Real virus writers are more concerned with making gobs of money with as little investment as possible. Mac doesn't play into that role yet, as the aforementioned marketshare is still small by comparison.
So millions of machines that no fellow botherder can swipe from you, almost off of them running no A/V, almost all of them running fairly homogeneous software and hardware setups...?
One would think that all that virgin territory would be well worth the effort for just those reasons, no?
Err, you do realize that DOS was/is utter pants for online use in the first place, right?
It made no sense to write (network-vectored) worms for DOS back then, because if you ran a DOS box, odds were excellent that you also ran it on a crap-slow modem with an intermittent network connection (mostly, the DOS users were offline).
That said, there were certainly no shortage of floppy-based malware written for DOS back in the day, in spite of the attack vector.
Now once Windows 95 and its built-in TCP/IP showed up... whoa, momma!
Seriously, folks - this has less to do with protecting the Rolls Royces of this world, and more to do with encouraging alternate means of locomotion.
Where would you rather give your money (if you're a US taxpayer, it is your money)... to a bunch of failing and backwards-looking automaking corps, or to a young and hungry company that is looking to change the very way we fuel up our cars?
Forget the politics - the Big Three are in thrall to a wage and compensation plan that is simply unsustainable and way above market value, no matter how the mathematics are applied. Not blaming the unions per se (the corps agreed to it, after all) but seriously - add it up yourself.
Coupled with the dragging and tooth-pulling required to get the likes of GM and Ford to go all-alternative (or to even jack up the fuel efficiency to something near what the competition has right now)? Why bother? They'll simply make a lot of noises about having changed their ways, and 10 years later they'll be right back in Congress again, begging for more money.
This may sound trollish, but screw that - let the innovators of this world get a leg-up, if we're going to be throwing around money in the first place. Let the collapse of the Big Three be an object lesson to those who think they're somehow entitled to continued existence just because they happen to be a big corporation.
Err, Saturns weren't built to just do "LEO" - they did launches to the frickin' Moon. There's a rather large diff between a 148 mile-high orbit and a 250,000 mile-high one, y'know?
Have any of these corps, in their pissing contest, ever think that maybe the problems could be compund (e.g. exploit one flaw after using another to deliver the exploit)?
Cripes - I'd be more worried about someone using a 0-day or undisclosed flaw to deliver that nasty little Vista Kernel exploit that MSFT has said it won't have patched for at least six months...
...bitching over something that was patched seems rather too academic by now, but then, London's hospital system was IIRC recently shut down completely due to a variant of the old Mytob worm - and how long has that one been out?
What in the hell are inmates doing with cell phones in the first place?
In an environment where even the smallest improvised weapon can be found and confiscated, you'd think it would be drop-easy for the prison to find and confiscate a cell phone. Any inmate caught with one gets n weeks/months added to their sentence... problem solved.
Seriously - it's prison, not a Hilton, FFS - if they need to use a phone (for speaking to their lawyer, loved-ones, etc), let 'em use a POTS phone wired into a wall somewhere.
The solution the SC prison system is looking for? It's akin to wrapping ships in Saran Wrap to fix any potential leaks - expensive and not very workable over time...
Funny - my last employer (currently in the Fortune 100... hint: look up the ticker symbol INTL) uses almost nothing but Linux to develop with these days.
McBride and his cronies my be at the moment... but SCO the organization is not. SCO has been bleeding worse than a freshly-amputated pig, with no signs of slowing down its losses. Nobody (especially in this economy) would want to buy such a toxic and radioactive property.
I also suspect that whoever is left holding the by-now worthless SCO stock would have little trouble in finding a contingency lawyer willing to sue McBride (and his buddies) personally for fiscal irresponsibility.
There is also the chance that the SEC may get in on the act as well.
Maybe they should just post the.sql dump of the database for anyone to download...
Sounds silly, but the best proof that an OSS project is worth keeping alive is the willingness of someone else to pick up where the original maintainer leaves off.
Besides, ask yourself this - how does the submitter's question differ WRT closed-source projects? Of course there's the money angle, but vendors are equally willing to dump proprietary projects once the income no longer equals the resources put towards distributing them.
The big (and IMHO useful) diff is that at least with OSS, when a project dies you can still do something about it if you think it's worthy of keeping alive (besides nursing increasingly outdated binaries, that is).
Err, why would the US gov't care? They have their own secure internetwork setups that are pretty much isolated from 'The Internet' as we know it. No one has creates a DDoS technique that can leap an air gap, so...
I suspect that most other first-world governments have similar infrastructures as well.
...the EU may be correct in this case - depending.
For public projects and the like, sure - the taxpayers have a right to know. OTOH, for military use and various secret services (I don't know if the EU has any of either, but I can see respective militaries and such among member nations pooling VLKs and the like through the EU), there's a lot of things the public doesn't necessarily have a compelling need to know about.
One question though - does the EU disclose contract and/or payment info for any other vendor, for any reason? If the answer is "no", then this request is probably par for the course.
All that said, perhaps the reason the EU denied it is because they may honestly not know. Sure, individual departments probably have a general idea, but in aggregate? Good luck with that one...
You know, as one of those prototypical evil world-dominating US citizen types, I should be happy that, vis-a-vis Microsoft, we're enslaving the world to an American-made product. Nevermind that it's second-rate and vastly inferior to Linux in more aspects than I care to count. Nevermind that it'll end up hurting innovation and the pocketbooks of third-world countries barely struggling to bring themselves upwards. They'll all be dependent on us!
Then again, I realize that damnit, it's a colossal waste of potential, energy, and resources... not to mention money.
Forget all the ephemeral left-leaning talking points bandied about concerning resentment towards the USA - thanks to intentionally crippling developing nations with Windows, future generations are gonna hate us more than you can ever imagine...
I'm thinking something more direct... an anonymous-looking execution of a hooded spammer won't get quite as much attention and effect as, say, the severed heads of spammers jammed onto a pike and set in front of a datacenter.
That, or we could show some mercy and at the same time have a living, breathing object lesson by castrating viagra spammers, etc...
Hell,.docx can't be opened by half of a typical office staff now, even sans OOo (you know, where the execs and wannabes thereof rush out and get/requisition MS Office 2k7, but the rest of the office gets by on Office 2k3? Yep - I know there's patches for it, but apparently MSFT hadn't bothered to push it via Windows Update... I think they're kinda torn between wanting to sell 2k7 licenses and trying to push the format.)
Even now, any document that you want to send outside of the company or for others' use, you send in "Office 97-2003" (plain ol'.doc) just to make sure the recipient has at least some hope of reading the thing... I just do PDF; makes it easier all around.
To be honest, read-only of the.docx format is all that OOo actually needs. Then if you get a file ending in.docx, you send back the changes in PDF, then watch as the recipient gets all red-faced and demands to know why you did that (evil grin).
Usually a smart telco doesn't sue, they simply bribe the legislature into restricting their municipal competition (bottom of page).
(Basically, Comcast and Qwest bribed the Utah legislature into stopping their multi-muni competitor, UTOPIA, in Utah. The Utah ACLU's letter against such action is here: http://www.acluutah.org/utopia.htm)
Agreed, big-time. It was like the 1980's and early '90s never ended in there... I loved it when it was out, but nowadays, it seems pretty irrelevant.
In spite of its subtle politics, it was damned funny. The politicking he employed was more of a scalpel (far better than the blatant dull machete' that was Doonesbury) which is what made you read Bloom County no matter what your politics were - and even if you were a staunch neocon, you laughed your ass off at it.
Then again, it lacks that timelessness which Calvin and Hobbes has. I have a shedload of Calvin and Hobbes books on the shelves... OTOH, I can't remember owning any Bloom County books since 1993 (I'd lost the ones I had when the apartment got flooded... never really bothered to replace them - I really should head out and get a few just to take me back).
C&H is a never-ending fountain of laughs (in spite of the moronic and seemingly never-ending 'calvin pissing on $object' car sticker derivatives). Bloom County OTOH is (sadly) a time capsule.
Sometime after October 14th, my wife and I will see a ballot here in Oregon. They usually make sure you have them two weeks before election day. You then drop it off in the mail, or you can skip the stamp and drop it off at city hall and the like.
And yep - exactly as you described... the judges and such have yes or no check marks for retention.
Thing is, (and you note this) nobody knows or remembers such things, so the majority just pick a yes or no on whim (unless a party affiliation is listed, then the voter gets something to go on - yeah, I know... sad, isn't it?) and carries on.
So unless there's an outcry, I doubt that he loses his job, even if I used a Sharpie to mark the "no" vote.
...what are they doing to improve the algorithms used to calculate the results? And if they're transparent (e.g. open for public inspection) - bonus!
(yes, I know that there are only a few folks in the Human race that would even know how to read the things. That said, it would be nice to have something educational, and at the same time open for public scrutiny so as to avoid political accusation, you know?)
If they blew it all right now, it'd be 2x their available cash.
OTOH, they'll more likely spread it over a few years, and skim it off the top of inbound money.
In fact, IIRC they just got done with something similar, and that this is just pretty much a new iteration of that (which probably explains why Wall Street collectively yawned in its direction yesterday).
It would likely be cheaper to just switch to FiOS.
Sure, Verizon (the lesser of two evils at the moment) would probably decide to start pulling the same stunts, but from a consumer PoV, why should I bother getting a biz-class account if I don't have to (yet)?
Also, a Comcast business-class package IIRC restricts the television side of things (no PPV movies, etc).
On the latter point? Not so fast... $company can (in most cases) run on half the staff because their orders will be effectively cut in half (or more) during the crisis, their production will drop sharply during this time, and the whole shebang will be slowed down anyway.
And yes, this will likely include networking/ISPs, because no sysadmin/netadmin is going to be stupid enough to cause downtime for expansions, performance tweaking, other installs, non-critical problems, etc. You simply run it until it dies and have standby equipment ready to swap out when it does. This is unlike normal operations, when admins will happily flop a core router cluster during a slow part of the day and kill one for upgrades, patching, etc etc etc.
Now once all the smoke clears and things kick back to normal, you have increased business again, which means you need more staff again. Again, this goes for ISPs and network providers, who will use that time to fix/upgrade/expand all the crap that they weren't able to during the crisis.
Historical parallel? Consider that after the Black Death passed in the 17th century, the cost of labor in Europe skyrocketed due to the lack of people to go around. I suspect that in an ugly-enough pandemic scenario, you're probably going to be short of staff once it passes anyway... can't lay off the dead, you know (well, you can, but it would look pretty silly when you do).
True - and as the chances of a given condition get more remote, the less likely it is that anyone has any sort of plan in place.
In tech terms, we can use backups as an analogy. The plans are pretty damned precise for contingencies like user goofs, a server blowing up, etc. But the D/R plans usually get a lot more vague when we start talking about floods, earthquakes, and fire... and these are still things that have a somewhat tangible probability.
When we finally get out to the level of civil unrest and pandemics, you may as well chuck in plans for asteroid impact and zombie apocalypse while you're at it, because the odds start getting low enough that it really isn't worth the time and resources to keep an active plan against.
It all depends on the bug in question. Not a doctor, but at a guess...
If it was something like Ebola, where you require person-to-person contact, you just wait until the affected people die/get-quarantined/etc and the bug dies off in general.
If it's something that can survive outside the human body for a short period of time, then we isolate ourselves and wait it out.
If it's something that can jump species easily and/or survive for long periods of time away from a host? We're pretty much in the shit, unless/until a cure, vaccine, and some sort of germicide/'viruscide' can be concocted.
Personally, and I think I can speak for most human beings: I'm not going to take the chance of becoming one of the statistics, all in the name of carrying on, you know?
Okay, so what about all the other interruptions in the day (mandatory meetings that don't involve what you're doing but you have to go to it anyway, emergencies that pop up which you're required to jump after, the Boss stopping by to get your input on something he/she just saw somewhere, folks stopping by to tell you some joke they heard on TV last night, vendors(!) wanting to get a word in edge-wise with you, phone calls, etc)?
Trust me, there's far worse than email out there (and I can always minimize my email client until I decide to go look at it).
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Real virus writers are more concerned with making gobs of money with as little investment as possible. Mac doesn't play into that role yet, as the aforementioned marketshare is still small by comparison.
So millions of machines that no fellow botherder can swipe from you, almost off of them running no A/V, almost all of them running fairly homogeneous software and hardware setups...?
One would think that all that virgin territory would be well worth the effort for just those reasons, no?
Err, you do realize that DOS was/is utter pants for online use in the first place, right?
It made no sense to write (network-vectored) worms for DOS back then, because if you ran a DOS box, odds were excellent that you also ran it on a crap-slow modem with an intermittent network connection (mostly, the DOS users were offline).
That said, there were certainly no shortage of floppy-based malware written for DOS back in the day, in spite of the attack vector.
Now once Windows 95 and its built-in TCP/IP showed up... whoa, momma!
Seriously, folks - this has less to do with protecting the Rolls Royces of this world, and more to do with encouraging alternate means of locomotion.
Where would you rather give your money (if you're a US taxpayer, it is your money)... to a bunch of failing and backwards-looking automaking corps, or to a young and hungry company that is looking to change the very way we fuel up our cars?
Forget the politics - the Big Three are in thrall to a wage and compensation plan that is simply unsustainable and way above market value, no matter how the mathematics are applied. Not blaming the unions per se (the corps agreed to it, after all) but seriously - add it up yourself.
Coupled with the dragging and tooth-pulling required to get the likes of GM and Ford to go all-alternative (or to even jack up the fuel efficiency to something near what the competition has right now)? Why bother? They'll simply make a lot of noises about having changed their ways, and 10 years later they'll be right back in Congress again, begging for more money.
This may sound trollish, but screw that - let the innovators of this world get a leg-up, if we're going to be throwing around money in the first place. Let the collapse of the Big Three be an object lesson to those who think they're somehow entitled to continued existence just because they happen to be a big corporation.
Err, Saturns weren't built to just do "LEO" - they did launches to the frickin' Moon. There's a rather large diff between a 148 mile-high orbit and a 250,000 mile-high one, y'know?
How many folks have UAC turned off already, and have admin privs at the same time?
Have any of these corps, in their pissing contest, ever think that maybe the problems could be compund (e.g. exploit one flaw after using another to deliver the exploit)?
Cripes - I'd be more worried about someone using a 0-day or undisclosed flaw to deliver that nasty little Vista Kernel exploit that MSFT has said it won't have patched for at least six months...
What in the hell are inmates doing with cell phones in the first place?
In an environment where even the smallest improvised weapon can be found and confiscated, you'd think it would be drop-easy for the prison to find and confiscate a cell phone. Any inmate caught with one gets n weeks/months added to their sentence... problem solved.
Seriously - it's prison, not a Hilton, FFS - if they need to use a phone (for speaking to their lawyer, loved-ones, etc), let 'em use a POTS phone wired into a wall somewhere.
The solution the SC prison system is looking for? It's akin to wrapping ships in Saran Wrap to fix any potential leaks - expensive and not very workable over time...
Funny - my last employer (currently in the Fortune 100... hint: look up the ticker symbol INTL) uses almost nothing but Linux to develop with these days.
McBride and his cronies my be at the moment... but SCO the organization is not. SCO has been bleeding worse than a freshly-amputated pig, with no signs of slowing down its losses. Nobody (especially in this economy) would want to buy such a toxic and radioactive property.
I also suspect that whoever is left holding the by-now worthless SCO stock would have little trouble in finding a contingency lawyer willing to sue McBride (and his buddies) personally for fiscal irresponsibility.
There is also the chance that the SEC may get in on the act as well.
Maybe they should just post the .sql dump of the database for anyone to download...
Sounds silly, but the best proof that an OSS project is worth keeping alive is the willingness of someone else to pick up where the original maintainer leaves off.
Besides, ask yourself this - how does the submitter's question differ WRT closed-source projects? Of course there's the money angle, but vendors are equally willing to dump proprietary projects once the income no longer equals the resources put towards distributing them.
The big (and IMHO useful) diff is that at least with OSS, when a project dies you can still do something about it if you think it's worthy of keeping alive (besides nursing increasingly outdated binaries, that is).
Err, why would the US gov't care? They have their own secure internetwork setups that are pretty much isolated from 'The Internet' as we know it. No one has creates a DDoS technique that can leap an air gap, so...
I suspect that most other first-world governments have similar infrastructures as well.
...the EU may be correct in this case - depending.
For public projects and the like, sure - the taxpayers have a right to know. OTOH, for military use and various secret services (I don't know if the EU has any of either, but I can see respective militaries and such among member nations pooling VLKs and the like through the EU), there's a lot of things the public doesn't necessarily have a compelling need to know about.
One question though - does the EU disclose contract and/or payment info for any other vendor, for any reason? If the answer is "no", then this request is probably par for the course.
All that said, perhaps the reason the EU denied it is because they may honestly not know. Sure, individual departments probably have a general idea, but in aggregate? Good luck with that one...
You know, as one of those prototypical evil world-dominating US citizen types, I should be happy that, vis-a-vis Microsoft, we're enslaving the world to an American-made product. Nevermind that it's second-rate and vastly inferior to Linux in more aspects than I care to count. Nevermind that it'll end up hurting innovation and the pocketbooks of third-world countries barely struggling to bring themselves upwards. They'll all be dependent on us!
Then again, I realize that damnit, it's a colossal waste of potential, energy, and resources... not to mention money.
Forget all the ephemeral left-leaning talking points bandied about concerning resentment towards the USA - thanks to intentionally crippling developing nations with Windows, future generations are gonna hate us more than you can ever imagine...
I'm thinking something more direct... an anonymous-looking execution of a hooded spammer won't get quite as much attention and effect as, say, the severed heads of spammers jammed onto a pike and set in front of a datacenter.
That, or we could show some mercy and at the same time have a living, breathing object lesson by castrating viagra spammers, etc...
Hell, .docx can't be opened by half of a typical office staff now, even sans OOo (you know, where the execs and wannabes thereof rush out and get/requisition MS Office 2k7, but the rest of the office gets by on Office 2k3? Yep - I know there's patches for it, but apparently MSFT hadn't bothered to push it via Windows Update... I think they're kinda torn between wanting to sell 2k7 licenses and trying to push the format.)
Even now, any document that you want to send outside of the company or for others' use, you send in "Office 97-2003" (plain ol' .doc) just to make sure the recipient has at least some hope of reading the thing... I just do PDF; makes it easier all around.
To be honest, read-only of the .docx format is all that OOo actually needs. Then if you get a file ending in .docx, you send back the changes in PDF, then watch as the recipient gets all red-faced and demands to know why you did that (evil grin).
Methinks it'll come to a head sooner or later.
Usually a smart telco doesn't sue, they simply bribe the legislature into restricting their municipal competition (bottom of page).
(Basically, Comcast and Qwest bribed the Utah legislature into stopping their multi-muni competitor, UTOPIA, in Utah. The Utah ACLU's letter against such action is here: http://www.acluutah.org/utopia.htm)
Agreed, big-time. It was like the 1980's and early '90s never ended in there... I loved it when it was out, but nowadays, it seems pretty irrelevant.
In spite of its subtle politics, it was damned funny. The politicking he employed was more of a scalpel (far better than the blatant dull machete' that was Doonesbury) which is what made you read Bloom County no matter what your politics were - and even if you were a staunch neocon, you laughed your ass off at it.
Then again, it lacks that timelessness which Calvin and Hobbes has. I have a shedload of Calvin and Hobbes books on the shelves... OTOH, I can't remember owning any Bloom County books since 1993 (I'd lost the ones I had when the apartment got flooded... never really bothered to replace them - I really should head out and get a few just to take me back).
C&H is a never-ending fountain of laughs (in spite of the moronic and seemingly never-ending 'calvin pissing on $object' car sticker derivatives). Bloom County OTOH is (sadly) a time capsule.
Sometime after October 14th, my wife and I will see a ballot here in Oregon. They usually make sure you have them two weeks before election day. You then drop it off in the mail, or you can skip the stamp and drop it off at city hall and the like.
And yep - exactly as you described... the judges and such have yes or no check marks for retention.
Thing is, (and you note this) nobody knows or remembers such things, so the majority just pick a yes or no on whim (unless a party affiliation is listed, then the voter gets something to go on - yeah, I know... sad, isn't it?) and carries on.
So unless there's an outcry, I doubt that he loses his job, even if I used a Sharpie to mark the "no" vote.
...what are they doing to improve the algorithms used to calculate the results? And if they're transparent (e.g. open for public inspection) - bonus!
(yes, I know that there are only a few folks in the Human race that would even know how to read the things. That said, it would be nice to have something educational, and at the same time open for public scrutiny so as to avoid political accusation, you know?)
If they blew it all right now, it'd be 2x their available cash.
OTOH, they'll more likely spread it over a few years, and skim it off the top of inbound money.
In fact, IIRC they just got done with something similar, and that this is just pretty much a new iteration of that (which probably explains why Wall Street collectively yawned in its direction yesterday).
It would likely be cheaper to just switch to FiOS.
Sure, Verizon (the lesser of two evils at the moment) would probably decide to start pulling the same stunts, but from a consumer PoV, why should I bother getting a biz-class account if I don't have to (yet)?
Also, a Comcast business-class package IIRC restricts the television side of things (no PPV movies, etc).
On the latter point? Not so fast... $company can (in most cases) run on half the staff because their orders will be effectively cut in half (or more) during the crisis, their production will drop sharply during this time, and the whole shebang will be slowed down anyway.
And yes, this will likely include networking/ISPs, because no sysadmin/netadmin is going to be stupid enough to cause downtime for expansions, performance tweaking, other installs, non-critical problems, etc. You simply run it until it dies and have standby equipment ready to swap out when it does. This is unlike normal operations, when admins will happily flop a core router cluster during a slow part of the day and kill one for upgrades, patching, etc etc etc.
Now once all the smoke clears and things kick back to normal, you have increased business again, which means you need more staff again. Again, this goes for ISPs and network providers, who will use that time to fix/upgrade/expand all the crap that they weren't able to during the crisis.
Historical parallel? Consider that after the Black Death passed in the 17th century, the cost of labor in Europe skyrocketed due to the lack of people to go around. I suspect that in an ugly-enough pandemic scenario, you're probably going to be short of staff once it passes anyway... can't lay off the dead, you know (well, you can, but it would look pretty silly when you do).
True - and as the chances of a given condition get more remote, the less likely it is that anyone has any sort of plan in place.
In tech terms, we can use backups as an analogy. The plans are pretty damned precise for contingencies like user goofs, a server blowing up, etc. But the D/R plans usually get a lot more vague when we start talking about floods, earthquakes, and fire... and these are still things that have a somewhat tangible probability.
When we finally get out to the level of civil unrest and pandemics, you may as well chuck in plans for asteroid impact and zombie apocalypse while you're at it, because the odds start getting low enough that it really isn't worth the time and resources to keep an active plan against.
It all depends on the bug in question. Not a doctor, but at a guess...
If it was something like Ebola, where you require person-to-person contact, you just wait until the affected people die/get-quarantined/etc and the bug dies off in general.
If it's something that can survive outside the human body for a short period of time, then we isolate ourselves and wait it out.
If it's something that can jump species easily and/or survive for long periods of time away from a host? We're pretty much in the shit, unless/until a cure, vaccine, and some sort of germicide/'viruscide' can be concocted.
Personally, and I think I can speak for most human beings: I'm not going to take the chance of becoming one of the statistics, all in the name of carrying on, you know?
Okay, so what about all the other interruptions in the day (mandatory meetings that don't involve what you're doing but you have to go to it anyway, emergencies that pop up which you're required to jump after, the Boss stopping by to get your input on something he/she just saw somewhere, folks stopping by to tell you some joke they heard on TV last night, vendors(!) wanting to get a word in edge-wise with you, phone calls, etc)?
Trust me, there's far worse than email out there (and I can always minimize my email client until I decide to go look at it).