Given the way that these viruses work, and given that your script fires a message to everyone who attempts to Code Red exploit a server running your script, and that there's no central registry of which servers / email addresses have been notified by your script :
Wouldn't this script, if widely employed, bring forth massive tidal waves of email as well?
Imagine an admin's joy at finding that not only are 20 of his servers infected and/or destroyed, but he has an inbox full of thousands of messages that are now swamping his mailserver.
Given that the communication of the email is not secure, could a malicious party not monitor traffic for copies of your script's message, and thus know exactly which servers can be exploited?
Perhaps a better solution would be a secure central registry / database of known-infected systems, which exposed a secure known-infected system reporting mechanism (even a simple XML message protocol via https for example). Just thinking on the fly here...
Anyway, the intention is noble...
I smell an ASP migration product opportunity
on
Nimda To Strike Again
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
After Gartner's recommendation, thousands of PHB's and even sane people will rush to switch from IIS to Apache / IBM HTTP Server / whatever.
Has anyone written a product yet to translate Active Server Pages (ASP) code to PHP, JSP, or some other format? Most of the basic scripting language concepts should translate pretty nicely.
Even if someone has built their IIS / ASP application 'correctly' (cough cough) isolating middle-tier logic to MTS or something similar, wouldn't Perl / Java / whatever wrappers to those COM / COM+ services also be straightforward to write?
Or has someone done this already? Isn't there (or wasn't there) a Chilisoft implementation of ASP that you could run on Apache and Linux?
Perhaps since we don't have biometric identification devices on handguns, the product is faulty, not the murderer who abuses it!
Maybe burglars who circumvent a security system in order to steal shouldn't be prosecuted either? Clearly the security product was faulty! Safecrackers are providing a public service by showing us how faulty the safes in the world are!
Perhaps we need fertilizer and fuel oil that combine into a tasty dessert treat instead of a dangerous bomb! That would be a better product! Outlawing fertilizer bombs would be punishing the likes of Tim McVeigh for "missuseing" (sic) knowledge!
At what point did citizens of our country stop being accountable for their actions?
Someone hand me a clue-by-four this guy needs a smacking.
Given the economic impact of viruses like Nimda, it shouldn't be hard to tell that creating and unleashing viruses like it is and should be a serious offense.
And yes, making an example of them DOES set a precedent for the treatment of all of us. That's the point of laws and law enforcement.
Please give the slippery slope angle a rest in this case, too. It's like you're arguing that outlawing assault with a handgun is tantamount to repealing the 2nd Amendment -- it simply ISN'T.
Destroying other peoples' property is a crime. Criminals who commit that crime should be punished accordingly. How complicated IS this?
I experienced the monopoly effect too, but it wasn't so maddening. I tried to get DSL service from I think it was Northpoint. They said they had to do a 'line check' to be sure I could support DSL. Then I didn't hear from them for like 3 weeks. When they finally called back they said it looked like I couldn't get DSL.
6 months later SBC wouldn't quit bothering me to hook up DSL to the SAME lines over the SAME CO equipment that Northpoint was trying to use. I put 2 and 2 together and saw what was going on : SBC was giving Northpoint the runaround and stranging their business while they got their own offering ready.
The ending for me was that I use Cable for broadband. The ending for Northpoint was less attractive. I hope these guys can build a solid case and take a serious bite out of the ILECs.
Officers and Directors of the company can absolutely be sued for instigating criminal or civil crimes at their companies. For this reason companies take out "Directors' Insurance" which pays in the event someone is successful in going after a Director for whatever reason (covers legal fees etc.).
As to the specifics of Directors' insurance I can't say, since IANAL... I just remember us having to buy it at my previous company.
Otherwise, there would be nobody willing to take a Board of Directors' seat, especially at a large, public company.
Maybe that's why my Win98 machine is so flaky sometimes. Microsoft has been building solar flare disturbance simulators into the Windows kernel since 3.1...
except on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, when my favorite local station is about 3 minutes of ads an hour... seems to be when they play all the best stuff too.
my solution? Listen to the radio only when driving on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Pick out tunes that they play that I like, go buy them, burn them, and listen to CDs in the car the other 5 days of the week.
If people have rights, and know about them, and can't be legally coerced to give them up, the situation would be different. If the video store had asked you "How many kids do you have? How much money do you make?" -- you'd tell them where to stick it. You'd need privacy statues that guaranteed you didn't have to give up your ID except in certain situations. Law enforcement would have to know what those are, as well (Think "Miranda").
I see a National ID as a potential good thing, but it would require lots of education of the US population, as well as of law enforcement. Otherwise (like the SSN is) it could be a bad thing.
Because a National ID would be a convenient key to link together your various accounts and dealings (as SSN is today), there would have to be specific legislation forbidding its use in almost all cases, and again extensive education of law enforcement, businesses, and the public about the public's privacy rights.
Unless legally forbidden, businesses would absolutely ask you for that National ID to tie your records together, since a more complete picture of you reduces their risk in extending you credit / trust (which the video store is doing). Even if it were legally forbidden for them to ask you to provide this National ID #, businesses woudl charge you slightly higher prices for things, to account for the business' increased risk in dealing with you.
In the video store case, their alternative would be to charge you more, or require you to put down a deposit on the video that you'd get back when you returned the video. Anyone else remember when the video stores used this form of secured credit (circa 1985)?
been ID'ed doing nothing wrong, out at night, not driving etc. The policeman wanted to see "my ID" and I had none on me. He informed me that I was required by law to have it on me (and I am not), and I (diplomatically) informed him of this. As a result I was basically detained and threatened a bit ("You want to go to jail, son?") before being let go.
Just because you have legal rights doesn't mean an ignorant fool with a badge and a gun can't essentially take them away from you. One problem with Ellison's types of proposals is that the rights to privacy require a large amount of education throughout the law enforcement community (think "Miranda").
Using SSN as a common identifier to link up who you are with your credit history, etc. is just a fast, low-cost way of using a common key to join the data. You can do this manually ("references"), but it just costs more due to the manual verification process involved.
Even if you automated it (like the credit agencies to do determine "who you are" in the absence of SSN), it would have some probability of being correct, and the remaining probability that it is incorrect is risk to the creditor, and would be priced into the good / service / credit you were attempting to access.
I think the idea is a good one, don't get me wrong, but I think realistically it would just COST more to implement. Just a consideration...
Most Americans don't understand their rights with respect to their SSN. They freely give it when they don't have to. As for me, I almost always refuse to give it unless it's for a tax-related deal (like setting up a bank account that pays interest, brokerage account, etc.). I invariably get dumbfounded looks and a conversation with "the manager" who has to approve my opening an account / applying / whatever without giving it.
A separate system for ID (vs. tax) like you talk about the French having sounds more ideal, but the amount of education and administrative overhead would be high.
At least we could probably make it harder to forge than a Yemeni passport. But with our track record on currency...
say on a sweater on their chests? Thanks Hawthorne!
But with larger societies it's hard to enforce so how about just permanently tattooing or disfiguring them? Maybe give them ID collars around their necks that explode if tampered with?
to the fact that there are several thousand people who are without homes in the Battery Park City area. Perhaps you didn't realize that they were allowed 15 minutes to recover all their personal belongings, and most of them were covered with sooty sludge with the windows being long gone and all (no pun intended).
Enough with the anti-Microsoft rhetoric. At least in this case they were doing something meaningful (giving the temporarily homeless temporary clothing at little to no cost to them). Contrast this with Ellison and his ORACLE ROCKS! message, and National ID propaganda.
The implications of a war on Afghanistan are, as this article raises, quite scary. Even if, in a sustained bombing campaign or a land war victory, we "win", what next?
Afghanistan will need a government to replace the Taliban... The Afghanis will doubtless harbor a deep hatred for Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others who might aid us in such a war. This could easily lead to a much larger scope Middle East conflict.
It's just amazing to me how little perspective the average American has in situations like this (even our leaders), and how short and selective our memories are.
The Russians remind us that a war in Afghanistan is largely unwinnable by US standards. Our own history in Vietnam should clue us in as well. Will we never learn?
Maps cost money because the finer details of them change constantly. Who would keep your 'open source' map up to date? I for one, wouldn't spend the time. I'd rather pay someone else to do it, by buying a map.
It's predictable that soulless people with an agenda to push will capitalize on tragedy in order to push it. The degree of their true callousness can be measured by how quickly they move to do so.
Use this as an opportunity to seek out information and learn about a part of the world most Americans don't know anything about. Gather facts. Draw your own conclusions. Don't allow sorrow and anger to drive you like a sheep into the arms of a waiting ideologue, ready to capitalize on our misfortune.
Or... view the source of the page, get the link to the image, create you own.html file with the link, and use the "Save Target As" feature from your own link.
I found that easier to do than turn off javascript in IE 5.5... MSFT must have moved around the option since IE3 or 4 when I last had to turn it off.. ahh well
If the attackers were on a suicide mission like those yesterday, their killing everyone on board would be a better outcome, sadly, but obviously.
If the attackers had some other agenda, there's no way they would kill everyone on board, that would eliminate their leverage to get whatever they want, whether it's distribution of a message, freeing of a fellow terrorist, you name it.
What the type of solution proposed could do, is prevent commercial airliners from becoming cruise missiles, and would help turn any airline hijacking into a known problem, that of dealing with terrorists threatening to kill passengers on the ground.
Middle Eastern nations need to be given an actual helping hand which will help bring about real economic and social independence from the Western powers. This is important because it targets the motivational aspects of terrorism.
What exactly do you mean by "helping hand"? I assume you mean financial aid of some sort.
Threatening and carrying out criminal acts upon others in order to get them to give you share of their wealth has a name. It is called extortion.
I think the point is that capitalism out of check results in the purchase of the votes of elected represenatatives, not the brainwashing of the populace through advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
...I actually have *never* even noticed them, much less actively ignored them. Wow!
Scary to think of a company of tens of thousands of employees whose name is the complete sentence : "I B.M."
Anyway I guess another hosting company will inevitably be seeing an inflow of customers from the "Exodus exodus" : Inflow
Given the way that these viruses work, and given that your script fires a message to everyone who attempts to Code Red exploit a server running your script, and that there's no central registry of which servers / email addresses have been notified by your script :
Wouldn't this script, if widely employed, bring forth massive tidal waves of email as well?
Imagine an admin's joy at finding that not only are 20 of his servers infected and/or destroyed, but he has an inbox full of thousands of messages that are now swamping his mailserver.
Given that the communication of the email is not secure, could a malicious party not monitor traffic for copies of your script's message, and thus know exactly which servers can be exploited?
Perhaps a better solution would be a secure central registry / database of known-infected systems, which exposed a secure known-infected system reporting mechanism (even a simple XML message protocol via https for example). Just thinking on the fly here...
Anyway, the intention is noble...
After Gartner's recommendation, thousands of PHB's and even sane people will rush to switch from IIS to Apache / IBM HTTP Server / whatever.
Has anyone written a product yet to translate Active Server Pages (ASP) code to PHP, JSP, or some other format? Most of the basic scripting language concepts should translate pretty nicely.
Even if someone has built their IIS / ASP application 'correctly' (cough cough) isolating middle-tier logic to MTS or something similar, wouldn't Perl / Java / whatever wrappers to those COM / COM+ services also be straightforward to write?
Or has someone done this already? Isn't there (or wasn't there) a Chilisoft implementation of ASP that you could run on Apache and Linux?
Perhaps since we don't have biometric identification devices on handguns, the product is faulty, not the murderer who abuses it!
Maybe burglars who circumvent a security system in order to steal shouldn't be prosecuted either? Clearly the security product was faulty! Safecrackers are providing a public service by showing us how faulty the safes in the world are!
Perhaps we need fertilizer and fuel oil that combine into a tasty dessert treat instead of a dangerous bomb! That would be a better product! Outlawing fertilizer bombs would be punishing the likes of Tim McVeigh for "missuseing" (sic) knowledge!
At what point did citizens of our country stop being accountable for their actions?
Someone hand me a clue-by-four this guy needs a smacking.
Given the economic impact of viruses like Nimda, it shouldn't be hard to tell that creating and unleashing viruses like it is and should be a serious offense.
And yes, making an example of them DOES set a precedent for the treatment of all of us. That's the point of laws and law enforcement.
Please give the slippery slope angle a rest in this case, too. It's like you're arguing that outlawing assault with a handgun is tantamount to repealing the 2nd Amendment -- it simply ISN'T.
Destroying other peoples' property is a crime. Criminals who commit that crime should be punished accordingly. How complicated IS this?
I experienced the monopoly effect too, but it wasn't so maddening. I tried to get DSL service from I think it was Northpoint. They said they had to do a 'line check' to be sure I could support DSL. Then I didn't hear from them for like 3 weeks. When they finally called back they said it looked like I couldn't get DSL.
6 months later SBC wouldn't quit bothering me to hook up DSL to the SAME lines over the SAME CO equipment that Northpoint was trying to use. I put 2 and 2 together and saw what was going on : SBC was giving Northpoint the runaround and stranging their business while they got their own offering ready.
The ending for me was that I use Cable for broadband. The ending for Northpoint was less attractive. I hope these guys can build a solid case and take a serious bite out of the ILECs.
Officers and Directors of the company can absolutely be sued for instigating criminal or civil crimes at their companies. For this reason companies take out "Directors' Insurance" which pays in the event someone is successful in going after a Director for whatever reason (covers legal fees etc.).
As to the specifics of Directors' insurance I can't say, since IANAL... I just remember us having to buy it at my previous company.
Otherwise, there would be nobody willing to take a Board of Directors' seat, especially at a large, public company.
can MicroSOFT be far behind?
Maybe that's why my Win98 machine is so flaky sometimes. Microsoft has been building solar flare disturbance simulators into the Windows kernel since 3.1...
except on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, when my favorite local station is about 3 minutes of ads an hour... seems to be when they play all the best stuff too.
my solution? Listen to the radio only when driving on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Pick out tunes that they play that I like, go buy them, burn them, and listen to CDs in the car the other 5 days of the week.
With all the A's how to distinguish? Perhaps a series of degrees like A1, A2, A3, B1, B2...
Hmm that sounds like the US government pay grade classifications (open cheek insert tongue) !
If people have rights, and know about them, and can't be legally coerced to give them up, the situation would be different. If the video store had asked you "How many kids do you have? How much money do you make?" -- you'd tell them where to stick it. You'd need privacy statues that guaranteed you didn't have to give up your ID except in certain situations. Law enforcement would have to know what those are, as well (Think "Miranda").
I see a National ID as a potential good thing, but it would require lots of education of the US population, as well as of law enforcement. Otherwise (like the SSN is) it could be a bad thing.
Because a National ID would be a convenient key to link together your various accounts and dealings (as SSN is today), there would have to be specific legislation forbidding its use in almost all cases, and again extensive education of law enforcement, businesses, and the public about the public's privacy rights.
Unless legally forbidden, businesses would absolutely ask you for that National ID to tie your records together, since a more complete picture of you reduces their risk in extending you credit / trust (which the video store is doing). Even if it were legally forbidden for them to ask you to provide this National ID #, businesses woudl charge you slightly higher prices for things, to account for the business' increased risk in dealing with you.
In the video store case, their alternative would be to charge you more, or require you to put down a deposit on the video that you'd get back when you returned the video. Anyone else remember when the video stores used this form of secured credit (circa 1985)?
been ID'ed doing nothing wrong, out at night, not driving etc. The policeman wanted to see "my ID" and I had none on me. He informed me that I was required by law to have it on me (and I am not), and I (diplomatically) informed him of this. As a result I was basically detained and threatened a bit ("You want to go to jail, son?") before being let go.
Just because you have legal rights doesn't mean an ignorant fool with a badge and a gun can't essentially take them away from you. One problem with Ellison's types of proposals is that the rights to privacy require a large amount of education throughout the law enforcement community (think "Miranda").
Using SSN as a common identifier to link up who you are with your credit history, etc. is just a fast, low-cost way of using a common key to join the data. You can do this manually ("references"), but it just costs more due to the manual verification process involved.
Even if you automated it (like the credit agencies to do determine "who you are" in the absence of SSN), it would have some probability of being correct, and the remaining probability that it is incorrect is risk to the creditor, and would be priced into the good / service / credit you were attempting to access.
I think the idea is a good one, don't get me wrong, but I think realistically it would just COST more to implement. Just a consideration...
Most Americans don't understand their rights with respect to their SSN. They freely give it when they don't have to. As for me, I almost always refuse to give it unless it's for a tax-related deal (like setting up a bank account that pays interest, brokerage account, etc.). I invariably get dumbfounded looks and a conversation with "the manager" who has to approve my opening an account / applying / whatever without giving it.
A separate system for ID (vs. tax) like you talk about the French having sounds more ideal, but the amount of education and administrative overhead would be high.
At least we could probably make it harder to forge than a Yemeni passport. But with our track record on currency...
say on a sweater on their chests? Thanks Hawthorne!
But with larger societies it's hard to enforce so how about just permanently tattooing or disfiguring them? Maybe give them ID collars around their necks that explode if tampered with?
One strike and you're out!
to the fact that there are several thousand people who are without homes in the Battery Park City area. Perhaps you didn't realize that they were allowed 15 minutes to recover all their personal belongings, and most of them were covered with sooty sludge with the windows being long gone and all (no pun intended).
Enough with the anti-Microsoft rhetoric. At least in this case they were doing something meaningful (giving the temporarily homeless temporary clothing at little to no cost to them). Contrast this with Ellison and his ORACLE ROCKS! message, and National ID propaganda.
The implications of a war on Afghanistan are, as this article raises, quite scary. Even if, in a sustained bombing campaign or a land war victory, we "win", what next?
Afghanistan will need a government to replace the Taliban... The Afghanis will doubtless harbor a deep hatred for Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others who might aid us in such a war. This could easily lead to a much larger scope Middle East conflict.
It's just amazing to me how little perspective the average American has in situations like this (even our leaders), and how short and selective our memories are.
The Russians remind us that a war in Afghanistan is largely unwinnable by US standards. Our own history in Vietnam should clue us in as well. Will we never learn?
Is it happy hour already?
Maps cost money because the finer details of them change constantly. Who would keep your 'open source' map up to date? I for one, wouldn't spend the time. I'd rather pay someone else to do it, by buying a map.
It's predictable that soulless people with an agenda to push will capitalize on tragedy in order to push it. The degree of their true callousness can be measured by how quickly they move to do so.
Use this as an opportunity to seek out information and learn about a part of the world most Americans don't know anything about. Gather facts. Draw your own conclusions. Don't allow sorrow and anger to drive you like a sheep into the arms of a waiting ideologue, ready to capitalize on our misfortune.
Shame on you, Jon Katz.
Or... view the source of the page, get the link to the image, create you own .html file with the link, and use the "Save Target As" feature from your own link.
I found that easier to do than turn off javascript in IE 5.5 ... MSFT must have moved around the option since IE3 or 4 when I last had to turn it off.. ahh well
If the attackers were on a suicide mission like those yesterday, their killing everyone on board would be a better outcome, sadly, but obviously.
If the attackers had some other agenda, there's no way they would kill everyone on board, that would eliminate their leverage to get whatever they want, whether it's distribution of a message, freeing of a fellow terrorist, you name it.
What the type of solution proposed could do, is prevent commercial airliners from becoming cruise missiles, and would help turn any airline hijacking into a known problem, that of dealing with terrorists threatening to kill passengers on the ground.
Middle Eastern nations need to be given an actual helping hand which will help bring about real economic and social independence from the Western powers. This is important because it targets the motivational aspects of terrorism.
What exactly do you mean by "helping hand"? I assume you mean financial aid of some sort.
Threatening and carrying out criminal acts upon others in order to get them to give you share of their wealth has a name. It is called extortion.
I think the point is that capitalism out of check results in the purchase of the votes of elected represenatatives, not the brainwashing of the populace through advertising.