If you have to ask the question "why do these guys try to push the boundaries?", then you are in the wrong place. I can't speak for all techies, but all the ones I know are always interested in seeing how far you can push the envelope. Think of it like art.
I read most of the article(s), waiting for the punchline and for the author to start talking about CAS latencies, RAMBUS (is evil), etc. and then it dawned on me that he reall was talking about some sort of physical activity. At that realisation, I stopped reading since "physical activity" is something that I'm fairly averse to...:)
In the Mozilla 1.1 thread, someone pointed out the Zap Embed bookmarklets. I put 'Zap Embeds' into my toolbar in Moz1.0, and it is a lifesaver (or an "eyesaver")! It works great!! Check it out, you won't regret it. Hit "Zap Embeds" in the toolbar the moment you come across an annoying flash advert, and voila! That critter is nuked!
I'm looking for a feature (that others have requested too) that will allow me to dynamically enable/disable a plugin (Hint: Flash ads, or stupid Java tickers). I know I can just muck around with the plugins directory, but that is more of a permanent change. It would be nice to have a dropdown menu about all of the plugins installed, and enable/disable them like that; or you could bind some hot keys to enable/disable specific plugins.
I think the mistake these chaps made was to go public, without giving the DoD folks time to rectify the problem. If they had talked to DoD in secret, and helped them identify the weaknesses and secure their networks, they would have gotten something out of the whole thing. Going public with it was like throwing a stone at a large hornets' nest while standing 6 ft away. Of course the hornets will come after you!
I think these guys got too greedy. They went public in the hopes that they'll get noticed and jump straight to "Step 3. Profit!!".
If you submit a/. story to a site that you run, please check your bandwidth first to see if it can survive the Slashdot effect, or at least put up a less-graphic version of the page.
Back in the days when IPOs were hot (anyone remember them?), we wrote a client to place IPO orders on WitCapital's site automatically (when they had first-come, first-served allotments). In those days, it didn't really matter what IPO you got. All you had to do was get it and flip the same day, making a tidy sum of ca$h.
Later, we automated ordering on E*Trade's site. We wrote an application that would check their site for IPOs, fill-in the series of forms and submit the orders. Got many an IPO that way, and it was fun too.
Of course, who hasn't written an EBay sniper using a few lines of LWP?
Well, you better hope that none of your friends and family who run a certain OS from Redmond will get infected by the KLEZ pain-in-the-ass. For, it might start sending out mail to all of his/her contacts with YOUR email address as the source. And then your email address will be out in the open, for everyone to grab.
Makes me wonder if the SPAMmers have anything to do with this KLEZ bastard. I hope they catch the guy who wrote it, and feed him just spam for 32 years in his jail cell.
And they are a joke to the rest of the world. Listen: there's a sucker born every minute, and it looks like you found yourself in a roomfull of those.
You should have asked them: did you have MS SQL also installed a few years ago? Because it didn't exist then, did it?
In the tech world, if you go by what didn't work "a few years ago", you are making a big mistake. Technology keeps changing. Heck, "a few years ago" even Pentiums had a hardware flaw. Why are these guys using Pentiums today?
My motto: the right technology for the right job+price. I had a situation where group in our dept needed a "data warehouse" for doing some research. They were being sold a bill of goods by Oracle: $100K+ for the whole setup. I looked at their problem, and realised that they were going to be just doing plain SELECTs only; none of this other fancy stuff. I encouraged them to try out MySQL and they are happy. Sure, they have to work around a few minor issues (like they shut down the warehouse every night to add new data). But the savings have made the project possible! If they had not saved the $100K, the project would not even have started.
In the 1930s, the Public Works Administration started building lots of highways, interstates, etc. to keep the people occupied, and to pull the US out of the Great Depression (when unemployment reached 25%).
Could a similar thing be done with the Tech world today? Building and rolling out lots of infrastructure (after all, the Internet is the "highway" of the 'net), could the tech economy be pulled out of the doldrums?
I'm just musing aloud here...
Parrots can make most of the sounds that humans can make (
and then some). Does that mean parrots can "speak" like humans, or develop a culture? I don't think the ability to make sounds has anything to do with culture.
I'm glad people are taking a closer look at Google's ranking algorithm. Hopefully, the scrutiny will make it more robust and tamper-proof.
Here are some more URLs that might be of interest:
It only demonstrates that humans that are well separated from nature will go to significant effort to indulge in unnatural behaivor.
Please. These Indians have been vegetarians for millenia. Their ancient holy books (3000+ years old) tout the advantages of being vegetarian. Are you saying that their ancestors of 2000+ years ago were more separated from nature than today's typical Western meat eater?
What kind of "vegetarian" can't make use of grasses?
Just because you're a vegetarian it doesn't mean that any damn plant matter is digestible by you! There are lots of plants out there that no herbivore will touch. This is the problem with you meat-minded people: you think that all plants are the same, just because all meat looks the same! They are not.
It is even more than that. Humans, by nature, are designed to eat meat.
Did you really think when you wrote this, or did you just dig it out of your ass?
I'll take an example: In India, there are 100s of millions of people who are complete vegetarians; who will not eat egss, fish, poultry or (red) meat. And yet they are healthy; live long and fruitful lives and (going by the population) reproduce like nobody's business. Now please tell me, why is this so?
"Humans were designed to eat meat" is just another myth that people propagate, who don't want to consider the alternatives. It makes it a nice, closed argument: God/nature meant it this way, so I don't want to change.
If you ever want to try a vegetarian lifestyle, stay away from the "meat substitutes" like Boca burgers and other such crap. Go for the true vegetarian life: try the different legumes, beans, grains, spices, fruits, etc. and your tongue will wake up to the most exquisite world of taste that it will ever know. Mix them together (properly) to form succulent dishes that send your taste buds screaming in delightful agony. The rich flavors of the vegetarian world are light-years ahead of the hunk of meat at your local butcher.
Which raises another question: is it OK to expect to be paid to find such bugs/exploits? On the one hand, the hacker ethic says no; on the other, by finding such bugs & exploits the finder is doing the vendor a service and might reasonably expect to get paid.
What do y'all think of this issue? It is possible this has been discussed before, though.
Let me just start by saying, "don't
believe everything you read in the press:-)".
What a lame answer. Whats preventing him from coming on/. and posting his side of the story? Did he, or did he not, threaten to sic the DMCA on SnoSoft?
Re:How many people do check the MD5 checksum?
on
OpenSSH Package Trojaned
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Thats what I was thinking, too. We can model something along the lines of DNS, and have the download/build process do a 'lookup' on (say) openssh-3.4p1.packages.net, to get the MD5 sum, and compare it with whats on hand.
Never underestimate the power of a bunch of pissed-off nerds...:)
Slashdot Mirror
If you have to ask the question "why do these guys try to push the boundaries?", then you are in the wrong place. I can't speak for all techies, but all the ones I know are always interested in seeing how far you can push the envelope. Think of it like art.
I read most of the article(s), waiting for the punchline and for the author to start talking about CAS latencies, RAMBUS (is evil), etc. and then it dawned on me that he reall was talking about some sort of physical activity. At that realisation, I stopped reading since "physical activity" is something that I'm fairly averse to... :)
In the Mozilla 1.1 thread, someone pointed out the Zap Embed bookmarklets. I put 'Zap Embeds' into my toolbar in Moz1.0, and it is a lifesaver (or an "eyesaver")! It works great!! Check it out, you won't regret it. Hit "Zap Embeds" in the toolbar the moment you come across an annoying flash advert, and voila! That critter is nuked!
I'm looking for a feature (that others have requested too) that will allow me to dynamically enable/disable a plugin (Hint: Flash ads, or stupid Java tickers). I know I can just muck around with the plugins directory, but that is more of a permanent change. It would be nice to have a dropdown menu about all of the plugins installed, and enable/disable them like that; or you could bind some hot keys to enable/disable specific plugins.
I think these guys got too greedy. They went public in the hopes that they'll get noticed and jump straight to "Step 3. Profit!!".
I hope they learn their lessons.
If you submit a /. story to a site that you run, please check your bandwidth first to see if it can survive the Slashdot effect, or at least put up a less-graphic version of the page.
Back in the days when IPOs were hot (anyone remember them?), we wrote a client to place IPO orders on WitCapital's site automatically (when they had first-come, first-served allotments). In those days, it didn't really matter what IPO you got. All you had to do was get it and flip the same day, making a tidy sum of ca$h.
Later, we automated ordering on E*Trade's site. We wrote an application that would check their site for IPOs, fill-in the series of forms and submit the orders. Got many an IPO that way, and it was fun too.
Of course, who hasn't written an EBay sniper using a few lines of LWP?
Makes me wonder if the SPAMmers have anything to do with this KLEZ bastard. I hope they catch the guy who wrote it, and feed him just spam for 32 years in his jail cell.
And they are a joke to the rest of the world. Listen: there's a sucker born every minute, and it looks like you found yourself in a roomfull of those.
You should have asked them: did you have MS SQL also installed a few years ago? Because it didn't exist then, did it?
In the tech world, if you go by what didn't work "a few years ago", you are making a big mistake. Technology keeps changing. Heck, "a few years ago" even Pentiums had a hardware flaw. Why are these guys using Pentiums today?
My motto: the right technology for the right job+price. I had a situation where group in our dept needed a "data warehouse" for doing some research. They were being sold a bill of goods by Oracle: $100K+ for the whole setup. I looked at their problem, and realised that they were going to be just doing plain SELECTs only; none of this other fancy stuff. I encouraged them to try out MySQL and they are happy. Sure, they have to work around a few minor issues (like they shut down the warehouse every night to add new data). But the savings have made the project possible! If they had not saved the $100K, the project would not even have started.
Checkout Apache Test page. Apache comes with Flood, a profile-driven web server tester.
Could a similar thing be done with the Tech world today? Building and rolling out lots of infrastructure (after all, the Internet is the "highway" of the 'net), could the tech economy be pulled out of the doldrums?
I'm just musing aloud here...
My dentist still uses a Windows 3.x machine to run his scheduling software (which keeps track of patients' appointments, etc.).
Parrots can make most of the sounds that humans can make ( and then some). Does that mean parrots can "speak" like humans, or develop a culture? I don't think the ability to make sounds has anything to do with culture.
Here are some more URLs that might be of interest:
Please. These Indians have been vegetarians for millenia. Their ancient holy books (3000+ years old) tout the advantages of being vegetarian. Are you saying that their ancestors of 2000+ years ago were more separated from nature than today's typical Western meat eater?
What kind of "vegetarian" can't make use of grasses?
Just because you're a vegetarian it doesn't mean that any damn plant matter is digestible by you! There are lots of plants out there that no herbivore will touch. This is the problem with you meat-minded people: you think that all plants are the same, just because all meat looks the same! They are not.
Did you really think when you wrote this, or did you just dig it out of your ass?
I'll take an example: In India, there are 100s of millions of people who are complete vegetarians; who will not eat egss, fish, poultry or (red) meat. And yet they are healthy; live long and fruitful lives and (going by the population) reproduce like nobody's business. Now please tell me, why is this so?
"Humans were designed to eat meat" is just another myth that people propagate, who don't want to consider the alternatives. It makes it a nice, closed argument: God/nature meant it this way, so I don't want to change.
If you ever want to try a vegetarian lifestyle, stay away from the "meat substitutes" like Boca burgers and other such crap. Go for the true vegetarian life: try the different legumes, beans, grains, spices, fruits, etc. and your tongue will wake up to the most exquisite world of taste that it will ever know. Mix them together (properly) to form succulent dishes that send your taste buds screaming in delightful agony. The rich flavors of the vegetarian world are light-years ahead of the hunk of meat at your local butcher.
It would be interesting to do an analysis and see who at /. reposts most often. My money is on CmdrTaco.
Put it on an FTP server in the goatse.cx domain. No one's gonna look at that thing for years to come.
Why spend $200 on a box to make a copy of a DVD, when my sub-$100 DVD player will do it for free? Plus, it has no region coding either. Go Apex!
Could this have something to do with the "vision" ?
And what were you smoking?
Considering that a large amount of spam originates from China, I'm sure Mr. Ralsky thinks China is the place to be. Sounds like heaven to him!
Only a total idiot would get into Telecom in this market.
What do y'all think of this issue? It is possible this has been discussed before, though.
What a lame answer. Whats preventing him from coming on /. and posting his side of the story? Did he, or did he not, threaten to sic the DMCA on SnoSoft?
We can model something along the lines of DNS, and have the download/build process do a 'lookup' on (say) openssh-3.4p1.packages.net, to get the MD5 sum, and compare it with whats on hand.
Never underestimate the power of a bunch of pissed-off nerds... :)