Okay, EVERYONE knows those crazed people who hijacked those planes used the internet, so as a response restrictions on Online liberties are necissary.
Though not many people know, they also used telephones! Doesn't this scare you, that a phone can be used for terrorist activities?! We should let the FBI wiretap everyone on a whim, so that we can be protected! But wait, they also used CARS! Can you believe that?! I guess that means renting cars should be outlawed and one should have to get govt approval to buy a car of their own! All these things and MORE need to be limited for our own protection.
"But this is an ethernet appliance. Its the future. Listen to the music. Pretty soon, the lights in your room will have an ethernet jack as everything else. Imagine downloading some coordinated mood lighting from your server after dinner."
The stove, refrigerator, even the kitchen sink, er dishwasher... Everything will have an IP address. Your dinner will be cooked to exacting specifications and the groceries will be automatically ordered.
This beleif caused the dotcom bubble. It has already been proven wrong (by the bursting of the bubble). People ENJOY shopping. The smell of an open market (flea markets), the sound of people, the touch of new fabric, and many other things can NEVER be replaced by technology.
There is no denying that bundling helps consumers. Apple does it, Linux does it, FreeBSD does it, everyone does it. It's more of a matter of only having ONE vender for those bundled services. What if HP's customers DON'T want WMP, but instead need Quicktime as the default API for all multimedia services? Too bad, WMP must be the default. What if Dells customers don't want.Net on any of their machines and instead what a different service? Too bad,.NET must be prominent. Last but not least, as we have seen with a more recent worm that can be spread by merely opening a web page, there is little to no recourse you, I or and OEM has. In a choice driven market of bundled services, when a vender repeatedly bundles insecure services on their computers, their customers will have recourse and will be able to migrate to a more secure enviroment.
How is this acheived? Simple. Give OEM's the same right of first sale that everyeone else has. Let any OEM remove or add any service from Windows they feel their customers don't want or want, then let the market decide.
"Having your own thoughts and the right to express them is one of many things that makes this country great, but there comes a time and place where you need to support your country (and military) first. So far these groups have not done anything wrong yet...I would hate to see things degrade to their status durring the Vietnam war days."
If people should not protest wars and give "support", then what exactly are we fighting for? In the end, isn't the ability to disagree and voice your opinion freely one of the main goals in "defending freedom"?
I'm not really sure how this will help. Having a server off by default will not make it harder to break into once the server has been turned on. Not only that, the problem's exploited by worms and script kiddies are all known, sometimes months and even years in advance of an attack. If MS were truely serious, they would exstablish an independant body to certify MSCEs, make it so that the certification is much more difficult than it is now, and only provide support to customers who have certified personal on staff. On top of this, MS should guarantee backward compatibility of ALL software installed on a system after a security update is applied (within a given product version) so that admins won't be terrified to install updates.
If the user has Classic running, which is VERY often the case, there is a problem. Classic is setuid root. All one would have to due is encode a malicious classic program as a.hqx, have it add itself to the startup procedure for OS X, and *poofie* instand backdoor.
Just tested it. It appears that IE opens the file without specifing which application to open it with (which is something that OS X supports), in the expectation that the.hqx file is also stuffit compressed (which is logical, %99.99 of the time anything that is.hqx is also.sit). So I just chmod 700 IE (it's owned by root which is in the same group as the admin account) on both Macs in our Lab. Not a big deal since everyone uses Mozilla anyhow.
How different is this from the lawsuit with Microsoft oh so many years ago over look and feel?
Very different. Apple lost because they signed a bad license with MS and it was ruled that Apple had licensed their look and feel to MS. Not many people know, as part of the IE budle/investment agreement, MS had to pay Billions (it's unknown, but that is what Apple claimed MS owed them) in back payments to Apple for licenses and as far as I know is still paying Apple to this day.
"what Windows OS comes with CD burning and DVD playback out of the box? Or even CD ripping and mp3 encoding, movie making, DVD burning software, and web server software out of the box?"
Windows XP does, except for DVD player/burner (sorta, I beleive it has the codecs just no player). Funny thing is those additions came in reaction to Apple's moves, with Apple having a 6-12 month lead over MS. Infact I would say XP as it stands NOW (vs. say Win2K) is a direct reaction to OS X, but thats another story.
You know my biggest fear isn't any loss of freedom, in the end the Supreme Court has a habit of shooting that stuff down for the bullshit it is. My biggest fear is encased in the following scenerio:
Let's say for the sake of arguement, they find people in the US who helped conspire the attacks on Sept 11. Now lets assume it was based of a broadened search that Congress allows. Okay, the person(s) responsible get convicted and go to jail. Now they appeal that search warrent used to tap your email, and insist they should have gotten a wiretap for it. The Supreme Court agrees and thows out ALL evidence based of the improper search and gives them a new trial. Now with probabally all evidence gone, someone may have to be se free. That's what I fear. Congresss being shortsighted and seeking a quick solution and in the end get no justice cause the laws used to find the people were unconstitional.
Let OEMs have the same rights of resale that consumers have. That is, let them modify Windows in any way they see fit, while at the same time forcing MS to license Windows at the same cost to all OEM's under the same license. Add to that, not allowing them to help supplement shelving and advertising or any other costs that OEM's occur if they stick to MS's version of Windows.
Then you will IMMEDIATELY see competition in the market as companies dump WMP for Real, Quicktime or home brewed solution.
Irrelevent. It has nothing to do with putting a USB 1.0 device on the chain. It has to do with the fact that USB 2.0 uses time slices, rather than bandwidth sharing. Move your mouse and half the time your USB 2 port will ONLY do mouse stuff, even if you are trying to import video. Firewire has no such problem...
One of the main reason I have heard time and time again for companies not switching to another lower TCO OS (MacOS, some open source Unix) is the cost of retraining. Here, MS, clearly made the cost of ownership HIGHER than the cost of retraining and a company noticed it. Now, after MS tries to move everyone to.NET and owning a WinTel computer requires annual fees, don't you think more companies will move away from Windows?
The natural recourse is to cease all business in Australia and ignore the law suit. Problem is, as we see with the US attitude with countries like China, profit takes precidence over ethics. It's just profitable to limit your speech in places with Draconian laws.
Not being a PC person, spending my work day in a SGI/OS X enviroment and having OS X at home, I just don't understand something. On Mac's, Linux ships with Mac-on-Linux. The last I played with it was years ago (3-4?), but it worked. It worked well. I assume today it works near flawlessly. OS X runs OS 9 apps transparently at about 95% of their native speed. Now, what I don't get is why Linux on x86 does NOT have a GPL'ed envrioment that boots Windows inside of LInux at near full speed with no loss of compatibility (I mean even OS 9 apps in OS X "Blue Box" have access to OpenGL and Networking).
I don't care how much it costs to make a drug (research and all), if you can save (or extend) just one human life by breaking a patent, just one life, you are totally justified in breaking the patent. The lives of our fellow humans are bigger than patent laws. They are bigger and the WTO. They are the most important thing one can care about. Now let's address the points one by one.
"1. Basically Brazil breaks the agreed internation law and makes the stuff for free, thereby forcing other nations to either follow their example of pay the difference. (see South Africa's example - do it or we take your companies assests)"
If a the only reasonable way a person can feed their family is by stealing, they are totally morally justified by doing so. If the only reasonable way a POOR country can get drugs to help their citizens live productive lives is by breaking patents they are morally justified in doing so.
"2. Reduces the possibility of region specific drugs NOT being developed because companies rightfully fear losing all investment. (some diseases are more prevalent in certain areas of the world - that is an obvious statement)."
Asolutely silly. There will always be profit in creating drugs. The question is whether or not the company wants to price gauge. All you have to do is look at the difference between the cost of drugs in the US and in Canada. They charge what they beleive they can get with their monolopy power.
"3. Raises spectre of loss of intellectual property on other levels, and more and more are confiscated for the "public good""
It is not a question of public good. It is a question of human life. Noone has the right to put a price on YOUR right to live. They have a right to reasonable compensation, if possible.
"4. Increases the likelyhood of similar industries leaving "hostile" countries furthering the problem that country faces."
Totally 100% irrelevent. In this case said country would just produce the drugs themselves after visiting the US and see what the drug is.
"When do we stop? Who can judge what is a fair price for something? Who can judge what can fairly be patented?"
begin rant
In the case of saving lives, Brazil is totally justified. We stop when drug companies stop trying to hold the lives of people hostage with high prices. We stop when people can get affordable health care. Do you realize how modern AIDS drugs were developed? Researchers when to South America and got bark, branches, plants, etc from their forests, came back to the US and tested how they affected HIV. At one point in the mid-eighties a drug was found to inhibit HIV production and cause it to recede (for a time). They went back into the forest and the tree they got it from was gone due to clear cutting. Then the inhibitors arrived, helped, then HIV learned to resist them. They then tried to produce NATURALLY OCCURING CHEMICALS in the lab and got a patent. Patent on what?!?!?! A process? The way i see things, Brazil has a RIGHT to HIV drugs since many if not all of them came from their forests....
"Since type/creator is not in the resource fork, but in the file itself, altering them would alter the file in a very small and usually insignificant way"
Bzzt..Wrong. It's stored in the inode tree, not the file. The moment you copy a MacOS file to a flat file system, it looses this information permenantly. Now if you copy to a PC zip disk it APPEARS to keep it, but in reality, it stores the information on invisible files.
"But I download an awful lot in Zip and RAR archives. Doing that on a Mac would not affect type/creator of the files within the archive"
Bzzt...Wrong. Both zip and rar do NOT keep MacOS style meta data post compression. Not only that but Mac users almost exclusivly use Stuff it for compression. I know I do, because...drum roll please....it KEEPS the meta data post compression.
"and even more information can be gleaned from looking over someone's back when they type. Let's be serious, guys.;-)"
Although funny, it does seem to miss the point, which isn't clearly outlined. Picture it this way......
There are Hundreds of thousands, if not Millions to 10's of Millions of computers out there that use encryption to transmit very important data. Sometimes that data is a trade secret, sometimes that data is Finacial Results that SEC rules say you can't publish yet, sometimes its internal company communication...almost all of which is being sent by Dilbert clones. Sometimes the admin, who may just be a High School teacher (they can't afford admins), chooses to use encryption over the entire network to allow kids to use dictionary passwords.
Anyhow, rule number 1 of security, the overall security of your network is only as good as your weakest link. So maybe the corporate exchanges within the network are all secure, but an employee on a low profile, unimporatant computer uses ssh to access his personal email and not only that it's a dictionary password, it's just email afterall. Now some clever cracker packet sniffs his email typing patterns, and does a brute force attack on his password...Now all that is needed is patience and one person to send the wrong info to that email account. Not only that, but by reading his email, one might be able to know how the company works and then call up one day and socially engineer important information. This COULD happen and if encryption in general and SSH in particular doesn't immediatly change to prevent this sort of attack, it will happen.
In the old days, crackers went through the garbage of a target, before attacking it. (Hell, that is still done.) Now a days, the word "garbage" means different things. It could be a note to a family member that the boss is out of town for the weekend, that the company is moving to Linux next week or maybe even a Dilbert protype emailing himself his own password to the corporate network. At anyrate, this kind of thing is a bit more serious than it sounds at first glance and should be fixed immediately.
"But my point is that in Windows all one needs to do is highlight the filename and change the three-letter extension. No dialog box and pull-down menu necessary. Faster and easier. IMHO, of course."
Current shipping version of Windows (ME) does not allow that. You have to right click on the file and get the properties dialog, because....the extensions are hidden. Second the current version of Windows has a VERY archane dialog for changing default apps for a given extension, compared to the elegance of OS X, is next to useless.
"You are of course aware that type/creator is not in the resource fork for Mac files, and so if you download a graphic created with Mac Photoshop, it will usually want to open in Photoshop if you have it installed?"
Just not true. Netscape, IE, all every FTP app I can think of all reset the type and creator on download, if it is there at all. They use the builtin database in MacOS for determining the type/creator, which will ALWAYS be set to an app you have. As I said the ONLY times I know this will happen is when you 1. Download a stuff-it archive and 2. Download from a Hotline server that is Mac based. As I also said, I can't recall the last time I downloaded a file as a stuffit archive and Hotline is for pirates...
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, EVERYONE knows those crazed people who hijacked those planes used the internet, so as a response restrictions on Online liberties are necissary.
Though not many people know, they also used telephones! Doesn't this scare you, that a phone can be used for terrorist activities?! We should let the FBI wiretap everyone on a whim, so that we can be protected! But wait, they also used CARS! Can you believe that?! I guess that means renting cars should be outlawed and one should have to get govt approval to buy a car of their own! All these things and MORE need to be limited for our own protection.
Fucking stupid if you ask me.
The stove, refrigerator, even the kitchen sink, er dishwasher... Everything will have an IP address. Your dinner will be cooked to exacting specifications and the groceries will be automatically ordered.
This beleif caused the dotcom bubble. It has already been proven wrong (by the bursting of the bubble). People ENJOY shopping. The smell of an open market (flea markets), the sound of people, the touch of new fabric, and many other things can NEVER be replaced by technology.
I sure do hope you were trying to be funny...
How is this acheived? Simple. Give OEM's the same right of first sale that everyeone else has. Let any OEM remove or add any service from Windows they feel their customers don't want or want, then let the market decide.
If people should not protest wars and give "support", then what exactly are we fighting for? In the end, isn't the ability to disagree and voice your opinion freely one of the main goals in "defending freedom"?
I'm not really sure how this will help. Having a server off by default will not make it harder to break into once the server has been turned on. Not only that, the problem's exploited by worms and script kiddies are all known, sometimes months and even years in advance of an attack. If MS were truely serious, they would exstablish an independant body to certify MSCEs, make it so that the certification is much more difficult than it is now, and only provide support to customers who have certified personal on staff. On top of this, MS should guarantee backward compatibility of ALL software installed on a system after a security update is applied (within a given product version) so that admins won't be terrified to install updates.
[localhost:Classic Startup.app/Contents/Resources] login% pwd
/System/Library/CoreServices/Classic Startup.app/Contents/Resources
[localhost:Classic Startup.app/Contents/Resources] login% ls -la TruBlueEnvironment
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root wheel 476740 Sep 26 20:04 TruBlueEnvironment
Sure looks like it's setuid root to me.
If the user has Classic running, which is VERY often the case, there is a problem. Classic is setuid root. All one would have to due is encode a malicious classic program as a .hqx, have it add itself to the startup procedure for OS X, and *poofie* instand backdoor.
Just tested it. It appears that IE opens the file without specifing which application to open it with (which is something that OS X supports), in the expectation that the .hqx file is also stuffit compressed (which is logical, %99.99 of the time anything that is .hqx is also .sit). So I just chmod 700 IE (it's owned by root which is in the same group as the admin account) on both Macs in our Lab. Not a big deal since everyone uses Mozilla anyhow.
Can someone tell me what magic will prevent 13 year old girls everywhere from jumping on daddies PC and downloading the mp3s from Britian?
Very different. Apple lost because they signed a bad license with MS and it was ruled that Apple had licensed their look and feel to MS. Not many people know, as part of the IE budle/investment agreement, MS had to pay Billions (it's unknown, but that is what Apple claimed MS owed them) in back payments to Apple for licenses and as far as I know is still paying Apple to this day.
Windows XP does, except for DVD player/burner (sorta, I beleive it has the codecs just no player). Funny thing is those additions came in reaction to Apple's moves, with Apple having a 6-12 month lead over MS. Infact I would say XP as it stands NOW (vs. say Win2K) is a direct reaction to OS X, but thats another story.
You know my biggest fear isn't any loss of freedom, in the end the Supreme Court has a habit of shooting that stuff down for the bullshit it is. My biggest fear is encased in the following scenerio:
Let's say for the sake of arguement, they find people in the US who helped conspire the attacks on Sept 11. Now lets assume it was based of a broadened search that Congress allows. Okay, the person(s) responsible get convicted and go to jail. Now they appeal that search warrent used to tap your email, and insist they should have gotten a wiretap for it. The Supreme Court agrees and thows out ALL evidence based of the improper search and gives them a new trial. Now with probabally all evidence gone, someone may have to be se free. That's what I fear. Congresss being shortsighted and seeking a quick solution and in the end get no justice cause the laws used to find the people were unconstitional.
Let OEMs have the same rights of resale that consumers have. That is, let them modify Windows in any way they see fit, while at the same time forcing MS to license Windows at the same cost to all OEM's under the same license. Add to that, not allowing them to help supplement shelving and advertising or any other costs that OEM's occur if they stick to MS's version of Windows.
Then you will IMMEDIATELY see competition in the market as companies dump WMP for Real, Quicktime or home brewed solution.
"Alas, ATG was disbanded and the group folded into other development orgs at Apple"
Then reborn in the form of Apple's Advanced Computation Group.
Irrelevent. It has nothing to do with putting a USB 1.0 device on the chain. It has to do with the fact that USB 2.0 uses time slices, rather than bandwidth sharing. Move your mouse and half the time your USB 2 port will ONLY do mouse stuff, even if you are trying to import video. Firewire has no such problem...
2. The moment you put a mouse (or anyother low speed device) on that USB 2.0 port you loose the 480MB/sec max throughput.
3. Microsoft supports Firewire instead of USB 2
4. Firewire is looking to move to 800MB/sec in the near future.
For peats sake, Michael, you Slashdotted someones bathroom. You should be ashamed of yourself.
One of the main reason I have heard time and time again for companies not switching to another lower TCO OS (MacOS, some open source Unix) is the cost of retraining. Here, MS, clearly made the cost of ownership HIGHER than the cost of retraining and a company noticed it. Now, after MS tries to move everyone to .NET and owning a WinTel computer requires annual fees, don't you think more companies will move away from Windows?
The natural recourse is to cease all business in Australia and ignore the law suit. Problem is, as we see with the US attitude with countries like China, profit takes precidence over ethics. It's just profitable to limit your speech in places with Draconian laws.
Not being a PC person, spending my work day in a SGI/OS X enviroment and having OS X at home, I just don't understand something. On Mac's, Linux ships with Mac-on-Linux. The last I played with it was years ago (3-4?), but it worked. It worked well. I assume today it works near flawlessly. OS X runs OS 9 apps transparently at about 95% of their native speed. Now, what I don't get is why Linux on x86 does NOT have a GPL'ed envrioment that boots Windows inside of LInux at near full speed with no loss of compatibility (I mean even OS 9 apps in OS X "Blue Box" have access to OpenGL and Networking).
I hope a doctor reminds you of that if you are hit by a car that you "didn't see coming" and he refuses treatment.
"1. Basically Brazil breaks the agreed internation law and makes the stuff for free, thereby forcing other nations to either follow their example of pay the difference. (see South Africa's example - do it or we take your companies assests)"
If a the only reasonable way a person can feed their family is by stealing, they are totally morally justified by doing so. If the only reasonable way a POOR country can get drugs to help their citizens live productive lives is by breaking patents they are morally justified in doing so.
"2. Reduces the possibility of region specific drugs NOT being developed because companies rightfully fear losing all investment. (some diseases are more prevalent in certain areas of the world - that is an obvious statement)."
Asolutely silly. There will always be profit in creating drugs. The question is whether or not the company wants to price gauge. All you have to do is look at the difference between the cost of drugs in the US and in Canada. They charge what they beleive they can get with their monolopy power.
"3. Raises spectre of loss of intellectual property on other levels, and more and more are confiscated for the "public good""
It is not a question of public good. It is a question of human life. Noone has the right to put a price on YOUR right to live. They have a right to reasonable compensation, if possible.
"4. Increases the likelyhood of similar industries leaving "hostile" countries furthering the problem that country faces."
Totally 100% irrelevent. In this case said country would just produce the drugs themselves after visiting the US and see what the drug is.
"When do we stop? Who can judge what is a fair price for something? Who can judge what can fairly be patented?"
begin rant
In the case of saving lives, Brazil is totally justified. We stop when drug companies stop trying to hold the lives of people hostage with high prices. We stop when people can get affordable health care. Do you realize how modern AIDS drugs were developed? Researchers when to South America and got bark, branches, plants, etc from their forests, came back to the US and tested how they affected HIV. At one point in the mid-eighties a drug was found to inhibit HIV production and cause it to recede (for a time). They went back into the forest and the tree they got it from was gone due to clear cutting. Then the inhibitors arrived, helped, then HIV learned to resist them. They then tried to produce NATURALLY OCCURING CHEMICALS in the lab and got a patent. Patent on what?!?!?! A process? The way i see things, Brazil has a RIGHT to HIV drugs since many if not all of them came from their forests....
/end rant
Bzzt..Wrong. It's stored in the inode tree, not the file. The moment you copy a MacOS file to a flat file system, it looses this information permenantly. Now if you copy to a PC zip disk it APPEARS to keep it, but in reality, it stores the information on invisible files.
"But I download an awful lot in Zip and RAR archives. Doing that on a Mac would not affect type/creator of the files within the archive"
Bzzt...Wrong. Both zip and rar do NOT keep MacOS style meta data post compression. Not only that but Mac users almost exclusivly use Stuff it for compression. I know I do, because...drum roll please....it KEEPS the meta data post compression.
Although funny, it does seem to miss the point, which isn't clearly outlined. Picture it this way......
There are Hundreds of thousands, if not Millions to 10's of Millions of computers out there that use encryption to transmit very important data. Sometimes that data is a trade secret, sometimes that data is Finacial Results that SEC rules say you can't publish yet, sometimes its internal company communication...almost all of which is being sent by Dilbert clones. Sometimes the admin, who may just be a High School teacher (they can't afford admins), chooses to use encryption over the entire network to allow kids to use dictionary passwords.
Anyhow, rule number 1 of security, the overall security of your network is only as good as your weakest link. So maybe the corporate exchanges within the network are all secure, but an employee on a low profile, unimporatant computer uses ssh to access his personal email and not only that it's a dictionary password, it's just email afterall. Now some clever cracker packet sniffs his email typing patterns, and does a brute force attack on his password...Now all that is needed is patience and one person to send the wrong info to that email account. Not only that, but by reading his email, one might be able to know how the company works and then call up one day and socially engineer important information. This COULD happen and if encryption in general and SSH in particular doesn't immediatly change to prevent this sort of attack, it will happen.
In the old days, crackers went through the garbage of a target, before attacking it. (Hell, that is still done.) Now a days, the word "garbage" means different things. It could be a note to a family member that the boss is out of town for the weekend, that the company is moving to Linux next week or maybe even a Dilbert protype emailing himself his own password to the corporate network. At anyrate, this kind of thing is a bit more serious than it sounds at first glance and should be fixed immediately.
Current shipping version of Windows (ME) does not allow that. You have to right click on the file and get the properties dialog, because....the extensions are hidden. Second the current version of Windows has a VERY archane dialog for changing default apps for a given extension, compared to the elegance of OS X, is next to useless.
"You are of course aware that type/creator is not in the resource fork for Mac files, and so if you download a graphic created with Mac Photoshop, it will usually want to open in Photoshop if you have it installed?"
Just not true. Netscape, IE, all every FTP app I can think of all reset the type and creator on download, if it is there at all. They use the builtin database in MacOS for determining the type/creator, which will ALWAYS be set to an app you have. As I said the ONLY times I know this will happen is when you 1. Download a stuff-it archive and 2. Download from a Hotline server that is Mac based. As I also said, I can't recall the last time I downloaded a file as a stuffit archive and Hotline is for pirates...