Then your average mix of other browsers. I'm not much one to care about market share though. I'd fire a web designer who decided to work with only one browser, end of story.
The real thing we have to be asking is, "should the school even have been collecting these records in the first place?" -- The school obviously has the right to keep the logs since it is their hardware and network, though it doesn't mean that just because they can do it, that they should do it. Moreover, were the students informed that they were being logged in such intricate detail? I know the going trend is "Students have NO rights" but I tend to disagree with that. If they were not informed of the logging and made clear just how much information the school was collecting on them, then I think they have a reasonable expectaton of privacy.
Only 22 MB? I've collected 4 Gigabyte logs in a few hours over here from the DoS attacks we deal with. (I own a shell company, heh.) I must agree though, these packet kiddies just look for ways to justify for their attacks, but it all comes down to ego boosting. It's akin to a child throwing a tantrum in a store because their parent(s) did not buy them [insert ultra-cool kiddie toy here.]
Until the FBI (or in my case, the RCMP) decides to get off their asses and actually prosecute these criminals, the situation will never change. It's amazing the laws these people enforce while ignoring others.. Imagine:
If a group of gang members were standing in front of your store, preventing customers from getting in and severly damaging your business, you can bet your ass the cops would be all over them. Why don't they understand that DoS attacks are just as bad? Of course, all the major internet providers don't give a damn and happily let their networks be used to propagate these attacks. I can't count the number of times I've seen attacks from a few hundred @home cable modems, abuse reports of which went ignored.
One would hope that we had gotten out of the dark ages and opened up our minds a bit. It's upsetting that such a decision could be upheld. It's been said before; the government should not be doing the parenting, the parents should be.
Dell does ship naked PCs, at least in their server lines. The Poweredge 1300 (FreeBSD) I have sitting here was delivered to me 'naked' after I selected the option "No OS installed." on the order form. I got a nice formatted HD, and didn't even have to waste my time formatting it again; plug it in, boot the FreeBSD CD, Done. I may really dislike Dell's workstations, but I love their servers.:)
It would seem to me that some company out there is always trying to abuse their product's market share by doing little things like this. The question that must be asked, is does anyone really expect this to change without legislation? With the community seemingly wanting the government out of ANYTHING to do with the Internet, this would not be done without resistance.. Oh well.
In principle, I agree with you totally. But there has to be a line drawn with how much we will take from these people. If _reasonable_ laws, that were _enforced fairly_ and not _abused_ were in place and stopped all the crack attempts and dos attacks, I'd be a happy man. Unfortunately, reasonable laws that are enforced fairly and not abused seem to be quite rare and subject to media hype and associated public backlash and fright.
Personally, I'd take being the admin and owner of a DoS'ed business web site over being stabbed any day. Are your priorities that out of whack?
To some people, losing their business and means to obtain the basic needs in life (food, shelter, etc) can be just as bad if not worse than being stabbed. At least being stabbed is relatively quick. The reason that DoS attacks are not taken seriously and stopped is precisely because of that attitude.
A DoS attack is akin to a gang standing outside your store with guns refusing to let anyone in or out. Unfortunately, the police and other law enforcement agencies do not take DoS attacks seriously at all.
No, I'm not saying outlaw - I am saying reasonably control. It is not unreasonable to take proven and effect steps to stop such a large amount of bandwidth being abused. ISPs are NOT happy to do filtering, because it means more resources and more hardware costs to them. I've had that very debate with several larger ISPs in the last year. I am by no means for denying users access to broadband! I simply believe that we should do whatever it takes to remove these insecure computers from the network when they are being used to destroy other people's buisnesses.
If Joe User gets his 100Mbit broadband, and leaves it on, doesn't care, has a trojan installed for months and is having his computer be abused for denial of service attacks, Joe User DESERVES to have his bandwidth taken away from him. Joe User would be responsible for the attacks for not doing anything about them.
Of course the largest problem will be making the ISPs cooperate. I've had conversations with people at @Home regarding mass abuse of cable modems for DoS attacks that quite literally make me sick from their lack of caring.:/
I disagree. I have frequently and personally dealt with DoS attacks coming from roughly 200-300 @Home broadband users, all of whom had their machine compromised with various items, the most common being SubSeven which has a built in DoS feature. If you do your math, 1Mbit/s cable * 200-300 cable modems = One hell of alot of DoS power.
I see this more and more now as more untrained, clueless users get high speed internet and get trojaned and never even know it. Don't think the cable companies are helpful at getting rid of these DoS attacks either, most won't lift a finger to help you.
But what you are forgetting is that these broadband home users who know nothing and consistantly get cracked and trojaned are a LARGE cause for denial of service attacks which do a ton of damage since the average script kiddie has well over 200 of these clueless people's machines compromised. Having electricity in your house does not cost other people thousands in damages and put business' web sites out of operation, now does it?
Who cares about DoS attacks? I don't suppose you have been severely damaged by them then? What you may or may not realize is that the script kiddies sit there trojaning all these clueless home users who now have at least 1Mbit/s of bandwidth a piece. They have HUGE networks over > 200-400 cable modems that all do DoS attacks against a single target at the same time. That adds up to a -LOT- of bandwidth.
Ever tried reporting a DoS attack from one cable company at roughly 200 hosts of theirs doing it? You get absolutely no where. Believe me, I know and have done it on several occasions. At BEST you get "Our customer was not doing thisintentionally, their computer was compromised." - Who cares? They are still being an (unknowing) part in a federal offense that is costing people thousands of dollars per second/minute/hour (depends on scale).
These home users who have no clue what is going on, are causing HUGE amounts of damages to business around the Internet, and not a single thing is being done to stop it. It's time that home users are held accountable within the responsibilities involved in running a high bandwidth computer on a public network.
Until that is done, I'm going to pray that this does not happen anytime soon, the last thing we businesses need are script kiddies with 400 trojaned Windows machines all on 100Mbit connections. I firmly believe that one should need basic training and a license to handle high bandwidth computers. It IS a weapon, and it can do loads of damage to businesses. Why does everyone seem to ignore that?
I have to agree. I actually run Matrox cars in all my BSD machines since I do not have a particular need for great 3D graphics but do need the wonderful job Matrox does in the 2D area. However, I also always use Nvidia (current, Geforce (1)) cards in my Windows machine. Yes, I use Windows for gaming, and I always will until there's a great BSD port of Freespace 2 - go away.:P
Yep. The GPL has done some good things for us in the short run, but in the long run it will cause problems that no one ever wants to deal with. I'll happily contribute to GPL code, but I would never license anything *I* write under GPL. That's what the BSD (3 clause) license is for.
The simple fact is: There's no place for politics in licenses.
To be honest, in my own personal experience, I have had problems with AMD K6 processors. Granted I realize that these are older and the K7 is a whole different story, but I cannot afford to take the risk of something not working right. Strictly speaking out of my work and home experience, I have never had any problem with any Intel Pentium chips starting at P133 going to PIII 667 and SMP PIII 550 setups. However, I accept that this is my experience and is not based in science at all:)
AMD should get a big clap on the back for at least challenging Intel and doing a damn good job at it, but I will not become an AMD believer until I see how they do over the long run. Intel may not be pretty, but it has a long and strong track record. I've got nothing against AMD, but I'd like to see them mature a bit before I start putting my servers on the line in the name of AMD.:)
Night Watch, now that connects the images floating around in my head, why didn't I think of that reference? Oh well, it's only a matter of time before 'President [current|Clark] has signed a decree today declaring martial law.' becomes truth.
The way that Patricia has been treated today is disgusting, and I hope you're all ashamed of yourselves. She implies that she's 16, so of course she's going to make a few naive comments. But this is hardly an excuse for the sort of hostility she has received. Maybe people should have politely corrected her, rather than resorting to flames. We should be trying to nurture and encourage young female geeks, rather than treating them so badly.
Patricia: keep posting to Slashdot, and try your best to ignore the comments of some of these cavemen. The majority of Slashdot readers and moderators are decent people, but there are a few sexist neanderthals who try to spoil it for everyone.
Not that I intend to drag myself into the gender debate, but the way Patricia and Lita being treated is quite uncalled for. It's also sad that any woman with intelligence who is not passive is considered a feminist.
Grow up majority-of-men, this is not the 1950s. It's time you stop feeling threatened by intelligent women. You can handle being beat by a man, but can you handle being beat for by a woman? The mentality in play here is quite sad.
Regards, Matt Heckaman
PS: I'm not a troll, though I'm sure I'll be moderated down for my non-conformist view.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. Checking my site logs over the last ~611,000 requests:
76% - IE
5% - Netscape
13% - Ipswitch_WhatsUp (wtf is this??)
Then your average mix of other browsers. I'm not much one to care about market share though. I'd fire a web designer who decided to work with only one browser, end of story.
-Matt
The real thing we have to be asking is, "should the school even have been collecting these records in the first place?" -- The school obviously has the right to keep the logs since it is their hardware and network, though it doesn't mean that just because they can do it, that they should do it. Moreover, were the students informed that they were being logged in such intricate detail? I know the going trend is "Students have NO rights" but I tend to disagree with that. If they were not informed of the logging and made clear just how much information the school was collecting on them, then I think they have a reasonable expectaton of privacy.
-Matt
Only 22 MB? I've collected 4 Gigabyte logs in a few hours over here from the DoS attacks we deal with. (I own a shell company, heh.) I must agree though, these packet kiddies just look for ways to justify for their attacks, but it all comes down to ego boosting. It's akin to a child throwing a tantrum in a store because their parent(s) did not buy them [insert ultra-cool kiddie toy here.]
Until the FBI (or in my case, the RCMP) decides to get off their asses and actually prosecute these criminals, the situation will never change. It's amazing the laws these people enforce while ignoring others.. Imagine:
If a group of gang members were standing in front of your store, preventing customers from getting in and severly damaging your business, you can bet your ass the cops would be all over them. Why don't they understand that DoS attacks are just as bad? Of course, all the major internet providers don't give a damn and happily let their networks be used to propagate these attacks. I can't count the number of times I've seen attacks from a few hundred @home cable modems, abuse reports of which went ignored.
-Matt
Ah it's been a while since I've heard a 'Brave New World' quote on slashdot, nice to see.
Matt
That depends on how you look at it. The way I see it, a responsible parent would either:
1. Go with their child
2. Pay attention at home enough to know if their child was playing a game they deem 'bad'.
There should not have to be LAWS stating this, it should be a parental responsibility, not a matter of legislation.
In my opinion, of course.
-Matt
One would hope that we had gotten out of the dark ages and opened up our minds a bit. It's upsetting that such a decision could be upheld. It's been said before; the government should not be doing the parenting, the parents should be.
Matt
My opinion is this:
1. I own the bandwidth
2. I own the server that the mail software runs on.
3. I have the right to do most any legal thing with my own network. Such as firewalling all of AOL's IP addresses. If they don't like it, tough.
4. I chose freely to give MAPS the authority to say who gets blocked. Since I own my mail server, it's within my rights to delegate that authority.
I don't see what the big deal is.
Matt
ROFL, Microbytes! I have more friends that work in their various stores than I can count. I'd never do it myself though.
(Yes, I live in Montreal)
Matt
Doh, I meant to say:
I didn't even have to waste my time formatting it again to delete Windows(TM).
I need to start using the Preview button.
Dell does ship naked PCs, at least in their server lines. The Poweredge 1300 (FreeBSD) I have sitting here was delivered to me 'naked' after I selected the option "No OS installed." on the order form. I got a nice formatted HD, and didn't even have to waste my time formatting it again; plug it in, boot the FreeBSD CD, Done. I may really dislike Dell's workstations, but I love their servers.
Matt
It works great on FreeBSD as well, I'm using it at the moment. :P
-Matt
It would seem to me that some company out there is always trying to abuse their product's market share by doing little things like this. The question that must be asked, is does anyone really expect this to change without legislation? With the community seemingly wanting the government out of ANYTHING to do with the Internet, this would not be done without resistance.. Oh well.
Matt
In principle, I agree with you totally. But there has to be a line drawn with how much we will take from these people. If _reasonable_ laws, that were _enforced fairly_ and not _abused_ were in place and stopped all the crack attempts and dos attacks, I'd be a happy man. Unfortunately, reasonable laws that are enforced fairly and not abused seem to be quite rare and subject to media hype and associated public backlash and fright.
Matt
Personally, I'd take being the admin and owner of a DoS'ed business web site over being stabbed any day. Are your priorities that out of whack?
To some people, losing their business and means to obtain the basic needs in life (food, shelter, etc) can be just as bad if not worse than being stabbed. At least being stabbed is relatively quick. The reason that DoS attacks are not taken seriously and stopped is precisely because of that attitude.
A DoS attack is akin to a gang standing outside your store with guns refusing to let anyone in or out. Unfortunately, the police and other law enforcement agencies do not take DoS attacks seriously at all.
Matt
No, I'm not saying outlaw - I am saying reasonably control. It is not unreasonable to take proven and effect steps to stop such a large amount of bandwidth being abused. ISPs are NOT happy to do filtering, because it means more resources and more hardware costs to them. I've had that very debate with several larger ISPs in the last year. I am by no means for denying users access to broadband! I simply believe that we should do whatever it takes to remove these insecure computers from the network when they are being used to destroy other people's buisnesses.
If Joe User gets his 100Mbit broadband, and leaves it on, doesn't care, has a trojan installed for months and is having his computer be abused for denial of service attacks, Joe User DESERVES to have his bandwidth taken away from him. Joe User would be responsible for the attacks for not doing anything about them.
Of course the largest problem will be making the ISPs cooperate. I've had conversations with people at @Home regarding mass abuse of cable modems for DoS attacks that quite literally make me sick from their lack of caring.
Matt
I disagree. I have frequently and personally dealt with DoS attacks coming from roughly 200-300 @Home broadband users, all of whom had their machine compromised with various items, the most common being SubSeven which has a built in DoS feature. If you do your math, 1Mbit/s cable * 200-300 cable modems = One hell of alot of DoS power.
I see this more and more now as more untrained, clueless users get high speed internet and get trojaned and never even know it. Don't think the cable companies are helpful at getting rid of these DoS attacks either, most won't lift a finger to help you.
Cheers,
Matt
But what you are forgetting is that these broadband home users who know nothing and consistantly get cracked and trojaned are a LARGE cause for denial of service attacks which do a ton of damage since the average script kiddie has well over 200 of these clueless people's machines compromised. Having electricity in your house does not cost other people thousands in damages and put business' web sites out of operation, now does it?
Matt
Who cares about DoS attacks? I don't suppose you have been severely damaged by them then? What you may or may not realize is that the script kiddies sit there trojaning all these clueless home users who now have at least 1Mbit/s of bandwidth a piece. They have HUGE networks over > 200-400 cable modems that all do DoS attacks against a single target at the same time. That adds up to a -LOT- of bandwidth.
Ever tried reporting a DoS attack from one cable company at roughly 200 hosts of theirs doing it? You get absolutely no where. Believe me, I know and have done it on several occasions. At BEST you get "Our customer was not doing thisintentionally, their computer was compromised." - Who cares? They are still being an (unknowing) part in a federal offense that is costing people thousands of dollars per second/minute/hour (depends on scale).
These home users who have no clue what is going on, are causing HUGE amounts of damages to business around the Internet, and not a single thing is being done to stop it. It's time that home users are held accountable within the responsibilities involved in running a high bandwidth computer on a public network.
Until that is done, I'm going to pray that this does not happen anytime soon, the last thing we businesses need are script kiddies with 400 trojaned Windows machines all on 100Mbit connections. I firmly believe that one should need basic training and a license to handle high bandwidth computers. It IS a weapon, and it can do loads of damage to businesses. Why does everyone seem to ignore that?
Regards,
Matt
I have to agree. I actually run Matrox cars in all my BSD machines since I do not have a particular need for great 3D graphics but do need the wonderful job Matrox does in the 2D area. However, I also always use Nvidia (current, Geforce (1)) cards in my Windows machine. Yes, I use Windows for gaming, and I always will until there's a great BSD port of Freespace 2 - go away. :P
Matt
Yep. The GPL has done some good things for us in the short run, but in the long run it will cause problems that no one ever wants to deal with. I'll happily contribute to GPL code, but I would never license anything *I* write under GPL. That's what the BSD (3 clause) license is for.
The simple fact is: There's no place for politics in licenses.
Matt
To be honest, in my own personal experience, I have had problems with AMD K6 processors. Granted I realize that these are older and the K7 is a whole different story, but I cannot afford to take the risk of something not working right. Strictly speaking out of my work and home experience, I have never had any problem with any Intel Pentium chips starting at P133 going to PIII 667 and SMP PIII 550 setups. However, I accept that this is my experience and is not based in science at all
AMD should get a big clap on the back for at least challenging Intel and doing a damn good job at it, but I will not become an AMD believer until I see how they do over the long run. Intel may not be pretty, but it has a long and strong track record. I've got nothing against AMD, but I'd like to see them mature a bit before I start putting my servers on the line in the name of AMD.
Cheers,
Matt
Night Watch, now that connects the images floating around in my head, why didn't I think of that reference? Oh well, it's only a matter of time before 'President [current|Clark] has signed a decree today declaring martial law.' becomes truth.
Matt
I guess smaller ISPs dont switch their traffic
Really? I'm small, and not even a full ISP, (shells, hosting, whatnot) and even I switch my entire network.. Isn't that just the 'wise' thing to do?
Matt
The way that Patricia has been treated today is disgusting, and I hope you're all ashamed of yourselves. She implies that she's 16, so of course she's going to make a few naive comments. But this is hardly an excuse for the sort of hostility she has received. Maybe people should have politely corrected her, rather than resorting to flames. We should be trying to nurture and encourage young female geeks, rather than treating them so badly.
Patricia: keep posting to Slashdot, and try your best to ignore the comments of some of these cavemen. The majority of Slashdot readers and moderators are decent people, but there are a few sexist neanderthals who try to spoil it for everyone.
Very well said, you sum up my thoughts very well.
Matt
Not that I intend to drag myself into the gender debate, but the way Patricia and Lita being treated is quite uncalled for. It's also sad that any woman with intelligence who is not passive is considered a feminist.
Grow up majority-of-men, this is not the 1950s. It's time you stop feeling threatened by intelligent women. You can handle being beat by a man, but can you handle being beat for by a woman? The mentality in play here is quite sad.
Regards,
Matt Heckaman
PS: I'm not a troll, though I'm sure I'll be moderated down for my non-conformist view.