I believe the poster was referring to the fact that the scans only checked for transfers and those who had a lot of transfers were deemed automatically to have been breaking the law.
The volunteers on AOL were hired and terminated like employees, told to work specific hours like employees, and in every respect except compensation and benefits were employees of AOL. That is the issue. AOL is trying to get away with having an unpaid workforce and the suit seeks to slap their wrist for it. Verant is doing the same thing with everquest, and Microsoft lost a similar suit by its contract employees.
Now now, you know very well that while norwegian teenagers can be jailed for breaking US laws, and US companies can sue anyone in the world under US COUNTY venues, no one else in any other country can sue any US entity under THEIR laws. That would be fair... and we americans don't play fair. That's how we got to be the hyperpower:).
This is offtopic, but obviously you missed the point of the MSSQL7 story. The same vulnerability existed in a RedHat distro, but was immediately fixed and resulted in no breakins. However it resulted in tons of bad press for RedHat. The MSSQL7 issue will not be fixed, even in MSSQL2000, has resulted in hundreds of thousands of breakins, yet received 0 press outside of/.
The story was about mainstream publications having bad technical accuracy and a microsoft bias, not an attempt to bash microsoft.
IIRC all he said was that he was one of the early promoters, which he was. He also is said to have coined the phrase "Information Superhighway" which he probably did.
I don't like algore either.. but let's be accurate in our critiques of him.. there are much more important things to critique...
They made you sign a non-disclosure agreement, NOT a non-compete. You could work for their main competitor without incident. You just cannot disclose sensitive information, which is not hard to do.
Many startups are having applicants sign non-disclosure before the interview. The reason is that in order to discuss the nature of the job, they have to reveal sensitive information. At many start-ups, everything is sensitive information because they are working on some Next Big Thing and any information leaking out about what they are doing could potentially harm them.
TransMeta did the very same thing, and it has been important to their success. Had anything leaked out about what they were doing, prior to the time when they were ready, it would have meant disaster as IBM and Intel would have easily duplicated their technology and brought it to market faster, then been able to sue transmeta for breaking "their" patents!
It is a cutthroat world out there in IT, as far as business is concerned. Geeks try to avoid bean-counting as a rule and tend to forget that.
yep that is why ie for the mac kicks butt. It is far snappier, uses less memory, and is less intrusive than the windows counterpart. Office for the mac, however, is as bloated as ever.
Personally I can't see why they don't allow you to right-click and choose "open in a new window." I mean IE is built into the file browser and this is doable in IE, why not when browsing files?
These types of agreements are not only legal, they are common. (Agreements in which only one party can change the agreement at will.) Credit card agreements come to mind, some leases, etc.
Of course when they change the agreement you reserve the right to get out of it, but the point is that it is detrimental to you if you do. If you cancel your credit card, you instantly owe your full balance. If you cut off Microsoft, you have no computer business.
Actually it is possible within the current system to allow that, for one thing one could change the perms of the main database, for another you can actually set up a red hat box such that each user has their own local database. I read a howto on this.. I will see if I can dig up the url. Of course this second method only allows you to install stuff for yourself, not systemwide...
Linux is gearing up to take over the desktop in a big way. When it does, it is going to need to be accessable to Joe Random User, and that means, in this day and age, AOL on the desktop. Every copy of windows and macOS comes with AOL's client, as does every other cd produced (lots of computer and game magazines with CD's are including the latest AOL Cd with them.
Potatoe came with the AOL web server, and they had open source devel team ala Gnutella.. it was only a matter of time...
These publications have gotten really bad about publishing trolls like the referenced article as serious journalism. The reason they do it is they know that anything "controversial" will generate ad revenue. And we keep taking the bait.
Maybe if people stopped reading trash like this it would stop being printed. The fact is the article has no significant points or arguments, no proof and no examples. Just a nasty jab at Linux at the end of an otherwise rather boring and uninspired article few people would ever have read otherwise.
The/. trolls have more content and better arguments against open source and linux than these guys could dream of making, and we recognize them for what they are. When will we stop rewarding the mainstream media for engaging in this sort of behaviour?
Well, so could have a brain-dead donkey.. but intel figured they'd cash in on the stock anyway.. it seemed like a PHB maneuver to me, in fact it reeks of PHB activity...
But of course it costs hundreds of thousands to make the CD's. That does not count the money they spend bribing the radio stations to play their labels' music and the money they spend on advertising, etc.
Still, the cost of producing the cd still approaches the sub-dollar range, because they are making them in bulk processes. It's the same kind of process that allows you to make a $500 processor for $50, if you happen to have a multimillion dollar factory lying around unused and are aking millions of processors.
The response of the artists in the past has been to create their own labels. That way they get the cash and the power to promote other artists. But you have to already be rich to make your own label, generally, if you want it to be a successful one.
Not necessarily BS. They make millions of copies, and the copying process is very cheap. When you divide the production cost by millions of copies, the total cost to make each CD, even including the copy cost, is very low indeed and it would not be unreasonable to say it might be in the neighbourhood of $0.30.
Redhat and Debian, for two distros, have automagic patches that are about as easy as a service pack. RedHat sells a support line such that one can have updates pushed to one's machine over priority FTP. Microsoft does not make it as easy as that.
The same user that cannot follow directions to patch will be found with SP1 or whatever the OEM put there (or whatever a technician walked them through installing step-by-step). They will also end up with mismatched files as installing programs and drivers overwrite new files with old ones thanks to Microsoft's Super-duper-strong *cough* versioning. A Service pack may help some of this, (except where it doesn't and breaks stuff with the wrong versions of files) but the user often does not know they need to install it.
At least in a packaging distro there is decent versioning (without resorting to the VMS way of puting versions in the filesystem.. hm why did NT not get that?) and a "look man you are installing old stuff on new stuff.. STOP." error message that you can always count on.
Of course we all know Mr. Moody's "controversial" article is only meant to draw advertising revenue. He has written some real gems, too.. check out his "past articles" section. No on second thought don't. Even if the statistics had been accurate, the correlation was so obviously spurious as to be comical.
Of course the media have not pointed out the other good things about Linux and Open Source in this area. For one thing, these vulnerabilities were found because the source was available. Often they were found before they were even used. With closed-source there are many vulnerabilities waiting to be "discovered," usually by someone cracking the box. The other thing to consider is that the vulnerabilities in Linux all get patched immediately. There are bugs in windows and NT that have persisted for years without Microsoft fixing them.
With Linux, you have a lot of power over your box and what is installed. Most of the vulnerabilities in distros are in packages you would not install on a box you wanted to secure. You also have the source so you can alter it and have a box that is very different from what any cracker might expect. With Windows you get what Mr. Bill feeds you and you'd damn better like it.
Of course there are flaws in both systems and strengths as well. But I will take the power of Linux any day. At least if my linux box does not work, I know who I can blame. I'd rather not wait for someone else to save me from my issues.
I think some tools to edit and otherwise interface with the rpm database directly are in order. Especially since they would help deal with rpm database corruption (which is annoying).
# rpm -U niftypackage-1.2.3.rpm
niftypackage-1.2.3 needs libpackage-3.2.1
# rpm -U libpackage-3.2.1.rpm
libpackage-3.2.1 is already installed.
# rpm -q libpackage
#
# rpm -e libpackage
libpackage is not installed.
# rpm -U libpackage-3.2.1.rpm
libpackage-3.2.1 is already installed.
Darn it!
As for your particular problem, currently one could create one's own rpm and install it, but I understand this is not what you want to do in this case. I think it would be nice if there was a way for rpm or whatever to check the system and find the files installed, then update the database on that basis. That way if the database itself gets hosed, you could always build another one. As far as I understand rebuilddb does not do that, but instead does a sort of sanity or consistency check, but I could be wrong.
One other thing: they still have the "GUI in the kernel" problem, and though they have implemented *finally* a textual boot, it still uses the same display driver (which leaves the same problem of bad display drivers killing your server) and is essentially useless for doing much of anything.
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napster uses a random port IIRC. your other suggestions are quite valid.
I believe the poster was referring to the fact that the scans only checked for transfers and those who had a lot of transfers were deemed automatically to have been breaking the law.
Time-Warner is doing the same thing.
Windows 95/98/ME (why doesn't Microsoft kill of this piece of crap?)
Because they need justification for charging several times as much for Windows 2000.
The volunteers on AOL were hired and terminated like employees, told to work specific hours like employees, and in every respect except compensation and benefits were employees of AOL. That is the issue. AOL is trying to get away with having an unpaid workforce and the suit seeks to slap their wrist for it. Verant is doing the same thing with everquest, and Microsoft lost a similar suit by its contract employees.
(*Except for some product called Small Business Server, but even there the expectation is that setup is done by a reseller.)
Microsoft does not allow OEM's to set up this portion of SBS.
Now now, you know very well that while norwegian teenagers can be jailed for breaking US laws, and US companies can sue anyone in the world under US COUNTY venues, no one else in any other country can sue any US entity under THEIR laws. That would be fair... and we americans don't play fair. That's how we got to be the hyperpower :).
This is offtopic, but obviously you missed the point of the MSSQL7 story. The same vulnerability existed in a RedHat distro, but was immediately fixed and resulted in no breakins. However it resulted in tons of bad press for RedHat. The MSSQL7 issue will not be fixed, even in MSSQL2000, has resulted in hundreds of thousands of breakins, yet received 0 press outside of /.
The story was about mainstream publications having bad technical accuracy and a microsoft bias, not an attempt to bash microsoft.
IIRC all he said was that he was one of the early promoters, which he was. He also is said to have coined the phrase "Information Superhighway" which he probably did.
I don't like algore either.. but let's be accurate in our critiques of him.. there are much more important things to critique...
They made you sign a non-disclosure agreement, NOT a non-compete. You could work for their main competitor without incident. You just cannot disclose sensitive information, which is not hard to do.
Many startups are having applicants sign non-disclosure before the interview. The reason is that in order to discuss the nature of the job, they have to reveal sensitive information. At many start-ups, everything is sensitive information because they are working on some Next Big Thing and any information leaking out about what they are doing could potentially harm them.
TransMeta did the very same thing, and it has been important to their success. Had anything leaked out about what they were doing, prior to the time when they were ready, it would have meant disaster as IBM and Intel would have easily duplicated their technology and brought it to market faster, then been able to sue transmeta for breaking "their" patents!
It is a cutthroat world out there in IT, as far as business is concerned. Geeks try to avoid bean-counting as a rule and tend to forget that.
yep that is why ie for the mac kicks butt. It is far snappier, uses less memory, and is less intrusive than the windows counterpart. Office for the mac, however, is as bloated as ever.
Personally I can't see why they don't allow you to right-click and choose "open in a new window." I mean IE is built into the file browser and this is doable in IE, why not when browsing files?
These types of agreements are not only legal, they are common. (Agreements in which only one party can change the agreement at will.) Credit card agreements come to mind, some leases, etc.
Of course when they change the agreement you reserve the right to get out of it, but the point is that it is detrimental to you if you do. If you cancel your credit card, you instantly owe your full balance. If you cut off Microsoft, you have no computer business.
Actually it is possible within the current system to allow that, for one thing one could change the perms of the main database, for another you can actually set up a red hat box such that each user has their own local database. I read a howto on this.. I will see if I can dig up the url. Of course this second method only allows you to install stuff for yourself, not systemwide...
Linux is gearing up to take over the desktop in a big way. When it does, it is going to need to be accessable to Joe Random User, and that means, in this day and age, AOL on the desktop. Every copy of windows and macOS comes with AOL's client, as does every other cd produced (lots of computer and game magazines with CD's are including the latest AOL Cd with them.
Potatoe came with the AOL web server, and they had open source devel team ala Gnutella.. it was only a matter of time...
These publications have gotten really bad about publishing trolls like the referenced article as serious journalism. The reason they do it is they know that anything "controversial" will generate ad revenue. And we keep taking the bait.
Maybe if people stopped reading trash like this it would stop being printed. The fact is the article has no significant points or arguments, no proof and no examples. Just a nasty jab at Linux at the end of an otherwise rather boring and uninspired article few people would ever have read otherwise.
The /. trolls have more content and better arguments against open source and linux than these guys could dream of making, and we recognize them for what they are. When will we stop rewarding the mainstream media for engaging in this sort of behaviour?
Well, so could have a brain-dead donkey.. but intel figured they'd cash in on the stock anyway.. it seemed like a PHB maneuver to me, in fact it reeks of PHB activity...
But of course it costs hundreds of thousands to make the CD's. That does not count the money they spend bribing the radio stations to play their labels' music and the money they spend on advertising, etc.
Still, the cost of producing the cd still approaches the sub-dollar range, because they are making them in bulk processes. It's the same kind of process that allows you to make a $500 processor for $50, if you happen to have a multimillion dollar factory lying around unused and are aking millions of processors.
The response of the artists in the past has been to create their own labels. That way they get the cash and the power to promote other artists. But you have to already be rich to make your own label, generally, if you want it to be a successful one.
hmm.. no rob malda on that list. Interesting, no?
Not necessarily BS. They make millions of copies, and the copying process is very cheap. When you divide the production cost by millions of copies, the total cost to make each CD, even including the copy cost, is very low indeed and it would not be unreasonable to say it might be in the neighbourhood of $0.30.
Redhat and Debian, for two distros, have automagic patches that are about as easy as a service pack. RedHat sells a support line such that one can have updates pushed to one's machine over priority FTP. Microsoft does not make it as easy as that.
The same user that cannot follow directions to patch will be found with SP1 or whatever the OEM put there (or whatever a technician walked them through installing step-by-step). They will also end up with mismatched files as installing programs and drivers overwrite new files with old ones thanks to Microsoft's Super-duper-strong *cough* versioning. A Service pack may help some of this, (except where it doesn't and breaks stuff with the wrong versions of files) but the user often does not know they need to install it.
At least in a packaging distro there is decent versioning (without resorting to the VMS way of puting versions in the filesystem.. hm why did NT not get that?) and a "look man you are installing old stuff on new stuff.. STOP." error message that you can always count on.
Of course we all know Mr. Moody's "controversial" article is only meant to draw advertising revenue. He has written some real gems, too.. check out his "past articles" section. No on second thought don't. Even if the statistics had been accurate, the correlation was so obviously spurious as to be comical.
Of course the media have not pointed out the other good things about Linux and Open Source in this area. For one thing, these vulnerabilities were found because the source was available. Often they were found before they were even used. With closed-source there are many vulnerabilities waiting to be "discovered," usually by someone cracking the box. The other thing to consider is that the vulnerabilities in Linux all get patched immediately. There are bugs in windows and NT that have persisted for years without Microsoft fixing them.
With Linux, you have a lot of power over your box and what is installed. Most of the vulnerabilities in distros are in packages you would not install on a box you wanted to secure. You also have the source so you can alter it and have a box that is very different from what any cracker might expect. With Windows you get what Mr. Bill feeds you and you'd damn better like it.
Of course there are flaws in both systems and strengths as well. But I will take the power of Linux any day. At least if my linux box does not work, I know who I can blame. I'd rather not wait for someone else to save me from my issues.
I think some tools to edit and otherwise interface with the rpm database directly are in order. Especially since they would help deal with rpm database corruption (which is annoying).
# rpm -U niftypackage-1.2.3.rpm
niftypackage-1.2.3 needs libpackage-3.2.1
# rpm -U libpackage-3.2.1.rpm
libpackage-3.2.1 is already installed.
# rpm -q libpackage
#
# rpm -e libpackage
libpackage is not installed.
# rpm -U libpackage-3.2.1.rpm
libpackage-3.2.1 is already installed.
Darn it!
As for your particular problem, currently one could create one's own rpm and install it, but I understand this is not what you want to do in this case. I think it would be nice if there was a way for rpm or whatever to check the system and find the files installed, then update the database on that basis. That way if the database itself gets hosed, you could always build another one. As far as I understand rebuilddb does not do that, but instead does a sort of sanity or consistency check, but I could be wrong.
One other thing: they still have the "GUI in the kernel" problem, and though they have implemented *finally* a textual boot, it still uses the same display driver (which leaves the same problem of bad display drivers killing your server) and is essentially useless for doing much of anything.