All the more reason to do all your real work under a user account with limited privileges and definitely never to allow others who use your computer to run with administrative privileges. Since nothing can touch C:\Program Files from a regular user account, the trojan would be ineffectual.
For all its security efforts, Microsoft continues to let users run as administrator by default, which is downright irresponsible. I just spent an evening cleaning an acquaintance's computer of a persistent, multiple spyware infection because of this policy of Microsoft. Needless to say I created separate restricted user accounts for all members in the household, but the Microsoft installer should have done this from the beginning! You cannot expect regular users to do anything except go with the default.
I also installed Firefox, and set all of the Internet Exploder security settings on "High" on all accounts except the administrator one (so that Windows Update can be run).
Jean Michel Jarre did some impressive stuff, but it was never mainstream chart
music.
I'd dispute that, at least here in Europe his hit albums like Oxygene and Equinoxe were definitely mainstream chart material.
Also, Jarre made it to the Guinness Book of Records three times for largest-size concert audiences.
(source -- I know, I know, not authoritative)
Mozilla AppSuite has had millions of downloaded copies, but the conversion rate sucked. People simply didn't want to use it, and it barely registered 1% marketshare three years after 1.0.
Uh, that does not follow. "barely 1%" is still millions of copies. There's an awful lot of people on the Intarweb these days.
I'd like to see you remove all the password protection from your systems. Let's see if you still think passwords are useless a week later.
Where I work I've given the employees their randomly-generated, reasonably strong passwords in closed envelopes, with a policy to keep them strictly secret from everything and everybody, especially each other. We can reasonably expect our employees to have the responsibility to keep a letter secret, but I know better than to let users choose their own passwords.
Also, we change them very rarely so that users can memorize their passwords and don't need to have the password letter at hand (which IMO would be a far bigger security risk than keeping passwords permanent but strong).
Of course this is not perfect security, but it's very far from useless. It's a compromise between strong security and human nature. Neglect either and you get problems.
They had a great product but somewhere along the way something went bad...
Netscape 6 was a complete disaster, but netscape 7 and up, which are based on more recent Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey) versions, are actually decent. It still doesn't have an advantage over Mozilla proper, though, unless you like the integrated AIM/ICQ client.
Whenever RMS is mentioned in an article,
some variation of the same old GNU/Linux joke
comes up, and invariably gets modded up.
This is getting way more tiring than RMS's own
harping on adding the GNU/ to Linux. What if we
just STFU about it, okay? We know the good man
is a dork, now. Let's pay some attention to his
points instead; some of them may be worth listening
to and even have some importance.
Copyright 2004 Happy Mutants LLC. Some rights reserved. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States [and other countries].
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Jailed for using a nonstandard browser A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx -- a text-based browser used by the blind, Unix-users and others -- on Sun's Solaris operating system. The site-operator decided that this "unusual" event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him. From a mailing list:
For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.
Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.
Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....
So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell:(
Link (Thanks, Patrick!)
Update:: The source that told me about this has corroborated it with more detail in private email, but is leery of going public. I hope that more publicly available details appear soon, and will post them when I have them.
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:08:00 AM permalink | Other blogs commenting on this post Sponsored by:
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In China, there's no such avenue. In China, you can't have more than one child, and the ratio of male to females in the country is regulated by the government, to the point where I've heard that girls are regularly aborted. (I can neither confirm nor deny that, as I've never been to China.)
Girls are regularly aborted (or killed after birth) in China but not because of any government policy; it's because since ancient times, the culture values men more than women, and if parents are to have only one child, they want it to be a son so they have more status and their son can take care of them when they grow old. It's actually a very anti-communist way of thinking. As evil as Communism may be, men and women are equal in it.
In the US, you can have as many kids as you (if you're female) want, or as many as your wife will bear you. Imagine not being able to have a second child - and because the government says so!
To be fair, the US also does not have the pressing overpopulation problem that China has.
For a dead network it's sure showing an awful lot of activity (and I'm not talking about spam either; I don't see any spam, because I just a decent server).
*sigh* I remember the days where I could catch up on 50 newsgroups in under an hour, reading most of the threads too.
I'd consider that a lot closer to dead than what it's now.
If I need information now, I hit google.
Me too, and where do I often find it if it's somewhat obscure? That's right, in the Googlified Usenet (unfortunately severely fscked up in the new beta service; try groups.google.ca for the old, semi-decent interface).
The GPL only covers distribution, not use. By definition, then, it cannot possibly be an End User License Agreement.
Re:IRC is not a "city", it's many cities and towns
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 1
Oh, it has been attacked allright. You'd be surprised at the shit the admins get to deal with sometimes.:-) The difference is that the network is small enough and the community cohesive enough that script kiddies, pedophiles, and other scum can be kept out mostly successfully.
IRC is not a "city", it's many cities and towns.
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
From the article:
IRC is a big, dangerous city full of crime.
This is misleading nonsense because IRC is a protocol, not a community. There are hundreds or thousands of IRC networks out there, including a few big ones. IRC is a number of big cities plus lots of small towns. I happen to frequent this nice small town where people are mostly friendly, children are welcome, and warez and sex channels are forbidden (this is enforced). Just goes to show that the article is one big misleading generalization with sensationalism as its only purpose.
P2P is nothing new, it's just a buzzword. The Internet itself is fundamentally one big peer-to-peer network, so they should start by indicting these folks who are, after all, responsible for the greatest copyright violation vehicle in history.
Adding in the XML framework means you can now edit configs for any number of apps from a single application instead of first hunting down the config file and then editing it by hand.
So, you have to hunt them down in the registry instead of in the file system -- how is this better? Plus, you lose the ability to edit the config with a text editor in a simple way. I prefer the traditional way, and this is one reason why I opt out of the entire GNOME/KDE bloatware culture.
Re:How lightweight, if it requires gtk+?
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Are there any good WMs which don't have any gtk+ or Qt dependencies?
So? The whole point of Free software is that it can be forked if the original developers mess up. They have messed up with the Mac port, so now a fork has come forward that provides the functionality instead. How is this bad?
Well, I'll have to admit I didn't know that - thanks for the tip! But as you say, this support is far from universal (far from every application in common use is Cocoa) which in my view significantly weakens this argument. This may help an Emacs user use the Mac, but I doubt it'll help a Mac user use Emacs.
Why not use emacs? [...] And it works the same under MS Windows or X Windows.
You answered your own question there, at least as far as most Mac users are concerned. The emacs user interface is completely foreign to a Mac environment.
Not being averse to editing a site by hand and not being entirely a stranger to programming either, I've taken to simply using Makefiles (with GNU `make') to implement site templates. Works like a charm. `make' resolves the dependencies and automatic updates, and the Makefile calls `cat' for concatenating and `sed' for inserting, replacing and editing. Mine even automatically updates the stuff to the webserver and makes backups.
If you're not familiar with these tools, the learning curve may be somewhat steep, but it's a very powerful method.
Is the OP brainwashed because he doesn't agree with you?
No, just because he's brainlessly reciting US-fascist government propaganda. There's no opinion present in that post with which to disagree -- just evidence of successful zombiefication. I'm sure he'll make ideal cannon fodder, just like the Muslim suicide terrorists he might end up fighting. The sad thing is, he has a lot in common with them.
I think of all the things not worth defending or fighting for, you're a prime example.
I'm crushed - just crushed.
Think you can count on Iran or N. Korea to stay out of ours once they've developed the weapons to make a big impact? I sure don't.
I'd count on them to stay out of your (the USA's) business a lot more than I'd count on the USA to stay out of theirs. Or do you recall any of them invading another country recently?
Congratulations on your apparently very successful brainwashing.
Too bad the people you want to "liberate" don't seem to agree that it's such a great thing you're doing, especially after you've been there for a while and the total, murderous chaos you are creating becomes apparent (cf. Iraq as the latest example out of many).
The world would be a much more peaceful place if people and countries stayed out of each other's god damn business.
Slashdot Mirror
For all its security efforts, Microsoft continues to let users run as administrator by default, which is downright irresponsible. I just spent an evening cleaning an acquaintance's computer of a persistent, multiple spyware infection because of this policy of Microsoft. Needless to say I created separate restricted user accounts for all members in the household, but the Microsoft installer should have done this from the beginning! You cannot expect regular users to do anything except go with the default.
I also installed Firefox, and set all of the Internet Exploder security settings on "High" on all accounts except the administrator one (so that Windows Update can be run).
I'd dispute that, at least here in Europe his hit albums like Oxygene and Equinoxe were definitely mainstream chart material. Also, Jarre made it to the Guinness Book of Records three times for largest-size concert audiences. (source -- I know, I know, not authoritative)
Uh, that does not follow. "barely 1%" is still millions of copies. There's an awful lot of people on the Intarweb these days.
I'd like to see you remove all the password protection from your systems. Let's see if you still think passwords are useless a week later.
Where I work I've given the employees their randomly-generated, reasonably strong passwords in closed envelopes, with a policy to keep them strictly secret from everything and everybody, especially each other. We can reasonably expect our employees to have the responsibility to keep a letter secret, but I know better than to let users choose their own passwords.
Also, we change them very rarely so that users can memorize their passwords and don't need to have the password letter at hand (which IMO would be a far bigger security risk than keeping passwords permanent but strong).
Of course this is not perfect security, but it's very far from useless. It's a compromise between strong security and human nature. Neglect either and you get problems.
Netscape 6 was a complete disaster, but netscape 7 and up, which are based on more recent Mozilla Suite (Seamonkey) versions, are actually decent. It still doesn't have an advantage over Mozilla proper, though, unless you like the integrated AIM/ICQ client.
That is not correct. Netscape 6 was simply a clone of an early Mozilla beta.
Whenever RMS is mentioned in an article, some variation of the same old GNU/Linux joke comes up, and invariably gets modded up. This is getting way more tiring than RMS's own harping on adding the GNU/ to Linux. What if we just STFU about it, okay? We know the good man is a dork, now. Let's pay some attention to his points instead; some of them may be worth listening to and even have some importance.
...in case of near-slashdotting. :p
[stuff cut to pacify lame(ness) filter][stuff cut to pacify lame(ness) filter]Girls are regularly aborted (or killed after birth) in China but not because of any government policy; it's because since ancient times, the culture values men more than women, and if parents are to have only one child, they want it to be a son so they have more status and their son can take care of them when they grow old. It's actually a very anti-communist way of thinking. As evil as Communism may be, men and women are equal in it.
To be fair, the US also does not have the pressing overpopulation problem that China has.
The GPL only covers distribution, not use. By definition, then, it cannot possibly be an End User License Agreement.
Oh, it has been attacked allright. You'd be surprised at the shit the admins get to deal with sometimes. :-) The difference is that the network is small enough and the community cohesive enough that script kiddies, pedophiles, and other scum can be kept out mostly successfully.
From the article:
This is misleading nonsense because IRC is a protocol, not a community. There are hundreds or thousands of IRC networks out there, including a few big ones. IRC is a number of big cities plus lots of small towns. I happen to frequent this nice small town where people are mostly friendly, children are welcome, and warez and sex channels are forbidden (this is enforced). Just goes to show that the article is one big misleading generalization with sensationalism as its only purpose.
P2P is nothing new, it's just a buzzword. The Internet itself is fundamentally one big peer-to-peer network, so they should start by indicting these folks who are, after all, responsible for the greatest copyright violation vehicle in history.
Oh I see, thanks. Please substitute "foreigner" for "dumbass", though, it's more accurate. :) I have only ever read Calvin & Hobbes in Dutch.
Um, I don't think that one is right.
So, you have to hunt them down in the registry instead of in the file system -- how is this better? Plus, you lose the ability to edit the config with a text editor in a simple way. I prefer the traditional way, and this is one reason why I opt out of the entire GNOME/KDE bloatware culture.
IceWM is my favorite.
So? The whole point of Free software is that it can be forked if the original developers mess up. They have messed up with the Mac port, so now a fork has come forward that provides the functionality instead. How is this bad?
Unfortunately, they also appear to be spammers or at least spam-supporters, in spite of their claims to the contrary.
Well, I'll have to admit I didn't know that - thanks for the tip! But as you say, this support is far from universal (far from every application in common use is Cocoa) which in my view significantly weakens this argument. This may help an Emacs user use the Mac, but I doubt it'll help a Mac user use Emacs.
You answered your own question there, at least as far as most Mac users are concerned. The emacs user interface is completely foreign to a Mac environment.
If you're not familiar with these tools, the learning curve may be somewhat steep, but it's a very powerful method.
No, just because he's brainlessly reciting US-fascist government propaganda. There's no opinion present in that post with which to disagree -- just evidence of successful zombiefication. I'm sure he'll make ideal cannon fodder, just like the Muslim suicide terrorists he might end up fighting. The sad thing is, he has a lot in common with them.
I'm crushed - just crushed.
I'd count on them to stay out of your (the USA's) business a lot more than I'd count on the USA to stay out of theirs. Or do you recall any of them invading another country recently?
Too bad the people you want to "liberate" don't seem to agree that it's such a great thing you're doing, especially after you've been there for a while and the total, murderous chaos you are creating becomes apparent (cf. Iraq as the latest example out of many).
The world would be a much more peaceful place if people and countries stayed out of each other's god damn business.