Page Rank seems to work on the premise that the more a site is linked to, the
more valuable it is.
Exactly! That's why Google became the number one search engine on the planet.
In the early days of search engines (when sites like Altavista and HotBot were
king) pages were ranked soley on their own content. The idea
of analyzing
the links between
pages was absolutely revolutionary. Prior to that the best measure of a search
engine was the number of pages it indexed - a number that was proudly
displayed on the front page of most search engines of that time.
Lots of pages indexed meant lots of results. You often had
to wade through up to 10 pages of results to find what you were looking for.
Although all the results contained the correct keywords the actual content
was often wildly irrelevant. Relevance was gauged by factors like the number
of times a keyword appeared on the page, encouraging the creation of pages
full of crap (such as tiny white text
on white background repeating popular search phrases tens or hundreds of times).
Enter Google. The relevance of results increased dramatically. It became common
to find what you were looking for on the first page of results. Hell, the results
were so good they introduced the I'm Feeling Lucky button to take
you immediately to the first result. That's why today most people don't search for information anymore, they google for it.
It's true that PageRank has it's own problems, and that content
spamming has been largely replaced by link
spamming. Still, things are much better these days than before Google came
around.
If you paid for a full retail version of Windows the license allows you to move it from computer to computer. If you're running an OEM version the licence does not allow this. Up until the last year or so if you wanted to move an OEM version from one computer to another you could phone up and say that you're using it on the same computer but with a new motherboard. Then the OEM licence was changed to specifically disallow that kind of thing, presumably because there is no practical way to tell the difference between a new motherboard and a new computer. And it's not just motherboards that can cause Windows to require activation again. If you change enough components, such as adding RAM, a larger disk and a new video card all at the same time you might cross the line into what's considered a new computer.
All that being said, I've moved OEM versions between computers quite a number of times and I've yet to be refused activation key. It is necessary to speak to someone over the phone, however.
There are different kinds of certs. One kind is a server certificate that identifies a specific server. It wouldn't be a cert for an entire domain but for a particular host beneath that domain. I'm not too sure how this works in a load-balancing situation, where the DNS for www.somedomain.com resolves to multiple physical servers. My guess is that they purchase one certificate and then copy it onto all the backend servers.
Using HTTPS should be safe; it provides encryption so your password won't be
sniffed on the wire as you log in. What you have to be careful about is whether
you are in fact being connected to the server you think you are. If you are tricked
into logging in to a fake site then encrypting your password in transit won't
help.
This is where certificates come into play. A site like www.paypal.com will
use a certificate that's signed by a widely recognized Certificate Authority
(such
as Verisign).
Your browser will trust the site because (by default) it trusts the CA. If
someone tries to fake it I would expect one of three things to happen:
The fake site could use plain HTTP instead of HTTPS, hoping that most people
won't notice.
The fake site could use HTTPS with a self-signed certificate, in which
case your browser would prompt you whether or not to trust it.
The fake site could use a certificate bought from a trusted CA, in which
case you wouldn't know anything is wrong.
Scenario (3) would mean that they had to give some credentials to the CA when
obtaining their certificate, so there is some accountability in theory. Also,
I'd like to think that the CA wouldn't sign a fraudulent certificate for www.paypal.com but there is precedent for mistakes
being made.
I've been noticing ESSID's like "GuestWiFi" around lately but I'm reluctant to use them. It seems to me like anyone asking me to connect is a high risk for man-in-the-middle attacks. There are so many potential ways to abuse this. Most DHCP users also receive DNS server settings. The person who controls what you use for DNS can do lots of interesting things, like sending www.hotmail.com or www.paypal.com to their server with a fake login page that snags your account info.
On the contrary, in the majority businesses I deal with the same people "process invoices" and "write the cheques". They work in "Accounts Payable". These people don't normally "sign" the cheques, however, and someone else may have generated a purchase order to start the process. When a single person is able to control the purchasing process from start to finish - Product Selection, Vendor Selection, Purchase Order, Accounts Payable, Signing Authority - that's when serious abuse can occur. Most business owners have enough sense to avoid this situation.
> Singling out IT managers as potential sources of fraud is disingenuous. ALL
managers
have the potential for fraud, because they have the access and the authority
to commit the crime.
You're missing one of the main points, stated clearly on the first page of
TA:
"An information-technology manager with a larcenous
bent is
uniquely qualified to carry out clandestine procurement activities.
Not only do some corporate I.T. budgets top $1 billion, but the head
of information technology oftentimes has the most complete access
to the company's inner workings and
understands
better than anyone else what alarms not to trip when absconding with
funds
from the corporate coffers."
Of course your oversite hasn't prevented you from being modded up as "Insighful".
When installing Windows XP it is mandatory to ACTIVATE the software (if you plan on using it for more than 30 days). It is not mandatory to REGISTER it. Avoiding the latter step should avoid the kind of abuse you are talking about. You allow Microsoft to verify that you are using a genuine copy of Windows without providing specific details about who you are.
I agree, although I find that text looks much nicer (even on CRT displays) with ClearType turned on via "Display, Properties, Appearance, Effects, Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts".
This requires that you don't disable "Smooth edges of screen fonts" under "System, Properties, Advanced, Performance".
I also leave on "Use common tasks in folders". The rest I can do without.
If, like me, you are still running some old version of BIND (like 4.9 or 5.X) you can turn off recursion by adding the following line to named.boot & restarting named:
options no-recursion
Another recommended configuration is
options no-recursion no-fetch-glue
NOTE: If you turn off recursion on any DNS server make sure you don't list that server in any other computer's resolv.conf file.
"Phil Green, research director at d3o Labs, says it is difficult to precisely measure the material's properties because the hardening effect only last as long as the impact itself."
So put something soft (like putty or a melon) under it, whack it with a pole, remove the armor and see how much damage was done. Repeat with other types of armor for comparison.
To all the jackasses out there who can't resist modding any negative comment as flamebait:
Think about what flamebait actually means. It is a deliberate attempt to piss someone off and start a flame war. The parent is making simple statement - that going around repeating "a trojan is not a virus" may be technically correct but adds no valuable insight to the discussion. This statement is hardly an incitement to argue. Nobody would conceivably feel strongly enough about it to respond.
When you call a dog it comes to you because it hears your voice coming from the direction you want it to go. So how is the animal supposed to understand where you are calling it to when your voice is coming from a speaker beside its ear?
Your idea of "one entity in charge of assigning names for the Internet" is exactly
how things were in the beginning. There were many arguments against that system.
You can read about it here.
When I sought my first connection to the net they didn't even charge for domain names. As
the net kept growing name registrations started going nuts and there was a legitimate
argument for charging money in order to provide the service and infrastructure required.
Then came the dot com boom and things really went nuts. These charges started to
amount to millions of dollars and everybody wanted a slice of the pie. Why should one company
be granted a monopoly on such a cash cow? That is the reason it will never be centralized again.
I have a stack of old boxen in my office doing reliable duty as (respectively)
a NAT router / packet filter, an SMTP server, DNS server, SMTP server and SMB
fileserver. They are all running OpenBSD except
the fileserver which runs FreeBSD (because
my SATA RAID controller shipped with a driver for FreeBSD). They all perform
excellently, although Gallery is
a bit slow on the webserver when doing
things like resizing photos. The "fastest" one of the bunch is a
Pentium II with 64 Mb RAM.
Outlook Express has newsreader capabilities but is absolutely horrible at
downloading
binaries. It's extremely slow for one thing, often pinning the CPU at 100%
while
"searching message for hyperlinks". It also requires you to manually select all
the pieces of a file and move them into the correct order.
This little program, on the other hand, is amazing. It automatically gathers
scattered pieces together and shows at a glance whether all the pieces are present.
There is a small learning curve with Binary Boy but if you use Usenet for downloading pr0^H^H^Hmedia it pays off quickly in the time you will save.
At first glance I thought this was talking about RISC/os -
an operating system I ran on MIPS boxen before they were bought out by SGI and
eventually mothballed.
It was an interesting OS - one of the "dual universe" Unices that were both 4.3
BSD and SVR3 at the same time. You could make it resemble and behave like either OS by setting a few
environment variables. In that sense it was a rare example of defragmentation
in the Unix world.
Slashdot Mirror
Page Rank seems to work on the premise that the more a site is linked to, the more valuable it is.
Exactly! That's why Google became the number one search engine on the planet. In the early days of search engines (when sites like Altavista and HotBot were king) pages were ranked soley on their own content. The idea of analyzing the links between pages was absolutely revolutionary. Prior to that the best measure of a search engine was the number of pages it indexed - a number that was proudly displayed on the front page of most search engines of that time.
Lots of pages indexed meant lots of results. You often had to wade through up to 10 pages of results to find what you were looking for. Although all the results contained the correct keywords the actual content was often wildly irrelevant. Relevance was gauged by factors like the number of times a keyword appeared on the page, encouraging the creation of pages full of crap (such as tiny white text on white background repeating popular search phrases tens or hundreds of times).
Enter Google. The relevance of results increased dramatically. It became common to find what you were looking for on the first page of results. Hell, the results were so good they introduced the I'm Feeling Lucky button to take you immediately to the first result. That's why today most people don't search for information anymore, they google for it.
It's true that PageRank has it's own problems, and that content spamming has been largely replaced by link spamming. Still, things are much better these days than before Google came around.
If you really object to where Microsoft is going with WGA, here is a good article on how to remove WGA and use an alternative to Windows Update.
The article doesn't mention how to get access to other Microsoft downloads, however, such as Windows Defender.
If you paid for a full retail version of Windows the license allows you to move it from computer to computer. If you're running an OEM version the licence does not allow this. Up until the last year or so if you wanted to move an OEM version from one computer to another you could phone up and say that you're using it on the same computer but with a new motherboard. Then the OEM licence was changed to specifically disallow that kind of thing, presumably because there is no practical way to tell the difference between a new motherboard and a new computer. And it's not just motherboards that can cause Windows to require activation again. If you change enough components, such as adding RAM, a larger disk and a new video card all at the same time you might cross the line into what's considered a new computer.
All that being said, I've moved OEM versions between computers quite a number of times and I've yet to be refused activation key. It is necessary to speak to someone over the phone, however.
There are different kinds of certs. One kind is a server certificate that identifies a specific server. It wouldn't be a cert for an entire domain but for a particular host beneath that domain. I'm not too sure how this works in a load-balancing situation, where the DNS for www.somedomain.com resolves to multiple physical servers. My guess is that they purchase one certificate and then copy it onto all the backend servers.
Using HTTPS should be safe; it provides encryption so your password won't be sniffed on the wire as you log in. What you have to be careful about is whether you are in fact being connected to the server you think you are. If you are tricked into logging in to a fake site then encrypting your password in transit won't help.
This is where certificates come into play. A site like www.paypal.com will use a certificate that's signed by a widely recognized Certificate Authority (such as Verisign). Your browser will trust the site because (by default) it trusts the CA. If someone tries to fake it I would expect one of three things to happen:
Scenario (3) would mean that they had to give some credentials to the CA when obtaining their certificate, so there is some accountability in theory. Also, I'd like to think that the CA wouldn't sign a fraudulent certificate for www.paypal.com but there is precedent for mistakes being made.
I've been noticing ESSID's like "GuestWiFi" around lately but I'm reluctant to use them. It seems to me like anyone asking me to connect is a high risk for man-in-the-middle attacks. There are so many potential ways to abuse this. Most DHCP users also receive DNS server settings. The person who controls what you use for DNS can do lots of interesting things, like sending www.hotmail.com or www.paypal.com to their server with a fake login page that snags your account info.
On the contrary, in the majority businesses I deal with the same people "process invoices" and "write the cheques". They work in "Accounts Payable". These people don't normally "sign" the cheques, however, and someone else may have generated a purchase order to start the process. When a single person is able to control the purchasing process from start to finish - Product Selection, Vendor Selection, Purchase Order, Accounts Payable, Signing Authority - that's when serious abuse can occur. Most business owners have enough sense to avoid this situation.
> Singling out IT managers as potential sources of fraud is disingenuous. ALL managers have the potential for fraud, because they have the access and the authority to commit the crime.
You're missing one of the main points, stated clearly on the first page of TA:
"An information-technology manager with a larcenous bent is uniquely qualified to carry out clandestine procurement activities. Not only do some corporate I.T. budgets top $1 billion, but the head of information technology oftentimes has the most complete access to the company's inner workings and understands better than anyone else what alarms not to trip when absconding with funds from the corporate coffers."
Of course your oversite hasn't prevented you from being modded up as "Insighful".
When installing Windows XP it is mandatory to ACTIVATE the software (if you plan on using it for more than 30 days). It is not mandatory to REGISTER it. Avoiding the latter step should avoid the kind of abuse you are talking about. You allow Microsoft to verify that you are using a genuine copy of Windows without providing specific details about who you are.
is barely mentioned in TFA. What they're referring to is BlackBerry Enterprise Server v4.1 Express.
Only a 1-User licence is provided for free, however.
RIM is obviously worried about Microsoft giving away push technology in Exchange Server 2003 SP2.
I agree, although I find that text looks much nicer (even on CRT displays) with ClearType turned on via "Display, Properties, Appearance, Effects, Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts".
This requires that you don't disable "Smooth edges of screen fonts" under "System, Properties, Advanced, Performance".
I also leave on "Use common tasks in folders". The rest I can do without.
OMG LMAO
c _id=4805
http://forum.bastarddomain.com/showtopic.php?topi
If, like me, you are still running some old version of BIND (like 4.9 or 5.X) you can turn off recursion by adding the following line to named.boot & restarting named:
options no-recursion
Another recommended configuration is
options no-recursion no-fetch-glue
NOTE:
If you turn off recursion on any DNS server make sure you don't list that server in any other computer's resolv.conf file.
As is discussed here.
From TA:
"Phil Green, research director at d3o Labs, says it is difficult to precisely measure the material's properties because the hardening effect only last as long as the impact itself."
So put something soft (like putty or a melon) under it, whack it with a pole, remove the armor and see how much damage was done. Repeat with other types of armor for comparison.
To all the jackasses out there who can't resist modding any negative comment as flamebait:
Think about what flamebait actually means. It is a deliberate attempt to piss someone off and start a flame war. The parent is making simple statement - that going around repeating "a trojan is not a virus" may be technically correct but adds no valuable insight to the discussion. This statement is hardly an incitement to argue. Nobody would conceivably feel strongly enough about it to respond.
To all the purists out there who can't resist piping up with "It's not a virus - it's a trojan":
It's a useless distinction to say that trojans are not viruses because they require user intervention.
Would you go around saying that gonorrhoea is not a true disease because you have to do something voluntarily to get it?
Trojans are a CLASS of virus.
When you call a dog it comes to you because it hears your voice coming from the direction you want it to go. So how is the animal supposed to understand where you are calling it to when your voice is coming from a speaker beside its ear?
Your idea of "one entity in charge of assigning names for the Internet" is exactly how things were in the beginning. There were many arguments against that system. You can read about it here.
When I sought my first connection to the net they didn't even charge for domain names. As the net kept growing name registrations started going nuts and there was a legitimate argument for charging money in order to provide the service and infrastructure required.
Then came the dot com boom and things really went nuts. These charges started to amount to millions of dollars and everybody wanted a slice of the pie. Why should one company be granted a monopoly on such a cash cow? That is the reason it will never be centralized again.
I have a stack of old boxen in my office doing reliable duty as (respectively) a NAT router / packet filter, an SMTP server, DNS server, SMTP server and SMB fileserver. They are all running OpenBSD except the fileserver which runs FreeBSD (because my SATA RAID controller shipped with a driver for FreeBSD). They all perform excellently, although Gallery is a bit slow on the webserver when doing things like resizing photos. The "fastest" one of the bunch is a Pentium II with 64 Mb RAM.
I read about this the other day. The plan is to build the telescope in Canada but its final location isn't decided yet. Hawaii is one possibility.
Outlook Express has newsreader capabilities but is absolutely horrible at downloading binaries. It's extremely slow for one thing, often pinning the CPU at 100% while "searching message for hyperlinks". It also requires you to manually select all the pieces of a file and move them into the correct order.
This little program, on the other hand, is amazing. It automatically gathers scattered pieces together and shows at a glance whether all the pieces are present. There is a small learning curve with Binary Boy but if you use Usenet for downloading pr0^H^H^Hmedia it pays off quickly in the time you will save.
At first glance I thought this was talking about RISC/os - an operating system I ran on MIPS boxen before they were bought out by SGI and eventually mothballed. It was an interesting OS - one of the "dual universe" Unices that were both 4.3 BSD and SVR3 at the same time. You could make it resemble and behave like either OS by setting a few environment variables. In that sense it was a rare example of defragmentation in the Unix world.
in the security community for quite some time.
Rain Forest Puppy drafted a formal policy you can peruse here.if the solution described didn't use a firewall, as in this line from TFA:
"The servers and their respective applications sit in their own DMZ, protected by an Application-layer firewall".