Hi! What universe are you living in, and how can I get there? If the settlement and court case are making MS weak, then it sounds like a pretty good place to me.
In this reality however, the court case is supposed to make them weaker, but it's really just turned into a farce since Shrub took office. The settlement is supposed to restore balance to the market, but all it says is "MS promises not break the law for 5 years, and if they do, they promise not to break the law for 7 years"
Posting this in the US would not be a violatiuon of theDMCA except if you used some ludicrously tortured logic
No, it isn't - here's the logic.
At it's core, the DMCA protects anything that controls access to a copyrighted work in the digital domain (like on a computer). Basically, telling people how to circumvent an access control is a violation of the DMCA.
File permissions - by definition - control access to files - the Berne convention states that pretty much anything that's created by a human is protected under copyright law (like the files protected by your file permission bits.)
The detailed changelog lays out steps on how to circumvent file permissions, therefore it's in direct violation of the DMCA.
if you get access to copyrighted_file.txt, the technological measure wasn't very "effective", now was it?
*sigh*
(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
READ, PARSE, COMPREHEND.
You need some work on the last one. The meaning of the word "Effective" is spelled out.
Linux does not provide DMCA type copy protection -- PERIOD
YES, IT DOES -- PERIOD
Assuming you have a file named "copyrighted_file", which contains copyrighted text, the following command:
$ chmod 600 copyrighted_file.txt
will "effectively" prevent access to it by the system - this is all that's required under the DMCA to qualify as a "technological measure", as per section 1201-3:
(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
In layspeak: if something stops you from looking at something without someone's permission, then it 'effectively controls access'.
This is the main purpose of the +r bit in file permissions.
>2- Unicode File Traversal Vulnerability. Appeared like 1-1.5 year ago. Still some servers vulnerable
Again, sysadmin problem. Its been patched.
But it's still a problem with the OS. It doesn't matter if it's been patched or not.
>3- Melisa & IloveYou & others countlessly many Ms Word worms
Application problems, not OS problems, big difference.
But the application (IE) is (according to MS) part of the OS. The problem is that it's integrated with the OS so much that it becomes an OS problem.
3 of the 5 issues above are application issues, not OS issues.
No, one of the 5 issues about is an application issue. If MS says that IE is part of the OS, then it's part of the OS, and there's nothing you can do to refute that.
Why are we happy when something that should be handled by new technology gets taken care of by the legal system?
Because spam is a social problem, not a technological one. It doesn't matter what technological 'solutions' you come up with, if someone wants to spam you, they are going to spam you.
To me all it this says is that nobody is serious enough about SPAM to come up with a smart solution.
Spammers lie and steal - are you suggesting that meatspace laws against fraud and theft are simply a failure to come up with a technological method of preventing them?
what would you suggest?
I would suggest making spam illegal.
At best, spam is theft of service. This needs to be recognized by legislators, and codified into law. Technological 'solutions' will meet with (at best) mediocre success.
"Using a bot written by someone else to play is even lamer. That just shows you have no skill in any manner."
From the point of view of an outside observer, I can see this point. However, one of the things I used to do...
I don't see your point - you seem to be advocating using a bot (the word "however" above), but then you give an example of not using a bot.. (your example of using them as practice drones.. someone else was using them, you were not.)
Bills on the floor in the House or Senate are not laws yet. They do not affect you yet. They may never affect you.
Some of this is true, but you have to ask yourself this: "When is the right time to speak up about them?"
Waiting until after a bill becomes a law is clearly the wrong time to start protesting it. "Hey, there's a bad bill that's being debated - let's wait until after it becomes law before we tell people we don't want it!"
To quote "Saturday the 14th", it's like "bolting the barn door after the horses have eaten your children."
There's a difference between ease of administration and efficiency of administration. Linux walks all over Windows in the second category, but not in the first.
Depends on how you define 'ease'.
Last summer, (we were without a junior level admin at the time) I was off work, when I got a call from my boss - someone was unable to dial into our modem bank, so he called me to ask how to check the RADIUS logs.. I told him "ssh into the machine, cd to the log directory, and type 'grep [username] radius.log |tail'"
His comment was "wow, that was easy! Oh, and he's just typing his password wrong."
Linux... does a wonderful job of hiding the stuff you need
I think you're talking about Windows here.
I spent virtually no time maintaining machines...the machines here are no different than the machines people have at home. When they see a choice, the pick the logical one instead of shouting "I'm way over my head!!!" and calling me about it.
So what you're saying is that TCO doesn't include administration if the sysadmin doesn't do it?
Sorry Mr. Troll, but the T in TCO stands for Total - it doesn't matter if someone other than the sysadmin does it, the employees still have to be paid to do it, so thereforo you must count the time they spend in the Total Cost of Ownership.
maybe you?re just lousy at adminning Windows boxes.:)
OK, Touché.. I realize that was a cheap shot, and I apologize. (glad to see you took it in jest..)
In truth, I'm quite good at adminning Windows, although I loathe it.. even though I'm "linux only" right now, I still get calls from customers running Windows, who want me to solve a problem for them (because the consultant who's doing it now can't - I've handled situations like "the two NT machines can't talk to each other, so therefore it must be a problem with that damn Linux server you have", which (after a quick ssh session), turns out to be "one of your switches is fried - the second NT machine can't talk to _anything_ off it's physical wire")
Windows just requires too much time to admin - starting from a bare HD, I can have Slackware installed, fully configured and ready to go in under an hour. With NT or 2K, an hour would be barely enough time to get you a base install, without applications or configuration.
The idea that a Linux admin can handle more machines then a Windows admin doesn't wash with me
Then you've obviously never adminned both (or you're just lousy at it).
I personally admin over two dozen Linux servers... If we needed to, I could easily double that.. or triple it (although I wouldn't have time to read/. then:o)
16 or so of the machines I admin are squid proxies.. spread out over several thousand square kilometers.. a month ago there was a vulnerability reported in squid (not too serious - only affected unsecured boxes), and it took me about 90 minutes to patch them all, including compiling the software and testing it on our dev machine to make sure that it worked in our config (which it didn't right off the bat - some of the directives in squid.conf had changed.)
Windows does take more to config. As Malor said in another reply, scripting is everything.
They can't sue closed source software either. (Well, maybe in the US one could sue an inanimate object, but not in the rest of the world - and if they can sue closed source software, then they can just as easily sue open source software, too.)
But to address your point: in the theoretical universe that would allow them to sue a closed-source company, they could also sue an open source company. (And they might have better luck doing it, as OSS developers would probably have less funds for lawyers.)
this kind of approach to building is a fudamentally old way of getting the job done.
True, however you missed the first bit of that sentence.
It is often characterized as a fundamentally new way to develop software
Which basically means "this is how others see it", not "this is how we see it."
They didn't say that it was a new way to do things, but that others percieve it as a new way to do things.
Re:of course 15 coders makes for less bugs
on
Open Source Studies
·
· Score: 2
What I mean is that if you want to run an open source web server, you use Apache
Not necessarily. In the case of X, this is (probably) true, but there are alternatives to Apache. Take Caudium, for example. It's a fully-featured GPL web server, that has pretty much every feature Apache has, and then some. It's easier to administer (especially for people familiar with point-and-click interfaces), faster, and scales better than Apache.
Apache is much more well known, and I wouldn't recommend changing if you already use it, but if you were starting from scratch, I'd highly recommend Caudium.
OK, my first experience with the internet was in 1989. Perhaps not as long as you.
I didn't really start using it until 1994 or so, but I think you've got your history glasses set too much to the 'rose' tint.
Back in our day of the internet, nearly every server ran an open relay to.... "Relay email"
OK, but why? - simple, because that's the way it had always been.. any why had it always been like that? Because in the 'old days' (before you were online) mail servers didn't know how to talk to every other mail server on the planet.. so they left themselves 'open', to facilitate mail sending from two sites that didn't know how to get to each other.
Now that pretty much every mail server knows how to talk to every other mail server, we don't need it any more. If your mail server doesn't understand MX records, it's time for an upgrade (there have been GREAT advances in mail software in the past 25 years.)
You wanna send an email to the admin at server xyz? Log in and send him a mail. That's all.
OK, and this can't be done now why???
Closed relays don't stop anyone from sending mail to mail admins.
We understand the old ways.
I'm guessing you don't. If you did, you'd know the real reason why mail relays were left open.
(To answer the previous poster's question, Mr Gilmor keeps an open relay to permit anonymous mail. An admirable goal in theory, but given the spam problem, a questionable decision. I'm still not sure if it's right to be doing it in the 21st century.)
Red Hat and SuSE have had the excellent RPM system for a decade now, while Debian's apt-rpm system is equally impressive.
And all of them lose, hands down, when compared to Slackware's package management.
Slackware's package management (and yes, it IS package management) conforms to the principles on which Unix is based.
Instead of one (nonstandard, multifunction) tool, Slackware uses standard command line tools, such as grep, ls, and cat. These are commands that every sysadmin already knows. The package database is a list of plain text files, not a binary mishmash (I've seen Redhat people bitch about the Windows registry, and how plain text files in/etc/ are much easier to deal with, but they miss the point that they're married to the exact same concept with the RPM database.)
Ever had the RPM database become corrupt on a Redhat box?
How about if the RPM command itself gets hosed?
If you have, you'll appreciate the simplicity of Slack's system. If not, pray that you never do.
I had something like 5 kernel panics over the course of 6 months under Slack, none so far in 8 months under Debian
What did you change?
I've been running Slackware for 5 years (on a couple of dozen servers, and on my home and work desktops and laptop), and have never _once_ had a kernel panic, in any version (from 3.0, up to and including Slack 8.1)
Performance was fine too - I don't know what you mean by "significantly better performance", perforance doing what?
crontab entry to do updates from security.debian.org can do them unassisted
You've never run an important box then, because no sysadmin worth his salt would ever trust something as critical as security updates to an automated process. You manually test each update on an offline machine to make sure nothing breaks (like maybe the config file changed?), then deploy it on the live machines. Trusting software install to a script is just asking for trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
this settlement and court case makes them weak
Hi! What universe are you living in, and how can I get there? If the settlement and court case are making MS weak, then it sounds like a pretty good place to me.
In this reality however, the court case is supposed to make them weaker, but it's really just turned into a farce since Shrub took office. The settlement is supposed to restore balance to the market, but all it says is "MS promises not break the law for 5 years, and if they do, they promise not to break the law for 7 years"
It's really quite pathetic.
Posting this in the US would not be a violatiuon of theDMCA except if you used some ludicrously tortured logic
No, it isn't - here's the logic.
At it's core, the DMCA protects anything that controls access to a copyrighted work in the digital domain (like on a computer). Basically, telling people how to circumvent an access control is a violation of the DMCA.
File permissions - by definition - control access to files - the Berne convention states that pretty much anything that's created by a human is protected under copyright law (like the files protected by your file permission bits.)
The detailed changelog lays out steps on how to circumvent file permissions, therefore it's in direct violation of the DMCA.
if you get access to copyrighted_file.txt, the technological measure wasn't very "effective", now was it?
*sigh*
(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
READ, PARSE, COMPREHEND.
You need some work on the last one. The meaning of the word "Effective" is spelled out.
Linux does not provide DMCA type copy protection -- PERIOD
YES, IT DOES -- PERIOD
Assuming you have a file named "copyrighted_file", which contains copyrighted text, the following command:
$ chmod 600 copyrighted_file.txt
will "effectively" prevent access to it by the system - this is all that's required under the DMCA to qualify as a "technological measure", as per section 1201-3:
(B) a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
In layspeak: if something stops you from looking at something without someone's permission, then it 'effectively controls access'.
This is the main purpose of the +r bit in file permissions.
The other example, that of the Mexican doctor, was promptly repudiated by the, yes, US court.
So you're saying that this means it didn't happen?
Reminds me of Big Brother - "It didn't happen because we say it didn't happen!"
how often, exactly does the US send people to another country to "kidnap" someone we want to put on trial?
You ask this question, then provide two examples.
So to spell things out for you, the answer would be "too often."
>2- Unicode File Traversal Vulnerability. Appeared like 1-1.5 year ago. Still some servers vulnerable
Again, sysadmin problem. Its been patched.
But it's still a problem with the OS. It doesn't matter if it's been patched or not.
>3- Melisa & IloveYou & others countlessly many Ms Word worms
Application problems, not OS problems, big difference.
But the application (IE) is (according to MS) part of the OS. The problem is that it's integrated with the OS so much that it becomes an OS problem.
3 of the 5 issues above are application issues, not OS issues.
No, one of the 5 issues about is an application issue. If MS says that IE is part of the OS, then it's part of the OS, and there's nothing you can do to refute that.
Why are we happy when something that should be handled by new technology gets taken care of by the legal system?
Because spam is a social problem, not a technological one. It doesn't matter what technological 'solutions' you come up with, if someone wants to spam you, they are going to spam you.
To me all it this says is that nobody is serious enough about SPAM to come up with a smart solution.
Spammers lie and steal - are you suggesting that meatspace laws against fraud and theft are simply a failure to come up with a technological method of preventing them?
what would you suggest?
I would suggest making spam illegal.
At best, spam is theft of service. This needs to be recognized by legislators, and codified into law. Technological 'solutions' will meet with (at best) mediocre success.
"Using a bot written by someone else to play is even lamer. That just shows you have no skill in any manner."
From the point of view of an outside observer, I can see this point. However, one of the things I used to do...
I don't see your point - you seem to be advocating using a bot (the word "however" above), but then you give an example of not using a bot.. (your example of using them as practice drones.. someone else was using them, you were not.)
So.. why is it OK to use a bot again?
Bills on the floor in the House or Senate are not laws yet. They do not affect you yet. They may never affect you.
Some of this is true, but you have to ask yourself this: "When is the right time to speak up about them?"
Waiting until after a bill becomes a law is clearly the wrong time to start protesting it. "Hey, there's a bad bill that's being debated - let's wait until after it becomes law before we tell people we don't want it!"
To quote "Saturday the 14th", it's like "bolting the barn door after the horses have eaten your children."
There's a difference between ease of administration and efficiency of administration. Linux walks all over Windows in the second category, but not in the first.
Depends on how you define 'ease'.
Last summer, (we were without a junior level admin at the time) I was off work, when I got a call from my boss - someone was unable to dial into our modem bank, so he called me to ask how to check the RADIUS logs.. I told him "ssh into the machine, cd to the log directory, and type 'grep [username] radius.log |tail'"
His comment was "wow, that was easy! Oh, and he's just typing his password wrong."
Linux ... does a wonderful job of hiding the stuff you need
...the machines here are no different than the machines people have at home. When they see a choice, the pick the logical one instead of shouting "I'm way over my head!!!" and calling me about it.
I think you're talking about Windows here.
I spent virtually no time maintaining machines
So what you're saying is that TCO doesn't include administration if the sysadmin doesn't do it?
Sorry Mr. Troll, but the T in TCO stands for Total - it doesn't matter if someone other than the sysadmin does it, the employees still have to be paid to do it, so thereforo you must count the time they spend in the Total Cost of Ownership.
maybe you?re just lousy at adminning Windows boxes. :)
OK, Touché.. I realize that was a cheap shot, and I apologize. (glad to see you took it in jest..)
In truth, I'm quite good at adminning Windows, although I loathe it.. even though I'm "linux only" right now, I still get calls from customers running Windows, who want me to solve a problem for them (because the consultant who's doing it now can't - I've handled situations like "the two NT machines can't talk to each other, so therefore it must be a problem with that damn Linux server you have", which (after a quick ssh session), turns out to be "one of your switches is fried - the second NT machine can't talk to _anything_ off it's physical wire")
Windows just requires too much time to admin - starting from a bare HD, I can have Slackware installed, fully configured and ready to go in under an hour. With NT or 2K, an hour would be barely enough time to get you a base install, without applications or configuration.
The idea that a Linux admin can handle more machines then a Windows admin doesn't wash with me
/. then :o)
Then you've obviously never adminned both (or you're just lousy at it).
I personally admin over two dozen Linux servers... If we needed to, I could easily double that.. or triple it (although I wouldn't have time to read
16 or so of the machines I admin are squid proxies.. spread out over several thousand square kilometers.. a month ago there was a vulnerability reported in squid (not too serious - only affected unsecured boxes), and it took me about 90 minutes to patch them all, including compiling the software and testing it on our dev machine to make sure that it worked in our config (which it didn't right off the bat - some of the directives in squid.conf had changed.)
Windows does take more to config. As Malor said in another reply, scripting is everything.
I'd like to see projects that have deadlines that HAVE to be met
What happens when you have a closed source software deadline that HAS to be met?
You get Windows 95.
They can't sue OSS.
They can't sue closed source software either. (Well, maybe in the US one could sue an inanimate object, but not in the rest of the world - and if they can sue closed source software, then they can just as easily sue open source software, too.)
But to address your point: in the theoretical universe that would allow them to sue a closed-source company, they could also sue an open source company. (And they might have better luck doing it, as OSS developers would probably have less funds for lawyers.)
this kind of approach to building is a fudamentally old way of getting the job done.
True, however you missed the first bit of that sentence.
It is often characterized as a fundamentally new way to develop software
Which basically means "this is how others see it", not "this is how we see it."
They didn't say that it was a new way to do things, but that others percieve it as a new way to do things.
What I mean is that if you want to run an open source web server, you use Apache
Not necessarily. In the case of X, this is (probably) true, but there are alternatives to Apache. Take Caudium, for example. It's a fully-featured GPL web server, that has pretty much every feature Apache has, and then some. It's easier to administer (especially for people familiar with point-and-click interfaces), faster, and scales better than Apache.
Apache is much more well known, and I wouldn't recommend changing if you already use it, but if you were starting from scratch, I'd highly recommend Caudium.
OK, my first experience with the internet was in 1989. Perhaps not as long as you.
I didn't really start using it until 1994 or so, but I think you've got your history glasses set too much to the 'rose' tint.
Back in our day of the internet, nearly every server ran an open relay to.... "Relay email"
OK, but why? - simple, because that's the way it had always been.. any why had it always been like that? Because in the 'old days' (before you were online) mail servers didn't know how to talk to every other mail server on the planet.. so they left themselves 'open', to facilitate mail sending from two sites that didn't know how to get to each other.
Now that pretty much every mail server knows how to talk to every other mail server, we don't need it any more. If your mail server doesn't understand MX records, it's time for an upgrade (there have been GREAT advances in mail software in the past 25 years.)
You wanna send an email to the admin at server xyz? Log in and send him a mail. That's all.
OK, and this can't be done now why???
Closed relays don't stop anyone from sending mail to mail admins.
We understand the old ways.
I'm guessing you don't. If you did, you'd know the real reason why mail relays were left open.
(To answer the previous poster's question, Mr Gilmor keeps an open relay to permit anonymous mail. An admirable goal in theory, but given the spam problem, a questionable decision. I'm still not sure if it's right to be doing it in the 21st century.)
What are nets used for?
Keeping hair out of your McBurger?
found out severl people were going as lions
I once went as a lion, but I wore a polka-dot shirt and pants, and carried a sign that read "do not feed".
When people asked me what I was, I said I was just carrying the "Sign on the dotted lion."
Another time I wrapped myself in tinfoil and wore a chicken head.
Nobody got that one at all - (Silver Poulet)
No he's not being denied access.
Yes, he is being denied access. He can't access the site because the site doesn't work with his screen reader software.
It's more as if you were allowed into Target, but were physically unable to spend money, or something.
And this isn't discrimination because????
Red Hat and SuSE have had the excellent RPM system for a decade now, while Debian's apt-rpm system is equally impressive.
/etc/ are much easier to deal with, but they miss the point that they're married to the exact same concept with the RPM database.)
And all of them lose, hands down, when compared to Slackware's package management.
Slackware's package management (and yes, it IS package management) conforms to the principles on which Unix is based.
Instead of one (nonstandard, multifunction) tool, Slackware uses standard command line tools, such as grep, ls, and cat. These are commands that every sysadmin already knows. The package database is a list of plain text files, not a binary mishmash (I've seen Redhat people bitch about the Windows registry, and how plain text files in
Ever had the RPM database become corrupt on a Redhat box?
How about if the RPM command itself gets hosed?
If you have, you'll appreciate the simplicity of Slack's system. If not, pray that you never do.
i try to abstain from being a smart-ass but outages are normal?
:o)
Well, this is Worldcom
I had something like 5 kernel panics over the course of 6 months under Slack, none so far in 8 months under Debian
What did you change?
I've been running Slackware for 5 years (on a couple of dozen servers, and on my home and work desktops and laptop), and have never _once_ had a kernel panic, in any version (from 3.0, up to and including Slack 8.1)
Performance was fine too - I don't know what you mean by "significantly better performance", perforance doing what?
crontab entry to do updates from security.debian.org can do them unassisted
You've never run an important box then, because no sysadmin worth his salt would ever trust something as critical as security updates to an automated process. You manually test each update on an offline machine to make sure nothing breaks (like maybe the config file changed?), then deploy it on the live machines. Trusting software install to a script is just asking for trouble.