There are (reportedly) ready-made tools for the job. Probably some Vicious Basic app with a point-and-clink interface:
Exploit Code Red backdoor: (Yes/No/Goatse.cx)
Spread like wildfire via Outlook: (Yes/Hell Yes)
Infect IIS: (Subnet/Random IP/Both)
Payload: (Bomb scare/README.TXT/Mail random.doc/FORMAT C:\)
DDOS: (whitehouse.gov/fbi.gov/slashdot.org)
The least MS could do is patch the stuff they are making and selling right now. Not blame the sysadmins and script kiddies. Bill and Ballmer made the holes in the software, they should be responsible for filling them in.
As IIS is now, it's not only an open door - it mails hand-written invitations with detailed maps and instructions (bring your own beer) to every cracker in the known universe. There are blue-gilled Gnerfils on Alpha Centauri IV that have received invitiations to crack IIS boxen. If IIS servers were women, the police would bust them all for soliciting. They go out in the street and drag people in. They are black wormholes, sucking in unsuspecting crackheads.
If you dig a big-ass hole in the middle of the road and cover it with a tarp, do we blame the people who drive into it, the local road department for not downloading a ton of asphalt into it fast enough or the idiot who dug the hole in the first place? "Hey, them dumbasses shouldn't drive too fast to see tarp-covered holes in the road anyways. Ya gotta be prepared for anything out drivin', not my fault." Yeah, right.
Aw, what do I care anymore? I upgraded from Win2k and IIS (yes, fully patched AND with a BlackICE firewall) to RH 7.1 and Apache last week.
But look at it this way, if I put a stamp and an address on a thousand dollar bill and then put it in a mailbox, would you actually blame a poor postal worker for nicking it?
If I park a brand new Jaguar X-Type with the engine running and the door ajar in (insert local 'bad' neighbourhood here) would you not blame me for having to walk home?
If I build and sell you a house in that same 'hood, with no locks on the doors and big neon signs outside that says "FREE MONEY AND DRUGS (PLEASE DO MY WIFE ON THE WAY OUT)" would you not be slightly upset with me?
If I code a 'open ports' (someone at MS misheard 'open source') software, bully everyone into paying top dollars for it and then leave them hanging in the cold breeze when all the juniors at Scriptkiddie U exploits its shortcomings, would you not blame me?
Sure, the admins are to blame because they didn't have the guts to tell their PHBs to get a decent platform instead and the PHBs are to blame because they didn't know better than to listen to MS' marketspeak and FUDmachine (no one have ever been fired for buying MS - WELL IT'S ABOUT TIME THEY WERE!) and the scriptkiddes are to blame for walking right in, with no formal invitation.
How more inviting can you get? You install a webserver that one of the largets software publishers on this planet has honed and polished for over five years and the default mode of installation is set to "I_RUN_IIS,_COME_FUCK_ME!"
If you buy a Windows 2000 Server CD today with IIS included, it will not contain a single patch released in the last year and a half. Not one. Not even SP1. MS can not even be bothered to patch the software they are manufacturing right now, it's still the same CD image they released over a year ago. What if you bought a new Ford and it had Bridgestone tires plus a hand-written note in the glove compartment that said "Please change the tires, they are unsafe". Ralph Nader would be at Ford's throat like a pitbull on speed. MS gets away with it, time and time again.
MS rolling over and being dead would make my day, actually.
Noone asked them to blame the sysadmins but everyone and their dog has asked them to fix their fscking software. This is not fixing, this is just putting more fingers in the dyke when the tide is rising. It's a ploy. It's hot air. It's RFUD - the forced deployment of a warm and fuzzy feeling.
MS has been a disease in the digital nervous system for many years now - many of you young bucks (oh God, now I feel like Sid) have never experienced a world without Microsoft. You don't remember competition like it used to be. Sure, there's Linux and the Mac, but can you imagine choosing from ten living platforms? All of them with their own merits, their unique features, unique hardware and each and every one of them with healthy applications and game industries. Take the distro wars and multiply by a hundred. It was great fun slamming the Atari losers, putting down the Apple II dweebs and the hopeless PC pundits that didn't want to see that the Amiga ruled the world.;-) The PET, Vic-20, C=64, MSX, Jupiter Ace, Sinclair ZX-80, 81 and the Spectrum, Texas 4/99, Altair and Apple II were the real pioneer platforms. Those of us who grew up with them jumpstarted the computer revolution.
But I digress. The point is that MS has done a lot of damage to the world in general and the computer industry in particular and the sooner the Cascades fall over and push Redmond into the Pacific the better.
Now go ahead and mod me down as Flamebait, Troll, Off-topic AND Overrated. Like I care.:-)
As soon as the mirrors update (which several of them already have) you won't have to get it from ftp.gnome.org (when I tried just before I posted the mirrors, it was deader than Elvis).
Not really. I mean, I've had this old beaten up Toshiba Sat Pro for like four years now - it was a 64MB, 4GB PII@266 when I got it and it had 160MB/12GB when I sold it last week. It ran Red Hat 7.1 with KDE no sweat and even Win 2k Pro with no major problems (apart from what you'd expect from MS). I had Office 2k and all that, no big deal. Way back when I was consulting for Sendit/MIBU, I dual-booted into an NT 4 Server Enterprise Edition with an SQL Server, MSMQ and loads of other crap for documentation and testing and it ran jeest fine, thankyouverymuch.
So why would a musician need 4-6 times the CPU? An engineer in the field would be better off with a ruggedized sub-notebook, regardless of the CPU - he'd want battery power and durability, not 1200MHz of powersucking bestiality. OK, the Quaking student is a point, but what student can cough up 2 grand for a laptop like that anyway?
Sony's C1 line of picturebook has a 600mhz crusoe, bluetooth, ethernet, usb, firewire and pcmcia.
There you go. I'd have thought it'd take a little longer for someone to build a laptop/notebook after my specs, but I'm not complaining.:-)
This kinda validates my point a bit: A step down in CPU power do not necessarily mean having to step down in features. But most laptop and notebook manufacturers act like this is the law or something. Are we really driving that curve or is the manufacturers doing it for us?
I'm not saying you don't need a laptop, I'm saying maybe you could make do with an 700 MHz CPU instead of a 1200 MHZ one. If I could trade those CPU cycles into an extra hour of battery life and a cheaper box and still get the other high-end extras, I'd be sold instantly.
However, something (insert favourite conspiracy theory here) keeps driving 'innovation' to keep those gadgets out of my price range. Sure, I could get a used high-end or new low-end laptop but then I'd have to add several PC Cards to get the functionality that I'd prefer to have builtin from the start.
It's possible that Transmeta will change that since their CPU focuses more on conserving energy and money than generating high numbers on MIPS (Marketing Innovations Per Second) tests and MHz tables.
The current high-end intel-powered laptops are just silly - who needs a 1.2GHz Mobile Pentium III in a laptop anyway? Is really Powerpoint XP that bloated? I don't think so. I've just sold off my old Toshiba PII@266 laptop but when I try to find a cheap, light-weight system with a decent screen, Bluetooth, 802b.11, Ethernet and modem built in I come up empty-handed. The models with the bells and whistles are also oversized with CPU so the price goes up and battery life goes down.
Transmeta may provide the solution to this equation.
I'm getting used to it. The whole intro plays like a joint NASA/Air Force recruitment commercial and that actually fits with the rest of the show, IMHO.
I think they wanted to separate Enterprise from the other Trek shows, both to signal that this is different (except they'll sneak in the same time-warp plots and weekly alien nose-jobs) and to attract a new audience that thinks 'real' Trek is silly.
Now, don't get me wrong, I even love Voyager and the first seasons of DS9, I often hum Voyager's theme song on my bike and Picard could take out Archer any day. But, give Enterprise a chance. Treat the intro like another commercial and zap around while its playing. It's not like the producers give a rat's ass what we think anyway...:-)
Thanks. I should have made CmdrTaco do an Ask Slashdot feature instead of going it alone with Google. I got a few hits with "only 19" so it never occured to me that someone would've spelled it out. Apache's mod_speling should catch that, anyway.:-)
Well, almost always. Just last night I was looking for the lyrics for Red Gum's Only 19 so I did the altalaGoogle dance. I found one verse inscribed on an Australian Vietnam War Memorial (Wall of Words) and another verse in Google's cache (the site itself was gone), but I had to try to make out the most of it myself, with varying results.
If anyone has this, please try to defeat Slashdot's imaginative Spam armoring and mail me.
Most imperfect systems don't prompt people in cheap suits with shoulder holsters to run out of the woodwork in packed airports to drag some poor unsuspecting father of four from Deadwood, KS into a small room to beat a confession out of him.
If I got hassled like that everytime my server went down, I'd be busy installing Linux now. Hey wait, I am...
Aw, there are so many utils and apps I miss from the Amiga that it's not even funny. I actually bought a brand-new A1200 just a few weeks ago (~100 USD), but I couldn't find the 2.5" HD cable I could've sworn was lying around here the week before so it's not installed yet. DPaint and PageStream rocked my world - Paint Shop and PageMaker just isn't the same...
America's New War:
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Emacs vs. vi
Emacs President Shrub today announced a new iniative in the war on user-friendlyness; Operation Infinite Swapspace.
This can be seen as a direct response to vi's recent attacks on Emacs functionality when a flock of rabid vi supporters chanted "vi don't suck, vi is leet, vi can edit in ftp!" outside the Emacs embassy in Kaboom, capital of Afarawayistan.
An Emacs representative commented the attack with "Those evil vi-llains will do anything to confuse the issues. The fact is that Emacs can solve the Towers of Hanoi problem faster than a vi user can learn to save a file and this bugs the hell out of them since most of them don't even know where Hanoi is. We are going to find their leader/vigor/bin/laden and make him pay for this atrocity."
vigor himself just said that "Vi vill:q! them!"
The Piconian ambassador was not available for a// comment, but rumours has it that he's busy compiling evidence.
It doesn't really fit into the series about exploration and discovery.
Sure it does! I wouldn't mind doing some serious exploration and discovery of, say, B'Elanna's, Seven's and/or Troi's anatomies.
Haven't seen Enterprise yet, being an alien type of person myself, but I have read the leaked script, saw the promos, trailers and interviews and it looks good to me.
Just going into a knee-jerk reaction and condemning anything that moves (New Trek sux! The Amiga is dead! BSD is dying! Osama's been laid! RMS' genes are not GPL'd! Onion soup tastes like month-old fungi on cow droppings!) is utterly futile. I understand that no one cares what I say anyway so I'll just sit back and wait for the show to arrive via the airwaves, either via a P2P filesharing app over my wireless broadband connection or the regularly scheduled TV transmissions in my country.... GIMME! NOW! *buhahaha*
The Bad Guys(TM) could just use www.spammimic.com to hide their messages in what looks like regular spamscum.
Or, you could hide steg messages in what looks like Sircam virii - just change the words a bit, move a space or two or even mess with the attached files.
There's so much data on the Net today that it's not even funny anymore and lots of it is metadata (Napster login names, tcp packet TTLs, file lengths and the naming of cats on personal homepages spring to mind) so you wouldn't even have to bother using a book cipher or pre-set code phrases like "Buy two quarts of milk on the way home, dear" which of course means "ram two commercial jets into tall buildings before breakfast".
I don't really understand why anyone bothers, unless it's to catch the really stupid terrorists, the ones that failed Terrorism 101 by not being able to scare the kindergarten kids next door out of their lunch money. Or, to watch over the general populace...
The point is that you can find hidden messages, faces on Mars and backwards satanic messages everywhere if you look hard enough, but it's impossible to find real messages that's been hidden good enough. Just deal with it.
I haven't been able to reliably read my own handwriting for years. Given a small government grant, I could develop this even further into a true, secure, incommunication system of one-way cryptos. If I could be bothered to learn Navajo, I'd be set for life.
Slashdot Mirror
He can't be serious!
Maybe he should just copyright the concept of naming and be done with it. :-)
Exploit Code Red backdoor: (Yes/No/Goatse.cx) .doc/FORMAT C:\)
Spread like wildfire via Outlook: (Yes/Hell Yes)
Infect IIS: (Subnet/Random IP/Both)
Payload: (Bomb scare/README.TXT/Mail random
DDOS: (whitehouse.gov/fbi.gov/slashdot.org)
The least MS could do is patch the stuff they are making and selling right now. Not blame the sysadmins and script kiddies. Bill and Ballmer made the holes in the software, they should be responsible for filling them in.
As IIS is now, it's not only an open door - it mails hand-written invitations with detailed maps and instructions (bring your own beer) to every cracker in the known universe. There are blue-gilled Gnerfils on Alpha Centauri IV that have received invitiations to crack IIS boxen. If IIS servers were women, the police would bust them all for soliciting. They go out in the street and drag people in. They are black wormholes, sucking in unsuspecting crackheads.
If you dig a big-ass hole in the middle of the road and cover it with a tarp, do we blame the people who drive into it, the local road department for not downloading a ton of asphalt into it fast enough or the idiot who dug the hole in the first place? "Hey, them dumbasses shouldn't drive too fast to see tarp-covered holes in the road anyways. Ya gotta be prepared for anything out drivin', not my fault." Yeah, right.
Aw, what do I care anymore? I upgraded from Win2k and IIS (yes, fully patched AND with a BlackICE firewall) to RH 7.1 and Apache last week.
But look at it this way, if I put a stamp and an address on a thousand dollar bill and then put it in a mailbox, would you actually blame a poor postal worker for nicking it?
If I park a brand new Jaguar X-Type with the engine running and the door ajar in (insert local 'bad' neighbourhood here) would you not blame me for having to walk home?
If I build and sell you a house in that same 'hood, with no locks on the doors and big neon signs outside that says "FREE MONEY AND DRUGS (PLEASE DO MY WIFE ON THE WAY OUT)" would you not be slightly upset with me?
If I code a 'open ports' (someone at MS misheard 'open source') software, bully everyone into paying top dollars for it and then leave them hanging in the cold breeze when all the juniors at Scriptkiddie U exploits its shortcomings, would you not blame me?
Sure, the admins are to blame because they didn't have the guts to tell their PHBs to get a decent platform instead and the PHBs are to blame because they didn't know better than to listen to MS' marketspeak and FUDmachine (no one have ever been fired for buying MS - WELL IT'S ABOUT TIME THEY WERE!) and the scriptkiddes are to blame for walking right in, with no formal invitation.
How more inviting can you get? You install a webserver that one of the largets software publishers on this planet has honed and polished for over five years and the default mode of installation is set to "I_RUN_IIS,_COME_FUCK_ME!"
If you buy a Windows 2000 Server CD today with IIS included, it will not contain a single patch released in the last year and a half. Not one. Not even SP1. MS can not even be bothered to patch the software they are manufacturing right now, it's still the same CD image they released over a year ago. What if you bought a new Ford and it had Bridgestone tires plus a hand-written note in the glove compartment that said "Please change the tires, they are unsafe". Ralph Nader would be at Ford's throat like a pitbull on speed. MS gets away with it, time and time again.
MS rolling over and being dead would make my day, actually.
Noone asked them to blame the sysadmins but everyone and their dog has asked them to fix their fscking software. This is not fixing, this is just putting more fingers in the dyke when the tide is rising. It's a ploy. It's hot air. It's RFUD - the forced deployment of a warm and fuzzy feeling.
MS has been a disease in the digital nervous system for many years now - many of you young bucks (oh God, now I feel like Sid) have never experienced a world without Microsoft. You don't remember competition like it used to be. Sure, there's Linux and the Mac, but can you imagine choosing from ten living platforms? All of them with their own merits, their unique features, unique hardware and each and every one of them with healthy applications and game industries. Take the distro wars and multiply by a hundred. It was great fun slamming the Atari losers, putting down the Apple II dweebs and the hopeless PC pundits that didn't want to see that the Amiga ruled the world. ;-) The PET, Vic-20, C=64, MSX, Jupiter Ace, Sinclair ZX-80, 81 and the Spectrum, Texas 4/99, Altair and Apple II were the real pioneer platforms. Those of us who grew up with them jumpstarted the computer revolution.
But I digress. The point is that MS has done a lot of damage to the world in general and the computer industry in particular and the sooner the Cascades fall over and push Redmond into the Pacific the better.
Now go ahead and mod me down as Flamebait, Troll, Off-topic AND Overrated. Like I care. :-)
Oh, you prefer tucows? ;-)
ftp.yggdrasil.com
and
ftp.sunet.se
should work better. Sorry. (No, I'm NOT just karma whoring! Am not!)
As soon as the mirrors update (which several of them already have) you won't have to get it from ftp.gnome.org (when I tried just before I posted the mirrors, it was deader than Elvis).
Guess again. :-)
http://www.gnome.org/mirrors/ftpmirrors.php3
ftp://ftp.twoguys.org/GNOMEg /pub/GNOME/s es/gnome-2.0-lib-alpha1/
ftp://ftp3.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome
ftp://ftp.rpmfind.net/linux/gnome.org/
ftp://ftp.sourceforge.net/pub/mirrors/gnome/
ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Gnome
ftp://ftp.yggdrasil.com/mirrors/site/ftp.gnome.or
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/X11/GNOME/pre-gnome2/relea
Go fish! :-)
Not really. I mean, I've had this old beaten up Toshiba Sat Pro for like four years now - it was a 64MB, 4GB PII@266 when I got it and it had 160MB/12GB when I sold it last week. It ran Red Hat 7.1 with KDE no sweat and even Win 2k Pro with no major problems (apart from what you'd expect from MS). I had Office 2k and all that, no big deal. Way back when I was consulting for Sendit/MIBU, I dual-booted into an NT 4 Server Enterprise Edition with an SQL Server, MSMQ and loads of other crap for documentation and testing and it ran jeest fine, thankyouverymuch.
So why would a musician need 4-6 times the CPU? An engineer in the field would be better off with a ruggedized sub-notebook, regardless of the CPU - he'd want battery power and durability, not 1200MHz of powersucking bestiality. OK, the Quaking student is a point, but what student can cough up 2 grand for a laptop like that anyway?
There you go. I'd have thought it'd take a little longer for someone to build a laptop/notebook after my specs, but I'm not complaining. :-)
This kinda validates my point a bit: A step down in CPU power do not necessarily mean having to step down in features. But most laptop and notebook manufacturers act like this is the law or something. Are we really driving that curve or is the manufacturers doing it for us?
However, something (insert favourite conspiracy theory here) keeps driving 'innovation' to keep those gadgets out of my price range. Sure, I could get a used high-end or new low-end laptop but then I'd have to add several PC Cards to get the functionality that I'd prefer to have builtin from the start.
It's possible that Transmeta will change that since their CPU focuses more on conserving energy and money than generating high numbers on MIPS (Marketing Innovations Per Second) tests and MHz tables.
Transmeta may provide the solution to this equation.
I think they wanted to separate Enterprise from the other Trek shows, both to signal that this is different (except they'll sneak in the same time-warp plots and weekly alien nose-jobs) and to attract a new audience that thinks 'real' Trek is silly.
Now, don't get me wrong, I even love Voyager and the first seasons of DS9, I often hum Voyager's theme song on my bike and Picard could take out Archer any day. But, give Enterprise a chance. Treat the intro like another commercial and zap around while its playing. It's not like the producers give a rat's ass what we think anyway... :-)
Ah well, one lives and learns.
(But no goats, much to my disappointment)
If anyone has this, please try to defeat Slashdot's imaginative Spam armoring and mail me.
Ohh, I'm a TLA whore. :-)
If I got hassled like that everytime my server went down, I'd be busy installing Linux now. Hey wait, I am...
(How's your tolerance for bad spelling?)
Aw, there are so many utils and apps I miss from the Amiga that it's not even funny. I actually bought a brand-new A1200 just a few weeks ago (~100 USD), but I couldn't find the 2.5" HD cable I could've sworn was lying around here the week before so it's not installed yet. DPaint and PageStream rocked my world - Paint Shop and PageMaker just isn't the same...
Emacs President Shrub today announced a new iniative in the war on user-friendlyness; Operation Infinite Swapspace.
This can be seen as a direct response to vi's recent attacks on Emacs functionality when a flock of rabid vi supporters chanted "vi don't suck, vi is leet, vi can edit in ftp!" outside the Emacs embassy in Kaboom, capital of Afarawayistan.
An Emacs representative commented the attack with "Those evil vi-llains will do anything to confuse the issues. The fact is that Emacs can solve the Towers of Hanoi problem faster than a vi user can learn to save a file and this bugs the hell out of them since most of them don't even know where Hanoi is. We are going to find their leader /vigor/bin/laden and make him pay for this atrocity."
vigor himself just said that "Vi vill :q! them!"
The Piconian ambassador was not available for a // comment, but rumours has it that he's busy compiling evidence.
Sure it does! I wouldn't mind doing some serious exploration and discovery of, say, B'Elanna's, Seven's and/or Troi's anatomies.
Haven't seen Enterprise yet, being an alien type of person myself, but I have read the leaked script, saw the promos, trailers and interviews and it looks good to me.
Just going into a knee-jerk reaction and condemning anything that moves (New Trek sux! The Amiga is dead! BSD is dying! Osama's been laid! RMS' genes are not GPL'd! Onion soup tastes like month-old fungi on cow droppings!) is utterly futile. I understand that no one cares what I say anyway so I'll just sit back and wait for the show to arrive via the airwaves, either via a P2P filesharing app over my wireless broadband connection or the regularly scheduled TV transmissions in my country. ... GIMME! NOW! *buhahaha*
Or, you could hide steg messages in what looks like Sircam virii - just change the words a bit, move a space or two or even mess with the attached files.
There's so much data on the Net today that it's not even funny anymore and lots of it is metadata (Napster login names, tcp packet TTLs, file lengths and the naming of cats on personal homepages spring to mind) so you wouldn't even have to bother using a book cipher or pre-set code phrases like "Buy two quarts of milk on the way home, dear" which of course means "ram two commercial jets into tall buildings before breakfast".
I don't really understand why anyone bothers, unless it's to catch the really stupid terrorists, the ones that failed Terrorism 101 by not being able to scare the kindergarten kids next door out of their lunch money. Or, to watch over the general populace...
The point is that you can find hidden messages, faces on Mars and backwards satanic messages everywhere if you look hard enough, but it's impossible to find real messages that's been hidden good enough. Just deal with it.
I haven't been able to reliably read my own handwriting for years. Given a small government grant, I could develop this even further into a true, secure, incommunication system of one-way cryptos. If I could be bothered to learn Navajo, I'd be set for life.
Hey, will Ashcroft want to have backdoors installed in my pens now?