This is because learning to distinguish faces is mostly a learned skill... there seems to be a certain stage of development in early life where the brain is "primed" to learn this sort of thing... and if you miss this opportunity (due to blindness etc...) it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to learn to distinguish faces later in life. An appropriate parallel would be with "wild children", kids that grow up in the wild unattended (it happens occasionally) and don't learn to speak. There seems to be a time during cognitive development which the brain is also primed to learn speech (or develop a base set of phonemes, at any rate), and if this stage is missed, the person has a very difficult time learning to speak, and always speaks "strangely".
I think this is really the key. Examine the three scenarious here.
1. You're security conscious, preemptively patched for the DCOM exploit or run a firewall. Result: You didn't get hit by Blaster OR the cleanup worm. Status: Good netizen.
2. You just found out about the worm as it made CNN/webite of choice. You patch & remove the worm if you're running it. Result: You're no longer infected, you won't get hit by the cleanup worm (since you patched the DCOM exploit) Status: Decent netizen.
3. You live under a rock. Maybe you heard about one of them "worm" things on the telly-vision and wonder if you could sell them for bait. You think patches are to fix up your clothes. Result: You're a wormhole, and six months from now people will be getting worm propagaion requests from your IP address. Enter "white-hat" worm, which magically fixes your computer, since you sure as hell aren't going to do it. Status: Crappy netizen, but at least you're not wasting everyone's bandwith as much now.
The worst case scenario is that this is another malicious worm, which uses the same DCOM exploit to spread itself. Responsible netizens will have already patched against the exploit, so no harm done, and those people that are too ignorant or irresponsible to patch their systems would most likely end up getting infected by the next big worm anyways, so we're not any worse off than before. In the best case scenario, the white-hat worm patches up the system, cleans it up and terminates itself.
To use the house analogy, an unattended computer is like an empty house with the landlord absent. If crack dealers or pimps move in (a malicious worm), it doesn't just affect the one house. Crime in the neighborhood goes up, property values decrease, local taxes might increase, more low-lifes move in, etc... There are neighborhood-wide reprecussions to the landlord's irresponsibility. The neighbors of the absentee/irresponsible landlord are well within their rights to call the police and have the pimps/crack dealers removed from the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, there's nobody that I can realistically turn to in order to have the worm issue addressed. So, in my book, the white-hat worm is just fine by me. If you're computer-savvy enough to worry about it, odds are it won't affect you anyways.
Yeah, it's basically the opposite of a hovercraft... instead of creating a cushion of air to float on, the wall-climbing robot has the fan running the other way (pushing it out the top) which creates a region of low pressure underneath, which "sucks" the robot into the wall. Pretty neat idea.
No, in this case, learning karate, carrying mace, having a decent legal system etc... would be like learning how to *use* Windows software, and patching it regularly, and installing a firewall. Switching to Linux would be like locking yourself into your home and convincing yourself that you didn't need anything from the outside world anyways.:-)
It's called a firewall. It's proteced me from Nimda, Code Red, etc.
Yes yes, I was once a smarmy know-it-all just like you, smugly thumbing my nose as the poor suckers who didn't know about complex technology like "firewalls" and whatnot to protect themselves from evil worms. Then my computer-illiterate (now ex-) girlfriend downloaded an attachment from her hotmail account and ran it manually... and that was the end of that.
As a gamer, I hate one-button mice. Using a key for alt-fire is just such a pain in the ass. Basically, why use two hands to do what could be accomplished with just one?
Most large ISPs already do require you to keep your computer secure, but they haven't gotten to the point of penalizing offenders (yet). Check this little bit out in SBC/Yahoo!'s TOS
I don't read this as requiring people to keep their computers secure... this reads like a CYA for SBC/Yahoo... basically, if you get hacked/backdoored/infected with virus-du-jour, you can't sue us. It could possibly be read as, if you get prosecuted for spamming senators with kiddie porn because your computer got backdoored into an open relay, we (SB/Yahoo) aren't liable for that, either.
Then probably the Silmarillion, although that kinda reads like the torah...."and so and so begot so and so, who begot so and so...who betrayed so and so..."
That's not the Torah, that's the Old Testament, fool!
Slashdot Mirror
perhaps a talking kangaroo.
Been there, done that... and of course, it had to co-star Ice-T.
This is because learning to distinguish faces is mostly a learned skill... there seems to be a certain stage of development in early life where the brain is "primed" to learn this sort of thing... and if you miss this opportunity (due to blindness etc...) it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to learn to distinguish faces later in life. An appropriate parallel would be with "wild children", kids that grow up in the wild unattended (it happens occasionally) and don't learn to speak. There seems to be a time during cognitive development which the brain is also primed to learn speech (or develop a base set of phonemes, at any rate), and if this stage is missed, the person has a very difficult time learning to speak, and always speaks "strangely".
Jingoistic, revisionist movies like Red Dawn and Rambo tried to change the way people looked at the war and spin it into a falsely positive light.
Red Dawn? Obviously he didn't even *watch* the movie... Red Dawn had nothing to do with Vietnam.
No no, they're domestically challenged :-)
Maybe the surgance in linux on the desktop will cause more people to get a clue
No, it will just mean more idiots running badly misconfigured linux boxes.
65 pfft... I currently have 780 sitting in my junk folder... and that's not counting most of the antivirus bounces... thank god for fat pipes.
Everyone knows (or should know)
I think this is really the key. Examine the three scenarious here. 1. You're security conscious, preemptively patched for the DCOM exploit or run a firewall. Result: You didn't get hit by Blaster OR the cleanup worm. Status: Good netizen.
2. You just found out about the worm as it made CNN/webite of choice. You patch & remove the worm if you're running it. Result: You're no longer infected, you won't get hit by the cleanup worm (since you patched the DCOM exploit) Status: Decent netizen.
3. You live under a rock. Maybe you heard about one of them "worm" things on the telly-vision and wonder if you could sell them for bait. You think patches are to fix up your clothes. Result: You're a wormhole, and six months from now people will be getting worm propagaion requests from your IP address. Enter "white-hat" worm, which magically fixes your computer, since you sure as hell aren't going to do it. Status: Crappy netizen, but at least you're not wasting everyone's bandwith as much now.
The worst case scenario is that this is another malicious worm, which uses the same DCOM exploit to spread itself. Responsible netizens will have already patched against the exploit, so no harm done, and those people that are too ignorant or irresponsible to patch their systems would most likely end up getting infected by the next big worm anyways, so we're not any worse off than before. In the best case scenario, the white-hat worm patches up the system, cleans it up and terminates itself.
To use the house analogy, an unattended computer is like an empty house with the landlord absent. If crack dealers or pimps move in (a malicious worm), it doesn't just affect the one house. Crime in the neighborhood goes up, property values decrease, local taxes might increase, more low-lifes move in, etc... There are neighborhood-wide reprecussions to the landlord's irresponsibility. The neighbors of the absentee/irresponsible landlord are well within their rights to call the police and have the pimps/crack dealers removed from the neighborhood. Unfortunately, there's nobody that I can realistically turn to in order to have the worm issue addressed. So, in my book, the white-hat worm is just fine by me. If you're computer-savvy enough to worry about it, odds are it won't affect you anyways.
Shame on you, wasting all those CPU cycles on strlen() calls! :-P
Yeah, it's basically the opposite of a hovercraft... instead of creating a cushion of air to float on, the wall-climbing robot has the fan running the other way (pushing it out the top) which creates a region of low pressure underneath, which "sucks" the robot into the wall. Pretty neat idea.
haha! nice :)
Hear hear! Stupid Grim Fandango engine...
No, in this case, learning karate, carrying mace, having a decent legal system etc... would be like learning how to *use* Windows software, and patching it regularly, and installing a firewall. Switching to Linux would be like locking yourself into your home and convincing yourself that you didn't need anything from the outside world anyways. :-)
Could you provide links to a credible source debunking this theory? Everything I can find points to this in fact being true.
It's called a firewall. It's proteced me from Nimda, Code Red, etc.
Yes yes, I was once a smarmy know-it-all just like you, smugly thumbing my nose as the poor suckers who didn't know about complex technology like "firewalls" and whatnot to protect themselves from evil worms. Then my computer-illiterate (now ex-) girlfriend downloaded an attachment from her hotmail account and ran it manually... and that was the end of that.
Aha! You're not even a cow. Even the youngest calves know cows have hoofs, not hands. Imposter!
:-P
And I'd have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids!
Why do you hate me? Is it because I'm good looking?
I think you probably posted some blatant flamebait one day, and I was in a pissy mood.
Don't worry... with the MATRIX system in place, you won't need to watch your cornhole... Big Brother will be watching it for you :)
As a gamer, I hate one-button mice. Using a key for alt-fire is just such a pain in the ass. Basically, why use two hands to do what could be accomplished with just one?
Pfft... newbies :-)
Most large ISPs already do require you to keep your computer secure, but they haven't gotten to the point of penalizing offenders (yet). Check this little bit out in SBC/Yahoo!'s TOS
I don't read this as requiring people to keep their computers secure... this reads like a CYA for SBC/Yahoo... basically, if you get hacked/backdoored/infected with virus-du-jour, you can't sue us. It could possibly be read as, if you get prosecuted for spamming senators with kiddie porn because your computer got backdoored into an open relay, we (SB/Yahoo) aren't liable for that, either.
Is that you, Terano? :-P
US Copyright law is irrelevent here. What matters are the laws in Germany and the Czech Republic.
... which are covered by the international treaties that he explicitly mentions in his post. Yeesh.
If Slashdot ran the post office, you'd receive four copies of the same [...] package, often on the same day.
:-)
Sweet, where do I sign up? Time to order some memory through SlashMail
Then probably the Silmarillion, although that kinda reads like the torah...."and so and so begot so and so, who begot so and so...who betrayed so and so..."
That's not the Torah, that's the Old Testament, fool!
How about we send all three to Mars to dig a hole, and leave Pauly Shore in it when they leave?
Our only hope is if they turn it over to private industry
Er... turning over our phone numbers to private industry is what got us into this freakin' mess in the first place!