So how did Microsoft get away with baldly fabricating evidence?
(I'm talking about the falsified video about the removal of Internet Explorer, where the desktop changed from one release to the other, belying a major time lapse, to say the least.)
When I heard about that, I thought that the attorneys presenting that perjury would land in jail. Instead they just got a little lecture and that was that.
In college anthropology, I was taught that the average _human_ vocabulary is 40,000 words.
I know a computer can store thousands of words in its RAM or ROM, but calling that a vocabulary is overstretching the point. "Vocabulary" implies comprehension.
I'll wager this robot can't tell its nouns from most of verbs.
Even the FBI is crying "buffer overflow," following in Microsoft's footsteps to divert attention for a designed-in security flaw.
It makes sense, from the perspective of a defensive Microsoft. "Buffer overflow? Who hasn't slipped up once or twice and had a buffer overflow bug? We have our code scanners routing out the last one or two of these bugs, they'll all be gone soon and we'll all be safe."
The bigger gaff is that they designed the OS to say "hack me" (or words to that effect) whenever some other device--any other device--asks to fondle, as it were, the OS's drivers. That this is a huge security exposure is obvious to anyone who is old enough to remember the early days of hacking. Some hotshot designers at Microsoft, (probably with degrees in marketing, not computing) designed this "hack me" feature into the OS intentionally.
Now they have the attention of the NIPC/FBI. Even FBI agents (who, over the last 10 years, gave new meaning to the term "anti-intellegence") know that on Christmas day, millions of un-patched XP OS's are going on line, in the same 24-hour period. The hackers will be waiting to stick their electronic -er-fingers in those exposed UPNP ports and leave behind a little deposit.
Maybe, maybe not, the FBI realizes that some of those systems will have time-delay bugs planted in the pre-patched OS's. Then, downloading the patch will produce the false security that keeps the spirit of the XP season alive throughout the coming year.
The silver lining? Corporate PHB's, the holy grail of Microsoft marketing, will lose confidence in any of Mr.Bill's claims of reliability and security, once and for all. XP was supposed to be the one-size-fits-all OS, from palmtops to corporate web front-ends to data warehouses. (not that it was the first attempt at this unification by Microsoft, or even their competitors.) Even the golf-buddy execs are going to remember the day when the FBI started pushing patches to the monopolist's holey flagship.
Did anybody notice, last year, when Bill Gates started to cut the cord to Microsoft? He did see the big fall coming, you know. Not as stupid as we make him out to be, eh?
> But the majority of the time, I would
> see sploits circulated by my Russian friends
> on IRC weeks before anyone even mentioned the > vulnerability on BUGTRAQ....
> Stopping full disclosure won't hurt the script
> kiddies. It will hurt the admins, who won't
> have enough information to patch their source
> base to fix the problem.
Seems to me some reverse-espionage is in order. Last time I took a security course, it was recommended that a savvy security admin lurk in the dark areas, just to share the information XPerience earlier than the public.
Golly, a business-savvy person could even make money that way.
What Microsoft doesn't understand is that if black hats are trading the information, they can't really tell the white/grey hats from the black ones, over the internet connection.
A pet peeve of mine is that PHB's think that "device" uptime is the same as "system" uptime.
Decades ago, we had fault tolerant systems that had large-chunk redundancy. An entire mainframe could fail and the system kept serving.
OTOH, haven't you ever had a failing app take down your system, while running on perfectly healthy hardware?
The reason this misconception, that perfect-hardware==perfect-uptime, frustrates me, is that the PHB's get sold this bill of goods by hardware salespeople. Then they don't even allow for downtime to upgrade the effing OS every two years. Nor do they allow for a second system to either (a) take the load during an upgrade, or (b) test updates to the application.
For this silly reason, giant, fault-tolerant boxes are hurting, rather than helping, high-availability computing. Bosses would rather spend money on sexy hardware that won't solve the problem, instead of paying smart people who can design-in the uptime with combos of hardware, software, and procedures.
Try searching for "marlboro" on google.
What would you expect ? The marlboro home-page ?
Oh, no; we have the Marlboro College, poems, but no tobacco company home page.
Coincidence?
Well, let's see. Try Yahoo:
11. Discount Marlboro Cigarettes
Description:offers a variety of cigarette brands.
Address:http://www.discount-marlboro-cigarettes. c om/
Category:Business and Economy > Shopping and Services > Hobbies>Smoking
23. Toilet Paper
Description:Marlboro Man comes out of closet! Roy Rogers/Mr. Rogers same man!
Address:http://www.thetp.com/
Category:Entertainment > Humor > Parody>News
Not much about Marlboro Cigarettes.
I stopped looking after 100 hits, then noticed:
RelatedSearches:
marlboro cigarettes,
marlboro miles,
marlboro miles catalog,
marlboro gear,
marlboro man
I noticed lots and lots of things Marlboro that were named after one of the many places Marlboro. Didn't you see all of these places?
Maybe you should have picked a different cigarette, say "Newport," "Salem," or "Raleigh?"
> Its so sad to see the "Freest Country on the Planet" resort to this Fascist behavior.
I thought that patriotic fib was limited to U.S. public education. (Did somebody say "Fascist?")
Who else is working our side of the street?
Re:Worst thing that could have happened.
on
Adobe Backs Down
·
· Score: 2
> I really would have liked to have seen this go to court. While I feel for Dmitry's family, I think that his case could have been used to overturn the DMCA.
Here's what you do: violate the DMCA until you get thrown in jail, and have your case in court.
It's called civil disobedience.
BTW, You can't have a proxy go to jail for you, and still call it civil disobedience (not in my book).
The insects live for two years as larvae, eating worms in the soil, and for just two weeks as adults - enjoying just 14 nights of flying, flashing and courtship. Then it is all over.
Oh God. I was a kid. I didn't realize what I was doing, keeping those bugs trapped in a jar.
Slashdot Mirror
...we still operate under this 640 node barrier.
So how did Microsoft get away with baldly fabricating evidence?
(I'm talking about the falsified video about the removal of Internet Explorer, where the desktop changed from one release to the other, belying a major time lapse, to say the least.)
When I heard about that, I thought that the attorneys presenting that perjury would land in jail. Instead they just got a little lecture and that was that.
In college anthropology, I was taught that the average _human_ vocabulary is 40,000 words.
I know a computer can store thousands of words in its RAM or ROM, but calling that a vocabulary is overstretching the point. "Vocabulary" implies comprehension.
I'll wager this robot can't tell its nouns from most of verbs.
Just goes to show, the universe is a PC-clone, not a Macintosh.
"All this equipment that's out there has to use something that's the same size as the original punch cards," said Mr. Oliver...
Trivia: "Hollerith" cards were the same size as U.S. Confederate Bills, the currency that pre-dates the current U.S. Treasury Notes.
Question: where the hell did 8-1/2 x 11 inch letterhead come from?
This would create a market for 5-cent bags that screen out the tagged signals from the 5-cent tags.
Spy vs. spy ==> tag vs. bag
> We are effectively selecting against being sucessfull. Wierd.
Not weird. Republican.
> The office would then set it going and if it was still running a year later, they would consider the patent application.
So why don't they do this with software patents?
A senator will never send you a letter that says s/he disagrees with you.
In fact, when there's a hot issue and they know it's hot, they probably have two form letters, one pro and one con.
The people who read the mail for the senators send out the "pro" mail to the "pro" constituents and the "con" mail to the "con" constituents.
Call it 'vote preservation'.
Quoth the article:
"The most exciting possibilities are the ones we're not thinking about."
People who say things like this are leading the frontiers of technology?
Makes me think again about the value of journalism.
Even the FBI is crying "buffer overflow," following in Microsoft's footsteps to divert attention for a designed-in security flaw.
It makes sense, from the perspective of a defensive Microsoft. "Buffer overflow? Who hasn't slipped up once or twice and had a buffer overflow bug? We have our code scanners routing out the last one or two of these bugs, they'll all be gone soon and we'll all be safe."
The bigger gaff is that they designed the OS to say "hack me" (or words to that effect) whenever some other device--any other device--asks to fondle, as it were, the OS's drivers. That this is a huge security exposure is obvious to anyone who is old enough to remember the early days of hacking. Some hotshot designers at Microsoft, (probably with degrees in marketing, not computing) designed this "hack me" feature into the OS intentionally.
Now they have the attention of the NIPC/FBI. Even FBI agents (who, over the last 10 years, gave new meaning to the term "anti-intellegence") know that on Christmas day, millions of un-patched XP OS's are going on line, in the same 24-hour period. The hackers will be waiting to stick their electronic -er-fingers in those exposed UPNP ports and leave behind a little deposit.
Maybe, maybe not, the FBI realizes that some of those systems will have time-delay bugs planted in the pre-patched OS's. Then, downloading the patch will produce the false security that keeps the spirit of the XP season alive throughout the coming year.
The silver lining? Corporate PHB's, the holy grail of Microsoft marketing, will lose confidence in any of Mr.Bill's claims of reliability and security, once and for all. XP was supposed to be the one-size-fits-all OS, from palmtops to corporate web front-ends to data warehouses. (not that it was the first attempt at this unification by Microsoft, or even their competitors.) Even the golf-buddy execs are going to remember the day when the FBI started pushing patches to the monopolist's holey flagship.
Did anybody notice, last year, when Bill Gates started to cut the cord to Microsoft? He did see the big fall coming, you know. Not as stupid as we make him out to be, eh?
> Al gore invented the internet
That's why the fundamental unit of computer logic is called the 'algorithm'.
Could we assign a number to this oratory to save time?
Maybe I'm naieve, but...
> But the majority of the time, I would
> see sploits circulated by my Russian friends
> on IRC weeks before anyone even mentioned the > vulnerability on BUGTRAQ....
> Stopping full disclosure won't hurt the script
> kiddies. It will hurt the admins, who won't
> have enough information to patch their source
> base to fix the problem.
Seems to me some reverse-espionage is in order. Last time I took a security course, it was recommended that a savvy security admin lurk in the dark areas, just to share the information XPerience earlier than the public.
Golly, a business-savvy person could even make money that way.
What Microsoft doesn't understand is that if black hats are trading the information, they can't really tell the white/grey hats from the black ones, over the internet connection.
Or can they?
(my emphasis)
A pet peeve of mine is that PHB's think that "device" uptime is the same as "system" uptime.
Decades ago, we had fault tolerant systems that had large-chunk redundancy. An entire mainframe could fail and the system kept serving.
OTOH, haven't you ever had a failing app take down your system, while running on perfectly healthy hardware?
The reason this misconception, that perfect-hardware==perfect-uptime, frustrates me, is that the PHB's get sold this bill of goods by hardware salespeople. Then they don't even allow for downtime to upgrade the effing OS every two years. Nor do they allow for a second system to either (a) take the load during an upgrade, or (b) test updates to the application.
For this silly reason, giant, fault-tolerant boxes are hurting, rather than helping, high-availability computing. Bosses would rather spend money on sexy hardware that won't solve the problem, instead of paying smart people who can design-in the uptime with combos of hardware, software, and procedures.
Quench-rant (for now).
-
RelatedSearches:
marlboro cigarettes,
marlboro miles,
marlboro miles catalog,
marlboro gear,
marlboro man
I noticed lots and lots of things Marlboro that were named after one of the many places Marlboro. Didn't you see all of these places?Maybe you should have picked a different cigarette, say "Newport," "Salem," or "Raleigh?"
Isn't it funny that they released a bonehead tool just after they found out that their own admins are boneheads?
> Its so sad to see the "Freest Country on the Planet" resort to this Fascist behavior.
I thought that patriotic fib was limited to U.S. public education. (Did somebody say "Fascist?")
Who else is working our side of the street?
> I really would have liked to have seen this go to court. While I feel for Dmitry's family, I think that his case could have been used to overturn the DMCA.
Here's what you do: violate the DMCA until you get thrown in jail, and have your case in court.
It's called civil disobedience.
BTW, You can't have a proxy go to jail for you, and still call it civil disobedience (not in my book).
> Boycott America- Not Worth The Risk Of Visiting
Those of us who were born and live here have the duty to try and improve the place.
Is it any different where you live?
> Sir, you are absolutely correct that the post I made was callous. It doesn't change what happened, though.
Just wanted to say, this is the most respectful introduction, to a rebuttal, that I have ever seen.
Part of a particularly well-reasoned discussion, esp. considering the politically hot subject.
Good reading today. Thank you (all) for making it so.
What I would like to see is a tileable display module (zero-width margins), with hardware to distribute the video to various combinations of tiles.
Then you could construct a custom display of whatever size and shape you like.
You could also maintain the display by replacing individual tiles (instead of replacing the whole display).
Anyone heard of such a scheme in industry?
I keep seeing these "PS2" headlines and thinking they're talking about the IBM PS/2.
I really need to wake up now.
If you sue a Make Money Fast spammer, and win a big award, then the spam wasn't false in the first place.
Russell, meet Whitehead. Whitehead, Russell.