I'm a little surprised there isn't anything there that applies to the Diebold documents. Granted, personal rights take a back seat to commercial interests in the great US of A, but I still think there oughta be some sort of exception for political speech.
But maybe I'm just a tad touchy because I just decided to mirror the documents. And I don't want to be sued.
It's a good point, but, ultimately, I still think tape is on its way out. Give it years, sure, but optical is cheaper and in many ways superior for external storage, and hard drives are faster, more convenient, and will be cheaper soon. Tapes are far too akward a medium to compete forever.
It is possible to break into a wipe multiple redundant backups in multiple physical locations. It is also possible to build a fairly secure dedicated backup server. With convenience comes some small security risk.
Honestly, though, as hard drive capacity increases and price decreases, tape storage is being replaced by RAID. Multiple copies on RAID in different physical locations have easily the reliability of tape. Tape's often have problems that are not apparent while they are being written, only when you try to get back your precious data. And the cost of a tape drive, new media, and maybe a changing robot (or minimum wage employee) has to be factored in as well. Tape is definitely on it's way out, if only slowly, as hard drive price per megabyte decreases.
You are right to criticize Linux for ease of use. But I don't think that equates to innovation. Making GUI's more comfortable, making controls more intuitive, that's not innovation. I am not denigrating those very real acheivments, but they aren't particularly revolutionary.
Linux made popular, and for many, pioneered a new method of software development. It even created an entirely new enterprise, you might say, service industries like RedHat who function with the profit margins and innovation of software companies. Linux is also very popular among schools, research instutitions, and labs. When someone needs a custom solution (i.e., an embedded Wireless AP that can work with our existing authentication system without buying an expensive ReefEdge or similar), they often turn to Linux (as I did in the above example).
Linux has not pioneered great things for the desktop or user interface. And coincidentally, Linux accounts for a miniscule fraction of the desktop market. But that does not mean Linux has not innovated.
I happen to largely agree with you, but I can guess at how someone who doesn't would answer. The justification is that it somehow serves our national or social interests to encourage civic-mindedness, including patriotism. Considering ROTC influence in high-schools and colleges--a number of prestigious universities have launched campaigns to reform their interaction with ROTC programs, such as the Navy's JAG at law schools, that are entitled to use of the schools' resources for recruitment in exchange for government funding, on the grounds that since those recruiters discriminate against gays, the situation is un-Constitutional--I think the Pledge is a fairly minor transgression.
Well, that was my point. That I don't fly a jet engine that has fly-by-wire.:P But those that do also have far more sophisticated redundancies for the electrical system; we have very limited backups (i.e. a battery that can go about 30 minutes if the alternator fails) since the electrical system is not strictly necessary.
Pilots are not required to carry a slide rule, but it is common practice. Pilots use a special circular slide rule known as an E6B, with a special design that makes it very easy to do calculations such as time needed to travel a certain distance at a certain speed, flight time for a certain amount of feul, etc.
I use an E6B, not for reliability but because it's cheap. But I've seen many catalogues and flight shops sell "electronic E6B's", presumably just calculators optimized again for those sorts of problems. I've seen them in use, but never tried it myself.
Anyway, if the avionics electronics all failed, you'd face more difficulties navigating than having your calculator or not, most likely (though you'd have no issues staying aloft on a plane thats not fly-by-wire--the avionics electrical system is independent of the magnetos that provide the spark for combustion in the engine).
As for computer viruses, there haven't been any viruses lately.
I'll admit, I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, so I'll just give you the benefit of the doubt.
For the increase in viruses, think about Sobig, as well as worms like Blaster and Welchia.
For why there may be a link between spam and viruses, it's been widely speculated that spammers are behind many infections, as a means of relaying messages through innocent hosts to avoid themselves being implicated and having their connections cut off.
For why Australia may be affected more noticably, my impression is that they have a much more concentrated ISP market with much fewer diversity. So where smaller ISPs in the States may not be noticed--many spammers try random names at big domains, like hotmail, but leave alone your smaller regional ISP--in Australia, the big ISPs are the only ISPs, so the increase in spam is more noticable by everyone online.
Sure there are, but people with Windows desktops who's mail servers run Linux aren't all that likely to register here. And there really aren't that many heavy-duty shell servers out there with a clientel more sophisticated than annoying IRC trolls, wannabe script-kiddies, and other undesirables who probably also wouldn't be bothered to register at the Linux Counter.
Why are there fewer Linux machines than Linux users (at a ratio of.898)? I can imagine there are a small number of Linux families--multiple people to a single computer--but I would guess this is far offset by the number of Linux users with multiple machines (which seems to be the norm among more computer-savvy folks; I know I actively use two Linux machines and an OpenBSD box and own a couple more older Linux machines that I've taken out of service). Could it be that many people consider themselves to be, spiritually, Linux users but do not actually own a Linux machine?
On a bit of a tangent, that is the sort of attitude that is a little annoying about the Linux community. Ideological choices about your OS make little sense, even less so for those who are so caught up in the ideology that they know little about the technical specifics. I use Linux in situations where it suits my needs--as a desktop mainly; I prefer other OSes for servers--but if another OS came along that suited my application better, I would have little hesitation in switching.
First off, it's usually called "social engineering," in my experience. Aside from that, yes, poor physical security is a fair consideration, but that has nothing to do with my point. My point was that if he considers himself a security expert in the fields of locks and safes, he still has little qualification to comment on software diversity. Security is security, but prison guars and locksmiths know little about buffer overflows or cross-site scripting.
It also includes, "while Linux plays a siren song of independence from Microsoft...companies increasingly view Linux as a better alternative platform." Sounds far less anti-Linux than after his professed conversion (brought about by some doubtlessly unprofessional letters from many who also certainly are not fit representatives of enterprise Linux).
Some other nice quotes: "AMD is... likely to either merge or more closely partner with Transmeta by the end of 2003 to create
a more compelling alternative to Intel's offerings."
"Microsoft animosity: The license changes instituted by Microsoft in the previous period have clearly
forced policy changes that should shift business away from the company long term. This will be
slowed by the unavailability of reasonable alternatives -- but the bar for that 'reasonableness' has
been lowered substantially and we expect certain accounts, like government, to be unusually
aggressive when considering the alternatives through 2003."
I didn't bother to gather up the stupid typos, etc. Maybe I should become a freelance editor for stupid hacks.
He did comment on how "[a] good chunk of [his] life was spent doing security audits," presumably computer security audits. On one of these (as I said, due to context, presumably computer security) audits, "[t]he central administrator kept a ring of keys for all of the doors, and put the keys to the confidential office safe on the same ring. It was relatively simple to penetrate her desk to get this ring of keys and access virtually everything."
Gee. I didn't realize pen-testing referred to breaking into people's desks and stealing their keyrings. Screw TCP/IP Illustrated. If you want to be a 1337 hacker, grab a fucking crowbar.
I use OpenBSD on my personal web and mail server, but for a project involving building a wireless access point out of a Soekris board (they're 486-based embedded system platforms; I think they were featured here on/. before) I chose Linux. The AP has to do authentication, and NAT those connections that are authenticated.
I looked at OpenBSD, but--and I'll admit, I'm not that familiar with pf--if I'm not mistaken it isn't possible to actually set the index of a rule for evaluation like one can do with iptables -I. So for example, the default rule is deny all, nat outgoing tcp/80 to the authentication server. If someone is authenticated, a rule for his MAC needs to be evaluated above that default rule. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to set precedence of evaluation. I can't imagine this is totally impossible, though, so if anyone knows...?
Other than that, I have to agree with your comments. Ports are largely comparable to apt, though perhaps not quite as good (FreeBSD ports are a bit more polished, and by the way, Open suggests that you use packages as they are more frequently maintained). Other than that, configurations are slightly different, but overall behavior is largely the same. Faster, more secure, and more stable much of the time, though.
I used to use Proxomitron on my Windows machine all the time (back when I had a Windows machine). But it is important to note that it is no longer in active development, and may concievable have security vulnerabilities. You may want to consider alternatives. I use Privoxy on my Linux and Unix machines, and while it's not as user-friendly as Proxomitron, it's easily as effective. There are many other alternatives as well, but I haven't tried them (and yes, Privoxy runs on Windows).
That's hilarious. I stumbled across EMusic (thanks to a mention of it in Zinf) at about the end of last week. I tried out the free demo, and figured $45 for three months of downloading was worth it. After all, I could only get about 3 albums for that price on CD; here I could find easily 10 or 20 good ones and tons more I wouldn't mind, so I figured it would pay for itself.
So I registered for the 3 month service ($15 a month) last Sunday and started downloading. Now, you only can queue 45 tracks at any given time, which is a real pain (I considered scripting something to aid me on this, but never got around to it). But whenever I was at my machine, I'd click on new albums to download. Finding good artists was easy--EMusic doesn't have the absolute widest selection--so I just started at CCR, downloading every single album, and went right through 'till I realized on Tuesday that I had nearly 4000 tracks. W00t.
Well, on Teusday, when I was sorta coming off that initial orgy of downloading, I got the following e-mail from EMusic:
NOTICE OF SUBSCRIPTION TERMINATION
Your EMusic.com subscription has been permanently
terminated pursuant to sections 5.3 and 7.1 of the
EMusic.com Subscription Agreement due to account
activity in violation of the terms and spirit of the
EMusic service.
The monthly subscription fee collected by EMusic.com
with respect to the current period shall be reimbursed
to your credit card account and EMusic.com will not
bill for those months remaining of your subscription
commitment period.
Now, just to make it clear to anyone who missed the implications: my usage patterns apparently matched those of a 'bot (and why not--I was a machine!). So EMusic cancelled my subscription and refunded my service fee. I got 4000 MP3s, legally, for absolutely free. So as I said, w00t. Too bad this service isn't around any more.
I think it was Kasporov who claimed--and this appears to be a very Kasporovian thing to do, from what I've heard--that the IBM technicians administering Deep Blue cheated by having speakers attached to the machine (why would it have speakers, anyway?) play speech-synthesized clips from Shakespear to insult him, distracting him during his turns.
I honestly can't remember where I read this, and whether it was parody or real. But the thought is pretty funny.
I don't know about that. You certainly have a point, but they did say they are working to develop more secure IDSs. Obviously, the best IDS won't tell you if your tech-support guys are morons who give out passwords, or if your CEO likes to download porn-dialers. But IDSs can, ideally, detect odd behavior on the network on hosts. So while their findings are definitely very limited, the application is just as limited, I think, and probably unaffected by the warped testing conditions.
Hey, it's cool. I'm sure I've done that before, too. And you do see a lot of nonsense on Slashdot;)
I know I'd prefer OSX over Windows any day (being solely a Linux user on my desktop, though), if only I could afford it, but I don't think I'm representative of most Mac users. But since the Mac customer base is so small, all those media pros definitely play a big role.
Read what I said before you comment. I said more media-savvy. Not more tech-savvy. Apple's greatest market-share is among digital media professionals. They don't know how to code, but they do know how to rip CDs.
I didn't know he picked on Dell. That's just weird.
But in terms of Apple promoting piracy, I don't think its so much deliberate as it is that Apple caters to a certain market. Dell caters to home PC users who don't know a whole lot; Apple caters to, if not more knowledgable users in general, at least more media-savvy. iMovie is a good example of this; at least part of Apple's marketshare are digital media pros; many of the others are hobbyists.
Apple's customers often have iPods, DVD burners, broadband connections. Apple is, as you say, no more responsible for how these are used than Dell is for their digital media offerings. But Apple's customers probably do get more use out of theirs.
It crosses my mind that this was part of how Apple got the RIAA onboard with iTunes. "Look, our customers have all they need for digital music on a grand scale. If we don't provide it legally, they'll just get it illegally." It's not that Apple endorses piracy, I don't think. But you think they ever wonder how someone can possibly fill a 30GB iPod?
Slashdot Mirror
But maybe I'm just a tad touchy because I just decided to mirror the documents. And I don't want to be sued.
It's a good point, but, ultimately, I still think tape is on its way out. Give it years, sure, but optical is cheaper and in many ways superior for external storage, and hard drives are faster, more convenient, and will be cheaper soon. Tapes are far too akward a medium to compete forever.
It is possible to break into a wipe multiple redundant backups in multiple physical locations. It is also possible to build a fairly secure dedicated backup server. With convenience comes some small security risk.
Honestly, though, as hard drive capacity increases and price decreases, tape storage is being replaced by RAID. Multiple copies on RAID in different physical locations have easily the reliability of tape. Tape's often have problems that are not apparent while they are being written, only when you try to get back your precious data. And the cost of a tape drive, new media, and maybe a changing robot (or minimum wage employee) has to be factored in as well. Tape is definitely on it's way out, if only slowly, as hard drive price per megabyte decreases.
Linux made popular, and for many, pioneered a new method of software development. It even created an entirely new enterprise, you might say, service industries like RedHat who function with the profit margins and innovation of software companies. Linux is also very popular among schools, research instutitions, and labs. When someone needs a custom solution (i.e., an embedded Wireless AP that can work with our existing authentication system without buying an expensive ReefEdge or similar), they often turn to Linux (as I did in the above example).
Linux has not pioneered great things for the desktop or user interface. And coincidentally, Linux accounts for a miniscule fraction of the desktop market. But that does not mean Linux has not innovated.
Does Linus use teeth whitener?
I happen to largely agree with you, but I can guess at how someone who doesn't would answer. The justification is that it somehow serves our national or social interests to encourage civic-mindedness, including patriotism. Considering ROTC influence in high-schools and colleges--a number of prestigious universities have launched campaigns to reform their interaction with ROTC programs, such as the Navy's JAG at law schools, that are entitled to use of the schools' resources for recruitment in exchange for government funding, on the grounds that since those recruiters discriminate against gays, the situation is un-Constitutional--I think the Pledge is a fairly minor transgression.
Well, that was my point. That I don't fly a jet engine that has fly-by-wire. :P But those that do also have far more sophisticated redundancies for the electrical system; we have very limited backups (i.e. a battery that can go about 30 minutes if the alternator fails) since the electrical system is not strictly necessary.
I use an E6B, not for reliability but because it's cheap. But I've seen many catalogues and flight shops sell "electronic E6B's", presumably just calculators optimized again for those sorts of problems. I've seen them in use, but never tried it myself.
Anyway, if the avionics electronics all failed, you'd face more difficulties navigating than having your calculator or not, most likely (though you'd have no issues staying aloft on a plane thats not fly-by-wire--the avionics electrical system is independent of the magnetos that provide the spark for combustion in the engine).
I'll admit, I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, so I'll just give you the benefit of the doubt.
For the increase in viruses, think about Sobig, as well as worms like Blaster and Welchia.
For why there may be a link between spam and viruses, it's been widely speculated that spammers are behind many infections, as a means of relaying messages through innocent hosts to avoid themselves being implicated and having their connections cut off.
For why Australia may be affected more noticably, my impression is that they have a much more concentrated ISP market with much fewer diversity. So where smaller ISPs in the States may not be noticed--many spammers try random names at big domains, like hotmail, but leave alone your smaller regional ISP--in Australia, the big ISPs are the only ISPs, so the increase in spam is more noticable by everyone online.
Or something.
Sure there are, but people with Windows desktops who's mail servers run Linux aren't all that likely to register here. And there really aren't that many heavy-duty shell servers out there with a clientel more sophisticated than annoying IRC trolls, wannabe script-kiddies, and other undesirables who probably also wouldn't be bothered to register at the Linux Counter.
On a bit of a tangent, that is the sort of attitude that is a little annoying about the Linux community. Ideological choices about your OS make little sense, even less so for those who are so caught up in the ideology that they know little about the technical specifics. I use Linux in situations where it suits my needs--as a desktop mainly; I prefer other OSes for servers--but if another OS came along that suited my application better, I would have little hesitation in switching.
First off, it's usually called "social engineering," in my experience. Aside from that, yes, poor physical security is a fair consideration, but that has nothing to do with my point. My point was that if he considers himself a security expert in the fields of locks and safes, he still has little qualification to comment on software diversity. Security is security, but prison guars and locksmiths know little about buffer overflows or cross-site scripting.
It also includes, "while Linux plays a siren song of independence from Microsoft...companies increasingly view Linux as a better alternative platform." Sounds far less anti-Linux than after his professed conversion (brought about by some doubtlessly unprofessional letters from many who also certainly are not fit representatives of enterprise Linux).
Some other nice quotes: "AMD is ... likely to either merge or more closely partner with Transmeta by the end of 2003 to create
a more compelling alternative to Intel's offerings."
"Microsoft animosity: The license changes instituted by Microsoft in the previous period have clearly forced policy changes that should shift business away from the company long term. This will be slowed by the unavailability of reasonable alternatives -- but the bar for that 'reasonableness' has been lowered substantially and we expect certain accounts, like government, to be unusually aggressive when considering the alternatives through 2003."
I didn't bother to gather up the stupid typos, etc. Maybe I should become a freelance editor for stupid hacks.
Gee. I didn't realize pen-testing referred to breaking into people's desks and stealing their keyrings. Screw TCP/IP Illustrated. If you want to be a 1337 hacker, grab a fucking crowbar.
I looked at OpenBSD, but--and I'll admit, I'm not that familiar with pf--if I'm not mistaken it isn't possible to actually set the index of a rule for evaluation like one can do with iptables -I. So for example, the default rule is deny all, nat outgoing tcp/80 to the authentication server. If someone is authenticated, a rule for his MAC needs to be evaluated above that default rule. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to set precedence of evaluation. I can't imagine this is totally impossible, though, so if anyone knows...?
Other than that, I have to agree with your comments. Ports are largely comparable to apt, though perhaps not quite as good (FreeBSD ports are a bit more polished, and by the way, Open suggests that you use packages as they are more frequently maintained). Other than that, configurations are slightly different, but overall behavior is largely the same. Faster, more secure, and more stable much of the time, though.
What are gumboots?
I used to use Proxomitron on my Windows machine all the time (back when I had a Windows machine). But it is important to note that it is no longer in active development, and may concievable have security vulnerabilities. You may want to consider alternatives. I use Privoxy on my Linux and Unix machines, and while it's not as user-friendly as Proxomitron, it's easily as effective. There are many other alternatives as well, but I haven't tried them (and yes, Privoxy runs on Windows).
So I registered for the 3 month service ($15 a month) last Sunday and started downloading. Now, you only can queue 45 tracks at any given time, which is a real pain (I considered scripting something to aid me on this, but never got around to it). But whenever I was at my machine, I'd click on new albums to download. Finding good artists was easy--EMusic doesn't have the absolute widest selection--so I just started at CCR, downloading every single album, and went right through 'till I realized on Tuesday that I had nearly 4000 tracks. W00t.
Well, on Teusday, when I was sorta coming off that initial orgy of downloading, I got the following e-mail from EMusic:
Now, just to make it clear to anyone who missed the implications: my usage patterns apparently matched those of a 'bot (and why not--I was a machine!). So EMusic cancelled my subscription and refunded my service fee. I got 4000 MP3s, legally, for absolutely free. So as I said, w00t. Too bad this service isn't around any more.
I honestly can't remember where I read this, and whether it was parody or real. But the thought is pretty funny.
I don't know about that. You certainly have a point, but they did say they are working to develop more secure IDSs. Obviously, the best IDS won't tell you if your tech-support guys are morons who give out passwords, or if your CEO likes to download porn-dialers. But IDSs can, ideally, detect odd behavior on the network on hosts. So while their findings are definitely very limited, the application is just as limited, I think, and probably unaffected by the warped testing conditions.
I know I'd prefer OSX over Windows any day (being solely a Linux user on my desktop, though), if only I could afford it, but I don't think I'm representative of most Mac users. But since the Mac customer base is so small, all those media pros definitely play a big role.
Um. You need to chill out. Thanks for the defense and all, but, seriously. Get a life.
Read what I said before you comment. I said more media-savvy. Not more tech-savvy. Apple's greatest market-share is among digital media professionals. They don't know how to code, but they do know how to rip CDs.
But in terms of Apple promoting piracy, I don't think its so much deliberate as it is that Apple caters to a certain market. Dell caters to home PC users who don't know a whole lot; Apple caters to, if not more knowledgable users in general, at least more media-savvy. iMovie is a good example of this; at least part of Apple's marketshare are digital media pros; many of the others are hobbyists.
Apple's customers often have iPods, DVD burners, broadband connections. Apple is, as you say, no more responsible for how these are used than Dell is for their digital media offerings. But Apple's customers probably do get more use out of theirs.
It crosses my mind that this was part of how Apple got the RIAA onboard with iTunes. "Look, our customers have all they need for digital music on a grand scale. If we don't provide it legally, they'll just get it illegally." It's not that Apple endorses piracy, I don't think. But you think they ever wonder how someone can possibly fill a 30GB iPod?