they do make cool ads, they just won't show them here. hell, i went and downloaded that commercial. And how many people watched those BMW Films commercials?
Because the truth is that, on the internet backbone, more than half the servers are a variant of Linux, *BSD, or Unix. And servers are the real prize for system crackers looking to take control of a system or cause significant harm
What does this have to do with email worms? Do you open email on your server? This worm is just like every other worm out there, it's social engineering against the clueless user and there are vast numbers of clueless people using M$. I will say that there are many more lazy sysadmins who admin M$ machines, making it easier for the clueless users to do bad things to themselves.
I..... you know what... forget it.... this is a complete waste of my time.... your an idiot and a zealot. It would be just as easy to infect other systems if you could trick the user into running an executable.
I have no idea what your 'servers are the real prize' arguement is about. If you want to crack a server do you send a trojan to the admin or do you scan it with nmap looking for exploits?
um, not to be a M$ apologist, but buffer overflows constitute the majority of all security flaws.....in all software. it's not just Macro$haft. and it's more like 1 out of every 3 security flaws is NOT a buffer overflow.
"including efforts to facilitate sharing information about suspected violators amongst law enforcement agencies"
hmmmmm, i wonder how they could get all that information out to so many agencies quickly and effeciently. is there some kind of way to share files between a large group of users that can balance the bandwidth load between all the users???;)
1.They are supposed to disclose the protocols to competitors.
well, they are. they charge for it, but they are making it available. show me where the doj said you have to freely give these protocols over to anyone who asks. it just says they have to be available to competitors at a reasonable price. now 'a reasonable price' could be debated, but as has already been said in the business world $100k is not really that much. M$ considers these protocols (and i'm not even sure what they are) to be trade secrets and therefore very valuable, but they make them available because the doj said they have to. my question would be, did M$ make these protocols available to anyone before at any cost?
and
2. the cost of providing this information is practically zero
not really, M$ considers them valuable trade secrets and although i agree that protocols such as these should be open and freely available, M$ has created a business around them and has the right to charge for them. again, show me where the doj said they have to make all protocols freely available. you seem to think that since open source is a competitor to M$ the open source community should be allowed to see the protocols, but M$ probably has a good arguement that the open source community is not a competitor because it's not a business entity. now if RedHat wanted to cough up the $100k, fine, have at it, but you still have to sign the NDA and not give them over to the entire community.
look, i understand where you are coming from and i agree that M$ is evil and i would love to see all there protocols and os code to be opened to the public. but they are not and the doj backed off and let M$ get away with a slap on the wrist. in my eyes the doj is at fault here for not cracking down on M$ and laying out a clearly defined set of rules for them. basically all they did was say 'ok bill, now quite beig mean and try to play nice with the other kids.' and that just ain't gonna happen until the doj smacks them around and says here is how you will play our you will not play at all.
I think that's because golf is a game designed to make the players want to kill themselves. It's just accepted by society that golfers are eventually either going to have heart attacks or go insane and kill themselves and any caddy within 300 feet.
Yes, I'm a golfer.......just one more round, I can bring my handicap down with just one.. more.. round.....
I've been using winamp forever, gnutella was a great idea, I can't remember the name but they made a program that would replace the ads in AIM with visualizations from winamp and now this.
I believe AOL has an outstanding opportunity here. Imagine AOL letting the nullsoft team wreak havoc on the AOL interface. Imagine AOL users with secure communications, a real email client and the ability to share anything with a trusted node. Hell, imagine if AOL/TimeWarner would open up there content so users could browse the catalog and download for a small fee (just like itunes, but not just music).
Would you be willing to pay for an AOL account if you had a secure platform that was infinitely customizable (think winamp skins) and access to huge amounts of content and the ability to share content with friends? Yeah, I'm sure there would be some DRM involved, but maybe not, maybe if you could only share with other people who had aol accounts they could just make money from the monthly fee (I know there are lots of problems in that area, but I'm dreaming ok).
Still not convinced. Ok, how about a partnership between AOL and Lindows? Bring AOL to linux via lindows. Cheap pc's with AOL accounts to make sure mom & pop can use the pc and get online.
Maybe I've got delusions of grandeur here, but don't you think this idea would make bill g soil his pants?
I don't think it's truely 'on by default'. A msg box comes up the first time it tries to update asking you what you want to do: auto-update, reminder for manual update or off.
That's not 'on by default', but likely many people, including lazy admins, set it to auto at that point.
Since you pointed out how to turn off auto-update, I'll add a link to the updates
WTF? A service is offered and the user's use it to it's fullest, then the service provider complains because they are losing money? Sounds like a whiny ISP to me. Just because your business plan doesn't work is not my problem.
marketing guy - "Let's sell our widgets for x amount"
tech guy - "but if they use our widgets it will cost us more than x"
marketing guy - "phaw! no one's actually going to use our widgets"
willing to bet a vast proportion of P2P files sharing is illegal files.
How can you tell? Is there an evil bit? Seriously, since the ISP doesn't know that the traffic isn't legitimate there is no way to stop it without shutting down all traffic.
I agree that most of it is likely illegal material, but we don't know, maybe lots of people are making video's of their kids birthday parties and naming it 'matrix reloaded.avi' and putting it in the kazaa share for the world to see.
My point is, it's wrong to assume people are criminals. Just because it's possible to break the law doesn't mean I'm going to break it, even if every one around me is. I don't shop at gas stations that make me pay before I pump, same principle. I will gladly drive further down the road for a gas station that doesn't assume I'm a criminal.
Maybe ISP's will offer different package's for different users, just like they do now for business/residential. I don't have a problem with paying a little more for being a heavy bandwidth user, but I at least want the option to have a totally uncensored service.
If you know some way to judge another persons intentions, please let us know. I'm sure the DOJ would be very interested in your methods.
I think the old saying is "innocent until proven guilty" or something like that. Since the search engine the kid built searched for any file available, not just mp3 files, and he says it's not a piracy tool I'm inclined to believe him until someone can show proof that there was intent to steal music. Who's to say his intention wasn't to share poetry.
"If he made it just as a search engine, then yes, they don't have a leg to stand on."
"JORDAN: Yes, my search engine is much like Google. You can pretty much use it to search for any type of file."
There you have it, it's EXACTLY like a search engine. And the RIAA doesn't have any legs to stand on, which is why they were careful when they chose who they used as an example.
Hey, I read that book! What a crappy ending. I didn't even think about it related to this dicussion, but your right, it's all about your individual perspective. The humans of the future, in Eon, didn't even have to have a body, they could live in "City Memory" and be given new bodies at will. I'm not so sure they practised GM more than just finding a way to insert the human 'soul' into a new vessel.
This fits with bluesnowbunny's comment below, we simply don't have the knowledge to answer these questions. Unfortunetly, we will likely go through long periods of pain and suffering to find the answers.
I don't believe organ transplants and genetic modification can be compared. Feel free to disagree, I don't have anything to back that up other than common sense.
You bring up another question though, what happens if someone with genetically modified organs donates them to someone without? How do you know there won't be any consequences? We know that transplanted organs have to be 'typed' to make sure the receiver will not reject the new organ, are you certain we can say there won't be any problems if this is done?
Again, I'm not against GM, I'm simply saying there are, at this time, too many problems hidden in the darkness of our limited scientific knowledge. I don't understand how advocating research could be considered 'fearmongering'.
Re:When did we decide "no more progress?"
on
The Rights of GM Humans
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There are tons of questions here, and I think that's more why many scientists are lobbying to have restrictions on GM of anything, much less humans. What if a child is found to have some disease while in the womb, and doctors perform GM and fix the disease, but the modification also CAUSES the child to have MS? Think about it, how many times have you made a minor change to some code that couldn't possibly affect anything else only to find that it blows out everything else?
Even with the advancements in science and medicine this century much of what doctors do is guesswork. Now think about how each computer out there has a different setup, different video cards, different processors, you have to understand everything about that system to diagnose a problem. Many doctors out there are pretty clueless as it is, imagine if everyone that came in for a physical had all sorts of minor differences. I could see a major problem with doctors misdiagnosing problems simply because they didn't know that John Doe had a GM'd liver.
AS far as how society will react to GM humans, I think it will depend on how much of a modification is done and why. If someone is modified to be 8 feet tall so they can play basketball, many people will see this as wrong. But someone modified to correct a disease or deformity I think would be accepted. Of course, you will always have that group that screams about 'purity' and 'God didn't intend these people to live' but that's really nothing new. It's all an individual perspective.
I'm not really against genetic modification and I think modifying my kids to be basketball players would be great (on the other hand, my kids might have objections), but I do think there are far too many unanswered questions and far too many things that we don't understand yet to start modifying and re-engineering people. The potential benefits outweigh the potential dangers in my opinion (not that I even have 1/100th of the information that I would need to really make that call).
Before diving headlong into something that could be enormously destructive to an individual, a society and an ecosystem I think there should be much much more research and understanding.
This is just my individual perspective, feel free to deviate.
I know it's useless, but I'm gonna do it anyway, just to make myself feel better.
You can easily turn off all the AOL banner ads and most of the other offending material, just go to preferences\marketing and set everything to off.
Also, I'd like to point out that AOL is one of the very few ISP's that offer dialup from almost anywhere, with no extra charges for out of towners. Back when I travelled all over the country this was of great importance to me.
Recently, since the spam blocking feature was implemented in 8.0 I've noticed much less spam going to my open aol account. Sure, I still get a good bit, but I can tell it's dropping, I used to get hundreds of spams/day, now I only get about 25 or so. Also, I have another screenname where I use the built in blocking tools, sure they aren't great, but I NEVER get spam to that email address, if only because it blocks everyone I don't accept.
My AOL account is used by 4 people in 3 different states. AOL has never even questioned this, please tell me of another ISP that wouldn't freak when different users logged in from different states. My parents use it and a couple of my friends use it for email and some web browsing. Oh, and even though they likely don't know it, you can minimize the aol window and use whatever browser you choose. I will also point out here that AOL does not kick you off for inactivity anymore, or even pop up a msg telling you you've been idle (ok, the buddy list msg pops up, but that's it). That hasn't been part of AOL since about version 4.0.
And about all those cd's they send out, there are tons of uses for them. I've always got plenty of coasters, even though I rarely get an AOL cd in the mail anymore. I really like the cases they use now too, toss the cd and I have a new cd case to use with cd's of my choice.
I proudly admit to having an aol account for at least 10 years. The only problem I have ever had with AOL was back when they had the huge surge of users and I kept getting busy signals, but hey, sometimes business is better than you expect. It only took them a few months to get enough lines up in my area and I haven't seen that problem since then.
As to your point about AOL advertising to it's users, well, yeah, duh, they are in the business of making money. I see nothing wrong with this. They offer a channel for their users to buy things, if a particular user doesn't want to use those channels they can turn them off, easily.
Sorry for the rant, but I just don't get why so many people just bash AOL because 'AOL users suck'. Maybe it's the same thing with Wal-Mart, they are hated because they are successful, both started out as small, individually owned companies and have grown into enormous intergalactic corporations.
\sigh\ If I didn't know that this post isn't going to get read I'd feel like I were committing karma suicide by admitting that I actually like AOL.
Re:I wrote the Wired story and, yes, I've seen pro
on
AOL's Merlin Compromised?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Over the weekend there was an exploit posted to bugtraq about being able to access files on an xp machine with a win2k recorvery disk. But you had to have physical access. Most people replied that if you had physical access to the machine then all bets are off. There is no security at that point.
Now, it seems to me that these people you are talking about essentially had physical access. They had someone logged into a machine on the inside and fed them information and did whatever they were asked. You say a friend, a disgruntled employee, gave them a code. Well at that point its simply a case of an individual with a lack of morals doing something wrong. Just because you are upset at your employer doesn't give you the right to screw over 35+million people.
This is not a hack, it's simply an individual making a poor decision. I would like to think that aol had all sorts of firewall/proxy/logging going on and could easily identify where a problem was coming from, but I have no knowledge of the system other than what I've read. So I'm not going to argue that it couldn't be done. I'm just going to say it's not AOL's fault. AOL should be diligent in there security measure's, but what can you do when someone in the NOC is out to get you?
An analogy for you. You go to a resturaunt and order food. You pay with a credit card that you give to the waiter. The waiter copies the card#, the exp date and even your sig from the receipt. That waiter runs up a bill on your card. Now, do you immediately blame the resuraunt? I don't think so, at a certain point, you have to trust people to be honest. Unfortunetely a certain few of them will chose to screw you over.
AOL may have problems and should probably pay more attention to personel in critical positions, however, I'm not sure how much anyone can do if the door is unlocked from the inside.
nope, sorry, that wasn't me. I'm sure it was funny, but not everyone who uses MS software is a moron. I'm not going to go to war with you on this, but i can connect to my exchange server with several different email clients (probably more than i even know about).
I'm not sure what your talking about on setup of a debian box, so i'll leave that alone. but i've had very little problem doing anything i wanted to do with this companies MS software. Sure, there are problems with MS software (more so with the companies business practices) but can you name any piece of software that has ever been released by any company that didn't have ANY bugs?
on the virus front, i've been here 2 years. not one virus has gotten through. one man's garbage is another man's treasure, we simply have a difference of opinion. I'm not sure why your so angry.
It's pointless. I've pointed out this link many many times before, but noone listens. They just want to blame MS for all of it. They are somewhat to blame, but when they issue a patch, fix the hole in new versions and point it out to admin's there is really not much more that can be done since they don't have a time machine.
I'm an exchange 5.5 admin, my users are all using outlook, the only problem i have is when a user will call and say they got an email that says it has an attachment, but they can't open it. I ask them what the file name is and then explain the company email policy (If it's a virus you shouldn't open it, if it's a flash-of-the-week, you shouldn't view it at work).
If you don't like Exchange/Outlook fine, use whatever works best for you. I find it easy to use and administer. I hate MS for many reasons, but they do have *some* very good business software.
Oh, and Taco, Outlook has filtering built in. It's very easy to use and since I've gotten my rules in place I very rarely get spam or any virii showing up in my inbox, maybe you should look into it;)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Spielberg is a big Douglas Adams fan.
they do make cool ads, they just won't show them here. hell, i went and downloaded that commercial. And how many people watched those BMW Films commercials?
Because the truth is that, on the internet backbone, more than half the servers are a variant of Linux, *BSD, or Unix. And servers are the real prize for system crackers looking to take control of a system or cause significant harm
..... you know what... forget it .... this is a complete waste of my time .... your an idiot and a zealot. It would be just as easy to infect other systems if you could trick the user into running an executable.
What does this have to do with email worms? Do you open email on your server? This worm is just like every other worm out there, it's social engineering against the clueless user and there are vast numbers of clueless people using M$. I will say that there are many more lazy sysadmins who admin M$ machines, making it easier for the clueless users to do bad things to themselves.
I
I have no idea what your 'servers are the real prize' arguement is about. If you want to crack a server do you send a trojan to the admin or do you scan it with nmap looking for exploits?
um, not to be a M$ apologist, but buffer overflows constitute the majority of all security flaws.....in all software. it's not just Macro$haft. and it's more like 1 out of every 3 security flaws is NOT a buffer overflow.
we just got done with testing on sp3 and gave the ok for the techs to install it yesterday.
"including efforts to facilitate sharing information about suspected violators amongst law enforcement agencies"
;)
hmmmmm, i wonder how they could get all that information out to so many agencies quickly and effeciently. is there some kind of way to share files between a large group of users that can balance the bandwidth load between all the users???
I have a problem with two things you are saying:
1.They are supposed to disclose the protocols to competitors.
well, they are. they charge for it, but they are making it available. show me where the doj said you have to freely give these protocols over to anyone who asks. it just says they have to be available to competitors at a reasonable price. now 'a reasonable price' could be debated, but as has already been said in the business world $100k is not really that much. M$ considers these protocols (and i'm not even sure what they are) to be trade secrets and therefore very valuable, but they make them available because the doj said they have to. my question would be, did M$ make these protocols available to anyone before at any cost?
and
2. the cost of providing this information is practically zero
not really, M$ considers them valuable trade secrets and although i agree that protocols such as these should be open and freely available, M$ has created a business around them and has the right to charge for them. again, show me where the doj said they have to make all protocols freely available. you seem to think that since open source is a competitor to M$ the open source community should be allowed to see the protocols, but M$ probably has a good arguement that the open source community is not a competitor because it's not a business entity. now if RedHat wanted to cough up the $100k, fine, have at it, but you still have to sign the NDA and not give them over to the entire community.
look, i understand where you are coming from and i agree that M$ is evil and i would love to see all there protocols and os code to be opened to the public. but they are not and the doj backed off and let M$ get away with a slap on the wrist. in my eyes the doj is at fault here for not cracking down on M$ and laying out a clearly defined set of rules for them. basically all they did was say 'ok bill, now quite beig mean and try to play nice with the other kids.' and that just ain't gonna happen until the doj smacks them around and says here is how you will play our you will not play at all.
I think that's because golf is a game designed to make the players want to kill themselves. It's just accepted by society that golfers are eventually either going to have heart attacks or go insane and kill themselves and any caddy within 300 feet.
.. more .. round.....
Yes, I'm a golfer.......just one more round, I can bring my handicap down with just one
Obviously, MS bashing abounds, but I view this as a good thing.
/.er's would agree that MS bashing is a good thing ;)
I think most
I've been using winamp forever, gnutella was a great idea, I can't remember the name but they made a program that would replace the ads in AIM with visualizations from winamp and now this.
I believe AOL has an outstanding opportunity here. Imagine AOL letting the nullsoft team wreak havoc on the AOL interface. Imagine AOL users with secure communications, a real email client and the ability to share anything with a trusted node. Hell, imagine if AOL/TimeWarner would open up there content so users could browse the catalog and download for a small fee (just like itunes, but not just music).
Would you be willing to pay for an AOL account if you had a secure platform that was infinitely customizable (think winamp skins) and access to huge amounts of content and the ability to share content with friends? Yeah, I'm sure there would be some DRM involved, but maybe not, maybe if you could only share with other people who had aol accounts they could just make money from the monthly fee (I know there are lots of problems in that area, but I'm dreaming ok).
Still not convinced. Ok, how about a partnership between AOL and Lindows? Bring AOL to linux via lindows. Cheap pc's with AOL accounts to make sure mom & pop can use the pc and get online.
Maybe I've got delusions of grandeur here, but don't you think this idea would make bill g soil his pants?
I don't think it's truely 'on by default'. A msg box comes up the first time it tries to update asking you what you want to do: auto-update, reminder for manual update or off.
That's not 'on by default', but likely many people, including lazy admins, set it to auto at that point.
Since you pointed out how to turn off auto-update, I'll add a link to the updates
WTF? A service is offered and the user's use it to it's fullest, then the service provider complains because they are losing money? Sounds like a whiny ISP to me. Just because your business plan doesn't work is not my problem.
willing to bet a vast proportion of P2P files sharing is illegal files.
How can you tell? Is there an evil bit? Seriously, since the ISP doesn't know that the traffic isn't legitimate there is no way to stop it without shutting down all traffic.
I agree that most of it is likely illegal material, but we don't know, maybe lots of people are making video's of their kids birthday parties and naming it 'matrix reloaded.avi' and putting it in the kazaa share for the world to see.
My point is, it's wrong to assume people are criminals. Just because it's possible to break the law doesn't mean I'm going to break it, even if every one around me is. I don't shop at gas stations that make me pay before I pump, same principle. I will gladly drive further down the road for a gas station that doesn't assume I'm a criminal.
Maybe ISP's will offer different package's for different users, just like they do now for business/residential. I don't have a problem with paying a little more for being a heavy bandwidth user, but I at least want the option to have a totally uncensored service.
Ms simply has deeper pockets than everyone else because of DOS/Win OEM sales.
I'd say that's Not a bad business strategy at all. In fact, it's really good one.
I have more money than you, I will grind you into oblivion. Seems like a winning strategy to me.
If you know some way to judge another persons intentions, please let us know. I'm sure the DOJ would be very interested in your methods.
I think the old saying is "innocent until proven guilty" or something like that. Since the search engine the kid built searched for any file available, not just mp3 files, and he says it's not a piracy tool I'm inclined to believe him until someone can show proof that there was intent to steal music. Who's to say his intention wasn't to share poetry.
"If he made it just as a search engine, then yes, they don't have a leg to stand on."
"JORDAN: Yes, my search engine is much like Google. You can pretty much use it to search for any type of file."
There you have it, it's EXACTLY like a search engine. And the RIAA doesn't have any legs to stand on, which is why they were careful when they chose who they used as an example.
Hey, I read that book! What a crappy ending. I didn't even think about it related to this dicussion, but your right, it's all about your individual perspective. The humans of the future, in Eon, didn't even have to have a body, they could live in "City Memory" and be given new bodies at will. I'm not so sure they practised GM more than just finding a way to insert the human 'soul' into a new vessel.
This fits with bluesnowbunny's comment below, we simply don't have the knowledge to answer these questions. Unfortunetly, we will likely go through long periods of pain and suffering to find the answers.
I don't believe organ transplants and genetic modification can be compared. Feel free to disagree, I don't have anything to back that up other than common sense.
You bring up another question though, what happens if someone with genetically modified organs donates them to someone without? How do you know there won't be any consequences? We know that transplanted organs have to be 'typed' to make sure the receiver will not reject the new organ, are you certain we can say there won't be any problems if this is done?
Again, I'm not against GM, I'm simply saying there are, at this time, too many problems hidden in the darkness of our limited scientific knowledge. I don't understand how advocating research could be considered 'fearmongering'.
There are tons of questions here, and I think that's more why many scientists are lobbying to have restrictions on GM of anything, much less humans. What if a child is found to have some disease while in the womb, and doctors perform GM and fix the disease, but the modification also CAUSES the child to have MS? Think about it, how many times have you made a minor change to some code that couldn't possibly affect anything else only to find that it blows out everything else?
Even with the advancements in science and medicine this century much of what doctors do is guesswork. Now think about how each computer out there has a different setup, different video cards, different processors, you have to understand everything about that system to diagnose a problem. Many doctors out there are pretty clueless as it is, imagine if everyone that came in for a physical had all sorts of minor differences. I could see a major problem with doctors misdiagnosing problems simply because they didn't know that John Doe had a GM'd liver.
AS far as how society will react to GM humans, I think it will depend on how much of a modification is done and why. If someone is modified to be 8 feet tall so they can play basketball, many people will see this as wrong. But someone modified to correct a disease or deformity I think would be accepted. Of course, you will always have that group that screams about 'purity' and 'God didn't intend these people to live' but that's really nothing new. It's all an individual perspective.
I'm not really against genetic modification and I think modifying my kids to be basketball players would be great (on the other hand, my kids might have objections), but I do think there are far too many unanswered questions and far too many things that we don't understand yet to start modifying and re-engineering people. The potential benefits outweigh the potential dangers in my opinion (not that I even have 1/100th of the information that I would need to really make that call).
Before diving headlong into something that could be enormously destructive to an individual, a society and an ecosystem I think there should be much much more research and understanding.
This is just my individual perspective, feel free to deviate.
Better yet, can I sue /. for spamming me with duplicate stories?
I know it's useless, but I'm gonna do it anyway, just to make myself feel better.
You can easily turn off all the AOL banner ads and most of the other offending material, just go to preferences\marketing and set everything to off.
Also, I'd like to point out that AOL is one of the very few ISP's that offer dialup from almost anywhere, with no extra charges for out of towners. Back when I travelled all over the country this was of great importance to me.
Recently, since the spam blocking feature was implemented in 8.0 I've noticed much less spam going to my open aol account. Sure, I still get a good bit, but I can tell it's dropping, I used to get hundreds of spams/day, now I only get about 25 or so. Also, I have another screenname where I use the built in blocking tools, sure they aren't great, but I NEVER get spam to that email address, if only because it blocks everyone I don't accept.
My AOL account is used by 4 people in 3 different states. AOL has never even questioned this, please tell me of another ISP that wouldn't freak when different users logged in from different states. My parents use it and a couple of my friends use it for email and some web browsing. Oh, and even though they likely don't know it, you can minimize the aol window and use whatever browser you choose. I will also point out here that AOL does not kick you off for inactivity anymore, or even pop up a msg telling you you've been idle (ok, the buddy list msg pops up, but that's it). That hasn't been part of AOL since about version 4.0.
And about all those cd's they send out, there are tons of uses for them. I've always got plenty of coasters, even though I rarely get an AOL cd in the mail anymore. I really like the cases they use now too, toss the cd and I have a new cd case to use with cd's of my choice.
I proudly admit to having an aol account for at least 10 years. The only problem I have ever had with AOL was back when they had the huge surge of users and I kept getting busy signals, but hey, sometimes business is better than you expect. It only took them a few months to get enough lines up in my area and I haven't seen that problem since then.
As to your point about AOL advertising to it's users, well, yeah, duh, they are in the business of making money. I see nothing wrong with this. They offer a channel for their users to buy things, if a particular user doesn't want to use those channels they can turn them off, easily.
Sorry for the rant, but I just don't get why so many people just bash AOL because 'AOL users suck'. Maybe it's the same thing with Wal-Mart, they are hated because they are successful, both started out as small, individually owned companies and have grown into enormous intergalactic corporations.
\sigh\ If I didn't know that this post isn't going to get read I'd feel like I were committing karma suicide by admitting that I actually like AOL.
Over the weekend there was an exploit posted to bugtraq about being able to access files on an xp machine with a win2k recorvery disk. But you had to have physical access. Most people replied that if you had physical access to the machine then all bets are off. There is no security at that point.
Now, it seems to me that these people you are talking about essentially had physical access. They had someone logged into a machine on the inside and fed them information and did whatever they were asked. You say a friend, a disgruntled employee, gave them a code. Well at that point its simply a case of an individual with a lack of morals doing something wrong. Just because you are upset at your employer doesn't give you the right to screw over 35+million people.
This is not a hack, it's simply an individual making a poor decision. I would like to think that aol had all sorts of firewall/proxy/logging going on and could easily identify where a problem was coming from, but I have no knowledge of the system other than what I've read. So I'm not going to argue that it couldn't be done. I'm just going to say it's not AOL's fault. AOL should be diligent in there security measure's, but what can you do when someone in the NOC is out to get you?
An analogy for you. You go to a resturaunt and order food. You pay with a credit card that you give to the waiter. The waiter copies the card#, the exp date and even your sig from the receipt. That waiter runs up a bill on your card. Now, do you immediately blame the resuraunt? I don't think so, at a certain point, you have to trust people to be honest. Unfortunetely a certain few of them will chose to screw you over.
AOL may have problems and should probably pay more attention to personel in critical positions, however, I'm not sure how much anyone can do if the door is unlocked from the inside.
"because its geeks that wrote it"
As opposed to the farm hands that write code for microsoft??
nope, sorry, that wasn't me. I'm sure it was funny, but not everyone who uses MS software is a moron. I'm not going to go to war with you on this, but i can connect to my exchange server with several different email clients (probably more than i even know about).
I'm not sure what your talking about on setup of a debian box, so i'll leave that alone. but i've had very little problem doing anything i wanted to do with this companies MS software. Sure, there are problems with MS software (more so with the companies business practices) but can you name any piece of software that has ever been released by any company that didn't have ANY bugs?
on the virus front, i've been here 2 years. not one virus has gotten through. one man's garbage is another man's treasure, we simply have a difference of opinion. I'm not sure why your so angry.
It's pointless. I've pointed out this link many many times before, but noone listens. They just want to blame MS for all of it. They are somewhat to blame, but when they issue a patch, fix the hole in new versions and point it out to admin's there is really not much more that can be done since they don't have a time machine.
;)
I'm an exchange 5.5 admin, my users are all using outlook, the only problem i have is when a user will call and say they got an email that says it has an attachment, but they can't open it. I ask them what the file name is and then explain the company email policy (If it's a virus you shouldn't open it, if it's a flash-of-the-week, you shouldn't view it at work).
If you don't like Exchange/Outlook fine, use whatever works best for you. I find it easy to use and administer. I hate MS for many reasons, but they do have *some* very good business software.
Oh, and Taco, Outlook has filtering built in. It's very easy to use and since I've gotten my rules in place I very rarely get spam or any virii showing up in my inbox, maybe you should look into it
"Now you don't even have to be online to have your number stolen."
right, before the internet, credit card numbers couldn't be stolen. I also understand that before the internet, no music was ever pirated.
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