Speaking of which, that lock you have on your front door can be picked in a few seconds. Don't believe me? Tell me your address, and I'll report here what your Royal Doulton brought on eBay.
Some people trust the locks on their houses because they do not know any better. That doesn't make them bad or wrong. Just "ignorant".
Some people trust the system on their computers because they don't know any better. That doesn't make the bad or wrong. Just "ignorant".
The only difference is that you have a physical limit to the houses you can break into. There is no such limit on computers.
People have a much easier time understanding physical security because they can see it. They know when they've been robbed. They know when the neighbors are robbed.
With a computer, they probably won't know, or even really care. Unless they lose money from their accounts.
And fighting against ignorance is a long and difficult task. There are millions of individuals out there and each one has to be correctly educated.
Personally, I'd recommend focusing on an easier target ("easier" being relative here). Get Microsoft to ship the next version of Windows without any open ports by default. Yeah, I know what you're going to say. But it's more likely to happen than educating the millions of individual users out there.
All this guy did was use some source code and change some settings. Nothing major. He's not the kind of guy who's going to make another Napster. He probably doesn't even know how he's doing what he's doing.
I have to agree.
The only reason this guy is having any success at this is because of the default security settings on Windows.
No, this isn't an anti-Microsoft rant. But the fact is that without those open ports, his worm wouldn't be spreading. You cannot depend upon the end-users to correctly patch or firewall their systems.
All it would take to stop this guy is for the next version of Windows to ship without any open ports by default. Ubuntu already does this, Apple already does this.
Having a software firewall on the machine is a distant 2nd place option. If there is a flaw in the firewall software, he'll have the same opportunity he has now.
#1. Repair the voting system. If you cast a vote, it must be counted. Until the votes of the people are counted, there won't be any reform.
#2. If you can't vote, you can't contribute. No corporations giving money to candidates or their election funds. Only people can vote and only people should be contributing money.
#3. End all PAC/lobby contributions. If a PAC wants to convince a Congress Critter to do something, that PAC can send a brochure or booklet or study. But it must be printed. That is all that they can do. No trips. No dinners. No gifts.
Once you've managed those, the people will have a CHANCE of taking back their government. Right now it is run by corporations, for corporations.
It's only when the cost of identity fraud exceeds the profitability from easy granting of credit that they'll change.
BINGO!!!
And Bruce Schneier has said the same thing. If you want to fight identity "theft" (really just old fashioned fraud), then you put the burden on the financial institutions.
Once their costs exceed the profits, they'll change their processes.
Until then, they'll talk a lot, but do nothing of real value.
Until there's some kind of global standard, defining just what identifies you as you, and there is a system for storing, retrieving, and updating that information in a manner that foils potential thieves, identity theft will continue to be a problem for the forseeable future.
The more "global" you make it, the more problems you have from the people who manage the system.
If a single item will "identify" you, then the value of that single item skyrockets.
As the value goes up, so does the incentive to break the system so that you can cash in on it.
I hear that Novell was pushing really hard for IPX/SPX to be the protocol for the internet, which was silly and impossible because it's a broadcast protocol.
No. They were pushing for IPX to IP gateways/proxy servers so that a local network could run IPX (far less configuration than TCP/IP back then) and still access Internet services, securely. Don't forget that back then people were still selling 3rd party TCP/IP stacks.
Then they put off implementing TCP/IP for a million years, while the internet (and networks connected to it) were taking off on TCP/IP.
On the client, it wasn't very difficult to run IPX and TCP/IP. What they did not do was offer their NetWare file system access via TCP/IP until the 5.x series.
I also hear that Novell put a lot of work into Directory Access Protocol (DAP) for network management databases.
In a way. They focused on using the X.500 standard for their NDS product.
DAP grew and grew and was too bulky to be popularly used.
No. X.500 was designed to handle just about everything in the world. Novell implemented a sub-set of it.
The problem was that Novell did that back when most people were still on NetWare 3.12 or using a Windows domain model.
Admin'ing an NDS tree is more work and takes more expertise. Novell failed to sell people on the benefits of a directory service.
Somebody made up Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is now used by Microsoft for Active Directory.
LDAP is also a sub-set of the X.500 standard.
Active Directory can talk to LDAP, but it is not LDAP.
NDS can talk to LDAP, but it is not LDAP. Novell even has NLDAP (Novell LDAP) implemented as a server process.
The problems Novell had were:
#1. They made very solid products. There wasn't any reason for small shops to dump NetWare 3.12 and upgrade to 4.x or 5.x or 6.x now.
#2. They VIGOROUSLY defended their licensing revenue. A NetWare server would broadcast it's serial number and if it saw another server using it, it would kick all the users off of it. Meanwhile, anyone could install 1,000 NT servers with a single license number.
#3. Their servers sucked as application servers. But they rocked as file and print servers. But more and more apps were moving to the server.
#4. Novell tried to buy their way into a fight with Microsoft on the desktop with WordPerfect and such.
#5. Today, they are still back in the early 1990's. 5a. Patching GroupWise is more difficult than patching Win2K or
Debian. 5b. Patching NetWare 6.5 is more difficult... come on! Debian's solved that problem years ago! Learn from them. 5c. Novell's sales force sucks ass at the small company level. They simply refuse to tell you how to buy their products and even what their products are. 5d. NWAdmin is needed for some admin tasks. Console1 is needed for others. NoRM is needed for yet others. 5e. In order to run some of the BASIC admin utilities, you have to correctly configure NetWare + Apache + Tomcat + Java + LDAP/NLDAP + their stupid Tomcat app + SSL (and I may have left out a sub-system or two). What fucking moron thought that THAT would be a good idea? And the fucking app doesn't even uninstall cleanly so if you do make a mistake, you have to look up how to remove all the little bits so you can re-install it. 5f. Great. You like webservers and such. But why the fuck does EVERY app have to be run via the web with its own fucking ports?
I can go on and on and on about this. Really. Novell has, today, managed to incorporate EVERY bad idea for the last 20 years from every vendor out there.
Seriously. Grab the latest service pack for NetWare 6.5 and make sure you read the install text. You'll have to dig down to a sub-directory to make sure you install 2 sub-items that are NOT automatically installed when you install the service pack but which are required.
Learn from Debian, Novell. Patching your system should be even EASIER than Windows Update.
Do I find it annoying? Yes. However, I also find it a necessary nuissance to help keep smugglers and criminals from easily moving money around through our banking system.
The REAL problem is when people accept this kind of monitoring as "necessary".
Enron dumped hundreds of millions of dollars off-shore and the government never suspected a thing.
These people pay off $6K of debt and they're investigated and you support that.
If you've got a better solution, I'd love to hear it.
Yeah, it's called "Freedom".
Sometimes it means that the criminals get away, but that's part of the price of Freedom.
Those are the basic areas for all industries. Anything "new" will still be in one of those. Whether there are lots or few "new" industries, it really won't matter unless they are REVOLUTIONARY.
And revolutionary ideas need fertile ground to start in. If you aren't working in manufacturing, then it is highly unlikely that you'll think of a revolutionary new way of manufacturing. The more jobs we send overseas, the fewer people we'll have with the experience to make the new discoveries.
If we aren't manufacturing cars, then we'll still be importing the model that incorporates the next revolution in auto-manufacturing, design, safety or whatever. We'll be importing the flying cars. We'll be importing the hover cars.
In the past, we've often taken the lead in discovering the next revolution. But that was when WE were the ones also producing the previous editions.
Once we lose that, there is no reason to believe that we'll ever "discover" the next revolution and lots of statistical reasoning to believe that we will not. There are lots more people in the world than in the US. If it doesn't require basic operational knowledge, then they have the advantage.
Our system needs a major overhaul (or maybe a complete teardown and rebuild).
I like the idea of limiting contributions to only people who can vote in that race.
But what about allowing 3rd parties (also out-of-state) to buy time on TV to run their "informational" ads about "issues"?
Personally, I'd limit all PAC's to only producing PRINTED material and sending that to the Congress Critters. No money. No trips. No lunch meetings. Nothing.
Go ahead, change the numbers around all you want. As long as you stick with possible values (ie. non-negative values), the facts remain the same. Namely that fact that one nation cannot always be the best at producing everything.
Great. So the US ends up being the best supplier of Intel chips (for example).
Everything else is supplied, cheaper and as fast or faster by other countries.
Which means that the execs at Intel have money, but the rest of the US economy is reduced to trying to sell services to Intel and those execs.
Our economy cannot survive that. It would collapse.
Suppose it takes China 10 h to produce a computer, and 2 h to produce a car . It takes America 2 h to produce a computer, and 1 h to produce a car. America has an absolute advantage over China, as they can produce more computers and cars in a fixed amount of time.
Why "suppose" that?
Manufacturing a car isn't magic. There is nothing that limits that technology to the USofA. Even if they cannot make them as fast as we can TODAY, they can match our speed in 10 years.
And, for the kill, they wouldn't be buying cars from the US. They'd be buying them, as we do, from Japan.
And 99% of the chips in a computer are already made in China or Taiwan. And they crank out motherboards, too. The only thing we still have is Intel and AMD. And China is looking at their own processor.
It's a race to the bottom and we need to stop it now.
...I think there is a point to be made in the fact that we don't try nearly as hard to sell our crap overseas as foreigners do selling their crap to us. Outsourcing wouldn't be such an issue if we weren't the only people buying our stuff.
But what do we have to sell?
Almost anything we make can be made cheaper in China or even India.
And as time goes by, more manufacturing will be moved there.
This isn't about DIFFERENT products. There aren't any different products. I can outfit an entire house at WalMart and almost all of their stuff is imported from China. So any country that would be a consumer of our products would be smarter to just get those same products from China. We do.
I'm in favour of a global economy, but not in the way it is being done.
Right now, we're in a race to the bottom because we aren't putting any barriers on countries without the same worker protections or environmental protections that we have.
Rather than dragging us down, we need to bring them up.
It costs a lot of money to get a PhD. Which, for most people, means a lot of student loans. There's no way you're going to finance night school on a WalMart paycheck.
Which means a lot of debt that cannot be paid off on a WalMart paycheck.
Which means... over time... less focus on education because there just isn't enough of a payoff for it. Except for lawyers and doctors. And too many lawyers looking at a bunch of doctors has its own problems.
The same goes for a Masters degree. The same goes for a Bachelors degree.
When the jobs will only require and support the "free" education you get at a public high school, that's all that most people will pursue.
And once the education rate is in decline, it's all over for the country.
#1. Either someone re-writes your code for you (unlikely) or #2. Every time you make a mistake ("mistake" being defined as doing it a different way than the person flaming you), you'd be informed of your ignorance via insults and told to RTFM.
WTF? That sounds more like a reality TV show than writing code. Only a masochist would spend time learning code that way (and being "taught" by sadists and people with ego issues).
I bought it. I read it. It was a quick read and light on the mind.
So I bought "Angels and Demons" by him. He has the exact same style in that book. I instantly knew who the good guys were and who the "secret" bad guy was.
It's like a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery for adults.
I believe it is because most people are comfortable with being part of the herd.
90%+ of the desktops out there are Windows. If you have a problem, even if you cannot get it fixed, you'll be among other people who have had problems.
With Linux, you have to expend effort to find such a group of people.
What benefit is there for any particular individual to do so?
So, home users won't migrate until businesses do. And for a business, there are real benefits to migrating to Linux. Which is why more businesses and governments are.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people trust the system on their computers because they don't know any better. That doesn't make the bad or wrong. Just "ignorant".
The only difference is that you have a physical limit to the houses you can break into. There is no such limit on computers.
People have a much easier time understanding physical security because they can see it. They know when they've been robbed. They know when the neighbors are robbed.
With a computer, they probably won't know, or even really care. Unless they lose money from their accounts.
And fighting against ignorance is a long and difficult task. There are millions of individuals out there and each one has to be correctly educated.
Personally, I'd recommend focusing on an easier target ("easier" being relative here). Get Microsoft to ship the next version of Windows without any open ports by default. Yeah, I know what you're going to say. But it's more likely to happen than educating the millions of individual users out there.
The only reason this guy is having any success at this is because of the default security settings on Windows.
No, this isn't an anti-Microsoft rant. But the fact is that without those open ports, his worm wouldn't be spreading. You cannot depend upon the end-users to correctly patch or firewall their systems.
All it would take to stop this guy is for the next version of Windows to ship without any open ports by default. Ubuntu already does this, Apple already does this.
Having a software firewall on the machine is a distant 2nd place option. If there is a flaw in the firewall software, he'll have the same opportunity he has now.
This calls his integrity into question because of his employment circumstances.
#1. Repair the voting system. If you cast a vote, it must be counted. Until the votes of the people are counted, there won't be any reform.
#2. If you can't vote, you can't contribute. No corporations giving money to candidates or their election funds. Only people can vote and only people should be contributing money.
#3. End all PAC/lobby contributions. If a PAC wants to convince a Congress Critter to do something, that PAC can send a brochure or booklet or study. But it must be printed. That is all that they can do. No trips. No dinners. No gifts.
Once you've managed those, the people will have a CHANCE of taking back their government. Right now it is run by corporations, for corporations.
And Bruce Schneier has said the same thing. If you want to fight identity "theft" (really just old fashioned fraud), then you put the burden on the financial institutions.
Once their costs exceed the profits, they'll change their processes.
Until then, they'll talk a lot, but do nothing of real value.
If a single item will "identify" you, then the value of that single item skyrockets.
As the value goes up, so does the incentive to break the system so that you can cash in on it.
If you lose nothing when your identity is "stolen", then what's to stop some unscrupulous person from doing so ... repeatedly?
The money has to come from somewhere.
The problem was that Novell did that back when most people were still on NetWare 3.12 or using a Windows domain model.
Admin'ing an NDS tree is more work and takes more expertise. Novell failed to sell people on the benefits of a directory service.LDAP is also a sub-set of the X.500 standard.
Active Directory can talk to LDAP, but it is not LDAP.
NDS can talk to LDAP, but it is not LDAP. Novell even has NLDAP (Novell LDAP) implemented as a server process.
The problems Novell had were:
#1. They made very solid products. There wasn't any reason for small shops to dump NetWare 3.12 and upgrade to 4.x or 5.x or 6.x now.
#2. They VIGOROUSLY defended their licensing revenue. A NetWare server would broadcast it's serial number and if it saw another server using it, it would kick all the users off of it. Meanwhile, anyone could install 1,000 NT servers with a single license number.
#3. Their servers sucked as application servers. But they rocked as file and print servers. But more and more apps were moving to the server.
#4. Novell tried to buy their way into a fight with Microsoft on the desktop with WordPerfect and such.
#5. Today, they are still back in the early 1990's.
5a. Patching GroupWise is more difficult than patching Win2K or
Debian.
5b. Patching NetWare 6.5 is more difficult
5c. Novell's sales force sucks ass at the small company level. They simply refuse to tell you how to buy their products and even what their products are.
5d. NWAdmin is needed for some admin tasks. Console1 is needed for others. NoRM is needed for yet others.
5e. In order to run some of the BASIC admin utilities, you have to correctly configure NetWare + Apache + Tomcat + Java + LDAP/NLDAP + their stupid Tomcat app + SSL (and I may have left out a sub-system or two). What fucking moron thought that THAT would be a good idea? And the fucking app doesn't even uninstall cleanly so if you do make a mistake, you have to look up how to remove all the little bits so you can re-install it.
5f. Great. You like webservers and such. But why the fuck does EVERY app have to be run via the web with its own fucking ports?
I can go on and on and on about this. Really. Novell has, today, managed to incorporate EVERY bad idea for the last 20 years from every vendor out there.
Seriously. Grab the latest service pack for NetWare 6.5 and make sure you read the install text. You'll have to dig down to a sub-directory to make sure you install 2 sub-items that are NOT automatically installed when you install the service pack but which are required.
Learn from Debian, Novell. Patching your system should be even EASIER than Windows Update.
I just replaced two NetWare 4.11 servers in 2005. They were running just fine.
I was consulting back in 1999-2000 and I never saw any Y2K problems with NetWare.
Enron dumped hundreds of millions of dollars off-shore and the government never suspected a thing.
These people pay off $6K of debt and they're investigated and you support that.Yeah, it's called "Freedom".
Sometimes it means that the criminals get away, but that's part of the price of Freedom.
Food, shelter, clothing, health, recreation, education, transportation.
Those are the basic areas for all industries. Anything "new" will still be in one of those. Whether there are lots or few "new" industries, it really won't matter unless they are REVOLUTIONARY.
And revolutionary ideas need fertile ground to start in. If you aren't working in manufacturing, then it is highly unlikely that you'll think of a revolutionary new way of manufacturing. The more jobs we send overseas, the fewer people we'll have with the experience to make the new discoveries.
If we aren't manufacturing cars, then we'll still be importing the model that incorporates the next revolution in auto-manufacturing, design, safety or whatever. We'll be importing the flying cars. We'll be importing the hover cars.
In the past, we've often taken the lead in discovering the next revolution. But that was when WE were the ones also producing the previous editions.
Once we lose that, there is no reason to believe that we'll ever "discover" the next revolution and lots of statistical reasoning to believe that we will not. There are lots more people in the world than in the US. If it doesn't require basic operational knowledge, then they have the advantage.
Our system needs a major overhaul (or maybe a complete teardown and rebuild).
I like the idea of limiting contributions to only people who can vote in that race.
But what about allowing 3rd parties (also out-of-state) to buy time on TV to run their "informational" ads about "issues"?
Personally, I'd limit all PAC's to only producing PRINTED material and sending that to the Congress Critters. No money. No trips. No lunch meetings. Nothing.
Everything else is supplied, cheaper and as fast or faster by other countries.
Which means that the execs at Intel have money, but the rest of the US economy is reduced to trying to sell services to Intel and those execs.
Our economy cannot survive that. It would collapse.
Manufacturing a car isn't magic. There is nothing that limits that technology to the USofA. Even if they cannot make them as fast as we can TODAY, they can match our speed in 10 years.
And, for the kill, they wouldn't be buying cars from the US. They'd be buying them, as we do, from Japan.
And 99% of the chips in a computer are already made in China or Taiwan. And they crank out motherboards, too. The only thing we still have is Intel and AMD. And China is looking at their own processor.
It's a race to the bottom and we need to stop it now.
Almost anything we make can be made cheaper in China or even India.
And as time goes by, more manufacturing will be moved there.
This isn't about DIFFERENT products. There aren't any different products. I can outfit an entire house at WalMart and almost all of their stuff is imported from China. So any country that would be a consumer of our products would be smarter to just get those same products from China. We do.
I'm in favour of a global economy, but not in the way it is being done.
Right now, we're in a race to the bottom because we aren't putting any barriers on countries without the same worker protections or environmental protections that we have.
Rather than dragging us down, we need to bring them up.
But this is /. and I'm pedantic ... so ... :)
... over time ... less focus on education because there just isn't enough of a payoff for it. Except for lawyers and doctors. And too many lawyers looking at a bunch of doctors has its own problems.
It costs a lot of money to get a PhD. Which, for most people, means a lot of student loans. There's no way you're going to finance night school on a WalMart paycheck.
Which means a lot of debt that cannot be paid off on a WalMart paycheck.
Which means
The same goes for a Masters degree.
The same goes for a Bachelors degree.
When the jobs will only require and support the "free" education you get at a public high school, that's all that most people will pursue.
And once the education rate is in decline, it's all over for the country.
The only reason we buy products from China and such is that they are LESS EXPENSIVE than the same product made here.
It is NOT because it's a DIFFERENT product.
Which pretty much leaves just food, Intel/AMD chips and movies/music.
Yeah, that's going to help the average US citizen.
... it doesn't look so good.A F855_VALLEY_20060227193322.gif
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/MK-
Okay, so most people don't read the articles, I know.
But the numbers don't match the story.
#1. Either someone re-writes your code for you (unlikely)
or
#2. Every time you make a mistake ("mistake" being defined as doing it a different way than the person flaming you), you'd be informed of your ignorance via insults and told to RTFM.
WTF? That sounds more like a reality TV show than writing code. Only a masochist would spend time learning code that way (and being "taught" by sadists and people with ego issues).
I pointed out that the concept has been around longer (and documented) than the HGHB book.
"Hobbit" is something that Tolkien thought up. So that term can be protected with copyrights or trademarks.
"Elf" cannot be. Too much prior art. It's a generic now.
You'll see that "Ents" were changed also.
I bought it. I read it. It was a quick read and light on the mind.
So I bought "Angels and Demons" by him. He has the exact same style in that book. I instantly knew who the good guys were and who the "secret" bad guy was.
It's like a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery for adults.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095497/
Written by Nikos Kazantzakis who died in 1957. So the concept of Jesus and Mary getting married has been around (and documented) for quite a while.
I believe it is because most people are comfortable with being part of the herd.
90%+ of the desktops out there are Windows. If you have a problem, even if you cannot get it fixed, you'll be among other people who have had problems.
With Linux, you have to expend effort to find such a group of people.
What benefit is there for any particular individual to do so?
So, home users won't migrate until businesses do. And for a business, there are real benefits to migrating to Linux. Which is why more businesses and governments are.
I used to think all the postings I read were fake until this happened to me.
...
A cute new girl started working as my boss last week.