The Register article points to another article which talks about how the arrest of the PhatBot worm creator may provide some information on the rental of hordes of compromised machine as networks of spam zombies. It lists a common price of $500 for 10,000 machines -- In other words, your box is worth $.05 to a spammer.
Note that the protective covering is going to be at the level of the ionosphere... This means that all of the satelites that were built with a presumption that they had the protection of the magnetosphere are gonna get royally fried when that protection is gone.
Granted -- the current flock of satellites should be long gone by the time that happens, but this *will* raise the cost of LEO satelites over time.
Windows Update doesn't ask you a single question. It just gives you a list.
As I rememvber it (It was a couple of weeks ago, and I don't have an XP box in the house anymore):
You go to the windows site, and find the windowsupdate thingy on the left.
You get a 'Click here to start the process'.
Then it's 'Click here to see what we've found for you'.
You then have to choose the stuff that makes sense and isn't likely to break your system.
If you chose two updates that need to be rebooted before the next step, then you have to decide (sorry -- guess) which one is best installed first.
Then it's 'click here to start the download'
(I can't remember if you have to click again after the download is finished).
After rebooting, start the whole process over again until there's nothing left to reboot after.
And that's just for one box.
A lot? It only reboots once for critical updates that require it.
There seem to be a lot of those (for me as someone used to Linux).
I admit, it's gotten better. With earlier MS-Windows system you pretty much had to reboot after every update (and sometimes restart the entire install if you forgot). Nontheless, I've still had monolithic update sessions for XP where I've stopped counting the number of reboots I've had to do.
With Linux, you you never have to reboot more than once (and even then, only if you've replaced the kernel).
Uh, what dependencies have you had to resolve for Windows Update?
That's the kicker: They don't tell you. You have to guess. I think that this is what results in people's systems being broken after an update -- a dependency that nobody bothered to warn users about.
* to resolve this, the EU directive is proposed that enforces a common approach across the EU (and, upon any members of the EU that are part of the EPC).
Thus, by stopping this directive, the situation gets worse.
You misrepresent the situation (I'm guessing willfully so). The European parliament did not veto the idea of a consistent patent directive across Europe.. What they did do is apply strict (and IMHO sane) rules on what could be patented and why. Had the parlimentary directive gone thru, much of the EU's software industry would have been quite content (or at least mollified).
Instead, what's being pushed thru is something that's likely to be more disruptive than the demonstrably broken system in the US.
Most of the time, the updates take no longer than 10 minutes... without requiring a reboot and without making the system slow or unresponsive.
BWAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
I've updated two friends' Windows boxes, now. The first big service pack took Hours to install. First time it happened, I thought there was just something wonky about the box.. Second time, I started calling it a pattern.
After that, there were a dozen or so patches that took me the better part of a day to get them all installed. (start up a download, click on install, go do something else, come back, reboot) -- and that's despite the fact that at least one of them was doing the auto-update thingie.
For Linux updates, I just start the process in the background and let it run while I do some real work on the same desktop. When I update my (very non-geek) roommate's box, the only reason I tell him what I'm doing is so that he doesn't shut down the box mid-update.
NT has been a multi-user system since its inception.
I'd describe it as single-user multi-login. NT doesna't do a very good job of handling multiple users at the same time.
Two simple examples:
Localtime on the hardware clock & timstamps. This makes life difficult if you have two users in different timezones.
context switching is painfully slow (this is part of the reason why MS-Windows has such a heavy reliance on multi-threading). One user with a background task can be annoying. 2 or more users doing the same thing would be almost unusable.
It's not that Windows can't do it, but it has to jump thru all sorts of hoops to allow it to happen. It's multiuser capable but it's inherently a single-user system.
Unix/Linux, on the other hand, is inherently multi-user with the degenerate case of N==1 for a single user system. Linux actually has to jump thru a couple of hoops to deal with the single- user- wants- to- think- he- owns- the- box paradigm.
First things first: Start running Linux. (doesn't have to be on your desktop, but I'd recommend it).
In any case, you can do a 'show all headers'. Look at the 'Recieved' lines... Ignore the first line (it's going to be from your ISP), and any other lines that seem to indicate that your ISP bounced the messages around internal boxes. The next IP after that is going to be either direct from the box, or it's related ISP service. (ignore the name that often turns out to be incorrect/misleading)
Do a 'whois' lookup on that IP, and send an email to the 'abuse' owner of the netblock. (this is where Linux comes in handy). If the IP is the address of a box you know, then you're in trouble.
I actually have a set of perl & shell scripts that take a message with forwarded attachments, peels out each attachment, looks at the headers, does the necessary logic and then emails the responsible ISP. I'm a bit lazy, though. I just look at the reverse DNS and use that to get the name of the responsible ISP.
At that point, I just have to gather up all of the day's virus emails, and forward thtm to 'report@localhost' and let Linux do the rest of the work for me.
I have two Windows 2000 machines that I run with absolutely no firewall. They have IPs provided by the cable modem, and they're not NAT'ed..... I have not been infected with anything....
So, uhm, what's your IP addrss again? Not that I'm going to do anything with the information, it's juat that I think I'm posting this message via your box.
:-)
Ah, actually, Microsoft tried a "new security initiative" back in 2001 as well
Ah, yes. I remember that.
I got a good laugh out of them doing a big PR push with their declaration that security was no longer going to be treated as a PR issue.
Tell me about it....
Yes. A mist full of nasty chemicals (that are going to sit in your house, on just about every horizontal surface and contaminate much more than just the fleas [but not get the fleas in the cracks of the couch and other places where they're really hiding]).
If you lose, don't rant about the failure of democracy. Rant about the failure of your powers of persuasion.
My understanding of what happend is something like:
The patent office comes out with a wishlist.
The EU Parliment votes it down and puts some strict limits on software patents.
The Parliment vote is passed to some bureaucrats to clean up and make into 'proper' laws (it's now out of the Parliament's hands).
The bureaucrats rip out all of the changes made by parliament, and add a few options that weren't even in there to begin with.
The president -- currently held by Ireland -- (and literally sponsored by Microsoft) manages to get his EU Council of Ministers to accept this bureaucrat-mangled edit.
If you had enough chemicals floating thru the house to gut your CD collection, I'm glad I don't live there! That's a nasty amount of bioactive chemistry in your home.
When running a game-server, I ran across someone who pretty much fit the government's "terrorism checklist" to a T, he was talking about not being alive for more than the next couple of days, and the government was proclaiming a high risk time with the probable deadline about the same time that my 'friend' was expecting to die.
I spent an entire day trying find someone who might take my report seriously... This inclded finding out that 'terrorist hotlines' were closed
only a few months after they were opened to big fanfare, and being bounced
around by people who had absolutely no idea what to do with my data.
I finally talked to someone who seemed entirely nonplussed with my information.
Now, in my world, I was dealing with someone who was -- at the very least -- borderline suicidal. Even if it was only his life at stake, I figure that people should be trying to hunt him down and make sure that he was OK. Given that there was other infomation that led me to believe that this could be a bit more than 'just' a suicidal kid, the unwillingness of anybody to take this information seriously really left me pissed.
If the government is going to use 9/11 as an excuse to invade oilfields and investigate people for membership in human rights organizations (like they did this kid), then I'm not interested.
Most of the nastiest human rights violations on this continent have been comitted by the right ring, not the left wing...
From the KKK, to Pinkerman's hired thugs gunning down strikers to the Oklahoma bombing.
And they're asking this kid if he's a member of friggin UT watch???. They're far more interested in fighting tuitin fee hikes and questionable firings than they are in blowing up campus buildings (which would raise tuition).
In addition, without an opinion from the court, any interpretation of the Munich ruling may eventually find support. That would include the view that the court may have disregarded, and found unnecessary to explore, the GPL and
simply ensured that the creator of a copyrightable work may impose any legal terms for its distribution while a distributor may not give the false impression that a work is in the public domain or in his own ownership. The same result would hold true for any of the multitude of distribution schemes involving published source code and for those prohibiting the publication of source code.
I think that this puts a very suscinct spin on the GPL validity question -- If you want to invalidate the GPL in court, it wouldn't be a case of having to defend the GPL de novo. As long as the underlying copyright is valid, it would be the violator under the gun to prove that the conditions of the GPL (placed on what would, otherwise, be a violation of copyright law) are somehow illegal -- and not very distinguishable from invalidating conditions that (for example) prevented publication of the source code.
I'd be inclined to go with the later (although I was extremely sceptical when I went in -- I was actually going on the presumption that they were a cult (due to a key misunderstanding on my part), I was trying to get enough information to get my mom 'out'. Needless to say, I've changed my mind -- bigtime.
That was more than 10 years ago. I still think it's great, and would encourage people to take it (at the very least, go to an intro session. They're 3 hours, free, and most people get value out of them...
One of cousin kept going to the intro sessions but he never signed up. One time I invited him to another intro session, and he was "yeah... I think it's time to go to another one". I was like "hunh??".
Turns out he was getting enough value out of the intro sessions, that he didn't see the need to actually sign up.
I suggested that, if he was getting that much out of 3 hours, how much would he get out of the whole weekend?
On the sunday of the course, he was like: "How come you didn't make me sign up sooner?"
The vast majority of people who actually take (and complete) the course find it very worthwhile. About the worst review I'v gotten was "It's the best thing I've ever done in my life, but I'm not going to do it again". Since the crux of the course is in the last few hours, people who leave in the middle, may be a bit wierded out about the purpose of the whole thing.
Bottom line, I'd say 'do it'. If you haven't been to an intro, at least go to one, then decide for yourself. If you have any more questions, I'm thinking a private email might be a bit better (( bcgreen.com!spamuel , if you understand the old usenet email protocol )), but either location's fine with me.
Not entirely sure... I came across it in a course called The Landmark Forum. They attributed it to Mark Twain, but he seems to have gotten it from anthropologist Margret Mead (I think that's the name). I'm not sure if it came from somewhere else before that.
#!/usr/bin/perl # REM nam37 codes X10: print "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical "; X20: print "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness "; X30: print "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even "; X40: print "the school's janitors could use it.\n"; X50: end
Slashdot Mirror
The Register article points to another article which talks about how the arrest of the PhatBot worm creator may provide some information on the rental of hordes of compromised machine as networks of spam zombies. It lists a common price of $500 for 10,000 machines -- In other words, your box is worth $.05 to a spammer.
Granted -- the current flock of satellites should be long gone by the time that happens, but this *will* raise the cost of LEO satelites over time.
I think that what you really want, is somebody who's an expert at correctly identifying rip-offs.
<P>
It's actually pretty simple, and has the added bonus of giving people a hot-link.
I think that some people would rather use shred(1) .
As I rememvber it (It was a couple of weeks ago, and I don't have an XP box in the house anymore):
A lot? It only reboots once for critical updates that require it.
There seem to be a lot of those (for me as someone used to Linux).
I admit, it's gotten better. With earlier MS-Windows system you pretty much had to reboot after every update (and sometimes restart the entire install if you forgot). Nontheless, I've still had monolithic update sessions for XP where I've stopped counting the number of reboots I've had to do.
With Linux, you you never have to reboot more than once (and even then, only if you've replaced the kernel).
Uh, what dependencies have you had to resolve for Windows Update?
That's the kicker: They don't tell you. You have to guess. I think that this is what results in people's systems being broken after an update -- a dependency that nobody bothered to warn users about.
Thus, by stopping this directive, the situation gets worse.
You misrepresent the situation (I'm guessing willfully so). The European parliament did not veto the idea of a consistent patent directive across Europe.. What they did do is apply strict (and IMHO sane) rules on what could be patented and why. Had the parlimentary directive gone thru, much of the EU's software industry would have been quite content (or at least mollified).
Instead, what's being pushed thru is something that's likely to be more disruptive than the demonstrably broken system in the US.
I guess you must be a Linux user, then.
Who needs porn? Try getting a girlfriend (If you're really lucky, you can get a geek girlfriend who can do your updates for you -- in her skivies).
BWAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
I've updated two friends' Windows boxes, now. The first big service pack took Hours to install. First time it happened, I thought there was just something wonky about the box.. Second time, I started calling it a pattern.
After that, there were a dozen or so patches that took me the better part of a day to get them all installed. (start up a download, click on install, go do something else, come back, reboot) -- and that's despite the fact that at least one of them was doing the auto-update thingie.
For Linux updates, I just start the process in the background and let it run while I do some real work on the same desktop. When I update my (very non-geek) roommate's box, the only reason I tell him what I'm doing is so that he doesn't shut down the box mid-update.
I'd describe it as single-user multi-login. NT doesna't do a very good job of handling multiple users at the same time.
Two simple examples:
- Localtime on the hardware clock & timstamps. This makes life difficult if you have two users in different timezones.
- context switching is painfully slow (this is part of the reason why MS-Windows has such a heavy reliance on multi-threading). One user with a background task can be annoying. 2 or more users doing the same thing would be almost unusable.
It's not that Windows can't do it, but it has to jump thru all sorts of hoops to allow it to happen. It's multiuser capable but it's inherently a single-user system.Unix/Linux, on the other hand, is inherently multi-user with the degenerate case of N==1 for a single user system. Linux actually has to jump thru a couple of hoops to deal with the single- user- wants- to- think- he- owns- the- box paradigm.
In any case, you can do a 'show all headers'. Look at the 'Recieved' lines... Ignore the first line (it's going to be from your ISP), and any other lines that seem to indicate that your ISP bounced the messages around internal boxes. The next IP after that is going to be either direct from the box, or it's related ISP service. (ignore the name that often turns out to be incorrect/misleading)
Do a 'whois' lookup on that IP, and send an email to the 'abuse' owner of the netblock. (this is where Linux comes in handy). If the IP is the address of a box you know, then you're in trouble.
I actually have a set of perl & shell scripts that take a message with forwarded attachments, peels out each attachment, looks at the headers, does the necessary logic and then emails the responsible ISP. I'm a bit lazy, though. I just look at the reverse DNS and use that to get the name of the responsible ISP.
At that point, I just have to gather up all of the day's virus emails, and forward thtm to 'report@localhost' and let Linux do the rest of the work for me.
So, uhm, what's your IP addrss again? Not that I'm going to do anything with the information, it's juat that I think I'm posting this message via your box.
:-)
Ah, yes. I remember that.
I got a good laugh out of them doing a big PR push with their declaration that security was no longer going to be treated as a PR issue.
Tell me about it....
Yes. A mist full of nasty chemicals (that are going to sit in your house, on just about every horizontal surface and contaminate much more than just the fleas [but not get the fleas in the cracks of the couch and other places where they're really hiding]).
My understanding of what happend is something like:
- The patent office comes out with a wishlist.
- The EU Parliment votes it down and puts some strict limits on software patents.
- The Parliment vote is passed to some bureaucrats to clean up and make into 'proper' laws (it's now out of the Parliament's hands).
- The bureaucrats rip out all of the changes made by parliament, and add a few options that weren't even in there to begin with.
- The president -- currently held by Ireland -- (and literally sponsored by Microsoft) manages to get his EU Council of Ministers to accept this bureaucrat-mangled edit.
Voila! democracy subverted!If you had enough chemicals floating thru the house to gut your CD collection, I'm glad I don't live there! That's a nasty amount of bioactive chemistry in your home.
I spent an entire day trying find someone who might take my report seriously... This inclded finding out that 'terrorist hotlines' were closed only a few months after they were opened to big fanfare, and being bounced around by people who had absolutely no idea what to do with my data.
I finally talked to someone who seemed entirely nonplussed with my information.
Now, in my world, I was dealing with someone who was -- at the very least -- borderline suicidal. Even if it was only his life at stake, I figure that people should be trying to hunt him down and make sure that he was OK. Given that there was other infomation that led me to believe that this could be a bit more than 'just' a suicidal kid, the unwillingness of anybody to take this information seriously really left me pissed.
If the government is going to use 9/11 as an excuse to invade oilfields and investigate people for membership in human rights organizations (like they did this kid), then I'm not interested.
Most of the nastiest human rights violations on this continent have been comitted by the right ring, not the left wing...
From the KKK, to Pinkerman's hired thugs gunning down strikers to the Oklahoma bombing.
And they're asking this kid if he's a member of friggin UT watch???. They're far more interested in fighting tuitin fee hikes and questionable firings than they are in blowing up campus buildings (which would raise tuition).
Give me a break!
Sure I can! I do it all the time.
Sometimes, I'm even right!
A second article in the German American Law Journal claims to minimize the first article, but still includes the following juicy tidbit:
I think that this puts a very suscinct spin on the GPL validity question -- If you want to invalidate the GPL in court, it wouldn't be a case of having to defend the GPL de novo. As long as the underlying copyright is valid, it would be the violator under the gun to prove that the conditions of the GPL (placed on what would, otherwise, be a violation of copyright law) are somehow illegal -- and not very distinguishable from invalidating conditions that (for example) prevented publication of the source code.Even better yet, I've posted my previous reply as a journal entry so we can take this conversation out of the public thread.
That was more than 10 years ago. I still think it's great, and would encourage people to take it (at the very least, go to an intro session. They're 3 hours, free, and most people get value out of them...
One of cousin kept going to the intro sessions but he never signed up. One time I invited him to another intro session, and he was "yeah... I think it's time to go to another one". I was like "hunh??". Turns out he was getting enough value out of the intro sessions, that he didn't see the need to actually sign up. I suggested that, if he was getting that much out of 3 hours, how much would he get out of the whole weekend?
On the sunday of the course, he was like: "How come you didn't make me sign up sooner?"
The vast majority of people who actually take (and complete) the course find it very worthwhile. About the worst review I'v gotten was "It's the best thing I've ever done in my life, but I'm not going to do it again". Since the crux of the course is in the last few hours, people who leave in the middle, may be a bit wierded out about the purpose of the whole thing.
Bottom line, I'd say 'do it'. If you haven't been to an intro, at least go to one, then decide for yourself. If you have any more questions, I'm thinking a private email might be a bit better (( bcgreen.com!spamuel , if you understand the old usenet email protocol )), but either location's fine with me.
Not entirely sure... I came across it in a course called The Landmark Forum. They attributed it to Mark Twain, but he seems to have gotten it from anthropologist Margret Mead (I think that's the name). I'm not sure if it came from somewhere else before that.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# REM nam37 codes
X10: print "In 1963 two Dartmouth College math professors had a radical ";
X20: print "idea - create a computer language muscular enough to harness ";
X30: print "the power of the period's computers, yet simple enough that even ";
X40: print "the school's janitors could use it.\n";
X50: end
# (don't ask me why I did this...)