I have only recently run into pages that wouldn't render properly in Mozilla, such as the most recent redesign of Providian's site. It's only been sites with menu bars at the top that I've noticed problems with, and I have no idea if that has anything to do with HTML or not.
I've also noticed that since nVidia redesigned their driver download page(s) there is a critical button that simply won't work in Mozilla, though I'm pretty possitive that this isn't anything to do with HTML.
However, these occurances are few and far between. In fact, they are infrequent enough that whenever I encounter such a problem I send the offending company an email politely explaining that those of us who prefer not to support convicted abusive monopolies would appreciate the minimal extra care it takes to ensure that we are able to use the companies online resources.
I think the only way the situation is going to change is those of us who care take the time to inform the people creating these sites. I we don't, then they can go on thinking that it doesn't matter since everyone just uses MSIE anyway. Make them aware, and hopefully they will change their ways.
Well, being a white male who is paying his own way through college while also supporting a family, I have to say "cry me a fucking river".
I know you are trying to present valid arguements, but I hear a whiny teenager saying things like "But I don't want to work, I'll never have time to party", and "You mean I have to live with my parents for another four years? I can't take it!"
Seriously, how much of that is just wanting to get away from your parents and do stupid, crazy stuff? How much of that has anything to do with actual education?
As for the supposed change to excessive debt, there was no change. Read my earlier comments where I was talking about people are buried in debt. Most people have some debt, and that isn't necessarily bad. Christ, I've got 2 new cars, I've certainly got debt, but I my level of debt is such that I could still make my payments if I were making half as much as I am now, so I don't consider my debt to be excessive.
I never said having debt was dumb, I said being buried in debt was dumb. You're the one who decided that was an all-or-nothing deal.
I don't design circuits, because I'm bad at it. Most of the engineers I've worked with are good at it, but they still make mistakes. I'm very good at finding those mistakes. And in the mean time, I'm also continuing my education (you know, at school, where I already said I learned my tech skills).
I'm glad your school gave you real experience, it's too bad they didn't teach you how to read.
You could acquire some marketable skills and earn the money to pay for it yourself. You could work while going to school. You could get scholarships and grants. You could take all your general ed requirements and intro classes at a JC. You could go to a public school, which is much less expensive. You could live off-campus, which is generally much cheaper than living in Dorms. You could go to a school near your hometown so you can avoid housing costs completely by living with your parents.
And before you say you can't get a good education at a cheaper school, in my experience instructors at the JC level are much more involved in their classes, so the education is actually better. You may not get a prestigious education, but you will probably learn more.
Doing any one of these things will dramatically reduce your college debt, and aren't particularly difficult. So, yes, excessive college debt is dumb.
I offer my sister as an example: She got a BS in Combined Sciences with a Medical Focus from Santa Clara University, which is both highly respected and very expensive (around $26k/year, IIRC), and then she went to UCLA for Paramedic school. Her college debt is under $30k, and the $11k loan for paramedic school doesn't have to be paid back as long as she maintains employment in a medical field for a certain number of years. While she was at SCU she took some classes at the local JC to get her EMT license and worked part time as an EMT, and she persued all manner of scholarships (she even competed in a beauty contest for one). She's currently working as a paramedic and taking classes to become an RN. Once she has fulfilled the time requirement for the above loan, she'll go to medical school for her MD, which she will likely have saved enough to pay for herself. The cost to our parents was only a couple thousand a year.
It's a matter of semantics, I suppose. It is a privately owned network, but it is offered as a public service to the students. While your office example is valid in a business situation, it isn't necessarily in a school environment. At work the network is a tool of the business which, like the copy machine, is there for the specific purpose of getting work done. At a school the network is part of a service/education package the students are paying for, and yes, there is legal precedent for this:
Humboldt State University (California) was building a new libraray. As with all such projects, it ended up over budget and behind schedule (IIRC, around $5M and 2 years, respectively). The students brought a class action against the school for a partial refund of their tuition for the years when this new library, which was a service they were paying for as part of their tuition, was unavailable to them. They won.
Similarly, if a network access fee were deducted from your paycheck, you would be able to sue your employer for restricting access/activity on that network.
It wasn't just a movie, there was a paper written about the whole thing by some big-time psychologist, which is where the term Generation X originated.
What I see around me is a lot of people with no real skills sitting in coffee shops whining that they aren't getting paid big money anymore, and that's all I was talking about. As for the debt thing, I think it's just plain dumb. I make 1/2 to 1/3 of what some of my friends were making, and yet I have very little debt, while they are buried under it. My credit card debt I could pay off in a few months at my current wages, and even if I were making 1/2 as much (which would be possible just about anywhere, since that wouldn't be much over minimum wage) I would still be able to cover all my bills, including the 2 cars.
Yeah, everything is a gamble, but if you aren't prepared to lose, if you over-extend yourself to the point where you can't afford to be making less than you are, then it IS your fault, and your situation is the direct result of your own poor planning.
And again, while I've been laid off several times in the last few years, and I haven't collected a single unemployment check. I always apply, just in case, but I've never been unemployed long enough to recieve one. Mostly that's due to the skill set I've developed, which anyone could get within a year at a JC. Most retraining programs will support you for at least that long. My attitude makes a big difference to, in that I view every job that comes my way as a learning opportunity, and if it sucks, well, I've still learned something from it that will likely come in handy down the road, and there's nothing stopping me from looking for another job just because I already have one.
So no, fate has nothing to do with it. I've worked to get where I am, and I take what opportunities come my way even if they aren't exactly what I want, rather than sitting around whining about how the economy is so bad and I can't get the exact job I went to school for.
The whole Generation X thing is a bunch of crap, since the term was origionally coined to describe British teen gangs in the late 50s/early 60s. I don't recall all the details, but the origional Generation X was split into 2 groups that were constantly at war with each other. The defining difference between the 2 groups was music, one group listened to Ska and I don't remember what the other group listened to.
Another historical side note, Billy Idol's band in the late 70s, before he got famous in his own right, was called Generation X.
Re:Sad truth is that-patronizing.
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Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you read my comment again, you might notive that my real skills were picked up in tech classes at a Junior College. One of the things I noticed working as a tech is that electronic engineers come out of school knowing dick about electronics. They know tons of theory, sure, and they can calculate charge capacitance in their sleep, and they have a much better understanding of circuit design as a whole than I do, but when their circuit doesn't work they come to me to find out why. That's what I mean by "real" skills.
However, I wasn't talking about people who went to school and actually got an education. I was talking about web-monkeys who dropped out their freshman year to capitalize on their investment in "Learn Web Design in 24 Hours" and spent their $75k on partying.
But hey, getting buried in debt is just plain dumb anyway, college education or not. Whenever you gamble, eventually you lose. Merely having an education doesn't somehow magically make you not a "lamer" or "loser", especially when so many schools will let you make up degrees that are essentially meaningless (like the guy who started Sub Pop records who has a degree in "Punk Rock"). If you've buried yourself in debt, you are a loser, I don't care if you're the next Einstein (who, btw, wasn't buried in debt only because he married women who were as practical as he was not).
I know a few of those, and it's just pathetic. A few years ago they thought they were so much better than me because they were making all this money and living in the Bay Area and having all this fun. Now their all moping around, living in their parents basements and begging them to pay for their return to school since they didn't bother to save any money.
I spent the.boom years at a JC (I had to pay for it all myself, and I don't like the idea of debt). I took some tech classes so I would have some real skills with which to earn the money to finish up my degree (was EE, but I discovered programming along the way, which I love even more than hardware, and have changed to CS). I met my wife and we had a beautiful daughter.
In the end I came out ahead, at least from my perpective. I have a wonderful family, 2 new cars, a job that I love, all my bills are paid, and I still can to go to school part time (taking only 1 or 2 classes a semester may be the slow road, but it does wonders for your GPA). I entered the job market just before the crash (or perhaps right at the beginning of it), but thanks to the real world skills I took the time to learn, I've never been out of work for more than a week, which is totally doable because my car payments and rent combined are half what my Bay Area friends were paying for just rent.
On the whole, it seems like the crash has actually been to my advantage, all because, as I said, I took the time to learn some real skills.
File shares however are frequently enabled automagically by pooly designed and configured OS's.
Name a single OS that automagically enables file shares. I can't, and I'm quite familiar with several.
Even under the most piss-poor Windows install a file share has to be set up intentionally, and in that dialogue box the user has the option of giving it a password or leaving it totally unprotected.
They are RARELY setup for the INTENT of general public access.
Are you joking, or do you just have no idea what you're talking about? Every unprotected share I've ever seen was specifically for the purpose of general public access by everyone on the network. That's the whole point. If you don't want everybody and their third uncle checking out your stuff you put a freaking password on it in the dialogue box you had to open to set up the share in the first place.
If you scanned a computer and found open services, you must get authorization from the computer OWNER. The computer itself doesn't know who the hell you are, or whether you REALLY should be there or not.
The OWNER has given PERMISSION by opening an UNPROTECTED SHARE on a PUBLIC NETWORK. The computer knows who should or shouldn't be there by letting in only the people who know the password, and if there isn't a password that means EVERYONE.
And as for your dialogue above, for an unprotected windows share it's more like:
Scanner: Knock Knock. Computer: Hi. Scanner: Can I come in? Computer: Yeah, sure! Make yourself at home! Would you like to run some unauthorized code?
First, he didn't promote the service, so likely only he and maybe a few friends knew about it. That says nothing about what he planned to do with it in the future, but I'll get to that below.
Second, there's no reason that merely finding open shares couldn't be a service, it all depends on what you do with the information you gather. If you use the info to contact people and politely let them know that they've left their computer wide open for anyone to poke around in, that would certainly be a benevolent use of the service, even if "you" happens to be Microsoft. In fact, that would be an excellent way for them to improve their security reputation since so many security problems are caused by "admins" who don't know what they are doing. (Along those lines, I think MS should start releasing security patches for Outlook and IE as viruses that repair their own exploits after they replicate. Sadly, that's the only way some servers would ever get patched.)
Finally, saying that scanning a public network that one is a member of is intrusive or a privacy violation is absurd. Do the people who would say this actually know what scanning is? It's no more intrusive or privacy violating that me noticing that you left your front door open.
The AUP does not mention scans and I did not 'break' or 'crack' security in any way.
It sure sounds to me like all he did was scan for open shares. As I said, if he trespassed on someone elses system, I agree that he should be in trouble. However, an "indexing system" doesn't suggest downloading or redistribution at all, it only suggests indexing. The "peer-to-peer file web-based file" part makes no sense, and only suggests that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Anyway, if all he's doing is scanning then I agree with him. If he's rummaging around in other people's systems and downloading their files, I agree with you. The way I read the article all he's doing is scanning.
Can you or anyone cite a legal precedent that states someone who has open shares on a PC in their possession retains no right to the privacy of those shares, and that that data on those shares is legally accessible by anyone who can get to it?
Of course not, because there isn't one.
However, I don't believe that is an issue in this case because the way I read the article he's just walking down the street looking for open doors, not going through them.
The door analogy is a poor one in this case, though, since a share that isn't protected by a password invites in anyone who makes an inquiry. Certainly if you leave your door open that doesn't mean I have the right to enter your house, but if you set up an automated system near your open door that invites me in when I knock, I would not be in the wrong by coming in.
I don't condone trespassing, and I thought I stated that clearly in my post. My impression is that he was merely scanning, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.
By allowing a user to login w/out a password, the server has authorized the client to use its services.
That's exactly like saying that by leaving my back door unlocked, I've authorized the psycho down the block to come in to my house. It just doesn't hold water to me.
I think the idea is that it's more like leaving your door open with an automated system set up that invites anyone who knocks to come in.
I'm not sure I agree with it, but it's an interesting point which deserves some thought.
Probably it's just that samba doesn't have control of the Linux print spooler, so once the document is passed to the spooler you would have to cancel the job from Linux.
It seems a little odd to me, that seems like something that would be fairly simple to set up, at least from the *nix end. There's the matter of trapping the correct command from the Windows side, of course, but that seems like one they would have caught by now. Is the problem just under Windows 2000, or other Windows versions as well?
Just because you have read access to something doesn't mean you ought to be using it and certainly doesn't mean you'll be looked upon favorably if you write a tool to do it on a large scale.
Read the article again, because you obviously missed some important parts. All he did was scan for open shares, he did not exploit or violate them in any way.
Had he actually violated anyones privacy or trespassed on their systems I would agree with you. But just scanning? Unless scanning is srictly against the AUP, he didn't violate a damned thing and he is completely in the right.
Or perhaps you are suggesting it is illegal for me to walk down the street and notice that someones door is open? If that's not illegal in the real world there's no reason it should be illegal in the electronic one.
Ah, all is made clear! Dyndns seems to take care of my big reservation regarding the project, and I wish I'd known about the service a year ago when I was trying to make GBs of 3D CAD models accessable to the clients of a small engineering company I was working for at the time (in other words, thanks for pointing that out to me).
Speaking of that small engineering company, the server I built for them was based on a 350MHz K6-2 with 256MB RAM that they had sitting unused in the back storeroom. I put in a cheap network card (check pricewatch.com, you can find PCI 10/100 cards for as little as $2 each, and yes, they are supported in Linux because they all use the RealTek 8139 chip), a 20GB IDE hard drive, and a basic (no GUI) install of SuSE (7.3) and Samba. The whole thing cost about $200, half of which was the hard drive and the other half was to pay me to set it up. It has sat under the desk that holds their printers, happily serving massive 3D CAD files to 5-10 workstations without a hitch, since I brought it online in february. I removed the keyboard, monitor, and mouse so no one would be tempted to use it, and did administration over ssh.
This is exactly what I recomend for you. It's cheap, easy, and has plenty of power for what you want to do. IIRC you wanted software RAID1, so I would estimate you could do it for under $200 in hardware, maybe $300 if you don't have an old system laying around taking up closet space. The Promise IDE controllers are now allegedly supported under Linux (and the cheap IDE controllers can be easily changed to a RAID controller with a resistor and a PROM flash), so you may want to invest in one of those to improve drive performance, but I don't know how much that would really matter in your case.
The important parts are: hard drive speed, network card speed, RAM. Any Pentium 2 or K6-2 CPU should be more than fast enough. Your DSL modem only has a 10-base Ethernet connection on your end, so your server only has to be capable of sustaining about 1MByte per second to keep it full, and the WAN side is likely much slower than that. This is a trivial task for the hardware setup I've described, so don't worry about the hardware end.
If you want to use a setup like the one I've described and need any help getting it running the email address above is good (after you remove slashdot's anti-spam stuff, of course). Feel free to email me with any questions, I'll be glad to help if I can (note that I know nothing about web servers, but I'll be doing exactly what you are doing as soon as I can put a server together, so I should learn soon enough).
It seems like cost is an important issue for you, both for the hardware and the power to keep it running 24/7. You'll need DSL with a static IP address to host it yourself, which is a fairly expensive prospect. It's certainly more expensive than paying a providor for the space, plus even if you have a static IP that doesn't mean that your AUP allows for self-hosting.
Do you need to have all your pictures on the web? Is there really any significant advantage to that? How does that advantage weigh against the significant price difference for static DSL with hosting priveleges?
Personally, I would have a server in my home to store all that stuff. Leave it on all the time in some back room where it won't bother anyone and let it do it's thing. Linux or BSD are excellent for that. Leave the web hosting to someone else, and set your server to make nightly mirrors of the site if your really concerned about the providor suddenly going away (there are utilities in most Linux distros specifically for that purpose).
Check how much web space you have with your DSL, and if thisis for the whole family ask other families to donate their unused space to the cause. There's no reason the whole site has to be at the same IP address, and between a few accounts you could have a significant amount of space, and back it all up regularly if you're really concerned about losing it.
Well, as of 10:21am (Pacific Whatever Time) the server could no longer be found by my browser, despite being able to find it repeatedly since 10:07am, so it appears that your warnings have been in vain.
It's a shame really, I was kind of curious about that hamster thing...
Of course, id prefer google to keep up a kickass search engine, not waste its money arguing against idiots like this that represent themselves so they can sue for free.
It's only free until he loses the counter-suit and has to pay all the defendants legal costs.
I don't know that there is a counter-suit, but if I were a named defendant there certainly would be.
The issue of why Google needs to waste money fighting this guy has been dealt with elsewhere.
Are there test rigs for hard drives, etc that allow for basic functionality testing?
There are. I've never actually seen one, but I know they exist. I work in Customer Service Repair for a company that sells rebranded high-end RAIDs (that's not our core business, but it's one of the products I support). I know that our vendor has ways of doing these kind of tests, but we don't. It's something I've thought about, but our units have protection circuits so actual damage isn't an issue for us, it would just be a troubleshooting tool that would allow us to pin down some behavior we've observed.
Anyway, most likely you'd have to build your own. An old, otherwise useless motherboard (anything new enough to have onboard IDE, all it has to do is spin it up) would likely do the trick, along with a power supply, an IDE cable, and maybe a couple of multimeters. You'd want to hack up the power supply and IDE cables to allow you to measure current on a few of the critical lines. You could also add some fuses or something for protection, if you're into that sort of thing.
Anyway, my first guess in the situation you discribed is a current spike from the drive on spin-up. The rig I've discribed should test for that, and if you put a fuse on every line it should be a quick test (although you might go through a lot of fuses).
That's my preliminary concept, anyway, I'm sure there are better ways to do it. It's unlikely I'll ever get around to building it, so feel free to steal my idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I have only recently run into pages that wouldn't render properly in Mozilla, such as the most recent redesign of Providian's site. It's only been sites with menu bars at the top that I've noticed problems with, and I have no idea if that has anything to do with HTML or not.
I've also noticed that since nVidia redesigned their driver download page(s) there is a critical button that simply won't work in Mozilla, though I'm pretty possitive that this isn't anything to do with HTML.
However, these occurances are few and far between. In fact, they are infrequent enough that whenever I encounter such a problem I send the offending company an email politely explaining that those of us who prefer not to support convicted abusive monopolies would appreciate the minimal extra care it takes to ensure that we are able to use the companies online resources.
I think the only way the situation is going to change is those of us who care take the time to inform the people creating these sites. I we don't, then they can go on thinking that it doesn't matter since everyone just uses MSIE anyway. Make them aware, and hopefully they will change their ways.
Well, being a white male who is paying his own way through college while also supporting a family, I have to say "cry me a fucking river".
I know you are trying to present valid arguements, but I hear a whiny teenager saying things like "But I don't want to work, I'll never have time to party", and "You mean I have to live with my parents for another four years? I can't take it!"
Seriously, how much of that is just wanting to get away from your parents and do stupid, crazy stuff? How much of that has anything to do with actual education?
As for the supposed change to excessive debt, there was no change. Read my earlier comments where I was talking about people are buried in debt. Most people have some debt, and that isn't necessarily bad. Christ, I've got 2 new cars, I've certainly got debt, but I my level of debt is such that I could still make my payments if I were making half as much as I am now, so I don't consider my debt to be excessive.
I never said having debt was dumb, I said being buried in debt was dumb. You're the one who decided that was an all-or-nothing deal.
Yeah, that's exactly what I said.
I don't design circuits, because I'm bad at it. Most of the engineers I've worked with are good at it, but they still make mistakes. I'm very good at finding those mistakes. And in the mean time, I'm also continuing my education (you know, at school, where I already said I learned my tech skills).
I'm glad your school gave you real experience, it's too bad they didn't teach you how to read.
You could acquire some marketable skills and earn the money to pay for it yourself. You could work while going to school. You could get scholarships and grants. You could take all your general ed requirements and intro classes at a JC. You could go to a public school, which is much less expensive. You could live off-campus, which is generally much cheaper than living in Dorms. You could go to a school near your hometown so you can avoid housing costs completely by living with your parents.
And before you say you can't get a good education at a cheaper school, in my experience instructors at the JC level are much more involved in their classes, so the education is actually better. You may not get a prestigious education, but you will probably learn more.
Doing any one of these things will dramatically reduce your college debt, and aren't particularly difficult. So, yes, excessive college debt is dumb.
I offer my sister as an example: She got a BS in Combined Sciences with a Medical Focus from Santa Clara University, which is both highly respected and very expensive (around $26k/year, IIRC), and then she went to UCLA for Paramedic school. Her college debt is under $30k, and the $11k loan for paramedic school doesn't have to be paid back as long as she maintains employment in a medical field for a certain number of years. While she was at SCU she took some classes at the local JC to get her EMT license and worked part time as an EMT, and she persued all manner of scholarships (she even competed in a beauty contest for one). She's currently working as a paramedic and taking classes to become an RN. Once she has fulfilled the time requirement for the above loan, she'll go to medical school for her MD, which she will likely have saved enough to pay for herself. The cost to our parents was only a couple thousand a year.
It's a matter of semantics, I suppose. It is a privately owned network, but it is offered as a public service to the students. While your office example is valid in a business situation, it isn't necessarily in a school environment. At work the network is a tool of the business which, like the copy machine, is there for the specific purpose of getting work done. At a school the network is part of a service/education package the students are paying for, and yes, there is legal precedent for this:
Humboldt State University (California) was building a new libraray. As with all such projects, it ended up over budget and behind schedule (IIRC, around $5M and 2 years, respectively). The students brought a class action against the school for a partial refund of their tuition for the years when this new library, which was a service they were paying for as part of their tuition, was unavailable to them. They won.
Similarly, if a network access fee were deducted from your paycheck, you would be able to sue your employer for restricting access/activity on that network.
It wasn't just a movie, there was a paper written about the whole thing by some big-time psychologist, which is where the term Generation X originated.
What I see around me is a lot of people with no real skills sitting in coffee shops whining that they aren't getting paid big money anymore, and that's all I was talking about. As for the debt thing, I think it's just plain dumb. I make 1/2 to 1/3 of what some of my friends were making, and yet I have very little debt, while they are buried under it. My credit card debt I could pay off in a few months at my current wages, and even if I were making 1/2 as much (which would be possible just about anywhere, since that wouldn't be much over minimum wage) I would still be able to cover all my bills, including the 2 cars.
Yeah, everything is a gamble, but if you aren't prepared to lose, if you over-extend yourself to the point where you can't afford to be making less than you are, then it IS your fault, and your situation is the direct result of your own poor planning.
And again, while I've been laid off several times in the last few years, and I haven't collected a single unemployment check. I always apply, just in case, but I've never been unemployed long enough to recieve one. Mostly that's due to the skill set I've developed, which anyone could get within a year at a JC. Most retraining programs will support you for at least that long. My attitude makes a big difference to, in that I view every job that comes my way as a learning opportunity, and if it sucks, well, I've still learned something from it that will likely come in handy down the road, and there's nothing stopping me from looking for another job just because I already have one.
So no, fate has nothing to do with it. I've worked to get where I am, and I take what opportunities come my way even if they aren't exactly what I want, rather than sitting around whining about how the economy is so bad and I can't get the exact job I went to school for.
The whole Generation X thing is a bunch of crap, since the term was origionally coined to describe British teen gangs in the late 50s/early 60s. I don't recall all the details, but the origional Generation X was split into 2 groups that were constantly at war with each other. The defining difference between the 2 groups was music, one group listened to Ska and I don't remember what the other group listened to.
Another historical side note, Billy Idol's band in the late 70s, before he got famous in his own right, was called Generation X.
If you read my comment again, you might notive that my real skills were picked up in tech classes at a Junior College. One of the things I noticed working as a tech is that electronic engineers come out of school knowing dick about electronics. They know tons of theory, sure, and they can calculate charge capacitance in their sleep, and they have a much better understanding of circuit design as a whole than I do, but when their circuit doesn't work they come to me to find out why. That's what I mean by "real" skills.
However, I wasn't talking about people who went to school and actually got an education. I was talking about web-monkeys who dropped out their freshman year to capitalize on their investment in "Learn Web Design in 24 Hours" and spent their $75k on partying.
But hey, getting buried in debt is just plain dumb anyway, college education or not. Whenever you gamble, eventually you lose. Merely having an education doesn't somehow magically make you not a "lamer" or "loser", especially when so many schools will let you make up degrees that are essentially meaningless (like the guy who started Sub Pop records who has a degree in "Punk Rock"). If you've buried yourself in debt, you are a loser, I don't care if you're the next Einstein (who, btw, wasn't buried in debt only because he married women who were as practical as he was not).
Amen!
.boom years at a JC (I had to pay for it all myself, and I don't like the idea of debt). I took some tech classes so I would have some real skills with which to earn the money to finish up my degree (was EE, but I discovered programming along the way, which I love even more than hardware, and have changed to CS). I met my wife and we had a beautiful daughter.
I know a few of those, and it's just pathetic. A few years ago they thought they were so much better than me because they were making all this money and living in the Bay Area and having all this fun. Now their all moping around, living in their parents basements and begging them to pay for their return to school since they didn't bother to save any money.
I spent the
In the end I came out ahead, at least from my perpective. I have a wonderful family, 2 new cars, a job that I love, all my bills are paid, and I still can to go to school part time (taking only 1 or 2 classes a semester may be the slow road, but it does wonders for your GPA). I entered the job market just before the crash (or perhaps right at the beginning of it), but thanks to the real world skills I took the time to learn, I've never been out of work for more than a week, which is totally doable because my car payments and rent combined are half what my Bay Area friends were paying for just rent.
On the whole, it seems like the crash has actually been to my advantage, all because, as I said, I took the time to learn some real skills.
File shares however are frequently enabled automagically by pooly designed and configured OS's.
Name a single OS that automagically enables file shares. I can't, and I'm quite familiar with several.
Even under the most piss-poor Windows install a file share has to be set up intentionally, and in that dialogue box the user has the option of giving it a password or leaving it totally unprotected.
They are RARELY setup for the INTENT of general public access.
Are you joking, or do you just have no idea what you're talking about? Every unprotected share I've ever seen was specifically for the purpose of general public access by everyone on the network. That's the whole point. If you don't want everybody and their third uncle checking out your stuff you put a freaking password on it in the dialogue box you had to open to set up the share in the first place.
If you scanned a computer and found open services, you must get authorization from the computer OWNER. The computer itself doesn't know who the hell you are, or whether you REALLY should be there or not.
The OWNER has given PERMISSION by opening an UNPROTECTED SHARE on a PUBLIC NETWORK. The computer knows who should or shouldn't be there by letting in only the people who know the password, and if there isn't a password that means EVERYONE.
And as for your dialogue above, for an unprotected windows share it's more like:
Scanner: Knock Knock.
Computer: Hi.
Scanner: Can I come in?
Computer: Yeah, sure! Make yourself at home! Would you like to run some unauthorized code?
First, he didn't promote the service, so likely only he and maybe a few friends knew about it. That says nothing about what he planned to do with it in the future, but I'll get to that below.
Second, there's no reason that merely finding open shares couldn't be a service, it all depends on what you do with the information you gather. If you use the info to contact people and politely let them know that they've left their computer wide open for anyone to poke around in, that would certainly be a benevolent use of the service, even if "you" happens to be Microsoft. In fact, that would be an excellent way for them to improve their security reputation since so many security problems are caused by "admins" who don't know what they are doing. (Along those lines, I think MS should start releasing security patches for Outlook and IE as viruses that repair their own exploits after they replicate. Sadly, that's the only way some servers would ever get patched.)
Finally, saying that scanning a public network that one is a member of is intrusive or a privacy violation is absurd. Do the people who would say this actually know what scanning is? It's no more intrusive or privacy violating that me noticing that you left your front door open.
From the article:
The AUP does not mention scans and I did not 'break' or 'crack' security in any way.
It sure sounds to me like all he did was scan for open shares. As I said, if he trespassed on someone elses system, I agree that he should be in trouble. However, an "indexing system" doesn't suggest downloading or redistribution at all, it only suggests indexing. The "peer-to-peer file web-based file" part makes no sense, and only suggests that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Anyway, if all he's doing is scanning then I agree with him. If he's rummaging around in other people's systems and downloading their files, I agree with you. The way I read the article all he's doing is scanning.
Can you or anyone cite a legal precedent that states someone who has open shares on a PC in their possession retains no right to the privacy of those shares, and that that data on those shares is legally accessible by anyone who can get to it?
Of course not, because there isn't one.
However, I don't believe that is an issue in this case because the way I read the article he's just walking down the street looking for open doors, not going through them.
The door analogy is a poor one in this case, though, since a share that isn't protected by a password invites in anyone who makes an inquiry. Certainly if you leave your door open that doesn't mean I have the right to enter your house, but if you set up an automated system near your open door that invites me in when I knock, I would not be in the wrong by coming in.
I don't condone trespassing, and I thought I stated that clearly in my post. My impression is that he was merely scanning, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.
By allowing a user to login w/out a password, the server has authorized the client to use its services.
That's exactly like saying that by leaving my back door unlocked, I've authorized the psycho down the block to come in to my house. It just doesn't hold water to me.
I think the idea is that it's more like leaving your door open with an automated system set up that invites anyone who knocks to come in.
I'm not sure I agree with it, but it's an interesting point which deserves some thought.
Probably it's just that samba doesn't have control of the Linux print spooler, so once the document is passed to the spooler you would have to cancel the job from Linux.
It seems a little odd to me, that seems like something that would be fairly simple to set up, at least from the *nix end. There's the matter of trapping the correct command from the Windows side, of course, but that seems like one they would have caught by now. Is the problem just under Windows 2000, or other Windows versions as well?
Just because you have read access to something doesn't mean you ought to be using it and certainly doesn't mean you'll be looked upon favorably if you write a tool to do it on a large scale.
Read the article again, because you obviously missed some important parts. All he did was scan for open shares, he did not exploit or violate them in any way.
Had he actually violated anyones privacy or trespassed on their systems I would agree with you. But just scanning? Unless scanning is srictly against the AUP, he didn't violate a damned thing and he is completely in the right.
Or perhaps you are suggesting it is illegal for me to walk down the street and notice that someones door is open? If that's not illegal in the real world there's no reason it should be illegal in the electronic one.
ftp.suse.com
They probably aren't there yet, as it usually takes a few weeks for SuSE to get their FTP version ready.
Ah, all is made clear! Dyndns seems to take care of my big reservation regarding the project, and I wish I'd known about the service a year ago when I was trying to make GBs of 3D CAD models accessable to the clients of a small engineering company I was working for at the time (in other words, thanks for pointing that out to me).
Speaking of that small engineering company, the server I built for them was based on a 350MHz K6-2 with 256MB RAM that they had sitting unused in the back storeroom. I put in a cheap network card (check pricewatch.com, you can find PCI 10/100 cards for as little as $2 each, and yes, they are supported in Linux because they all use the RealTek 8139 chip), a 20GB IDE hard drive, and a basic (no GUI) install of SuSE (7.3) and Samba. The whole thing cost about $200, half of which was the hard drive and the other half was to pay me to set it up. It has sat under the desk that holds their printers, happily serving massive 3D CAD files to 5-10 workstations without a hitch, since I brought it online in february. I removed the keyboard, monitor, and mouse so no one would be tempted to use it, and did administration over ssh.
This is exactly what I recomend for you. It's cheap, easy, and has plenty of power for what you want to do. IIRC you wanted software RAID1, so I would estimate you could do it for under $200 in hardware, maybe $300 if you don't have an old system laying around taking up closet space. The Promise IDE controllers are now allegedly supported under Linux (and the cheap IDE controllers can be easily changed to a RAID controller with a resistor and a PROM flash), so you may want to invest in one of those to improve drive performance, but I don't know how much that would really matter in your case.
The important parts are: hard drive speed, network card speed, RAM. Any Pentium 2 or K6-2 CPU should be more than fast enough. Your DSL modem only has a 10-base Ethernet connection on your end, so your server only has to be capable of sustaining about 1MByte per second to keep it full, and the WAN side is likely much slower than that. This is a trivial task for the hardware setup I've described, so don't worry about the hardware end.
If you want to use a setup like the one I've described and need any help getting it running the email address above is good (after you remove slashdot's anti-spam stuff, of course). Feel free to email me with any questions, I'll be glad to help if I can (note that I know nothing about web servers, but I'll be doing exactly what you are doing as soon as I can put a server together, so I should learn soon enough).
I used to blame nVidia drivers for my X crashes, too. Then I switched from KDE to WindowMaker (which I actually prefer) and no more X crashes.
Hmmm... I wonder whose code was buggy there...
Besides Nvidia could very well release a BSD driver.
They have.
Now what kernel does the Mac OS X use?
The Mach kernel, which is NOT THE BSD KERNEL!
FreeBSD was the first OS the Mach kernel would run, which is why Apple based OS X on FreeBSD, but FreeBSD does not use the Mach kernel.
Regular backup/archive.
It seems like cost is an important issue for you, both for the hardware and the power to keep it running 24/7. You'll need DSL with a static IP address to host it yourself, which is a fairly expensive prospect. It's certainly more expensive than paying a providor for the space, plus even if you have a static IP that doesn't mean that your AUP allows for self-hosting.
Do you need to have all your pictures on the web? Is there really any significant advantage to that? How does that advantage weigh against the significant price difference for static DSL with hosting priveleges?
Personally, I would have a server in my home to store all that stuff. Leave it on all the time in some back room where it won't bother anyone and let it do it's thing. Linux or BSD are excellent for that. Leave the web hosting to someone else, and set your server to make nightly mirrors of the site if your really concerned about the providor suddenly going away (there are utilities in most Linux distros specifically for that purpose).
Check how much web space you have with your DSL, and if thisis for the whole family ask other families to donate their unused space to the cause. There's no reason the whole site has to be at the same IP address, and between a few accounts you could have a significant amount of space, and back it all up regularly if you're really concerned about losing it.
Well, as of 10:21am (Pacific Whatever Time) the server could no longer be found by my browser, despite being able to find it repeatedly since 10:07am, so it appears that your warnings have been in vain.
It's a shame really, I was kind of curious about that hamster thing...
Of course, id prefer google to keep up a kickass search engine, not waste its money arguing against idiots like this that represent themselves so they can sue for free.
It's only free until he loses the counter-suit and has to pay all the defendants legal costs.
I don't know that there is a counter-suit, but if I were a named defendant there certainly would be.
The issue of why Google needs to waste money fighting this guy has been dealt with elsewhere.
Are there test rigs for hard drives, etc that allow for basic functionality testing?
There are. I've never actually seen one, but I know they exist. I work in Customer Service Repair for a company that sells rebranded high-end RAIDs (that's not our core business, but it's one of the products I support). I know that our vendor has ways of doing these kind of tests, but we don't. It's something I've thought about, but our units have protection circuits so actual damage isn't an issue for us, it would just be a troubleshooting tool that would allow us to pin down some behavior we've observed.
Anyway, most likely you'd have to build your own. An old, otherwise useless motherboard (anything new enough to have onboard IDE, all it has to do is spin it up) would likely do the trick, along with a power supply, an IDE cable, and maybe a couple of multimeters. You'd want to hack up the power supply and IDE cables to allow you to measure current on a few of the critical lines. You could also add some fuses or something for protection, if you're into that sort of thing.
Anyway, my first guess in the situation you discribed is a current spike from the drive on spin-up. The rig I've discribed should test for that, and if you put a fuse on every line it should be a quick test (although you might go through a lot of fuses).
That's my preliminary concept, anyway, I'm sure there are better ways to do it. It's unlikely I'll ever get around to building it, so feel free to steal my idea.