You are right, but as I said in a previous reply: While I agree that no OS is 100% secure, a production plant or process shouldn't purposefully select an OS that has a huge number of known flaws.
It's the difference between walking in a dark alley wearing a bullet proof jacket (sure, leaves your head exposed) and walking in the same alley wearing a fluorescent tee-shirt saying "rob me" and flashing a wad of cash. In both cases, you have some risk. In the latter, you're just asking for trouble.
Your chrootexec program is interesting. Did you post the source somewhere?
This is exactly why having windows machines in a production process is a bad idea. You never know when a worm, virus, trojan or other beast is going to interfere with your fabrication, the files or the hard disk imaging.
IBM is running its new 90-nm microelectronics fab (in Fishkill, NY) entirely on Linux. So if it's feasible for a plant of that complexity, it should be feasible for a small assembly plant such as Zen Creative's.
Let's see, the FBI doesn't want to have to do anything with the hero of this story. Story is totally devoid of technical content. The article is littered with fluffy little improbable pieces like When he uncovered the Titan Rain routers in Guangdong, he carefully installed a homemade bugging code in the primary router's software. -- how? By clicking on the "Install homemade bugging code" link in the router's web page? Or was that "router" running IIS4 on Windows? Puhlease.
The story's author is Nathan Thornburgh. A look at his
track records at the Time shows a total lack of technology articles. And this story isn't raising his average. Looks like the author is anything but a techie. Which doesn't prevent him from writing down to his audience about things he knows nothing about.
Frankly, I can't help but wonder if Thornburgh hasn't been completely hogwashed by this Carpenter guy. The story would also be a tad more convincing if the artcile didn't read like a bad movie script or one of those inane pulp "hacker" novels concocted by writers who think using FTP to transfer files is a great technical prowess.
Thornburgh should write B-movies for the sci-fi channel. At least he won't have to explain the technobabble.
The USPTO plans to require a Microsoft browser on their trademark reg site are simply brilliant. Look, Microsoft is in trouble with this Linux and firefox contraptions
competing against it, it really needs help from the taxpayer. Expecially after having been punished so harshly by the government.
However, why stop here? Other people are in great need of help after receiving a harsh sentence. So I suggest the USPTO should use the financial services of the
Gambino family
to handle the trademark registration payments on their web sites. After all, if they give business to one federally-convicted firm, why not support another?
Actually, that's not true. A certain large UK Westminster bank chose an all-MS solution for their back office and the project was a total, utter disaster. Eventually, the chief architect got fired and the back office was redone by MS competitors using Unix.
And don't forget the CardSystems PR blowup where the choice of MS machines to host confidential credit card data resulted in a massive compromise of CC numbers. Visa withdrew their business and CardSystems's future is iffy at best with 75% of their income gone. Heads are rolling in the aftermath.
So yes, you can very easily get fired for specifying MS.
You wrote:
The EU are going to murder you over this and rest assure the settlement with the EU wont be as lenient as the last time.
I am afraid you're entertaining hopes about the EU. The real power in Brussels is the Commission, which is entirely made of unelected technocrats. There is an elected Parliament, but it's mostly a registration chamber for the Commission's directives. The Commission has such a contempt for the Parliament that they openly displayed it in several occasions, the last one being the Software Patent affair.
Last time MS and the Commissars met, MS paid half a billion and got away with their monopolistic behavior (Windows-N with no media player, anyone? Any taker? No? Didn't think so.) I fail to see why the next encounter would be any different. As for the Parliament, it just doesn't have any mechanism at its disposal to intervene in that kind of issue: that's strictly Commission business.
You're right, "games as a safety valve for thrill-crime" is very possibly a factor,at least for this category of petty "for fun" crime. But other factors have been mentioned for the crime rate dip. One is harsher prosecution. Another is the sad fact that a lot of violent criminals were crack addicts who just died off.
It remains to be seen how the current wave of methadone addiction sweeping the Midwest will affect future crime rate. Especially considering all the "meth orphans", kids effectively abandoned by their parents who will probably grow up with quite a negative attitude. Specialists are saying that we'll miss the good old days of crack heads.
* Do you make sure you're not typing private information (such as SSN or bank account numbers) on the keyboard of your windows machine, the one in the den where you persist in running IE and Outlook and click on every damn banner, the one that runs 317 pieces of spyware, 89 trojans and 11 keyloggers and is so slow it takes 40 minutes to open AOL dialer, and oh by the way this frantic call on your phone answering machine is your credit card fraud department asking you if they should approve an order of 50 Dell laptop to Lagos, Nigeria?
It's crap like this that makes me not want to have kids.
Whoah, slow down. Wrong conclusion. You want to have kids and substract them from the influence of the induhvidual setting these moronic school rules. I suggest shooting all the morons, or, if the former was somehow deemed impractical due to ammo cost, homeschooling your kids.
You want bright, informed kids to give nightmares and stress the heck out of these school admin morons. Now, science shows that applying high stress on lab rats decreases their libido. Ergo, if you stress these morons enough with your kids, they won't reproduce as much, thus ensuring a higher average IQ for the next generation.
So go forth and multiply. Save the next generation.
I suggest MS should look into a alliance with the somewhat misunderstood government of Zimbabwe, which is currently writing a
whole new chapter in the human right violation book.
I mean, if you start buttering up the worst tyrants of the planet, you shouldn't stop at puny Vietnam, right?
corporate America isn't giving a damn about security for the average joe's accounts and such.
Evil corporations as the source of all our troubles? Ha! You wish!
You're acting like this new security disaster has been committed by some huge faceless monster. Nope, see, CardSystems is a small company, one of these relatively clueless offices. Clueless as in "running windows and getting a trojan".
You don't have to invoke the evil spirit of big corporations to explain carelessness and stupidity. Say, I bet you have at least one noisy asshole neighbor, don't you? I do. One of my neighbors routinely sets his boom box on his patio and set it to "annoyingly loud" on a radio channel that plays about 2 songs between each 10-minute commercial run. And then he leaves. That's right, we keep enjoying the boom box while he's gone. Is that sheer evilness? No, he's just completely clueless and easily distracted by shiny objects, that all. I'm sure that the day I finally lob a molotov coktail to his patio, he'll not even realize why I'm angry.
Well, when this kind of guy becomes a manager, he ends up working in joints like CardSystems: clueless, dumb and unaware that their utter obliviousness of the rest of the world might even cause a problem.
According to the article, the leak was caused by a Trojan.
Last time I checked, Trojans were found mostly 1. in jeans pockets on a Saturday night, 2. on Windows machines.
And sure enough, Netcraft tells us that the horny hypothesis can safely be discarded. It's Windows all right:
Site <a href="http://www.cardsystems.com/">http://www.card systems.com/</a> Domain cardsystems.com IP address 63.83.95.71 Country US Date first seen April 1997 Domain Registry networksolutions.com Organisation CardSystems Solutions, Inc., 6390 East Broadway, Tucson, 85710, United States Last reboot 82 days ago
Now, I realize that this doesn't mean necessarily that the CC numbers are kept on a Windows machine, but this is apparently an MS shop, so that's not surprising.
I disagree. IBM sold a lot of Linux servers last years, they run Linux on every machine in their line. Their proprietary machines (mainframes) are precisely the origin of their troubles these days. As an example, IBM contributed Eclipse to the Open Source community, and if you were a developer, chances are you'd rank Eclipse very high in your list of indispensable tools.
The no-cost nature of Eclipse doesn't stop IBM from selling WSAD, basically a set of proprietary plugins on top of Eclipse. Just as the free Linux doesn't preclude IBM, or RedHat, from making money by supporting it.
So my point is that you can perfectly support Open Source Software full blast, provide value for the OSS community and your customer, yet make billions. Ergo, Forbes's Dan Lyons is a nincompoop.
Dan Lyons has made a career out of trashing linux in Forbes.
Absolutely right. On the 15th, the same Dan Lyons released this little gem. An excerpt:
This is what open source software is all about: creating knockoffs and giving them away, destroying the value of whatever the other guy is selling.
This is of course plain false. Counter-example:
IBM, a heavy-weight in open-source, is not starving.
The complete idiocy of this statement means that nobody at Forbes understands the nature of open-source and its implications. And this is a magazine that is supposed to explain us how to financially suceed? With advice like that, their readers aren't going to threaten Warren Buffet and Bill Gates anytime soon.
From the article: Implement operating system and software updates to patch the vulnerabilities exploited by these trojans. As Microsoft Office vulnerabilities have been particularly exploited, advice contained in all Microsoft security bulletins should be followed. These can be found at: Microsoft Security Bulletin Search http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/current. aspx
Maybe I am missing something, but why do the Brit spooks perform classified work and put secret documents on Windows machines? If all they want is to provide a click-and-drool interface to their secretaries, the Mac is perfect, not to mention open-source OSes.
So why are the British taxpayers allowing them to weaken national security and waste their money, just to enrich a non-UK software company? Isn't it betrayal?
Parent is funny. Why has it been modded off-topic?
Open source is bad for innovation: The proof!
on
McVoy Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But if the world goes to 100% open source, innovation goes to zero.
Oh, how insightful! What wisdom!
There are plenty of examples to prove the man right. Take a look, for instance, at the unfortunate, stagnating world of physics. For some silly macho reason, all physicists have to provide their experiments, their data, their calculations, their data and their conclusions in excruciately detailed papers that are submitted to journals for all to see. This process is glorified with noble-sounding terms such as "peer review", "refutability" and "sound science". Physicists pretend this allows them to build on their predecessors' results.
But, as you have guessed, this is just another example of open source. That's right, folks, physics is plagued by a generalized use of the dreaded open source! The source is not code here, it's data, theories and calculations, but the principe is the same: let's face it, physicists don't know how to keep things proprietary.
Which explains why the field is so totally devoid of innovation. Ah, if only physics was practiced with a decent proprietary attitude, like back in the good old time when Galileo taunted his colleagues by hinting about wonders he had observed with his new expensive telescope! Or when alchemists jealously kept their recipes and processes a secret! By now, we would have wonderful machines, such as vehicules flying in the air, devices carrying your voice on a wire, and calculators weighing only a fraction of a ton!
Verily, physical sciences needs to get rid of its openness to finally become innovative. And that is also true for computer sciences, of course.
Good grief, man, how can you let these people treat you like that? There are
laws to protect whistleblowers. Your old boss attempted to cover up a series of huge blunders that could have potentially cost the bank millions in liability, not to mention lost goodwill. Firing a whistleblower who documents an irregularity is a Federal offense.
Get a lawyer and sue the morons 'til their ass bleeds, THEN call the medias for good measure. Sit back, enjoy. Then, for the next few years, make sure to stop every morning for donuts at the next employment place of your ex-boss.
... what can be attributed to good old bureaucratic incompetence.
Your explanation is actually very optimistic. It describes an administration with a set (albeit evil) purpose, and, with sheer determination, remarkable acumen and awesome foresight, this demonic plan is achieved.
I think that this is actually giving credit to this bureaucratic mess known as NASA. They haven't been that organized since the Appolo days.
NASA is in survival mode. Its actions are not rational, they are guided by the panic of administrators that see their personal empires crumble.
NASA has admirable engineers and great scientists, but they don't get to make the decisions. Bureaucrats do. Evil geniuses need not apply. Now, on the other hand, if you know someone who can snowjob Congress, they are hiring...
Slashdot Mirror
It's the difference between walking in a dark alley wearing a bullet proof jacket (sure, leaves your head exposed) and walking in the same alley wearing a fluorescent tee-shirt saying "rob me" and flashing a wad of cash. In both cases, you have some risk. In the latter, you're just asking for trouble.
Your chrootexec program is interesting. Did you post the source somewhere?
Thanks
IBM is running its new 90-nm microelectronics fab (in Fishkill, NY) entirely on Linux. So if it's feasible for a plant of that complexity, it should be feasible for a small assembly plant such as Zen Creative's.
The story's author is Nathan Thornburgh. A look at his track records at the Time shows a total lack of technology articles. And this story isn't raising his average. Looks like the author is anything but a techie. Which doesn't prevent him from writing down to his audience about things he knows nothing about.
Frankly, I can't help but wonder if Thornburgh hasn't been completely hogwashed by this Carpenter guy. The story would also be a tad more convincing if the artcile didn't read like a bad movie script or one of those inane pulp "hacker" novels concocted by writers who think using FTP to transfer files is a great technical prowess.
Thornburgh should write B-movies for the sci-fi channel. At least he won't have to explain the technobabble.
However, why stop here? Other people are in great need of help after receiving a harsh sentence. So I suggest the USPTO should use the financial services of the Gambino family to handle the trademark registration payments on their web sites. After all, if they give business to one federally-convicted firm, why not support another?
That's Gattaca. A name composed only of the letters ACTG, which represent the amino-acids composing DNA.
Actually, that's not true. A certain large UK Westminster bank chose an all-MS solution for their back office and the project was a total, utter disaster. Eventually, the chief architect got fired and the back office was redone by MS competitors using Unix.
And don't forget the CardSystems PR blowup where the choice of MS machines to host confidential credit card data resulted in a massive compromise of CC numbers. Visa withdrew their business and CardSystems's future is iffy at best with 75% of their income gone. Heads are rolling in the aftermath.
So yes, you can very easily get fired for specifying MS.
You wrote: The EU are going to murder you over this and rest assure the settlement with the EU wont be as lenient as the last time.
I am afraid you're entertaining hopes about the EU. The real power in Brussels is the Commission, which is entirely made of unelected technocrats. There is an elected Parliament, but it's mostly a registration chamber for the Commission's directives. The Commission has such a contempt for the Parliament that they openly displayed it in several occasions, the last one being the Software Patent affair.
Last time MS and the Commissars met, MS paid half a billion and got away with their monopolistic behavior (Windows-N with no media player, anyone? Any taker? No? Didn't think so.) I fail to see why the next encounter would be any different. As for the Parliament, it just doesn't have any mechanism at its disposal to intervene in that kind of issue: that's strictly Commission business.
Blush. Yes, duh. Sorry, I meant methamphetamine. Apologies.
It remains to be seen how the current wave of methadone addiction sweeping the Midwest will affect future crime rate. Especially considering all the "meth orphans", kids effectively abandoned by their parents who will probably grow up with quite a negative attitude. Specialists are saying that we'll miss the good old days of crack heads.
* Do you make sure you're not typing private information (such as SSN or bank account numbers) on the keyboard of your windows machine, the one in the den where you persist in running IE and Outlook and click on every damn banner, the one that runs 317 pieces of spyware, 89 trojans and 11 keyloggers and is so slow it takes 40 minutes to open AOL dialer, and oh by the way this frantic call on your phone answering machine is your credit card fraud department asking you if they should approve an order of 50 Dell laptop to Lagos, Nigeria?
Whoah, slow down. Wrong conclusion. You want to have kids and substract them from the influence of the induhvidual setting these moronic school rules. I suggest shooting all the morons, or, if the former was somehow deemed impractical due to ammo cost, homeschooling your kids.
You want bright, informed kids to give nightmares and stress the heck out of these school admin morons. Now, science shows that applying high stress on lab rats decreases their libido. Ergo, if you stress these morons enough with your kids, they won't reproduce as much, thus ensuring a higher average IQ for the next generation.
So go forth and multiply. Save the next generation.
I agree, the problem of MS being pirated would be solved through educating customers. But it would be a solution that might leave MS very unhappy.
Because the sad truth is that educated customers buy Macs or install Linux...
I mean, if you start buttering up the worst tyrants of the planet, you shouldn't stop at puny Vietnam, right?
Evil corporations as the source of all our troubles? Ha! You wish!
You're acting like this new security disaster has been committed by some huge faceless monster. Nope, see, CardSystems is a small company, one of these relatively clueless offices. Clueless as in "running windows and getting a trojan".
You don't have to invoke the evil spirit of big corporations to explain carelessness and stupidity. Say, I bet you have at least one noisy asshole neighbor, don't you? I do. One of my neighbors routinely sets his boom box on his patio and set it to "annoyingly loud" on a radio channel that plays about 2 songs between each 10-minute commercial run. And then he leaves. That's right, we keep enjoying the boom box while he's gone. Is that sheer evilness? No, he's just completely clueless and easily distracted by shiny objects, that all. I'm sure that the day I finally lob a molotov coktail to his patio, he'll not even realize why I'm angry.
Well, when this kind of guy becomes a manager, he ends up working in joints like CardSystems: clueless, dumb and unaware that their utter obliviousness of the rest of the world might even cause a problem.
Ooops, sorry, cut-and-paste missed a line. Here, look for yourself: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http:/ /www.cardsystems.com
Last time I checked, Trojans were found mostly 1. in jeans pockets on a Saturday night, 2. on Windows machines.
And sure enough, Netcraft tells us that the horny hypothesis can safely be discarded. It's Windows all right:
Now, I realize that this doesn't mean necessarily that the CC numbers are kept on a Windows machine, but this is apparently an MS shop, so that's not surprising.The no-cost nature of Eclipse doesn't stop IBM from selling WSAD, basically a set of proprietary plugins on top of Eclipse. Just as the free Linux doesn't preclude IBM, or RedHat, from making money by supporting it.
So my point is that you can perfectly support Open Source Software full blast, provide value for the OSS community and your customer, yet make billions. Ergo, Forbes's Dan Lyons is a nincompoop.
Absolutely right. On the 15th, the same Dan Lyons released this little gem. An excerpt:
This is what open source software is all about: creating knockoffs and giving them away, destroying the value of whatever the other guy is selling.
This is of course plain false. Counter-example: IBM, a heavy-weight in open-source, is not starving.
The complete idiocy of this statement means that nobody at Forbes understands the nature of open-source and its implications. And this is a magazine that is supposed to explain us how to financially suceed? With advice like that, their readers aren't going to threaten Warren Buffet and Bill Gates anytime soon.
Maybe I am missing something, but why do the Brit spooks perform classified work and put secret documents on Windows machines? If all they want is to provide a click-and-drool interface to their secretaries, the Mac is perfect, not to mention open-source OSes.
So why are the British taxpayers allowing them to weaken national security and waste their money, just to enrich a non-UK software company? Isn't it betrayal?
It gives a whole new meaning to the term "to photoshop a moustache on a woman's face".
Down the stairs, that is.
Parent is funny. Why has it been modded off-topic?
Oh, how insightful! What wisdom!
There are plenty of examples to prove the man right. Take a look, for instance, at the unfortunate, stagnating world of physics. For some silly macho reason, all physicists have to provide their experiments, their data, their calculations, their data and their conclusions in excruciately detailed papers that are submitted to journals for all to see. This process is glorified with noble-sounding terms such as "peer review", "refutability" and "sound science". Physicists pretend this allows them to build on their predecessors' results.
But, as you have guessed, this is just another example of open source. That's right, folks, physics is plagued by a generalized use of the dreaded open source! The source is not code here, it's data, theories and calculations, but the principe is the same: let's face it, physicists don't know how to keep things proprietary.
Which explains why the field is so totally devoid of innovation. Ah, if only physics was practiced with a decent proprietary attitude, like back in the good old time when Galileo taunted his colleagues by hinting about wonders he had observed with his new expensive telescope! Or when alchemists jealously kept their recipes and processes a secret! By now, we would have wonderful machines, such as vehicules flying in the air, devices carrying your voice on a wire, and calculators weighing only a fraction of a ton!
Verily, physical sciences needs to get rid of its openness to finally become innovative. And that is also true for computer sciences, of course.
Get a lawyer and sue the morons 'til their ass bleeds, THEN call the medias for good measure. Sit back, enjoy. Then, for the next few years, make sure to stop every morning for donuts at the next employment place of your ex-boss.
It's much more rewarding that setting the place on fire.
Your explanation is actually very optimistic. It describes an administration with a set (albeit evil) purpose, and, with sheer determination, remarkable acumen and awesome foresight, this demonic plan is achieved.
I think that this is actually giving credit to this bureaucratic mess known as NASA. They haven't been that organized since the Appolo days.
NASA is in survival mode. Its actions are not rational, they are guided by the panic of administrators that see their personal empires crumble.
NASA has admirable engineers and great scientists, but they don't get to make the decisions. Bureaucrats do. Evil geniuses need not apply. Now, on the other hand, if you know someone who can snowjob Congress, they are hiring...