This is not the way it is anymore. Every US dollar used to be backed by an equivalent amount of gold in the Federal Reserve. However, this is no longer the case. The US moved away from the gold standard and now the only thing that makes that dollar worth anything is the faith and belief that is is worth something. In reality it is just a pretty piece of paper.
Intellectual property is much the same, it is the "faith" that it has value that makes it so, and the artificial laws created to ensure that this "faith" is enforced. We are being limited in our rights to determine what has value and what does not. This is what I take argument with. I hold no value in Britney Spears music, so I do not purchase it. Yet, I do value a New Order CD. I do not value it enough to warrant 17 bucks however, and so I used to buy them used for around 5 or 6 bucks USD.
That right was taken away from me by big business. I can't walk into most record stores anymore and find a New Order CD, because it is not "new & cool" to most United Statesmen.
So where can I turn for my music, which I enjoy if the big companies deem it unworthy of their time to allow me access? I turn to some anonymous d00d who will let me download the mp3 off of his server. Now they claim it has value again and want to stop me from having access, while at the same time not providing me access themselves. Does this not seem hypocritical?
How about all those Blues recordings I want?
Or those 15 year old computer programs that companies have chosen to abandon?
We need to re-formulate the lifespan someone else can hold onto their "IP" and make them realize they cannot be selfish about it. Either make it accessible to those who want it, or give up your rights to covet it (and covet is what the big boys do.)
My Mandarin is quite rusty since I only took 1 year of it back in 1994. But if necessary I will be more than happy to fire up the pingyin and start typing in Mandarin, maybe then my girlfriend's parents will understand me. They only speak mainly Cantonese, but they understand enough Mandarin to converse in it. Unfortunately, I've forgotten almost all 1800 characters I did know (use it or lose it!) and I sincerely doubt that most United Statesmen (whoever coined USian missed the obvious, United Statesman is a better sounding term and most of us big egoed Americans will like the regal sound of it =) will convert to Mandarin Chinese.
Living in the US it is difficult to learn another language since so few people I converse with are willing to take the time to suffer through my Chinese, they'd rather speak to me in English since we both converse in it fairly well.
Anyway, better get back to practicing Mandarin...
Ni hao ma?
Wo hen hao xie xie nin.
Wo shuo zhong guo hua[r] (r is optional BeiJing-ism)
Ni shuo bu shuo zhong guo huar?
Bu shuo? Ai-yah!
Dan root@foobar# shutdown -h now System will be halted.
This is not new. This is old hat. VLIW has existed (in theory and practice) for over 20 years.
[insert Dr. Evil]
I have perfected a new I/O device called a "mouse", this "mouse" is capable of controlling a "pointer" in my latest invention, the "GUI".
Is it an eeeeeevil GUI?
Eeeevil Hugs and kisses,
Dr. Evil root@foobar# shutdown -h now System will be halted.
Yes, but look at the VAX. VAX code was very small because of the insideous instruction set shoved upon us. VAX was designed for this, small compiled code, but look at how slow it is trying to run a windowed system. DECwindows took almost 5 minutes to fire up on my old VAXen.
Sparcs were designed with the opposite ideology that disk and memory are cheap when compared to speed. Sparc ideology (RISC) emphasizes more instructions generated for compiled code over the VAX design ideology. VAX was designed when disk and memory were very expensive and so code footprint needed to be small. This sacrifices speed. There are always tradeoffs in any design. I personally feel we have definitely reached the stage where speed concerns outweigh code size, we've been there for quite some time.
CISC gives you a smaller footprint for your code, but you sacrifice the one thing I love so much about RISC. Easy to read assembler code. I can't for the life of me learn to love x86 or VAX assembly programming, but I could write Sparc code all day and be happy. That's because Sparc assembler is so much easier to read and write than x86 or VAX. But that is MHO, YMMV.
Dan root@foobar# shutdown -h now System will be halted.
Tell this to people in Cuba, China, various areas of Africa, most of the US where holding a differing opinion or lifestyle will get you in the least, beat up, possibly killed.
(I'm sure I've left out many coutnries in precious Europe as well.)
Just because the UN says you're entitled to something doesn't make it so. This is reality, not the UN's version of the way the world should be. Unfortunately freedom only comes to those with the guns/money/power/all of the above. Mostly because they are able to maintain a position of superiority over those who would oppress them. Only egalitarian use of such power allows those without to flex their "freedom".
Freedom my friends, is an illusion.
root@foobar# shutdown -h now System will be halted.
There is an obvious parallel in Stallman's GNU Manifesto to the arguments in favor of abolishing copyright. The open source movement shows us this in practice.
If we were to abolish the existing copyright laws, nothing would happen.
People will still innovate.
Companies will still pay people to innovate for them. Perhaps even more so.
People of all economic stratum will have access to technology.
Here is my reasoning for each statement I have made.
[1] will occur because people invented before copyright laws existed, the inventors and tinkerers who discovered such all time favorites such as fire, and the wheel did not do so to become rich, they did so to make their lives easier. People will still need better tools and better methods of performing tasks. Innovation will not be stifled. People will still be paid to perform R&D, just as Stallman argued programmers will be paid to code. Notice the similarity in the arguments. People will be paid for what they do, NOTwhat they have done. Inventors still invent, possibly even more so because they need to keep producing in order to make a living. They can't rest on their laurels and live off off the one wonder invention they make early on.
[2] Companies like to save money. Companies who are worth their salt have a good well-funded R&D infrastructure in place. Universities will still research, it is their bread and butter (besides robbing their students blind, but that's another story.) Companies will still hire R&D because R&D will save them money in the long run and allow them to invent new products which they will still be able to sell and service despite copyright laws. Yes, other companies will benefit from their R&D and leech their designs, but most likely they will have to enhance them in some way to make them more appealable to the consumer. Notice how robust and feature rich open sourced software becomes (as opposed to bug ridden proprietary stuff Redmond spews forth.) If company A invents and builds the wonder widget, company B will have to make the wonder widget++, or they will have to make theirs cheaper, or in five fruity flavours, or provide the customer with some additional service to distinguish themselves in the market. This benefits the consumer. Prices will become lower and the market will have many different variations of the same product, offering more choice. (Choice == Good)
[3] Just as Linux is free, as in free bheer and free in speech. Products will be reduced to saner levels of pricing. That new wonder widget might sell for 50 bucks, but the wonder widget++ made by somebody else might be 25 bucks. It will force fierce competition between corporations. They do not like this. It causes them to have to work for a living instead of being robber-barons.
Copyright is an obstruction to the movement of thoughts and ideas. It exists to benefit the greedy and the lazy. Sometimes it is necessary to enact a revolution to change the stagnant ways of the past. We need to abolish copyright. Pay writers to write, not for how many books they sell. Pay artists to create instead of sell. Force a different model of thought to come into play when it comes time to dish out the paychecks.
We need to think outside the box on this, we are too accustomed to thinking about the way things are. We need to start thinking about the way things will be.
Dan O'Shea root@foobar# shutdown -h now System will be halted.
Hmmm...the last time I opened up the ole Hennessy and Patterson Computer Architectures, A Quantitive Approach, measuring the CPU performance in terms of MIPS is a fallacy.
Benchmarking in general is a big lie. It has been proven time and time again their is no way to quantitatively compare the performance of two CPUs accurately. Everything we have come up with as of now is just rough guesstimates.
This goes on to show that this is especially true when comparing across two different architectures(i.e. - A MIPS and a x86)
Considering the intel line of IA-32 has changed both internally in the way it handles x86 instructions and the fact that MIPS is a meaningless method of measuring performance, you have left me with a vaccuous statement as the subject of your post.
Here is a good example:
I have two computers the Foo-1 and Foo-2, both run on the Foo86 instruction set. Foo-1 runs the Foo86 code itself, Foo-2 runs the Foo86 code through a frobulator-translation and then executes the frobulator code. Frobulator code is notoriously much larger than Foo86 code because it follows the RISC principle of KISS (Keep it simple stupid). Now we see the figures below for some arbitrary piece of code.
I think UNIX did alot to change the way OS design was viewed. UNIX treats everything as a file. UNIX focused on making a system with multiple users on the same system at the same time.(multiprocessing anyone?)
I think the boys over in Murray Hill are doing alot now with Plan9 and a few other ideas I sometimes hear they kick around.
My question to all of you obviously more experienced coders out there:
What's the next paridigmn for creating the next less sucky OS?
Treat everything as a data object? a module?
I don't know. I would love to see an OS based on a functional programming language. Something small and compact without too much bloat to it. Code up a decent GUI as well. Or how about this...the GUI is the text. Multiple windows of text ala an Xterm, clicking on the word disk0 or some such thing would open up another window showing you the contents of the disk0 object.
Every piece of text is a mouse clickable object. If you type in disk0 it becomes a mouse clickable object which links to the contents of disk0.
Perhaps we would arrive at a new GUI or a new concept that makes either more sense to users, or perhaps is faster to operate with, with minimal learning curve.
A natural language based OS?
A user can type in his questions (eventually speak to the computer ala voice recognition) and receive textual and aural inpouts from the machine. I.E. "Computer, please tell me the contents of disk0." "The contents of disk0 are, foo.txt, bar.c, baz.h"
Eventually somebody or something has to sit down and figure out a different way of looking at the data we are presented and see if it makes more, or less sense than what we currently have.
I don't know who that somebody is but I think it won't kill me to sit down tonight and see if I can come up with a few ideas.
I'm thinking about using a functional language because it forces me to look at things slightly differently than when I write C code.
Anyone else have any ideas or pointers to projects currently looking at stuff like this?
Here's my shot at explaining why it is possible to magnetize the Statue of Liberty.
Anything and everything is susceptible to Magnetic Fields. It is only limited to the strength of the magnetic field. Everything can be magnetized, as magnetism is merely the alignment of atoms. There are guys levitating spiders and magnetizing living objects likes frogs over at Fermilab and other places. The field strength of these things is enormous however. I believe the idea is to perfect anti-gravity and hopefully utilize this technology as some form of propulsion. The problem lies in the amount of energy required to generate such a dense magnetic field. (Think of powering New York City for a month and using all that energy for all of a few brief seconds)
So, Magneto has the ability to generate and control magnetic fields. In the comics he became so powerful as to be able to stop a persons bloodflow by controlling the ferrites in the persons blood. Magneto in my opinion is a character that lends himself to become all powerful, because as he learns to control his abilities and generate denser and more powerful magnetic fields he might literally be an unstoppable character. No one would be able to come close to him, they would die before they had a chance to do anything.
Magnetic fields are an interesting phenomena in their own right. I am by no means a physicist, however think for a moment that since all things can be magnetized, theoretically, all Magneto need do is generate a dense enough magnetic field to magnetize the copper and then he can control it as he sees fit.
You know, he comments a lot on the size of the linux kernel, but 700k isn't really that large in my mind. In days where computers are shipping with at least 64Megs of ram, 0.7k isn't much to ask for the guts.
I hate to be a dingus, but I think you mean 0.7M not k.
I'm unclear by about what you're saying here when you state you cleaned up. Unless you did a completely fresh re-installation from a cdrom or some other medium that is known to be safe and cannot be altered you did not clean anything up.
Before going back on the network you should:
Perform fresh install, then disbale all unnecessary services. Perform a suid audit and determine which suids are needed and which aren't. Consider changing the umask on the system to something a bit more secure. A umask of 027 will yield the following permissions rwxrw---- for newly created files.
Set up your hosts.deny to ALL:ALL Configure IP Chains to do what you want them to do. I believe gfcc is a nice gui frontend to make this easier.
For a company based implementation maybe even another step further and have another box in front of this one as a dedicated firewall.
Never assume you have gotten everything cleaned up on a cracked box unless you have wiped the disk, or even better backed the disk up then wiped the original for re-use. Go back and look at the old disk in a safe environment to see what went wrong.
Installing tripwire is also a good idea so if it happens again you know what was touched.
Might even be beneifical to have a sniffer out there to see what's going on on your network.
And of course there's always the obvious:
No telnetd and ftpd USE SSH!!!
Portscan your box before others do and remove the unecessary daemons running on your system.
I completely removed inetd form the equation after I read up on why it's bad for people like me who don't need ***ANY*** of the services it provided.
And as always good strong encryption and frequent password changes will increase the likelihood of not getting cracked.
Remember, the crackers are always one step ahead of you, stay on your toes and get all the latest security fixes and releases when they come out.
Nothing is foolproof, so even after you do all this, prepare to be cracked and provide your system with a method of recovery should such an event happen. This means keeping a secure immutable backup of the system somplace safe and updating frequently enough for it to be useful.
Perhaps a slightly modified Morse Code is in order. We can add some formatting characters and a couple of slight hacks to good ol' Morse's Code and we have a very easy to use interface for wearables that does not require the user to look at what they're typing.
The use of a sticky key code can allow for character combinations. Uppercase and lowercase could be handled either contextually by the computer or through a modified capslock/shift combo code. For caps lock we use sticky key code + shift code, for shift key we use shift code (which by the nature of it's intended use should be defaulted to sticky)
I can imagine now, people everywhere absent mindedly tapping out emails and writing down notes while walking down the street. The additional benefit of only needing to learn a few additional modified codes if you already know Morse Code (and *who* doesn't know Morse Code?) allows for users to adapt quickly to the interface as well as learn a useful (if albeit slightly modified) standard already in place.
Dan O'Shea
The Ghost of Samuel Morse looks kindly upon thee...
Slashdot Mirror
This is not the way it is anymore. Every US dollar used to be backed by an equivalent amount of gold in the Federal Reserve. However, this is no longer the case. The US moved away from the gold standard and now the only thing that makes that dollar worth anything is the faith and belief that is is worth something. In reality it is just a pretty piece of paper.
Intellectual property is much the same, it is the "faith" that it has value that makes it so, and the artificial laws created to ensure that this "faith" is enforced. We are being limited in our rights to determine what has value and what does not. This is what I take argument with. I hold no value in Britney Spears music, so I do not purchase it. Yet, I do value a New Order CD. I do not value it enough to warrant 17 bucks however, and so I used to buy them used for around 5 or 6 bucks USD.
That right was taken away from me by big business. I can't walk into most record stores anymore and find a New Order CD, because it is not "new & cool" to most United Statesmen.
So where can I turn for my music, which I enjoy if the big companies deem it unworthy of their time to allow me access? I turn to some anonymous d00d who will let me download the mp3 off of his server. Now they claim it has value again and want to stop me from having access, while at the same time not providing me access themselves. Does this not seem hypocritical?
How about all those Blues recordings I want?
Or those 15 year old computer programs that companies have chosen to abandon?
We need to re-formulate the lifespan someone else can hold onto their "IP" and make them realize they cannot be selfish about it. Either make it accessible to those who want it, or give up your rights to covet it (and covet is what the big boys do.)
Regards,
dan
My Mandarin is quite rusty since I only took 1 year of it back in 1994. But if necessary I will be more than happy to fire up the pingyin and start typing in Mandarin, maybe then my girlfriend's parents will understand me. They only speak mainly Cantonese, but they understand enough Mandarin to converse in it. Unfortunately, I've forgotten almost all 1800 characters I did know (use it or lose it!) and I sincerely doubt that most United Statesmen (whoever coined USian missed the obvious, United Statesman is a better sounding term and most of us big egoed Americans will like the regal sound of it =) will convert to Mandarin Chinese.
Living in the US it is difficult to learn another language since so few people I converse with are willing to take the time to suffer through my Chinese, they'd rather speak to me in English since we both converse in it fairly well.
Anyway, better get back to practicing Mandarin...
Ni hao ma?
Wo hen hao xie xie nin.
Wo shuo zhong guo hua[r] (r is optional BeiJing-ism)
Ni shuo bu shuo zhong guo huar?
Bu shuo? Ai-yah!
Dan
root@foobar# shutdown -h now
System will be halted.
People,
Repeat after me, "When I see a Monty Python foot the article is humour related...ad infinitum..."
Regards.
root@foobar# shutdown -h now
System will be halted.
VLIW - Very Long Instruction Word
This is not new. This is old hat. VLIW has existed (in theory and practice) for over 20 years.
[insert Dr. Evil]
I have perfected a new I/O device called a "mouse", this "mouse" is capable of controlling a "pointer" in my latest invention, the "GUI".
Is it an eeeeeevil GUI?
Eeeevil Hugs and kisses,
Dr. Evil
root@foobar# shutdown -h now
System will be halted.
Yes, but look at the VAX. VAX code was very small because of the insideous instruction set shoved upon us. VAX was designed for this, small compiled code, but look at how slow it is trying to run a windowed system. DECwindows took almost 5 minutes to fire up on my old VAXen.
Sparcs were designed with the opposite ideology that disk and memory are cheap when compared to speed. Sparc ideology (RISC) emphasizes more instructions generated for compiled code over the VAX design ideology. VAX was designed when disk and memory were very expensive and so code footprint needed to be small. This sacrifices speed. There are always tradeoffs in any design. I personally feel we have definitely reached the stage where speed concerns outweigh code size, we've been there for quite some time.
CISC gives you a smaller footprint for your code, but you sacrifice the one thing I love so much about RISC. Easy to read assembler code. I can't for the life of me learn to love x86 or VAX assembly programming, but I could write Sparc code all day and be happy. That's because Sparc assembler is so much easier to read and write than x86 or VAX. But that is MHO, YMMV.
Dan
root@foobar# shutdown -h now
System will be halted.
Tell this to people in Cuba, China, various areas of Africa, most of the US where holding a differing opinion or lifestyle will get you in the least, beat up, possibly killed. (I'm sure I've left out many coutnries in precious Europe as well.)
Just because the UN says you're entitled to something doesn't make it so. This is reality, not the UN's version of the way the world should be. Unfortunately freedom only comes to those with the guns/money/power/all of the above. Mostly because they are able to maintain a position of superiority over those who would oppress them. Only egalitarian use of such power allows those without to flex their "freedom".
Freedom my friends, is an illusion.
root@foobar# shutdown -h now
System will be halted.
There is an obvious parallel in Stallman's GNU Manifesto to the arguments in favor of abolishing copyright. The open source movement shows us this in practice.
If we were to abolish the existing copyright laws, nothing would happen.
Here is my reasoning for each statement I have made.
[1] will occur because people invented before copyright laws existed, the inventors and tinkerers who discovered such all time favorites such as fire, and the wheel did not do so to become rich, they did so to make their lives easier. People will still need better tools and better methods of performing tasks. Innovation will not be stifled. People will still be paid to perform R&D, just as Stallman argued programmers will be paid to code. Notice the similarity in the arguments. People will be paid for what they do, NOT what they have done. Inventors still invent, possibly even more so because they need to keep producing in order to make a living. They can't rest on their laurels and live off off the one wonder invention they make early on.
[2] Companies like to save money. Companies who are worth their salt have a good well-funded R&D infrastructure in place. Universities will still research, it is their bread and butter (besides robbing their students blind, but that's another story.) Companies will still hire R&D because R&D will save them money in the long run and allow them to invent new products which they will still be able to sell and service despite copyright laws. Yes, other companies will benefit from their R&D and leech their designs, but most likely they will have to enhance them in some way to make them more appealable to the consumer. Notice how robust and feature rich open sourced software becomes (as opposed to bug ridden proprietary stuff Redmond spews forth.) If company A invents and builds the wonder widget, company B will have to make the wonder widget++, or they will have to make theirs cheaper, or in five fruity flavours, or provide the customer with some additional service to distinguish themselves in the market. This benefits the consumer. Prices will become lower and the market will have many different variations of the same product, offering more choice. (Choice == Good)
[3] Just as Linux is free, as in free bheer and free in speech. Products will be reduced to saner levels of pricing. That new wonder widget might sell for 50 bucks, but the wonder widget++ made by somebody else might be 25 bucks. It will force fierce competition between corporations. They do not like this. It causes them to have to work for a living instead of being robber-barons.
Copyright is an obstruction to the movement of thoughts and ideas. It exists to benefit the greedy and the lazy. Sometimes it is necessary to enact a revolution to change the stagnant ways of the past. We need to abolish copyright. Pay writers to write, not for how many books they sell. Pay artists to create instead of sell. Force a different model of thought to come into play when it comes time to dish out the paychecks.
We need to think outside the box on this, we are too accustomed to thinking about the way things are. We need to start thinking about the way things will be.
Dan O'Shea
root@foobar# shutdown -h now
System will be halted.
Hmmm...the last time I opened up the ole Hennessy and Patterson Computer Architectures, A Quantitive Approach, measuring the CPU performance in terms of MIPS is a fallacy.
Benchmarking in general is a big lie. It has been proven time and time again their is no way to quantitatively compare the performance of two CPUs accurately. Everything we have come up with as of now is just rough guesstimates.
This goes on to show that this is especially true when comparing across two different architectures(i.e. - A MIPS and a x86)
Considering the intel line of IA-32 has changed both internally in the way it handles x86 instructions and the fact that MIPS is a meaningless method of measuring performance, you have left me with a vaccuous statement as the subject of your post.
Here is a good example:
I have two computers the Foo-1 and Foo-2, both run on the Foo86 instruction set. Foo-1 runs the Foo86 code itself, Foo-2 runs the Foo86 code through a frobulator-translation and then executes the frobulator code. Frobulator code is notoriously much larger than Foo86 code because it follows the RISC principle of KISS (Keep it simple stupid). Now we see the figures below for some arbitrary piece of code.
arch.: Foo-1, Foo-2
program: gcc.c, gcc.c
Foo86: 2M inst., 2M inst.
Frobulator: N/A, 15M inst.
Both Foo-1 and Foo-2 execute the gcc code in 1 second.
Foo-1 has a MIPS rating of 2
Foo-2 has a MIPS rating of 15
But the execution time is the same you say?
Hmmm....maybe MIPS is not such a great idea afterall.....
But it won't stop the marketdroids from using it to proclaim the Foo-2 is a better, more enhanced Foo-1 because it has a higher MIPS rating...
And of course people wilkl run out and buy the Foo-2 and their code will run at the same speed as the rest of us stuck on the Foo-1's.
Dan O'Shea
typing this on his Foo-1.
I think UNIX did alot to change the way OS design was viewed. UNIX treats everything as a file. UNIX focused on making a system with multiple users on the same system at the same time.(multiprocessing anyone?)
I think the boys over in Murray Hill are doing alot now with Plan9 and a few other ideas I sometimes hear they kick around.
My question to all of you obviously more experienced coders out there:
What's the next paridigmn for creating the next less sucky OS?
Treat everything as a data object? a module?
I don't know. I would love to see an OS based on a functional programming language. Something small and compact without too much bloat to it. Code up a decent GUI as well. Or how about this...the GUI is the text. Multiple windows of text ala an Xterm, clicking on the word disk0 or some such thing would open up another window showing you the contents of the disk0 object.
Every piece of text is a mouse clickable object. If you type in disk0 it becomes a mouse clickable object which links to the contents of disk0.
Perhaps we would arrive at a new GUI or a new concept that makes either more sense to users, or perhaps is faster to operate with, with minimal learning curve.
A natural language based OS?
A user can type in his questions (eventually speak to the computer ala voice recognition) and receive textual and aural inpouts from the machine. I.E. "Computer, please tell me the contents of disk0." "The contents of disk0 are, foo.txt, bar.c, baz.h"
Eventually somebody or something has to sit down and figure out a different way of looking at the data we are presented and see if it makes more, or less sense than what we currently have.
I don't know who that somebody is but I think it won't kill me to sit down tonight and see if I can come up with a few ideas.
I'm thinking about using a functional language because it forces me to look at things slightly differently than when I write C code.
Anyone else have any ideas or pointers to projects currently looking at stuff like this?
It would be a nice project to jump in to, no?
Dan O'Shea
Here's my shot at explaining why it is possible to magnetize the Statue of Liberty.
Anything and everything is susceptible to Magnetic Fields. It is only limited to the strength of the magnetic field. Everything can be magnetized, as magnetism is merely the alignment of atoms. There are guys levitating spiders and magnetizing living objects likes frogs over at Fermilab and other places. The field strength of these things is enormous however. I believe the idea is to perfect anti-gravity and hopefully utilize this technology as some form of propulsion. The problem lies in the amount of energy required to generate such a dense magnetic field. (Think of powering New York City for a month and using all that energy for all of a few brief seconds)
So, Magneto has the ability to generate and control magnetic fields. In the comics he became so powerful as to be able to stop a persons bloodflow by controlling the ferrites in the persons blood. Magneto in my opinion is a character that lends himself to become all powerful, because as he learns to control his abilities and generate denser and more powerful magnetic fields he might literally be an unstoppable character. No one would be able to come close to him, they would die before they had a chance to do anything.
Magnetic fields are an interesting phenomena in their own right. I am by no means a physicist, however think for a moment that since all things can be magnetized, theoretically, all Magneto need do is generate a dense enough magnetic field to magnetize the copper and then he can control it as he sees fit.
Dan O'Shea
I hate to be a dingus, but I think you mean 0.7M not k.
Cheers,
Dan O'Shea
I'm unclear by about what you're saying here when you state you cleaned up. Unless you did a completely fresh re-installation from a cdrom or some other medium that is known to be safe and cannot be altered you did not clean anything up.
Before going back on the network you should:
Perform fresh install, then disbale all unnecessary services. Perform a suid audit and determine which suids are needed and which aren't. Consider changing the umask on the system to something a bit more secure. A umask of 027 will yield the following permissions rwxrw---- for newly created files.
Set up your hosts.deny to ALL:ALL Configure IP Chains to do what you want them to do. I believe gfcc is a nice gui frontend to make this easier.
For a company based implementation maybe even another step further and have another box in front of this one as a dedicated firewall.
Never assume you have gotten everything cleaned up on a cracked box unless you have wiped the disk, or even better backed the disk up then wiped the original for re-use. Go back and look at the old disk in a safe environment to see what went wrong.
Installing tripwire is also a good idea so if it happens again you know what was touched.
Might even be beneifical to have a sniffer out there to see what's going on on your network.
And of course there's always the obvious:
No telnetd and ftpd
USE SSH!!!
Portscan your box before others do and remove the unecessary daemons running on your system.
I completely removed inetd form the equation after I read up on why it's bad for people like me who don't need ***ANY*** of the services it provided.
And as always good strong encryption and frequent password changes will increase the likelihood of not getting cracked.
Remember, the crackers are always one step ahead of you, stay on your toes and get all the latest security fixes and releases when they come out.
Nothing is foolproof, so even after you do all this, prepare to be cracked and provide your system with a method of recovery should such an event happen. This means keeping a secure immutable backup of the system somplace safe and updating frequently enough for it to be useful.
Laters, Dan O'Shea
Perhaps a slightly modified Morse Code is in order. We can add some formatting characters and a couple of slight hacks to good ol' Morse's Code and we have a very easy to use interface for wearables that does not require the user to look at what they're typing.
The use of a sticky key code can allow for character combinations. Uppercase and lowercase could be handled either contextually by the computer or through a modified capslock/shift combo code. For caps lock we use sticky key code + shift code, for shift key we use shift code (which by the nature of it's intended use should be defaulted to sticky)
I can imagine now, people everywhere absent mindedly tapping out emails and writing down notes while walking down the street. The additional benefit of only needing to learn a few additional modified codes if you already know Morse Code (and *who* doesn't know Morse Code?) allows for users to adapt quickly to the interface as well as learn a useful (if albeit slightly modified) standard already in place.
Dan O'Shea
The Ghost of Samuel Morse looks kindly upon thee...