I'm not very knowledgeable on the editorial process of./
Neither am I. Come to think of it, this is the first I've heard of the "editorial process of the current working directory." I ought to go googling later....
Or is there some other dot-slash that's relevant to this story?
Yep. Like I said, I could still support Childs if I had more info.
Can't remember what I read yesterday, so I can't have you verify how misleading my sources were.
If Terry doing his job was disruptive to the City, then this whole thing is completely stupid. I'm sure Terry has his reasons for what he did, but because he's a network administrator and is leagues ahead of the average computer user in terms of what he knows, the trick is going to be making the City understand his reasons why he did whatever it is he did.
After R'ing a couple more FA's (this time linked to from/.), seems like all he did was be more paranoid about network security than his boss(es) liked. The trick, then, is going to be making the judge/jury understand why what he did was just doing his job (and having an idea of the average computer user, that looks pretty unlikely).
Again, knowing Section 502 that he's accused of violating would help. After a quick but not a thorough search of Google, I have no idea what this section of San Francisco or California law is.
After skimming TFA and googling for more information on this, all I see is that Childs appears to have abused his technological powers as a network administrator.
No network administrator is going to be at risk for anything as long as they play nice and don't pull crap like bringing a city's network activity to a screeching halt just because they're pissed off or whatever.
Sure, you can be as paranoid as you want about security, but there is no reason why an entire city's network activity should be cut off, nor should there ever be any reason to refuse restore it. Well, okay, in recent years in the US, maybe there could be reason, but this is not the case with what Childs did.
The only problem I have that prevents me from being completely against Childs right now is that I don't know what "Section 502" is that charges 2-4 mention, so I don't know if he was actually in violation of that at all.
Unrelatedly, I'm new here and I have a question: How long before I make a habit of noticing fantastic-looking headlines and immediately checking for a kdawson story?
Besides, I suspect that most corporate users will just update the whole PC and buy new ones with Windows 77 pre-installed. In the 10 years of my IT career I have seen one large company (Novartis) that actually did its own OS installations on a regular basis. The rest just used the computers with whatever OS was delivered at purchase, most of the time the unchanged vendor installation.
...how is your future era with common linux desktops or bug-free Windows relevant here? Also, how much disk space do you need to install Windows XP Service Pack 143?
Is XP really going to last long enough for Microsoft to make Windows 77? Wow.
There are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns. He can cite the known unknowns fairly easily. He could cite the issue with the system and the problem with churning out a solution after sitting in front of a monitor for a few days (or however long it takes) and actually writing the program to fix it.
For the known unknowns, there will be known issues for which solutions cannot currently be formed, for lack of enough information to fix the problem.
Agreed. It would be nice to see the day when Windows would no longer be able to run the viruses of yesteryear/yesterversion/[time period of your choosing].
Truly, breaking compatibility with current Windows stuff would be a plus.
I've had similar experiences with Ubuntu. Its just too damn bloated.
But Linux is just the kernel and it is indeed fast. What distros pile on top of the kernel is what can slow the whole OS down if they are not careful.
Ubuntu's not even that bad about it, in my experience (8.04.1, 8.10). After I log in, when I see my full desktop prepared and my wireless Internet ready to go, the system is ready for me to start doing stuff. Kubuntu (8.04.x), I wanna give maybe 1 or 2 seconds to get settled after I get my Internet.
However, on logging into Windows Vista (or even, to a lesser extent, XP), I wanna wait five or ten minutes for the system to free up the CPU before I start doing stuff, because in my experience, Windows likes to do a lot of stuff in the background.
It's like filling up your gas tank at a self-serve pump, and then complaining when you realize that the guy who runs the gas station replaced the fluids in your engine free of charge.
No, I'm not applauding criminal activity because of a grudge. I'm applauding it for how widespread the program is and how it just refuses to die. It ain't every day you find a program as impressive as this one. How often has a piece of malware evolved to perpetuate itself, let alone multiple times?
This is a great effort on the programmers' parts, whether or not it actually does anything malicious to Windows systems.
I'd say that Swedes and others who have English as their second language in general are better on separating homophones than those with English as their first language. I can't remember ever seeing a swede mixing up their/they're/there, your/you're or site/sight. I frequently see Americans and UKians doing that. For some reason, mixing up then/than and lose/loose seems very common though. Furthermore we never use "whom" and "neither...nor" and we always have a problem deciding whether to use "who", "that" or "which".:)
o_O What? Do you mean "British" or "Englishmen"? C'mon, please pick an already existing word. There's more than enough of them.
(And yes, you could restore your home directory from backups, but how do you know whether the backups are infected?)
Nice question. I bet if a solution had been found by now, it'd be as emphasized as possible for Windows users. If a solution were available, Conficker might have a harder time spreading through USB drives.
Or maybe I'm just an idiot and I don't think outside the box. Is there such a solution?
Never said expert, dude. Said I could install tarballs, and said that I have seen some idiot Windows users.
I was running a Kubuntu live USB one day, and the guy next to me asked me where all the "stuff" was. When he motioned to the desktop, I realized that he mentioned the icons, which were present in the school's Windows stuff, but not my Kubuntu live session. Decided to leave it at "This isn't Windows." Was about three seconds away from flooding his ears with shit he would never understand.
I have been asked multiple times by the same guy how to save stuff to a flash drive and how to remove it. I swear, if I weren't paranoid of getting into school trouble, I would have smacked the guy the first time he asked.
Granted, community college isn't the best place to find computer-oriented people (I swear, I am working on getting back into CMU), but it does give nice support to the argument that Windows users can, in fact, be idiots. I could have bashed these morons without installing Linux just because Microsoft Windows became boring as a computer experience.
By the way, is there such a thing as an Advanced Placement distro of Ubuntu that I could run? Or are you just suggesting that I install Debian? I'd consider it for the massive learning experience that I imagine is available.
Awesome. This is the greatest piece of malware I've ever seen. Conficker has done an absolutely wonderful job of becoming a real, recognized, major threat, even worming its way into several government systems.
The fact that it's evolving to continue its journey into every computer it can find is quite impressive to me. I don't think I've ever heard of a malware threat this bad. Conficker's botnet is now measured in percentage of Windows machines infiltrated. When you get a significant percentage of computers like, say, 30% of 90% of the Desktop OS market (or whatever M$'s current stranglehold is worth), that's something to be proud of.
I haven't heard of this actually doing anything malicious yet, and judging from some comments here, it hasn't actually done anything yet. But whatever it does do (after it disables and resets all the preferences and whatnot), I bet it's completely epic and noteworthy and huge and stuff. There's no way something giant isn't going down when all is said and done.
I applaud the efforts of the programmers who wrote this quite beautiful program and set it loose in the wild. I look forward to more developments, both in the program and the fight against it, and I look forward to laughing my ass off as it infiltrates Windows system after Windows system, while remembering how recently I converted to Linux.:)
I don't think that tarballs aren that big a deal. I've been running Ubuntu since around New Year's '09 or so, as my first exploration of the Linux world. I broke away from Windows because (a) I was bored of knowing my OS so well and (b) I've been looking for a balance between cheap and stable, and few things if any beat FOSS for that.
I quickly learned how to build a tarball, whether it's gzipped or bzipped, and I even had a couple of scripts to do it for me (lost them on a reinstall when I got Windows XP from a friend and failed to get grub back from a live disc, and I only keep Windows around because of my gaming addiction). I'll get around to re-writing those at some point and throwing them into/bin where they belong.
And if malware gets into my system, what's the worst that happens? I'm forced to reinstall my OS again? Gee, like I haven't wiped a hard disk before. >_> That'd be the other problem with attacking Linux systems: we probably don't care as much about whether we will have to reinstall it on a malicious attack, and we have probably been backing up important stuff anyway for a good long while now, too. In other words, we're not nearly the idiots that Windows users tend to be (and I have seen some real idiots somehow manage to use Windows; it's quite sad to watch, honestly).
No, really, I do. *looks up Pokedex on Diamond card* On my Pokemon Diamond card, which I've had since release, I have 387 obtained and 407 owned. The save file is going on 150 hours of gameplay time.
However, I do not own a Zune or any Apple products, so we're all good on those two points.
If FOSS sold itself, the Year of the Linux Desktop would have been here years ago, Firefox/Google Chrome and OpenOffice would reign supreme, and M$ would have died when Linux took over.
There is now a flaw with your thought.
Fix: FOSS sells itself to people, mostly people who know a thing or two about a computer beyond Internet usage, who understand that the pay-for software is bad and wish for a better alternative. They then think, "Hey, this is free! Why have I not gotten into using this yet!?"
Only as long as you let them legislate whatever they want. That's the basis of the whole system. Do you hate what the government is doing? Really? Do you hate it enough to do something about it? Or are you just gonna sit at your computer and complain about it on/.?
Wow. That timeline just makes this whole thing completely retarded. Asymetrix abandoned it in much less time than it took for Psion to hand out these letters. And when Psion wasn't even the first company to take this word, I wouldn't expect a reasonable person to see any sort of strength in these letters (IANAL, but I did do a law intro course in high school).
The term "netbook" hasn't been associated with Psion for as long as I can remember. I first heard the term "netbook" when it became an accepted generic term for halfway between a laptop and a thin client a few years back.
People seem surprised that Psion is still around, and I bet this lawsuit just runs them the rest of the way into the ground when they have to pay losing legal costs.
Oh, I see. I was under the impression that the phrase "It just works" was a synonym for something like "It simply works". Apparently it is a synonym for "It barely works".
I thought "It barely works" is M$ Windows.
Or is there less difference between the companies than one would initially guess?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not very knowledgeable on the editorial process of ./
Neither am I. Come to think of it, this is the first I've heard of the "editorial process of the current working directory." I ought to go googling later....
Or is there some other dot-slash that's relevant to this story?
Yep. Like I said, I could still support Childs if I had more info.
Can't remember what I read yesterday, so I can't have you verify how misleading my sources were.
If Terry doing his job was disruptive to the City, then this whole thing is completely stupid. I'm sure Terry has his reasons for what he did, but because he's a network administrator and is leagues ahead of the average computer user in terms of what he knows, the trick is going to be making the City understand his reasons why he did whatever it is he did.
After R'ing a couple more FA's (this time linked to from /.), seems like all he did was be more paranoid about network security than his boss(es) liked. The trick, then, is going to be making the judge/jury understand why what he did was just doing his job (and having an idea of the average computer user, that looks pretty unlikely).
Again, knowing Section 502 that he's accused of violating would help. After a quick but not a thorough search of Google, I have no idea what this section of San Francisco or California law is.
After skimming TFA and googling for more information on this, all I see is that Childs appears to have abused his technological powers as a network administrator.
No network administrator is going to be at risk for anything as long as they play nice and don't pull crap like bringing a city's network activity to a screeching halt just because they're pissed off or whatever.
Sure, you can be as paranoid as you want about security, but there is no reason why an entire city's network activity should be cut off, nor should there ever be any reason to refuse restore it. Well, okay, in recent years in the US, maybe there could be reason, but this is not the case with what Childs did.
The only problem I have that prevents me from being completely against Childs right now is that I don't know what "Section 502" is that charges 2-4 mention, so I don't know if he was actually in violation of that at all.
Unrelatedly, I'm new here and I have a question: How long before I make a habit of noticing fantastic-looking headlines and immediately checking for a kdawson story?
Besides, I suspect that most corporate users will just update the whole PC and buy new ones with Windows 77 pre-installed. In the 10 years of my IT career I have seen one large company (Novartis) that actually did its own OS installations on a regular basis. The rest just used the computers with whatever OS was delivered at purchase, most of the time the unchanged vendor installation.
...how is your future era with common linux desktops or bug-free Windows relevant here? Also, how much disk space do you need to install Windows XP Service Pack 143?
Is XP really going to last long enough for Microsoft to make Windows 77? Wow.
There are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns. He can cite the known unknowns fairly easily. He could cite the issue with the system and the problem with churning out a solution after sitting in front of a monitor for a few days (or however long it takes) and actually writing the program to fix it.
For the known unknowns, there will be known issues for which solutions cannot currently be formed, for lack of enough information to fix the problem.
Agreed. It would be nice to see the day when Windows would no longer be able to run the viruses of yesteryear/yesterversion/[time period of your choosing].
Truly, breaking compatibility with current Windows stuff would be a plus.
I've had similar experiences with Ubuntu. Its just too damn bloated.
But Linux is just the kernel and it is indeed fast. What distros pile on top of the kernel is what can slow the whole OS down if they are not careful.
Ubuntu's not even that bad about it, in my experience (8.04.1, 8.10). After I log in, when I see my full desktop prepared and my wireless Internet ready to go, the system is ready for me to start doing stuff. Kubuntu (8.04.x), I wanna give maybe 1 or 2 seconds to get settled after I get my Internet.
However, on logging into Windows Vista (or even, to a lesser extent, XP), I wanna wait five or ten minutes for the system to free up the CPU before I start doing stuff, because in my experience, Windows likes to do a lot of stuff in the background.
It's like filling up your gas tank at a self-serve pump, and then complaining when you realize that the guy who runs the gas station replaced the fluids in your engine free of charge.
No, I'm not applauding criminal activity because of a grudge. I'm applauding it for how widespread the program is and how it just refuses to die. It ain't every day you find a program as impressive as this one. How often has a piece of malware evolved to perpetuate itself, let alone multiple times?
This is a great effort on the programmers' parts, whether or not it actually does anything malicious to Windows systems.
Linux from scratch? Ooh, cool. I gotta work my way up to that.
Will do some Googling later.
I'd say that Swedes and others who have English as their second language in general are better on separating homophones than those with English as their first language. I can't remember ever seeing a swede mixing up their/they're/there, your/you're or site/sight. I frequently see Americans and UKians doing that. For some reason, mixing up then/than and lose/loose seems very common though. Furthermore we never use "whom" and "neither...nor" and we always have a problem deciding whether to use "who", "that" or "which". :)
o_O What? Do you mean "British" or "Englishmen"? C'mon, please pick an already existing word. There's more than enough of them.
*awaits off-topic moderation*
(And yes, you could restore your home directory from backups, but how do you know whether the backups are infected?)
Nice question. I bet if a solution had been found by now, it'd be as emphasized as possible for Windows users. If a solution were available, Conficker might have a harder time spreading through USB drives.
Or maybe I'm just an idiot and I don't think outside the box. Is there such a solution?
Never said expert, dude. Said I could install tarballs, and said that I have seen some idiot Windows users.
I was running a Kubuntu live USB one day, and the guy next to me asked me where all the "stuff" was. When he motioned to the desktop, I realized that he mentioned the icons, which were present in the school's Windows stuff, but not my Kubuntu live session. Decided to leave it at "This isn't Windows." Was about three seconds away from flooding his ears with shit he would never understand.
I have been asked multiple times by the same guy how to save stuff to a flash drive and how to remove it. I swear, if I weren't paranoid of getting into school trouble, I would have smacked the guy the first time he asked.
Granted, community college isn't the best place to find computer-oriented people (I swear, I am working on getting back into CMU), but it does give nice support to the argument that Windows users can, in fact, be idiots. I could have bashed these morons without installing Linux just because Microsoft Windows became boring as a computer experience.
By the way, is there such a thing as an Advanced Placement distro of Ubuntu that I could run? Or are you just suggesting that I install Debian? I'd consider it for the massive learning experience that I imagine is available.
Awesome. This is the greatest piece of malware I've ever seen. Conficker has done an absolutely wonderful job of becoming a real, recognized, major threat, even worming its way into several government systems.
The fact that it's evolving to continue its journey into every computer it can find is quite impressive to me. I don't think I've ever heard of a malware threat this bad. Conficker's botnet is now measured in percentage of Windows machines infiltrated. When you get a significant percentage of computers like, say, 30% of 90% of the Desktop OS market (or whatever M$'s current stranglehold is worth), that's something to be proud of.
I haven't heard of this actually doing anything malicious yet, and judging from some comments here, it hasn't actually done anything yet. But whatever it does do (after it disables and resets all the preferences and whatnot), I bet it's completely epic and noteworthy and huge and stuff. There's no way something giant isn't going down when all is said and done.
I applaud the efforts of the programmers who wrote this quite beautiful program and set it loose in the wild. I look forward to more developments, both in the program and the fight against it, and I look forward to laughing my ass off as it infiltrates Windows system after Windows system, while remembering how recently I converted to Linux. :)
I don't think that tarballs aren that big a deal. I've been running Ubuntu since around New Year's '09 or so, as my first exploration of the Linux world. I broke away from Windows because (a) I was bored of knowing my OS so well and (b) I've been looking for a balance between cheap and stable, and few things if any beat FOSS for that.
I quickly learned how to build a tarball, whether it's gzipped or bzipped, and I even had a couple of scripts to do it for me (lost them on a reinstall when I got Windows XP from a friend and failed to get grub back from a live disc, and I only keep Windows around because of my gaming addiction). I'll get around to re-writing those at some point and throwing them into /bin where they belong.
And if malware gets into my system, what's the worst that happens? I'm forced to reinstall my OS again? Gee, like I haven't wiped a hard disk before. >_> That'd be the other problem with attacking Linux systems: we probably don't care as much about whether we will have to reinstall it on a malicious attack, and we have probably been backing up important stuff anyway for a good long while now, too. In other words, we're not nearly the idiots that Windows users tend to be (and I have seen some real idiots somehow manage to use Windows; it's quite sad to watch, honestly).
Hey! I play Pokemon, you insensitive clod!
No, really, I do. *looks up Pokedex on Diamond card* On my Pokemon Diamond card, which I've had since release, I have 387 obtained and 407 owned. The save file is going on 150 hours of gameplay time.
However, I do not own a Zune or any Apple products, so we're all good on those two points.
*sees subject*
If FOSS sold itself, the Year of the Linux Desktop would have been here years ago, Firefox/Google Chrome and OpenOffice would reign supreme, and M$ would have died when Linux took over.
There is now a flaw with your thought.
Fix: FOSS sells itself to people, mostly people who know a thing or two about a computer beyond Internet usage, who understand that the pay-for software is bad and wish for a better alternative. They then think, "Hey, this is free! Why have I not gotten into using this yet!?"
Only as long as you let them legislate whatever they want. That's the basis of the whole system. Do you hate what the government is doing? Really? Do you hate it enough to do something about it? Or are you just gonna sit at your computer and complain about it on /.?
Wow. That timeline just makes this whole thing completely retarded. Asymetrix abandoned it in much less time than it took for Psion to hand out these letters. And when Psion wasn't even the first company to take this word, I wouldn't expect a reasonable person to see any sort of strength in these letters (IANAL, but I did do a law intro course in high school).
The term "netbook" hasn't been associated with Psion for as long as I can remember. I first heard the term "netbook" when it became an accepted generic term for halfway between a laptop and a thin client a few years back.
People seem surprised that Psion is still around, and I bet this lawsuit just runs them the rest of the way into the ground when they have to pay losing legal costs.
There's an idea. They can call it "Web Investigator" or something like that. Something synonymous with "Internet Explorer", but distinctly not IE.
Oh, I see. I was under the impression that the phrase "It just works" was a synonym for something like "It simply works". Apparently it is a synonym for "It barely works".
I thought "It barely works" is M$ Windows. Or is there less difference between the companies than one would initially guess?