So, unless our systems are far more fragile and easily corrupted than the Russian's (who didn't have any major problems) ours would have been fine as well.
Frankly, most people could have cared less if all the windows 95/98 machines crashed, they were of no concern. Sure it would have been annoying for joe average, but not a big deal otherwise.
Most of the work went into servers and (specifically) mainframes where many problems DID exist and work began to fix them quietly around the early 90s. Even so, some things failed, were quickly fixed, and not talked about much. How eager would you be as a company, university, or government to admit you had y2k problems after all the hype and money spent to fix them?
At the time I was a mainframe operator with Penn State (I'm still with them, just in a much less annoying job), and I remember we had a ton of things that needed fixing. Even so, there were some fairly significant problems that popped up on new year's day that had not been caught. If I remember correctly, the program that validated rsa secureIDs failed amoung some other less serious snafus.
I imagine most places when through something similar, a few years of hunting and fixing and then dealing with some small problems that they missed after the fact.
However, I notice that civilization did not collapse. There was no "fight club" style destruction of everyone's credit rating or a total collapse of the money system, planes did not fall out of the sky, nukes did not sporatically go off, etc. Maybe that COULD have happened but remember people began seriously talking about this problem around 1996 (at least the media began picking it up then) so there was plenty of time to fix stuff.
Many people found great deals on generators and survival gear (food, etc) the following year on ebay:) I know that was a great time for search and rescue teams to pick up cheap gear.
You don't really know much about liberty alliance do you? It is a federated identity management service, using OASIS's SAML to assert authentication status and attributes, not like passport's "store everything in one place" service.
It is also licensed such that MS cannot modify or extend it in a way that is interoperable with the spec (which would make it useless anyway).
So you understand the concept of authentication but seem to be completely drawing a blank on the concept of authorization.
Think of it like a slashdot ID. By logging into the system any old user cannot post stories to the front page. Only certain users can do that. This is how most security works. A combination of authentication (are you really who you say you are?) and authorization (ok, you are who you say you are, what are you allowed to do?)
Ok, so laser is light. Basically what you are suggesting is that we block light from entering the cockpit. This might prove to be a problem for the pilot.
Block a specific wavelength? which one? Green and red? Ignoring that the pilot might need to see those colors while flying lasers can be made at different wavelengths to get around that.
A more expensive solution would be to have cameras outside the cockpit and replace the windows with plasma screens. However technically cool that sounds, the numver of individual points of potential failure jumps up dramatically. I don't know what a good solution to this problem should be, other than people not being assholes, and that is not going to happen.
As I typed this my local Pittsburgh news station just reported that someone shined a bright spotlight into the cockpits of two planes that were taking off at Pgh Internation this morning.
I agree that is a part of it, but certainly not the only place their advantage lies. Their advantage is primarily that they are under active developement and can react much quicker than Microsoft's IE. Basically MS won their browser war and forgot to maintain the product, let alone enhance it. Now they are scrambling to restart developement and like any good 800lbs gorilla, they are quite slow to do anything.
The whole "the only reason project X seems more secure than project Y is because project Y is more popular" is quite an annoying (and false) meme. By that logic Apache should be much less secure than IIS. Sometimes project Y is just poorly designed. In the case of IE that is certainly what happened. It does not matter how many highly paid devs MS has that understand security if the final project decisions are made by clueless execs who insist on senseless integration with the OS for purposes of beating a DOJ trial and other decisions that are simply bad for security. Those highly paid devs can only do so much good.
Are you under the delusion that the computer industry is static and once a application gains dominance it will never be unseated?
Perhaps you should go back to crunching numbers in Lotus 123, reading email with Eudora, browsing the web with Netscape Communicator, and composing documents with WordPerfect, since this time they have all won and have the competition beat.
He robbed people, or attempted to rob them. This is like robbing a bank, only worse.
Attempting to steal credit cards electronically (and failing) is worse than robbing a bank? By what value system are you making this judgement?
I don't sympathize with him, but I would like to see him get the same sentence as someone who attempted to steal credit cards in meatspace. The fact that electrons were involved does not change the crime and should not change the punishment. I bet it wouldn't be higher than someone who in fact DID commit rape (as this sentence is)
All updates and policy changes on this level are made either with MSI packages that are pushed out at 3 AM each night, or by just changing the group policy to allow it. They use WISE professional studio to do silent installs of all packages.
I posted it to the NOP PSU mailing list, and I'll post it here again. Firefox MSI Packages
We (ITS) certainly never dictate the technology that PSU departments can use, we try simply to provide the best services available and make the best recomendations. Given the internal reaction I have been hearing there will certainly be pockets that insist on using IE, mostly becasue of short sighted web application purchasing or design decisions that have forced it on them. That is their choice though. Enforcing Firefox useage would be just as bad as forcing IE. It is a platform independent web, and sites coded to existing standards should have no problem with any browser.
I submitted this morning but it got rejected, but this seems a good place to bring it up.
In a tech news story Penn State recommends that its 120,000+ users "use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities. Web browser options include Firefox, one of several alternatives available for Windows, Mac and other operating systems. It works with all Web-based applications used at Penn State"
"ITS has made this recommendation because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities."
And I am only saying if the ad annoys you or distracts you then not displaying it isn't going to hurt anyone either. I'm not for an all out blocking of all ads on all websites. But I do not believe that the technology to let a user decide to not request images and display them on a website is not a bad thing. And even if it is a bad thing, users want them and it is a very simple procedure (or rather, it is the lack of a simple procedure), so it is going to exist, like it or not. The fact that it exists means that content providers will have to re-think how they fund their service. Perhaps moving to less obnoxious, more relevent ads will remove some of the incentive to block them.
No, nor do I photoshop any graphics I get to remove ads, or attempt to modify pdf files with content I do not need. That is more trouble than it is worth. However instructing my web browser to simply not load images that I do not find necessary is a simple procedure (before ad blockers it was easy to do by editing/etc/hosts) that makes it easier for me to pick out the content I want without needless distractions.
This is how people view ads, as useless distractions (often overbearing or misleading distractions). Telling someone the ad is for their own good and they should watch it is not going to change their perceptions, or their actions. And it seems illogical to me to say that by recieving one freely given product (content) without also accepting another freely given product (ad) is a form of theft. I understand how the business model is supposed to work, but that is what I find illogical. I don't think that is a reasonable approach for economic transactions.
That doesn't matter. It's part of the content. You're still separating content and ads and saying the ads don't relate to the content. It's all content.
And to that point what is wrong (morally or otherwise) with me picking and choosing what content I wish to see? So the ads are part of the content? I don't want that part of the content so I will filter it out.
A failed business plan doesn't mean you get to steal shit.
Woah woah woah. We are not talking about illegal copyright violation of mp3s here. Let's keep that seperate as it is a completely different issue. We are talking about selectivly deciding what content (that is freely offered) to display and read.
It means that the content providers don't make money.
Making money is their problem, not mine. The fundemental problem here is that you assume there is some kind of bargain struck between users and content providers who rely on ads when in fact there is none. If a content provider wishes to limit access on monatary basis, and I choose to take part then we have a bargain. They may even attach a clause that stipulates that I must view their material in a certain way. They are free to attempt to do so and I am free to accept or decline and not make use of their service.
But you don't do that. You still want all those items. You just aren't willing to pay the price. So you steal.
I have enjoyed this conversation up to this point. Now I feel you are willfully distorting the truth and using inflamatory labels (presumably) to get a reaction of me. It will not work, I understand the issue a little too well to be engaged by labels like "thief" and "pirate" so please don't waste your or my time by going down that road.
And you who wants to focus on he moral and ignore the legal (which of course does not support your position at all). To bring up the concept of stealing when we are talking about a completely conceptual product is laughable. How can you steal something that is not tangible? I am not stealing web content, it is still there. The basic economic laws of supply and demand do not work when the most basic assumption of economics (scarce resources) is not met. So if you want to get into concepts such as stealing when talking about pure intellectual property, then you have automatically opened the foor to making this a legal discussion.
We are both smart people and we both know what stealing is. Attempting to distort that word to mean "not going along with my silly scheme to make money" is not going to help anyone. Am I stealing if I buy an XBox (loss leader) but no games?
Microsoft is counting on my buying games to cover the low price of the unit. Is there a moral obligation I have to make that plan work for them?
Television producers count on me watching commercials and generating revenue for their sponsors. Am I wrong to ignore commercials? Am I wrong to record a TV show (I have nearly a whole collection of MST3K episodes I recorded myself) and cut out commercials?
Walmart, Best Buy, etc. all offer some products at a loss because their intent is to get the customer in where they hopefuly will purchase more expensive items. If I just buy the sale items am I morally wrong? Am I stealing?
The bottom line is that these content providers made a choice. And that choice was that their customers would behave in a certain manner when they had no obligation of ANY KIND to do so. Sometimes the gamble pays off. Sometimes it pays off for a while but then greed sets in on the part of the sponsors and they go overboard. Then the customer remembers that they also have a choice, that their participation in this little scheme is voluntary by design. You may call it stealing till you are blue in the face if you desire, that still will not make it so.
Besides, I know I am not going to view the ads anyway, so I choose not to "steal" their bandwidth for something I do not want. I know it sucks for corporations when citizens still have some freedoms left that allow them to do what they want with their own computers and choose what they view, but that is the world we live in. Failure to recognize this and plan for it is a failing on the part of the content provider, not their customer.
Because when I am reading an article about a new technology or the prime minister of England, punching a monkey, my ip address being "exposed", and the next episode of Survivor are not things that are remotly connected with the content, nor are they things I want distracting me from said content.
I do not feel a moral obligation to watch a cartoon monkey race across the screen when reading content that has been published on the internet. The very idea seems silly and laughable to me. I am sorry of the developers of a business plan assumed I would feel otherwise.
I agree with what you say but I think it was more the immature and irresponsible way in which Rather handled the documents after doubt was cast on them that hurt his career. He sounded like a whiny, clueless kid who got caught doing something wrong. He dismissed critics (who turned out to be right) in a very unprofessional way and his remose was too late and seemed only directed at the fact that he got caught.
Even today you see "professional" news personalities more outraged at the existence of the webloggers who "outted" the documents as false than the fact that false documents were reported as true. This is very telling of the state of news today.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I can't think of a single anarchist government.
Finkployd
So, unless our systems are far more fragile and easily corrupted than the Russian's (who didn't have any major problems) ours would have been fine as well.
Yeah
I still question just how fragile our system really was (is?)
Finkployd
I find it offensive to associate the GPL with a form of government that's responsible for killing many millions of people.
Are you aware of a major form of government that is NOT responsible for killing millions of people?
Finkployd
Frankly, most people could have cared less if all the windows 95/98 machines crashed, they were of no concern. Sure it would have been annoying for joe average, but not a big deal otherwise.
Most of the work went into servers and (specifically) mainframes where many problems DID exist and work began to fix them quietly around the early 90s. Even so, some things failed, were quickly fixed, and not talked about much. How eager would you be as a company, university, or government to admit you had y2k problems after all the hype and money spent to fix them?
Finkployd
At the time I was a mainframe operator with Penn State (I'm still with them, just in a much less annoying job), and I remember we had a ton of things that needed fixing. Even so, there were some fairly significant problems that popped up on new year's day that had not been caught. If I remember correctly, the program that validated rsa secureIDs failed amoung some other less serious snafus.
:) I know that was a great time for search and rescue teams to pick up cheap gear.
I imagine most places when through something similar, a few years of hunting and fixing and then dealing with some small problems that they missed after the fact.
However, I notice that civilization did not collapse. There was no "fight club" style destruction of everyone's credit rating or a total collapse of the money system, planes did not fall out of the sky, nukes did not sporatically go off, etc. Maybe that COULD have happened but remember people began seriously talking about this problem around 1996 (at least the media began picking it up then) so there was plenty of time to fix stuff.
Many people found great deals on generators and survival gear (food, etc) the following year on ebay
Finkployd
He has done nothing useful except manage to make people follow the cause of Free Software by using an expressly and completely non-free license.
Really? And here I thought he was a programmer created gcc, gdb, emacs, etc.
Finkployd
That may be true, but then I am confused why MS (and IBM) worked to create WS-Federation.
Finkployd
You don't really know much about liberty alliance do you? It is a federated identity management service, using OASIS's SAML to assert authentication status and attributes, not like passport's "store everything in one place" service.
It is also licensed such that MS cannot modify or extend it in a way that is interoperable with the spec (which would make it useless anyway).
Finkployd
So you understand the concept of authentication but seem to be completely drawing a blank on the concept of authorization.
Think of it like a slashdot ID. By logging into the system any old user cannot post stories to the front page. Only certain users can do that. This is how most security works. A combination of authentication (are you really who you say you are?) and authorization (ok, you are who you say you are, what are you allowed to do?)
Finkployd
Ok, so laser is light. Basically what you are suggesting is that we block light from entering the cockpit. This might prove to be a problem for the pilot.
Block a specific wavelength? which one? Green and red? Ignoring that the pilot might need to see those colors while flying lasers can be made at different wavelengths to get around that.
A more expensive solution would be to have cameras outside the cockpit and replace the windows with plasma screens. However technically cool that sounds, the numver of individual points of potential failure jumps up dramatically. I don't know what a good solution to this problem should be, other than people not being assholes, and that is not going to happen.
As I typed this my local Pittsburgh news station just reported that someone shined a bright spotlight into the cockpits of two planes that were taking off at Pgh Internation this morning.
I agree that is a part of it, but certainly not the only place their advantage lies. Their advantage is primarily that they are under active developement and can react much quicker than Microsoft's IE. Basically MS won their browser war and forgot to maintain the product, let alone enhance it. Now they are scrambling to restart developement and like any good 800lbs gorilla, they are quite slow to do anything.
The whole "the only reason project X seems more secure than project Y is because project Y is more popular" is quite an annoying (and false) meme. By that logic Apache should be much less secure than IIS. Sometimes project Y is just poorly designed. In the case of IE that is certainly what happened. It does not matter how many highly paid devs MS has that understand security if the final project decisions are made by clueless execs who insist on senseless integration with the OS for purposes of beating a DOJ trial and other decisions that are simply bad for security. Those highly paid devs can only do so much good.
Finkployd
It jumped the shark, comment-wise, way before you even signed up for your current account. Before I did, for that matter.
I think it started right about the time I got my account. No coincidence I am sure.
I cannot imagine that it would be, I do not believe Apple has any history of doing any such thing.
Finkployd
Quake devastated my social life my first year of college.
Finkployd
Are you under the delusion that the computer industry is static and once a application gains dominance it will never be unseated?
Perhaps you should go back to crunching numbers in Lotus 123, reading email with Eudora, browsing the web with Netscape Communicator, and composing documents with WordPerfect, since this time they have all won and have the competition beat.
Finkployd
That is twice now they hav saved Europe's ass. Being the first to break the German's Enigma machine and now this.
Granted in the whole scheme of things, that first one might have been a little more important.
So I never understood this, why does Poland seem to end up being the butt of jokes? Or is that just a US thing?
He robbed people, or attempted to rob them. This is like robbing a bank, only worse.
Attempting to steal credit cards electronically (and failing) is worse than robbing a bank? By what value system are you making this judgement?
I don't sympathize with him, but I would like to see him get the same sentence as someone who attempted to steal credit cards in meatspace. The fact that electrons were involved does not change the crime and should not change the punishment. I bet it wouldn't be higher than someone who in fact DID commit rape (as this sentence is)
Finkployd
All updates and policy changes on this level are made either with MSI packages that are pushed out at 3 AM each night, or by just changing the group policy to allow it. They use WISE professional studio to do silent installs of all packages.
I posted it to the NOP PSU mailing list, and I'll post it here again. Firefox MSI Packages
Finkployd
We (ITS) certainly never dictate the technology that PSU departments can use, we try simply to provide the best services available and make the best recomendations. Given the internal reaction I have been hearing there will certainly be pockets that insist on using IE, mostly becasue of short sighted web application purchasing or design decisions that have forced it on them. That is their choice though.
Enforcing Firefox useage would be just as bad as forcing IE. It is a platform independent web, and sites coded to existing standards should have no problem with any browser.
Finkployd
I submitted this morning but it got rejected, but this seems a good place to bring it up.
In a tech news story Penn State recommends that its 120,000+ users "use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities. Web browser options include Firefox, one of several alternatives available for Windows, Mac and other operating systems. It works with all Web-based applications used at Penn State"
"ITS has made this recommendation because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities."
Finkployd
And I am only saying if the ad annoys you or distracts you then not displaying it isn't going to hurt anyone either. I'm not for an all out blocking of all ads on all websites. But I do not believe that the technology to let a user decide to not request images and display them on a website is not a bad thing. And even if it is a bad thing, users want them and it is a very simple procedure (or rather, it is the lack of a simple procedure), so it is going to exist, like it or not. The fact that it exists means that content providers will have to re-think how they fund their service. Perhaps moving to less obnoxious, more relevent ads will remove some of the incentive to block them.
Finkployd
No, nor do I photoshop any graphics I get to remove ads, or attempt to modify pdf files with content I do not need. That is more trouble than it is worth. However instructing my web browser to simply not load images that I do not find necessary is a simple procedure (before ad blockers it was easy to do by editing /etc/hosts) that makes it easier for me to pick out the content I want without needless distractions.
This is how people view ads, as useless distractions (often overbearing or misleading distractions). Telling someone the ad is for their own good and they should watch it is not going to change their perceptions, or their actions. And it seems illogical to me to say that by recieving one freely given product (content) without also accepting another freely given product (ad) is a form of theft. I understand how the business model is supposed to work, but that is what I find illogical. I don't think that is a reasonable approach for economic transactions.
Finkployd
That doesn't matter. It's part of the content. You're still separating content and ads and saying the ads don't relate to the content. It's all content.
And to that point what is wrong (morally or otherwise) with me picking and choosing what content I wish to see? So the ads are part of the content? I don't want that part of the content so I will filter it out.
A failed business plan doesn't mean you get to steal shit.
Woah woah woah. We are not talking about illegal copyright violation of mp3s here. Let's keep that seperate as it is a completely different issue. We are talking about selectivly deciding what content (that is freely offered) to display and read.
It means that the content providers don't make money.
Making money is their problem, not mine. The fundemental problem here is that you assume there is some kind of bargain struck between users and content providers who rely on ads when in fact there is none. If a content provider wishes to limit access on monatary basis, and I choose to take part then we have a bargain. They may even attach a clause that stipulates that I must view their material in a certain way. They are free to attempt to do so and I am free to accept or decline and not make use of their service.
But you don't do that. You still want all those items. You just aren't willing to pay the price. So you steal.
I have enjoyed this conversation up to this point. Now I feel you are willfully distorting the truth and using inflamatory labels (presumably) to get a reaction of me. It will not work, I understand the issue a little too well to be engaged by labels like "thief" and "pirate" so please don't waste your or my time by going down that road.
And you who wants to focus on he moral and ignore the legal (which of course does not support your position at all). To bring up the concept of stealing when we are talking about a completely conceptual product is laughable. How can you steal something that is not tangible? I am not stealing web content, it is still there. The basic economic laws of supply and demand do not work when the most basic assumption of economics (scarce resources) is not met. So if you want to get into concepts such as stealing when talking about pure intellectual property, then you have automatically opened the foor to making this a legal discussion.
We are both smart people and we both know what stealing is. Attempting to distort that word to mean "not going along with my silly scheme to make money" is not going to help anyone. Am I stealing if I buy an XBox (loss leader) but no games?
Microsoft is counting on my buying games to cover the low price of the unit. Is there a moral obligation I have to make that plan work for them?
Television producers count on me watching commercials and generating revenue for their sponsors. Am I wrong to ignore commercials? Am I wrong to record a TV show (I have nearly a whole collection of MST3K episodes I recorded myself) and cut out commercials?
Walmart, Best Buy, etc. all offer some products at a loss because their intent is to get the customer in where they hopefuly will purchase more expensive items. If I just buy the sale items am I morally wrong? Am I stealing?
The bottom line is that these content providers made a choice. And that choice was that their customers would behave in a certain manner when they had no obligation of ANY KIND to do so. Sometimes the gamble pays off. Sometimes it pays off for a while but then greed sets in on the part of the sponsors and they go overboard. Then the customer remembers that they also have a choice, that their participation in this little scheme is voluntary by design. You may call it stealing till you are blue in the face if you desire, that still will not make it so.
Besides, I know I am not going to view the ads anyway, so I choose not to "steal" their bandwidth for something I do not want. I know it sucks for corporations when citizens still have some freedoms left that allow them to do what they want with their own computers and choose what they view, but that is the world we live in. Failure to recognize this and plan for it is a failing on the part of the content provider, not their customer.
Because when I am reading an article about a new technology or the prime minister of England, punching a monkey, my ip address being "exposed", and the next episode of Survivor are not things that are remotly connected with the content, nor are they things I want distracting me from said content.
I do not feel a moral obligation to watch a cartoon monkey race across the screen when reading content that has been published on the internet. The very idea seems silly and laughable to me. I am sorry of the developers of a business plan assumed I would feel otherwise.
Finkployd
I agree with what you say but I think it was more the immature and irresponsible way in which Rather handled the documents after doubt was cast on them that hurt his career. He sounded like a whiny, clueless kid who got caught doing something wrong. He dismissed critics (who turned out to be right) in a very unprofessional way and his remose was too late and seemed only directed at the fact that he got caught.
Even today you see "professional" news personalities more outraged at the existence of the webloggers who "outted" the documents as false than the fact that false documents were reported as true. This is very telling of the state of news today.
Finkployd