They already require the user to go through the steps you suggest, and they ARE DOING IT! You can write fool-proof code, but you can't write dang fool-proof code?
Windows is exploited the most because Microsoft has, in the past, opted for a less secure security model so that Microsoft OS's and apps could be more "user friendly". There isn't much of a security model. It's insecure by design. A mail client should never, ever be allowed to execute code received from the outside. It shouldn't even be an option to turn on. Self-executing zip files are a disaster. Always invoke (preferably by hand) an archive unpacker to deal with archives - why do you think unshar was invented? Fix those two problems (which have been documented for a long, long time) and you would go a long ways towards solving the security problem on Microsoft Windows.
It's one of the 4 Horsemen of the Infocalypse and used since the inception of the world wide web to justify censorship, mandated governmental spying on all internet traffic and the like.
I've never seen any data that suggests that it's either as big of a problem as is claimed, or that there's a whole lot of traffic outside of law enforcement agents trying to sting people. I don't believe for a moment that it's as much as 1% of all internet crime.
Not very nicely put, but true. The average yearly income for a Chinese family is less than a single license for Vista. I'm surprised they sold that many.
This isn't an article about Vista so much as the sad state of affairs in China. A few people are becoming (very) rich, everybody else is unbelievably poor. If Microsoft dropped the price to something average Chinese could afford (we had to keep the price of Turbolinux in China under US$15) they would probably sell a hundred million copies.
How is an email with a picture instead of actual text (so a text scanner can't detect it) claiming it's from your IT department and they need you to run this patch to get rid of a virus, instructing you to open the attached zip file (with password, provided in the picture) which is password protected (so a zip scanner can't get in it) a Windows problem?!?!? Prior art. You name two things which were determined to be harmful (over) two decades ago.
First, a properly engineered mail program should never provide a function to execute received content. Never.
Second, why are you executing an archive at all? That's STUPID. Read up on some history of shell archives on USENET and why the unshar program was invented to read and perform patches. Is it so hard to type `unzip '?
I think you could properly set up a lawsuit directed at Microsoft and whomever "designed" zip format. Cigarette manufacturers have been successfully sued and they have been putting warning labels on cigarettes for decades.
Warning, if you use Microsoft as directed, your computer will be infected by viruses, trojans and malware.
It's comparative. Overall, I would rate his administration as better than Bush's, sad as that may be. But really, does the "Assault Weapons" ban compare with the "Patriot" Act? I think not. Did Reno slaughter as many people in Waco as Bush (and his father) have in Iraq? No.
True, both of the items you named were bad, but I expect the US government to do bad. I try to aim my voting at people who will do less bad than the ones running against them. That's really hard given the extremely low quality of candidates.
I used to have a web page entitled "All the reasons why Bill Clinton is a great President". The text of the page was <BODY></BODY>. It's still true.
Oh good lord, please don't vote for Hillary. Her husband didn't do much damage in 2 years with a Democrat congress. He did a lot of stupid things, true, but by comparison with Bush, it worked better for me. And your reaction is exactly why a vote for Hillary! is a good thing. So many people hate her she'll never "get anything done". Gridlock is Good. I wish I could vote for my dead dog for President. I guarantee you he would be better dead or alive than whomever we do get.
All my life it's been more taxes/less freedom and I'm sick of it.
I'm rather convinced that Obama represents significant change from the status quo -- and I've spent a nontrivial amount of time looking at his positions. As did I before blacking out the box next to Bush's name in 2000. The only defense I have is my vote didn't count because the state I was voting in sent their Electoral College votes to Algore.
If he is truly against the status quo, he doesn't stand a prayer of either getting elected or living long enough to implement anything, but... Obama is a black man. I do believe that a woman has a chance of being elected this time around. The two women with the best chances are Hillary! and Rice. I myself will vote for Hillary! if it seems likely that electing her will cause "gridlock", Gridlock is Good. I do not believe that the United States culturally is ready to accept a non-white as President, unless she is a non-white woman.
I've deluded myself twice in the last decade and a half that I was voting for "change" - first in 1994, by voting for a "major party" candidate for congress based on the Contract with America, second in 2000 when I believed current President Bush's campaign promises. OK, that was stupid, but the people who voted for Democrat candidates in the last election are guilty of the same. Whatever. Democrat, Republic, "Independent" like Lieberman or Sanders they're all rotten to the core or corrupted by the system before they ever have a chance.
BTW, Of all candidates in the 2000 primaries I would have loved to have voted for was Alan Keyes. But he didn't stand a chance and was wiped out long before California got a chance to vote for him. Whatever else you want to say about Alan Keyes, there is no way he could have been as terrible a President as Bush. Whatever.
I stand by the statement I wrote earlier here. I don't know who is going to be elected President in 2008, but he is going to be a corrupt Democrat or Republican and we are going to pay more taxes and continue to lose freedom. It's very sad when you have to base a vote for supreme leader of your country based on an assessment of who will do the least damage, but that is the state of the USA today.
(Before anyone calls me racist, though they will not read this, this is slashdot after all, I am married to a woman differently shaded than me).
You're thinking of Louis Freeh's Carnivore. No, that's not what I remember about Leahy. I remember his name coming up all the time on the cypherpunks mailing list either attached to the latest Net Censorship bill or anti-encryption/anti-privacy bill. I can't recall which now, I just remember that he is on the short list of the most technology unfriendly Senators.
This tired GOP talking point is completely untrue. (I've never been a registered Republican, nor do I tend to pay much attention to US media) I read the LA Times historical link someone else posted and I guess replacing all the attorneys at the start of the term has been standard practice at least back Carter. I stand corrected, though I consider the LA Times a dubious at best source of news.
Two senior members of the GOP house leadership are in jail here. There is nothing remotely similar that occured during the Clinton admin. Ron Brown died under mysterious circumstances before he could be put in jail. "The most ethical administration in history" was not without more than its fair share of real scandal.
Reno appointed independent prosecutors in cases where there was a clear conflict of interest. This administration should stop stalling and do likewise. The law that she did that under was rescinded a long time ago. Too bad, maybe it's time to bring it back.
Oh well. Have fun and happy hunting. I'm certainly not defending the Bush Administration.
In fact, a substantial portion of the American public considers Reagan to be among the best five presidents thus far and perhaps the greatest to serve within their living memory. That's a qualified statement if ever there was one. My living memory only goes back to Richard Nixon (I don't remember anything about Johnson) and under those circumstances and considering we've only had bozos in office starting with Woody Wilson in 1914 doesn't mean anything.
Sure President Reagan did some good things, but he's also responsible for civil forfeiture laws, financial anti-privacy laws (demonization of the term "money laundering" - only the very rich are allowed financial privacy) and hugely escalating the failed and costly War on Some Drugs.
I'm sick of both Democrats and Republicans and unending corruption and gradual loss of freedom.
Now when you've got a Blackberry (which they were all issued by the RNC) and are using that to talk to other people in the White House about campaign/fundraising issues, when you need to communicate with those same people about something else, how many real people are going to bother to wait until they can get to their government email account and how many are going to just hit reply on the Blackberry? This isn't the standard they hold defense contractors to. When I worked for a defense contractor I was basically forbidden to even talk to coworkers in certain projects (fixed cost ones were the stickiest) without an Internal Work Authorization for that project. The color of money is a strict issue when working with the government. This is along the same lines.
Sounds to me like this is just human nature and some badly written laws coming together. No, this about the government not holding themselves to the same standards they hold others to. This was one of the planks of the Platform for America that we voted for in 1994 and I certainly expect a Republican administration to respect it.
I don't think that was flamebait, but whatever.
The thing I liked most about Clinton was that congress opposed him. When less gets done I'm a little more comfortable. Bring on the fighting between the branches. Amen! Gridlock is Good. The best example is the misnamed "Patriot" Act. We successfully fought off the pieces of it when Clinton's minions Freeh and Reno were trying to get it passed back in the 90's. But given a situation and compliant congress we got it all in one ugly package at the drop of a hat.
I think it is important that we send a strong message to future presidents and, more importantly, to the whole world that we don't stand for this sort of garbage. You have to go back almost a hundred years to find a decent US President (William Howard Taft 1909-1913). We not only do stand it, we appear to prefer it. I'm surprised it's taken the world this long to figure it out.
Each successive president grabs a little bit more power for themselves. Yeah. The only counter example I can think over that period would possibly be Kennedy who did try to restore real money and lowered marginal tax rates before he got himself killed. In the rest of the 20th century? Maybe only William Howard Taft. http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/wt27. html
Notable quote from the Whitehouse bio:
Unlike Roosevelt, Taft did not believe in the stretching of Presidential powers. He once commented that Roosevelt "ought more often to have admitted the legal way of reaching the same ends." He also built Baguio City when he was governor of the Philippines because Manila was too hot. Baguio City is cool.
I don't know who will be elected President in '08, but he will be a corrupt (Democrat or Republican) and we'll pay more taxes and lose more freedom.
Why can't i have him [Leahy] in MY state? You must be new. Leahy was one of the clowns pushing for Total Information Awareness (it had a different name then) in the Clinton era.
It's not like Clinton did the same thing in the 90s...oh, wait...). None of this is any different than the Clinton administration. The first thing Clinton did when taking office was fire all the attorneys in the DOJ and replace them. There was also a nearly identical scandal over lost email. Same corruption, different people.
If there is to be any real change, people are going to have to stop voting for both Democrats and Republicans.
I think I am ready for a change. Not enough people care, just look at the cast of clowns running for President in '08. Maybe Ron Paul could make a change for the better, but I don't think he has any chance of getting a nomination, let alone winning the general election. Two decades of corrupt Bush/Clinton government -- enough already!
Re:Why do this?
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 2, Informative
+5 Insightful? Too many moderators on crack, I guess.
You're an idiot if you think this began 7 years ago. It's been happening all my life and I am sure it didn't start in the 1960's. Look through the cypherpunks mailing list archives whereever they are these days. Loss of freedom in the US has been a long slow process for a looooong time.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
The trouble being that techies willing to help you with Linux are much harder for the Mr and Mrs A. Verage-Joe to get hold of than a Windows helper. This isn't any different than saying the Microsoft Windows is a monopoly and should stay a monopoly because everyone uses it.
Yeah. First they stole "hacker", now they're trying to steal "superuser" from us too? Enough already!
Too much attention is paid to the powerful user, or the Superuser as I call him. (UNIX geeks, I'm aware I'm overloading the term.) English pervert or moron.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm impressed though. Really.
It's one of the 4 Horsemen of the Infocalypse and used since the inception of the world wide web to justify censorship, mandated governmental spying on all internet traffic and the like.
I've never seen any data that suggests that it's either as big of a problem as is claimed, or that there's a whole lot of traffic outside of law enforcement agents trying to sting people. I don't believe for a moment that it's as much as 1% of all internet crime.
Not very nicely put, but true. The average yearly income for a Chinese family is less than a single license for Vista. I'm surprised they sold that many.
This isn't an article about Vista so much as the sad state of affairs in China. A few people are becoming (very) rich, everybody else is unbelievably poor. If Microsoft dropped the price to something average Chinese could afford (we had to keep the price of Turbolinux in China under US$15) they would probably sell a hundred million copies.
Hey! That's the Fleming House cannon. I helped drag it back to Caltech, long, long ago.
Sigh.
First, a properly engineered mail program should never provide a function to execute received content. Never.
Second, why are you executing an archive at all? That's STUPID. Read up on some history of shell archives on USENET and why the unshar program was invented to read and perform patches. Is it so hard to type `unzip '?
I think you could properly set up a lawsuit directed at Microsoft and whomever "designed" zip format. Cigarette manufacturers have been successfully sued and they have been putting warning labels on cigarettes for decades.
Warning, if you use Microsoft as directed, your computer will be infected by viruses, trojans and malware.
It's comparative. Overall, I would rate his administration as better than Bush's, sad as that may be. But really, does the "Assault Weapons" ban compare with the "Patriot" Act? I think not. Did Reno slaughter as many people in Waco as Bush (and his father) have in Iraq? No.
True, both of the items you named were bad, but I expect the US government to do bad. I try to aim my voting at people who will do less bad than the ones running against them. That's really hard given the extremely low quality of candidates.
I used to have a web page entitled "All the reasons why Bill Clinton is a great President". The text of the page was <BODY></BODY>. It's still true.
My comments were directed at an American, not at someone educated.
All my life it's been more taxes/less freedom and I'm sick of it.
If he is truly against the status quo, he doesn't stand a prayer of either getting elected or living long enough to implement anything, but
I've deluded myself twice in the last decade and a half that I was voting for "change" - first in 1994, by voting for a "major party" candidate for congress based on the Contract with America, second in 2000 when I believed current President Bush's campaign promises. OK, that was stupid, but the people who voted for Democrat candidates in the last election are guilty of the same. Whatever. Democrat, Republic, "Independent" like Lieberman or Sanders they're all rotten to the core or corrupted by the system before they ever have a chance.
BTW, Of all candidates in the 2000 primaries I would have loved to have voted for was Alan Keyes. But he didn't stand a chance and was wiped out long before California got a chance to vote for him. Whatever else you want to say about Alan Keyes, there is no way he could have been as terrible a President as Bush. Whatever.
I stand by the statement I wrote earlier here. I don't know who is going to be elected President in 2008, but he is going to be a corrupt Democrat or Republican and we are going to pay more taxes and continue to lose freedom. It's very sad when you have to base a vote for supreme leader of your country based on an assessment of who will do the least damage, but that is the state of the USA today.
(Before anyone calls me racist, though they will not read this, this is slashdot after all, I am married to a woman differently shaded than me).
I retract this statement and apologize. Senator Leahy was one of the senators who voted against CDA and brought forth legislation to repeal it, so he's one of the few good guys. http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind 9602b&L=nettrain&T=0&P=5298
You're thinking of Louis Freeh's Carnivore. No, that's not what I remember about Leahy. I remember his name coming up all the time on the cypherpunks mailing list either attached to the latest Net Censorship bill or anti-encryption/anti-privacy bill. I can't recall which now, I just remember that he is on the short list of the most technology unfriendly Senators.
Oh well. Have fun and happy hunting. I'm certainly not defending the Bush Administration.
Sure President Reagan did some good things, but he's also responsible for civil forfeiture laws, financial anti-privacy laws (demonization of the term "money laundering" - only the very rich are allowed financial privacy) and hugely escalating the failed and costly War on Some Drugs.
I'm sick of both Democrats and Republicans and unending corruption and gradual loss of freedom.
Notable quote from the Whitehouse bio: Unlike Roosevelt, Taft did not believe in the stretching of Presidential powers. He once commented that Roosevelt "ought more often to have admitted the legal way of reaching the same ends." He also built Baguio City when he was governor of the Philippines because Manila was too hot. Baguio City is cool.
I don't know who will be elected President in '08, but he will be a corrupt (Democrat or Republican) and we'll pay more taxes and lose more freedom.
If there is to be any real change, people are going to have to stop voting for both Democrats and Republicans.
+5 Insightful? Too many moderators on crack, I guess.
You're an idiot if you think this began 7 years ago. It's been happening all my life and I am sure it didn't start in the 1960's. Look through the cypherpunks mailing list archives whereever they are these days. Loss of freedom in the US has been a long slow process for a looooong time.
I accuse you of being an astroturfer.