Perhaps a better alternative would be to send a simple e-mail to vulnerable sites and allow them to make the decision to patch or upgrade to the newest version.
This sounds really great in theory. Unfortunately, I know too many people who politely explained to someone that that had a security problem, just to have an embarressed admin turn around and claim that the person pointing it out must a hacker breaking into the system.
I even know a case where a person explained that the password on windows 95 was not meant for security purposes and that you could bypass it by clicking cancel, just to be reprimanded for breaking into computers he was authorized to use.
These day's, I would think real hard before telling somebody you don't know that they have a security problem. People don't turn down the opporunity to punish good deeds often enough.
BTW. I'm not saying the worm is a good idea. Even if the intentions are all good, if it fails in some unexpected way, it is still the author's fault. He/she has no right to be tampering with other people's system without their permission.
Now, I'm wondering if they bought the name just so they could make money out of lawsuits. If they do, and it works, I wonder how many other companies will attempt to by rights to long and outdated software just to attempt to raise their bottom line by sueing everyone.
Hey! Don't knock it. I mean, look what's it's done for SCO, and they don't even have a case or own the copyrights in question. These guys will at least have the pretense of a broken leg to stand on.
Now, If 99% of the people I know use the Internet, and the study says 50% of the people I know don't use the Internet I'm going to go with my gut. Sure, there's a hell of a large margin of error with a sample of a single person's expecience, but I find it impossible to believe the deviation could be 49% even if my own top-of-the-head approximations are way off.
I know what you mean. You hear all of these radical statistics that just don't reflect the world we live in. In fact, just last week, my wife and I were watching the news on the private jet when a report came on discussing the plight of the poor. They went on statics of how so many families can't even pull in $30,000 and have less than (get this) $1000 in savings. Now honestly! I have homes on at least 3 continents, and I have yet to meet a single person who is even close to that. Even my aid who is dictating this makes over $80,000. How these people make this stuff up is beyond me. Someone needs to mod the parent mod up.
We have the climate changing in drastic ways, we have a killer asteroid coming our way, and some odd billion years from now, either the Bees or the Cock Roaches will be arguing over whether they sencelessly 'hunted' us out of existence.
I alway thought that OSS was about choice. People are free to take the source and provided they comply with licenses, use it how they choose. Even if they choose poorly. Of course, other are free to choose to not help.
I just find it appropriate to read this with a flash ad about Equifax claiming windows TCO is 14% lower than Linux's.
How is this flamebait? It's moderation abuse. Several votes of the people in the US have been over turned repeatly over gay marrage. It is definately an example of a some minority forcing itself on the majority. I would have to assume this was moderated by members of that minority.
The parent post made a very good point and it was not stated in a way that remotely deserved to be called flamebait. This must be a topic on Slashdot were opposition is simply not tolerated.
Fine. I guess I'll burn some of my karma and add that there is another small minority who is making it illegal to say "Merry Christmas" in public. I know some folks are upset about religious extremists, but frankly there are some of us not so extreme religious folk who are sick of the counter extremists. It's getting to the point that you can't legally say "God" with following it with "dammit". Actually they'll beep out "God".
It's one thing to if parents won't restrict what their kids watch. It's another when you can't watch anything because it is no longer reasonable to expect that the superbowl is going to be a football game and not a strip tease. If you want to tell people that they have to fence their kids into safe boundaries, then those boundaries have to be respected by both sides.
If the answer is to not buy TV's then I don't want my tax money going to anything related to TV. No PBS, no CSPAN, no grants, endownments or anti-trust regulation period. If the channels broadcast over the airwaves can't be made usable to the portion of the public with children who are not kept muzzled in cages under the bed, then it can't possible be considered a public resource and public money should not go to any of it.
Frankly, I didn't care if it was code ported from Solaris to Linux or (as I was thinking) from Linux to Solaris. I was even wondering if the two could be merged into a super UNIX of sort with all the 'cool' factors that Linux is the primary target system for as well as some more of the higher end stuff that Sun has been targetting for years. I wasn't going to hold my breath on that one.
Also, I find that there are other License that are not GPL compatible that are still good, like CPL. GPL just has a lot of worthwhile momentum (and inertia) behind it. What has me worried at the moment about this license is an earlier comment to this post by a Slashdotter who goes by the name Alan Cox. He seems to feel that most of the changes were minor and not really bad, except for one that would allow contributor to secretly insert 3rd party patented code, thus contaminating the source and creating liability for everyone else. That just not very nice.
Maybe it was a mistake on Alan's interpretation or an oversight by Sun's lawyer, but I'd like to at least hear that one get resolved.
Cool! I got modded up high enough to get through my own filter. Unfortunately, it was for the sarcasm in the first paragragh. The response to Jim's article made it sound like Jim made a point of one company beating another and that it would not have been possible without closed source. Yet, Apache beats the Microsoft webserver. I guess I should finally go RTFA.
Yes, Microsoft is not really known for their ability to write stable or bullet proof code, or anything that could be mistaken for such. Yet they are the ones standing up with their tarnished reputation to claim closed source is better. Since they obviously are not the example of their own thesis, you'd think they'd try to get someone who was to do the talking.
If their ease of use is how closed source is better, then I'd still question them being the example. These day's my Mom does just was well with her email, web browsing and such on Linux as she did on Windows. She couldn't have installed Linux herself, but she couldn't have installed Windows either. Now, she is now longer blaming herself for 'being stupid' and crashing her computer or making it do 'wierd things', because it's not crashing or flaking out any more, and as much as I love to offer the compliment, it's not because she is any more computer savy now that she was on Windows.
At the very least, it proves that Linux is not the junk hobiest software and the closed source is not inherently better. And that Microsoft, should not be the ones to speak.
Take Joe's web page. It's so secret that I can't even read it. To many people are trying to veiw it right now. Of course, the secret would be better served if he had been more selective about who he let's in, instead of just setting a number of people who would be in on what he had to say.
More seriously, if a company can't beat a competing product by releasing open source, then I would assume the microsoft web server would be better and more popular than any open source web server. However, that doesn't seem to hold. Perhaps Joe has a response to that on his page. I'll have to wait until his (closed source) web server recovers to see.
I'm of two minds on this. There is the obvious DDOS aspect, and DDOSes are wrong. But on the other hand, this case is different than a normal DDOS. This isn't a few people with a network of hacked machines. This is grass roots.
Basically, what is the different between a DDOS and the internet equivelent of a picket or protest? I hate asking that question, because I didnt like it when folks did the same thing during the US election to silence the party they didn't like. But this is still the same basic idea of getting a group of people to protest in front of an unethical company's door.
In the real world, you can protest, but you still have to let people through unharmed and you can't do actual damage to the establishment you are protesting. You are just taking up space and congesting traffic outside the place.
It seems the difference here would be if you crash the box. And then there's the question of whether the box actually crashed or is it faked. (At least, I'd be amazed if there wasn't a/.er out there screaming that.)
...and I hope it is, does that mean we can take the money currently being funneled into researching a disease that we have a complete understanding how it infects people and thus how to prevent it, and instead funnel it into older diseases that we still don't know why people get them, like some forms of cancer.
I don't want to be insensitive to aids victums, especially those who contracted it before we knew how it travelled, but I can say I know anyone personally who has aids, much less died of it. I can't count the people I've lost to various forms of cancer. I don't really have much pity cases where people get lung cancer by smoking or skin cancer by sun bathing 8 hours a day after it was common knowledge that these were unsafe things to do, but there are still countless forms of cancer that we just have no clue as to how or why people get them. The treatment is hell at best, and more fatal that the disease in most of the cases I've seen.
You've got to love it when the treatment it to chemically and/or radioactively poison the patient in the hopes of killing the disease before you kill the patient. I pray cancer treatment can advance fast enough that my kids will be able to look back on today's doctors as witch doctors for using such means.
I don't know if I'd be so hard on all these folks. We definately know of the one ISP that was dumb enough buy in, but how did all these other companies get their licenses? Was it the sort of thing were they bought UNIXware and got a Linux license slipped into the fine print? They've done that before and called it a victory.
It's still rude to do to a customer. Sell them a product and slap the Linux license on it as they walk out the door, like a big "KICK ME!" sign. All the more reason to migrate away from anything SCO.
The Anonymous Coward calls me... and I'm incendiary?
I didn't say he wasn't incendiary. I said he was acurate. One can be both, and being one does not imply the other.
If you don't see the American Taliban agenda for a Christian country,...
Nice. We don't have to call people Hitler these days to smear them. Yes, some folks have an agenda. That doesn't change the fact that your original post made it sound like the story was crediting embryonic stemcell research, or that the original response that we've branched off from called you on it correctly, or that your response to that response totally over looked that he was correct in that much.
I'm sure they'll join you in editing profanity from the web, at first in quotes of other people's statements, then "preemptively" on anyone in their way. Eventually that will include you, too, as well as me.
You have the right or use all the profanity you want here. I don't have to repeat it. It was a choice I made about my post. There's a difference there. Remember, shiny side out.
F* the Anonymous doubletalk Coward, whose Bushlover ideology blinds them to Bush's antiscience, antireality ideology that is putting America into the Dark Ages. And is so twisted that they use "ideology" as an insult, when they are purely a creature of it. I'm sure the "Coward" in your Anonymous ID is purely accurate.
In making your incindiary response to his, you seemed to have missed that what he said was at least accurate, where as you initial post was just insulting and at best, ignorant. (I'm being optimistic and assuming you were not purposely trying to spread mis-information about those who believe differently than you in the hopes of smearing their beliefs, using an unrelated example to prove you are right.)
Let's see. As long as a "Pre-existing Business Relationship" means 12 or more degrees of separation...
We worked with... ... ... ...
Who was working on the set of Flatliners with Kevin Bacon
Who's brother... ... ... ...
Who walked you dog once last year, so as you can see, we are practically family. BTW, we don't take checks.
In my company, except for the possibility of a rare manager being that innept, we wouldn't tolerate it. Computer security isn't always a show stopper, but allowing external access to machines with company data almost always is. If nothing else, legal would come down hard and say no.
So my advice would be to go explain it to the lawyers. If it scares them (meaning if you communicate effectively why is scares you) they might have enough clout to kill the deal, causing others to try to convince the vendor to write the app in a way that is more secure for their customers.
Taxing communications is like taxing air. We all need to communicate with others the same way we all need to breath. Why not just tax people on the streets for talking to each other?
Shut Up!!! Dude! They're bad enough without the help. Want to suggest something else so they can go for the triple?
You have the link to CNN. Where's the link to this guys site? That's darn irritating. CNN didn't link to the site either! It's that sort of thing that makes my trigg^H^H^H^H^Hmouse finger itch.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. It's been done before.
Is it fsp or rts? Is it multi-player and/or single player? And is there a God mode?
This sounds really great in theory. Unfortunately, I know too many people who politely explained to someone that that had a security problem, just to have an embarressed admin turn around and claim that the person pointing it out must a hacker breaking into the system.
I even know a case where a person explained that the password on windows 95 was not meant for security purposes and that you could bypass it by clicking cancel, just to be reprimanded for breaking into computers he was authorized to use.
These day's, I would think real hard before telling somebody you don't know that they have a security problem. People don't turn down the opporunity to punish good deeds often enough.
BTW. I'm not saying the worm is a good idea. Even if the intentions are all good, if it fails in some unexpected way, it is still the author's fault. He/she has no right to be tampering with other people's system without their permission.
Hey! Don't knock it. I mean, look what's it's done for SCO, and they don't even have a case or own the copyrights in question. These guys will at least have the pretense of a broken leg to stand on.
I know what you mean. You hear all of these radical statistics that just don't reflect the world we live in. In fact, just last week, my wife and I were watching the news on the private jet when a report came on discussing the plight of the poor. They went on statics of how so many families can't even pull in $30,000 and have less than (get this) $1000 in savings. Now honestly! I have homes on at least 3 continents, and I have yet to meet a single person who is even close to that. Even my aid who is dictating this makes over $80,000. How these people make this stuff up is beyond me. Someone needs to mod the parent mod up.
We have the climate changing in drastic ways, we have a killer asteroid coming our way, and some odd billion years from now, either the Bees or the Cock Roaches will be arguing over whether they sencelessly 'hunted' us out of existence.
I alway thought that OSS was about choice. People are free to take the source and provided they comply with licenses, use it how they choose. Even if they choose poorly. Of course, other are free to choose to not help.
I just find it appropriate to read this with a flash ad about Equifax claiming windows TCO is 14% lower than Linux's.
How is this flamebait? It's moderation abuse. Several votes of the people in the US have been over turned repeatly over gay marrage. It is definately an example of a some minority forcing itself on the majority. I would have to assume this was moderated by members of that minority.
The parent post made a very good point and it was not stated in a way that remotely deserved to be called flamebait. This must be a topic on Slashdot were opposition is simply not tolerated.
Fine. I guess I'll burn some of my karma and add that there is another small minority who is making it illegal to say "Merry Christmas" in public. I know some folks are upset about religious extremists, but frankly there are some of us not so extreme religious folk who are sick of the counter extremists. It's getting to the point that you can't legally say "God" with following it with "dammit". Actually they'll beep out "God".
It's one thing to if parents won't restrict what their kids watch. It's another when you can't watch anything because it is no longer reasonable to expect that the superbowl is going to be a football game and not a strip tease. If you want to tell people that they have to fence their kids into safe boundaries, then those boundaries have to be respected by both sides.
If the answer is to not buy TV's then I don't want my tax money going to anything related to TV. No PBS, no CSPAN, no grants, endownments or anti-trust regulation period. If the channels broadcast over the airwaves can't be made usable to the portion of the public with children who are not kept muzzled in cages under the bed, then it can't possible be considered a public resource and public money should not go to any of it.
Frankly, I didn't care if it was code ported from Solaris to Linux or (as I was thinking) from Linux to Solaris. I was even wondering if the two could be merged into a super UNIX of sort with all the 'cool' factors that Linux is the primary target system for as well as some more of the higher end stuff that Sun has been targetting for years. I wasn't going to hold my breath on that one.
Also, I find that there are other License that are not GPL compatible that are still good, like CPL. GPL just has a lot of worthwhile momentum (and inertia) behind it. What has me worried at the moment about this license is an earlier comment to this post by a Slashdotter who goes by the name Alan Cox. He seems to feel that most of the changes were minor and not really bad, except for one that would allow contributor to secretly insert 3rd party patented code, thus contaminating the source and creating liability for everyone else. That just not very nice.
Maybe it was a mistake on Alan's interpretation or an oversight by Sun's lawyer, but I'd like to at least hear that one get resolved.
Cool! I got modded up high enough to get through my own filter. Unfortunately, it was for the sarcasm in the first paragragh. The response to Jim's article made it sound like Jim made a point of one company beating another and that it would not have been possible without closed source. Yet, Apache beats the Microsoft webserver. I guess I should finally go RTFA.
Yes, Microsoft is not really known for their ability to write stable or bullet proof code, or anything that could be mistaken for such. Yet they are the ones standing up with their tarnished reputation to claim closed source is better. Since they obviously are not the example of their own thesis, you'd think they'd try to get someone who was to do the talking.
If their ease of use is how closed source is better, then I'd still question them being the example. These day's my Mom does just was well with her email, web browsing and such on Linux as she did on Windows. She couldn't have installed Linux herself, but she couldn't have installed Windows either. Now, she is now longer blaming herself for 'being stupid' and crashing her computer or making it do 'wierd things', because it's not crashing or flaking out any more, and as much as I love to offer the compliment, it's not because she is any more computer savy now that she was on Windows.
At the very least, it proves that Linux is not the junk hobiest software and the closed source is not inherently better. And that Microsoft, should not be the ones to speak.
Take Joe's web page. It's so secret that I can't even read it. To many people are trying to veiw it right now. Of course, the secret would be better served if he had been more selective about who he let's in, instead of just setting a number of people who would be in on what he had to say.
More seriously, if a company can't beat a competing product by releasing open source, then I would assume the microsoft web server would be better and more popular than any open source web server. However, that doesn't seem to hold. Perhaps Joe has a response to that on his page. I'll have to wait until his (closed source) web server recovers to see.
I'm of two minds on this. There is the obvious DDOS aspect, and DDOSes are wrong. But on the other hand, this case is different than a normal DDOS. This isn't a few people with a network of hacked machines. This is grass roots.
/.er out there screaming that.)
Basically, what is the different between a DDOS and the internet equivelent of a picket or protest? I hate asking that question, because I didnt like it when folks did the same thing during the US election to silence the party they didn't like. But this is still the same basic idea of getting a group of people to protest in front of an unethical company's door.
In the real world, you can protest, but you still have to let people through unharmed and you can't do actual damage to the establishment you are protesting. You are just taking up space and congesting traffic outside the place.
It seems the difference here would be if you crash the box. And then there's the question of whether the box actually crashed or is it faked. (At least, I'd be amazed if there wasn't a
Well, ya. It's the same message they have for all of us. "Make a deal with us or face the consequences."
...and I hope it is, does that mean we can take the money currently being funneled into researching a disease that we have a complete understanding how it infects people and thus how to prevent it, and instead funnel it into older diseases that we still don't know why people get them, like some forms of cancer.
I don't want to be insensitive to aids victums, especially those who contracted it before we knew how it travelled, but I can say I know anyone personally who has aids, much less died of it. I can't count the people I've lost to various forms of cancer. I don't really have much pity cases where people get lung cancer by smoking or skin cancer by sun bathing 8 hours a day after it was common knowledge that these were unsafe things to do, but there are still countless forms of cancer that we just have no clue as to how or why people get them. The treatment is hell at best, and more fatal that the disease in most of the cases I've seen.
You've got to love it when the treatment it to chemically and/or radioactively poison the patient in the hopes of killing the disease before you kill the patient. I pray cancer treatment can advance fast enough that my kids will be able to look back on today's doctors as witch doctors for using such means.
I don't know if I'd be so hard on all these folks. We definately know of the one ISP that was dumb enough buy in, but how did all these other companies get their licenses? Was it the sort of thing were they bought UNIXware and got a Linux license slipped into the fine print? They've done that before and called it a victory.
It's still rude to do to a customer. Sell them a product and slap the Linux license on it as they walk out the door, like a big "KICK ME!" sign. All the more reason to migrate away from anything SCO.
I didn't say he wasn't incendiary. I said he was acurate. One can be both, and being one does not imply the other.
Nice. We don't have to call people Hitler these days to smear them. Yes, some folks have an agenda. That doesn't change the fact that your original post made it sound like the story was crediting embryonic stemcell research, or that the original response that we've branched off from called you on it correctly, or that your response to that response totally over looked that he was correct in that much.
You have the right or use all the profanity you want here. I don't have to repeat it. It was a choice I made about my post. There's a difference there. Remember, shiny side out.
In making your incindiary response to his, you seemed to have missed that what he said was at least accurate, where as you initial post was just insulting and at best, ignorant. (I'm being optimistic and assuming you were not purposely trying to spread mis-information about those who believe differently than you in the hopes of smearing their beliefs, using an unrelated example to prove you are right.)
Kinda like thinning out the surplus population? Me thinks somebody's having a Dickens moment.
We worked with...
...
...
...
...
...
...
Who was working on the set of Flatliners with Kevin Bacon
Who's brother...
Who walked you dog once last year, so as you can see, we are practically family. BTW, we don't take checks.
So my advice would be to go explain it to the lawyers. If it scares them (meaning if you communicate effectively why is scares you) they might have enough clout to kill the deal, causing others to try to convince the vendor to write the app in a way that is more secure for their customers.
Shut Up!!! Dude! They're bad enough without the help. Want to suggest something else so they can go for the triple?
You have the link to CNN. Where's the link to this guys site? That's darn irritating. CNN didn't link to the site either! It's that sort of thing that makes my trigg^H^H^H^H^Hmouse finger itch.
And if Microsoft didn't act that way when they call out their attack dog, the BSA, people would hold them to the same standard.
Karma is the name given to society's collective sub-contious desire to get back at the bastards and hypocrites.