those at the camp use the hotspot access for chores ranging from e-mail to getting real-time weather conditions
Folks... you're in a tent at the north pole... you don't need an internet connection to check on weather conditions! Just open the tent flap, for goodness' sake.
As far as I know, no commercially available VoIP phone uses VNC these days, which is a real pity
The window behind my browser is a VNC session over a VPN to work... the VNC server has been up for months now. It's a robust bit o' code that I agree should be used more widely.
Thanks for the additional info, it's good to hear about the labs working on yet more cool tech.
What is it with the on again/off again Netscape browser? The last few releases have been so bloated with mostly unnecessary "stuff" that Mozilla was a better (if not yet as well branded) choice.
I understand that the name "Netscape" itself has huge mindshare, but does anyone really associate that with AOL or Time Warner? Does it give their brands any additional mindshare by association? The article says Netscape claims to be the No. 2 browser now, but how much of that is due to people like me who have an old system (333MHz Sun Ultra10) still in use that use 4.7 due to its relative speed compared to newer browsers? I've tried Opera and Mozilla/Firefox on that system, it's pretty slow.
And will AOL users get this browser as their default, or are the business units of Netscape and AOL that separate? The anti-phishing features, if robust, would be a geeksend to the masses.
This is way too late, you won't see it, but I'll reply just the same.
This wouldn't have been a case of "giving an interview", it would be someone saying "yeah, I know someone who got canned today." Don't be so serious.
Picture this... your CEO decides he wants to buy another company. It takes a long time and there's plenty of people unhappy about it, but he finally prevails. He spends a LOT of money doing it. He then announces 5000 people are going to be laid off as a direct result of this purchase.
On my planet people get angry about stuff like that. They start talking about their feelings, someone they know who got axed... and at a watering hole within spitting distance of the corporate headquarters, it's a likely bet that some of them would talk to a reporter.
And as a note, I wasn't attempting to make it "sound like something so extraordinary". It was probably of minor interest, but I had a tiny shred of information to share so I did. Sorry it didn't measure up for you.
My wife and I went to Mistral last night -- a restaurant literally around the corner from the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores. As we waited for our table near the bar, a man walks up and asks, "Do you two work for Oracle?" We told him no, we didn't. He went on to explain that he was a reporter who had been asked to stop by and see if he could get any reaction from any Oracle employees he could find. He had asked someone on the restaurant staff how many of the customers were usually from Oracle on a Friday, and was told "Oh, about 80%." He said he had asked a dozen people thus far and no one had admitted to being an Oracle employee.
I don't know about that 80% figure, it seems high to me, but I would guess that not a lot of people felt like their usual night out on the town after that news was announced.
I'm so glad the merger happened, it is obviously such a good thing for the people who have worked so hard to make the company what it is today. Er, not...
One class of products seen on the floor at CES that has generated a lot of interest is the SEX (Slashdot-Effect eXterminator) that promises to end the near instantaneous meltdown caused by the DDoS^H^H^H^H heavy loads placed upon sites linked to by that "News for Nerds" site.
"See that big hole in the side there?" asks Ned Farblestrom of BlackHole Technologies, pointing to a 3/4 inch hole in the side of the case. "That's where we hook up a big fat pipe to handle the load. Those Slashdotters won't be able to fill that up!"
[snip] go to the source and change the laws, if they do not work for you.
Yes, that's exactly how it's supposed to work.
I think the protections the ISPs are asking to keep (namely to have the BSA or software companies file lawsuits to reduce the number of frivolous information requests) is reasonable. This will make the costs higher to prosecute an individual, but if that individual is found guilty then they pay a higher penalty for having engaged in the illegal activity. I'm fine with that.
Nevertheless, it is completely within reason for the BSA to ask for easier access to information from ISPs; it's up to us to protest any bills that are put forward to allow it if we feel it's an unnecessary proposal or excessively invasive. That's how our government works, and it's how we participate. I'm not saying it's perfect, or that an individual's protections aren't trampled upon by various laws, but at least we have some method of making our thoughts known.
I just spent a few buckazoids buying an Arctic Cooler for my 9800 Pro to quiet it down, and it had just one medium-speed fan. I can't imagine what this beast will sound like.
Not me; I've bought my last one. I own an i950 and while it has stunning print quality as it rolls out of the printer, the pictures fade very fast. Not even in bright sunlight; in rooms that have a lot of light, yes, but not directly falling on the pictures. I can only imagine what would happen in direct sunlight!
I use Canon ink and Canon photo paper exclusively. I contaced Canon support and they claim some ridiculous longevity like 25 years... baloney. I'm seeing changes in 25 weeks or less. They have some method of coming up with their figures according to the brightness, pictures must be under plastic, etc. Well, gee, welcome to the real world where pictures sit out exposed to light and air.
I'd understand small changes in a few years, but what I'm seeing consistently borders on fraud IMO.
My digital photofile nephew swears by the midrange Epsons, claiming they have some patented ink that resists fading to a much greater degree. I think I may end up with a R800 soon...
AntiVir connects with some site out there to get its updates, probably using a fully-qualified hostname (i.e., not an IP address). Let's suppose "the police" are the federal authorities in this case; they have the resouces that can figure out what site is being contacted, what data is transmitted, etc. They change the DNS at the ISP to talk to their specially-prepared server that looks, acts and tastes just like AntiVir's update site. They wait for you do to an AntiVir update, at which time you get an updated set of definitions, or better yet a whole new program installed. Now the feds know your machine is "ready" to receive the spyware and it won't be detected by the now hijacked AntiVir program.
Improbable? Sure. But not impossible.
Even using Knoppix or other live CD distro doesn't protect you from site spoofing. But it sure beats trusting software/data files installed from somewhere on the Internet.
... by Margaret Atwood so this scares the pants off me. There are all sorts of genetically modified animals in that book and they're really scary, like the wolvogs (part wolf, part dog) that look nice and happy but take your hand off if they can get at you. I don't like where this sort of thing may be going...
LOL... I've been running into this a lot lately, what with the elections coming up. Any discussion about taxes, education, health care, you name it -- the reality is soooo out there that it's hard to grasp. No matter how much you open up the scope of the discussion, there's some aspect you're missing that all too often is important.
It's so much easier to just pick a position and stick with it... makes the brain hurt less.
Considering how many people are affected by malware loaded by visiting/loading code from a malicious (or hacked) website, I would expect this to spread relatively quickly once the exploit is propagated around all over the net.
I saw one post indicating that the anti-virus tools can pick it up, but can they do so when you visit a website? My guess is no, and as such the majority of people who don't update their systems regularly (most people) have a pretty high likelihood of coming across such a site sooner rather than later as a result.
Mandrake is well known for being a 'newbie' distro
Perhaps, but of all of the rpm-based distros, they're the best about keeping true FOSS separate from the commercial bits. Plus they're about the best when it comes to making the disto available for free IMO. I started with RedHat, but moved to Mandrake and for the server I haven't been disappointed.
I will bring up a source-based distro on another box and work with it for awhile to see if it works well for me.
I saw a great documentary on the discovery channel once about those engines.. Now used by used by an american company as you said.
Come to think of it, that's probably where I got that tidbit of info -- not from the Astronautix site.
I can't explain why I'm so damned fascinated by the Soviet space program, but I eat it up. I guess it might be kinda like breasts; hidden and built-up for so long that I look at 'em every chance I get.
I read with great interest the history of Buran on astronautix.com. Man, once I found that site I burned several hours reading about the N1 program, Buran, just tons of Soviet-era information that I had no idea was out there. Amazing that the N1 engines were bought by an American company and will end up being used; great story about how they were squirreled away after being ordered destroyed.
I was amazed to learn that Buran flew into space completely by remote control. Kudos to the Russians for this feat.
That's pretty close to what I told him. I explained that Netscape, losing the browser war, had open-sourced their codebase. Lots of folks, including some people paid by their company to do so, contributed to first the rewrite then the enhancement of Mozilla (later Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.). And some people do it for the satisfaction of making the best browser they can.
He couldn't quite grok the entirety of it, but he accepted it. I can't wait to show him OpenOffice sometime.;-)
However, there is one person (whom I know only through chatting on Yahoo Messenger) that is totally convinced that Mozilla is a company with a business model built around distribution of adware. This stems from the fact that he claims to have tried Thunderbird late last winter/early spring and it coincided with an increase of pop-ups and system crashes while he used it to browse. He cleaned his system up (removing Firefox and a few other things) and it worked better again.
Funny you should mention this. He installed SpywareBlaster on his kids' PC first at my suggestion, and saw several popups show up. He immediately thought it was SpywareBlaster that caused it, and promptly removed it. I had to carefully explain that they occurred because he had used IE to download the proram, and by opening up IE he had started the malware. He was shocked that opening IE could open up other programs, as most people are. I got a word in at that point about monopolistic practices... embedding the browser... poor security model... that resonated a bit because of all of the press during the anti-trust trial. Good grief, that seems like eons ago, doesn't it?
People try to use their common sense to understand what's happening on their computer, but because of the complexity of the malware common sense fails them. My neighbor got the gist of what I was telling him, and he's a smart guy. But it's just damned hard to visualize this stuff, so at the end of the day he just trusted me and when I left he was popup free and happily browsing with Firefox 1.0PR.
But if some funny stuff starts happening on the machine he may start to waver again. We'll see.
Ya know, I've got a spare box that I may just do this on. Thanks for reminding me; I have used Gentoo, but only for a short time on a desktop and I didn't like how long some of the big apps (like Gnome/KDE) took to build. But on a server, I bet it would be plenty speedy.
My server runs on Mandrake, and it went from 8.1 to 9.2 (10.0 was out, but I was already in the process of doing the bring-up and data migration). On the old version I would have needed to bring up a much newer kernel version and I wasn't very pleased about how much had changed in 2.4 compared to 2.2. I kept a box running quite a long time on 2.2, keeping on top of updates. But 2.4 was used as a development version in some ways; I got bit by one of the "interim" versions somewhere around 2.4.11 on some hardware and waited for ages to bring up another (like 2.4.20 or so).
Anyway, the kernel was just part of it; circular dependencies being the pain that they are, I opted to go for the newer distro as I considered it easier and faster compared to the number of packages I should update under 8.1. But as the other reply suggested, a source-based distro might just be the way to go. I haven't tried Gentoo in a couple of years, and perhaps for a server the builds would be straightforward.
Heh... I *just* saw that episode again last night. Classic.
Really, how can ppl buy MS if they know that in the future they may not recieve any support for their insecure software?
Let's compare Microsoft vs. OSS. The browser is one component (integrated into the core OS in Windows, yes, and that should NEVER have happened) but there's countless other bits of software that make up an operating system and its applications. I am still running a copy of Windows 2000 on one box, and I still get updates for various flaws from time to time, about four years after purchasing it. I'm pretty pleased about that.
By contrast, I can't keep a Linux distro on a box for longer than about two years. I can modify a spec file and rebuild a RPM with (the second cousin of) the best of them, but at some point things just stop building properly. The solution? Upgrade to a new distro. Just went through this on my mail/web server a couple of months ago; damn but it's hard to make the new versions of all the software play nicely together. But I digress...
Overall, I'd say MS is up there with the best of them in terms of shipping updates that are compatible with a fairly old version of their software, their broken security model notwithstanding. I'm a lot less concerned about broken components like IE that I can (happily) replace than core OS components needing an update that I am stuck with... thankfully those are rare enough in my case.
Anyway, I'm a flip-flopper on the subject of the OS I use; both Windows and Linux (oh yeah, Solaris too) on a daily basis and have both a use for, and issues with, all of them. C'est la vie.
Slashdot Mirror
those at the camp use the hotspot access for chores ranging from e-mail to getting real-time weather conditions
Folks... you're in a tent at the north pole... you don't need an internet connection to check on weather conditions! Just open the tent flap, for goodness' sake.
- Leo
As far as I know, no commercially available VoIP phone uses VNC these days, which is a real pity
The window behind my browser is a VNC session over a VPN to work... the VNC server has been up for months now. It's a robust bit o' code that I agree should be used more widely.
Thanks for the additional info, it's good to hear about the labs working on yet more cool tech.
- Leo
What is it with the on again/off again Netscape browser? The last few releases have been so bloated with mostly unnecessary "stuff" that Mozilla was a better (if not yet as well branded) choice.
I understand that the name "Netscape" itself has huge mindshare, but does anyone really associate that with AOL or Time Warner? Does it give their brands any additional mindshare by association? The article says Netscape claims to be the No. 2 browser now, but how much of that is due to people like me who have an old system (333MHz Sun Ultra10) still in use that use 4.7 due to its relative speed compared to newer browsers? I've tried Opera and Mozilla/Firefox on that system, it's pretty slow.
And will AOL users get this browser as their default, or are the business units of Netscape and AOL that separate? The anti-phishing features, if robust, would be a geeksend to the masses.
- Leo
This is way too late, you won't see it, but I'll reply just the same.
This wouldn't have been a case of "giving an interview", it would be someone saying "yeah, I know someone who got canned today." Don't be so serious.
Picture this... your CEO decides he wants to buy another company. It takes a long time and there's plenty of people unhappy about it, but he finally prevails. He spends a LOT of money doing it. He then announces 5000 people are going to be laid off as a direct result of this purchase.
On my planet people get angry about stuff like that. They start talking about their feelings, someone they know who got axed... and at a watering hole within spitting distance of the corporate headquarters, it's a likely bet that some of them would talk to a reporter.
And as a note, I wasn't attempting to make it "sound like something so extraordinary". It was probably of minor interest, but I had a tiny shred of information to share so I did. Sorry it didn't measure up for you.
- Leo
My wife and I went to Mistral last night -- a restaurant literally around the corner from the Oracle campus in Redwood Shores. As we waited for our table near the bar, a man walks up and asks, "Do you two work for Oracle?" We told him no, we didn't. He went on to explain that he was a reporter who had been asked to stop by and see if he could get any reaction from any Oracle employees he could find. He had asked someone on the restaurant staff how many of the customers were usually from Oracle on a Friday, and was told "Oh, about 80%." He said he had asked a dozen people thus far and no one had admitted to being an Oracle employee.
I don't know about that 80% figure, it seems high to me, but I would guess that not a lot of people felt like their usual night out on the town after that news was announced.
I'm so glad the merger happened, it is obviously such a good thing for the people who have worked so hard to make the company what it is today. Er, not...
- Leo
One class of products seen on the floor at CES that has generated a lot of interest is the SEX (Slashdot-Effect eXterminator) that promises to end the near instantaneous meltdown caused by the DDoS^H^H^H^H heavy loads placed upon sites linked to by that "News for Nerds" site.
"See that big hole in the side there?" asks Ned Farblestrom of BlackHole Technologies, pointing to a 3/4 inch hole in the side of the case. "That's where we hook up a big fat pipe to handle the load. Those Slashdotters won't be able to fill that up!"
[snip] go to the source and change the laws, if they do not work for you.
Yes, that's exactly how it's supposed to work.
I think the protections the ISPs are asking to keep (namely to have the BSA or software companies file lawsuits to reduce the number of frivolous information requests) is reasonable. This will make the costs higher to prosecute an individual, but if that individual is found guilty then they pay a higher penalty for having engaged in the illegal activity. I'm fine with that.
Nevertheless, it is completely within reason for the BSA to ask for easier access to information from ISPs; it's up to us to protest any bills that are put forward to allow it if we feel it's an unnecessary proposal or excessively invasive. That's how our government works, and it's how we participate. I'm not saying it's perfect, or that an individual's protections aren't trampled upon by various laws, but at least we have some method of making our thoughts known.
- Leo
Hopefully they've added the segment registers to this architecture... that would be so cool. Er, waitaminute...
Obviously not what they'd do. But I gotta admit, it was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the headline.
- Leo
I just spent a few buckazoids buying an Arctic Cooler for my 9800 Pro to quiet it down, and it had just one medium-speed fan. I can't imagine what this beast will sound like.
Okay, well, I guess I can...
- Leo
Buy a Canon.
Not me; I've bought my last one. I own an i950 and while it has stunning print quality as it rolls out of the printer, the pictures fade very fast. Not even in bright sunlight; in rooms that have a lot of light, yes, but not directly falling on the pictures. I can only imagine what would happen in direct sunlight!
I use Canon ink and Canon photo paper exclusively. I contaced Canon support and they claim some ridiculous longevity like 25 years... baloney. I'm seeing changes in 25 weeks or less. They have some method of coming up with their figures according to the brightness, pictures must be under plastic, etc. Well, gee, welcome to the real world where pictures sit out exposed to light and air.
I'd understand small changes in a few years, but what I'm seeing consistently borders on fraud IMO.
My digital photofile nephew swears by the midrange Epsons, claiming they have some patented ink that resists fading to a much greater degree. I think I may end up with a R800 soon...
Your mileage may vary. But I doubt it.
- Leo
Think about this...
AntiVir connects with some site out there to get its updates, probably using a fully-qualified hostname (i.e., not an IP address). Let's suppose "the police" are the federal authorities in this case; they have the resouces that can figure out what site is being contacted, what data is transmitted, etc. They change the DNS at the ISP to talk to their specially-prepared server that looks, acts and tastes just like AntiVir's update site. They wait for you do to an AntiVir update, at which time you get an updated set of definitions, or better yet a whole new program installed. Now the feds know your machine is "ready" to receive the spyware and it won't be detected by the now hijacked AntiVir program.
Improbable? Sure. But not impossible.
Even using Knoppix or other live CD distro doesn't protect you from site spoofing. But it sure beats trusting software/data files installed from somewhere on the Internet.
- Leo
... by Margaret Atwood so this scares the pants off me. There are all sorts of genetically modified animals in that book and they're really scary, like the wolvogs (part wolf, part dog) that look nice and happy but take your hand off if they can get at you. I don't like where this sort of thing may be going...
- Leo
LOL... I've been running into this a lot lately, what with the elections coming up. Any discussion about taxes, education, health care, you name it -- the reality is soooo out there that it's hard to grasp. No matter how much you open up the scope of the discussion, there's some aspect you're missing that all too often is important.
It's so much easier to just pick a position and stick with it... makes the brain hurt less.
C'est la vie.
- Leo
Sorry, that should be "yes to a similar vulnerability, but not to this exact one, unless you've upgraded to the newest version."
Must hit "Preview" to check those links, not "Submit"...
- Leo
Considering how many people are affected by malware loaded by visiting/loading code from a malicious (or hacked) website, I would expect this to spread relatively quickly once the exploit is propagated around all over the net.
I saw one post indicating that the anti-virus tools can pick it up, but can they do so when you visit a website? My guess is no, and as such the majority of people who don't update their systems regularly (most people) have a pretty high likelihood of coming across such a site sooner rather than later as a result.
- Leo
yes, if you haven't updated to the latest version.
See this Slashdot thread.
- Leo
Mandrake is well known for being a 'newbie' distro
Perhaps, but of all of the rpm-based distros, they're the best about keeping true FOSS separate from the commercial bits. Plus they're about the best when it comes to making the disto available for free IMO. I started with RedHat, but moved to Mandrake and for the server I haven't been disappointed.
I will bring up a source-based distro on another box and work with it for awhile to see if it works well for me.
- Leo
I saw a great documentary on the discovery channel once about those engines.. Now used by used by an american company as you said.
Come to think of it, that's probably where I got that tidbit of info -- not from the Astronautix site.
I can't explain why I'm so damned fascinated by the Soviet space program, but I eat it up. I guess it might be kinda like breasts; hidden and built-up for so long that I look at 'em every chance I get.
- Leo
Folks, so sorry about the popups; I had no idea as I'm using Firefox and they just didn't happen to me. I'd have mentioned it had I known.
- Leo
I read with great interest the history of Buran on astronautix.com. Man, once I found that site I burned several hours reading about the N1 program, Buran, just tons of Soviet-era information that I had no idea was out there. Amazing that the N1 engines were bought by an American company and will end up being used; great story about how they were squirreled away after being ordered destroyed.
I was amazed to learn that Buran flew into space completely by remote control. Kudos to the Russians for this feat.
- Leo
That's pretty close to what I told him. I explained that Netscape, losing the browser war, had open-sourced their codebase. Lots of folks, including some people paid by their company to do so, contributed to first the rewrite then the enhancement of Mozilla (later Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.). And some people do it for the satisfaction of making the best browser they can.
;-)
He couldn't quite grok the entirety of it, but he accepted it. I can't wait to show him OpenOffice sometime.
- Leo
Funny you should mention this. He installed SpywareBlaster on his kids' PC first at my suggestion, and saw several popups show up. He immediately thought it was SpywareBlaster that caused it, and promptly removed it. I had to carefully explain that they occurred because he had used IE to download the proram, and by opening up IE he had started the malware. He was shocked that opening IE could open up other programs, as most people are. I got a word in at that point about monopolistic practices... embedding the browser... poor security model... that resonated a bit because of all of the press during the anti-trust trial. Good grief, that seems like eons ago, doesn't it?
People try to use their common sense to understand what's happening on their computer, but because of the complexity of the malware common sense fails them. My neighbor got the gist of what I was telling him, and he's a smart guy. But it's just damned hard to visualize this stuff, so at the end of the day he just trusted me and when I left he was popup free and happily browsing with Firefox 1.0PR.
But if some funny stuff starts happening on the machine he may start to waver again. We'll see.
- Leo
Ya know, I've got a spare box that I may just do this on. Thanks for reminding me; I have used Gentoo, but only for a short time on a desktop and I didn't like how long some of the big apps (like Gnome/KDE) took to build. But on a server, I bet it would be plenty speedy.
- Leo
Maybe you are doing something wrong.
Well, that would be a first. (not)
My server runs on Mandrake, and it went from 8.1 to 9.2 (10.0 was out, but I was already in the process of doing the bring-up and data migration). On the old version I would have needed to bring up a much newer kernel version and I wasn't very pleased about how much had changed in 2.4 compared to 2.2. I kept a box running quite a long time on 2.2, keeping on top of updates. But 2.4 was used as a development version in some ways; I got bit by one of the "interim" versions somewhere around 2.4.11 on some hardware and waited for ages to bring up another (like 2.4.20 or so).
Anyway, the kernel was just part of it; circular dependencies being the pain that they are, I opted to go for the newer distro as I considered it easier and faster compared to the number of packages I should update under 8.1. But as the other reply suggested, a source-based distro might just be the way to go. I haven't tried Gentoo in a couple of years, and perhaps for a server the builds would be straightforward.
- Leo
Heh... I *just* saw that episode again last night. Classic.
Really, how can ppl buy MS if they know that in the future they may not recieve any support for their insecure software?
Let's compare Microsoft vs. OSS. The browser is one component (integrated into the core OS in Windows, yes, and that should NEVER have happened) but there's countless other bits of software that make up an operating system and its applications. I am still running a copy of Windows 2000 on one box, and I still get updates for various flaws from time to time, about four years after purchasing it. I'm pretty pleased about that.
By contrast, I can't keep a Linux distro on a box for longer than about two years. I can modify a spec file and rebuild a RPM with (the second cousin of) the best of them, but at some point things just stop building properly. The solution? Upgrade to a new distro. Just went through this on my mail/web server a couple of months ago; damn but it's hard to make the new versions of all the software play nicely together. But I digress...
Overall, I'd say MS is up there with the best of them in terms of shipping updates that are compatible with a fairly old version of their software, their broken security model notwithstanding. I'm a lot less concerned about broken components like IE that I can (happily) replace than core OS components needing an update that I am stuck with... thankfully those are rare enough in my case.
Anyway, I'm a flip-flopper on the subject of the OS I use; both Windows and Linux (oh yeah, Solaris too) on a daily basis and have both a use for, and issues with, all of them. C'est la vie.
- Leo