The overriding requirement is to get the system back up and running and issuing licences as soon as possible.
If it's a week to reformat and reinstall enough of the computers with existing software *then* think about changing platforms, or a couple of months or more to migrate to Linux, which would you choose?
they hate the DMCA and friends because they're bad for innovation, which means less stuff for them to make money on.
Not quite. They hate the DMCA et al because they think that more money can be made without them, than with them. It's got nothing to do with stifling innovation, and everything to do with stifling profit opportunities.
If they thought more money could be made in licensing deals, they'd be backing the laws.
Part of the reson for that is that open source projects have neither the obligation nor the resources to regression test the fix on a wide variety of platforms and configurations, while commercial projects do. (Well, they at least have the obligation...)
It's acceptable for an OSS project to produce a patch and say "here ya go, good luck"; the same is *not* true of MS. That's part of the reason why OSS patches tend to come out faster...
a jolly good idea because all the poor buggers like my brother (who got caught for 125gbp just the other day - bloody MS insecure ^&*&^%$) would find their net connection refused and realise that they're being done
That's the other good thing about ADSL - I don't have to worry about shit like this. No (traditional) modem, no way it can dial out. Good job too, as in the past I've had to clean a handful of the little buggers off my girlfriend's PC.
Sucks to be caught out by this sort of thing though - hope your brother gets/got the money back.
I can't speak for the US market, but here in the UK retailers make it plain that dead pixels on LCDs is normal, and that most manufacturers will only accept a return if there are more than some threshold number that are bad. Admittedly, this number is reasonably low, but I've never seen it quoted as being zero.
I have an LCD monitor at work - 21", does 1600x1200 native. It has one dead pixel (stuck red) roughly in the lower right-hand corner of the upper-left ninth of the screen (if you see what I mean). It's a little irritating when I notice it, but most of the time I don't.
My main concerns with LCDs, and the reason why I'm in the market for a new CRT rather than an LCD to replace my aging CRT, is performance for games, resolution, and price. As a programmer, I want as much screen space as possible, prefering to run at 1600x1200. As a gamer, I want the refresh rate up (no smearing once it hits 40 - 50 fps, please). As a poor guy with a car, mortgage, kid, etc, I want it affordable. Right now, that leaves me with no choice but a CRT. Still, I have a nice big desk, so that's not a problem.
a) check your umask setting - I believe that 0200 is default, but YMMV
b) there are Windows viruses/trojans now that spread as an encrypted zip file (to avoid virus scanners) - that requires that the user save the file, open it, type in the password from the email it was attached to, then run the contained executable. They still spread
They're in a difficult position though. If they want to do business in China, then they're going to have to abide by Chinese laws and customs.
Lokk at it this way - no technological method for filtering out "undesirable" sites and news, etc, is going to be 100% efficient or effective. At least with google serving the Chinese market, there will be "windows of opportunity" for people to find stuff that their government deems unsuitable. With the web continuing to grow, these opportunities will become more frequent and longer-lasting, as google/the Chinese authorities play whack-a-mole, a game that's impossible to win...
As others have said, at the end of the day, google is just a company, and this isn't really their fight. Change has to come from within, not be imposed from outside. Besides, for all anyone knows, there could be an unofficial, internal google policy to not be as quick at complying with takedown requests as they could be, or to introduce subtle inefficiencies and bugs into the process/software. Let's see how this plays out for a while before calling people evil. (Do google even claim not to be evil?)
a) name me one operating system that has never been exploited (and remember, this was a *local* exploit) b) the game is being developed for Windows, it makes sense to develop it on Windows (yes, I know about cross-compilers, but still)
It seems easy to me. You set up a LAN, with internet access through a gateway box as normal, firewalled as normal, etc. Then you set up another LAN, with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the internet-accessible LAN. If you have to get stuff from the net-acessible LAN to the other one (patches, drivers, etc) you burn them to CD or similar, and virus and spyware scan the hell out of it.
Works for us. Sure, it's a bit of a pain at times, especially when (as we do) you have to reproduce a bug on the secure network, go back to your desk, fix it, put the code on CD/whatever, go back to the secure room, upload it, test it, etc. Our situation is a little more strict, however - we're dealing with classified (as in Official Secrets Act) stuff, so not everyone in the company has access. For the Valve guys, just having two PCs under their desk and a little self-discipline should be good enough.
Still, anyone can make a mistake, which is why I always like to make it harder to make mistakes.
Yeah; a friend of mine got his account cleaned out once by someone who went on a shopping spree at high street stores. I sure hope high street shopping goes down in flames, the degenerates...
They do not even have rights to the films in Australia, having signed them over to the distributors there.
Are you *sure* about that? Unless you've seen the contracts, you don't know the terms. It's possible that the distributors have been granted some kind of non-exclusive distribution rights. Even if they have been granted exclusive rights, that doesn't necessarily mean that the copyrights have actually been turned over to them.
No, I've not seen the contracts either, but I'd be very surprised if they said something to the effect of "ok, we own the films in America, you own them in Australia".
Can you really blame them for having their MS software exploited?
Yes, yes I can. The guy got exploited on a machine that had access to their single most valuable resource - the HL2 source repository.
Why was something that precious, and that big a target, on a machine that was net-accessible? Why was he running a known vulnerable piece of software on it?
Sure, I take the odd chance with my machine too - but I'm not given access to that sort of stuff. If I was, I hope I'd be a little more careful.
In linux, the only difference is the user would have to su to root before running sh installvirus.sh
Only if you want the virus to have write access to all the files on the drive. If you just want the virus to have write access to the user's files (and any group/world writable files lying around), and/or open (high-numbered) network ports, root is unecessary.
That's not to say that the same users who run this sort of crap on their Windows box wouldn't merrily type in their root password when prompted, assuming that they didn't either log in as root anyway or give their user root privs.
And that's great and wonderful and then you get an infected blood transfusion or product (unlikely at least in the "first world", I admit), or some nutter stabs you with an infected syringe and *bam* you're up shit creek. Or the condom breaks. Or one or all of those things happens to your virginal partner, adn you contract it from them.
What if a client machine (running Windows) has a drive mapped to the Unix file server, and contracts a virus that scans all available drives looking for files to infect?
Without effective antivrus software on the file server, the files on it are going to be infected. True, effective anti-virus software on the client would stop that too, but that's a lot harder to control, especially if users are running as admin, or can bring laptops in from home, etc. The server you can definitely control.
The gp suggests that government agencies should use pdf as a file format, the parent asks (as I was going to) whether there are any programs other than Acrobat that enable one to edit pdfs.
That's tenuously offtopic for the story, but perfectly ontopic for this discussion thread.
So, I'll ask - is there any software other than that produced by Adobe, Free or propriatary, that can edit pdf files? As the parent also says, that's editing pdf, not just outputting another format as pdf - so accept pdf as input, edit it, create pdf as output.
After all, despite checking both Politics topics boxes on the "exclude these from the front page" preferences and saving my preferences, I'm still getting politics stories on the front page....
The higher TCO is generally put down to having to retrain the admins and users of the systems in question, not to mention the loss of productivity while they become accustomed to the change. Not saying that's the way it happens, just that in my experience that's at least part of the explanation for increased TCO.
Incidentally, if you're really spending that much time fixing your Windows boxes, someone somewhere is donig something very badly wrong. I've run a few XP boxes for the last couple of years, and have spent a total of maybe an hour fixing problems with them. You're also not comparing like with like - the Linux file server is just sat there serving files. The Windows machines have (it seems) all sorts of clueless users abusing them.
That said, you'll have to expend a lot less effort if you switch the desktops to Linux, until enough people follow suit that the crapware writers start to target it; then you'll find your users installing all sorts of crap again.
Slashdot Mirror
The overriding requirement is to get the system back up and running and issuing licences as soon as possible.
If it's a week to reformat and reinstall enough of the computers with existing software *then* think about changing platforms, or a couple of months or more to migrate to Linux, which would you choose?
they hate the DMCA and friends because they're bad for innovation, which means less stuff for them to make money on.
Not quite. They hate the DMCA et al because they think that more money can be made without them, than with them. It's got nothing to do with stifling innovation, and everything to do with stifling profit opportunities.
If they thought more money could be made in licensing deals, they'd be backing the laws.
and fixed within hours (if possible)
Part of the reson for that is that open source projects have neither the obligation nor the resources to regression test the fix on a wide variety of platforms and configurations, while commercial projects do. (Well, they at least have the obligation...)
It's acceptable for an OSS project to produce a patch and say "here ya go, good luck"; the same is *not* true of MS. That's part of the reason why OSS patches tend to come out faster...
a jolly good idea because all the poor buggers like my brother (who got caught for 125gbp just the other day - bloody MS insecure ^&*&^%$) would find their net connection refused and realise that they're being done
That's the other good thing about ADSL - I don't have to worry about shit like this. No (traditional) modem, no way it can dial out. Good job too, as in the past I've had to clean a handful of the little buggers off my girlfriend's PC.
Sucks to be caught out by this sort of thing though - hope your brother gets/got the money back.
I can't speak for the US market, but here in the UK retailers make it plain that dead pixels on LCDs is normal, and that most manufacturers will only accept a return if there are more than some threshold number that are bad. Admittedly, this number is reasonably low, but I've never seen it quoted as being zero.
I have an LCD monitor at work - 21", does 1600x1200 native. It has one dead pixel (stuck red) roughly in the lower right-hand corner of the upper-left ninth of the screen (if you see what I mean). It's a little irritating when I notice it, but most of the time I don't.
My main concerns with LCDs, and the reason why I'm in the market for a new CRT rather than an LCD to replace my aging CRT, is performance for games, resolution, and price. As a programmer, I want as much screen space as possible, prefering to run at 1600x1200. As a gamer, I want the refresh rate up (no smearing once it hits 40 - 50 fps, please). As a poor guy with a car, mortgage, kid, etc, I want it affordable. Right now, that leaves me with no choice but a CRT. Still, I have a nice big desk, so that's not a problem.
Since when do you need to open port 25 to *send* email?
Well...
a) check your umask setting - I believe that 0200 is default, but YMMV
b) there are Windows viruses/trojans now that spread as an encrypted zip file (to avoid virus scanners) - that requires that the user save the file, open it, type in the password from the email it was attached to, then run the contained executable. They still spread
That's great for people who don't mind downloading applications, but what about people with slow/metered/no internet connections?
Yes, I understand that it caches the app after the first download, but what if that first download is impossible or impractical?
They're in a difficult position though. If they want to do business in China, then they're going to have to abide by Chinese laws and customs.
Lokk at it this way - no technological method for filtering out "undesirable" sites and news, etc, is going to be 100% efficient or effective. At least with google serving the Chinese market, there will be "windows of opportunity" for people to find stuff that their government deems unsuitable. With the web continuing to grow, these opportunities will become more frequent and longer-lasting, as google/the Chinese authorities play whack-a-mole, a game that's impossible to win...
As others have said, at the end of the day, google is just a company, and this isn't really their fight. Change has to come from within, not be imposed from outside. Besides, for all anyone knows, there could be an unofficial, internal google policy to not be as quick at complying with takedown requests as they could be, or to introduce subtle inefficiencies and bugs into the process/software. Let's see how this plays out for a while before calling people evil. (Do google even claim not to be evil?)
What does p2p use have to do with WHOIS information? You don't need a domain to use eMule, etc.
(Yes, yes, I know, IHBT, IHL, I will not HAND)
True, but:
a) name me one operating system that has never been exploited (and remember, this was a *local* exploit)
b) the game is being developed for Windows, it makes sense to develop it on Windows (yes, I know about cross-compilers, but still)
It seems easy to me. You set up a LAN, with internet access through a gateway box as normal, firewalled as normal, etc. Then you set up another LAN, with absolutely no connection whatsoever to the internet-accessible LAN. If you have to get stuff from the net-acessible LAN to the other one (patches, drivers, etc) you burn them to CD or similar, and virus and spyware scan the hell out of it.
Works for us. Sure, it's a bit of a pain at times, especially when (as we do) you have to reproduce a bug on the secure network, go back to your desk, fix it, put the code on CD/whatever, go back to the secure room, upload it, test it, etc. Our situation is a little more strict, however - we're dealing with classified (as in Official Secrets Act) stuff, so not everyone in the company has access. For the Valve guys, just having two PCs under their desk and a little self-discipline should be good enough.
Still, anyone can make a mistake, which is why I always like to make it harder to make mistakes.
Yeah; a friend of mine got his account cleaned out once by someone who went on a shopping spree at high street stores. I sure hope high street shopping goes down in flames, the degenerates...
Nevermind "economic", the majority of human activities are gain driven, whether it be monetary, sexual, power/prestige/social standing or whatever.
That's probably down to dirt/degradation of the film, rather than a lack of resolution (which would manifest as a lack of fine detail and blurriness)
They do not even have rights to the films in Australia, having signed them over to the distributors there.
Are you *sure* about that? Unless you've seen the contracts, you don't know the terms. It's possible that the distributors have been granted some kind of non-exclusive distribution rights. Even if they have been granted exclusive rights, that doesn't necessarily mean that the copyrights have actually been turned over to them.
No, I've not seen the contracts either, but I'd be very surprised if they said something to the effect of "ok, we own the films in America, you own them in Australia".
Going after people for core files?
Can you really blame them for having their MS software exploited?
Yes, yes I can. The guy got exploited on a machine that had access to their single most valuable resource - the HL2 source repository.
Why was something that precious, and that big a target, on a machine that was net-accessible? Why was he running a known vulnerable piece of software on it?
Sure, I take the odd chance with my machine too - but I'm not given access to that sort of stuff. If I was, I hope I'd be a little more careful.
In linux, the only difference is the user would have to su to root before running sh installvirus.sh
Only if you want the virus to have write access to all the files on the drive. If you just want the virus to have write access to the user's files (and any group/world writable files lying around), and/or open (high-numbered) network ports, root is unecessary.
That's not to say that the same users who run this sort of crap on their Windows box wouldn't merrily type in their root password when prompted, assuming that they didn't either log in as root anyway or give their user root privs.
And that's great and wonderful and then you get an infected blood transfusion or product (unlikely at least in the "first world", I admit), or some nutter stabs you with an infected syringe and *bam* you're up shit creek. Or the condom breaks. Or one or all of those things happens to your virginal partner, adn you contract it from them.
Avoidance is not the same thing as vaccination.
What if a client machine (running Windows) has a drive mapped to the Unix file server, and contracts a virus that scans all available drives looking for files to infect?
Without effective antivrus software on the file server, the files on it are going to be infected. True, effective anti-virus software on the client would stop that too, but that's a lot harder to control, especially if users are running as admin, or can bring laptops in from home, etc. The server you can definitely control.
What do you call OS X then?
Expensive
(Given that I'd have to buy a Mac)
How is this Offtopic?
The gp suggests that government agencies should use pdf as a file format, the parent asks (as I was going to) whether there are any programs other than Acrobat that enable one to edit pdfs.
That's tenuously offtopic for the story, but perfectly ontopic for this discussion thread.
So, I'll ask - is there any software other than that produced by Adobe, Free or propriatary, that can edit pdf files? As the parent also says, that's editing pdf, not just outputting another format as pdf - so accept pdf as input, edit it, create pdf as output.
After all, despite checking both Politics topics boxes on the "exclude these from the front page" preferences and saving my preferences, I'm still getting politics stories on the front page....
You're telling me that Star Wars used only computer-generated sets? That there were no physical sets involved at all?
Offtopic I know, but I'm really starting to wish that article submitters could save the commentary for comments...
The higher TCO is generally put down to having to retrain the admins and users of the systems in question, not to mention the loss of productivity while they become accustomed to the change. Not saying that's the way it happens, just that in my experience that's at least part of the explanation for increased TCO.
Incidentally, if you're really spending that much time fixing your Windows boxes, someone somewhere is donig something very badly wrong. I've run a few XP boxes for the last couple of years, and have spent a total of maybe an hour fixing problems with them. You're also not comparing like with like - the Linux file server is just sat there serving files. The Windows machines have (it seems) all sorts of clueless users abusing them.
That said, you'll have to expend a lot less effort if you switch the desktops to Linux, until enough people follow suit that the crapware writers start to target it; then you'll find your users installing all sorts of crap again.