Good furniture costs money, so be prepared to fork it over.
I was in the same position about a month ago, I was tired of spending ~300 bucks every 3 years for a new chair.
I decided on a Herman Miller Eames Aluminum Group Softpad Management chair. Looks good, very comfortable. Comfort improves with age in the same way a baseball mitt does.
Also, 12 year warranty.
A bit south of 2k, but I've seen them on ebay used for around 600ish.
You're right that those things would cause an increase in the price of oil, but not to the extent it has. The real issue is that the Fed is loaning money out below the cost of inflation, basically paying people to borrow money.
This causes people to do hugely leveraged buys of commodities, such as oil futures. It's a bubble, just like tech stocks and housing.
It should be. Protecting the right of speech that no one disagrees with is pretty much pointless. The tone of this article is hilariously ironic however. Almost worthy of being in The Onion.
Exercise triggers many chemical reactions that will quell phantom hunger as well. Yes, if you're generally in a "fasting" state and you're exercising, you will be hungrier but your body will also not require you to completely fill the expenditure with food.
Aerobic exercise is often not effective at creating fat loss. Generally, you're not going to have enough stamina to really work off a meaningful amount of calories. Aerobic work also works off muscle glycogen, which doesn't replace well from stored fat. (That's where post-exercise hunger goes to). Now, switch this to an extended work-out period of more than an hour and you can see very good results once you burn past your stored glycogen, just be prepared for the "bonk".
Anaerobic exercise however will burn fat, and does actually allow targeted fat loss. This is pretty much why high-intensity interval training does lead to fairly rapid fat loss. Weight training, same thing.
A lot of people (dare I say, most) actually won't see ANY weight loss initially when exercising, they'll be replacing fat with lean mass.
This is a case of the cure being worse than the disease. You're plan here would prevent interested 3rd parties from commenting about elections in pay-for media. I grant you that there are major and huge abuses in our current system. Interested third parties aren't and won't always be shills for a particular political party, and they need to have their rights to speak out for or against our potential leaders protected. The restriction on freedom of speech for your option is unacceptable.
The real cure to this would be to have an educated and interested populace of active voters. People who will stand up with their vote and demand the current political process of demonizing isn't what we expect out of people we are putting into power. Unfortunatly, that will never happen in our lifetime. Legislation is the wrong answer to 99 out of 100 questions.
Did the liberal facist camp hire a parrot that can type? I swear I see the same nonsensical response to such a variety of issues it must have.
Please take your brain and look outside the monoculture of whatever college campus you reside. Hold onto whatever ideas you wish, but back them with knowledge instead of replying with drivel. Leaked documents from unknown sources aren't very convincing. I shudder to think of what reasons you are attributing Bush to have for launching an agressive war.
The UN is the "United Nations" The security council of the "United Nations" passed quite a number of resolutions pressing Iraq to comply with the conditions of their surrender in the first Gulf War. The lack of will to enforce their resolutions and the terms of the surrender lead to the Iraq war. The actions of France in particular lead to Sadam's incorrect notion that he was going to get ANOTHER pass this time around. His personal history illustrated that he would not bend to any pressure unless backed into a corner. With France busy tearing down any corners in sight, the only thing left was to evict him from power.
I hope the EU finds itself powerful. Frankly I'm tired of having to foot the bill for the US playing the world's janitor. I doubt most of Western Europe will ever again hold real power. They would have to dismantle the socialist welfare states they have built up while resting comfortably within our protection during the cold war. Unlikely.
An unusually articulate AC wrote: Since the United States knew he had WMDs, then where are they? The UN report stated that there were no WMDs in Iraq.
Everyone knew they HAD them. They USED them for cripes sake. The issue most people (in the WORLD, not just the US) were mistaken about was if Sadam STILL had them. There were no records of the destruction of the WMD stockpiles we KNEW he had. Either they were actually destroyed and noone recorded the fact or they are still missing.
AC wrote: What does the war in Iraq have to do with 9/11?
9/11 demonstrated how much ignoring problems can cost. The war isn't on Al Qaeda, it's on terrorism. Saddam clearly was a sponser of terrorism, even if he didn't sponser Al Qaeda. Sadam was defying the UN and generally acting like he was hiding something from the rest of the world. He had and had used chemical weapons in the past. He had been attempting to obtain nuclear materials in the past. He had an adamant hatred toward the U.S. All of these factors put him high on the list of threats to the U.S. If we really are fighting a war on terror to prevent future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, Iraq was the next logical target after the Afghanistan. The war had nothing to with oil beyond the fact that Iraq's oil gave Sadam more potential to be a threat to the world than if he did not have that wealth to fall upon. Take of the tin foil hat my friend, at least when it comes to foreign policy.
And yes, we used to support Sadam over Iraq. To be honest, the party line of the Baathist party is a much more comfortable fit to traditional US values than what I fear even the new Iraq government will bring to the table.
War is a terrible thing, but it is an inevitable result of the world we live in.
SB5 Wrote: Funny how Pakistan, India, North Korea, China have been seeking WMD but we aren't doing shit about that.
Pakistan, India, N. Korea and China weren't defeated after an agressive incursion into a neighboring country and forced to sign an agreement to surrender their rights to own certain weapon systems in order to preserve their governance.
The key reason the "consensus" was that Iraq had undisclosed WMD was that we know they had them. They used them against Iran and the Kurdish region. There were no credible records of their destruction after the first Gulf War. Why would Sadam destroy weapons to fulfill the surrender terms and not record the details of their destruction? It's seems that is what happened.
Let me also remind everyone who finds it easy to forget, Sadam had kicked out the inspectors. He only let them back in when the US started sending troops to the border, and he never complied with all the conditions for the inspections.
The Iraq war happened because 9/11 showed what can happen when threats are not taken seriously enough. It also happened because the UN has become a paper tiger. If the UN had a backbone, war might have been avoided. Even Sadam might have quailed if the security council had been prepaired to enforce their own resolutions.
Re:hmm, free copying...
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 1
You can read thousands and thousands of books for free. Look in you phone book for something called a "library".
Honestly, if they are going to charge me per byte of traffic, I'm going to need to see itemized lists of what they are charging me for.
Just being on my current cable network invites floods of port scans, let alone the amount of traffic Code Red generated Who's going to be billed for that? Unless they have the infrastructure to track only bandwidth resulting from user requests I can see a lot of mischarging here.
You sound like various sales people I've run into. None of which were able to pass a simple blind test between generic 12gauge cable and 12gauge high end monster cable. Or between a 99.00 monster svid cable and a 12 dollar one.
Cable doesn't have to be expensive to work you know. Rip the power cord from any lamp and use it for speaker cable, you'll never know the difference.
* Everyone and their dog will recommend using cables that are as short as possible. This is far less important than using high-quality cables . I personally use and recommend Monster Cable brand's highest quality offerings as a bare minimum. It's expensive, but it's truly worth it, and you can still use relatively long cables to allow yourself some slack
Monster Cable, the audiophiles modern day snake oil. Monster cable is to audio what huge mufflers are to ricers. There may be a small difference, but your money is better spent where the price/performance ratio is better. (amps / speakers)
Bugtraq does not always get NT bugs. NT-Bugtraq gets the majority of them. NT-Bugtraq was founded when the users of Bugtraq became irate at the volume of NT related traffic. Generally unless it's a fairly major bug it won't appear on the generic Bugtraq.
End of Days: Not every movie has to have a deep meaning or good acting. End of Days is a typical Arnold flick. Good action with enough plot to get by. Fun movie to watch, lots of skin shown. Won't ever qualify in my list of favorite movies, but worth the price of admission to be sure.
Being J.M.: This is probably the most origional movie I have seen in a fairly long time, and one of the better movies this year. I dare you to watch this movie and not laugh. Just imagining all the actors having to jump off something by the New Jersey Turnpike and landing hard in the ditch makes me smile. Acting was good, with Diaz actually holding up well with a character that doesn't fit with a normal Diaz role. I applaud.
We looked at PGP, and we looked at the SMIME variants. The latter, IIRC, suffers from from a recent Netscape/Microsoft implementation divergence making the one's keys incompatible with the other's (how surprising!).
Actually, this is a bit less nefarious than you think. S-MIME clients are in the process of being upgraded to allow dual key-pair implentations of certificates. It was noted that a single key-pair won't cut it for non-repudiation on systems were key recovery is in force. You therefor need to support an encrypting and a signing pair. There are incompatibilities arising in S-MIME because of this. Hopefully it will resolve itself as more people upgrade their client software.
One thing before I get started.. This type of application as it potentially contains medical data will fall under "HIPAA: Security and Electronic Signature Standard" which goes into effect January 1st of 2000. You will want to look that over and check to make sure this system complies. The text of the regulation is available at the Federal Register.
As to your question, usename/passwords can be considered "reasonably secure" if you have proper controls on them. If passwords lock after three bad attempts, if there are some controls on password content, etc., then they can probably be relied upon to a resonable degree. What you need to do is talk to your organizations legal department, and find out from them what the potential legal cost of a breech would cost the organization. Take those figures to your boss. Implementing a two-factor authentication scheme isn't very difficult, it would be somewhat costly depending on your user base however (most hard tokens generally are in the neighborhood of 30-50 each). Both Security Dynamics and Vasco (the two token vendors I'm most familiar with) use simple Radius TACACS+ servers with the tokens. Securing a web site with those protocols is fairly trivial. (Apache and IIS have plugins for this I believe)
Going outside of your question a bit, a better solution entirely would be to setup a PKI system. The interface for your application sounds a bit clunky and could be avoided with S-MIME. Most commercial PKI packages have evolved to the point where an implementation like this wouldn't be overly complex. An automated registration authority could issue certificates to your customers easily enough, enabling dual authentication and non-repudiation / data integrity. It could also turn your solution into an email based one, skipping the work-around you have done with the web front-end. For a less comprehensive solution, albeit an even more simple one, you could purchase certificates from a vendor such as Verisign for your doctors. The web front end could be used by customers who would receive the responses via S-MIME from the doctors.
Excuse me? Digital Signatures, barring a fault in implementation are very difficult to forge. From your stance I will assume you do not understand what a digitial signature is. A digital signature is a hash of the signed document that is encrypted with the signer's private key. This means that since changing the document produces a very different hash and the person changing the document should not have the origional signer's private key, they would be unable to recreate the signature.
The key weakness in this scheme is protecting the signer's private key. This key is protected well barring physical access to the machine it resides on. Chances are you'll realize your machine has been comprimised and be able to revoke the keypair (certificate) before anything can happen. This risk can also be reduced with a certificate stored on a smart card.
While not impossible, forging a digital signature is not a trivial exercise. Forging a pen and paper signature is by far easier. There were some issues with this legislation that show that it may have been rushed to the floor, but there does need to be legislation providing a minimum of legal strength to digital signatures on a national level. Many states already recognize them as legally binding, but without all the states having this is keeping the technology from being used on a national basis. The Clinton administration is not opposed to digital signatures as far as I know, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Commerce are moving forward with their proposed electronic signature standard (142.310 I think) that would bring legal weight to digital signatures.
IMHO this is all a good thing. The legistlation however needs to be watched as this is a potential window for something of a "national id" to be instituted in the form of digital certificates.
Even if this wasn't new, there really is no way to stop it. Smurf and Fraggle were good examples of this with the added bonus of a very good ratio of required attacker bandwidth to the ammount of bandwidth used in the actual attack. The attack described in this article could be as simple as sending out thousands of forged icmp packets to single IPs (Unlike to broadcast addresses like Smurf and Fraggle). I would be very surprised if people were actually rooting "thousands" of boxes to be used as attack points in an assault such as this, it's too non-trivial for your average script-kiddie DoS monger.
All of Koja's books have the same basic story-line, but I'm certain this was done for an effect. Koja's main strength is her descriptive pose. Very quotable.
Ahh, but now what's to stop somebody from spoofing the RH update site and installing a job that unlocks your machine just as effectively as it would if the updates were never applied?
Nothing currently, however a bit of integration with Asymetric encryption and digital signatures would render this point mooter than it is already. Since the machine being updated initiates the connection, the task of the cracker spoofing Redhat's update site is non-trivial. It would require access to the routers or networks along the path, and assurance all traffic will go over the same route.
On the contrary, Windows 95 boxes are broken into ALL THE TIME. The people using those boxes just never know generally. In response to your points:
1) There's not much they can do there when they've broken in- there isn't a single-point-of-vulnerabilty root account that gives away the whole store once access has been gained
Everybody is root on a Windows 95 box. Can we say "single user system with multi-user functionality bolted on"? I knew you could.
2) Win95 boxes don't contain much of value to a hacker, they are end-user, not server machines.
This is iffy. Most 95 break-ins I would have to guess occur because of file and print services are enabled on boxes that have direct connections to the Internet. Let's not forget nice things like BO and BO2K, always fun. There is definitely useful information SOMEWHERE residing on a Windows 95 machine, but do you really have the time to search the millions that are out there and vulnerable?
I appologize, bad example. I was merely trying to point out that while the 10 commandments may have components that instill a sense of general morality, a few are heavily sectarian, and if sactioned for schools, may cause feelings of exclusion for a fair percentage of students.
Never trust a government who's idea of seperation of church and state includes printing "In God We Trust" on it's currency.
Slashdot Mirror
Sonny, I remember when we had to walk uphill both ways just to get a page load from Chips & Dips.
Good furniture costs money, so be prepared to fork it over.
I was in the same position about a month ago, I was tired of spending ~300 bucks every 3 years for a new chair.
I decided on a Herman Miller Eames Aluminum Group Softpad Management chair. Looks good, very comfortable. Comfort improves with age in the same way a baseball mitt does.
Also, 12 year warranty.
A bit south of 2k, but I've seen them on ebay used for around 600ish.
You're right that those things would cause an increase in the price of oil, but not to the extent it has. The real issue is that the Fed is loaning money out below the cost of inflation, basically paying people to borrow money.
This causes people to do hugely leveraged buys of commodities, such as oil futures. It's a bubble, just like tech stocks and housing.
It should be. Protecting the right of speech that no one disagrees with is pretty much pointless. The tone of this article is hilariously ironic however. Almost worthy of being in The Onion.
http://indoctrinate-u.com/
Exercise triggers many chemical reactions that will quell phantom hunger as well. Yes, if you're generally in a "fasting" state and you're exercising, you will be hungrier but your body will also not require you to completely fill the expenditure with food.
Aerobic exercise is often not effective at creating fat loss. Generally, you're not going to have enough stamina to really work off a meaningful amount of calories. Aerobic work also works off muscle glycogen, which doesn't replace well from stored fat. (That's where post-exercise hunger goes to). Now, switch this to an extended work-out period of more than an hour and you can see very good results once you burn past your stored glycogen, just be prepared for the "bonk".
Anaerobic exercise however will burn fat, and does actually allow targeted fat loss. This is pretty much why high-intensity interval training does lead to fairly rapid fat loss. Weight training, same thing.
A lot of people (dare I say, most) actually won't see ANY weight loss initially when exercising, they'll be replacing fat with lean mass.
So it's automatically the status quo that must change and not you?
grep sed and cut (awk is too bloated)
This is a case of the cure being worse than the disease. You're plan here would prevent interested 3rd parties from commenting about elections in pay-for media. I grant you that there are major and huge abuses in our current system. Interested third parties aren't and won't always be shills for a particular political party, and they need to have their rights to speak out for or against our potential leaders protected. The restriction on freedom of speech for your option is unacceptable.
The real cure to this would be to have an educated and interested populace of active voters. People who will stand up with their vote and demand the current political process of demonizing isn't what we expect out of people we are putting into power. Unfortunatly, that will never happen in our lifetime. Legislation is the wrong answer to 99 out of 100 questions.
Did the liberal facist camp hire a parrot that can type? I swear I see the same nonsensical response to such a variety of issues it must have.
Please take your brain and look outside the monoculture of whatever college campus you reside. Hold onto whatever ideas you wish, but back them with knowledge instead of replying with drivel. Leaked documents from unknown sources aren't very convincing. I shudder to think of what reasons you are attributing Bush to have for launching an agressive war.
The UN is the "United Nations" The security council of the "United Nations" passed quite a number of resolutions pressing Iraq to comply with the conditions of their surrender in the first Gulf War. The lack of will to enforce their resolutions and the terms of the surrender lead to the Iraq war. The actions of France in particular lead to Sadam's incorrect notion that he was going to get ANOTHER pass this time around. His personal history illustrated that he would not bend to any pressure unless backed into a corner. With France busy tearing down any corners in sight, the only thing left was to evict him from power.
I hope the EU finds itself powerful. Frankly I'm tired of having to foot the bill for the US playing the world's janitor. I doubt most of Western Europe will ever again hold real power. They would have to dismantle the socialist welfare states they have built up while resting comfortably within our protection during the cold war. Unlikely.
An unusually articulate AC wrote:
Since the United States knew he had WMDs, then where are they? The UN report stated that there were no WMDs in Iraq.
Everyone knew they HAD them. They USED them for cripes sake. The issue most people (in the WORLD, not just the US) were mistaken about was if Sadam STILL had them. There were no records of the destruction of the WMD stockpiles we KNEW he had. Either they were actually destroyed and noone recorded the fact or they are still missing.
AC wrote:
What does the war in Iraq have to do with 9/11?
9/11 demonstrated how much ignoring problems can cost. The war isn't on Al Qaeda, it's on terrorism. Saddam clearly was a sponser of terrorism, even if he didn't sponser Al Qaeda. Sadam was defying the UN and generally acting like he was hiding something from the rest of the world. He had and had used chemical weapons in the past. He had been attempting to obtain nuclear materials in the past. He had an adamant hatred toward the U.S. All of these factors put him high on the list of threats to the U.S. If we really are fighting a war on terror to prevent future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, Iraq was the next logical target after the Afghanistan. The war had nothing to with oil beyond the fact that Iraq's oil gave Sadam more potential to be a threat to the world than if he did not have that wealth to fall upon. Take of the tin foil hat my friend, at least when it comes to foreign policy.
And yes, we used to support Sadam over Iraq. To be honest, the party line of the Baathist party is a much more comfortable fit to traditional US values than what I fear even the new Iraq government will bring to the table.
War is a terrible thing, but it is an inevitable result of the world we live in.
SB5 Wrote:
Funny how Pakistan, India, North Korea, China have been seeking WMD but we aren't doing shit about that.
Pakistan, India, N. Korea and China weren't defeated after an agressive incursion into a neighboring country and forced to sign an agreement to surrender their rights to own certain weapon systems in order to preserve their governance.
The key reason the "consensus" was that Iraq had undisclosed WMD was that we know they had them. They used them against Iran and the Kurdish region. There were no credible records of their destruction after the first Gulf War. Why would Sadam destroy weapons to fulfill the surrender terms and not record the details of their destruction? It's seems that is what happened.
Let me also remind everyone who finds it easy to forget, Sadam had kicked out the inspectors. He only let them back in when the US started sending troops to the border, and he never complied with all the conditions for the inspections.
The Iraq war happened because 9/11 showed what can happen when threats are not taken seriously enough. It also happened because the UN has become a paper tiger. If the UN had a backbone, war might have been avoided. Even Sadam might have quailed if the security council had been prepaired to enforce their own resolutions.
You can read thousands and thousands of books for free. Look in you phone book for something called a "library".
Honestly, if they are going to charge me per byte of traffic, I'm going to need to see itemized lists of what they are charging me for.
Just being on my current cable network invites floods of port scans, let alone the amount of traffic Code Red generated Who's going to be billed for that? Unless they have the infrastructure to track only bandwidth resulting from user requests I can see a lot of mischarging here.
You sound like various sales people I've run into. None of which were able to pass a simple blind test between generic 12gauge cable and 12gauge high end monster cable. Or between a 99.00 monster svid cable and a 12 dollar one.
Cable doesn't have to be expensive to work you know. Rip the power cord from any lamp and use it for speaker cable, you'll never know the difference.
* Everyone and their dog will recommend using cables that are as short as possible. This is far less important than using high-quality cables . I personally use and recommend Monster Cable brand's highest quality offerings as a bare minimum. It's expensive, but it's truly worth it, and you can still use relatively long cables to allow yourself some slack
Monster Cable, the audiophiles modern day snake oil. Monster cable is to audio what huge mufflers are to ricers. There may be a small difference, but your money is better spent where the price/performance ratio is better. (amps / speakers)
Bugtraq does not always get NT bugs. NT-Bugtraq gets the majority of them. NT-Bugtraq was founded when the users of Bugtraq became irate at the volume of NT related traffic. Generally unless it's a fairly major bug it won't appear on the generic Bugtraq.
End of Days: Not every movie has to have a deep meaning or good acting. End of Days is a typical Arnold flick. Good action with enough plot to get by. Fun movie to watch, lots of skin shown. Won't ever qualify in my list of favorite movies, but worth the price of admission to be sure.
Being J.M.: This is probably the most origional movie I have seen in a fairly long time, and one of the better movies this year. I dare you to watch this movie and not laugh. Just imagining all the actors having to jump off something by the New Jersey Turnpike and landing hard in the ditch makes me smile. Acting was good, with Diaz actually holding up well with a character that doesn't fit with a normal Diaz role. I applaud.
I didn't see the others.
We looked at PGP, and we looked at the SMIME variants. The latter, IIRC, suffers from from a recent Netscape/Microsoft implementation divergence making the one's keys incompatible with the other's (how surprising!).
Actually, this is a bit less nefarious than you think. S-MIME clients are in the process of being upgraded to allow dual key-pair implentations of certificates. It was noted that a single key-pair won't cut it for non-repudiation on systems were key recovery is in force. You therefor need to support an encrypting and a signing pair. There are incompatibilities arising in S-MIME because of this. Hopefully it will resolve itself as more people upgrade their client software.
One thing before I get started.. This type of application as it potentially contains medical data will fall under "HIPAA: Security and Electronic Signature Standard" which goes into effect January 1st of 2000. You will want to look that over and check to make sure this system complies. The text of the regulation is available at the Federal Register.
As to your question, usename/passwords can be considered "reasonably secure" if you have proper controls on them. If passwords lock after three bad attempts, if there are some controls on password content, etc., then they can probably be relied upon to a resonable degree. What you need to do is talk to your organizations legal department, and find out from them what the potential legal cost of a breech would cost the organization. Take those figures to your boss. Implementing a two-factor authentication scheme isn't very difficult, it would be somewhat costly depending on your user base however (most hard tokens generally are in the neighborhood of 30-50 each). Both Security Dynamics and Vasco (the two token vendors I'm most familiar with) use simple Radius TACACS+ servers with the tokens. Securing a web site with those protocols is fairly trivial. (Apache and IIS have plugins for this I believe)
Going outside of your question a bit, a better solution entirely would be to setup a PKI system. The interface for your application sounds a bit clunky and could be avoided with S-MIME. Most commercial PKI packages have evolved to the point where an implementation like this wouldn't be overly complex. An automated registration authority could issue certificates to your customers easily enough, enabling dual authentication and non-repudiation / data integrity. It could also turn your solution into an email based one, skipping the work-around you have done with the web front-end. For a less comprehensive solution, albeit an even more simple one, you could purchase certificates from a vendor such as Verisign for your doctors. The web front end could be used by customers who would receive the responses via S-MIME from the doctors.
Hope this helped at least a little.
Excuse me? Digital Signatures, barring a fault in implementation are very difficult to forge. From your stance I will assume you do not understand what a digitial signature is. A digital signature is a hash of the signed document that is encrypted with the signer's private key. This means that since changing the document produces a very different hash and the person changing the document should not have the origional signer's private key, they would be unable to recreate the signature.
The key weakness in this scheme is protecting the signer's private key. This key is protected well barring physical access to the machine it resides on. Chances are you'll realize your machine has been comprimised and be able to revoke the keypair (certificate) before anything can happen.
This risk can also be reduced with a certificate stored on a smart card.
While not impossible, forging a digital signature is not a trivial exercise. Forging a pen and paper signature is by far easier. There were some issues with this legislation that show that it may have been rushed to the floor, but there does need to be legislation providing a minimum of legal strength to digital signatures on a national level. Many states already recognize them as legally binding, but without all the states having this is keeping the technology from being used on a national basis. The Clinton administration is not opposed to digital signatures as far as I know, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Commerce are moving forward with their proposed electronic signature standard (142.310 I think) that would bring legal weight to digital signatures.
IMHO this is all a good thing. The legistlation however needs to be watched as this is a potential window for something of a "national id" to be instituted in the form of digital certificates.
Even if this wasn't new, there really is no way to stop it. Smurf and Fraggle were good examples of this with the added bonus of a very good ratio of required attacker bandwidth to the ammount of bandwidth used in the actual attack. The attack described in this article could be as simple as sending out thousands of forged icmp packets to single IPs (Unlike to broadcast addresses like Smurf and Fraggle). I would be very surprised if people were actually rooting "thousands" of boxes to be used as attack points in an assault such as this, it's too non-trivial for your average script-kiddie DoS monger.
All of Koja's books have the same basic story-line, but I'm certain this was done for an effect. Koja's main strength is her descriptive pose. Very quotable.
Bad Brains - IMHO her best
Skin - Disturbing.
Ahh, but now what's to stop somebody from spoofing the RH update site and installing a job that unlocks your machine just as effectively as it would if the updates were never applied?
Nothing currently, however a bit of integration with Asymetric encryption and digital signatures would render this point mooter than it is already. Since the machine being updated initiates the connection, the task of the cracker spoofing Redhat's update site is non-trivial. It would require access to the routers or networks along the path, and assurance all traffic will go over the same route.
On the contrary, Windows 95 boxes are broken into ALL THE TIME. The people using those boxes just never know generally. In response to your points:
1) There's not much they can do there when they've broken in- there isn't a single-point-of-vulnerabilty root account that gives away the whole store once access has been gained
Everybody is root on a Windows 95 box. Can we say "single user system with multi-user functionality bolted on"? I knew you could.
2) Win95 boxes don't contain much of value to a hacker, they are end-user, not server machines.
This is iffy. Most 95 break-ins I would have to guess occur because of file and print services are enabled on boxes that have direct connections to the Internet. Let's not forget nice things like BO and BO2K, always fun. There is definitely useful information SOMEWHERE residing on a Windows 95 machine, but do you really have the time to search the millions that are out there and vulnerable?
I appologize, bad example. I was merely trying to point out that while the 10 commandments may have components that instill a sense of general morality, a few are heavily sectarian, and if sactioned for schools, may cause feelings of exclusion for a fair percentage of students.
Never trust a government who's idea of seperation of church and state includes printing "In God We Trust" on it's currency.