Because someone always mentions DOD-5200.28-STD Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria ("Orange Book") compliance let me just say by the time it would get round to being certificated as a proper defense-grade OS it will be hideously obsolete - the latest Micro$oft OS to be certified "secure" (hahahahah) is NT 4.0 which shows how long the process takes. Take a history trip and look at some of the Certified Products.
In any case, to be a properly secure distribution you need DoD/NSA style certifications. The Common Criteria go part of the way there, but again certification is slow and really not universally accepted. (There's a flame bait for you CC fans).
Bottom line - true security requires seriously lengthy evaluation and certification. And even so, a product like NT 4.0 is still being found to have security holes to this day.
Sigh.. anyone fancy rewriting Multics for the Intel platform?:)
Nope.. who the heck wants to read fiction on the web? That's what books are for.
There's nothing I enjoy more than a soak in the bath with a good book.. but if you think I'm gonna balance a $1500 laptop on the edge of the bath to read, forget it!
Hmmm.. we did a couple of thousand addys, but we deliberately restricted the circulation so it DIDN'T get out onto Usenet and across different institutions.
I'm pretty certain I remember EMPs on Usenet before then.. but the point I wanted to make is it's no big deal.. it's an obvious use of the medium and frankly he's right when he says that someone else would have done it if he hadn't.
IMHO the really evil bastards are those who write email-addy-gathering spiders that scrape email addresses of web pages.. those things are the bane of my life I can tell you!
Back in 1987 we mass-mailed everyone at the university I was studying at to offer them floppy disks for sale. We gathered the names from the mail system usage tables on our Multics system.
Needless to say we got dragged up before the head of school, and severely told off.. but in those days they didn't have any rules against spamming, so that was all they could do.
That was 15 years ago. I guess we weren't the first then either.
Lavasoft's AdAware program is great at dealing with these spyware/scumware packages.. I don't know if it deals with Morpheus yet but it's updated regularly (like an antivirus package).
If you don't have it installed on your Windows system, then do so RIGHT NOW. Heck, these guys are heroes.. best of all it's free!:)
Well hey I run a site about the Orange Book and it's still a pretty good basis for ranking systems.. the Common Criteria are derived from it, but there's nothing like a good old DoD certification if you're responsible for the security of any major nation.
The TCSEC certification process is important in that it's a real certification.. if you get a TCSEC rating of "B" or better you know you've got a kick-ass secure system, and the US Government says so. Certification is, and always will be, extremely time consuming and expensive.
Also, the most secure systems tend to be weird and wonderful, or hideously out-of-date. Check out the site;) and have a look. Oh yeah, and don't expect Windows XP to get certified any time soon.
On the principle you can never have too much litigation, I wonder who Amazon is going to sue next?
Maybe it can bring an action against that long river in South America that stole its name. The online store did come first, didn't it? Just think of the damages all of those native people would have to pay out. Maybe they'll have to pulp all the rainforest for even more books for Amazon to sell:)
The bottom line is dichromats and anomalous trichomats (such as myself) really screw up complex color models, and ultimately the best designs tend to be those that concentrate on providing a really high contrast, and never, ever use colour as the primary way of conveying information (e.g. press the GREEN button for this, RED button for that).
It's quite easy to test a color scheme to see if it's readable across all types of colour perception, simply load a sample into your favourite paint or photo editing package and test the colours with each of the RGB elements removed in turn.. then try it in monochrome to check that it's still readable. If you try this with Slashdot you'll find that the colour scheme is great:)
Now if only those b*stards who make kit with Red/Orange/Green LEDs took the same amount of care the world would be a happier place!
Well, BT has to find a way of paying of its mountain of debt somehow.. why not tax everyone on the net instead of actually finding a business plan that works.
Actually, BT can also (just about) lay claim to inventing the first electronic computer (when they were the Post Office) at Bletchley Park towards during WWII. Maybe they can tax us for that as well.
You're damn right, I posted elsewhere here but Cloud 9 were unbelievably shitty in terms of service. DoS is just an excuse for their own incompetence. ("DoS my arse")
DoS my arse - Cloud 9 were the ISP for my wife's company, and if their experience is anything to go by it's not suprising they went bust.
Let's start with the awful customer service, unreliable connections, awful customer service, immoral and possibly illegal business practices, awful customer service and awful customer service.
Her firm had a problem with the mail relay, it's only a small firm and they'd left the relay open and some spammers had found it. Cloud 9 terminated their connection without notice of any kind, and when finally they found a human being to talk to (they like to do their tech support by fax) they basically tried to blackmail her firm into handing over control of their domain, hosting etc etc to Cloud 9 before they'd reinstate the service. Needless to say, they got dumped very quickly indeed and went to Demon.
Frankly they're a shitty outfit and they've got their just rewards.
Move out of Chicago. Better still move out of Illinois. Even better, move out of the industrialised world altogther. I understand that they're looking for IT consultants in Kandahar. Your Russian may come in useful.
Apologise. Make humor of it. Show some hubris. Everyone makes mistakes. My biggest involved rat poison and some hamsters.
Find a new career where no-one has access to a web browser. Maybe a prison warder in the state penitentiary?
Invent an UNDO button for real life. Get Mr Shifman to press it about a zillion times and let him start over.
Any more ideas?:)
Re:Happens in Brick and Mortar Businesses
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
Oh man! I just got broadband too and AdCritic was one of the reasons!
Anyway, NTL (my cableco) is looking so financially wobbly it's just not true so I may lose that too.
Life sucks. Oh well, at least I don't live in Afghanistan:)
Even the BBC collapsed under the sheer weight.. it was TVs, Radio or hunting down smaller news sites such as Ananova or nothing.
Hey look I wrote about it:) here, just a monthly diary entry. I just thought it was a significant moment in net history.
One thing it made me do though was change my news provider to Ananova, run by the UK's Press Association - the stories are posted much more quickly than anywhere else:)
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, to be a properly secure distribution you need DoD/NSA style certifications. The Common Criteria go part of the way there, but again certification is slow and really not universally accepted. (There's a flame bait for you CC fans).
Bottom line - true security requires seriously lengthy evaluation and certification. And even so, a product like NT 4.0 is still being found to have security holes to this day.
Sigh.. anyone fancy rewriting Multics for the Intel platform? :)
Death to these hand-wringing liberal rebels!
Check out scumware.com and Parasiteware for more info on these. Another case for AdAware!
Ouch! Nasty! As I said, these people are lowlife scum who deserve to meet an unfortunate end in a dark alley.
Sounds like another job for AdAware!
Great idea. Maybe I can take down the speed limit signs in my neighbourhood so I can go as fast as I like. Doh.
Yes everything I read on the web is true. It must be, because they would allow it to be published otherwise, would they?
There's nothing I enjoy more than a soak in the bath with a good book.. but if you think I'm gonna balance a $1500 laptop on the edge of the bath to read, forget it!
I'm pretty certain I remember EMPs on Usenet before then.. but the point I wanted to make is it's no big deal.. it's an obvious use of the medium and frankly he's right when he says that someone else would have done it if he hadn't.
IMHO the really evil bastards are those who write email-addy-gathering spiders that scrape email addresses of web pages.. those things are the bane of my life I can tell you!
Needless to say we got dragged up before the head of school, and severely told off.. but in those days they didn't have any rules against spamming, so that was all they could do.
That was 15 years ago. I guess we weren't the first then either.
We never did sell any floppy disks though! :)
If you don't have it installed on your Windows system, then do so RIGHT NOW. Heck, these guys are heroes.. best of all it's free! :)
The TCSEC certification process is important in that it's a real certification.. if you get a TCSEC rating of "B" or better you know you've got a kick-ass secure system, and the US Government says so. Certification is, and always will be, extremely time consuming and expensive.
Also, the most secure systems tend to be weird and wonderful, or hideously out-of-date. Check out the site ;) and have a look. Oh yeah, and don't expect Windows XP to get certified any time soon.
Maybe it can bring an action against that long river in South America that stole its name. The online store did come first, didn't it? Just think of the damages all of those native people would have to pay out. Maybe they'll have to pulp all the rainforest for even more books for Amazon to sell :)
This is a great page - Ocular Times.
The bottom line is dichromats and anomalous trichomats (such as myself) really screw up complex color models, and ultimately the best designs tend to be those that concentrate on providing a really high contrast, and never, ever use colour as the primary way of conveying information (e.g. press the GREEN button for this, RED button for that).
It's quite easy to test a color scheme to see if it's readable across all types of colour perception, simply load a sample into your favourite paint or photo editing package and test the colours with each of the RGB elements removed in turn.. then try it in monochrome to check that it's still readable. If you try this with Slashdot you'll find that the colour scheme is great :)
Now if only those b*stards who make kit with Red/Orange/Green LEDs took the same amount of care the world would be a happier place!
Actually, BT can also (just about) lay claim to inventing the first electronic computer (when they were the Post Office) at Bletchley Park towards during WWII. Maybe they can tax us for that as well.
http://www.cloud-nine.com/
Clearly Cloud 9 likes to treat users the same way *I* like to treat users, but it doesn't work so well those users are actually customers.
This would be why I'm not in business for myself :)
You're damn right, I posted elsewhere here but Cloud 9 were unbelievably shitty in terms of service. DoS is just an excuse for their own incompetence. ("DoS my arse")
Let's start with the awful customer service, unreliable connections, awful customer service, immoral and possibly illegal business practices, awful customer service and awful customer service.
Her firm had a problem with the mail relay, it's only a small firm and they'd left the relay open and some spammers had found it. Cloud 9 terminated their connection without notice of any kind, and when finally they found a human being to talk to (they like to do their tech support by fax) they basically tried to blackmail her firm into handing over control of their domain, hosting etc etc to Cloud 9 before they'd reinstate the service. Needless to say, they got dumped very quickly indeed and went to Demon.
Frankly they're a shitty outfit and they've got their just rewards.
If you don't know about Snapnames, read about it here, but essentially it's a back-ordering service.
NSI are actually a Snapnames affiliate, so they get $7 per back-ordered name through their site. I guess they want the rest of the money too.
- A name change. How about Bernard Ctrl-Alt-Delman?
- Move out of Chicago. Better still move out of Illinois. Even better, move out of the industrialised world altogther. I understand that they're looking for IT consultants in Kandahar. Your Russian may come in useful.
- Apologise. Make humor of it. Show some hubris. Everyone makes mistakes. My biggest involved rat poison and some hamsters.
- Find a new career where no-one has access to a web browser. Maybe a prison warder in the state penitentiary?
- Invent an UNDO button for real life. Get Mr Shifman to press it about a zillion times and let him start over.
Any more ideas?Oh man! I just got broadband too and AdCritic was one of the reasons!
:)
Anyway, NTL (my cableco) is looking so financially wobbly it's just not true so I may lose that too.
Life sucks. Oh well, at least I don't live in Afghanistan
Hey look I wrote about it :) here, just a monthly diary entry. I just thought it was a significant moment in net history.
One thing it made me do though was change my news provider to Ananova, run by the UK's Press Association - the stories are posted much more quickly than anywhere else :)