would only approach systems that have subscribed to this as a service.
inform the Administrator of the system (through email
some sort of confirmation/activation/deactivation process available to the Administrator
I've got an idea too! How about an "opt in system" where system administrators get emailed a location to where the "patch" is! That way they would:
1) Be informed of the problem.
2) Told where to get the fix
3) Have some sort of confirmation/activation/deactivation process available to the Administrator
Of course this is irrelevant until the law is actually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which hasn't happened yet.
It doesn't say "when the Supreme Court has ruled".. Whether the Supreme Court rules that the DMCA is unconstitutional or not, the fact remains that it IS unconstitutional. And when people are imprision and held without bail for violating such a law, there should be punishments for those who were involved with jailing them. The Feds, Adobe, individual agents, the guy who took his fingerprints....
And to pre empt an arguement: "Just doing their job" is not a valid excuse.
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.
-- American Jurisprudence, Second Edition, Volume 16, Section 177
Although I'm sure explaining this to the people trying to arrest you might be difficult.
"You see, the law you're trying to arrest me for breaking in not constitutional, therefore I am not bound to obey it. So you see... oww! Hey! that hurts! OWW!"
Now this elite 'smartier than thou' attitude towards end users is precisely what is going to keep linux away from desktop users.
No, refusing to think about trying to learn a new interface is what is going to keep people away from it. I'd be willing to bet if you took someone who had never seen a computer before and taught them gnome, that they would be all manners of confused when placed in front of a windows computer.
There is nothing about the Windows UI that makes it more intuitive to use. People are just used to it because that's all they've ever seen. People had to learn the windows interface (they weren't born knowing how to use it) so why is it so unreasonable for people to learn a Gnome interface?
There is a lot of money spent on user interface research and evaluation.
Same with cars, but you still had to learn how to drive it, right? If people aren't willing to try a new interface, then the ONLY thing that will get them on linux is an EXACT copy of the windows UI. I hate the Windows UI. It's clunky and doesn't work the way I expect it to. I know people who used a unix station for the first time and had absolutely no problem with it. These weren't computer folks either. I'm talking about english majors who took a few minutes playing with the system (I think it was ICEwm) and then were good to go on it.
The gist I get from your post is that because people are used to the Windows UI, nothing else will ever work. I disagree. I think anyone who is willing to learn will be just as comfortable with it.
The point is that they had to learn the Windows UI in order to use Windows, so why is it horrible that they would have to take 30 minutes to learn a new UI?
They can migrate if they take a little bit of time to learn the UI. If they're familiar with one, 30 minutes should be all it takes to get them to basic functionality on a given UI.
Then again, I have seen rats smarter than many users, but that might just be from that green glowing stuff in the sewer.
If these participants were used to using Windows, then of course everything is going to be a bit confusing for them. So some people were confused by the icons. So what exactly does this "e" with the line around it do? What's this big "W" for? (Those would be Internet Explorer and Word)
Wouldn't it make more sense to take people who weren't used to ANY interface? Of course, I suppose it would be hard to find these people. I guess we could enlist the help of some Quakers.
The way I see it, learning a new UI isn't much different from learning to drive a new car. Sure, it's not exactly the same. The gear shift might be on the steering wheel or inbetween the seats. The headlights might be next to the windshield wipers levers or on the console. The point is that people can figure that out if given a few minutes.
I use many different UIs, from Macs to Windows to KDE and Gnome with different window managers, etc. Each one took a bit of time to learn.
And why do people refuse to take time to learn, anyway? You have to learn how to drive a car, but people refuse to learn how to use their computers. Seriously, take 30 minutes and figure out the basics, and the rest will come in time.
I can see a lot of uses for this other than just for games. Context sensitive menus for other applications would be incredibly cool as well. How about when I open up my SQL application I get buttons that show relevent options?
I touch "insert into" and it shows me a list of tables in the current database.
It could do all of that without having to make everything into a GUI or taking away the ability to use the keyboard as well.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I think this would be incredibly cool to get my hands on.
What it looks like:
me@machine (01:53:11 PM)(07/06/01)(pts/8)(BG: 0/0)
$
Time, date, terminal,number of backgrounded jobs, and number of backgrounded jobs that are running. It's a little on the complex side, but I like it. All the funky escape codes change the colors (so it works best with a white text on black background)
Especially since, with Pine at least, one instance locks the inbox, and you have to remember which is what, and so on. It's not really convenient on the long run.
I agree with your point here, but there's no locking problem like that in mutt. Although adding that functionality into the application is not necessary. Using the unix philosophy of having many small programs that do one thing right, why not just spawn a new screen session instead of adding bloat to the code?
I guess it can't be everything to everyone...
Ahh.. the beauty of having choices. I like mutt, I'll use it! You want gui, have at! This is why open standards are a Good Thing(tm). Everyone gets to use what they want and still use the same standards. Wooho!
I've been using mutt for about 3 years now, and absolutely love it.
[...]is that you can not edit/read more than one message in the same time. Heck, if you want to edit one message and read another (to copy/paste text, for instance), you can't. You have to exit editing, read the other message, and come back.
Or you could do what I do: open another shell and run another copy of mutt! Even remotely when I log in I use screen to have multiple terminals... I make a new one, copy, switch, paste. No trouble!
That's why I think a GUI will eventually be better.
Not I! A GUI solution requires that I be at the desktop (or that I'm at a terminal that can handle remote X connections tunneled through ssh)
I prefer to keep mine text based so I can check it from any machine that has network and ssh access. (And with putty a quick download, any Windows box will do. And there's plenty of them wherever you go)
The most aggrivating part of this is the concept of Peer to Peers. Some one installs Black Ice and then leaves snotty messages about "hacking attempts" when they get a hit on port 6346... which is Gnutella!
They run a peer to peer and don't realize that, oh maybe the computers might have to CONNECT?!
We even had a script kiddie flood us for a connection, even though the punk had been on gnutella that same day!
I mostly put the blame on the companies that sell the firewall software for windows. The make this huge hype about those "evil hackers" and even bother explaining WHY machines might get REAL connections.
A better educated user base would be ideal, but I think I'm dreaming.
The point was that gpg CAN encrypt to multiple people. I ran a simple test case using the command line. Mutt will also encrypt to all the recipiants. I'm assuming OE and Eudora have hooks to do the same thing.
So now: Emails can be encrypted to multiple recipiants via email clients, thus making it viable for group discussions.
Also, if I understand it correctly, you can really only send an encrypted message to one person at a time, because you're encrypting it with their public key (so that their private key decrypts it). So PGP is not really a solution for, say, mailing lists
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. You can encrypt a message to multiple recipiants at the same time, and each of their private keys will decrypt it. This makes it easy to send the same email to multiple people
gpg-encrypt -r Person1 Person2 Person3 should work for that.
Just because the general population starts using our words in a different manner doesn't mean that we have to like it. What do you think fire fighters would do if people started calling arsonists "Firemen"? They'd probably be pretty upset about it.
The same words can mean different things. If you're playing pool and ask someone for an 8-ball, it's drastically different if your in a crack house and ask for one.
A hacker is a hacker, a cracker is a cracker. Let the media screw it up, we can stil use our terms in our environment correctly.
BUT don't do anything to make him think that hacking is right, or legal, or endorsed out there in the real world.
But hacking is right, legal, and endorsed out there in the real world.
Hell, even cracking is right, legal, and endorsed.
Like when a friend asks you to have a go at his system to make sure it's secure. That's right, legal, AND endorsed. This kids cracking some school security after being ASKED TO makes it at least endorsed.
No, he meant linux. The point was that managers complain that they have no one to sue if Linux breaks. He was pointing out the due to the EULA on MS products, you have no one to sue if _they_ break.
You can't sue anyone in either context, therefore you get to sue the same people when using either Linux or Windows.
True, I can see a Samba network being wide open, but that doesn't mean that they could get a screenshot of the desktop. Unless this guy was the actual spammer and wrote the story to cover himself;-)
The lack of technical detail, and specifically the references the "screen shots" led me to believe that this story isn't real. As easy as it is to take down a Windows box, it is not easy to gain full remote access except through BackOriface or what not.
I also find it highly unlikely that every single spammer in this group would be completely vunerable to an attack. It's entirely possible that there is some voodoo that I don't know about, but this doesn't look real to me.
I've got two boxes here, but only one ethernet port. So I've got one box being used as a web server, etc, etc, that also masqing my desktop. I've gotten Quake3 to run, no problem, but I can't see "Local Games", I'm guessing this is because Quake3 tries to do some broadcast based on what it thinks your IP address is.
This author [snip] wants to have her cake and eat it.
Well what else are you going to do with cake? Sit and look at it? Hey! I bought this great cake the other day. It looks so cute on my dresser!
If I buy a cake, I'm going to eat it. I want to have cake AND eat it! After that, I'm going to get some beer AND drink it! I may even go hog wild, get some pants AND wear them!
Some universities LOSE money by providing internet access. Students here pay about $12 a semester for a "technology fee" which cover on campus labs, access to scanners, printers, and of course RESNET. The entire purpose of RESNET is to allow people to use the internet for educational purposes. There's even information about this when they apply for an account.
When legit uses of the network of an educational institute are hampared by people downloading as many MP3s as possible, the university has an obligation to put an end to it. We're not talking about minor amounts of traffic here either. As I mentioned earlier, it's take a full 20% of the bandwith (well, not anymore!). If it wasn't slowing down legit network traffic, then I'm sure no one would have a problem with it.
My point is that if each users network traffic didn't affect any other users network traffic, life would be good. But it _does_ affect network everyone's traffic. (All it takes is about 10 boxes to completly saturate a single segment of resnet.) And that results in legit users getting mad.
They are a business, I agree. Their business is to provide their students with the best education possible. This includes libraries, computer labs, language labs, etc. All these are for education. Napster, as far as I know, provides NO educational value. So when it clogs bandwith, POOF, it's gone. Just keeping their business going.
recently there have been many articles in our campus newspaper about the speed of the network being slowed by MP3 transfers (not really, but they have to make an excuse for the poor technology).
Well, I know that the resnet traffice here was 20% napster. That's 1/5th of the bandwith. People on the same subnets as the heavy napsters users started complaining about the slowdown. They had no idea it was being caused by napster, just that their connection had gotten slower.
Since napster provides no "educational value" and was "hampering system resources" we had to can it. there wasn't really a viable alternative. Napster was affecting our network, and after people complained we blocked connections to the napster servers. This isn't "an excuse for poor technology", it's "people wasting bandwith and hampering other peoples connections."
Until every single person has unlimited bandwith to anywhere, this will be a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
For the love of god, just follow the link once. Please? Humour me.
would only approach systems that have subscribed to this as a service.
inform the Administrator of the system (through email
some sort of confirmation/activation/deactivation process available to the Administrator
I've got an idea too! How about an "opt in system" where system administrators get emailed a location to where the "patch" is! That way they would:
1) Be informed of the problem.
2) Told where to get the fix
3) Have some sort of confirmation/activation/deactivation process available to the Administrator
Or how about a web page where users could find updates?
Or maybe a site that tracks bugs in software?
And all that without having to have microsoft send out more stupid worms.
My point is that if people don't use the tools already availible, why would the take the time to opt-in to this program?
-- Zack
Of course this is irrelevant until the law is actually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which hasn't happened yet.
It doesn't say "when the Supreme Court has ruled".. Whether the Supreme Court rules that the DMCA is unconstitutional or not, the fact remains that it IS unconstitutional. And when people are imprision and held without bail for violating such a law, there should be punishments for those who were involved with jailing them. The Feds, Adobe, individual agents, the guy who took his fingerprints....
And to pre empt an arguement: "Just doing their job" is not a valid excuse.
-- Zack
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it.
-- American Jurisprudence, Second Edition, Volume 16, Section 177
Although I'm sure explaining this to the people trying to arrest you might be difficult.
"You see, the law you're trying to arrest me for breaking in not constitutional, therefore I am not bound to obey it. So you see... oww! Hey! that hurts! OWW!"
-- Zack
No, refusing to think about trying to learn a new interface is what is going to keep people away from it. I'd be willing to bet if you took someone who had never seen a computer before and taught them gnome, that they would be all manners of confused when placed in front of a windows computer.
There is nothing about the Windows UI that makes it more intuitive to use. People are just used to it because that's all they've ever seen. People had to learn the windows interface (they weren't born knowing how to use it) so why is it so unreasonable for people to learn a Gnome interface?
There is a lot of money spent on user interface research and evaluation.
Same with cars, but you still had to learn how to drive it, right? If people aren't willing to try a new interface, then the ONLY thing that will get them on linux is an EXACT copy of the windows UI. I hate the Windows UI. It's clunky and doesn't work the way I expect it to. I know people who used a unix station for the first time and had absolutely no problem with it. These weren't computer folks either. I'm talking about english majors who took a few minutes playing with the system (I think it was ICEwm) and then were good to go on it.
The gist I get from your post is that because people are used to the Windows UI, nothing else will ever work. I disagree. I think anyone who is willing to learn will be just as comfortable with it.
-- Zack
The point is that they had to learn the Windows UI in order to use Windows, so why is it horrible that they would have to take 30 minutes to learn a new UI?
They can migrate if they take a little bit of time to learn the UI. If they're familiar with one, 30 minutes should be all it takes to get them to basic functionality on a given UI.
Then again, I have seen rats smarter than many users, but that might just be from that green glowing stuff in the sewer.
-- Zack
Well, okay then! Let's go grab the Amish then.
If they're not too busy "Living in an Amish paradise."
-- Zack
If these participants were used to using Windows, then of course everything is going to be a bit confusing for them. So some people were confused by the icons. So what exactly does this "e" with the line around it do? What's this big "W" for? (Those would be Internet Explorer and Word)
Wouldn't it make more sense to take people who weren't used to ANY interface? Of course, I suppose it would be hard to find these people. I guess we could enlist the help of some Quakers.
The way I see it, learning a new UI isn't much different from learning to drive a new car. Sure, it's not exactly the same. The gear shift might be on the steering wheel or inbetween the seats. The headlights might be next to the windshield wipers levers or on the console. The point is that people can figure that out if given a few minutes.
I use many different UIs, from Macs to Windows to KDE and Gnome with different window managers, etc. Each one took a bit of time to learn.
And why do people refuse to take time to learn, anyway? You have to learn how to drive a car, but people refuse to learn how to use their computers. Seriously, take 30 minutes and figure out the basics, and the rest will come in time.
-- Zack
I can see a lot of uses for this other than just for games. Context sensitive menus for other applications would be incredibly cool as well. How about when I open up my SQL application I get buttons that show relevent options?
I touch "insert into" and it shows me a list of tables in the current database.
It could do all of that without having to make everything into a GUI or taking away the ability to use the keyboard as well.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I think this would be incredibly cool to get my hands on.
-- Zack
I think the quote is "The LOVE of money is the root of all evil." Not "Money is the root of all evil."
Somewhat different.
-- Zack
What it looks like:
me@machine (01:53:11 PM)(07/06/01)(pts/8)(BG: 0/0)
$
Time, date, terminal,number of backgrounded jobs, and number of backgrounded jobs that are running. It's a little on the complex side, but I like it. All the funky escape codes change the colors (so it works best with a white text on black background)
-- Zack
I agree with your point here, but there's no locking problem like that in mutt. Although adding that functionality into the application is not necessary. Using the unix philosophy of having many small programs that do one thing right, why not just spawn a new screen session instead of adding bloat to the code?
I guess it can't be everything to everyone...
Ahh.. the beauty of having choices. I like mutt, I'll use it! You want gui, have at! This is why open standards are a Good Thing(tm). Everyone gets to use what they want and still use the same standards. Wooho!
[...]is that you can not edit/read more than one message in the same time. Heck, if you want to edit one message and read another (to copy/paste text, for instance), you can't. You have to exit editing, read the other message, and come back.
Or you could do what I do: open another shell and run another copy of mutt! Even remotely when I log in I use screen to have multiple terminals... I make a new one, copy, switch, paste. No trouble!
That's why I think a GUI will eventually be better.
Not I! A GUI solution requires that I be at the desktop (or that I'm at a terminal that can handle remote X connections tunneled through ssh)
I prefer to keep mine text based so I can check it from any machine that has network and ssh access. (And with putty a quick download, any Windows box will do. And there's plenty of them wherever you go)
The most aggrivating part of this is the concept of Peer to Peers. Some one installs Black Ice and then leaves snotty messages about "hacking attempts" when they get a hit on port 6346... which is Gnutella!
They run a peer to peer and don't realize that, oh maybe the computers might have to CONNECT?!
We even had a script kiddie flood us for a connection, even though the punk had been on gnutella that same day!
I mostly put the blame on the companies that sell the firewall software for windows. The make this huge hype about those "evil hackers" and even bother explaining WHY machines might get REAL connections.
A better educated user base would be ideal, but I think I'm dreaming.
I hate feeding the trolls.
The point was that gpg CAN encrypt to multiple people. I ran a simple test case using the command line. Mutt will also encrypt to all the recipiants. I'm assuming OE and Eudora have hooks to do the same thing.
So now: Emails can be encrypted to multiple recipiants via email clients, thus making it viable for group discussions.
Now, remove your head from your ass.
Thank you.
I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. You can encrypt a message to multiple recipiants at the same time, and each of their private keys will decrypt it. This makes it easy to send the same email to multiple people
gpg-encrypt -r Person1 Person2 Person3
should work for that.
Just because the general population starts using our words in a different manner doesn't mean that we have to like it. What do you think fire fighters would do if people started calling arsonists "Firemen"? They'd probably be pretty upset about it.
The same words can mean different things. If you're playing pool and ask someone for an 8-ball, it's drastically different if your in a crack house and ask for one.
A hacker is a hacker, a cracker is a cracker. Let the media screw it up, we can stil use our terms in our environment correctly.
But hacking is right, legal, and endorsed out there in the real world.
Hell, even cracking is right, legal, and endorsed.
Like when a friend asks you to have a go at his system to make sure it's secure. That's right, legal, AND endorsed. This kids cracking some school security after being ASKED TO makes it at least endorsed.
No, he meant linux. The point was that managers complain that they have no one to sue if Linux breaks. He was pointing out the due to the EULA on MS products, you have no one to sue if _they_ break.
You can't sue anyone in either context, therefore you get to sue the same people when using either Linux or Windows.
True, I can see a Samba network being wide open, but that doesn't mean that they could get a screenshot of the desktop. Unless this guy was the actual spammer and wrote the story to cover himself ;-)
The lack of technical detail, and specifically the references the "screen shots" led me to believe that this story isn't real. As easy as it is to take down a Windows box, it is not easy to gain full remote access except through BackOriface or what not.
I also find it highly unlikely that every single spammer in this group would be completely vunerable to an attack. It's entirely possible that there is some voodoo that I don't know about, but this doesn't look real to me.
I've got two boxes here, but only one ethernet port. So I've got one box being used as a web server, etc, etc, that also masqing my desktop. I've gotten Quake3 to run, no problem, but I can't see "Local Games", I'm guessing this is because Quake3 tries to do some broadcast based on what it thinks your IP address is.
Anyone know of any solution to this?
Well what else are you going to do with cake? Sit and look at it? Hey! I bought this great cake the other day. It looks so cute on my dresser!
If I buy a cake, I'm going to eat it. I want to have cake AND eat it! After that, I'm going to get some beer AND drink it! I may even go hog wild, get some pants AND wear them!
Some universities LOSE money by providing internet access. Students here pay about $12 a semester for a "technology fee" which cover on campus labs, access to scanners, printers, and of course RESNET. The entire purpose of RESNET is to allow people to use the internet for educational purposes. There's even information about this when they apply for an account.
When legit uses of the network of an educational institute are hampared by people downloading as many MP3s as possible, the university has an obligation to put an end to it. We're not talking about minor amounts of traffic here either. As I mentioned earlier, it's take a full 20% of the bandwith (well, not anymore!). If it wasn't slowing down legit network traffic, then I'm sure no one would have a problem with it.
My point is that if each users network traffic didn't affect any other users network traffic, life would be good. But it _does_ affect network everyone's traffic. (All it takes is about 10 boxes to completly saturate a single segment of resnet.) And that results in legit users getting mad.
They are a business, I agree. Their business is to provide their students with the best education possible. This includes libraries, computer labs, language labs, etc. All these are for education. Napster, as far as I know, provides NO educational value. So when it clogs bandwith, POOF, it's gone. Just keeping their business going.
Well, I know that the resnet traffice here was 20% napster. That's 1/5th of the bandwith. People on the same subnets as the heavy napsters users started complaining about the slowdown. They had no idea it was being caused by napster, just that their connection had gotten slower.
Since napster provides no "educational value" and was "hampering system resources" we had to can it. there wasn't really a viable alternative. Napster was affecting our network, and after people complained we blocked connections to the napster servers. This isn't "an excuse for poor technology", it's "people wasting bandwith and hampering other peoples connections."
Until every single person has unlimited bandwith to anywhere, this will be a problem.