Amen to that! But this is a problem faced by all government workers, not just those in the technology sector. My wife teaches high school and is daily faced with teachers that aren't worth a tinker's damn but who, because of seniority, draw higher salaries. In fact, in our county (Fauquier, Virginia) these teachers lobbied to have the pay differential for those with masters and PhDs cut and, instead, put the money into paying for logevity. That's not at all the smartest way to get young, qualified people into the teaching profession.
Government workers are gonna have to face the fact that, if they want better pay and more respect, they have to get rid of the dead weight in their ranks. Untill they do, the tax payers (their bosses) will continue to cut government budgets.
I keep hoping that Microsloth will make an even bigger misstep some day. My preference would be to see.Net become the biggest computer fiasco since dBase IV but anything that makes an Ashton-Tate out of the gang at Redmond would please me to no end.
Shades of Vietnam! From the Washington Post: "[S]oldiers involved in the battle said the live video links gave them little useful information and were sometimes a distraction, encouraging higher-level military staffs to try to micromanage the fighting." Look here for the full article.
I stopped contributing to WETA, a Washington, DC public radio and TV station, some years ago when they admitted to selling my name and address to mailing lists. I knew they had done it before they told me because they had uniquely messed up my name on their labels and that same name kept cropping up time after time. They called me during their last fund-raiser and asked for a contribution. I told them that I would be happy to contribute but only after I went a year without getting any junk mail with that name on it!
Ah, how I long for the good old days when you could just set a cron job that would mail a spammer a core dump every 10 minutes.
I have to wonder, though, instead of just blocking server, if someone might not develop software that would email back to the orginator of the message (that is, the retailer who created the spam or had it created) and make it very clear that you will not buy his product simply because he spammed you. (Are you listening, SonicBlue? I ain't buying squat from y'all!) Maybe that would get the point across.
Of course, there are always the bozos that break any cartel and loosers that will answer spams with subjects like "View my webcam!!"
The Tom Clancy games are another villian in this regard. The one's I've installed for my kids made no attempt to see what version of DirectX I was running. They just proceeded to stomp all over it and install DirectX 5. Pissed me off, especially considering the hell I went through with the upgrade from DirectX 6 to 7. I've told my kids (and the games's publisher) that I will not buy any more of their games until they promise me that they will stop that. Naturally, I have gotten no response...
Not when it's coming from Dubya! He's just showing his daddy's spine. I wonder if we can get Maggie Thatcher to make Dubya stand firm on Microsoft and tobacco the way she got George the First to intervene in Kuwait?
This might work okay on toe-poppers and bouncing betties but it's gonna get blown to bits by an anti-tank or anti-vehicular mine. The monsters that we used to practice planting in the 82d Airborne could blow (we were told) a plate of steel through the bottom of any US or Soviet main battle tank. That's likely enough force to send this little box (or pieces of it) quite high in the air.
The issue is not the bomb making instructions but the hacking charge. Seizing this punk's computer is a perfectly legit way of gathering evidence against him for hacking, something that he has admitted to already.
As far as I'm concerned, this bozo's defence is specious. He hacks web sites because that is the only way to get his message out. So, I can hack Micro$oft because I think Windows is junk? I can spray paint lime-green PT Cruisers because I think the color sucks? This boy need some serious wall-to-wall counseling by my old First Sergeant!
the treatment he's going through? Huh? Just what treatment are he and you whining about? The guy has admitted to cracking into sites, a felony, right? So his computer equipment has been seized and he is questioned. What is so out of line about that? It's called "gathering evidence". I hope the sonofabitch is packed off for a good long while and kept away from computers for even longer.
Another habitable planet might be a good idea but we (apparently) won't be needing it very soon (barring the actions of the Bush EPA).
Frankly, I've always wondered why the rush to find other civilizations. Unless we confidently expect to be able to do to them what Cortez did to the Aztecs, I think the best idea is to hope the Earth stays hidden from prying eyes. Afterall, we may be Aztecs to them! And since when has a lesser civilization benefitted from meeting a superior one?
So this is what my tax dollars went to vs. stopping Enron before it was too late. SIGH! Besides, I always heard that it was a sin to let a fool keep his money.
I dunno... Based on America's experience in the 19th Century, it seems that one should recommend you Spanish speaking countries to those attempting to build a military reputation.
Q: Why did the French plant trees along the Champ Elysee? A: Because Germans like to march in the shade.
I see nothing wrong in reverse engineering a file format. I've written such tools before. It's done all the time, even by the big guys. Microsoft reads WordPerfect and visa-versa. Used to be Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel could swap files. And look at Sun's StarOffice--reads and writes MS Office file formats. When I was working at NASA, the most popular piece of software we had for Macs and PCs on our Network was MacLink for converting popular Mac formats (like MacWord) to PC formats (like WordStar and WordPerfect; a time before Windows).
So why not pirate the books, too? I lived in Korea in the mid-80's and pirated software complete with manuals was common place. And not just manuals. All books were easily available in pirated form--from NY Times best sellers, to classical poetry, to computer manuals. The prices were about 1/10th to 1/5th of the US list price (yes, even that was copied on the jacket!). In addition, there were special editions printed just for the Asian market with the US publisher's permission. My copy of K&R 2d is one of these Asian student editions.
I worked as a government contractor for **years** and I must say that commercial applications development has it beat by orders of magnitude!! This is especailly true when dealing with security organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency or the CIA. For one thing, I refuse to sit for a lie dector test. More than that, their security regulations are archane and written by people whose computer experience ended with punch cards. Stuff like "How to Wipe Magnetic Core" but no mention of a personal computer. I worked three years in a SCIF where it was forbidden under pain of dismissal and prison to carry magnetic media in or out but where all the computers were hooked up to the internet with full WWW capabilities!! You figure...
Yes, the is a hold up! I live about 40 miles WSW of Washington, DC in a largely rural county and growing bedroom community. Except for a small radius within the local town, there is no option for DSL or cable modem nor will the local phone or cable companies tells us when they will provide these services. My only option is to pay for ISDN--a setup charge of about $500 and a monthly fee of $240/month for unlimited use.
Even in Fairfax County, the nation's richest, broadband is not univerally available. A friend of mine lives within walking distance to the Metro and still can't get DSL or cable modem.
Hey, recall the old days--before GUIs and WWW? Back in the DOS 2 and 3 days, I recall many of my friends accusing Prodigy of trying a similar stunt. The assertion was that when you ran the Prodigy software, it made a listing of all files on your local drives and forwarded that to the Prodigy server. Prodigy denied it but more than one claim running around FidoNet was that users would make a clean copy of the Prodigy floopy, and, after connecting for a brief session, found that floopy now contained new hidden files with the directory trees of both their A and B drive on it.
To spend several hundred dollars on something that can be done with less than a buck reminds me of what Richard Prior said about cocaine: "It's God's way of telling you that you have too much money." Like cell phone handsets, palm pilots just seem like a case of conspicuous consumption to me.
Granted, there are useful things for handhelds. I took part in an early prototype of a handheld PC with hand writing recognition and bar coding for performing inventory of warehouses and cargo shipments. It worked great and saved a lot of money. That and what you describe are valid business uses. But outside of a business setting, what I see are people taking down grocery lists, reading novels that were too bad to be bought by a real publisher, or preforming the electronic equivalent of tying a string around their finger. That is stupid technology.
Okay, I guess I am just out of sync with technology but, despite having been in this business for 20 years and online since MILNET/ARPANET in the mid-80s, and despite having written and managed a web product for 5 years, I have absolutely no interest in being connected 24x7. The only use I have found for my cell phone is being able to run to the mall and still get a call if the church youth group needs to tell me that my son broke his leg. But I do not give that number to my coworkers or customers and have told more than one boss that I will under no circumstances wear a beeper.
What on earth do I need with portals that dump me stock reports faster than I can trade or palm pilots that link me to recipe web sites (or even SlashDot?). I go along with the Chicago economist and Nobel winner Milton Friedman that palm pilots are stupid technology--multi-hundred dollar items that take merely the place of a 49 pad of paper and a stubby pencil. This, I know, puts me out of step with almost all my coworkers but so be it.
So, what do I want in a cell phone? Not stock quotes; not web access; not images; not even (are you listening Nokia?) centipede! I just want to be able to be reach or be reached by my kids or wife from wherever I am and not have to worry about the g**d*** out of service area or all lines busy messages! Is that to much to ask?
There is no other way to put it! Statements in Microsloth's security bulletin are pure lies. The only way one cannot take them as lies it to believe that Mircosoft engineers are too stupid to recognize the problem:
* The first vulnerability involves a flaw in the handling of the Content-Disposition and Content-Type header fields in an HTML stream.... A security vulnerability exists because, if an attacker altered the HTML header information in a certain way, it could be possible to make IE believe that an executable file was actually a different type of file -- one that it is appropriate to simply open without asking the user for confirmation.
and
So, is the problem that IE is handling certain MIME types incorrectly?
No. IE handles files appropriate for their MIME types - the problem in this case is that it's possible to convince IE that a file is of a different MIME type than it really is, by altering the Content-Disposition and Content-Header fields. IE would then handle the file in the wrong way, potentially with dangerous results.
Wrong! Lies!! The problem exists because IE refuses to believe the headers and reads the file extension instead. This is completely at odds with the standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that! But this is a problem faced by all government workers, not just those in the technology sector. My wife teaches high school and is daily faced with teachers that aren't worth a tinker's damn but who, because of seniority, draw higher salaries. In fact, in our county (Fauquier, Virginia) these teachers lobbied to have the pay differential for those with masters and PhDs cut and, instead, put the money into paying for logevity. That's not at all the smartest way to get young, qualified people into the teaching profession.
Government workers are gonna have to face the fact that, if they want better pay and more respect, they have to get rid of the dead weight in their ranks. Untill they do, the tax payers (their bosses) will continue to cut government budgets.
I keep hoping that Microsloth will make an even bigger misstep some day. My preference would be to see .Net become the biggest computer fiasco since dBase IV but anything that makes an Ashton-Tate out of the gang at Redmond would please me to no end.
Sounds like a Windows problem. Maybe a Mac problem, too. But I can't see this happening on Linux!
Shades of Vietnam! From the Washington Post: "[S]oldiers involved in the battle said the live video links gave them little useful information and were sometimes a distraction, encouraging higher-level military staffs to try to micromanage the fighting." Look here for the full article.
Yes. I did this the last time the Republican National Committee asked for my donation.
I stopped contributing to WETA, a Washington, DC public radio and TV station, some years ago when they admitted to selling my name and address to mailing lists. I knew they had done it before they told me because they had uniquely messed up my name on their labels and that same name kept cropping up time after time. They called me during their last fund-raiser and asked for a contribution. I told them that I would be happy to contribute but only after I went a year without getting any junk mail with that name on it!
Ah, how I long for the good old days when you could just set a cron job that would mail a spammer a core dump every 10 minutes.
I have to wonder, though, instead of just blocking server, if someone might not develop software that would email back to the orginator of the message (that is, the retailer who created the spam or had it created) and make it very clear that you will not buy his product simply because he spammed you. (Are you listening, SonicBlue? I ain't buying squat from y'all!) Maybe that would get the point across.
Of course, there are always the bozos that break any cartel and loosers that will answer spams with subjects like "View my webcam!!"
The Tom Clancy games are another villian in this regard. The one's I've installed for my kids made no attempt to see what version of DirectX I was running. They just proceeded to stomp all over it and install DirectX 5. Pissed me off, especially considering the hell I went through with the upgrade from DirectX 6 to 7. I've told my kids (and the games's publisher) that I will not buy any more of their games until they promise me that they will stop that. Naturally, I have gotten no response...
Not when it's coming from Dubya! He's just showing his daddy's spine. I wonder if we can get Maggie Thatcher to make Dubya stand firm on Microsoft and tobacco the way she got George the First to intervene in Kuwait?
This might work okay on toe-poppers and bouncing betties but it's gonna get blown to bits by an anti-tank or anti-vehicular mine. The monsters that we used to practice planting in the 82d Airborne could blow (we were told) a plate of steel through the bottom of any US or Soviet main battle tank. That's likely enough force to send this little box (or pieces of it) quite high in the air.
The issue is not the bomb making instructions but the hacking charge. Seizing this punk's computer is a perfectly legit way of gathering evidence against him for hacking, something that he has admitted to already.
As far as I'm concerned, this bozo's defence is specious. He hacks web sites because that is the only way to get his message out. So, I can hack Micro$oft because I think Windows is junk? I can spray paint lime-green PT Cruisers because I think the color sucks? This boy need some serious wall-to-wall counseling by my old First Sergeant!
the treatment he's going through? Huh? Just what treatment are he and you whining about? The guy has admitted to cracking into sites, a felony, right? So his computer equipment has been seized and he is questioned. What is so out of line about that? It's called "gathering evidence". I hope the sonofabitch is packed off for a good long while and kept away from computers for even longer.
Another habitable planet might be a good idea but we (apparently) won't be needing it very soon (barring the actions of the Bush EPA).
Frankly, I've always wondered why the rush to find other civilizations. Unless we confidently expect to be able to do to them what Cortez did to the Aztecs, I think the best idea is to hope the Earth stays hidden from prying eyes. Afterall, we may be Aztecs to them! And since when has a lesser civilization benefitted from meeting a superior one?
So this is what my tax dollars went to vs. stopping Enron before it was too late. SIGH! Besides, I always heard that it was a sin to let a fool keep his money.
I dunno... Based on America's experience in the 19th Century, it seems that one should recommend you Spanish speaking countries to those attempting to build a military reputation.
Q: Why did the French plant trees along the Champ Elysee?
A: Because Germans like to march in the shade.
I see nothing wrong in reverse engineering a file format. I've written such tools before. It's done all the time, even by the big guys. Microsoft reads WordPerfect and visa-versa. Used to be Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel could swap files. And look at Sun's StarOffice--reads and writes MS Office file formats. When I was working at NASA, the most popular piece of software we had for Macs and PCs on our Network was MacLink for converting popular Mac formats (like MacWord) to PC formats (like WordStar and WordPerfect; a time before Windows).
So why not pirate the books, too? I lived in Korea in the mid-80's and pirated software complete with manuals was common place. And not just manuals. All books were easily available in pirated form--from NY Times best sellers, to classical poetry, to computer manuals. The prices were about 1/10th to 1/5th of the US list price (yes, even that was copied on the jacket!). In addition, there were special editions printed just for the Asian market with the US publisher's permission. My copy of K&R 2d is one of these Asian student editions.
I worked as a government contractor for **years** and I must say that commercial applications development has it beat by orders of magnitude!! This is especailly true when dealing with security organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency or the CIA. For one thing, I refuse to sit for a lie dector test. More than that, their security regulations are archane and written by people whose computer experience ended with punch cards. Stuff like "How to Wipe Magnetic Core" but no mention of a personal computer. I worked three years in a SCIF where it was forbidden under pain of dismissal and prison to carry magnetic media in or out but where all the computers were hooked up to the internet with full WWW capabilities!! You figure...
Yes, the is a hold up! I live about 40 miles WSW of Washington, DC in a largely rural county and growing bedroom community. Except for a small radius within the local town, there is no option for DSL or cable modem nor will the local phone or cable companies tells us when they will provide these services. My only option is to pay for ISDN--a setup charge of about $500 and a monthly fee of $240/month for unlimited use.
Even in Fairfax County, the nation's richest, broadband is not univerally available. A friend of mine lives within walking distance to the Metro and still can't get DSL or cable modem.
Hey, recall the old days--before GUIs and WWW? Back in the DOS 2 and 3 days, I recall many of my friends accusing Prodigy of trying a similar stunt. The assertion was that when you ran the Prodigy software, it made a listing of all files on your local drives and forwarded that to the Prodigy server. Prodigy denied it but more than one claim running around FidoNet was that users would make a clean copy of the Prodigy floopy, and, after connecting for a brief session, found that floopy now contained new hidden files with the directory trees of both their A and B drive on it.
AMC did an Abbott and Costello marathon last New Year's Day. I wish they were doing it again this year.
To spend several hundred dollars on something that can be done with less than a buck reminds me of what Richard Prior said about cocaine: "It's God's way of telling you that you have too much money." Like cell phone handsets, palm pilots just seem like a case of conspicuous consumption to me.
Granted, there are useful things for handhelds. I took part in an early prototype of a handheld PC with hand writing recognition and bar coding for performing inventory of warehouses and cargo shipments. It worked great and saved a lot of money. That and what you describe are valid business uses. But outside of a business setting, what I see are people taking down grocery lists, reading novels that were too bad to be bought by a real publisher, or preforming the electronic equivalent of tying a string around their finger. That is stupid technology.
Okay, I guess I am just out of sync with technology but, despite having been in this business for 20 years and online since MILNET/ARPANET in the mid-80s, and despite having written and managed a web product for 5 years, I have absolutely no interest in being connected 24x7. The only use I have found for my cell phone is being able to run to the mall and still get a call if the church youth group needs to tell me that my son broke his leg. But I do not give that number to my coworkers or customers and have told more than one boss that I will under no circumstances wear a beeper.
What on earth do I need with portals that dump me stock reports faster than I can trade or palm pilots that link me to recipe web sites (or even SlashDot?). I go along with the Chicago economist and Nobel winner Milton Friedman that palm pilots are stupid technology--multi-hundred dollar items that take merely the place of a 49 pad of paper and a stubby pencil. This, I know, puts me out of step with almost all my coworkers but so be it.
So, what do I want in a cell phone? Not stock quotes; not web access; not images; not even (are you listening Nokia?) centipede! I just want to be able to be reach or be reached by my kids or wife from wherever I am and not have to worry about the g**d*** out of service area or all lines busy messages! Is that to much to ask?
There is no other way to put it! Statements in Microsloth's security bulletin are pure lies. The only way one cannot take them as lies it to believe that Mircosoft engineers are too stupid to recognize the problem:
... A security vulnerability exists because, if an attacker altered the HTML header information in a certain way, it could be possible to make IE believe that an executable file was actually a different type of file -- one that it is appropriate to simply open without asking the user for confirmation.
* The first vulnerability involves a flaw in the handling of the Content-Disposition and Content-Type header fields in an HTML stream.
and
So, is the problem that IE is handling certain MIME types incorrectly?
No. IE handles files appropriate for their MIME types - the problem in this case is that it's possible to convince IE that a file is of a different MIME type than it really is, by altering the Content-Disposition and Content-Header fields. IE would then handle the file in the wrong way, potentially with dangerous results.
Wrong! Lies!! The problem exists because IE refuses to believe the headers and reads the file extension instead. This is completely at odds with the standard.