I had specifically told it what drive to install itself on and it instead installed on a different drive, wiping out my MacOS 9 partition, but I don't hold a grudge about that
Don't hold a grudge? Hell, that sounds to me like a feature.
Well, there are more companies than just Red Hat trying to make money off of Linux. Off the top of my head, I can name Transgaming, Suse, Mandrake, VA Software, Loki, Corel, and Lindows. I'm sure there are more, but I'm tired and very sick right now. But just using those companies, it's a pretty scary picture.
Mandrake, Corel, and VA Software are all losing money. It's particularly impressive just how proud VA is that they've only lost 3.7 million in the first quarter this year, as opposed to the 9.8 million they lost first quarter last year. And you can't exactly claim it's starting losses either, all 3 have been around for years.
Transgaming doesn't have financial information on their site, but they're a tiny (20 employees according to this June article) private Canadian company. While that's great for those 20 people, I don't think selling access to freely distributable software and asking people not to distribute it is really a scalable business model. Lindows is apparently another small (they claim 50 employees when trying to explain why they charge for click-n-run, who knows if it's accurate or not.) private company.
SUSE may be the only other major profitable company there, I can't really tell since they also don't list financial information. (At least, not on their English site, and not that I could find on their German site with Babelfish.)
So, out of 8 Linux companies, one is (maybe 2 are, if SUSE is good.) large and profitable, 2 are small and private, 3 are large and losing money, and one already went bankrupt. Still not enough to really mean anything, but not quite as happy a picture as just considering Red Hat.
It's too bad the original poster didn't actually read the article, since it's pretty clear that they are not talking about a new encoding for barcodes, they are talking about replacing barcodes with rfid chips. (See the very first paragraph of the article, "which could someday replace with a microchip the series of black vertical lines found on most merchandise", or the group's website) This is ground we've covered a dozen times. Oh, well, I guess that's to be expected for stories Michael posts.
If you look at what cellphones have done to the telecom industry, you can see how only when consumer choice enters the equation do companies get on the "more for less" bandwagon.
You're absolutely right. Now, go invent non-lethal wireless power distribution:)
I got to spend most of the day playing with this. Turns out this is msblast. The '60 seconds to reboot' thing only affects XP, not 2k. The reason we were getting these strange symptoms and nothing for the virus scanners to catch is that this is a failed msblast. The buffer overflow hit, but failed to download the payload through tftp. (Yes! Finally, an advantage to having your WAN links running at 750% of capacity - virus-induced TFTP transfers fail!) We found that installing MS03-026 on the system and rebooting cleared the weird behavior, and for one or two that did actually manage to download the actual virus file, Trend's newer virus defs find it and kill it mercilessly (even removing the registry entry.)(Trend pattern file v606, released yesterday, supposedly found msblast, but we didn't see any actual detections until v608 came out today. Could have just been that none of the machines had downloaded it yet yesterday...)
Hope this helps the people who had similar symptoms.
Yeah, yeah, it's bad form to reply to yourself. But I'm leaving for the night so I figured I'd post a few more details I remember in case it helps anybody else.
If the worm we got autostarts anything, it uses one of the sneakier methods. I didn't check the ini files, but I did check out both run and both runonce keys and there was nothing unexpected in any of them. File sizes and dates on the files that were there matched a clean system (although that's not a guarantee, I didn't run checksums). The damage to explorer, IE, and Word did survive a reboot, however, so it modifies something on the system. We had the system up for the better part of an hour on the network, watching ethereal on the switch's mirror port, and didn't see any strange traffic, so I don't know what triggers it's spread. The dial-in client that was one of the original vectors had been connected for something like 8 hours when it started scanning, and we are it's internet access so it couldn't have been (easily) infected from outside today without us seeing it (we were monitoring after central's exchange server went boom), so I strongly suspect it's got a timer or trigger to start scanning. (Maybe idle time? It started roughly half an hour after they closed for the night, hence us kicking them off and revoking their dial-in privliges instead of just calling them.) I didn't catch any actual infections in the packet dumps, only scans after the vulnerable machines had already been hit, so I don't have a network dump, but I'll hook an infected machine to the test network in the morning and try to get one. If I can talk the manager into leaving me alone for long enough I'll try to get it to infect a dummy machine I've imaged and see exactly what changes it makes. Anyways, good luck to anyone still playing with these things.
I'm an admin for a local County department. While our network was mostly unaffected (I'll get to that in a second), the county's Central IS department, that runs the county backbone from which we get our internet feed, had their exchange 5.5 box (on nt4 - not patchable) go down sometime really early this morning.
My department's network consists almost entirely of win2k boxes with the odd 9x client at some of the less well funded sites. We've got a dozen 2k servers and roughly 300 workstations, the vast majority of which were patched, and a restrictive firewall. Today we got hit by a worm for the first time, from another county department (behind the firewall), and from a dial-in client at a charity who uses one of our databases. I blocked port 135 from the rest of the county and terminated that dialin client, and started checking out the few boxes we knew hadn't been patched yet. I want to stress that the worm that hit us was not the MSBlast thing everyone's talking about. It doesn't shut down the machine (although it seems to crash the RPC service ~50% of the time). It's not detected by Trend's newest definitions (that include msblast), or by Symantec's msblast remover tool. Whatever it was, it did a number on those workstations and we left them unplugged from the network pending figuring out what the hell is wrong with them.
It seems to spread the same way, scanning network ranges (apparently at random - when the dialin client finished scanning our block it went on to start scanning 5.69.something) on port 135 and attempting to infect any it hit. One thing to note is that is crashed the RPC service on a couple of fully patched clients, but for most of them it had no effect. On the ones that it did infect (IE, the ones that weren't patched), it disabled file copying through the GUI (both drag&drop and copy&paste). It also disables a number of odd things, mostly dialogs, like IE's "Find (on this page)" Between those two I suspect it infected at least one system DLL. Something it did didn't agree with Word, which would popup up an error on creating a new document, saying that the document could not be registered, so other documents would not be able to link to this one. I didn't spend too much time on it (There were only a few unpatched boxes, we took them offline and went home), but I didn't find any reference anywhere to this. It wasn't scanning out from the infected machines, so it may have a time delay or something built in.
So, first, the people in the story weren't the first government agency to be affected, by far (although none of our public services were affected AFAIK). And second, has anyone else seen a second RPC worm going around? Or is this some mutated version of msblast?
Q: What is in the fluid?
A: A water based non-toxic liquid that is similar to the fluid used in special effects fog machines. The Fluid consists of Distilled Water, Glycerin (a USP kosher food additive) and Propylene Glycol (a USP kosher food additive ).
Why not just program the existing scroll wheel so that when held down, it behaves like the "hand" tool in Photoshop. Press down the middle button, and then drag the document around the window.
Logitech and MS's windows mouse drivers both already have options to do that. Internet Explorer has that built in even if you don't use the driver option. And you can get the Autoscroll extension to do the same thing in Firebird. There's probably a way to do it in straight mozilla too, but I haven't tried it since Phoenix 0.5 came out:)
I wonder if the submitter even read the article, or just skimmed it. If you actually read the article you'll see the line "The Linux desktops mostly belonged to developers or quality assurance and technical support staffers responsible for supporting our company's software on Linux." In other words, this isn't some random company, it's a software company that writes software for linux. No wonder they're seeing installs.
Oh, and to actually answer the question, I run a 350 workstation.gov network and haven't seen a single linux install. (There's 1 apple, though.)
Was it in Back to School where, during the movie they had a progrsion of students leaving tape recorders in their seat instead of attending of class, and by then end even the proffesor was replaced by a tape recorder?
The idea of having a robot attend meetings for you (or touring and inspecting factories, repairing computers, or any other task that normally requires physical presence but doesn't justify travel) is called telepresence, and people have been working on it for years and years. For example, here's a rather sophisticated 386-based telepresence robot from 1995. That happens to be the very first hit out of 39,100 if you look for telepresence at Google.
(This comment has been stripped of it's MS-bashing nature, because really, if you don't like them you don't need me to explicitly point out that they're reinventing the wheel, and if you do like them you'll ignore it anyways...)
What if people wanted to leave the list? Would they have to return thier organs? If not, people could join if they needed organs, get the organs, then quit.
They already have a rule to (somewhat) alleviate this - there's a 180 day waiting period after you join before you qulify to receive preferential access to other member's organs. See their FAQ, 6th question.
While I don't know the particulars of how it started, one of the organizations I support at work is a vocational high school that has a bunch of equipment from E-Rate. They've got ~20 PCs total in 2 labs in different buildings, 2 Cisco Catalyst 2924 switches, one in each lab connected by gig fiber, and a Cisco 3640 handling a T1 back to our main office. So if that's where the "Universal Service" fee is going, I'm OK with it. Of course, they've also got a Cisco 4600 series CDM, and a pair of 500 series CEs. They seem to think those are VCRs, but they've never actually used them. So that's like $35,000 worth of E-Rate money going to waste. (Although they do actually have some use for the equipment, they just don't know how to use it, I'm working on it...)
It could mean that your installed DSL line could have several different choices of ISP's instead of just the ISP officially supported by the telephone company, which will lead to price competition and eventually monthly pricing more akin to dial-up pricing (e.g., US$20 to US$22 per month unlimited access).
I don't know about SBC's area, but for anyone else stuck in Qwest's area (I feel for you, really) you can already pick from multiple ISPs. Qwest has their ISP list so you can see who's available. I have unlimited 640k/256k access for $19.95 a month from these guys.
Dude, what do you think you're doing? Slashdot trolls aren't supposed to admit they're adolescents! Next thing you know people will start putting honest answers on the polls, and then the whole world will collapse!
No matter what they do, DoubleClick will always, repeatedly, be able to claim a mistrial for conflict of interest. After all, where in the US are you going to find a Judge that doesn't hate banner ads? (Then again, maybe that's why they filed it in PA...)
Re:I have said it before and I will say it again..
on
In Pursuit Of A Spammer
·
· Score: 5, Funny
What really bothers me about spam is that they have to be so cowardly about it and spoof source email addresses like kajfaiojiu@iouem.com.
On behalf of my good friend Kaj Faiojiu, webmaster of iouem.com, I'd like to ask you not to post his email address in public.
Slashdot Mirror
Mandrake, Corel, and VA Software are all losing money. It's particularly impressive just how proud VA is that they've only lost 3.7 million in the first quarter this year, as opposed to the 9.8 million they lost first quarter last year. And you can't exactly claim it's starting losses either, all 3 have been around for years.
Transgaming doesn't have financial information on their site, but they're a tiny (20 employees according to this June article) private Canadian company. While that's great for those 20 people, I don't think selling access to freely distributable software and asking people not to distribute it is really a scalable business model. Lindows is apparently another small (they claim 50 employees when trying to explain why they charge for click-n-run, who knows if it's accurate or not.) private company.
And Loki... You know.
SUSE may be the only other major profitable company there, I can't really tell since they also don't list financial information. (At least, not on their English site, and not that I could find on their German site with Babelfish.)
So, out of 8 Linux companies, one is (maybe 2 are, if SUSE is good.) large and profitable, 2 are small and private, 3 are large and losing money, and one already went bankrupt. Still not enough to really mean anything, but not quite as happy a picture as just considering Red Hat.
It's too bad the original poster didn't actually read the article, since it's pretty clear that they are not talking about a new encoding for barcodes, they are talking about replacing barcodes with rfid chips. (See the very first paragraph of the article, "which could someday replace with a microchip the series of black vertical lines found on most merchandise", or the group's website) This is ground we've covered a dozen times. Oh, well, I guess that's to be expected for stories Michael posts.
sqr(10 * the answer to life, the universe, and everything ^ 3)
the answer to life, the universe, and everything!
(the answer to life, the universe, and everything * the mass of the earth) / 1 googol
Yes, I've heard of that... Precursor to the internet, incredible bandwidth but insane latency, right?
You're absolutely right. Now, go invent non-lethal wireless power distribution :)
I got to spend most of the day playing with this. Turns out this is msblast. The '60 seconds to reboot' thing only affects XP, not 2k. The reason we were getting these strange symptoms and nothing for the virus scanners to catch is that this is a failed msblast. The buffer overflow hit, but failed to download the payload through tftp. (Yes! Finally, an advantage to having your WAN links running at 750% of capacity - virus-induced TFTP transfers fail!) We found that installing MS03-026 on the system and rebooting cleared the weird behavior, and for one or two that did actually manage to download the actual virus file, Trend's newer virus defs find it and kill it mercilessly (even removing the registry entry.)(Trend pattern file v606, released yesterday, supposedly found msblast, but we didn't see any actual detections until v608 came out today. Could have just been that none of the machines had downloaded it yet yesterday...)
Hope this helps the people who had similar symptoms.
If the worm we got autostarts anything, it uses one of the sneakier methods. I didn't check the ini files, but I did check out both run and both runonce keys and there was nothing unexpected in any of them. File sizes and dates on the files that were there matched a clean system (although that's not a guarantee, I didn't run checksums). The damage to explorer, IE, and Word did survive a reboot, however, so it modifies something on the system. We had the system up for the better part of an hour on the network, watching ethereal on the switch's mirror port, and didn't see any strange traffic, so I don't know what triggers it's spread. The dial-in client that was one of the original vectors had been connected for something like 8 hours when it started scanning, and we are it's internet access so it couldn't have been (easily) infected from outside today without us seeing it (we were monitoring after central's exchange server went boom), so I strongly suspect it's got a timer or trigger to start scanning. (Maybe idle time? It started roughly half an hour after they closed for the night, hence us kicking them off and revoking their dial-in privliges instead of just calling them.) I didn't catch any actual infections in the packet dumps, only scans after the vulnerable machines had already been hit, so I don't have a network dump, but I'll hook an infected machine to the test network in the morning and try to get one. If I can talk the manager into leaving me alone for long enough I'll try to get it to infect a dummy machine I've imaged and see exactly what changes it makes. Anyways, good luck to anyone still playing with these things.
My department's network consists almost entirely of win2k boxes with the odd 9x client at some of the less well funded sites. We've got a dozen 2k servers and roughly 300 workstations, the vast majority of which were patched, and a restrictive firewall. Today we got hit by a worm for the first time, from another county department (behind the firewall), and from a dial-in client at a charity who uses one of our databases. I blocked port 135 from the rest of the county and terminated that dialin client, and started checking out the few boxes we knew hadn't been patched yet. I want to stress that the worm that hit us was not the MSBlast thing everyone's talking about. It doesn't shut down the machine (although it seems to crash the RPC service ~50% of the time). It's not detected by Trend's newest definitions (that include msblast), or by Symantec's msblast remover tool. Whatever it was, it did a number on those workstations and we left them unplugged from the network pending figuring out what the hell is wrong with them.
It seems to spread the same way, scanning network ranges (apparently at random - when the dialin client finished scanning our block it went on to start scanning 5.69.something) on port 135 and attempting to infect any it hit. One thing to note is that is crashed the RPC service on a couple of fully patched clients, but for most of them it had no effect. On the ones that it did infect (IE, the ones that weren't patched), it disabled file copying through the GUI (both drag&drop and copy&paste). It also disables a number of odd things, mostly dialogs, like IE's "Find (on this page)" Between those two I suspect it infected at least one system DLL. Something it did didn't agree with Word, which would popup up an error on creating a new document, saying that the document could not be registered, so other documents would not be able to link to this one. I didn't spend too much time on it (There were only a few unpatched boxes, we took them offline and went home), but I didn't find any reference anywhere to this. It wasn't scanning out from the infected machines, so it may have a time delay or something built in.
So, first, the people in the story weren't the first government agency to be affected, by far (although none of our public services were affected AFAIK). And second, has anyone else seen a second RPC worm going around? Or is this some mutated version of msblast?
Q: What is in the fluid?
A: A water based non-toxic liquid that is similar to the fluid used in special effects fog machines. The Fluid consists of Distilled Water, Glycerin (a USP kosher food additive) and Propylene Glycol (a USP kosher food additive ).
I believe you want YASQL, then.
Logitech and MS's windows mouse drivers both already have options to do that. Internet Explorer has that built in even if you don't use the driver option. And you can get the Autoscroll extension to do the same thing in Firebird. There's probably a way to do it in straight mozilla too, but I haven't tried it since Phoenix 0.5 came out :)
Oh, and to actually answer the question, I run a 350 workstation .gov network and haven't seen a single linux install. (There's 1 apple, though.)
Actually, I believe that was from Real Genius...
(This comment has been stripped of it's MS-bashing nature, because really, if you don't like them you don't need me to explicitly point out that they're reinventing the wheel, and if you do like them you'll ignore it anyways...)
Congratulations, you just figured out what the rest of mean when we say 'conservative'. You're a little late, but welcome to the party anyways.
That would be the job of the person receiving your resumes.
They already have a rule to (somewhat) alleviate this - there's a 180 day waiting period after you join before you qulify to receive preferential access to other member's organs. See their FAQ, 6th question.
While I don't know the particulars of how it started, one of the organizations I support at work is a vocational high school that has a bunch of equipment from E-Rate. They've got ~20 PCs total in 2 labs in different buildings, 2 Cisco Catalyst 2924 switches, one in each lab connected by gig fiber, and a Cisco 3640 handling a T1 back to our main office. So if that's where the "Universal Service" fee is going, I'm OK with it. Of course, they've also got a Cisco 4600 series CDM, and a pair of 500 series CEs. They seem to think those are VCRs, but they've never actually used them. So that's like $35,000 worth of E-Rate money going to waste. (Although they do actually have some use for the equipment, they just don't know how to use it, I'm working on it...)
I don't know about SBC's area, but for anyone else stuck in Qwest's area (I feel for you, really) you can already pick from multiple ISPs. Qwest has their ISP list so you can see who's available. I have unlimited 640k/256k access for $19.95 a month from these guys.
Dude, what do you think you're doing? Slashdot trolls aren't supposed to admit they're adolescents! Next thing you know people will start putting honest answers on the polls, and then the whole world will collapse!
No matter what they do, DoubleClick will always, repeatedly, be able to claim a mistrial for conflict of interest. After all, where in the US are you going to find a Judge that doesn't hate banner ads? (Then again, maybe that's why they filed it in PA...)
On behalf of my good friend Kaj Faiojiu, webmaster of iouem.com, I'd like to ask you not to post his email address in public.
Thanks.
I suspect that either you're in some utopian dreamland, or you forgot the word 'not' between 'are' and 'stupid'...