Kudos to gleam for actually reading the source article before posting an opinion! (I don't have time to list all the counter examples. You know who you are.)
That said, I agree about the intent of the law but must respectfully disagree on its likely effect. "Intent to do harm" is one of the crucial deciding factors. I expect the lawmakers are not entirely clueless and intend to apply this to the person/entity (potentially) being prosecuted, and not just to the virus itself. Even so, the Finnish AV community will have to jump through unaccustomed hoops in order to avoid prosecution.
How will an Finnish AV researcher make a new virus, or information about a new virus technique, available to other AV researchers and reasonably expect the information will not also be used for harm by anyone at any time? Claiming ignorance may be a good defense for the casual computer user, but how could an AV researcher claim to be ignorant of the potential harm or potential misuse?
Application frobbing aside, Microsoft funded a comparison of WNT to a brand new Linux 2.2 kernel with brand new drivers running on a distribution based on the 2.0 kernel against WNT 4.0 which had been around for years and patched. Redhat was very careful to point out that 2.2 on 5.x wasn't officially supported, but MS chose this unsupported combination to make the comparison.
Since W2K (Y2K:) was previously announced to be *shipping* by the end of the year, it might be good to take whatever is available at the end of the year and benchmark it against whatever non-development Linux kernel is available -- all on Merced, preferably an 8-way system with >2GB RAM. If MS execs protest it's not in production yet, well, fair is fair.
If W2K still doesn't run on I64 by then, the results should be published anyway, perhaps in a parody of a popular consumer magazine review. ("Even our most patient testers gave up after two weeks when the bitmaps had *still* not downloaded on the test web page.")
The University of Southern CA has perfected a process for creating very tiny necklaces. Their web site sports a near-sighted house ant admiring a gold necklace. They claim that their new process, EFAB (tm), allows the creation of such jewelry without the need for a cleanroom. Apparently, they can mass-produce insect necklaces for under $1.00 each. This might not sound all that promising until you consider how many small insects who, up till now, have had no access to fine jewelry.
Looks like a hot stock pick!
For more information, see: http://www.isi.edu/efab
I switched to Redhat 4.2 way back when because its drivers were more up-to-date than the other distributions I had tried. Since then, I've had problems with 5.0 and 5.2. Bug fix RPMs have been posted, but I've recently run into three very different machines on which 5.2 (as shipped) would not install at all. However, I kludged a patched CDROM that works on all three. (Basic idea: Replace the original RPMs with symlinks to replacement RPMs -- excluding kernel RPMs which would cause LILO to fail at the end.) I could post the scripts I use to generate the disks (starting from a RH 5.2 disk and a directory of patch RPMs), but with 6.0 only a few weeks away (hopefully including all the patches plus linux 2.2.3 plus GNOME 1.x), there's probably not much of a point.
Can anyone point me to TFM so I can R about how the lists of RPMs are *supposed* to be changed for Redhat CDROMs -- instead of using symlinks as I did? No doubt there will be patches for 6.0, and it can save a lot of installation time (or in some cases, make installation *possible*) to simply have the latest patches on the CDROM directly.
Thanks in advance, Chuck Phillips c d p @ p e a k p e a k . c o m . n o s p a m
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That said, I agree about the intent of the law but must respectfully disagree on its likely effect. "Intent to do harm" is one of the crucial deciding factors. I expect the lawmakers are not entirely clueless and intend to apply this to the person/entity (potentially) being prosecuted, and not just to the virus itself. Even so, the Finnish AV community will have to jump through unaccustomed hoops in order to avoid prosecution.
How will an Finnish AV researcher make a new virus, or information about a new virus technique, available to other AV researchers and reasonably expect the information will not also be used for harm by anyone at any time? Claiming ignorance may be a good defense for the casual computer user, but how could an AV researcher claim to be ignorant of the potential harm or potential misuse?
Application frobbing aside, Microsoft funded a comparison of WNT to a brand new Linux 2.2 kernel with brand new drivers running on a distribution based on the 2.0 kernel against WNT 4.0 which had been around for years and patched. Redhat was very careful to point out that 2.2 on 5.x wasn't officially supported, but MS chose this unsupported combination to make the comparison.
Since W2K (Y2K:) was previously announced to be *shipping* by the end of the year, it might be good to take whatever is available at the end of the year and benchmark it against whatever non-development Linux kernel is available -- all on Merced, preferably an 8-way system with >2GB RAM. If MS execs protest it's not in production yet, well, fair is fair.
If W2K still doesn't run on I64 by then, the results should be published anyway, perhaps in a parody of a popular consumer magazine review. ("Even our most patient testers gave up after two weeks when the bitmaps had *still* not downloaded on the test web page.")
The University of Southern CA has perfected a process for creating very
tiny necklaces. Their web site sports a near-sighted house ant admiring a
gold necklace. They claim that their new process, EFAB (tm), allows the
creation of such jewelry without the need for a cleanroom. Apparently,
they can mass-produce insect necklaces for under $1.00 each. This might
not sound all that promising until you consider how many small insects who,
up till now, have had no access to fine jewelry.
Looks like a hot stock pick!
For more information, see: http://www.isi.edu/efab
I switched to Redhat 4.2 way back when because its drivers were more up-to-date than the other distributions I had tried. Since then, I've had problems with 5.0 and 5.2. Bug fix RPMs have been posted, but I've recently run into three very different machines on which 5.2 (as shipped) would not install at all. However, I kludged a patched CDROM that works on all three. (Basic idea: Replace the original RPMs with symlinks to replacement RPMs -- excluding kernel RPMs which would cause LILO to fail at the end.)
I could post the scripts I use to generate the disks (starting from a RH 5.2 disk and a directory of patch RPMs), but with 6.0 only a few weeks away (hopefully including all the patches plus linux 2.2.3 plus GNOME 1.x), there's probably not much of a point.
Can anyone point me to TFM so I can R about how the lists of RPMs are *supposed* to be changed for Redhat CDROMs -- instead of using symlinks as I did? No doubt there will be patches for 6.0, and it can save a lot of installation time (or in some cases, make installation *possible*) to simply have the latest patches on the CDROM directly.
Thanks in advance,
Chuck Phillips
c d p @ p e a k p e a k . c o m . n o s p a m