Playing devil's advocate here; I'll venture that most of those machines get reformatted with a warez'd copy of Windows.
If I was aware of that happening, I'd turn them in. Not out of Linux zealotry per se, but because I don't want M$ to have a good reason to squash the market for PCs without the M$ tax.
As soon as regulatory authority is brought to bear to prevent software vendors from circumventing the first and fourth amendments, and when concerns such as quality and reliability are federally mandated, I'll consider supporting this.
I remember printing little plastic gorillas at theme parks years ago - you just had to remember to carry them around upside down until they fully hardened.
How does this benefit me? With product activation, Intuit can provide faster, more efficient support for TurboTax customers. Without technology to ensure compliance with our License Agreement, TurboTax customers who legitimately purchase the product wait longer for support because of increased contacts from users seeking support for unlicensed software.
eh? Thousands of users calling support to deal with product activation issues are going to make it easier for me to get support?
"We've heard from people who installed TurboTax right away and then got a new PC for Christmas. For most people, they can reactivate the product without even contacting us."
So these people who had no problems called you up out of the clear blue to tell you it worked?
I don't know. TurboTax is only good for one tax year, so the useage lifetime for the software is as long as it takes me to actually do my taxes, which is only a couple of days, if that. Not a very big window of opportunity for total system failure , IMHO. It's not like they're keying the O/S to your hardware via the Internet or anything.
But as a Linux security book, I'd suggest the man pages first.
Well, I am a professional security consultant, and I find Toxen's work to be eminently practical and useful. I'm not personally famimiliar with anything the man pages have to say about password policies or paths of vulnerability. On my system, I don't seem to have manual entries for either of these.
Wow, a professional journalist missed the nuance of italicized text preceding my comment. See, we Slashdot folk do that when we quote somebody else. While I applaud your concern for Bob Toxen's buying habits, the fact that he has written one of the industry's most important books on computer security lends a certain weight to his words.
On a side, note, just where are these opulently paid Linux integrators?
Unfortunately, a fair number of "Mom and Pop" sites use IIS, though a surprisingly high percentage
do use Linux. For this reason, before giving my credit card to a new web merchant I always do:
nmap -O -sS -F -P0 -T Aggressive newguy.com
Stealth port scan with agressive timing? Now that's consumer activism.
Method A - what TCP session? Just send the request!
Method B - initiate TCP handshake and begin legitimate conversation.
So what you're saying is that since method A is going to fail if attempted through a stateful firewall, Every corporate customer of Microsoft has to wait until method A fails for every single outbound web connection, regardless of the server, so that joe sixpack with a modem will think M$ is the shit.
Unless of course, you don't run a firewall. Trustworthy computing, anyone?
I wonder if the mindless millions of corporate tools who've standardized on IIS/IE have any concept of this.
About this particular problem, i installed some redhat 8 last month and font support is really better than before.
Agreed. I also saw a great deal of improvement after recompiling freetype with a bytecode option turned on (not enabled by default due to a patent dispute, I believe), but you still have to admit that the presentation is abysmal compared to the way fonts work on a Mac or Windows.
hahahaha! Damn. If I was drinking milk I would have spit it out all over my screen. That was funny.
Seriously, though, I think your statements may be colored by simply being used to Windows and paying the price that using it demands. I've been using Linux as a desktop at home and at work for some months now, and reboots and reinstalls are now alien to me. (Also, I have no problem with MS documents in Open Office).
Certainly, some features are annoying, and Linux has some drawbacks (FONTS!). I find you may be omitting some benefits to using Linux, such as OO's bullets/numbers toolbar. Also, once you've solved a problem in Linux, it stays solved. Windows' seemingly random crashes cannot be mitigated by any means, including calling Microsoft tech support. On the whole, Linux is easier to use, allows me to be more productive, and is infinitely more flexible.
Does this new science perform an action previously left up to God. Alright, when do we start!
That's a good paraphrase of the position I described. Absurd, isn't it? It interests me to see scientists allow an irrational urge to disprove the existence of God to determine their actions, and indeed, to sweep aside the ethical concerns of their work. In order to allow them to return to a thoughtful analysis of their work, unfettered by the belief that they can and must destroy God, I would like to make the following statement.
As a Christian, there is no scientific achievement that can reduce either my personal esteem for God, or my willingness to discuss and demonstrate that esteem. You have nothing to prove. Please proceed with your experiments accordingly.
...about cloning. Based on what I've seen here, the answer is conditional.
If controlling the weather will piss of religious people, then yes, we should do it. If not, then the usual prudence with regard to new science applies.
You misunderstand. I in no way oppose anyone saying anything. But saying something while misrepresenting yourself as the party you are attempting to criticize is cowardly and illegal.
Discussing the actions of Dow is one thing. Doing so with a domain name and web site format intended to deceive the viewer as to the source of the material is quite another.
I happen to agree with you with regard to the behavior of Dow, but giving the Dows of the world more ammunition to shut down public participation by clearly attemtpting to deceive the public is no way to effectively protest it.
I never find myself on this side of the argument, but the only thing I see here which is not steaming troll meat is the Dow DMCA complaint, which is actually pretty reasonable. The owner of the dow-chemical domain is not named George Dow-Chemical, images and text WERE taken from the dow web site without their permission, and all of this was used to deceive the public as to the intents and actions of Dow.
One could actually make a pretty good argument that those opposed to the DMCA wish only to plagarize and deceive, based on the actions of these parodists. For this reason, I cannot support their efforts. Freedom of information is too important to me.
I have a serious spam problem on my server. I have a couple of users who are amazingly profligate with how and where they share their e-mail address, and it has turned my server into an interesting anti-spam lab.
I tried the RBLs, but in my experience, they only work if you are reasonably careful with your address. Once you get on enough opt-in lists, you get so much spam from legitimate servers that RBLs don't work anymore.
The final answer has been to use a Bayesian filter which tags messaages for filtering on the client. I'm using bogofilter, trained with a message corpus of about 10,000. This has been the only thing which has really worked, and the client side filter provides a safety valve against false positives. (Although, to date, I've had no false positives).
Slashdot Mirror
I am a 270 pound martial artist. (No, not Sumo.) Bring it.
Playing devil's advocate here; I'll venture that most of those machines get reformatted with a warez'd copy of Windows.
If I was aware of that happening, I'd turn them in. Not out of Linux zealotry per se, but because I don't want M$ to have a good reason to squash the market for PCs without the M$ tax.
Start from the top.
As soon as regulatory authority is brought to bear to prevent software vendors from circumventing the first and fourth amendments, and when concerns such as quality and reliability are federally mandated, I'll consider supporting this.
I remember printing little plastic gorillas at theme parks years ago - you just had to remember to carry them around upside down until they fully hardened.
It seems geourl.org is located... nowhere. It seems the /. effect can alter the very fact of your physical existence.
How does this benefit me?
With product activation, Intuit can provide faster, more efficient support for TurboTax customers. Without technology to ensure compliance with our License Agreement, TurboTax customers who legitimately purchase the product wait longer for support because of increased contacts from users seeking support for unlicensed software.
eh? Thousands of users calling support to deal with product activation issues are going to make it easier for me to get support?
Wow, I've gotten quite a few responses to this post. Good points, all.
A little research also revealed that the company they are using for the registration piece is known to involve spyware in their software.
All of this is sufficient to make me start looking for another tax software solution.
"We've heard from people who installed TurboTax right away and then got a new PC for Christmas. For most people, they can reactivate the product without even contacting us."
So these people who had no problems called you up out of the clear blue to tell you it worked?
Try nmap 3.x. I think it has better OS recognition. I would advise against port scanning hosts you do not personally control. That is illegal.
I don't know. TurboTax is only good for one tax year, so the useage lifetime for the software is as long as it takes me to actually do my taxes, which is only a couple of days, if that. Not a very big window of opportunity for total system failure , IMHO. It's not like they're keying the O/S to your hardware via the Internet or anything.
I can't think of any better way to say this...
Fuckin - ay!
Considering that the perp's address (or one that can be easily traced to him) is in the e-mail, I don't know why they need web logs.
Furthermore, I don't know why the perp would be surfing the discussion on cryptome, unless he's just reviewing his handiwork.
But as a Linux security book, I'd suggest the man pages first.
Well, I am a professional security consultant, and I find Toxen's work to be eminently practical and useful. I'm not personally famimiliar with anything the man pages have to say about password policies or paths of vulnerability. On my system, I don't seem to have manual entries for either of these.
Wow, a professional journalist missed the nuance of italicized text preceding my comment. See, we Slashdot folk do that when we quote somebody else. While I applaud your concern for Bob Toxen's buying habits, the fact that he has written one of the industry's most important books on computer security lends a certain weight to his words.
On a side, note, just where are these opulently paid Linux integrators?
Unfortunately, a fair number of "Mom and Pop" sites use IIS, though a surprisingly high percentage do use Linux. For this reason, before giving my credit card to a new web merchant I always do:
nmap -O -sS -F -P0 -T Aggressive newguy.com
Stealth port scan with agressive timing? Now that's consumer activism.
Method A - what TCP session? Just send the request!
Method B - initiate TCP handshake and begin legitimate conversation.
So what you're saying is that since method A is going to fail if attempted through a stateful firewall, Every corporate customer of Microsoft has to wait until method A fails for every single outbound web connection, regardless of the server, so that joe sixpack with a modem will think M$ is the shit.Unless of course, you don't run a firewall. Trustworthy computing, anyone?
I wonder if the mindless millions of corporate tools who've standardized on IIS/IE have any concept of this.
Finally, somebody please mirror these images, the bandwidth on that site is getting sucked dry.
Do a gnutella on Microsoft Slides.
About this particular problem, i installed some redhat 8 last month and font support is really better than before.
Agreed. I also saw a great deal of improvement after recompiling freetype with a bytecode option turned on (not enabled by default due to a patent dispute, I believe), but you still have to admit that the presentation is abysmal compared to the way fonts work on a Mac or Windows.
libobscure.so.2
hahahaha! Damn. If I was drinking milk I would have spit it out all over my screen. That was funny.
Seriously, though, I think your statements may be colored by simply being used to Windows and paying the price that using it demands. I've been using Linux as a desktop at home and at work for some months now, and reboots and reinstalls are now alien to me. (Also, I have no problem with MS documents in Open Office).
Certainly, some features are annoying, and Linux has some drawbacks (FONTS!). I find you may be omitting some benefits to using Linux, such as OO's bullets/numbers toolbar. Also, once you've solved a problem in Linux, it stays solved. Windows' seemingly random crashes cannot be mitigated by any means, including calling Microsoft tech support. On the whole, Linux is easier to use, allows me to be more productive, and is infinitely more flexible.
Does this new science perform an action previously left up to God. Alright, when do we start!
That's a good paraphrase of the position I described. Absurd, isn't it? It interests me to see scientists allow an irrational urge to disprove the existence of God to determine their actions, and indeed, to sweep aside the ethical concerns of their work. In order to allow them to return to a thoughtful analysis of their work, unfettered by the belief that they can and must destroy God, I would like to make the following statement.
As a Christian, there is no scientific achievement that can reduce either my personal esteem for God, or my willingness to discuss and demonstrate that esteem. You have nothing to prove. Please proceed with your experiments accordingly.
...about cloning. Based on what I've seen here, the answer is conditional.
If controlling the weather will piss of religious people, then yes, we should do it. If not, then the usual prudence with regard to new science applies.
There's something profoundly in keeping with the Star Trek tradition to see the admiral using a teleprompter.
You misunderstand. I in no way oppose anyone saying anything. But saying something while misrepresenting yourself as the party you are attempting to criticize is cowardly and illegal.
Discussing the actions of Dow is one thing. Doing so with a domain name and web site format intended to deceive the viewer as to the source of the material is quite another.
I happen to agree with you with regard to the behavior of Dow, but giving the Dows of the world more ammunition to shut down public participation by clearly attemtpting to deceive the public is no way to effectively protest it.
I never find myself on this side of the argument, but the only thing I see here which is not steaming troll meat is the Dow DMCA complaint, which is actually pretty reasonable. The owner of the dow-chemical domain is not named George Dow-Chemical, images and text WERE taken from the dow web site without their permission, and all of this was used to deceive the public as to the intents and actions of Dow.
One could actually make a pretty good argument that those opposed to the DMCA wish only to plagarize and deceive, based on the actions of these parodists. For this reason, I cannot support their efforts. Freedom of information is too important to me.
I have a serious spam problem on my server. I have a couple of users who are amazingly profligate with how and where they share their e-mail address, and it has turned my server into an interesting anti-spam lab.
I tried the RBLs, but in my experience, they only work if you are reasonably careful with your address. Once you get on enough opt-in lists, you get so much spam from legitimate servers that RBLs don't work anymore.
The final answer has been to use a Bayesian filter which tags messaages for filtering on the client. I'm using bogofilter, trained with a message corpus of about 10,000. This has been the only thing which has really worked, and the client side filter provides a safety valve against false positives. (Although, to date, I've had no false positives).