While I'm not opposed to the distribution of virus for non-benign purposes, the phrase 'causing danger to data-processing systems' is incredibly broad. If I'm doing database development, and I somehow manage to bonehead the SQL so it says "DELETE * FROM users WHERE username LIKE '%'" under a rare condition, I just wrote a program which causes danger to data-processing systems which is actually just a bug.
I think it'll be a long time until anybody knows if this law was an intelligent move or not. It's certainly well-intentioned, but the possibilities for abuse of enforcement do exist.
Here's to hoping that Finnish judges are saner than their counterparts in America.
A lot of people have reacted in a way that I find truly shocking. There's been a few posts citing that they shouldn't live there, and feeling no pity. To those who feel this way, please check out http://geohazards.cr.usgs.gov/eq/graphics/usmap1.p df for a map of earthquake risk in America, and then think about how practical it is, in reality, to move everybody into the listed safe zones.
Also, there've been people who seem bothered by the presence of religion, stating that it doesn't help. Please remember that this is your view, it may not be THEIR view. Seeing as nobody can 100% explain the universe (science is great, but what caused the singularity which resulted in the big ban? no, we can't explain it.), it's best that we all just accept that somebody's beliefs might differ from yours. I'm a devout agnostic:), grew up in a christian household. when my mom grew ill with cancer a friend of mine would always rub her buddha's belly for her. I didn't understand it, but I appreciated it. After all, when disaster strikes, you try EVERYTHING to stop it.
As for the price of RAM, I don't particularly mind paying a bit more for reasons such as this.
And now the politically correct: 'please take whatever actions that you believe could possibly help the victims of this terrible tragedy.'
The CBC made a video about him and it's funny in a very accidental way. It's bizarre and I must say, Monsieur Troy is a bit... what's the word... insane, but it's worth the four bucks to watch it.
He doesn't ever get attacked by a bear (sorry to ruin the surprise) but the rest of it makes it worth it.
Role-playing is fine... I'm sure there's many a person who has had sexual play that's not quite kosher, but there's a difference. This guy was told 'I'm 13 years old' and then he proceeded to discuss sexual fantasies with this person. You just do NOT do that unless you can verify that the person is really a 45 year old housewife with a fetish.
They found kiddie porn on his computer AND he crossed state lines in order to hook up with this girl. That's so, so wrong. Personally, I hope he enjoys the company of his new boyfriends in jail. I don't think this is a defensible action.
This really makes me glad of one of the things that the ops of one music-chat channel I frequent do. Whenever we notice an underager, we try to befriend them in order to be sure that they can have somebody to talk to who is SAFE. To protect them from these perverts. Unfortunately I know (IRL) somebody who was the victims of one of a pedophilic bastard. After seeing the psychological damage it does, and the condition she was in previous to the abuse, it's quite obvious that pedophiles are a predatory, and dangerous breed.
NSI: if you're going to give us additional features, then
a) make them optional in an opt-in setup. you'll get fewer immediate signups, but they'll be people who wanted the service.
b) make them secure. your market is a reasonably technically savvy audiance, and they can spot this stuff a mile away.
c) make them RELEVENT. The world doesn't need Yet Another Web-mail provider. There's already hotmail, mail.com, etc, etc, etc. not to mention the fact that you targetted people who already administer their own domains. Most of us are happy with our domains.
d) follow your own rules. If I'm not allowed to use your database for spamming, you certainly aren't allowed to use it to spam either. that's just basic ethics.
Now if only they'd take this into consideration...
At my company we've got quite a few women geeks around. More men, but my department has 12 people in it, 4 of whom are geeks. I guess I've always been lucky, I've never had trouble finding myself a snappy little geek girl. There's something so amazing about a cute girl who calls you up and says 'something's wrong'... then proceeds to ask questions about why SNMPd is disappearing without a core file.
Useless... utterly useless.
on
CALEA update
·
· Score: 1
Okay, so this will stop drug dealers? Here's how a drug dealer gets around this one. 'dude, if you want to call me on the phone a gram of coke is a 'frag'' (stated in person).
The conversation later sounds like this "yo dude, man, want to play some quake?" (can i buy some coke?) "sure dude, what's the fraglimit?" (sure, how much?) "I dunno, let's play for 12 frags" (12 grams)
Okay, now the drug dealer, without encryption, has just made a 12 gram deal, in a basically unbreakable code. he's not a drug dealer, he just likes to play quake.
You've just made me join the ranks of converts from Intel. I'm currently helping a friend of mine with a home network now that he has DSL. I had spec'd Intel, but I just fired off an e-mail telling him to buy the 3coms instead. Thank you for finally realizing that Open Source users are customers too!
While the company I work for is fine (ain't unix grand?) there are many which truly aren't.
My father is in charge of for a large (read multi-billion dollar profit/year) chemical company. Fortunately, companies like this also have the resources to do GOOD y2k testing, but they found a lot of little snafu's. Things like control devices which died after y2k. This is likely to affect smaller companies harder as they don't have the time to test every widget in a complicated system. The effect of one of these failures actually wouldn't have been particularly nasty, except for the fact that an affected plant would shut down before y2k, attempt to start after y2k, and it would fail to start for mysterious reasons. This would mean lost revenue... etc etc.
Personally, I'm going to be out of town for New Year's, and just in case there's a problem with something, I'll have a case of wine, and maybe some crackers. I'll be fine:)
Currently, I am ignoring the evacuation orders, as nothing much will actually happen for another 10 hours or so, but after that...
I think the key word there was 'currently'. I'd assume that this fellow will have the good sense to bail out of there at some point between the time of his post, and 10 hours or so after that, when it starts to hit. If he doesn't, I won't even discuss that. Let's just hope he has the good sense to realize that while it may be fine to ignore evacuation orders for a bit (perhaps to stave off looters?), it's certainly not the most intelligent thing to ignore them during the storm.
It would seem to me that the journalist took what was a limited scope scientific investigation and ended up implying that all of us geek geniuses lack social graces, etc. I personally think that while this may explain a certain percentage of "non-standard behaviorisms", it's certainly not the norm.
I know many "geeks" who are physically capable, very interesting, and have no issues with "small talk". I truly believe that the "35-year old computer programmer virgin" is the exception, not the rule.
At my office there's one person who comes to mind after reading this article, but that's one person out of an entire department full of ivy-league certified geniuses, most of which you could NEVER guess their occupation to judge solely by looks, coordination, manners, etc.
I'd likely buy softcover. By the time a book has worn out, generally there's at least a minor update available, so I'd really rather pay $30 twice than $50 once, just on the offchance that the update is on the one page I need:)
I would love such a beast, and even more, I'd love the ability to 'subscribe' to a particular book. I'm not too terribly interested in the NT series of books for instance, no matter how good they are.
I currently receive the ora catalogue, but I don't really have time to crosscheck it against my library of 30 or 40 o'reilly titles to check for new versions. Thus I tend to occasionally have some version lag, that I'd LOVE to get rid of.
I'd take this as speculation at best. Has anyone else noticed that Babbage's (at least those near me) have large amounts of Dreamcast stuff, right near a sign which proclaims that the Playstation II release date will be '2001?'. Somehow I smell a fish with the fact that nobody's published release dates seem to mesh at all with Sony's announced schedule.
Personally I loved the Babbage's manager who told me that 'Microsoft is backing Dreamcast, so you know it won't fail. Microsoft has never made a bad product.' I burst out laughing, purchased my copy of Kingpin and made a mental note to never ever shop there again.
this is true, a good DAC should take care of jitter, but I'd guess that anybody who is using an SBLive! for serious music doesn't have an Apogee PSX-100/DA-2000/etc... lying around:)
I do quit a bit of database development at work. My reasoning for ODBC is that it's not as tied to a specific vendor's database.
I'd really like to understand what made you think that I was stating that the use of PHP and ODBC somehow obliterated the need for structure and/or rules, perhaps there's a misunderstanding? I'd appreciate if you'd e-mail me. (I'd e-mail you, but you're an AC)
As some swoon over W2K, others recall the hype over Java.
To judge by Microsoft Corp's red-hot stock price and press clipppings, one might conclude that software giant RedHat Software Inc. is in for trouble.
Microsoft is the gargantuan Redmond company that has run up a massive market capitilization by peddling a version of 'windows', the decreasingly popular high-cost computer operating system.
But mention Microsoft and Windows to Linus Torvalds, kernel manager for the upcoming Linix kernel, and he'd probably seem almost on the verge of stifling a yawn. He'd likely say something like, "when you look at the hype versus the reality today, there's a big disconnect, besides it doesn't really affect me"
Maybe he would be whistling in the dark. But then, Linux has been here before.
Remember Java? That was the radical new technoligy of four years ago, an upstart product that threatened to smash operating system dependance once and for all.
Born in the labs of Sun Microsystems Inc. and intended at first to run cable TV controller boxes... this reporter has just realized that Java and Linux and W2K are very different both in form, feature and implementation making the Java comparison utterly useless.
Java basically died for original purposes.
Talk to Linux developers and they'll tell you that a similar fate awaits W2K. Kevin Way, director of FUD at ThereIsNoLinux Inc., says that W2K hype has already peaked. "Cold hard reality is coming to bear," he says.
Kevin points to the desperation of almost laughable articles which make claims like W2K being ready for heavy-duty tasks even when industry groups like the gartner group are recommending against adoption for several years. Also, W2K is notoriously complex, expensive and unstable, making it a poor choice for anybody but the most overfunded and masochistic users.
"There certainly are categories where W2K is a strong competitor," Way admits. For example he says it makes a good gaming platform. But Kevin says W2K still isn't ready for heavy-duty tasks that Linux, *BSD and other such open-source projects are designed to perform.
"They're probably a toddler now, instead of an adolescent," Way says.
Still, the java experience is utterly unrelated, yet somehow suggests that it's too early to say what W2K will do assuming it ever grows up.
As was noted, sound card manufacturers want to make money more than music, so things like the SBLive don't exactly follow the specs. The SBLive says it has a S/PDIF over coax output, but its output is not properly terminated internally, and leaves open the possibility of a ground loop, also it outputs at too high of a voltage, according to S/PDIF specs. Also, I would not describe the Live! as a low jitter device, and large amounts of jitter do become audible on beter output systems.
Some sort of database backend done through ODBC so that you ditch most of the 'but we don't have somebody who knows that database' issues, then a whole mess of php or c or whatever is neccessary for the application.
I'd be more than willing to help on the database/php side of something like this assuming it was well organized and such.
I installed gnome on my BSD machine yesterday. the process consisted of:
cd/usr/ports/x11/gnome make install
done. all dependencies accounted for, etc.
honestly, if you're on BSD it's dead easy, if you're on any major linux distribution, it should be almost equally dead easy, there's a site somewhere (no idea of the URL offhand) which keeps recent versions of gnome on tap in (S)RPM format.
How many times have you seen those three lines and wondered 'what do they do?' and decided to trace them? With open source it's terribly easy to do so and if I noted three lines of code in PAM which allowed access via a third party, I'd certainly be quite public about my announcement.
has to be BSD style init. BSD init has the advantage that all configuration parameters are located in one nice easy to find place. SysV style init on the other hand offers an easier method if inserting/deleting services, and runlevels are useful. inittab is great for keeping something running, ttytab from BSD is poor in comparison, the only way I can keep something running from ttytab is if I hack it so that it's a TTY.
yep, it's that easy. physical_access = you_can_do_anything.
at the lilo prompt, instead of typing 'linux' (or whatever) type 'linux single'. bam, instant root access shell.
as for the other operating systems, assuming they're not using a cryptographic file system, your worst case scenario is add the drive to an alternate machine which can access the filesystem, mount it as/mnt/serveriwanttohack, and then edit/mnt/serveriwanttohack/etc/passwd.
I, personally, am not concerned with these kinds of 'vulnerabilities' considering that in almost all cases, if you have something truly secure, they're locked away in a camera'd, card-access only server room anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm not opposed to the distribution of virus for non-benign purposes, the phrase 'causing danger to data-processing systems' is incredibly broad. If I'm doing database development, and I somehow manage to bonehead the SQL so it says "DELETE * FROM users WHERE username LIKE '%'" under a rare condition, I just wrote a program which causes danger to data-processing systems which is actually just a bug.
I think it'll be a long time until anybody knows if this law was an intelligent move or not. It's certainly well-intentioned, but the possibilities for abuse of enforcement do exist.
Here's to hoping that Finnish judges are saner than their counterparts in America.
Jessie Download
Jessie project page
SGI OSS project page
Enjoy!
A lot of people have reacted in a way that I find truly shocking. There's been a few posts citing that they shouldn't live there, and feeling no pity. To those who feel this way, please check out http://geohazards.cr.usgs.gov/eq/graphics/usmap1.p df for a map of earthquake risk in America, and then think about how practical it is, in reality, to move everybody into the listed safe zones.
:), grew up in a christian household. when my mom grew ill with cancer a friend of mine would always rub her buddha's belly for her. I didn't understand it, but I appreciated it. After all, when disaster strikes, you try EVERYTHING to stop it.
Also, there've been people who seem bothered by the presence of religion, stating that it doesn't help. Please remember that this is your view, it may not be THEIR view. Seeing as nobody can 100% explain the universe (science is great, but what caused the singularity which resulted in the big ban? no, we can't explain it.), it's best that we all just accept that somebody's beliefs might differ from yours. I'm a devout agnostic
As for the price of RAM, I don't particularly mind paying a bit more for reasons such as this.
And now the politically correct: 'please take whatever actions that you believe could possibly help the victims of this terrible tragedy.'
The CBC made a video about him and it's funny in a very accidental way. It's bizarre and I must say, Monsieur Troy is a bit... what's the word... insane, but it's worth the four bucks to watch it.
He doesn't ever get attacked by a bear (sorry to ruin the surprise) but the rest of it makes it worth it.
Role-playing is fine... I'm sure there's many a person who has had sexual play that's not quite kosher, but there's a difference. This guy was told 'I'm 13 years old' and then he proceeded to discuss sexual fantasies with this person. You just do NOT do that unless you can verify that the person is really a 45 year old housewife with a fetish.
They found kiddie porn on his computer AND he crossed state lines in order to hook up with this girl. That's so, so wrong. Personally, I hope he enjoys the company of his new boyfriends in jail.
I don't think this is a defensible action.
This really makes me glad of one of the things that the ops of one music-chat channel I frequent do. Whenever we notice an underager, we try to befriend them in order to be sure that they can have somebody to talk to who is SAFE. To protect them from these perverts. Unfortunately I know (IRL) somebody who was the victims of one of a pedophilic bastard. After seeing the psychological damage it does, and the condition she was in previous to the abuse, it's quite obvious that pedophiles are a predatory, and dangerous breed.
NSI: if you're going to give us additional features, then
a) make them optional in an opt-in setup. you'll get fewer immediate signups, but they'll be people who wanted the service.
b) make them secure. your market is a reasonably technically savvy audiance, and they can spot this stuff a mile away.
c) make them RELEVENT. The world doesn't need Yet Another Web-mail provider. There's already hotmail, mail.com, etc, etc, etc. not to mention the fact that you targetted people who already administer their own domains. Most of us are happy with our domains.
d) follow your own rules. If I'm not allowed to use your database for spamming, you certainly aren't allowed to use it to spam either. that's just basic ethics.
Now if only they'd take this into consideration...
At my company we've got quite a few women geeks around. More men, but my department has 12 people in it, 4 of whom are geeks. I guess I've always been lucky, I've never had trouble finding myself a snappy little geek girl. There's something so amazing about a cute girl who calls you up and says 'something's wrong'... then proceeds to ask questions about why SNMPd is disappearing without a core file.
Okay, so this will stop drug dealers? Here's how a drug dealer gets around this one. 'dude, if you want to call me on the phone a gram of coke is a 'frag'' (stated in person).
The conversation later sounds like this
"yo dude, man, want to play some quake?" (can i buy some coke?)
"sure dude, what's the fraglimit?" (sure, how much?)
"I dunno, let's play for 12 frags" (12 grams)
Okay, now the drug dealer, without encryption, has just made a 12 gram deal, in a basically unbreakable code. he's not a drug dealer, he just likes to play quake.
You've just made me join the ranks of converts from Intel. I'm currently helping a friend of mine with a home network now that he has DSL. I had spec'd Intel, but I just fired off an e-mail telling him to buy the 3coms instead. Thank you for finally realizing that Open Source users are customers too!
While the company I work for is fine (ain't unix grand?) there are many which truly aren't.
:)
My father is in charge of for a large (read multi-billion dollar profit/year) chemical company. Fortunately, companies like this also have the resources to do GOOD y2k testing, but they found a lot of little snafu's. Things like control devices which died after y2k. This is likely to affect smaller companies harder as they don't have the time to test every widget in a complicated system. The effect of one of these failures actually wouldn't have been particularly nasty, except for the fact that an affected plant would shut down before y2k, attempt to start after y2k, and it would fail to start for mysterious reasons. This would mean lost revenue... etc etc.
Personally, I'm going to be out of town for New Year's, and just in case there's a problem with something, I'll have a case of wine, and maybe some crackers. I'll be fine
Currently, I am ignoring the evacuation orders, as nothing much will actually happen for another 10 hours or so, but after that...
I think the key word there was 'currently'. I'd assume that this fellow will have the good sense to bail out of there at some point between the time of his post, and 10 hours or so after that, when it starts to hit. If he doesn't, I won't even discuss that. Let's just hope he has the good sense to realize that while it may be fine to ignore evacuation orders for a bit (perhaps to stave off looters?), it's certainly not the most intelligent thing to ignore them during the storm.
It would seem to me that the journalist took what was a limited scope scientific investigation and ended up implying that all of us geek geniuses lack social graces, etc. I personally think that while this may explain a certain percentage of "non-standard behaviorisms", it's certainly not the norm.
:)
I know many "geeks" who are physically capable, very interesting, and have no issues with "small talk". I truly believe that the "35-year old computer programmer virgin" is the exception, not the rule.
At my office there's one person who comes to mind after reading this article, but that's one person out of an entire department full of ivy-league certified geniuses, most of which you could NEVER guess their occupation to judge solely by looks, coordination, manners, etc.
Fie on this anti-geek FUD
I'd likely buy softcover. By the time a book has worn out, generally there's at least a minor update available, so I'd really rather pay $30 twice than $50 once, just on the offchance that the update is on the one page I need :)
I would love such a beast, and even more, I'd love the ability to 'subscribe' to a particular book. I'm not too terribly interested in the NT series of books for instance, no matter how good they are.
I currently receive the ora catalogue, but I don't really have time to crosscheck it against my library of 30 or 40 o'reilly titles to check for new versions. Thus I tend to occasionally have some version lag, that I'd LOVE to get rid of.
I'd take this as speculation at best. Has anyone else noticed that Babbage's (at least those near me) have large amounts of Dreamcast stuff, right near a sign which proclaims that the Playstation II release date will be '2001?'. Somehow I smell a fish with the fact that nobody's published release dates seem to mesh at all with Sony's announced schedule.
Personally I loved the Babbage's manager who told me that 'Microsoft is backing Dreamcast, so you know it won't fail. Microsoft has never made a bad product.' I burst out laughing, purchased my copy of Kingpin and made a mental note to never ever shop there again.
this is true, a good DAC should take care of jitter, but I'd guess that anybody who is using an SBLive! for serious music doesn't have an Apogee PSX-100/DA-2000/etc... lying around :)
I do quit a bit of database development at work. My reasoning for ODBC is that it's not as tied to a specific vendor's database.
I'd really like to understand what made you think that I was stating that the use of PHP and ODBC somehow obliterated the need for structure and/or rules, perhaps there's a misunderstanding? I'd appreciate if you'd e-mail me. (I'd e-mail you, but you're an AC)
As some swoon over W2K, others recall the hype over Java.
To judge by Microsoft Corp's red-hot stock price and press clipppings, one might conclude that software giant RedHat Software Inc. is in for trouble.
Microsoft is the gargantuan Redmond company that has run up a massive market capitilization by peddling a version of 'windows', the decreasingly popular high-cost computer operating system.
But mention Microsoft and Windows to Linus Torvalds, kernel manager for the upcoming Linix kernel, and he'd probably seem almost on the verge of stifling a yawn. He'd likely say something like, "when you look at the hype versus the reality today, there's a big disconnect, besides it doesn't really affect me"
Maybe he would be whistling in the dark. But then, Linux has been here before.
Remember Java? That was the radical new technoligy of four years ago, an upstart product that threatened to smash operating system dependance once and for all.
Born in the labs of Sun Microsystems Inc. and intended at first to run cable TV controller boxes... this reporter has just realized that Java and Linux and W2K are very different both in form, feature and implementation making the Java comparison utterly useless.
Java basically died for original purposes.
Talk to Linux developers and they'll tell you that a similar fate awaits W2K. Kevin Way, director of FUD at ThereIsNoLinux Inc., says that W2K hype has already peaked. "Cold hard reality is coming to bear," he says.
Kevin points to the desperation of almost laughable articles which make claims like W2K being ready for heavy-duty tasks even when industry groups like the gartner group are recommending against adoption for several years. Also, W2K is notoriously complex, expensive and unstable, making it a poor choice for anybody but the most overfunded and masochistic users.
"There certainly are categories where W2K is a strong competitor," Way admits. For example he says it makes a good gaming platform. But Kevin says W2K still isn't ready for heavy-duty tasks that Linux, *BSD and other such open-source projects are designed to perform.
"They're probably a toddler now, instead of an adolescent," Way says.
Still, the java experience is utterly unrelated, yet somehow suggests that it's too early to say what W2K will do assuming it ever grows up.
As was noted, sound card manufacturers want to make money more than music, so things like the SBLive don't exactly follow the specs. The SBLive says it has a S/PDIF over coax output, but its output is not properly terminated internally, and leaves open the possibility of a ground loop, also it outputs at too high of a voltage, according to S/PDIF specs. Also, I would not describe the Live! as a low jitter device, and large amounts of jitter do become audible on beter output systems.
Some sort of database backend done through ODBC so that you ditch most of the 'but we don't have somebody who knows that database' issues, then a whole mess of php or c or whatever is neccessary for the application.
I'd be more than willing to help on the database/php side of something like this assuming it was well organized and such.
I installed gnome on my BSD machine yesterday. the process consisted of:
/usr/ports/x11/gnome
cd
make install
done. all dependencies accounted for, etc.
honestly, if you're on BSD it's dead easy, if you're on any major linux distribution, it should be almost equally dead easy, there's a site somewhere (no idea of the URL offhand) which keeps recent versions of gnome on tap in (S)RPM format.
How many times have you seen those three lines and wondered 'what do they do?' and decided to trace them? With open source it's terribly easy to do so and if I noted three lines of code in PAM which allowed access via a third party, I'd certainly be quite public about my announcement.
has to be BSD style init. BSD init has the advantage that all configuration parameters are located in one nice easy to find place. SysV style init on the other hand offers an easier method if inserting/deleting services, and runlevels are useful. inittab is great for keeping something running, ttytab from BSD is poor in comparison, the only way I can keep something running from ttytab is if I hack it so that it's a TTY.
yep, it's that easy. physical_access = you_can_do_anything.
/mnt/serveriwanttohack, and then edit /mnt/serveriwanttohack/etc/passwd.
at the lilo prompt, instead of typing 'linux' (or whatever) type 'linux single'. bam, instant root access shell.
as for the other operating systems, assuming they're not using a cryptographic file system, your worst case scenario is add the drive to an alternate machine which can access the filesystem, mount it as
I, personally, am not concerned with these kinds of 'vulnerabilities' considering that in almost all cases, if you have something truly secure, they're locked away in a camera'd, card-access only server room anyway.
I believe we could improve slashdot and the free software communities by administering the following quiz:
1) Do you believe that the GPL will save the world?
2) Do you believe that the GPL will ruin the world?
3) Do you believe the BSD licensing will save the world?
4) Do you believe that BSD licensing will ruin the world?
5) Do you get visibly upset if somebody says 'free software' instead of 'open source'?
and then shoot everybody who answers 'yes' to anything.
(quiz stolen from an acquaintance of mine)