DirecTV scored a direct hit against pirates. Over the course of a few months it surreptitiously broadcast, byte by byte, a program that allowed it to permanently disable pirate DirecTV access cards. On January 21st, they triggered the program. Supposedly this knocked out 98% of cracked cards. My favorite tidbit is that they wrote "GAME OVER" into an affected area of memory. The pirate community is already working on hardware workarounds and, supposedly, the cracked cards that use emulation are easy to fix. So while DirecTV won this battle, the war goes on.
Maybe your data is just squirreled away on the vendor's server somewhere. Convenient mechanisms to get the data into their system from open-source applications, but no easy way to get it back out. (Maybe even none at all, you know that whole DMCA circumvention thing.)
Nah, once in a while - due to crashes of the service providers servers - your data gets blown into oblivion.
Of course it's only then when you realize paragraph 9) of the service agreement, which states that the vendor is not liable, and never liable, and under no circumstances liable and if you want to sue anyway, you have to do that at the village court of Bogobogo, whose wise men get together at every third full moon.
The same paragraph of course blabbers something of unlikely event and every reasonable care which will do you real good, when you try to prove that indeed you filed your tax declaration on time, when the two IRS guys come knocking on your door.
Urge all ISP's to add a clause that in their policy that sending mail with forged headers will cause termination of service and a fine of $25 per mail sent.
But you'll be facing a serious collection problem.
I worked for Digital from '90 through 94 and was, via informal channels, in contact with a lot of US DEcies, some in engineering.
I remember a specific guy, let's call him Dan K, who communicated in '93 that he was working on an unbelievable, revolutionary thing that will change the world, but he couldn't tell us what. It was obvious however, that Dan was virtually exploding from excitement.
The thing he was working on turned out to be the World Wide Web.
I'm impressed up to this day, by the brilliance and quality of some of the folks working for DEC at that time. And no! Bob Palmer was sure as hell not one of them.
Yeah, so much for "but Open Source has no support" resoning of some commercial players.
I really apreciate all your help, especially since it's actually a RTFM issue.
The material and documentation (same as software, from brilliant to outright rotten) is so overwhelming that it's really hard to delve through and pick the really important stuff.
Your response is very well thought out and reasonable.
My beef is not that every web designer should be compliant with every browser, my beef is with jerks that insult their potential userbase in the believe of being the best web wiz around, while apologizing in the same sentence.
Also flash sites, that don't let you circumvent the 5 minute intro are a sure way to drive my business elsewhere.
Your approach is very commendable and I wouldn't complain that I can't enjoy dancing paper clips or a streaming video from Jerry Falwell (sp?) or Pat Buchannan. I really admire web designer, becuase you are wading through hell in an attempt to get your code straight and from a structured programming perspective HTML is pretty bad.
I dont see any reason for me to bother myself with works of horror such as netscape (no offense, its a fact)
Especially the don't want to offend part. Sort of as if I say to my customers:
I swear, but the programmers you employ truely write the most godawful SQL code I've ever seen. Man, you folks must be such idiots. But really sir, no offense, this is just to educate you.
YMMV, but I perceive such an attitude as extremely arrogant. Maybe a lot of people like to function in a whiz-bang, multimedia, MP3infested, 30zillion color, streaming world.
There are other people out there, who primarily use the web for content, that might even browse in ascii and have absolutely valid reasons.
This guy is yelling into my face that I'm an asshole, just because I prefer not to waste my time with megs of downloads of stupid shit, like ActiveX controls that corrupt my system or dancing coffee cups, written in Java, OK?
I can't speak for all points you mentioned, but I know for a fact that it took all of 10 days and a miserably failed attempt of installing the Digital Ixus software to provoke strange behavior on a brandnew laptop.
That's really not so bad, since it only gets 1/4 of my laptops disk capacity, is not the default OS, and I anyway only need it to edit customer documents during a train ride.
But what really got my attention, was this statement of yours:
The text on that site is
Sorry, the browser you currently use is not supported by this site.
This column focuses on Microsoft (only) technologies (take data binding and xsl for example) and, as
an intranet applications developer, I dont see any reason for me to bother myself with works of horror
such as netscape (no offense, its a fact).
This site's traffic (as well as the world's) is 90% Internet Explorer, I wont bother with compatibility issues
over a misely 10% who use an inferior browser.
In my book the guy's a fucking arrogant dweeb.
He has certainly every right in the world to target whoever he wants, but he might consider a message that doesn't blurt to the world that he's full of it.
But then I mostly use Lynx most of the time anyway.
They're striving for a filesystem with plugins, so it would be very extendable.
Although this opens a lot of possibilities it could also be rather dangerous. As long those plugins cannot mess with the core of the file system, I don't see much of a problem.
Illustra (bought by Informix a few years ago) had the conceptual great idea of Data Blades. Those where modules (plugins) you could write yourself to add additional functionality to the database engine and that there are a lot of rotten programmers out there.
The problem is, that those Data Blades messed directly with the kernel of the database engine.
I don't know, if this is still an issue. But a few years ago you had to have your Data Blades certified by Informix, otherwise a voided warranty (probably in terms of support) might have been the least of your worries.
Because I never kick out power cables. Instead I compulsively flick those huge red switches you find in IT operations rooms.
This is why linux has not been the enterprise choice; when it costs you x thousand dollars for a minute of downtime, you want that server back up as quickly as possible. Now we just have to have the FS war; ext3, reiser, jfs, xfs....:)
It's an imporatant corner stone, certainly. Like better SMP support and the LVM. On a cached (by the OS) disk sub system you don't want to install a productive database device on a file system.
But the real reason of course, is that the decision makers (senior management) don't have clippy, the paper clip which should be shot at their disposal.
Alas, I reserve the right to reverse my opinion, since I only use it for a couple month. It appears to perform excellent an I haven't noticed any trouble at all. Ah and there's the LVM thingie which gives me the feeling that I can't only have the cake, but eat it too.
What prevented me to convert the desktop machine is the backup all your data bit, before conversion which is claimed not to provide any problems.
From what I heard at Linuxworld (the Frankfurt, not the New York issue) the other journaling file systems are just not far enough advanced to use them productively.
After talking with various folks more knowledgeable then me (stability issues) I decided to use ReiserFS for the 15 Gig root partition on my laptop.
In a nutshell: it rocks
And not having to fsck a 15 Gig partition every umpteenth time saves a lot of time and nerves (have you noticed, that this always happens when when you're in a hurry ?)
Because the only reason for this tax is to fill the pockets of some unimaginative media giants.
Dont you know ? You only license music nowadays.
Until your licensed recording magically turns into a product
The magic moment is when a new super-mega-hifi-monster recording media (according to press releases by the RIAA) appears on the market and you go to a store and you intend to upgrade your licensed media for a buck or two.
But fear not: The world is so full a magic.
Because the moment you leave the store your proudly purchased product magically turns into a license
You may want to refer to a good dictionary under extortion, greed or racket.
When I was an MIS director, I had all the critical passwords written down on separate, sealed envelopes with my signature on them and put in a safe deposit box which could only be opened by the VP of finance...
This is certainly a smart thing to do, like a disaster recovery plan, which is actually tested, clearly labeled and externaly stored backups, computer rooms, that don't look like my apartement at the age of 19 (the hifi equipment, specifically), etc...
Reality is quite different, unfortunately.
Nevermind, I still don't think that backdoors are necessarily bad, if they are not hidden and if they are not exploitable by every yoyo walking through cubicle land.
Yep, there are probably a lot of backdoors in vital products, like OS or database products.
However, that's not only evil nastyness, the day might come where a company blesses a db manufacturer for implementing a backdoor, just after both dba's got run over by the same truck.
Ok, CHANGE_ON_INSTALL (Oracle) or a NULL password on MSSQLServer and Sybase are not backdoors. They are fairly well documented defaults and the problem lies with companies hiring incompetent dba's. Hell, you have this nice point-a-cklicka interface. Why in earth should we spend 120k on a dba?
What is a backdoor on one db however, or could be considered one, is the ability to start the database server while generating a new password for one of the dba's they scratched out from under that bus. However, this can't be done by Joe Dork in accounting, you need either root or access to the startup files. This is not officially documented, but I tought it numerous times in the respective dba class?
Is this a security risk ? Potentially, of course. Is it necessary ? Well, you decide. If there is no way in the world (safe for a hex editor, and that's no fun on a 500gig database) to access your corporate data it's a god send. If you're the security officer of a company, it's probably worse then cockroaches in your cake.
Backdoors can have absolutely legit reasons, but they have to have a certain level of protection. And keeping it a "secret" is not an appropriate protection.
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Nah, once in a while - due to crashes of the service providers servers - your data gets blown into oblivion.
Of course it's only then when you realize paragraph 9) of the service agreement, which states that the vendor is not liable, and never liable, and under no circumstances liable and if you want to sue anyway, you have to do that at the village court of Bogobogo, whose wise men get together at every third full moon.
The same paragraph of course blabbers something of unlikely event and every reasonable care which will do you real good, when you try to prove that indeed you filed your tax declaration on time, when the two IRS guys come knocking on your door.
This on itself is bad. But check out this story to find out what might happen with your mandatorily provided registration data...
But you'll be facing a serious collection problem.
I remember a specific guy, let's call him Dan K, who communicated in '93 that he was working on an unbelievable, revolutionary thing that will change the world, but he couldn't tell us what. It was obvious however, that Dan was virtually exploding from excitement.
The thing he was working on turned out to be the World Wide Web.
I'm impressed up to this day, by the brilliance and quality of some of the folks working for DEC at that time. And no! Bob Palmer was sure as hell not one of them.
Yo, your post might have been offtopic (sort of), but the link sure as hell is hillarious...
There could have been far worse things in your... Err! never mind
I really apreciate all your help, especially since it's actually a RTFM issue.
The material and documentation (same as software, from brilliant to outright rotten) is so overwhelming that it's really hard to delve through and pick the really important stuff.
My beef is not that every web designer should be compliant with every browser, my beef is with jerks that insult their potential userbase in the believe of being the best web wiz around, while apologizing in the same sentence.
Also flash sites, that don't let you circumvent the 5 minute intro are a sure way to drive my business elsewhere.
Your approach is very commendable and I wouldn't complain that I can't enjoy dancing paper clips or a streaming video from Jerry Falwell (sp?) or Pat Buchannan. I really admire web designer, becuase you are wading through hell in an attempt to get your code straight and from a structured programming perspective HTML is pretty bad.
Especially the don't want to offend part. Sort of as if I say to my customers:
YMMV, but I perceive such an attitude as extremely arrogant. Maybe a lot of people like to function in a whiz-bang, multimedia, MP3infested, 30zillion color, streaming world.
There are other people out there, who primarily use the web for content, that might even browse in ascii and have absolutely valid reasons.This guy is yelling into my face that I'm an asshole, just because I prefer not to waste my time with megs of downloads of stupid shit, like ActiveX controls that corrupt my system or dancing coffee cups, written in Java, OK?
That's really not so bad, since it only gets 1/4 of my laptops disk capacity, is not the default OS, and I anyway only need it to edit customer documents during a train ride.
But what really got my attention, was this statement of yours:
Oh And Fuck Netscape, lynx is better...
Man, and that from a graphics designer :>
In my book the guy's a fucking arrogant dweeb.
He has certainly every right in the world to target whoever he wants, but he might consider a message that doesn't blurt to the world that he's full of it.
But then I mostly use Lynx most of the time anyway.
I'm probably gonna embarrass myselfe here, but since I never claimed to by the guru in Linux issues, here we go:
From the four partitions, one goes to W2K (gak!), one is swap, one is /boot and the remaining one is /root.
I'm sure there's a way around this, but I have no clue how.
Thanks for the hint, do you have a good pointer where to educate myself ?
Although this opens a lot of possibilities it could also be rather dangerous. As long those plugins cannot mess with the core of the file system, I don't see much of a problem.
Illustra (bought by Informix a few years ago) had the conceptual great idea of Data Blades. Those where modules (plugins) you could write yourself to add additional functionality to the database engine and that there are a lot of rotten programmers out there.
The problem is, that those Data Blades messed directly with the kernel of the database engine.I don't know, if this is still an issue. But a few years ago you had to have your Data Blades certified by Informix, otherwise a voided warranty (probably in terms of support) might have been the least of your worries.
Thanks for your interesting post.
Because I never kick out power cables. Instead I compulsively flick those huge red switches you find in IT operations rooms.
This is why linux has not been the enterprise choice; when it costs you x thousand dollars for a minute of downtime, you want that server back up as quickly as possible. Now we just have to have the FS war; ext3, reiser, jfs, xfs....:)
It's an imporatant corner stone, certainly. Like better SMP support and the LVM. On a cached (by the OS) disk sub system you don't want to install a productive database device on a file system.
But the real reason of course, is that the decision makers (senior management) don't have clippy, the paper clip which should be shot at their disposal.
What prevented me to convert the desktop machine is the backup all your data bit, before conversion which is claimed not to provide any problems.
But then why should I backup my data ?
SuSE 7.0 includes ReiserFS and ships with the 2.2.16 kernel.
From what I heard at Linuxworld (the Frankfurt, not the New York issue) the other journaling file systems are just not far enough advanced to use them productively.
In a nutshell: it rocks
And not having to fsck a 15 Gig partition every umpteenth time saves a lot of time and nerves (have you noticed, that this always happens when when you're in a hurry ?)
Dont you know ? You only license music nowadays.
Until your licensed recording magically turns into a product
The magic moment is when a new super-mega-hifi-monster recording media (according to press releases by the RIAA) appears on the market and you go to a store and you intend to upgrade your licensed media for a buck or two.
But fear not: The world is so full a magic.
Because the moment you leave the store your proudly purchased product magically turns into a license
You may want to refer to a good dictionary under extortion, greed or racket.
No need to thank me.
Actually, bad weather leads to more electricity being produced, in our parts of the world. But then 55-60% from our power stems from hydro :>
Thanks for the interesting elaboration
Aparently it's a genuine quote, published in this interview in the The Register .
This is certainly a smart thing to do, like a disaster recovery plan, which is actually tested, clearly labeled and externaly stored backups, computer rooms, that don't look like my apartement at the age of 19 (the hifi equipment, specifically), etc...
Reality is quite different, unfortunately.
Nevermind, I still don't think that backdoors are necessarily bad, if they are not hidden and if they are not exploitable by every yoyo walking through cubicle land.
Admittedly, two big ifs...
However, that's not only evil nastyness, the day might come where a company blesses a db manufacturer for implementing a backdoor, just after both dba's got run over by the same truck.
Ok, CHANGE_ON_INSTALL (Oracle) or a NULL password on MSSQLServer and Sybase are not backdoors. They are fairly well documented defaults and the problem lies with companies hiring incompetent dba's. Hell, you have this nice point-a-cklicka interface. Why in earth should we spend 120k on a dba?
What is a backdoor on one db however, or could be considered one, is the ability to start the database server while generating a new password for one of the dba's they scratched out from under that bus. However, this can't be done by Joe Dork in accounting, you need either root or access to the startup files. This is not officially documented, but I tought it numerous times in the respective dba class?
Is this a security risk ? Potentially, of course. Is it necessary ? Well, you decide. If there is no way in the world (safe for a hex editor, and that's no fun on a 500gig database) to access your corporate data it's a god send. If you're the security officer of a company, it's probably worse then cockroaches in your cake.
Backdoors can have absolutely legit reasons, but they have to have a certain level of protection. And keeping it a "secret" is not an appropriate protection.