Better yet, why not just run the patch installer for them?
All well and good, I guess. But what of the day when people don't see your white hatting as such? Then someone will come out with a variant of your white hat hack on Code Red and, instead of having it hit the patch, will have it install something really nasty on the box, making it look like they're white hatting.
Yes, this could be done now--infect a box, then have it hit a second virus that slams the box after the DDoS is done--but it would be more elegant after someone started to white hat Code Red.
When are people going to get the hint that despite all their propoganda, Microsoft is not good for anyone.
No, let's make that, "When are people going to get the hint that, despite the conveniences, relying on one entity for the managemente of data or other assets is not good for anyone."
Well, it would appear that Matthew Haughey of MetaFilter has considered building SirCamExchange.com [according to betterwhois, it's still available...]. He compares it to FilePile, but I find the idea rather...inane. Oh well.
If you'll read the article, you'll note that the guy said, and I'm paraphrasing, "If you opt out of the user directory upon signup, you're not going to get spammed like a madman."
Because this community isn't out to make a ton of money and rule the world. This community is out to make software that works so amazingly well the gods will notice.
Who says they haven't already? I'd rather the people take notice.
If you want to beat up Microsoft, be my guest. Just don't tie yourself so closely to us code writers that you take us down with you should you loose.
I don't plan on loosing [sic], really. And it's not so much beating them. Microsoft makes a really great straw man, and hey, that's what excites the public. I'm not really into beating straw men per se, but you can start to focus the debate on relative merits at that point.
Again, I repeat. I'm not here writting code to beat Microsoft. I'm here to make this f*&king computer do my bidding. Don't tell me to change my licensing practices, or my direction (beat Microsoft at all costs) just becuase you think Microsoft needs to be beaten. I didn't make my code GPL so you could fight a battle with it. I made it GPL so you could use your computer efficiently, to help advance humanity, to some day get the human race to the stars.
Personally, I'll never ask you to change your licensing ideas just to "beat Microsoft". Microsoft is very clear in its sourcing and licensing policy, and I want to contrast the community's policy with that. Those who will examine the contrast carefully will likely take the community's side. Then once they do that, and they see the excellent code being created by the community, Microsoft will be marginalized and have to go back to writing good code to have market share.
If you stop coding with the GPL [or the BSD, but I prefer the GPL myself], I'll kick your ass. =P
We should be concentrating on doing what we do best - writing good code and sharing it with each other.
Yes, the coders should continue down their most excellent path. But not everyone in this community is a coder./me raises hand
We made it this far by concentrating on that - writing good software.
Yes. Will that carry you? The best code out there needs marketing, whether it's word of mouth or something else. The best coders are rarely the best marketers. Leave that to your users.
We did not get this far by targetting a company and attempting to beat it with a free alternative.
You wouldn't know it from all the anti-MSFT FUD as well as looking at the varions WM's around the community...
We should not be targetting Microsoft and attempting to beat them.
Why the heck not? They're the big giant. If you can fell them, you can go kick the butts of the rest of the Phillistines.
They will out manuever us.
MSFT can outmuscle you. They cannot outmaneuver you.
We should drop all this bickering with MS and go back to doing something that Microsoft can't beat us at: writing good code.
I hope that the coders do just that. I hope that they haven't gotten bogged down in the external fights. The community has to find its external leaders and let them take the fight to the public and to Microsoft. You'll notice that MSFT never uses coders to present their side--they use polished people like Craig Mundie who have a good idea of what their position is and how to express it clearly. Why should the community be any different?
At the risk of sounding like a/. drone, I'm happy to see this sort of analysis done. There are surely some who'd argue that the conclusions drawn [i.e., the next attack could be designed better and be much more effective] might spur someone on to building a nastier worm. Sure. Probably will happen. But if everyone will learn what causes this problem--duh, not updating the security fixes--then the problems will become minimized.
Of course, it also provides every reason for non-IIS/MSFT users and sysadmins to chuckle, but who's to say that hubris won't set in?
...that someone would make this argument at some point. I understand it, and in some ways, I'd like to see the GPL [as well as other free/open licenses] tested in a court of law, mainly for the attention that would bring to the licenses.
But, however, the fact that Vidomi realized they screwed up and weren't going to get away with it and fixed the violation says to me, "We knew we would lose." The GPL hasn't been invalidated, and no lawyers are signficantly richer to prove that fact. Shouldn't we be happy for that? =)
Perhaps willfully ignorant would be a better term, they don't know and they don't want to know, they just want their computer to work.
The way to get past that is education. Make it a point to teach people how this stuff works (even for windows). Then you can explain to them the difference between windows and linux.
All well and good...until you have someone up against a deadline who needs a relatively simple question answered. At that point, you tell them what time it is, not how to build a watch or how it was built by monks from Finland who slaved away like mad in college rebuilding...
Seriously, I wish my company was a Linux house. It's not, for several reasons. One big one will be this: there aren't enough knowledgable people to go around who are good at explaining things to people. People aren't worried about JFS, they just want to know how to recover from a power blip. They don't care about CLI, they just want their box secure. Etc.
It would be one thing if NASA PAO would release anything of worth. But no, they have to block a mess of stuff that's interesting and even useful to know if you're halfway interested in space. Heck, I've been a little busy this last week, and I didn't even realize NASA was launching another ISS mission until last night--and I work with NASA.
NASA PAO is one of the most closeted groups. They let out only what they want you to know...
Not only has Microsoft been struggling to restore full service, but on Thursday the company also shut down MSN Messenger as it restarted the network of servers that handle messaging traffic. That "reboot" failed to immediately fix the problem. [Emphasis added.]
...if you'll ask me. My roommate is the incoming president of UAH's ASCE chapter, and he was highly involved with this year's competition.
What it comes down to for me is...
on
ORBS Forks
·
· Score: 4
...choice. I can choose to use ORBS [in a way, I do, since I use SpamCop], or I can choose not to use it. Using ORBS will block mail, some legitimate, from reaching me. But hey, that's my choice.
While the Internet is open [for the most part] territory, each of the ISP's are private entities and, if they so choose, can choose to use ORBS [or similar] to protect their customers from spam. Some will like it, some won't. The spam policy is one of the things I research about an ISP before I use them--and when they make changes in that policy, I sort through them. I have left an ISP because of a spam policy, and I won't hesitate to do so again.
If you don't like that Earthlink is using ORBS and its child processes, don't use Earthlink. It's as simple as that.
If your neighbor crashes into a tree while driving home drunk, you blame the bartender.
Actually, you should. It's in the code of ethics of bartenders to stop serving someone who appears to have had too much to drink as well as to try to find them a ride home. I've never had to avail myself of the latter, but I have been asked more than once if I was driving before being served another drink. The courtesy was great to have.
Engeneers do build bridges and use
only well known ways to do things and very very
rarely allowed to deviate from the common path,
where in programming it is one of the rules to
follow so you become a successful programmer.
Eh?
Okay, so I follow best practices [in my job, they're NASA standards, specifications, etc.], but I have to use a fair amount of creativity. Only engineers who're re-inventing something--say, a bridge--"never deviate from a common path". [My roommate, a grad student in CivEng, would kick my arse if he read that, but I hold that it's true--he's just building me a target.] Yeah, we've got a bag of tricks, but engineers have to be creative in solution-finding as well.
Or did you miss that great scene from Apollo 13 where NASA engineers were tasked to "make this fit into the area designed for this with all of this"?
I crack up every time I watch that scene. Working in an aerospace project office is a lot like that. You just keep faking it and hope no one notices...and you have a guy fiddling in the corner while Rome is burning. =)
Well, he doesn't develop software for them. He develops hardware solutions for certain problems. [All I'm saying. I know he has a clearance.] But he already holds a patent from when he worked for NASA/MSFC. He can license it to whomever he wants if NASA doesn't make it a part of some project on which they need its use.
You are doing what every evangelist and salesperson does. You are taking advantage of really stupid people by lying and selling stuff.
Whoa now, evangelism=sales. In some ways they're related, but sales often doesn't care whether the product helps you. Those who evangelize do. As an evangelist myself, I almost resent this. =)
If you're thinking from a programmatic angle--"I want to run GNUCash to balance my checkbook"--then the software is accessible to anyone that wants to use GNUCash on a standalone basis. [Barring weird system calls, etc.] But you're right--in a developer's standpoint, it is inaccessible for those who don't choose to develop under the GPL.
And you responded:
Well, in that case, GNUCash still seems to have less restrictions on it than your average closed-source product. The only way you'll get the opportunity to develop new code based on MS Money, for example, is if you get hired by Microsoft to write a new version of MS Money for them.
And that matters how? Okay, it matters to developers. But guess what--developers either want to jump for the big bucks [-snort-] and develop products like Money along, or they want to build their own versions.
The developer's argument is for another time. The big problem is that, unfortunately, the free|open community is full of a lot of coders and not a lot of users. By that, I mean that yes, there are a lot of coders who use a lot of products, but for the most part those who develop code inside the community highly outnumber those who don't [which includes me at this time].
Is this a problem? Yes, and no.
It's not a problem for the community internally--like any community of ideas, the marginal cost of adding another is small to nonexistent, but the marginal benefit of adding another is potentially very high, in that new people often see problems in new ways, even if they don't know how to fix them.
Where the problem lies for the community is that there aren't a lot of users who can say, "Hey, man, I use this GPL/BSD'd stuff, and man, it's great! Bugs get fixed faster! You can get the bugs for free! There's no pirating! No guilt! Just use it--that's what it's there for, man!"
On the other hand, the closed-source community has a large pile of users [sadly including me today, but that's because my job is an M$FT outfit] who can say, "Hey, [insert program] does what I want it to do reasonably well, isn't hideously expensive, and won't crash my computer."
The mass of people are going to be users and not coders. Why? Even with good education, people are inherently lazy and will want to seek the least resistive path. [Burn me a Win2K Pro CD? SURE!] They aren't going to worry about things like licenses and such. They want things to work. They tend not to think that IP is a bad thing, and so demonizing from a company they may no like but do conduct business with on a regular basis will hit home for them. It's that simple.
You also wrote:
Ballmer is using arguments which are applicable to developers and using them to breed FUD in the user base, which is irresponsible. He needs to be called out on his statements.
Irresponsible for whom? He's speaking for his corporation. It's not irresponsible for them. I would accept the argument that it's irresponsible for the general population at hand, though, and that's probably what you're getting at with the about comment. However, like all Microsofties, Ballmer speaks for the Collective, as well he should. He does need to be corrected, and this is the community's job.
If you accept the incorrect usage of "open source" to mean "GPL'd code" then this statement makes perfect sense.
Yeah, here I think he's using the "dominance" of the GPL to stand for all open/free licensing. It's clever: remember, most folks can only stand two things in opposition. Why do you think there are just two major US political parties, eh? We like to think in terms of two exclusive choices, so Microsoft is taking the most extreme example to their cause--the GPL--and making it the standard-bearer. From their viewpoint, it's startingly good spin.
I presume that what Ballmer meant to say was "The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds GPL'd work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody."
This is an understandable viewpoint. GPL'd code is not accessable to everybody. It is only accessable to developers who are willing to release their code under the GPL license which excludes large portions of the community. Government-funded GPL code is inaccessable to the Apache Foundation, it's inaccessable to the OpenBSD developers, and it's inaccessable to any commercial developers who are working on closed-source products.
Wait now...that depends on how you term accessibility. If you're thinking from a programmatic angle--"I want to run GNUCash to balance my checkbook"--then the software is accessible to anyone that wants to use GNUCash on a standalone basis. [Barring weird system calls, etc.] But you're right--in a developer's standpoint, it is inaccessible for those who don't choose to develop under the GPL.
The difference here in my mind is this: most folks aren't developers and won't care about the licensing. [Look at how people break M$FT licenses now.] Those who are--and they'll be the loudest--will yell. Most of the rest of us [I'm more user than coder] won't much care.
If tax dollars are funding a project, then the results of that development should be available to everyone and not just people who use one particular license. This is the rationale behind the laws which prevent the government from enjoying a copyright on the data it produces.
On a standalone basis, it is: you can enjoy the benefits of whatever the code does no matter what license you use. Now, of course, if you want to build upon that code, that's where it gets hairy.
I'm close to this on a personal level, as a friend of mine does work for the Army, some of which is patentable. He, not the government, would own the patent. It's interesting how it works.
Government code should be public domain, not placed under a restrictive license like the GPL.
This is a legitimate argument; my only concern is that M$FT will use the GPL/BSD argument [again, I couch in terms of two exclusive choices] to muddy the waters--"people on the inside of the 'Open Source' movement even say the GPL is bad!" I don't want to not have the discussion; I'd rather have it after M$FT loses some market share.
Slashdot Mirror
All well and good, I guess. But what of the day when people don't see your white hatting as such? Then someone will come out with a variant of your white hat hack on Code Red and, instead of having it hit the patch, will have it install something really nasty on the box, making it look like they're white hatting.
Yes, this could be done now--infect a box, then have it hit a second virus that slams the box after the DDoS is done--but it would be more elegant after someone started to white hat Code Red.
This whole tiff is rather interesting, but not as interesting as this:
Yeesh.
Ummm, did you not realize that your comment's parent was a parody [or worse, probably stunnigly like] the reaction of most PHB's?
No, let's make that, "When are people going to get the hint that, despite the conveniences, relying on one entity for the managemente of data or other assets is not good for anyone."
Does this mean we have to see John Wayne in more crappy beer commercials? Please, don't drag the Duke through the mud much longer...
Well, it would appear that Matthew Haughey of MetaFilter has considered building SirCamExchange.com [according to betterwhois, it's still available...]. He compares it to FilePile, but I find the idea rather...inane. Oh well.
If you'll read the article, you'll note that the guy said, and I'm paraphrasing, "If you opt out of the user directory upon signup, you're not going to get spammed like a madman."
Who says they haven't already? I'd rather the people take notice.
I don't plan on loosing [sic], really. And it's not so much beating them. Microsoft makes a really great straw man, and hey, that's what excites the public. I'm not really into beating straw men per se, but you can start to focus the debate on relative merits at that point.
Personally, I'll never ask you to change your licensing ideas just to "beat Microsoft". Microsoft is very clear in its sourcing and licensing policy, and I want to contrast the community's policy with that. Those who will examine the contrast carefully will likely take the community's side. Then once they do that, and they see the excellent code being created by the community, Microsoft will be marginalized and have to go back to writing good code to have market share.
If you stop coding with the GPL [or the BSD, but I prefer the GPL myself], I'll kick your ass. =P
Yes, the coders should continue down their most excellent path. But not everyone in this community is a coder. /me raises hand
Yes. Will that carry you? The best code out there needs marketing, whether it's word of mouth or something else. The best coders are rarely the best marketers. Leave that to your users.
You wouldn't know it from all the anti-MSFT FUD as well as looking at the varions WM's around the community...
Why the heck not? They're the big giant. If you can fell them, you can go kick the butts of the rest of the Phillistines.
MSFT can outmuscle you. They cannot outmaneuver you.
I hope that the coders do just that. I hope that they haven't gotten bogged down in the external fights. The community has to find its external leaders and let them take the fight to the public and to Microsoft. You'll notice that MSFT never uses coders to present their side--they use polished people like Craig Mundie who have a good idea of what their position is and how to express it clearly. Why should the community be any different?
Yeah, and if you'll post your resume online, I think the FBI needs a guy just like you...
At the risk of sounding like a /. drone, I'm happy to see this sort of analysis done. There are surely some who'd argue that the conclusions drawn [i.e., the next attack could be designed better and be much more effective] might spur someone on to building a nastier worm. Sure. Probably will happen. But if everyone will learn what causes this problem--duh, not updating the security fixes--then the problems will become minimized.
Of course, it also provides every reason for non-IIS/MSFT users and sysadmins to chuckle, but who's to say that hubris won't set in?
Heck, it'd still be meaningless gibberish that little girls will go all googly over anyway...
...that someone would make this argument at some point. I understand it, and in some ways, I'd like to see the GPL [as well as other free/open licenses] tested in a court of law, mainly for the attention that would bring to the licenses.
But, however, the fact that Vidomi realized they screwed up and weren't going to get away with it and fixed the violation says to me, "We knew we would lose." The GPL hasn't been invalidated, and no lawyers are signficantly richer to prove that fact. Shouldn't we be happy for that? =)
All well and good...until you have someone up against a deadline who needs a relatively simple question answered. At that point, you tell them what time it is, not how to build a watch or how it was built by monks from Finland who slaved away like mad in college rebuilding...
Seriously, I wish my company was a Linux house. It's not, for several reasons. One big one will be this: there aren't enough knowledgable people to go around who are good at explaining things to people. People aren't worried about JFS, they just want to know how to recover from a power blip. They don't care about CLI, they just want their box secure. Etc.
It would be one thing if NASA PAO would release anything of worth. But no, they have to block a mess of stuff that's interesting and even useful to know if you're halfway interested in space. Heck, I've been a little busy this last week, and I didn't even realize NASA was launching another ISS mission until last night--and I work with NASA.
NASA PAO is one of the most closeted groups. They let out only what they want you to know...
Bet they know how I feel at work every day now...
...if you'll ask me. My roommate is the incoming president of UAH's ASCE chapter, and he was highly involved with this year's competition.
...choice. I can choose to use ORBS [in a way, I do, since I use SpamCop], or I can choose not to use it. Using ORBS will block mail, some legitimate, from reaching me. But hey, that's my choice.
While the Internet is open [for the most part] territory, each of the ISP's are private entities and, if they so choose, can choose to use ORBS [or similar] to protect their customers from spam. Some will like it, some won't. The spam policy is one of the things I research about an ISP before I use them--and when they make changes in that policy, I sort through them. I have left an ISP because of a spam policy, and I won't hesitate to do so again.
If you don't like that Earthlink is using ORBS and its child processes, don't use Earthlink. It's as simple as that.
Actually, you should. It's in the code of ethics of bartenders to stop serving someone who appears to have had too much to drink as well as to try to find them a ride home. I've never had to avail myself of the latter, but I have been asked more than once if I was driving before being served another drink. The courtesy was great to have.
Eh?
Okay, so I follow best practices [in my job, they're NASA standards, specifications, etc.], but I have to use a fair amount of creativity. Only engineers who're re-inventing something--say, a bridge--"never deviate from a common path". [My roommate, a grad student in CivEng, would kick my arse if he read that, but I hold that it's true--he's just building me a target.] Yeah, we've got a bag of tricks, but engineers have to be creative in solution-finding as well.
Or did you miss that great scene from Apollo 13 where NASA engineers were tasked to "make this fit into the area designed for this with all of this"?
I crack up every time I watch that scene. Working in an aerospace project office is a lot like that. You just keep faking it and hope no one notices...and you have a guy fiddling in the corner while Rome is burning. =)
Well, he doesn't develop software for them. He develops hardware solutions for certain problems. [All I'm saying. I know he has a clearance.] But he already holds a patent from when he worked for NASA/MSFC. He can license it to whomever he wants if NASA doesn't make it a part of some project on which they need its use.
Whoa now, evangelism=sales. In some ways they're related, but sales often doesn't care whether the product helps you. Those who evangelize do. As an evangelist myself, I almost resent this. =)
I wrote:
And you responded:
And that matters how? Okay, it matters to developers. But guess what--developers either want to jump for the big bucks [-snort-] and develop products like Money along, or they want to build their own versions.
The developer's argument is for another time. The big problem is that, unfortunately, the free|open community is full of a lot of coders and not a lot of users. By that, I mean that yes, there are a lot of coders who use a lot of products, but for the most part those who develop code inside the community highly outnumber those who don't [which includes me at this time].
Is this a problem? Yes, and no.
It's not a problem for the community internally--like any community of ideas, the marginal cost of adding another is small to nonexistent, but the marginal benefit of adding another is potentially very high, in that new people often see problems in new ways, even if they don't know how to fix them.
Where the problem lies for the community is that there aren't a lot of users who can say, "Hey, man, I use this GPL/BSD'd stuff, and man, it's great! Bugs get fixed faster! You can get the bugs for free! There's no pirating! No guilt! Just use it--that's what it's there for, man!"
On the other hand, the closed-source community has a large pile of users [sadly including me today, but that's because my job is an M$FT outfit] who can say, "Hey, [insert program] does what I want it to do reasonably well, isn't hideously expensive, and won't crash my computer."
The mass of people are going to be users and not coders. Why? Even with good education, people are inherently lazy and will want to seek the least resistive path. [Burn me a Win2K Pro CD? SURE!] They aren't going to worry about things like licenses and such. They want things to work. They tend not to think that IP is a bad thing, and so demonizing from a company they may no like but do conduct business with on a regular basis will hit home for them. It's that simple.
You also wrote:
Irresponsible for whom? He's speaking for his corporation. It's not irresponsible for them. I would accept the argument that it's irresponsible for the general population at hand, though, and that's probably what you're getting at with the about comment. However, like all Microsofties, Ballmer speaks for the Collective, as well he should. He does need to be corrected, and this is the community's job.
Yeah, here I think he's using the "dominance" of the GPL to stand for all open/free licensing. It's clever: remember, most folks can only stand two things in opposition. Why do you think there are just two major US political parties, eh? We like to think in terms of two exclusive choices, so Microsoft is taking the most extreme example to their cause--the GPL--and making it the standard-bearer. From their viewpoint, it's startingly good spin.
Wait now...that depends on how you term accessibility. If you're thinking from a programmatic angle--"I want to run GNUCash to balance my checkbook"--then the software is accessible to anyone that wants to use GNUCash on a standalone basis. [Barring weird system calls, etc.] But you're right--in a developer's standpoint, it is inaccessible for those who don't choose to develop under the GPL.
The difference here in my mind is this: most folks aren't developers and won't care about the licensing. [Look at how people break M$FT licenses now.] Those who are--and they'll be the loudest--will yell. Most of the rest of us [I'm more user than coder] won't much care.
On a standalone basis, it is: you can enjoy the benefits of whatever the code does no matter what license you use. Now, of course, if you want to build upon that code, that's where it gets hairy.
I'm close to this on a personal level, as a friend of mine does work for the Army, some of which is patentable. He, not the government, would own the patent. It's interesting how it works.
This is a legitimate argument; my only concern is that M$FT will use the GPL/BSD argument [again, I couch in terms of two exclusive choices] to muddy the waters--"people on the inside of the 'Open Source' movement even say the GPL is bad!" I don't want to not have the discussion; I'd rather have it after M$FT loses some market share.
Gracias. =)