If you disclose it, people will be miffed but may buy from you again. If you don't disclose it and it gets out that you didn't tell anyone, nobody will ever buy from you again.
I don't see how this is even a question. If someone broke into your machine, do what Egghead did. Tell every customer and the police.
If someone used my credit card to ship weapons to Iraq, I would be really pissed if I didn't notice because some vendor did not disclose anything to cover his ass.
The fraud was detected, the guy didn't lose any money, and there are laws that prohibit the vendor from shipping the war equipment to "rogue states". If the vendor shipped the night vision stuff to the United Arab Emirates, he lost his money and won't do it again. If he didn't, what's the problem?
Credit card fraud happens all the time. It's unavoidable. It's a tradeoff between less hassle and more security when paying. We chose less hassle, so we collectively pay the insurance and investigation. Nobody got hurt, the fraud didn't cost the guy any money. What's the outrage?
...to make you believe that those cables aren't already tapped. Even the Stasi secret service from the format East Germany was able to tap fiber optics. This is no problem at all, the only problem is that while you apply the tap, the line is interrupted. So, if you tap the line while it is installed, nobody is the wiser.
Also, tapping the repeaters is no problem, and in the Echelon discussion, at least one photo of a US submarine designed explicitly for installing taps on submarine cables and repeaters was publicized.
There is no reason to believe that the submarine cables aren't tapped by every major secret service. And even if they weren't, the points where the cables leave the sea and the major routers, POTS switches and exchange points are tapped.
Also, the paragraph about Global Crossing is bogus or even a Red Herring. Nobody in their right mind would rely on a line not being tapped, especially an international line. Their lines leave the sea to enter Europe or whatever country somewhere, and you can be sure that they are tapped there by the respective country and their allies.
The embedded market is not completely fucked up ye
on
Open Source & Embedded
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· Score: 1
I haven't got any spam trying to sell me embedded engineering manpower yet, like I got several for web design, Virusal Basic and other markets that have crashed recently.
I wonder, though, why companies aren't giving more money to the people whose software they use. Has Bruce Perens ever received a single penny for busybox? From any of the companies that use it? I don't know, but it certainly hasn't happened for me. It's sad that companies using open source software usually only spend money on training people who never did any embedded stuff rather than on the people whose ready-made software they are going to rip.
Java is doomed. It could have been a powerful tool to break the Microsoft monopoly if Sun hadn't been exactly the same kind of control freak about it as they claim Microsoft is. Nobody is using Java because it is good technology. People use Java because the university does not teach anything but Java anymore, or because clueless management made a strategic decision that from now on all projects should be Java based. The same kind of constellation that brought us the Microsoft problem in the first place.
Anyway, I have seen Sun strong-arm an industry consortium in a (big) niche market to make it impossible to implement their Java based standard with a GPL re-implementation of Java. Sun deserves all the doom they get. They are no better than Microsoft.
And, on a side note: Java-the-language sucks. The syntax and semantics are more complex and less powerful than previous languages. You need more training to do less work with Java than with other languages (I'm not talking about C++ here, obviously). I don't know why Sun did this, but they had a reason for it. I guess the reason why Java is so slow is that they wanted to sell more and faster hardware;-)
Why don't we make killing people illegal, too? And armed robbery! Theft!
Making something a illegal does not make it stop.
I'm all for making distributing viruses illegal, if it also means those stupid Outlook users can be sued who do all the virus spreading. It's not the viruses that is dangerous, it's stupidity.
Re:Hold the bashing! What about Busybox?
on
Lineo near Death
·
· Score: 1
Busybox and tinylogin were developed by Erik Andersen, not Lineo. They employed him, but those were not Lineo projects and Lineo sacked him a few months ago. See www.codepoet.org.
Microsoft "operating systems" have been plagued by trojans and viruses for decades. Now Microsoft simply outlaws them. You may not remote control XP with Back Orifice and Sub7! That will finally put a rest to those pesky hackers on the Internet.
that the German government still listens too much to the US government and the MPAA mafia. They didn't do much against the back-to-the-stone-age "Cybercrime Convention", for example. Also, the European Patent Office is in Germany. And on no other country citizens pay as much "taxes for the poor artists" on CD-Rs, CD-R media, tapes, scanners etc. And soon on computers, too.
Also, the taxes are quite high (not as high as Scandinavia, though).
We need a wealthy foundation
on
Patent Nonsense
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· Score: 1
...that employs patent lawyers to have dubious patents revoked. And they should only get paid little money with large bonuses for every patent they manage to have revoked.
Then, if 90% of the patents stupid companies file are being revoked, things will change. The patent law isn't so bad. It's just that politicians think that more patents means more innovation and thus they tell the patent offices to accept more patents. The prior art rules are there, they just need to be applied. Complaining on Usenet does not help. We need an independent entity to spend money on killing off stupid patents.
Patents cost money, you know? Big companies will start applying only for non-bogus patents if all the bogus ones are revoked and publicly ridiculed.
I don't refuse to buy CDs because I lack the money.
I refuse to buy CDs because they are
a) copy protected. In Europe, we pay special taxes on CD-R media and drives to compensate artists for the copies we make. I pay for the right to make copies. If they make CDs I can't copy, but refuse to give me my money back, then that is fraud. I don't like fraud.
b) giving the money to RIAA, not to the artists.
I would gladly pay $10 to the artists I like and download the music from whereever I want. Face it, people are downloading the music anyway. Give them a way to pay the artist (and not the music industry mafia) and they will do it. It's in their own interest, they want more music from the artist.
their web server times out on me. Why? Because Sun's firewall is broken and drops TCP connections using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).
How stupid can a single company be? I bet that article goes to great lengths to say how well suited Sun is to provide scalable web servers. And they can't even get their own web server configured properly!
What a buch of losers. ECN is, by the way, an official internet standard (RFC3168), which happens to be implemented by Linux.
Governments have given tax exemption or reduction to non-profit entities in the public interest for ever. It's their job to do that. Also, why pay money to some commercial vendor if the money could also be spent on a free software implementation that could then be used in other government agencies or even be given to other governments for free (think 3rd world countries)! There is no excuse to sink money in the deep pockets of some lobbyist if all the required functionality can be obtained from free software for the same (or less) money.
This article says nothing whatsoever about why coding is naturally insecure. It says that Microsoft is unable to write secure code. Well, duh!
Actually, coding is not inherently insecure. There are a couple of good counter examples (qmail and djbdns, for example).
Microsoft's code is insecure because this way customers can be made more dependent on them. And each time they download a patch, they get a big Microsoft logo in their face. Talk to a PR specialist if you don't see why this is good for them. Besides, there is no incentive to make bug-free code. Nowadays customers are so used to broken code that they actually believe that it can't be any different.
Bad business model
on
A Loki Timeline
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's always easy to say "told you so" after the fact,
but in this case it's true. I haven't bought a single Linux game. If I buy a Windows game, and it sucks, I can sell it. Also, I have the choice from which local dealership to buy it, so the price will be lower due to the competition.
I as a user expect vendors to make the Linux binaries available as a free download, just like they make patches and bonus map packs available for free download. I will always prefer games which I know have a Linux version.
So, Loki's business model of trying to sell Linux ports was flawed. Most gamers will want the Windows version, if only because using it eliminates a whole class of problems: interoperability problems with the Windows version your friends are using.
As long as there is enough money to carpet bomb mountains and piles of rock in Afghanistan, this is not a valid excuse. Just for a moment: consider the money that is poured into weaponry (and I'm not only talking ammo here! The US scientist who sent the anthrax letters gets a salary and took the Anthrax from the expensive bio-weapon program of the USA. Do you know how much money sustaining that program costs? I don't. Why don't we find out?).
It is sad enough that we spend money on weapons at all in a time where people starve to death. Starvation and hygiene should be priority 1, research should be priority 2, and at the very end of the list, somewhere in the fine print, should be the military. Until we are enlightened enough not to need military at all, that is. I'm not holding my breath.
Real hackers do call themselves hackers, and they carry that label with pride. Real hackers don't
brag with this term, however.
And yes, real hackers go to hacker conventions.
Of course, weenies and kiddies happen to go to hacker conventions, too, hoping that some of the heroic image rubs off on them. I am happy to have met several real hackers on several hacker conventions and that some people who have met me on hacker conventions consider me a hacker, too.
Slashdot Mirror
If you disclose it, people will be miffed but may buy from you again. If you don't disclose it and it gets out that you didn't tell anyone, nobody will ever buy from you again.
I don't see how this is even a question. If someone broke into your machine, do what Egghead did. Tell every customer and the police.
If someone used my credit card to ship weapons to Iraq, I would be really pissed if I didn't notice because some vendor did not disclose anything to cover his ass.
Credit card fraud happens all the time. It's unavoidable. It's a tradeoff between less hassle and more security when paying. We chose less hassle, so we collectively pay the insurance and investigation. Nobody got hurt, the fraud didn't cost the guy any money. What's the outrage?
Also, tapping the repeaters is no problem, and in the Echelon discussion, at least one photo of a US submarine designed explicitly for installing taps on submarine cables and repeaters was publicized.
There is no reason to believe that the submarine cables aren't tapped by every major secret service. And even if they weren't, the points where the cables leave the sea and the major routers, POTS switches and exchange points are tapped.
Also, the paragraph about Global Crossing is bogus or even a Red Herring. Nobody in their right mind would rely on a line not being tapped, especially an international line. Their lines leave the sea to enter Europe or whatever country somewhere, and you can be sure that they are tapped there by the respective country and their allies.
I haven't got any spam trying to sell me embedded engineering manpower yet, like I got several for web design, Virusal Basic and other markets that have crashed recently.
I wonder, though, why companies aren't giving more money to the people whose software they use. Has Bruce Perens ever received a single penny for busybox? From any of the companies that use it? I don't know, but it certainly hasn't happened for me. It's sad that companies using open source software usually only spend money on training people who never did any embedded stuff rather than on the people whose ready-made software they are going to rip.
Java is doomed. It could have been a powerful tool to break the Microsoft monopoly if Sun hadn't been exactly the same kind of control freak about it as they claim Microsoft is. Nobody is using Java because it is good technology. People use Java because the university does not teach anything but Java anymore, or because clueless management made a strategic decision that from now on all projects should be Java based. The same kind of constellation that brought us the Microsoft problem in the first place.
;-)
Anyway, I have seen Sun strong-arm an industry consortium in a (big) niche market to make it impossible to implement their Java based standard with a GPL re-implementation of Java. Sun deserves all the doom they get. They are no better than Microsoft.
And, on a side note: Java-the-language sucks. The syntax and semantics are more complex and less powerful than previous languages. You need more training to do less work with Java than with other languages (I'm not talking about C++ here, obviously). I don't know why Sun did this, but they had a reason for it. I guess the reason why Java is so slow is that they wanted to sell more and faster hardware
Why don't we make killing people illegal, too?
And armed robbery! Theft!
Making something a illegal does not make it stop.
I'm all for making distributing viruses illegal, if it also means those stupid Outlook users can be sued who do all the virus spreading. It's not the viruses that is dangerous, it's stupidity.
Busybox and tinylogin were developed by Erik Andersen, not Lineo. They employed him, but those were not Lineo projects and Lineo sacked him a few months ago. See www.codepoet.org.
Microsoft "operating systems" have been plagued by trojans and viruses for decades. Now Microsoft simply outlaws them. You may not remote control XP with Back Orifice and Sub7! That will finally put a rest to those pesky hackers on the Internet.
that the German government still listens too much to the US government and the MPAA mafia. They didn't do much against the back-to-the-stone-age "Cybercrime Convention", for example. Also, the European Patent Office is in Germany. And on no other country citizens pay as much "taxes for the poor artists" on CD-Rs, CD-R media, tapes, scanners etc. And soon on computers, too.
Also, the taxes are quite high (not as high as Scandinavia, though).
...that employs patent lawyers to have dubious patents revoked. And they should only get paid little money with large bonuses for every patent they manage to have revoked.
Then, if 90% of the patents stupid companies file are being revoked, things will change. The patent law isn't so bad. It's just that politicians think that more patents means more innovation and thus they tell the patent offices to accept more patents. The prior art rules are there, they just need to be applied. Complaining on Usenet does not help. We need an independent entity to spend money on killing off stupid patents.
Patents cost money, you know? Big companies will start applying only for non-bogus patents if all the bogus ones are revoked and publicly ridiculed.
I don't refuse to buy CDs because I lack the money.
I refuse to buy CDs because they are
a) copy protected. In Europe, we pay special taxes on CD-R media and drives to compensate artists for the copies we make. I pay for the right to make copies. If they make CDs I can't copy, but refuse to give me my money back, then that is fraud. I don't like fraud.
b) giving the money to RIAA, not to the artists.
I would gladly pay $10 to the artists I like and download the music from whereever I want. Face it, people are downloading the music anyway. Give them a way to pay the artist (and not the music industry mafia) and they will do it. It's in their own interest, they want more music from the artist.
their web server times out on me. Why?
Because Sun's firewall is broken and drops TCP connections using Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).
How stupid can a single company be? I bet that article goes to great lengths to say how well suited Sun is to provide scalable web servers. And they can't even get their own web server configured properly!
What a buch of losers. ECN is, by the way, an official internet standard (RFC3168), which happens to be implemented by Linux.
Governments have given tax exemption or reduction to non-profit entities in the public interest for ever. It's their job to do that. Also, why pay money to some commercial vendor if the money could also be spent on a free software implementation that could then be used in other government agencies or even be given to other governments for free (think 3rd world countries)! There is no excuse to sink money in the deep pockets of some lobbyist if all the required functionality can be obtained from free software for the same (or less) money.
This article says nothing whatsoever about why coding is naturally insecure. It says that Microsoft is unable to write secure code. Well, duh!
Actually, coding is not inherently insecure. There are a couple of good counter examples (qmail and djbdns, for example).
Microsoft's code is insecure because this way customers can be made more dependent on them. And each time they download a patch, they get a big Microsoft logo in their face. Talk to a PR specialist if you don't see why this is good for them. Besides, there is no incentive to make bug-free code. Nowadays customers are so used to broken code that they actually believe that it can't be any different.
but in this case it's true. I haven't bought a single Linux game. If I buy a Windows game, and it sucks, I can sell it. Also, I have the choice from which local dealership to buy it, so the price will be lower due to the competition.
I as a user expect vendors to make the Linux binaries available as a free download, just like they make patches and bonus map packs available for free download. I will always prefer games which I know have a Linux version.
So, Loki's business model of trying to sell Linux ports was flawed. Most gamers will want the Windows version, if only because using it eliminates a whole class of problems: interoperability problems with the Windows version your friends are using.
It is sad enough that we spend money on weapons at all in a time where people starve to death. Starvation and hygiene should be priority 1, research should be priority 2, and at the very end of the list, somewhere in the fine print, should be the military. Until we are enlightened enough not to need military at all, that is. I'm not holding my breath.
And yes, real hackers go to hacker conventions.
Of course, weenies and kiddies happen to go to hacker conventions, too, hoping that some of the heroic image rubs off on them. I am happy to have met several real hackers on several hacker conventions and that some people who have met me on hacker conventions consider me a hacker, too.
- pics of the 30 box AlphaLinux cluster rendering POV-Ray images in parallel.
- masses of people panicking over a power failure that immobilized them at Friday evening because the metro was frozen.
- A few Linux cameos
- IBM praising VisualAge COBOL (no joke!)
Warning! The images are on a German university server and are about 200k each, so downloading them might take a few hours for you guys from the US.