There is a reason to use https for publicly available stuff--- to prevent server spoofing. Assuming that you consider Verisign to be a trusted authority:^)
That's a fairly big assumption. Personally I'd rather go with the checksum myself, and who cares if I get the file from ftp.evilhax0rs.org as long as it's verifiably the correct file.
If it's something like a redhat ISO, you can safely download the file from anywhere (I've heard of people getting new distros from kazaa because the ftp servers are all overloaded.) then get the MD5SUM file from any random mirror or several if you're paranoid. There's very little chance of getting a tampered ISO from one source and a matching tampered checksum from a completely different source.
I know you're just trolling, but I'm going to answer this anyhow.
OE would begin to run, then I would see a dialog telling me "There was a problem" and it would close again. When I clicked on the technical details, it told me the problem was with wlang.dll, and some other details that weren't a lot of help.
Normally when I get something like this, I simply uninstall and then reinstall the program which cleans up all the broken/corrupted EXE's, DLL's and configuration associated with the problem, but in XP they have made IE and OE non-removable, so MS's tech support for this issue is a little more complicated.
Step one; XP comes with a handy tool that checks all the critical system files and repairs them as required. Usually it works, this time it didn't.
Step two; you can hack the registry and fool windows into thinking IE and OE are not installed. The installer program for IE should then overwrite all the files and build a clean configuration, fixing any that are damaged. This also failed.
Step three; you can do what Microsoft calls an "In-place upgrade", reinstalling the entire OS while keeping as much of the drivers and applications as the installer recognises. This also failed.
Step four; suggested on IRC. You can create a new user, who should have a clean config for OE, and see if they can run it. No.
Step five; suggested on IRC, you can boot in safe mode in case there's a broken driver somewhere causing the problem. We were getting desperate at this point:)
Step six; I have another windows box which is working prefectly, let's see if all the OE files and that dll are identical. They are.
Step seven. It's 11pm and Liz wants the box for work tomorrow. Reinstall the fucking thing.
I run freebsd at home, so there's possibly a few other things I could have done that I'm not aware of.
..the resources and ability to help you 10 years from now when you're having trouble.
I don't want help ten years from now; I wanted help yesterday when OE wouldn't load at all. $30/mo MS tech support kept us on the phone for half an hour and eventually led us to a knowledgebase article that I could have found in 2 minutes through google (and which didn't work).
So after searching through the rest of Knowledgebase and google for every possible combination of words and filenames in the error message, I resorted to asking on IRC and got some better advice which also didn't work. (it was better in that they suggested some other possibilities I hadn't thought of, but it wasn't any more successful)
Two points here;
MS's phone support costs money, and at the end of the day really isn't any better than the free support available on the web and IRC.
Eventually I had to reinstall windows and all applications, since I'd spent ten hours on the problem and exausted all the technical support (both paid and free) available to me. That shouldn't be necessary for what appeared at first to be a fairly simple problem in a single application. Forget tech support. Write a more solid product!
The mail client has no idea what From (envelope address) or From: (Header address) are supposed to be until someone configures it. Changing it to something else is utterly trivial.
Almost the only thing you can't change is the Recieved-By: headers. All the ones from your own mailer to the open relay (usually just two hops) will be correct, and even when spammers add their own fake ones it's trivial to follow the chain back to where it 'breaks'.. The spammer's real IP address is usually the first (from the bottom) IP in the chain that doesn't answer an SMTP connection, and usually it's also the first one where the hostname and IP don't match.
Re:All the server's will be fixed in a jiffy.
on
Unreal Security Hole
·
· Score: 1
It's not that they care or not..
UT server doesn't get installed by default as part of NT or Win2K.
The vast majority of nimda hits are from home users who clicked "install everything" when they first set up windows, and don't even realise they've got a web server running.... and yeah, there's probably a few clueless admins that never patched. This is more true for slammer than nimda though..
I already suggested that (a garden tool tax) on the RIAA-internet-tax story. This tax is no different to the RIAA's blank media tax or their attempted internet tax.
The precedent has been set. You missed the chance to stop it back when they started taxing blank casette tapes.
Richard Stallman released GNU/EMACS under the GPL. It was the first thing he released under it, and I seriously doubt he's released a single line of code since under any other license.
The GPL doesn't stop Richard (or anyone else) from selling GNU/EMACS source on tape for a profit. It doesn't stop Redhat from selling GNU/Linux CD's for $50 per set, and it doesn't stop local Electronics retailers from putting Redhat CD's on the shelf at NZ$250. OTOH it severly limits everyone's ability to sell overpriced software, because the very first person prepared to pay your price can then run off a copy for all their friends, and under the GPL it's not legal for you to pretend otherwise.
The same applies to sources on floppy disk; If you really want the code it's not an unreasonable effort, and if the code is GPL'd then -you're- free to put it on an FTP site for eveyone else.
But I don't think any of this is even relevent anyhow; I gather Castle are only offering the source as proof that it's -not- GPL'd code. Studying someone else's code to get ideas about how to solve a problem is something Richard generally approves of. I know Microsoft doesn't like that kind of reverse-engineering but the GPL doesn't explicitly forbid it.
I was trying to use sarcasm to make a point; the idea that GPL forces you to make your source downloadable for free and flatly prohibits any commercial use is something Microsoft has been pushing, and it's just plain wrong. It might be a little archaic, but Castle distributing the source on floppies is little different from RMS distributing his source on tapes, and it's a fairly safe bet that if Richard was doing it, it's not prohibited by the GPL.
You're perfectly entitled to sell CD's of GPL'd software are whatever price you like. There's not a lot of room for profit however since everyone else is perfectly welcome to sell them cheaper or give them away if they wish. And you must let anyone who buys the CD know that they have this right, traditionally by the "COPYING" file in the root or/docs directory of the CD/archive.
Nobody ever said the source code had to be freely downloadable. It only has to be readily available. If you don't include the source with the compiled program you must provide the end user with some way of getting the source. Limited to at least three years, and I think there might also be some clause about 'reasonable cost'. Free copying to floppies would comply with this. Richard's tapes did; the cost was perfectly reasonable at the time and not everyone had internet access.
Gimmie a break. I'm not trying to bash Richard at all!
Seriously; they do need to make it clear what code is GPL'd and how to get the source (traditionally, a file called COPYING somewhere). I don't know if they've done that.
And the GPL'd code would need to be quite separate from the rest of the non-GPL'd kernel. It doesn't sound like they've done that, but if the GPL'd code was compiled into it's own separate binary called from the rest of the kernel they'd probably be OK. Richard hates the idea, but plenty of non-GPL's linux drivers work that way (nvidia, lucent, etc)
I don't think offering the source on floppies rather than a convenient FTP server is the real issue here.
The guy who originally wrote EMACS clearly didn't understand the GPL either. No FTP server; mailing out the source on Magnetic Tape for $100 a copy? Someone ought to be hassling him a bit more too!!
Oh wait.. that was Richard Stallman.
copyright violation + encryption == 10 years ?
on
Locutus Preview Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Joy oh joy..
Under the new "PATRIOT II" legislation, using encryption while comitting a crime will result in a prison sentence of 5 to 10 years. They don't mention if it has to be a 'serious' crime, so I guess copyright violation qualifies.
OK. I read the article again, and I admit that I got some of it wrong. I'm still not totally convinced however.
Am I correct in my understanding that the style sheet being returned for Opera and Mozilla is technically 'broken' as far as standards goes, and only works/worked because Opera didn't and Netscape still doesn't properly handle "margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;" ? Properly, it should move the text outside the frame the way this version currently renders in IE and Opera 7 ?
I'll also accept your word that MSN is -currently- returning a page that refers to 'site.css' for unidentified browsers. The opera.com article is quite specific that at the time they tested, it was referring to the IE version for unidentified browsers and it's possible that MSN changed it recently.
I stand behind the rest of my inflamatory rant. I can't see any reason why they'd send a special version when (I'm trusting opera.com's screenshots here) opera7 and opera 6 both render the "IE" version perfectly well. That's the entire POINT of CSS.
Conclusion; I accept that I grossly oversimplified, but I'm still left with the very strong feeling that MSN are sending different versions of CSS to try and break browsers, rather than to try and compensate for them.
If you download the page and style-sheet (using wget) while identifying yourself as IE or any other browser than Opera, you set sent a web page and style sheet that renders properly in IE, and in Netscape, and in Opera.
If you download the page (using wget) identifying yourself as Opera7, you get a page that looks broken not just in Opera, but in every other browser too, including IE because the style sheet says to render it in a way that looks 'broken'.
1 Take regular ordinary video projector. 2 Mount in ceiling or high cupboard. 3 ??? 4 Profit.
I think step three here is "convince idiot investors that this is something new"
If you want to make the benchtop touch-sensitive just have a grid of wires embedded in it, and a bit of electronics that scanns it for changes in capacitance. The same technology exists in those 'glidepoint' mousepads.
About a million years ago I thought up the idea of putting a video projector behind a sheet of frosted glass with copper etching or a fine mesh of wires embedded in it.
My original idea was to have it at 45 degrees like a draughting board, but horizontal or vertical would be OK, just more tiring to work on. Also I was planning to use a stylus rather than touchscreen; that way you can rest your arms on the work surface.
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
I was a couple of years ago.
Right now I'm using an old ZyXel external modem as a fax/answering machine, which requires a serial port. But I guess if I was really pushed I could use a Lucent Winmodem for the job..
Not really a big issue; if I want to use legacy hardware I'll just have to use it with a legacy mobo..
And floppy drives totally suck. Every bit of new hardware I've handled in the past 2 years has had the drivers on CD, or I've had to find them myself on the web. All the popular OS cd's are bootable (freebsd etc, not just linux and doze). It's getting hard to find a mobo that can't boot from CD even for someone like me who plays with older hardware.
I've done telephone apps with prerecorded phrases strung together too. The key to making it sound natural is to really cut your samples tight. It also helps if your phone interface can play back-to-back signal without gaps or clicks.
The first version sounded terrible; after a few months I re-recorded everything speaking fairly fast and cutting the ends of each sample right back to audio. When I'd done that it sounded better than a lot of commercial systems I've heard.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a reason to use https for publicly available stuff--- to prevent server spoofing. Assuming that you consider Verisign to be a trusted authority :^)
That's a fairly big assumption. Personally I'd rather go with the checksum myself, and who cares if I get the file from ftp.evilhax0rs.org as long as it's verifiably the correct file.
If it's something like a redhat ISO, you can safely download the file from anywhere (I've heard of people getting new distros from kazaa because the ftp servers are all overloaded.) then get the MD5SUM file from any random mirror or several if you're paranoid. There's very little chance of getting a tampered ISO from one source and a matching tampered checksum from a completely different source.
Has anyone invited Michael Moore to speak at the next NRA rally?
I know you're just trolling, but I'm going to answer this anyhow.
:)
OE would begin to run, then I would see a dialog telling me "There was a problem" and it would close again. When I clicked on the technical details, it told me the problem was with wlang.dll, and some other details that weren't a lot of help.
Normally when I get something like this, I simply uninstall and then reinstall the program which cleans up all the broken/corrupted EXE's, DLL's and configuration associated with the problem, but in XP they have made IE and OE non-removable, so MS's tech support for this issue is a little more complicated.
Step one; XP comes with a handy tool that checks all the critical system files and repairs them as required. Usually it works, this time it didn't.
Step two; you can hack the registry and fool windows into thinking IE and OE are not installed. The installer program for IE should then overwrite all the files and build a clean configuration, fixing any that are damaged. This also failed.
Step three; you can do what Microsoft calls an "In-place upgrade", reinstalling the entire OS while keeping as much of the drivers and applications as the installer recognises. This also failed.
Step four; suggested on IRC. You can create a new user, who should have a clean config for OE, and see if they can run it. No.
Step five; suggested on IRC, you can boot in safe mode in case there's a broken driver somewhere causing the problem. We were getting desperate at this point
Step six; I have another windows box which is working prefectly, let's see if all the OE files and that dll are identical. They are.
Step seven. It's 11pm and Liz wants the box for work tomorrow. Reinstall the fucking thing.
I run freebsd at home, so there's possibly a few other things I could have done that I'm not aware of.
..the resources and ability to help you 10 years from now when you're having trouble.
I don't want help ten years from now; I wanted help yesterday when OE wouldn't load at all. $30/mo MS tech support kept us on the phone for half an hour and eventually led us to a knowledgebase article that I could have found in 2 minutes through google (and which didn't work).
So after searching through the rest of Knowledgebase and google for every possible combination of words and filenames in the error message, I resorted to asking on IRC and got some better advice which also didn't work. (it was better in that they suggested some other possibilities I hadn't thought of, but it wasn't any more successful)
Two points here;
MS's phone support costs money, and at the end of the day really isn't any better than the free support available on the web and IRC.
Eventually I had to reinstall windows and all applications, since I'd spent ten hours on the problem and exausted all the technical support (both paid and free) available to me. That shouldn't be necessary for what appeared at first to be a fairly simple problem in a single application. Forget tech support. Write a more solid product!
The mail client has no idea what From (envelope address) or From: (Header address) are supposed to be until someone configures it. Changing it to something else is utterly trivial.
Almost the only thing you can't change is the Recieved-By: headers. All the ones from your own mailer to the open relay (usually just two hops) will be correct, and even when spammers add their own fake ones it's trivial to follow the chain back to where it 'breaks'.. The spammer's real IP address is usually the first (from the bottom) IP in the chain that doesn't answer an SMTP connection, and usually it's also the first one where the hostname and IP don't match.
It's not that they care or not..
.. and yeah, there's probably a few clueless admins that never patched. This is more true for slammer than nimda though..
UT server doesn't get installed by default as part of NT or Win2K.
The vast majority of nimda hits are from home users who clicked "install everything" when they first set up windows, and don't even realise they've got a web server running..
I already suggested that (a garden tool tax) on the RIAA-internet-tax story. This tax is no different to the RIAA's blank media tax or their attempted internet tax.
The precedent has been set. You missed the chance to stop it back when they started taxing blank casette tapes.
I'm waiting to see if slashdot is 'big enough' to register on the zeitgeist(sp?) :)
I only have one site.
:)
It's first hit for the nicknames "zcat" and "hunnyb" however, along with a few two-word searches.
I'm rather proud of that
Boy did you miss the point.
Richard Stallman released GNU/EMACS under the GPL. It was the first thing he released under it, and I seriously doubt he's released a single line of code since under any other license.
The GPL doesn't stop Richard (or anyone else) from selling GNU/EMACS source on tape for a profit. It doesn't stop Redhat from selling GNU/Linux CD's for $50 per set, and it doesn't stop local Electronics retailers from putting Redhat CD's on the shelf at NZ$250. OTOH it severly limits everyone's ability to sell overpriced software, because the very first person prepared to pay your price can then run off a copy for all their friends, and under the GPL it's not legal for you to pretend otherwise.
The same applies to sources on floppy disk; If you really want the code it's not an unreasonable effort, and if the code is GPL'd then -you're- free to put it on an FTP site for eveyone else.
But I don't think any of this is even relevent anyhow; I gather Castle are only offering the source as proof that it's -not- GPL'd code. Studying someone else's code to get ideas about how to solve a problem is something Richard generally approves of. I know Microsoft doesn't like that kind of reverse-engineering but the GPL doesn't explicitly forbid it.
Sheesh!!
/docs directory of the CD/archive.
I was trying to use sarcasm to make a point; the idea that GPL forces you to make your source downloadable for free and flatly prohibits any commercial use is something Microsoft has been pushing, and it's just plain wrong. It might be a little archaic, but Castle distributing the source on floppies is little different from RMS distributing his source on tapes, and it's a fairly safe bet that if Richard was doing it, it's not prohibited by the GPL.
You're perfectly entitled to sell CD's of GPL'd software are whatever price you like. There's not a lot of room for profit however since everyone else is perfectly welcome to sell them cheaper or give them away if they wish. And you must let anyone who buys the CD know that they have this right, traditionally by the "COPYING" file in the root or
Nobody ever said the source code had to be freely downloadable. It only has to be readily available. If you don't include the source with the compiled program you must provide the end user with some way of getting the source. Limited to at least three years, and I think there might also be some clause about 'reasonable cost'. Free copying to floppies would comply with this. Richard's tapes did; the cost was perfectly reasonable at the time and not everyone had internet access.
Gimmie a break. I'm not trying to bash Richard at all!
Sarcasm's a new concept to you, isn't it?
Damn, that got to +5 funny real fast!!
Seriously; they do need to make it clear what code is GPL'd and how to get the source (traditionally, a file called COPYING somewhere). I don't know if they've done that.
And the GPL'd code would need to be quite separate from the rest of the non-GPL'd kernel. It doesn't sound like they've done that, but if the GPL'd code was compiled into it's own separate binary called from the rest of the kernel they'd probably be OK. Richard hates the idea, but plenty of non-GPL's linux drivers work that way (nvidia, lucent, etc)
I don't think offering the source on floppies rather than a convenient FTP server is the real issue here.
The guy who originally wrote EMACS clearly didn't understand the GPL either. No FTP server; mailing out the source on Magnetic Tape for $100 a copy? Someone ought to be hassling him a bit more too!!
Oh wait.. that was Richard Stallman.
Joy oh joy..
Under the new "PATRIOT II" legislation, using encryption while comitting a crime will result in a prison sentence of 5 to 10 years. They don't mention if it has to be a 'serious' crime, so I guess copyright violation qualifies.
This could get interesting.
OK. I read the article again, and I admit that I got some of it wrong. I'm still not totally convinced however.
Am I correct in my understanding that the style sheet being returned for Opera and Mozilla is technically 'broken' as far as standards goes, and only works/worked because Opera didn't and Netscape still doesn't properly handle
"margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px;" ? Properly, it should move the text outside the frame the way this version currently renders in IE and Opera 7 ?
I'll also accept your word that MSN is -currently- returning a page that refers to 'site.css' for unidentified browsers. The opera.com article is quite specific that at the time they tested, it was referring to the IE version for unidentified browsers and it's possible that MSN changed it recently.
I stand behind the rest of my inflamatory rant. I can't see any reason why they'd send a special version when (I'm trusting opera.com's screenshots here) opera7 and opera 6 both render the "IE" version perfectly well. That's the entire POINT of CSS.
Conclusion; I accept that I grossly oversimplified, but I'm still left with the very strong feeling that MSN are sending different versions of CSS to try and break browsers, rather than to try and compensate for them.
Did you read the fucking article?
If you download the page and style-sheet (using wget) while identifying yourself as IE or any other browser than Opera, you set sent a web page and style sheet that renders properly in IE, and in Netscape, and in Opera.
If you download the page (using wget) identifying yourself as Opera7, you get a page that looks broken not just in Opera, but in every other browser too, including IE because the style sheet says to render it in a way that looks 'broken'.
[zcat@herbert]# fdisk /mbr /dev//mbr: No such file or directory
:)
fdisk: cannot open disk
ohhh.. DOS prompt..
Or what?!! You're seriously trying to tell me that you're never seen a video projector before?!!
1 Take regular ordinary video projector.
2 Mount in ceiling or high cupboard.
3 ???
4 Profit.
I think step three here is "convince idiot investors that this is something new"
If you want to make the benchtop touch-sensitive just have a grid of wires embedded in it, and a bit of electronics that scanns it for changes in capacitance. The same technology exists in those 'glidepoint' mousepads.
About a million years ago I thought up the idea of putting a video projector behind a sheet of frosted glass with copper etching or a fine mesh of wires embedded in it.
My original idea was to have it at 45 degrees like a draughting board, but horizontal or vertical would be OK, just more tiring to work on.
Also I was planning to use a stylus rather than touchscreen; that way you can rest your arms on the work surface.
It depends on what you're doing of course, but if I were in your position I would be taking a very hard look at Linux or freebsd right now.
Someone remind me to hit preview next time :(
How the hell did G.W. Bush become President?
Good question.
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
I was a couple of years ago.
Right now I'm using an old ZyXel external modem as a fax/answering machine, which requires a serial port. But I guess if I was really pushed I could use a Lucent Winmodem for the job..
Not really a big issue; if I want to use legacy hardware I'll just have to use it with a legacy mobo..
And floppy drives totally suck. Every bit of new hardware I've handled in the past 2 years has had the drivers on CD, or I've had to find them myself on the web. All the popular OS cd's are bootable (freebsd etc, not just linux and doze). It's getting hard to find a mobo that can't boot from CD even for someone like me who plays with older hardware.
I've done telephone apps with prerecorded phrases strung together too. The key to making it sound natural is to really cut your samples tight. It also helps if your phone interface can play back-to-back signal without gaps or clicks.
The first version sounded terrible; after a few months I re-recorded everything speaking fairly fast and cutting the ends of each sample right back to audio. When I'd done that it sounded better than a lot of commercial systems I've heard.