The whole problem is twofold. The first is stupid users. How can you possibly secure a network against attacks if your users are constantly undermining your lockdown efforts? The second is privilege escalation at the binary level. System-level software with any sort of hole will allow an attacking program the ability to do whatever it wants, even if the user isn't running as root (the daemon is running at that level).
We had a guy who was constantly downloading and running every attachment he ever received. We finally set him up with an ePod terminal and some crayons and haven't had a significant virus problem since. As a bonus, we get some interesting artwork to hang in the lobby.
This goes to show the benefits of Open Source software. Being able to see the code gives attackers a practically clear window into the guts of any network relying on that software. More eyes means more vulnerabilities found, so the network is actually safer because all these holes are known, if not by the security companies themselves, by the attackers who attempt to exploit the bugs.
We can't take the drastic step of eliminating Windows on our networks because it is so entrenched, but the slow migration away from it one desktop at a time is giving us a whole new outlook on viruses.
The idea behind all this mapping is to find genetic sequences that can be used to mend ailing people. Using a computer to throw every single combination possible against the wall and seeing what sticks is certainly a way to go about this, but it also raises the spectre of a single large company owning all these combinations. This wouldn't be such a terrible thing if there was some sort of actual science involved, but by brute-forcing results, they are doing nothing more complicated than running a counting program with an infinite number of bits.
So each result is directly traceable to a number. Will these companies own these numbers? Can you even take out a patent on a number? In the DeCSS case, it was argued that the decoding algorithm was protected even though some implementations of it were nothing more than a carefully crafted prime number.
I don't like the idea of someone owning numbers any more than I think someone should be entitled to the fruits of their own work. This whole patent "creation/reward" system is getting turned on its head because of the power of computers. What would have been prohibitive even 10 or 15 years ago is possible (even easy) now. How can we keep our rights without sacrificing the progress of science and the arts?
What has impressed me about Linux is not so much that it has enabled some sort of "software revolution", but rather in how it has given chip/platform makers a specific, generic target OS that they can use freely to get something useful running on their hardware quickly.
It used to be the case that platform makers would have to either develop their own minimal operating system for testing purposes or work very closely with an OS maker to port their software to the new hardware platform. With Linux, this has been pushed into the anals of history. Now the Linux OS porting goes hand in hand with platform building, as evidenced by the almost immediate support for Linux at the time of hardware release.
I'm not so much interested in how the Cell board is going to revolutionize anything (it won't), but in how we have, in just the past few years, seen a dramatic increase in the number of hardware platforms being released. And not just in numbers, but also in variety. The number of different types of hardware platforms has risen dramatically. It's only limitation is the number of chip instruction sets supported by gcc and the imaginations of hardware manufacturers.
If you want to see how Microsoft's monopoly has hurt the computer industry, look no further than the current industry. Whereas hardware platforms were pretty standardized and boring, now, with Linux (and real competition to Microsoft's hegemony) the numbers of innovative platforms has increased dramatically. We need a Microsoft out there developing consumer-level applications and quality, user-friendly operating systems. However, we also need a real competitor like Linux to push the giant into innovating.
It's important to understand that the mind is only one aspect of the brain. Inasmuch as they say they want to reproduce the mind, it has already been achieved to some extent in software. The primary drawback is that it is software, so it is necessarily limited to the speed of the CPU. So the fully thinking program already exists, it just needs better hardware to get it thinking at a reasonable rate.
How awesome would it be to have such a thing implemented on the Cell architecture. Even the name fits the application.
Re-visiting the LFS scenario every year or two, for you distro-monkeys, should be a requirement of the "Order of The Penguin" membership...
I don't understand this "Cult of the Difficult" that seems to be very pervasive in the Open Source community. Software has always been about making the difficult easier. We design and write software to make tasks faster or more easily performed or, in some cases like the spreadsheet, possible.
So I don't see what the fascination is with trifling with the minutia of a system just for kicks. I guess if it's for your own kicks, that's fine, but comments like yours above are very common in the computer technology industry. "If you don't understand the root of this, you will never understand this."
Understanding every little bit of something is not a requirement for using it. For most things, it shouldn't be. And for the best-written software, it isn't. Why, then, do people think that getting your hands dirty in Linux source code is such a good thing for everyone? It seems like a colossal waste of time for most people who would rather get their work done.
I had the same reaction when some Mac fanatic tried to tell me how much more user-friendly MacOS was in one breath and then turn around and tell someone that they need to manually increase the amount of RAM allotted to some random program in the next breath. That isn't user-friendliness. That's OS-retardation.
A good piece of software should anticipate what you want to do and make it easy to do it. It should handle things that you don't want to handle, and it should optimize things that you do often. It should, to steal a phrase from Apple, Just Work.
I don't want to fiddle with Linux's innards any more than I want to fiddle with my own. I am happy with GIGO and am willing to accept it as a black box, but if something goes wrong, I'd rather call a doctor who spent 8 years of their life studying the black box than trying to do that studying on my own.
People have been doing LFS for years. It's nothing really too new or significant.
It's not even a really good way to learn about how "Linux the OS" works. It's just another way of spending an inordinate amount of time tinkering with your computer (not that there's anything wrong with that).
If you want the benefits of LFS without the pain, just stick with Gentoo or Sorcerer Linux and let someone else worry about the sources. You still get the custom compilation benefits but don't have to waste time trying to track down stupid dependency problems (at least not as much as you would with LFS, but more than with a mainstream distro).
If we aren't sure, let's keep looking. Send up a few drilling robots and get some serious soil samples. Let's see if there's any water under that dusty ground.
Investigating from a distance is fine for things we can't reach, but Mars is just around the corner, in astronomic terms. We spend all this time sending up little probes when what is needed is not Martian air samples, but Martian soil samples.
Unfortunately it's not profitable to investigate other planets. The benefit to sending up rockets is plain. The benefit of sending rockets to Mars isn't. Until a better form of propulsion comes along to unseat exploding volatile gases in a chamber, we aren't ever going to see the type of financial backing for scientific endeavors necessary to send something significant to Mars.
Maybe if they decided to put in Abiword instead of that OpenOffice monstrosity, they could keep their LiveCDs on one disk.
It's not my project, so I don't have any real input into what goes in and what is released, but let's just say I'd rather have a nice thin and light Mini distro than a bloody huge Maxi.
If Morse code is so much better than using text messaging, why doesn't everyone do it?
Rhetorical question. The answer, obviously, is that it is a pain in the ass to learn and gain any serious encoding/decoding speed.
It's a lot like typing (which most of us take for granted). Objectively, it is the fastest way to transcribe data. However, it requires quite a bit of practice to get up to a level fast enough to make it better and more useful than normal writing.
Free falling from 15,000 feet is faster than landing in a plane from the same height. Doesn't mean you want to go ahead with it.
It's not really an embarrassment to Microsoft. It's an embarrassment to Koreans who have long been the leaders in wide-spread broadband and internet usage. You'd have expected that they, of all nationalities, would have their act together when it came to running servers. Unfortunately, it seems that even they are not immune to hacks.
Which is all for the better, of course. The more these systems are attacked, the harder they become. Kind of like how the SR-71's outer plating would become harder each time it took to the skies, or like how the samurai's katana becomes harder each time it is thrust into the forge. Systems become stronger by trial.
So next time there won't be this problem. That there was a problem this time is unfortunate, but like the lessons of history, this experience will make the victims Better. Stronger. Faster than before.
How many people are led down the primrose path to Hell by some friend or lover who we trusted completely? Whether it be some sort of suddent infidelity or a constant wearing down of trust, that person eventually broke our trust.
Now, in the light of our experience, we look at all of our future relationships through the darkened glass of failed trust. Is it any wonder that half of all marriages end in divorce now? We can't open our hearts to those we love 100% because it means that we may have our trust abused again.
The problem isn't lack of trust. The problem is, and always has been, the lack of trustworthiness.
Do you have any evidence for this? It seems a little implausible to me to argue that the airlines would say, "Gosh, maintenance on our planes isn't so important; it's ok if a few crash now and then." And it's doubly implausible that the FAA would be chill about that.
There are instances where airlines have been known to cut corners to save a buck.
He takes a tip from the silicon chip makers and uses the same type of technology to etch a pattern in a wafer. Then he creates a mold (like a mask, not like the stuff growing in the crotches of slashbots) which he can use repeatedly as a printing template.
Since a lot of bacteria grow resistant to antibiotics, it makes sense to use this kind of "printing press" to study how they create their protective biofilm. As a species, we are slowly succumbing to our own success at killing off bacteria. However the rise of super-bacteria that are immune to our medicines is a huge worry. If this type of research can shine some light on why these bacteria are so resistant and how we can control them to be less dangerous to us, then we will be able to hold off our extinction for a few more years.
What is the cultural underpinning for not keeping PCs patched? I understand that the population in Europe, with its plummeting birthrates, is slowly becoming older, but I can't imagine that the reason for this problem is because of grandpa Johan not knowing about patching.
Is it because of an innate sense of distrust of New World things? Are they unwilling to download the latest patches from Microsoft and this is resulting in their computers being open to zombie attacks?
And of all the places you'd expect badly configured computers, Britain, Germany, and France are the least likely candidates. Is this because they hate Bush?
Let's look at the whole concept of an IT union. That's what the article is really trying to get at, though it seems to be unable to connect the dots.
Unions have historically been necessary in professions where the employees have been at a severe economic disadvantage to the employer. In such cases, the employee would suffer more greatly by being punished by the employer than by doing some odious task. A great example is the auto industry where thousands upon thousands of workers would be literally unable to support themselves if the factory left town. The management is able to use this knowledge and leverage it into forcing longer hours for worse pay upon the workers. It is only through unionization and the threat of collective/mass work stoppage that the management is kept in check.
In the modern age, unions have been a device to demand better treatment for worse productivity. They have ceased to be helpful guardians of employee rights and have become oppressive bureaucracies in their own right. This is not really a good direction, IMO.
If the primary goal of a union ought to be the protection of worker rights and the establishment of a partnership in which both management and the employees receive favorable outcomes. It should seek to balance the power of the employers with the needs of the employees.
However in the software world, the employees are not hamstrung by monetary concerns. Any Joe Programmer can pick up a cheap $200 bare bones PC and a copy of Linux and be programming the next great thing. He doesn't need management to do this.
So management, despite its seeming power, does not actually have very much leverage over any IT employee. It is not the case that if the company packs up and leaves town that the computer engineer is suddenly out on his ass. Rather, he still has the tools at his disposal to continue productive work on his own.
Because of this natural balance in the IT industry, it will never make sense to have an industry-wide union.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole problem is twofold. The first is stupid users. How can you possibly secure a network against attacks if your users are constantly undermining your lockdown efforts? The second is privilege escalation at the binary level. System-level software with any sort of hole will allow an attacking program the ability to do whatever it wants, even if the user isn't running as root (the daemon is running at that level).
We had a guy who was constantly downloading and running every attachment he ever received. We finally set him up with an ePod terminal and some crayons and haven't had a significant virus problem since. As a bonus, we get some interesting artwork to hang in the lobby.
This goes to show the benefits of Open Source software. Being able to see the code gives attackers a practically clear window into the guts of any network relying on that software. More eyes means more vulnerabilities found, so the network is actually safer because all these holes are known, if not by the security companies themselves, by the attackers who attempt to exploit the bugs.
We can't take the drastic step of eliminating Windows on our networks because it is so entrenched, but the slow migration away from it one desktop at a time is giving us a whole new outlook on viruses.
The idea behind all this mapping is to find genetic sequences that can be used to mend ailing people. Using a computer to throw every single combination possible against the wall and seeing what sticks is certainly a way to go about this, but it also raises the spectre of a single large company owning all these combinations. This wouldn't be such a terrible thing if there was some sort of actual science involved, but by brute-forcing results, they are doing nothing more complicated than running a counting program with an infinite number of bits.
So each result is directly traceable to a number. Will these companies own these numbers? Can you even take out a patent on a number? In the DeCSS case, it was argued that the decoding algorithm was protected even though some implementations of it were nothing more than a carefully crafted prime number.
I don't like the idea of someone owning numbers any more than I think someone should be entitled to the fruits of their own work. This whole patent "creation/reward" system is getting turned on its head because of the power of computers. What would have been prohibitive even 10 or 15 years ago is possible (even easy) now. How can we keep our rights without sacrificing the progress of science and the arts?
Hey Apple! Get rid of QTTask.exe and anything else that tries to quietly install itself without permission.
It was awfully clever of you to have QTTask.exe re-spawn after deletion. But don't do it again.
What has impressed me about Linux is not so much that it has enabled some sort of "software revolution", but rather in how it has given chip/platform makers a specific, generic target OS that they can use freely to get something useful running on their hardware quickly.
It used to be the case that platform makers would have to either develop their own minimal operating system for testing purposes or work very closely with an OS maker to port their software to the new hardware platform. With Linux, this has been pushed into the anals of history. Now the Linux OS porting goes hand in hand with platform building, as evidenced by the almost immediate support for Linux at the time of hardware release.
I'm not so much interested in how the Cell board is going to revolutionize anything (it won't), but in how we have, in just the past few years, seen a dramatic increase in the number of hardware platforms being released. And not just in numbers, but also in variety. The number of different types of hardware platforms has risen dramatically. It's only limitation is the number of chip instruction sets supported by gcc and the imaginations of hardware manufacturers.
If you want to see how Microsoft's monopoly has hurt the computer industry, look no further than the current industry. Whereas hardware platforms were pretty standardized and boring, now, with Linux (and real competition to Microsoft's hegemony) the numbers of innovative platforms has increased dramatically. We need a Microsoft out there developing consumer-level applications and quality, user-friendly operating systems. However, we also need a real competitor like Linux to push the giant into innovating.
With him over at Google, it will be pretty cool to see the Google system ported onto Plan9.
Would a sentient computer pour acid on itself to get intoxicated?
It's important to understand that the mind is only one aspect of the brain. Inasmuch as they say they want to reproduce the mind, it has already been achieved to some extent in software. The primary drawback is that it is software, so it is necessarily limited to the speed of the CPU. So the fully thinking program already exists, it just needs better hardware to get it thinking at a reasonable rate.
;-)
How awesome would it be to have such a thing implemented on the Cell architecture. Even the name fits the application.
I guess a supercomputer will have to do.
Re-visiting the LFS scenario every year or two, for you distro-monkeys, should be a requirement of the "Order of The Penguin" membership ...
I don't understand this "Cult of the Difficult" that seems to be very pervasive in the Open Source community. Software has always been about making the difficult easier. We design and write software to make tasks faster or more easily performed or, in some cases like the spreadsheet, possible.
So I don't see what the fascination is with trifling with the minutia of a system just for kicks. I guess if it's for your own kicks, that's fine, but comments like yours above are very common in the computer technology industry. "If you don't understand the root of this, you will never understand this."
Understanding every little bit of something is not a requirement for using it. For most things, it shouldn't be. And for the best-written software, it isn't. Why, then, do people think that getting your hands dirty in Linux source code is such a good thing for everyone? It seems like a colossal waste of time for most people who would rather get their work done.
I had the same reaction when some Mac fanatic tried to tell me how much more user-friendly MacOS was in one breath and then turn around and tell someone that they need to manually increase the amount of RAM allotted to some random program in the next breath. That isn't user-friendliness. That's OS-retardation.
A good piece of software should anticipate what you want to do and make it easy to do it. It should handle things that you don't want to handle, and it should optimize things that you do often. It should, to steal a phrase from Apple, Just Work.
I don't want to fiddle with Linux's innards any more than I want to fiddle with my own. I am happy with GIGO and am willing to accept it as a black box, but if something goes wrong, I'd rather call a doctor who spent 8 years of their life studying the black box than trying to do that studying on my own.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
People have been doing LFS for years. It's nothing really too new or significant.
It's not even a really good way to learn about how "Linux the OS" works. It's just another way of spending an inordinate amount of time tinkering with your computer (not that there's anything wrong with that).
If you want the benefits of LFS without the pain, just stick with Gentoo or Sorcerer Linux and let someone else worry about the sources. You still get the custom compilation benefits but don't have to waste time trying to track down stupid dependency problems (at least not as much as you would with LFS, but more than with a mainstream distro).
The Beatles argument! How can I defend myself?
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Chewbacca.
If we aren't sure, let's keep looking. Send up a few drilling robots and get some serious soil samples. Let's see if there's any water under that dusty ground.
Investigating from a distance is fine for things we can't reach, but Mars is just around the corner, in astronomic terms. We spend all this time sending up little probes when what is needed is not Martian air samples, but Martian soil samples.
Unfortunately it's not profitable to investigate other planets. The benefit to sending up rockets is plain. The benefit of sending rockets to Mars isn't. Until a better form of propulsion comes along to unseat exploding volatile gases in a chamber, we aren't ever going to see the type of financial backing for scientific endeavors necessary to send something significant to Mars.
It truly is an agent of the Empire.
But why aren't they using those external fins as heat sinks?
Swapping CDs? For a LiveCD?
Maybe if they decided to put in Abiword instead of that OpenOffice monstrosity, they could keep their LiveCDs on one disk.
It's not my project, so I don't have any real input into what goes in and what is released, but let's just say I'd rather have a nice thin and light Mini distro than a bloody huge Maxi.
If Morse code is so much better than using text messaging, why doesn't everyone do it?
Rhetorical question. The answer, obviously, is that it is a pain in the ass to learn and gain any serious encoding/decoding speed.
It's a lot like typing (which most of us take for granted). Objectively, it is the fastest way to transcribe data. However, it requires quite a bit of practice to get up to a level fast enough to make it better and more useful than normal writing.
Free falling from 15,000 feet is faster than landing in a plane from the same height. Doesn't mean you want to go ahead with it.
It's not really an embarrassment to Microsoft. It's an embarrassment to Koreans who have long been the leaders in wide-spread broadband and internet usage. You'd have expected that they, of all nationalities, would have their act together when it came to running servers. Unfortunately, it seems that even they are not immune to hacks.
Which is all for the better, of course. The more these systems are attacked, the harder they become. Kind of like how the SR-71's outer plating would become harder each time it took to the skies, or like how the samurai's katana becomes harder each time it is thrust into the forge. Systems become stronger by trial.
So next time there won't be this problem. That there was a problem this time is unfortunate, but like the lessons of history, this experience will make the victims Better. Stronger. Faster than before.
What's the difference between something like this and naturally occurring pheremones?
Websters defines trust as the act of trusting.
How many people are led down the primrose path to Hell by some friend or lover who we trusted completely? Whether it be some sort of suddent infidelity or a constant wearing down of trust, that person eventually broke our trust.
Now, in the light of our experience, we look at all of our future relationships through the darkened glass of failed trust. Is it any wonder that half of all marriages end in divorce now? We can't open our hearts to those we love 100% because it means that we may have our trust abused again.
The problem isn't lack of trust. The problem is, and always has been, the lack of trustworthiness.
Do you have any evidence for this? It seems a little implausible to me to argue that the airlines would say, "Gosh, maintenance on our planes isn't so important; it's ok if a few crash now and then." And it's doubly implausible that the FAA would be chill about that.
There are instances where airlines have been known to cut corners to save a buck.
He takes a tip from the silicon chip makers and uses the same type of technology to etch a pattern in a wafer. Then he creates a mold (like a mask, not like the stuff growing in the crotches of slashbots) which he can use repeatedly as a printing template.
Since a lot of bacteria grow resistant to antibiotics, it makes sense to use this kind of "printing press" to study how they create their protective biofilm. As a species, we are slowly succumbing to our own success at killing off bacteria. However the rise of super-bacteria that are immune to our medicines is a huge worry. If this type of research can shine some light on why these bacteria are so resistant and how we can control them to be less dangerous to us, then we will be able to hold off our extinction for a few more years.
Headcheese?
Europe Home to Majority of Zombies
Which explains the smell.
What is the cultural underpinning for not keeping PCs patched? I understand that the population in Europe, with its plummeting birthrates, is slowly becoming older, but I can't imagine that the reason for this problem is because of grandpa Johan not knowing about patching.
Is it because of an innate sense of distrust of New World things? Are they unwilling to download the latest patches from Microsoft and this is resulting in their computers being open to zombie attacks?
And of all the places you'd expect badly configured computers, Britain, Germany, and France are the least likely candidates. Is this because they hate Bush?
Let's look at the whole concept of an IT union. That's what the article is really trying to get at, though it seems to be unable to connect the dots.
Unions have historically been necessary in professions where the employees have been at a severe economic disadvantage to the employer. In such cases, the employee would suffer more greatly by being punished by the employer than by doing some odious task. A great example is the auto industry where thousands upon thousands of workers would be literally unable to support themselves if the factory left town. The management is able to use this knowledge and leverage it into forcing longer hours for worse pay upon the workers. It is only through unionization and the threat of collective/mass work stoppage that the management is kept in check.
In the modern age, unions have been a device to demand better treatment for worse productivity. They have ceased to be helpful guardians of employee rights and have become oppressive bureaucracies in their own right. This is not really a good direction, IMO.
If the primary goal of a union ought to be the protection of worker rights and the establishment of a partnership in which both management and the employees receive favorable outcomes. It should seek to balance the power of the employers with the needs of the employees.
However in the software world, the employees are not hamstrung by monetary concerns. Any Joe Programmer can pick up a cheap $200 bare bones PC and a copy of Linux and be programming the next great thing. He doesn't need management to do this.
So management, despite its seeming power, does not actually have very much leverage over any IT employee. It is not the case that if the company packs up and leaves town that the computer engineer is suddenly out on his ass. Rather, he still has the tools at his disposal to continue productive work on his own.
Because of this natural balance in the IT industry, it will never make sense to have an industry-wide union.