Your article "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty" is not even slightly accurate in many regards, certainly not the standard of reporting I am used to seeing from the BBC.
Starting from the top...
"It's usually no easier to fathom the motives of virus creators than it is of any other perpetrator of damage for damage's sake."
Generally (certainly in the last 12 months) most of the viruses (Blaster being a notable exception) have a specific purpose. The Sobig series of viruses (prior to MyDoom they were the top of the infection lists) are used to set up open mail relays to allow spammers to keep sending spam despite tighter regulation and wider use of DNS blacklists. Several viruses have set up DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) networks that can be targetted at any IP address at short notice. Typically these have been used in extortion scams (mafia links have been expounded but never confirmed) as the recent fiasco with online gambling sites and the Super Bowl demonstrated.
In short, viruses can be used to make a lot of money and I don't believe that's such a difficult motive to fathom at all.
" It has attacked a company based in Utah called SCO, bringing down its website with a barrage of data sent from countless computers into which the worm had been insinuated, unbeknownst to the users.
There seems little doubt that SCO was targeted - illegally and unacceptably, lest anyone be in any doubt - because it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system."
SCO has indeed annoyed many Linux advocates and users but by no means is it clear that this virus came from the Linux community or that attacking SCO is the real purpose of this virus. The virus also installs a backdoor into the infected system allowing access to it's network resources, it can also download and execute arbitrary code at the instigation of the author. Only 25% of infected machines will attack SCO until 12th Feb but all infected machines have this backdoor and it will remain active after the SCO DDoS has ended. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the attack on SCO may in fact be a diversionary tactic to avert suspicion away from the real authors (i.e. electronic criminals/spammers) and onto a community that is generally highly technical and known to hate SCO. I am by no means saying this is fact but it is at least as reasonable a hypothesis as that put forward by your article.
"So, it seems likely that the perpetrators of the MyDoom virus and its variants are internet vandals with a specific grudge."
Not at all, see above for my rebuttal. It's possible but by no means this clear cut.
"SCO is the big, bad company that violates one of their sacred principles, as they would see it."
No, SCO is a company trying to take advantage of other peoples work because their own product failed. If there is any SCO code found in the Linux kernel (yet to be determined but so far all their examples have been debunked in hours) it will likely be removed the same day and be considered no great loss. The anger is caused by SCO making a lot of noise but producing no actual evidence, their claim of "trade secrets" is surely not valid because if their claim is valid then the code is already publicly available for download from www.kernel.org!
Most of us (and the financial community is slowly coming around to this view it appears) believe that IBM will squash SCO like a bug (for want of a more appropriate phrase) in court and things will move on as before.
"It is probably the most successful virus in this form of internet warfare, where a wickedly ingenious program persuades thousands of computers to bombard a single website on a particular date."
This paragraph starts out fine but there is nothing ingenious about the program at all. It does not exploit any clever holes in the operating system it just relies on the user being fooled into running it. Despite years of telling people not to click on unknown attachments they still do which is ho
If all these jobs are related to call center, I say LET them NOT move to india.
Yes you heard me , let them NOT move to india. The last thing I want as an Indian, my country to be columbia/mexico of the IT industry. I think indians should be ashamed to be the janitors of IT industry.
I work in tech support and it doesn't have to be the IT 'janitor' job. We work unscripted, training consists of an introduction to the company systems and generally people are live within a few days of starting. We are expected to have sufficient knowledge and ability to be able to diagnose and (where appropriate) resolve issues ranging from server failures to "How do I send an attachment?". The company pays significantly more than the average for tech support because we're expected to be GOOD at what we do.
I spent over a week getting Gentoo to work! Then again, 6 days of that was waiting for KDE to emerge. For what it's worth, I found KDE on Gentoo visibly faster than on SuSE or RedHat. This was on a Celeron 333 with 64MB RAM though so not exactly cutting edge:)
I believe it does apply across all architectures. I seem to recall that the kernel makefile defaults to -O6 but that's just future proofing for when the higer optimisation levels actually mean something:)
Here is a haiku I have made. Explain to me if/why it is flawed, and what makes a good haiku.
A bird sits on me, I am walking away now, It shits on my head.
Since you asked...
How to write Haiku
In japanese, the rules for how to write Haiku are clear, and will not be discussed here. In foreign languages, there exist NO consensus in how to write Haiku-poems. Anyway, let's take a look at the basic knowledge:
What to write about?
Haiku-poems can describe almost anything, but you seldom find themes which are too complicated for normal PEOPLE's recognition and understanding. Some of the most thrilling Haiku-poems describe daily situations in a way that gives the reader a brand new experience of a well-known situation.
The metrical pattern of Haiku
Haiku-poems consist of respectively 5, 7 and 5 syllables in three units. In japanese, this convention is a must, but in english, which has variation in the length of syllables, this can sometimes be difficult.
The technique of cutting
The cutting divides the Haiku into two parts, with a certain imaginative distance between the two sections, but the two sections must remain, to a degree, independent of each other. Both sections must enrich the understanding of the other.
To make this cutting in english, either the first or the second line ends normally with a colon, long dash or ellipsis.
The seasonal theme.
Each Haiku must contain a kigo, a season word, which indicate in which season the Haiku is set. For example, cherry blossoms indicate spring, snow indicate winter, and mosquitoes indicate summer, but the season word isn't always that obvious.
Please notice that Haiku-poems are written under different rules and in many languages. For translated Haiku-poems, the translator must decide whether he should obey the rules strictly, or if he should present the exact essence of the Haiku. For Haiku-poems originally written in english, the poet should be more careful. These are the difficulties, and the pleasure of Haiku.
I think the 'ignorant terrorist' sterotype persists because it makes terrorism easier to handle in our minds if we don't think of the people doing it, or behind it, as intelligent, rational people.
Intelligent I can deal with, it's the rational thing I struggle with.
The reason why those received so much attention was that they had a clear leadership, a clear message and a plethora of voters that would take a direction from their union leaders.
As has been observed, directing geeks is like herding cats (yes I know, the original was about programmers but I think it works just as well as a generalisation).
No bunch of geeks is going to be told what to vote by anyone, they're too proud of being "Free Thinkers" to stand for that.
Of course the number that actually are Free Thinkers is substantially less;)
You do your job well no matter how hard it might be for you, or you aren't going to survive on your wages and tips. It's the same principle as, say, every other job in the world.
That is SO wrong! Serving staff depend SOLELY on their tips to live! They pretty much get taxed their entire pay ($2.19/hr) as the government takes 8% of their total sales in tax anyway.
Imagine you are out for a meal, 4 of you and the service is ok, nothing special but still ok. If you do not tip that server they have literally worked for NOTHING!
Example: 6 people occupy a table for 2 hours and spend $150. They leave no tip but the government is going to tax that server 8% anyway. So, the server is paying $12 in tax yet has only been paid $4.38 so they have effectively paid over $7.50 for the priviledge of waiting on your tight fisted ass!
Do you see why in a tipping culture you MUST tip? Either that or join the UK and don't have a culture that tips but where serving staff are paid 4 times as much.
And if you want to see just how annoying this is check out this site. Feel the love;)
The author of the article you quote apparently never played any Amiga games in the mid 80's with kickass sound effects (and yes, that was a Personal Computer).
Oh come on! PC means IBM compatible and we all know it.
If we declare the hardware to be alive, then a machine like it has to be able to produce it.
The hardware is NOT alive though, the consciousness of an AI would be in its memory patterns. It should be theoretically possible to move an AI to completely new hardware without damaging the ego/id/whatever. Obviously this is not possible with humans (at the moment, possibly never) hence our needing to take greater care of our bodiers and viewing them as an essential part of ourselves.
If bodies were interchangeable our definition of what is and is not alive would probably be wildly different. After all, do we worry about dead skin cells? Of course not, nevertheless they were a living part of our bodies but are seen as replaceable. Now extend this to the idea of a completely replaceable body and you should see how the hardware is completely irrelevant to whether or not an AI is alive except in regards to total destruction of that hardware with no backup of the underlying ego.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh dear, oh deary deary me.
Your article "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty" is not even slightly accurate in many regards, certainly not the standard of reporting I am used to seeing from the BBC.
Starting from the top...
"It's usually no easier to fathom the motives of virus creators than it is of any other perpetrator of damage for damage's sake."
Generally (certainly in the last 12 months) most of the viruses (Blaster being a notable exception) have a specific purpose. The Sobig series of viruses (prior to MyDoom they were the top of the infection lists) are used to set up open mail relays to allow spammers to keep sending spam despite tighter regulation and wider use of DNS blacklists. Several viruses have set up DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) networks that can be targetted at any IP address at short notice. Typically these have been used in extortion scams (mafia links have been expounded but never confirmed) as the recent fiasco with online gambling sites and the Super Bowl demonstrated.
In short, viruses can be used to make a lot of money and I don't believe that's such a difficult motive to fathom at all.
" It has attacked a company based in Utah called SCO, bringing down its website with a barrage of data sent from countless computers into which the worm had been insinuated, unbeknownst to the users.
There seems little doubt that SCO was targeted - illegally and unacceptably, lest anyone be in any doubt - because it has enraged many people devoted to the Linux operating system."
SCO has indeed annoyed many Linux advocates and users but by no means is it clear that this virus came from the Linux community or that attacking SCO is the real purpose of this virus. The virus also installs a backdoor into the infected system allowing access to it's network resources, it can also download and execute arbitrary code at the instigation of the author. Only 25% of infected machines will attack SCO until 12th Feb but all infected machines have this backdoor and it will remain active after the SCO DDoS has ended. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the attack on SCO may in fact be a diversionary tactic to avert suspicion away from the real authors (i.e. electronic criminals/spammers) and onto a community that is generally highly technical and known to hate SCO. I am by no means saying this is fact but it is at least as reasonable a hypothesis as that put forward by your article.
"So, it seems likely that the perpetrators of the MyDoom virus and its variants are internet vandals with a specific grudge."
Not at all, see above for my rebuttal. It's possible but by no means this clear cut.
"SCO is the big, bad company that violates one of their sacred principles, as they would see it."
No, SCO is a company trying to take advantage of other peoples work because their own product failed. If there is any SCO code found in the Linux kernel (yet to be determined but so far all their examples have been debunked in hours) it will likely be removed the same day and be considered no great loss. The anger is caused by SCO making a lot of noise but producing no actual evidence, their claim of "trade secrets" is surely not valid because if their claim is valid then the code is already publicly available for download from www.kernel.org!
Most of us (and the financial community is slowly coming around to this view it appears) believe that IBM will squash SCO like a bug (for want of a more appropriate phrase) in court and things will move on as before.
"It is probably the most successful virus in this form of internet warfare, where a wickedly ingenious program persuades thousands of computers to bombard a single website on a particular date."
This paragraph starts out fine but there is nothing ingenious about the program at all. It does not exploit any clever holes in the operating system it just relies on the user being fooled into running it. Despite years of telling people not to click on unknown attachments they still do which is ho
I have mod points but unfortunately there's no +1 Troll option.
I work in tech support and it doesn't have to be the IT 'janitor' job. We work unscripted, training consists of an introduction to the company systems and generally people are live within a few days of starting. We are expected to have sufficient knowledge and ability to be able to diagnose and (where appropriate) resolve issues ranging from server failures to "How do I send an attachment?". The company pays significantly more than the average for tech support because we're expected to be GOOD at what we do.
I spent over a week getting Gentoo to work! Then again, 6 days of that was waiting for KDE to emerge. For what it's worth, I found KDE on Gentoo visibly faster than on SuSE or RedHat. This was on a Celeron 333 with 64MB RAM though so not exactly cutting edge :)
I believe it does apply across all architectures. I seem to recall that the kernel makefile defaults to -O6 but that's just future proofing for when the higer optimisation levels actually mean something :)
Since you asked...
Yours is no more a haiku than the one the article discusses.
You had carbonite? Oh you youngsters have no idea how lucky you *SLAP*
OW! What was that for?
2004 election turnouts by state...
...In a shock result South Korea managed a 9875% turnout!
Florida: 43%
Texas: 51%...
Sinch? SINCH? Synchronise is pronounced 'sink run eyes', how do you get sinch from that?
FYI, both spellings of synch are legitimate.
You really must start reading more.
If it's any consolation, I'd have modded you +1 funny.
As has been observed, directing geeks is like herding cats (yes I know, the original was about programmers but I think it works just as well as a generalisation).
No bunch of geeks is going to be told what to vote by anyone, they're too proud of being "Free Thinkers" to stand for that.
Of course the number that actually are Free Thinkers is substantially less ;)
What'll you give me for my homophobe?
That is SO wrong! Serving staff depend SOLELY on their tips to live! They pretty much get taxed their entire pay ($2.19/hr) as the government takes 8% of their total sales in tax anyway.
Imagine you are out for a meal, 4 of you and the service is ok, nothing special but still ok. If you do not tip that server they have literally worked for NOTHING!
Example: 6 people occupy a table for 2 hours and spend $150. They leave no tip but the government is going to tax that server 8% anyway. So, the server is paying $12 in tax yet has only been paid $4.38 so they have effectively paid over $7.50 for the priviledge of waiting on your tight fisted ass!
Do you see why in a tipping culture you MUST tip? Either that or join the UK and don't have a culture that tips but where serving staff are paid 4 times as much.
And if you want to see just how annoying this is check out this site. Feel the love ;)
Oh come on! PC means IBM compatible and we all know it.
Oops, guess posting as AC was a little pointless now :D
For eating at home you can use an omelette as the base for a pizza. Just make sure your tomato sauce and toppings are low carb and you're sorted :)
Obviously you need to use a knife and fork but hey, nothing's perfect.
I went from a size 28(UK) to a 16 on Atkins, bacon and eggs for breakfast and I look fab again \o/
You're mistaken.
Ok, this thread is full of people assuming MS are dumb. Monopolists they may be but dumb they're not.
1. IRM allows you to block forwarding of a message.
2. IRM allows you to block printing of a message.
3. Cut and paste is disabled for protected messages.
4. You cannot get round it by using a non-MS mail client, the client will simply not be able to open the email at all.
5. Screenshots are feasible but how many large corporations filter images in email sent externally? I know we do!
This is not going to be as trivial to work round as many are suggesting.
Old laser scientists never die, they just become incoherent :)
Ok, second go as /. ate the first one :/
The hardware is NOT alive though, the consciousness of an AI would be in its memory patterns. It should be theoretically possible to move an AI to completely new hardware without damaging the ego/id/whatever. Obviously this is not possible with humans (at the moment, possibly never) hence our needing to take greater care of our bodiers and viewing them as an essential part of ourselves.
If bodies were interchangeable our definition of what is and is not alive would probably be wildly different. After all, do we worry about dead skin cells? Of course not, nevertheless they were a living part of our bodies but are seen as replaceable. Now extend this to the idea of a completely replaceable body and you should see how the hardware is completely irrelevant to whether or not an AI is alive except in regards to total destruction of that hardware with no backup of the underlying ego.
I see no reason why an AI couldn't do this as well?