> Those appear to tell us he cracked passwords that he should not have and he ran a program on Intel computers that enabled him to access the computers from outside Intel, which he had been previously caught doing and instructed to stop
Well, he was doing this in such an obvious way that I can't beleive he was really malicious, in particular in 1993. I used to run crack on password files, mostly as a game. I think every sysadmin should run crack on user password. When I was an UNIX student, the sysadmin let us run crack on/etc/passwd. Too bad for lusers that used easy password. There were setuid files about everywhere (reseted by nighlty scripts, but this is easily worked around). We were studiying UNIX in a hostile environment. It was a game to try to root the university servers. (We got root once, he was pretty pissed. He ran to the machine room and shutdown the servers in emergency). Of course we had backdoors to most computers where we had accounts.
Anyway, this mostly show a lack of security in intel (if he bring back the password at home and crack those there, would he be guilty ? Yes ? So he is guilty of cat/etc/passwd ? Put an open ftp server. You'll get hundreds of get/etc/passwd). IMHO, Intel should have droppped the suit, but they probably wanted to make an example.
Too bad I don't have moderator points today. Can I moderate an entire article as "Flamebait"?
I would have modded it up as "Funny".
Of course Napster is going to get its info from wherever it can find it. Hell, the RIAA can give them the list of all song names, authors, albums, etc, etc. Napster could take its data from FreeDB, but it would not be as funny. After all, FreeDB give free information, for the good and the evil.
The CDDB steal data from people that were riping CDS to put the on Napster which now sleeps with RIAA and uses the very data those people typed in and can't have free access to, to prevent them access to the song they ripped.
It's... marvelous. Really. It is a splendid shortcut of what the net have become.
> They're SUPPOSED to moderate on the basis of the quality of the post but NOT on the basis of whether it agrees with their opinions. But some yeild to the temtation to moderate down postings with which they have an ideological disagreement.
Now, ther is another possibility. It is that the moderator looked at the history of 'quantum_pixie' to see its posting habits. In that case, he may have found that 'quantum_pixie' have a clear tendancy to post "provocatively creative" ideas. For instance:
* "I have yet to see anyone clearly state why copy protection for hard drives would be a bad thing"
* "The police (particularly the British police) are notoriously corrupt"
* "children need to be protected, though, not used as pawns in a libertarian game"
* "The developers for KDE should take a good long look at the Gnome team, and realize that developing a clean, stable, intuitive window manager is more important than integrating yesterdays buzzwords"
* "How will it affect surrounding wildlife to have lasers beamed through the air every which way ? Will birds have to worry about being cooked as they fly?"
* "When highly confidential and sensitive data is transferred, it is critical that a demonstrably secure algorithm be used. All public key algorithms have failed this test, and thus do not deserve consideration in a serious computing environment"
This is a random sample. I definitely like qpt, which IMHO, is one of the most funny contributor to slashdot.
From my point of view, yes, this should have been modded Funny, not Troll.
"how important is this realistically" ? Wtf this means ? UK is probably the most pro-american part of the EU. If UK refuses software patents, it can be a huge win for the EU. "how important is this realistically" ? Well, as important as it can be. America IP laws are fucked, probably definitely. The only hope is that EU and Japan stand against US, if we want our childs to *own* their thoughts.
> thus still protecting themselves in as much geographical area as possible
So what ? The only way to eradicate software patent is to make them uninforcable. *If* EU refuses software patents, than development companies may have an interest to be in EU to develop software. In this case, the US will have to relax the legislation to keep the software businesses aboard.
> the poster you responded to may be a nutter who really thinks software is religion
Not at all, so thanks for using 'may'. I don't use windows and tend to avoid microsoft products, but this is something personal (that started before there was even a Microsof Windows). Note that I don't run linux either, but that it for practical reasons.
The whole point of the rant was hypocrisy, and I have my share of it too (If I was less hypocrit, I would use *no* microsoft products, I would do a web page about *why* I don't use them, and would actively promote a real boycott, and become a 'nutter who really thinks software is religion' on your radar:-) ).
> Those who accept the death penalty believe that it will save more innocent lives if those convicted of murder are executed
Yep. But the original poster said 'These peope forfeit the lot, the moment they murder', which is wrong in the sense accidental penalty of innocent means that those people loosed their rights without murdering.
Your description is more correct than his, which by pretending beeing mecanic (ie: murder -> lost of rights -> death penalty can be applied) had a huge hole.
> Want to boycott RJR Nabisco? No more Kraft Mac and Cheeze for you! Disney? May as well turn off the TV. Sony? Forgetabout it.
Omygod. You are okay to boycott *only* if it is easy ? You think that a boycott is just consumer choice ? You agree to refuse to boycott de-facto monopolies, because it may hurt your comfort ?
Of course, you are in line with slashdot. CmdrTaco that still runs windows ("For the games"), and got all wet at the idea of Diablo II.
All this is fake. The real problem is that you don't have any cause you feel strong enought to fight for. Hey, I don't have either. I sorta boycott things I don't like (Television, Disney, FastFoods, Microsoft, Intel, Sony). And, frankly, it doesn't cost me much. Half-baked boycott.
> I imagine many people are boycotting DVDs or CDs due to the MPAA/RIAA
No, they are not. Most of them are boycotting DVDs or CDs cause they can get the for free (as-in-beer) on the net.
> These groups can easily claim that lack of sales was not due to boycotts [...]
Claims made by those groups have *never* needed to bear any relation with reality. They have an advantage to say that sales declines so they can push new laws throught the American Congress (which I don't care about), and the WTO (which I do care about). They already did this for TV, and for Video. In every case, (MP|RI)AA will pretend that they lost obscene amounts of money, and that they have god-given right to profit on all entertainment and IP. "ALL YOUR NET MUSIC ARE BELONG TO US" kind of thing. They'll probably win...
Oh, bob. Last time you gave me a babaooey (and a special one !), and now, that ? What happened ?
You are one of the best techno-columnist of slashdot. Respect your readership. Think about all the little boys and girls, religiously reading what you have to tell the world.
Btw, any progress on the two-buttons macintosh mouse front ?
Oh my GNU. I can't beleive that there are morons that stores the prices client-side.
I am surprised that
1/ A lot of sites have goatsecx'ed shopping carts
2/ This have not been abused to death (ie: if you can get 25$ on a notebook, then you should buy a hundred of them).
I would first suspect employees of those dotcoms that hacked the databases for them or their friends. Like boo.com (Thanks to hole in the applications, employees were able to buy products in pounds, and pay in pesetas). Then I would suspect plain bugs (I once had the WebObject store.apple.com proposing me real nice prices, with a lot of 0$ options on high-end macs. I didn't bought them, but maybe I should have ?).
Btw, what are "pricing snafus resulting in a smorgasbord of bargains" ? Is this pig english thing already used at zdnet ?
> It's tolerable. The main problem was that it's rather cold in the winter; -2 to 5 degrees. Only some parts of the structure are heated; some rooms, like the kitchen, are pretty much the same temperature as outside, just without wind -- you can see your breath, the room is about as cold as the fridge, etc.
See the bright side of it. You can host overclocked servers easily.
> Famous slashdot poster Signal 11 grew tired of this site. So he gave away his account. Dear beloved free speech advocate Michael discovered this and used his authorial privileges to steal the account. No warning was given. No explanation either. The account was simply stolen and that was that.
I recall that. There have been a log posted. Anybody kept it ? (too bad -1: Offtopic posts are not archived. Surprising, isn't it ?)
> I think they may be secretly hoping it doesn't stand up in court, because in order to be struck down, RIAA has to show just how poor a law the DMCA really is and start the ball rolling on repealing the law
I don't get it. They will just add something like 'DCMA-is-for-consumers,-not-for-RIAA'. Of course 'DCMA-is-for-consumers,-not-for-RIAA' will be written 'in-case-of-file-swapping, a law enforcment agency can be asked by plaintiff to ask for a descryption key. Plaintiff can then monitor traffic for a limited time'. Of course, 'in-case-of-file-swapping' will be written 'in case of suspicion of repeated copyright violation'...
I'm sorry, but I have yet to see a case where a clever-or-not-so-clever hack can destroy a money-bought law. The law will just become more and more fascist, ("Dear congress, those evil bastard are trying everything to break our beloved DMCA. Could-you add something about death penalty for anyone making a digital copy of anything ? Thanks in advance. PS: Feel free to use the enclosed blank check.)
All in all, we agree. I've been a bit start to jump on my gun.
I was specifically upset by the sentence:
"Lists, drop-down, scrolling or whatever, are inappropriate GUI elements for selecting from hundreds of items"
I agree with you about the drop-down/combo stuff.
I tried to make a point about the fact that other GUI elements (ie: lists and scrolling) should handle an arbitrary number of elements. On that, we seem to agree.
> I will, however, suggest that visualizing a log file in a drop-down list is perhaps a less than optimal design choice
:-)
> The list viewport is so small in relation to the total list size
This is broken. I hate combo boxes because of that. The list viewport should be as big as the user want.
> The scroll thumb moves tens or hundreds of items with the tiniest of mouse inputs
A system like NeXTstep used 'alt'-click to slowly move thumb. All UI should also have all windows resizable so the list viewport can be made arbitrary large. I hate we I have a big screen, with a non-resizable little window, in which there is a tiny list that ask me to choose in which laguage I speak, starting with 'Afrikaans', 'Albanais',...
> I had done many prototypes showing how java was 7 - 9% faster on all Windows implementations but due to the restrictions placed on us by Sun we had to use c++
I remember that, Bob. Java was really an option. But what prevented its widespread use at microsoft was probably the fact that it was not invented yet. We used to joke a lot about that ("Java is so slow that it is not even here yet !")
> because of the lack of proper method deconstruction eating up your resources.
I remember that too. We joked about it a lot ("Sorry bill, the dog ated all my resources"). In fact, I don't think I recall anything but jokes of this time. That was the good time.
Slashdot Mirror
> Intel didn't bring suit against Randal
So much for opening my mouth without have read all the web site. Thanks for the correction.
Cheers,
--fred
> Those appear to tell us he cracked passwords that he should not have and he ran a program on Intel computers that enabled him to access the computers from outside Intel, which he had been previously caught doing and instructed to stop
/etc/passwd. Too bad for lusers that used easy password. There were setuid files about everywhere (reseted by nighlty scripts, but this is easily worked around). We were studiying UNIX in a hostile environment. It was a game to try to root the university servers. (We got root once, he was pretty pissed. He ran to the machine room and shutdown the servers in emergency). Of course we had backdoors to most computers where we had accounts.
/etc/passwd ? Put an open ftp server. You'll get hundreds of get /etc/passwd). IMHO, Intel should have droppped the suit, but they probably wanted to make an example.
Well, he was doing this in such an obvious way that I can't beleive he was really malicious, in particular in 1993. I used to run crack on password files, mostly as a game. I think every sysadmin should run crack on user password. When I was an UNIX student, the sysadmin let us run crack on
Anyway, this mostly show a lack of security in intel (if he bring back the password at home and crack those there, would he be guilty ? Yes ? So he is guilty of cat
Cheers,
--fred
Thx. He put a personal backdoor and ran crack on a few files.
:-). IMHO, his bigger fault was getting caught...
Gees. Recall me when I was a student. Mmm. I should be in jail now
Cheers,
--fred
I spend about half an hour on the website.
Sure, it does document the legal case, but is there a way to actually find what you did ?
Cheers,
--fred
I would have modded it up as "Funny".
Of course Napster is going to get its info from wherever it can find it. Hell, the RIAA can give them the list of all song names, authors, albums, etc, etc. Napster could take its data from FreeDB, but it would not be as funny. After all, FreeDB give free information, for the good and the evil.
The CDDB steal data from people that were riping CDS to put the on Napster which now sleeps with RIAA and uses the very data those people typed in and can't have free access to, to prevent them access to the song they ripped.
It's... marvelous. Really. It is a splendid shortcut of what the net have become.
Cheers,
--fred
lol
> They're SUPPOSED to moderate on the basis of the quality of the post but NOT on the basis of whether it agrees with their opinions. But some yeild to the temtation to moderate down postings with which they have an ideological disagreement.
Now, ther is another possibility. It is that the moderator looked at the history of 'quantum_pixie' to see its posting habits. In that case, he may have found that 'quantum_pixie' have a clear tendancy to post "provocatively creative" ideas. For instance:
* "I have yet to see anyone clearly state why copy protection for hard drives would be a bad thing"
* "The police (particularly the British police) are notoriously corrupt"
* "children need to be protected, though, not used as pawns in a libertarian game"
* "The developers for KDE should take a good long look at the Gnome team, and realize that developing a clean, stable, intuitive window manager is more important than integrating yesterdays buzzwords"
* "How will it affect surrounding wildlife to have lasers beamed through the air every which way ? Will birds have to worry about being cooked as they fly?"
* "When highly confidential and sensitive data is transferred, it is critical that a demonstrably secure algorithm be used. All public key algorithms have failed this test, and thus do not deserve consideration in a serious computing environment"
This is a random sample. I definitely like qpt, which IMHO, is one of the most funny contributor to slashdot.
From my point of view, yes, this should have been modded Funny, not Troll.
Cheers,
--fred
This is not insightful, it is just plain stupid.
"how important is this realistically" ? Wtf this means ? UK is probably the most pro-american part of the EU. If UK refuses software patents, it can be a huge win for the EU. "how important is this realistically" ? Well, as important as it can be. America IP laws are fucked, probably definitely. The only hope is that EU and Japan stand against US, if we want our childs to *own* their thoughts.
> thus still protecting themselves in as much geographical area as possible
So what ? The only way to eradicate software patent is to make them uninforcable. *If* EU refuses software patents, than development companies may have an interest to be in EU to develop software. In this case, the US will have to relax the legislation to keep the software businesses aboard.
Cheers,
--fred
> took it upon myself to release the logs
Thanks for that. It would have been more fun/efficient if you released the logs slowly ("And tomorrow, as a guest star, lowtax, from SA fame...")
Anyway, it is always nice when shit hits the fan that way...
Cheers,
--fred
> Michael laid them all off.
Or maybe just deleted their accounts...
Cheers,
--fred
> I think the point was hypocrisy
:-) ).
That's was exactly it.
> the poster you responded to may be a nutter who really thinks software is religion
Not at all, so thanks for using 'may'. I don't use windows and tend to avoid microsoft products, but this is something personal (that started before there was even a Microsof Windows). Note that I don't run linux either, but that it for practical reasons.
The whole point of the rant was hypocrisy, and I have my share of it too (If I was less hypocrit, I would use *no* microsoft products, I would do a web page about *why* I don't use them, and would actively promote a real boycott, and become a 'nutter who really thinks software is religion' on your radar
Cheers,
--fred
> Those who accept the death penalty believe that it will save more innocent lives if those convicted of murder are executed
Yep. But the original poster said 'These peope forfeit the lot, the moment they murder', which is wrong in the sense accidental penalty of innocent means that those people loosed their rights without murdering.
Your description is more correct than his, which by pretending beeing mecanic (ie: murder -> lost of rights -> death penalty can be applied) had a huge hole.
Cheers,
--fred
> Want to boycott RJR Nabisco? No more Kraft Mac and Cheeze for you! Disney? May as well turn off the TV. Sony? Forgetabout it.
Omygod. You are okay to boycott *only* if it is easy ? You think that a boycott is just consumer choice ? You agree to refuse to boycott de-facto monopolies, because it may hurt your comfort ?
Of course, you are in line with slashdot. CmdrTaco that still runs windows ("For the games"), and got all wet at the idea of Diablo II.
All this is fake. The real problem is that you don't have any cause you feel strong enought to fight for. Hey, I don't have either. I sorta boycott things I don't like (Television, Disney, FastFoods, Microsoft, Intel, Sony). And, frankly, it doesn't cost me much. Half-baked boycott.
> I imagine many people are boycotting DVDs or CDs due to the MPAA/RIAA
No, they are not. Most of them are boycotting DVDs or CDs cause they can get the for free (as-in-beer) on the net.
> These groups can easily claim that lack of sales was not due to boycotts [...]
Claims made by those groups have *never* needed to bear any relation with reality. They have an advantage to say that sales declines so they can push new laws throught the American Congress (which I don't care about), and the WTO (which I do care about). They already did this for TV, and for Video. In every case, (MP|RI)AA will pretend that they lost obscene amounts of money, and that they have god-given right to profit on all entertainment and IP. "ALL YOUR NET MUSIC ARE BELONG TO US" kind of thing. They'll probably win...
Cheers,
--fred
> What can be the human rights violation in frying/shooting/poisoning a convicted murderer. These peope forfeit the lot, the moment they murder.
And of course, there have never been any innocent sentenced to death.
Cheers,
--fred
> You are a penis.
Vous en etes un autre.
It explains everything.
Cheers,
--fred
> And don't even get me started on the French
Oh, bob. Last time you gave me a babaooey (and a special one !), and now, that ? What happened ?
You are one of the best techno-columnist of slashdot. Respect your readership. Think about all the little boys and girls, religiously reading what you have to tell the world.
Btw, any progress on the two-buttons macintosh mouse front ?
Cheers,
--fred
Oh my GNU. I can't beleive that there are morons that stores the prices client-side.
I am surprised that
1/ A lot of sites have goatsecx'ed shopping carts
2/ This have not been abused to death (ie: if you can get 25$ on a notebook, then you should buy a hundred of them).
I would first suspect employees of those dotcoms that hacked the databases for them or their friends. Like boo.com (Thanks to hole in the applications, employees were able to buy products in pounds, and pay in pesetas). Then I would suspect plain bugs (I once had the WebObject store.apple.com proposing me real nice prices, with a lot of 0$ options on high-end macs. I didn't bought them, but maybe I should have ?).
Btw, what are "pricing snafus resulting in a smorgasbord of bargains" ? Is this pig english thing already used at zdnet ?
Cheers,
--fred
> It's tolerable. The main problem was that it's rather cold in the winter; -2 to 5 degrees. Only some parts of the structure are heated; some rooms, like the kitchen, are pretty much the same temperature as outside, just without wind -- you can see your breath, the room is about as cold as the fridge, etc.
See the bright side of it. You can host overclocked servers easily.
Cheers,
--fred
> Famous slashdot poster Signal 11 grew tired of this site. So he gave away his account. Dear beloved free speech advocate Michael discovered this and used his authorial privileges to steal the account. No warning was given. No explanation either. The account was simply stolen and that was that.
I recall that. There have been a log posted. Anybody kept it ? (too bad -1: Offtopic posts are not archived. Surprising, isn't it ?)
Cheers,
--fred
> A war of disinformation
Or, more likely, you created the so-called impostors and this little silly war, just to get a little more attention on you.
Who could loose time impersonating you from _several_ different accounts ? It is just ridiculous, even Bruce Pernes don't have that much impostors.
Cheers,
--fred
Could a perl wizard tell us what exactly this linuxnews.pl do, as it looks a little cryptic to me ? Sure, it looks like perl, but...
Cheers
--fred
> I think they may be secretly hoping it doesn't stand up in court, because in order to be struck down, RIAA has to show just how poor a law the DMCA really is and start the ball rolling on repealing the law
I don't get it. They will just add something like 'DCMA-is-for-consumers,-not-for-RIAA'. Of course 'DCMA-is-for-consumers,-not-for-RIAA' will be written 'in-case-of-file-swapping, a law enforcment agency can be asked by plaintiff to ask for a descryption key. Plaintiff can then monitor traffic for a limited time'. Of course, 'in-case-of-file-swapping' will be written 'in case of suspicion of repeated copyright violation'...
I'm sorry, but I have yet to see a case where a clever-or-not-so-clever hack can destroy a money-bought law. The law will just become more and more fascist, ("Dear congress, those evil bastard are trying everything to break our beloved DMCA. Could-you add something about death penalty for anyone making a digital copy of anything ? Thanks in advance. PS: Feel free to use the enclosed blank check.)
Cheers,
--fred
All in all, we agree. I've been a bit start to jump on my gun.
...
I was specifically upset by the sentence:
"Lists, drop-down, scrolling or whatever, are inappropriate GUI elements for selecting from hundreds of items"
I agree with you about the drop-down/combo stuff.
I tried to make a point about the fact that other GUI elements (ie: lists and scrolling) should handle an arbitrary number of elements. On that, we seem to agree.
> I will, however, suggest that visualizing a log file in a drop-down list is perhaps a less than optimal design choice
:-)
> The list viewport is so small in relation to the total list size
This is broken. I hate combo boxes because of that. The list viewport should be as big as the user want.
> The scroll thumb moves tens or hundreds of items with the tiniest of mouse inputs
A system like NeXTstep used 'alt'-click to slowly move thumb. All UI should also have all windows resizable so the list viewport can be made arbitrary large. I hate we I have a big screen, with a non-resizable little window, in which there is a tiny list that ask me to choose in which laguage I speak, starting with 'Afrikaans', 'Albanais',
Cheers,
--fred
> I had done many prototypes showing how java was 7 - 9% faster on all Windows implementations but due to the restrictions placed on us by Sun we had to use c++
I remember that, Bob. Java was really an option. But what prevented its widespread use at microsoft was probably the fact that it was not invented yet. We used to joke a lot about that ("Java is so slow that it is not even here yet !")
> because of the lack of proper method deconstruction eating up your resources.
I remember that too. We joked about it a lot ("Sorry bill, the dog ated all my resources"). In fact, I don't think I recall anything but jokes of this time. That was the good time.
Cheers,
--fred
This made my day Bob, thanks.
Cheers,
--fred