Hey, I used to write Linux kernel code for a living. I've seen a driver crash all over the place. Multiple times. And you know what? Linux kept on ticking. It's easy to handle a driver crash. Just write the oops to the log device and return from the driver as if nothing happened. Of course, you can't do that when your memory protection has failed (or is non-existient) and the bad driver just scribbled all over your stack...
A driver under Linux is a module. If the module fails, it fails; the scheduler continues to run, and therefore so does the rest of the system. It's not a very pretty way to handle a screwup, but a system complex enough to handle it prettily is gonna be such a resource hog I wouldn't want it. But it does get handled.
As for the wags that say Linux is not a desktop operating system, tell that to my wife, who's been running Red Hat and Mandrake for the last four years. Or better yet, tell it to the Germans, who just threw out Microsoft in favor of SuSE. (And then there's all the folks running OS X, which we all know is just BSD with a nice GUI... and looks a helluvalot like Solaris and CDE...)
He's Russian, not American. This is not his fight, and it is unfair for him to be taken hostage to remove a bad US law.
Agreed. What I want to know is, where is Mr. Putin in all this? Where are all the Russian diplomats? I know when another country had some of our people held hostage to their laws, we raised a huge stink.
Well, something stinks. Pardon my paranoia, but I gotta wonder if this isn't a red herring to get our attention away from something more important, like the fact that the Russians and the Chinese are buddy-buddy once again after quite some years of antimosity.... and that Taiwan is sitting right off the Chinese coast with all those motherboard factories....
One does, indeed, wonder...
But, yeah, I agree, this is our fight, and Felten has enough ammo to strike down the DMCA alreddie. No need to keep some poor Russian in the brig... and besides, if they have to let him go, it'll make the FBI look bad, which IMHO is a Good thing.
Re:A lament of great social and political importan
on
Testdrive A Linux iPAQ
·
· Score: 1
No, I'll be delighted.
Weblogs->Slashdot *click*
warpeightbot... *click*
Edit->Find in Page *click*
iPAQ *return* *click*
File->Open in new tab *click*
mailto:legal@compaq.com *return*
Subject: invoice *return*
Nice Super Bowl ad. *flip tab* *copy* *flip tab* *paste*
Okay, I'll settle for 1% of gross from now 'til next Super Bowl Sunday. Or I could post what you did back to Slashdot...
File->Send
Linux box, handmade: $700
DSL connection: $60/mo
Login to Slashdot: $Free
Bill to Compaq for stealing the idea: $1,000,000.
Telling the world you did it: PRICELESS
There are some things money can't buy. A good Mastercard parody is one of them.
A lament of great social and political importance
on
Testdrive A Linux iPAQ
·
· Score: 4
Oh, Lord, wontcha buy me, a Linux iPAQ
My little Palm Pilot, I have not time to hack
An Open Source system, my PDA lacks...
Oh, Lord, wontcha buy me, a Linux iPAQ
(OK, let's see what kind of sense of humor these guys have...;)
3) I'd like to see the formal request from Adobe to the Feds to release Dimitry
4) This doesn't begin to address the FBI's frankly unconstitutional conduct.
Yeah, we won the battle. Ooh rah. We Americans won Lexington and Concord, too. After which the Redcoats proceeded to kick our asses around the continent for several years. Just because Darth Vader was last seen spinning off into space doesn't mean the saga is over. It just got started.
Not that I think this is unwinnable. I think it's very winnable. But it's going to take more than just a week, and more than just a single protest. It's going to take time and effort and bucks and blood and sweat and tears, against an enemy far more powerful and insidious than li'l ole Adobe. I'm talking about tyrrany, foriegn and domestic. (No, I don't advocate the violent overthrow of the US government. I advocate the impeachment, explulsion, and possible execution for treason for those elements within the government who have sold out our rights and our country to the highest bidder.) But we can win this war, and we will win it, if we stay the course.
All aboard.
-- 'And should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, "We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive!" Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!'
-- ID4
Think about what would happen if one of your colleagues sent you a random Linux binary through email and claimed it was a greeting card - would you run it? Well, the drooling masses will run any.exe that a "known" source sends to them, and that is the crux of the problem.
Sure, I'd run it.
$ su
Password:
# useradd fred123
# passwd fred123
Changing password for user fred123
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully
# cp suspicious.exe/home/fred123
# chown fred123.fred123/home/fred123/*
# chmod 700/home/fred123/*
# exit
$ su - fred123
Password:
fred123$./suspicious.exe
suspicious.exe:/etc/shadow: permission denied
The problem here isn't even gullible users. It's the fact that under Win9x, you're running as god all the time, and can seriously hurt yourself. Under Linux, I can create a temporary user in about 30 seconds, go crap all over the resulting sandbox, and I *might* release a forkbomb or fill up/home... if I was being lazy. If I was really worried about it, I could ulimit the bejeezus out of the new userid, and whatever little surprises lay in that exe wouldn't get past first base.
And it's not just Linux, or other Unixes... VMS, NOS, NOS/VE, VM/CMS... IS there another OS out there that DOESN'T have proper ACL's and CPU/process limits? BeOS, MAYBE?
Yes, there are a lot of clueless Windows users. There is still no excuse for deliberate insecurity on the part of the OS. As for Microsoft "giving the users what they want"... As Norm Schwartzkopf would say, bovine scatology. See previous comment.
Re:The solution to all MS related security issues
on
Unsafe At Any Runlevel
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· Score: 1
... is to never let it get to a C: prompt. Simply insert your favorite alternative OS install media into the appropriate drive before POST completes, and you never have to worry about all that again. Or order one preinstalled.... I dunno about *BSD, but there certainly are a lot of people pushing Linux boxen... and there's always MacOS, too...
Well if I shut down telnetd how am I going to telnet to my router-box-in-the-closet to upgrade?!
1) Get libsafe. The telnetd exploit is a buffer overflow (like so many bugs these days); if someone tries to hack your system this way, libsafe will trap it, kill telnetd (which is fine since telnetd should be running from (x)inetd and can respawn), and mail root.
2) Surely the router is firewalling port 23 on the outbound side, or at least tcpwrappered (or blocked in xinetd.conf), right? In the extreme case you can hardwire it to come from only your personal machine...
3) Hardwire it. Use a null modem cable, serial port to serial port; you could even set the headless box to boot to the serial port (yeah, this takes a kernel recompile, but you would've wanted to do that anyway). Use getty on the router, and minicom on your side (don't forget to configure it to not send "ATZ" for the "modem" init string....).
Frankly, I just use OpenSSH and be done with it... no reason to send bucks to Finland when the Canadians will do it better for free... and if it weren't for the fact that my housemate has Windows machines that occasionally need to PPTP to her work, I'd be using OpenBSD as the firewall.... when they get around to making pf tunnel alternate protocols, I'll likely be switching.
--
Linux for the stable desktop
Mac for publishing and pretty pictures
OpenBSD for secure servers
Windows for games
Use the right tool for the job.
So, what, are you saying that Dave Cutler doesn't understand NT?
Uhh, yeah, as a matter of fact, Linus was saying no one could.
A fully-functioning (ahem) Linux can be compressed down and fit on a floppy disk. (Can you say, Linux Router Project? tomsrtbt? hal91? A full-out Red Hat system with Apache, Samba, NFS tools, Linuxconf-web, IDE-RAID, and all the dependencies for all that stuff, is only 72MB worth of disk fully expanded. Absolutely-fscking-minimal Win95, I mean, just enough to boot the system, is 102MB (IIRC, plus or minus a meg or two), forget about anything useful like a browser or an editor fancier than Notepad. And NT is bigger than that, by how many orders of magnitude, I don't know, when I left that job I quit using Windows for keeps.
NT is too big and too tightly coupled by far for any one man to keep all the twisty relationships between his ears, is Linus' point. There are at least two people on the planet (Linus and Alan) who can keep the Linux kernel between their ears; I don't doubt that Miguel could do the same thing if he tried... but then Miguel's celebrity points up precisely the major flaw in the whole Windows design package: We never tried to integrate the GUI into the OS. (One notices that the folks in Cupertino have realized the error of their ways...) Such strategy produces an extreme case of bloat which is difficult at best to get rid of... much less manage the code for.
No one says "We're gonna screw you, and take over you own architecture, oh, and, you can't innovate either" quite like Miguel.
Linus does.
The setting: Early 1999, a documents convention in Atlanta (all about printers and scanners and signature verification technology, etc...). On the stage, left to right, are Linus, a senior Microsoft marketroid,
Maddog, and a Wall Street analyst. The Microsoft guy was running off at the mouth about all the huge labs they have in Redmond, where they can replicate any problem known to man. Linus jumps into the fray with a case involving the U.S. Post Office. (Those little barcodes you get on the bottom of all your envelopes? Those barcodes are put there by printers powered by Linux. Only thing that would run that reliably and had good vendor support.) It seems USPS was having a performance problem. They called Red Hat. Red Hat looked at it. They scratched their heads, and forwarded it to Linus. Linus looked at it, scratched his head, vi'ed a couple files, had an "aha" moment (discovered a race condition), tappity, tappity, tappity, compile, init 6, diff-pipe-mail, problem solved. Total turnaround time for USPS, 48 hours.
Then he delivered the zinger.
We didn't have to replicate the problem. We understood it.
No one understands NT.
There was dead silence in the room, and I've never seen anyone look quite so uncomfortable as that Microsoft marketroid sitting there in the spotlight between the two most vocal penguinheads on the planet....
I must admit, though, it's fun to see other folks catching on to Linus' PR methods...
-- I'd rather listen to [Sir Isaac] Newton than to [Microsoft's VP Craig] Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up
the room less.
-- Linus
My wife made the switch three years ago for one very simple reason: Windows 95 ate the registry and forced a reinstall twice in as many weeks. She's on her second Linux box now, running Mandrake and Gnome and Mozilla (0.9.1 was finally stable enough to replace Netscape 4.7x, thank goodness... she was tiring of it for much the same reason, i.e. it kept crashing) and AbiWord and Gnumeric and xpat2 and FreeCiv... all of the things your average person uses on a computer. She even learned how to blow away Netscape when it hung, which is pretty esoteric at first blush, but ain't so hard when you pay attention...
Joe Average Computer User is getting pretty savvy, actually. These things have been around long enough for folks to have grown up with them. Matter of fact, my mother in law takes exception to the comment "your grandma could do it"... and points out quite rightly that most back offices are RUN by Grandma... not OUR grandmas born in ought-five but Greg Geek's parents, who are now grandmas because Greg is old enough to have finally found a geekette and decided to procreate.
Besides, somebody has come up with a distro aimed at Joe Random Windows User... ironically, it's made in Redmond, and it's called Redmond Linux. (Shamless plug for a business associate of mine.) I haven't had time to take a real good look at it, but given what I know can be done with Linux, it can't be that hard to put together something really User Friendly.
There are a hell of a lot of competnet mail administrators out there who are at the mercy of their less-than-competent ISP in regards to reverse DNS. From my experience, you'll be throwing out a hell of a lot of legitimate mail with an policy that's blind to this fact.
There are a couple of solutions to this:
Use the ISP's mail services. IMAP/SSL messages down, set the ISP's SMTP host as a smart-host. This is what I do; I've seen the pain a friend goes thru running his own mail service, and I don't want it. (This assumes ISP's DNS admin isn't truly a doofus.)
Get a third-party mail account. If you like webmail, Yahoo is pretty good at this (and has semi-effective spam filtering and allows you to roll your own filters as well). NewsAndMail.com allows SSL access (but has no filters). There are others I can't vouch for. Check them out here. Or you can get a pay-for-play shell account (or I think some people do free ones; if you know of them, hit "reply") and go all-out with procmail...
As for the doofi who insist on using idiot.com or spamhaus.com who want to send you email... get yourself one of those free webmail accounts that has forwarding capabilites. Tell your less-than-clued (or stuck) friends (I have a good friend who HAS to use AOL for work... ugh.) to send you mail at thiscouldntpossiblybearealuser@yahoo.com (or whatever) and forward the yahoo account to me@mycozylittledomain.org, and hey, presto! problem solved.
(FWIW, I really do like Yahoo a lot; I might even could be convinced to go pay-for-play with them, if the pay was modest and the play was as froody as it currently is... they have some annoying habits, but most of them can be (and are) fixed with Junkbuster; the rest (like always inserting a new filter at the END of the list) can be dealt with. Yeah, I *wish* I could work for them, but that would require moving to the PRCa, and I'm just not going to do that.)
In case anybody missed it, when the appeals court decision was announced, Scott McNeally was positively crowing. Not only was the remedy (the breakup) vacated and remanded rather than reversed (translation: the lower court, less Penfield Jackson, can do anything from smack Bill on the wrist with a wet noodle, to shredding Microsoft and serving it to Linus Torvalds au brochette... but I digress), but the monopoly judgement was affirmed.
Microsoft is a monopoly; it is so written in the law now.
This means that Sun's (and AOL's and Compaq's) lawyers are working feverishly to come up with the best way to use that legal ammunition to hang it in to the Evil Empire. (I don't know what Oracle thinks of this, or whether they would even have standing, but gods help us all if Ellison decides it's worth it and goes after Bill.... the scene of legal carnage would be unimaginable.) New Mexico can get stuffed. The corporations have not yet begun to fight.
Something not obvious to the casual observer is that, much to everyone's bloodthirsty chagrin, Adobe actually had nothing to do with the initial cease-and-desist letter. Under the German legal system, ANY low-down, scum-sucking sharkey rat bastard with a law office can do this sort of thing without Adobe (or anyone else's) say-so. How do I know? A German posted it to Slashdot.
When Adobe finally got wind of it, they said, "Whoa, Herr Sharkey. Heel!" Not to say that Adobe doesn't deserve pounding on for their near-total abandonment of Linux... but I think the settlement offer (just change the bloody NAME, for Seldon's sake) is quite reasonable.
[...]
every damn time I read something about good comercial software here, most people just complain that it's not free!
You give me a good product, price it reasonably, make it work right on my platform, I'll pay. When Opera releases 5.1x (the one with the CSS bugfixes) on Linux, I'll likely buy it. Back when I was still using Windows on a regular basis, I bought Cookie Pal. If I had been interested in programming on i386's back before Linux, I would've bought Turbo C. I actually did buy Quicken back before they mandated Internet Exploder. I've bought several Linux box sets, and an OpenBSD diskset.
Point is, no, there are some radicals out there who insist on using 100% Free Software, and I can see that POV, but I think there are a number of folks who don't mind paying good money for good produce. Personally, I get ticked at people who try to enforce a monopoly on me. On the other hand, I'm also about to throw Netscape off my box, frankly because it sucks and there's better stuff (Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror) out there, and the number of sites that need the Real True Netscape is fast approaching zero. (It may be zero alreddie, I just haven't confirmed that to my satisfaction yet.)
Don't make me subscribe, don't force-bundle software on me, particularly if it sucks, don't cost me an arm and a leg (Photoshop), I'm happy.
IANAS either, but I know (and used to work for) a few good ones at Georgia Tech. One was an instrumentation geek; he was the guy who built the instruments and thus was privy to the raw data. While he concedes that it's generally considered rude to foul our own nest, the fact remains that (despite the executive summary of a certain study, which is a political diatribe having nothing to do with the actual contents of the study (the conclusion of which states "we need more study")) we're still getting a handle on this whole climate thing, and to say global warming is real is to commit the same error that the newspapers did concerning President Dewey.
Global Warming is FUD.
It is FUD perpetrated on us for the purpose of increasing the power of the Imperial Federal Government and the United Nations over the Evil American Capitalistas.
Now, before you hit the "flame" button, think about this: I believe in saving the earth just as much as Greenpeace does. However, I believe in doing so sanely. I don't believe in shutting down the American industrial complex; I believe in transforming it so that it works with nature, rather than against it. Organic farming. Biodiesel. Composting. Recycling. Well-thought-out mass transit. Telecommuting. Reducing government and spreading what's left throughout the land, rather than concentrating it in smoggy cities, and linking them all with the Internet. Good Honest Hemp for paper and clothes and plastic and pig food. Wind farms. Houses made of rammed earth or straw bales or dug into the side of a hill. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
The current crisis in California is the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if the eco-radicals get their way. California hasn't built a power plant of any kind in ten years. It Wasn't Allowed. And now, basically, they're screwed. And so are we, if we don't perform a crano-rectal reinversion and figure out that what's going on is that a very small, vocal bunch is trying to shut down America.
Let me repeat myself here in case somebody doesn't get it. I believe in saving the planet too, for all the animals. Including the big semi-furless funny-looking mammals that have a real serious tool codependence. I believe that, instead of looking for things we should not do to the planet, we should look for things we can do to save both the whales and our civilization. I think we can be both high-tech and high-touch, green and gold, work with nature rather than either against it or abandoning it. When I see things like Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone, I am reminded that the Earth has done far more terrible things to itself than we do, and recovers beautifully... and while I still feel physically ill every time I head down towards Mt. Ranier and see what Weyrhauser has done to our forests (Good, Honest HEMP!) I think the time and effort we spend beating down the timber companies would be far better spent promoting alternate solutions rather than simply trying to shut them down....
If you tell a man "stop what you're doing, you're naughty-bad-evil-wicked" he's as liable to flip you the bird as anything. If you tell him "hey, there's a much easier, better way to do that" and even give him a business case including his conversion costs.... he might just take you up on it.
This is what we need to be about. Global warming, global schmarming. Just find ways to sustainably do things cleaner and better, and let the Earth worry about the rest. It'll do just fine, and has for years. <carl_sagan> Billions and billions of them. </carl_sagan>
The reason (according to the Standard article) Clear Channel couldn't Internet-ize their radio stations is because the commercials are covered by some sort of union protection racket (because the ad agencies won't pay the voice talent for their time up front)?? I know I've never heard of any programmer getting bonuses because the program got downloaded fifty zillion times on the Internet...
And you wonder why I hate unions and RIAA.
--
It is that which fertilizes the soil, and none can abide the odor thereof.
I suppose to be fair, online radio is useful if you follow a certain station for some reason or live somewhere totally isolated, but for the masses, it seems like extra baggage.
Both of those are certainly true (I used to follow WSB-Atlanta before they went Windows-only and Major League Baseball decided to be a twit and go pay-only, and still listen to the Tennessee Volunteers play ball here in sunny Seattle (yes, it is sunny three months out of the year!))... there's also one other case. My old building at a certain Very Large Airplane Company was also a Faraday cage. That is, damn little in the way of radio signal got in. Even 1900mHz cellphone traffic. Much easier to listen to the tunage on the T-1's than try to tape an antenna to the glass on an appropriate wall, particularly if your cube bay didn't have a window to begin with....
Not to mention the fact that some talk show hosts have new audiences in places like Moscow....
Thanks, Professor, for the PDF URL... I think it's ironic to note that the law.com site in the original article required cookies in order to view the page.... whilst the Professor provided us the link and the opinion for free.
Free as in speech wins again... and in the long run will probably save our butts, come the revolution...
Option 1: Hack code to place a button on your menu bar (Mozilla, sorry about you IE users) that will toggle ALL Javashit on/off.
Or just use Galeon. Enable Java/script is right there on the Settings menu. And a few other handy things like user-defined toolbars, right-click on bookmarks, tabbed browsing a la Opera, and the ability to turn off those dreaded popups altogether. (You can also stuff'em into tabs if you use something that needs popups). Just don't forget to set your network prefs to HTTP 1.0 if you're Junkbusting.
(which is: a newline, to separate itself from the garbage above it, date and time surrounded by pipes, another newline to avoid the prompt getting excessively long, short hostname, colon, working directory, return code in parens, right caret, space.)
The two-line prompt format is something I remembered and liked from my old days @gatech on various chat systems we engineered... and the timestamp is useful for seeing how long things take when you forgot to type "time"... including how long you were gone to lunch or some such:) As for all the mail/user/group stuff, that's what "id" and kbiff are for... and no color, because I occasionally use a dummy terminal to check mail (where I don't _need_ kbiff). Platform independent, obvious (except for the retcode), and useful. Suits me.
(Oh, the fiddly bit with HOME vs. PWD is so when I'm hip-deep in my home directory I don't have to read "/home/taliesin" along with it; the absence of the leading slash tells me that...)
--
No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd
only had good intentions. He had money as well.
-- Margaret Thatcher
The neat thing is that neither your party or mine really gives a damn about us. All they really care about is taking more freedom from us and making the government more powerful, only from different directions and in different areas. But, its all bad.
Maybe when enough people like you figure out that the Demopublicans and the Republicrats are all out to trash both your wallet and your rights, and that the Libertarian Party isn't a bunch of druggies but just feels that it's nobody's damn business what consenting adults do to themselves or each other behind closed doors, we might get somewhere.
Until that happens, however, basically, we're fscked.
--
In the long, twilight struggle which lies ahead,
there is the possibility of hope. -- Draal, Babylon 5 #219
Here in the Pacific Northwest, I know of at least two individuals who are making a go of their bands... promoting stuff on the Internet, raising money thru local concerts, advance sales, etc. Gaia Consort is an, umm, alternative band (just happens to be my favorite) that just went to press on a new CD funded entirely by the fans (some of whose names are on the album for making significant contributions).... one of the other little perks is that even base-level contributors (I bought an advance copy of the CD) get into the passworded section of the site where they can nab advance mixes of the work as it happens... is verra cool, actually helping music evolve.
Now, Chris doesn't make any real bucks on this. But someone you might have heard a bit more about does... Heather Alexander, a Celtic fiddler/singer/songwriter, actually makes a living at this, both for herself and her hubby/agent. No, they're not rolling in it. But they're doing what they want to be doing, and making a living at it. I would call that success.
The point is, the music industry outside of RIAA is not dead. There are a lot of small labels working outside the box, and bands who get airplay on alternative stations and rackspace in mom and pop music stores... and a growing audience that does NOT listen to Top 40 anymore. When enough people figure out that there's more to life than "Oops, I did it again," RIAA will lose its stranglehold on the business, and the world will change. A very quiet revolution, but I think it's already happening, given the amount of noise going on in the courts....
No, I didn't get a dime for those shameless plugs, I'm just a fan. Deadhead-style band promoting is alive and well.
they could get it back... the boys at Fort Meade specialize in recovering third- and fourth-generation overwritten files.... my brother-in-law does such things for a living (though not for Never Say Anything)...
Of course, I noted near the end of the article that the truly classified machines still get trashed, it's just the garden-variety receptionist and lower-end lackey machines that get given to universities where the 33l33+ #@X0R d00dZ lurk...
Unless you just need the raw brute force horsepower, don't use a traditional desktop/side machine. Even ancient laptops have hookups for VGA, keyboard and mouse-like device, and even those that do have fans don't make nearly as much noise as that big honkin' megatower.... didn't y'all run Slashdot off a laptop for a week or three once? As I recall, it wasn't that bad...
Just as a shameless plug (I bought one of their smaller boxen, the BlackPerl Z), the Emperor Linux Rhino (aka Dell Inspiron with a custom Linux install) is a full gigglehertz PIII platform, with a PAIR of optical drives (one can be a burner!), built-in 10/100 Ethernet, up to 512mb RAM, up to 48gb of disk, sound, and a 15" screen if you're tired of staring at a CRT all day. Yeah, it's a pig, and expensive, but it'll do everything you'd need it to and be quiet about it. And you can take it with you.
I can second the recommendation on the PC Power and cooling stuff, too, if you're not in the mood to buy a new computer; (chief geek over at Linux Journal) Dan Wilder's response to them was, and I quote, "[these are] built like a brick shithouse!"
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I used to write Linux kernel code for a living. I've seen a driver crash all over the place. Multiple times. And you know what? Linux kept on ticking. It's easy to handle a driver crash. Just write the oops to the log device and return from the driver as if nothing happened. Of course, you can't do that when your memory protection has failed (or is non-existient) and the bad driver just scribbled all over your stack...
A driver under Linux is a module. If the module fails, it fails; the scheduler continues to run, and therefore so does the rest of the system. It's not a very pretty way to handle a screwup, but a system complex enough to handle it prettily is gonna be such a resource hog I wouldn't want it. But it does get handled.
As for the wags that say Linux is not a desktop operating system, tell that to my wife, who's been running Red Hat and Mandrake for the last four years. Or better yet, tell it to the Germans, who just threw out Microsoft in favor of SuSE. (And then there's all the folks running OS X, which we all know is just BSD with a nice GUI... and looks a helluvalot like Solaris and CDE...)
Well, something stinks. Pardon my paranoia, but I gotta wonder if this isn't a red herring to get our attention away from something more important, like the fact that the Russians and the Chinese are buddy-buddy once again after quite some years of antimosity.... and that Taiwan is sitting right off the Chinese coast with all those motherboard factories....
One does, indeed, wonder...
But, yeah, I agree, this is our fight, and Felten has enough ammo to strike down the DMCA alreddie. No need to keep some poor Russian in the brig... and besides, if they have to let him go, it'll make the FBI look bad, which IMHO is a Good thing.
Weblogs->Slashdot *click*
warpeightbot... *click*
Edit->Find in Page *click*
iPAQ *return* *click*
File->Open in new tab *click*
mailto:legal@compaq.com *return*
Subject: invoice *return*
Nice Super Bowl ad. *flip tab* *copy* *flip tab* *paste*
Okay, I'll settle for 1% of gross from now 'til next Super Bowl Sunday. Or I could post what you did back to Slashdot...
File->Send
Linux box, handmade: $700
DSL connection: $60/mo
Login to Slashdot: $Free
Bill to Compaq for stealing the idea: $1,000,000.
Telling the world you did it: PRICELESS
There are some things money can't buy. A good Mastercard parody is one of them.
My little Palm Pilot, I have not time to hack
An Open Source system, my PDA lacks...
Oh, Lord, wontcha buy me, a Linux iPAQ
(OK, let's see what kind of sense of humor these guys have... ;)
1) Dimitry is (to my knowledge) still in jail.
2) The DMCA is still on the books
3) I'd like to see the formal request from Adobe to the Feds to release Dimitry
4) This doesn't begin to address the FBI's frankly unconstitutional conduct.
Yeah, we won the battle. Ooh rah. We Americans won Lexington and Concord, too. After which the Redcoats proceeded to kick our asses around the continent for several years. Just because Darth Vader was last seen spinning off into space doesn't mean the saga is over. It just got started.
Not that I think this is unwinnable. I think it's very winnable. But it's going to take more than just a week, and more than just a single protest. It's going to take time and effort and bucks and blood and sweat and tears, against an enemy far more powerful and insidious than li'l ole Adobe. I'm talking about tyrrany, foriegn and domestic. (No, I don't advocate the violent overthrow of the US government. I advocate the impeachment, explulsion, and possible execution for treason for those elements within the government who have sold out our rights and our country to the highest bidder.) But we can win this war, and we will win it, if we stay the course.
All aboard.
--
'And should we win the day, the 4th of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, "We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive!" Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!'
-- ID4
$ su /home/fred123 /home/fred123/* /home/fred123/* ./suspicious.exe
/etc/shadow: permission denied
Password:
# useradd fred123
# passwd fred123
Changing password for user fred123
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully
# cp suspicious.exe
# chown fred123.fred123
# chmod 700
# exit
$ su - fred123
Password:
fred123$
suspicious.exe:
Aha!
fred123$ exit
$ su
Password:
# userdel -r fred123
# exit
The problem here isn't even gullible users. It's the fact that under Win9x, you're running as god all the time, and can seriously hurt yourself. Under Linux, I can create a temporary user in about 30 seconds, go crap all over the resulting sandbox, and I *might* release a forkbomb or fill up /home... if I was being lazy. If I was really worried about it, I could ulimit the bejeezus out of the new userid, and whatever little surprises lay in that exe wouldn't get past first base.
And it's not just Linux, or other Unixes... VMS, NOS, NOS/VE, VM/CMS... IS there another OS out there that DOESN'T have proper ACL's and CPU/process limits? BeOS, MAYBE?
Yes, there are a lot of clueless Windows users. There is still no excuse for deliberate insecurity on the part of the OS. As for Microsoft "giving the users what they want"... As Norm Schwartzkopf would say, bovine scatology. See previous comment.
... is to never let it get to a C: prompt. Simply insert your favorite alternative OS install media into the appropriate drive before POST completes, and you never have to worry about all that again. Or order one preinstalled.... I dunno about *BSD, but there certainly are a lot of people pushing Linux boxen... and there's always MacOS, too...
2) Surely the router is firewalling port 23 on the outbound side, or at least tcpwrappered (or blocked in xinetd.conf), right? In the extreme case you can hardwire it to come from only your personal machine...
3) Hardwire it. Use a null modem cable, serial port to serial port; you could even set the headless box to boot to the serial port (yeah, this takes a kernel recompile, but you would've wanted to do that anyway). Use getty on the router, and minicom on your side (don't forget to configure it to not send "ATZ" for the "modem" init string....).
Frankly, I just use OpenSSH and be done with it... no reason to send bucks to Finland when the Canadians will do it better for free... and if it weren't for the fact that my housemate has Windows machines that occasionally need to PPTP to her work, I'd be using OpenBSD as the firewall.... when they get around to making pf tunnel alternate protocols, I'll likely be switching.
--
Linux for the stable desktop
Mac for publishing and pretty pictures
OpenBSD for secure servers
Windows for games
Use the right tool for the job.
A fully-functioning (ahem) Linux can be compressed down and fit on a floppy disk. (Can you say, Linux Router Project? tomsrtbt? hal91? A full-out Red Hat system with Apache, Samba, NFS tools, Linuxconf-web, IDE-RAID, and all the dependencies for all that stuff, is only 72MB worth of disk fully expanded. Absolutely-fscking-minimal Win95, I mean, just enough to boot the system, is 102MB (IIRC, plus or minus a meg or two), forget about anything useful like a browser or an editor fancier than Notepad. And NT is bigger than that, by how many orders of magnitude, I don't know, when I left that job I quit using Windows for keeps.
NT is too big and too tightly coupled by far for any one man to keep all the twisty relationships between his ears, is Linus' point. There are at least two people on the planet (Linus and Alan) who can keep the Linux kernel between their ears; I don't doubt that Miguel could do the same thing if he tried... but then Miguel's celebrity points up precisely the major flaw in the whole Windows design package: We never tried to integrate the GUI into the OS. (One notices that the folks in Cupertino have realized the error of their ways...) Such strategy produces an extreme case of bloat which is difficult at best to get rid of... much less manage the code for.
The setting: Early 1999, a documents convention in Atlanta (all about printers and scanners and signature verification technology, etc...). On the stage, left to right, are Linus, a senior Microsoft marketroid, Maddog, and a Wall Street analyst. The Microsoft guy was running off at the mouth about all the huge labs they have in Redmond, where they can replicate any problem known to man. Linus jumps into the fray with a case involving the U.S. Post Office. (Those little barcodes you get on the bottom of all your envelopes? Those barcodes are put there by printers powered by Linux. Only thing that would run that reliably and had good vendor support.) It seems USPS was having a performance problem. They called Red Hat. Red Hat looked at it. They scratched their heads, and forwarded it to Linus. Linus looked at it, scratched his head, vi'ed a couple files, had an "aha" moment (discovered a race condition), tappity, tappity, tappity, compile, init 6, diff-pipe-mail, problem solved. Total turnaround time for USPS, 48 hours.
Then he delivered the zinger.
There was dead silence in the room, and I've never seen anyone look quite so uncomfortable as that Microsoft marketroid sitting there in the spotlight between the two most vocal penguinheads on the planet....I must admit, though, it's fun to see other folks catching on to Linus' PR methods...
--
I'd rather listen to [Sir Isaac] Newton than to [Microsoft's VP Craig] Mundie. He may have been dead for almost three hundred years, but despite that he stinks up the room less.
-- Linus
Joe Average Computer User is getting pretty savvy, actually. These things have been around long enough for folks to have grown up with them. Matter of fact, my mother in law takes exception to the comment "your grandma could do it"... and points out quite rightly that most back offices are RUN by Grandma... not OUR grandmas born in ought-five but Greg Geek's parents, who are now grandmas because Greg is old enough to have finally found a geekette and decided to procreate.
Besides, somebody has come up with a distro aimed at Joe Random Windows User... ironically, it's made in Redmond, and it's called Redmond Linux. (Shamless plug for a business associate of mine.) I haven't had time to take a real good look at it, but given what I know can be done with Linux, it can't be that hard to put together something really User Friendly.
- Use the ISP's mail services. IMAP/SSL messages down, set the ISP's SMTP host as a smart-host. This is what I do; I've seen the pain a friend goes thru running his own mail service, and I don't want it. (This assumes ISP's DNS admin isn't truly a doofus.)
- Get a third-party mail account. If you like webmail, Yahoo is pretty good at this (and has semi-effective spam filtering and allows you to roll your own filters as well). NewsAndMail.com allows SSL access (but has no filters). There are others I can't vouch for. Check them out here. Or you can get a pay-for-play shell account (or I think some people do free ones; if you know of them, hit "reply") and go all-out with procmail...
As for the doofi who insist on using idiot.com or spamhaus.com who want to send you email... get yourself one of those free webmail accounts that has forwarding capabilites. Tell your less-than-clued (or stuck) friends (I have a good friend who HAS to use AOL for work... ugh.) to send you mail at thiscouldntpossiblybearealuser@yahoo.com (or whatever) and forward the yahoo account to me@mycozylittledomain.org, and hey, presto! problem solved.(FWIW, I really do like Yahoo a lot; I might even could be convinced to go pay-for-play with them, if the pay was modest and the play was as froody as it currently is... they have some annoying habits, but most of them can be (and are) fixed with Junkbuster; the rest (like always inserting a new filter at the END of the list) can be dealt with. Yeah, I *wish* I could work for them, but that would require moving to the PRCa, and I'm just not going to do that.)
In case anybody missed it, when the appeals court decision was announced, Scott McNeally was positively crowing. Not only was the remedy (the breakup) vacated and remanded rather than reversed (translation: the lower court, less Penfield Jackson, can do anything from smack Bill on the wrist with a wet noodle, to shredding Microsoft and serving it to Linus Torvalds au brochette... but I digress), but the monopoly judgement was affirmed.
Microsoft is a monopoly; it is so written in the law now.
This means that Sun's (and AOL's and Compaq's) lawyers are working feverishly to come up with the best way to use that legal ammunition to hang it in to the Evil Empire. (I don't know what Oracle thinks of this, or whether they would even have standing, but gods help us all if Ellison decides it's worth it and goes after Bill.... the scene of legal carnage would be unimaginable.) New Mexico can get stuffed. The corporations have not yet begun to fight.
When Adobe finally got wind of it, they said, "Whoa, Herr Sharkey. Heel!" Not to say that Adobe doesn't deserve pounding on for their near-total abandonment of Linux... but I think the settlement offer (just change the bloody NAME, for Seldon's sake) is quite reasonable.
Point is, no, there are some radicals out there who insist on using 100% Free Software, and I can see that POV, but I think there are a number of folks who don't mind paying good money for good produce. Personally, I get ticked at people who try to enforce a monopoly on me. On the other hand, I'm also about to throw Netscape off my box, frankly because it sucks and there's better stuff (Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror) out there, and the number of sites that need the Real True Netscape is fast approaching zero. (It may be zero alreddie, I just haven't confirmed that to my satisfaction yet.)
Don't make me subscribe, don't force-bundle software on me, particularly if it sucks, don't cost me an arm and a leg (Photoshop), I'm happy.
--
These are my ideas, you can't have them
Global Warming is FUD.
It is FUD perpetrated on us for the purpose of increasing the power of the Imperial Federal Government and the United Nations over the Evil American Capitalistas.Now, before you hit the "flame" button, think about this: I believe in saving the earth just as much as Greenpeace does. However, I believe in doing so sanely. I don't believe in shutting down the American industrial complex; I believe in transforming it so that it works with nature, rather than against it. Organic farming. Biodiesel. Composting. Recycling. Well-thought-out mass transit. Telecommuting. Reducing government and spreading what's left throughout the land, rather than concentrating it in smoggy cities, and linking them all with the Internet. Good Honest Hemp for paper and clothes and plastic and pig food. Wind farms. Houses made of rammed earth or straw bales or dug into the side of a hill. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
The current crisis in California is the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if the eco-radicals get their way. California hasn't built a power plant of any kind in ten years. It Wasn't Allowed. And now, basically, they're screwed. And so are we, if we don't perform a crano-rectal reinversion and figure out that what's going on is that a very small, vocal bunch is trying to shut down America.
Let me repeat myself here in case somebody doesn't get it. I believe in saving the planet too, for all the animals. Including the big semi-furless funny-looking mammals that have a real serious tool codependence. I believe that, instead of looking for things we should not do to the planet, we should look for things we can do to save both the whales and our civilization. I think we can be both high-tech and high-touch, green and gold, work with nature rather than either against it or abandoning it. When I see things like Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone, I am reminded that the Earth has done far more terrible things to itself than we do, and recovers beautifully... and while I still feel physically ill every time I head down towards Mt. Ranier and see what Weyrhauser has done to our forests (Good, Honest HEMP!) I think the time and effort we spend beating down the timber companies would be far better spent promoting alternate solutions rather than simply trying to shut them down....
If you tell a man "stop what you're doing, you're naughty-bad-evil-wicked" he's as liable to flip you the bird as anything. If you tell him "hey, there's a much easier, better way to do that" and even give him a business case including his conversion costs.... he might just take you up on it.
This is what we need to be about. Global warming, global schmarming. Just find ways to sustainably do things cleaner and better, and let the Earth worry about the rest. It'll do just fine, and has for years. <carl_sagan> Billions and billions of them. </carl_sagan>
P.S. Fallen Angels kicked ass.
And you wonder why I hate unions and RIAA.
--
It is that which fertilizes the soil, and none can abide the odor thereof.
Not to mention the fact that some talk show hosts have new audiences in places like Moscow....
Free as in speech wins again... and in the long run will probably save our butts, come the revolution...
just another satisfied user....
Bah. I prefer the Keep It Simple Stupid approach. No color, no fancy-ass highlighting, just when and where I am.
:) As for all the mail/user/group stuff, that's what "id" and kbiff are for... and no color, because I occasionally use a dummy terminal to check mail (where I don't _need_ kbiff). Platform independent, obvious (except for the retcode), and useful. Suits me.
export PS1='\n|\t \d|\n\h:${PWD#${HOME}/}($?)> '
which looks like
|11:05:49 Fri Jul 6|
escaflowne:/home/taliesin(0)>
(which is: a newline, to separate itself from the garbage above it, date and time surrounded by pipes, another newline to avoid the prompt getting excessively long, short hostname, colon, working directory, return code in parens, right caret, space.)
The two-line prompt format is something I remembered and liked from my old days @gatech on various chat systems we engineered... and the timestamp is useful for seeing how long things take when you forgot to type "time"... including how long you were gone to lunch or some such
(Oh, the fiddly bit with HOME vs. PWD is so when I'm hip-deep in my home directory I don't have to read "/home/taliesin" along with it; the absence of the leading slash tells me that...)
--
No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd
only had good intentions. He had money as well.
-- Margaret Thatcher
Maybe when enough people like you figure out that the Demopublicans and the Republicrats are all out to trash both your wallet and your rights, and that the Libertarian Party isn't a bunch of druggies but just feels that it's nobody's damn business what consenting adults do to themselves or each other behind closed doors, we might get somewhere.
Until that happens, however, basically, we're fscked.
--
In the long, twilight struggle which lies ahead,
there is the possibility of hope.
-- Draal, Babylon 5 #219
Now, Chris doesn't make any real bucks on this. But someone you might have heard a bit more about does... Heather Alexander, a Celtic fiddler/singer/songwriter, actually makes a living at this, both for herself and her hubby/agent. No, they're not rolling in it. But they're doing what they want to be doing, and making a living at it. I would call that success.
The point is, the music industry outside of RIAA is not dead. There are a lot of small labels working outside the box, and bands who get airplay on alternative stations and rackspace in mom and pop music stores... and a growing audience that does NOT listen to Top 40 anymore. When enough people figure out that there's more to life than "Oops, I did it again," RIAA will lose its stranglehold on the business, and the world will change. A very quiet revolution, but I think it's already happening, given the amount of noise going on in the courts....
No, I didn't get a dime for those shameless plugs, I'm just a fan. Deadhead-style band promoting is alive and well.
Of course, I noted near the end of the article that the truly classified machines still get trashed, it's just the garden-variety receptionist and lower-end lackey machines that get given to universities where the 33l33+ #@X0R d00dZ lurk...
Just as a shameless plug (I bought one of their smaller boxen, the BlackPerl Z), the Emperor Linux Rhino (aka Dell Inspiron with a custom Linux install) is a full gigglehertz PIII platform, with a PAIR of optical drives (one can be a burner!), built-in 10/100 Ethernet, up to 512mb RAM, up to 48gb of disk, sound, and a 15" screen if you're tired of staring at a CRT all day. Yeah, it's a pig, and expensive, but it'll do everything you'd need it to and be quiet about it. And you can take it with you.
I can second the recommendation on the PC Power and cooling stuff, too, if you're not in the mood to buy a new computer; (chief geek over at Linux Journal) Dan Wilder's response to them was, and I quote, "[these are] built like a brick shithouse!"
Good luck...
warpeightbot