Since you ask right now, you are probably using the 'unstable' branch of Debian (where Netatalk recently broke for Mac OS X clients).
That's when I decided to dig into the world of NetInfo - the NIS-like information system for Mac OS X. Basically, I now configured my Mac OS X client as a NIS client, which also auto-mount file shares from my Linux server via NFS. It's not that hard to set up, really. A nice side effect is that the network drives perform significantly better than they did using AFP/Netatalk.
Of course, I also run Samba on my server. If you are looking for a single solution/protocol across platforms, then that's probably the route to go. Mac OS X comes with Samba.
Then, if you are looking for file synchronization tools (as opposed to network file sharing), let me recommend a little utility called "unison". Runs on Linux, Mac OS X (UNIX), and Windows.
I use a Mac at work, and man, I was so glad when Safari came out. Mozilla on the mac is a steaming pile of crap. IE is no better. Both are sluggish and tired. Unfortunately Mozilla Mail is the only e-mail client that has encryption for e-mail.
As a Mac (OS X) user, you should consider yourself blessed as far as browsers go. Apple's Safari browser is good, though its KHTML rendering engine does run into the occasional snag with convoluted (non-standard) content here and there. But the reason I make that statement is the Camino browser (formerly Chimera), also available from http://www.mozilla.org/.
It is fast (faster than Safari, despite Apple's word to the countrary), lightweight, and better integrated with the (by itself sexy) Mac OS X operating environment than any of its competitors.
It does not come with an e-mail client though. You may think differently, but I think this is good. A web browser should be just that - a web browser. That way, you are "free" to pick the mail client that best suits your needs regardless of browsers - and personally, I tend to favor the "Mail" application that ships with Mac OS X (for much the same reasons: lightweight, very usable).
Needless to say, Camino renders pages extremely well (thanks to Gecko); has the set of options that you are likely to care about (like pop-up blocking, per-site cookie policies...) while not overwhelming you with hard-to-follow, busy option screens (like Mozilla and in particular MSIE), and is, like Mozilla itself, Free Software (TM).
My wife received one of these "special offers" for TurboTax Premier for Windows. We installed it, activated it online, and started our return.
Two weeks later, I wanted to continue where I left off. This time, the software would not start - but instead asked her to purchase the software again. There was a 1-800 number to call if we had previously paid, but we did not receive any useful feedback from there.
The only thing that had changed on her machine in the mean time was that I had replaced an older 6x CD-Writer with a newer 40x one. She is only running Windows 2000 on her machine, so the LILO boot sector issue does not apply.
End of story is that we got a refund for her copy, and instead I bought TurboTax for my Mac (OS X).
After reading this, next year we will be using different software - maybe H&R TaxCut or an online service.
Chimera is a Free(tm) browser, and so will not be subject to a vendor's (Apple's) agenda. In practice, this means that features like popup blocking, selective cookie acceptance/rejection won't go away (the way they have in IE) whenever the vendor no longer blesses such "anti-commercial" features. It also means better code scrutiny, and ultimately, better security.
Filing date is not important
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 4, Informative
A patent can be filed "post mortem", as long as the person or entity that files for it were the primary (first) inventor. For instance, if AOL can prove that they invented IM before, say, IRC (circa 1987), they have a case.
You make a good point. What system on the Internet even has this port open?
Most Windows machines - that is - most computers on the Internet.
I have a CGI script running from Apache on my Linux firewall, named "/scripts/root.exe". (This is actually a counterterrorism measure against a unrelated issue, namely the IIS hole and the Nimda virus). Part of what I am doing in this script is to use Samba ("nmblookup" and "smbclient") to determine the Windows name of the attacking machine, and then to send back a pop-up message warning the owner about their virus infection.
I log these responses as well. I used to get a 75% "hit rate", that is, 75% of attackers exposed NetBIOS information (such as their computer name) directly on the Internet. Recently, my ISP (AT&T Broadband) have started to filter out incoming traffic to ports 137-139 - and since most requests come from people in the same IP address range as mine, most probes are thus unsuccessful nowadays. But among IP addresses from by other ISPs, I still get more machines that reveal this information than machines that don't.
Needless to say, all of these machines would be exposed to "smbdie" - however most of them are probably still running Win98, and so are not affected.
USA already has extraterritorial laws of this nature. For instance, one law enacted circa 1997 says that any US citizen has the right to sue anyone from anywhere that does business with a Cuban entity (specifically, a Cuban entity which uses native Cuban resources that the US citizen considers his or hers). Not only that, but the lawsuit would take place in a US court.
Another one is the US law which prohibits trade with nations that the US considers to have "inadequate" copyright protections.
This legislation by the EU has been mentioned in Slashdot earlier, before it was temporarily shelved due to US pressure. The status quo is that US organizations like Microsoft can easily build up a vast array of information on citizens in, say, Germany, whereas German companies are prohibited from doing the same due to privacy protection laws. Hence, this law which applies the same standard to everyone who does "business" with Germans.
Moderators, please do not let this question through.
Aside from the obvious linguistic snafu (the word "candor" is not fitting here, "inviting manner" is not really applicable when you answer), there are some PR/political concerns here.
A cheap point for Doug Miller is "we don't consider ourselves enemies of the devoted good folks in the open source community". In fact, he would then strenghten an earlier PR stunt by Microsoft labelling the Linus & Co "Robin Hood and his diciples of the Sherwood Forest". Not to mention that even thinking of "enemies" here is extremely childish.
Second, using loaded descriptions like "struggling marketshare" about IIS requires some backup - backup that does not exist. IIS is not struggling by any accounts. Despite its many security flaws, it has a solid foothold in a space that's fairly new to Microsoft. No doubt he would refer to Microsoft's many other products with a similar beginning - Microsoft Money, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer, even Microsoft Windows had low market shares during the first couple of releases.
Folks, please let us give questions in a neutral tone.
Problems like these are part of the reason for the new testing distribution - most of the in-transit problems associated with being on the bleeding edge are sorted out, while your system is also not too outdated.
In contrast, the unstable distribution will remain just that - unstable. New packages might prompt particular dependencies that are not yet ready. Old packages may break if one of their dependencies is updated. So on, so forth.
It is a Good Idea(tm) to let only legitimate businesses willing to pay $2000 for one or two domain names, and not squatters collecting hundreds of these, register domain names under ".biz". In fact, it will most certainly unclutter the namespace sufficiently that the $1,000,000 price tags that some companies are now paying said squatters are a thing of the past.
But ".biz" is an incredibly stupid TLD. Imagine "sun.biz", "cisco.biz", etc. If anyting, it will only attract spammers, like flies. I.e. "direct marketing" organizations, and their ilk.
As a side note, the problem with inability to deal with squatting of ".com" (.net,.org) addresses has to do with several registrars handling these. Competition for domain name registration is Good, but no single TLD should be in the hands of more than one registrar. Why? Because they will compete for customers by lowering their prices - if one entity managed it they could actually increase the prices for registration based on the current shortage.
Specific criterias for each TLD is Good. ".org" should be reserved for certified non-profit organizations (not per a specific government's tax rules, but per the registrar's rules). ".net" should be reserved for network service providers. ".pro" for professionals. A valid trademark for ".com". ".nothing" for domain name squatters.
Price competition within a single TLD is Bad. Squatters can buy hundreds of domain names easily, then resell them at astronomical prices. They would not buy hundreds of $2000 names, but a legitimate business would.
Stupid TLDs are bad. The price tag of $50000 for a TLD application filtered out common sense, and left only money left to speak. Bad idea.
Actually a firewall does basically nothing if you are somewhat technical, which these people seem to be.
You could easily build a tunnel (e.g. VTun) from the inside of a LAN to some point outside, and then have basically a VPN back in. I do that from where I work to my home. Even if your firewall blocks all direct connections, but have a HTTP or SOCKS proxy in place, there already exist tunnels that go through them.
My point about "judgement skills", though, was that these people are probably just as concerned as their management about security, and probably have much better grip on what it entails to make their network secure. Thus, if you are not going to trust them, you might as well make your network a complete island (whether they create such chatting channels, or not).
Seems like these guys are really good resources to understand and deal with computer crimes and other computer-related operations. Why would CIA want to criminalize them, leaving only meek people behind? Sure, that's gotta make them more savvy and efficient as an organization.
Seems to me that what these people were doing is pretty harmless from a national security point of view. If their management does not trust their intentions and their judgement skills, they should not have hired them in the first place.
Now, instead, they will make CIA an organization only for dead weights.
C:\WINNT\Profiles\christk\Desktop>ls
Eudora Pro.lnk docs on 'D'.lnk latin.txt
bad_ani.txt k1639386.txt mrobbins.txt
C:\WINNT\Profiles\wilsonkl\Desktop> And yes, that was 'ls', not 'dir':)
Well, given that this is on your desktop, I bet you don't see the names that way under your DesTop Icons. In fact, you won't see them that way in your Windows Explorer, unless, of course, you have that infamous check box checked.
The point made, methinks, was that the names you see were not the actual names of the file. WYSINWYG.
If you are a programmer, at least, look at companies that develop so-called embedded systems. The operating systems of choice in this industry are UNIX-like: WindRiver vxWorks and LynuxWorks LynxOS/BlueCat Linux. Indeed, many embedded designs are starting to utilize plain Linux.
What are embedded systems, you ask. Damn smart question - you should be proud of yourself. Fact is, probably most programmers in the world are actually developing such systems. Basically, any electronic/computing device that is not a conventional computer. For instance, gaming devices, cd-rom drives, DNA analyzers (I do that), telecommunications devices, power utility switches, routers/bridges, medical instruments,....
Keywords to look for would be firmware development, embedded systems programming, real-time development.
Best part of it all is that you'll probably get to deal with some of the most interesting development environments that exist. For instance, we developed our said DNA analyzer using ObjecTime, and going forward we'll be using Rational RoseRT - tools that automatically generate C++ code based on the model that you visually draw! (You just fill in the "meat" of each function - the action that takes place in a transition, say). Logic Analyzers, emulators/simulators, virtual platforms, cross-compiler environments -- this is all the stuff that teach you everything about computers - and nice OS designs.
Now, if you were not actually asking as a programmer, but as a systems administrator or other IT drone, here is the (more limited) tip: Go for the back ends - i.e. web servers, IBM's Net.Commerce development, DNS/Firewall administration, that type of stuff. But those are not real people - the I.T. world is just to stuffed with "management types". If you still have the choice, look for software/firmware development environments - much cooler people and more casual atmosphere.
Those are some pretty broad and sweeping claims to say that basically most every major software player gets ideas from debian, any conspiracy theories to back this up?
The claims were not all that broad - especially when considering that the reverse is true, too. Debian has obtained one or two things elsewhere - after all, that's what Free really means - sharing of ideas.
Nonwithstanding, consider software distribution/updates/depencency checks via the internet. Bill Gates may not have gotten the idea directly from Debian, but chances are that someone in Microsoft did, then relayed it up the foodchain. (Tongue-in-cheek to your conspiracy theory reference). RedHat's case seems more obvious, and, indeed, a bit overdue, considering that Mandrake also latched onto the idea a while back.
So I'll just repeat that the Debian Project is one of the most dynamic playground for idea exchange in today's software landscape. Not even the various *BSDs have a development model that invite the same kind of public participation. Some application specific development efforts, like KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, and Apache are very close, but again, with the development infrastructure, project management, packaging system, and overall cohesiveness of Debian's effort, it remains probably the largest-scale public development effort in the world.
Debian/ARM was actually started with the Netwinder, about 2 years ago. That's when/why I joined the Debian project, and can only attest to the fact that the more you know about Debian, the more likely you are to be using it for the rest of your life.
"RedHat Network", "Microsoft.NET", and even *BSD get a lot of their groundwork/ideas from the Debian playground. Indeed, most of the action and futuristic designs happen right there. Probably more software come out of the Debian project nowadays than anywhere else, including Microsoft and GNU.
So, the iPAC distribution is not at all surprising. Already, Debian exists on more platforms than any other distribution.
Much as we can despise/dislike ESR and his style, he did (together with Bruce Perens) coin the term "Open Source". The trademark is still actually owned by Software in Public Interest - though ESR has challenged that.
This discussion is kindof like trying to decide who invented the computer. What is "the Open Source movement"? Published source code? AT&T Bell Labs did that with the original UNIX, in 1969. Freely available source code? Many will agree that the GNU project (1984) made software "Free" for the first time. And in the DOS days, of course there was "freeware" and "shareware", which sometimes came with source.
Back in the old days, we typically just made our programs available without any regard to licensing, rights of use, copyrights, etc. -- something that would make these programs unacceptable according to, for instance, the DFSG. Still, the source code was usually public, so they could still probably be called "open source" (although not Open Source(tm)).
The only thing that's for certain is that RedHat did not invent any of this, any more than Al Gore did. They company was busy creating CD-ROMs based on DOS shareware when they noticed this "Linux" phenomenon pop up, and the latched on to it. They made one of the first distributions (along with Slackware, Yggdrasil, and Debian), but very little of the actual development effort was theirs.
For Sun, it makes a lot of sense to stick with Solaris as their standard UNIX platform. Some reasons why:
It's supportable. Solaris is theirs, they know it in and out. They do the development, the distribution, the end user support. They do not have to rely on outside developer enthusiasm and expertise.
The license is controlled by Sun, not by the (often moody) Richard Stallman. Nuff said.
Solaris is still better for some tasks. Especially in networked NFS environments.
Solaris integrates better with existing Sun servers (which they obviously want to continue selling). Think of a simple thing like User/Group ID's on a NIS/NFS cluster.
Solaris mindshare promotes Sun hardware.
Certainly, Linux excels at a whole host of areas where Solaris may fall a little short. Mostly in user space; as far as the kernel goes VFS (providing IPX/SPX, SMB, DevFS...) is probably one of the few things that stands out. In user space, especially in nice/solid/automated distributions like Debian, there is a tremendous ease of keeping your system the slickest it can be, and at the same time, most secure - something you have to work a bit harder to achieve under Solaris.
That said, the market that caters to those demands is mostly saturated, and for Sun to do what they do best - rock solid backends and network-oriented systems - they are better off sticking with Solaris.
A Corel Netwinder (StrongARM cpu) running Debian as DHCP/Samba/Print/WINS/NIS/Masquerading/Mail/Web/FT P/IMAP/NFS/Automount server (with tons of domain names pointing to it).
A Sun Ultra 1 from work. (Shared NFS/NIS/Automounted home directories from my Netwinder). Used for telecommuting (most of my work applications, such as Rational Rose RT, and Lotus Notes, run on it).
Monitor from this SUN is hooked into a VGA switch box (via a Sun-to-VGA converter), and is thus shared by all my machines.
A cable modem, switched hub, and wireless ethernet bridge.
A laptop from work with a Wireless PCMCIA card, dual-boot between Linux and Windows (using DHCP in both cases, plug&play both home and work).
A PC with OpenBSD/Debian/Win95/WinNT...
A VPN tunnel (TCP/IP, Netware, AppleTalk) to my work LAN, initiated by my Solaris workstation there, using VTUN and IPNat.
My wife's PC is setup with her own home directory on my Netwinder as her primary document directory.
Her cousin's computer equipped with a wireless ethernet card.
What I'm most proud of? Not a single one of these machines is faster than 350 MHz!:-)
This confirms my suspicion that the way IDC collects its data is not very suitable for the brand GNU world of free software.
Debian's distribution model, for instance, does not favor physical media (CD-ROMs), but rather "subscription" of updates via the Internet. And according to several Slashdot polls, Debian has the second largest user base. (Granted, these are some of the most geeky users, but nevertheless it shows a point).
Old world mindsets (like IDC's measurement of sales) does not cope well with new realities. Too bad, their loss.
IPSeq (service 50) are not the only way to establish a VPN. For instance, you can use IP inside IP (Using either the kernel-based 'ipip.o' module, or a user-space ipip driver), or do as I do, create a PPP tunnel inside an SSH connection.
Here is how:
From your machine inside a firewalled LAN (e.g. work), use the following `pppd' options file (under Debian, create it in/etc/ppp/peers, e.g./etc/ppp/peers/my-home):
# This link is over a SSH network connection
pty "ssh -t -enone -C yourhost.home.net/usr/sbin/pppd noauth ipparam 172.16.0.0/16"
# IP Addresses to use for this link
192.168.0.1:192.168.0.2
# Let the remote host start the conversation
silent
# We trust each other
noauth
# Keep modem up even if connection fails
persist
Here, replace 172.16.0.0/16 with your company network. This will be used as argument for the PPP 'if-up' script on your home computer.
Make sure the root user on your work machine can SSH to your home machine (as root) without being prompted for password. If neccessary, run 'ssh-keygen', and copy the '/root/.ssh/identity.pub' file from work to '/root/.ssh/authorized_keys' at home.
At home, create an if-up script, as follows:
Under Debian, create/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/vpn
Under RedHat, create or add to/etc/ppp/ip-up.local
The script should contain:
#!/bin/bash
################################################## ######################
### FILE:/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/vpn
### PURPOSE: Add routes after bringing up PPP link
################################################## ######################
### The following two lines are only needed with RedHat;
### Debian supplies these from the master ip-up script.
### $6 contains remote network/netmask (e.g. 172.16.0.0/16)
[ "$PPP_IFACE" ] || PPP_IFACE=$1
[ "$PPP_IPPARAM" ] || PPP_IPPARAM=$6
### Configure the route
if [ "$PPP_IPPARAM" ]
then /sbin/route add -net $PPP_IPPARAM dev $PPP_IFACE metric 1 /sbin/ipchains -I input -j ACCEPT -i $PPP_IFACE /sbin/ipchains -I forward -j MASQ -s 192.168.1.0/24 -i $PPP_IFACE /sbin/ipchains -I output -j ACCEPT -i $PPP_IFACE
fi
Edit root's crontab on your work machine (crontab -e), to start this PPP link. Under Debian, it will look as follows:
(replace 'my-home' with the name of the PPP options file in/etc/ppp/peers).
Using this, you now have a PPP over SSH tunnel to/from your home. If it breaks, it is immediately brought back up (hence "persist" above); and if too many retries have passes and PPP gives up, a new connection is retried every 20 minutes (or whatever you set the crontab line to).
Slashdot Mirror
Since you ask right now, you are probably using the 'unstable' branch of Debian (where Netatalk recently broke for Mac OS X clients).
That's when I decided to dig into the world of NetInfo - the NIS-like information system for Mac OS X. Basically, I now configured my Mac OS X client as a NIS client, which also auto-mount file shares from my Linux server via NFS. It's not that hard to set up, really. A nice side effect is that the network drives perform significantly better than they did using AFP/Netatalk.
Of course, I also run Samba on my server. If you are looking for a single solution/protocol across platforms, then that's probably the route to go. Mac OS X comes with Samba.
Then, if you are looking for file synchronization tools (as opposed to network file sharing), let me recommend a little utility called "unison". Runs on Linux, Mac OS X (UNIX), and Windows.
I use a Mac at work, and man, I was so glad when Safari came out. Mozilla on the mac is a steaming pile of crap. IE is no better. Both are sluggish and tired. Unfortunately Mozilla Mail is the only e-mail client that has encryption for e-mail.
As a Mac (OS X) user, you should consider yourself blessed as far as browsers go. Apple's Safari browser is good, though its KHTML rendering engine does run into the occasional snag with convoluted (non-standard) content here and there. But the reason I make that statement is the Camino browser (formerly Chimera), also available from http://www.mozilla.org/.
It is fast (faster than Safari, despite Apple's word to the countrary), lightweight, and better integrated with the (by itself sexy) Mac OS X operating environment than any of its competitors.
It does not come with an e-mail client though. You may think differently, but I think this is good. A web browser should be just that - a web browser. That way, you are "free" to pick the mail client that best suits your needs regardless of browsers - and personally, I tend to favor the "Mail" application that ships with Mac OS X (for much the same reasons: lightweight, very usable).
Needless to say, Camino renders pages extremely well (thanks to Gecko); has the set of options that you are likely to care about (like pop-up blocking, per-site cookie policies...) while not overwhelming you with hard-to-follow, busy option screens (like Mozilla and in particular MSIE), and is, like Mozilla itself, Free Software (TM).
My wife received one of these "special offers" for TurboTax Premier for Windows. We installed it, activated it online, and started our return.
Two weeks later, I wanted to continue where I left off. This time, the software would not start - but instead asked her to purchase the software again. There was a 1-800 number to call if we had previously paid, but we did not receive any useful feedback from there.
The only thing that had changed on her machine in the mean time was that I had replaced an older 6x CD-Writer with a newer 40x one. She is only running Windows 2000 on her machine, so the LILO boot sector issue does not apply.
End of story is that we got a refund for her copy, and instead I bought TurboTax for my Mac (OS X).
After reading this, next year we will be using different software - maybe H&R TaxCut or an online service.
ROTFL!
(I don't know why, I just thought this one was reeeeaaaaalllly funny)
Chimera is a Free(tm) browser, and so will not be subject to a vendor's (Apple's) agenda. In practice, this means that features like popup blocking, selective cookie acceptance/rejection won't go away (the way they have in IE) whenever the vendor no longer blesses such "anti-commercial" features. It also means better code scrutiny, and ultimately, better security.
A patent can be filed "post mortem", as long as the person or entity that files for it were the primary (first) inventor. For instance, if AOL can prove that they invented IM before, say, IRC (circa 1987), they have a case.
Only then.
You make a good point. What system on the Internet even has this port open?
Most Windows machines - that is - most computers on the Internet.
I have a CGI script running from Apache on my Linux firewall, named "/scripts/root.exe". (This is actually a counterterrorism measure against a unrelated issue, namely the IIS hole and the Nimda virus). Part of what I am doing in this script is to use Samba ("nmblookup" and "smbclient") to determine the Windows name of the attacking machine, and then to send back a pop-up message warning the owner about their virus infection.
I log these responses as well. I used to get a 75% "hit rate", that is, 75% of attackers exposed NetBIOS information (such as their computer name) directly on the Internet. Recently, my ISP (AT&T Broadband) have started to filter out incoming traffic to ports 137-139 - and since most requests come from people in the same IP address range as mine, most probes are thus unsuccessful nowadays. But among IP addresses from by other ISPs, I still get more machines that reveal this information than machines that don't.
Needless to say, all of these machines would be exposed to "smbdie" - however most of them are probably still running Win98, and so are not affected.
In the US, OPhoto and ShutterFly are a couple.
There is also some Linux software to manage your own photo albums, if you have a web site available:
I also have a HP PhotoSmart 100 printer, so my as far as photos go, I have reached nerdvana. :)
As such, any Slashdot article pointing to an external site is a DDOS attack.
:)
USA already has extraterritorial laws of this nature. For instance, one law enacted circa 1997 says that any US citizen has the right to sue anyone from anywhere that does business with a Cuban entity (specifically, a Cuban entity which uses native Cuban resources that the US citizen considers his or hers). Not only that, but the lawsuit would take place in a US court.
Another one is the US law which prohibits trade with nations that the US considers to have "inadequate" copyright protections.
This legislation by the EU has been mentioned in Slashdot earlier, before it was temporarily shelved due to US pressure. The status quo is that US organizations like Microsoft can easily build up a vast array of information on citizens in, say, Germany, whereas German companies are prohibited from doing the same due to privacy protection laws. Hence, this law which applies the same standard to everyone who does "business" with Germans.
Moderators, please do not let this question through.
Aside from the obvious linguistic snafu (the word "candor" is not fitting here, "inviting manner" is not really applicable when you answer), there are some PR/political concerns here.
A cheap point for Doug Miller is "we don't consider ourselves enemies of the devoted good folks in the open source community". In fact, he would then strenghten an earlier PR stunt by Microsoft labelling the Linus & Co "Robin Hood and his diciples of the Sherwood Forest". Not to mention that even thinking of "enemies" here is extremely childish.
Second, using loaded descriptions like "struggling marketshare" about IIS requires some backup - backup that does not exist. IIS is not struggling by any accounts. Despite its many security flaws, it has a solid foothold in a space that's fairly new to Microsoft. No doubt he would refer to Microsoft's many other products with a similar beginning - Microsoft Money, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer, even Microsoft Windows had low market shares during the first couple of releases.
Folks, please let us give questions in a neutral tone.
Yes, as I said earlier, XFree86 runs on Sparc, but not on Solaris/Sparc. (Linux + NetBSD though).
If you don't believe me, try for yourself. Compile, and you will find that you get all these clients, but no server.
Problems like these are part of the reason for the new testing distribution - most of the in-transit problems associated with being on the bleeding edge are sorted out, while your system is also not too outdated.
In contrast, the unstable distribution will remain just that - unstable. New packages might prompt particular dependencies that are not yet ready. Old packages may break if one of their dependencies is updated. So on, so forth.
It is a Good Idea(tm) to let only legitimate businesses willing to pay $2000 for one or two domain names, and not squatters collecting hundreds of these, register domain names under ".biz". In fact, it will most certainly unclutter the namespace sufficiently that the $1,000,000 price tags that some companies are now paying said squatters are a thing of the past.
But ".biz" is an incredibly stupid TLD. Imagine "sun.biz", "cisco.biz", etc. If anyting, it will only attract spammers, like flies. I.e. "direct marketing" organizations, and their ilk.
As a side note, the problem with inability to deal with squatting of ".com" (.net, .org) addresses has to do with several registrars handling these. Competition for domain name registration is Good, but no single TLD should be in the hands of more than one registrar. Why? Because they will compete for customers by lowering their prices - if one entity managed it they could actually increase the prices for registration based on the current shortage.
- Specific criterias for each TLD is Good. ".org" should be reserved for certified non-profit organizations (not per a specific government's tax rules, but per the registrar's rules). ".net" should be reserved for network service providers. ".pro" for professionals. A valid trademark for ".com". ".nothing" for domain name squatters.
- Price competition within a single TLD is Bad. Squatters can buy hundreds of domain names easily, then resell them at astronomical prices. They would not buy hundreds of $2000 names, but a legitimate business would.
- Stupid TLDs are bad. The price tag of $50000 for a TLD application filtered out common sense, and left only money left to speak. Bad idea.
-torActually a firewall does basically nothing if you are somewhat technical, which these people seem to be.
You could easily build a tunnel (e.g. VTun) from the inside of a LAN to some point outside, and then have basically a VPN back in. I do that from where I work to my home. Even if your firewall blocks all direct connections, but have a HTTP or SOCKS proxy in place, there already exist tunnels that go through them.
My point about "judgement skills", though, was that these people are probably just as concerned as their management about security, and probably have much better grip on what it entails to make their network secure. Thus, if you are not going to trust them, you might as well make your network a complete island (whether they create such chatting channels, or not).
Seems like these guys are really good resources to understand and deal with computer crimes and other computer-related operations. Why would CIA want to criminalize them, leaving only meek people behind? Sure, that's gotta make them more savvy and efficient as an organization.
Seems to me that what these people were doing is pretty harmless from a national security point of view. If their management does not trust their intentions and their judgement skills, they should not have hired them in the first place.
Now, instead, they will make CIA an organization only for dead weights.
Well, given that this is on your desktop, I bet you don't see the names that way under your DesTop Icons. In fact, you won't see them that way in your Windows Explorer, unless, of course, you have that infamous check box checked.
The point made, methinks, was that the names you see were not the actual names of the file. WYSINWYG.
If you are a programmer, at least, look at companies that develop so-called embedded systems. The operating systems of choice in this industry are UNIX-like: WindRiver vxWorks and LynuxWorks LynxOS/BlueCat Linux. Indeed, many embedded designs are starting to utilize plain Linux.
What are embedded systems, you ask. Damn smart question - you should be proud of yourself. Fact is, probably most programmers in the world are actually developing such systems. Basically, any electronic/computing device that is not a conventional computer. For instance, gaming devices, cd-rom drives, DNA analyzers (I do that), telecommunications devices, power utility switches, routers/bridges, medical instruments, .. ..
Keywords to look for would be firmware development, embedded systems programming, real-time development.
Best part of it all is that you'll probably get to deal with some of the most interesting development environments that exist. For instance, we developed our said DNA analyzer using ObjecTime, and going forward we'll be using Rational RoseRT - tools that automatically generate C++ code based on the model that you visually draw! (You just fill in the "meat" of each function - the action that takes place in a transition, say). Logic Analyzers, emulators/simulators, virtual platforms, cross-compiler environments -- this is all the stuff that teach you everything about computers - and nice OS designs.
Now, if you were not actually asking as a programmer, but as a systems administrator or other IT drone, here is the (more limited) tip: Go for the back ends - i.e. web servers, IBM's Net.Commerce development, DNS/Firewall administration, that type of stuff. But those are not real people - the I.T. world is just to stuffed with "management types". If you still have the choice, look for software/firmware development environments - much cooler people and more casual atmosphere.
Those are some pretty broad and sweeping claims to say that basically most every major software player gets ideas from debian, any conspiracy theories to back this up?
The claims were not all that broad - especially when considering that the reverse is true, too. Debian has obtained one or two things elsewhere - after all, that's what Free really means - sharing of ideas.
Nonwithstanding, consider software distribution/updates/depencency checks via the internet. Bill Gates may not have gotten the idea directly from Debian, but chances are that someone in Microsoft did, then relayed it up the foodchain. (Tongue-in-cheek to your conspiracy theory reference). RedHat's case seems more obvious, and, indeed, a bit overdue, considering that Mandrake also latched onto the idea a while back.
So I'll just repeat that the Debian Project is one of the most dynamic playground for idea exchange in today's software landscape. Not even the various *BSDs have a development model that invite the same kind of public participation. Some application specific development efforts, like KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, and Apache are very close, but again, with the development infrastructure, project management, packaging system, and overall cohesiveness of Debian's effort, it remains probably the largest-scale public development effort in the world.
Debian/ARM was actually started with the Netwinder, about 2 years ago. That's when/why I joined the Debian project, and can only attest to the fact that the more you know about Debian, the more likely you are to be using it for the rest of your life.
"RedHat Network", "Microsoft.NET", and even *BSD get a lot of their groundwork/ideas from the Debian playground. Indeed, most of the action and futuristic designs happen right there. Probably more software come out of the Debian project nowadays than anywhere else, including Microsoft and GNU.
So, the iPAC distribution is not at all surprising. Already, Debian exists on more platforms than any other distribution.
Much as we can despise/dislike ESR and his style, he did (together with Bruce Perens) coin the term "Open Source". The trademark is still actually owned by Software in Public Interest - though ESR has challenged that.
This discussion is kindof like trying to decide who invented the computer. What is "the Open Source movement"? Published source code? AT&T Bell Labs did that with the original UNIX, in 1969. Freely available source code? Many will agree that the GNU project (1984) made software "Free" for the first time. And in the DOS days, of course there was "freeware" and "shareware", which sometimes came with source.
Back in the old days, we typically just made our programs available without any regard to licensing, rights of use, copyrights, etc. -- something that would make these programs unacceptable according to, for instance, the DFSG. Still, the source code was usually public, so they could still probably be called "open source" (although not Open Source(tm)).
The only thing that's for certain is that RedHat did not invent any of this, any more than Al Gore did. They company was busy creating CD-ROMs based on DOS shareware when they noticed this "Linux" phenomenon pop up, and the latched on to it. They made one of the first distributions (along with Slackware, Yggdrasil, and Debian), but very little of the actual development effort was theirs.
For Sun, it makes a lot of sense to stick with Solaris as their standard UNIX platform. Some reasons why:
Certainly, Linux excels at a whole host of areas where Solaris may fall a little short. Mostly in user space; as far as the kernel goes VFS (providing IPX/SPX, SMB, DevFS...) is probably one of the few things that stands out. In user space, especially in nice/solid/automated distributions like Debian, there is a tremendous ease of keeping your system the slickest it can be, and at the same time, most secure - something you have to work a bit harder to achieve under Solaris.
That said, the market that caters to those demands is mostly saturated, and for Sun to do what they do best - rock solid backends and network-oriented systems - they are better off sticking with Solaris.
Brag time, huh?
The near perfect geek recipe (found in my house):
What I'm most proud of? Not a single one of these machines is faster than 350 MHz! :-)
This confirms my suspicion that the way IDC collects its data is not very suitable for the brand GNU world of free software.
Debian's distribution model, for instance, does not favor physical media (CD-ROMs), but rather "subscription" of updates via the Internet. And according to several Slashdot polls, Debian has the second largest user base. (Granted, these are some of the most geeky users, but nevertheless it shows a point).
Old world mindsets (like IDC's measurement of sales) does not cope well with new realities. Too bad, their loss.
IPSeq (service 50) are not the only way to establish a VPN. For instance, you can use IP inside IP (Using either the kernel-based 'ipip.o' module, or a user-space ipip driver), or do as I do, create a PPP tunnel inside an SSH connection.
Here is how:From your machine inside a firewalled LAN (e.g. work), use the following `pppd' options file (under Debian, create it in /etc/ppp/peers, e.g. /etc/ppp/peers/my-home):
/usr/sbin/pppd noauth ipparam 172.16.0.0/16"
# This link is over a SSH network connection
pty "ssh -t -enone -C yourhost.home.net
# IP Addresses to use for this link
192.168.0.1:192.168.0.2
# Let the remote host start the conversation
silent
# We trust each other
noauth
# Keep modem up even if connection fails
persist
Here, replace 172.16.0.0/16 with your company network. This will be used as argument for the PPP 'if-up' script on your home computer.
Make sure the root user on your work machine can SSH to your home machine (as root) without being prompted for password. If neccessary, run 'ssh-keygen', and copy the '/root/.ssh/identity.pub' file from work to '/root/.ssh/authorized_keys' at home.
At home, create an if-up script, as follows:
The script should contain:
#!/bin/bash
#################################################
### FILE:
### PURPOSE: Add routes after bringing up PPP link
#################################################
### The following two lines are only needed with RedHat;
### Debian supplies these from the master ip-up script.
### $6 contains remote network/netmask (e.g. 172.16.0.0/16)
[ "$PPP_IFACE" ] || PPP_IFACE=$1
[ "$PPP_IPPARAM" ] || PPP_IPPARAM=$6
### Configure the route
if [ "$PPP_IPPARAM" ]
then
fi
Edit root's crontab on your work machine (crontab -e), to start this PPP link. Under Debian, it will look as follows:
/etc/ppp/peers).
*/20 * * * * netstat -rn | grep -qs ^192.168.0.2 || pon my-home
(replace 'my-home' with the name of the PPP options file in
Using this, you now have a PPP over SSH tunnel to/from your home. If it breaks, it is immediately brought back up (hence "persist" above); and if too many retries have passes and PPP gives up, a new connection is retried every 20 minutes (or whatever you set the crontab line to).
Undetectable. :-)