"Can you provide a link to the statistics showing "the most used and most successful way of infecting a machine" is by users executing the code themselves?" Go to any one of the Anti Virus websites where they list a "top xxx" threats list, and look at the infection methods. You'll find that a large majority of them are spread via social engineering.
Windows requires that you be an administrator to change your time zone or Desktop resolution. Time on a multi-user computer system is a sensitive thing and should require admin rights. I don't where you came up with the desktop resolution bit. Anyone can change that.
would you kindly point towards any single item which I have posted which is factually FALSE? The entire table that shows "IQ by country" for starters.
An IQ of 67, which is what the book claims is the average of Nigeria is borderline mentally retarded by U.S. standards. Koko the gorilla has scored between 70-95 on an American sign language IQ tests.
Do you honestly believe that the people of Nigeria are on average much stupider than mountain gorillas?
Having grown up in a town where 40% of the parents and children are straight from Mexico, simple observation tells me that your theory is fully of hole, because these kids after going through an American Educational system do not end up retards as your source suggests they should.
I live in Central California and live and work with tons of people who are first/second/third generation Mexican-Americans. I don't need studies to tell me that the shit this guy is parroting is racist bullshit.
Though it was certainly useless in terms of convincing him, replying to him serves to bring out the ludicrousness of his position, so...good job.:)
With Vista and OS X, you have no other option than to put up with DRM. The only way you have to put up with DRM is if you *choose* to buy DRM'ed content.
btw, holding back on the "fucking idiots" might make your argument more direct and less patronising People like you continue to demonstrate that you don't understand the issue at hand deserve to be called fucking idiots. DRM is basically decryption of encrypted content via obfuscated keys. The same exact technology that makes DRM possible makes is possible for you to protect your data from other people.
If asshat companies abuse DRM technology and sufficiently annoy consumers then the market will put those asshat companies in their place by rejecting the technology. Remember DivX DVD's?
That part is not true. And after you said that you basically admit that DRM could be implemented in an open source OS, but it might be harder.
If you advocate the use open source operating systems, that's great and if you want to educate people about DRM and advocate against it, that's also great but stop thinking the first solution is a practical solution to the second problem.
Suggesting people switch to Linux to fight DRM is like suggesting people drive tanks to cut down on highway casualties.
I'm not sure why they freaked about the BSD It's just fear of the unknown. People at the top don't like the status quo rocked unless they are the ones doing the rocking. Several years ago I implemented a spam filtering solution using OpenBSD and postfix/SA. I was green in UNIX type OSs, so it was a great learning experience for me. After getting a few file permission bugs worked out, the thing ended up running for 2.5 years straight without a hiccup. It ended up being very accurate. Then on the advice of a consultant who was a Windows guy, the boss decided to replace it with a Barracuda.
Justification for replacing the BSD box was that "I was the only person who knew how to fix it". The fact that the box had never even hiccuped in two and a half years, and there was ample documentation on how to get mail flowing temporarily in case of a failure if I was gone, apparently meant nothing. The Barracuda is ok, but it didn't solve the support problem at all. The Barracuda is not as accurate, and it has 'hiccuped' a few times, causing minor mail flow issues and both times we were stuck sitting with our thumbs up our asses while waiting for support.
Now we are running Vmware ESX, so I get to come to the rescue every time the GUI management tools fail and the need to hit the bare console comes up. Five bucks say we'll be replacing Vmware with Microsoft's virtual solution in a few years!
Anyway, enough with the rant. Thanks for the advice on CentOS. I'll keep that in the back of my mind.
I know UNIX (big fan of Free and OpenBSD), but we're an all Windows shop. Being the only person at work who knows anything about UNIX, there is huge fear of anything UNIX at work, so I don't get to play much with such things at work. I actually got a scolding at work for setting up a virtual FreeBSD server on our test blade a couple of months ago.
Thanks for the reply though. I Googled GFS and it looks like something I might want to check out later since I plan in setting up a central storage solution at home in the future.
A "protected video path" type setup under Linux would simply not be very possible, and if someone tried it, the source is available so it can be circumvented trivially. The protected path could be implemented in the form of binary kernel modules and binary driver hooks. If Nvidia can put that type of binary blob shenanigans, why can't others? The practicality of implementing it on a moving target like the linux ABI is not there, but that doesn't make using an open source operating systems a good method for fighting DRM. I'm pretty sure the market, as a whole, prefers access to content over access to source code. This makes Open source/Free operating systems irrelevant to the discussion.
The primary reason for free software being a good antidote to DRM is that I am voting with my wallet. Buying or staying with XP "instead" of Vista doesn't send Microsoft the message -- they may want you to get Vista, but you are still sending money Microsoft's way. OSX is also a big DRM supporter. So, by not purchasing OSX or Windows it sends the message to Apple & Microsoft that I will not spend money with DRM supporters. The huge driver behind DRM is the content owners, not operating system makers. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are on the record saying that DRM is bullshit, and a huge PITA. I think you will find that pretty much 100% of TV's nowadays support various forms of DRM, like HDCP.
Just a word of encouragement. I smoked for 14 years until last May. I'm not sure exactly why I quit, but one day I just decided I was sick of it, and have managed to not start back up.
When I decided I was at a big box store shopping and I picked up a box of nicotine gum. It *really* helped out a lot for the first week or so. After that the gum ran out, I could not justify to myself spending more on bad tasting gum than I would for an equivalent supply of cigarettes, so I went cold turkey from there. If you ever think you've had enough, I would recommend the nicotine replacement. It certainly helped with the chemical aspect, but unfortunatlty the psychological aspect of a smoking addiction is a much bigger piece of the puzzle.
Anyhow, don't take my post as saying, "You should quit, because I did." There is nothing that annoyed me more than non-smokers who told me I should quit. Every time someone suggested I quit or told me about how bad smoking was, I would think in my head, "No shit Sherlock! Got any more valuable life tips for me asshole?", or a sarcastic, "Really? I had no idea these things were bad for me! Thanks for letting me know!".
Good luck, and to hell with the ignorant the anti-smoking Nazis.
The original poster proposed using a Free(TM) OS as a method of fighting DRM. The next poster correctly pointed out that using a Free(TM) OS has absolutely nothing to do with the issue. Then you idiots keep railing about how using a Free(TM) OS will somehow solve the DRM problem - completely ignoring (and seemingly ignorant of) the fact that DRM can be implemented in ANY operating system with or without cooperation from the authors of the OS.
The issue is DRM and protected content, not operating systems. You can choose not to purchase and consume protected content weather or not you run a Free(TM) OS or not.
Many large virtualized deployments include very advanced technologies such as shared SANs, shared infrastructure, and complex virtualization tools. Correctomundo.
We recently moved everything into virtua-land, complete with a hige SAN, fiberchannel switches, blade servers - the whole nine yards.
While I do think the move was a net positive, the complication of 60 physical servers was more or less replaced by the complication of all the new SAN/Bladecenter components and their interdependency.
One particular thing we've run into is "firmware hell", where you have several components in the chain that all require firmware updates and all depend on each other.
I had a similar experience a few years back. I decided to finally sit down and rip my wife and I's entire music collection. I encoded a clip of music in LAME MP3, Blade Encoder(MP3), Muse Pack, and Ogg formats. I used a bitrate of around 200kpbs in all of the samples, and made sure not to use Joint Stereo.
I then compared how each of the compressed samples sounded compared to the original wav clip. Both the LAME Mp3 clip and the MPC clip sounded different from the original; not distorted, as with lower bitrates but as if someone had run an EQ filter on them. The Blade MP3 sounded pretty damn close to the original and the Ogg sample sounded identical the original.
It's possible that some setting I used, or the decoders involved were the cuplrits, but ogg due to it's ability to accurate reproduce sound and it's freeness won out.
There have been multiple worms for SQL Server and IIS. Multiple, as in...two? Since the slammer incident there have been no critical vulnerabilities discovered for SQL 2000, and there have never been ANY vulnerabilities discovered for SQL 2005. The last worm for SQL or IIS was several years ago. The fact that they are still propogating means little.
I get tons of hits on my various sshd logs every day from hacked linux boxes running apache. Following your logic, that means linux and apache are insecure.
Remember when Windows Update servers were infected? No, I don't. Care to refresh everyone's memory here by linking to a source so I can read about it?
Who knows how many holes are in IIS still that just haven't been found and how many were fixed quietly and thus never reported. If there were a ton of unknown holes in IIS, IIS servers would be getting hacked left and right and everyone would know it, but they are not.
Sales are down, shops like CompUSA are going out of business and people are losing their jobs because M$ pandered to media interests instead of user interests. So twitter, not only is Vista a bad operating system, it's the cause of the coming recession too?!
Sales are down because the economy is heading into the toilet on the heels of the worst housing market collapse in recent memory, and CompUSA is going out of business, partially because of increasing competition with online stores that offer better prices and more convenience, and partially from bad management.
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Sounds about like the linux version of Flash.
An IQ of 67, which is what the book claims is the average of Nigeria is borderline mentally retarded by U.S. standards. Koko the gorilla has scored between 70-95 on an American sign language IQ tests.
Do you honestly believe that the people of Nigeria are on average much stupider than mountain gorillas?
Having grown up in a town where 40% of the parents and children are straight from Mexico, simple observation tells me that your theory is fully of hole, because these kids after going through an American Educational system do not end up retards as your source suggests they should.
The dude you're arguing with is not joking. He's racist nutjob.
:)
Just look at his posting history.
I live in Central California and live and work with tons of people who are first/second/third generation Mexican-Americans. I don't need studies to tell me that the shit this guy is parroting is racist bullshit.
Though it was certainly useless in terms of convincing him, replying to him serves to bring out the ludicrousness of his position, so...good job.
If asshat companies abuse DRM technology and sufficiently annoy consumers then the market will put those asshat companies in their place by rejecting the technology. Remember DivX DVD's?
If you advocate the use open source operating systems, that's great and if you want to educate people about DRM and advocate against it, that's also great but stop thinking the first solution is a practical solution to the second problem.
Suggesting people switch to Linux to fight DRM is like suggesting people drive tanks to cut down on highway casualties.
I've never bought DRMed content and have no plans to.
Justification for replacing the BSD box was that "I was the only person who knew how to fix it". The fact that the box had never even hiccuped in two and a half years, and there was ample documentation on how to get mail flowing temporarily in case of a failure if I was gone, apparently meant nothing. The Barracuda is ok, but it didn't solve the support problem at all. The Barracuda is not as accurate, and it has 'hiccuped' a few times, causing minor mail flow issues and both times we were stuck sitting with our thumbs up our asses while waiting for support.
Now we are running Vmware ESX, so I get to come to the rescue every time the GUI management tools fail and the need to hit the bare console comes up. Five bucks say we'll be replacing Vmware with Microsoft's virtual solution in a few years!
Anyway, enough with the rant. Thanks for the advice on CentOS. I'll keep that in the back of my mind.
I know UNIX (big fan of Free and OpenBSD), but we're an all Windows shop. Being the only person at work who knows anything about UNIX, there is huge fear of anything UNIX at work, so I don't get to play much with such things at work. I actually got a scolding at work for setting up a virtual FreeBSD server on our test blade a couple of months ago.
Thanks for the reply though. I Googled GFS and it looks like something I might want to check out later since I plan in setting up a central storage solution at home in the future.
The OP said to pirate content, which is actually an effective method (one which I support) of fighting DRM.
Of course I am on the same side as the OP. He presented what was, IMO, a valid tactic for fighting DRM. The second poster didn't.
Hi there,
Just a word of encouragement. I smoked for 14 years until last May. I'm not sure exactly why I quit, but one day I just decided I was sick of it, and have managed to not start back up.
When I decided I was at a big box store shopping and I picked up a box of nicotine gum. It *really* helped out a lot for the first week or so. After that the gum ran out, I could not justify to myself spending more on bad tasting gum than I would for an equivalent supply of cigarettes, so I went cold turkey from there. If you ever think you've had enough, I would recommend the nicotine replacement. It certainly helped with the chemical aspect, but unfortunatlty the psychological aspect of a smoking addiction is a much bigger piece of the puzzle.
Anyhow, don't take my post as saying, "You should quit, because I did." There is nothing that annoyed me more than non-smokers who told me I should quit. Every time someone suggested I quit or told me about how bad smoking was, I would think in my head, "No shit Sherlock! Got any more valuable life tips for me asshole?", or a sarcastic, "Really? I had no idea these things were bad for me! Thanks for letting me know!".
Good luck, and to hell with the ignorant the anti-smoking Nazis.
You Free(TM) OS fanboys are all fucking idiots.
The original poster proposed using a Free(TM) OS as a method of fighting DRM.
The next poster correctly pointed out that using a Free(TM) OS has absolutely nothing to do with the issue.
Then you idiots keep railing about how using a Free(TM) OS will somehow solve the DRM problem - completely ignoring (and seemingly ignorant of) the fact that DRM can be implemented in ANY operating system with or without cooperation from the authors of the OS.
The issue is DRM and protected content, not operating systems. You can choose not to purchase and consume protected content weather or not you run a Free(TM) OS or not.
We recently moved everything into virtua-land, complete with a hige SAN, fiberchannel switches, blade servers - the whole nine yards.
While I do think the move was a net positive, the complication of 60 physical servers was more or less replaced by the complication of all the new SAN/Bladecenter components and their interdependency.
One particular thing we've run into is "firmware hell", where you have several components in the chain that all require firmware updates and all depend on each other.
Cracker had more than one hit?
*ducks*
What? I thought it was funny!
His sig is worth a laugh too.
I had a similar experience a few years back. I decided to finally sit down and rip my wife and I's entire music collection. I encoded a clip of music in LAME MP3, Blade Encoder(MP3), Muse Pack, and Ogg formats. I used a bitrate of around 200kpbs in all of the samples, and made sure not to use Joint Stereo.
I then compared how each of the compressed samples sounded compared to the original wav clip. Both the LAME Mp3 clip and the MPC clip sounded different from the original; not distorted, as with lower bitrates but as if someone had run an EQ filter on them. The Blade MP3 sounded pretty damn close to the original and the Ogg sample sounded identical the original.
It's possible that some setting I used, or the decoders involved were the cuplrits, but ogg due to it's ability to accurate reproduce sound and it's freeness won out.
We have some of the affected models here at work, but I make my own clone images sans the HP crapware.
I get tons of hits on my various sshd logs every day from hacked linux boxes running apache. Following your logic, that means linux and apache are insecure. Remember when Windows Update servers were infected? No, I don't. Care to refresh everyone's memory here by linking to a source so I can read about it? Who knows how many holes are in IIS still that just haven't been found and how many were fixed quietly and thus never reported. If there were a ton of unknown holes in IIS, IIS servers would be getting hacked left and right and everyone would know it, but they are not.
Sales are down because the economy is heading into the toilet on the heels of the worst housing market collapse in recent memory, and CompUSA is going out of business, partially because of increasing competition with online stores that offer better prices and more convenience, and partially from bad management.
Have you though about being tested for Syphilis?
Vista sucks!!!!1
Will you be my friend?
The Operation Flashpoint dedicated server bug that deleted every file of the drive that it was installed on makes this one look weak.
Wish I could find a link right now but I can't. It will quite a scene on the BI forums when that one came out.
doh. I meant to say "premium support".
Like with every other modern OS, a kernel bug is required for userspace apps to cause Windows 2000, 2003, or XP to bluescreen.
Of course, there've been a few kernel bugs in Windows!