Re:The main thing I think the article misses ...
on
The Next Generation
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
First off: There's plenty of people yelling over cell-phones changing people's nature.
And I'd easily say that technology has changed human nature, or perhaps allowed human nature to be shown more openly.
Humans are greedy, and selfish, and except for small times, inherently evil. But of course we have to work together to live. Technology and fucking (population booms) are changing that. You can't look to your neighbor anymore and know that if he died, then you'd have alot more work to do.
Humans won't change (though biotech may succeed I hope) but their circumstances and values may; and those are probably more important.
The only problem is that the proposed bill will not support privacy. It significantly hurts the "way things should be".
the "Way Things Should Be(tm)":
companies may not collect any of my information without my explicit, non-clickthrough authorization. They may not store longer than a week, resell, retransmit, redistribute, or publish my information without my explicit,non-clickthrough authorization, and only then for the purpose to complete the service I requested of them, for the limited period of time I specify.
It's my information. My Privacy.
This bill says that only my "personally identifyable" information is mine. But I'm REQUIRED to give that for the right to drive, or to get social security, or to get a credit card, or even a loan to buy a house.
From there that information can be correlated to other things to find out if I drink, or like kinky sex, or vote Republican. People, Companies, and even worse my Government can then use that to persecute me.
Do not accept less than full control of your privacy.
Actually, if you have any sort of vlanning going on almost all of your traffic will visit a few routers, which can then do ACL work. (messy, but effective)
Furthermore if you're protecting say, a payroll server, it will only have 1 ethernet connection. Put the firewall there.
(note: I personally think firewalls are a BAD idea. The entire concept of a closed box firewall defeats the entire purpose of security. If you want machines to be secure, make them secure, don't put filtering in front of them and expect that to be fool/hack-proof. The only place for ACL's is to protect machines that run vulnerable services that you must run, or machines that you wish to limit access to via ip (due to someone trying to brute force passwords, flooding, etc.))
Who needs a firewall nic that needs a central policy server? Anyone who can connect to the central policy server is probably already behind the firewall.
Lately I've been having thoughts regarding the internet as a whole. General nostalgia about times when the internet was free, and good, and exciting.
I worry that the Internet is doomed to irrevicably loose what made it so good (for me). Popup ads, spam, trolls, lamers in the doom-like of the season, and the concept of 'cyberwar' fill me with despair over how misguided most of humanity is. I fear that what is probably the best invention of my lifetime will be tarnished by greed, selfishness, and stupidity.
I've had problems with 3com905(b and c) with certain switches. The cards would eventually cease auto-negotiating with certain types of switches. Probably something on the card died due to heat/use. Granted it's only been 3-4 cards in maybe 200 i've seen, but still; something to note.
Doesn't anyone remember when viruses would actually do something?
Used to be when you got a virus it would munge your bootsector, and as much of the disk as it could after it mailed itself you all your friends.
The viruses these days just seem to be made to propogate as far as possible, or to do something juvenile like deface web sites.
The only reason they are only hype these days is because the payload is (relatively) innoxious. One line of code could make the few hundred thousand of computers infected last year dead, rather than popping up a cute little message.
That just because they were community developed, doesn't mean the company didn't give out specs and info to facilatate the community's work.
3com cards seem to work on everything Recent Intel network gear Recent Nvidia 3dfx used to IBM (even before the Linux money, their laptops worked well)
From what it looks like Ximian just made something that automatically interfaces with Exchange 2000's web interface rather than using the same protocol Outlook uses (though I could be wrong)
Re:What's wrong with HTTP?
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 2
Becuase it was made with a simple thing in mind:
Send short request, get slightly longer short response back; end.
If applications actually used this, that'd be great, but in the real world they don't. Almost every application is better served by a persistant connection.
And just because firewalls only let those things through, doesn't mean they should.
In Outlook XP at least, there is no longer a "corporate" mode, Exchange is just one more option. (meaning you can use exchange and imap at the same time (wow)).
From what I understand you can still send calendar requests using the 'local' calendar, you just cannot see when other people are scheduled (which is why you have a web browser or something that can view the centralized DB you have elsewhere).
You'd need to schedule something to run every so often to check if the user modifies/deletes something (or write a proper com addin) so that Outlook and the server are synchronized, but the idea is more that Outlook functionality would be ancillary to the full functionality of the program.
The full functionality would exist in something you had control over, like a cli client, or a web front end (though web front ends are bad, ugly, and limited), or through an IM. There are many community run IM clients (Trillian!) that could probably very easily add functionality for this.
IMO the IM tie in is logical because (to me) the protocols to do both are very similar, and to a degree help solve quick communication problems.
Anyways, I ramble... The reason I originally looked into the 'solution' isn't so much to get windows users off of outlook (which would be nice, but imo, impossible) but to get everyone else into scheduling, and get control of the server. Plus it is something simple, for I am no great coder.
Re:Becuase of Stupidity of course
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
*nod* though what sort of security do you gain if everything you could do on a "wide-open" setup, could be done via port 80?
Think a little.
Becuase of Stupidity of course
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It's becoming more and more common that the "Internet" is just Internet Explorer to most people. So some smart fellow thinks it'd be a grand idea if services could be served this way, to appease the lowest common denominator. PHB's get ahold of it, and wham! off it goes to the media, and in 2-3 years everyone (hopefully) realises what a bad idea it was.
If you want a unified 'client' for all services, make one, don't kludge everything onto http. Please...
One thing that I've thought about, and is *ugly* albeit workable, is having a plugin/attachment to outlook so it can access "proper" calendaring. It's not terribly hard I recently found to write a script to enter and retrieve calendar information in outlook, using outlook's dll's.
It's a simple COM interface, which can even be accessed by PHP (which I used, because VB sucks (imo) and c*'s string parsing is painful). Why not just attach an IM style (or better yet, a real fekking IM) mini-server to the php script? Normal calendar invites go out via email, get grabbed by the mail server, and sent via the IM (or the protocol used) to the little mini-server. Have a mechanism to accept the invite, and the php script enters the invite into the user's calendar, or a central open-format database where other clients can see info.
(note: php cal access source available on request, just reply)
IMO the best way to break Exchange in the office is by including calendaring into a corporate IM service. It must be done quickly, as MS isn't dumb, and Exchange 2000 includes IM, though almost nobody uses it!
Oh yeh, my bad. Though it's debatable that the ranks in Profession(lawyer) are necissary to do the feat, you might need to make a Profession(lawyer) check (DC 25) to avoid prison/fines though...
Nice sig btw, Bruce Cambell and John DeLancie together in the old west, couldn't fail (unless of course it's on during like Sunday at 11 am)
If they are humans, they can have 2 clean-room reverse-engineering feats at level 1! =D
*ahem* on a more serious note:
Actually if the DMCA is invoked then the argument isn't that they copied Blizzard's stuff, or even reverse engineered it. Its because Blizzard does key-checking with their multiplayer games to make sure you bought a legitimate copy (or have a good key-gen) of their game. The bnetd version does not include this because they don't care about keychecking, they just want to play the game.
Blizzard will argue that this will invalidate their copyright protection (cd-keys) because people can now play multiplayer without buying a license (cd-key). And they're right.
bnetd will likely argue one of a few tracks:
a) cd-keys aren't effective copyright protection. I have a starcraft key-gen. Google knows of them...
b) that they have a clickthrough license agreement (do they? i dunno) that says "by downloading this source, I agree to only use it with legitimately purchased copies of Blizzard games." or some such.
In a legal sense I don't see bnetd have too much to argue about except that the DMCA sucks, and cd-keys suck, or cd-keys are not copyright protection as far as the DMCA is concerned.
I think there should be public schools. I think there should be computers in public schools. I think public schools should pay for the software they teach.
As everyone so vociferously flamed, this will likely cost the school great amounts of money even if they are in compliance. IMO the school should hold out until the auditors come with a search warrant, and they should sue the bejesus out of the company/state if they *are* in compliance for defamation/harassment.
I mean seriously, what judge is going to issue a warrant to search a public school without evidence?
And people say windows is bloated enough to begin with! =D
Only problem with this imo, is that "Joe User" will never find it. In my previos example OEMs could color "their" version however they'd like at install.
Sure power users could still do their own install and do what they'd like, but power users are the vast minority of users these days (as any phone monkey can tell you)
No, but wouldn't it be better if during the windows install it gave you a bevy of choices for each component install?
Have a "software disk" or two or three that includes alternative options.
Install Web Browser?:
(o) Microsoft Internet Explorer ( ) Netscape Navigator ( ) Opera ( ) Mozilla Clone ( ) None
Have options for everything. Their stuff will be default, but allow others to modify installers to install other things as their own distro. MS gets the cash for the sale, with perhaps some for the distro maker due to "value added" stuff.
Because if you notice, those same Alternative OSes are gaining in bloat becuase there's becoming less and less things that you need to go and find and install, because it all comes with the distro.
It was perhaps a slight troll, though yes. and they should have to show the license. This is the way things work. What I was trying to point out (perhaps a little too indirectly for the slashdot crowd) was that if you have a problem with the system, change the system, not the problem.
Software licenses inherently lead to this sort of problem. They always will until you put the burden on the seller, or until you eliminate licensing. (or do something clever)
And yes. It *is* an unreasonable standard, though with a warrant (which the school can delay until MS shows with a warrant) they will still have to show licenses. Of course it blows... so change it.
Slashdot Mirror
First off: There's plenty of people yelling over cell-phones changing people's nature.
And I'd easily say that technology has changed human nature, or perhaps allowed human nature to be shown more openly.
Humans are greedy, and selfish, and except for small times, inherently evil. But of course we have to work together to live. Technology and fucking (population booms) are changing that. You can't look to your neighbor anymore and know that if he died, then you'd have alot more work to do.
Humans won't change (though biotech may succeed I hope) but their circumstances and values may; and those are probably more important.
The only problem is that the proposed bill will not support privacy. It significantly hurts the "way things should be".
the "Way Things Should Be(tm)":
companies may not collect any of my information without my explicit, non-clickthrough authorization. They may not store longer than a week, resell, retransmit, redistribute, or publish my information without my explicit,non-clickthrough authorization, and only then for the purpose to complete the service I requested of them, for the limited period of time I specify.
It's my information. My Privacy.
This bill says that only my "personally identifyable" information is mine. But I'm REQUIRED to give that for the right to drive, or to get social security, or to get a credit card, or even a loan to buy a house.
From there that information can be correlated to other things to find out if I drink, or like kinky sex, or vote Republican. People, Companies, and even worse my Government can then use that to persecute me.
Do not accept less than full control of your privacy.
Actually, if you have any sort of vlanning going on almost all of your traffic will visit a few routers, which can then do ACL work. (messy, but effective)
Furthermore if you're protecting say, a payroll server, it will only have 1 ethernet connection. Put the firewall there.
(note: I personally think firewalls are a BAD idea. The entire concept of a closed box firewall defeats the entire purpose of security. If you want machines to be secure, make them secure, don't put filtering in front of them and expect that to be fool/hack-proof. The only place for ACL's is to protect machines that run vulnerable services that you must run, or machines that you wish to limit access to via ip (due to someone trying to brute force passwords, flooding, etc.))
Then why don't you have an internal firewall? It's foolish not to these days as prolly 80% of your attacks will be internal.
Who needs a firewall nic that needs a central policy server? Anyone who can connect to the central policy server is probably already behind the firewall.
Remote users? They all use laptops.
What's that leave?
Lately I've been having thoughts regarding the internet as a whole. General nostalgia about times when the internet was free, and good, and exciting.
:[
I worry that the Internet is doomed to irrevicably loose what made it so good (for me). Popup ads, spam, trolls, lamers in the doom-like of the season, and the concept of 'cyberwar' fill me with despair over how misguided most of humanity is. I fear that what is probably the best invention of my lifetime will be tarnished by greed, selfishness, and stupidity.
Guess this is how Environmentalists feel...
Heh
while(1){
~My_Computer();
}
I've had problems with 3com905(b and c) with certain switches. The cards would eventually cease auto-negotiating with certain types of switches. Probably something on the card died due to heat/use. Granted it's only been 3-4 cards in maybe 200 i've seen, but still; something to note.
Maybe the reason Code Red was ineffective was because it was overhyped, and more people installed prevention/knew to avoid it?
Food for thought.
Doesn't anyone remember when viruses would actually do something?
Used to be when you got a virus it would munge your bootsector, and as much of the disk as it could after it mailed itself you all your friends.
The viruses these days just seem to be made to propogate as far as possible, or to do something juvenile like deface web sites.
The only reason they are only hype these days is because the payload is (relatively) innoxious. One line of code could make the few hundred thousand of computers infected last year dead, rather than popping up a cute little message.
WarDriving for WaReZ.
That just because they were community developed, doesn't mean the company didn't give out specs and info to facilatate the community's work.
3com cards seem to work on everything
Recent Intel network gear
Recent Nvidia
3dfx used to
IBM (even before the Linux money, their laptops worked well)
From what it looks like Ximian just made something that automatically interfaces with Exchange 2000's web interface rather than using the same protocol Outlook uses (though I could be wrong)
Becuase it was made with a simple thing in mind:
Send short request, get slightly longer short response back; end.
If applications actually used this, that'd be great, but in the real world they don't. Almost every application is better served by a persistant connection.
And just because firewalls only let those things through, doesn't mean they should.
In Outlook XP at least, there is no longer a "corporate" mode, Exchange is just one more option. (meaning you can use exchange and imap at the same time (wow)).
From what I understand you can still send calendar requests using the 'local' calendar, you just cannot see when other people are scheduled (which is why you have a web browser or something that can view the centralized DB you have elsewhere).
You'd need to schedule something to run every so often to check if the user modifies/deletes something (or write a proper com addin) so that Outlook and the server are synchronized, but the idea is more that Outlook functionality would be ancillary to the full functionality of the program.
The full functionality would exist in something you had control over, like a cli client, or a web front end (though web front ends are bad, ugly, and limited), or through an IM. There are many community run IM clients (Trillian!) that could probably very easily add functionality for this.
IMO the IM tie in is logical because (to me) the protocols to do both are very similar, and to a degree help solve quick communication problems.
Anyways, I ramble... The reason I originally looked into the 'solution' isn't so much to get windows users off of outlook (which would be nice, but imo, impossible) but to get everyone else into scheduling, and get control of the server. Plus it is something simple, for I am no great coder.
*nod* though what sort of security do you gain if everything you could do on a "wide-open" setup, could be done via port 80?
Think a little.
It's becoming more and more common that the "Internet" is just Internet Explorer to most people. So some smart fellow thinks it'd be a grand idea if services could be served this way, to appease the lowest common denominator. PHB's get ahold of it, and wham! off it goes to the media, and in 2-3 years everyone (hopefully) realises what a bad idea it was.
If you want a unified 'client' for all services, make one, don't kludge everything onto http. Please...
One thing that I've thought about, and is *ugly* albeit workable, is having a plugin/attachment to outlook so it can access "proper" calendaring. It's not terribly hard I recently found to write a script to enter and retrieve calendar information in outlook, using outlook's dll's.
It's a simple COM interface, which can even be accessed by PHP (which I used, because VB sucks (imo) and c*'s string parsing is painful). Why not just attach an IM style (or better yet, a real fekking IM) mini-server to the php script? Normal calendar invites go out via email, get grabbed by the mail server, and sent via the IM (or the protocol used) to the little mini-server. Have a mechanism to accept the invite, and the php script enters the invite into the user's calendar, or a central open-format database where other clients can see info.
(note: php cal access source available on request, just reply)
IMO the best way to break Exchange in the office is by including calendaring into a corporate IM service. It must be done quickly, as MS isn't dumb, and Exchange 2000 includes IM, though almost nobody uses it!
Oh yeh, my bad. Though it's debatable that the ranks in Profession(lawyer) are necissary to do the feat, you might need to make a Profession(lawyer) check (DC 25) to avoid prison/fines though...
Nice sig btw, Bruce Cambell and John DeLancie together in the old west, couldn't fail (unless of course it's on during like Sunday at 11 am)
*sigh*
(personal views/opinion follows)
I view "card carrying NRA members" with vast distrust. I view most anyone that owns more than 1 gun per adult with distrust.
I distrust guns in general. I think people should distrust guns.
And you know what? The government and the police have guns. This is why the 2nd Amendment exists, and why it must be protected.
I should have the right to own a weapon, and they should never have to use it.
If they are humans, they can have 2 clean-room reverse-engineering feats at level 1! =D
*ahem* on a more serious note:
Actually if the DMCA is invoked then the argument isn't that they copied Blizzard's stuff, or even reverse engineered it. Its because Blizzard does key-checking with their multiplayer games to make sure you bought a legitimate copy (or have a good key-gen) of their game. The bnetd version does not include this because they don't care about keychecking, they just want to play the game.
Blizzard will argue that this will invalidate their copyright protection (cd-keys) because people can now play multiplayer without buying a license (cd-key). And they're right.
bnetd will likely argue one of a few tracks:
a) cd-keys aren't effective copyright protection. I have a starcraft key-gen. Google knows of them...
b) that they have a clickthrough license agreement (do they? i dunno) that says "by downloading this source, I agree to only use it with legitimately purchased copies of Blizzard games." or some such.
In a legal sense I don't see bnetd have too much to argue about except that the DMCA sucks, and cd-keys suck, or cd-keys are not copyright protection as far as the DMCA is concerned.
Stupid Laws suck.
Fine actually.
I think there should be public schools.
I think there should be computers in public schools.
I think public schools should pay for the software they teach.
As everyone so vociferously flamed, this will likely cost the school great amounts of money even if they are in compliance. IMO the school should hold out until the auditors come with a search warrant, and they should sue the bejesus out of the company/state if they *are* in compliance for defamation/harassment.
I mean seriously, what judge is going to issue a warrant to search a public school without evidence?
And people say windows is bloated enough to begin with! =D
Only problem with this imo, is that "Joe User" will never find it. In my previos example OEMs could color "their" version however they'd like at install.
Sure power users could still do their own install and do what they'd like, but power users are the vast minority of users these days (as any phone monkey can tell you)
No, but wouldn't it be better if during the windows install it gave you a bevy of choices for each component install?
Have a "software disk" or two or three that includes alternative options.
Install Web Browser?:
(o) Microsoft Internet Explorer
( ) Netscape Navigator
( ) Opera
( ) Mozilla Clone
( ) None
Have options for everything. Their stuff will be default, but allow others to modify installers to install other things as their own distro. MS gets the cash for the sale, with perhaps some for the distro maker due to "value added" stuff.
Because if you notice, those same Alternative OSes are gaining in bloat becuase there's becoming less and less things that you need to go and find and install, because it all comes with the distro.
It was perhaps a slight troll, though yes. and they should have to show the license. This is the way things work. What I was trying to point out (perhaps a little too indirectly for the slashdot crowd) was that if you have a problem with the system, change the system, not the problem.
Software licenses inherently lead to this sort of problem. They always will until you put the burden on the seller, or until you eliminate licensing. (or do something clever)
And yes. It *is* an unreasonable standard, though with a warrant (which the school can delay until MS shows with a warrant) they will still have to show licenses. Of course it blows... so change it.