I know that Cox Cable blocks ports 80 & 443, and possibly others. What I don't understand is that their Use Policy specifically forbids running any kind of server, and yet they allow inbound access to just about every port. Running a web server on port 81 works just fine...
Are there *any* ports at all, on a consumer-grade machine, that *need* to listen to the outside world?? Pretty much everything that a casual user does is initiated from their PC - email is either web-based or POP/IMAP to a server, web browsing goes to external servers, IM (of all kinds) generally links to a central server, IRC and other chatrooms have central servers, games that coordinate multiple online players generally have a central server, etc. All have one thing in common - the initial connection is outbound from the user's PC. The SYN packet goes out, a SYN/ACK comes back, and the connection is running.
If the cable company simply dropped all inbound SYN (but not SYN/ACK) packets destined for subscriber systems, a fair proportion of virus/worm infections would be stopped dead. OK, so that wouldn't stop malware being downloaded from webpages, or in email attachments, and it wouldn't stop a zombie PC from reaching out to a controller, but it should stop infection-from-first-boot.
This is, after all, what a NAT router does - if a port isn't explicitly forwarded, connections to that port are dropped.
I realize that this would be a royal PITA for us geeks running our own servers at home, but that could be handled by allowing us to request certain ports to be opened.
Hmmm, government logic at its finest - if you don't meet the standard we set, we'll cut your funding so you can't possibly meet the standard without begging for funding from some other source... Sad, very sad.
/lib and/usr/lib are separate for similar reasons./lib holds system libraries, while/usr/lib holds user-installed libraries. It makes threat containment easier.
I always understood that separation to be so that you had a fighting chance of getting a crashed machine back to life./bin &/lib contained the necessary tools to recover the rest of the system - fdisk, dump, restore, etc - so if your root partition wasn't completely toasted, you'd be able to repair everything else. As a last resort, you could get dump, tar or dd backups of data partitions if a complete wipe became necessary.
Isn't that why booting to single user gives you just the small root partition without attempting to touch anything else?? Of course, all the toss-everything-into-root Linux installation instructions blow that plan out of the water...
Back in the day when Solaris 1 was called SunOS, the network booted clients all had their own root and swap partitions on the remote server. They'd mount a shared/usr and other things, but they definitely had their own root and swap, so/etc was unique to each client.
That's certainly how it was with SunOS 3.x, before SunOS 4.x mutated into Solaris 1. By the time Solaris 2 came out, we had migrated to systems with disks in, so if early Solaris 2 operated as you described, I never used it that way.
School I went to used to have a bottle of uranyl acetate on an open shelf in the chemistry lab. Apparently that acetate of uranium is a standard reagent for some test or other. Whatever it was used for, it was far more radioactive than the official radiation sources kept in a lead box, locked away under the stairs. Actually, my physics teacher's watch was more radioactive than the official sources - pre-war radium dial...
Didyou look at the image linked in the article header, that shows how Oregon proposes to implement such a system?? It seems to be saying that whenever you fill up with gas, the Service Station will interrogate your car for a mileage report. The simple fix for that system, for people living near enough to the state line, would be to drive out-of-state to fill up. And take a couple of 5-gallon gas cans along as well, in case they get caught short too far from the state line...
Re:Disconnect and motivation
on
The Music Man
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· Score: 1
Must be a bad day for mods - I was going for Funny, not Insightful. Ah well...
As for the business method patent that might be a good idea. I don't know why Linus would though...
I was thinking that Linus could donate the patent to a group like EFF, because it would be kinda funny to be able to slap the RIAA with a patent infringement lawsuit whenever they fire a volley of P2P copyright infringement lawsuits.
No, I don't really think the RIAA is using the Internet to mirror their data - I just thought there was some potential for humour...
Re:Disconnect and motivation
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation?
Perhaps they use Linus' method: "real men don't do backups - they post their code to the Internet, and let others mirror it".
No, really, the RIAA could be doing exactly that. This would explain why they haven't done what seems blindingly obvious to us - switch from CD distribution to network channels. As long as they distribute CDs at inflated prices, the P2P networks will thrive, thereby maintaining their backups copies. If they switch to a business model that kills the P2P networks, they'd have to spend enormous amounts of money archiving and preserving everything...
Ahh, if only Linus would apply for a business method patent on the "upload and mirror" backup strategy...
The concern is that, if you fill out the printer registration card with name, address, phone number and serial number and if the spyware sends the printer serial number along with the other information, then they can tie cartridge usage to a particular name/address record, along with the IP it came from.
Which immediately suggests a course of action to "poison" the information pool - register as Darl McBride and start copying something illegal...
participating in the stupid law assistance program
That's really only going to work on a counterfeiter dumb enough to have an Internet connection on his currency scan'n'print LAN.
The people they're most likely to catch are the kids that watch National Treasure, and then start scanning $bills and loading the images into a pirated copy of PhotoShop to see if they can find the clues...
... The recorded holographic interference pattern will now diffract the laser light passing through it, creating a 3D image of the original object as if it was still there.
In other words, you have an apparently clear glass plate which, when illuminated from behind by laser, shows the 3D image. So, your fake ID would need to be substantially thicker than a regular ID...
I have a copy of Holography Handbook which describes building a sandbox. I don't have the book handy right now (packing up to move house), but there's a review on the Amazon page that contains this comment:
The authors explain, with numerous photos, how to set up a 4'x4'x1' sandbox table, full of 1600 pounds of sand, all "floating" on partially inflated inner tubes for making your own holograms. That way, when the garbage truck goes past the house, no vibrations will disrupt the inertial stability of your optics lab. And you can put the lenses and mirrors on long sticks and just push them into the sandbox!
Dunno about the UPC-reading laser, but I guess it would work.
I'd like to think that they'd suffer some kind of penalty for allowing a client to go down in flames so spectacularly. Like never, ever working in Utah again, or something...:)
Here at work we were told, "Do not apply SP2. If you do, stuff will break. We're testing to see what needs upgrading to work with SP2." I wouldn't be too surprised if other corporate IT groups did the same.
Mind you, I don't often boot XP, as I find Linux much more work-friendly...:)
I think this is a major plus - you can have several browser windows open, each with multiple tabs. Right now I have a couple of windows open. One contains 4 tabs with corporate monitoring tools running, and I can see on each tab that the overall page state of each is green, without having to flip through them. The other browser window has the Slashdot front page in the first tab and some articles in other tabs.
Perhaps the most useful thing is that just by picking up those two windows and dragging them from the CRT to the LCD (laptop w/ monitor) I have a clear desktop to work on. By using tabs I'm reducing the numbers of windows I have to drag around from 10 to 2.
I've yet to see proof that the world wasn't created in 6 days. So far as I'm concerned, there's nothing the Evolutionists can say that the Creationists can't refute with: "Any Supreme Being that can create a whole universe in 6 days can sure as heck also create X", where X is whatever evidence the Evolutionists produce.
For example, take fossils - why couldn't the Creator simply build fossils into the rocks as He creates them?? Why would He?? Perhaps it's some kind of puzzle, or test...
BTW, I wouldn't classify myself as either Creationist or Evolutionist. There appears to be evidence that evolution takes place - the pepper moth in England during the Industrial Revolution evolved from a mostly light gray color with a few individuals that were dark gray, to mostly dark gray with a few light gray individuals. This was in response to their tree bark habitat being polluted by soot and smoke. On the other hand, I can see a Creator with a sense of humor creating fossils and pepper moth "evolution" as a massive practical joke...
And finally, there's no evidence that the world wasn't created next week, and that everything we're doing right now isn't simply bogus memories created along with the rest of the mess. I'm not sure I'd want to believe in a god that would give us memories of Dubya being re-elected, though...:)
On paper they don't show a profit, which in itself is suspect given that you can't easily tell in advance what movies will be popular and which are likely to bomb. The studios are able to do this by creative accounting that somehow makes all their income almost exactly equal to their expenses.
The only specific example I can think of offhand is the Spiderman movie, where the original cartoonist, Stan Lee, agreed to allow use of his characters in return for a percentage of the profit. He then sued when he didn't get a penny.
I meant that, if there were some process by which the tables could be copied with no more or less effort than books are printed, then the analogy has some value.
Conversely, if any given book is written by hand, from scratch, and completely ignoring printing presses & electronic distribution then again, the table analogy has value.
I don't think I was commenting on whether the carpenter and the author should be due continuous, perpetual payments...
Slashdot Mirror
Which immediately opens up a new market for arms dealers - selling M16s to Iraqis...
Are there *any* ports at all, on a consumer-grade machine, that *need* to listen to the outside world?? Pretty much everything that a casual user does is initiated from their PC - email is either web-based or POP/IMAP to a server, web browsing goes to external servers, IM (of all kinds) generally links to a central server, IRC and other chatrooms have central servers, games that coordinate multiple online players generally have a central server, etc. All have one thing in common - the initial connection is outbound from the user's PC. The SYN packet goes out, a SYN/ACK comes back, and the connection is running.
If the cable company simply dropped all inbound SYN (but not SYN/ACK) packets destined for subscriber systems, a fair proportion of virus/worm infections would be stopped dead. OK, so that wouldn't stop malware being downloaded from webpages, or in email attachments, and it wouldn't stop a zombie PC from reaching out to a controller, but it should stop infection-from-first-boot.
This is, after all, what a NAT router does - if a port isn't explicitly forwarded, connections to that port are dropped.
I realize that this would be a royal PITA for us geeks running our own servers at home, but that could be handled by allowing us to request certain ports to be opened.
Hmmm, government logic at its finest - if you don't meet the standard we set, we'll cut your funding so you can't possibly meet the standard without begging for funding from some other source... Sad, very sad.
I always understood that separation to be so that you had a fighting chance of getting a crashed machine back to life. /bin & /lib contained the necessary tools to recover the rest of the system - fdisk, dump, restore, etc - so if your root partition wasn't completely toasted, you'd be able to repair everything else. As a last resort, you could get dump, tar or dd backups of data partitions if a complete wipe became necessary.
Isn't that why booting to single user gives you just the small root partition without attempting to touch anything else?? Of course, all the toss-everything-into-root Linux installation instructions blow that plan out of the water...
That's certainly how it was with SunOS 3.x, before SunOS 4.x mutated into Solaris 1. By the time Solaris 2 came out, we had migrated to systems with disks in, so if early Solaris 2 operated as you described, I never used it that way.
You're kidding, right?? This *is* Slashdot, after all...
Have you tried distccKNOPPIX?? I haven't needed one yet, but that's the one I'd try first.
School I went to used to have a bottle of uranyl acetate on an open shelf in the chemistry lab. Apparently that acetate of uranium is a standard reagent for some test or other. Whatever it was used for, it was far more radioactive than the official radiation sources kept in a lead box, locked away under the stairs. Actually, my physics teacher's watch was more radioactive than the official sources - pre-war radium dial...
Didyou look at the image linked in the article header, that shows how Oregon proposes to implement such a system?? It seems to be saying that whenever you fill up with gas, the Service Station will interrogate your car for a mileage report. The simple fix for that system, for people living near enough to the state line, would be to drive out-of-state to fill up. And take a couple of 5-gallon gas cans along as well, in case they get caught short too far from the state line...
I was thinking that Linus could donate the patent to a group like EFF, because it would be kinda funny to be able to slap the RIAA with a patent infringement lawsuit whenever they fire a volley of P2P copyright infringement lawsuits.
No, I don't really think the RIAA is using the Internet to mirror their data - I just thought there was some potential for humour...
Perhaps they use Linus' method: "real men don't do backups - they post their code to the Internet, and let others mirror it".
No, really, the RIAA could be doing exactly that. This would explain why they haven't done what seems blindingly obvious to us - switch from CD distribution to network channels. As long as they distribute CDs at inflated prices, the P2P networks will thrive, thereby maintaining their backups copies. If they switch to a business model that kills the P2P networks, they'd have to spend enormous amounts of money archiving and preserving everything...
Ahh, if only Linus would apply for a business method patent on the "upload and mirror" backup strategy...
I wonder if the packets are tagged in any way?? It would be kinda funny to trap some packets and retransmit them out of sequence... Many times...
Which immediately suggests a course of action to "poison" the information pool - register as Darl McBride and start copying something illegal...
That's really only going to work on a counterfeiter dumb enough to have an Internet connection on his currency scan'n'print LAN.
The people they're most likely to catch are the kids that watch National Treasure, and then start scanning $bills and loading the images into a pirated copy of PhotoShop to see if they can find the clues...
From the "What Are Holograms" page on the kit's website:
In other words, you have an apparently clear glass plate which, when illuminated from behind by laser, shows the 3D image. So, your fake ID would need to be substantially thicker than a regular ID...
Depending on the power of the laser, that might not be a problem for very long...
Dunno about the UPC-reading laser, but I guess it would work.
I'd like to think that they'd suffer some kind of penalty for allowing a client to go down in flames so spectacularly. Like never, ever working in Utah again, or something... :)
No, it's management that needs someone external to blame, especially if customers are impacted.
Mind you, I don't often boot XP, as I find Linux much more work-friendly... :)
I think this is a major plus - you can have several browser windows open, each with multiple tabs. Right now I have a couple of windows open. One contains 4 tabs with corporate monitoring tools running, and I can see on each tab that the overall page state of each is green, without having to flip through them. The other browser window has the Slashdot front page in the first tab and some articles in other tabs.
Perhaps the most useful thing is that just by picking up those two windows and dragging them from the CRT to the LCD (laptop w/ monitor) I have a clear desktop to work on. By using tabs I'm reducing the numbers of windows I have to drag around from 10 to 2.
For example, take fossils - why couldn't the Creator simply build fossils into the rocks as He creates them?? Why would He?? Perhaps it's some kind of puzzle, or test...
BTW, I wouldn't classify myself as either Creationist or Evolutionist. There appears to be evidence that evolution takes place - the pepper moth in England during the Industrial Revolution evolved from a mostly light gray color with a few individuals that were dark gray, to mostly dark gray with a few light gray individuals. This was in response to their tree bark habitat being polluted by soot and smoke. On the other hand, I can see a Creator with a sense of humor creating fossils and pepper moth "evolution" as a massive practical joke...
And finally, there's no evidence that the world wasn't created next week, and that everything we're doing right now isn't simply bogus memories created along with the rest of the mess. I'm not sure I'd want to believe in a god that would give us memories of Dubya being re-elected, though... :)
The only specific example I can think of offhand is the Spiderman movie, where the original cartoonist, Stan Lee, agreed to allow use of his characters in return for a percentage of the profit. He then sued when he didn't get a penny.
And it's completely impossible for an enemy combatant to disrupt or subvert communications with this thing, right??
I meant that, if there were some process by which the tables could be copied with no more or less effort than books are printed, then the analogy has some value.
Conversely, if any given book is written by hand, from scratch, and completely ignoring printing presses & electronic distribution then again, the table analogy has value.
I don't think I was commenting on whether the carpenter and the author should be due continuous, perpetual payments...