I'm sure the fanboys will rush in with the "flamebait" mods, but....
Could google simply be looking at purchasing a consistent revenue stream? I mean, how does google make money? Where is its steady source of revenue? There's adwords and......umm....the five people that actually bought google earth pro? They're not really selling much of anything. It's nice that they're being altruistic, but if I'm an investor, I'd like to see them actually make some money
AOL, if purchased cheap enough, is a cash cow. Scamming a customer base out 22 bucks a month for dial-up and "content" has to be able to earn you a profit once you go all hack 'n slash on the layers of fat that have built up around the company. There's some decent infrastructure there, and a recognizable brand name. It ain't worth 5 billion dollars, but it's worth something.
Any deal for AOL probably includes whatever's left of Netscape, maybe there's something there worth having, too.
Programs like that work well for people who use the computer as a glorified typewriter. But do you expect me to have to rebuild my development environment from scratch every time I reboot?
Nope. You store your dev. env. in a "thawed" partition. In all of the lockdown programs I've used, you have the option of creating a partion that is not blown away on reboot. Deepfreeze and similar programs, when properly configured, are exceptional tools. They offer great virus protection, and even better spyware protection. The key is to make sure the inital images is put together properly.
You can do patching & updates as well. You can schedule a period of time to unfreeze the machine, send your patches and updates, then lockup the machine.
Even more sci-fi but not as far fetched is the idea of using a laser to measure the vibrations bouncing off of a pane of glass and converting that to sound. You can capture sound with greater sensitivty than a microphone, and from much farther away.
As for brute force lockouts, simply capture the sound of someone logging to the point where you've got a greater certainty of what the password is. Things like repeated characters and the shift key being turned on to denote a special character will become even more apparent over time. If you're patient enough, you can even figure out password expiration.
They tried that. Subscription based TV without the ads. They called it "Cable."
Once people started paying, in came the ads. There's still the rare quasi-commercial free station (HBO & Showtime, whose only commercials are the ones for their own programming between airings), but the rest of the TV landscape is littered with commericals. Hell, there's shrinking shows to fit in an extra 15 or 30 second commercial.
I love it when my buddies try and tell me how great XM is "cause there aren't any commercials!" Yeah, just wait. I pay to see too many commercials as it is.
(Though not a top 5 all time college back. Not even close. There are way to many guys from barely Division I "Northwest Podunk State A&M" type schools that rack up big numbers against poor teams)
Dunn's a mensch. He's always giving to charity, leading by example, and just generally doing the right thing the right way.
Now, if he'd only stop screwing every fantasy football that drafts him, he'd be an ok guy.
Correct, though you need to install IPX to use it on a LAN. Starcraft does not allow you to create games over a local TCP/IP connection, only though their server.
Seti-Boinc is an object lesson in how to screw a good idea with incompetent design.
Right, I missed the O'Reiley book about "properly setting up massive distributed computing projects."
Tell me, what was so incompetent about the design? Or anything else about this project for that matter? Seti-classic is done. Period. there's nothing more to be learned from the project, you're just re-working the same units over and over. That phase of the project is dead. Move on.
Seti@home was not fine with the old client. There were easily exploitable ways of running up your CPU time that brought into question the validity of the results being returned. It became less a question of donating CPU time to science, and more of an attempt to show the world how big your geek-dick is. "I've got blah blah blah hours on Seti" started to become the equivilent of "I just bought a new H2"
BOINC is a huge improvement over the old client. It does require more RAM to run than the old client, but the infrastructure created by BOINC can (and is) being used by a number of different projects. With BOINC you can now split CPU time between the projects that you're attached to. Your computer can now split a user defined amount of time between finding ET, Modeling for CERN, Seeking out gravitational waves, doing Climate research.
The old Seti system was good, but it's outdated. The new client is evolution in action. The majority of the bugs I've seen are server side, and are mostly related to being one of the largest distributed processing endevours in the world. Give it another shot with the latest versions of BOINC and Seti. Though you'll have to wait a couple days, they're still cleaning up some database issues.
There's nothing wrong with lazy, arrogent, wanna-be BOFH's getting eaten by various large animals. For one, it'll open up the job market. Just think of how many MCP's a hungry lioness could chew through in a year? If you think think "reboot & reinstall" provides job security, just wait till you see what happens to the H1B market when Simba finds out that vegan-fed PFY doesn't put up as much of a fight.
Also, I've always felt the CCNP program needed to spend more time in the handling of large calibre small arms
WSUS works like a charm, you can tell it to check for updates every day, and then all clients on the network can be forced to apply the patches.
There are instances where WSUS cannot really help much:
Are you running WSUS on W2k, or 2k3?
I've tried getting WSUS going on 2000, but I keep hitting the same snag. everything installs just peachy, but I can't get to the Admin page to configure the damn thing. I keep getting an unhandled exception related to the.Net framework.
The articles I've found relating to this problem (and there aren't many) point to the Asp.net user not having rights to the.Net framework directory. Of course, this isn't the case for my setup.
I'm hoping it works better after we migrate to 2003. The nice thing is, even installed but not working, WSUS is still better than SUS.
The print spooler service runs with admin / system priviledges. Since it's a fairly common service, with high privs, so it's got a nice big target painted on its back.
Who knows? maybe it's one of those services that hasn't had a ground-up rewrite in a long time.
This is a "follow up" story. The original simply said microsoft won the case. Today we learned what microsoft was going to do with the money.
I figured Bill would just blow the money on strippers and coke. Or perhaps on a death ray. Maybe even buy a grilled cheese sandwich off of ebay with the image of Don Knotts wearing a burka while training a horse to ride a unicycle burned into it.
If it's going to law enforcement, It'll end up going to the "OMG Kiddie PorN!!!!!!!! It's teh evil!!!!!" fund.
Don't get me wrong. Child pornographers deserve their own special ring of Hell. But it seems that to law enforcement, computer crime == kiddie porn. Period. No other crime occurs on a computer. Ever. Just child porn. Nothing else. End of line.
There are other crimes occuring involved the magic, glowing grey box.
It's pretty hard to say "I didn't know stealing a car was illegal" and have it stand up in court.
OTOH you can make an argument that since a machine has services available to the public, e.g. a web server, the "Oh gosh, I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to dump the hash file, crack all the passwords, and turn the box into a warez dump" argument may stand up. But by explicitly denying "unauthorized use", you've got a slightly better case.
No, a banner won't help much. But it's there, and since common sense doesn't seem to matter in court, ("It's not what you know, it's what you can prove") you want the best possible case. It's the electronic equivlent of an "Employees Only" sign on a door.
People are missing the point here. It's not about just banning USB Flash drives. Policies & rules are created to give the company a level of paperwork to fall back on. Say somebody takes X amount of data or source code home, starts selling, and gets busted. At least in court they can't say "But there was no rule against it!" Think of it like having a logon banner for servers. Does it really deter hackers? No, but it gives you a bit more of a leg to stand on if it comes down to getting the authorities involved.
It's a lot like setting a speed limit. Yeah, most people ignore it, and the rule can be abused by those who make the rules. But in the end there's a valid reason for having it. Strong, well-written and enforced policies are just another layer in your security model.
Like the title says, do you really need to pull time from the outside world, or are you just looking for reasonable consistancy?
If it's the latter (and assuming the servers support feeding time to clients, which they probably do), you can use a windows task on the client machines to run the following command:
net time \\server/set/y
You can put that into a batch file, put a "cls" at the end, set the task to run said batch file (as an account with admin priv's) and make it run whenever you feel like it. Logon, logoff, specific time, etc.
The usefulness of windows tasks is somewhat underrated.
In a few years we'll have wireless that's almost half as fast as gigabit ethernet! Wooohooo!
I love hearing the PHB's squaking about how "Pretty soon we won't need to bother cabling buildings." My last employer (http://www.wcccd.edu/) thought that MAC-Whitelisted, unencrypted, 802.11b was the wave of the future. Yeah, try pushing an image to 20 clients over that connection. Sigh, Wayne County.
Wireless won't replace cabling in the near future. It's nice for a general connection to the web, but not for heavy-duty data movement.
Maurice La Marche didn't do the voice of the Robot devil. Dan "Homer Simpson" Castellaneta did. La Marche did (according to IMDB): Lrr, Morbo, and Calculon among others.
Re:iRiver is better than iPod, iTunes = high risk
on
Apple's 500 Million Songs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Also, beware of iTunes and using your credit card for it. I know a number of people who had their credit cards stolen through iTunes. I wouldn't take that risk and rather use any good P2P software.
Exactly. Why let some no name steal your credit card number when you can have the RIAA sue you AND infest your computer with a multitude of trojans and spyware!
A man comes into a hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest.
The Doctor on call decides to wait to hear from some of his fellow doctors in a couple days before deciding on a course of action. Oh, and maybe this months New England Journal of Medicine will have an article or two. Besides, treating gunshot wounds is messy and time consuming. In the meantime the patient dies.
According to you, only the guy that did the shooting is guilty of a crime. It's called negligance, and it's legally valid.
Not patching your box might not be criminal, but it is negligant.
I know the current trend in society is to try and find ways to feel guilty and try not to blame someone for something they do, but the responsibility for this mess lies with the perpetrator.
You've missed part of the point. Not keeping your systems up to date does make you guilty. There is blame to be assigned to the victim here. This isn't just a misguided kid fucking up computers for fun.
-Microsoft released shoddy code to the public.
-After Microsoft acknowledged said faulty code, they released a fix for it, which people did not apply.
-Oh yeah. After all that someone wrote a worm that exploited the vulnerability and unleashed it on the world.
Your "but she was ASKING for it!" line of thinking is flawed.
Apples / Oranges.
Unpatched systems are asking to be hit. Especially when the vulnerability is so old that even Microsoft gets around to putting out a patch. Sasser broke roughly two weeks after Microsoft issued a patch through their regular channels, and that patch came about only months after blaster.
There's enough blame to go round. Being an admin is a bit like being a cop. You are responable for the safety of others, and ignorance (willful or otherwise) is a crime.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the fanboys will rush in with the "flamebait" mods, but....
Could google simply be looking at purchasing a consistent revenue stream? I mean, how does google make money? Where is its steady source of revenue? There's adwords and......umm....the five people that actually bought google earth pro? They're not really selling much of anything. It's nice that they're being altruistic, but if I'm an investor, I'd like to see them actually make some money
AOL, if purchased cheap enough, is a cash cow. Scamming a customer base out 22 bucks a month for dial-up and "content" has to be able to earn you a profit once you go all hack 'n slash on the layers of fat that have built up around the company. There's some decent infrastructure there, and a recognizable brand name. It ain't worth 5 billion dollars, but it's worth something.
Any deal for AOL probably includes whatever's left of Netscape, maybe there's something there worth having, too.
Supervillion?!!?
Super dumbass.
Programs like that work well for people who use the computer as a glorified typewriter. But do you expect me to have to rebuild my development environment from scratch every time I reboot?
Nope. You store your dev. env. in a "thawed" partition. In all of the lockdown programs I've used, you have the option of creating a partion that is not blown away on reboot. Deepfreeze and similar programs, when properly configured, are exceptional tools. They offer great virus protection, and even better spyware protection. The key is to make sure the inital images is put together properly.
You can do patching & updates as well. You can schedule a period of time to unfreeze the machine, send your patches and updates, then lockup the machine.
Even more sci-fi but not as far fetched is the idea of using a laser to measure the vibrations bouncing off of a pane of glass and converting that to sound. You can capture sound with greater sensitivty than a microphone, and from much farther away.
As for brute force lockouts, simply capture the sound of someone logging to the point where you've got a greater certainty of what the password is. Things like repeated characters and the shift key being turned on to denote a special character will become even more apparent over time. If you're patient enough, you can even figure out password expiration.
Patience is a virtue.
They tried that. Subscription based TV without the ads. They called it "Cable."
Once people started paying, in came the ads. There's still the rare quasi-commercial free station (HBO & Showtime, whose only commercials are the ones for their own programming between airings), but the rest of the TV landscape is littered with commericals. Hell, there's shrinking shows to fit in an extra 15 or 30 second commercial.
I love it when my buddies try and tell me how great XM is "cause there aren't any commercials!" Yeah, just wait. I pay to see too many commercials as it is.
Dunn really is a nice guy.
(Though not a top 5 all time college back. Not even close. There are way to many guys from barely Division I "Northwest Podunk State A&M" type schools that rack up big numbers against poor teams)
Dunn's a mensch. He's always giving to charity, leading by example, and just generally doing the right thing the right way.
Now, if he'd only stop screwing every fantasy football that drafts him, he'd be an ok guy.
Correct, though you need to install IPX to use it on a LAN. Starcraft does not allow you to create games over a local TCP/IP connection, only though their server.
Seti-Boinc is an object lesson in how to screw a good idea with incompetent design.
Right, I missed the O'Reiley book about "properly setting up massive distributed computing projects."
Tell me, what was so incompetent about the design? Or anything else about this project for that matter? Seti-classic is done. Period. there's nothing more to be learned from the project, you're just re-working the same units over and over. That phase of the project is dead. Move on.
Seti isn't BOINC. BOINC isn't Seti.
Seti@home was not fine with the old client. There were easily exploitable ways of running up your CPU time that brought into question the validity of the results being returned. It became less a question of donating CPU time to science, and more of an attempt to show the world how big your geek-dick is. "I've got blah blah blah hours on Seti" started to become the equivilent of "I just bought a new H2"
BOINC is a huge improvement over the old client. It does require more RAM to run than the old client, but the infrastructure created by BOINC can (and is) being used by a number of different projects. With BOINC you can now split CPU time between the projects that you're attached to. Your computer can now split a user defined amount of time between finding ET, Modeling for CERN, Seeking out gravitational waves, doing Climate research.
The old Seti system was good, but it's outdated. The new client is evolution in action. The majority of the bugs I've seen are server side, and are mostly related to being one of the largest distributed processing endevours in the world. Give it another shot with the latest versions of BOINC and Seti. Though you'll have to wait a couple days, they're still cleaning up some database issues.
I'm thinking of swapping out our fax machine with one of these, then keeping a log to see how long it takes before someone notices........
There's nothing wrong with lazy, arrogent, wanna-be BOFH's getting eaten by various large animals. For one, it'll open up the job market. Just think of how many MCP's a hungry lioness could chew through in a year? If you think think "reboot & reinstall" provides job security, just wait till you see what happens to the H1B market when Simba finds out that vegan-fed PFY doesn't put up as much of a fight.
Also, I've always felt the CCNP program needed to spend more time in the handling of large calibre small arms
WSUS works like a charm, you can tell it to check for updates every day, and then all clients on the network can be forced to apply the patches.
.Net framework.
.Net framework directory. Of course, this isn't the case for my setup.
There are instances where WSUS cannot really help much:
Are you running WSUS on W2k, or 2k3?
I've tried getting WSUS going on 2000, but I keep hitting the same snag. everything installs just peachy, but I can't get to the Admin page to configure the damn thing. I keep getting an unhandled exception related to the
The articles I've found relating to this problem (and there aren't many) point to the Asp.net user not having rights to the
I'm hoping it works better after we migrate to 2003. The nice thing is, even installed but not working, WSUS is still better than SUS.
The print spooler service runs with admin / system priviledges. Since it's a fairly common service, with high privs, so it's got a nice big target painted on its back.
Who knows? maybe it's one of those services that hasn't had a ground-up rewrite in a long time.
This is a "follow up" story. The original simply said microsoft won the case. Today we learned what microsoft was going to do with the money.
I figured Bill would just blow the money on strippers and coke. Or perhaps on a death ray. Maybe even buy a grilled cheese sandwich off of ebay with the image of Don Knotts wearing a burka while training a horse to ride a unicycle burned into it.
If it's going to law enforcement, It'll end up going to the "OMG Kiddie PorN!!!!!!!! It's teh evil!!!!!" fund.
Don't get me wrong. Child pornographers deserve their own special ring of Hell. But it seems that to law enforcement, computer crime == kiddie porn. Period. No other crime occurs on a computer. Ever. Just child porn. Nothing else. End of line.
There are other crimes occuring involved the magic, glowing grey box.
I smell a Ben Affleck film!
Check the bottom of your shoes, I think you stepped in something.
I keeeed, I keeeed
It's pretty hard to say "I didn't know stealing a car was illegal" and have it stand up in court.
OTOH you can make an argument that since a machine has services available to the public, e.g. a web server, the "Oh gosh, I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to dump the hash file, crack all the passwords, and turn the box into a warez dump" argument may stand up. But by explicitly denying "unauthorized use", you've got a slightly better case.
No, a banner won't help much. But it's there, and since common sense doesn't seem to matter in court, ("It's not what you know, it's what you can prove") you want the best possible case. It's the electronic equivlent of an "Employees Only" sign on a door.
People are missing the point here. It's not about just banning USB Flash drives. Policies & rules are created to give the company a level of paperwork to fall back on. Say somebody takes X amount of data or source code home, starts selling, and gets busted. At least in court they can't say "But there was no rule against it!" Think of it like having a logon banner for servers. Does it really deter hackers? No, but it gives you a bit more of a leg to stand on if it comes down to getting the authorities involved.
It's a lot like setting a speed limit. Yeah, most people ignore it, and the rule can be abused by those who make the rules. But in the end there's a valid reason for having it. Strong, well-written and enforced policies are just another layer in your security model.
Like the title says, do you really need to pull time from the outside world, or are you just looking for reasonable consistancy?
/set /y
If it's the latter (and assuming the servers support feeding time to clients, which they probably do), you can use a windows task on the client machines to run the following command:
net time \\server
You can put that into a batch file, put a "cls" at the end, set the task to run said batch file (as an account with admin priv's) and make it run whenever you feel like it. Logon, logoff, specific time, etc.
The usefulness of windows tasks is somewhat underrated.
In a few years we'll have wireless that's almost half as fast as gigabit ethernet! Wooohooo!
I love hearing the PHB's squaking about how "Pretty soon we won't need to bother cabling buildings." My last employer (http://www.wcccd.edu/) thought that MAC-Whitelisted, unencrypted, 802.11b was the wave of the future. Yeah, try pushing an image to 20 clients over that connection. Sigh, Wayne County.
Wireless won't replace cabling in the near future. It's nice for a general connection to the web, but not for heavy-duty data movement.
On the other, at least we don't have to get rectal exams on entry to the park.
You haven't looked at ticket prices lately have you?
POINT OF PARLIMENTARY PROCEDURE!!!!!
Maurice La Marche didn't do the voice of the Robot devil. Dan "Homer Simpson" Castellaneta did. La Marche did (according to IMDB): Lrr, Morbo, and Calculon among others.
la Marche also did Orson Welles on "The Critic"
and lastly the infamous Orson Welles "frozen peas" spot that inspired La Marche.
Also, beware of iTunes and using your credit card for it. I know a number of people who had their credit cards stolen through iTunes. I wouldn't take that risk and rather use any good P2P software.
Exactly. Why let some no name steal your credit card number when you can have the RIAA sue you AND infest your computer with a multitude of trojans and spyware!
It's all about return on investment people.
A man comes into a hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest.
The Doctor on call decides to wait to hear from some of his fellow doctors in a couple days before deciding on a course of action. Oh, and maybe this months New England Journal of Medicine will have an article or two. Besides, treating gunshot wounds is messy and time consuming. In the meantime the patient dies.
According to you, only the guy that did the shooting is guilty of a crime. It's called negligance, and it's legally valid.
Not patching your box might not be criminal, but it is negligant.
I know the current trend in society is to try and find ways to feel guilty and try not to blame someone for something they do, but the responsibility for this mess lies with the perpetrator.
You've missed part of the point. Not keeping your systems up to date does make you guilty. There is blame to be assigned to the victim here. This isn't just a misguided kid fucking up computers for fun.
-Microsoft released shoddy code to the public.
-After Microsoft acknowledged said faulty code, they released a fix for it, which people did not apply.
-Oh yeah. After all that someone wrote a worm that exploited the vulnerability and unleashed it on the world.
Your "but she was ASKING for it!" line of thinking is flawed.
Apples / Oranges.
Unpatched systems are asking to be hit. Especially when the vulnerability is so old that even Microsoft gets around to putting out a patch. Sasser broke roughly two weeks after Microsoft issued a patch through their regular channels, and that patch came about only months after blaster.
There's enough blame to go round. Being an admin is a bit like being a cop. You are responable for the safety of others, and ignorance (willful or otherwise) is a crime.