I get blocked with my user agent set to my standard fav, "Beelzebub/6.6.6", but when I revert back to Netscape/Linux standard, "Mozilla/4.73 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.19-1k ppc)" everything works fine.
Clearly you need to be reporting either (A) a Microsoft browser, or (B) any browser on an unsupported (but recognised!) platform.
So if Microsoft can't identify your platform, it won't let you in. If it can identify your platform as Linux, it lets you in.
Since I don't use Flash, Java, Javascript, or cookies, and I lie about both my user agent and referer, I'm pretty used to lots of badly broken pages. Frequently I can get past the front door by looking tat the page source, but in general I don't bother with web pages that require such nonsense.
Apple may have registered "iPod" in Australia, but I have been unable to come up with any evidence of an American trademark of that name by Apple. I realize that this isn't a real product yet, but somehow I have a hard time imagining Apple even announcing a product without having the relevent trademarks first!
I run a fairly active server at a university for file sharing... FTP, HTTP, netatalk, etc. It's even doing software RAID and has a tape drive. It's a B/W G3 running LinuxPPC. No problems setting up, and today I hit 300 days uptime.
I think the G3 machines are top-notch Linux boxen.
As a former resident of NH, I can tell you that Gregg doesn't have a clue about crypto policy or much else. It's staggering that he was ever elected in the first place, but I guess Americans love to vote for idiots.
Whatever his reasons for flip-flopping, I'm sure they have nothing to do with understanding the issues.
...is the Win2K vs. Win XP results. As everyone (including the author of the article) has pointed out, pipes don't play a very important role in Windows -- so it's perhaps true that the Linux vs. Windows comparison isn't very meaningful.
However, the significant performance degradation in any feature from one version of Windows to the next is a pretty damning result. It would seem to legitimize the feeling that many Windows users have that XP is a big downgrade from 2K.
That'd be Philips actually. They started the trademark process in 1980 but adandoned it in 1983. So I don't think that the compact disc logo is trademarked at all.
I guess we see how, feature by feature, GNU/Linux is an OK replacement for Windoze. Personally I'd like to see the opposite comparison -- Windows as a replacement for Linux in a Linux shop populated with Linux users.
I mean really, the sorts of solutions that a dedicated *NIX user implements are frequently not even possible in off-the-shelf land. Or, perhaps more to the point, the canned settings/templates/interfaces tend to steer you towards certain kinds of solutions whereas the *NIX environment is more of an open canvas.
It should read "MS, CNET On 7-Day Messenger Outrage"
Seriously though, as poorly as this bodes for.NET and as outraged as people should be, this little bump in the road isn't likely to give the higher-ups at Microsoft any of their much-needed dose of perspective.
Nmap, the network scanner, has long had a feature
which attempts to rate how good (random) a TCP sequence is. Any TCP stack worth its salt would be very hard to exploit on this basis, but I guess there are still some TCP stacks that aren't worth their salt.
In a year, most Mac users will be using OS X. Most of them will only be dimly aware that they're running UNIX. Rather, they'll be wondering What the hell happened to the Mac interface?
I don't really see MacOS X competing with LinuxPPC except in a very small arena: small shops with servers running on Apple hardware. In most of these cases, OS X will win.
Why? Because it's supported by Apple, and if something goes wrong, they can call up Apple and bitch until someone makes things better.
But for the most part, people who are using LinuxPPC as a workstation will not switch over. They probably like their window manager, and they probably like the performance they get. They probably also don't like the funky NeXT-style layout of the filesystem. Lord knows I don't.
I think the goal here should be to give the user a choice between "pretty" booting and useful booting. MacOS X Server (and possibly regular MacOS X) gives you such a choice. There's some key that you hold as the machine starts to bootstrap that makes it flip into verbose boot mode.
If the mainstream Linux distros offered such a feature, I think it would be another feather in the cap of Linux in general. Sure, it seems silly, but once Linux can do everything Windoze can (and of course a whole lot more) then it will be taken seriously by the consumer and business markets.
Yes, it may sound silly to say that a "dumbing-down" feature might make people take Linux more seriously, but I think it is sadly the case.
The plea agreements require the men to reveal to the internet providers how they accomplished their scheme.
Doesn't seem like too much of a mystery to me... I sincerely hope they didn't get out of much jail time in turn for explaining how to use spammer software!
The real mystery is how they managed to trick 12,000 people out of almost $350,000 with such a pathetic scam.
Let me start by saying that I have been using LinuxPPC heavily for over a year now, and have fould the experience very good.
That said, however, I don't think that LinuxPPC is very likely to encourage people to by Mac hardware. Rather, it gives new life to old hardware. Got an old PowerMac 8500 lying around? Too slow to do much of anything useful with MacOS? That's where LinuxPPC comes in. Mac hardware is just too expensive to buy for the purpose of running Linux on.
Realistically, OS X will not change this. OS X is seriously processor-intensive stuff. It's clearly workstation-oriented: the GUI is the selling point. LinuxPPC, on the other hand, is great on all kinds of hardware for all kinds of uses.
I would definitely recommend LinuxPPC (or Yellowdog, etc) on that box. My experience with NetBSD on Mac hardware is that it's not very well optimised, and it's hard to get X to work for shit.
LinuxPPC is not only "good enough" to use as a workstation, it is perfect. I myself run LinuxPPC on a PowerMac 8550/132 (Pretty much the same as your box I think), and it runs so smoothly that I use the machine preferentially to my G4/500 running MacOS. I also use it for some serving -- solid as a rock and pretty quick, too.
I can say pretty confidently that you will experience no stability or performence problems with LinuxPPC on that hardware, either. I've only ever had one kernel panic on my LinuxPPC workstation, and that was when I was trying to write to a badly damaged HFS partition. The 604-based PPC machines are probably the ones that LinuxPPC has been most extensively tested on.
One note, however, is that you will need to disable Gnome and use a more lightweight window manager. Gnome is just unacceptably slow on older hardware. Also, figuring out all the OpenFirmware settings can be a hassle.
Those guys have been doing a great job the last couple of years. Sure the documentation isn't always the greatest, but if you want to turn Mac hardware into a production server, ya can't beat it.
The BSD core notwithstanding, I think it may be a couple of years before OS X becomes as fast and robust a server platform as LinuxPPC. Great job guys!
There are a number of next generation systems currently being developed today as "de-kernelised" systems - that is, operating systems that are not developed for a specific kernel, either in-house or from third parties. Athena is one of these, and it makes it very easy for us to develop Athena for many different types of kernels, even other operating systems without restriction.
Kinda puts a new twist on the arguments in the Micro$oft case... Maybe now Micro$oft can say that, instead of being part of the OS, that it actually is the OS!
...as long as the existing products remain
available until there is evidence that there is no market demand for them, any combination of computer programs is permissible as long as it does not violate other principles of antitrust law.
I'm not so sure about this point. Suppose Micro$oft was selling Windoze 2010 for $1000, and they sell Outlook Express for $1000 as well. If I understand the argument correctly, it would be OK for them to combine them into a single package as long as they went on selling the two seperately.
So what do they do? They bolt the two together, call the package Windoze 2010 Professional, and sell it for $1000. Or hey, maybe they're feeling deperate to dominate the mailer market and they sell the combined version for less than either of the components! Either way, no one will buy the components seperately anymore.
It seems that making this exception in the consideration of software combinations creates a big, fat loophole.
But for the most part, it's one of the most lucid documents in the whole case that I've read...
If an attacker were to break into a system and managed to retrieve the keys they would then be able to execute a man in the middle with extreme ease.
The way I see it, you need to have root to retrieve a private key. If someone already has root on your computer, don't you have more pressing concerns than whether or not someone might execute a man-in-the-middle attack against you?
It's been done before (or at least something like it)... The French Republican calendar of the last 18th century employed a great deal of decimal math. From the Britannica:
The seven-day week was abandoned, and each 30-day month was divided into three periods of 10 days called décades, the last day of a décade being a rest day. It was also agreed that each day should be divided into decimal parts, but this was not popular in practice and was allowed to fall into disuse.
I think the blunt truth is that, considering that Americans are still using 12s, 60s, 16s, etc. to measure distance and weight, what chance is there of anybody being able to cope with "time" being messed with?
I think you have to be invited to be considered a "White Hat" -- if you do nice things without an invitation, that makes you a "Gray Hat", and if you do bad things that makes you a "Black Hat".
-Alec
It's very rarely that I see binaries that do me any good at all, as I run Linux on a nonstandard platform, LinuxPPC. So on one hand, I feel that if you are going to make binaries at all, you should make them for as many platforms as possible. However, I think developers would do better to focus their energies on making the source easy to compile.
So, if you are able to provide lots of platform support with your binaries (like Netscape, Seti@Home, etc...) go for it. Otherwise, go over your makefiles with a fine-toothed comb.
Project Gutenberg doesn't have any kind of power to apply the GPL to the works they publish because they don't own the works they publish... they are all in the public domain.
I think this very fact makes the Adobe license very questionable legally. They can own the typefaces, the software used to display the text, etc., but they don't own the text. They can also get someone to write a new introduction to the book and copyright that, but they still don't own the body of the text. I don't think Adobe's license comes even close to squaring with "fair use" or any basic notions of "public domain" IP.
Apparently Australia has a null-vote option built into its political system... you just draw a big "X" across the ballot. The "null" vote actually gets counted as such, and apparently has been significant in past elections in getting a message across to political leaders.
Of course, the null vote is more important in a country where voting is compulsory (like Australia) than in the US, but I still think it would be a useful option in the American elections.
Some would argue that voting for a 3rd party (read Nader) accomplishes the same thing, but I don't think that that's entirely true. A vote for a far-left party takes a vote only from the moderate-left party... a vote for Nader is more useful to Bush than Gore.
The other difference is that a null vote is entirely politically neutral, whereas voting 3rd party entails endorsing that party's platform. I might consider voting Nader as a protest, but his foreign policy is so awful that I find Gore more palatable...
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly you need to be reporting either (A) a Microsoft browser, or (B) any browser on an unsupported (but recognised!) platform.
So if Microsoft can't identify your platform, it won't let you in. If it can identify your platform as Linux, it lets you in.
Since I don't use Flash, Java, Javascript, or cookies, and I lie about both my user agent and referer, I'm pretty used to lots of badly broken pages. Frequently I can get past the front door by looking tat the page source, but in general I don't bother with web pages that require such nonsense.
Apple may have registered "iPod" in Australia, but I have been unable to come up with any evidence of an American trademark of that name by Apple. I realize that this isn't a real product yet, but somehow I have a hard time imagining Apple even announcing a product without having the relevent trademarks first!
I think the G3 machines are top-notch Linux boxen.
Whatever his reasons for flip-flopping, I'm sure they have nothing to do with understanding the issues.
However, the significant performance degradation in any feature from one version of Windows to the next is a pretty damning result. It would seem to legitimize the feeling that many Windows users have that XP is a big downgrade from 2K.
Here is the USPTO record.
I guess we see how, feature by feature, GNU/Linux is an OK replacement for Windoze. Personally I'd like to see the opposite comparison -- Windows as a replacement for Linux in a Linux shop populated with Linux users.
I mean really, the sorts of solutions that a dedicated *NIX user implements are frequently not even possible in off-the-shelf land. Or, perhaps more to the point, the canned settings/templates/interfaces tend to steer you towards certain kinds of solutions whereas the *NIX environment is more of an open canvas.
It should read "MS, CNET On 7-Day Messenger Outrage"
.NET and as outraged as people should be, this little bump in the road isn't likely to give the higher-ups at Microsoft any of their much-needed dose of perspective.
Seriously though, as poorly as this bodes for
From the FreeBSD home page:
FreeBSD is an advanced BSD UNIX operating system for the Intel compatible (x86), DEC Alpha, and PC-98 architectures.
...if it ran on PPC I would likely be using that instead of Linux/PPC.
Does this mean that the PlayStation 3 is going to be PPC? :)
Check out http://insecure.org/nmap/
I don't really see MacOS X competing with LinuxPPC except in a very small arena: small shops with servers running on Apple hardware. In most of these cases, OS X will win.
Why? Because it's supported by Apple, and if something goes wrong, they can call up Apple and bitch until someone makes things better.
But for the most part, people who are using LinuxPPC as a workstation will not switch over. They probably like their window manager, and they probably like the performance they get. They probably also don't like the funky NeXT-style layout of the filesystem. Lord knows I don't.
If the mainstream Linux distros offered such a feature, I think it would be another feather in the cap of Linux in general. Sure, it seems silly, but once Linux can do everything Windoze can (and of course a whole lot more) then it will be taken seriously by the consumer and business markets.
Yes, it may sound silly to say that a "dumbing-down" feature might make people take Linux more seriously, but I think it is sadly the case.
Doesn't seem like too much of a mystery to me... I sincerely hope they didn't get out of much jail time in turn for explaining how to use spammer software!
The real mystery is how they managed to trick 12,000 people out of almost $350,000 with such a pathetic scam.
That said, however, I don't think that LinuxPPC is very likely to encourage people to by Mac hardware. Rather, it gives new life to old hardware. Got an old PowerMac 8500 lying around? Too slow to do much of anything useful with MacOS? That's where LinuxPPC comes in. Mac hardware is just too expensive to buy for the purpose of running Linux on.
Realistically, OS X will not change this. OS X is seriously processor-intensive stuff. It's clearly workstation-oriented: the GUI is the selling point. LinuxPPC, on the other hand, is great on all kinds of hardware for all kinds of uses.
LinuxPPC is not only "good enough" to use as a workstation, it is perfect. I myself run LinuxPPC on a PowerMac 8550/132 (Pretty much the same as your box I think), and it runs so smoothly that I use the machine preferentially to my G4/500 running MacOS. I also use it for some serving -- solid as a rock and pretty quick, too.
I can say pretty confidently that you will experience no stability or performence problems with LinuxPPC on that hardware, either. I've only ever had one kernel panic on my LinuxPPC workstation, and that was when I was trying to write to a badly damaged HFS partition. The 604-based PPC machines are probably the ones that LinuxPPC has been most extensively tested on.
One note, however, is that you will need to disable Gnome and use a more lightweight window manager. Gnome is just unacceptably slow on older hardware. Also, figuring out all the OpenFirmware settings can be a hassle.
Good Luck!
The BSD core notwithstanding, I think it may be a couple of years before OS X becomes as fast and robust a server platform as LinuxPPC. Great job guys!
Kinda puts a new twist on the arguments in the Micro$oft case... Maybe now Micro$oft can say that, instead of being part of the OS, that it actually is the OS!
I'm not so sure about this point. Suppose Micro$oft was selling Windoze 2010 for $1000, and they sell Outlook Express for $1000 as well. If I understand the argument correctly, it would be OK for them to combine them into a single package as long as they went on selling the two seperately.
So what do they do? They bolt the two together, call the package Windoze 2010 Professional, and sell it for $1000. Or hey, maybe they're feeling deperate to dominate the mailer market and they sell the combined version for less than either of the components! Either way, no one will buy the components seperately anymore.
It seems that making this exception in the consideration of software combinations creates a big, fat loophole.
But for the most part, it's one of the most lucid documents in the whole case that I've read...
-Alec
The way I see it, you need to have root to retrieve a private key. If someone already has root on your computer, don't you have more pressing concerns than whether or not someone might execute a man-in-the-middle attack against you?
-Alec
The seven-day week was abandoned, and each 30-day month was divided into three periods of 10 days called décades, the last day of a décade being a rest day. It was also agreed that each day should be divided into decimal parts, but this was not popular in practice and was allowed to fall into disuse.
I think the blunt truth is that, considering that Americans are still using 12s, 60s, 16s, etc. to measure distance and weight, what chance is there of anybody being able to cope with "time" being messed with?
-ALec
I think you have to be invited to be considered a "White Hat" -- if you do nice things without an invitation, that makes you a "Gray Hat", and if you do bad things that makes you a "Black Hat". -Alec
So, if you are able to provide lots of platform support with your binaries (like Netscape, Seti@Home, etc...) go for it. Otherwise, go over your makefiles with a fine-toothed comb.
-Alec
I think this very fact makes the Adobe license very questionable legally. They can own the typefaces, the software used to display the text, etc., but they don't own the text. They can also get someone to write a new introduction to the book and copyright that, but they still don't own the body of the text. I don't think Adobe's license comes even close to squaring with "fair use" or any basic notions of "public domain" IP.
Apparently Australia has a null-vote option built into its political system... you just draw a big "X" across the ballot. The "null" vote actually gets counted as such, and apparently has been significant in past elections in getting a message across to political leaders. Of course, the null vote is more important in a country where voting is compulsory (like Australia) than in the US, but I still think it would be a useful option in the American elections. Some would argue that voting for a 3rd party (read Nader) accomplishes the same thing, but I don't think that that's entirely true. A vote for a far-left party takes a vote only from the moderate-left party... a vote for Nader is more useful to Bush than Gore. The other difference is that a null vote is entirely politically neutral, whereas voting 3rd party entails endorsing that party's platform. I might consider voting Nader as a protest, but his foreign policy is so awful that I find Gore more palatable...