Swen may not be strictly a worm, but it sure isn't a virus, either! A virus is just a chunk of code that is put into another executable, and typically is never run by itself. Swen is another type of malware called a Trojan Horse. It looks like something good and tricks the user into executing it, but then it turns out to be something bad (just like the real Trojan Horse).
I don't think we've really seen a good virus in quite some time. This is probably due to the fact that they're hard to write and the fact that virus scanners are pretty good at detecting their presence even if it doesn't have a signature for the specific virus (this has to do with certain things that a virus does to get itself executed). Writing a trojan horse or a worm is much easier by comparison.
This is why there is no broadband market in the U.S., because there are not enough people able to notice the advantages.
True enough, but it's not just the customers who aren't able to notice the advantages. Most broadband providers actively try to make broadband suck. They seem to think that broadband is a fast modem and that people are just going to want to chat on AIM and browse eBay (or their crappy site which they make your homepage if you let them near your computer). Things like a "no servers" policy, massively asynchonous connections (2MB down and 48kB up), and PPPoE ("bringing the crap of dialup to broadband") make even technologically capable people question why they're spending $45+ a month for essentially a fast modem. Fortunately, I don't have to deal with PPPoE, and my provider hasn't blocked all the incoming ports yet (they've blocked some), so I can still justify the expense. But don't think it's just the computer illiterate customers causing a lack of broadband. The computer illiterate PHBs (and possibly even BOFHs) are sure helping.
It's not exactly the same, but (x)emacs does have a form of intellisense. Start typing the variable or function name and press Meta+/ (probably Alt+/ on x86 machines? I usually use emacs on Suns) It's not as smart as true intellisense in other IDEs, but it does a remarkably good job. All it does is look around in your other buffers for ways to complete what you've typed, based on the idea that what you've typed has probably been typed before. I know I use it all the time when I'm coding at work, and I've found it very useful. Not as helpful for those who don't know the object model (where ture intellisense really helps), but I'd be surprised if Microsoft's intellisense didn't choke on my project's baseline anyway (their IDE sure does -- thank goodness for Cygwin).
Emacs is actually a pretty versitile environment and can do a lot of neat things for you. Of course, for quick text editing, vi still reigns supreme for me:)
Your point is true, but I would like to bring up something else. I pay at least as much to recieve snail mail spam as I do email spam. In fact, I probably pay more per item on snail mail spam because I have to manually retrieve, sort, inspect, and destroy it. At least with email spam, my computer does all the work for me.
But you're right that the (relatively) high cost of snail mail does keep the spam levels down there. Not that I'd give up (nearly) free email just to slow down email spam.
For all practical purposes they've already started whitelisting for mail servers, considering they blacklist a good portion of the net, usually from even CONNECTING to their mail servers. And it's not just @aol.com, it's @cs.com and @*.rr.com and more (the rr.com being particularaly ironic because they blacklist their own IP addresses, so their own customers can't email to their incoming mail server - of course that's why I run my own mail server and don't trust my email to idiots who think IP blacklists are a good thing).
Some other ISPs (thinking that this is a good idea) have also started similar if-it's-not-commercial-email- it's-not-getting-through campaigns of blocking all "non-commercial" IP addresses. The only thing those of us not wanting to pay hundreds of dollars a month for broadband can do is relay through some other mail server (like a common spammer).
*sigh* I guess it's up to their customers to either protest, or like it. There's not much anyone else can do, except try to educate the customers away from AOL.
I sympathize, but in my experience, it's only Windows makes a diverse network hard. For example, at my current place of employment, there are 4 types of systems -- Solaris, SGI, Linux, and NT (usually 4.0, but some 2k and XP). The Solaris, SGI, and Linux systems all interoperate extremely well, and in general don't get in the way when I'm trying to work. Windows, however, is always a major stumbling block. Now, granted, our group takes a very Unix-y approach to development, but at least from our perspective, operating system diversity is only a problem for Windows.
Of course, if you've already got 35000 users of Windows (sunk cost) it would be harder to switch (since like I said, Windows won't make it easy).
Won't do anything for me -- my ISP has decided to block (without informing me, they just did it as usual) all incoming and outgoing packets on port 135 at the cable modem (I know it's at the modem because I don't get the normal MS network neighborhood chatter in my firewall logs).
I haven't decided if this block is a good or bad thing, but I wish they would have at least informed me they were doing it. They do have my email address after all. Or maybe they tried but it couldn't get through since their email servers don't accept mail from even their own IP addresses anymore.
*sigh* I really wish cable ISPs weren't a monopoly so I could escape from the idoits there (it seems mostly management idiots, but there could be a BOFH or a tech idiot in there as well).
Though they're different, I have one of my credit cards send me an email whenever my current statement is ready and whenever they receive my payment. I'm sure they have millions of customers, though I'd imagine only a small percentage use that service. In any case, it's a nice thing, and I'd hate to see the anti-spammers take it away.
Oh, and yes, I hate anti-spammers (the radical ones, not people who just think spam is bad) way more than spammers because while spammers make email annoying, anti-spammers try to make email NOT WORK AT ALL.
(now watch me get modded down for not pulling the anti-spam party line)
That's a good point about shredding being fun. I certainly don't _need_ to shred all that junk mail I get, but it gives me a certain sense of satisfaction when I do. I highly recommend it to everyone else -- it's definitely worth the money for a cheap shredder.
And there's one major reason: the lack of a distribution-independent and *easy* (read GUI) method of installing and updating third party software.
Then what, praytell, operating system _did_ you install? I sure hope it wasn't Windows, because every Linux distro out there far and away exceeds any Windows package management scheme. To install a Windows application, the developer must write a program to do all the installation work. Or he/she can use a program like InstallShield that will write a program that will do all the work. But none of that is a property of Windows. The only reason it works on Windows is because of the homogeneousness (if that's a word, I probably misspelt it:) of Windows platforms. Any dependency that an app needs above the base Windows install must be on the install CD.
Frankly, Linux is way ahead of Windows in this area. There are other issues with how the Linux community handles packages (file format, distribution, etc), but it's so much better than Windows that it's not even funny. Besides, there are plenty of graphical package managers (I used gnorpm a lot when I first started using Linux), so it's amazing that people still cite difficulty installing as a reason to not use Linux. I'm not to say there aren't other reasons, because there certainly are, but this isn't one of them.
Go out to your local record store and stand in front handing out free copies of the latest Metallica album! Spread free music to the world! Remember, you're not "stealing" if you're not taking something physical. That's what civil disobedience is supposed to be about, not hiding behind your ISP like a total pussy.
I don't know if you meant that in sarcasm or not, but that's a very interesting idea. Burn a whole bunch of CDs with various music on them and start handing them out for free in a public place. I wonder what the reaction would be to a group of people giving away CDs. I don't pretend that it would be legal, but if done right, it could be an effective form of civil disobiedience (with the appropriate threat of harm to the protestors).
More than that -- auto-preview of unread messages. I like being able to glance down the list of unread messages to find the more important ones. It also helps me identify spam (unread message with no body -- delete!) I don't know of another mail client that can do this (one of the main reasons I still use Outlook). If only I could find a way to disable the "feature" that prefers to display HTML over plain text...
Oh, since this story is about Mozilla, I specifically won't use Mozilla's mail client because it's tied so closely to the browser. If the browser crashes (this does happen occasionally) or I accidently hit ^Q, I've lost my mailer. I may give it a try once the browser and mail client become separate processes.
Oh, please. I was the submitter and frankly, you're right. This guy should be punished. I don't think there's any question of his guilt in the matter. What upsets me is the $180 million in restitution he was ordered to pay. AFAICT, this isn't a punitive fine, it's payment for damages incurred to DirectTV and Echostar. Except these weren't real damages, they are potential damages that haven't occurred and thus could never really be quantified. Even if there were actual damages due to his selling the descramblers, they still couldn't be really quantified -- how do you know how many of the people not paying for the service would pay for it if they didn't have the descrambler?
The guy going to prison or paying a fine for his crimes is not the problem here. The fact that he's paying for potential damages that haven't occurred is.
I assume it's just the laws don't require the price to reflect sales tax. The store isn't going to put a price any higher than it has to. But in a way, that does keep the taxes lower. I think people would be much more upset if they bought 10 gallons of gas at 75 cents/gallon and had to pay $12.50 for it (gas prices in the U.S. are always shown including tax). There are occasionally other places such as movie theaters that also include tax in their price.
Of course, the real kicker is that coupons seem to be applied after the sales tax is calculated. So, you pay sales tax on the marked price of the item, not the actual price you're paying. That, or the stores are pocketing the difference...
Hmmm... I had the opposite experience. I had a palm for a while which I used for simple PDA type tasks -- calendar, tasks, mail, and small notes. Nothing too fancy. It even had a couple of silly games on it. But it worked well, was exceptionally stable (I didn't even know it _could_ be reset until my brother showed me how). And the battery lasted forever. And it was really thin, too. I could easily fit it in my pocket without any problems.
Then, I got an iPaq. It's stability leaves something to be desired. Sure, it looks pretty, and has more power, but it's not a particularly good PDA. It's kind of a half breed between PDA and full PC, and doesn't really do either particularly well. It takes too long to turn on -- it's a couple seconds after I push the power button before I can reliably do anything (I know it's OK to use when the screen refreshes). If I turn it off in that period, it locks up and I have to reboot it. And when I reboot it, it doesn't remember simple things like the input method I prefer (the scribble variant). There are also a lot of times when I wish it was more PC like (usually when I have the wireless card plugged in and I'm trying to figure out why it doesn't work this time -- usually I just reboot it to get it to work). And I can't easily do things like SSH (I haven't found a good/Open Source SSH client for it).
Sure, there are a lot of good things about it. I like listening to MP3s or playing old Nintendo games on it. And MS has some nice tools for developing applications for it (I wrote a program to keep track of passwords securely that I considered Open Sourcing, but didn't know if there would be enough interest).
The iPaq has it's place, but for pure PDA type applications, I'd recommend a Palm. At least for how I was using the one I had (sadly, I had to give it back as it wasn't really mine), it worked much better than the iPaq.
Only if you run command.exe instead of cmd.exe. Or, you could be like me and when you have the misfortune of being on a Windows PC, run bash.exe. Cygwin (at least the command line stuff) has never been slow(er than the rest of the PC) for me.
Re:The MOST important change
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
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· Score: 1
I don't remember at the moment exactly what was wrong. I'm pretty sure that the Forte compiler couldn't get through the configure script because linking the test applications seemed to fail. I couldn't figure out why the linking failed, though, but it ended up complaining about a missing library when it was really some other failure. I also seem to remember the configure program trying to compile a test program that used the exit() function without #include'ing , which caused it to think that something else was wrong.
You need a *lot* of open source software to get it to build.
I could very well be missing some critical development header files or something (I know I have the libraries I need because I can and do run the binaries, they just aren't built with the configuration I need).
I know it's possible to compile Mozilla under Solaris, I just haven't quite figured out how, yet:) I guess I'll try again on Monday.
Slashdot Mirror
Swen may not be strictly a worm, but it sure isn't a virus, either! A virus is just a chunk of code that is put into another executable, and typically is never run by itself. Swen is another type of malware called a Trojan Horse. It looks like something good and tricks the user into executing it, but then it turns out to be something bad (just like the real Trojan Horse).
I don't think we've really seen a good virus in quite some time. This is probably due to the fact that they're hard to write and the fact that virus scanners are pretty good at detecting their presence even if it doesn't have a signature for the specific virus (this has to do with certain things that a virus does to get itself executed). Writing a trojan horse or a worm is much easier by comparison.
Good thing I only read slashdot.
Oh, wait. Crap.
2MB down and 48kB up
Oops, my bad... I got my units confused. That should be 2Mb down and 384kb up.
This is why there is no broadband market in the U.S., because there are not enough people able to notice the advantages.
True enough, but it's not just the customers who aren't able to notice the advantages. Most broadband providers actively try to make broadband suck. They seem to think that broadband is a fast modem and that people are just going to want to chat on AIM and browse eBay (or their crappy site which they make your homepage if you let them near your computer). Things like a "no servers" policy, massively asynchonous connections (2MB down and 48kB up), and PPPoE ("bringing the crap of dialup to broadband") make even technologically capable people question why they're spending $45+ a month for essentially a fast modem. Fortunately, I don't have to deal with PPPoE, and my provider hasn't blocked all the incoming ports yet (they've blocked some), so I can still justify the expense. But don't think it's just the computer illiterate customers causing a lack of broadband. The computer illiterate PHBs (and possibly even BOFHs) are sure helping.
heh, you're right: "The site www.microsoft-antitrust.gov is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000." Wonder who's bright idea that was...
It's not exactly the same, but (x)emacs does have a form of intellisense. Start typing the variable or function name and press Meta+/ (probably Alt+/ on x86 machines? I usually use emacs on Suns) It's not as smart as true intellisense in other IDEs, but it does a remarkably good job. All it does is look around in your other buffers for ways to complete what you've typed, based on the idea that what you've typed has probably been typed before. I know I use it all the time when I'm coding at work, and I've found it very useful. Not as helpful for those who don't know the object model (where ture intellisense really helps), but I'd be surprised if Microsoft's intellisense didn't choke on my project's baseline anyway (their IDE sure does -- thank goodness for Cygwin).
:)
Emacs is actually a pretty versitile environment and can do a lot of neat things for you. Of course, for quick text editing, vi still reigns supreme for me
Your point is true, but I would like to bring up something else. I pay at least as much to recieve snail mail spam as I do email spam. In fact, I probably pay more per item on snail mail spam because I have to manually retrieve, sort, inspect, and destroy it. At least with email spam, my computer does all the work for me.
But you're right that the (relatively) high cost of snail mail does keep the spam levels down there. Not that I'd give up (nearly) free email just to slow down email spam.
For all practical purposes they've already started whitelisting for mail servers, considering they blacklist a good portion of the net, usually from even CONNECTING to their mail servers. And it's not just @aol.com, it's @cs.com and @*.rr.com and more (the rr.com being particularaly ironic because they blacklist their own IP addresses, so their own customers can't email to their incoming mail server - of course that's why I run my own mail server and don't trust my email to idiots who think IP blacklists are a good thing).
Some other ISPs (thinking that this is a good idea) have also started similar if-it's-not-commercial-email- it's-not-getting-through campaigns of blocking all "non-commercial" IP addresses. The only thing those of us not wanting to pay hundreds of dollars a month for broadband can do is relay through some other mail server (like a common spammer).
*sigh* I guess it's up to their customers to either protest, or like it. There's not much anyone else can do, except try to educate the customers away from AOL.
That sounds like a lawyer joke...
:)
What do you call 35000 Windows users at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!
I sympathize, but in my experience, it's only Windows makes a diverse network hard. For example, at my current place of employment, there are 4 types of systems -- Solaris, SGI, Linux, and NT (usually 4.0, but some 2k and XP). The Solaris, SGI, and Linux systems all interoperate extremely well, and in general don't get in the way when I'm trying to work. Windows, however, is always a major stumbling block. Now, granted, our group takes a very Unix-y approach to development, but at least from our perspective, operating system diversity is only a problem for Windows.
Of course, if you've already got 35000 users of Windows (sunk cost) it would be harder to switch (since like I said, Windows won't make it easy).
"...you have it easy, you run Linux, stop complaining!"
:)
That's when you snap your suspenders, scratch your beard, and remember why you have that smug look on your face
Won't do anything for me -- my ISP has decided to block (without informing me, they just did it as usual) all incoming and outgoing packets on port 135 at the cable modem (I know it's at the modem because I don't get the normal MS network neighborhood chatter in my firewall logs).
I haven't decided if this block is a good or bad thing, but I wish they would have at least informed me they were doing it. They do have my email address after all. Or maybe they tried but it couldn't get through since their email servers don't accept mail from even their own IP addresses anymore.
*sigh* I really wish cable ISPs weren't a monopoly so I could escape from the idoits there (it seems mostly management idiots, but there could be a BOFH or a tech idiot in there as well).
Though they're different, I have one of my credit cards send me an email whenever my current statement is ready and whenever they receive my payment. I'm sure they have millions of customers, though I'd imagine only a small percentage use that service. In any case, it's a nice thing, and I'd hate to see the anti-spammers take it away.
Oh, and yes, I hate anti-spammers (the radical ones, not people who just think spam is bad) way more than spammers because while spammers make email annoying, anti-spammers try to make email NOT WORK AT ALL.
(now watch me get modded down for not pulling the anti-spam party line)
That's a good point about shredding being fun. I certainly don't _need_ to shred all that junk mail I get, but it gives me a certain sense of satisfaction when I do. I highly recommend it to everyone else -- it's definitely worth the money for a cheap shredder.
Actually, I always thought the old design was nice -- simple and easy to read. Oh, well, maybe I'm just old and stuck in my ways :)
And there's one major reason: the lack of a distribution-independent and *easy* (read GUI) method of installing and updating third party software.
:) of Windows platforms. Any dependency that an app needs above the base Windows install must be on the install CD.
Then what, praytell, operating system _did_ you install? I sure hope it wasn't Windows, because every Linux distro out there far and away exceeds any Windows package management scheme. To install a Windows application, the developer must write a program to do all the installation work. Or he/she can use a program like InstallShield that will write a program that will do all the work. But none of that is a property of Windows. The only reason it works on Windows is because of the homogeneousness (if that's a word, I probably misspelt it
Frankly, Linux is way ahead of Windows in this area. There are other issues with how the Linux community handles packages (file format, distribution, etc), but it's so much better than Windows that it's not even funny. Besides, there are plenty of graphical package managers (I used gnorpm a lot when I first started using Linux), so it's amazing that people still cite difficulty installing as a reason to not use Linux. I'm not to say there aren't other reasons, because there certainly are, but this isn't one of them.
Go out to your local record store and stand in front handing out free copies of the latest Metallica album! Spread free music to the world! Remember, you're not "stealing" if you're not taking something physical. That's what civil disobedience is supposed to be about, not hiding behind your ISP like a total pussy.
I don't know if you meant that in sarcasm or not, but that's a very interesting idea. Burn a whole bunch of CDs with various music on them and start handing them out for free in a public place. I wonder what the reaction would be to a group of people giving away CDs. I don't pretend that it would be legal, but if done right, it could be an effective form of civil disobiedience (with the appropriate threat of harm to the protestors).
More than that -- auto-preview of unread messages. I like being able to glance down the list of unread messages to find the more important ones. It also helps me identify spam (unread message with no body -- delete!) I don't know of another mail client that can do this (one of the main reasons I still use Outlook). If only I could find a way to disable the "feature" that prefers to display HTML over plain text...
Oh, since this story is about Mozilla, I specifically won't use Mozilla's mail client because it's tied so closely to the browser. If the browser crashes (this does happen occasionally) or I accidently hit ^Q, I've lost my mailer. I may give it a try once the browser and mail client become separate processes.
Sorry, if I had known the site had popups, I wouldn't have linked to it. Since I always use Mozilla, popups are a thing of the past :P
Oh, please. I was the submitter and frankly, you're right. This guy should be punished. I don't think there's any question of his guilt in the matter. What upsets me is the $180 million in restitution he was ordered to pay. AFAICT, this isn't a punitive fine, it's payment for damages incurred to DirectTV and Echostar. Except these weren't real damages, they are potential damages that haven't occurred and thus could never really be quantified. Even if there were actual damages due to his selling the descramblers, they still couldn't be really quantified -- how do you know how many of the people not paying for the service would pay for it if they didn't have the descrambler?
The guy going to prison or paying a fine for his crimes is not the problem here. The fact that he's paying for potential damages that haven't occurred is.
I assume it's just the laws don't require the price to reflect sales tax. The store isn't going to put a price any higher than it has to. But in a way, that does keep the taxes lower. I think people would be much more upset if they bought 10 gallons of gas at 75 cents/gallon and had to pay $12.50 for it (gas prices in the U.S. are always shown including tax). There are occasionally other places such as movie theaters that also include tax in their price.
Of course, the real kicker is that coupons seem to be applied after the sales tax is calculated. So, you pay sales tax on the marked price of the item, not the actual price you're paying. That, or the stores are pocketing the difference...
Where do you get the codecs for playing the DivX files? Or does WMP already have that ability?
Since the iPaq screen is taller than it is wide, can you rotate the video 90 degrees and have a more widescreen presentation?
Hmmm... I had the opposite experience. I had a palm for a while which I used for simple PDA type tasks -- calendar, tasks, mail, and small notes. Nothing too fancy. It even had a couple of silly games on it. But it worked well, was exceptionally stable (I didn't even know it _could_ be reset until my brother showed me how). And the battery lasted forever. And it was really thin, too. I could easily fit it in my pocket without any problems.
Then, I got an iPaq. It's stability leaves something to be desired. Sure, it looks pretty, and has more power, but it's not a particularly good PDA. It's kind of a half breed between PDA and full PC, and doesn't really do either particularly well. It takes too long to turn on -- it's a couple seconds after I push the power button before I can reliably do anything (I know it's OK to use when the screen refreshes). If I turn it off in that period, it locks up and I have to reboot it. And when I reboot it, it doesn't remember simple things like the input method I prefer (the scribble variant). There are also a lot of times when I wish it was more PC like (usually when I have the wireless card plugged in and I'm trying to figure out why it doesn't work this time -- usually I just reboot it to get it to work). And I can't easily do things like SSH (I haven't found a good/Open Source SSH client for it).
Sure, there are a lot of good things about it. I like listening to MP3s or playing old Nintendo games on it. And MS has some nice tools for developing applications for it (I wrote a program to keep track of passwords securely that I considered Open Sourcing, but didn't know if there would be enough interest).
The iPaq has it's place, but for pure PDA type applications, I'd recommend a Palm. At least for how I was using the one I had (sadly, I had to give it back as it wasn't really mine), it worked much better than the iPaq.
Only if you run command.exe instead of cmd.exe. Or, you could be like me and when you have the misfortune of being on a Windows PC, run bash.exe. Cygwin (at least the command line stuff) has never been slow(er than the rest of the PC) for me.
I don't remember at the moment exactly what was wrong. I'm pretty sure that the Forte compiler couldn't get through the configure script because linking the test applications seemed to fail. I couldn't figure out why the linking failed, though, but it ended up complaining about a missing library when it was really some other failure. I also seem to remember the configure program trying to compile a test program that used the exit() function without #include'ing , which caused it to think that something else was wrong.
:) I guess I'll try again on Monday.
You need a *lot* of open source software to get it to build.
I could very well be missing some critical development header files or something (I know I have the libraries I need because I can and do run the binaries, they just aren't built with the configuration I need).
I know it's possible to compile Mozilla under Solaris, I just haven't quite figured out how, yet