I work for the University of California, at Berkeley, as a System Administrator for Residential Computing. We're the department responsible for the residential network - not the physical portion, but basically everything else. Last year, I was responsible for the security mailing list, meaning I took care of security, abuse, and copyright case for the 6,000+ students living in the dorms here.
Now, the following is in any way, shape, or form, official University Policy, or even opinion. Just my own thoughts & experiences on this subject. Now that that's out of the way...
The majority of the security problems on our network come from Windows 2000. At the beginning of this semester, and last semester, we were flooded with compromised computers - Code Red last year (hundreds of cases), and variations of DarkIRC (which exploits the "no Administrator password" problem) this year. We've spent thousands of dollars (on employee hours only) at least. When we hear about a compromised system, we it's Win2K (twice it's turned out to be Linux though =).
After the first six weeks (meaning, for us, right about now), we've gone through almost every Win2k machine & set an Administrator password, installed Norton, etc - BECAUSE THEY'VE ALL BEEN COMPROMISED. At least all the vulnerable ones. This keeps our Residential Computing Consultants (RCC's) pretty busy, but our network even busier. We lose a lot of bandwidth because of these people as well, which slows down the net for everyone else (we're capped at 60Mbps), and hurts their dorm experiences.
I would vastly prefer Win98 than Win2k on our systems. It's much harder to compromise, since to turn it into a server. Win2k already has all the tools a hacker needs to log in, and attack others - and without the Administrator password, it's all set up for this already! I don't know if WinXP is any better (since I'm not working as Security anymore), but hopefully it is.
It makes sense to get rid of Win2k. People have unpatched versions usually, and frequently no passwords, so they get hacked all the time. I wouldn't mind doing the same thing in Berkeley, but our primary philosophy is Open Network - we don't block anything, we don't tell you what to use, etc. We let you run servers if you want. We have a bandwidth limit now (5GB a week), but that's fairly new too, since we've only recently been capped (thanks to P2P - the dorms were using more bandwidth than the rest of the University combined!!). Other than that, however, Residential Computing is and strives to be the model ISP. We are mostly students ourselves, and so we know what our peers want. And in my opinion, they would all be better of without Win2k.
For more info about Berkeley's Residential Computing, check out http://www.rescomp.berkeley.edu =)
If you install Linux on such a computer, say, and then something goes wrong with Windows later so you need to use the Rescue disk & you lose everything you had on the Linux partition: aren't there laws that (even though a contract says otherwise) protect you from that? Car manufacturers can't have contracts saying "any damage involved using this car is not the responsibility of Ford" for example, so how come Microsoft can?
Crossing out lines and inserting (usually in italics or bold) new text is the traditional legal way to show the changes within a document. Often used for laws and whatnot (so you can see how the law has been amended, etc). Microsoft is using this to emphasize how its plan is different from the government's...
Dear Congresswomen: I'm not sure how much you follow the copyright issues in the technology sector, but their importance is ever increasing. Due to a law commonly referred to as "DMCA", companies are censoring popular news sources. Specifically, Microsoft has threatened to sue Slashdot (a user-moderated "newsgroup") because of certain "URL links" INDIVIDUALS have posted on the service. The link to the story on Slashdot about this issue is "http://slashdot.org/features/00/05/11/0153247.sht ml". Since, by Slashdot's user agreement, the posts belong to the individuals and are reprinted by their permission, cleary Slashdot is not personally responsible for copyright infringement. They have good faith that the reprinted material is legal. Yet, the DMCA makes Microsoft's litigation potentially successful. Should they win, any such website would need to censor every user's comments--which is impossible, due to the shear number of comments posted. Thus, hundreds of useful, informative websites would have essentially been deemed illegal. This is just one example of the many examples of how DMCA can ruin the best aspects of the web. I ask you to consider rewriting the law--or eliminating it altogether. Thank you for your time,
Here's a quick calculation of the power needed to run a 100% efficient spacecraft near the Earth (warning: very rough. =) E=.5mv^2=.5m(10t)^2=50mt^2. (rounding, etc). So in one second, E=50m=500,000J for a 10,000kg spacecraft... Thus, at LEAST 500,000J/s=500,000W must be used to counter the falling spacecraft, by basic conservation of energy.... That's 5,000 100W lightbulbs... This is going to be a BRIGHT spacecraft. Where is he going to get all this energy? PLEASE correct any wrong assumptions/simplifications... Just throwing this out there....
Slashdot Mirror
I work for the University of California, at Berkeley, as a System Administrator for Residential Computing. We're the department responsible for the residential network - not the physical portion, but basically everything else. Last year, I was responsible for the security mailing list, meaning I took care of security, abuse, and copyright case for the 6,000+ students living in the dorms here.
Now, the following is in any way, shape, or form, official University Policy, or even opinion. Just my own thoughts & experiences on this subject. Now that that's out of the way...
The majority of the security problems on our network come from Windows 2000. At the beginning of this semester, and last semester, we were flooded with compromised computers - Code Red last year (hundreds of cases), and variations of DarkIRC (which exploits the "no Administrator password" problem) this year. We've spent thousands of dollars (on employee hours only) at least. When we hear about a compromised system, we it's Win2K (twice it's turned out to be Linux though =).
After the first six weeks (meaning, for us, right about now), we've gone through almost every Win2k machine & set an Administrator password, installed Norton, etc - BECAUSE THEY'VE ALL BEEN COMPROMISED. At least all the vulnerable ones. This keeps our Residential Computing Consultants (RCC's) pretty busy, but our network even busier. We lose a lot of bandwidth because of these people as well, which slows down the net for everyone else (we're capped at 60Mbps), and hurts their dorm experiences.
I would vastly prefer Win98 than Win2k on our systems. It's much harder to compromise, since to turn it into a server. Win2k already has all the tools a hacker needs to log in, and attack others - and without the Administrator password, it's all set up for this already! I don't know if WinXP is any better (since I'm not working as Security anymore), but hopefully it is.
It makes sense to get rid of Win2k. People have unpatched versions usually, and frequently no passwords, so they get hacked all the time. I wouldn't mind doing the same thing in Berkeley, but our primary philosophy is Open Network - we don't block anything, we don't tell you what to use, etc. We let you run servers if you want. We have a bandwidth limit now (5GB a week), but that's fairly new too, since we've only recently been capped (thanks to P2P - the dorms were using more bandwidth than the rest of the University combined!!). Other than that, however, Residential Computing is and strives to be the model ISP. We are mostly students ourselves, and so we know what our peers want. And in my opinion, they would all be better of without Win2k.
For more info about Berkeley's Residential Computing, check out http://www.rescomp.berkeley.edu =)
If you install Linux on such a computer, say, and then something goes wrong with Windows later so you need to use the Rescue disk & you lose everything you had on the Linux partition: aren't there laws that (even though a contract says otherwise) protect you from that? Car manufacturers can't have contracts saying "any damage involved using this car is not the responsibility of Ford" for example, so how come Microsoft can?
Crossing out lines and inserting (usually in italics or bold) new text is the traditional legal way to show the changes within a document. Often used for laws and whatnot (so you can see how the law has been amended, etc). Microsoft is using this to emphasize how its plan is different from the government's...
dB
Dear Congresswomen:t ml". Since, by Slashdot's user agreement, the posts belong to the individuals and are reprinted
I'm not sure how much you follow the copyright issues in the technology sector, but their importance is ever increasing. Due to a law commonly referred to as "DMCA", companies are censoring popular news sources. Specifically, Microsoft has threatened to sue Slashdot (a user-moderated "newsgroup") because of certain "URL links" INDIVIDUALS have posted on the service. The link to the story on Slashdot about this issue is "http://slashdot.org/features/00/05/11/0153247.sh
by their permission, cleary Slashdot is not personally responsible for copyright infringement. They have good faith that the reprinted material
is legal.
Yet, the DMCA makes Microsoft's litigation potentially successful. Should they win, any such website would need to censor every user's comments--which is impossible, due to the shear number of comments posted. Thus, hundreds of useful, informative websites would have essentially been deemed illegal.
This is just one example of the many examples of how DMCA can ruin the best aspects of the web. I ask you to consider rewriting the law--or eliminating it altogether.
Thank you for your time,
Dobromir Montauk
Just so you know, airplanes are a LOT safer than cars right now... Check the stats. =)
dB
Here's a quick calculation of the power needed to run a 100% efficient spacecraft near the Earth (warning: very rough. =)
E=.5mv^2=.5m(10t)^2=50mt^2. (rounding, etc).
So in one second, E=50m=500,000J for a 10,000kg spacecraft... Thus, at LEAST 500,000J/s=500,000W must be used to counter the falling spacecraft, by basic conservation of energy.... That's 5,000 100W lightbulbs... This is going to be a BRIGHT spacecraft.
Where is he going to get all this energy?
PLEASE correct any wrong assumptions/simplifications... Just throwing this out there....