Ask any webmaster who's been around for a decade about broken standards. Netscape didn't even comply with the standards THEY created!
I'm well aware of the horrors of Netscapes adherance to standards. My point is that Microsoft helped tie users into IE by moving the goal posts enough to make pages look terrible in anything other than IE as time went on.
Because of both IE and Netscape, webmasters suffered. But that was not my point. My point was that IE was a "pleasure to use" comparatively, because Microsoft exploited the fact that they shipped IE in Windows by default. Instant market share which allowed them to change things as time went on in such a way to make other browsers look like crap and thus increase their market share. Forcing everyone else to play catch up.
So how then is Microsoft to blame for breaking the same "standards?"
Netscape does it so Microsoft are excused? For me it has to do with Microsofts dishonest leap to dominance, with massive resources at hand they decided to sabotage the competition at the expense of leaving a mess behind them for everyone else to worry about but them.
Two wrongs. I'm not laying all the blame on Microsoft, but they certainly played a big role and MS innovation is the topic. MS innovates nasty business tactics.
Re:What has you chained to your firewall?
on
Tear Down the Firewall
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...my philosophy was "I'm running port scanning to make sure 22, 80 and 443 are the only ports listening on the boxes - why should I put a firewall in front of it to only let those ports through?... But, unfortunately, you can't just throw the firewalls out even if you don't need them.
But you do need them. You should assume that your servers will get rooted, in which case they may soon be listening on any other ports and initiating connections to anywhere also on any port, or even DoS'ing the rest of your internal machines or worse still machines external to your network.
The power of a dedicated firewall, is that since it may be dedicated to tasks such as segmenting networks, packet filtering, prioritization and bandwidth shaping, but with no accessible service, it is highly unlikely to become rooted and thus is perfect for enforcement of rules or even damage control should a machine become rooted.
You can do so much with a dedicated firewall and whatever you do, it will not just get disabled once an externally reachable service gets rooted.
They mat not have been the first on the scene with a browser, but they were certainly the first to produce one that was a pleasure to use (by the standards at the time)
and achieved that by breaking standards no less! Oh what a legacy they have left! A severely disabled, confused www.
What about the open source guys? Ah, the business model is interesting but we haven't seen much in the way of technical innovation.
What have Microsoft actually innovated? I would seriously like to know. All I ever see from them is new functionality in the form of defensive answers to the innovation of others. They copy, modify or buy innovation. But what have they genuinely innovated?
I love using OpenBSD servers and firewalls, OSX desktops and begrudgingly use Windows XP Pro on my laptop (along with FreeSBD, which I love too). I just bought a very nice new Sony VAIO VGN-A49GP notebook with a 1920x1200 17" LCD display. The display is spectacular to say the least, but text is difficult to read at the default dpi setting within Windows XP of 96dpi. This displays true resolution is about 133dpi so I have tried various settings within XP including the "Large Size (120dpi)" setting which I figured would be catered for well. All settings larger than 96dpi, even the 120dpi option, cause font problems within system dialogs and web sites including Microsofts own from within IE. Often text within a SYSTEM dialog renders beyond the window it is within and is thus unreadable. I can't imagine such a problem occuring within OSX. Even Windows XP is still a dogs breakfast in these sorts of regards and shows that Microsoft products are still completely covered in bandages, instead of being fixed at fundamental levels. Do they even bother testing these perhaps fringe settings? 120dpi is their "Large Size" setting, so you would think at least it was tested. Could this come down to the driver? If so I would have to say that that indicates a fundamental design flaw if a driver is able to cause such havoc.
OpenBSD has deployed (I realise they may not have innovated the fundamentals) active memory protection security measures which Microsoft attempted much later and only came half way to what OpenBSD deployed.
Microsoft is not leading innovation in usability or security and I personally would say they are also not leading in stability (although I agree they have come a very long way). Performance is an area where there is a lot of overlap, but for a company with so much money and so many paid developers, I have to wonder why they don't have it all?
Oh no, wait a second, no I don't... that's right, they trumpet features and all those other things in prime time slots, etc and sell product based more on the trumpetting than the actual quality they deliver. I guess this is to be expected though, just like from the rest of the big capitalist corps like Cisco, Sony, Apple... wait, then how is it that Apple can keep reinventing themselves and their products, while keeping viable AND delivering quality products?
I live for the day when Microsoft dies. Thank heavens FreeBSD runs on my $5,000 AU notebook. ; )
some cheap players to beat the quality of some expensive "audiophile" *cough* *cough* units.
I remember a $75 Marantz CD player having MUCH better specs than a $25,000 Meridian.
The Meridian looked cheap and nasty to the eye and the price tag held NOTHING but an empty reputation.
Lots of audiophile targetted equipment is severely over priced and yet audiophile mags give them wonderful reviews, but with nothing but subjective opinion and meaningless remarks like "fluid" and "warm".
On a side note, I wonder if the days of truely high quality gear, like the Pioneer M-91 power amp, are over? Because I don't see the sorts of numbers it offered.
There are lots of different companies making SPARC laptops. I think even Acer makes some.
Do a search for SPARC notebook or laptop from Google. Unfortunately, they are expensive. I was considering getting one until I saw the prices. $6,000 - $30,000 Australian dollars.
The $30,000 unit would be many times slower than some of Dell's cheapest, nastiest boat anchors.
I like the UltraSPARC and don't mind a performance hit to be able to have OpenBSD sparc64 in my backpack. But the prices are not worth it for the mere tinker value which I would like.
If a decent UltraSPARC II based unit was the cost of a Powerbook, I'd probably buy it.
FreeBSD, being rather generic in focus, is a tougher one to design for. Maybe the guy who owns the beastie copyright will transfer it to FreeBSD (or grant unlimited license, etc.) and beastie will become official.
He's a cool guy actually. He's written books, papers and BSD code and most recently on a book on FreeBSD, so who knows. I don't know if FreeBSD would want exclusive rights to Beastie though. Since Beastie has such a general BSD history, FreeBSD would probably still want an image for their own identity.
Sorry, but I don't find NetBSD's logo (as linked in the summary) to be very creative.
I hated it at first, but it has since grown on me. Although previous NetBSD images were not great anyway. I like FreeBSD's Beastie though.
The much liked OpenBSD wireframe demon head T-shirt is not longer being made and they now have a wireframe puffy shirt which in my opinion does not look anywhere near as good. Lucky I bought two of the originals a while ago.
There claim of a 500 mph cruse has yet to be proven. I will believe it when I see it.
Me too. Considering that in the land of Unlimited Air Racing, where people take old WWII fighters and soup them up like top fuel dragsters of the skies, those fixed-wing built-for-speed machines have to be pushed really hard to crack 500MPH. They push their engines 3,500-4,000 HP and the typical result is an engine which explodes or a high speed run which frustratingly does not quite manage 500MPH. 450MPH is typical. 500MPH is the golden number for these guys and breaking it gets you close to the Piston Engined World Speed Record for a 15km run (517MPH).
It is not only big characters. You told "it is not their computer" but what about when it is "their" computer? If they bougth it from an research project of them, and they are paying conectivity from their research projects and they are the "starlets" you loose all the authority to tell them "this can't be done", even if it is so they can make better use of those tools. I've just seen it too many times.
Yes but it's the companies network and selling network access to these people should be accompanied with a TOS agreement which both parties agree to prior to giving access and paying money.
If the person involved is not happy with the TOS, outsource their Internet access and then they're on their own. We did this where I worked. Unfortunately, it's these difficult users who cause something like an educational institution (which you would expect to be a cooperative entity), to resort to TOS and SLA's which departments must agree to to be supported.
We took a hard line, but I'll admit that it went too far and I was often helping staff members in creative ways because management (IT and upper) went too far with enforcement. Ultimately good staff members were put out by a minority of bad.
I guess this reflects society in general in some respects and is to be expected in large entities like edu's.
Contradictory. The business is responsible for the actions of its staff members, correct. This is a case for the staff members being responsible for the actions of the business. If the two are, I don't know the proper Australian legal term, but here it's "procurists", i.e. authorized to make legal representation of the company, as a member of the executive board would be, then yes. Otherwise, they should not be held personally responsible. Note that they didn't commit a crime per se, simply ignored or were blissfully unaware of, communication attempts with no guarantee of contact.
Actually it is not contradictory because it is not that black and white. The company is in trouble and the individuals are in trouble. If people were not responsible also on a personal level, then you get the problem where a disgruntled staff member can harm the company severely and then walk away.
It is a crime to knowingly overlook a crime and that is what they have done. They knew about the emails because they "treated them like spam" but also if you do some searches for the admins names and "swiftel" at Google, you will find infringement notices and claims which state they forward ALL notices to the users. Yet infringements apparently continued because they have ended up in court. Did they enforce TOS agreements? Apparently they have done wrong because a judge has deemed that they can be sued.
As you say, an individual is responsible of wrongdoing in most jurisdictions if he is aware of an illegal act and fails to take some sort of action on it. However, as sysadmins, such awareness is not guaranteed, and I suppose it's up to the courts to decide whether a failed attempt to contact the sysadmins through an unreliable method constitutes "informing".
Yes but these individuals were aware of what was happening. As judged by the federal court.
What's a 'responsible agent' in your phrasing?
Any appropriate person who is the next step up. If you're just a citizen on the street, then the police or some specific government department you are aware of as being appropriate. If you're a net user and savvy enough, you would check the contact page for the ISP hosting the illegal activity. If you're an ISP admin, it may be your superior or appropriate government department if need be. It depends on the illegal activity. Reporting the sharing of top 40 mp3's is going to be way different to reporting paedophilia and terrorist activity.
Don't know about you, but my TEACHERS cause more problems than students and they pretty much piss on the policies... We point them out to the administrators, etc... AND THEY DO NOTHING!
This shows an overall management problem. If staff members don't respect company policies, they don't respect the company. They shouldn't be fired for installing gambling software, they should be reprimanded for blatantly disrespecting company policy and then fired if this continues. I've seen it happen more than once and other staff members see this and take the policies series. : )
Don't forget, policies don't have to only be political. They can be enforced with system policies. Then if the staff member actively circumvents that software enforced policy, they are in even bigger trouble. It is not their computer and they are not there to use company resources to gamble, etc.
Policies work well in companies which work well.
I agree however, that educational institutions have some very BIG characters who can be really annoying to deal with. Especially those that are going for their second long service... ; ) They become the problem which they spent the last 20 years complaining about!
Although I'm sure OpenBSD could do a windows and baulk at running on different hardware to what it was installed under:/
Good luck with it. BTW, OpenBSD is very generic so that when you move a hdd with OpenBSD installed, from one PC to another, it will pretty much work just fine except for:
Your NIC configuration if the NIC's are different types.
Your X configuration if the video cards are different types and you had to manually configure X. Sometimes X just auto probes and works.
Both of these situations are very easy to fix.
If you used a SCSI disk and move it to a PC with a different controller, you might get bitten with the different translation problem. This does not happen much with IDE.
* DMZ: Put your servers into appropriately configured DMZ's using a seperate OpenBSD host as the firewall. Lock it down so that only traffic which you specifically allow can get through.
* PATCH: Keep your Windows servers patched.
* FILTER: Doesn't Windows 2003 have a built in packet filter? If so, use it!
* HARDEN the Windows servers. Remove every service which they don't *need* to be running.
* REPLACE any Windows servers that you can, with more secure options.
* BACKUPS: Keep good regular backups so that it will be less hassle for you to restore from them and patch, should they be compromised. The longer between backups, the harder your job will be to fix the problem because you might find the losses of restoring an old backup hurt more than the actual compromise itself. You'll be checking what is newer and working hard to make sure that the newer files are not infected with trojans, worms, viruses, etc.
* DON'T DEPLOY: If you can get away with it, don't give people a solution if the only solution is an insecure one. You may find that you provide a solution which people suddenly "can't live without" but is either uneconomical to keep secure or impossible to keep secure. It is better to not give people a taste of that solution at all. Especially since they worked just fine without it up until now and *you* know that they don't *need* it.
* SOE: Develop standard operating environment's for the desktops, lock them down and enforce IT usage policies. Do the desktops need to share data amongst themselves peer-to-peer? Having worked in edu for years, I would imagine not on the whole, so apply a firewall to the SOE itself which will fit within your network configuration. A smaller department server you will be able to take ownership of and control if they want to share amongst themselves and this takes the tinker factor away from the end users and removes their excuse for admin rights for that task. You can also make it so that any damage or network congestion they cause, can be limited to their department. You do it this way for them because "you can easily backup a central server" and upper management will agree with you on that from a risk point of view. If all your desktops, servers and network are as secure as you can make them and you have polices people must adhere to, then you will have much less problems.
What you will also find is that you will get to a stage where instead of putting out fires all the time, you will be constantly improving your systems and making IT better instead of always trying to make IT work. You will also find that problems start to settle with the real problem staff and you will then be able to manage them and point to the polices.
Courts decide. But police actually execute the decision. It boils down to weapons. Don't confound ideas and actual actions.
The "weapon" is the POWER of the court. Police powers in Australia are nowhere near the power of the courts.
So what did your admired, beloved law do to protect the stabbed person? Nothing. And that's the point. You can lough about ideals, but in the end, the law in itself is not working. If the ideal of respecting others is not put into practice, the law is useless in preventing crime.
If the person who performed the stabbing had been allowed to remain in society, then you could say that the law is not working. But the person was put away, preventing other people in the future from being hurt or killed. Since people can't see into the future, I accept this to be as good as it can get.
Laws DO protect people to a good extent, but they can't prevent ALL crimes since humans are animals and animals have an element of unpredictability and police response times can't be 0 seconds.
We don't need laws, we need people respecting others. That's all.
But we DO NOT and WILL NOT get this across all of society. Never. And since this will never happen, we need mechanisms in place to minimise damage to society from these people.
I would love to think that some day the World would become some nirvana, all weapons would be destroyed and everyone would work cooperatively for the good of all mankind, but it's not going to happen.
Do you live in some corrupt police state which has severely corrupted your idea of what police, courts and law are?
I agree it should be a no brainer, but so far I've been frustrated by my own limitations because the method is not idiot proof.
Your problem is not a difficulty with burning a bootable OpenBSD CDR. Your problem is a difficulty with burning ANY x86 bootable CDR on your Mac.
El Torito is for making x86 bootable CD's. I'm not surprised that your Mac is not designed to build x86 bootable CD's.
Since you downloaded the x86 files, I assume your not wanting to install this on your Mac? ; ) OpenBSD is not quite ready for the G5's yet and you won't have a great amount of luck with x86 OpenBSD under VirtualPC. It's unstable. But then what isn't under the OSX version of VPC (besides Windows)?
BTW, that page you link to makes assumptions without stating them. Which could lead a newbie up the garden path.
What you need to do is download all those files the best way you know you can on a machine which you know you can easily create an El Torito bootable CD. You could get the files with wget, click on each one in turn and save it, sometimes you can even drag the i386 folder to your desktop to save it with all the files. In fact, from within Safari, if I click on a mirror ftp site near me and then navigate to the 3.7 folder and then drag the i386 folder to my desktop, I get a dialog stating that it is copying 158Mb. This is actually how I downloaded this realease. I usually use wget.
I downloaded i386, macppc and sparc64, src, src-sys, X-src and ports then moved them to my PC and burned them all as an x86 bootable CDR using Nero. I burned seperate macppc and sparc64 bootable CDR's with the iso's provided within these downloads, so as to quickly and simply be able to install on one of my Mac's and my Sun's.
Maybe there is a burning App for Mac OSX which supports El Toriito. I don't know. Anyone? Maybe you'll find mkisofs or something similar in fink? Can you not download this on the machine you intend to run x86 OpenBSD on?
"(which contained pirated music etc)".. No they didn't.
.. Yes they did.
This case also involves the use of DC hubs and just because Bittorrent can serve nothing but.torrent files, does not mean that someone cannot also serve the infringing files on the same server.
The cost of the first CD sold is $250,000, the second $1.00.
Yes economies of scale.
In AU you can buy decent notebooks for $1,500, while a 500MHz UltraSPARC notebook could run anywhere from $6,000 to $30,000 AU. Massed produced versus very exotic.
1. "ISP" != sysadmins at the ISP.. ISP = legally authorized representatives of ISP, ISP management, whatever.
NOT true. In Australia, a business is responsible for the actions of its staff members. They are agents of the ISP and they and their actions within the working hours constitute actions of the ISP.
2. "legal order". Not emails, not phone calls. In most of the world this takes the form of a subpoena, a court order, visit by a duly authorized officer of the law, notarized & witnessed document, whatever.
That is completely beside the point. The point is that ANYONE can alert a responsible agent of illegal activities and that responsible agent MUST take action by law if they find these claims to be true. It does not take anything like a legal document for a responsible party who has been alerted to illegal activities to take action. And ALL citizens of Australia are responsible for informing of illegal activities which they become aware of.
The act of "turning a blind eye" to crime is a crime itself.
It has not more power or legitimation than any other idea.
The ability to take away your freedom is ALL POWERFUL. The idea that laws that have been honed over hundreds of years, for the benefit of good people, is not better than "any other idea", is completely crazy.
Without the weapon of the police, it is nothing more than a contribution to a debate.
Police don't put people in prison. Courts of law do.
This shows that a law is no differant from any tyranny.
No actually this statement shows that you are some anarchy nut.
People should respect and care for each other by their own free will.
People should... and... a large number don't.
On any side. We don't need any law to do that.
Here is an education for you... people cannot be trusted WITH THEMSELVES. We all need law to protect the good and courts to remove the threat of the bad.
Here is a real World example from my own life. A few months ago, a moron racist neighbour of mine yelled out to an ethnic man walking past. He yelled racist disparaging remarks about the man. The ethnic man called the man down to him as a challenge, obviously angry at the racists comments. They met face-to-face, had a fight and the racist was stabbed in the neck with a knife.
The FACT is that people do NOT all do the right thing. Law provides reasonable rules for people to live by and also penalties which serve to discourage crime or in bad cases remove criminals from innocent society.
Just saying "people should respect and care for each other" is not going to suddenly cause people to respect and care for each other. People respect and care for themselves. That is the bottom line. It's a dog-eat-dog World and one day you might be relieved that a law was enforced to save your life, health, loved one or property.
The price someone sees fit to charge is purely artificial, it has no connection to the actual cost of creating information.... What is the true cost of any of those ideas?
They decide the cost, but of course there is no "true" cost. There is no "true worth" either, because the worth is for you to decide, as it does not hold the same value to all people. Since it is theirs they can charge what they like for it. The decision is yours as to whether the item is worth more to you than the money that they are asking for it.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me. Especially given that we are talking about a luxury item and not some life saving or sustaining item which is artificially inflated solely for the purpose of exploiting the incredible demand from critically desperate people. ; )
I should have also added that crypto exists because the data is expected to get copied bit-for-bit. Getting a bit perfect copy is easy but not good enough to decrypt or authorise yourself to use it.
My point is, that the RIAA cannot boo and make this go away with legal measures, it will be always possible to copy data while a Neumann-principle based computer exist, i'd hazard the guess that such computer will exist for a while...
This is too simplistic, since reading digital data and sucessfully interpreting that digital data are two different things and the later can be made extremely difficult for unauthorised people.
It would not be so hard to sell digital data which is bound to your machine and also bound to you through some authenticating tokens for yourself and another for the file in question. If that personal token is also employed to fingerprint the data as interpretted, then you could be very buggered if it "gets out" covered in your "fingerprints".
Slashdot Mirror
The main article makes you think a couple of chips save the day, and makes A/C's last longer.
It did not make me think that at all.
Has the headline changed since you wrote this?
1947: Gates (transistor). Best thing to happen to computing.
1955: Gates (human). Worst thing to happen to computing.
Ask any webmaster who's been around for a decade about broken standards. Netscape didn't even comply with the standards THEY created!
I'm well aware of the horrors of Netscapes adherance to standards. My point is that Microsoft helped tie users into IE by moving the goal posts enough to make pages look terrible in anything other than IE as time went on.
Because of both IE and Netscape, webmasters suffered. But that was not my point. My point was that IE was a "pleasure to use" comparatively, because Microsoft exploited the fact that they shipped IE in Windows by default. Instant market share which allowed them to change things as time went on in such a way to make other browsers look like crap and thus increase their market share. Forcing everyone else to play catch up.
So how then is Microsoft to blame for breaking the same "standards?"
Netscape does it so Microsoft are excused? For me it has to do with Microsofts dishonest leap to dominance, with massive resources at hand they decided to sabotage the competition at the expense of leaving a mess behind them for everyone else to worry about but them.
Two wrongs. I'm not laying all the blame on Microsoft, but they certainly played a big role and MS innovation is the topic. MS innovates nasty business tactics.
...my philosophy was "I'm running port scanning to make sure 22, 80 and 443 are the only ports listening on the boxes - why should I put a firewall in front of it to only let those ports through? ... But, unfortunately, you can't just throw the firewalls out even if you don't need them.
But you do need them. You should assume that your servers will get rooted, in which case they may soon be listening on any other ports and initiating connections to anywhere also on any port, or even DoS'ing the rest of your internal machines or worse still machines external to your network.
The power of a dedicated firewall, is that since it may be dedicated to tasks such as segmenting networks, packet filtering, prioritization and bandwidth shaping, but with no accessible service, it is highly unlikely to become rooted and thus is perfect for enforcement of rules or even damage control should a machine become rooted.
You can do so much with a dedicated firewall and whatever you do, it will not just get disabled once an externally reachable service gets rooted.
They mat not have been the first on the scene with a browser, but they were certainly the first to produce one that was a pleasure to use (by the standards at the time)
and achieved that by breaking standards no less! Oh what a legacy they have left! A severely disabled, confused www.
What about the open source guys? Ah, the business model is interesting but we haven't seen much in the way of technical innovation.
What have Microsoft actually innovated? I would seriously like to know. All I ever see from them is new functionality in the form of defensive answers to the innovation of others. They copy, modify or buy innovation. But what have they genuinely innovated?
I love using OpenBSD servers and firewalls, OSX desktops and begrudgingly use Windows XP Pro on my laptop (along with FreeSBD, which I love too). I just bought a very nice new Sony VAIO VGN-A49GP notebook with a 1920x1200 17" LCD display. The display is spectacular to say the least, but text is difficult to read at the default dpi setting within Windows XP of 96dpi. This displays true resolution is about 133dpi so I have tried various settings within XP including the "Large Size (120dpi)" setting which I figured would be catered for well. All settings larger than 96dpi, even the 120dpi option, cause font problems within system dialogs and web sites including Microsofts own from within IE. Often text within a SYSTEM dialog renders beyond the window it is within and is thus unreadable. I can't imagine such a problem occuring within OSX. Even Windows XP is still a dogs breakfast in these sorts of regards and shows that Microsoft products are still completely covered in bandages, instead of being fixed at fundamental levels. Do they even bother testing these perhaps fringe settings? 120dpi is their "Large Size" setting, so you would think at least it was tested. Could this come down to the driver? If so I would have to say that that indicates a fundamental design flaw if a driver is able to cause such havoc.
OpenBSD has deployed (I realise they may not have innovated the fundamentals) active memory protection security measures which Microsoft attempted much later and only came half way to what OpenBSD deployed.
Microsoft is not leading innovation in usability or security and I personally would say they are also not leading in stability (although I agree they have come a very long way). Performance is an area where there is a lot of overlap, but for a company with so much money and so many paid developers, I have to wonder why they don't have it all?
Oh no, wait a second, no I don't... that's right, they trumpet features and all those other things in prime time slots, etc and sell product based more on the trumpetting than the actual quality they deliver. I guess this is to be expected though, just like from the rest of the big capitalist corps like Cisco, Sony, Apple... wait, then how is it that Apple can keep reinventing themselves and their products, while keeping viable AND delivering quality products?
I live for the day when Microsoft dies. Thank heavens FreeBSD runs on my $5,000 AU notebook. ; )
some cheap players to beat the quality of some expensive "audiophile" *cough* *cough* units.
I remember a $75 Marantz CD player having MUCH better specs than a $25,000 Meridian.
The Meridian looked cheap and nasty to the eye and the price tag held NOTHING but an empty reputation.
Lots of audiophile targetted equipment is severely over priced and yet audiophile mags give them wonderful reviews, but with nothing but subjective opinion and meaningless remarks like "fluid" and "warm".
On a side note, I wonder if the days of truely high quality gear, like the Pioneer M-91 power amp, are over? Because I don't see the sorts of numbers it offered.
There are lots of different companies making SPARC laptops. I think even Acer makes some.
Do a search for SPARC notebook or laptop from Google. Unfortunately, they are expensive. I was considering getting one until I saw the prices. $6,000 - $30,000 Australian dollars.
The $30,000 unit would be many times slower than some of Dell's cheapest, nastiest boat anchors.
I like the UltraSPARC and don't mind a performance hit to be able to have OpenBSD sparc64 in my backpack. But the prices are not worth it for the mere tinker value which I would like.
If a decent UltraSPARC II based unit was the cost of a Powerbook, I'd probably buy it.
FreeBSD, being rather generic in focus, is a tougher one to design for. Maybe the guy who owns the beastie copyright will transfer it to FreeBSD (or grant unlimited license, etc.) and beastie will become official.
He's a cool guy actually. He's written books, papers and BSD code and most recently on a book on FreeBSD, so who knows. I don't know if FreeBSD would want exclusive rights to Beastie though. Since Beastie has such a general BSD history, FreeBSD would probably still want an image for their own identity.
Sorry, but I don't find NetBSD's logo (as linked in the summary) to be very creative.
I hated it at first, but it has since grown on me. Although previous NetBSD images were not great anyway. I like FreeBSD's Beastie though.
The much liked OpenBSD wireframe demon head T-shirt is not longer being made and they now have a wireframe puffy shirt which in my opinion does not look anywhere near as good. Lucky I bought two of the originals a while ago.
There claim of a 500 mph cruse has yet to be proven. I will believe it when I see it.
Me too. Considering that in the land of Unlimited Air Racing, where people take old WWII fighters and soup them up like top fuel dragsters of the skies, those fixed-wing built-for-speed machines have to be pushed really hard to crack 500MPH. They push their engines 3,500-4,000 HP and the typical result is an engine which explodes or a high speed run which frustratingly does not quite manage 500MPH. 450MPH is typical. 500MPH is the golden number for these guys and breaking it gets you close to the Piston Engined World Speed Record for a 15km run (517MPH).
Carters machine is 62HP and close to an autogyro.
I doubt 500MPH heavily.
It is not only big characters. You told "it is not their computer" but what about when it is "their" computer? If they bougth it from an research project of them, and they are paying conectivity from their research projects and they are the "starlets" you loose all the authority to tell them "this can't be done", even if it is so they can make better use of those tools. I've just seen it too many times.
Yes but it's the companies network and selling network access to these people should be accompanied with a TOS agreement which both parties agree to prior to giving access and paying money.
If the person involved is not happy with the TOS, outsource their Internet access and then they're on their own. We did this where I worked. Unfortunately, it's these difficult users who cause something like an educational institution (which you would expect to be a cooperative entity), to resort to TOS and SLA's which departments must agree to to be supported.
We took a hard line, but I'll admit that it went too far and I was often helping staff members in creative ways because management (IT and upper) went too far with enforcement. Ultimately good staff members were put out by a minority of bad.
I guess this reflects society in general in some respects and is to be expected in large entities like edu's.
Contradictory. The business is responsible for the actions of its staff members, correct. This is a case for the staff members being responsible for the actions of the business. If the two are, I don't know the proper Australian legal term, but here it's "procurists", i.e. authorized to make legal representation of the company, as a member of the executive board would be, then yes. Otherwise, they should not be held personally responsible. Note that they didn't commit a crime per se, simply ignored or were blissfully unaware of, communication attempts with no guarantee of contact.
Actually it is not contradictory because it is not that black and white. The company is in trouble and the individuals are in trouble. If people were not responsible also on a personal level, then you get the problem where a disgruntled staff member can harm the company severely and then walk away.
It is a crime to knowingly overlook a crime and that is what they have done. They knew about the emails because they "treated them like spam" but also if you do some searches for the admins names and "swiftel" at Google, you will find infringement notices and claims which state they forward ALL notices to the users. Yet infringements apparently continued because they have ended up in court. Did they enforce TOS agreements? Apparently they have done wrong because a judge has deemed that they can be sued.
As you say, an individual is responsible of wrongdoing in most jurisdictions if he is aware of an illegal act and fails to take some sort of action on it. However, as sysadmins, such awareness is not guaranteed, and I suppose it's up to the courts to decide whether a failed attempt to contact the sysadmins through an unreliable method constitutes "informing".
Yes but these individuals were aware of what was happening. As judged by the federal court.
What's a 'responsible agent' in your phrasing?
Any appropriate person who is the next step up. If you're just a citizen on the street, then the police or some specific government department you are aware of as being appropriate. If you're a net user and savvy enough, you would check the contact page for the ISP hosting the illegal activity. If you're an ISP admin, it may be your superior or appropriate government department if need be. It depends on the illegal activity. Reporting the sharing of top 40 mp3's is going to be way different to reporting paedophilia and terrorist activity.
Don't know about you, but my TEACHERS cause more problems than students and they pretty much piss on the policies... We point them out to the administrators, etc... AND THEY DO NOTHING!
This shows an overall management problem. If staff members don't respect company policies, they don't respect the company. They shouldn't be fired for installing gambling software, they should be reprimanded for blatantly disrespecting company policy and then fired if this continues. I've seen it happen more than once and other staff members see this and take the policies series. : )
Don't forget, policies don't have to only be political. They can be enforced with system policies. Then if the staff member actively circumvents that software enforced policy, they are in even bigger trouble. It is not their computer and they are not there to use company resources to gamble, etc.
Policies work well in companies which work well.
I agree however, that educational institutions have some very BIG characters who can be really annoying to deal with. Especially those that are going for their second long service... ; ) They become the problem which they spent the last 20 years complaining about!
Although I'm sure OpenBSD could do a windows and baulk at running on different hardware to what it was installed under :/
Good luck with it. BTW, OpenBSD is very generic so that when you move a hdd with OpenBSD installed, from one PC to another, it will pretty much work just fine except for:
Your NIC configuration if the NIC's are different types.
Your X configuration if the video cards are different types and you had to manually configure X. Sometimes X just auto probes and works.
Both of these situations are very easy to fix.
If you used a SCSI disk and move it to a PC with a different controller, you might get bitten with the different translation problem. This does not happen much with IDE.
I also have to agree.
* DMZ: Put your servers into appropriately configured DMZ's using a seperate OpenBSD host as the firewall. Lock it down so that only traffic which you specifically allow can get through.
* PATCH: Keep your Windows servers patched.
* FILTER: Doesn't Windows 2003 have a built in packet filter? If so, use it!
* HARDEN the Windows servers. Remove every service which they don't *need* to be running.
* REPLACE any Windows servers that you can, with more secure options.
* BACKUPS: Keep good regular backups so that it will be less hassle for you to restore from them and patch, should they be compromised. The longer between backups, the harder your job will be to fix the problem because you might find the losses of restoring an old backup hurt more than the actual compromise itself. You'll be checking what is newer and working hard to make sure that the newer files are not infected with trojans, worms, viruses, etc.
* DON'T DEPLOY: If you can get away with it, don't give people a solution if the only solution is an insecure one. You may find that you provide a solution which people suddenly "can't live without" but is either uneconomical to keep secure or impossible to keep secure. It is better to not give people a taste of that solution at all. Especially since they worked just fine without it up until now and *you* know that they don't *need* it.
* SOE: Develop standard operating environment's for the desktops, lock them down and enforce IT usage policies. Do the desktops need to share data amongst themselves peer-to-peer? Having worked in edu for years, I would imagine not on the whole, so apply a firewall to the SOE itself which will fit within your network configuration. A smaller department server you will be able to take ownership of and control if they want to share amongst themselves and this takes the tinker factor away from the end users and removes their excuse for admin rights for that task. You can also make it so that any damage or network congestion they cause, can be limited to their department. You do it this way for them because "you can easily backup a central server" and upper management will agree with you on that from a risk point of view. If all your desktops, servers and network are as secure as you can make them and you have polices people must adhere to, then you will have much less problems.
What you will also find is that you will get to a stage where instead of putting out fires all the time, you will be constantly improving your systems and making IT better instead of always trying to make IT work. You will also find that problems start to settle with the real problem staff and you will then be able to manage them and point to the polices.
Courts decide. But police actually execute the decision. It boils down to weapons. Don't confound ideas and actual actions.
The "weapon" is the POWER of the court. Police powers in Australia are nowhere near the power of the courts.
So what did your admired, beloved law do to protect the stabbed person? Nothing. And that's the point. You can lough about ideals, but in the end, the law in itself is not working. If the ideal of respecting others is not put into practice, the law is useless in preventing crime.
If the person who performed the stabbing had been allowed to remain in society, then you could say that the law is not working. But the person was put away, preventing other people in the future from being hurt or killed. Since people can't see into the future, I accept this to be as good as it can get.
Laws DO protect people to a good extent, but they can't prevent ALL crimes since humans are animals and animals have an element of unpredictability and police response times can't be 0 seconds.
We don't need laws, we need people respecting others. That's all.
But we DO NOT and WILL NOT get this across all of society. Never. And since this will never happen, we need mechanisms in place to minimise damage to society from these people.
I would love to think that some day the World would become some nirvana, all weapons would be destroyed and everyone would work cooperatively for the good of all mankind, but it's not going to happen.
Do you live in some corrupt police state which has severely corrupted your idea of what police, courts and law are?
I agree it should be a no brainer, but so far I've been frustrated by my own limitations because the method is not idiot proof.
Your problem is not a difficulty with burning a bootable OpenBSD CDR. Your problem is a difficulty with burning ANY x86 bootable CDR on your Mac.
El Torito is for making x86 bootable CD's. I'm not surprised that your Mac is not designed to build x86 bootable CD's.
Since you downloaded the x86 files, I assume your not wanting to install this on your Mac? ; ) OpenBSD is not quite ready for the G5's yet and you won't have a great amount of luck with x86 OpenBSD under VirtualPC. It's unstable. But then what isn't under the OSX version of VPC (besides Windows)?
BTW, that page you link to makes assumptions without stating them. Which could lead a newbie up the garden path.
What you need to do is download all those files the best way you know you can on a machine which you know you can easily create an El Torito bootable CD. You could get the files with wget, click on each one in turn and save it, sometimes you can even drag the i386 folder to your desktop to save it with all the files. In fact, from within Safari, if I click on a mirror ftp site near me and then navigate to the 3.7 folder and then drag the i386 folder to my desktop, I get a dialog stating that it is copying 158Mb. This is actually how I downloaded this realease. I usually use wget.
I downloaded i386, macppc and sparc64, src, src-sys, X-src and ports then moved them to my PC and burned them all as an x86 bootable CDR using Nero. I burned seperate macppc and sparc64 bootable CDR's with the iso's provided within these downloads, so as to quickly and simply be able to install on one of my Mac's and my Sun's.
Maybe there is a burning App for Mac OSX which supports El Toriito. I don't know. Anyone? Maybe you'll find mkisofs or something similar in fink? Can you not download this on the machine you intend to run x86 OpenBSD on?
This case also involves the use of DC hubs and just because Bittorrent can serve nothing but
The cost of the first CD sold is $250,000, the second $1.00.
Yes economies of scale.
In AU you can buy decent notebooks for $1,500, while a 500MHz UltraSPARC notebook could run anywhere from $6,000 to $30,000 AU. Massed produced versus very exotic.
And you got it wrong.
1. "ISP" != sysadmins at the ISP.. ISP = legally authorized representatives of ISP, ISP management, whatever.
NOT true. In Australia, a business is responsible for the actions of its staff members. They are agents of the ISP and they and their actions within the working hours constitute actions of the ISP.
2. "legal order". Not emails, not phone calls. In most of the world this takes the form of a subpoena, a court order, visit by a duly authorized officer of the law, notarized & witnessed document, whatever.
That is completely beside the point. The point is that ANYONE can alert a responsible agent of illegal activities and that responsible agent MUST take action by law if they find these claims to be true. It does not take anything like a legal document for a responsible party who has been alerted to illegal activities to take action. And ALL citizens of Australia are responsible for informing of illegal activities which they become aware of.
The act of "turning a blind eye" to crime is a crime itself.
It is manmade.
It's a part of what makes us civil.
It has not more power or legitimation than any other idea.
The ability to take away your freedom is ALL POWERFUL. The idea that laws that have been honed over hundreds of years, for the benefit of good people, is not better than "any other idea", is completely crazy.
Without the weapon of the police, it is nothing more than a contribution to a debate.
Police don't put people in prison. Courts of law do.
This shows that a law is no differant from any tyranny.
No actually this statement shows that you are some anarchy nut.
People should respect and care for each other by their own free will.
People should... and... a large number don't.
On any side. We don't need any law to do that.
Here is an education for you... people cannot be trusted WITH THEMSELVES. We all need law to protect the good and courts to remove the threat of the bad.
Here is a real World example from my own life. A few months ago, a moron racist neighbour of mine yelled out to an ethnic man walking past. He yelled racist disparaging remarks about the man. The ethnic man called the man down to him as a challenge, obviously angry at the racists comments. They met face-to-face, had a fight and the racist was stabbed in the neck with a knife.
The FACT is that people do NOT all do the right thing. Law provides reasonable rules for people to live by and also penalties which serve to discourage crime or in bad cases remove criminals from innocent society.
Just saying "people should respect and care for each other" is not going to suddenly cause people to respect and care for each other. People respect and care for themselves. That is the bottom line. It's a dog-eat-dog World and one day you might be relieved that a law was enforced to save your life, health, loved one or property.
The price someone sees fit to charge is purely artificial, it has no connection to the actual cost of creating information. ... What is the true cost of any of those ideas?
They decide the cost, but of course there is no "true" cost. There is no "true worth" either, because the worth is for you to decide, as it does not hold the same value to all people. Since it is theirs they can charge what they like for it. The decision is yours as to whether the item is worth more to you than the money that they are asking for it.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me. Especially given that we are talking about a luxury item and not some life saving or sustaining item which is artificially inflated solely for the purpose of exploiting the incredible demand from critically desperate people. ; )
It's shitty modern music for fucks sake.
I should have also added that crypto exists because the data is expected to get copied bit-for-bit. Getting a bit perfect copy is easy but not good enough to decrypt or authorise yourself to use it.
My point is, that the RIAA cannot boo and make this go away with legal measures, it will be always possible to copy data while a Neumann-principle based computer exist, i'd hazard the guess that such computer will exist for a while...
This is too simplistic, since reading digital data and sucessfully interpreting that digital data are two different things and the later can be made extremely difficult for unauthorised people.
It would not be so hard to sell digital data which is bound to your machine and also bound to you through some authenticating tokens for yourself and another for the file in question. If that personal token is also employed to fingerprint the data as interpretted, then you could be very buggered if it "gets out" covered in your "fingerprints".