1. Write devastating super-virus 2. Release it 3. Destroy unsuspecting internet 4. ??? 5. Profit!
ObSlashdotJoke aside, I always wondered where step 4 came in. Clearly, from the number of viruses doing the rounds now, bragging rights alone is enough of a draw for many; equally clearly, from the vast weight of bugs in viruses, it primarly draws teenage l33t hax0rs with more testosterone than talent.
All the devestation of every trojan and virus in history has been without a clear step 4. The addition of a step 4 worries me a lot, and as has been said before even non-Windows people like me can't feel smug and safe forever.
Yeah, I agree. All the sandboxing you care to apply to any OS or environment or whatnot -- and Unix permissions is only another level of sandbox, after all -- is ultimately useless if people are going to click "yes". That virus might not be able to trash/usr, but it sure can trash/home/rich and that's much worse. The stuff in/usr I can get back with an apt-get; my personal files are only on DVD+RW and that's a pain in the ass.
The one glimmer of goodness is that those of us who don't run EXEs and DOCs we get in the mail are much more secure, but clueless folk on Linux are only safer than clueless folk on Windows because of security through obscurity, not any good reason. And that won't last.
Doesn't stop me smiling a little, though, when I grep my web server hitlogs and find dozens of attempts to retreive cmd.exe?.
As for state of this department, general computing knowledge amongst compsci academics is woeful. To be fair, it's not their job; we have sysadmins and techs for that, but I can run rings around pretty much anyone here and I'm not much more than a sophisticated hobbyist.
There are instructions on the SCUMMVM website. Basically, it's a tool you run over the monster.sou file from the original game; my Sam And Max complete talkie is 44Mb after that compression.
It wreaked havoc here yesterday, at least half a dozen people were infected despite, as you say, the fact that you have the run the PIF in the ZIP before it snags you.
Where am I, you ask?
A computer science department at a major UK university.
I mean, if we don't have the meagre amounts of Clue necessary to avoid this crap, who the hell does?
(and btw, the sound is really good... as long as you're not plugged in to wall power. the supplied power converter sends a nasty buzz into the audio hardware. so i have to build a power filter, ugh.)
See also: WiFi. Streaming audio across my LAN sounds pretty ropy, presumably because of the interference from the CF WiFi card.
No, I haven't done it myself; apparantly the Gameboy emu is full speed now, and MAME is supposed to be OK for old and simple stuff. I keep meaning to get around to playing with it but there's so little time...
The PDA has Linux on it, but comes with a CD of Windows sync and link software to get files on and off, syncronise the Zaurus with Outlook, and whatnot.
It's not really a PDA, it's a pocketable Linux computer.
First, the PDA side of things. People criticise it for having weak PDA features which, compared to Palms, and that's somewhat true; my previous Psion PDAs had a few extra features around the edges that I miss, but by and large the PIM features are fine for my moderately advanced use.
But there's so much more! SCUMMVM in the palm of your hand with mp3-encoded talkie versions of Fate of Atlantis or Day of the Tentacle is pretty nifty.Add a Wifi card, install Wellenwreiter or Kismet, and go low-profile warwalking. I have a Pocketop IR folding keyboard for long documentation on the go; the screen rotation software Just Works, unlike a lot of PocketPCs.
Unlike Palm owners, I can handle DOC and XLS files native on the device; this is particularly key because the Zaurus is a computer in its own right and not a PDA. The Hancom office apps shipped with it are usable enough for quick on-the-go editing and creation. I could do with one of these now for instant printing of invoices when I'm out at a client's site.
The big compelling piece of software is OpenZaurus, a completely open source and regularly updated distro to replace the Sharp ROM. It's a bit like trading Debian stable for unstable; kinda hacky at times, kinda buggy at others, but it's so exciting to get a massive batch of upgrades every few weeks full of improvements. It's never been buggy enough to lose my PDA data, and in any event with multisync, unison and rsync my data is backed up six ways to Sunday.
Other people like apps like opie-reader for ebooks, portable Ogg players (there are a few), portable DivX playback, email (this is noticeable ropy under OpenZaurus, but getting better), and many more... For more ideas, see this thread on zaurus.com.
Downsides? I find the QWERTY keyboard wearing after a few minutes, hence I have the Pocketop, and I've managed to scratch the screen under the handwriting recognition area so I can't really use it any more (I think that was my fault, to be fair). The battery life sucks too, but then it does on all these colour mobile devices. Apparently, the SL5600 is better.
So basically, if you want a PDA, get a Palm. If you want a pocketable Linux computer in a PDA form factor with respectable PIM features and a mountain of open source apps, get a Zaurus.
I'm a computer science PhD student and I use Java for my simulations, LaTeX and PDFs for docs... and I do most of that under Mac OS X, whilst also opening DOCs that idiots send me. I do think it's a compelling platform for science computing. Three members of my group have gotten Powerbooks in the last few months.
And LaTeX, at least amongst my peers, is on the decline. There are a horrific number of PhD students here typesetting thesis in Word. *shudder*
I bet an attack of this nature turns up an absolute shedload of valuable, confidential information, and I bet there are plenty of pissant ISPs in the world with poorly configured DNS servers too. How often has this kind of attack been found? I'm suddenly real glad I run my own DNS server behind my firewall.
"No financial losses" my ass. Lets see what Visa's customers have to say about that when the logins for half a million credit card e-banking systems get compromised. Hmm, almost makes me wish I could detect a similar attack so we could see what the UK police would do. "Intarweb, sir? Nah, not on our patch, you seee...."
Frankly, if you think there is no Mac-PC price difference, you must be smoking crack.
I don't have the time to put some really detailed numbers together because I should be writing my thesis, so I'll pick a system I was looking at just yesterday for a friend: this, from Multivision here in the UK. Briefly, it has:
3200+ Athlon
1Gb ram, 120Gb hard disk
19" CRT (18" TFT, add £180
NEC 4x DVD+RW
128Mb ATI 9800 Pro
Audigy 2 soundcard and some 6-channel speakers
A non-ugly black case, keyboard and mouse
This costs £1700 inc VAT with the 18" TFT screen. A 17" Apple studio display is £549. The balance of £1150 buys you a G4 1Ghz with 256Mb ram, 60Gb hard disk, a GF4MX with 64Mb and a DVD combo drive. Those machines aren't in the same league; they're barely even on the same planet.
Don't dismiss me as an Apple hater; I'm writing this on an iBook I love to bits and use every single day. I'd love use a G5 tower as my main workstation (I am a PhD compsci student), but I strongly suspect I won't be able to afford one.
As for putting 970s in laptops, I need to re-read the Ars Technica article about the chip because I am unfamiliar with how suited it is to mobile processing. Sure you might cram it into a Powerbook, but if it makes the underside run at 60 degC and brings the battery life down to an hour and a half, then that's two good reasons to choose Apple over x86 out of the window. I have read in passing that in fact the 970 is very low power (as it's other life is as a blade processor, I find this unsurprising) so I could well be proven wrong here. We will see.
I agree with many of the previous posters: no way was this a deliberate leak, because that is the opposite of Apple's style. I believe the specs though.
The three key issues for me are: exactly how fast, exactly how much, and what will be in the laptops? I'd like to see some G5 vs P4 vs Opteron benchmarks, but based on the rumourmill I think the dual G5 will be a beast. Of course, the rumourmill is mainly populated by the Apple faithful which makes me rather wary, but still, it looks promising.
At least one rumour claimed prices would go down compared to G4s, which I think is rather unlikely although not I guess out of the question -- if Apple decided they want a much bigger chunk of the market, aggressive price cutting at the same time as releasing a new model that for the first time in four years is as fast as the competition would certainly set things in motion with a bang.
As for the new 15.4" powerbooks, which look pretty likely, I'm betting on a G4 for them. Although the 970, from what I hear, is a very low power chip, and after all it*is* the year of the laptop... Hmm, I dunno.
In any event, I wonder if I'll be able to replace my main Debian workstation with a G5 next week. Guess I'll have to wait and see some prices!
The suit also adds illegal export issues stemming from the worldwide availability of open-source software. SCO claims IBM has breached its contract by making multiprocessor operating system technology available "for free distribution to anyone in the world," including residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Libya, countries to which the United States controls exports. The open-source technology IBM released "can be used for encryption, scientific research and weapons research," the suit said.
I can just imagine the conversation at SCO headquarters (presumable the CEO's mom's basement):
"Uhh, gee Darl, we're taking some pretty heavy flack and there sure are a lot of those blue-suited lawyers. What if the eventual judge we end up in front of has even the tiniest portion of Clue? We'll be doomed for sure!"
"Don't worry, minion: I have incontravertable proof that those evil masterminds at IBM have been working exclusively towards funding Cuba's ICBM research, in utter contravention of the American Way! It's foolproof! WE CAN'T LOSE!" *rubs hands with glee*
I mean, come on. Surely this is one of the more brain-dead things SCO has come out with in the last few months, which is really something of an impressive achievement given the general level of dumbness they are sinking too. I just hope they go away really soon.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at when I spoke about a custom licence; I should have just called it BSD-style. What I wrote there was confusing. Thanks for the correction.
Hey, you have a T610. I'm considering one of those to replace my T68i with at upgrade time, but I've not been able to find one to play with yet. From what I've heard, it's very similar to the T68i but much, much quicker. How are you finding it? Is it as fast as I've been led to believe?
Seems to me that as it was on Nullsoft's server, it was probably intended -- at the time at least -- as an official release. I suspect the Nullsoft boys wrote it to be released and went ahead and did it.
Secondly, as various other things on the Nullsoft site are under weird and wonderful open-source redistribution-allowed licences, I reckon they are probably allowed to determine their own licences under their contract with TW.
So I suspect the GPL licence on the original source is legit. Otherwise, we have to assume they haven't been allowed to open source their other bits of software and TW have been turning a blind eye; TW don't seem like the type to turn a blind eye to anything to me.
Now, this is what I find interested: I couldn't find any other GPL software on the site, just stuff under some custom-written clickthrough redistribution allowed licences. Could it be that Frankel came up with this while messing around, decided to release it knowing it would probably get pulled, and put it under the GPL on purpose? Knowing that it would get mirrored to Hades if TW did pull it?
I'm just speculating, of course, but it seems to me that's the likely way events occured. We'll be able to tell in the next few weeks by the vigour TW employs in asking people to stop hosting mirrors, I suppose.
I've thought of this, and I'd love to, but as a lowly PhD student I find it difficult to change the primary teaching language of a 700-strong computer science department. When I'm king of the world, I'll add it to my ToDo list.
I agree. I'm a PhD student at Cardiff Uni and I've spent a lot of time teaching Java to undergrads, some of whom have limited programming experience. It was once a beautiful teaching language, but every new version of the language makes it harder and harder for beginners.
Don't get me wrong, I also code Java and I love the new features; the trick, as you say, is to focus on teaching a subset. Nevertheless, I await with dread the point next semester when a student points to a piece of example code with an inner class and asks "what's that?"
This is utterly redundant, but I can't help but pat the team responsible for this on the back anyway: this is a fantastic addition to the capabilities of the Linux kernel. Well done guys!
Our household LAN has various components, like a file server, an Xbox for DivX and mp3 playback through the 5.1 surround sound system, and a half-dozen PCs (shared house). We needed both wired (for speed; e.g., file server to LAN or Xbox to file server) and wireless (for laptop flexibility) so we installed both. I can use my iBook with a little micro hifi in the kitchen to stream mp3 wirelessly, as the layout of the house made wiring the kitchen a pricey prospect; meanwhile, I still get to shove gigabytes of data on and off the file server pretty quickly from any of the wired desktop machines.
I think the best answer depends on the layout of your house, but with wired being so cheap, I would suggest using wires were you need them and they can be easily run, and wireless wherever wires cannot reach.
As for getting music to each room, I'm leaning towards the view many other posters have suggested: round up some classic Pentium desktops and use them as streaming nodes. It's not fantastically elegant but at least it's cheap and flexibile.
Does anyone know if the Region2 release has these problems too? I have a copy of the trilogy on my to-DivX pile and I'd like to know if it should be sent back before I burn a day's CPU on it.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Write devastating super-virus
2. Release it
3. Destroy unsuspecting internet
4. ???
5. Profit!
ObSlashdotJoke aside, I always wondered where step 4 came in. Clearly, from the number of viruses doing the rounds now, bragging rights alone is enough of a draw for many; equally clearly, from the vast weight of bugs in viruses, it primarly draws teenage l33t hax0rs with more testosterone than talent.
All the devestation of every trojan and virus in history has been without a clear step 4. The addition of a step 4 worries me a lot, and as has been said before even non-Windows people like me can't feel smug and safe forever.
Yeah, I agree. All the sandboxing you care to apply to any OS or environment or whatnot -- and Unix permissions is only another level of sandbox, after all -- is ultimately useless if people are going to click "yes". That virus might not be able to trash /usr, but it sure can trash /home/rich and that's much worse. The stuff in /usr I can get back with an apt-get; my personal files are only on DVD+RW and that's a pain in the ass.
The one glimmer of goodness is that those of us who don't run EXEs and DOCs we get in the mail are much more secure, but clueless folk on Linux are only safer than clueless folk on Windows because of security through obscurity, not any good reason. And that won't last.
Doesn't stop me smiling a little, though, when I grep my web server hitlogs and find dozens of attempts to retreive cmd.exe?.
As for state of this department, general computing knowledge amongst compsci academics is woeful. To be fair, it's not their job; we have sysadmins and techs for that, but I can run rings around pretty much anyone here and I'm not much more than a sophisticated hobbyist.
There are instructions on the SCUMMVM website. Basically, it's a tool you run over the monster.sou file from the original game; my Sam And Max complete talkie is 44Mb after that compression.
It wreaked havoc here yesterday, at least half a dozen people were infected despite, as you say, the fact that you have the run the PIF in the ZIP before it snags you.
Where am I, you ask?
A computer science department at a major UK university.
I mean, if we don't have the meagre amounts of Clue necessary to avoid this crap, who the hell does?
No, I haven't done it myself; apparantly the Gameboy emu is full speed now, and MAME is supposed to be OK for old and simple stuff. I keep meaning to get around to playing with it but there's so little time...
It's rather rubbish, I am informed.
For full on commuter scaring, however, one of these would appear to be in order. I should buy one, really.
The PDA has Linux on it, but comes with a CD of Windows sync and link software to get files on and off, syncronise the Zaurus with Outlook, and whatnot.
It's not really a PDA, it's a pocketable Linux computer.
First, the PDA side of things. People criticise it for having weak PDA features which, compared to Palms, and that's somewhat true; my previous Psion PDAs had a few extra features around the edges that I miss, but by and large the PIM features are fine for my moderately advanced use.
But there's so much more! SCUMMVM in the palm of your hand with mp3-encoded talkie versions of Fate of Atlantis or Day of the Tentacle is pretty nifty.Add a Wifi card, install Wellenwreiter or Kismet, and go low-profile warwalking. I have a Pocketop IR folding keyboard for long documentation on the go; the screen rotation software Just Works, unlike a lot of PocketPCs.
Unlike Palm owners, I can handle DOC and XLS files native on the device; this is particularly key because the Zaurus is a computer in its own right and not a PDA. The Hancom office apps shipped with it are usable enough for quick on-the-go editing and creation. I could do with one of these now for instant printing of invoices when I'm out at a client's site.
The big compelling piece of software is OpenZaurus, a completely open source and regularly updated distro to replace the Sharp ROM. It's a bit like trading Debian stable for unstable; kinda hacky at times, kinda buggy at others, but it's so exciting to get a massive batch of upgrades every few weeks full of improvements. It's never been buggy enough to lose my PDA data, and in any event with multisync, unison and rsync my data is backed up six ways to Sunday.
Other people like apps like opie-reader for ebooks, portable Ogg players (there are a few), portable DivX playback, email (this is noticeable ropy under OpenZaurus, but getting better), and many more... For more ideas, see this thread on zaurus.com.
Downsides? I find the QWERTY keyboard wearing after a few minutes, hence I have the Pocketop, and I've managed to scratch the screen under the handwriting recognition area so I can't really use it any more (I think that was my fault, to be fair). The battery life sucks too, but then it does on all these colour mobile devices. Apparently, the SL5600 is better.
So basically, if you want a PDA, get a Palm. If you want a pocketable Linux computer in a PDA form factor with respectable PIM features and a mountain of open source apps, get a Zaurus.
I'm a computer science PhD student and I use Java for my simulations, LaTeX and PDFs for docs... and I do most of that under Mac OS X, whilst also opening DOCs that idiots send me. I do think it's a compelling platform for science computing. Three members of my group have gotten Powerbooks in the last few months.
And LaTeX, at least amongst my peers, is on the decline. There are a horrific number of PhD students here typesetting thesis in Word. *shudder*
I bet an attack of this nature turns up an absolute shedload of valuable, confidential information, and I bet there are plenty of pissant ISPs in the world with poorly configured DNS servers too. How often has this kind of attack been found? I'm suddenly real glad I run my own DNS server behind my firewall.
"No financial losses" my ass. Lets see what Visa's customers have to say about that when the logins for half a million credit card e-banking systems get compromised. Hmm, almost makes me wish I could detect a similar attack so we could see what the UK police would do. "Intarweb, sir? Nah, not on our patch, you seee...."
I don't have the time to put some really detailed numbers together because I should be writing my thesis, so I'll pick a system I was looking at just yesterday for a friend: this, from Multivision here in the UK. Briefly, it has:
This costs £1700 inc VAT with the 18" TFT screen. A 17" Apple studio display is £549. The balance of £1150 buys you a G4 1Ghz with 256Mb ram, 60Gb hard disk, a GF4MX with 64Mb and a DVD combo drive. Those machines aren't in the same league; they're barely even on the same planet.
Don't dismiss me as an Apple hater; I'm writing this on an iBook I love to bits and use every single day. I'd love use a G5 tower as my main workstation (I am a PhD compsci student), but I strongly suspect I won't be able to afford one.
As for putting 970s in laptops, I need to re-read the Ars Technica article about the chip because I am unfamiliar with how suited it is to mobile processing. Sure you might cram it into a Powerbook, but if it makes the underside run at 60 degC and brings the battery life down to an hour and a half, then that's two good reasons to choose Apple over x86 out of the window. I have read in passing that in fact the 970 is very low power (as it's other life is as a blade processor, I find this unsurprising) so I could well be proven wrong here. We will see.
I agree with many of the previous posters: no way was this a deliberate leak, because that is the opposite of Apple's style. I believe the specs though.
The three key issues for me are: exactly how fast, exactly how much, and what will be in the laptops? I'd like to see some G5 vs P4 vs Opteron benchmarks, but based on the rumourmill I think the dual G5 will be a beast. Of course, the rumourmill is mainly populated by the Apple faithful which makes me rather wary, but still, it looks promising.
At least one rumour claimed prices would go down compared to G4s, which I think is rather unlikely although not I guess out of the question -- if Apple decided they want a much bigger chunk of the market, aggressive price cutting at the same time as releasing a new model that for the first time in four years is as fast as the competition would certainly set things in motion with a bang.
As for the new 15.4" powerbooks, which look pretty likely, I'm betting on a G4 for them. Although the 970, from what I hear, is a very low power chip, and after all it*is* the year of the laptop... Hmm, I dunno.
In any event, I wonder if I'll be able to replace my main Debian workstation with a G5 next week. Guess I'll have to wait and see some prices!
(bet this gets -1 redundant)
1. Sue (IBM)|(Red Hat)|(Linus)|(TEH WORLD)
2. Lose
3. ???
4. Profit!
"Uhh, gee Darl, we're taking some pretty heavy flack and there sure are a lot of those blue-suited lawyers. What if the eventual judge we end up in front of has even the tiniest portion of Clue? We'll be doomed for sure!"
"Don't worry, minion: I have incontravertable proof that those evil masterminds at IBM have been working exclusively towards funding Cuba's ICBM research, in utter contravention of the American Way! It's foolproof! WE CAN'T LOSE!" *rubs hands with glee*
I mean, come on. Surely this is one of the more brain-dead things SCO has come out with in the last few months, which is really something of an impressive achievement given the general level of dumbness they are sinking too. I just hope they go away really soon.
Just imagine what we could do with a Beowulf cluster of these!
Yeah, that's what I was getting at when I spoke about a custom licence; I should have just called it BSD-style. What I wrote there was confusing. Thanks for the correction.
Hey, you have a T610. I'm considering one of those to replace my T68i with at upgrade time, but I've not been able to find one to play with yet. From what I've heard, it's very similar to the T68i but much, much quicker. How are you finding it? Is it as fast as I've been led to believe?
Warning: there are half-assed guesses below.
Seems to me that as it was on Nullsoft's server, it was probably intended -- at the time at least -- as an official release. I suspect the Nullsoft boys wrote it to be released and went ahead and did it.
Secondly, as various other things on the Nullsoft site are under weird and wonderful open-source redistribution-allowed licences, I reckon they are probably allowed to determine their own licences under their contract with TW.
So I suspect the GPL licence on the original source is legit. Otherwise, we have to assume they haven't been allowed to open source their other bits of software and TW have been turning a blind eye; TW don't seem like the type to turn a blind eye to anything to me.
Now, this is what I find interested: I couldn't find any other GPL software on the site, just stuff under some custom-written clickthrough redistribution allowed licences. Could it be that Frankel came up with this while messing around, decided to release it knowing it would probably get pulled, and put it under the GPL on purpose? Knowing that it would get mirrored to Hades if TW did pull it?
I'm just speculating, of course, but it seems to me that's the likely way events occured. We'll be able to tell in the next few weeks by the vigour TW employs in asking people to stop hosting mirrors, I suppose.
Oh, and I don't regard Java as anything even close to a syntactic nightmare. But then again I do a lot of Perl so I have a warped perspective.
I've thought of this, and I'd love to, but as a lowly PhD student I find it difficult to change the primary teaching language of a 700-strong computer science department. When I'm king of the world, I'll add it to my ToDo list.
I agree. I'm a PhD student at Cardiff Uni and I've spent a lot of time teaching Java to undergrads, some of whom have limited programming experience. It was once a beautiful teaching language, but every new version of the language makes it harder and harder for beginners.
Don't get me wrong, I also code Java and I love the new features; the trick, as you say, is to focus on teaching a subset. Nevertheless, I await with dread the point next semester when a student points to a piece of example code with an inner class and asks "what's that?"
This is utterly redundant, but I can't help but pat the team responsible for this on the back anyway: this is a fantastic addition to the capabilities of the Linux kernel. Well done guys!
Our household LAN has various components, like a file server, an Xbox for DivX and mp3 playback through the 5.1 surround sound system, and a half-dozen PCs (shared house). We needed both wired (for speed; e.g., file server to LAN or Xbox to file server) and wireless (for laptop flexibility) so we installed both. I can use my iBook with a little micro hifi in the kitchen to stream mp3 wirelessly, as the layout of the house made wiring the kitchen a pricey prospect; meanwhile, I still get to shove gigabytes of data on and off the file server pretty quickly from any of the wired desktop machines.
I think the best answer depends on the layout of your house, but with wired being so cheap, I would suggest using wires were you need them and they can be easily run, and wireless wherever wires cannot reach.
As for getting music to each room, I'm leaning towards the view many other posters have suggested: round up some classic Pentium desktops and use them as streaming nodes. It's not fantastically elegant but at least it's cheap and flexibile.
Does anyone know if the Region2 release has these problems too? I have a copy of the trilogy on my to-DivX pile and I'd like to know if it should be sent back before I burn a day's CPU on it.