Speaking of unusual aching, you might want to read Christ that aches with Johnathan Frakes. For all you ST:TNG fans out there. Off topic, I know, but now that the Karma cap is in place, I'm a crazy man.
Puh-lease. The kinds of metadata described need more structure than what a README can provide. Perhaps he should look into the NFO file format. It's human readable, infinately extensable and much more k-rad. If you're interested in learning about this exciting new format, visit the NFO consortium to view their library of sample implementations.
Actually, I think his point was that someone who might be sympathetic could just tell someone the root password and the person told could covertly use the system without getting in trouble. If his name is added to wheel and wheel is monitored, both the person who added them and the person added could get in trouble. Obviously, in his example the Admin doesn't want to give up control, and the users are fighting the man. It's a no harm no foul kinda thing, I think.
I think things have changed a bit now, but you're right -- GNU software design certainly reflects this paradigm, even in today's modern security-paranoid age. Here's a great few paragraphs I've excerpted from the GNU sh-utils manual from '96 (I kid you not)
----
Why GNU su does not support the `wheel' group
(This section is by Richard Stallman.)
Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)
However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.
I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.
----
I didn't know if I should shake my head and weep or pump my fist "right-on" style and start a food collective. It wasn't exactly the answer to the question I was looking for, but it is one of the cooler things I've ever seen in a software manual.
Ha. People say "why is Linux more popular than OpenBSD" (or FreeBSD for that matter). The fact that the kernel coding process for Linux is more seat-of-your-pants means more features/faster development cycle. And more features/faster development cycle means wider acceptance. As I see it, Linux's development strategy is similar to Microsoft's, it's just that quality is given a higher priority than UI integration.
And besides, the problem is userspace apps such as daemons. If anyone should be doing a review, it should be individual distributions. Of course Lin distributions tend to promote and exploit Linux's up-to-dateness rather than its stableness, so you're out of luck there too.
I remember that day clearly. Usually I'm pretty cool about trolls, but that day I just wanted to find that troll and punch him in the face as hard as I could. Thanks for ruining Slashdot, asshole.
It's times like that that lower my faith in the inherent goodness of mankind. How someone could both be that much of a jerk and a coward is beyond me. Regardless of whether or not people were waxing too rhapsidic about him, I know that at least TCP/IP Illustrated vol. I (the only book of his I've read) is a wonderful book and he deserves the highest level of respect for that alone.
I agree that it makes sense to promote free unix for government institutions, I'm not sure that Linux is the right thing to push. Normally, I encourage people to use Linux (over both non-free and BSD systems) for a five main reasons:
1. Linux is free in cost
2. Linux's source is available if that's your thing
3. Linux is politically subversive
4. Linux's community is folksy and congenial
5. Linux is more bleeding edge than other OSes, and is thus more fun
For PEOPLE, these makes sense. For schools, these makes sense. For the government, only points 1 and 2 makes sense. The government wants a free unix that has available source, but they don't want to have to release that source to users, they want a support comminity that is fastidious rather than hip and they want stability and unexplotivity over all else.
What would I reccomend for a lot of government institutions? BSD. OpenBSD, preferably, since it's got another government-friendly plus: security.
Don't get me wrong. I'm as big of a GPL pusher as the next guy, but I've come to the conclusion that the government is a lost cause as far as Free Software goes. No matter how hard we try, CIA agents won't start attending LUG meetings (except perhaps to keep an eye on the Red(hat) Menace), DoD personnel won't post patches to Linux-kernel, and NSA spooks aren't going to release Enlightenment themes any time soon.
No, I think as taxpayers, the best we can hope for is that the government will stop adopting $1,000,000 solutions where $0 ones will do nicely. And as much as I'd like to wish that Linux is the best tool for the job, a lot of the time it isn't. What makes me like Linux so much - that it's got all kinds of quirky features and kernel development is so fast, also does make it less stable to some degree. As a user, I not only accept that trade-off, it's what gets me using Linux in the first place (a fun unix, whoda thunk it), but for the feds, they want something more boring. And slow-but-steady OpenBSD seems just about perfect.
Since a vacuum doesn't work in another vacuum, could you use an anti-vacuum, i.e. "decompress the cargo bay, Mr. Data" to force debris away from the ship?
Although, I shouldn't complain, self-guided lazers frying pieces of space junk could be pretty awesome. Imagine an incoming meteor shower - I can just see it picking the little guys off one a second. That's how I want my taxpayer dollars spent!
Something that's always confused me about this case is what victory would mean. If, for example, at some time in the future, the Supreme Court were to find for the defendant, would that mean:
A) DeCSS is legal and thus linking to DeCSS is protected since the software was legal in the first place
or
B) DeCSS is or isn't legal, but it doesn't matter since linking is as constitutionally protected as a newspaper.
Are those two resolutions mutually exclusive? Did you decide early on that A was more important constitutionally than B and decide to focus on defending the legality of DeCSS? If B is outside of the scope of your desired outcome, should we be worried that this whole fiasco will repeat itself when someone comes out with DeSDMI or some other cool hack that everyone wants to link to?
The complicated undertaking, which has been a work in progress for over a year, requires the companies to map native Win32 API calls to the Linux equivalents so that Windows applications will run normally in that environment.
Are you sure their job is to port MS apps? The way I read it, they're basically re-developing WINE, only with non-disclosure agreements... not specifically porting Office/IE/etc.
Mainsoft's research and development team, located in Lod, Israeli, is working with Microsoft employees from Redmond and a small group of developers from France, [where Mainsoft originated]. The goal is for Microsoft's applications to run on Linux."
Wow, that would seem to be WINE's goal as well.
Anyone else read this interpretation?
I agree totally. I've said it once, I've said it a million times, the thought that a judge could do a better job of setting Internet policy than you or me is absurd.
I think you've sort of misinterpreted the intent of this article. I rather liked it. I, and I would imagine a lot of other/.ers are fascinated by the man behind GNU. Certainly, RMS comes across as a rather caustic individual, especially to non-coders and I think this article helps put a more human face on a man whose total and utter devotion to a single cause has made him so unique.
I would assume, since the article indicated that the scope of the discussions was limited to the legalities of GPL compliance, they meant correctly in a legal sense. Another example would be, "The police officer told me to drop the knife and release my hostage so that I would orient myself correctly with laws concerning murder and kidnapping."
But even if he had meant philosophically, it could be argued that there is a correct and a non correct way to view things within a closed set of belief. Just as Christians would generally agree that the belief of "adultury is wrong" is a correct one, people within the Free Software Movement believe that it is correct not to restrict the freedom of individuals by licensing software in such a fashon that restricts their freedom to learn and share.
Just a thought. I could argue with your stance on despising all things politically correct for hours,(heaven forbid that we call someone a Native American rather than an Indian) but I think it's already been done.
(OT) Does anyone else out there find it funny this was modded informative instead of insightful? Are there really people out there going, "hmm, Amendments to the Constitution, how interesting, strange that I've never heard of them before." I would wager that those people are instead saying to themselves "how insightful of this individual to remind us of the fundimental concepts on which our nation was based." But who knows, I suppose if you're the type to moderate karmabait up...
People will rip CDs for a while. But if people [in the music industry] do their job right, the incentive to rip CDs en masse will go away. Then the industry will adopt a common encrypted format and CDs will go away the way LPs went away.
I think history pretty much shows that the odds are stacked against this outcome. When people went from listening to nothing to listening to phonographs, it was a clear improvement. When people went from listening to phonographs to listening to CDs, it was a clear improvement.
But there is no reason to adopt SDMI formats over CDs/mp3s. There is no improvement in several areas:
It doesn't sound better (worse potentially)
It's a complete hassle to transfer to different devices/computers/etc since it's so fair-use unfriendly
You can't share SDMI content with your friends (or your Internet friends, heh heh)
I can see the conversation with a sales clerk: "Oh, you want me to buy the more expensive model which sounds the same, but is a complete pain in the ass to use. I hope you don't mind if I just buy the CD player"
The only way people will adopt SDMI is if they are extorted into it by the RIAA companies by raising the price of CDs and lowering the price of SDMI content. But as far as people voulentarily adopting it because of "value being added to the online SDMI experience" or whatever the hell this guy's talking about, I don't think it's going to happen.
Denial of Service attacks represent a significant threat to the stability of our network infrastructure because of the inherent vulnerability in the TCP/IP 3-handshake reliable protocol. Successful prosecution of the perpetrators should raise the awareness that DoS and DDoS are very serious crimes with serious consequences. Also, system administrators are likely to collaborate in devising plans for rapid network response to thwart the source of the attacks.
Sigh. He's so close to a logical viewpoint, it's frustrating. His first point is incongruous with his second. What he doesn't realize is that successful prosecution of the perpetrators prevents system administrators from collaborating to devise plans for rapid network response. There's no incentive for the Internet community to work to patch holes in security when we can just rely on fear of governmental reprimand to do the same thing. The inverse is true as well: fixing DoS problems on a technical level prevents more government regulation of the Internet from having to occur.
Yes, passing laws is the easier solution, but haven't we learned this lesson already? The government is simply not a qualified caretaker for the Internet! The more we let governments assume jurisdiction, the worse the Internet gets. Duh. Joe Senator or even Jane Supreme-Court-Justice is simply not as qualified as you or me to make decisions about how the Internet is run. The problem is so many people are reliant on the government protecting them from everything, they've forgotten how to do things for themselves. The problem is, the biggest whiners also have the most amount of money and money = political influence. God bless America.
Your Redhat example is a pretty fair one, but I must disagree. I recently did a RH 6.2 Workstation-style install, which I would assume is what a newbie would go for by default. To my surprise, no network services were turned on. For anyone who just wants to use Redhat as an alternative to Win9x, this is a great option - more secure than a 9x machine - no SMB listeners.
Granted, you are more than correct about their dismal Server and Custom installs. Finger with @host support? RPC and NFS? Yuck. But I would argue that a sysadmin should be expected to know how to turn off extraneous services whereas the average Workstation user wouldn't.
I guess the real concern is people who are trying out RH as an alternative to NT or as brand-newbies. It would be nice if part of the Server or Custom RH install would be where it asks you what the primary purpose of the machine is and it shuts down the rest or all of the services - i.e. you choose 'Webserver' and it shuts down everything except Apache, or 'Proxy ' and it shuts down everything but Squid and turns on "Rusty's Three Line Guide to Masqurading". Of course, the NT admin cum Linux admin should be already accustomed to "unbinding" services on NT for security purposes, so I a still kind of failing to see what the problem is for anything except convenience.
Of course he will be Mulder's opposite. Every character introduced starts out as Mulder's opposite. Scully was the skeptic. Kraicheck (sp? sorry) was the perfect FBI man, right down to the boring, wide-striped ties. I wonder what Doggett will become.
How right you are. Here's the key differences between the two characters as I see it:
Mulder prefers gathering information about crimes through the traditional method of questioning witnesses and noting their responses. Doggett instead locates suspects' family members, brutally murders them, assumes their form and tricks suspects into confessing their crimes.
Mulder spent years training to become an expert murder profiler. Doggett's skills were programmed by an alliance of evil artificial intelligences from the future.
Mulder has a sharp wit and is quick on his feet. Doggett's susceptibility to the "Wolfie" trick allows suspects to easily evade capture.
Mulder likes to color outside the lines, not conforming to expected FBI social protocols. Doggett is a by-the-books amorphous child-hunting cyborg, seamlessly blending into a crowd of other liquid metal deathbots.
Mulder has a weakness for pornography and 1-900 numbers. Doggett has a weakness for sipping brandys and German opera.
So, I guess that answers your question. Man, I can just imagine the personality clashes now - this is going to be some great TV!!!
LISTER: What do you believe in, then? Do you believe in God? RIMMER: God? Certainly not! What a preposterous thought! I believe in aliens, Lister. LISTER: Oh, right, fine. Something sensible at last. RIMMER: Aliens, Lister, with technology so far in advance of our own we can't even begin to imagine. LISTER: Well, that's not difficult. Mankind hasn't even got the technology to create a toupee that doesn't get big laughs.
Star Wars is not a kid's series. Did you see Empire? Not a kid's movie. For chrisssakes, they wanted David Lynch to direct ROTJ. Can you imagine that? He would have changed Vader's secret from being Luke's father to being addicted to laughing gas (that's why he makes the huffing noise when he talks) No, the problem with Episode I is that George Lucas made it a kid's movie, even though the subject matter was much too serious to pull it off. Not-so-coincidentally, that's also the same problem with most pieces of garbage that Hollywood craps out nowadays.
A very good show. You may have fooled everyone else, but you'll never fool me. The real Signal 11 will show himself - and you will be defeated.
Okay, *maybe* you've got some points, but you have to admit the combination of brazen bombastic statements and the wrong user ID did make for a highly suspicious post. Each of your points, if proven non-factual (especially the 780kbps comment) could be intpreted as sarcastic or trollish without a fair degree of context you failed to provide.
Sigh, at least in my mind it will always be a troll.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of unusual aching, you might want to read Christ that aches with Johnathan Frakes. For all you ST:TNG fans out there. Off topic, I know, but now that the Karma cap is in place, I'm a crazy man.
Puh-lease. The kinds of metadata described need more structure than what a README can provide. Perhaps he should look into the NFO file format. It's human readable, infinately extensable and much more k-rad. If you're interested in learning about this exciting new format, visit the NFO consortium to view their library of sample implementations.
Actually, I think his point was that someone who might be sympathetic could just tell someone the root password and the person told could covertly use the system without getting in trouble. If his name is added to wheel and wheel is monitored, both the person who added them and the person added could get in trouble. Obviously, in his example the Admin doesn't want to give up control, and the users are fighting the man. It's a no harm no foul kinda thing, I think.
----
----
I didn't know if I should shake my head and weep or pump my fist "right-on" style and start a food collective. It wasn't exactly the answer to the question I was looking for, but it is one of the cooler things I've ever seen in a software manual.
Contrary to what everyone else is saying, I think you're thinking of Clarke's Islands in the Sky
The kid's uncle was a lawyer and the space station was technically part of Earth, and the prize was a trip to anywhere on the planet.
Good book.
Sorry, but this seems funny to me - the term "The income tax people" sounds like a corporate slogan, i.e.
Network Solutions: The dot com people.
The US Government: The income tax people.
Ha. People say "why is Linux more popular than OpenBSD" (or FreeBSD for that matter). The fact that the kernel coding process for Linux is more seat-of-your-pants means more features/faster development cycle. And more features/faster development cycle means wider acceptance. As I see it, Linux's development strategy is similar to Microsoft's, it's just that quality is given a higher priority than UI integration.
And besides, the problem is userspace apps such as daemons. If anyone should be doing a review, it should be individual distributions. Of course Lin distributions tend to promote and exploit Linux's up-to-dateness rather than its stableness, so you're out of luck there too.
Just thought I'd destroy your arguments.
Ross
I remember that day clearly. Usually I'm pretty cool about trolls, but that day I just wanted to find that troll and punch him in the face as hard as I could. Thanks for ruining Slashdot, asshole.
It's times like that that lower my faith in the inherent goodness of mankind. How someone could both be that much of a jerk and a coward is beyond me. Regardless of whether or not people were waxing too rhapsidic about him, I know that at least TCP/IP Illustrated vol. I (the only book of his I've read) is a wonderful book and he deserves the highest level of respect for that alone.
I agree that it makes sense to promote free unix for government institutions, I'm not sure that Linux is the right thing to push. Normally, I encourage people to use Linux (over both non-free and BSD systems) for a five main reasons:
1. Linux is free in cost
2. Linux's source is available if that's your thing
3. Linux is politically subversive
4. Linux's community is folksy and congenial
5. Linux is more bleeding edge than other OSes, and is thus more fun
For PEOPLE, these makes sense. For schools, these makes sense. For the government, only points 1 and 2 makes sense. The government wants a free unix that has available source, but they don't want to have to release that source to users, they want a support comminity that is fastidious rather than hip and they want stability and unexplotivity over all else.
What would I reccomend for a lot of government institutions? BSD. OpenBSD, preferably, since it's got another government-friendly plus: security.
Don't get me wrong. I'm as big of a GPL pusher as the next guy, but I've come to the conclusion that the government is a lost cause as far as Free Software goes. No matter how hard we try, CIA agents won't start attending LUG meetings (except perhaps to keep an eye on the Red(hat) Menace), DoD personnel won't post patches to Linux-kernel, and NSA spooks aren't going to release Enlightenment themes any time soon.
No, I think as taxpayers, the best we can hope for is that the government will stop adopting $1,000,000 solutions where $0 ones will do nicely. And as much as I'd like to wish that Linux is the best tool for the job, a lot of the time it isn't. What makes me like Linux so much - that it's got all kinds of quirky features and kernel development is so fast, also does make it less stable to some degree. As a user, I not only accept that trade-off, it's what gets me using Linux in the first place (a fun unix, whoda thunk it), but for the feds, they want something more boring. And slow-but-steady OpenBSD seems just about perfect.
How many Cardassians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Four. THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!
(rimshot)
Since a vacuum doesn't work in another vacuum, could you use an anti-vacuum, i.e. "decompress the cargo bay, Mr. Data" to force debris away from the ship?
Although, I shouldn't complain, self-guided lazers frying pieces of space junk could be pretty awesome. Imagine an incoming meteor shower - I can just see it picking the little guys off one a second. That's how I want my taxpayer dollars spent!
Something that's always confused me about this case is what victory would mean. If, for example, at some time in the future, the Supreme Court were to find for the defendant, would that mean:
A) DeCSS is legal and thus linking to DeCSS is protected since the software was legal in the first place
or
B) DeCSS is or isn't legal, but it doesn't matter since linking is as constitutionally protected as a newspaper.
Are those two resolutions mutually exclusive? Did you decide early on that A was more important constitutionally than B and decide to focus on defending the legality of DeCSS? If B is outside of the scope of your desired outcome, should we be worried that this whole fiasco will repeat itself when someone comes out with DeSDMI or some other cool hack that everyone wants to link to?
Are you sure their job is to port MS apps? The way I read it, they're basically re-developing WINE, only with non-disclosure agreements... not specifically porting Office/IE/etc.
Wow, that would seem to be WINE's goal as well.
Anyone else read this interpretation?
I agree totally. I've said it once, I've said it a million times, the thought that a judge could do a better job of setting Internet policy than you or me is absurd.
I think you've sort of misinterpreted the intent of this article. I rather liked it. I, and I would imagine a lot of other /.ers are fascinated by the man behind GNU. Certainly, RMS comes across as a rather caustic individual, especially to non-coders and I think this article helps put a more human face on a man whose total and utter devotion to a single cause has made him so unique.
Just my $0.02
I would assume, since the article indicated that the scope of the discussions was limited to the legalities of GPL compliance, they meant correctly in a legal sense. Another example would be, "The police officer told me to drop the knife and release my hostage so that I would orient myself correctly with laws concerning murder and kidnapping."
But even if he had meant philosophically, it could be argued that there is a correct and a non correct way to view things within a closed set of belief. Just as Christians would generally agree that the belief of "adultury is wrong" is a correct one, people within the Free Software Movement believe that it is correct not to restrict the freedom of individuals by licensing software in such a fashon that restricts their freedom to learn and share.
Just a thought. I could argue with your stance on despising all things politically correct for hours,(heaven forbid that we call someone a Native American rather than an Indian) but I think it's already been done.
(OT) Does anyone else out there find it funny this was modded informative instead of insightful? Are there really people out there going, "hmm, Amendments to the Constitution, how interesting, strange that I've never heard of them before." I would wager that those people are instead saying to themselves "how insightful of this individual to remind us of the fundimental concepts on which our nation was based." But who knows, I suppose if you're the type to moderate karmabait up...
I think history pretty much shows that the odds are stacked against this outcome. When people went from listening to nothing to listening to phonographs, it was a clear improvement. When people went from listening to phonographs to listening to CDs, it was a clear improvement.
But there is no reason to adopt SDMI formats over CDs/mp3s. There is no improvement in several areas:
I can see the conversation with a sales clerk: "Oh, you want me to buy the more expensive model which sounds the same, but is a complete pain in the ass to use. I hope you don't mind if I just buy the CD player"
The only way people will adopt SDMI is if they are extorted into it by the RIAA companies by raising the price of CDs and lowering the price of SDMI content. But as far as people voulentarily adopting it because of "value being added to the online SDMI experience" or whatever the hell this guy's talking about, I don't think it's going to happen.
I know the feeling. Olympia-based Kill Rock Stars isn't on the list either. I guess I'll have to buy more from them now. Not a problem.
Sigh. He's so close to a logical viewpoint, it's frustrating. His first point is incongruous with his second. What he doesn't realize is that successful prosecution of the perpetrators prevents system administrators from collaborating to devise plans for rapid network response. There's no incentive for the Internet community to work to patch holes in security when we can just rely on fear of governmental reprimand to do the same thing. The inverse is true as well: fixing DoS problems on a technical level prevents more government regulation of the Internet from having to occur.
Yes, passing laws is the easier solution, but haven't we learned this lesson already? The government is simply not a qualified caretaker for the Internet! The more we let governments assume jurisdiction, the worse the Internet gets. Duh. Joe Senator or even Jane Supreme-Court-Justice is simply not as qualified as you or me to make decisions about how the Internet is run. The problem is so many people are reliant on the government protecting them from everything, they've forgotten how to do things for themselves. The problem is, the biggest whiners also have the most amount of money and money = political influence. God bless America.
Your Redhat example is a pretty fair one, but I must disagree. I recently did a RH 6.2 Workstation-style install, which I would assume is what a newbie would go for by default. To my surprise, no network services were turned on. For anyone who just wants to use Redhat as an alternative to Win9x, this is a great option - more secure than a 9x machine - no SMB listeners.
Granted, you are more than correct about their dismal Server and Custom installs. Finger with @host support? RPC and NFS? Yuck. But I would argue that a sysadmin should be expected to know how to turn off extraneous services whereas the average Workstation user wouldn't.
I guess the real concern is people who are trying out RH as an alternative to NT or as brand-newbies. It would be nice if part of the Server or Custom RH install would be where it asks you what the primary purpose of the machine is and it shuts down the rest or all of the services - i.e. you choose 'Webserver' and it shuts down everything except Apache, or 'Proxy ' and it shuts down everything but Squid and turns on "Rusty's Three Line Guide to Masqurading". Of course, the NT admin cum Linux admin should be already accustomed to "unbinding" services on NT for security purposes, so I a still kind of failing to see what the problem is for anything except convenience.
How right you are. Here's the key differences between the two characters as I see it:
So, I guess that answers your question. Man, I can just imagine the personality clashes now - this is going to be some great TV!!!
LISTER: What do you believe in, then? Do you believe in God?
RIMMER: God? Certainly not! What a preposterous thought! I believe in aliens, Lister.
LISTER: Oh, right, fine. Something sensible at last.
RIMMER: Aliens, Lister, with technology so far in advance of our own we can't even begin to imagine.
LISTER: Well, that's not difficult. Mankind hasn't even got the technology to create a toupee that doesn't get big laughs.
Star Wars is not a kid's series. Did you see Empire? Not a kid's movie. For chrisssakes, they wanted David Lynch to direct ROTJ. Can you imagine that? He would have changed Vader's secret from being Luke's father to being addicted to laughing gas (that's why he makes the huffing noise when he talks) No, the problem with Episode I is that George Lucas made it a kid's movie, even though the subject matter was much too serious to pull it off. Not-so-coincidentally, that's also the same problem with most pieces of garbage that Hollywood craps out nowadays.
(Hands clapping slowly)
A very good show. You may have fooled everyone else, but you'll never fool me. The real Signal 11 will show himself - and you will be defeated.
Okay, *maybe* you've got some points, but you have to admit the combination of brazen bombastic statements and the wrong user ID did make for a highly suspicious post. Each of your points, if proven non-factual (especially the 780kbps comment) could be intpreted as sarcastic or trollish without a fair degree of context you failed to provide.
Sigh, at least in my mind it will always be a troll.