Exactly, you're agreeing with me yet claiming you're disagreeing. The trouble is that they are non-technical people who are setting precedent about the legality of certain pieces of software. While you and I both logically know that stealing passwords is illegal whether done through lophtcrack or a poorly configured, ancient version of sendmail, the average jury member does not. The fear that I have is that by allowing them to get charged with possession of burglary or theft tools, that the tools will become not illegal when used illegally, but just plain illegal. This is the first case that I'm aware of where the program used in the break-in has been classified in this manner, and I foresee a possibility of a dangerous precedent. However, as with all but seven other people who regularly post on/., I'm not a lawyer. Colour me paranoid if you will, but the charge that is listed with relation to l0phtcrack does not have an obvious 'if used to commit a crime' clause. I attempted to find the actual text of the law to check this, but couldn't find the statute on-line and don't have the free time to check a library. ----------------------------
Pennsylvania is known for all it's silly and slightly odd town names. I mean while you're visiting Beaver College drive through Amish country and go to Intercourse, if you run out of gas before you get there, you'll end up in BlueBall. Oh, and if you're worried about anti-drug web censorship then don't mention that you're from Smoketown or Pottstown.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the Philadelphia Inquirer is the major Philadelphia newspaper. It's real. It does *NOT* have articles regarding the end of the world, elvis, or how to lose 30 pounds in 30 minutes. ----------------------------
Because it's simply not true. Netscape navigator has shit-poor CSS and HTML4 support. IE5 introduced the world to a new level of compliance, piss-poor. Mozilla, while unstable, has almost perfect to the spec compliance for CSS and HTML4.
Anyway, I'm not going to waste any more of my energy on your troll.
If I murder somebody with a rock, I should get charged with murder, not possession of a rock.
The issue that I see is that many many programs can be exploited manually. What if you have a vulnerable network daemon and the attacker uses nc to feed it input. Is nc illegal then? How about if somebody writes a trojan in C, is the compiler illegal? the linker?
I'm not attempting to be difficult, I just fail to see the point of criminalizing a particular password recovery tool moreso than other methods of attack. If the alleged crimes are true, then I have no problems with them going down for what they did, but I don't see the how as being particularly relevant. ----------------------------
Actually it seems to me that the new plague on/. is whining, also known as 'bitching and moaning'. This is the fact that as I follow an interesting thread, inevitably somebody comments about moderation instead of the topic, an evil which this message is guilty of as well. If you have problems with moderation, then log in and sometimes you'll be a moderator.
Storal of the mory, whining gets you nowhere, so take 3 minutes, make yourself an account, and enjoy the ability to (meta)moderate. In the meantime I'll just be glad that I normally browse at +1. ----------------------------
nah, i don't hate anybody for being successful. as for me, no, i never worshipped amazon. they used to provide me with a nice service, and they were winning the war fairly. now, with the 1-click thing, it seems like they're resorting to cheating even though they were winning. It's low, and, well, I vote with my wallet.
Amazon.com is in the same category as Wal-mart, Borders, BN and Starbucks. They've managed to become very successful, but along the way have done things which make me quite willing to avoid using their services. I doubt they even notice my absence, but I get to know that I'm not knowingly financing actions which I don't agree with.
I have absolutely no problem with success, as long as you play fair and don't intentionally cause injuries. ----------------------------
Personally, I think he made it very clear how he felt when I read the phrase 'pissing in the well' in his personal e-mail to Monsieur Bezos.
I'm glad to see Tim come out and publicly comment on this 1-click patent.
I just did a few quick lookups on Quicken, and it would appear that so far my boycott of amazon has cost them a touch over $7k. Unfortunately the boycott is bound to fail since we can only help them lose more money, which is evidentally pinnacle to their business plan.
How does Jeff Bezos sleep at night?... on piles of money, with hundreds of naked women. ----------------------------
The Linux NS is much more stable than the FreeBSD NS (scary, eh?). I'm posting this from Linux NS running on FreeBSD 3.4, a common enough option that there's actually a port for linux netscape in the freebsd ports collection. ----------------------------
Novell v. Microsoft isn't even a competition. Novell kicks Microsoft's ass handily in every area it tries to. Okay, so you can't play Solitaire on Novell, aside from that, it's great.
As for stability, it's an admin's dream. Power, extendibility, insert buzzword here, Novell is just plain great.
As for why you don't need those directory services, for your home machine, you don't. Now run a business. A large business. Now you need them. ----------------------------
I hate to say this, but for *good* quality printing from *nix, I've found the available answers to be 'buy a postscript printer', 'buy a postscript printer', and 'buy a postscript printer'. Unfortunately it's quite hard to justify the cost of a Color Laserjet 4500 or other "low-end" colour laser printers.
I'd be extremely happy if somebody could tell me how wrong I am. ----------------------------
First of all, you should understand System Administration to some degree, this will help you understand basics like daemons, permissions, basic networking, and figuring out what you need and what's just cruft on your system. A text which I gladly recommend is Essential System Administration. This will *not* secure your system but it will help. A lot. Step two, learn about security specifically. You can read Practical Unix and Internet Security which gives a good overview and a fair amount of detail on securing a system, and being assured that they remain that way.
Once you finish doing this, you'll be on your way to being a *competant* admin (even if it is just your own machine). From then on, while you'll be far from a security expert, when some kiddie checks your doorknob, you can be assured that your door is locked, and they'll move on.
I know the books I mentioned cost $35 or so, which if you're young might be a non-trivial amount of money. If it is, I suggest saving up and buying them anyway. If you understand the stuff in them, then you'll know what you need to look up on the net for further info.
Good luck, and feel free to e-mail me with any further questions.
I officially work 37.5 hours/week and am salaried so more work != more money. As for how much I work, well... due to some emergency bugfixes I worked 20 hours yesterday. so I guess with Monday's 10 hours, and the 4 hours I put in on Sunday just because I was bored, that I'm done for the week.
I'm not complaining either, I love my job and it's rare that I'm 'forced' to work overtime. I just find it absurd to think that most of us work a 33 hour week. I'm not sure where those jobs are, but sign me up for two of em, I'm used 66 hour weeks anyway:-) ----------------------------
I officially work 37.5 hours/week and am salaried so more work != more money. As for how much I work, well... due to some emergency bugfixes I worked 20 hours yesterday. so I guess with Monday's 10 hours, and the 4 hours I put in on Sunday just because I was bored, that I'm done for the week. I'm not complaining either, I love my job and it's rare that I'm 'forced' to work overtime. I just find it absurd to think that most of us work a 33 hour week. I'm not sure where those jobs are, but sign me up for two of em, I'm used 66 hour weeks anyway:-) ----------------------------
Not to mention the whole massive Les Miserables thing. South park was such an amazing satire of american culture, I loved it. Too bad some people never got past the phrase 'unclefucker' to realize what the movie is about. ----------------------------
if you read the book for starship troopers, then see the movie, you'll be horridly disappointed at the complete removal of all content from the book. However, if you watch the movie before the book as I did... you won't know and you'll say 'cheezy but fun' to the movie:-) ----------------------------
what with all this foolish nonsense about this God character people keep telling me about. I mean, it's quite odd really, this irrational belief in an odd pyramid scam. Hmm... I'll turn off the Christian flamebait now, but my point is simply that some of us don't believe that there is a God, and therefore we by definition *have* to have a different definition of marraige than yours. Mine is more of a committed relationship, filled with love and caring. That's it. I could care less if whatever higher beings that may or may not exist notice. But that's just me. ----------------------------
Web columnists get paid for bringing readers, and Mr. Metcalfe has succeeded with aplumb in doing that with this latest irrational comparison. Yes, Mr. Metcalfe, I swear that all Open Source software users are exactly like the unfortunately typical flaming slashdroids that sometimes show their face here. Really. I swear that I'm not being sarcastic.
Mr. Metcalfe just got a whole lot of hits from us, therefore proving to his employers his competance as a desirable writer. Odd, isn't it, that one can do that today solely by writing bizarre gibberish and merging it with an seventh grade paper on animal farm?
Mr. Metcalfe, you're a real nowhere man. ----------------------------
I found one of you vinyl snobs among my coworkers and I did a test. The test was 'can you tell the difference between vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D and vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D , piped through an Apogee PSX-100 and written out digitall onto tape on a Tascam DA-38'.
The answer was that no, they couldn't. Which leads me to believe that my idea is right, that people who like vinyl, don't like vinyl. They like the warm, distorted sound that vinyl afficianados seem to adore. I admit though, I cheated a bit, and did do the digital recording at 24/96. And I'll also give you that a $500 turntable isn't exactly comparable to the digital side of my setup.
Tube amps? Records? They add tons of distortion... it just happens to be pleasing distortion. My personal opinion is that if the artist wanted the vinyl sound, they would've made a final pass after mastering which would consist solely of playing a vinyl version of the mastered record and recording it digitally.
(sorry about the double post. should've previewed) ----------------------------
I found one of you vinyl snobs among my coworkers and I did a test. The test was 'can you tell the difference between vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D and vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D , piped through an Apogee PSX-100 and written out digitall onto tape on a Tascam DA-38'. The answer was that no, they couldn't. Which leads me to believe that my idea is right, that people who like vinyl, don't like vinyl. They like the warm, distorted sound that vinyl afficianados seem to adore. I admit though, I cheated a bit, and did do the digital recording at 24/96. Tube amps? They add tons of distortion... it just happens to be pleasing distortion. My personal opinion is that if the artist wanted the vinyl sound, they would've made a final pass after mastering which would consist solely of playing a vinyl version of the mastered record and recording it digitally. ----------------------------
Not to be predictable, but yes, it *can* crash without a BSOD. I'd be willing to bet that he has a driver problem. I'd also be willing to bet he's not overclocking (who overclocks their corporate desktop?) and as for IRQ conflicts... he said at the office, most offices have fairly competent tech staff setting up machines initially. But you're right, we're all zealots, and crazy and w2k has no problems. just like Linux has no problems and can't crash. uh-huh. whatever. ----------------------------
I just received this letter in response to previous correspondance with the editor in chief of newsbytes, including discussion of publishing a correction instead of pulling the original article.
We are not publishing that follow-up report, since it would not be ethical to publish remarks that could be, or are suspected of being erroneous. We have also removed the original story from our Web site and have requested that Computer Currents do so too, which they have done. The next time this issue comes up we will do a more complete story with all sides represented.
Thanks very much to everyone for their comments and insight.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, you're agreeing with me yet claiming you're disagreeing. The trouble is that they are non-technical people who are setting precedent about the legality of certain pieces of software. While you and I both logically know that stealing passwords is illegal whether done through lophtcrack or a poorly configured, ancient version of sendmail, the average jury member does not. The fear that I have is that by allowing them to get charged with possession of burglary or theft tools, that the tools will become not illegal when used illegally, but just plain illegal. This is the first case that I'm aware of where the program used in the break-in has been classified in this manner, and I foresee a possibility of a dangerous precedent. However, as with all but seven other people who regularly post on /., I'm not a lawyer. Colour me paranoid if you will, but the charge that is listed with relation to l0phtcrack does not have an obvious 'if used to commit a crime' clause. I attempted to find the actual text of the law to check this, but couldn't find the statute on-line and don't have the free time to check a library.
----------------------------
Pennsylvania is known for all it's silly and slightly odd town names. I mean while you're visiting Beaver College drive through Amish country and go to Intercourse, if you run out of gas before you get there, you'll end up in Blue Ball. Oh, and if you're worried about anti-drug web censorship then don't mention that you're from Smoketown or Pottstown.
I hope my point is clear.
----------------------------
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the Philadelphia Inquirer is the major Philadelphia newspaper. It's real. It does *NOT* have articles regarding the end of the world, elvis, or how to lose 30 pounds in 30 minutes.
----------------------------
Because it's simply not true. Netscape navigator has shit-poor CSS and HTML4 support. IE5 introduced the world to a new level of compliance, piss-poor. Mozilla, while unstable, has almost perfect to the spec compliance for CSS and HTML4.
Anyway, I'm not going to waste any more of my energy on your troll.
----------------------------
If I murder somebody with a rock, I should get charged with murder, not possession of a rock.
The issue that I see is that many many programs can be exploited manually. What if you have a vulnerable network daemon and the attacker uses nc to feed it input. Is nc illegal then? How about if somebody writes a trojan in C, is the compiler illegal? the linker?
I'm not attempting to be difficult, I just fail to see the point of criminalizing a particular password recovery tool moreso than other methods of attack. If the alleged crimes are true, then I have no problems with them going down for what they did, but I don't see the how as being particularly relevant.
----------------------------
Actually it seems to me that the new plague on /. is whining, also known as 'bitching and moaning'. This is the fact that as I follow an interesting thread, inevitably somebody comments about moderation instead of the topic, an evil which this message is guilty of as well. If you have problems with moderation, then log in and sometimes you'll be a moderator.
Storal of the mory, whining gets you nowhere, so take 3 minutes, make yourself an account, and enjoy the ability to (meta)moderate. In the meantime I'll just be glad that I normally browse at +1.
----------------------------
nah, i don't hate anybody for being successful. as for me, no, i never worshipped amazon. they used to provide me with a nice service, and they were winning the war fairly. now, with the 1-click thing, it seems like they're resorting to cheating even though they were winning. It's low, and, well, I vote with my wallet.
Amazon.com is in the same category as Wal-mart, Borders, BN and Starbucks. They've managed to become very successful, but along the way have done things which make me quite willing to avoid using their services. I doubt they even notice my absence, but I get to know that I'm not knowingly financing actions which I don't agree with.
I have absolutely no problem with success, as long as you play fair and don't intentionally cause injuries.
----------------------------
Personally, I think he made it very clear how he felt when I read the phrase 'pissing in the well' in his personal e-mail to Monsieur Bezos.
... on piles of money, with hundreds of naked women.
I'm glad to see Tim come out and publicly comment on this 1-click patent.
I just did a few quick lookups on Quicken, and it would appear that so far my boycott of amazon has cost them a touch over $7k. Unfortunately the boycott is bound to fail since we can only help them lose more money, which is evidentally pinnacle to their business plan.
How does Jeff Bezos sleep at night?
----------------------------
Nah, you're wrong. By the time my PDA has 24-bit colour, people will be using a better encoding scheme than mp3.
----------------------------
The correct URL is http://us.imdb.com/StudioBrief/ 2000/20000222.html#3.
Original uncensored lyrics are available at: http://www.beef-cake.com /interactive/lyrics/blulyrics.html for those of you who want to see what all the fuss is aboot.
What is everybody laughing aboot?
----------------------------
The Linux NS is much more stable than the FreeBSD NS (scary, eh?). I'm posting this from Linux NS running on FreeBSD 3.4, a common enough option that there's actually a port for linux netscape in the freebsd ports collection.
----------------------------
Novell v. Microsoft isn't even a competition. Novell kicks Microsoft's ass handily in every area it tries to. Okay, so you can't play Solitaire on Novell, aside from that, it's great.
As for stability, it's an admin's dream. Power, extendibility, insert buzzword here, Novell is just plain great.
As for why you don't need those directory services, for your home machine, you don't. Now run a business. A large business. Now you need them.
----------------------------
I hate to say this, but for *good* quality printing from *nix, I've found the available answers to be 'buy a postscript printer', 'buy a postscript printer', and 'buy a postscript printer'. Unfortunately it's quite hard to justify the cost of a Color Laserjet 4500 or other "low-end" colour laser printers.
I'd be extremely happy if somebody could tell me how wrong I am.
----------------------------
First of all, you should understand System Administration to some degree, this will help you understand basics like daemons, permissions, basic networking, and figuring out what you need and what's just cruft on your system. A text which I gladly recommend is Essential System Administration. This will *not* secure your system but it will help. A lot. Step two, learn about security specifically. You can read Practical Unix and Internet Security which gives a good overview and a fair amount of detail on securing a system, and being assured that they remain that way.
Once you finish doing this, you'll be on your way to being a *competant* admin (even if it is just your own machine). From then on, while you'll be far from a security expert, when some kiddie checks your doorknob, you can be assured that your door is locked, and they'll move on.
I know the books I mentioned cost $35 or so, which if you're young might be a non-trivial amount of money. If it is, I suggest saving up and buying them anyway. If you understand the stuff in them, then you'll know what you need to look up on the net for further info.
Good luck, and feel free to e-mail me with any further questions.
----------------------------
I officially work 37.5 hours/week and am salaried so more work != more money. As for how much I work, well... due to some emergency bugfixes I worked 20 hours yesterday. so I guess with Monday's 10 hours, and the 4 hours I put in on Sunday just because I was bored, that I'm done for the week.
:-)
I'm not complaining either, I love my job and it's rare that I'm 'forced' to work overtime. I just find it absurd to think that most of us work a 33 hour week. I'm not sure where those jobs are, but sign me up for two of em, I'm used 66 hour weeks anyway
----------------------------
I officially work 37.5 hours/week and am salaried so more work != more money. As for how much I work, well... due to some emergency bugfixes I worked 20 hours yesterday. so I guess with Monday's 10 hours, and the 4 hours I put in on Sunday just because I was bored, that I'm done for the week. I'm not complaining either, I love my job and it's rare that I'm 'forced' to work overtime. I just find it absurd to think that most of us work a 33 hour week. I'm not sure where those jobs are, but sign me up for two of em, I'm used 66 hour weeks anyway :-)
----------------------------
I'll put 5USD that the conclusion of your second hypothesis is correct. :-)
.sig.
I defer to my
----------------------------
Not to mention the whole massive Les Miserables thing. South park was such an amazing satire of american culture, I loved it. Too bad some people never got past the phrase 'unclefucker' to realize what the movie is about.
----------------------------
if you read the book for starship troopers, then see the movie, you'll be horridly disappointed at the complete removal of all content from the book. However, if you watch the movie before the book as I did... you won't know and you'll say 'cheezy but fun' to the movie :-)
----------------------------
what with all this foolish nonsense about this God character people keep telling me about. I mean, it's quite odd really, this irrational belief in an odd pyramid scam. Hmm... I'll turn off the Christian flamebait now, but my point is simply that some of us don't believe that there is a God, and therefore we by definition *have* to have a different definition of marraige than yours. Mine is more of a committed relationship, filled with love and caring. That's it. I could care less if whatever higher beings that may or may not exist notice. But that's just me.
----------------------------
Web columnists get paid for bringing readers, and Mr. Metcalfe has succeeded with aplumb in doing that with this latest irrational comparison. Yes, Mr. Metcalfe, I swear that all Open Source software users are exactly like the unfortunately typical flaming slashdroids that sometimes show their face here. Really. I swear that I'm not being sarcastic.
Mr. Metcalfe just got a whole lot of hits from us, therefore proving to his employers his competance as a desirable writer. Odd, isn't it, that one can do that today solely by writing bizarre gibberish and merging it with an seventh grade paper on animal farm?
Mr. Metcalfe, you're a real nowhere man.
----------------------------
I found one of you vinyl snobs among my coworkers and I did a test. The test was 'can you tell the difference between vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D and vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D , piped through an Apogee PSX-100 and written out digitall onto tape on a Tascam DA-38'.
The answer was that no, they couldn't. Which leads me to believe that my idea is right, that people who like vinyl, don't like vinyl. They like the warm, distorted sound that vinyl afficianados seem to adore. I admit though, I cheated a bit, and did do the digital recording at 24/96. And I'll also give you that a $500 turntable isn't exactly comparable to the digital side of my setup.
Tube amps? Records? They add tons of distortion... it just happens to be pleasing distortion. My personal opinion is that if the artist wanted the vinyl sound, they would've made a final pass after mastering which would consist solely of playing a vinyl version of the mastered record and recording it digitally.
(sorry about the double post. should've previewed)
----------------------------
I found one of you vinyl snobs among my coworkers and I did a test. The test was 'can you tell the difference between vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D and vinyl played on a technics SL1200M3D , piped through an Apogee PSX-100 and written out digitall onto tape on a Tascam DA-38'. The answer was that no, they couldn't. Which leads me to believe that my idea is right, that people who like vinyl, don't like vinyl. They like the warm, distorted sound that vinyl afficianados seem to adore. I admit though, I cheated a bit, and did do the digital recording at 24/96. Tube amps? They add tons of distortion... it just happens to be pleasing distortion. My personal opinion is that if the artist wanted the vinyl sound, they would've made a final pass after mastering which would consist solely of playing a vinyl version of the mastered record and recording it digitally.
----------------------------
Not to be predictable, but yes, it *can* crash without a BSOD. I'd be willing to bet that he has a driver problem. I'd also be willing to bet he's not overclocking (who overclocks their corporate desktop?) and as for IRQ conflicts... he said at the office, most offices have fairly competent tech staff setting up machines initially. But you're right, we're all zealots, and crazy and w2k has no problems. just like Linux has no problems and can't crash. uh-huh. whatever.
----------------------------
I just received this letter in response to previous correspondance with the editor in chief of newsbytes, including discussion of publishing a correction instead of pulling the original article.
We are not publishing that follow-up report, since it would not be ethical to publish remarks that could be, or are suspected of being erroneous. We have also removed the original story from our Web site and have requested that Computer Currents do so too, which they have done. The next time this issue comes up we will do a more complete story with all sides represented.
Thanks very much to everyone for their comments and insight.
Sincerely,
editor in chief
----------------------------