Out of curiosity, how similar is Vista's ReadyBoost feature to just mounting a USB drive as swap in Linux?
Not really similar at all.
Can you hot-unplug the drive in Linux if it's being used for swap?
Nope, your system will crash unless you swapoff first (and of course that will fail if you're using more memory than you have physical RAM).
According to a FAQ on ReadyBoost I found, Vista will back up the pagefile to disk so it's not a catastrophe if you yank out the USB stick.
Correct. The data on the USB stick is used as a cache, not swap.
And is there any setting in Linux to tweak to let the system know you've got a fast swap partition, other than simply monkeying with/proc/sys/vm/swappiness ?
If there were, how would you want this information to affect Linux's behavior?
What would be neat is if you could swap out flash drives in the event of a failure. Or upgrade the flash drive capacity. I'd be more interested in that than a permanently integrated flash drive. You're correct to be skeptical of its lifespan.
Well then, good news for you: Vista supports a feature called ReadyBoost, which can use just about any flash memory device (e.g. a cheap USB thumb drive) as a cache to improve performance.
Yes, FireWire 400 is faster than USB 2.0. If you don't believe it, buy an external 5.25" enclosure that supports both, and install a 16x DVD burner. Try burning some DVDs at 16x. With Firewire, it'll work every time. With USB, about a third of the time it'll fail. Burning at a slower speed works fine, of course.
If you run sshd on port 22, try creating an account with a username like "temp" and password "temp123", or something similarly easy to guess. You'll be pwned within hours, most likely. They won't get root, of course, but why would a spambot need root?
Take a look at MIMEDefang, which can do the e-mail part of that (it runs ClamAV and SpamAssassin for you as well). Fully configurable with some Perl hacking.
Oh freddled gruntbuggly, Thy micturations are to me As plurdled gabbleblotchits On a lurgid bee. Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles, Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon See if I don't.
Hmmm, so what you're saying is the problem isn't actually security, it's people like you?
Yeah, basically. I made a stupid mistake (I created a temporary account for something, set a weak password, and forgot to delete the account when I was done). My point was that Linux is exploitable, and the majority of the population is more clueless than we are; if they were running Linux, malware would target them too.
The appropriately named CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was marketed as a tool to reduce spam. Does it do that? No, it does the opposite by legitimizing spam through a "first one's free" loophole that was probably put in there by powerful lobbyists.
And yet, I rarely see any of this newly-legitimized spam.
It does nothing to make unsolicited commercial email illegal. CAN-SPAN actually makes getting rid of spam utterly impossible. And that's your idea of good legislation?
OK, it's not good legislation, but it's not as bad as it could have been. It has loopholes, but spam that exploits those loopholes isn't currently bothering me. Spam that is illegal according to CAN-SPAM is what's causing most of the problems. If we could step up enforcement, illegal spam would decrease, and if this leaves only legalized spam remaining, taking care of that is as simple as changing the law.
What are you trying to do? Disable the button so your OS won't put the computer into standby mode? Check your BIOS settings, and your OS power management settings. Or completely disconnect the button? You can physically unplug it from the motherboard, but you'd better find some alternative means of turning your system on (again, check the BIOS settings; some support powering on by a keyboard combination, and many support Wake-on-LAN).
What happens when government email servers start crashing? Will this become a "national security" issue? Will it occur to government that the CAN-SPAM Act was a horrible bit of legislation? Or will they see the server crashes as an attack on infrastructure? And what is the likely result? Government putting legal pressure on software makers to patch their security holes? Or owners of zombified computers being placed under NSA scrutiny?
CAN-SPAM wasn't a horrible bit of legislation; in fact, it makes just about all the spam I currently receive clearly illegal. Just making it illegal doesn't solve the problem.
Windows XP Service Pack 2, released over two years ago, enables a firewall by default, which stops all those worms we used to be plagued with. Additionally, with the increasing popularity of 802.11 wifi, many people are moving their computers behind NAT routers, which also prevent those worms from working. Boy, that sure made a big dent in the amount of spam I see!
Seriously, security holes in software are not the problem. Sure, they make it a little easier to automate the process, but if Linux had over 50% market share on the desktop, millions of Linux boxes would be turned into spam zombies very quickly. My own Linux server was hit by a worm that turned it into a spam zombie for awhile; I didn't notice until I got a complaint from my ISP.
Yeah right, if you're running an ISP, you're doing it all wrong if you don't reserve the right to monitor all traffic coming and going on your connection. I bet you yourself are the one doing the spamming.....
They probably did monitor, and couldn't find any evidence of spamming themselves. The customer is a known spammer, but the customer was not using this ISP's service to engage in spam, at least as far as the ISP can tell. Spamhaus may have evidence to the contrary, but they're not sharing. The ISP has a contract with the customer (whom they didn't know was a spammer when they entered into the contract), and the customer has not violated the terms of that contract as far as the ISP knows. The ISP doesn't want to break the contract just because Spamhaus says they should, and Spamhaus's attitude frankly sucks.
Good becuase its there stupidity that cuased their pc to be compromised in the first place. If they had just kept their system up to date and not installed the smilely face card weather thingie they wouldn't be a spam spewing zombie right now. People need to take responsiblity for haveing insecure systems. It isn't Microsofts fault, I use XP and my system is secure, its their own fault for being lazy and ignorant. If they start getting billed for their ignorance than maybee they will pay more attention to computer secutity.
Average stupid people won't pay it; they'll spend hours on the phone complaining to some poor customer service agent instead, about how they've been charged for services they haven't used and accused of something they haven't done. Meanwhile, the spammers have already moved on to their next victim, so they don't care.
There is currently no technical measure that can be taken to stop spam at the source. Sure, you can try to put up obstacles, but I assure you, spammers will continue to find workarounds. The only real solution is for Congress to earmark funding for the FTC and FBI to find and prosecute spammers. It won't happen overnight, but if you start throwing experienced spammers in jail, all you'll be left with is the inexperienced spammers, who are easier to deal with.
Will this force spammers to move overseas? Absolutely, and many foreign governments have already agreed to cooperate in the war on spam.
Then there's the question of whether spam is actually illegal. Well, remember CAN-SPAM, the law that most Slashdotters said was a complete waste of time? The argument was, if CAN-SPAM were actually enforced, we'd still get a ton of legal spam that complies with the CAN-SPAM act. That's true, but it would be trivial to filter out! I almost never get spam that complies with CAN-SPAM.
Look for a SpamAssassin plugin called "FuzzyOcr", it uses the "gocr" optical character recognition software to convert the image to plain text, then does a fuzzy string comparison to match against close approximations of a list of keywords. The OCR software isn't very good (don't use the stable version, use the latest developer version, it's stable enough) and the way the string matching works there's a significant possibility for false positives (especially if you e-mail someone a screen shot, that happens to contain some text - any text at all), but so far I haven't had a problem with false positives, and it definitely catches a lot of spam. It does various filters on the image before sending it to the OCR software, so it catches things like the animated GIFs with what look like tiny bits of colored thread scattered throughout.
FWIW, yes, God is fair. God doesn't discriminate on the basis of race or class or nationality or wealth or intelligence or appearance. (It could be argued that there is some discrimination based on gender, but the majority of this is simply due to societal norms at the time the Bible was written.)
Ever since the Fall of Man, we have all been born into a sinful nature; all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. None of us deserve to spend eternity in communion with God (which is the true essence of Heaven), because God, by His very nature, absolutely requires righteousness, and none of us qualify. Not you, not me, not Pat Robertson, not Jerry Falwell, not James Dobson, not Billy Graham, not Pope Benedict. There's nothing any of us can do to earn our way in. Go ahead, try to be a better person than your neighbors; try not to do anything wrong - it won't help. It's too late; you've already messed it up. Don't feel bad - so have I. We deserve to spend eternity separated from God; that would be fair.
But God is a God of love, and grace, and mercy, in addition to being a God of justice. That's why He sent His Son as a sacrifice to pay for our mistakes, to make up for the wrong we've done. It's not automatic, you have to accept the gift, but it is a gift, offered indiscriminately. You can't earn it, and there's no other way in.
Firefox has gained enough recognition that the vast majority of web sites are no longer designed to work exclusively in Internet Explorer. Additionally, because of this competitive pressure, Microsoft has improved the quality of their browser (it still won't pass ACID2, but IE7 sucks less than IE6), and while they still may be technically incompetent, they're at least not being asses - Microsoft is actually attempting to work cooperatively with other browser vendors (for example, by adopting Firefox's RSS icon instead of creating their own).
Yes, IE still has ~90% market share, which is sad (because it's such a steaming pile of crap), but it's no longer a major problem for those of us who choose not to use it. Therefore, I say we won.
It's like saying, "You can't run porn businesses next to public highways" or "with public utility power."
If that public highway happens to run near a school, you might run into exactly that problem. Many places in the US prohibit "adult" businesses located near schools.
I have heard that this is precisely the reason Sadam Hussein wasn't very clear when he said Iraq didn't have WMDs; he (foolishly) wasn't concerned about the US (he never thought we'd actually invade Baghdad) but wanted to make sure that other more dangerous countries thought he might have WMDs, to deter them from invading.
As you can see from my user ID, I've been a member of Slashdot for a lot longer than you have, and over the past nearly-a-decade I believe I've picked up a pretty good idea of what is and is not appropriate to discuss in this particular public forum. Who are you to declare what is and what is not appropriate here?
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Out of curiosity, how similar is Vista's ReadyBoost feature to just mounting a USB drive as swap in Linux?
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness ?
Not really similar at all.
Can you hot-unplug the drive in Linux if it's being used for swap?
Nope, your system will crash unless you swapoff first (and of course that will fail if you're using more memory than you have physical RAM).
According to a FAQ on ReadyBoost I found, Vista will back up the pagefile to disk so it's not a catastrophe if you yank out the USB stick.
Correct. The data on the USB stick is used as a cache, not swap.
And is there any setting in Linux to tweak to let the system know you've got a fast swap partition, other than simply monkeying with
If there were, how would you want this information to affect Linux's behavior?
What would be neat is if you could swap out flash drives in the event of a failure. Or upgrade the flash drive capacity. I'd be more interested in that than a permanently integrated flash drive. You're correct to be skeptical of its lifespan.
Well then, good news for you: Vista supports a feature called ReadyBoost, which can use just about any flash memory device (e.g. a cheap USB thumb drive) as a cache to improve performance.
Apple has always designed their own motherboards; I'd say that's somewhat significant.
Yes, FireWire 400 is faster than USB 2.0. If you don't believe it, buy an external 5.25" enclosure that supports both, and install a 16x DVD burner. Try burning some DVDs at 16x. With Firewire, it'll work every time. With USB, about a third of the time it'll fail. Burning at a slower speed works fine, of course.
If you run sshd on port 22, try creating an account with a username like "temp" and password "temp123", or something similarly easy to guess. You'll be pwned within hours, most likely. They won't get root, of course, but why would a spambot need root?
4. Legality is a huge issue, and this technique was proposed in the past. If something isn't legal, you cannot be paid for it.
I don't know about that; spammers seem to be doing rather well for themselves...
I take it you've never seen this page?
Take a look at MIMEDefang, which can do the e-mail part of that (it runs ClamAV and SpamAssassin for you as well). Fully configurable with some Perl hacking.
Hmmm, so what you're saying is the problem isn't actually security, it's people like you?
Yeah, basically. I made a stupid mistake (I created a temporary account for something, set a weak password, and forgot to delete the account when I was done). My point was that Linux is exploitable, and the majority of the population is more clueless than we are; if they were running Linux, malware would target them too.
The appropriately named CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was marketed as a tool to reduce spam. Does it do that? No, it does the opposite by legitimizing spam through a "first one's free" loophole that was probably put in there by powerful lobbyists.
And yet, I rarely see any of this newly-legitimized spam.
It does nothing to make unsolicited commercial email illegal. CAN-SPAN actually makes getting rid of spam utterly impossible. And that's your idea of good legislation?
OK, it's not good legislation, but it's not as bad as it could have been. It has loopholes, but spam that exploits those loopholes isn't currently bothering me. Spam that is illegal according to CAN-SPAM is what's causing most of the problems. If we could step up enforcement, illegal spam would decrease, and if this leaves only legalized spam remaining, taking care of that is as simple as changing the law.
Ha! Wow, thanks, I'm dumb. It was late, I was tired, and I saw the comment ID instead. I respectfully withdraw my comment.
You're an idiot. But I would definitely like to see more effort made toward minimizing the power usage of those devices when they're not in use.
What are you trying to do? Disable the button so your OS won't put the computer into standby mode? Check your BIOS settings, and your OS power management settings. Or completely disconnect the button? You can physically unplug it from the motherboard, but you'd better find some alternative means of turning your system on (again, check the BIOS settings; some support powering on by a keyboard combination, and many support Wake-on-LAN).
Gas prices are up, SUV sales are down. These things take time.
What happens when government email servers start crashing? Will this become a "national security" issue? Will it occur to government that the CAN-SPAM Act was a horrible bit of legislation? Or will they see the server crashes as an attack on infrastructure? And what is the likely result? Government putting legal pressure on software makers to patch their security holes? Or owners of zombified computers being placed under NSA scrutiny?
CAN-SPAM wasn't a horrible bit of legislation; in fact, it makes just about all the spam I currently receive clearly illegal. Just making it illegal doesn't solve the problem.
Windows XP Service Pack 2, released over two years ago, enables a firewall by default, which stops all those worms we used to be plagued with. Additionally, with the increasing popularity of 802.11 wifi, many people are moving their computers behind NAT routers, which also prevent those worms from working. Boy, that sure made a big dent in the amount of spam I see!
Seriously, security holes in software are not the problem. Sure, they make it a little easier to automate the process, but if Linux had over 50% market share on the desktop, millions of Linux boxes would be turned into spam zombies very quickly. My own Linux server was hit by a worm that turned it into a spam zombie for awhile; I didn't notice until I got a complaint from my ISP.
Yeah right, if you're running an ISP, you're doing it all wrong if you don't reserve the right to monitor all traffic coming and going on your connection. I bet you yourself are the one doing the spamming.....
They probably did monitor, and couldn't find any evidence of spamming themselves. The customer is a known spammer, but the customer was not using this ISP's service to engage in spam, at least as far as the ISP can tell. Spamhaus may have evidence to the contrary, but they're not sharing. The ISP has a contract with the customer (whom they didn't know was a spammer when they entered into the contract), and the customer has not violated the terms of that contract as far as the ISP knows. The ISP doesn't want to break the contract just because Spamhaus says they should, and Spamhaus's attitude frankly sucks.
Good becuase its there stupidity that cuased their pc to be compromised in the first place. If they had just kept their system up to date and not installed the smilely face card weather thingie they wouldn't be a spam spewing zombie right now. People need to take responsiblity for haveing insecure systems. It isn't Microsofts fault, I use XP and my system is secure, its their own fault for being lazy and ignorant. If they start getting billed for their ignorance than maybee they will pay more attention to computer secutity.
Average stupid people won't pay it; they'll spend hours on the phone complaining to some poor customer service agent instead, about how they've been charged for services they haven't used and accused of something they haven't done. Meanwhile, the spammers have already moved on to their next victim, so they don't care.
There is currently no technical measure that can be taken to stop spam at the source. Sure, you can try to put up obstacles, but I assure you, spammers will continue to find workarounds. The only real solution is for Congress to earmark funding for the FTC and FBI to find and prosecute spammers. It won't happen overnight, but if you start throwing experienced spammers in jail, all you'll be left with is the inexperienced spammers, who are easier to deal with.
Will this force spammers to move overseas? Absolutely, and many foreign governments have already agreed to cooperate in the war on spam.
Then there's the question of whether spam is actually illegal. Well, remember CAN-SPAM, the law that most Slashdotters said was a complete waste of time? The argument was, if CAN-SPAM were actually enforced, we'd still get a ton of legal spam that complies with the CAN-SPAM act. That's true, but it would be trivial to filter out! I almost never get spam that complies with CAN-SPAM.
Look for a SpamAssassin plugin called "FuzzyOcr", it uses the "gocr" optical character recognition software to convert the image to plain text, then does a fuzzy string comparison to match against close approximations of a list of keywords. The OCR software isn't very good (don't use the stable version, use the latest developer version, it's stable enough) and the way the string matching works there's a significant possibility for false positives (especially if you e-mail someone a screen shot, that happens to contain some text - any text at all), but so far I haven't had a problem with false positives, and it definitely catches a lot of spam. It does various filters on the image before sending it to the OCR software, so it catches things like the animated GIFs with what look like tiny bits of colored thread scattered throughout.
And if you drive over some schoolkids while fondling with your car-radio, you are still guilty of murder.
If it was accidental, isn't it still vehicular manslaughter, not murder?
FWIW, yes, God is fair. God doesn't discriminate on the basis of race or class or nationality or wealth or intelligence or appearance. (It could be argued that there is some discrimination based on gender, but the majority of this is simply due to societal norms at the time the Bible was written.)
Ever since the Fall of Man, we have all been born into a sinful nature; all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. None of us deserve to spend eternity in communion with God (which is the true essence of Heaven), because God, by His very nature, absolutely requires righteousness, and none of us qualify. Not you, not me, not Pat Robertson, not Jerry Falwell, not James Dobson, not Billy Graham, not Pope Benedict. There's nothing any of us can do to earn our way in. Go ahead, try to be a better person than your neighbors; try not to do anything wrong - it won't help. It's too late; you've already messed it up. Don't feel bad - so have I. We deserve to spend eternity separated from God; that would be fair.
But God is a God of love, and grace, and mercy, in addition to being a God of justice. That's why He sent His Son as a sacrifice to pay for our mistakes, to make up for the wrong we've done. It's not automatic, you have to accept the gift, but it is a gift, offered indiscriminately. You can't earn it, and there's no other way in.
God is fair... but people don't want fairness.
The browser wars are over? Who won?
We did.
Firefox has gained enough recognition that the vast majority of web sites are no longer designed to work exclusively in Internet Explorer. Additionally, because of this competitive pressure, Microsoft has improved the quality of their browser (it still won't pass ACID2, but IE7 sucks less than IE6), and while they still may be technically incompetent, they're at least not being asses - Microsoft is actually attempting to work cooperatively with other browser vendors (for example, by adopting Firefox's RSS icon instead of creating their own).
Yes, IE still has ~90% market share, which is sad (because it's such a steaming pile of crap), but it's no longer a major problem for those of us who choose not to use it. Therefore, I say we won.
It's like saying, "You can't run porn businesses next to public highways" or "with public utility power."
If that public highway happens to run near a school, you might run into exactly that problem. Many places in the US prohibit "adult" businesses located near schools.
I have heard that this is precisely the reason Sadam Hussein wasn't very clear when he said Iraq didn't have WMDs; he (foolishly) wasn't concerned about the US (he never thought we'd actually invade Baghdad) but wanted to make sure that other more dangerous countries thought he might have WMDs, to deter them from invading.
As you can see from my user ID, I've been a member of Slashdot for a lot longer than you have, and over the past nearly-a-decade I believe I've picked up a pretty good idea of what is and is not appropriate to discuss in this particular public forum. Who are you to declare what is and what is not appropriate here?
Oh! Before they had registered users at all? That's possible.