While financial rewards and praise are all great, there is one thing that every open source developer would be happy to accept from you:
STOP USING WINDOWS.
Zealotry aside, the fact that you and a lot of other people use Windows, helps the people who constantly damage what we make and love, so by refusing to support them even if it is 3% more convenient for you than, say, Linux or *BSD, you help to hurt us, and there isn't much else that can compensate this. Next time when some hideous API will create horrible incompatibilities with our software, when part of format will get patented, or when frivolous lawsuit will be brought against some of us, we won't think about praise or money we got from you, we will just think that by using Windows you have added to their dominance and paved the road that they are marching on. It's not like we hate you personally for that, but we would appreciate if you will refuse to help our enemies.
Other environments may be better looking or follow languages' syntax more closely, but XEmacs certainly is most flexible and gives least amount of distraction to the programmer.
I don't agree with the idea that "religious freedom" is obtainable or even
necessary in the modern society. Almost everywhere in the world people already can gather in someone's
home and practice any kind of religious ritual that doesn't include
commiting some crime, or even behave in their private life according to
the teaching of some religion -- again, within the boundaries that are
allowed by the laws. Last time I have checked, most of popular religions,
(at least in their most popular interpretations) do not openly advocate
murder, theft, rape, fraud, etc. -- even islam and mormons -- so religious people that
practice religion privately don't need any "protection" of their right to
believe in their religions.
But "religious freedom" is not about rights, it's about a completely
different thing -- power. Religions have a goal not only to guide some
number of supporters, they have a goal of being spread, having new
supporters indoctrinated, and to control the society. So with the
exception of the case of parent, home-schooling his child based on the
teaching of some religion, it's a matter of power, and in any society,
even a very liberal one, power is not guaranteed to be given just because
someone wants it -- power is not a right, and at best it's obtained
because someone else exercises rights (to vote) but usually because
someone else delegates that power. Governments don't have "right to
have power", they are power and are at least supposed to exist for
the purpose of using that power in the interests of the people that
governments are supposed to be servants of. This means that governments by
their purpose have a lot of power but no rights at all.
Now look at the organizations that are not government. Some can
influence the government, and except for bribery and other unethical
practices, their influence is based on them representing someone's
interests, but it's in the end government's decision, to whom to listen,
and government is supposed to make decisions for the good of the society
(it usually doesn't but since I am explaining my point about oppression of
religion being good I am talking about what government is supposed to do,
not how it fails to do that). I, and other educated people, know that
religions are, basically, a bunch of lies, and spreading religions in the
society makes people dumber by creating salad in their heads, causes
hypocrisy and unethical behaviour by creating artificial ethical
contradictions that are nothing but contradictions of modern philosophy
with old, flawed fictional texts. Religious people, of course, disagree,
and will claim that my, or even majority of educated people's opinion is
not any more justified than their claims, however disagreement never
stopped society from restricting power, freedom or even rights of mentally
ill people -- no one postpones placing someone into a mental clinic, or
taking away their right to enter into some contracts until a person agrees
that it will be for his own good -- most of people merely agree with the
arguments of doctors that certain categories of people should not be
allowed to place themselves and others in danger, and society's goal
toward those people is not to care about their "freedom" to endanger
themselves and others but to cure their diseases if possible, and if not,
at least reduce the amount of their suffering. Mentally ill people may
strongly disagree with that and demand a proof that they are sick and not
everyone else, however unless discussions about that have therapeutic
effect on their diseases, no one seems to be eager to discuss this topic
with them.
With religions I am not against reducing rights of religious people --
despite some pretty "crazy" behavior, religious people don't do much harm
while practicing their religions among themselves. But I am against giving
those people power to control the society, government, education
and science -- believing in something fictional being real is not a
qualification for any kind of power, and at least scientific community
(with the exception of seriously confused people heavily indoctrinated
with religion in their childhood) has way, way more than necessary reasons
to consider all religions to be based on false theories.
This is my explanation, why I consider oppression of religions'
aspirations to power to be necessary, and not in any way contradicting to
the idea of human rights. I understand that the government of
this country does not accept this point of view, however this is not
because of some kind of "freedom" and "democracy" practiced by it but
because it is controlled by Christian fundamentalists. Christians can't
declare official theocracy, so they do the second best thing and practice
"freedom" that leaves them with the access to power due to their
numbers, propaganda and poor education level of the large part of the
population.
Now "pro-religious-freedom" folks are welcome to present their
ravings. Yawn.
The network is still running, just (some?) subscribers (at least some of them) are for some reason kicked out of the serial numbers database, so their modems are declared "unsubscribed" and are redirected to WWC (and apparently WWC only) registration service. I have called WWC, and they told me that they can ask whoever is running the network now, and they will re-subscribe my modems tomorrow morning. Whoever was on the phone happened to even know that point to point capability can be enabled or disabled when "modem" is subscribed for service -- this is a great progress compared to their usually incompetent customer/technical suupport types.
The "modems" can be used for point to point links without retransmitters, however the distances that I have observed were much less than a mile -- apparently long distances are achievable only if there is a cleat line of sight between transmitter and receiver, and in those conditions 2.4GHz wireless stuff makes at least as muhc sense, plus it's faster.
The information about ricochet modems and their use in both "normal" and point to point mode under linux is at this page that I maintain.
In particular, to make program not do something that it shouldn't one doesn't need to rely on the protocol that is security-neutral anyway (the other end can be malicious even if you aren't) but should place restrictions on the processes on the host.
Capabilities system, that now can be used to manipulate processes' abilitites to use raw sockets without making them run as root at the same time, is one of the examples how it's done in the kernel. While I am sure, neither RXC, nor Microsoft engineers looked a it, Linux already implements it and even had a sendmail security bug related to improper implementation of that.
Now we can only *imagine* what a Ricochet-based wireless Beowolf Cluster would have been like...
While Ricochet is obviously a poor choice for networking in a cluster, a bunch of boxes with ricochet radios in close proximity will still talk to each other even if the retransmitters and other pieces of infrastructure are down -- they just need to use peer to peer mode, that works in proximity with all ricochet devices, even ones where it's "disabled" (so retransmitters don't route it).
There is no such thing as "decent" distributed objects infrastructure now, and won't be for quite a while -- the technology isn't advanced enough to provide model that will provide the design that will provide the standard that will provide the implementation, so all we have (COM, DCOM, Java-based stuff,...) amounts to amateurish attempts to do things with no theory or design behind them. I also have a strong suspicion that neither Microsoft nor Sun and especially not Gnome will originate this design.
I forgot -- there are hostnames and IP addresses in the body of the virus, however they are of the destination or a mailserver, not the originator (see my report about it). Headers are more useful.
"Received:" headers in he mail usually contain IP addresses and dates -- when checked against ISP logs they can point to the user, or a phone number if he used a dialup with your account.
Of course, email MUST be copied in the form it was received, not mutilated by Outlook or other kind of garbage. If the recipient is unlucky enough to use Exchange, enable POP or IMAP support and download email from it using fetchmail or pine.
Just like little kids don't understand that there is a lot of things that can happen and they will be dead, most of adults believe that it's impossible that there can be a real and absolutely unavoidable threat to their lives, leave alone a threat to lives of a lot of people at once. I have news for them -- each of you can die at any time. Anyone with a sufficient amount of persistence and time can kill any number of people with trouble becoming significant if the desired number of victims is in the range of millions or tens of millions.
If by any chance I was what you would describe a "psycho", had a desire to kill you (or even you plus some large number of people) and ignored all other consequences of my actions, I would accomplish it with my existing level of education, available materials and money. Same applies, I believe, to CmdrTaco, Hemos, JonKatz, most of your former teachers in high school, most of your neighbors, most of your relatives unless they are very, very old or very, very young, your mailman, a salesperson in the nearest store, garbage truck driver, and quite possibly a newspaper boy. And there is absolutely nothing you, or anyone else can do about it. If you want to be "safe" against that I would recommend you to kill yourself, so no one else would. This is the bad news. The good news are, people relatively rarely kill other people, and even more rarely kill large numbers of other people. Even mobsters. Even muslim terrorists. Even disgruntled postal workers. And people never kill tens of millions of people at once, at least they never did. They don't do that because even seriously screwed up people that may have a desire to kill someone don't have enough motivation for relatively complex process of preparing and performing murder, or especially a mass murder, and because most of people really hate to have even a remote chance of being convicted murderers. So unless Toys'R'Us will start selling terrorist kits for $9.99 with no cooling off period, it's very unlikely that someone will kill you and few millions of people around you.
This brings another, more general, thing -- every system has a situation when it fails, and everyone who denies it about whatever he is selling or supposed to be responsible for, is a liar. Any car will be smashed, killing everyone inside, if driven into the wall at high enough speed. No bank will keep its money if robbers will arrive in a bunch of tanks. All airplanes can fall. Nuclear reactor on a power plant, no matter how "safe" it was designed, will blow up if enough idiots will run it for few years. Same applies to chemical plants, oil refineries, ballistic missiles. Earth itself has some chance of being smashed by something large and fast that may hit it. One can decrease the probability of a failure, but eliminating it is impossible. This means, there is always a point where it takes an unacceptable amount of resources to achieve some level of "safety" no matter how important or noble the goal of achieving "safety" in that particular situation is. There is always a point beyond that where "unacceptable amount of resources" becomes "complete lunacy". And I don't think, I know, what is beyond that, but it certainly isn't pretty. The fact that by painting scary enough picture of death and destruction it's possible to drive this safety-obsessed society to any level of effort necessary to achieve this kind of "safety" at the expense of everything else, scares me more than anything a bunch of scaremongers can invent.
I have received the first email sent by that thing three days ago and reported some brief analysis to bugtraq, got a "rejected, send to incidents" response, sent to incidents, and apparently there is still nothing in the archives -- I have no idea why, incidents list posts all kinds of "I have seen a big spider hanging over my keyboard, I think he tried to hack me" stuff.
.
For everyone interested, messages with virus and extracted infected documents are here.
iirc you have to still select all mails in a folder; ctrl+y ( apply filters ) to apply filters to stored mail.
At least once it failed
Also the mailbox format is easy to remover - I corrupted my inbox several times now -- often all I have to do is remove the *.ibex for that folder and it's fixed...
When pine uses imap, it doesn't use any mailboxes locally and completely relies on the server. Since I use Cyrus, it allows me to have >100000 messages in a folder without any loss of performance.
...was one released yesterday, and it was kinda ok except that it has a poor idea when to ask for passwords for IMAP mailboxes, and was hard to convince to apply filters to the whole mailbox if it was already cached. However the main problem for me was that it always caches mail received through IMAP locally -- I have huge mailboxes that I never want to see sorted, so I prefer pine's way of handling IMAP where cache is small (and fits in memory), and messages are read only when user scrolls to them.
Are you stupid or simply that naive ?
Show me a country that does not put its interest first and foremost before anything else ?
First, countries do it all the time -- this is what treaties are for, to make countries do something that is not in their direct interests, in exchange to other countries supporting them in something else.
Second, US is trying to have its cake and eat it, too -- anything that it does abroad is presented as some kind of act to "preserve freedom", "help", etc., and US demands some kind of special treatment and respect because of some "good" that it does to the world. Then when accused in blatant hypocrisy of those claim, Americans immediately declare that US is acting in US interests and should not be a subject to any scrutiny. If it happened few times in a decade one may be fooled, but when every time Americans do anything at all abroad it's touted like some kind of saving the world and happen to be a support of few large corporations' interests, it becomes way too ugly.
"Deal with it."
He did.
On the other hand he sounded too alarmist.
These anti-business, anti-America etc posters are very small ( but vocal) minority and most likely 90% will outgrow these silly ideas when they hit 30 anyway.
If your first paragraph should be taken seriously, everyone in the world must be "anti-American" unless he is in America. In fact, not everyone is because some degree of cooperation with US is still possible. However it isn't much -- for various reasons US remains being the most hated country in the world. As for "anti-business" people being a minority, it worth to be mentioned that in the most of the developed world governments implement some kinds of socialist policies that in US would be declared to be "anti-business", yet for some reason are acceptable for those countries. Americans can argue that they are still right, but certainly they aren't in the majority on those issues, they just have trouble talking with foreigners.
Um, what the hell are you talking about? When and where does the United States Government loot? Is it fashionable to be anti-american on slashdot?
US being rather selfish in everything it does abroad is a separate issue, however any country that perceives itself as being invulnerable ends up becoming a parasite on everything that it can loot, and then goes into a deep decline after the damage is done -- there were no exceptions in the history, and US isn't likely to create the first one.
OFF-TOPIC: I remember the origins the net being heavily influenced by libertarian thought. Or, libertarian being disportionally represented on the net as opposed to the mainstream media.
I remember no such thing. Libertarians just have so many "enemies" that they can attribute to themselves almost any change in ths situation -- whatever side lost something is likely to be opposed to them.
Either I've just started noticing, or a new trend is showing up on slashdot: Posters are increasingly anti-business, anti-american, anti-profit, anti-car, anti-capitalist.
The danger is not that the system will work -- it's that US will behave as if it works. If it just worked, no one would care unless nuclear war actually started, but if it affected US' behavior at the extent that US started causing completely unacceptable damage to everyone else, the only possible remedy would be to actually attack US. Missile defense, of course, wouldn't do much, so US will respond with their nuclear weapons.
So, for US it's a game "give me your wallet!" while for the rest of the world it's damage that US causes by looting everyone vs. damage from nuclear war that will happen if measures that can stop the looting were taken.
With enough looting (US is unaware of the game rules for others and doesn't put any limits to looting) at least for some nuclear-capable country the perceived cost of looting will outweight the cost of nuclear war, but once one country started a war with US, others can only decrease the amount of damage to themselves by making the war shorter, and that means attacking one of the countries that originally started it. It will be more beneficial to attack US because that would also eliminate the possibility of the subsequent nuclear war if some other country will make the same decision as the originator of the war even if the originator will be defeated, so everyone except extreme US loyalists will have no choice but to attack US. This means that in the long run the global nuclear war is the only possible outcome.
It may be argued that after the first failure of missile defense everyone would expect that the US would stop the looting, so they will then attack the original aggressor and not the US. This is unlikely because then the US, if it will survive the war, will continue the same behavior, relying on the precieved support of the majority of the nuclear-capable countries, so attacking the aggressor will still increase the probability of the appearance of the new aggressor in the future, while attacking US will reduce it. In any case, at least one large-scale nuclear war inevitably happens.
...that Americans made about their life on Mir, we will hear the same about their own^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H"International" station... What about the idea that life in space is umm... hard? How about learning other languages? Who, can I guess, insisted on dragging some flimsy laptops with Windows and Outlook into space?
The problem is not that it's hard to prove that certain sequence of strings were sent to syslog at certain time -- it's that it's impossible to make sure that they are authentic to begin with. Application called "sendmail" is not necessarily a real sendmail, it might be some altered version that sends bullshit into the logs, and there is no way to determine if the sysadmin isn't completely trusted.
Yeah, now we just need to find out, who has the stone that matches them. With the luck our civilization had recently, I would guess, it's either Gates, Bush or Arafat;-P
It's not legal to include the in the EULA statements that are in themselves a libel. For example, it will be illegal to write a license that disallows the program to be used by "murderers, including Jon Katz".
Come on. I've read the Unicode standard, I read unicode@unicode.org, I've read most of the publicly accessable proposals and I'm familiar with all the Technical Reports. There is a lot of complexity in Unicode, but it's mostly derived from the inescapable complexity of the writing systems and compatibility with older systems, and most of the complexity can be ignored if you willing to support some subset (European systems, or European/Russian/CJKV systems). That complexity is going to exist whether you use Unicode or some other multilingual system. Supporting Unicode at the Xterm/Yudit-level is simple, and supporting Unicode in an application with Pango & GTK 2.0 should be just as simple.
Then what was the point of your argument? If implemented in the display-only library and used for displaying/printing only, Unicode is just as "simple" as would be any other system, with or without multiple charsets. If program does anything complex, it should handle various language-dependent stuff anyway, however bare Unicode support provides no such infrastructure, and a reasonable infrastructure can be implemented either with or without Unicode. Then what is the advantage of Unicode? Being self-proclaimed status quo in standards' backroom-politics, that no one supports properly anyway, that is hard to segment into subsets, non-expandable, maintained by a closed standards body and requires more resources?
I don't claim that Unicode theoretically can't be used as the base for languages support -- in theory it can, but the problem is, it provides no advantage compared to multi-charset system if used as a part of multilingual text support infrastructure. I have already explained why such infrastructure does not exist now, however I believe that when it will become necessary, someone will have to implement it anyway. So now, when no one needs it, Unicoders are busy to claim this "piece of noosphere", just like some people tried to sell land on Mars -- just because it's there, and before it will become obvious that it's not theirs.
The goal of Project Gutenberg is to transcribe public domain texts in a format readable for the largest audience possible.
By this logic it should use Microsoft Word or at least PDF -- both very widely supported, more wide than even plain text files in UTF-8 (yes, I know, Word can use unicode internally -- this isn't the point).
Unicode HTML and UTF-8 plain text are those formats.
Are they? Most of my boxes don't have them installed -- the one I am writing this message on is an exception, but only because it has Mozilla, what is still a bloatware. My handhelds most likely never will have them installed -- they don't have enough ram, and need rather nontrivial manipulations with characters size and formatting to keep texts in some languages readable, so plain stream of unicode text would be impossible to display without some heavy heuristics.
Some proprietary and/or obscure complex typesetting format is neither portable nor accessible to a wide audience.
I wouldn't dream to propose a non-open standard for this. However the trouble with open standards is that they never appear before they become necessary, and I, following the principle that standards and tools should be developed as the need arises, am not making any detailed proposals at this time. But when there will be a need, the standard that will be created must be open, expandable and easy to port and reimplement -- something that anything Unicode-based is not. If you mean that charset is "proprietary", I am not aware of any charset except, maybe, "klingon in private unicode" that was in any way declared to be someone's property. If multi-charset support infrastructure will be created, it would be reasonable to include some common facility into the libraries that will make it possible for users to allow programs, when they see an unknown language ar charset, to automatically download fonts, tables and even formatting/comparison/input methods/... source code automatically from some servers that keep directories of known charsets and languages, and this would be an open, expandable and flexible infrastructure, available to everyone. If someone wants his language that never had local charset in the first place to be represented by its range in Unicode, he should be able to do that, however in a system like that there should be no reason to prevent established language/charsets combinations from being used just because of someone's narrow view of the problem.
Maybe I am wrong is this traditionalism, and it will be better if I made an infrastructure for stateful text support just to demonstrate this point -- after all, even with all dynamic fonts/code/input methods/... it won't be in any way more complex than any other solution, merely useless because right now still almost no one uses multiple languages in a single document. But maybe the need to demonstrate the solution for a problem that no one experiences yet is now a good reason enough when someone else is trying to sneak in an impractical solution as the standard while no one is looking.
I see current advance of Unicode as something that may serve some simple need now, but can severely limit further progress if accepted as widely as Unicoders are trying to get accepted. That would not be "good enough" as TCP is "good enough", large SMP kernel lock was "good enough" or C pointers are "good enough" -- it's "good enough" as Windows, region codes, crippleware, etc. are "good enough" -- people accept them because those things are pushed, and the inconvenience they create isn't bad enough until it's too late, but when it's too late, people still use them because there is nothing else in sight.
Slashdot Mirror
While financial rewards and praise are all great, there is one thing that every open source developer would be happy to accept from you:
STOP USING WINDOWS.
Zealotry aside, the fact that you and a lot of other people use Windows, helps the people who constantly damage what we make and love, so by refusing to support them even if it is 3% more convenient for you than, say, Linux or *BSD, you help to hurt us, and there isn't much else that can compensate this. Next time when some hideous API will create horrible incompatibilities with our software, when part of format will get patented, or when frivolous lawsuit will be brought against some of us, we won't think about praise or money we got from you, we will just think that by using Windows you have added to their dominance and paved the road that they are marching on. It's not like we hate you personally for that, but we would appreciate if you will refuse to help our enemies.
Really, you just had to upgrade your liux distribution to the version that already included all that.
Other environments may be better looking or follow languages' syntax more closely, but XEmacs certainly is most flexible and gives least amount of distraction to the programmer.
I don't agree with the idea that "religious freedom" is obtainable or even necessary in the modern society. Almost everywhere in the world people already can gather in someone's home and practice any kind of religious ritual that doesn't include commiting some crime, or even behave in their private life according to the teaching of some religion -- again, within the boundaries that are allowed by the laws. Last time I have checked, most of popular religions, (at least in their most popular interpretations) do not openly advocate murder, theft, rape, fraud, etc. -- even islam and mormons -- so religious people that practice religion privately don't need any "protection" of their right to believe in their religions.
But "religious freedom" is not about rights, it's about a completely different thing -- power. Religions have a goal not only to guide some number of supporters, they have a goal of being spread, having new supporters indoctrinated, and to control the society. So with the exception of the case of parent, home-schooling his child based on the teaching of some religion, it's a matter of power, and in any society, even a very liberal one, power is not guaranteed to be given just because someone wants it -- power is not a right, and at best it's obtained because someone else exercises rights (to vote) but usually because someone else delegates that power. Governments don't have "right to have power", they are power and are at least supposed to exist for the purpose of using that power in the interests of the people that governments are supposed to be servants of. This means that governments by their purpose have a lot of power but no rights at all.
Now look at the organizations that are not government. Some can influence the government, and except for bribery and other unethical practices, their influence is based on them representing someone's interests, but it's in the end government's decision, to whom to listen, and government is supposed to make decisions for the good of the society (it usually doesn't but since I am explaining my point about oppression of religion being good I am talking about what government is supposed to do, not how it fails to do that). I, and other educated people, know that religions are, basically, a bunch of lies, and spreading religions in the society makes people dumber by creating salad in their heads, causes hypocrisy and unethical behaviour by creating artificial ethical contradictions that are nothing but contradictions of modern philosophy with old, flawed fictional texts. Religious people, of course, disagree, and will claim that my, or even majority of educated people's opinion is not any more justified than their claims, however disagreement never stopped society from restricting power, freedom or even rights of mentally ill people -- no one postpones placing someone into a mental clinic, or taking away their right to enter into some contracts until a person agrees that it will be for his own good -- most of people merely agree with the arguments of doctors that certain categories of people should not be allowed to place themselves and others in danger, and society's goal toward those people is not to care about their "freedom" to endanger themselves and others but to cure their diseases if possible, and if not, at least reduce the amount of their suffering. Mentally ill people may strongly disagree with that and demand a proof that they are sick and not everyone else, however unless discussions about that have therapeutic effect on their diseases, no one seems to be eager to discuss this topic with them.
With religions I am not against reducing rights of religious people -- despite some pretty "crazy" behavior, religious people don't do much harm while practicing their religions among themselves. But I am against giving those people power to control the society, government, education and science -- believing in something fictional being real is not a qualification for any kind of power, and at least scientific community (with the exception of seriously confused people heavily indoctrinated with religion in their childhood) has way, way more than necessary reasons to consider all religions to be based on false theories.
This is my explanation, why I consider oppression of religions' aspirations to power to be necessary, and not in any way contradicting to the idea of human rights. I understand that the government of this country does not accept this point of view, however this is not because of some kind of "freedom" and "democracy" practiced by it but because it is controlled by Christian fundamentalists. Christians can't declare official theocracy, so they do the second best thing and practice "freedom" that leaves them with the access to power due to their numbers, propaganda and poor education level of the large part of the population.
Now "pro-religious-freedom" folks are welcome to present their ravings. Yawn.
The "modems" can be used for point to point links without retransmitters, however the distances that I have observed were much less than a mile -- apparently long distances are achievable only if there is a cleat line of sight between transmitter and receiver, and in those conditions 2.4GHz wireless stuff makes at least as muhc sense, plus it's faster.
The information about ricochet modems and their use in both "normal" and point to point mode under linux is at this page that I maintain.
In particular, to make program not do something that it shouldn't one doesn't need to rely on the protocol that is security-neutral anyway (the other end can be malicious even if you aren't) but should place restrictions on the processes on the host.
Capabilities system, that now can be used to manipulate processes' abilitites to use raw sockets without making them run as root at the same time, is one of the examples how it's done in the kernel. While I am sure, neither RXC, nor Microsoft engineers looked a it, Linux already implements it and even had a sendmail security bug related to improper implementation of that.
Now we can only *imagine* what a Ricochet-based wireless Beowolf Cluster would have been like...
While Ricochet is obviously a poor choice for networking in a cluster, a bunch of boxes with ricochet radios in close proximity will still talk to each other even if the retransmitters and other pieces of infrastructure are down -- they just need to use peer to peer mode, that works in proximity with all ricochet devices, even ones where it's "disabled" (so retransmitters don't route it).
There is no such thing as "decent" distributed objects infrastructure now, and won't be for quite a while -- the technology isn't advanced enough to provide model that will provide the design that will provide the standard that will provide the implementation, so all we have (COM, DCOM, Java-based stuff,...) amounts to amateurish attempts to do things with no theory or design behind them. I also have a strong suspicion that neither Microsoft nor Sun and especially not Gnome will originate this design.
I forgot -- there are hostnames and IP addresses in the body of the virus, however they are of the destination or a mailserver, not the originator (see my report about it). Headers are more useful.
"Received:" headers in he mail usually contain IP addresses and dates -- when checked against ISP logs they can point to the user, or a phone number if he used a dialup with your account.
Of course, email MUST be copied in the form it was received, not mutilated by Outlook or other kind of garbage. If the recipient is unlucky enough to use Exchange, enable POP or IMAP support and download email from it using fetchmail or pine.
Just like little kids don't understand that there is a lot of things that can happen and they will be dead, most of adults believe that it's impossible that there can be a real and absolutely unavoidable threat to their lives, leave alone a threat to lives of a lot of people at once. I have news for them -- each of you can die at any time. Anyone with a sufficient amount of persistence and time can kill any number of people with trouble becoming significant if the desired number of victims is in the range of millions or tens of millions.
If by any chance I was what you would describe a "psycho", had a desire to kill you (or even you plus some large number of people) and ignored all other consequences of my actions, I would accomplish it with my existing level of education, available materials and money. Same applies, I believe, to CmdrTaco, Hemos, JonKatz, most of your former teachers in high school, most of your neighbors, most of your relatives unless they are very, very old or very, very young, your mailman, a salesperson in the nearest store, garbage truck driver, and quite possibly a newspaper boy. And there is absolutely nothing you, or anyone else can do about it. If you want to be "safe" against that I would recommend you to kill yourself, so no one else would. This is the bad news. The good news are, people relatively rarely kill other people, and even more rarely kill large numbers of other people. Even mobsters. Even muslim terrorists. Even disgruntled postal workers. And people never kill tens of millions of people at once, at least they never did. They don't do that because even seriously screwed up people that may have a desire to kill someone don't have enough motivation for relatively complex process of preparing and performing murder, or especially a mass murder, and because most of people really hate to have even a remote chance of being convicted murderers. So unless Toys'R'Us will start selling terrorist kits for $9.99 with no cooling off period, it's very unlikely that someone will kill you and few millions of people around you.
This brings another, more general, thing -- every system has a situation when it fails, and everyone who denies it about whatever he is selling or supposed to be responsible for, is a liar. Any car will be smashed, killing everyone inside, if driven into the wall at high enough speed. No bank will keep its money if robbers will arrive in a bunch of tanks. All airplanes can fall. Nuclear reactor on a power plant, no matter how "safe" it was designed, will blow up if enough idiots will run it for few years. Same applies to chemical plants, oil refineries, ballistic missiles. Earth itself has some chance of being smashed by something large and fast that may hit it. One can decrease the probability of a failure, but eliminating it is impossible. This means, there is always a point where it takes an unacceptable amount of resources to achieve some level of "safety" no matter how important or noble the goal of achieving "safety" in that particular situation is. There is always a point beyond that where "unacceptable amount of resources" becomes "complete lunacy". And I don't think, I know, what is beyond that, but it certainly isn't pretty. The fact that by painting scary enough picture of death and destruction it's possible to drive this safety-obsessed society to any level of effort necessary to achieve this kind of "safety" at the expense of everything else, scares me more than anything a bunch of scaremongers can invent.
...in front of Adobe HQ. About 40-45 protesters are here, despite hot weather and EFF's advice to put protests on hold.
I have received the first email sent by that thing three days ago and reported some brief analysis to bugtraq, got a "rejected, send to incidents" response, sent to incidents, and apparently there is still nothing in the archives -- I have no idea why, incidents list posts all kinds of "I have seen a big spider hanging over my keyboard, I think he tried to hack me" stuff.
.For everyone interested, messages with virus and extracted infected documents are here.
iirc you have to still select all mails in a folder; ctrl+y ( apply filters ) to apply filters to stored mail.
At least once it failed
Also the mailbox format is easy to remover - I corrupted my inbox several times now -- often all I have to do is remove the *.ibex for that folder and it's fixed...When pine uses imap, it doesn't use any mailboxes locally and completely relies on the server. Since I use Cyrus, it allows me to have >100000 messages in a folder without any loss of performance.
...was one released yesterday, and it was kinda ok except that it has a poor idea when to ask for passwords for IMAP mailboxes, and was hard to convince to apply filters to the whole mailbox if it was already cached. However the main problem for me was that it always caches mail received through IMAP locally -- I have huge mailboxes that I never want to see sorted, so I prefer pine's way of handling IMAP where cache is small (and fits in memory), and messages are read only when user scrolls to them.
Are you stupid or simply that naive ? Show me a country that does not put its interest first and foremost before anything else ?
First, countries do it all the time -- this is what treaties are for, to make countries do something that is not in their direct interests, in exchange to other countries supporting them in something else.
Second, US is trying to have its cake and eat it, too -- anything that it does abroad is presented as some kind of act to "preserve freedom", "help", etc., and US demands some kind of special treatment and respect because of some "good" that it does to the world. Then when accused in blatant hypocrisy of those claim, Americans immediately declare that US is acting in US interests and should not be a subject to any scrutiny. If it happened few times in a decade one may be fooled, but when every time Americans do anything at all abroad it's touted like some kind of saving the world and happen to be a support of few large corporations' interests, it becomes way too ugly.
"Deal with it." He did. On the other hand he sounded too alarmist. These anti-business, anti-America etc posters are very small ( but vocal) minority and most likely 90% will outgrow these silly ideas when they hit 30 anyway.
If your first paragraph should be taken seriously, everyone in the world must be "anti-American" unless he is in America. In fact, not everyone is because some degree of cooperation with US is still possible. However it isn't much -- for various reasons US remains being the most hated country in the world. As for "anti-business" people being a minority, it worth to be mentioned that in the most of the developed world governments implement some kinds of socialist policies that in US would be declared to be "anti-business", yet for some reason are acceptable for those countries. Americans can argue that they are still right, but certainly they aren't in the majority on those issues, they just have trouble talking with foreigners.
Um, what the hell are you talking about? When and where does the United States Government loot? Is it fashionable to be anti-american on slashdot?
US being rather selfish in everything it does abroad is a separate issue, however any country that perceives itself as being invulnerable ends up becoming a parasite on everything that it can loot, and then goes into a deep decline after the damage is done -- there were no exceptions in the history, and US isn't likely to create the first one.
OFF-TOPIC: I remember the origins the net being heavily influenced by libertarian thought. Or, libertarian being disportionally represented on the net as opposed to the mainstream media.
I remember no such thing. Libertarians just have so many "enemies" that they can attribute to themselves almost any change in ths situation -- whatever side lost something is likely to be opposed to them.
Either I've just started noticing, or a new trend is showing up on slashdot: Posters are increasingly anti-business, anti-american, anti-profit, anti-car, anti-capitalist.
Deal with it.
As I have explained in some other place:
The danger is not that the system will work -- it's that US will behave as if it works. If it just worked, no one would care unless nuclear war actually started, but if it affected US' behavior at the extent that US started causing completely unacceptable damage to everyone else, the only possible remedy would be to actually attack US. Missile defense, of course, wouldn't do much, so US will respond with their nuclear weapons.
So, for US it's a game "give me your wallet!" while for the rest of the world it's damage that US causes by looting everyone vs. damage from nuclear war that will happen if measures that can stop the looting were taken.
With enough looting (US is unaware of the game rules for others and doesn't put any limits to looting) at least for some nuclear-capable country the perceived cost of looting will outweight the cost of nuclear war, but once one country started a war with US, others can only decrease the amount of damage to themselves by making the war shorter, and that means attacking one of the countries that originally started it. It will be more beneficial to attack US because that would also eliminate the possibility of the subsequent nuclear war if some other country will make the same decision as the originator of the war even if the originator will be defeated, so everyone except extreme US loyalists will have no choice but to attack US. This means that in the long run the global nuclear war is the only possible outcome.
It may be argued that after the first failure of missile defense everyone would expect that the US would stop the looting, so they will then attack the original aggressor and not the US. This is unlikely because then the US, if it will survive the war, will continue the same behavior, relying on the precieved support of the majority of the nuclear-capable countries, so attacking the aggressor will still increase the probability of the appearance of the new aggressor in the future, while attacking US will reduce it. In any case, at least one large-scale nuclear war inevitably happens.
...that Americans made about their life on Mir, we will hear the same about their own^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H"International" station... What about the idea that life in space is umm... hard? How about learning other languages? Who, can I guess, insisted on dragging some flimsy laptops with Windows and Outlook into space?
The problem is not that it's hard to prove that certain sequence of strings were sent to syslog at certain time -- it's that it's impossible to make sure that they are authentic to begin with. Application called "sendmail" is not necessarily a real sendmail, it might be some altered version that sends bullshit into the logs, and there is no way to determine if the sysadmin isn't completely trusted.
Yeah, now we just need to find out, who has the stone that matches them. With the luck our civilization had recently, I would guess, it's either Gates, Bush or Arafat ;-P
They don't do that anymore. They also don't allow point to point connections over their network for devices sold later than last december.
they die.
It's not legal to include the in the EULA statements that are in themselves a libel. For example, it will be illegal to write a license that disallows the program to be used by "murderers, including Jon Katz".
Come on. I've read the Unicode standard, I read unicode@unicode.org, I've read most of the publicly accessable proposals and I'm familiar with all the Technical Reports. There is a lot of complexity in Unicode, but it's mostly derived from the inescapable complexity of the writing systems and compatibility with older systems, and most of the complexity can be ignored if you willing to support some subset (European systems, or European/Russian/CJKV systems). That complexity is going to exist whether you use Unicode or some other multilingual system. Supporting Unicode at the Xterm/Yudit-level is simple, and supporting Unicode in an application with Pango & GTK 2.0 should be just as simple.
Then what was the point of your argument? If implemented in the display-only library and used for displaying/printing only, Unicode is just as "simple" as would be any other system, with or without multiple charsets. If program does anything complex, it should handle various language-dependent stuff anyway, however bare Unicode support provides no such infrastructure, and a reasonable infrastructure can be implemented either with or without Unicode. Then what is the advantage of Unicode? Being self-proclaimed status quo in standards' backroom-politics, that no one supports properly anyway, that is hard to segment into subsets, non-expandable, maintained by a closed standards body and requires more resources?
I don't claim that Unicode theoretically can't be used as the base for languages support -- in theory it can, but the problem is, it provides no advantage compared to multi-charset system if used as a part of multilingual text support infrastructure. I have already explained why such infrastructure does not exist now, however I believe that when it will become necessary, someone will have to implement it anyway. So now, when no one needs it, Unicoders are busy to claim this "piece of noosphere", just like some people tried to sell land on Mars -- just because it's there, and before it will become obvious that it's not theirs.
The goal of Project Gutenberg is to transcribe public domain texts in a format readable for the largest audience possible.
By this logic it should use Microsoft Word or at least PDF -- both very widely supported, more wide than even plain text files in UTF-8 (yes, I know, Word can use unicode internally -- this isn't the point).
Unicode HTML and UTF-8 plain text are those formats.
Are they? Most of my boxes don't have them installed -- the one I am writing this message on is an exception, but only because it has Mozilla, what is still a bloatware. My handhelds most likely never will have them installed -- they don't have enough ram, and need rather nontrivial manipulations with characters size and formatting to keep texts in some languages readable, so plain stream of unicode text would be impossible to display without some heavy heuristics.
Some proprietary and/or obscure complex typesetting format is neither portable nor accessible to a wide audience.
I wouldn't dream to propose a non-open standard for this. However the trouble with open standards is that they never appear before they become necessary, and I, following the principle that standards and tools should be developed as the need arises, am not making any detailed proposals at this time. But when there will be a need, the standard that will be created must be open, expandable and easy to port and reimplement -- something that anything Unicode-based is not. If you mean that charset is "proprietary", I am not aware of any charset except, maybe, "klingon in private unicode" that was in any way declared to be someone's property. If multi-charset support infrastructure will be created, it would be reasonable to include some common facility into the libraries that will make it possible for users to allow programs, when they see an unknown language ar charset, to automatically download fonts, tables and even formatting/comparison/input methods/... source code automatically from some servers that keep directories of known charsets and languages, and this would be an open, expandable and flexible infrastructure, available to everyone. If someone wants his language that never had local charset in the first place to be represented by its range in Unicode, he should be able to do that, however in a system like that there should be no reason to prevent established language/charsets combinations from being used just because of someone's narrow view of the problem.
Maybe I am wrong is this traditionalism, and it will be better if I made an infrastructure for stateful text support just to demonstrate this point -- after all, even with all dynamic fonts/code/input methods/... it won't be in any way more complex than any other solution, merely useless because right now still almost no one uses multiple languages in a single document. But maybe the need to demonstrate the solution for a problem that no one experiences yet is now a good reason enough when someone else is trying to sneak in an impractical solution as the standard while no one is looking.
I see current advance of Unicode as something that may serve some simple need now, but can severely limit further progress if accepted as widely as Unicoders are trying to get accepted. That would not be "good enough" as TCP is "good enough", large SMP kernel lock was "good enough" or C pointers are "good enough" -- it's "good enough" as Windows, region codes, crippleware, etc. are "good enough" -- people accept them because those things are pushed, and the inconvenience they create isn't bad enough until it's too late, but when it's too late, people still use them because there is nothing else in sight.