Color me (-1, Troll), but what are the chances that the public will know or care about this? Most of my clients/coworkers/friends/family members are "just average users" who use Word, IE and Outlook, and who barely even know what a computer virus is. They certainly don't know what a "bug" or "vulnerability" is, and their grasp of computer security generally ranges from tenuous down to completely nonexistant. (My mother used to think that running a LAN in our home was "illegal", since every time her computer said "Application X has performed an illegal operation", she freaked out and asked if the cops were on their way!) Until this sort of thing ends up on the 6:00 news, as well as the front pages of USA Today and the New York Times, most people will not be aware that there is a problem. And when something happens, they will blame themselves, their kids for "messing with the computer", the last tech who touched their machine... or perhaps simply say "the computer's broken... durned computer..."
We need bugs like this to be publicized in major newspapers, the way "human" virus outbreaks (and potential outbreaks) like SARS or Ebola are. That way, people might actually start patching their systems...
Post-it notes by keyboards don't bother me so much, unless they are on mission-critical accounts, in situations where untrusted individuals (e.g. janitors, or the public, as in the case of someone who works at an Internet Cafe/public library/school) can get to them.
What bothers me is when users use passwords like "sophia" or "pears" or "1952" and then expect ME to safeguard their accounts... AND to make matters worse they have zero clue about the risks they are placing OTHER accounts in by doing so.
I had an ex-boss-- the CEO of a dot-com-- who simply hated passwords. Her solution? Set up all of our workstations without a password at all, or with the same password, which never changed. (The password was the name of the company.) This was in an office in New York City, which we shared with other companies.
Apparently, this hatred of passwords had even spread so far as the techs-- when I joined the company, I almost immediately found that one of our three servers (running Windows (NT 4.0 Server), no less, had NO Administrator password whatsoever.
Users simply do not understand why passwords are important. They are completely unaware of the concept of a bad password (say, "apple") being cracked by a dictionary attack, and then being used as a stepping stone to gain root (at which point it's all over). I run a Web host myself, and I constantly have to explain to users why good passwords are important. And this problem has gotten much worse with time (at present my company is 5 years old).
People generally have the attitude of "Oh, who would try breaking into my account, I just have some photos of my cat there." Maybe so, but if your account has a one-word password, and you have shell or FTP access to the system, Bad Things could happen if your account was compromised...
And then, of course, the techs (us!) would get blamed.
This almost makes me think MS is behind all this.
on
SCO's Next Target: SGI?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have always been somewhat suspicious that there is a significant SCO-Microsoft connection, but the possibility that SGI is next on their hit-list just increases my worry.
SGI is a company that MS has every reason in the world to want to crush. They have traditionally been a major Unix vendor, they produce high-end graphics workstations that compete directly with popular Wintel solutions, and at one point they spurned Microsoft by dropping an ill-fated line of x86 workstations. And, making matters even worse (for SGI; better for MS), SGI is already suffering financially. This would be a great time for MS to crush them under their heel.
It is entirely possible that MS is pulling some strings here. SGI's target market and SCO's are wholly different, and I really don't see any reason why they (as opposed to HP/Digital/Compaq or any other Unix vendor) would be a real target. It just seems odd. SGI builds graphics workstations, and SCO provides general-purpose workhorse Unix OSes to businesses. Unless MS were involved, why would SCO pick on SGI in particular?
Look, first of all, that "more open than ever" crap is BS. I believe it was mentioned earlier on SlashDot that you only get XML export capabilities by buying some fancier, more expensive version of Office-- though don't quote me on that one. Anyhow, if you honestly believe Microsoft is going to release their vicegrip on their file formats even one bit (disregarding the nice publicity stunts they pull to make it look like their formats are open, like offering licensing for the Word/Excel Binary File Formats (BFF)-- if they are so open, then how come not even Sun's StarOffice can perfectly open Word/Excel files?!), you need some serious deluding.
Also, you seem to be saying that the DRM "features" will be like password-protection on a Zip file-- either it's used, or it's not used. I doubt it will work that way; each file will probably have a DRM "layer". Even if it is set to allow access from anyone, on any computer, using any version of Office (it's not like MS will put in an "Allow OpenOffice.Org and StarOffice users to open this document" checkbox!), you will still have to go through some wonkalicious DRM API just to figure that out. It would be like decrypting a password, only to find out that the password is empty-string. Or "password". Or the letter "a".
Remember, even extremely trivial things can be considered "protection" in the eyes of the law. The clever SlashDotter who jokes that his sig is "double ROT13 encrypted", and that by reading it you have committed a DMCA violation, is dead on! Microsoft could simply ROT13 the entire document, and then claim that anyone who is "decrypting" their "digital rights managed" documents is violating the DMCA. Sure, they might not get away with it with something THAT trivial, but all they have to do is make the crypto more complex than something a Judge would understand (NOT hard at all), and voila, they'll never lose. As a large company, and one that the current Presidential administration is fond of, they essentially can't lose, unless they do something so ridiculous that even a judge and a jury can see through it.
And remember, it's technically illegal to play a freaking DVD on Linux. Don't give me any crap about non-CSSed DVDs. In practice, those things do not exist for 99% of the world. In the real world, any DVD that anyone's actually heard of (not "All the Bloopers from the 1976-1985 Super Bowls"-- think "The Matrix", "Vanilla Sky", "Star Wars Episode II"...) IS going to be CSS-encrypted, and without a "valid license" from the MPAA/DVD-CCA, guess what-- it's illegal to play such a disc. Xine doesn't have a license. MPlayer doesn't have a license. VLC doesn't have a license. Like it or not, the fact is that it is illegal to play DVDs under Linux, since none of the players are licensed to decrypt CSS.
Likewise, it WILL soon be illegal to open Word documents with anything but Windoze/MSWord and MacOS/MSWord if DRM becomes part of the file format. Period, case closed, take your head out of the sand and smell the injustice.
It's not supposed to be a freaking troll. Why does the truth always get downplayed as a troll on SlashDot?
I simply provided a link to a previous SlashDot story, along with the message that I took away from it (i.e. that it may soon be illegal for any non-MS entity to offer.DOC compatibility in their programs). If you disagree with my interpretation, so be it... but my track record is quite good. When Bush was elected and everyone downplayed the dangers, I said "A, we're going to get into a war. Or more thant one. And B, Microsoft is going to get let off the hook." And lo and behold, I was right on both counts.
Or, to put it another way: The same judges who SHOULD be smacking the RIAA around for mass extortion are the ones who'll be happily BENDING OVER BACKWARDS to do anything the RIAA asks for.
I am no longer a party to the mass delusion that America is a republic or a "democracy". It is an oligarchy.
This is the RIAA we're talking about. When you're one of the most politically powerful lobbies in the nation, nothing you can do is "extortion". This is merely "business".
This story, published on SlashDot less than 24 hours ago, notes that interoperating with the next version of the Word format may soon be a DMCA violation due to design decisions being made by MS (i.e. using DRM "features" in the format itself).
What good is OpenOffice if it's illegal? It'd get railroaded right off of the "legitimate" Internet just like DeCSS, and if someone finds out that you used it, you could very well go to jail. Not my cuppa.
I wish that we in the SlashDot community would have a longer memory, and that we would organize some sort of community against the DMCA (for it is the law which permits this sort of egregious BS). We should be rallying in the streets, but we're not. Pretty soon we may all be FORCED to buy a PeeCee with Windows and MS Office, or we will be completely unable to interoperate with the DRM-"protected".DOC format everyone else will be using. (And if you think everyone won't upgrade eventually, you're wrong. When Win95 came out, people said that adoption would be slow... and then when Win98 came out... and so on. How many people are running Win95 today?)
I recall that Microsoft's Mac OS software division recently had a contest called "Ms. MoXie". I hope this guy doesn't get sued;) (For info on this past event, see this page.
Us here at SlashDot tend to take a dim view of Microsoft (even though many of us like some of their products-- I myself like their mice, and MS Word is nice), but most people don't even realize there's a choice.
I apply for Unix Systems Administrator positions sometimes, and virtually ALWAYS I get asked for my resume in... MS Word format.
Giving them a PDF isn't good enough. They just ask you for the Word version again as if you'd said nothing.
I'm starting to think that MS's slogan should be "But EVERYONE uses Microsoft!", since that seems to be the way most end-users seem to think (without even realizing it). Or, of course, it could just be "Microsoft: You WILL use our software, whether you want to or not...")
This sort of thing is getting really tiresome. When will MS finally get the Grand Cosmic Smackdown for doing this sort of thing? How long can an ill-gotten monopoly last? (And why do so many SlashDotters seem to like defending MS?)
...by the Subject line of an email I just sent to some of my friends on this matter:
Subject: Great ideas that will never come to pass
Re: "It's almost strange to be earning money..."
on
Dotgnu Coding Competition
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As much as I love Open-Source/Free Software, it IS very very hard to make a living making it. I'm not talking about writing code for an employer, and then getting permission to release it; I'm talking about actually making your living DIRECTLY off of making, releasing and "selling" open source/free software, a la Red Hat (who just recently turned a profit for the first time). I'd love to hear some more stories from people who've actually made money by coding OSS/FS.
I'd like to see a timeline of events in this whole SCO debacle. Should make for some interesting reading. Skimming back through a billion SlashDot stories would be a pain.
Especially when it's anti-Microsoft. But hey, off-topic (but TRUE) posts about our current "leader" are a great way to get modded down. The word needs to get out somehow, but hey... SlashDot moderators won't LET it get out on here...
Well, if the RIAA can discover "virtual" CD burners in raids, maybe they'll tax "virtual ISPs", or "server potential" which would be the result of some weird formula involving CPU types and speeds, RAM complements, etc...
I can see the headlines now. "Joseph McMurphy has been artrested in Altamonte Springs, Florida, for allegedly possessing the equivalent of 6 Internet servers without paying network wiring taxes. This amount, roughly equivalent to 60 small Web sites or 600 personal sites......."
Listen, ANYTHING that speaks out against current prevailing trends is generally "news" to the majority of Americans. The trend in recent years is to "go with the flow" of the status quo; most people I talk to about Mac OS, Linux, etc. either (A) know nothing about them, or (B) think Windows is so much better (client-side and often server-side!) than both of them.
Unless some press that runs contrary to this prevailing notion gets into mainstream companies...well, Windows will probably continue to be stuffed down everyone's throats by a majority of uninformed users and managers.
Imagine a pretty, smart geek chick like Ceren Ercen wearing only SPRAY-ON COMPUTERS... running Gentoo... and a Beowulf cluster of them at that!!!... ))drool((
Slashdot Mirror
You mean a land of overpriced housing, layoffs, and geeks living six per house in impoverished conditions?
Color me (-1, Troll), but what are the chances that the public will know or care about this? Most of my clients/coworkers/friends/family members are "just average users" who use Word, IE and Outlook, and who barely even know what a computer virus is. They certainly don't know what a "bug" or "vulnerability" is, and their grasp of computer security generally ranges from tenuous down to completely nonexistant. (My mother used to think that running a LAN in our home was "illegal", since every time her computer said "Application X has performed an illegal operation", she freaked out and asked if the cops were on their way!) Until this sort of thing ends up on the 6:00 news, as well as the front pages of USA Today and the New York Times, most people will not be aware that there is a problem. And when something happens, they will blame themselves, their kids for "messing with the computer", the last tech who touched their machine... or perhaps simply say "the computer's broken... durned computer..."
We need bugs like this to be publicized in major newspapers, the way "human" virus outbreaks (and potential outbreaks) like SARS or Ebola are. That way, people might actually start patching their systems...
Post-it notes by keyboards don't bother me so much, unless they are on mission-critical accounts, in situations where untrusted individuals (e.g. janitors, or the public, as in the case of someone who works at an Internet Cafe/public library/school) can get to them.
What bothers me is when users use passwords like "sophia" or "pears" or "1952" and then expect ME to safeguard their accounts... AND to make matters worse they have zero clue about the risks they are placing OTHER accounts in by doing so.
I had an ex-boss-- the CEO of a dot-com-- who simply hated passwords. Her solution? Set up all of our workstations without a password at all, or with the same password, which never changed. (The password was the name of the company.) This was in an office in New York City, which we shared with other companies.
Apparently, this hatred of passwords had even spread so far as the techs-- when I joined the company, I almost immediately found that one of our three servers (running Windows (NT 4.0 Server), no less, had NO Administrator password whatsoever.
Users simply do not understand why passwords are important. They are completely unaware of the concept of a bad password (say, "apple") being cracked by a dictionary attack, and then being used as a stepping stone to gain root (at which point it's all over). I run a Web host myself, and I constantly have to explain to users why good passwords are important. And this problem has gotten much worse with time (at present my company is 5 years old).
People generally have the attitude of "Oh, who would try breaking into my account, I just have some photos of my cat there." Maybe so, but if your account has a one-word password, and you have shell or FTP access to the system, Bad Things could happen if your account was compromised...
And then, of course, the techs (us!) would get blamed.
I have always been somewhat suspicious that there is a significant SCO-Microsoft connection, but the possibility that SGI is next on their hit-list just increases my worry.
SGI is a company that MS has every reason in the world to want to crush. They have traditionally been a major Unix vendor, they produce high-end graphics workstations that compete directly with popular Wintel solutions, and at one point they spurned Microsoft by dropping an ill-fated line of x86 workstations. And, making matters even worse (for SGI; better for MS), SGI is already suffering financially. This would be a great time for MS to crush them under their heel.
It is entirely possible that MS is pulling some strings here. SGI's target market and SCO's are wholly different, and I really don't see any reason why they (as opposed to HP/Digital/Compaq or any other Unix vendor) would be a real target. It just seems odd. SGI builds graphics workstations, and SCO provides general-purpose workhorse Unix OSes to businesses. Unless MS were involved, why would SCO pick on SGI in particular?
Look, first of all, that "more open than ever" crap is BS. I believe it was mentioned earlier on SlashDot that you only get XML export capabilities by buying some fancier, more expensive version of Office-- though don't quote me on that one. Anyhow, if you honestly believe Microsoft is going to release their vicegrip on their file formats even one bit (disregarding the nice publicity stunts they pull to make it look like their formats are open, like offering licensing for the Word/Excel Binary File Formats (BFF)-- if they are so open, then how come not even Sun's StarOffice can perfectly open Word/Excel files?!), you need some serious deluding.
Also, you seem to be saying that the DRM "features" will be like password-protection on a Zip file-- either it's used, or it's not used. I doubt it will work that way; each file will probably have a DRM "layer". Even if it is set to allow access from anyone, on any computer, using any version of Office (it's not like MS will put in an "Allow OpenOffice.Org and StarOffice users to open this document" checkbox!), you will still have to go through some wonkalicious DRM API just to figure that out. It would be like decrypting a password, only to find out that the password is empty-string. Or "password". Or the letter "a".
Remember, even extremely trivial things can be considered "protection" in the eyes of the law. The clever SlashDotter who jokes that his sig is "double ROT13 encrypted", and that by reading it you have committed a DMCA violation, is dead on! Microsoft could simply ROT13 the entire document, and then claim that anyone who is "decrypting" their "digital rights managed" documents is violating the DMCA. Sure, they might not get away with it with something THAT trivial, but all they have to do is make the crypto more complex than something a Judge would understand (NOT hard at all), and voila, they'll never lose. As a large company, and one that the current Presidential administration is fond of, they essentially can't lose, unless they do something so ridiculous that even a judge and a jury can see through it.
And remember, it's technically illegal to play a freaking DVD on Linux. Don't give me any crap about non-CSSed DVDs. In practice, those things do not exist for 99% of the world. In the real world, any DVD that anyone's actually heard of (not "All the Bloopers from the 1976-1985 Super Bowls"-- think "The Matrix", "Vanilla Sky", "Star Wars Episode II"...) IS going to be CSS-encrypted, and without a "valid license" from the MPAA/DVD-CCA, guess what-- it's illegal to play such a disc. Xine doesn't have a license. MPlayer doesn't have a license. VLC doesn't have a license. Like it or not, the fact is that it is illegal to play DVDs under Linux, since none of the players are licensed to decrypt CSS.
Likewise, it WILL soon be illegal to open Word documents with anything but Windoze/MSWord and MacOS/MSWord if DRM becomes part of the file format. Period, case closed, take your head out of the sand and smell the injustice.
It's not supposed to be a freaking troll. Why does the truth always get downplayed as a troll on SlashDot?
.DOC compatibility in their programs). If you disagree with my interpretation, so be it... but my track record is quite good. When Bush was elected and everyone downplayed the dangers, I said "A, we're going to get into a war. Or more thant one. And B, Microsoft is going to get let off the hook." And lo and behold, I was right on both counts.
I simply provided a link to a previous SlashDot story, along with the message that I took away from it (i.e. that it may soon be illegal for any non-MS entity to offer
Or, to put it another way: The same judges who SHOULD be smacking the RIAA around for mass extortion are the ones who'll be happily BENDING OVER BACKWARDS to do anything the RIAA asks for.
I am no longer a party to the mass delusion that America is a republic or a "democracy". It is an oligarchy.
This is the RIAA we're talking about. When you're one of the most politically powerful lobbies in the nation, nothing you can do is "extortion". This is merely "business".
Perhaps you're right. But who's going to argue this in a court of law for us?
This story, published on SlashDot less than 24 hours ago, notes that interoperating with the next version of the Word format may soon be a DMCA violation due to design decisions being made by MS (i.e. using DRM "features" in the format itself).
.DOC format everyone else will be using. (And if you think everyone won't upgrade eventually, you're wrong. When Win95 came out, people said that adoption would be slow... and then when Win98 came out... and so on. How many people are running Win95 today?)
What good is OpenOffice if it's illegal? It'd get railroaded right off of the "legitimate" Internet just like DeCSS, and if someone finds out that you used it, you could very well go to jail. Not my cuppa.
I wish that we in the SlashDot community would have a longer memory, and that we would organize some sort of community against the DMCA (for it is the law which permits this sort of egregious BS). We should be rallying in the streets, but we're not. Pretty soon we may all be FORCED to buy a PeeCee with Windows and MS Office, or we will be completely unable to interoperate with the DRM-"protected"
I recall that Microsoft's Mac OS software division recently had a contest called "Ms. MoXie". I hope this guy doesn't get sued ;) (For info on this past event, see this page.
You didn't read the freaking story, did you.
This would make OpenOffice.org LEGALLY UNABLE to read Word files.
...or even know about this.
Us here at SlashDot tend to take a dim view of Microsoft (even though many of us like some of their products-- I myself like their mice, and MS Word is nice), but most people don't even realize there's a choice.
I apply for Unix Systems Administrator positions sometimes, and virtually ALWAYS I get asked for my resume in... MS Word format.
Giving them a PDF isn't good enough. They just ask you for the Word version again as if you'd said nothing.
I'm starting to think that MS's slogan should be "But EVERYONE uses Microsoft!", since that seems to be the way most end-users seem to think (without even realizing it). Or, of course, it could just be "Microsoft: You WILL use our software, whether you want to or not...")
This sort of thing is getting really tiresome. When will MS finally get the Grand Cosmic Smackdown for doing this sort of thing? How long can an ill-gotten monopoly last? (And why do so many SlashDotters seem to like defending MS?)
A balloon the height of the Empire State Building!? Whoa!
...by the Subject line of an email I just sent to some of my friends on this matter:
Subject: Great ideas that will never come to pass
As much as I love Open-Source/Free Software, it IS very very hard to make a living making it. I'm not talking about writing code for an employer, and then getting permission to release it; I'm talking about actually making your living DIRECTLY off of making, releasing and "selling" open source/free software, a la Red Hat (who just recently turned a profit for the first time). I'd love to hear some more stories from people who've actually made money by coding OSS/FS.
I'd like to see a timeline of events in this whole SCO debacle. Should make for some interesting reading. Skimming back through a billion SlashDot stories would be a pain.
Especially when it's anti-Microsoft. But hey, off-topic (but TRUE) posts about our current "leader" are a great way to get modded down. The word needs to get out somehow, but hey... SlashDot moderators won't LET it get out on here...
Is he a hanging chad? A dimpled chad? Oh! Oh! The humor! ;)
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all we>SPLUThey!
Well, if the RIAA can discover "virtual" CD burners in raids, maybe they'll tax "virtual ISPs", or "server potential" which would be the result of some weird formula involving CPU types and speeds, RAM complements, etc...
I can see the headlines now. "Joseph McMurphy has been artrested in Altamonte Springs, Florida, for allegedly possessing the equivalent of 6 Internet servers without paying network wiring taxes. This amount, roughly equivalent to 60 small Web sites or 600 personal sites......."
Listen, ANYTHING that speaks out against current prevailing trends is generally "news" to the majority of Americans. The trend in recent years is to "go with the flow" of the status quo; most people I talk to about Mac OS, Linux, etc. either (A) know nothing about them, or (B) think Windows is so much better (client-side and often server-side!) than both of them.
Unless some press that runs contrary to this prevailing notion gets into mainstream companies...well, Windows will probably continue to be stuffed down everyone's throats by a majority of uninformed users and managers.
Perhaps now we should try to get other "mainstream" media entities to cover stories with this sort of angle... such as:
* The New York Times
* CNN
* USA Today
* The Wall Street Journal? (Yeah, it's a long shot, but...)
Does anyone here have contacts with any of these companies?
Imagine a pretty, smart geek chick like Ceren Ercen wearing only SPRAY-ON COMPUTERS... running Gentoo... and a Beowulf cluster of them at that!!! ... ))drool((