Linux is a kernel, upon which you can run a number of applications. To say that Linux is insecure because somebody runs a buggy web application is ridiculous. If the defacement happens because of a exploit against the OS itself, fine, but that number doesn't reflect that.
A better measure would be to calculate the approximate economic damage created by a given security breach, and then adjust the figure to acommodate for the installed base. That is, if a Linux hack costs $1,000,000 and there are 20 times as many Windows boxes, then it's equivalent to a $20,000,000 hit in Windows terms.
I pictured an IBM semi-trailer rumbling down the highway, with an SCO chicken (looked like Darl with feathers) standing at the other end of a straight, squaking furiously at the oncoming behemoth. The chicken doesn't stand a chance.
Actually had pretty much the same vision. Or perhaps just the CEO of SCO standing there blabbing his mouth like the Information Minister of Iraq.
"There is no semi-truck barreling down on me. I am in invicible!"
There's no clearer sign that SCO is walking on thin ice here than the desperation of their tactics lately.
Desperate acts:
* They accuse IBM of being this manipulating orwellian company that could somehow motivate us open source advocates to hate them.
* They claim the GPL is invalid on grounds that would effectively destroy the publishing industry if upheld.
* They make many of their claims sound like legal claims without actually filing them in court
They are trying to win a war of public opinion to infalte the stock price. They will lose in court, without question, so they are doing everything they can to try to make IBM bail them out.
IBM is an evil corporation, don't get me wrong, but it's nice to see them excercising a little enlightened self interest and playing chicken with SCO.
Here's the thing, you have a certain user base out there which is using MSN without using the MSN client. Most of the MSN users are using the MSN client however. By forcing people to use the MSN client, they guarantee that at least some portion of the users of that system will just stop using it.
If I'm a user of the MSN client, and a few friends of mine use third party products, there's a greater likelyhood I'll stop using MSN altogether. The value in any IM network is the availability of my friends. I don't use AIM because it's technically superior, I use it because I have more friends on AIM. In reality though I use GAIM, which means I may soon not be using MSN. Fine by me, I'll just use yahoo and aim.
Ultimately if you get taken to court because of a copyright violation that was discovered because the cracked software phoned home, I doubt the court will grant you much leighway.
If the software's anti-theft tracking was being put in place by the police, that would be a violation of the fourth amendment. On the other hand, this is being done by a private corporation which has far more rights.
Think about LoJack, the car anti-theft mechanism, that tracks the car. Isn't that effectively the same thing? That's perfectly legal.
I don't like the notion of a company installing such spyware because there's little guarantee that they are only reporting pirates. Furthermore, what's to keep them from reporting subtle violations of the license agreement that aren't in fact illegal under copyright law. Once the spyware is there, there's effectively no limit on what it can do.
Plus you want to keep pushing the GUI that made it popular in the first place.
No, what made it popular was that everybody's software runs on it. Macintosh was ahead of Microsoft for a long long time when it came to the GUI. People kept buying Wintel boxes because that's what they had at work and, generally speaking, they were cheaper.
Look at an early 90's macintosh GUI and compare it to windows 3.11 and tell me that the window GUI would win over anybody. Then compare it to windows 95, and it's closer but it's still in favor of apple. Basically at 95, the GUI became good enough to not detract from the system but it was hardly something that would convince people to use it.
They aren't going to win any more of the desktop market by making it look fancier. They don't have to win over anybody? They just need to avoid losing them. Ultimately that will most likely happen through continuing to make people need windows rather than choose it on its merits.
What probably happened is that the outside firewall was set up to block access to that port. However, some employee went home, plugged in their company laptop into the DSL line and got infected. Then they came into work, plugged into the corporate network and suddenly the nuclear sysytems are hosed.
Given the advent of laptops, broadband, and wireless networks, it seems that network administrator, increasingly, cannot put faith in the integrity of their own internal networks. The odds are probably much higher that such worms will infect through a company laptop than somehow work their way through a company's external security.
Even if the automation was forced, the problem is that the majority of internet users still use dial-up. They are at a lower risk for infection, but they are still at risk (trust me, my father-in-law got hit by it). The problem with dial-up users is that they don't want to spend literally hours downloading patches, so they don't patch their system.
What would be nice is if Microsoft provided a CD subscription for their patches for cheap.
The problem isn't a matter of you being overeducated, the problem is how you are likely to perceive the job you take. When a company hires you, they want you to like the job and feel like you are being fulfilled because you are more productive that way. If you take a job implementing technology and you have a PHD, their reasonable concern is that you will not feel it is worthy of you. That you will become bored and restless and quit or become unproductive.
I mean, lets face it, would you feel fulfilled working in a burger king if you had a PHD? No. At some point there's a level where you will feel that, and many companies may believe that your credentials will put you above them.
I lived in a rented house in college that had what turned out to be dangerous wiring.
LESSON 1: Polarity
Here's a cool tip for you. When wiring up electrical outlets, if you reverse the hot and the neutral lines, you actually create a voltage potential between the outlets. I discovered this because I touched the stove and the refridgerator at the same time accidentally. I got a huge jolt, shook a bit, and called the land lord.
LESSON 2: Breakers and Wiring Guages
If you should ever run wiring in your house, you need to make sure that the breaker that you use matches the capabilities of the wiring. If you should decide to run wiring into an attic using 15 amp capable wiring, it is a bad idea to put a 30 amp breaker on it. It's an even worse idea to hook up approximately 27 amps worth of electrical heaters to this circuit because it will cause the wiring in the wall to catch fire. Of course if one assumes that the person wiring the house isn't insane, you may not know to avoid plugging in said heaters.
LESSON 3: DOCTORS ARE NOT ELECTRICIANS
Eletricity isn't brain surgery, and just as you don't want an electrician siticking sharp metal objects into your brain, you don't want a doctor futzing with wiring. Actually I suppose if you are a doctor who does know how to work with electricity it would be okay, but the one who had previously owned our house had no clue on the subject. Worse, he had no clue and he mistakenly thought that he knew everything.
So, if you look in the electrical box and it instills fear in you, call a professional. Don't even think of doing it yourself.
It's not stupidity, it's a great way to make some quick money. I mean, it's underhanded, and ultimately futile, but you can't deny that the execs and shareholders are making a quick buck.
In the end, what SCO is doing isn't illegal, and it won't get any of them in hotwater unless somebody can proove that they filed the suit only to get the stock up, knowing full well it was a baseless lawsuit. Their claims hold just enough water to keep them safe even if they won't stand up in court.
This is a great demonstration of what is wrong with the focus on creating short term profits in corporate america. The SCO execs are not only sniking the future of their company, but potentially the future of other companies. They are doing so, blindly, for the quick buck.
This is a civil suit, not a criminal trial. Therefore the burden of proof is "the proponderance of evidence" if I'm not mistaken. But of course, IANAL:)
De-regulation works well when there is a competitive marketplace and it fails utterly when there isn't. Witness the airlines for examples of both how it succeeds and fails. If you are travelling between major hubs in the US, you have multiple airlines to choose from and the price you pay is pretty low. If you are travelling between off-hub points, then you pay a premium because it's likely only one or two airlines serve that route.
The electrical industry, much like the phone and cable industry is too dependent on the connection to the house to be truly competitive. Ultimately whoever controls the wires into the home runs the show and has a competitive (and frequently regulatory) advantage over anybody who would need to run new wires.
There seems to be this belief that privatizing and de-regulating are magical cure alls for many problems. They aren't. If a market is naturally prone to creating uncompetitive monpolies, then neither government nor private industry will make it more efficient over the long run. Thus you are better off with government where at least the motivations are to please the citizenry rather than please the shareholders.
I'm really nervous about this going before a jury. It'll be the good corporate citizens defending their honest right to make money for their hard work vs. the godless communists who've infected IBM.
Another thing that's stupid about this line of legal logic is that it would render site licenses invalid. What is a site license but a limited right to make copies?
Notice though that the attorney is simply declaring the GPL invalid. I will, in turn, declare Richard Stallman to be the King of Norway. Both of these declarations have no legal validity, and both are pretty hilarious concepts. What he says and what the courts say are likely to be very different things
To write off the potential for bad things to happen through our knowledge of DNA, is as silly as writing off it's potential good. The good and the bad are both there to be used, it's just a matter of the people who have the knowledge to manipulate it. Knowledge and technology are power, but that power is amoral, it's up to the wielder of that power how to use it and there's no physical law prevent somebody for using it for the wrong reasons.
Eventually somebody will have the knowledge and the will to use this power destructively. Yes we also get many benefits, and so the double edged sword of technology swings as usual.
This is exactly the sort of thing that is nicely dealt with through the existence of Freenet. Nobody can take down freenet, so if such things are hosted through Freenet, then the DMCA becomes totally irrelevant. They can't send the threatening letter to anybody because there's no source to send it too, just an anonymous network of servers happily sending the data where needed.
I use NiMH batteries for my wireless mouse, and my camera. Got a simple charger over at radioshack, and it works quite well. The batteries provide equivalent if not better power than alkalines and though they cost more up front, are definitely cheaper in the long run.
Let's assume that it was as easy as he suggests. This ultimately becomes no different than the situation we have for oil now. Countries near the equator would generate more power and be able to have control over the northern climates.
Now, granted, the poorer countries tend to be nearer to the equator, which you'd think would give them a leg up, but it wouldn't. If you look at oil and other resource based economies, it is good for making the powerful wealthy, but since they are not labor intensive, that wealth doesn't get shared amongst the people.
Actually the stock market bubble is an ideal comparison. A stock market bubble is caused when, as a whole, investors miscalculate the value of the market. They believe that the future potential of a market sector is more substantial than it is.
In this case we have that same logic, just on the micro scale, applied to a single company. A bunch of investors look at the lawsuit and the numbers involved and think it's going to bring SCO a lot of money. More specifically I suspect they believe that this will ultimately lead to either a settlement with IBM or a buyout of SCO by IBM, either of which benefits the stock price but doesn't have anything to do with the legal merit of the case.
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Linux is a kernel, upon which you can run a number of applications. To say that Linux is insecure because somebody runs a buggy web application is ridiculous. If the defacement happens because of a exploit against the OS itself, fine, but that number doesn't reflect that.
A better measure would be to calculate the approximate economic damage created by a given security breach, and then adjust the figure to acommodate for the installed base. That is, if a Linux hack costs $1,000,000 and there are 20 times as many Windows boxes, then it's equivalent to a $20,000,000 hit in Windows terms.
I pictured an IBM semi-trailer rumbling down the highway, with an SCO chicken (looked like Darl with feathers) standing at the other end of a straight, squaking furiously at the oncoming behemoth. The chicken doesn't stand a chance.
Actually had pretty much the same vision. Or perhaps just the CEO of SCO standing there blabbing his mouth like the Information Minister of Iraq.
"There is no semi-truck barreling down on me. I am in invicible!"
Nope, it's not paranoia, it's desperation!
There's no clearer sign that SCO is walking on thin ice here than the desperation of their tactics lately.
Desperate acts:
* They accuse IBM of being this manipulating orwellian company that could somehow motivate us open source advocates to hate them.
* They claim the GPL is invalid on grounds that would effectively destroy the publishing industry if upheld.
* They make many of their claims sound like legal claims without actually filing them in court
They are trying to win a war of public opinion to infalte the stock price. They will lose in court, without question, so they are doing everything they can to try to make IBM bail them out.
IBM is an evil corporation, don't get me wrong, but it's nice to see them excercising a little enlightened self interest and playing chicken with SCO.
Here's the thing, you have a certain user base out there which is using MSN without using the MSN client. Most of the MSN users are using the MSN client however. By forcing people to use the MSN client, they guarantee that at least some portion of the users of that system will just stop using it.
If I'm a user of the MSN client, and a few friends of mine use third party products, there's a greater likelyhood I'll stop using MSN altogether. The value in any IM network is the availability of my friends. I don't use AIM because it's technically superior, I use it because I have more friends on AIM. In reality though I use GAIM, which means I may soon not be using MSN. Fine by me, I'll just use yahoo and aim.
Ultimately if you get taken to court because of a copyright violation that was discovered because the cracked software phoned home, I doubt the court will grant you much leighway.
If the software's anti-theft tracking was being put in place by the police, that would be a violation of the fourth amendment. On the other hand, this is being done by a private corporation which has far more rights.
Think about LoJack, the car anti-theft mechanism, that tracks the car. Isn't that effectively the same thing? That's perfectly legal.
I don't like the notion of a company installing such spyware because there's little guarantee that they are only reporting pirates. Furthermore, what's to keep them from reporting subtle violations of the license agreement that aren't in fact illegal under copyright law. Once the spyware is there, there's effectively no limit on what it can do.
Plus you want to keep pushing the GUI that made it popular in the first place.
No, what made it popular was that everybody's software runs on it. Macintosh was ahead of Microsoft for a long long time when it came to the GUI. People kept buying Wintel boxes because that's what they had at work and, generally speaking, they were cheaper.
Look at an early 90's macintosh GUI and compare it to windows 3.11 and tell me that the window GUI would win over anybody. Then compare it to windows 95, and it's closer but it's still in favor of apple. Basically at 95, the GUI became good enough to not detract from the system but it was hardly something that would convince people to use it.
They aren't going to win any more of the desktop market by making it look fancier.
They don't have to win over anybody? They just need to avoid losing them. Ultimately that will most likely happen through continuing to make people need windows rather than choose it on its merits.
What probably happened is that the outside firewall was set up to block access to that port. However, some employee went home, plugged in their company laptop into the DSL line and got infected. Then they came into work, plugged into the corporate network and suddenly the nuclear sysytems are hosed.
Given the advent of laptops, broadband, and wireless networks, it seems that network administrator, increasingly, cannot put faith in the integrity of their own internal networks. The odds are probably much higher that such worms will infect through a company laptop than somehow work their way through a company's external security.
Even if the automation was forced, the problem is that the majority of internet users still use dial-up. They are at a lower risk for infection, but they are still at risk (trust me, my father-in-law got hit by it). The problem with dial-up users is that they don't want to spend literally hours downloading patches, so they don't patch their system.
What would be nice is if Microsoft provided a CD subscription for their patches for cheap.
The problem isn't a matter of you being overeducated, the problem is how you are likely to perceive the job you take. When a company hires you, they want you to like the job and feel like you are being fulfilled because you are more productive that way. If you take a job implementing technology and you have a PHD, their reasonable concern is that you will not feel it is worthy of you. That you will become bored and restless and quit or become unproductive.
I mean, lets face it, would you feel fulfilled working in a burger king if you had a PHD? No. At some point there's a level where you will feel that, and many companies may believe that your credentials will put you above them.
I lived in a rented house in college that had what turned out to be dangerous wiring.
LESSON 1: Polarity
Here's a cool tip for you. When wiring up electrical outlets, if you reverse the hot and the neutral lines, you actually create a voltage potential between the outlets. I discovered this because I touched the stove and the refridgerator at the same time accidentally. I got a huge jolt, shook a bit, and called the land lord.
LESSON 2: Breakers and Wiring Guages
If you should ever run wiring in your house, you need to make sure that the breaker that you use matches the capabilities of the wiring. If you should decide to run wiring into an attic using 15 amp capable wiring, it is a bad idea to put a 30 amp breaker on it. It's an even worse idea to hook up approximately 27 amps worth of electrical heaters to this circuit because it will cause the wiring in the wall to catch fire. Of course if one assumes that the person wiring the house isn't insane, you may not know to avoid plugging in said heaters.
LESSON 3: DOCTORS ARE NOT ELECTRICIANS
Eletricity isn't brain surgery, and just as you don't want an electrician siticking sharp metal objects into your brain, you don't want a doctor futzing with wiring. Actually I suppose if you are a doctor who does know how to work with electricity it would be okay, but the one who had previously owned our house had no clue on the subject. Worse, he had no clue and he mistakenly thought that he knew everything.
So, if you look in the electrical box and it instills fear in you, call a professional. Don't even think of doing it yourself.
It's not stupidity, it's a great way to make some quick money. I mean, it's underhanded, and ultimately futile, but you can't deny that the execs and shareholders are making a quick buck.
In the end, what SCO is doing isn't illegal, and it won't get any of them in hotwater unless somebody can proove that they filed the suit only to get the stock up, knowing full well it was a baseless lawsuit. Their claims hold just enough water to keep them safe even if they won't stand up in court.
This is a great demonstration of what is wrong with the focus on creating short term profits in corporate america. The SCO execs are not only sniking the future of their company, but potentially the future of other companies. They are doing so, blindly, for the quick buck.
t said, for example, that more than 829,000 lines of SMP code had been duplicated in Linux
And there are also 657 communists on this website!
If you are sick of RedHat's extortive licensing fees that you instead switch to Windows XP... :)
Norway would promptly be renamed NNUS...
(Norway's Not United States)
This is a civil suit, not a criminal trial. Therefore the burden of proof is "the proponderance of evidence" if I'm not mistaken. But of course, IANAL :)
De-regulation works well when there is a competitive marketplace and it fails utterly when there isn't. Witness the airlines for examples of both how it succeeds and fails. If you are travelling between major hubs in the US, you have multiple airlines to choose from and the price you pay is pretty low. If you are travelling between off-hub points, then you pay a premium because it's likely only one or two airlines serve that route.
The electrical industry, much like the phone and cable industry is too dependent on the connection to the house to be truly competitive. Ultimately whoever controls the wires into the home runs the show and has a competitive (and frequently regulatory) advantage over anybody who would need to run new wires.
There seems to be this belief that privatizing and de-regulating are magical cure alls for many problems. They aren't. If a market is naturally prone to creating uncompetitive monpolies, then neither government nor private industry will make it more efficient over the long run. Thus you are better off with government where at least the motivations are to please the citizenry rather than please the shareholders.
I'm really nervous about this going before a jury. It'll be the good corporate citizens defending their honest right to make money for their hard work vs. the godless communists who've infected IBM.
Exactly!
Another thing that's stupid about this line of legal logic is that it would render site licenses invalid. What is a site license but a limited right to make copies?
Notice though that the attorney is simply declaring the GPL invalid. I will, in turn, declare Richard Stallman to be the King of Norway. Both of these declarations have no legal validity, and both are pretty hilarious concepts. What he says and what the courts say are likely to be very different things
To write off the potential for bad things to happen through our knowledge of DNA, is as silly as writing off it's potential good. The good and the bad are both there to be used, it's just a matter of the people who have the knowledge to manipulate it. Knowledge and technology are power, but that power is amoral, it's up to the wielder of that power how to use it and there's no physical law prevent somebody for using it for the wrong reasons.
Eventually somebody will have the knowledge and the will to use this power destructively. Yes we also get many benefits, and so the double edged sword of technology swings as usual.
This is exactly the sort of thing that is nicely dealt with through the existence of Freenet. Nobody can take down freenet, so if such things are hosted through Freenet, then the DMCA becomes totally irrelevant. They can't send the threatening letter to anybody because there's no source to send it too, just an anonymous network of servers happily sending the data where needed.
I use NiMH batteries for my wireless mouse, and my camera. Got a simple charger over at radioshack, and it works quite well. The batteries provide equivalent if not better power than alkalines and though they cost more up front, are definitely cheaper in the long run.
Let's assume that it was as easy as he suggests. This ultimately becomes no different than the situation we have for oil now. Countries near the equator would generate more power and be able to have control over the northern climates.
:)
Now, granted, the poorer countries tend to be nearer to the equator, which you'd think would give them a leg up, but it wouldn't. If you look at oil and other resource based economies, it is good for making the powerful wealthy, but since they are not labor intensive, that wealth doesn't get shared amongst the people.
So, bad idea. Try again
Actually the stock market bubble is an ideal comparison. A stock market bubble is caused when, as a whole, investors miscalculate the value of the market. They believe that the future potential of a market sector is more substantial than it is.
In this case we have that same logic, just on the micro scale, applied to a single company. A bunch of investors look at the lawsuit and the numbers involved and think it's going to bring SCO a lot of money. More specifically I suspect they believe that this will ultimately lead to either a settlement with IBM or a buyout of SCO by IBM, either of which benefits the stock price but doesn't have anything to do with the legal merit of the case.
Linux is in trouble. The SCO litigation obviously has enough bite to warrant a significant SCO stock response
Ummmm... I should think that the last 5 years or so of market performance should demonstrate the flaws in this statement.