The summary says SuSE was used with KDE, which is how it comes out of the box. I don't see any indiction that they 'tweaked the hell out of it'. I will have to wait until the translation comes out to see what level of tweaking was involved. If anyone cares to read the German and comment on this issue, I would be greatful.
I true open-source fashion, you should take matters into your own hands by 1) search the web for an existing solution, or 2) writing your own. Luckly for those of of with limited tallent, spamd already exists. This is a tarpit that is a fake SMTP server that takes a very long time (10 minutes or so) to respond with the error message of your choice. You can get lists of spammers or build your own.
Spammers do have first amendment rights, so they might have a right to send me spam. I don't understand the laws as they deal with commercial speech, so I don't know where their rights end. I just want to make sure it costs them more than it costs me. They are not in this for freedom, they are in it for money. If they have to pay more, they will spam less.
This is not what is meant by security through obscurity - a password is not obscure. A password is secret. Being secret and being secure are very different. Both imply that information is rare. However, the mechanisms are completely different. A secret is actively protected. An obscure fact may be poorly publicized or simething so mundane that few people bother to learn it.
Security thought obsurity means 'hiding' a web server on port 3211 and using ports 4432 and 4332 for SNMP. Or making up an entirely new protocol to duplicate an existing protocol. The problem with this is that you may feel secure, because you have done something that will at least slow down an attacker. If you combined 'secuirty though obscurity' with an active means of detecting intruders, you are getting somewhere. If you know that you are being hacked, security through obsurity will gain you some time to react. But if you are one of the vast majority of admins that doesn't actively monitor log files, this advantage is lost.
We also volunteer to work on an county election comission and test it yourself. The choice of machines is not determined by the federal government. We, the electorate, need to be involved in more than 'pulling the lever'
As a practical matter, I accept that Bush is president. The 'hanging chads' issue is a sideshow. A bigger issue in the Florida election was the treatment of ex-convicts. If an ex-convict from another state is allowed to vote in the state in which they were convicted, the State of Florida is obligated to accept the ex-con. as a voter.
However, Job Bush systematcially attempted to 'cleanse' the voting lists, in direct contradiction of a court order (See page 34 of The Best Deomocracy Money Can Buy, by Greg Palast). There are at least 40,000 ex-felons that are allowed to vote in Florida, so this is not an insignificant number, given that the election results were so close.
But there were some amaizingly slopply errors in the 'data cleaning'. For example, the state of Texas supplied a list of 8,000 convicts that were not eligilble to vote. The company overseeing the error, ChoicePoint DBT, called this a simple data error. However, the list was for misdimeanor convictions, so the people on this liste were eligible to vote. In fact after a 1997 law, even convicted felons in Texas are eligible to vote after doing their time. There were similar irrgularities for convicts from other states (Ohio, Illinois)
Standing up for the rights of 'criminals' may not be popular, but they do have rights and when one person's rights are denied, the rights of all are attacked. This too is not a abstract concept. One of the 'felons' on the Florida purge list was a Thomas Cooper, who was 'convicted' in 2007. There is also a Jonny Jackson, Jr., who was purged from the list because of a felon conviction by a John Fitzgerald Jackson. The voter lists were not verifed with the dilligance given a Visa card application.
This is only paritally true. If you are putting software in a life-critical system for which you can be held accountable, the economics of defects changes rapidly. Engineers at companies like Rockwell Collins are applying
formal methods and tools like
ACL2, which is GPLed, by the way.
However, these methods are used at very low levels software, I don't think we will be seeing proofs of the properties of web browsers or word processors any time soon.
Perhaps a distributed systems could be developed to solve formal proofs of increasingly more complex software components. This could be a worthy companion to Operation SETI. As long as it plays nice (perhaps at 10), I would be happy to share my idle clock cycles to validate pieces of Linux or a BSD.
Just ask Larry.
Larry said "Silicon Valley" isn't coming back. That may be, since Silicon Valley has to pay their staff enough to cover California housing. The software industry is nearly unique in the degree to which is has decoupled 'product' and 'stuff'. Software can travel the world in seconds and can be anyone with some analytic aptitude and willingness to read the source and the manual. This can be done from almost anywhere. Only a fool would thing that the only engineers in the world that can write great code are found in Silicon Valley or Redmond, and Larry is no fool.
I suspect that the software industry will devide into 'tool makers' and 'scripters'. The scripters will use the tools to meet the needs of clients, while a tiny fraction (of the programmers in the world) will code the shared tools.
With open source, common code drops in price. Proprietary code can exist, but it must compete with open source that is at least 'good enough' for many users. This will limit what the 'tool makers' can charge. But custom scripters, that meet the need of a particular clients, are still needed. They produce a product that is complementary to the hardware and the 'tools', so microeconomics predicts that they (us) will have increased demand. Countering that is an increasing supply of programmers (from overseas competitors and from displaced 'tool makers'). I don't know how to quantify the supply and demand for scripter and I don't know how elastic the market is, but I think that these market forces will dominate the next decade.
Software 'giants' thought they could develop tools and sell them to every user in the world - they thought that the sky was the limit on their ability to profit. So, for these companies, the sky is indeed falling.
I'll bet its still going cheaper - a bottle of everclear that lasts a year is not all that expensive, even with with the tax. If undergrad can afford it, cost is not an issue;-)
SixDimensionalArray has provided a good resource - read it before the knee jerk reations reach your fingertips. The wakeup call for this is allged to be NIMDA, which infects 'computers'. It would be useful to remind the authors of this paper that it infects Windows computers.
Linux can be more secure than this, but it is not a complete solution. Simply encuraging a polygot of OS's will help. Monoculture (in OS or an ecosystem) & inbreeding (restricting evolution in OS to one town, say Redmond) lead to weaker systems.
Mutts dominate in nature - purebreads are weak. We need to support Linux, Windows, BSD's and others to make a healthier Internet.
Here is my letter - any suggestions?
Members of the Commission,
As a citizen of a democracy, it is my duty to be involved and I thank you for
this opportunity to comment upon this matter. Computers have advanced at a
rate that I would never have believed. As a teenager, I would bicycle 3 miles
to get access to a computer that I shared with dozens of others. Today, I
have a PC that has at least a thoussand times greater computing power and the
ability to connect to millions of other computes via the Internet. This
really is the stuff of science fiction - how we use this will be limited only
by our imagninations and our laws. You truly have a great power.
My central concern when I read this document is that it focuses almost
entirely on the viewpoint of the current industry. For example, on page 15,
paragraph 2 all of the 'parts' of transition are listed. The consumers didn't
make the list. It is also clear that the 'content producers' are the existing
producers. Do not forget that many people have disparage the 'vast wasteland'
that is modern television.
There is no consideration of how artists other than the existing content
producers will enter into the conversation. With the explosion of computing
power and the quality of home recording equipment, we could see an explosion
of creative content. If there is no consideration of these players, the
results will be skewed towards the interests of the current industry. I would
like to know how
the protection schemes will affect the interests of other citizens. As a
'consumer', I suppose that this will allow me to access television with more
channels and more resolution. This is valuable, but there are other valuable
concerns that ought to be considered.
First, how does this promote fair use? I have the right to record and
playback television shows. Whenever a special news or sporting event preempts
regular programming, the local station usually broadcasts the preempted show
sometime in the middle of the night - with the expection that viewers can
record the program to view at their convenience. This is one simple example.
Second, will this suppress our ability to parody and critique existing works?
Digital sampling is widely used in audio technologies, can visual artists also
digitally sample the television shows that are sent into their homes?
Artists have great latitude to copy images into their own works. Would the
proposed scheme protect this right? Will the aspiring artists even be able to
investigate the works of 'the masters'?
The content producers for television can carefully study how to construct
their content to maximize its effectiveness. In an open society, all of us
should have a similar ability to research how the content affects us. This can
be especially critical for academics, who have been the traditional
researchers in our society. Will academics that are critical of the industry
be able to dissect the content frame by frame to study every detail of the
works?
As I understand the current schene, it would give the content providers nearly
perfect control of their content. This undercuts any notion of fair use. It
also seems to undercut the notion of 'general purpose computer'. As others
have noted, the term 'multimedia' should perhaps be replaced by 'unimedial'.
It all comes down to long lists of ones and zeros. If you are going to
control how my computer deals with files, you had better consider these
issues. I find it almost impossible to believe that this Commission is not
getting involved with issues that go far beyond its mandate.
Please reconsider your support for this technology and find a combination of
social and technical solutions that don't sacrifice personal liberties to the
interests of an industry that will be outdated within a decade.
5. I think that the free market will probably be the best way to determine how importantly fair use should factor in to these new designs.
Free markets are an economic construction that allocated scarce resources. It is perhaps the best mechanism we have DEVISED for this purpose. One problem is that information is not scarce, at least once it has been published. WE, as a society make it scarce with copyrights & patents. This is a choise we make to reward the creative process. I support this, but at a level comperable with what the founding fathers of the US had in mind.
So, how can a free market sort out fair-use. These are artifical constructions & we must choose which one is paramount. There is no invisible hand at work here, WE must choose.
Q: Why is American beer/coffee like sex in a canoe?
A: its F***ing close to water.
Drink 12 oz of French expresso and you will realize the even Starbucks waters down their drinks. 12 - 24 oz of brown water is not a good deal, even if you get twice as much
Slashdot Mirror
The summary says SuSE was used with KDE, which is how it comes out of the box. I don't see any indiction that they 'tweaked the hell out of it'. I will have to wait until the translation comes out to see what level of tweaking was involved. If anyone cares to read the German and comment on this issue, I would be greatful.
Spammers do have first amendment rights, so they might have a right to send me spam. I don't understand the laws as they deal with commercial speech, so I don't know where their rights end. I just want to make sure it costs them more than it costs me. They are not in this for freedom, they are in it for money. If they have to pay more, they will spam less.
Hey Slashdot admins! mod this up ... Simon's right, this howto has a lot more detail. Thanks Simon for your work on this.
Security thought obsurity means 'hiding' a web server on port 3211 and using ports 4432 and 4332 for SNMP. Or making up an entirely new protocol to duplicate an existing protocol. The problem with this is that you may feel secure, because you have done something that will at least slow down an attacker. If you combined 'secuirty though obscurity' with an active means of detecting intruders, you are getting somewhere. If you know that you are being hacked, security through obsurity will gain you some time to react. But if you are one of the vast majority of admins that doesn't actively monitor log files, this advantage is lost.
and look how many cluster bombs we managed to destroy
??? = sell the looted goods -- finally, one even I can figure out
We also volunteer to work on an county election comission and test it yourself. The choice of machines is not determined by the federal government. We, the electorate, need to be involved in more than 'pulling the lever'
However, Job Bush systematcially attempted to 'cleanse' the voting lists, in direct contradiction of a court order (See page 34 of The Best Deomocracy Money Can Buy, by Greg Palast). There are at least 40,000 ex-felons that are allowed to vote in Florida, so this is not an insignificant number, given that the election results were so close.
But there were some amaizingly slopply errors in the 'data cleaning'. For example, the state of Texas supplied a list of 8,000 convicts that were not eligilble to vote. The company overseeing the error, ChoicePoint DBT, called this a simple data error. However, the list was for misdimeanor convictions, so the people on this liste were eligible to vote. In fact after a 1997 law, even convicted felons in Texas are eligible to vote after doing their time. There were similar irrgularities for convicts from other states (Ohio, Illinois)
Standing up for the rights of 'criminals' may not be popular, but they do have rights and when one person's rights are denied, the rights of all are attacked. This too is not a abstract concept. One of the 'felons' on the Florida purge list was a Thomas Cooper, who was 'convicted' in 2007. There is also a Jonny Jackson, Jr., who was purged from the list because of a felon conviction by a John Fitzgerald Jackson. The voter lists were not verifed with the dilligance given a Visa card application.
However, these methods are used at very low levels software, I don't think we will be seeing proofs of the properties of web browsers or word processors any time soon.
Perhaps a distributed systems could be developed to solve formal proofs of increasingly more complex software components. This could be a worthy companion to Operation SETI. As long as it plays nice (perhaps at 10), I would be happy to share my idle clock cycles to validate pieces of Linux or a BSD.
Just ask Larry.
Larry said "Silicon Valley" isn't coming back. That may be, since Silicon Valley has to pay their staff enough to cover California housing. The software industry is nearly unique in the degree to which is has decoupled 'product' and 'stuff'. Software can travel the world in seconds and can be anyone with some analytic aptitude and willingness to read the source and the manual. This can be done from almost anywhere. Only a fool would thing that the only engineers in the world that can write great code are found in Silicon Valley or Redmond, and Larry is no fool.
I suspect that the software industry will devide into 'tool makers' and 'scripters'. The scripters will use the tools to meet the needs of clients, while a tiny fraction (of the programmers in the world) will code the shared tools.
With open source, common code drops in price. Proprietary code can exist, but it must compete with open source that is at least 'good enough' for many users. This will limit what the 'tool makers' can charge. But custom scripters, that meet the need of a particular clients, are still needed. They produce a product that is complementary to the hardware and the 'tools', so microeconomics predicts that they (us) will have increased demand. Countering that is an increasing supply of programmers (from overseas competitors and from displaced 'tool makers'). I don't know how to quantify the supply and demand for scripter and I don't know how elastic the market is, but I think that these market forces will dominate the next decade.
Software 'giants' thought they could develop tools and sell them to every user in the world - they thought that the sky was the limit on their ability to profit. So, for these companies, the sky is indeed falling.
I'll bet its still going cheaper - a bottle of everclear that lasts a year is not all that expensive, even with with the tax. If undergrad can afford it, cost is not an issue ;-)
SixDimensionalArray has provided a good resource - read it before the knee jerk reations reach your fingertips. The wakeup call for this is allged to be NIMDA, which infects 'computers'. It would be useful to remind the authors of this paper that it infects Windows computers. Linux can be more secure than this, but it is not a complete solution. Simply encuraging a polygot of OS's will help. Monoculture (in OS or an ecosystem) & inbreeding (restricting evolution in OS to one town, say Redmond) lead to weaker systems. Mutts dominate in nature - purebreads are weak. We need to support Linux, Windows, BSD's and others to make a healthier Internet.
Here is my letter - any suggestions? Members of the Commission, As a citizen of a democracy, it is my duty to be involved and I thank you for this opportunity to comment upon this matter. Computers have advanced at a rate that I would never have believed. As a teenager, I would bicycle 3 miles to get access to a computer that I shared with dozens of others. Today, I have a PC that has at least a thoussand times greater computing power and the ability to connect to millions of other computes via the Internet. This really is the stuff of science fiction - how we use this will be limited only by our imagninations and our laws. You truly have a great power. My central concern when I read this document is that it focuses almost entirely on the viewpoint of the current industry. For example, on page 15, paragraph 2 all of the 'parts' of transition are listed. The consumers didn't make the list. It is also clear that the 'content producers' are the existing producers. Do not forget that many people have disparage the 'vast wasteland' that is modern television. There is no consideration of how artists other than the existing content producers will enter into the conversation. With the explosion of computing power and the quality of home recording equipment, we could see an explosion of creative content. If there is no consideration of these players, the results will be skewed towards the interests of the current industry. I would like to know how the protection schemes will affect the interests of other citizens. As a 'consumer', I suppose that this will allow me to access television with more channels and more resolution. This is valuable, but there are other valuable concerns that ought to be considered. First, how does this promote fair use? I have the right to record and playback television shows. Whenever a special news or sporting event preempts regular programming, the local station usually broadcasts the preempted show sometime in the middle of the night - with the expection that viewers can record the program to view at their convenience. This is one simple example. Second, will this suppress our ability to parody and critique existing works? Digital sampling is widely used in audio technologies, can visual artists also digitally sample the television shows that are sent into their homes? Artists have great latitude to copy images into their own works. Would the proposed scheme protect this right? Will the aspiring artists even be able to investigate the works of 'the masters'? The content producers for television can carefully study how to construct their content to maximize its effectiveness. In an open society, all of us should have a similar ability to research how the content affects us. This can be especially critical for academics, who have been the traditional researchers in our society. Will academics that are critical of the industry be able to dissect the content frame by frame to study every detail of the works? As I understand the current schene, it would give the content providers nearly perfect control of their content. This undercuts any notion of fair use. It also seems to undercut the notion of 'general purpose computer'. As others have noted, the term 'multimedia' should perhaps be replaced by 'unimedial'. It all comes down to long lists of ones and zeros. If you are going to control how my computer deals with files, you had better consider these issues. I find it almost impossible to believe that this Commission is not getting involved with issues that go far beyond its mandate. Please reconsider your support for this technology and find a combination of social and technical solutions that don't sacrifice personal liberties to the interests of an industry that will be outdated within a decade.
5. I think that the free market will probably be the best way to determine how importantly fair use should factor in to these new designs. Free markets are an economic construction that allocated scarce resources. It is perhaps the best mechanism we have DEVISED for this purpose. One problem is that information is not scarce, at least once it has been published. WE, as a society make it scarce with copyrights & patents. This is a choise we make to reward the creative process. I support this, but at a level comperable with what the founding fathers of the US had in mind. So, how can a free market sort out fair-use. These are artifical constructions & we must choose which one is paramount. There is no invisible hand at work here, WE must choose.
Hacking take on a new meaning with croup-ware
I want to see biplanes flying over plains and giant heards.
Q: Why is American beer/coffee like sex in a canoe? A: its F***ing close to water. Drink 12 oz of French expresso and you will realize the even Starbucks waters down their drinks. 12 - 24 oz of brown water is not a good deal, even if you get twice as much