I can think of less ordinary people that should
be tracked too : current or former CIA executives
for instance. They have showed a real talent for
doing nasty things using airplanes : Pigs Bay,
Chile, IranGate, sponsorship of extremist armed
groups, add your favorite state terrorism act
here...
The average dude is now getting more and more
filed, americans' cherished freedom is fading out,
but I don't think this will stop the madness in
this world. Governments, corps and friends are too
clever for shooting themselves so bad.
As always, strong authentication (along with a fine appreciation of the remaining risks) is the obligatory path, whatever the service is. The next step is clever partitioning : if your front end server gets compromised, try to reduce the possibilities of spreading through your network, using physical separation, filtering devices, DMZs... And of course, take care of your server software and audit the app's code. Evnetually, you may add an app level filtering proxy, but I don't know if there is such a beast for SOAP requests.
It is true however that multiplexing every app protocol on the planet through a single HTTP canal may make HTTP look like NetBios (damn "three ports fit all" paradigm). Handle with care !
I definitely disagree. And I don't understand your point. RMS designed,founded and led the GNU project, hats off RMS ! He wrote the GNU GPL, and is still working on new versions and legal issues, nice work ! I wouldn't do it myself. He tries to fight software patents, to protect the right to code for the new coders you're calling. He also hacked gcc, emacs, gdb which are invaluable tools, the elementary bricks to build the whole Free Software House. He doesn't seem to code anymore, so what ? He's useful and has certainely more clues about the real wolrd than the average 15 year old nerd. RMS pours moral salt and pepper into the whole Free Software cauldron. He insists on Freedom being more important than wealth and commerce, cooperation being more valuable for Society than greed. What an unusual and refreshing vision of the world !
Keep on speaking RMS, you're condemned to repeat the same old printer driver story over and over !;)
Another important point is that Minitel terminal devices are free (read gratis) or very cheap and easy to use. There are a lot of such beasts in the houses, compared to the number of personal computers, which are expensive and rather frightening for everyday people.
Yahoo's idea is pretty clever : use the installed Minitel base, gather a user community and keep them when they buy a PC.
Well, I'm in the making of a GNU/Linux router. I chose to use mainly a CD and a floppy holding the kernel and some config files. I know floppies are unreliable but I want a read-only medium (hardware protected) that garantees the integrity of the system and I don't want to burn a new CD each time I have to add a route or upgrade the kernel (in case there is a bug in the TCP/IP stack). I understand Theo's point about floppies but I've yet to find a better solution. If someone has a hint... --
Don't you think we could follow the event live and direct through the eyes of some earth observation satellites (could somebody name a few ?) ? Kewl huh ?;)
For once we could witness the amount of garbage we dare to throw into the ocean.
Working with no office mate and in a tolerant country, I am allowed to smoke at work. Since I roll my cigarettes, my keyboards are filled with ashes and tobacco bits. With a little bit of sorting, I guess I could roll one more with them... Kind of an emergency reserve for hard working days !
Come on CmdrTaco, is there anybody here who is older than 12 and enjoys Dragonball Z ?
I thought it was 'News for Nerd' not 'News for Kids'...
Anyway, don't take my little rant too seriously.
--
Re:License wars are a waste of energy
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
As long as it works, why should the license matter so much? It's only software, it's not a matter of life and death.
Well,... it is, kinda. It is all about Freedom. You can't ignore the growing importance of computers and software in the life of millions, if not billions, of people. Open standards and Free Sofware are the best protection against the risk of having our lives tied in the hands of few people (big corps, governments...)
I've seen a lot of proprietary software that work, for sure, but if you ignore the licence issue, you miss the big picture. Software is now part of the way humanity works (or fails to;)
I understand these issues may seem boring, they are nevertheless fundamental to our digital future.
Well, MAPI is a proprietary protocol. Adapting our Free email clients would require a bunch of reverse engineering (remember Samba ?) and would be of little use, since we already have nice and open protocols.
If you want to use Evolution (or pine, or whatever) with an Exchange server, you can spawn the POP3/IMAP/SMTP "connectors" on the server. You can use Outlook this way too.
As for the extra features you might miss, I think it'd be smarter to use other tools.;)
btw, the GPLd version will be v6, which is a complete re-write according so some things I've heard. Apparantly, since the takeover, Sun have quadrupled the number of developers!
Wouldn't it have been smarter to release the source code before a complete rewrite, in order to benefit from the work of the community ? I'm afraid there won't be too many people eager to dive into such a huge piece of code, only to fix bugs.
Anyway, this is good news, and if it's GPL'd, AbiWord and such could borrow code and design ideas. --
OK, now I'm a calmed down a bit, I can back my flamebait by facts (Tx Google).
Here is a link to Le Monde, the French reference paper (say the Times for England, or the Herald Tribune for the USA). All the facts about this bombing and who did it are HERE !
The site you'r linking to is very closely related to a political association who's preaching ultra-liberalism. They're too tainted to be trusted, nothing close to the widely recognized objectivity of Le Monde ("The World" if you can't speak French).
On Wednesday, April 19, 2000, an attack on a McDonald's resulted in the death of a '28 year-old waitress'. Jose Bove is believed to have ordered this attack.
Hey man quit smoking crack immediately ! This bombing has been perpetrated by crazy independantists from Britanny (western France), the so-called Armée Révolutionaire Bretonne. They aren't related to Jose Bove's union or movement and have been caught by police. Please check your information or shut up !
Moderators, take him down please, those "facts" are pure BS.
I'm so glad as well as a little surprised you decided to talk about this man Jon.
I was there in Millau among the 50,000 or 80,000 human beings gathered under the motto "The World Is Not For Sale.". Ambiance was incredible, everybody was kind to others, and the powerful feeling that we can do something against the marketization of life was in the air.
I can't tell you about American Values, but World Citizenship values were definitely there. Yes, healthcare, education, welfare, local identities and customs, free speech, etc are anything but marketable concepts. And yes, multinational trusts and Almighty Money try to have them under control these days.
I am rather addicted to the Internet, to Slashdot et al, and I am a Free Software aficionado too, but I don't run for stock-options and I don't agree with the ultra liberal freaks that will lead us to sell our mother, our soul and Earth for a few more 0 on a bank account.
Thank you Jon, I usually don't read your columns because I used to find them too American-centric. Not today
BTW, have a look at the IndyMedia network (this link is for France, covering Jose Bove's story). There is life after CNN...
Complete (physical) isolation is very hard to reach in such cases. You often need to make data from the spaceship available to the outside world (processed telemetry et al) or to connect the control center to other multipurpose LANs. As you said, partial isolation may be done using only outgoing connections and firewall devices, but if seeing how an active ftp connection is done, you can understand this is no panacea, especially if you are low on $ for your project.
Oh, by the way, take a look at this GOA report. It states that using trust relations between hosts you can reach some of NASA's critical systems.
Actually, what I see is a particularly noticeable delay needed to download the little green GIFs with a rounded edge (slc.gif). The page is already displayed though so I can read/. but it takes time to complete. I don't think it behaved the same a few weeks ago.
If we conduct periodic purges of the library based on the whims of the moment ("nudity is bad, now it's good; racism is good, now it's bad; cold fusion is a myth, cold fusion works great, no wait--it's a myth after all")
I agree that censorship is something we all have to fight, and nudity is the right example to pick up because its perception has changed a lot, depending on when and where it takes place and who you are. BUT you cannot say racism might be someday acceptable. Racism is the one of the simplest corrollary of man's stupidity and should be agressively fought, no matter the era, location or culture. Racism is a plague for humanity, has always been so and will always be.
But your nickname seems to be made of a mix of 'fascist' and 'slashdot','fascist' may explain your position...
The fact of the matter is, you either believe that anyone who is a criminal should be allowed to make money off of their crimes, or you are a hypocrite.
You're right but isn't Mitnick supposed to _already_ have paid for is crime ? Five years in jail aren't enough ? Shouldnt he be allowed to find a (legal) place in society using his skills ?
I once thought that Free Speech was a cornerstone of the American Society, I was wrong.
But when you think of all the stupid cases like the woman who baked her cat in her micro wave oven (wanting to dry it off) and won millions, you can't really be surprised.
There is no reason to justify that software should be a tool restricted to a small part of the humans. Computers are now taking a growing place into how people communicate, solve scientific and technical issues, how art may spread, how society evlolves. Society should not build itself entirely over business and money, and Free Software is part of this idea. The magic coktail made of freedom+lowcost+hitech perfectly fit this role. So Free Software may be a passion for some of us, even make some others earn money, but the most important is that it is designed to be open to everybody, regardless of who he is, preserving freedom and equality, in the limits of its scope, of course.
So Thanks to RMS and the FSF who designed and formalised how to protect Free Software and let it grow and improve.
System administration may not be the hardest task in the world, it however involves a complex range of skills, habits, dedication, experience, knowledge, etc. OSes like NT try to oversimplify system administration, by hiding the internals of the intricate thing you have to deal with. IMHO, this doesn't do the job of a sysadmins who knows his job. But NT often forces you to keep ignorant : "you don't have to know how this work, you're too dumb anyway"
I don't really consider security and sysadmin as different tasks (though earning my spaghetti as a security-only engineer). Good security implies day-to-day system administration with secrity in mind.
Though IANAL et al, I am really saddened by all those tragical suits against smart programmers and reverse engineers. I mean, this ain't no magic, this ain't no piracy, this is work and brainpower.
So how could we make things clearer to the judges ? We, as tech-aware people, have to inform everyone that "the times they are a changin'" ! There is no doubt we'll always find a guy smart enough to reverse engineer any protection against wild copy. So isn't it time to think about new ways of supporting creation ?
I think we need another Bruce Perens, maybe more specialized, to act as the Voice of the Community about those music / video / DVD things. Judges and governments have to understand that software and digital information changes the rules. There is nothing closest to an MP3 than the 'cp' of it... There is always an access to/dev/dsp too, so is there a chance to prevent us to 'su' as root on our own PC and catch/dev/dsp's input?
Hi fellow Slashdotters ! Here is my humble translation of the mmdeium article. I'm French, so be kind to my English writing. Sorry if this someone already post a similar thing while I'm typing this.
pssst! formaly warned
Montreal (January 12 2000) - the pssst! website from Quebec has been formaly warned by the American company Yahoo! to have allegedly been the author of the Yahoo!Quebec parody!. The editor in chief of Multimédium, Dominic Fugère, and somenone called Mathieu, whose names appeared with the bottom of the parodied page, are also quoted in the formal warning.
The Yahoo!Quebec site, a parody of the famous American portal Yahoo!, was created a few months ago by Jean-Hugues Roy, organizer of the Branché emission in Radio-Canada.
Surprisingly, this one was not quoted in the formal warning and was thus not well-informed yet when we joined it in evening. " I will begin with carefully read the formal warning and will re-examine the laws on the cybersquatting and other laws on the marks of trade before deciding if I will withdraw the site, answers it. I perhaps will modify the search engine and the graphics of the logo. "
In his parody, Jean-Hugues Roy used the exact logo of Yahoo!, to which it added the word " Quebec ". As for the search engine of the parodied page, it searches the data base of a directory of porn sites. These are the two details which probably exacerbated the susceptibility of Yahoo! Inc. Extracts of the formal warning, sent by the lawyer company Smart & Biggar from Ottawa, seem to confirm this assertion.
" I believed that Yahoo! was the last big company to have the sens of humour, affirms Jean-Hugues Roy. There are several parodies of Yahoo!. Some are even indexed in their search engine! "
Clement Laberge, the person in charge of the pssst! website, to which the formal warning is mainly intended, has until next Monday, January 17, to inform the lawyers of Yahoo! that he withdrew the site, thing which he cannot do by himself because he doesn't have control on the site.
Thanx to Bablefish for the canvas.
Hope this helps
OffTopic addition : Any Linux/Free Software job in Toulouse, France ?
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of less ordinary people that should
be tracked too : current or former CIA executives
for instance. They have showed a real talent for
doing nasty things using airplanes : Pigs Bay,
Chile, IranGate, sponsorship of extremist armed
groups, add your favorite state terrorism act
here...
The average dude is now getting more and more
filed, americans' cherished freedom is fading out,
but I don't think this will stop the madness in
this world. Governments, corps and friends are too
clever for shooting themselves so bad.
Enjoy.
As always, strong authentication (along with a fine appreciation of the remaining risks) is the obligatory path, whatever the service is. The next step is clever partitioning : if your front end server gets compromised, try to reduce the possibilities of spreading through your network, using physical separation, filtering devices, DMZs ... And of course, take care of your server software and audit the app's code. Evnetually, you may add an app level filtering proxy, but I don't know if there is such a beast for SOAP requests.
It is true however that multiplexing every app protocol on the planet through a single HTTP canal may make HTTP look like NetBios (damn "three ports fit all" paradigm). Handle with care !
Do you agree ?
> It's time to abolish RMS. Without apology.
;)
I definitely disagree. And I don't understand your point. RMS designed,founded and led the GNU project, hats off RMS ! He wrote the GNU GPL, and is still working on new versions and legal issues, nice work ! I wouldn't do it myself. He tries to fight software patents, to protect the right to code for the new coders you're calling. He also hacked gcc, emacs, gdb which are invaluable tools, the elementary bricks to build the whole Free Software House. He doesn't seem to code anymore, so what ?
He's useful and has certainely more clues about the real wolrd than the average 15 year old nerd. RMS pours moral salt and pepper into the whole Free Software cauldron. He insists on Freedom being more important than wealth and commerce, cooperation being more valuable for Society than greed. What an unusual and refreshing vision of the world !
Keep on speaking RMS, you're condemned to repeat the same old printer driver story over and over !
Frankly, we need him.
--
Another important point is that Minitel terminal devices are free (read gratis) or very cheap and easy to use. There are a lot of such beasts in the houses, compared to the number of personal computers, which are expensive and rather frightening for everyday people.
Yahoo's idea is pretty clever : use the installed Minitel base, gather a user community and keep them when they buy a PC.
mon avis à deux balles
--
Well, I'm in the making of a GNU/Linux router. I chose to use mainly a CD and a floppy holding the kernel and some config files. I know floppies are unreliable but I want a read-only medium (hardware protected) that garantees the integrity of the system and I don't want to burn a new CD each time I have to add a route or upgrade the kernel (in case there is a bug in the TCP/IP stack). I understand Theo's point about floppies but I've yet to find a better solution. If someone has a hint ...
--
Don't you think we could follow the event live and direct through the eyes of some earth observation satellites (could somebody name a few ?) ? Kewl huh ? ;)
For once we could witness the amount of garbage we dare to throw into the ocean.
--
Working with no office mate and in a tolerant country, I am allowed to smoke at work. Since I roll my cigarettes, my keyboards are filled with ashes and tobacco bits. With a little bit of sorting, I guess I could roll one more with them ... Kind of an emergency reserve for hard working days !
...
As long as it ain't weed
--
Come on CmdrTaco, is there anybody here who is older than 12 and enjoys Dragonball Z ? ...
I thought it was 'News for Nerd' not 'News for Kids'
Anyway, don't take my little rant too seriously.
--
As long as it works, why should the license matter so much? It's only software, it's not a matter of life and death.
... it is, kinda. It is all about Freedom. You can't ignore the growing importance of computers and software in the life of millions, if not billions, of people. Open standards and Free Sofware are the best protection against the risk of having our lives tied in the hands of few people (big corps, governments ...)
;)
Well,
I've seen a lot of proprietary software that work, for sure, but if you ignore the licence issue, you miss the big picture. Software is now part of the way humanity works (or fails to
I understand these issues may seem boring, they are nevertheless fundamental to our digital future.
--
Well, MAPI is a proprietary protocol. Adapting our Free email clients would require a bunch of reverse engineering (remember Samba ?) and would be of little use, since we already have nice and open protocols.
;)
If you want to use Evolution (or pine, or whatever) with an Exchange server, you can spawn the POP3/IMAP/SMTP "connectors" on the server. You can use Outlook this way too.
As for the extra features you might miss, I think it'd be smarter to use other tools.
--
btw, the GPLd version will be v6, which is a complete re-write according so some things I've heard. Apparantly, since the takeover, Sun have quadrupled the number of developers!
Wouldn't it have been smarter to release the source code before a complete rewrite, in order to benefit from the work of the community ? I'm afraid there won't be too many people eager to dive into such a huge piece of code, only to fix bugs.
Anyway, this is good news, and if it's GPL'd, AbiWord and such could borrow code and design ideas.
--
Hey guys, what about an interview of John Steed ? Along with Emma Peel of course ;)
..
I know my humour sucks
--
OK, now I'm a calmed down a bit, I can back my flamebait by facts (Tx Google).
Here is a link to Le Monde, the French reference paper (say the Times for England, or the Herald Tribune for the USA). All the facts about this bombing and who did it are HERE !
The site you'r linking to is very closely related to a political association who's preaching ultra-liberalism. They're too tainted to be trusted, nothing close to the widely recognized objectivity of Le Monde ("The World" if you can't speak French).
Peace.
--
On Wednesday, April 19, 2000, an attack on a McDonald's resulted in the death of a '28 year-old waitress'. Jose Bove is believed to have ordered this attack.
Hey man quit smoking crack immediately ! This bombing has been perpetrated by crazy independantists from Britanny (western France), the so-called Armée Révolutionaire Bretonne. They aren't related to Jose Bove's union or movement and have been caught by police. Please check your information or shut up !
Moderators, take him down please, those "facts" are pure BS.
--
I'm so glad as well as a little surprised you decided to talk about this man Jon.
I was there in Millau among the 50,000 or 80,000 human beings gathered under the motto "The World Is Not For Sale.". Ambiance was incredible, everybody was kind to others, and the powerful feeling that we can do something against the marketization of life was in the air.
I can't tell you about American Values, but World Citizenship values were definitely there. Yes, healthcare, education, welfare, local identities and customs, free speech, etc are anything but marketable concepts. And yes, multinational trusts and Almighty Money try to have them under control these days.
I am rather addicted to the Internet, to Slashdot et al, and I am a Free Software aficionado too, but I don't run for stock-options and I don't agree with the ultra liberal freaks that will lead us to sell our mother, our soul and Earth for a few more 0 on a bank account.
Thank you Jon, I usually don't read your columns because I used to find them too American-centric. Not today
BTW, have a look at the IndyMedia network (this link is for France, covering Jose Bove's story). There is life after CNN...
--
Complete (physical) isolation is very hard to reach in such cases. You often need to make data from the spaceship available to the outside world (processed telemetry et al) or to connect the control center to other multipurpose LANs. As you said, partial isolation may be done using only outgoing connections and firewall devices, but if seeing how an active ftp connection is done, you can understand this is no panacea, especially if you are low on $ for your project.
;)
Oh, by the way, take a look at this GOA report. It states that using trust relations between hosts you can reach some of NASA's critical systems.
I don't want to be an astronaut anymore
--
Actually, what I see is a particularly noticeable delay needed to download the little green GIFs with a rounded edge (slc.gif). The page is already displayed though so I can read /. but it takes time to complete. I don't think it behaved the same a few weeks ago.
Am I the only one to see that behaviour ?
--
If we conduct periodic purges of the library based on the whims of the moment ("nudity is bad, now it's good; racism is good, now it's bad; cold fusion is a myth, cold fusion works great, no wait--it's a myth after all")
I agree that censorship is something we all have to fight, and nudity is the right example to pick up because its perception has changed a lot, depending on when and where it takes place and who you are. BUT you cannot say racism might be someday acceptable. Racism is the one of the simplest corrollary of man's stupidity and should be agressively fought, no matter the era, location or culture. Racism is a plague for humanity, has always been so and will always be.
But your nickname seems to be made of a mix of 'fascist' and 'slashdot','fascist' may explain your position...
--
The fact of the matter is, you either believe that anyone who is a criminal should be allowed to make money off of their crimes, or you are a hypocrite.
You're right but isn't Mitnick supposed to _already_ have paid for is crime ? Five years in jail aren't enough ? Shouldnt he be allowed to find a (legal) place in society using his skills ?
--
I once thought that Free Speech was a cornerstone of the American Society, I was wrong.
...
But when you think of all the stupid cases like the woman who baked her cat in her micro wave oven (wanting to dry it off) and won millions, you can't really be surprised.
Give US judges a clue
--
The Deception Toolkit might be something you'll find useful for your honeypot.
There is no reason to justify that software should be a tool restricted to a small part of the humans. Computers are now taking a growing place into how people communicate, solve scientific and technical issues, how art may spread, how society evlolves. Society should not build itself entirely over business and money, and Free Software is part of this idea. The magic coktail made of freedom+lowcost+hitech perfectly fit this role. So Free Software may be a passion for some of us, even make some others earn money, but the most important is that it is designed to be open to everybody, regardless of who he is, preserving freedom and equality, in the limits of its scope, of course.
So Thanks to RMS and the FSF who designed and formalised how to protect Free Software and let it grow and improve.
On sysadmins, I really agree.
System administration may not be the hardest task in the world, it however involves a complex range of skills, habits, dedication, experience, knowledge, etc. OSes like NT try to oversimplify system administration, by hiding the internals of the intricate thing you have to deal with. IMHO, this doesn't do the job of a sysadmins who knows his job. But NT often forces you to keep ignorant : "you don't have to know how this work, you're too dumb anyway"
I don't really consider security and sysadmin as different tasks (though earning my spaghetti as a security-only engineer). Good security implies day-to-day system administration with secrity in mind.
Though IANAL et al, I am really saddened by all those tragical suits against smart programmers and reverse engineers. I mean, this ain't no magic, this ain't no piracy, this is work and brainpower.
... There is always an access to /dev/dsp too, so is there a chance to prevent us to 'su' as root on our own PC and catch /dev/dsp's input?
So how could we make things clearer to the judges ? We, as tech-aware people, have to inform everyone that "the times they are a changin'" ! There is no doubt we'll always find a guy smart enough to reverse engineer any protection against wild copy. So isn't it time to think about new ways of supporting creation ?
I think we need another Bruce Perens, maybe more specialized, to act as the Voice of the Community about those music / video / DVD things. Judges and governments have to understand that software and digital information changes the rules. There is nothing closest to an MP3 than the 'cp' of it
Well, maybe it is a little too late 4 me...
Hi fellow Slashdotters ! Here is my humble translation of the mmdeium article. I'm French, so be kind to my English writing. Sorry if this someone already post a similar thing while I'm typing this.
pssst! formaly warned
Montreal (January 12 2000) - the pssst! website from Quebec has been formaly warned by the American company Yahoo! to have allegedly been the author of the Yahoo!Quebec parody!. The editor in chief of Multimédium, Dominic Fugère, and somenone called Mathieu, whose names appeared with the bottom of the parodied page, are also quoted in the formal warning.
The Yahoo!Quebec site, a parody of the famous American portal Yahoo!, was created a few months ago by Jean-Hugues Roy, organizer of the Branché emission in Radio-Canada.
Surprisingly, this one was not quoted in the formal warning and was thus not well-informed yet when we joined it in evening. " I will begin with carefully read the formal warning and will re-examine the laws on the cybersquatting and other laws on the marks of trade before deciding if I will withdraw the site, answers it. I perhaps will modify the search engine and the graphics of the logo. "
In his parody, Jean-Hugues Roy used the exact logo of Yahoo!, to which it added the word " Quebec ". As for the search engine of the parodied page, it searches the data base of a directory of porn sites. These are the two details which probably exacerbated the susceptibility of Yahoo! Inc. Extracts of the formal warning, sent by the lawyer company Smart & Biggar from Ottawa, seem to confirm this assertion.
" I believed that Yahoo! was the last big company to have the sens of humour, affirms Jean-Hugues Roy. There are several parodies of Yahoo!. Some are even indexed in their search engine! "
Clement Laberge, the person in charge of the pssst! website, to which the formal warning is mainly intended, has until next Monday, January 17, to inform the lawyers of Yahoo! that he withdrew the site, thing which he cannot do by himself because he doesn't have control on the site.
Thanx to Bablefish for the canvas.
Hope this helps
OffTopic addition : Any Linux/Free Software job in Toulouse, France ?