If I wanted to refine weapons grade fuel, and money was no object, I'd set up a distributed system for doing it in as many places as possible without anyone knowing about it. The ideal method would be to conceal the refining apparatus inside something which is used by the general public every day, consumes significantly more energy than the refining process, lasts for a longish time and has to be recycled at an approved special facility when it is done with.
Now, for successful electrostatic separation of uranium isotopes, you'd need a high vacuum environment and a very high voltage, low current power supply. Such as you would get in a cathode ray tube, for instance..... and you aren't allowed to dispose of those in landfill anymore in many countries.....
Some doctors in England want to outlaw long, pointy chef's knives (no, I'm really not kidding)...
I like my long, pointy chef's knife. I use it for boning chickens. Actually I use it for lots of other things too..... making sure to wash it in hot water with antibacterial detergent between uses..... but for opening up chicken thighs, nothing beats it. Chicken breast meat is often lacking in flavour {unless you go for an organically-raised bird}, legs are better done up as "spicy chicken bones" to give as a snack to party guests you'd rather not have invited. Thighs are the chicken's best-kept secret: cheap and full of flavour. Once you've the knack of boning, it's easy. And if you're making curry, don't brown them first: just place them raw in the sauce, in a casserôle dish in the oven on number 4 or 5 for an hour or so. YES, it will cook through; but it will take an hour, and unless you've got cast-iron guts don't be tempted to taste it before then if you don't fancy spending an evening on the toilet. Even better, leave the meat in the sauce in the fridge overnight. Un-sealed, it absorbs the wonderful flavours better.
Mmm..... I'm getting hungry now just thinking about that chicken curry. Well, it's nearly lunchtime.....
Anyway, there's nothing worse than a knife that just isn't quite sharp enough to cut the thing you were originally trying to cut with it, but is still sharp enough to cut you. Sure most cooks will agree with me there.....
I know I shouldn't respond to sigs, but in your case I'll make an exception. "PC Load Letter" is an error message on HP laser printers. It means someone has been fiddling around with the settings on their computer, and needs a dose of the cluebat as soon as possible.
It officially means "Paper cassette - load US letter size paper" {216 x 279 -- a weirdy size used only in the USA and nowhere else on Earth; everyone else preferring the ISO paper sizes with their constant aspect ratio. 297 is to 210 as 420 is to 297.}
The only reason the New England Patriots are the "world" champions is because every other country except the USA plays proper {i.e., Association} football. {As in World Cup, UEFA champions League, Euro 2004 &c.} The sad truth is nobody else gives a stuff about your stupid little game.
Probably in the parent poster's mind, too. I mean, if you're all in favour of other people using your hard work to create a closed-source product from which they later profit, fair enough..... apart from telling you I think it's a bad idea, I can't do much to stop you. But if someone were to use my hard work in that way, I would not be so laid back. I also don't have anything like the brand awareness that the BSD folks do {A J Who? Nah..... this one from FooCorp Global PLC probably does a better job}; nor can I make the commitment that if anybody makes a non-Free version of something I wrote, I will immediately respond by exercising the rights I reserved earlier and producing a Free clone of what they wrote.
So for me, and for all others that feel the same way, there is the GPL and -- mainly for the diehard hackers, these days -- various source-only licences. In fact, the BSD licence -- minus the permission to distribute binary executables -- is probably better than the GPL for scripts written in interpreted languages, just by virtue of its brevity.
You can add it to your quote library with my pleasure..... By the way, the "missing" first part {which I did not quote here as it did not seem relevant} was 'MS EULA = sharing is theft'.
In 2002, it would have been KDE2, and you'd have been better off with GNOME than that. Konqueror lacked tabs and rendered almost everything badly. And those icons..... Still, I remember KWord being slightly quicker than OO.o, if it could be persuaded to stay up.
KDE has really grown up a lot since then, and KOffice is improving. Give it another chance. I've gone over to Debian Unstable and I've seen the incremental improvements. In all probability, KOffice 2.0 will cane OpenOffice.org when it comes out. Three and a half years is a long time in Open Source Software development. Even Debian have had nearly two releases since then!
Open Source is like a special kind of bank account, where every investor receives an amount of interest dependent on the total amount ever deposited by all investors {even if since withdrawn}.
If some company using, say, exim for their e-mail servers find they need to make an improvement to exim, then every exim user can potentially benefit from that improvement -- and, just as importantly, nobody can ever undo that improvement.
Or to put it another way: When you light an unlit candle from a lit one, the room does not get any darker.
Almost all the "old" rules of economics -- and the political theories which followed on from them, including Capitalism and Marxism -- were written in an Age of Scarcity, where the demand for goods outstripped supply. As the supply of certain goods is beginning to exceed the demand, we are moving out of the Age of Scarcity and into an Age of Plenty. New rules will have to be written to deal with this. Simply creating artificial scarcity has already been shown not to work.....
That's a big black mark against the {three-clause} BSD licence. At least if you used the GPL, or a source-only BSD licence {i.e. not allowing binary distribution} then any "competing" product based on your code can never be made closed-source. You will have the advantage that anything they do, you also can do, and probably for less money than they want for it.
The BSD people are very aware of this, and work their collective behinds off to keep software free. But it's a trap for the unwary.
Remember! BSD = sharing is not theft, GPL = not sharing is theft.
Cygwin, MinGW et al are harmful to the cause of Open Source in the same way that textured vegetable protein "burgers" are harmful to the cause of vegetarianism. Making TVP actually is less efficient in terms of land and energy usage than traditional m**t farming, yet vegetarians -- and probably the ones that eat TVP -- incessantly trumpet the notion that vegetarianism is "more efficient".
If we go out of our way to make Open Source software available on closed platforms, then we are making a rod for our own backs. Open Source applications on Open Source operating systems must come first. We can tempt people to switch with our own coolness. It's not worth delaying the Linux release of foo because some feature doesn't work in the Windows version.
Well-written software should compile on any properly-specified architecture. On the flipside, software which will not compile on certain architectures may be badly-written. {Not every program need be fully portable -- if it makes use of specific hardware features, for instance, portability is quite unnecessary.} Alternatively, the architecture may be improperly-specified.....
LETS == Local Exchange Trading Scheme. Basically a group of people, all with useful skills and assets, who come together and perform work for one another in exchange for favours. No hard currency changes hands. A committee is usually required when you have more than about 20 members, to keep track of who did what and decide what is worth how much.
The WINE project is an utter red herring IMHO and may even prove to be damaging in the long term -- like those textured soya protein burgers that only serve to legitimise meat eating. Or like methadone {keeps you from wanting gear at first..... but when some brown inevitably comes your way, you aren't going to refuse just because you've already had your Green Gloop, and you just crank up the severity of your habit}. Why teach a cat to bark, when you can learn to appreciate meows instead? I recently shew a computer-illiterate friend how to use KWord, Gaim &c. She has since tried Windows and doesn't think it is any easier.....
I will never carry an identity card. If I am not free to go about my business without the threat of having to account for myself, then I might just as well be in prison.
Equip every aeroplane with a knockout gas cylinder, containing enough to zonk out everyone on board, including the crew; and a remote control system allowing the plane to be landed from the ground at any airport. The Authorities could then board the plane wearing breathing apparatus, and sort out the terrorists from the civilians while they were still incapacitated.
Obviously it would have to be made an offence to carry breathing apparatus in the passenger compartment of an aeroplane, but an oxygen tank is pretty hard to conceal anyway.
Alternatively, just have a self-destruct system and blow the plane clean out of the sky; passengers, crew and all. Just make sure the pieces were small enough not to do much damage to anything they landed on. At least that way, it would be impossible to hijack a plane. A couple of hundred civilian lives are a small price to pay for not letting terrorists get their way.
Maybe not Linux per se, but KMail shows you very clearly just how fake these fake e-mails are. And if you take the {small} amount of time it takes to learn to use GNU/Linux, then you will most probably pick up a few clues along the way.
There are almost no "working class" people left anymore in our disposable society. We all have mobile phones, computers and DVD players in the glorious reign of Tony Blair -- therefore we cannot, by definition, be working-class! The real jobs have been exported overseas, and all we have left is a consuming class: if they have jobs at all, it is something crap like sanitising telephones or cutting sandwiches {until kitchen knives are banned for safety reasons; then we will all have to put up with imported frozen sandwiches and pay the former sandwich-cutting former taxpayers dole money}. In the end, they will have no useful skills to help them survive: They need the Company's wages {to buy their naff polyester tracksuits, daft boots and counterfeit Burberry bags} more than The Company needs their labour. It is the Capitalist Wet Dream come true.
Why not get involved with your local LETS, offering a service to completely de-Microsoft people's computers and train them up in the use of Firefox {Web}, OpenOffice {word processing}, Evolution {e-mail} and PHPMyAdmim {database}? If you can do enough work for enough people, then you can almost end up doing without pound notes altogether. I say almost because there some things you still need to buy for which there aren't yet any shops that accept payment by barter.
First and foremost, the cost of housing needs to be brought down by any means necessary. Impose a duty on house sales: the higher the price, the higher the duty. Invest this money in building more council houses. When renting a home is cheaper than buying one {as it should be -- after all, you pay rent for as long as you live in a place, but you only pay a mortgage for a fixed term}, house prices will come down.
And if you have a bank account, remember you will end up paying for the phishing scams..... the bank won't be able to afford to pay you so much interest on your account if they have to reimburse some stupid rich tosser who fell for a phishing scam.
The only people who fall for these things are the ones with no common sense. They are the same ones who, a few thousand years ago, would have been some wild creature's dinner. That's one of the reverse benefits {malefits?} of progress; it has allowed people to survive who would otherwise have perished through simple unfitness to do so, in turn lowering the mean fitness-for-survival of the human race as a whole. Nature keeps coming up with dafter and dafter idiots, but thanks to our idiot-friendly society, the wolves and the tigers are still starving.
For starters, why the chuff would a bank with which you don't even have an account send you an e-mail message? And why the chuff would they use a strangely-named GIF image of some awkwardly-phrased and badly-spelt text, asking you to confirm or update your details and including a bunch of meaningless words? Why the chuff would your own bank send you almost the same message -- but with a few changes to the "text" and a different name for the GIF image?
No bank would ever ask you to confirm your details in such an insecure way as over the Internet. No bank will ever ask you for your payment card PIN -- if it ever gets lost, they will just send you a new card and PIN. Similarly with passwords -- you pick a new one. The plaintext is never stored, just the scrambled form. What you entered is re-scrambled, and only the scrambled forms are compared. And if you want to update anything like your address if you move house or your name if you get married, you have to fill out a stackload of forms in a branch, in front of Bank staff.
You don't need to be a full-on computer security expert to know all this. You just need to have a bit of common sense, and to have read the literature the bank were legally obliged to give you when you opened your account.
IMHO, if you are stupid enough to get hit by a phishing scam, you deserve to lose everything -- and stand as an example to the rest of us. So we can say "Ha ha, at least I'm not that stupid" or "Oo-er, I'd better be careful".
Windows does not have a consistent structure for storing essential system configuration information {/etc}, a convention for instructing a running programme to re-read its configuration {SIGHUP} or a process sheduler {/sbin/init}. As a consequence of these omissions, it is necessary to stop and restart every running programme whenever a change is made. This leads to jokes like "The mouse has been moved. You need to reboot your system for the change to take effect."
A few years ago though, I remember some unix flavour insisting to recompile the kernel when an ordinarily trivial change was made {e.g. moving a device from one serial port to another}. Cue new joke -- "The mouse has been moved. You need to recompile your kernel for the change to take effect."
Typing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade costs somewhere between f**k-all and precious little. OK, so I have to ssh into every machine in the company to do it {or, absit omen, leave my desk}; but in the time it's taken me to post this comment I have already thought of at least two workarounds.
So are they saying Microsoft would write me a cheque if I patched a Windows system? Or are they just saying that somebody who goes around patching Windows systems will do it for a lot less money than someone who goes around patching Linux ones? Which is a no-brainer, because -- thanks to the wonders of random breakdowns -- there's this double-edged situation where a trained chimpanzee could make it look like they had fixed a Windows system, yet a real expert is just as likely as anyone to find their "repair" does not work in practice. This is why Windows technicians are cheap -- even if you know your stuff, the sad fact is that, through no fault of your own, many things are beyond your abilities; and there is no shortage of pissy-knickered schoolkid wannabees who'll do your job for less. By contrast, a Linux system either works or it doesn't, only ever doesn't work for a good reason and needs someone who understands Linux to fix it if it's broken. Linux technicians are expensive because it's damn nigh impossible for the aforementioned wannabees to bluff their way in.
Suppose a car rental company rents out a car to somebody who uses it to travel internationally and pick up a large stash of child pornography {in printed form}, class A drugs or weapons of mass destruction. Is that car rental company in any way legally complicit in the offence?
In the same way, you would not be found complicit if some third party does something with your network that you could not prevent outright, but would rather they didn't anyway. Just make sure outside connections are logged and users are aware of it. But that comes under the heading of "reasonable precautions" anyway.
The radio spectrum is a shared resource, and whether you like it or not, somebody is always going to be trying to use your wireless network. Nothing short of a Faraday cage around your perimeter is going to stop them if they're really determined. What's more, if you make it too hard to get in, you'll annoy them. It's better to limit the damage people can do if they get in, than to assume that they won't get in.
It's either an application problem or a hardware problem. Basically, used memory is not being zeroed out, so one programme can look at what another programme left behind.
In the case of a software frame buffer {like the 1980s home computers with bit-mapped graphics: Spectrum, BBC et al} failure to zero out memory causes spurious artifacts on the display. You can see this if you switch between graphics modes by writing to the hardware registers directly rather than using the "proper" system calls which clear the screen. {On the Beeb, you could actually grow a stack through the display memory. Pretty, but you'd better hope not to scroll the screen or print over that area.} The solution was implemented in software: create system calls that zero-out the display memory when switching graphics modes. {As a bonus, your users need only send one number to the routine, which can poke the right values into all the relevant registers on their behalf. They just don't get to invent their own graphics modes, but if you ever update the display ULA in future then at least you won't kill half the games software in existence.}
What we're talking about here is cache memory not being zeroed out between uses by successive processes. That looks to me very much like a hardware problem. It's not even an easy problem. My guess is that the implementors looked at it, decided "It's potentially insecure in theory but bloody difficult to make use of in practice", and left it that way on purpose. Like there's no point fitting an expensive lock on a wooden door with a person-sized glass panel in the middle of it -- especially if that door is only accessible through an overgrown garden with an underfed Alsatian in it.
BTW, crypto software running in userland could never, ever be made immune to snooping from kernel space -- at least, not on a system with any kind of debugging. The solution is to read and understand every bit of the kernel source -- including all drivers -- or get some independent expert to do so for you, so as to be sure the kernel contains nothing that could be used for malicious purposes. Hardware crypto devices would be more immune to tampering -- but less susceptible to independent verification.
Imagine this: <CHEESY MEXICAN ACCENT>Hey, extranjero! You want to send secret message? I chave code so secret, nobody onderstand eet 'cep' for me an' my brother. Djou dictates to me, one word a time, I write eet down in secret code. Then I send eet to my brother and che go to your amigo, and read heem the secret code. Nobody in world onderstand 'cep' my brother.</CHEESY MEXICAN ACCENT>
Not every distro relies on a heavily-patched kernel. Slackware use a kernel from kernel.org. Debian apply some kernel patches, but you can take an "ordinary" kernel and compile it and Debian userland will run just fine on it anyway.
Certain distributions {one named after a dog in an orange drink advert springs to mind} have a kernel so full of patches that the userland won't stay up on an "ordinary" kernel.
It's really only a big deal until some hacker figgers out how to graft the patchset for an older kernel onto the newest kernel. I for one would have no objection if software not compiled on my machine would not run there..... in fact, a kernel/userland mismatch situation pretty much saved my job once.
Slashdot Mirror
If I wanted to refine weapons grade fuel, and money was no object, I'd set up a distributed system for doing it in as many places as possible without anyone knowing about it. The ideal method would be to conceal the refining apparatus inside something which is used by the general public every day, consumes significantly more energy than the refining process, lasts for a longish time and has to be recycled at an approved special facility when it is done with.
..... and you aren't allowed to dispose of those in landfill anymore in many countries .....
Now, for successful electrostatic separation of uranium isotopes, you'd need a high vacuum environment and a very high voltage, low current power supply. Such as you would get in a cathode ray tube, for instance
Mmm
Anyway, there's nothing worse than a knife that just isn't quite sharp enough to cut the thing you were originally trying to cut with it, but is still sharp enough to cut you. Sure most cooks will agree with me there
Three defeats, I think you'll find.
.....</tune>
<tune="/songs/midi/amazing_grace.mid">Four-two, four-two,
Four-two, four-two,
Four-two, four-two, fo-o-our-twooooo
I know I shouldn't respond to sigs, but in your case I'll make an exception. "PC Load Letter" is an error message on HP laser printers. It means someone has been fiddling around with the settings on their computer, and needs a dose of the cluebat as soon as possible.
It officially means "Paper cassette - load US letter size paper" {216 x 279 -- a weirdy size used only in the USA and nowhere else on Earth; everyone else preferring the ISO paper sizes with their constant aspect ratio. 297 is to 210 as 420 is to 297.}
The only reason the New England Patriots are the "world" champions is because every other country except the USA plays proper {i.e., Association} football. {As in World Cup, UEFA champions League, Euro 2004 &c.} The sad truth is nobody else gives a stuff about your stupid little game.
Probably in the parent poster's mind, too. I mean, if you're all in favour of other people using your hard work to create a closed-source product from which they later profit, fair enough ..... apart from telling you I think it's a bad idea, I can't do much to stop you. But if someone were to use my hard work in that way, I would not be so laid back. I also don't have anything like the brand awareness that the BSD folks do {A J Who? Nah ..... this one from FooCorp Global PLC probably does a better job}; nor can I make the commitment that if anybody makes a non-Free version of something I wrote, I will immediately respond by exercising the rights I reserved earlier and producing a Free clone of what they wrote.
So for me, and for all others that feel the same way, there is the GPL and -- mainly for the diehard hackers, these days -- various source-only licences. In fact, the BSD licence -- minus the permission to distribute binary executables -- is probably better than the GPL for scripts written in interpreted languages, just by virtue of its brevity.
You can add it to your quote library with my pleasure ..... By the way, the "missing" first part {which I did not quote here as it did not seem relevant} was 'MS EULA = sharing is theft'.
In 2002, it would have been KDE2, and you'd have been better off with GNOME than that. Konqueror lacked tabs and rendered almost everything badly. And those icons ..... Still, I remember KWord being slightly quicker than OO.o, if it could be persuaded to stay up.
KDE has really grown up a lot since then, and KOffice is improving. Give it another chance. I've gone over to Debian Unstable and I've seen the incremental improvements. In all probability, KOffice 2.0 will cane OpenOffice.org when it comes out. Three and a half years is a long time in Open Source Software development. Even Debian have had nearly two releases since then!
Open Source is like a special kind of bank account, where every investor receives an amount of interest dependent on the total amount ever deposited by all investors {even if since withdrawn}.
.....
If some company using, say, exim for their e-mail servers find they need to make an improvement to exim, then every exim user can potentially benefit from that improvement -- and, just as importantly, nobody can ever undo that improvement.
Or to put it another way: When you light an unlit candle from a lit one, the room does not get any darker.
Almost all the "old" rules of economics -- and the political theories which followed on from them, including Capitalism and Marxism -- were written in an Age of Scarcity, where the demand for goods outstripped supply. As the supply of certain goods is beginning to exceed the demand, we are moving out of the Age of Scarcity and into an Age of Plenty. New rules will have to be written to deal with this. Simply creating artificial scarcity has already been shown not to work
That's a big black mark against the {three-clause} BSD licence. At least if you used the GPL, or a source-only BSD licence {i.e. not allowing binary distribution} then any "competing" product based on your code can never be made closed-source. You will have the advantage that anything they do, you also can do, and probably for less money than they want for it.
The BSD people are very aware of this, and work their collective behinds off to keep software free. But it's a trap for the unwary.
Remember! BSD = sharing is not theft, GPL = not sharing is theft.
Cygwin, MinGW et al are harmful to the cause of Open Source in the same way that textured vegetable protein "burgers" are harmful to the cause of vegetarianism. Making TVP actually is less efficient in terms of land and energy usage than traditional m**t farming, yet vegetarians -- and probably the ones that eat TVP -- incessantly trumpet the notion that vegetarianism is "more efficient".
.....
If we go out of our way to make Open Source software available on closed platforms, then we are making a rod for our own backs. Open Source applications on Open Source operating systems must come first. We can tempt people to switch with our own coolness. It's not worth delaying the Linux release of foo because some feature doesn't work in the Windows version.
Well-written software should compile on any properly-specified architecture. On the flipside, software which will not compile on certain architectures may be badly-written. {Not every program need be fully portable -- if it makes use of specific hardware features, for instance, portability is quite unnecessary.} Alternatively, the architecture may be improperly-specified
LETS == Local Exchange Trading Scheme. Basically a group of people, all with useful skills and assets, who come together and perform work for one another in exchange for favours. No hard currency changes hands. A committee is usually required when you have more than about 20 members, to keep track of who did what and decide what is worth how much.
..... but when some brown inevitably comes your way, you aren't going to refuse just because you've already had your Green Gloop, and you just crank up the severity of your habit}. Why teach a cat to bark, when you can learn to appreciate meows instead? I recently shew a computer-illiterate friend how to use KWord, Gaim &c. She has since tried Windows and doesn't think it is any easier .....
Check up on http://www.lets-linkup.com/. Note, every group will be different.
The WINE project is an utter red herring IMHO and may even prove to be damaging in the long term -- like those textured soya protein burgers that only serve to legitimise meat eating. Or like methadone {keeps you from wanting gear at first
I lived in Birmingham for three years, and by the time I left, oi aiven peeked oop the accint!
What exactly is wrong with being gay anyway? It's my understanding that "GAY" is an abbreviation for "Good As You".
I will never carry an identity card. If I am not free to go about my business without the threat of having to account for myself, then I might just as well be in prison.
Equip every aeroplane with a knockout gas cylinder, containing enough to zonk out everyone on board, including the crew; and a remote control system allowing the plane to be landed from the ground at any airport. The Authorities could then board the plane wearing breathing apparatus, and sort out the terrorists from the civilians while they were still incapacitated.
Obviously it would have to be made an offence to carry breathing apparatus in the passenger compartment of an aeroplane, but an oxygen tank is pretty hard to conceal anyway.
Alternatively, just have a self-destruct system and blow the plane clean out of the sky; passengers, crew and all. Just make sure the pieces were small enough not to do much damage to anything they landed on. At least that way, it would be impossible to hijack a plane. A couple of hundred civilian lives are a small price to pay for not letting terrorists get their way.
Maybe not Linux per se, but KMail shows you very clearly just how fake these fake e-mails are. And if you take the {small} amount of time it takes to learn to use GNU/Linux, then you will most probably pick up a few clues along the way.
There are almost no "working class" people left anymore in our disposable society. We all have mobile phones, computers and DVD players in the glorious reign of Tony Blair -- therefore we cannot, by definition, be working-class! The real jobs have been exported overseas, and all we have left is a consuming class: if they have jobs at all, it is something crap like sanitising telephones or cutting sandwiches {until kitchen knives are banned for safety reasons; then we will all have to put up with imported frozen sandwiches and pay the former sandwich-cutting former taxpayers dole money}. In the end, they will have no useful skills to help them survive: They need the Company's wages {to buy their naff polyester tracksuits, daft boots and counterfeit Burberry bags} more than The Company needs their labour. It is the Capitalist Wet Dream come true.
..... the bank won't be able to afford to pay you so much interest on your account if they have to reimburse some stupid rich tosser who fell for a phishing scam.
Why not get involved with your local LETS, offering a service to completely de-Microsoft people's computers and train them up in the use of Firefox {Web}, OpenOffice {word processing}, Evolution {e-mail} and PHPMyAdmim {database}? If you can do enough work for enough people, then you can almost end up doing without pound notes altogether. I say almost because there some things you still need to buy for which there aren't yet any shops that accept payment by barter.
First and foremost, the cost of housing needs to be brought down by any means necessary. Impose a duty on house sales: the higher the price, the higher the duty. Invest this money in building more council houses. When renting a home is cheaper than buying one {as it should be -- after all, you pay rent for as long as you live in a place, but you only pay a mortgage for a fixed term}, house prices will come down.
And if you have a bank account, remember you will end up paying for the phishing scams
For chuff's sake, get a chuffing grip!
The only people who fall for these things are the ones with no common sense. They are the same ones who, a few thousand years ago, would have been some wild creature's dinner. That's one of the reverse benefits {malefits?} of progress; it has allowed people to survive who would otherwise have perished through simple unfitness to do so, in turn lowering the mean fitness-for-survival of the human race as a whole. Nature keeps coming up with dafter and dafter idiots, but thanks to our idiot-friendly society, the wolves and the tigers are still starving.
For starters, why the chuff would a bank with which you don't even have an account send you an e-mail message? And why the chuff would they use a strangely-named GIF image of some awkwardly-phrased and badly-spelt text, asking you to confirm or update your details and including a bunch of meaningless words? Why the chuff would your own bank send you almost the same message -- but with a few changes to the "text" and a different name for the GIF image?
No bank would ever ask you to confirm your details in such an insecure way as over the Internet. No bank will ever ask you for your payment card PIN -- if it ever gets lost, they will just send you a new card and PIN. Similarly with passwords -- you pick a new one. The plaintext is never stored, just the scrambled form. What you entered is re-scrambled, and only the scrambled forms are compared. And if you want to update anything like your address if you move house or your name if you get married, you have to fill out a stackload of forms in a branch, in front of Bank staff.
You don't need to be a full-on computer security expert to know all this. You just need to have a bit of common sense, and to have read the literature the bank were legally obliged to give you when you opened your account.
IMHO, if you are stupid enough to get hit by a phishing scam, you deserve to lose everything -- and stand as an example to the rest of us. So we can say "Ha ha, at least I'm not that stupid" or "Oo-er, I'd better be careful".
"Maybe as good as The Empire Strikes Back".
So, better than Attack of the Clones {obviously} and The Phantom Menace, but not quite as good as the original Star Wars or Return of the Jedi?
I'm not holding my breath, I've drier lentils to soak.
Windows does not have a consistent structure for storing essential system configuration information {/etc}, a convention for instructing a running programme to re-read its configuration {SIGHUP} or a process sheduler {/sbin/init}. As a consequence of these omissions, it is necessary to stop and restart every running programme whenever a change is made. This leads to jokes like "The mouse has been moved. You need to reboot your system for the change to take effect."
A few years ago though, I remember some unix flavour insisting to recompile the kernel when an ordinarily trivial change was made {e.g. moving a device from one serial port to another}. Cue new joke -- "The mouse has been moved. You need to recompile your kernel for the change to take effect."
Typing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade costs somewhere between f**k-all and precious little. OK, so I have to ssh into every machine in the company to do it {or, absit omen, leave my desk}; but in the time it's taken me to post this comment I have already thought of at least two workarounds.
So are they saying Microsoft would write me a cheque if I patched a Windows system? Or are they just saying that somebody who goes around patching Windows systems will do it for a lot less money than someone who goes around patching Linux ones? Which is a no-brainer, because -- thanks to the wonders of random breakdowns -- there's this double-edged situation where a trained chimpanzee could make it look like they had fixed a Windows system, yet a real expert is just as likely as anyone to find their "repair" does not work in practice. This is why Windows technicians are cheap -- even if you know your stuff, the sad fact is that, through no fault of your own, many things are beyond your abilities; and there is no shortage of pissy-knickered schoolkid wannabees who'll do your job for less. By contrast, a Linux system either works or it doesn't, only ever doesn't work for a good reason and needs someone who understands Linux to fix it if it's broken. Linux technicians are expensive because it's damn nigh impossible for the aforementioned wannabees to bluff their way in.
Then you have Plausible Deniability.
Suppose a car rental company rents out a car to somebody who uses it to travel internationally and pick up a large stash of child pornography {in printed form}, class A drugs or weapons of mass destruction. Is that car rental company in any way legally complicit in the offence?
In the same way, you would not be found complicit if some third party does something with your network that you could not prevent outright, but would rather they didn't anyway. Just make sure outside connections are logged and users are aware of it. But that comes under the heading of "reasonable precautions" anyway.
The radio spectrum is a shared resource, and whether you like it or not, somebody is always going to be trying to use your wireless network. Nothing short of a Faraday cage around your perimeter is going to stop them if they're really determined. What's more, if you make it too hard to get in, you'll annoy them. It's better to limit the damage people can do if they get in, than to assume that they won't get in.
This isn't a kernel problem.
It's either an application problem or a hardware problem. Basically, used memory is not being zeroed out, so one programme can look at what another programme left behind.
In the case of a software frame buffer {like the 1980s home computers with bit-mapped graphics: Spectrum, BBC et al} failure to zero out memory causes spurious artifacts on the display. You can see this if you switch between graphics modes by writing to the hardware registers directly rather than using the "proper" system calls which clear the screen. {On the Beeb, you could actually grow a stack through the display memory. Pretty, but you'd better hope not to scroll the screen or print over that area.} The solution was implemented in software: create system calls that zero-out the display memory when switching graphics modes. {As a bonus, your users need only send one number to the routine, which can poke the right values into all the relevant registers on their behalf. They just don't get to invent their own graphics modes, but if you ever update the display ULA in future then at least you won't kill half the games software in existence.}
What we're talking about here is cache memory not being zeroed out between uses by successive processes. That looks to me very much like a hardware problem. It's not even an easy problem. My guess is that the implementors looked at it, decided "It's potentially insecure in theory but bloody difficult to make use of in practice", and left it that way on purpose. Like there's no point fitting an expensive lock on a wooden door with a person-sized glass panel in the middle of it -- especially if that door is only accessible through an overgrown garden with an underfed Alsatian in it.
BTW, crypto software running in userland could never, ever be made immune to snooping from kernel space -- at least, not on a system with any kind of debugging. The solution is to read and understand every bit of the kernel source -- including all drivers -- or get some independent expert to do so for you, so as to be sure the kernel contains nothing that could be used for malicious purposes. Hardware crypto devices would be more immune to tampering -- but less susceptible to independent verification.
Imagine this: <CHEESY MEXICAN ACCENT>Hey, extranjero! You want to send secret message? I chave code so secret, nobody onderstand eet 'cep' for me an' my brother. Djou dictates to me, one word a time, I write eet down in secret code. Then I send eet to my brother and che go to your amigo, and read heem the secret code. Nobody in world onderstand 'cep' my brother.</CHEESY MEXICAN ACCENT>
Not every distro relies on a heavily-patched kernel. Slackware use a kernel from kernel.org. Debian apply some kernel patches, but you can take an "ordinary" kernel and compile it and Debian userland will run just fine on it anyway.
..... in fact, a kernel/userland mismatch situation pretty much saved my job once.
Certain distributions {one named after a dog in an orange drink advert springs to mind} have a kernel so full of patches that the userland won't stay up on an "ordinary" kernel.
It's really only a big deal until some hacker figgers out how to graft the patchset for an older kernel onto the newest kernel. I for one would have no objection if software not compiled on my machine would not run there