Time to add nimp.org to your hosts file. The link is an auto redirect from rds.yahoo.com to members.on.nimp.org. This is how Yahoo redirects search results to find out who clicked what. Yawho? search results are thus no longer safe to click. For best results, add rds.yahoo.com to your hosts file or equivalent blocker as well.
members.on.nimp.org resolves to poulet0.zoy.org. The IP address is [80.65.228.130]. Best to block that as well. The DNS administrator for this server is Slashdot User "Sam H", UID 3979.
Somebody at slashdot should have a look at our anonymous coward's IP address. It would be nice if we could quit this nonsense. I hope this isn't some troll that bought a low UID in the auction.
And maybe some slashdotter in Paris could call Sam and ask him to fix his compromisedserver. It does look like someone truly nasty took it over in August of 2005. Big Debian fan this one. Likes the GNAA routine and the whole bit.
I'm not certain about pinning this on Sam. sam.zoy.org resolves to a different IP. One of you intertubes wizards want to weigh in here?
The car analogy: a Gentoo system is to a Windows system as the Ultima GTR is to the Posche 911 GT-3 RS. You have to buy the parts yourself and put them together, but price wise it is practically free and performance wise it totally blows everything away (if you ever get it compiled/assembled enough to test it, if you do it right, ymmv).
50 units of laptop per day, day after day is a practical deployment schedule for a middling organization.
Google isn't a middling organization. It's Google. I doubt if they deployed that many each day their deployment would ever finish before the next deployment cycle began. Same with IBM and most other Fortune 50's.
People who deploy on that scale use imaging. They would consider the idea of uninstalling anything during the deployment a failure of the process.
Nobody in their right mind in the deployments field would consider starting with the OEM's standard shipping image. They use a standard enterprise licensed version, add only the windows options they must have and they install their licensed apps with updates and lock down the services, firewall, user accounts and local machine policy settings among other preparation steps.
The OEMs will put your own image on for a small fee if you're buying thousands of units.
Some of them then have their equipment shipped to a third party team for last minute hardware corrections, burn in testing, BIOS and physical security adjusment and other processing.
There is a lot more to it than this but you get the picture. Large scale deployments is a complicated task with process management, milestones, schedules and a lot of other stuff. It's not even remotely like your one guy taking three hours to uninstall apps on one PC you envisioned.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
I am confident these FBI agents are as eager to avoid sweeping up the innocent with the guilty in their net as they are to protect society from kiddie diddlers. They want to get the bad guy and they want to do a good job and throwing the innocent into prison serves neither of those goals. That they don't even check the referrer does seem to indicate they lack the skill to do so. They should hire some knowledgeable consultants to help them. If they had the skills to run their own spam zombie net I am sure they would be more informed. I don't believe they would be so evil as to zombie your computer, download kiddie porn with it while you slept and then come break down your door and throw you in prison for not knowing enough to prevent them from doing it. By the way, even if you're very good with the computer, for someone with the right tools doing such a thing to you and then calling them to report you to get you thrown in prison is a trivial matter. Remote desktop is a standard tool for the botmaster, as is a clean uninstall afterward, and building the social engineering to get you to open an email containing the content is easily done by anyone who knows you.
If the FBI agents did have the skill to run a zombie network it would be clear to them that most people lack the skill to avoid being innocently swept up and that they lack the knowledge necessary to sort the innocent from the guilty. Perhaps so much so that they would despair of a technical answer and go back to identifying the actors in the real kiddie porn. Computer security this year is truly this bad.
Don't imagine I'm admiring the evil botherders here, either. I despise them as well. But I'm aware they have great tools for doing these things and pointing this out is important if people are to be informed about what's going on here.
In the mean time if you hold any hope of public service in your life you need to feed your PC to a chipper. Then get someone else to print your emails on paper and read them to you over the phone, preferably long distance. Never touch another keyboard again. This is how most public officials handle these issues.
Even in the US 50% of electricity is generated with coal. Yes, it's bizarre that it is still so, but it's true.
In the rest of the world the situation is considerably worse. Where were your lamps made? I don't think the steel poles that streetlamps are made from come from an area where nuclear and hydro are the predominate source of electricity. It's highly doubtful that the lamps at your local hardware store are made in such a place.
And then there's the fact that smelting of steel isn't done with electricity. They pile the steel scraps into a huge chimney that's mostly full of coal, light it up and then force air in until the heat from the coal heats the steel enough to melt. A very carbon intensive process, this. This is the part the part that uses the most fossil fuels for almost anything made of steel, no matter how it spends the rest of its life.
Compared to these issues the energy burned by the bulb is probably a trivial fragment of the total carbon budget for a light. Every little bit helps though.
Some of the realities of carbon output are pretty scary. All tars exposed to an oxygen atmosphere are oxidizing (slowly burning). That means every square inch of asphalt between your house and your job are doing their bit to add to global warming, and contribute a considerable fraction compared to the fuel powered vehicles driving over it. The road burns whether you're driving over it or not, so all those huge vacant K-Mart parking lots add up to quite a lot.
It really is worse than that. Any site you go to can link any content from any other site, and not show it to you -- just load it transparently in the background. You will have downloaded the material without your knowledge and it will be in your cache when they break your door down.
The article plainly states that they do not even bother to record the referring URL or page, which means they don't care if you were prank porn'd. Considering some freaks are out there getting SWAT called on people it's realistic to expect that this will be a toy of choice for disgruntled former life partners and competetive coworkers with an evil bent. You'll be guilty of committing a crime completely without your knowledge. You won't just lose your equipment -- you will go to PMITA prison and spend the rest of your life on the registry. Same with if you have an HTML email with the content embedded but otherwise looking harmless. Since there are hundreds of thousands of compromised sites out there, and millions of spam bots the internet bad guys could get almost all of us on this list pretty quickly. Also some browser plugins automatically download all of the pages linked from your current page in the background to speed up browsing.
What this means is that this Internet is now useless with pictures. Or embedded content of any kind.
I'm all for catching and punishing the freaks that seek out this content and most especially the ones that publish it. But to leave enforcement this wide open to abuse is just wrong.
It's time to browse with Lynx again. Who would have thought that would come up again for people who weren't blind?
Just about the only alternative that works is browsing via secure remote desktop from offshore hosting.
If we were not now using that very same gas or worse - coal to generate the power that drives the lights, and eliminating the efficiency by multiplying the number of lights, I might be more encouraged about our "progress". The creation of one metal light pole itself probably accounts for far more emissions than the gas a dozen old gas lamps used in their lifetimes.
The most efficient lamp, car or person is the one you don't make.
WLOC doesn't include onsite support. Some of them do. Making aunt Sally pay the extra is preferable to blowing my holiday weekends on such nonsense if she can afford it.
Unless I'm not seeing the old bird nearly enough. That's different.
Also a bad answer if uncle Lester might wind up in the press shortly after the tech shows up.
Your parents can buy a contract to have somebody take care of their PC with 24/7 monitoring, patch management, device prefailure notification and instant tech support. It's like extending your NOC to support aunt Sally.
It doesn't cost anywhere near as much as you might think.
If you look at his postings, the changes are only part of the thing he is screaming against. He's also screaming about the libraries, claiming that they are complexity for complexity's sake when that honestly isn't the case.
I'm not screaming. This is the internet, so THIS IS SCREAMING.
Let me share with you the Tao of Programming:
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
.NET is the COBOL of the modern era, except that COBOL at least survived 50 years. The best hope.NET has is 5. 'Twere better not to learn it.
Yes, changing the APIs for some things is a pain in the arse, and it annoys me. If they do it to lock out competitors, I wish they'd knock it off. If they do it because they honestly think that it's better, that's different. Either way, it's their sandbox to manage as they see fit. If they screw over too much of their user base, people will go elsewhere tool wise and I think that they know that.
It is seldom that I have such an opportunity to use the same quote twice in one day, but...
'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.' - Edmund Burke
In a few months when Microsoft deprecates.NET in favor of the new Longhorn approved architecture (ca-ching or whatever it is) you will herald it at the Next Great Thing. I hope in that moment you remember this: if deer move too fast, shoot the bison. Build not your castle upon the sand. Time spent understanding the babbling of a fool is time wasted.
Yet you refuse to listen to me on a point where I apparently know a heck of a lot more than you do - productivity and mastery lie not in knowing everything about everything but rather in having a solid basis in the fundamentals and knowing where to look for knowledge which you will only use infrequently instead of wasting mental space on memorizing things which will be largely useless to you on a day-to-day basis.
Wasting mental space on things like.NET which will in five years be obsoleted by the Microsoft tool-of-the-day?
You're confusing "knowing just enough about your tools to not cut yourself" and knowing the basics and overall use of a set of tools without memorizing every single nuance so that you are capable and comfortable to use them effectively, looking for more information when needed and knowing basically where to find it, without wasting your productive time on trivia.
Mastering the nuances of usage is essential to security. You cannot deny that is important.
Given your attitude, somehow I'm not surprised that you don't understand the difference. The first is being a novice (a state that some people never get out of). The second is mastery.
Yeah, I'm still a novice. I am still uncomfortable about some of the side effects of operators on matrix operations in APL on the IBM 5150. Someday I hope to appreciate fully the four basic loops of C and the nuances of stdlib. If I have trouble with inheritance in C++ I know there are better people to take it up with than you.
That has little to do with the topic, which is the mystic abortion that is.NET. The simplest answer is usually best. The elegant solution expresses completely the solution eloquently. Form follows function. None of these ideals are present in.NET..NET is complexity for the sake of incomprehensibility. It sells more bootcamps. It drives up the price of certs. Those certs are used by idiots to gain entry into the halls of business where they wreak havok with knowledge but without understanding. It's a bad thing. It's ephemeral and will be obsoleted by another, more complex, equally bad thing because that is its purpose.
The busybox developers are doing their bit to preserve the GPL. It is unfortunate they are so shortsighted as to neglect the value of your contribution completely.
Your willingness to forbear the issue speaks a great deal about your maturity.
While I still appreciate their continuing efforts on behalf of the GPL, my respect for them is greatly reduced.
Thanks for all you've done for us Bruce. I signed the petition and I'll make sure everybody at work knows they have an opportunity to do the same.
1) You don't have to memorize what is in every namespace in *any* language. You just have to have a good enough overview of them to know where to look effectively for something you need. Spending all of your time trying to memorize everything in libraries is a waste of time and usually only done by undergads who think that they know it all.
This way lies madness. Knowing just enough about your tools to not cut yourself is not how you become a good craftsman.
2) These are just toys to keep you occupied
I hate to break it to you, but there is a great deal of business that is done on Microsoft software. There are a number of reasons for that (admittedly, not all of them are good reasons). One of them is that MS has done something Linux and the others haven't - they make software that makes it fairly simple for most businesses and people to do 80% of what they need to easily. In addition, needs which are not met by MS itself, and a number of needs which are, are covered by various 3rd parties.
And one day most of those apps will be ported to.NET 2.3,.NET 3.0, reverted to.NET 2.7 and then the new stable.NET 3.1. Probably by someone with even less of a grasp of the fractal complexity the beast has grown to by then. Then Microsoft will announce the new and more powerful C$ language (pronounced ca-ching!) and associated libraries and deprecate the entire thing. Of course the next year Microsoft Update will require a service pack that doesn't support the obsolete.NET platform but by then you'll be fully committed to developing your ca-ching! apps at your new position. The poor sap who follows you where you are, however, is going to have a heck of a time figuring out how you got this beast to work when the documentation is no longer available. Everything you thought was clever will cause him to curse your name. Forgotten workarounds will be re-implemented, even if not needed, in the ca-ching platform because nobody recalls what they do. Eventually management will re-org to eliminate the broken business intelligence by deleting the entire department.
Computer science is not magic. You are not a high priest of the occult secrets. It's just a job where you wrangle the bits from one buffer to another. Get over yourself.
There is an ancient chinese adage: "in the course of a long life, a wise man will be prepared to abandon his baggage several times."
Sometimes the simplest way to ease your burden is not to pick it up. When a young programmer retires, noone will remember this.NET thing ever existed. Learning is fun, but it's important not to waste too much of your life learning ephemeral trivia if you want to contribute to real progress that will be a legacy.
The purpose of this complexity is to ensure the tool is obsolete before it is mastered.
Since.NET platforms have an average lifespan of what, 18 months? You could spend that much time in a bootcamp drilling namespaces and methods all day and not get there before it's time to enroll in the next one. 384,000 methods? 12,324 public classes? How many of those are deprecated? How many soon will be? And of course if you use this junk to develop for windows, try to remember not to get uppity and make a market with your product. You don't have a chance because the real tools are not here. These are just toys to keep you occupied. But look! They're shiny!
Do not invest your time and money learning trash like this when the turnover is this high. It's not worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank Sam H. He's the DNS admin for that server. See My other post on this.
Time to add nimp.org to your hosts file. The link is an auto redirect from rds.yahoo.com to members.on.nimp.org. This is how Yahoo redirects search results to find out who clicked what. Yawho? search results are thus no longer safe to click. For best results, add rds.yahoo.com to your hosts file or equivalent blocker as well.
members.on.nimp.org resolves to poulet0.zoy.org. The IP address is [80.65.228.130]. Best to block that as well. The DNS administrator for this server is Slashdot User "Sam H", UID 3979.
Somebody at slashdot should have a look at our anonymous coward's IP address. It would be nice if we could quit this nonsense. I hope this isn't some troll that bought a low UID in the auction.
And maybe some slashdotter in Paris could call Sam and ask him to fix his compromised server. It does look like someone truly nasty took it over in August of 2005. Big Debian fan this one. Likes the GNAA routine and the whole bit.
I'm not certain about pinning this on Sam. sam.zoy.org resolves to a different IP. One of you intertubes wizards want to weigh in here?
Hey, Sam.
You want to get this server out of your DNS? It's hosting viruses linked from slashdot through a rds.yahoo.com forward.
That would be nice. Thanks.
Please don't click it.
Might as well try Gentoo.
The car analogy: a Gentoo system is to a Windows system as the Ultima GTR is to the Posche 911 GT-3 RS. You have to buy the parts yourself and put them together, but price wise it is practically free and performance wise it totally blows everything away (if you ever get it compiled/assembled enough to test it, if you do it right, ymmv).
You're just wrong on every premise.
50 units of laptop per day, day after day is a practical deployment schedule for a middling organization.
Google isn't a middling organization. It's Google. I doubt if they deployed that many each day their deployment would ever finish before the next deployment cycle began. Same with IBM and most other Fortune 50's.
People who deploy on that scale use imaging. They would consider the idea of uninstalling anything during the deployment a failure of the process.
Nobody in their right mind in the deployments field would consider starting with the OEM's standard shipping image. They use a standard enterprise licensed version, add only the windows options they must have and they install their licensed apps with updates and lock down the services, firewall, user accounts and local machine policy settings among other preparation steps.
The OEMs will put your own image on for a small fee if you're buying thousands of units.
Some of them then have their equipment shipped to a third party team for last minute hardware corrections, burn in testing, BIOS and physical security adjusment and other processing.
There is a lot more to it than this but you get the picture. Large scale deployments is a complicated task with process management, milestones, schedules and a lot of other stuff. It's not even remotely like your one guy taking three hours to uninstall apps on one PC you envisioned.
What makes you think the camera is not already there? Have you disassembled your cable box?
Food for thought. Your cable box could have a camera already. If you have cable internet you know it has enough bandwidth for monitoring you.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
I am confident these FBI agents are as eager to avoid sweeping up the innocent with the guilty in their net as they are to protect society from kiddie diddlers. They want to get the bad guy and they want to do a good job and throwing the innocent into prison serves neither of those goals. That they don't even check the referrer does seem to indicate they lack the skill to do so. They should hire some knowledgeable consultants to help them. If they had the skills to run their own spam zombie net I am sure they would be more informed. I don't believe they would be so evil as to zombie your computer, download kiddie porn with it while you slept and then come break down your door and throw you in prison for not knowing enough to prevent them from doing it. By the way, even if you're very good with the computer, for someone with the right tools doing such a thing to you and then calling them to report you to get you thrown in prison is a trivial matter. Remote desktop is a standard tool for the botmaster, as is a clean uninstall afterward, and building the social engineering to get you to open an email containing the content is easily done by anyone who knows you.
If the FBI agents did have the skill to run a zombie network it would be clear to them that most people lack the skill to avoid being innocently swept up and that they lack the knowledge necessary to sort the innocent from the guilty. Perhaps so much so that they would despair of a technical answer and go back to identifying the actors in the real kiddie porn. Computer security this year is truly this bad.
Don't imagine I'm admiring the evil botherders here, either. I despise them as well. But I'm aware they have great tools for doing these things and pointing this out is important if people are to be informed about what's going on here.
In the mean time if you hold any hope of public service in your life you need to feed your PC to a chipper. Then get someone else to print your emails on paper and read them to you over the phone, preferably long distance. Never touch another keyboard again. This is how most public officials handle these issues.
Even in the US 50% of electricity is generated with coal. Yes, it's bizarre that it is still so, but it's true.
In the rest of the world the situation is considerably worse. Where were your lamps made? I don't think the steel poles that streetlamps are made from come from an area where nuclear and hydro are the predominate source of electricity. It's highly doubtful that the lamps at your local hardware store are made in such a place.
And then there's the fact that smelting of steel isn't done with electricity. They pile the steel scraps into a huge chimney that's mostly full of coal, light it up and then force air in until the heat from the coal heats the steel enough to melt. A very carbon intensive process, this. This is the part the part that uses the most fossil fuels for almost anything made of steel, no matter how it spends the rest of its life.
Compared to these issues the energy burned by the bulb is probably a trivial fragment of the total carbon budget for a light. Every little bit helps though.
Some of the realities of carbon output are pretty scary. All tars exposed to an oxygen atmosphere are oxidizing (slowly burning). That means every square inch of asphalt between your house and your job are doing their bit to add to global warming, and contribute a considerable fraction compared to the fuel powered vehicles driving over it. The road burns whether you're driving over it or not, so all those huge vacant K-Mart parking lots add up to quite a lot.
It really is worse than that. Any site you go to can link any content from any other site, and not show it to you -- just load it transparently in the background. You will have downloaded the material without your knowledge and it will be in your cache when they break your door down.
The article plainly states that they do not even bother to record the referring URL or page, which means they don't care if you were prank porn'd. Considering some freaks are out there getting SWAT called on people it's realistic to expect that this will be a toy of choice for disgruntled former life partners and competetive coworkers with an evil bent. You'll be guilty of committing a crime completely without your knowledge. You won't just lose your equipment -- you will go to PMITA prison and spend the rest of your life on the registry. Same with if you have an HTML email with the content embedded but otherwise looking harmless. Since there are hundreds of thousands of compromised sites out there, and millions of spam bots the internet bad guys could get almost all of us on this list pretty quickly. Also some browser plugins automatically download all of the pages linked from your current page in the background to speed up browsing.
What this means is that this Internet is now useless with pictures. Or embedded content of any kind.
I'm all for catching and punishing the freaks that seek out this content and most especially the ones that publish it. But to leave enforcement this wide open to abuse is just wrong.
It's time to browse with Lynx again. Who would have thought that would come up again for people who weren't blind?
Just about the only alternative that works is browsing via secure remote desktop from offshore hosting.
If we were not now using that very same gas or worse - coal to generate the power that drives the lights, and eliminating the efficiency by multiplying the number of lights, I might be more encouraged about our "progress". The creation of one metal light pole itself probably accounts for far more emissions than the gas a dozen old gas lamps used in their lifetimes.
The most efficient lamp, car or person is the one you don't make.
WLOC doesn't include onsite support. Some of them do. Making aunt Sally pay the extra is preferable to blowing my holiday weekends on such nonsense if she can afford it.
Unless I'm not seeing the old bird nearly enough. That's different.
Also a bad answer if uncle Lester might wind up in the press shortly after the tech shows up.
Managed services.
Your parents can buy a contract to have somebody take care of their PC with 24/7 monitoring, patch management, device prefailure notification and instant tech support. It's like extending your NOC to support aunt Sally.
It doesn't cost anywhere near as much as you might think.
Moderation abuse? Anybody?
I'm not screaming. This is the internet, so THIS IS SCREAMING.
Let me share with you the Tao of Programming:
.NET is the COBOL of the modern era, except that COBOL at least survived 50 years. The best hope .NET has is 5. 'Twere better not to learn it.
It is seldom that I have such an opportunity to use the same quote twice in one day, but...
In a few months when Microsoft deprecates .NET in favor of the new Longhorn approved architecture (ca-ching or whatever it is) you will herald it at the Next Great Thing. I hope in that moment you remember this: if deer move too fast, shoot the bison. Build not your castle upon the sand. Time spent understanding the babbling of a fool is time wasted.
It took me exactly one upgrade cycle of development tools to figure out that this was cyclic abuse. It was about 1995.
What's your problem? Slow learner? I don't want to be insensitive, but do you think you should be sharing that?
Wasting mental space on things like .NET which will in five years be obsoleted by the Microsoft tool-of-the-day?
Mastering the nuances of usage is essential to security. You cannot deny that is important.
Yeah, I'm still a novice. I am still uncomfortable about some of the side effects of operators on matrix operations in APL on the IBM 5150. Someday I hope to appreciate fully the four basic loops of C and the nuances of stdlib. If I have trouble with inheritance in C++ I know there are better people to take it up with than you.
That has little to do with the topic, which is the mystic abortion that is .NET. The simplest answer is usually best. The elegant solution expresses completely the solution eloquently. Form follows function. None of these ideals are present in .NET. .NET is complexity for the sake of incomprehensibility. It sells more bootcamps. It drives up the price of certs. Those certs are used by idiots to gain entry into the halls of business where they wreak havok with knowledge but without understanding. It's a bad thing. It's ephemeral and will be obsoleted by another, more complex, equally bad thing because that is its purpose.
'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.' - Edmund Burke
I still can't believe you posted your phone number on slashdot. Have you got a paypal account where we can send money?
The busybox developers are doing their bit to preserve the GPL. It is unfortunate they are so shortsighted as to neglect the value of your contribution completely.
Your willingness to forbear the issue speaks a great deal about your maturity.
While I still appreciate their continuing efforts on behalf of the GPL, my respect for them is greatly reduced.
Thanks for all you've done for us Bruce. I signed the petition and I'll make sure everybody at work knows they have an opportunity to do the same.
This way lies madness. Knowing just enough about your tools to not cut yourself is not how you become a good craftsman.
And one day most of those apps will be ported to .NET 2.3, .NET 3.0, reverted to .NET 2.7 and then the new stable .NET 3.1. Probably by someone with even less of a grasp of the fractal complexity the beast has grown to by then. Then Microsoft will announce the new and more powerful C$ language (pronounced ca-ching!) and associated libraries and deprecate the entire thing. Of course the next year Microsoft Update will require a service pack that doesn't support the obsolete .NET platform but by then you'll be fully committed to developing your ca-ching! apps at your new position. The poor sap who follows you where you are, however, is going to have a heck of a time figuring out how you got this beast to work when the documentation is no longer available. Everything you thought was clever will cause him to curse your name. Forgotten workarounds will be re-implemented, even if not needed, in the ca-ching platform because nobody recalls what they do. Eventually management will re-org to eliminate the broken business intelligence by deleting the entire department.
Computer science is not magic. You are not a high priest of the occult secrets. It's just a job where you wrangle the bits from one buffer to another. Get over yourself.
There is an ancient chinese adage: "in the course of a long life, a wise man will be prepared to abandon his baggage several times."
Sometimes the simplest way to ease your burden is not to pick it up. When a young programmer retires, noone will remember this .NET thing ever existed. Learning is fun, but it's important not to waste too much of your life learning ephemeral trivia if you want to contribute to real progress that will be a legacy.
1991 was a long time ago. Linux is old.
The purpose of this complexity is to ensure the tool is obsolete before it is mastered.
Since .NET platforms have an average lifespan of what, 18 months? You could spend that much time in a bootcamp drilling namespaces and methods all day and not get there before it's time to enroll in the next one. 384,000 methods? 12,324 public classes? How many of those are deprecated? How many soon will be? And of course if you use this junk to develop for windows, try to remember not to get uppity and make a market with your product. You don't have a chance because the real tools are not here. These are just toys to keep you occupied. But look! They're shiny!
Do not invest your time and money learning trash like this when the turnover is this high. It's not worth it.
With a redundant array of inefficient developers, AKA Extreme Programming.