6 months ago I first saw some Linux Netbooks here in Japan. When I went to buy one for my daughter's birthday last month, I couldn't find a single one. They had all been replaced with Windows XP. Everywhere.
Microsoft strikes again with back room deals to keep Linux out of the market in Japan.
Looks like I'll need to spend a little more and buy a MacBook for my daughter. I absolutely refuse to pay the Microsoft Tax, and can't get any of the Japanese sellers to remove it.
A while back I noticed that the advertising banners on the top of one of the Japanese sports newspaper sites was either one of two ads:
Microsoft Vista
Planet of the AV
One of these featured the virtues of using its product, the other promised seductive videos of vices. Can you tell which one was more honest in its advertisement?
But does Microsoft feel any shame for being less reputable than an AV (Adult Video) site?
IF MS really wanted to lock you into Windows, they could have broken Netscape or any of their other competitors at any time. [...] But they never did.
That is incorrect. Installing the Japanese version of MS Office broke Netscape 4.x Gold's TPC/IP stack. Back then, MS Office couldn't even export to HTML (third party macros could), so why would the TCP/IP stack need changing? (Other than to try to destroy a compeditor?)
My solution was to stop installing MS Office. Netscape was more important to me. Netscape Gold was my word processor (I had given up on MS Word the year before for writing anything as I fought with its auto-xxxx functionalty too often). I didn't use spreadsheets that often, and I would miss Access. But some principals were more important to me.
From that point on, I requested spreadsheets in CSV format and documents as plain text. I drove my supervisors and managment nuts with my refusal to accept MS formatted files (this started back in 1997-8, before I was so fed up with Microsoft that I started moving all my work to FreeBSD - but that's a different story), but they found a way to accommodate me.
Don't tell me that Microsoft never stooped so low as to undermine a compeditor by deliberately breaking the libraries that their compeditors used. They did. And it drove me away from Microsoft.
Such predictive systems were on most computers in Japan in the 1980s. They were known then as Front End Processors, renamed to Input Method Editors (to be different?) in the 1990s by Microsoft. The better ones (ATOK) could lead you along as you typed in Japanese for the correct Kanji choice for the Hiragana (pronunciation alphabet) entered.
Any engineer who'd spent time in Japan (typing in Japanese) in the 1980s could have brought this idea back with them for entering English. The need just didn't arise for English speakers (typers) until more recently, but the idea and tech are old.
I stopped using Word back in 1997 when I couldn't get a simple (C) to not be turned into a copyright symbol in a document. After several hours of searching help and disabling what seemed like hundreds of preferences that began with "auto," I pasted the document text into Netscape Gold's HTML editor and never looked back.
I've given the PHBs plenty of trouble since then by not accepting DOC files (or later on Excel files either). They can't figure out how to save in any other format (which was my suggestion the first few years).
To make a long story short, they've finally taken to just printing the document for me and e-mailing it to everyone else.
I sincerely hope that this rash of zero-day viruses will finally get them to consider ODF, but it'll probably take another 3-5 years before that epiphany hits any of them.
I'm currently more concerned with the war on streaming, and am getting more and more depressed as alternative streams to MS Media Player are slowly disappearing.
The latest to go was Comedy Central. I've enjoyed The Daily Show over the Internet for the past few years, but that came to an abrupt end a couple of weeks ago when all of the newer streams were in MS Media Player format only. I asked if this was temporary, and mentioned that the link to "change player preferences" didn't work in FireFox, and their indirect reply was to change the media player pop-up window to no longer give a choice of media formats. It's Microsoft or nothing.
I've tried VLC (get audio, no video) and MPlayer, but neither work. Unless the/. crowd can somehow campaign for the return of Real streams, especially now that it's been Opened, I'm afraid that it's time to remove Comedy Central from my daily opened tab group.
Was this conference the reason behind a large increase in SSH attack attemps over the past two weeks? The past few months had been relatively quiet in regard to SSH attacks (I was wondering if I'd been cracked and they weren't being reported any more), but I've been getting multiple attempts pretty much daily for the past two weeks. What's up?
But something is out of kilter when the heroes aren't the innovators, the discovers, the creators, but the MBAstard who can best throw his weight around.
Read "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It's an alternate history located in London exploring the time line of "what if computers were created 100 years earlier?" The results were a society of scientists, where those who contribute to science become royalty (it's what's in your mind, not the color of your blood). There still are politicians, patent lawers, and other social leaches, but in the end, it's carefully thought out planning that saves London. (Ok, that's not quite the end.)
I realize that a lot of people here didn't like the book. I don't think that I really got it my first reading about 10 years ago, but on my second reading last month, the social structure Gibson was proposing really struck me. Would a society built on scientific principals work today? Or would the lawers and CEOs see to it that it never came about? Where would K&R and Linus be in such a society?
Actually, I've been in an elevator where pushing the button twice had an effect. I accidently pushed both the 6 and 7 buttons one time, then double clicked the 6 button, and it turned off. I thought that was a rather nice feature. It was a small enough elevator (max 5 people) that it's unlikely that someone would cancel out a floor another person wanted.
I've been happilly using FreeBSD since installing it over the release version of Windows 98 on my laptop when Win98's "production" version turned out worse than Beta 2. Several notebooks later, all with FreeBSD installed over the OS they came with minutes after arriving home, I decided I didn't want to pay the MS tax any more and bought a PowerBook.
OS/X is basically FreeBSD with some eye candy, I told myself. That got it in the door. I installed the X server so that I can still run a lot of the standard stuff from the FreeBSD and GNU/Linux worlds. (Getting Japanese to work on the X side of things is a pain! Never had any trouble, even in 1998, getting a Japanese environment to work on FreeBSD.)
But there are a lot of things different than FreeBSD. The startup for one. FreeBSD was so much easier than Linux to get what I wanted up and running at startup. Just put a script in/usr/local/etc/rc.d. (Never did figure out what all of the different boot levels on Linux were about.) I have yet to figure out how to do it properly on OS/X. There's a startup directory under/System, but it doesn't appear to take shell scripts. If an application doesn't do it's magic when the package is installed, it doesn't get used. I feel like this sort of thing has been hidden from the end user, and it's annoying. FreeBSD was so well put together from an administrative point of view, why hide these things?
But in the end, the complaints are relatively few. I no longer cvsup the world every few weeks, leaving make world running all night. (Well, I do still have a number of other FreeBSD servers scattered over the planet, so it's not quite "never" - just no longer with a direct link to the keyboard.) It's taking a while, but I'm slowly finding applications that perform as well on OS/X as on FreeBSD. (Until I recently upgraded iTerm, editing Japanese documents with vim hasn't been nearly as easy as it had been in kterm.)
Yea, I miss FreeBSD as my primary desktop/development machine. But my parents like that I now edit videos of their grandchildren and send them to them online and via DVD as they're 13 time zones away.
No sooner do I write this then I get spam from Harte-Hanks, a marketing firm in Austin, Texas, posted to my forums. Did it come through a compromized Windows' box in their IP block? I don't know. But
ipfw -q add 10516 deny all from 63.95.64.0/21 to any
takes care of them rather well. For a target marketer, they chose the wrong target.
P.S. Most cracking attempts againt my computer (SSH and the Apache flaws back when they were first discovered a couple years back) appear to originate from Texas. Why is that?
I had someone trying to spam my forum with a meditation site. (S)he claimed that it really helps to relax you. Well, the fool posting it didn't read that all messages must be approved before they get posted, because (s)he posted the same message a few times, then got frustrated and wrote, "All I'm trying to do is let you know that this really works!"
I was under the impression that that person really needed to have a site to help her/him meditate. It's a shame that no such links were available on my forum.
I've had a number posted to my forum. Looking up the originating ISP in the HTTP logs shows that they came from the Hard Rock Cafe in Kuwait and a number of ISPs in Pakistan. Needless to say, those ISPs are now blocked at the firewall, and the spamming has stopped (for at least three weeks).
I guess I wasn't clear. I don't have formmail.pl or any variant on my system at all. I don't use such a script. ALL requests to/cgi-bin/formmail.pl are from spammers looking for such a script, most using open relays of Microsoft-infected machines. The point I was trying to make is that I report such scans of my system, not that formmail is being abused.
Every time I get a hit for/*/FormMail.* I log it. I go through these logs and notify the ISPs from which they came that they have a user committing "Unauthorized Access" to my site, and explain that the intruder is either a spammer looking to abuse my resources or an open proxy to spammers. Most get closed after the first notice. USWest and QWest (same company?) tend to take at least three notices over a two week period. (QWest Minnisoda failed to stop these attacks after three weeks and have been firewalled out of my domain - the whole net block, not just the offending luser.)
Notifying the ISPs of these infections is very important. Unfortunately, it takes a LOT of time to do this. I go through spirts of shutting down these things, then spans where I give up thinking it's futile (and have other things that I want to get done, but reporting all the attacks takes up too much of my time).
I'm considering updating my filter to not just log these, but to keep track of attacks and, if flagged after human review, start automatically sending Unauthorized Access messages to the ISPs.
Of course, then there's the trouble that no Microsoft machine directly connected to the Internet (i.e. not behind a properly administered firewall) can get the necessary patches before getting infected. That pretty much means that after a home user cleans his/her computer up (reformats, reinstalls), she/he will immediately be re-infected.
A friend just went through this - unable to get the patches installed without being rebooted first. He couldn't even get the information on what needed to be turned off to prevent the reboots before getting rebooted.
Did anyone else notice that it was soon after Balmer testified in the anti-trust sit-com about how revealing Microsoft's source code would be a national security threat, that China and several eastern European countries bought into Microsoft's Shared Source inititive?
- Free/OpenBSD and linux/unix have been around for quite awhile, and both are getting more usage daily. Both are on the net all over the place. Yet they're still not a target or at the very least, an unsuccessful target.
When the Apache faw came out a couple of years ago, with an example exploit for FreeBSD, I had two attacks less than 24 hours from the news release. The pattern was the same:
"Powered by" page accessed with referrer from a Google search of "powered by freebsd"
Fragmented HTTP requests run for approximately one our - with no effect
There are people out there just waiting to attack BSD systems - wanting to. There just aren't that many opportunities or vulnerable systems.
- Seriously, I think this will be viewed as a major setback by SCO.
Why is it that every "major setback" SCO suffers is followed by a rise is stock price? I do wish we could stop them from profitting from these major setbacks.
- That's a great idea. On the other hand, I live in a small town with exactly one feasible ISP that's not a residential cable service with incoming port filters.
Has the U.S. become so backward an nation that one is forced to have a choice of one provider? In Japan, even out where there are nothing but hills and rice paddies, if you've got a phone line, you have a choice of providers - and broadband providers at that.
Maybe it's your representitive or the FCC that you need to be complaining to. They're the ones allowing these monopolies to grow and fester.
My Mom and Dad keep trying to convice me to move back to the U.S. with their only grandchildren, but between what I see on CNN and what I read here about the backward state of ISPs over there, I don't forsee ever moving back.
- As a result, people with more tech knowledge tend to also run a more secure system [...]
According to this reasoning, companies that have a good IT department with knowledgable system administrators shouldn't have been hit by these latest two bugs. And I'm sure that nobody will argue that the DoD doesn't do everything in their power to make sure that the only spyware on their machines is the spywhere they put there to monitor their minions. Yet, I recall reading that the Navy/Marines' network was also brought to its knees (although no intrusions were reported for "really" secure systems).
I guess there's nothing any of us can do to be totally secure beyond unplugging that network cable.
I read an article a year or two ago about a guy here in Japan who was shocked by the phone in his shirt pocket when his sweat seaped in. There are tales about how the electro magnetic field can cause pace makers to malfunction. Well, this is a a way that these phones can cause a heart attack, which it did, if I remember correctly. Needless to say, I won't carry mine in a pocket.
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6 months ago I first saw some Linux Netbooks here in Japan. When I went to buy one for my daughter's birthday last month, I couldn't find a single one. They had all been replaced with Windows XP. Everywhere.
Microsoft strikes again with back room deals to keep Linux out of the market in Japan.
Looks like I'll need to spend a little more and buy a MacBook for my daughter. I absolutely refuse to pay the Microsoft Tax, and can't get any of the Japanese sellers to remove it.
A while back I noticed that the advertising banners on the top of one of the Japanese sports newspaper sites was either one of two ads:
One of these featured the virtues of using its product, the other promised seductive videos of vices. Can you tell which one was more honest in its advertisement?
But does Microsoft feel any shame for being less reputable than an AV (Adult Video) site?
Look, Microsoft has long held the hypothisis that if they say something enough times that they can make it true. Observe:
I really don't know why people believe a word that comes out of Redmond any more.
That is incorrect. Installing the Japanese version of MS Office broke Netscape 4.x Gold's TPC/IP stack. Back then, MS Office couldn't even export to HTML (third party macros could), so why would the TCP/IP stack need changing? (Other than to try to destroy a compeditor?)
My solution was to stop installing MS Office. Netscape was more important to me. Netscape Gold was my word processor (I had given up on MS Word the year before for writing anything as I fought with its auto-xxxx functionalty too often). I didn't use spreadsheets that often, and I would miss Access. But some principals were more important to me.
From that point on, I requested spreadsheets in CSV format and documents as plain text. I drove my supervisors and managment nuts with my refusal to accept MS formatted files (this started back in 1997-8, before I was so fed up with Microsoft that I started moving all my work to FreeBSD - but that's a different story), but they found a way to accommodate me.
Don't tell me that Microsoft never stooped so low as to undermine a compeditor by deliberately breaking the libraries that their compeditors used. They did. And it drove me away from Microsoft.
Such predictive systems were on most computers in Japan in the 1980s. They were known then as Front End Processors, renamed to Input Method Editors (to be different?) in the 1990s by Microsoft. The better ones (ATOK) could lead you along as you typed in Japanese for the correct Kanji choice for the Hiragana (pronunciation alphabet) entered.
Any engineer who'd spent time in Japan (typing in Japanese) in the 1980s could have brought this idea back with them for entering English. The need just didn't arise for English speakers (typers) until more recently, but the idea and tech are old.
I stopped using Word back in 1997 when I couldn't get a simple (C) to not be turned into a copyright symbol in a document. After several hours of searching help and disabling what seemed like hundreds of preferences that began with "auto," I pasted the document text into Netscape Gold's HTML editor and never looked back.
I've given the PHBs plenty of trouble since then by not accepting DOC files (or later on Excel files either). They can't figure out how to save in any other format (which was my suggestion the first few years).
To make a long story short, they've finally taken to just printing the document for me and e-mailing it to everyone else.
I sincerely hope that this rash of zero-day viruses will finally get them to consider ODF, but it'll probably take another 3-5 years before that epiphany hits any of them.
The latest to go was Comedy Central. I've enjoyed The Daily Show over the Internet for the past few years, but that came to an abrupt end a couple of weeks ago when all of the newer streams were in MS Media Player format only. I asked if this was temporary, and mentioned that the link to "change player preferences" didn't work in FireFox, and their indirect reply was to change the media player pop-up window to no longer give a choice of media formats. It's Microsoft or nothing.
I've tried VLC (get audio, no video) and MPlayer, but neither work. Unless the /. crowd can somehow campaign for the return of Real streams, especially now that it's been Opened, I'm afraid that it's time to remove Comedy Central from my daily opened tab group.
Was this conference the reason behind a large increase in SSH attack attemps over the past two weeks? The past few months had been relatively quiet in regard to SSH attacks (I was wondering if I'd been cracked and they weren't being reported any more), but I've been getting multiple attempts pretty much daily for the past two weeks. What's up?
If Google ran across one of the sites, would the script still be on the cached page? Or does Google clean scripts before caching?
Read "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It's an alternate history located in London exploring the time line of "what if computers were created 100 years earlier?" The results were a society of scientists, where those who contribute to science become royalty (it's what's in your mind, not the color of your blood). There still are politicians, patent lawers, and other social leaches, but in the end, it's carefully thought out planning that saves London. (Ok, that's not quite the end.)
I realize that a lot of people here didn't like the book. I don't think that I really got it my first reading about 10 years ago, but on my second reading last month, the social structure Gibson was proposing really struck me. Would a society built on scientific principals work today? Or would the lawers and CEOs see to it that it never came about? Where would K&R and Linus be in such a society?
This is what a contry that produces more engineers than lawers is capable of doing. What's the ratio in North America?
Actually, I've been in an elevator where pushing the button twice had an effect. I accidently pushed both the 6 and 7 buttons one time, then double clicked the 6 button, and it turned off. I thought that was a rather nice feature. It was a small enough elevator (max 5 people) that it's unlikely that someone would cancel out a floor another person wanted.
OS/X is basically FreeBSD with some eye candy, I told myself. That got it in the door. I installed the X server so that I can still run a lot of the standard stuff from the FreeBSD and GNU/Linux worlds. (Getting Japanese to work on the X side of things is a pain! Never had any trouble, even in 1998, getting a Japanese environment to work on FreeBSD.)
But there are a lot of things different than FreeBSD. The startup for one. FreeBSD was so much easier than Linux to get what I wanted up and running at startup. Just put a script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. (Never did figure out what all of the different boot levels on Linux were about.) I have yet to figure out how to do it properly on OS/X. There's a startup directory under /System, but it doesn't appear to take shell scripts. If an application doesn't do it's magic when the package is installed, it doesn't get used. I feel like this sort of thing has been hidden from the end user, and it's annoying. FreeBSD was so well put together from an administrative point of view, why hide these things?
But in the end, the complaints are relatively few. I no longer cvsup the world every few weeks, leaving make world running all night. (Well, I do still have a number of other FreeBSD servers scattered over the planet, so it's not quite "never" - just no longer with a direct link to the keyboard.) It's taking a while, but I'm slowly finding applications that perform as well on OS/X as on FreeBSD. (Until I recently upgraded iTerm, editing Japanese documents with vim hasn't been nearly as easy as it had been in kterm.)
Yea, I miss FreeBSD as my primary desktop/development machine. But my parents like that I now edit videos of their grandchildren and send them to them online and via DVD as they're 13 time zones away.
- ipfw -q add 10516 deny all from 63.95.64.0/21 to any
takes care of them rather well. For a target marketer, they chose the wrong target.P.S. Most cracking attempts againt my computer (SSH and the Apache flaws back when they were first discovered a couple years back) appear to originate from Texas. Why is that?
I had someone trying to spam my forum with a meditation site. (S)he claimed that it really helps to relax you. Well, the fool posting it didn't read that all messages must be approved before they get posted, because (s)he posted the same message a few times, then got frustrated and wrote, "All I'm trying to do is let you know that this really works!"
I was under the impression that that person really needed to have a site to help her/him meditate. It's a shame that no such links were available on my forum.
I've had a number posted to my forum. Looking up the originating ISP in the HTTP logs shows that they came from the Hard Rock Cafe in Kuwait and a number of ISPs in Pakistan. Needless to say, those ISPs are now blocked at the firewall, and the spamming has stopped (for at least three weeks).
I guess I wasn't clear. I don't have formmail.pl or any variant on my system at all. I don't use such a script. ALL requests to /cgi-bin/formmail.pl are from spammers looking for such a script, most using open relays of Microsoft-infected machines. The point I was trying to make is that I report such scans of my system, not that formmail is being abused.
Sorry that wasn't clear.
Every time I get a hit for /*/FormMail.* I log it. I go through these logs and notify the ISPs from which they came that they have a user committing "Unauthorized Access" to my site, and explain that the intruder is either a spammer looking to abuse my resources or an open proxy to spammers. Most get closed after the first notice. USWest and QWest (same company?) tend to take at least three notices over a two week period. (QWest Minnisoda failed to stop these attacks after three weeks and have been firewalled out of my domain - the whole net block, not just the offending luser.)
Notifying the ISPs of these infections is very important. Unfortunately, it takes a LOT of time to do this. I go through spirts of shutting down these things, then spans where I give up thinking it's futile (and have other things that I want to get done, but reporting all the attacks takes up too much of my time).
I'm considering updating my filter to not just log these, but to keep track of attacks and, if flagged after human review, start automatically sending Unauthorized Access messages to the ISPs.
Of course, then there's the trouble that no Microsoft machine directly connected to the Internet (i.e. not behind a properly administered firewall) can get the necessary patches before getting infected. That pretty much means that after a home user cleans his/her computer up (reformats, reinstalls), she/he will immediately be re-infected.
A friend just went through this - unable to get the patches installed without being rebooted first. He couldn't even get the information on what needed to be turned off to prevent the reboots before getting rebooted.
Good. Maybe this will shutup a good portion of the Microsoft apologits who always start of posts with "I'm no fan of M$ either, but ..."
Did anyone else notice that it was soon after Balmer testified in the anti-trust sit-com about how revealing Microsoft's source code would be a national security threat, that China and several eastern European countries bought into Microsoft's Shared Source inititive?
When the Apache faw came out a couple of years ago, with an example exploit for FreeBSD, I had two attacks less than 24 hours from the news release. The pattern was the same:
There are people out there just waiting to attack BSD systems - wanting to. There just aren't that many opportunities or vulnerable systems.
Why is it that every "major setback" SCO suffers is followed by a rise is stock price? I do wish we could stop them from profitting from these major setbacks.
- That's a great idea. On the other hand, I live in a small town with exactly one feasible ISP that's not a residential cable service with incoming port filters.
Has the U.S. become so backward an nation that one is forced to have a choice of one provider? In Japan, even out where there are nothing but hills and rice paddies, if you've got a phone line, you have a choice of providers - and broadband providers at that.
Maybe it's your representitive or the FCC that you need to be complaining to. They're the ones allowing these monopolies to grow and fester.
My Mom and Dad keep trying to convice me to move back to the U.S. with their only grandchildren, but between what I see on CNN and what I read here about the backward state of ISPs over there, I don't forsee ever moving back.
SPEWS appears to be the least of your problems.
According to this reasoning, companies that have a good IT department with knowledgable system administrators shouldn't have been hit by these latest two bugs. And I'm sure that nobody will argue that the DoD doesn't do everything in their power to make sure that the only spyware on their machines is the spywhere they put there to monitor their minions. Yet, I recall reading that the Navy/Marines' network was also brought to its knees (although no intrusions were reported for "really" secure systems).
I guess there's nothing any of us can do to be totally secure beyond unplugging that network cable.
I read an article a year or two ago about a guy here in Japan who was shocked by the phone in his shirt pocket when his sweat seaped in. There are tales about how the electro magnetic field can cause pace makers to malfunction. Well, this is a a way that these phones can cause a heart attack, which it did, if I remember correctly. Needless to say, I won't carry mine in a pocket.