Commentary is an essential part of journalism. Jon is someone who repackages and reinterprets events into a coherent whole. It's important to have someone connecting ideas from different stories. People who post comments do it as well.
It is the process of interpretation that meakes sense out of random news events.
What they, and apparent you, have missed is that he needed the CGI exploit to set up the crontab exploit. He used his CGI trick to put the crontab exploit in place. It was only a temporary dead end.
Another question is exactly how much security tuning went into the NT machine other than just applying the Service packs. There was a message on Bugtraq (Date: 10/4/99 From: Doug LeBlanc Subject:Re: RFP9903: AeDebug vulnerability) which seemed to indicate that other work was done.
This is one good reason to take most of the useful command line utilities out of
%systemroot% tree, put them elsewhere and DACL them to admins:F only. For a list of the ones I would move, see the config on the www.hackpcweek.com NT machine.
Breaking up MS into Baby Bills is fine and dandy either horizontally (several companies, each with license to the OS code) or vertically (systems, applications), but someone is going to have to own and operate these companies.
Who has the cash to buy in and who do you trust to do it?
Sun? IBM? AOL?
(Red Hat is a wrong answer. The company didn't benefit from the runup in stock price, the investors did.)
One big problem: MS dosn't own the rights to all of the code in the OS. They have licensed rights to portions of it from third parties. If the court tried to make them open those parts, the copyright holders would have something to say about it.
I use a Sierra Wireless Aircard in my Mitsubishi Amity laptop. It speaks CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data) to my provider which gives me an IP address directly routed to the Internet for a flat monthly fee from Bell Atlantic Mobile.
To get it to run under Linux, I acquired a diff to the PCMCIA sources to add support for the card. Patch, make, make install and then some additional futzing with minicom and the Aircard reference manual to learn how to load my IP address into the card.
I can now read and send email and surf the web from the Long Island Rail Road for $25/month.
Here's a link to more information on Linux and CDPD.
Sorry, thanks for playing. Do we have some parting gifts for our contestant, Don Pardo?
The force due to gravity is proportional to the products of the masses. So the force declines in proportion to the mass lost. But, because of F=ma, the accelleration due to gravity remains constant and thus so does the orbit.
Not that we can ever remove an appreciable amount of matter from Uranus anyway.
Frankly, I'm really tired of searching for widget + Linux and getting a bunch of ZD pages about the Windows version of widget with a Linux link buried in a side panel.
Furthermore, ZD just rented out the top half of the building that I work in. I don't think that they filed an environmental impact statement for the effect of increased bogon flux on nearby workers. I'm concerned that my children come out looking like Bill Gates or, worse yet, Bill Macrone.
Is there an equivalent offense under US law, and have Microsoft committed it?
Yes and no. Yes, there is a law against obstruction of justice. No, this isn't against that law becuase the court is only supposed to rule on the evidence presented in court and not based on newspaper ads, articles or editorials. It generally is not against the law to lie in ads, articles and editorials unless it is done (a) to intentionally damage somone's reputation (i.e. libel and slander) or (b) to make (demonstrably) false claims about a product.
It sounds like it's time to roll up your sleeves and start coding instead of sitting back and whining. Linux has any number of window managers. An OS/2-like one would be an asset.
Sure, simulations can give an answer to what the expected number of and size distribution of planets is for a planetary system, but we don't know this is true until we observe enough planetary systems to tell if our models are any good. I've certainly heard of models that give distributions close to what we observe in our own system.
The rest mass of a photon (particle of electro-magnetic radiation, which includes all frequencies of visible light) is 0 - not 0."some very small amount" but just plain 0. And, in the absence of electro-magnetic fields, a photon has speed c in all relativistic frames of reference. (hence "c" is the "speed of light", which is "invariant in a vacuum").
You've given the two important points, but failed to connect them in a useful way. The rest mass of a photon is exactly zero, but we never observe photons at rest. They always travel (through a vacuum) at c. Each photon has a energy proportional to its frequency. Dividing the energy by c^2 gives the mass of a moving photon which is a function of it's frequency.
Of course, the problem with this method is that it's a lot easier to find a massive planet close to a star than a tiny one. Guess what kind of planets we've found by this method: large ones close to stars. The observations to date are horribly skewed by the only reliable method.
Secondly, Microsoft isn't legally a monopoly in the first place. Lets not change the definition of a monopoly just because we hate Microsoft. A 90% market share alone does not make a monopoly--you have a control entry into the market place, for one. This means that you can block other people from entering the market.
Sorry, that's not the legal definition of a Monopoly. The ability to control prices makes a Monopoly.
Except it *does* allow the NSA to change your crypto. Whether they would want to or whether they have a better way in through another security hole is debatable. The real point is that it is unnecessary for you and I to have a NSA key in our copy of Windows.
I upgraded the memory to 48M, added an external battery for 5 hours of fun and a cell modem for TCP/IP everywhere. The cell modem didn't support Linux, but thanks to a web pages out there and some judicious reading from manuals, I have wireless IP for $25/month flat rate. All of this in a 2 pound package. Yummy.
What these guys are saying is that they have discovered a series of apparently unrelated problems that appear to share the same, non-gaussian distribution.
Processes that follow the process that gives yield to the distribution are not gaussian but slightly skewed in their outliers. I'm waiting to read something more technical before I conclude that they are full of shit.
In my own field (financial modelling) we don't have a good distribution for stock market activity. It's usually modelled lognormal, but it is clear that there are too many big drop days for the true distribution to be lognormal. People try to patch lognormal distributions, but the results are mixed. We use the lognormal distribution because it's the best one that we've got realizing that we're not going to catch those big drop days in the models. If a new distribution has a reasonable physical model underlying it with parameters that are readily estimable, you can bet that we'll use it. But we just can't tell from *this* article what exactly they've found here.
If the curve represents a count of species, the most common species would be represented by a single point near the right hand side of the curve. The work is just an observation that, in certain apparently unrelated fields, a new probability distribution is operating.
In my own field, the distribution of stock market returns is often taken to be distributed log-normal. Unfortunately, extreme downturns in the market that have been observed should be so rare that they should never be observed with the frequency that they are. A new distribution that gives increased weight to rare events would be very useful.
You ask, "Shouldn't this have been obvious?" No, not really. New distributions are not often found. One can mathematically derive any number of distributions, but they have little use unless you can find physical processes that exemplify them. With the development of chaos theory and fractal theory (the self-similarity referred to in the article) new physical processes have been defined. These have only been recognized in the last 25 years or so.
MS is just not paranoid enough about security issues. This stems directly from a single-user mindset and a lack of experience with multi-user and network security issues.
Unfortunately, they're too paranoid about potential competitors.
Re:Hey, why did he turn out the lights?
on
BOFHcam
·
· Score: 1
Gee, I didn't know that the lights don't work in England at night. How silly of me. Thanks for that erudite correction, halfwit.
Slashdot Mirror
Commentary is an essential part of journalism. Jon is someone who repackages and reinterprets events into a coherent whole. It's important to have someone connecting ideas from different stories. People who post comments do it as well.
It is the process of interpretation that meakes sense out of random news events.
I've begun to notice widescreen TVs in commercials and TV shows. And not just the Philips commercial. Commercials having nothing to do with TVs.
I want widescreen TV to view movies in their original widescreen glory, but I'll have to wait until the standards are established.
What they, and apparent you, have missed is that he needed the CGI exploit to set up the crontab exploit. He used his CGI trick to put the crontab exploit in place. It was only a temporary dead end.
Breaking up MS into Baby Bills is fine and dandy either horizontally (several companies, each with license to the OS code) or vertically (systems, applications), but someone is going to have to own and operate these companies.
Who has the cash to buy in and who do you trust to do it?
Sun? IBM? AOL?
(Red Hat is a wrong answer. The company didn't benefit from the runup in stock price, the investors did.)
One big problem: MS dosn't own the rights to all of the code in the OS. They have licensed rights to portions of it from third parties. If the court tried to make them open those parts, the copyright holders would have something to say about it.
I use a Sierra Wireless Aircard in my Mitsubishi Amity laptop. It speaks CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data) to my provider which gives me an IP address directly routed to the Internet for a flat monthly fee from Bell Atlantic Mobile.
To get it to run under Linux, I acquired a diff to the PCMCIA sources to add support for the card. Patch, make, make install and then some additional futzing with minicom and the Aircard reference manual to learn how to load my IP address into the card.
I can now read and send email and surf the web from the Long Island Rail Road for $25/month.
Here's a link to more information on Linux and CDPD.
Sorry, thanks for playing. Do we have some parting gifts for our contestant, Don Pardo?
The force due to gravity is proportional to the products of the masses. So the force declines in proportion to the mass lost. But, because of F=ma, the accelleration due to gravity remains constant and thus so does the orbit.
Not that we can ever remove an appreciable amount of matter from Uranus anyway.
ZDNN is nothing but a big banner serving machine.
Frankly, I'm really tired of searching for widget + Linux and getting a bunch of ZD pages about the Windows version of widget with a Linux link buried in a side panel.
Furthermore, ZD just rented out the top half of the building that I work in. I don't think that they filed an environmental impact statement for the effect of increased bogon flux on nearby workers. I'm concerned that my children come out looking like Bill Gates or, worse yet, Bill Macrone.
Is there an equivalent offense under US law, and have Microsoft committed it?
Yes and no. Yes, there is a law against obstruction of justice. No, this isn't against that law becuase the court is only supposed to rule on the evidence presented in court and not based on newspaper ads, articles or editorials. It generally is not against the law to lie in ads, articles and editorials unless it is done (a) to intentionally damage somone's reputation (i.e. libel and slander) or (b) to make (demonstrably) false claims about a product.
It sounds like it's time to roll up your sleeves and start coding instead of sitting back and whining. Linux has any number of window managers. An OS/2-like one would be an asset.
Sure, simulations can give an answer to what the expected number of and size distribution of planets is for a planetary system, but we don't know this is true until we observe enough planetary systems to tell if our models are any good. I've certainly heard of models that give distributions close to what we observe in our own system.
The rest mass of a photon (particle of electro-magnetic radiation, which includes all frequencies of visible light) is 0 - not 0."some very small amount" but just plain 0. And, in the absence of electro-magnetic fields, a photon has speed c in all relativistic frames of reference. (hence "c" is the "speed of light", which is "invariant in a vacuum").
You've given the two important points, but failed to connect them in a useful way. The rest mass of a photon is exactly zero, but we never observe photons at rest. They always travel (through a vacuum) at c. Each photon has a energy proportional to its frequency. Dividing the energy by c^2 gives the mass of a moving photon which is a function of it's frequency.
Of course, the problem with this method is that it's a lot easier to find a massive planet close to a star than a tiny one. Guess what kind of planets we've found by this method: large ones close to stars. The observations to date are horribly skewed by the only reliable method.
Secondly, Microsoft isn't legally a monopoly in the first place. Lets not change the definition of a monopoly just because we hate Microsoft. A 90% market share alone does not make a monopoly--you have a control entry into the market place, for one. This means that you can block other people from entering the market.
Sorry, that's not the legal definition of a Monopoly. The ability to control prices makes a Monopoly.
Take a look at the Bugtraq archives. It ain't so hard to get a Windows machine to run exploit code. ASP holes, HTA holes, Java holes.
What's next?
- Judge orders onerous penalty (it dosn't really matter what penalty).
- Appeals court throws out verdict.
- Retrial in 2001 or Government throws in the towel.
Remember, you read it here first.
I agree it is just that simple, except...
Except it *does* allow the NSA to change your crypto. Whether they would want to or whether they have a better way in through another security hole is debatable. The real point is that it is unnecessary for you and I to have a NSA key in our copy of Windows.
I upgraded the memory to 48M, added an external battery for 5 hours of fun and a cell modem for TCP/IP everywhere. The cell modem didn't support Linux, but thanks to a web pages out there and some judicious reading from manuals, I have wireless IP for $25/month flat rate. All of this in a 2 pound package. Yummy.
What these guys are saying is that they have discovered a series of apparently unrelated problems that appear to share the same, non-gaussian distribution.
Processes that follow the process that gives yield to the distribution are not gaussian but slightly skewed in their outliers. I'm waiting to read something more technical before I conclude that they are full of shit.
In my own field (financial modelling) we don't have a good distribution for stock market activity. It's usually modelled lognormal, but it is clear that there are too many big drop days for the true distribution to be lognormal. People try to patch lognormal distributions, but the results are mixed. We use the lognormal distribution because it's the best one that we've got realizing that we're not going to catch those big drop days in the models. If a new distribution has a reasonable physical model underlying it with parameters that are readily estimable, you can bet that we'll use it. But we just can't tell from *this* article what exactly they've found here.
If the curve represents a count of species, the most common species would be represented by a single point near the right hand side of the curve. The work is just an observation that, in certain apparently unrelated fields, a new probability distribution is operating.
In my own field, the distribution of stock market returns is often taken to be distributed log-normal. Unfortunately, extreme downturns in the market that have been observed should be so rare that they should never be observed with the frequency that they are. A new distribution that gives increased weight to rare events would be very useful.
You ask, "Shouldn't this have been obvious?" No, not really. New distributions are not often found. One can mathematically derive any number of distributions, but they have little use unless you can find physical processes that exemplify them. With the development of chaos theory and fractal theory (the self-similarity referred to in the article) new physical processes have been defined. These have only been recognized in the last 25 years or so.
MS is just not paranoid enough about security issues. This stems directly from a single-user mindset and a lack of experience with multi-user and network security issues.
Unfortunately, they're too paranoid about potential competitors.
Gee, I didn't know that the lights don't work in England at night. How silly of me. Thanks for that erudite correction, halfwit.
I wouldn't necessarially trust the time stamps on web files as a true indication of their last modification dates.
It can be found at the bottom of every page. Ergo: