Nothing compares MS security to that of the rest of the world better than seeing how they fix the same damn vulnerability. Let this be a lesson to you. Never astroturf with facts. A quality 'turf would have been to say: "Yes, but Linux has a history of at least three times as many security problems with PNG as Microsoft"
The only thing that I hate about Firefox is that it is very slow, probably due to the fact that my computer system has limited DRAM and that Firefox must swap to disk more often than IE.
Slow on startup, or slow while actually surfing? My experience is that Firefox is generally faster than anything else in actually rendering web pages, but it does take a lot longer to load up when you start it. This is because IE loads into memory when the PC boots up. Part of the interminably long time you spend waiting for Windows to come up includes the time it takes to load IE and all of its supporting libraries into RAM. When you click the button, BAM, you get IE, ready to go. It looks faster, but that is because MS is hiding the time it really takes to load it.
If you want this functionality, Mozilla includes a quickstarter app that can fire up on boot up just like IE (with the commensurate delays). I don't think this is even an option with Firefox, but it is a pretty silly option after all, when you really think about it.
A vulnerability is not a vulnerability till somebody discovers it
So that's how security works! Supress knowledge of the problem!
It's nice to see that Symantec's corporate culture hasn't changed very much since the days when Peter Norton thought computer viruses were an urban legend.
Free speech in the Constitution is primarily about protecting political speech. Commercial free speech has been ruled by the Supreme Court to be bound by more restriction.
The type of speech (commercial) was not specified in the original statement. I used the term to describe the type of setting or business relationship, the pretense of which is claimed as governing authority over any speech, not just commercial. I excluded what you are calling commercial (qualified) speech in the first sentence of my response.
Not employing bloggers at all seems a fair enough policy to me.
Why, exactly? (given that we aren't talking about sharing confidential company information - you did use the unqualified term, "bloggers") If we (ostensibly) have enough respect for free speech to write it into the Constitution of the country, why does it make sense not to allow free speech in a commercial setting as a matter of course?
The presumption in the article is that, from a security standpoint, the only thing separating IE from Firefox is popularity. Doesn't ActiveX, etc. etc. etc. represent a serious qualitative difference in security problems?
A firewall containing a junk-blocking HTTP proxy can.
That isn't a firewall. That's a web filter. If, by some unlikely circumstance, your suggestion derives from astroturfing nor trolling and you honestly believe in the effectiveness of web filters, then pity prevents me from responding to it.
What if the issue really doesn't have anything to do with ease of use? Consider this: How many modern computer users would even know how to install an operating system? How many have ever actually done so?
If the problem is simply that market dominance is simply a matter of whatever happens to come pre-installed (and it certainly seems to be), then two things instantly click into focus:
The question of choice is irrelevant, so it doesn't make sense to wonder why people choose Windows. They don't.
Anything that creates choice has a tremendous opportunity to succeed. Something like the new, inexpensive Mac has a real chance of changing the PC marketplace.
It seems to me (as an avowed Linux evangelist) that efforts should be directed toward teaching people that malware happens because you run Windows, and that you have a choice not to.
I don't really ever see a flamewar when these sort of articles come up. A flamewar tends to erupt when two sides passionately disagree about a particular topic, but where both sides have (reasonably) intellectually honest and well thought out opinions on it. All I see when an anti-MS article comes around are hit and run posters such as yourself (astroturfers?). The vast majority of those who know anything about the issue always seem to be in frustrated agreement that Windows really does catastrophically suck and can't understand how a product so utterly devoid of any pretense not simply of quality, but of product liability, continues to do well in a free market.
Red herring. What portion of the 91% of computer users infected with spyware were infected by an inbound attack? I'll give you a hint. It's probably smaller than the number of Linux workstations in use currently as personal computers. The vast majority of infected users got that way as a direct result of the hideous security flaw that is IE. All they had to do was visit the wrong web site. Windows firewall can do NOTHING to stop that.
As usual, the one most willing to hurl the accusation of "theft" is the party most given to perpetrating it. (in this case, the movie industry)
It may be that losing the opportunity of selling a movie to a party who may or may not actually buy it can only obtusely be considered theft. Stealing actual screen content for movies that were bought and paid for, however, most certainly is. I will remember this hypocrisy the next time I am forced to watch a "don't steal movies" ad in the previews or when I see the horrible brown antipiracy dots in the middle of the next film I go to see.
Objectively speaking (objectivity being in short supply in this environment)
Indeed so. I've recently completed an intensive 7 month research project in which I compared the performance of Windows 2000 and 2003 with Linux/Samba running on the same hardware. It was very interesting to see how empirical reality stacked up against commonly accepted wisdom on the comparisons between Linux and other solutions.
Commonly accepted wisdom reads very much like your post did - nebulous, dismissive, voice-of-reason style speak that derives an almost guaranteed collective harrumph from Slashdot moderators and the IT community at large. Office 2003 is a collaboration suite? WTF? It's not even intended to be used as a "collaboration suite". It's a desktop application suite, and a rather bad one at that (with the possible exception of Excel). Microsoft's collaboration suite is Exchange. The competing products are Notes and Groupwise. To make a claim regarding 2003 as a collaboration piece, much less a good one, is to ignore the well-known problems of version incompatibility between Office releases, document rot, and the ability to recover hidden information within documents, all of which directly controvene collaboration.
I performed thousands of tests and generated more raw test data than would fit on a DVD because my company needed to know the facts about server performance. I didn't trust what was being said on blogs and fora about the various products. I installed and tested numerous operating system/application configurations. My testing revealed that not only is Samba better, more stable, and faster than Windows file services on the exact same hardware, but Windows can't even remotely compete. Performance analysis baselines and processor utilization levels during testing weren't even comparable. There was no "voice of reason" about it - no comfortable anti-groupthink rhetorical position into which one could arrogantly recline and dispense half-truths and irrelevant tripe. There was only fact - hard cold reality. Sort of like how every major Internet virus disaster, spyware infestation, and countless other sorts of electronic calamity occurs as a direct result of using Microsoft software. You can't spin that. You can't moderate that. It simply, relentlessly, is.
Further standing in plain sight is the source code for Samba. Because we had access to the innards of the file server system, we could further optimize the already exemplary out of the box performance of the system and fine-tune it for our specific needs. We now have a file server system that could never be matched in performance or cost by a monolithic, proprietary solution that attempts to be all things to all people from its ignominious perch within a cardboard box.
So yeah, objectivity certainly seems to me to be in short supply. Luckily for me and my company, however, choice is not.
There is more to the web than formatted content. Dynamic websites have been a must to attract hits since 1998. Facts of life, deal with it.
Client side scripting = dynamic content? I'm sure that's very illuminating to the PHP or Cold Fusion programmers in attendance. And you are actually invoking chronological technophilia in that stunning technical analysis. The irony makes my eyes bleed. You must be a technology columnist.
Next time you go tell someone to get with it, you might want to be sure what "it" is, not to mention what century you're in.
They even carried on quoting it after some eminent scientist wrote in to point out their idiocy in missing the fact that CO2 production by humans is a closed loop, whereas fossil fuels release stored CO2.
Yes, because CO2 released when burning fossil fuels is magically tagged so that plants know not to use it for photosynthesis ever again.
What process caused the CO2 to get "stored" in the first place, again?
I seem to have touched a nerve here. Allow me to make a summary reply to the following summary of responses I've received so far:
The idiots DO get into the Gentoo community
I use Gentoo, and I am an idiot!
You are an arrogant prick!
Okay, so you can stumble your way into a stage 3/genkernel setup that works without knowing anything I listed. It has never occurred to me to use anything but a stage 1 installation - basically because it was possible and gave me better access to the system's innards. I assumed that most users who would want something like stage 3 would go somewhere else, and so that other Gentoo users were more like me. That was an assumption for which I hope the reader doesn't hold the overall community responsible. I don't speak for Gentoo - I speak for myself.
If I am an arrogant prick, that must mean there are other reasons why support on the Gentoo fora are currently so accessible and helpful -- that the rest of the community are NOT arrogant pricks. Given the choice, I rather like the idea of being wrong about that, and so will accede to the, uh, optimism of those who point out that the Gentoo community is already overrun with idiots and functions well in spite of it. After all, I don't seem to be arrogant enough not to need support from the community every now and then, and hope that that doesn't change when Gentoo gets easier to get into.
Slashdot Mirror
After RTFMing, this problem has been known since August of last year
I RTFMed, too. Seems like vulnerability was fixed in August of last year by Gentoo, Red Hat, andMandrake.
Nothing compares MS security to that of the rest of the world better than seeing how they fix the same damn vulnerability. Let this be a lesson to you. Never astroturf with facts. A quality 'turf would have been to say: "Yes, but Linux has a history of at least three times as many security problems with PNG as Microsoft"
This guy might have.
The only thing that I hate about Firefox is that it is very slow, probably due to the fact that my computer system has limited DRAM and that Firefox must swap to disk more often than IE.
Slow on startup, or slow while actually surfing? My experience is that Firefox is generally faster than anything else in actually rendering web pages, but it does take a lot longer to load up when you start it. This is because IE loads into memory when the PC boots up. Part of the interminably long time you spend waiting for Windows to come up includes the time it takes to load IE and all of its supporting libraries into RAM. When you click the button, BAM, you get IE, ready to go. It looks faster, but that is because MS is hiding the time it really takes to load it.
If you want this functionality, Mozilla includes a quickstarter app that can fire up on boot up just like IE (with the commensurate delays). I don't think this is even an option with Firefox, but it is a pretty silly option after all, when you really think about it.
Is the sound of a tree falling significant under the following circumstances?
A) lumber companies issue earplugs to lumberjacks in an effort to address the environmental concerns of logging.
B) recording the sound of a tree falling and disseminating the recording were punishable under the DMCA.
From TFA:
A vulnerability is not a vulnerability till somebody discovers it
So that's how security works! Supress knowledge of the problem!
It's nice to see that Symantec's corporate culture hasn't changed very much since the days when Peter Norton thought computer viruses were an urban legend.
Free speech is an inalienable human right, not a matter of law.
Brilliantly put, and I am ashamed for not having said it in the first place.
Free speech in the Constitution is primarily about protecting political speech. Commercial free speech has been ruled by the Supreme Court to be bound by more restriction.
The type of speech (commercial) was not specified in the original statement. I used the term to describe the type of setting or business relationship, the pretense of which is claimed as governing authority over any speech, not just commercial. I excluded what you are calling commercial (qualified) speech in the first sentence of my response.
Not employing bloggers at all seems a fair enough policy to me.
Why, exactly? (given that we aren't talking about sharing confidential company information - you did use the unqualified term, "bloggers") If we (ostensibly) have enough respect for free speech to write it into the Constitution of the country, why does it make sense not to allow free speech in a commercial setting as a matter of course?
Why? What does that have to do with anything?
They're setting a very public precedent about the dangers to blogging on the one hand and trying to break into the business on the other.
The presumption in the article is that, from a security standpoint, the only thing separating IE from Firefox is popularity. Doesn't ActiveX, etc. etc. etc. represent a serious qualitative difference in security problems?
A firewall containing a junk-blocking HTTP proxy can.
That isn't a firewall. That's a web filter. If, by some unlikely circumstance, your suggestion derives from astroturfing nor trolling and you honestly believe in the effectiveness of web filters, then pity prevents me from responding to it.
Yeah, no doubt. Amend "free" in my post to read:
"<sarcasm>free</sarcasm>"
me: A firewall cannot stop malware that exploits weaknesses in your browser.
you: Er, no. (case of infestation not related to browsing)
Are we in the same conversation?
If the problem is simply that market dominance is simply a matter of whatever happens to come pre-installed (and it certainly seems to be), then two things instantly click into focus:
- The question of choice is irrelevant, so it doesn't make sense to wonder why people choose Windows. They don't.
- Anything that creates choice has a tremendous opportunity to succeed. Something like the new, inexpensive Mac has a real chance of changing the PC marketplace.
It seems to me (as an avowed Linux evangelist) that efforts should be directed toward teaching people that malware happens because you run Windows, and that you have a choice not to.I don't really ever see a flamewar when these sort of articles come up. A flamewar tends to erupt when two sides passionately disagree about a particular topic, but where both sides have (reasonably) intellectually honest and well thought out opinions on it. All I see when an anti-MS article comes around are hit and run posters such as yourself (astroturfers?). The vast majority of those who know anything about the issue always seem to be in frustrated agreement that Windows really does catastrophically suck and can't understand how a product so utterly devoid of any pretense not simply of quality, but of product liability, continues to do well in a free market.
paraphrased: firewall, etc.
Red herring. What portion of the 91% of computer users infected with spyware were infected by an inbound attack? I'll give you a hint. It's probably smaller than the number of Linux workstations in use currently as personal computers. The vast majority of infected users got that way as a direct result of the hideous security flaw that is IE. All they had to do was visit the wrong web site. Windows firewall can do NOTHING to stop that.
Just wondering... what does the /. effect actually do to the server?
That sounds like a great idea for the "Ask Slashdot" section.
You don't have to astroturf in this thread. No one is taking it seriously enough to worry about. Move along.
As usual, the one most willing to hurl the accusation of "theft" is the party most given to perpetrating it. (in this case, the movie industry)
It may be that losing the opportunity of selling a movie to a party who may or may not actually buy it can only obtusely be considered theft. Stealing actual screen content for movies that were bought and paid for, however, most certainly is. I will remember this hypocrisy the next time I am forced to watch a "don't steal movies" ad in the previews or when I see the horrible brown antipiracy dots in the middle of the next film I go to see.
Maybe I should have looked twice at that strange hit in my web logs from a few months ago:
Nutscrape 1.0 running on CP/M
Objectively speaking (objectivity being in short supply in this environment)
Indeed so. I've recently completed an intensive 7 month research project in which I compared the performance of Windows 2000 and 2003 with Linux/Samba running on the same hardware. It was very interesting to see how empirical reality stacked up against commonly accepted wisdom on the comparisons between Linux and other solutions.
Commonly accepted wisdom reads very much like your post did - nebulous, dismissive, voice-of-reason style speak that derives an almost guaranteed collective harrumph from Slashdot moderators and the IT community at large. Office 2003 is a collaboration suite? WTF? It's not even intended to be used as a "collaboration suite". It's a desktop application suite, and a rather bad one at that (with the possible exception of Excel). Microsoft's collaboration suite is Exchange. The competing products are Notes and Groupwise. To make a claim regarding 2003 as a collaboration piece, much less a good one, is to ignore the well-known problems of version incompatibility between Office releases, document rot, and the ability to recover hidden information within documents, all of which directly controvene collaboration.
I performed thousands of tests and generated more raw test data than would fit on a DVD because my company needed to know the facts about server performance. I didn't trust what was being said on blogs and fora about the various products. I installed and tested numerous operating system/application configurations. My testing revealed that not only is Samba better, more stable, and faster than Windows file services on the exact same hardware, but Windows can't even remotely compete. Performance analysis baselines and processor utilization levels during testing weren't even comparable. There was no "voice of reason" about it - no comfortable anti-groupthink rhetorical position into which one could arrogantly recline and dispense half-truths and irrelevant tripe. There was only fact - hard cold reality. Sort of like how every major Internet virus disaster, spyware infestation, and countless other sorts of electronic calamity occurs as a direct result of using Microsoft software. You can't spin that. You can't moderate that. It simply, relentlessly, is.
Further standing in plain sight is the source code for Samba. Because we had access to the innards of the file server system, we could further optimize the already exemplary out of the box performance of the system and fine-tune it for our specific needs. We now have a file server system that could never be matched in performance or cost by a monolithic, proprietary solution that attempts to be all things to all people from its ignominious perch within a cardboard box.
So yeah, objectivity certainly seems to me to be in short supply. Luckily for me and my company, however, choice is not.
There is more to the web than formatted content. Dynamic websites have been a must to attract hits since 1998. Facts of life, deal with it.
Client side scripting = dynamic content? I'm sure that's very illuminating to the PHP or Cold Fusion programmers in attendance. And you are actually invoking chronological technophilia in that stunning technical analysis. The irony makes my eyes bleed. You must be a technology columnist.
Next time you go tell someone to get with it, you might want to be sure what "it" is, not to mention what century you're in.
They even carried on quoting it after some eminent scientist wrote in to point out their idiocy in missing the fact that CO2 production by humans is a closed loop, whereas fossil fuels release stored CO2.
Yes, because CO2 released when burning fossil fuels is magically tagged so that plants know not to use it for photosynthesis ever again.
What process caused the CO2 to get "stored" in the first place, again?
Well put. Please see my summary reply.
- The idiots DO get into the Gentoo community
- I use Gentoo, and I am an idiot!
- You are an arrogant prick!
Okay, so you can stumble your way into a stage 3/genkernel setup that works without knowing anything I listed. It has never occurred to me to use anything but a stage 1 installation - basically because it was possible and gave me better access to the system's innards. I assumed that most users who would want something like stage 3 would go somewhere else, and so that other Gentoo users were more like me. That was an assumption for which I hope the reader doesn't hold the overall community responsible. I don't speak for Gentoo - I speak for myself.If I am an arrogant prick, that must mean there are other reasons why support on the Gentoo fora are currently so accessible and helpful -- that the rest of the community are NOT arrogant pricks. Given the choice, I rather like the idea of being wrong about that, and so will accede to the, uh, optimism of those who point out that the Gentoo community is already overrun with idiots and functions well in spite of it. After all, I don't seem to be arrogant enough not to need support from the community every now and then, and hope that that doesn't change when Gentoo gets easier to get into.