You can pay a little more now for secure systems, or you can pay a lot later to clean up the mess when every Swiss cheese Windows box on your LAN gets assraped because one moron in your company can't resist clicking on every attachment in their Outlook inbox.
AT&T WorldNet thought so. A couple months before I left them when Comcast finally rolled out cable internet in my area (circa '97-'98), they slapped a monthly limit on their service because of "heavy usage" by a fair number of people. It was so long ago, I don't really remember the details, but I do know that I went over their limit both of those months and was subject to some hefty additional charges.
If I had not already been planning to leave WorldNet, I sure as hell would have because of that.
And if I hadn't left Comcast two years ago for the greener pastures of unrestricted DSL, I would be shopping for a new ISP now as well.
By the time abuse@... is receiving complaints, the spammer has already moved on to the next prepaid-hours connection.
Huh? I report the spam to the broadband ISP who owns the IP block, not the originator. I assume since spamming is a violation of the ISP's ToS, they track down the oblivious idiot whose machine is relaying spam and tell them to clean up their machine or their service will be suspended/terminated.
There are a lot of Windows-using idiots out there, so helping to take out one owned machine isn't doing much, when 10 more are probably taking its place in the time it takes me to write the e-mail to the abuse@, but I feel like I should do more than just blacklist everything.
Most of the spam I get these days comes from SMTP-trojaned Windows boxes sitting on consumer broadband networks.
As I receive spam from these machines, I forward it to the appropriate abuse@ and add the enclosing netblock to my SMTP blacklist. I am slowly but surely shitcanning the customer IP ranges of every consumer broadband network in North America. Considering how uppity the broadband ISPs get when people "abuse" their allegedly-unlimited bandwidth, I'm astounded that they allow unpatched, zombied Windows boxes to just pump out thousands of spam messages.
Probably 98% of people with broadband have zero need or desire to access an SMTP server other than what is provided by their ISP. To that end, I wholeheartedly agree with you that port 25 on these networks should be restricted. The 2% who require less-restricted SMTP capability could be accomodated for a few bucks more per month, and the ISPs could probably add a "one strike and you're out" policy-- account termination upon the first proven complaint about spam originating from the machine of one of those less-restricted SMTP users.
"They just sit back and wait for patches to appear, and then it is a race to write the first virus. We want to get patch deployment down from days or weeks to hours."
Yes, because the faster they get the patches out, the sooner the majority of Joe Sixpack type users can ignore them.
Making patches available is the easy part. Getting all those people who bought Windows because it was marketed as secure and low maintenance to be aware of and install the patches is the hard part.
Some people have already gotten their hands on the iTunes promotional bottles of Pepsi. The code looks like it's 10 characters. Only letters are visible in this image of a cap.
...and toss the mouse in a drawer. That's what I did.
Picked up the OEM edition of the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop from newegg.com for a little over $50. I use a corded Logitech mouse.
I stuck the Microsoft mouse in the drawer within arm's length of my desk, so when my right-handed friends are visiting and want to check their e-mail, they don't have to suffer the mental anguish of mousing with their left hand. They just grab the wireless out of the drawer, use it, and toss it back in when done.
I liked the MS keyboard so much, I bought a second one for use at work, where the keyboard and mouse cords were always getting in the way of something-- and there, I do use the MS mouse.
---------- Junk faxing is an illegal business. Junk faxers are in violation of the law. They are being paid by a third party to present me with advertisements using my paper, my toner, my electricity, and my phone service-- basically, they're making money at my expense. Since that's the case, I have absolutely no problem with making some money at their expense, and in fact I am currently pursuing a civil action against one of Fax.com's customers, who sent me one junk fax about every two weeks for almost all of 2003.
The very thought that you are attempting to coax sympathy from your readers for people engaged in an illegal business is laughable, and so is the sense of indignation over consumers getting fed up and using the legal system to fight back.
Drug dealing is another illegal business where some people are trying to make money in violation of the law and at the expense of other people. Are you sympathetic toward drug dealers? Are you indignant when they are penalized in accordance with the law? ----------
Your post reminds me of an old SNL skit with Nicolas Cage. His wife (don't remember who played her) was pregnant, and they were trying to decide on names for the baby. Almost anything she suggested, he shot down because it could somehow be contorted into a taunt-- he was hypersensitive about it to the extreme.
Then the doorbell rings and delivery guy (Rob Schneider) asks for "Asswipe [lastname]." The husband tells him the correct pronunciation is "oz-WEE-pay"
Pause here for a few seconds to simulate me Googling for SNL "Nicolas Cage" +Asswipe
Ah, here is a transcript of the skit. God bless the Internet.
Doesn't Microsoft already own a huge chunk of Apple?
No. Below is my canned history of Microsoft's Apple stock, which I keep around to set straight misinformed individuals such as yourself:
August 6, 1997- Microsoft agreed to purchase $150 million in non-voting Apple preferred stock. Note that it was NON-VOTING stock-- so essentially this was just a goodwill investment in Apple. Microsoft was required to hold the stock for at least 3 years before selling. Another clause of this investment was that Microsoft was to continue to produce Macintosh products, including all new versions of the Microsoft Office product, for a period of five years. In exchange, Apple would make Internet Explorer the default web browser on Macs, and not sue the living hell out of Microsoft.* Microsoft has long since sold all of this stock, at a nice profit, I might add. This agreement expired in August 2002, and since then MS has occasionally made noise about discontinuing Mac Office.
* Strong rumors from several sources indicate that the 1997 deal was the public portion of a settlement made after Apple discovered substantial patent and/or copyright infringment by MS in Windows. Word is that there was a meeting between senior Apple and MS officials where Apple laid out the evidence and an ultimatum. Personally, I think there is some credibility to this, as Microsoft rarely if ever does anything that could be deemed 'nice,' especially to a competitor. There is, however, another school of thought that says Microsoft was only acting in their own self-interest, propping up Apple so they would have a competitor to point to when the antitrust thing really built up some steam. I question the use of the term 'propping up,' as Apple had a few billion in the bank at the time and did not need the $150M, and the government would have realized that.
I was going to do voice control via lapel mic a couple years ago. Then 3Com's Audrey bombed and the units were getting blown out for chump change, so instead I bought a few of them to sprinkle around the house, and just use the web interface I was already constructing.
I second that. I switched from Comcast to Speakeasy because I wanted to run my own servers. The service is great (in the next couple of weeks I'm supposed to get a free upgrade from 1.5 down/384 up to 1.5 down/768 up), and the CSRs have always been courteous when I've called to change my service or report an outage.
They send e-mail notices when there's going to be maintenance-related downtime, which is nice. And I've only experienced one long (6 hour) unscheduled outage in the two years I've been using them. I think there was one other outage where something at the telco office had to be rebooted, but that was fixed pretty quickly.
I remember hearing about a drive for the old MDs that was intended for using them as data storage, but I've never seen one.
It was almost 10 years ago that I first saw one listed in a MacWarehouse (IIRC) catalog. It was ridiculously expensive. Iomega came out with the Zip drive a few months later, and quickly killed that particular incarnation of MD-Data.
IBM created the PC and then basically "open sourced" the architecture. Who knows why they did this, because lots of people made big money off it, and IBM didn't see very much of that.
According to most of the books I've read concerning the history of the computer industry, it happened something like this:
The IBM PC was hurriedly slapped together with off-the-shelf parts because IBM wanted a piece of the burgeoning personal computer market, which was then practically owned by Apple. IBM knew that if they went through their normal development cycle and did everything in-house, the product would have been hopelessly late to market. So they assembled a team of people and told them to basically circumvent the normal IBM Way of Doing Things, and did so by buying almost every component they needed from outside vendors, including the OS, which came from a relatively small company called Microsoft (perhaps you've heard of them?). The only truly proprietary part of the PC was the BIOS.
Anyway, IBM went ahead with the PC because they thought that the proprietary BIOS would prevent anyone from duplicating the PC without getting trampled by IBM's lawyers. They also thought that the volume discount component prices they were getting could not be matched by any ragtag startup company. Compaq proved them wrong, first by reverse-engineering the BIOS and then producing an IBM PC clone profitably.
Phoenix also reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS, but instead of building their own PC clones with it, they began licensing their version to anyone who wanted to use it.
Then the hardware producers in Asia started stamping out shipping containers full of parts, component prices reached 'commodity' status, and IBM's perceived exclusive economies of scale were history.
Microsoft's non-exclusive terms with IBM let them license MS-DOS to anyone who wanted it, so the cloners were able to ship the same OS as IBM.
IBM still tried to compete, but their product cycle was twice as long as everyone else's. IIRC, Compaq was first to market with a 386-based system. IBM had defined the standards and then the cloners ran away with the market. Microchannel was IBM's attempt to regain the title of 'standard-bearer' for the computer industry, but the cloners took one look at the onerous licensing terms for MCA and said no thanks. They then formed their own coalition to develop standards for the hardware they were developing, and that was pretty much it for IBM as a force in the personal computing market.
So basically, IBM didn't "open source" their hardware purposely. They were victims of their own greed-- desperate to get a piece of the personal computer market as quickly as possible, they created an almost completely open system that was much more quickly and easily duplicated by third parties than they thought.
It's the fact that apple only sells LCD monitors, starting at $699.
Yes, and nobody else makes displays that work on the Mac. I'm just imagining the two ViewSonic LCDs that are connected to my G4 right now.
It's the fact that airport (which is a fancy name for 802.11b/g) is much more expensive than what is available for PCs.
Yeah, and no other wireless hardware works with the Mac. Those pesky hallucinogens pumped through the air ducts at my office only make me THINK my iBook is connecting via the company's Compaq wireless access point.
It's also the fact that systems have high initial costs ($1299 for JUST A BOX!).
Well, it's not Apple's fault that people are cheap, short-sighted idiots. I've gotten significantly longer usage out of the Macs I've owned than the x86 hardware I've owned. I got six years out of the last Power Mac I bought new, but I've rebuilt my x86 box with newer hardware three times in that same time period. You might be able to get a PC for 1/3 the cost of a Mac, but chances are you'll have purchased two more before I'm ready to replace my Mac.
Now I have to say that I don't agree with censorship, but GTA: Vice City is a game that could do with restricting as to who can play it.
Well, gee, Sparky, I think that's the whole point of that "M - Mature" emblem on the lower left corner of the box. You can't blame the game company if parents don't keep their kids from playing violent video games, any more than you can blame the power company if parents don't keep their kids from sticking a fork in an outlet.
Or did you mean some sort of "Leisure Suit Larry"-esque means of preventing people from playing it, by asking a bunch of questions only people old enough to play would be able to answer? Not that that scheme would work longer than five minutes in this day and age, before 'prepubescentgamerz.com' posted the full list of questions and answers.
~Philly
Re:Two comments, just to alienate everyone equally
on
Windows 98 Phased Out
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
For comparisons sake - as a Powerbook owner, should I be incensed that OS 6 is not maintained by Apple?
No, because there's not a Powerbook in existence that can boot OS 6. There are plenty of machines seeing daily use in this world that are still running Windows 98 and won't be replaced anytime soon. And what about the machines whose manufacturers won't support any other OS than what shipped with the hardware? I'm pretty sure Sony has that policy, and I think Dell will give you a hard time about it as well if you upgrade your OS and go calling them for support.
Also, Apple makes a great deal of their older software available for free download. You can get any complete version of OS 6, and the complete version of 7 up to 7.5.3. Microsoft doesn't even make DOS 1.0 available for free download anywhere that I can find.
Slashdot Mirror
(Must.... click.... "Preview"!)
Of course, they're expensive as all hell
PC viruses spawn $55 billion loss in 2003"
You can pay a little more now for secure systems, or you can pay a lot later to clean up the mess when every Swiss cheese Windows box on your LAN gets assraped because one moron in your company can't resist clicking on every attachment in their Outlook inbox.
is it really possible to abuse a 56k connection?
AT&T WorldNet thought so. A couple months before I left them when Comcast finally rolled out cable internet in my area (circa '97-'98), they slapped a monthly limit on their service because of "heavy usage" by a fair number of people. It was so long ago, I don't really remember the details, but I do know that I went over their limit both of those months and was subject to some hefty additional charges.
If I had not already been planning to leave WorldNet, I sure as hell would have because of that.
And if I hadn't left Comcast two years ago for the greener pastures of unrestricted DSL, I would be shopping for a new ISP now as well.
~Philly
By the time abuse@... is receiving complaints, the spammer has already moved on to the next prepaid-hours connection.
Huh? I report the spam to the broadband ISP who owns the IP block, not the originator. I assume since spamming is a violation of the ISP's ToS, they track down the oblivious idiot whose machine is relaying spam and tell them to clean up their machine or their service will be suspended/terminated.
There are a lot of Windows-using idiots out there, so helping to take out one owned machine isn't doing much, when 10 more are probably taking its place in the time it takes me to write the e-mail to the abuse@, but I feel like I should do more than just blacklist everything.
~Philly
Already covered on July 7th, 2003.
If you didn't see it then, the BBC News story linked in the July posting still works.
~Philly
Most of the spam I get these days comes from SMTP-trojaned Windows boxes sitting on consumer broadband networks.
As I receive spam from these machines, I forward it to the appropriate abuse@ and add the enclosing netblock to my SMTP blacklist. I am slowly but surely shitcanning the customer IP ranges of every consumer broadband network in North America. Considering how uppity the broadband ISPs get when people "abuse" their allegedly-unlimited bandwidth, I'm astounded that they allow unpatched, zombied Windows boxes to just pump out thousands of spam messages.
Probably 98% of people with broadband have zero need or desire to access an SMTP server other than what is provided by their ISP. To that end, I wholeheartedly agree with you that port 25 on these networks should be restricted. The 2% who require less-restricted SMTP capability could be accomodated for a few bucks more per month, and the ISPs could probably add a "one strike and you're out" policy-- account termination upon the first proven complaint about spam originating from the machine of one of those less-restricted SMTP users.
~Philly
I mean, cheezus, it's only software - it's not like people are getting killed in poor quality cars or anything.
No, nothing's happened like that yet. But things are heading that way.
And shitty software has already killed a few people.
~Philly
"They just sit back and wait for patches to appear, and then it is a race to write the first virus. We want to get patch deployment down from days or weeks to hours."
Yes, because the faster they get the patches out, the sooner the majority of Joe Sixpack type users can ignore them.
Making patches available is the easy part. Getting all those people who bought Windows because it was marketed as secure and low maintenance to be aware of and install the patches is the hard part.
~Philly
Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year once.
Like someone else said previously, Yasser Arafat has a Nobel Peace Prize.
Milli Vanilli once had a Grammy.
George W. Bush has made a mockery of the US Presidency.
I may not like Bill Gates and the way his company acts, but I have to give credit to a man who can admit his mistakes. It's not an easy thing to do.
Just don't ask him to admit wrongdoing. Apparently, that's too difficult for him to do.
~Philly
...right here!
~Philly
Some people have already gotten their hands on the iTunes promotional bottles of Pepsi. The code looks like it's 10 characters. Only letters are visible in this image of a cap.
~Philly
...and toss the mouse in a drawer. That's what I did.
Picked up the OEM edition of the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop from newegg.com for a little over $50. I use a corded Logitech mouse.
I stuck the Microsoft mouse in the drawer within arm's length of my desk, so when my right-handed friends are visiting and want to check their e-mail, they don't have to suffer the mental anguish of mousing with their left hand. They just grab the wireless out of the drawer, use it, and toss it back in when done.
I liked the MS keyboard so much, I bought a second one for use at work, where the keyboard and mouse cords were always getting in the way of something-- and there, I do use the MS mouse.
~Philly
And if I set up a password server, I couldn't change the IP address of the machine. Ever.
This has been addressed by Apple with a script to change the IP settings everywhere necessary, without breaking any services.
Works like a charm, I had to do it a couple months ago for a client.
~Philly
----------
Junk faxing is an illegal business. Junk faxers are in violation of the law. They are being paid by a third party to present me with advertisements using my paper, my toner, my electricity, and my phone service-- basically, they're making money at my expense. Since that's the case, I have absolutely no problem with making some money at their expense, and in fact I am currently pursuing a civil action against one of Fax.com's customers, who sent me one junk fax about every two weeks for almost all of 2003.
The very thought that you are attempting to coax sympathy from your readers for people engaged in an illegal business is laughable, and so is the sense of indignation over consumers getting fed up and using the legal system to fight back.
Drug dealing is another illegal business where some people are trying to make money in violation of the law and at the expense of other people. Are you sympathetic toward drug dealers? Are you indignant when they are penalized in accordance with the law?
----------
~Philly
Your post reminds me of an old SNL skit with Nicolas Cage. His wife (don't remember who played her) was pregnant, and they were trying to decide on names for the baby. Almost anything she suggested, he shot down because it could somehow be contorted into a taunt-- he was hypersensitive about it to the extreme.
Then the doorbell rings and delivery guy (Rob Schneider) asks for "Asswipe [lastname]." The husband tells him the correct pronunciation is "oz-WEE-pay"
Pause here for a few seconds to simulate me Googling for SNL "Nicolas Cage" +Asswipe
Ah, here is a transcript of the skit. God bless the Internet.
~Philly
..I'd like Microsoft to have to admit to wrongdoing when they stop doing something wrong.
This "We didn't do it, and we promise to never do it again" shit is getting old.
~Philly
Doesn't Microsoft already own a huge chunk of Apple?
No. Below is my canned history of Microsoft's Apple stock, which I keep around to set straight misinformed individuals such as yourself:
August 6, 1997- Microsoft agreed to purchase $150 million in non-voting Apple preferred stock. Note that it was NON-VOTING stock-- so essentially this was just a goodwill investment in Apple. Microsoft was required to hold the stock for at least 3 years before selling. Another clause of this investment was that Microsoft was to continue to produce Macintosh products, including all new versions of the Microsoft Office product, for a period of five years. In exchange, Apple would make Internet Explorer the default web browser on Macs, and not sue the living hell out of Microsoft.* Microsoft has long since sold all of this stock, at a nice profit, I might add. This agreement expired in August 2002, and since then MS has occasionally made noise about discontinuing Mac Office.
* Strong rumors from several sources indicate that the 1997 deal was the public portion of a settlement made after Apple discovered substantial patent and/or copyright infringment by MS in Windows. Word is that there was a meeting between senior Apple and MS officials where Apple laid out the evidence and an ultimatum. Personally, I think there is some credibility to this, as Microsoft rarely if ever does anything that could be deemed 'nice,' especially to a competitor. There is, however, another school of thought that says Microsoft was only acting in their own self-interest, propping up Apple so they would have a competitor to point to when the antitrust thing really built up some steam. I question the use of the term 'propping up,' as Apple had a few billion in the bank at the time and did not need the $150M, and the government would have realized that.
~Philly
I was going to do voice control via lapel mic a couple years ago. Then 3Com's Audrey bombed and the units were getting blown out for chump change, so instead I bought a few of them to sprinkle around the house, and just use the web interface I was already constructing.
~Philly
These RIAA pukes are starting to blur the line between corporation and government.
First they started collected taxes by getting a "you'll probably use these for piracy" fee tacked onto recordable media.
Now they're donning lettered windbreakers to act as law enforcement.
What next, are they going to form their own army and invade Thailand on some WMD (weapons of music duplication) witch hunt??? Where does it end?
~Philly
I second that. I switched from Comcast to Speakeasy because I wanted to run my own servers. The service is great (in the next couple of weeks I'm supposed to get a free upgrade from 1.5 down/384 up to 1.5 down/768 up), and the CSRs have always been courteous when I've called to change my service or report an outage.
They send e-mail notices when there's going to be maintenance-related downtime, which is nice. And I've only experienced one long (6 hour) unscheduled outage in the two years I've been using them. I think there was one other outage where something at the telco office had to be rebooted, but that was fixed pretty quickly.
~Philly
I remember hearing about a drive for the old MDs that was intended for using them as data storage, but I've never seen one.
It was almost 10 years ago that I first saw one listed in a MacWarehouse (IIRC) catalog. It was ridiculously expensive. Iomega came out with the Zip drive a few months later, and quickly killed that particular incarnation of MD-Data.
~Philly
IBM created the PC and then basically "open sourced" the architecture. Who knows why they did this, because lots of people made big money off it, and IBM didn't see very much of that.
According to most of the books I've read concerning the history of the computer industry, it happened something like this:
The IBM PC was hurriedly slapped together with off-the-shelf parts because IBM wanted a piece of the burgeoning personal computer market, which was then practically owned by Apple. IBM knew that if they went through their normal development cycle and did everything in-house, the product would have been hopelessly late to market. So they assembled a team of people and told them to basically circumvent the normal IBM Way of Doing Things, and did so by buying almost every component they needed from outside vendors, including the OS, which came from a relatively small company called Microsoft (perhaps you've heard of them?). The only truly proprietary part of the PC was the BIOS.
Anyway, IBM went ahead with the PC because they thought that the proprietary BIOS would prevent anyone from duplicating the PC without getting trampled by IBM's lawyers. They also thought that the volume discount component prices they were getting could not be matched by any ragtag startup company. Compaq proved them wrong, first by reverse-engineering the BIOS and then producing an IBM PC clone profitably.
Phoenix also reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS, but instead of building their own PC clones with it, they began licensing their version to anyone who wanted to use it.
Then the hardware producers in Asia started stamping out shipping containers full of parts, component prices reached 'commodity' status, and IBM's perceived exclusive economies of scale were history.
Microsoft's non-exclusive terms with IBM let them license MS-DOS to anyone who wanted it, so the cloners were able to ship the same OS as IBM.
IBM still tried to compete, but their product cycle was twice as long as everyone else's. IIRC, Compaq was first to market with a 386-based system. IBM had defined the standards and then the cloners ran away with the market. Microchannel was IBM's attempt to regain the title of 'standard-bearer' for the computer industry, but the cloners took one look at the onerous licensing terms for MCA and said no thanks. They then formed their own coalition to develop standards for the hardware they were developing, and that was pretty much it for IBM as a force in the personal computing market.
So basically, IBM didn't "open source" their hardware purposely. They were victims of their own greed-- desperate to get a piece of the personal computer market as quickly as possible, they created an almost completely open system that was much more quickly and easily duplicated by third parties than they thought.
~Philly
It's the fact that apple only sells LCD monitors, starting at $699.
Yes, and nobody else makes displays that work on the Mac. I'm just imagining the two ViewSonic LCDs that are connected to my G4 right now.
It's the fact that airport (which is a fancy name for 802.11b/g) is much more expensive than what is available for PCs.
Yeah, and no other wireless hardware works with the Mac. Those pesky hallucinogens pumped through the air ducts at my office only make me THINK my iBook is connecting via the company's Compaq wireless access point.
It's also the fact that systems have high initial costs ($1299 for JUST A BOX!).
Well, it's not Apple's fault that people are cheap, short-sighted idiots. I've gotten significantly longer usage out of the Macs I've owned than the x86 hardware I've owned. I got six years out of the last Power Mac I bought new, but I've rebuilt my x86 box with newer hardware three times in that same time period. You might be able to get a PC for 1/3 the cost of a Mac, but chances are you'll have purchased two more before I'm ready to replace my Mac.
~Philly
Now I have to say that I don't agree with censorship, but GTA: Vice City is a game that could do with restricting as to who can play it.
Well, gee, Sparky, I think that's the whole point of that "M - Mature" emblem on the lower left corner of the box. You can't blame the game company if parents don't keep their kids from playing violent video games, any more than you can blame the power company if parents don't keep their kids from sticking a fork in an outlet.
Or did you mean some sort of "Leisure Suit Larry"-esque means of preventing people from playing it, by asking a bunch of questions only people old enough to play would be able to answer? Not that that scheme would work longer than five minutes in this day and age, before 'prepubescentgamerz.com' posted the full list of questions and answers.
~Philly
For comparisons sake - as a Powerbook owner, should I be incensed that OS 6 is not maintained by Apple?
No, because there's not a Powerbook in existence that can boot OS 6. There are plenty of machines seeing daily use in this world that are still running Windows 98 and won't be replaced anytime soon. And what about the machines whose manufacturers won't support any other OS than what shipped with the hardware? I'm pretty sure Sony has that policy, and I think Dell will give you a hard time about it as well if you upgrade your OS and go calling them for support.
Also, Apple makes a great deal of their older software available for free download. You can get any complete version of OS 6, and the complete version of 7 up to 7.5.3. Microsoft doesn't even make DOS 1.0 available for free download anywhere that I can find.
~Philly