The argument that Mr. Hussein gassed his own people is commonly used as justification for cluster-bombing innocent children in Baghdad. The United States of America provided the Iraqi government with numerous chemical and biological weapons during the buildup of hostilities with Iran. Sorry, but we didn't seem to mind it much when it served our political needs, so why are people so adamant about bringing it up now? This was 20 years ago, when Donald Rumsfeld was shaking hands with Hussein and offering him our support. I am willing to bet that the information we had was receipts for stuff we sold his ass over the last 20 years...by the guys who openly supported selling it to him. That's why they freaked, and were one-upped by their own puppet, or perhaps the scientists and leaders behind him. Afghanistan: Mission NOT Accomplished. Iraq: Mission NOT Accomplished. Unless the mission was to bomb the living shit out of civilians with devastating and even radioactive weapons, then give a ton of corporate contracts to companies that have screwed with the region for decades now and need new sources of revenue...
Fitting end to a great show
on
The Simpsons Movie
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Now that the Simpsons has started to lose its touch, the kiss of death appears, a movie. Once you resort to making a movie, you signify the beginning of the end for a tv show. This season's schizophrenic and dull writing has really impacted my view of The Simpsons, it is just not the same anymore, not as funny. I've been a fan since viewing it at Spike and Mike's in the late 80's, witnessing the shows on the big screen instead of on the Tracy Ullman show. I was a big fan of Groenig, having read his Life in Hell strips in my sister's UCLA Bruin, around the same time that Bill the Cat was forming Deathtongue. In the mid nineties, we'd gather at the Rat and Raven in San Francisco, watch the show over a beer, and shush anyone who was blasphemous enough to actually talk during the show. This is in a full bar, mind you, where the commercial breaks were the only time you could get a refill.
The 30 minute format (including commercials, of course) is perfect for the show, how they'll pull off a full-length animated feature, I don't know. I do know, however, that the show has lost some of its luster. The writing doesn't seem as good, and I can only think that being that funny for 10+ years has to take a toll on creativity. The movie will have devoted followers, and loyal fans, as well as critics and naysayers. Having been into the Simpsons since its inception, my opinion is that a movie will change things forever. I wish I could be excited about it, I will go, of course, but I can only wish that my doubts are completely unjustified, and I get a pleasant surprise.
Dude, I recognized the articl writer as a windbag, not a player, and bailed on it immediately. Too bad I read the first 15 paragraphs or so...talk about going nowhere and wasting time...
(Pet peeve: check your grammar and cut/paste errors before you publish stuff)
I read a quote that TiVo used its "technology" to measure viewing habits during the SuperBowl. I hate the idea that someone would be metering my viewing habits...so doing it myself is even more optimal.
We can send in the RIAA to handle this one. Using the Republican AND Democrats DMCA-type rules, I'm sure a crime was committed. I can't wait until some tech fails to patch up the systems and someone manages to float the petty internal bickering out to the rest of the world for viewing...
We should make sure we completely destroy this planet first. I mean, Mars is pretty much uninhabitable, so it makes little sense to give up this plush, fertile planet for one so desolate quite yet...
Cubes suck. I've worked in 3, but the rest of my jobs have been cubeless...I think it's a prerequisite now to avoid workplaces that use them. Awful things. This poor chap violated the cube laws, too. Probably had HR pull him in and give him a scolding. Places like this are yucky, but it is nice to know that someone has some creativity to be the penguin in the crowd singing "I've gotta be me!"
This will be ineffective. Congress understands computers and related technology about as well as my mom, so this type of bill will fail before it even gets going.
I've got a filter list going in my "spam" account on yahoo...but it is very interesting how I'm getting emails lately.
1) The spammer is changing the mail sender IP address by a stepping of one address approximately every 3 hours.
2) The spammer is changing the subdomain (e.g. xx1.spammerdomainnamehere.us...xx2.spammerdomainna mehere.us etc.) for each mail.
3) The spammer is changing the sender's name and email address with every message.
4) The spammer is changing the actual domain name every few hours as well. I get about 30 a day from the same people...with one of the changes mentioned.
Litigation won't help, since this type of spam is obviously intended to circumvent spam filters and blocks, spammers will get around the law and we'll be in a designer drug situation (we all know how well the war on drugs has gone).
Blah blah blah Microsoft blah blah blah Windows sucks blah blah blah ha ha ha it happened to a Linux distro blah blah blah...this has nothing to do with M$, it is an Info Security issue.
I'm sorry you work in such a lame environment. Here's an idea, get a job somewhere that has the tools you need.
I've got a system that has had about an hour of downtime (excluding the obnoxious reboot cycles of patches/routine maintenance) in almost 2 years. The engineers and developers are completely able to use their systems, and are willing to accept certain limitations of the software/hardware in order to do their jobs. Shucks, that sounds like compromise, it must be hard for you.
I don't make it impossible for people to do their job...and it's never been my policy. If you didn't have the IT monkeys to complain about, you'd still wind up bitching about your project manager changing the schedule, or the sales guy adding "features," or maybe the engineering manager not knowing what he/she's talking about. It has nothing to do with the policy, take a look in the mirror sometime...
The Fortune-50 customer you're talking about probably would be happy to know that the IT screwups prevented the sales and bizdev folks (the ones who generate revenue, you know, the ones that neither the IT guys or the Developers have a job without) from spreading some worm that brought down your entire system and caused them to have some DOS as a result. There is no resemblance to me, my systems run great, and I don't have any complaints from the developers here. In fact, the developers are actually cool people who don't act like you do in any way. We share the frustrations of it being 2003 and our standardized OS is completely lacking (you work with what you have, complaining about it does what, exactly?). I don't get flame/hatemail, nor do they use terms like "screwups" or "monkeys" when talking about any of their coworkers. You have a bad attitude, the IT guys probably hate dealing with you...and you wind up suffering. Vicious cycle, but it isn't ALL IT's fault.
Funny, I used to work with folks like you, here's what I wound up fighting:
1) I fought the company developers who insisted upon having administrative privileges for everything, then, when their systems got fucked up, I fought their managers over the time I lost geting pulled away to fix the asinine problem they created by hosing their machine. Windows voodoo is an art, and knowing Linux does not make you a Windows guru.
2) I fought again to maintain ownership of files and permissions, because people like #1 above would walk in and do things like install ODBC drivers on a web server that was running company specific programs, and they didn't know that stupid WinDOS needed to have the service pack reapplied, effectively shutting down 25 other people from doing their work.
3) I fought platform bigots who didn't know that there are resources like technet, which are as good or better than any of the linux documentation I've read. In fact, whenever I have a problem on Linux machines, it is next to impossible to get more help than a generalized technical reference to the problem, and a solution that assumes I already know how to fix it.
4) I fought people with bad attitudes all day. People who would bitch about the limitations of Windows, constantly trying to prove that they knew more about what they did than I did (of course you know more about it, you pompous ass, that's what you get paid to do), while I had 60 messages in my inbox from people who were too daft to learn, for the 20th time, how to connect a printer, or why their mistyped email address was bouncing. People who liked to sit on their platform holier than all others, and bitch all day about how Windows sucked, especially for doing some really vague or obscure thing. At the end of the day, we had 1,500 people who were able to do their jobs "efficiently" and 5 people who felt better about demeaning "reboot monkeys," who never had to risk their jobs by telling the CTO he couldn't have access to the Administrator or root passwords.
Talk to me next month and I won't have a litany of complaints, because now I work at a small company, running windows (and a debian web server), and everything is smooth and works great. On top of that, I've empowered every user that needs it to have admin privileges on their systems, and on top of that, I don't have any platform bigots to tell me why Mac is better, or Linux is the only way to go. I'm really, really glad that I don't work with people like you anymore.
I've posted several times that all OS's have vulnerabilities, but now I'm done. Anyone who posts to/. about M$ vulnerabilities vs. *nix vulnerabilities are just listening to themselves mumble some platform bigotry crap. Who gives a shit what I think? Who gives a shit what you think? This exploit is being released as a service to the community, and bitching about it in a post is a flaccid, pointless exercise in listening to ourselves talk. That said, I'm going to go clean out some spam from my yahoo account. Big deal...Microsoft sucks...Linux users are pompous, nobody gives a shit what you think...just patch your farging server and shut up.
The OS is really not as important as the security habits of the sysadmin, particularly related to password strength. I've known a lot of platform bigots (you know the ones, Linux is God you Microserf, bow before me for I am root and can write perl scripts) who used really lame passwords. Compromising a machine, regardless of platform, is easier when the machine is not patched (see bugtraq) and when strong authentication is not used.
Again, I repeat myself here, but it has to be said...EVERY OS is vulnerable. If anything, this article doesn't surprise me because of the difficulty in protecting a Linux system, an inherent problem with *nix flavors. You can build them to be beautiful, screaming machines, but you have to have in-depth knowledge about what to do, how to do it and why you should set them up a certain way. If you don't know what to protect yourself against, you won't do it...
Using 3L337 as a password won't protect your system from script kiddies, sorry.
Does anyone know if the RIAA violated any COPA laws by obtaining and releasing information about a 12 year old? Since we are in an interesting legal free-for-all with DRM, copyright, software patents and various other issues, could there be some way to pin child endangerment charges on the RIAA in this case, based on other poorly written laws? Anyone with a law degree or real understanding of the law care to respond, since I don't really know much about it?
First off, the market is a real bitch right now, so having a job is a good thing. I've done the 300+ users/5 servers/no help thing before, and it isn't really enjoyable. I've found that if you let someone run all over you and then complain about it, you will be in a mindset that doesn't allow you to succeed at your job. Managers understand that you need help, if you explain it to them. All a CEO or VP wants to hear is that you can fix it, you have 2 or 3 options on how to, and it will take x amount of time to do so, given your other priorities. Give them options, and tell them what those options mean, both from a time standpoint and a finance standpoint (if they choose not to do it, then they know the consequences). Treat everyone the same way...you are saving the company money by making good decisions. You are not going to make it if you just react to a bunch of technical problems, because nobody gives a shit about your having to stay late to patch IIS. You also have to balance typical BOFH draconian policies with effective workflow. Don't create problems for yourself by making a bunch of changes to your security policy all at once. Instead, implement the changes one step at a time, starting with strong authentication and GET BUY IN from the higher ups on why it is important. If you fear talking to the CEO or President, then you won't get much respect from them. Teach them why you are competent and explain what they get out of you. You might be surprised when they recommend to your manager that you should hire some consultants to do some of the grunt work while you implement a more strategic project. Of course, you have to be able to provide a fiscally responsible solution, with a readable and understandable discussion of what the technology will do for them and put it in layman's terms. It requires writing, yes, but in writing you have both your proof of concept, ROI evaluation and Ass-Covering documentation for when the shit hits the fan and people are pointing fingers. Good luck.
Receiving 100 emails a day for penis enlargement, porn sites, great deals on vacations and a bunch of other crap is not a "pleasant experience" either.
It is not illegal to send unsolicited email, no, but unsolicited email is slowly crippling email itself. Just because it is not illegal does not make the spammers tactics any better than the anti-spammers.
It is legal for me to ride a train and drink a beer, but if I could magically clone myself 100 million times, then all the trains around here would have a bunch of drunk me's running around, and that would make the train system sort of pointless, except that I'd be pretty amused. Your argument would indicate that this would be ok...100 million beer drinking me's...that sounds cool.
And he did time...at least he didn't get "Gitmo'd"
What this man needs is money, and a solid lawyer...and even then, there is so much vague and easily abused language in our laws to make this essentially a losing effort for him. He already lost the time...no amount of money can get that back.
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The argument that Mr. Hussein gassed his own people is commonly used as justification for cluster-bombing innocent children in Baghdad. The United States of America provided the Iraqi government with numerous chemical and biological weapons during the buildup of hostilities with Iran. Sorry, but we didn't seem to mind it much when it served our political needs, so why are people so adamant about bringing it up now? This was 20 years ago, when Donald Rumsfeld was shaking hands with Hussein and offering him our support. I am willing to bet that the information we had was receipts for stuff we sold his ass over the last 20 years...by the guys who openly supported selling it to him. That's why they freaked, and were one-upped by their own puppet, or perhaps the scientists and leaders behind him. Afghanistan: Mission NOT Accomplished. Iraq: Mission NOT Accomplished. Unless the mission was to bomb the living shit out of civilians with devastating and even radioactive weapons, then give a ton of corporate contracts to companies that have screwed with the region for decades now and need new sources of revenue...
Now that the Simpsons has started to lose its touch, the kiss of death appears, a movie. Once you resort to making a movie, you signify the beginning of the end for a tv show. This season's schizophrenic and dull writing has really impacted my view of The Simpsons, it is just not the same anymore, not as funny. I've been a fan since viewing it at Spike and Mike's in the late 80's, witnessing the shows on the big screen instead of on the Tracy Ullman show. I was a big fan of Groenig, having read his Life in Hell strips in my sister's UCLA Bruin, around the same time that Bill the Cat was forming Deathtongue. In the mid nineties, we'd gather at the Rat and Raven in San Francisco, watch the show over a beer, and shush anyone who was blasphemous enough to actually talk during the show. This is in a full bar, mind you, where the commercial breaks were the only time you could get a refill.
The 30 minute format (including commercials, of course) is perfect for the show, how they'll pull off a full-length animated feature, I don't know. I do know, however, that the show has lost some of its luster. The writing doesn't seem as good, and I can only think that being that funny for 10+ years has to take a toll on creativity. The movie will have devoted followers, and loyal fans, as well as critics and naysayers. Having been into the Simpsons since its inception, my opinion is that a movie will change things forever. I wish I could be excited about it, I will go, of course, but I can only wish that my doubts are completely unjustified, and I get a pleasant surprise.
and my ow spellin. Pet peeved myself.
Dude, I recognized the articl writer as a windbag, not a player, and bailed on it immediately. Too bad I read the first 15 paragraphs or so...talk about going nowhere and wasting time...
(Pet peeve: check your grammar and cut/paste errors before you publish stuff)
I read a quote that TiVo used its "technology" to measure viewing habits during the SuperBowl. I hate the idea that someone would be metering my viewing habits...so doing it myself is even more optimal.
I downloaded a copy for free from some dude in Pakistan...
Smallest calculator in the world at one point...I think I got it in 1977.
We can send in the RIAA to handle this one. Using the Republican AND Democrats DMCA-type rules, I'm sure a crime was committed. I can't wait until some tech fails to patch up the systems and someone manages to float the petty internal bickering out to the rest of the world for viewing...
I thought Bagle was to blame for the malfunction.
We should make sure we completely destroy this planet first. I mean, Mars is pretty much uninhabitable, so it makes little sense to give up this plush, fertile planet for one so desolate quite yet...
Cubes suck. I've worked in 3, but the rest of my jobs have been cubeless...I think it's a prerequisite now to avoid workplaces that use them. Awful things. This poor chap violated the cube laws, too. Probably had HR pull him in and give him a scolding. Places like this are yucky, but it is nice to know that someone has some creativity to be the penguin in the crowd singing "I've gotta be me!"
Cool, now we can have substandard wireless units in the US to match our crappy cell phone network...
You can purchase a CD player for less than the price of a music CD today...
This will be ineffective. Congress understands computers and related technology about as well as my mom, so this type of bill will fail before it even gets going.
a mehere.us etc.) for each mail.
I've got a filter list going in my "spam" account on yahoo...but it is very interesting how I'm getting emails lately.
1) The spammer is changing the mail sender IP address by a stepping of one address approximately every 3 hours.
2) The spammer is changing the subdomain (e.g. xx1.spammerdomainnamehere.us...xx2.spammerdomainn
3) The spammer is changing the sender's name and email address with every message.
4) The spammer is changing the actual domain name every few hours as well. I get about 30 a day from the same people...with one of the changes mentioned.
Litigation won't help, since this type of spam is obviously intended to circumvent spam filters and blocks, spammers will get around the law and we'll be in a designer drug situation (we all know how well the war on drugs has gone).
Blah blah blah Microsoft blah blah blah Windows sucks blah blah blah ha ha ha it happened to a Linux distro blah blah blah...this has nothing to do with M$, it is an Info Security issue.
I'm sorry you work in such a lame environment. Here's an idea, get a job somewhere that has the tools you need.
I've got a system that has had about an hour of downtime (excluding the obnoxious reboot cycles of patches/routine maintenance) in almost 2 years. The engineers and developers are completely able to use their systems, and are willing to accept certain limitations of the software/hardware in order to do their jobs. Shucks, that sounds like compromise, it must be hard for you.
I don't make it impossible for people to do their job...and it's never been my policy. If you didn't have the IT monkeys to complain about, you'd still wind up bitching about your project manager changing the schedule, or the sales guy adding "features," or maybe the engineering manager not knowing what he/she's talking about. It has nothing to do with the policy, take a look in the mirror sometime...
The Fortune-50 customer you're talking about probably would be happy to know that the IT screwups prevented the sales and bizdev folks (the ones who generate revenue, you know, the ones that neither the IT guys or the Developers have a job without) from spreading some worm that brought down your entire system and caused them to have some DOS as a result. There is no resemblance to me, my systems run great, and I don't have any complaints from the developers here. In fact, the developers are actually cool people who don't act like you do in any way. We share the frustrations of it being 2003 and our standardized OS is completely lacking (you work with what you have, complaining about it does what, exactly?). I don't get flame/hatemail, nor do they use terms like "screwups" or "monkeys" when talking about any of their coworkers. You have a bad attitude, the IT guys probably hate dealing with you...and you wind up suffering. Vicious cycle, but it isn't ALL IT's fault.
Funny, I used to work with folks like you, here's what I wound up fighting:
1) I fought the company developers who insisted upon having administrative privileges for everything, then, when their systems got fucked up, I fought their managers over the time I lost geting pulled away to fix the asinine problem they created by hosing their machine. Windows voodoo is an art, and knowing Linux does not make you a Windows guru.
2) I fought again to maintain ownership of files and permissions, because people like #1 above would walk in and do things like install ODBC drivers on a web server that was running company specific programs, and they didn't know that stupid WinDOS needed to have the service pack reapplied, effectively shutting down 25 other people from doing their work.
3) I fought platform bigots who didn't know that there are resources like technet, which are as good or better than any of the linux documentation I've read. In fact, whenever I have a problem on Linux machines, it is next to impossible to get more help than a generalized technical reference to the problem, and a solution that assumes I already know how to fix it.
4) I fought people with bad attitudes all day. People who would bitch about the limitations of Windows, constantly trying to prove that they knew more about what they did than I did (of course you know more about it, you pompous ass, that's what you get paid to do), while I had 60 messages in my inbox from people who were too daft to learn, for the 20th time, how to connect a printer, or why their mistyped email address was bouncing. People who liked to sit on their platform holier than all others, and bitch all day about how Windows sucked, especially for doing some really vague or obscure thing. At the end of the day, we had 1,500 people who were able to do their jobs "efficiently" and 5 people who felt better about demeaning "reboot monkeys," who never had to risk their jobs by telling the CTO he couldn't have access to the Administrator or root passwords.
Talk to me next month and I won't have a litany of complaints, because now I work at a small company, running windows (and a debian web server), and everything is smooth and works great. On top of that, I've empowered every user that needs it to have admin privileges on their systems, and on top of that, I don't have any platform bigots to tell me why Mac is better, or Linux is the only way to go. I'm really, really glad that I don't work with people like you anymore.
I've posted several times that all OS's have vulnerabilities, but now I'm done. Anyone who posts to /. about M$ vulnerabilities vs. *nix vulnerabilities are just listening to themselves mumble some platform bigotry crap. Who gives a shit what I think? Who gives a shit what you think? This exploit is being released as a service to the community, and bitching about it in a post is a flaccid, pointless exercise in listening to ourselves talk. That said, I'm going to go clean out some spam from my yahoo account. Big deal...Microsoft sucks...Linux users are pompous, nobody gives a shit what you think...just patch your farging server and shut up.
The OS is really not as important as the security habits of the sysadmin, particularly related to password strength. I've known a lot of platform bigots (you know the ones, Linux is God you Microserf, bow before me for I am root and can write perl scripts) who used really lame passwords. Compromising a machine, regardless of platform, is easier when the machine is not patched (see bugtraq) and when strong authentication is not used.
Again, I repeat myself here, but it has to be said...EVERY OS is vulnerable. If anything, this article doesn't surprise me because of the difficulty in protecting a Linux system, an inherent problem with *nix flavors. You can build them to be beautiful, screaming machines, but you have to have in-depth knowledge about what to do, how to do it and why you should set them up a certain way. If you don't know what to protect yourself against, you won't do it...
Using 3L337 as a password won't protect your system from script kiddies, sorry.
Thanks. Too bad that loophole can't get turned around on them...
Does anyone know if the RIAA violated any COPA laws by obtaining and releasing information about a 12 year old? Since we are in an interesting legal free-for-all with DRM, copyright, software patents and various other issues, could there be some way to pin child endangerment charges on the RIAA in this case, based on other poorly written laws? Anyone with a law degree or real understanding of the law care to respond, since I don't really know much about it?
First off, the market is a real bitch right now, so having a job is a good thing. I've done the 300+ users/5 servers/no help thing before, and it isn't really enjoyable. I've found that if you let someone run all over you and then complain about it, you will be in a mindset that doesn't allow you to succeed at your job. Managers understand that you need help, if you explain it to them. All a CEO or VP wants to hear is that you can fix it, you have 2 or 3 options on how to, and it will take x amount of time to do so, given your other priorities. Give them options, and tell them what those options mean, both from a time standpoint and a finance standpoint (if they choose not to do it, then they know the consequences). Treat everyone the same way...you are saving the company money by making good decisions. You are not going to make it if you just react to a bunch of technical problems, because nobody gives a shit about your having to stay late to patch IIS. You also have to balance typical BOFH draconian policies with effective workflow. Don't create problems for yourself by making a bunch of changes to your security policy all at once. Instead, implement the changes one step at a time, starting with strong authentication and GET BUY IN from the higher ups on why it is important. If you fear talking to the CEO or President, then you won't get much respect from them. Teach them why you are competent and explain what they get out of you. You might be surprised when they recommend to your manager that you should hire some consultants to do some of the grunt work while you implement a more strategic project. Of course, you have to be able to provide a fiscally responsible solution, with a readable and understandable discussion of what the technology will do for them and put it in layman's terms. It requires writing, yes, but in writing you have both your proof of concept, ROI evaluation and Ass-Covering documentation for when the shit hits the fan and people are pointing fingers. Good luck.
He got the idea from Bono of U2
Receiving 100 emails a day for penis enlargement, porn sites, great deals on vacations and a bunch of other crap is not a "pleasant experience" either.
It is not illegal to send unsolicited email, no, but unsolicited email is slowly crippling email itself. Just because it is not illegal does not make the spammers tactics any better than the anti-spammers.
It is legal for me to ride a train and drink a beer, but if I could magically clone myself 100 million times, then all the trains around here would have a bunch of drunk me's running around, and that would make the train system sort of pointless, except that I'd be pretty amused. Your argument would indicate that this would be ok...100 million beer drinking me's...that sounds cool.
And he did time...at least he didn't get "Gitmo'd"
What this man needs is money, and a solid lawyer...and even then, there is so much vague and easily abused language in our laws to make this essentially a losing effort for him. He already lost the time...no amount of money can get that back.
Kind of late, isn't it?