. With Java, you can build on the graphics principles learned with PostScript to build animated, multimedia GUI applets. Because the students may not own Java-capable computers (like something with IE or Netscape 4+), use Waba, which is just Java, but without all the built-in classes and dumb bloat that Sun stuck into Java. Waba requires only 64K of memory, and the entire VM and program code can fit in 50K. It supports graphics, GUI, and sound, and runs in the JVM of Java-enabled browsers (being a subset of Java).
Although I'm advocating some pretty OLD stuff, the students don't need to suffer in crusty old editors or shells to learn this stuff. Give them nice tools/editors/shells, with all the key commands where they expect (i.e. arrows/backspace/return for editing, not ^F/^B/^H or the vi command set).
Using modest software like FORTH, PostScript and Waba would also make it viable for schools to partner with obsolete PC recyclers, and donate a rebubished CPU, Monitor, Keyboard, Modem, and mouse to students that don't have a computer at home.
You don't need an expensive or even a recent computer to learn programming. It's the OEMs, like Apple, who keep goading to the schools and parents to buy Buy BUY new machines semi-annually. "Without multimedia, your children will be DUMB, un-employed, pregnant, drug-using drop outs! Do you want Strawberry, Tangerine, or Grape?" High-school programming classes are not about getting you a job, and you don't need to know C or Java already to get accepted into a CS program. Kids need to learn how computers work from the lowest-levels, so they don't grow up to be superstitious, clueless, and gullible when it comes to technology. Just throwing iMacs at kids and schools (as tempting as it may be to throw iMacs at anything) isn't go to insure that.
Something missing from the debate on Smart Tags is their inherent lack of trust. When IE parses a word of text, it trusts the Microsoft Smart Tags server to pony up an authentic set of links to content that is relevant and legitimate. Someone's name should ideally bring up links to their home page, photos, software/articles on-line that they've written, pages about them, etc.
Two problems with this scheme:
1) Web content is no longer static. It hasn't been for YEARS. CGI, ASP, Javascript, ActiveX, META redirects, TARGET tags, frames, Flash and Java -- each makes the web more dynamic, interactive, and untrustworthy. The crudest example is a deceptive URL which takes you to a different site (or kind of site) than what you expected. Goatse.cx is a social engineering example of this. But a different, innocent sounding URL could use any of these to redirect you there (meta, sub-frame, asp redirect, onmouseover Javascript to disguise the URL in the status bar) against your will or without your intent.
Now, are smart tags so smart that the same can't be done to them?
- hijack the DNS of the Smart Tag servers and serve up your own links, for good or evil
- compromise the Smart Tag database and substitute URLs for innocent subjects with indecent subjects (whitehouse.gov? No, whitehouse.com!)
- mess with the Certificate of Authority for the keypair that signs these so-called "Smart" tags. (They are _signed_, aren't they?) so that all Microsoft's hard-won ST's seem to IE to be signed with an invalid or untrusted key. Bill, what else does DOS stand for?
- trojan the HTML at the end of a Smart Tag with malicious javascript, redirects, framesets, applets, ActiveX components, etc.
Think about it. Smart Tags cannot _only_ link up to Microsoft content. That would be too obvious, even for the BG. It would be unprofitable too. MS is going to sell "spots" (like ad spots on TV) to its partners, so when you see "laptop" in the page text the smart tags point to the OEM's who bid 1st, 2nd and 3rd highest for that privilidge. Do you think Microsoft is doing this just to improve your "browser experience"? They're trying to become an ASP with.NET, right? Move from selling OSes to OEM to services to.com's. If people are willing to pay several times for high placement in several different search engines, they will not balk to have MS put their URL on every browser on the the planet that happens across their company name on the web.
And some of those Smart Tags will point to public domain URLs out of Microsoft's control (like the US Government's web sites -- for now) to expedite the illusion of goodwill on their part for gifting you with this (say it with me) "innovative" technology.
So you're sifting your web logs at your job at an ISP or collocation host. And you notice innordinate hits on a particular web page. Checking the referer pages reveals that none of the pages have ONE SINGLE LINK to the page hit in your logs, and the URL is not alluded to in the text of the referer pages, ever. You may have found the terminus of a Smart Tag. May? A look at the agent/browser ID string will settle it.
If the URL at the end of a Smart Tag becomes unmaintained but the DNS stays good (until the domain name fee comes up for renewal) the Smart Tag server will never know until it gets:
- a 404
- or a page with radically different textual/meta content
So you leave the text alone and add a trojaned javascript pop-up or ActiveX to beat up on IE users. (The windows world on-line seems to be so inclined to do this to one another...)
It's only a matter of time before crackers, bored ISP employees, and prankster webmasters of free web sites (Geocities, Anglefire, et al) figure out how to tell when their site gets "smarted" by Microsoft's Smart Tags.
And then they will poison their HTML and wait for the lemmings to rush the cliff.
2) Semantics
English words do not now and never will map one to one with discrete meanings. Use a search engine to seek out advice on caring for the "free kitten" you got from those kids in the Safeway parking lot. See how many links you get that are on caring for cats.
Is Microsoft's software so smart that this will not happen with it? The word "drive" in the BSD docs isn't going to point to Autobytel.com or Honda.com? Ever?
So they get to pick and choose which words they want Smart Tagged. When the subject of the smart tag links doesn't semantically match the content of the text, it going to get amusing. Think what USENET gateways and mailing list archives are going to light up like... Those messages are pure context caught mid-conversation, full of abbreviations, slang, and inside jokes (name 3 Enlish words that end in "gry", right?)
The "Smart" in Smart Tags is going to force the W3C to add the SARCASM tag to the standard at the gunpoint-assisted insistence of the journalists and users.
"Smart", huh? Makes me think of that kid's joke:
Smart Kid: Whatsa matter?
Not-so-smart: I'm so stupid. I can't find the answer I'm looking for on the internet. This "Google" is so confusing. Why, God, does it have to be so hard?
Smart Kid: Mm-hm. Well, I have just the thing. These "Smart Pills" will make you smarter. Then you won't need a search engine to know stuff. Want some? They're free!
Not-so-smart: Hell yes!
Smart Kid: (hands over black, warm, moist, and spongy confections, not unlike raisinets...)
Not-so-smart: (begins to gag, then face alights with signs of insight) Ack! Those weren't Smart Pills!! Those were rabbit droppings!!
Smart Kid: See! You knew that instantly! And you didn't even need a search engine...
Damn -- I was surpised to hear that what I was doing in 1997 has only this year become possible. If only I had listened to informed people like you, then I would've known better.
Seriously though, RevRDist is great stuff. If you like Macs, especially if you work with them, you owe it to yourself to learn how to work it. It takes some hacking: ResEdit, diffing files, understanding the Gestalt function, etc. It saves alot of work and maintenance in the long run, and you learn a lot about the MacOS at the file/resource level.
This guy needs to buy MacOS X. It will require him to pick up at least an iMac, if not a nice G4, and stuff at least 256 megs of RAM in it to get good speed. Even if he has a Mac laying around which was made no more than 2 years ago, the odds are against it being able to run MacOS X, with or without 2 gigs of RAM, fast PCI graphics cards and a G3 processor upgrade card.
Repeat after Steve: Fruit-colored Macs only beyond this point -- no beige allowed.
Were Microsoft has failed, Apple ironically provides.
I already own a Mac. It's not very old. I'm talking the life-span of a small rat here. It CAN NOT run MacOS X. If I could, I would buy it, but there's no need. I'd have to buy an accelerator probably with a proprietary extension to get it to even boot up. No chance.
And I don't intend to shell out $800 to replace what I already own to have an OS that only does what I already do. I can already burn CDs. I can get a Firewire card and burn DVDs later, though movies on CD-R work just fine. Think with your brain, for crying out loud. It's not "just $800" if it means you have to toss the computer you already bought and own!
Unless you use your home computer for work that makes money besides just a wage, then sure, that $800 will pay itself off. But that doesn't typify most of the people Apple targets.
When I was a kid, I only knew ProDOS and later MacOS. Hard-won experience with way too many other OSes has taught me to re-evaluate their merits along 2 simple lines:
1) Is it flexible? Can you without installing ANY OTHER VENDOR SOFTWARE implement a variety of creative solutions to your problems or your business, even automating your solution to run unattended? This is not unreasonable - even an Apple II had a nearly complete development system in ROM, and one easy enough that people with no programming background could teach themselves from scratch, and maybe build something they could sell.
2) Does it play nice with the other kids in the playground, especially the foreign ones? If it's on a LAN, again only with the core OS and any OS updates/packs, can it provided services to other computers and use the services of others, no matter how esoteric, proprietary, or bizarre?
2) is starting to eclipse 1) in importance, but of course with 1) you can build 2) yourself.
Along these lines, Linux and BSD win hands down. VMS is pretty close. You can write a multi-user database solution with web & telnet access, if you didn't have to BUY a TCP/IP stack for VMS... Ah, but there's always DecNET (ha ha). NT? Once you get the Option Pack on there and a reasonable service pack, you have Perl, ASP, OBDC, and even a small assembler to work with. Whether NT sucks or not, you can get a lot done with just it and the tools it comes with.
MacOS totally fails on these two points. For one, the only "tool" it comes with is AppleScript, limited TCP/IP services, and some dumb multimedia widgets. It's a kiosk OS, plain and simple. If what you want to do can't be done by being a mouse-jockey, waiting to click that next modal "OK", then forget it, MacOS is not for you.
The question for me with MacOS X is not whether it's a good UNIX. It's whether Apple is going to turn in into another OS like Windows, MacOS or NT that thethers you that KVM trinity to get work done. I sit so much in front of computers, the last thing I need is another screen to stare at, no matter how pretty. That's my question. If you were stranded on an alien planet with a solar array and a lan of G4s, and ONLY A MACOS X CD for software, is it flexible enough to build a complete solution to inventory supplies and water the plants while you're out and away? Is it self-hosting? In a corporation, could you feasably use it to do away with all Windows, Solaris and OS/2 systems, providing everything those did to your MacOS clients (or other OS clients) and yet still talk to the Pike, OS/390, MVS, or other mainframe? You certainly can with BSD or Linux. Does Apple have enough guts to make a viable competitor and alternative to Solaris and Windows 2000? Part of me hopes they don't chicken out.
> I wonder: the analogy to the 1960s may work,
> but should ex-hippies really be the target
> audience? Are they the ones running all the
> servers nowadays?
No. They're running the mainframe. But those old salts aren't hippies, even if they're from from the same generation. Would you call Steve Wozniak a "punk"? (Save it for Steve Jobs...)
The ex-hippies are busy pestering the recalcitrant, 20-something Solaris/NT/VMS admin to install Napster, RealPlayer, CometCursor, WebShots, WinAmp, and/or DirectDraw on their so-called "workstation." The easiest method to get them to go away is to try to persuade them to install a "free UNIX" on their dilipidated Apple or Wintel junker they have at home. They seem to suspect you're trying to trick them. Linux and BSD sound to them like something British cattle get infected with. Something that doesn't come with any good games.
Mainframe guys, who probably have a history with IBM gear at some point, are their target. At our company, the AS/400s are marked for death about once a year, and they get an annual reprieve when the MSSQL on NT replacement system just can't pick up the job. Linux for IBM is a subtle way of saying to all of us in-the-know: "Upgrade your crufty old datacenter. Windows NT not required". Sounds groovy to me.
Slashdot Mirror
They AREN'T. They're using Hotmail, (mostly), MSN , and the MSDN. Microsoft migrated the authentication backend for these services to use their new Passport service. It inflates their "subscriber" numbers, making it appear that millions of suckers actually "chose" Passport out of their own volition and interest. Now Windows XP will get thrown into the mix, with built-in nags to persuade you like a piece of bad shareware to sign up for it.
If it weren't for the last mile problem (ethernet or fiber to every home, like any other basic utility) Microsoft could tie your XP login password to a Passport account over the internet. Then every single sale of XP could've been counted towards their Passport "subscriber" base. It's just a matter of broadband before the way is clear...
"Interoperate", eh? Imagine that. It's the undocumented "Borg" mode that the rest of us are worried about.
And it has good range. Especially if you shout.
Or Microsoft PR got their cheques in to everyone on time except Infoworld. Blame it on Sep 11. The feds probably thought the Microsoft MindControl dust (OEM version) inside was Antrax powder.
Scary, huh?
Now if they could just record its evil laugh...
Yet another major campaign in the Cold War, again a proxy war in fairly worthless territory, territory that neither nation would have bothered with were it not for the other superpower.
You're kidding, right?
Does the phrase "warm water port" mean anything to you? The former Soviet Union had the largest amount of oceanic coastline of any nation in the world, but almost all of it was arctic. The year-road coastal ice and ship-wreaking icebergs meandering just off shore made the USSR's coastlines nearly useless for military and commercial ship deployment.
The USSR basically had three viable ports: the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, and the most southerly coasts of Sibera nearest Korea. All of those ports could EASILY be blockaded by foreign navies via the North Sea, the Dardenells or the entire Mediterranean, and bases in Alaska, Japan, and South Korea. Notice the strong Allied presence in all of those areas.
Despite Russia's Marxist rhetoric, the Soviet Union could barely support its internal needs for basics like food, medicine, and power, without imports. In an all-out war, it would have been fairly straightforward to cut off the USSR from all shipments and starve them out.
So one of Russian big goals in the cold war was to conquer its way to a warm water seaport, and the quickest way was through Afghanistan, since Russian provinces already surrounded it. From there, they planned to continue on to the Indian Ocean, which would have given them enough tropical coast to make a blockade very hard for us to enforce.
Besides missle counts, the oceans were a big theatre of the cold war, especially involving submarine movements. Part of Vietnam's value was it's proximity to both the Indian and Pacific oceans. Used as a soviet/chinese naval base, ships and subs could patrol from there to destroy US subs and ships.
So don't call Afghanistan a "worthless" territory to fight over. It may have seemed pointless to you, and maybe all war really is pointless, but it wasn't pointless to the Russians to take it, or pointless for us to help the Afghanis keep it. It was just a move and countermove in a big, impersonal game of chess with nations.
A "special" BIOS tech they require OEMs to install would do the trick, probably using keypairs to verify a signed bootloader.
That was true of 5.1, that StarOffice monopolized your X desktop. This has been fixed in 5.2 and 6.x version of StarOffice and OpenOffice. But you're right, it is iritating the way 5.1 takes over.
More of an outliner than a word-processor or even an editor. It's not Word, but it's not bad. And hey, IT'S NOT WORD!! XML files, exports to HTML and ASCII, and maybe others (that's all I use). You can get binaries for Win32 or Linux. I've compiled it on NetBSD without ncurses and it's works OK.
http://hnb.sourceforge.net
A
That theory about aluminum catalyzing the onset of Alzheimers has been scrapped. You can safely go back to drinking out of cans again and stop intaking artificial estrogen residue from the plastic in pop bottles. Your voice should re-deepen naturally with a few years...
Another bonus is that it will help these countries get an immediate return on their university computer science programs. Money funneled into cs education will yield graduates capable of filling whatever needs the government may have by porting and extending existing free software, and of course translating the English UI to Spanish and/or Portuguese. If an application doesn't exist in free form, the government can always contract the creation of a new piece of software. But the CS graduates their universities generate will be in a better position to evaluate pre-existing applications to find applicable code.
So Microsoft (and many other US companies) will lose sales in South America unless they sell it under a liscence acceptable to those governments. The challenge for the US will be to figure out how to convert the money that once went toward Microsoft EULAs and CAs into sales for other companies. Unless Microsoft is prepared to come around... What I hear from Microsoft is that they're willing to divulge code, but they tack on a price in addition to their current liscencing schemes. It doesn't sound like that would be compatible with these new policies (and it would raise the price even further for them).
It's only hard if you don't know how to prepare the setup required to maintain $1 millon in PC hosts:
http://www.infrastructures.org
Computers are amazingly good at automatic repetetive logical tasks. 99% of all systems administration involves repetitive logical tasks. The trick is to make the machines do all the work of maintaining themselves that they can programmatically handle.
So if you're a clueless "paper" sysadmin, yep, it's impossible -- can't be done.
Still, I'd rather have the z-machine mainframe!
A guy in your exact situation solved that problem very nicely:
http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/multiuser/
No X terminal required.
Yes, it's a proof of concept... for now.
After being invoked, the worm already has the code to find arbitrary files and create new files. If the problem of invoking the virus sidesteps the social engineering -- tricking the viewer into clicking on a game -- then it could move on to the following:
- scan all disks and shares for PDF files and insert the trojan and worm code into all of them.
- save a DLL, Acrobat plugin, or postscript dictionary into Acrobat's directories, permanantly modifying Acrobat's behavior. It could then infect every PDF viewed and saved from then on.
- Trojan Acrobat Distiller, which is just a glorified PS/EPS -> PDF RIP. Like most RIPs, the PostScript VM gets its settings by interpreting ASCII PostScript code in some startup files. You might be able to "infect" Distiller to trojan all PDF files it's used to create.
- Trojan Distiller watch folders. The *.options, prologue.ps, or epilogue.ps could be infected with the worm to create infected PDFs.
Of course most people don't have the full Acrobat, let alone Distiller, unless they traffic in warez or do graphics work out of their house. But DTP/Publishing houses are different. Almost every Mac on this floor has the full version of Acrobat AND Distiller AND Microsoft Outlook. And if you have Office installed, guess what? You're Mac has VB on it. It's just a matter of crafting the script to not depend on Windows file paths. Then there's the shops that use Windows NT for their DTP/Pre-Press workstations...
We get many, many PDF files from AP and ad designers from outside the company. If this worm improved its triggerability, it might get as bad as Word macro viruses. That's all that's holding it back.
>>Now for a display of massive ignorance:
>>I wonder what a PDF virus could do on a
>>system whose GUI is based on PDF (Mac OS X)?
I don't know. On Display PostScript GUIs, the widgets themselves are literally snippets of PostScript code. The difference between PostScript and PDF code if that PDF code _is_ PostScript, but it must be completely inline. No loops, conditionals, procedure calls, or recursion. So ability of PDF itself to do this is limited.
However, if DPDF on MacOS X supports embedding foreign files in the PDF code, then the answer is "It's hunting season! And we're hunting Macintoshes!" faster than you can say Elmer FUD. Any widget on the GUI might be able to contain either the worm or a link to the worm, depending on what you had to do to invoke it. This PoC worm needs you to click on it. So you might be able to trojan a DPDF widget to execute the worm on a mouseclick. An improved worm might execute by just being viewed, like JavaScript code in a webpage or email.
But Apple has to license DPDF from Adobe for real money per copy sold, so in a negotiation to keep the cost down and license a less featureful version, the answer is probably no, or at least, not yet.
Don't get ahead of yourself. MS's basic market is best described as "businesses with money". That's not you. Just because you don't know any NT users is meaningless. Vendors, "Solution Providers" (ha ha), OEMs, and VARs are selling NT in droves, for better or for worse.
FE, in the newspaper/publishing industry, almost every vendor production system runs on NT, followed distantly by Solaris, and then by the occasional AIX, VMS, BSD/OS, Linux, or Tru64 system. For the past several years our company has been replacing all of its old SunOS and VMS systems, and what we've found while shopping around is that the vast vast majority of system offerings are NT4 with MSSQL (6.5, 7, or 2000), with some Solaris options (but that's fading), and Windows 2000 systems just on the horizon. Sometimes you can get Sybase or Oracle, but the basic system recipe is NT + PostScript/PDF + SQL. If you want to buy a backend publishing system, you better like NT, because that's basically all that's for sale.
A good recent example is the Associated Press. You know who they are, right? All of their turnkey solutions they used to sell ran OS/2 for whatever reason. Now all AP products are W2K, across the board. Whether you want it or not, if you want AP gear, that's what's for sale.
The only Linux publishing vendors I've found are YARC (RIPs embedded on a PowerPC PCI card), Caldera, and I think SCS (could be wrong).
I'm not saying whether this is good or bad. NT gives the impression of being easier to learn, more integratable, faster, and cheaper than Sun or DEC gear... but most of those promises pretty much disintegrate in the details, especially when you start dealing with scalability, upgrades, or security. Linux or BSD products could make a killing in publishing, if anyone had the guts to actually sell them. NT's big advantage is its familiarity: the ease of getting employees who know it, the Windows 95 GUI, non-proprietary PC gear.
Anybody out their in the industry know otherwise? Are any newspapers using Linux- or BSD-based vendor systems?
C?! Java?! That's like arguing which bunch of politians are more honest, Democrats or Republicans. The answer is "none of the above".
.ps or .eps code and sent back a .JPG of the output and a text log of the RIP messages. Then they could do their assignments on web access PCs at any public library.
A learning language has several requirements different from a application development language (like C or VB+Access) or a scripting language for a production evironment (Perl, any UNIX shell, DCL). Students need a language that is
- free. As in: here, have a diskette to take home.
- light. Low system requirements. Run on any old computer students may own or schools may be saddled with. Were talking 8 bit here, not 16 or 32.
- small. The entire run-time and development environment should fit on a $1 3.5" floppy. Not a CD-ROM. Students may not own or have access to computers with 660 free Megabytes of hard drives space to install the software.
- portable. Students do not all own the same kind of computer, if they own one at all. Same with schools.
- low-level. Students should be able to learn about the assembly language underpinnings of the language: registers, stacks, zero-page, addressing...
- FAST. on slow/obsolete hardware.
- Interactive. None of this edit/compile/link/run/crash/repeat BS. It's easier to learn when you can try out the syntax at a prompt, like BASIC or any shell.
- Toolable. You should be able to write tools in the lanuage to help you write programs faster and more easily. If you can write your own syntax-sensitive IDE and source code tools, students will see how programs can make programming itself easier. The easiest example would be an editor that accepts scripts written in the language their learning to modify the current file. They can write easy stuff, like Comment/Uncomment, to make it easier to get their homework done.
Few languages fit all these requirements. Most require a "Developer-class Workstation" eg. a fast CPU with generous RAM and lots and lots of free disk space. It's not fair to kids to assume they have that available at home or that they can stay after school to use the lab. Kids should be taught languages they can use on any PC they can afford, obtain, or borrow.
And that'd be FORTH. It's essentially a reverse-polish notation macro for raw assembly. It's easy to port by essentially porting the macros to a new CPU/architectures. It'll run on ANYTHING. You can learn it on an Apple II+, a PC/jr, an AT, a 286 clone picked up at Goodwill for $30, or the family Macintosh Plus (or iMac for that matter). Procedures can be built interactively and/or in an editor -- compilation is optional. It has everything C(++) has -- pointers, structs, file I/O, OOP, flow control, and access to the hardware at the lowest levels. GNU has gforth available.
From there, you can teach them PostScript, which is basically FORTH, only easier to read and with easier built-in datatypes. Students can learn on GhostScript and GSView, with a final copy for turned-in homework sent to a printer and RIP'd without errors and with correct output on the paper (use an overlay for grading). PostScript is a nice intro to 2D graphics programming (no animation though), and you learn how printers and fonts work. If students don't have a PC or Mac that can run GSView, it would be trivial to build a web interface to Ghostscript that accepted their
Then, you graduate to not Java, but the Java VM itself, which is also stack-based, and operates along the same lines as PostScript and FORTH. You can teach them Java, and show how the sytax of Java is compiled into the JVM bytecodes that act just like the FORTH they alread know and hate/love. With Java, you can build on the graphics principles learned with PostScript to build animated, multimedia GUI applets. Because the students may not own Java-capable computers (like something with IE or Netscape 4+), use Waba, which is just Java, but without all the built-in classes and dumb bloat that Sun stuck into Java. Waba requires only 64K of memory, and the entire VM and program code can fit in 50K. It supports graphics, GUI, and sound, and runs in the JVM of Java-enabled browsers (being a subset of Java).
Although I'm advocating some pretty OLD stuff, the students don't need to suffer in crusty old editors or shells to learn this stuff. Give them nice tools/editors/shells, with all the key commands where they expect (i.e. arrows/backspace/return for editing, not ^F/^B/^H or the vi command set).
Using modest software like FORTH, PostScript and Waba would also make it viable for schools to partner with obsolete PC recyclers, and donate a rebubished CPU, Monitor, Keyboard, Modem, and mouse to students that don't have a computer at home.
You don't need an expensive or even a recent computer to learn programming. It's the OEMs, like Apple, who keep goading to the schools and parents to buy Buy BUY new machines semi-annually. "Without multimedia, your children will be DUMB, un-employed, pregnant, drug-using drop outs! Do you want Strawberry, Tangerine, or Grape?" High-school programming classes are not about getting you a job, and you don't need to know C or Java already to get accepted into a CS program. Kids need to learn how computers work from the lowest-levels, so they don't grow up to be superstitious, clueless, and gullible when it comes to technology. Just throwing iMacs at kids and schools (as tempting as it may be to throw iMacs at anything) isn't go to insure that.
Something missing from the debate on Smart Tags is their inherent lack of trust. When IE parses a word of text, it trusts the Microsoft Smart Tags server to pony up an authentic set of links to content that is relevant and legitimate. Someone's name should ideally bring up links to their home page, photos, software/articles on-line that they've written, pages about them, etc.
.NET, right? Move from selling OSes to OEM to services to .com's. If people are willing to pay several times for high placement in several different search engines, they will not balk to have MS put their URL on every browser on the the planet that happens across their company name on the web.
Two problems with this scheme:
1) Web content is no longer static. It hasn't been for YEARS. CGI, ASP, Javascript, ActiveX, META redirects, TARGET tags, frames, Flash and Java -- each makes the web more dynamic, interactive, and untrustworthy. The crudest example is a deceptive URL which takes you to a different site (or kind of site) than what you expected. Goatse.cx is a social engineering example of this. But a different, innocent sounding URL could use any of these to redirect you there (meta, sub-frame, asp redirect, onmouseover Javascript to disguise the URL in the status bar) against your will or without your intent.
Now, are smart tags so smart that the same can't be done to them?
- hijack the DNS of the Smart Tag servers and serve up your own links, for good or evil
- compromise the Smart Tag database and substitute URLs for innocent subjects with indecent subjects (whitehouse.gov? No, whitehouse.com!)
- mess with the Certificate of Authority for the keypair that signs these so-called "Smart" tags. (They are _signed_, aren't they?) so that all Microsoft's hard-won ST's seem to IE to be signed with an invalid or untrusted key. Bill, what else does DOS stand for?
- trojan the HTML at the end of a Smart Tag with malicious javascript, redirects, framesets, applets, ActiveX components, etc.
Think about it. Smart Tags cannot _only_ link up to Microsoft content. That would be too obvious, even for the BG. It would be unprofitable too. MS is going to sell "spots" (like ad spots on TV) to its partners, so when you see "laptop" in the page text the smart tags point to the OEM's who bid 1st, 2nd and 3rd highest for that privilidge. Do you think Microsoft is doing this just to improve your "browser experience"? They're trying to become an ASP with
And some of those Smart Tags will point to public domain URLs out of Microsoft's control (like the US Government's web sites -- for now) to expedite the illusion of goodwill on their part for gifting you with this (say it with me) "innovative" technology.
So you're sifting your web logs at your job at an ISP or collocation host. And you notice innordinate hits on a particular web page. Checking the referer pages reveals that none of the pages have ONE SINGLE LINK to the page hit in your logs, and the URL is not alluded to in the text of the referer pages, ever. You may have found the terminus of a Smart Tag. May? A look at the agent/browser ID string will settle it.
If the URL at the end of a Smart Tag becomes unmaintained but the DNS stays good (until the domain name fee comes up for renewal) the Smart Tag server will never know until it gets:
- a 404
- or a page with radically different textual/meta content
So you leave the text alone and add a trojaned javascript pop-up or ActiveX to beat up on IE users. (The windows world on-line seems to be so inclined to do this to one another...)
It's only a matter of time before crackers, bored ISP employees, and prankster webmasters of free web sites (Geocities, Anglefire, et al) figure out how to tell when their site gets "smarted" by Microsoft's Smart Tags.
And then they will poison their HTML and wait for the lemmings to rush the cliff.
2) Semantics
English words do not now and never will map one to one with discrete meanings. Use a search engine to seek out advice on caring for the "free kitten" you got from those kids in the Safeway parking lot. See how many links you get that are on caring for cats.
Is Microsoft's software so smart that this will not happen with it? The word "drive" in the BSD docs isn't going to point to Autobytel.com or Honda.com? Ever?
So they get to pick and choose which words they want Smart Tagged. When the subject of the smart tag links doesn't semantically match the content of the text, it going to get amusing. Think what USENET gateways and mailing list archives are going to light up like... Those messages are pure context caught mid-conversation, full of abbreviations, slang, and inside jokes (name 3 Enlish words that end in "gry", right?)
The "Smart" in Smart Tags is going to force the W3C to add the SARCASM tag to the standard at the gunpoint-assisted insistence of the journalists and users.
"Smart", huh? Makes me think of that kid's joke:
Smart Kid: Whatsa matter?
Not-so-smart: I'm so stupid. I can't find the answer I'm looking for on the internet. This "Google" is so confusing. Why, God, does it have to be so hard?
Smart Kid: Mm-hm. Well, I have just the thing. These "Smart Pills" will make you smarter. Then you won't need a search engine to know stuff. Want some? They're free!
Not-so-smart: Hell yes!
Smart Kid: (hands over black, warm, moist, and spongy confections, not unlike raisinets...)
Not-so-smart: (begins to gag, then face alights with signs of insight) Ack! Those weren't Smart Pills!! Those were rabbit droppings!!
Smart Kid: See! You knew that instantly! And you didn't even need a search engine...
You mean like RevRDist?!
Damn -- I was surpised to hear that what I was doing in 1997 has only this year become possible. If only I had listened to informed people like you, then I would've known better.
Seriously though, RevRDist is great stuff. If you like Macs, especially if you work with them, you owe it to yourself to learn how to work it. It takes some hacking: ResEdit, diffing files, understanding the Gestalt function, etc. It saves alot of work and maintenance in the long run, and you learn a lot about the MacOS at the file/resource level.
This guy needs to buy MacOS X. It will require him to pick up at least an iMac, if not a nice G4, and stuff at least 256 megs of RAM in it to get good speed. Even if he has a Mac laying around which was made no more than 2 years ago, the odds are against it being able to run MacOS X, with or without 2 gigs of RAM, fast PCI graphics cards and a G3 processor upgrade card.
Repeat after Steve: Fruit-colored Macs only beyond this point -- no beige allowed.
Were Microsoft has failed, Apple ironically provides.
I already own a Mac. It's not very old. I'm talking the life-span of a small rat here. It CAN NOT run MacOS X. If I could, I would buy it, but there's no need. I'd have to buy an accelerator probably with a proprietary extension to get it to even boot up. No chance. And I don't intend to shell out $800 to replace what I already own to have an OS that only does what I already do. I can already burn CDs. I can get a Firewire card and burn DVDs later, though movies on CD-R work just fine. Think with your brain, for crying out loud. It's not "just $800" if it means you have to toss the computer you already bought and own! Unless you use your home computer for work that makes money besides just a wage, then sure, that $800 will pay itself off. But that doesn't typify most of the people Apple targets.
When I was a kid, I only knew ProDOS and later MacOS. Hard-won experience with way too many other OSes has taught me to re-evaluate their merits along 2 simple lines:
1) Is it flexible? Can you without installing ANY OTHER VENDOR SOFTWARE implement a variety of creative solutions to your problems or your business, even automating your solution to run unattended? This is not unreasonable - even an Apple II had a nearly complete development system in ROM, and one easy enough that people with no programming background could teach themselves from scratch, and maybe build something they could sell.
2) Does it play nice with the other kids in the playground, especially the foreign ones? If it's on a LAN, again only with the core OS and any OS updates/packs, can it provided services to other computers and use the services of others, no matter how esoteric, proprietary, or bizarre?
2) is starting to eclipse 1) in importance, but of course with 1) you can build 2) yourself.
Along these lines, Linux and BSD win hands down. VMS is pretty close. You can write a multi-user database solution with web & telnet access, if you didn't have to BUY a TCP/IP stack for VMS... Ah, but there's always DecNET (ha ha). NT? Once you get the Option Pack on there and a reasonable service pack, you have Perl, ASP, OBDC, and even a small assembler to work with. Whether NT sucks or not, you can get a lot done with just it and the tools it comes with.
MacOS totally fails on these two points. For one, the only "tool" it comes with is AppleScript, limited TCP/IP services, and some dumb multimedia widgets. It's a kiosk OS, plain and simple. If what you want to do can't be done by being a mouse-jockey, waiting to click that next modal "OK", then forget it, MacOS is not for you.
The question for me with MacOS X is not whether it's a good UNIX. It's whether Apple is going to turn in into another OS like Windows, MacOS or NT that thethers you that KVM trinity to get work done. I sit so much in front of computers, the last thing I need is another screen to stare at, no matter how pretty. That's my question. If you were stranded on an alien planet with a solar array and a lan of G4s, and ONLY A MACOS X CD for software, is it flexible enough to build a complete solution to inventory supplies and water the plants while you're out and away? Is it self-hosting? In a corporation, could you feasably use it to do away with all Windows, Solaris and OS/2 systems, providing everything those did to your MacOS clients (or other OS clients) and yet still talk to the Pike, OS/390, MVS, or other mainframe? You certainly can with BSD or Linux. Does Apple have enough guts to make a viable competitor and alternative to Solaris and Windows 2000? Part of me hopes they don't chicken out.
I'm just going to randomly and for no reason mention the name of a mainframe manufacturer and then a scripting language for C programs.
Pyramid.
Scheme.
I should probably also mention something that's purportedly born every minute and a verb used to describe a sheep getting shorn...
> I wonder: the analogy to the 1960s may work,
> but should ex-hippies really be the target
> audience? Are they the ones running all the
> servers nowadays?
No. They're running the mainframe. But those old salts aren't hippies, even if they're from from the same generation. Would you call Steve Wozniak a "punk"? (Save it for Steve Jobs...)
The ex-hippies are busy pestering the recalcitrant, 20-something Solaris/NT/VMS admin to install Napster, RealPlayer, CometCursor, WebShots, WinAmp, and/or DirectDraw on their so-called "workstation." The easiest method to get them to go away is to try to persuade them to install a "free UNIX" on their dilipidated Apple or Wintel junker they have at home. They seem to suspect you're trying to trick them. Linux and BSD sound to them like something British cattle get infected with. Something that doesn't come with any good games.
Mainframe guys, who probably have a history with IBM gear at some point, are their target. At our company, the AS/400s are marked for death about once a year, and they get an annual reprieve when the MSSQL on NT replacement system just can't pick up the job. Linux for IBM is a subtle way of saying to all of us in-the-know: "Upgrade your crufty old datacenter. Windows NT not required". Sounds groovy to me.