The funny thing is, most malware these days is designed to be stealthy. It mustn't slow down the system, or consume too many resources, otherwise it gets noticed too quickly and becomes useless after the next antivirus and antimalware definitions are released.
I'd like to bet most malware these days is a hell of a lot better designed than Firefox, in terms of CPU and memory usage. You might not like what they do, but you have to give the malware writers some credit for coding skills.
Yes, they should only teach OpenOffice in schools... nothing better than having 40+ kids scratching their heads and asking "why doesn't this work properly like the computer at home ?".
You might as well advocate learning Swahili instead of English. It's all about life skills, which will invariably mean dealing with MS products at some point early in your working life.
Note, I'm not an MS shill, but neither am I an OSS evangelist. I just want my kids to have skills that will be USEFUL when they grow up.
Well it stopped the EU from extorting money from Microsoft. Never mind, they still have ongoing antitrusts with Google and Oracle to keep the coffers filled (and Greece in the black).
Funny how the customers / businesses were the ones who felt the pain, yet Brussels gets to keep all the money for themselves.
Whether you agree or not with the US conducting "wars" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and potentially Iran or N.Korea in future, one thing is becoming absolutely clear.
The US simply cannot behave in an honest manner. Just yesterday there's a new storm brewing over the Iraq mortality figures, with the Iraqis quoting 500+ and the US quoting 200+.
Secrecy is to protect things that might endanger security, NOT to hide stats that look bad and might show a nation in a bad light.
And now, they want to tread all over every international law and agreement, and even their own goddamn first amendment about freedom of speech, and "detain" Julian at the first opportunity. Or possibly he'll just mysteriously "disappear".
US, YOU DO NOT OWN THE FUCKING WORLD. You fought the Communists for 30 years. What makes you ANY better than China if this is the direction you will take ?
Oh, and if you have 2 hard disks, you can also get a huge performance boost by telling MySQL to store the table and index files (MYI and MYD if you're using MyISAM tables) on one disk, and the transaction logs etc on the other disk. Saves you a large amount of disk thrashing.
And don't use InnoDB tables for this data... it's reference data, you're not going to need transactions and rollbacks etc, as you're unlikely to be writing anything... it'll probably be 100% read only access.
If you are loading a big table in MySQL with a ton of rows and indexes, foreign keys etc...
Load the table structure first. Disable indexes. Load the table data. Enable indexes.
If you don't he'll be updating the index sorting and stats once for every row inserted, rather than doing one pass at the end on the whole dataset. It can make the difference between taking 7 hours to load, and perhaps 90 minutes.
My bad, I bow to your personal experience of many previous ice ages.
When you touch a stove and burn your hand, you don't need to keep touching it repeatedly to know it's probably still hot.
Hmmm let's see... we've probably had at least a thousand cycles of cooling and warming periods in the last 4.5 billion years, all before man even existed. So what's the probable cause of the one thousand and first ? MAN OF COURSE !!! NO OTHER POSSIBLE EXPLANATION !!!
Yes, but what I'm talking about is not mitigating AGW itself, as no one has categorically proved the "A" part !
If, hypothetically, we are experiencing a natural warming cycle, one that comes along every 15,000 years or whatever, one that even if man reduced all his carbon emissions to zero TOMORROW would still not affect it, it will be the first time that "civilized" man will have to deal with Darwinism at it's finest.
It will no longer be about the money, it will be about survival of the species. Low lying areas will get washed out, people will have to relocate to higher ground, new fertile pastures etc etc. A mass exodus is nothing new.
Last September 2009, I experienced first hand Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines, and let me tell you, nothing is more humbling than sitting on your roof with your loved ones wondering when the flood waters will subside. Our entire downstairs was filled with mud and water to the ceiling, we lost pretty much 3/4 of our possessions but thankfully we all survived intact.
Things can be replaced, people can't.
So is it better to be throwing money at reducing something that *may* be part of the problem, or is it better to accept that whatever we do, the climate IS cyclic in nature, and we do something to improve our immediate situation instead.
Improve water supplies to drought prone areas, or better still, make sure people don't LIVE in drought prone areas to begin with. Instead of worrying about your beach-house getting flooded, move to somewhere a couple of hundred feet above sea level now, rather than wait till you get washed away.
It's funny that every discussion about climate, pollution, Mother Earth etc., ultimately comes down to the money, and not about the humans themselves. Makes you wonder what is more important in the grand scale of things.
The places that are likely to endure catastrophic droughts are the places that have ALWAYS endured catastrophic droughts... i.e. 1st / 2nd world countries closest to the equator... up till now our solution has been to throw food, and more recently condoms, at them.
How about either finding a way to MOVE those people to a place where their yearly food supply WON'T be wiped out in 5 minutes during a drought, or alternatively build serious water pipelines to mitigate the problems in those areas.
I find it amazing that we can build oil piplines from Siberia all the way to Western Europe, but we can't do a water pipe over a fraction of the distance.
Recent torrent study linked with dickheads who think the only way to "prove" global warming is real is by taking anyone who has concerns or skepticism with the data or the methods applied to that data and trying to associate them with negatively perceived groups such as:-
Evolution Denialists Creationists Holocaust Denialists Nazis Pol Pot Osama Bin Laden etc etc.
the history of mankind has been that of war for thousands and thousands of years.
This is true... but other countries throughout history tended to either WIN or LOSE... not fuck around for 10 years, spending billions of dollars you don't have, taking out many civilian targets then trying to hide it in the name of "national security", only to find the enemy as strong or even stronger than when you started.
Secondly, why do you think downloading for personal use should be legal?
I don't NEED to think, is is ALREADY legal in Canada and the Netherlands, and to an extent UK.
If I invest a lot of time writing a book with the intention of selling it why do you think you should be able to make a copy of my work without paying me?
So lending libraries are bad too ?
You wouldn't get a builder to build you a wall and then not pay him for his work so why do you feel you shouldn't have to pay for my work?
The builder builds one wall, and gets paid (first sale). If I then move the wall to another location, or give the wall to my neighbour, should he pay the builder too ?
You make a book, you get paid once per physical item (first sale). If I then give that lend that book to my friend, does he/she pay too ? Of course not.
The whole purpose of lending libraries is to allow people who cannot afford to buy things access to culture, to broaden the horizons of all. How is this ANY different from file sharing ? You have not been deprived of a sale, because that sale would NEVER have been made... but someone, somewhere is now aware of your work who wasn't before... someone who might in the future, have the ways and means to afford your NEXT book.
And there we go... the apologists RUSH out of the woodwork to defend the fact that their precious Ubuntu is NOT perfect, and use semantics and air-fairy language to pretend a repository is anything more than a glorified website.
Analyze the Parent's excuse for a reply and we see the following (emphasis mine).
Not quite..DEB file = package that is usually, but not exclusively found in a repository. Normally associated with Debian based distros. Functionally equivalent to a Windows EXE file in this case.
So because the malware came in a package format that CAN be used by Ubuntu, even though it's not the USUAL Ubuntu package format, that means it's somehow exempt ?
Gnome Look = a community run website which allows unrestricted uploads of themes, screen savers, wallpapers, icon sets etc. No review process. Access and I assume uploading rights only require a simple account. Basically, so long as you have an email address, you can upload. So functionally equivalent to a random web site or torrent if we were dealing with Windows.
The ENTIRE Linux O/S is community run. Do you know every single person who wrote code that is contained in that system ? Every torrent or EXE I've ever downloaded goes through the typical community verification, e.g. Marking fakes, warning about malwares and trojans contained in the installer, comments on how it works, ratings out of 10 etc. It's not JUST Linux stuff that has a review process, that all depends on where you obtain your stuff.
Repository = a collection of package files maintained and monitored by the distro creator or a third party. Packages included in repositories are usually carefully inspected before inclusion, and responsible maintainers will only accept contributions from known good sources or build from the project's published source code. Using third party repositories is at the user's own risk, and is seen as such.
I see what you did there. You summarized the entire repository method of trusted software in terms of maybes, usuallys, hopefullys and fingers-crossed. Every is fine until someone you THOUGHT you trusted turns out ot be a bad guy.
In your example, a DEB file was downloaded from a website. Not downloaded from a repository by a package manager. No screening, no verification of source, no checks at all. Anybody with sufficient knowledge and freely available software can make a package, but only trusted parties can get one into the distro run repository, or any reputable third party repository.
Semantics only. Most stuff downloaded from websites will come packaged as an "installer", usually Microsoft's own, or the Nullsoft one, or InstallShield. Again, you say "only trusted parties can get one into the distro run repository, or any reputable third party repository". So it STILL boils down to getting the trust of the repository owner, then slipping in a sneaky bit of code. WHO exactly decides if a third party (or first party) repository is "reputable". No one... you ASSUME it's reputable, right up until the time something bad happens, then churn out lame excuses rather than accept you model is fundamentally the same as Windows, unless you "happen to know how to read source code, and read EVERY line of the source before installing".
No repository was compromised. Which was the OP's point. It isn't impossible, just very difficult to anonymously sneak malware or copyright or patent infringing software into a repository. Basically, not worth the effort.
It's only worth not worth the effort while the Distros remain obscure... but something like Ubuntu which seems to be gaining at least some traction and popularity, already we have seen it CAN get a virus or malware, and no amount of handwringing and excuse making will change the fact your "trust model" is in essence the same as Windows for the majority of "non-geek" users. You HOPE th
Slashdot Mirror
Apple have been either buying out or stealing other peoples IP then passing if off as their own "patentable innovations" for years.
The funny thing is, most malware these days is designed to be stealthy. It mustn't slow down the system, or consume too many resources, otherwise it gets noticed too quickly and becomes useless after the next antivirus and antimalware definitions are released.
I'd like to bet most malware these days is a hell of a lot better designed than Firefox, in terms of CPU and memory usage. You might not like what they do, but you have to give the malware writers some credit for coding skills.
Not to worry, once you install anything else, it won't be a pristine Linux install anyway.
pristine/pristn/Adjective
1. In its original condition; unspoiled.
2. Clean and fresh as if new; spotless.
That would be Firefox.
Yes, they should only teach OpenOffice in schools ... nothing better than having 40+ kids scratching their heads and asking "why doesn't this work properly like the computer at home ?".
You might as well advocate learning Swahili instead of English. It's all about life skills, which will invariably mean dealing with MS products at some point early in your working life.
Note, I'm not an MS shill, but neither am I an OSS evangelist. I just want my kids to have skills that will be USEFUL when they grow up.
I think the Bible can be pretty accurate in some respects ... there's an awful lot of chapters about sheep.
Damnit ... $50 USD ... that's only 38.50 Euros.
Pleased to say I jumped straight into the money at #7 with my first submission :-)
Where AM I going to spend a whole 50 Euros ? Maybe I'll donate it to Greece, seems like they need it.
Well it stopped the EU from extorting money from Microsoft. Never mind, they still have ongoing antitrusts with Google and Oracle to keep the coffers filled (and Greece in the black).
Funny how the customers / businesses were the ones who felt the pain, yet Brussels gets to keep all the money for themselves.
Whether you agree or not with the US conducting "wars" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and potentially Iran or N.Korea in future, one thing is becoming absolutely clear.
The US simply cannot behave in an honest manner. Just yesterday there's a new storm brewing over the Iraq mortality figures, with the Iraqis quoting 500+ and the US quoting 200+.
Secrecy is to protect things that might endanger security, NOT to hide stats that look bad and might show a nation in a bad light.
And now, they want to tread all over every international law and agreement, and even their own goddamn first amendment about freedom of speech, and "detain" Julian at the first opportunity. Or possibly he'll just mysteriously "disappear".
US, YOU DO NOT OWN THE FUCKING WORLD. You fought the Communists for 30 years. What makes you ANY better than China if this is the direction you will take ?
Oh, and if you have 2 hard disks, you can also get a huge performance boost by telling MySQL to store the table and index files (MYI and MYD if you're using MyISAM tables) on one disk, and the transaction logs etc on the other disk. Saves you a large amount of disk thrashing.
And don't use InnoDB tables for this data ... it's reference data, you're not going to need transactions and rollbacks etc, as you're unlikely to be writing anything ... it'll probably be 100% read only access.
If you are loading a big table in MySQL with a ton of rows and indexes, foreign keys etc ...
Load the table structure first.
Disable indexes.
Load the table data.
Enable indexes.
If you don't he'll be updating the index sorting and stats once for every row inserted, rather than doing one pass at the end on the whole dataset. It can make the difference between taking 7 hours to load, and perhaps 90 minutes.
Resistance is futile.
My bad, I bow to your personal experience of many previous ice ages.
When you touch a stove and burn your hand, you don't need to keep touching it repeatedly to know it's probably still hot.
Hmmm let's see ... we've probably had at least a thousand cycles of cooling and warming periods in the last 4.5 billion years, all before man even existed. So what's the probable cause of the one thousand and first ? MAN OF COURSE !!! NO OTHER POSSIBLE EXPLANATION !!!
Are you happy now ?
Presumably the same thing that caused the last one ... you know, after all the ice melted ?
Yes, but what I'm talking about is not mitigating AGW itself, as no one has categorically proved the "A" part !
If, hypothetically, we are experiencing a natural warming cycle, one that comes along every 15,000 years or whatever, one that even if man reduced all his carbon emissions to zero TOMORROW would still not affect it, it will be the first time that "civilized" man will have to deal with Darwinism at it's finest.
It will no longer be about the money, it will be about survival of the species. Low lying areas will get washed out, people will have to relocate to higher ground, new fertile pastures etc etc. A mass exodus is nothing new.
Last September 2009, I experienced first hand Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines, and let me tell you, nothing is more humbling than sitting on your roof with your loved ones wondering when the flood waters will subside. Our entire downstairs was filled with mud and water to the ceiling, we lost pretty much 3/4 of our possessions but thankfully we all survived intact.
Things can be replaced, people can't.
So is it better to be throwing money at reducing something that *may* be part of the problem, or is it better to accept that whatever we do, the climate IS cyclic in nature, and we do something to improve our immediate situation instead.
Improve water supplies to drought prone areas, or better still, make sure people don't LIVE in drought prone areas to begin with. Instead of worrying about your beach-house getting flooded, move to somewhere a couple of hundred feet above sea level now, rather than wait till you get washed away.
It's funny that every discussion about climate, pollution, Mother Earth etc., ultimately comes down to the money, and not about the humans themselves. Makes you wonder what is more important in the grand scale of things.
Yes, well played. If his logic is sound, attack his credentials.
The places that are likely to endure catastrophic droughts are the places that have ALWAYS endured catastrophic droughts ... i.e. 1st / 2nd world countries closest to the equator ... up till now our solution has been to throw food, and more recently condoms, at them.
How about either finding a way to MOVE those people to a place where their yearly food supply WON'T be wiped out in 5 minutes during a drought, or alternatively build serious water pipelines to mitigate the problems in those areas.
I find it amazing that we can build oil piplines from Siberia all the way to Western Europe, but we can't do a water pipe over a fraction of the distance.
It's news because unlike other countries, which just talk about it, China sets a goal of giving every user Broadband access, then DOES IT.
1. Collect underpants
2. Mop up oil spill
3. Profit !
Yes, finally, a working business plan for Underpants Gnomes
Recent torrent study linked with dickheads who think the only way to "prove" global warming is real is by taking anyone who has concerns or skepticism with the data or the methods applied to that data and trying to associate them with negatively perceived groups such as :-
Evolution Denialists
Creationists
Holocaust Denialists
Nazis
Pol Pot
Osama Bin Laden
etc etc.
the history of mankind has been that of war for thousands and thousands of years.
This is true ... but other countries throughout history tended to either WIN or LOSE ... not fuck around for 10 years, spending billions of dollars you don't have, taking out many civilian targets then trying to hide it in the name of "national security", only to find the enemy as strong or even stronger than when you started.
Secondly, why do you think downloading for personal use should be legal?
I don't NEED to think, is is ALREADY legal in Canada and the Netherlands, and to an extent UK.
If I invest a lot of time writing a book with the intention of selling it why do you think you should be able to make a copy of my work without paying me?
So lending libraries are bad too ?
You wouldn't get a builder to build you a wall and then not pay him for his work so why do you feel you shouldn't have to pay for my work?
The builder builds one wall, and gets paid (first sale). If I then move the wall to another location, or give the wall to my neighbour, should he pay the builder too ?
You make a book, you get paid once per physical item (first sale). If I then give that lend that book to my friend, does he/she pay too ? Of course not.
The whole purpose of lending libraries is to allow people who cannot afford to buy things access to culture, to broaden the horizons of all. How is this ANY different from file sharing ? You have not been deprived of a sale, because that sale would NEVER have been made ... but someone, somewhere is now aware of your work who wasn't before ... someone who might in the future, have the ways and means to afford your NEXT book.
And there we go ... the apologists RUSH out of the woodwork to defend the fact that their precious Ubuntu is NOT perfect, and use semantics and air-fairy language to pretend a repository is anything more than a glorified website.
Analyze the Parent's excuse for a reply and we see the following (emphasis mine).
Not quite. .DEB file = package that is usually, but not exclusively found in a repository. Normally associated with Debian based distros. Functionally equivalent to a Windows EXE file in this case.
So because the malware came in a package format that CAN be used by Ubuntu, even though it's not the USUAL Ubuntu package format, that means it's somehow exempt ?
Gnome Look = a community run website which allows unrestricted uploads of themes, screen savers, wallpapers, icon sets etc. No review process. Access and I assume uploading rights only require a simple account. Basically, so long as you have an email address, you can upload. So functionally equivalent to a random web site or torrent if we were dealing with Windows.
The ENTIRE Linux O/S is community run. Do you know every single person who wrote code that is contained in that system ? Every torrent or EXE I've ever downloaded goes through the typical community verification, e.g. Marking fakes, warning about malwares and trojans contained in the installer, comments on how it works, ratings out of 10 etc. It's not JUST Linux stuff that has a review process, that all depends on where you obtain your stuff.
Repository = a collection of package files maintained and monitored by the distro creator or a third party. Packages included in repositories are usually carefully inspected before inclusion, and responsible maintainers will only accept contributions from known good sources or build from the project's published source code. Using third party repositories is at the user's own risk, and is seen as such.
I see what you did there. You summarized the entire repository method of trusted software in terms of maybes, usuallys, hopefullys and fingers-crossed. Every is fine until someone you THOUGHT you trusted turns out ot be a bad guy.
In your example, a DEB file was downloaded from a website. Not downloaded from a repository by a package manager. No screening, no verification of source, no checks at all. Anybody with sufficient knowledge and freely available software can make a package, but only trusted parties can get one into the distro run repository, or any reputable third party repository.
Semantics only. Most stuff downloaded from websites will come packaged as an "installer", usually Microsoft's own, or the Nullsoft one, or InstallShield. Again, you say "only trusted parties can get one into the distro run repository, or any reputable third party repository". So it STILL boils down to getting the trust of the repository owner, then slipping in a sneaky bit of code. WHO exactly decides if a third party (or first party) repository is "reputable". No one ... you ASSUME it's reputable, right up until the time something bad happens, then churn out lame excuses rather than accept you model is fundamentally the same as Windows, unless you "happen to know how to read source code, and read EVERY line of the source before installing".
No repository was compromised. Which was the OP's point. It isn't impossible, just very difficult to anonymously sneak malware or copyright or patent infringing software into a repository. Basically, not worth the effort.
It's only worth not worth the effort while the Distros remain obscure ... but something like Ubuntu which seems to be gaining at least some traction and popularity, already we have seen it CAN get a virus or malware, and no amount of handwringing and excuse making will change the fact your "trust model" is in essence the same as Windows for the majority of "non-geek" users. You HOPE th
Here you go ...
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/12/09/2215253/Malware-Found-Hidden-In-Screensaver-On-Gnome-Look