I hate to lose what's left of my karma, but I need to point something out to the shortsighted SlasdotCollective.
When the 386 came out, people like you said "dos doesn't multitask anyway, and who needs 4mb of memory?"
When the Pentium came out, people like you said "my 486 is perfectly fine, this new pentium thing is a waste"
When the Pentium Pro came out, people like you said "what a waste of money, PPro is not too much faster than Pentium"
When the Pentium II for consumers came out, people like you said, "My pentium 133 is fine, whats the difference anyway"
The first generation of most chips are not a great price/performance combo. But the 2nd and third generations of these chips will get progressively better and better, just as the Athlon has improved from the POS P2 knockoff that it originally was.
AMD is the winner in the consumer market right now, after years and years of going nowhere. But consumer PC market is a relatively low-margin and fickle market. Intel makes their cash in the mainstream business market. Few, if any of the big-name business pc vendors even offer AMD-based pc's, since AMD cannot deliver a consistent supply of chips.
Here are some real old-school PC games that meant alot to me when I was a little brat. People consider 'old' games to be from '94 or 97', so I guess that these are ancient.
- Starflight
- Adventure Construction Set (let you build maps and make your own games!)
- The Bards Tale 1-3
- Wasteland
- Space Quest 1-3
- Silent Service
- Balance of Power (strategy wargame, 1983 style)
- Command HQ (first good multiplayer game)
- Seven Cities of Gold
Actually, I was the victim of just such an attack less than two months ago at my mid-sized company.
Some cracker managed to r00t my companies external mail relay and send many thousands of spam emails. After this was discovered they sent out even more with forged headers.
It was very frustrating, since I just started cleaning up the mess that my predecessors left. (Open relays, misconfigured firewall) A careless mistake on my part left the FTP service open to the internet, and some kiddie took advantage of an exploit in wu-ftpd.
For about three weeks messages with our domain were being sent out through other means. We were receiving 30-40 thousand messages/day versus 8-10k per day normally. I swapped in a new server, blocked smtp from yahoo.com and made a script that kept most of the bounces out of the delivery queue. The increased traffic bogged the server for awhile, but the system was functional.
Thankfully, our cracker was not very good at covering his tracks, and the FBI was able to find the idiot.
My saying that "[spam's] impact on business is nil" was probaly a poor way to put it. The incident that I described was a major pain in the ass and is something that I would rather not repeat. However, the vast majority of sites will never ever experience something like this. I prefer accepting the risk of having something like this happen than having the government or some lunatics like the people at ORBS protecting me with techniques that simply do not work.
The names of sex offenders are published for all to see because they have been convicted of a crime in an open court. Court records, like most government records, are public records, open to all.
MAPS and ORBS are unaudited private groups who claim to represent the interests of the internet at large. They publish lists of servers which are known 'spammers' or open relays. While we all dislike spam, it is not a crime, nor should it ever be.
You'll be glad when the law allows you to sue for unauthorized use of your mailservers. Good for you. I'm sure you'll be even happier when internet usage is taxed to support the 'war on spam'.
I will never understand why people are so psychotic about spam. It's impact on business is nil. People wasting their workday reading and posting to Slashdot and other message boards wastes far more bandwidth than spam.
If there was, your boss would not be able to express the desire to fire you, if you did not agree to hear it.
There is nothing wrong with unsolicited communication. If you are in my way, I have the right to ask you to move.
The problem with spam is that it the sending of it generally violates the contracts between the carriers (UUNet, etc) and their customers (the spammer). In other cases, spam can be considered a theft of service.
Also, your statement "Freedom of speech is only a valid concept when there exists an audience who will willingly listen to that speech." is completely absurd. The entire point of Free (as in liberty) speech is that you have the unfettered right to communicate. Spam, paper junkmail, and Jerry Springer are the prices that we pay to communicate in better and faster ways.
I find it amazing how people can accept, understand and advocate the notion of 'Free software'; yet cannot understand the Bill of Rightds.
The Romans were known for manipulating the calender in order to increase their terms in office! (during the days of the Republic)
Several Praetors who were granted one-year dictatorships by the Senate added and subtracted months from the calender, extending their reigns for a few months.
Julius Caesar, while he did name a month after himself actually fixed things quite a bit. Adding two more months to the calender put it in better alignment with the seasons, making it more difficult for future emperors to futz with the calender.
Pope Gregory deleted several weeks and instituted the leap year in order remove seasonal 'drift' for good. By the time the 13th century rolled around, Easter was falling before the equinox, contradicting the bible. (I think)
I also heard that our present calender drifts 9 minutes a year, although I am not certain of that.
I have never understood the fanatical hatred that people harbor regarding spam. Spam is annoying, but it is not something that is worth sacrificing any rights for.
The whole ideal behind the internet is universal connectivity. Allowing major backbone providers to block off entire networks because they may or may not contain spammers in fundamentally wrong.
Remember that injustice can be committed by companies other than Intel, Microsoft or some other Slashdot-approved "evil" corporation
I recieved a warning that my mail server was an open relay. One small problem --- the ip address in question was beind a firewall which only allowed ports 22 and 80!
I had to waste several hours emailing back and forth with some idiot at ORBS to clear the whole issue up. I am considering blocking ORBS and RBL subnets at my site to avoid more nonsense and wasted time in the future.
It is pretty difficult to justify calling AT&T a monopoly in the year 2000.
Local cable monopolies were created long ago by state and local governments who lack any foresight well before AT&T was involved.
AT&T is facing stiff competition for phone service, and it's market share is eroding. (Hence the plunge in it's stock price)
This is not the profile of a monopoly.
As far as the performance of cable modems is concerned, I can see your point in that the peer to peer nature leads to performance problems in some areas. Where I live (Albany, NY) Time Warner had alot of growing pains when it first setup it's network. In the past 9 months, performance has improved signifigantly as the company adds new nodes to it's network. I normally have between 950 and 2000 kbps of bandwidth and haven't had any major service problems since July (i used to get between 250 and 750 kbps).
I contrast this with friends with DSL service that took weeks to hook and and continues to underperform and suffer constant outages, all while paying more for "guaranteed levels of service".
The only thing of any use in this book was the Appendix, it provided a good intro to RCS (useful for training operators or non-admin staff) and a decent explanation of LDAP and SNMP.
Otherwise, it is a complete and total waste of time and money.
You say that spamming is the same thing as forging someone's signature on a check. I'll accept that for the purposes of this argument.
What would constitute 'ethical' check fraud? If I paid my neighbor's water bill by writing and signing one of her checks, would that be 'ethical'? The fact that I performed a service for my neighbor does not make my forging of her signature legal.
Since 'ethics' are an abstract concept, it is difficult or impossible to make policy based on someone behaving 'ethically'. Who decides that spam is unethical and passively hacking is ok? You? My isp? The gov't?
I suggest moving and remapping all keyboard keys on a daily basis. By doing this, you will have no idea which key is which, and will either not use your computer or input quasi-random data into the pc.
Since you are in the middle of nowhere, cable modem access will be pretty quick.
I am not sure what 'problems' you are referring to with cable modems. If you are concerned about security, take reasonable precautions to protect any sensitive data that is on your pc, or turn the thing off when you are not using it.
If you have some weird moral objection to paying AT&T money for their services, don't bitch that you do not have access to broadband.
That's a very hackish solution, with far too much room for failure.
What this guy should be doing is purchasing a real database engine (ie Oracle, Informix, DB2, etc. While this is very expensive, so is having data corrupted or destroyed using some el cheapo solution.
The reason why 'the laws of robotics' would be inappropriate for a killing robot is a simple one:
the enemy changes
what if you have a civil war? crazed rioters? what if we join up with the chinese to destroy the indians?
if we built robot B-52's in the 1950's which were hard-coded to obliterate the Soviet Union, we never could of obliterated swaths of North Vietnam and Laos or killed thousands of Iraqis in the desert.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to lose what's left of my karma, but I need to point something out to the shortsighted SlasdotCollective.
When the 386 came out, people like you said "dos doesn't multitask anyway, and who needs 4mb of memory?"
When the Pentium came out, people like you said "my 486 is perfectly fine, this new pentium thing is a waste"
When the Pentium Pro came out, people like you said "what a waste of money, PPro is not too much faster than Pentium"
When the Pentium II for consumers came out, people like you said, "My pentium 133 is fine, whats the difference anyway"
The first generation of most chips are not a great price/performance combo. But the 2nd and third generations of these chips will get progressively better and better, just as the Athlon has improved from the POS P2 knockoff that it originally was.
AMD is the winner in the consumer market right now, after years and years of going nowhere. But consumer PC market is a relatively low-margin and fickle market. Intel makes their cash in the mainstream business market. Few, if any of the big-name business pc vendors even offer AMD-based pc's, since AMD cannot deliver a consistent supply of chips.
Here are some real old-school PC games that meant alot to me when I was a little brat. People consider 'old' games to be from '94 or 97', so I guess that these are ancient.
- Starflight
- Adventure Construction Set (let you build maps and make your own games!)
- The Bards Tale 1-3
- Wasteland
- Space Quest 1-3
- Silent Service
- Balance of Power (strategy wargame, 1983 style)
- Command HQ (first good multiplayer game)
- Seven Cities of Gold
This story is a great example of a foul EULA, but it is obviously not written by a lawyer.
Since GCC is an open source project. Intel working with the GCC maintainers also assists Microsoft indirectly, since GCC is open software.
MS can observe the design of GCC and write their own code to mimic certain elements, if they desire to do si.
Actually, I was the victim of just such an attack less than two months ago at my mid-sized company.
Some cracker managed to r00t my companies external mail relay and send many thousands of spam emails. After this was discovered they sent out even more with forged headers.
It was very frustrating, since I just started cleaning up the mess that my predecessors left. (Open relays, misconfigured firewall) A careless mistake on my part left the FTP service open to the internet, and some kiddie took advantage of an exploit in wu-ftpd.
For about three weeks messages with our domain were being sent out through other means. We were receiving 30-40 thousand messages/day versus 8-10k per day normally. I swapped in a new server, blocked smtp from yahoo.com and made a script that kept most of the bounces out of the delivery queue. The increased traffic bogged the server for awhile, but the system was functional.
Thankfully, our cracker was not very good at covering his tracks, and the FBI was able to find the idiot.
My saying that "[spam's] impact on business is nil" was probaly a poor way to put it. The incident that I described was a major pain in the ass and is something that I would rather not repeat. However, the vast majority of sites will never ever experience something like this. I prefer accepting the risk of having something like this happen than having the government or some lunatics like the people at ORBS protecting me with techniques that simply do not work.
The names of sex offenders are published for all to see because they have been convicted of a crime in an open court. Court records, like most government records, are public records, open to all.
MAPS and ORBS are unaudited private groups who claim to represent the interests of the internet at large. They publish lists of servers which are known 'spammers' or open relays. While we all dislike spam, it is not a crime, nor should it ever be.
You'll be glad when the law allows you to sue for unauthorized use of your mailservers. Good for you. I'm sure you'll be even happier when internet usage is taxed to support the 'war on spam'.
I will never understand why people are so psychotic about spam. It's impact on business is nil. People wasting their workday reading and posting to Slashdot and other message boards wastes far more bandwidth than spam.
There is no such thing as 'nonconsensual' speech.
If there was, your boss would not be able to express the desire to fire you, if you did not agree to hear it.
There is nothing wrong with unsolicited communication. If you are in my way, I have the right to ask you to move.
The problem with spam is that it the sending of it generally violates the contracts between the carriers (UUNet, etc) and their customers (the spammer). In other cases, spam can be considered a theft of service.
Also, your statement "Freedom of speech is only a valid concept when there exists an audience who will willingly listen to that speech." is completely absurd. The entire point of Free (as in liberty) speech is that you have the unfettered right to communicate. Spam, paper junkmail, and Jerry Springer are the prices that we pay to communicate in better and faster ways.
I find it amazing how people can accept, understand and advocate the notion of 'Free software'; yet cannot understand the Bill of Rightds.
The mania of the French revolution bore that ridiculous system.
The blunt truth is, the mental and societal problems that would stem from altering 'time' would prevent this from ever happening.
The decimal day, hour, etc is a ploy to squeeze more worktime out of our days.
The gregorian calender is a universal calender used in business and science everywhere on earth. Mucking with it would be an extremely bad idea.
How does our current system not make any sense??
It is riddled with archaic elements, since it is largely unmodified since the 13th century. But it is accurate and works ok.
If you are bitching because programming date functions is needlessly complex, get a grip. They pay us to program for a reason.
The Romans were known for manipulating the calender in order to increase their terms in office! (during the days of the Republic)
Several Praetors who were granted one-year dictatorships by the Senate added and subtracted months from the calender, extending their reigns for a few months.
Julius Caesar, while he did name a month after himself actually fixed things quite a bit. Adding two more months to the calender put it in better alignment with the seasons, making it more difficult for future emperors to futz with the calender.
Pope Gregory deleted several weeks and instituted the leap year in order remove seasonal 'drift' for good. By the time the 13th century rolled around, Easter was falling before the equinox, contradicting the bible. (I think)
I also heard that our present calender drifts 9 minutes a year, although I am not certain of that.
I cannot fly, and I have never been on an airplane, but some guy in Nebraska built a plane out of chopsticks using glue.
I don't know whether it's safe or not.
Thank you for a voice of sanity!
I have never understood the fanatical hatred that people harbor regarding spam. Spam is annoying, but it is not something that is worth sacrificing any rights for.
The whole ideal behind the internet is universal connectivity. Allowing major backbone providers to block off entire networks because they may or may not contain spammers in fundamentally wrong.
Remember that injustice can be committed by companies other than Intel, Microsoft or some other Slashdot-approved "evil" corporation
I recieved a warning that my mail server was an open relay. One small problem --- the ip address in question was beind a firewall which only allowed ports 22 and 80!
I had to waste several hours emailing back and forth with some idiot at ORBS to clear the whole issue up. I am considering blocking ORBS and RBL subnets at my site to avoid more nonsense and wasted time in the future.
It is pretty difficult to justify calling AT&T a monopoly in the year 2000.
Local cable monopolies were created long ago by state and local governments who lack any foresight well before AT&T was involved.
AT&T is facing stiff competition for phone service, and it's market share is eroding. (Hence the plunge in it's stock price)
This is not the profile of a monopoly.
As far as the performance of cable modems is concerned, I can see your point in that the peer to peer nature leads to performance problems in some areas. Where I live (Albany, NY) Time Warner had alot of growing pains when it first setup it's network. In the past 9 months, performance has improved signifigantly as the company adds new nodes to it's network. I normally have between 950 and 2000 kbps of bandwidth and haven't had any major service problems since July (i used to get between 250 and 750 kbps).
I contrast this with friends with DSL service that took weeks to hook and and continues to underperform and suffer constant outages, all while paying more for "guaranteed levels of service".
Not!
The only thing of any use in this book was the Appendix, it provided a good intro to RCS (useful for training operators or non-admin staff) and a decent explanation of LDAP and SNMP.
Otherwise, it is a complete and total waste of time and money.
There is no such thing as 'ethical' hacking.
You say that spamming is the same thing as forging someone's signature on a check. I'll accept that for the purposes of this argument.
What would constitute 'ethical' check fraud? If I paid my neighbor's water bill by writing and signing one of her checks, would that be 'ethical'? The fact that I performed a service for my neighbor does not make my forging of her signature legal.
Since 'ethics' are an abstract concept, it is difficult or impossible to make policy based on someone behaving 'ethically'. Who decides that spam is unethical and passively hacking is ok? You? My isp? The gov't?
I suggest moving and remapping all keyboard keys on a daily basis. By doing this, you will have no idea which key is which, and will either not use your computer or input quasi-random data into the pc.
This is the ultimate encryption.
Since you are in the middle of nowhere, cable modem access will be pretty quick.
I am not sure what 'problems' you are referring to with cable modems. If you are concerned about security, take reasonable precautions to protect any sensitive data that is on your pc, or turn the thing off when you are not using it.
If you have some weird moral objection to paying AT&T money for their services, don't bitch that you do not have access to broadband.
As the inheritor of a real POS messed up sco box, i must agree that sco is one of the worst unix enviroments of all time.
I almost want to put nt on it...
A great idea would be a sort of 'tap' on a vga or keyboard cable that could record input and output.
I know that the military and ny gov't uses this, but I have no idea where you can get it.
That's a very hackish solution, with far too much room for failure.
What this guy should be doing is purchasing a real database engine (ie Oracle, Informix, DB2, etc. While this is very expensive, so is having data corrupted or destroyed using some el cheapo solution.
The reason why 'the laws of robotics' would be inappropriate for a killing robot is a simple one:
the enemy changes
what if you have a civil war? crazed rioters? what if we join up with the chinese to destroy the indians?
if we built robot B-52's in the 1950's which were hard-coded to obliterate the Soviet Union, we never could of obliterated swaths of North Vietnam and Laos or killed thousands of Iraqis in the desert.
Remember that rules are flexible. Laws are not.
That is simply wrong.
I have used my sprint phone in the albany/saratoga area, all the way down to florida and west to chicago with no problems.
It works in analog mode in places like rural Vermont, the Adirondacks and the southern tier of NY.
My only complaint about sprint is that the analog roaming is a big ripoff
They use stolen alien technology from the Roswell crash. All of the servers fit on the boardroom table at the trilateral commission's HQ.
Search on zdnet, they put one up a few days ago.
I submitted the story to slashdot, but the powers that be rejected it.