Spending decades and millions to get people to recode their applications for linux/BSD distro is "easier".
I understand that term easier is relative, but you have to be pretty high to call that "easier" than simply securing the machine.
And it's not like what I did is very different from what corporate IT security does. They just lock machine a bit further from user in addition to the internet,
Not entirely sure which exploits you are talking about, as I haven't had a single one of those in years in spite of being exposed to the open internet. Either they are not as functional as you seem to believe them to be, or they are extremely uncommon and require significant targeting which won't happen for a random machine on the internet.
They are both actually. Both are directions of sexual interest. They are not exclusive. One can be attracted to certain sex and age group. For example a lot of older men are attracted to younger women, usually in their early twenties.
Proper software firewall, hand built firewall security policy i.e. all ports stealthed nothing goes in our out without asking (important as it enables you to see if you do get hit regardless of everything else). Essentially machine is autistic to the internet unless there's software running on it that is asking for connection. This weeds out most of the problems. I followed up by going through process list and weeding out everything I didn't need. The windows notification process to (dysfunctional) WAU and so on. If it's not needed, disable it, as it's a potential vector. Use a decent block list. I used peerguardian's malware/known botnet blocklist. It severely cuts down on number on potential infection sources and again, it lets you spot a potential threat that has gotten through as such software would likely start hitting known botnet addresses for control information. Sane antivirus. Specifically one that isn't too sensitive, but isn't too aggressive. Check everything with it. Reasonably updated internet facing software. That's browser, mail software and so on. It may also help to sandbox these with something like sandboxie (I didn't bother because I kept them up to date and felt that was enough, now that I no longer do so on this machine I sandbox the browser and email software).
Effectively a mix of sane security policy, locked down machine and common sense. What most people appear to not understand on/. is that windows being vulnerable isn't the end of the world, nor is it a guarantee of infection. You still need an infection vector and infection source in addition to vulnerability to get infected, and locking those down is often enough, as long as you're not someone like Valve who is going to get hit by specifically tailored directed attack, you're going to be fine. Or at least much better off than someone who's all updated but doesn't secure infection vectors or infection sources.
We are talking about XP. Not other OSs. It's exceptionally obvious that it's light enough stands for "it's light enough to run wintel software on older machines".
I genuinely don't understand why there are so many people here on slashdot talking about windows security and not understanding it. It's entirely possible to secure a completely vanilla XP machine (zero updates, just basic boxed copy from release) to use on a fixed, open to internet static IP. I have done so myself, after my first XP machine borked itself badly trying to run SP1, completely killing the updating system. I didn't even bother fixing it and ran vanilla XP for years on that machine. This in spite of it running on university network which was teeming with aggressive nerdy wannabe hackers who made a shitload of attempts to exploit machines on the network, as I found out when I became network's admin a few years later.
Funnily enough when I eventually got my hands on slipstreamed XP SP2 disk and decided to make a clean install, that machine got owned in about 30 seconds after hitting the log in menu for the first time after installation. Because I forgot to unplug the ethernet cable during installation and machine was obviously not secure out of the box - it just had the up to date patches, but several infection vectors were left exposed. So the vanilla, complete unupdated but secured XP machine ran fine for years, and fully updated machine got owned in 30 seconds flat on the same network socket.
That is the reality of IT. First thing in securing machines is not patches, but elimination of vectors. Patches are just a jury rigged solution for the time when an exploit vector was left open. There are always vulnerabilities. That is the first rule of IT security. Eliminate or contain vectors of infection, then start thinking about what to do if something does get through.
And if you secure it tightly enough, even vanilla XP is secure.
The fact that you think that #2 and #3 are the same thing shows a massive level of ignorance of IT, to the point where I have a hard time seeing how we could have any kind of argument on topic of IT security without you taking at least a few basic courses on IT security.
Not too long ago, law allowed to take poor women of "questionable character" and forcibly sterilize them against their will.
Only slightly longer in the past racial segregation was legally mandated.
The answer to your "no, we don't listen to phone conversations" strawman attempt (watch the show in question, it's full of them) is that this is an argument on many levels, and even if you can strawman a certain aspect of the argument to show that you are right, it does nothing to fix the fact that the entire issue sets you fully in the wrong. Both legally and ethically.
In the end, I suppose your comment fits the episode. It was full on pro-NSA shilling, to the point of specifically lying about accusations leveled. Just as you are doing here and now. You should fire off a a job application with 60 minutes. You'd fit in quite well.
The beauty of it is that neither French nor Russians had such a capability. They're building it up ASAP now to restore the equilibrium.
It's the same thing as MAD. If one nation goes overboard and has a massively overreaching intelligence apparatus that sees everything, others have to have an equivalent or stand to lose badly in various issues that require intelligence. Trans Atlantic trade treaty negotiations have been a good example of this - how can you negotiate when you find out that NSA's bulk information collection means that your negotiation position is known to negotiators on the other side?
It's also where it becomes massively self harming as well, because once it's blown, you won't even get those negotiations going, because no one will trust you. And that means concrete losses of huge amounts of wealth on both sides.
Not when held under wraps obviously. But as seen in modern conflicts of Libya and Syria, even a small amount of tension can explode when sufficiently fed from outside. In Syria, all it took was drought that led the hardcore conservative farmers to start protesting, which pushed the small snowball that eventually became an avalanche of civil war, managing to go through phases that didn't resemble one another at all, like the much publicized youth protests, and much less publicized like takeovers of key infrastructure early on.
We are talking about MURDER rates. There is a very clear distinction, that some crimes result in a human corpse. Some do not. Attempting to draw a strange strawman on the basis of "crimes with no deaths resulting from it is the same as crime with deaths resulting from it" wins no points in my book.
We had our white vs red civil war. Whites won, but a whole lot of reds lived through it and stayed in the country. This in turn helped to ensure that we always had a "pro soviet" wing and "pro nato" wing, to the point where soviets created a fake government out of reds that left for USSR during winter war.
Management of these forces was one of the balancing acts needed in finnish politics for decades.
This is a common lie perpetrated in US by certain interest groups, which is viewed with severe derision in Switzerland itself.
In Switzerland, the guns are not issued to "militia". They are issued to Army reserves as they leave the army. The guns are not meant to use to anything other than defense of the country against outside attackers. Such threats by their nature take time to develop, and army has plans on distributing gear and ammunition to reserves in such event.
P.S. Also, they issue high quality Swiss weapons. Suggestion on issuing low quality US assault rifles with be met with even more derision. This isn't Israel where US pressure groups have severe effect.
No, people looking for a way to people use guns to kill other people. More often than not because that's the most efficient way.
There's a pretty good example of this in Switzerland. Just a few years ago they had a pretty big (by European standards) gun murder problem (far less than US). How did they take it down to European levels in spite of every man having an assault rifle at home, courtesy of Swiss army? They forbade owning ammunition and mandated that gun itself is stored in completely disassembled state. They also forbade taking gun out of the house without special permit, which is difficult to get.
Result: their murder rate went to European one, with gun murder collapsing. Because when the most efficient tool is disassembled and has no ammo, people use other more available but less efficient tools, which may or may not serve the purpose. It's very easy to kill someone with a gun. It's a lot harder to kill someone with a knife. It's exceptionally hard to kill someone with bare hands.
No offense, but we were the poster child for Cold War proxy war site. We were playing both sides, and both sides were actively playing on our territory. Our companies like Nokia were used to both build up telephony infrastructure for USSR as well as spy on it by US (a fairly known scandal that popped up recently, where US required Nokia to insert various spying tools into telephony network elements it build for USSR or otherwise face crippling sanctions). The only reasons we didn't was because we successfully played both sides against one another while visibly surrendering to demands of USSR on the surface, and because both sides viewed it as beneficial that there was a country with such a strong independence drive and such a deep willingness to bow when necessary, allowing for many delicated NATO-WP negotiations to take place in it.
Germans even invented term Finnlandisierung (becoming like Finland) as a scary term to explain what country becomes when it effectively surrenders all but its de jure independence. It used it as a comparison to DDR.
Due to sheer strategic importance of the country, even one wrong step would have almost immediately forced Russians to act. Which would have forced NATO to counteract. Which meant that politicians had to act to safeguard as much of their people as possible for the fight that would come after Russian tanks and NATO nukes.
Hence, the law to have a bomb shelter in every house and large bomb shelters in every large city.
Slashdot Mirror
Spending decades and millions to get people to recode their applications for linux/BSD distro is "easier".
I understand that term easier is relative, but you have to be pretty high to call that "easier" than simply securing the machine.
And it's not like what I did is very different from what corporate IT security does. They just lock machine a bit further from user in addition to the internet,
Far too tight and dysfunctional.
Not entirely sure which exploits you are talking about, as I haven't had a single one of those in years in spite of being exposed to the open internet. Either they are not as functional as you seem to believe them to be, or they are extremely uncommon and require significant targeting which won't happen for a random machine on the internet.
To be fair, most P4s are pretty much dead nowadays. Rambus RAM sticks were extremely fragile. P3/First gen Athlon may still be running though!
Men in their fourties, fifties and sixties on the other hand are.
It's fun to watch all the russophobes crawl out of their holes for this.
Citation needed.
They are both actually. Both are directions of sexual interest. They are not exclusive. One can be attracted to certain sex and age group. For example a lot of older men are attracted to younger women, usually in their early twenties.
I always thought that light bot was one of the geekier, and at the same time more educational games I played about programming.
http://light-bot.com/
Proper software firewall, hand built firewall security policy i.e. all ports stealthed nothing goes in our out without asking (important as it enables you to see if you do get hit regardless of everything else). Essentially machine is autistic to the internet unless there's software running on it that is asking for connection. This weeds out most of the problems.
I followed up by going through process list and weeding out everything I didn't need. The windows notification process to (dysfunctional) WAU and so on. If it's not needed, disable it, as it's a potential vector.
Use a decent block list. I used peerguardian's malware/known botnet blocklist. It severely cuts down on number on potential infection sources and again, it lets you spot a potential threat that has gotten through as such software would likely start hitting known botnet addresses for control information.
Sane antivirus. Specifically one that isn't too sensitive, but isn't too aggressive. Check everything with it.
Reasonably updated internet facing software. That's browser, mail software and so on. It may also help to sandbox these with something like sandboxie (I didn't bother because I kept them up to date and felt that was enough, now that I no longer do so on this machine I sandbox the browser and email software).
Effectively a mix of sane security policy, locked down machine and common sense. What most people appear to not understand on /. is that windows being vulnerable isn't the end of the world, nor is it a guarantee of infection. You still need an infection vector and infection source in addition to vulnerability to get infected, and locking those down is often enough, as long as you're not someone like Valve who is going to get hit by specifically tailored directed attack, you're going to be fine. Or at least much better off than someone who's all updated but doesn't secure infection vectors or infection sources.
They explain why it doesn't have to.
The drive to update for sake of updating is an expensive one.
We are talking about XP. Not other OSs. It's exceptionally obvious that it's light enough stands for "it's light enough to run wintel software on older machines".
I genuinely don't understand why there are so many people here on slashdot talking about windows security and not understanding it. It's entirely possible to secure a completely vanilla XP machine (zero updates, just basic boxed copy from release) to use on a fixed, open to internet static IP. I have done so myself, after my first XP machine borked itself badly trying to run SP1, completely killing the updating system. I didn't even bother fixing it and ran vanilla XP for years on that machine. This in spite of it running on university network which was teeming with aggressive nerdy wannabe hackers who made a shitload of attempts to exploit machines on the network, as I found out when I became network's admin a few years later.
Funnily enough when I eventually got my hands on slipstreamed XP SP2 disk and decided to make a clean install, that machine got owned in about 30 seconds after hitting the log in menu for the first time after installation. Because I forgot to unplug the ethernet cable during installation and machine was obviously not secure out of the box - it just had the up to date patches, but several infection vectors were left exposed. So the vanilla, complete unupdated but secured XP machine ran fine for years, and fully updated machine got owned in 30 seconds flat on the same network socket.
That is the reality of IT. First thing in securing machines is not patches, but elimination of vectors. Patches are just a jury rigged solution for the time when an exploit vector was left open. There are always vulnerabilities. That is the first rule of IT security. Eliminate or contain vectors of infection, then start thinking about what to do if something does get through.
And if you secure it tightly enough, even vanilla XP is secure.
The fact that you think that #2 and #3 are the same thing shows a massive level of ignorance of IT, to the point where I have a hard time seeing how we could have any kind of argument on topic of IT security without you taking at least a few basic courses on IT security.
Not too long ago, law allowed to take poor women of "questionable character" and forcibly sterilize them against their will.
Only slightly longer in the past racial segregation was legally mandated.
The answer to your "no, we don't listen to phone conversations" strawman attempt (watch the show in question, it's full of them) is that this is an argument on many levels, and even if you can strawman a certain aspect of the argument to show that you are right, it does nothing to fix the fact that the entire issue sets you fully in the wrong. Both legally and ethically.
In the end, I suppose your comment fits the episode. It was full on pro-NSA shilling, to the point of specifically lying about accusations leveled. Just as you are doing here and now.
You should fire off a a job application with 60 minutes. You'd fit in quite well.
The beauty of it is that neither French nor Russians had such a capability. They're building it up ASAP now to restore the equilibrium.
It's the same thing as MAD. If one nation goes overboard and has a massively overreaching intelligence apparatus that sees everything, others have to have an equivalent or stand to lose badly in various issues that require intelligence. Trans Atlantic trade treaty negotiations have been a good example of this - how can you negotiate when you find out that NSA's bulk information collection means that your negotiation position is known to negotiators on the other side?
It's also where it becomes massively self harming as well, because once it's blown, you won't even get those negotiations going, because no one will trust you. And that means concrete losses of huge amounts of wealth on both sides.
Many reasons.
1. It's light enough.
2. It's air gapped.
3. It's secured via elimination of infection vectors.
4. It's needed for legacy reasons.
5. Etc.
Not when held under wraps obviously. But as seen in modern conflicts of Libya and Syria, even a small amount of tension can explode when sufficiently fed from outside. In Syria, all it took was drought that led the hardcore conservative farmers to start protesting, which pushed the small snowball that eventually became an avalanche of civil war, managing to go through phases that didn't resemble one another at all, like the much publicized youth protests, and much less publicized like takeovers of key infrastructure early on.
You'll have to quote me mindlessly attacking you. I'm not seeing it.
Assaults? Robberies?
We are talking about MURDER rates. There is a very clear distinction, that some crimes result in a human corpse. Some do not. Attempting to draw a strange strawman on the basis of "crimes with no deaths resulting from it is the same as crime with deaths resulting from it" wins no points in my book.
All of these require significant preparation, and as a result are wholly unsuitable for the purpose of passion murder.
He who lives in a house of glass should not throw stones.
We had our white vs red civil war. Whites won, but a whole lot of reds lived through it and stayed in the country. This in turn helped to ensure that we always had a "pro soviet" wing and "pro nato" wing, to the point where soviets created a fake government out of reds that left for USSR during winter war.
Management of these forces was one of the balancing acts needed in finnish politics for decades.
This is a common lie perpetrated in US by certain interest groups, which is viewed with severe derision in Switzerland itself.
In Switzerland, the guns are not issued to "militia". They are issued to Army reserves as they leave the army. The guns are not meant to use to anything other than defense of the country against outside attackers. Such threats by their nature take time to develop, and army has plans on distributing gear and ammunition to reserves in such event.
P.S. Also, they issue high quality Swiss weapons. Suggestion on issuing low quality US assault rifles with be met with even more derision. This isn't Israel where US pressure groups have severe effect.
No, people looking for a way to people use guns to kill other people. More often than not because that's the most efficient way.
There's a pretty good example of this in Switzerland. Just a few years ago they had a pretty big (by European standards) gun murder problem (far less than US).
How did they take it down to European levels in spite of every man having an assault rifle at home, courtesy of Swiss army? They forbade owning ammunition and mandated that gun itself is stored in completely disassembled state. They also forbade taking gun out of the house without special permit, which is difficult to get.
Result: their murder rate went to European one, with gun murder collapsing. Because when the most efficient tool is disassembled and has no ammo, people use other more available but less efficient tools, which may or may not serve the purpose. It's very easy to kill someone with a gun. It's a lot harder to kill someone with a knife. It's exceptionally hard to kill someone with bare hands.
I would not, as I generally find that people running random internet sites that I've never heard of to be of not trustworthy quality.
No offense, but we were the poster child for Cold War proxy war site. We were playing both sides, and both sides were actively playing on our territory. Our companies like Nokia were used to both build up telephony infrastructure for USSR as well as spy on it by US (a fairly known scandal that popped up recently, where US required Nokia to insert various spying tools into telephony network elements it build for USSR or otherwise face crippling sanctions). The only reasons we didn't was because we successfully played both sides against one another while visibly surrendering to demands of USSR on the surface, and because both sides viewed it as beneficial that there was a country with such a strong independence drive and such a deep willingness to bow when necessary, allowing for many delicated NATO-WP negotiations to take place in it.
Germans even invented term Finnlandisierung (becoming like Finland) as a scary term to explain what country becomes when it effectively surrenders all but its de jure independence. It used it as a comparison to DDR.
Due to sheer strategic importance of the country, even one wrong step would have almost immediately forced Russians to act. Which would have forced NATO to counteract. Which meant that politicians had to act to safeguard as much of their people as possible for the fight that would come after Russian tanks and NATO nukes.
Hence, the law to have a bomb shelter in every house and large bomb shelters in every large city.