So wouldn't it be kinda funny to redirect that guy's update stealing to a page of bogus information? Or, if you don't want to bother creating something bogus, simply keep an old copy of your pages and send them to him.
I kinda like the thought of the Army and Navy gathering all those unsolicited CDs, loading them into a cruise missile or two, punching in Bill's address and launching... Doesn't really matter if there's no explosives onboard - those things arrive fast enough to do a fair amount of damage just from their mass moving at speed. And with luck they wouldn't expend all their fuel before arrival.
More to the point, the voter should be able to look at the ballot paper and ask the booth operator, "Who the hell are these people?" Because, let's face it, those people who actually get off their butts and go out to vote probably know the name of the person they want to vote for... You'd think the same would go for the voting machines, with the obvious exception that the machine could fuck up the vote by (deliberately?) incrementing the wrong counter.
It wasn't so long ago that I had to recover from a "security guy" deleting half a password file. He vi'd/etc/passwd, screwed it up, saved the screwup, then tried to recover by copying/etc/opasswd to/etc/passwd. He got it the wrong way around, though, and managed to copy the screwed up/etc/passwd to opasswd...
Another time, possibly the same guy was trying to set up a list of generic userids that wouldn't be allowed to login, but could be su'd to. He read somewhere about/etc/nologin preventing logins, so he put the list of names in that file... On a production server... Fortunately, port 512 was open and I was able to 'rexec "rm/etc/nologin"'. I could probably have logged in at the console as root and achieved the same result, but that's in another building and "security" don't give out the root password because we have SeOS on the box - you login as yourself and sesu to root - if you can login at all...
[SCO] have also refused to accept the GPL, claiming that some preposterous theory of theirs makes it invalid
According to clause 5:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program.
A judge might not agree, but that seems like a fairly clear copyright violation to me. The language is not full of the little twists and turns that makes litigation so much fun and judges have had a lot of practice dealing with copyright violations, so if Fyodor's legal team could keep SCO's FUD to a minimum, I'd say they'd stand a good chance.
It wouldn't even have to be The Big Test of the GPL that might or might not work in court.
It really boils down to this: show me where in the GPL it says that the copyright holder can alter or revoke the license? It says that, due to actions of the user the user may not be eligible to exercise the license, but there is absolutely no verbiage that says that the copyright holder can unilaterally revoke a user's rights.
I don't know about revoking a user's right, but clause 5 states that:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
So, by publically asserting that the GPL is invalid, SCO leaves themselves wide open to copyright infringement lawsuits. Perhaps Fyodor should have used simpler wording: "Dear SCO, by not accepting the GPL you are illegally distributing a copyrighted work. Cease and desist immediately. Failure to do so will result in legal action."
Though I don't suppose the threat of legal action would frighten them at all. Perhaps siezure of all assets containing infringing material would get their attention. But then again, if nobody's buying SCO products, that probably won't frighten them much either.
Would it not be possible, with a certain amount of effort, to use Photoshop or The Gimp to remove the visible watermark? Or at least, to reduce the visibility? I don't know, I'm not a photo-editing guru...
As for the non-visible-watermarked images, those could still have the noise kind of watermark added when you download them, couldn't they? Mind you, that would be even easier to defeat - print the image then scan it back in. That should introduce a sufficient extra noise component to mask the noise watermark... If ultra-paranoid, fiddle with various settings (color, contrast, brightness, etc) before scanning.
In our case, they'd be ransacking big iron belonging to several major companies other than their intended target. Wanna bet the squeals would reach the White House? Just how much accountability do the feds have when it comes to collateral damage?
I haven't watched the video, but according to the text, while one officer was dealing with Mr Hiibel, at least one other was preventing the daughter from exiting the truck. When she finally forced the door open, she was thrown face-down and had one officer kneel on her back while he and another handcuffed her. After she was cuffed, the original officer took time out to tak to her.
So, where was the threat? With one officer keeping the truck door closed (and presumably in a position to see what was going on in the cab) and another standing by observing, the officer talking to Mr Hiibel should NOT have felt threatened. Three armed and alert police officers facing a rancher and his teenage daughter? If just one of them ran the registration before the confrontation, they would have known: a) that the truck wasn't reported stolen; and therefore: b) who was likely to be in it.
Now where was it I read that movies deliberately don't break even? Dunno... I think it was related to the guy that drew the original Spiderman comics not getting a dime from the movie. IIRC, he was promised a percentage or the profits, and then the studio did the usual financial juggling and showed a net loss. Or something like that.
This apparently happens even when the movie in question is a big hit and rakes in millions on the opening weekend. Somehow Hollywood's version of bistromathics makes the excess disappear.
Re:I like reason #4
on
SCOoby Snacks
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So the DOS attack that took out their website last week was normal business operation?
As others have pointed out, their webserver runs Linux, so technically, SCO Unix wasn't hit by the DoS attack.
Oh, wait, they claim Linux is a derivative of SCO Unix... Never mind...
What are those guys smoking??
on
SCOoby Snacks
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· Score: 1, Funny
Whatever it is those SCO guys are smoking, I want some...
But, don't buy a house, sign a covenant saying you have read the fucking bylaws and will abide by them and then whine like a little bitch because you can't do what you agreed you wouldn't do.
My wife and bought a house in a HOA, but at the signing there was no copy of the bylaws to even read through, let alone sign. It was months after we moved in that the HOA dredged up an old copy of the bylaws, and only then because of the annual change in the committee and my wife took on some secretarial duties. We never were not required to sign anything.
So, Mr Anonymous Fucking Coward, where does the HOA stand if I choose to put up a 3m dish in my yard with a 6 foot fence around it? The fence is allowed and the dish isn't, but the only way anyone could see it would be to trespass on my property and peer over the top of the fence.
The day when someone can pass the source code for a virus around and tell people how to compile and then run it
Back in 1988, when Robert Morris unleashed the first Internet Worm, it was quickly trapped and studied in captivity. Researchers at several universities disassembled it and converted it back to the original C code, extracting from it the list of 432 words that formed the passwords it would attempt to use, as well as the various methods it used to try to spread itself.
The original worm was found to be "broken" in that it failed to stop on finding a certain string in the C library after recompiling itself on a newly subverted machine, which may be partially why it "escaped" into the wild. I think the worm researchers found a couple of other problems as well.
And then someone posted patches... I don't think a patched worm made it out of anyone's lab...
as a developer, you will (most of the time) have/need access to the real data at some point
That's not necessarily true. It would take more work, but the pre-prelease versions could be handed off to the QA dept of the originating company. Then, if their real-world data causes a problem, they hand back error reports to the developer, possibly with made-up database records that demonstrate the problem. More work and longer to release, but sensitive data is controlled.
This would not be substantially different to running the whole development cycle in-house.
Sounds like you know more than most people about AS. She's now in 7th grade, was diagnosed privately while in 4th grade, but the school wouldn't even accept that there was a problem until we said the magc words "Due Process Hearing" to the State Board of Education. Suddenly they were falling all over themselves to get it sorted out and saying, "by the way, forget about due process and arbitration, we'll just agree to everything and ignore it because we don't have the funds."
She skipped most of 4th grade by refusing to attend school (and no, we couldn't have dragged her there without chaining her to a desk) but she still went into 5th grade with straight A's. Some semi-official home tutoring helped there.
She's done the thing with flash cards and is now reasonably proficient at mood recognition, though she still occasionally says something insulting and can't see why it hurts - after all, she just telling it like it is... As for channelling the perfectionism - she just made 7th grade Spelling Bee champion because her spelling is nigh-on perfect... She's also not averse to injecting some humor into her homework. Last night she was looking up and typing definitions for words, one of which was "irony", and she wondered why I started laughing. I told her to Google for "Blackadder" and "irony" - she found "irony - like goldy and bronzy, only made of iron", so that's what she used. She also added, at my suggeston, "It's ironic that dictionary.com has almost this exact definition."
My daughter has been diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome, and you're right about the body language and social skills problems. Asperger's is essentially a brain "defect", where the brain simply doesn't have the same internal "wiring" as a so-called normal person and consequently she simply doesn't recognise other peoples' emotions or when she herself is being outright rude and obnoxious.
That said, there are side effects that *can* be treated by prescription. My daughter is something of a perfectionist, to the extent that she draws letters rather than simply writing, and she's constantly erasing and redrawing. This generally puts her behind with her schoolwork, which makes her anxious and then depressed. Since she started on Paxil, she's been much more stable, easier to "talk down" when she's uptight about something, and has been able to move from mostly Special Ed classes to mainstream.
if the site's there, it's been approved and has resources attached to it
Besides which, now that the worms are out of the can, so to speak, it's unlikely that any Linux Dell Blog would disappear for long. It might not have a dell.com address, but it would come back in some form. If nothing else, the Dell folks who put it together would become more active in distro-specific forums, in a "not blessed by Dell, but we know what the hell we're talking about" kind of way.
article explaining how AMD received $683 million in grants from Germany and the state of Saxony
I swear, the first time read that I thought it said AMD was being given the state of Saxony along with a pile of cash... Shouldn't be reading this stuff after working through the night, I guess...:)
Slashdot Mirror
So wouldn't it be kinda funny to redirect that guy's update stealing to a page of bogus information? Or, if you don't want to bother creating something bogus, simply keep an old copy of your pages and send them to him.
I kinda like the thought of the Army and Navy gathering all those unsolicited CDs, loading them into a cruise missile or two, punching in Bill's address and launching... Doesn't really matter if there's no explosives onboard - those things arrive fast enough to do a fair amount of damage just from their mass moving at speed. And with luck they wouldn't expend all their fuel before arrival.
More to the point, the voter should be able to look at the ballot paper and ask the booth operator, "Who the hell are these people?" Because, let's face it, those people who actually get off their butts and go out to vote probably know the name of the person they want to vote for... You'd think the same would go for the voting machines, with the obvious exception that the machine could fuck up the vote by (deliberately?) incrementing the wrong counter.
Another time, possibly the same guy was trying to set up a list of generic userids that wouldn't be allowed to login, but could be su'd to. He read somewhere about /etc/nologin preventing logins, so he put the list of names in that file... On a production server... Fortunately, port 512 was open and I was able to 'rexec "rm /etc/nologin"'. I could probably have logged in at the console as root and achieved the same result, but that's in another building and "security" don't give out the root password because we have SeOS on the box - you login as yourself and sesu to root - if you can login at all...
And if anybody deserves to have their shorts squeezed, it's SCO...
Construction paper? Are you nuts? It wouldn't be anything like as robust as that!
And that would affect non-American filesharing programs how, exactly?
Oh, wait, America still has more firepower than most nations. Never mind...
According to clause 5:
A judge might not agree, but that seems like a fairly clear copyright violation to me. The language is not full of the little twists and turns that makes litigation so much fun and judges have had a lot of practice dealing with copyright violations, so if Fyodor's legal team could keep SCO's FUD to a minimum, I'd say they'd stand a good chance.
It wouldn't even have to be The Big Test of the GPL that might or might not work in court.
I don't know about revoking a user's right, but clause 5 states that:
So, by publically asserting that the GPL is invalid, SCO leaves themselves wide open to copyright infringement lawsuits. Perhaps Fyodor should have used simpler wording: "Dear SCO, by not accepting the GPL you are illegally distributing a copyrighted work. Cease and desist immediately. Failure to do so will result in legal action."
Though I don't suppose the threat of legal action would frighten them at all. Perhaps siezure of all assets containing infringing material would get their attention. But then again, if nobody's buying SCO products, that probably won't frighten them much either.
In fact, Fyodor can use SCO's own tactics against them - "you can't use my code, but I'm not going to tell you which bits are mine..."
As for the non-visible-watermarked images, those could still have the noise kind of watermark added when you download them, couldn't they? Mind you, that would be even easier to defeat - print the image then scan it back in. That should introduce a sufficient extra noise component to mask the noise watermark... If ultra-paranoid, fiddle with various settings (color, contrast, brightness, etc) before scanning.
In our case, they'd be ransacking big iron belonging to several major companies other than their intended target. Wanna bet the squeals would reach the White House? Just how much accountability do the feds have when it comes to collateral damage?
So, where was the threat? With one officer keeping the truck door closed (and presumably in a position to see what was going on in the cab) and another standing by observing, the officer talking to Mr Hiibel should NOT have felt threatened. Three armed and alert police officers facing a rancher and his teenage daughter? If just one of them ran the registration before the confrontation, they would have known: a) that the truck wasn't reported stolen; and therefore: b) who was likely to be in it.
This apparently happens even when the movie in question is a big hit and rakes in millions on the opening weekend. Somehow Hollywood's version of bistromathics makes the excess disappear.
As others have pointed out, their webserver runs Linux, so technically, SCO Unix wasn't hit by the DoS attack.
Oh, wait, they claim Linux is a derivative of SCO Unix... Never mind...
Whatever it is those SCO guys are smoking, I want some...
My wife and bought a house in a HOA, but at the signing there was no copy of the bylaws to even read through, let alone sign. It was months after we moved in that the HOA dredged up an old copy of the bylaws, and only then because of the annual change in the committee and my wife took on some secretarial duties. We never were not required to sign anything.
So, Mr Anonymous Fucking Coward, where does the HOA stand if I choose to put up a 3m dish in my yard with a 6 foot fence around it? The fence is allowed and the dish isn't, but the only way anyone could see it would be to trespass on my property and peer over the top of the fence.
Back in 1988, when Robert Morris unleashed the first Internet Worm, it was quickly trapped and studied in captivity. Researchers at several universities disassembled it and converted it back to the original C code, extracting from it the list of 432 words that formed the passwords it would attempt to use, as well as the various methods it used to try to spread itself.
The original worm was found to be "broken" in that it failed to stop on finding a certain string in the C library after recompiling itself on a newly subverted machine, which may be partially why it "escaped" into the wild. I think the worm researchers found a couple of other problems as well.
And then someone posted patches... I don't think a patched worm made it out of anyone's lab...
That's not necessarily true. It would take more work, but the pre-prelease versions could be handed off to the QA dept of the originating company. Then, if their real-world data causes a problem, they hand back error reports to the developer, possibly with made-up database records that demonstrate the problem. More work and longer to release, but sensitive data is controlled.
This would not be substantially different to running the whole development cycle in-house.
She skipped most of 4th grade by refusing to attend school (and no, we couldn't have dragged her there without chaining her to a desk) but she still went into 5th grade with straight A's. Some semi-official home tutoring helped there.
She's done the thing with flash cards and is now reasonably proficient at mood recognition, though she still occasionally says something insulting and can't see why it hurts - after all, she just telling it like it is... As for channelling the perfectionism - she just made 7th grade Spelling Bee champion because her spelling is nigh-on perfect... She's also not averse to injecting some humor into her homework. Last night she was looking up and typing definitions for words, one of which was "irony", and she wondered why I started laughing. I told her to Google for "Blackadder" and "irony" - she found "irony - like goldy and bronzy, only made of iron", so that's what she used. She also added, at my suggeston, "It's ironic that dictionary.com has almost this exact definition."
That said, there are side effects that *can* be treated by prescription. My daughter is something of a perfectionist, to the extent that she draws letters rather than simply writing, and she's constantly erasing and redrawing. This generally puts her behind with her schoolwork, which makes her anxious and then depressed. Since she started on Paxil, she's been much more stable, easier to "talk down" when she's uptight about something, and has been able to move from mostly Special Ed classes to mainstream.
Besides which, now that the worms are out of the can, so to speak, it's unlikely that any Linux Dell Blog would disappear for long. It might not have a dell.com address, but it would come back in some form. If nothing else, the Dell folks who put it together would become more active in distro-specific forums, in a "not blessed by Dell, but we know what the hell we're talking about" kind of way.
Isn't that a bit like putting the wolves in charge of the sheep?