In other words, this is all about using security as an excuse to make DRM a legally required component of the Operating System, and force software to respect that component.
"Security" is just the horse used to hide the DRM soldiers inside.
The man has taste and the personality to carry it out.
Hell, my GF was all a flutter and he never even tried to pick her up or hit on her. Whatever you think of his appearance he seems to have one of those "Make women melt" vibes. (And no, she does not get "All a flutter" for guys other than me very often.)
Of course, she is a Geek girl in her MAC way, so that may have been a factor.
Dr Peter Berridge, a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Oldham Hospital who has treated Ecstasy users, said powerful stimulants such as Ecstasy triggered release of ADH, a hormone that slows the action of the kidneys, even when excess water is in the body. "Water intoxication can occur after drinking as little as three litres. Under these circumstances, it causes headache, nausea and vomiting," he said.
"Leah Betts died after just one [Ecstasy] tablet - she drank too much water whilst the drug stopped her body disposing of it. It may be she set out not to disgrace her parents. When she started to feel ill she thought: what could she do, and she started to drink water."
http://www.ravesafe.org/otherinfo/leah_betts.htm Dr Peter Berridge, a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Oldham Hospital who has treated Ecstasy users, said powerful stimulants such as Ecstasy triggered release of ADH, a hormone that slows the action of the kidneys, even when excess water is in the body. "Water intoxication can occur after drinking as little as three litres. Under these circumstances, it causes headache, nausea and vomiting," he said.
I'd say that counts as reducing the body's ability to flush excess water.
Actually, the Ecstacy did play a role. It reduces the body's ability to flush excess water.
She might have survived the massive quantity of water she drank had she not been on Ecstacy, but possibly not.
It's not so much an anti-drug tale as a matter of making sure you know what you're taking and what it does to the body.
Funny thing is, I'd never heard about her death except as from excess water consumption where illegal drugs may or may not have been a contributing factor. I'd heard she drank all that water to flush the drug from her system before her Father got home. Because the drug in question causes your body to retain more water than it normally would, it was not going to work.
The message I took away from it was she was a dumb ass for not knowing what the pill was going to do to her body.
This is a strong indication that the American (and other) Societies seem to take precedence of profit over Social Responsibility.
You must not be from the United States.
If you were, you'd know that the idea of Profit above all else is a given for most the country.
It's not a revelation. Saying "American Society puts money above responsibility" is like saying "The sky is blue and tends to have clouds now and then" or "There are times when water, in one form or another, falls from the sky."
It's a given. It's a depressing commentary on the civilization, but it's a given.
Given the fact that my Windows XP box at work has had more application crashes than my old Win 98 box did, I'll move to Mongolia nd live in a Yurt before staying with their damn OS.
I'm sorry, but the quality is going downhill faster than an asteroid falling from the sky.
Given the stability issues I've seen in XP, Microsoft has staked their future on the human race's inability to recognize garbage. If people really are worthless brain dead sheep, then Microsoft will be around until the next World War. If not, then Microsoft's power will start to erode even faster.
I pray to God they go away. I'm really pissed off that XP went to the trouble of changing the Windows directory to be c:\windows instead of c:\winnt, but the concept of making the damn thing more stable is clearly beyond their grasp.
Oops! Outlook crashed again when I tried to create a new message.
I was so happy with W2K. Fairly stable and fast. Kept running for days. Now with X f***ing P I get crashes like I did in the days of Windows 98.
That's the end of the line. I have a Linux box on my desk not being used for anything. Anyone know of a good Linux replacement for SQL Server's Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer that can connect to SQL Server 2000? How about a good Homesite replacement. If I can get those then XP is dead for me at work, and I can finally leave it where it belongs. An OS for playing computer games at home.
That's still a massive number of users out there who are vulnerable, due to the fact that IE6 still has this problem.
Yahoo might just sit on this until someone uses the flaw to write a virus that exploits it.
Here's the idea:
User views e-mail.
Code executes that sends a copy of the message to everyone in user's inbox and address book that has an @yahoo.com address.
Repeat.
Yahoo grinds to a halt and HAS to start filtering the exploit, or more likely, filter the specific virus thus leaving the hole itself open.
Of course I have neither the skill nor inclination to implement such an idea. I happen to like using Yahoo and would be pissed if some script kiddie brought it to it's knees.
So it only works against IE. An older version of IE. On windows. Oh lawdy lawdy! Alert the press!
Despite what the article says, it also works in the latest IE6.
So, the two most popular webmail services have a major flaw that would allow arbitrary action on the account data for about 95% of the computers that could access it, which is probably 9?% of the Yahoo and Hotmail users.
This impacts the vast majority of Hotmail and Yahoo users. I'd say it's newsworthy.
On the flip side, I haven't encountered many Linux applications that HAVE to be run as root. Games will sometimes need to be run as root, and many server applications as well.
I think this has more to do with education than anything else. Every Linux newbie gets inundated with "Don't run as root" warnings from whatever documentation they use to get up and running. The whole multiuser thing is a well established part of Unix culture, and Linux inherited that.
Most Windows users were accustomed to single user systems from the pre W2K days (NT was never really big for home use) and have carried that mentality over, seeing different kinds of user accounts as an annoyance instead of a layer of protection.
You could mitigate the Office issues by running the install as administrator, and disabling all the "Install on first use" options in the default install.
Windows rapidly becomes less than useful when not running as admin, at least for what I use it for. At home I use it to play games (Many of which only run from an administrator account) and at work I'm a developer using applications that lose most their functionality if run as anything other than admin. (Some from Microsoft)
But you're forgetting the endorsement by Prince Charles.
"If I'd had one of these a few years back, I could have kept all my dates with Camilla encrypted and locked away from prying eyes. The Voice over IP support would have allowed us to chat over a secure chanel, so our phone sex sessions would have remained undetected. I'd still be married, Diana would still be alive, and no one would know that both Diana and I had lovers on the side. Everyone would have been happy!"
Cut to shot of Charles' hand holding up the PDA.
Voice over: "Linea LX, let it save your wife's life today."
Well, it would make it easy to tape business meeting without the boss knowing. They would THINK you were taking notes on your PDA, when in reality you were spying on them for the NASD.
I was not involved in the decision not to upgrade the software.
As a matter of fact, I advocated upgrading.
I have no one to blame but management.
On a side note, the productivity lost due to the staff in question having admin access to their local machines easily exceeded the cost of the software by a factor of ten or more.
Having users run as root / administrator all the time is a major issue for any OS, and our admin spends a good portion of his time fixing issues that ultimately stem from a dumb user doing something stupid.
My favorite:
We had a user, we'll call her T.
T called out admin three or four times a day. Every time a dialog box came up she would call for help. This included calls every time IE couldn't find a web site. Finally he told her to stop calling for minor problems, and not to call for trivial issues anymore.
The first dialog she ignores is the Norton Antivirus error message telling her that she's opening an infected attachment.
The problem is, running as anything other than admin isn't always an option because of poorly written applications.
Case in point: Omnipage.
We have an older version of Omnipage. I forget the logic behind not upgrading, but we'll leave that as an aside.
If you run as anything other than an Administrator, the application appears to freeze at startup. What's really happening is that the splash image is concealing an error message. You have to know the windows shortcut keys necessary to either move the error message until it's visible or just hit the "YES." Once loaded it's still a mess, and can't open any files.
Long story short, in order to be able to use a software package that has become critical to our business process, we have to have a bunch of users running as the administrators on their local machines. W2K "Run As" doesn't cut it, as the problems still occur.
A few months back, one of our sales staff had a problem. His computer just wasn't working properly by any stretch of the imagination. After a few minutes investigation, I realized that he'd manages to corrupt his install of IE.
This is a good sales guy (Listens to IT, good to work with, nice guy) and I didn't want to subject him to the downtime of a complete reinstall, but the IE upgrade app didn't work. (Kept crashing)
So I ran Spambot on the computer to clean things up a little (Adaware wouldn't run, as it apparently uses some of the IE rendering components to display it's interface) and put (then) Thunderbird on his PC.
I told him briefly what Mozilla and Thunderbird were, installed the tabbed browsing plugin and told him I would try to download the full install of IE 6 and come back. He understood Thunderbird to be a temporary measure.
Later in the day, I have IE reinstalled and his computer running just fine.
Fast forward two months to this past Friday. Our newest web developer and I are discussing browsers, and he's wishing all the NON IE browsers would die so he could just develop for one platform.
In comes said sales guy and starts taking the developer to task, raving about Mozilla. It turns out he's been using thunderbird as his main browser ever since I installed it, and only uses IE when a site doesn't work in Thunderbird (He still hasn't upgraded from the version I installed).
Don't you love it when a technology proves itself on it's own merits?
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, this is all about using security as an excuse to make DRM a legally required component of the Operating System, and force software to respect that component.
"Security" is just the horse used to hide the DRM soldiers inside.
The man has taste and the personality to carry it out.
Hell, my GF was all a flutter and he never even tried to pick her up or hit on her. Whatever you think of his appearance he seems to have one of those "Make women melt" vibes. (And no, she does not get "All a flutter" for guys other than me very often.)
Of course, she is a Geek girl in her MAC way, so that may have been a factor.
dude! run away, she's really a guy!
Well, not anymore.
Not the most respectable source, but most news sites are blocked by the firewall where I work.
Emphasis mine.
http://www.ravesafe.org/otherinfo/leah_betts.htm
Dr Peter Berridge, a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Oldham Hospital who has treated Ecstasy users, said powerful stimulants such as Ecstasy triggered release of ADH, a hormone that slows the action of the kidneys, even when excess water is in the body. "Water intoxication can occur after drinking as little as three litres. Under these circumstances, it causes headache, nausea and vomiting," he said.
"Leah Betts died after just one [Ecstasy] tablet - she drank too much water whilst the drug stopped her body disposing of it. It may be she set out not to disgrace her parents. When she started to feel ill she thought: what could she do, and she started to drink water."
http://www.ravesafe.org/otherinfo/leah_betts.htm
Dr Peter Berridge, a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Oldham Hospital who has treated Ecstasy users, said powerful stimulants such as Ecstasy triggered release of ADH, a hormone that slows the action of the kidneys, even when excess water is in the body. "Water intoxication can occur after drinking as little as three litres. Under these circumstances, it causes headache, nausea and vomiting," he said.
I'd say that counts as reducing the body's ability to flush excess water.
Actually, the Ecstacy did play a role. It reduces the body's ability to flush excess water.
She might have survived the massive quantity of water she drank had she not been on Ecstacy, but possibly not.
It's not so much an anti-drug tale as a matter of making sure you know what you're taking and what it does to the body.
Funny thing is, I'd never heard about her death except as from excess water consumption where illegal drugs may or may not have been a contributing factor. I'd heard she drank all that water to flush the drug from her system before her Father got home. Because the drug in question causes your body to retain more water than it normally would, it was not going to work.
The message I took away from it was she was a dumb ass for not knowing what the pill was going to do to her body.
Does any of this relate to Palm devices that are Bluetooth enabled or have the Bluetooth card?
And what about the USB Bluetooth devices for adding it to a PC? Are they vulnerable as well?
This is a strong indication that the American (and other) Societies seem to take precedence of profit over Social Responsibility.
You must not be from the United States.
If you were, you'd know that the idea of Profit above all else is a given for most the country.
It's not a revelation. Saying "American Society puts money above responsibility" is like saying "The sky is blue and tends to have clouds now and then" or "There are times when water, in one form or another, falls from the sky."
It's a given. It's a depressing commentary on the civilization, but it's a given.
Given the fact that my Windows XP box at work has had more application crashes than my old Win 98 box did, I'll move to Mongolia nd live in a Yurt before staying with their damn OS.
I'm sorry, but the quality is going downhill faster than an asteroid falling from the sky.
Given the stability issues I've seen in XP, Microsoft has staked their future on the human race's inability to recognize garbage. If people really are worthless brain dead sheep, then Microsoft will be around until the next World War. If not, then Microsoft's power will start to erode even faster.
I pray to God they go away. I'm really pissed off that XP went to the trouble of changing the Windows directory to be c:\windows instead of c:\winnt, but the concept of making the damn thing more stable is clearly beyond their grasp.
Oops! Outlook crashed again when I tried to create a new message.
I was so happy with W2K. Fairly stable and fast. Kept running for days. Now with X f***ing P I get crashes like I did in the days of Windows 98.
That's the end of the line. I have a Linux box on my desk not being used for anything. Anyone know of a good Linux replacement for SQL Server's Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer that can connect to SQL Server 2000? How about a good Homesite replacement. If I can get those then XP is dead for me at work, and I can finally leave it where it belongs. An OS for playing computer games at home.
Yes,
Yes I am very frustrated with him.
And the company voted him "Person of the Year" during all of this.
On a side note, if you know anyone looking five and a half years experience implementing and maintaining Learning and Content Management systems...
No you're not.
From what I hear, you CAN'T get a refund on the sale of a soul.
There is an Acrobat reader for Palm you know.
Works very well too I might add.
That's still a massive number of users out there who are vulnerable, due to the fact that IE6 still has this problem.
Yahoo might just sit on this until someone uses the flaw to write a virus that exploits it.
Here's the idea:
User views e-mail.
Code executes that sends a copy of the message to everyone in user's inbox and address book that has an @yahoo.com address.
Repeat.
Yahoo grinds to a halt and HAS to start filtering the exploit, or more likely, filter the specific virus thus leaving the hole itself open.
Of course I have neither the skill nor inclination to implement such an idea. I happen to like using Yahoo and would be pissed if some script kiddie brought it to it's knees.
So it only works against IE. An older version of IE. On windows. Oh lawdy lawdy! Alert the press!
Despite what the article says, it also works in the latest IE6.
So, the two most popular webmail services have a major flaw that would allow arbitrary action on the account data for about 95% of the computers that could access it, which is probably 9?% of the Yahoo and Hotmail users.
This impacts the vast majority of Hotmail and Yahoo users. I'd say it's newsworthy.
On the flip side, I haven't encountered many Linux applications that HAVE to be run as root. Games will sometimes need to be run as root, and many server applications as well.
I think this has more to do with education than anything else. Every Linux newbie gets inundated with "Don't run as root" warnings from whatever documentation they use to get up and running. The whole multiuser thing is a well established part of Unix culture, and Linux inherited that.
Most Windows users were accustomed to single user systems from the pre W2K days (NT was never really big for home use) and have carried that mentality over, seeing different kinds of user accounts as an annoyance instead of a layer of protection.
You could mitigate the Office issues by running the install as administrator, and disabling all the "Install on first use" options in the default install.
Windows rapidly becomes less than useful when not running as admin, at least for what I use it for. At home I use it to play games (Many of which only run from an administrator account) and at work I'm a developer using applications that lose most their functionality if run as anything other than admin. (Some from Microsoft)
Sadly, the network admin was the one who installed the software, not me.
For him, defaults were always fine, as making changes would have required effort.
But you're forgetting the endorsement by Prince Charles.
"If I'd had one of these a few years back, I could have kept all my dates with Camilla encrypted and locked away from prying eyes. The Voice over IP support would have allowed us to chat over a secure chanel, so our phone sex sessions would have remained undetected. I'd still be married, Diana would still be alive, and no one would know that both Diana and I had lovers on the side. Everyone would have been happy!"
Cut to shot of Charles' hand holding up the PDA.
Voice over: "Linea LX, let it save your wife's life today."
Well, it would make it easy to tape business meeting without the boss knowing. They would THINK you were taking notes on your PDA, when in reality you were spying on them for the NASD.
Oops, I've said too much again...
Figures.
The day after I replace my dead Palm IIIxe with a new T2, THIS is announced. I could have gotten a $35.00 Palm III to tide me over if I'd known.
True, to an extent.
I was not involved in the decision not to upgrade the software.
As a matter of fact, I advocated upgrading.
I have no one to blame but management.
On a side note, the productivity lost due to the staff in question having admin access to their local machines easily exceeded the cost of the software by a factor of ten or more.
Upgrading will often save money.
AMEN!!
Having users run as root / administrator all the time is a major issue for any OS, and our admin spends a good portion of his time fixing issues that ultimately stem from a dumb user doing something stupid.
My favorite:
We had a user, we'll call her T.
T called out admin three or four times a day. Every time a dialog box came up she would call for help. This included calls every time IE couldn't find a web site. Finally he told her to stop calling for minor problems, and not to call for trivial issues anymore.
The first dialog she ignores is the Norton Antivirus error message telling her that she's opening an infected attachment.
And thus a new virus hits our network.
The problem is, running as anything other than admin isn't always an option because of poorly written applications.
Case in point: Omnipage.
We have an older version of Omnipage. I forget the logic behind not upgrading, but we'll leave that as an aside.
If you run as anything other than an Administrator, the application appears to freeze at startup. What's really happening is that the splash image is concealing an error message. You have to know the windows shortcut keys necessary to either move the error message until it's visible or just hit the "YES." Once loaded it's still a mess, and can't open any files.
Long story short, in order to be able to use a software package that has become critical to our business process, we have to have a bunch of users running as the administrators on their local machines. W2K "Run As" doesn't cut it, as the problems still occur.
Turn off the preview pane.
:)
If you don't preview the message in Outlook, the virus doesn't launch when you select the message, unless of course you open it.
Security is more a matter of use and procedure than anything else.
My Bad. I installed FIREbird on his computer, not Thunderbird
A few months back, one of our sales staff had a problem. His computer just wasn't working properly by any stretch of the imagination. After a few minutes investigation, I realized that he'd manages to corrupt his install of IE.
This is a good sales guy (Listens to IT, good to work with, nice guy) and I didn't want to subject him to the downtime of a complete reinstall, but the IE upgrade app didn't work. (Kept crashing)
So I ran Spambot on the computer to clean things up a little (Adaware wouldn't run, as it apparently uses some of the IE rendering components to display it's interface) and put (then) Thunderbird on his PC.
I told him briefly what Mozilla and Thunderbird were, installed the tabbed browsing plugin and told him I would try to download the full install of IE 6 and come back. He understood Thunderbird to be a temporary measure.
Later in the day, I have IE reinstalled and his computer running just fine.
Fast forward two months to this past Friday. Our newest web developer and I are discussing browsers, and he's wishing all the NON IE browsers would die so he could just develop for one platform.
In comes said sales guy and starts taking the developer to task, raving about Mozilla. It turns out he's been using thunderbird as his main browser ever since I installed it, and only uses IE when a site doesn't work in Thunderbird (He still hasn't upgraded from the version I installed).
Don't you love it when a technology proves itself on it's own merits?