Official transcript of a conversation that happened between me and a secretary at my college but several short hours ago:
The Secretary: Wierd i keep on getting these email messages i don't know who they're from and they have really wierd subject messages etc. All they have is an attachment that really doens't do anything when I try and run it.
Me: That's wierd. Maybe they're virii.
The Secretary: Yea whatever. But the one that really gets me is that rogers sent me an email telling me that we were gonna get disconnected for illegal spamming activicty.
Me: (Ears perking) Really, that's interesting i wonder why they would think that.
The Secretary: That's not the best of it. In that same email, rogers sent along an attachment. I tried to run it, but sure enough, same thing as before. Kinda wierd until i checked the filename. It said virus_remover123.exe. Why would rogers send me that?
ME: (Genuinly concerned (for level of intelligence)) Well, i don't think that rogers would send that. Do you have your antivirus uptodate?
The Secretary: No not at all HAHA. But of course i tried updating it to see if that would find anything, but i couln't do the update... having problems on computer and it reboots all the time.
Me: Ya that's wierd i gotta go to work and answer phones for people with internet and virus problems. Have a good day!.
Wierd. Ya see ya.
My life, both at a non-IT oriented college and at work and everywhere but home safe home (thanks to TUX) is oriented around virii. Who would've ever thought when i installed my first copy of linux in '95?
From following some of what this guy has posted on his site before, i recall him working on Open Inventor. Is all the code referred to not currently GPL'd, including IMD, or does he just want to GPL IMD alone?
what is even more insidious (and i think like that) is that someone could potentially modify html, txt, doc, etc files on such content developers, and "change history". this would not nessesarily go noticed. someone, if they did it quietly enough, could modify public opinion, books as they get published, and other "reliable" sources of information. Before you cry "impossible", have you ever worked at a newspaper or a desktop publishing house, or a political organisation, or a web content firm? Well, i have work in all theses places, and they have just as bad a security as everyone else. Someone could potential sabatoge our intillectual infrastructure (if the western world has any left).
I work (actually contract) for the largest broadband ISP in Canada (at least on the dsl side), and recently all the employees got a inside memo stating that the synch rates for ALL our dsl customers (we have three different speeds: 128kb, 1.5 mb, and 3.0mb) will be doubling over the next few months. That means that the customers will be getting 256kb, 3.0mb and 6.0mb all for the same price. For example, you would be getting a 3.0mb download and 728kb upload, unlimited, for 44 bucks cnd (not counting the fact that it is half price for a year). THe moral of the story is, move to canada, eh.
You may ask, why the great prices? The reason is simple. They are for quebec (i live in New Brunswick), and in quebec, there are 3 broadband suppliers: Bell Sympatico (dsl), Rogers Cable, and VideoTron(dsl). Which means that he best way to have low prices is to encourage competition, and be right demanding of your suppliers.
Which is why it makes me so angry when i heard people say that our tech sector is suffering form lack of competition. IMHO, the states is the only place that has problems with monopoly. Your economy or government, or people, or something is breeding monopolies. I don't think i need to take the time to list examples
Really..... dd is great BECAUSE is copies the bits bit by bit. That is it's greatest power, the fact that it totally arranges you files alligned and "defragged". If you want to do OS imaging, using netrom or the like, do it with dd.
the place I work for (Bell Sympatico in Canada) seems pretty good. Right now I am on the phones for Quebec, and they get 3 meg download, 800 upstream starting today for 24 / month canadian. That's with no contract, and DSL technology is not too bad.
the service doesn't disconnect at all. I know for a fact because most of the customers will flip and bezerk if ever their high speed router or their modem needs resetting. Thats what happens with plenty of competition, as Rogers, videotron and sympatico are available almost universially.
just a note... ntfsresize is a great utility, it worked for me and it'll work for you. I just wish that redhat would get their head out of (insert bad place here) and either include it or support a mirging of parted and ntfsresize
Some will say that they couldn't do it because the windows defrag didn't do a good enough job. Yes it will do a good enough job. You may need to do it twice, and you need to understand that you can't make the new partition bigger than the last speck of data on the disk. As long as do do it consciously (don't resize under the influence (RUI)
FYI if you're not a dabbler in stereography, and you want to see how cool it is, check out www.lesyeuxenstereo.com . sorry the site is in french, but there is english help for you monoculturalists:)
I quote the article: "The problem is that each Linux installation is different, and that's a security issue."
What he means to say, or should say, is "The problem is that we don't feel like security policies for the various distributions that exist". Let me explain.
Cracking 101: a homogenous network is really easy to break. I'm not revealing anyone's trade secrets here. That's basic security. The dream network to have if you never want to get rooted, is a network with many linux, osX, beOS, *BSD or any other modern unix variant, being correctly configured. This is heterogenity. It is a balace. It is the yang of sysadmin
Having several years of sysadmin under my belt, I know that this might require more thinking and potentially more working on the security guys part (i'm a security guy). But it's the best.
If you can think like a cracker, try to imagine finding some foo on how to root a router running Dell Unix System V/386 R4.04 issue 2.2 or perhaps ESIX System V R3 and R4. Ok i know that redhat kinda likes to use system V type scripts sometimes, but i don't think that there are very many EASY cracks for all of the variety. Go try googling for how to hack a network with every OS in use today
I'm not condoning tring to install a different distro or even different unix on everyone's desk, that would be too much of the ying of sysadmin and not enough yang. But we need to get away from M$-type "security from obscurity" and "usability from homogenity" type ideaology. Today's booming antivirus and security industry shows that microsoft's ideas don't make the world a more secure place.
umm, buddy.
XP ain't nearly as stable as people claim it to be. For many usages (par examle, when you're researching somthing online with a million browser pages open) linux will do the jub a million times better.
You will note this quite clearly when all your windows dissapear and a little dialogue box asks you if you want to send a bug report to redmond. This is reffered to in informatique as a crash. it happens all the time on XP. therefore, XP is unstable
Slashdot Mirror
The Secretary: Wierd i keep on getting these email messages i don't know who they're from and they have really wierd subject messages etc. All they have is an attachment that really doens't do anything when I try and run it.
Me: That's wierd. Maybe they're virii.
The Secretary: Yea whatever. But the one that really gets me is that rogers sent me an email telling me that we were gonna get disconnected for illegal spamming activicty.
Me: (Ears perking) Really, that's interesting i wonder why they would think that.
The Secretary: That's not the best of it. In that same email, rogers sent along an attachment. I tried to run it, but sure enough, same thing as before. Kinda wierd until i checked the filename. It said virus_remover123.exe. Why would rogers send me that?
ME: (Genuinly concerned (for level of intelligence)) Well, i don't think that rogers would send that. Do you have your antivirus uptodate?
The Secretary: No not at all HAHA. But of course i tried updating it to see if that would find anything, but i couln't do the update... having problems on computer and it reboots all the time.
Me: Ya that's wierd i gotta go to work and answer phones for people with internet and virus problems. Have a good day!.
Wierd. Ya see ya.
My life, both at a non-IT oriented college and at work and everywhere but home safe home (thanks to TUX) is oriented around virii. Who would've ever thought when i installed my first copy of linux in '95?
From following some of what this guy has posted on his site before, i recall him working on Open Inventor. Is all the code referred to not currently GPL'd, including IMD, or does he just want to GPL IMD alone?
I was just thinking about looking at that project a couple of hours ago, and now it's gone and gotten slashdotted.
what is even more insidious (and i think like that) is that someone could potentially modify html, txt, doc, etc files on such content developers, and "change history". this would not nessesarily go noticed. someone, if they did it quietly enough, could modify public opinion, books as they get published, and other "reliable" sources of information. Before you cry "impossible", have you ever worked at a newspaper or a desktop publishing house, or a political organisation, or a web content firm? Well, i have work in all theses places, and they have just as bad a security as everyone else. Someone could potential sabatoge our intillectual infrastructure (if the western world has any left).
great, now we're gonna have every geek/nerd/whatever (i forgot the difference) signing up for the us military. the gamers corps
I work (actually contract) for the largest broadband ISP in Canada (at least on the dsl side), and recently all the employees got a inside memo stating that the synch rates for ALL our dsl customers (we have three different speeds: 128kb, 1.5 mb, and 3.0mb) will be doubling over the next few months. That means that the customers will be getting 256kb, 3.0mb and 6.0mb all for the same price. For example, you would be getting a 3.0mb download and 728kb upload, unlimited, for 44 bucks cnd (not counting the fact that it is half price for a year). THe moral of the story is, move to canada, eh.
You may ask, why the great prices? The reason is simple. They are for quebec (i live in New Brunswick), and in quebec, there are 3 broadband suppliers: Bell Sympatico (dsl), Rogers Cable, and VideoTron(dsl). Which means that he best way to have low prices is to encourage competition, and be right demanding of your suppliers.
Which is why it makes me so angry when i heard people say that our tech sector is suffering form lack of competition. IMHO, the states is the only place that has problems with monopoly. Your economy or government, or people, or something is breeding monopolies. I don't think i need to take the time to list examples
Really..... dd is great BECAUSE is copies the bits bit by bit. That is it's greatest power, the fact that it totally arranges you files alligned and "defragged". If you want to do OS imaging, using netrom or the like, do it with dd.
vivre la france
the place I work for (Bell Sympatico in Canada) seems pretty good. Right now I am on the phones for Quebec, and they get 3 meg download, 800 upstream starting today for 24 / month canadian. That's with no contract, and DSL technology is not too bad.
the service doesn't disconnect at all. I know for a fact because most of the customers will flip and bezerk if ever their high speed router or their modem needs resetting. Thats what happens with plenty of competition, as Rogers, videotron and sympatico are available almost universially.
just a note... ntfsresize is a great utility, it worked for me and it'll work for you. I just wish that redhat would get their head out of (insert bad place here) and either include it or support a mirging of parted and ntfsresize
Some will say that they couldn't do it because the windows defrag didn't do a good enough job. Yes it will do a good enough job. You may need to do it twice, and you need to understand that you can't make the new partition bigger than the last speck of data on the disk. As long as do do it consciously (don't resize under the influence (RUI)
FYI if you're not a dabbler in stereography, and you want to see how cool it is, check out www.lesyeuxenstereo.com . sorry the site is in french, but there is english help for you monoculturalists :)
I quote the article: "The problem is that each Linux installation is different, and that's a security issue."
What he means to say, or should say, is "The problem is that we don't feel like security policies for the various distributions that exist". Let me explain.
Cracking 101: a homogenous network is really easy to break. I'm not revealing anyone's trade secrets here. That's basic security. The dream network to have if you never want to get rooted, is a network with many linux, osX, beOS, *BSD or any other modern unix variant, being correctly configured. This is heterogenity. It is a balace. It is the yang of sysadmin
Having several years of sysadmin under my belt, I know that this might require more thinking and potentially more working on the security guys part (i'm a security guy). But it's the best.
If you can think like a cracker, try to imagine finding some foo on how to root a router running Dell Unix System V/386 R4.04 issue 2.2 or perhaps ESIX System V R3 and R4. Ok i know that redhat kinda likes to use system V type scripts sometimes, but i don't think that there are very many EASY cracks for all of the variety. Go try googling for how to hack a network with every OS in use today
I'm not condoning tring to install a different distro or even different unix on everyone's desk, that would be too much of the ying of sysadmin and not enough yang. But we need to get away from M$-type "security from obscurity" and "usability from homogenity" type ideaology. Today's booming antivirus and security industry shows that microsoft's ideas don't make the world a more secure place.
umm, buddy. XP ain't nearly as stable as people claim it to be. For many usages (par examle, when you're researching somthing online with a million browser pages open) linux will do the jub a million times better. You will note this quite clearly when all your windows dissapear and a little dialogue box asks you if you want to send a bug report to redmond. This is reffered to in informatique as a crash. it happens all the time on XP. therefore, XP is unstable