Hacking into a site of "the father of the internet" would be seen as gaining major credit inside the site cracking community. How, in general terms, have you gone about addressing security issues for your site ?
Whilst I'd agree with his basic premise, I think there are a lot of fuzzy areas between the continents. Maybe a better theory is to identify each area as continental plates and the fuzzy areas as the points where the plates merge, leading to things like volcanoes, ridges, mountains and earthquakes.
I'd guess DVD support in Linux sits on one of these zones, in an area of high geological activity between CorpNet, TechNet & CultureNet:-).
On the above premise, one could perhaps visualise X-Net, not as a continental plate, but as a huge oceanic plate, with deep abysses leading down to who knows where...
In addition, there are the many shallow seas of personal internet pages, created just becuase you've been allocated one.
Nope, you have to remember he's also concerned about the future implications of decisions made today. Whilst I'm not on his side, I can see his point, which is that he is concerned that DeCSS and packages like it can decode his product and allow people to set up Warez type sites for movies. This is obviously not a problem at current internet transfer rates, but his argument is that in a few years time we will all have connection rates that make such transfers technically feasible. Similarly it is not economic to dedicate the storage to save decrypted movies to hard disk, but again in a few years time, when mass storage costs have come down one or two of orders of magnitude, it will be economic to save movies to such storage.
The MPAA is aiming for long term protection of its product and therefore want laws in place [and associated legal decisions] which enforce such protection.
There are lots of other reasons why I don't agree with him, hence the sig line.....
I'm normally on the side of Linux in most arguments, but it's possible that a Linux distro may have a similar number of flaws at any one time as Windows 2K. [Note that I'm referring to distribution rather than version of Linux].
I'm willing to bet that by the time you add up currently open bugs in XFree, KDE, Gnome, sendmail, nntp, Linux itself, the GNU utilities, compilers etc etc etc, you end up with a number certainly in the thousands.
It may be regarded as unfair to mention problems with these apps in the same breath as problems with the OS itself, but I'm willing to bet that some of the 63000 bugs in W2K include problems with Solitaire, Minesweeper and all the other cruft that makes it a rounded package.
On the good side, I am willing to believe that in Linux most of these problems will have less effect on the smooth running of the rest of the system.
To this poem I must reply, Moderators shoot your cr*p from the sky, Surely it is no crime, when Anonymous Cowards like you behave like slime, when you submit multiple trash, we need a moderator to kick your ass, if we need to see your puns we just set our theshold to -1 (minus wun!) Once was a time when Anonymous meant brave and true, now most post garbage just like you.
This problem is similar to the so called birthday problem i.e. given a number of people n, what is the possibility of two of them sharing the same birthday? If I remember my stats correctly, the result is surprisingly large...
For n=2 364 ways second person could have birthday without matching first For n=3 363 ways third person can have birthday not matching other two p(match) = 1-365x364x363/(365^3) ....
when this gets to about 20, p(match) is about 40%!!
The chances of a DNA match amounts to a similar problem, so the stats rapidly build up to an high likelihood of a match after about 20-30 samples.
..it's nice news, and it appears Linux is rocketing nicely up the popularity charts. I'd like to know where Linux stands in the overall OS popularity charts.
With the huge strides in usability which desktops like Gnome and KDE seem to be adding to Linux, and the rapid advance in terms of performance, such that Linux is at least operating in the same ballpark as any other operating system. I'm beginning to believe that Linux has a fighting chance of being the #1 OS everywhere by say Jan 2003. I wouldn't have been confident enoough to say that even a year ago, but Linux as an OS just gets better and better in all fields, not just the server market.
Last time I wrote something about the future I said I'd regard Linux as being a contender when games were regularly released for Linux at the same time as for Windows. Whilst that is not true yet, many companies at least look about producing a Linux version of the software and the time lag appears to be less and less. I'd like to hope that within the next 12 months this becomes more and more true.
Reading the comments about the DDoS detector indicates what a paranoid bunch of people us Slashdotters appear to be! Most of us won't touch an FBI binary with a bargepole and those of us that do seem to be testing what it does on some spare machine before we release it on our real systems.
In my current area of Linux interest, the field of DVD, DeCSS and css-auth, it has been suggested that Linux users may be happy with binary only drivers to get round our legal problems - these comments show that appears to be utter cr*p. Unless we have at least thge opportunity to see the source code, we won't let such things anywhere near our systems.
As far as editorial independence goes, most news sites seem to have a fair amount of leeway from their owners e.g the Linux DVD community has received a fair amount of support from the press despite the fact that a large number of their associate companies may be part of the MPAA.
The problem I can see is that whilst I appreciate that Slashdot is not exclusively a Linux site, such users must make up a fair proportion of its readership. And if there's one thing Linux users like it is lots of choice. It seems that choice is going to be significantly lessened if companies such as VA and RedHat gobble up all the myriad companies under their own corporate umbrella. A huge number of people moved onto Linux so they didn't have to do things the Microsoft way.
In the main I have no objection to companies growing organically, but the Linux market is starting to look very acquisitive, and in the end this may severly curtail the amount of choice out there.
P.S. Aplogies for any typos - just had LASIK eye surgery, so vision is a bit blurred out of one eye at the moment.
It is possible to install netscape as a non-root user so that other users can use your install. For example you can have a group 'netscape' and assign group executable privelages to your non-root install.
I used to play Lego demolition derby, which consisted of each player building a vehicle and taking it in turns to ram your opponents, with last vehicle left mobile still winning.
If I'd known my Lego vehicles could have projectile weapons my childhood would have been a lot more fun [and I'd probably have been seen by a lot of psychiatrists:-)].
On terrestrial UK TV [can't remember the channel] there is a program called "Robot Wars" where teams of people build radio controlled vehicles whose aim is to demolish the other vehicle.
It should be possible to create a similar type of competition involving designing Lego Mindstorm vehicles, only with no external interference allowed. Anyone ever tried this ?
> Where did you hide the last few years ? Well that comment was a little thoughtless, but if you must know....
I've been busy supplying performance improvements to css-auth. [you know, a certain Linux DVD decryption program]. Also I occassionally contribute to KDE; not often enough, as I have a real job [telecomms s/w design ] which surprisingly often involves C & C++.
Unfortunately it's no longer possible to read everything that comes out in the field of software design. Design patterns have not even been seen on my reading list and are not required reading for telecoms software either.
I actually came away thinking this is another design fad like: Yourdon, Schlaer-Mellor, SSADM, UML....the list is long and tedious.
> Unlike Mandrake, all they did was re-label a buggy version of a Red Hat distribution and call it something new.
AFAIK, that is almost how Mandrake started out. They simply did a RedHat distro with KDE instead of GNOME.
However, Mandrake, unlike LinuxOne, seemed to start out with a degree of support from the Linux community. LinuxOne seems to be trying to forgo the hard work of gaining the respect and support of the Linux community and aiming straight for the rumoured gold in 'them thar Linux hills'. They seem to be unaware that you have to do the first before getting the second.
If this turns out to be the story of LinuxOne, then I'm prepared to radically change my opinion. But I'm not expecting to!
Judge Kaplan wrote: "They contend that DeCSS is necessary to achieve interoperability between computers running on the Linux system and DVDs and that this exception therefore is satisfied.20 This contention fails for three reasons.
____________________
20 Def. Mem. at 8-9.
First, defendants have offered no evidence to support this assertion.
Second, even assuming that DeCSS runs under Linux, it concededly runs under Windows---a far more widely used operating system---as well. It therefore cannot reasonably be said that DeCSS was developed "for the sole purpose'' of achieving interoperability between Linux and DVDs.
Finally, and most important, the legislative history makes it abundantly clear that Section 1201(f) permits reverse engineering of copyrighted computer programs only and does not authorize circumvention of technological systems that control access to other copyrighted works, such as movies.21 Inconsequence, the reverse engineering exception does not apply."
As far as I can see this point could successfully be defeated if a) one shows DeCSS running under Linux b) one shows current work in progress to playback of DVDs under Linux c) as far as the act goes, one does not have to show the sole purpose, just the primary purpose, and demonstrating that CSS operation under WINE is a necessary first step until the kernel supported DVD ioctl calls would defeat this. d) CSS as implemented in Xing _is_ a computer program and not a technolocal system; on this point alone we are home free as far as I can see.
I'm not sure personally whether I'd be happy or sad if Microsoft joined the Linux party.
On the one hand, Linux would move into driver support heaven, since it would be obligatory for everyone to support it. And finally, we'd be able to use the worlds de-facto word processor and spreadsheet in a much better environment.
> What the 15-year old long-haired "open source" Linux bigots seem to forget, is that for a long time, Microsoft was the premiere vendor of PC Unix
But as a 36 year old balding Linux bigot, I have to wonder whether Microsoft and its associated business practices would be agood for the market as a whole. And I can think of a lot of MS programming dead ends I'd rather not see on my machine.
A number of posters have stated that the GPL could probably be breached by companies who aren't willing to play by the rules. However, the fact is that such companies aren't able to sell into the technically savvy Linux market without suffering lots of opprobrium, and public opinion appears to be as effective a method of ensuring companies conform to the rules as any court of law.
The many comparisons to gold rushes in the article missed one vital point, which was that the really successful people in the gold rush were mainly the people who got in early.
Whilst I think companies/ distributions such as Red Hat, Debian et al may lose some market share Linux is shaping up to be a big market with room for both 'niche' people/ companies and mainstream companies. I see Red Hat losing market share in terms of proportion, but still growing in terms of numbers.
The only thing I can see which would really shake the market would be if a certain 800lb gorilla tagged MSFT jumped into it with both feet. If Linux (and possibly Hurd) keep growing at the same rate as they have done then I suspect that this will happen sooner rather than later. People still forget that Microsoft had a large share of the Unix market at one time.
The feature you refer to which prevents playback though a VCR is known as Macrovision. Your DVD player can probably be modified to remove this feature, depending on the model.
Slashdot Mirror
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this section, nominations are performed live at the Oscars.
So who should be nominated as entries for the following [proposed] SlashDot poll ?
Who should sing "Blame Canada" at the Oscars ?
a) singer 1
b) singer 2
c) singer 3
d) singer 4
e) Rob/ Hemos sucks
insert suggestions for singers 1..4
Hacking into a site of "the father of the internet" would be seen as gaining major credit inside the site cracking community. How, in general terms, have you gone about addressing security issues for your site ?
Whilst I'd agree with his basic premise, I think there are a lot of fuzzy areas between the continents. Maybe a better theory is to identify each area as continental plates and the fuzzy areas as the points where the plates merge, leading to things like volcanoes, ridges, mountains and earthquakes.
:-).
I'd guess DVD support in Linux sits on one of these zones, in an area of high geological activity between CorpNet, TechNet & CultureNet
On the above premise, one could perhaps visualise X-Net, not as a continental plate, but as a huge oceanic plate, with deep abysses leading down to who knows where...
In addition, there are the many shallow seas of personal internet pages, created just becuase you've been allocated one.
Yes, I was dumb enough to reply, but reasonably witty posts, whether you agree or not, deserve a response....
Nope, you have to remember he's also concerned about the future implications of decisions made today. Whilst I'm not on his side, I can see his point, which is that he is concerned that DeCSS and packages like it can decode his product and allow people to set up Warez type sites for movies. This is obviously not a problem at current internet transfer rates, but his argument is that in a few years time we will all have connection rates that make such transfers technically feasible. Similarly it is not economic to dedicate the storage to save decrypted movies to hard disk, but again in a few years time, when mass storage costs have come down one or two of orders of magnitude, it will be economic to save movies to such storage.
The MPAA is aiming for long term protection of its product and therefore want laws in place [and associated legal decisions] which enforce such protection.
There are lots of other reasons why I don't agree with him, hence the sig line.....
I'm normally on the side of Linux in most arguments, but it's possible that a Linux distro may have a similar number of flaws at any one time as Windows 2K. [Note that I'm referring to distribution rather than version of Linux].
I'm willing to bet that by the time you add up currently open bugs in XFree, KDE, Gnome, sendmail, nntp, Linux itself, the GNU utilities, compilers etc etc etc, you end up with a number certainly in the thousands.
It may be regarded as unfair to mention problems with these apps in the same breath as problems with the OS itself, but I'm willing to bet that some of the 63000 bugs in W2K include problems with Solitaire, Minesweeper and all the other cruft that makes it a rounded package.
On the good side, I am willing to believe that in Linux most of these problems will have less effect on the smooth running of the rest of the system.
To this poem I must reply,
Moderators shoot your cr*p from the sky,
Surely it is no crime,
when Anonymous Cowards like you behave like slime,
when you submit multiple trash,
we need a moderator to kick your ass,
if we need to see your puns
we just set our theshold to -1 (minus wun!)
Once was a time when Anonymous meant brave and true,
now most post garbage just like you.
This problem is similar to the so called birthday problem i.e. given a number of people n, what is the possibility of two of them sharing the same birthday? If I remember my stats correctly, the result is surprisingly large...
For n=2
364 ways second person could have birthday without matching first
For n=3
363 ways third person can have birthday not matching other two
p(match) = 1-365x364x363/(365^3)
....
when this gets to about 20, p(match) is about 40%!!
The chances of a DNA match amounts to a similar problem, so the stats rapidly build up to an high likelihood of a match after about 20-30 samples.
Yes, but a t least it's not anonymous shit!
:-)
..it's nice news, and it appears Linux is rocketing nicely up the popularity charts. I'd like to know where Linux stands in the overall OS popularity charts.
With the huge strides in usability which desktops like Gnome and KDE seem to be adding to Linux, and the rapid advance in terms of performance, such that Linux is at least operating in the same ballpark as any other operating system. I'm beginning to believe that Linux has a fighting chance of being the #1 OS everywhere by say Jan 2003. I wouldn't have been confident enoough to say that even a year ago, but Linux as an OS just gets better and better in all fields, not just the server market.
Last time I wrote something about the future I said I'd regard Linux as being a contender when games were regularly released for Linux at the same time as for Windows. Whilst that is not true yet, many companies at least look about producing a Linux version of the software and the time lag appears to be less and less. I'd like to hope that within the next 12 months this becomes more and more true.
..means you use Linux! :-)
Reading the comments about the DDoS detector indicates what a paranoid bunch of people us Slashdotters appear to be! Most of us won't touch an FBI binary with a bargepole and those of us that do seem to be testing what it does on some spare machine before we release it on our real systems.
In my current area of Linux interest, the field of DVD, DeCSS and css-auth, it has been suggested that Linux users may be happy with binary only drivers to get round our legal problems - these comments show that appears to be utter cr*p. Unless we have at least thge opportunity to see the source code, we won't let such things anywhere near our systems.
As far as editorial independence goes, most news sites seem to have a fair amount of leeway from their owners e.g the Linux DVD community has received a fair amount of support from the press despite the fact that a large number of their associate companies may be part of the MPAA.
The problem I can see is that whilst I appreciate that Slashdot is not exclusively a Linux site, such users must make up a fair proportion of its readership. And if there's one thing Linux users like it is lots of choice. It seems that choice is going to be significantly lessened if companies such as VA and RedHat gobble up all the myriad companies under their own corporate umbrella. A huge number of people moved onto Linux so they didn't have to do things the Microsoft way.
In the main I have no objection to companies growing organically, but the Linux market is starting to look very acquisitive, and in the end this may severly curtail the amount of choice out there.
P.S. Aplogies for any typos - just had LASIK eye surgery, so vision is a bit blurred out of one eye at the moment.
Froz wrote:
/]# adduser froz /]# adduser froz2 /]# adduser froz47 -
:-)
Sure, it's all fun and games with your personal clones until they start demanding their own account on your machine...
[root@localhost
adduser: user froz exists
[root@localhost
adduser: user froz2 exists
[root@localhost
adduser: user froz47 exists
-----------------------------------------------
This would also give entirely new meaning to being the root user!
Livid site went down temporarily ... try it now.
It is possible to install netscape as a non-root user so that other users can use your install. For example you can have a group 'netscape' and assign group executable privelages to your non-root install.
..would've seemed a bit strange if he'd had plastic bionics, with 'Made In Taiwan' stamped on them somewhere! :-)
I used to play Lego demolition derby, which consisted of each player building a vehicle and taking it in turns to ram your opponents, with last vehicle left mobile still winning.
:-)].
If I'd known my Lego vehicles could have projectile weapons my childhood would have been a lot more fun [and I'd probably have been seen by a lot of psychiatrists
On terrestrial UK TV [can't remember the channel] there is a program called "Robot Wars" where teams of people build radio controlled vehicles whose aim is to demolish the other vehicle.
It should be possible to create a similar type of competition involving designing Lego Mindstorm vehicles, only with no external interference allowed. Anyone ever tried this ?
> Where did you hide the last few years ?
Well that comment was a little thoughtless, but if you must know....
I've been busy supplying performance improvements to css-auth. [you know, a certain Linux DVD decryption program]. Also I occassionally contribute to KDE; not often enough, as I have a real job [telecomms s/w design ] which surprisingly often involves C & C++.
Unfortunately it's no longer possible to read everything that comes out in the field of software design. Design patterns have not even been seen on my reading list and are not required reading for telecoms software either.
I actually came away thinking this is another design fad like: Yourdon, Schlaer-Mellor, SSADM, UML....the list is long and tedious.
If you didn't understand a word of this review [and I've got to admit I came close] then perhaps this web site will help
Design Patterns
This is the homepage of the previous book in the series.
> Unlike Mandrake, all they did was re-label a buggy version of a Red Hat distribution and call it something new.
AFAIK, that is almost how Mandrake started out. They simply did a RedHat distro with KDE instead of GNOME.
However, Mandrake, unlike LinuxOne, seemed to start out with a degree of support from the Linux community. LinuxOne seems to be trying to forgo the hard work of gaining the respect and support of the Linux community and aiming straight for the rumoured gold in 'them thar Linux hills'. They seem to be unaware that you have to do the first before getting the second.
If this turns out to be the story of LinuxOne, then I'm prepared to radically change my opinion. But I'm not expecting to!
IANAL, but:
Judge Kaplan wrote:
"They contend that DeCSS is necessary to achieve interoperability between computers running on the Linux system and DVDs and that this exception
therefore is satisfied.20 This contention fails for three reasons.
____________________
20 Def. Mem. at 8-9.
First, defendants have offered no evidence to support this assertion.
Second, even assuming that DeCSS runs under Linux, it concededly runs under Windows---a far more widely used operating system---as well. It
therefore cannot reasonably be said that DeCSS was developed "for the sole purpose'' of achieving interoperability between Linux and DVDs.
Finally, and most important, the legislative history makes it abundantly clear that Section 1201(f) permits reverse engineering of copyrighted computer programs only and does not authorize circumvention of technological systems that control access to other copyrighted works, such as movies.21 Inconsequence, the reverse engineering exception does not apply."
As far as I can see this point could successfully be defeated if
a) one shows DeCSS running under Linux
b) one shows current work in progress to playback of DVDs under Linux
c) as far as the act goes, one does not have to show the sole purpose, just the primary purpose, and demonstrating that CSS operation under WINE is a necessary first step until the kernel supported DVD ioctl calls would defeat this.
d) CSS as implemented in Xing _is_ a computer program and not a technolocal system; on this point alone we are home free as far as I can see.
I'm not sure personally whether I'd be happy or sad if Microsoft joined the Linux party.
On the one hand, Linux would move into driver support heaven, since it would be obligatory for everyone to support it. And finally, we'd be able to use the worlds de-facto word processor and spreadsheet in a much better environment.
> What the 15-year old long-haired "open source" Linux bigots seem to forget, is that for a long time, Microsoft was the premiere vendor of PC Unix
But as a 36 year old balding Linux bigot, I have to wonder whether Microsoft and its associated business practices would be agood for the market as a whole. And I can think of a lot of MS programming dead ends I'd rather not see on my machine.
A number of posters have stated that the GPL could probably be breached by companies who aren't willing to play by the rules. However, the fact is that such companies aren't able to sell into the technically savvy Linux market without suffering lots of opprobrium, and public opinion appears to be as effective a method of ensuring companies conform to the rules as any court of law.
The many comparisons to gold rushes in the article missed one vital point, which was that the really successful people in the gold rush were mainly the people who got in early.
Whilst I think companies/ distributions such as Red Hat, Debian et al may lose some market share Linux is shaping up to be a big market with room for both 'niche' people/ companies and mainstream companies. I see Red Hat losing market share in terms of proportion, but still growing in terms of numbers.
The only thing I can see which would really shake the market would be if a certain 800lb gorilla tagged MSFT jumped into it with both feet. If Linux (and possibly Hurd) keep growing at the same rate as they have done then I suspect that this will happen sooner rather than later. People still forget that Microsoft had a large share of the Unix market at one time.
The feature you refer to which prevents playback though a VCR is known as Macrovision. Your DVD player can probably be modified to remove this feature, depending on the model.
See: http://www.dvdutils.com and many other sites for more info