I agree that the explanation is pretty vague. They must have based it on the change of doppler shift in multiple consecutive transmissions (as the plane was flying further south it was flying away from the satellite rather than parallel). It would be a bit more credible if they also showed their estimates for the other transmissions, not just the last one.
Bottom line is that they must have better information and be reasonably confident about it otherwise they wouldn't be concentrating on a single area. Kind of how it didn't make sense to me why they were searching on the wrong side of the Malaysian peninsula until they disclosed the primary radar data.
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Ah yes, indeed you're right. But I normally use WindowMaker and thus I haven't noticed this. And therefore the windows key still has no use for me.
Re:No! I use CapsLock as my "ESC" key
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Windows key is a better candidate for this as it's not used for anything on a Linux system anyway.
Adding the following to your ~/.bashrc or similar will turn your left Windows key into another escape key:
In computer databases, I always use year,month,day, and so does every other American I've met who programs. The only time the weird month,day,year order is used is when displaying to a user or receiving input from a user. Once inside the database, it's ordered the right way around (which is neither how Americans nor Europeans write it).
Well, some Europeans do use this format... I'm from Hungary, and this is how we've always written our dates. For example, 5:20PM on 29th October 2004 is written like:
2004 Október 29. 17:20
I therefore propose that Hungarian should become the official language of the Internet. It's a perfectly sensible language and at least 10 million people speak it already.
I'll submit an RFC (in Hungarian) for this end. If I don't receive any feedback, then it shall become an official IETF recommendation and I will rule the world! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Just out of curiosity, why doesn't a severed finger work? Is it along the same lines as the reason why my laptop's touchpad won't work with a gloved finger?
Nope. Touchpads, IIRC, work by detecting the changes in the electrical properties (resistance?) of the pad as it makes contact with your skin.
Fingerprint scanners OTOH utilise several different methods, at least one of which will most likely not work with a severed finger. This method picks up the temperature difference between the ridges of your fingerprint and the comparatively cooler air that's trapped between them (air is a pretty good heat insulator). It sounds crazy but it must be true! I've read it on the Internet;-P
What, you don't build your own processors? What fun is that?
Chip development, and particularly processor development is a hobby few people can afford. But you can roll your own CPU on a budget -- use an FPGA (Field Programmable Grid Array) where you can program the connections between the components. And there are people who do this kind of thing. You can find some of their work here
What we really need is a client that renders the HTML but doesn't establish objects requiring outside connections in the process. Does anyone know of an HTML rendering email client that has such an option?
Umm, How about Mozilla?
In the Mozilla preferences dialog, under Privacy > Images there's a checkbox saying "Do not load remote images in Mail & Newsgroups messages". This will get rid of simple web bugs.
There are two more checkboxes under Advanced > Scripts & Plugins that relate to email privacy: "Enable JavaScript for (...) Mail & Newsgroups", and "Enable Plugins for Mail & Newsgroups". These are both disabled by default, which means no scripting of any kind in emails either.
Let's see... the Debian project had three boxes compromised. The MO of the attacker seems to be to install a rootkit on the compromised machine and look for passwords caught by the keylogger. Then using the captured username and password, log into another machine, escalate privileges using his exploit, install another rootkit, lather, rinse & repeat.
To me this means one thing. The stolen Debian developer account was almost certainly stolen because the developer logged into a Debian.org server from a box that was already compromised. And who knows how many other boxes has this individual or group compromised already?
In fact, anyone offering public shell access (eg SourceForge) on Linux could have been easily affected by this vulnerablity. And anyone who logged into another Linux box from a compromised machine runs the risk of having their machine rootkitted already.
Admittedly this is nowhere near as bad as a remotely exploitable hole, but it's still bad. Once you're local on the machine (whether using some kind of remote login or an exploit in userland software), on Unix systems* your next step is privilege escalation, which is what this exploit lets you do. This makes a relatively minor intrusion (if permissions are used sensibly) into a full-blown one that requires re-installing the machine.
No software is perfect and these things do happen. But pointing out how Windows had worse holes in the past doesn't really help anyone who got 0w|\|3d this way. OTOH the Debian announcement was brilliant, they did a great job of explaining what happened and how. The only omission was made by the kernel guys for not recognising that this bug would allow privilege escalation, otherwise the fix would have been made available a lot sooner. Unfortunately for everyone, the person who did recognise the opportiunity chose to use it for his own purposes rather than reporting it.
So to sum it up: the ball was dropped, machines were compromised and saying that Windows is worse (apart from stating the obvious;-)) doesn't help anyone. So let's try not to take it personally and get defensive (I know, it's hard thing for me as well), patch your boxes and move on.
* And any operating system that properly restrict the accounts used to run services. Privilege escalation attacks exist for Windows as well, but they're needed less often since whatever you're compromising is likely to run with 'LocalSystem' privileges anyway.
Indeed... And the sole reason for the existence of this product is the omission by Microsoft to put the value of the 'Server:' header into the Metabase or Registry or some other 'sensible' place.
I'm just guessing here, but I guess that their 'product' is an ISAPI filter that simply replaces the server header with the string of your choice. This provides absolutely no protection except the false sense of security that you have 'outsmarted' those damn kids.
And they want how much for providing this *ahem* indispersible service? (There's no way to check the prices, they're slashdotted already;-))
...Unless of course if you're dealing with a completely clueless (or just plain sneaky) kiddie who throws every single exploit he has (regardless the server) at your box. That's when security through obscurity stops working
(Hope my meta-moderation does't get undone by the slashcode for posting here...)
One more reason why your post was informative rather than a troll. Canopy Group / SCO's ownership of TrollTech was one of the recurring comments on/., so it was really useful to point out that combined they still only own about 5.7% of the company. Way too little to influence the decisions TrollTech makes.
I used WP from version 4 through 6, and that's not how I remember it. You just selected the text and then selected bold if memory serves, like most word processors. Of course the tag soup you're talking about was hiding back there, and even in this situation where you don't have to worry about another program trying to parse the thing this is bad - it can cause all sorts of strange little problems, like for instance if you delete the text but not the spaces around it, and the spaces were inside the bold tags, then later you put your cursor in those spaces and start typing - wtf is that bold?!?!? The beautiful thing with WP though, unlike Word, was you could 'reveal codes' and figure these things out.
Hmm, maybe we had 'reveal codes' turned on by default... It was 1996 and I was a just a student / newbie so my memory is somewhat hazy. In any case I remember seeing the codes and how you had to turn bold on and off (even if turning them on and off was probably done using Ctrl+B). And later it helped me make sense of the bizarre behaviour that you describe above.
It's too bad noone else will read this discussion now that the story's off the front page . It could have influenced someone, but now it's just another rant in the sea of rants that make up Slashdot:-/
But if this thing is a real Frontpage work-alike, it's going to spit out horrid broken code almost as bad as Word anyway, that's the biggest worry I would have.
Since this is the offshot of the Mozilla Composer, it won't be quite as bad as Frontpage. I don't think that by 'workalike' they mean 'we'll duplicate the bugs and the brain-damage'...
But every implementation of this idea I've seen yet spits out horrible broken code and there are reasons for that, so I'm a bit skeptical too.
Ouch, I'm a web standards geek and you've touched a major sore spot of mine. So I guess I have no choice but to have a rant;-)
Apologies if you already know this and / or if I get something wrong. I'm writing this so someone would correct me if I'm wrong...
<rant>
You have every reason to be skeptical. Even Mozilla Composer spits out tag soup. It's valid tag soup, but it's still lacks any kind of semantics and structure. And that's because it is utterly impossible to produce a semantically correct HTML document with a word processor, especially for people who only know word processors. On a side note, tag soup syndrome also explains why those MS Word documents so incredibly bloated.
I had the misfortune to be required to learn WordPerfect for DOS, which was still an non-WYSIWYG word processor. And guess what. If you wanted to make text bold, you had to insert a special 'bold' code (using some key combination I can't remember) and then at the end of the bold text, enter an 'end bold' code, similarly to using <b> in HTML.
When WYSIWYG editors came along, they automated this process. You'd select some text, click on the 'bold' button and the word processor inserts the begin and end markers for you at the beginning and the end of the selection. As you continue to edit the document, there would be more and more markers scattered all over the document, but you don't know that since you cannot see the source. So your document is tag soup and you don't know it.
Then as word processors evolved, they kept adding more and more formatting options, all of which had to be stored with the text. Even the default settings were saved because the default could be set different on another computer. To make things worse, MS Word and WordPerfect were constantly trying to crack each other's document format while simultaneously make it as hard as possible to read their format. The result is a massive, bloated mess. When you save HTML from MS Word, this bloated mess and the associated philosophy gets converted to a bastardised version of MS-HTML, which adds extra features to accomodate formatting that doesn't at all belong into a web document, laced with conditional comments and other 'innovations'.
Frontpage and Dreamweaver both started out as simple word processors that produce HTML markup. This was OK, because most people were familiar with word processors and because valid and semantically correct HTML wasn't even considered by anyone. Web developers at the time thought that they could write anything in any order as long as it looked right, and so the WYSIWYG editors could get away with doing the same.
Even Mozilla Composer works like a dumb word processor, which just doesn't cut it any more, especially not for a Mozilla component. Let's see an example. I start a new document and get a HTML document shell with an incorrect doctype declaration and a badly indented head and body.
Each time I press enter, a <br> is added. Each time I select some text and apply some formatting, a new <div> or <span> gets added with a style attribute. This is bad because it makes it almost impossible to produce semantically correct markup even if you know HTML and CSS. And a million style attributes are no better than a million <font> tags.
What would a decent editor look like then? For starters, it could remove
But you are right, there are things that are quicker in an editor that writes HTML for you (or at least does code hinting), especially if you don't know HTML inside out. And there is certainly a bigger market out there for WYSIWIG editors than there is for Vim;-)
Good point! I always wanted an editor or IDE that supports the Vim key bindings. In fact, the lack of them turned me off Bluefish, Quanta and Anjuta even though all three are really nice editors / IDEs.
Of course an editor that supports the Vim shortcuts could still have a WYSIWIG interface and implement the usual Windows / Gnome / KDE shortcuts like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, etc. Wouldn't it be nice? I think the main reason why such editor doesn't exist is because the Vim users rather stick to Vim than implement something like that for another IDE.
I use Vim for just about anything involving editing text. I'm a web developer so I started off with Allaire Homesite, then moved to ColdFusion Studio, then Dreamweaver when CF Studio was discontinued. After about 3 months using Dreamweaver, I switched to a Windows build of gVim and I'm very happy with it.
But you have to admit that Vim is definitely not for everyone. You wouldn't give it to your average business user -- or even to a HTML newbie. It's not only the unusual keyboard shortcuts and the RegExp-driven text find / replace that make it totally unusable for a non-geek, but Vim is still a primarily text-based app that doesn't even offer code hinting.
These days, HTML is commonly used in a typical business. If Linux wants to make it to the business desktop, it is important to have a good quality WYSIWYG HTML editor to give to those who can barely use a word processor, and those who just want to make quick edits without having to learn HTML. Face it, not everyone wants to do that.
And for the people who do know HTML (like myself), their life would become much easier if the people who don't could give them a simple HTML page instead of a horrible MS Word doc that's impossible to automatically convert to anything resembling sane, semantically correct HTML.
No flame intended, just wanted to point out that this project is not such a bad idea after all.
I am a web developer and I hate IE. I hate it because after I have finished coding my beautiful and elegant website, I have to work around the bugs in IE (at least version 5.0 or 5.5 up) -- which often means that I have to weight down my pages with extra tags and / or CSS attributes or remove a feature -- or as some people do, 'hide' certain CSS rules from IE.
The reason why web developers are complaining is this: A web page coded according to standards should look / work pretty much the same in the browsers that support the same standard, and degrade gracefully in those that don't. You should not need to design your page for any specific browser. Browsers should be written to support standards and rendering bugs should be taken seriously.
Don't you know that Windows does fake copying and actually copies in the background? It is really annoying on removable drives, and its dangerous.
That's called buffered I/O and is a standard feature of modern operating systems. Where it gets dangerous is that Windows doesn't force you to manually unmount removable disks before pulling them out, which can easily result in data loss. But that's what the little light is for next to those drives. If the light is on, don't take the disk out or you will lose data.
Oh, and always stop the hardware before removing USB or firewire storage devices as on Windows that's the only way to be sure that all the data has been written to them.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the explanation is pretty vague. They must have based it on the change of doppler shift in multiple consecutive transmissions (as the plane was flying further south it was flying away from the satellite rather than parallel). It would be a bit more credible if they also showed their estimates for the other transmissions, not just the last one. Bottom line is that they must have better information and be reasonably confident about it otherwise they wouldn't be concentrating on a single area. Kind of how it didn't make sense to me why they were searching on the wrong side of the Malaysian peninsula until they disclosed the primary radar data.
Ah yes, indeed you're right. But I normally use WindowMaker and thus I haven't noticed this. And therefore the windows key still has no use for me.
The Windows key is a better candidate for this as it's not used for anything on a Linux system anyway.
Adding the following to your ~/.bashrc or similar will turn your left Windows key into another escape key:
xmodmap -e 'keysym Super_L = Escape'Well, some Europeans do use this format... I'm from Hungary, and this is how we've always written our dates. For example, 5:20PM on 29th October 2004 is written like:
I therefore propose that Hungarian should become the official language of the Internet. It's a perfectly sensible language and at least 10 million people speak it already.
I'll submit an RFC (in Hungarian) for this end. If I don't receive any feedback, then it shall become an official IETF recommendation and I will rule the world! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
You mean this one?
Benefits of voice recognition:
hereDrawbacks:
here, here and hereThe geeks at Opera must read UserFriendly...
I for one welcome our new Knomell overlords.
Nope. Touchpads, IIRC, work by detecting the changes in the electrical properties (resistance?) of the pad as it makes contact with your skin.
Fingerprint scanners OTOH utilise several different methods, at least one of which will most likely not work with a severed finger. This method picks up the temperature difference between the ridges of your fingerprint and the comparatively cooler air that's trapped between them (air is a pretty good heat insulator). It sounds crazy but it must be true! I've read it on the Internet ;-P
FPGA = Field Programmable Gate Array.
Damn, I really have too many acronyms / abbreviations to remember these days.
Chip development, and particularly processor development is a hobby few people can afford. But you can roll your own CPU on a budget -- use an FPGA (Field Programmable Grid Array) where you can program the connections between the components. And there are people who do this kind of thing. You can find some of their work here
Umm, How about Mozilla?
In the Mozilla preferences dialog, under Privacy > Images there's a checkbox saying "Do not load remote images in Mail & Newsgroups messages". This will get rid of simple web bugs.
There are two more checkboxes under Advanced > Scripts & Plugins that relate to email privacy: "Enable JavaScript for (...) Mail & Newsgroups", and "Enable Plugins for Mail & Newsgroups". These are both disabled by default, which means no scripting of any kind in emails either.
Let's see... the Debian project had three boxes compromised. The MO of the attacker seems to be to install a rootkit on the compromised machine and look for passwords caught by the keylogger. Then using the captured username and password, log into another machine, escalate privileges using his exploit, install another rootkit, lather, rinse & repeat.
To me this means one thing. The stolen Debian developer account was almost certainly stolen because the developer logged into a Debian.org server from a box that was already compromised. And who knows how many other boxes has this individual or group compromised already?
In fact, anyone offering public shell access (eg SourceForge) on Linux could have been easily affected by this vulnerablity. And anyone who logged into another Linux box from a compromised machine runs the risk of having their machine rootkitted already.
Admittedly this is nowhere near as bad as a remotely exploitable hole, but it's still bad. Once you're local on the machine (whether using some kind of remote login or an exploit in userland software), on Unix systems* your next step is privilege escalation, which is what this exploit lets you do. This makes a relatively minor intrusion (if permissions are used sensibly) into a full-blown one that requires re-installing the machine.
No software is perfect and these things do happen. But pointing out how Windows had worse holes in the past doesn't really help anyone who got 0w|\|3d this way. OTOH the Debian announcement was brilliant, they did a great job of explaining what happened and how. The only omission was made by the kernel guys for not recognising that this bug would allow privilege escalation, otherwise the fix would have been made available a lot sooner. Unfortunately for everyone, the person who did recognise the opportiunity chose to use it for his own purposes rather than reporting it.
So to sum it up: the ball was dropped, machines were compromised and saying that Windows is worse (apart from stating the obvious ;-)) doesn't help anyone. So let's try not to take it personally and get defensive (I know, it's hard thing for me as well), patch your boxes and move on.
* And any operating system that properly restrict the accounts used to run services. Privilege escalation attacks exist for Windows as well, but they're needed less often since whatever you're compromising is likely to run with 'LocalSystem' privileges anyway.
Well, having .asp pages on an Apache / Linux server is enough to arouse suspicion that it isn't Apache on Linux after all.
Exactly ;-)
Indeed... And the sole reason for the existence of this product is the omission by Microsoft to put the value of the 'Server:' header into the Metabase or Registry or some other 'sensible' place.
I'm just guessing here, but I guess that their 'product' is an ISAPI filter that simply replaces the server header with the string of your choice. This provides absolutely no protection except the false sense of security that you have 'outsmarted' those damn kids.
And they want how much for providing this *ahem* indispersible service? (There's no way to check the prices, they're slashdotted already ;-))
Yes, security through obscurity does work ;-)
...Unless of course if you're dealing with a completely clueless (or just plain sneaky) kiddie who throws every single exploit he has (regardless the server) at your box. That's when security through obscurity stops working
Don't worry, I did see him in metamod ;-)
(Hope my meta-moderation does't get undone by the slashcode for posting here...)
One more reason why your post was informative rather than a troll. Canopy Group / SCO's ownership of TrollTech was one of the recurring comments on /., so it was really useful to point out that combined they still only own about 5.7% of the company. Way too little to influence the decisions TrollTech makes.
Yeah, just imagine the confusion if someone accidentally bought the wrong one...
D'oh!
Hmm, maybe we had 'reveal codes' turned on by default... It was 1996 and I was a just a student / newbie so my memory is somewhat hazy. In any case I remember seeing the codes and how you had to turn bold on and off (even if turning them on and off was probably done using Ctrl+B). And later it helped me make sense of the bizarre behaviour that you describe above.
It's too bad noone else will read this discussion now that the story's off the front page . It could have influenced someone, but now it's just another rant in the sea of rants that make up Slashdot :-/
Since this is the offshot of the Mozilla Composer, it won't be quite as bad as Frontpage. I don't think that by 'workalike' they mean 'we'll duplicate the bugs and the brain-damage'...
Ouch, I'm a web standards geek and you've touched a major sore spot of mine. So I guess I have no choice but to have a rant ;-)
Apologies if you already know this and / or if I get something wrong. I'm writing this so someone would correct me if I'm wrong...
<rant>
You have every reason to be skeptical. Even Mozilla Composer spits out tag soup. It's valid tag soup, but it's still lacks any kind of semantics and structure. And that's because it is utterly impossible to produce a semantically correct HTML document with a word processor, especially for people who only know word processors. On a side note, tag soup syndrome also explains why those MS Word documents so incredibly bloated.
I had the misfortune to be required to learn WordPerfect for DOS, which was still an non-WYSIWYG word processor. And guess what. If you wanted to make text bold, you had to insert a special 'bold' code (using some key combination I can't remember) and then at the end of the bold text, enter an 'end bold' code, similarly to using <b> in HTML.
When WYSIWYG editors came along, they automated this process. You'd select some text, click on the 'bold' button and the word processor inserts the begin and end markers for you at the beginning and the end of the selection. As you continue to edit the document, there would be more and more markers scattered all over the document, but you don't know that since you cannot see the source. So your document is tag soup and you don't know it.
Then as word processors evolved, they kept adding more and more formatting options, all of which had to be stored with the text. Even the default settings were saved because the default could be set different on another computer. To make things worse, MS Word and WordPerfect were constantly trying to crack each other's document format while simultaneously make it as hard as possible to read their format. The result is a massive, bloated mess. When you save HTML from MS Word, this bloated mess and the associated philosophy gets converted to a bastardised version of MS-HTML, which adds extra features to accomodate formatting that doesn't at all belong into a web document, laced with conditional comments and other 'innovations'.
Frontpage and Dreamweaver both started out as simple word processors that produce HTML markup. This was OK, because most people were familiar with word processors and because valid and semantically correct HTML wasn't even considered by anyone. Web developers at the time thought that they could write anything in any order as long as it looked right, and so the WYSIWYG editors could get away with doing the same.
Even Mozilla Composer works like a dumb word processor, which just doesn't cut it any more, especially not for a Mozilla component. Let's see an example. I start a new document and get a HTML document shell with an incorrect doctype declaration and a badly indented head and body.
Each time I press enter, a <br> is added. Each time I select some text and apply some formatting, a new <div> or <span> gets added with a style attribute. This is bad because it makes it almost impossible to produce semantically correct markup even if you know HTML and CSS. And a million style attributes are no better than a million <font> tags.
What would a decent editor look like then? For starters, it could remove
I think Frodo meant 'WYSIWYG aside'.
But you are right, there are things that are quicker in an editor that writes HTML for you (or at least does code hinting), especially if you don't know HTML inside out. And there is certainly a bigger market out there for WYSIWIG editors than there is for Vim ;-)
Good point! I always wanted an editor or IDE that supports the Vim key bindings. In fact, the lack of them turned me off Bluefish, Quanta and Anjuta even though all three are really nice editors / IDEs.
Of course an editor that supports the Vim shortcuts could still have a WYSIWIG interface and implement the usual Windows / Gnome / KDE shortcuts like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, etc. Wouldn't it be nice? I think the main reason why such editor doesn't exist is because the Vim users rather stick to Vim than implement something like that for another IDE.
I use Vim for just about anything involving editing text. I'm a web developer so I started off with Allaire Homesite, then moved to ColdFusion Studio, then Dreamweaver when CF Studio was discontinued. After about 3 months using Dreamweaver, I switched to a Windows build of gVim and I'm very happy with it.
But you have to admit that Vim is definitely not for everyone. You wouldn't give it to your average business user -- or even to a HTML newbie. It's not only the unusual keyboard shortcuts and the RegExp-driven text find / replace that make it totally unusable for a non-geek, but Vim is still a primarily text-based app that doesn't even offer code hinting.
These days, HTML is commonly used in a typical business. If Linux wants to make it to the business desktop, it is important to have a good quality WYSIWYG HTML editor to give to those who can barely use a word processor, and those who just want to make quick edits without having to learn HTML. Face it, not everyone wants to do that.
And for the people who do know HTML (like myself), their life would become much easier if the people who don't could give them a simple HTML page instead of a horrible MS Word doc that's impossible to automatically convert to anything resembling sane, semantically correct HTML.
No flame intended, just wanted to point out that this project is not such a bad idea after all.
I am a web developer and I hate IE. I hate it because after I have finished coding my beautiful and elegant website, I have to work around the bugs in IE (at least version 5.0 or 5.5 up) -- which often means that I have to weight down my pages with extra tags and / or CSS attributes or remove a feature -- or as some people do, 'hide' certain CSS rules from IE.
The reason why web developers are complaining is this: A web page coded according to standards should look / work pretty much the same in the browsers that support the same standard, and degrade gracefully in those that don't. You should not need to design your page for any specific browser. Browsers should be written to support standards and rendering bugs should be taken seriously.
That's called buffered I/O and is a standard feature of modern operating systems. Where it gets dangerous is that Windows doesn't force you to manually unmount removable disks before pulling them out, which can easily result in data loss. But that's what the little light is for next to those drives. If the light is on, don't take the disk out or you will lose data.
Oh, and always stop the hardware before removing USB or firewire storage devices as on Windows that's the only way to be sure that all the data has been written to them.