You can get Guinness at a Montreal Expos game. Granted, the baseball sucks...but at least the beer is OK. (and the drinking age is 18 or 19, too, not 21...not that I'd like that or anything *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*)
Okay, read the article first. It includes comments from Andy Mueller-Maguhn, a leader of Berlin's Chaos Computer Club and also Europe's representative on the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), about the political sensitivities that might be offended by a German move away from Microsoft for all security-sensitive stuff (in other words, the US Government might be offended by "US Software is Insecure" being bandied about by the German government). The article suggests that the original report may, indeed, be accurate.
Beyond that, why announce to the world that your sensitive systems are or are not running any given OS or group of OSen? I mean, "Our sensitive systems will no longer run NT" (if an accurate statement) lets crackers know that (a) NT-only exploits won't work and (b) if they do, the box is uninteresting. Of course, that is assuming the statement is accurate ("Hey, Hans, how about if we disuguise the DoD C&C codes as marketing data and put zem on one of zose NT servers?" "Ah, excellent, Frans. Zee stupid Americans vill never realize.")
Alright, then I'm gonna show my ignorance of TCP/IP fundamentals:
If only one of two machines generates the ISN, how does the other one know what the ISN should be? Or is it just echoed back in the next packet, so if there is a disreptency the host that was supposed to generate the ISN can say "Whoa, buddy, I didn't send you that packet?"
The story seems to suggest that it is possible to garner enough info from eavesdropping to guess an ISN (sequence number), which are now pseudorandom on most network-worthy OSen. So it then does not matter if the next ISN is pseudorandom, pseudopseudorandom, or simple enough for GW Bush to guess. This seems logical to me, as all info that the two puters use to create the next ISN has to be something that a middleman would be able to capture, or the other end wouldn't be able to see it, right? Or am I missing something obvious here.
Of course, it does point out the solution: end-to-end crypto. That's definitely something I'd like to see, though I suppose I'd need a faster puter for peak traffic times.
But it does make a difference when Mozilla crashes and Wordperfect doesn't go down versus when IE crashes and the system (including your word processor) goes down with it. I've had Netscape take X down on me once--and even then, I think it may hae actually just been hung (as opposed to crashed), but I just killed X.
Or how about when IE brings down explorer (being that they're pretty much the same proggie) but then, after restarting explorer, you can't get to some application that was minimized to the tray?
It also makes a difference when the C++ (or assembly language or any other language that uses pointers) homework I was doing tries to change some memory it shouldn't and I get a nice error message versus a BSOD (granted, this is a 9x versus Real OS issue, not a Linux versus all versions of Windows).
Or, even better, double-major--there are definite benefits to taking CS classes, especially ones that deal with theory. However, I agree wholeheartedly that there's a lot of value in having a liberal arts education. The biggest difference is that having the CS classes will probably be more valuable in an economic/job-seeking sense whereas the liberal arts classes (especially if you can focus in on areas that really interest you) will have much more value to you personally. My 2 cents, anyhow.
(Oh, yeah, I'm considering a double-major in English and Comp Sci...aside from the threatening senior-year workload, I think it should be doable.)
Re:Speaking of outdated technology...
on
The Modem Lives On
·
· Score: 1
More mundane functions? You mean like viewing a Flash-"enhanced" site that displays a bunch of text that could just as easily have been written up in HTML, albeit with a little less audiovisual crap to distract one from the text? I think that modem users are good for the web because the offer, at least at the outside, a reason to put up web pages that don't have ludicrous numbers of useless graphics, nested tables, and Java applets where a simple HTML page or perhaps a form using CGI would do quite well (since "Because that's a better, cleaner way to do things, and we don't need that crap" doesn't seem to hold water these days).
That's interesting, because I just did./configure, dl'd and installed the libs it needed (zlib and OpenSSL),./configure again, make, make install, edit/usr/local/etc/sshd_config so it ran on port 123 (testing purposes, ssh is the only access I have to my Linux box, so...), start/usr/local/sbin/sshd, ssh in on port 123, verify that it works, change sshd_config, kill -HUP `cat/var/run/sshd.pid`, and it's all set.
The above is on a Slack install still running kernel 2.0.38 and some older version of glibc.
Spam costs the receiver money, which is what I think you meant. Let me give a quick example: I run a couple of domains on a 486/33. They exist primarily as email addresses for me and for me to have SSH access to a Real Command Interpreter(TM). However, my resources are seriously affected by the 100s (and I'm serious here, split among about 3 active email addresses and five or six inactive ones) of spam messages that my mail server filters out each day. That doesn't even include the time and effort I spent setting up the mail server (and then getting it to play nice with fetchmail) or the time that I learned why an open relay was a Bad Thing(TM) the hard way (including a complementary blocking of all outbound traffic to port 25 from my machine until I resolved the problem).
Bottom line: it's not just the 3-10 seconds (don't laugh, when the pipes at both ends are full, it can very definitely take 10 or more seconds for Pine to refresh the screen with the next message) it takes me to delete each email that makes it through my filters; it's also about the bandwidth, disk resources, and CPU resources it takes to either (a) keep that email from reaching my inbox or (b) receiving it and routing it to my inbox. Banners are quite different because they are (well, except for those annoying ECMAScript no-kill popup ones) opt-in and most of the cost is borne by the advertiser or the carrier of the advertising.
Well, we all know that people have tried speed governors before (AFAIK, most modern cars are limited to a top speed somewhat below the rating on their stock tires), and that a lot of people simply disable them. And don't forget older vehicles...my 89 Toyota 1/2 ton will prolly stand 200k or so more miles on the engine if the body lasts that long (rust issues--I live in New England), and even if I doubled my yearly mileage that would put me well into the next decade (OK, so I don't plan on still driving it then because I want 4wd. You get the point)
However, if some vehicles are speed-limited and some aren't, don't we increase speed variance (which is the number one cause of non-DUI accidents, perhaps of all accidents, IIRC)? Granted, we would eventually have a situation where there would be a relatively small number of people who cared to bother removing their governors (which would prolly be illegal and hence not a service readily available at Jiffy Lube) who would be traveling noticably faster than other traffic and therefore easier to ticket.
But this also assumes accurately calibrated speedometers. *chuckles* Yeah, mine's accurate--the needle at 60MPH mean's I'm doing like 53MPH. So I guess the easiest way to defeat the governor is a bigger set of tires.
Because if I bring my Windows95 CD to a friend's computer and install it, that's illegal because he doesn't have a license for it (unless he just doesn't have install media because his OEM didn't provide it, in which case it is legal).
Conversely, if I have 100 licenses for Office2000 and one CD, I can install it 100 times legally. Either way, the license is independent of the media (though it may be illegal for one to retain a copy of the media after selling the license).
A supervisor? DId you miss the article from a little over a month ago, where "Elevating to a Supervisor" consists of "Transferring to a Coworker" according to offical company policy at some places? I haven't worked at a tech-support center, but I have worked in a more general call center, and it was similarly disorganized and problematic, largely due to problems beyond the control of those in the actual call center.
But they're not buying the CDs themselves, they're buying the licenses. And a license to run Windows on one PC should be independent of the installation media, so they can still buy licenses from folks who bought a PC with OEM Windoze, a restore disk, and installed Linux (or *BSD or Be or that OS my friend wrote in his spare time a few years ago or whatever).
A five inch tailpipe can't make your car faster or look better, and a hole in your computer case won't either!
Actually, going to a larger diameter pipe cat back will usually give you an additional 5-10 horses (and better gas mileage); this does require a high-flow muffler, though, too. A high-flow cat (or no cat at all...just gut it and weld a large pipe inside it to avoid echoing) will yield even more horses and better gas mileage.
(Obviously, if you're constantly using those extra horses your gas mileage isn't going to improve, but if you put on a performance exhaust and don't change driving habits, you will see improved gas mileage. Just watch out for smog inspections...laws vary by state.)
And some case mods are designed to increase airflow (obviously, not a plexiglass window) which can in turn allow one to OC components even more.
The author seems to suggest that every work posted must be properly attributed and marked as factual or non-factual. However, this seems to overlook a simple method I've taught my students (in my Internet Publishing) class over the years: always verify the source. If you can't, don't trust it. It's usually pretty damn simple if there's attribution on the page; if there isn't, then don't trust it as factual without further verification. Why is this so hard? We do the same thing at the checkout aisle...if The New York Times has a front-page story about alien contact, it will probably be taken as truth. If The Enquirer has a front-page story about alien contact, then we assume the the world is working as usual.
How is a small business or some such not a real seller? I've bought several peripherals from peecee part distributors; in all cases, the cost from the auction was lower than the cost at their websites. Whenever I've seen this, it's apparently been the small biz offering a product at a lower price on eBay in hopes that (a) it would draw attention to their website and/or (b) the bid would eventually go high enough to make money.
Besides which, I feel more comfortable buying from a place with a real-looking business website and a real business phone number than from someone who is just a small-time eBay person; the former gives more ways to be tracked down, whereas the latter does not. *shrug* I've bought from both, though.
OK, let's look at some of the things (some already pointed out by the AC) that are required for an information economy:
electricity--stable and plentiful
sanitiation
literacy
telecomm infrastructure (ie stable phone lines)
Reasonable physical health...I mean, a brand new Athlon doesn't do a whole lot of good if you can't use it because you're stuck in bed, shivering with a fever
Social acceptance of the technology
I got a lot of those from William Wresch's Disconnected. It didn't get great reviews here on Slashdot, but I think it's a worthwhile read if you honestly think that going from impoverished 3rd world nation to IT industry is that easy.
I"ll second that motion. I don't know how the rights would work out, but I think that could be quite a series.
Of course, then there's the whole consistancy issue (I think just about every scifi series ever has had some of those), especially if the series was in the same universe as the books
We noted (as a result of our completely random input testing) that
any application running on Windows platforms is vulnerable to random input streams generated by any other application running on the same system. This appears to be a flaw in the Win32 message interface.
I will preface further comments by noting that I am a second-year college student, studying CS...I do not have extensive programming experience with either X or Windows, though I am pretty decent with basic console stuff.
1. I thought NT/2000 was supposed to protect applications from each other? I've definitely noticed a difference between the behavior of my C++ proggies on my 2000 box versus on other people's 9x boxen when my pointer logic isn't quite right (or isn't anywhere close to right, for that matter)--I have yet to bring down the whole system, whereas they do on a regular basis. *knocks on wood* So does this mean that if my programs were using the API to generate random Win32 messages, I could bring down anything I wanted to?
2. If this is the case, why is NT/2000 so much mroe stable than 9x? Is it just the memory protection?
I remember getting free demo versions of Lotus Ami Pro and Freelance Graphics for Windows (this was using Win3.1) that would do everything except for save or print...probably the same idea.
From console, after I fscked up my Linux partition by playing with inittab and booted from floppy:
# mnt/dev/hda1/mnt
# cd etc
# ls
# jed inittab.conf
(jed not found--remind me to roll my own rescue disk sometime)
# vi inittab.conf
(fix two fscked up lines)
init 6 (reboot, it works)
(I'll save the details of the time I fscked up the disk and had to look at lost nodes in/lost+found and copy them back to etc with the correct filenames...actually made it work, too, to my great surprise.)
After a similar experience with a fscked up registry in Windows (and this time, it wasn't my fault--some program had mysteriously been mucking around in there and trashed it), I found that the only thing I could do with regedit from the command line was to dump the registry to text...and even then, it wouldn't work consistantly. And after dumping it to text, I found that the MS-DOS editor wouldn't open it (file too large) and that I couldn't even reimport it as is (I forgot the error message, though).
So what, you ask, is the difference between mucking with the registry with regedit and mucking with text-based config files? The latter can be done from the command line after a box gets hosed; the former cannot. (Granted, I haven't tried Win2k's console mode to see if that would let me muck with the registry...I may have to try that sometime).
But Win2k is far better, IMO, than NT 4. I tried NT 4 on my personal workstation just for shits and giggles. Blah. Then I got my hands on a copy of an early Win2k build...wonderful. Granted, I am stuck on a MS-focused network, but it's still a decent OS. The only crashes I've had have been due to shady drivers combined with shady CD Ripping software (the only thing I've found to work consistantly is the proggie from the cdrtools pacakge), the UI is nice (IMO), and with a few aftermarket Open Source tools (especially CygWin's bash port), it's a decent OS. If I could just get Ethereal to work under Win2k, I might stop using Linux on this workstation.
On the other hand, it is resource-hungry (my personal workstation has 256 MB of RAM, and Win2k likes to eat 60-80MB of it without even having any non-system proggies running). And I don't think I'd be particularly inclined to use it for a server...the console-mode SSH support is severely lacking (ie I haven't noticed any) and I'm sure that my 486/33 Linux box is doing far better with its various serving tasks than it would be under Win2k. Oh, wait, I couldn't even *install* Win2k on it. So, yeah.
Yes, but most likely, the same is the case on a WinNT network..I find it hard to believe that MS wouldn't have setup security on their servers (which is presumably where the source code would reside) so that anyone could read any files...only developers who needed source access would have such access. And the same would be true on a *nix system...if the person is working on the source, then presumably they'd have access to it and therefore it would be "personal" files ot the extent that a trojan under their UID could read it and email it to Russia or South Africa or Hackensack or wherever.
Um, regardless of your opinion of Mitnick, he did mention identity theft in the article. Therefore, he does have some experience with the field (namely, federal DNA database to assure identity). Of course, someone else raised the issue of somone cracking said database and changing the name associated with a couple of DNA strands, but....
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a minute...let's look at those odds again:
1 out of 100 tests is inaccurate. No tests give a false negative. That means that, out of every 100 tests, 1 is a false positive.
Out of every 100,000 tests is a true positive.
By a, 1,000 out of every 100,000 tests will be a false positive.
Therefore only 1 out of every 1,000 people who test positive will have the disease.
So, in other words, I'm going to get the same number of projects done as I was before--none of 'em!
Wanna see my resume? I'm looking for a summer job.
You can get Guinness at a Montreal Expos game. Granted, the baseball sucks...but at least the beer is OK. (and the drinking age is 18 or 19, too, not 21...not that I'd like that or anything *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*)
Okay, read the article first. It includes comments from Andy Mueller-Maguhn, a leader of Berlin's Chaos Computer Club and also Europe's representative on the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), about the political sensitivities that might be offended by a German move away from Microsoft for all security-sensitive stuff (in other words, the US Government might be offended by "US Software is Insecure" being bandied about by the German government). The article suggests that the original report may, indeed, be accurate.
Beyond that, why announce to the world that your sensitive systems are or are not running any given OS or group of OSen? I mean, "Our sensitive systems will no longer run NT" (if an accurate statement) lets crackers know that (a) NT-only exploits won't work and (b) if they do, the box is uninteresting. Of course, that is assuming the statement is accurate ("Hey, Hans, how about if we disuguise the DoD C&C codes as marketing data and put zem on one of zose NT servers?" "Ah, excellent, Frans. Zee stupid Americans vill never realize.")
Alright, then I'm gonna show my ignorance of TCP/IP fundamentals:
If only one of two machines generates the ISN, how does the other one know what the ISN should be? Or is it just echoed back in the next packet, so if there is a disreptency the host that was supposed to generate the ISN can say "Whoa, buddy, I didn't send you that packet?"
The story seems to suggest that it is possible to garner enough info from eavesdropping to guess an ISN (sequence number), which are now pseudorandom on most network-worthy OSen. So it then does not matter if the next ISN is pseudorandom, pseudopseudorandom, or simple enough for GW Bush to guess. This seems logical to me, as all info that the two puters use to create the next ISN has to be something that a middleman would be able to capture, or the other end wouldn't be able to see it, right? Or am I missing something obvious here.
Of course, it does point out the solution: end-to-end crypto. That's definitely something I'd like to see, though I suppose I'd need a faster puter for peak traffic times.
But it does make a difference when Mozilla crashes and Wordperfect doesn't go down versus when IE crashes and the system (including your word processor) goes down with it. I've had Netscape take X down on me once--and even then, I think it may hae actually just been hung (as opposed to crashed), but I just killed X.
Or how about when IE brings down explorer (being that they're pretty much the same proggie) but then, after restarting explorer, you can't get to some application that was minimized to the tray?
It also makes a difference when the C++ (or assembly language or any other language that uses pointers) homework I was doing tries to change some memory it shouldn't and I get a nice error message versus a BSOD (granted, this is a 9x versus Real OS issue, not a Linux versus all versions of Windows).
Or, even better, double-major--there are definite benefits to taking CS classes, especially ones that deal with theory. However, I agree wholeheartedly that there's a lot of value in having a liberal arts education. The biggest difference is that having the CS classes will probably be more valuable in an economic/job-seeking sense whereas the liberal arts classes (especially if you can focus in on areas that really interest you) will have much more value to you personally. My 2 cents, anyhow.
(Oh, yeah, I'm considering a double-major in English and Comp Sci...aside from the threatening senior-year workload, I think it should be doable.)
More mundane functions? You mean like viewing a Flash-"enhanced" site that displays a bunch of text that could just as easily have been written up in HTML, albeit with a little less audiovisual crap to distract one from the text? I think that modem users are good for the web because the offer, at least at the outside, a reason to put up web pages that don't have ludicrous numbers of useless graphics, nested tables, and Java applets where a simple HTML page or perhaps a form using CGI would do quite well (since "Because that's a better, cleaner way to do things, and we don't need that crap" doesn't seem to hold water these days).
That's interesting, because I just did ./configure, dl'd and installed the libs it needed (zlib and OpenSSL), ./configure again, make, make install, edit /usr/local/etc/sshd_config so it ran on port 123 (testing purposes, ssh is the only access I have to my Linux box, so...), start /usr/local/sbin/sshd, ssh in on port 123, verify that it works, change sshd_config, kill -HUP `cat /var/run/sshd.pid`, and it's all set.
The above is on a Slack install still running kernel 2.0.38 and some older version of glibc.
Spam costs the receiver money, which is what I think you meant. Let me give a quick example: I run a couple of domains on a 486/33. They exist primarily as email addresses for me and for me to have SSH access to a Real Command Interpreter(TM). However, my resources are seriously affected by the 100s (and I'm serious here, split among about 3 active email addresses and five or six inactive ones) of spam messages that my mail server filters out each day. That doesn't even include the time and effort I spent setting up the mail server (and then getting it to play nice with fetchmail) or the time that I learned why an open relay was a Bad Thing(TM) the hard way (including a complementary blocking of all outbound traffic to port 25 from my machine until I resolved the problem).
Bottom line: it's not just the 3-10 seconds (don't laugh, when the pipes at both ends are full, it can very definitely take 10 or more seconds for Pine to refresh the screen with the next message) it takes me to delete each email that makes it through my filters; it's also about the bandwidth, disk resources, and CPU resources it takes to either (a) keep that email from reaching my inbox or (b) receiving it and routing it to my inbox. Banners are quite different because they are (well, except for those annoying ECMAScript no-kill popup ones) opt-in and most of the cost is borne by the advertiser or the carrier of the advertising.
Well, we all know that people have tried speed governors before (AFAIK, most modern cars are limited to a top speed somewhat below the rating on their stock tires), and that a lot of people simply disable them. And don't forget older vehicles...my 89 Toyota 1/2 ton will prolly stand 200k or so more miles on the engine if the body lasts that long (rust issues--I live in New England), and even if I doubled my yearly mileage that would put me well into the next decade (OK, so I don't plan on still driving it then because I want 4wd. You get the point)
However, if some vehicles are speed-limited and some aren't, don't we increase speed variance (which is the number one cause of non-DUI accidents, perhaps of all accidents, IIRC)? Granted, we would eventually have a situation where there would be a relatively small number of people who cared to bother removing their governors (which would prolly be illegal and hence not a service readily available at Jiffy Lube) who would be traveling noticably faster than other traffic and therefore easier to ticket.
But this also assumes accurately calibrated speedometers. *chuckles* Yeah, mine's accurate--the needle at 60MPH mean's I'm doing like 53MPH. So I guess the easiest way to defeat the governor is a bigger set of tires.
Because if I bring my Windows95 CD to a friend's computer and install it, that's illegal because he doesn't have a license for it (unless he just doesn't have install media because his OEM didn't provide it, in which case it is legal).
Conversely, if I have 100 licenses for Office2000 and one CD, I can install it 100 times legally. Either way, the license is independent of the media (though it may be illegal for one to retain a copy of the media after selling the license).
A supervisor? DId you miss the article from a little over a month ago, where "Elevating to a Supervisor" consists of "Transferring to a Coworker" according to offical company policy at some places? I haven't worked at a tech-support center, but I have worked in a more general call center, and it was similarly disorganized and problematic, largely due to problems beyond the control of those in the actual call center.
But they're not buying the CDs themselves, they're buying the licenses. And a license to run Windows on one PC should be independent of the installation media, so they can still buy licenses from folks who bought a PC with OEM Windoze, a restore disk, and installed Linux (or *BSD or Be or that OS my friend wrote in his spare time a few years ago or whatever).
A five inch tailpipe can't make your car faster or look better, and a hole in your computer case won't either!
Actually, going to a larger diameter pipe cat back will usually give you an additional 5-10 horses (and better gas mileage); this does require a high-flow muffler, though, too. A high-flow cat (or no cat at all...just gut it and weld a large pipe inside it to avoid echoing) will yield even more horses and better gas mileage.
(Obviously, if you're constantly using those extra horses your gas mileage isn't going to improve, but if you put on a performance exhaust and don't change driving habits, you will see improved gas mileage. Just watch out for smog inspections...laws vary by state.)
And some case mods are designed to increase airflow (obviously, not a plexiglass window) which can in turn allow one to OC components even more.
The author seems to suggest that every work posted must be properly attributed and marked as factual or non-factual. However, this seems to overlook a simple method I've taught my students (in my Internet Publishing) class over the years: always verify the source. If you can't, don't trust it. It's usually pretty damn simple if there's attribution on the page; if there isn't, then don't trust it as factual without further verification. Why is this so hard? We do the same thing at the checkout aisle...if The New York Times has a front-page story about alien contact, it will probably be taken as truth. If The Enquirer has a front-page story about alien contact, then we assume the the world is working as usual.
How is a small business or some such not a real seller? I've bought several peripherals from peecee part distributors; in all cases, the cost from the auction was lower than the cost at their websites. Whenever I've seen this, it's apparently been the small biz offering a product at a lower price on eBay in hopes that (a) it would draw attention to their website and/or (b) the bid would eventually go high enough to make money.
Besides which, I feel more comfortable buying from a place with a real-looking business website and a real business phone number than from someone who is just a small-time eBay person; the former gives more ways to be tracked down, whereas the latter does not. *shrug* I've bought from both, though.
OK, let's look at some of the things (some already pointed out by the AC) that are required for an information economy:
I got a lot of those from William Wresch's Disconnected. It didn't get great reviews here on Slashdot, but I think it's a worthwhile read if you honestly think that going from impoverished 3rd world nation to IT industry is that easy.
I"ll second that motion. I don't know how the rights would work out, but I think that could be quite a series.
Of course, then there's the whole consistancy issue (I think just about every scifi series ever has had some of those), especially if the series was in the same universe as the books
From the second page of the fuzz paper:
I will preface further comments by noting that I am a second-year college student, studying CS...I do not have extensive programming experience with either X or Windows, though I am pretty decent with basic console stuff.
1. I thought NT/2000 was supposed to protect applications from each other? I've definitely noticed a difference between the behavior of my C++ proggies on my 2000 box versus on other people's 9x boxen when my pointer logic isn't quite right (or isn't anywhere close to right, for that matter)--I have yet to bring down the whole system, whereas they do on a regular basis. *knocks on wood* So does this mean that if my programs were using the API to generate random Win32 messages, I could bring down anything I wanted to?
2. If this is the case, why is NT/2000 so much mroe stable than 9x? Is it just the memory protection?
I remember getting free demo versions of Lotus Ami Pro and Freelance Graphics for Windows (this was using Win3.1) that would do everything except for save or print...probably the same idea.
From console, after I fscked up my Linux partition by playing with inittab and booted from floppy: /dev/hda1 /mnt /lost+found and copy them back to etc with the correct filenames...actually made it work, too, to my great surprise.)
# mnt
# cd etc
# ls
# jed inittab.conf
(jed not found--remind me to roll my own rescue disk sometime)
# vi inittab.conf
(fix two fscked up lines)
init 6
(reboot, it works)
(I'll save the details of the time I fscked up the disk and had to look at lost nodes in
After a similar experience with a fscked up registry in Windows (and this time, it wasn't my fault--some program had mysteriously been mucking around in there and trashed it), I found that the only thing I could do with regedit from the command line was to dump the registry to text...and even then, it wouldn't work consistantly. And after dumping it to text, I found that the MS-DOS editor wouldn't open it (file too large) and that I couldn't even reimport it as is (I forgot the error message, though).
So what, you ask, is the difference between mucking with the registry with regedit and mucking with text-based config files? The latter can be done from the command line after a box gets hosed; the former cannot. (Granted, I haven't tried Win2k's console mode to see if that would let me muck with the registry...I may have to try that sometime).
But Win2k is far better, IMO, than NT 4. I tried NT 4 on my personal workstation just for shits and giggles. Blah. Then I got my hands on a copy of an early Win2k build...wonderful. Granted, I am stuck on a MS-focused network, but it's still a decent OS. The only crashes I've had have been due to shady drivers combined with shady CD Ripping software (the only thing I've found to work consistantly is the proggie from the cdrtools pacakge), the UI is nice (IMO), and with a few aftermarket Open Source tools (especially CygWin's bash port), it's a decent OS. If I could just get Ethereal to work under Win2k, I might stop using Linux on this workstation.
On the other hand, it is resource-hungry (my personal workstation has 256 MB of RAM, and Win2k likes to eat 60-80MB of it without even having any non-system proggies running). And I don't think I'd be particularly inclined to use it for a server...the console-mode SSH support is severely lacking (ie I haven't noticed any) and I'm sure that my 486/33 Linux box is doing far better with its various serving tasks than it would be under Win2k. Oh, wait, I couldn't even *install* Win2k on it. So, yeah.
Yes, but most likely, the same is the case on a WinNT network..I find it hard to believe that MS wouldn't have setup security on their servers (which is presumably where the source code would reside) so that anyone could read any files...only developers who needed source access would have such access. And the same would be true on a *nix system...if the person is working on the source, then presumably they'd have access to it and therefore it would be "personal" files ot the extent that a trojan under their UID could read it and email it to Russia or South Africa or Hackensack or wherever.
Um, regardless of your opinion of Mitnick, he did mention identity theft in the article. Therefore, he does have some experience with the field (namely, federal DNA database to assure identity). Of course, someone else raised the issue of somone cracking said database and changing the name associated with a couple of DNA strands, but....