What I do not quite understand is why people assume that Web is confidential medium to begin with. It is not, and those who somehow believe that it is should readjust their views accordingly...
If you are trully paranoid, then study the way things work on the Web and use anonimizers, proxies, relays, etc. and hide yourself behind those. Nobody is going to work for you to make sure that you web surfing stays confidential...
Some companies do cross the line from time to time when they forget TO DISCLOSE that they are collecting information about you, such that even if you wanted to you had no obvious way to find out about what a program or web site are doing.
Yet again, assume that everybody will be collecting info on you, and adjust accordingly.
People like to complain a lot about spyware, yet on many occasions they actually do willingly install it themselves. And as disgusting as the spyware is, it often discloses what kind of information it is going to collect.
Going back to the subject, Google achieves the high accuracy of search by *TRACKING* what people find useful. "Is not this outrageous ?!?" some might exclaim. It might be... Yet I would never want to go back to things like AltaVista which only advantage was speed. I do want to provide Google with the feedback such that next time my search is a little better than before. Consider this as a service to the web community at large.
"We are going to use Unix and Linux as the evaluation platforms for our products in the future, and not Windows, because the customer demand for Windows is not there," she said. "Frankly, there is a fair amount of disenchantment with Microsoft products because of security problems."... said Mary-Ann Davidson, chief security officer for Oracle.
Wow. I knew Larry hated Bill and MS, but I sure wouldn't have expected this! Or is he just conceding the Windows server database market to Bill and trying to grow the Linux market on the low end + the UNIX market at the higher end?
Smart companies try to transform complementary products of other companies into commodity items. OS for Oracle nicely fits into this picture. Since they need it anyway, might as well be inexpensive Linux. Also, one more Linux system - one less Windows system that could run MSSQL instead of Oracle. The choice to support Linux is really no brainer for Larry the Nut.
Linux port should also be relatively cheap for Oracle, since it is very much like standard Unix and Oracle tends to use basic OS facilities anyway.
It is likely that this whole f#ck up was caused by clueless middle people at Epic. Those that have no frigging clue about what security people do in situations like this. I am pretty sure they also could not be bothered to research the consequences of their silence.
Hopefully this story gets more publicity so that even the least informed ones get a clue that ignoring vulnerabilities is a BAD thing to do!!!
EULA - something wrong with the big picture
on
California EULA Lawsuit
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It is about time that somebody started making at least some noise over EULAs.
Companies force you to enter into what they think of as an agreement, yet, you do not get to read the terms of it before you pay. Also, companies would like us to believe that we can't do anything with their boxed software even if we did not open the box and agreed with EULA! So, from their perspective you are entering a service agreement just like a cable or a phone contract.
So software either has got to become like true service, where you do sign real papers and have some grace period to cancel the contract if you do not like the software. Or, it becomes like normal merchandise and then there should be no stupid EULAs, and you can do with your copy whatever you want and sell it to however wants it without any restrictions.
As is consumers get the worst of both worlds.
It seems like software companies should not have their cake and eat it too.
Weird failures occur so often, such as disks returning garbage without the controller informing the OS, that Google does a checksum on _every_ data structure in their user-level software. He also talked about how Linux is good enough for them, but it doesn't perform well with respects to I/O under heavy load.
These guys are probably using cheap arse IDE controllers. In any case, x86 boxes are so disposable these days that it is a lot cheaper to replace a box with another one than have a $$$ support contract.
Of course, for this to work flawlessly frequent failures need to be built into the application, meaning that if some box goes down the system is able to stop using it. This is pretty trivial to do for highly distributed applications such as Google search.
Sun uniprocessor performance has been very uncompetitive for quite some time now. I bet they would have switched a long time ago if it was not for the difficulty of porting software from Solaris to Linux. Plus human inertia...
The worst problem for Sun is once they loose customers to Linux, there is no turning back. They still hold well in 64-bit area, however, once commodity hardware such as x86-64 gets there, this battle will also be over.
This is the main reason why the company is likely to go down the drain.
4. It is not backward-compatible across minor releases." Then this fool goes and compares 1.3 to 1.4 or 1.1 to 1.2 as IF those are minor releases. (anyone that uses java knows the 3rd digit has been the minor one) The 2nd number has so far been treated majorly by Sun's releases and I would NEVER call 1.2 or 1.3 or 1.4 a minor release, they have years between them.
I recently did some Oracle installs, and their installer is written in Java to be cross platform compatible. Poor fellas have 2 or 3 copies of JRE on the install CD because their components were written at different times and can't use each other's JREs! Java was supposed to be a cross platform language, yet you can't even run things on the same platform reliably due to the version differences. In addition, Oracle java installer is a huge memory hog. Takes way more resources than the running DB itself. As for large footprints, I stopped complaining about even M$ abuse of memory after the price came down so much. Just go buy some more. Its a valid issue, but I wouldn't mark it as worth of writing a letter.
FYI, M$ actually has almost gotten their act together. WinXP is extremely reasonable with RAM and the speed is very good once all the stupid visual effects are turned off. The problem with Java is that you'll need huge amount of RAM per application, and may run out of physical RAM even if you pack 2 Gb into an Intel box.
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What I do not quite understand is why people assume that Web is confidential medium to begin with. It is not, and those who somehow believe that it is should readjust their views accordingly ...
...
... Yet I would never want to go back to things like AltaVista which only advantage was speed. I do want to provide Google with the feedback such that next time my search is a little better than before. Consider this as a service to the web community at large.
If you are trully paranoid, then study the way things work on the Web and use anonimizers, proxies, relays, etc. and hide yourself behind those. Nobody is going to work for you to make sure that you web surfing stays confidential
Some companies do cross the line from time to time when they forget TO DISCLOSE that they are collecting information about you, such that even if you wanted to you had no obvious way to find out about what a program or web site are doing.
Yet again, assume that everybody will be collecting info on you, and adjust accordingly. People like to complain a lot about spyware, yet on many occasions they actually do willingly install it themselves. And as disgusting as the spyware is, it often discloses what kind of information it is going to collect.
Going back to the subject, Google achieves the high accuracy of search by *TRACKING* what people find useful. "Is not this outrageous ?!?" some might exclaim. It might be
"We are going to use Unix and Linux as the evaluation platforms for our products in the future, and not Windows, because the customer demand for Windows is not there," she said. "Frankly, there is a fair amount of disenchantment with Microsoft products because of security problems." ... said Mary-Ann Davidson, chief security officer for Oracle.
Wow. I knew Larry hated Bill and MS, but I sure wouldn't have expected this! Or is he just conceding the Windows server database market to Bill and trying to grow the Linux market on the low end + the UNIX market at the higher end?
Smart companies try to transform complementary products of other companies into commodity items. OS for Oracle nicely fits into this picture. Since they need it anyway, might as well be inexpensive Linux. Also, one more Linux system - one less Windows system that could run MSSQL instead of Oracle. The choice to support Linux is really no brainer for Larry the Nut.
Linux port should also be relatively cheap for Oracle, since it is very much like standard Unix and Oracle tends to use basic OS facilities anyway.
It is likely that this whole f#ck up was caused by clueless middle people at Epic. Those that have no frigging clue about what security people do in situations like this. I am pretty sure they also could not be bothered to research the consequences of their silence.
Hopefully this story gets more publicity so that even the least informed ones get a clue that ignoring vulnerabilities is a BAD thing to do!!!
It is about time that somebody started making at least some noise over EULAs.
Companies force you to enter into what they think of as an agreement, yet, you do not get to read the terms of it before you pay. Also, companies would like us to believe that we can't do anything with their boxed software even if we did not open the box and agreed with EULA! So, from their perspective you are entering a service agreement just like a cable or a phone contract.
So software either has got to become like true service, where you do sign real papers and have some grace period to cancel the contract if you do not like the software. Or, it becomes like normal merchandise and then there should be no stupid EULAs, and you can do with your copy whatever you want and sell it to however wants it without any restrictions. As is consumers get the worst of both worlds.
It seems like software companies should not have their cake and eat it too.
Weird failures occur so often, such as disks returning garbage without the controller informing the OS, that Google does a checksum on _every_ data structure in their user-level software. He also talked about how Linux is good enough for them, but it doesn't perform well with respects to I/O under heavy load.
These guys are probably using cheap arse IDE controllers. In any case, x86 boxes are so disposable these days that it is a lot cheaper to replace a box with another one than have a $$$ support contract.
Of course, for this to work flawlessly frequent failures need to be built into the application, meaning that if some box goes down the system is able to stop using it. This is pretty trivial to do for highly distributed applications such as Google search.
Sun uniprocessor performance has been very uncompetitive for quite some time now. I bet they would have switched a long time ago if it was not for the difficulty of porting software from Solaris to Linux. Plus human inertia ...
The worst problem for Sun is once they loose customers to Linux, there is no turning back.
They still hold well in 64-bit area, however, once commodity hardware such as x86-64 gets there, this battle will also be over.
This is the main reason why the company is likely to go down the drain.
4. It is not backward-compatible across minor releases." Then this fool goes and compares 1.3 to 1.4 or 1.1 to 1.2 as IF those are minor releases. (anyone that uses java knows the 3rd digit has been the minor one) The 2nd number has so far been treated majorly by Sun's releases and I would NEVER call 1.2 or 1.3 or 1.4 a minor release, they have years between them.
I recently did some Oracle installs, and their installer is written in Java to be cross platform compatible. Poor fellas have 2 or 3 copies of JRE on the install CD because their components were written at different times and can't use each other's JREs!
Java was supposed to be a cross platform language, yet you can't even run things on the same platform reliably due to the version differences.
In addition, Oracle java installer is a huge memory hog. Takes way more resources than the running DB itself.
As for large footprints, I stopped complaining about even M$ abuse of memory after the price came down so much. Just go buy some more. Its a valid issue, but I wouldn't mark it as worth of writing a letter.
FYI, M$ actually has almost gotten their act together. WinXP is extremely reasonable with RAM and the speed is very good once all the stupid visual effects are turned off. The problem with Java is that you'll need huge amount of RAM per application, and may run out of physical RAM even if you pack 2 Gb into an Intel box.