Roseanne Barr has published her diet plan under a C.C. license. She says she hopes this will encourage others to eat as live as healthy and be as thin as she is.
>SCO had a couple of very real UNIX products out there in the '90s
No they didn't. You're confusing SCO from Utah with Santa Cruz Operations. SCO is a rename of the old company Caldera after they bought the name and rights from the original SCO - now known as Tarantella.
PLEASE GET THIS CLEAR: The company that sued Linux and the company that made unixware ARE NOT THE SAME COMPANY. They are completely seperate corporations in completely different places started by completely different people and have NOTHING common. SCO actually did have two fairly decent products back in the Caldera years. Caldera Linux was perhaps the best desktop distro in it's day (though they were also the first distro to ship with a non-free DE by default [they used KDE back when QT was still non-free]), and DR-DOS was probably the best DOS replacement ever developed.
The things - Caldera basically died during the UnitedLinux fiasco and never really had another product, they bought the unix business from SCO along with the name, while the old SCO focussed on their security business and became Tarantella, but never did anything with it - except to make the source code of the very first unix kernel available as a free download for curiosity purposes (this ended up counting severely against them in the case they lost- they had effectively declared the unix they owned to be a valueless thing of purely historic interest- and now they want to sue others for supposedly stealing it - ironically there really wasn't any of that code in Linux at any time because it really WAS just of historic interest. What the hell would Linux want with code written in the 1970's for 8-bit CPU's ?)
>You do realize what "scorched earth" means, right? You do realize that it's almost the exact opposite of what the US has been doing almost since day 1 of Gulf War II?
No. It's not. I am descended of the first people scorched earth was ever used again and a direct-line descendant of the inventor of Guerilla warfare at that. It wasn't the scorched earth that won the boer war - it was the concentration camps. Burning down the farms and destroying the infrastructure had only made my ancestors fight HARDER. And there is no practical difference between what the US is doing in Iraq now and what Britain did here a century ago. There is... symbolic differences. There is a CLAIM that civilians aren't targeted (Britain said that too - then they killed 27 000 of them). There is a claim that infrastructure is being built not demolished - but the average quality of life of an Iraqi today is an order of magnitude worse than it was before the war. You've "liberated" them from a dictator ? On the contrary you tossed them out of the frying pan into the fire. Your construction work is just a way to give cushy cash contracts to the CEO's who funded your politicians and keep the oil flowing. It's never been about uplifting the people of the country. If it actually had been - if the average Iraqi citizen today had a better life, with the opportunities that freedom brings then there wouldn't have been any insurgents.
Scorched earth has NEVER worked against Guerilla tactics. But Guerilla tactics are incredibly dependent on the support of the local (non-combatant) population. That's why Britain put the boer women in concentration camps - to remove that supporting population, it was the only way to beat the guerillas. The US can't dare to get RID of the local population like they did - but you could have won their support for YOUR side, if you'd come even close to trying to live up to Bush's "Iraqi Freedom" promise. Instead you've made their lives a living hell, that must by default breed sympathy for the insurgents. As long as guerillas have the sympathy and support of the civilian population - it's impossible to win a war against them. Congratulations, you've created yourself a war that cannot be won. You're too powerful to lose it, and you've made a system that means THEY cannot lose either... do you really want to see it span decades before ultimately just giving up and leaving ? Did you learn nothing from Vietnam ?
>bout your Mad Mickey example.. do you really think almost every person would turn suicidal after their community was attacked?
Do you really think almost none of them would ? The percentage who would goes up with the severity of the attacks. The more harm you do - the more people's point-of-no-return you'll breach. You say "scorched earth" - by definition you're going to hit nearly every survivor with that strategy.
>"screw it all, we're done, I'm going out in a blaze of glory." I don't think ANYBODY thinks that- I specifically said what a huge number of people WILL say however which is. "They've destroyed everything I ever loved, nothing can make that okay... I may only be able to get a tiny bit of justice but by $DEITY I will get that little bit because I owe it to my dead loved ones".
>If your enemy has plans to destroy you, then by all means be a terrorist. Otherwise, swallow your pride and give up. Exactly - that's what my own ancestors did in the Boer war. Again- scorched earth is a horrible and terrible strategy but it IS effective - in a conventional, declared state of war. It is effective when the people you are waging it against are using guerilla tactics to fight an actual war. Even then - not all cultures and nations would do so. A LOT of people here were very unhappy about the surrender. We did it because with 27000 woman and children dead, there were as many left in the camps - and we knew another six months and there wouldn't be any. But we also knew if we could have held out another six months we'd have won the war (there is documented evidence of this - British records indicate that plans for surrender on their side was already underway when we did so - though we didn't know it at the time, as it stands the next election saw the politicians who had come up with scorched-earh being utterly destroyed by their own furious people - if we had kept fighting past the election the next party would have had no CHOICE but to run on a "we will surrender and give up the war" platform). And that is the war that the term "scorched earth" was COINED in - it's the ultimate example.
The point is it only really worked because the fighters on the ground had something left to save by giving up - and didn't KNOW that they would have won if they just held out a little longer. I don't think the sacrifice would have been worth it, to this day the population of my people is calculated to be less than 10% of what it would have been if the concentration camps never happened. We may not have existed afterward since there wouldn't be anybody to bear a new generation.
But there also wasn't international oversight. Do you really think any country -even the USA could REALLY get away with what Britain did there today ? The last country that tried to was at the time at LEAST as powerful as you are now, and ended up at war with the ENTIRE WORLD - and lost.
So you can't GO that far... if anything history suggests that scorched earth strategies, in the long run, causes the invading force to LOSE the war.
Each other. Gestures and body language is probably the oldest and best established form of human communication predating spoken word by millions of years.
>By lying to them and buying them expensive presents?
I was going to say by coating them in our erm DNA... but most of the people on/. already operate their computers that way. There's probably an entire lost generation dried up inside old discarded keyboards by now.
I'm arguing that they won't need to. I'm arguing that if you've had a repository system for a couple of years- the very idea would be so strange, unusual and convoluted that most people will say "bugger that, too much effort"
Scorched earth worked to end the Guerilla phase of the anglo boer war.
The price was the slow death by disease and starvation of 27 000 women and children...
But that wasn't terrorism, it was guerilla tactics in a formally declared war used by the invaded nation as a defense against the invaders.
When you're dealing with actual terrorists - no it doesn't work. It worked because the Boers had lost a LOT but not everything - it worked because surrender meant saving the ones still alive.
If you try to leave guerillas with nothing "to fight for" what you actually do is leave them with "nothing to lose" - every civilian you kill in a country means 5 formerly moderate family members signing up at the nearest training camp. In fact I think you'll find scorched earth policies is the best possible way to make a LOT more terrorists. When you make people feel that they are fighting a genuinely just war against a cruel and murderous nation - you remove all the moral blocks that stop people like you and me from using bombs to get our way. You remove the family ties that make us reconsider. Most of us won't risk our families suffer for our believes. But when we've already lost them - avenging them can become all we still care about.
Scorched earth policies only work when you're fighting a properly declared war against a force using guerilla tactics against soldiers. It doesn't work against terrorist who target civilians as a matter of course.
Not to mention there is the whole Geneva convention and such you know...
It's easy to say scorched earth when you belong to a powerful nation. What if you were born in one of the smaller, oppressed nations - and some insane people in your country planted a bomb on the soil of a powerful one they have a grudge against ? Hell Timothy Mcveigh is your own piece of proof that terrorists targeting their own people is not unusual - rationality doesn't enter into it by definition.
So after Mad Mickey plants his bomb, the powerful nation comes and levels your city with misiles, shoots at your children in school busses, their misiles "accidently" hit your schools and hospitals and their soldiers push you around on the streets, rape your mother who was innocently imprisoned because she has alzheimers and walks with a cane and couldn't make it home before curfew because she got disoriented and lost. You lose your job because their actions have destroyed your economy and the few family members you have left are struggling and starving and you remember that things were better before they show up.
Do you say "It's all Mad Micky's fault- let's find him and his cohorts and hand them over so it will end" ? Or do you say "Mad Mickey was right all along - these bastards deserve to die for what they do, deserve to suffer as they made us suffer. As we suffer for the crimes of one, so they all should suffer for the crimes of a few of the soldiers. We don't have an army that can beat them in open combat, but we can plant bombs like Mad Mickey did, we can use suicide attacks to get in among them. They killed our women and children - we can kill theirs... we may not be able to win back our homeland, or win a war - but we can make them feel a little bit of the suffering they have made us feel."
Honestly ? Do you think you wouldn't choose the second option ? Even if you say so - you do realize that almost every person alive WOULD take it.
You're using scorched earth tactics NOW. All it does is make MORE enemies who have LESS to loose.
Well - the good news is, we can foresee that risk - and plan ahead for it.
As for making it impossible - we both know that's never going to happen - but merely raising the bar a bit (or in this case rather a lot) must ipso facto reduce the power of botnets.
I said "better" - I didn't say perfectly. I'd say the total number of infected apps in GNU/Linux repositories right now is likely to be less than what is in the iPhone's app-store (where there were several revelations about trojans recently) and certainly orders of magnitude less than what you would find in for example tucows's app listing (I haven't used windows in many years when I did that was the closest thing to a "repository" you could find for comparitive purposes but I'll bet whatever is current in the windows world is even worse).
Did I say you were greedy ? Definitely not. I said your medical system was bad. I also said it was bad for YOU - not bad for the rest of the world (mostly - it becomes an issue when drug patents mean those patients can't get lifesaving drugs but that's another thing).
I said the system you have keeps your own prices artificially high - and that creates a market for the swindlers. Those same donations you mention REDUCE their market in their own countries. Do the math.
You know, as a citizen of one of those "not America" countries... I would prefer you don't do it at all and actually consider all those jurisdiction things. You know why ? Because even if it means spammers are harder to catch - I would still rather prefer NOT having to worry about navy seals jumping through my bedroom window if I call your government a bunch of profiteering warmongers.
If Guantanamo Bay proves one thing it's this: most Americans think civil liberties belong to them, only to them and us people inthe rest of the world have no rights at all - even if it means your government gets to trample all over the rights granted to me by mine...
Somehow, a few dead spammers as lovely as that sounds, doesn't sound worth it to me.
I wasn't thinking of that one no. The story I am thinking off was definitely a company effort, I remember reading the details and the whitepaper on the company site. I just can't remember their name.
It is done - most of those "Spammer gets 10 years" headlines you see are about exactly that: they are ultimately convicted of credit card fraud. The trouble is - the vast majority of the time the spammers and their victims are in vastly different jurisdictions, which makes investigation and conviction harder (as it now requires significant international cooperation). Most of the spammers are in developing nations where police services are significantly underfunded and less effective than in the US which means even if you find them an arrest is still hard... look how much trouble the US has catching well known drug barons in countries like Colombia and Mexico - when they HAVE the local authorities assisting. Now try to imagine catching a spammer in Lagos arguably a far less nefarious crime (at least according to law enforcement), without the kind of international networks set up for trying to stop it that the drug barons face, in countries where local law enforcement is basically a kind of bribe-collection service.... Yeah - that's gonna happen.
>Good luck with that. Of course once OUR Windows is dead it'll be YOUR machines sending us SPAM.
No it won't. The "windows gets targeted only because it's biggest" argument is a fallacy - and an easily debunked one at that.
Here's the REAL reason why you will never see much spams or trojans in the Linux world. Unlike our windows counterparts, when we need an app for some task, we don't open a (insecure) browser, search around, find a.exe which we then RUN to install the program.
We connect to a repository, which is run by software experts who have repackaged and tested the programs in question, the software gets downloaded automatically - the files are checked using digital signatures to prevent MitM attacks, and only then installed.
Average computer users will never have the capacity of computer experts to tell trojans from useful apps, and either way have no viable means of determining if a particular install file is trustworthy without having already taken the risk, all while dealing with a browser/email combination that could do all this without them even being aware of it (though at least that has gotten better than it used to - remember I-Love-You, that's how bad Outlook once was!). Us GNU/Linux users pool our resources to have people who are skilled select and evaluate the apps in our repositories and make our selection from a set that's pre-vetted. We can choose on features and design without having to WORRY about "does it coincidentally install spyware which will later be installing a botnet", because the people who packaged the software have nothing to gain by not removing such, and everything to benefit from ensuring the trustworthiness of the software.
Remove the capacity to write "installer programs" for windows - create a repository (perhaps even a paid one - like Apple's app-store) and you solve the botnet problem. Trouble is, Microsoft unlike the GNU/Linux companies won't find the best way to keep their repo profitable is to be open to all comers who write useful software. Much like Apple, they'll end up using it to make sure nothing i available to their users that competes with their own products. The cure may be even worse than the disease - so I don't know if it's something to push for. What I can tell you is, as long as ordinary users are supposed to vet good from bad software (people who have ZERO training in how to tell the difference in other words) - botnets WILL proliferate. The problem isn't even so much OS-design (though it plays a role), it's the way software is managed on the two platforms. GNU/Linux simply has a software management concept that is by it's very nature far, far more secure than Windows. It's not perfect - last year Fedora's repos were pwned temporarily - and they had to create and issue a full set of new keys to ensure the integrity of what they contained - but the problem was fixable without any customer ever being at risk. That's what GNU/Linux's repository concept does - it takes the task of risk assessment and gives it to people who are trained at for the job so by definition they do it better.
Drug faking isn't new - it's just new in the US. I spent quite a lot of time in Nigeria during my career, and one thing you learn fast is to only go to embassy doctors who import their medicines. Why ? Because there is a thriving market for fake malaria (and other) medicines - faked so well that even doctors (local or Western) can't tell the difference. People die from Malaria in redcross hospitals because the last batch of pills were basically sugar pills dressed up so well (along with packaging) that neither a trained doctor nor a pharmacist could tell they were getting fakes.
Thing is - in Nigeria the drug-faking business has hit a snag. Nigeria is notorious for various crimes (particularly product forgery) not being addressed because a well-placed bribe solves the problem. Trouble is - the minister of health is about as close to unbribe-able as a politician can get. Her own sister died (in the kind of rich-man's hospital where politician's family go) from malaria because the meds she got were fakes. She hates fake drugs, so she's been going after them hard. She's put together crack teams of what is probably the best law enforcement in the entire country going after them and shutting down warehouse after warehouse. Had a few attempts on her life already because she's just not folding.
*Up to here is fact - the next bit is my own conjecture*
What happens when criminals find a lucrative market starting to disappear because law enforcement got effective ? They find a new market. The USA is proving to be ripe for their exploitation. Your own profit-over-human-life approach to healthcare has created the ideal conditions for them - in fact, better conditions. In Nigeria they had to compete with charity organisations and drugs priced for a very poor country. In the USA - they can undercut the real thing by 80% and still make more money from a single pill than they'd make out of a thousand back home. If there is one thing Nigerians have proven to be very good at, it's using the internet to commit crimes. It's also a fact that in South Africa more than 80% of all illegal drug trade (particularly cat, heroine and cocaine) are run by Nigerian expatriates. Most Nigerians are good, honest, intensely moral and very peaceful people - but those among them who are criminals are among the best (as in most effective and deadly) in the world. They obviously have the infrastructure to smuggle heroine and cocaine, compared to that smuggling a pill that looks exactly like antibiotics must be remarkably easy.
That is only partially true. There was a/. story not long ago about a white-hat company that utterly destroyed a botnet. Sorry I can't remember the names which is making googling rather hard. I do remember the technical details (whose surprised ?). It was a difficult and involved process - the botnet relied on numerous DNS tricks to always be able to find it's control servers. What the white hats did was to trace and track the current set of master servers. Knocking them out wouldn't do any good, as the controllers would just activate a new set and the bots would find them.
Instead they tracked the servers, worked with law enforcement and the ISP's hosting them and got those DNS names rerouted to their own servers - which were running a control server of their own, designed to be a drop-in compatible replacement for the real thing. Result - suddenly the good guys controlled all the bots, and could then actively locate and eradicate the infections (including letters to the owners of the computers and such). It meant a lot of coordination between many organisations because pulling it off meant a huge bunch of people doing slightly different updates to servers at the exact same time - but it was done, and it shows it CAN be done.
Interestingly I do remember that the company that did it are the new kids in security, a small startup. They don't have any share of the pie that symantec and the like has, so they have no vested interest in keeping botnets alive. Instead they are trying to build a business model on studying, and then actively destroying them. Trouble is - botnets are like hydra's, as long as there are so many vulnerable machines on the net (e.g. the entire Microsoft Windows customer base) destroying one doesn't do any good - you see a drop in spam for a few days, maybe a week or two, then another botnet has filled in the gap. The only real way to solve the problem is to remove those deliciously easy targets. We all know exactly how easy that will be.
>Besides, even if they were somehow to convince a jury to let them wipe all of the Android phones out there
So basically all google has to do is during Jury selection limit their criteria to "do you use an android phone" - if they can get just 5 or so android users on the jury there is no way in hell that the jury will reach a decision that gets their lovely smartphones wiped !:P
>Having zombies, pirates, ninjas, robots, vampires, and werewolves in an MMORPG would be awesome!
We do - every single one of these things is present in WoW (except maybe the Ninja's though the flesheaters are basically zombie ninjas which is even better)
Yes, I said that in my post. I started by correcting the statements about the GPL - then I specifically indicated that this does NOT however apply to Google because they didn't USE the GPL'd code from SUN at all.
In fact I said everything in your correction - and then some.
The real problem with my long comment is that you didn't read it.
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Roseanne Barr has published her diet plan under a C.C. license. She says she hopes this will encourage others to eat as live as healthy and be as thin as she is.
>SCO had a couple of very real UNIX products out there in the '90s
No they didn't. You're confusing SCO from Utah with Santa Cruz Operations. SCO is a rename of the old company Caldera after they bought the name and rights from the original SCO - now known as Tarantella.
PLEASE GET THIS CLEAR: The company that sued Linux and the company that made unixware ARE NOT THE SAME COMPANY. They are completely seperate corporations in completely different places started by completely different people and have NOTHING common.
SCO actually did have two fairly decent products back in the Caldera years. Caldera Linux was perhaps the best desktop distro in it's day (though they were also the first distro to ship with a non-free DE by default [they used KDE back when QT was still non-free]), and DR-DOS was probably the best DOS replacement ever developed.
The things - Caldera basically died during the UnitedLinux fiasco and never really had another product, they bought the unix business from SCO along with the name, while the old SCO focussed on their security business and became Tarantella, but never did anything with it - except to make the source code of the very first unix kernel available as a free download for curiosity purposes (this ended up counting severely against them in the case they lost- they had effectively declared the unix they owned to be a valueless thing of purely historic interest- and now they want to sue others for supposedly stealing it - ironically there really wasn't any of that code in Linux at any time because it really WAS just of historic interest. What the hell would Linux want with code written in the 1970's for 8-bit CPU's ?)
>You do realize what "scorched earth" means, right? You do realize that it's almost the exact opposite of what the US has been doing almost since day 1 of Gulf War II?
No. It's not. I am descended of the first people scorched earth was ever used again and a direct-line descendant of the inventor of Guerilla warfare at that. It wasn't the scorched earth that won the boer war - it was the concentration camps. Burning down the farms and destroying the infrastructure had only made my ancestors fight HARDER.
And there is no practical difference between what the US is doing in Iraq now and what Britain did here a century ago. There is... symbolic differences. There is a CLAIM that civilians aren't targeted (Britain said that too - then they killed 27 000 of them). There is a claim that infrastructure is being built not demolished - but the average quality of life of an Iraqi today is an order of magnitude worse than it was before the war.
You've "liberated" them from a dictator ? On the contrary you tossed them out of the frying pan into the fire. Your construction work is just a way to give cushy cash contracts to the CEO's who funded your politicians and keep the oil flowing. It's never been about uplifting the people of the country. If it actually had been - if the average Iraqi citizen today had a better life, with the opportunities that freedom brings then there wouldn't have been any insurgents.
Scorched earth has NEVER worked against Guerilla tactics. But Guerilla tactics are incredibly dependent on the support of the local (non-combatant) population. That's why Britain put the boer women in concentration camps - to remove that supporting population, it was the only way to beat the guerillas. The US can't dare to get RID of the local population like they did - but you could have won their support for YOUR side, if you'd come even close to trying to live up to Bush's "Iraqi Freedom" promise. Instead you've made their lives a living hell, that must by default breed sympathy for the insurgents.
As long as guerillas have the sympathy and support of the civilian population - it's impossible to win a war against them. Congratulations, you've created yourself a war that cannot be won. You're too powerful to lose it, and you've made a system that means THEY cannot lose either... do you really want to see it span decades before ultimately just giving up and leaving ? Did you learn nothing from Vietnam ?
Well once there's too much DNA in a keyboard it usually gets discarded, since the keys tend to get too sticky to type on... or so I've heard.
>bout your Mad Mickey example.. do you really think almost every person would turn suicidal after their community was attacked?
Do you really think almost none of them would ? The percentage who would goes up with the severity of the attacks. The more harm you do - the more people's point-of-no-return you'll breach. You say "scorched earth" - by definition you're going to hit nearly every survivor with that strategy.
>"screw it all, we're done, I'm going out in a blaze of glory."
I don't think ANYBODY thinks that- I specifically said what a huge number of people WILL say however which is. "They've destroyed everything I ever loved, nothing can make that okay... I may only be able to get a tiny bit of justice but by $DEITY I will get that little bit because I owe it to my dead loved ones".
>If your enemy has plans to destroy you, then by all means be a terrorist. Otherwise, swallow your pride and give up.
Exactly - that's what my own ancestors did in the Boer war. Again- scorched earth is a horrible and terrible strategy but it IS effective - in a conventional, declared state of war. It is effective when the people you are waging it against are using guerilla tactics to fight an actual war.
Even then - not all cultures and nations would do so. A LOT of people here were very unhappy about the surrender. We did it because with 27000 woman and children dead, there were as many left in the camps - and we knew another six months and there wouldn't be any. But we also knew if we could have held out another six months we'd have won the war (there is documented evidence of this - British records indicate that plans for surrender on their side was already underway when we did so - though we didn't know it at the time, as it stands the next election saw the politicians who had come up with scorched-earh being utterly destroyed by their own furious people - if we had kept fighting past the election the next party would have had no CHOICE but to run on a "we will surrender and give up the war" platform).
And that is the war that the term "scorched earth" was COINED in - it's the ultimate example.
The point is it only really worked because the fighters on the ground had something left to save by giving up - and didn't KNOW that they would have won if they just held out a little longer. I don't think the sacrifice would have been worth it, to this day the population of my people is calculated to be less than 10% of what it would have been if the concentration camps never happened. We may not have existed afterward since there wouldn't be anybody to bear a new generation.
But there also wasn't international oversight. Do you really think any country -even the USA could REALLY get away with what Britain did there today ? The last country that tried to was at the time at LEAST as powerful as you are now, and ended up at war with the ENTIRE WORLD - and lost.
So you can't GO that far... if anything history suggests that scorched earth strategies, in the long run, causes the invading force to LOSE the war.
>what else do we interact with like that?
Each other. Gestures and body language is probably the oldest and best established form of human communication predating spoken word by millions of years.
>By lying to them and buying them expensive presents?
I was going to say by coating them in our erm DNA... but most of the people on /. already operate their computers that way. There's probably an entire lost generation dried up inside old discarded keyboards by now.
>I'll continue to get my pussy the old-fasioned way, good sir.
alt.sex.binaries ?
Look on the bright side- next time you give windows the finger it will know what you mean !
Aaah yes - that explains why "your computer has a virus" fake-sites are doing so well does it ?
I'm arguing that they won't need to. I'm arguing that if you've had a repository system for a couple of years- the very idea would be so strange, unusual and convoluted that most people will say "bugger that, too much effort"
Scorched earth worked to end the Guerilla phase of the anglo boer war.
The price was the slow death by disease and starvation of 27 000 women and children...
But that wasn't terrorism, it was guerilla tactics in a formally declared war used by the invaded nation as a defense against the invaders.
When you're dealing with actual terrorists - no it doesn't work. It worked because the Boers had lost a LOT but not everything - it worked because surrender meant saving the ones still alive.
If you try to leave guerillas with nothing "to fight for" what you actually do is leave them with "nothing to lose" - every civilian you kill in a country means 5 formerly moderate family members signing up at the nearest training camp.
In fact I think you'll find scorched earth policies is the best possible way to make a LOT more terrorists. When you make people feel that they are fighting a genuinely just war against a cruel and murderous nation - you remove all the moral blocks that stop people like you and me from using bombs to get our way. You remove the family ties that make us reconsider.
Most of us won't risk our families suffer for our believes. But when we've already lost them - avenging them can become all we still care about.
Scorched earth policies only work when you're fighting a properly declared war against a force using guerilla tactics against soldiers. It doesn't work against terrorist who target civilians as a matter of course.
Not to mention there is the whole Geneva convention and such you know...
It's easy to say scorched earth when you belong to a powerful nation. What if you were born in one of the smaller, oppressed nations - and some insane people in your country planted a bomb on the soil of a powerful one they have a grudge against ? Hell Timothy Mcveigh is your own piece of proof that terrorists targeting their own people is not unusual - rationality doesn't enter into it by definition.
So after Mad Mickey plants his bomb, the powerful nation comes and levels your city with misiles, shoots at your children in school busses, their misiles "accidently" hit your schools and hospitals and their soldiers push you around on the streets, rape your mother who was innocently imprisoned because she has alzheimers and walks with a cane and couldn't make it home before curfew because she got disoriented and lost.
You lose your job because their actions have destroyed your economy and the few family members you have left are struggling and starving and you remember that things were better before they show up.
Do you say "It's all Mad Micky's fault- let's find him and his cohorts and hand them over so it will end" ?
Or do you say "Mad Mickey was right all along - these bastards deserve to die for what they do, deserve to suffer as they made us suffer. As we suffer for the crimes of one, so they all should suffer for the crimes of a few of the soldiers. We don't have an army that can beat them in open combat, but we can plant bombs like Mad Mickey did, we can use suicide attacks to get in among them. They killed our women and children - we can kill theirs... we may not be able to win back our homeland, or win a war - but we can make them feel a little bit of the suffering they have made us feel."
Honestly ? Do you think you wouldn't choose the second option ? Even if you say so - you do realize that almost every person alive WOULD take it.
You're using scorched earth tactics NOW. All it does is make MORE enemies who have LESS to loose.
Well - the good news is, we can foresee that risk - and plan ahead for it.
As for making it impossible - we both know that's never going to happen - but merely raising the bar a bit (or in this case rather a lot) must ipso facto reduce the power of botnets.
I said "better" - I didn't say perfectly. I'd say the total number of infected apps in GNU/Linux repositories right now is likely to be less than what is in the iPhone's app-store (where there were several revelations about trojans recently) and certainly orders of magnitude less than what you would find in for example tucows's app listing (I haven't used windows in many years when I did that was the closest thing to a "repository" you could find for comparitive purposes but I'll bet whatever is current in the windows world is even worse).
Did I say you were greedy ? Definitely not. I said your medical system was bad. I also said it was bad for YOU - not bad for the rest of the world (mostly - it becomes an issue when drug patents mean those patients can't get lifesaving drugs but that's another thing).
I said the system you have keeps your own prices artificially high - and that creates a market for the swindlers. Those same donations you mention REDUCE their market in their own countries. Do the math.
I didn't - but it's one in a million, not every single bloody app !
You know, as a citizen of one of those "not America" countries... I would prefer you don't do it at all and actually consider all those jurisdiction things. You know why ? Because even if it means spammers are harder to catch - I would still rather prefer NOT having to worry about navy seals jumping through my bedroom window if I call your government a bunch of profiteering warmongers.
If Guantanamo Bay proves one thing it's this: most Americans think civil liberties belong to them, only to them and us people inthe rest of the world have no rights at all - even if it means your government gets to trample all over the rights granted to me by mine...
Somehow, a few dead spammers as lovely as that sounds, doesn't sound worth it to me.
I wasn't thinking of that one no. The story I am thinking off was definitely a company effort, I remember reading the details and the whitepaper on the company site. I just can't remember their name.
It is done - most of those "Spammer gets 10 years" headlines you see are about exactly that: they are ultimately convicted of credit card fraud. The trouble is - the vast majority of the time the spammers and their victims are in vastly different jurisdictions, which makes investigation and conviction harder (as it now requires significant international cooperation). Most of the spammers are in developing nations where police services are significantly underfunded and less effective than in the US which means even if you find them an arrest is still hard... look how much trouble the US has catching well known drug barons in countries like Colombia and Mexico - when they HAVE the local authorities assisting.
Now try to imagine catching a spammer in Lagos arguably a far less nefarious crime (at least according to law enforcement), without the kind of international networks set up for trying to stop it that the drug barons face, in countries where local law enforcement is basically a kind of bribe-collection service....
Yeah - that's gonna happen.
>Good luck with that. Of course once OUR Windows is dead it'll be YOUR machines sending us SPAM.
No it won't. The "windows gets targeted only because it's biggest" argument is a fallacy - and an easily debunked one at that.
Here's the REAL reason why you will never see much spams or trojans in the Linux world. Unlike our windows counterparts, when we need an app for some task, we don't open a (insecure) browser, search around, find a .exe which we then RUN to install the program.
We connect to a repository, which is run by software experts who have repackaged and tested the programs in question, the software gets downloaded automatically - the files are checked using digital signatures to prevent MitM attacks, and only then installed.
Average computer users will never have the capacity of computer experts to tell trojans from useful apps, and either way have no viable means of determining if a particular install file is trustworthy without having already taken the risk, all while dealing with a browser/email combination that could do all this without them even being aware of it (though at least that has gotten better than it used to - remember I-Love-You, that's how bad Outlook once was!).
Us GNU/Linux users pool our resources to have people who are skilled select and evaluate the apps in our repositories and make our selection from a set that's pre-vetted. We can choose on features and design without having to WORRY about "does it coincidentally install spyware which will later be installing a botnet", because the people who packaged the software have nothing to gain by not removing such, and everything to benefit from ensuring the trustworthiness of the software.
Remove the capacity to write "installer programs" for windows - create a repository (perhaps even a paid one - like Apple's app-store) and you solve the botnet problem. Trouble is, Microsoft unlike the GNU/Linux companies won't find the best way to keep their repo profitable is to be open to all comers who write useful software. Much like Apple, they'll end up using it to make sure nothing i available to their users that competes with their own products.
The cure may be even worse than the disease - so I don't know if it's something to push for. What I can tell you is, as long as ordinary users are supposed to vet good from bad software (people who have ZERO training in how to tell the difference in other words) - botnets WILL proliferate. The problem isn't even so much OS-design (though it plays a role), it's the way software is managed on the two platforms.
GNU/Linux simply has a software management concept that is by it's very nature far, far more secure than Windows. It's not perfect - last year Fedora's repos were pwned temporarily - and they had to create and issue a full set of new keys to ensure the integrity of what they contained - but the problem was fixable without any customer ever being at risk. That's what GNU/Linux's repository concept does - it takes the task of risk assessment and gives it to people who are trained at for the job so by definition they do it better.
Drug faking isn't new - it's just new in the US. I spent quite a lot of time in Nigeria during my career, and one thing you learn fast is to only go to embassy doctors who import their medicines.
Why ? Because there is a thriving market for fake malaria (and other) medicines - faked so well that even doctors (local or Western) can't tell the difference.
People die from Malaria in redcross hospitals because the last batch of pills were basically sugar pills dressed up so well (along with packaging) that neither a trained doctor nor a pharmacist could tell they were getting fakes.
Thing is - in Nigeria the drug-faking business has hit a snag. Nigeria is notorious for various crimes (particularly product forgery) not being addressed because a well-placed bribe solves the problem. Trouble is - the minister of health is about as close to unbribe-able as a politician can get. Her own sister died (in the kind of rich-man's hospital where politician's family go) from malaria because the meds she got were fakes. She hates fake drugs, so she's been going after them hard. She's put together crack teams of what is probably the best law enforcement in the entire country going after them and shutting down warehouse after warehouse. Had a few attempts on her life already because she's just not folding.
*Up to here is fact - the next bit is my own conjecture*
What happens when criminals find a lucrative market starting to disappear because law enforcement got effective ? They find a new market. The USA is proving to be ripe for their exploitation. Your own profit-over-human-life approach to healthcare has created the ideal conditions for them - in fact, better conditions. In Nigeria they had to compete with charity organisations and drugs priced for a very poor country. In the USA - they can undercut the real thing by 80% and still make more money from a single pill than they'd make out of a thousand back home.
If there is one thing Nigerians have proven to be very good at, it's using the internet to commit crimes. It's also a fact that in South Africa more than 80% of all illegal drug trade (particularly cat, heroine and cocaine) are run by Nigerian expatriates. Most Nigerians are good, honest, intensely moral and very peaceful people - but those among them who are criminals are among the best (as in most effective and deadly) in the world. They obviously have the infrastructure to smuggle heroine and cocaine, compared to that smuggling a pill that looks exactly like antibiotics must be remarkably easy.
That is only partially true. There was a /. story not long ago about a white-hat company that utterly destroyed a botnet. Sorry I can't remember the names which is making googling rather hard.
I do remember the technical details (whose surprised ?). It was a difficult and involved process - the botnet relied on numerous DNS tricks to always be able to find it's control servers. What the white hats did was to trace and track the current set of master servers. Knocking them out wouldn't do any good, as the controllers would just activate a new set and the bots would find them.
Instead they tracked the servers, worked with law enforcement and the ISP's hosting them and got those DNS names rerouted to their own servers - which were running a control server of their own, designed to be a drop-in compatible replacement for the real thing. Result - suddenly the good guys controlled all the bots, and could then actively locate and eradicate the infections (including letters to the owners of the computers and such).
It meant a lot of coordination between many organisations because pulling it off meant a huge bunch of people doing slightly different updates to servers at the exact same time - but it was done, and it shows it CAN be done.
Interestingly I do remember that the company that did it are the new kids in security, a small startup. They don't have any share of the pie that symantec and the like has, so they have no vested interest in keeping botnets alive. Instead they are trying to build a business model on studying, and then actively destroying them.
Trouble is - botnets are like hydra's, as long as there are so many vulnerable machines on the net (e.g. the entire Microsoft Windows customer base) destroying one doesn't do any good - you see a drop in spam for a few days, maybe a week or two, then another botnet has filled in the gap.
The only real way to solve the problem is to remove those deliciously easy targets. We all know exactly how easy that will be.
>Besides, even if they were somehow to convince a jury to let them wipe all of the Android phones out there
So basically all google has to do is during Jury selection limit their criteria to "do you use an android phone" - if they can get just 5 or so android users on the jury there is no way in hell that the jury will reach a decision that gets their lovely smartphones wiped ! :P
>Having zombies, pirates, ninjas, robots, vampires, and werewolves in an MMORPG would be awesome!
We do - every single one of these things is present in WoW (except maybe the Ninja's though the flesheaters are basically zombie ninjas which is even better)
Yes, I said that in my post.
I started by correcting the statements about the GPL - then I specifically indicated that this does NOT however apply to Google because they didn't USE the GPL'd code from SUN at all.
In fact I said everything in your correction - and then some.
The real problem with my long comment is that you didn't read it.