djb doesn't release his work under a proper opensource license, so most distributions want nothing to do with his software. Thus djbdns is not a viable alternative.
It may make it a tricky alternative for distributors (who have to supply the original plus patches rather than a modified original), but that doesn't mean it's not a fine alternative for savvy admins whose needs it otherwise meets.
Qmail is saddled with the same restrictions and is used by many of the busiest mail sites on the net (Hotmail, Critical Path, Yahoo, the spam-magnet server in my house, etc.). Surely there's some hint of viability in there.
If a parent leaves a loaded gun on a table and their young child kills himself or his sister, then the parent is certianly legaly responsible. How is this different?
Because that analogy isn't even vaguely applicable.
First of all, if you find a security flaw, you have no way of knowing that you're the only person to have done so. Chances are you're not. But some of those people will keep it to themselves, to use for their own purposes which are probably not constructive.
Secondly, you're completely ignoring the actual point of releasing this information, which is to give people who use the flawed product some way to protect themselves. With knowledge of the flaw, they can take measures to make sure they're not attacked. Without this knowledge, they are at the mercy of the other people who have discovered the problem.
I will say this: Making this information available benefits experienced and competent system administrators, to the detriment of the less knowledgeable (who may not have the means to protect themselves against the problem, and may therefore find themselves under attack by copycat exploiters). However, since being or hiring experienced administrators is a socially beneficial act, it is to be encouraged through this and any other measures, especially when better overall security is the main dividend.
or alternatively they must ensure that their customers do not run open SMTP software on their own PCs. In other words ORBS implies that ISPs must require their customers to allow the ISP to vet/check their PCs or else offer only a "managed end-user equipment" service [impossibly costly].
This is specious. All an ISP has to do to prevent customers from doing their own SMTP deliveries, is tell their router to block outbound connections to TCP port 25. Takes 30 seconds, costs nothing, and requires no interacting with client equipment/software.
Funny you should say that - after reading about the BIND priesthood's latest moves I decided to do exactly that. The man's a pain in the rear sometimes but over the years I've learned that his software works, and works well.
djbdns takes an entirely different approach to DNS serving, breaking the problem apart into completely separate components which are addressed by completely separate programs. This takes some getting used to, and it's not always immediately apparent how you can address every esoteric situation that you could with BIND's kitchen-sink approach (mainly because the different programs can't, of course, share port 53). Plus, you have to tread down the slippery slope of DJB replacements for a score of core system services - inetd, init, and so on. But so far I've got DNS servers running in 1/5 the memory footprint, serving queries about 10% faster, from a source that history suggests is all-but-guaranteed to be free of security problems.
Up to now, I hadn't even considered replacing BIND with anything else - just salivating hungrily when new versions came out, in hopes that they might actually run for more than a month or two without an urgent security upgrade. I guess it seemed somehow easier to use the same package everyone else did, if only because experts and books are easy to come by. But now that their long-awaited conclusive answer to the constant plague of security problems is to formally and officially sweep them under the rug, it looked like time to hitch my wagon to a new star. Obviously the underlying problem is not getting solved anytime soon.
One point he made, All right, let's say we all chip in $10/month to read Slashdot. Still want to get rid of those ads? I didn't think so is actually quite on the mark.
It's exactly on the other side of the planet from the mark. Spam drives up the end-user cost of the email we all enjoy using. Advertising on Slashdot drives down the end-user cost of this web site.
The fundamental difference is that web advertising is done with the complicity of the person who's actually paying for the resource.
UK won the Big Brother award for number of public camera placements.W hat's next on Big Brother's agenda?
Big Brother snooped on people's private lives. Controlling the speed with which people drive on public roads, and recording events that take place in public spaces, is entirely different.
I strongly believe in your right to do anything you want in total privacy on your own property - as long as it doesn't hurt anyone who didn't know what they were getting into - but the public space is a different beast altogether. People have demonstrated quite clearly that they have no interest in behaving socially; it is to the benefit of the vast majority of people that society work to ensure the safety of the areas we all need to pass through in order to conduct our business.
You start to cross a street and somone shoots over a hill doing 2x the speed limit, your only option is to gun it and get out of their way. Hitting your brakes only makes it worse.
What does this have to do with speeding? Unless you're driving a rocket car, you're not going to get it to 55 in the space of an intersection.
where pretty much everyone (IMHO) is against something like this--how can they find engineers to design something like that? Is everyone so immoral that they will sell out the freedom of a country for a decent sum of cash?
I'd work on it in a flash. I far more value my freedom of life and limb over your "freedom" to endanger me because you want to hear your car go zoom zoom. And to think I've been sitting around pestering the city council to install speed cameras in our neighborhood (apparently soon to be approved, you'll be happy to hear) when I could have been attacking the problem at the source. Sounds good to me.
A free society does not mean that people should be free to flaunt laws that are to everyone's benefit. That's anarchy, not society. You're welcome to live in anarchy as far as I'm concerned, but do it somewhere else: I'm sure as hell not going to pay for the roads and infrastructure you'll need in order to drive around. For further information please consult helpful reference Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
MS recently "donated" about $50,000 in OS licenses to the university I attend. By not having to pay for the OS on some of the machines they can now do one of the following: build a new lab, hire another tech support person, support four more grad students for a year, remodel the office of the department chair, etc.
No they can't. Because this was no doubt an engineering or compsci lab - probably across the hall from one full of donated unix systems from other vendors like HP - it means unix machines are being displaced with Windows. That in turn means they will need two to three times as many support personnel to keep things running, which will eclipse the savings many times over - each year!
I find the font size too big for my taste. Is there a way I can shrink it?
Sure, it's easy! Just create a rule for your proxy to pass pages from freshmeat off to a quick script that regexes down the font size.
I'm about to do it myself; the new Large Print Edition Freshmeat is giving me a headache. Methinks it was designed for Linux Netscape font sizes, which are absurdly small. What they should have done is make the font sizes the same as on everyone else's site, and just changed the setting in their local copy of Netscape to suit their personal preferences.
This is interesting. I've run heavily-used servers on unfirewalled networks with 20K users without any IMAP-related security issues. Can you elaborate a little more on the problems you've had?
There were buffer overflow problems with some versions of UW-IMAPd, but these had nothing to do with the IMAP protocol and were easily resolved with software updates. Surely that's not what you're talking about.
Can you please tell me how high your enery bill is (in MJ/kW/...)
Rent in my apartment building includes utilities (heat/power/water/gas), presumably because it would be too expensive to go in and install individual meters for everything. I guess the building was put up before people started worrying about where all the energy was going to come from.
It's nice on the one hand - I can leave my server running all the time, and take long showers when I feel the need - but on the other hand it sort of makes me feel guility. I've assuaged that by not using the air conditioning (gets pretty hot here in the summer) and using a combination of thick blinds and a box fan instead. I installed fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen, bathroom, and walk-in closets - but I found that for areas where I read, it's just not comfortable.
However, when I'm walk up to the building at night, I see things like windows open in the wintertime (and you just know they've got the heat on), air conditioners left on all day while the occupants are at work (so they don't have to wait those 10 minutes for it to cool down when they get home), and lights on in every room all the time. I suppose it's just too easy to abuse.
Is reading printed material a true saving of energy? How much power is really saved? It seems that printing would use more energy(and resources)
Try the library. Just yesterday I went and gathered a collection of printed material dating back to 1950. Surely if you amortize the paper production cost over the past 51 years, the cost for my reading would be trivial compared to the power usage for the electric glow-box you're facing right now.
You could solve that. Enter some data. It's not as if they drove around the country in a van full of laptops, charting the latitude and longitude of each point at which they could bring up Slashdot.org. They're counting on people to put in the information. It's called cooperation.
Certainly in Australia, any commercial organisation doing this kind of thing would need a Carrier licence
You sure about that? The 2.4Ghz channel has already been given blanket approval (in Australia as well as dozens of other nations) for low-power usage. Granted, Australia does have particularly onerous communications regulations (can you say Austel, anyone?) but this may not be subject to even those.
Every now and then we get mail with my name and our 5+4 zipcode on it.
About 10 zillion years ago, when I was in college, we discovered that mail would reach a dorm room with nothing but two numbers on it: The room number and the 9-digit zip code (no name, city, etc.).
The INS uses hand geometry (in lieu of passports, but in conjunction with a card) for its INSPASS speedy-entry program. You'd think that for a use like this they would have done a fair amount of research, so that might be looking into.
Unless you are paid in dollars, you will experience the dramatic fluctuations in PPP experienced by native IT workers and for that matter all workers in that country. This is, of course, not the case for those countries whose currencies are pegged to the dollar.
This is not terribly interesting unless you are an economist. PPP is arguably useful for second-guessing the central bank's monetary policy, but for someone living in a country and earning money there, it's not relevant (and neither is whether or not the local currency is pegged to the dollar, or the shilling, or on the gold standard). Remember that the bulk of things you will be spending money on as an individual are more or less entirely outside the domain of PPP (rent, food, etc.) because they are immobile, perishable, or for other reasons not subject to arbitrage.
If you are going to live somewhere, you need to find out (A) How much you are going to get paid, (B) How much things cost, (C) What the rate of inflation is like, and (D) whether your pay will keep pace with inflation.
If you are going to be repatriating a share of your earnings, then you are additionally concerned about historical exchange rate movements (mainly so you can determine whether to keep your money with you or to immediately send it to your home country) but monkeying with PPP is sophistry at best (lemme guess, you just had your first econ class).
Really? The US is the only country that taxes its citizens when they work outside its borders? Does anyone have any references to back that up? I'm curious, because I'm a US citizen and I may end up working abroad soon.
There may be one other country, but basically, yes, it's true. There is a decently large exemption for people who fit the IRS' definition of living abroad - it's $75,000 this year, I think - and after that you are taxed. The US participates in a fair number of double-taxation treaties, so you may not end up paying taxes to both countries in any case, though it gets sufficiently complex that you will probably need an account and/or tax lawyer.
In any case you are theoretically required to file a tax return, even if you are beneath the $75K line. Forms are available at your nearest handy-dandy US consulate.
Not many countries actually have tax reporting arrangements with the US, so, depending on your situation, you may find it fairly easy to avoid the whole thing. I always file when living overseas - because it seems easier and safer in the long run. Plus, they tend to come looking when there are gaps in your tax filing. I suppose you could file and lie on your return but that seems a bit egregious.
Slashdot Mirror
djb doesn't release his work under a proper opensource license, so most distributions want nothing to do with his software. Thus djbdns is not a viable alternative.
It may make it a tricky alternative for distributors (who have to supply the original plus patches rather than a modified original), but that doesn't mean it's not a fine alternative for savvy admins whose needs it otherwise meets.
Qmail is saddled with the same restrictions and is used by many of the busiest mail sites on the net (Hotmail, Critical Path, Yahoo, the spam-magnet server in my house, etc.). Surely there's some hint of viability in there.
Ha ha, very funny. In other words, all an ISP has to do is to cut off its customers from the Internet on port 25.
Yes, what's the problem with that? ISPs run mail relays for their customers; it's not like this stops them from doing anything legitimate.
If a parent leaves a loaded gun on a table and their young child kills himself or his sister, then the parent is certianly legaly responsible. How is this different?
Because that analogy isn't even vaguely applicable.
First of all, if you find a security flaw, you have no way of knowing that you're the only person to have done so. Chances are you're not. But some of those people will keep it to themselves, to use for their own purposes which are probably not constructive.
Secondly, you're completely ignoring the actual point of releasing this information, which is to give people who use the flawed product some way to protect themselves. With knowledge of the flaw, they can take measures to make sure they're not attacked. Without this knowledge, they are at the mercy of the other people who have discovered the problem.
I will say this: Making this information available benefits experienced and competent system administrators, to the detriment of the less knowledgeable (who may not have the means to protect themselves against the problem, and may therefore find themselves under attack by copycat exploiters). However, since being or hiring experienced administrators is a socially beneficial act, it is to be encouraged through this and any other measures, especially when better overall security is the main dividend.
or alternatively they must ensure that their customers do not run open SMTP software on their own PCs. In other words ORBS implies that ISPs must require their customers to allow the ISP to vet/check their PCs or else offer only a "managed end-user equipment" service [impossibly costly].
This is specious. All an ISP has to do to prevent customers from doing their own SMTP deliveries, is tell their router to block outbound connections to TCP port 25. Takes 30 seconds, costs nothing, and requires no interacting with client equipment/software.
Looks like it's time to replace BIND with djbdns
Funny you should say that - after reading about the BIND priesthood's latest moves I decided to do exactly that. The man's a pain in the rear sometimes but over the years I've learned that his software works, and works well.
djbdns takes an entirely different approach to DNS serving, breaking the problem apart into completely separate components which are addressed by completely separate programs. This takes some getting used to, and it's not always immediately apparent how you can address every esoteric situation that you could with BIND's kitchen-sink approach (mainly because the different programs can't, of course, share port 53). Plus, you have to tread down the slippery slope of DJB replacements for a score of core system services - inetd, init, and so on. But so far I've got DNS servers running in 1/5 the memory footprint, serving queries about 10% faster, from a source that history suggests is all-but-guaranteed to be free of security problems.
Up to now, I hadn't even considered replacing BIND with anything else - just salivating hungrily when new versions came out, in hopes that they might actually run for more than a month or two without an urgent security upgrade. I guess it seemed somehow easier to use the same package everyone else did, if only because experts and books are easy to come by. But now that their long-awaited conclusive answer to the constant plague of security problems is to formally and officially sweep them under the rug, it looked like time to hitch my wagon to a new star. Obviously the underlying problem is not getting solved anytime soon.
One point he made, All right, let's say we all chip in $10/month to read Slashdot. Still want to get rid of those ads? I didn't think so is actually quite on the mark.
It's exactly on the other side of the planet from the mark. Spam drives up the end-user cost of the email we all enjoy using. Advertising on Slashdot drives down the end-user cost of this web site.
The fundamental difference is that web advertising is done with the complicity of the person who's actually paying for the resource.
Montana no longer has a speed limit on interstates.
Alas, your dreamworld has vanished. After a dramatic surge in highway fatalities, Montana reinstated its speed limits - a year ago. Pay attention.
UK won the Big Brother award for number of public camera placements.W hat's next on Big Brother's agenda?
Big Brother snooped on people's private lives. Controlling the speed with which people drive on public roads, and recording events that take place in public spaces, is entirely different.
I strongly believe in your right to do anything you want in total privacy on your own property - as long as it doesn't hurt anyone who didn't know what they were getting into - but the public space is a different beast altogether. People have demonstrated quite clearly that they have no interest in behaving socially; it is to the benefit of the vast majority of people that society work to ensure the safety of the areas we all need to pass through in order to conduct our business.
How long would it take for someone to hack it and install a linux on that device?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies!
What if they don't enforce speed limits exactly, but limit how much you can break them by
That makes no sense. Why not just set a higher speed limit?
You start to cross a street and somone shoots over a hill doing 2x the speed limit, your only option is to gun it and get out of their way. Hitting your brakes only makes it worse.
What does this have to do with speeding? Unless you're driving a rocket car, you're not going to get it to 55 in the space of an intersection.
where pretty much everyone (IMHO) is against something like this--how can they find engineers to design something like that? Is everyone so immoral that they will sell out the freedom of a country for a decent sum of cash?
I'd work on it in a flash. I far more value my freedom of life and limb over your "freedom" to endanger me because you want to hear your car go zoom zoom. And to think I've been sitting around pestering the city council to install speed cameras in our neighborhood (apparently soon to be approved, you'll be happy to hear) when I could have been attacking the problem at the source. Sounds good to me.
A free society does not mean that people should be free to flaunt laws that are to everyone's benefit. That's anarchy, not society. You're welcome to live in anarchy as far as I'm concerned, but do it somewhere else: I'm sure as hell not going to pay for the roads and infrastructure you'll need in order to drive around. For further information please consult helpful reference Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
---raju1kabir, pedestrian and cyclist
MS recently "donated" about $50,000 in OS licenses to the university I attend. By not having to pay for the OS on some of the machines they can now do one of the following: build a new lab, hire another tech support person, support four more grad students for a year, remodel the office of the department chair, etc.
No they can't. Because this was no doubt an engineering or compsci lab - probably across the hall from one full of donated unix systems from other vendors like HP - it means unix machines are being displaced with Windows. That in turn means they will need two to three times as many support personnel to keep things running, which will eclipse the savings many times over - each year!
Your university just took it up the cakehole.
I find the font size too big for my taste. Is there a way I can shrink it?
Sure, it's easy! Just create a rule for your proxy to pass pages from freshmeat off to a quick script that regexes down the font size.
I'm about to do it myself; the new Large Print Edition Freshmeat is giving me a headache. Methinks it was designed for Linux Netscape font sizes, which are absurdly small. What they should have done is make the font sizes the same as on everyone else's site, and just changed the setting in their local copy of Netscape to suit their personal preferences.
'grep important *' may fail
'grep -r important .'
I have had too many security issues with IMAP
This is interesting. I've run heavily-used servers on unfirewalled networks with 20K users without any IMAP-related security issues. Can you elaborate a little more on the problems you've had?
There were buffer overflow problems with some versions of UW-IMAPd, but these had nothing to do with the IMAP protocol and were easily resolved with software updates. Surely that's not what you're talking about.
Can you please tell me how high your enery bill is (in MJ/kW/...)
Rent in my apartment building includes utilities (heat/power/water/gas), presumably because it would be too expensive to go in and install individual meters for everything. I guess the building was put up before people started worrying about where all the energy was going to come from.
It's nice on the one hand - I can leave my server running all the time, and take long showers when I feel the need - but on the other hand it sort of makes me feel guility. I've assuaged that by not using the air conditioning (gets pretty hot here in the summer) and using a combination of thick blinds and a box fan instead. I installed fluorescent bulbs in the kitchen, bathroom, and walk-in closets - but I found that for areas where I read, it's just not comfortable.
However, when I'm walk up to the building at night, I see things like windows open in the wintertime (and you just know they've got the heat on), air conditioners left on all day while the occupants are at work (so they don't have to wait those 10 minutes for it to cool down when they get home), and lights on in every room all the time. I suppose it's just too easy to abuse.
Is reading printed material a true saving of energy? How much power is really saved? It seems that printing would use more energy(and resources)
Try the library. Just yesterday I went and gathered a collection of printed material dating back to 1950. Surely if you amortize the paper production cost over the past 51 years, the cost for my reading would be trivial compared to the power usage for the electric glow-box you're facing right now.
You could solve that. Enter some data. It's not as if they drove around the country in a van full of laptops, charting the latitude and longitude of each point at which they could bring up Slashdot.org. They're counting on people to put in the information. It's called cooperation.
Certainly in Australia, any commercial organisation doing this kind of thing would need a Carrier licence
You sure about that? The 2.4Ghz channel has already been given blanket approval (in Australia as well as dozens of other nations) for low-power usage. Granted, Australia does have particularly onerous communications regulations (can you say Austel, anyone?) but this may not be subject to even those.
Personally I think cell phones are a phallic representation used primairly by people who either don't have one or think theirs is too small.
If that's the case, how come one's status increases as the size of one's cell phone decreases?
Every now and then we get mail with my name and our 5+4 zipcode on it.
About 10 zillion years ago, when I was in college, we discovered that mail would reach a dorm room with nothing but two numbers on it: The room number and the 9-digit zip code (no name, city, etc.).
The INS uses hand geometry (in lieu of passports, but in conjunction with a card) for its INSPASS speedy-entry program. You'd think that for a use like this they would have done a fair amount of research, so that might be looking into.
Unless you are paid in dollars, you will experience the dramatic fluctuations in PPP experienced by native IT workers and for that matter all workers in that country. This is, of course, not the case for those countries whose currencies are pegged to the dollar.
This is not terribly interesting unless you are an economist. PPP is arguably useful for second-guessing the central bank's monetary policy, but for someone living in a country and earning money there, it's not relevant (and neither is whether or not the local currency is pegged to the dollar, or the shilling, or on the gold standard). Remember that the bulk of things you will be spending money on as an individual are more or less entirely outside the domain of PPP (rent, food, etc.) because they are immobile, perishable, or for other reasons not subject to arbitrage.
If you are going to live somewhere, you need to find out (A) How much you are going to get paid, (B) How much things cost, (C) What the rate of inflation is like, and (D) whether your pay will keep pace with inflation.
If you are going to be repatriating a share of your earnings, then you are additionally concerned about historical exchange rate movements (mainly so you can determine whether to keep your money with you or to immediately send it to your home country) but monkeying with PPP is sophistry at best (lemme guess, you just had your first econ class).
Really? The US is the only country that taxes its citizens when they work outside its borders? Does anyone have any references to back that up? I'm curious, because I'm a US citizen and I may end up working abroad soon.
There may be one other country, but basically, yes, it's true. There is a decently large exemption for people who fit the IRS' definition of living abroad - it's $75,000 this year, I think - and after that you are taxed. The US participates in a fair number of double-taxation treaties, so you may not end up paying taxes to both countries in any case, though it gets sufficiently complex that you will probably need an account and/or tax lawyer.
In any case you are theoretically required to file a tax return, even if you are beneath the $75K line. Forms are available at your nearest handy-dandy US consulate.
Not many countries actually have tax reporting arrangements with the US, so, depending on your situation, you may find it fairly easy to avoid the whole thing. I always file when living overseas - because it seems easier and safer in the long run. Plus, they tend to come looking when there are gaps in your tax filing. I suppose you could file and lie on your return but that seems a bit egregious.