That does not stand the least little bit of a chance to stand up in court.
For example...
The following phrase is a trade secret of me:
"Rubber baby buggered bindles"
Viewing of this phrase outside this message by persons other by myself is subject to a mandatory licencing fee of $5.00. You now owe me $5.00. Cough it up you hippie.
Something is either patented, trademarked, or FAIR GAME once discovered.
Clearly this shows that the bureaucrat in question is merely abhorrent of change. The Library of Congress, more than anyone else, has overwhelming reason to switch to electronic storage and retrieval, considering that they keep multiple copies of every book published, for archival purposes.
...and while normally I'm not the type of person to call for someone's head on a platter over a singular incident, the comments made demonstrate such an overwhelming ignorance and arrogance that I find the word "Luddite" as used by other posters to feel completely accurrate. Let us hope that the man either quits, is fired, or dies or old age or cranial calcification soon so someone with a functioning brain can take over.
How can reading books online be any more isolating than a vast warehouse with fewer people than one per 100 square feet where no one is really even supposed to speak to each other!
And now if we can just find a way of forcing the *BSD zealots to quit making unrealistic (for ANY operating system) claims, and just generally annoying the hell out of everyone. Then perhaps we can start letting them come to the good parties again...
Hate to burst your bubble, but if 2.4 has anything to do with fsck'ing the drives after an unclean shutdown then it would be *seriously* overstepping the bounds of what it's supposed to manage.
Sanity checks on the filesystems is the responsibility of the init scripts, not the kernel.
While they might be able to fill the inside of the i-Opener with epoxy to make it unmodifiable (without a whomping huge mess on your hands) I really don't see how they could be forcing anyone to pay the $21.95 for much beyond the first month. They don't have any proprietary patents on technology used here (like the MPAA would be able to wrangle with rogue DVD use) and the equipment is being *sold* (not leased or rented) to the customer, so once someone's bought one, it's theirs to do with as they wish. Trying to make someone stay subscribed to their internet service is very likely to result in some *ugly* lawsuits.
I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has recieved one of the supposedly unmodifiable units to find out if they really did fill it with epoxy. I honestly can't think of any other modification that could have been made so quickly to prevent tampering...
If Bill Gates can convince an entire industry that thrives on deliverables and bureaucracy that they should conduct all their important buisness with a set of programs which have little more than the faint scent of pre-determined safeguards or sanity checks sprayed on the marketing materials, then you're out of your skull if you think anyone's going to be incorporating meaningful checks into future smart systems. Get real. The people with the money to build that which could destroy the world don't have the sense to think such things are important. For that matter, the last thing they would want is their software telling them that something they're doing is unethical or illegal, because that would open the possibility that their own computers could rat 'em out. There's no way that would be allowed to happen. We will almost certainly by picking up personal licences of Mutually Assured Destruction, Personal Edition v6.0 by the year 2100. Bank on it.
<tour guide voice> COme along group... As we approach supposition B you may be rather suprised by the size of the hole and feel a little vertigo. If you begin to feel nauseous, sit down and put your head between your knees, and take slow deep breaths. This hole is in actuality one of the largest man made holes in recent history, in fact, just last year a farm equipment company set a new Guinness record by driving no less than 3,768 Mack trucks through it side by side. </tour guide voice>
Where exactly is this AI that produces new AI at Bowie? I would really like some so that I can put the various computers in my home to work producing something I can use to finally begin my campaign of world domination. In any case, good show that your teacher didn't know to question that. So long as you're staying this far ahead of your instructors, a little err now and then is nothing.:)
No one easily upgrades their libc. For that matter, upgrading libc is something that affects the entire system, so it shouldn't be done "casually" by any measure. That's just madness.
In any case, minor revision jumps aren't nearly as dependency-hostile as the jump from libc5 to glibc (v6), and when you make that jump, you might as well just reinstall a glibc-built version of your distribution, since you're going to be upgrading just about everything on the system at one time.
The author of the article was clearly writing outside of his field of expertise. Linux is not as vulnerable to virii because it actually has a security model. For a virus to infect a Linux machine, it would have to compromise the security model. For a virus to infect a Windows machine, it merely has to make a few function calls to start copying itself around.
Actually, I'm so irritated at this kind of irresponsible fear-mongering nonsense, I'm not going to comment further, because there's not a single nice thing I can think of to say about the guy at the moment, aside from possibly he might one day stop a bullet from killing someone with a clue.
The problem that is cropping up here (as I see it) is that people are expecting far too much in the way of assistance from the interface. What they are trying to achieve is considerably more complex than tying one's own shoes, and yet the user time and time again will complain that an interface is broken simply because they can't figure it out (although they have no problems tying their shoes, most of the time).
Zero-knowledge interfaces are a myth for tasks above a given level of complexity. No interface, no matter how complex and "intuitive", is going to let a common user do a stress and wear analysis on a four-lane split level suspension bridge that will keep cars from spilling over into the drink after a few months use.
The thing that really needs to be addressed, is the required minimum knowledge level of the user, because without it, they're going to fail even if the interface is another user who does know what they're doing.
A computer is a marvelously complex device, typically containing more tiny switches inside than there are stars visible in the night sky. How the HELL people expect to be able to use one when they refuse to even attempt to look for documentation is beyond me.
(Want another example? Ever watched someone desperately struggle to figure out how to configure their software to use a proxy server, when they don't even know what a CIDR block is, or better yet, that their own desktop machine has an IP address? I have a particular person in mind from this example--don't say it can never happen.)
What Microsoft clearly intends is that no matter what users want, they're going to do everything in their power to make sure admins have to put up a Windows2000 server on their network. The majority of people using computers (including the administrators of most networks) are not technically competent enough to understand why the incompatibility occurs, and they're almost certainly not competent enough to run around making changes to a lot of their production systems, so they're going to wind up being forced to simply pay someone else to fix it so that the Win2k users can "take advantage" of this wonderful thing called Kerberos. This is the kind of crap that Microsoft lives off of. Make sure all the users are morons, and some of them will eventually be promoted to administrators, and then flood the market with other morons trained in the efficient sales and marketing of Microsoft products, and call them technicians anyway.
...which is about the same time that the local MSCE's will be undoing their belts, ready to deliver the Microsoft "solution".
Frankly, at this point I would rather shove my hands up to the shoulders into a wood chipper than to use Microsoft products anymore.
This business with the ad_hoc network name is about as secure as the average SNMP device, i.e., unless you know the magic name (which is quite sniffable) you can't connect. Once you know the magic name, there's no stopping you.
Personally, I'm pickier than that. There is always the chance that one of my more unthinking pals might pull up into my driveway and smurf the Whitehouse from my LAN as a joke. (The Secret Service would almost certainly be at my house the next day. Ha. Ha. *ahem*) So if you have a little time and you're using Linux *anyway*, go ahead and get the Free S/WAN patches so that you can encrypt the link, and then only route packets coming over the encrypted link. Since Free S/WAN can do things using RSA keys to restrict who connects to the routable network, you can keep potential ne'er do wells tucked neatly into their own little subnet where they can't access anything else.
In my opinion, this is still not even close to comparing in cost to the WebGear Aviators. $179 for one pc-card, and $70 for an adapter to install it in a desktop? You have to be kidding me. The WebGear for $139 (just about anyplace) gets you *two* cards, and *two* adapters. Considering that in some places you might make the landlord upset if you start drilling holes and running cables, this makes the WebGear Aviators almost competitive with 10base-T. (Or at least it does if you think costing well over twice as much is supposed to be competitive)
The price tag claim of $149 either means they plan to release this in 3rd quarter of the year 2005, or they are just plain making this up. Any two of those components that are supposed to be in the unit would cost more than the $149.
I strongly suspect someone at the news agency mistook a joke or jest as being an actual scoop.
I would suggest *not* using pgcc on anything but completely "experimental" machines right now. I have yet to see it build a version of glibc-2.1.2 that will pass it's own test suite. Apparently I may be a bigger compulsive compiler than the guys who put pgcc together, since I've gotten no responses to my emails to them asking for confirmation of this, and that was well over a week ago. (Boy did they get enough detail on what I was doing. Heheh.)
Anyway, if it can't build glibc, then I would not expect to be able to safely use it on the kernel at all. (Well, it compiles, but the self-tests that come with glibc fail miserably--and although it did build 2.2.14, it did not appear to be stable. Could be a K6 "thing", but I doubt it.)
Unless this choice of 7.0 is in direct response to Patrick Volkerding making comments to the effect of "leveling the playing field" with respect to versioning, I'm afraid the Mandrake team have just lost quite a bit of respect in my eyes.
I am hoping that they will comment publicly to shed some light on this in the next few days. If not, by mid-summer I'm going to release a small distro loosely based on Slackware being recompiled with new targets (and most of the cruft sliced out) and just start the goddamn versioning at 12.4.
...you clearly did NOT read the original declaration of an impending UDP. Things were qualified rather carefully, and in particular, a listing of the 100 news servers that were the origin of the most spam to usenet was listed.
EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM WAS AN @HOME NEWS SERVER.
The AUP Enforcement department for @Home has had their thumbs stuffed up their asses for long enough. The throw the book at anyone who dares have a web server showing the default Apache page on it, but never do a damn thing about open relays, which are a much bigger threat. The reasoning seems to be that open relays aren't a bandwidth muncher, but a web site that gets twelve hits a month is.
In all honesty, they'll probably ignore this UDP since the summary cancellations will mean they will no longer have to forward so many complaints about Usenet spamming to/dev/null.
...the problem is the people who have completely and totally ignored everything the W3C ever said about why and how tags and documents should be used. Okay, so it's not limited to just that, but it's the most obvious symptom.
For example... How many sites have you see simply neglect to use the paragraph (<P>) tag? Instead they choose to make indiscriminate usage of the hard line break (<BR>) tags to separate blocks of text. This is silently wrong although the visible output is the same. Remember how WAIS engines could further qualify searches by how "close" multiple worsds in a search were to each other in a document? Here in HTML we have a way to group words into semantic bundles by paragraph, and people completely ignore it. (No, we're not to the point yet.)
How many times have you actually seen people use the <DD> and <DT> tags properly by a web page author when they are giving definitions? Most authors seem to simply decide that they don't like the way the text looks, and use some oddball invocation of tables and/or transparent GIF images. Of course, this means that a search spider has no idea that it's looking at the definition of something now, where if the text were marked properly, any query of "definition of widget" or "definition:widget" would immediately return that page! Why do people dislike using <DD> & <DT> for definitions--the most popular answer I get is that they didn't like the way those tags formatted their text. They're entirely missing the point again that HTML is for marking different parts of a document with extra meaning. The browser is supposed to be what decides how it is shown to the user. META tags were abused by porn vendors and the other bottom feeding denziens of the net to the point where they are nearly useless now. Even with CSS1 and CSS2 waiting in the wings to allow authors to properly control document layouts, most people seem to be too lazy to create their documents properly, so long as it's not immediately obvious that they were the ones who did something wrong. (Seems like the attitude of some large corporations--and we're still not at the point yet.)
The proper use of HTTP is also completely neglected by most web site administrators. The cache/no-cache pragmas, the last-modified times, the content-type declarations, these things were all meant to give hints to the remote client (which is not supposed to be assumed to be a browser) about what type of document they're looking at and how to deal with it. Instead we find sites who have marketing directors who insist that everything be done to inflate their hit counts as much as possible by preventing last-modified times from going out so the browsers won't cache the documents. We have entire sites which in their insecurity that someone, somewhere, might decide that the entire site sucks and needs to be done over (just the look, not the content mind you!) so they make the entire site out of dynamically generated content (like shtml- and php3-only sites), even though the parts that matter never change. (Apache now includes a number of things to get around this problem of template driven content by the way--see the 'Full' option for the X-Bit Hack for one such example.) (Almost there now.)
I'm terribly sorry to have to point it out, but far too many web page authors have completely disregarded the fact that HTML is not meant to be used to format the text. HTML is meant to mark-up the document so that the browser can format the text, and thus, upwards of 90% of the web pages online today are a folly in progress.
Tons of things to facilitate search engines were specifically included in the protocols, but go straight out the window in practice because of short sighted people who seem to think that the title WebMaster confers them automatic competence and understanding of the system itself.
Do not blame the search engine for the ignorance of the masses (because they are asses).
Style over substance is the real culprit. (Point!)
I would like to know why on earth they went to this mainly freetext output frm the at least somewhat machine-parseable output of before.
I'd also like to know what is wrong with using rwhois for this, since it has all the nice referral stuff built right into it.
I think they let a suit design how the new whois works, instead of an actual programmer, and that is a BAD thing. Protocol implementations should not be changed by clueless bureaucrats, damnit.
Possibly you should take a break from sniffing glue and reconsider whether or not this type of Denial of Service attack affects more than just the site it's aimed at.
What the Ehippies (okay, so the name is weak) are advocating is basically a concious "slashdotting" of a particular server. It is not some heavily overdone SYNflood or UDPstorm and as such isn't going to have much of an impact on anything but the WTO's servers and the segments very near to it, of which I am *certain* you are not on.
...and if you want your porn faster, get a cablemodem and quit wasting time complaining about what other people do with the internet, cluebie.
Don't worry about it. It's just another thing that proves that either JP is too ignorant to know the contextual difference between an attack and an individual packet, or that he couldn't tell the truth if he was instructed to read it from cue cards.
Frankly, my take on it is that the guy is a compulsive liar, and that he's not bright enough to know that no one but the poor media hacks with deadlines to beat believes a word he says anymore.
The guy is *not* a professional (well, not any type of professional I've ever seen before) and he's certainly not interested in telling the truth. I find it particular telling that he refused to answer the questions that he COULD answer. If nothing else, he owes an APOLOGY to the gent he screwed over by declaring him to be a member of gH.
This latest fiasco just brings my opinion of him to "disgustingly pathetic".
(Final note: How the hell JP say his social life is in order? I have serious doubts about how many people would actually hang out with him without being paid cash up front. At this point, I'd have to be pretty bored to waste the time it takes to spit in his face, and I'm a pretty friendly guy.)
Actually, the latest version of gcc would be 2.95.2 and I've been using it and a binutils beta (2.9.5.0.14) for the last few weeks while carefully trying to rebuild everything in Slackware 7.0 for the target i586-pc-linux-gnu to get some speed and memory tweaks. I have had no problems whatsover (once I figured out why my package creation script was missing some of the files when I rebuilt gcc and tried to make it back into a package). I'm not interested in trying to distribute these as packages (since the point of doing them is to get the optimizations for your particular CPU, and I don't have a 686 anywhere, just a lot of K6-2's) but I will probably put instructions for rebuilding the two online somewhere soon. I would suggest that those that know how go ahead and rebuild gcc-2.95.2 and give it a whirl (just be sure and use the same target platform as your binutils, or rebuild your binutils to the same target platform as the new gcc, or you will severely break things)
Now, I'm not what could be construed as a fan of RedHat by any means, but I'd like to say something in their defense. McMillan is the distributor for RedHat's box sets in bookstores (or at least they were the last time I checked). Should it even be considered a challenge for them to outsell RedHat--since all they have to do is ship twice as many copies of their version of Linux out to the same locations? It seems to me that this should be considered in the same realm as calling blasting away at fish in a rain barrel with a shotgun "fishing".
Actually, after reading further down, I suggest people just skip that document entirely. It's heavily flawed, and it's not going to do anything but confuse newbies. (Although it may make experienced system administrators chuckle a bit.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's really cruel.
I *just* finished a wipe and reinstall on my home
desktop machine not 20 minutes ago, and now I gotta download and recompile the kernel again.
arggghhh...
That does not stand the least little bit of a chance to stand up in court.
For example...
The following phrase is a trade secret of me:
"Rubber baby buggered bindles"
Viewing of this phrase outside this message by persons other by myself is subject to a mandatory licencing fee of $5.00. You now owe me $5.00.
Cough it up you hippie.
Something is either patented, trademarked, or FAIR GAME once discovered.
Clearly this shows that the bureaucrat in question is merely abhorrent of change. The Library of Congress, more than anyone else, has overwhelming reason to switch to electronic storage and retrieval, considering that they keep multiple copies of every book published, for archival purposes.
...and while normally I'm not the type of person to call for someone's head on a platter over a singular incident, the comments made demonstrate such an overwhelming ignorance and arrogance that I find the word "Luddite" as used by other posters to feel completely accurrate. Let us hope that the man either quits, is fired, or dies or old age or cranial calcification soon so someone with a functioning brain can take over.
How can reading books online be any more isolating than a vast warehouse with fewer people than one per 100 square feet where no one is really even supposed to speak to each other!
Lunatic!
And now if we can just find a way of forcing the *BSD zealots to quit making unrealistic (for ANY operating system) claims, and just generally annoying the hell out of everyone. Then perhaps we can start letting them come to the good parties again...
Hate to burst your bubble, but if 2.4 has anything to do with fsck'ing the drives after an unclean shutdown then it would be *seriously* overstepping the bounds of what it's supposed to manage.
Sanity checks on the filesystems is the responsibility of the init scripts, not the kernel.
While they might be able to fill the inside of the i-Opener with epoxy to make it unmodifiable (without a whomping huge mess on your hands) I really don't see how they could be forcing anyone to pay the $21.95 for much beyond the first month.
They don't have any proprietary patents on technology used here (like the MPAA would be able to wrangle with rogue DVD use) and the equipment is being *sold* (not leased or rented) to the customer, so once someone's bought one, it's theirs to do with as they wish. Trying to make someone stay subscribed to their internet service is very likely to result in some *ugly* lawsuits.
I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has recieved one of the supposedly unmodifiable units to find out if they really did fill it with epoxy. I honestly can't think of any other modification that could have been made so quickly to prevent tampering...
If Bill Gates can convince an entire industry that thrives on deliverables and bureaucracy that they should conduct all their important buisness with a set of programs which have little more than the faint scent of pre-determined safeguards or sanity checks sprayed on the marketing materials, then you're out of your skull if you think anyone's going to be incorporating meaningful checks into future smart systems. Get real. The people with the money to build that which could destroy the world don't have the sense to think such things are important. For that matter, the last thing they would want is their software telling them that something they're doing is unethical or illegal, because that would open the possibility that their own computers could rat 'em out. There's no way that would be allowed to happen. We will almost certainly by picking up personal licences of Mutually Assured Destruction, Personal Edition v6.0 by the year 2100. Bank on it.
<tour guide voice> COme along group... As we approach supposition B you may be rather suprised by the size of the hole and feel a little vertigo. If you begin to feel nauseous, sit down and put your head between your knees, and take slow deep breaths. This hole is in actuality one of the largest man made holes in recent history, in fact, just last year a farm equipment company set a new Guinness record by driving no less than 3,768 Mack trucks through it side by side. </tour guide voice>
Where exactly is this AI that produces new AI at Bowie? I would really like some so that I can put the various computers in my home to work producing something I can use to finally begin my campaign of world domination. In any case, good show that your teacher didn't know to question that. So long as you're staying this far ahead of your instructors, a little err now and then is nothing. :)
*ahem*
No one easily upgrades their libc. For that matter, upgrading libc is something that affects the entire system, so it shouldn't be done "casually" by any measure. That's just madness.
In any case, minor revision jumps aren't nearly as dependency-hostile as the jump from libc5 to glibc (v6), and when you make that jump, you might as well just reinstall a glibc-built version of your distribution, since you're going to be upgrading just about everything on the system at one time.
The author of the article was clearly writing outside of his field of expertise. Linux is not as vulnerable to virii because it actually has a security model. For a virus to infect a Linux machine, it would have to compromise the security model. For a virus to infect a Windows machine, it merely has to make a few function calls to start copying itself around.
Actually, I'm so irritated at this kind of irresponsible fear-mongering nonsense, I'm not going to comment further, because there's not a single nice thing I can think of to say about the guy at the moment, aside from possibly he might one day stop a bullet from killing someone with a clue.
The problem that is cropping up here (as I see it) is that people are expecting far too much in the way of assistance from the interface. What they are trying to achieve is considerably more complex than tying one's own shoes, and yet the user time and time again will complain that an interface is broken simply because they can't figure it out (although they have no problems tying their shoes, most of the time).
Zero-knowledge interfaces are a myth for tasks above a given level of complexity. No interface, no matter how complex and "intuitive", is going to let a common user do a stress and wear analysis on a four-lane split level suspension bridge that will keep cars from spilling over into the drink after a few months use.
The thing that really needs to be addressed, is the required minimum knowledge level of the user, because without it, they're going to fail even if the interface is another user who does know what they're doing.
A computer is a marvelously complex device, typically containing more tiny switches inside than there are stars visible in the night sky. How the HELL people expect to be able to use one when they refuse to even attempt to look for documentation is beyond me.
(Want another example? Ever watched someone desperately struggle to figure out how to configure their software to use a proxy server, when they don't even know what a CIDR block is, or better yet, that their own desktop machine has an IP address? I have a particular person in mind from this example--don't say it can never happen.)
What Microsoft clearly intends is that no matter what users want, they're going to do everything in their power to make sure admins have to put up a Windows2000 server on their network. The majority of people using computers (including the administrators of most networks) are not technically competent enough to understand why the incompatibility occurs, and they're almost certainly not competent enough to run around making changes to a lot of their production systems, so they're going to wind up being forced to simply pay someone else to fix it so that the Win2k users can "take advantage" of this wonderful thing called Kerberos. This is the kind of crap that Microsoft lives off of. Make sure all the users are morons, and some of them will eventually be promoted to administrators, and then flood the market with other morons trained in the efficient sales and marketing of Microsoft products, and call them technicians anyway.
...which is about the same time that the local MSCE's will be undoing their belts, ready to deliver the Microsoft "solution".
Frankly, at this point I would rather shove my hands up to the shoulders into a wood chipper than to use Microsoft products anymore.
This business with the ad_hoc network name is about as secure as the average SNMP device, i.e., unless you know the magic name (which is quite sniffable) you can't connect. Once you know the magic name, there's no stopping you.
Personally, I'm pickier than that. There is always the chance that one of my more unthinking pals might pull up into my driveway and smurf the Whitehouse from my LAN as a joke. (The Secret Service would almost certainly be at my house the next day. Ha. Ha. *ahem*) So if you have a little time and you're using Linux *anyway*, go ahead and get the Free S/WAN patches so that you can encrypt the link, and then only route packets coming over the encrypted link. Since Free S/WAN can do things using RSA keys to restrict who connects to the routable network, you can keep potential ne'er do wells tucked neatly into their own little subnet where they can't access anything else.
In my opinion, this is still not even close to comparing in cost to the WebGear Aviators. $179 for one pc-card, and $70 for an adapter to install it in a desktop? You have to be kidding me. The WebGear for $139 (just about anyplace) gets you *two* cards, and *two* adapters. Considering that in some places you might make the landlord upset if you start drilling holes and running cables, this makes the WebGear Aviators almost competitive with 10base-T. (Or at least it does if you think costing well over twice as much is supposed to be competitive)
The price tag claim of $149 either means they plan to release this in 3rd quarter of the year 2005, or they are just plain making this up. Any two of those components that are supposed to be in the unit would cost more than the $149.
I strongly suspect someone at the news agency mistook a joke or jest as being an actual scoop.
I would suggest *not* using pgcc on anything but completely "experimental" machines right now. I have yet to see it build a version of glibc-2.1.2 that will pass it's own test suite. Apparently I may be a bigger compulsive compiler than the guys who put pgcc together, since I've gotten no responses to my emails to them asking for confirmation of this, and that was well over a week ago. (Boy did they get enough detail on what I was doing. Heheh.)
Anyway, if it can't build glibc, then I would not expect to be able to safely use it on the kernel at all. (Well, it compiles, but the self-tests that come with glibc fail miserably--and although it did build 2.2.14, it did not appear to be stable. Could be a K6 "thing", but I doubt it.)
Unless this choice of 7.0 is in direct response to Patrick Volkerding making comments to the effect of "leveling the playing field" with respect to versioning, I'm afraid the Mandrake team have just lost quite a bit of respect in my eyes.
I am hoping that they will comment publicly to shed some light on this in the next few days. If not, by mid-summer I'm going to release a small distro loosely based on Slackware being recompiled with new targets (and most of the cruft sliced out) and just start the goddamn versioning at 12.4.
(grumble grumble *schills* grumble)
...you clearly did NOT read the original declaration of an impending UDP. Things were qualified rather carefully, and in particular, a listing of the 100 news servers that were the origin of the most spam to usenet was listed.
/dev/null.
EVERY DAMN ONE OF THEM WAS AN @HOME NEWS SERVER.
The AUP Enforcement department for @Home has had their thumbs stuffed up their asses for long enough. The throw the book at anyone who dares have a web server showing the default Apache page on it, but never do a damn thing about open relays, which are a much bigger threat. The reasoning seems to be that open relays aren't a bandwidth muncher, but a web site that gets twelve hits a month is.
In all honesty, they'll probably ignore this UDP since the summary cancellations will mean they will no longer have to forward so many complaints about Usenet spamming to
...the problem is the people who have completely and totally ignored everything the W3C ever said about why and how tags and documents should be used. Okay, so it's not limited to just that, but it's the most obvious symptom.
For example... How many sites have you see simply neglect to use the paragraph (<P>) tag? Instead they choose to make indiscriminate usage of the hard line break (<BR>) tags to separate blocks of text. This is silently wrong although the visible output is the same. Remember how WAIS engines could further qualify searches by how "close" multiple worsds in a search were to each other in a document? Here in HTML we have a way to group words into semantic bundles by paragraph, and people completely ignore it. (No, we're not to the point yet.)
How many times have you actually seen people use the <DD> and <DT> tags properly by a web page author when they are giving definitions? Most authors seem to simply decide that they don't like the way the text looks, and use some oddball invocation of tables and/or transparent GIF images. Of course, this means that a search spider has no idea that it's looking at the definition of something now, where if the text were marked properly, any query of "definition of widget" or "definition:widget" would immediately return that page! Why do people dislike using <DD> & <DT> for definitions--the most popular answer I get is that they didn't like the way those tags formatted their text. They're entirely missing the point again that HTML is for marking different parts of a document with extra meaning. The browser is supposed to be what decides how it is shown to the user. META tags were abused by porn vendors and the other bottom feeding denziens of the net to the point where they are nearly useless now. Even with CSS1 and CSS2 waiting in the wings to allow authors to properly control document layouts, most people seem to be too lazy to create their documents properly, so long as it's not immediately obvious that they were the ones who did something wrong. (Seems like the attitude of some large corporations--and we're still not at the point yet.)
The proper use of HTTP is also completely neglected by most web site administrators. The cache/no-cache pragmas, the last-modified times, the content-type declarations, these things were all meant to give hints to the remote client (which is not supposed to be assumed to be a browser) about what type of document they're looking at and how to deal with it. Instead we find sites who have marketing directors who insist that everything be done to inflate their hit counts as much as possible by preventing last-modified times from going out so the browsers won't cache the documents. We have entire sites which in their insecurity that someone, somewhere, might decide that the entire site sucks and needs to be done over (just the look, not the content mind you!) so they make the entire site out of dynamically generated content (like shtml- and php3-only sites), even though the parts that matter never change. (Apache now includes a number of things to get around this problem of template driven content by the way--see the 'Full' option for the X-Bit Hack for one such example.) (Almost there now.)
I'm terribly sorry to have to point it out, but far too many web page authors have completely disregarded the fact that HTML is not meant to be used to format the text. HTML is meant to mark-up the document so that the browser can format the text, and thus, upwards of 90% of the web pages online today are a folly in progress.
Tons of things to facilitate search engines were specifically included in the protocols, but go straight out the window in practice because of short sighted people who seem to think that the title WebMaster confers them automatic competence and understanding of the system itself.
Do not blame the search engine for the ignorance of the masses (because they are asses).
Style over substance is the real culprit. (Point!)
I would like to know why on earth they went to this mainly freetext output frm the at least somewhat machine-parseable output of before.
I'd also like to know what is wrong with using rwhois for this, since it has all the nice referral stuff built right into it.
I think they let a suit design how the new whois works, instead of an actual programmer, and that is a BAD thing. Protocol implementations should not be changed by clueless bureaucrats, damnit.
Possibly you should take a break from sniffing glue and reconsider whether or not this type of Denial of Service attack affects more than just the site it's aimed at.
What the Ehippies (okay, so the name is weak) are advocating is basically a concious "slashdotting" of a particular server. It is not some heavily overdone SYNflood or UDPstorm and as such isn't going to have much of an impact on anything but the WTO's servers and the segments very near to it, of which I am *certain* you are not on.
...and if you want your porn faster, get a cablemodem and quit wasting time complaining about what other people do with the internet, cluebie.
Don't worry about it. It's just another thing that proves that either JP is too ignorant to know the contextual difference between an attack and an individual packet, or that he couldn't tell the truth if he was instructed to read it from cue cards.
Frankly, my take on it is that the guy is a compulsive liar, and that he's not bright enough to know that no one but the poor media hacks with deadlines to beat believes a word he says anymore.
The guy is *not* a professional (well, not any type of professional I've ever seen before) and he's certainly not interested in telling the truth. I find it particular telling that he refused to answer the questions that he COULD answer. If nothing else, he owes an APOLOGY to the gent he screwed over by declaring him to be a member of gH.
This latest fiasco just brings my opinion of him to "disgustingly pathetic".
(Final note: How the hell JP say his social life is in order? I have serious doubts about how many people would actually hang out with him without being paid cash up front. At this point, I'd have to be pretty bored to waste the time it takes to spit in his face, and I'm a pretty friendly guy.)
Actually, the latest version of gcc would be 2.95.2 and I've been using it and a binutils beta (2.9.5.0.14) for the last few weeks while carefully trying to rebuild everything in Slackware 7.0 for the target i586-pc-linux-gnu to get some speed and memory tweaks. I have had no problems whatsover (once I figured out why my package creation script was missing some of the files when I rebuilt gcc and tried to make it back into a package). I'm not interested in trying to distribute these as packages (since the point of doing them is to get the optimizations for your particular CPU, and I don't have a 686 anywhere, just a lot of K6-2's) but I will probably put instructions for rebuilding the two online somewhere soon. I would suggest that those that know how go ahead and rebuild gcc-2.95.2 and give it a whirl (just be sure and use the same target platform as your binutils, or rebuild your binutils to the same target platform as the new gcc, or you will severely break things)
Now, I'm not what could be construed as a fan of RedHat by any means, but I'd like to say something in their defense. McMillan is the distributor for RedHat's box sets in bookstores (or at least they were the last time I checked). Should it even be considered a challenge for them to outsell RedHat--since all they have to do is ship twice as many copies of their version of Linux out to the same locations? It seems to me that this should be considered in the same realm as calling blasting away at fish in a rain barrel with a shotgun "fishing".
Actually, after reading further down, I suggest people just skip that document entirely. It's heavily flawed, and it's not going to do anything but confuse newbies. (Although it may make experienced system administrators chuckle a bit.)
There appear to be a lot of errors in the firewall-seen FAQ. *ahem*