... well, it wasn't exactly a ground-breaking article ('adminspotting' says it more succinctly), but you can bet thats one journalist who gets great tech support from now on!
Lewis Mettler is incensed in his ZDnet talkback article that the security flaw he "brought up" isn't raising SlashDot headlines around the planet. The very foundations of OpenSource aren't sinking in FUD. It comes as quite a shock to him that "almost all Linux supporters just resort to personal insults rather than address the issue."
So, why is this? Lewis's original article does raise some good points, but not new ones by any standards [1]. And his dismissal of the relevance of the problem of trust to closed-source (binary) programs is ill-founded given the ease with which an experienced person can hack binaries. Or, for that matter, replace a closed-source binary with a newly compiled open-source one.
But by far the worst problem Lewis is having with his argument is his failure to realise he is stating the obvious. Or at the very least the well known. No one with computer security knowledge can be bothered arguing, so all he's hearing from are the me-toos and ACs.
Lewis, you'll raise headlines and win the attention of serious UNIX administrators when you tell us something we don't know. And hey, you've finally got your airtime on SlashDot anyway.
[1] See "Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson. Communications of the ACM, Volume 27, Number 8, August 1984. Online at http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/ [2] ObPersonalAbuse: bgcolor="#99FF99" really sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
... well, it wasn't exactly a ground-breaking article ('adminspotting' says it more succinctly), but you can bet thats one journalist who gets great tech support from now on!
-----Sharkoid
Blah Blah me too Blah Blah
... go have a beer in celebration.
Congrats Rob but beware Creeping Featurism and or Feeping Creaturism. Beware also mixed drinks
For my money? Timezone as GMT+/- and date format as a text string as per UNIX date function.
My fave (as per always) is the only mildly perverse `date '+%Y%m%d %H%M%S'`
Lewis Mettler is incensed in his ZDnet talkback article that the security flaw he "brought up" isn't raising SlashDot headlines around the planet. The very foundations of OpenSource aren't sinking in FUD. It comes as quite a shock to him that "almost all Linux supporters just resort to personal insults rather than address the issue."
So, why is this? Lewis's original article does raise some good points, but not new ones by any standards [1]. And his dismissal of the relevance of the problem of trust to closed-source (binary) programs is ill-founded given the ease with which an experienced person can hack binaries. Or, for that matter, replace a closed-source binary with a newly compiled open-source one.
But by far the worst problem Lewis is having with his argument is his failure to realise he is stating the obvious. Or at the very least the well known. No one with computer security knowledge can be bothered arguing, so all he's hearing from are the me-toos and ACs.
Lewis, you'll raise headlines and win the attention of serious UNIX administrators when you tell us something we don't know. And hey, you've finally got your airtime on SlashDot anyway.
[1] See "Reflections on Trusting Trust", by Ken Thompson.
Communications of the ACM, Volume 27, Number 8, August 1984.
Online at http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/
[2] ObPersonalAbuse: bgcolor="#99FF99" really sucks.