Vbug, a Microsoft developer support company based in the UK with just six employees, received around 720,000 e-mails messages in a month, 99.84 percent of which were spam.
Six employees, 720,000 spams? Someone there must be a real porn hound/idiot giving out email addresses to the wrong folks. I call bullshit on that one, hell, I call bullshit on this whole article.
I work for a small company, use my email for communicaiton with clients/colleagues (ie; what it's for - not for signing up for a free trial to www.hotwetsluts.com), and I've yet to get spammed on it in 4 years. No filters, either. Only one guy in our company has spam problems, and because he's an asshat who regularly "works late" ie; downloading porn.
2500 folks who use Yahoo email as their primary email and would bother to respond to this questionaire.
So it's basically a sample of people who don't know nothing about computers.
And nowhere in the article does it explain where they get this "the average PC is teh broke 9 days a year" business. Methinks they pulled it from their ass.
As for IT folks, their JOB is to clean viruses and fix PCs, so its the inverse - sounds like they actually DO WORK 9 days a year. No wonder they're all outsourced. I wouldn't keep a department on salary who only work 9 days a year.
Here and everywhere else too. Most businesses with a firewall and properly configured network don't have problems with the virus' or trojans.
The problems are user incompetence, when some propellerhead tries to "tweak" the desktop on his workstation and winds up with everything all borked. Or the neat freaks who obsessively "clean" their hard drives of all those useless.vxd and.dll files. Or reconfigure their modems or network adapters, etc, etc..
Still, 9 days a year sounds hokey to me. Getting a virus or trojan shouldn't even take the system down a full day, such things are generally easily correctable. Of course, your average cubicle jockey will use it as an excuse to do nothing that day.
Before the do-not-call list it wasn't exactly hard to get rid of a telemarketer. Before they would even make their pitch you would have the phone hung up because they would mispronounce your name.
Now they don't even get that far. The phone doesn't ring. I don't have to interrupt dinner to go answer it.
And email is a big problem for you, but not for most people. I've yet to recieve a spam on my work email. And folks who don't use computers for a living couldn't give a shit.
At least with email spam I don't have some device ringing and interrupting my dinner, or ringing at 3AM to ask me about the interest rate on my mortgage.
Not necessarily 429,000 other people. Just that many complaints.
You know there are old ladies who have nothing better to do than complain.
I'm on the list, and like the parent, I don't get the calls anymore. I would get 3 a day from various mortgage brokers. All you had to do was buy a home and you were barraged. Duct cleaners, carpet shampooers, credit folks, etc.
It got to the point that I unplugged my landline for a week.
I've gotten one unsolicited call since the list went into effect. I hung up and didnt bother to complain, but others would.
The system IS working, and working extremely well.
I'd bet a great number of those complaints are invalid, as well. Eg; My oil company called me the other day to ask if I wanted to renew my service contract and lock in to a heating oil price now. I bet some folks would call that in as a complaint, but I'm already a customer so it doesn't count. It was a marketing call, but it wasn't a cold call (ie; calling someone out of the clear blue sky and trying to sell them shit).
Release early - ie; when you KNOW it's unfinished.
Relase often - ie; it's so full of bugs and unfinished you need nightly builds to work them all out. At this point, you're releasing forever because now you have yourself a moving target with no set "completion" point, or any goal you're trying to achieve.
Listen to your customers - And if they complain just say "well it's free so fuck you if you dont like it". Seriously, no OSS projects "listen" to the customers.
If they did "listen", Linux wouldn't be a monolithic kernel, so I could download binary drivers for my new video card without recompiling it. Guess what, nVidia or ATi are never going to want to open their drivers' source. Doing so would essentially give away all the IP they put into designing their GPUs. A month later, some fab is set up in taiwan producing Radeon clones.
Samba would be able to function as an Active Directory Controller - it can't, and it's not even a project goal, NT4-style is apparently good enough, they haven't even plugged the gaping security holes in the old scheme MS did. Ie; you have to disable "require sign or seal" to join 2k or XP to a samba domain, essentially, you don't give a rats ass about verifying the authenticity of the MD4 password hashes that get bandied about plaintext on the network.
Open source "works", but not all of the time, and not always how you want it to.
I'd rather develop software for a specific platform, and then let the various OS's figure out how to run it.
You can run my Win32 program on linux through Wine, on a mac with VirtualPC, or run my linux binaries under linux for windows, or cygwin, etc..
I look forward to an OS-agnostic future. ELF apps built for linux, but Macs or Windows has no problem running them, etc..
The OS should provide an appropriate environment for your stuff to run in, the developers shouldnt have to pay much heed to "portability". How much time is wasted in big OSS projects to make sure it can compile in 90000 flavors of unix?
That's where the future is, IMO. Not in watered-down crappy looking Java swing apps.
Then the zealot OS wars can just frigging end, since the OS will just be a commodity.
Since I put OpenLDAP on one of my boxes, and configured it all up.. It works but I'm having a problem.. When I ssh in as root, it asks my password - I give it, then it says denied and asks my password again, this time it will accept it.
I think the auth is failing on LDAP, then being accepted by unix. The root user doesn't exist in LDAP, I don't want any system users in there, just regular network folks (ie; actual people, no bin or ftp or root). It should bypass LDAP when it doesnt find a cn=root entry, and just auth against the local/etc/passwd file. LDAP users log in fine.
It's a bigger problem when I try to log in as a regular user, then su to root. Then you only get one shot at giving a password, which fails. Also, I can't use the passwd command on root for the same reason (it asks for the old password once, fails, and thats that).
The temperature of your fingertips is going to vary widely. If you've been holding a cup of coffee, it'll jack up to 110, 120 maybe, if you just came inside it could be down around 60 or so.
98 degrees is an average core body temperature, extremedies generally run cooler. Thats why your testicles hang down - they dont work at 98 degrees, they need to be cooler. It's also why briefs and tight pants make you sterile.
Besides, all you'd have to do is put the fake finger in a cup of warm (98 degree) water..
I think the real solution is to realize that this kind of shit only works in movies or cartoons right now.
Thats not quite true. Yeah, he was against extremism, but he was himself an extremist. He was really just against any opposing viewpoint. To an extremist, being the wrong kind of Muslim is as bad as being a Jew or Christian.
Beards are a sign of manhood/strength to most muslims, and forcing every man to be shaven was more about emasculation and control than any particular religious statement.
Kind of like linux zealots getting in a big fight over vi vs emacs or distro A vs distro B. Watch the community constantly backstab and trip itself up by splitting hairs over what is (in the big picture) stupid shit.
The Iraqi Information (Technology) Minister Says:
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"Linux is a great and powerful Operating system! Open Source desktops are fully mature and without flaws! All hardware works perfectly with linux! Authentication with PAM/SAMBA/LDAP/nsswitch is easily configured! Printing is plug and play! BSD is dying in the street!"
1U mobos and components are EXPENSIVE. This is a cheap alternative for consumer level devices. Ie; I don't need a quad-Xeon blade with built-in RAID-5 fibre channel array, I just want a box that can play DVDs and check emails......and fits inside my greased up yoda doll.
They take less power, and there already exists a (several in fact) DC-DC converter for them. It's a daughterboard/PSU that clips right on the mobo's atx connector, and takes 12VDC in. Ie; wire it right up to your car, or the 12V line of another PSU (ie embed another computer in an open drive bay), or a wall-wart, etc.
/etc/passwd has to be world readable, or some other nameservice (ie, nss_ldap or whatever).
That's why they moved the passwords to the (non world readable)/etc/shadow, many many moons ago.
Though if you're really cool you'd move that to LDAP. If configuring pam, nss, openldap and samba wasn't such a PAIN IN THE ASS (why cant ldap clients just agree to read one conf file, why do I have to deal with/etc/openldap/ldap.conf,/etc/ldap.conf,/etc/smbldap-tools/smbldap.conf, et cetera et cetera) it'd probably be standard by now.
Secure authentication against an LDAP directory. What a concept. Wonder who does that, oh yeah, Windows 2000 and up. Meanwhile here I am sending out MD4 password hashes to authenticate against samba, one of the biggest security faults of NT4.0 that's now embraced by the OSS community for some reason. (Andrew, Samba needs to function as an Active Directory controller! Accept nothing less!)
Anyways, you need to upgrade, fella. There shouldn't be anything special in/etc/passwd.
Because I can take old parts, stick them in a box, install linux, hide the box under my desk (or wherever) and ssh into it.
All my gruntwork, downloading, bittorrents, etc, run on that old box, never to bother my good machine.
Taking the time to type 'screen btorrent blahblah.iso.torrent' is more convenient than having my main machine slow to a crawl after torrent opens 9 billion connections.
My old linux text-only boxes exist do do my bulk downloading for me.
Bittorrent itself is the best client, the btdownloadcurses.py script. Building just the ncurses app without needing the bloat of X to link against was a bit annoying. Thankfully emerge can pull it off with "-qt -gtk -gnome" use flags.
Another good client is called ctorrent, written in C, a console app. It segfaults when the d/l is > 2gigs (I think thats why), and sometimes doesnt redownload failed segments.. I had to drag some downloads to a windows box and finish them up with the real client. Shame about the bugs, it's a very light and fast app, I hope it's finished.
An old P200/MMX, a big hard drive, and all my downloading is done via ssh, and my real computer is never bogged down with such tasks. wget, bittorrent, ncftp, etc..
Also, it makes throttling it easy. At the gateway, I just throw all traffic from my "grunt boxes" IP's into a lower queue. Torrents no more grind my connection to a halt, it's much more effective than trying to mark packets for other reasons (size, etc).
dircproxy is a cool lil app too, I can keep connected to IRC and bounce from machine to machine. It doesn't handle DCC's all that well, it always seems to clip them.
You pay the backbone folks for what you put on the net, not what you take off. Ie; the ISP's bandwidth costs are based on their uplink - how much they host, etc..
I seen plenty of this type of genius graduate sit down at a box and go "It says 'rpm: command not found', it must be broken!" Or emerge, or apt-get, or whatever your favorite package tool is.
And of course, they know nothing of the package format above all package formats, a source tarball.
So as much Red Hat degrees as you have, it doesnt seem to start until the app is already built and installed, via rpm. If I have to build and install postfix (or whatever), so that the "Architect" can configure it, he's absolutely useless to me.
Slashdot Mirror
We're trying to make all the IT guys/cable monkeys feel as though they're important and relevant, if only for 9 days a year.
Vbug, a Microsoft developer support company based in the UK with just six employees, received around 720,000 e-mails messages in a month, 99.84 percent of which were spam.
Six employees, 720,000 spams? Someone there must be a real porn hound/idiot giving out email addresses to the wrong folks. I call bullshit on that one, hell, I call bullshit on this whole article.
I work for a small company, use my email for communicaiton with clients/colleagues (ie; what it's for - not for signing up for a free trial to www.hotwetsluts.com), and I've yet to get spammed on it in 4 years. No filters, either. Only one guy in our company has spam problems, and because he's an asshat who regularly "works late" ie; downloading porn.
2500 folks who use Yahoo email as their primary email and would bother to respond to this questionaire.
So it's basically a sample of people who don't know nothing about computers.
And nowhere in the article does it explain where they get this "the average PC is teh broke 9 days a year" business. Methinks they pulled it from their ass.
As for IT folks, their JOB is to clean viruses and fix PCs, so its the inverse - sounds like they actually DO WORK 9 days a year. No wonder they're all outsourced. I wouldn't keep a department on salary who only work 9 days a year.
Here and everywhere else too. Most businesses with a firewall and properly configured network don't have problems with the virus' or trojans.
.vxd and .dll files. Or reconfigure their modems or network adapters, etc, etc..
The problems are user incompetence, when some propellerhead tries to "tweak" the desktop on his workstation and winds up with everything all borked. Or the neat freaks who obsessively "clean" their hard drives of all those useless
Still, 9 days a year sounds hokey to me. Getting a virus or trojan shouldn't even take the system down a full day, such things are generally easily correctable. Of course, your average cubicle jockey will use it as an excuse to do nothing that day.
Before the do-not-call list it wasn't exactly hard to get rid of a telemarketer. Before they would even make their pitch you would have the phone hung up because they would mispronounce your name.
Now they don't even get that far. The phone doesn't ring. I don't have to interrupt dinner to go answer it.
And email is a big problem for you, but not for most people. I've yet to recieve a spam on my work email. And folks who don't use computers for a living couldn't give a shit.
At least with email spam I don't have some device ringing and interrupting my dinner, or ringing at 3AM to ask me about the interest rate on my mortgage.
This list is a godsend.
Not necessarily 429,000 other people. Just that many complaints.
You know there are old ladies who have nothing better to do than complain.
I'm on the list, and like the parent, I don't get the calls anymore. I would get 3 a day from various mortgage brokers. All you had to do was buy a home and you were barraged. Duct cleaners, carpet shampooers, credit folks, etc.
It got to the point that I unplugged my landline for a week.
I've gotten one unsolicited call since the list went into effect. I hung up and didnt bother to complain, but others would.
The system IS working, and working extremely well.
I'd bet a great number of those complaints are invalid, as well. Eg; My oil company called me the other day to ask if I wanted to renew my service contract and lock in to a heating oil price now. I bet some folks would call that in as a complaint, but I'm already a customer so it doesn't count. It was a marketing call, but it wasn't a cold call (ie; calling someone out of the clear blue sky and trying to sell them shit).
They could be lying around in your swap file at any given time right now. This is nothing new.
That only works for free software.
Release early - ie; when you KNOW it's unfinished.
Relase often - ie; it's so full of bugs and unfinished you need nightly builds to work them all out. At this point, you're releasing forever because now you have yourself a moving target with no set "completion" point, or any goal you're trying to achieve.
Listen to your customers - And if they complain just say "well it's free so fuck you if you dont like it". Seriously, no OSS projects "listen" to the customers.
If they did "listen", Linux wouldn't be a monolithic kernel, so I could download binary drivers for my new video card without recompiling it. Guess what, nVidia or ATi are never going to want to open their drivers' source. Doing so would essentially give away all the IP they put into designing their GPUs. A month later, some fab is set up in taiwan producing Radeon clones.
Samba would be able to function as an Active Directory Controller - it can't, and it's not even a project goal, NT4-style is apparently good enough, they haven't even plugged the gaping security holes in the old scheme MS did. Ie; you have to disable "require sign or seal" to join 2k or XP to a samba domain, essentially, you don't give a rats ass about verifying the authenticity of the MD4 password hashes that get bandied about plaintext on the network.
Open source "works", but not all of the time, and not always how you want it to.
I agree with the quote.
I'd rather develop software for a specific platform, and then let the various OS's figure out how to run it.
You can run my Win32 program on linux through Wine, on a mac with VirtualPC, or run my linux binaries under linux for windows, or cygwin, etc..
I look forward to an OS-agnostic future. ELF apps built for linux, but Macs or Windows has no problem running them, etc..
The OS should provide an appropriate environment for your stuff to run in, the developers shouldnt have to pay much heed to "portability". How much time is wasted in big OSS projects to make sure it can compile in 90000 flavors of unix?
That's where the future is, IMO. Not in watered-down crappy looking Java swing apps.
Then the zealot OS wars can just frigging end, since the OS will just be a commodity.
Since I put OpenLDAP on one of my boxes, and configured it all up.. It works but I'm having a problem.. When I ssh in as root, it asks my password - I give it, then it says denied and asks my password again, this time it will accept it.
/etc/passwd file. LDAP users log in fine.
/lib/security/pam_securetty.so /lib/security/pam_nologin.so /lib/security/pam_ldap.so /lib/security/pam_unix_auth.so use_first_pass
/lib/security/pam_ldap.so /lib/security/pam_unix_acct.so
/lib/security/pam_cracklib.so /lib/security/pam_ldap.so use_authtok /lib/security/pam_unix_passwd.so use_first_pass md5 shadow
/lib/security/pam_unix_session.so
I think the auth is failing on LDAP, then being accepted by unix. The root user doesn't exist in LDAP, I don't want any system users in there, just regular network folks (ie; actual people, no bin or ftp or root). It should bypass LDAP when it doesnt find a cn=root entry, and just auth against the local
It's a bigger problem when I try to log in as a regular user, then su to root. Then you only get one shot at giving a password, which fails. Also, I can't use the passwd command on root for the same reason (it asks for the old password once, fails, and thats that).
So, what gives?
Here's my system-auth file.
auth required
auth required
auth sufficient
auth required
account sufficient
account required
password required
password sufficient
password required
session required
Oh yeah, OpenLDAP is a kind of fingerprint scanner that works on Jell-O. (Slashdot mods are probably too stupid to know I'm lying).
The temperature of your fingertips is going to vary widely. If you've been holding a cup of coffee, it'll jack up to 110, 120 maybe, if you just came inside it could be down around 60 or so.
98 degrees is an average core body temperature, extremedies generally run cooler. Thats why your testicles hang down - they dont work at 98 degrees, they need to be cooler. It's also why briefs and tight pants make you sterile.
Besides, all you'd have to do is put the fake finger in a cup of warm (98 degree) water..
I think the real solution is to realize that this kind of shit only works in movies or cartoons right now.
The patent system is to provide a legal protection for inventions.
The problem is, it's been allowed to evolve in such a way that the whole system is now really only accessible to lawyers, not inventors or engineers.
If your friend was a lawyer - or had deep enough pockets to hire one - he'd have no problem getting a patent.
I disagree and therefore he is a TROLL posting FLAMEBAIT!
Thats not quite true. Yeah, he was against extremism, but he was himself an extremist. He was really just against any opposing viewpoint. To an extremist, being the wrong kind of Muslim is as bad as being a Jew or Christian.
Beards are a sign of manhood/strength to most muslims, and forcing every man to be shaven was more about emasculation and control than any particular religious statement.
Kind of like linux zealots getting in a big fight over vi vs emacs or distro A vs distro B. Watch the community constantly backstab and trip itself up by splitting hairs over what is (in the big picture) stupid shit.
"Linux is a great and powerful Operating system! Open Source desktops are fully mature and without flaws! All hardware works perfectly with linux! Authentication with PAM/SAMBA/LDAP/nsswitch is easily configured! Printing is plug and play! BSD is dying in the street!"
1U mobos and components are EXPENSIVE. This is a cheap alternative for consumer level devices. Ie; I don't need a quad-Xeon blade with built-in RAID-5 fibre channel array, I just want a box that can play DVDs and check emails... ...and fits inside my greased up yoda doll.
Go linux!
They take less power, and there already exists a (several in fact) DC-DC converter for them. It's a daughterboard/PSU that clips right on the mobo's atx connector, and takes 12VDC in. Ie; wire it right up to your car, or the 12V line of another PSU (ie embed another computer in an open drive bay), or a wall-wart, etc.
/etc/passwd has to be world readable, or some other nameservice (ie, nss_ldap or whatever).
/etc/shadow, many many moons ago.
/etc/openldap/ldap.conf, /etc/ldap.conf, /etc/smbldap-tools/smbldap.conf, et cetera et cetera) it'd probably be standard by now.
/etc/passwd.
That's why they moved the passwords to the (non world readable)
Though if you're really cool you'd move that to LDAP. If configuring pam, nss, openldap and samba wasn't such a PAIN IN THE ASS (why cant ldap clients just agree to read one conf file, why do I have to deal with
Secure authentication against an LDAP directory. What a concept. Wonder who does that, oh yeah, Windows 2000 and up. Meanwhile here I am sending out MD4 password hashes to authenticate against samba, one of the biggest security faults of NT4.0 that's now embraced by the OSS community for some reason. (Andrew, Samba needs to function as an Active Directory controller! Accept nothing less!)
Anyways, you need to upgrade, fella. There shouldn't be anything special in
Because I can take old parts, stick them in a box, install linux, hide the box under my desk (or wherever) and ssh into it.
All my gruntwork, downloading, bittorrents, etc, run on that old box, never to bother my good machine.
Taking the time to type 'screen btorrent blahblah.iso.torrent' is more convenient than having my main machine slow to a crawl after torrent opens 9 billion connections.
My old linux text-only boxes exist do do my bulk downloading for me.
Bittorrent itself is the best client, the btdownloadcurses.py script. Building just the ncurses app without needing the bloat of X to link against was a bit annoying. Thankfully emerge can pull it off with "-qt -gtk -gnome" use flags.
Another good client is called ctorrent, written in C, a console app. It segfaults when the d/l is > 2gigs (I think thats why), and sometimes doesnt redownload failed segments.. I had to drag some downloads to a windows box and finish them up with the real client. Shame about the bugs, it's a very light and fast app, I hope it's finished.
An old P200/MMX, a big hard drive, and all my downloading is done via ssh, and my real computer is never bogged down with such tasks. wget, bittorrent, ncftp, etc..
Also, it makes throttling it easy. At the gateway, I just throw all traffic from my "grunt boxes" IP's into a lower queue. Torrents no more grind my connection to a halt, it's much more effective than trying to mark packets for other reasons (size, etc).
dircproxy is a cool lil app too, I can keep connected to IRC and bounce from machine to machine. It doesn't handle DCC's all that well, it always seems to clip them.
You pay the backbone folks for what you put on the net, not what you take off. Ie; the ISP's bandwidth costs are based on their uplink - how much they host, etc..
So it saves them big bucks that way.
I seen plenty of this type of genius graduate sit down at a box and go "It says 'rpm: command not found', it must be broken!" Or emerge, or apt-get, or whatever your favorite package tool is.
And of course, they know nothing of the package format above all package formats, a source tarball.
So as much Red Hat degrees as you have, it doesnt seem to start until the app is already built and installed, via rpm. If I have to build and install postfix (or whatever), so that the "Architect" can configure it, he's absolutely useless to me.
Am I right or wrong, people?
Red Rocket Certified Arse Cadet
That's how I'm going to read it on resumes.
I myself am using Linux, and I haven't been able to find any solutions
I was using linux and had the same problem.
Why would you add a (crappy) FM transmitter to your laptop, rather than adding WiFi to your stereo?