You need the supported version of Redhat, but you don't need a supported version of Windows? You do know that Microsoft won't give you any support at all, right? Unless you call the support line and pay per incident. (And they have been unfavorably compared to the psychic friend's network.)
Just configure the machines correctly and you should rarely (never?) need to update them. It's a client machine, why does it need sshd or anything else? Setup a basic iptables rule to drop everything incoming.
Sure, there's a bit of admin cost, but not much more than the install process for Win2k and in Linux it's easily scriptable. No problems "ghosting" many machines from one, no problems copying config info (in nice seperate files) from one to another, etc.
There are a ton of updates for Linux systems but rarely for the kernel or any external service a user would need. Even when they are, the usual severity is priv escalation, meaning you need an account already. In other words, just like a Windows machines by default. When needed it's just as easy to push updates to a bunch of machines (or set them to pull from a specific server) with a few lines of perl and a crontab entry.
Finally, Linux admins scale better. Add ten times the machines and the admin job isn't much more complex. (Except for hardware problems.)
I really wish all the users I deal with used Linux. I'd get so much more Slashdot time.
They just need to give the CS department a project for the students... It's fairly hard to come up with a real-world task that will build skills, and yet choose something students can complete in a semester. Modifying an existing project would be a great way to handle this.
Great, so your department is clarifying their position amongst themselves, in what's got to be a shorter and less painful meeting than the final one. This means that one person, usually the manager, can go to the final meeting with full knowledge and represent the rest of you. (And, sell you down the river no doubt, but such is life.)
Ideally the final meeting can be between one person from each department involved and because everyone is prepared through a series of earlier meetings, nobody has a valid excuse to delay.
I saw a dot matrix at a trade show a few years back that printed with UV ink. The computer thought it was printing in black and it came out invisible except under blacklight. (Once it dried - there was a small sheen while wet.)
Print that overtop of the rest of the printing and it'd probably work very well. I doubt people look very close at the sharpness of the glow.
This isn't actually true with software, they just say it is. If you buy it from a store, it's yours. If you sit down at a table and read and agree to a contract before you get the CD, it's a license.
You can't do some things with your software, like reproduce it, but then you can't do some things with your printer (print money) or your knife (stab someone) and you still own those things.
Seems like a reasonable idea actually. Wage economic war against someone you hate.
Of course you are right, they'd need to pass much more than that, and then to bring the economy down, let people know that a few billion dollars worth are fake.
There's a lot of value to the government in the appearance of security, that's why they jump so hard on counterfeiters, they don't want people to think that the money they accept could be counterfeit. If nobody trusted the currency...
Do you understand the difficulty of guessing the correct port five-port sequence, where order matters and any wrong guess silently restarts the process? Especially since anyone setting up port knocking would already have a rule for discarding any system port-scanning you. Define port-scanning as 100 connection requests without a successful connect and that allows for only twenty guesses before you're banned. 64535 ^ 5 is much higher than 5; much, much higher.
The problem with opening the packet and looking at it is that you've then got a service, with pretty hefty privs, listening to the network.
With letting iptables and sshd do all the listening your perl script only needs to detect a correct pattern and allow access to ssh, the failure mode is pretty small and the window of opportunity for feeding it bad data is likewise small. A service performing a signature verification (expensive) on a whole packet of data has a much larger window of vulnerabilities - more opportunities to have a buffer overflow, or fail to parse the packet, or whatever.
The knocking just seems so much quicker, easier, less risky, and just as secure.
I'd imagine that port knocking would be used by university students whose dorms forbid running servers of any type. SSH would be secure, but they'd shut off your net connection if they saw it. Port knocking means you can pass a scan and yet still run SSH.
The basic networking stack already processes these packets. It looks at the port number and decides if it wants to do anything. It then decides if it should be nice about this (let the other end know nothing is running) or sneaky (pretend it didn't hear you, so you don't know if it's there at all).
If I try to connect to your desktop machine at port 80 it's already got to decide how to handle it, regardless of what's running (or not) so this doesn't make your network stack need to be any more complex.
Exactly. And have the sequence be at least based off of time, if not the originating IP and a password. (MD5 all of that, use the hash to determine the sequence.)
And if you detect a DoS attack, you do exactly what you do right now. Drop everything from the offending host. Except in this case you'd want to drop it before the sequence-finder program ran, to give it less crap to look at.
And of course, any access to a port not in the sequence, or out of place, resets this and you have to start again after a timeout. That way a few linear scans won't open any lock.
You can also open up inbound ports from specific external IP addresses only, and do many at once. So ten inbound connections can reach ten different internal webservers, and at the next request, reach the same one again.
This can be done dynamically as a form of load balancing which is a neat hack. Expire the specific forward rule after 30s or something. Means similar requests cluster - less DB traffic.
But, combine this with knocking and you've got the next step. Secret services on a 'stealthed' IP, where you can request which quake server (for instance) by knocking in a different way.
Port scanning isn't what it once was. Especially once you factor in time-sensitive keys (easily doable - both machines need a net connect to reach each other, ntp is then trivial) and ID-sensitive keys (so my key isn't like yours, even at the same time). Even if you managed to snoop on a 'knock' you couldn't repeat it.
Actually, cable is rarely ever bottlenecked in the local loop. The speed cap is applied to the "modem", not to the line. The line is still much faster than the backbone connection to the internet. You really can't max out the local loop (unless you're file-sharing with neighbors) because you're bottlenecked by the internet connection.
It's very rare that cable users (or DSL) can't max out a speedtest page at their ISP website, at least to their programmed limits. It's when you go out to the internet and find that your cheap-ass ISP bought a single T1 for your half of the town that you get the lag.
And there's a market for old consoles. I'll buy em with a few games. I've occasionally had people over and wanted to play a racing game or whatever and I don't want to go to the trouble of installing one and rebooting a few times, etc.
If I could pick a PS2 up with 3-4 games (the ones that have sequels out for the PS3 at that time) for $100 or so it's worth it.
The XBox, if #2 isn't compatible, won't be for sale like that because people will need to keep them. That means I won't end up buying an XBox because they won't hit the used market.
That may not mean much to the companies directly, but the $100 for ditching an old system can be directly applied to purchasing a new one, meaning that backwards compatible systems sort of come with a $100 rebate.
By that measure, the guy who mugs Darl in an alley and takes his cash and Rollex should be more famous, because his hourly wage is even higher. Feh. Crime pays.
Darl is only making money because nobody has shot him yet. Wait for his crimes to bankrupt someone and we'll see who has the last laugh.
That excuse (CIA Agents) is a load of bull. Not that the inspectors didn't contain some CIA agents, but because all it takes to be a CIA agent is to report to the CIA at some point and because every other member of the party was reporting to one or another intelligence service. (I'm sure there were a few civilians on the inspection teams, but who really expects them to be able to evaluate the situation?)
Evaluating evidence of weapons production is a matter for intelligence agencies. They can correlate the stories with satellite photos and intelligence reports, they'll have agents on the ground getting corroborating stories, etc.
It's painfully obvious that Saddam was just using the CIA agents thing as an excuse. By seeing how far he could push and what the UN response was he could judge how much leeway he had.
And as for the war itself, whatever pathetic excuse Shrub came up with, it's been popular among all the Iraqis I've talked to. Both expats and current inhabitants want him gone. The only concern I've heard is that the USA isn't going to stick around and the UN is going to rubber-stamp any collection of locals, despite a strong religious or racial bias, and the country won't be any better off. Nobody (except Saddam's family, etc) wanted him to stick around. He and his sons were violent and arbitrarily cruel and they've had a very large number of people killed over the years.
Nobody wants to live in a war zone but a short war that led to a free country seems better to most than living in fear all the time.
Ahh yes, I forgot that "we" and our allies regularly slip high explosives onto civilian busses, into dance halls and diners, schools, etc.
How about you grow up and take a second to think before you post. Rigging something in the middle of Siberia to blow up is very different than going out of your way to kill civilians who usually aren't involved with either side of the conflict.
What's wrong with that? If a country is too stupid to employ Enigma-level encryption they deserve to be snooped on. Seriously, security isn't a kiddy game where the other side plays fair. You need to home-grow certain critical parts based on your own specialists' work.
Crypto machines are the ultimate closed-source fiasco. You need to have complete trust in something they won't show you the guts of, or the plans for.
This really shows why kfg is right saying that this is encouraging countries to support open-source. They get the benefit of other people's research without the risks of trusting their products completely.
Some of the needless changes. Where it's always best to stick with the book and I can't see how it would help the film to change it.
Then, the main problem I see, that Frodo in the first book was too weak. Didn't fight back against the Nazgul even a little.
The big change I *like* was Arwen. She went from a nothing that Aragorn married only because of history you just hear about. In the book he really should have gone for Eowyn - she would have been a match.
But in the movie they showed Arwen as having something going for her. It's not that they beefed her up as a love interest for the female audience; they simply filled out the existing love interest until it was believable.
When I first heard about her expanded role I was scared. I pictured the Fellowship of the Ten, not just more backstory on Arwen. Jackson played this really well.
Lost profit? From people who weren't going to pay? Hah!
See it as free advertising targetted at those who will pay.
I register shareware I want to keep using, but even at $.25 it's not worth registering if I'm going to use it monthly - too much hassle. So I only register things I really like.
I assume other people are the same way. I may not register WinZip because I work from the CLI most of the time even in Windows, but other people don't have a CLI copy of unzip, or are afraid of the CLI, WinZip is going to be great for them and they'll probably register it.
If I hadn't registered WinZip it'd be driving me nuts and I'd never recommend it to anyone. As is, I install it on every computer I build (unregistered). I'm sure some of those people have liked and registered it.
In your world I've stolen $15 (?) from WinZip INC. In the real world, I've given them hundreds of leads and taken care of the hard part - getting the software installed. Now, when these hundreds of people click on zip files they think WinZip is how to handle them, not just one way, but *the* way.
Very good payment, imho, for my few uses per month.
Re:It's another case against OS monoculture
on
More MyDoom Gloom
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· Score: 1
The difference is that unixes are designed with multi-user security in mind. If you have a system-level backup system a user-level worm won't be able to wipe out the data. You'll also be able to restrict user's ability to run apps at all, and what they'll be allowed to do. Compare to Microsoft where once you have a running app it's only a hair away from being admin where it can do anything.
Also, open source unix machines tend to be setup with security in mind - doing things that will limit the propogation of dumb-user-clicks-the-attachment worms. To target Linux you'll need an actual exploit. Not that they don't exist, but with the response time as low as it is, it'll be hard for a virus writer to respond before Linus does. The malware authors will have to discover the bugs instead of now how they simply read bugtraq.
My point about the IE bugs is that they're listed as system bugs, not IE bug. As in, even if you don't use IE you need to patch them. Why? Sounds like it's got wider-ranging implications. The problem isn't that IE is buggy, the problem is that it's built into the OS and its bugs are wider in scope.
As for the APIs, I didn't think you seriously expected me to remember the names and functions of some 9x API that I've never used.
As I remember it, DR-DOS was completely legit, hence Microsoft's annoyance. Can't quote a reference to the Win3.x DR-DOS issue either, so sorry.
And yeah, Linux ripped off Unix... And there's *any* proof of this?
If Linux is just a rebadged UNIX, SCO might have a point, but if it was they'd show some evidence and get it over with, as opposed to veiled threats and refuted allegations. If they have an issue I wish them well, but I highly doubt it.
Besides, even if the devil himself had bought the remenants of DR-DOS, what of it? It's still down to Microsoft's actions in the past, not the identities of the litigants now.
And the fact that SCO bought a company that bought a company that was victimized by Microsoft means what?
And no, now there's no reason for uninstalling IE, assuming you don't mind their IE-specific bugs being general system issues. Read the release text for some of the XP updates - IE fixes you need even if you don't use it.
The Microsoft way to win an argument is to filibuster over something so long that it's not an issue anymore and thus claim it never was. Sure, IE6 may be fairly well behaved, but there were real stability/security reasons to remove IE from 98. Likewise, I'm sure the MS response to DR-DOS is "Who uses DOS?", but that misses the point that they had to fake an error message to make a competitor's product look worse.
How about -1 Flamebait for being an idiot and spouting uninformed garbage?
Microsoft has done everything it can to prevent competitors apps from working, from the days of "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" until present day. It's not their place to advertise competitor's products, but how about not intentionally sabotaging them, hmmm?
I think what you meant to say was "Yet another poster comes back as an AC to whine about being moderated as the unthinking drone he is."
I really wish Slashdot internally logged the IPs of ACs. I'd love to perma-ignore you and any other posters (ill_mango) who just happen to use your IP.
Slashdot Mirror
You need the supported version of Redhat, but you don't need a supported version of Windows? You do know that Microsoft won't give you any support at all, right? Unless you call the support line and pay per incident. (And they have been unfavorably compared to the psychic friend's network.)
Just configure the machines correctly and you should rarely (never?) need to update them. It's a client machine, why does it need sshd or anything else? Setup a basic iptables rule to drop everything incoming.
Sure, there's a bit of admin cost, but not much more than the install process for Win2k and in Linux it's easily scriptable. No problems "ghosting" many machines from one, no problems copying config info (in nice seperate files) from one to another, etc.
There are a ton of updates for Linux systems but rarely for the kernel or any external service a user would need. Even when they are, the usual severity is priv escalation, meaning you need an account already. In other words, just like a Windows machines by default. When needed it's just as easy to push updates to a bunch of machines (or set them to pull from a specific server) with a few lines of perl and a crontab entry.
Finally, Linux admins scale better. Add ten times the machines and the admin job isn't much more complex. (Except for hardware problems.)
I really wish all the users I deal with used Linux. I'd get so much more Slashdot time.
They just need to give the CS department a project for the students... It's fairly hard to come up with a real-world task that will build skills, and yet choose something students can complete in a semester. Modifying an existing project would be a great way to handle this.
Great, so your department is clarifying their position amongst themselves, in what's got to be a shorter and less painful meeting than the final one. This means that one person, usually the manager, can go to the final meeting with full knowledge and represent the rest of you. (And, sell you down the river no doubt, but such is life.)
Ideally the final meeting can be between one person from each department involved and because everyone is prepared through a series of earlier meetings, nobody has a valid excuse to delay.
I saw a dot matrix at a trade show a few years back that printed with UV ink. The computer thought it was printing in black and it came out invisible except under blacklight. (Once it dried - there was a small sheen while wet.)
Print that overtop of the rest of the printing and it'd probably work very well. I doubt people look very close at the sharpness of the glow.
This isn't actually true with software, they just say it is. If you buy it from a store, it's yours. If you sit down at a table and read and agree to a contract before you get the CD, it's a license.
You can't do some things with your software, like reproduce it, but then you can't do some things with your printer (print money) or your knife (stab someone) and you still own those things.
Seems like a reasonable idea actually. Wage economic war against someone you hate.
...
Of course you are right, they'd need to pass much more than that, and then to bring the economy down, let people know that a few billion dollars worth are fake.
There's a lot of value to the government in the appearance of security, that's why they jump so hard on counterfeiters, they don't want people to think that the money they accept could be counterfeit. If nobody trusted the currency
Do you understand the difficulty of guessing the correct port five-port sequence, where order matters and any wrong guess silently restarts the process? Especially since anyone setting up port knocking would already have a rule for discarding any system port-scanning you. Define port-scanning as 100 connection requests without a successful connect and that allows for only twenty guesses before you're banned. 64535 ^ 5 is much higher than 5; much, much higher.
The problem with opening the packet and looking at it is that you've then got a service, with pretty hefty privs, listening to the network.
With letting iptables and sshd do all the listening your perl script only needs to detect a correct pattern and allow access to ssh, the failure mode is pretty small and the window of opportunity for feeding it bad data is likewise small. A service performing a signature verification (expensive) on a whole packet of data has a much larger window of vulnerabilities - more opportunities to have a buffer overflow, or fail to parse the packet, or whatever.
The knocking just seems so much quicker, easier, less risky, and just as secure.
I'd imagine that port knocking would be used by university students whose dorms forbid running servers of any type. SSH would be secure, but they'd shut off your net connection if they saw it. Port knocking means you can pass a scan and yet still run SSH.
The basic networking stack already processes these packets. It looks at the port number and decides if it wants to do anything. It then decides if it should be nice about this (let the other end know nothing is running) or sneaky (pretend it didn't hear you, so you don't know if it's there at all).
If I try to connect to your desktop machine at port 80 it's already got to decide how to handle it, regardless of what's running (or not) so this doesn't make your network stack need to be any more complex.
Exactly. And have the sequence be at least based off of time, if not the originating IP and a password. (MD5 all of that, use the hash to determine the sequence.)
And if you detect a DoS attack, you do exactly what you do right now. Drop everything from the offending host. Except in this case you'd want to drop it before the sequence-finder program ran, to give it less crap to look at.
And of course, any access to a port not in the sequence, or out of place, resets this and you have to start again after a timeout. That way a few linear scans won't open any lock.
You can also open up inbound ports from specific external IP addresses only, and do many at once. So ten inbound connections can reach ten different internal webservers, and at the next request, reach the same one again.
This can be done dynamically as a form of load balancing which is a neat hack. Expire the specific forward rule after 30s or something. Means similar requests cluster - less DB traffic.
But, combine this with knocking and you've got the next step. Secret services on a 'stealthed' IP, where you can request which quake server (for instance) by knocking in a different way.
Port scanning isn't what it once was. Especially once you factor in time-sensitive keys (easily doable - both machines need a net connect to reach each other, ntp is then trivial) and ID-sensitive keys (so my key isn't like yours, even at the same time). Even if you managed to snoop on a 'knock' you couldn't repeat it.
Actually, cable is rarely ever bottlenecked in the local loop. The speed cap is applied to the "modem", not to the line. The line is still much faster than the backbone connection to the internet. You really can't max out the local loop (unless you're file-sharing with neighbors) because you're bottlenecked by the internet connection.
It's very rare that cable users (or DSL) can't max out a speedtest page at their ISP website, at least to their programmed limits. It's when you go out to the internet and find that your cheap-ass ISP bought a single T1 for your half of the town that you get the lag.
And there's a market for old consoles. I'll buy em with a few games. I've occasionally had people over and wanted to play a racing game or whatever and I don't want to go to the trouble of installing one and rebooting a few times, etc.
If I could pick a PS2 up with 3-4 games (the ones that have sequels out for the PS3 at that time) for $100 or so it's worth it.
The XBox, if #2 isn't compatible, won't be for sale like that because people will need to keep them. That means I won't end up buying an XBox because they won't hit the used market.
That may not mean much to the companies directly, but the $100 for ditching an old system can be directly applied to purchasing a new one, meaning that backwards compatible systems sort of come with a $100 rebate.
By that measure, the guy who mugs Darl in an alley and takes his cash and Rollex should be more famous, because his hourly wage is even higher. Feh. Crime pays.
Darl is only making money because nobody has shot him yet. Wait for his crimes to bankrupt someone and we'll see who has the last laugh.
That excuse (CIA Agents) is a load of bull. Not that the inspectors didn't contain some CIA agents, but because all it takes to be a CIA agent is to report to the CIA at some point and because every other member of the party was reporting to one or another intelligence service. (I'm sure there were a few civilians on the inspection teams, but who really expects them to be able to evaluate the situation?)
Evaluating evidence of weapons production is a matter for intelligence agencies. They can correlate the stories with satellite photos and intelligence reports, they'll have agents on the ground getting corroborating stories, etc.
It's painfully obvious that Saddam was just using the CIA agents thing as an excuse. By seeing how far he could push and what the UN response was he could judge how much leeway he had.
And as for the war itself, whatever pathetic excuse Shrub came up with, it's been popular among all the Iraqis I've talked to. Both expats and current inhabitants want him gone. The only concern I've heard is that the USA isn't going to stick around and the UN is going to rubber-stamp any collection of locals, despite a strong religious or racial bias, and the country won't be any better off. Nobody (except Saddam's family, etc) wanted him to stick around. He and his sons were violent and arbitrarily cruel and they've had a very large number of people killed over the years.
Nobody wants to live in a war zone but a short war that led to a free country seems better to most than living in fear all the time.
Ahh yes, I forgot that "we" and our allies regularly slip high explosives onto civilian busses, into dance halls and diners, schools, etc.
How about you grow up and take a second to think before you post. Rigging something in the middle of Siberia to blow up is very different than going out of your way to kill civilians who usually aren't involved with either side of the conflict.
Monica was chaste. It just depends on what the meaning of the word chaste.
Chaste means 'being in a state of celibacy', celibacy means the 'condition of being unmarried' or 'avoidance of sexual intercourse'.
What's wrong with that? If a country is too stupid to employ Enigma-level encryption they deserve to be snooped on. Seriously, security isn't a kiddy game where the other side plays fair. You need to home-grow certain critical parts based on your own specialists' work.
Crypto machines are the ultimate closed-source fiasco. You need to have complete trust in something they won't show you the guts of, or the plans for.
This really shows why kfg is right saying that this is encouraging countries to support open-source. They get the benefit of other people's research without the risks of trusting their products completely.
Some of the needless changes. Where it's always best to stick with the book and I can't see how it would help the film to change it.
Then, the main problem I see, that Frodo in the first book was too weak. Didn't fight back against the Nazgul even a little.
The big change I *like* was Arwen. She went from a nothing that Aragorn married only because of history you just hear about. In the book he really should have gone for Eowyn - she would have been a match.
But in the movie they showed Arwen as having something going for her. It's not that they beefed her up as a love interest for the female audience; they simply filled out the existing love interest until it was believable.
When I first heard about her expanded role I was scared. I pictured the Fellowship of the Ten, not just more backstory on Arwen. Jackson played this really well.
Lost profit? From people who weren't going to pay? Hah!
See it as free advertising targetted at those who will pay.
I register shareware I want to keep using, but even at $.25 it's not worth registering if I'm going to use it monthly - too much hassle. So I only register things I really like.
I assume other people are the same way. I may not register WinZip because I work from the CLI most of the time even in Windows, but other people don't have a CLI copy of unzip, or are afraid of the CLI, WinZip is going to be great for them and they'll probably register it.
If I hadn't registered WinZip it'd be driving me nuts and I'd never recommend it to anyone. As is, I install it on every computer I build (unregistered). I'm sure some of those people have liked and registered it.
In your world I've stolen $15 (?) from WinZip INC. In the real world, I've given them hundreds of leads and taken care of the hard part - getting the software installed. Now, when these hundreds of people click on zip files they think WinZip is how to handle them, not just one way, but *the* way.
Very good payment, imho, for my few uses per month.
The difference is that unixes are designed with multi-user security in mind. If you have a system-level backup system a user-level worm won't be able to wipe out the data. You'll also be able to restrict user's ability to run apps at all, and what they'll be allowed to do. Compare to Microsoft where once you have a running app it's only a hair away from being admin where it can do anything.
Also, open source unix machines tend to be setup with security in mind - doing things that will limit the propogation of dumb-user-clicks-the-attachment worms. To target Linux you'll need an actual exploit. Not that they don't exist, but with the response time as low as it is, it'll be hard for a virus writer to respond before Linus does. The malware authors will have to discover the bugs instead of now how they simply read bugtraq.
My point about the IE bugs is that they're listed as system bugs, not IE bug. As in, even if you don't use IE you need to patch them. Why? Sounds like it's got wider-ranging implications. The problem isn't that IE is buggy, the problem is that it's built into the OS and its bugs are wider in scope.
As for the APIs, I didn't think you seriously expected me to remember the names and functions of some 9x API that I've never used.
As I remember it, DR-DOS was completely legit, hence Microsoft's annoyance. Can't quote a reference to the Win3.x DR-DOS issue either, so sorry.
And yeah, Linux ripped off Unix... And there's *any* proof of this?
If Linux is just a rebadged UNIX, SCO might have a point, but if it was they'd show some evidence and get it over with, as opposed to veiled threats and refuted allegations. If they have an issue I wish them well, but I highly doubt it.
Besides, even if the devil himself had bought the remenants of DR-DOS, what of it? It's still down to Microsoft's actions in the past, not the identities of the litigants now.
Thanks. I managed to find the crack but those would have come in handy.
And the fact that SCO bought a company that bought a company that was victimized by Microsoft means what?
And no, now there's no reason for uninstalling IE, assuming you don't mind their IE-specific bugs being general system issues. Read the release text for some of the XP updates - IE fixes you need even if you don't use it.
The Microsoft way to win an argument is to filibuster over something so long that it's not an issue anymore and thus claim it never was. Sure, IE6 may be fairly well behaved, but there were real stability/security reasons to remove IE from 98. Likewise, I'm sure the MS response to DR-DOS is "Who uses DOS?", but that misses the point that they had to fake an error message to make a competitor's product look worse.
Got any proof that they've changed?
How about -1 Flamebait for being an idiot and spouting uninformed garbage?
Microsoft has done everything it can to prevent competitors apps from working, from the days of "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" until present day. It's not their place to advertise competitor's products, but how about not intentionally sabotaging them, hmmm?
I think what you meant to say was "Yet another poster comes back as an AC to whine about being moderated as the unthinking drone he is."
I really wish Slashdot internally logged the IPs of ACs. I'd love to perma-ignore you and any other posters (ill_mango) who just happen to use your IP.