I've set up about 7 windows / linux dual boot machines. Most of the time the process is incredibly easy. The Ubuntu installer is the best OS installer I've ever used and it can take care of everything by itself. It can do the hard drive repartitioning, linux installation, grub installation, secondary OS detection & grub configuration. It's possible to use the Ubuntu install cd to transform a windows-only machine into a windows / ubuntu dual boot machine in about 15 minutes.
However, it doesn't go smoothly 100% of the time. I ran into snags with 1 of my dual boot installs that ended up needing the hard drive reformatted (multiple times). I'm still not positive what went wrong - it might have had to do with WinXP sp0 & high volume SATA drives. Anyway, there is reason for caution, and your desire not to upset windows in any way is justified.
Several other posters have very good suggestions on a cautious approach to doing the installation. wintermute000 suggested tyring it out on a second machine first. That's probably the safest way to do it. The most reliable test would be a second machine with identical hardware specs of the first one. If all goes well on your dry run, you can be pretty confident that it will work just the same when you do it on your primary machine.
If you are in a home environment, you probably don't have duplicate hardware & likely don't have a second machine. If you don't have access to a second machine and still wish to continue, I would put forward the following caveat. The standard things that happen during the Ubuntu install process that carry the most risk to an existing windows installation are repartitioning, and rewriting the master boot record. With that in mind, atlastiamborn's suggestion is probably a good one. From what I read, the wubi install mode does not do any repartitioning of the hard drive and does not affect the master boot record. The mbr points to the windows bootloader, and the windows bootloader calls grub, which loads linux. I haven't tried a wubi install yet, so I can't vouch for it for sure, but the specs match what you're looking for pretty good.
From what I read, there is a performance hit associated with a wubi install, pribably related to reading & writing to a NFTF(windows) file system. If you try out Ubuntu with wubi and you like it and want more performance, here is what I'd do.
Back up your data before you touch your hard drive on your primary machine. You probably won't need to use your backup data, but better safe than sorry. If something goes wrong during an OS install, it can mean that you have to format your hard drive (this is really rare). Leave your original windows installation unmolested on hard drive 1. Don't do any repartitioning & don't touch the MBR. Dedicate hard drive 2 to ubuntu. This means reformatting hard drive 2 with an EXT3 partition and probabably a small swap partition (2x the size of your RAM). The ubunutu installer can handle this. However, you would want a non-standard install in that you would want to have the MBR (untouched) call the windows bootloader which would call grub which would boot Ubuntu. I've never done this type of install before but I know it is possible. Perhaps someone else on this forum can help you.
A couple of corrections to earlier posts. Ntfs-3g has been supported native in Ubuntu since Ubuntu 7.10. No need to do any extra install steps for this; it's already there. Ntfs-3g allows you to read & write to an NTFS(windows) partition. This is awesome for a dual boot machine. fixmbr is a lousy utility. Your master boot record contains data for up to 4 primary partitions. fixmbr is totally windows centric - it assumes 1 NTFS parition for the whole hard disk. If you run fixmbr, you will whack your whole primary partition table (at least this is what I did with an old windows XP install CD - maybe fixmbr has gotten smarter in recent versions). Don't use fixmbr except as a last resort. If you use fixmbr, you will definitely have to reinstall linux & you will probably have to reinstall windows too.
Sounds like the judge understood it pretty well to me.
I beg to differ. The judge is wrong; there are perfectly legitimate uses for a zone transfer by another party other than the one that operates the primary server.
In my previous job, I worked for an e-commerce company. Occasionally we would acquire new clients who were using someone else's e-commerce software. As part of the site migration process, we would set up an intermediary site where our client could test that all of their data was present and everything worked as before. Part of the migration entailed replicating DNS configurations to ensure that the switch from one host to another worked smoothly and didn't break any integration with 3rd party systems (external MX servers, office static IP's, legacy FTP sites, etc).
In one particular instance, we were acquiring a client based in the UK (We were in the US). We had communication problems with the old host. There's a 7 hour time difference, and the old host was somewhat unresponsive to email. We had a deadline to complete the migration.
So how did I satisfy our coustomer's demands & complete the migration? I who was not the same party that operates the primary server did a
host -l
The migration went smoothly. There is a good reason this data is public.
I had a very rewarding vista experience the other day. Windows Vista + goodbye-microsoft.com (paraphrased dialog with computer)
vista: I see you are trying to connect to the internet. The internet is full of boogeymen. Are you sure you want to connect? me: yes vista: I see you are downloading a progam. Programs can be dangerous. They can be full of nasty things. Maybe you would like to go back to your sandbox and play with some of your toys instead. Are you sure you want to download? me: yes vista: Oops! the progam is attempting to run now! I'm pretty sure you didn't want to do that! That progam is from the internet. You don't know where its been. Why don't you go back and play with the shiny new interface while I hide all of your files and programs to protect you from yourself? me: I know what I'm doing. run that program. vista: Oh No! That program is going into the registry! It's going into the bootloader! It's TOUCHING me in my SPECIAL PLACES! Please stop this! I can give you all kinds of shiny trinkets for you to waste your time with. me: escalate authority. force override. proceed with execution. vista: AAAAAGGGHHH! WHAT'S THAT YOU'RE HACKING OFF? IS IT MY TORSO? IT IS! MY PRECIOUS TORSO! me: Hahahaha. (reboot) debian linux: thank you for accepting one of our free tanks.
There are so many things wrong with this idea. 1) The assumption that all merchants are 100% honest and would never screw their own customers. 2) The assumption that the use-once rootkit is 100% bug free and leaves nothing behind on the client computer. 3) The open dissemination of rootkit technology 4) Training users that it is a generally accepted practice for thier computer to be taken out of their control 5) The spread of the acceptance of the business idea that it is OK to root people if your cause is just (and the business self evaluates whether or not they think their own cause is just). 6) Liability - if you were legally taking controll of a customer's computer with their consent, you would be liable for anything bad that occurred during the time the computer was out of their control - that's a lot of free tech support. 7) Restoration of control of computer to customer - what happens if the phone lines go down, a backhoe hits a cable or the server is struck by lightning during the 'secure' transaction? PwOned for eternity? 8) An extension of #1 - phishing sites utilizing the new 'secure' transaction after customers have been trained that being rooted is ok. 9) Cross browser compatibility - I'm kind of presuming that this can only be done with IE & activex. What if the customer is using Firefox? (or does their choice of firefox prove that they are not an idiot and don't need the extra 'security'?) 10) OS intercompatibility - I'm presuming that they want to root Windows. What if the customer is using Linux? (again, does the choice of Linux prove that the customer is not an idiot and doesn't need the extra 'security')
I do find the idea to be intersting of enumerating the people that always click yes and correlating they to a category of higher risk. But what is proposed as a 'remedy' is just the biggest case of overkill I have heard in ages.
The deeper problem is that what is proposed is possible. It should not be possible to root a machine from within a browser. A browser should never be able to escalate to root privileges. The internet is an untrusted envioronment, and a browser should act as a layer of strong prophylaxis between the internet and the computer user. If the user needs administrative privileges to reconfigure their computer, they should use another tool other than a browser. If this inconveniences them and slows them down, tough shit - it's a sensible tradeoff of security for convenience. This precaution won't slow them down nearly as much as being pw0ned.
The fact that something like this is permitted by Microsoft, IE and ActiveX is just a horrible design decision that no amount of user education will ever counterballance.
OK, I'll admit that the immigration question is a little bit of a diversion from the privacy question. I married a foreign national and I learned through painful firsthand experience what the immigration process is like. When people gloss over the details of this process, get their facts wrong and draw improper conclusions, it makes my blood boil.
On the other hand, the bush administration has confused the privacy question with the immigration question by rolling the agencies that would oversee these subjects into one: the Department of Homeland Security.
Also, it is within Kerr's purview to advise the president on matters related to the Department of Homeland Security which includes the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Hence it is his responsibility to be informed about the immigration issue (which only affects millions of Americans & foreign nationals living in America and only sees press coverage every day).
The point I am making is that this man does not know his own business. He is not competent and should not be trusted to re-engineer the balance of power between the People and the State.
"perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an (Internet service provider) who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data."
No one else seems to have caught this, so I thought I'd pipe up. According to US immigration law, if you are an illegal entrant into the US, you will never be eligible for a green card. If you were an illegal entrant and you have a green card, it means the immigration people made a MISTAKE with your data.
So, Donald Kerr is arguing - "We're the security aparatus of the government - just trust us." But in the same breath he is confirming his belief that "The security aparatus of the government makes mistakes and cannot be trusted to handle people's data."
PS. There is a fringe case in which the statement tha Donald Kerr made is accurate. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 contained the most recent amnesty for illegal entrants. Amnesty was granted to people who entered illegally before 1982 and lived and worked continuously in the US between 1982 & 1986. If this is what he meant than the segment of the population he refers to for with his 'Illegal Entrant' statement, than the segment of people are 'those who illegally entered the US over 25 years ago, lived & worked in the US continually between 1982 & 1986 , took advantage of an INS amnesty, later applied and were granted green cards, probably renewed their green cards once or twice (because they expire after 10 years) an have not yet gone through the process to become a naturalized citizen of the United States, but are still (or again) living in the US and are currently employed at an Internet Service Provider'. That is a really really really small segment of the population. So why would he bring it up? It's the big red herring. These days you can get away with anything in the federal government by pointing the finger of blame at immigrants and foreigners.
It seems that the computer industry on the whole has become more concerned with energy efficiency over the last few years. I'm glad to see it. As a discipline, computer science is always looking for ways to eke out more efficiency, whether it is at the algorithmic level or at the level of chip manufacture. It seems to be a be a natural fit to extend this thinking further into energy consumption as well.
But I have to wonder, how much of a difference can we make? I think that the energy consumption involved in the field of computers - through the whole lifecycle: manufacture, operation & disposal - is relatively low compared to the energy consumed in other areas of the economy (transportation, heating, lighting, manufacture).
Would we be better off spending our time optimizing energy consumption in other industries?
I'd like to emphasize a point suggested by the parent: "the employer usually has the upper hand in any negotiation"
The subject of unpaid overtime / legal protection / unions has come up many times on slashdot. The most frequent responses I read to this subject are along the lines of "it's your responsibility to look out for yourself. Negotiate a fair wage and fair conditions for yourself at the time of hiring. If your employer screws you, quit and find a new job." I think that the people who post those responses are hardworking, ethical, probably libertarian, believe in the free market economy. I have a lot of respect for them.
However, I think there is a flaw in this thinking. Within this paradigm, the only time that the employee has the capability to affect their working conditions is at the bargaining table at the time of hiring. But the power relationship between the 2 parties at the bargaining table is not equal. It hurts the potential employee more to walk out than it hurts the employer to look for a replacement. The same relationship applies if conditions become abusive during employment. It hurts the employee more to be out of a job than it hurts the employer to be temporarily short-staffed. As long as the balance of power is heavily in favor of the employer, they are in a position to make excessive demands.
I don't think you can rely on market forces to fix this problem when there is such an imbalance of power between the employer & the employee.
OK, this is really an inane article and I shouldn't dignify it with a response, but I take issue with the author Chris Soghoian on so many levels that I just can't resist.
Chris's blog post is full of sweeping generalizations and inaccuracies
1) 'Web site designers depend upon advertising revenue to pay their bandwidth bills as well as to pay for the staff' - some do, some don't. The fact that this is stated as an absolute makes it fallacious. Some websites pay bandwidth costs themselves (rather than get kickbacks from ad agencies) because they want to promote goods or services; there are a host of 'catalog sites' that do this (funding comes from goods & services changing hands offline). Some pay their own bandwidth because they are hosting an ecommerce site and they want to sell people stuff and accept payment over the internet (again funding doesn't come from kickbacks from ad agencies). Some pay for their own bandwidth and eat the costs because they want to generously contribute content for free to the internet as a whole.
2) 'Every time someone uses advertisement-blocking software . . . they are denying the Web site operator revenue that would otherwise have gone to pay for the bandwidth that is consumed during that browsing session'. As far as I know, this is just not true in most cases. Most webmasters are getting paid for hosting ads on their site in a way that is independent of what the end users of their website do with those ads once they are transmitted to their computers. There may be some correlation between the ad payout and the number of hits on a site, but nothing more granular than that. If a person is surfing and hits an ad based website with firefox & adblock, the webmaster is going to get paid regardless.
3) 'Web advertising skipping technology are far closer to theft than they are to freeloading . . . (most of the article in the middle) . . . a few things are clear: Users of advertisement-skipping technology are essentially engaged in theft of resources.' He makes a claim, he provides no substantiation afterwards as to why the reader should consider his claim to be true, he then reasserts the claim as though he as proved it - this is just bad writing.
Chris is jumping on the moral high ground and claiming that people surfing with adblock are thieves. Then he turns around and suggests that site owners should exploit web browser security holes to punish people. I would contend that hacking people's web browsers is far more unethical. This guy's a hypocrite.
The grey area that Chris talks about can be clarified fairly easily in the following manner. Who owns the physical media on which the 1's & 0's constituting the data reside? Whoever owns the physical media owns the data that resides on it. So yes, the website owner owns the data for his website when it is resident on his servers. He is within his rights to do anything that he wishes with that data. He can change it, delete it or (as Chris suggests) refuse to transmit it to users surfing with firefox and adblock.
Conversely, the surfer owns all of the data on his machine. He is within his rights to copy it, erase it, flip all the 1's and 0's or not to display the ads embedded within the data. It's his hard drive, his RAM, his monitor, his pixels, his power. He can do whatever he wants with his general purpose computer. It is his property.
The propaganda that emanates from large corporations these days reeks more and more of restrictions on freedoms after a thing is bought (or given away). Copying a song which you have purchased is theft. Editing out the commercials on a video tape that you own is freeloading. Choosing not to display an online advertisement on your computer is immoral and a theft of resources. How long will it be until we are told that it is a theft of resources to press the mute button while an advertisement is playing on TV or that we have violated an end use agreement and are stealing because we fold a newspaper so that we can read the art
But seriously, North Korea is the only country in the world with whom we are technically at war. Congress signed a formal declaration of war for the Korean war and although we have an armistice with NK, we have no peace treaty and so the war never ended (technically). Congress has not used a formal declaration of war since. Not for Vietnam. Not for the cold war. Not for Kosovo. Not for Iraq. An authorization to use force is not the same thing.
Sometimes I think that things wouldn't be so fucked up right now if congress hadn't abdicated its constitutionally sanctioned role in warmaking. Also, seen in this light, there are grounds to challenge Bush's elevated executive powers that he claims through his role as commander in chief during wartime on the basis that we are not at war and that he never asked Congress to declare war.
I have to agree. Really, how hard is it to play music without skipping? Do you have to cripple your OS to do it? I don't think so.
I've got Ubuntu Feisty Fawn running on last years system (Dell optiplex 270 - P4 3ghz hyper-threaded core). I was flogging my CPU with 2 instances of John the ripper, scp'ing 150MB of files across the network and playing mp3's simultaneously. No music skipping.
I don't write the drivers or anything, but empirically, other systems look like they are doing this better.
I was the primary point of contact with a PCI DSS auditor in my previous job. In my experience, these kinds of compliance issues always came down to a human judgment that was made by the auditor.
In our case, the following setup was deemed to be compliant: * The production server writes logs to a log server using syslogng * The log server is located in a geographiclly distant location * The permissions on the log files resident on the log server were locked down such that only root could read them * We ran AIDE on the log server & configured it to monitor the logs such that it could detect any changes to the logs after they were at rest. * We monitored the AIDE logs daily to look for signs of alteration of the production server logs. (Running AIDE against logs generated a lot of noise but it was tolerable) * We retained the log records from the production server for a year.
I am sure that readers will note that our configuration did not truly guarantee that the logs were unalterable. However, it was enough to pass the interpretation of 'unalterable' that we received from our auditor, and that was really what mattered.
Everything was done Linux & open source. Hope this helps.
I think that a lot of the posts so far have been unreasonably hard on Bruce. I also think that a lot of posters may not have read down to the end of the article.
I think that the point is that the current situation is out of whack and that the computer security industry enjoys a higher prominence than it should (at least in comparison with other industries). For instance, most of the public have no idea what security measures are in place to protect the power grid - at the same time, Norton antivirus is a household name.
Many of the previous posts are correct in saying that security problems will just disppear. But can the situation be made better than it is now? I'd agree with Bruce that "aftermarket security is actually a very inefficient way to spend our security dollars".
Assuming that the computer industry moves towards more efficiency in this respect, we may very well see more security baked in to the development process. It would mean a reduction in prominence of the security industry as security problems become more of an industry issue than a universal issue.
I had a look at your source material here I think that your source has not fully interpreted the material that they got from the Congressional Budget Office here
There are 2 observations that can be made from the CBO data that were left out on allegromedia that I think are relevant to this discussion.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (not poorer relative to the rich but absolutely poorer.) see CBO stats in the table named 'Average Pretax Family Income (In 1995 dollars)' (compare highest quintile to lowest quintile, 1977 to 1999[projected] )
While the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, the tax burden on the wealthiest is decreasing over time. see CBO stats in the table named 'Effective Total Federal Tax Rate (In percent)' (examine the tax burden for the top 1% from 1977 to 1999 [projected] )
France derives almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear power.
Glad someone brought this up. Other countries have also gotten rid of fossil fuel as their main electricity source. Switzerland and Sweden have cut their fossil fuel energy prodction rates to next to nothing with a combination of Nuclear and Hydroelectric power. Finland and Austria have done the same with Hydro-electric alone. (source CIA World Factbook). Of course most countries can't go all hydro-electric; they just don't have the geography for it. However, it does serve to demonstrate that we have realistic alternatives to Fossil Fuel based electricity production.
There is something else that hasn't been brought up yet that I think is pertainent to this discussion. Lovelock says that it is a question of time, that renewable energy is all well and good, but that we don't have time to set it up as a main source of energy. He contends that we have time (just barely) to go nuclear and diminish the consequences of global warming.
My question is, assuming that we decided that it was the right course of action, just how fast could we go nuclear?
The moral of the story is that if you ask for some creepy information, and it's not exactly clear why you asked for it, then the FBI and Secret Service are going to have some questions to ask you, and they'll open a file on it.
This goes completely against the purpose of of the freedom of information act. Prior to the freedom of information act, citizens had to justify to the government why they wanted the info that they were requesting and the government was under no particular obligation to provide the information. The freedom of information act turns this assumption on its head (and rightly so in my opinion); the citizen may request information from the government for any reason or no reason at all and the onus is on the government to justify itself why such information should be withheld.
If we revert to the old assumption that the citizen must justify himself to the government, we are taking a big step away from transparency and accountability in government.
The same thing can be done with humans, afterall, and no one complains about loss of privacy by seeing a police officer legally on public land looking for criminals . . . what difference does it make if a police officer was stationed looking for people?
I think this is a usefull question to think about. One difference that I can think of is that if it were done with people, you would have to have a police officer stationed on every corner looking at you personally, all the time. I think that the general populace would be unhappy with such an overwhelming and visible police presence.
For more food for thought, take a camera and go around the city, get in front of people and take pictures of their faces. You will probably piss a lot of people off. True, they are in a pulbic place and do not have a legal expectation of privacy in the same way that they would within their own home. However, this sidesteps the issue of common courtesy; most people would prefer if you asked and received their permission before you took a picture of them.
In both of these examples, human beings watching or photographing you would piss you off. Why then should it not piss you off if machines are doing the same thing?
So this eyewitness applauds the superb work done by these gardai in a very difficult situation.
Most of the time the Garda can't find their arse with both hands. Looks like they got it bang on this time. Fair play to them. I saw a similar scene at an internet cafe in Dublin about 2 months ago. Somebody was being hauled out of onto the street by to Garda and 2 plainclothes garda. I always figured he was getting busted for kiddie porn. Perhaps it was spam after all.
Since terrorism (in the 9-11 sense) is a response to U.S. tyranny elsewhere, ending the tyranny would end the terrorism.
Bullshit. Terrorists (in the 9-11 sense) hate America not because of what we have done wrong, but fundamentally who we are and what we have done right. They hate us for our freedom of religion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, secular government, liberal society and equality of the sexes. Al Quaeda will not be satisfied with anything short of an American Theocracy.
I was looking for a post on this. I do not remember being asked to declare a party affiliation when I voted in Montana. Do regulations on this change state by state? Anyone out there goot the goods on this?
It seems to me that a requirement to declare party affiliation violates the principle of voter anonymity and vote secrecy.
In other countries, (eg. Zimbabwe) you could be killed for declaring for the wrong party.
I am new to this subject, so if the things I am about to ask are already common knowledge, apologies in advance.
First, The SCO policy of selling an "Intellectual Property Liscense for Linux" based on an allegation (rather than a conviction) that Linux uses SCO source code seems to me to be shady and premature. If the lawsuit gets thrown out of court, I presume that these liscenses which they are selling will be of zero value. In this scenario, since SCO had access to their original source code, they must have known that their lawsuit would fail, and that they were selling liscenses that were worthless. Could they be sued or prosecuted for this?
Second, if the lawsuit goes in favor of SCO, the liscenses that they are selling are would only cover users for SCO source code embeded in Linux. Would this open the door for other companies to also claim that Linux had some of their source code embedded in it and demand that users purchase additional liscenses?
I would be the first to volunteer to goto Mars even if it meant there was a 99 percent chance I would die. I'm sure there alot of other American's that would do the same.
Mod parent up please.
Yes you are right, a lot of Americans would do the same. I for one would be willing to go even if I knew it was a one way ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
I've set up about 7 windows / linux dual boot machines. Most of the time the process is incredibly easy. The Ubuntu installer is the best OS installer I've ever used and it can take care of everything by itself. It can do the hard drive repartitioning, linux installation, grub installation, secondary OS detection & grub configuration. It's possible to use the Ubuntu install cd to transform a windows-only machine into a windows / ubuntu dual boot machine in about 15 minutes.
However, it doesn't go smoothly 100% of the time. I ran into snags with 1 of my dual boot installs that ended up needing the hard drive reformatted (multiple times). I'm still not positive what went wrong - it might have had to do with WinXP sp0 & high volume SATA drives. Anyway, there is reason for caution, and your desire not to upset windows in any way is justified.
Several other posters have very good suggestions on a cautious approach to doing the installation. wintermute000 suggested tyring it out on a second machine first. That's probably the safest way to do it. The most reliable test would be a second machine with identical hardware specs of the first one. If all goes well on your dry run, you can be pretty confident that it will work just the same when you do it on your primary machine.
If you are in a home environment, you probably don't have duplicate hardware & likely don't have a second machine. If you don't have access to a second machine and still wish to continue, I would put forward the following caveat. The standard things that happen during the Ubuntu install process that carry the most risk to an existing windows installation are repartitioning, and rewriting the master boot record. With that in mind, atlastiamborn's suggestion is probably a good one. From what I read, the wubi install mode does not do any repartitioning of the hard drive and does not affect the master boot record. The mbr points to the windows bootloader, and the windows bootloader calls grub, which loads linux. I haven't tried a wubi install yet, so I can't vouch for it for sure, but the specs match what you're looking for pretty good.
From what I read, there is a performance hit associated with a wubi install, pribably related to reading & writing to a NFTF(windows) file system. If you try out Ubuntu with wubi and you like it and want more performance, here is what I'd do.
Back up your data before you touch your hard drive on your primary machine. You probably won't need to use your backup data, but better safe than sorry. If something goes wrong during an OS install, it can mean that you have to format your hard drive (this is really rare). Leave your original windows installation unmolested on hard drive 1. Don't do any repartitioning & don't touch the MBR. Dedicate hard drive 2 to ubuntu. This means reformatting hard drive 2 with an EXT3 partition and probabably a small swap partition (2x the size of your RAM). The ubunutu installer can handle this. However, you would want a non-standard install in that you would want to have the MBR (untouched) call the windows bootloader which would call grub which would boot Ubuntu. I've never done this type of install before but I know it is possible. Perhaps someone else on this forum can help you.
A couple of corrections to earlier posts. Ntfs-3g has been supported native in Ubuntu since Ubuntu 7.10. No need to do any extra install steps for this; it's already there. Ntfs-3g allows you to read & write to an NTFS(windows) partition. This is awesome for a dual boot machine. fixmbr is a lousy utility. Your master boot record contains data for up to 4 primary partitions. fixmbr is totally windows centric - it assumes 1 NTFS parition for the whole hard disk. If you run fixmbr, you will whack your whole primary partition table (at least this is what I did with an old windows XP install CD - maybe fixmbr has gotten smarter in recent versions). Don't use fixmbr except as a last resort. If you use fixmbr, you will definitely have to reinstall linux & you will probably have to reinstall windows too.
Hope this helps.
Good luck.
Sounds like the judge understood it pretty well to me.
I beg to differ. The judge is wrong; there are perfectly legitimate uses for a zone transfer by another party other than the one that operates the primary server.
In my previous job, I worked for an e-commerce company. Occasionally we would acquire new clients who were using someone else's e-commerce software. As part of the site migration process, we would set up an intermediary site where our client could test that all of their data was present and everything worked as before. Part of the migration entailed replicating DNS configurations to ensure that the switch from one host to another worked smoothly and didn't break any integration with 3rd party systems (external MX servers, office static IP's, legacy FTP sites, etc).
In one particular instance, we were acquiring a client based in the UK (We were in the US). We had communication problems with the old host. There's a 7 hour time difference, and the old host was somewhat unresponsive to email. We had a deadline to complete the migration.
So how did I satisfy our coustomer's demands & complete the migration?
I who was not the same party that operates the primary server did a
host -l
The migration went smoothly.
There is a good reason this data is public.
I had a very rewarding vista experience the other day.
Windows Vista + goodbye-microsoft.com
(paraphrased dialog with computer)
vista: I see you are trying to connect to the internet. The internet is full of boogeymen. Are you sure you want to connect?
me: yes
vista: I see you are downloading a progam. Programs can be dangerous. They can be full of nasty things. Maybe you would like to go back to your sandbox and play with some of your toys instead. Are you sure you want to download?
me: yes
vista: Oops! the progam is attempting to run now! I'm pretty sure you didn't want to do that! That progam is from the internet. You don't know where its been. Why don't you go back and play with the shiny new interface while I hide all of your files and programs to protect you from yourself?
me: I know what I'm doing. run that program.
vista: Oh No! That program is going into the registry! It's going into the bootloader! It's TOUCHING me in my SPECIAL PLACES! Please stop this! I can give you all kinds of shiny trinkets for you to waste your time with.
me: escalate authority. force override. proceed with execution.
vista: AAAAAGGGHHH! WHAT'S THAT YOU'RE HACKING OFF? IS IT MY TORSO? IT IS! MY PRECIOUS TORSO!
me: Hahahaha. (reboot)
debian linux: thank you for accepting one of our free tanks.
Agreed. WTF!
There are so many things wrong with this idea.
1) The assumption that all merchants are 100% honest and would never screw their own customers.
2) The assumption that the use-once rootkit is 100% bug free and leaves nothing behind on the client computer.
3) The open dissemination of rootkit technology
4) Training users that it is a generally accepted practice for thier computer to be taken out of their control
5) The spread of the acceptance of the business idea that it is OK to root people if your cause is just (and the business self evaluates whether or not they think their own cause is just).
6) Liability - if you were legally taking controll of a customer's computer with their consent, you would be liable for anything bad that occurred during the time the computer was out of their control - that's a lot of free tech support.
7) Restoration of control of computer to customer - what happens if the phone lines go down, a backhoe hits a cable or the server is struck by lightning during the 'secure' transaction? PwOned for eternity?
8) An extension of #1 - phishing sites utilizing the new 'secure' transaction after customers have been trained that being rooted is ok.
9) Cross browser compatibility - I'm kind of presuming that this can only be done with IE & activex. What if the customer is using Firefox? (or does their choice of firefox prove that they are not an idiot and don't need the extra 'security'?)
10) OS intercompatibility - I'm presuming that they want to root Windows. What if the customer is using Linux? (again, does the choice of Linux prove that the customer is not an idiot and doesn't need the extra 'security')
I do find the idea to be intersting of enumerating the people that always click yes and correlating they to a category of higher risk. But what is proposed as a 'remedy' is just the biggest case of overkill I have heard in ages.
The deeper problem is that what is proposed is possible. It should not be possible to root a machine from within a browser. A browser should never be able to escalate to root privileges. The internet is an untrusted envioronment, and a browser should act as a layer of strong prophylaxis between the internet and the computer user. If the user needs administrative privileges to reconfigure their computer, they should use another tool other than a browser. If this inconveniences them and slows them down, tough shit - it's a sensible tradeoff of security for convenience. This precaution won't slow them down nearly as much as being pw0ned.
The fact that something like this is permitted by Microsoft, IE and ActiveX is just a horrible design decision that no amount of user education will ever counterballance.
OK, I'll admit that the immigration question is a little bit of a diversion from the privacy question. I married a foreign national and I learned through painful firsthand experience what the immigration process is like. When people gloss over the details of this process, get their facts wrong and draw improper conclusions, it makes my blood boil.
On the other hand, the bush administration has confused the privacy question with the immigration question by rolling the agencies that would oversee these subjects into one: the Department of Homeland Security.
Also, it is within Kerr's purview to advise the president on matters related to the Department of Homeland Security which includes the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. Hence it is his responsibility to be informed about the immigration issue (which only affects millions of Americans & foreign nationals living in America and only sees press coverage every day).
The point I am making is that this man does not know his own business. He is not competent and should not be trusted to re-engineer the balance of power between the People and the State.
"perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an (Internet service provider) who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data."
No one else seems to have caught this, so I thought I'd pipe up. According to US immigration law, if you are an illegal entrant into the US, you will never be eligible for a green card. If you were an illegal entrant and you have a green card, it means the immigration people made a MISTAKE with your data.
Who are the immigration people? The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services who were until recently the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is a subsection of the Department of Homeland Security.
So, Donald Kerr is arguing - "We're the security aparatus of the government - just trust us." But in the same breath he is confirming his belief that "The security aparatus of the government makes mistakes and cannot be trusted to handle people's data."
PS. There is a fringe case in which the statement tha Donald Kerr made is accurate. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 contained the most recent amnesty for illegal entrants. Amnesty was granted to people who entered illegally before 1982 and lived and worked continuously in the US between 1982 & 1986. If this is what he meant than the segment of the population he refers to for with his 'Illegal Entrant' statement, than the segment of people are 'those who illegally entered the US over 25 years ago, lived & worked in the US continually between 1982 & 1986 , took advantage of an INS amnesty, later applied and were granted green cards, probably renewed their green cards once or twice (because they expire after 10 years) an have not yet gone through the process to become a naturalized citizen of the United States, but are still (or again) living in the US and are currently employed at an Internet Service Provider'. That is a really really really small segment of the population. So why would he bring it up? It's the big red herring. These days you can get away with anything in the federal government by pointing the finger of blame at immigrants and foreigners.
This looks like a positive development.
It seems that the computer industry on the whole has become more concerned with energy efficiency over the last few years. I'm glad to see it. As a discipline, computer science is always looking for ways to eke out more efficiency, whether it is at the algorithmic level or at the level of chip manufacture. It seems to be a be a natural fit to extend this thinking further into energy consumption as well.
But I have to wonder, how much of a difference can we make? I think that the energy consumption involved in the field of computers - through the whole lifecycle: manufacture, operation & disposal - is relatively low compared to the energy consumed in other areas of the economy (transportation, heating, lighting, manufacture).
Would we be better off spending our time optimizing energy consumption in other industries?
I'd like to emphasize a point suggested by the parent: "the employer usually has the upper hand in any negotiation"
The subject of unpaid overtime / legal protection / unions has come up many times on slashdot. The most frequent responses I read to this subject are along the lines of "it's your responsibility to look out for yourself. Negotiate a fair wage and fair conditions for yourself at the time of hiring. If your employer screws you, quit and find a new job." I think that the people who post those responses are hardworking, ethical, probably libertarian, believe in the free market economy. I have a lot of respect for them.
However, I think there is a flaw in this thinking. Within this paradigm, the only time that the employee has the capability to affect their working conditions is at the bargaining table at the time of hiring. But the power relationship between the 2 parties at the bargaining table is not equal. It hurts the potential employee more to walk out than it hurts the employer to look for a replacement. The same relationship applies if conditions become abusive during employment. It hurts the employee more to be out of a job than it hurts the employer to be temporarily short-staffed. As long as the balance of power is heavily in favor of the employer, they are in a position to make excessive demands.
I don't think you can rely on market forces to fix this problem when there is such an imbalance of power between the employer & the employee.
"Unless your savy enough to not allow root logins . . ."
Ubuntu disables root login by default, which seems to me to be a good security measure.
OK, this is really an inane article and I shouldn't dignify it with a response, but I take issue with the author Chris Soghoian on so many levels that I just can't resist.
Chris's blog post is full of sweeping generalizations and inaccuracies
1) 'Web site designers depend upon advertising revenue to pay their bandwidth bills as well as to pay for the staff' - some do, some don't. The fact that this is stated as an absolute makes it fallacious. Some websites pay bandwidth costs themselves (rather than get kickbacks from ad agencies) because they want to promote goods or services; there are a host of 'catalog sites' that do this (funding comes from goods & services changing hands offline). Some pay their own bandwidth because they are hosting an ecommerce site and they want to sell people stuff and accept payment over the internet (again funding doesn't come from kickbacks from ad agencies). Some pay for their own bandwidth and eat the costs because they want to generously contribute content for free to the internet as a whole.
2) 'Every time someone uses advertisement-blocking software . . . they are denying the Web site operator revenue that would otherwise have gone to pay for the bandwidth that is consumed during that browsing session'. As far as I know, this is just not true in most cases. Most webmasters are getting paid for hosting ads on their site in a way that is independent of what the end users of their website do with those ads once they are transmitted to their computers. There may be some correlation between the ad payout and the number of hits on a site, but nothing more granular than that. If a person is surfing and hits an ad based website with firefox & adblock, the webmaster is going to get paid regardless.
3) 'Web advertising skipping technology are far closer to theft than they are to freeloading . . . (most of the article in the middle) . . . a few things are clear: Users of advertisement-skipping technology are essentially engaged in theft of resources.' He makes a claim, he provides no substantiation afterwards as to why the reader should consider his claim to be true, he then reasserts the claim as though he as proved it - this is just bad writing.
Chris is jumping on the moral high ground and claiming that people surfing with adblock are thieves. Then he turns around and suggests that site owners should exploit web browser security holes to punish people. I would contend that hacking people's web browsers is far more unethical. This guy's a hypocrite.
The grey area that Chris talks about can be clarified fairly easily in the following manner. Who owns the physical media on which the 1's & 0's constituting the data reside? Whoever owns the physical media owns the data that resides on it. So yes, the website owner owns the data for his website when it is resident on his servers. He is within his rights to do anything that he wishes with that data. He can change it, delete it or (as Chris suggests) refuse to transmit it to users surfing with firefox and adblock.
Conversely, the surfer owns all of the data on his machine. He is within his rights to copy it, erase it, flip all the 1's and 0's or not to display the ads embedded within the data. It's his hard drive, his RAM, his monitor, his pixels, his power. He can do whatever he wants with his general purpose computer. It is his property.
The propaganda that emanates from large corporations these days reeks more and more of restrictions on freedoms after a thing is bought (or given away). Copying a song which you have purchased is theft. Editing out the commercials on a video tape that you own is freeloading. Choosing not to display an online advertisement on your computer is immoral and a theft of resources. How long will it be until we are told that it is a theft of resources to press the mute button while an advertisement is playing on TV or that we have violated an end use agreement and are stealing because we fold a newspaper so that we can read the art
Hah! Excellent reference.
But seriously, North Korea is the only country in the world with whom we are technically at war. Congress signed a formal declaration of war for the Korean war and although we have an armistice with NK, we have no peace treaty and so the war never ended (technically). Congress has not used a formal declaration of war since. Not for Vietnam. Not for the cold war. Not for Kosovo. Not for Iraq. An authorization to use force is not the same thing.
Sometimes I think that things wouldn't be so fucked up right now if congress hadn't abdicated its constitutionally sanctioned role in warmaking. Also, seen in this light, there are grounds to challenge Bush's elevated executive powers that he claims through his role as commander in chief during wartime on the basis that we are not at war and that he never asked Congress to declare war.
I have to agree. Really, how hard is it to play music without skipping? Do you have to cripple your OS to do it? I don't think so.
I've got Ubuntu Feisty Fawn running on last years system (Dell optiplex 270 - P4 3ghz hyper-threaded core).
I was flogging my CPU with 2 instances of John the ripper, scp'ing 150MB of files across the network and playing mp3's simultaneously. No music skipping.
I don't write the drivers or anything, but empirically, other systems look like they are doing this better.
Technically, we're not at war with Iraq. We're at war with North Korea.
I was the primary point of contact with a PCI DSS auditor in my previous job. In my experience, these kinds of compliance issues always came down to a human judgment that was made by the auditor.
In our case, the following setup was deemed to be compliant:
* The production server writes logs to a log server using syslogng
* The log server is located in a geographiclly distant location
* The permissions on the log files resident on the log server were locked down such that only root could read them
* We ran AIDE on the log server & configured it to monitor the logs such that it could detect any changes to the logs after they were at rest.
* We monitored the AIDE logs daily to look for signs of alteration of the production server logs. (Running AIDE against logs generated a lot of noise but it was tolerable)
* We retained the log records from the production server for a year.
I am sure that readers will note that our configuration did not truly guarantee that the logs were unalterable. However, it was enough to pass the interpretation of 'unalterable' that we received from our auditor, and that was really what mattered.
Everything was done Linux & open source.
Hope this helps.
I think that a lot of the posts so far have been unreasonably hard on Bruce. I also think that a lot of posters may not have read down to the end of the article.
I think that the point is that the current situation is out of whack and that the computer security industry enjoys a higher prominence than it should (at least in comparison with other industries). For instance, most of the public have no idea what security measures are in place to protect the power grid - at the same time, Norton antivirus is a household name.
Many of the previous posts are correct in saying that security problems will just disppear. But can the situation be made better than it is now? I'd agree with Bruce that "aftermarket security is actually a very inefficient way to spend our security dollars".
Assuming that the computer industry moves towards more efficiency in this respect, we may very well see more security baked in to the development process. It would mean a reduction in prominence of the security industry as security problems become more of an industry issue than a universal issue.
I had a look at your source material
here
I think that your source has not fully interpreted the material that they got from the Congressional Budget Office
here
There are 2 observations that can be made from the CBO data that were left out on allegromedia that I think are relevant to this discussion.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (not poorer relative to the rich but absolutely poorer.)
see CBO stats in the table named 'Average Pretax Family Income (In 1995 dollars)' (compare highest quintile to lowest quintile, 1977 to 1999[projected] )
While the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, the tax burden on the wealthiest is decreasing over time.
see CBO stats in the table named 'Effective Total Federal Tax Rate (In percent)' (examine the tax burden for the top 1% from 1977 to 1999 [projected] )
Are any of you other guys working on Payment Card Industry Data Security Compliance? (PCI DSS)
Check this out:
The full requirements are here
Check out section 10 and the requirements for logs. Note the suggestion to store logs for 1 year with high security, possibly online.
Does anyone know of any online backup service that would fit the bill for this?
France derives almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear power.
Glad someone brought this up. Other countries have also gotten rid of fossil fuel as their main electricity source. Switzerland and Sweden have cut their fossil fuel energy prodction rates to next to nothing with a combination of Nuclear and Hydroelectric power. Finland and Austria have done the same with Hydro-electric alone. (source CIA World Factbook). Of course most countries can't go all hydro-electric; they just don't have the geography for it. However, it does serve to demonstrate that we have realistic alternatives to Fossil Fuel based electricity production.
There is something else that hasn't been brought up yet that I think is pertainent to this discussion. Lovelock says that it is a question of time, that renewable energy is all well and good, but that we don't have time to set it up as a main source of energy. He contends that we have time (just barely) to go nuclear and diminish the consequences of global warming.
My question is, assuming that we decided that it was the right course of action, just how fast could we go nuclear?
This goes completely against the purpose of of the freedom of information act. Prior to the freedom of information act, citizens had to justify to the government why they wanted the info that they were requesting and the government was under no particular obligation to provide the information. The freedom of information act turns this assumption on its head (and rightly so in my opinion); the citizen may request information from the government for any reason or no reason at all and the onus is on the government to justify itself why such information should be withheld.
If we revert to the old assumption that the citizen must justify himself to the government, we are taking a big step away from transparency and accountability in government.
I think this is a usefull question to think about. One difference that I can think of is that if it were done with people, you would have to have a police officer stationed on every corner looking at you personally, all the time. I think that the general populace would be unhappy with such an overwhelming and visible police presence.
For more food for thought, take a camera and go around the city, get in front of people and take pictures of their faces. You will probably piss a lot of people off. True, they are in a pulbic place and do not have a legal expectation of privacy in the same way that they would within their own home. However, this sidesteps the issue of common courtesy; most people would prefer if you asked and received their permission before you took a picture of them.
In both of these examples, human beings watching or photographing you would piss you off. Why then should it not piss you off if machines are doing the same thing?
So this eyewitness
applauds the superb work done by these gardai in a very difficult
situation.
Most of the time the Garda can't find their arse with both hands. Looks like they got it bang on this time. Fair play to them. I saw a similar scene at an internet cafe in Dublin about 2 months ago. Somebody was being hauled out of onto the street by to Garda and 2 plainclothes garda. I always figured he was getting busted for kiddie porn. Perhaps it was spam after all.
Since terrorism (in the 9-11 sense) is a response to U.S. tyranny elsewhere, ending the tyranny would end the terrorism.
Bullshit. Terrorists (in the 9-11 sense) hate America not because of what we have done wrong, but fundamentally who we are and what we have done right. They hate us for our freedom of religion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, secular government, liberal society and equality of the sexes. Al Quaeda will not be satisfied with anything short of an American Theocracy.
I was looking for a post on this. I do not remember being asked to declare a party affiliation when I voted in Montana. Do regulations on this change state by state? Anyone out there goot the goods on this?
It seems to me that a requirement to declare party affiliation violates the principle of voter anonymity and vote secrecy.
In other countries, (eg. Zimbabwe) you could be killed for declaring for the wrong party.
I am new to this subject, so if the things I am about to ask are already common knowledge, apologies in advance.
First, The SCO policy of selling an "Intellectual Property Liscense for Linux" based on an allegation (rather than a conviction) that Linux uses SCO source code seems to me to be shady and premature. If the lawsuit gets thrown out of court, I presume that these liscenses which they are selling will be of zero value. In this scenario, since SCO had access to their original source code, they must have known that their lawsuit would fail, and that they were selling liscenses that were worthless. Could they be sued or prosecuted for this?
Second, if the lawsuit goes in favor of SCO, the liscenses that they are selling are would only cover users for SCO source code embeded in Linux. Would this open the door for other companies to also claim that Linux had some of their source code embedded in it and demand that users purchase additional liscenses?
Mod parent up please.
Yes you are right, a lot of Americans would do the same. I for one would be willing to go even if I knew it was a one way ticket.