Most of the Red Hat updates list are for insecure temporary file usage. Who knows what programs are doing *that* under Windows. Probably no-one not exploiting it ever will.
The first point you make, and the point you make most strongly, seems to be that Windows software is always significantly easier to install than comparible Linux software.
Let's assume for a moment that the following items are true:
Your client could be running Windows 2000 or Debian Linux with equal likelyhood.
The only decisive factor in the Debian vs. 2000 choice is the ease of installation of a piece of software to perform specific task T.
There exists a software package L, packaged
for Debian (as a.deb), which will acceptably perform task T.
There exists a software package W, packaged
for Windows 2000 (as an.exe installer), which will acceptably perform task T.
Debian is the obvious choice. "apt-get install L" is significantly easier than "search web/search store; find product; buy; download/wait for CD; double click; next; next; next; next; next; next; Install; maybe Reboot".
Let's assume that in the above example it's not Debian/.deb but RedHat/.rpm
With rpmfind/freshmeat/etc it's still easier than
the windows install. The linux install becomes "Search web; find package; download; rpm -i package.rpm"
Even with a source tarball it's pretty simple "search; find; download;./configure; make; make install"
Your second point has to do with the avalibility of software for Linux vs. Windows.
I'm not going to argue this point, but if you're basing your O/S choice entirely on the basis of the featurefullness of avalible web add filtering
software, you deserve to be smacked.
Why would you ever want to do something that complex and difficult? In what real situation is it nessisary?
Even if it is nessisary, why do it in kernel space? It seems like it would kill file system efficiency in one fell swoop. A user space program could emulate the functionality for the few cases in which it may actually be nessisary.
The Daemon problem isn't solved by ACLs, it's solved by Capibilities, which are something entirely different.
The accountant problem is solved by giving the accountants one account, and a tarball of all the accounting records.
The student problem can be solved by posting your work to your public_html directory, password restricting access with HTTP authentication, and giving your pals the password to your website.
As far as I can tell, there is no clean way to implement ACLs so that they don't slow the filesystem down immensely at the kernel level. It just seems like a kludge to me.
Well, to comply with the restrictions you identified exactly, I would use the following:
Users alex, bob, and carol are in group thisfile.
The permissions on the file are u:rw g:rw o:none
That would be hella-stupid, unless you have people on staff who are *extremely* qualified at implementing cryptography. 4000 bit keys are useless if you make a moronic mistake implementing the key system. If you need security, use PGP, GPG, SSH, or some other reliable, already implemented open protocal.
Say you have a country of 6 states:
Hicksland, Redneck, Hillbillie, Technostate, Bookplace, and The Port.
There are three candidates: Eric Cartman for the "Confederesah Party", and Mr Garrison for the "Gay" party, and Chef with his new "Party" party that no one expects to be able to win.
The Port has 110,000 citizens. Redneck has 100,000,000 citizens. The other states each have 50,000,000.
Now, 90% of the voters in Redneck, Hillbillie, and Hicksland are going to vote for Cartman, because they like his "Get the niggers out of our schools." and "Gay people should have their ass kicked." platform. Only 7% will vote for Garrison (Because he's gay), and only 3% will vote for Chef, both because he's black and because they don't want to "throw away their vote".
In Bookplace and The Port, 55% will vote
for Garrison, mostly because he's not Cartman. 40% will vote for Cartman, because of his 1.2% tax cut initiative, and because of rumors about Garrison's sex life. The other 5% will vote for Chef.
In Technostate, 60% will vote for Garrison, because he's not Cartman. 20% will vote for each of Chef and Cartman. The technostate voters know that Chef is the only candidate that doesn't base his entire platform on something meaningless, but Garrison is the lesser of two morons.
That means that the majority of voters are voting for Cartman, mostly because of the large groups in some of the states. In a direct republic (majority wins) this elects Cartman, which would be a Bad Thing(tm). No one wants to see Eric Cartman as president.
In a Electoral College system, Garrison will be elected, because he carried more states. This is slightly better than Cartman getting elected, and shows the advantages of an electoral college system.
If instead of a standard "vote for one candidate" ballot, a preferental ballot had been used, the votes would have been similar, but a little bit closer. With an electoral college, Garrison would win - Without, Cartman. *But* the big win would be that more people would have voted Chef as their primary choice, and the statisticians would have to report that Chef actually got somewhere near 30-40% of the popular vote, possibly allowing him to win the next election.
I'm running KDE2 right now, using Konqueror as my web browser. I'm not having any problems. It doesn't crash on any of the websites I view. It manages to properly display everything I need it too. It supports JavaScript if I turn it on. It does SSL. It doesn't do Java right, but I care not. It even will use my true type fonts.
I doubt that all the NT machines would have sent such info, and I doubt that all the copys of NT his company has are unregistered. Obviously the *registered* copys sent the info. Microsoft: have fun proving otherwise to the Jury.
(Objection, your honor. My client doesn't even run Windows.)
Small scale "piracy" is good for their buisness. If a 14 year old who wants to be a sysadmin when he grows up has to pay $500 for NT, it's not going to happen - he'll find Linux and learn that. If he can "pirate" NT, then he'll learn NT, and Microsoft will have other NT admin on the market in a few years.
It's similar with MS Office. Normal home users aren't going to pay $600 for an office licence, but they'll happilly "pirate" it to be using the same thing the people they know are. This helps Microsoft by giving them another Office user.
Small scale "piracy" helps even more, if Microsoft is known to crack down on large scale "piracy". If a company's employies are all experianced in NT/Office, the company will be forced to buy licences for these products. And licences to the yearly upgrades to these products. And licences to other MS products, because only MS products work well with MS products.
If Joey the 14 year old sysadmin-to-be pirates NT, learns it, and doesn't find out about alternitives, (Or absorbs the MS-Propaganda at 14, and dismisses the alternitives) think how many potential licenses for Microsoft products he will cause to be purchased once he gets his MSCE and a job.
If Joey can't "pirate" NT, or even has trouble "pirating" it because of copy protection, Microsoft may well get NO licences.
Small scale "piracy" acceptance, and no copy protection, is an obvious win for Microsoft. Suing buisness that "pirate" Microsoft software just reinforces the win condition.
I would assume that it would have intragalactic ramifications the same way that the gravity-attraction between you and your computer monitor has an effect.
i.e. The effect is there, but on the given scale it doesn't matter.
In the type of configuration that you would have trouble setting up under Linux, a free AOL CD stops being easy, and may become entirely impossible.
In the best case (which is luckily pretty common), all you have to do is run your distro's simple PPP setup utility, type in a couple of strings and numbers, and you're connected.
It's only in the complex case that setting up Linux PPP is the least bit difficult.
The problem is that only the heating system is controlled by the thermostat, therefore it's possible to increase the temprature significantly more than it can be decreased.
What kind of moron sysadmin who makes his network so insecure and unstable that a single client machine running something unexpected can break everything? If you scripts are so crappy that they assume things that have a good chance of not being true, you should resign now. (Windows NT service pack 4 blah! We can't install SP5, it'd break my scripts.)
It's not like someone's pingflooding the DNS server...
You have a good point about the murderer/rapist only getting 10 years in jail. Of course the "fix" for this is simple. Throw the
murderer in jail forever (or, better yet, make sure that the murderer has full access to the legal system and when due process has
run out execute him).
As far as I'm conserned you're trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem is having both a law on the books that makes three felony convictions a life sentance, and having felonies be so meaningless that carrying a pound of weed to your freind in another state is a felony.
Rather than try to justify throwning nonviolent perpitrators of semi-irrelevent crimes in jail for life, (In none of my three examples was anyone even hurt, or even nessisarily put in significant danger.) life sentances should be reserved for people who really deserve them: serial murder-rapists, etc.
The purpise of the justice system is to keep society civilized. Three strikes and victimless felonies ain't civilized.
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You shouldn't have to eliminate network traffic to have secure systems.
Most of the Red Hat updates list are for insecure temporary file usage. Who knows what programs are doing *that* under Windows. Probably no-one not exploiting it ever will.
So use the same key on all of the servers who would have the same host name.
The first point you make, and the point you make most strongly, seems to be that Windows software is always significantly easier to install than comparible Linux software.
Let's assume for a moment that the following items are true:
Debian is the obvious choice. "apt-get install L" is significantly easier than "search web/search store; find product; buy; download/wait for CD; double click; next; next; next; next; next; next; Install; maybe Reboot".
Let's assume that in the above example it's not Debian/.deb but RedHat/.rpm
With rpmfind/freshmeat/etc it's still easier than the windows install. The linux install becomes "Search web; find package; download; rpm -i package.rpm"
Even with a source tarball it's pretty simple "search; find; download; ./configure; make; make install"
Your second point has to do with the avalibility of software for Linux vs. Windows. I'm not going to argue this point, but if you're basing your O/S choice entirely on the basis of the featurefullness of avalible web add filtering software, you deserve to be smacked.
You don't seem to understand what the word democracy means? Do the people vote on the laws? No? It's not a democracy.
Why would you ever want to do something that complex and difficult? In what real situation is it nessisary?
Even if it is nessisary, why do it in kernel space? It seems like it would kill file system efficiency in one fell swoop. A user space program could emulate the functionality for the few cases in which it may actually be nessisary.
The Daemon problem isn't solved by ACLs, it's solved by Capibilities, which are something entirely different.
The accountant problem is solved by giving the accountants one account, and a tarball of all the accounting records.
The student problem can be solved by posting your work to your public_html directory, password restricting access with HTTP authentication, and giving your pals the password to your website.
As far as I can tell, there is no clean way to implement ACLs so that they don't slow the filesystem down immensely at the kernel level. It just seems like a kludge to me.
Well, to comply with the restrictions you identified exactly, I would use the following: Users alex, bob, and carol are in group thisfile. The permissions on the file are u:rw g:rw o:none
I don't understand what you need ACLs for...
All they do is complexify and bloat a relitively simple permissions concept.
Again, what actual situation do you want to deal with that you can't do with existing Linux permissions?
And many of us will still be running Linux 2.4.32, it'll just be a "Pirate OS".
That would be hella-stupid, unless you have people on staff who are *extremely* qualified at implementing cryptography. 4000 bit keys are useless if you make a moronic mistake implementing the key system. If you need security, use PGP, GPG, SSH, or some other reliable, already implemented open protocal.
Say you have a country of 6 states:
Hicksland, Redneck, Hillbillie, Technostate, Bookplace, and The Port.
There are three candidates: Eric Cartman for the "Confederesah Party", and Mr Garrison for the "Gay" party, and Chef with his new "Party" party that no one expects to be able to win.
The Port has 110,000 citizens. Redneck has 100,000,000 citizens. The other states each have 50,000,000.
Now, 90% of the voters in Redneck, Hillbillie, and Hicksland are going to vote for Cartman, because they like his "Get the niggers out of our schools." and "Gay people should have their ass kicked." platform. Only 7% will vote for Garrison (Because he's gay), and only 3% will vote for Chef, both because he's black and because they don't want to "throw away their vote".
In Bookplace and The Port, 55% will vote for Garrison, mostly because he's not Cartman. 40% will vote for Cartman, because of his 1.2% tax cut initiative, and because of rumors about Garrison's sex life. The other 5% will vote for Chef.
In Technostate, 60% will vote for Garrison, because he's not Cartman. 20% will vote for each of Chef and Cartman. The technostate voters know that Chef is the only candidate that doesn't base his entire platform on something meaningless, but Garrison is the lesser of two morons.
That means that the majority of voters are voting for Cartman, mostly because of the large groups in some of the states. In a direct republic (majority wins) this elects Cartman, which would be a Bad Thing(tm). No one wants to see Eric Cartman as president.
In a Electoral College system, Garrison will be elected, because he carried more states. This is slightly better than Cartman getting elected, and shows the advantages of an electoral college system.
If instead of a standard "vote for one candidate" ballot, a preferental ballot had been used, the votes would have been similar, but a little bit closer. With an electoral college, Garrison would win - Without, Cartman. *But* the big win would be that more people would have voted Chef as their primary choice, and the statisticians would have to report that Chef actually got somewhere near 30-40% of the popular vote, possibly allowing him to win the next election.
I'm not having any such problems with the 2.0-final debs. The links on Slashdot are green.
I'm using the current Debian unstable KDE 2.0-final packages, and I haven't had any speed problems.
I'm running KDE2 right now, using Konqueror as my web browser. I'm not having any problems. It doesn't crash on any of the websites I view. It manages to properly display everything I need it too. It supports JavaScript if I turn it on. It does SSL. It doesn't do Java right, but I care not. It even will use my true type fonts.
Ever read the licence agreement for the Map Editor that comes with Blizzard's StarCraft?
I doubt that all the NT machines would have sent such info, and I doubt that all the copys of NT his company has are unregistered. Obviously the *registered* copys sent the info. Microsoft: have fun proving otherwise to the Jury.
(Objection, your honor. My client doesn't even run Windows.)
Small scale "piracy" is good for their buisness. If a 14 year old who wants to be a sysadmin when he grows up has to pay $500 for NT, it's not going to happen - he'll find Linux and learn that. If he can "pirate" NT, then he'll learn NT, and Microsoft will have other NT admin on the market in a few years.
It's similar with MS Office. Normal home users aren't going to pay $600 for an office licence, but they'll happilly "pirate" it to be using the same thing the people they know are. This helps Microsoft by giving them another Office user.
Small scale "piracy" helps even more, if Microsoft is known to crack down on large scale "piracy". If a company's employies are all experianced in NT/Office, the company will be forced to buy licences for these products. And licences to the yearly upgrades to these products. And licences to other MS products, because only MS products work well with MS products.
If Joey the 14 year old sysadmin-to-be pirates NT, learns it, and doesn't find out about alternitives, (Or absorbs the MS-Propaganda at 14, and dismisses the alternitives) think how many potential licenses for Microsoft products he will cause to be purchased once he gets his MSCE and a job.
If Joey can't "pirate" NT, or even has trouble "pirating" it because of copy protection, Microsoft may well get NO licences.
Small scale "piracy" acceptance, and no copy protection, is an obvious win for Microsoft. Suing buisness that "pirate" Microsoft software just reinforces the win condition.
Not really. If we came up with a word for "The time of one rotation around the galactic center", it might be able to ruin one of those.
I would assume that it would have intragalactic ramifications the same way that the gravity-attraction between you and your computer monitor has an effect.
i.e. The effect is there, but on the given scale it doesn't matter.
There are other factors, like how galaxys form, galaxy clusters, gravity, etc.
In the type of configuration that you would have trouble setting up under Linux, a free AOL CD stops being easy, and may become entirely impossible.
In the best case (which is luckily pretty common), all you have to do is run your distro's simple PPP setup utility, type in a couple of strings and numbers, and you're connected.
It's only in the complex case that setting up Linux PPP is the least bit difficult.
The problem is that only the heating system is controlled by the thermostat, therefore it's possible to increase the temprature significantly more than it can be decreased.
What kind of moron sysadmin who makes his network so insecure and unstable that a single client machine running something unexpected can break everything? If you scripts are so crappy that they assume things that have a good chance of not being true, you should resign now. (Windows NT service pack 4 blah! We can't install SP5, it'd break my scripts.)
It's not like someone's pingflooding the DNS server...
As far as I'm conserned you're trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem is having both a law on the books that makes three felony convictions a life sentance, and having felonies be so meaningless that carrying a pound of weed to your freind in another state is a felony.
Rather than try to justify throwning nonviolent perpitrators of semi-irrelevent crimes in jail for life, (In none of my three examples was anyone even hurt, or even nessisarily put in significant danger.) life sentances should be reserved for people who really deserve them: serial murder-rapists, etc.
The purpise of the justice system is to keep society civilized. Three strikes and victimless felonies ain't civilized.