If something has DRM that you find to be unacceptable just do not buy it. Of course the problem you will have with this is that others who do not care will continue to buy it, and losing you as a customer will probably not be the companies biggest concern.
This is the wrong way to think. You shouldn't have any say in what people buy besides what you vote with your wallet. It is very democratic, you see?
If people generally don't care about DRM the sales of the crippled product will not be affected. If they do care then the sales will drop, and DRM will be redesigned or removed. The only possible problem anyone could have with this is that they want a greater say in the matter than "Joe and Jane Six-Pack" as the typical consumer is usually referred to here.
But that's just it... if something has crappy DRM and people don't like the DRM they won't buy it -- they will steal it!:)
"A rudimentary keyboard controller; any 4x4 matrix will easily do the job. Make it 8x8 and you have more keys you'll ever need"
And 640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody....
Look, goddamnit, it's an ATM. It only has to count to 200, add and subtract, send a 12 digit number and a four digit number and get a binary response. If you are not a spiffy enough programmer to do that in 640k, you do not deserve to write for an ATM machine. KISS is an important principle especially when it comes to security.
When I look at what programmers of yore did with 4k, or even a very small fraction of that, I wonder what the hell an ATM is doing running Windows or any other consumer desktop OS, "stripped down" though it may be. Besides for Microsoft "stripped down" means they neglected to install solitaire during the setup.:P
I think the idea is so the bank can use off the shelf software to serve advertising on their ATMs. Not that it would be that difficult to do this with OS/2, mind.
I wrote the following email to Bank of America's support staff after reading this article:
--
What is your reaction to this story:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34175.ht ml
Why on earth would someone buy ATMs based on Windows?
I'd call that criminal stupidity if I were you.
I like the online banking service a lot, and it works pretty well, but the use of Windows ATMs really unsettles me. I'd rather see you return to OS/2 than feel that one day I won't have access to my money because of this kind of messup.
OS/2 has worked just fine, and quite honestly being bombarded with advertisements whenever I use an ATM is not what I would call a significant improvement in service.
Your reactions, please.
Many thanks.
Best D
--
I haven't heard from them yet, but they promise a response between "3 to 6 business days", so it's not like they're tardy just yet.
D
Considering Bank of America was hit by SQL Slammer and did not care and instead used even more Windows ATMs, it is clear they do not give a shit about security or your email. Personally I will never use a bank that uses Windows on its ATMs because one day, some cracker is going to get tired of banks not caring about these worms and write one that, in addition to infecting these insecure ATM machines, takes all the money out of your account and wires it to their swiss bank account.
Personally I would rather not be the victim of such an attack. I also prefer to use a bank that actually gives a shit about security. After all, why the hell are you using a bank if it is not to protect your assets? Why pay them all those outrageous fees just to access *your* money otherwise?
And please don't forget lousy programming, design and engineering on the part of M$. Not to mention the complete dain bramage on the part of the management schmuck at Deibold who decided that XP embedded was a suitable choice for an ATM, even if they didn't build the ATMs themselves.
And don't forget they use Windows for their voting machines, and Access for the database:P.
Well, it's not like we OWN the word hacker. Language is decided by the majority, by common use, not by initial definition. If it were, a "faggot" would still be a pile of sticks and "spam" would still be a moderately disgusting tinned meat product. If 9/10 of the world use this word in an offensive context, we should stop using it unless we want to get strange looks -- it's certainly easier than trying to educate all these people on how we want them to use it, as if we had some authority in the matter. "Coder" is a word which is pretty similar (same number of syllables, same intended meaning) without any of the associated negatives.
I am sorry, but I have to call bullshit here. we do indeed own the term hacker, as well as megabyte, RAM, ROM, and any number of other terms which directly relate to and are defined by our profession. This is the only profession in which journalists (who IMHO should be called "hacks" from now on whenever they use the term hacker inappropriately) do not respect our professional terms. I mean they don't call chemists in the pharmaceuticals field "drug dealers" do they? Do they call demolitions experts "terrorists?" What if they started calling the Palestinian suicide bombers "explosives experts" and inextricably linked the two professions. How quickly do you think the military and the police would be up in arms over it?
And as an American I am embarrased when the Albanians feel compelled to come and observe whether our elections are free and fair!
Fidel Castro likewise offered to send election observers to Florida. I am not sure whether he would have worried about them coming back... Around the same time an election observed by a team run by Jimmy Carter confirmed his regime in perpetuity.
So you honestly think that she didn't know that getting music for free (and don't try to tell me she never realized that everybody else has to buy it) instead of paying for it was illegal??
If she's that dumb, then let Darwin take it's course.
No, she did not know that the service she PAID FOR was illegal. She went to Kazaa's website, paid $39.95 or whatever for the advertised service of downloading music. Do you think that people that pay for iTunes will be sued by the RIAA? Of course they won't. How is the average person supposed to understand that they can pay Apple for the same service and not get sued, but pay Kazaa for the exact same service and get sued into oblivion?
You're probably right, there probably won't be (m)any soccer mom types with dual head setups.. but for the ones that do exist, it should be as easy as plugging it in in order to get a wider desktop acceptance of linux.. I want to be able to plug in my PDA or digital camera or whatnot and just have it work like in OS X or Windows..
Actually, this anti grandma and soccer mom attitude reflects the myopia of most geeks. Think about it. About 5-10 years ago, how many soccer moms emailed their friends, took digital pictures, scanned documents and photos, used the internet, and burned CDs? Pretty fucking close to 0, but why? Because it was a pain in the ass to do it and they had no idea why they would want to go through the trouble. But I can promise you 99% of soccer moms with a computer do all of these things now. In fact, I have found that non-geeks do these kinds of things more often than geeks in many cases. But they do it because now you can just buy product X at comp-uselessa and take it home and it works.
Have you all forgotten why we built the personal computer in the first place? It was supposed to empower the users to do things they had not done before. It was supposed to make people's lives easier. And the degree to which it does is the degree to which it is adopted by Joe Sixpack and his wife. Now they can shoot their own family pictures and movies on digital cameras, create a dvd complete with menus, and mail it to grandma. Or they can email those same pictures and movies to grandma. This is, again, becasue hardware and software was developed to the point that ease-of-use was there.
To those who say that the Soccer mom does not use dual monitors; for shame. If they had a mac they were doing that for ages. For several years Windows soccer moms were using dual monitors. Why? Why? Why? Well first off why do *you* use dual monitors? That's right, you do it so you can do more at once, with more screen and/or desktop real estate. How many normal users have you met that did not have 5000 things on their desktop because it's easier to find there? Does it not make sense for them to have twice as much space for them to clutter just as they buy an SUV with twice as much space to clutter? And if they can do it easily, they will do it.
Re:The CIS majors must know something the CS don't
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Now we have the tablet PC from microsoft with handwriting software."
And by all accounts it is useless.
Handwriting recognition is HARD, and while Palm's stuff works, it's kind of cheating, since you have to conform to their writing style.
You had to do that with Apple's (unfoprtunately patented) technology. The joke was that they made it look like you were teaching the newton to recognize your handwriting, but in reality your Newton taught you how to write legibly. It was genious, honestly. I thought it was kind of funny going through the "training" sequence complete with lines right out of a "Big Chief" notebook from elementary school.
"They could have owned Linux" was said in regards to the fact that Novell could have been a huge player and market leader in the Linux market.
I'm not so sure about that. I think Ransom Love really thinks they could have owned Linux. After all it was him that started Caldera on the road against Linux in the first place, by trying to charge per-user connection licenses to connect to a Caldera Linux server and trying to make SCO UNIXware and Caldera the same product by mingling the codebases.
Good God, this is the _second_ post I've seen in this thread where some idiot has moderated a vanilla AC "overrated". FOR FUCK'S SAKE, A +0 POST CANNOT BE OVERRATED! Particularly not an insightful one like this.
*sigh*
Mr Moderator, can I have some of your crack, please? Reading the real Slashdot is only getting me down.
Sure it can. You do know that slahsdot has -1 posts, don't you? I am not saying I agree with the moderation in this case, or even with the use of underrated/overrated (I think it is lame to even have these moderations) but if you think the post should have been -1 then, yes, a 0 post is overrated.
Who knows what the motives were at this point. Maybe its just a *BSD user trying to show that linux is insecure, and doesn't want to hurt anyone else. Maybe it's some script kiddie who had an early bedtime and had to go to bed before he got to do any major damage. Maybe it is part of a campaign to discredit linux in general (*cough*SCO). Until more is known, the goal of this break-in won't be known.
Well, to my mind it is just another example of why debian's approach olf holding back releases forever does not work for the modern world. They probably were running very old unpatched software; after all, you owuld expect the debian project to eat their dogfood,right? Oh well, too bad they will probably not understand the implications and carry on like always, like IIS users do.
The girl was illegally sharing copyrighted materials. She was one of many who have been contacted.
Slashdot, in a typical tactic of propoganda latches onto one example and drives it home. A 12 year old! A 15 year old!
Meanwhile, no matter how you shake it, they're still doing the legal thing--protecting their copyrighted works! Even Jamie of Slashdot knows what that is about--threatening the daily Slashdot summary site because they are "illegal."
Both girls professed a profound ignorance of teh technical and legal issues involved. They did not even know they were sharing files. They found the website for kazaa and paid for a software program that lets you download music. I mean, hey, it was cheaper than iTunes, right?
She installed the software and searched for music. In a hidden dialog deep in the innards of the interface is the checkbox that is checked by default that makes all the files you download sharable by default. But she would not bother to look for it, of course. Now she gets hit by all this lawyerese and stuff and is freaking out.
You have to realize that 99% of the world does not read slashdot and has no idea how any of this stuff works. A growing percentage have heard of mp3s, but they have no idea what the big deal is with the RIAA if they even know who that is, which most don't. All they know is you can get movies and MP3s on the internet. Time Warner says you can get them faster if you buy their service, and they are even part of the RIAA (and responsible for the clueless fucks at CNN that are misinforming the public).
This RIAA suing people crap is a scam. They are going to try to squeeze more blood from a rock by force. I mean do you think that girl's parents would have bought $3500 worth of cds before she got to college? Probably not.
Isn't the first rule, don't talk? This coder is going to get whacked! I would have kept my mouth shut if made a proggie for the mob. If I had a ham sandwich with Tony Soprano, I wouldn't talk about it for chrissakes.
The author Simson Garfinkel could also get whacked because he knows the guy who talked.
Maybe it's too Hollywood, but would you even risk it? Would you? So maybe they didn't pay the guy enough? He says he makes 1/3 of $150k, but he likes living under the radar. That makes sense for about two seconds. I'd rather make $150k and keep it in my shoebox.
They aren't paying the guy enough, so he bragged about it to Wired, who published it.
The chain of stupidity doesn't stop there. Now the IRS is after this guy for tax evasion, and they can connect him to the writer of the story and the mob itself, meaning some mob boss at the top is shitting his pants right now -- if this is isn't total BS.
"But in the fog of all those poker games, I had neglected to take the humanities classes required for graduation. So I left without a degree and moved to New York City. My plan was to become a professional card player."
And now the FBI knows you by name.
He talked, but to Wired. The Mafiosos he knows probably do not read Wired or Slashdot. Also he left out all details, so it woudl be pretty hard to determine who he was or who he was talking about unless you were personally privy to the events. Even then the stories were so generic that it could have been anyone.
And where do you get the idea the FBI knows his name from the story? Like you would give your real name for a story like that?
Between this type of scare tactic and the saturation of the P2P networks with garbage files, I think they days of the current generation apps and networks could be numbered. The average file-sharing home user scares fairly easily. I'm not saying these networks will dissapear, but they will cease to be the giant beasts that they are today. I think IRC and new networks like Waste will continue to reign/rise up in the place of the Napster paradigm.
You know what? I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and have come to the conclusionthat it is indeed the end of an era, but not like the RIAA thinks. MP3s are big and artists have figured out that they can distribute them to their fans and get the message out much easier than when they go through the record companies. This is especially true of artists who are not signed, but even mainstream artists to a degree are getting into the act.
The RIAA seems to have decided they don't wnat customers. They have crippled CDs and made some of them break your computer if you dare to play them there. They have sued the hell out of people for downloading mp3s and running internet radio stations. I say screw-em. There are a lot of legitemate, legal MP3s sanctioned by the copyright holders out there and that library will continue to grow. So let's not give RIAA CDs free advertising anymore. Let's support the independant artists and others who "get it" by listening only to their music, buying only their albums and other merchandise, and visiting their concerts.
Eventually the RIAA will die because of sheer market forces like the buggy-whip manufacturers and scribes they are.
Oh, I can't connect to my ISP, cause my anti virus software needs updated. I can't update my anti virus software because I can't connect to my ISP.
Yep, this is definately going to stop viruses from spreading, because nobody will be able to connect to the internet to spread a virus.
You are incredibly dense.. let me spell it out for you. The router will be able to connect you to the antivirus vendor's site or to some other approved site so you can get the virus software/definitions. Or you can install Linux and have done. Even little linksys routers can do that much; do you think that the Cisco routers will be incapable of this? Heck, if they really want to get fancy they can have the router hold the software so you can download it right from the router.
In other words, as long as the people administering the router are not complete morons this will work very well. Besides, they will have the option of dealing with clients that fail authentication however they want; anything from completely denying them in the case of a corporate router to only allowing them to access a specific part of the network where you are quarantined and/or can get the software you need to be authenticated.
Cisco firewalls are not your little linksys router from Fry's or that 386 running OpenBSD over in the corner.
Just as a sidenote: OpenBSD can do all this. Out of the box. Look into authpf and pf: you can identify hosts based on OS, whether they are running a login program, and shape the traffic resulting from this.
(Though I wouldn't like to try running it on a 386. 486 sure.)
Ok, I'm done being an OpenBSD shrill for the day.
Ok, did not mean to disparage OpenBSD, but was more pointing to the monster hardware used in Cisco equipment. To be fair, I wouldn't doubt that the Free Software crowd will also be able to come up with some free implementation of the above technologies.
real great solution, what happens when i get that user that has win95 and a version of norton just as old. Your computers says "Hey big boy I have some super spanky AV installed. Let my mail through!" "Duh! ok boss" Great that they're tying something new, this just doesn't seem to hard to circumvent.
Win95's old Norton will not be able to authenticate to this system. You will have to buy the brand new sofware that ties into teh validation system. If they do this the smart way, that will include checking version of software and date of virus defs. You did notice that all the big antivirus manufacturers are part of the system, right?
I think it will be circumventable, but not easily if they do this right, and any circumvention of the system will require a significant increase in virus payload. Besides, before the person who can be infected gets infected, they will notice they cannot connect to their ISP (or their work firewall) and get the updated software. It's a pretty elegant solution IMHO.
by making clever rulesets for the thousands of new viruses every month. The virus would have already infected your network by the time you handcraft one rule. Look at the shortcomings of the Cisco router rulesets. It's a joke. They only catch the low hanging fruit at best.
No, again, that is not what they are doing. Why don't you try reading the posts you are replayiung to, or maybe the article?
They are not trying to filter the viruses. They are authenticating host traffic by checking whether they have virus software in place. The latter is incredibly simpler and more elegant than the former.
It is Microsoft's fault for producing poor code. It is not Microsoft's fault for producing viri. Its seems to me -- honestly -- that there is a prevasive thought in the Slashdot community that it's the product's fault, not the exploiter's. Could any clearify this for me? The virus writer is more at fault right? I mean, Bill Gates may be the biggest bastard ever, and he may have even broken anti-trust laws, but does that mean that virus writers aren't equally or even more so wrong?
The reason is NOT because Windows is more insecure, or easier to write viruses for, even if that is the case. The reason is the market saturation. 90% of the worlds desktops are running some 32-bit version of Windows, that's a helluva lot of machines to infect. People who write viruses with malicious intentions do it to bring down major infrastructure, and they can do this easily if they infect a few hundred thousand Windows boxes. And the more people that use Windows, the more viruses there will be.
What if everyone used Linux or Macintosh, and there was no Windows boxes left? Then virus coders would work night and day on exploits and trojans for Linux and Mac. It's a matter of deciding on a goal ("to bring down a whole chunk of the global network infrastructure") and then forming a plan ("get all Windows machines to spew out compressed UDP packets of dumbass to every known host").
In conclusion, don't be so smug with your Linux machine during the next round of Welchia or Klez, because if Linux had the desktop market share of Windows, then YOU'D be feeling the pain.
That explains all those worms the script kiddies released last week to attack sendmail and apache. Oh, wait...
Or, hey, let's infect all the Cisco Routers so we take down some major corporate sites and backbones. You know, with that IOS virus.
Hmm, I guess market penetration has nothing to do with it. No, it is design, design, design. tellya what, I'll give you a cookie. It is easier to write viruses in and for Windows than any other OS and Microsoft has ensured that Windows will be readily available and familiar to script kiddies. So market penetration in terms of what the kiddies have may have something to do with it, but it would not be possible if it were not so easy to write viruses for Windows and so easy for worms to penetrate Windows environments. Programs to attack these other systems would be far more complex and with the exception of Linux less likely to be in teh hands of kiddies.
"Traffic shaping" is a fucking joke right now. It's just a half-ass measure to get the low hanging fruit only. You don't know anything about protocols. Each OSI LAYER, eh? Who cares. How are you going to distinguish the individual files infected with viruses being transmitted if they use a proprietary protocol or compression or encryption of any kind.
Simple. According to the article, and the post you replied to, they are not even going to try something as incredibly stupid as that. Instead, they will require authentication according to their own protocol which will allow them to determine whether you have antivirus software. Traffic from hosts without virus protection can then be treated differently than traffic from host which have it.
As to Michael's comment about this requiring people to use Windows on every host, that's just silly. Cisco themselves use BSD and their customers are heavy into real OSs like Solaris, etc. They are not going to stop traffic from such hosts, even by default. I would be willing to bet that they are going to work in some way of identifying the type of host that they are getting the traffic from, and therefore allowing the administrator of the firewall to give Linux, Solaris, et al a pass in such cases.
Cisco firewalls are not your little linksys router from Fry's or that 386 running OpenBSD over in the corner. They have pretty powerful hardware and very flexible software. You can construct some pretty neat rulesets and do very clever things, so this kind of thing is honestly not a surprise and certainly not beyond their capabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
If something has DRM that you find to be unacceptable just do not buy it. Of course the problem you will have with this is that others who do not care will continue to buy it, and losing you as a customer will probably not be the companies biggest concern.
This is the wrong way to think. You shouldn't have any say in what people buy besides what you vote with your wallet. It is very democratic, you see?
If people generally don't care about DRM the sales of the crippled product will not be affected. If they do care then the sales will drop, and DRM will be redesigned or removed. The only possible problem anyone could have with this is that they want a greater say in the matter than "Joe and Jane Six-Pack" as the typical consumer is usually referred to here.
But that's just it... if something has crappy DRM and people don't like the DRM they won't buy it -- they will steal it! :)
"A rudimentary keyboard controller; any 4x4 matrix will easily do the job. Make it 8x8 and you have more keys you'll ever need"
And 640K of RAM ought to be enough for anybody....
Look, goddamnit, it's an ATM. It only has to count to 200, add and subtract, send a 12 digit number and a four digit number and get a binary response. If you are not a spiffy enough programmer to do that in 640k, you do not deserve to write for an ATM machine. KISS is an important principle especially when it comes to security.
When I look at what programmers of yore did with 4k, or even a very small fraction of that, I wonder what the hell an ATM is doing running Windows or any other consumer desktop OS, "stripped down" though it may be. Besides for Microsoft "stripped down" means they neglected to install solitaire during the setup. :P
I think the idea is so the bank can use off the shelf software to serve advertising on their ATMs. Not that it would be that difficult to do this with OS/2, mind.
t ml
I wrote the following email to Bank of America's support staff after reading this article:
--
What is your reaction to this story:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34175.h
Why on earth would someone buy ATMs based on Windows?
I'd call that criminal stupidity if I were you.
I like the online banking service a lot, and it works pretty well, but the use of Windows ATMs really unsettles me. I'd rather see you return to OS/2 than feel that one day I won't have access to my money because of this kind of messup.
OS/2 has worked just fine, and quite honestly being bombarded with advertisements whenever I use an ATM is not what I would call a significant improvement in service.
Your reactions, please.
Many thanks.
Best
D
--
I haven't heard from them yet, but they promise a response between "3 to 6 business days", so it's not like they're tardy just yet.
D
Considering Bank of America was hit by SQL Slammer and did not care and instead used even more Windows ATMs, it is clear they do not give a shit about security or your email. Personally I will never use a bank that uses Windows on its ATMs because one day, some cracker is going to get tired of banks not caring about these worms and write one that, in addition to infecting these insecure ATM machines, takes all the money out of your account and wires it to their swiss bank account.
Personally I would rather not be the victim of such an attack. I also prefer to use a bank that actually gives a shit about security. After all, why the hell are you using a bank if it is not to protect your assets? Why pay them all those outrageous fees just to access *your* money otherwise?
And please don't forget lousy programming, design and engineering on the part of M$. Not to mention the complete dain bramage on the part of the management schmuck at Deibold who decided that XP embedded was a suitable choice for an ATM, even if they didn't build the ATMs themselves.
And don't forget they use Windows for their voting machines, and Access for the database :P.
Well, it's not like we OWN the word hacker. Language is decided by the majority, by common use, not by initial definition. If it were, a "faggot" would still be a pile of sticks and "spam" would still be a moderately disgusting tinned meat product. If 9/10 of the world use this word in an offensive context, we should stop using it unless we want to get strange looks -- it's certainly easier than trying to educate all these people on how we want them to use it, as if we had some authority in the matter. "Coder" is a word which is pretty similar (same number of syllables, same intended meaning) without any of the associated negatives.
I am sorry, but I have to call bullshit here. we do indeed own the term hacker, as well as megabyte, RAM, ROM, and any number of other terms which directly relate to and are defined by our profession. This is the only profession in which journalists (who IMHO should be called "hacks" from now on whenever they use the term hacker inappropriately) do not respect our professional terms. I mean they don't call chemists in the pharmaceuticals field "drug dealers" do they? Do they call demolitions experts "terrorists?" What if they started calling the Palestinian suicide bombers "explosives experts" and inextricably linked the two professions. How quickly do you think the military and the police would be up in arms over it?
'Irregardless' was not even a word till large numbers of ignorant people started using it.
It's still not a word, unless you are an illiterate clown bent on the downfall of civilization.
And as an American I am embarrased when the Albanians feel compelled to come and observe whether our elections are free and fair!
Fidel Castro likewise offered to send election observers to Florida. I am not sure whether he would have worried about them coming back... Around the same time an election observed by a team run by Jimmy Carter confirmed his regime in perpetuity.
Deja vu. It's a glitch in the matrix; happens when they change something.
Of course the odd thing is that there are dupes on slashdot all the time yet nothing ever changes here...
So you honestly think that she didn't know that getting music for free (and don't try to tell me she never realized that everybody else has to buy it) instead of paying for it was illegal??
If she's that dumb, then let Darwin take it's course.
No, she did not know that the service she PAID FOR was illegal. She went to Kazaa's website, paid $39.95 or whatever for the advertised service of downloading music. Do you think that people that pay for iTunes will be sued by the RIAA? Of course they won't. How is the average person supposed to understand that they can pay Apple for the same service and not get sued, but pay Kazaa for the exact same service and get sued into oblivion?
You're probably right, there probably won't be (m)any soccer mom types with dual head setups.. but for the ones that do exist, it should be as easy as plugging it in in order to get a wider desktop acceptance of linux.. I want to be able to plug in my PDA or digital camera or whatnot and just have it work like in OS X or Windows..
Actually, this anti grandma and soccer mom attitude reflects the myopia of most geeks. Think about it. About 5-10 years ago, how many soccer moms emailed their friends, took digital pictures, scanned documents and photos, used the internet, and burned CDs? Pretty fucking close to 0, but why? Because it was a pain in the ass to do it and they had no idea why they would want to go through the trouble. But I can promise you 99% of soccer moms with a computer do all of these things now. In fact, I have found that non-geeks do these kinds of things more often than geeks in many cases. But they do it because now you can just buy product X at comp-uselessa and take it home and it works.
Have you all forgotten why we built the personal computer in the first place? It was supposed to empower the users to do things they had not done before. It was supposed to make people's lives easier. And the degree to which it does is the degree to which it is adopted by Joe Sixpack and his wife. Now they can shoot their own family pictures and movies on digital cameras, create a dvd complete with menus, and mail it to grandma. Or they can email those same pictures and movies to grandma. This is, again, becasue hardware and software was developed to the point that ease-of-use was there.
To those who say that the Soccer mom does not use dual monitors; for shame. If they had a mac they were doing that for ages. For several years Windows soccer moms were using dual monitors. Why? Why? Why? Well first off why do *you* use dual monitors? That's right, you do it so you can do more at once, with more screen and/or desktop real estate. How many normal users have you met that did not have 5000 things on their desktop because it's easier to find there? Does it not make sense for them to have twice as much space for them to clutter just as they buy an SUV with twice as much space to clutter? And if they can do it easily, they will do it.
"Now we have the tablet PC from microsoft with handwriting software."
And by all accounts it is useless.
Handwriting recognition is HARD, and while Palm's stuff works, it's kind of cheating, since you have to conform to their writing style.
You had to do that with Apple's (unfoprtunately patented) technology. The joke was that they made it look like you were teaching the newton to recognize your handwriting, but in reality your Newton taught you how to write legibly. It was genious, honestly. I thought it was kind of funny going through the "training" sequence complete with lines right out of a "Big Chief" notebook from elementary school.
"They could have owned Linux" was said in regards to the fact that Novell could have been a huge player and market leader in the Linux market.
I'm not so sure about that. I think Ransom Love really thinks they could have owned Linux. After all it was him that started Caldera on the road against Linux in the first place, by trying to charge per-user connection licenses to connect to a Caldera Linux server and trying to make SCO UNIXware and Caldera the same product by mingling the codebases.
Good God, this is the _second_ post I've seen in this thread where some idiot has moderated a vanilla AC "overrated". FOR FUCK'S SAKE, A +0 POST CANNOT BE OVERRATED! Particularly not an insightful one like this.
*sigh*
Mr Moderator, can I have some of your crack, please? Reading the real Slashdot is only getting me down.
Sure it can. You do know that slahsdot has -1 posts, don't you? I am not saying I agree with the moderation in this case, or even with the use of underrated/overrated (I think it is lame to even have these moderations) but if you think the post should have been -1 then, yes, a 0 post is overrated.
Who knows what the motives were at this point. Maybe its just a *BSD user trying to show that linux is insecure, and doesn't want to hurt anyone else. Maybe it's some script kiddie who had an early bedtime and had to go to bed before he got to do any major damage. Maybe it is part of a campaign to discredit linux in general (*cough*SCO). Until more is known, the goal of this break-in won't be known.
Well, to my mind it is just another example of why debian's approach olf holding back releases forever does not work for the modern world. They probably were running very old unpatched software; after all, you owuld expect the debian project to eat their dogfood,right? Oh well, too bad they will probably not understand the implications and carry on like always, like IIS users do.
I don't get people around here.
The girl was illegally sharing copyrighted materials. She was one of many who have been contacted.
Slashdot, in a typical tactic of propoganda latches onto one example and drives it home. A 12 year old! A 15 year old!
Meanwhile, no matter how you shake it, they're still doing the legal thing--protecting their copyrighted works! Even Jamie of Slashdot knows what that is about--threatening the daily Slashdot summary site because they are "illegal."
Both girls professed a profound ignorance of teh technical and legal issues involved. They did not even know they were sharing files. They found the website for kazaa and paid for a software program that lets you download music. I mean, hey, it was cheaper than iTunes, right?
She installed the software and searched for music. In a hidden dialog deep in the innards of the interface is the checkbox that is checked by default that makes all the files you download sharable by default. But she would not bother to look for it, of course. Now she gets hit by all this lawyerese and stuff and is freaking out.
You have to realize that 99% of the world does not read slashdot and has no idea how any of this stuff works. A growing percentage have heard of mp3s, but they have no idea what the big deal is with the RIAA if they even know who that is, which most don't. All they know is you can get movies and MP3s on the internet. Time Warner says you can get them faster if you buy their service, and they are even part of the RIAA (and responsible for the clueless fucks at CNN that are misinforming the public).
This RIAA suing people crap is a scam. They are going to try to squeeze more blood from a rock by force. I mean do you think that girl's parents would have bought $3500 worth of cds before she got to college? Probably not.
Isn't the first rule, don't talk? This coder is going to get whacked! I would have kept my mouth shut if made a proggie for the mob. If I had a ham sandwich with Tony Soprano, I wouldn't talk about it for chrissakes.
The author Simson Garfinkel could also get whacked because he knows the guy who talked.
Maybe it's too Hollywood, but would you even risk it? Would you? So maybe they didn't pay the guy enough? He says he makes 1/3 of $150k, but he likes living under the radar. That makes sense for about two seconds. I'd rather make $150k and keep it in my shoebox.
They aren't paying the guy enough, so he bragged about it to Wired, who published it.
The chain of stupidity doesn't stop there. Now the IRS is after this guy for tax evasion, and they can connect him to the writer of the story and the mob itself, meaning some mob boss at the top is shitting his pants right now -- if this is isn't total BS.
"But in the fog of all those poker games, I had neglected to take the humanities classes required for graduation. So I left without a degree and moved to New York City. My plan was to become a professional card player."
And now the FBI knows you by name.
He talked, but to Wired. The Mafiosos he knows probably do not read Wired or Slashdot. Also he left out all details, so it woudl be pretty hard to determine who he was or who he was talking about unless you were personally privy to the events. Even then the stories were so generic that it could have been anyone.
And where do you get the idea the FBI knows his name from the story? Like you would give your real name for a story like that?
Between this type of scare tactic and the saturation of the P2P networks with garbage files, I think they days of the current generation apps and networks could be numbered. The average file-sharing home user scares fairly easily. I'm not saying these networks will dissapear, but they will cease to be the giant beasts that they are today. I think IRC and new networks like Waste will continue to reign/rise up in the place of the Napster paradigm.
You know what? I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and have come to the conclusionthat it is indeed the end of an era, but not like the RIAA thinks. MP3s are big and artists have figured out that they can distribute them to their fans and get the message out much easier than when they go through the record companies. This is especially true of artists who are not signed, but even mainstream artists to a degree are getting into the act.
The RIAA seems to have decided they don't wnat customers. They have crippled CDs and made some of them break your computer if you dare to play them there. They have sued the hell out of people for downloading mp3s and running internet radio stations. I say screw-em. There are a lot of legitemate, legal MP3s sanctioned by the copyright holders out there and that library will continue to grow. So let's not give RIAA CDs free advertising anymore. Let's support the independant artists and others who "get it" by listening only to their music, buying only their albums and other merchandise, and visiting their concerts.
Eventually the RIAA will die because of sheer market forces like the buggy-whip manufacturers and scribes they are.
Oh, I can't connect to my ISP, cause my anti virus software needs updated. I can't update my anti virus software because I can't connect to my ISP.
Yep, this is definately going to stop viruses from spreading, because nobody will be able to connect to the internet to spread a virus.
You are incredibly dense.. let me spell it out for you. The router will be able to connect you to the antivirus vendor's site or to some other approved site so you can get the virus software/definitions. Or you can install Linux and have done. Even little linksys routers can do that much; do you think that the Cisco routers will be incapable of this? Heck, if they really want to get fancy they can have the router hold the software so you can download it right from the router.
In other words, as long as the people administering the router are not complete morons this will work very well. Besides, they will have the option of dealing with clients that fail authentication however they want; anything from completely denying them in the case of a corporate router to only allowing them to access a specific part of the network where you are quarantined and/or can get the software you need to be authenticated.
Cisco firewalls are not your little linksys router from Fry's or that 386 running OpenBSD over in the corner.
Just as a sidenote: OpenBSD can do all this. Out of the box. Look into authpf and pf: you can identify hosts based on OS, whether they are running a login program, and shape the traffic resulting from this.
(Though I wouldn't like to try running it on a 386. 486 sure.)
Ok, I'm done being an OpenBSD shrill for the day.
Ok, did not mean to disparage OpenBSD, but was more pointing to the monster hardware used in Cisco equipment. To be fair, I wouldn't doubt that the Free Software crowd will also be able to come up with some free implementation of the above technologies.
real great solution, what happens when i get that user that has win95 and a version of norton just as old. Your computers says "Hey big boy I have some super spanky AV installed. Let my mail through!"
"Duh! ok boss"
Great that they're tying something new, this just doesn't seem to hard to circumvent.
Win95's old Norton will not be able to authenticate to this system. You will have to buy the brand new sofware that ties into teh validation system. If they do this the smart way, that will include checking version of software and date of virus defs. You did notice that all the big antivirus manufacturers are part of the system, right?
I think it will be circumventable, but not easily if they do this right, and any circumvention of the system will require a significant increase in virus payload. Besides, before the person who can be infected gets infected, they will notice they cannot connect to their ISP (or their work firewall) and get the updated software. It's a pretty elegant solution IMHO.
I will defend WP against vim/emacs, because you are comparing a good word processor to a couple of good text editors- they aren't the same thing.
No, they're not, at least initially, but they can be used as such with far more and better features and more control over formatting.
by making clever rulesets for the thousands of new viruses every month. The virus would have already infected your network by the time you handcraft one rule. Look at the shortcomings of the Cisco router rulesets. It's a joke. They only catch the low hanging fruit at best.
No, again, that is not what they are doing. Why don't you try reading the posts you are replayiung to, or maybe the article?
They are not trying to filter the viruses. They are authenticating host traffic by checking whether they have virus software in place. The latter is incredibly simpler and more elegant than the former.
It is Microsoft's fault for producing poor code. It is not Microsoft's fault for producing viri. Its seems to me -- honestly -- that there is a prevasive thought in the Slashdot community that it's the product's fault, not the exploiter's. Could any clearify this for me? The virus writer is more at fault right? I mean, Bill Gates may be the biggest bastard ever, and he may have even broken anti-trust laws, but does that mean that virus writers aren't equally or even more so wrong?
You have it there, buddy. The problem, as Steve Ballmer so eloquently put it, is developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.
No, No, NO.
The reason is NOT because Windows is more insecure, or easier to write viruses for, even if that is the case. The reason is the market saturation. 90% of the worlds desktops are running some 32-bit version of Windows, that's a helluva lot of machines to infect. People who write viruses with malicious intentions do it to bring down major infrastructure, and they can do this easily if they infect a few hundred thousand Windows boxes. And the more people that use Windows, the more viruses there will be.
What if everyone used Linux or Macintosh, and there was no Windows boxes left? Then virus coders would work night and day on exploits and trojans for Linux and Mac. It's a matter of deciding on a goal ("to bring down a whole chunk of the global network infrastructure") and then forming a plan ("get all Windows machines to spew out compressed UDP packets of dumbass to every known host").
In conclusion, don't be so smug with your Linux machine during the next round of Welchia or Klez, because if Linux had the desktop market share of Windows, then YOU'D be feeling the pain.
That explains all those worms the script kiddies released last week to attack sendmail and apache. Oh, wait...
Or, hey, let's infect all the Cisco Routers so we take down some major corporate sites and backbones. You know, with that IOS virus.
Hmm, I guess market penetration has nothing to do with it. No, it is design, design, design. tellya what, I'll give you a cookie. It is easier to write viruses in and for Windows than any other OS and Microsoft has ensured that Windows will be readily available and familiar to script kiddies. So market penetration in terms of what the kiddies have may have something to do with it, but it would not be possible if it were not so easy to write viruses for Windows and so easy for worms to penetrate Windows environments. Programs to attack these other systems would be far more complex and with the exception of Linux less likely to be in teh hands of kiddies.
"Traffic shaping" is a fucking joke right now. It's just a half-ass measure to get the low hanging fruit only. You don't know anything about protocols. Each OSI LAYER, eh? Who cares. How are you going to distinguish the individual files infected with viruses being transmitted if they use a proprietary protocol or compression or encryption of any kind.
Simple. According to the article, and the post you replied to, they are not even going to try something as incredibly stupid as that. Instead, they will require authentication according to their own protocol which will allow them to determine whether you have antivirus software. Traffic from hosts without virus protection can then be treated differently than traffic from host which have it.
As to Michael's comment about this requiring people to use Windows on every host, that's just silly. Cisco themselves use BSD and their customers are heavy into real OSs like Solaris, etc. They are not going to stop traffic from such hosts, even by default. I would be willing to bet that they are going to work in some way of identifying the type of host that they are getting the traffic from, and therefore allowing the administrator of the firewall to give Linux, Solaris, et al a pass in such cases.
Cisco firewalls are not your little linksys router from Fry's or that 386 running OpenBSD over in the corner. They have pretty powerful hardware and very flexible software. You can construct some pretty neat rulesets and do very clever things, so this kind of thing is honestly not a surprise and certainly not beyond their capabilities.