I couldn't agree more about remote backdoors being bad. HOwever...
I run a web server which is located at a site about 30 miles from my office. (for the record I don't drive). THe only system running on that webserver that allows remote access is ssh running on a non-standard port. If, for some reason, the ssh daemon dies, I'm fucked. I have to get out to the site ASAP and get it back up. I don't want to do that. If there is a backdoor/exploit in Apache that would allow me to get ssh running again, I'd be much happier using that....
I say bug, but it could be anything, from a hacker to a freak EM storm currupting the system. And who said anything about a Unix system? That's not the only OS used in mission critical systems, y'know...
THe most famous company for having a backdoor is possibly Novell... have you ever heard of burglar.nlm?
It was developed for use by Novell support engineers to reset the supervisor password in Netware in the event that it was somehow lost (be it a crash in the server, a hack, or forgetfullness). All they needed to do was get to the server console, install the NLM and wehay! No supervisor password.
However, the NLM got out, and due to bugs in Netware ppl could install the NLM remotely, hack into rconsole and voila! A nice new 0wn3d network...
After a while, Novell (Apparently) started terminating support contracts on any system that had burglar on it.
Backdoors aren't always a bad thing. Hypothetical situation...
Say due to some "bug" in the software, you get locked out of your mission critical system. How do you get back in? You phone tech. support and ask for help. 2 possible outcomes: Format and complete reinstall (you only last the last x hours/days/weeks work), or they send out an engineer with knowledge of a backdoor and allow you access to your system again. Personally, I'd prefer the latter of the 2 options, it's a helluva that more cost effective in the long term, and helps support of the software.
THe one downfall to this is that people MAY (not nessecarilly will) discover the backdoor and exploit it, however, if the backdoor is there, chances are there is a way to disable it (as in this case, deleting a dll file). Maybe MS did a good thing here, maybe not. WHo's to say?
Maybe we're taking the wrong approach to AI atm. Maybe we shouldn't try to create something with human intelligence, or even monkey-like intelligence. We should aim small to begin with, then build on what we discover.
AI and A-Life are a big hobby of mine... I'm developing a software system that should be capable of evolution (in the Darwin sense (survival of the fittest), not the "oh, I don't work, must fix myself" sense). However, finding an environment where a piece of software has netural enemies will cast doubts onto the nature of the system (can you guess what it is?), but with any luck, I may get results...
If I were in control of MS, and the government tried to break me up, I'd relocate the HQ to another company, out of US juristiction. Infact, all of the suggested penelties would be solved that way. The US can only impose their sentences within the US (other countries can follow suit, yes, but that would mean another lengthy trial). If licensing restrictions are imposed, would they be imposed worldwide or just in the US?
IMHO, that post was perfectly on topic. This is a YRO article, and what's being discussed is online rights (mainly censorship^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmoderation).
/. is a perfect example of why censorship is sometimes required (the A/C trolling does seriously piss me off at times, but sometimes it is hilarious), but it also shows that the power of censorship is easy to abuse if it is in the hands of the wrong people.
I'm not pro-censorship, but I'm not anti-censorship either. There are some things that really needs censoring (who wants to see videos of 4 year olds giving blowjobs?), but opinions aren't one of them. I expect most of the/. mods are Open Source fanatics of some form, and they'd get seriously pissed off if someone decided to deny other people access to their code, so why deny people access to other peoples comments?
I couldn't agree more. I know plenty of girls IRC that like computers and technology...
I live in Bath, UK, (where Netcraft are based) and sometimes go for drinks with some of the staff from Netcraft. I sometimes bring a friend of mine (her web page is here. At some point during the evening, the subject of Windoze coding came up. She was the only person there who knew what the Win32 API was (she's still in school, and some of the big Netcraft techs were there).
Girls having an interest in computers and technology isn't anything new.
I'm starting to agree with the common/. opinion of Katz... GET A LIFE!
It is more efficient to search from a small base to a larger base...
For example, if you wanted to find shop.uk.com, you are searching a very large dataset, where as shop.co.uk is much smaller (it would only encompass the.uk tld). Some hypothetical figures:
Let's assume there are 128 countries (remember, we're being hypothetical)
You have 2 choices. You search the.com TLD for the country (which would have to be located on a centralised DNS server, otherwise how would you know which on to search), or you have 128 different DNS servers and you know which on you want. The latter option also has the advantage of redusing load on the servers, as the single centralised server (granted, it could be a farm with load balancing, but the problem is still there) would have to deal with every single DNS request.
I think (but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) but New Scientist is an English (as in, not American, not language) magazine, so they probably saw it on UK Gold or something....
FYI, NT is not built on DOS at all. While Windows 9x uses the DOS kernel, NT doesn't.
NT uses the "Windows NT Executive" (that blue pretty (and frightenenly familiar) blue screen that you see on bootup). Thatis the NT kernel. NT might include a DOS like Command Prompt, but then, so do many other OSes (like AmigaOS had CLI), but this isn't DOS, at all. That is one of the biggest differences betweem NT and Win9x.
Hmmm... seems alot of people work well to NIN... Maybe I should take a laptop to their concert here in the UK on Dec 1st and actually get some work done...
No, Hotmail was moved to the passport server after the minor (understatement) security incident. That was a reletively good move on their part. Microsoft does do good things occasionally.
Get a clue. The MacOS and Linux ports of q3a were released first to stop a deluge of bug reports from millions of users, as there are less people on those platforms, so the Windoze versions would be more stable.
I hate to disagree (no, really, I do), but I have found that some people are interested in (h|cr)acking taking place in real time... let me share a little anecdote...
Last week, I discovered my college had blocked a certain website which I post to regularly, we'll call it, um, dotslash for now... As you can imagine, I was most displeased. Now, this college knew very little about security problems, and they ran a vanilla install of IIS4. So, there I was, on the college webserver, sending a polite note from Administrator to the sysadmin asking them to unblock dotslash (I didn't do any damage to the webserver, that would be wrong), but what I was doing generated alot of interest from the group (mostly cute girls, I might add). However, when I'm "hacking" (coding), I generally get very little interest (unless it involves pretty pictures, again, the cute girls....), so "script-kiddie" type hax0rz (sorry, had to be done) do seem to have a lot of pulling power....
Some minor discrepancy which catched my eye. The author first states that
(A) Authoritarian methods will kill any given open source project more effectively than anything else.
and later (B)
Open source may sound democratic, but it isn't. Leaders of the best known open source development efforts often explicitely stated that they function as dictators
It seems impossible that booth of these statements are true. Did the author miss something here?
These statements back each other up. The first one says that dictatorships will kill an OS project, the second one says that the best known OS projects have dictators, ergo, OS will fail (not my personally opinion, but that of the original author). There is no contradiction in either of these statements.
Slashdot Mirror
ALso, wouldn't that be creating a backdoor?
There is no way in hell I'd reboot this server...
it takes about 10 minutes doing the memory check...
I couldn't agree more about remote backdoors being bad. HOwever...
I run a web server which is located at a site about 30 miles from my office. (for the record I don't drive). THe only system running on that webserver that allows remote access is ssh running on a non-standard port. If, for some reason, the ssh daemon dies, I'm fucked. I have to get out to the site ASAP and get it back up. I don't want to do that. If there is a backdoor/exploit in Apache that would allow me to get ssh running again, I'd be much happier using that....
I say bug, but it could be anything, from a hacker to a freak EM storm currupting the system. And who said anything about a Unix system? That's not the only OS used in mission critical systems, y'know...
THe most famous company for having a backdoor is possibly Novell... have you ever heard of burglar.nlm?
It was developed for use by Novell support engineers to reset the supervisor password in Netware in the event that it was somehow lost (be it a crash in the server, a hack, or forgetfullness). All they needed to do was get to the server console, install the NLM and wehay! No supervisor password.
However, the NLM got out, and due to bugs in Netware ppl could install the NLM remotely, hack into rconsole and voila! A nice new 0wn3d network...
After a while, Novell (Apparently) started terminating support contracts on any system that had burglar on it.
Backdoors aren't always a bad thing. Hypothetical situation...
Say due to some "bug" in the software, you get locked out of your mission critical system. How do you get back in? You phone tech. support and ask for help. 2 possible outcomes: Format and complete reinstall (you only last the last x hours/days/weeks work), or they send out an engineer with knowledge of a backdoor and allow you access to your system again. Personally, I'd prefer the latter of the 2 options, it's a helluva that more cost effective in the long term, and helps support of the software.
THe one downfall to this is that people MAY (not nessecarilly will) discover the backdoor and exploit it, however, if the backdoor is there, chances are there is a way to disable it (as in this case, deleting a dll file). Maybe MS did a good thing here, maybe not. WHo's to say?
Isn't it moronic that you had to point it out?
How about a simple bash script that detects new /. articles and automatically does a first post?
That'd prolly piss off alotta trolls out there, are smarter, artificial troll that did the job better than you did...
Maybe we're taking the wrong approach to AI atm. Maybe we shouldn't try to create something with human intelligence, or even monkey-like intelligence. We should aim small to begin with, then build on what we discover.
AI and A-Life are a big hobby of mine... I'm developing a software system that should be capable of evolution (in the Darwin sense (survival of the fittest), not the "oh, I don't work, must fix myself" sense). However, finding an environment where a piece of software has netural enemies will cast doubts onto the nature of the system (can you guess what it is?), but with any luck, I may get results...
The GNU way... rip off other ppls code...
If I were in control of MS, and the government tried to break me up, I'd relocate the HQ to another company, out of US juristiction. Infact, all of the suggested penelties would be solved that way. The US can only impose their sentences within the US (other countries can follow suit, yes, but that would mean another lengthy trial). If licensing restrictions are imposed, would they be imposed worldwide or just in the US?
IMHO, that post was perfectly on topic. This is a YRO article, and what's being discussed is online rights (mainly censorship^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmoderation).
/. mods are Open Source fanatics of some form, and they'd get seriously pissed off if someone decided to deny other people access to their code, so why deny people access to other peoples comments?
/. is a perfect example of why censorship is sometimes required (the A/C trolling does seriously piss me off at times, but sometimes it is hilarious), but it also shows that the power of censorship is easy to abuse if it is in the hands of the wrong people.
I'm not pro-censorship, but I'm not anti-censorship either. There are some things that really needs censoring (who wants to see videos of 4 year olds giving blowjobs?), but opinions aren't one of them. I expect most of the
Churchill's Commentary on Man: Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on
THat was the quote at the bottom of the article...
Oops... IRC should read IRL...
*need to get out more*
I couldn't agree more. I know plenty of girls IRC that like computers and technology...
/. opinion of Katz... GET A LIFE!
I live in Bath, UK, (where Netcraft are based) and sometimes go for drinks with some of the staff from Netcraft. I sometimes bring a friend of mine (her web page is here. At some point during the evening, the subject of Windoze coding came up. She was the only person there who knew what the Win32 API was (she's still in school, and some of the big Netcraft techs were there).
Girls having an interest in computers and technology isn't anything new.
I'm starting to agree with the common
It is more efficient to search from a small base to a larger base...
.uk tld). Some hypothetical figures:
.com TLD for the country (which would have to be located on a centralised DNS server, otherwise how would you know which on to search), or you have 128 different DNS servers and you know which on you want. The latter option also has the advantage of redusing load on the servers, as the single centralised server (granted, it could be a farm with load balancing, but the problem is still there) would have to deal with every single DNS request.
For example, if you wanted to find shop.uk.com, you are searching a very large dataset, where as shop.co.uk is much smaller (it would only encompass the
Let's assume there are 128 countries (remember, we're being hypothetical)
You have 2 choices. You search the
I think (but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) but New Scientist is an English (as in, not American, not language) magazine, so they probably saw it on UK Gold or something....
FYI, NT is not built on DOS at all. While Windows 9x uses the DOS kernel, NT doesn't.
NT uses the "Windows NT Executive" (that blue pretty (and frightenenly familiar) blue screen that you see on bootup). Thatis the NT kernel. NT might include a DOS like Command Prompt, but then, so do many other OSes (like AmigaOS had CLI), but this isn't DOS, at all. That is one of the biggest differences betweem NT and Win9x.
Just a quick question, but does/will it support DirectX?
Hmmm... seems alot of people work well to NIN...
Maybe I should take a laptop to their concert here in the UK on Dec 1st and actually get some work done...
IIRC, FireFly is/was a music database that used an interesting AI system to assist users selecting other albums based on a small selection.
I really don't see what this has to do with Passport?
No, Hotmail was moved to the passport server after the minor (understatement) security incident. That was a reletively good move on their part. Microsoft does do good things occasionally.
Get a clue. The MacOS and Linux ports of q3a were released first to stop a deluge of bug reports from millions of users, as there are less people on those platforms, so the Windoze versions would be more stable.
I hate to disagree (no, really, I do), but I have found that some people are interested in (h|cr)acking taking place in real time... let me share a little anecdote...
Last week, I discovered my college had blocked a certain website which I post to regularly, we'll call it, um, dotslash for now... As you can imagine, I was most displeased. Now, this college knew very little about security problems, and they ran a vanilla install of IIS4. So, there I was, on the college webserver, sending a polite note from Administrator to the sysadmin asking them to unblock dotslash (I didn't do any damage to the webserver, that would be wrong), but what I was doing generated alot of interest from the group (mostly cute girls, I might add). However, when I'm "hacking" (coding), I generally get very little interest (unless it involves pretty pictures, again, the cute girls....), so "script-kiddie" type hax0rz (sorry, had to be done) do seem to have a lot of pulling power....
Some minor discrepancy which catched my eye. The author first states that
(A) Authoritarian methods will kill any given open source project more effectively than anything else.
and later (B)
Open source may sound democratic, but it isn't. Leaders of the best known open source development efforts often explicitely stated that they function as dictators
It seems impossible that booth of these statements are true. Did the author miss something here?
These statements back each other up. The first one says that dictatorships will kill an OS project, the second one says that the best known OS projects have dictators, ergo, OS will fail (not my personally opinion, but that of the original author). There is no contradiction in either of these statements.