But, NOC operators are smart. A lot smarter than most people belive. Most NOCs have already identified people connecting Linksys routers to their "single computer" DSL. When you call and claim that there is no router, they *know* you are lying. Hint: MACs are usually company specific.
Most NOCs know when you run bittorrent. They can see your utilization. They can tell if you are connecting to trackers for Linux distros and they can also tell when you connect to trackers for pr0n.
Bored NOCs read your email and watch you surf like it's some kind of reality show.
When you use TOR to encrypt bittorrent, you are not fooling anyone.
When you spoof the headers, they *will* be able to see it.
But does that "low speed" connection have the QoS to support VoIP and video on demand? How will she react when, during en episode of ER, the stream pauses? Will she call you? The cable company? Or, will she just expect the hiccups as a condition of the line?
I really expect to see the cable companies lean hard on VoD. YouTube and Google Video is, in essence, competing with the cable company for eyeballs. If you don't expect them to try to impose delays and skips in an off-site video stream, then you are just niave.
>>I don't see why the current model is unsustainable. If it is then changing the rate structure fixes nothing.
When you have a fixed supply (a single OC-48 servicing a neghborhood) and an exponentially increasing demand (mainly bittorrent and streaming media), you have to have the right to increase the price.
>>Yet I know lots of people who have had their service cut off without notice (nice to find that out when you get home from work on Friday) for exceeding some unwritten limit.
It gets worse. That happened to me once. When I claimed that my contract had nothing about a cap, they pointed me to a URL. I had to go to the library to check it out. Apparently, the contract I signed was modified by an online TOS. Every month, when I paid my bill, I agreed to the updated TOS. The updated TOS did have a limit of sorts. There were no hard numbers, but they did have a line defining "network abusers" as people engaging in excessive P2P traffic.
Not really applicable here. Moore states that the number of transistors will double every 18 months. He states nothing about processor speed, bandwidth, or utilization.
However, let's both agree that the cost of tech is going down. A T1 today costs a lot less than a T1 10 years ago. I remember paying thousands in install fees and hundreds for monthly fees. Costs are dropping.
But, I think we can also agree that the customer demand is rapidly outstripping capabilities. ISPs are not structured to give every customer 100% utilization 24/7. Yes, they sold "unlimited bandwidth". Yes, they sold "always on". However, a lot of the fine print advised customers agianst 100% utilization. They just can't get upstream bandwidth cheap enough to resell to customers and still make a profit.
>>The amount of labor required to run fiber is roughly the same as the amount required to run twisted pair.
That's complete bullshit. I have installed fiber and copper. I have run "house cable" from comms closets to the customers' desktops. I have also been in manholes running cable between buildings. Fiber takes a lot more time to install. You need a lot of expensive, specialized tools to install it. You have to be a lot more anal about QA after the install.
>>The amount of labor required to add routes is the same no matter how fast or slow the links in question are.
That's BS too. OSPF and EIGRP are nice, but not perfect. You have to have people qualified to analyze the network before you upgrade. They have to examine every possible reason for the lack of performance. And, after install, they have to go back to find and fix the next bottleneck.
It isn't as easy as letting MRTG graphs show overutilized lines. You can't just take a OC-48 at 80% utilization and upgrade it to a OC-192. A lot of times, telcos save money by finding low utilization backdoors into overtaxed areas.
Cisco and Juniper are not cheap. Neither are the certified techs who really know how to herd them cats like a mofo.
>>And material cost doesn't vary much with the speed of the link, either.
Yet another misleading statement. The tools neede to diagnose noise on a voice line (i.e. a lineman's handset) are a lot less expensive than the tools needed to diagnose malformed cells on a OC-192.
Furthermore, the techs qualified to operate these tools get paid a *shitload* of money. It is not uncommon for a tech holding a Acterna TestPad to earn 4x what the lineman earns.
On top of that, the more lines you have, the more techs you need. You also need a lot more sophistication in the NOC to predict, diagnose, and reroute around broken lines. When an OC-192 drops, networks reel trying to automatically reroute. Well-paid NOC staff can identify low-priority customers (read, residential ISPs and cable ISPs) and disconnect them to perserve customers who would actually notice (and, more to the point, demand a chargeback for the outage). Sure, you could trust a computer or routing table to do that, but paid staff can do a much better job.
>>And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be
No residential ISP will start off by hiring a team of CCIEs to install and configure enterprise-class routers. They start off by installing a few DSLAMs and some Cisco 2600s. They link the whole thing together with stickytape, rust, and T1s. Then, as the customer base grows, they start an endless cycle of upgrades.
It'd be nice to have a network designed from the ground up to provide 100mbps FTTD/FTTC/FTTH. Look at Japan and NTT for an example. The problem with that is that there is no room for the "little fish" in that equation. While a lot of Mom&Pop ISPs are gone, their equipment still serves the same customers. The bills just go to AT&T vice Vicki and Kenniths' ISP and resturant.
>>We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest tran
I agree on both points. However, there is a signifigant cost involved with moving a lot of traffic. As I have said before, Cisco, Juniper, and Bay are not cheap. Especially for equipment capable of moving data at OC-48 and up.
While the ISPs may not charge for peering, they both have to buy additional blades and pay techs to update and maintain those systems.
How do they meter what? I have a water meter, a gas meter, and I pay a hefty fee for trash removal. If I need a couch or other large thing carried away, I pay extra.
An ISP could throw MRTG on your line and easily monitor how many packets they sent to you and you sent to them. At the end of the month, they bill you $30 for the basic service and $1 per GB for everything over 30GB. Or something like that.
The last mile is a tiny fraction of the problem. Your ISP could probably uncap your like with no real problems; until they try and send your traffic somewhere. The top-level ISPs charge a lot for moving traffic across the country. Until the ISPs come up with a model to provide unlimited bandwidth to eash other, then the last mile is inconsequential.
Not true. VoIP traffic is more time sensitive than FTP traffic. A SSH session needs better response than bittorrent. And video on demand needs to be processed before a/. page reload.
Sure, it's all 1s and 0s, but those 1s and 0s are arranged into headers and payload. Headers can be analyzed and tagged for prority. All this takes processing power and memory.
It's simple: if you want your VoD to play seamlessly and you want your VoIP to be a clear as a land-line call, you pay more for tagging.
If not, then your 1s and 0s can get lumped in with all the others. Your phone call to mom will be lumped in with my pr0n download.
Read the contract. They have the right to modify the contract at any point with no notice. You then have the oppertunity to renew the contract by continuing to pay.
If you don't like Wal Mart's practices, then don't shop there.
If MaBell is fucking you with the big blue dick, call SpeakEasy. No luck there? Call DirectPC. No luck there? Get the telecom to drop in a T1 line and share it between 4 neghbors.
You are on/. You *have* to know that the current model is not sustainable. Would you prefer to see the providers go out of service trying to meet growing customer needs? Or would you allow them to price the limited commodity according to the exponential growth in demand?
Here in Japan, the ISPs still oversell. But at least they give you the option of how much oversell you get screwed on.
When you buy FTTH service from NTT, they have a high-speed and low-speed option. The HS option is twice the price. However, if you look at the systems, both give you 100mbps over single-mode fiber.
What's the difference?
Well, the HS option has 16 customers per DSLAM; the LS option has 32 per.
As US customers become better educated about their line capabilities, expect more ISPs to cater to their needs. But, you better be prepared to pay for it.
Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service.
While MS might have problems breaking into a full search system, there is a ton of room for a company that can do one thing really well.
Look at ISO Hunt. They picked an area and really cached in on it.
My advice to MS: become the best video game search engine out there. It'd be really easy. Have a box to search and buttons to look for reviews, purchace, FAQs/walkthroughs, and cheats.
Hell, you could pick anything. But do one thing and do it really well.
Well, the pedal is a dumb idea to begin with. However, if you want to design a new pedal to do both jobs, design it so that neither action is triggered by "normal" motion. Think about rotate clockwise to accelerate and counter-clockwise to decelerate.
You could also have a pedal for the inactive foot that needs to be depressed in order for the actions of the primary pedal to be acknowledged.
However, I think moving the throttle to the steering column is the way to go. Push the column to accelerate and pull to decelerate. After that, move the column to a joystick and place it between the passenger and driver seats. Put the blinker, lights, and wipers on a hat switch on the stick.
Hell, you could even make the stick ambidextrous. The car could be driven safely from either seat.
I always thought the funniest April Fools Joke would be a day of dupes. Just keep everything mostly normal. Only, have the same story posted over and over. Use different wording each time. Maybe have contradictory dupes.
Then, at the end of the day, have a slashback covering the dupes.
I ran Adsense on a small community site. Because of our location, we all subscribed to the same ISP. This ISP utilized a private address space and used a half-dozen or so proxy servers to connect people to the internets.
It came as no real surprise when Google ditched my account. To them, they only saw 6 people visiting the site over and over.
I'm willing to bet that most sites getting screwed out of money fall into a similar category.
There are a lot of reasons to use something like this.
As a noob, sometimes the directions the NPC gives are misleading. "Go take this to some guy north of here" is a perfect example. That happens in WoW all the time. The guy might actually be NorthEast or NW. You just can't tell. Sometimes, they change the locations of mobs in a patch but don't update the quest text. You could spend an hour looking for evil spiders in the North while the actual spiders have moved to the East.
As an experienced player, you'll be more focused on guild teamwork. No matter what you are doing, someone in your group will have done it a few times before. Having a map while following the other players around keeps you from getting lost.
Also, as an experienced player, sometimes you need to work on your new characters. In that case, the story is unimportant. You just need to level up quickly.
That's the funniest thing I've seen all day. It's like 1PM here and my morning was a real shitfest. And, after I clean my monitor and keyboard, I'm sure my afternoon will be better. Thanks.
The theory is that you should disable root logins (over SSH at least) and only allow users to SSH in. The problem comes from users that use weak passwords and/or use their/. user/pass combo for the webserver. Eventually, a hacker will intercept the user/pass and login as that user. With compiler tools, he can begin building tools and modifying the $PATH so that those tools run vice the ones in/usr/bin.
Now, the hacker just waits for the user to login and try to "su" or "sudo".
After that, the hacker has full access to your box.
Now, could he just build them on his own machine and scp them over? Probably. But, without a lot of homework, he won't know what version of said tool you have or what libraries he can link to.
There seem to be "perfect setup" articles about every major Linux distro. I even used one on my own site. However, you need to be aware that these articles are written for ISP Config. In fact, they seem to be almost a viral marketing tool designed to pimp ISP Config.
Now, there is nothing wrong with that. Just be aware that some things may not work if you do not install ISPC.
For instance, a newbie following along may not notice that he disable the ability for his server to run php in/var/www. A newbie may also be perplexed as to why he can get to his site on http://url443/ but not on https://url./
I've even seen examples that suggested installing compilers and tools to build modules needed by SpamAssasin. Anyone installing a compiler on a production web server should be shot.
In short, unless you go on to install the ISPc, your site will be broken and may be vulnerable to attack.
So, buyer (reader?) beware! You may not be getting what you want.
>>So my question for those in uniform is: to the extent to you are allowed to address these points
We can vote. Other than that, we have a very limited view. We are given objectives and are required to meet those objectives. We will never been in a position to vote on strategy. Neither will you.
The people vote for a leader. The leader decides a strategy. The military commanders decide on objectives and milestones. The grunts kill the enemy and try and stay alive.
>>, what should we (American civilians who are not memebers of congress) do about it?
All you can do is vote. However, once a can of worms is opened, it's impossible to close again. We can never leave Iraq. We can, however, vote for leaders that are willing to apply the same effort to Iraq as our grandfathers applied to Germany and Japan. Maybe in 50 years or so, Bagdhad will be a hot tourist spot.
For gaming on WinXP, I use an app called Shoot!. While playing Falcon, I use it for fairly simple (press T, wait 5 seconds, press 1) macros. I was dicking around and decided to set up a profile for some simple stuff in Cygwin. If I say "list", the program returns "ls". "List all" will return "ls -a". "List all long" will return "ls -la".
You can, with some tweaking, even get it to understand complicated stuff. If I say "manual g r u b", I can get "man grub". "Vi save quit" could be mapped to ":wq" without too much trouble.
Anything you can type, it can do.
I don't think it works under Linux. I don't know of anything like it under linux. It does, however, work quite well inside PuTTY.
>>There are good arguments for a VAT, but the simple fact is that sales tax generally disproportinately affects the poor. Wealthy individuals spend a much smaller percentage of their income, which means that, percentage wise, they actually pay less tax under a purely VAT system than those who have less income.
Just exclude the first $15k from the VAT. Make the VAT proportional to the item being purchased.
Want a second? 20%
Want a third car? 30%
Want a big-screen HDTV? 30%
Want a yacht? 40%
First TV, car, and computer should be tax free. As should a cell phone and land line. Groceries should also be tax free.
The problem is that we need to directly charge the rich more without making it seem like we are charging them more. The rich tend to complain. Maybe we could just throw a few of them in the guillotine and redistribute the wealth.
I have to stand up and say I'm probably guilty of lumping Environmentalists into a big group.
I grew up with hippies around. They grew herbs and shat in a bucket. They wore natural fibers and (when required) drove an ancient Volvo diesel. They ate vegies and talked about dolphin-tainted tuna.
We, on the other hand, raised and slaughtered pigs, chickens, and rabbits. We drove Ford pick-ups and drank beer on Saturday. We used flush toilets and cooked steaks on the grill. We talked about nuking the ruskies and took drags off Marlborl Reds.
So, here's the thing. I see environmentalists as having their priorities fucked up. Why is an owl more important than a logger's family? Why is old-growth forest more important than a parking lot? Why are we worried about dolphins?
In short, if there isn't a direct payoff to me, then fuck it.
Just like you can't argue the Savior's sacrifice with an atheist, you can't use extinction to argue with us; we just don't care.
Now, I tend to be a more reasonable redneck. I lived in Europe and Asia. I honestly think that the solution to many of America's problems is $5/gallon gasoline. That and a 20% consumer tax could provide the social services needed to get the Old Girl right again.
However, as for the Amazon; fuck it.
Baby seals? Where's my club?
Dolphins? They taste great with some mayo and relish.
Poverty in Africa? Fuck them! We have poverty in America.
Cows? Good for boots and steaks; and milk's ok too.
Redwood forest? That shit would look really good as a new deck.
And hippies? Well, they may have some valid points. But if they think I should give up my deck, tuna, steak, or car, then fuck them.
Slashdot Mirror
Too true.
But, NOC operators are smart. A lot smarter than most people belive. Most NOCs have already identified people connecting Linksys routers to their "single computer" DSL. When you call and claim that there is no router, they *know* you are lying. Hint: MACs are usually company specific.
Most NOCs know when you run bittorrent. They can see your utilization. They can tell if you are connecting to trackers for Linux distros and they can also tell when you connect to trackers for pr0n.
Bored NOCs read your email and watch you surf like it's some kind of reality show.
When you use TOR to encrypt bittorrent, you are not fooling anyone.
When you spoof the headers, they *will* be able to see it.
But does that "low speed" connection have the QoS to support VoIP and video on demand? How will she react when, during en episode of ER, the stream pauses? Will she call you? The cable company? Or, will she just expect the hiccups as a condition of the line?
I really expect to see the cable companies lean hard on VoD. YouTube and Google Video is, in essence, competing with the cable company for eyeballs. If you don't expect them to try to impose delays and skips in an off-site video stream, then you are just niave.
>>I don't see why the current model is unsustainable. If it is then changing the rate structure fixes nothing.
When you have a fixed supply (a single OC-48 servicing a neghborhood) and an exponentially increasing demand (mainly bittorrent and streaming media), you have to have the right to increase the price.
>>Yet I know lots of people who have had their service cut off without notice (nice to find that out when you get home from work on Friday) for exceeding some unwritten limit.
It gets worse. That happened to me once. When I claimed that my contract had nothing about a cap, they pointed me to a URL. I had to go to the library to check it out. Apparently, the contract I signed was modified by an online TOS. Every month, when I paid my bill, I agreed to the updated TOS. The updated TOS did have a limit of sorts. There were no hard numbers, but they did have a line defining "network abusers" as people engaging in excessive P2P traffic.
>>You see, thanks to Moore's law
Not really applicable here. Moore states that the number of transistors will double every 18 months. He states nothing about processor speed, bandwidth, or utilization.
However, let's both agree that the cost of tech is going down. A T1 today costs a lot less than a T1 10 years ago. I remember paying thousands in install fees and hundreds for monthly fees. Costs are dropping.
But, I think we can also agree that the customer demand is rapidly outstripping capabilities. ISPs are not structured to give every customer 100% utilization 24/7. Yes, they sold "unlimited bandwidth". Yes, they sold "always on". However, a lot of the fine print advised customers agianst 100% utilization. They just can't get upstream bandwidth cheap enough to resell to customers and still make a profit.
>>The amount of labor required to run fiber is roughly the same as the amount required to run twisted pair.
That's complete bullshit. I have installed fiber and copper. I have run "house cable" from comms closets to the customers' desktops. I have also been in manholes running cable between buildings. Fiber takes a lot more time to install. You need a lot of expensive, specialized tools to install it. You have to be a lot more anal about QA after the install.
>>The amount of labor required to add routes is the same no matter how fast or slow the links in question are.
That's BS too. OSPF and EIGRP are nice, but not perfect. You have to have people qualified to analyze the network before you upgrade. They have to examine every possible reason for the lack of performance. And, after install, they have to go back to find and fix the next bottleneck.
It isn't as easy as letting MRTG graphs show overutilized lines. You can't just take a OC-48 at 80% utilization and upgrade it to a OC-192. A lot of times, telcos save money by finding low utilization backdoors into overtaxed areas.
Cisco and Juniper are not cheap. Neither are the certified techs who really know how to herd them cats like a mofo.
>>And material cost doesn't vary much with the speed of the link, either.
Yet another misleading statement. The tools neede to diagnose noise on a voice line (i.e. a lineman's handset) are a lot less expensive than the tools needed to diagnose malformed cells on a OC-192.
Furthermore, the techs qualified to operate these tools get paid a *shitload* of money. It is not uncommon for a tech holding a Acterna TestPad to earn 4x what the lineman earns.
On top of that, the more lines you have, the more techs you need. You also need a lot more sophistication in the NOC to predict, diagnose, and reroute around broken lines. When an OC-192 drops, networks reel trying to automatically reroute. Well-paid NOC staff can identify low-priority customers (read, residential ISPs and cable ISPs) and disconnect them to perserve customers who would actually notice (and, more to the point, demand a chargeback for the outage). Sure, you could trust a computer or routing table to do that, but paid staff can do a much better job.
>>And any really smart ISP will build infrastructure that's by design as fast as it can be
No residential ISP will start off by hiring a team of CCIEs to install and configure enterprise-class routers. They start off by installing a few DSLAMs and some Cisco 2600s. They link the whole thing together with stickytape, rust, and T1s. Then, as the customer base grows, they start an endless cycle of upgrades.
It'd be nice to have a network designed from the ground up to provide 100mbps FTTD/FTTC/FTTH. Look at Japan and NTT for an example. The problem with that is that there is no room for the "little fish" in that equation. While a lot of Mom&Pop ISPs are gone, their equipment still serves the same customers. The bills just go to AT&T vice Vicki and Kenniths' ISP and resturant.
>>We've known since the 80s that fiber would be the fastest tran
I agree on both points. However, there is a signifigant cost involved with moving a lot of traffic. As I have said before, Cisco, Juniper, and Bay are not cheap. Especially for equipment capable of moving data at OC-48 and up.
While the ISPs may not charge for peering, they both have to buy additional blades and pay techs to update and maintain those systems.
Yeah, SBC charging Google for bandwidth is pretty shitty. And I doubt it'll happen. However, SBC can charge their customers per GB.
How do they meter what? I have a water meter, a gas meter, and I pay a hefty fee for trash removal. If I need a couch or other large thing carried away, I pay extra.
An ISP could throw MRTG on your line and easily monitor how many packets they sent to you and you sent to them. At the end of the month, they bill you $30 for the basic service and $1 per GB for everything over 30GB. Or something like that.
The last mile is a tiny fraction of the problem. Your ISP could probably uncap your like with no real problems; until they try and send your traffic somewhere. The top-level ISPs charge a lot for moving traffic across the country. Until the ISPs come up with a model to provide unlimited bandwidth to eash other, then the last mile is inconsequential.
Not true. VoIP traffic is more time sensitive than FTP traffic. A SSH session needs better response than bittorrent. And video on demand needs to be processed before a /. page reload.
Sure, it's all 1s and 0s, but those 1s and 0s are arranged into headers and payload. Headers can be analyzed and tagged for prority. All this takes processing power and memory.
It's simple: if you want your VoD to play seamlessly and you want your VoIP to be a clear as a land-line call, you pay more for tagging.
If not, then your 1s and 0s can get lumped in with all the others. Your phone call to mom will be lumped in with my pr0n download.
But long distance is. If you were grabbing everything from a local cache, then your ISP wouldn't have a problem.
Read the contract. They have the right to modify the contract at any point with no notice. You then have the oppertunity to renew the contract by continuing to pay.
/. You *have* to know that the current model is not sustainable. Would you prefer to see the providers go out of service trying to meet growing customer needs? Or would you allow them to price the limited commodity according to the exponential growth in demand?
If you don't like Wal Mart's practices, then don't shop there.
If MaBell is fucking you with the big blue dick, call SpeakEasy. No luck there? Call DirectPC. No luck there? Get the telecom to drop in a T1 line and share it between 4 neghbors.
You are on
Here in Japan, the ISPs still oversell. But at least they give you the option of how much oversell you get screwed on.
When you buy FTTH service from NTT, they have a high-speed and low-speed option. The HS option is twice the price. However, if you look at the systems, both give you 100mbps over single-mode fiber.
What's the difference?
Well, the HS option has 16 customers per DSLAM; the LS option has 32 per.
As US customers become better educated about their line capabilities, expect more ISPs to cater to their needs. But, you better be prepared to pay for it.
Electricity is metered. Water is metered. Hell, even my trash is metered. What makes you think bandwidth will be any different? People need to be prepared to pay, per MB or GB, if they want quality service.
While MS might have problems breaking into a full search system, there is a ton of room for a company that can do one thing really well.
Look at ISO Hunt. They picked an area and really cached in on it.
My advice to MS: become the best video game search engine out there. It'd be really easy. Have a box to search and buttons to look for reviews, purchace, FAQs/walkthroughs, and cheats.
Hell, you could pick anything. But do one thing and do it really well.
Well, the pedal is a dumb idea to begin with. However, if you want to design a new pedal to do both jobs, design it so that neither action is triggered by "normal" motion. Think about rotate clockwise to accelerate and counter-clockwise to decelerate.
You could also have a pedal for the inactive foot that needs to be depressed in order for the actions of the primary pedal to be acknowledged.
However, I think moving the throttle to the steering column is the way to go. Push the column to accelerate and pull to decelerate. After that, move the column to a joystick and place it between the passenger and driver seats. Put the blinker, lights, and wipers on a hat switch on the stick.
Hell, you could even make the stick ambidextrous. The car could be driven safely from either seat.
I always thought the funniest April Fools Joke would be a day of dupes. Just keep everything mostly normal. Only, have the same story posted over and over. Use different wording each time. Maybe have contradictory dupes.
Then, at the end of the day, have a slashback covering the dupes.
I ran Adsense on a small community site. Because of our location, we all subscribed to the same ISP. This ISP utilized a private address space and used a half-dozen or so proxy servers to connect people to the internets.
It came as no real surprise when Google ditched my account. To them, they only saw 6 people visiting the site over and over.
I'm willing to bet that most sites getting screwed out of money fall into a similar category.
There are a lot of reasons to use something like this.
As a noob, sometimes the directions the NPC gives are misleading. "Go take this to some guy north of here" is a perfect example. That happens in WoW all the time. The guy might actually be NorthEast or NW. You just can't tell. Sometimes, they change the locations of mobs in a patch but don't update the quest text. You could spend an hour looking for evil spiders in the North while the actual spiders have moved to the East.
As an experienced player, you'll be more focused on guild teamwork. No matter what you are doing, someone in your group will have done it a few times before. Having a map while following the other players around keeps you from getting lost.
Also, as an experienced player, sometimes you need to work on your new characters. In that case, the story is unimportant. You just need to level up quickly.
That's the funniest thing I've seen all day. It's like 1PM here and my morning was a real shitfest. And, after I clean my monitor and keyboard, I'm sure my afternoon will be better. Thanks.
The theory is that you should disable root logins (over SSH at least) and only allow users to SSH in. The problem comes from users that use weak passwords and/or use their /. user/pass combo for the webserver. Eventually, a hacker will intercept the user/pass and login as that user. With compiler tools, he can begin building tools and modifying the $PATH so that those tools run vice the ones in /usr/bin.
Now, the hacker just waits for the user to login and try to "su" or "sudo".
After that, the hacker has full access to your box.
Now, could he just build them on his own machine and scp them over? Probably. But, without a lot of homework, he won't know what version of said tool you have or what libraries he can link to.
There seem to be "perfect setup" articles about every major Linux distro. I even used one on my own site. However, you need to be aware that these articles are written for ISP Config. In fact, they seem to be almost a viral marketing tool designed to pimp ISP Config.
/var/www. A newbie may also be perplexed as to why he can get to his site on http://url443/ but not on https://url./
Now, there is nothing wrong with that. Just be aware that some things may not work if you do not install ISPC.
For instance, a newbie following along may not notice that he disable the ability for his server to run php in
I've even seen examples that suggested installing compilers and tools to build modules needed by SpamAssasin. Anyone installing a compiler on a production web server should be shot.
In short, unless you go on to install the ISPc, your site will be broken and may be vulnerable to attack.
So, buyer (reader?) beware! You may not be getting what you want.
>>So my question for those in uniform is: to the extent to you are allowed to address these points
We can vote. Other than that, we have a very limited view. We are given objectives and are required to meet those objectives. We will never been in a position to vote on strategy. Neither will you.
The people vote for a leader. The leader decides a strategy. The military commanders decide on objectives and milestones. The grunts kill the enemy and try and stay alive.
>>, what should we (American civilians who are not memebers of congress) do about it?
All you can do is vote. However, once a can of worms is opened, it's impossible to close again. We can never leave Iraq. We can, however, vote for leaders that are willing to apply the same effort to Iraq as our grandfathers applied to Germany and Japan. Maybe in 50 years or so, Bagdhad will be a hot tourist spot.
Now if you could just do something like this for users' network utilization...
For gaming on WinXP, I use an app called Shoot!. While playing Falcon, I use it for fairly simple (press T, wait 5 seconds, press 1) macros. I was dicking around and decided to set up a profile for some simple stuff in Cygwin. If I say "list", the program returns "ls". "List all" will return "ls -a". "List all long" will return "ls -la".
You can, with some tweaking, even get it to understand complicated stuff. If I say "manual g r u b", I can get "man grub". "Vi save quit" could be mapped to ":wq" without too much trouble.
Anything you can type, it can do.
I don't think it works under Linux. I don't know of anything like it under linux. It does, however, work quite well inside PuTTY.
>>There are good arguments for a VAT, but the simple fact is that sales tax generally disproportinately affects the poor. Wealthy individuals spend a much smaller percentage of their income, which means that, percentage wise, they actually pay less tax under a purely VAT system than those who have less income.
Just exclude the first $15k from the VAT. Make the VAT proportional to the item being purchased.
Want a second? 20%
Want a third car? 30%
Want a big-screen HDTV? 30%
Want a yacht? 40%
First TV, car, and computer should be tax free. As should a cell phone and land line. Groceries should also be tax free.
The problem is that we need to directly charge the rich more without making it seem like we are charging them more. The rich tend to complain. Maybe we could just throw a few of them in the guillotine and redistribute the wealth.
I have to stand up and say I'm probably guilty of lumping Environmentalists into a big group.
I grew up with hippies around. They grew herbs and shat in a bucket. They wore natural fibers and (when required) drove an ancient Volvo diesel. They ate vegies and talked about dolphin-tainted tuna.
We, on the other hand, raised and slaughtered pigs, chickens, and rabbits. We drove Ford pick-ups and drank beer on Saturday. We used flush toilets and cooked steaks on the grill. We talked about nuking the ruskies and took drags off Marlborl Reds.
So, here's the thing. I see environmentalists as having their priorities fucked up. Why is an owl more important than a logger's family? Why is old-growth forest more important than a parking lot? Why are we worried about dolphins?
In short, if there isn't a direct payoff to me, then fuck it.
Just like you can't argue the Savior's sacrifice with an atheist, you can't use extinction to argue with us; we just don't care.
Now, I tend to be a more reasonable redneck. I lived in Europe and Asia. I honestly think that the solution to many of America's problems is $5/gallon gasoline. That and a 20% consumer tax could provide the social services needed to get the Old Girl right again.
However, as for the Amazon; fuck it.
Baby seals? Where's my club?
Dolphins? They taste great with some mayo and relish.
Poverty in Africa? Fuck them! We have poverty in America.
Cows? Good for boots and steaks; and milk's ok too.
Redwood forest? That shit would look really good as a new deck.
And hippies? Well, they may have some valid points. But if they think I should give up my deck, tuna, steak, or car, then fuck them.