Re:Only need IE to get past 'unknown browser' scre
on
Redmondmag on Dumping IE
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So those people running these sites will only see IE in their logs, assume that noone uses anything else and continue to make sites that require IE.. This is not what we want atall, we should complain to the website authors and not use the site until it works with standards compliant browsers.
Well, piracy is what makes platforms popular, the amiga would never have had any success without piracy, virtually every amiga owner i ever met had piles and piles of pirate games, windows also owes its popularity to piracy
But since when have MS products ever been as good as, or had an equivalent feature set, to their competitors products. The fact that it comes by default will make people use it and not bother to look for anything better. Also as the popularity of alternatives decreases, many people will forget there ever was an alternative atall.
And for that matter, if people stop using third party software firewalls and everyone uses the inbuilt one, malware writers will only have one firewall they need to turn off or change the ruleset of.
Actually, microsoft came out with a 32bit os a year after the first 64bit os's came out. So in order for microsoft to make a 64bit os, we have to wait for a truly innovative company to come out with a 128bit os, and then wait a year for ms to catch up with the step behind.
Well... BMP is an open, if somewhat shitty format.. Or if not open, its sufficiently simple that it's well understood and the specifications are widely known. Also, paint comes from a time before ms had a monopoly.. This brings up another point however, ms saw fit to create nonstandard file formats, look at bitmap images and wave audio - there were always formats such as PCX and VOICE, pcx supported some simple compression which made the files much smaller than bitmaps, and they actually loaded faster because of the smaller file sizes and slow media of the day... As for voice audio files, they had silence compression which wave did not, there was also the apple AIFF format and the amiga 8svx/16svx IFF format that could have been used.
I doubt chkrootkit will find it, it's not a rootkit, just a tool that executes under an unpriveleged account and thus can't really hide itself much. I believe it installs to/tmp or/var/tmp, since theres few other dirs likely to be writeable from a guest/test account and there may not be a $HOME. Aside from that, i always found chkrootkit to be a very poor tool anyway..
And most worms will scan the local ipblock first before scanning others, and the local ipblock could mean you and a thousand other customers of the same isp.
There is a worm populating which scans for some machines with logins guest and test with the same passwords.. It consists of x86 linux static binaries and won't execute on any other platform even if the logins in question exist on it.. These logins are not default on any platform, but occasionally such accounts exist for testing.. I have a copy of this worm at the office where i will be next week if you want to mail me - bert64@slashdot.firenzee.com Otherwise, you could create a honeypot... This worm makes no attempt to gain root access so you could put up a machine which can't make outgoing connections, and wait for the worm to install itself.
And these cheap devices often support incredibly stupid microsoft protocols like UPNP... that allow machines behind the "firewall" to open arbitrary ports on it.. Thus defeating the point of the firewall completely... It is trivial for a trojan to instruct a upnp compatible device to open ports for it.. This must be one of the most stupid protocols ever devised, and on many consumer level broadband devices it cannot be disabled!
Well, gcc may well get slower and the programs it compiles may well get bigger too. But on the flip side hardware is getting faster and technologies like distcc are appearing to improve compile speed.. So it's really a race between software authors to make slower software and hardware makers to make faster hardware, same as it always has been.... The end user experience appears roughly the same speed as it always has been.
Personally i always try to write portable code, which involves not using features which are broken/different on different compilers or os's... That way, anyone who wants to use your code is free to build and run it on whatever OS he chooses using whatever compiler he chooses... One program of mine for instance, builds on linux with gcc, icc or ccc (compaq's compiler), solaris with gcc and sun workshop, irix with gcc and mipspro, aix with gcc and ibm's compiler etc...
Call center staff will just use what they're given, and will moan about whatever theyre using.. All the call center staff i know moan about the windows systems they use, and they would moan about linux systems too, but most likely they would moan less after the initial whimpering about the changes.. As for installing software, why do your call center staff need to do this? You should prevent people installing arbitrary software on the machines, remember these are business machines there for a specific purpose, third party software could interfere with the business purposes
Actually my biggest gripe with firefox (1.0pre) is that ctrl+u pressed into the url bar no longer clears it, as it did in 0.9.3 In 0.9.3 i could click anywhere in the url bar and hit ctrl+u to clear the whole bar, now i'm forced to do windows style dragging the mouse over all the text (annoying with a huge url that scrolls sideways) and hitting delete... A few other things irritate me, but this is the worst, especially the fact the behavior changed so suddenly annoys me a lot.. Is there any way to easily fix this or have i no choice but to stick with 0.9.3 ?
If it's a problem with temporary files then you should be able to just delete them instead of rebooting, and who's to say rebooting will cause those files to be removed?
Actually, linux will use all your memory as a disk cache.. If the memory truly is faulty, then it should crash linux aswell... It's more likely there is some kind of incompatibility between some parts of the system and/or the drivers and that particular type of memory.
The problem is that the windows gui was never designed with security in mind, it was built on singleuser non networked dos where security wasn't a concern atall.
How exactly does pressing ctrl alt delete make it in any way secure? You could easily create a simulation of the windows login screen under linux that let you press ctrl alt delete and behaved as expected while capturing your password
No, windows server 2003 presents the login screen faster but the network services aren't all loaded yet, and if your running a server surely you want the services running and available? Linux won't display the login box until after everything is initialized, windows will half load itself, show the login and continue loading in the background.
Also you can optimize the hell out of a linux bootup process, all those nice friendly init scripts can be replaced with a hardcoded multithreaded C program, or even removed (resulting in the box booting to whatever login daemons you specified in/etc/inittab instantly after mounting the fs)
Infact, sometime i plan to rewrite a hardcoded init process that just loads up my minimal services without any fancy shit..
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So those people running these sites will only see IE in their logs, assume that noone uses anything else and continue to make sites that require IE.. This is not what we want atall, we should complain to the website authors and not use the site until it works with standards compliant browsers.
Well, piracy is what makes platforms popular, the amiga would never have had any success without piracy, virtually every amiga owner i ever met had piles and piles of pirate games, windows also owes its popularity to piracy
But since when have MS products ever been as good as, or had an equivalent feature set, to their competitors products. The fact that it comes by default will make people use it and not bother to look for anything better. Also as the popularity of alternatives decreases, many people will forget there ever was an alternative atall.
And for that matter, if people stop using third party software firewalls and everyone uses the inbuilt one, malware writers will only have one firewall they need to turn off or change the ruleset of.
Actually, microsoft came out with a 32bit os a year after the first 64bit os's came out. So in order for microsoft to make a 64bit os, we have to wait for a truly innovative company to come out with a 128bit os, and then wait a year for ms to catch up with the step behind.
Well...
BMP is an open, if somewhat shitty format.. Or if not open, its sufficiently simple that it's well understood and the specifications are widely known.
Also, paint comes from a time before ms had a monopoly..
This brings up another point however, ms saw fit to create nonstandard file formats, look at bitmap images and wave audio - there were always formats such as PCX and VOICE, pcx supported some simple compression which made the files much smaller than bitmaps, and they actually loaded faster because of the smaller file sizes and slow media of the day...
As for voice audio files, they had silence compression which wave did not, there was also the apple AIFF format and the amiga 8svx/16svx IFF format that could have been used.
Actually, there are increasing numbers of services in newer versions of windows which CANT be turned off, such as RPC among other things.
I doubt chkrootkit will find it, it's not a rootkit, just a tool that executes under an unpriveleged account and thus can't really hide itself much. I believe it installs to /tmp or /var/tmp, since theres few other dirs likely to be writeable from a guest/test account and there may not be a $HOME. Aside from that, i always found chkrootkit to be a very poor tool anyway..
And most worms will scan the local ipblock first before scanning others, and the local ipblock could mean you and a thousand other customers of the same isp.
There is a worm populating which scans for some machines with logins guest and test with the same passwords.. It consists of x86 linux static binaries and won't execute on any other platform even if the logins in question exist on it..
These logins are not default on any platform, but occasionally such accounts exist for testing..
I have a copy of this worm at the office where i will be next week if you want to mail me - bert64@slashdot.firenzee.com
Otherwise, you could create a honeypot... This worm makes no attempt to gain root access so you could put up a machine which can't make outgoing connections, and wait for the worm to install itself.
And these cheap devices often support incredibly stupid microsoft protocols like UPNP... that allow machines behind the "firewall" to open arbitrary ports on it.. Thus defeating the point of the firewall completely...
It is trivial for a trojan to instruct a upnp compatible device to open ports for it.. This must be one of the most stupid protocols ever devised, and on many consumer level broadband devices it cannot be disabled!
Well, gcc may well get slower and the programs it compiles may well get bigger too. But on the flip side hardware is getting faster and technologies like distcc are appearing to improve compile speed.. So it's really a race between software authors to make slower software and hardware makers to make faster hardware, same as it always has been.... The end user experience appears roughly the same speed as it always has been.
Personally i always try to write portable code, which involves not using features which are broken/different on different compilers or os's...
That way, anyone who wants to use your code is free to build and run it on whatever OS he chooses using whatever compiler he chooses...
One program of mine for instance, builds on linux with gcc, icc or ccc (compaq's compiler), solaris with gcc and sun workshop, irix with gcc and mipspro, aix with gcc and ibm's compiler etc...
Call center staff will just use what they're given, and will moan about whatever theyre using.. All the call center staff i know moan about the windows systems they use, and they would moan about linux systems too, but most likely they would moan less after the initial whimpering about the changes..
As for installing software, why do your call center staff need to do this? You should prevent people installing arbitrary software on the machines, remember these are business machines there for a specific purpose, third party software could interfere with the business purposes
Actually my biggest gripe with firefox (1.0pre) is that ctrl+u pressed into the url bar no longer clears it, as it did in 0.9.3
In 0.9.3 i could click anywhere in the url bar and hit ctrl+u to clear the whole bar, now i'm forced to do windows style dragging the mouse over all the text (annoying with a huge url that scrolls sideways) and hitting delete...
A few other things irritate me, but this is the worst, especially the fact the behavior changed so suddenly annoys me a lot..
Is there any way to easily fix this or have i no choice but to stick with 0.9.3 ?
If it's a problem with temporary files then you should be able to just delete them instead of rebooting, and who's to say rebooting will cause those files to be removed?
Actually, linux will use all your memory as a disk cache.. If the memory truly is faulty, then it should crash linux aswell... It's more likely there is some kind of incompatibility between some parts of the system and/or the drivers and that particular type of memory.
16 year warrantee? assuming a hexadecimal form.. that's not so bad
But the unix version of VNC or rdesktop will let you pass that key sequence straight through...
The problem is that the windows gui was never designed with security in mind, it was built on singleuser non networked dos where security wasn't a concern atall.
How exactly does pressing ctrl alt delete make it in any way secure? You could easily create a simulation of the windows login screen under linux that let you press ctrl alt delete and behaved as expected while capturing your password
That's why thin clients like sunrays with no possible removeable media are a good idea.
No, windows server 2003 presents the login screen faster but the network services aren't all loaded yet, and if your running a server surely you want the services running and available?
Linux won't display the login box until after everything is initialized, windows will half load itself, show the login and continue loading in the background.
The google toolbar is IE only, it attempts to implement missing features into IE that firefox already has.
Also you can optimize the hell out of a linux bootup process, all those nice friendly init scripts can be replaced with a hardcoded multithreaded C program, or even removed (resulting in the box booting to whatever login daemons you specified in /etc/inittab instantly after mounting the fs)
Infact, sometime i plan to rewrite a hardcoded init process that just loads up my minimal services without any fancy shit..