Hey, I've got a low 6-digit UID, have been involved in UNIX on a daily basis since 1997 (and on-and-off since 1992) and I still come here occasionally.
PS. Don't want to start a flamewar, but if by "POSIX compliant" you mean GNU/Linux, you are mistaken.
PPS. I'm sure I remember seeing this scam, and those carvings, well over a year ago
I, for one, welcome our US overlords. Really, I don't know what the Iraqis have been complaining about; I look forward to an endless invasion of my sovereign country with an unknown body count
YANAL. Nor am I, but even I know that McKinnon did his typing in the UK; whether the site is hosted in the UK or the USA (or elsewhere) seems to be generally treated as irrelevant - if the info hosted in COUNTRY_Y, but is available in COUNTRY_X, and it's against COUNTRY_X's laws, and COUNTRY_X is large enough (I think the USA qualifies) then COUNTRY_X's laws are also invoked, simply because COUNTRY_Y will back down to the prosecuting country.
Look at the Yahoo!/Ebay stuff about French laws about Nazi memorabilia, for example.
Dropping my mod privs to post this...
Simple, clear, well-understood and documented solution for - as you say - very low-powered devices, by modern standards, have lead to a still simple, well-understood and documented solution for today's needs. As you also say, ACLs have been added for additional control should that be required (and whilst it sometimes is required, it often indicates a lack of simple, clear, well-understood and documented system configuration in the first place).
If the best workaround is the list provided in this article (ignore security completely, give all control to a single user, or give all users full access) is certainly not an improvement.
No, it's not retarded... for anyone who follows his advice, and clicks the Google Adsense advert and signs up to Google Adsense, then he (Holmes Wilson, according to whois) gets $100 from Google for a succesful referal.
That's a pretty smart way of fooling people into clicking the link. Underhand, but smart.
No no no. You have missed the point. I can take a Windows virus into my Linux system with total impunity; an ELF-format virus is a far more dangerous toy to play with.
No, the virus writers need a vector into one platform, and can infect two platforms... normally, when a Windows PC has been infected and, in turn, mailed out viruses to everyone in its addressbook, I have happily deleted these Win32 binaries from my inbox (using Linux). Now, if they could also be treated as ELFs, then granted, I should have to:
Save to disk
Make executable
Execute
But a single bug in Thunderbird, Evolution, etc, could make a virus (already well-spread by Windows PCs) a real threat to Linux desktop users, too.
No, you couldn't. See the previous posts. There is no difference between http://a/b/c/d on "b/c/d" on server "A", and "/d" on server "A/B/C". The DNS Server should not differentiate between these.
One thing that DNS did badly in the early days, was to add extensions for email (the MX tag). That was an application-specific addition to something which was basically a globalised/etc/hosts file.
This was spotted early on, and although we are stuck with that mess now, adding more application-specific crap into DNS would make the existing DNS mash worse than it already is.
I would rather that someone suggest a method to remove MX stuff from DNS without breaking the existing email infrastructure... I don't have the answer myself, but if some genius can find a way to do that, then the Internet can become a better place.
This is known as a "clicktrap" and (imho) is the most annoying thing in the world to happen upon.
I envy your simple life. If the worst thing in your life is a bad link on a website, you either have a perfect life, or no life. Does the war in Iraq not annoy you? Does "third-world" poverty not annoy you? Is this really the most annoying thing in the world?
What a simple life. I envy your clarity of thought.
I agree completely; if I don't want responsibility, I can work a sewing machine from 9-5. As I am responsible for the design of certain large systems, if I chose to say that "It's 5.30pm, I've clocked off", I wouldn't be doing my job. That is exactly my complaint - the 24/7 connectivity "benefits" are benefits for the employer, not for the employee.
I am an employee, and in the 1980s, if I was not in my office, I would be uncontactable (and that would be accepted). Now, I find that I turn up on Monday morning, having left my phone off all weekend, and it turns out that there was a fire in the datacentre on Friday night. That's not my problem in a direct sense, but it is my problem in that our upgrade work could not be carried out over the weekend (as all resources (and more - called in by their phones, of course!) had their weekends ruined by an unforseen event, and the fact that they were available.)
That's my point - on the one hand, it's a pain to be available, but then again, if the datacentre catches fire on Friday evening, and nobody was available, then it would be worse for all of us. Fortunately, those who had to be available, were available, and work is going on to get back to normal MO, but if those people weren't accessible on the weekend, it would have been much worse.
That is the dichtomy - having a Life vs. screwing things up at work.
It means that I can't say "Yeah, let's do Thursday at 8pm" because it's Sunday morning at the moment, and until about 6pm Thursday I can't say for sure that I'm available. If the plan is for a meal at my house, then that screws up everybody's plans.
It means that if you've got a 9-5 job, but I'm supposed to be babysitting for you, and suddenly get called into the office, then my work has called off your personal plans.
This work-based lifestyle has consequences which reach out into everybody's social circles. It is not productive, and it is not a good way to work. I'm not saying that "9-5 and then clock off" is necessarily better, but the ability to leave the office and then be uncontactable until you next visit the office was a Good Thing (for those of us who remember it!)
I agree with you in terms of the legal position - if you're being paid for a 40-hr-week, then make sure that you don't do more than 40 hours. However, if you get to the point that on Thursday lunchtime, you've already done 45 hours, and there's a critical upgrade happening on the weekend, which is being planned on Thursday afternoon and Friday, what do you do? If you walk out of the office, switch off the phone and go skiing, what happens on Monday when you get back to work and find that the idiots have set fire to the entire datacentre?
Us techies are employed for a reason - we know the details, and management do not understand it. If they decide on Friday that they'll install a CPU into a PCI slot, and you're not around to point out that this is impossible, they'll go ahead and try to do it anyway.
If there's a tagline to attract flames, I think that's got to be it!:-)
I love the BBC, and in this case (I didn't see the original broadcast), the BBC have stated, on their own bbc.co.uk domain, that they oversimplified a very complicated issue in a 4-minute segment. Ergo, I love the BBC even more.
I'm surprised at the "30% or more" stats for BitTorrent (or is that P2P in general?), but the argument that legitimate users shouldn't use encryption simply because "bad" people might use it also is crap. I don't agree with USAian gun laws ("we can all have guns because any other guy could have a gun"), but I reserve the right to use encryption for anything I choose to send over the internet.
I agree that ISPs (within their published Terms and Conditions) can choose to restrict (say) unencrypted BitTorrents, and that adding encryption to Torrents in order to evade detection is a pain for the ISPs, but to say that the use of encryption in itself is either immoral, illegal, or against T&C's, is not a good way for an ISP to go about Public Relations.
If the security services have a problem with many users using (admittedly weak) encryption - just enough to get it around the ISP's current set of firewall rules - then the security services have a problem.
If we all agreed to encode our phone conversations for the next week, would GCHQ say that we can't use phones, simply because they can't tell the difference between:
1) Legitimate sharing of information
2) Illegal sharing of corporate data (not strictly in the Govt's remit anyway)
3) Terrorist activity
If the security services can't tell the difference between "A Bug's Life" and "Let's fly planes into Canary Wharf", do we all need to change our private contracts with whatever ISP we choose to use such that we agree that we will never encrypt anything, so that the encrypted stuff sticks out like a sore thumb? There goes the entire telecommuting workforce, who depend upon encrypted VPN access into corporate VLANs, and the national economy takes a huge dive along with it.
"Boycott Google - Everything you've ever searched for is permanently associated with your IP address. Fun!"
It's not associated with your IP address - that could change over time (dialup), or apply to many people (corporate proxy).
It's worse than that - it's associated with your PC. Your cookie is sent to Google whenever you use it (google.com, gmaail, maps.google.com, etc). They don't just tie it in with your IP, it's your PC, and whatever Google services you access with that PC.
If you're going to be paranoid, get the paranoia right!:-)
When I did PC support, there was a new-hire secretary who had no Windows experience. (This was in the days of Win3.1). I showed her how to find the games, as these would help her to use the mouse. Without that, she'd no idea about what the mouse did, or what it was for.
I agree with the sentiment, but I'm not sure that it's as bad as that (or not yet, anyway)... if someone proposes to the CEO that they offshore all staff, then the same argument applies - the "prove it's cheaper" is quite easy, but "prove that it will provide the quality of service we require" is not necessarily as simple. Sometimes, it does work (and helps to shift (some) Western cash to the less well-off countries, which must be a Good Thing, in that if we were not divided between "ultra-rich" and "ultra-poor" countries, there would be significantly less motivation for war), and sometimes it doesn't work (As someone who only speaks English (my limitation, I admit), have you tried getting tech support from Dell?!).
I could have added the moral aspect to my original post (it is something I feel strongly about), but I have to admit that in my personal experience, the people who are in power, are in power thanks to the status quo, and are therefore very resistant to changing that status quo (the ladder upon which they are standing).
If that gives you an unmanageable burden, there is (theoretically) the option of getting out of the capitalist system, but it is not easy (particularly for those of us in the Western world, where houses cost hundreds of thousands, etc, etc). Just because it's not easy doesn't mean that it's not an option, of course.
However, I feel that this is getting rather philosophical for a discussion that was originally about the choice between two operating systems:-)
The OP seemed to imply an implicit preference for Linux over Windows; all I was really trying to say (though, as often happens, I got over verbose) is that from a business perspective (and I was addressing it from the assumption that you have chosen to work for a capitalist business), the "technically better" solution is not necessarily the "business better" solution.
In a similar way, the "morally better" solution is not necessarily the "business better" solution, but that is really a different discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I've got a low 6-digit UID, have been involved in UNIX on a daily basis since 1997 (and on-and-off since 1992) and I still come here occasionally.
PS. Don't want to start a flamewar, but if by "POSIX compliant" you mean GNU/Linux, you are mistaken.
PPS. I'm sure I remember seeing this scam, and those carvings, well over a year ago
I, for one, welcome our US overlords. Really, I don't know what the Iraqis have been complaining about; I look forward to an endless invasion of my sovereign country with an unknown body count
No, it doesn't, you are wrong.
it doesn't necessarily mean that it is ok to file share
It certainly doesn't say that.
P2P, for example bittorrent, could be seen as making copies for other people (as you upload data to them).
No sh1t, Einstein
Okay then - what if I make copies for personal use, and then re-sell the originals? Which is the "pirated" copy now?
In other news, a survey found that the majority of Americans don't understand why the rest of the world view them as dumb, mindless sheep.
YANAL. Nor am I, but even I know that McKinnon did his typing in the UK; whether the site is hosted in the UK or the USA (or elsewhere) seems to be generally treated as irrelevant - if the info hosted in COUNTRY_Y, but is available in COUNTRY_X, and it's against COUNTRY_X's laws, and COUNTRY_X is large enough (I think the USA qualifies) then COUNTRY_X's laws are also invoked, simply because COUNTRY_Y will back down to the prosecuting country. Look at the Yahoo!/Ebay stuff about French laws about Nazi memorabilia, for example.
Dropping my mod privs to post this ...
Simple, clear, well-understood and documented solution for - as you say - very low-powered devices, by modern standards, have lead to a still simple, well-understood and documented solution for today's needs. As you also say, ACLs have been added for additional control should that be required (and whilst it sometimes is required, it often indicates a lack of simple, clear, well-understood and documented system configuration in the first place).
If the best workaround is the list provided in this article (ignore security completely, give all control to a single user, or give all users full access) is certainly not an improvement.
No, it's not retarded... for anyone who follows his advice, and clicks the Google Adsense advert and signs up to Google Adsense, then he (Holmes Wilson, according to whois) gets $100 from Google for a succesful referal. That's a pretty smart way of fooling people into clicking the link. Underhand, but smart.
15,000 miles in 100 hours - that's an average speed of 150mph in his commute
No no no. You have missed the point. I can take a Windows virus into my Linux system with total impunity; an ELF-format virus is a far more dangerous toy to play with.
- Save to disk
- Make executable
- Execute
But a single bug in Thunderbird, Evolution, etc, could make a virus (already well-spread by Windows PCs) a real threat to Linux desktop users, too.One thing that DNS did badly in the early days, was to add extensions for email (the MX tag). That was an application-specific addition to something which was basically a globalised /etc/hosts file.
This was spotted early on, and although we are stuck with that mess now, adding more application-specific crap into DNS would make the existing DNS mash worse than it already is.
I would rather that someone suggest a method to remove MX stuff from DNS without breaking the existing email infrastructure... I don't have the answer myself, but if some genius can find a way to do that, then the Internet can become a better place.
I envy your simple life. If the worst thing in your life is a bad link on a website, you either have a perfect life, or no life. Does the war in Iraq not annoy you? Does "third-world" poverty not annoy you? Is this really the most annoying thing in the world?
What a simple life. I envy your clarity of thought.
I agree completely; if I don't want responsibility, I can work a sewing machine from 9-5. As I am responsible for the design of certain large systems, if I chose to say that "It's 5.30pm, I've clocked off", I wouldn't be doing my job. That is exactly my complaint - the 24/7 connectivity "benefits" are benefits for the employer, not for the employee. I am an employee, and in the 1980s, if I was not in my office, I would be uncontactable (and that would be accepted). Now, I find that I turn up on Monday morning, having left my phone off all weekend, and it turns out that there was a fire in the datacentre on Friday night. That's not my problem in a direct sense, but it is my problem in that our upgrade work could not be carried out over the weekend (as all resources (and more - called in by their phones, of course!) had their weekends ruined by an unforseen event, and the fact that they were available.) That's my point - on the one hand, it's a pain to be available, but then again, if the datacentre catches fire on Friday evening, and nobody was available, then it would be worse for all of us. Fortunately, those who had to be available, were available, and work is going on to get back to normal MO, but if those people weren't accessible on the weekend, it would have been much worse. That is the dichtomy - having a Life vs. screwing things up at work.
It means that I can't say "Yeah, let's do Thursday at 8pm" because it's Sunday morning at the moment, and until about 6pm Thursday I can't say for sure that I'm available. If the plan is for a meal at my house, then that screws up everybody's plans. It means that if you've got a 9-5 job, but I'm supposed to be babysitting for you, and suddenly get called into the office, then my work has called off your personal plans. This work-based lifestyle has consequences which reach out into everybody's social circles. It is not productive, and it is not a good way to work. I'm not saying that "9-5 and then clock off" is necessarily better, but the ability to leave the office and then be uncontactable until you next visit the office was a Good Thing (for those of us who remember it!)
I agree with you in terms of the legal position - if you're being paid for a 40-hr-week, then make sure that you don't do more than 40 hours. However, if you get to the point that on Thursday lunchtime, you've already done 45 hours, and there's a critical upgrade happening on the weekend, which is being planned on Thursday afternoon and Friday, what do you do? If you walk out of the office, switch off the phone and go skiing, what happens on Monday when you get back to work and find that the idiots have set fire to the entire datacentre? Us techies are employed for a reason - we know the details, and management do not understand it. If they decide on Friday that they'll install a CPU into a PCI slot, and you're not around to point out that this is impossible, they'll go ahead and try to do it anyway.
And if they saw slashdot browsing below 5, they'd write us off completely
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/SunFi reV120_shared/spec.html just as one example. This is not news (and it doesn't really matter!)
I saved up enough for an 80286 towards the end of my first year.
If there's a tagline to attract flames, I think that's got to be it! :-)
I love the BBC, and in this case (I didn't see the original broadcast), the BBC have stated, on their own bbc.co.uk domain, that they oversimplified a very complicated issue in a 4-minute segment. Ergo, I love the BBC even more.
I'm surprised at the "30% or more" stats for BitTorrent (or is that P2P in general?), but the argument that legitimate users shouldn't use encryption simply because "bad" people might use it also is crap. I don't agree with USAian gun laws ("we can all have guns because any other guy could have a gun"), but I reserve the right to use encryption for anything I choose to send over the internet.
I agree that ISPs (within their published Terms and Conditions) can choose to restrict (say) unencrypted BitTorrents, and that adding encryption to Torrents in order to evade detection is a pain for the ISPs, but to say that the use of encryption in itself is either immoral, illegal, or against T&C's, is not a good way for an ISP to go about Public Relations.
If the security services have a problem with many users using (admittedly weak) encryption - just enough to get it around the ISP's current set of firewall rules - then the security services have a problem.
If we all agreed to encode our phone conversations for the next week, would GCHQ say that we can't use phones, simply because they can't tell the difference between:
1) Legitimate sharing of information
2) Illegal sharing of corporate data (not strictly in the Govt's remit anyway)
3) Terrorist activity
If the security services can't tell the difference between "A Bug's Life" and "Let's fly planes into Canary Wharf", do we all need to change our private contracts with whatever ISP we choose to use such that we agree that we will never encrypt anything, so that the encrypted stuff sticks out like a sore thumb? There goes the entire telecommuting workforce, who depend upon encrypted VPN access into corporate VLANs, and the national economy takes a huge dive along with it.
"Boycott Google - Everything you've ever searched for is permanently associated with your IP address. Fun!" It's not associated with your IP address - that could change over time (dialup), or apply to many people (corporate proxy). It's worse than that - it's associated with your PC. Your cookie is sent to Google whenever you use it (google.com, gmaail, maps.google.com, etc). They don't just tie it in with your IP, it's your PC, and whatever Google services you access with that PC. If you're going to be paranoid, get the paranoia right! :-)
FFS. If you need to ask, you need to check your moral bone.
When I did PC support, there was a new-hire secretary who had no Windows experience. (This was in the days of Win3.1). I showed her how to find the games, as these would help her to use the mouse. Without that, she'd no idea about what the mouse did, or what it was for.
I could have added the moral aspect to my original post (it is something I feel strongly about), but I have to admit that in my personal experience, the people who are in power, are in power thanks to the status quo, and are therefore very resistant to changing that status quo (the ladder upon which they are standing).
If that gives you an unmanageable burden, there is (theoretically) the option of getting out of the capitalist system, but it is not easy (particularly for those of us in the Western world, where houses cost hundreds of thousands, etc, etc). Just because it's not easy doesn't mean that it's not an option, of course.
However, I feel that this is getting rather philosophical for a discussion that was originally about the choice between two operating systems :-)
The OP seemed to imply an implicit preference for Linux over Windows; all I was really trying to say (though, as often happens, I got over verbose) is that from a business perspective (and I was addressing it from the assumption that you have chosen to work for a capitalist business), the "technically better" solution is not necessarily the "business better" solution.
In a similar way, the "morally better" solution is not necessarily the "business better" solution, but that is really a different discussion.