Our beloved open source has the odd issue but nothing that hammers the net like most Micro$oft w0rm5.
Fortunately most open source software is on the server side right now, so there are fewer machines and are run by more savvy people, so patches get applied a lot faster. But just wait, if linux gets popular on the desktop, they'll have the same issues as Windows: either force patches on users, or have users who wait three months until the worm exploit comes out before clicking on the "accept update" button.
Like I said, being a rather large company, we have a large restrictive firewall (only telnet and http/s go out, and even then only with a password) and spam/virus detection and such, and we need 100% uptime connectivity to our other sites around the world. Even a single ethernet drop at a desk costs each department $30 / month. That has to be administrative overhead, so I'm pretty sure that's where the $41 / gig comes from. Though a 41 times increase seems a bit much, eh?
I don't quite understand network costs either. I work at a Fortune 100 company, and supposedly they pay 4 cents per megabyte that goes to/from the internet, or $41 a gig. Certainly there are firewall / antivirus / constantly-on-call-net-admin costs included in there, but I've always been puzzled at the difference between my cable modem costs and my workplace's costs.
Now certainly, the broadband companies don't expect you to be downloading at maximum speed constantly, and if you were you'd be in the top 0.0001% of bandwidth users so they may very well find a reason to boot you. So you can't really say your bandwidth costs $0.05 per gigabyte. If you pay $50 a month for broadband, then apparently the broadband people think the average user will use less than 50 gig of bandwidth a month, which I think is a good bet.
Here is the documentation for the patch. They don't hardcode an IP, they just have a way to say that wildcards records don't necessarily have to work everywhere. eg. you can say that "*.foobar.com => 1.2.3.4" but you can't say that "*.com => 64.94.110.11".
The problem (for one) is that there are a lot of other programs than just web browsers using these name lookups (eg. the several examples mentioned in this story and last, spam detection and backup mail servers).
Also, people have to actively take technical countermeasures to stop this. With MSIE you at least have a choice as to whether you use it. Microsoft at least gave away for free something they paid developers for, Verisign was given this power by the US government and decided to abuse that gift.
Also, given Verisign's attitude towards the importance of internet standards vs. profit, who's to say their next hack won't be much harder to find a technical solution for?
This is great news, and is something I'd expect to see picked up on online sites all over the internet. However, a Google news search turned up nothing more. And the Register story is little more than a reference to the Scotsman, with not much to indicate that the Register did any independant verification (eg. they bring up the question of which Ford picked, Suse or Mandrake, but don't mention any answer). In other words, it's essentially rumor at this point.
I don't have the balls to do it, but can anyone get Ford on the phone? Or are there any Ford.com people who read slashdot who can verify?
I won't go to the bathroom without my laptop. I have a barstool in front of my toilet that's the perfect height for it. And with a TV that can be seen from the bathroom doorway, I could spend hours on the toilet if I so desired.
It may be common sense, but so is quality assurance, developing products for quality rather than by schedule only, etc... but none of these things ever happen in real companies it seems.
It's continuing verification that Linux is not just a "school project" or some random punks' little project. It's a modern OS which can compete with the best that closed-source companies can create. It validates that open-source can compete with closed-source. It validates that the profit motive is not the only major force in business and that else should be ignored.
Yes, this has been proven years ago, but seeing as how controversy-seeking reporters like to continually spout that unix-based OS's are has-beens, it's good to have huge companies like Sony continue to send these sorts of messages.
I don't think the legal process is at all involved here yet, other than that lawsuits take a while to get going so that they're (unintentionally) leaving lots of room for lots of non-legal stuff. The PR that's going on now is based on legal claims, but as those claims are as yet unproven, you really can't blame it on the legal system yet.
The problem is that 1) corporations executives have (via their investments in stock and the large ability to influence that stock) a vested interest in inflating their stocks, to the detriment of other investors, and 2) the media has a vested interest in writing controversial stories that sometimes end up assisting corporate executives in their profit-making.
You'll still have some problems with ghostscript since the Adobe PDF somehow adds some rogue postscript in your printer output that makes the ps2pdf crap out. Ghostscript somehow has a "feature" that supports Adobe's lameness, implemented in its pdf_sec.ps file. You just have to override it with a hacked version like this and you should be good.
Googling for pdf_sec.ps along with "Adobe" or whatnot should give you more info.
But hardly any corporation takes the effort to properly secure things like this. The reason? Because there's a trade-off between security and usability, and most people discover that security is generally a pain in the butt. DRM won't change that. All DRM will change is that the general public will find out firsthand, and magazines will have a little more to write about.
It's true that you can get a reasonable amount of information across with a minimum amount of power and complication with ham radios.
But ham radios don't provide as much low-latency networked on-the-fly information access that data networks do. Eg. imagine a city could query every stoplight to see if it's out... and the computer could sumarize the findings on a map... you'd never want to do this sort of tedious data mining over voice or morse code. And things like video-streams from street cameras are nearly impossible without having a separate ham sit next to each camera.
I don't know that this sort of broad information access is necessarily required in an emergency now in most places, but still, there are a few parts of cities that are currently blanketed with street-cameras. And emergency information like this will only become more prevalent in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately most open source software is on the server side right now, so there are fewer machines and are run by more savvy people, so patches get applied a lot faster. But just wait, if linux gets popular on the desktop, they'll have the same issues as Windows: either force patches on users, or have users who wait three months until the worm exploit comes out before clicking on the "accept update" button.
Yes, in order to make sendmail even more convoluted, I recommend it be rewritten in perl. Or maybe javascript, that would work too.
Mistakes happen to everyone, and microsoft code isn't necessarily even the most important part of the internet.
Like I said, being a rather large company, we have a large restrictive firewall (only telnet and http/s go out, and even then only with a password) and spam/virus detection and such, and we need 100% uptime connectivity to our other sites around the world. Even a single ethernet drop at a desk costs each department $30 / month. That has to be administrative overhead, so I'm pretty sure that's where the $41 / gig comes from. Though a 41 times increase seems a bit much, eh?
Now certainly, the broadband companies don't expect you to be downloading at maximum speed constantly, and if you were you'd be in the top 0.0001% of bandwidth users so they may very well find a reason to boot you. So you can't really say your bandwidth costs $0.05 per gigabyte. If you pay $50 a month for broadband, then apparently the broadband people think the average user will use less than 50 gig of bandwidth a month, which I think is a good bet.
Here is the documentation for the patch. They don't hardcode an IP, they just have a way to say that wildcards records don't necessarily have to work everywhere. eg. you can say that "*.foobar.com => 1.2.3.4" but you can't say that "*.com => 64.94.110.11".
Also, people have to actively take technical countermeasures to stop this. With MSIE you at least have a choice as to whether you use it. Microsoft at least gave away for free something they paid developers for, Verisign was given this power by the US government and decided to abuse that gift.
Also, given Verisign's attitude towards the importance of internet standards vs. profit, who's to say their next hack won't be much harder to find a technical solution for?
I don't have the balls to do it, but can anyone get Ford on the phone? Or are there any Ford.com people who read slashdot who can verify?
That's awesome. :)
Is that legal? I mean, it's similar to low-power FM transmitters, but now it's on the TV band....
Well, add a fridge (with beer) in the bathroom and hacked sattelite with unlimited free pr0n on the TV, and you're pretty much there.
Counterargument: People still vote and involve themselves in politics.
I won't go to the bathroom without my laptop. I have a barstool in front of my toilet that's the perfect height for it. And with a TV that can be seen from the bathroom doorway, I could spend hours on the toilet if I so desired.
The "ssh tunnels are very bad performance" statement may be elaborated a bit more on this page titled "Why TCP Over TCP Is A Bad Idea".
Note that code is not available for everything. In particular, the seattle group wasn't able to find publicly-avilable drivers for the 802.11g radio.
3. Low SNR communication applies to machine de/en/coded morse as well.
It may be common sense, but so is quality assurance, developing products for quality rather than by schedule only, etc... but none of these things ever happen in real companies it seems.
Yes, this has been proven years ago, but seeing as how controversy-seeking reporters like to continually spout that unix-based OS's are has-beens, it's good to have huge companies like Sony continue to send these sorts of messages.
More likely, the submitter meant "flash memory" which is typically used to store mostly static data over long periods of time.
I wouldn't nitpick, but he repeated the word "RAM" so many times that I was forced to post this.
Canada is almost certainly less dense population-wise, isn't it?
The problem is that 1) corporations executives have (via their investments in stock and the large ability to influence that stock) a vested interest in inflating their stocks, to the detriment of other investors, and 2) the media has a vested interest in writing controversial stories that sometimes end up assisting corporate executives in their profit-making.
Googling for pdf_sec.ps along with "Adobe" or whatnot should give you more info.
But hardly any corporation takes the effort to properly secure things like this. The reason? Because there's a trade-off between security and usability, and most people discover that security is generally a pain in the butt. DRM won't change that. All DRM will change is that the general public will find out firsthand, and magazines will have a little more to write about.
But ham radios don't provide as much low-latency networked on-the-fly information access that data networks do. Eg. imagine a city could query every stoplight to see if it's out... and the computer could sumarize the findings on a map... you'd never want to do this sort of tedious data mining over voice or morse code. And things like video-streams from street cameras are nearly impossible without having a separate ham sit next to each camera.
I don't know that this sort of broad information access is necessarily required in an emergency now in most places, but still, there are a few parts of cities that are currently blanketed with street-cameras. And emergency information like this will only become more prevalent in the future.
Are there any plans out there for a DIY LED lightbulb? Or a cheap compact 1.5v power supply?