I'm reading the replies to your post and can understand where they're coming from. The problem they have is that they have minimal exposure at most to Scientology. My mother tried to raise me Christian and I ended up Atheist. Anyone who tries to compare Scientology to Christianity truly doesn't understand. To those that would like a better understanding and read a fascinating history of a cult, I recommend you read A Piece of Blue Sky.
I just reread my post and thought I'd clarify something. While he was trying to get the exception made to see me, we were still allowed to visit. It was a year later when we met for the last time that he told me the Church had reached a final decision.
"Anyone else had any interesing encounters with those people?"
I am a child of Scientology. I was born with both parents in the church. My father is now in the Sea Org (Their elite with the long term contract) and my mother is on the Scientology list of public enemies. The church prohibits my father from speaking with me as a result. Same thing goes for my mother's sister (Yes, she's my aunt) who can't talk to her whole family. The reason? My mother is a "Suppressive Person" (SP). Anyone that communicates with her is a "Potential Trouble Source" (PTS). People in the Sea Org such as my father and aunt are not allowed to communicate directly with SPs or PTSs and heavily discouraged from using things like approved letters. My father physically abused me and I ended up in the hospital when I was younger. Yes, I remember an incident. He told my mother to go to hell and didn't speak to either of us when I was 6. Left my mother with a huge IRS debt from when they were married. His mother had sent him money to pay it and my mother thought it was taken care of. 10 years later, she starts getting threatening letters from the IRS. 10 years of IRS interest before they set "Reasonable" limits amounted to something like $15,000. It's all OK though since my mother is considered "Fair Game", right ? When I was 16 and moved out on my own to get away from my mother who's still struggling to erase the mental damage done by the church, I went to see my father and try to get to know him. He was still at a mission and wasn't subject to the harsher rules in the Sea Org. I'm a forgiving person and thought both of us could benefit from getting to know each other. I lived in the same house (Paying rent like everyone else) with 4 Scientologists total and even took a basic course at the mission my father worked at to try and understand what my father and aunt were so committed to. Man those people are are brainwashed. Reading about it isn't the same as seeing it. The best example I can give is a kid. Must have been 7 or 8 at most. He was walking around at an event at the LA building trying to recruit people. He sounded just like all the adults and had an answer for any argument you threw his way. These people live in their own subculture complete with their own laws and reasoning. A half year later, I moved out, but still visited my father when he actually used his one day off per week for personal use. Shortly after I moved out, he joined the Sea Org (He had been invited like 10 years earlier, but had a lot of responsibility at the mission he's been at). For one year, he struggled to get an exception made so he could see me. We saw each other about once every other month. He was finally getting remarried and I was going to be his best man. The last time I saw him or spoke to him, he called me for a visit. I knew something was wrong before I arrived. We went to a Burger King for lunch and he told me that he would not see me again and I could not even attend the wedding. When I asked why he keeps doing this; why he throws away everything else for the sake of Scientology, he responded, "It's all I know how to do after 20 years."
This is kind of a trimmed down version for the sake of making the post short. Maybe someday I'll talk with someone and spend a few years on a crusade with others to fully expose the church to the public eye. As long as the average persona hasn't heard of Scientology, the cult will continue to thrive and amass lost souls.
"It's just too much trouble for them to shift-click and do a 'run as'"
I don't have any trouble doing that and anyone who runs unpatched client apps on a production server as a domain admin should have their rights taken away and be demoted to junior admin.
LOL, god I loathe 9x. First thing I do when I come into a business or help someone with their home computer is migrate to the NT family. I wish Microsoft would have named the NT family something other than Windows just so people wouldn't classify them as the same OS. Moving the home side of their operation away from 9x and burying it is making my life much easier. No more new computers with ME. Having a firewall enabled by default was the second great change. Now if they could only figure out a way to stop adware out of the box, bliss would ensue.
"Trust me, without the competition, what there is of it, you'd be running WinME still."
Okay, you just lost any credibility by believing that 9x/ME is even close to the NT family. If I were stuck with a pre XP OS, I'd be on Windows 2000.
"Who is your boss?"
My boss is more technical than myself and a total MS cheerleader. I used to be a Mac nutcase (I still have issue 1 of MacAddict) and used FreeBSD at work. I loathed MS products and had the same attitude that most people on here have. I then landed a better paying job supporting W2K Pro for MS, then shortly after that, NT4 Server. You'd think a critic of MS being exposed to nothing but broken Windows boxes would hate it that much more, but I didn't. Instead, I realized that it really is a good operating system if you know how to use it and the amount of features it offers to a business is unparalleled. I'd estimate that less than 1% of the cases I worked were a result of the product itself. After working with the NT family of operating systems for 6 years, I have a lot of respect for the OS and feel that in my youth, I just needed an enemy. Good vs Evil. Microsoft is a monopoly and had some very shady history such as the whole fiasco when he got a sneek peek at the Mac and rushed Windows out the door. It really is quite sad that I let my hatred stop me from progressing for such a long time.
"No matter how great the OS is, lack of applications is what holds it back"
That's true to an extent. If you walk into a business though with a solid offering, covering all the business needs and it saves them money and interoperates with industry standard (Even if it is a proprietary format), they'll bite. End users will then be comfortable with what you offer after using it at work and not hesitate to take it home.
That's funny. I administer about 100 Windows boxes and none of them have been compromised in the two years I've been with the company. That's 2000 and XP. Out of the box, Windows XP SP2 is not open to the Internet. If the computer is a member of a workgroup, it's open to its local subnet and that's all. If it's a member of a domain, the administrator can use group policy to configure it any way he/she pleases. In fact, when it comes to patches, a proper group policy will have all Windows XP boxes (Even with no service pack) and Windows 2000 (As of SP3 I believe) updating automatically. I configure some basic settings from the server and all the computers in our organization get the settings.
Congratulations on your narrow minded, immature, emotional "M$ is the Devil" reaction. The reverse FUD is working....really. In the meantime, I'll just continue running a Windows network the way it should be run and not lose any sleep over it. So will most other business networks. And so will the workers who want to use the same thing at home that they use at work. All the talk about Windows being insecure out of the box for the home user is now past tense as of SP2. Soon enough, it'll be another outdated argument right up there with "Windows is unstable" and "What about backward compatability with DOS apps? They can't force users to upgrade!"
If the developers of other OSes want to battle with MS for market share, they should focus on developing the product and deliver all the new features that people feel is worth paying for the latest version of Windows. While they stand around shouting about a particular advantage, Microsoft is moving to take that away while creating many more advantages of their own.
Umm, you do realize that Sony beat the others to market by a long shot (1 year) the last two generations? Besides, Enoch Root's a wimp. You should have used the name Bobby Shaftoe.:p
I actually agree with you. I'm know for a fact that there are people out there hoarding zero-day exploits. 99.9% of the servers that are attacked though are completely random and done so using exploits for vulnerabilities that have already been patched by the vendor. It's those sparse and few that worry me. It's been publicized that N. Korea has a few hundred hired hackers that it's using. If their only successes thus far have been things like a mail server only used for announcements to the public, I think we're doing OK.
I haven't seen an IIS virus in ages. In any case, which do you think would make media headlines, "Microsoft hacked" or "Apache hacked"? Who besides computer nerds gives a shit about Apache or even knows what it is. Hackers target whatever will get them the most ego and media attention. As Firefox gets more and more attention, the rate at which exploits are discovered has increased. Viruses are a separate issue. Typically, they target email and IM is starting to make gains. I wouldn't wory too much about web browser viruses until someone gets smart and creates one that runs a small http server to propogate itself, kind of like how some viruses run their own SMTP.
-Lucas
Re:Building is more fun than working at Maccers
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Mac mini Dissection
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I totally agree. It's almost as bad as when people tell me to ditch my 93 Camaro Z28 and get a new car. First, I like working on my car and I have no warranty to worry about. 2nd, with the $5,000 or less I could sell my car for, I'd still have to make payments to get a new Kia. Third, I prefer driving my current car over a dirt cheap Kia. Fourth, my car will still spank the hell out of most "new" cars on my #1 requirement, FUN.
I will always build my own workstations and home servers. For relatives and friends, I either build them a PC because of all the little things I do to make it a beautiful thing or if I don't have the time, I recommend they go to a local shop with a good reputation. For business, I go with Dell. In a business environment, you only upgrade if the computer wasn't configured right in the first place (i.e., not enough memory for future software or a slow hard drive). If it has everything it will need to last four or five years, then you just replace the whole thing once its turn to be replaced is up. For the notebooks, we buy the idiot warranty so the next time someone decides to put a bottle of gatorade in their carrying case, I don't have to buy a new motherboard off Ebay and perform surgery to replace it.
The one catch for me is that I started on the Macintosh and I would love to have this thing sitting at home to play with. When I stepped up to my mother's iBook running OS X, I felt like an idiot. I would just love to learn it inside and out and use it in lieu of Linux.
The thing is, I enjoy driving it and I actually do work on it. I've been learning more about engine building than computers lately. If I do anything to get rid of insurance on it, I'll pick up an old beater economy car to use as a daily driver and make the Camaro a 100% project car that I only take to the track.
I'm 24. Before I turned 24, I was paying roughly $3,360 per year for full coverage with a $500 deductible in AZ on a 12 year old car that I completely own. CA was roughly the same. Liability was about 80% of that. Most recently, that was with no speeding tickets for over 3 years (The insurance company said that's all they look at) and no claims/accidents ever. Why is this? Because I'm male with a Camaro Z28 living in the SW. Sexism, profiling of the type of car I drive, and auto theft rates in AZ (#1 in the country for many years).
To be more on topic, I'd estimate that 90% of the accidents I see involve women drivers. I'm not saying that males are always better drivers. What I'm saying is that defensive driving requires good reflexes, something young men are more inclined to have. The kind of experience where you have to respond quickly to changing conditions such as people pulling out in front of you and stopping when you're doing 45 mph. Throughout childhood, men generally play more sports, video games, and other activities that help them prepare to be better drivers. As a result of women being required to use quick reflexes for the first time and keep track of several moving objects all around them, they tend to be much more cautious, responding to their fear. Many times, this behavior is beneficial because they're not going to do anything risky like us males. However, they will do things that cause accidents when they think they're being safe. Slamming on the brakes for a yellow light, merging at 30% the speed of traffic, turning on their blinkers way too early and creeping to the turn when on a busy street, not checking blind spots because they're afraid to turn their head around while moving. The scary thing is when they're disciplining the kids, talking on the cell phone, fiddling with makeup/hair, messing with the radio, etc. All of these types of things make accidents more likely for men and women, but again, men are better prepared for the "game" of juggling these things. Of course, because males have been raised to compete and play games, we tend to do stupid things more often and cause dangerous accidents. We also don't obey ridiculous speed limits that are set low enough for the legal driver with the lowest skill level. We get more tickets.
I honestly wish there were no profiling whatsoever and everyone started at the same place, with the value of the vehicle being the only variable. If you file a claim, your rates go up.
"It's a great product, small, fast and more secure. You don't see anybody disputing that."
Actually, I dispute that. Most people that claim it's more secure say that it's because of the amount of vulnerabilities being found in Internet Explorer compared to Firefox. How many people are looking for unknown vulnerabilities in IE? How many are looking at Mozilla/Firefox? This is determined by the media. When there's a MS vulnerability, it's all over the news and the finder gets a ton of glory and hopeful job offers. I see MS patches making it into mainstream news such as the Associated Press. As Firefox gets a spotlight because of a good amount of security professionals (Which happen to be coders with a personal agenda) recommending people switch, I've seen an increase in the amount of vulnerabilities reported. Don't believe me? Look at the stats and compare IE with Firefox. Yes, IEs numbers are higher, but think in proportion to how many skilled people are looking for vulnerabilities in each product. If you look at the different versions of Mozilla over the timeline they give, you can see that not many vulnerabilities were found early last year or before that compared to when Firefox really started to get attention. Imagine how many vulnerabilities would be found if they got the amount of media attention that IE vulns get. Until both products get the same amount of hacker attention, it's premature to say which is more secure.
As a security professional, I believe that as long as you keep your software patched up (computers, routers, switches, etc.), your only fear is a zero day. Hopefully you have other layers of security such as a border firewall, IPSec Transport mode with packet filtering at every host, multiple antivirus vendors software (with at least one of them configured to block password protected archives, known dangerous file types and dangerous content), ongoing training, locked down servers with all the fat trimmed, middle tier servers, etc. These things are not vendor specific. You can run Windows, Linux, OSX, BSD, Solaris and still be able to do these things. Assuming you have all that set up, one zero day most likely wouldn't be enough. If someone really wants in and you've done all these things, do you really think you're going to get "pwned" because you chose a specific vendor or software package? No. You're going to get pwned because someone will be social engineered or some aspect of physical security will be bypassed. It's a hell of a lot easier to get into a company by phishing than it is to hunt down a couple silver bullet zero days as you get through each layer of security. My point is that if someone wants to get in, they can do it. It only takes a few holes at most and enough patience to find them to get to a target. It's up to the admin to ensure that it's as difficult as possible to find them and to ensure that the damage is minimized. Auditing (logging), backups, intrusion detection, policies, procedures, security assessments, a good data structure with granular permissions, etc can help minimize impact.
My professional opinion is that it just doesn't matter what you use as long as it's well administered, but if you want to force me to pick one side and guess which code has less vulnerabilities, I'm going to pick MS. Security through obscurity isn't a magic elixir, but it's definitely another layer of protection. And with all the attention MS gets, they've had an opportunity to patch up a lot of their vulnerabilities. At this point, new vulns are probably easier to find on other vendors that aren't as popular.
Most customers were very nice. If they called in, it was usually because a server, many servers, or the whole network was down and they were in over their heads. If I needed to put someone on hold, I would give them the option to get hold music or to have me hit the mute button so they could sit in silence. Most chose silence. If I got a customer that thought being a dickhead would help their situation, I would use what's known as "Punishment Hold." After he/she finished ranting, I'd say "Please hold" and walk out for a long smoke break (10-15 minutes). I'd come back and announce that I'm back without giving any reason why they were put on hold. Most of the time, these people settled down like children exiting a time out corner.
I usually try to prevent a reinstall by mounting the drive on another computer and scanning it with AV software, Ad-Aware, and Spybot. Toss the drive back in the bastard system and boot up. From there, run Hijack This to manually rip out things that Spybot and Ad-Aware miss. After that, they're "Fixed." If they're using 95/98/ME and are willing to buy the upgrade, I get them on the latest NT OS (WinXP currently). The 9x family is a complete pile of shit and a stark contrast to the stable NT family. After that, I recommend that they add more memory (512MB for XP is perfect for most users, including myself) and more importantly, a faster hard drive (A new model 7200RPM drive will make older systems seem like new). I can migrate them to the new hard drive very easily using NTBackup (Included with Windows). As far as where I order from, I basically do a pricewatch search for 7200RPM and pick the least expensive drive with internal transfer rates on par with the newest models. Storage capacity usually isn't an issue unless the system is for someone who pirates all day every day. For the memory, I go to www.18004memory.com to ensure compatability and get great prices. If they are really liking the improvements thus far, a $75-$100 video card is last. You can find roundup reviews to figure out which card has the best bang for the buck, then do a pricewatch search on the model. To help prevent future housecalls, I explain to them that it's best to read all messages when browsing the Internet so they know what they are downloading and aren't suckered into installing by clicking a No button. I show them how to update and use the spyware removal tools. I rarely ever have to go back after one of my housecalls. The most I'lll see is a call or two from the user, paranoid about installing something they're not sure if they need such as Macromedia Flash.
Remember that speeds faster than 1056Mbps (132MBps) will not be seen if you're using a PCI card or an on-board chipset that passes through the PCI bus.
After two company notebooks were stolen (We're 99% sure it was a certain employee, but have no proof), I started installing DirectUpdate on all the notebooks, updating a record on dyndns.org that corresponds to the computer name. The software is running as a service and there's no start menu, desktop, or system tray icons. Basically, the users are unaware of the softwares existence. If a notebook is ever stolen or gone missing and is connected to an internet connection and booted, I'll be able to track it down and prosecute.
Microsoft is initially releasing an anti-spyware program for free and may charge for it in the future. Reverse FUD people here make a big stink about it. *sigh*
This is a SPYWARE removal tool. Not ANTIVIRUS software. Spyware gets onto computers by users who choose to install them. Even if these programs are hidden in a long EULA for a program that effectively acts as trojan horse, it's currently legal. Microsoft cannot do anything about it until it's illegal. The sites that use illegal tactics to install spyware such as exploiting vulnerabilities are legally hacking your computer. These sites are typically shady as hell and most offen are related to illegal activities such as cracks.am, used for downloading program cracks and serial numbers. If you browse to a site that is obviously shady as hell and get spyware put on through a vulnerability and proceed to blame Microsoft, you're an idiot. If I made a pr0n site and used a known vulnerability in Firefox to load malware onto your computer, running under your credentials (Most likely root or equivelant access), would you blame the pr0n site creaters for being sneaky bastards or the developers of your software for being human and making a mistake? It doesn't matter how much money Microsoft has. No amount of money in the world is going to guarantee vulnerability free software. As a business, it is their responsibility to make a reasonable best effort and compared to 99.9% of the software vendors out there, they're top notch. If you gasped at that statement, then maybe you haven't tried to deal with as many companies as I have. Hell, I reported a major security vulnerability (Bug 224692, search for it on bugzilla.mozilla.org) that affects Mozilla and Firefox on the win32 platform over a year ago. It's still not fixed.
I believe a smart move on Microsoft's part would be to partner with Symantec and release a limited antivirus package. The definition files only get updated to handle viruses that get onto the computer via a vulnerability in Microsoft software. The user is made abundantly aware of this fact during the install process. All OSes and revisions that have the security center like XP SP2 still nag the user to get a full anti-virus software solution. Put this package on Windows Update for all versions of Windows that are still in product lifecycle and snail mail free CDs to anyone that calls an 800 number. Advertise the fuck out of it. Symantec makes the product and does the definition updates. The amount of extra development time it would cost them to do this is minimal. In exchange, they get highlighted bling-bling in all of Microsoft's listings of Antivirus vendors. At that point, virus writers will move on to target another operating system or product and Slashdotters will STFU and get back to making Linux, Mozilla, and hopefully a replacement for Outlook/Exchange.
What about the Spyware problem, you ask? This is not Microsoft's problem just like spam is not their problem. If they can profit by making a solution, I don't see any reason to have a problem with that.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the moderators need to RTFA before they mod you down.
-Lucas
I just reread my post and thought I'd clarify something. While he was trying to get the exception made to see me, we were still allowed to visit. It was a year later when we met for the last time that he told me the Church had reached a final decision.
I am a child of Scientology. I was born with both parents in the church. My father is now in the Sea Org (Their elite with the long term contract) and my mother is on the Scientology list of public enemies. The church prohibits my father from speaking with me as a result. Same thing goes for my mother's sister (Yes, she's my aunt) who can't talk to her whole family. The reason? My mother is a "Suppressive Person" (SP). Anyone that communicates with her is a "Potential Trouble Source" (PTS). People in the Sea Org such as my father and aunt are not allowed to communicate directly with SPs or PTSs and heavily discouraged from using things like approved letters. My father physically abused me and I ended up in the hospital when I was younger. Yes, I remember an incident. He told my mother to go to hell and didn't speak to either of us when I was 6. Left my mother with a huge IRS debt from when they were married. His mother had sent him money to pay it and my mother thought it was taken care of. 10 years later, she starts getting threatening letters from the IRS. 10 years of IRS interest before they set "Reasonable" limits amounted to something like $15,000. It's all OK though since my mother is considered "Fair Game", right ? When I was 16 and moved out on my own to get away from my mother who's still struggling to erase the mental damage done by the church, I went to see my father and try to get to know him. He was still at a mission and wasn't subject to the harsher rules in the Sea Org. I'm a forgiving person and thought both of us could benefit from getting to know each other. I lived in the same house (Paying rent like everyone else) with 4 Scientologists total and even took a basic course at the mission my father worked at to try and understand what my father and aunt were so committed to. Man those people are are brainwashed. Reading about it isn't the same as seeing it. The best example I can give is a kid. Must have been 7 or 8 at most. He was walking around at an event at the LA building trying to recruit people. He sounded just like all the adults and had an answer for any argument you threw his way. These people live in their own subculture complete with their own laws and reasoning. A half year later, I moved out, but still visited my father when he actually used his one day off per week for personal use. Shortly after I moved out, he joined the Sea Org (He had been invited like 10 years earlier, but had a lot of responsibility at the mission he's been at). For one year, he struggled to get an exception made so he could see me. We saw each other about once every other month. He was finally getting remarried and I was going to be his best man. The last time I saw him or spoke to him, he called me for a visit. I knew something was wrong before I arrived. We went to a Burger King for lunch and he told me that he would not see me again and I could not even attend the wedding. When I asked why he keeps doing this; why he throws away everything else for the sake of Scientology, he responded, "It's all I know how to do after 20 years."
This is kind of a trimmed down version for the sake of making the post short. Maybe someday I'll talk with someone and spend a few years on a crusade with others to fully expose the church to the public eye. As long as the average persona hasn't heard of Scientology, the cult will continue to thrive and amass lost souls.
-Lucas
1) Client Apps on server
2) Unpatched
3) Logged in as domain admin
Maybe any one of these three by itself would warrant just a backhand, but all three combined is just asking for a smackdown.
-Lucas
I don't have any trouble doing that and anyone who runs unpatched client apps on a production server as a domain admin should have their rights taken away and be demoted to junior admin.
-Lucas
-Lucas
I guess you didn't get my point.
"Trust me, without the competition, what there is of it, you'd be running WinME still."
Okay, you just lost any credibility by believing that 9x/ME is even close to the NT family. If I were stuck with a pre XP OS, I'd be on Windows 2000.
"Who is your boss?"
My boss is more technical than myself and a total MS cheerleader. I used to be a Mac nutcase (I still have issue 1 of MacAddict) and used FreeBSD at work. I loathed MS products and had the same attitude that most people on here have. I then landed a better paying job supporting W2K Pro for MS, then shortly after that, NT4 Server. You'd think a critic of MS being exposed to nothing but broken Windows boxes would hate it that much more, but I didn't. Instead, I realized that it really is a good operating system if you know how to use it and the amount of features it offers to a business is unparalleled. I'd estimate that less than 1% of the cases I worked were a result of the product itself. After working with the NT family of operating systems for 6 years, I have a lot of respect for the OS and feel that in my youth, I just needed an enemy. Good vs Evil. Microsoft is a monopoly and had some very shady history such as the whole fiasco when he got a sneek peek at the Mac and rushed Windows out the door. It really is quite sad that I let my hatred stop me from progressing for such a long time.
"No matter how great the OS is, lack of applications is what holds it back"
That's true to an extent. If you walk into a business though with a solid offering, covering all the business needs and it saves them money and interoperates with industry standard (Even if it is a proprietary format), they'll bite. End users will then be comfortable with what you offer after using it at work and not hesitate to take it home.
-Lucas
Congratulations on your narrow minded, immature, emotional "M$ is the Devil" reaction. The reverse FUD is working....really. In the meantime, I'll just continue running a Windows network the way it should be run and not lose any sleep over it. So will most other business networks. And so will the workers who want to use the same thing at home that they use at work. All the talk about Windows being insecure out of the box for the home user is now past tense as of SP2. Soon enough, it'll be another outdated argument right up there with "Windows is unstable" and "What about backward compatability with DOS apps? They can't force users to upgrade!"
If the developers of other OSes want to battle with MS for market share, they should focus on developing the product and deliver all the new features that people feel is worth paying for the latest version of Windows. While they stand around shouting about a particular advantage, Microsoft is moving to take that away while creating many more advantages of their own.
-Lucas
Umm, you do realize that Sony beat the others to market by a long shot (1 year) the last two generations? Besides, Enoch Root's a wimp. You should have used the name Bobby Shaftoe. :p
-Lucas
-Lucas
I wonder though why Microsoft didn't update to a newer version of libPNG when the vulnerability was addressed last August.
-Lucas
The download stopped moving 1.14MB into it.
I actually agree with you. I'm know for a fact that there are people out there hoarding zero-day exploits. 99.9% of the servers that are attacked though are completely random and done so using exploits for vulnerabilities that have already been patched by the vendor. It's those sparse and few that worry me. It's been publicized that N. Korea has a few hundred hired hackers that it's using. If their only successes thus far have been things like a mail server only used for announcements to the public, I think we're doing OK.
-Lucas
-Lucas
I will always build my own workstations and home servers. For relatives and friends, I either build them a PC because of all the little things I do to make it a beautiful thing or if I don't have the time, I recommend they go to a local shop with a good reputation. For business, I go with Dell. In a business environment, you only upgrade if the computer wasn't configured right in the first place (i.e., not enough memory for future software or a slow hard drive). If it has everything it will need to last four or five years, then you just replace the whole thing once its turn to be replaced is up. For the notebooks, we buy the idiot warranty so the next time someone decides to put a bottle of gatorade in their carrying case, I don't have to buy a new motherboard off Ebay and perform surgery to replace it.
The one catch for me is that I started on the Macintosh and I would love to have this thing sitting at home to play with. When I stepped up to my mother's iBook running OS X, I felt like an idiot. I would just love to learn it inside and out and use it in lieu of Linux.
-Lucas
-Lucas
To be more on topic, I'd estimate that 90% of the accidents I see involve women drivers. I'm not saying that males are always better drivers. What I'm saying is that defensive driving requires good reflexes, something young men are more inclined to have. The kind of experience where you have to respond quickly to changing conditions such as people pulling out in front of you and stopping when you're doing 45 mph. Throughout childhood, men generally play more sports, video games, and other activities that help them prepare to be better drivers. As a result of women being required to use quick reflexes for the first time and keep track of several moving objects all around them, they tend to be much more cautious, responding to their fear. Many times, this behavior is beneficial because they're not going to do anything risky like us males. However, they will do things that cause accidents when they think they're being safe. Slamming on the brakes for a yellow light, merging at 30% the speed of traffic, turning on their blinkers way too early and creeping to the turn when on a busy street, not checking blind spots because they're afraid to turn their head around while moving. The scary thing is when they're disciplining the kids, talking on the cell phone, fiddling with makeup/hair, messing with the radio, etc. All of these types of things make accidents more likely for men and women, but again, men are better prepared for the "game" of juggling these things. Of course, because males have been raised to compete and play games, we tend to do stupid things more often and cause dangerous accidents. We also don't obey ridiculous speed limits that are set low enough for the legal driver with the lowest skill level. We get more tickets.
I honestly wish there were no profiling whatsoever and everyone started at the same place, with the value of the vehicle being the only variable. If you file a claim, your rates go up.
-Lucas
Actually, I dispute that. Most people that claim it's more secure say that it's because of the amount of vulnerabilities being found in Internet Explorer compared to Firefox. How many people are looking for unknown vulnerabilities in IE? How many are looking at Mozilla/Firefox? This is determined by the media. When there's a MS vulnerability, it's all over the news and the finder gets a ton of glory and hopeful job offers. I see MS patches making it into mainstream news such as the Associated Press. As Firefox gets a spotlight because of a good amount of security professionals (Which happen to be coders with a personal agenda) recommending people switch, I've seen an increase in the amount of vulnerabilities reported. Don't believe me? Look at the stats and compare IE with Firefox. Yes, IEs numbers are higher, but think in proportion to how many skilled people are looking for vulnerabilities in each product. If you look at the different versions of Mozilla over the timeline they give, you can see that not many vulnerabilities were found early last year or before that compared to when Firefox really started to get attention. Imagine how many vulnerabilities would be found if they got the amount of media attention that IE vulns get. Until both products get the same amount of hacker attention, it's premature to say which is more secure.
As a security professional, I believe that as long as you keep your software patched up (computers, routers, switches, etc.), your only fear is a zero day. Hopefully you have other layers of security such as a border firewall, IPSec Transport mode with packet filtering at every host, multiple antivirus vendors software (with at least one of them configured to block password protected archives, known dangerous file types and dangerous content), ongoing training, locked down servers with all the fat trimmed, middle tier servers, etc. These things are not vendor specific. You can run Windows, Linux, OSX, BSD, Solaris and still be able to do these things. Assuming you have all that set up, one zero day most likely wouldn't be enough. If someone really wants in and you've done all these things, do you really think you're going to get "pwned" because you chose a specific vendor or software package? No. You're going to get pwned because someone will be social engineered or some aspect of physical security will be bypassed. It's a hell of a lot easier to get into a company by phishing than it is to hunt down a couple silver bullet zero days as you get through each layer of security. My point is that if someone wants to get in, they can do it. It only takes a few holes at most and enough patience to find them to get to a target. It's up to the admin to ensure that it's as difficult as possible to find them and to ensure that the damage is minimized. Auditing (logging), backups, intrusion detection, policies, procedures, security assessments, a good data structure with granular permissions, etc can help minimize impact.
My professional opinion is that it just doesn't matter what you use as long as it's well administered, but if you want to force me to pick one side and guess which code has less vulnerabilities, I'm going to pick MS. Security through obscurity isn't a magic elixir, but it's definitely another layer of protection. And with all the attention MS gets, they've had an opportunity to patch up a lot of their vulnerabilities. At this point, new vulns are probably easier to find on other vendors that aren't as popular.
-Lucas
-Lucas
-Lucas
-Lucas
Remember that speeds faster than 1056Mbps (132MBps) will not be seen if you're using a PCI card or an on-board chipset that passes through the PCI bus.
-Lucas
-Lucas
This is a SPYWARE removal tool. Not ANTIVIRUS software. Spyware gets onto computers by users who choose to install them. Even if these programs are hidden in a long EULA for a program that effectively acts as trojan horse, it's currently legal. Microsoft cannot do anything about it until it's illegal. The sites that use illegal tactics to install spyware such as exploiting vulnerabilities are legally hacking your computer. These sites are typically shady as hell and most offen are related to illegal activities such as cracks.am, used for downloading program cracks and serial numbers. If you browse to a site that is obviously shady as hell and get spyware put on through a vulnerability and proceed to blame Microsoft, you're an idiot. If I made a pr0n site and used a known vulnerability in Firefox to load malware onto your computer, running under your credentials (Most likely root or equivelant access), would you blame the pr0n site creaters for being sneaky bastards or the developers of your software for being human and making a mistake? It doesn't matter how much money Microsoft has. No amount of money in the world is going to guarantee vulnerability free software. As a business, it is their responsibility to make a reasonable best effort and compared to 99.9% of the software vendors out there, they're top notch. If you gasped at that statement, then maybe you haven't tried to deal with as many companies as I have. Hell, I reported a major security vulnerability (Bug 224692, search for it on bugzilla.mozilla.org) that affects Mozilla and Firefox on the win32 platform over a year ago. It's still not fixed.
I believe a smart move on Microsoft's part would be to partner with Symantec and release a limited antivirus package. The definition files only get updated to handle viruses that get onto the computer via a vulnerability in Microsoft software. The user is made abundantly aware of this fact during the install process. All OSes and revisions that have the security center like XP SP2 still nag the user to get a full anti-virus software solution. Put this package on Windows Update for all versions of Windows that are still in product lifecycle and snail mail free CDs to anyone that calls an 800 number. Advertise the fuck out of it. Symantec makes the product and does the definition updates. The amount of extra development time it would cost them to do this is minimal. In exchange, they get highlighted bling-bling in all of Microsoft's listings of Antivirus vendors. At that point, virus writers will move on to target another operating system or product and Slashdotters will STFU and get back to making Linux, Mozilla, and hopefully a replacement for Outlook/Exchange.
What about the Spyware problem, you ask? This is not Microsoft's problem just like spam is not their problem. If they can profit by making a solution, I don't see any reason to have a problem with that.
-Lucas