There is no such thing as a "text file". There are only files encoded in EBCDIC, 7-Bit-ASCII, 8-Bit-ASCII, Latin-1, Latin-15, Latin-Whatever, Windows-1252, Shift-JIS, Big5, UTF-4/8/16/... according to Unicode Version... hopefully with an intact BOM to indicate endianess, with \n, \r, \r\n or something else as line endings, and without any reference mechanism, hence without a sane way to handle citations, ToCs, indexes, glossaries and footnotes. Let alone illustrations.
Granted, compared to anything else, text files are a pretty safe bet, even if they dont exist:-)
Thursday May 30, 12:29 pm Eastern Time
Press Release
SOURCE: Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
Open Source Software May Offer Target for Terrorists, According to Study by Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Committee for the Common Defense
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 30, 2002--Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to "open source" as some groups propose.
"Opening the Open Source Debate", a soon to be released white paper by Alexis de Tocqueville Institution details the complex issues surrounding open source, particularly if federal agencies such as the Department of Defense or the Federal Aviation Administration use software that inherently requires that its blueprints, source code and architecture is made widely available to any person interested - without discretion.
In a paper to be released next week, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution outlines how open source might facilitate efforts to disrupt or sabotage electronic commerce, air traffic control or even sensitive surveillance systems.
Unlike proprietary software, open source software does not make the underlying code of a software confidential.
"Computer systems are the backbone of U.S. national security", says Fossedal, chairman of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution and its Committee for the Common Defense, which will release the study. "Before the Pentagon and other federal agencies make uninformed decision to alter the very foundation of computer security, they should study the potential consequences carefully."
Contact:
Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
Ken Brown, 202/548-0006
Don't get me wrong, I am not unhappy with LINUX. It will get all the people
who want to turn MINIX in BSD UNIX off my back. But in all honesty, I would
suggest that people who want a **MODERN** "free" OS look around for a
microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that.
Re:Not only was the ultimate eBook reader out...
on
Bubble Bursts for e-Books
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is actually one of the biggest problems with e-books (apart from neither vendors nor customers being particularly interested in them):
You can read real books just fine even hundreds of years after they were printed. E-book-readers will, like all hardware and software products, evolve, sometimes breaking compatibility. If I would decide to buy one today, it is unlikely that I can read the books I have for it in 50 years unless I keep the reader around and working. And keeping a ton of different readers for all my books in different formats doesn't sound all that attractive either.
This is of course worse with brain-dead DRM formats, that will likely be updated or replaced everytime they are cracked, which propably won't take long if there would be enough interest. But even HTML evolved quite a bit, and I doubt modern browsers get the first versions quite right - and it's just 10 years old.
Simplicity is great (and IMHO the lack of it is the biggest reason why
newer features don't get used), as long as you can still do what you need
to.
The biggest problem right now is the root user, IMHO. You just need root
privileges too often, and in classical Unix, you either are root, or you
are not. There is, however, no reason why my MTA has to be able to change
everybodys passwords, write to raw disks, load kernel modules or modify
packet filter rules just because it has to listen on port 25. Capabilities
fix just that: You can grant a process the capability to listen on a port < 1024 without neccessarily granting it anything else.
File system permissions are less critical, but cumbersome. Imagine a file
that should be readable by the members of two groups, for example.
No easy way in classical Unix except creating a new group with the members
of them both, and you have to keep them in synch manually. It gets worse
if you want to make sure that people don't accidentally (or with malicious
intent, but that is a lost battle in most cases) don't leak things they may legitimatly work with to others who don't. Mandatory Access Controls (MAC) make this possible, but it is a lot of work to set up - basically, you define a context of users, objects (like files) and processes to work on them that is hopefully safe, and the system forbids anything else - you might be allowed to view a file in a browser, but not to copy it to another file with different permissions, for example.
As I said, things like Capabilities or MAC are becoming more common. There are, as usual, kernel patches for Linux, FreeBSD 5 has this kind of things, proprietary Unixes sometimes have special "Trusted" versions with these features.
For more insight about the Unix models, I suggest reading some of the papers written by the Eros project, or the Unix Haters Handbook, where some Multics people talk about that. Asking VMS veterans can also be enlightening.
Not that I would want to get associated with that other troll, but
how exactly do you suppose that Unix permissions or "design" prevent
viruses from spreading? Last I looked, I could connect to Linux boxes
all over the net quite fine using my normal unprivileged user account,
there's nothing that would malicious code from doing the same. A virus
doesn't need to run as root to replicate or anything.
In fact, the classical Unix security model with ugw/rwx permissions
and the omnipotent root is pretty poor (granted, it is better then
no permissions or mostly unused ones). Which is why basically
every Unix-like OS is busy implementing extensions to it, like
capabilities, fine-grained ACLs, MAC etc. I don't know about any
Linux distro or other Unix that uses them sensibly out of the box,
however.
Set up a Honeynet. Nothing more insightful than watching real attackers trying to do their thing, without having to worry about getting them off your production systems ASAP.
It is a much better way to learn about the real security risks than trying to come up with a network secured against threats learned from books only.
Another good idea to enlighten your students is to have them install one redhat 6.0 box, and a current one. Likely, the 6.0 box will be rooted in a matter of hours, or, if you are lucky, days. Then, use the slashdot search engine to compare the number of posts claiming that Linux is inherently secure when RH6.0 was current vs. today - likely, you'll find that they are the same. Lesson learned: No matter what people tell you, all software sucks. The best thing to know as someone dealing with security.
If you are too cheap for an anti-virus program, how about not executing
programs from untrusted sources? While we are at it, if you are too cheap
for a personal firewall, not having arbitrary ports open could be an OK
solution.
There are drawbacks, however: a) You have to understand, at least a little,
how computers and networks work, and b) it severely harms the economy, because
you neither pay people who write these useless kinds of software, nor those
who "repair" you computer after a break-in against which they offer little
protection anyway.
Why do people keep writing books about "C/C++", or keep referring to it
as if there was such a programming language? They are two, distinct
languages with radically different problems and very different styles,
used mostly for very different things by disjoint programmer communities.
They have less in common than Java and C#.
And don't argue that C is a subset of C++ - is isn't. It never really was
(look at the output of "printf("%d", sizeof('x'));" for a start, never mind "#include <string.h>" vs. "#include <cstring>"), and they
evolved independently since. Today, C contains lots of stuff not in C++,
like variable-size arrays, some fixed-sized integer types (like "32-bit
integer" or "integer as large as a pointer"), the boolean types
are incompatible etc.
One would expect that people who talk about programming languages, or even
write a book about them, would know what language they are talking about.
Does it work with any mailinglist or only a select few?
Well, read the page! You can get basically any mailing list via gmane that can be subscribed by anybody. For the mailing list manager, gmane looks just like any other (human) subscriber.
I'd like to express my disagreement with your defense. Making Unix-like systems and the services that run on them look easier to people with a short attention span, or those that have better things to do, is not a good idea. Unix is not simple. Nor is Windows, for that matter, or Mac OS, or BeOS, Eros, VMS, or any other system that uses general-purpose computers for complex tasks.
Computers, and especially computer networks, are f*cking complex beasts, and handling them properly is difficult. It you mishandle them, they are dangerous. The ugly thing is, you might not care, because they harm other, innocent people, not you (or they do, but you won't notice).
This kind of thinking brought us the MCSE, personal firewalls, and outlook worms filling up mailboxes of non-vulnerable people, taking down one mailserver or the other on their way, wasting millions in bandwidth. And I don't care if I'm attacked by a Windows zombie box or because somebody misunderstood samba permissions and didn't bother to filter out related traffic at the (hopefully existing) firewall. If you don't know how to your computer and your software works, that's OK, division of labour has been a sucessfully deployed strategy for some millenia. Just pay somebody who does. Or take your time to learn. Or keep the fuck away from public networks, so that you can't harm anybody else.
It would appear its not a newsgroup but a webboard?
Gmane is a service that lets you read and post to mailing lists via NNTP with a usenet newsreader, and makes archives available on the web. So, Ian posted to a mailing list, which was routed to usenet and archived as a (read-only) "webboard".
And now, would somebody please mod me off-topic?:-)
Re:there is a national ID system
on
Beyond Fear
·
· Score: 1
...companies that make a living out of collecting data about you, aggregating it, and providing that information to others. A good system of national IDs with good privacy legislation would make those companies redundant.
Why would they? Just because you have an ID card doesn't have anything to do with the collection of personal data. I have a national ID card, and neither is that itself used to create a personality profile of me, nor does it hinder lots of companies to earn money by spying on me. The only one that is likely to make a profit is the state - the things are fucking expensive if you've lost one or it expired.
You have to remember what allows verisign todo wildcarding, the fact that they still manage the root servers.
They only operate A and J, leaving 11 others. Although it would cause some hassle if they were to move somewhere else away from Verisign (somewhere outside the US would be a good idea...), it isn't as if the net would immediatly implode if Verisign would try do play dirty.
And anyway, why did they need root servers for that stunt? They didn't wildcard ".", after all.
There are ways to directly fight spammers without waiting for new laws, and without delegating the problem to someone else. Client-side filtering is no solution, the spammers don't care much - people who filter wouldn't have bought from them anyway - and it still causes massive bandwith cost.
One of the nicest ways is a "teergrube" (tarpit) - a special SMTP server that is tuned to process incoming mail really, really slow, thus making the spammer's tools very ineffective. It doesn't take much bandwith or other resources to run one - everybody who has a computer connected to the net and doesn't need to run a "real" mail server (or is willing to configure a teergrubing proxy that only traps spammers and lets the real MTA take care of ham mail) should do so.
Most spam is sent via open mail relays. If you are bored or annoyed enough, take the time to read spam mail headers (the interesting one is the last "recieved" line, usually), and inform the admin of the open relay, so that they can close it or get the fuck out of the internet. Also, inform a blacklist like the Open Relay Database, so that mail servers will reject mails from these hosts.
Try to poison they address databases. Set up a web page invisible for human users that contains lots of addresses that don't exist. But be sure that these addresses also will never exist - only use subdomains that you control, or those mentioned in RFC 2606 (Reserved Top-Level Domain Names), hoping that stupid spamware will try to send to these addresses anyway.
None of this is at odds with client-side filtering or legislative initiatives, just some additional ideas. And annoying these bastards feels good.
That doesn't really work. Either you would only be able to recieve mails from people whose auth token you already know, say from a key exchange in a personal, real-world meeting (obviously not a good idea for sales@example.com type addresses), or you need a global web of trust that makes sure that everyone that can connect to the internet has one, and only one, signature that can be unambigously traced down to the real person (of course, without harming privacy...). The first way is undesirable, the second one has basically be a dream scince the invention of public key crypto, without anything happening.
Besides, every time I see an exploit, it's after Microsoft has already issued a patch.
This only helps agains worms, DDoS etc, i.e. attacks where the attacker doesn't really care about who you are. It is likely that at least some of the vulnerabilities have been known and used by blackhats to break into systems they are specifically interested in, without making much noise.
Aditionally, your claim is simply false. There are many known vulnerabilities (and even more plain misbehaviours, like Outlook not following RFCs) for which no patches exist, nor is it likely that there will until massive, higly visible exploits start damaging Microsofts image. One of them is currently being exploited in the wild.
Maybe they could design the stuff secure out of the box, but they'd be the first manufacturer to accomplish such a feat.
Any effort in this direction would help. Although even if they would succeed, there would still be worms and viruses - Swen for example didn't depend on the years-old bug it could exploit, most infections are probably due to social engineering. If stupid users will run each and every program they are told to by strangers, no technical solution will save you.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, compared to anything else, text files are a pretty safe bet, even if they dont exist :-)
Thursday May 30, 12:29 pm Eastern Time
Press Release
SOURCE: Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
Open Source Software May Offer Target for Terrorists, According to Study by Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Committee for the Common Defense
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 30, 2002--Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to "open source" as some groups propose.
"Opening the Open Source Debate", a soon to be released white paper by Alexis de Tocqueville Institution details the complex issues surrounding open source, particularly if federal agencies such as the Department of Defense or the Federal Aviation Administration use software that inherently requires that its blueprints, source code and architecture is made widely available to any person interested - without discretion.
In a paper to be released next week, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution outlines how open source might facilitate efforts to disrupt or sabotage electronic commerce, air traffic control or even sensitive surveillance systems.
Unlike proprietary software, open source software does not make the underlying code of a software confidential.
"Computer systems are the backbone of U.S. national security", says Fossedal, chairman of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution and its Committee for the Common Defense, which will release the study. "Before the Pentagon and other federal agencies make uninformed decision to alter the very foundation of computer security, they should study the potential consequences carefully."
Contact:Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
Ken Brown, 202/548-0006
kenbrown@adti.net
www.adti.net
You can read real books just fine even hundreds of years after they were printed. E-book-readers will, like all hardware and software products, evolve, sometimes breaking compatibility. If I would decide to buy one today, it is unlikely that I can read the books I have for it in 50 years unless I keep the reader around and working. And keeping a ton of different readers for all my books in different formats doesn't sound all that attractive either.
This is of course worse with brain-dead DRM formats, that will likely be updated or replaced everytime they are cracked, which propably won't take long if there would be enough interest. But even HTML evolved quite a bit, and I doubt modern browsers get the first versions quite right - and it's just 10 years old.
The biggest problem right now is the root user, IMHO. You just need root privileges too often, and in classical Unix, you either are root, or you are not. There is, however, no reason why my MTA has to be able to change everybodys passwords, write to raw disks, load kernel modules or modify packet filter rules just because it has to listen on port 25. Capabilities fix just that: You can grant a process the capability to listen on a port < 1024 without neccessarily granting it anything else.
File system permissions are less critical, but cumbersome. Imagine a file that should be readable by the members of two groups, for example. No easy way in classical Unix except creating a new group with the members of them both, and you have to keep them in synch manually. It gets worse if you want to make sure that people don't accidentally (or with malicious intent, but that is a lost battle in most cases) don't leak things they may legitimatly work with to others who don't. Mandatory Access Controls (MAC) make this possible, but it is a lot of work to set up - basically, you define a context of users, objects (like files) and processes to work on them that is hopefully safe, and the system forbids anything else - you might be allowed to view a file in a browser, but not to copy it to another file with different permissions, for example.
As I said, things like Capabilities or MAC are becoming more common. There are, as usual, kernel patches for Linux, FreeBSD 5 has this kind of things, proprietary Unixes sometimes have special "Trusted" versions with these features.
For more insight about the Unix models, I suggest reading some of the papers written by the Eros project, or the Unix Haters Handbook, where some Multics people talk about that. Asking VMS veterans can also be enlightening.
In fact, the classical Unix security model with ugw/rwx permissions and the omnipotent root is pretty poor (granted, it is better then no permissions or mostly unused ones). Which is why basically every Unix-like OS is busy implementing extensions to it, like capabilities, fine-grained ACLs, MAC etc. I don't know about any Linux distro or other Unix that uses them sensibly out of the box, however.
It is a much better way to learn about the real security risks than trying to come up with a network secured against threats learned from books only.
Another good idea to enlighten your students is to have them install one redhat 6.0 box, and a current one. Likely, the 6.0 box will be rooted in a matter of hours, or, if you are lucky, days. Then, use the slashdot search engine to compare the number of posts claiming that Linux is inherently secure when RH6.0 was current vs. today - likely, you'll find that they are the same. Lesson learned: No matter what people tell you, all software sucks. The best thing to know as someone dealing with security.
There are drawbacks, however: a) You have to understand, at least a little, how computers and networks work, and b) it severely harms the economy, because you neither pay people who write these useless kinds of software, nor those who "repair" you computer after a break-in against which they offer little protection anyway.
And don't argue that C is a subset of C++ - is isn't. It never really was (look at the output of "printf("%d", sizeof('x'));" for a start, never mind "#include <string.h>" vs. "#include <cstring>"), and they evolved independently since. Today, C contains lots of stuff not in C++, like variable-size arrays, some fixed-sized integer types (like "32-bit integer" or "integer as large as a pointer"), the boolean types are incompatible etc.
One would expect that people who talk about programming languages, or even write a book about them, would know what language they are talking about.
I never had any speed problems with X on my firewall. Then again, I never had X installed on my firewall either, especially not an X server.
And it is very useful indeed. Thanks, Larsi!
Computers, and especially computer networks, are f*cking complex beasts, and handling them properly is difficult. It you mishandle them, they are dangerous. The ugly thing is, you might not care, because they harm other, innocent people, not you (or they do, but you won't notice).
This kind of thinking brought us the MCSE, personal firewalls, and outlook worms filling up mailboxes of non-vulnerable people, taking down one mailserver or the other on their way, wasting millions in bandwidth. And I don't care if I'm attacked by a Windows zombie box or because somebody misunderstood samba permissions and didn't bother to filter out related traffic at the (hopefully existing) firewall. If you don't know how to your computer and your software works, that's OK, division of labour has been a sucessfully deployed strategy for some millenia. Just pay somebody who does. Or take your time to learn. Or keep the fuck away from public networks, so that you can't harm anybody else.
This looks like a job for emergency pants!
And now, would somebody please mod me off-topic? :-)
Don't bother... There are ~30 critical updates for IE that you'll still be missing.
No need to buy a Mac.
Let's have ICANN and Verisign have their fight, and then kill the survivor. Both have to be replaced.
And anyway, why did they need root servers for that stunt? They didn't wildcard ".", after all.
One of the nicest ways is a "teergrube" (tarpit) - a special SMTP server that is tuned to process incoming mail really, really slow, thus making the spammer's tools very ineffective. It doesn't take much bandwith or other resources to run one - everybody who has a computer connected to the net and doesn't need to run a "real" mail server (or is willing to configure a teergrubing proxy that only traps spammers and lets the real MTA take care of ham mail) should do so.
Most spam is sent via open mail relays. If you are bored or annoyed enough, take the time to read spam mail headers (the interesting one is the last "recieved" line, usually), and inform the admin of the open relay, so that they can close it or get the fuck out of the internet. Also, inform a blacklist like the Open Relay Database, so that mail servers will reject mails from these hosts.
Try to poison they address databases. Set up a web page invisible for human users that contains lots of addresses that don't exist. But be sure that these addresses also will never exist - only use subdomains that you control, or those mentioned in RFC 2606 (Reserved Top-Level Domain Names), hoping that stupid spamware will try to send to these addresses anyway.
None of this is at odds with client-side filtering or legislative initiatives, just some additional ideas. And annoying these bastards feels good.
That doesn't really work. Either you would only be able to recieve mails from people whose auth token you already know, say from a key exchange in a personal, real-world meeting (obviously not a good idea for sales@example.com type addresses), or you need a global web of trust that makes sure that everyone that can connect to the internet has one, and only one, signature that can be unambigously traced down to the real person (of course, without harming privacy...). The first way is undesirable, the second one has basically be a dream scince the invention of public key crypto, without anything happening.
Aditionally, your claim is simply false. There are many known vulnerabilities (and even more plain misbehaviours, like Outlook not following RFCs) for which no patches exist, nor is it likely that there will until massive, higly visible exploits start damaging Microsofts image. One of them is currently being exploited in the wild.
Any effort in this direction would help. Although even if they would succeed, there would still be worms and viruses - Swen for example didn't depend on the years-old bug it could exploit, most infections are probably due to social engineering. If stupid users will run each and every program they are told to by strangers, no technical solution will save you.