"Correct" or "incorrect" use of technology is in the eye of the beholder.
Besides, nobody's forcing you to make anything transparent. Technology is like a rope. You can use it to hang yourself, but you don't have to. You can also use it to tie pretty knots and impress all your Boy Scout friends, but you don't have to.
It troubles me that you used Eterm with UTF-8 support. I have been waiting for a patch to enable UTF-8 support in Eterm for some time now, but I have yet to receive one. If you have been holding onto one for 4 years now without sharing it with the rest of the community, I encourage you to renounce your wicked ways and contribute the patch, if for no other reason than to save my sanity.
For the record, Eterm is under active development. 0.9.3 will be out Real Soon Now(tm).
As for a tabbed interface, several other commenters have pointed out Eterm's integration with screen. Even better than tabs, IMHO, since you can detach your entire session and reattach from anywhere.
I started out my life on Unix as a sysadmin, and I always found it distasteful how software developers would get all pissed off at the people who reported the vulnerabilities, as if they were somehow to blame for the author's own screw-ups.
The bottom line is simply that the person who wrote the code is responsible for their own mistakes. That's really where the buck stops.
In the end, all that really matters is that things get fixed as quickly and correctly as possible for the sake of the users. Ego-sparring and public feuds accomplish nothing and are ultimately counterproductive.
Didn't intend to chew anyone out; I apologize if it seemed that way. I just don't want people to be afraid to run Eterm because of the somewhat-outdated information (which Mr. Moore himself acknowledged) in the report. Just trying to make sure that the information out there is complete and accurate, that's all.:-)
They're obvious exaggerations for the intent of being humorous. No one should take them seriously or interpret them as anything other than playful jabs.
The baddies seem to be eterm and rxvt. There's a nice description of a compromise scenario via eterm at the bottom of the article.
Please note that the "case study" provided was contrived at best and damagingly inaccurate at worst. No official release of Eterm EVER could be used in the way they describe. Only people following CVS Eterm would ever have been open to such an attack, and those people would have updated to a fixed version almost 2 years ago.
The case study is intended to illustrate a "Worst Case Scenario" type situation, not be any sort of realistic portrayal of actual events.
If you'll read the follow-up conversation on BUGTRAQ (link posted above), you'll note that Eterm 0.9.2 is NOT vulnerable to the screen dump problem. I was also unable to create a scenario where the title bug could be exploited in such a way as to hide the command line that was imbedded in there, so the user would have to blindly hit Enter with a complete command line for the exploit sitting there. Only a severely ignorant user would do that.
You should also read about *why* Mr. Moore gave Eterm the "most vulnerable" award. The only reason he gave which hasn't been fixed for almost 2 years now was the quality and thoroughness of my documentation.:-)
I, too, have been on all sides of the coin, from channel user, to channel admin, to network admin, to IRCop and Services admin/author.
It really boils down to attitude. A good network admin must understand some key points:
It's about the network, not the person. The most important thing is the good of the network and its users, not any one person. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few, so to speak. If one person gets in the way of the goal, that person must go.
Channel matters are separate from network matters. This is vital for appropriate and prudent separation of power. The role of an IRCop or a server admin is to *serve*. Network authorities should be involved in channel matters only to the extent expressly requested by the leadership of that channel. Furthermore, network admins who are also channel leaders should restrict themselves to only using their channel-related powers when acting on behalf of the channel rather than the network.
Service is key. The network exists to serve the users. To that end, intrustiveness into the lives of the users should be kept to an absolute minimum. Users on your network shouldn't even know you exist until they need you.
Unfortunately, freenode has no such policies or guidelines for its admins.
Have you listened to yourself lately? I don't know what you're smoking, but it must be good.
It should be painfully obvious to anyone who still has use of his brain that PDPC/FreeNode will never be a "hub" of any kind for open source IRCing, so-called "peer-directed" projects, or anything else lilo wants it to be. He is simply not the kind of leader that inspires a sense of confidence that things will be handled responsibly. People see him as a power-hungry dictator; right or wrong, that impression will derail PDPC sooner or later.
lilo has a pipe dream. He wants to be paid to IRC all day. Frankly, I wouldn't mind that myself. But out here in the real world, we have bills to pay. After the Software Engineering team left VA, there were incredibly talented people like Andrew Tridgell and Ted T'so who were suddenly out of a job. Infinitely more users have benefitted from the work of those two gentlemen than have ever even *heard* of OPN. Yet did any of the Samba team sit around asking for donations? Of course not! They and the rest of the engineers are gainfully employed once again, and continuing to make a difference.
Just incase you haven't been listening. The reason for the plee for donations is to go into the pocket of the IRCops - mainly 1: Lilo.
Not mainly lilo, *exclusively* lilo.
(no, not to maintain the servers, bandwidth, etc etc).
Unless you count his personal DSL line at home, of course.:-)
Why? Because he doesnt have a job and is finding it hard to survive. The reason he claims is because he spends so much time admining OPN..
He doesn't have a job because he kept getting fired. He kept getting fired because he wasn't doing his job. He wasn't doing his job because he was sitting on his ass all day IRCing.
Sound familiar? (Hint: "Hmmm, well, if I can't get an employer to pay me to IRC all day, perhaps I can sucker some users into it!")
Has he thought of maybe offloading some of the work to someone else? Probably, but then he'd have to get a job.
That, and he's a control freak. Which in and of itself is not a bad thing entirely; I'm a control freak too. The difference is, he wants everyone else to pay for his controlling nature.
I wish people would be a little more tolerant. It costs quite a bit to operate OPN and asking for donations to help pay for it is IMHO long overdue.
So how, exactly, does it cost a lot to operate OPN? All servers and bandwidth are donated (via a server sponsoring policy which absolutely sucks, IMHO...but I digress). The only "expenditures" are the time of the admin staff, and in true Free Software Style, here's my advice: If you can't afford to do it, DON'T DO IT.
The messages asking for donations are sent via WALLOPS,
Not true. They are sent via "global notices" which are not quite as easy to reliably ignore.
which can be turned off, and via the nick FUNDRASING which you may ignore.
Somewhat true. At least once lilo has sent a fundraising message as himself, which he excused as having "used the wrong client." Whether that's true or not, who knows. In any event, the topic of #E contains instructions on how to best ignore the global notices seen thus far, and it will continue to be refined until either they stop or lilo decides (again) that #E is no longer welcome on OPN.
Have you ever actually tried controlling air traffic? There's no comparison between ATC and CVS, other than perhaps that they are both TLA's.
With open source development, you can always take a break. If you turn your eyes away from your code to check the latest news on Slashdot, nobody dies.
But air traffic control...dammit, man, those planes! They just keep coming and coming! Make them stop!
First let me say that what I am about to say is my own personal opinion. I didn't "check it" with anyone here to make sure it was "politically correct." This is how I honestly feel. So here goes.
No matter how much good you try to do, there will always be some people for whom it is never enough. There will also always be people who suspect that you have alterior motives. And that's okay. A healthy skepticism is never a bad thing. But I can assure you that some of the most skeptical members of the community, and the harshest critics of actions which don't benefit Linux as a whole, work at VA! The employees of VA are members of the Linux community just like the rest of you; we haven't lost that focus and mindset.
So why did we buy Andover? Well, I'm not on the executive staff, so I can't say for certain what all the reasons are. But I do know the people running VA, and I know the people running Slashdot. I can say two things with 100% certainty. CmdrTaco and Hemos would never tolerate anyone exercising editorial control over Slashdot, no matter who it was. They would sooner jump ship and go elsewhere. And I know that no one at VA would want to harm Slashdot by trying to assert any such control over it. We all like Slashdot just the way it is. (Many of us read it at *least* daily.) Slashdot is a great community site; CmdrTaco and Hemos need to stay right where they are and keep doing what they've been doing so well for so long.
We will always have our critics like Bowie. There will be people who will misinterpret our actions and hold grudges and continue to flame us ad nauseum at every opportunity. We accept that as part of existing in such a dynamic, diverse, vocal community. We wouldn't change that even if we could. Those people are welcome to their opinions as always. We will continue to work hard at doing the best job we can for our customers and for the Linux community as a whole.
When Linux wins, VA Linux wins. And when VA Linux wins, Linux wins. That's how it has been since the early 90's, and everyone at VA is committed to making sure it will always be that way.
Umm...I thought the "desktop" was a Windows philosphy.
Apparently you've never heard of "Macintosh" or "Amiga.":-)
I didn't say it was bad to have a paradigm where the desktop acts like a directory. I meant that it is very Windows-ish to say that the desktop IS a directory.
Asking would be good. But, then you need a standard way to ask, don't you? Is there or could there be one?
Of course there could, and there should, be one. And the designers of the subsystem should have created it *before* snarfing mouse clicks that didn't belong to them.:-)
Forgive the question, but I haven't upgraded E beyond the one that came with RH6. Is this something you can configure? Mandrake was talking about how important it is to him that things be configurable by the user. Since this conflict would seem to be an obvious problem when using E with GNOME (which, I assume, many people do), I would imagine that it would be a good candidate for such configurability.
Of course you can configure it, at least from E's side. You can change the binding for the right-click menu to something else (e.g., left button). I don't know if you can change gmc's behavior, though.
And, for what it's worth, I think that if you're going to impliment a desktop on the root window, it makes much more sense to have the file manager do it than the window manager, since it is supposed to be just a graphical representation for a directory, right? You would want it to look and behave like all the other directories do...in the file manager you're using. But, then, since you might be primarily using one of any number of file managers, you need the ability to turn off such functionality in each.
That is a Windows philosophy! Evil!
In X, the "desktop" is a window, not a file or a directory, and the window manager is in charge of it. If a file manager wants to trespass on what has always been window manager territory, it should ask nicely first. gmc doesn't.
Of course *somebody* needs to get the root window clicks. Enlightenment does that. So does just about every window manager on the planet. What he is trying to say is that any application that is *not* the window manager should *not* intercept root window clicks. It's Naughty(tm).
This is not to preclude the concept of an integrated environment. There should certainly *be* a desktop, and objects on that desktop, but it should be up to the window manager, not the file manager, to handle them.
If you ask me, a truly integrated environment requires that the window manager and the file manager be intimately intertwined, so the best practice is often to have them be the same application.
Slashdot Mirror
Silly boy. MacOS X has transparent terminals too.
"Correct" or "incorrect" use of technology is in the eye of the beholder.
Besides, nobody's forcing you to make anything transparent. Technology is like a rope. You can use it to hang yourself, but you don't have to. You can also use it to tie pretty knots and impress all your Boy Scout friends, but you don't have to.
It troubles me that you used Eterm with UTF-8 support. I have been waiting for a patch to enable UTF-8 support in Eterm for some time now, but I have yet to receive one. If you have been holding onto one for 4 years now without sharing it with the rest of the community, I encourage you to renounce your wicked ways and contribute the patch, if for no other reason than to save my sanity.
For the record, Eterm is under active development. 0.9.3 will be out Real Soon Now(tm).
As for a tabbed interface, several other commenters have pointed out Eterm's integration with screen. Even better than tabs, IMHO, since you can detach your entire session and reattach from anywhere.
...he'd be a rutabaga.
PS: No hamsters were harmed in the making of this comment.
I recommend perusal of the CVS commits list archives.
Because they, themselves stole it. See below.
I'll take "Features Enlightenment Had 3 Years Ago" for $100, Alex.
Anyone who thinks Enlightenment development has "gotten stuck" hasn't been paying attention.
Thanks. :)
I started out my life on Unix as a sysadmin, and I always found it distasteful how software developers would get all pissed off at the people who reported the vulnerabilities, as if they were somehow to blame for the author's own screw-ups.
The bottom line is simply that the person who wrote the code is responsible for their own mistakes. That's really where the buck stops.
In the end, all that really matters is that things get fixed as quickly and correctly as possible for the sake of the users. Ego-sparring and public feuds accomplish nothing and are ultimately counterproductive.
Convincing, perhaps, but also misleading. Please see my comments here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=55578&cid=5415 971
Didn't intend to chew anyone out; I apologize if it seemed that way. I just don't want people to be afraid to run Eterm because of the somewhat-outdated information (which Mr. Moore himself acknowledged) in the report. Just trying to make sure that the information out there is complete and accurate, that's all. :-)
They're obvious exaggerations for the intent of being humorous. No one should take them seriously or interpret them as anything other than playful jabs.
The baddies seem to be eterm and rxvt. There's a nice description of a compromise scenario via eterm at the bottom of the article.
Please note that the "case study" provided was contrived at best and damagingly inaccurate at worst. No official release of Eterm EVER could be used in the way they describe. Only people following CVS Eterm would ever have been open to such an attack, and those people would have updated to a fixed version almost 2 years ago.
The case study is intended to illustrate a "Worst Case Scenario" type situation, not be any sort of realistic portrayal of actual events.
If you'll read the follow-up conversation on BUGTRAQ (link posted above), you'll note that Eterm 0.9.2 is NOT vulnerable to the screen dump problem. I was also unable to create a scenario where the title bug could be exploited in such a way as to hide the command line that was imbedded in there, so the user would have to blindly hit Enter with a complete command line for the exploit sitting there. Only a severely ignorant user would do that.
:-)
You should also read about *why* Mr. Moore gave Eterm the "most vulnerable" award. The only reason he gave which hasn't been fixed for almost 2 years now was the quality and thoroughness of my documentation.
Maybe so. But if I am a tool, at least I'm a tool who doesn't beg users for money or threaten to shut down channels for disagreeing with me.
It really boils down to attitude. A good network admin must understand some key points:
It's about the network, not the person. The most important thing is the good of the network and its users, not any one person. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few, so to speak. If one person gets in the way of the goal, that person must go.
Channel matters are separate from network matters. This is vital for appropriate and prudent separation of power. The role of an IRCop or a server admin is to *serve*. Network authorities should be involved in channel matters only to the extent expressly requested by the leadership of that channel. Furthermore, network admins who are also channel leaders should restrict themselves to only using their channel-related powers when acting on behalf of the channel rather than the network.
Service is key. The network exists to serve the users. To that end, intrustiveness into the lives of the users should be kept to an absolute minimum. Users on your network shouldn't even know you exist until they need you.
Unfortunately, freenode has no such policies or guidelines for its admins.
It seems to be a pretty simple proposition; lilo is requesting money to continue providing a service. Nobody had any complaints when things were free.
Then you weren't paying attention. I suggest reading www.lilofree.net sometime.
Have you listened to yourself lately? I don't know what you're smoking, but it must be good.
It should be painfully obvious to anyone who still has use of his brain that PDPC/FreeNode will never be a "hub" of any kind for open source IRCing, so-called "peer-directed" projects, or anything else lilo wants it to be. He is simply not the kind of leader that inspires a sense of confidence that things will be handled responsibly. People see him as a power-hungry dictator; right or wrong, that impression will derail PDPC sooner or later.
lilo has a pipe dream. He wants to be paid to IRC all day. Frankly, I wouldn't mind that myself. But out here in the real world, we have bills to pay. After the Software Engineering team left VA, there were incredibly talented people like Andrew Tridgell and Ted T'so who were suddenly out of a job. Infinitely more users have benefitted from the work of those two gentlemen than have ever even *heard* of OPN. Yet did any of the Samba team sit around asking for donations? Of course not! They and the rest of the engineers are gainfully employed once again, and continuing to make a difference.
Just incase you haven't been listening. The reason for the plee for donations is to go into the pocket of the IRCops - mainly 1: Lilo.
:-)
Not mainly lilo, *exclusively* lilo.
(no, not to maintain the servers, bandwidth, etc etc).
Unless you count his personal DSL line at home, of course.
Why? Because he doesnt have a job and is finding it hard to survive.
The reason he claims is because he spends so much time admining OPN..
He doesn't have a job because he kept getting fired. He kept getting fired because he wasn't doing his job. He wasn't doing his job because he was sitting on his ass all day IRCing.
Sound familiar? (Hint: "Hmmm, well, if I can't get an employer to pay me to IRC all day, perhaps I can sucker some users into it!")
Has he thought of maybe offloading some of the work to someone else? Probably, but then he'd have to get a job.
That, and he's a control freak. Which in and of itself is not a bad thing entirely; I'm a control freak too. The difference is, he wants everyone else to pay for his controlling nature.
I wish people would be a little more tolerant. It costs quite a bit to operate OPN and asking for donations to help pay for it is IMHO long overdue.
So how, exactly, does it cost a lot to operate OPN? All servers and bandwidth are donated (via a server sponsoring policy which absolutely sucks, IMHO...but I digress). The only "expenditures" are the time of the admin staff, and in true Free Software Style, here's my advice: If you can't afford to do it, DON'T DO IT.
The messages asking for donations are sent via WALLOPS,
Not true. They are sent via "global notices" which are not quite as easy to reliably ignore.
which can be turned off, and via the nick FUNDRASING which you may ignore.
Somewhat true. At least once lilo has sent a fundraising message as himself, which he excused as having "used the wrong client." Whether that's true or not, who knows. In any event, the topic of #E contains instructions on how to best ignore the global notices seen thus far, and it will continue to be refined until either they stop or lilo decides (again) that #E is no longer welcome on OPN.
Have you ever actually tried controlling air traffic? There's no comparison between ATC and CVS, other than perhaps that they are both TLA's.
With open source development, you can always take a break. If you turn your eyes away from your code to check the latest news on Slashdot, nobody dies.
But air traffic control...dammit, man, those planes! They just keep coming and coming! Make them stop!
First let me say that what I am about to say is my own personal opinion. I didn't "check it" with anyone here to make sure it was "politically correct." This is how I honestly feel. So here goes.
No matter how much good you try to do, there will always be some people for whom it is never enough. There will also always be people who suspect that you have alterior motives. And that's okay. A healthy skepticism is never a bad thing. But I can assure you that some of the most skeptical members of the community, and the harshest critics of actions which don't benefit Linux as a whole, work at VA! The employees of VA are members of the Linux community just like the rest of you; we haven't lost that focus and mindset.
So why did we buy Andover? Well, I'm not on the executive staff, so I can't say for certain what all the reasons are. But I do know the people running VA, and I know the people running Slashdot. I can say two things with 100% certainty. CmdrTaco and Hemos would never tolerate anyone exercising editorial control over Slashdot, no matter who it was. They would sooner jump ship and go elsewhere. And I know that no one at VA would want to harm Slashdot by trying to assert any such control over it. We all like Slashdot just the way it is. (Many of us read it at *least* daily.) Slashdot is a great community site; CmdrTaco and Hemos need to stay right where they are and keep doing what they've been doing so well for so long.
We will always have our critics like Bowie. There will be people who will misinterpret our actions and hold grudges and continue to flame us ad nauseum at every opportunity. We accept that as part of existing in such a dynamic, diverse, vocal community. We wouldn't change that even if we could. Those people are welcome to their opinions as always. We will continue to work hard at doing the best job we can for our customers and for the Linux community as a whole.
When Linux wins, VA Linux wins. And when VA Linux wins, Linux wins. That's how it has been since the early 90's, and everyone at VA is committed to making sure it will always be that way.
Umm...I thought the "desktop" was a Windows philosphy.
Apparently you've never heard of "Macintosh" or "Amiga." :-)
I didn't say it was bad to have a paradigm where the desktop acts like a directory. I meant that it is very Windows-ish to say that the desktop IS a directory.
Asking would be good. But, then you need a standard way to ask, don't you? Is there or could there be one?
Of course there could, and there should, be one. And the designers of the subsystem should have created it *before* snarfing mouse clicks that didn't belong to them. :-)
Forgive the question, but I haven't upgraded E beyond the one that came with RH6. Is this something you can configure? Mandrake was talking about how important it is to him that things be configurable by the user. Since this conflict would seem to be an obvious problem when using E with GNOME (which, I assume, many people do), I would imagine that it would be a good candidate for such configurability.
Of course you can configure it, at least from E's side. You can change the binding for the right-click menu to something else (e.g., left button). I don't know if you can change gmc's behavior, though.
And, for what it's worth, I think that if you're going to impliment a desktop on the root window, it makes much more sense to have the file manager do it than the window manager, since it is supposed to be just a graphical representation for a directory, right? You would want it to look and behave like all the other directories do...in the file manager you're using. But, then, since you might be primarily using one of any number of file managers, you need the ability to turn off such functionality in each.
That is a Windows philosophy! Evil!
In X, the "desktop" is a window, not a file or a directory, and the window manager is in charge of it. If a file manager wants to trespass on what has always been window manager territory, it should ask nicely first. gmc doesn't.
*sigh*
Of course *somebody* needs to get the root window clicks. Enlightenment does that. So does just about every window manager on the planet. What he is trying to say is that any application that is *not* the window manager should *not* intercept root window clicks. It's Naughty(tm).
This is not to preclude the concept of an integrated environment. There should certainly *be* a desktop, and objects on that desktop, but it should be up to the window manager, not the file manager, to handle them.
If you ask me, a truly integrated environment requires that the window manager and the file manager be intimately intertwined, so the best practice is often to have them be the same application.