The article in the second link did say that the best poker playing programs can already beat skilled amateurs, that it takes a pro to beat them (although there has to be some fuzziness around the word pro; Chris Moneymaker was an amateur when he won the 2003 WSOP main event; he won his seat through an online satellite tournament).
However, that doesn't mean that online casinos are going to put poker bots into the mix; they have no reason to do so, and a lot of reasons not to do it. The reasons not to all center around the fact that if word got out, their customers would vanish overnight. Plus, there is no such thing as "odds skewed toward the house"
In poker you do not play against the house (no, video poker is not poker); you play (only) against other players. The house makes its money on the rake in ring games, or on the tournament fee in tournaments. To the house, it doesn't matter who wins the game; they get paid anyway. The only way bots could make a difference is if the house fielded highly skilled bots that could beat enough human players to finish in the money most of the time in tourneys, or take most of the money in ring games. In those cases, like I said, if word got around their customers would all vanish. It probably wouldn't even take proof; just a credible rumor. The most important thing to the house in poker is that there by no cheating, or even the perception of cheating.
The danger of poker-playing bots, then, comes not from the house, but from other players. Imagine a bot that could play well at the speed of online poker and run on a consumer grade computer (even if it needed a high-end one). If it could watch your cards, the public cards, and the play of other players and tell you - with good accuracy - what to do, that would be formidable indeed. If the bot were good enough to beat most human players, that would be enough for people to profitably cheat. Sometimes you'd get caught and be kicked out, but there are a lot of poker sites out there. If the use of such bots becomes widespread, it could be the death of online poker.
Where I used to work, we had a commodity K62-300 box running Solaris x86 go for over three years on an unfirewalled global IP, acting as a DNS server for an ISP. In the end, it was brought down by the power supply fan seizing. It was so type I couldn't even turn it by sticking a screwdriver in the blades.
Have you ever been in a data center? Cabinets that are all locked. To get the key, you have to sign it out from security. Ditto for the cages. It wouldn't just require a drunken/disgruntled employee, it would require a conspiracy of them: security staff to hand over the keys and the disgruntled employees to do the misdeeds.
Well, there is one way around that: you walk over to the EPO button and give it a whack. It'll take down the whole floor. Rinse, lather, repeat on other floors. How many do you think you can do before someone stops you?
Anyway, my employer has a lot of stuff in 365 Main. We're not one of the companies mentioned in TFA, but we're certainly one of the ones affected. Within a couple minutes of the outage, we knew we'd lost everything we had there and several of our sysadmins grabbed their gear and headed for the city to go join that line outside of 365. By the time they left the building we had confirmation that it was a power outage.
Power was already back on when they got inside and they immediately brought up anything that wasn't already up and tested it all to make sure it was OK. To say the least, this is inconsistent with (tall) tales of somebody going apeshit on 40 racks.
Their original claim to fame was that you would be able to seamlessly run Windows apps on what was then called Lindows.
Somewhere between that promise and the actual release of Lindows 1.0, they had a falling out with Codeweavers, and Codeweavers terminated their business relationship with Lindows:
Neither Codeweavers nor Lindows had much to say in public that I am aware of, but there have been rumors that the main issue was that Lindows wasn't too keen on the idea of releasing their Wine modifications, and that while Codeweavers persuaded them to release a lot of code, the relationship kind of soured from there. Again, this is conjecture and rumor that I remember hearing at the time, not (AFAIK) documented fact, but based on how secretive Lindows was during their first beta cycle (beta testers paid $99 bucks and got the title Lindows Insider and access to betas), not releasing source code and saying "The source will be there when we release 1.0" (IIRC the source was released at the time), I find the conjecture plausible.
Actually, yes, a lot of inbound connections like the ones he showed are a smoking gun for ownage. There are only two explanations that cover it on a network like his:
1) You are running P2P stuff knowingly and are too lacking in knowledge to figure out that that's what your packet sniffer is showing you; I did note in my post that this may be regular P2P stuff
2) You have an owned box. Anybody involved even slightly with botnet research can tell you this. As I already stated, P2P is the state of the art in botnets. If a person is not running BT or any other P2P apps, and yet we see a lot of connections on his network that can only be reasonably explained by P2P activity, then they can also be reasonably explained only by one or more owned hosts on the network.
As to why the original post is gone, it could be b/c it was BS and they pulled it, it could be because it was/.ed and they pulled it, it could be that he took so much shit for it that he decided, he'd be better off retreating from the field. Whatever the cause, that does not undermine the basic concept that if his claims were true and not just something he made up, then the two most reasonable explanations for what he saw both involve P2P; the only question between them is whether it was voluntary P2P or involuntary P2P (ownage).
Feeling compassion for violent sociopaths (powerful or not) is all well and good, but it's also only practical *after* they have been defeated. While they are still out there doing their thing, "You don't know what love is, and I feel sorry for you" could be re-stated as "Please, Mr. Nut Job, sir, I'd like to be your next victim."
Once the sociopath has been contained (by defeat in war, arrest by the police, etc, depending on how big of a sociopath we're talking about here), then we can start talking about compassion.
While the sociopath is trying to kill you, compassion and $3.33 will get you a Venti Latte at Starbucks. So, of course, will $3.35 without the compassion.
Of course, I'd much rather see sociopaths be promptly executed. If being given a death sentence meant they lead you out the back door of the courthouse and shot you, I rather expect you'd see a lot less of the sort of behavior that gets people death sentences.
Yeah, I looked at the wide-ranging place he's getting connections from and asked myself, "Now, what do IPs in all those places - especially China - tend to have in common?" I've been working in email security for four years and was a postmaster before that, so I had a ready answer to that question; zombies.
P2P and fast-flux networks is the current cutting edge of botnets, and that fits with all the inbound connections he's seeing.
The explanation that fits best with his experience is that his Vista box has already been owned and has become part of a botnet.
While his conspiracy theory that Microsoft is in bed with DoD, DOHS, and Haliburton (gimme a break!) is clearly anti-MS FUD, there is good reason to draw a bad conclusion about Vista from this. One of Vista's big selling points was better security, yet here we have somebody stepping up front and center with an apparently freshly installed and freshly owned Vista box.
The article doesn't speak well of Vista, but not for the tinfoil hat theory advanced by its author.
The other leading theory, which has been advanced by a number of others, is that he's running bit torrent or another P2P app. This is also plausible, and if the zombie theory is wrong, then the P2P app theory still holds. Bhy far the least likely explanation is the conspiracy theory advanced by the author.
Precisely:-) But a 5xx bounce would be the brick. If they're just dropping the mail on the floor, that's more like you sitting off in the corner muttering about what an asshole I am for sending you a 20 meg attachment but not telling me to quit doing it, so I keep right on.
We can certainly infer, based on that, that there is a maximum message size of some value less than 20 meg for free accounts. That could certainly explain some undelivered mail, both inbound and outbound; however, it would be very bad behavior indeed on Hotmail's part if the response to an over-sized mail were to drop it on the floor rather than give it a 5xx bounce.
There's nothing anyone could sue for; like most everything else, Hotmail comes with no warranty, express or implied. And because they don't charge for it and have no SLA, the biggest shyster lawyer in the world couldn't throw anything at that wall that would stick.
The spam filter idea is indeed the most likely cause, though. I've been in the email security business for four years and was a postmaster at an ISP before that, and this phenomenon has "spam filter" written all over it.
Well, OK, second most likely. I read TFA and what it really has written all over it is "bullshit." Description of the test mails is pretty sketchy, doesn't mention if the attachments were fake, real, or some mix of the two, if they contained spam or viruses or not, etc. (if they did, it would certainly produce numbers like TFA puts up), no samples of the mails used, etc. In short, it bears little resemblance to what one might call a "real" study. I'm sure I'm not the only mail admin who read it and called BS.
The whole thing reads like nothing but a smear job on MS, and a million miles from unbiased. I dislike MS as much as anyone, but TFA is just whack. I mean, there's so many bad things about so many MS products that we *know* are true, why does somebody need to make up stuff like this?
Welcome to Slashdot, where telling the truth (that someone who thinks of a small child crawling out a window and being killed as funny is a sick fuck) will get you modded flamebait.
Can someone who understands these deep mysteries tell me how a person who thinks it's funny when a child is killed in a tragic accident could not be considered a sick fuck, at least by any person who is not himself a sick fuck? I'm really trying to understand this.
This is absolutely spot-on, kudos and mod points be unto you.
Whether a person likes Red Hat or not (I gave up on them when Red Hat 8 came out; couldn't stomach Bluecurve, switched to Debian, and never looked back), RH has GPLed everything they've written. GPLed it, out there where anyone else who wants to can take it and try to turn a buck off it.
The first Linux distro I ever used was called the "Turbo Linux Edition of Red Hat 4.2." That's what it said right on the CD. In the installer, the references were to Red Hat throughout. It was only in later versions of TurboLinux that they came up with any of their own stuff. There was a TL release 1.0 that was their own flavor (but still very Red Hattish in many regards) and 2.0 was more distinctively Turbo Linux (I was in the private beta test program for that, back when TL was in a small storefront office in western Tokyo; those were the days).
And now we have Xen complaining that if they released everything under the GPL that others would have the same opportunity to make money from it that they have? Like people do with RPM? And Anaconda? And all the other stuff that Red Hat has GPLed over the years?
Ummmm, gee. Boo hoo. Cry me a river. I know they need to make some level of profit, but c'mon: Red Hat has given more to them, even if in directly through doing a lot to advance the state of Linux and paying kernel developers for years, then Xen has ever given back to RH or to FOSS in general, so I'm not terribly moved by their reasoning.
Can't imagine what kind of a sick fuck it takes to mod that funny. Several times a year you read news stories about exactly that happening: very young children, some still crawling, who go straight out a window and are severely injured or killed because they have no idea to be afraid of it.
No, this is not flamebait and this is not a troll. It's whacking some sicko upside the head with a desperately needed cluestick. There's a big difference. In other words, this has been a public service post.
I'm a troll because I pointed out the *fact* that it was on CNN two days prior? OK fine. By the time important (or at least interesting) stories on technology or science make it CNN they are typically already not really even news anymore. A science story gets to/. two days after it gets to CNN. Could someone please explain to me how that is not lame?
Oh, wait, This is Slashdot. A troll is anything that a moderator personally disagrees with, regardless of its truth value, or that criticizes/. or anyone or anything that moderator likes.
Also, you, the moderator, are an asshat for having no clue about the difference between a troll and flamebait. Saying they were lame for getting a story two days after CNN may be skirting the edges of flamebait, but it's definitely not a troll. Calling you a stupid asshat isn't a troll, either; it's flamebait. Please mod accordingly.
"I also consider this to make it evil, but that's a separate issue"
That's the distinction that often gets missed in the "evil/viral" argument, I wish I had mod points to give you.
Sure, the GPL is viral. I don't think anyone really denies that. Some think that's evil, some not. I'm in the "not" camp.
The reason I'm in the "not" camp is because the viral nature of the GPL is not primarily intended to cause someone's non-GPL software to unintentionally fall under the GPL; rather, it is a defensive mechanism aimed at the misappropriation of GPLed software. To wit, you can't use GPLed software in non-free software, and to make sure you don't, the license requires you to release any software you combine with GPLed software under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license. In practice, people who don't want to do that have generally been given the option of ripping out all the GPLed software from their product(s) and duplicating the functionality on their own.
I have no problem with this. The GPL isn't trying to hide anything or get Free software in through the back door. It tells you up front what your rights and obligations are, and like other FOSS licenses, is orders of magnitude more clear about that than proprietary licenses. The GPL requires that if you get, you have to give back, and you can do anything you want with GPLed software except make it non-free. I have no problem with that. It's clear and up-front, and if anyone doesn't like it, the answer is simple: use something else, write it yourself, or pay someone to write it yourself. Those are the same three options you have with a proprietary license you don't like. Well, with the additional stricture that if you write it yourself or have someone do it, the proprietary vendor might look for some software patent violation they could use as grounds to sue you.
Software licenses are not "evil" or "good" - they just are. They reflect the beliefs and values of those who right them. The FSF believes you can do anything you want with software except make it non-free. BSD and similar believe you can even make it non-free. Proprietary licenses believe you can only do what they specifically authorize you to do, and what they authorize really isn't a whole lot. If I were going to sling terms like "evil" around, I daresay the target wouldn't be any open-source license.
My definition of winning is pretty much in line with yours, that Linux will be a first-tier OS alonside Windows with a lot of hardware manufacturers and PC vendors, although I wouldn't count it as impossible that it might at some future point hit the second definition: having a desktop market share >= Windows. While there is still room for improvement in a number of areas, in a number of other areas Linux is already *better* than Windows as a desktop OS. KDE in particular (of course, some of you may say Gnome ) is mostly better than the Windows UI. Vista? Kubuntu, in particular, has done some neat things. Since I got a Mac this year, I know where they got those ideas:-)
The biggest area to be worked on now, IMO is UI consistency. For example, on my Mac, to get to the preferences in *any* application I know that I can hit Cmd-comma. That level of consistency is typical. In my experience, Windows doesn't reach this level, and Linux desktops are even farther away from it. Macs aren't perfect - I have my own little list of UI annoyances - but 6 months after getting this Mac, I continue to be impressed by the level of UI consistency and attention to detail. It's really something. That's the bar that KDE and Gnome need to jump for: to have a UI as good as Apple's in terms of polish and consistency.
I have a Windows machine at home that is pretty used for one purpose only: to use voice/video in Yahoo Messenger to keep in touch with far-flung family members who all use it. At either home or work, I have machines running Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and XP. Of those five, Windows is the only one that will send both my attitude and my language into the toilet in minutes. It feels like a total kludge in comparison to both KDE and OS X. Looked at that way, I don't find the idea that Linux could someday hold either a majority desktop market share, or at least the largest single slice, to be beyond the realm of possibility. After all, we all know people who use Windows and only Windows, and hate it. They stick to it like a person in a dysfunctional relationship might cling to an abusive boyfriend/girlfriend, but sooner or later they'll buck up their courage and look around, and they'll see that there's someone better out there and that relationships aren't supposed to be that way.
It's already the case for most people that "Once you go Mac, you never go back." The day when it also becomes "Once you go Tux, Windows is out of luck" isn't so far off either, maybe:)
How can a monster company like IBM act like this? It's not mostly out of altruism, although I am sure they have some. IBM invented FUD, as any old-time mainframer can tell you.
Why, then, do they do it? The number one reason IBM supports open standards, supports open source, has opened its patents, and has contributed so much code to Linux is that IBM believes it can compete more effectively on a more level playing field. Compete against whom? Microsoft, mostly. When there is an entrenched de facto monopoly that fully dominates one area of your business (the dekstop) and is trying to muscle in on your turf (higher end servers, databases, web services, hosted services) and has already muscled in very successfully on your groupware turf, how do you fight back?
You try to level the playing field by commoditizing the thing your opponent sells. Microsoft is a software company; IBM sells a lot of software, but their primary business is hardware and services. If they can commoditize the software that runs on their hardware and on which they provide value-added services, it gives them a competitive advantage against software companies (and against hardware companies that don't use open source, too). The revenue stream of the software company goes down, while the revenue they make on service and on hardware sales increases as a result of reduced software costs.
While Sun also has some altruism (maybe more than IBM, because Sun's roots are in BSD; IBM's roots are firmly in proprietary software), I think it's a pretty good bet that the main reason for open-sourcing Solaris and Java is that they weren't making a lot of money on those things anyway (Solaris used to cost hundreds of dollars a copy, then it became essentially free as in beer) and Microsoft has done a pretty good job of fighting off Java on a lot of fronts, so if they open-source Java and Solaris they get:
-Commoditization pressure on Microsoft -The same benefits of that pressure that IBM reaps, because like IBM, Sun is a hardware and consulting company that also sells software -Probably more Java mindshare and marketshare -Some respect from the FOSS community; what accountants call good will -Linux might stop eating Solaris' lunch a little bit on the lower end of Sun's market
Why do they hope HP will do this too? Because of HP is the same kind of company Sun and IBM are, although HP is more purely a hardware play than either Sun or IBM. If they follow suit and start opening their patent portolio and maybe even open source HP/UX, that puts even more commoditization pressure on Microsoft. Of course, Sun, IBM, and HP all compete against each other - they're selling into the same markets - but each of them views Microsoft as more of a threat. If they all act to substantially level the playing field by opening up lots of their IP, that will make a significant counterweight to Microsoft's dominant position.
Fast forward five to ten years into the future and envision one possible scenario: the successor to Vista has just been released, or maybe hasn't even made it yet. Some places are still running XP. Linux has continued it's slow push onto the desktop and has pushed even farther into the server market. IBM, Sun, and HP all sell servers with either Linux or Solaris, AIX, or HP/UX. Same price either way; the lot have been open-sourced.
On the desktop side, Dell is still selling Linux machines, and they've been joined by Gateway, Lenovo, maybe even Sony (OK, that last one is crazy talk:p). Linux has a 5-10% desktop market share, and Apple has risen to 10% also. Google has 1/4 of the office suite market, and is competing very effectively with Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services for spam filtering, email archiving, and IM & web security.
Microsoft is still a formidable company, with a huge warchest of cash and a lot of highly successful product lines, but the combined weight of its competitors has not only checked its market share gains, but reversed a number of them.
I'm pretty sure his lack of a beard or turban has nothing to do with being "careful" and a lot to do with being a middle-class white guy. Your culture/religion is something you're brought up with, not something in your genes. The fact that his biological father is Syrian influences nothing but his looks.
I think the only place Steve Jobs is considered a terrorist is in Redmond, where they're all scared of him:)
They will indeed be competing directly with MSFT on MSFT's turf. Some of you will recall that Microsoft bought FrontBridge Technologies, Postini's biggest competitor, in 2005. The business models and service line-ups are pretty much identical. Anti-spam, anti-virus, archiving for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, etc.
I bet steveb threw a chair not only across the office when he heard the news, but straight through his window:)
I work for a Postini competitor that was also acquired recently, and we went for a lot more than what Google paid (nyaanyaanyaanyaaaaanya ), so 615 million is not really high. Also, like others in this business, they're more than just a spam filter.
No, it was not an ad hominen attack. You shouldn't throw around words you don't understand. A personal attack? I suppose, a mild one. OTOH, anonymous trolls deserve them, so...
Glad it was better for you. Their response to me was basically "Sorry you don't like it, but the contract doesn't guarantee perfect coverage in the service area." I couldn't get it through to them that I wasn't complaining about not having coverage in some places; the problem was spotty coverage in most places and unusably bad coverage at home and at work. They followed that up with "The coverage map says we have coverage there, so we do."
I wonder if I drew a map that put California near, say, Tahiti, that wishfulness would make it float over there, too?:p
I used T-Mobile for years on southern California, and they were very good. However, when I took a job in northern California this year, I very quickly found out two things:
1) T-Mobile sucks in the SF bay area. At my house and at my office, the signal was so poor that either the phone was effective unusable or - often - it was truly unusable, with a signal so weak I could neither make nor receive calls. Most other places that I would go weren't a whole lot better
2) Among colleagues who had also relocated to the bay area, there are many, many former T-Mobile users, and they all had the same story: "T-Mobile was great where I used to live, but they stink here. I switched to (Sprint|Verizon)"
They told me that Cingular was just as bad as T-Mobile in the bay area. After checking out Sprint and Verizon, I chose Sprint and have been very happy with them. Coverage is pretty good, and the sales guy at my local Sprint store was awesome. He even told me some good places to go fishing in the bay area.
As for T-Mobile, who cared not one whit that I'd been a loyal customer for years and the only reason I was leaving them was because they're service was unusable where I live and work (both my office and my home are within 5 or 6 miles of San Francisco International Airport, I don't live out in BFE here, T-Mobile is just useless) and I could neither make nor receive calls most of the time, they charged me cancellation fee * 3 lines anyway, even though it was completely the fault of their crappy network that I was leaving.
Just on the off chance that any T-Mobile employee might be reading this, there are two things you ought to know:
1) I will never, ever, ever do business with T-Mobile again, not even if they were to offer me free phones and free service for my family, for life. Not even if should in the future move to a place where T-Mobile has the only decent coverage. I'll use a competitor, or do without a cell phone.
2) A great many people I know personally have heard this story. I can't imagine how many more have just read it. Pissing off a longtime loyal customer is generally not a good idea. The 600 bucks you got out of me for a problem that was *your* fault will be more than made up by people who don't become a T-Mobile customer after talking to me. Not just because of your bad coverge around here and your bad attitude about it on the phone, but because of all the great things I've been telling people about Sprint; their customer service is better than yours, and so is their network, at least around the bay area.
Slashdot Mirror
The article in the second link did say that the best poker playing programs can already beat skilled amateurs, that it takes a pro to beat them (although there has to be some fuzziness around the word pro; Chris Moneymaker was an amateur when he won the 2003 WSOP main event; he won his seat through an online satellite tournament).
However, that doesn't mean that online casinos are going to put poker bots into the mix; they have no reason to do so, and a lot of reasons not to do it. The reasons not to all center around the fact that if word got out, their customers would vanish overnight. Plus, there is no such thing as "odds skewed toward the house"
In poker you do not play against the house (no, video poker is not poker); you play (only) against other players. The house makes its money on the rake in ring games, or on the tournament fee in tournaments. To the house, it doesn't matter who wins the game; they get paid anyway. The only way bots could make a difference is if the house fielded highly skilled bots that could beat enough human players to finish in the money most of the time in tourneys, or take most of the money in ring games. In those cases, like I said, if word got around their customers would all vanish. It probably wouldn't even take proof; just a credible rumor. The most important thing to the house in poker is that there by no cheating, or even the perception of cheating.
The danger of poker-playing bots, then, comes not from the house, but from other players. Imagine a bot that could play well at the speed of online poker and run on a consumer grade computer (even if it needed a high-end one). If it could watch your cards, the public cards, and the play of other players and tell you - with good accuracy - what to do, that would be formidable indeed. If the bot were good enough to beat most human players, that would be enough for people to profitably cheat. Sometimes you'd get caught and be kicked out, but there are a lot of poker sites out there. If the use of such bots becomes widespread, it could be the death of online poker.
Where I used to work, we had a commodity K62-300 box running Solaris x86 go for over three years on an unfirewalled global IP, acting as a DNS server for an ISP. In the end, it was brought down by the power supply fan seizing. It was so type I couldn't even turn it by sticking a screwdriver in the blades.
:)
Clearly, I'm hung like an eHorse
Have you ever been in a data center? Cabinets that are all locked. To get the key, you have to sign it out from security. Ditto for the cages. It wouldn't just require a drunken/disgruntled employee, it would require a conspiracy of them: security staff to hand over the keys and the disgruntled employees to do the misdeeds.
Well, there is one way around that: you walk over to the EPO button and give it a whack. It'll take down the whole floor. Rinse, lather, repeat on other floors. How many do you think you can do before someone stops you?
Anyway, my employer has a lot of stuff in 365 Main. We're not one of the companies mentioned in TFA, but we're certainly one of the ones affected. Within a couple minutes of the outage, we knew we'd lost everything we had there and several of our sysadmins grabbed their gear and headed for the city to go join that line outside of 365. By the time they left the building we had confirmation that it was a power outage.
Power was already back on when they got inside and they immediately brought up anything that wasn't already up and tested it all to make sure it was OK. To say the least, this is inconsistent with (tall) tales of somebody going apeshit on 40 racks.
Their original claim to fame was that you would be able to seamlessly run Windows apps on what was then called Lindows.
0 335256
Somewhere between that promise and the actual release of Lindows 1.0, they had a falling out with Codeweavers, and Codeweavers terminated their business relationship with Lindows:
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/04/05/
Neither Codeweavers nor Lindows had much to say in public that I am aware of, but there have been rumors that the main issue was that Lindows wasn't too keen on the idea of releasing their Wine modifications, and that while Codeweavers persuaded them to release a lot of code, the relationship kind of soured from there. Again, this is conjecture and rumor that I remember hearing at the time, not (AFAIK) documented fact, but based on how secretive Lindows was during their first beta cycle (beta testers paid $99 bucks and got the title Lindows Insider and access to betas), not releasing source code and saying "The source will be there when we release 1.0" (IIRC the source was released at the time), I find the conjecture plausible.
Actually, yes, a lot of inbound connections like the ones he showed are a smoking gun for ownage. There are only two explanations that cover it on a network like his:
/.ed and they pulled it, it could be that he took so much shit for it that he decided, he'd be better off retreating from the field. Whatever the cause, that does not undermine the basic concept that if his claims were true and not just something he made up, then the two most reasonable explanations for what he saw both involve P2P; the only question between them is whether it was voluntary P2P or involuntary P2P (ownage).
1) You are running P2P stuff knowingly and are too lacking in knowledge to figure out that that's what your packet sniffer is showing you; I did note in my post that this may be regular P2P stuff
2) You have an owned box. Anybody involved even slightly with botnet research can tell you this. As I already stated, P2P is the state of the art in botnets. If a person is not running BT or any other P2P apps, and yet we see a lot of connections on his network that can only be reasonably explained by P2P activity, then they can also be reasonably explained only by one or more owned hosts on the network.
As to why the original post is gone, it could be b/c it was BS and they pulled it, it could be because it was
Feeling compassion for violent sociopaths (powerful or not) is all well and good, but it's also only practical *after* they have been defeated. While they are still out there doing their thing, "You don't know what love is, and I feel sorry for you" could be re-stated as "Please, Mr. Nut Job, sir, I'd like to be your next victim."
Once the sociopath has been contained (by defeat in war, arrest by the police, etc, depending on how big of a sociopath we're talking about here),
then we can start talking about compassion.
While the sociopath is trying to kill you, compassion and $3.33 will get you a Venti Latte at Starbucks. So, of course, will $3.35 without the
compassion.
Of course, I'd much rather see sociopaths be promptly executed. If being given a death sentence meant they lead you out the back door of the courthouse and shot you, I rather expect you'd see a lot less of the sort of behavior that gets people death sentences.
Yeah, I looked at the wide-ranging place he's getting connections from and asked myself, "Now, what do IPs in all those places - especially China - tend to have in common?" I've been working in email security for four years and was a postmaster before that, so I had a ready answer to that question; zombies.
P2P and fast-flux networks is the current cutting edge of botnets, and that fits with all the inbound connections he's seeing.
The explanation that fits best with his experience is that his Vista box has already been owned and has become part of a botnet.
While his conspiracy theory that Microsoft is in bed with DoD, DOHS, and Haliburton (gimme a break!) is clearly anti-MS FUD, there is good reason to draw a bad conclusion about Vista from this. One of Vista's big selling points was better security, yet here we have somebody stepping up front and center with an apparently freshly installed and freshly owned Vista box.
The article doesn't speak well of Vista, but not for the tinfoil hat theory advanced by its author.
The other leading theory, which has been advanced by a number of others, is that he's running bit torrent or another P2P app. This is also plausible, and if the zombie theory is wrong, then the P2P app theory still holds. Bhy far the least likely explanation is the conspiracy theory advanced by the author.
Precisely :-) But a 5xx bounce would be the brick. If they're just dropping the mail on the floor, that's more like you sitting off in the corner muttering about what an asshole I am for sending you a 20 meg attachment but not telling me to quit doing it, so I keep right on.
Interesting, thanks for that info.
We can certainly infer, based on that, that there is a maximum message size of some value less than 20 meg for free accounts. That could certainly explain some undelivered mail, both inbound and outbound; however, it would be very bad behavior indeed on Hotmail's part if the response to an over-sized mail were to drop it on the floor rather than give it a 5xx bounce.
There's nothing anyone could sue for; like most everything else, Hotmail comes with no warranty, express or implied. And because they don't charge for it and have no SLA, the biggest shyster lawyer in the world couldn't throw anything at that wall that would stick.
The spam filter idea is indeed the most likely cause, though. I've been in the email security business for four years and was a postmaster at an ISP before that, and this phenomenon has "spam filter" written all over it.
Well, OK, second most likely. I read TFA and what it really has written all over it is "bullshit." Description of the test mails is pretty sketchy, doesn't mention if the attachments were fake, real, or some mix of the two, if they contained spam or viruses or not, etc. (if they did, it would certainly produce numbers like TFA puts up), no samples of the mails used, etc. In short, it bears little resemblance to what one might call a "real" study. I'm sure I'm not the only mail admin who read it and called BS.
The whole thing reads like nothing but a smear job on MS, and a million miles from unbiased. I dislike MS as much as anyone, but TFA is just whack. I mean, there's so many bad things about so many MS products that we *know* are true, why does somebody need to make up stuff like this?
Welcome to Slashdot, where telling the truth (that someone who thinks of a small child crawling out a window and being killed as funny is a sick fuck) will get you modded flamebait.
Can someone who understands these deep mysteries tell me how a person who thinks it's funny when a child is killed in a tragic accident could not be considered a sick fuck, at least by any person who is not himself a sick fuck? I'm really trying to understand this.
This is absolutely spot-on, kudos and mod points be unto you.
Whether a person likes Red Hat or not (I gave up on them when Red Hat 8 came out; couldn't stomach Bluecurve, switched to Debian, and never looked back), RH has GPLed everything they've written. GPLed it, out there where anyone else who wants to can take it and try to turn a buck off it.
The first Linux distro I ever used was called the "Turbo Linux Edition of Red Hat 4.2." That's what it said right on the CD. In the installer, the references were to Red Hat throughout. It was only in later versions of TurboLinux that they came up with any of their own stuff. There was a TL release 1.0 that was their own flavor (but still very Red Hattish in many regards) and 2.0 was more distinctively Turbo Linux (I was in the private beta test program for that, back when TL was in a small storefront office in western Tokyo; those were the days).
And now we have Xen complaining that if they released everything under the GPL that others would have the same opportunity to make money from it that they have? Like people do with RPM? And Anaconda? And all the other stuff that Red Hat has GPLed over the years?
Ummmm, gee. Boo hoo. Cry me a river. I know they need to make some level of profit, but c'mon: Red Hat has given more to them, even if in directly through doing a lot to advance the state of Linux and paying kernel developers for years, then Xen has ever given back to RH or to FOSS in general, so I'm not terribly moved by their reasoning.
Can't imagine what kind of a sick fuck it takes to mod that funny. Several times a year you read news stories about exactly that happening: very young children, some still crawling, who go straight out a window and are severely injured or killed because they have no idea to be afraid of it.
No, this is not flamebait and this is not a troll. It's whacking some sicko upside the head with a desperately needed cluestick. There's a big difference. In other words, this has been a public service post.
I'm a troll because I pointed out the *fact* that it was on CNN two days prior? OK fine. By the time important (or at least interesting) stories on technology or science make it CNN they are typically already not really even news anymore. A science story gets to /. two days after it gets to CNN. Could someone please explain to me how that is not lame?
/. or anyone or anything that moderator likes.
Oh, wait, This is Slashdot. A troll is anything that a moderator personally disagrees with, regardless of its truth value, or that criticizes
Also, you, the moderator, are an asshat for having no clue about the difference between a troll and flamebait. Saying they were lame for getting a story two days after CNN may be skirting the edges of flamebait, but it's definitely not a troll. Calling you a stupid asshat isn't a troll, either; it's flamebait. Please mod accordingly.
Thank you for your time.
Heck, it was on *CNN* two days ago. They set a new /. record for lameness on this one :p
"I also consider this to make it evil, but that's a separate issue"
That's the distinction that often gets missed in the "evil/viral" argument, I wish I had mod points to give you.
Sure, the GPL is viral. I don't think anyone really denies that. Some think that's evil, some not. I'm in the "not" camp.
The reason I'm in the "not" camp is because the viral nature of the GPL is not primarily intended to cause someone's non-GPL software to unintentionally fall under the GPL; rather, it is a defensive mechanism aimed at the misappropriation of GPLed software. To wit, you can't use GPLed software in non-free software, and to make sure you don't, the license requires you to release any software you combine with GPLed software under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license. In practice, people who don't want to do that have generally been given the option of ripping out all the GPLed software from their product(s) and duplicating the functionality on their own.
I have no problem with this. The GPL isn't trying to hide anything or get Free software in through the back door. It tells you up front what your rights and obligations are, and like other FOSS licenses, is orders of magnitude more clear about that than proprietary licenses. The GPL requires that if you get, you have to give back, and you can do anything you want with GPLed software except make it non-free. I have no problem with that. It's clear and up-front, and if anyone doesn't like it, the answer is simple: use something else, write it yourself, or pay someone to write it yourself. Those are the same three options you have with a proprietary license you don't like. Well, with the additional stricture that if you write it yourself or have someone do it, the proprietary vendor might look for some software patent violation they could use as grounds to sue you.
Software licenses are not "evil" or "good" - they just are. They reflect the beliefs and values of those who right them. The FSF believes you can do anything you want with software except make it non-free. BSD and similar believe you can even make it non-free. Proprietary licenses believe you can only do what they specifically authorize you to do, and what they authorize really isn't a whole lot. If I were going to sling terms like "evil" around, I daresay the target wouldn't be any open-source license.
My definition of winning is pretty much in line with yours, that Linux will be a first-tier OS alonside Windows with a lot of hardware manufacturers and PC vendors, although I wouldn't count it as impossible that it might at some future point hit the second definition: having a desktop market share >= Windows. While there is still room for improvement in a number of areas, in a number of other areas Linux is already *better* than Windows as a desktop OS. KDE in particular (of course, some of you may say Gnome ) is mostly better than the Windows UI. Vista? Kubuntu, in particular, has done some neat things. Since I got a Mac this year, I know where they got those ideas :-)
:)
The biggest area to be worked on now, IMO is UI consistency. For example, on my Mac, to get to the preferences in *any* application I know that I can hit Cmd-comma. That level of consistency is typical. In my experience, Windows doesn't reach this level, and Linux desktops are even farther away from it. Macs aren't perfect - I have my own little list of UI annoyances - but 6 months after getting this Mac, I continue to be impressed by the level of UI consistency and attention to detail. It's really something. That's the bar that KDE and Gnome need to jump for: to have a UI as good as Apple's in terms of polish and consistency.
I have a Windows machine at home that is pretty used for one purpose only: to use voice/video in Yahoo Messenger to keep in touch with far-flung family members who all use it. At either home or work, I have machines running Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and XP. Of those five, Windows is the only one that will send both my attitude and my language into the toilet in minutes. It feels like a total kludge in comparison to both KDE and OS X. Looked at that way, I don't find the idea that Linux could someday hold either a majority desktop market share, or at least the largest single slice, to be beyond the realm of possibility. After all, we all know people who use Windows and only Windows, and hate it. They stick to it like a person in a dysfunctional relationship might cling to an abusive boyfriend/girlfriend, but sooner or later they'll buck up their courage and look around, and they'll see that there's someone better out there and that relationships aren't supposed to be that way.
It's already the case for most people that "Once you go Mac, you never go back." The day when it also becomes "Once you go Tux, Windows is out of luck" isn't so far off either, maybe
How can a monster company like IBM act like this? It's not mostly out of altruism, although I am sure they have some. IBM invented FUD, as any old-time mainframer can tell you.
:p). Linux has a 5-10% desktop market share, and Apple has risen to 10% also. Google has 1/4 of the office suite market, and is competing very effectively with Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services for spam filtering, email archiving, and IM & web security.
Why, then, do they do it? The number one reason IBM supports open standards, supports open source, has opened its patents, and has contributed so much code to Linux is that IBM believes it can compete more effectively on a more level playing field. Compete against whom? Microsoft, mostly. When there is an entrenched de facto monopoly that fully dominates one area of your business (the dekstop) and is trying to muscle in on your turf (higher end servers, databases, web services, hosted services) and has already muscled in very successfully on your groupware turf, how do you fight back?
You try to level the playing field by commoditizing the thing your opponent sells. Microsoft is a software company; IBM sells a lot of software, but their primary business is hardware and services. If they can commoditize the software that runs on their hardware and on which they provide value-added services, it gives them a competitive advantage against software companies (and against hardware companies that don't use open source, too). The revenue stream of the software company goes down, while the revenue they make on service and on hardware sales increases as a result of reduced software costs.
While Sun also has some altruism (maybe more than IBM, because Sun's roots are in BSD; IBM's roots are firmly in proprietary software), I think it's a pretty good bet that the main reason for open-sourcing Solaris and Java is that they weren't making a lot of money on those things anyway (Solaris used to cost hundreds of dollars a copy, then it became essentially free as in beer) and Microsoft has done a pretty good job of fighting off Java on a lot of fronts, so if they open-source Java and Solaris they get:
-Commoditization pressure on Microsoft
-The same benefits of that pressure that IBM reaps, because like IBM, Sun is a hardware and consulting company that also sells software
-Probably more Java mindshare and marketshare
-Some respect from the FOSS community; what accountants call good will
-Linux might stop eating Solaris' lunch a little bit on the lower end of Sun's market
Why do they hope HP will do this too? Because of HP is the same kind of company Sun and IBM are, although HP is more purely a hardware play than either Sun or IBM. If they follow suit and start opening their patent portolio and maybe even open source HP/UX, that puts even more commoditization pressure on Microsoft. Of course, Sun, IBM, and HP all compete against each other - they're selling into the same markets - but each of them views Microsoft as more of a threat. If they all act to substantially level the playing field by opening up lots of their IP, that will make a significant counterweight to Microsoft's dominant position.
Fast forward five to ten years into the future and envision one possible scenario: the successor to Vista has just been released, or maybe hasn't even made it yet. Some places are still running XP. Linux has continued it's slow push onto the desktop and has pushed even farther into the server market. IBM, Sun, and HP all sell servers with either Linux or Solaris, AIX, or HP/UX. Same price either way; the lot have been open-sourced.
On the desktop side, Dell is still selling Linux machines, and they've been joined by Gateway, Lenovo, maybe even Sony (OK, that last one is crazy talk
Microsoft is still a formidable company, with a huge warchest of cash and a lot of highly successful product lines, but the combined weight of its competitors has not only checked its market share gains, but reversed a number of them.
Linux and Mac c
I know this is just feeding a troll, but...
:)
I'm pretty sure his lack of a beard or turban has nothing to do with being "careful" and a lot to do with being a middle-class white guy. Your culture/religion is something you're brought up with, not something in your genes. The fact that his biological father is Syrian influences nothing but his looks.
I think the only place Steve Jobs is considered a terrorist is in Redmond, where they're all scared of him
They will indeed be competing directly with MSFT on MSFT's turf. Some of you will recall that Microsoft bought FrontBridge Technologies, Postini's biggest competitor, in 2005. The business models and service line-ups are pretty much identical. Anti-spam, anti-virus, archiving for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, etc.
:)
I bet steveb threw a chair not only across the office when he heard the news, but straight through his window
I work for a Postini competitor that was also acquired recently, and we went for a lot more than what Google paid (nyaanyaanyaanyaaaaanya ), so 615 million is not really high. Also, like others in this business, they're more than just a spam filter.
No, it was not an ad hominen attack. You shouldn't throw around words you don't understand. A personal attack? I suppose, a mild one. OTOH, anonymous trolls deserve them, so...
Glad it was better for you. Their response to me was basically "Sorry you don't like it, but the contract doesn't guarantee perfect coverage in the service area." I couldn't get it through to them that I wasn't complaining about not having coverage in some places; the problem was spotty coverage in most places and unusably bad coverage at home and at work. They followed that up with "The coverage map says we have coverage there, so we do."
:p
I wonder if I drew a map that put California near, say, Tahiti, that wishfulness would make it float over there, too?
Start at the neck. Saves you the trouble of having to cut off the other one.
I used T-Mobile for years on southern California, and they were very good. However, when I took a job in northern California this year, I very quickly found out two things:
1) T-Mobile sucks in the SF bay area. At my house and at my office, the signal was so poor that either the phone was effective unusable or - often - it was truly unusable, with a signal so weak I could neither make nor receive calls. Most other places that I would go weren't a whole lot better
2) Among colleagues who had also relocated to the bay area, there are many, many former T-Mobile users, and they all had the same story: "T-Mobile was great where I used to live, but they stink here. I switched to (Sprint|Verizon)"
They told me that Cingular was just as bad as T-Mobile in the bay area. After checking out Sprint and Verizon, I chose Sprint and have been very happy with them. Coverage is pretty good, and the sales guy at my local Sprint store was awesome. He even told me some good places to go fishing in the bay area.
As for T-Mobile, who cared not one whit that I'd been a loyal customer for years and the only reason I was leaving them was because they're service was unusable where I live and work (both my office and my home are within 5 or 6 miles of San Francisco International Airport, I don't live out in BFE here, T-Mobile is just useless) and I could neither make nor receive calls most of the time, they charged me cancellation fee * 3 lines anyway, even though it was completely the fault of their crappy network that I was leaving.
Just on the off chance that any T-Mobile employee might be reading this, there are two things you ought to know:
1) I will never, ever, ever do business with T-Mobile again, not even if they were to offer me free phones and free service for my family, for life. Not even if should in the future move to a place where T-Mobile has the only decent coverage. I'll use a competitor, or do without a cell phone.
2) A great many people I know personally have heard this story. I can't imagine how many more have just read it. Pissing off a longtime loyal customer is generally not a good idea. The 600 bucks you got out of me for a problem that was *your* fault will be more than made up by people who don't become a T-Mobile customer after talking to me. Not just because of your bad coverge around here and your bad attitude about it on the phone, but because of all the great things I've been telling people about Sprint; their customer service is better than yours, and so is their network, at least around the bay area.