I'm with you. I don't agree with this sort of worm for other reason, as I've posted elsewhere in this thread, I was only pointing out that the ideal response is rarely practiced, so it's not a particularly good argument against this sort of worm.
You probably already know this, but the default options in OS X make everything incredibly slow. If you turn off all the stupid eye candy, it's half usable. My coworker thought I was kidding, until I showed him that just mousing over the animated menus uses 50% of the processor.
I work for a printing company. We still use OS9 in prepress. Quark is one major factor, but also the "enhancements" in Illustrator 10 make it not backward compatible with our trapping software (on IRIX).
We are looking to upgrade our trapping software, but so far all the offerings seem to suck, badly. If anyone knows of a good trapping software, that runs on UNIX/Linux/or even OSX as a last resort, that is up to date, that doesn't require you buy into their "workflow management" software as well, that can be automated, preferably with a shell script or hot folders, let me know.
There was some issues around font management, but I think they are fixed now, with some training in OS X font management. That's been another hurdle, getting the artists to accept the change. I think they are ready for it now though, just need to get that trapping software ready, and Quark going.
The reality is that most Windows people don't do those things anyway. My girlfriend recently got a job as a technician-type in a computer shop. She told me their method for Blaster:
1. Install the fix. Even if the machine is infected. Then reboot. 2. Run fixblast.exe to see if the machine is still infected.
I explained to her that there is no way to trust the machine at all once it is infected, unless booting from known-clean files. I think some of it sunk in, because she is now warning people that what they are doing will "most likely" work, but the only way to be sure is a clean install.
The reality of the issue is that user's don't back up files. A clean reinstall is not an option when someone brings a computer in to a shop, not if you want to keep customers. They will talk to their friends who will tell them that their computer was fixed without a reinstall, and then wonder why you were so incompetant as to require one. They will call you incessantly asking if you can recover a file they had forgotten to back up.
There is a definite problem enforcing best practices on users in a home environment.
You get a little more freedom to do things the right way in a corporate internal IT shop, but for home users, the reality is a quick patch-up and then back on the net.
Innocent if they happen to be on cable or other shared bandwidth, and this white-hat worm infects a few of the people on their subnet and hammers the outgoing connection.
Except that vaccines aren't contagious, and aren't created by lone doctors working in their basement with no oversight or peer review.
Maybe this could be more closely compared to adding flouride to city water. It's there, whether you want it or not.
I doubt this will ever be legitimized. Too much room for spyware/adware/etc, too much potential legal liability for the creator. It would be very difficult to rewite current virus laws to allow for such an exemption without opening loopholes for the less than legitimate sleeze.
Yeah, the only time I'd want to see a link to the main site is if it was something not well known, maybe a personal site like www.sharedhostingdudes.com/~coolgeek/.
Linking to The Guardian front page is like those "Netscape Now" links everyone used to have on their web page.:)
That God for government funded studies. I wouldn't have been able to make plans for 5.7 billion years from now had they not stole my wages to do such important work!
I don't know about RH9.... Maybe it's just the screen savers, but I installed it at work the other day, up2dated it, then left it over the weekend. When I came back, X was totally locked up, to the point where I couldn't get the console back even by sshing in and killing stuff.
Turning off the screen savers seemed to have helped, but it still looks bad when a screen saver can make a reboot necessary to get local access back.
This same hardware was running previous versions of red hat.
We're starting to test our PHP code on 9, it seems to be OK on the PHP+apache server front for now, but we haven't tested it under any load yet. I'm afraid that all the experimental kernel patches that RH includes for better desktop performance might be a problem, but time will tell.
Yeah, I know I can recompile the kernel, but everytime I have to compile something, it negates paying for RHN a little bit, since I have to keep up with patches myself then.
The server I set up runs tripwire, and they pay me a small fee to update it each month and to check things when tripwire sends me an email. I usually scan the logs for anything unusual every now and then too.
I'm curious, because we recently puchased a large commercial (expensive) payroll system that is written in Delphi (it also happen to be a buggy pile of shit).
We also have one other commercial app we bought written in Delphi (it's OK, but the installation process is complex, and it seems to break easily if you change anything).
The alternative is maintaining the boatload of cruft needed for backward compatibility.
Windows is bloated for reasons other than only incompetance. Think about the reams of code needed to support apps all the way from DOS to modern Windows.
On the other hand, Linux-type OS's aren't too bad. I regularly download ancient programs (in source code form) and they compile just fine. Maybe they need a little tweak to their Makefile or something, but usually nothing serious.
I guess you could think of it as a practical reason that open source is better.
But even with a complete DMZ setup, I'd still run into the same upgrade problems. In fact I think you have it backward. The firewall wouldn't need to be upgraded, but the server would.
The firewall wouldn't have any open ports (except maybe ssh), so why would it need patches and upgrades?
LyX is really easy, and really good at the kinds of documents LaTeX is designed to create. Try it sometime, you'll be surprised. Do read the help docs that are in the help menu if you get stuck though.
You can download RedHat and install it on as many PCs as you like virtualy free.
This isn't quite true. The RH enterprise server license is a per-copy license. The terms are a borderline violation of the GPL, IMHO.
The free version of RH only has 12 months of security and bigfix updates. That's what's forcing this issue, far more than support, which most people can handle in-house.
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I'm with you. I don't agree with this sort of worm for other reason, as I've posted elsewhere in this thread, I was only pointing out that the ideal response is rarely practiced, so it's not a particularly good argument against this sort of worm.
You probably already know this, but the default options in OS X make everything incredibly slow. If you turn off all the stupid eye candy, it's half usable. My coworker thought I was kidding, until I showed him that just mousing over the animated menus uses 50% of the processor.
I work for a printing company. We still use OS9 in prepress. Quark is one major factor, but also the "enhancements" in Illustrator 10 make it not backward compatible with our trapping software (on IRIX).
We are looking to upgrade our trapping software, but so far all the offerings seem to suck, badly. If anyone knows of a good trapping software, that runs on UNIX/Linux/or even OSX as a last resort, that is up to date, that doesn't require you buy into their "workflow management" software as well, that can be automated, preferably with a shell script or hot folders, let me know.
There was some issues around font management, but I think they are fixed now, with some training in OS X font management. That's been another hurdle, getting the artists to accept the change. I think they are ready for it now though, just need to get that trapping software ready, and Quark going.
Software lasts more than 18 months? Wow.
Hundreds of the programs that are part of my OS install have been refined for 10-20 years.
I use them every day. You might have heard of some of them, like "grep" or "sed" or "vi".
They work great.
Thanks, I didn't know that.
It does seem risky from my lay point of view though. What if there were a mutation?
The reality is that most Windows people don't do those things anyway. My girlfriend recently got a job as a technician-type in a computer shop. She told me their method for Blaster:
1. Install the fix. Even if the machine is infected. Then reboot.
2. Run fixblast.exe to see if the machine is still infected.
I explained to her that there is no way to trust the machine at all once it is infected, unless booting from known-clean files. I think some of it sunk in, because she is now warning people that what they are doing will "most likely" work, but the only way to be sure is a clean install.
The reality of the issue is that user's don't back up files. A clean reinstall is not an option when someone brings a computer in to a shop, not if you want to keep customers. They will talk to their friends who will tell them that their computer was fixed without a reinstall, and then wonder why you were so incompetant as to require one. They will call you incessantly asking if you can recover a file they had forgotten to back up.
There is a definite problem enforcing best practices on users in a home environment.
You get a little more freedom to do things the right way in a corporate internal IT shop, but for home users, the reality is a quick patch-up and then back on the net.
Wouldn't that situation sort of contradict the DMCA?
Why would this have anything to do with the DMCA?
Innocent if they happen to be on cable or other shared bandwidth, and this white-hat worm infects a few of the people on their subnet and hammers the outgoing connection.
Except that vaccines aren't contagious, and aren't created by lone doctors working in their basement with no oversight or peer review.
Maybe this could be more closely compared to adding flouride to city water. It's there, whether you want it or not.
I doubt this will ever be legitimized. Too much room for spyware/adware/etc, too much potential legal liability for the creator. It would be very difficult to rewite current virus laws to allow for such an exemption without opening loopholes for the less than legitimate sleeze.
Yeah, the only time I'd want to see a link to the main site is if it was something not well known, maybe a personal site like www.sharedhostingdudes.com/~coolgeek/.
:)
Linking to The Guardian front page is like those "Netscape Now" links everyone used to have on their web page.
That God for government funded studies. I wouldn't have been able to make plans for 5.7 billion years from now had they not stole my wages to do such important work!
Red Hat 9 has what? 9 months before its EOL?
I don't know about RH9.... Maybe it's just the screen savers, but I installed it at work the other day, up2dated it, then left it over the weekend. When I came back, X was totally locked up, to the point where I couldn't get the console back even by sshing in and killing stuff.
Turning off the screen savers seemed to have helped, but it still looks bad when a screen saver can make a reboot necessary to get local access back.
This same hardware was running previous versions of red hat.
We're starting to test our PHP code on 9, it seems to be OK on the PHP+apache server front for now, but we haven't tested it under any load yet. I'm afraid that all the experimental kernel patches that RH includes for better desktop performance might be a problem, but time will tell.
Yeah, I know I can recompile the kernel, but everytime I have to compile something, it negates paying for RHN a little bit, since I have to keep up with patches myself then.
Wow, they still make computers?
:)
I think it's a given that Packard Bell sucks, in any case.
Heh, you sounded like Clippy, ironically.
Not unattended, just not needing major upgrades.
The server I set up runs tripwire, and they pay me a small fee to update it each month and to check things when tripwire sends me an email. I usually scan the logs for anything unusual every now and then too.
You are right, I had forgotten. I only remembered seeing long variable names.
Does no one use Delphi anymore?
I'm curious, because we recently puchased a large commercial (expensive) payroll system that is written in Delphi (it also happen to be a buggy pile of shit).
We also have one other commercial app we bought written in Delphi (it's OK, but the installation process is complex, and it seems to break easily if you change anything).
Variable names limited to two characters
What BASIC had that limitation? Surely none that I ever used as a kid (mid 80s).
The alternative is maintaining the boatload of cruft needed for backward compatibility.
Windows is bloated for reasons other than only incompetance. Think about the reams of code needed to support apps all the way from DOS to modern Windows.
On the other hand, Linux-type OS's aren't too bad. I regularly download ancient programs (in source code form) and they compile just fine. Maybe they need a little tweak to their Makefile or something, but usually nothing serious.
I guess you could think of it as a practical reason that open source is better.
This isn't offtopic, he's right.
A 350k capitalized expense over 5 years is only 70k a year. That means you can hire maybe one 40k a year sysadmin/programmer for the same price.
I know that they should have a seperate firewall.
But even with a complete DMZ setup, I'd still run into the same upgrade problems. In fact I think you have it backward. The firewall wouldn't need to be upgraded, but the server would.
The firewall wouldn't have any open ports (except maybe ssh), so why would it need patches and upgrades?
LyX is really easy, and really good at the kinds of documents LaTeX is designed to create. Try it sometime, you'll be surprised. Do read the help docs that are in the help menu if you get stuck though.
alot easier to support a bunch of Windows desktops than Unix or Linux desktops
You picked a bad day to say that, after thousands of us spent last week running around putting patches on Windows machines.
A simple shell script would have done it all automatically had those clients been anything other than Windows.
Are you in southwest VA? Know PHP?
We are looking for temporary help over the winter. Reply if interested.
You can download RedHat and install it on as many PCs as you like virtualy free.
This isn't quite true. The RH enterprise server license is a per-copy license. The terms are a borderline violation of the GPL, IMHO.
The free version of RH only has 12 months of security and bigfix updates. That's what's forcing this issue, far more than support, which most people can handle in-house.
At least that's the situation I am facing.