But since the industry moved faster than the speed of government bureaucracy, this basically meant the government was paying to keep the old equipment running to produce the old detergent.
It's worth noting that government bureaucracies move no slower (and often faster) than private industry bureaucracies.
This is adequately demonstrated by GM's glacial pace of operations; the most significant innovations at GM in the last 80 years were driven by government mandates (seatbelts, fuel efficiency, pollution control, etc.) GM is literally slower than the intentionally deliberate processes of a democratic republic!
Organizations that have no bureaucracy - that run tight - can be very fast by comparison. But despite political rhetoric to the contrary, being a "government" bureaucracy does not automagically make something inefficient.
Any sort of bureaucracy (or large consensus-process effort) slows things down. That's why the military doesn't stop to vote on stuff on the battlefield - even the Finns save that kind of process for base camp. Dictatorship is fast and risky, checks and balances are slower and (most of the time) safer.
In a capitalist economy, investors decide which kind of leadership an enterprise needs at any given time, until a company grows too large to be led by anyone or anything but its own inertia. I think GM hit that wall decades ago.
For instructional use, they give us software for free. We decided to just go and get their software assurance pack (more or less a site license for their software for any use) and it is extremely cheap on a yearly basis. Students get massive discounts, and the get to keep the license when they leave and use it for any purpose, including for profit.
This is standard practice, and has been since IBM, DEC and Honeywell were competing for marketshare and PCs were not even a glimmer in anyone's eye.
The caveat is that this "Educational Licensing" is for degree granting institutions only. If I run classes for disabled children who will never be able to work, I will not receive this licensing. If I run classes for crippled nuns that were run over by Larry Ellison's car, I will not receive this licensing.
The reason computer companies do this is because of research done by IBM when I was just a pup. The marketing geniuses at IBM figured out that bright young graduates who had been trained on a particular system would influence buying decisions for decades after graduation, by pressuring their employers to purchase the systems they were most competent and comfortable with. By giving their stuff to schools, they receive sales benefits vastly in excess of the cost of providing the tapes (downloads, nowadays); even in the case of hardware there is a significant long-term benefit, so IBM and DEC used to give away hardware too (free hardware is rarer these days because the margins are too thin).
MS and Adobe are actually two of the best companies for cutting educational institutions a break
There's nothing wrong with what they are doing. It's good business! But they are not cutting you a break It's an entirely self-serving and profit making activity. If you're feeling anything more than mild gratitude you are just being used - do you feel like your butcher is "cutting you a break" whenever he doesn't stuff your pork chops with feces? No, you just appreciate a good businessman doing what's right for his own business.
Some of the engineering companies... Well they are assholes:P.
The engineering companies probably can't afford to help you (although it's true they might also be assholes) because they can't recover the costs like Microsoft can.
When I was doing work with underprivileged city kids, Novell and HP stepped up, Microsoft and IBM declined because we weren't "degree granting". When I was working for a non-profit research organization, HP stepped up - with very very expensive hardware I might add - but Microsoft and IBM declined because we weren't "degree granting".
Of course, all that was before Carly Fiorina. I don't know how HP treats non-profit research labs today.
there are 2 situations you have to deal with. 1: Someone who while wearing one of these devices wraps it in tinfoil and goes to mexico. 2: Someone who while wearing one of these devices walks down into his basement or as part of a job (gainful employment is good isn't it) has to carry stuff into a metal shipping container or for any reason at all legitimately ends up either underground or inside a metal cage.
You forgot the situation where Mr. John Birch doesn't like criminals, so he grabs a few felons off the street and chains them up somewhere they aren't supposed to go, like the local lodge hall. He and his buddies can laugh and drink beer while the hapless prisoners get punished for being out of place.
Remember the days of DOS and having to try to walk someone through installing something through DOS (with a CLI mind you) and how many people couldn't just type the drive right? Misspelled Install every single time, etc?
Yeah, autorun might be a security nightmare, but its a lot nicer for anyone who has had to do tech support with clueless users.
I know exactly what you mean! That's why I pre-emptively kill anyone who approaches me as if they even might ask me for some technical support.
I know it's hard on their families, but it makes my stress levels so much more manageable! I highly recommend you take up a policy of pre-emptive murder... sure there are some problems, and occasionally you kill somebody who just wanted to offer you a sandwich, but overall it's really worth it.
Many Windows applications don't call code libraries -- dubbed "dynamic-link library," or "DLL" -- using the full pathname, but instead use only the filename, giving hackers wiggle room. Criminals can exploit that by tricking the application into loading a malicious file with the same name as the required DLL. The result: Hackers can hijack the PC and plant malware on the machine.
Another Result: you can load applications onto network shares and you won't have to load.DLLs on every single machine. This "feature" is extensively used in large corporate and academic networks.
Another Result: you can run applications with mutually incompatible.DLLs of the same name. Usually not simultaneously, though. A hack that is also extensively used in large corporations.
Another Result: you can move applications from one folder to another without having to edit the application configuration to include the new path names of.DLLs. Very convenient to end users.
The vulnerability is ancient and well known, and results from Windows lack of delineation between user space and system space. Apps load shareable objects into the windows system directory by design, which is frankly insane and was known to be insane at least a decade before Microsoft existed as a company.
Although some windows applications exist that are well behaved and live entirely in a single folder (no registry nonsense, no shareable objects loaded into system space, reasonable permissions on individual components, etc.) very few consumers understand what a good application actually is - the magazine reviews don't help, either, since they tend to concentrate on eye candy and ease of installation, which are among the least important features of most programs.
Re:Why support companies that pull crap like this?
on
Droid X Gets Rooted
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· Score: 2, Interesting
at the end of the day we still need email clients in our pockets
I definitely don't want or need (or have) an email client in my pocket. I hope to one day be as successful as Dr. Knuth, so I won't need any email clients at all.
Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?
Because that is how science works. Any decent scientist would rather say "here is my data, please help me find something wrong with it."
Correct! Here's the heart of the matter; some of these scientists are assholes who deserve the opprobrium which is being heaped upon them - not because their data or analytical methods were bad, but because they are self-important assholes who were too high and mighty to follow the reasonable and well known rules of scientific data sharing.
Of course, this whole sideshow is just another Brown rabbit-hole like "global warming" in general. The real issues that need to be faced are pollution, resource depletion, and distortion of the global economic and political systems caused by petroleum dependency.
Talking about "global warming" is like discussing barnacles on your propeller while your boat is already aground and slowly being pounded to splinters by the surf.
No, Einstein was the sage even at the time, which is why Szilard got him to sign the letter.
Ah, I see you actually know the history!
Leo Szilard may well have been the greatest mind of the 20th century. He was so damn smart most people never heard of him! And he wasn't severely mentally ill, either - the other thinkers of his time (Tesla, for example) were pretty much bonkers.
But these are just about the same crime tools as picklock, gun, ax, etc. And these people are robbers, who just use some other tools.
Whoa, whoa, hold on there a minute!
The botnet is "just about the same" as a stolen gun, a stolen axe, stolen lockpicks, etc. Generic tools have no inherent moral dimension; lockpicks can be used to save a baby locked in a burning building, an axe can be used to build a house for a homeless person, a gun can be used to defend against criminals or to hunt for food.
A tool only has the moral dimensions the tool user imposes upon it by the circumstances of its creation, ownership and use.
The botnets are created from unwillingly compelled zombies; they exist as a continuous theft of resources from the zombie owners. Therefore they are not "just about the same" as my gun, my axe, or a set of lock picks.
My estate will be taking care of my body in a way that I, and my heirs, feel is appropriate. No embalming or burning or transplants for me, thank you. That shit's for the short-sighted. I hope to eventually become part of a mighty oaken timber holding up a beautiful piece of sustainable architecture, but honestly I will settle for just not becoming a bunch of spoiled meat soaked with refinery toxins. Maintaining productive soil is more valuable to the human race than temporarily extending the life of any one person.
Now, if some living person asks me nicely on my deathbed if they can have one of my organs, I might consider it. If I really, really like that person, if I really think their existence makes the world a fundamentally better place, then maybe. But I'd rather not end up like William Lucas, thanks anyway, so don't put me on any lists.
SMTP - home users should only be able to connect to port 25 on their ISPs mail server.
My home mail server is more reliable and secure than my ISP's mail server. My mailserver has never sent out any spam, theirs has sent literally millions if not billions of spams.
So, you have reduced security and service availability with your silly rule when you apply it to me.
And, for a bonus, plugged up my email!
Blocking all SMTP only makes sense when one has total contempt for the home user. In reality, there are much better solutions, but this one that glories in punishing the innocent - so naturally it's the one meglomaniacs always choose. It's like cutting off everyone in a city's water supply because some few people are pumping sewage back into the lines - sure, it hamfistedly solves the problem, but targeting the problem source would be more desirable than degrading the service as a whole.
The ISPs could kill all the botnets, worms and viruses practically overnight, but they won't because it would mean paying for truly high quality staff. They'd rather hire surly teenagers with delusions of grandeur, or at least that's what it seems like whenever I call them to make them stop one of their customers from attacking one of the hospital networks I work with. They act like blocking a port is integral calculus, and god forbid they should actually try to help their customers decontaminate.
A properly run network would not block any ports of a well behaved paying customer, and would quarantine infected boxes completely. This task could easily be achieved given the financial resources of verizon and comcast, but they are too cheap to hire quality staff and too incompetent to recognize them anyway.
My question for Slashdot: is there a way to get down to the 'bare metal' and write these bits?
Not using commonly available hardware. The disks sold today contain small computers that take your requests for specific sectors and translate them for maximum reliability and efficiency. This frees your main processor from doing that work and reserves your I/O bandwidth for data; it's more efficient. I did what you are talking about in the early 1980s using a PDP-11/34 computer and RL01 and RL02 disk drives. That system is still running today in an aerospace application, but I would never write something like that today. It's no longer an optimal use of resources.
Any good utilities out there to do this? Obviously a free and open source solution would be preferable, but I'm open to anything at this point.
I don't know of any utilities specifically designed to re-write the firmware on hard drives with custom code, but the firmwares are definitely writable, so you should be able to do it if you are motivated enough. I'd start by googling it, personally. You might also want to look at the various linux bios projects out there; those guys are re-writing the firmware on their motherboards, which is a somewhat similar process.
If you maintain a connection when you are not physically present you have downgraded your security to nearly non-existent. Your unattended computer is not secure if it is powered on. It is vulnerable to physical attacks and to zero-day exploits that it would not encounter if it were turned off when not being used.
If you make a fresh connection to a host that you have already got the host keys for - that italicized clause there is what protects you from man-in-the-middle attacks - you are making a Diffie-Hellman key exchange which is not crackable by sniffing and cannot be brute-forced in real-time. A fresh connection is vastly, fundamentally safer than an unattended computer, even if your computer is locked in Superman's Fortress of Solitude.
If you aren't familiar with how DHE works, you should check it out. Very elegant and simple.
I doubt we'll get a single response from a person on the cutting edge of cryptanalysis who can give you a meaningful answer on the relative strength of Diffe-Hellman vs AES, which is what your question comes down to
Yowza! That's some killer irony you got goin' on there hoss! Awesome!
Wait, did you think that was a meaningful response?
Maybe I shouldn't tell you that you can modify your configuration so that... nah, I'm not telling.
But my comment was meant to apply to the situation where you're connecting to a host from a client that has never connected before. OpenSSH will say The authenticity of host blablahblah can't be established. RSA key fingerprint is numbertynumbernumnum. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?
If you say "yes" it adds the key to your known_hosts file, this is where you can get MITM'd. Sorry I wasn't more precise; thanks for pointing it out.
Yeah, if the host key changes and you don't know a good reason for it, you'd be a fool to connect. Thus you should have to edit known_hosts manually.
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It's worth noting that government bureaucracies move no slower (and often faster) than private industry bureaucracies.
This is adequately demonstrated by GM's glacial pace of operations; the most significant innovations at GM in the last 80 years were driven by government mandates (seatbelts, fuel efficiency, pollution control, etc.) GM is literally slower than the intentionally deliberate processes of a democratic republic!
Organizations that have no bureaucracy - that run tight - can be very fast by comparison. But despite political rhetoric to the contrary, being a "government" bureaucracy does not automagically make something inefficient.
Any sort of bureaucracy (or large consensus-process effort) slows things down. That's why the military doesn't stop to vote on stuff on the battlefield - even the Finns save that kind of process for base camp. Dictatorship is fast and risky, checks and balances are slower and (most of the time) safer.
In a capitalist economy, investors decide which kind of leadership an enterprise needs at any given time, until a company grows too large to be led by anyone or anything but its own inertia. I think GM hit that wall decades ago.
Well, except for the famous fighting Quakers of Philadephia, who have fought in all of the USA's wars, including the revolution.
And of course, General Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine evar.
And Nixon, as you mentioned.
Ubuntu is easier to install and supports more hardware and software.
Hackintoshes are like teaching a pig to sing. Even if you succeed, it just wastes your time and annoys Apple.
Ten years ago they said I was mad for proposing this.
Thanks, comcast, you arrogant incompetents, for taking a decade to listen to your customers.
But I already moved to FIOS, along with my ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD, so tough luck.
This is standard practice, and has been since IBM, DEC and Honeywell were competing for marketshare and PCs were not even a glimmer in anyone's eye.
The caveat is that this "Educational Licensing" is for degree granting institutions only. If I run classes for disabled children who will never be able to work, I will not receive this licensing. If I run classes for crippled nuns that were run over by Larry Ellison's car, I will not receive this licensing.
The reason computer companies do this is because of research done by IBM when I was just a pup. The marketing geniuses at IBM figured out that bright young graduates who had been trained on a particular system would influence buying decisions for decades after graduation, by pressuring their employers to purchase the systems they were most competent and comfortable with. By giving their stuff to schools, they receive sales benefits vastly in excess of the cost of providing the tapes (downloads, nowadays); even in the case of hardware there is a significant long-term benefit, so IBM and DEC used to give away hardware too (free hardware is rarer these days because the margins are too thin).
There's nothing wrong with what they are doing. It's good business! But they are not cutting you a break It's an entirely self-serving and profit making activity. If you're feeling anything more than mild gratitude you are just being used - do you feel like your butcher is "cutting you a break" whenever he doesn't stuff your pork chops with feces? No, you just appreciate a good businessman doing what's right for his own business.
The engineering companies probably can't afford to help you (although it's true they might also be assholes) because they can't recover the costs like Microsoft can.
When I was doing work with underprivileged city kids, Novell and HP stepped up, Microsoft and IBM declined because we weren't "degree granting". When I was working for a non-profit research organization, HP stepped up - with very very expensive hardware I might add - but Microsoft and IBM declined because we weren't "degree granting".
Of course, all that was before Carly Fiorina. I don't know how HP treats non-profit research labs today.
tractor beams attract things... pressor beams push on things...
Well known in science fiction literature since the early 1930s or so, I think.
I guess if you are a Tom Swift Jr. fan you'd want to call it a repellatron. As featured in "Tom Swift Jr. and his Repellatron Skyway" for example.
You forgot the situation where Mr. John Birch doesn't like criminals, so he grabs a few felons off the street and chains them up somewhere they aren't supposed to go, like the local lodge hall. He and his buddies can laugh and drink beer while the hapless prisoners get punished for being out of place.
I know exactly what you mean! That's why I pre-emptively kill anyone who approaches me as if they even might ask me for some technical support.
I know it's hard on their families, but it makes my stress levels so much more manageable! I highly recommend you take up a policy of pre-emptive murder... sure there are some problems, and occasionally you kill somebody who just wanted to offer you a sandwich, but overall it's really worth it.
Another Result: you can load applications onto network shares and you won't have to load .DLLs on every single machine. This "feature" is extensively used in large corporate and academic networks.
Another Result: you can run applications with mutually incompatible .DLLs of the same name. Usually not simultaneously, though. A hack that is also extensively used in large corporations.
Another Result: you can move applications from one folder to another without having to edit the application configuration to include the new path names of .DLLs. Very convenient to end users.
The vulnerability is ancient and well known, and results from Windows lack of delineation between user space and system space. Apps load shareable objects into the windows system directory by design, which is frankly insane and was known to be insane at least a decade before Microsoft existed as a company.
Although some windows applications exist that are well behaved and live entirely in a single folder (no registry nonsense, no shareable objects loaded into system space, reasonable permissions on individual components, etc.) very few consumers understand what a good application actually is - the magazine reviews don't help, either, since they tend to concentrate on eye candy and ease of installation, which are among the least important features of most programs.
I definitely don't want or need (or have) an email client in my pocket. I hope to one day be as successful as Dr. Knuth, so I won't need any email clients at all.
Having spent years working in a museum, and more than once spending the night due to a missed train, I must respectfully decline.
I've seen enough giant mutant cockroaches to last me a lifetime, thanks anyway.
Correct! Here's the heart of the matter; some of these scientists are assholes who deserve the opprobrium which is being heaped upon them - not because their data or analytical methods were bad, but because they are self-important assholes who were too high and mighty to follow the reasonable and well known rules of scientific data sharing.
Of course, this whole sideshow is just another Brown rabbit-hole like "global warming" in general. The real issues that need to be faced are pollution, resource depletion, and distortion of the global economic and political systems caused by petroleum dependency.
Talking about "global warming" is like discussing barnacles on your propeller while your boat is already aground and slowly being pounded to splinters by the surf.
I'd rather have illegal Mexicans living next door than racist trash. I've met both, and I know which ones have stronger morals and work ethics.
I agree, and I already said so.
However, Tesla was (at least) obsessive-compulsive to an almost crippling degree. You should read up on his personal life.
Ah, I see you actually know the history!
Leo Szilard may well have been the greatest mind of the 20th century. He was so damn smart most people never heard of him! And he wasn't severely mentally ill, either - the other thinkers of his time (Tesla, for example) were pretty much bonkers.
Whoa, whoa, hold on there a minute!
The botnet is "just about the same" as a stolen gun, a stolen axe, stolen lockpicks, etc. Generic tools have no inherent moral dimension; lockpicks can be used to save a baby locked in a burning building, an axe can be used to build a house for a homeless person, a gun can be used to defend against criminals or to hunt for food.
A tool only has the moral dimensions the tool user imposes upon it by the circumstances of its creation, ownership and use.
The botnets are created from unwillingly compelled zombies; they exist as a continuous theft of resources from the zombie owners. Therefore they are not "just about the same" as my gun, my axe, or a set of lock picks.
My estate will be taking care of my body in a way that I, and my heirs, feel is appropriate. No embalming or burning or transplants for me, thank you. That shit's for the short-sighted. I hope to eventually become part of a mighty oaken timber holding up a beautiful piece of sustainable architecture, but honestly I will settle for just not becoming a bunch of spoiled meat soaked with refinery toxins. Maintaining productive soil is more valuable to the human race than temporarily extending the life of any one person.
Now, if some living person asks me nicely on my deathbed if they can have one of my organs, I might consider it. If I really, really like that person, if I really think their existence makes the world a fundamentally better place, then maybe. But I'd rather not end up like William Lucas, thanks anyway, so don't put me on any lists.
My home mail server is more reliable and secure than my ISP's mail server. My mailserver has never sent out any spam, theirs has sent literally millions if not billions of spams.
So, you have reduced security and service availability with your silly rule when you apply it to me.
And, for a bonus, plugged up my email!
Blocking all SMTP only makes sense when one has total contempt for the home user. In reality, there are much better solutions, but this one that glories in punishing the innocent - so naturally it's the one meglomaniacs always choose. It's like cutting off everyone in a city's water supply because some few people are pumping sewage back into the lines - sure, it hamfistedly solves the problem, but targeting the problem source would be more desirable than degrading the service as a whole.
The ISPs could kill all the botnets, worms and viruses practically overnight, but they won't because it would mean paying for truly high quality staff. They'd rather hire surly teenagers with delusions of grandeur, or at least that's what it seems like whenever I call them to make them stop one of their customers from attacking one of the hospital networks I work with. They act like blocking a port is integral calculus, and god forbid they should actually try to help their customers decontaminate.
A properly run network would not block any ports of a well behaved paying customer, and would quarantine infected boxes completely. This task could easily be achieved given the financial resources of verizon and comcast, but they are too cheap to hire quality staff and too incompetent to recognize them anyway.
Not using commonly available hardware. The disks sold today contain small computers that take your requests for specific sectors and translate them for maximum reliability and efficiency. This frees your main processor from doing that work and reserves your I/O bandwidth for data; it's more efficient.
I did what you are talking about in the early 1980s using a PDP-11/34 computer and RL01 and RL02 disk drives. That system is still running today in an aerospace application, but I would never write something like that today. It's no longer an optimal use of resources.
I don't know of any utilities specifically designed to re-write the firmware on hard drives with custom code, but the firmwares are definitely writable, so you should be able to do it if you are motivated enough. I'd start by googling it, personally.
You might also want to look at the various linux bios projects out there; those guys are re-writing the firmware on their motherboards, which is a somewhat similar process.
In which case my original statements still hold.
If you maintain a connection when you are not physically present you have downgraded your security to nearly non-existent. Your unattended computer is not secure if it is powered on. It is vulnerable to physical attacks and to zero-day exploits that it would not encounter if it were turned off when not being used.
If you make a fresh connection to a host that you have already got the host keys for - that italicized clause there is what protects you from man-in-the-middle attacks - you are making a Diffie-Hellman key exchange which is not crackable by sniffing and cannot be brute-forced in real-time. A fresh connection is vastly, fundamentally safer than an unattended computer, even if your computer is locked in Superman's Fortress of Solitude.
If you aren't familiar with how DHE works, you should check it out. Very elegant and simple.
Computers don't come with those any more.
And, although a few vendors ship with instructions for creating a boot disk, hardly anyone actually follows those instructions.
Nah, the original question says the guy is using puTTY and OpenSSH. They both implement RFC4419.
If somebody manages to crack DHE this guy's home server security will be the least of our problems. The algorithm is pretty straightforward.
Yowza! That's some killer irony you got goin' on there hoss! Awesome!
Wait, did you think that was a meaningful response?
Maybe I shouldn't tell you that you can modify your configuration so that... nah, I'm not telling.
But my comment was meant to apply to the situation where you're connecting to a host from a client that has never connected before. OpenSSH will say
The authenticity of host blablahblah can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is numbertynumbernumnum.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?
If you say "yes" it adds the key to your known_hosts file, this is where you can get MITM'd. Sorry I wasn't more precise; thanks for pointing it out.
Yeah, if the host key changes and you don't know a good reason for it, you'd be a fool to connect. Thus you should have to edit known_hosts manually.