The most 'impressive' denial of service going on here is the social one. Get a lot of folk out there that are manually trying to get patched, all together and it's going to cause a hell of a spike on whatever machines service the update. This is aided slightly by some good meeja stories.
Removing the DNS for windowsupdate.com is one thing but windowsupdate.microsoft.com looks a lot like toast right now. That could be because there are variants of the worm, I suppose, but I'd wager it's the monkeys at keyboards.
Imagine if they didn't have the best part of a month to patch and a week to prepare for the ddos. How about an hour or so to code for a new exploit and 15 minutes for it to propagate? Patching isn't going to save anyone if that sort of thing ever because commonplace.
And you use it on ten different systems. Joy. If there is any incremental element to knocking over a password then changing it does help. I don't have much trouble remembering 5 pretty complex (and uncorrelated) changing every [week,3 months) passwords for different systems/keys and I'm happier that they're different in case any of the individual systems is compromised before I next hand it my plain-text password. The rest of my passwords (Web stuff, mainly) are either crap or unmemorable noise, and I'll use the entirely hokey mail-me-a-new-password feature to get back in to my account. That that isn't usually offered as an encrypted mail is a shame. You're right that I would pick longer passwords if I didn't change them as often, but I reckon 12-16 digits of alpha-symbol-numeric crud are good enough for the stuff I'm doing.
It may be because you're serving them as text/plain rather than text/css, but that's off the top of my head. ISTR the non-quirks mode being suitably picky over this.
I realise that some companies, especially large ones mandate the use of various software. That's not dopey. What's dopey is using something that is practically bound to explode in their faces. This isn't to do with hating microsoft, as such, since I don't automatically. I may dislike their shadier practices but still not hate them. This is a much more limited belief that it isn't possible to deploy Outlook and have it be safe over any sensible period of time. If the suggested client was Open Source I'd still argue against it if it had the history of privacy and security flaws that Outlook and cousins have. Historically there have been repeated exploits, most of which were throttlable either with a patch or something increasingly complex running at the edge of the network. The window of opportunity for exploiting them is big enough, and their occurance is frequent enough, that you can expect it to go badly wrong.
I'm not blaming folk with jobs at places where they force this on people, but rather questioning the sanity of mandating the use of something that puts so much of your (presumably precious) information at risk.
If it explodes badly enough for a business to go under then it'll affect the users who lose their jobs, plainly. The adversarial 'can't trust our users' is part of the problem. If you go so far as to hire smart people who can see it's a problem, then it's worth listening to them if they propose a safer alternative.
They only do a javascript boink after serving the content though. The 'people^H^H^H^H^Hrinter friendly' page' is unencumbered by both the crud and that Javascript.
(Although it doesn't matter much since you've pasted it I suppose).
You don't expect them to let users pick their own mail clients, browsers, etc, do you?
No, I expect them to mandate a mail client that will blow up in their faces before long. It's only a matter of time before someone starts really using the largest involuntary distributed computer on the planet.
That's all very sound, unless you go for some sort of all-you-can-eat affair, which at least one chain (UGC) in the UK offers. It's ten quid a month for most of the country, or twenty if you want to include any of the four closest to my house (which means you are up if you go about 3 times every four weeks).
At that point you're only left with working out if it is worth spending the time to watch the film, and I've watched more great films I didn't know much about than I have sat through mindless pap.
All in I end up happier from getting to not be per-incident bothered about how good a film is ('is it worth it?' &c), and that in itself is worth something to me too.
Isn't the CD the backup? And it'll last a fair while longer sitting nestled in its case somewhere, as opposed to getting a zonking scratch down it at a random party.
As for using them at the click of a mouse, I'd much rather a sane, easy touch screen + voice gubbins. I prefer to not have to use a desktoppian interface just to listen to some music.
All that said - are there any good OS projects for doing happy-shiny interfaces like this? Anything I found through Google seemed pretty sleepy/resting/dead.
For it to really help you need to think through what you're linking to and what you're serving off.
If you link to/foo - but it's really some index page served off/foo/ then a bunch of browsers won't give you vlink-happiness.
We should go further still and serve the same bit of content of one URI. This includes - amongst other stuff - picking one fully qualified domain and redirecting the various alternatives (www...,...com/org/co.uk/whatever) to that one. Unless of course you're doing different stuff for different hosts - sensibly. It helps for caching, for people returning to the site, and it's just plain cleaner.
It has been said elsewhere that even the cost of identifying all the license-hampered parts would be high. And if you cock it up, the danger is that you get pretty seriously lawyered.
(On your last point)
To be NP-complete it needs to be in NP as well. It may seem like a silly thing, and it'll be simple in many cases (guess... try). Otherwise you might drag in things from outside NP.
This has stayed fairly US-centric. It'd be nice to know if my (ex-CWC) NTL digital cable box could be coerced into supplying the MPEG stream out of one of those oh-so-tempting-looking connectors on the back. It's a Pace box, and Telewest use the same hardware, I believe. Also NTL are switching over their existing digiboxes to the CWC style ones too.
Slashdot Mirror
The most 'impressive' denial of service going on here is the social one. Get a lot of folk out there that are manually trying to get patched, all together and it's going to cause a hell of a spike on whatever machines service the update. This is aided slightly by some good meeja stories.
Removing the DNS for windowsupdate.com is one thing but windowsupdate.microsoft.com looks a lot like toast right now. That could be because there are variants of the worm, I suppose, but I'd wager it's the monkeys at keyboards.
Imagine if they didn't have the best part of a month to patch and a week to prepare for the ddos. How about an hour or so to code for a new exploit and 15 minutes for it to propagate? Patching isn't going to save anyone if that sort of thing ever because commonplace.
Petite Delice has been there for a few years, but I wasn't around here in '94. They do make damn fine coffee though.
And you use it on ten different systems. Joy.
If there is any incremental element to knocking over a password then changing it does help. I don't have much trouble remembering 5 pretty complex (and uncorrelated) changing every [week,3 months) passwords for different systems/keys and I'm happier that they're different in case any of the individual systems is compromised before I next hand it my plain-text password. The rest of my passwords (Web stuff, mainly) are either crap or unmemorable noise, and I'll use the entirely hokey mail-me-a-new-password feature to get back in to my account. That that isn't usually offered as an encrypted mail is a shame.
You're right that I would pick longer passwords if I didn't change them as often, but I reckon 12-16 digits of alpha-symbol-numeric crud are good enough for the stuff I'm doing.
It may be because you're serving them as text/plain rather than text/css, but that's off the top of my head. ISTR the non-quirks mode being suitably picky over this.
wget http://eclectric.com/style.css ...
Length: 1,215 [text/plain] ...
0K . 100% @ 1.16 MB/s
16:42:17 (1.16 MB/s) - `style.css' saved [1215/1215]
I realise that some companies, especially large ones mandate the use of various software. That's not dopey. What's dopey is using something that is practically bound to explode in their faces. This isn't to do with hating microsoft, as such, since I don't automatically. I may dislike their shadier practices but still not hate them. This is a much more limited belief that it isn't possible to deploy Outlook and have it be safe over any sensible period of time. If the suggested client was Open Source I'd still argue against it if it had the history of privacy and security flaws that Outlook and cousins have. Historically there have been repeated exploits, most of which were throttlable either with a patch or something increasingly complex running at the edge of the network. The window of opportunity for exploiting them is big enough, and their occurance is frequent enough, that you can expect it to go badly wrong.
I'm not blaming folk with jobs at places where they force this on people, but rather questioning the sanity of mandating the use of something that puts so much of your (presumably precious) information at risk.
If it explodes badly enough for a business to go under then it'll affect the users who lose their jobs, plainly. The adversarial 'can't trust our users' is part of the problem. If you go so far as to hire smart people who can see it's a problem, then it's worth listening to them if they propose a safer alternative.
They only do a javascript boink after serving the content though. The 'people^H^H^H^H^Hrinter friendly' page' is unencumbered by both the crud and that Javascript. (Although it doesn't matter much since you've pasted it I suppose).
No, I expect them to mandate a mail client that will blow up in their faces before long. It's only a matter of time before someone starts really using the largest involuntary distributed computer on the planet.
That's all very sound, unless you go for some sort of all-you-can-eat affair, which at least one chain (UGC) in the UK offers. It's ten quid a month for most of the country, or twenty if you want to include any of the four closest to my house (which means you are up if you go about 3 times every four weeks).
At that point you're only left with working out if it is worth spending the time to watch the film, and I've watched more great films I didn't know much about than I have sat through mindless pap.
All in I end up happier from getting to not be per-incident bothered about how good a film is ('is it worth it?' &c), and that in itself is worth something to me too.
That message has been there for days.
Maybe the scouts are in trouble then...
ISTR seeing the gifts bit in a trailer
Isn't the CD the backup? And it'll last a fair while longer sitting nestled in its case somewhere, as opposed to getting a zonking scratch down it at a random party.
As for using them at the click of a mouse, I'd much rather a sane, easy touch screen + voice gubbins. I prefer to not have to use a desktoppian interface just to listen to some music.
All that said - are there any good OS projects for doing happy-shiny interfaces like this? Anything I found through Google seemed pretty sleepy/resting/dead.
For it to really help you need to think through what you're linking to and what you're serving off.
/foo - but it's really some index page served off /foo/ then a bunch of browsers won't give you vlink-happiness.
...com/org/co.uk/whatever) to that one. Unless of course you're doing different stuff for different hosts - sensibly. It helps for caching, for people returning to the site, and it's just plain cleaner.
If you link to
We should go further still and serve the same bit of content of one URI. This includes - amongst other stuff - picking one fully qualified domain and redirecting the various alternatives (www...,
Why not share the files over something that is MIME-aware? (and use systems which are too)
That it's your LAN doesn't stop you using sensible protocols used in the wider, wilder Internet.
It has been said elsewhere that even the cost of identifying all the license-hampered parts would be high. And if you cock it up, the danger is that you get pretty seriously lawyered.
(On your last point)
To be NP-complete it needs to be in NP as well. It may seem like a silly thing, and it'll be simple in many cases (guess... try). Otherwise you might drag in things from outside NP.
This has stayed fairly US-centric. It'd be nice to know if my (ex-CWC) NTL digital cable box could be coerced into supplying the MPEG stream out of one of those oh-so-tempting-looking connectors on the back. It's a Pace box, and Telewest use the same hardware, I believe. Also NTL are switching over their existing digiboxes to the CWC style ones too.