Since HTML is such a menace, why not get rid of it? You can remove markup (note: markup) without losing the meaning of text. This Windows client strips HTML and displays sweet, innocent plaintext.
First, I commute to work by bicycle. This isn't possible for everyone but it might be more "possible" than you think -- try it out one day, how long does it take you to bike to work? Rush hour is easier on cyclists. I can actually bike to work faster than my bus during rush hour.
Many progressive employers offer shower facilities to employees who do morning exercise. Half an hour of biking each trip, and you're looking at an hour of vigorous cardio workout a day. That is HUGE.
Next, it's important to take the stairs whenever possible. Stair climbing is great exercise, and it fits right into the "office" routine. You can even make extra trips for the hell of it.
But you can't, the labels won't let you publish their stuff without burying it in restrictions.
The labels themselves could offer a music download service without DRM. Maybe they would make so much money that the "losses" from file sharing (which as we know, are wildly inflated) would be insignificant.
Low cost music downloads are definitely the right idea, but the choice of content (digital rights-locked media) is just plain wrong, and a stupid business choice.
Look at it from a business perspective. Your company offers cheap downloads, and delivers media clips that employ Digital Rights Management (DRM) to somehow restrict how, when, and where this media can be stored for later recall. These are unnecessary complications at the user side.
And then comes along I, your competitor, and also offers cheap downloads of "pure audio" - MP3, OGG, FLAC, whatever. Users who buy from my site get audio that they can use any way they like, just like if they owned their own CD or tape. As a result, users overwhelmingly prefer my service because of the tremendous versatility of the media I offer.
Back when our little organization had a Windows 2000 server (a couple years ago) I quickly realized that leaving the server unattended for a week was hazardous... some major exploit would undoubtedly be discovered.
We replaced it and are quite happy now. We don't pay anything for our new OS, and I go away for months and nothing bad happens:)
Ah well, as with most other things, Japan and Europe will lead, and North America will get dragged along eventually, kicking and screaming, bleeding corporate profits all along the way
... that is, if America doesn't first fall apart, under the weight of a 6 trillion dollar debt, lack of resources and weak prospects for true home-grown innovation.
Existing infrastruction is a definate. They wanna make more money on existing pipes, etc.
Correct. At the time, decision makers in the industry thought that there would be perpetually rising demand for what they had then. They were wrong, and it seems that they have over-invested in what is now becoming legacy equipment (outdated; and more efficient and less costly technologies now exist).
The article makes a good point about unwitting hosts participating in world-wide spamming. A host that is insecure can become compromised by an automated worm or mailicous attacker and then configured to relay junk mail.
As a system administrator this worries me. Typically we use blocklists for netblocks that are known to be sources of spam. But when a random internet host is compromised and used as a mail relay, this slips past our blocklists (for a while).
The moral of the story is that computer security and spam fighting go together. Though average users don't get the point, it is every internet user's responsibility to keep their host secure both for their own good, and to be a good neighbour.
The big fear for anybody working in a company is that their ass is on the line and they're going to get canned if they try something wacky and screw it up.
Myself, I don't have that fear because I run my own small business. So I use linux as I damn well please, and I save plenty of money in doing so. If something does go wrong, I fetch a cold clamato with lemon and cellery, and try to figure things out using the wide range of resources available.
I can't believe crap like this is actually a problem! Just don't open suspicious attachments. And use a safe email client that treats attachments carefully, like JBMail instead of Outlook.
I think the big problem these days is how software tries to automatically integrate everything: scripting, HTML, multimedia. Why the hell do you need that for mail? It just adds unnecessary risk.
folks don't really understand that they are giving their work away for free and can not reasonably expect anything in return. Not a salary, not an occasional trip, not even acknowledgement.
NOT TRUE. Under the GPL you can sell your work, and make whatever money you choose to charge. See the FAQ.
The worm I am afraid of is one that learns (or at least adapts) using some sort of evolution-based algorthm
That would be frightening. Although, from my familiarity with evolutionary style programming (genetic, simulated annealing, evolution) you really can't get anything dramatic to come out of simply a software evolution algorithm. There needs to be that "touch of Gawd".
In other words, a worm with the capabilities you describe would still have to have programmed into it many different attack vectors targeted at different systems. Tt can not generate things this different on its own without human help.
So it is a very good thing to give it many hard targets, different OS'es.
A really nice way to make an extremely destructive worm would be to ensure that the great majority of computers connected to the internet are running the exact same operating software. This would guarantee that a vulnerability can reliably be exploited in pretty much any neighbor.
Unfortunately, such a scenario is but a dream. Modern operating systems are too secure!
We set up a small undergraduate research lab at the University of Manitoba's EE Dept. For the summer we are doing research in networking and telecommunications. All of our workstations are running slackware linux and we find most of what we need in this distro. OK, so this is slightly contrived (we're doing networking after all) but we rely big time upon iptables, tcpdump, iptraf, Sun's java, and lotsa unix utilities. I think people underestimate how many useful tools are in linux.
When I started playing around with Linux five years ago, I had no understanding of 'real world' network security. Today I consider myself quite knowledgeable on the subject; I oversee network configuration and security for several LANs (including my own business); I've written academic papers on the subject and I am currently involved with university research in networking.
Learning any complicated system is an iterative process. First get started, then keep the ball rolling. I started by setting up an internet connected linux server in my basement, which immediately got hacked. Then I read up to understand how it happened; I started reading USENET groups like comp.os.linux.security and I rapidly gained a pretty good idea of what was going on.
The benefit of playing around with linux is that you immediately have access to all the major tools and technologies that power the internet - and can tinker around with them. Get slackware, and play around with iptables (firewall), ssh, apache configuration, mail, and all the other fun stuff like unix permissions!
Ya. But just imagine getting hammered with taxation!! Ohhhhh, that's gotta hurt the ol wallet
You're right, he's only a few billion dollars rich. Why should he have to contribute a more to America than the average person? Sometimes the world is just so unfair.
They messed up everything. They fecked up the story line.
I disagree! I saw it last night, and although it was not as slick as the first one, the story was great and the action was spectacular. All it needed was some more editing - scenes shortened, sometimes cut out, irrelevant motifs dropped, etc. But if you can tolerate some editing oversights then I think you'll be happy with the plot and the way the story from the 1st matrix matures.
Things get more interesting in this Matrix! The movie is bang-on, except a little too much bureaucroacy and domestic stuff I didn't need to see. Hopefully in #3 they can return more to that surrealistic, video game style fantasy they did so well in #1.
Has anyone compared this firebird you speak of, to the mysterious cult of opera? I'm quite happy as an opera cultsman, yet i am open to bribery:P
I was a dedicated Opera users (I also bought it). But I've switched to Phoenix/Firebird because it works just as well as Opera and has some added advantages - the tabbed browsing, prevention of popups and especially the mozilla engine (I find there are fewer HTML rendering glitches).
Opera is still faster though. However I am very happy with Firebird. My only gripe was that it was easy to crash (at least on win32, using drop down lists like in search engines) but maybe they have fixed that now?
Slashdot Mirror
Since HTML is such a menace, why not get rid of it? You can remove markup (note: markup) without losing the meaning of text. This Windows client strips HTML and displays sweet, innocent plaintext.
First, I commute to work by bicycle. This isn't possible for everyone but it might be more "possible" than you think -- try it out one day, how long does it take you to bike to work? Rush hour is easier on cyclists. I can actually bike to work faster than my bus during rush hour.
Many progressive employers offer shower facilities to employees who do morning exercise. Half an hour of biking each trip, and you're looking at an hour of vigorous cardio workout a day. That is HUGE.
Next, it's important to take the stairs whenever possible. Stair climbing is great exercise, and it fits right into the "office" routine. You can even make extra trips for the hell of it.
Low cost music downloads are definitely the right idea, but the choice of content (digital rights-locked media) is just plain wrong, and a stupid business choice.
Look at it from a business perspective. Your company offers cheap downloads, and delivers media clips that employ Digital Rights Management (DRM) to somehow restrict how, when, and where this media can be stored for later recall. These are unnecessary complications at the user side.
And then comes along I, your competitor, and also offers cheap downloads of "pure audio" - MP3, OGG, FLAC, whatever. Users who buy from my site get audio that they can use any way they like, just like if they owned their own CD or tape. As a result, users overwhelmingly prefer my service because of the tremendous versatility of the media I offer.
And then my business kicks your ass.
Where the hell did you find that? On my new big LCD monitor it looks like this lady is in the room right beside me. I'm not going to be able to sleep.
Back when our little organization had a Windows 2000 server (a couple years ago) I quickly realized that leaving the server unattended for a week was hazardous... some major exploit would undoubtedly be discovered.
:)
We replaced it and are quite happy now. We don't pay anything for our new OS, and I go away for months and nothing bad happens
Who's cynical now?
The article makes a good point about unwitting hosts participating in world-wide spamming. A host that is insecure can become compromised by an automated worm or mailicous attacker and then configured to relay junk mail.
As a system administrator this worries me. Typically we use blocklists for netblocks that are known to be sources of spam. But when a random internet host is compromised and used as a mail relay, this slips past our blocklists (for a while).
The moral of the story is that computer security and spam fighting go together. Though average users don't get the point, it is every internet user's responsibility to keep their host secure both for their own good, and to be a good neighbour.
The big fear for anybody working in a company is that their ass is on the line and they're going to get canned if they try something wacky and screw it up.
Myself, I don't have that fear because I run my own small business. So I use linux as I damn well please, and I save plenty of money in doing so. If something does go wrong, I fetch a cold clamato with lemon and cellery, and try to figure things out using the wide range of resources available.
I can't believe crap like this is actually a problem! Just don't open suspicious attachments. And use a safe email client that treats attachments carefully, like JBMail instead of Outlook.
I think the big problem these days is how software tries to automatically integrate everything: scripting, HTML, multimedia. Why the hell do you need that for mail? It just adds unnecessary risk.
In the USA, education is a mere 14% of the military budget -- pretty sick, isn't it?
Children are losing out, and with that money Microsoft is growing. Now isn't that disgusting?
Well, you can't always get what you want. Consumers pay the bills, and consumers will dictate the way products will appear in the future.
That would be frightening. Although, from my familiarity with evolutionary style programming (genetic, simulated annealing, evolution) you really can't get anything dramatic to come out of simply a software evolution algorithm. There needs to be that "touch of Gawd".
In other words, a worm with the capabilities you describe would still have to have programmed into it many different attack vectors targeted at different systems. Tt can not generate things this different on its own without human help.
So it is a very good thing to give it many hard targets, different OS'es.
A really nice way to make an extremely destructive worm would be to ensure that the great majority of computers connected to the internet are running the exact same operating software. This would guarantee that a vulnerability can reliably be exploited in pretty much any neighbor.
Unfortunately, such a scenario is but a dream. Modern operating systems are too secure!
We set up a small undergraduate research lab at the University of Manitoba's EE Dept. For the summer we are doing research in networking and telecommunications. All of our workstations are running slackware linux and we find most of what we need in this distro. OK, so this is slightly contrived (we're doing networking after all) but we rely big time upon iptables, tcpdump, iptraf, Sun's java, and lotsa unix utilities. I think people underestimate how many useful tools are in linux.
Yes, here's a little background on gnutella and the protocol.
I think my favourite SI unit is the Newton (unit of force)... holy crap, I just realized have no life.
When I started playing around with Linux five years ago, I had no understanding of 'real world' network security. Today I consider myself quite knowledgeable on the subject; I oversee network configuration and security for several LANs (including my own business); I've written academic papers on the subject and I am currently involved with university research in networking.
Learning any complicated system is an iterative process. First get started, then keep the ball rolling. I started by setting up an internet connected linux server in my basement, which immediately got hacked. Then I read up to understand how it happened; I started reading USENET groups like comp.os.linux.security and I rapidly gained a pretty good idea of what was going on.
The benefit of playing around with linux is that you immediately have access to all the major tools and technologies that power the internet - and can tinker around with them. Get slackware, and play around with iptables (firewall), ssh, apache configuration, mail, and all the other fun stuff like unix permissions!
You're kidding about the colloidal silver stuff right? This stuff is useless, possibly dangerous. Check this out
I disagree! I saw it last night, and although it was not as slick as the first one, the story was great and the action was spectacular. All it needed was some more editing - scenes shortened, sometimes cut out, irrelevant motifs dropped, etc. But if you can tolerate some editing oversights then I think you'll be happy with the plot and the way the story from the 1st matrix matures.
Things get more interesting in this Matrix! The movie is bang-on, except a little too much bureaucroacy and domestic stuff I didn't need to see. Hopefully in #3 they can return more to that surrealistic, video game style fantasy they did so well in #1.
I was a dedicated Opera users (I also bought it). But I've switched to Phoenix/Firebird because it works just as well as Opera and has some added advantages - the tabbed browsing, prevention of popups and especially the mozilla engine (I find there are fewer HTML rendering glitches).
Opera is still faster though. However I am very happy with Firebird. My only gripe was that it was easy to crash (at least on win32, using drop down lists like in search engines) but maybe they have fixed that now?